I'm manny, and this is no such thing. The show where we settle our dumb arguments and yours by actually doing the research. On today's episode, does RFK Junior have a point?
There's no no such thing, no such thing.
Such than such than such. Thank you?
All right, how's it going, guys? Good as you can see. I'm set up it with all these boxes around me.
How is the move?
It was fine. I think I went through like all of the classic moving processes where you think you don't have that much until it's the day before, and then you're like, how the hell do I haven't touched any of this in a year? The move was fine, but I still do have like a deep layer of resentment towards the previous landlords for selling the building and course, yeah, and making me move. I really liked that place. Speaking of someone who also inspires deep layers of resentment, that's good. Yeah,
thank you. This episode is about RFK Junior. Obviously. RFK Junior is the head of the HHS, the Health and Human Services Department, which has a stated goal of enhancing the well being of all Americans. I think we're in a bit of a cliffhanger in regards to that mission, because RFK Junior has pushed and promoted a lot of problematic theories and ideologies as it pertains to our health.
But at the same time, he's captured the adoration of millions of people in the so called Make America Healthy Again movement, And so I thought this episode would be a good opportunity to ask two questions. One, how has he taken these ideas and resonated with so many people? And too, what should we as trusters of science do
about his influence and reach? And so, similar to the episode we did about the rise of political violence and assassination attempts a couple months ago, I think we're going to keep our intro here pretty short because we just want to get straight to the expert. But first I just wanted to ask you, guys, where do you think his explosion and popularity comes from?
If we're being honest, the reason RFK came unto my radar is because of Curb your Enthusiasm, Shara Hines, right, And that was you know, he wasn't really on my radar until people are like, oh my god, Cheryl's dating at Kennedy.
I remember working on a show and they were covering the anti VAXX movement, and RFK was obviously figured into that. And then just in his background, I knew he was an environmental lawyer, and that gave him some sort of legitimate See. Obviously, also being a Kennedy, people assume you're probably not going to be totally crazy, even though yeah, it's kind of a cursed family. He was always kind of careful, careful enough in his phrasing for things to
kind of have one foot in and foot out. I think we still see that today.
I think years ago, I remember, like years like before I got to New York, like in college. Maybe I remember hearing about some of the things he was doing for the environment, for the cause of the environment. I remember he got arrested, I think, and I remember thinking, wow, like, this is a Kennedy who's part of this like very established apparatus of politics. But here's one of the family members who's kind of going out getting arrested because he cares about the environment so much.
Tell us why you got arrested yesterday, Bob. We were protesting the Xcel pipeline or demonstrating.
Yeah, he's arrested for a keystone Excel oil pipeline protest at the White House seeing.
Wow, that's incredible considering the people he works for. Now, fast forward, fast forward years and years and years, he's running for president. He's got all these scandals. The one thing I remember sticking out the most in terms of like controversy was this measles vaccine moment that happened in Samoa. Have you guys heard of this.
There's an update from the Samoan government latest. Over three thousand measles cases reported, one hundred and ninety eight recorded in the last twenty four hours, fifty three measles related death.
Basically before this outbreak, two kids died after getting the measles vaccine, not because the vaccine was dangerous, but because the nurses accidentally mixed the vaccine with a muscle relaxant instead of water, which is how you're usually supposed to do it. RFK Junior kind of saw that as an opportunity to be like, hey, look, the measles vaccine is killing kids, and he visited the island and drummed up
all of this anti vaccine rhetoric. The vaccination rates dropped on the island, and then when there was an outbreak, so many people died, and he denies any involvement of getting fewer people vaccinated. But if you talk to people there, if you've talked to experts about it, they see a pretty clear correlation between his rhetoric in Samoa and the drop in vaccination rates during an outbreak that killed people.
Here's Senator Elizabeth Warren confronting RFK Junior about this at his confirmation hearing.
Do you accept even a sentill, just even a sliver of responsibility for the drop in vaccinations and the subsequent deaths of more than seventy people, anything you do differently?
No, absolutely not.
The Samoa incident was years ago, But today RFK Junior is still going on about measles, talking about how vitamin a is a good enough treatment for the measles outbreak happening in Texas, and now kids there are overdosing on vitamin a, which I didn't even know was a thing, learning so much about this, about how dumb all of this is. All right, we have established the kind of
healthcare risks that AREFK junior poses. But sometimes I struggle with how to process him, because, you know, like ten percent of the shit he says, you do kind of go like, oh, okay, man, that kind of makes sense. He's talking about like ultra processed foods and how bad they are for you, and it's like, yeah, okay, these like forever chemicals that are in the water. In the water doesn't sound good to me. He wants to do he wants to do universal HSA's, which is great but
weird because he's like gutting all of hhs. You know, he talks about childhood obesity, being anti big pharma. If I didn't know exactly who RFK Junior was and I only listened to what he said in speeches, I could pretty easily see someone getting caught up in that.
It's funny because we were stunning around the clip and I saw it for a few days before I actually listened to what he said in the clip. But like the headline of the clip was like r K. Junior is like, we need to take the phones out of the schools because they're not good for kids.
I was like, oh, yeah, I agree, agree, And then you played a clip and then he's talking about, you know, like how it fucks with their brains because of some way I don't even know.
The cell phones also produce electric magnetic radiation. It has been shown to damage to neurological damage to kids when it's around them all day.
Yeah, the five gives actually what arget was, which is like a new spin on it.
And I was like, all right, you know, not the reason why I would say take the phone out of
the schools. But I've heard people talk about Michelle Obama try to get people to eat healthier and people are picking out so it's like some of this stuff, Like I don't think everything he's saying is out right, like this is dumb and bad, which I think, from my point of view makes it harder, right, Like it would be a lot easier for me to know how to approach this guy if everything he was saying was just sort of crazy and like I could just basically ignore it.
But the fact that like, yeah, we should be eating less ultra processed foods, but like the way that he wants to tackle it is like not allowing for snap benefits to cover ultra processed foods, and it's like, Okay, what are these people going to eat? And a lot of these ways they don't have fresh fruits and vegetables, and as we all know, fresh fruits and vegetables are a lot more expensive than ultra processed foods, So are you gonna make you know, are you gonna get people
more snap benefits? And they're talking about cutting snap benefits right, So it's like there's always I feel like, oh yeah, that kind of makes sense. And then and either the way it's going to be executed or the reason for some of this stuff kind of throws you off, So it makes it makes it harder to sort of navigate.
Yeah, I think he gets into a universally human problem, which is like, we're so good at being able to point out something that's bad, but it's when it comes time to like figuring out how to fix it or having any kind of like meaningful discourse about solutions, that's just garbage.
Listen, if he can solve autism by September, like you said.
That's great.
We recognize obviously autism is famously a spectrum, you know, certainly livable, but it's like, you know, okay, this is concerning if it is rising this much, or is it diagnosing whatever.
What drives me crazy about this shit is like there have been doctors who've been studying this stuff for decades.
And in just so we don't get demonetized. The CDC data shows that there is no correlation between vaccinations and an increase in autism. But RFK Junior is here to stay, and like I said at the top of this episode, I want to figure out how he's been able to resonate with so many people and what we should be doing to deal with this kind of a figure that high up in office. So after the break, we're going
to talk to Derek Brez. He's a writer, an author, he's the co host of the Conspirituality podcast, and he has been covering RFK Junior extensively for the past few years. All Right, we're here with Derek Berez, co author of the Conspiratuality book and co founder of the Conspiratuality Podcast. We want to talk to you, Derek, not just because you've reported extensively on RFK Junior, but also because you've reported on the wellness environment that surrounds basically everything that
he does. But first, on the day of this recording, actual RFK Junior announced at a cabinet meeting that he's going to figure out what's behind the quote autism epidemic by September of this year, by.
September, we will know what has caused autism an epidemic and will be able to elimit those exposures.
So, Derek, I just want to get your reaction to this. Can RFK Junior figure this out by September?
He figured it out years ago when he decided that he was going to start suing a lot of pharmaceutical companies around vaccines. So he's doing science in the exact way that science is not done, meaning he's already come to a conclusion, and now he's been systematically putting the pieces into place to come to that conclusion in some sort of official manner, even though the science is likely not to hold up.
So that's interesting because I consider RFK Junior to be a peddler of misinformation. But do you think there's enough of an argument to be able to call this disinformation where where he is being intentionally misleading?
It's always hard for a lot of reasons, especially in a litigious society like America, and RFK Junior being a lawyer who knows how to navigate that. But I would say that if you were intentionally saying things in order to monetize them or to sway people to your side, and to your opinion, I would call that disinformation.
So, Derek, you and two other people, Julian Walker and Matthew Remsky wrote this incredible book called Conspiratuality. It talks about influencers in the wellness space who kind of pedal misinformation and conspiracy theories. And so I thought you would be a great person to ask about how RFK Junior and his ideas have resonated with so many people. So I'll just put the question to you, how the hell did this happen?
We live in a for profit healthcare system that does not look out for people, and the idea that pharmaceutical companies, in alignment with insurance companies and medical systems would not be looking out for our best interest has affected tens of millions, hundreds of millions of Americans for a very long time. People don't go to preventive screenings or get tests done because they can't afford them. So that that
is the root cause of so many people's frustration with medicine. Now, on top of that, we have a longstanding wellness quote unquote community in America that has always looked to alternative medicine. In our book, we go back two hundred years finding examples of this and probably goes back even further. And I was a yoga instructor for decades of my life.
I was very heavily involved in the wellness community, working with food companies, and I know that community very well, having spent time there, and they are mostly well intention people. But the problem is a lot of them are scientifically illiterate.
And that really is what happens is that RFK Junior takes a feeling that people have about their being distrust in the government and with healthcare specifically, but then they do not really understand how the scientific process works, and he exploits that gap in people's knowledge, and he appeals to this idea that nature at some point was healing and that everyone was just in great shape all of the time, which is a complete fallacy, but he exploits those sorts of gaps and.
Knowledge you mentioned earlier. Being a part of the wellness community as a yoga instructor for my whole life, that kind of community has always been adjacent to, like a lefty liberalism. These days, I feel like that kind of community has been pretty successfully branded as closer to the right. Could you explain that shift from the left to the right.
So conspirituality is this sort of blending between new age liberalism and right wing conservatism. But where the connective tissue in my feeling is that it's an individualism. These sorts of spirituality that we practice in America is very self focused and self centered. It's always about healing the individual. It's very rarely about talking about community, and usually when community is invoked, it usually only is my community, the
people who already believe the way that I do. So while on its face it seems like how did these communities come together, it's really a form of protectionism, of self protectionism that has united them because a lot of so called Latte liberals, you know, they are also people who are involved in nimbi movements. They want to solve homelessness, but they don't want it built on their block. So that's kind of a feature of liberalism in America.
So I was recently watching one of those twenty versus one YouTube videos from Jubilee, and the topic for that episode was anti vaxxers versus a doctor. One of the sentiments that kept coming up from the anti vaxxers was this idea that we are actually glowing away from nature, and the further we get away from nature, the more diseases we will see. I was wondering if you could respond to that sentiment, because I feel like nature could
kind of kill you in a heartbeat. So what is the science behind that.
It's called the naturalistic fallacy, and it actually is another parallel with the right wing, because the right wing glorifies the nineteen fifties post World World War two. America is this ideal time because it is when we became a global superpower, but there was a lot going on that was not good in the nineteen fifties. The same things happens in the wellness perspective, whereas this idea that we were once in harmony with nature, which is just total bullshit.
Before antibiotics, vaccines, and then measures like hand washing, you could very easily die of a cut. Infectious diseases killed people. You know. One thing that RFK Junior does is he goes we have a chronic disease epidemic. Now, we do
have problems with chronic diseases. But the reasons that chronic diseases are more prevalent than infectious diseases right now is because We've solved a lot of problems with infectious diseases through vaccines and antibiotics, So this is just a different example of how we've been grappling and fighting against nature for a long time. Becoming an apex predator doesn't just happen without a long struggle, and that struggle continues. But
in some senses, we're victims of our own success. We can pretty much eat any food anytime of the year from wherever we want, if we have things that would have killed us just a few generations ago. I'm a cancer survivor and I had a relatively and I'm putting this in quotes easy time with it because the technology and the science has advanced so much. Whereas one hundred and fifty years ago, I would not be here right.
Now, Derek, I feel like so much of how RFK Junior resonates with people has to do with the fact that he is the person introducing people to a given issue. I find myself being introduced to a lot of these topics by r of K Junior, and then I have to go figure out, you know, what's right and what's wrong. So I'm hoping we can just throw some r of K junior claims at you and get your reaction. Where do they come from? Is it bullshit or not? So how about we start with this idea that vitamin A
is a sufficient enough treatment for measles. Where does that come from?
It comes from studies that were done on malnourished children in Africa, and it's very specific to malnourished children, and they had good efficacy with megadoses of vitamin A too, megadoses to be specific, given over the course of something like forty eight hours. They had good results from that. But what often happens with anti vaxers or wellness people in general is they'll cling to a study, extrapolate from it,
and then pretend that it's good for everyone. Vitamin A toxicity is a known problem, and we've seen some children now have to go to the hospital in West Texas because of that toxicity. But there is a little bit of truth to a very specific community that they pretend will we'll affect everyone in the same way, and that's just not how biology works.
Okay, what about the claim that seed oils are bad for you. Seed oils, of course the oils that are extracted from vegetable crops, so we're talking canola oil, corn oil, flax seed oil. Are those things bad for you?
That started with or at least was mainstreamed by someone named Paul Saladino, who was formerly known as the Carnivore Doctor because he was an early carnivore diet devotee, who now incorporates fruits and vegetables because he knows that sort of diet can't last, and he's moved on to another stick. Seed oils, like canola oil, they're used in ultra processed
foods a lot because they are inexpensive. The problem is the sugar and the carbs, and then different things, the excess carbohydrates that are in ultra processed foods and just the manufacturing process. They've isolated one of the components that is extremely well studied, is known to have cardiovascular benefits and is known to have other health benefits, and they've taken that and pretended to that that is the actual problem.
And the anti seed oil rhetoric has been pretty successful because you have franchised restaurants like Steak and Shake making a big deal out of switching from seed oils to beef tallo for when they make their French fries.
Yeah, it's audience capture. I mean, any sort of company is going to look for what can give them a leg up and to get into the news cycle. And I don't know much about Steak and Shake, so I've never lived in an area what that has one, So I don't know their policies. I don't know their politics, but it doesn't surprise me that if they perhaps have a conservative bent to their politics, then they want to appeal to that crowd. It does not surprise me that they jump on the bandwagon.
I am actually from a state that has Steak and Shake, and I can confirm that it has a conservative leaning. Okay, okay, okay, what about fluoride in the wall? Good or bad?
First off, I'll just say that this feeds into another aspect that RFK is really good at exploiting. I brought up the naturalistic fallacy. There's also chemophobia, and that's people's fear of chemicals. So the idea that something is synthetic and that it's put into something skivs people out. My understanding is that the benefits have largely been around the
enamel of teeth and people have gotten less cavities. We've seen instances for example in Canada, where one province took the floride out and the childhood cavity rate shot up, so they put it back in and it went back down. I happen to live now in the largest city in America that does not fluoridate its water, which is Portland, Oregon. There's a strong hippie culture here that runs with some
of its politics. But from my understanding and from the experts that I've talked to, it is a net positive to have fluoride in the water at the levels of point seven no leaders, it is not going to have any harmful effects.
Earlier, Devin Noah and I were talking about some of the things that RFK Junior says that we actually agree with, and I'm curious, has he said anything that you actually support.
Well, Unfortunately, the changes that he's proposed that I would love to see happen, I don't think he has the power to do. And that's things like ending the pharma lobby in DC and ending direct to consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals on television. We are one of two countries in the world that allow that. He campaigned on those things, and since he's been installed at the AHHS, he has not brought them up once, And that is what I figured, because the pharma lobby just has too much power with
both Democrats and Republicans. It is the largest lobby in DC. The idea that he would get that through was always a misnomer.
Right as anti establishment as RFK Junior seems, he doesn't seem to be immune from the classic politician behavior of making promises that he knows he can't keep. But Derek, we have learned so much in this episode. However, before I let you go, I wanted to ask you what we, as individuals have the power to do in the face of this movement of shitty science. What would you say to someone who perhaps has dipped their toes in the worldview of someone like RFK Junior, but hasn't quite gone
off the deep end yet? How would you approach someone like that?
I would do my best to try to get that person to adhere to a heuristic that I came up very early on with conspirtuality, which is, watch what they say and then watch what they sell. So if you look at not just RFK, but if you look at the people in his inner circle, all of them sell branded supplements, books, or protocols that go against mainstream medicine
in some capacity, every single one of them. So if you can help someone say why are these people fomenting distrust and conventional medicine at every turn but then selling you their own branded products, that should be your first signal that something isn't right here?
All right?
That was Derek Barris, co host of the Conspiratuality podcast. Yeah, what did we think? I mean? I really I liked the point about like approaching people in a reasonable manner instead of like what's been the average liberal response to things we don't agree with, which is just to like completely shit on someone.
This is going to be a tough four years for me because I feel like I have very little patience for this stuff in that like, I don't want to spend time explaining to people you don't like basic things that experts are saying, because it feels like we are living in a world right now where it doesn't really matter what the facts are or what actually happened.
Right. Yeah. I have family members who, I mean, at peak COVID were you know, kind of spousing all the same kind of stuff, and I went into a mode of like, you don't know what you're talking about, and it's an understandable reaction, like I still feel the need to be like that. But then yeah, the result is
not that they're like understanding your position better. It's more that like, what the hell I'm being antagonized for the way that I think, and and it probably makes them double down, like get even deeper into that avenue of information. But like Devin said, there does seem to be just
like two different worlds of information happening. We saw that this week with the Supreme Court decision that was nine to zero against Trump about bringing the mistakenly deported guy back, and they immediately were like, actually it was nine to zero in our favor, and then and that was it. Conversation's over. So it's like, all right, yeah, this is going to be a fair like an incredibly frustrating era
to live in. And I feel like, you know, I do feel like the classic like MSNBC like mom now where it's like, you know, in the first Trump administration, I'm like whatever, like this is very all, very stupid, but it's gonna be okay. And now I'm like, holy shit, I can't I can't believe what I'm seeing. And so I want to be able to practice more patience and tolerance, but then this is like the worst era to be
trying to practice that. In the part of the appeal of RFK is of course that in this kind of what the whole episode has been about is like, there will be these things where it's like you want to hear them out on certain things, or attacking big pharma and you know, advertisement on TV and these sorts of things which are obviously way harder goals because there is money and other factors.
Right. I guess like my approach if someone I knew was kind of dipping their toe into some of this stuff, my approach would be to try to take it on a case by case thing and not just like, oh well, everything RFK or you know, insert anyone in this realm is totally off base and wrong. The seed oil thing, if you don't want to eat that, I don't really care. I don't think kids aren't gonna die, but that obviously there's stuff where it's like, Okay, we're trying to get
rid of the polio vaccine. That's pretty bad.
Thanks for listening to no such thing by Manny, Noah and Devin. This was our second news oriented episode. Let us know if you liked it and if we should do even more of them, or let us know if you're like, uh, this sucks. Stop doing news. You guys are idiots. Our guest today was Derek Barris, author of the Conspiratuality book and host of the Conspiratuality podcast. Definitely visit the substack for today's episode at No Such Thing
dot Show. It's going to have a list of resources for people who want to learn more about all the issues we talked about today. The theme song for No Such Thing is produced by me Manny certain self is on the beat for the song you're listening to right now. Finally, if you liked what you heard today, please leave us five stars on wherever you're listening to this podcast. It helps us so much and I'll talk to you guys next week.