Curing Medical Misinformation with Dr. Noc & Scott Hamilton Kennedy

Can you trust medical information on the internet? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly team up with pharmaceutical scientist and social media “medfluencer” Morgan McSweeny (aka Dr. Noc) to break down common internet medical myths from Big Pharma to raw milk to vaccine hesitancy. Plus a discussion with filmmaker Scott Hamilton Kennedy from Shot in the Arm.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's a person to do online trying to find medical information that they can trust? We gotta step in and do something about that.

• 0:07Gary O'Reilly?

  We'll have to find someone who knows the truth.

• 0:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I think we already have him. He's here now.

• 0:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, that's good.

• 0:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. It's not me, by the way.

• 0:16Gary O'Reilly?

  That's a relief.

• 0:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On StarTalk, how to sift back from fiction on medical information on the internet. Coming right up.

• 0:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk, special edition. And when it's special edition, you know we've got Gary O'Reilly. Gary?

• 0:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Hi, Neil.

• 0:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck Knight, how you doing, man?

• 0:46Chuck Nice?

  Hey, what's happening, guys?

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can't do a show without you.

• 0:48Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man, that's very nice.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Although we do sometimes.

• 0:51Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, I was about to say, it's very nice, even though that's not true.

• 0:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So today, we're talking about medical misinformation.

• 1:01Chuck Nice?

  I don't believe you.

• 1:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey, they started early.

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Medical misinformation. Gary, take me into this. What do we got?

• 1:09Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, well, we live in a data-driven world, and we actually always have, haven't we? Better information makes for better decisions. So why would you want to purposefully create disinformation? We are talking about spreading medical disinformation that can threaten people's lives, potentially. How can we tell the difference between fact and fiction? What does the actual science say? It's expert time. Um, yeah, and for that, we went to a TikToker slash YouTuber who is on the front line where this battle is taking place. Plus, Neil, we're gonna sit you down with an Academy-nominated filmmaker responsible for the vaccine documentary, A Shot in the Arm, and that would be Scott Hamilton Kennedy.

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up in this very

• 1:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  podcast, yes.

• 1:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I have, in my office here at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, who flew in from Boston for this interview, Dr. Noc. I should be here. Thanks for the invitation. Dude, this is a clean-cut guy as you've ever seen.

• 2:12Chuck Nice?

  I have to tell you, you are the whitest dude I've ever seen.

• 2:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can see me dance.

• 2:16Chuck Nice?

  I'm just saying.

• 2:19Chuck Nice?

  I appreciate it though, I really do.

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have a PhD, so you're an academic medical professional, we can call it that.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In pharmacology?

• 2:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, pharmaceutical sciences.

• 2:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pharmaceutical sciences.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  Drug development, the immunology of drugs.

• 2:35Chuck Nice?

  Oh, cool, man.

• 2:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and these are drugs invented by lab scientists to achieve some effect in our physiology, and that is your expertise?

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, excellent. And you're definitely a social media influencer, and there's a word I just learned today. Yeah, you got it. Medfluencer?

• 2:54Chuck Nice?

  Oh, medfluencer?

• 2:56Speaker 03

  For better or for worse.

• 2:57Chuck Nice?

  Medfluencer. I got like a medical influencer, medfluencer.

• 3:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say.

• 3:01Chuck Nice?

  I got you. I was, no, listen, I was trying to get clear on it.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The word sucks.

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, well, no, we'll get used to it. That's not my words, you get used to them. And so you've taken it upon yourself to try to correct the internet with all of its misguided ways regarding medical doses, medical choices.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  Perhaps a misguided mission, but yeah, that's the goal.

• 3:25Chuck Nice?

  That's not, no, that's a great mission.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, you know.

• 3:28Chuck Nice?

  The internet is a cesspool of misinformation and disinformation, so.

• 3:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what makes you think you could, I mean, who, you say, let me take on the whole internet?

• 3:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A whole system.

• 3:39Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, are you the guy that, in that meme where he's like brushing back waves with a, with a?

• 3:46Chuck Nice?

  You ever see that, the guy with a push broom? He's on the beach trying to brush back the ocean.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what it feels like.

• 3:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you've been on the internet for now seven, six or seven years. When did the internet become such a a safe place for misinformation?

• 4:05Speaker 03

  It's a good question. So I think there's been the transition, obviously, from print to radio to television to now social media. I think it was that last gap, which has really democratized. Anybody can sit down in their car and make a piece of content.

• 4:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you can't sit in your car and make a TV show.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  No.

• 4:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Right, there's these editorial layers.

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Filters there, yeah.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Right, which, you know, is a bad thing, because not everybody could get their thoughts out there. But now, of course, the downside is that everyone can do the same for positive information and false information.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so the, so the tightest way to say what you just said was, it was a problem that not anyone could get their information out when it was limited to TV?

• 4:42Chuck Nice?

  And now it's a problem that everybody can get their information out.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  And so there's been this big shift, and of course, it's now entertainment. The medical information on TikTok and Instagram, you're competing with people who are dancing, and cats and dogs and everything. And so you may be presenting this very nuanced argument about something, but you're constrained, you have to make it entertaining, or no one's ever gonna see it.

• 5:06Gary O'Reilly?

  So the truth is boring?

• 5:08Speaker 03

  The truth is boring and nuanced, and takes a long time to say.

• 5:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Amazing, isn't it? Where you can, you can find an environment where the truth is exactly what you need it to be, yet some people turn their back on it because it doesn't have a cat, or it's not entertaining.

• 5:23Chuck Nice?

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, I find that in all the work that I do with climate.

• 5:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's got a second life where he's a climate advocate.

• 5:32Chuck Nice?

  Yes, and it's so hard to have like very succinct entertaining messaging, because the other side has stuff like, "Drill, baby, drill."

• 5:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 5:44Chuck Nice?

  And we don't-

• 5:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Slogans.

• 5:46Chuck Nice?

  Right, slogans. And slogans are great. That's why you see them on bumper stickers, because they work, you know? But "Make a sustainable economy through renewable energy, baby," doesn't work. It just doesn't-

• 5:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, baby.

• 5:59Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, right.

• 6:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Sounds like you've tried, though.

• 6:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And failed. So we've got here what might also be echo chambers, where people hear what they want, or they look for information to- they look for their understanding of information to be affirmed, and you do a Google search, and you'll find it. You'll find this seven other people who think exactly the way you do, and there's a false affirmation. So how do you sort that out for people?

• 6:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I mean, that confirmation bias is really-

• 6:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There is confirmation bias.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  Really, really hard to escape. And unless you're very thoughtful about doing so, you won't escape it. You have to be intentional. And being intentional, of course, takes a lot of mental energy, which you may not have. If you pull up Instagram, usually you're not looking to change your opinion on something. You're looking to spend five minutes while you're waiting for, you know, a train or something. So it really takes a very intentional effort to get out of this type of bubble.

• 6:54Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Do the algorithms still push things towards people even though, like-

• 7:02Chuck Nice?

  Your confirmation bias is wrong. Does it still say, let me go get more of this information? Because that just makes it even worse for you then.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the way I think of algorithms is really of people's attention. Like, what is holding people's attention? And so inescapably, platforms seek to optimize. How long are people going to stay on our platform and see more ads? The business model. It is, and it works extremely well. And it's good for the consumer because you are interested and you're entertained while you're watching it. But the dark side is sometimes the things that hold your attention the most are not what you would intellectually choose if you tick off on a paper ahead of time. I want to watch videos about this. You find yourself slipping into like rage baity content. Things that are arousing these negative emotions.

• 7:44Chuck Nice?

  Yes, and you know what's funny about that? Okay, I'm embarrassed to say this. I just found out, I think it was our producer Alex who taught me, you can just go up and put not interested. And then it says, okay, we won't show you any more of this. Which I did not know.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  I didn't know that either.

• 8:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and then all my-

• 8:05Speaker 03

  There's a whole lot of crap showing up on my line.

• 8:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and I'm like, and so I'm like, am I an angry guy? Every video is somebody beating the crap out of somebody. What is going on? Like, why is this happening?

• 8:15Speaker 03

  It's your inner self.

• 8:16Chuck Nice?

  It is my inner self, I guess.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  I think there's truth to that. You can learn a lot about somebody just by looking at 10 videos on their feed or something. Probably it's one of the deepest ways to, you know. That's scary.

• 8:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it is, it is, yeah. But now I just hit not interested because although, here's the problem. The reason I hit not interested is because I was watching it. This stuff would come across and I'd be like, oh my God, is it Tuesday? I just spent the whole day watching people get the crap beat out of them. And I didn't want to.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  And this is a topic of research. If you ask people, do you want to see negative content and emotional content? They'll tell you no. But if then you track what happens when it comes across their feed, they stick through, it's like a car crash. You know, like, everyone turns and look their head at the last second. You can't, almost can't escape watching this content, even if intellectually you think it's not good for me.

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So as an influencer, you need to be sensitized to that so you know how to navigate it for what you create and what you, and what your expectations are.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the audience. So Gary, why don't you give us a laundry list here.

• 9:17Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, before we do, because you're fighting this disinformation, you can't just go on to your platform and say, you know, don't watch that, don't listen, you're dumb.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  No.

• 9:27Gary O'Reilly?

  You just, because this is immediately causing a problem. So what are your strategies to actually get across and make this information more acceptable to people who wouldn't necessarily want to know?

• 9:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me ask that better.

• 9:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Of course.

• 9:44Gary O'Reilly?

  In English.

• 9:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why should anyone listen to your ass instead of anybody else? If you're both talking medicine online.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there is this tension of who are you trying to talk to? Is it people who already agree with you? In which case, you may sort of go for sensationalized approaches to a topic. Or is it people in the middle who are undecided? In which case you may take a more nuanced approach to discussion. If you want to change minds, you have to do number two. The problem with doing number two is it's inherently less interesting than speaking to people who already agree with you.

• 10:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not as good clickbait.

• 10:15Speaker 03

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

• 10:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bad dance moves, not badass dance moves.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Well.

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  Depends on the video.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  But there has to be something to get people watching.

• 10:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so there's some, there's some common medical topics.

• 10:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 10:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That people have strong opinions about.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And have chosen their expert who feeds them this information. So you compile the list.

• 10:58Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, let's, let's, let's start off with the one that's obviously popular. Is there a cure for cancer that they are keeping secret?

• 11:06Chuck Nice?

  It's always they.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  The they.

• 11:08Gary O'Reilly?

  They.

• 11:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  They being the pharmaceutical companies and the government researchers and the university researchers collectively, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people.

• 11:16Chuck Nice?

  Cause you know, it's easier to make money off of the treatment than it is the cure.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:21Chuck Nice?

  And I'm like, clearly you know nothing about pharmaceutical companies. Cause let me tell you something, if they had a cure for cancer, it'd be like, yes, we have the cure. It is one million dollars per pill.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  And that happens. That's part of the, there's, there's a few ways to answer this question. One is the biology of the cancer itself. One is from the pharmaceutical company's perspective and one is from social media perspective. But certainly like you're saying, there are cures for some cancers.

• 11:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:48Speaker 03

  You can't consider all cancer one thing. It's hundreds of different diseases. There will never be a treatment for all cancers. But we have right now, some really, really good treatments for cancers where 50 years ago, 70 years ago, survival rates were basically zero percent. The most common pediatric cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, ALL, literally from zero percent in the 1950s. Today, it's something like 90% success rates with treatments.

• 12:11Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  And in the 10% of patients who don't respond well initially, there are backup treatments like CAR T cell therapies, which happen to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but are super effective.

• 12:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  And so the point is, you know, over time, research does develop treatments for specific cancers. When they work really well, you can charge lots of money. And you can bet that if pharmaceutical companies could sell that treatment for all cancers and multiply their market size by 30 fold, they would be jumping at the opportunity to do so.

• 12:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So where's the ethical compass for a pharmaceutical company? On the pricing, yeah.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:45Chuck Nice?

  I believe it's the twisting of the mustache. That's how the compass works.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in that example.

• 12:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, or the biting of the pinky.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  You check the bank account balance and notify the shareholders. So part of it is, there's this limited period of patent exclusivity, where you make as much money as you can to try to justify all of your R and D that you've done up until that point, and then you get generics which are much cheaper. So cisplatin for testicular cancer, metastatic testicular cancer, used to be super low survival rate. Then researchers discovered cisplatin, this drug, you've reduced mortality by something like two-thirds, I think, since the 1970s.

• 13:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  It's generic now. I think the cost of a vial, I don't know exactly. It's like tens of dollars, hundreds of dollars. So you get this initial period, we can make a lot of money off of a new drug.

• 13:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  And then, everybody else gets to compete with you in that drug.

• 13:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how much time is it?

• 13:39Speaker 03

  Uh, I can't remember the exact number, maybe 10 years, 15 years. It differs for chemical drugs or biologic drugs.

• 13:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But wait, biology is just an extreme expression of chemistry.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how are you distinguishing chemical drugs from biological drugs?

• 13:52Speaker 03

  So chemical drugs being like small molecule, maybe a better example, biologics like antibody drugs. Where it's this protein that's been synthesized by cells.

• 14:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So vaccines would come under that category?

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Vaccines, I think, are biologics.

• 14:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying, yeah.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  But you see stuff like metastatic melanoma. Used to have a median survival time, and when I say "used to", I'm talking about the 2000s, like 2010. Median survival time of six to nine months.

• 14:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is skin cancer.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  Skin cancer that has spread to your lymph nodes and maybe other places in the body. Horrible prognosis. Until people developed what is currently a very expensive treatment.

• 14:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Melanin.

• 14:29Chuck Nice?

  And the reason it's expensive is because it's hard as hell to be black.

• 14:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me I'm lying.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  Well, a warning.

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For sun-induced skin cancer.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, so you can't totally discount risk of skin cancer.

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course. So just to be precise, the evidence that I know says that white people are 25 times more likely to contract skin cancer than black people, all because of the melanin. But risk not zero.

• 14:56Gary O'Reilly?

  No.

• 14:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bob Marley died of skin cancer.

• 14:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, he was light skinned though.

• 14:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, stop. No, it was on the bottom of his foot. It wasn't sun induced.

• 15:02Chuck Nice?

  Oh wow, it wasn't sun induced, it was just, yeah, yeah.

• 15:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back to your, your.

• 15:06Chuck Nice?

  Anyway.

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The cure for that.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Metastatic melanoma, 2010. Median survival time, six to nine months.

• 15:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Today, I think it's almost 10 years.

• 15:15Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  And so the difference is that people have been doing all this basic and translational research. Now we have drugs called checkpoint inhibitors that modify your immune system. So your immune system can now go attack the cancer better.

• 15:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  And they're very expensive.

• 15:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 15:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Uh, they're currently on patent. I think most of them are on patent. They're going to become generic. They will become less expensive. But I can tell you, the companies that make them right now would love to sell them for every cancer out there if they had data showing it worked for every cancer out there.

• 15:43Chuck Nice?

  Also, you get to re-up the patent for the different uses. So if, like.

• 15:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you could.

• 15:49Chuck Nice?

  If you can modify the drug in any way to treat something else. That's a brand new patent now.

• 15:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, there's a downstream effect of these drugs.

• 15:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 15:55Gary O'Reilly?

  To find out they've got other applications.

• 15:57Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, so.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  It has to be a meaningful. You can't just tinker with it and try to be cute and then say, we got a new patent.

• 16:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Because what people will do is say, well, that's not a meaningful difference. We're still just going to use the generic of your first drug. It works just as well. So you really do have to make an advance.

• 16:11Chuck Nice?

  It has to be a true alteration.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:13Chuck Nice?

  Ah, okay, that makes sense.

• 16:24Speaker 04

  I'm Nicholas Costella and I'm a proud supporter of StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 16:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Does big pharma suppress natural remedies because they aren't profitable? Which kind of touches on what we've just been discussing.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I shouldn't say yeah, I should say no. That's the start to that question. There's actually a huge number of drugs that have natural origins. And I'll think of a few examples. Aspirin's a good example.

• 16:57Chuck Nice?

  Aspirin.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  From, I think, willow bark?

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, bark.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  For thousands of years. People took it and turned it into salves or ointments or whatever it was for the same properties. A chemist figured out. I forget what year, but you know, this is the active compound in the willow bark that's having these effects. If we modify it a little bit, it reduces the gastrointestinal side effects. We sell that now as aspirin. And clearly aspirin's not very expensive.

• 17:17Gary O'Reilly?

  No.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Yet.

• 17:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which would be the buffered aspirin that protects your stomach lining?

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Uh, right. Cetaceasolic acid versus salicyte. I'm not a chemist.

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay.

• 17:28Chuck Nice?

  Sound like one.

• 17:29Gary O'Reilly?

  No!

• 17:31Chuck Nice?

  But go ahead.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  But basically, and that's one example. I think like, I forget the number, 30, 40% of all drugs, FDA-approved drugs, do have a natural origin. Either directly from nature or it's been modified a little bit and then used as a

• 17:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how much of that was studied from indigenous cultures that had long traditions?

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Some of it was. Like if there's this story of people have used this plant for hundreds or thousands of years. Researchers take it, isolate all the compounds.

• 17:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  Put it in this huge panel against a cancer target, for example.

• 17:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you get a psychedelic.

• 18:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those were found, every culture's found that.

• 18:03Chuck Nice?

  Without a doubt.

• 18:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the plants.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  So the misconception, I think, is if it looks like a pill, it's not natural.

• 18:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  But it's very possible that the molecules in there came from the bark of some tree or something.

• 18:13Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. I hate when I hear people say, "Oh, it's not a natural remedy." And I'm like, here's the thing. Everything that's happening in your body is happening on a molecular basis. So these people have found a way to figure out a way to isolate the molecular compounds, and it's the same thing. So now you don't have to eat a bustle full of weed. You can just take a pill, dummy. It's called progress. Anyway, sorry.

• 18:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so progressing. Are raw diets, i.e. raw milk, raw meat, healthier because they're more natural? And then we've got a caveat here. What about pink Himalayan sea salt versus regular table salt?

• 18:52Speaker 03

  Great. Both very closely related. The answer is no.

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Watch where you step there. I have Himalayan salt. I spent a lot of money on it.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  People will claim, you know, the pink salt has 400% more of this mineral compared to regular table salt. If neither of them in the first place were supplying a meaningful amount of that nutrient or mineral to your health.

• 19:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  It's not a difference. And so the risk is actually if you think- What are you saying is 400 times a small number is still a small number? Exactly. Right, it's 1% versus 4% of your daily intake and you're getting more from eating a mango or whatever it might be otherwise. And so the risk is if people think pink Himalayan sea salt is healthy for me, now you're using more of it on your food and the real health impact is second order. It's now you're eating 3,000mg of salt per day.

• 19:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  Instead of 1,500 because you think it's giving you these health effects.

• 19:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  And then you'd have risk for hypertension or-

• 19:39Chuck Nice?

  And the number one contributor to hypertension is salt intake, so, I mean, aside from heredity, like, you know, so first is, yeah, all that kind of, but first is being black, then, let's be honest, okay, listen, you're black, you're gonna get high blood pressure, but then it's your lifestyle and then sodium intake, you know?

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the raw milk is similar. There's no meaningful benefits to consuming raw milk or raw meat compared to the pasteurized version. And so people will blow this way out of proportion. I think this is where people get tribalized on social media. You have people who very passionately only drink raw milk or who otherwise say, if you do drink raw milk, you're gonna die or something. Oh, so that's the polarization of that decision? Exactly. And so people's lived experiences are, well, I drink raw milk all the time and so do my friends and none of us have died. What are you talking about? Right. And realistically, you know, maybe hundreds or a couple thousand people may be hospitalized per year from doing it. It's not a big risk, but it's an unnecessary risk because there's no benefit from drinking raw milk compared to pasteurized. But the people who say there is a benefit, what reasons are they giving?

• 20:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and what are the supposed benefits? Because this is, this got really big a couple of months ago.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  It was a whole movement.

• 20:52Chuck Nice?

  It got huge.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  It was a movement. And it's because of this polarization, people like identify as raw milk as an anti-establishment statement almost. And there are proposed things like it's got these undenatured proteins or enzymes or live bacteria in it.

• 21:07Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  Which mechanistically we think will help your health. I haven't seen any evidence to support any of those actual benefits as being truly beneficial. But somebody came up with it. Yeah, they did. To assume that it's true.

• 21:18Chuck Nice?

  Right. And I know who that guy was.

• 21:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, moving on. Are GMO foods bad for your health?

• 21:29Speaker 03

  Hmm, for your health, no. I have no concern eating a genetically modified food. The fact that there's a modified gene in there or leading to a modified protein, you digest it just like any other protein or DNA in all the food that we eat. There is though, sort of a second level of effect. It's not bad for you eating the modified corn or whatever.

• 21:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  And I'm not an expert on this part, but what are the environmental impacts of now having this monoculture? And having companies being in control of the seeds that are used to make that particular product? Or different pesticide use that are specific for those modified things? Those are all separate questions from if I eat this modified soy or corn, is it going to directly harm my health? To that part, the answer is very clearly no.

• 22:11Chuck Nice?

  Right, so what you're saying is that there are separate arguments that you can make against GMOs, but not the one that talks about whether or not it's harmful.

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To you physiologically.

• 22:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  Right, and there's quite a lot of, you know, decades of research from very large populations showing there's not health risks from eating the modified version of this.

• 22:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, aren't, isn't most, aren't most crops monocrops?

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean.

• 22:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whether or not it's GMO, I mean, isn't?

• 22:37Speaker 03

  I don't know the answer to that. I know for like corn and soy and stuff, I think like 90% plus are GMO.

• 22:42Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  So if you're eating any corn-based product.

• 22:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  And maybe there's something to be said there. If the process of GMO makes corn more available in our diet, and that meaningfully shifts the overall food profile that we're eating, maybe that shift has an impact on our dietary intake overall as a culture. Has nothing to do with the corn itself versus an unmodified corn.

• 23:02Chuck Nice?

  Right. And by the way, I don't know if you've ever seen heirloom corn, but screw that crap, okay? Like, the corn that's modified is juicy and delicious.

• 23:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and sweet and everything.

• 23:13Chuck Nice?

  Not like, not this pink and purple and blue shriveled up little thing that, you know, they call corn.

• 23:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, so.

• 23:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think there's very little food sold in a supermarket. That matches its ungenetically modified.

• 23:27Chuck Nice?

  Ancestor?

• 23:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ancestor.

• 23:29Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 23:29Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So all of them, so if it's not laboratory GMO, it'd be farmer GMO.

• 23:33Chuck Nice?

  Right. Because at some point.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  Selected over centuries.

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and I don't have, people say they should label the food if it's GMO. And while that's surely not necessary, if you did do that, I would say, label it to GMO, and then have one branch say, and is it scientist GMO, or is it farmer GMO?

• 23:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then every food item in the.

• 23:53Chuck Nice?

  Would be GMO.

• 23:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would be GMO of some kind.

• 23:55Chuck Nice?

  Anytime you make a hybrid, or crossbreed, or do anything like that, you're genetically modifying the plant. Yeah.

• 24:01Gary O'Reilly?

  It's carrots, isn't it? Carrots originally were purple.

• 24:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, by the way, I love purple carrots, yeah.

• 24:05Gary O'Reilly?

  There you go. Right, moving on. What about fluoride in the water?

• 24:09Speaker 03

  These types of broader public health initiatives, if you take them away, it's not going to harm everyone equally, assuming there is a benefit.

• 24:17Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  Who's it going to most deeply impact? The people who have least access to dental care, who have least access to fluoridated toothpastes and regular tooth brushing. Right? There's a large chunk of society who possibly wouldn't see as much of a big health impact compared to another section of society who may see massive disproportionate impacts.

• 24:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That dialogue had never discussed. Nobody ever talks about that.

• 24:38Chuck Nice?

  Right, right.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  And certainly, if you happen to be in a very privileged stance, you can't decide just based on yourself for very broad public health. You shouldn't. You certainly can, and people often do.

• 24:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, so following up on your sort of comment and cleverness was, what are some of the red flags the content might be misinformed?

• 24:59Chuck Nice?

  Oh, good.

• 25:00Gary O'Reilly?

  What gets your ears pricked up and go, oh, hello?

• 25:03Chuck Nice?

  Good stuff, yeah.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a lot, it's a strong overlap with the type of content that is very intriguing to watch. And so you'll see anecdotes being presented. I have three friends who had very late-stage cancer.

• 25:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  They took XYZ medications and now none of them have cancer.

• 25:19Chuck Nice?

  Hydroxychloroquine.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I wasn't gonna name medications. This is a different podcast that is frequently done. So anecdotes being presented in place of evidence is an immediate red flag, but it's also really compelling.

• 25:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they think it's evidence. They think it's evidence when they present an anecdote.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  And there's a saying, "The plural of anecdotes is not data."

• 25:38Chuck Nice?

  Nice. I need that on a T-shirt. Yes, but only scientists have, even their slogans are boring. "The plural of anecdotes is not data," which is beautiful to say. I wish most people got it, though.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's not a replacement for a controlled clinical study where you're monitoring all these different variables that otherwise can easily confound whatever you're looking at.

• 26:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. What I tell people when they say, "Oh, I have an aunt who took this herbal cure for cancer, and she's doing just fine right now," and I say, "The nine people who took that herbal cure and are now dead are not being interviewed by anybody."

• 26:15Speaker 03

  No.

• 26:18Gary O'Reilly?

  How much of what gets put out on social media has behind it a conflict of interest?

• 26:23Speaker 03

  That's a major red flag. So if you see somebody telling you, "Oh, this autoimmune disease, and this cancer, and this heart disease are all due to a deficiency in these three vitamins," which if you go to the link in my bio, I happen to be selling in a vial for $90 per month, can you really trust that these very broad statements... First of all, making broad statements like that, there's a reason why people see individual nutritionists and dieticians and doctors. It's because you can't give prescriptive advice, like if you take more vitamin D, you can solve your autoimmune disease. That's simply not true. But if you're selling a vitamin D capsule, you're very motivated to make that type of statement.

• 26:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that's another red flag.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  However, just because they're selling it to you doesn't mean it doesn't work.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this would only mean you just want to be a little more cautious.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's not an immediate disqualifying event.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Exactly. So I would start from a place of skepticism to start. And then if you see, "Oh, there's conflict of interest," and they're presenting only anecdotes, and they're being sensationalized and exaggerating, and they're claiming that this one particular treatment is helping with five different diseases.

• 27:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're really charismatic.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  And they're really charismatic, then your guardrail should be almost at the roof.

• 27:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow, okay. So that's the the universal cure-all tablet potion lotion.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, if somebody's selling you something and they say you've got autoimmune disease or heart disease or cancer or you're feeling depressed, maybe you need more of this thing that costs a hundred dollars a month.

• 27:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't this the same as the dude that sells elixirs?

• 27:50Gary O'Reilly?

  The tonic.

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The tonic?

• 27:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 27:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From the back of the wagon?

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Right. The snake oil salesman.

• 27:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 27:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't that the same thing but on the internet today?

• 27:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Working in the same principles. Working to the same audience.

• 28:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Same, same. We're all still human.

• 28:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Vulnerable to those.

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Susceptible humans.

• 28:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  And that's exactly it, because when you're feeling vulnerable, when you're feeling like, I've been to the doctor, they told me they don't know exactly what's going on. But this person says, maybe they do. And they've got this thing they can sell me, maybe it'll work. In a, if you weren't feeling vulnerable in that moment, you might easily identify that as, oh, they're just grifting. They're trying to make a buck.

• 28:22Gary O'Reilly?

  So that they're looking for the desperate, the last refuge.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or the desperate's find them.

• 28:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 28:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 28:28Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, the other one here, false dichotomies and polarized thinking.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  Hmm, yeah, so this is another example, things that perform super well on social media. If you say, if you don't eat a totally plant-based or totally carnivore diet, you're at risk for all these different diseases. The reality is in between. Like, obviously, if you eat more whole plant-based foods and vegetables and nuts and legumes and whole grains, that's better for your health. But it's not like you can't occasionally have some non-plant-based foods. It's a, it's a spectrum. But the type of content that's always going to perform really well is where you make these really big, bold, sensational claims that aren't necessarily reflective of the scientific reality.

• 29:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How is one to know that? Is the evidence that they're making a, an extraordinary claim?

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the evidence.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  That's, that's one of these things where if that's ticking a box on the content, they're making this super exaggerated claim.

• 29:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so this should be like a toolkit.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Like a checklist, yeah.

• 29:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A checklist you send around. Do we believe that the medical misinformation is known to be misinformation by the people peddling it? Or do they actually think it's real? Because if they think it's real, then someone else has to know it's misinformation and not the person who's delivering.

• 29:37Gary O'Reilly?

  But it becomes misinformation and then if they know that it's false and they still share it, then it becomes disinformation.

• 29:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 29:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  I think there's both. I think a lot of the time, people do genuinely believe the things they're saying. Even if they're selling the product to fix this deficiency or whatever, they're not doing it. Sometimes they may be, but they're not always doing it knowingly deceiving you. A lot of the time, I think people do believe the things that they're peddling.

• 30:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that boosts their sincerity on camera.

• 30:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right?

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I don't think you can do it otherwise. You can't sit in front of a camera and lie to people for years knowingly just extracting money from them. Some people can. Most people I don't think could.

• 30:13Chuck Nice?

  Well, I think what people do psychologically is convince themselves. So they lie to themselves first until they believe their own lie.

• 30:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that can happen.

• 30:23Chuck Nice?

  And then they're able to promulgate that lie convincingly because they actually believe it.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, and this, up until recently, I wasn't sure if some of the biggest sort of peddlers of disinformation and questionable supplements really believe what they were talking about. I watched this crazy video about Joe Mercola, one of the largest sort of supplement salesmen and pushers of misinformation. Investigative reporting showing he consults with what he believes is an entity from the causal plane. He gets on Zoom sessions with this sort of seer person who is relaying messages from this other plane of existence. It was astonishing to show that, you know, he truly believes that this person is channeling this other entity and guiding his business practice. And the types of information, he's going to be one of the top 10 suppliers like medical institutions in the world.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  Stunning to see the videos of these Zoom sessions. And realize, he's not making this up from his mansion just to try to sell people more supplements. There's something deeper going on here.

• 31:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 31:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Disinformation, misinformation is one thing. When you angle it and you bring it in an anti-science way, this can't just be, "We don't like science, let's move on." There must be strategies. There must be ways which this messaging is being pushed and delivered.

• 31:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, it's not only anti-science, it's also, "Well, I don't trust scientists." You know, you have the urge to say, "Well, trust me, I'm an expert." But then, anyone can say that. And so why should I trust you and not someone else?

• 31:55Speaker 03

  Right, or someone with the exact same credentials. So PhDs, doctors all the time, make statements that are totally incorrect.

• 32:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And many of them have the pedigree of what school they attended or they were awarded in, and so...

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that your comment about trust is a huge one. If most people think about the FDA, or the NIH, or the CDC, there's probably not a face that comes to mind.

• 32:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At all!

• 32:17Speaker 03

  At all, maybe one person. But even if there is one person, they don't know what that person is like in their free time. They don't know if they have a family or what they enjoy. That's the opposite of what happens on social media. You develop these deep, like, personal relationships almost with people that you see, whether they're pushing misinformation or evidence-based information. I think it takes that human connection to actually build up trust in whatever someone is saying.

• 32:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so you're saying that the people who are peddling misinformation are developing a relationship with their viewer where the viewer trusts them?

• 32:48Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 32:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so how's the trust going in your TikTok channel?

• 32:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so aside from medical information videos...

• 32:56Chuck Nice?

  Do you get a lot of haters who are just like, "You're so full of, you know..."

• 33:01Speaker 03

  Sometimes, there's some selection.

• 33:02Chuck Nice?

  "You're working for the Big Pharma!"

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, chuck, haters will be haters.

• 33:05Chuck Nice?

  "Haters going hate?"

• 33:06Speaker 03

  It happens, you know, with a big enough viewership, you get all manner of comments. But part of it is not just making like, "I'm gonna tell you about ibuprofen today." So, you know, I make videos with my dog. Or I'll do a little silly dancing video or a trend or something. Just to show that you are a real person. You're not just parroting data from a research paper.

• 33:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With a lab coat.

• 33:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. In fact, the most memorable DM I've ever received, this is back in 2021. Everyone had questions about the COVID vaccines. So I was talking about that for 99% of the livestream. I come to the very end of it and I say, I've got to go. My wife is almost home from the hospital. I've got to go cook her dinner. And then I end the livestream.

• 33:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool.

• 33:40Speaker 03

  And then.

• 33:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the comments were about that.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  The message I got afterwards was, I didn't know if I believed you about the COVID vaccines. I don't know if I can trust you. I don't know if I can trust science. Until you said, the reason you were leaving was to go cook dinner for your wife. And I realized, like, you're just a normal person.

• 33:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Right. But so what is the best strategy for viewers who want to know? Rather than absorb information from someone who is very entertaining and very personable, but may not be the right source. Where do they go? Is it do your own research?

• 34:12Chuck Nice?

  Have you done the research?

• 34:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Neil's talked about it. You've got this confirmation bias. How do you sort of navigate through that for getting the right, right information?

• 34:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Especially since you have a PhD. How many years did it take for your PhD?

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Four and a half.

• 34:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So for nearly five years, focusing on that one topic.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Years, journals, papers, published. And there are people who spend a half hour in an afternoon.

• 34:36Chuck Nice?

  I did the research.

• 34:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did the research.

• 34:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, which could be listening to a podcast. It could be watching a YouTube video.

• 34:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  And so the short answer is, realistically, I think most people can't do their own research in the way that I would interpret doing one's own research on a topic. And so what you're left with.

• 34:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, half of graduate school is learning how to be a graduate student.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  Right. It's really, it's complex, not just to find the relevant research papers, but to critically interpret their study design and the results in the context of the broader literature. You're talking hundreds of hours of just time spent reading in a given topic area. No one's going to do that, certainly not after watching an Instagram video and then questioning, is this medically accurate? And so what you're left with, unfortunately, is you do have to identify people or institutions that you trust.

• 35:20Chuck Nice?

  I was going to say trusted sources is, is really the key.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  You're never going to go do all of the research required on every given medical topic or topic, you know, in general in your life.

• 35:29Gary O'Reilly?

  So do the institutions need to do more to make this accessible? In the face of the fact that science seems to have been weaponized and turned against itself.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think there's a critical shortcoming in that. If people were to tune in to the four-hour discussion section where the CDC talks about the benefits and risks of this vaccine or this intervention, you would very quickly realize these people are taking a very rigorous approach to both the medical risks and the benefits. I trust them to come up with the right answer. You never see any of that, even though it's technically publicly available, because all of the focus, most of the focus, is not on communicating those sort of inner details of how these decisions are made. It ends up being, this is the decision.

• 36:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or the recommendation.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  Or the recommendation. For good reason, perhaps, because then doctors can take that and make that recommendation known. But I think things have shifted, even just since COVID. I think we would really benefit from personalization of these big institutions in a way that people feel they know people at them.

• 36:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I'm old enough to remember, this would be mid-eighties now, early eighties, where the Surgeon General, C. Everett Coop, came out and said, you gotta wear condoms, prevent the spread of AIDS. And I don't think anyone had publicly said the word condom before.

• 36:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially not a public official. And people trusted him, plus he had his little...

• 36:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Sex education in school, and that was about it.

• 36:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and plus he had a certain grandpa element to him. He was the face of the nation's medicine.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Fauci maybe was that, but not really. So is that the solution here?

• 37:00Speaker 03

  I think that's a big part of it. It's really humanizing the process of how do we come to these recommendations in the first place? And then, do we trust a recommendation because we know the process you've gone through? People are never going to sit down and do 300 hours' worth of research on a topic.

• 37:15Gary O'Reilly?

  As someone with a PhD in pharmacology, and I will mention immunology, explain the actual science of how vaccines work and how the body then goes to create the necessary antibodies.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  It's actually the same process as when you're infected with a virus. And so it's the same answer for both. I'll answer it from a vaccine standpoint. You get the injection in your arm. What have you just injected? Most often, little pieces of the pathogen. So what happens in your arm tissue? Pretty much nothing right there. You've got one big immune cell that comes in and scoops it up. It takes it to your draining lymph node is what it's called. So it goes through this whole separate pathway in your body. You've got your blood circulatory system. Most people don't know, you actually have a separate, almost circulation system called lymph.

• 38:00Chuck Nice?

  Lymphatic system.

• 38:01Speaker 03

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

• 38:12Chuck Nice?

  Well, it's like a lineup.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  It is. The neat part is all of those cells that are just sitting in your lymph node, waiting to be shown something they recognize.

• 38:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're sitting there like this.

• 38:21Speaker 03

  They, exactly, like the guy for the car at the airport.

• 38:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if they don't recognize it, then what?

• 38:25Speaker 03

  Nothing happens.

• 38:26Chuck Nice?

  And then they, and the one lymph node is just like, take your time. It's okay.

• 38:30Speaker 03

  Exactly, the immune cells getting tired walking along.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  But all of those cells were randomly generated in advance.

• 38:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  So before COVID ever existed, you had in your body T cells and B cells that recognized COVID. And then when you eventually got infected for the first time or got your vaccine, it was like their time to shine, basically. They're like, oh, hey, I know that one.

• 38:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  When that happens, that cell gets activated. It multiplies, multiplies, multiplies. It starts making antibodies that go back to your site of infection, go throughout your whole body. It also activates T cells. So T cells are the ones that recognize, oh, that, that friendly cell's infected with a virus. I better kill that cell.

• 39:07Chuck Nice?

  I have to kill that cell.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. So you get this combination of antibodies that are floating around to neutralize the virus when it's in between cells and T cells to kill the ones that are incubating virus actively. And that same process happens whether you've been infected with a virus. It still takes the piece of virus and goes to the lymph node and activates the B and T cells.

• 39:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's something I never understood. There are people who had pretty serious side effects to the COVID vaccine. If the vaccine is doing what COVID itself would have done, does that mean they would have had those same side effects had they gotten COVID straight up?

• 39:37Speaker 03

  I don't think so. I don't know of data to say one way or the other. If the severity of your vaccine response is predictive.

• 39:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He doesn't know the data one way. That's honest.

• 39:46Speaker 03

  Honest but boring, that's cool.

• 39:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can cope with that. No, I just want to call out that when a scientist is speaking and they're honest about their work and they don't, they'll say, I don't know one way or another. That's honesty. I'd rather that. Right. Yeah. You could lie to us and be really confident and then do what you say.

• 40:02Speaker 03

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

• 40:16Chuck Nice?

  You're not gonna get infected.

• 40:18Speaker 03

  It's gonna be.

• 40:19Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, your infection, if you do get it, it's gonna be lessened by the fact that you've been vaccinated.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 40:24Chuck Nice?

  So, yeah.

• 40:25Gary O'Reilly?

  It's like trying to get toothpaste back in the tube.

• 40:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Let's talk about the less extreme misunderstandings about vaccines, starting with, can you have too many vaccinations?

• 40:36Speaker 03

  Hmm. The short answer is no. There comes a point where if you keep vaccinated against a certain pathogen, you don't get additional benefit. There was actually really big results just published for HPV vaccines, one dose versus two doses.

• 40:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The human papilloma virus.

• 40:50Speaker 03

  That's right, the one that causes cervical cancer. Going from one dose to two doses is not that much better than one dose.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But very important to know that.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  Right. Critically.

• 40:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But there has to be, trials have to reveal that.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, you wouldn't know.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, this is the result of decades of clinical studies. Maybe to your question, though, of in general, like people talk about, oh, my child's gonna receive X number of vaccines over Y number of years. To that one, the answer is definitely no. If you consider the total number of pathogens we're exposed to on a daily basis, think about your entire gut, it's constantly being sampled for bacteria and viruses and everything. And then your immune system is secreting antibodies into your gut to regulate your gut microbiome. An additional one or 10 pathogens per vaccine is a drop in the bucket compared to.

• 41:31Chuck Nice?

  Compared to everything that's happening inside your body all the time.

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, I cannot emphasize enough that the comparison he gave is very common in science. You can say, will this harm me?

• 41:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, yeah, but look at all the other things you're doing, and you're not worried about that harming you, and those risks are 10 times as high.

• 41:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  And it's not a harm.

• 41:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's very important comparison to make, and it's a statistical comparison that I don't think people are comfortable or have experience doing.

• 42:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, because the way they intuit is.

• 42:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Intuition is false.

• 42:06Chuck Nice?

  It's false.

• 42:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 42:07Chuck Nice?

  They intuit wrongly because they say, well, if I took this vaccine and this vaccine and this vaccine and this vaccine, all at the same time, my body must not be able to handle that, and that is what is causing this disease or this condition or whatever. But the truth is, your body is responding to it because it's responding to that. All the time.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, and separately in parallel, this goes back to the fact there's all these cells sitting in your lymph node, waiting for their target.

• 42:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Just because you activate this one, this other one is still available, just waiting for its target.

• 42:38Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  You can activate both at the same time.

• 42:40Chuck Nice?

  At the same time.

• 42:40Speaker 03

  And they're not competing.

• 42:42Chuck Nice?

  They're doing different things, they're fighting different things. It's not like one is stepping on the other.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 42:47Chuck Nice?

  You know, they're both going, it's like a five alarm fire. One fire station is called, then a second fire station is called. They don't cancel each other out.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  No.

• 42:58Chuck Nice?

  They help each other do their thing. You know, one takes one part of house, one takes another. So, yeah.

• 43:03Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, couple of other less extreme misunderstandings to go through. Can you firstly overload the immune system, or can you boost the immune system?

• 43:13Speaker 03

  Oh, great question.

• 43:14Chuck Nice?

  That's wow.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  You both cannot boost your immune system in the ways you're thinking of, nor do I think it would be a good idea to boost your immune system. You want balance in your immune system, actually. If you get too much immune activity, you know what you end up with. Autoimmune disease.

• 43:28Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  If you get too little immune activity in your body, that increases your risk for cancer.

• 43:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  And so it's this balance between having just enough immune activity to respond to acute infections and stuff. But even if you could boost your immunity by taking some supplement, I don't know that you would want to do so.

• 43:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  There are certainly...

• 43:46Chuck Nice?

  It's funny, because when we start out in life, that's the whole idea, is not to keep your child away, just let them go do whatever, because they're going to encounter these pathogens naturally, and then they're going, their body, their immune system is going to develop accordingly.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I should say there are things you can do to reduce the function of your immune system. So, you don't want to be not getting enough sleep.

• 44:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  I should say it in the way that you should do it. You should get high quality, high...

• 44:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't want to negative the thing, yeah.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, confusing myself.

• 44:14Chuck Nice?

  So get proper sleep.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  Sleep, nutrition, physical activity, right? Low stress over time. These things are boring. They do meaningfully impact your immune response. If you sleep deprived someone before giving them a vaccine, you can measure differences in the titers they're going to develop, like in the days leading up to and after vaccine.

• 44:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But in the what that they're going to develop?

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Uh, like the antibody responses to that vaccine.

• 44:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  Will be worse if you've sleep deprived them for the days leading up to it.

• 44:37Chuck Nice?

  Look at that.

• 44:38Speaker 03

  So, the basic lifestyle stuff, like...

• 44:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Is that an experiment someone's conducted?

• 44:42Speaker 03

  It is, yeah.

• 44:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Too bad for those people.

• 44:46Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  So if you're doing those things.

• 44:49Chuck Nice?

  I get the flu every year and I took the vaccine. No.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. If you're doing sort of the basic lifestyle stuff that you know already for every other disease on the planet, that's basically the extent of what you want to do to be caring for your immune system. It's also going to help you with everything else.

• 45:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before we go on to bring on my next guest, why is it that some vaccines need to be boosted later on?

• 45:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas others don't?

• 45:13Speaker 03

  Great question.

• 45:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in other words, you can be immune, you can be vaccinated for life with one kind, but another one you need, you need a.

• 45:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Measles is like that.

• 45:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that right?

• 45:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, if you got a measles shot as a child back in the 60s, you're probably going to need a booster right now.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  There's two levels of variability here. One is across different pathogens. Some pathogens are capsular and it's harder to get longer lasting, you know, antibody responses against what you need to get responses against. You just need to get boosted. Those infections, if you get them, maybe you get infections more recurrently with rhinoviruses or different coronaviruses. It's not like you get infected once in your life and then you never get that pathogen again.

• 45:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  Over time, maybe your immunity wanes for whatever reason. So there's differences across pathogens just based on their structure.

• 45:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  There's also big differences.

• 45:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you say structure, you mean they're physical, how the molecules would ever connect?

• 46:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, and how, how that primes your memory immune response to be either longer lasting or not.

• 46:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Interesting.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  But then there's also huge differences across people in the variability of both the potency of your immune response and the duration that it lasts.

• 46:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  And you can't tell based on how you feel. And so that there's two levels of variability there. Over a population, it works great, but at any given person for any given pathogen, you could see hugely different persisting antibody levels 20, 30 years after vaccination.

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I heard this saying, no medicine is good for anyone until it has been tested on everyone.

• 46:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's some truth to that, right?

• 46:42Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 46:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 46:54Speaker 03

  Right. Which is the whole value of doing post-marketing surveillance, which is done very surprisingly rigorously.

• 47:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that your best word, surveillance? Come on.

• 47:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Post follow up.

• 47:06Speaker 03

  Post marketing follow up. Where you've got these databases looking out for signals of potential risk. And if one pops up, you know, that's probably anecdotal, but it serves as the basis for a rigorous investigation that you go do then afterwards.

• 47:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it. And so tell me, and just to end it here, tell me about the vaccine.

• 47:26Speaker 03

  Adverse event.

• 47:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Adverse effects reporting system. Theirs.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  Theirs.

• 47:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, what is that?

• 47:31Speaker 03

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

• 47:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gives you an excuse to focus in.

• 47:51Speaker 03

  Right. For things that could be very rare that you would never see in a typical clinical trial, even if you had 10,000, 20,000 people in the clinical study.

• 48:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's one in a million or one in 10 million.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Right. And so there's some noise because these things are voluntarily reported and sometimes things do happen by coincidence.

• 48:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what the V stands for, volunteer.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, V stands for vaccine.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, vaccine adverse event reporting system.

• 48:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this relies entirely on someone knowing it exists, logging on and typing in some effect.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Adverse effect.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  It's often healthcare providers who will log it. They'll say the person got this vaccine.

• 48:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, good. So there's a professional in the loop.

• 48:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good to know that.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  But just because it's in the system doesn't mean it's necessarily related. It's a starting point for investigation and that's where it goes wrong. People will say, look how many reports there were in the system. But of course, what happens if you vaccinate 30 million children? Some of those children are going to have other things happen to them.

• 48:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That are unrelated. Oh.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  But that may be related.

• 48:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It might be related or they may not be. There's some rare other thing that it's time coincident with. And there's not a cause and effect.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  Right. And so it's critical to have to identify when there are true signals. You can't rely on it to show that vaccines are dangerous for XYZ.

• 49:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Yes. Interesting. Tell me if I'm wrong here. When the COVID vaccine arrived and it wasn't yet enough for everybody, so they did first responders and then teachers, I think that rollout felt sensible to me. All of us who remembered things like the polio vaccine and the smallpox vaccine, fully expected that once you got that vaccine, you would never get COVID again. But that is not what happened. And then it's always a new strain and there's new this and then people got it twice. Some people got the same strain twice. So it seems to me that fact undermines certain people's confidence.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That that was either the right vaccine or an appropriate vaccine or whether people even knew what they were talking about.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We all know people who've had COVID three, four times. I was novid until like three months ago, I would say.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think this is a misalignment of expectations versus reality. We know looking at other coronaviruses, because there are seasonal coronaviruses that mostly now cause the common cold, people get reinfected all the time.

• 50:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 50:13Speaker 03

  And so there's every reason to expect with a new coronavirus, you have immunity now, that doesn't totally preclude you from infection later.

• 50:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but if I had smallpox, I expect no smallpox.

• 50:23Speaker 03

  Right. And so there's huge variability across different pathogens.

• 50:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nobody told us that when the vaccine came out.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  Exactly. So I think that's the short falling of communication.

• 50:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did they know that that was something they could have communicated at the time? Or was it still on the frontier of learning, of the progress of the novelty of the virus?

• 50:41Speaker 03

  There's a big part of that, too, is being honest and we don't know for sure yet. This is a new virus. Right now, if you get the vaccine, you're not going to get infected or it's a 95% reduction in risk, or your risk of severe disease is reduced by 90%. But how that will change three years from now, you can't be totally certain.

• 50:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If they knew that, they needed to be honest about it, I think.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that's how science works. You know what you know at any given time and you give the best available information. So we want everyone to watch your postings. Dr. Knock.

• 51:14Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 51:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dr.noc.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  That's right. D R dot N O C.

• 51:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's on. TikTok and are you called that also on Instagram?

• 51:21Speaker 03

  TikTok, Instagram. Yep, same name.

• 51:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Rising through three and a half million viewers. That should be 20 million viewers, I think.

• 51:29Chuck Nice?

  Even more than that. We need it. We need it.

• 51:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  330 million viewers.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  The whole country.

• 51:36Chuck Nice?

  The country.

• 51:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for coming down.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  Really appreciate the invitation. Enjoyed the discussion.

• 51:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Live into my office. And it's good to know you're in arms reach up there in Boston. Brookline is your town.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 51:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. Right across the Charles River.

• 51:50Chuck Nice?

  Why don't you just give the man's address?

• 51:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  I wear a disguise at all times outside of the recording studio, so you'll never notice me.

• 52:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, when we come back, Scott Hamilton Kennedy will tell us about his film, his documentary, Shot in the Ark.

• 52:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the subject of medical misinformation, we can't call that topic complete without venturing into the world of vaccine hesitancy. And there's one person who's at the front of that conversation. And it's my friend, Scott Hamilton Kennedy. Scott, welcome to StarTalk.

• 52:48Speaker 05

  Good to see you, Neil.

• 52:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, dude. You're a filmmaker.

• 52:51Speaker 05

  I am a filmmaker, storyteller.

• 52:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Documentary filmmaker, storyteller, because not all documentaries tell stories.

• 52:56Speaker 05

  They try.

• 52:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're just informational.

• 52:59Speaker 05

  They can be a little laundry listy.

• 53:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, when you're laundry list, it's less compelling, I find.

• 53:03Speaker 05

  Agreed.

• 53:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you know deeply, I'm guessing, that people love to have stories told to them.

• 53:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And why?

• 53:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the origin of that?

• 53:13Speaker 05

  I would say Yuval Harari said it so beautifully in his book Sapiens, that he said that storytelling is the best tool we have available to us as human beings to get along, to agree to change things. He really put it into such an amazing context, that it is the art of storytelling that we can use to convince each other to make this world a more functioning place.

• 53:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you made a film called Shot in the Arm,

• 53:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  which I actually had something to do with.

• 53:40Speaker 05

  You did.

• 53:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You invited me as a script consultant.

• 53:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not that I am an expert on vaccines, but that I do think deeply about how people learn science

• 53:50Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 53:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and what may convince them, one way or another. So, thank you for inviting me.

• 53:55Speaker 05

  I would call you my mentor, sir, if I could.

• 53:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, no. So, where did that film come from, in your head?

• 54:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, I'll go all the way back to 2018. I was talking to a wonderful doctor, Dr. John Swartsburg.

• 54:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were viruses invented in 2018 yet?

• 54:11Speaker 05

  In 2018, well, you know Dr. John Swartsburg, because we got to do another film together called Food Evolution. That was a reset of the conversation on GMOs. And Dr. John Swartsburg runs the Berkeley Wellness Letter, this fantastic letter out of Cal Berkeley that has doctors vet scientific information and then bring it back to the public in a consumable way.

• 54:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, what do you say? Doctors vet the scientific information? It means they read the journals?

• 54:34Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 54:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And bring journal information?

• 54:35Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 54:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the people?

• 54:36Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 54:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the people don't have to read the journals?

• 54:38Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 54:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're interpreted?

• 54:40Speaker 05

  It's wonderful.

• 54:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 54:41Speaker 05

  It's such a simple, beautiful, and very much of your world, too, right? You're a wonderful translator in a way of complicated science. And he said to me, "Scott, what's your next movie gonna be on? You should take on these anti-vaxxers." This is fall 2018. And in my wisdom, I said, "Oh, no. Why would I need to touch them? They're gonna go away. They're gonna burn out." Genius, as always. Cut to spring 2019, record-breaking measles outbreak, a state of emergency here in New York City in the Orthodox Jewish community.

• 55:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Measles?

• 55:10Speaker 05

  Measles outbreak.

• 55:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After it had been declared defeated.

• 55:14Speaker 05

  We were on the road to eliminating it in 2000.

• 55:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  World Health Organization? Do they make these declarations?

• 55:20Speaker 05

  That's right. That's my lazy research I did when I saw the state of emergency in New York City, is I did a little research and I saw that we were about to eliminate it, 2000. So what the heck is going on here?

• 55:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:30Speaker 05

  Why would we have a state of emergency if we're so close? And I called Dr. Paul Offit, who's a big part of the upshot in the arm. And he said, "Scott, it's not very complicated, but it is nefarious. There are people out there." That have become to be known as anti-vaxxers, who scare and convince parents to not vaccinate their children. And there's, it's never a matter of if, it's going to be a matter of when, if you do lower those vaccine rates, that you're going to see a measles outbreak.

• 55:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And measles has some, among viruses, some like unique, not only unique, but it's highly

• 56:01Speaker 05

  Highly contagious.

• 56:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Highly contagious.

• 56:02Speaker 05

  It can stay in a room, I think it's two hours after.

• 56:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just floating in the air.

• 56:07Speaker 05

  Floating in the air, yeah. That, it's that contagious. So, that I thought was enough to begin a movie. And so I began this movie in 2019. My first day of shooting was at the CDC's ASAP meetings, where they confirm the next vaccines that are coming out. And I had Paul Offit there, and I had one of the top anti-vaxxers there, Del Bigtree, who went on to be, he's a dear friend of Robert Kennedy Jr.'s, went on to be Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Communications Director during his presidential run, but we'll come back to that. And I also filmed with Andrew Wakefield, a doctor who had his actually license taken away when his study was found to be, that it was fraudulent and incorrect, and trying to make a connection between autism and the MMR, measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.

• 56:51Speaker 05

  So, we thought we had a pretty important movie in all of those elements, and then COVID happened. And it went to another place where we had to film from lockdown. I included my family a little bit as like the all of us. And for a minute, we thought the antis might, God forbid, go away when you have a once in a century pandemic, but they got stronger and more nefarious.

• 57:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How does someone judge, in your cinematic world, whether or not your film is propaganda?

• 57:19Speaker 05

  Great. Vet it, right?

• 57:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go vet it.

• 57:22Speaker 05

  Yeah. Look, look at the experts that I have in the film. Look at the scientific studies that we point out in the film. We put, we put them right up on the screen, we have them on our website, all those.

• 57:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I will add, the experts you do interview, they're not saying, "Listen to me because I alone have this one answer."

• 57:37Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 57:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're representing a scientific medical establishment.

• 57:41Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 57:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And at some point, we have to reclaim The importance of the word establishment.

• 57:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's become a bad word. Are you from the establishment?

• 57:51Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 57:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's bad.

• 57:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, there's a reason why an establishment exists.

• 57:56Speaker 05

  That, yeah, it's, it, the, the level of cynicism is very, very depressing. But to, back to your point, your question about the film, vet the film. Don't take my word for it. Don't take the fact that I have the wonderful Neil deGrasse Tyson as my executive producer, which is a, a great honor and should make them say, hey, if Neil vetted it, that should mean something. That's fine, but vet the film. And vet the words coming out of the people we refer, refer to as antis in the film.

• 58:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It, it is true that most propaganda films don't invite you to vet it.

• 58:26Speaker 05

  That's right. But again, that goes back to my, I'm, I'm trying to wrap it up, but, but the tools that we could have on StarTalk's website, on Black Valley Films website, on Shot in the Arms website.

• 58:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Black Valley Films is your production company.

• 58:39Speaker 05

  It's my production company, thank you. Is that says, here are the tools we use for vetting. Right? They're right there. Here are the tools we use for vetting. And it's transparent.

• 58:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it needs to be more of that.

• 58:47Speaker 05

  And, and say, hey, you trying to poke a hole in me? Do you have those tools on your website?

• 58:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 58:52Speaker 05

  Right?

• 58:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that empowers people to verify.

• 58:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In some way or another. So Scott, what is your film, Shot in the Arm, have to say about our responsibility to each other? Because that's, seems to be deeper than just any conversation about medicine.

• 59:10Speaker 05

  Right.

• 59:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a, it's a social.

• 59:12Speaker 05

  Contract.

• 59:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Contract.

• 59:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about that.

• 59:14Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, no, it's a great, it's a great point that, uh, the social contract became part of the film through, um, a few different characters in the film that reminded me of it. I don't remember the last time I probably talked about it outside of making this film. Was it in grade school or something? So.

• 59:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Civics class?

• 59:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, a simple definition of the social contract are these norms that are written, or sometimes not written, that have become norms. Don't drink and drive. Take out your trash. Be a decent neighbor. Be a good citizen in your community. Don't harm your children. Feed your children. All these different things. And vaccines could be, is part of that, right? That you don't necessarily get a vaccine. You do get a vaccine to keep yourself safe, but sometimes you don't get a vaccine necessarily for you to stay safe. You get a vaccine so you don't pass something on to somebody who's more vulnerable than you. And sadly during covid, we saw, it was building up long before covid, but during covid, we really saw a kind of a bit of a disaster around our social contract that people leaned into what they would call freedom,

• 1:00:14Speaker 05

  but it's really a version of selfishness. I'm sorry to say, it's a tough word.

• 1:00:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you explored in the film that the original sort of anti-vaxxers was a community deeply embedded in liberal voting factions.

• 1:00:28Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:00:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And only under covid was there a right-leaning faction that were not so much anti-pharma, which is the common battle cry in the left, but they were just pro-freedom.

• 1:00:43Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:00:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so their notion was, you can't inject me if I don't want you to.

• 1:00:49Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:00:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So why don't we just still allow that, but then deny them access to places where they could spread the disease?

• 1:00:57Speaker 05

  Or you give them their own island.

• 1:01:03Speaker 05

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

• 1:01:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But not everything in that list is equal. So for example, if your water supply, your personal water supply, you remove the fluoride.

• 1:01:33Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:01:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one else is affected by that.

• 1:01:35Speaker 05

  True.

• 1:01:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you are not vaccinated and you catch the disease and you infect others, then they are affected.

• 1:01:43Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 1:01:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so not all the reasons why you might ship people to this island are equivalent.

• 1:01:48Speaker 05

  No, I just want to ship them ones of all life. I didn't say that this was, I didn't say this was a kind decision, Neil. This is a frustrated, this is a decision.

• 1:01:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so there's been a failure on the civics front.

• 1:02:01Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:02:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's what you're really getting at.

• 1:02:02Speaker 05

  An individual, individual front that we, did we, do we remember that there's a thing called the social contract? Do we want to pause?

• 1:02:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I never learned it about it that way, but in fifth grade, I did have civics class.

• 1:02:12Speaker 05

  I don't think I even had civics.

• 1:02:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I had a civics, I had a button called, you were in the civics club.

• 1:02:16Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 1:02:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I might still have that button, actually. And we did things like we held elections and campaigning. People ran for president of the class and things that were microcosms of the larger society.

• 1:02:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:02:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We didn't pretend someone had been vaccinated or had a disease, but, but it forced you to think about other people.

• 1:02:37Speaker 05

  That's it.

• 1:02:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And maybe that was undervalued in the kindergarten through 12 curriculum.

• 1:02:43Speaker 05

  It might be another one of those things that we took for granted in a bad way, that we took for granted that we have these systems. And maybe our kinder people in our family were making those systems work. If it was our grandparents who were teaching us to be polite or whatever the different things were.

• 1:02:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So how do we fix it?

• 1:03:03Speaker 05

  Again, this is, these, not quickly, let's start there, not quickly. Um, the quick part would be to say, is there a problem? I might make a comparison to, uh, alcohol and, and addiction, right? We may, we probably all have some family member that has been addicted to something like alcohol or a drug. And we wanted to help them and we might want to say, stop, it's not going to work. What's the first step that's going to get them to actually go down the road, admitting their addiction? So I think we're living through a time where people are not in the place to admit that they might have a problem about being cynical about science. They might have a problem about humility. They might have a problem with their relationship to the social contract.

• 1:03:48Speaker 05

  And we have to admit that problem.

• 1:03:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but if you're an alcoholic, you might go into therapy. Do you go into therapy if you're not admitting that science matters in your life?

• 1:03:56Speaker 05

  But you usually don't go to therapy unless you've, until you've admitted it. You don't go to dry out.

• 1:04:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No occasion.

• 1:04:03Speaker 05

  You don't, yeah, you, you might have an intervention, but besides the intervention, it's you, the first step has to be, and it's still even within intervention, they can leave the, the drug rehab place, right? They have to admit that they have a problem. So can we as a society admit that we have a problem about cynicism, that we have a problem about selfishness, that we have a problem about what is expertise and who we should be listening to? That, I think, is...

• 1:04:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but you're the filmmaker and there's nothing more influential in American society than a well-made film that everyone sees and is deeply affecting them.

• 1:04:35Speaker 05

  Did you just take us in a time machine prior to social media?

• 1:04:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:40Speaker 05

  I would agree with that statement, except for, I love films. They've been incredible.

• 1:04:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know after the movie Ghost with, you know, Whoopi Goldberg and, and...

• 1:04:48Speaker 05

  Demi Moore.

• 1:04:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Demi Moore.

• 1:04:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After that film, polls on people's belief in ghosts went up.

• 1:04:53Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 1:04:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just because of the film.

• 1:04:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That they somehow made it more real because it was a story well told.

• 1:05:00Speaker 05

  Without question.

• 1:05:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I'm just a scientist and you're the storyteller. You're, you're the time-honored storyteller.

• 1:05:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whose craft predates science.

• 1:05:09Speaker 05

  Nice. Nice. Beautiful. The storytelling predates science. Yes. And I am an independent documentary filmmaker. So that's documentary filmmaker and independent means that I'm a little bit on the outside.

• 1:05:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you do if someone notices in your funding stream that you get money from, like, the enemy? You get money from pharma and you're trying to say that pharma is good?

• 1:05:31Speaker 05

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

• 1:05:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, people have come to assume it.

• 1:05:56Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:05:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Scott, we previously collaborated on a film, Food Evolution.

• 1:06:01Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:06:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which explored misinformation regarding...

• 1:06:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Genetically modified organisms.

• 1:06:07Speaker 05

  GMOs.

• 1:06:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  GMOs. And in both of these films, you're exploring things that in the left-leaning community, some of them are hold sacred, and you are dismantling some of their beliefs. Within this. And you had a phrase, and I never remember it exactly. What was it?

• 1:06:26Speaker 05

  The limitation of well-intentioned liberals?

• 1:06:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The limitations of well-intentioned liberals.

• 1:06:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where it's an idea that wants to be, they want to promote, then they overstep.

• 1:06:37Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:06:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In what they think is true regarding the idea.

• 1:06:41Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:06:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, but they think they're right.

• 1:06:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But.

• 1:06:44Speaker 05

  Confirmation bias, rabbit hole.

• 1:06:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:06:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so this has been your, this is your thing?

• 1:06:50Speaker 05

  It's a piece of the pie. It was different prior to COVID, because now then everything blew up, and, and there was all sorts of people with their limitations of, of, of good intentions. But, yes, I, as a born and raised diehard liberal, I came to question my liberal brothers and sisters through that, through that lens. That it isn't just, good intentions are not enough. You've got to have data, you have to have evidence, you have to have repeatability, you have to check yourself every so often. So, yes, it's a.

• 1:07:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, my point was that often the liberal left will declare that the conservative right is anti-science.

• 1:07:26Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:07:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and they'll cite very obvious examples, such as denial of climate change, and in some cases denial of evolution. But the, the statement is made as though they're up on high.

• 1:07:38Speaker 05

  Looking down.

• 1:07:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Looking down, whereas you part the curtains in the liberal community, you get things like homeopathic medicines, you get crystal healing, feather energy, you get these things. The only way you can embrace these ideas and philosophies is to reject.

• 1:07:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The science that either comes from part or all of mainstream science that denies it.

• 1:08:03Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:08:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so that puts you in a weird place as a storyteller.

• 1:08:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, you did a beautiful thing on the poster for Food Evolution and you sign it saying to Scott, who's not afraid of what is true.

• 1:08:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did I say that?

• 1:08:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, I may have forged it.

• 1:08:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 1:08:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I thought it was such a, it took me a little while actually Neil to come back to it and go, oh, that's what that means.

• 1:08:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:25Speaker 05

  Because I'm not afraid of what is true.

• 1:08:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:08:27Speaker 05

  Right? I'm afraid of what's been manipulated.

• 1:08:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's a group think thing that.

• 1:08:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, or somebody lying. Or somebody lying to me, right? Somebody tells me the truth, I'm going to deal with the truth, right? Somebody tells me something that's.

• 1:08:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you handle the truth?

• 1:08:40Speaker 05

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

• 1:09:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a bias alert.

• 1:09:01Speaker 05

  It's a bias alert. Wouldn't that be fantastic?

• 1:09:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it would.

• 1:09:04Speaker 05

  Or God forbid, we seize like an engine and I can't talk anymore. I'm so full of shit, my body stops functioning. Not me, anyone.

• 1:09:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you say seize like an engine, you're referring to an internal combustion engine.

• 1:09:15Speaker 05

  Thank you very much.

• 1:09:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because electric engines don't seize.

• 1:09:17Speaker 05

  Are there electric engines out there? Just kidding. Yes, thank you. I was going old school.

• 1:09:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so thanks Scott for doing this little bit of conversation, exposing you to our loyal audiences.

• 1:09:28Speaker 05

  Love this audience.

• 1:09:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we're all here to try to make a better world using science as the tool. And now we have to include storytellers as part of that tool.

• 1:09:38Speaker 05

  I really appreciate it.

• 1:09:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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