God Awful Movies - 552: House of Numbers

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

This week, Michael Marshall joins us for another reluctant foray into the dark world of AIDS denialism. Which is just a fantastic premise for a comedy show.---Check out more from Marsh on Skeptics with a K and the Know Rogan ExperienceIf you’d like to make a per episode donation and get monthly bonus episodes, please check us out on Patreon: http://patreon.com/godawfulCheck out our other shows, The Scathing Atheist, The Skepticrat, Citation Needed, and D&D Minus.Our theme music is written and performed by Ryan Slotnick of Evil Giraffes on Mars. If you’d like to hear more, check out their Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EvilGiraffesOnMars/Report instances of harassment or abuse connected to this show to the Creator Accountability Network here: https://creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org/

He's basically asking her, so if I take a really accurate test, but it disagrees with the less accurate test, which of these tests are I meant to trust? So confusing. He says, like, well, but this test says that if you get a positive, you should get additional testing. So it's obviously useless. It's like the shampoo bottles always say rinse and repeat. When is the repeating? There's got to be a less appropriate venue for me to be raising this objection.

God-awful movie. Movies. Welcome back to the GAMCast, where each week we sample another selection from Christian cinema because professional Lego Taster isn't actually a job, apparently. I'm your host, Noelusions.

Heath is off this week, but sitting 900 miles to my immediate northeast as my bad friend, Eli Bosnick, Eli, how are you this fine afternoon, sir? Fantastic, Noah. Well, I thought you were going to say more, so I gave you a little pause there, nothing. Heath usually throws a...

No, okay. And we're also excited to welcome back, guest masochist extraordinaire and co-host of the No Rogan Experience. Michael Marshall Marsh, welcome back. Great to be here. Thanks for having me back. I can't even blame you for this film. I feel this is all my fault. It is.

The reason we're doing this, the reason we're talking about this film, I've got to apologize to you guys for change. How does it feel to be on the receiving end of the apology? Oh, right. Yeah. No, this is fucking karma, isn't it? So tell us much. What day cares aren't you allowed right now? Right.

What carnic torture are we going to be breaking down? today. So we watched House of Numbers. It's the 2009 documentary that asks, what if we were wrong about AIDS? You know, what if the real killer really was? A gay lifestyle and poor nutrition.

And those killers, they've been hiding behind the grassy knoll all this time or something like that. Because Big Farmer and the CDC have conspired to frame a virus like it was HIV-Harvey August. And Eli, how bad was this movie? Well, if you love the pseudoscientific bullshit we tackle here on godiful movies, but you wish it had, you know, universally world history significant plague repercussions.

You will love this movie. Look, I know none of the bullshit that we tackle is harmless, right? We wouldn't tackle it if it was harmless, right? We don't make movies about people who like just hang out and do stupid shit. But the difference between Eat the Sun and this, which made AIDS significantly where it feels measured. The vibes are different. Even they, the bullshitters, feel like a little out of their element, right? You know how like whenever the Trump administration is interviewed, it's very obvious they want to be like,

I don't know, man. They just said we would like get to be fucking in charge. or something. And now, why is the New York Times here? That's how everyone in this movie feels. Like, okay, here I go with my AIDS denial. So the thing about this movie, so some of the movies that we watch are enjoyable. It's actually fun to watch them.

They're so bad. And some of them are the kind of thing where, like, if you really like bad movies, you can enjoy them. But this is one of those things. Like, if you enjoyed this movie, I don't want to be friends with you. Right? If you enjoyed any frame of this movie, I don't think we should hang out anymore. So other than that, is there anything you guys want to nominate this one for being the best,

to be in the worst at? Okay, I'm going to go best, worst investigative journalists. Because throughout this movie, we will meet lots of experts. You know, they're going to talk to people from the WHO. They're going to talk to people from the CDC. We're going to talk to doctors and scientists. Anthony Fauci is in it, yeah. Anthony Fauci is in it quite a lot.

And then we're going to talk to the people who disagree with them. and they almost all just get the Chiron investigative journalist. Not any kind of background, no expertise, not even where they're an investigative journalist for. And that's because if you Google them, they're just a guy who thinks a thing that this movie needs to put on par with a CDC or WHO guys. Not even author.

Yeah. Yeah. He'll give you author for free half the time, but not even in this. No. No, no, no. And I was going to go with this, because we have so many of these like experts and idiots kind of moments, I was going to go with best worst split screen arguments, right?

Because a clever documentarian will sometimes be able to make his bullshit argument by, you know, doing the like the correct snippet at the right time and making his interviewee sound wrong when he isn't. This is not a talented documentarian. So what he does is he puts Anthony Fauci on one side of this screen and some asshole who's called himself an investigative journalist, right, on the other side. And he has him kind of duking it out. One will say something and then they go, well, he says that, but that's fucking, this fucking bullshit.

He probably fucks his mom or whatever. They do that like four times in the movie. And every time the movie gets its own ass kicked in it, it's amazing. It sure does. It's great. There is one. We'll get to it when we get to it. There's one doctor who breaks character from being like the authority and is like,

oh, that guy should fucking die. He's like, how about you fuck off, man? How about you eat a dick and fuck right off? I love that guy so much. And I'm going to go with best, best top comment that proves Marsh is right about literally everything. So. Would that be the one that you've posted a picture of? Yes, it is.

It is at the top of our notes here. It is very important to me spiritually. So we are doing this movie because for those of you who don't listen to our sister's show, scathing atheist, we had Marshon to do a segment called Who's Woot. to talk about the sort of baddie behind the baddies in this movie, Peter Dewsberg. And so Marsh has written an article about, hey, just so you know, Joe Rogan is an AIDS denier and he's an AIDS denier because of this person. And to prove Marsh's point, the top comment underneath this movie with 32 likes is who is here after finding out about this on Joe Rogan podcast. So thank you, Jeff Youngblood, for providing us this citation.

Yeah, specifically four months ago, which is when Joe interviewed Gavin DeBecker, who is another AIDS denialist that they had a long conversation about how AIDS isn't caused by HIV and recommended this movie. So, yeah, this is proof of concept for my other show, the Norogun experience. This is why we do it. All tie together. All one fan. It's just one extended ad.

It's a sponsored post. To be honest, the reason I went with the one that I did, we were all trying to avoid the worst worst, which is worst, worst, worst. possible breakfast cup clause because if you Google anybody in this who says AIDS isn't caused by HIV and see what happened to them afterwards, it no longer becomes a comedy show. It stops being funny very quick. I'm sorry, Marsha, I have to strongly disagree because after years of like, oh shit, that guy ended up health and human services, it was nice to Google someone and be like, they died and their baby

died of AIDS. Oh, God. Oh, it was not nice. But that is what you found when you Googled almost any of them. more extreme than I would have hoped for. I was just kind of thinking jail or shut up. Yeah, the worst thing is, I don't know which of the people in this movie you're referring

to there, because that happens more than once so many people. Right, so the refutation of this movie is just this movie, but we add a big thing whenever they show up that says, deceased and give the year and the cause of death. Just hyphen, and then a year is how you debunk this movie. We are

wasting our time with this podcast. Just investigative journalist, 1964 to like 2,000. 12. Well, yes, exactly. All right. Well, this one's going to contain a lot of rage bait, so I'm going to need a minute to sedate myself, but we'll be back in a flash with all the malignant stupidity that is House of Numbers. I'm telling you, Noah, you're just jealous. I literally could not be less jealous. Well, hey, guys, are you ready to record the rest of the podcast? We'd love to, Marsh, but I'm doing my new workout, butt crunches.

But crunches. Yeah, they're part of the workouts they don't want to. you to know about from my fitness plan from Crunch Biggins. I see. Okay. And how much with this plan? Just 11 easy payments of $99.99, Marsh. Oh, wow. That's a lot.

Easy. Okay. It's forbidden knowledge, guys. The stuff is not cheap. Look, Eli, if you want to get in shape without gimmicks, you should just try FitBod. What's FitBod? FitBod customizes every workout and adapts as you improve to avoid boredom and plateaus on your journey. But have you actually tried it?

I sure have, Marsh. I love how FitBaud adapts my workout to whatever equipment I have available so I can get a great workout in whether I'm in an empty hotel room or a fully stocked gym. That's why I, Noah, personally endorse FitBOD. Where do I sign up? Level up your workout. Join FitBOD today to get your personalized workout plan. Get 25% off your subscription or try the app for free for seven days at FitBOD. Me slash gam. That's F-I-T-B-O-D-M-E-slash-GAM. All right, Noah, thanks. I guess I won't need butt crunches. after all. Yeah, I don't think so. Yeah, give me a second. I'm going to go get rid of the weights. Sorry.

They don't ask. Don't ask. Yep, okay, yep, not asking. You know. All right, everyone. Welcome to the first ever writer's room meeting for House of Number. Woo!

Yeah. Now, this movie is going to prove once and for all that HIV testing doesn't work. Wait a second. What? Well, I thought we were proving that HIV doesn't cause AIDS.

Oh, we could say that too. Right. Well, yeah, okay, so if HIV doesn't cause AIDS, how can the tests be bad? There's nothing to test for. Well, they're wrong. They're wrong to test for it. They're wrong about detecting the nothing? Yes.

Okay, I'm sorry, not to further complicate things, but I was actually hoping that we'd use the movie to prove that AIDS drugs. are complete ineffective. But ineffective against the disease that doesn't exist? Exactly. Oh, no, we can do that too. I can totally do that too. I'm sorry, so the movie is about how the testing is bad for a disease that doesn't exist

and also the drugs can't cure it? Yeah. Yeah, no, that sounds good to me. Does that sound good to you, Frank? Oh, he died of AIDS. I'll get the cart. Yeah, I used the red trash bags. I know.

And we're back for the breakdown and we're going to open up on some terrifying AIDS facts that we're going to spend most of the movie ignoring. Yeah, I mean, the first fact we are going to find out is that this is a Brent W. Leung film. And it is a film of his in that it's the only one of his films. It's the only thing he actually directed. He did do some other work. He edited CMT 20 sexiest men.

And he was also the editor of CMT 20 sexiest women and CMT 50 steamy as Southern Stars. So, you know, he's a reliable source for medical stuff is what I'm saying. He's done a lot of work. He's out there. He's making waves. So they say at this point that there is no other disease. Do you think he's ever been sitting there cutting together footage in the CMT office? And someone's been like, so what about you?

What's your weekend? And he was like, well, I don't think AIDS is real. And they were like, ooh. So if you could just put Merle Haggard back on screen, I actually don't want to. We're not going to have this conversation. So you think Merle Haggard makes the 50 steviest. I'm going to travel a world talking to AIDS. Okay.

Yeah. So, yeah, no, but we learned that... We better hope he makes them 50s. We learn that 10 people die of AIDS every second. Well, that's only if you believe UNAIDS about it. Well, yes, exactly. Can you believe that? Right, right.

And then he says, he's like, you know, there's no other disease but AIDS that kills essentially everyone who gets it. And I'm like, yes, the fuck there are. Like, rabies kills pretty much 100% of the people that get to the point where they're showing symptoms. Like, there's a bunch of neurodegenerative diseases with 100% mortality.

Like, that's such a stupid fucking thing to start. So that's wrong. Yeah. Don't worry. I won't point out every time he's wrong. You can't do another 11-hour episode, Noah. Right, right, yeah. He does say that people just aren't scared of AIDS anymore.

And it's like, yeah, but that's because of you. That's because of movies like you all that say AIDS isn't real. Exactly. So he comes up as a narrator here. And my God, what a lethargic fucking narrator. Like, have you ever tried a podcast and then you just nope out eight seconds in. It's this guy's podcast. He's so bored with it. Ah. So yeah, he's like, you know, the whole world united to defeat AIDS, except for me.

Of course, the whole world minus me, united to defeat AIDS. And for me, I'm on AIDS's side, whether or not you want to believe it. That's the thing. He's saying, like, well, you know, people are trying to end AIDS. And that's a bad thing, actually. Like, what is your point here? That's ridiculous. Yeah, right. But he explains that Big Pharma doesn't want. want to cure AIDS because it's way more profitable to sell you drugs for life is the real deal. I'm fairly sure Big Pharma could figure out how to market a cure for AIDS. I reckon they could solve it. They could really manage it.

How was Big Pharma doing before AIDS? Were they just medium pharma up until that point? Or were they doing okay? AIDS came along and really turned that whole business model around. Yeah. No, I really did. We're losing so much money on all the medicine. I mean, look, telling people drugs for life is significantly less valuable when they only live for a few fucking years, guys.

I mean, okay, but then our lethargic narrator tells us a little bit about his bio-right. He was born right before AIDS got big, so he could still see it in, like, small venues. Yeah. At that point. And he's delivering this kind of thing about himself. One, very tastefully from a cemetery, really lovely visuals there. Yeah, uh-huh. And he's also, he's wearing his most serious, like, documentary turrets.

little neck. And I'm not sure whether he was wearing that turtle neck when he was editing CMT greatest road trips, which is another thing from his own. I don't think he was. I think every day's casual Friday of the CMT offices. He identifies himself here as an AIDS child, which I think is actually kind of insulting, given how many children have AIDS. Yes, right.

We already took that term and used it. Maybe just say millennial, huh? So then we zip around the world and we ask like a man on the street questions about AIDS. Yeah, he asked it to exactly two people, though. Initially, like before he goes like around the world and stuff, he goes like to two different people. And it's at an AIDS walk event and he finds two people

who don't, who seem to not know much about AIDS. Now, the second one of them, he cuts away immediately. And it feels like there's a back half of that sentence, which explains a lot. Yeah. I just want to ask that, Brett, you went along to a AIDS walk event you've shown us two of those voxpops. How many people did you interview while you were there?

Was it only two or was it more? It was just the one, two guys. So that's just the thing, right? So it has been demonstrated over and over again with these kind of man on the street interviews. You can find people who don't know which is bigger between the earth and the sun. Yeah, right?

And with relative ease. So he's trying to make the argument that, you know, the average man on the street doesn't really know a lot about AIDS. And he shows two people going, well, I don't fucking know. Yeah. That proves it. Yeah.

But then he explains that he's going to write off a lot of travel for this. He went all over the world and he talked with distinguished experts. And they show some photos of the distinguished experts. And I only point that out because they're trying to make these experts look like bad people right throughout the movie. And so when we meet one of them, the photo they show is him shaking hands with Fidel Castro. Yeah. We couldn't find another photo of the guy that we interviewed. Sorry.

Yeah. It's great because the photo before that is Anthony Fauci and I'd literally written down like, oh yeah, Smea Fauci by showing the photo of him where he's shaking hands with W, why don't you? And then the next photo is a guy for UN Age

shaking hands with Fidel Castro. It's amazing. And this two around the world. He does the Voxpops in other countries. He goes to London. We found out that Londoners are idiots. We knew that from looking at them. We could see their haircuts.

It was very clear that these people would not have very much race. But then he goes to Cape Town and they all are very well versed in what AIDS is and what it does. And then he's saying like, so everybody's confused about AIDS but the South Africans were incredibly

clear about AIDS so what is that they got it on lock they're actually very aware of A&S yeah when Alton because I had forgotten Anthony Fauci was part of the AIDS thing too when COVID happened and the COVID denial happened and that had to be fucking crazy for Anthony Fauci

right to be like oh yeah like again yeah like this again like because the other guy he knows the polio guy he hangs out with Ebola guy There's not a widespread international, no such thing. He's two for fucking, he must be sitting at home going, is it me?

Is it the way I say it? There's a terrible illness. It's called COVID-19. That seems normal, right? That doesn't seem to be suspicious. There's a terrible illness. Now that feels like an over-delivery that I'm doing here. Okay, so then a bunch of people who actually know shit

explain the difference between HIV and AIDS, right? Because that's what he's tripping people up. on, right? He's asking him what's HIV, what's AIDS. So then a bunch of people who know shit explain it, but he's mixing them in with people who are like intentionally muddying the waters because they're AIDS denialists. Yes. And so the end result is us just going like, wow, everybody's saying different shit. Yeah. Right. And like even one of the experts, the first expert he's talking to sounds like he's calling Brent an idiot in his reply. Because his reply is, unfortunately, people don't remember the definition after hearing it. And that is a very

pointed thing to be saying to Brent after he's just given Brent the definition of AIDS. Right. So yeah. And then he's, but he's like, you know, why decades after the discovery of HIV is there's still so much controversy about it? I'm like, because you're an asshole. You can't use the controversy that you're stoking as evidence that there's justification for the fucking controversy you're stoking. Still a lot of questions in my brain and nobody else's. I think we should dive deeper. The fucking vaccines have been around a while. Theory of evolution has been around a while too. Man, why is there still so much controversy? Yeah.

Because you're a bunch of fucking assholes. Yeah, it's ridiculous. His question is basically, isn't it bad that there's people like me out here making movies about HIV doesn't cause it? Isn't that a bad thing? It is, man. It is. Ah. Yeah, so we meet a couple of our different talking heads.

We meet the lady from the Perth group. Yeah, she is particularly bad. Alina Papadopoulos, I think her name is sort of like, I guess. But like, I don't know. I wasn't clear to begin with that this movie recognized that she was wrong or not. Because this was the only time we see Brent actually sitting with the expert while we're seeing these other experts saying, well, AIDS is real. And then it was with her and he's very sympathetic to her.

So I looked her up. She died of heart failure in 2022 as a COVID-denier. And there are people on her, like people talking about her. COVID-deniers talking about how she was killed by the government for all the things that she knew. So that is. Sure. Yeah. Sure. Good job, COVID. Batten cleanup. Yeah, but she's the one trying to sneak up on AIDS denialism from the back by going,

we're not saying that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. We're saying that you can't prove that HIV causes AIDS. Right. Flash cut to 97 Jews. I can absolutely prove that HIV causes AIDS. It is my life's work. Yeah, and 300,000 South Africans as well in particular. Yeah. I'm not doing their voices.

Nice try, Mark. You could do white. South Africans. You've got a white African voice in you, surely. Hey, is he kidding. Yeah, that's close. It's me. I see a theater.

So then we, he says, but to really understand the story, we're going to have to go back to the 80s. So we step all the way back to 1981 with news reports on the gay cancer, right? Which is how it was originally reported. We meet the doctor who created grid here. The terminology, yeah. The term.

The term, right. That was the original term for AIDS was gay-related, immune deficiency or grid. Yeah. I had that doctor as Will Ferrell's serious uncle because he looks like...

He does. A little older, a little more serious but enough of a feral about him. Sure, yep. Yep, I get it. And we only get one talking head segment with him

and it's the most effective this movie ever is because he's like, yeah, I don't know why I called it gay related. That in retrospect was not great. Yeah.

But he's like, yeah, yeah, sorry about And then some other people come up and they start explaining to us. And this is, I guess, as much as anything, the premise of this movie. Now, like most of these denialist documentaries, they're just going to throw a bunch of shit on the wall against the wall here. Some of it will contradict itself. So it's impossible to say any one thing is their argument. But as much as anything is their argument, they're going to say here that, like, the CDC was actually really hoping for a new disease to come along because they were running out all that sweet polio money right about 1981.

Yeah. Yeah, it's Carrie Mullis who's making that argument. And he said like the CDC, they were just looking for a plague so they didn't lose their budget. But what's his argument then? Is it that the CDC invented AIDS? And then the rest of the world went along with them because they wanted the CDC to have money? Like, Freddie Mercury must be so embarrassed that he fell for it and died of AIDS. Like, oh, man, just for the CDC's budget.

Yeah, right. Right. All these babies in Africa are like huge supporters of the CDC. It's really. These babies are team players. Well, they were team players. But then he says, but once they called it a disease,

once they called this thing a disease, America was obsessed with it and wanted to throw a lot of money at it. And I'm like, yeah, in 1981, we sure were throwing a lot of money at AIDS. Yeah, yeah. He even says there were memos saying we need to find a new plague.

And it's like, cool, can you show us one of those memos? No, no. this otherwise. I have 500 CDC people who personally emailed me their AIDS. But they are able, Marsh, to

reenact congressional hearings doing their high school performance of Oklahoma voice. I hope that'll be enough for you. They do quite a bit of that. Okay. So then we get a bunch of experts confusing the definition of by only being shown for half a sentence at a time

and then mixed in with denialists. Yes, yeah. This is where we get our first footage of Peter Dusberg. And look, I don't like to call people out on this show, but Marcia, do need to call you out for your journalistic malpractice because the fact that you did not mention in your segment on our sister show that Peter Dusberg looks and talks like the evil German scientist he is. Yeah.

Gross malpractice. Oh, he is a fucking cartoon character. Hello, it is I. Pira-Muzba. Everyone else is talking fucking... It's impossible to convey. Everyone else is talking normal about AIDS. You know, AIDS, and he's like,

he's got a fucking steaming beaker behind him. He's in an industrial lab. Igor's in the background, like loading legs and arms into a cart. It's wild. By that point, he lived in America for like 50 years. He'd only been in Germany for 20 years before that. Like, you'd think his accent would...

adjust in some kind of way. But no, he's still got the late 1940s German accent. That's not a good one. Yeah. So, okay. So, but then he tries to argue that they keep changing the definition of AIDS every year. You know, what is it?

Is it a syndrome? Is it a disease? I'm like, well, that stands for syndrome. So I think it's a syndrome. Right. But there's a lot of, like, in his effort to make it seem like there's a bunch of definitions, there's a lot of like, what is it? Is it a tiger?

Is it a cat? Is it a mammal? You know? Yeah. Because a lot of these are not contradictory. Yeah, it's just you just asked a bunch of people who know what it is to explain what it is. And they're not using exactly the same phrasing as they do that. But they all agreeing on it. Yeah.

It's ridiculous. Yeah. And also the whole like, they change the definition every year of thing. First of all, they don't change it every fucking year. They've changed it several times. But like, we release new dictionaries every year, man. That's just how definitions were. Yeah.

And even when we're seeing the people giving different definition of AIDS, he's including the ones who were wrong as well. It's like, well, yeah, that's also going to be confusing. But when he's talking about the changing definitions, those changing definitions don't agree with any of the people who are wrong about AIDS. They all agree with the people who are right about AIDS. Yeah, exactly. There's no definition that says, for example,

that HIV doesn't cause it or anything like that, or anything that would support anything that they're trying to say in the stupid fucking movie. Yeah. And then there's maybe the most insulting part of the entire movie where we see a few AIDS patients like listing all the perks of having AIDS. Oh, yeah. It's pretty fucking great to have AIDS. A free place to live. Free health care.

AIDS. The best parking spots. They literally show a guy with AIDS holding up his parking pest, his handicapped parking best with a big thumbs up. and a smile. Hey, everybody, hey, everybody, bring it in. If you're ever being filmed and someone says,

would you hold up your handicapped barking placard and give a big thumbs up? You say no to that person. No one with good intentions has ever wanted that photo. It's so mad. Some of the people that talk to,

they talk to a guy called Harvey. And Harvey is, he's very relaxed in his seating. He sat outside in a little chair. It feels like he's only sat in that chair after he was negotiated out of the hammock that he originally wanted to be interviewed in. They have to talk him down from the hammock into this like very loose chair. I will take off the robe and put on clothes, but only if I get to do my interview about the AIDS crisis like this.

I like, so, okay, so he's sitting back in this fucking lounge chair under the shade of a tree, drinking a big fucking ice tea the whole time. I'm like, dude, you're talking about AIDS. Yeah. Why would you choose that? And he's one of the bad guys. Yeah, at least do a few buttons up on your shirt. Just a couple more buttons, so that we're not seeing quite as much.

And this is where they talk about, like, oh, when the cases were starting to go down, and then they changed the definition and the numbers shot up again and, like, more than double, as if they'd fudge the numbers. And what happened was they just changed the list of symptoms that could be indicative of AIDS to include things like the list of indicators started to include cervical cancer and a couple of others. Basically, it got to 1993 and they thought, oh, yeah, women. Women. Right.

And when they look, they found it. We forgot about them. Yeah. Yeah. They can't be gay. Why would gay guys have sex with them? That doesn't make any sense. You mean like they tricked them?

They put on a mustache sometimes. That's how they get a gay guy to have sex. In it, Duesberg even says, well, you know, the more symptoms you identify, the more patients you catch. It's like, right, but that's a good thing because you want to catch all of the patients. We're trying to catch all of them. Yes. That's the thing is that, like, they keep making this seem sinister.

they're like, you know, as we got better and better at identifying AIDS, we found it more and more. Yes. Yeah. If we stop looking, there'd be no AIDS, huh? We can totally make AIDS go away if you stop doing any tests by Dewsburg's logic, yeah. You say that is a good thing, but here in men

are from Mars and women are from Venus, I find that scorekeeping is actually a bad idea in relationships. With AIDS, the virus. So then we head to Africa, right? Brent comes up and he's like, I went to where my bullshit could do the most harm.

He describes it as Africa. That troubled continent is a, oh, that's already a bad start. That is a super bad start. Yeah, but we meet a radio DJ who's bored of all this damn AIDS talk. She's an AIDS denialist who's now, she has AIDS. Yes. And is now on AIDS medication and has deleted her entire history of AIDS denialism from the internet as much as she can.

But it doesn't work because Google. has a next page. It's the internet, yeah. Yeah, it's just the internet. Yeah. And so, okay, so, but they talk about, like, trying to diagnose AIDS in Africa, right, without access to all the cutting-edge lab equipment. And they're trying to make it sound dastardly because it's less effective.

And, you know, look, it is, it's a really fucked up aspect of the capitalist world that we live in that there's a whole goddamn continent where, like, nearly everybody can't get access to modern medicine or whatever. But that doesn't mean that the people who are doing the testing in Africa are bad. Right. And initially they're talking about the fact that you wouldn't have access to tests, so you would look for a symptom pattern instead. But they'd say, well, you can't say that these patients go AIDS because they've just got

all of the symptoms that you see in AIDS patients, but not a positive test. So you can't say for certain. Right. Yeah, exactly. You can only say that they have AIDS because they died of AIDS. Yeah. Right. He's like, whole countries are convinced that AIDS is.

real. It's a tragedy. I'm like, well, it's going to be a fucking tragedy. They said now they can discover AIDS all over Africa. It's like, yeah, well, where there's AIDS, yes. Like, if there's AIDS there, then yes. And again, the alternative is not discovering AIDS where there is AIDS if you can't do a test. And that is a much worse situation than saying we've got these symptoms. We think it's probably age. We should treat it as such. Right. And the thing is, think for it like a pregnancy test. Without a pregnancy test, how do you even know you're pregnant? Well, eventually the symptoms become pretty undeniable. And you can go, I think this is pregnancy.

No, I need a photo of the baby eventually. And that's the only real, that's 100% accurate. And that's the only test that counts. Not even that. You did. Like, if you could have a baby, but you don't know you're pregnant until you've peed on a stick and the lines gone. Right. Exactly.

Like, until that point, you can't. Right. This baby could have come from anywhere. You're just diagnosed based on the symptoms. Yeah. Just the symptoms. Yeah. So, and then, like, one guy comes in and he's like, well, you could, you could mistake.

tuberculosis for AIDS. And I'm like, well, then AIDS must not exist. They check in with one real doctor here who's like, yeah, of course misdiagnosis happens. What a stupid question. Hey, I have follow questions about you now. Right, right. Hey, dude, set a timer next to that guy. So yeah, but here's the thing. So they're talking about this one protocol of how to determine whether somebody has AIDS based on symptoms, right? And they're trying to like throw a bunch of smoke up to try to make everybody think that this is a really bad thing, right?

That it's getting a lot of misdiagnosis. And they're saying, like, you know, a lot of, most places don't even use it anymore, right? As though that means that everybody admitted that it was evil the whole fucking time. But what they never establish is like whether or not the count of HIV and AIDS got higher or lower in the places that stopped using that protocol. Yeah. Right. Like, if that's the argument you're trying to make that this protocol is bad, then what you have to

show is that when the protocol stopped being used, the numbers shifted significantly. Because if it's just bad, right? If it's just bad, maybe it's undercounting the AIDS. Yeah, exactly. And they say we go through a couple of investigative journalists as well. We meet Tom Bethel, Googled him. He also wrote that Darwin was wrong about natural selection and that climate change was a hawks. So that is this AIDS expert. Then we meet a guy called Neville Hodgkinson, whose Chiron says, Medical and Science correspondent of the Sunday Times 1985 to 1994, which makes you ask what happened in 1994, yes. And the answer is he left to join a yogic cult and to publish AIDS denial books.

And the thing is, not a lot of people's like CVs, resumes as a science journalist, have an end date. There's not a lot of expiry. It's not the living ones anyway. Unless they quit, stop doing QED, like, whether they are. And yours does. Everyone's going to think you joined a yogic cult. to start writing AIDS denial book. Maybe I have.

Yeah. We also meet Celia Farber, another investigative journalist who doesn't even know what AIDS is anymore. And I agree. Celia Farber does not know what she's talking about when she's talking about AIDS. So, yes, she doesn't know what AIDS is anymore.

So they're going to be making two parallel arguments about AIDS throughout this movie, right? One is that when we see AIDS in Africa, that's really just the result of poverty, right? where those are just diseases of poverty. Yeah. And they're all being lumped together as AIDS to like steal all of the money or whatever. But of course, AIDS doesn't just exist in Africa.

It exists all over the fucking world. So then they're going to make a parallel argument that AIDS is a grouping of diseases that are, you know, just shit that gay people get for being gay, right? Yes. And so this is where, like Celia Farber is the first one who sort of introduces this problem, right? And tries to explain it away. And she's like, AIDS seems to be a different disease in Greenwich, Philly. than it is in Africa because it presents

with all of these different symptoms. Right. And I'm like, yeah, man, a lot of diseases are like that, as it turns out, a lot of disease, you know, if you grow up in a really rich country with great medicine versus if you grow up in one of the poorest places in the fucking world, yeah. Most diseases present differently.

And what's amazing is we now get an expert who makes exactly that argument, right? We get a talking head and the suspicious guy is back and he's like, yeah, to be clear, no one's redefining the HIV virus. We're all pretty clear about what that virus is. Are you making you have to tell me, it's like me, cops. Show me your dick.

When Celia Farbo, when she's saying AIDS is different in Greenwich Village, I just thought, well, that's just more New York exceptionalism. Like, relax, New York. You can get bagels and pizza anywhere. It's different. Bagels, pizza, and AIDS anywhere, New York. When I think in New York. Weirdly, that is a shop in Liverpool where most of it is.

The bagel's pretty decent. Almost worth getting the AIDS for, to be honest. The AIDS are good, the AIDS are pretty good too. Yeah, no, the AIDS is strong. He goes, at this point, so he goes, there are more than 12 different definitions of AIDS worldwide. And like more than 12, so 13. So stupid.

I just found four different definitions for different guys. So buckle the fuck in. Yeah, it's so stupid like, of course disease is going to be defined differently in different countries. Definitions are a human construct. It's not like losing an arm where you're measuring how many arms you've got and it's pretty hard to get that wrong or to vary. With AIDS, you're measuring amounts of something, like T-cell counts and things and viral load. Yeah. Right.

But then so Brick comes up and he goes, high school biology taught me that diseases can't be different from one place or another. And I'm like, you know what? No non-stupid argument ever started with high school biology taught me. Yeah. At this point, we had had enough talking heads to refute the bad arguments that I thought we were going to cut to his high school biology teacher being like, that is not what I taught him. That's a very stupid thing of him to say and I'm ashamed he was in my class. What have I been doing with my life? I hear he works for CMT now.

It seems like that's where it would be best for him to remain. So, okay. But now we go to the scene of the crime, HIV testing. Right? Oh, and this is good. Because again, they have to introduce this with Vox Pops, with people. He's asking people, have you ever had an HIV test? And people are going, no.

And then it's wondering, he's like, yeah, I did. Yeah, I had HIV test. Yeah, I think it was a good thing to get tested. And you know what? Good on that lady. 2009. Good on that lady being so very open and positive about having had an HIV test. That's the kind of thing that demolished his stigma and not the kind of thing he wanted in his film.

So, and sorry to yank us back into the sad part of this, but we meet Kim Bannon, who got an age diagnosis. We meet Ken Bundy, who also got an age diagnosis. AIDS diagnosis and I'm like, oh, the movie's going to tell these people they're fine, isn't it? And it is. Hey, how's Kim doing these days? Do you anyone to Google? Dead from AIDS. She's dead from AIDS? Yes.

Yeah. No, that's a lot of that. How's Ken? Can okay? Can do it? He's dead of AIDS. He died of AIDS. Also dead of AIDS. Just probably a coincidence. This is where I would turn off the YouTube video. Now, look, I know, I know I'm not your average bear, but I feel like a quick

googs magoogs would have really It ended my investigatory process here. Yeah. Well, okay, you say that, but you don't know how much gay sex Kim Bannon was having after this film came out. That's true. Yeah. He started using a lot of paupers afterwards.

How clean the water she was drinking is. Right. No, yeah, exactly. So, but now the documentary, Brent, is going to go to, he's in Johannesburg and he's going to get an HIV test while he's there. And this is so stupid because he's saying about how like, oh, these aren't in doctors clinics and hospitals. These are everywhere.

It's like, yeah, because there's lots of AIDS. Like, when you're in a, when you see a testing center in a place where lots of people are, that's a sign that you're in a place with a high incidence of AIDS because you need to, you don't get that in New Jersey because there isn't as much AIDS in New Jersey. But here, it needs to be everywhere to try and catch the people who have it. So you know. Yeah. And then there's, he does so much bullshit trying to discredit these tests because he's like,

you know, wait, we're going to take two different tests. And she's like, well, yeah. So if one of them comes up positive and the other comes up. negative, then, you know, because they're inaccurate in different ways or whatever, then we take this other test and we'll know for sure, you know, so we're taking two tests because that's the safest way to do it, right? Because, of course, these are rapid tests, right? The actual, like, more accurate test is more expensive and you can't do it at a bus station necessarily, et cetera, et cetera. And so they just have these rapid tests that look for, like,

specific antibodies. I don't know what the fuck they look for, but they look for, like, you know, specific symptoms of AIDS that might not be 100% accurate. Cut to a guy taking a picture of his positive AIDS test so he can get out of work. I'm going to use this a bunch of times. But the thing is, as well, right, he says, but you send the rapid tests have a higher specificity in areas of higher risk populations, as if that means that this test accuracy depends on where you're doing it. Oh, that's a sign.

He's brought that as a gotcha. And it's like, that's not it. It's that they're not fully evaluated in low-risk areas because they're not rolled out in low-risk areas. because they don't need to be because those low risk areas are typically in parts of the world that have enough funding to do a more robust testing. But it's also just maths. Because if you have a test that's right, 99 times out of 100, and you're using an area where your chance of being infected is one in 100,000,

if you get a positive test, it's more likely to be an error than a real positive. But if you're in a place where one in 10 people are infected, you get a positive. It's more likely to be legit because there's so much of the infection going around, you're more likely to have it than it to be an incorrect test. it's just maths at this point. Maybe you should have paid attention to high school math as much as you weren't paying attention to high school biology. Well, right, so that's the thing is that so many of the arguments in this movie fall apart

when you ask, like, what do you think it should look like then? Yeah. I think there should be a perfect magic wand that they gently place against your forehead. Right, right. And then the words, AIDS is burned there forever and can't be removed. Oh, God. Eventually, Kim almost says those words. But then, okay, there's a great moment here where he's getting the AIDS test.

And they're also trying to make it seem like it's inaccurate because they ask about lifestyle factors. Like, why would you have to ask about lifestyle factors if you have this perfectly accurate test, right? Again, it's for the same reason. If you're engaging in high risk activity, you're at a higher risk of having it, which puts the incidence higher than the possibility of an incorrect test, of a false policy. That's why they're asking. There is a great bit where she says to him, let me ask you about your sex life. and we basically immediately cut away.

It's like an interesting camera. He looks at the camera and he's like, no, no, no. And even better, when we cut back to her, she's like, anyways, as I was saying, since you've never gotten late before, we can assume. It could not be more clear that he's just like, no, I'm not getting any.

It's just me in my hands. Yeah, I think it's because what he cut out when he said, ask you about your sex life, he said, well, I did wank off a lot whilst editing 50 sex years of seven jenets. A lot of people think Merle Haggard didn't belong in there, but I'm you. You'll see. You'll see.

All right. Well, we also need to turn the cameras off for a minute to talk about Brent's sex life. So we're going to take a quick break. But we'll be back in a minute with even more House of Numbers. Ooh, nice. That game I want us on sale. Eli. Come on.

You know the rules. Fine. Noah. What's Eli? doing? He's managing his spend by dancing? Yeah, every time he wants to buy something, he has to do the entire dance sequence from Dirty Dancing.

Wait, aren't there two parts of that sequence? Well, no, yeah, he does him both. Right, okay, yeah, fine. Okay, well, I suppose it's one way to be more conscious about your spending habits, but why doesn't you just try Rocket Money? What? Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel unwanted subscriptions. It monitors your spending.

and helps you lower your bill so you can grow your savings. Well, that sounds great. It is. Rocket Money consolidates your checking, savings, loans, and investments into a single dashboard to give you a clear view of your financial picture. Plus, Rocket Money can track subscriptions and has the ability to cancel unwanted ones within the app within just a few taps. But have you actually tried it? I have, I signed up for Rocket Money when they became a sponsor,

and now they're the way I shared my screen away. One second. And now they're the way I keep track of my funds and even automate my savings. That's why I, Eli Bosnick, personally endorsed Rocket Money. All right, Marsh, I'm sold. Where do I sign up? Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Join at RocketMoney.com slash awful movies.

That's rocketmoney.com slash awful movies. Rocketmoney.com slash awful movies. So, Eli, what did you want to buy? Oh, okay. I want to get Slay the Spire, too. Oh, did you get the one with the version with the soundtrack? Damn it, here I go again. A little more energy on the left.

I'm tired. All right, gentlemen. I call this meeting of the evil conspiracy guys who run everything and only ever get found out by the mentally ill and con men to order. As you know, today we're going to fake a brand new illness. Ooh, how evil of us. How will we do it? So, we find all the areas of the world where there's insufficient nutrition and clean water, and then we tell them that the effects of all that stuff are the same disease.

I see. But won't everyone know it's just starvation and dirty water? You'd think so. But have you ever noticed how starvation and having gay, Sex have the exact same symptoms. Oh, that's very well known. Yes, of course. Right. So we start by saying gay men have the disease. And then we only say starving people have it later. It's brilliant. I'm sorry, I don't understand.

How are we going to use this to make money? That's the best part, my friend. We tell the government we need lots and lots of money to help fight this disease, and then we are positively rolling on it. So we're going to fake a disease in two different communities without anybody noticing, and then we'll get rich off the money that the Western world wants to give to the poorest in the world and gay people. Exactly. It's perfect.

Yeah, no, this is going to go great. Hanukkah. And we're back for still more of the shit. We're going to introduce now the most heartbreaking of our tragedies in this movie. this would be the AIDS denialist that adopted a baby from Romania that turned out to have HIV. Oh, God, this is such a horrible story. And I knew this story going in because we covered it on No Rogan.

When Rogan talked to Gavin DeBekker about AIDS denialism, they were talking about this kiss to say, well, if you watch this movie, there's this kid from Romania with HIV and, you know, they did great. They're doing brilliantly. So I'd already done the research of this one. It's not good. Yeah. They're going to slow roll this story.

story in this movie as well. So at this point, they introduced them just as the parents about to adopt a kid. But the wording they use when they see the kids in Romania, the mom says, I'll have one of those children. I thought to myself, I'll have one of those children, which is an insane way to phrase, I'm going to adopt an orphan. Yeah. Also, the guy had a very bulky Bartokomis view of Romania, apparently, because he's like,

they went to Romania and to demonstrate Romania, we see a fucking bunch of sheep on a road. So many sheep. So many sheep in one place. It's amazing. Yeah. Okay. But then it turned out they got the baby. They got an HIV test in Romania. The baby didn't have HIV, but then they got home and got her tested and she did. Right. That's all we learned about the story at that point. Yeah. And because we were in the section of the movie where they were casting aspersions on HIV testing, I thought that this family was going to be the example of like, and our kid didn't have AIDS. And I was going to be like, okay, well, it's a case of me. No, their kid has AIDS. Yeah. It's. Yeah. Don't hold out hope for that.

And either the first one was a false positive because of the way that it was administered, sorry, false negative because it was administered, or their kid hadn't got a high enough viral load after infection at the time that they were tested the first time. But they're going to take it as, well, one of the tests said she didn't have it. So we're good here. Yeah, exactly. So now we go back to Brent. And this is where he's doing the two, they're doing two tests.

And he's like trying to like, be like, oh, well, why isn't one test good enough? Well, that's the better test. Why aren't you just using that one? Oh, God, it's so stupid. So, yes, you're doing two tests at once. Because you do that because you don't want an error. So if they both agree, great. If there's a discrepancy, she says, we've got a third test, which is more accurate,

and that'll be the tie break. And he says, well, I don't use that one. She rightly points out, if we use that one, how would you know if it's an error? How would you know if that one has an error on it? Yes. You'd still want to back up anyway. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. He thinks it's a got you when he says that. And I'm like 80% sure that's because he thinks that she's idiot based on her accent, her age and her skin color and her gender. I think he's put all those things together and said, I must be smarter than this lady, who does this all day and knows what she's doing? Yeah, it's, can I say, because like a lot of this is very echoey, or I should say pre-echoey of COVID denialism, right?

Well, the rapid tests are inaccurate and the, right, all that stuff. It's got a different vibe when you're doing it to a woman's face in Johannesburg. Right. And that's just the thing, right? So a lot of the actual experts that he deals with, we see on camera as they start to realize, hey, you know what, there's no reason for you to be drilling down on this unless you're an asshole, right? Which is where she's getting by the time he gets to the, well, why don't we just use,

why don't they make the whole plane out of the black box, you know, a portion of this bullshit. Yeah. And he thinks he's cracked this whole thing open. Him, Brandon W. Young, the editor of Sex on Demand, thinks he's cracked open the entire HIV. Right. You're only bringing me stronger towards Brandon's side. I want you to know, Marsh, this is.

That is fair. So, yeah, but he shits all over these tasks. And then we have this guy James Chin who shows up to just choke on the how the sausages get made metaphor. You know what they say? If you knew how sausage was made, you would eventually come to believe that sausages are a Jewish conspiracy. That's what they say. So, okay, so now we're going to go to London and we're going to see how they,

we're going to examine the testing protocols there because wouldn't you know it, they're completely different than they are in South Africa because of fucking course they are. Yes. Yeah. And he actually goes to two different doctors who explain the tests. And then he goes to a third person who's just a dickhead

who dismisses all that. And he does that as a sort of a, you see, people disagree. But like the two people who were, who are, credible experts didn't disagree. Right. Your dickhead disagreed with that. No, he just popped in between their clips and roasted them. Yeah.

But, okay, so now we go back to the parents of the Romanian kid, right? And there's a very like, you know, how dare the doctors diagnose my kid with HIV kind of a thing that happens here? Very rude of him. We were trying to make a casserole. I was going to make one of the fun ones with noodles and marshmallows. But then they said, my doctor. had AIDS. Right.

Did murder her. So, and then we go back to this lady Kim who got her HIV diagnosis back in the 80s or whatever. And she's, and I can, I totally understand how this happens if you get an HIV diagnosis, especially back in the 80s when it was much more of a death sentence. But she's looking at her paper. And the paper says, you know, possible infection on it because science hedges its bets. And she's going, see, it's just a possible infection.

And they told me I had it. Right, which again, you know, they probably combine that with all these other risk factors and other tests and everything else, but, you know. Yeah, exactly. This is the thing is like all of this, they just misunderstand probability and things. That even when we were talking about the Romanian kid, we find out the Romanian kid had AIDS. And the doctor said she has a 20% chance of living to the age of two, which this movie then takes us. And therefore, it would be miraculous if she were to make it to two. Yes.

That's not what a 20% chance of something means. It means in one in five occasions, she'll make it. to two, and this might be that one. So, like, all the way through, they will just misunderstand basic probability. Right. No, they will literally say of that later, at first they only gave her two years to live, right? Not at all

what they said. Not at all what you said they said. Right? We're not even hearing from them. But, yeah, so we just have a bunch of moments where, like, a real expert will say, well, actually, this is a very good test. And a fake expert will say, you're a very good test, motherfucker.

Yeah. Like so much the movie. is him talking to an expert, not understanding them, and then going to a self-declared former science correspondence to clarify things in his favor. Not so sure about the Western blot test. I don't have you know. There's genuinely a bit where he's talking to a lady who says about Western Blot test kind of thing. And then he's like, I was confused, so I went to somebody else.

It's like, well, why didn't you go to her? You were just with her. She could have answered. Why did you go to someone else? I was confused, but she was doing that thing when I asked questions. that experts tend to do where they talk slower and louder instead of saying different words. Right. And another thing he establishes here, we met this guy Liam, who's probably my least favorite

talking head and the whole fucking thing. But Liam explains that there's, he explains a legitimate disagreement about how the testing protocols should be for AIDS. Yeah. But then he concludes that therefore all testing is bullshit. Yes. Which is obviously ridiculous. That they're showing two sides of an argument about,

updating the testing protocols to be even more accurate. Like, what is the best way we can take this and make it even more accurate? And he says, well, they're disagreeing. Therefore, all of the tests aren't accurate and are wrong and AIDS is made up. It's like, no, it could just be that what they've got is good and they disagree about how to improve it. But what they agree that what they have is good and you disagree with that, you dick it. Well, there's even a moment where they're like, well, there's different protocols from

every different manufacturer. Sounds like bullshit to me. I'm like, yeah, right? It's like how PlayStation and Xbox have different protocols and that's how you know video games don't exist. That's why I don't believe in Mario. But he extrapolates to the dumbest possible thing as he's going to do throughout the movie, right?

Where he's like, well, because there are different criteria from different manufacturers in different countries, you could have AIDS in one country and not another. Yeah, and it's ludicrous because what they're talking about in some cases, is where your viral load is detectable, like at what point is a detectable viral load, and that might be set differently at the time in different places.

That's actually not the case anymore. These days we just have, is your viral load detectable? That's actually regularly achieved these days in lots of HIV patients because of AIDS medications that you don't believe exists. So, like, the technology to get you down to undetectable exists, and you can have HIV without it being detected in any kind of way. But, yeah, this guy's denying all of that. Just this discrepancy thing is what he's kind of.

of anomaly hunting on. Right. And to be clear, you can't have AIDS in one country and not another. You could be diagnosed with it in one country and not another. You can meet a various different criterion. He's also doing this talking head bit on the border, right? You know that swimming pool where there's like five states that meet in the swimming pool so you can swim from one state?

I feel like that's not the right vibe for your AIDS denial documentary. I know it's a little late for these notes. I'm on these things. I'm on the team. I'm on the West Bank, yeah. Should have been like, I don't think Chuck E. Cheese is a great way to talk about rodent-born pathogens in the plague. So, yeah, no, he walks back and forth between Canada and the U.S. to get...

Between AIDS and not AIDS, yes. And on to get AIDS, yeah, right. And then we meet Christine, who was lied to by big AIDS as well. How's she doing? She doing good? She died to AIDS. Really soon, really, really, really soon after this. Like, the year...

She died the year before this movie. came out is actually died of age-related pneumonia, and they will not talk about that. That's crazy. Usually they do all the credits for someone when they were part of the production, but they didn't make it. They were also not going to talk about the fact that her child died of age three years before this interview happened.

Oh, wow. That's crazy. What a coincidence that she just happened to know a kid who died of AIDS, and then she also died of eight. That's fucking, that's buck wild. That child, a lot of poppers, a lot of dirty water. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly.

That's what's going on there. Honestly, if my son would agree to eat a meat, I would let him have paupers. There are like four vegetables that I would trade for paupers at this point in my five-year-old's life. So, and then, so they do this bit now, too, where they're like, they talk about how New Jersey was trying to implement mandatory HIV testing for newborn babies. if they didn't know if the mother what the mother's status was and I'm like, you guys are against that.

Like, you guys are so evil. I keep underestimating you. They make the mistake of cutting to a New Jersey politician here who's like, that's a good fucking thing. Get out of my office. Yeah, why the fuck would you not do that? Never see him again. Yeah, they know it's such an obviously good thing

that they have to kind of slow it a bit. It's sort of like the, what, do you know, they're doing mandatory testing for pregnant mothers? If we don't know they've got ears or not. Yes. No, just the first bit. That is bad, yeah. He asks one of them,

how do you know which test to do it with? And she says, you use the more sensitive one. And she's really struggling not to add, you're fucking idiot. Of course we use the more sensitive test. He's basically asking her, so if I take a really accurate test, but it disagrees with the less accurate test,

which of these tests are I meant to trust? So confusing. I got it at my baby die. She says, he says like, well, but this test says that if you get a positive, you should get additional testing. So it's obviously useless. It's like the shampoo bottles always say rinse and repeat.

When is the repeating. There's got to be a less appropriate venue for me to be raising this objection. But then poor Kim comes up and she's like, well, I just want one test that tells me for sure whether I have AIDS or not. I'm like, well, we all want that. Oh, Kim, I got one for you. Oh, no. It's your Wikipedia page. Oh, no.

Oh, my God. You had it, girl. We locked it down. We locked it down. 100% dollars and dollars. Where's that collarshy bet? I'll take it. So then Brent tries to demonize the fact that they encourage doctors to consider risk factors when doing AIDS tests.

Yeah. And again, I guess the argument here is like, why should it matter if the test is accurate? And it's just, again, it's just risk factors. stuff like if you get a positive test and you've been sharing needles with an IV drug user, that's more likely to be a genuine positive than you haven't. It's just maths. Like pregnancy tests can be wrong, but your positive is more likely to be a false positive if you're a fucking virgin. It's probably not pregnant at that point. So they ask you if you're a virgin so they can test whether this is a false or true positive. Yeah, no, the entire movie is I don't know

how diagnostics work and I refuse to learn the documentary. Yeah. And even all of that is just about the rapid test which have a level of like sensitivity that can introduce more false positives, but then you send them for a longer confirmatory test that will tell you for sure or more close to Shoea. Yeah, you obviously would want to get the broadest possible fucking net. Yeah. But one of the ladies that they've got on, one of these women that they kill with their bullshit, has it now extrapolated, you know, there are some false positives, which is true, all the way

to we don't know if anyone has HIV. Right. Because any positive could be a false positive if there are. are false positives. Yes, although we do know that that lady had HIV because she died of AIDS before this film came out. So, you got 100% percent. Then they bring up Tabo Mubecki, which is a crazy thing to do if you're on their side. Right? This is the Prime Minister of South Africa that just killed hundreds of thousands of people with his AIDS denialism. An estimated 300,000 people died in South Africa because of his age. Because of his age.

and these deniers policies that were informed by the Perth group and Peter Duesberg. So the people we've seen in this film were the ones who were advising that policy. And that's important to point out because Tabo and Beke's policy came out of force in 2008. It was from about 2000 to 2008 with a years around his policy. So this film came out a year after even Tabal and Becker had realized that the people in this film were full of shit. Yes. And I was going to make a joke about how that would be like us citing Ronald Reagan as our AIDS crusader,

except that's what the movie's going to do. We're going to go there, yeah. We also meet this guy. Rionn, I think, was his name. He was hired by Rolling Stone to get to the bottom of this AIDS bullshit once and for all. All right, everybody, I'm just checking out the weekly assignments. Sarah, if you're going to interview Kiss about their latest album, and Greg, you're going to do the sticks tour. You're doing a store. And then Rion, I'd like you to find out if AIDS is real here at Rolling Stone magazine.

But here's the thing, though, is that he discovered that maybe it wasn't so real because he couldn't find any surge in coffin demand in the areas where AIDS was supposedly so bad. Yeah. Like, lots of coffin factories had gone bankrupt. So that's proof that nobody's dying. Just like during COVID, some places ran out of body bags. So people stopped dying as a result. There's nowhere to put them at that was amazing.

Yeah, it's impressive. He goes, if we could just stop the body bag, makers. we would all be immortal. There was also this weird fucking moment where he's like, you know, the anti-science expert, ex-Rillingstone guy, he says, you know,

like the Who says that this many people have AIDS, but I don't know how the hell they're getting these numbers, so those numbers don't count. And then we cut to the guy who worked for the Who that developed those numbers. And he's like, it's on our fucking website how we got him. Why didn't you just read the fucking thing that we sent him?

We sent him a fucking thing. Yeah. Like there were disagreements among experts as to how to get. the exact numbers, but neither those experts deny that AIDS is real and it's caused by HIV. Right. This is like having them argue about whether

80 or 90 people died in an earthquake and then surmising from that argument that earthquakes aren't real. Right, yes. Fucking stupid. Right. But then Brent wanted to write off a trip to Switzerland, so we had to Geneva to get the real numbers from the hood. I guess you've got to show up at the office

to get the real numbers, right? Hello, I'd like to see the numbers, please? Could you take me to them? And what does he talk about here? Because he says there aren't any official numbers of AIDS patients. Yeah, there can only be estimates unless you've been around the world counting them one by one. Right.

Or it's impossible unless you've done that. It's impossible for us to know any idea because estimates aren't good enough. You've got to do a headcount. Right. All right. Everybody who has AIDS arms up for the last time, Kim, please raise your hand. You are actively dying of AIDS. Yeah, that's the other reason that it's difficult to know how many people.

have got AIDS because there's so many fucking AIDS deniers in this film fucking with the numbers who have it but refused to admit it. We get one of the best examples of my best worst where they've got the denialist and the real scientists sort of split screen arguing with each other and the movie just does not know that it's losing the argument. Yeah. But they also, at this point they're like, you know, but eventually the UN realized they were actually overestimating the prevalence of AIDS.

Now, I don't know if that's true, but I can tell you one thing for sure. If they did, like, revise the number down, it's not because some fucking HIV denialist documentary opened their eyes to the reality of it. You don't think there was a guy sitting in a hammock like this going, I'm not so sure in the WHA. We're like, this guy's making a lot of sense. He seems pretty chill about AIDS.

Maybe we should be too. Well, the thing is, I know you say you're not sure, no way. If you pause and just read that news article, where it's talking about the number of AIDS cases tumbling, even in that news article, it says it's tumbled all the way down from 38 million global cases to 33.2 million global cases. Oh, wow, it's not so much more than zero.

Yes. Yeah, but then they start talking about all the money that flows into, you know, AIDS research and AIDS prevention and stuff. And they start talking about PEPFAR. And I'm like, you motherfuckers, PEPFAR is such a good thing. I'm willing to side with George W. Bush about. it.

Yeah. You guys are going to make me be on his fucking side? Look, I know we got some sciencey people in our audience, and I think we can all agree that if there's anything that's benefited from a tremendous amount of funding, it's the fight against AIDS. Am I right? This is it. They even show, like, footage of George Bush talking about funding AIDS.

And, like, remember a time when one of your presidents said they'd spend billions fighting AIDS and it got a round of applause in Congress? That's the footage they show. It's like, Doge literally did the opposite of that and got the same round of applause in Congress. We are going to stop all funding for AIDS around the world. Yep. But also, okay, so there's also this really disgusting moment

where the one woman investigative reporter or whatever, she comes up and she goes like, you know, most people are at no measurable risk of AIDS. And I'm like, so we shouldn't spend money on it? Yeah. I don't have a. AIDS and, well, you know what, I'm done. I don't have AIDS. Yes, right. The vast majority of people aren't even at risk of an HIV infection. So fuck

those who are. Yes, so fuck everybody else. Yeah. And then the other people who do have AIDS, they die of it. So eventually, no one will. This is a self-terminating issue is what I'm saying into a camera forever. There's also, we see Luke Montagna in here as well, the guy who discovered HIV and then discovered he'd been misquoted in this film because he put out a statement saying that is not what I said and not what I meant here. And this is bad because like you, like Noah, you were forced to defend or be on the same side as George W. Bush. I'm on the same side here as Luke Montania, the guy who discovered HIV and then went mad and became a homeopath and homopathy supporter and he's right in this film. And look, I have a lot of really stupid ideas,

but this guy, yeah, it's really fucking up. Well, but okay, so, but we're all going to have to do that, because now Eli is going to have to be on the other side of the I don't need a condom part of the argument, right? No, I don't. I refuse. You do, though, you have to. Otherwise, you're an AIDS denialist right now. So, but yeah, but they come up and they're like, you know, we did this lady come up and she says, well, you know, I did a study of people who have HIV and who are having sex with their heterosexual partners. And then we cut away from her and this dude Liam shows back up and he's like, and what did she find?

that no one got HIV. Yeah. And I'm like, why didn't you have her saying that, man? Why did you have to cut in and explain her results when you had the actual scientist there? Yeah. So I read the study. This is from her study. Overall 68 or 19% of the 360 female partners of HIV-infected men and two of the 82

male partners of HIV-infected women were infected during the cause of the study. Oh, it's so much more than zero. Yeah. Yeah. That is more than zero. Yeah. That's makes it. That's why you need the other talk.

head to correct that little. Then also from the same study, this is a quote, over time the authors observed increased condom use and no new infections. Oh, over time, the more, like if you have AIDS

and practice safe sex, you're less likely to infect someone, but that's because of the condom, not because AIDS isn't real as they're making out here. So this is a study about the effectiveness of condoms to prevent transmission. Marsh.

Yes. Eli Bosnick. Condoms feel weird. There is that. AIDS might feel. pretty weird as well. Good point. Unwanted pregnancy definitely feels weird.

So, but then they get a bunch of clips of these experts saying that, like, you know, look, AIDS won't infect you every time you have sex with somebody, right? And that's pretty widely known. Oh, God. And again, this is so stupid. It's like, what are the chances of you getting AIDS if you have sex with somebody who's HIV positive? What's a chance of you contracting HIV?

And, like, look, yes, the chance is quite small per sexual act. HIV is harder to transmit, but for a long time, if you did catch it, it was a death sentence. Yes. Like, herpes is easy to transmit, but won't kill you. Like, HIV for a long time,

if you got it, you would die. And so the question is, how many turns at Russian roulette does it take to kill you? I was going to say, this movie's just holding a revolver to its head being like, guys, there are five empty chambers in the gun.

Yes. You are freaking out over nothing. One second, let me put my baby's head next to me. mine. I'm going to put my headdocks to mind. It's cool. Don't worry. Google me. How did I do? Right. Yeah. Jesus. Fucking great.

But the experts are saying like, but look, this is pretty widely known. And he's like, I beg to disagree. I don't widely know anything. So we go back to the Voxpops. Right. We go back to these people going like, well, I thought every time that you sneeze near person with AIDS, you got AIDS. You know, I always thought it was super easy to transmit. Yeah. That's because you didn't know anything about it. Right. There's also an amazing moment here where we go back to Celia and she tells us that AIDS is actually over now. And it cuts to a headline.

And the headline says, world AIDS pandemic among heterosexuals is over. It's over. Telling who you value there. And also not true. 62% of new infections in 2024 in the UK were from heterosexual intercourse. And that's largely because the message about safe sex really hit home in the gay community and kind of less. in the heterosexual community. So there is still, it's not a pandemic anymore,

but there is still a high rate of infection or a higher rate of infection for heterosexual people than gay people in the UK for that reason. Yeah. And so, and then we hear more from that radio broadcaster who knows more than all the doctors. I wrote at this point, it's like,

wow, she's a proto podcaster, guys. And this is when they introduced Ronald Reagan in such a fucked up way that I almost have to take his side too. They're almost making me side with W and Ronald Reagan. Condoms, W. Ronald Reagan. Yeah.

It's the fucking worst. But they point out here that it was really important to Ronald Reagan because, you know, he kind of got clobbered for ignoring AIDS for so long that he had this one big accomplishment in that they discovered the disease that caused it like on his watch, right? And that's why everybody was so married to that idea. Yeah. They say that, you know, when the guy discovered that HIV caused AIDS, they did a press conference before it was even peer reviewed and published.

And I'm like, well, I feel like you don't slow walk the major. discoveries about ongoing pandemics, though, right? I feel like you would tell everybody right away when you figured out... All right, everyone. There's a little something going on, but we're going to give it the three to five years of internal review that most medical evidence needs. And yeah, then we'll tell you what AIDS is. And they say about how, like, well, once they discovered HIV, they only funded research

that agreed that HIV caused AIDS. It's like, yeah, they only funded AIDS research that believes. that believed in AIDS, the fucking fascists. How dare they? Right. Well, and so there's this moment for me, like, for anybody who really knows these arguments or who's been hanging out with Marsh over the last few weeks,

you kind of know where everything's going in this movie. And you know that one of the things they have to introduce is the idea that AIDS is caused by being gay. Yeah. Which is a pretty awkward thing to have to bring up. So I was kind of wondering how they were going to do that. They do it here that they call it the co-factor hypothesis. Yeah, this is essentially going to be the argument from,

it's a bit more complicated than that. It's not just HIV, it's lots of other stuff as well. But, like, yes, they are, but those core factors are all about exposure. It's like, if you have HIV, you are going to develop HIV positive and your risk of developing AIDS. There isn't a, you have to be in a certain situation to make you susceptible to HIV. Right. And what we watch is a series of,

ever more suspicious talking heads being like, well, yeah, I mean, no one's isolated from all other factors when they get HIV. I think I'm in an AIMs-denial. Yes, yeah, right, right. The core factors they're talking about are just about influencing the progression of HIV. It's things like multiple infections. If you get infected multiple times, you're more like a higher viral load and therefore more at risk of developing symptoms. But the core factors are the risk behaviors that you're doing that lead you, prone to infect, like lead you exposed to infection. It's not, well, you know, you smoke that cigarette, so HIV really wants to punish you for that.

That's not how it works. Marsh, be honest. Between me and Noah, who would get the most AIDS right now? Because Noah's been working out, but he smoked for a while, but I'm fat. So it depends whether you would see it as a competition. If you saw it as a competition, you'd win hands down, Eli. If it was like, oh, who can get the most AIDS go? I think you'd need it.

If I set my heart to it, I could get it. so much AIDS. I think you're right. I'm closer to the village than he is. That's true. So we watch Fauci versus some shouty Australian and a split screen best worst for a little while. And then we learned that fucking Romania baby's grandpa read an AIDS denialist thing about Dewsberg. Yeah. About how he's a maverick. And it's like, stop calling scientists mavericks and lone geniuses. Yes. A maverick is a bad. thing when it comes to science at this point.

You're not going to be able to just discover a brand new thing anymore. The law-hanging fruit is gone. You want people who are diligent, not Mavericks. And I certainly don't want Maverick cell biologists, guys. Yeah. With 1940s Germany accents. Right, well, right, that doesn't help. Well, I love that.

They show one guy, because he's clearly asked about Dijsberg now, and the guy who he's the real expert that he's interviewing, I was like, ah, fuck, it's one of these guys. And so he's trying to be at least somewhat different. And he goes, well, yeah, no, Duesberg's really smart, but he's killing people with his theories. Those are his exact words. He is. And it's just classic stuff, classic academic stuff, you know. He's like, oh, no, he's very highly intelligent.

He's highly credible. He's highly educated. He is a mass murderer, you know, classic academic criticism. Hundreds of thousands of things. No one ever says that, no one ever opens with that cool stuff when they're mad at me for lying. I want to hear about how smart I am and my credentials academically before. before I'm killing people. Yeah, he's like, you know, he's killing people with his theories.

I'm like, yeah, so's this movie, man. And then Duesberg calls all of his colleagues a bunch of horrors. Yes. That was a weird moment where he just starts going like, ah, yes, but they are all a bunch of prostitute. A bunch of trained prostitute. Ah, like the ones who have sex for money. They also are at very high risk for AIDS.

And highly trained, apparently. You don't want an untrained prostitute. You don't want a maverick prostitute. You want a really trained one. I'd like to see your credentials, please. So, yeah. So then Brent asks Fauci for the evidence. And so Fauci explains the evidence.

Right? Like, I guess Brent is too dumb to know that that's what's going on. So he thinks it's a gotcha? Yeah, it's great. It's like, I asked him for evidence. And then we see Fauci very clearly explaining all the evidence that we have. And then it cuts back to Brent saying, still unclear about,

the evidence that I went to it. I was like, well, you weren't listening, you fucking idiot. He's like, I want a C-H-I-V and punch it in a stupid face. Yeah, look it right in the eye, man to mind. Man to virus. So we go to this microscopist guy and I don't know if he's a denialist or

if he's just being bitchy about this guy's microscope skills, right? Because he keeps looking at these slides and going like, yeah, that's probably a virus, but I can't tell for sure, you know, or whatever. I don't know if he's a denialist or not. But then we hooked back up with Kim.

She gets to the part in her story where she found the AIDS denialists. Yep. Which, of course, preceded the part where she died of AIDS. Yeah, it's rough. It is so fucking rough. This AIDS patient stumbled across the AIDS and I is like, oh, my God, it's awful. We also go back to the Greek lady for a second to talk about the virus. And she says, look, it's one thing to look like a virus.

It's another thing to be a virus. It's right. But like some things that look like viruses are viruses. In many ways, many classics of the genre have the local virus. It turns out that when it does walk like a duck, though, and then we get this, okay, I think this might be the dumbest attempt at an argument in the entire movie. It's not the most homicidal, it's not the worst or whatever, but there's this guy who had this slogan for some AIDS thing, AIDS awareness thing,

that was like, we all have AIDS. Yeah. Right? And then, so Brent comes through and he goes, but we don't all have AIDS, though. We don't. We aren't the world. were individuals living on top of it. Yes, exactly.

Stupid sting. Yeah, it's like we don't all have AIDS. We do live in a society. As a society, we have AIDS. We as a society have AIDS and we should be dealing with it. That is the fucking point, you idiot. But then you see the guy, one of the discoverers or whatever, like the real experts that he's got,

the guy going like, yeah, no, I think that's a dumb slogan. I don't think that's we don't all have AIDS. And I'm like, okay, at this point, you're interviewing a guy who doesn't like the defund the police slogan to argue that police brutality doesn't happen. Yes. But also, I get the idea by this point that Gallo had had so much bullshit with this guy that he's throwing him a bone about one thing he might slightly agree on.

It's like, all right, yeah, I think that's stupid as well. Can we, are we done now? All right. Well, Brent seems to be getting desperate and I want to give him a break before he resorts to something like plus the word AIDS was already taken. But first, let me give Act to me the hard sell. Can we make an exception to there not being a hell? what if we built our own?

What better excuse could there be for creating immortality? Find out even more about why when we return for the homicidal conclusion of House of Numbers. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. And then I have him sneak into the second class at a different college. Now, he's gotten two weeks of college for free. Right. I mean, you're assuming there's a lot of continuity there. I mean, there's got to be some, right?

Hey, guys. What's you doing? Oh, hey, no, I was just planning my kids' college education. Oh, yeah? Yeah, rather than paying, we're just going to have him, like, walk into one campus one week and say, like, oh, I got lost. And then he does that at various colleges around New Jersey until he has a cumulatively free education. So it seems like you might be dealing with a little financial stress. Tell me about it. So have you ever considered talking about it in therapy?

therapy for financial stress? For anything that's got you down. And if you're thinking giving therapy a try, you should try online therapy from BetterHelp. Huh, what's BetterHelp? BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and better helps 12 plus years of experience and industry leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time.

If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. So no awkward therapist breakups? No awkward therapist breakups. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash awful. That's better, h-elp.com slash awful. All right, Noah.

Yeah, thanks. Hey, just out of curiosity, how much continuity do you think classes have between like week one and week two at different colleges? Just from, like from week to week? Yeah. I mean, there's probably some. Probably some.

Thank you, Marsh. Next. Excuse me, sir. What is this supposed to be? Oh, it's a metal detector. Uh-huh, I see. And why do I need to step through that? Oh, we use it to look for weapons.

So it can detect weapons? No, no, it's a metal detector. Exactly. But not all weapons are made of metal. Right, but most of them are. And there are metal things that aren't weapons. Right. No, but it's a...

And yet, here you stand promoting the idea that this is a 100% accurate way to find weapons. No, I didn't say that. I said it's a metal detector. Okay, so how do you define metal? It's a screening tool. It detects metal. And then we investigate further to see if that metal is a weapon. You can look for different things in different ways.

What the fuck is the matter with you? Okay, all right, all right. Well, then why isn't the whole airport a metal detector? God, I hate you so much. Yeah, I hear that a lot. And we're back for still more of this shit. We're going to rejoin the action with Brent telling us about a BBC story that challenged some ideas about HIV, but critically, not all the ideas about HIV. Yeah, this is very annoying.

The BBC article actually began a longstanding theory of how HIV slowly depletes the body's capacity to fight infection is wrong. So it's like the now they think that it's after. theory of HIV is wrong. But like, not that HIV causes aid. No. That bit isn't wrong. We were very confident about that. It was challenging how it goes about causing AIDS. Like, we know it does it, how we thought it was this way. It's actually a slightly different way. And in conjunction with this, we're now in 2007, Brent goes like, well, you know, the Washington Post said that researchers were surprised by how much they didn't know. And I'm like, well, that's, that's science, man. That happens all the fucking time. That's good shit, right?

When that happens, Marsh, as our resident science communicator, I do need you to get with the nerds and explain to them that they can't express their delight and joy at curiosity because it just make stupid people think they're wrong. Also, I want to talk to the science journalists and science editors to stop doing headlines like this because these headlines kill. We don't know very much about HIV is a headline that kills. The Washington Post said there were surprises that were reminding us how much you don't know, but the story specifically was that they tried a certain time.

type of vaccine, and that vaccine didn't pan out. We thought it would work, and it didn't. And it just shows how much we don't still know about this disease. Again, it's not saying we don't know that HIV causes AIDS because we definitely, definitely do. Right. Guys, we did this vaccine trial and it went so badly, AIDS doesn't exist. It's like, this argument is if it's not completely understood, then we must know nothing.

Right. But I don't know, I don't completely understand how data gets encoded and then transmitted in binary over the internet. So I guess computers and the internet no longer exist because the gap in my knowledge. Well, and he throws in these clips because he gets the one doctor going like, well, I don't think anybody

completely understands it. And then we get another expert who goes like, well, you know, we actually have a poor understanding of like this one very specific aspect of infection or whatever. And then with that as their evidence, they conclude well, they can't prove that HIV even causes AIDS.

Right? Which really smacks of, well, you guys can't prove there's no God. Right. Which is, again, a really weird argument to put after you spent the first third of your movie talking about how inaccurate the tests are. So then I would say the most disingenuous edit of the entire film. Because there's a guy that they talked to for like six minutes and they just cut out like single sentences that he said that sound contradictory.

because they'll have him say a sentence and then it'll come up and it'll be like four minutes later and he'll say the opposite thing and then it'll be like two minutes later oh, he says something that might contradict that a little bit entirely out of context. Yeah, and it's not even the full sentence.

It's like a half sentence. Yeah, you can sound like you're contradicting yourself if you cut out everything other than three half sentences six minutes apart. Right. It's like that time that Marsh argued that the earth was flat on TikTok. I did do that.

I did do that. I'm so glad I could share that with the world. Still the most watch thing I've ever done. So then, okay, so then another person who died of AIDS tells us that AIDS doesn't exist. Yeah. Yep, she had the courage and open heart to deny the disease that she had and had died from before this movie was ever released. Yes. Also, she killed her baby.

Yeah. And then we, so we go back to South Africa and we argue that maybe AIDS is just being poor, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's literally the grind up all your cash and inject it into your veins bit from South Park. Pretty much. It really is. And it's like, yes, poverty leads to disease. Some of those diseases include AIDS via HIV.

So it's not one thing or the other. This is a co-factor to some degree. Well, and then he's like, well, you know, why aren't we spending more money to help poor people in Africa? I'm like, you're actively standing in the way of the money. We do spend you son of a bitch. Yeah. But, you know, like, so this argument. of course, and it's entirely disingenuous

because if this was actually what they cared about, he'd be making a documentary about trying to spend money to get better sanitation in Africa, is that what we're calling AIDS is really just diseases of poverty that are all getting lumped in into this same category. And they're like, so why don't we spend money on the sanitation

that we spend on AIDS? And of course, the reality of it is that we're not going to die of bad sanitation in Africa. Yes. Right? We might potentially die of AIDS.

And so we do have a vested interest, you know, just a self-interest in trying to ameliorate the epidemic of AIDS in Africa, right? And that's what it is. We're just selfish fucks is the problem. Also, is the claim you're making the reason we haven't dealt with clean water inequality is because we are overfunding AIDS? Yes. Yeah.

Sorry. All the African money went to AIDS again this year. Yeah, and it's so stupid because, look, we all agree that kind of poverty that they show in this film, that they sort of delight, in fact, in showing Atlanta in this film. That's terrible. But this movie isn't advocating for dealing with that poverty in any kind of way. It's just using that poverty as a prop to argue against helping people with the AIDS that they keep getting. Yes, absolutely. So, okay, so now we jump to 2008.

He points to an op-ed in the USA Today that says we're spending way too much too much. much money on AIDS. I'm like, well, if the USA Today says it. Yeah, we're spending too much money on AIDS because it's making how much money we spend on other things look bad. You're right. Is arguing. Yeah.

Also, I don't know why there's a bit here where he's making that point. And I don't know why we needed to see a naked child with his dick out in order of him to make that point. Feel if we could have got. Yeah, we needed a naked child. In a different way. A lot of fucks in this movie for a, for like a documentary, right? Right. They're all.

Yeah. So, but yeah, then, so they're making this argument, of course, that it's all about poverty. And then he's like, but of course, there's also AIDS in America. Fuck. Fuck, me. Why did I bring up that point against myself? Fucks the entire argument at that point. But, of course, now we can blame the gayness, right?

Which is where we were going the whole time. We had to get all of these fucks that weren't on board to stop watching before we did. But this is where we go back to Duesburg. Right? And he goes, you know, well, a lot of Americans take illicit drugs, and we really don't talk about that. And like, I feel like we talk about it. Yeah. And that's the thing.

Like, Duseberg saying it's the illicit drugs. So somehow AIDS knows to only harm the people whose drugs are illegal, but to leave all the legal substance abuses and users alone. Right. Yeah. And it's so stupid that there are two, according to this, there are two different causes that both identically produce the symptom pattern of AIDS. Like, in places where HIV, also exists. You've got two different causes.

Because you know what they say, two explanations are better than one. If it takes two explanations and try your thing, that's got to be better than one. If doing illegal drugs made you have the symptoms of AIDS, our podcasts would be

a spin-off of Angels in America, just by Noah's presence alone. I can't disprove a whole lot of pseudoscience personally, but the idea that you can get AIDS from doing drugs, I feel like I can knock that one right the fuck out. Yeah, you've nailed that one.

But yeah, so, but now it's time for the movie to explore the, what if the gays had it come in the hypothesis. So we have just a bunch of people just going, look, gay people in the 70s were collecting STDs like fucking Pokemon. Okay, it was a, it was a, everybody had, they had a punch card with all of them listed alphabetically. And whoever got them first, we get a free sandwich. A kissing booth. There was a kissing booth.

There was a kissing booth. That's how you get AIDS. That's essentially an all you can AIDS buffet. And you've got the former science correspondent who's basically arguing that the more you fuck, the better you were at gay. So they were being out to have as much gay as possible to prove how gay they were. Yeah. No, it's about volume. It really is gayness.

There's a guy called Dave who went to a bathhouse and came back with three separate STDs and two different parasites. Yeah. What the hell was he doing at that bathhouse? Right. Jesus Christ, man. You got to stop blowing aliens, man. when someone has a second set of limbs. Well, hey, you know, if they have a second son,

it depends on which limbs. But yeah, but this is where they bring up Amel nitrate, right? Poppers. Yes. Right? And again, hey, look, if you could get AIDS from Huffin Leather Cleaner, I would have AIDS. I'm just saying, like, I can super early disimprove.

He might be AIDS, like the manifestation. Like, you remember how there was the symbiote? He might be the symbiote but for AIDS. Right. Yeah. Now, here's the thing, though, if you want to make this argument that amyl nitrate, the argument they're making is that using a lot of amyl nitrate breaks down your immune system and looks like AIDS, right?

Yeah. Well, then all you'd have to do is correlate, like, AIDS and amyl nitrate use in different places in different times, which they make no effort to do. They just say, like, oh, the gays were doing that shit back in the 70s. Yes, that's exactly their entire argument. But, like, it's to do with the pop is because the first reported. cases were people who also use poppers, but they were also wearing shoes and speaking English. Did we check if wearing shoes causes AIDS? Because there's a correlation there as well.

We should probably check that out. And I've got to say, this is, I mean, they talk about the promiscuity at the time. There's a guy who says that they were having hundreds of sexual partners a month. And I just thought, that sounds absolutely exhausting. Right. That's, that's five a day if you take weekends off, which they probably didn't even take weekends off. Well, no, they probably didn't take weekends off. But, but then like, Imagine if you fuck the same guy twice, that doesn't count. Right? Doesn't count.

Different partners, not different fucks. Yeah. So, yeah. But then, you know, at one point, they're talking about, like, they're trying to make some cancer or another into amino nitrate use. And a real expert chimes in and he goes, well, you know, actually that thing that you're talking about is that's caused by a virus. And then they have Duesberg. He comes in to, like, knock that down. He goes, oh, another virus.

Always with these people have viruses, you know. Yeah. Kaposi's sarcoma is the kind of. And it's because Juzok doesn't believe viruses cause cancer, even though, as I mentioned on scathing, he's the guy who discovered that viruses cause cancer. It's pretty weird, man. They won Luzvacolids and went,

actually, I'm probably wrong about that. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Also, they talk about amyl nitrate as well. And at one point he says, if you look here on the back of the packet, it says it's fatal to swallow amyl nitrate. Therefore, it's got to be bad to inhale. And I thought, okay, try that argument in reverse using water. Right, yes. It's fatal to inhale it, so therefore it must be fatal to swallow it, right?

It would be dangerous at least, yeah. So yeah, so then Brent summarizes where we are again. We go back to the microscopist that doesn't like the HIV pictures that are available. But even he's like, no, I mean, it's probably a virus, man. Like I think that's what I'm looking at here. Yeah. This is where I think one of the experts kind of loses it on him. David Baltimore. Yeah, this guy's great. He just kind of like, he goes like, you know, well, how would you isolate and know the picture?

He's like, the fucking picture. You would look at him on the goddamn internet, man. That work has been done. Why aren't you just looking at a fucking textbook? I'm a world expert in this fucking category. And you're asking me this bullshit. Yeah, his clip ends with go take a bio class, hard cut. Yeah, so it's in textbooks.

And what they're doing here is they talk about, could you isolate the virus? doing that very specifically. It's based on a misapplication of something called coax postulates, which were good for diagnosing other types of diseases. Like, can you get a bacteria to grow in a petri dish? If so, then we know that is a specific thing. It doesn't work on some viruses because viruses require a host cell to survive. So can you isolate the virus out of the host cell and put it in a petri dish? Yeah, but then it dies immediately. So you can't be like, well, this clearly, you know, doesn't work because it's separate. So, like, they aren't

in any way useful for telling whether there are viruses is dangerous not. But they applied it not just to AIDS. You heard it an awful lot during COVID as well. Sure. Like have you isolated the COVID virus? Yeah, that was a big one. Yeah.

Well, so there is a great moment because like right after that guy basically just tells him to go fuck himself. We bring up another fake expert who goes, yeah, they're actually embarrassed by how right we are all the time. Yeah. That's why he was getting so angry because he was so embarrassed. Yeah. But then he starts in again about how. Now the CDC guidelines say that you can have AIDS without ever having a positive HIV test. We already went over why this is fucking stupid.

But he's looped back around like Pac-Man now to this argument. Yeah. And none of it really applies to the definition of AIDS that we use today because we've got more testing and there's less incidents around. So it's easy to do that testing. So these days you will have an HIV test and that's what the diagnosis we're based on. But like, yeah, due in, let's talk about in 1987, if you're getting classic AIDS-related symptoms, and you're in a high-risk group, in 1987,

when they were talking about when they said that, at the high of the epidemic, it's pretty reasonable to think you've got AIDS. Yeah. What are you doing here? Well, right. But their extrapolation is absolutely bat-shit once again, right? Because they're like, look,

you've got thousands of documented AIDS cases without HIV. But you don't. No. You have thousands of documented AIDS cases without HIV tests, because you don't have to test somebody where you already know they have fucking AIDS. it's like, do you guys have a person who was, obviously none of us are friends with COVID deniers? But do you have a friend who like walked that line and now whenever you bring it up, they're like, well, you know, nowadays they say and you're like, nah, let's do the fucking medical tents and central park advice.

Not Anthony Fauci on a beach somewhere slipping a pinocalada advice. So yeah. So, but then we introduce yet another journalist, I guess, late in the game. we bring in Mark Conlin, who would like to tell scientists how to science. Damn it. Yeah. Yeah, he was the guy who didn't get investigative journalist. He only got journalists.

Right. Yeah. He doesn't even investigate shit this guy. He just says what he heard. Yeah. He tells us how impartial scientists are supposed to be. And in the second sentence of us meeting him, he is screaming. Right.

Right. Yeah. But, yeah. And again, another one of the AIDS patients telling us how hard it is to find people who will support you and your denial. And I'm like, good for them, though, I guess. Yeah. So, okay, so.

Funeral home directors. Yeah, very right. So now we're going to tackle the real villains once again. But this time they are HIV drugs, right? So we go back to the Romanian baby who was given AZT and had side effects, right? Because growing up with AIDS is rough. Yeah, especially early on. I mean, it depends when this particular case was.

Certainly early on when people were taking. AZT, they didn't exactly know the right dorsage to give because it was still brand new, but they didn't have the time to go through all the trials to figure out the exact dosage. And it was better to have the side effects than to die from AIDS. Yes. And she was a child who had HIV from a very young age. Her development is going to be different as a result. Her immune system is going to be more unpredictable, and she's dealing with the side effects of AZT,

but you don't want her to get AIDS. And they're saying about like, but she took these AIDS medications, it made her feel unwell. sure, chemotherapy makes patients feel them well. You wouldn't stop giving your kid chemotherapy if they had cancer so they'd feel better, would you? Because it's the thing that's going to help. Maybe these parents would. Yeah, they would actually in fairness. They probably would. They got a letter from Peter Duk.

And look, it's very easy if you don't have Marsh on your podcast to tell you otherwise to think of Peter Duesberg as just a person who was wrong. And so a really great piece of evidence for him being a massively evil piece of shit for whom there should be a bad afterlife is that he wrote these parents a letter saying, take your kid off AZT immediately. Yes. I've got to say something. I'm very confident about a lot of shit.

And I'm pretty stupid. There's almost no circumstance where someone else's medical history and the life of their child that I'd be like, dear person I'm talking to, take my advice, not your doctor. Well, so let's keep in my, first of all, he's not a fucking doctor. He's a maverick cell biologist. He's not a fucking medical doctor. And secondly, even if he was a medical fucking doctor, no medical doctor that, you know, deserves his fucking license would diagnose a child from afar for anything. Yeah.

Right? This is a kid he never met. He wasn't even in the same fucking country with them when this happened. They said, you know, yeah, our kid's taking AZT and she's getting leg cramps. She's like, take her off of it and give her AIDS instead. Yeah, it's utterly ghoulish. It's genuinely ghouly. Yeah.

And then we get a news voice that cuts in. I don't even know if this could be from some fucking YouTube video or whatever, but it's a newsy sounding voice. And a guy goes, you know, despite spending a lot of money on the drugs, people with AIDS are still dying. Like, yeah, man, it's AIDS. It's the AIDS too and that. Very much the AIDS too.

It would be. This is also where we get our anti-drug cocktail thing, right? Because the response to this, right? Because look, there were a lot of side effects of AZT. AZT is a very harsh drug. It was used in a variety of different doses. There's a lot to be learned from how AZT was handed out. Now we use a drug cocktail that is much milder, except it's much harder to criticize that.

So they just do a sort of like, and the cocktail's probably bad too. I don't know. Well, the one guy comes up, I believe it was the Rolling Stone guy. He comes up and goes, you know, the ASTT, they gave him too much. And it's hard to ignore at this point that we killed a whole generation of AIDS patients with that. And I'm like, no, no, the AIDS killed that generation of AIDS patients. Yep. And to be clear, there is no evidence that people died widespread from AZT. That was a claim made in Duesberg's book.

Jonathan Jerry actually went off to find that book, find the citation. It was to another AIDS denialist book where a guy just said a thing. Oh. Based on nothing at all. I reckon it's going to have killed a lot of people. So, yeah, there is no evidence. That's true. Or as I call it, desk work.

Yeah, exactly. Research. So then we watch a graphic that they've made of like what happens when you take AZT, which is apparently a pharmaceutical hand grenade of some sort. They literally, they show, you know, the drug guy, the guy that takes the drugs from the fucking Jerry Seinfeld bit, taking the drug, and then it just gets into his gut and just explodes everywhere. It's got shrap on the shit.

It's so stupid. It's so stupid. Even the way they talk about it, Brent in the voiceover is saying the chemotherapy drug. And like, is it he was planned. as a chemotherapy drug, but it was terrible at being chemotherapy, so it was abandoned and never used. It'd be a bit like calling Viagra the heart medication

every time you discuss it. Yeah, right. Also, do we want to use as our example of drugs that don't work chemotherapy? Because it actually works super good. Right. Yeah. Right. But one of the guys comes up, he's like, well, yeah, sure, patients do better in the short term, but in the long term,

they die. And I'm like, they have AIDS though. Yeah. Right? Like, that was going to happen. Also just mortal. They're literally trying to make the argument that the symptoms of AIDS come from AZT, even though, of course, they predate AZT. Yeah, but when it was before AZT, it was the gay sex or the poor sanitation that was doing it, then AZT came along, and that's what did all this thing.

It's so weird that it would keep doing the same thing. But yeah, this line that they have, the patients do better in the short term, but in the long term they die. Like, medicine really counts, not dying in the short term as well. one in the wind column. That is a big plus for doctors. Especially doing better. You know, like when you die, yeah, doing better is great. Classic medical establishment apologism.

If you can't make me immortal, I don't want your drugs in my system, March. Either stop death entirely or get back to work. Well, and then they bring up this one lady who was misdiagnosed with AIDS and she got an AIDS drug and she gave her bad side effects and she sued and she was given like a settlement of several million dollars. And I'm like, okay, but that's just bad AIDS thing.

Like this doesn't support any of the arguments that you've made up to this point. I really sympathized with this because I once put a bunch of insulin on top of my hot fudge Sunday. There was a lot of miscommunication going on between me and that pharmacist. But what I learned is that diabetes isn't real. Yeah.

You know, he talks to some pharmacists in Africa who, admit that yes, sometimes people do die of side effects, just in general, not of specifically of AIDS drugs, but just in general. Yes, people can die of drug side effects. Even that guy,

the guy he's talking to, gives an answer that feels a lot like, what answer do you want me to say and how much is it worth to you? Like, right, that he gives that answers. Yeah. Yeah. He's also struggling with English, right? English is clearly not his first language, or probably not even his second. Then we meet

a lady whose sister was murdered by AIDS medicine. Okay. Now, this story would seem to be very sad, except at one point she describes her sister after taking the medicine of having full-blown AIDS. And I feel like you want to avoid the term full-blown AIDS in your anti-AIDS. I think it's the first time they've said full-blown AIDS in this entire film. Congratulations to them. I didn't hear any of the other experts use it, which is Anthony Fauci at no point referred to it as the FBI. So, yeah, but this woman, like, she was diagnosed with AIDS. She was pregnant, I think, and they were like, well, you know, there's this experimental

drug that you can take that we think will, you know, lower the risk of passing AIDS onto your, or HIV onto your baby. And she took it and she died from the side effects of that drug that was being tested at the time, right? And it was never actually approved. Yeah, and that's a bad thing. She died from serious side effects. Nobody think that's a good thing.

It's a rare thing, but it's not, there's nobody going to say this is what's meant to happen. Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. As I understand it, that that's a drug that like that after that trial, they were like, nope, we can't use that. It occasionally kills people from skin conditions, right? Yeah.

So, yeah, and again, yeah, that's fucking awful. And it would be great if there was a way to do medicine where we never had to find out that way that those are the way that's the side effects, right? Any medicine that anyone ever dies from taking ever isn't the disease that it treats is fake. Yeah, exactly. Wait till you hear about Tylenol. And then we, yeah, well, then we hear about fucking Romanian baby's parents taking her off the drugs. Mm-hmm.

And they go, yep, took her off the drugs. And they said she wouldn't survive and she'll be 19 in 2009. Yep, she will not be 20 in 2010, unfortunately. Now, see, okay, this is a perfect example of our hosts. Both Marsh and Noah have written very thoughtful notes in there about like she did not, unfortunately she did pet. Mine goes, and she's dead. Yeah, 2015.

Yeah, she was dead December 2015, I think it was. Okay. All right. Yeah, so she made it a few more years after this movie, yeah. Had a child. even. Oh, wow. A child had AIDS.

Mm. Is the kid dead? I don't think so. I think the kids on... It's a deeply sad story. The kid took the AIDS medicine and is alive. Child particular services took the kid off her because she wasn't going to... Oh, I remember this.

Yes. Oh, wow. Yeah, anti-retrovirals. But I think it was all... I've not followed up on the kid. Okay. Wow. So, yeah.

Classic skepticism, unless they can dunk on you. Am I right? Everybody? But, yeah, she made... She made a complete recovery from the A-ZT. And I'm like, yeah, not the AIDS so much, though. And then we get our wrap-up where we literally downplay the likelihood of getting AIDS. We might as well end this by saying, so go out there and stick you dick and some weird shit.

You know, it's not as bad. A bag of needles. Just go for it. Yeah, go crazy. At one point, one of their fake pseudoscientists goes, it's hard to change people's mind. And I wrote in my notes, Marsh to himself as he tries to fall asleep every night. Yeah, right.

I mean, I specifically, yeah, it really is hard to get people to change their minds about something even when it's super serious and they're super wrong, isn't it? It's really hard, isn't it? It's very, very difficult. Yeah. So, yeah, but Brent explains that we're tackling AIDS instead of poverty because you can only tackle one bad thing at a time. Yeah.

He says, the victims of HIV deserve our respect. Even if I've just made a movie lying about their deaths. Yes, right. Right. and killing them even, yeah. And then we end on the shop and hierarchy quote that I feel like he would take back if he knew what people,

the one about like first knowledge is ridiculed and then it's opposed and then it's self-evident or whatever. I feel like you'd take it back if you knew how people were using it now. I feel like he said it and then he turned to the people in the room with him and he was like, hey guys,

I'm worried that stupid people will use that way more than smart people. Should I just back sees that? Yeah. I'm worried. But that does it. I don't know that we've ever done a movie with a higher body count than this one.

No. So, boy, I need to wash that out of my palate altogether. So that does it for our review of my house and numbers. That doesn't do it for the episode just yet because we still need a reason for me to pull more on my hair out next week. So Eli, tell us what's on deck. Trey believes he has found his purpose in life to help deconstruct the faith of the victims of Christian brainwashing

and to belittle those who promote the faith in an unseen creator. Wait a second. Showing off his impressive knowledge of science and disdain for superstitions, he becomes an internet rock star. Oh no. His chance encounter with Jewel leaves him yearning for something more in life. His aspirations of a romantic conquest take a hit when he discovers that the woman who stole his heart is a devoted member

of that subsection of culture he loves to mock. They both step out of their comfort zone when he challenges her to show him God. We'll be watching Donald James Parker's Beauty and the atheist. Oh, I'm in that one, I think. You are. So are you.

No, I'm not. I'm very clearly not. He did you and Heathen. He left me out. Oh, okay. I thought he did you and me and left Heath out, but I'm definitely in there. You can tell which ones it is. Okay, all right. He was afraid to do it Jew.

I'm back. No, no, I don't think he is. Oh, yeah, I forgot. So with that to look forward to, we're going to bring episode 552 to a merciful close. Once again, a huge thanks to Michael Marshall for all his help today. Be sure to check the show notes for a link to more shit from him on Skeptons with a K and the No Rogan Experience. And an equally huge thanks to all the Patreon donors that helped make this show go. If you'd like to catch yourself among the ranks, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com. I'll find there by earning early access to an ad-free version of every episode. You can also help a ton by leaving a five-star review and by sharing the show on all your various social media platforms.

and if you enjoyed this show, be sure check out our sibling shows the skating Atheist, citation data, D&D minus, and the skeptocrat, available wherever podcast live. If you have questions,

comments or cinematic suggestions, you can email goddiful movies, gmail.com, Tim Roberts and takes care of our social media. Our theme song was written and performed by Ryan Slotnik and the other music was written

and performed by our audio engineer Morgan Clark and was used with permission. Thanks again for giving us to check your life this week for Heath Endwright and Nilai positive I'm the only person to work. I got my own name wrong. Promise to work hard to earn another check. Next week and tell then,

we'll leave you with the American graffiti clothes. Dr. Anthony Fauci went on to enjoy an entire decade without people falsely blaming him for an epidemic of death. So that was nice, I guess. HIV went on to send Brent a thank you card. Scientists developed the vaccine for AIDS with 100% efficacy rate. And it's so bad right now that you forgot about that. Now it's on video.

You can see when Eli isn't paying attention up to the count. So that's the problem is that I'm, I don't like to say not paying attention. I am so focused, but it doesn't appear. I'm listening so intently. Yeah. Like the gifted improviser I am. We can see that. We can see.

I'm so locked in. The way that you're sometimes checking your phone to see just how locked in. Subway Surfer is a great way. Del Close, the great improviser. You do need to be ready to improvise at any point during a five count. Because what if you want to throw in a different number or letter in that? All right, here we go. Even the metaphor of the title is stupid.

Yeah. Right, because it's supposed to be House of Cards. Right. Because the House of Cards is... But a House of Numbers is just a good... It's a house based on facts. Yes, you want to have some pretty solid numbers around. Numbers are hard.

Yes, exactly. House of cards folds apart very easily. Numbers don't, like, collapse in that company. You need them, actually. There's no way to do it without numbers. All right. interstitial one. This content is scanned credentialed,

which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm to their hotline at 617-249455, or on their website at creator accountability network.org. This podcast is a production of Puzzle and a Thunderstorm LLC and was created without the use of generative AI. Its contents may not be used for AI training. Copyright 2026. All rights reserved.