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[00:00:00.880 --> 00:00:08.720] A mochi moment from Tara, who writes, For years, all my doctor said was eat less and move more, which never worked.
[00:00:08.720 --> 00:00:10.080] But you know what does?
[00:00:10.080 --> 00:00:13.280] The simple eating tips from my nutritionist at Mochi.
[00:00:13.280 --> 00:00:20.000] And after losing over 30 pounds, I can say you're not just another GLP1 source, you're a life source.
[00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:21.040] Thanks, Tara.
[00:00:21.040 --> 00:00:23.600] I'm Myra Amit, founder of Mochi Health.
[00:00:23.600 --> 00:00:27.360] To find your mochi moment, visit joinmochi.com.
[00:00:27.360 --> 00:00:30.640] Tara is a mochi member, compensated for her story.
[00:00:37.040 --> 00:00:44.960] It is Thursday, the 1st of May, 2025, and you're listening to Skeptics with a K, the podcast for science, reason, and critical thinking.
[00:00:44.960 --> 00:00:56.000] Skeptics with a K is produced by Skeptic Media in association with the Merseyside Skeptic Society, a non-profit organization for the promotion of scientific skepticism on Merseyside around the UK and internationally.
[00:00:56.000 --> 00:00:57.280] I'm your host, Mike Hall.
[00:00:57.280 --> 00:00:58.400] With me today is Marsh.
[00:00:58.400 --> 00:00:58.960] Hello.
[00:00:58.960 --> 00:00:59.840] And Alice.
[00:00:59.840 --> 00:01:00.800] Hello.
[00:01:01.120 --> 00:01:05.120] So I went to see The War of the Worlds, Jeff Wayne's musical.
[00:01:05.440 --> 00:01:05.840] Oh, really?
[00:01:05.840 --> 00:01:06.160] Okay.
[00:01:06.480 --> 00:01:10.080] War of the Worlds, which was on at the Echo or Echo Arena.
[00:01:10.080 --> 00:01:11.280] The MS Bank Arena.
[00:01:11.280 --> 00:01:12.240] It's the fucking Echo.
[00:01:12.240 --> 00:01:13.440] Everyone calls it The Echo.
[00:01:13.680 --> 00:01:15.200] We will call it The Echo forever.
[00:01:15.200 --> 00:01:15.840] I don't care who launches it.
[00:01:16.480 --> 00:01:19.440] The Echo is a viable newspaper.
[00:01:20.080 --> 00:01:22.000] And I've always enjoyed War of the Worlds.
[00:01:22.000 --> 00:01:24.800] I listened to the album, like the Jeff Wayne musical album.
[00:01:24.800 --> 00:01:28.640] I enjoyed the book as well, but I listened to the Jeff Wayne album when I was quite little.
[00:01:28.640 --> 00:01:32.960] My mom had it on tape on my Philips Compact cassette.
[00:01:32.960 --> 00:01:34.320] My mum had it on that.
[00:01:34.320 --> 00:01:36.720] So I listened to that when I was quite little.
[00:01:36.720 --> 00:01:38.160] Frightened the fucking life out of me.
[00:01:38.160 --> 00:01:38.640] Oh, really?
[00:01:38.640 --> 00:01:39.360] Absolutely terrified.
[00:01:39.520 --> 00:01:42.080] I've never heard it other than the chances of anything.
[00:01:42.320 --> 00:01:44.160] Yeah, other than the main risk.
[00:01:45.280 --> 00:01:51.200] But absolutely terrified the light out of me to the point where I remember I must have been 11, 12 years old.
[00:01:51.200 --> 00:01:58.000] I remember giving my mom the tapes and saying, Don't let me have this again until I'm 15, because it's too scary.
[00:01:58.000 --> 00:01:58.880] I can't deal with it.
[00:01:58.880 --> 00:02:02.200] And you were only diagnosed a few years ago.
[00:02:03.400 --> 00:02:07.800] No other child has gone, keep this away from me till I'm old enough to appreciate it.
[00:02:08.440 --> 00:02:09.800] I can't be trusted.
[00:02:09.800 --> 00:02:12.680] I can't be trusted with this cassette recording.
[00:02:13.320 --> 00:02:19.480] But I remember a couple of years later going to my mom, I decided I wanted to listen to it again and going to my mom and said, look, I know I said.
[00:02:19.800 --> 00:02:21.320] Oh, you're jaunting for a hit.
[00:02:21.480 --> 00:02:26.760] Don't give me this until I'm 15, but I think it'll be and that's a few dialogue reasons of kind of.
[00:02:26.760 --> 00:02:29.000] And my mum said, honestly, I've forgotten.
[00:02:29.000 --> 00:02:30.600] You never said that, so here you go.
[00:02:30.600 --> 00:02:31.160] Nice.
[00:02:31.160 --> 00:02:32.360] And completely forgotten.
[00:02:32.440 --> 00:02:40.200] Anyway, so they did a live stage version of War of the Worlds, which is oddly something that I always wanted to do.
[00:02:40.200 --> 00:02:43.560] When I was in school, it must be year nine, year 10.
[00:02:43.560 --> 00:02:46.120] I had this idea of doing War of the Worlds for the school play.
[00:02:46.120 --> 00:02:49.720] The school would do a play every year, was the school play that we did.
[00:02:49.720 --> 00:02:54.680] I think the first year that I was in secondary school, it was our day out, was the school play.
[00:02:54.840 --> 00:02:55.320] Okay.
[00:02:55.320 --> 00:03:00.840] And we also did, we did Gregory's Girl, we did Guys and Dolls, we did Bugsy Malone, we did Starlight Express.
[00:03:01.000 --> 00:03:01.640] You know, it was everything.
[00:03:01.720 --> 00:03:04.040] I think we did Wizard of Oz when I was secondary school.
[00:03:04.040 --> 00:03:04.360] Yeah.
[00:03:04.360 --> 00:03:04.840] Yeah.
[00:03:05.160 --> 00:03:07.320] And I had this idea of doing War of the Worlds for that.
[00:03:07.320 --> 00:03:10.280] So I think you get a school orchestra to play like the musical beat.
[00:03:10.280 --> 00:03:13.640] You get the school choir can do the chorus, as it were.
[00:03:13.640 --> 00:03:15.640] And then the drama department can do.
[00:03:15.720 --> 00:03:17.480] There's a relatively small number of parts.
[00:03:17.480 --> 00:03:21.640] So, you know, you just need five or six people to do the acty bits.
[00:03:21.640 --> 00:03:22.680] And I thought that would be good.
[00:03:22.680 --> 00:03:24.920] Never got anywhere because the head of drama hated me.
[00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:26.680] Head of drama fucking despised me.
[00:03:26.680 --> 00:03:29.400] So that idea never, never got off the ground.
[00:03:29.400 --> 00:03:32.040] But I always had this idea of doing it at school.
[00:03:32.040 --> 00:03:36.520] And then many years later, I was in a pub with Tony Slattery.
[00:03:36.960 --> 00:03:38.440] This is a late Tony Slattery.
[00:03:38.440 --> 00:03:40.120] It's a freewheeling fucking conversation.
[00:03:40.120 --> 00:03:40.760] This isn't it.
[00:03:40.920 --> 00:03:49.680] I was in a pub with Tony Slattery, and the idea came up again of we should do War of the Worlds as a stage play, which Tony was hugely enthusiastic about, and he thought this was a brilliant idea.
[00:03:50.000 --> 00:03:54.320] And we ended up talking about, you know, what could we do, and how could you make it work, and what would that look like?
[00:03:54.320 --> 00:03:56.480] And could we go and get a license to produce it?
[00:03:56.480 --> 00:04:03.760] Just pub talk, you know, it wasn't like I was sitting there writing a business plan with Tony Slattery, it was just pub banter, right?
[00:04:03.760 --> 00:04:13.440] But then it must have been only a few months after that that Jeff Wayne announced he was doing it as a I think Tony got on the blower.
[00:04:13.520 --> 00:04:14.640] I don't think that at all.
[00:04:14.640 --> 00:04:17.600] I think from what I read about Tony Slattery, he was often on the blower.
[00:04:17.600 --> 00:04:24.640] Yes, he did say to me in that conversation, he'd taken the gross domestic product of a small country up his nostrils.
[00:04:24.640 --> 00:04:24.960] Really?
[00:04:25.360 --> 00:04:25.600] Exactly.
[00:04:28.640 --> 00:04:30.080] I can say that now he's dead.
[00:04:30.080 --> 00:04:35.520] But yeah, Jeff Wayne announced he was doing exactly that, was doing that stage version of it, which I was gasping to see.
[00:04:35.520 --> 00:04:37.360] This was like 2006, something like that.
[00:04:37.680 --> 00:04:43.440] But I was never able to see it until just these last couple of weeks where it came to Liverpool.
[00:04:43.440 --> 00:04:45.200] And it was really, it was a spectacular.
[00:04:45.280 --> 00:04:47.840] The chances of it coming to Liverpool.
[00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:49.280] Turns out one in one.
[00:04:49.280 --> 00:04:49.600] Yeah.
[00:04:49.920 --> 00:04:52.240] Eventually, you know, a long enough timeline.
[00:04:52.240 --> 00:04:56.080] The version that I saw was based on the Liam Neeson version of the album.
[00:04:56.080 --> 00:04:58.480] They did a remake with Liam Neeson a few years ago.
[00:04:58.480 --> 00:04:58.960] Yeah.
[00:04:59.840 --> 00:05:01.440] God, he'll do anything.
[00:05:02.880 --> 00:05:07.360] So rather than the Richard Burton version, which the original was, it was a Liam Neeson version.
[00:05:07.360 --> 00:05:11.840] So they had this kind of projected hologram of Liam Neeson on the stage.
[00:05:11.840 --> 00:05:15.680] They had other actors, because obviously Liam Neeson's not going on tour with him.
[00:05:15.760 --> 00:05:16.240] No, yeah.
[00:05:16.240 --> 00:05:20.760] So the other actors would interact with this pre-recorded hologram of Liam Neeson.
[00:05:21.000 --> 00:05:22.080] The hologram of Liam Neeson.
[00:05:22.080 --> 00:05:24.960] Did it just make you think he was dead in Star Wars?
[00:05:24.960 --> 00:05:30.120] It's just like a dead Liam Neeson is just like force-coursing his way in to talk about Mars.
[00:05:29.600 --> 00:05:35.880] And there were lasers shooting all over the arena to represent the heat ray, and there was actual fire on the stage.
[00:05:36.040 --> 00:05:41.960] Like would every time the Martians burned something, like flames would leap up on the stage.
[00:05:41.960 --> 00:05:52.840] One of the songs in War of the Worlds is called Forever Autumn, which it turns out is a love song based on a Lego ad, but that's too much, that's too much detail even for this freewheeling anecdote.
[00:05:52.840 --> 00:05:59.880] But during that song, leaves fell from the rafters across the whole audience during the song called Forever Autumn.
[00:05:59.880 --> 00:06:01.640] Was this, which theater was this in?
[00:06:01.640 --> 00:06:02.680] This was in the Echo.
[00:06:02.680 --> 00:06:03.400] Yeah, I think that was.
[00:06:03.400 --> 00:06:04.920] Oh, those are already there.
[00:06:04.920 --> 00:06:06.760] That's just naturally there, the Echo.
[00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:10.520] Just a coincidental breeze just knocked those off, is what that was.
[00:06:10.520 --> 00:06:16.840] And there was a huge Martian fighting machine that comes down from the ceiling and kind of straddles the stage.
[00:06:16.840 --> 00:06:19.080] Sat astride the whole stage.
[00:06:19.080 --> 00:06:19.800] It was fantastic.
[00:06:19.800 --> 00:06:22.840] But yeah, at the time of my life, it was absolutely fucking fucking brilliant.
[00:06:22.840 --> 00:06:23.640] Show.
[00:06:23.640 --> 00:06:29.080] Except, except for the fucking dickhead sat in front of me.
[00:06:29.080 --> 00:06:29.880] Oh.
[00:06:30.520 --> 00:06:31.080] So I was...
[00:06:31.160 --> 00:06:32.280] Still accounting for it.
[00:06:32.280 --> 00:06:35.080] I was there with both Lana and Emma and myself.
[00:06:35.720 --> 00:06:36.760] We were all there together.
[00:06:36.760 --> 00:06:41.240] And we must have been the only people in the room who are not of pensionable age.
[00:06:41.240 --> 00:06:46.200] You haven't seen so much grey hair this side of a UKIP annual conference, right?
[00:06:46.520 --> 00:06:49.480] Which is not a surprise because the album came out in 1978.
[00:06:49.480 --> 00:06:53.160] So it's not a surprise that all the original fans are like pensioners now.
[00:06:53.160 --> 00:06:55.480] But we're sat on our seats waiting for the show to start.
[00:06:55.480 --> 00:06:58.600] And then the guy comes, this guy comes bounding up the stairs.
[00:06:58.600 --> 00:06:59.960] He gets to the stop of the stairs.
[00:06:59.960 --> 00:07:05.560] He points at the ceiling and bellows, but still they come.
[00:07:05.880 --> 00:07:07.320] Oh, fucking hell.
[00:07:07.320 --> 00:07:13.480] And he starts running up and down the steps in the arena, which is, it was so fucking obnoxious, right?
[00:07:13.480 --> 00:07:18.000] And I get that he's excited to see it and he's excited to come and see the show.
[00:07:18.320 --> 00:07:23.120] My excitement level often doesn't rise very high, in all honesty.
[00:07:23.120 --> 00:07:26.560] He was well beyond what I'm socially comfortable with.
[00:07:26.720 --> 00:07:34.320] So he's running around, but his partner eventually encourages him to come and sit down, you know, and it turns out he sat right in front of us.
[00:07:34.320 --> 00:07:39.120] And as him and his partner sits down, it becomes very apparent that the pair of them reek of booze.
[00:07:39.120 --> 00:07:40.080] Ah, okay.
[00:07:40.080 --> 00:07:41.600] So they're absolutely leathered.
[00:07:41.600 --> 00:07:43.040] So I'm thinking, fuck me.
[00:07:43.040 --> 00:07:46.400] I've been waiting 30 years to see this fucking stage play.
[00:07:46.400 --> 00:07:48.400] And I don't want to have to deal with this.
[00:07:48.400 --> 00:07:49.360] But it's all right.
[00:07:49.360 --> 00:07:50.640] I'm trying to tell myself it's okay.
[00:07:50.640 --> 00:07:51.680] He's excited.
[00:07:51.680 --> 00:07:52.240] It's fine.
[00:07:52.240 --> 00:07:54.400] He'll probably settle down when the show starts.
[00:07:54.720 --> 00:07:56.880] Doesn't settle down when the show starts.
[00:07:57.200 --> 00:08:01.360] So as the bands are coming on, he's whooping and cheering.
[00:08:01.360 --> 00:08:02.640] All right, fair enough.
[00:08:02.800 --> 00:08:04.000] We're meant to be cheering the band.
[00:08:04.000 --> 00:08:09.120] Everyone else is applauding politely, but he's whooping and cheering.
[00:08:09.120 --> 00:08:14.480] The show itself is conducted by Jeff Wayne personally, who actually is conducting.
[00:08:14.960 --> 00:08:16.000] I say conducting.
[00:08:16.640 --> 00:08:19.440] He's vaguely disco dancing near the orchestra.
[00:08:19.440 --> 00:08:20.800] I don't know what they're doing by that point.
[00:08:21.280 --> 00:08:24.160] I imagine they're probably on it by this point, right?
[00:08:24.160 --> 00:08:28.000] I don't know if he makes any difference to the actual performance of the show at all.
[00:08:28.000 --> 00:08:28.720] But it's his show.
[00:08:28.720 --> 00:08:29.520] He can do what he likes.
[00:08:29.520 --> 00:08:31.600] You know, he deserves those applaudits.
[00:08:31.600 --> 00:08:34.800] Anyway, Jeff Wayne comes out and everyone starts applauding.
[00:08:34.800 --> 00:08:37.840] But the guy in front of me just starts going, Go on, Jeff.
[00:08:37.840 --> 00:08:38.640] Go on, Jeff.
[00:08:38.640 --> 00:08:39.440] Get in there, Jeff.
[00:08:39.440 --> 00:08:40.560] Go on, chance.
[00:08:40.560 --> 00:08:41.760] Go on, Jeff.
[00:08:41.760 --> 00:08:42.720] And I don't know why.
[00:08:42.960 --> 00:08:48.640] Then he started doing the whistling, kind of big, loud whistle and shouting, get in there, Jeff.
[00:08:48.640 --> 00:08:49.520] Get in where?
[00:08:49.520 --> 00:08:50.080] I don't know.
[00:08:50.080 --> 00:08:51.680] I don't know what Jeff is getting in.
[00:08:51.680 --> 00:08:54.000] There was a kind of cage that he was getting in the cage from.
[00:08:54.240 --> 00:08:55.040] Maybe that's what he meant.
[00:08:55.760 --> 00:08:57.520] Maybe it was getting the cage, Jeff.
[00:08:57.840 --> 00:09:08.840] And the show starts, and this guy is scream-singing along with every song, which is kind of okay because for the most part you can't hear it because the show is very loud as well.
[00:09:08.840 --> 00:09:17.800] Except when he's wildly out of time, in which case that's all you can hear, is him scream-singing the lyrics to War of the World songs along with the orchestra.
[00:09:17.800 --> 00:09:26.600] Everyone around us at this point is getting incredibly pissed off at this bloke, but probably worse than him because he was honestly just excited.
[00:09:26.840 --> 00:09:30.760] He was being obnoxious about it, but he was just happy to be there.
[00:09:30.760 --> 00:09:37.880] His partner, however, clearly had no interest in War of the Worlds whatsoever, and so spent the whole time on her phone.
[00:09:37.880 --> 00:09:47.080] On Instagram, taking pictures of herself, taking pictures of the stage, taking photos of him, looking at her Facebook with the screen on full brightness.
[00:09:47.080 --> 00:09:47.800] Oh, they always do.
[00:09:47.800 --> 00:09:48.360] It's so dark.
[00:09:48.520 --> 00:09:50.840] Dazzling everyone behind.
[00:09:51.160 --> 00:09:52.520] So come the interval.
[00:09:52.520 --> 00:09:54.120] It all fucking kicked off.
[00:09:54.120 --> 00:10:01.080] The people behind have started having a go and started deliberately picking a fight with these people, saying, look, can you put your phone away?
[00:10:01.080 --> 00:10:06.040] She's getting really annoyed, saying it's, you know, it's his 60th birthday, and we're just out here to have fun.
[00:10:06.040 --> 00:10:07.880] It's like, well, we're out here to have fun as well.
[00:10:07.880 --> 00:10:11.000] And you're stopping us having to put your fucking phone away.
[00:10:11.000 --> 00:10:18.120] And it was incredibly anxiety-inducing just having this row that was going on around us.
[00:10:18.120 --> 00:10:22.120] Eventually, this couple disappear and they go down to the bar.
[00:10:22.120 --> 00:10:26.200] And the rest of us who were left were like a little support group going, are you okay?
[00:10:26.200 --> 00:10:26.920] Are you all right?
[00:10:26.920 --> 00:10:28.200] Are you doing okay?
[00:10:28.520 --> 00:10:32.280] Because the guy just before he left was saying, Look, let's just leave it now.
[00:10:32.280 --> 00:10:33.960] Let's just let you love War of the Worlds.
[00:10:33.960 --> 00:10:35.080] I love War of the Worlds.
[00:10:35.080 --> 00:10:35.800] Let's just agree.
[00:10:35.800 --> 00:10:37.240] We'll just leave it.
[00:10:37.560 --> 00:10:44.200] But everyone else was trying to leave it as he was perpetuating the argument by insisting that we leave it.
[00:10:44.520 --> 00:10:47.920] And the second act starts, and they never come back.
[00:10:47.920 --> 00:10:49.840] Good, they've fucked off.
[00:10:49.840 --> 00:10:53.280] The woman came back briefly to grab her coat and then vanished.
[00:10:53.280 --> 00:11:02.160] So, I assume they've had words with each other and decided to fucking slink off, which really helped settle the audience down so we could enjoy the second half.
[00:11:02.160 --> 00:11:04.560] But the second half is the shittest bit of the album.
[00:11:05.600 --> 00:11:07.280] Which is really annoying.
[00:11:07.280 --> 00:11:09.680] But I'd recommend listeners go and see it if you get the chance.
[00:11:10.240 --> 00:11:16.960] It was really a great show, and the chances of you having an obnoxious bell end at your show are a million to one.
[00:11:23.520 --> 00:11:28.080] I don't know if we've ever mentioned it on the show before, but Marsh, have you got any podcast with Cecil Cicero?
[00:11:28.240 --> 00:11:28.880] I have got it.
[00:11:29.200 --> 00:11:30.960] I don't talk about it too much, but it never comes up.
[00:11:32.160 --> 00:11:33.760] I genuinely don't mention it that often.
[00:11:33.760 --> 00:11:35.120] Literally, every show since you've started.
[00:11:35.200 --> 00:11:35.600] I've wished you to show you.
[00:11:35.760 --> 00:11:43.360] Literally every episode of this show since where you listen to and examine episodes of the Joe Rogan experience.
[00:11:43.360 --> 00:11:48.960] Joe Rogan is an interesting character when it comes to thinking about skepticism and particularly conspiracism.
[00:11:48.960 --> 00:11:53.440] And I think it's easy to assume that everybody in skepticism knows who Joe Rogan is.
[00:11:53.760 --> 00:11:54.320] I think it's easy to say.
[00:11:54.480 --> 00:11:55.600] I can tell you right now, they don't.
[00:11:55.600 --> 00:11:56.080] They don't.
[00:11:56.080 --> 00:11:56.720] I've learned.
[00:11:56.960 --> 00:11:59.920] I think it's easy to not know who he is, especially in the UK.
[00:12:00.240 --> 00:12:04.320] And especially because as skeptics, we are not the target audience of his podcast.
[00:12:04.320 --> 00:12:10.160] So, for listeners who don't know who Joe Rogan is, he's an American comedian and ultimate fighting championship commentator.
[00:12:10.160 --> 00:12:17.520] But these days, he's most famous for his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, an incredibly prolific interview show.
[00:12:17.520 --> 00:12:21.200] The show launched in 2009, the same year as Skeptics with a K.
[00:12:21.200 --> 00:12:21.960] And while we're in our...
[00:12:22.040 --> 00:12:24.120] Oh god, we've been gone as long as Rogan.
[00:12:24.280 --> 00:12:25.320] Oh, I've never checked that.
[00:12:25.360 --> 00:12:26.640] I didn't even put two and two together.
[00:12:26.640 --> 00:12:35.640] And while we're in our early 400s in terms of episode number, the Joe Rogan Experience has released over 2,300 episodes in the same time period.
[00:12:36.280 --> 00:12:40.760] I don't know if you have a feel for, like, has he like increased in frequency of episodes?
[00:12:41.320 --> 00:12:45.240] I think there was times when he wasn't doing as many as four a week, but he typically does four a week now.
[00:12:45.560 --> 00:12:49.480] And their episode lengths are from like one to five hours per episode, right?
[00:12:49.480 --> 00:12:55.400] Yeah, they're typically more towards the two and a half to four is typical.
[00:12:55.400 --> 00:13:00.440] Yeah, I'll fucking interview Jordan Peterson today as of recording, so I'm gonna have to fucking listen to that.
[00:13:00.520 --> 00:13:03.640] He's putting out an enormous amount of content.
[00:13:03.640 --> 00:13:08.120] But perhaps the most important thing about the Joe Rogan experience is its reach.
[00:13:08.120 --> 00:13:14.920] The show is the number one podcast, according to Spotify, in the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
[00:13:14.920 --> 00:13:17.800] It only just lost its top spot in Ireland.
[00:13:17.800 --> 00:13:22.600] So basically, the entire English-speaking world is hooked on the Joe Rogan experience.
[00:13:22.600 --> 00:13:25.000] Yeah, it fluctuated a little bit when the telepathy tapes came out.
[00:13:25.000 --> 00:13:26.040] That went on number one.
[00:13:26.040 --> 00:13:28.040] And for a while, Midas Touch.
[00:13:28.040 --> 00:13:28.840] Midas Touch?
[00:13:29.080 --> 00:13:29.960] Midas Touch, yeah.
[00:13:29.960 --> 00:13:31.880] That was number one for a bit, but I don't think he stayed there.
[00:13:31.880 --> 00:13:38.600] But he's been number one in the US five years on the trot, more than.
[00:13:38.920 --> 00:13:44.600] The show has 19.7 million subscribers and over 6 billion views on YouTube.
[00:13:45.080 --> 00:13:46.600] Almost doing as well as we are then.
[00:13:47.880 --> 00:13:50.120] We can't even tell his Spotify numbers and things as well.
[00:13:50.280 --> 00:13:50.840] No, exactly.
[00:13:51.080 --> 00:13:55.640] We don't know his true numbers, but like 6 billion views on YouTube is ridiculous.
[00:13:55.640 --> 00:14:03.720] And researchers have identified that the influence on audiences is significant, with guests seeing a significant impact to their book sales.
[00:14:03.720 --> 00:14:10.920] For example, Graeme Hancock saw a 519% sales increase within one week of appearing on the show.
[00:14:10.920 --> 00:14:28.080] We see similar impacts on, so he doesn't tend to have political, like specific political people on that often, but when he has, he's seen donation, they've seen donations to those political members skyrocket within a month of being on the show.
[00:14:28.720 --> 00:14:41.840] And while we might not always notice Rogan making the news week by week, we're regularly seeing claims made by guests such as Mel Gibson dominating the media discourse in the days after a guest appearance on that show.
[00:14:41.840 --> 00:14:57.200] So it might not be Joe Rogan's show says this again, but we're seeing I was googling something relating to the story that I'm going to talk about today, and the first page of news is Mel Gibson talks about X on these are the claims he's made.
[00:14:57.200 --> 00:15:10.480] I'm sure most of those articles will mention the Joe Rogan experience, but if you're not looking for it, then all you're seeing is more misinformation and not realizing that it's the Joe Rogan experience that is leading to that dominating the press quite as much as it is.
[00:15:10.480 --> 00:15:20.640] There's also a secondary layer of bottom feeders, essentially, who are just repeating the things that happen on Joe Rogan to an audience who already believes that in order to pick up their audience.
[00:15:20.960 --> 00:15:21.920] A very careful caveat.
[00:15:23.040 --> 00:15:29.280] Well, this is the thing is, it feels like arguably we were in a similar space with the No Rogan experience, except we're looking for that audience to try.
[00:15:29.280 --> 00:15:36.080] I did an interview recently with a podcast in America, Sam, there's some, I think it was called, I forget the name of it.
[00:15:36.080 --> 00:15:37.280] We're talking about the telepathy tapes.
[00:15:37.280 --> 00:15:39.520] It was a bit of an unexpected appearance on there.
[00:15:39.520 --> 00:15:46.720] And he kept describing the No Rogan experience as a companion piece to the Joe Rogan experience.
[00:15:46.720 --> 00:15:49.200] So, your show is like a companion show to Joe Rogan.
[00:15:49.200 --> 00:15:54.240] And at one point in the interview, I said, well, it's a companion in the same way that Methadone is a companion to heroin.
[00:15:56.480 --> 00:15:57.200] And this is it.
[00:15:57.200 --> 00:16:31.720] So, what Joe Rogan is doing with his significant power in not just the media, but the kind of the whole fucking discourse of everything is interviewing predominantly people with conspiracy beliefs and making sometimes quite dangerous claims, but it going almost entirely unchallenged, which is why you and Cecil decided to do some relatively gentle challenging in the sense that you're hoping to reach an audience of people who might not be skeptics already but are wanting to, you know, might be gently challenged and corrected on some of the stuff that they might be hearing on Joe Rogan.
[00:16:31.880 --> 00:16:34.920] Not just ridiculing it, but try to explain why it's wrong, yeah.
[00:16:34.920 --> 00:16:37.720] Don't worry, I'm not making this episode an entire long plug of your podcast.
[00:16:37.800 --> 00:16:39.240] I'm very surprised, but I'm enjoying it.
[00:16:39.400 --> 00:16:47.320] But I wanted to set the scene a little bit because the topic I'm talking about today originally came to us through you picking it up from one of your listeners to Joe Rogan Experience.
[00:16:47.320 --> 00:16:57.000] And I think for me, that's made me realize that I probably unconsciously dismiss the Joe Rogan experience as just a place where the cranks go to talk about their crank views.
[00:16:57.000 --> 00:17:18.760] But with a listenership quite as significant as it is, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume, and actually fairly well documented, that there's a sizable chunk of the Rogan audience who wouldn't describe themselves as conspiracy theorists, who maybe would describe themselves as critical thinkers, or be open to more, a wider variety of views and viewpoints.
[00:17:18.760 --> 00:17:30.840] And in fact, researchers argue that the show's appeal is largely that it offers a space for men to engage with masculinity without going quite as far as the incel pick apart is parts of the manosphere.
[00:17:30.840 --> 00:17:36.280] So it's somewhere that, because it is a predominantly male audience, yes, and a presumably male guests as well.
[00:17:36.280 --> 00:17:37.560] Almost exclusively male guests.
[00:17:37.560 --> 00:17:57.760] I think it's like 90% of the guests and predominantly talking about male topics as well, or talking about topics that are of interest to men, and is almost seen as a rebellion against that kind of being overly emasculated, as people would say, but also not going as far as the Andrew Tates of the world.
[00:17:57.760 --> 00:17:58.720] Yeah, and that's true.
[00:17:58.720 --> 00:18:05.840] And one of the things that's been really surprising is how completely conflict-averse the entire experience is.
[00:18:05.840 --> 00:18:12.400] For something that is meant to be like hyper-masculine, we're not that this feminized, we're not this kind of neutered version.
[00:18:12.640 --> 00:18:13.840] We can say what we like.
[00:18:13.840 --> 00:18:15.040] They never disagree.
[00:18:15.040 --> 00:18:17.280] There is no conflict on that show almost at all.
[00:18:17.280 --> 00:18:26.240] There was one recently where there was a debate between Douglas Murray and a guy called Dave something or other that we're going to touch on about Gaza and Ukraine.
[00:18:26.240 --> 00:18:29.760] But other than that, Joe Roganosh offers no conflict at all.
[00:18:29.760 --> 00:18:31.760] He rolls with whatever's coming.
[00:18:31.760 --> 00:18:42.320] But then the other thing that he does is interview guests from a really wide range of backgrounds, from scientists to comedians to the really deep conspiracy theorists.
[00:18:42.320 --> 00:18:50.320] So there's something of interest to a wider audience than we might expect if we just dismiss it as where the cranks go to talk about crank topics.
[00:18:51.040 --> 00:19:02.080] There are people who will be listening because, well, I hate when they talk about conspiracy theories and the flat earth and whatever, but I find it quite interesting when they talk about this scientific topic or, you know, the issues with sleep or whatever other topics are.
[00:19:02.560 --> 00:19:09.840] They'll have Woody Harrelson on, but when they're talking to Woody Harrelson, they'll randomly start talking about some health claim or some conspiracy claim.
[00:19:09.840 --> 00:19:11.440] And that's what they'll be doing with Woody Harrelson.
[00:19:11.440 --> 00:19:19.320] So people who like an actor will watch the show and they'll say, well, I don't believe everything that Joe's always saying, but then they can't tell which bits not to believe.
[00:19:19.120 --> 00:19:19.480] Yeah.
[00:19:19.680 --> 00:19:22.800] And so they'll leave some stuff behind, but then pick up some random bits here and there.
[00:19:22.800 --> 00:19:24.960] And I understand he's a pretty good interviewer.
[00:19:25.080 --> 00:19:27.280] He's he makes his guests feel at ease.
[00:19:27.280 --> 00:19:32.680] He helps draw them into conversation and deviates through a wide-ranging variety of topics.
[00:19:33.080 --> 00:19:39.400] Yeah, I don't think he's a good interviewer, but he's an easy person for his guests to talk to, which isn't quite the same thing, but yeah.
[00:19:39.720 --> 00:19:46.760] And presumably an easy listener as well, given he's done comedies and commentating, I'm sure he's reasonably entertaining to listen.
[00:19:47.560 --> 00:19:48.680] I find it quite hard.
[00:19:49.000 --> 00:19:56.120] People have said, in articles that I've read, people have said that part of the reason they listen is because he's just entertaining to listen to, and they don't believe all that bullshit.
[00:19:56.520 --> 00:19:58.680] And obviously some of these people will be justifying it to themselves.
[00:19:58.840 --> 00:20:00.840] And it depends when as well, but yeah, sure.
[00:20:00.840 --> 00:20:12.520] So that means some of the ideas that are circulated on there are unusual ideas that are suddenly accessible to a really wide audience and can then start to take root.
[00:20:12.520 --> 00:20:20.600] Take, for example, Fen Benzadol, which you think is somewhat of a mild obsession of Joe's at the moment that he's mentioning it with some regularity on the show.
[00:20:20.600 --> 00:20:21.640] Yeah, he keeps bringing it up.
[00:20:21.640 --> 00:20:21.880] Yeah.
[00:20:21.880 --> 00:20:29.080] So what will happen with Joe Rogan is he'll find out about something at some point, often from a guest who's come on and said, oh, but what about this?
[00:20:29.080 --> 00:20:33.240] He'll have it in his mind and then he'll keep bringing it up in subsequent interviews.
[00:20:33.240 --> 00:20:40.440] I described him recently as he's like the guy from Memento, but if somebody took away his tattoo gun and gave him an Etcher sketch.
[00:20:40.440 --> 00:20:45.160] So like he can retain some piece of knowledge for some degree of time, but they'll fade very quickly.
[00:20:45.160 --> 00:20:47.240] But he'll keep it for several episodes.
[00:20:47.240 --> 00:20:49.720] And Fen Bender's also something he keeps coming back to.
[00:20:50.040 --> 00:21:01.720] So the mention that you shared with me, which would arguably be the first mention of it on his show, given the phrasing around how he described it, was from October 2023.
[00:21:01.720 --> 00:21:11.320] So he's been on the train, the Fen Benzadol train, for a while when he was talking to Graham Hancock, pseudoarchaeologist, about the cancer diagnosis of Flint Dibble.
[00:21:11.320 --> 00:21:21.920] So Flint's an archaeologist and former QED speaker, and at the time, he'd agreed to debate Graham Hancock on the Joe Rogan experience, but the date had to be moved because of his cancer treatment.
[00:21:21.920 --> 00:21:26.320] And so on the episode, Joe spontaneously brings up fembendazole.
[00:21:26.480 --> 00:21:30.000] This is something he's initiated entirely.
[00:21:30.000 --> 00:21:33.040] It's not come from a guest as far as this episode goes.
[00:21:33.040 --> 00:21:36.400] Yeah, they talk about why Flint's not there and say he's got cancer.
[00:21:36.400 --> 00:21:38.480] And then Joe's like, I wonder if he's taken Fembendazole.
[00:21:38.880 --> 00:21:39.840] I wonder if he's having this.
[00:21:39.840 --> 00:21:40.880] He should be having this.
[00:21:40.880 --> 00:21:45.040] Yeah, it literally, he literally just generates it from almost nowhere.
[00:21:45.040 --> 00:21:49.440] It seems clear that he's come across it on Instagram or Twitter because he can't remember the name of it.
[00:21:49.440 --> 00:21:54.000] So he goes to his saved posts on one of those two platforms to try and find the name of it.
[00:21:54.000 --> 00:21:57.920] And he says it's some sort of very low-cost drug that's being repurposed.
[00:21:57.920 --> 00:22:04.160] I think it's some sort of anti-parasitic drug that's being repurposed and is having supposedly remarkable results.
[00:22:04.160 --> 00:22:10.560] He goes on to say that fembenzadole has at least 12 proven anti-cancer mechanisms in vitro and in vivo.
[00:22:10.560 --> 00:22:12.240] It disrupts micro.
[00:22:12.240 --> 00:22:14.000] So he's reading this from a web page.
[00:22:14.000 --> 00:22:38.000] He says it disrupts microtubulate polymerization, a major mechanism, induces cell cycle, whatever that means, arrest, blocks glucose transport and impairs glucose utilization by cancer cells, increases p53 tumor suppressor levels, inhibits cancer cell viability, inhibits cancer cell migration and invasion, induces apoptosis, induces autophagy is what he means.
[00:22:38.000 --> 00:22:39.040] It's not what he says.
[00:22:39.040 --> 00:22:44.080] Induces, they're trying to get me with all these words, he says, and then says a word that he has invented.
[00:22:44.480 --> 00:23:00.920] Preoptosis and necrosis, induces differentiation and senescence, inhibits tumor angiogenesis, reduces colony formation and inhibits stemness in cancer cells, inhibits drug resistance and sensitizes cells to conventional chemo as well as radiation therapy.
[00:23:00.920 --> 00:23:02.360] And he does just read that.
[00:22:59.920 --> 00:23:03.080] He is literally.
[00:23:03.400 --> 00:23:10.520] He pulls up the website for a company selling fembenzado and is literally just reading it off the page.
[00:23:10.520 --> 00:23:16.920] Yeah, and like you knew what many of those words were and you found it difficult to get through that in a way that you kept interested in.
[00:23:16.920 --> 00:23:19.560] He doesn't know any of those words, but he's still just reading that to his audience.
[00:23:19.800 --> 00:23:25.080] So when you said he's quite entertaining to listen to, the problem was in my brain, I was like, well, look, because it's quite often that.
[00:23:25.080 --> 00:23:28.680] He'll bring up a website and just read blocks of text he doesn't understand.
[00:23:28.680 --> 00:23:31.400] Well, I think he did it more interestingly than I just did it.
[00:23:33.560 --> 00:23:39.400] He goes on to say that there's a very similar drug in the same family that's already been approved by the FDA, and that is menbenzadol.
[00:23:39.400 --> 00:23:43.000] And it is in several clinical trials right now for brain cancers and colon cancers.
[00:23:43.000 --> 00:23:47.320] And he says, so why are there no fembenzadol clinical trials for cancer?
[00:23:47.640 --> 00:23:51.480] That's the question posed on the website that he's reading from.
[00:23:51.480 --> 00:23:53.320] So what is fembenzadol?
[00:23:53.320 --> 00:24:03.880] He is writing that it is a wide-spectrum anti-parasitic medication which is used for sheep, cattle, horses, fish, dogs, cats, rabbits, and seals, as well as a few other animals.
[00:24:03.960 --> 00:24:05.720] I did not see seals to me at the end of that.
[00:24:05.720 --> 00:24:11.000] It's used to treat a range of gut parasites like hookworms, roundworms, and tapeworms.
[00:24:11.000 --> 00:24:20.120] And the way it works is by binding to a protein called tubulin, which makes up microtubules, exactly as Joe Rogan says, reading from the website that he's reading from.
[00:24:20.280 --> 00:24:31.720] So microtubules are a crucial part of the cell structural system, and when microtubules can't form properly due to the drug binding to them, the cells eventually die through our root.
[00:24:31.720 --> 00:24:37.560] Membenzadole, the other drug that Roger mentions, is essentially the human version of fembenzadole.
[00:24:37.720 --> 00:24:40.280] So, where we give sheep, dogs, et cetera.
[00:24:40.520 --> 00:24:49.520] Fembenzadole, we give humans menbenzadol to treat thread worms and other gut-based parasitic infections.
[00:24:49.840 --> 00:24:52.320] Is it the same thing chemically, or are they distinctions?
[00:24:53.040 --> 00:24:54.320] I think they're slightly different.
[00:24:54.320 --> 00:24:54.720] Okay.
[00:24:54.720 --> 00:24:58.640] But it's doing the same thing and it's treating the same thing.
[00:24:58.640 --> 00:25:05.920] But Joe's advocating the animal version of it rather than the ivermectin days again, isn't it?
[00:25:05.920 --> 00:25:07.200] Well, it is very much that.
[00:25:07.440 --> 00:25:10.880] Yeah, he's advocating the animal version of it rather than the human version.
[00:25:11.200 --> 00:25:16.160] Because he says the menbendazole is already given to people and has some good evidence.
[00:25:16.160 --> 00:25:18.160] So why aren't the trials for fembendazole?
[00:25:18.720 --> 00:25:20.720] Because the menbendazole is given to people.
[00:25:20.720 --> 00:25:26.400] And I think when you say it's the ivermectin thing again, I think it is the ivermectin thing again because it was just after, this is October 2023.
[00:25:26.400 --> 00:25:26.720] Sure.
[00:25:26.720 --> 00:25:27.840] Yeah, parasites were.
[00:25:28.080 --> 00:25:32.560] Well, we'll come back to the timing of all this because there's more to it than that.
[00:25:32.560 --> 00:25:39.600] So, surprisingly, much of what Rogan reads from the website is actually scientifically pretty reasonable.
[00:25:39.600 --> 00:25:42.320] That would be a surprise to him because he's no idea what he read.
[00:25:42.960 --> 00:25:54.880] Drugs that bind to tubulin will have an impact on things like apoptosis and cell migration and autophagy and differentiation and senescence and p53, which is a very frequently mutated protein when it comes to cancer.
[00:25:54.880 --> 00:26:00.240] And drugs that bind to microtubules are already given as anti-cancer medications.
[00:26:00.240 --> 00:26:10.560] For example, docetaxel is a chemotherapy which targets microtubules and is given for a range of cancers, including breast, lung, prostate, gastric, head and neck, and ovarian cancer.
[00:26:10.880 --> 00:26:21.680] And Rogan is right about something else too: that there are pre-clinical trials and some very early clinical trials investigating membenzadole for use in cancer treatment that shows some promise.
[00:26:21.680 --> 00:26:26.720] And there are early pre-clinical trials investigating fembenzadole for cancer therapeutics too.
[00:26:26.720 --> 00:26:30.040] So these are being tested as potential anti-cancer treatments.
[00:26:30.040 --> 00:26:32.680] We're still very, very early stages.
[00:26:29.600 --> 00:26:36.040] We're not ready for these to be used in humans yet, really.
[00:26:36.600 --> 00:26:41.560] But we are doing research into it because there is scientific plausibility that they might be useful.
[00:26:41.880 --> 00:26:52.520] But here's the issue: so, firstly, the fact that these two treatments aren't being rolled out for patient use yet has absolutely nothing to do with big pharma not thinking they're marketable.
[00:26:52.520 --> 00:27:04.440] So that's what he says in the interview: he thinks the reason these aren't being sold is because they're not marketable, they're cheap medications, and you can't make money out of that.
[00:27:04.440 --> 00:27:05.400] Which is not true.
[00:27:05.400 --> 00:27:13.880] Getting a medication from conception through to patient use is a phenomenally expensive process with a really high failure rate.
[00:27:13.880 --> 00:27:25.240] Pharmaceutical companies love an opportunity to use a drug that's already reliably used in humans, that's already got safety profile data, that's already been taken through to market.
[00:27:25.240 --> 00:27:28.920] We know that it's, you know, it's good for some things.
[00:27:28.920 --> 00:27:34.280] We're starting from a really high level already before we then start trying to find another use for it.
[00:27:34.280 --> 00:27:37.720] That's really valuable to a pharmaceutical company.
[00:27:37.720 --> 00:27:40.920] We also already know it does the thing that we want it to do.
[00:27:40.920 --> 00:27:42.680] We know it binds to tubulin.
[00:27:42.680 --> 00:27:46.840] We know that when it does that, it disrupts microtubule formation.
[00:27:46.840 --> 00:27:59.160] We can use various different ways to design drugs where we're looking at, oh, I think this molecule will bind to tubulin, but then even if it does, the cell finds a way around it and it doesn't disrupt the microtubule formation at all.
[00:27:59.160 --> 00:28:04.200] And so you've spent ages getting this drug through and realize, oh, it doesn't do what we wanted it to do.
[00:28:04.200 --> 00:28:08.440] It should do what we want it to do, but it turns out it's more complicated in the process.
[00:28:08.440 --> 00:28:13.480] So it's really useful to have a drug that we know already does the thing we want it to do.
[00:28:13.480 --> 00:28:15.520] And we see this in business all the time.
[00:28:14.680 --> 00:28:17.520] Like that's basically what drop shipping is.
[00:28:18.240 --> 00:28:24.320] It's taking something that already exists and bringing it to another market for a higher price to make a good profit.
[00:28:24.640 --> 00:28:34.560] And in fact, anyone with any ounce of business sense knows full well that it doesn't take something being available for cheaper elsewhere to prohibit sales for that thing at a higher price.
[00:28:34.560 --> 00:28:45.200] People will spend more for the same thing all the time for a whole range of reasons, including brand loyalty, choosing a trusted source, convenience, or accessibility.
[00:28:45.200 --> 00:28:50.160] Yeah, and you can join our Patreon if you go to patreon.com forward slash getricok.
[00:28:50.160 --> 00:29:00.400] If fembenzadol was approved as an anti-cancer medication, I guarantee that healthcare organizations are going to want to buy it from a pharmaceutical company rather than a veterinary practice.
[00:29:00.400 --> 00:29:01.200] Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:01.200 --> 00:29:08.480] And patients are much more likely to want to take it if it's prescribed by their oncologist than buying it online from a random source.
[00:29:08.480 --> 00:29:23.440] I appreciate that's a little harder in places like America where insurance companies or lack of insurance come into the equation, but there's plenty of ways to justify why it's important to buy a medication from a pharmaceutical company, even if the drug is identical to one sold elsewhere.
[00:29:23.440 --> 00:29:34.400] But even taking that out the equation, just being able to sell the same product for a higher price, membenzadol and fembenzadol aren't really great drugs for this purpose at the moment.
[00:29:34.400 --> 00:29:38.720] So the problem is they don't pass across the gastrointestinal barrier very well at all.
[00:29:38.720 --> 00:29:42.080] That's great for an anti-parasitic drug that's given for gut parasites.
[00:29:42.080 --> 00:29:43.040] Yeah, that's where they are.
[00:29:43.040 --> 00:29:50.320] Because the parasites are there and it means the toxicity levels for the patient are really low because it's not getting into the main system.
[00:29:50.320 --> 00:29:53.520] It's just staying where the parasites are and then passing through.
[00:29:53.520 --> 00:30:02.200] So it's perfect for what it does, and it means that these drugs have very low toxicity for the patient, but really decent toxicity for the parasites.
[00:29:59.520 --> 00:30:04.520] It makes it a really safe and reliable treatment.
[00:30:05.160 --> 00:30:11.080] But if we want to treat cancer, we need the medication to get further around the body depending on where the tumor is.
[00:30:11.080 --> 00:30:17.720] We're not necessarily testing this, these drugs for stomach cancer, we're testing them for brain cancer.
[00:30:17.720 --> 00:30:20.840] If it's staying in the gut, it's not getting to the brain.
[00:30:21.160 --> 00:30:38.200] So if Membenzadol and Fembenzadol are to be used as anti-cancer medications, we need to figure out a way around that, which might mean changing the molecular structure of the medication somehow, adding something to the drug structure to help it get into the system better, or changing how it's administered perhaps.
[00:30:38.200 --> 00:30:41.880] So instead of an oral tablet, maybe it's injected instead.
[00:30:41.880 --> 00:30:49.320] And these are things that pharmaceutical companies can test and patent so that their version of the drug is the effective and saleable one.
[00:30:49.320 --> 00:30:49.720] Yeah.
[00:30:49.720 --> 00:30:52.760] So that you're not selling the same thing as the cheap version anymore.
[00:30:52.760 --> 00:30:56.440] You're selling your optimized version that now gets into the system better.
[00:30:56.760 --> 00:31:02.280] Answering the question asked earlier in the interview, why aren't there clinical trials for fembenzidol?
[00:31:02.280 --> 00:31:06.600] His guest, Graham Hancock, which is just unfathomable to me that this is the conversation they're having.
[00:31:06.920 --> 00:31:07.880] No, yeah, yeah.
[00:31:08.040 --> 00:31:21.160] Like, we're talking about clinical trials of an anti-parasitic drug to treat cancer between a comedian and a UFC commentator and a guy who thinks that aliens made the pyramids.
[00:31:21.160 --> 00:31:23.960] Ancient civilization is not necessarily aliens, but yes.
[00:31:24.200 --> 00:31:26.040] Yeah, he doesn't necessarily say aliens.
[00:31:26.040 --> 00:31:27.880] He's also not an archaeologist or a historian.
[00:31:27.880 --> 00:31:29.560] He's just a journalist who does that to do that.
[00:31:29.560 --> 00:31:30.760] Yeah, absolutely.
[00:31:30.760 --> 00:31:42.200] And it came up because of a guy they know who had, like, because Flintibble had cancer, they brought this up as unasked for medical advice to somebody who wasn't there in front of an audience of millions.
[00:31:42.200 --> 00:31:43.400] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:31:43.720 --> 00:31:48.080] So Graham Hancock said an answer to that question, why aren't there clinical trials for fembenzidol?
[00:31:44.920 --> 00:31:50.320] His answer was, big pharma doesn't see a margin in it.
[00:31:50.640 --> 00:31:54.800] Which is amazing because prior to that conversation, he hadn't heard of fembenzazole.
[00:31:55.040 --> 00:31:56.960] It's the first time he knew about it.
[00:31:56.960 --> 00:32:00.720] He had an answer to that question, despite it being something he just learned about.
[00:32:00.720 --> 00:32:05.840] Well, to be fair, he did imply that he'd heard about it, but he just like he'd seen some articles, he hadn't read too much about it.
[00:32:06.000 --> 00:32:06.720] That sounds bullshit.
[00:32:06.960 --> 00:32:08.240] That one's bullshit.
[00:32:09.440 --> 00:32:10.960] The classic, yeah, I know what you're talking about.
[00:32:10.960 --> 00:32:13.360] Oh, yeah, I think I heard something, but not all the details.
[00:32:13.360 --> 00:32:14.240] You tell me.
[00:32:14.560 --> 00:32:18.320] I know, but the listeners maybe don't, so why don't you explain it to them?
[00:32:18.640 --> 00:32:22.640] To which Rogan says, I mean, if that, who knows?
[00:32:22.640 --> 00:32:26.240] But if that is the case, I mean, what an enemy of the people.
[00:32:26.240 --> 00:32:29.520] They're preventing information and preventing people from using things.
[00:32:29.520 --> 00:32:32.240] So he's not even saying that that is the reason.
[00:32:32.240 --> 00:32:33.040] He's implying it.
[00:32:33.040 --> 00:32:35.040] He's leaving it to the audience to make a decision.
[00:32:35.040 --> 00:32:36.880] But he's flipped the narrative.
[00:32:36.880 --> 00:32:40.720] Instead of saying, look, researchers have found that Membenzadol might be useful.
[00:32:40.720 --> 00:32:44.400] So they're starting to do pre-clinical trials and then clinical trials.
[00:32:44.400 --> 00:32:47.680] And then they're following the same route with Fembenzadole, a similar drug.
[00:32:47.680 --> 00:32:52.080] They've just started a bit later on, so they haven't got as far with the clinical trials yet.
[00:32:52.080 --> 00:32:58.320] He's now saying, well, why are they withholding progress on Fembenzado if they're moving forward with Membenzado?
[00:32:58.640 --> 00:33:03.040] The truth is that we don't know yet that these two medications are reliable for cancer use.
[00:33:03.040 --> 00:33:05.120] We don't have enough data to say either way.
[00:33:05.120 --> 00:33:11.680] There are countless medications that are promising for cancer that turn out to be useless once we give it to human patients.
[00:33:11.680 --> 00:33:18.640] We can't rely on the fact that it works in cell or animal models to be a reliable predictor that it will work in patients.
[00:33:18.640 --> 00:33:20.640] There's a long way to go in terms of testing.
[00:33:20.640 --> 00:33:32.440] And the frustrating thing as well is if the testing does actually show that it is effective, Joe Rogan will take it as evidence that he was right all along and they've just now come out and accept that he was right, rather than the process just happening as you want the process to happen.
[00:33:29.520 --> 00:33:33.960] As the process should happen, yeah.
[00:33:34.280 --> 00:33:42.600] And in fact, membenzadol, while promising for treating and even possibly preventing some cancers, there's also some data that it might accelerate the progression of some cancers too.
[00:33:42.600 --> 00:33:45.160] So this is why the research is really important.
[00:33:45.160 --> 00:33:57.880] We need to do more research to make sure that A, it is effective as an anti-cancer medication, B, it can get to where it needs to get to treat those cancers, and C, it's safe for use as an anti-cancer medicine, which, you know, we don't know.
[00:33:57.880 --> 00:34:03.480] There's a lot of research left to do, and until then, it's just not safe to use this as a medication to treat cancer.
[00:34:03.800 --> 00:34:04.680] But what's the harm?
[00:34:04.680 --> 00:34:11.320] I just told you that these two medications are low toxicity for humans, and that is certainly true, but they're not zero toxicity.
[00:34:11.320 --> 00:34:16.840] Of course, there are risks associated with taking the wrong medication for your cancer diagnosis.
[00:34:16.840 --> 00:34:19.720] We need to make sure that we're being safe taking something that works.
[00:34:19.720 --> 00:34:26.520] And if we eschew what the oncologist says and take something else, then we might be avoiding something that truly works in favor of something that doesn't.
[00:34:26.520 --> 00:34:32.040] Membenzadol, for example, is in clinical trials for gliomas, a brain cancer that we find exceptionally hard to treat.
[00:34:32.040 --> 00:34:44.360] But if you decide to take it experimentally for something like breast cancer, which we're really very good at treating, then you're potentially missing an opportunity to take a treatment that works in favor of something we just don't have the evidence for.
[00:34:45.240 --> 00:34:59.800] But in addition, there have been cases where patients have taken fembenzadol and been considerably unwell, including one patient in Japan with non-small cell lung cancer who took fembenzadol based on social media advice and ended up with drug-induced liver damage.
[00:34:59.800 --> 00:35:13.320] The patient took fembenzadol for a month, had severe liver damage, which resolved when she stopped taking the drug, and in the meantime, there was no evidence of tumour shrinking in her cancer, which was reported in 2021, long before Rogan got talking about fembenzidol.
[00:35:13.320 --> 00:35:21.120] In fact, fembenzidol has circulated as an alternative therapy for cancer treatment on social media for a while, since at least 2016.
[00:35:22.000 --> 00:35:44.240] A study published out of South Korea titled How Cancer Patients Get Fake Cancer Information from TV to YouTube, a qualitative study focusing on fembenzadol scandal, explains that the fembenzadol scandal was an incident wherein false information that fembenzadol, an anti-halmintic used to treat various parasites in dogs, cured terminal lung cancer spread among patients.
[00:35:44.240 --> 00:35:51.360] It started with the claim of American cancer patient Joe Tippins, but rather became sensational in South Korea.
[00:35:51.680 --> 00:35:58.560] The truth is, Joe Tippins, the American cancer patient, was also part of a clinical trial for a new anti-cancer medication.
[00:35:58.560 --> 00:36:10.960] But under the care of a veterinarian, he chose to attribute his survival to taking what is now referred to as the Joe Tippins protocol of fembenzadol plus vitamin E supplement, CBD oil and bioavailable curcumin.
[00:36:11.280 --> 00:36:19.280] The news really took off in South Korea when a local comedian shares his intention to take fembenzadol for his cancer diagnosis.
[00:36:19.280 --> 00:36:26.640] The comedian later shared that he would not take or recommend fembenzadol and ultimately died from his cancer in 2021.
[00:36:27.280 --> 00:36:47.360] But in a study researching the impact of the social media misinformation around fembenzadol in South Korea, a survey of 86 people living with cancer showed that about half of the cancer patients had taken non-prescription anti-helmintics during their chemotherapy and 96.5% of them did not inform their clinicians.
[00:36:47.360 --> 00:36:48.160] Jesus.
[00:36:48.480 --> 00:37:00.000] The paper points out that the term drug repurposing or drug repositioning refers to the novel use of a drug previously developed or approved for a specific clinical purpose to treat a disease for which it was not originally designed.
[00:37:00.280 --> 00:37:09.320] And it goes on to say that this phenomenon is particularly common in the field of medicine and can be attributed to the long period of time required for and the high cost of drug development.
[00:37:09.320 --> 00:37:18.200] Existing approved drugs can be made available within a shorter time period by decreasing the number of required clinical trials and reducing the number of process validations and stability tests.
[00:37:18.200 --> 00:37:22.840] Patients can rapidly access an additional treatment option at a reasonable price.
[00:37:23.480 --> 00:37:27.400] So Rogan's talking about something that's already been around for a while.
[00:37:27.400 --> 00:37:32.120] People have been talking about fembenzadol as an option to treat cancer for ages and it doesn't work.
[00:37:32.120 --> 00:37:32.920] There's no evidence for it.
[00:37:32.920 --> 00:37:36.200] It's clearly taken off in some areas and become quite popular.
[00:37:36.200 --> 00:37:40.600] But he's in how he talks about it, he's reasonably balanced about it.
[00:37:40.600 --> 00:37:46.920] So in his interview with Hancock, he never actively says that people should take fembenzadol.
[00:37:46.920 --> 00:37:55.160] And even a flint dibble, who he is offering like unsolicited health advice to, he says, I hope he's interested in even just examining it.
[00:37:55.160 --> 00:37:58.200] He's not saying he should take this.
[00:37:58.200 --> 00:38:01.560] He's saying, you know, I'm giving you information for you to make a call.
[00:38:01.560 --> 00:38:15.240] He even says in his preamble about it, the problem is when these people that are creating these incredible drugs, these scientists and doctors and these people that are having these amazing medical advancements, they're connected to something that just wants to make money.
[00:38:15.240 --> 00:38:26.200] The people that are selling the drugs and the people that are running the companies are completely different than the scientists that are legitimately developing these things, and many of them turn out to be very effective for all sorts of ailments and disease.
[00:38:26.200 --> 00:38:29.640] He's positioning himself as not being anti-science.
[00:38:29.640 --> 00:38:31.400] He will tell you the science.
[00:38:31.400 --> 00:38:35.960] I'll tell you the science slightly wrong, like not the wrong science, but with the wrong inflection.
[00:38:36.280 --> 00:38:37.480] He's not anti-medicine.
[00:38:37.480 --> 00:38:41.720] He just wants to give people access to the best science and the best medicine.
[00:38:41.720 --> 00:38:47.200] And that will be fine if Membenzadol or Fembenzado were proven to be useful treatments for cancer.
[00:38:44.920 --> 00:38:48.320] But we're just not there yet.
[00:38:48.560 --> 00:38:53.680] And he's just then just telling you the science, just telling you the medicine from a balanced position.
[00:38:53.840 --> 00:38:56.880] And I think that's true at that point because that's first learning about it.
[00:38:56.880 --> 00:39:00.640] But then I was just trying to check to scan through to see if I can find other mentions.
[00:39:00.640 --> 00:39:04.480] I haven't found one initially, but I'm fairly certain when he brings it up at other times.
[00:39:04.480 --> 00:39:08.000] He's not bringing it up to talk about it from a balanced science point of view.
[00:39:08.400 --> 00:39:12.880] And we know there's all sorts of things that they won't even look into, things like Fembendazole.
[00:39:12.880 --> 00:39:22.800] And that's it, is that when you keep coming back to something that's been locked into your memory like that, we do find the shorthands, we do find that we resolve it in our brains as something else.
[00:39:22.800 --> 00:39:30.240] So here he's being balanced because he's only just learned about it, he's only just sharing about it, and he's reading it fresh and has the more balanced position.
[00:39:30.240 --> 00:39:37.680] But the next time he talks about it, it's like, yeah, it's like that drug that definitely works that we talked about last time and now it's resolved in his memory as something slightly different.
[00:39:37.680 --> 00:39:44.000] Yeah, the annoying thing is fembendazole is such a specific long word that he can't always get right.
[00:39:44.000 --> 00:39:55.440] So any tools that I have to search for specific keywords through the transcript, either he's not saying it quite right or the transcript doesn't understand it and doesn't transcribe it right, which means I can't just go into the database and say, when did he last talk about fembendazole?
[00:39:55.600 --> 00:40:00.880] Yeah, I tried the same to search through the tool that you sent me and I couldn't find fembenzadole.
[00:40:00.880 --> 00:40:07.520] I did search through, and I nearly went through and countered, but it was too many and I was too tired to count.
[00:40:07.520 --> 00:40:11.920] I searched cancer and he mentions cancer a lot.
[00:40:11.920 --> 00:40:17.760] Yeah, four and a half thousand results from the scan that from a thousand episodes.
[00:40:17.720 --> 00:40:19.840] Well, so on average, four times an episode.
[00:40:20.080 --> 00:40:26.800] Yeah, so it that tool that you give will have multiple, will give you every mentions, there'll be multiple within each episode.
[00:40:27.040 --> 00:40:29.080] Within a thousand episodes, you think, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:40:28.560 --> 00:40:34.360] So I nearly went through and counted like how many episodes this year he mentioned cancer in.
[00:40:28.720 --> 00:40:35.400] Yeah, that's too many.
[00:40:29.120 --> 00:40:35.960] That's too hard to do.
[00:40:36.360 --> 00:40:43.480] There's two, it's not too hard to do, but like he's released a lot of episodes in 2025 alone, so it just would have taken some time.
[00:40:43.480 --> 00:40:46.680] Tell me about it.
[00:40:46.680 --> 00:40:54.600] But now we're in a world where misinformation is dominant, where people who are living with cancer are bombarded with advice and recommendations of ways to treat their cancer.
[00:40:54.600 --> 00:40:59.800] Sometimes it is tempting to take advice from a podcast if you trust the hosts.
[00:40:59.800 --> 00:41:10.360] And if people have been listening to Joe Rogan interviewing a lot of experts, you know, he doesn't just interview cranks, he also interviews scientists and researchers and whatever.
[00:41:10.360 --> 00:41:17.560] And they might also have crank views on things, but you know, that can be hard to unpick when you're just listening to an interview show.
[00:41:17.560 --> 00:41:29.480] If you now trust the podcast host, then it could be tempting to take recommendations of ways to treat your cancer, especially when you're bombarded by all sorts of information in the wider circle.
[00:41:29.800 --> 00:41:38.200] But we've said it before, and we will say it again: don't take medical advice from a podcast, especially not the Joe Rogan experience, and especially not Skeptics with a K.
[00:41:43.000 --> 00:41:47.320] So, for Liverpool Skeptic of the Pub, we have a social event this evening at Dr.
[00:41:47.320 --> 00:41:48.440] Duncan's on St.
[00:41:48.440 --> 00:41:49.320] John's Lane.
[00:41:49.320 --> 00:41:51.560] And if you're in the Liverpool area, you should definitely come along to that.
[00:41:51.560 --> 00:41:52.680] That's going to be from 8 p.m.
[00:41:52.760 --> 00:41:53.400] I'm going to be there.
[00:41:53.400 --> 00:41:54.120] Are you going to do it?
[00:41:54.200 --> 00:41:54.760] I'll be there.
[00:41:54.760 --> 00:41:55.720] I'm pretty sure I'll be there.
[00:41:55.720 --> 00:41:57.000] It should be fun, should be interesting.
[00:41:57.000 --> 00:41:58.440] It's always nice, always enjoyable.
[00:41:58.600 --> 00:42:00.200] It's going to be for me in time.
[00:42:00.200 --> 00:42:03.240] And yes, if you're in the Liverpool area, definitely come along to that one.
[00:42:03.240 --> 00:42:09.160] And next week, on the 6th of May, the tickets for QED are going to be going on sale.
[00:42:09.160 --> 00:42:10.360] We can't do it any more than that.
[00:42:10.360 --> 00:42:10.520] Nope.
[00:42:10.680 --> 00:42:11.320] Tickets will be on the side.
[00:42:11.400 --> 00:42:13.080] We can't tell you any more than that right now.
[00:42:13.320 --> 00:42:15.120] We literally can't tell you any more than that.
[00:42:14.600 --> 00:42:17.840] But yes, on the 6th of May, that's from 3 p.m.
[00:42:17.920 --> 00:42:18.880] UK time.
[00:42:18.880 --> 00:42:20.560] Local times may vary.
[00:42:14.760 --> 00:42:21.120] And you should.
[00:42:21.760 --> 00:42:23.840] UK time, which is BST at 200.
[00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:25.200] British summer time at the moment.
[00:42:25.200 --> 00:42:25.680] Yeah.
[00:42:25.680 --> 00:42:28.560] Yeah, you'll find information about that at qbdcon.org.
[00:42:28.560 --> 00:42:29.600] It's the last QED.
[00:42:29.840 --> 00:42:31.760] And yes, it will be the final QED.
[00:42:32.960 --> 00:42:34.000] Will be the final QED.
[00:42:34.240 --> 00:42:35.120] Last chance to come.
[00:42:35.120 --> 00:42:40.400] So if you're one of those people who's always said, I'll get to QED one day, this is your last chance to do it.
[00:42:40.400 --> 00:42:42.400] And I'm talking to you, Jake.
[00:42:43.440 --> 00:42:46.880] So just narrow cast this one by one.
[00:42:47.280 --> 00:42:51.120] Yeah, we'll sell our tickets one by one.
[00:42:51.440 --> 00:42:54.000] Aside from that, then I think that is all we have time for.
[00:42:54.000 --> 00:42:54.640] I think it is.
[00:42:54.640 --> 00:42:57.200] All that remains then is we thank Marsh for coming on today.
[00:42:57.200 --> 00:42:57.680] Cheers.
[00:42:57.680 --> 00:42:58.880] And thank you to Alice.
[00:42:58.880 --> 00:42:59.440] Thank you.
[00:42:59.440 --> 00:43:02.160] We have been Skeptics with a K, and we will see you next time.
[00:43:02.160 --> 00:43:02.880] Bye now.
[00:43:02.880 --> 00:43:03.840] Bye.
[00:43:08.640 --> 00:43:13.760] Skeptics with a K is produced by Skeptic Media in association with the Merseyside Skeptic Society.
[00:43:13.760 --> 00:43:22.720] For questions or comments, email podcast at skepticswithakay.org and you can find out more about Merseyside Skeptics at merseyside skeptics.org.uk.

Prompt 2: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 3: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 4: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Full Transcript

[00:00:00.880 --> 00:00:08.720] A mochi moment from Tara, who writes, For years, all my doctor said was eat less and move more, which never worked.
[00:00:08.720 --> 00:00:10.080] But you know what does?
[00:00:10.080 --> 00:00:13.280] The simple eating tips from my nutritionist at Mochi.
[00:00:13.280 --> 00:00:20.000] And after losing over 30 pounds, I can say you're not just another GLP1 source, you're a life source.
[00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:21.040] Thanks, Tara.
[00:00:21.040 --> 00:00:23.600] I'm Myra Amit, founder of Mochi Health.
[00:00:23.600 --> 00:00:27.360] To find your mochi moment, visit joinmochi.com.
[00:00:27.360 --> 00:00:30.640] Tara is a mochi member, compensated for her story.
[00:00:37.040 --> 00:00:44.960] It is Thursday, the 1st of May, 2025, and you're listening to Skeptics with a K, the podcast for science, reason, and critical thinking.
[00:00:44.960 --> 00:00:56.000] Skeptics with a K is produced by Skeptic Media in association with the Merseyside Skeptic Society, a non-profit organization for the promotion of scientific skepticism on Merseyside around the UK and internationally.
[00:00:56.000 --> 00:00:57.280] I'm your host, Mike Hall.
[00:00:57.280 --> 00:00:58.400] With me today is Marsh.
[00:00:58.400 --> 00:00:58.960] Hello.
[00:00:58.960 --> 00:00:59.840] And Alice.
[00:00:59.840 --> 00:01:00.800] Hello.
[00:01:01.120 --> 00:01:05.120] So I went to see The War of the Worlds, Jeff Wayne's musical.
[00:01:05.440 --> 00:01:05.840] Oh, really?
[00:01:05.840 --> 00:01:06.160] Okay.
[00:01:06.480 --> 00:01:10.080] War of the Worlds, which was on at the Echo or Echo Arena.
[00:01:10.080 --> 00:01:11.280] The MS Bank Arena.
[00:01:11.280 --> 00:01:12.240] It's the fucking Echo.
[00:01:12.240 --> 00:01:13.440] Everyone calls it The Echo.
[00:01:13.680 --> 00:01:15.200] We will call it The Echo forever.
[00:01:15.200 --> 00:01:15.840] I don't care who launches it.
[00:01:16.480 --> 00:01:19.440] The Echo is a viable newspaper.
[00:01:20.080 --> 00:01:22.000] And I've always enjoyed War of the Worlds.
[00:01:22.000 --> 00:01:24.800] I listened to the album, like the Jeff Wayne musical album.
[00:01:24.800 --> 00:01:28.640] I enjoyed the book as well, but I listened to the Jeff Wayne album when I was quite little.
[00:01:28.640 --> 00:01:32.960] My mom had it on tape on my Philips Compact cassette.
[00:01:32.960 --> 00:01:34.320] My mum had it on that.
[00:01:34.320 --> 00:01:36.720] So I listened to that when I was quite little.
[00:01:36.720 --> 00:01:38.160] Frightened the fucking life out of me.
[00:01:38.160 --> 00:01:38.640] Oh, really?
[00:01:38.640 --> 00:01:39.360] Absolutely terrified.
[00:01:39.520 --> 00:01:42.080] I've never heard it other than the chances of anything.
[00:01:42.320 --> 00:01:44.160] Yeah, other than the main risk.
[00:01:45.280 --> 00:01:51.200] But absolutely terrified the light out of me to the point where I remember I must have been 11, 12 years old.
[00:01:51.200 --> 00:01:58.000] I remember giving my mom the tapes and saying, Don't let me have this again until I'm 15, because it's too scary.
[00:01:58.000 --> 00:01:58.880] I can't deal with it.
[00:01:58.880 --> 00:02:02.200] And you were only diagnosed a few years ago.
[00:02:03.400 --> 00:02:07.800] No other child has gone, keep this away from me till I'm old enough to appreciate it.
[00:02:08.440 --> 00:02:09.800] I can't be trusted.
[00:02:09.800 --> 00:02:12.680] I can't be trusted with this cassette recording.
[00:02:13.320 --> 00:02:19.480] But I remember a couple of years later going to my mom, I decided I wanted to listen to it again and going to my mom and said, look, I know I said.
[00:02:19.800 --> 00:02:21.320] Oh, you're jaunting for a hit.
[00:02:21.480 --> 00:02:26.760] Don't give me this until I'm 15, but I think it'll be and that's a few dialogue reasons of kind of.
[00:02:26.760 --> 00:02:29.000] And my mum said, honestly, I've forgotten.
[00:02:29.000 --> 00:02:30.600] You never said that, so here you go.
[00:02:30.600 --> 00:02:31.160] Nice.
[00:02:31.160 --> 00:02:32.360] And completely forgotten.
[00:02:32.440 --> 00:02:40.200] Anyway, so they did a live stage version of War of the Worlds, which is oddly something that I always wanted to do.
[00:02:40.200 --> 00:02:43.560] When I was in school, it must be year nine, year 10.
[00:02:43.560 --> 00:02:46.120] I had this idea of doing War of the Worlds for the school play.
[00:02:46.120 --> 00:02:49.720] The school would do a play every year, was the school play that we did.
[00:02:49.720 --> 00:02:54.680] I think the first year that I was in secondary school, it was our day out, was the school play.
[00:02:54.840 --> 00:02:55.320] Okay.
[00:02:55.320 --> 00:03:00.840] And we also did, we did Gregory's Girl, we did Guys and Dolls, we did Bugsy Malone, we did Starlight Express.
[00:03:01.000 --> 00:03:01.640] You know, it was everything.
[00:03:01.720 --> 00:03:04.040] I think we did Wizard of Oz when I was secondary school.
[00:03:04.040 --> 00:03:04.360] Yeah.
[00:03:04.360 --> 00:03:04.840] Yeah.
[00:03:05.160 --> 00:03:07.320] And I had this idea of doing War of the Worlds for that.
[00:03:07.320 --> 00:03:10.280] So I think you get a school orchestra to play like the musical beat.
[00:03:10.280 --> 00:03:13.640] You get the school choir can do the chorus, as it were.
[00:03:13.640 --> 00:03:15.640] And then the drama department can do.
[00:03:15.720 --> 00:03:17.480] There's a relatively small number of parts.
[00:03:17.480 --> 00:03:21.640] So, you know, you just need five or six people to do the acty bits.
[00:03:21.640 --> 00:03:22.680] And I thought that would be good.
[00:03:22.680 --> 00:03:24.920] Never got anywhere because the head of drama hated me.
[00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:26.680] Head of drama fucking despised me.
[00:03:26.680 --> 00:03:29.400] So that idea never, never got off the ground.
[00:03:29.400 --> 00:03:32.040] But I always had this idea of doing it at school.
[00:03:32.040 --> 00:03:36.520] And then many years later, I was in a pub with Tony Slattery.
[00:03:36.960 --> 00:03:38.440] This is a late Tony Slattery.
[00:03:38.440 --> 00:03:40.120] It's a freewheeling fucking conversation.
[00:03:40.120 --> 00:03:40.760] This isn't it.
[00:03:40.920 --> 00:03:49.680] I was in a pub with Tony Slattery, and the idea came up again of we should do War of the Worlds as a stage play, which Tony was hugely enthusiastic about, and he thought this was a brilliant idea.
[00:03:50.000 --> 00:03:54.320] And we ended up talking about, you know, what could we do, and how could you make it work, and what would that look like?
[00:03:54.320 --> 00:03:56.480] And could we go and get a license to produce it?
[00:03:56.480 --> 00:04:03.760] Just pub talk, you know, it wasn't like I was sitting there writing a business plan with Tony Slattery, it was just pub banter, right?
[00:04:03.760 --> 00:04:13.440] But then it must have been only a few months after that that Jeff Wayne announced he was doing it as a I think Tony got on the blower.
[00:04:13.520 --> 00:04:14.640] I don't think that at all.
[00:04:14.640 --> 00:04:17.600] I think from what I read about Tony Slattery, he was often on the blower.
[00:04:17.600 --> 00:04:24.640] Yes, he did say to me in that conversation, he'd taken the gross domestic product of a small country up his nostrils.
[00:04:24.640 --> 00:04:24.960] Really?
[00:04:25.360 --> 00:04:25.600] Exactly.
[00:04:28.640 --> 00:04:30.080] I can say that now he's dead.
[00:04:30.080 --> 00:04:35.520] But yeah, Jeff Wayne announced he was doing exactly that, was doing that stage version of it, which I was gasping to see.
[00:04:35.520 --> 00:04:37.360] This was like 2006, something like that.
[00:04:37.680 --> 00:04:43.440] But I was never able to see it until just these last couple of weeks where it came to Liverpool.
[00:04:43.440 --> 00:04:45.200] And it was really, it was a spectacular.
[00:04:45.280 --> 00:04:47.840] The chances of it coming to Liverpool.
[00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:49.280] Turns out one in one.
[00:04:49.280 --> 00:04:49.600] Yeah.
[00:04:49.920 --> 00:04:52.240] Eventually, you know, a long enough timeline.
[00:04:52.240 --> 00:04:56.080] The version that I saw was based on the Liam Neeson version of the album.
[00:04:56.080 --> 00:04:58.480] They did a remake with Liam Neeson a few years ago.
[00:04:58.480 --> 00:04:58.960] Yeah.
[00:04:59.840 --> 00:05:01.440] God, he'll do anything.
[00:05:02.880 --> 00:05:07.360] So rather than the Richard Burton version, which the original was, it was a Liam Neeson version.
[00:05:07.360 --> 00:05:11.840] So they had this kind of projected hologram of Liam Neeson on the stage.
[00:05:11.840 --> 00:05:15.680] They had other actors, because obviously Liam Neeson's not going on tour with him.
[00:05:15.760 --> 00:05:16.240] No, yeah.
[00:05:16.240 --> 00:05:20.760] So the other actors would interact with this pre-recorded hologram of Liam Neeson.
[00:05:21.000 --> 00:05:22.080] The hologram of Liam Neeson.
[00:05:22.080 --> 00:05:24.960] Did it just make you think he was dead in Star Wars?
[00:05:24.960 --> 00:05:30.120] It's just like a dead Liam Neeson is just like force-coursing his way in to talk about Mars.
[00:05:29.600 --> 00:05:35.880] And there were lasers shooting all over the arena to represent the heat ray, and there was actual fire on the stage.
[00:05:36.040 --> 00:05:41.960] Like would every time the Martians burned something, like flames would leap up on the stage.
[00:05:41.960 --> 00:05:52.840] One of the songs in War of the Worlds is called Forever Autumn, which it turns out is a love song based on a Lego ad, but that's too much, that's too much detail even for this freewheeling anecdote.
[00:05:52.840 --> 00:05:59.880] But during that song, leaves fell from the rafters across the whole audience during the song called Forever Autumn.
[00:05:59.880 --> 00:06:01.640] Was this, which theater was this in?
[00:06:01.640 --> 00:06:02.680] This was in the Echo.
[00:06:02.680 --> 00:06:03.400] Yeah, I think that was.
[00:06:03.400 --> 00:06:04.920] Oh, those are already there.
[00:06:04.920 --> 00:06:06.760] That's just naturally there, the Echo.
[00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:10.520] Just a coincidental breeze just knocked those off, is what that was.
[00:06:10.520 --> 00:06:16.840] And there was a huge Martian fighting machine that comes down from the ceiling and kind of straddles the stage.
[00:06:16.840 --> 00:06:19.080] Sat astride the whole stage.
[00:06:19.080 --> 00:06:19.800] It was fantastic.
[00:06:19.800 --> 00:06:22.840] But yeah, at the time of my life, it was absolutely fucking fucking brilliant.
[00:06:22.840 --> 00:06:23.640] Show.
[00:06:23.640 --> 00:06:29.080] Except, except for the fucking dickhead sat in front of me.
[00:06:29.080 --> 00:06:29.880] Oh.
[00:06:30.520 --> 00:06:31.080] So I was...
[00:06:31.160 --> 00:06:32.280] Still accounting for it.
[00:06:32.280 --> 00:06:35.080] I was there with both Lana and Emma and myself.
[00:06:35.720 --> 00:06:36.760] We were all there together.
[00:06:36.760 --> 00:06:41.240] And we must have been the only people in the room who are not of pensionable age.
[00:06:41.240 --> 00:06:46.200] You haven't seen so much grey hair this side of a UKIP annual conference, right?
[00:06:46.520 --> 00:06:49.480] Which is not a surprise because the album came out in 1978.
[00:06:49.480 --> 00:06:53.160] So it's not a surprise that all the original fans are like pensioners now.
[00:06:53.160 --> 00:06:55.480] But we're sat on our seats waiting for the show to start.
[00:06:55.480 --> 00:06:58.600] And then the guy comes, this guy comes bounding up the stairs.
[00:06:58.600 --> 00:06:59.960] He gets to the stop of the stairs.
[00:06:59.960 --> 00:07:05.560] He points at the ceiling and bellows, but still they come.
[00:07:05.880 --> 00:07:07.320] Oh, fucking hell.
[00:07:07.320 --> 00:07:13.480] And he starts running up and down the steps in the arena, which is, it was so fucking obnoxious, right?
[00:07:13.480 --> 00:07:18.000] And I get that he's excited to see it and he's excited to come and see the show.
[00:07:18.320 --> 00:07:23.120] My excitement level often doesn't rise very high, in all honesty.
[00:07:23.120 --> 00:07:26.560] He was well beyond what I'm socially comfortable with.
[00:07:26.720 --> 00:07:34.320] So he's running around, but his partner eventually encourages him to come and sit down, you know, and it turns out he sat right in front of us.
[00:07:34.320 --> 00:07:39.120] And as him and his partner sits down, it becomes very apparent that the pair of them reek of booze.
[00:07:39.120 --> 00:07:40.080] Ah, okay.
[00:07:40.080 --> 00:07:41.600] So they're absolutely leathered.
[00:07:41.600 --> 00:07:43.040] So I'm thinking, fuck me.
[00:07:43.040 --> 00:07:46.400] I've been waiting 30 years to see this fucking stage play.
[00:07:46.400 --> 00:07:48.400] And I don't want to have to deal with this.
[00:07:48.400 --> 00:07:49.360] But it's all right.
[00:07:49.360 --> 00:07:50.640] I'm trying to tell myself it's okay.
[00:07:50.640 --> 00:07:51.680] He's excited.
[00:07:51.680 --> 00:07:52.240] It's fine.
[00:07:52.240 --> 00:07:54.400] He'll probably settle down when the show starts.
[00:07:54.720 --> 00:07:56.880] Doesn't settle down when the show starts.
[00:07:57.200 --> 00:08:01.360] So as the bands are coming on, he's whooping and cheering.
[00:08:01.360 --> 00:08:02.640] All right, fair enough.
[00:08:02.800 --> 00:08:04.000] We're meant to be cheering the band.
[00:08:04.000 --> 00:08:09.120] Everyone else is applauding politely, but he's whooping and cheering.
[00:08:09.120 --> 00:08:14.480] The show itself is conducted by Jeff Wayne personally, who actually is conducting.
[00:08:14.960 --> 00:08:16.000] I say conducting.
[00:08:16.640 --> 00:08:19.440] He's vaguely disco dancing near the orchestra.
[00:08:19.440 --> 00:08:20.800] I don't know what they're doing by that point.
[00:08:21.280 --> 00:08:24.160] I imagine they're probably on it by this point, right?
[00:08:24.160 --> 00:08:28.000] I don't know if he makes any difference to the actual performance of the show at all.
[00:08:28.000 --> 00:08:28.720] But it's his show.
[00:08:28.720 --> 00:08:29.520] He can do what he likes.
[00:08:29.520 --> 00:08:31.600] You know, he deserves those applaudits.
[00:08:31.600 --> 00:08:34.800] Anyway, Jeff Wayne comes out and everyone starts applauding.
[00:08:34.800 --> 00:08:37.840] But the guy in front of me just starts going, Go on, Jeff.
[00:08:37.840 --> 00:08:38.640] Go on, Jeff.
[00:08:38.640 --> 00:08:39.440] Get in there, Jeff.
[00:08:39.440 --> 00:08:40.560] Go on, chance.
[00:08:40.560 --> 00:08:41.760] Go on, Jeff.
[00:08:41.760 --> 00:08:42.720] And I don't know why.
[00:08:42.960 --> 00:08:48.640] Then he started doing the whistling, kind of big, loud whistle and shouting, get in there, Jeff.
[00:08:48.640 --> 00:08:49.520] Get in where?
[00:08:49.520 --> 00:08:50.080] I don't know.
[00:08:50.080 --> 00:08:51.680] I don't know what Jeff is getting in.
[00:08:51.680 --> 00:08:54.000] There was a kind of cage that he was getting in the cage from.
[00:08:54.240 --> 00:08:55.040] Maybe that's what he meant.
[00:08:55.760 --> 00:08:57.520] Maybe it was getting the cage, Jeff.
[00:08:57.840 --> 00:09:08.840] And the show starts, and this guy is scream-singing along with every song, which is kind of okay because for the most part you can't hear it because the show is very loud as well.
[00:09:08.840 --> 00:09:17.800] Except when he's wildly out of time, in which case that's all you can hear, is him scream-singing the lyrics to War of the World songs along with the orchestra.
[00:09:17.800 --> 00:09:26.600] Everyone around us at this point is getting incredibly pissed off at this bloke, but probably worse than him because he was honestly just excited.
[00:09:26.840 --> 00:09:30.760] He was being obnoxious about it, but he was just happy to be there.
[00:09:30.760 --> 00:09:37.880] His partner, however, clearly had no interest in War of the Worlds whatsoever, and so spent the whole time on her phone.
[00:09:37.880 --> 00:09:47.080] On Instagram, taking pictures of herself, taking pictures of the stage, taking photos of him, looking at her Facebook with the screen on full brightness.
[00:09:47.080 --> 00:09:47.800] Oh, they always do.
[00:09:47.800 --> 00:09:48.360] It's so dark.
[00:09:48.520 --> 00:09:50.840] Dazzling everyone behind.
[00:09:51.160 --> 00:09:52.520] So come the interval.
[00:09:52.520 --> 00:09:54.120] It all fucking kicked off.
[00:09:54.120 --> 00:10:01.080] The people behind have started having a go and started deliberately picking a fight with these people, saying, look, can you put your phone away?
[00:10:01.080 --> 00:10:06.040] She's getting really annoyed, saying it's, you know, it's his 60th birthday, and we're just out here to have fun.
[00:10:06.040 --> 00:10:07.880] It's like, well, we're out here to have fun as well.
[00:10:07.880 --> 00:10:11.000] And you're stopping us having to put your fucking phone away.
[00:10:11.000 --> 00:10:18.120] And it was incredibly anxiety-inducing just having this row that was going on around us.
[00:10:18.120 --> 00:10:22.120] Eventually, this couple disappear and they go down to the bar.
[00:10:22.120 --> 00:10:26.200] And the rest of us who were left were like a little support group going, are you okay?
[00:10:26.200 --> 00:10:26.920] Are you all right?
[00:10:26.920 --> 00:10:28.200] Are you doing okay?
[00:10:28.520 --> 00:10:32.280] Because the guy just before he left was saying, Look, let's just leave it now.
[00:10:32.280 --> 00:10:33.960] Let's just let you love War of the Worlds.
[00:10:33.960 --> 00:10:35.080] I love War of the Worlds.
[00:10:35.080 --> 00:10:35.800] Let's just agree.
[00:10:35.800 --> 00:10:37.240] We'll just leave it.
[00:10:37.560 --> 00:10:44.200] But everyone else was trying to leave it as he was perpetuating the argument by insisting that we leave it.
[00:10:44.520 --> 00:10:47.920] And the second act starts, and they never come back.
[00:10:47.920 --> 00:10:49.840] Good, they've fucked off.
[00:10:49.840 --> 00:10:53.280] The woman came back briefly to grab her coat and then vanished.
[00:10:53.280 --> 00:11:02.160] So, I assume they've had words with each other and decided to fucking slink off, which really helped settle the audience down so we could enjoy the second half.
[00:11:02.160 --> 00:11:04.560] But the second half is the shittest bit of the album.
[00:11:05.600 --> 00:11:07.280] Which is really annoying.
[00:11:07.280 --> 00:11:09.680] But I'd recommend listeners go and see it if you get the chance.
[00:11:10.240 --> 00:11:16.960] It was really a great show, and the chances of you having an obnoxious bell end at your show are a million to one.
[00:11:23.520 --> 00:11:28.080] I don't know if we've ever mentioned it on the show before, but Marsh, have you got any podcast with Cecil Cicero?
[00:11:28.240 --> 00:11:28.880] I have got it.
[00:11:29.200 --> 00:11:30.960] I don't talk about it too much, but it never comes up.
[00:11:32.160 --> 00:11:33.760] I genuinely don't mention it that often.
[00:11:33.760 --> 00:11:35.120] Literally, every show since you've started.
[00:11:35.200 --> 00:11:35.600] I've wished you to show you.
[00:11:35.760 --> 00:11:43.360] Literally every episode of this show since where you listen to and examine episodes of the Joe Rogan experience.
[00:11:43.360 --> 00:11:48.960] Joe Rogan is an interesting character when it comes to thinking about skepticism and particularly conspiracism.
[00:11:48.960 --> 00:11:53.440] And I think it's easy to assume that everybody in skepticism knows who Joe Rogan is.
[00:11:53.760 --> 00:11:54.320] I think it's easy to say.
[00:11:54.480 --> 00:11:55.600] I can tell you right now, they don't.
[00:11:55.600 --> 00:11:56.080] They don't.
[00:11:56.080 --> 00:11:56.720] I've learned.
[00:11:56.960 --> 00:11:59.920] I think it's easy to not know who he is, especially in the UK.
[00:12:00.240 --> 00:12:04.320] And especially because as skeptics, we are not the target audience of his podcast.
[00:12:04.320 --> 00:12:10.160] So, for listeners who don't know who Joe Rogan is, he's an American comedian and ultimate fighting championship commentator.
[00:12:10.160 --> 00:12:17.520] But these days, he's most famous for his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, an incredibly prolific interview show.
[00:12:17.520 --> 00:12:21.200] The show launched in 2009, the same year as Skeptics with a K.
[00:12:21.200 --> 00:12:21.960] And while we're in our...
[00:12:22.040 --> 00:12:24.120] Oh god, we've been gone as long as Rogan.
[00:12:24.280 --> 00:12:25.320] Oh, I've never checked that.
[00:12:25.360 --> 00:12:26.640] I didn't even put two and two together.
[00:12:26.640 --> 00:12:35.640] And while we're in our early 400s in terms of episode number, the Joe Rogan Experience has released over 2,300 episodes in the same time period.
[00:12:36.280 --> 00:12:40.760] I don't know if you have a feel for, like, has he like increased in frequency of episodes?
[00:12:41.320 --> 00:12:45.240] I think there was times when he wasn't doing as many as four a week, but he typically does four a week now.
[00:12:45.560 --> 00:12:49.480] And their episode lengths are from like one to five hours per episode, right?
[00:12:49.480 --> 00:12:55.400] Yeah, they're typically more towards the two and a half to four is typical.
[00:12:55.400 --> 00:13:00.440] Yeah, I'll fucking interview Jordan Peterson today as of recording, so I'm gonna have to fucking listen to that.
[00:13:00.520 --> 00:13:03.640] He's putting out an enormous amount of content.
[00:13:03.640 --> 00:13:08.120] But perhaps the most important thing about the Joe Rogan experience is its reach.
[00:13:08.120 --> 00:13:14.920] The show is the number one podcast, according to Spotify, in the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
[00:13:14.920 --> 00:13:17.800] It only just lost its top spot in Ireland.
[00:13:17.800 --> 00:13:22.600] So basically, the entire English-speaking world is hooked on the Joe Rogan experience.
[00:13:22.600 --> 00:13:25.000] Yeah, it fluctuated a little bit when the telepathy tapes came out.
[00:13:25.000 --> 00:13:26.040] That went on number one.
[00:13:26.040 --> 00:13:28.040] And for a while, Midas Touch.
[00:13:28.040 --> 00:13:28.840] Midas Touch?
[00:13:29.080 --> 00:13:29.960] Midas Touch, yeah.
[00:13:29.960 --> 00:13:31.880] That was number one for a bit, but I don't think he stayed there.
[00:13:31.880 --> 00:13:38.600] But he's been number one in the US five years on the trot, more than.
[00:13:38.920 --> 00:13:44.600] The show has 19.7 million subscribers and over 6 billion views on YouTube.
[00:13:45.080 --> 00:13:46.600] Almost doing as well as we are then.
[00:13:47.880 --> 00:13:50.120] We can't even tell his Spotify numbers and things as well.
[00:13:50.280 --> 00:13:50.840] No, exactly.
[00:13:51.080 --> 00:13:55.640] We don't know his true numbers, but like 6 billion views on YouTube is ridiculous.
[00:13:55.640 --> 00:14:03.720] And researchers have identified that the influence on audiences is significant, with guests seeing a significant impact to their book sales.
[00:14:03.720 --> 00:14:10.920] For example, Graeme Hancock saw a 519% sales increase within one week of appearing on the show.
[00:14:10.920 --> 00:14:28.080] We see similar impacts on, so he doesn't tend to have political, like specific political people on that often, but when he has, he's seen donation, they've seen donations to those political members skyrocket within a month of being on the show.
[00:14:28.720 --> 00:14:41.840] And while we might not always notice Rogan making the news week by week, we're regularly seeing claims made by guests such as Mel Gibson dominating the media discourse in the days after a guest appearance on that show.
[00:14:41.840 --> 00:14:57.200] So it might not be Joe Rogan's show says this again, but we're seeing I was googling something relating to the story that I'm going to talk about today, and the first page of news is Mel Gibson talks about X on these are the claims he's made.
[00:14:57.200 --> 00:15:10.480] I'm sure most of those articles will mention the Joe Rogan experience, but if you're not looking for it, then all you're seeing is more misinformation and not realizing that it's the Joe Rogan experience that is leading to that dominating the press quite as much as it is.
[00:15:10.480 --> 00:15:20.640] There's also a secondary layer of bottom feeders, essentially, who are just repeating the things that happen on Joe Rogan to an audience who already believes that in order to pick up their audience.
[00:15:20.960 --> 00:15:21.920] A very careful caveat.
[00:15:23.040 --> 00:15:29.280] Well, this is the thing is, it feels like arguably we were in a similar space with the No Rogan experience, except we're looking for that audience to try.
[00:15:29.280 --> 00:15:36.080] I did an interview recently with a podcast in America, Sam, there's some, I think it was called, I forget the name of it.
[00:15:36.080 --> 00:15:37.280] We're talking about the telepathy tapes.
[00:15:37.280 --> 00:15:39.520] It was a bit of an unexpected appearance on there.
[00:15:39.520 --> 00:15:46.720] And he kept describing the No Rogan experience as a companion piece to the Joe Rogan experience.
[00:15:46.720 --> 00:15:49.200] So, your show is like a companion show to Joe Rogan.
[00:15:49.200 --> 00:15:54.240] And at one point in the interview, I said, well, it's a companion in the same way that Methadone is a companion to heroin.
[00:15:56.480 --> 00:15:57.200] And this is it.
[00:15:57.200 --> 00:16:31.720] So, what Joe Rogan is doing with his significant power in not just the media, but the kind of the whole fucking discourse of everything is interviewing predominantly people with conspiracy beliefs and making sometimes quite dangerous claims, but it going almost entirely unchallenged, which is why you and Cecil decided to do some relatively gentle challenging in the sense that you're hoping to reach an audience of people who might not be skeptics already but are wanting to, you know, might be gently challenged and corrected on some of the stuff that they might be hearing on Joe Rogan.
[00:16:31.880 --> 00:16:34.920] Not just ridiculing it, but try to explain why it's wrong, yeah.
[00:16:34.920 --> 00:16:37.720] Don't worry, I'm not making this episode an entire long plug of your podcast.
[00:16:37.800 --> 00:16:39.240] I'm very surprised, but I'm enjoying it.
[00:16:39.400 --> 00:16:47.320] But I wanted to set the scene a little bit because the topic I'm talking about today originally came to us through you picking it up from one of your listeners to Joe Rogan Experience.
[00:16:47.320 --> 00:16:57.000] And I think for me, that's made me realize that I probably unconsciously dismiss the Joe Rogan experience as just a place where the cranks go to talk about their crank views.
[00:16:57.000 --> 00:17:18.760] But with a listenership quite as significant as it is, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume, and actually fairly well documented, that there's a sizable chunk of the Rogan audience who wouldn't describe themselves as conspiracy theorists, who maybe would describe themselves as critical thinkers, or be open to more, a wider variety of views and viewpoints.
[00:17:18.760 --> 00:17:30.840] And in fact, researchers argue that the show's appeal is largely that it offers a space for men to engage with masculinity without going quite as far as the incel pick apart is parts of the manosphere.
[00:17:30.840 --> 00:17:36.280] So it's somewhere that, because it is a predominantly male audience, yes, and a presumably male guests as well.
[00:17:36.280 --> 00:17:37.560] Almost exclusively male guests.
[00:17:37.560 --> 00:17:57.760] I think it's like 90% of the guests and predominantly talking about male topics as well, or talking about topics that are of interest to men, and is almost seen as a rebellion against that kind of being overly emasculated, as people would say, but also not going as far as the Andrew Tates of the world.
[00:17:57.760 --> 00:17:58.720] Yeah, and that's true.
[00:17:58.720 --> 00:18:05.840] And one of the things that's been really surprising is how completely conflict-averse the entire experience is.
[00:18:05.840 --> 00:18:12.400] For something that is meant to be like hyper-masculine, we're not that this feminized, we're not this kind of neutered version.
[00:18:12.640 --> 00:18:13.840] We can say what we like.
[00:18:13.840 --> 00:18:15.040] They never disagree.
[00:18:15.040 --> 00:18:17.280] There is no conflict on that show almost at all.
[00:18:17.280 --> 00:18:26.240] There was one recently where there was a debate between Douglas Murray and a guy called Dave something or other that we're going to touch on about Gaza and Ukraine.
[00:18:26.240 --> 00:18:29.760] But other than that, Joe Roganosh offers no conflict at all.
[00:18:29.760 --> 00:18:31.760] He rolls with whatever's coming.
[00:18:31.760 --> 00:18:42.320] But then the other thing that he does is interview guests from a really wide range of backgrounds, from scientists to comedians to the really deep conspiracy theorists.
[00:18:42.320 --> 00:18:50.320] So there's something of interest to a wider audience than we might expect if we just dismiss it as where the cranks go to talk about crank topics.
[00:18:51.040 --> 00:19:02.080] There are people who will be listening because, well, I hate when they talk about conspiracy theories and the flat earth and whatever, but I find it quite interesting when they talk about this scientific topic or, you know, the issues with sleep or whatever other topics are.
[00:19:02.560 --> 00:19:09.840] They'll have Woody Harrelson on, but when they're talking to Woody Harrelson, they'll randomly start talking about some health claim or some conspiracy claim.
[00:19:09.840 --> 00:19:11.440] And that's what they'll be doing with Woody Harrelson.
[00:19:11.440 --> 00:19:19.320] So people who like an actor will watch the show and they'll say, well, I don't believe everything that Joe's always saying, but then they can't tell which bits not to believe.
[00:19:19.120 --> 00:19:19.480] Yeah.
[00:19:19.680 --> 00:19:22.800] And so they'll leave some stuff behind, but then pick up some random bits here and there.
[00:19:22.800 --> 00:19:24.960] And I understand he's a pretty good interviewer.
[00:19:25.080 --> 00:19:27.280] He's he makes his guests feel at ease.
[00:19:27.280 --> 00:19:32.680] He helps draw them into conversation and deviates through a wide-ranging variety of topics.
[00:19:33.080 --> 00:19:39.400] Yeah, I don't think he's a good interviewer, but he's an easy person for his guests to talk to, which isn't quite the same thing, but yeah.
[00:19:39.720 --> 00:19:46.760] And presumably an easy listener as well, given he's done comedies and commentating, I'm sure he's reasonably entertaining to listen.
[00:19:47.560 --> 00:19:48.680] I find it quite hard.
[00:19:49.000 --> 00:19:56.120] People have said, in articles that I've read, people have said that part of the reason they listen is because he's just entertaining to listen to, and they don't believe all that bullshit.
[00:19:56.520 --> 00:19:58.680] And obviously some of these people will be justifying it to themselves.
[00:19:58.840 --> 00:20:00.840] And it depends when as well, but yeah, sure.
[00:20:00.840 --> 00:20:12.520] So that means some of the ideas that are circulated on there are unusual ideas that are suddenly accessible to a really wide audience and can then start to take root.
[00:20:12.520 --> 00:20:20.600] Take, for example, Fen Benzadol, which you think is somewhat of a mild obsession of Joe's at the moment that he's mentioning it with some regularity on the show.
[00:20:20.600 --> 00:20:21.640] Yeah, he keeps bringing it up.
[00:20:21.640 --> 00:20:21.880] Yeah.
[00:20:21.880 --> 00:20:29.080] So what will happen with Joe Rogan is he'll find out about something at some point, often from a guest who's come on and said, oh, but what about this?
[00:20:29.080 --> 00:20:33.240] He'll have it in his mind and then he'll keep bringing it up in subsequent interviews.
[00:20:33.240 --> 00:20:40.440] I described him recently as he's like the guy from Memento, but if somebody took away his tattoo gun and gave him an Etcher sketch.
[00:20:40.440 --> 00:20:45.160] So like he can retain some piece of knowledge for some degree of time, but they'll fade very quickly.
[00:20:45.160 --> 00:20:47.240] But he'll keep it for several episodes.
[00:20:47.240 --> 00:20:49.720] And Fen Bender's also something he keeps coming back to.
[00:20:50.040 --> 00:21:01.720] So the mention that you shared with me, which would arguably be the first mention of it on his show, given the phrasing around how he described it, was from October 2023.
[00:21:01.720 --> 00:21:11.320] So he's been on the train, the Fen Benzadol train, for a while when he was talking to Graham Hancock, pseudoarchaeologist, about the cancer diagnosis of Flint Dibble.
[00:21:11.320 --> 00:21:21.920] So Flint's an archaeologist and former QED speaker, and at the time, he'd agreed to debate Graham Hancock on the Joe Rogan experience, but the date had to be moved because of his cancer treatment.
[00:21:21.920 --> 00:21:26.320] And so on the episode, Joe spontaneously brings up fembendazole.
[00:21:26.480 --> 00:21:30.000] This is something he's initiated entirely.
[00:21:30.000 --> 00:21:33.040] It's not come from a guest as far as this episode goes.
[00:21:33.040 --> 00:21:36.400] Yeah, they talk about why Flint's not there and say he's got cancer.
[00:21:36.400 --> 00:21:38.480] And then Joe's like, I wonder if he's taken Fembendazole.
[00:21:38.880 --> 00:21:39.840] I wonder if he's having this.
[00:21:39.840 --> 00:21:40.880] He should be having this.
[00:21:40.880 --> 00:21:45.040] Yeah, it literally, he literally just generates it from almost nowhere.
[00:21:45.040 --> 00:21:49.440] It seems clear that he's come across it on Instagram or Twitter because he can't remember the name of it.
[00:21:49.440 --> 00:21:54.000] So he goes to his saved posts on one of those two platforms to try and find the name of it.
[00:21:54.000 --> 00:21:57.920] And he says it's some sort of very low-cost drug that's being repurposed.
[00:21:57.920 --> 00:22:04.160] I think it's some sort of anti-parasitic drug that's being repurposed and is having supposedly remarkable results.
[00:22:04.160 --> 00:22:10.560] He goes on to say that fembenzadole has at least 12 proven anti-cancer mechanisms in vitro and in vivo.
[00:22:10.560 --> 00:22:12.240] It disrupts micro.
[00:22:12.240 --> 00:22:14.000] So he's reading this from a web page.
[00:22:14.000 --> 00:22:38.000] He says it disrupts microtubulate polymerization, a major mechanism, induces cell cycle, whatever that means, arrest, blocks glucose transport and impairs glucose utilization by cancer cells, increases p53 tumor suppressor levels, inhibits cancer cell viability, inhibits cancer cell migration and invasion, induces apoptosis, induces autophagy is what he means.
[00:22:38.000 --> 00:22:39.040] It's not what he says.
[00:22:39.040 --> 00:22:44.080] Induces, they're trying to get me with all these words, he says, and then says a word that he has invented.
[00:22:44.480 --> 00:23:00.920] Preoptosis and necrosis, induces differentiation and senescence, inhibits tumor angiogenesis, reduces colony formation and inhibits stemness in cancer cells, inhibits drug resistance and sensitizes cells to conventional chemo as well as radiation therapy.
[00:23:00.920 --> 00:23:02.360] And he does just read that.
[00:22:59.920 --> 00:23:03.080] He is literally.
[00:23:03.400 --> 00:23:10.520] He pulls up the website for a company selling fembenzado and is literally just reading it off the page.
[00:23:10.520 --> 00:23:16.920] Yeah, and like you knew what many of those words were and you found it difficult to get through that in a way that you kept interested in.
[00:23:16.920 --> 00:23:19.560] He doesn't know any of those words, but he's still just reading that to his audience.
[00:23:19.800 --> 00:23:25.080] So when you said he's quite entertaining to listen to, the problem was in my brain, I was like, well, look, because it's quite often that.
[00:23:25.080 --> 00:23:28.680] He'll bring up a website and just read blocks of text he doesn't understand.
[00:23:28.680 --> 00:23:31.400] Well, I think he did it more interestingly than I just did it.
[00:23:33.560 --> 00:23:39.400] He goes on to say that there's a very similar drug in the same family that's already been approved by the FDA, and that is menbenzadol.
[00:23:39.400 --> 00:23:43.000] And it is in several clinical trials right now for brain cancers and colon cancers.
[00:23:43.000 --> 00:23:47.320] And he says, so why are there no fembenzadol clinical trials for cancer?
[00:23:47.640 --> 00:23:51.480] That's the question posed on the website that he's reading from.
[00:23:51.480 --> 00:23:53.320] So what is fembenzadol?
[00:23:53.320 --> 00:24:03.880] He is writing that it is a wide-spectrum anti-parasitic medication which is used for sheep, cattle, horses, fish, dogs, cats, rabbits, and seals, as well as a few other animals.
[00:24:03.960 --> 00:24:05.720] I did not see seals to me at the end of that.
[00:24:05.720 --> 00:24:11.000] It's used to treat a range of gut parasites like hookworms, roundworms, and tapeworms.
[00:24:11.000 --> 00:24:20.120] And the way it works is by binding to a protein called tubulin, which makes up microtubules, exactly as Joe Rogan says, reading from the website that he's reading from.
[00:24:20.280 --> 00:24:31.720] So microtubules are a crucial part of the cell structural system, and when microtubules can't form properly due to the drug binding to them, the cells eventually die through our root.
[00:24:31.720 --> 00:24:37.560] Membenzadole, the other drug that Roger mentions, is essentially the human version of fembenzadole.
[00:24:37.720 --> 00:24:40.280] So, where we give sheep, dogs, et cetera.
[00:24:40.520 --> 00:24:49.520] Fembenzadole, we give humans menbenzadol to treat thread worms and other gut-based parasitic infections.
[00:24:49.840 --> 00:24:52.320] Is it the same thing chemically, or are they distinctions?
[00:24:53.040 --> 00:24:54.320] I think they're slightly different.
[00:24:54.320 --> 00:24:54.720] Okay.
[00:24:54.720 --> 00:24:58.640] But it's doing the same thing and it's treating the same thing.
[00:24:58.640 --> 00:25:05.920] But Joe's advocating the animal version of it rather than the ivermectin days again, isn't it?
[00:25:05.920 --> 00:25:07.200] Well, it is very much that.
[00:25:07.440 --> 00:25:10.880] Yeah, he's advocating the animal version of it rather than the human version.
[00:25:11.200 --> 00:25:16.160] Because he says the menbendazole is already given to people and has some good evidence.
[00:25:16.160 --> 00:25:18.160] So why aren't the trials for fembendazole?
[00:25:18.720 --> 00:25:20.720] Because the menbendazole is given to people.
[00:25:20.720 --> 00:25:26.400] And I think when you say it's the ivermectin thing again, I think it is the ivermectin thing again because it was just after, this is October 2023.
[00:25:26.400 --> 00:25:26.720] Sure.
[00:25:26.720 --> 00:25:27.840] Yeah, parasites were.
[00:25:28.080 --> 00:25:32.560] Well, we'll come back to the timing of all this because there's more to it than that.
[00:25:32.560 --> 00:25:39.600] So, surprisingly, much of what Rogan reads from the website is actually scientifically pretty reasonable.
[00:25:39.600 --> 00:25:42.320] That would be a surprise to him because he's no idea what he read.
[00:25:42.960 --> 00:25:54.880] Drugs that bind to tubulin will have an impact on things like apoptosis and cell migration and autophagy and differentiation and senescence and p53, which is a very frequently mutated protein when it comes to cancer.
[00:25:54.880 --> 00:26:00.240] And drugs that bind to microtubules are already given as anti-cancer medications.
[00:26:00.240 --> 00:26:10.560] For example, docetaxel is a chemotherapy which targets microtubules and is given for a range of cancers, including breast, lung, prostate, gastric, head and neck, and ovarian cancer.
[00:26:10.880 --> 00:26:21.680] And Rogan is right about something else too: that there are pre-clinical trials and some very early clinical trials investigating membenzadole for use in cancer treatment that shows some promise.
[00:26:21.680 --> 00:26:26.720] And there are early pre-clinical trials investigating fembenzadole for cancer therapeutics too.
[00:26:26.720 --> 00:26:30.040] So these are being tested as potential anti-cancer treatments.
[00:26:30.040 --> 00:26:32.680] We're still very, very early stages.
[00:26:29.600 --> 00:26:36.040] We're not ready for these to be used in humans yet, really.
[00:26:36.600 --> 00:26:41.560] But we are doing research into it because there is scientific plausibility that they might be useful.
[00:26:41.880 --> 00:26:52.520] But here's the issue: so, firstly, the fact that these two treatments aren't being rolled out for patient use yet has absolutely nothing to do with big pharma not thinking they're marketable.
[00:26:52.520 --> 00:27:04.440] So that's what he says in the interview: he thinks the reason these aren't being sold is because they're not marketable, they're cheap medications, and you can't make money out of that.
[00:27:04.440 --> 00:27:05.400] Which is not true.
[00:27:05.400 --> 00:27:13.880] Getting a medication from conception through to patient use is a phenomenally expensive process with a really high failure rate.
[00:27:13.880 --> 00:27:25.240] Pharmaceutical companies love an opportunity to use a drug that's already reliably used in humans, that's already got safety profile data, that's already been taken through to market.
[00:27:25.240 --> 00:27:28.920] We know that it's, you know, it's good for some things.
[00:27:28.920 --> 00:27:34.280] We're starting from a really high level already before we then start trying to find another use for it.
[00:27:34.280 --> 00:27:37.720] That's really valuable to a pharmaceutical company.
[00:27:37.720 --> 00:27:40.920] We also already know it does the thing that we want it to do.
[00:27:40.920 --> 00:27:42.680] We know it binds to tubulin.
[00:27:42.680 --> 00:27:46.840] We know that when it does that, it disrupts microtubule formation.
[00:27:46.840 --> 00:27:59.160] We can use various different ways to design drugs where we're looking at, oh, I think this molecule will bind to tubulin, but then even if it does, the cell finds a way around it and it doesn't disrupt the microtubule formation at all.
[00:27:59.160 --> 00:28:04.200] And so you've spent ages getting this drug through and realize, oh, it doesn't do what we wanted it to do.
[00:28:04.200 --> 00:28:08.440] It should do what we want it to do, but it turns out it's more complicated in the process.
[00:28:08.440 --> 00:28:13.480] So it's really useful to have a drug that we know already does the thing we want it to do.
[00:28:13.480 --> 00:28:15.520] And we see this in business all the time.
[00:28:14.680 --> 00:28:17.520] Like that's basically what drop shipping is.
[00:28:18.240 --> 00:28:24.320] It's taking something that already exists and bringing it to another market for a higher price to make a good profit.
[00:28:24.640 --> 00:28:34.560] And in fact, anyone with any ounce of business sense knows full well that it doesn't take something being available for cheaper elsewhere to prohibit sales for that thing at a higher price.
[00:28:34.560 --> 00:28:45.200] People will spend more for the same thing all the time for a whole range of reasons, including brand loyalty, choosing a trusted source, convenience, or accessibility.
[00:28:45.200 --> 00:28:50.160] Yeah, and you can join our Patreon if you go to patreon.com forward slash getricok.
[00:28:50.160 --> 00:29:00.400] If fembenzadol was approved as an anti-cancer medication, I guarantee that healthcare organizations are going to want to buy it from a pharmaceutical company rather than a veterinary practice.
[00:29:00.400 --> 00:29:01.200] Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:01.200 --> 00:29:08.480] And patients are much more likely to want to take it if it's prescribed by their oncologist than buying it online from a random source.
[00:29:08.480 --> 00:29:23.440] I appreciate that's a little harder in places like America where insurance companies or lack of insurance come into the equation, but there's plenty of ways to justify why it's important to buy a medication from a pharmaceutical company, even if the drug is identical to one sold elsewhere.
[00:29:23.440 --> 00:29:34.400] But even taking that out the equation, just being able to sell the same product for a higher price, membenzadol and fembenzadol aren't really great drugs for this purpose at the moment.
[00:29:34.400 --> 00:29:38.720] So the problem is they don't pass across the gastrointestinal barrier very well at all.
[00:29:38.720 --> 00:29:42.080] That's great for an anti-parasitic drug that's given for gut parasites.
[00:29:42.080 --> 00:29:43.040] Yeah, that's where they are.
[00:29:43.040 --> 00:29:50.320] Because the parasites are there and it means the toxicity levels for the patient are really low because it's not getting into the main system.
[00:29:50.320 --> 00:29:53.520] It's just staying where the parasites are and then passing through.
[00:29:53.520 --> 00:30:02.200] So it's perfect for what it does, and it means that these drugs have very low toxicity for the patient, but really decent toxicity for the parasites.
[00:29:59.520 --> 00:30:04.520] It makes it a really safe and reliable treatment.
[00:30:05.160 --> 00:30:11.080] But if we want to treat cancer, we need the medication to get further around the body depending on where the tumor is.
[00:30:11.080 --> 00:30:17.720] We're not necessarily testing this, these drugs for stomach cancer, we're testing them for brain cancer.
[00:30:17.720 --> 00:30:20.840] If it's staying in the gut, it's not getting to the brain.
[00:30:21.160 --> 00:30:38.200] So if Membenzadol and Fembenzadol are to be used as anti-cancer medications, we need to figure out a way around that, which might mean changing the molecular structure of the medication somehow, adding something to the drug structure to help it get into the system better, or changing how it's administered perhaps.
[00:30:38.200 --> 00:30:41.880] So instead of an oral tablet, maybe it's injected instead.
[00:30:41.880 --> 00:30:49.320] And these are things that pharmaceutical companies can test and patent so that their version of the drug is the effective and saleable one.
[00:30:49.320 --> 00:30:49.720] Yeah.
[00:30:49.720 --> 00:30:52.760] So that you're not selling the same thing as the cheap version anymore.
[00:30:52.760 --> 00:30:56.440] You're selling your optimized version that now gets into the system better.
[00:30:56.760 --> 00:31:02.280] Answering the question asked earlier in the interview, why aren't there clinical trials for fembenzidol?
[00:31:02.280 --> 00:31:06.600] His guest, Graham Hancock, which is just unfathomable to me that this is the conversation they're having.
[00:31:06.920 --> 00:31:07.880] No, yeah, yeah.
[00:31:08.040 --> 00:31:21.160] Like, we're talking about clinical trials of an anti-parasitic drug to treat cancer between a comedian and a UFC commentator and a guy who thinks that aliens made the pyramids.
[00:31:21.160 --> 00:31:23.960] Ancient civilization is not necessarily aliens, but yes.
[00:31:24.200 --> 00:31:26.040] Yeah, he doesn't necessarily say aliens.
[00:31:26.040 --> 00:31:27.880] He's also not an archaeologist or a historian.
[00:31:27.880 --> 00:31:29.560] He's just a journalist who does that to do that.
[00:31:29.560 --> 00:31:30.760] Yeah, absolutely.
[00:31:30.760 --> 00:31:42.200] And it came up because of a guy they know who had, like, because Flintibble had cancer, they brought this up as unasked for medical advice to somebody who wasn't there in front of an audience of millions.
[00:31:42.200 --> 00:31:43.400] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:31:43.720 --> 00:31:48.080] So Graham Hancock said an answer to that question, why aren't there clinical trials for fembenzidol?
[00:31:44.920 --> 00:31:50.320] His answer was, big pharma doesn't see a margin in it.
[00:31:50.640 --> 00:31:54.800] Which is amazing because prior to that conversation, he hadn't heard of fembenzazole.
[00:31:55.040 --> 00:31:56.960] It's the first time he knew about it.
[00:31:56.960 --> 00:32:00.720] He had an answer to that question, despite it being something he just learned about.
[00:32:00.720 --> 00:32:05.840] Well, to be fair, he did imply that he'd heard about it, but he just like he'd seen some articles, he hadn't read too much about it.
[00:32:06.000 --> 00:32:06.720] That sounds bullshit.
[00:32:06.960 --> 00:32:08.240] That one's bullshit.
[00:32:09.440 --> 00:32:10.960] The classic, yeah, I know what you're talking about.
[00:32:10.960 --> 00:32:13.360] Oh, yeah, I think I heard something, but not all the details.
[00:32:13.360 --> 00:32:14.240] You tell me.
[00:32:14.560 --> 00:32:18.320] I know, but the listeners maybe don't, so why don't you explain it to them?
[00:32:18.640 --> 00:32:22.640] To which Rogan says, I mean, if that, who knows?
[00:32:22.640 --> 00:32:26.240] But if that is the case, I mean, what an enemy of the people.
[00:32:26.240 --> 00:32:29.520] They're preventing information and preventing people from using things.
[00:32:29.520 --> 00:32:32.240] So he's not even saying that that is the reason.
[00:32:32.240 --> 00:32:33.040] He's implying it.
[00:32:33.040 --> 00:32:35.040] He's leaving it to the audience to make a decision.
[00:32:35.040 --> 00:32:36.880] But he's flipped the narrative.
[00:32:36.880 --> 00:32:40.720] Instead of saying, look, researchers have found that Membenzadol might be useful.
[00:32:40.720 --> 00:32:44.400] So they're starting to do pre-clinical trials and then clinical trials.
[00:32:44.400 --> 00:32:47.680] And then they're following the same route with Fembenzadole, a similar drug.
[00:32:47.680 --> 00:32:52.080] They've just started a bit later on, so they haven't got as far with the clinical trials yet.
[00:32:52.080 --> 00:32:58.320] He's now saying, well, why are they withholding progress on Fembenzado if they're moving forward with Membenzado?
[00:32:58.640 --> 00:33:03.040] The truth is that we don't know yet that these two medications are reliable for cancer use.
[00:33:03.040 --> 00:33:05.120] We don't have enough data to say either way.
[00:33:05.120 --> 00:33:11.680] There are countless medications that are promising for cancer that turn out to be useless once we give it to human patients.
[00:33:11.680 --> 00:33:18.640] We can't rely on the fact that it works in cell or animal models to be a reliable predictor that it will work in patients.
[00:33:18.640 --> 00:33:20.640] There's a long way to go in terms of testing.
[00:33:20.640 --> 00:33:32.440] And the frustrating thing as well is if the testing does actually show that it is effective, Joe Rogan will take it as evidence that he was right all along and they've just now come out and accept that he was right, rather than the process just happening as you want the process to happen.
[00:33:29.520 --> 00:33:33.960] As the process should happen, yeah.
[00:33:34.280 --> 00:33:42.600] And in fact, membenzadol, while promising for treating and even possibly preventing some cancers, there's also some data that it might accelerate the progression of some cancers too.
[00:33:42.600 --> 00:33:45.160] So this is why the research is really important.
[00:33:45.160 --> 00:33:57.880] We need to do more research to make sure that A, it is effective as an anti-cancer medication, B, it can get to where it needs to get to treat those cancers, and C, it's safe for use as an anti-cancer medicine, which, you know, we don't know.
[00:33:57.880 --> 00:34:03.480] There's a lot of research left to do, and until then, it's just not safe to use this as a medication to treat cancer.
[00:34:03.800 --> 00:34:04.680] But what's the harm?
[00:34:04.680 --> 00:34:11.320] I just told you that these two medications are low toxicity for humans, and that is certainly true, but they're not zero toxicity.
[00:34:11.320 --> 00:34:16.840] Of course, there are risks associated with taking the wrong medication for your cancer diagnosis.
[00:34:16.840 --> 00:34:19.720] We need to make sure that we're being safe taking something that works.
[00:34:19.720 --> 00:34:26.520] And if we eschew what the oncologist says and take something else, then we might be avoiding something that truly works in favor of something that doesn't.
[00:34:26.520 --> 00:34:32.040] Membenzadol, for example, is in clinical trials for gliomas, a brain cancer that we find exceptionally hard to treat.
[00:34:32.040 --> 00:34:44.360] But if you decide to take it experimentally for something like breast cancer, which we're really very good at treating, then you're potentially missing an opportunity to take a treatment that works in favor of something we just don't have the evidence for.
[00:34:45.240 --> 00:34:59.800] But in addition, there have been cases where patients have taken fembenzadol and been considerably unwell, including one patient in Japan with non-small cell lung cancer who took fembenzadol based on social media advice and ended up with drug-induced liver damage.
[00:34:59.800 --> 00:35:13.320] The patient took fembenzadol for a month, had severe liver damage, which resolved when she stopped taking the drug, and in the meantime, there was no evidence of tumour shrinking in her cancer, which was reported in 2021, long before Rogan got talking about fembenzidol.
[00:35:13.320 --> 00:35:21.120] In fact, fembenzidol has circulated as an alternative therapy for cancer treatment on social media for a while, since at least 2016.
[00:35:22.000 --> 00:35:44.240] A study published out of South Korea titled How Cancer Patients Get Fake Cancer Information from TV to YouTube, a qualitative study focusing on fembenzadol scandal, explains that the fembenzadol scandal was an incident wherein false information that fembenzadol, an anti-halmintic used to treat various parasites in dogs, cured terminal lung cancer spread among patients.
[00:35:44.240 --> 00:35:51.360] It started with the claim of American cancer patient Joe Tippins, but rather became sensational in South Korea.
[00:35:51.680 --> 00:35:58.560] The truth is, Joe Tippins, the American cancer patient, was also part of a clinical trial for a new anti-cancer medication.
[00:35:58.560 --> 00:36:10.960] But under the care of a veterinarian, he chose to attribute his survival to taking what is now referred to as the Joe Tippins protocol of fembenzadol plus vitamin E supplement, CBD oil and bioavailable curcumin.
[00:36:11.280 --> 00:36:19.280] The news really took off in South Korea when a local comedian shares his intention to take fembenzadol for his cancer diagnosis.
[00:36:19.280 --> 00:36:26.640] The comedian later shared that he would not take or recommend fembenzadol and ultimately died from his cancer in 2021.
[00:36:27.280 --> 00:36:47.360] But in a study researching the impact of the social media misinformation around fembenzadol in South Korea, a survey of 86 people living with cancer showed that about half of the cancer patients had taken non-prescription anti-helmintics during their chemotherapy and 96.5% of them did not inform their clinicians.
[00:36:47.360 --> 00:36:48.160] Jesus.
[00:36:48.480 --> 00:37:00.000] The paper points out that the term drug repurposing or drug repositioning refers to the novel use of a drug previously developed or approved for a specific clinical purpose to treat a disease for which it was not originally designed.
[00:37:00.280 --> 00:37:09.320] And it goes on to say that this phenomenon is particularly common in the field of medicine and can be attributed to the long period of time required for and the high cost of drug development.
[00:37:09.320 --> 00:37:18.200] Existing approved drugs can be made available within a shorter time period by decreasing the number of required clinical trials and reducing the number of process validations and stability tests.
[00:37:18.200 --> 00:37:22.840] Patients can rapidly access an additional treatment option at a reasonable price.
[00:37:23.480 --> 00:37:27.400] So Rogan's talking about something that's already been around for a while.
[00:37:27.400 --> 00:37:32.120] People have been talking about fembenzadol as an option to treat cancer for ages and it doesn't work.
[00:37:32.120 --> 00:37:32.920] There's no evidence for it.
[00:37:32.920 --> 00:37:36.200] It's clearly taken off in some areas and become quite popular.
[00:37:36.200 --> 00:37:40.600] But he's in how he talks about it, he's reasonably balanced about it.
[00:37:40.600 --> 00:37:46.920] So in his interview with Hancock, he never actively says that people should take fembenzadol.
[00:37:46.920 --> 00:37:55.160] And even a flint dibble, who he is offering like unsolicited health advice to, he says, I hope he's interested in even just examining it.
[00:37:55.160 --> 00:37:58.200] He's not saying he should take this.
[00:37:58.200 --> 00:38:01.560] He's saying, you know, I'm giving you information for you to make a call.
[00:38:01.560 --> 00:38:15.240] He even says in his preamble about it, the problem is when these people that are creating these incredible drugs, these scientists and doctors and these people that are having these amazing medical advancements, they're connected to something that just wants to make money.
[00:38:15.240 --> 00:38:26.200] The people that are selling the drugs and the people that are running the companies are completely different than the scientists that are legitimately developing these things, and many of them turn out to be very effective for all sorts of ailments and disease.
[00:38:26.200 --> 00:38:29.640] He's positioning himself as not being anti-science.
[00:38:29.640 --> 00:38:31.400] He will tell you the science.
[00:38:31.400 --> 00:38:35.960] I'll tell you the science slightly wrong, like not the wrong science, but with the wrong inflection.
[00:38:36.280 --> 00:38:37.480] He's not anti-medicine.
[00:38:37.480 --> 00:38:41.720] He just wants to give people access to the best science and the best medicine.
[00:38:41.720 --> 00:38:47.200] And that will be fine if Membenzadol or Fembenzado were proven to be useful treatments for cancer.
[00:38:44.920 --> 00:38:48.320] But we're just not there yet.
[00:38:48.560 --> 00:38:53.680] And he's just then just telling you the science, just telling you the medicine from a balanced position.
[00:38:53.840 --> 00:38:56.880] And I think that's true at that point because that's first learning about it.
[00:38:56.880 --> 00:39:00.640] But then I was just trying to check to scan through to see if I can find other mentions.
[00:39:00.640 --> 00:39:04.480] I haven't found one initially, but I'm fairly certain when he brings it up at other times.
[00:39:04.480 --> 00:39:08.000] He's not bringing it up to talk about it from a balanced science point of view.
[00:39:08.400 --> 00:39:12.880] And we know there's all sorts of things that they won't even look into, things like Fembendazole.
[00:39:12.880 --> 00:39:22.800] And that's it, is that when you keep coming back to something that's been locked into your memory like that, we do find the shorthands, we do find that we resolve it in our brains as something else.
[00:39:22.800 --> 00:39:30.240] So here he's being balanced because he's only just learned about it, he's only just sharing about it, and he's reading it fresh and has the more balanced position.
[00:39:30.240 --> 00:39:37.680] But the next time he talks about it, it's like, yeah, it's like that drug that definitely works that we talked about last time and now it's resolved in his memory as something slightly different.
[00:39:37.680 --> 00:39:44.000] Yeah, the annoying thing is fembendazole is such a specific long word that he can't always get right.
[00:39:44.000 --> 00:39:55.440] So any tools that I have to search for specific keywords through the transcript, either he's not saying it quite right or the transcript doesn't understand it and doesn't transcribe it right, which means I can't just go into the database and say, when did he last talk about fembendazole?
[00:39:55.600 --> 00:40:00.880] Yeah, I tried the same to search through the tool that you sent me and I couldn't find fembenzadole.
[00:40:00.880 --> 00:40:07.520] I did search through, and I nearly went through and countered, but it was too many and I was too tired to count.
[00:40:07.520 --> 00:40:11.920] I searched cancer and he mentions cancer a lot.
[00:40:11.920 --> 00:40:17.760] Yeah, four and a half thousand results from the scan that from a thousand episodes.
[00:40:17.720 --> 00:40:19.840] Well, so on average, four times an episode.
[00:40:20.080 --> 00:40:26.800] Yeah, so it that tool that you give will have multiple, will give you every mentions, there'll be multiple within each episode.
[00:40:27.040 --> 00:40:29.080] Within a thousand episodes, you think, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:40:28.560 --> 00:40:34.360] So I nearly went through and counted like how many episodes this year he mentioned cancer in.
[00:40:28.720 --> 00:40:35.400] Yeah, that's too many.
[00:40:29.120 --> 00:40:35.960] That's too hard to do.
[00:40:36.360 --> 00:40:43.480] There's two, it's not too hard to do, but like he's released a lot of episodes in 2025 alone, so it just would have taken some time.
[00:40:43.480 --> 00:40:46.680] Tell me about it.
[00:40:46.680 --> 00:40:54.600] But now we're in a world where misinformation is dominant, where people who are living with cancer are bombarded with advice and recommendations of ways to treat their cancer.
[00:40:54.600 --> 00:40:59.800] Sometimes it is tempting to take advice from a podcast if you trust the hosts.
[00:40:59.800 --> 00:41:10.360] And if people have been listening to Joe Rogan interviewing a lot of experts, you know, he doesn't just interview cranks, he also interviews scientists and researchers and whatever.
[00:41:10.360 --> 00:41:17.560] And they might also have crank views on things, but you know, that can be hard to unpick when you're just listening to an interview show.
[00:41:17.560 --> 00:41:29.480] If you now trust the podcast host, then it could be tempting to take recommendations of ways to treat your cancer, especially when you're bombarded by all sorts of information in the wider circle.
[00:41:29.800 --> 00:41:38.200] But we've said it before, and we will say it again: don't take medical advice from a podcast, especially not the Joe Rogan experience, and especially not Skeptics with a K.
[00:41:43.000 --> 00:41:47.320] So, for Liverpool Skeptic of the Pub, we have a social event this evening at Dr.
[00:41:47.320 --> 00:41:48.440] Duncan's on St.
[00:41:48.440 --> 00:41:49.320] John's Lane.
[00:41:49.320 --> 00:41:51.560] And if you're in the Liverpool area, you should definitely come along to that.
[00:41:51.560 --> 00:41:52.680] That's going to be from 8 p.m.
[00:41:52.760 --> 00:41:53.400] I'm going to be there.
[00:41:53.400 --> 00:41:54.120] Are you going to do it?
[00:41:54.200 --> 00:41:54.760] I'll be there.
[00:41:54.760 --> 00:41:55.720] I'm pretty sure I'll be there.
[00:41:55.720 --> 00:41:57.000] It should be fun, should be interesting.
[00:41:57.000 --> 00:41:58.440] It's always nice, always enjoyable.
[00:41:58.600 --> 00:42:00.200] It's going to be for me in time.
[00:42:00.200 --> 00:42:03.240] And yes, if you're in the Liverpool area, definitely come along to that one.
[00:42:03.240 --> 00:42:09.160] And next week, on the 6th of May, the tickets for QED are going to be going on sale.
[00:42:09.160 --> 00:42:10.360] We can't do it any more than that.
[00:42:10.360 --> 00:42:10.520] Nope.
[00:42:10.680 --> 00:42:11.320] Tickets will be on the side.
[00:42:11.400 --> 00:42:13.080] We can't tell you any more than that right now.
[00:42:13.320 --> 00:42:15.120] We literally can't tell you any more than that.
[00:42:14.600 --> 00:42:17.840] But yes, on the 6th of May, that's from 3 p.m.
[00:42:17.920 --> 00:42:18.880] UK time.
[00:42:18.880 --> 00:42:20.560] Local times may vary.
[00:42:14.760 --> 00:42:21.120] And you should.
[00:42:21.760 --> 00:42:23.840] UK time, which is BST at 200.
[00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:25.200] British summer time at the moment.
[00:42:25.200 --> 00:42:25.680] Yeah.
[00:42:25.680 --> 00:42:28.560] Yeah, you'll find information about that at qbdcon.org.
[00:42:28.560 --> 00:42:29.600] It's the last QED.
[00:42:29.840 --> 00:42:31.760] And yes, it will be the final QED.
[00:42:32.960 --> 00:42:34.000] Will be the final QED.
[00:42:34.240 --> 00:42:35.120] Last chance to come.
[00:42:35.120 --> 00:42:40.400] So if you're one of those people who's always said, I'll get to QED one day, this is your last chance to do it.
[00:42:40.400 --> 00:42:42.400] And I'm talking to you, Jake.
[00:42:43.440 --> 00:42:46.880] So just narrow cast this one by one.
[00:42:47.280 --> 00:42:51.120] Yeah, we'll sell our tickets one by one.
[00:42:51.440 --> 00:42:54.000] Aside from that, then I think that is all we have time for.
[00:42:54.000 --> 00:42:54.640] I think it is.
[00:42:54.640 --> 00:42:57.200] All that remains then is we thank Marsh for coming on today.
[00:42:57.200 --> 00:42:57.680] Cheers.
[00:42:57.680 --> 00:42:58.880] And thank you to Alice.
[00:42:58.880 --> 00:42:59.440] Thank you.
[00:42:59.440 --> 00:43:02.160] We have been Skeptics with a K, and we will see you next time.
[00:43:02.160 --> 00:43:02.880] Bye now.
[00:43:02.880 --> 00:43:03.840] Bye.
[00:43:08.640 --> 00:43:13.760] Skeptics with a K is produced by Skeptic Media in association with the Merseyside Skeptic Society.
[00:43:13.760 --> 00:43:22.720] For questions or comments, email podcast at skepticswithakay.org and you can find out more about Merseyside Skeptics at merseyside skeptics.org.uk.