Less than two weeks after a shooter unloaded 500 rounds at the CDC in Atlanta, RFK Jr gutted that agency's violence prevention research by firing 100 employees. Less than a month later, Charlie Kirk was shot in front of a crowd of 3K at a Utah university. Millions saw the graphic clip online, which ignited a propaganda and disinformation culture war. Meanwhile, yet another child shot his classmates at a Denver high school that same day.
It's not the guns though, say the GOP pundits and politicians, it's the violent rhetoric from the left, and those hateful transgender antifascists. Just ask RFK Jr. He'll confirm that it's not the guns, but all those kids overmedicated on dangerous antidepressants.
What are SSRIs anyway, do hurt people hurt people, and do gun laws have any effect?
Show Notes
No, Antidepressants Do Not Provoke Mass Shootings
Mental Illness and Lone Actor Terrorism
Is There a Link Between Mental Health and Mass Shootings? | Columbia University Department of Psychiatry
Politically-Motivated Violence is Rare in the US
No Statistical Support for SSRI-Mass Shooting Connection
Mass Shooters and Political Assassins Have Similar Profiles
The Violence Prevention Project
Characteristics of Lone Wolf Violent Offenders
Blackpill Aesthetics: A Crash Course in Meme Extremism
62: Manifesting Something Awful (w/Dale Beran) — Conspirituality
Gun Purchases by Year
Correlation Between States with Weak Laws/High Ownership and Gun Deaths
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you know.
Five, six white people pushed me in the car.
I'm going, what the hell?
Basically, your stay-at-home moms were picking up these large amounts of heroin.
All you gotta do is receive the package.
Don't have to open it, just accept it.
She was very upset, crying.
Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand, and I saw the flash of light.
Listen to the Chinatown Sting wherever you get your podcast.
Comedy fans, listen up.
I've got an incredible podcast for you to add to your cue.
Nobody listens to Paula Poundstone.
You probably know that I made an appearance recently on this absolutely ludicrous variety show that combines the fun of a late-night show with the wit of a public radio program and the unique knowledge of a guest expert who was me at the time, if you can believe that.
Embrace yourself for roller coaster ride of wildly diverse topics from Paula's hilarious attempts to understand QAnon to riveting conversations with a bona fide rocket scientist.
You'll never know what to expect, but you'll know you're in for a high-spirited, hilarious time.
So this is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co-host Adam Thelber, who is great.
They're both regular panelists on NPR's classic comedy show.
You may recognize them from that.
Wait, wait, don't tell me.
And they bring the same acerbic yet infectiously funny energy to nobody listens to Paula Poundstone.
When I was on, they grilled me uh in an absolutely unique way about conspiracy theories and yoga and yoga pants and QAnon, and uh we had a great time.
They were very sincerely interested in the topic, but they still found plenty of hilarious angles in terms of the questions they asked and how they followed up on whatever I gave them, like good comedians do.
Check out their show.
There are other recent episodes you might find interesting as well, like hearing crazy Hollywood stories from legendary casting director Joel Therm or their episode about killer whales and killer theme songs.
So nobody listens to Paula Poundstone is an absolute riot.
You don't want to miss.
Find Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Music Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod, as well as individually on Blue Sky.
You can search for our names there.
And you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon at Patreon.com/slash conspirituality.
You can also just access our bonus episodes every Monday via Apple subscriptions.
We are independent media creators, and we really appreciate your support.
Conspirituality 275.
It's never the guns.
Less than two weeks after a shooter unloaded 500 rounds at the CDC in Atlanta, Bobby Kennedy decided to gut that agency's violence prevention research by firing 100 employees.
Less than a month later, Charlie Kirk was shot in front of a crowd of 3,000 at a Utah University.
Millions saw the graphic clip online, which ignited a propaganda and disinformation culture war.
Meanwhile, yet another child shot his classmates at a Denver high school that same day.
It's not the guns, though, say the GOP pundits and politicians.
It's the violent rhetoric from the left and those hateful transgender antifascists.
Ask RFK Jr., and he'll confirm it's not the guns, but all those kids over medicated on dangerous antidepressants.
But what are SSRIs anyway?
Do hurt people hurt people, and do gun laws have any effect.
Guns have always been as American as Apple Pie.
But as with so much of what we cover on this podcast, the dark paranoia of pandemic conspiracism put some extra worms in those already rotten apples.
Gun sales hit an all-time high during 2020.
You remember, guys, the good old days of QAnon infected MAGA extremists toting guns outside state houses and schools doing drag queen story hour and intimidating voters at ballot boxes.
Those were the days.
Yeah.
Anyway, during that year, over 21 million guns were sold.
And that's just going off the data from guns purchased legally.
That was a whopping 64% increase from the previous year.
And it far outstripped other spikes, like after Obama was elected and after Sandy Hook, which are in second and third place, amidst fears in both cases that gun laws would tighten up.
We did have that 10-year assault weapons ban, which was passed under Clinton from 1994 to 2004.
It was never renewed under Bush and then blocked by the Senate when Obama tried to reinstate it.
Sadly, the data is actually fairly inconclusive that this ban reduced gun deaths in the U.S., but it is clear that after it expired, increased access to those weapons and more specifically to large capacity magazines does correspond with the trend of mass shootings becoming increasingly more deadly over the last 20 years.
The violence project reports that the use of assault rifles by mass shooters tripled during the 2020s.
Large capacity magazines also result in 10 times the number of fatalities on average at each incident.
It turns out that alongside Trump's and RFK Jr.'s other assaults on the health of our democracy and population, we can also chalk this devastating social ill up to the conspiracy-driven paranoia and distrust of institutions that reached fever pitch during COVID.
And while gun deaths per capita are still significantly higher in Latin American countries and Caribbean islands, some of which are U.S. territories, the U.S. leads high-income countries, with numbers averaging up to 10 times higher than countries like France, Germany, Canada, and Australia, and deaths of children by firearm are up to 80 times higher than those countries.
But since the Supreme Court transformed into its conservative supermajority in 2020, and the rubber stamping of so much of Project 2025 after last year's election, gun control laws are only getting more lax.
We've seen the return of the bump stock, that terrible modification that allows for continuous firing via the gun's recoil against the trigger finger.
It had been banned after the worst mass shooting in U.S. history killed 60 and wounded 413 at a country music festival in Las Vegas.
Over the last decade, the average number of people killed in a single mass shooting event has doubled.
We've also seen expanded permissions for handguns, with 29 states as of this year allowing permitless concealed carry.
That's up from just four in 2013.
Those numbers are terrifying when considered in the context of the last study I'll reference here.
The violence policy center found that states within the U.S. with weaker gun laws and higher rates of gun ownership correlated perfectly with high numbers of gun deaths.
The most recent year they had data on that was for 2023.
And the three top states for gun deaths were Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama.
The bottom three were Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York.
And this paints an almost too predictable picture of American gun politics.
So beyond anything else, beyond violent movies and video games, beyond the internet and social media, beyond hate speech and the supposed decline of Christian family values, the largest single variable in our normalized crisis of gun violence is simply access to guns.
You know, there's this uh Buddhist metaphor about the effect of karma like increasing in weight and intensity over time.
And, you know, they they use the example of the small banyan seed that grows into forest-like single tree clump masses that you can't uproot.
And that's what I feel like when it comes to guns and America and the real sort of problem of an intractable issue that it sort of compounds over time.
Because honestly, with 300 million guns in the country and political violence rising, the window for amnesties or buybacks or legislative sort of initiatives is closing or closed.
I would be arming myself if I lived there at this point.
And then with the Kirk murder, that was a hunting rifle that was super common.
Uh, you know, not the weapon you'd even want to ban from the huge numbers of folks who legitimately hunt.
Yeah.
I mean, we're never going to have gun uh erasure, but I think we can we can still try to have some forms of gun control because yeah, you're right.
That that bolt action rifle and the handgun used on the same day in Denver don't fit the AR-15 typology.
They're not the kind of weapon that uh that a lot of that legislation would target.
Nonetheless, the strong correlation between stronger gun laws and less gun deaths in certain parts of the country does mean it's not a zero-sum game.
It kind of surprised me when the right came out a couple of weeks ago, even before the Kirk murder, uh, saying that transgender individuals should not have access to guns.
And I speculated that the NRA wouldn't go for it.
And a few days later, the NRA came out and was just like guns are for everyone.
So the woke NRA now is uh is promoting them for for anyone who wants them.
I there are still buyback programs that do exist, Matthew, but you're right.
It's not, it's not like it's going to solve the problem.
But from what I see every year, different cities.
I remember when I lived in New Jersey, Newark would have regularly have them.
They were successful at capturing hundreds of guns on that day, but you're talking about hundreds of millions that exist in the country.
Yeah.
And we also know from the photos that have been unearthed from the shooter's social media history and his family's social media history that he really lived within a subculture that fetishizes guns and especially fetishized big guns and militarized guns.
So there's there, there's a whole tapestry there that he's seems to be part of.
As a semi-outsider, for me, what's so confounding about the American shooting crisis is that this absolute overwhelming number of guns meets a culture that I view as intensely contradictory and crazy making, like in wealth inequality, war policy, a bunch of other areas.
As a dual citizen, I've always felt this way.
So like I cross the border.
And on one hand, I recognize everything.
Uh, but on the other hand, I know that the underlying logic about what can happen on any given normal day is just different.
You cross the border and you're in a different place.
And shortly after I was born on an Air Force base in the Upper Peninsula in Michigan.
So my dad was enlisted.
He worked as a jet technician.
My Canadian mother said, This country is insane and we're getting out of here.
Yeah.
Uh she had, and it wasn't about the people that she knew.
She had friends.
Uh, she loved my dad's parents in Detroit, but she could not comprehend a country where like half or more of the population at that time could watch body bags on television come back from Vietnam and still think, yeah, we have to stay the course.
And always she would say in the back of her mind was so many people have guns.
And it also didn't help that our neighbor out in the sticks of this is Oswego County, uh, didn't like how much our dog barked, and so he just shot at him from the back porch.
That didn't help.
Wow.
Okay, let's transition to another aspect of this story.
Uh, mental health has sadly become Republicans' go-to deflection from addressing gun laws.
But we know they also vote to defund mental health services, and they're not exactly therapy friendly in GOB circles.
So it's hard to take them seriously.
A tiny percentage of people with mental illness are also violent.
So we should set aside any ugly stereotyping.
Also, there are killers who are not mentally ill.
They may have material, moral, or ideological motivations behind their actions, even if those are at odds with the dominant society or the regimes of state-sanctioned violence they have endured.
But here's some research which supports a prescription I want to recommend of combining much stronger gun control with well-funded and integrated mental health services.
Everything that follows will be cited in the show notes.
So let's start with criminologist Paul Densley.
He co-founded the violence prevention project with Gillian Peterson in 2017.
It's the largest existing database of mass shootings going back to 1966 and correlating 150 life history variables based on interviews with perpetrators and their families, they identified four recurring themes: early childhood trauma, a crisis point involving suicidality, validation via studying prior shooting by others, and access to firearms.
They've also emphasized that shooters often leak their intended actions ahead of time as a kind of unheeded cry for help.
In a 2024 interview, Densley discussed the overlaps between lone actor assassins and mass shooters, saying that the research into mass shooters actually gets its start with studying the political assassinations of the 1960s.
And in both of these cases, the profile tends to be isolated, alienated men in their 20s who are not involved with a broader political movement, but are acting out of personal grievance as a way of externalizing personal issues.
This was right after the attempted shooting of Trump that he did the interview.
And Densley noted that that shooter's internet history showed that he may have been equally willing to assassinate Biden or Trump based on their speaking schedule and in proximity to where he lived.
Speaking of online radicalization, he said we often see that hate comes late.
Clever turn of phrase.
It means that one of the final phases before they act could include latching onto an ideology that identified someone to blame and punish as the target of their performance of violence, which usually also results in their own death and tells us something about where they're at in their lives.
Now, a study published in 2013 by Clark McCaulay, Sofia Moskolenko, and Benjamin Saun in the journal Perspectives on Terrorism, actually compared what they refer to as assassins and school attackers.
They found that lone wolf terrorists that they'd also studied actually have three characteristics in common with these assassins and school attackers.
They plan and perpetrate violence.
The great majority do it alone.
And a great majority act out of a perceived grievance, not out of any material self-interest.
So it's sort of clearing up the separating them out from other forms of criminality, we could say.
They identify six mechanisms of radicalization: personal grievance, political grievance, risk and status seeking, slippery slope, and unfreezing.
And that last one, unfreezing, refers to the loss of the everyday reassurance of relationships and routines.
Now, I would suggest here, as with vulnerability to cult indoctrination, those who've perhaps moved far from home or had someone close to them die, maybe they've lost a romantic partner or a job or been struck by illness can be more susceptible to radicalization.
Combined then with a personal sense of having been mistreated or identifying with a political sense of mistreatment of a group that you're in, and then a slippery slope of becoming desensitized to the idea and or the experience of violence and a drive to regain respect and a sense of being seen through this spectacular violent act can tip them over the edge.
They also found that even if they weren't in a violent group, having a relative, a friend, or a romantic partner who was, could also be a factor in how they chose their targets as a way of kind of uh defending or fighting on behalf of the honor of someone they loved.
Unfreezing is such an odd term, and I'm wondering how they came up with it, because it sounds like the people who aren't provoked to violence are somehow frozen or repressed.
Did you get a sense of like why they were using that term?
Yeah, yeah, it is.
You're right.
It's it's a technical term that they came up with.
I'm not sure of the origin of it.
Okay.
Um, I I would I would use something like unmooring, right?
That they've they've they've they've become disconnected from their uh their they call them reassuring routines and relationships, right?
I mean, speaking in Freudian terms, we could say that the superego unfroze, right?
It's it it released its lock upon, you know, the drive.
Yeah, maybe who knows?
What would otherwise have a somewhat normative uh repressive effect?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
So the last study I'll reference here is from 2015.
It's by Emily Corner and Paul Gill.
It's called false dichotomy, mental illness, and lone actor terrorism.
And this paper does an excellent job of summarizing the kind of complex and contentious history of a field which is wildly Swung from postulating that all terrorists must be mentally ill to saying that none of them could be mentally ill because they have to be disciplined and precise.
And they point out that treating mental illness as a stark dichotomy, like either you are or you aren't, in black and white terms may be a mistake.
And also that most of the prior research was on terrorists who accidentally a group and not actually on lone actors.
And so what they found was that lone actors were 13.5 times more likely to have some kind of mental illness than a group actor, and they were 18 times more likely to have a romantic partner or a spouse who was deeply involved with a broader movement.
These are all researchers who are looking at the intersections and overlaps between data on terrorism, assassinations, and mass shootings.
And to me, it indicates that better funded and integrated mental health services and channels of communication between families, schools, and law enforcement could play a huge role in reducing these types of events by identifying these folks sooner.
In the days before the Charlie Kirk killing and the school shooting at Evergreen High School in Colorado, RFK Jr. had appeared on Fox News, and then again at a Maha press briefing to opine that guns are not really the problem.
Rather, antidepressants may be the root cause.
In fact, uh, when he was a kid, they used to bring guns to school all the time.
There was no problem with it.
We weren't shooting up the hallways.
Yeah, yeah.
So he has some memory of the golden age in which we all safely just brought guns to school and yeah, didn't shoot one another.
So what what could it be except the antidepressants?
He was commenting at that time on the Annunciation Catholic school church shooting in Minneapolis on August 28th, in which two children were killed and 18 were injured, along with three senior citizens also injured.
He claimed that when he was a kid, we had gun clubs at school.
Here's the exact quote.
Yeah, there it is.
Kids brought guns to school and were encouraged to do so, and nobody was walking into schools and just shooting people.
He also announced that the NIH would be initiating studies to look into a proposed correlation between what he called over-medicating our kids and gun violence.
Oh, my God.
If you're obsessed with true crime cults or conspiracy theories, I've got the perfect show for you.
Conspiracy Theories Cults and Crimes is a new weekly podcast from Crime House and Pave Studios that dives into the darkest corners of human behavior.
Every Wednesday, we uncover the true stories behind the world's most shocking crimes, deadly ideologies, and secret plots, from mass suicides and political assassinations to secret government experiments and UFO cults.
You'll hear about infamous cases like Jonestown and JFK, as well as hidden horrors like the octopus murders and starvation heights.
But remember, these aren't just stories, these are real people, real events and very real consequences.
So if you love mystery, madness, and diving deep into the world's most unbelievable true stories, you won't want to miss this.
Follow conspiracy theories, cults, and crimes now, wherever you get your podcasts.
And for ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts.
Have you ever wondered why we call French fries French fries?
Or why something is the greatest thing since sliced bread?
There are answers to those questions.
Everything everywhere daily is a podcast for curious people who want to learn more about the world around them.
Every day you'll learn something new about things you never knew you didn't know.
Subjects include history, science, geography, mathematics, and culture.
If you're a curious person and want to learn more about the world you live in, just subscribe to everything everywhere daily, wherever you cast your pod.
Do you want to know what it's like to hang out with MS-13 in El Salvador?
How the Russian Mafia fought battles all over Brooklyn in the 1990s.
Well, what about that time I got lost in the Burmese jungle hunting the world's biggest meth lab?
Or why the Japanese YQs have all those crazy dragon tattoos?
I'm Sean Williams.
And I'm Danny Gold.
And we're the host of the Underworld Podcast.
We're journalists that have traveled all over, reporting on dangerous people and places.
And every week we'll be bringing you a new story about organized crime from all over the world.
We know this stuff because we've been there.
We've seen it.
And we've got the near misses and embarrassing tales to go with it.
We'll mix in reporting with our own experiences in the field.
And we'll find some bad jokes while we're at it.
The Underworld Podcast explores the criminal underworlds that affect all of our lives, whether we know it or not.
Available wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaking of over medication, Julian, I want to look briefly at the history of the antidepressants that Kennedy decries.
Now, the man regularly invokes toxicity when referring to pharmaceutical interventions he doesn't like, but it turns out his understanding and championing of certain forms of chemistry is highly selective given his love for methylene blue and of testosterone replacement theory uh therapy, for example.
Yeah.
Pharmacological therapy for depression began in the 1950s with monoamine oxidase inhibitors or MAOIs, which prevent the breakdown of certain neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin and tricyclic antidepressants or TCAs, which makes mood regulating chemicals like serotonin and norepinephrine more available in the brain.
Neither class of drugs was initially used to treat depression, which is quite common in pharmacology.
Consider the discovery of phenothiazines in 1883.
Ironically, the story of pharmacology begins with one of Kennedy's favorite tinctures, methylene blue.
This happened when German scientist Paul Ehrlich was staining cells with phenothiazine, which was a popular textile dye.
It made your blue jeans blue.
And it was also a breakthrough application that won him a Nobel Prize.
Methylene blue is a derivative of phenothiazine.
Ehrlich speculated it could treat malaria, but that didn't pan out.
His work, however, laid the foundation for future research and led to the development of promethizine, later used to first treat allergies thanks to its antihistamine properties.
Then it became an antipsychotic when maritime doctors in Tunisia noticed that it had a peculiar side effect.
It made soldiers calm and somnolent.
So yes, to use modern wellness influencer speak for a moment, RFK Jr. is drinking industrial dye stains.
You know, these stories are so extraordinary, and I think they present this narrative split that is hard for a lot of people to process because there's this like serendipitous discovery pathway involved in, you know, discovering that textile dyes have a particular effect that you know happens to be calming or something like that.
And, you know, the the feeling is whoa, we found out that this thing works totally by chance.
Isn't it amazing how we put stuff together and learn, you know, against all odds.
We learn about brain chemistry in textile mills.
And then on the other hand, I think that stories like this offer the narrative pathway of so you're telling us that this evil industrial world, like the satanic mills of Blake, gives us miracle substances.
And in that sort of division, the context gets conflated with the discovery.
And I think it's easy to see how the aggrieved or the conspiratorial mind can say, oh, isn't this a sly way of telling people that the textile mill is good and healthy or it makes good things, or that it, you know, it benefits us in some way, you know?
And I think we all face the same contradiction over things like military tech that gets personalized into the you know, personal computer space and things like that.
Yeah, I mean, with the with the mills, it's like you're telling us that the very project of industrialization that's so separated us from nature and from from living in the soil, yeah, and and and turned us into these into these, you know, exploited workers and under conditions that were deeply toxic, somehow out of all of that comes something that can be wholesome And good for your mental health.
Yeah, that chilled us out.
Yeah.
I mean, it's it's like I can imagine Musk sponsoring a study showing that kids exposed to cobalt, you know, or whatever in the mines of Democratic Republic of Congo, like lowers cancer rates while they're, you know, getting minerals for electric batteries.
And so more kids should be sent down to the mines or something like that.
You can see it happening, right?
Yeah.
One of the reasons I believe is because, and you probably heard me stumble over a couple of words is because they're all multisyllabic.
So people, and and this was shown when Kennedy walked around in Washington being like, pronounce this, and senators couldn't pronounce the words.
And then you would have actual researchers say, oh, that's salt.
But because we use Latin derived terms that have many syllables for really for coding reasons for them to understand, for researchers to better understand the lineage of where they come from and how they interact.
Well, because that spills over into the mainstream, people are like, seven syllables, no way, that can't be good for you.
And as basic as it sounds, I think that really makes an impact.
The coding is about categorization and etymology, right?
Yeah.
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah, but like you keep hearing me say thiazine.
So we can trace different forms of that back to Ehrlich.
Right.
Right.
And so 70 years later, we're discovering these chemicals for depression use, but it's based off of his research.
And you can tell that because you see thiazine at the end.
Right.
Okay.
It is a lot to process and understand, but it's important because basically all drugs are derivatives of previous chemical experiments.
So many discoveries are made when researchers are looking for something else.
How about LSD?
Because it was originally used as a stimulant for circulatory and respiratory aid.
Speaking of depression, MAOIs were discovered during tuberculosis treatments where patients displayed unusual unusual mood elevations.
TCAs were found to improve depressive symptoms during schizophrenia trials.
These discoveries prompted the first biological psychiatric theories, which suggest suggested that depression was linked to deficits in key neurotransmitters like norepinephrines and serotonin.
While both were somewhat effective, they cause serious side effects like heart problems and seizures.
So researchers kept looking.
I should note that all of this is occurring during the tranquilizer revolution.
It's really important for this story.
This is also a class of drugs that were developed from Ehrlich's research.
Psychiatrists began using one of them, Thorazine, in therapy in 1952 because of its targeted effect, which, as you flagged earlier, Matthew, it chilled people the fuck out.
Side effects were rampant though.
In 1955, Meprobomate was brought to the market.
This was discovered when researchers were developing a penicillin preservative and they noticed it calm rats down without knocking them out.
That was the targeted effect.
It was later christened Milltown in honor of a sleepy suburb next to Johnson Johnson's world corporate headquarters in New Brunswick.
And it became the world's first blockbuster drug with over a billion pills produced in 1957.
Now, ironically, I grew up in Milltown and my college Ruckers is next to JJ's headquarters.
I also worked in the emergency room of Robert Wood Johnson of Johnson Johnson University Hospital.
So pharmacology is sort of baked into my existence.
One other thing that as I'm listening to you, Derek, I'm cluing into about how difficult it is for the Maha mind to accept this type of, you know, scientific progress is that the whole idea of the targeted effect seems to be just sort of categorically different from how we understand, you know, the things in the world that we relate to to have holistic effects upon us.
It's like, you know, you you know, if if you have a certain type of vegetable, it'll have a range of nutrients.
And yet when you apply one of these chemicals uh to a particular symptom, it will might have a targeted effect in one place, but then it will have a bunch of side effects that you weren't expecting and I think that's that's difficult for people to process.
There's this no I don't know, there's something about um they seem to be two different languages.
It's like this this broken down, very specific language of chemistry is trying to interact with you know being and existence and something that feels to people to be networked and systemic and holistic.
They all want to be shamans or a lot of them do.
Yeah.
And this idea that you could just travel somewhere and fix somebody whole cloth is very seductive to a mind that doesn't really understand how the scientific process works.
And yet at the same time, if you drink ayahuasca or you eat the beotic cactus, a lot of times when you have mushrooms, there's the targeted effect of the mind expansion and whatever psychospiritual healing you might experience, but you also tend to throw up a whole bunch because there's a bunch of stuff in there that's toxic to your body.
Yes, but that's not a side effect that's determining it's purging.
Right.
So the side okay so the side effect is something that we accept I suppose in the holistic world.
But you can get you can get pharma farm pharmacologically extracted active ingredients from all of those um plants and have none of the side effects and all of the benefits but that's not natural.
Because for example in ayahuasca the combination of the natural ingredients is still chemical based.
So it's only certain chemicals in there that are having the effect that it's happening having and yes the the side effects do exist.
Uh I never threw up in ayahuasca but the next day when I had to shit it was not pretty every time so it does something to your digestion that that you can't process regardless and you're going to most likely have some sort of effect from so Miltown again where I grew up the drug it was a huge hit.
In 1956 one in 20 Americans were using it.
It was huge in the mainstream comedian Merton Burl promoted it on his show.
He was known as Uncle Miltown Salvador Dali was paid to create an exhibit that captured the feeling of being on this tranquilizer.
As with many early drugs though side effects started to take off the more people use them and within a few years it was rescheduled it was eventually taken off the market but tranquilizers open the door for antidepressants.
In the 60s experiments revealed that serotonin plays a vital role in mood regulation inspiring interest in serotonin reuptake as a therapeutic target.
Scientists believe that increasing serotonin in certain brain regions could relieve symptoms of depression this is known as the serotonin hypothesis and it is completely contested it was contested in the early 70s it's still contested today but it caused drug developers to focus on this neurotransmitter pathway.
And so SSRIs or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors became the first class of antidepressants designed with this particular strategy in mind.
Chemists began searching for molecules that could modulate the serotonin transporter without negatively impacting norepinephrine or dopamine.
Again, this research originated from modifications to phenothiazines the first SSRI, Zimelidine was withdrawn in 1983 due to rare cases of Gion Barr syndrome.
Then you get floxetine or Prozac.
This was developed at Eli Lilly and it was approved by the FDA in 1987.
Known as a miracle drug it has helped millions of people and was initially thought to have fewer adverse effects and so SSRIs quickly became the standard for depression treatment.
And didn't just treat depression but also anxiety disorders, OCD, PTSD, and panic disorder and yes, they definitely have side effects you have gastrointestinal disturbances, sexual dysfunction, insomnia, irritability, and in rare cases increased suicidality particularly in adolescence this created a growing amount of public distrust which led to more people questioning the chemical basis for depression.
If Milltown was requested by name, which was really happening a lot in the 50s so is Prozac due to the flood of advertising on television and in magazines.
Peter Kramer wrote a bestseller in 1993 called Listening to Prozac and he introduced the idea of cosmetic psycho pharmacology And this is the notion that you can feel better than well, which as we know is pretty common in wellness influencers speak and biohacking spaces now.
Optimization comes straight line right from there.
You have the tech people in the early 80s who were playing with all sorts of pharmacology, and you have this basically it's in the water, it's in the air.
The idea that you can optimize in particular targeted ways.
Prozac was also being called out for suicidal ideation at the time.
However, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights petitioned the FDA for its withdrawal.
A high-profile FDA review found no causal link between Prozac and suicide or violence, but anecdotes from some patients and doctors continued.
Still, SSRIs remain first-line therapy for depression and anxiety disorders.
While research continues on creating better therapeutics that treat a wide variety of people, don't have as many side effects and fit into our evolving understanding of mood disorders.
We should just note it's really no different than what is happening with autism.
There are better diagnostic criteria.
We have a better understanding of how different individuals react.
And so we are trying to create better therapeutics for it.
There's benzodiazepines, which were introduced in 1960, and many people take Xanax today.
That's what I was prescribed when I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.
And for a short period, it was quite useful for me.
Should also note that a lot of these drugs are only recommended for short periods.
So a lot of the systemic effects that happen over time are probably because there's really no recommended tapering processes for people who want to get off them.
And that is a real issue.
You also have the first SNRI or serotonin or epinephrine reuptake inhibitor, which hit the market in 93.
And more recently, you have interventions like ketamine that have come onto the market.
Kramer's better than well thesis triggered ethical debates over medical enhancement versus treatment.
And I feel like Kennedy has tapped into this lineage of criticism.
We know that SSRIs like Prozac have helped millions of people deal with mood disorders.
And we know there are side effects in some people.
Research consistently shows that interventions like talk therapy in conjunction with pharmaceuticals work better than pharmaceuticals alone.
Yet in America, that's cost prohibitive to many people who can only for afford a prescription.
And you won't hear that kind of nuance come from Kennedy, who has repeatedly opposed socialized medicine.
Yet, as with many things that he says, there's a grain of truth, all chemicals have side effects.
But as is his nature, his myopic focus on antidepressants, which have helped many people with crippling depression or anxiety navigate their lives.
It obscures more than it reveals.
Could their use have aided in some shootings?
It is certainly possible.
But to suggest that they're a root cause of gun violence is a convenient way to avoid conversations about gun control or as I just mentioned, socialized medicine, two factors that certainly affect gun violence more than pharmaceuticals.
You know, for me, one standout sentence from you, Derek here is uh better the better than well thesis triggers an ethical debate over medical enhancement versus treatment.
And I feel like RFK Jr. is tapped into this lineage of criticism.
So 100% agree that this is kind of a wedge point or irritant for the Maha sensibility because the notion of harm reduction violates the wish for the miraculous cure.
And the idea that some people might actually need non-self-generated but also not divine help really messes with her sense of meritocracy and spiritual alignment.
Yeah.
So this this whole tension between whether something is natural or not is very much at the forefront with this.
But I want to also reply, Derek, to where you're saying that could it have could SSRIs have contributed to some shootings?
Yes.
The data shows that about 1% of these kinds of shooters have ever been on antidepressants.
And I think the population size at something like 11%.
And that's the thing about these conversations, because if I were to say it's never affected anyone, then you'd have critics saying, No, we we can show you that it has, or they've been on it.
And I think that is always important to just like vaccine side effects, they is they affect such a minute part of the population.
And yet, if you were to deny that there are any, you would get so much pushback.
And but in the broader scope of public health, it is such a non or such a small number, almost insignificant.
And yet you have to recognize it.
And this is always the tension between like the wellness influencers and actual researchers, they is they will acknowledge that there are rare cases of it, and you have to acknowledge it, but they're not speaking deterministically in that sense, and wellness influencers love to speak deterministically.
Well, you have to acknowledge it because you want to we want to find the cause for that.
You want to try to mitigate the actual problem.
So I mean, one of the core reasons that that Maha is a fascist movement with a religious psychic structure, is because the Maha person, I don't think is able to abide the fact that some people just go through unsolvable material challenges that have nothing to do with willpower or beliefs.
They are facts of luck or nature.
So the irony is that you know, Bobby looks out in the world and sees autism, which, you know, where there are estimates, you know, currently that up to 20% of the human population is neurodiverse in in one sense or another, or one in five people.
So it's obviously a natural variation.
And he has to find a pathology for it.
Like God would not have intended for some people to be autistic, or else my God is cruel and unfair.
But actually, maybe your God is a god of diversity, you know, and you can learn about that instead of deciding what a child must be based on your own biases and anxieties.
And another thing I want to note about Maha Eugenics is that it's different from Nazi eugenics, aside from you know, not being at the let's just murder you now stage, unless you're Brian Kilmead on Fox, who just blurted out that unhoused people should be euthanized.
But the Nazis didn't have to manage the contradiction of playing God and deciding what humans must exactly be.
Because for the most part, they didn't care about God, they didn't believe in God.
But Maha Christians have something more difficult to negotiate internally.
They have to independently decide what God wants humans to be while also pretending to remain humble servants of God.
It's it's really shaky.
Yeah.
And last thing here, I I started off saying that Republicans try to deflect from any kind of gun legislation to mental health.
If they really cared about mental health when it comes to this particular topic, they would actually be advocating for finding the best solution that would incorporate some kind of therapy and probably some kind of pharmaceutical treatment for people who might be at danger of enacting some kind of murder suicide the way that a lot of these uh young kids end up doing.
Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster.
If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep Podcast.
I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.
Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention.
And then your mind lets you drift off.
Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
Overwhelmed by investing.
If you're anything like us, the hardest part is getting started.
That's why we created the Investing for Beginners podcast.
Our goal is to help simplify money so it can work for you.
We invite guests To demystify investing.
At least try to be setting aside like the minimum 10% into the 401k.
I'll teach you the basics of the market.
Yeah, I think compound interest should be at the start of any discussion about investing.
And we've had investment professionals who teach in a simple way.
Evaluation driven bear market.
You know, we haven't really seen yet.
And I think everyone's thinking about it, but we haven't really seen yet.
Our QA episodes feature questions from listeners just like you.
So what do you think about the situation with ETBI, which is Activision?
I'm Dave Eherin, and I'm Andrew Saythere.
And we hope you join us on the Investing for Beginners Podcast.
On the Investing for Beginners Podcast.
Hey, do you have trouble sleeping?
Then maybe you should check out the Sleepy Podcast.
It's a show where I read old books in the public domain to help you get to sleep.
It was the best of times.
It was the worst of times.
It was the age of classic stories like The Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, Winnie the Pooh, stories that are great for adults and kids alike.
For years now, Sleepy has helped millions of people catch some much needed disease, start their next day off fresh, and discover old books that they didn't know they love.
So whether you have a tough time snoozing or you just like a good bedtime story, fluff up the cool side of your pillow and tune into Sleepy.
Unless you're driving, then please don't listen to Sleepy.
Find Sleepy on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
New episodes each week.
Sweet dreams.
Sweet dreams.
You know, I said several episodes back that I've spent way too many months of my life trying to make sense of the cognitive train wreck that is RFK Jr.
But when I step back and I really try to think about how he's left leapt from a lifetime experience of catastrophic gun violence in his own family with clear political and material causes,
to being convinced that gun violence in schools is somehow not related to politics or policy, but rather caused by medications that like 3.6% of school age kids take to reduce anxiety or lift depression or to manage the social stress of being neurodivergent.
I enter some new layer of like mystifying hell.
Because this is a guy who sees most things in terms of geopolitical or tycoon capitalist intrigue.
But then when it comes to mass shootings in schools, he turns to conspiracy theories focused on pharmaceutical corruption.
I mean, maybe that's the connection.
Maybe it's also easier to imagine and not totally untrue that the intent of a corrupt elite is to amass wealth no matter who pays the cost.
I mean, he should know.
He's been around, you know, uh, elites all of his life.
But his fictional answer comes at the expense of digging into how and why a kid might be influenced by all of the factors that you were talking about, Julian, by, you know, ideology, by white supremacy,
by anti-Semitism, or by the incoherent attention-seeking hilarity and violence of shitposting, which we're all slowly learning about as more becomes known and many things are unclear about Tyler Robinson.
There are no conclusive causal links between mental illness and mass shootings, but there's still a lot of debate on the problem because of the noise of self-reporting and the problem of poor access to mental health care, especially in decades past.
I looked at the Columbia University's mass murder database, which covers 1700 plus incidents between 1900 and 2019, and shows that only about 5% of mass shooters have severe mental illnesses like psychosis.
About 25% are associated with non-psychotic psychiatric conditions like depression.
So, according to that data set, at least, the majority of mass shooters, including school age offenders, do not have diagnosed mental illnesses.
And again, some critics say that this all might be lowballing things because of self reporting and poor access to mental health care and diagnoses and days gone by, but I haven't found significant rebuttals of those general findings.
And then for our present time, uh, this data set shows that only about 4% of mass shooters over the past several decades had taken antidepressants, including SSRIs, at some point in their lives.
That means not necessarily at the time of their crimes.
And that's way lower than the baseline rates of antidepressant use in the general population.
So 4% of US school children are prescribed SSRIs.
And this data set has 4% of mass shooters of all ages over past decades on SSRIs.
So by orders of magnitude, there are more kids using SSRIs than kids using SSRIs and doing mass shootings.
And my layperson's question is isn't it just as likely that SSRI use is having a positive and preventative effect against violence in schools?
Just like say, hmm, vaccines are having a positive and preventative effect on preventable infections.
Yeah.
And thank you for that, Matthew, because I was remembering incorrectly.
I said 1% earlier, but I'm I'm remembering the exact sentences that you uh that you got that from my own reading too.
Yeah, 4%.
So if we take medication and, you know, the confusing material around mental health diagnoses out of the mass shooter focus, then we have life stressors that can become acute, relationship problems, economic stress, social isolation, and volatile internet cultures that remix and co-opt every piece of agit prop from every political direction to create a flood of shitposting that at a certain point becomes real.
So as the picture emerges of Tyler Robinson, we get some indications in that direction.
GOP family, terminally online kid, you know, I wonder if that's with little supervision, perhaps swept up by Groiper bloodlust against Charlie Kirk and turning point for not being blackpilled enough, uh, and then etching his shell casings into artifacts of 4chan alienation, it seems.
Which also goes along with some of the research I mentioned earlier about perhaps studying and perhaps emulating other shooters.
Yeah, exactly.
Because this is a feature of a number of shooters uh recently going back to Christchurch.
There are really not many people who understand that culture, particularly because it designs itself to be impenetrable via irony.
None of those people who understand this culture are in Congress, and few of them work for major media platforms, especially since the attacks on disinformation journalism following Trump's second victory.
You really have to be embedded in these cultures to understand them.
And I don't see a lot of incentive for people to learn about them either, because like shit post assassinations don't serve established narratives.
And I just want to flag that way back, I think almost in our first year, we did an interview with a friend of the pod, Dale Barron, who really broke ground ground on all of that culture in his 2019 book, It Came from Something Awful.
I'd also suggest viewing somebody named Cy Control's eight-minute breakdown of black pill accelerationism.
Uh, that'll be in the show notes.
I saw someone comment that we're still trying to teach boomers what a message board is, and you're expecting them to understand GRIPers now.
Yeah.
And really it should be people like Cantorell who who are just sitting at the desk at Washington Post, right?
Um I want to say that at the center of these overlapping panics over medications and helicopter parenting, and then real radicalization threats via online shit posting, is the specter of the young, depressed or anxious or immiserated man or boy.
Like who is he?
What shall we do with him?
What is behind his eyes in that terrifying mugshot after the massacre?
Is he evil?
Is he a political enemy?
Is he poisoned by vaccines or SSRIs?
Is he under the spell of Andrew Tate or wokeness or trans ideology?
So for me, the mystery menacing boy is kind of like a focal point, uh talisman or an idol of our anxiety.
When something seems to make him understandable or approachable, the culture's really gratified.
So 15 year old Owen Cooper, I don't know if you guys saw this, just won the Emmy for his excellent performance in adolescence, which we covered.
And Cooper is particularly valuable as an actor, because he can play this inscrutable kid, but then be interviewed as the normal kid you recognize and relate to.
So he performs this role of black pill whisperer or shaman.
He's safe because he was only playing that role.
But speaking as the parent of two boys who share that age and demographic with kids who wind up in mugshots, it's pretty clear to me that punditry speculation on what's wrong with our boys is typically based on a failure of nuance and a failure of on-the-ground engagement with their lives.
And the paradox is that some of the biggest media properties out there about struggling boys are these kind of statistics-based galaxy brain takes in which no really solid in real life boy in trouble gets interviewed.
Like Richard Reeves's book, uh, he talks about interviewing one kid.
I know he goes on to do other interviews later, but his main book of Boys and Men is not based upon field work.
Jonathan Haid and Scott Galloway are no doubt concerned about the mysterious boy they can't understand or reach.
But the only real tweens and teens they engage with seem to be their own, right?
And although Galloway talks about mentoring the sons of his friends, that's a really narrow demographic.
So what I see in these discussions is two layers of abstraction that have different political valences.
There's demonizing on one side, and then there's hand wringing on the other.
And the demonizing abstraction seeks to blame political enemies for the kid's condition and make the kid into the debased acolyte of the other.
And that's what we get with the insane early projections onto Tyler Robinson from Nancy Mace and legions of MAGA flying monkeys before anyone even knows his name.
My favorite Twitter joke was uh he's trans.
Nope.
Uh, the bullets are trans, nope.
Uh his girlfriend is trans.
Uh, oh, maybe.
Um, and then we have Stephen Miller tweeting in the hours after Kirk's death, addressing both his killer and anyone who didn't respond to the news in the way he wanted them to.
Julian, do you want to read that?
There's an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country, which hates everything that is good, righteous, and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted, and depraved.
It is an ideology at war with family and nature.
It is envious, malicious, and soulless.
So that framing isn't going to fly very far outside of MAGA.
But there's another option, which is hand wringing, which I see coming more from and appealing more to the center.
And hand-wringing has this horizontal quality because it's often about parents low-key attacking each other across class and party lines over things like discipline, screen time, the appropriateness of gaming or social media.
And, you know, it really kind of stinks like the tensions on the soccer field sideline or in the stands at hockey.
And it rides on the performative parenting that gets monetized on Instagram.
And to me, there's often this abdication of class solidarity amongst parents.
Like it's hard enough living in often isolated nuclear units, but then with competitive parenting, people get to express contempt over how their neighbors are fucking up.
Like I would never feed my kids fruit loops.
Uh, that's not just a personal affirmation or commitment.
It's also a dig at the mom down the street who has fruit loops poisoning her home.
And it's just a really cheap and maudlin way to score social points.
But I think that's where I see Bobby really making his mark with his lies about SSRIs.
Because within the general panic about whether we are good enough parents that we shouldn't need to offer our kids medication, uh, There's this feeling that medication is a sign of parental failure.
Whether we're good enough, parents that we should remember how well things went in the 1970s and the 1980s when we didn't have all of this stuff.
Whether we're better than that, even though we now are aware of how toxic food dyes in fruit loops are and so on.
Allegedly.
Allegedly.
But Trumpism mobilizes both streams.
So Miller can attack boys as brainwashed radical leftists, and Maha can make boys the victims of progressive molecoddling.
And that takes chemical form in vaccines and SSRIs.
But the latter can be a bridge to the centrists who might not associate with MAGA at all, who make this same type of argument about self-responsibility.
The Maha version relies on chemical purity, like you're a bad parent if you resort to these toxic drugs.
But the centrist version relies on parenting perfectionism.
You're a bad parent if you coddle or accommodate or pander.
Currently, I'm reading an advanced reading copy of Scott Galloway's Notes on Being a Man.
And there's a lot of parts of it that are really compelling, and you know, I'll have more to say about it later.
But his general answer to the alleged suffering of boys and men as a class is most broadly competitive bootstraps, tips, and tricks.
So here's a sample of how he presents that sort of horizontal attack on other parents, Julian.
Some boys never make the transition to creating surplus value.
Concierge, bulldozer, and helicopter parents contribute to more self-indulgent young men than almost any other factor.
The eighth winniest kid lines up to receive a trophy, the phony feel-good school ecosystem with its lack of emphasis on fitness.
That version of masculinity is actively bad for young men.
It tells them nothing is their fault and that they're responsible for the successes, but not their failures, that they can sit passively by and still be winning.
They get to marinate in negative surplus value their whole lives while believing they're still being good citizens.
Bullshit.
So, all right, would you be surprised to know there isn't a single citation for any of the Sarah stereotypes?
Or that his book says nothing about which boys might need what type of care and support.
I mean, Galloway is too smart to have any opinions on SSRIs, and he does do an okay job in connecting the suffering of boys to the amiseration of wealth inequality.
But I do think he's a good example of the core axiom that this panic about boys and men relies on the demonizing to the hand-wringing.
An axiom that Bobby exercises every day, which is that you find anything you can to point at that does not involve changing the basic conditions of competition and inequality that young men and all of us struggle with.
So what the Maha to centrists share, I think, is a conspicuous silence on material support, universal health care, free education, college debt cancellation, maybe even a public works employment guarantee.
