StarTalk Radio - Curing Medical Misinformation with Dr. Noc & Scott Hamilton Kennedy

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

Can you trust medical information on the internet? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly team up with pharmaceutical scientist and social media “medfluencer” Morgan McSweeny (aka Dr. Noc) to break down common internet medical myths from Big Pharma to raw milk to vaccine hesitancy. Plus a discussion with filmmaker Scott Hamilton Kennedy from Shot in the Arm.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/curing-medical-misinformation-with-dr-noc-scott-hamilton-kennedy/Thanks to our Patrons Boutayeb BADAOUI, Paris Daniel, Moe Erakat, Jeff Esposito, Ramon Thomas, Dunc Sargent, daniel gilligan, Justin Shillington, littledumbcane, Troy Oates, Ryan, Justin K, Andy Weber, Steven Chang, Roberta B, Linda Pretty, Brenda Gasch Mittelstadt, Bogaert Dieter, Gerry Casey, Heny Koundi, Trish Wallace, Zak Rooley, A W, Cairo, GIF, Alex Cimpoies Tamasan, chris bettis, Tom Izsak, Colin Harper, Dale Hawkins, Brandon Kavulla, Nancy Coltrin, Debbie, townpoem, Pratik Nagar, Caroline MacLeod, Svitlana Rahimova, polltery, Vinay Nambiar, David W Chandler, Hawaii Mike, Jan & Blair Kinser, LadyofStyx, John Peterson, Sebastiano Catalano, Paris Kyriacopoulos, Alex Taylor, Terry Vaskor, Tim Raines, and nobody for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.

What's a person to do online trying to find medical information that they can trust we got to step in and do something about that We'll have to find someone who knows the truth. Yeah, I think we already have him He's here now. Oh, that's good. Yeah, it's not me by the way On Star Talk how to sift back from fiction on medical information on the internet coming right up Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk, special edition.

And when it's special edition, you know we've got Gary O'Reilly, Gary. Hi, Neil. Chuck Nice, how you doing, man? Hey, what's happening, guys? Can't do a show without you. Aw, man, that's very nice. Although we do sometimes.

I was going to say, I was about to say, it's very nice, even though that's not true. So today, we're talking about medical misinformation. I don't believe you. Oh, hey, they started early. Medical misinformation. Gary, take me into this. What do we got? All right, well we live in a data-driven world and we actually always have, haven't we? Better information makes for better decisions. So why would you want

to purposefully create disinformation? We are talking about spreading medical disinformation that can threaten people about spreading medical disinformation that can threaten people's lives, potentially. How can we tell the difference between fact and fiction? What does the actual science say? It's expert time. Yeah, and for that we went to a TikToker slash YouTuber who is on the front line where this battle is taking place. Plus, Neil, we're going to sit you down with an Academy nominated filmmaker responsible for the vaccine documentary, A Shot in the Arm, and that would be Scott Hamilton Kennedy.

Coming up in this very podcast, yes. So I have in my office here at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City, who flew in from Boston for this interview, Dr. Nock. Dr. Nock. Thanks for the invitation. Dude, this is a clean cut guys you've ever seen. I have to tell you, you're the whitest dude I've ever seen.

You can see me dance. I appreciate it though. I really do. You have a PhD, so you're an academic medical professional, we can call it that. That's right. In pharmacology? Yeah, pharmaceutical sciences. Pharmaceutical sciences.

Drug development, the immunology of drugs. Oh cool, man. Okay, and these are drugs invented by lab scientists to achieve some effect in our physiology, and that is your expertise. Yes. Yes, excellent. And you're definitely a social media influencer,

and there's a word I just learned today. You got a medfluencer? Oh, medfluencer? For better or for worse. Medfluencer, I got like a medical influencer, medfluencer. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say here. I got you. Okay.

No, listen, I was trying to get clear on it. The word sucks. Yeah, yeah. Okay. No, listen, I was trying to get clear on it. The word sucks. Let me do it. Yeah. Okay. No, no, we'll get used to it. That's not my word, you get used to them. And so you've taken it upon yourself

to try to correct the internet with all of its misguided ways regarding medical doses, medical choices. Perhaps a misguided mission, but yeah, that's the goal. That's not, no, that's a great mission. I mean, the internet is a cesspool of misinformation and disinformation, so. And what makes you think you could, I mean,

you say, let me take on the whole internet, the whole system. Yeah, are you the guy that, in that meme where he's like, brushing back waves with a push broom? You ever see that? The guy with the push broom where he's like brushing back waves with a with a He's on the beach trying to brush back the ocean So you've been on the internet for now 76 or seven years when did the internet become such a safe place for misinformation? It's a good question.

So I think there's been the transition, obviously, from print to radio to television to now social media. I think it was that last gap, which is really democratized. Anybody can sit down in their car and make a piece of content. You can't sit on your car and make a TV show. No. Right. There's these editorial layers.

Filters there, yes. Which is a bad thing, because not there's these editorial layers filters there. Yeah. Right. Which, uh, you know, is a bad thing because not everybody could get their thoughts out there. But now of course the downside is that everyone can do the same for positive information and false information. So the tightest way to say what you just said was, uh, it was a problem that not everyone could get their information out when it was limited to TV. And now everyone can get their information.

information out when it was limited to TV. And now it's a problem that they can get their information out. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's been this big shift, and of course it's now entertainment. The medical information on TikTok and Instagram, you're competing with people who are dancing and cats and dogs and everything.

And so you may be presenting this very nuanced argument about something, but you're constrained. You have to make it entertaining, or no one's ever gonna see it. So the truth is boring? The truth is boring and nuanced, and takes a long time to say. Amazing, isn't it? Yeah.

Where you can find an environment where the truth is exactly what you need it to be, yet some people will turn their back on it because it doesn't have a cat or it's not entertaining. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I find that in all the work that I do with climate. He's got a second life where he's a climate advocate. Yes. Yes.

And it's so hard to have very succinct, entertaining messaging because the other side has stuff like, drill baby, drill. Yeah. And we don't. Slogans. Right, slogans. And slogans are great. That's why you see them on bumper stickers,

because they work, you know. But make a sustainable economy through a renewable energy baby doesn't work. It just doesn't. Yeah baby. Sounds like you've tried though. And failed. So we've got here what might also be echo chambers

where people hear what they want or they look for information to, they look for their understanding of information to be affirmed and you do a Google search and you'll find it. You'll find there's seven other people who think exactly the way you do and there's a false affirmation.

So how do you sort that out for people? Yeah, so I mean that confirmation bias is really, confirmation bias. Really, really hard to escape. And unless you're very thoughtful about doing so, you won't escape it, you have to be intentional. And being intentional, of course, takes a lot of mental energy, which you may not have.

If you pull up Instagram, usually you're not looking to change your opinion on something. You're looking to spend five minutes while you're waiting for a train or something. So it really takes a very intentional effort to get out of this type of bubble. Yeah. Do the algorithms still push things towards people

even though your confirmation bias is wrong? Does it still say, let me go get more of this information? even though your confirmation bias is wrong, does it still say, let me go get more of this information? Because that just makes it even worse for you then. Yeah, so the way I think of algorithms is really of people's attention. Like what is holding people's attention? And so inescapably, platforms seek to optimize how long are people going to stay on our platform

and see more ads? The business model. It is, and it works extremely well. And it's good for the consumer because you are interested and you're entertained while you're watching it, but the dark side is sometimes the things that hold your attention the most are not what you would intellectually choose

if you tick off on a paper ahead of time. I want to watch videos about this. You find yourself slipping into like rage baiting content, things that are arousing these negative emotions. Yeah. And you know what's funny about that? Okay, I'm embarrassed to say this. I just found out, I think it was our producer Alex

who taught me you can just go up and put not interested and then says, okay, we won't show you any more of this, which I did not know. I didn't know that either. Yeah, and then all my- There's a whole lot of crap showing up on my line. I'm ready to- Yeah, and so I'm like, am I an angry guy?

Every video is somebody beating the crap out of somebody. What is going on? Like, why is this happening? It's your inner self. It is my inner self, I guess. I think there's truth to that. You can learn a lot about somebody just by looking at 10 videos on their feed or something.

Probably one of the deepest ways to, you know. That's scary. It is, it is, yeah. But now I just hit not interested because although here's the problem, the reason I hit not interested is because I was watching it. This stuff would come across and I'd be like, oh my God, is it Tuesday?

I just spent the whole day watching people get the crap beat out of them. And I didn't want to. And this is a topic of research. If you ask people, do you want to see negative content and emotional content, they'll tell you no. But if then you track what happens

when it comes across their feed, they stick through, it's like a car crash. You know, like everyone turns to look their head at the last second. You almost can't escape watching this content, even if intellectually you think, it's not good for me. So as an influencer, you need to be sensitized to that

so you know how to navigate it for what you create and what your expectations are for the audience. So Gary, why don't you give us a laundry list here. All right, before we do, because you're fighting this disinformation, you can't just go onto your platform and say, you know, don't watch that, don't listen to that, you're dumb. No.

You just, there's, because this is immediately causing a problem. So what are your strategies to actually get across and make this information more acceptable to people who wouldn't necessarily want to know? Let me ask that better. Of course. In English. Why should anyone listen to your ass instead of anybody else if you're both talking medicine online? Yeah, so there is this tension of who are you trying to talk to? Is it people who already agree with you, in which case you may sort

of go for sensationalized approaches to a topic? Or is it people in the middle who are undecided, in which case you may take a more nuanced approach to discussion. If you want to change minds, you have to do number two. The problem with doing number two is it's inherently less interesting than speaking to people who already agree with you. It's less, it's not as good click bait.

It's not. So you have to figure out strategies in the first half a second, five seconds, to kind of make it entertaining. Whether it's, and I've done some pretty embarrassing videos where the whole theme of the video is POV, point of view. We're dancing at a party. And I'm like dancing on screen while I'm exploring some medical topic.

And the only reason I'm doing these bad dance moves on screen is to keep it entertaining. Well I'm discussing- Just to be clear, they're bad dance moves, not bad ass dance moves. Well, it depends on the video. But there has to be something to get people watching. So there's some common medical topics

that people have strong opinions about and have chosen their expert who feeds them this information. So you compile the list. All right, let's start off with one that's obviously quite popular. Is there a cure for cancer that they are keeping secret? It's always they.

The they. They. They being the pharmaceutical companies and the government researchers and the university researchers collectively. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. Because you know it's easier to make money off of the treatment than it is the cure.

And I'm like, clearly you know nothing about pharmaceutical companies. Because let me tell you something, if they had a cure for cancer, it'd be like, yes, we have the cure, it is one million dollars per pill. And that happens. That's part of the answer. There's a few ways to answer this question.

One is the biology of the cancer itself. One is from the pharmaceutical company's perspective. And one is from social media perspective. But certainly, like you're saying, there are cures for some cancers. You can't consider all cancer one thing. It's hundreds of different diseases. There will never be a treatment for all cancers.

But we have right now some really, really good treatments for cancers. Where 50 years ago, 70 years ago, survival rates were basically 0%. The most common pediatric cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, ALL. Literally from 0% in the 1950s, today, something like 90% success rates with treatments.

Wow. And then the 10% of patients who don't respond well initially, there are backup treatments like CAR T cell therapies, which happen to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but are super effective. And so the point is, you know, over time research does develop treatments

for specific cancers. When they work really well, you know, over time research does develop treatments for specific cancers. When they work really well, you can charge lots of money and you can bet that if pharmaceutical companies could sell that treatment for all cancers and multiply their market size by 30-fold, they would be jumping at the opportunity to do so. Right. So where's the ethical compass for a pharmaceutical company on the pricing? Yeah. I believe it's the twisting of the mustache. ethical compass for a pharmaceutical company. I believe it's the twisting of the mustache. That's how the compass works.

Yeah, so in that example. Or the biting of the pinky. You check the bank account balance and notify the shareholders. So part of it is there's this limited period of patent exclusivity where you make as much money as you can to try to justify all of your R&D that you've done up until that point and then you get generics which are much cheaper.

So cisplatin for testicular cancer, metastatic testicular cancer, used to be super low survival rate. Then researchers discovered cisplatin, this drug, you've reduced mortality by something like two thirds I think since the 1970s. Wow. It's generic now, I think the cost of a vial, I don't know exactly, it's like tens of dollars, hundreds of dollars.

So you get this initial period where you can make a lot of money off of a new drug. Right. And then, everybody else gets to compete with you in that drug. You see the same. And how much time is it? I can't remember the exact number.

Maybe 10 years, 15 years. It differs for chemical drugs or biologic drugs. By the way, biology is just an extreme expression of chemistry. So how are you distinguishing chemical drugs from biological drugs? So chemical drugs being like small molecule, maybe a better example, biologics like antibody drugs, where it's this protein that's been synthesized by cells. So vaccines would come under that category?

Vaccines, I think, are biologics. Yeah, that's what I'm saying, yeah. But you see stuff like metastatic melanoma. Used to have a median survival time, and when I say used to, I'm talking about the 2000s, like 2010, median survival time of six to nine months. This is skin cancer. Skin cancer that has spread to your lymph nodes

and maybe other places in the body. Horrible prognosis. Until people developed what is currently a very expensive treatment. Melanin. Yeah. And the reason it's expensive is because his heart is held to be black.

Tell me I'm lying. Well, a warning. For sun-induced skin cancer. Yeah, okay, so you can't totally discount risk of skin cancer. Of course. So just to be precise, the evidence that I know says that white people are 25 times more likely

to contract skin cancer than black people, all because of the melanin. But risk is not zero. No. Bob Marley died of skin cancer. Yeah, he was light skinned though. No, stop it. No, no, it was on the bottom of his foot.

It wasn't sun induced. Oh wow, it wasn't sun induced. It was just, yeah, yeah. Back to your. Yes, anyway. The cure for that. Metastatic melanoma, 2010. Median survival time, six to nine months.

Wow. Today, I think it's almost 10 years. Wow. And so the difference is that people have been doing all this basic and translational research. Now we have drugs called checkpoint inhibitors that modify your immune system. So your immune system can now go attack the cancer better.

And they're very expensive. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. They're currently on patent. I think most of them are on patent. They're going to become generic. They will become less expensive. But I can tell you the companies that make them right now would love to sell them for every cancer out there

if they had data showing it worked for every cancer out there. Also you get to re-up the patent for the different uses. So, if you could, if you can modify the drug in any way to treat something else, that's a brand new patent now. There's a downstream effect of these drugs. You have to find out they've got other applications. Exactly.

So, it has to be meaningful. You can't just tinker with it and try to be cute and then say, we got a new patent. Because what people will do is say, well, that's not a meaningful difference. We're still just gonna use the generic of your first drug It works just as well. So you really do have you really gotta make it has to be a true alteration, right? Ah, okay that makes sense I'm Nicholas Costella and I'm a proud supporter of Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Does Big Pharma suppress natural remedies because they aren't profitable, which kind of touches on what we've just been discussing? Yeah. I shouldn't say yeah, I should say no. That's the start to that question. There's actually a huge number of drugs that have natural origins. I'll think of a few examples. Aspirin's a good example. From, I think, willow bark. For thousands of years, people took it and turned it into salves or ointments or whatever it was for the same properties.

A chemist figured out, I forget what year, but you know, this is the active compound. In the willow bark that's having these effects, if we modify it a little bit, it reduces the gastrointestinal side effects. We sell that now as aspirin. And clearly, aspirin's not very expensive. No. Yet... Or should that be the buffered aspirin that protects your stomach lining? Uh, right. C2Ciclic acid versus Salicin.

I'm not a chemist. Okay, okay. Sound like one. No! But go ahead. But basically, and that's one example, I think like, I forget the number, 30 to 40% of all drugs, FDA approved drugs,

do have a natural origin, either directly from nature or it's been modified a little bit and then used as a drug. And how much of that was studied from indigenous cultures that had long traditions of healing? Some of it was. Like if there's this story of people have used this plant for hundreds or thousands of years, researchers take it, isolate all the compounds,

put it in this huge panel against a cancer target, for example. And you get a psychedelic. Yeah. Which were found, every culture found that. That without a doubt. The plants. So the misconception I think is, if it looks like a pill, it's not natural. But it's very possible that the molecules in there came from the bark of some tree.

Absolutely. I hate when I hear people say, oh, it's not a natural remedy. And I'm like, here's the thing. Everything that's happening in your body is happening on a molecular basis. So these people have found a way to figure out a way to isolate the molecular compounds and it's the same thing. So now you don't have to eat a bussel full of weeds. You can just take a pill dummy. It's called progress. Anyway, sorry. Okay, so progressing. Are raw diets, i.e. raw milk, raw meat, healthier

because they're more natural? And then we've got a caveat here. What about pink Himalayan sea salt versus regular table salt? Great, both very closely related. The answer is no. Watch where you step there. I have Himalayan salt and I spent a lot of money on it.

People will claim the pink salt has 400% more of this mineral compared to regular table salt. If neither of them in the first place were supplying a meaningful amount of that nutrient or mineral to your health, it's not a difference. And so the risk is actually if you think- What you're saying is 400 times a small number is still a small number.

Exactly, it's 1% versus 4% of your daily intake and you're getting more from eating a mango or whatever it might be otherwise. And so the risk is if people think pink Himalayan salt is healthy for me, now you're using more of it on your food and the real health impact is second order. It's now you're eating 3,000 milligrams of salt per day instead of 1,500 because you think it's giving you

these health effects and then you'd have risk for hypertension or whatever. And the number one contributor to hypertension is salt intake. So, I mean, aside from heredity, like, you know. So first is, yeah, all that kind of stuff. But first is being black, then let's be honest, okay? You black, you gon' get high blood pressure.

But then it's your lifestyle and then sodium intake, you know? Yeah, and the raw milk is similar. There's no meaningful benefits to consuming raw milk or raw meat compared to the pasteurized version. And so people will blow this weight out proportion. I think this is where people get tribalized on social media.

You have people who very passionately only drink raw milk or who otherwise say, if you do drink raw milk, you're gonna die or something. Oh, so that's the polarization of that decision. Exactly. And so people's lived experiences are, well, I drink raw milk, you're going to die or something. Oh, so that's the polarization of that decision. Exactly. And so people's lived experiences are, well, I drink raw milk all the time, and so do my friends, and none of us have died.

What are you talking about? And realistically, maybe hundreds or a couple thousand people may be hospitalized per year from doing it. It's not a big risk, but it's an unnecessary risk, because there's no benefit from drinking raw milk compared to pasteurized. But the people who say there is a benefit, what reasons are they giving?

Yeah, and what are the supposed benefits? Because this got really big a couple of months ago. It did. It was a whole movement. It got huge. It was a movement. And it's because of this polar, people identify as raw milk as an anti-establishment statement almost.

And there are proposed things like, it's got these denatured proteins or enzymes or live bacteria in it, which mechanistically we think will help your health. I haven't seen any evidence to support any of those actual benefits as being truly beneficial. But somebody came up with it. Yeah, they did.

To assume that it's true. Right. And I know who that guy was. Okay, moving on. Are GMO foods bad for your health? For your health? No. I have no concern eating a genetically modified food.

The fact that there's a modified gene in there or leading to a modified protein, you digest it just like any other protein or DNA in all the food that we eat. There is, though, sort of a second level of effect. It's not bad from you eating the modified corn or whatever. And I'm not an expert on this part, but what are the environmental impacts of now having this monoculture and having companies being in control of the seeds

that are used to make that particular product or different pesticide use that are specific for those modified things? Those are all separate questions from, if I eat this modified soy or corn, is it going to directly arm my health? that are specific for those modified things. Those are all separate questions from, if I eat this modified soy or corn, is it going to directly harm my health? To that part, the answer is very clearly no.

Right, so what you're saying is that there are separate arguments that you can make against GMOs, but not the one that talks about whether or not it's harmful to your health. To you, physiologically. Right, and there's quite a lot of decades of research from very large populations showing there's not health risks from eating the modified version of this.

And by the way, aren't most crops mono crops? Yeah, I mean. Whether or not it's GMO, I mean isn't. I don't know the answer to that. I know for like corn and soy and stuff, I think like 90% plus are GMO. Right. So if you're eating any corn based product,

and maybe there's something to be said there, if the process of GMO makes corn more available in our diet, and that meaningfully shifts the overall food profile that we're eating, maybe that shift has an impact on our dietary intake overall as a culture. It has nothing to do with the corn itself versus an unmodified corn. And by the way, I don't know if you've ever seen

heirloom corn, but screw that crap, okay? Like the corn that's modified is juicy and delicious. Yeah, and sweet and everything, and large. Not this pink and purple and blue shriveled up little thing that they call corn. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so. I think there's very little food sold in a supermarket

that matches its ungenetically modified ancestor. Right. So all of them. So if it's not laboratory GMO, it'd be farmer GMO. Right. Because at some point it's- Selected over centuries. Exactly.

People say they should label the food if it's GMO. And while that's surely not necessary, if you did do that, I would say label it to GMO and then have one branch say, is it scientist GMO or is it farmer GMO? And then every food item in the- Would be GMO. Would be GMO of some kind.

Anytime you make a hybrid or cross breed or do anything like that, you're genetically modifying the plants. It's carrots, isn't it? Carrots originally were purple. Yeah, by the way, I love purple carrots, carrots. There you go. Right moving on. What about fluoride in the water? These types of broader public health initiatives if you take them away it's not going to harm everyone equally assuming there is a

benefit. Interesting. Who's it going to most deeply impact? The people who have least access to dental care, who have the least access to fluoridated toothpastes and regular tooth brushing, right? There's a large chunk of society who possibly wouldn't see as much of a big health impact compared to another section of society who may see massive disproportionate impacts. And that dialogue is never discussed. Nobody ever talks about it.

Right, right. And certainly if you happen to be in a very privileged stance, you can't decide just based on yourself. For a very broad public health matter, you shouldn't. You certainly can and people often do. Yeah, so following up on your sort of comment and cleverness was, what are some of the red flags that content might be misinformed?

What gets your ears pricked up and go, oh, hello? Good stuff, yeah. It's a lot, it's a strong overlap with the type of content that is very intriguing to watch. And so you'll see anecdotes being presented. I have three friends who had very late stage cancer. They took XYZ medications and now none of them have cancer. Hydroxychloroquine.

I wasn't going to name medications. This is a different podcast that is frequently done. So anecdotes being presented in place of evidence is an immediate red flag, but it's also really compelling. But they think it's evidence. They think it's evidence when they present an anecdote. And there's a saying, the plural of anecdotes is not data. Nice. I need that on a t-shirt. Yes. But only scientists have even, even their slogans are boring. The plural of anecdotes is not data,

which is beautiful to say. I wish most people got it though. Yeah, and it's not a replacement for a controlled clinical study, where you're monitoring all these different variables that otherwise can easily confound whatever you're looking at. Right, what I tell people when they say,

oh, I have an aunt who took this herbal cure for cancer and she's doing just fine right now, and I say the nine people who took that herbal cure and are now dead are not being interviewed by anybody. No. Yeah. Yeah. How much of what gets put out on social media

has behind it a conflict of interest? That's a major red flag. So if you see somebody telling you, oh, this autoimmune disease and this cancer and this heart disease are all due to a deficiency in these three vitamins, which if you go to the link in my bio, I happen to be selling in a vial for $90 per month.

Can you really trust that these very broad statements, first of all, making broad statements like that, there's a reason why people see individual nutritionists and dietitians and doctors. It's because you can't give prescriptive advice like if you take more vitamin D, you can solve your autoimmune disease. That's simply not true.

But if you're selling a vitamin D capsule, you're very motivated to make that type of statement. Okay, so that's another red flag there. However, just because they're selling it to you doesn't mean it doesn't work. Correct. So this would only mean you just want to be a little more cautious, but it's not an immediate disqualifying event.

Exactly, so I would start from a place of skepticism to start, and then if you see, oh, there's conflict of interest, and they're presenting only anecdotes, and they're being sensationalized and exaggerating, and they're claiming that this one particular treatment is helping with five different diseases. And they're really charismatic. And they're claiming that this one particular treatment is helping with five different diseases and they're really charismatic and they're really charismatic Then your guardrail should be almost at the roof. Wow. Okay, so that's the the universal cure all tablet

Potion lotion. Yeah, if somebody's selling you something and they say you've got autoimmune disease or heart disease or cancer or you're feeling depressed Maybe you need more of this thing that costs $100 a month. Isn't this the same as the dude that sells elixirs? The tonic. The tonic? Yes. From the back of the wagon? Right.

The snake oil salesman. The snake oil, yeah. Exactly it. Is that the same thing, but on the internet today? Working in the same principles. Working to the same audience. We're all still human. And they're vulnerable to those.

Susceptible humans. Yeah. And that's exactly it, because when you're feeling vulnerable, when you're feeling like, I've been to the same audience. We're all still human. They're vulnerable to those status. Susceptible humans. Yeah. And that's exactly it, because when you're feeling vulnerable, when you're feeling like, I've been to the doctor, they told me they don't know exactly what's going on. But this person says, maybe they do, and they've got this thing they can sell me,

maybe it'll work. If you weren't feeling vulnerable in that moment, you might easily identify that as, oh, they're just grifting. They're trying to make a buck. So they're looking for the desperate, the last refuge. Well, the desperates find them. Yes.

All right, the other ones here, false dichotomies and polarized thinking. Yeah, so this is another example, things that perform super well on social media. If you say, if you don't eat a totally plant-based or a totally carnivore diet, you're at risk for all these different diseases. The reality is in between.

Like, obviously, if you eat more whole plant-based foods and vegetables and nuts and legumes and whole grains, that's better for your health. But it's not like you can't occasionally have some non-plant-based foods. It's a spectrum. But the type of content that's always going to perform really well is where you make these really big, bold, sensational claims that aren't necessarily reflective of the scientific reality. How is one to know that? Is the evidence that they're making an extraordinary claim? Yeah. That's the evidence. That's one of these things where if that's

ticking a box on the content, they're making this super exaggerated claim. Wow, so this should be like a toolkit. Like a checklist. Yeah. A around. Do we believe that the medical misinformation is known to be misinformation by the people peddling it? Or do they actually think it's real? Because if they think it's real, then someone else has to know it's misinformation and not the person who's delivering. But it becomes misinformation,

and then if they know that it's false, and they still share it, then it becomes disinformation. Okay. I think there's both. I think a lot of the time, people do genuinely believe the things they're saying. Even if they're selling the product to fix this deficiency or whatever,

they're not doing it, sometimes they may be, but they're not always doing it knowingly deceiving you. A lot of the time, I think people do believe the things that they're peddling. And that boosts their sincerity on camera. Right. Right. Yeah I don't think you can do it Otherwise you can't sit in front of a camera and lie to people for years knowingly just extracting money from them

Some people can most people I don't think could well, I think what people do Psychologically is convinced themselves. So they lie to themselves first Until they believe their own lie because that can happen and then they're able to promulgate that lie convincingly because they actually believe it. Yeah, and this up until recently, I wasn't sure if some of the biggest sort of peddlers of disinformation and questionable supplements really believe what they were talking about.

I watched this crazy video about Joe Mercola, one of the largest sort of supplement salesmen and pushers of misinformation, investigative reporting showing he consults with what he believes is an entity from the causal plane. He gets on Zoom sessions with this sort of seer person who is relaying messages from this other plane of existence. It's astonishing to show that, you know, he truly believes that this person is channeling this other entity and guiding his business practice And the types of information he's going to be one of the top ten suppliers like medical institutions in the world

Stunning to see the videos of these zoom sessions and realize he's not making this up from his mansion Just to try to sell people more supplements There's something deeper going on here. Disinformation, misinformation is one thing. When you angle it and you bring it in an anti-science way, this can't just be, we don't like science, let's move on. There must be strategies. There must be ways in which this messaging is being pushed and delivered. And by the way, it's not only anti-science, it's also why I don't trust scientists. You have the urge to say, well, trust me, I'm an expert,

but then anyone can say that, and so why should I trust you and not someone else? Right, or someone with the exact same credentials. PhDs, doctors all the time make statements that are totally incorrect. And many of them have the pedigree of what school they attended or they were awarded in. And so.

Yeah, I think that your comment about trust is a huge one. If most people think about the FDA or the NIH or the CDC, there's probably not a face that comes to mind. That's the opposite. At all. At all. Maybe one person, but even if there is one person, they don't know what that person is like in their free time. They don't know if they have a family or what they enjoy. That's the opposite of what happens on social media.

You develop these deep, like, personal relationships almost with people that you see, whether they're pushing misinformation or evidence-based information. And I think it takes that human connection to actually build up trust in whatever someone is saying. Mm-hmm. Wait, so you're saying that the people who are peddling misinformation are developing a relationship with their viewer where the viewer trusts them.

Absolutely, yeah. Okay, so how's the trust going in your TikTok channel? Yeah, so aside from medical information videos. You're a friendly, personable guy. Do you get a lot of haters who are just like, you're so full of, you know. Sometimes, there's some selection. You're working for the big pharma.

Chuck, I get some. Haters will be haters. Haters going hate. It happens, you know, with a big pharma. Chuck I get some haters haters haters going hate it happens You know with a big enough viewership you get all manner of comments And but part of it is not just making like I'm gonna tell you about ibuprofen today So you know I make videos with my dog or I'll do a little silly dancing video or a trend or something Just to show that you are a real person. You're not just parroting data from a research paper It's a lab coat. Yeah're not just parroting data from a research paper. With lab coat. Yeah, in fact, the most memorable DM I've ever received,

this is back in 2021, everyone had questions about the COVID vaccine, so I was talking about that for 99% of the live stream. I come to the very end of it and I say, I've got to go. My wife is almost home from the hospital, I've got to go cook her dinner. And then I end the live stream. Cool, all the comments were about that.

The message I got afterwards was, I didn't know if I believed you about the COVID vaccines, I don't know if I can trust you, I don't know if I can trust science, until you said the reason you were leaving was to go cook dinner for your wife. And I realized, like, you're just a normal person. So what is the best strategy for viewers who want to know, rather than absorb information from someone who is very entertaining and very personable, but may not be the right source.

Where do they go? Is it do your own research? Is it go? Have you done the research? Niels talked about it. You've got this confirmation bias. How do you sort of navigate through that for getting the right information?

Right, especially since you have a PhD. How many years did it take for your PhD? Four and a half. So nearly five years focusing on that one topic. Right. Years, journals, papers, published, and there are people who spend half hour in an afternoon. I did the research.

I did the research. Which could be listening to a podcast. Could be watching a YouTube video. And so the short answer is, realistically I think most people can't do their own research in the way that I would interpret doing one's own research on a topic. And so what you're left with.

In fact, half of graduate school is learning how to be a graduate student. It's really, it's complex, not just to find the relevant research papers, but to critically interpret their study design and the results in the context of the broader literature. You're talking hundreds of hours of just time spent reading in a given topic area.

No one's going to do that. Certainly not after watching an Instagram video and then questioning, is this medically accurate? And so what you're left with, unfortunately, is you do have to identify people or institutions that you trust. I was going to say trusted sources is really the key. You're never going to go do all of the research required

on every given medical topic or topic, you know, in general in your life. So do the institutions need to do more to make this accessible in the face of the fact that science seems to have been weaponized and turned against itself? Yeah, I think there's a critical shortcoming in that. If people were to tune in to the four hour discussion section

where the CDC talks about the benefits and risks of this vaccine or this intervention, There's a critical shortcoming in that. If people were to tune in to the four hour discussion section where the CDC talks about the benefits and risks of this vaccine or this intervention, you would very quickly realize, these people are taking a very rigorous approach to both the medical risks and the benefits. I trust them to come up with the right answer. You never see any of that,

even though it's technically publicly available, because all of the focus, most of the focus, is not on communicating those sort of inner details of how these decisions are made. It ends up being, this is the decision. Or the recommendation. Or the recommendation. For good reason, perhaps, because then doctors can take that

and make that recommendation known. But I think things have shifted, even just since COVID. I think we would really benefit from personalization of these big institutions in a way that people feel they know people at them. Okay, I'm old enough to remember, this would be mid 80s now, early 80s,

where the Surgeon General, C. Everett Coop, came out and said you gotta wear condoms, prevent the spread of AIDS. I don't think anyone had publicly said the word condom before, especially not a public official. And people trusted him. Plus he had his little. Sex education in school and that was about it.

Yeah, and he had a certain grandpa element to him. He was a face of the nation's medicine. Right. And Fauci maybe was that, but not really. So is that the solution here? I think that's a big part of it, is really humanizing the process of how do we come to these recommendations in the solution here? I think that's a big part of it. It's really humanizing the process of how do we come to these recommendations

in the first place? And then we trust your recommendation because we know the process you've gone through. People are never going to sit down and do 300 hours worth of research on a topic. As someone with a PhD in pharmacology, and I will mention immunology, explain the actual science of how vaccines work

and how the body then goes to create the necessary antibodies. It's actually the same process as when you're infected with the virus. And so it's the same answer for both. I'll answer it from a vaccine standpoint. You get the injection in your arm. What have you just injected? Most often little pieces of the pathogen. So what happens in your arm tissue?

Pretty much nothing right there. You've got one big immune cell that comes in and scoops it up. It takes it to your draining lymph node, is what it's called. So it goes through this whole separate pathway in your body. You've got your blood circulatory system. Most people don't know, you actually have a separate, almost circulation system called lymph.

Lymphatic system. So the white blood cells travel from wherever you got the injection. It carries it back to a lymph node and it starts showing it to all these other immune cells and it says, do you recognize this? No. Do you recognize this? No.

Until it finds one. Oh, it's like a lineup. It is. And the neat part is all of those cells that are just sitting in your lymph node waiting to be shown something they recognize. They sit there like this. Exactly, like the guy for the car at the airport. So if they don't recognize it, then what?

Nothing happens. And then the one lymph node is just like, take your time. It's OK. Exactly, the immune cells getting tired walking along. Right. But all of those cells were randomly generated in advance. Right. So before COVID ever existed, you

had in your body T cells and B cells that recognized COVID. And then when you eventually got infected for the first time or got your vaccine, it was like their time to shine basically. They're like, oh, hey, I know that one. When that happens, that cell gets activated. It multiplies, multiplies, multiplies. It starts making antibodies

that go back to your site of infection, go throughout your whole body. It also activates T cells. So T cells are the ones that recognize, oh, that friendly cell's infected with a virus, I better kill that cell. I have to kill that cell. Right. Right.

Exactly. So you get this combination of antibodies that are floating around to neutralize the virus when it's in between cells, and T cells to kill the ones that are incubating virus actively. And that same process happens whether you've been infected with a virus,

it still takes the piece of virus and goes to the lymph node and activates the BNT cells. Here's something I never understood. There are people who had pretty serious side effects to the COVID vaccine. If the vaccine is doing what COVID itself would have done, does that mean they would have had those same side effects had they gotten COVID straight up?

I don't think so. I don't know of data to say one way or the other. If the severity of your vaccine response is predictive. He doesn't know the date of one way. That is honest. Honest but boring, that's the trade off. I can cope with that. No, I just want to call out

that when a scientist is speaking and they're honest about their work and they don't know, people say I don't know one way or another. That's honesty. I'd rather that. Right. Yeah. You could lie to us and be really confident

and then do what you say. Yeah, man, if you got a bad fever after the injection, you would have died from COVID. I don't know one way or the other. My suspicion is that there's probably not much of a link between the two and also that it would be very hard to test because obviously once you are vaccinated, you're not going to get infected.

It's going to be. And by the way, your infection, if you do get it, it's going to be lessened by the fact that you've been vaccinated. Right. So yeah. It's like trying to get toothpasteened by the fact that you've been vaccinated. Right. So yeah, it's... It's like trying to get toothpaste back in the tube. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not happening. Let's talk about the less extreme misunderstandings about vaccines, starting with, can you have too many vaccinations? Hmm. Hmm. The short answer is no. There comes a point where,

if you keep vaccinating against a certain pathogen, you don't get additional benefit. There's actually really big results just published for HPV vaccines, one dose versus two doses. The human papilloma virus. That's right, the one that causes cervical cancer. Going from one dose to two doses is not that much better than one dose.

Very important to know that. Critically. But that has to be, trials have to reveal that, or else you wouldn't know. Yeah, no, this is the result of decades of clinical studies. Maybe to your question, though, of in general, like people talk about, oh, my child's going to receive X number of vaccines

over Y number of years. To that one, the answer is definitely no. If you consider the total number of pathogens we're exposed to on a daily basis, think about your entire gut. It's constantly being sampled for bacteria and viruses and everything. And then your immune system is secreting antibodies

into your gut to regulate your gut microbiome. An additional one or 10 pathogens from a vaccine is a drop in the bucket compared to. Compared to everything that's happening inside your body all the time. By the way, I cannot emphasize enough that the comparison he gave is very common in science. You can say, will this harm me?

And yeah, but look at all the other things you're doing and you're not worried about that harming you and those risks are 10 times as high. So that's a- It's not a harm. That's very important comparison to make and it's a statistical comparison that I don't think people are comfortable

or have experience doing. Yeah, well because the way they intuit is- The intuition is false. It's false. They intuit wrongly because they say, well, if I took this vaccine and this vaccine and this vaccine and this vaccine all at the same time, my body must not be able to handle that.

And that is what is causing this disease or this condition or whatever. But the truth is your body is responding to it because it's responding to that all the time. Yeah, and separately in parallel, this goes back to the fact there's all these cells sitting in your lymph node waiting for their target. Just because you activate this one,

this other one is still available just waiting for its target. You can activate both at the same time. At the same time. And they're not competing. They're doing different things. They're fighting different things. They're fighting different things. It's not like one is stepping on the other.

Right. They're both going, it's like a five alarm fire. One fire station is called, then a second fire station is called. They don't cancel each other out. No. They help each other do their thing. One takes one part of the house, one takes another.

So yeah. All right, couple of other less extreme misunderstandings to go through, can you firstly overload the immune system or can you boost the immune system? Oh, great question. That's wow. You both cannot boost your immune system in the ways you're thinking of,

nor do I think it would be a good idea to boost your immune system. You want balance in your immune system actually. If you get too much immune activity, you know what you end up with, autoimmune disease. If you get too little immune activity in your body, that increases your risk for cancer. And so it's this balance between having

just enough immune activity to respond to acute infections and stuff, but even if you could boost your immunity by taking some supplement, I don't know that you would want to do so. It's funny because when we start out in life, that's the whole idea, is not to keep your child away, just let them go do whatever

because they're going to encounter these pathogens naturally and then their body, their immune system is going to develop accordingly. Yeah, I should say there are things you can do to reduce the function of your immune system. So you don't want to be not getting enough sleep. Right. I should say it in the way that you should do it.

You should get high quality, high quantity sleep. You don't double negative the thing, yeah. Yeah, confusing myself. So get proper sleep. Sleep, nutrition, physical activity, right? Low stress over time. These things are boring. They do meaningfully impact your immune response.

If you sleep deprive someone before giving them a vaccine, you can measure differences in the titers they're going to develop, like in the days leading up to and after a vaccine. But in the what that they're going to develop? Like the antibody responses to that vaccine will be worse if you've sleep-deprived them for the days leading up to it. Look at that.

So the basic lifestyle stuff, like if you- Is that an experiment someone's conducted? It is, yeah. Oh, gosh. To have to have to those people have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have

to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have

to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have

to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to do to be caring for your immune system. It's also going to help you with everything else. Before we go on and bring on my next guest, why is it that some vaccines need to be boosted later on? Whereas others don't? Great question. So in other words, you can be immune, you can be vaccinated for life with one kind,

but another one you need a... Measles is like that. Is that right? Yeah, if you got a measles shot as a child back in the 60s, you're probably going to need a booster right now. There's two levels of variability here. One is across different pathogens. Some pathogens are capsular,

and it's harder to get longer lasting antibody responses against what you need to get responses against. You just need to get boosted. Those infections, if you get them, maybe you get infections more recurrently with rhinoviruses or different coronaviruses. It's not like you get infected once in your life and then you never get that pathogen again.

Over time, maybe your immunity wanes for whatever reason. So there's differences across pathogens just based on their structure. There's also big differences though. When you say structure, you mean the physical, how the molecules would ever connect. Yeah, and how that primes your memory immune response to be either longer lasting or not.

Interesting. But then there's also huge differences across people in the variability of both the potency of your immune response and the duration that it lasts. Okay. And you can't tell based on how you feel. And so there's two levels of variability there. Over a population, it works great,

but at any given person for any given pathogen, you could see hugely different persisting antibody levels 20, 30 years after vaccination. I heard this saying no medicine is good for anyone until it has been tested on everyone. Wow. Yeah, so. There's some truth to that, right?

Absolutely. So you can't test it on everyone because you have sample sizes, but if you test it on a thousand people and there's a one in a million reaction that someone might have to it, you won't know that in that sample of a thousand. Right, which is the whole value

of doing post-marketing surveillance, which is done very surprisingly rigorously. That's your best word, surveillance, come on. You can't please. Post or follow up. Post, post marketing follow up. We've got these databases looking out for signals of potential risk, and if one pops up, that's probably anecdotal, but it serves as the basis

for a rigorous investigation that you go do then afterwards. Got it, and so tell me, and just to end it here, tell me about the vaccine... Adverse effects reporting system. And just to end it here, tell me about the vaccine... Adverse effects reporting system. VARES. VARES, yeah. What is that? So it's exactly that type of monitoring system

where we've tested these vaccines in this number of people, it looks good in that number of people, we're not gonna test it in 300 million people before we release it, so you release it. And you're getting safety signals. If the same thing starts to pop up over time, you say, well, we should go do a formal study and look if that's actually associated with the vaccine.

Gives you an excuse to focus in. Right. For things that could be very rare that you would never see in a typical clinical trial, even if you had 10,000, 20,000 people in the clinical study. Because it's one in a million or one in 10 million. Right. And so there's some noise

because these things are voluntarily reported and sometimes things do happen by coincidence. That's what the V-Stans were volunteer. Right. No, no, no, V-Stans were vaccine. Yeah, vaccine adverse event reporting system. So this relies entirely on someone knowing it exists, logging on and typing in some effect, adverse effect.

It's often healthcare providers who will log it. They'll say the person got this vaccine. Oh good, so there's a professional in the loop. Very good to know that. But just because it's in the system doesn't mean it's necessarily related. It's a starting point for investigation and that's where it goes wrong.

People will say, look how many reports there were in the system. But of course what happens if you vaccinate 30 million children, some of those children are gonna have other things happen to them. That are unrelated. Oh, of course. happens if you vaccinate 30 million children, some of those children are gonna have other things happen to them. That are unrelated. Oh, of course.

That may be related. That might be related or they may not be. The bigger the number, there's some rare other thing that it's time coincident with and there's not a cause and effect. And so it's critical to have, to identify when there are true signals, you can't rely on it to show that vaccines

are dangerous for XYZ. Right. Yes. Interesting. Yes. Interesting. Tell me if I'm wrong here. When the COVID vaccine arrived and it wasn't yet enough for everybody, so they did first responders and then teachers,

I think that rollout felt sensible to me. All of us who remembered things like the polio vaccine and the smallpox vaccine, fully expected that once you got that vaccine, you would never get COVID again. But that is not what happened. And then it's always a new strain and there's new this, and then people got it twice,

people got the same strain twice. So it seems to me that fact undermines certain people's confidence that that was either the right vaccine or an appropriate vaccine or whether people even knew what they were talking about. We all know people who've had COVID three, four times. I was no vid until like three months ago, I would say. Yeah, so I think this is a misalignment

of expectations versus reality We know looking at other coronaviruses because there are seasonal coronaviruses that mostly now cause the common cold people get reinfected all the time Yeah, and so there's every reason to expect with a new coronavirus you have immunity now That doesn't totally preclude you from infection later. Yeah, but if I had smallpox, I expect no smallpox Right, and so there's huge variability across different pathogens based on. Nobody told us that when the vaccine came out. Exactly, so I think that's the shortfalling

of communication. Did they know that that was something they could have communicated at the time? Or was it still on the frontier of learning of the progress of the novelty of the virus? There's a big part of that too, is being honest and we don't know for sure yet. This is a new virus. Right now, if you of that too, is being honest and we don't know for sure yet, this is a new virus.

Right now, if you get the vaccine, you're not going to get infected, or it's a 95% reduction in risk. Or your risk of severe disease is reduced by 90%. But how that will change three years from now, you can't be totally certain. If they knew that, they needed to be honest about it, I think.

Because that's how science works. You know what you know at any given time, and you give the best available information. So we want everyone to watch your postings. Dr. knock. Dr. knock. That's right, dr.noc. And that's on TikTok, and you call that also on Instagram?

TikTok, Instagram, yep, same name. Excellent, rising through three and a half million viewers. That should be 20 million viewers, I think. Even more than that. We need it, we need it. 330 million viewers, that's the next time you come on. The whole country. The country.

Thanks for coming down. Really appreciate the invitation, enjoyed the discussion. Live into my office, and it's good to know you're in Arms Reach up there in Boston. Brookline is your town. That's right. Right across the Charles River. Why don't you just give the man's address? No! Stop!

Stop! Sorry. I wear a disguise at all times outside of the recording studio, so you'll never notice me in the studio. All right, when we come back, Scott Hamilton Kennedy will tell us about his film, his documentary, Shot in the Art. On the subject of medical misinformation, we can't call that topic complete without venturing into the world of vaccine hesitancy.

And there's one person who's at the front of that conversation, and it's my friend, Scott Hamilton Kennedy. Scott, welcome to Star Talk. Good to see you, Neil. Hey, dude. You're a filmmaker. I am a filmmaker, storyteller. Documentary filmmaker, storyteller,

because not all documentaries tell stories. They try. Just informational. They can be a little laundry list-y. Yeah, when you're laundry list, it's less compelling, I find. Agreed. Because you know deeply, I'm guessing,

that people love to have stories told to them. And why? Yeah. What's the origin of that? I would say Yuval Harari said it so beautifully in his book Sapiens, that he said that storytelling is the best tool we have available to us as human beings to get along, to agree to change things.

He really put it into such an amazing context that it is the art of storytelling that we can use to convince each other to make this world a more functioning place. So you made a film called Shot in the Arm, which I actually had something to do with. You did. You invited me as a script consultant,

not that I am an expert on vaccines, but that I do think deeply about how people learn science and what may convince them one way or another. So thank you for inviting me. I would call you my mentor, sir, if I could. Oh, no, no. So where did that film come from in your head? Yeah, so I'll go all the way back to 2018.

I was talking to a wonderful doctor, Dr. John Schwartz. Were viruses invented in your head? Yeah, so I'll go all the way back to 2018. I was talking to a wonderful doctor, Dr. John Swartzberg. Were viruses invented in 2018 yet? Yeah. In 2018, well you know Dr. John Swartzberg because we got to do another film together called Food Evolution. That was a reset of the conversation on GMOs.

And Dr. John Swartzberg runs the Berkeley Wellness Letter, this fantastic letter out of Cal Berkeley that has doctors vet scientific information and then bring it back to the public in a consumable way. Not dissimilar. When you say doctors vet the scientific information, it means they read the journals and bring journal information to the people

so the people don't have to read the journals. That's right. They're interpreted. It's wonderful. It's such a simple, beautiful, and very much of your world too, right? You're a wonderful translator in a way of complicated science.

And he said to me, Scott, what's your next movie gonna be on? You should take on these anti-vaxxers. This is fall 2018. And in my wisdom, I said, oh no, why would I need to touch them? They're gonna go away. They're gonna burn out.

Genius as always. Cut to spring 2019, record breaking measles outbreak, a state of emergency here in New York City in the Orthodox Jewish community. Measles. Measles outbreak. After it had been declared defeated. We were on the road to eliminating it in 2000. World Health Organization,

did they make these declarations? That's right. That's my lazy research I did when I saw the state of emergency in New York City is I did a little research and I saw that we were about to eliminate it in 2000. So what the heck is going on here? Why would we have a state of emergency if we're so close?

And I called Dr. Paul Offit, who's a big part of the upshot in the arm, and he said, Scott, it's not very complicated, but it is nefarious that there are people out there that have come to be known as anti-vaxxers who scare and convince parents to not vaccinate their children. And it's never a matter of if,

it's going to be a matter of when, if you do lower those vaccine rates that you're going to see a measles outbreak. And measles has some among viruses, some like unique, not only unique, but it's highly- Highly contagious. Highly contagious. It can stay in a room, I think it's two hours after. So I-

Floating in the air. Floating in the air, yeah. It's that contagious. So that I thought was enough to begin a movie. And so I began this movie in 2019. My first day shooting was at the CDC's ACIP meetings where they confirm the next vaccines that are coming out. And I had pull off it there

and I had one of the top anti-vaxxers there, Del Bigtree, who went on to be, he's a dear friend of Robert Kenney Jr's, went on to be Robert Kenney Jr's communications director during his presidential run, but we'll come back to that. And I also filmed with Andrew Wakefield, a doctor who had his actually license taken away when his study was found to be that it was fraudulent

and incorrect and trying to make a connection between autism and the MMR measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. So we thought we had a pretty important movie and all of those elements, and then COVID happened. And it went to another place where we had to film from lockdown. I included my family a little bit as like the all of us.

And for a minute, we thought the antis might, God forbid, go away when you have a once in a century pandemic, but they got stronger and more nefarious. How does someone judge in your cinematic world whether or not your film is propaganda? Great, vet it, right? Vet it.

Yeah, look at the experts that I have in the film. Look at the scientific studies that we point out in the film. We put them right up on the screen. We have them on our website, all those things. And I will add, the experts you do interview, they're not saying, listen to me, because I alone have this one answer.

Correct. They are representing a scientific medical establishment. Correct. And at some point, we have to reclaim the importance of the medical establishment. Correct. Right, and at some point we have to reclaim the importance of the word establishment. It's become a bad word. Are you from the establishment? That's right.

Oh, that's bad. No, there's a reason why an establishment exists. Yeah, the level of cynicism is very, very depressing. But back to your point, your question about the film, vet the film, don't take my word for point, your question about the film, vet the film. Don't take my word for it. Don't take the fact that I have the wonderful Neil deGrasse Tyson as my executive producer,

which is a great honor and should make them say, hey, if Neil vetted it, that should mean something. That's fine. But vet the film and vet the words coming out of the people we refer to as antis in the film. It is true that most propaganda films don't invite you to vet it. That's right.

But again, that goes back to my, I'm trying to wrap it up, but the tools that we could have on StarTalk's website, on Black Valley Films' website, on Shot in the Arms' website that says, Black Valley Films is your production company. Is my production company, thank you, is that says, here are the tools we use for vetting.

Right, they're right there. Here are the tools we use for vetting. And it right there. Here are the tools we use for vetting. And it's transparent. And say, hey, you trying to poke a hole in me? Do you have those tools on your website? Right? So that empowers people to verify in some way or another. So Scott, what does your film Shot in the Arm

have to say about our responsibility to each other? Because that seems to be deeper than just any conversation about medicine. It's a social contract. Tell me about that. Yeah, no, it's a great point that the social contract became part of the film through a few different characters in the film that reminded me of it.

I don't remember the last time I probably talked about it outside of making this film. Was it in grade school or something? So- Civics class? Yeah, a simple definition of the social contractor. These norms that are written or sometimes not written that have become norms, don't drink and drive,

take out your trash, be a decent neighbor, be a good citizen in your community, don't harm your children, feed your children, all these different things. And vaccines could be, is part of that, right? That you don't necessarily get a vaccine. You do get a vaccine to keep yourself safe, but sometimes you don't get a vaccine necessary

for you to stay safe. You get a vaccine so you don't pass something on to somebody who's more vulnerable than you. And sadly, during COVID, we saw, it was building up long before COVID, but during COVID, we really saw kind of a bit of a disaster around our social contract that people leaned into what they would call freedom,

but it's really a version of selfishness, I'm sorry to say, it's a tough word. But it's- Well, wait, so you explored in the film that the original sort of anti-vaxxers was a community deeply embedded in liberal voting factions. And only under COVID was there a right-leaning faction that were not so much anti-pharma,

which is the common battle cry in the left, but they were just pro-freedom. And so their notion was you can't inject me if I don't want you to. So why don't we just still allow that, but then deny them access to places where they could spread the disease. Or we could give them their own island.

It's terribly cynical and maybe even mean, but if we had an island, all these people say, I want my freedoms. Don't tell me what drugs to take, don't touch my food, I don't want my milk to be pasteurized, I don't want fluoride in my water. Okay, fine, here's the island, you guys go start over again. I think somebody may have written a book that may have touched on this.

But not everything in that list is equal. So for example, if your water supply, your personal water supply, you remove the fluoride, no one else is affected by that. True. But if you are not vaccinated and you catch the disease and you infect others, then they are affected. Correct.

Okay, so not all the reasons why you might ship people to this island are equivalent. No, I just want to ship them ones in all life. I didn't say that this was a kind decision, Neil. This is a frustrated, this is a decision of frustration. Okay, so there's been a failure on the civics front, and that's what you're really getting at. An individual front, that we,

do we remember that there's a thing called the social contract? Do we want to pause? No, I never learned it about it that way, but in fifth grade I did have civics class. I don't think I even had civics class. Yeah, I had a civics class, I had a button called, you were in the civics club.

Nice. And I might still have that button, actually. And we did things like, we held elections and campaigning, people ran for president of the class and things that were microcosms of the larger society. We didn't pretend someone had been vaccinated or had a disease, but it forced you to think about other people.

That's it. And maybe that was undervalued in the kindergarten through 12 curriculum. It might be another one of those things that we took for granted in the kindergarten through 12 curriculum. It might be another one of those things that we took for granted in a bad way, that we took for granted that we have these systems and maybe our kinder people in our family were making those systems work,

if it was our grandparents or teachers gets to be polite or whatever the different things were. Right, right. So how do we fix it? Again, not quickly, let's start there, not quickly. The quick part would be to say, is there a problem? I might make a comparison to alcohol and addiction, right? We probably all have some family member

that has been addicted to something like alcohol or a drug and we wanted to help them. And we might want to say, stop, it's not gonna work. What's the first step that's gonna get them to actually go down the road admitting their addiction? So I think we're living through a time where people are not in the place to admit that they might have a problem

about being cynical about science. They might have a problem about humility. They might have a problem about humility. They might have a problem with their relationship to the social contract. And we have to admit that problem. Yeah, but if you're an alcoholic, you might go into therapy. Do you go into therapy if you're not admitting

that science matters in your life? It's a therapy session? You usually don't go to therapy unless you've, until you've admitted it. You don't go to dry out. On no occasion. You don't, yeah, you might have an intervention, but besides the intervention, it's you,

the first step has to be, and it's still even within intervention, they can leave the drug rehab place, right? They have to admit that they have a problem. So can we as a society admit that we have a problem about cynicism, that we have a problem about selfishness, that we have a problem about what is expertise and who we a problem about selfishness, that we have a problem about what is expertise and who we should be listening to, that I think is.

Yeah, but you're the filmmaker, and there's nothing more influential in American society than a well-made film that everyone sees and is deeply affecting them. Did you just take us in a time machine prior to social media? Yeah. I would agree with that statement,

except for, I love films, they've been incredible. Do you know after the movie Ghost, with Whoopi Goldberg and. Demi Moore. Demi Moore. After that film, polls on people's belief in ghost went up. There you go. Just because of the film.

Yeah. That they somehow made it more real, because it was a story well told. Without question. So I'm just a scientist and you are the storyteller. You are the time honored storyteller whose craft predates science. Nice, nice, beautiful.

The storytelling predates science. Yes, and I am an independent documentary filmmaker. So documentary filmmaker and independent means that I'm a little bit on the outside. What do you do if someone notices in your funding stream that you get money from, like, the enemy? You get money from Pharma, and you're trying to say that Pharma is good?

Sure. I do everything in my power to not take money from a conflict of interest in the making of the film, in the distribution of the film. I don't care who gives me money, because I finished the film, and it's locked, and it hasn't been influenced. But that's another, just because there is

a possible conflict of interest, doesn't mean there is a conflict of interest. People have come to assume it. That's right. So Scott, we previously collaborated on a film, Food Evolution, which explored misinformation regarding genetically modified organisms. The GMOs.

And in both of these films, you're exploring things that in the left-leaning community, some of them hold sacred and you are dismantling some of their beliefs within this. And you had a phrase, and I never remember it exactly, what was it? The limitation of well-intentioned liberals. The limitations of well-intentioned liberals.

Where it's an idea that they want to promote, then they overstep in what they think is true regarding the idea, but they think they're right. Yeah, confirmation bias rabbit hole. they're getting the idea. But they think they're right. But. Confirmation bias, rabbit hole. Okay. And so this has been your, this is your thing. It's a piece of the pie.

It was different prior to COVID because now everything blew up and there was all sorts of people with their limitations of good intentions. But yes, I, as a born and raised diehard liberal, I came to question my liberal brothers and sisters Yes, I, as a born and raised diehard liberal, I came to question my liberal brothers and sisters through that lens. That it isn't just good intentions are not enough.

You've got to have data, you have to have evidence, you have to have repeatability, you have to check yourself every so often. So, yes, it's a. Yeah, my point was, often the liberal left will declare that the conservative right is anti-science. Right. And they'll cite very obvious examples such as denial of climate change and in some cases

denial of evolution. But the statement is made as though they're up on high. Looking down. Looking down, whereas you part the curtains in the liberal community, you get things like homeopathic medicines, you get crystal healing, feather energy, you get these things. The only way you can embrace these ideas and philosophies

is to reject the science that either comes from part or all of mainstream science that denies it. That's right. And so that puts you in a weird place as a storyteller. Yeah, you did a beautiful thing on the poster for Food Evolution and you signed it saying to Scott who's not afraid of what is true. Did I say that?

Yeah. I may have forged it. No. Yeah, and I thought it was such a, it took me a little while actually, Neil, to come back to it and go, oh, that's what that means. Because I'm not afraid of what is true. I'm afraid of what's been manipulated.

Yeah, it's a group think thing that can happen. Yeah, or somebody lying. And you don't even know you're in a group think. Or somebody lying to me, right? Somebody tells me the truth, I'm going to deal with the truth. Somebody tells me something that's- Can you handle the truth?

That's right. Somebody tells me something that's scary and it's not true. Oh my God, it's a disaster, right? The truth is complicated enough. But to get back to like why I joked earlier about could we have a beeper on our phone that says, full of shit, full of shit, full of shit, right? You know, any of us, again, not political.

It's a bias alert. It's a bias alert, wouldn't that be fantastic? Or God forbid we seize like an engine and I can't talk anymore. I'm so full of shit my body stops functioning. Not me, anyone. Those other people. When you say seize like an engine,

you're referring to an internal combustion engine. Thank you very much. Because electric engines don't seize. Are there electric engines out there? Just kidding. Yes, thank you. I was going old school. All right, so thanks Scott,

for doing this little bit of conversation, exposing you to our loyal audiences. Love the audience. And we're all here to try to make a better world using science as the tool. And now we have to include storytellers as part of that tool. I really appreciate it.

All right, this has been Star Talks Special Edition. I want to thank Dr. Nock and Scott Hamilton Kennedy for coming in for this recording. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.