D (2:52)

This week in Spirituality.

A (2:54)

We've talked about Brian Johnson before. Perhaps too much. He's the tech millionaire who's turned biohacking into his whole personality. His estimated 2 million dollar a year reverse aging daily routine has completely swallowed his life while creating a social media avatar with over 2 million followers on both YouTube and Instagram and over 700,000 on X in addition to a super restrictive diet and a super inclusive supplement regime. Some of his unusual choices as motivated by his mantra don't die have included having a blood transfusion from his then 17 year old son and injecting his own penis with Botox. As we recently covered, Johnson livestreamed himself over the Thanksgiving weekend taking psychedelic mushrooms while monitoring over 200 biomarkers in his body. In addition to the support of his son, Talmudge and DJ vibes from musician and Elon Musk, three time baby mama Grimes, Johnson was joined on his performative magic mushroom stream by some journalists and business associates and his personal assistant Kate Tolo, who was with him in the room holding his hand for a lot of it, and they displayed several extended moments of additional loving intimacy. Though his loneliness and difficulty dating were key themes in last year's Netflix documentary about Johnson, it turns out that he and Tolo, who co founded his longevity startup Blueprint, have actually been in a secret romantic relationship for three years. The secrecy was broken. I think they couldn't hold it any longer after, you know, a million people had watched them gazing into each other's eyes while he was tripping. It was broken two days after the voyeuristic YouTube window into Johnson's trip with a voyeuristic video montage of their behind the scenes love. And that was titled all lowercase Guys, I have a Girlfriend. Cut next to December 29th and this is where our story really begins. There's an 844word tweet from the lovesick millionaire which caught our attention. And it starts like this. It's been 19 days and 20 hours since I last felt Kate's warm embrace. She landed 47 minutes ago. The 24 hours of travel no doubt has her rushing to shower. She needs to cleanse herself of a dirtied world incompatible with her sensibilities. The wash doubles as a ritual preparatory for entrance into the symbolic world we've constructed. There's more, a lot more. But I want to pause there to get your first reaction, Matthew.

B (5:36)

Okay, well, first reaction, I mean, bottom line for me is that this guy's wealth should be in immediately seized and redistributed to the unhoused and like, medically uninsured. So, you know, the main part of me just wants to, you know, see this torture of living in a world in which, you know, he has the ability to use his hobbies to distract people from the terrible morality he embodies, to just be like muted a little bit.

A (6:04)

So just take away all his toys Take away his ability to live this privileged existence.

B (6:09)

Right, yeah. Just give it away. Seize it.

D (6:12)

As we know we have political differences, so I'll chime in and say that seizing the assets of a non criminal citizen is not something that I agree with.

B (6:22)

Yeah, I know. Yeah.

A (6:24)

It doesn't seem like much of a stretch after we just went and kidnapped the president of a sovereign nation.

D (6:29)

It doesn't seem like a stretch. But anytime that we start seizing the assets of non criminals to form any sort of coalition or government, it never turns out too well. Yeah.

A (6:39)

So actually maybe we differ in terms of what that would represent. Right. It would. For maybe for you and I, Derek, it would be a next step down the line of what we already saw manifesting over the last few days.

D (6:49)

Right, right. Yeah, exactly.

B (6:51)

I mean, my real first impression is that he's sublimating his wildly imaginative Mormon DNA into metaphysical scientific jargon. And I think it's worth studying it a bit because I think it's one example of how at least one strand of pseudoscience language comes together. There's a bunch of goobers in our archive who do similar things like Zach Bush, Christiane Northrup, Kelly Brogan. They have this basic drive in their lives and marketing to awaken and touch God. And they have enough vocabulary and perhaps enough in real life contact with clients, bodies in health and sickness as medical professionals to dress up their religious impulses in medical jargon.

A (7:36)

Yeah, I mean, shout out to Zach Bush. I think he's the strongest example of this, Matthew. And you've done so much beautiful work unpacking his incredible word salad, religiosity blending with alternative medicine. Right.

B (7:50)

Yeah. I wonder where he is because he doesn't seem to be on my feeds anymore. Uh huh.

A (7:54)

He did disappear after making a really big impression.

D (7:57)

No, no, no. I was checking in on him last week actually. He's. He's still. The pastor, is still giving sermons, he's on the podcast circuit. He's just. I don't. I think he kind of fell out of Maha. He's never really coalesced with that crowd. So you have to seek him out a little bit more now.

B (8:14)

There's something pure about that, a little bit less. I mean, because if he didn't jump on the Maha train, I think that speaks to some kind of integrity, maybe, I don't know. But with this language stuff, sometimes all the dress up is additive. Like with Bush and Northrop, they want you to know up front that they're basically priests, but sometimes it's kind of hidden or Amassed like Brogan is less spiritually explicit. And Brian Johnson comes close, I think, to hiding his yearning for God altogether. But I'm going to argue that it's still driving things. Like, I think he wants to live forever after all, just like his, you know, the old Mormon patriarchs did.

A (8:53)

Yeah. And he's found his soulmate. Right. So Johnson spends the next few graphs in this Twitter missive musing on how costly their time apart, his time apart from Kate has been for his physical health. And this includes what he describes as the 100,000 myelinated fibers of his vagus nerve going into distress. And his immune system. He gives all of this jargon for. For what adds up to basically his immune system being repressed. He reflects on how much control he has over the anti aging environment he's created for himself. But how this contrasts with the out of control reality of needing the affection of his beloved. And then he spins this metaphor about there being a fiber optic cable streaming their connection at light speed. This is like the most metaphysical moment for me. But it's buffered by time and distance to create a kind of latency. Right. It's almost like they, they're tapping into the Akashic records together. But there's, there's some kind of WI fi disruption, but that's shifting now because she's 13 miles away. And he says, I can visualize the whites of her eyes, which is the most romantic thing I've ever heard. And viscerally feel her essence.

D (10:05)

This is all just early 2000s spiritual. Like I just remember in those circles people being like, I'm getting downloads. Yeah, from. From essence. That was exactly what they would say. The most apt comment I saw specifically about this poem, though someone online said so he didn't even pick her up from the airport because Brian lives in Venice. Depending on the time of day From Venice to LAX, it's between 12 minutes and 7 hours to get there. Yeah, I'm gonna guess that any partner would prefer their significant other show them love by picking them up rather than making them navigate to the rideshare parking lot. Which if you've never dealt with it at lax. It is one of the most jaw droppingly dumb examples of mobility infrastructure that has ever been created. And it's him talking about his love while she's during. That is, that's, that's the real story to me here.

A (11:01)

Yeah, we now we need to see the poem about how the carbon monoxide at LAX would like damage his, his anti aging kind of measures. Right. And so he's kind of weighed it up and he's like, well you could just, you could just go and walk in down those weird pathways and find that area where you can get a ride home. It's so crazy. So what follows as this continues is a sciency description of both his and her nervousness, their excitement and their arousal upon being reunited.

B (11:31)

Just to check here though, because he's really talking about his own. He. We don't really know anything. We don't get anything from her at all. Like it's all imputed, it's projected, right?

A (11:38)

Oh yeah, this is all his fantasy.

B (11:40)

Yeah, it's all him. Yeah.

A (11:41)

He describes the anti inflammatory chain reaction that he gets or is going to get from his first touch. He kind of muddles the imagination and the reality. Her aroma, his dopamine, their mirror neurons, the wildfire of goosebumps as blood vessels dilate and so forth and so on. It's basically softcore neuroporn where romance and eroticism are reimagined in sort of neurobiological scientific language.

B (12:10)

Yeah, I think you're right that Johnson might be reimagining religious and like pubescent erotic sensations in the language of science. Like he's not new with that. Well, you didn't say religious. I'm going to say that more. But I do think he's, he's sort of sublimating erotic sensations into science. So it makes me think of this community that I used to hang out with and this old writing friend that I haven't seen in years named Christian Book. I'll link to some recent news about him because he's just completed this 20 year poetry bioart project. It's called the Xenotext in which he encoded a poem into the DNA of an extremophile bacterium and he kind of organized it to or stimulated it to write a second related poem as a protein. And so what he wanted to do is to create an immortal work of poetry that could potentially outlive human civilization itself. Like he's about the most eccentric person I've ever known. Maybe you can see the kind of comparison I'm going to make here.

A (13:10)

Yeah, but this is, this is actually amazing. Right, because he's, he's basically trying to see if the code of a poem can evolve over time into like future poems, that it makes some sort of adaptions through this bacterial vessel. Right. That's wild.

B (13:27)

Yeah, it's incredible. It's incredible. And he spent 25 years on it and he's way more, way more concentrated on this than Brian Johnson is on his own blood numbers or whatever. Now, Book was directly inspired by something called the language poetry movement in the early 70s in which the focus was on language itself as the subject, like the materiality, the syntax, the sounds of the words. And these are all really super nerdy, marginally employed poets saying that every discourse from science to law to history to bureaucracy has its own internal erotic and irrational impulses. And they become audible if you lift that language out of its functionality and you look at the aesthetics. So their era is just filled with projects in which the poet would just obsessively study the literature of some obscure thing. Like with Dudeney it's geology. With Book it was crystals and now it's bacteria. With me it was the mechanics of a pipe organ. With Brian Johnson it's his blood levels. Right? Like he's like obsessively going over these numbers and writing them down and then, and then they're getting into his posts. And I think that that vocabulary is meant to become a kind of music unto itself. I think as atheists, because this is one thing that's very interesting here. He, he was very deeply Mormon. Like he grew up that way. Everybody can listen to my interview with Blair Hodges about Brian Johnson's basic milieu that he came out of. And now he's moved into this kind of like sublime immortality on a material level space. And you know, he doesn't talk about God directly. And I think that as atheists, I think you guys will appreciate that one of the most important things that the language poets are saying is that pre modern or pre scientific experiences of mystery and awe that were previously kind of dominated by religious language had not disappeared in a secular age, in a scientific age. And that there were many ways of talking about the immersive and awestruck sensations that religion had reduced to cliche.

A (15:25)

Yeah, I mean, one simple sort of vector of this is how sleep paralysis is explained in sort of pre scientific times as being a demon sitting on your chest. And by the time we get to the 1980s, it's alien abductions.

B (15:36)

Well, but the thing is that if you were Christian Book or Charles Bernstein or Ron Silliman talking about sleep paralysis, you could use the language of sleep paralysis to describe a kind of demonology. Right. Like that's their point is that you don't like reduce or lose anything by using the technical language. Yeah, it's actually, it actually is, is more beautiful, it's more poetic to, to use the scientific language.

D (16:00)

That's what Ramachandran has argued for neuroscience for a long time. And there is absolute. I, I don't particularly see. I think sometimes there's this kind. And you're not making a Matthew. But sometimes people think that because someone is an atheist, they can't find awe in the world, which is completely untrue in what. What Ramachandran argues for one.

B (16:18)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A (16:19)

That you can get into this false dichotomy where on one side you have God and awe and wonder and compassion and eroticism, and you have the straw Vulcan of the atheist who says that is not logical.

B (16:31)

Yeah, yeah. I mean that's exactly. And I think that's something that, I don't know. It's a tension that I think we see in the optimization bro science space all the time, right? Where half of the time they want to be talking about God, Half the time they want to be talking about science. But I think they cross their wires over and over and over again. And I think this reference to language poetry maybe gives us a clue that sometimes those wires aren't actually crossing. Maybe the person is doing the same thing at the same time. And I think maybe Johnson caught some of this bug in his fall away from Mormonism, you know, to, to sort of figure out, well, how can I make this new language of my bodily immortality into. Into poetry? But the thing about, you know, the language poets was that they were also challenging the eternality of the author, right? Like they didn't want to become immortal. They viewed themselves as just workers in the language mind. But, you know, Johnson is, you know, he's quite naive. He, he seems to think that if he keeps digging like he himself will become gold.

A (17:30)

Ah, that's a good description. So in addition to all of this that we've been discussing, As I read Johnson's tweet, I, I just feel this underlying vibe, I don't know about you guys, of control and obsession. Like it's almost, it's almost every breath youh take. You know, it's this dark romanticism. He describes how he's gonna have to start at zero again in winning over her trust after been apart. So, so he's disclosing something he's noticed about their intimacy. Right. But then he also imagines how she will have been preoccupied with what to wear.

B (18:06)

Yeah, I wonder why, Brian. I wonder why she's preoccupied with that. I, I, I, I can't imagine you're giving her any signals, any comments, anything that you, any preferences.

A (18:16)

He says Kate's been mulling over what she'll wear for days. She's considered dozens of possibilities and modeled out my anticipated emotional state.

D (18:24)

Ooh. So gr.

A (18:27)

Our planned activities. It's almost like he's praising her with this weird, like, oh, she's learned how to adapt to my neuroses.

D (18:34)

I'm surprised that. That he planned out their activities from the moment she walked in the door. That's shocking.

A (18:39)

The colors will be representative of her psychological state and be positioned to soothe mine. The texture, the style, the hues will interplay with our biology. The deliberately chosen accessories will add flare, intrigue, and play. This is how she flirts, seduces, and bypasses my mind to speak directly to my physiology. And then she has other tricks too.

B (19:05)

Oh, my God.

A (19:06)

Run.

B (19:07)

What's her name?

A (19:08)

That's amazing.

B (19:09)

Kate. Kate Solo.

A (19:10)

Did you guys ever read the book the Collector? It was also made into a film. It's the same guy who wrote the Friendship of Tenants Woman. John.

B (19:20)

Oh, John. John Irving.

A (19:21)

No, no, no. He's John Fowles. He's much beloved, especially in. Wrote this. This amazing book called the Collector, where the first half is from the perspective of this. This guy who's basically a stalker who wants to kidnap this. This beautiful woman. And the second half is written from her perspective as she's held prisoner by the basement that he's created with all of the books and the clothes that he thinks that she would love.

B (19:44)

Right.

D (19:44)

The creators of Better Call Saul. Their latest show is called the Diplomat. And Callan, my wife was telling me about an interview because the Diplomatic is looking at geopolitics from. From predominantly a female perspective, and most of the writers on the show are female. And when they asked the creator if Better Saw Call Saul fans will like the Diplomat, he was like, no, they won't. And the reason was is because Better Call Saul is very much written from the male perspective. But then you go and you watch. I think the Diplomat is one of the best written TV shows I've ever seen. And a big part of that reason is you get to look at how women view men in politics in ways that I've never seen on the screen before. And I. I have a feeling that if Kate were to write her own love poem and Brian approved it because that seems to be the dynamic of this relationship.

B (20:38)

Yeah. There's an NDA on poems.

D (20:40)

Yeah. There would be a much different sort of poetic quality to what she produces. I just looked it up to be clear, because I was muddled. It was the West Wing. Is the crib. One of some of the creators of the West Wing.

A (20:51)

Yes.

D (20:51)

Who did so I apologize to anyone, but glad we got that in. And yes, the creator said, no, it's, it's a different vibe.

A (20:58)

Great show. I couldn't help as I was perusing Brian Johnson's feed on X, noticing that just three days after this piece, on January 2nd, he boasted in a tweet about his excellent blood test results from last week. And that would have been while Kate was gone. And he says, better blood glucose control than 90, 99.8% of the population, undetectable levels of systemic inflammation. And he ends by saying it doesn't get any better. And this seems to directly contradict all of the negative health impacts that he starts off that poem with, about being separated from his love. So who knows?

D (21:41)

On October 9, 2025, shortly after the press conference in which RFK Jr claimed there's a link between acetaminophen use and autism, he said the following during a Cabinet meeting. And let me note that I'm clipping together two moments for time's sake here, but it is from within the same two minute stretch.

F (22:00)

The level of Trump Derangement Syndrome has now left political landscapes and it is now in the realm of pathology. And a mother could overwhelm millions of years of maternal instinct to put her baby at risk. And all you have to do is look at the studies which you and I talked about. Cuba has the highest, the lowest level in the world of acetaminophen use and it has the lowest autism rate in the world. This is not dispositive, it is not proof. We're doing the studies to make the proof.

D (22:35)

Yes. So I included the first moment because in the third segment today, Matthew will be discussing Trump Derangement Syndrome officially being studied. And here you can hear Kennedy clearly teeing up the possibility that HHS will lead the charge. Because, you know, why spend money on cancer research or offer SNAP recipients healthy food like you promised when you can spend your time tracking down fake diagnoses?

A (23:01)

Yeah, that could have been Christiane Northrup. From the time before we really started studying her. She would often go on Oprah and make these sorts of claims that, you know, the mothering instinct, everything in us knows that we should be opposed to vaccines. And this continues what is now normal but still bizarre, as a disinformation tactic of claiming that people, mothers specifically here, whose choices are informed by medical science, they're the ones endangering their children. While of course, those who are refusing vaccines or avoiding acetaminophen are being really responsible and science informed, he's the one Blurring the lines by linking criticism of his pseudoscience to Trump derangement syndrome. It's. It, isn't it? Wouldn't it be Kennedy derangement syndrome? That's really telling to me.

D (23:47)

Kennedy's whole purpose is to appease Trump like anyone else in the Cabinet and that. And actually, I think Kennedy does it better than most in that Cabinet. He really kowtows bootlegs very well. If you watch him in those meetings, he's always saying, you know, trying to say it's all because of you. Trump now let me go cancel 6 of the 17 childhood vaccinations like he did yesterday.

A (24:12)

I guess it takes one to know one.

B (24:14)

I think he also has the advantage of being in a sort of. In a. In a discourse that Trump is really lost in. And so the more that, see, he can just sort of throw in the sycophancy here and there, Trump isn't gonna miss. Isn't going to, like, sort of make any sense out of the actual medical information. So I think he's got a little bit of an easier job than. Than Hexath or even Rubio.

A (24:36)

Yeah.

D (24:37)

After Kennedy canceled six of the 17 recommendations yesterday, recording on Tuesday, of course, Trump sent out a long truth in which he called vaccines jabs. So he very much is just picking up on the antivax. He has been, but he's very much just whatever's being fed to him, he's regurgitating without actually thinking much about it, which isn't surprising, but it is scary for public health. About a minute later, in this moment, Kennedy that I clipped, Kennedy reveals that he's going to make the proof that I played that acetaminophen is the cause of autism. Now, immediately following this press conference, MAHA activists punted, claiming that that moment was a slip of the tongue. He didn't really mean that, which is utter bullshit. I've long argued that Maha is just MAGA for health. And just like Trump regularly speaks his mind, and then his staff comes to pretend that he didn't. Didn't say what he just said. And even after Trump says it again and again, MAHA activists regularly provide cover for Kennedy when the reality is Kennedy speaks very clearly about his intentions and we should believe him. Just like Stephen Miller saying, we're going after Greenland next. Like, I. I hear all these pundits saying, well, does he really mean it? It's like, believe these people. Look what's happening. Before we move on, I want to run a parallel example, because to me, I was watching this the other day and it sums up what Kennedy is doing. Julian, you and I have discussed signified B sides on this podcast before. We've clipped him In a recent YouTube video called Dave Chappelle Thinks We're Stupid. He kind of lays out what we're talking about perfectly.

G (26:15)

Dave Chappelle is full of. He's a bullshitter. And the thing that I need to fully engage with is that Dave knows he's a bullshitter, but he also knows that most of us don't know he's a bullshitter. To be fair to him, he's tried to tell us numerous times. Right. But despite that, people still hold him up as a truth teller, as the opposite of being full of, when in reality his main focus has always been bullshitting to get his money.

D (26:41)

Now, this is a 17 minute video and signified as a very nuanced thinker, I appreciate his content a lot. He's not saying do or don't wash Chappelle. That's not his argument. But throughout the time he lays out very clearly why the man bullshits regularly. And he goes back 30 years to the Chappelle show, to some things he said show that he's just basically doing what he needs to do to make money. And he lays it out. He's laid it out time and again. And to me, he could have just switched out Kennedy for Chappelle throughout the video and it would have been equally accurate. You just have to know how to listen to the man, which is partly taking them at their word. So when Kennedy says he's using gold standard science and every public health expert says, no, you're not actually using gold standard science because he's bullshitting and he knows it. When he comes out and actually says what he's doing, which is making the proof, we need to know that he's not bullshitting, that is, we need to know when to believe him.

A (27:41)

Yeah, yeah. Just a, a quick clarification. FD signifier is his main channel and that's where he does like his long form incredible video essays and then signified bsides. He does, he sometimes calls it light work, but Nonetheless it's like 17 minutes of analysis. But that's like, I'm just going off the dome here. Yeah, he's, he's fantastic. I caught that commentary as well. I thought it was really good. In this case at least. Chappelle has been repeatedly open about his motivations and his willingness to just say whatever he, he needs to to get paid. Right. And he. There's actually clips that signified shares of him doing exactly that on stage. We know Kennedy is bullshitting, but I would speculate he has not and will not ever be truly open about it. These are sort of like Freudian slips where he says, we're going to make the proof. I don't even know if he's able to be honest with himself about it.

D (28:31)

Yeah, that's true. And I want to look at an example for the rest of this segment because he's about to make the proof on another topic around vaccines, only this time it's the Hep B vaccine. Last June, most of you will remember, Kennedy fired all 17 members of a SIP, the vaccine advisory Board that helps inform the administration of best practices when it comes to vaccinations. He then installed longtime anti vax activists in two waves right on cue. At their September meeting, the board advised moving away from a universal birth dose recommendation for some newborns for the Hep B vaccine. This was clouded by high level activists claiming that newborns can't get sexually transmitted diseases. But as usual, this just represents their profound or willing misunderstanding of virus transmission. If a mother has Hep B exposure at birth carries about a 90% chance the baby will develop chronic infection, which greatly increases their risk of cirrhosis and liver cancer. Then you have all the MAHA activists come out and argue, well, just test the mother. But that's not how it works. Because a substantial share of childhood HEPV historically occurred in infants who, whose mothers tested negative or from other caregivers and household contacts who were chronically infected but unaware. And so a birth dose has greatly decreased the number of infections.

B (30:01)

Wasn't there another faction of high level MAHA activists who were saying that, well, if you're claiming that newborns can get sexually transmitted diseases, you're kind of also showing behind the curtain of the pedophilia cabal. Wasn't that part of the argument as well? Was that, oh, here's, here's, here's a, here's verification that they're kind of, they're trying to cover their tracks by, you know, creating medication for this disease that they're spreading through their incredible immorality.

D (30:36)

You have been deeper in the Internet than I have because I haven't seen that. I'm not surprised that that would have been an argument, but on the highest level, I haven't seen it.

B (30:45)

Yeah, yeah.

A (30:46)

I mean, it's an example of the kind of rhetoric that we get from these people when they will talk about the HPV vaccine seen being given to young girls. It's like, oh, well, this is really Just your way of saying that you want kids to be having sex at younger and younger ages instead of we're going to protect them from getting cancer later in life.

B (31:02)

Yeah, same category.

D (31:03)

Yeah. A birth dose. You know the birth dose sex movement. Oh my God. Now, in order to make the proof that waiting a few months for the Hep B vaccine instead of using a birth dose, which is what they're trying to do, the CDC granted a no bid 1.6 million dollar grant to the BE Health Project in southern Denmark. Denmark has been coming up a lot lately in Maha circles. The study is set to take place in Guinea Bissau where the project has been. This particular project, the researchers have done field work for decades. Not only didn't this organization bid for the grant, they didn't even request it. So what's going on here? All right, little background on this. BANDAM was founded in 1978 by Danish anthropologist Peter Abbey, who has a storied but controversial history in health research. His partner is his wife, Christine Stable Ben, who is a professor of global health. They're most famous for research into the non specific effects of vaccines, which ideally, idealistically, is an important area of research used to determine any issues vaccines might cause outside of their intended purpose.

B (32:20)

But.

D (32:21)

Well, first, some of Bandam's work has actually found that vaccines are protective against other diseases other than the target virus, which probably doesn't play too well in the anti vax circles. But the other research has found deleterious effects. The problem is that those studies have been criticized for systematically over interpreting their findings and when they were actually checked by their peers, which is the actual gold standing standard standard process that Kennedy laments over all the time. Bandham's findings were rendered null after proper statistical correction.

A (32:56)

So he's perfectly qualified to, to get this contract from Kennedy, in other words. Right.

D (33:01)

Well there, yeah, it turns out that there, there's relationships between them and he's. Yeah, cited him before. Abby and Ben have also been criticizing for refusing to publish trials that didn't fit what they were trying to prove with their concept of non specific effects, which as a reminder is what all the MA stands and anti vax activists say that pharma companies do when trials don't show what they want. Which is true. To be clear, sometimes Abby and Ben have done that as well. Now this concept of the non specific effect of vaccines has been a Maha brain worm for a while. Kennedy's friends like Mark Hyman and Marty Macary are on record claiming that the supposed accumulation of vaccines has effects we're not aware of. And this draws a direct link to Bandam's work, which has now been weaponized by the anti vax community.

A (33:54)

I just wanted to say, Derek, when we say that Big Pharma has actually failed to publish studies that have not given them the data, provided the data they were looking for, we don't have any evidence that they've done that with vaccines. Correct?

D (34:08)

Not that I'm aware of. That's usually the biologics.

A (34:10)

It's more in the realm of like antidepressants or pain relievers, et cetera. Yeah, correct.

D (34:16)

Now, final point. Point. Kennedy is very aware of Bandam's work as he's referenced it numerous times without the appropriate caveats of actual gold standard science. Ben even appeared on a podcast with Tracy Hogue, who is a longtime anti vax activist who now serves as the acting director for the FDA's center for Drug Evaluation and Research under Macary and is likely at least partly responsible for this sudden grant. Hogue is a sports medicine physician and epidemiologist who appears to have been radical by COVID 19, she was critical of school closures and vaccines. She went on to advise Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who recently advised his state to stop making all vaccine recommendations comparing public health recommendations to slavery. When the state of California tried to put forward a bill that stopped Covid disinformation from circulating, Hogue was among a group that sued the state, saying that the bill violated their first amendment rights.

A (35:18)

You know, Derek, it's. Anytime you go into this journalistic mode and you're listing all of the facts and you're giving all the backgrounds of the different people and the things they've actually done, it's like I get more and more emotional, right? Because this is just so staggering. What I hear is that Kennedy is determined to not only derail medical science for babies and children in ways that would normally save their lives wherever he can in the world, but he also is determined to enrich and empower the worst crackpots in the world to help him to do it. And I. I'm just depressed for the rest of today. Sorry.

B (35:51)

I also think, like, for. For both of you who are so fluent in the scientific discourse, what I notice about the way, the number of ways in which these people can attack each part of the process or cast doubt on each kind of study or each institution or each individual scientist, it's like they're finding all of the tender points along this very fragile, but also very, I don't know, like, dependable chain of producing knowledge that you guys are both really invested in because I mean, you're not scientists. But like, I think you can both feel like how difficult it was to put all of this in place. And it's also kind of extremely vulnerable. Like when you have to be transparent as a scientist with your method and your data and, and, and, and so on. You are leaving this incredible set of exposures for people to, to, you know, just sort of like fuck with in the public for the benefit of their followers and against the sort of general science illiteracy of the public.

D (37:04)

Yeah, well, that vulnerability has always been a problem in science because as is human nature, a number of scientists don't want to believe what they said is untrue. Famously Linus Pauling, who won two Nobel prizes, but then went on this mega dose vitamin C kick and every time he was challenged he was like, nope, I am right. And that, that actually is also a Maha tenant about vitamin C to this day. And those, those that level of misinformation persists because some scientists refuse to actually look at the data because, because of the very vulnerability that you just expressed. You know, I'm on all the Maha email lists and just this morning they sent out the Maha report, sent out an email about how great it is that children will no longer be getting be recommended the meningitis vaccine, for example. Now. Yeah, and, and it's just, I'm looking at it now and again they say gold standard research, including a research paper by Hogue and Martin Korf. And I clicked through to read it it and all it is is a PDF that is not in a journal and has not been peer reviewed. But they're called it gold standard. And this width of language, like they just don't care. They're showing their ass right to you. They're saying here we uploaded a PDF to our server that has not been looked at by anyone else and this is gold standard.

B (38:29)

Now it doesn't even have like the gold standard sticker from Office Depot that you can get like for, for grade.

D (38:35)

School, the scratch and sniff. They're all scratch and sniff snickers. So I just went over some of Bandam's road to the 1.6 million dollar grant and I wonder what they're gonna find. The timing also seems suspicious because Guinea Bissau is actually set to offer all newborns a birth dose starting in 2027. Because they've been paying attention and they're like, maybe we should do this right now. Now the country provides a routine 6, 10 and 14 week schedule, while the WHO recommends a universal universal birth dose. But remember, as of last week, we left the WHO thanks to Kennedy. A few weeks ago, I made a video on our Instagram comparing this study to Tuskegee, which is a shameful moment in American history in which black people were told they were receiving vaccinations for syphilis, yet they were being given a placebo to see what happens. A study that was supposed to last six months went on for 40 years, and it resulted in the death of 28 men directly from syphilis and another hundred from complications due to untreated syphilis. Ironically, anti vaxxers sometimes weaponize Tuskegee in an attempt to stoke government distrust, when in reality the distrust was earned by withholding those vaccinations.

A (39:56)

I think, Derek, it's not strictly true that they were being told they were given vaccines. They were being told they were being treated for bad blood, which was this weird catch all sort of diagnosis at a time when penicillin was known to be a very effective treatment for syphilis. But I don't think they were told they were being vaccinated. They were told they were doing all these diagnostics and they were being given these, in some cases, placebos that were supposed to help them. But I don't think they were ever even told they had syphilis. It's really atrocious.

D (40:25)

Well, they were told they were being treated for syphilis and in whatever they were being injected with was a placebo.

A (40:33)

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

D (40:34)

Yeah, yeah. So withholding vaccinations from babies is equally fraught with danger. And in America, an estimated 1.9 million people suffer from chronic Hep B, which is 5% of the population. That number is roughly 19% when you go to Guinea Bissau. Most chronic infections throughout West Africa, including Guinea Bissau, rise from mother to child transmission at birth or during early childhood exposure in their household households. As I mentioned, chronic hep B leads to a lifetime of complications, often to cirrhosis or liver cancer. Even if the person escapes that fate. Children with chronic Hep B often need lifelong monitoring and may need antiviral treatment to prevent progression, all of which affects quality of life and becomes an unnecessary health system burden. The lifetime cost of treating chronic Hep fever can be six figures above $100,000. The vaccine costs roughly 50 to $60 for all three doses. And then you get to low income countries like Guinea Bissau, where the vaccine actually costs 20 cents per dose, which the government covers, while the vaccine alliance Gavi covers The rest. And if you remember, one of the first things Kennedy did upon becoming HHS Sec Secretary Carry was to leave Gavi. So this is just another example of Kennedy's bullshitting when he says he wants to fight chronic disease. The Hep B birth dose prevents lifelong disease burden, and now he's doing everything in his power to make the proof that babies shouldn't get one. We already know what Bandam's study is going to find, and given that it's a five year grant, our best hope is that Kennedy is long gone from power by the time the study is made. And hopefully, hopefully we have a functional public health system trying to clean up his mess.

B (42:43)

Okay, so in the aftermath of the murders of Rob and Michelle Reiner, allegedly by their son Nick, who struggled with mental health and substance issues for many years, Trump took to Truth Social to offer his condolences, writing A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away together with his wife Michelle, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome. He was known to have driven people crazy by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump. So he goes on and on. Total fun house mirror stuff here. Here's a psychotic guy blaming a quite sane guy for his own murder due to a fake affliction named after the psychotic guy. But.

A (43:42)

Well, if you put it that way.

B (43:44)

Yeah. But if he doesn't call it a murder, of course, like TDS killed Rob Reiner, not and Michelle, not their son. Or if it killed him because his son was maga. Maybe that, that make sense?

A (43:55)

Yeah, maybe. I mean, he goes on and on and then the last sentence is may Robin Michelle rest in peace with an exclamation point. It's like this triumphal exclamation point after saying they died, they were terrible people and they drove other people crazy. Like maybe he drove his own son crazy. Is that the implication?

B (44:13)

I think, yeah, that's what he's saying, but he's not referring to his son. Somehow he's murdered by forces, spiritual forces or whatever.

A (44:19)

Yeah.

B (44:20)

By the way, I did learn that his habit of referring to himself in the third person has a literary name. Guys, did you know this is called ilism? And it has a small but significant footprint in the psychological literature as a tool for therapeutic self reflection. Like if you speak about yourself in the third person, sometimes you can Distance yourself from your emotions, from the things that you know are bothering you. Maybe you can get a new perspective. So maybe Donald is just trying to take care of himself here.

A (44:47)

I mean, I think we sort of know colloquially that it's a sign of grandiosity too, when you refer to yourself in the third person. It's just a way weird thing to do.

B (44:54)

Okay, so today I'm going to talk about Arizona State Senator Janae Shamp, who has just put Forward Senate Bill 1070, the Trump Derangement Syndrome Study Act. Now, her political origin story is about as loud as her cowboy hat is large. She lost her nursing job over refusing the COVID vaccine in 2020 and since then has made medical autonomy and. And you don't have to mask your kids at school for Bible thumping causes. But would you be surprised to know that she was also a prolific QAnon poster, according to an investigation by the Arizona Mirror? No, it wouldn't. But here's her bill. This is what the bill is about. Directly quoting from the bill, quote, the director of the Department of Health Services shall conduct or support research to advance the understanding of Trump Derangement Syndrome, including its origins, manifestations and long term effects on individuals, communities and public discourse. So this is a bill that would actually direct the Arizona Department of Health Services, in collaboration with mental health professionals, universities and state agencies, to analyze contributing factors such as media exposure, political polarization or social dynamics. So, and they're supposed to report within a year of the bill's passage on their findings, plus potential interventions.

A (46:14)

Wow, they're really weaponizing the woke language against us. Right?

B (46:19)

Yeah.

A (46:19)

I know you're going to mention this later, Matthew, but I didn't have this Soviet era repressive tactic and sort of state jargon on my bingo card. It's like they're literally trying to manufacture the pseudoscience psychiatry to discredit political opponents and perhaps even put them in mental hospitals.

B (46:36)

Yeah, pretty much. And one thing that I wondered about in reading the phrase in collaboration with mental health professionals, I looked into whether Arizona has begun licensing spiritual counselors and pastoral care providers under some mental health professional umbrellas. That's happened in a number of places. And that would mean that like Lori Ladd or Paula White could be weighing in as experts on all of this. So this has happened, this expansion has happened in some ways in Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Tennessee. It hasn't happened so far in Arizona. So I think Shamp is actually gonna have to go to legit mental health people for the time being. To get them to weigh in now in the section on the legislative findings that are prompting the bill. So I'm not that familiar with bill, sort of, I don't know, setup and rhetoric and stuff like that, but it seems like bills sometimes contain this preamble that's like, well, this is why we think this thing is needed. So there's a list of these points that she's made. One, political polarization has fractured national unity, right? Yes. Okay. So there's a national unity that Shamp feels is gone. I don't know when it was happening, but it's gone.

A (47:58)

We're gonna make America unified again.

B (48:00)

Yeah. Two, President Trump's economic and policy record includes tax cuts, deregulation, and international agreements benefiting US Interests. Right? Right.

A (48:11)

So it's rational. It's rational.

B (48:13)

That's happening. Three, despite these contributions, Trump Derangement Syndrome has emerged since 2016 and is perceived as a public. In other words, people who can't perceive Dear Leader's brilliance must be ill. Four, media reporting and amplification of unverified claims have fueled Trump Derangement Syndrome, deepening societal division. And there's no mention of what the claims are. Five, extreme political feelings and events, including assassination attempts on Trump, demonstrate escalation of such division, as if those two pot shots were the only political violence happening in the country or now, globally or persistently. Right.

A (48:57)

In the last decade.

B (48:58)

Okay, so none of this is original on Champ's part, even with regard to Trump, because Back in May, U.S. representative Warren Davidson, who's a Republican from Ohio, was joined by Representative Barry Moore of Alabama tabling a federal bill that would mobilize the NIH for the same purpose. And maybe that's where some potential tie in is with. With Kennedy. I don't know, Derek, who. Who would be sort of handling that file. But it looks like they're going to try to rope them in. There's also a proposal in the Minnesota state legislature to classify Trump Derangement Syndrome as an official mental illness under state statute. I mean, that's not how that works, by the way. But it's interesting.

D (49:42)

It would need to be categorized in the DSM 6, and I haven't heard of when that's coming out. I would not be surprised if they tried to actually make a push for it, but hopefully the actual psychiatrists will hold the line here.

A (49:56)

Well, they've got new gold standard psychiatry, though, you see, so they could just publish it in a PDF.

B (50:01)

PDF on a website. It's going to be on. Have a URL. Derek it's going to be on the Internet with a gold sticker. Yeah. I mean, lawmakers are circumventing the normal process here of deferring to medical institutions like the APA or the who. Fuck them. As authorities who can establish diagnosis, they're just going to sort of declare a mental illness. Now, whether this begins with politicians or their quack doctor toadies, this sort of pattern of fake diagnostics seem to emerge whenever power is challenged. So in 1851, we have plantation physician Samuel Cartwright, who coined the term drapetomania for the madness that drives people to run away from their enslaved conditions. And this was used to pathologize the need to escape. He also coined dysesthesia aethiopica to explain perceived laziness among enslaved laborers. But it's more than that as well, because dysesthesia breaks down to abnormal sensations. And I discovered that that was also the sort of root of this foundational claim that enslaved people, or black people in general, were pathologically insensitive to pain, which is why you just had to treat them harsher. Right?

A (51:27)

Yeah. I mean, this. This is where the correct use of the term gaslighting, I think, really comes in. Because in any of the examples that we're talking about here, there's this massive irony that you have a medically official language doing the work of telling people that their appropriate and healthy and human reactions to something incredibly dysfunctional or oppress is a kind of mental illness.

B (51:52)

Yeah. And I think the medical language has a laundering, neutralizing, objective flavor to it. Like, I'm not making a judgment here of you, all right. I'm actually. I've studied. I've compiled the data. I've consulted my Latin dictionary. I've created a term, I've planted a flag. It's like I'm making it. It's a way of. I mean, it's like. Because if you just said the thing outright. If you just said the thing outright, you know, I think enslaved people are insane for wanting to run away. I don't think anybody would listen to you. So, yeah, it goes on. There's so many examples. I mean, it took until 2003 for the Supreme Court to strike down the last anti sodomy laws. But homosexuality was illegal throughout the U.S. u.S. Until 1962, and as a supposed pathology was deemed a national security threat during the Cold War. And the echoes of this, of course, are now revived with hegseth's new anti trans regulations for the Department of War. We've talked about the lavender Scare quite often on this podcast. So then in the 1960s, and this is what you pinged before Julian, the top Soviet shrink, Andrei Snezhnevsky, coined the concept of sluggish schizophrenia to formalize an earlier Leninist pathologization of dissent from state ideology. So some of the symptoms included the presentation of what he called overvalued ideas or fixations on ideas that interrupted basic life functions. But then, get this, the person who was afflicted with sluggish schizophrenia also had an obsessive struggle for truth or justice. And so, except for the sluggish part, it sounds like he's describing a lot of revolutionaries, actually.

A (53:45)

Yeah, but these were counter revolutionaries, Matthew.

B (53:48)

They were. It was investigated, this whole thing, and condemned by the global psychiatric community. It was pretty much adjunct within the Soviet Union by the 80s, but until then, it was used as a framework for repression, including forced medication, indefinite detention, and probably worse things.

A (54:10)

Yeah, so for about 40 years. Right?

B (54:13)

Yeah, yeah. So. So this. So this X derangement syndrome as a formula that we see with Trump isn't new in that particular phraseology either, because in 2003, we have Harvard trained psychiatrist and neocon political pundit Charles Krauthammer topping off his liberal to conservative villain arc by coining Bush Derangement syndrome, which he defined as, quote, the acute onset of paranoia and otherwise normal people in reaction to the presidency. Nay, the very existence of George W. Bush. He puts the nay in.

A (54:50)

That was a quote.

B (54:51)

It is a quote, and I think it betrays that the coinage is satirical somewhat. He actually opens this column by saying, you know, it's been 30 years since I had my white coat on, and I actually, you know, I named, or I named a diagnosis from before. I can't remember what it was, but there was actually a legitimate thing that he discovered or he published on. So he is. Is satirizing a little bit. But he also used it in columns and media appearances about prominent Democrats like Howard Dean vocalizing, you know, clearly psychotic fears that Bush might suppress 911 information or lead the US deeper into Iraq in part to benefit business interests. Right. Completely insane. That would never happen. That Howard Dean must be crazy. So in 2015, blogger Esther Goldberg coined Trump Derangement Syndrome. But this was to mock what she called ruling class Republicans like George Will and others in the buttoned up, you know, GOP never Trump cohort who were aghast at his candidacy, just shocked. And Goldberg, being no psychiatrist, had this rationale that rested on Trump's obvious directness and authenticity. Like anyone who couldn't see that he was simply telling workers the unvarnished truth about America. They must be mentally ill. So this is from her column, quote, trump's message resonates with working class stiffs who believe that despite his wealth, he understands them and their concerns. When he speaks, they understand him. There's no complex grammar to parse. There's none of the phony folksiness you get from the Dems, none of the show nuffs and y' alls from a Hillary. To many ordinary Americans, Trump represents the promise of America as a land where everyone should have an opportunity to make it to the top if he works hard enough. These are the folks who gave the last election to Barack Obama because he made this promise. And now they're disillusioned. Okay, so from Goldberg, it spreads through right wing online spaces until we see it in 2017, with Fareed Zakaria writing a Washington Post column called liberals have to avoid Trump Derangement Syndrome. And that focused on how he'd been criticized for approving of Trump's potentially, you know, illegal, legal gray zone missile attacks on Syria. And he didn't like the comments. So some of that is about just feeling hurt about Twitter. And in the same year, Krauthammer showed up again in Washington Post with a column called you can't Govern by id. And he said that he wanted to update bds, or Bush Derangement Syndrome, with this sort of new phenomenon called Trump Derangement Syndrome, which was an offshore, but this time he had a more sophisticated take. So see what he does here. Quote. Having coined Bush Derangement Syndrome more than a decade ago, I feel authorized to weigh in on its most recent offshoot. What distinguishes Trump Derangement Syndrome is not just general hysteria about the subject, but additionally the inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences on the one hand and signs of psychic pathology on the other. But here's his point. As for legitimate policy differences, Krauthammer focuses on Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, which Krauthammer was actually in favor of. But he argues that these choices, which are legitimate, they're just policy choices, should be held apart from his cruel and pure ID behavior. So Krauthammer's conclusion is this masterpiece of convoluting all these issues together. He writes, quote, quote, trump was elected to do politically incorrect and needed things like withdrawing from Paris. He was not elected to do crazy things, starting with his tweets. If he cannot distinguish between the two, Trump Derangement Syndrome will only become epidemic. Okay? So the psychiatrist is diagnosing, withdrawing from Paris as sane, but the tweets as insane sane. And that will be the accelerant for Trump Derangement Syndrome. And Trump will be responsible for it insofar as the public can't be smart enough to tell his sane actions apart from his insane actions. Like, it's their problem. Like, Trump Derangement Syndrome is like a failure to, like, sort of really parse out where he makes sense and where he doesn't make sense. So by 2018, TDS is memed and counter memory memed. It's laughed off by late night comics and boomerangs in the hands of Trump opponents to describe their irrational behaviors. But it also gains supporters in Trump 1.0. And that starts with Sarah Huckabee Sanders publicly calling TDS a major epidemic among Democrats with a completely straight face. And that usage accelerates in relation to the correct assertion that he lost in 2020. Now, by 2024, Trump himself is using the phrase as an insult directed at Kamala Harris. Okay, so the workflow is that it gets applied to Democrats who think Bush is going to cause unnecessary death in Iraq. Then it's applied to never Trumpers who are fighting to hold on to the party of McCain and Romney. Then it's applied to resistance liberals who can sense the rise of fascism, and they don't really know how to respond to it, but they know that. That he's the figurehead and he's clearly not right. And one application I left out is that some American Communists will accuse anyone to the center of them of Trump Derangement Syndrome because it places the focus on Trump's cult of personality instead of on him being a symptom of capitalist insanity. But the final boss application is Trump authorizing the term against Harris and the late Rob Reiner. So I kind of hear a double edge in that. Like, he's pathologizing people who hate him. And he's also kind of owning the condition, like it's part of his brand, like, he can cause this thing. And it reminded me of when he stood there in the Oval Office beside Mamdani and basically said to the reporters, you know, it's okay if Zoran calls me a fascist. Like, because what he's really good at is capturing any sticky or transgressive content, even if it's aimed at him and only owning it, but also normalizing its meanings. He actually did something similar again on Air Force One after the strike on Caracas, when a reporter asked with some trepidation, so are you Saying there will now be an action against Colombia. And he replies, I think that would be good. Yeah, Right. Just sort of straight out, flat out.

D (61:37)

Says it in that same moment. It was all. When they asked about Maduro, they said, you kidnapped him. And he goes, I wouldn't use that word. But.

B (61:45)

Oh, but didn't he say later, oh, no, that's an okay word.

D (61:48)

Yes.

A (61:48)

Yeah.

D (61:48)

He followed it up with that. Yeah, yeah.

B (61:50)

So that. Yeah. And I think it takes him a moment. It's like, oh, you're accusing me of kidnapping. That doesn't sound good. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Kidnapping? Kidnapping. Well, you know what? You know what? If I can kidnap the guy and I can say it, and then maybe it's okay.

A (62:02)

I'm powerful.

B (62:03)

Right, Exactly. So I think there's always this, like, spinning around of the taboo into something that's actually valuable.

A (62:10)

It's really interesting, too, Matthew, to hear you go through the sort of etymology of all of this, you know, with relation to. To Bush Jr. And then to Trump, because I think in both cases, you have some people who are basically saying, you don't like the guy, you think the guy is stupid, you think the guy is corrupt. Right. You dislike how he. How he presents himself in public and the things he says and the ways he doesn't really seem to know what he's talking about. But you shouldn't let that distract you from the good policy decisions that he's actually making. Like, that's the initial iteration of the derangement syndrome. Right. Is that you've become so overwhelmed by your emotions of disgust and feeling that this person is unqualified and amoral that you can't actually see that they're doing good things.

B (62:53)

Right. Right. And there's also sort of an incredible displacement and rejection of emotionality in general. Right. Like it's. We're not the emotional ones. While every time you see Stephen Miller appear, hear in any interview, it looks like his face is going to melt off with some sort of internal conflict.

A (63:16)

Yeah.

B (63:17)

Anyway, Shamp's bill is probably going to die in committee, as far as I've read, but given that it's the third attempt so far, I don't think they're going to stop with this. I don't think the attempt to prove Trump derangement syndrome is going away. And it may be necessary as Trump's own actions become more unhinged and as he becomes more senile, maybe supporters will be incentivized to double down on these rhetorical strategies, to repudiate critics.

C (64:09)

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