In this installment, Jordan welcomes back to the show author and podcaster Jon Ronson to discuss his show Things Fell Apart, which has a new season out now. Tune in to hear about bad doctors and Jon's thoughts about Friday Night Lights.
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| I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | ||
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Knowledge fight. | |
| And enjoy knowledge fight. | ||
| Need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
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Stop it. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
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Andy in Kansas. | |
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your room. | ||
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Knowledge fight. | |
| Knowledge fight.com. | ||
| Hello, everyone. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| This is Jordan, unfortunately, without my co-host, Dan. | ||
| But today we are joined by John Ronson, who has inexplicably agreed to come back on the show. | ||
| Thank you very much, John. | ||
| It's always a delight to be with you and or Dan. | ||
| How are you doing? | ||
| What's your bright spot? | ||
| Oh, that is delightful that you would ask. | ||
| Well, my bright spot was going to be that Rafa Nadal is back playing tennis, and I woke up at 4 a.m. to watch his match this morning, but unfortunately he lost and might be injured again. | ||
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So, well, not my bright spot. | |
| But how about yours? | ||
| My bright spot is I'm watching for the first time Friday Night Lights, and I'm about to find out whether or not Coach Taylor can get East Dillon up to snuff enough that they can compete in state. | ||
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I mean, I will admit, I've never seen it. | |
| I've never seen it, but I say clean eyes, full hearts, can't lose, and variations of that all the time. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And what I just told you really summarizes it. | ||
| Actually, I've got to say, I kind of like it. | ||
| I've been living in America for nearly 12 years, and I think I'm ready to understand and appreciate small-town Texas life. | ||
| You know, I don't know if anybody is. | ||
| I watched Varsity Blues when I was way too young, and I just quit after that. | ||
| I mean, they're supposed to be 17 and they look like they're 40 going to strip clubs. | ||
| I don't understand the world anymore. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm thoroughly enjoying it. | ||
| We're binging it, except for season two, which goes completely off the rails. | ||
| And at the unlikely event that anybody listening to this is now inspired to watch Friday Night Lights, skip season two. | ||
| I can tell you, you really don't need to watch season two. | ||
| All the terrible narrative, Bad decisions they make in season two are never mentioned again in subsequent seasons. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| Yeah, it was just this kind of dark secret season two of Friday Night Lights. | ||
| Just skip it. | ||
| What is the best thing from season two that makes it pointless to watch? | ||
| There's a murder. | ||
| There's a murder! | ||
| There's a high school murder! | ||
| This is a small show about football. | ||
| That's what's so great about it. | ||
| And there's a murder. | ||
| And also there's a murder in self-defence that they then try and cover up. | ||
| And this is Texas, where if you kill someone in self-defence in Texas, they give you prizes. | ||
| So this whole narrative of covering up this self-defence killing is just absurd. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I played high school football in the Midwest, so admittedly it wasn't quite set in the same area, but every Friday we did not murder somebody. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| It was a terrible miscalculation. | ||
| What's so wonderful about that show is the smallness of it. | ||
| So to bring in something huge was just a ridiculous mistake. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's probably why I never watched it. | ||
| It's because I lived too much of that high school experience and I just wanted to... | ||
| I don't need it again. | ||
| I don't like football. | ||
| I don't like high school. | ||
| And my wife's a high school teacher. | ||
| I don't need it. | ||
| I got plenty of my life. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know who else's wife's a high school teacher? | ||
| Coach Taylor! | ||
| I knew it! | ||
| I knew you were going to get me with that. | ||
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Rodson! | |
| Yes. | ||
| Well, I suppose it's time to get into why I've trapped you here. | ||
| By the time this has come out, your new season of Things Fell Apart will be out. | ||
| Will it be the whole season or just the first episode? | ||
| The whole season, I'm happy to say, they're going to be playing it week by week on BBC Radio 4, but they're also putting the entire thing out all at once on Tuesday, January the 9th, which is in the past as we speak. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm so pleased. | ||
| You know, the weird thing, for some reason with me, every time I've done a podcast, it's always been... | ||
| It's been released in a slightly complicated way, which is always slightly frustrating for me. | ||
| So I'm so pleased that this is just being released in a kind of bingey, what do they call it? | ||
| Like when they put everything out at once. | ||
| There's a word, I've forgotten. | ||
| Anyway, it's being released in that way. | ||
| It's in German. | ||
| That's why you can't remember it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Liebenschirm. | ||
| And so I'm very pleased it's being released in such an easy way. | ||
| All of it, all at once, come Tuesday. | ||
| Yeah, and they really should, because I'll let people know, I pitched you this, that we would do three interviews, because you graciously gave me an advance copy, which makes me feel real special, and like I'm an actual member of the media instead of a clown. | ||
| Well, I'm very pleased, and it's partly because you helped. | ||
| There was one episode. | ||
| Well, Dan helped. | ||
| Dan helped. | ||
| Okay, downhill. | ||
| There was one episode that needed a little bit of kind of deep cut Alex Jones information. | ||
| So yeah, you and Dan were very kind to provide it. | ||
| So you were contractually obligated to come back on the show. | ||
| I got you. | ||
| Is that a copyright thing in Britain? | ||
| It's the principle of reciprocity. | ||
| Well, the thing is, as I was listening to all of them, I realized that we can do a kind of, we could do a quick little promotional interview where we say, oh, it's great, and all the stories are interesting, and did you know that America's weird? | ||
| We could do that. | ||
| Or we could really, really kind of dig into it and there's eight episodes, which means, I mean, considering that the last time we talked there was about three hours of content and our interview was about three hours. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It does give me pause and it takes me a year to do what like you and Dan or Joe Rogan on the other end of the scale could do in like a day. | ||
| I would say it's a little different. | ||
| Well, I should say, as a fan of you and various other podcasts, and as a fan and a subscriber, you know, I want constant content. | ||
| I want the feed to be updated twice a week or whatever. | ||
| But I can't do that myself. | ||
| I'm all about the minutiae. | ||
| I'm all about, you know, polishing and polishing and polishing. | ||
| I fear that my way of telling stories is slightly disappointing to people who want constant content. | ||
| Oh, I mean, imagine how I feel. | ||
| I have to continually remind myself. | ||
| So I put out a book in 2020. | ||
| And I've been working, and right now I've finally gotten to the draft process of the second one, right? | ||
| And I have to keep reminding myself it's okay. | ||
| People often take years between books because surrounding that is Dan churning out a novel every two days. | ||
| So it's tough. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I mean, these are, you know, like work that takes a long time to get right. | ||
| It's like our children. | ||
| You know, you want to, you know, these are hopefully the things that will live on after we're dead. | ||
| And so you do want to put the hours in to make it as good as possible. | ||
| So I don't regret it. | ||
| But in the end, we're slaves to our brains, right? | ||
| We can only do what our brains allow us to do. | ||
| And for me, my brain operates that I want to tell a story in kind of intricate detail. | ||
| Whereas, you know, three hours of... | ||
| It's just hard for me. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| Oh, I understand. | ||
| Yeah, you're really good at it. | ||
| Other people are really good at it. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| I'm good at the small. | ||
| I'm good at the minutiae. | ||
| Well, I find that fascinating, especially because you manage to put so much minutiae into what relatively is a small amount of time. | ||
| You know, we cram a lot of minutiae, but still into two hours. | ||
| I feel like after listening to a half hour of, you know, one of these episodes, there's a lot inside of it that is not even necessarily explicit. | ||
| But by having done all of this detail work, you can put a little bit in there that implies all of the rest of it without having to go too hard. | ||
| Leaving things unsaid. | ||
| That is such an important part of storytelling, of non-fiction storytelling. | ||
| You've got me onto one of my favourite subjects here. | ||
| I think one of the bad things that have evolved in the... | ||
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Not writing! | |
| Exactly, not writing! | ||
| Not putting words onto a paper! | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, one of the negatives... | ||
| I don't want to sound like an old, you know, an old... | ||
| Idiot. | ||
| But one of the things that kind of changed a little bit in the culture around 2013-2014, I think, was there was much more of an impetus for people to say exactly what they mean, lest they be misunderstood and they get into trouble for being misunderstood. | ||
| But I've always been a really big fan of leaving things unsaid, because if you leave things unsaid, then the storytelling process becomes like a kind of partnership between the author and the reader. | ||
| And I've always loved that. | ||
| You know, I love shows that don't spell everything out, or musicians or whatever. | ||
| So yes, that's exactly what I try to do, and I've tried to do in this series, like everything I do. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it is kind of always funny to me that... | ||
| People don't often share the same definition of words, and yet somehow people assume that cramming more of them into the same space will make it easier for people to understand. | ||
| If you are confused about the same definition of one word, imagine 40 of them and they say, ah, that's a whole mess. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| To me, there's nothing about this process that's more joyful to me than going back to a sentence and realizing you can say it in fewer words. | ||
| And the more words you take out, the more it becomes like that partnership between writer and reader. | ||
| It's my favorite. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| Yeah, I've told the story, but my final product of my book was about 50,000 words, and I had 100,000 that I took scissors to, and my red pen was bleeding at the end of it. | ||
| I tore it to shreds. | ||
| And that was my favorite part of the process. | ||
| It was the writing that was hard. | ||
| Yeah, I'd go as far as to say it's the only part of the process I enjoy. | ||
| The rest of it's a nightmare. | ||
| But taking out superfluous words just could be more pleasant. | ||
| Yeah, I would say sometimes it comes out of you and you just keep chasing that feeling, you know, where you go, oh, my God, look at all that that I put down. | ||
| And then you never see that much again. | ||
| Well, so what I wanted to talk to you about, in a way, respecting exactly what you described. | ||
| You know, this is something that you put in a lot of work on. | ||
| These are your kids. | ||
| So let's get into them and treat them like that instead of just being like, hey, listen on your own. | ||
| So I wanted to talk about the first two episodes as kind of a diptych to begin. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And can I say that, you know, we're going to be giving away like everything, right? | ||
| In this interview, all the twists and all the turns. | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| I don't know so much if we're like, because here's part of what I want to do is a lot of my questions really aren't necessarily about the content so much as they are I think if you compare these two stories together, there's a lot of weird things that kind of pop up on the side. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, let me ask you in that case, Jordan. | ||
| Do you think it would be better for people to pause and listen to the episodes and then come back to this? | ||
| Or do you think it would be okay for them to listen to this without having heard the episodes? | ||
| I think it'll be okay for them to listen to this because a lot of this also is going to be content that our listeners are going to be, if not like intimately familiar with. | ||
| this will all be in the realm of stuff that we've covered too, in a way. | ||
| You know, not the same way and not in that kind of narrative, Right. | ||
| Especially episode two, right? | ||
| Which really feeds into the kind of stuff that you do. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
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And yeah, so, but, The two things that make, or no, the thing that makes episode one and two tie together for me so closely is that I think at the heart of both stories is a doctor, a lie, and how much trust we put into the word doctor. | |
| Yes. | ||
| I think that's really, yeah, yeah, you're right. | ||
| Yeah, so the first story, the first episode, I would say, begins... | ||
| You know, in the 80s with a killer and then is compounded by another one. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Although we don't know at first that it's a killer. | ||
| Basically, in the 80s, in Miami, 32 women are found dead in mysterious circumstances. | ||
| They are all... | ||
| Black sex workers, which is probably the reason why this story is way less well known than it ought to be. | ||
| They had a couple of things in common, as well as that. | ||
| They were all found naked from the waist down in exactly the same position. | ||
| The detective, Frank Waslowski, said to me that you could superimpose their bodies on top of each other. | ||
| And they all had low levels of cocaine in their systems. | ||
| So that's the beginning of the mystery, like what happened? | ||
| Because nobody could figure out the cause of death. | ||
| There was no gunshots, no stabbings, nothing. | ||
| No blood. | ||
| It was just a mystery. | ||
| The detective was asked, he said at the time that it was the most mysterious case he had ever come across. | ||
| So then... | ||
| Enter into this story, Miami-Dade County's Deputy Chief Medical Examiner, a man named Dr. Charles Whetley. | ||
| Yeah, the second murderer that we're about to discuss. | ||
| By the way, had you heard of Dr. Whetley or this Miami story? | ||
| I had not heard of this Miami story. | ||
| And I think what's fun, again, what's fun about being from our show and then listening to this is you brought that... | ||
| Doctor, that name up. | ||
| And I immediately went, this guy's, this guy's treble. | ||
| And then I've been, and then I went off on a whole thing. | ||
| And now I'm going to, and now there's information that I'm going to share with you that you probably don't know. | ||
| Totally, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I went far down a rabbit hole, but I didn't go all the way. | ||
| I'm sure there's things about Dr. Wendley. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm sure there are. | ||
| It goes all the way to the top! | ||
| So Dr. Whetley examined the women's bodies and announced that he had determined the cause of death. | ||
| He said the women had all spontaneously dropped dead as a result of a combination of cocaine and sex. | ||
| When I said this to a friend of mine, by the way, she said, well, how come I'm not dead? | ||
| Well, there's a part of me that, you know, when they say, oh, they found small amounts of cocaine in their body, I would be like, well, it's the 80s. | ||
| I defy you to find less than some of that in 50% of the American population at that point in time. | ||
| Especially Miami. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Miami was cocaine central in the 80s, I know, for Miami Vice. | ||
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Yeah! | |
| And yeah, so he gave this diagnosis a name. | ||
| He said it was called excited delirium. | ||
| But then there were some other things happened. | ||
| Firstly, another body showed up of a 14-year-old girl called Antoinette Burns who wasn't a sex worker and she hadn't taken any cocaine. | ||
| But she was found in exactly the same position as all of the others. | ||
| So this was the first kink in the theory. | ||
| No cocaine in her system at all. | ||
| And then another woman showed up who was alive and said that she was a sex worker and she was with a guy and he went from being a gentleman into a damn maniac and started to choke her. | ||
| So they got a description of the guy, and they did some more investigating, and his name was Charlie Williams, and it turned out, of course, that it wasn't Excited Delirium, it was a serial killer. | ||
| I mean, yeah, I read the two words, Excited Delirium, and that is where it was like, in the back of my mind, I'm just hearing copaganda, and then it's like, he might as well have said, oh, they died of a broken heart. | ||
| You know, like, you're so full of shit. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| You know, they had too much fun! | ||
| So then, naturally, you go, how is it possible that this guy can get away with saying, oh, all of these women had too much fun to death? | ||
| Right. | ||
| There was undoubtedly a misogynistic element to this, but there was also a racist element, maybe not least because he was promoting a corresponding theory of male deaths from excited delirium. | ||
| He said women die in relation to sex, whereas men just go berserk. | ||
| They run through traffic, they rip their clothes off, and then they spontaneously drop dead of excited delirium after taking cocaine. | ||
| I read that in the 1919 World's Fair. | ||
| They released a thing about... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That one was bad. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
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Okay. | |
| So, at one point, Dr. Wettley addressed the fact that most cocaine users were white, whereas 70% of the men who died in police custody and were then diagnosed as having excited delirium were black. | ||
| And his answer wasn't, maybe this was racism, maybe this was police brutality. | ||
| His answer was, maybe black people are just more prone to spontaneously dropping dead of excited to live. | ||
| Maybe it's genetic. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| Hey, it's not me. | ||
| I'm not a racist. | ||
| The Lord just made black people have too much fun. | ||
| So they had to die. | ||
| I've read the Bible. | ||
| That is kind of the message, I think. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| You would think after the... | ||
| I'm not sure at what point to stop this story, whether you want to go all the way to the end or whether you think it's worth stopping on a cliffhanger and letting people listen to the episode. | ||
| See, I think that is the part where we should... | ||
| Switch over to the second episode. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, let me just say one thing. | ||
| What I do in the rest of the episode is... | ||
| Well, we're going to get back to it. | ||
| But I want to say that because we go from there to the future. | ||
| So we've stayed in this 1980s era situation where there is a doctor who is allowed to say these things, not just because he's a doctor, but because everyone around him is just like, oh... | ||
| The passive racism that's there. | ||
| That says, well, yeah, I mean, obviously, black sex workers, they're just going to die from having some cocaine. | ||
| And who really cares? | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| And very little media about it. | ||
| Almost none. | ||
| Fox did something in 1989. | ||
| ABC did something, I think, in 1984. | ||
| And from what I could tell, that was basically the only contemporaneous media about... | ||
| The mysterious deaths then murders of 32 women in Miami. | ||
| Kind of extraordinary. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and putting that into the context of... | ||
| Medicine at the time, you know, as our next kind of character that pops up is going to be involved with around this time, with the AIDS epidemic, with all of these people, and the medical establishment at that time could not have been more white men are the only people that matter, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's just no other way to describe it. | ||
| White male Christians straight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, when you look at kind of true crime, I mean, the cliche about true crime podcasting today is that it's white women. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| This idea of, you know, the damsel in distress that, you know, and, you know, obviously people have, many people before me have pointed out that all the most popular true crime podcasting tends to be about white women, not black women. | ||
| Everybody likes a white lady in trouble. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That goes back to fucking knights and shit. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, indeed. | ||
| Anyway, I digressed away from the second story. | ||
| Yes, so around this same time, we've got the second story, which is about Dr. Judy Mikevitz, including conversations with her, of course. | ||
| Plandemic Judy Mikevitz. | ||
| Which you'll have covered on Knowledge Facts, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| We've talked about her quite a bit. | ||
| And her buddy, her co-author on Plague of Corruption, Kevin or something, he's the co-author of The Great American Awakening or whatever with Alex. | ||
| So it's that guy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay, I didn't know that. | ||
| Episode 8 of Things Fell Apart is about Mickey Willis, who is the man who interviewed Judy Makovits for Plandemic. | ||
| So we return to Plandemic at the end of the series. | ||
| But no, I didn't know anything much about her co-author of Plague of Corruption. | ||
| Well, that's just a nice little fun fact. | ||
| He's in our world, too. | ||
| How's that? | ||
| What I find interesting here is that in one case we have the respected, this is just a medical examiner, this is a doctor, we just take this guy's opinion. | ||
| And how that spirals out into a professional career for him that lasts a good long while. | ||
| And then we have Dr. Judy Bykovitz, who has her... | ||
| I would say almost similar origin story and then follow-up career, right? | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a really interesting parallel, which to be honest, I never really thought of. | ||
| That's why you come on our show, baby! | ||
| That's what you do! | ||
| The connection of the consequences of untruths. | ||
| That's happening in like every episode this season. | ||
| Somebody tells a lie or something that isn't quite true and the ripples are kind of extraordinary. | ||
| But yeah, this kind of doctor connection I didn't really think of until just now. | ||
| For me, Judy Mikevitz is really the reason why I wanted to make things fell apart right from the beginning of season one because I'm really interested in this phenomenon. | ||
| Of why so many people are just falling down rabbit holes that they can't get out of. | ||
| And so many of them are smart people. | ||
| Judy Makovits is a very smart person. | ||
| And that's always been at the forefront of why I wanted to make things fell apart, because I've got friends who it's happened to. | ||
| I think everyone by now has got friends who it's happened to. | ||
| But between this tweet and that tweet a week later, they've gone insane. | ||
| And so I've been fascinated by that. | ||
| And so finding, you know, stumbling on Judy Makovits' story was perfect, because this is a perfect story. | ||
| About somebody who tumbles down a rabbit hole. | ||
| And as a consequence, I think, you know, influences many, many people to tumble down their own rabbit holes. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's something that I find really fascinating about her and the way that these two stories kind of do weave together is that how is it that people can trust her? | ||
| That kind of how is it possible? | ||
| And yet, in the first story, my question is, how is it that people don't go into a rabbit hole on Dr. Wheatley? | ||
| How is it possible that people will accept Dr. Wheatley saying, it's just this, without going into a rabbit hole, but Dr. Judy will say nonsense, and then people will go? | ||
| I find it so fascinating. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Well, of course, back in Wetley, by the way, you said Wheatley. | ||
| Oh, my apologies. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| But back then, of course, it wasn't the internet. | ||
| I mean, this was the late 80s, early 90s. | ||
| So he managed to escape the scandal in Miami and start going to forensic pathology conferences around America, promoting his theory of excited delirium. | ||
| And nobody knew about the scandal in Miami because there was no media, there was no internet. | ||
| It just stayed in Miami. | ||
| To this day, I mean, the Miami connection to excited delirium is still... | ||
| Totally unknown. | ||
| I interviewed this woman called Julia Sherwin, who's a civil rights lawyer. | ||
| She said that she gave a talk at a forensic pathology conference in 2020, where she talked about the Miami murders and the junk science origins of excited delirium. | ||
| And she said they still didn't know, even in 2020, a room full of forensic pathologists. | ||
| So it's an extraordinarily unknown story. | ||
| Yeah, well, and that's one of the things that I think you probably don't know is because at the end, you are very clear that excited delirium is no... | ||
| I've no longer accepted medical science and all that stuff. | ||
| But in about 15 to 20 minutes, I've got studies from 2011 all the way up until one in 2016 of studies saying that excited delirium is the cause. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I gave a talk in Belgium at a podcast festival in Ostend, Belgium in November. | ||
| And I told a little bit of the excited delirium story on stage. | ||
| And afterwards, a woman from Death Standard, which is, you know, the big paper in Belgium, came up to me and said there was two cases of people having died in police custody that were ongoing, that are ongoing now in Belgium. | ||
| And excited delirium is listed as a cause of death in both of them. | ||
| So even though, you know, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association don't recognise excited delirium, there are places in the world where it's still being used. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, and if it's not excited delirium in the United States now, it's some other propaganda term, you know, to get away with. | ||
| Agitated delirium, some people have started to call it. | ||
| Sure, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And by the way, can I just say one thing? | ||
| There might be some people listening to this thinking, okay, you know, I've seen videos of some guy in Florida who's clearly, you know, on drugs, ripping off his clothes and running down the street. | ||
| Like, is that not excited delirium? | ||
| And I had that thought too. | ||
| So I put that to forensic pathologist Joy Carter. | ||
| And her answer was... | ||
| It could be all sorts of things. | ||
| It could be diabetes mellitus. | ||
| It could be an overdose. | ||
| It could be intoxication. | ||
| It could be these spice drugs that come from Asia. | ||
| And her point was that putting it all in the same box and calling it excited delirium with all of the implications that this is like a thing that happens to black men because they have superhuman strength and they're impervious to pain. | ||
| That's where the problems start. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, for me, any bipolar type 1 person will... | ||
| We'll just look at that and go, yeah, I mean, yeah, that can happen. | ||
| All of you are weird for thinking that that's just crazy instead of being, eh, that could happen any couple of weeks now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's just how it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's the other thing that I come back to with these two stories is there are people still publishing obviously bogus studies about how excited delirium is the cause that are, you know, commissioned by either law enforcement or Taser. | ||
| The companies that make those, specifically for the purpose of obfuscating and lying about police murder and allowing it to continue. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's happened hundreds of times that somebody has died in police custody. | ||
| After being tased. | ||
| Now, you know, the one thing I would give taser is that you can't say, most often, you can't pinpoint exactly why the person died. | ||
| Because when somebody's been tased, they've also often been, you know, beaten up by several police officers and so on. | ||
| But on, I think, 276 occasions, in recent times, I'm not going back to the 90s, I'm going back to, like, the 2000s. | ||
| Somebody has died in police custody after being tased and excited delirium was listed as a cause of death. | ||
| Yeah, my personal feeling on that is with so many laws, like... | ||
| People are being put into jail for life for being in the same car as somebody who shot somebody later, and yet we're still, like, splitting hairs on, well, the cops also beat him to death. | ||
| It wasn't just Taser. | ||
| Like, I don't care. | ||
| I don't give a shit about disambiguating whether or not it was exactly Taser's fault. | ||
| The whole purpose of Taser is to facilitate shit like that. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, when I was writing The Men Who Stare at Goats, they offered to tase me at one point. | ||
| And I was like, maybe I should. | ||
| Because they all said, oh, we all tase each other as part of the training. | ||
| Of course they do. | ||
| Do you want to get tased? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I almost said yes. | ||
| And I've got to say, I'm very glad that I said no. | ||
| I find it so fascinating how often if you just sniff out dude behavior, you should just shut something down. | ||
| Like, if you hear a bunch of dudes being like, yeah, we tase each other to be strong, you're like, okay, shut down the whole project. | ||
| These idiots gotta go. | ||
| This is stupid. | ||
| What are we doing here? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, we've got this. | ||
| We've got this. | ||
| A story of people trusting this guy and people not knowing anything about it without the internet. | ||
| Then we have Judy Mikevitz, and she is publishing her study in Science Magazine. | ||
| And this is all the way back in 2007, I think it is? | ||
| It's around that. | ||
| I can't remember the exact... | ||
| Somewhere between 2007 and 2009. | ||
| I can't totally remember. | ||
| But somewhere around there. | ||
| Yeah, she... | ||
| And several other scientists, I think there were 15 authors on the paper, but she was the lead author, announced that they had determined the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome and it was a little-known mouse virus called XMRV. | ||
| And science published this and it became like an enormous thing because her point was not only was XMRV found in the samples of all of these people with chronic... | ||
| Fatigue syndrome, it was also found in a large proportion of asymptomatic people walking around. | ||
| So the point she was making was that huge numbers of people, millions and millions of Americans, were walking around with an infectious disease asymptomatically, which was a mouse virus called XMRV. | ||
| Did you see that? | ||
| I did see that. | ||
| Is there a demon? | ||
| What just happened? | ||
| This happens from time to time. | ||
| I make some sort of move and a thumbs up speech bubble appears in my Zoom. | ||
| And whenever I've tried to replicate it, it's never happened. | ||
| So I have no idea how it happens. | ||
| All right. | ||
| It's happened four or five times in the last couple of months. | ||
| If you have a person in your life who thinks it would be hilarious to slowly drive you insane, they are the person doing that to you right now. | ||
| Remotely making thumbs up on your face. | ||
| That's what's going on. | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| It does make you think, oh my God, am I being like hacked into by playful people? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So anyway, so yes, Science published this paper. | ||
| And then it was huge. | ||
| The government spent millions trying to replicate the study because this was like a big deal. | ||
| And nobody could replicate Judy's findings. | ||
| And Judy doubled down and refused to retract the paper. | ||
| And then things went... | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| I think people who know a lot about Judy Makovits know what happened with her ending up being a fugitive from justice and hiding out on a boat and science on the phone. | ||
| You know, saying, retract! | ||
| You've got to retract! | ||
| And she's like, no, I'm not going to retract! | ||
| And she's hiding, and she's, you know, all these, like, charges, you know, fugitive from justice, and then she ends up going to prison. | ||
| Like, I think if you're kind of a knowledge-fired listener and you're really in the weeds about this stuff, you may know this, but I think most people don't know this story. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I would say most people are somewhat familiar with Judy Mikovits' general, like, but in Alex's term, they would rather hear it from you, because you'll be telling, as far as you know, Whereas Alex's version is... | ||
| She was trapped by the FBI after they got a fraudulent warrant and then there's blood. | ||
| It's a whole thing. | ||
| Axe's version is the super evil telephone version of the truth. | ||
| So maybe give a rundown of exactly what happened. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And, you know, bad things happened to Judy. | ||
| She was arguably treated unfairly, I would say, at this moment. | ||
| So after she refused to retract the paper, then she's hiding out on a boat and she's charged with... | ||
| Because what happened was she gets into a terrible conflict with her employers. | ||
| They want her to hand over... | ||
| What's called a cell line. | ||
| This is like the materials that she was using in her experiments. | ||
| Now, from what I could understand, the reason why they wanted her to hand over a cell line was because a theory was forming among the people who couldn't replicate her findings that this XMRV, this mouse virus, was there in the cell line. | ||
| And it was just a genuine mistake. | ||
| It had infected the cell line and she genuinely mistakenly thought it was... | ||
| In the blood samples and not the cell line. | ||
| But she was refusing to hand it over in a very angry way, from what I can tell. | ||
| So she was fired and then a colleague of hers, I think one of her interns or co-workers, took her notebooks from the lab. | ||
| The quote from your story, just because I appreciated this one from a Judy and lying thief. | ||
| Max is a, quote, resourceful young man. | ||
| So I think it's very clear that he broke into the building and stole all the crap back, right? | ||
| Yeah, basically got her stuff back. | ||
| She said she wanted it back because she was worried that people would tamper with her notebooks and she wanted to preserve them. | ||
| But she got her notebooks back from the lab and now she was being charged or whatever, but basically she was being accused of theft. | ||
| Because she was stealing her own notebooks, which belonged to the lab. | ||
| Because if you're writing your notebooks, it's the lab's property. | ||
| And a fugitive for justice because she was hiding out on a boat. | ||
| So then she ends up... | ||
| I can't remember if she turned herself in, or she ended up anyway going to prison for five days. | ||
| And I've got to say, going to prison for five days for taking your own notebook from a lab is pretty rough. | ||
| Well, that was... | ||
| We've talked about that on our show, and that was something that I listened to again, and I was still like, well, first of all, it's easy to kind of overlook that, or at least overlook looking into it too deeper beyond saying, well, yeah, the cops are fucking awful. | ||
| That's the type of shit they do to people, and we're all just going to live with it until we die. | ||
| But the more I looked into it, the more I thought, why... | ||
| Did this happen? | ||
| That seems so strange to me that there would even be this scenario for stealing notes, right? | ||
| Like, people steal way more stuff with way less consequences all the time. | ||
| You can steal a car in Chicago and have fun. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| So I looked into it and I was trying to find, okay, well, where did all of this stuff come from? | ||
| And it said the warrant came from the university police. | ||
| The university place? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Well, that's what one place said. | ||
| And then I followed up, and then I kind of looked at it. | ||
| I don't even know if they can do that. | ||
| Are rent-a-cops able to issue warrants? | ||
| No idea. | ||
| Yeah, and then there's some people that... | ||
| Then it says that it's from the district attorney of Wahoo or Wahoo County. | ||
| But... | ||
| That seems even crazier, right? | ||
| Why would the district attorney specifically do that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It does seem odd. | ||
| I've got to say, that aspect of things seem odd. | ||
| Her employers, Annette and Harvey Whittemore, were big parts of society. | ||
| Okay, so were they wealthy, connected people who might know the district attorney? | ||
| Well, they were certainly wealthy people and they were certainly connected. | ||
| Whether or not, like I'm not at all alleging that they sort of tried to pull strings or anything. | ||
| But I do know that they were wealthy and they were connected. | ||
| But I've got no idea how she ended up being treated in such a draconian way. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that seems, and that's one of those things. | ||
| Like, again, I think that is part of our story here is that we could look over. | ||
| That, because we're so inured to the cops being the worst human beings on the planet. | ||
| And so annoyed with what Judy did next. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So that seems something that is so crazy to me that is not fully understood. | ||
| That, I feel like, should be something that's fully understood, is how she got to five days in prison in the first place. | ||
| Yeah, I agree with you. | ||
| It's, you know, as an outsider to America who's been living here for 12 years, like, I do really notice how sometimes the American law enforcement, you know, can be very... | ||
| Sometimes! | ||
| Sometimes! | ||
| Hey, blue bad eggs, come on! | ||
| You know, I mean, Britain is far from perfect, but you do seem to be very prison happy in this country. | ||
|
unidentified
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Love them, yeah. | |
| Can't stand people walking around. | ||
| Put them in a box! | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, yeah, and that experience wounded her deeply, clearly. | ||
| Irreparably, perhaps, or certainly profoundly wounded her. | ||
| Now, if you're narcissistically minded, and I think this is a really important thing about... | ||
| You know, everything that you do and knowledge fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think narcissism plays an enormous part in all of this. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like, why does Alex act the way he did? | ||
| Why did, you know, so many people? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think one of the, you know, one of the sort of symptoms of narcissism is if you're wounded. | ||
| I'm not saying this is true in Alex's case. | ||
| I really don't know. | ||
| But I think in other cases, undoubtedly, if you're narcissistically inclined and then you're wounded. | ||
| It's really hard for you to get over it. | ||
| You lash out and lash out and lash out in a sort of tireless way. | ||
| And I think Judy was so wounded by that whole experience. | ||
| Understandably, I don't think she should have gone to jail for five years for having her own notebooks stolen. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| That is the one part of this that is like, I can't get over why we all don't know more about that. | ||
| That seems... | ||
| I mean, if you're... | ||
| Because, I mean, I'm assuming it's true, right? | ||
| I'm sure it's true. | ||
| You know, we did a whole load of fact-checking and didn't find anything to the contrary. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| So, assuming that is true, then there are people involved who we can talk to, and nobody's talked to them? | ||
| Like, I feel like I want to talk to the district attorney. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Annette Whittemore didn't want to talk to us. | ||
| You know, obviously we approached her for an interview and she declined. | ||
| But yeah, so she was wounded and it was a wound. | ||
| You know, Naomi Klein talks about this in Doppelganger, that when somebody's ejected from the community, they don't just vanish, they don't just dissolve. | ||
| They join a different community where, you know, frequently they're more popular, more successful. | ||
| No, I mean, I'm looking at the timeline here, and her meteoric rise includes words from people seeming like, she seemed like a savior, that kind of thing. | ||
| And if you are even slightly narcissistically inclined, the moment someone calls you a savior, you're gone for good. | ||
|
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Yeah, you're not coming back from that. | |
| Because that's the other part of this, that people with chronic fatigue syndrome, rightly, are disillusioned by the mainstream medical establishment because they've been told for years that it's all in their heads. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And I mean, that's where we get back to Dr. Whetley. | ||
| You know, it is asking myself over and over and over again. | ||
| Or all too often, the narrative is like, oh, how do these people go over to the other side? | ||
| How is this possible? | ||
| And in your first two episodes, I feel like you've definitively proven... | ||
| A conspiracy between the government, big weapons, and a captive medical establishment to maintain the process by which they murder American citizens often. | ||
| And in your second episode, you've proven all too much. | ||
| The reason behind all of this stuff is not like, oh, why do people believe outlandish stuff? | ||
| It is like, well, we believe the wrong stuff in every direction. | ||
| People shouldn't have believed Dr. Wellesley for a second. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| They had too much fun. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| And so racist. | ||
| We mentioned this sort of in passing, but the fact is... | ||
| Dr. Wettley and other exponents of excited delirium say that, you know, these primarily black men, because even though excited delirium started with women, it's pretty much entirely about men now. | ||
| It's almost like the male... | ||
| Sometimes I think it's almost like the kind of male version of hysteria. | ||
| You know, it's taking these like... | ||
| I wrote down hysteria and physiognomy, both on my notes right here. | ||
| I've got those on my bingo card. | ||
| Just to put that there. | ||
| Because yes, taking these male traits, you know, these sort of cliched male traits, and especially the kind of racist black male traits of superhuman strength and perviousness to pain, and then they say these are symptoms of excited delirium, so you have to restrain them, you have to treat them harder than you otherwise might have done, and so on. | ||
| What isn't justified when you're fighting the Hulk? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Literally, the Hulk is used in the slideshows of police training slideshows. | ||
| A picture of the Hulk. | ||
| Great job, everybody! | ||
| Right. | ||
| And a picture of Jack Nicholson in The Shining as well. | ||
| Great! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Good stuff. | ||
| You know, and that was another thing about Excited Delirium that I was interested in in your piece. | ||
| One of the lines you have, I believe, is, you know, Excited Delirium is not recognized by the DSM or the AMA or any of these things. | ||
| And I'd be interested to know, would it matter if it was? | ||
| Well, the DSM is... | ||
| I think, I mean, this is why, this was the starting point for my book, The Psychopath Test, that the DSM is so hilariously packed. | ||
| It's hilariously useless. | ||
| It's useless to the point of ridiculousness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I diagnosed myself immediately with like 12 mental disorders from reading it, including parent-child relational problems, which, by the way, I blame my parents for. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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You get no sympathy laughs from me, sir. | |
| But the fact is there was 374 mental disorders, if I remember rightly, or over 886 pages of DSM-IV, and Excited Delirium's not in it. | ||
| So that, you know, they don't shy away from... | ||
| Well, actually, I interviewed Robert Spitzer. | ||
| Who was the architect of, you know, the expansion of the DSM. | ||
| And I said to him, were there any proposed mental disorders that you rejected? | ||
| And he named two. | ||
| This is a long time ago, see if I can remember this. | ||
| One of them was masochistic personality disorder, which was women who stayed in abusive relationships. | ||
| And he said, I got into terrible trouble with the feminists, so we put that one in the appendix. | ||
| And the other one... | ||
| That's a great answer to that problem! | ||
|
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Wow! | |
| Why don't people trust the medical establishment, John? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think they changed the name to self-defeating personality disorder. | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| And the other one which really made me laugh was atypical child syndrome. | ||
| And I said, so what would like the common characteristics of atypical child syndrome? | ||
| And he said, well, that's very hard to say because the children were very atypical. | ||
| So that one got rejected too. | ||
| So it's not nothing that excited delirium doesn't make it into the DSM. | ||
| That is so much the long dark tea time of the soul. | ||
| I think there's a moment where Kate Schechter is going through a mental hospital, and it is, yeah, I mean, it is so much like these people are so banal in their absolute nonsense sayings, like, well, I might be able to see the future, but who knows? | ||
| We'll find out next tomorrow. | ||
| Like, yeah, I don't know. | ||
| Absolute absurdity. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Oh, no, no, no, go for it. | ||
| No, all I was going to say was the way that DSM, I come up with this was DSM-3 or DSM-4, but with one of them, the way, because DSM-1 and DSM-2 were tiny, they were like pamphlets, there was almost no mental disorders in the 50s and 60s, and then it just grew and grew and grew. | ||
| They didn't have mental disorders back then. | ||
| I mean, of course, well, this goes into a whole other. | ||
| I think about, you know, when a diagnosis is good and when a diagnosis is not good. | ||
| And that's something that I look at a lot in the psychopath test. | ||
| And in my live show, Psychopath Night, which I'm doing next October, November, in Britain, Ireland, and Australia. | ||
| Next October? | ||
| It's 2024 now, so do you mean... | ||
| This October. | ||
| This October, ha ha ha! | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, because obviously it goes without saying that there's an awful lot of new diagnoses that came along which have been nothing but good, nothing but beneficial. | ||
| But then there's other occasions where you could argue not so good. | ||
| But yeah, the way that a lot of these new diagnoses happened was that Spitzer rented out a room at Columbia. | ||
| And all these people were like yelling, you know, all these different psychologists with their special interests were like yelling. | ||
| Like the New York Stock Exchange? | ||
| Yeah, it's like the New York Stock Exchange. | ||
| It just spits us in the middle with this little typewriter. | ||
| And that's how ADHD, you know, came to be named. | ||
| And all of these other... | ||
| Oh, they didn't create it there by being so nuts. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| It's like the person... | ||
| The energy metastasized and infected the world like in Scientology. | ||
| Not like that. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| But the way it was described to me was that it was like a noisy free-for-all, and the people with the loudest voices got listened to the most, and out of this kind of cacophony, all of these new mental disorders emerged. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These new definitions. | ||
| Yeah, I spent too much time reading about all of the therapy and psychology gurus of the 60s and 70s to trust anybody for a long time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, honestly, if there's any particular subject that I'm more interested in than any, it's this. | ||
| It's, you know, when do mental health diagnoses, when are they good, when are they not good, you know, how do they come to be, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| Oh, I mean, yeah, I've been fascinated since, I mean, I diagnosed myself as bipolar type 1. When I was 16, I was pretty sure for a long time, but I couldn't go to a doctor because my parents were so super religious, I wasn't going to get an accurate or even close to accurate diagnosis. | ||
| But did you subsequently get a diagnosis? | ||
| Well, so because things went great, seven years later, I went to a psychiatrist, the appropriate amount of time between when you know something. | ||
| And it was something that has kind of informed this conversation, and it's kind of what I've gone back to a lot while thinking about this, is that at first, I put a lot of trust in the idea of the doctor. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Doctor knows. | ||
| And it is through the experiences that I've had with psychiatry and with... | ||
| This type of medicine and the economy built around it, that makes me question so much of like, well, I get why people don't believe you. | ||
| Because a lot of people put too much trust in a doctor's expertise. | ||
| Not every doctor is an A-plus student. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And you've got some doctors who have a special interest. | ||
| They're interested in one particular disorder or illness, and they're much more likely than, I guess, to diagnose everyone with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Confirmation bias and so on. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And my first experience, and this is not something that I want to say is everybody's experience or is often experienced, but it's a common one. | ||
| And it was my first, which was the doctor prescribed a drug that was rep. | ||
| The rep was there last week who bought everybody lunch and who told them about this brand new, super exciting drug. | ||
| And yes, it's not covered. | ||
| And sure, it's not generic. | ||
| And sure, all this stuff. | ||
| But I guarantee you, you give this to your patients, you're going to get good results. | ||
| That kind of thing. | ||
| And I trusted that guy because he trusted the rep. | ||
| Not because he went to school for good stuff, you know? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And what happened? | ||
| I mean, within two weeks, I had spent hours paralyzed. | ||
| I lost some vision. | ||
| It was just an absolute disaster. | ||
| And it had to be, for a long time, me kind of growing out of that trust and just saying, I'm going to direct this. | ||
| And we're going to work together as two people and not as a doctor and an authority figure and not an authority figure. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, totally. | ||
| And by the way, Robert Spitz, I know we've veered away from Things Fell Apart here. | ||
|
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I think mental illness is right on board with Things Fell Apart. | |
| Well, I think that is true. | ||
| But Robert Spitz was very unambiguous about this. | ||
| He said to me, when somebody says to me, You know, I couldn't control my child. | ||
| You know, it ruined my life, ruined my child's life. | ||
| Then we put them on medication and it was night and day. | ||
| That's good news for a DSM person. | ||
| So Robert Spitzer was like unambiguously linking the DSM with the pharmaceutical. | ||
| Like, it wasn't ambiguous. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And for good and for ill, like, I'm not going to be, like, you know, all bloody Scientologist about this. | ||
| Oh, no, no, no. | ||
| I take meds. | ||
| I've worked it out. | ||
| But that's kind of what I'm saying with, and this is what gets us back to Things Fell Apart, is we've got doctors, we've got authority figures, and people just assume so much about them. | ||
| Even while they're looking up other stuff, you know, like all of this stuff about Judy. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, you've got... | ||
| Well, something happened to me. | ||
| This is a diversion again, but actually something happened to me which I haven't really told anyone, but now's the perfect time to say it. | ||
| Perfect time! | ||
| Okay, so midway through making, things fell apart. | ||
| I needed to have surgery for this condition called diverticulitis. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, yeah? | |
| So I took a couple of days. | ||
| That's awful, yeah. | ||
| Oh, it was horrible, but now I'm completely better. | ||
| Oh, that's great. | ||
| Yeah, the surgery I had for this was like American healthcare at its best. | ||
| Like, they chopped out a foot of my colon, and now I'm better. | ||
| So that's a good news story. | ||
| But in the process of it, I had all of these other tests, and I'm not going to be all... | ||
| I'm going to, you know... | ||
| Be a cliffhanger about this. | ||
| They falsely told me that they thought I had prostate cancer, which meant that I then had to go and have, like, a biopsy, which was an invasive thing. | ||
| You know, shoving a whole bunch of fucking needles into my prostate. | ||
| And I didn't have prostate cancer. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying that people shouldn't... | ||
| Believe doctors when they say you need to have a biopsy. | ||
| However, I don't think I should have had the biopsy. | ||
| And I think, you know, all of the doctors were like, you know, you've probably got it. | ||
| You've got to go and have the biopsy. | ||
| And I think this was an occasion of, like, over-testing and over-medicalization. | ||
| And I won't go into, like, the weeds of it, but basically... | ||
| I never thought I had it, and I shouldn't have had the biopsy. | ||
| And that's an example of over-medicalization. | ||
| And I think everybody, I mean, reasonable people look at this and go, yeah, man, it doesn't get more complex and ridiculous than the human body. | ||
| And anybody who's got a, you know, if you're a C-plus doctor, that means three out of four times you're doing a good job. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Who can really expect better than that when you're dealing with all kinds of blood and guts everywhere? | ||
|
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Right? | |
| That makes sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And let me say again, by the way, because the last thing I want to do is say that and somebody listening decides not to have a biopsy and then the next thing they know they die of prostate cancer. | ||
| Like, don't take my story as any sort of guidance for what you should or shouldn't do. | ||
| But that is what happened to me and it was a real thing. | ||
| It's the type of anecdotal story that is so notable, you tell it. | ||
| The story where everything went fine and you didn't have... | ||
| Not only did nothing happen, but nothing really notable happened is so common. | ||
| But I forgot about it. | ||
| I can't remember the last time I had an unnotable thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Whereas if I was still in Britain, I think the chance of me having the surgery for diverticulitis wouldn't have happened. | ||
| Like the waiting list on the NHS would have been so long and so on and people have to sort of suffer in silence more in Britain. | ||
| So, you know, there's a lot to be said for American healthcare too. | ||
| Oh, no, I'm... | ||
| The problem that I have with so many conversations about healthcare has nothing to do with region and everything to do with... | ||
| If you want to bake an apple pie, you have to create the universe. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| If you want to fix healthcare, you have to start from no borders. | ||
| You have to start away so far back that, yeah, good luck. | ||
| I don't know what to do with it. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Anyway, that was a big, long diversion. | ||
| But it's true that episodes one and episodes two are about when you can and can't trust doctors and scientists. | ||
| So I suppose it wasn't like a massive diversion. | ||
| Well, no, but that's kind of the thing. | ||
| You've just explained Dr. Judy Mikevitz. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Unfortunately, and I don't mean like you are the cause or anything along those lines. | ||
| And the way you have reacted to this stimulus is like a reasonable person where you say, shouldn't it fucking happen? | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| It's better that I found out that I don't than if I died tomorrow, right? | ||
| Like at the end of the day, that's kind of the answer. | ||
| Yeah, I guess it has to be the answer. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| But if you reacted like this, like the hospital... | ||
| Wanted an extra blank, blank thousand dollars from sticking a needle up my ass, you know? | ||
| And as a result, we can't trust the medical establishment at all. | ||
| And they're lying to us about COVID and they're lying to us about lockdown, et cetera, et cetera, which is clearly what's, you know, what happened. | ||
| I mean, the reason I first knew about... | ||
| Plandemic, actually, Judy Mikevitz was up here in upstate New York, a friend of mine who lives in a farmhouse a mile that way. | ||
| Said to me, like, six weeks into lockdown, like, have you heard about Plandemic? | ||
| There's this really eminent scientist called Judy Mikevich, and she's telling us that everything we're living through is a lie. | ||
| And he was completely into it. | ||
| And that's how I first heard about it from a, you know, a smart, good friend of mine up here in the... | ||
| New York countryside. | ||
| And so, yeah, tens of millions of people watched Plandemic, and huge numbers of them believed what Judy Makovits was saying. | ||
| But what the episode of Things Fell Apart looks at is whether or not she was doing this to get revenge on a medical community that wounded her. | ||
| Was that at the roots, you know, that personality type? | ||
| You know, I will say this. | ||
| In looking this up, so I don't know if you saw this, weirdly enough, but there was an episode of Nevada Newsmakers in 2007. | ||
| I'm a huge Nevada Newsmakers fan. | ||
| I got all the... | ||
| But here's something so fascinating about that, all right? | ||
| Dr. Judy and the Whittemores were being interviewed. | ||
| Yeah, they were on it. | ||
| There's actually a clip from that in the show. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Go on, sorry. | ||
| No, and the thing that I find so interesting about it is at one point she says they were telling me about stuff and I said I knew it was a virus and then I went to Nevada. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I find that fascinating, because that suggests to me that I don't think she even did the study at all. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, not even the fake one. | ||
| I think that's the real reason she's giving the samples, is there's not even a fake virus in there. | ||
| There's not even anything. | ||
| The whole thing is a lie. | ||
| The thing is, it wasn't just Judy Mankiewicz on that XMRV. | ||
| Paper that got published in Science. | ||
| There were people from the Cleveland Clinic. | ||
| There were people from the National Cancer Institute. | ||
| So there were definitely legitimate scientists involved in that study. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that's the next part of this. | ||
| If those people were involved, why is it that she's the only one who has a sample? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| How they wrote their paper. | ||
| Like, I don't know the answer to that. | ||
| Like, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know whether or not all of the testing was done within the Whittemore Peterson Institute. | ||
| And then the paper version of it was then sent out to the Cleveland Clinic. | ||
| I mean, maybe or maybe not. | ||
| Like, I honestly don't know. | ||
| But see, that's where I keep coming back to. | ||
| Why was she in jail for five days? | ||
| This is stuff that it's like, there are these little assumptions that I feel like are being made that are like lies that are covered up by the surface lies, if that makes sense, you know? | ||
| So much so that you don't even ask the question. | ||
| Like, there's no way, there's no way that she would just make up the whole thing, right? | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| And nobody's accusing her, or even, you know, Martin Edsering, who's the... | ||
| Guy at Science who was, you know, heavily involved in debunking her studies. | ||
| He doesn't think she made it up. | ||
| He thinks it was a genuine mistake. | ||
| I disagree. | ||
| I am the one person that is telling, I believe wholeheartedly, she made it up from the jump. | ||
| I think she was scamming these people from the jump. | ||
| That's my theory on this. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, go. | ||
| I'm not sure that I agree with you there. | ||
| Oh no, please don't. | ||
| It's a huge leap. | ||
| It's a huge leap. | ||
| I didn't see any evidence to support that theory. | ||
| Basically, the conclusion I came to was the XMRV, this mouse virus, ended up contaminating the materials that she was using in her experiments. | ||
| And that's why she mistakenly thought that the XMRV was in the blood samples. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| That makes sense. | ||
| That sounds like a reasonable series of events. | ||
| That would take place that would happen to a reasonable person that leads to stuff happening, right? | ||
| To me, that sounds crazy. | ||
| You're telling me that the person who is in Plandemic, who's lied about her biography over and over and over again, who's lied over and over and over and over and over again, is somehow telling the truth about one thing? | ||
| I mean, I also don't know what her life was like when she worked at the National Cancer Institute in Virginia. | ||
| Like, I don't know. | ||
| She could have been unimpeachable there. | ||
| Totally! | ||
| Well, and I looked into it and it says she has this thing in her biography where she thinks she's fought against bovine growth hormone stuff, you know? | ||
| Yes, there's something about her kind of overselling, you know, the AIDS research. | ||
| I mean, obviously now she says all of the stuff about Anthony Fauci that's all, you know, sort of, you know, extreme. | ||
| But I'm talking like back then, back in the early 2000s. | ||
| I mean, yeah, okay, so... | ||
| Counter to, you know, let me counter what you just said. | ||
| Please, please, no, that's the whole idea. | ||
| Okay, I've got a friend, former friend, we really don't get on anymore at all, who's a brilliant comedy writer, Graham Linehan. | ||
| Graham has become subsequently famous for being an extreme gender critical activist. | ||
| He basically goes on Twitter every day and goes on Facebook. | ||
| Oh, I know Glenn. | ||
| I love black books too. | ||
| That's the worst part. | ||
| I loved black books. | ||
| Well, that's where I'm going with this, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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I've known Graham since we were practically, you know, certainly in our 20s. | |
| We've been friends for decades. | ||
| I was in the audience for... | ||
| His first show, Paris. | ||
| I was in the audience for his second show, Father Ted. | ||
| His third show, The IT Cloud. | ||
| Graham, you know, for much of his life was... | ||
| A genius, a comedy genius. | ||
| Now, I think he had some difficult personality traits back then. | ||
| I remember one time he got really angry with me. | ||
| Actually, I wrote something in Time Out magazine that he took offence to about him, and he got very angry with me, and I had to apologise to him over the phone. | ||
| So he definitely had that easily wounded side to him all the time. | ||
| But, you know, but now, you know, his behavior on Twitter now doesn't mean that he wasn't brilliant for most of his life. | ||
|
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He was. | |
| And, you know, so could you not say the same thing about Judy Markievist? | ||
| Like, I'm not saying it's the truth. | ||
| Oh, no, no, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, obviously, I'm me, so I'm very stridently and confidently saying something that I'm only about 40% sure of. | ||
| But there is something to me listening to that Nevada Newsmakers interview. | ||
| What is so fascinating about that is that she's a liar. | ||
| She's lying in that interview. | ||
| She's doing a lot of lying in that interview. | ||
| And it reminds me so much of when we go back to 2004, Alex. | ||
| We have been told this narrative our entire... | ||
| You know, from the jump, like, Alex was different back then. | ||
| Alex wasn't this. | ||
| Alex wasn't this. | ||
| Alex wasn't this back then. | ||
| And I think the reality is he absolutely was. | ||
| We were the different people back then. | ||
| Or maybe it manifested, like with Graham getting really upset if he got a bad review, for instance. | ||
| Maybe it just manifested in less obviously nefarious ways. | ||
| Well, I mean, I've watched his comedy shows. | ||
| His attitudes towards women were not the specialist kind, even then, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, I'm thinking about what you're saying about kind of the 2004 Alex, because I've been guilty of that. | ||
| Like I've said many times, the Alex I knew in 1999 is a different Alex to the Alex of today. | ||
| But then I did that story for This American Life, which looks at how Alex was in middle school and high school before I knew him, when he exactly was the Alex of today. | ||
| So, yeah, maybe it just sometimes, maybe it lies dormant, or it manifests itself in a more likable way. | ||
| Or as you say, maybe we're different. | ||
| We've changed. | ||
| It's super interesting, though. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, well, that's... | ||
| I just find... | ||
| I keep finding her so interesting because I feel like the first two episodes of your show are almost so closely interconnected in a way. | ||
| Like, it is... | ||
| And my last interview was with Brandy Collins-Dexter. | ||
| And, you know, what we talked about is so many conspiracy theories. | ||
| We all go back to, well, there is a kernel of... | ||
| Truth to these conspiracy theories but usually that kernel is the United States government killing black people. | ||
| And this is that kind of situation in the 80s, in Miami. | ||
| And I understand that cops and the government are disambiguated somehow now, but they are not, in my head. | ||
| The government is killing black women and covering it up, you know? | ||
| Like, that is what is going on. | ||
| And then we get to Dr. Judy Mikevitz. | ||
| I see so much of, we're not going to be able to talk about her until somebody deals with... | ||
| What happened in the 80s, you know? | ||
| I mean, what happened in the 2000s? | ||
| Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know, it started before we met her, if that makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, undoubtedly. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, the fact is, the way she describes that conflict that she has when she's refusing to hand over the cell line... | ||
| Like, you know, when I listened to her tell that, I'm on the Whittemore side. | ||
| Like, hand over the cell line. | ||
| Just hand over the fucking cell line. | ||
| So, yeah, so she was clearly, you know, she was clearly difficult. | ||
| So, but, I mean, that's such a big question. | ||
| Why? | ||
| If everybody's worked on this paper, are you saying that nobody else has a copy of this cell line? | ||
| And if nobody else has a copy of this cell line, that says... | ||
| Some scary things to me. | ||
| That is a really interesting point you raised there, Jordan. | ||
| There were 15 authors to this study. | ||
| And as I say, I don't know how that study came to be written. | ||
| I don't know who was involved in the experiments, who just checked the paperwork. | ||
| I think you make a very good point. | ||
|
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I mean, I'm not sure. | |
| I just find it so fascinating, these little things that are connected to the past. | ||
| You know, like, we're not, you know, like, and that's why I really, really enjoy the series. | ||
| And I'm looking forward to, we're already at an hour and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| I'm looking forward to... | ||
| So we're going to do this again with subsequent episodes. | ||
| If you don't mind, we cannot do it again. | ||
| If this has been awful for you, that's totally fine. | ||
| No, it's been fun. | ||
| I'm happy to do it again. | ||
| Yeah, that'd be amazing. | ||
| But I find it so fascinating because it is like... | ||
| Your framing starts as, this is the culture wars exploding in lockdown. | ||
| And I see so much of like, if you look at this thing that happened, what you're looking at happened 30 years ago. | ||
| You're just seeing it like a star exploded 30 light years away. | ||
| You're just seeing the light right now. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| That's something I love about Things Fell Apart is that you go back to these. | ||
| And I love also working for the BBC because they don't, you know, they allow me to do these sort of experiments with narrative that, you know, 80% of some of these episodes have got nothing to do with lockdown, nothing to do with the culture wars. | ||
| It's only at the end that you understand the significance and the relevance of the story that you've just heard, which I love, you know, as a storyteller. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| No, absolutely. | ||
| And I don't know how much you want to spoil any more from your first two episodes. | ||
| I think we've covered quite a bit. | ||
| Yeah, I think I've spoiled enough. | ||
| I think people should go and listen to the storytelling. | ||
| That's kind of why I figured now would be a great time to kind of let this one be. | ||
| If you haven't stopped your recorder and listened to the first two episodes the moment we said hi, go do it now. | ||
| John? | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| And we'll get together again in like a couple of weeks and do it again. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| This is always a delight. | ||
| I'm still shocked that you submit yourself to so much screaming in such a short period of time. | ||
| Oh no, it's so much fun. | ||
| It was Elizabeth Williamson from the New York Times who first told me about you and Dan and was just raving about you. | ||
| You've got to hear these guys. | ||
| They're so funny. | ||
| They've dedicated their life to such a strange yet noble pursuit. | ||
| But I'm putting words into her mouth there. | ||
| She probably didn't say any of those things. | ||
| But I'm so glad she did because, yeah, I've had so much fun listening to Knowledge. | ||
| You know, the one I really actually loved was that I've completely forgot about this. | ||
| Episode eight is all about Mickey Willis. | ||
| And oh, no, I'm going to get confused. | ||
|
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Have you ever have you done an episode that's all about Mickey Willis? | |
| We've done an episode, I would assume... | ||
| I genuinely don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We've done too many episodes, and my memory is notoriously the worst. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, what I was listening to that I really, really loved was the one about Glenn Greenwald. | ||
| And I think Dan was dissecting the speech that Glenn Greenwald gave when he was introducing Alex. | ||
| And I don't know, there was something about that particular episode which I just thought, God, you know, you guys are so like on point. | ||
| You know, you're so, you know, you know your area so well that you can stop the tape. | ||
| My contention is and always has been, there's nothing sexier than Dan when he's angry. | ||
| When he's really taking somebody to task, people get riled. | ||
| There is riling going on. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, so there you go. | ||
| I'm very happy to come back. | ||
| Thank you so much, and I can't wait to do this again. | ||
| Yay! |