Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 391: Shane Mauss

Episode Date: July 18, 2020

Shane Mauss, comedian, science/academic translator and host of Here We Are, rejoins the DTFH to help demystify COVID-19! You can learn more about Shane on his website. This episode is brought to you by: BLUECHEW - Use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping. DHM Detox - Use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and save 20% on your first order! ExpressVPN - Visit expressVPN.com/duncan and get an extra 3 months FREE when you buy a 1 year package.

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. It's my dirty little angel. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Greetings, friends. It is I, Detrusel. This is the Duck at Trussell Family Hour podcast.

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What a crazy world we're in. I'm here in LA. We're just a virus-blasting machine out here. We got free coffers. I was out the other day pushing my sweet baby in his wagon. Wonderful magical day. The garbage trucks are waving at us. They can lift their thing up and they like to wave at kids.

He thinks that's incredible, as do I, I'll admit. They play little noises. There's all these basket hoops on our street and we carry a ball around and I flail at basketball in front of him. He still thinks I'm a star. But you know what? I'm walking down the street on the other side of the street. I was wearing a face mask but just someone just freely coughing.

Just coughing and coughing. It's like I understand. You probably have allergies. I understand you're with your child. But my God, how do you repress the boiling rage? How do you stop the anger when you think to yourself, what if she doesn't have allergies? She's a person in a way similar to people who during ancient rites and rituals

and the dark, balmy groves and chasms of the wild, pagan world find themselves mounted by demons and spiritual forces. You know what I'm talking about if you've seen Angel Heart? Humping and writhing and humping, slurping back mushroom brews and hypergalactic intelligences fill them up and they dance and howl. Similarly, how can you not think this person has potentially become some kind of servant to COVID? That it's neurologically taken over their mind,

produced some rationalization for how it makes sense in a city that's peaking with a pandemic to go outside and cough around kids. Anyway, I was far away on the other side of the street, masked up. So we can only do what we could do. And that's kind of what this episode is about. If you've listened to other episodes of the DTFH, you're familiar with Shane Moss by now.

He's not only a comedian, he is somebody who has a podcast dedicated to science and he's somebody who is obsessed with science. And I love him for it because my mind flails wildly in all directions. I allow myself to be mounted by my biases, misperceptions and desires for the universe to be other than it is. I have magical thinking all the fucking time. I believe in tarot cards and coin flips

and if a bird flies by, I think that must mean something good is about to happen or bad depending on what my mood is and the type of bird. The point is we need people like Shane Moss. We need rational people because if I'm teetering at all times on the edge of building like that mud thing that the guy made in Close Encounters of the Third Kind is summoning a UFO. If I'm always on the brink of, you know, attempting some weird ritual or spell

or anytime any news about a comet going by, you better believe I'm thinking, well, we're probably going to get smashed. We need people, we need the scientists, we need people like Shane Moss. But what's great about Shane Moss when we talk about this in this episode is he's a translator. You know, the way Ram Dass could translate eastern mysticism and these heavy duty, heady philosophical ideas that fill up thick books,

academic books that are kind of hard to wallow through and then Ram Dass is able to convert that into something that speaks right to your heart. Shane Moss does that with science. In other words, he makes it a little less dry and boring. A lot, in fact, completely entertaining. Because good God, what are you going to read a scientific? Is that what we're going to do? We're really going to open up a scientific journal and read it?

What are you going to read the Lancet? I'm not, maybe you are. I'm going to need a lot more Adderall if I'm going to do that. I can't get through it. You know, I studied psychology when I was in school and I remember reading these scientific papers with all the statistics and the weird shit. It's murky and you never, it's never satisfying.

We need translators like Shane Moss to deliver the truth to us. Which is, I think, the function of certain people in society, but good Lord, we talk about this in this podcast, the sort of reeling confusion many of us are feeling as we're being pelted with a variety of different data sets that are all being warped by whatever the pundit is that blowing them out. So it's nice. This podcast is great.

You know, and I haven't really done a podcast dedicated to COVID-19 yet. So if you, like me, have been experiencing a kind of reeling confused dysphoria related to this pandemic, if you find yourself waffling between subscribing to some of the beautifully weird conspiracy theories out there, such as the Meteor Impact Theory that I propagated unfortunately and actually sort of 80% believed to all the other theories out there, between those crazy, maybe not crazy, who knows what shit to like, you know, the dire prognostications of people who seem hysterical

to the sort of centrists between the two, who seem maybe like they're being a little not careful enough. If you just find yourself essentially like some kind of pinball being bounced around a dark COVID-19 information machine, then I think this, hopefully this episode will at the very least be a kind of voice for you because we were completely honest about our own confusion and Shane Moss as always is honest about his struggles with mental illness and his recent trip to a psychiatric unit, because he deals with mania sometimes, as do most of many, many brilliant people.

But not me. I've never suffered from any mental illness at all. Nope. Straight-arrow trussle here. Never wobbled at all. Smooth, calm, tranquil. I'm fine. We're going to jump right into this episode with Shane.

But first this. Bring me my, bring me my pills, Mary. Yes, sir. Every single week, three times a week, I've been hanging out with my dear Patreon subscribers. We have a book club right now. We're reading Dune. On Fridays, we have a family gathering.

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that you can demonstrate not just your allegiance with a podcast that Harper's Europe called the best fucking podcast of all time. So join us. Subscribe. Garb yourself with our garments, but I don't care if you do any of that. I'm just happy that you're listening. Thank you. Returning to the podcast is one of the most requested guests of the DTFH.

You know him from his awesome podcast. Here we are. Maybe you've seen him live at one of his stand up science shows. Maybe you've seen his tales from the trip where he talks about DMT or maybe you have watched his awesome documentary on psychedelics. Psychonautics, which is available on Amazon.com and lots of other streaming services. Now, without further ado, everyone, please welcome to the Dunkin Trussell Family Hour podcast, the brilliant Shane Moss. Shane, let's just jump into this son of a bitch. All right, let's do it, man.

Welcome back to the DTFH. Shane, I was on your Twitter. I've been actually trying to avoid Twitter. Oh, yeah, that's a very good idea. Thank you. Yeah, I've got a lot. I've had a lot of epiphanies regarding social media in general lately, but I got on your timeline and I thought it was so interesting that you were running into something that a lot of people you have any kind of voice right now are running into, which is this weird push. If you say anything rational, you get this bizarre pushback from people who I have gotten really deeply sucked into.

The conspiracy theory that COVID does not exist. Yeah. The masks are some kind of implement that is being placed on our society by nefarious beings who want us to submit via mass that they're prepping us for, you know, everything turning into what it's like at the airport. Yeah. In the master the first step. And so I saw that you tweeted that because you have been very vocal in your frustration regarding the anti science. I have. I've no doubt alienated many people, including friends, family and fans.

Well, but maybe you could tell me a little bit about the messages that you've been getting from people relating to what you've been talking about. Yeah. I mean, so I have, you know, science podcast. Here we are. And early on in this, I didn't know a thing about infectious disease. I know a little bit about the evolution of host virus relationship. And it's really fascinating. And early on, I made the same mistake that everyone seems to make during this, which is, which is that whatever.

Whoever we already, like everyone's becoming them. Many people are becoming the most themselves that they've ever been. That's cool. So like, like it really is like a mushroom trip for me, for my experience. So like the conspiracy people are the most into conspiracies. The environmentalists are the most like, now we're going to see now that people aren't driving and the skies are clear and bunnies are coming back. Now they'll see and the science people like myself are like, see you dopes. You should have paid attention in school and, and each political party has, has their, you know, agenda and everything else.

And so, so early on, I was like, well, this is great because people are going to care about science for the first time in my lifetime. That's sweet. And I don't know why I thought that. Looking back, hindsight bias. And early on, I was also, I mean, I remember you and I texting and I thought this was mass hysteria, like everything else on the news always is. Yes. And then when I learned about it, when I talked to some infectious disease people, I was like, oh, I'm going to readjust how I think about the long term for a while. And then I was just kind of vocally, my point has just been the point that I've been attempting to make is this is going to be a long haul.

If you're telling yourself a story that this is going to be like a few weeks and we're going to be done with this, this is going to be absolute torture for you. Right. And it's going to be better, in my opinion, for a lot of interesting psychological reasons to just think of it in terms of the long haul. And if things clear up sooner, that's going to be a huge win. But if we keep telling ourselves a story that this is almost over, it's just going to be torture. Every three weeks that you realize it's going to be another three weeks, that's just going to be another psychological loss to you. Right. And we just aren't built to handle that.

And so rather, and I was also hypomanic early on for like... Oh, really? So you had like a, it sort of came back for a second. I ended up in a psych ward, actually. Oh, no. Yeah. And in June, in June it turned into full blown mania. And I ended up in a psych ward again.

Man, I'm sorry. That's a bummer. It was a good trip. I learned a lot this time. The first time was the scariest thing that I've ever been through. The second time was also scary, but I learned a lot and was very fascinating and interesting. Is that because you sort of knew what to expect, so to speak? Yes.

I think that's the biggest thing is that, you know, think about it like, you know, I sometimes was going to Jamaica to help facilitate mushroom trips for people. And a lot of it was new people. And you sit down and kind of give some ideas of what to expect, but you don't want to implant too much, but you tell them some things that might come up and everything. And then you take the journey. Well, I think psych wards could benefit from a practice like that, which you don't see a therapist until you've already been into the psych ward.

So they take you in your craziest state. They don't, they don't say, Hey, you seem a little paranoid right now. So just so you know, we're going to put you in a place that's probably not going to help that situation. Right. There's cameras everywhere. There's people watching everyone and monitoring things. They have clipboards.

It's probably going to be scary for you. It is for everybody. And one thing that you might notice is that because there's these ways in which because people are coming and going and there's different shifts and different employees. We have a lot of like different things like color coding systems to keep track of who needs what attention, but you in your manic state might perceive that as a puzzle that needs to be solved in order to get out of here, which is a very common experience. What a terrible game show.

So, so if you know that like, Hey, if you have questions about the puzzle, just like ask us and we'll tell you, you know what that color coding on the door is for and all about. Yeah. And that might make you feel a little better about it. And just like, I could definitely see my mind getting caught by that. I could definitely see my mind imagining that I could decipher it, that it was some secret message being given to me by one of the doctors that there was a possibility of like a trap door in the floor based on those codes that would lead to like, you know, back into like

whatever MK ultra experiment I was in. Oh, you passed agent Moss. Now you can start your work in the CIA. That's exactly where it goes. And you're in your inner room with a bunch of other people as paranoid as you are in basically the same head state that are just as scary and some of them like the veterans are like usually pretty like deeply damaged people in my experience that really attached to they relate most to people that are damaged.

So when someone comes in shell shocked for their first time, they flock to those people and start like messing with their heads because it like brings them to their level and and and they they're able to like assert kind of dominance over this. Like, well, there you go. You just described Twitter. That's the same fucking thing. Friends, if you ever watch the office, yeah, you probably know it's based on the UK series also called the office.

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Shake off the shackles. There's digital bonds that keep you trapped in some imaginary geo location. Are we supposed to just live on planet earth friends? Are we supposed to just be citizens of this sweet planet? And yet we find ourselves separated by these bizarre geo membranes that keep us from enjoying other cultures. How are we to truly merge with our brothers and sisters if these walls exist? Express VPN.

Get the most out of your streaming services today. Express VPN dot com slash Duncan. If you use my link, you'll get an extra three months of Express VPN for free. Again, that's Express VPN dot com slash Duncan. Express VPN dot com slash Duncan to learn more. Tear down this wall. That thing you're talking about is why I'm not going on anymore. Because this is one of the things I think everybody does naturally is it's easier for

somebody to start resonating at your frequency than to start resonating at their frequency. You're familiar with your frequency. You know what it is. And so if you're around somebody and I've been around people who are panicking and they will sometimes if they're particularly distraught, they will get angry if you don't start panicking with them. You could tell that there is a sense of like they start feeling judged because you aren't deciding to join in on their freak out and they think you're being condescending when

the reality is you're just, you know, not tuning into that particular modality of emotion or whatever. Yes. You know, and it's really, it's to me, I think there's nothing wrong with that. If you're panicking, you're panicking. But to me, where it gets particularly dark is when there's that intentionality behind it where someone is actually actively trying to pull you into their horror show. Yeah.

Yeah. And which is, you know, every single like pretty much everything these days that you're watching that isn't just some like a Twitch channel involves someone trying to pull you into their horror show. Yeah. And I think that's the problem is like, right? Isn't this the reason there's so much fright like what you're talking about is happening? Because, you know, I, I real one thing I did realize is this thing where we're calling

these people dumb. Yeah. It's do, it's not doing any good. No. Because that just shames them further. It's, it's bad enough that like they, they're wrong. That sucks to be wrong. And it sucks to be deeply invested in being wrong.

Yeah. But then to have people saying, you dumb fuck, isn't it obvious? Yeah. That's going to make them really hook in deeper into their bias. Right? I just, one of my tweets yesterday actually was about how, was very much about, it was about how, you know, I was, I was reflecting because early on when I was hypomanic, one of the things that comes along with like hyper creativity, hyper, you know, tons of energy

and productivity is that you're also really snippy and have like no patience and often think that you're smarter than everybody. And so that was, that was coming out on Twitter. And I, you know, and I was like also embarrassed about it. Basically every time I tweet, I just feel bad about myself afterwards. But, but anyway, I did, I was thinking yesterday about my last serious girlfriend was this hippie chick who I love. She is probably the best girlfriend that I, that I've had.

And she refused to let me have a microwave in the house because of like radiation or kills the nutrients or whatever. And there was just nothing that I could say to, and so I tweeted about the, about how like I spent three years, you know, trying to like one, she was intelligent and open-minded. Two, she, she loved or at least tolerated me blabbing about science more than most people on earth was like really receptive and didn't have anything. No, like she wasn't arguing with anything that I said. She, it was just a feeling that she had.

And three months later, like I never got that microwave, you know, there, there's nothing that I'm going to tweet. That's going to take someone who's like rightly scared about something like a vaccine. And that's going to be like, yeah, you know what, this comic who's deeply invested in science probably has my best interest in, in mind. Right. So I should, I should, he just changed my mind about my take on vaccines. I, I, I disagree, man.

I think you actually, there is hope in, and I think there is like, you know, I know what you mean though. I mean, and it's, especially when you're in a living situation with someone where you have different views on fundamental things in the universe, like a microwave. It's, and you, you know, you realize that you're, you're either going to get in like an infinite fight or you're going to capitulate to their irrationality and just, it's going to take longer for you to cook your food. I'm reheating my coffee in a, in the one clean saucepan.

Yeah. Yeah. To then get in trouble for the dirty saucepan later and then, and then give a physics lecture. In response. Yes. You know, it's, it's, you know, I guess that's what compromises. Right. I guess that's what compromises.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes you just have to be like, you know, this is something Ramdas would always talk about. It's like, you know, I'd rather be, be in love than right. I'd write, you know, and, and so, and I think that could be used as a spiritual bypass for an excuse for cowardice sometimes, but in general, I get it, but I think there is hope in the sense, I think, I think there must be actually from science, except not virology, but from social psychology.

I think there probably is some reservoir of data out there that could create a more pragmatic way to communicate to people who have become invested in irrationality and that doesn't make them dig their heels in. Yeah. And I think that the first step is, first of all, I don't think they're dumb. I think actually as a, you know, conspiracy theorist myself. Yeah. And in the sense that I know.

You son of a bitch. You know, but if you look back at the very beginning of this fucking thing. Yeah. And you realize that Fauci said, don't wear masks. Yeah. Like there's video of him saying that. Yeah. And then he said, wear masks.

So what you're looking at there is to me, like one of, one of the great mistakes that was made during this fucking pandemic, which is the person who is supposed to be telling you the truth as it is, because he's a scientist, did not tell the truth. Yeah. And he did it with good intention. He wanted to protect the, what's it called PPE? What's it called? The protective PPE.

PPE. He wanted to protect that for the medical community. Yeah. And so he thought that he would do a little white lie. Yeah. But the problem is that spawned so many good reasons for people to be like, wait, you told me not to wear the fucking mask. Yeah.

Yeah. Now you're telling me to wear the mask. And then if I'm like paranoid, I'm going to say, wait a minute, were you trying to spread this shit around? Yeah. Like by saying not to wear this thing and you're a scientist, you do did know that it would stop the droplets, even though at that time we didn't know so much about it. You did know any scientist knew that the very least is going to stop spreading droplets of

this shit around. Right. But you said, don't wear the mask. And now you're saying wear the mask. And you want us to believe you now. Yeah. But you know, so to me, I don't think it's dumb. I think it's just unfortunate that people, this is have lean into the government or the

state to get the truth. Yeah. That's the number one problem. I think it's like you definitely, so I think to appease folks, you could say, yeah, you're right. Yeah. So all the times we've been lied to by our government, look at how many times they've told a shit that is not true.

So let's not listen to the government. Oh, yeah. You know what I mean? That's definitely not listen to the government. Right. And now once you say that, you know, you're kind of tuning in with them. Yeah. And then it's like, to me, if I was going to propose a counter conspiracy theory to the

one that there is no pandemic, one that I believe is equally irrational, but if I were going to maybe propose like a manipulative conspiracy theory designed to get people to start wearing masks who aren't. Yeah. Then what I would say is, oh, actually what you're looking at here is an intentional psyops designed to confuse people and to cull the herd. The pandemic is real. The risk of dying from it is relatively low, but it seems to have some neurological components

in it that are just being revealed right now. And if I were to look into like, if you study CRISPR gene editing and stuff, and that's been going on in China, there's no telling what this thing is. It could actually be recoding your DNA. And so you think that the vaccine is what has the chip in it. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. You don't understand. 5G is designed to interact with the COVID virus to control your mind.

And they know that people who don't wear masks are the Patriots. And so by keeping you people from wearing masks, they are unintentionally infecting you with COVID-19 because they want to control your minds. So wear the masks because it will keep you from becoming a puppet of the Chinese government. Something like that. You know what I mean? Spread that around. It is.

It's interesting because I don't think conspiracy theorists are dumb either. I think that they are very... I mean, the comedy community has tons of conspiracy theorists. So, I mean, I have a personal bias because I've had some dear friends kind of get lost in the conspiracy tunnel and really alienate lots of friends and family and everything. And also, like one person in particular who really meant a lot to me had multiple sclerosis, believed it was due to aspartame, which I'm not an aspartame advocate. But which led him to eventually shape-shifting lizards controlling this and that.

And distrust of the medical community, which made him deteriorate really quickly and also becoming insanely bigoted and alienating everyone and everything was like four white Christians. And that was like... And I've seen that happen with a few of my friends since. So, I have a personal bias because I don't think most conspiracy theorists have gone that far with things. Well, what's your definition of conspiracy theorist? I don't know. That's a good question.

You know, I would say... Yeah, that's a very good question. I guess it's someone that crosses my line. That's what I'm like, now you're a conspiracy theorist. Because here's what usually happens. It's like, hey, we shouldn't trust the government. I'm like, I agree. It's like...

And then corporations are corrupt in influencing the government. Like, absolutely. And then it goes from that to... Once it goes from like... Cars are dangerous or something. I'm like, yeah, I agree that there's been cover-ups about how dangerous cars are. Like, Ralph Nader stuff or something like that. But then it goes from like...

Oh, they've been planning accidents. See, they've been doing... You can look, they've been running crash tests this whole time. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. No, that's not what crash tests are for. This is a fictitious example just to kind of detach from like actual theories going on. Well, like, let's look at Watergate. What was the journalist who exposed that?

Was his name... I can't remember, but Watergate. Look at Watergate. That was a conspiracy theory. It started off as a conspiracy theory, but it was really just journalism. And then from great investigation, they exposed the whole damn thing. It was a literal conspiracy. The president of the fucking United States was involved in an actual conspiracy.

And then boom, you know, we get rid of Nixon. And that was like an idea of good journalism. To me, you know, like, my problem is like, I will get sucked into these things. Like, and I'm not ashamed of it. And I love that you're not ashamed of admitting that you were in a psych ward. I'm not ashamed of admitting that a few months ago, I thought a meteor was going to hit the earth. I got it in my head. The whole thing was designed to get us to, like, get inside and store up food

because they had some dad about a meteor hitting the earth. Wife just ferociously making fun of me all the way through until the meteor passed. Just all the way through. And I love that. I love it because it's calming me down and I appreciate. And I was thinking like, yeah, all my good friends would just say to me, Duncan, that is the dumbest shit you've ever said to me. And I would think, I know what you're thinking, but I think it's true.

But where I think, hopefully, I differ from some conspiracy theorists is now that the meteor has not hit the earth. I'm not saying, well, you see, actually, that's what Space Force was for. They got the meteor and pushed it out of the orbit that it was in. Or, you know, trying to, instead of just doing what I love about you and I love about scientists, instead of just being like, oh, no. I was completely fucking wrong there. That was bad irrational thinking.

I could have studied anything. I could have called friends who are into cosmology. I could have talked to anyone who I trusted and they would have been like, we're not getting hit by a meteor. But instead I leaned into irrationality and it gave me a little thrill for a few months. So I think the difference between bad conspiracy theory and good conspiracy theory is that bad conspiracy theorists cannot admit that they were wrong. Yeah, and what I love about scientists is they say,

I don't know more than anyone I've ever met in my entire life. And two, I find out how wrong I am every episode. If anyone listens to my podcast, I'm the worst part of the show, really. Basically, it's just me finding out how wrong I am for an hour every week about everything. And it's humbling. And I've canceled podcasts just because I'm like, I just can't feel stupid today. I just don't have it in me to feel this stupid. That's so cool.

And scientists themselves, I can recite their own work back to them. Like, hey, you had this paper come out three years ago that I thought was really interesting. And you said this and they'll be like, oh, actually, there's been a lot of research that's come in since this time. And it's not that scientists aren't immune to believing in their work way too much and everything else. But they quantify things, they say, I don't know. And they say, on the other hand, more than anyone that I ever talked to ever. And so if you take why I think there's a lot of conspiracy theories in the comedy community

and why I'm a little troubled by it because comedians have a little more of a platform than your average person, is because you do have what I would say is exceedingly intelligent people, but without a formal education and an understanding of how the scientific method actually works. Then you have people that are a little less than agreeable, typically. You have people that are anti-authority. And all of these things that are really terrific. You know, I've been a rebellious, anti-authority person my whole life. It's got me in a lot of trouble, but I value that in people.

But you have that in just the right combination. And I feel like it goes a little too far when it comes in terms of, when the first assumption is the intent to, say, wipe out 90% of the population or something, when, say, putting New York on lockdown, you know, the governor of New York, that's when you shut down commerce and productivity, you shut down all of the tax money and all of the funding that you're getting from that. There's no doubt that there's government cover up, but the actual intent of what the government is supposed to do is protect the citizens,

whether they're actually doing that or not is another thing. Whereas, say, a corporation, their actual intent has nothing to do with, like, on paper, like their mission statement has nothing to do with the betterment of the world. The goal is to increase quarterly profits. So if you look at the bad actor, and then they have the money and the funds to influence government, and then a lot of people that get into government are in it for their own ego. But I'm more willing to say, like, the government is being corrupted in all of these ways, rather than, say, the government is out to get us from square one,

because they got into this club where they all peed on each other, and then they want to kill 90% of that. What club's that? I want to be in that club. Population. I don't want to kill the population, but what's the pee on each other? No, just kidding. But this is, to me, the problem here is that, you know, in what you're saying, and this is what's really interesting to me is, like, many, like, conspiracy theorists don't, like, when I look at it as an emerging, at the very least, it's emerging folklore.

Yeah. Right? It's like, these are our jack tales, or these are our, like, new mythology, and it's, like, within its awe, and within it is, like, this sort of beautiful childlike excitement about mystery. And I appreciate all that, and I don't mean that in a condescending way. I think it's really quite beautiful that humans spin such wild tales using their lack of information. I think there's something really special about that, and it's beautiful. Yeah. But a lot of times, it's just not true.

But one thing that is most certainly true is, if you look up right now, it's called, it started with the Nazis, and I always forget the name of this. You probably know the name. What is it? Isolateral warfare? What's asymmetrical warfare? So, you know, this is, like, guerrilla warfare. This is the history of wars that people who are outmatched by, you know, numbers or technology or whatever will begin to, like, break certain rules of law, of war.

And that's how we won the Revolutionary Wars, guerrilla warfare. And this evolves over time. So, you know, this is, like, some story about the Vietnamese where, you know, had bombs and baby carriages that they were, like, you know, would push at soldiers. There'd be babies in there. And somebody said, like, stopped, you know, someone in the government said, you are using bombs and baby carriages. And the response from whoever their leader was was something like,

look, you give us your airplanes and we'll give you our baby carriages. Yeah. Right, you know? So, that's, so, that's, so, anyway, the, clearly the United States has not made a lot of friends over the last 50 years when it comes to our interaction with the world. So, if you, if you wanted to make the planet a murder mystery, right, and you were trying to figure out, well, what enemies do you have to figure out who's trying to kill you? The United States would, like, have to spend, like, a long time writing down all the various people that might have a grudge against us.

We've been bombing countries. We've been, the CIA has been going into countries causing revolutions, attempting to cause revolutions. We have been using all kinds of techniques, many of them insanely unethical techniques. You're preaching to the choir right now. Right. Imagine that having done that for so long that that wouldn't then be turned against us is, to me, really kind of short-sighted. To me, it's like, you know, a pandemic. We all knew a global pandemic was coming.

Yeah. Everyone knew that. It was not a matter of if, but when, and it happened. So there was a lot of time for enemies of the United States to prepare for this in terms of a military operation that isn't based on invasion of, you know, the homeland, but invasion of the mines. And so what better time to go into the message boards? What better time to get on social media? What better time to get into the psyche of a population that has not been educated when it comes to science, to the scientific method than during a global pandemic when everyone's stuck inside? What better time to start spreading wild ideas about what's happening in none of the, like, not just pandemic-related, but what better time to, like, figure out a way to, like, hack into Wayfair, for example.

Right. You know what I mean? And, like, just create these weird moments of grotesque novelty that produce nothing more than anxiety and a sense of desperation in people who have not gained control of their minds enough to be able to determine. What's real from what's not real? And if they don't know to be able to say, I don't know, then right now, we could expect right now, if we have enemies, this would be the time that people would begin a long-term PSY ops against, you know, a population that is already freaking the fuck out. And so I don't know why that doesn't get covered by conspiracy theorists, while they're always like, well, it's the WHO or the CDC or the president or the Clintons or Fauci who are trying to reduce the population or whatever. I don't understand why people don't think, wait, holy fuck, this could just easily be coming from any number of people who are just attempting to kill as many people as possible by making them seem like assholes for wearing masks. What better way to attack a country than to convince people in that country that it's stupid to wear a mask when there's a pandemic? It's so brilliant.

Yeah, I mean, another rather brilliant thing, though, and for me is just like, maybe this is my over fondness for Aquinas Razor and overly simplifying things, and it is that another fairly clever thing is viruses. Viruses think of very clever ways to invade hosts, and there's also all of these evolutionary mismatches with our modern world that are also playing out here that are pretty easily, that also fairly easily explain this, which is, one, I'm in Wisconsin right now, and so yeah, I am having to deal with my inbox filling with conspiracy theorists mad at me because I'm trying to be some COVID warrior or something on Twitter, and I get it. It's irritating, and I'm in everybody a little bit of a fragile and stressed state, and I'm indulging in my negativity bias and allowing myself a story of frustration because I'm also broken and a little scared myself and having to re-figure out my life. So I'm maybe a little more vulnerable to those things than in my normal every day, just usually getting a kick out of ridicule on a YouTube comment or something. But the point is, I'm in Wisconsin right now with a bunch of my extended family that just works nine to five jobs, isn't really big into politics that much, other than it's big into supporting Trump and everything that they already were doing, and they also just kind of buy into the narrative that this isn't a really big deal, and one thing that helps sell that is that this is a really, really, as, so, one of the things is with the asymptomatic carriers. So something that I've talked about a bunch on your podcast is just the difference in how the brain and our psychology has evolved and what it's evolved for, and oh, I just know I'm wearing this shirt right now that I like that is, I bought this because it has a chicken on it,

but it reminds me of my favorite expression in biology, that the chicken is just the egg's way of laying another egg. So all of this, all of this weird existence, us podcasting right now, trying to buy a better car, all of these things are this really strange roundabout way for genes to just replicate themselves and survive and be passed on. From my way of viewing things, and so that being said, there's the way that our disease avoidance mechanisms have evolved, we're not, we're long before the scientific method, long before germ theory, long before we understood there's these things that we couldn't detect with our eyes, we had to pick up on various, and those ancestors that happened to avoid people that looked sick were the ones that survived and reproduced longer, and that's why now if you see someone, I mean, if you saw someone hacking up a lung and drowning in their own lung fluids, you would distance yourself from them, you would ask them to cover their mouth, you would probably sanitize the area, that's a natural response that a lot of mammals won't eat another, won't eat a prey that looks sick. So much so, that prey will sometimes pretend to look sick, or like a goat or whatever will faint, so that the predators like, oh, better not eat that thing. Those are just these heuristics that, and all that it was was a preference, one person had a preference for avoiding someone that coughed and another person didn't. If being around someone that was coughing was evolutionarily good for you, we would be, any time someone coughed, we'd be running towards them, we'd be worshiping them, praising them, this is actually where the expression God bless you came from.

There was some plague where toward the end of it when people were dying, they were having like sneezing fits, which is such a bizarre way to die, and at first they thought it was, oh, the devil must be getting into them when they sneeze, and then once the plague eventually kind of went away, and it was like okay to sneeze again, then they kind of perpetuated a new story that was like, oh, it must be the devil getting out of somebody, so therefore God's blessing you when you sneeze. This is like when you're talking about how things that we picked up on, think about the stars. There's all of these mammals that navigate through looking at the stars, and there's all of these reasons for humans to say no where the North Star is in our past ancestral environment, and then we use these stories to create a narrative to help us remember these navigational tools, and then once we do that, and then once we have sexual selection for our intelligence, then the stories themselves become the vehicle for replicating genes, now you're impressing a lady by having the most fanciful story of what these stars mean, and now you have something like astrology that develops that is completely detached from its original utility, and so in that same way we have these disease avoidance mechanisms that feel very intuitive to it, no one needs to be told to avoid someone coughing, and then you have modern medicine, and you have modern germ theory, and modern sanitation that makes this the cleanest, most germ free environment that humans have ever lived in. We aren't mentally prepared for that, there's this hygiene hypothesis that I think we've talked about on the show maybe before, about why allergies are kind of potentially taking off right now.

Right now? Oh yeah, yeah, yes, yes. Can you explain it please? No, please, please re-explain it. It's because there are actually so few bacterial threats in our modern environment where the threat detection that we evolved for was for our past world where we would say have maybe 10 possible bacterial threats walking through the woods or whatever in a given day, and your immune system evolved to detect those threats, and all of a sudden the threat detection is only blipping once a day, and there's kind of like a supervisor in there going, why is this off? Why are we not detecting 10 threats like we have all the way through our evolutionary history? And so it increases that level of threat detection in the mind and in the immune system, and until, and this is just a theory, and it's pretty speculative and a little shaky if you ask me, but it's pretty fun, so let's talk about it.

Please. Until that threat detection becomes so sensitive that it goes, ooh, dander, and then sets off an immune response, which then itself, the autoimmune response, the inflammation that comes along with it, is the actual threat to you, not the dander. The dander was never a threat. It's the response to it. So then we live in this world that's one as sanitary as it's ever, so the type of bacteria that our ancestors would have been around, and it doesn't exist in the same way, but what does exist is another evolutionary novelty, which is these viruses that are being passed around through the domestication of livestock and animals, and now unlike a lot of animals that see a sheep fall over and go like, maybe I won't fuck with that thing, might have worms. Now we're detached from that process. We don't know how long this food has been, you know, festering or whatever else, and on top of that, when you're herding animals together, which is for the first time ever,

that's when these plagues, and that's when plagues started plaguing humans. It wasn't until, for the most part, it wasn't until we had civilizations where we packed people together with animals that all of the sudden these things started spreading. So we didn't have things like wet markets beforehand. We didn't have a lot of people eating bats, which by the way, do carry corona, and one of the reasons why they are able to carry around corona viruses so well without being influenced by themselves is actually the opposite of distancing. Because they sleep together, the heat of being packed together makes the virus manageable enough, kills off enough of the virus. Wait, so you're saying that as we all should be sleeping together? No. With humans, that won't work.

And with bats... And that's Shane Moss, everybody, you heard it from the man of science. We all need to sleep together more. Everyone come to my house. I don't want to do it, but we're going to do it. And take the first vaccine on the market. Sure, we've had some history of some light sterilization of populations here and there, but this one would be great. Light sterilization. So I'm sorry, I cut you off for a bad joke. Keep going. Sure, there's been some troubling history of vaccines in the past, but this one will for sure be good.

But there's something like... But when foreign viruses attack... So take, for example, bats who... There's bats in the northeast that have this white-nosed fungus. What happened was a caver came from England with some of this shit on his boots, went caving, bats got this white-nosed fungus, and it wiped out like 99% of a population. And so, foreign viruses and bacteria, they can happen and they can decimate populations without any conscious meddling or conspiracy. These are real things that absolutely can happen.

And those bats that distance themselves in the case of that new foreign virus, those are the ones that are surviving. And so they're actually sleeping further apart. So what's happening with things like COVID or what happened with the Black Plague or what happened with us giving blankets to the Indians is we had evolved alongside. We had a longer evolutionary arms race with these viruses and already kind of the people that were going to get weeded out got weeded out. And so we had already domesticated our livestock and we had that immunity built in. And so then when we came and gave Native Americans who weren't domesticating animals in the same way, it spread through the population. So all of this is to say is that it doesn't take as much sophisticated meddling to pull off a virus. And it also, the other thing is that because of our modern medicine, viruses need to stumble on new tricks that haven't been quote-unquote thought of.

I don't like giving virus like this intentionality because really it's just a blind. It's like a slot machine that just constantly someone, it's like evolutions pulling the handle and it's like coming up with all these different sequences and then boom, jackpot. It leaps, it jumps, and then we get COVID. That's probably why it's actually the evolution of why we have sex, why we have male and female genders in the first place. Why we went from, not we, why organisms went from asexual cloning to, which was about almost 3 billion years of that, to sexual reproduction, 1.2 billion years. And why these organisms stumbled on this idea of splitting 50% of your genes, which is a stupid deal. You want 100% of your genes. You want to clone a Duncan Trestle. You want to clone a Shane Moss. That's what we're all ultimately after. The world needs more of this guy around.

And so why is there a trade-off? And they speculate it's because of how quickly bacteria can pick the locks on a large organism's immune system. That replication was allowing generations to outwit and change the locks on bacteria and parasites and viruses. So that's why we have sex in the first place. So all of life is always having to evolve all of these crazy defense mechanisms. And one thing that we haven't, so much like every time someone coughs and sneezes, it does not mean that they're sick. It does not mean that they're going to kill you. This is just a heuristic. This is just a rule of thumb that you evolved. And because of that rule of thumb, you depend on it. And so when someone says, hey, this person assume everyone could be sick, it just doesn't resonate. There's nothing intuitive about that. And much of our conscious stories are fanciful explanations based on intuition.

And so then once you want to start like Googling, you know, whatever to validate, just like when my girlfriend yelled at me for the saucepan, I immediately Google arguments in favor of physics arguments in favor of microwaves. You know, we all do this. And so I think there's a bit of that going on as well. But that's what I'm talking about that. See, this is the new addition to our ecosystem. Like everything, like I'm not saying that the pandemic is like something that was created on purpose. And I'm not saying that, well, any conspiracy theory I've posited thus far is just something I think about. I don't really believe it necessarily. But what I'm saying is the difference between this pandemic and the 1918 pandemic, the Spanish flu is that we now are not just like rubbing shoulders with each other in the cities and,

you know, more populated than we were before, but that our minds are now connected than they ever were before. And that this addition of the social media to a pandemic, this is like where things like completely go literally go off the map. Like we can go back to the Spanish flu. We can go back to like you could find a precedent for anti-maskers in the history of virology. There was a time when it was considered you were an idiot for washing your hands. It was un-gentlemanly. You weren't supposed to wash your fucking hands. Do you know how this is actually how they stumbled upon germ theory in the first place or part of modern germ theory? This is a ridiculous story. There was some hospital where mothers that were giving birth were getting some infection. It's because the doctors were doing autopsies on corpses and they weren't washing their hands.

So they were getting diseases from touching rotten flesh and then delivering a baby. And those doctors were very smug and shit-heads. And I can't remember the lister. Not only that, it was a sign of pride if you were a surgeon to be walking around covered in blood. Bloody hands. If you wanted to slough off on a day, you would cover yourself in blood so it looked like you were busy. That's it. Blood, puke, flim, shit. That's what our doctors used to be. And our doctors, what is it? James Lister, is that his name? It's like the person where Listerine came from.

The point is there was a really intense struggle that he had to go through just to get the idea out that you need to wash your hands before you deliver a baby. So there's a precedent for people who are angrily not wearing masks or look at people who are wearing masks as being idiots. There's a precedent. There's a historic precedent. And I think there's some comfort in that knowing that that's not really a new thing. This has happened in the past, especially as a reaction from beings who are not familiar with the basic ideas of science, which by the way are pretty fucking boring and I don't blame a lot. You know what I mean? I don't blame people for not wanting to hear about this goddamn scientific method or to read research papers or to understand what it means if you're a doctor working at the CDC or to understand how many years you put into it. I don't want to fucking think about that.

And please, please no one listening think that I am any expert on infectious disease because I've been trying to learn. And it's fucking hard and it's boring, like you said, to actually learn. I mean the reason why I get some popularity for being on your or someone else's podcast and being a guest and kind of spinning these fun scientific tales and the reason why people like hearing me tell them is because most of what I'm saying is wrong. When I actually talk to a scientist about my interpretation of how science works, most of the time they're like, it's actually, that's an exciting way of putting it. But what the reality is, it's so much more nuanced, so much more boring and complicated and the data that needs to be mulled through is just like, give me a fucking break.

It's true for any cool thing, man, and you need translators. And I think that's what you function as is like a really good translator from some dry, boring, heady shit that most people don't want to. It's way more interesting to think that we're being controlled by Saturn, that there's a cube on Saturn that's controlling people than it is to imagine, what's really happening, which is an incredibly subtle form of math, a weird tidal flow of, I mean, we're looking at like, let's say we'd gotten hit by a fucking meteor, man. Let's say it had happened.

It might happen. It might happen. But let's say instead of the pandemic, we got meteors. So meteor smashes into some small city in Europe. And but it's a it's a good size meteor. It's like three Hiroshima's kicks up a bunch of dust in the atmosphere. It's raining ash all over the planet. And so, you know, guess who is going to be wearing masks outside?

Everybody, because they see the dust raining out of the sky. You're going to look like an asshole for not wearing a mask. No one's going to tell you to wear a mask, but they're like, you know, you're breathing in fucking cancer is fucking ash, right? You're not going to wear this shit, man, because I don't want to breathe my own CO2. But with it, the reason the pan a pandemic is so I think insidious is that you go outside. It's a beautiful day.

I know you are. And especially one where you've got a what's it called? Not hibernation. Incubation period that's so long. Yeah. You go outside. It's a beautiful day. You pass people.

You don't hear a single cough. You feel fine. Everybody's fine. You're the fuck. How easy would it be to think this is hysteria? Yeah. Come on. Look at the birds we're singing.

It's a beautiful day. I don't know anyone who's got this shit. This is just some fucking hysteria. And so it'd be very easy to go outside and believe the earth is flat. I mean, sometimes I still sometimes I'm outside and and I still think to myself like, what do you mean the earth is right? It's just not an intuitive thing. It's hollow.

Shane. But it is. It is the earth. Listen, we can talk about that in other podcasts. But what I'm saying is what we have here is one thing that isn't brand new. It's just a pandemic. It's it's new for our generation, but it's not new to the planet. This happens all the time, just like meteors.

The problem is this this thing that isn't new, but it is new in the sense that it's a new virus for us to deal with is that it's meeting a new landscape where we are all connected. And so to me, this is where we're this is the problem, which is that I and this is I believe this is a conspiracy theory that I believe right now. I think that there are groups of people, some of them state sponsored, some of them just like shit to servers who are intentionally trying to freak people out right now. And I think that there is a an organized an organized effort to do this.

And I think that I don't know who's doing it. I don't know why they're fucking doing it. But I think that a lot of people are being intentionally misled by I think state actors from other countries who are just trying to kill Americans by getting them to stop wearing masks. I think it's like so it's like they didn't start the pandemic. They didn't COVID-19 jumps out of a fucking pangolin that a monkey shit on whatever it comes out of a lab, whatever.

It's not like they made it. It's like they were waiting for the next pandemic. And then when things were when there was a lack of stability, they enacted some kind of horrible info campaign to get into the message boards and to get to the most vulnerable people. And you know what I'm saying? That's what that's what I think is happening. Yes.

Yes. I would agree with that quite a bit. Yeah. I mean, first off, this is not my area at all. And so and as someone who's a better, you're a better thinker about all of these sorts of things than I, I mean, I, I don't have a doubt in my mind that there's all sorts of people jumping on the instability of our country and trying to take advantage of it. Yeah.

With varying intent, like there, I don't think it's all coming from one group. I think there's people with varying intent. I think there's probably environmentalists who have a con who I really do want to lower the human population recognizing that a significant drop in the global population is good for the planet. I have talked with environmentalists who like early on in this that I like I kind of couldn't believe what it was like they were giddy, you know, at the idea of I'm not talking about people like actually working with environmental organizations or anything like that.

I'm just talking about like, you know, hippie friends of mine, big into the environment. It was like they were fucking giddy to, to hear the idea of and, and sorry, I cut you off, but, but that is to know you're filling in the blanks. I mean, it's like, I think that the, you know, we can use logic to come up with a theory of social psychology psychology that, that transcends any like specific conspiracy theory. And this is like, man, I was, if you just watch the history of the Nazis rise to power, Hitler's circle of evil, I think it's on Netflix. It's really creepy.

It's fun to watch. It's really a fuck fucked up thing, but great depression. You needed the Great Depression to get a Hitler. And so once, and this is like a ridiculous thing to mention, I was in a Uber in New York talking to a Syrian Uber driver. He was talking about ISIS and just saying, Oh no, they just always show up when there's war. They've been doing that for thousands of years.

Whenever there's war, they just sort of emerge this group of fanatics that exploits the conditions of war to gain power. So anytime there is instability in the world, certain factions begin to exercise asymmetric warfare techniques, info guerrilla warfare with some with, I don't know. There, I think there could be literally a hundred different factions that all have good reason to get out into the public that you shouldn't wear a mask. And, but what they all have in common is they know that if people don't wear a mask, it's going to cause this disease to go on and on and on and weaken the global economy and kill

a bunch of people. That's what they all know. So they want to prolong the pandemic as long as they can. And the smartest, what's the smartest way to do that? Get people to stop doing the one most pragmatic, simple thing you could fucking do to stop the spread of this shit. Get people to feel ashamed of it. Get societal pressure and make it political.

What are you some fucking pedophile? Are you some leftist pedophile? Is that why you're wearing that mask? You know, use as much, do whatever you can. Also, and I'll finish on this little dark point. Imagine this. What if some evil social psychologists had done a study recognizing that the people who are not wearing the masks who are more likely to get the disease are actually do represent

certain demographics, do represent certain genetic qualities. Like maybe there is a safe bet on intelligence or education levels for people who are deciding not to wear a mask. I just saw a study on that today. And what if you just, you wanted to exploit that because you were like, yeah, let's just get rid of those people. I just want to get rid of those people. And I know those are the very people who are going to believe me when I tell them that

it's the fucking sadness that want them to wear the mask. Yeah. And so you know what I mean? I'm just saying like we have to watch out. We have to watch anyone out there who's feeling like wearing a mask is a crime against humanity or an indication that you're part of the new world order. You need to, if you're going to accept that as a conspiracy theory, you should listen to my theory too and really let it roll around in your head a little bit and ask yourself

if you might be being manipulated by someone who wants you to get sick or who wants you to kill your parents. I mean, this is, I think there's pretty strong evidence for this having happened with drugs, with, you know, putting different crack and math and other things, you know, in certain communities. Maybe not math. Math seems like a different thing altogether, but crack was definitely targeting black communities, it seems, and it seems like a lot of the, for sure, a lot of drug stuff,

kind of, so it wouldn't be unprecedented. It would be quite the gamble to think that, to think that you were above one of these dummies spreading it to you or your kids or having your kid. I mean, I will say that it's possible that I'm only talking to the nice scientists, and I am in academia, you know, I am going through academia. What I'm not doing is interviewing people that are doing research within corporations, which would be a different thing to definitely be very wary of, and there's obviously going to be biases there.

But I will say, just like, you know, look at a socially distanced comedy club or something like that, which I think as someone who makes 90, 95% of their living off of live performing, I would love to be able to perform tonight. I think it's not the best idea in the world. But there's obvious motivation for comedy clubs and comedians to tell themselves a story that this is okay, that this is going to, that you can do a meet and greet afterwards, and everyone in that showroom knows the risks that they're taking and blah, blah, blah. Money is an incentive and it drives, and self-deception is one of my very favorite things to blab about.

It's something I tell myself I know a fair amount about. But there's also, you know, of the academics that I'm talking to, one thing to keep in mind is that the number of actual people working on, like say, a COVID vaccine is a tiny percentage of academia. Most of academia is like English professors and physicists and scientists that say had to kill off all of the animals in their labs when this happened. All of these academics who, the reason why I'm able to do a show called Stand Up Science usually in tour with and have them get up on stage in front of people is because a lot

of these academics love teaching. It's their stage. They love getting up in front of, they can't do that right now. A lot of these are just like, I'm talking through them in Zoom and watching their like four-year-old children come in and interrupt the conversation as they're pulling their hair out and working twice the number of hours as usual for, no one got a pay raise during a pandemic. Instead what happened was, hey, infectious disease people, I know you're working on AIDS. You've been doing a good job making it something that is very manageable to something that

was like a death sentence over the last 30 years and you're going to keep on trying to make it so that it doesn't, which did you know, I just found out with talking to an AIDS person, did you know that you can take, if you have HIV. You mean like an AIDS scientist? An AIDS scientist, yeah, someone who researches HIV. Okay. If you have HIV and you're in an early stage of it and you take the medication, like you, there's almost a 0% chance that you could give it to somebody else.

You could have all the unprotected sex you want. If you take the pill, one you're supposed to have like a 0% chance, that person instead is being pulled away to work on COVID stuff. No one's happy about this that I've talked to. I will say that the infectious disease people are a lot more alarmist than any of the social stuff. Like I remember when you texted me early on in this thing, I was hanging out with a business professor friend of mine and we were talking about this and it's like, this is clearly

mass hysteria. So everyone, because we're just used to people panicking way too much from the things that they see. Of course. That's the history of it. Yeah. See on the news. But the point is, is that, think that through a little bit, I mean, for the percentage of

people that would, for the percentage of people, scientists that would benefit from say a vaccine as opposed to all of academia that just wants to get fucking back to normal, there's no one scientist that's smarter than the whole of academia. And there's a peer review process. And by the way, that's not perfect either. As you're talking about conspiracy theorists telling the most fanciful stories, scientists been the most fan, I just retweeted something today that was like, you know, an academic breaking down how to write the best title.

And for him, it was advice to academia. The reason why I tweeted it was because I thought that people would maybe want to see that like academics are kind of flawed in this way as well, which is the most exciting title leads to step two, the most number of people reading your abstract. The most exciting abstract leads to people actually reading your boring fucking methodology. And maybe you're getting a chance to get that published so that maybe you can get funding. These fucking scientists are working on like shoestring budget. I had a person on my on my show who studies fish hearing cells.

It's the little they're called hair cells. It's what it's what we hear with. We have them as well. And when their hearing gets damaged, it regenerates. And she's trying to figure out how humans, when our hair cells damage, they don't regenerate. That's why we lose our hearing. So how can we get our hair cells to hear like fish? Yeah.

And regenerate. This is amazing. Like if we were able to just never have to worry about losing our hearing again, I mean, she has like a budget of like eight hundred or like eight thousand dollars to study. But wait, what you're saying is because like you think the the idea is that these scientists are living in these beautiful, yeah, the ivory tower, the idea of like ivory tower and stuff like that. Yeah.

I know you don't have this idea, but there's a lot of people that do. And I go in my usually under normal conditions, I do all of my podcasts remotely, I travel to them. So I've been to over three hundred different scientists, labs, offices or homes. And these are not luxurious quarters. That's, you know, that's interesting, man. I've never thought of that angle. This is not the fucking place where you teach X men.

This is like they're not living in some ivy, like ivy entangled mansion in New England. These are people who are living in shitty fucking apartments, like you've dedicated their lives to truth. They're not getting paid anything for doing that. And certainly they're not getting paid big fat fucking buckets of money from the Illuminati for inventing some doom vaccine. That's what you're saying. But who makes a good amount of money is there is an incredible in terms of supply and demand.

There is an incredible demand for us to be told more exciting narratives and narratives that that validate what we wish to be true. And there is very little supply out there. So one of the, one of the trends, hold on, Shane. So Shane, there. All right. Yeah. Well, we left off.

We're making the case against people who think that we've got these mad scientists who are getting shit tons of money when in fact it's like a diverse group of people with various you know, realms of expertise of which, you know, virology is a tiny percentage. So you're just, I think, trying to like eliminate the idea that we're dealing with the traditional conceptualization of what elite looks like. These people aren't driving Mercedes and stuff. And if people are interested, how I book my podcast is usually fairly random. So if I'm going through Ames, Iowa or something, I'll see if like Iowa State, I'll just like

look through their departments, see if someone's like, Oh, they have the biggest virtual reality lab in the country. I'll see if I can contact someone. So it's not what I'm saying is it would take some pretty insane work to create some veil that I'm not seeing through where they're like all of a sudden putting together some tiny office space that they only do podcasts with comedians in to give the air that, you know, they aren't drinking champagne or whatever all day. Right.

But what I will say is that one of the trends that I've seen is that there is, there's a high demand where we left off as I said, there's, there's, there is a high demand for the information that we want to hear about and the most exciting information. And so scientists that do deviate from the scientific method and often like get fired from being, by being manipulated by this, like maybe getting corporate money or something like that. They often write a book, have an insane Twitter following, get, make the rounds on popular podcasts and, and, and have a bestselling book because it's like disputing the common

narrative. Most of, most of like these, say, red pill academic types that gotten some sort of dispute with that, with academia. I'm not saying that they don't have a point they do and they're, and there's, there's say like Quillet is a, is a good example of a publication that's just like believes that academia is two PC or too much censorship. So it's, so it's scientists that are pushing back against that. The thing is, is that, is that there is a lot of those people when I look, those people

have like 50,000, 100,000 Twitter followers. The guests that I have on my podcast, if they have a Twitter account, they have like a thousand Twitter followers, maybe just like other, you know, they're not getting fame and fortune from any of this stuff. But you're, but you're also, it's, it's financially, you're going to make more money being controversial as a scientist. If you're in it for the dough, you're going to make more money by sort of going against what the data is showing, because it's like exciting.

It's romance. It's like scintillating to imagine that everyone was wrong and you're right. Be the one out of 10 doctors that tells you that you don't need to brush your teeth and people are going to be like, well, fuck, I always hated brushing my teeth. This, this dentist says I don't need to, I'm going to buy their book about that and follow them on Twitter because this person seems awfully outspoken about why we don't need to brush our teeth when it's just, you know, us wanting to can believe a more convenient reality in addition to a more exciting narrative going along with it.

One we don't need to brush our teeth to there's been an evil plot getting us to brush our teeth our whole life. And I hope we don't. That's as far as we explore dentistry because I don't, I don't know it. But, um, so, so there's that then I also hope that at some point I would, I would love to tell people that I hope that I'm not being an alarmist with any of this, that, that I'm attempting to look at this from a pragmatic way. And I think that, I think that there are ways that we can get through this pandemic with

like some fairly simple new habits that lead to us having productive, meaningful, happy lives and also treating ourselves better and whatnot in the process. And I think that I think there's psychological, yeah, I don't, I don't think that there's any reason to panic. I don't think, you know, one thing that caused me to panic was from a virology standpoint was the, um, was the kind of social uprising, the Black Lives Matter protests that was like, it had me so excited from like as someone who was just like, yeah, fucking defund the police, defund the military where we're at it, like defund the police.

That's not going nearly far enough for me. You know, it was like, normal Shane was like dreaming for this moment and then, but then seeing, you know, all of these people collecting and being like, oh fuck, like first off viruses don't care what color you are and listeners might be interested if they don't already know. There's no age, health, race, anything that's been associated with actual susceptibility to getting. It doesn't, it doesn't seem to, it seems, it seems that no age, race, sex, or anything

else or health, um, makes you less susceptible from getting it. Oh, but it's the symptoms. It's the symptoms. Once you have it, there's, there's enormous individual differences. I gotcha. And, and, and then there's misunderstandings like obesity. It's not obesity. It's, it, it is weight on the top of the chest and neck, uh, so you could, you could still

have a big ass, um, you could still have your big sexy ass, but, but if you have, if you have extra weight, you know, it'd be, it'd be like trying to put someone on a respirator and then setting phone books on their chest. Got it. So, so no face sitting. That's where the, if your friend has a sexy ass and you have COVID, this is not the time for your friend to sit on your chest and face. Yeah.

Yeah. You don't need to avoid your friend with that big sexy ass. But just, yeah, as long as they're not sitting on you, I get it. It's like, that's good to know. So that's very logical. That makes a lot of sense. And it's just like, yeah, if there's weight pushing down on your lungs and your lungs are like working through some kind of pneumonia, it's not going to help.

Yeah. And, and this is, you know, another reason of like, maybe, maybe we don't need to fat shame on top of everything else that's, that's, that's going on. Um, and you know, so just some things like that. So, so anyway, the point is, is when I saw the protests, I was like, you, you put people together like this, this is going to cause a lot of issues. And I was actually confused and excited when rates of infection didn't go up in many, if not all of the cities where, where the biggest protests were happening.

And, and the, my understanding is the speculation is, is this about intent where people that are going to approach, they weren't protesting science or a virus. Most of the people were wearing masks. Most of the people were trying to intentionally distance, even if they were getting, But LA is spiking now. Wait, what do you mean LA is like spiking and LA is spiking. Yeah. And, and so, I mean, I don't, I don't think anyone should be getting together in groups.

I don't, I don't think, Wait, shame. Do you think the spike happening in LA right now is not connected to those protests? I have no idea. I mean, it hasn't spiked in Minneapolis and the other places that, Right. You would think it would be spiking in New York and all the other places, but it's just spiking in LA.

That's so weird. That's, that's, that's weird. And the other, the other weird thing is that, is that heat and UV light, heat and humidity lowers the range at which droplets are, are going. So we're like probably really in for it in the fall and winter, not to be an alarmist. And then just, they just travel further and cold. And so I got nervous when, and I knew that there was like fundamental differences in policy, but I got nervous when, with Florida and Texas and Arizona peaking because I was

like, well, fuck, now it's the middle of summer and it's peaking now. Yes. I get that people aren't. But I think that some of it might be attached to people being in air conditioning and being indoors because it is so hot right now. So I'm, my fingers are crossed. I talked to someone about this. They don't, they don't agree with me.

They think it's more a policy thing. My fingers are crossed that, that it is fairly helpful to be outside in, in, in sun and that we don't need to panic as much about things like, um, say going to a beach or something. Right. If you're, if you're being reason or going for a hike, I, I mean, I, I go for distance hikes with friends all of the time. Do you wear a mask outside? Usually I'm not by anybody and I'm also, I'm, I'm also in Wisconsin by myself.

And so, and when I say distance hikes, I go for hikes by myself all the time and I go for hikes with, with friends, like every few weeks, usually I wear a mask, um, when I, when I do that, I would say that the biologists that I talked to, if you were to follow what they're doing, they're on full lockdown that like with their kids, I, I've asked a biologist in town here to like go on a distance hike with me, they, you know, they're not interested. Um, and whereas, whereas like more of the site, social psychologists or whatever are, are more to be, you know, thinking that this is some, some of this is an overreaction. So anyway, the whole thing with the, the protest that scared the shit out of me was that I

was like, well, what does discriminate is our healthcare system and our housing system. And so if, if minorities are going to be hit the hardest and people are collecting protests and then people don't have like a large enough home for an extra bedroom to quarantine and everything else. I, when I first saw that, I was just like, this is a fucking nightmare in terms of, in terms of the spread of this virus. And the fact that it hasn't spread more than a hat than I would have predicted that I think that that's at least an indicator that wearing a mask and being, and being mindful of distance

can work pretty well. And the, the one thing that I see when I see people, people, the pictures of people protesting is I think people still have it in their head that if you wear a face covering, you can just stand right next to someone, which you absolutely cannot and should not do. Distance and, and the mask. So that's, you know, I, I don't know enough of this stuff about any of this stuff. I feel like I'm talking out of, out of school when it comes to. It's okay.

I think you've been completely open about, and I don't think anybody is like, look, we started off the podcast talking about you were recently hospitalized. So I don't think that like, necessarily people are like going to be listening to either of us, like we're in the fucking CDC, we're, but, but I do think we represent a lot of people in the sense that we're just trying to work through the information we have in a logical way. Let me read you. Let me read you this, this, maybe you could break this down for me. I'd love to hear your theories on this.

Argentine, Argentinian fishing boat docks with over 50 COVID-19 cases. Argentina is trying to solve a medical mystery after 57 sailors were infected with the COVID-19 after 35 days at sea, despite the entire crew testing negative before leaving port. The Etchison, Maru fishing trawler. Yeah, is now docked at a port in the city of Ushawi. As some of the sailors are hospitalized, according to the ministry, 57 out of 61 crew members were diagnosed with a novel novel coronavirus after undergoing a new test. This is a mystery as all crew members had undergone 14 days of mandatory quarantine

at a hotel in the city of Ushawiya. Two other sailors have tested negative and two others are awaiting results. What the fuck? What is that? I mean, the only explanation I can think of was there was a false negative test or two within there because they think that you maybe need a certain amount of the virus to be detected by the tests in the first place. All right.

Well, that's boring. The good news is, is that it doesn't seem like there's false positives. See, that's what I'm saying. That's boring. But it does seem like there's false negatives. Yeah, yeah. You're not selling any books on that. There were, oh, the test didn't work.

It's such a logical thing to say. Probably one of the, someone was positive and the thing stuck in their body during the quarantine and just made it under the fence. This, this is the scariest thing about this to me is, is the idea that it's such a delayed onset. And, and the reason why virus, so when people are like, how, oh, this thing's like not deadly enough for my taste or what I like. I, I only, I only respect the extra deadly viruses. Here's some good news for people.

You're probably not going to see viruses that much more deadly than, than this. They, they do come along and they do exist. But, but the, in the kind of co-evolutionary arms race of virus host interaction, the virus will, if it can, take as much advantage and as much energy from the host as possible. But if a virus kills off a host before it can be spread to another host, then that's the extinction of that virus. Right. So it might even, it might even, what I would speculate from that, and I think wrongly based

on some academics that I've talked to recently that are infectious disease people, but from past of talking with the evolution of diseases, what I would speculate is that all of our distancing and all of those measures might lead to less severe strains eventually taking off. And then who knows if it's just a thing that we live with or whatever, but, but if it, if the only ones that are able to persist are the ones that take that much longer to actually do something to people, that gives it a lot more time to spread and, and everything else. So I don't know.

But what about the idea that it's dust from a comet? It's dust from a comet? Yeah. See, that's where mine goes. Is that one? That's where mine, I just, no, that's my fear. That's, see this, if you just want to understand, this is how my brain works. When I read a story like that, when I read a story like that, what I think, and I know

it's wrong. Oh, and the sailor story, you thought a little, they were all, oh, everyone's pointing at the shooting star. And then it came down and that's, oh, yeah, comet dust, that's a fun, well, I want to be in your mind then, that's, that's a beautiful, that's a beautiful little vision. No, you don't see my, so, so, no, because here's why my mind's terrifying when I let it go, do that, because it's not just like I think about that in a silly way, I'll be like, oh, I get it.

So really, here's what's happening. There's some kind of interstellar dust that's making it through the Earth's atmosphere. And that's what, and it's raining. We've entered into the part of the galaxy that has COVID as a alien, and we're passing through the dust and it isn't spread by humans, it's spread by it rains out of the sky on us. And then. That's amazing.

Thank you very much. And then, like, here's, what was that? And then, so, but then I've got an even better theory that, and again, I don't really believe these theories, but this is what my mind produces instead of what you just did, which I'm envious of, which is, oh yeah, the test was probably wrong. My mind says, how about this one, Shane, tell me what you think about this. So what has happened is the aliens have contacted the world's government, the main governments of the world, and they said they want to come, they want to share their, you know, technology

with us, but human breath kills them. So any human breath. You need to wear masks. So you need to get the, yeah. They want so the, oh, wearing mask thing is coming because the aliens are giddy trying to get us to cover our faces because if there's too much human breath in the atmosphere, it like kills them. Yeah, no, it's, well, they could wear their own masks, but that's what sissy's do in their

alien culture. Viva la nautuena masks! Masks are for sissy's. My name is Gornon 17, Emperor of the Glaxon Federation, and I will not sink to wearing a fucking mask for some goddamn monkey descendants with fucking poison breath. He's an impressive killer, but a little stubborn on the mask issue. I have not piloted this fucking death star for the last 7,000 Kornogs to land on a planet of fucking monkey descendants and put on a goddamn fucking mask.

I've got 19 mouths! I've got 19 mouths, that would be, that would, if you think we're low on PPE, imagine their situation when you have 19 mouths, my God. Yeah, so I mean, this is what I love, you know, I think it's like, what I love is, is like embracing that, the infantile part of the mind, the imaginative, I don't even call it infantile, the imaginative part of the human mind and recognizing that like, we do have in us some kind of irrational ape creature that doesn't have time to do like science. And so, it arrives at these ridiculous conclusions that are always magical in nature, because

the reality of what's happening is usually just so, A, I don't know, I'm alphabetizing, completely uncontrollable, and in the sense that like, it's way bigger than an individual. And also, it's not usually, it's not magical, it's just like, you know, you're talking about a thing that is like a kind of computer code that gets into our code, it doesn't interact well with our code, and it ends up disrupting our code enough that we die. And it's like, that's just fucking boring, it's just a boring, boring thing. It's actually pretty exciting, because viruses are like this half dead, half alive thing, that trick your cells into thinking that it's part of it, taking it in, and then the virus

turns the cell into its own factory to put out other viruses. When I first read about the neurologic stuff, that scared the shit out of me, because there are things like the, oh, what's the thing that cats get? You mean feline leukemia, feline HIV? No, it's, it's amazing, it goes from, so this virus, yeah, yeah, it wants to get in cats, but it does that through getting in rats first, and in rats, it changes their, it changes their neurochemistry so that they're driven to the smell of cat urine that they would normally run away from, so that they go out

and get eaten by a cat, which is what they eventually, and there's speculation that when a cat has toxoplasmosis, if humans are getting it, it's making them more fond of cats, and so that's where like these cat ladies are coming from. I just love that, it explains everything. And this is like, you've probably seen like the ants that get the mushroom virus that go, that go up, and so that's sort of, there's speculation that STIs cause people to be hornier, so that they'll be, and so that was my, when I heard neurologic thing, that's, that was the exciting story that my brain first went to, because there's things like rabies

that shut down your ability to salivate, because it gets spread through like blood and saliva, shut down your ability to salivate, and then it pumps you full of adrenaline, or it shuts down your ability to swallow, rather. So you can't swallow, you start foaming, you're pumped full of adrenaline, you haven't stuffed in days, you're agitated and aggressive, and that's how it gets transferred to someone else. So that's where I first went when I heard, but it sounds like with COVID it's probably something much simpler, which is because of the respiratory stuff, and because of a response to an infection, there's some blood clotting, and then blood clotting is causing some of the

neurologic issues, and I would think, without knowing much about that, that that's like somewhat good news in terms of something that would be treatable and manageable compared to the alternatives, like rabies turning us into aggressive zombies. Okay, okay, hold on a second, hold on. So is it possible, since we are talking about this crazy thing that viruses can do, you know, you go to someone's house, they've got cats, their house smells like cat piss, you walk in the door, you walk into this wall of cat piss smell, and to you, it's like horrible, you just want to get out because your mind is not infected, but they walk into that very same wall of cat piss, and they're like, smells of sweet, sweet home,

and it's just because Docs of Plasmosis is like, you know, is like working with them, but isn't it possible that I mean, this is if okay, and again, these kinds of things, man, they really make me scratch my chin at evolution, just to imagine that that evolution could be that precise, that the mutations can be that precise. But oh, well, it's not that it's just that most of them are failures. That's that's just kind of like the survivorship bias of seeing the ones that actually split off rather than the millions of and billions of evolutionary dead ends that were like horrible kind of ideas. There was a time when some eyes would get Docs of Plasmosis, and they like the smell of strawberries. And so it didn't do anything. And then there was

the Docs of Plasmosis time when they like to swim and it would just drown a bunch of mice, didn't work. But finally, cat piss, that's what works to keep it going. And so they just randomly selects, it's a slot. So but I mean, so could it be that one of the qualities of COVID-19 is that it makes you judge other people for wearing a face mask? Like that you don't mean could it be that it's neurologically when you're asymptomatic, it makes you want to go online and tweet about how you think it's fucking completely cowardly wearing masks. And you don't why not? If I mean, if like if that if things can be so so and I don't mean intentional, but so specific, yeah, to what better side effect than to for fucking humans to be embarrassed by wearing

a mask. It's the ultimate victory for a I mean, novelty and new. Yeah. And I mean, the masks are scary too. And they're just a reminder that there's a virus going on. I don't know. I saw some clear ones the other day. So you could still see people smiling. That's cool. Maybe we'll figure out work arounds for it. But but yeah, I I'm I'm pretty hopeful that this is just a respiratory virus that has a lot of asymptomatic that that also is is is something that seemingly might not always produce antibodies, which means you can get it again. That's the other thing is like the reason why early on that people were a little bit alarmist, including myself, was because of the unknown and the reason why it's frustrating when people are like,

but scientists said this and now they're saying this is because like they don't know and they're changing and hopefully they'll continue to change their mind and hopefully there'll be, you know, better news coming. But but one of the things that they didn't know early on is can you get it again if you've got it and it seems like there's already cases of that. And so when people are like people, I'm not talking about going on social media, I'm talking about just run of the mill folks, rural folks in Wisconsin that I hang out with their their attitude is often I just want to get this thing like I have an aunt who's like, I just want to get this thing and get it over with. It's like it's not the fucking chickenpox. That's a cold. Not it works like a not only can can you

get it a second time. But when it's when it's when it's create one when what we do know is that it's it's negatively impacting the people with pre existing respiratory issues. If if you were a healthy person that got COVID once and some people that are asymptomatic are having lung issues months later that shows like it looks like they have pneumonia months after this and they were asymptomatic when they actually had it. Does that mean when those people get it again? Now they had a pre existing respiratory issue. That's that's that's scary and and and so those are the things that I think people are still like let's hold our horses and and use some caution. But you know there's there's horrible crazy economic constraints

and I know man that's the other problem people need to work people have to make a living people's kids need to go to school and we're in this horrific like like game of like do we like what do we do here is it do we just like let God roll the dice if a bunch of us are going to die we're going to fucking die or do we like hold up until the economy completely crashes and massive famine happens all around the planet and people are starving and killing themselves and going fucking crazy. It's like which it it's this dark thing where where in between we thought there might have been a way which was do these little openings have these rules wear a mask do this and this and this but it didn't work actually that didn't work it's spreading again and we tried to do a little bargain

with it to see if we could open up the economy knowing that yeah fuck on one side we're risking giving a viral pneumonia to people with autoimmune disorders people with lung problems could that could die from it and but then on the other side we've got parents who can't get money for their kids parents who need like also we've got people on the so-called front lines who can't afford childcare and that's what school used to be so now we're going to lose yeah like people who are medical professionals because of this and so you end up in a satanic horrific binary right which is just like what do we do here are we are we do we just say fuck it and like get in there and like yeah maybe i'll die an agonizing death and maybe you will or do we say no no no i don't want to die

i don't want to risk that that kind of death sit back wait for the riots to start wait for society to truly collapse into a kind of medical authoritarian police state as people begin to like bring tanks into the cities to push people back who are beginning to like be like fuck it i gotta live i want to be outside it's like what which one do we choose and then to make matters worse we've got a fucking lunatic running the whole thing who makes no sense like not like makes no sense like he's saying different stuff like literally just a garbled fucking colegula level nero it is so crazy so that's happening on top of it all and then it's a political thing because of all that which is like and and and if he gets if he gets booted out the the the months following

aren't going to be the smoothest transition in the history of passing the presidential baton either but um so i mean i would say in my you know i would say that in my like like when i like to tell myself unrealistic fanciful stories it's that perhaps there could be a way of realizing like what we did was have two strict of lockdowns what we did was have two strict of universal blanket lockdowns everywhere you're locking down wyoming and everywhere else before you actually needed to in ways that were an overstep and i can tell this from following all my la friends on twitter because it's a very different experience being here in wisconsin where people just aren't being um you know people's rights or whatever you know there's not there's

not curfews there's not there's not the same pressure being put on people in small town midwest communities um you know masks are still voluntary in places and and everything else and and so if there was it as much as for for everyone's fear of like science and and um and the terminator robot taking over or whatever eventually and giving our uh just giving everything over to artificial intelligence i would much rather there be some sort of a universal like algorithm that is like here's the population density of an area here's the number of free hospital beds here's the number of cases in this area and then there's levels of opening that are considered acceptable here's what's considered an essential worker in this area

here's a more expanded version of an essential worker here here's um here's this this area has service air it has service industry and restaurant open for just essential workers first that are taking precautions and then expand from there i would take that over what's happening now which is is your governor red or blue because that determines whether you ever get to go outside again or if it's fucking spring break in myrtle beach and like and and so then what's happening is is when there is an overreaction in a lockdown then people say something like oh look nothing happened look the the number of deaths weren't what they projected it would be one i would say to that that nothing happened happening would have been a dream scenario that's in fact what

we're going for with the quarantine nothing didn't happen something happened and two the the reason why the the number of deaths were half of what the mainstream scientific infectious disease people and people that model pandemics were projecting was because they actually didn't give humans enough credit they factored when they projected that there would be 200 000 deaths by may they fact they thought 50 percent of the population would actually follow guidelines and take precautions and wash it about 75 percent of people did it and it was half the number of deaths which is not insignificant when you're talking about something that has had an average rate of of uh spread of two people for every one that has it you got to get that under one and then it goes away if if it's

two that's exponential growth and then you have the spanish flu and that's a that's a tricky number that like how are they quantifying that and everything else you know is a different is a different thing but there is like like south korea they did mass and crazy amount of testing and they were they pretty much had their freedoms um there was there was a um there was a case of someone who was symptomatic and symptomatic does mean you can spread your it's more you can spread it more uh because they're coughing and shit and and it has a higher load um in your slide but but a person that was symptomatic went out to a dance club and so everyone else that was getting testing and doing everything right was able to go to a fucking dance club in live life normally

and then one fucking symptomatic person got a hundred a hundred people that night i mean that's that's that that's exactly what you just described is the problem of having dense populations is that there is a certain percentage in any given population and where there is definitely going to be one completely died in the wool asshole like someone who's like putting on their sweat pants and their cool fucking dance their day their medallions and shit they're like they see that there's a dj they like they're like fuck it you know what fuck it i'm just gonna go dance tonight i'm gonna dance this virus away and then boom it like this is the problem is like we're dealing with this like generally human beings and my experience are wonderful amazing yes beautiful beings that

try to help as much as they can sometimes they get freaked out but generally awesome but there's always that one yeah and the the other side of that is all of the people doing everything right don't deserve motherfuckers like me yelling at them on twitter about how serious covid is they already know they've already heard it on a loop i'm tweeting at i'm they don't know like i'm tweeting at like a old high school buddy that i just talked to who's sitting at a bar that i just had a frustrating conversation telling him like why this is an actual thing that really exists and then i tweet about it to blow off steam most people are following a lot and then and then when you do that i mean it's like the trump thing when trump i got off twitter when

trump took office because of this but it was it was like uh you know is he a bad president yes but like when people when people when it was like every single day people needed to then even even the anti-trump people started being like all right yeah like we fucking get it and now it's like you know what maybe i'll vote for this guy because he's because i'm sick of being annoyed by all of these people saying the same thing over and over again that's something that i've been thinking about a lot too like i don't want to be perpetuating that i think that i have it's a yeah well i think that i've made a lot of mistakes in how i try to communicate these things along the way i know i was like half drunk half the time i was tweeting for a couple months tweets or digital sneezes i

mean that's the bottom line it's like if you're tweeting any any bit of information you're sneezing data into the void that can infect other people's minds and and you know we don't want to deal with we we don't there's this is like a i think a boundary that nobody wants to fuck with because you know when you start recognizing the viral nature of information itself whether it's true or false yeah then you run into some real freedom of speech issues right none of us want to lose the ability to tweet any crazy ass fucking thing we feel like tweeting we're drunk we're on pcp we want to tweet about whatever the fuck it is i don't want some council of elders to tell me hey you know that that pcp tweet you did about how the way to cure covid is

to lick toilet paper after you wipe your own ass that's like not a cool thing that you did and some people so we're gonna we're gonna you can't do that anymore but but that being said you know i think this is and this is what i love about this particular pandemic philosophically is like yeah you realize that a digital reflection of covid 19 is appearing in our data feeds and so it's like a thing this is what and this is what i'm saying with this new situation of the internet you we get to see something wild happen which is that covid 19 imprints itself into the data feeds and then in that imprinting it continues to be virulent but in a completely different way it has a digital component is what i'm saying

and this is something when yeah i think when people are studying disease i think that it's well worth looking into models of affection in the uh what do you what do you call it the no no sphere whatever models of infection in the in the ecosystem of the internet and you'll begin to realize that now when we get a new disease now we get a new virus it is actually going to exist digitally it's going to be digitally replicated and spread not as like a actual viral pneumonia but add in a in a mimetic way exactly that it lives in the internet just like it lives in ourselves it invades people's minds theories and philosophies connected to it it's in a similar fashion but it gets disseminated through twitter facebook instagram ideas evolve and they replicate

and they they they detach from the minds that they originated from they take on a life of their own and they can get powerful enough to hijack us to hide ideas the ideas themselves that now they're they don't have conscious intent they don't ideas don't know what they're doing they're just existing in this thing that we can barely really even conceptualize and then hijacking our minds which sometimes leads to then the replication of different whether it's viruses or i mean if you look at the like um um like like joseph smith who got who got ran out of uh ran out of everywhere and and you know at first was like hey i know where to find gold put them in jail for that and like oh hey i know where you can find god okay

i can't put put them in jail for that but we'll run them out of town and has like 50 followers and then and then um you know his wife catches them cheating says oh well god says you can have multiple lives and after he came up with that idea that idea took off and and created the fastest evolving religion in all of human history it spread faster because it's just some dude walking down the street with two ladies and a bunch of other dudes to be like hey buddy what's your secret like well i've been going to this new church oh new church you say i've been thinking about i've been thinking about getting a little more interesting yeah well look listen man this is to me uh an area of study that i think is so worth investigating because

what we're talking about here is a symbiosis that is being achieved between a virus and the internet and you're and so so so like what the ideas that you would want to be floating out there would not be ideas that help a virus you would want the ideas floating out there to kill the fucking thing to stop it but when you realize that there actually are asymptomatic carriers of a meme literally asymptomatic because they don't have the virus but they're working for the virus and their invitation to people to not wear masks and so that to me is fascinating in the sense that with uh i think it's cordyceps right that gets the ants to climb up on the high thing and blow up in the fungus turns other ants into zombies or like we

were mentioning toxoplasmosis it gets into cat shit right and then it gets into the nervous system of people who breathe the spores creating a different relationship with the cat in this case we have a virus that is unintentionally exploiting a brand new technology so that which ideas are being spread through the contagion of people looking at their social media and so to me this is where i'm beginning to think that social media itself uh you know the that we have to start looking at it as a vector of the pandemic uh you know what i mean like a disease zone yeah i and uh just pragmatically speaking um you know that my last trip to the psych ward i refused meds i didn't go on mood stabilizer or anything else and um and it was

it was just this wonderful experience in terms of it it was cut the first time that i was there i felt like the meds kind of interrupted my thought and so i couldn't i couldn't get to the end of what i was trying to figure out and anyhow what what um what what the best thing for my mental health was that i was taken away from my phone and computer and then i just chose not to watch tv um and for for one week and that was it i went i went from thinking time travelers were after me here whatever else to just the most mentally healthy i've been in one week of just not having a computer and not and not having a phone and think about that and yeah and and that's something anyone anyone can potentially just take a break from that so

because when we were talking about um you were mentioning earlier how not everyone has the capacity to think through these things well not everyone has the time i mean we kind of make our living uh like we're we're rewarded for getting to sit around pondering you know and um so there's intuitive thought which comes first and then this impressive deliberative thought this sometimes referred to as system one or system two system two being the deliberative thought this kind of prefrontal cortex that evolved later on it's really impressive um for for all of our lack of control that we do have as humans compared to other primates we're killing it but much like a cheetah um that that has this incredible like superpower of being able

to run really fast what it does afterwards is it collapses it uses all of its energy it can run like that for about two minutes and we're kind of like that with our decisions so uh so so they test this and there's like it's called decision fatigue or ego fatigue where they'll give someone easier or a hard test and then they'll have them walk walk down a hall um to turn in that test and in the middle of the hall there's a table and there's either like healthy snacks or cookies on the table and if someone had the hard test they grab the cookie if they had the easier test they're more inclined to grab the healthy snack because they have those resources available to make the smarter decision and we're talking about uh a condition where this is this new novel stressor

that people have that's not just a fear of dying a fear of losing your job it's also learning all the sudden we're all learning about supply chains and virology politics and like and the news is trying to terrify us and it's keeping us in sim system one all the time and and if you want to think about conspiracies i mean i i think they're pretty i think a lot of them aren't that hard to pull off in our fairly straightforward if you keep people in their system one that's where that's where their money is that that's where they're loosed that's that's where the cash in there that's where they'll swipe the credit cards if you keep people in there by scaring them or or or just or just making appealing to their kind of face value emotions or keeping them tired

or keep or keeping them drunk alcohol impairs you know that system one that that's going to be um you know people aren't going to think out where their money and they're easier to control and that's and that's what and that's what social media is doing you know so you have this terribly horrible scary stressful situation that already um uh inhibits your ability to use this system to use your deliberative or system two to use your deliberative there there's a great classic book thinking fast and slow is like the popular one most people would reference that i'd recommend but um and and then it keeps it also keeps you it keeps you clipping clicking it keeps you tuned into the news and it's just such a it it's like you don't you don't really even need

any bad actors on like a social media front for it's already doing it and then on top of that you throw in a little bad act it doesn't even need to be bad acting it can just be like the narrative that you want to tell yourself that like hey people know what they're getting into with these cigarettes you know if if they smoke the cigarettes that's their own fault so i i can sleep at night selling cigarettes to people but wait shame you know is there any correlation and i get what you're saying is but and this is something you could help help me hopefully it's not true but isn't there some correlation between this high level of anxiety that you know fight or flight every hour of the day that's being induced by technology and a weakened immune system

yes uh yeah so so stress sympathetic response so this is why this is why like meditation and yoga and stuff are great for you or even singing which um which activates more of the parasympathetic response to relaxation and um which is kind of just think of it as like short-term long-term so this is um this is i happen to have is it this is a only book you'll ever need i can't read it because my camera's blurry be behave by robert sapolsky it's uh it's a massive like 700 page book it's it's um it's fairly complicated but it's he's very funny and a great communicator so it's readable um but he he does a lot of stress response stuff um and and yeah so it's the idea is is that when you're under threat you this is about delegating energy

in the way that most mammals delegate energy is when there is a short-term threat that energy is delegated to short-term functions like activating your muscles um so that you can run and get away and so um it takes that energy away from potentially things like the immune system but definitely your digestion definitely your sex drive any of those long-term things that you don't need right then and there to get away from that threat and this is part of the problem with humans being too smart for their own good is we have existential dread and and watching the news and and reacting to things that aren't actually in our reacting to a shark attack halfway around the world just to get to the point here what you're if that's the case and what you're saying is that

the system one is being activated by our obsession with the internet and the technology uh of social media that then then the true symbiosis is happening with a virus that depends on a weakened immune system and and so yeah some probably not too in significant way by completely removing yourself from the news after having gained the information you need i think we all have the information which is we're in a pandemic you need to wash your hands you need to wear a mask you need to avoid you need to social distance from people if you're having any kind of symptoms at all you should stay home and you know i i think those are like the main points having gained that information there is no longer any increase in survivability for you by staying online but in

fact you're reducing your chances of avoiding getting COVID-19 every time you go online and activate those systems that freak you out yeah yeah but which might ultimately inhibit your immune system i tried to make a sketch about this early on about how how how um this this very idea of of learning um of learning that there's a virus that if you're stressed your immune system lowers so you can't so there's a very scary virus and you can't be stressed or you will get this you will get this virus so you're trying so my sketch was i did it with this girl like us trying to break that news to one another and like smile through the whole thing like so if you're stressed out you're gonna die but you don't freak out but there's a demon in the room that only eats people who are freaking out

yes i don't know why they haven't done that as a movie instead of like the silence a demon that is only drawn to fear listen so to me i think that that is a good kind of closing point which is look yeah there's not just obvious hygienic things you could do right now that are gonna not just keep you from getting COVID but keep you from getting all the other diseases that haven't gone on fucking vacation right now just because there's like a famous disease we still got the flu we still got the regular cold we still got all the other bullshit out there there's like basic hygienic practices uh that you could do and we all know what those are but also because it's brand new to the planet there seems to be a new form of digital hygiene

that people don't even know exists right and that would mean maybe turn off your shit for a little while right like stop going on there at night when you're up late you can't sleep that fucks your immune system up too right like all the like how much of this goddamn virus is how much success is this virus having solely because people are freaking the fuck out from being on their phones all day long yeah yeah absolutely and and also the other problem with the fear stoking is which i think is the most heartbreaking think about this for me is that to me this seems like such an opportunity for growth an opportunity to you know when you stress a system whether it's your own mind or a society or a culture or a

government or science or the medical industry problems rise to the surface pretty quickly we're now getting a very clear look at a lot of problems that were below some of our conscious awareness or certainly um uh within were hidden from kind of the common zeitgeist or whatever and and we could be we could be taking opportunities just you know i'm taking opportunities to learn new skills and try comedic acting yeah things like that makes silly web series and stuff for the first time and and we could be doing things like that if we weren't so obsessed with with just the fear aspect of this because all of change is going to when they're self-driving cars a lot of people are going to lose their lose their jobs if people stop binge drinking and take better care of themselves

a lot of service industries are going to be hurt from that we will need to learn to adapt and i think the hardest thing about all this for me is like holy shit is all of this fascinating you know normally Duncan if you were if you were if i was on the show and you're giving me a reminder to be be here be in the here in the now and be present i would like playfully push back about the logic but i have never been more of a believer in being in the here in the now and appreciating what is happening right now for the historical fascinating experience that it is and stop trying to pretend like this is going to be normal tomorrow and stop trying to pretend like it's something that it isn't and just experience it for what it is we might have sports games without

an audience and that might be a little bit of a bummer for you but it's also something that they're going to be showing clips of a hundred years from now it's such a fucking insane fascinating thing that we get to look when you go to the grocery store and someone put an empty like early on i remember on twitter someone putting an empty milk jug on their head as a mask and i'm sure a lot of people were scared of that because they didn't see it as an opportunity like today i got to go to a grocery store and there's a guy with an empty fucking milk jug on his head not only that but he was probably the smartest fucking person in the grocery store yeah like how amazing is that how amazing to find out he didn't even know there was covid he was just like fuck it i'm

gonna do it today the day's the day i finally do what i've been wanting to do for years where the milk jug and i would just say and i won't give a whole big science breakdown about this but if you if you want to increase positivity in life and i could break this down but we'll maybe do it another time small incremental gains so if it feels like you've lost everything rather than thinking you're just going to get everything back or or whatever or things are just going to take off tomorrow you're the way that lottery winners are never happy one year or whatever after they win the lottery people people that make tomorrow a little better than today and next year a little better than next than this year those are the people that have sustained happiness uh through

their lives and part of the reason why i was so actively like a little bit alarmist early on is because just getting it in our heads that this is like a tough situation that it's going to be a long haul uh negative things go just the opposite way so when someone's paralyzed and you think how could you even live like that holy what a horrible thing to go through people that are paralyzed actually mentally recover quite well and figure out how to live with it people that do the worst are people that have like ms or something where every every week every year it's getting worse because that's where that that's the incremental losses are pure torture a sharp a sharp loss i could break down the neural science but but anyway a sharp a sharp loss it's really hard in

the beginning and then there's small incremental gains towards progress after this you want to break your feet and then slowly recover from it you don't want to you don't want to get a neurologic disorder that leads leads to you deteriorating and you don't want to tell yourself that everything's going to be okay one week from now and one week have to go through this again and again and again if my best estimation of this is i'm planning my tour for fall 2021 and if it how if i start doing shows before that time that will be fantastic news everyone else trying to do shows two months from now they're going to be heartbroken you know i get it so you're kind of saying like look if you want to deal with this thing get real about it but also every single day there's like a

chance to do some little thing like self-care style thing a little thing not a big deal have tea tomorrow or like you know take more baths or meditate or or maybe exercise for like four minutes tomorrow or whatever take little steps forward and then over the course of the lockdown or the time you're inside you're saying there's a chance to really achieve lasting happiness and boy if i had a magic genie that wouldn't allow me to get rid of this virus but instead would allow me to get this one psychological thing through to people what what what i would hope for was would be that that would mean that we do a soft slow incremental reopening that is little gains over and over and over rather than a full reopening that lasts for three weeks and then

damn your your your hit all over again i think that's i think that's gonna crush people i think that's gonna break people's brains i don't think people are gonna be patient is the enemy of covid it seems like a kind of solid patience look shane this was a really enlightening conversation for me i'm really grateful you really helped me work out some ideas i have also helped me help frame me in a little bit here and there which i definitely need um thank you oh i'm grateful for you my friend i fucking love your show by the way i stayed up till five in the morning the night it came out watching it it's so good congratulations and timely well i know i wish it wasn't that's the thing i'd much rather it'd be less timely but hey shane tell people where they can find you

do you have a patreon uh yeah i do patreon.com slash shane moss i just started putting some behind the scenes stuff i started doing my patreon during this i have like half of my podcast paid for with it right now so that's progress um so if you want to throw a small incremental gain on there terrific um shane moss ma uss.com um for my podcast here we are where i interview at least one scientist each week and it's not all covid stuff on a loop by the way i try to most of what i want to focus on is how is this impacting our sleep how is this impacting our psychological well-being and stuff like that rather than give people a virology week after week um uh so uh so that's the kind of stuff that i'm doing there and uh yeah i'm i'm oh speak if you are gonna follow me i would

say that my instagram is a hair more positive uh then then my then the i would say twitter is the worst of who i am me too man we there's no doubt that twitter is in a particularly grotesque feedback loop of negativity right now there's sort of there's some beauty within that in ways if you catch me on the right but listen you are a positive person it's okay by the way i think any of us who've had any kind of online meltdown or terceness or anything it's all forgiven what the fuck are we supposed to do man no one knows how to react to this there's no right way to do this we're all losing our shit overtly or secretly you know i think that's something that's really wonderful about you is you don't hide the reality of what it's like to have mental illness you don't hide the reality

and that for people like me who get depressed and have had mental illness and do have mental illness because once you have an endogenous depression you got a depression it's gonna come and go it means a lot to us you know because it's like we i think that you know hearing someone with such clarity and such an understanding of science use that very same clarity to like freely talk about what it's like sometimes in the old gyroscope gets off a little bit it's liberating you know because it's just part of what happens it just happens if you've got this a meat computer running your show what do you expect you know shane i love you man thank you for being on this show i love you about it hopefully i'll see you in 2020 i think 2021 i i i think i think vaccine by

january uh influencer like yourself will get it by march i'll get it by may uh normals will get it by normals uh do you want to do a commercial for your 2021 tour that we can do in you could re-release in 2021 come out hey normals come out and then if you can convince people to take it and get there the the herd immunity which i'm skeptical will be able to that enough messaging will be able to get through then i'll be on tour by fall 2021 that's a very that's a very loose estimation so if you're listening to this in 2021 and we're all still alive and we beat this motherfucking thing come and see shane moss in 2021 until then subscribe to his patreon and thank you shane i'll see you out there had a great thanks buddy that was shane moss everybody all the links you

need to find shane moss or at dunkatrustle.com or save yourself some time and go to shane moss.com that's s-h-a-n-e-m-a-u-s-s dot com a big thank you to blue chew express v-p-n and d-h-m detox we're sponsoring this episode of the d-t-f-h all those offer codes will be at dunkatrustle.com if you don't want ads go to patreon.com forward slash d-t-f-h and subscribe support us dive in deep and i hope you all are having a great week and are healthy and happy and i'll see you next week until then Hare Krishna a good time starts with a great wardrobe next stop jc penny family get-togethers to fancy occasions wedding season two we do it all in style dresses suiting and plenty of color to play with get

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