From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
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Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Alexis the Britt Jackson. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Fellow conspiracy realists, longtime listeners, it feels so great to be back now. Like hopefully the majority of America, we took June teenth off. We treated it as the holiday it deserves to be treated as. And as a result, we had a couple of classic episodes in place of our strange news and listener mail
programs last week. We hope you enjoyed them, and we hope they freaked you out as much as they freaked us out when we recorded them.
Back in nineteen forty seven.
Yes, as the human calendars reckon, we have a lot. We have a lot of cool stuff to get to because well I say cool, it's interesting stuff. It is strange news and what we found was that. Weirdly enough, last week when we were going to previously on stuff they don't want you to know, when we were going to record Strange News, we had a bevy, a literal
cavalcade of different stories. A lot of things happened in the interim between our time now and our time then, and we cannot wait to share them with you.
And the good news, some of them have developed even further since that time, and others have just remained delightfully evergreen.
We'll get into brain rots, We'll get into corporate medical malfeasance, We'll get into so many things, including our buddies at the Pentagon. For now, we're going to take a quick break, and then we're going to talk about our buddy Julian, who's going home, all right, Julian Massage. If you know this show, it is not your first time listening to stuff they want you to know, then you know the story of Julian Assage quite well, the creator, the originator
of the world changing online resource known as WikiLeaks. And we talked about Julian in the past. We have not spoken directly to him, just to be clear. We know that he spends some time in a little bit of a you know, a legal pickle, a bag of diplomatic badgers.
Sort of like a diplomatic limbo, a lot of treadmilling. Right, then they have a cat at some point.
Support gap.
Yeah, So Julian usage fundamentally changed the actions of nation states, arguably radicalized and informed many public populations across the planet.
He was also being hunted by Uncle Sam as a result of his release of diplomatic cables that arguably endangered the lives of US service members, and particularly he may have played a role in the outcome of some US elections by not all the secrets he was given from folks across the world, but from his curation thereof the stuff he decided to leak versus the stuff that he withheld.
Yeah, he's a complicated figure, like a lot of the figures we've we talked about on this show, because without him, the American public, you, us, everyone wouldn't have known about a great and many things, right, or at least without someone who took the ac actions that he chose to take. So, but it's weird.
But then hearing in that though the choice right there is in the complexity there is like sort of a potentially problematic angle to this guy that he has like an agenda and isn't just out there for the pure but you know, proliferation of truth and justice, right, yeah, no way.
Yeah yeah. But and weirdly enough, the reason why he's getting out is because he has been I was going to use the word suffering. But he has been in captivity of one form or another for a long time, whether it was a choice or because he had to stay somewhere, right, he.
Was in the liminal space of embassy grounds. As we all know, fellow nerds, embassy grounds are kind of like freeports in that they are technically the soil of the country right in the embassy. So Ecuador helped him out. He got arrested on in April eleventh, twenty nineteen. He went to one of the crappiest prisons in the United Kingdom, Belmarsh. There's a reason that people write about it, and he now recently this is the breaking news. He waited. I
want to be careful I say this. He waited for some scandals, the cycle of scandals and outrage to circle through, you know, a real wheal of time kind of thing. With the amount of attention people give to News. He pled guilty to espionage in US courts, to the Department of Justice, essentially, and now he is released. He released, He is a free man. In returning to Australia post haste texted you guys, News wrote publicly, I think he made a deal.
Well, he made some kind of deal because they gave him time served. They said, you've spent five years behind bars already, so get out of here, and he went straight to well, how do you say the capital of Australia, Canberra, can bren.
Bra, can Bra.
Yeah, but it was crazy to watch footage of him just walking into an airplane because we've been watching him since what two thousand and seven maybe, yes, I mean like we we've made videos on him. Some of the first videos we did were about not about Wiki leaks in particular, but about people who were whistleblowers, and he was one of the top guys.
It is interesting how like when a government does what a Sane did, it's you know, good trade craft or what have you like, it's it's part of the business of you know, intelligence. But when someone like Assane does it and runs a foul of a government like the United States, Uh, it's essentially treason US or you know, it's considered like almost an act of informational terrorism. And there's an article on the Wall Street Journal that would somewhat agree with that headline.
Julian is no hero.
A guilty plea might free him, but remember why the US pursued him.
Yeah, let me give us the statement from the US district judge who made this, made this official, right, made this legit. This US district judge is Ramona Manglona, and she told Assage the following quote. With this pronouncement, it appears you will be able to walk out of this courtroom a free man. I hope there will be some peace restored with that, mister Massage. It's apparently an early happy birthday to you. I understand your birthdays next week. I hope you will start your new life in a
positive manner. And it is true, Julian Assange turns fifty three years old on July third, So if you're hearing this, happy birthday, man. Birthdays are the only real New Year's I walk down the street to continually diss the calendar.
No, he's one of those cats that has had white hair like since forever.
Right, Yeah, Targerian in that respect, which we talked about earlier.
Little Megala maniacal too like the Targarian.
Again, complicated figure. But also perhaps the most interesting thing for those of us playing along at home tonight, wherever you find yourself in this wide world, is that he.
Made a deal.
He clearly made a deal. There was an incentivized There was incentivization on both sides of the bargaining table. And the question we have to ask is what did she give up? What did this great secret keeper or this liberator of secrets? What did he give Uncle Sam in return for a again free life in Australia?
All right, yeah, mayapothesis. They sat across the table and said, Julian, don't do this again. We're gonna let you go. Don't do this again, and he's like okay.
When they said, hey, Putin's not your friend. Also maybe they played a little parody song like there are five private eyes watching you.
Well. Yeah, at times, Wiki Leaks had to completely shut down because of the intense surveillance that it was under. And the way they function is whistleblowers reach out to WikiLeaks, you know. They That's kind of how it all began. It was information gathering from individuals and groups who wanted to blow the whistle.
They self selected, self submitted.
Yep, they send the stuff to WikiLeaks. Wiki leaks uses whatever journalistic you know, parameters that they go by, and sometimes they would even link up with an outfit. Sure, and I'll feel like the Guardian or someone like like that connect with them. Then they release, like what were we saying, some small amount of whatever it is that
they've been given. But those people who would be blowing the whistle didn't feel comfortable reaching out we anymore because the government was peering over their shoulders at at all.
Times, because the the interface got compromised honestly, pretty early on. If we're talking about the just sheer amount of powerful actors who wanted control over that right, they they want to see the secrets. When people are they practice information asymmetry. You know, it doesn't matter if they're a government or a business or an individual. It is a like it is a hallmark of bad faith actors.
So it's not that mean though.
Yeah, information asymmetry in this case would be if you like, imagine you've got some boffins and they crack the code on wiki leaks, right, the first thing you want is not to let wiki leaks know it has been compromised. You want people to continue feeling safe whispering their secrets into this ostensibly black box. And then you want to leverage that and the next move would be to start sending fake information in there right to see how your adversaries will react. And I'm not being America a US
centric when I say this. Any country, any institution, would have taken advantage of this if possible. And then if things started to go sideways, they would spin out the conversation by saying, hey, we're just as surprised as you are. You know what I mean. We're just trying to get along with this Julian guy. He's crazy. It is still there's still a lot of questions to be answered here right What is the nature of the deal, what is
the information exchanged? What will the consequences be? But we do know people get up to shenanigans again, So much stuff happened this week. We're going to follow up on assanj But we haven't even talked about the Pentagon getting busted on propaganda.
Oh quick, quick question on assand real quick, if you don't mind, hasn't even kind of out of the loop and for a long time, Like, why would they be interested in information that he has? Would it still be relevant, or would it be some kind of something that he's been holding on to, or that.
He kept us some sort of insurance policy or what I know, We don't know, but I mean, I'm wondering.
He's had a team of attorneys behind him for I mean, since he's been in prison, right, twenty nineteen, since he was arrested, even before that, when even he was in the embassy, people have been attempting attorneys, right, powerful smart attorneys have been attempting to get him out of the situation. So I wonder if they're pulling levers as well.
Yeah, So to answer those questions, there are two things. First, in general, information is perishable, meaning you know, you can know everything about what's going down in Basra in two thousand and seven, but does that matter in twenty twenty four?
Right.
The second thing is the idea of a dead man's hand, dead man's switch. This is off then brought up in conspiratorial forms when we're talking about things like the death of Jeffrey Epstein, when we're talking about the evil and brilliant nuclear strategy of the former Soviet Union. It's kind of a you can't fire me, I quit and the building's burning idea. On an individual level, a dead man's hand is meant to or dead man's switch is meant to function as a kind of insurance. We're going to
talk about insurance later this week as well. In a different aspect.
Well, it's a way of like almost holding somebody hostage, or it's like a blackmail kind of opportunity. I guess it's like dirt that if in the event that something happens to me, this will be triggered and y'all who wish me harm are screwed.
So the primary concern there is that whatever this information may have been, it was enough to secure the safe international passage of a guy will doubtlessly be followed for the rest of his life in ways that may be invisible to him. Even and he's super smart.
He'll venture into the deep, deep deep bush where some of these undiscovered cryptids are hanging out. Yeah, hard time tracking him there.
Maybe he'll give some information on the anti VAXX program. Now we have to get to we missed your last week, folks. The news broke courtesy of Reuters the Pentagon, which is housed in the world's largest office building. What a weird flex. They also no longer have a subway, which is a shame.
But it turns out the news broke thanks to journalists Chris Bing and Joel Schechtman on June fourteenth, twenty twenty four, that the US military launched a clandestine secret program that was an anti vaccination disinformation campaign targeted at the nation of the philip and to a smaller degree, people in the Filipino diaspora across the world. It was entirely meant to discredit the Chinese vaccination program for COVID nineteen.
And it was.
It was sophisticated, it was organized, It was the kind of thing that you might associate with other adversarial countries, and it shows us an important lesson.
I guess my question is to what ends, you know, as my question often is just to smear them, embarrass them publicly, or is there some actionable you know next steps.
Wasn't it supposed to basically warn people against specific vaccinations coming out of China.
Yes, and the larger aim, the chess game of it was meant to It was an avenue of attack to diminish China's perceived growing influence on the Philippines, which are super crucial in that region. We know that China is on a maritime level, super beefed up with pretty much every other country in Southeast Asia that has access to the Pacific Ocean. Right, it's the China Sea, it's the South China Sea, and another countries say, we never agreed
to that. So the idea here, from the idea here from the doctor Strange Loves of the United States, was this would be a clever and cost effective means of reducing Chinese influence on the nation of the Philippines. The concern being that if that Chinese influence grows past a certain threshold, the Philippines will become a vassal state like Myanmar is a vassal state of China. So there was a greater good argument. There was a chess game greater
good argument for it. But it also probably costs some lives, just statistically, because they're telling people, they're telling people not to get vaccines.
Yeah, but think about all the people who didn't get those nanobots injected into them as a result of this campaign. I'm just joking.
I'm just true.
Think about the people who are still immune to five g right shut out to our classic episode. This thing started in twenty twenty. It went beyond Southeast Asia, That's what I mean when I'm talking about touching the diaspora. And it terminated officially in twenty twenty one. But they rolled out bought armies on x or on Twitter. They also had the thing you can see with a lot of bots, which is talking points slightly rephrased, super common on Reddit. What it shows us, Oh gosh, we don't
even have the time. I think this is an episode my Spidery Sen says, because we were talking off air about the idea of just putting podcasting and join the company responsible for this incredibly successful campaign. Let's just be honest. General Dynamics Information Technology. Looking.
I can use the sex of your name, but that they do good work.
We need innocuous names. If we're up to Shenanigans, look it up. The other stuff we didn't get to. There is a Connecticut sized dead zone that's coming out in the Gulf of Mexico, so be careful where you swim. California is fighting against hidden fees. Walmart is getting into surge pricing. Watch out for bacteria in Japan.
Oh, French people are pooping in the seen and protest of the Olympics. Yeah, yeah, that's the thing.
Oh, and we need to do a Boeing update because their star Liner issues are intense. As we record this, there are two astronauts still stuck up there in the star Liner because they can't Boeing can't figure out how to get it to work right.
And we know that we know that Boeing made some pretty heavy statements about whistleblowers recently, and.
Do oj I believe is starting to look at them for criminal prosecution.
Yep, there's a lot in there.
If you're using titanium, you know, we should be titanium. Oh, we're gonna pause for we're from our sponsors when we come back. There's something I think we I think multiple ones of us had us in here. There's a very interesting statement from the US Surgeon General which jibes with our earlier comments about social media as a dopamine casino.
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What or what is happening?
Sorry, guys, have a touch of the brain rot there.
What any of that means? What any of that means? Oh? Boy, guys.
Yeah, So I have the benefit, I suppose or curse depending on what where you stand, of having a fifteen year old kid and having being around kids also through their friendships and other friends I have who have younger kids.
Kind of getting this a.
Pretty broad picture of some of the Internet meme culture of like my kid's generation and the one beneath it and jen Alpha as it's known, really getting up to some very interesting beyond absurdist like slang and lingo and meme worship and a lot of it comes from streamers and twitch stuff, which has never really been.
Absurdist, though sorry to interject, is it absurdist or is it simply because this is an outside looking in perspective.
Yes, I would argue it is absurdist, I think, and I think that's where the appeal comes from with with the kids. I think they just like, you know, to me, absurdist is things like Tim and Eric awesome show, great job.
You know. It's like that kind of.
Level of which also is sort of memi and Internet kind of in terms of like what it feels like it's mimicking or like the kind of content.
That we would see that you know, but like they're.
Also mimicking like old infomercials from the nineties. Is a certain quality of that VHS weird still acting kind of bad infomercial thing that's made its way onto the Internet as proliferated in memes and has generated all of this crazy content. Of course, the biggest offender, I guess is TikTok, because it's all about a torch, a short attention span, theater kind of mentality.
Yeah, I just rattled off a bunch of.
These crazy bizarro non sequitors that all do have, you know, for the most part, explanations like, for example, riz is you know, short for charisma. It's how you you know when you're looking good. A way of attracting a romantic partner. Only in Ohio is a thing. It's a meme that implies that strange events apparently only happen in Ohio. It's not good. Apparently Ohio is considered like lame or kind of milk toast.
My son says, we're going to Ohio all the time.
Exactly, So your son's totally in that same set as the twins that I'm referred to, Mike.
It's reached normcore.
Yeah, right, it's interesting, but it's okay.
This this will probably be educational for youmat you've probably heard the term sigma.
A sigma is a term.
With a lot of these two even cross over into some of the kind of weird inseell e type men's rights type things, like a sigma male is a term describing sort of a lone wolf type who is successful but doesn't necessarily attach themselves to any kind of social norms or hierarchies. And you of course have an alpha which is a dominant, and then a beta which is, you know, also been co opted by certain other communities
like a beta cook, et cetera. Point being, there's a term called brain rot that is used to describe, I guess, a state of being kind of almost overwhelmed by all of this kind of content. You may have heard of skibbity toilet. It's the skibbitty adopp Yes, yes, me. This is weird little video with a dude's head popping out of a toilet, and now the kids say, skibbity.
There's a dance. Everything's got a dance.
The meme songs by a little Big and there's multiple versions of it, and a lot of people have taken this stuff and made other short form, weirdo non secular content, and the constant the idea of being inundated with this stuff and maybe a little too obsessed with it. I guess, with the infinite scroll that we have on social media is a brain rot. And as it turns out, the Surge in general and some other pretty significant authorities in medicine are starting to look at this and take it
rather seriously. There's an article on The New York Times that came out recently by Jessica Roy who's a Paris based writer called if you know what brain rot means, you might already have it. Subtitle is a popular term captures the condition of being terminally online with humor and pathos. Example that she uses as I quote, I've been watching so many tiktoks, I have brain rot.
And it's a term.
That's really only kind of come into the public, kind of mainstream ish consciousness in the last handful of years.
Like a lot of this stuff happens overnight, I swear. Even the term like on God.
And No Cap, I didn't know until maybe a couple of years ago, and then all of a sudden it was everywhere. You know, this stuff just kind of spreads
like wildfire. So to Ben's point, the Surgeon General of the United States is starting to looking at this as a legitimate medical concern, a legitimate kind of sociological breakdown in the youth, that they're getting this brain rot and they're worried that it's you know, literally causing them to be kind of zombified or in some way thrown into some kind of like fugue state, you know, and therefore is recommending that through what would take an Act of
Congress to include warning labels Surgeon General warning labors on many social media websites and, according to them, to regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe. Yeah, and it would require formal congressional approval. And this guy's name, by the way, is Vivek Murphy, who's the US Surgeon General.
And I don't know that this is sort of a two prong story.
There's there's on the one hand, the brain rot thing and the fact that it's now being looked at and researched as a legitimate kind of psychological disorder that is, you know, internet triggered. Doctor Michael Rich who's a pediatrician at the Digital Wellness Lab at the Boston Children's Hospital, they have determined this to be considered a form of
problematic interactive media use. And sorry, Rich actually found it the Digital Wellness Lab and he has this to say about just classifying brain rot as a way of describing what happens when you spend a lot of your time online and you have shifted your awareness over to the online space as opposed to in real life, and are filtering everything through the lens of what has been posted
and what can be posted. He adds that many of his patients actually consider having this condition I guess to be a badge of honor, like how much screen time are you getting? Like I'm you know, being terminally online is almost like a contest in some of some of these kids. And maybe that might seem ridiculous, but I think it is a particularly younger generation. Like I know these two twins who are psychotically online.
They can't you.
Take away their iPad for five seconds. They can't cope. It's literally the only way they know how to view the world. And the last point I'll make on the brain rot thing is that there is another school of thought that refers to this as a form of self soothing, and that this type of behavior is also just kind of acting out in order to self soothe, like people often do with drugs, miss self medication, they call that.
Because there's an underlying condition that isn't being addressed, whether it be some form of spectrum type type condition, you know, autism, whatever it might be, depression, what have you, that just isn't being addressed because the parents just shove the iPad into the baby's hands, make them.
Leave them alone for five minutes. You know, So I don't know'st's start with? The warning? Is social media like cigarettes?
And is a warning gonna do a damn thing other than maybe let parents know if they don't already know, the internet is maybe not the best to have unfettered access to when you're six years old. Maybe I don't know a warning is gonna help with those folks. What do you guys think Is that gonna do anything? Is it that simple? Is the genie already out of the bottle?
So before I answer this question, I'd like to point people to This is the thing I was sending around when I first learned about the news on June seventeenth, twenty twenty four. It's a guest essay by doctor Murphy himself in New York Times, and he has a line that really stood.
Out to me.
I'd like to read it here. It gets into poetry. It says the following and this is a very short read. It's very good. It's high impact stuff. You should read it, folks, if you have an interest in this. He says the following quote. There is no seat belt for parents to click, no helmet to snap in place, no assurance that trusted experts have investigated and ensured that these platforms are safe
for our kids. They're just parents and their children trying to figure it out on their own, pitted against some of the best product engineers and most well resourced companies in the world. I was like pumping my fist at the end of that, because that is very much true. Legislation lacks behind technological innovation, and I don't think this is in any way way some kind of political grand standing.
I would argue this is a legitimate concern. Something like this technology has not existed previously.
No, I mean, and I think you're absolutely right, Ben, and I would argue that this starting this conversation at that level of government where something can be done about it, is seemingly to me a step in the right direction. We also know that, you know, the US spending a whole lot of time targeting TikTok because of its Chinese ownership, while pretty much letting Twitter do whatever the f they want, including promoting you know, vehement racism, why nationalism, hardcore pornography, whatever,
unfettered you know, hate speech. So it's this guy is obviously not coming down with an agenda. He's the surgeon General. He doesn't really necessarily care what the political rhetoric.
I mean, his agenda is technically two key people healthy, and I.
Think it's a good way.
Yeah, Matt, And you know you mentioned the boys talking about Ohio risen up and all that, Like, what do you feel like that with with kids that have already had access to this stuff? Is it too late? You can't if you take it away from him? Their heads all freaking book.
I would say it's not too late. Humans are extremely adaptable. Children will get over things. I know I got over a great many things that didn't have to do with the Internet. I just you know, I'm sure we all did.
I don't know.
I feel pretty strongly about it. Today. I literally bought my son a device that doesn't have Internet access, but he can call me on it nice. Yeah, And I spent a lot of time and unfortunately money to make sure that it was advice that he could not access this stuff. Even if he wanted to write, He couldn't get the drug no matter what.
He couldn't hack this device or root it.
Well, maybe if one day, when he's old enough to hack the device, he'll probably have a device of his own that already has Internet access. Because he'll need it for whatever school thing.
He's doing right seven, he's eight.
It'd be pretty impressive if he did hack the device you got him.
Well, I mean, my devices are already hacked and I didn't do it. But it's all good. We'll figure that stuff out. But I wanted to give another quote here, just with that stuff in mind. This is from The Atlantic, writing about the New York Times piece. And this is a writer, another writer who didn't write the Atlantic piece, commenting on the New York Times piece. This writer's name is Jonathan hate Haidt. And this is a great quote
because this is how I feel. Quote. We as a country are generally careful about the consumer products and medications that harm small numbers of children, small numbers of children, Yet we have done nothing, absolutely nothing, ever to protect children from the main consumer product they use every day, which is social media, which is I think, guys, the problems with social media. Tell me if I'm wrong here.
I think there's they're completely separate from the language kids are using that we would, maybe, to Ben's point earlier, an outside perspective looking in. I thought about it for a while as we were talking there. I think you're absolutely right. When it comes to the language, because that is when I think about it more and more. It's the same thing we did. We've talked about this before
on the show. In our generation, we would use phrases and stuff to be insular so that maybe the parents don't know exactly what we're talking about.
You guys are one hundred percent right.
I'm just saying the choices in the language are absurd. It's there's a certain absurd itce bet to the comedy and the humor, but you're abu out of the coded language.
Also keep things for showing them, search terms, et cetera.
But the dangerous stuff with social media is the stuff that the three of us for sure experience when we're just interacting with other people. We're putting ourselves out there hoping that people enjoy or like what we're doing, and when they don't or if they're mean, it affects us, whether we want it to or not. Right, even if we can brush it off, it still hits right. Even if you can take a punch, you're still taking a punch. Does that make sense?
And please do folks, please do read that op ed by the Surgeon General himself and Matt I think you make a beautiful play. I appreciate the backup on this, you know, because there is the intergenerational aspect, right. You build community through the original technology of language. You see this in thieves. Can't you see this in demographic specific things. It's not inherently bad. It has simply been exacerbated by
this new, previously non existent technology. If there was social media in fourteen hundreds France, you know what I mean, history might have gone a different way and we would have a lot more weird French terms.
Yeah.
Well, I think too, just the.
Length of time the Internet has been around and how much information is available to young people.
I think it speaks volumes to the.
Vast different parts of culture that get pulled from to make some of these terms, you know, like they're from all over the place. A lot of it's from like you know, drag culture, sleigh or whatever. But there's a lot of terms that are borrowed from, like hip hop. There's a lot of terms that are borrowed from, you know, just memes or things that come up or that like catch phrases that certain streamers say, or things that happen
in like Fortnite or whatever. It's just interesting the way this stuff kind of evolves like a virus.
It's almost like these complex systems.
My son really quickly there's a cat who is living here right now, and the I used the term to describe what the cat was doing. Instead of saying meow her vocalization mew, I said mew and my son said that's not mewing that. I was like, yeah, it is, And then he demonstrated what mewing is and I was like, what how what ye your eight my son.
Anyway, it's a lot more than you think they do.
Yeah, And that's that's some of the absurd stuff too, because mewing I'm doing it. It's just kind of like think of a villain stroking their beard kind of while making a weird like blue steel like from Zulander face kind of.
It's like this gigachad kind of face.
You know.
It's and it's like, I don't really even know where that comes from or what it refers to, but it's a thing.
Yeah, it's it's really really interesting.
I do think that, you know, having a warning at least it puts something out there like that. Parents maybe if they're just totally in the dark, gives them access to the fact that, hey, from a place of authority, this is maybe not the best thing to let your kid do at an early age.
What if it was like, what was that campaign, the anti smoking campaign from back in the day that was like aimed directly at the kids and it was cool, was like Joe Cammel.
No, the kids loved Joe Cammell.
No, it was an anti smoking ad. It was the ones that were really like hit back in the day about true smoke truth. Yeah, what if they use that kind of model and they used meme speak like this kind of stuff we're talking about.
The anti spoking campaign was paid by tobacco companies as part of legal rea.
But what I'm saying is, what if you can make the messages super like that? What this app is totally Ohio? Or is going man? This app is in Ohio.
The Internet today guys who cover the story as well pointed out, I can't remember which one of them said it, but you know, in Europe, pretty much everywhere except for the United States, you might pack of cigarettes. It's kind of an image of a black lung on it. It has an image of someone who's had their leg amputated due to poor blood flow. It's got like children weeping over there into mommy or daddy in a hospital.
This is clearly a story that we hope resonates with you folks, definitely resonates with us internally. I gotta say my favorite example of those warning things in South Korea. Every time I go, I see a warning pack. They have the you know, the pantheon of graphic pictures of physiological problems. But my favorite is the picture on the pack of a child looking unhappy and crying while taller parents are arguing and smoking. I feel like that's more effective,
at least for that market. But the warning labels are important, and to your point, this is, at the very least this is a step in thinking about things in a more serious way.
Absolutely, and I'm with you on the tall people.
Smoking is the greatest deturnent of all, especially the children.
But the internet today, guys.
The point that they made was if you're going to do something like that with social media, it would need to be like an image of suicide or something like what would be the smoking equivalent that you could shock kids into thinking twice before they jump down the social
media rabbit hole. Essentially, the problem is that it makes you disconnected from society, and it can make you really depressed because you're viewing all of these other people that are better than you, smarter than you, better looking than you, more popular than you, etc.
And it can send you down a rabbit hole.
I'm grateful that my kids seems to have a decent head on their shoulders about it and isn't as terminally online as sum So, you know, small, small wins there. But I think this might be worth an episode unto itself, just this whole concept that we're talking about in this gen alpha phenomenon, and further exploring what could happen with a government intervention. We have heard, for example, snapchats already starting to self impose some restrictions that could potentially protect young people.
But anyway, let's take a.
Quick break and we'll hear worth more sponsor than to be back with another piece of strange mans.
And we've returned, and we're doing a bit of a time machine jump here. Boys, we are going back to two thoy twenty two December in fact, to an unrelated CBS Evening News report covering the ADHD prescription drug shortage was time travel.
Cue finger, Oh, we're there.
We're back, guys. Remember the pandemic. It was only two and change years ago, so.
It was only a decade ago.
So you know, I loved the mystery of going to the grocery store and everybody had about two thirds of their face covered up. Eye contact, had so much gravitas. And also also yeah, I still yeah, very expressive. Everybody was weighing the rock Johnson for a second. And I got to tell you, in these pandemic times, Matt, I loved it. I got so spoiled by not having to look at people's mouths. And I personally still rock a mask because I look better with two thirds of my face covered up.
Agreatable, but.
Okay, how it makes you feel just to put us all our fellow conspiracy realist in the moment twenty twenty two, when will this end?
Things are getting weird.
We're there, especially early on when there were intense travel restrictions and health formation. Yeah, not all information. The health concerns were very high, and there was a problem getting prescriptions. Not only was it impossible for a short time to go into the doctor to get prescribed a specific drug, it was very difficult to get an appointment after that time.
For a pretty large window. So the US government, the good old US government, lifted a tiny little rule that required a an in person medical visit to a medical professional before a patient could be prescribed what they consider controlled substances. One of these controlled substances was ADHD. Prescription medication such as amphetamine salts were also known as adderall. Now that's cool, that makes sense, right, Hey, I have
this thing. I need a prescription for it. I need to be diagnosed with it, which is a big deal. That's a big deal. So to get one of these drugs, a doctor has to say, hey, you need one of these drugs in the US, in the United States, and they do that through assessing you right before they had to see you in person. Now, after this restriction was lifted, you could get an online appointment and health a telehealther exactly.
Medical professional could look at you through the camera and go, hmmm, I think this person needs adderall.
And I've done just not to make this bout me. I have had those telehealth conversations, and I understand the skepticism when I'm thinking, you know, okay, I get it. Between the two of us, one is a doctor, but I also use zoom pretty frequently, and I'm not sure how good your spidy sense is.
Man. Yeah, well, especially for something like ADHD right.
Right, which is an internal mechanism.
It requires quite a bit of discussion. I mean, you would listen to a patient as a medical professional, but also watch them and see their mannerisms and a lot of that I would I would guess could you could diagnose or look at over a camera. But I think there's little things that would be missed, and there's potential for someone to try and get over on a medical professional to get a drug that they don't need prescribed but they want.
Right.
Because medications like adderall and other stimulants like that can be abused.
Exams are coming up, etc.
Well, yeah, they can be used for a lot of different things there as a studying drug, which was very popular and is still popular, or as a party drug, as a let's stay up. It's a stimulant, not not like but not unlike cocaine.
Right.
It's like one of those drugs that's rides the line there sometimes and it depends on who you are and what's going on internally how it could be used or abused.
All right, So that's back in twenty twenty two. At the time, CBS Evening News was reporting on how capitalism did its thing in response to these restrictions being lifted, and companies like Cerebral and Done Global and countless others they popped up or they pivoted, let's say, to begin trying to prescribe as many people as they could adderall and other stimulants.
Because capitalism is a drug that sells you drugs, that's right.
That drug keeps on drugging and then it goes into other countries and finds the stuff that you need to make the drugs, and secures that it brings it home.
A little bit of democracy, Yeah it's fine. It's fine to getting situations.
Yeah, it's fine. So back then in twenty twenty two, at the very end of it, there's this person named Kyle Robertson who was for quite a time and officially on paper forever, the founder of Cerebral, which was one of these companies who was doing this. And if you watch this video, it's a short video. In a pretty long report out of CBS Evening News, they discuss how
this person was ousted at the company. This Kyle Robertson of Cerebral but he made some statements before that whole thing happened, and I think right after it happened, alleging that quote, major investors pushed for increased prescriptions of adderall. So it was the money that was going into the company and the people who are providing the money for the company saying, hey, we need you to up these prescriptions.
Guys, that's not how it's supposed to work. Oh yeah, exactly how it's supposed to work.
Well, here's why where it gets weird and how we get to our main story for this segment. So that's cerebral Cerebral Health. I think it's called that was back in twenty twenty two. We are jumping to June eighteenth, twenty twenty four, when there's another telehealth company that just got in big trouble and there were arrests made. Let's quickly just talk about how weird that is. Generally, when we bring these stories to you, if it's about a corporation or a big company, something that has a lot
of profits that could be potentially helpful. Let's say, for the bottom line of the old GDP thing in the US, the company gets slapped with a fine because Uncle Sam gets his cut, and then that's it. They don't have to say, hey, we did a bunch of wrong things. Nobody goes to jail. It's just, hey, y'all did a bad thing. You're not supposed to do that. Give us some money, okay.
And if the punishment for a crime is a fee, then ultimately the crime is being poor. That's just true.
Yeah, And it's a cost of doing business, as we've said.
And this is what I really appreciate about the point you're building here, man, is that we have seen numerous other instances wherein the individuals responsible for the commission of the crime are not themselves punished as human individuals. Shout out the Sackler family, right. So this case is different in that there are decision makers who are in criminal trouble, not civil court or anything like that.
Correct.
Absolutely, I'm going to give you the headline of this article and then we'll jump into the specifics the article that you can find right now. Telehealth ceo charged in alleged one hundred million dollar scheme to provide quote easy
access unquote to adderall and other stimulants. This is out of CBS News June eighteenth, and in this article it describes how two of the top people, the CEO and I guess it's the clinical president or the head doctor of this company, were both arrested and they have been charged with some pretty serious crime, some allegations that the Department of Justice is saying these are not good. I'll just give you from the article here the two individuals.
Ruthia he r U t Hi A H E. This is the founder of Done Global d N E G L O B A L. This person was arrested in Los Angeles, and this is over allegations that she I'm going to list them off. One participated in the distribution of adderall over the internet, two submitted false and fraudulent claims for reimbursements, and three obstructed justice. The company's clinical president, a separate person named David Brody, was also arrested, this time in San Rafael, California, same charges. So are the
two main arrests that have occurred. Which is already a big deal, right.
Is this what you might call a pill mill? Is this similar to that?
Yeah?
Okay, pill mills exactly, at least according to the Department of Justice and Ann Milgram, who is oh gosh, she's the dea administrator currently the Drug Enforcement Agency Administrator. This company was basically just trying to get as many people as they could hooked on adderall, and not via a full on prescription that you would get from a doctor if you went in it was. It was selling people monthly subscriptions to a service wherein they can just get adderall.
Does that make sense? The difference between a prescription and a subscription.
It's called being a drug dealer because a prescription is prescribed for a defined window of time. A subscription expires when you decide not to pay for the fee.
And certain I I have a prescription low dose prescription for some anxiety medication, and it has zero refills every single round, right, so one refill lasts an entire month, and then the doctor has to call it in every time, and after a certain number.
Of those I have to I'm required.
To go in for a visit for them to check up on me and make sure I'm still worthy of the anxiety medication or whatever it is. But it's a way of keeping track and checking on you and making sure you're not just willy nilly popping these things like you know.
Jujubes well and anxiety medications very similar to ADHD. Medications can have some pretty gnarly effects, especially yes, especially when you combine, and can be extremely addictive.
Sotius effects, addiction spirals. Yeah, check out our new Tropics episode as well.
So we'll talk about that a little bit too in next Listener Mail episode.
YEP. I want to make sure we get this out there. Every understands the company is done Global Incorporated, don Global Incorporated.
The certainly are done.
Well well, I don't know. If you go to the website, it looks like everything's still going. They've been arrested, bad stuff's happening, but as of right now they're in litigation or whatever.
You know, right And also, again, getting in trouble as a corporation is different from if you are a John or Jane do Schmo and you get in trouble. I think one important point before we really drive this home, met is we haven't said it yet, but this medication is mission critical and life changing for many people. It's not everybody is out there recreationally doing adderall. Some people need it to function at a competent level and absolutely improve their lives to a massive degree.
And it has a completely different effect for those people.
The people that are just taking it recreationally or to get it edge or whatever.
It's an amphetamine.
But for people that really need it for ADHD or true whatever you know, similar condition, it calms them down. I've always found that to be an interesting paradox. That's true of a lot of drugs, Like if you're using it for the right reasons, it's different effect so different.
Absolutely. I know several people very close to me who use that medication because they need it, and since they need it, they see a psychiatrist who helps them make sure they still need it and all of that. I mean, it's exactly what you were talking about. No, there's a medical professional who was there for them, who is providing that service and taking literally medical care of them by providing this.
Stuff, combined with secondary treatments and mitigation strategies like meditation, mindfulness exercises which everybody should be attempting. Listening like active listening exercises are big for ADHD. As someone who struggled with it, it's not you know, like a waiting for the turn to get the dopamine a talking kind of thing, you know, And that that I think really really expands the afficacy of this kind of.
Medication fully, fully and that's I think why DEA administrator and Milgram, and you know, the DOJ is so kind of upset at these folks who are who are taking this and turning it on its head to turn a profit. Right, I'm going to read just a quick statement here from DEA administrator and Milgram. She released this on June fourteenth, after the arrests were announced by the DJ. It's kind of long, guys, but I think this just drives it
home of what's happening. The defendants allegedly preyed on Americans and put profits over patients by exploiting telemedicine rules that facilitated access to medications during the unprecedented COVID nineteen public health emergency. Instead of properly addressing medical needs, the defendants allegedly made millions of dollars by pushing addictive medications, in many cases done global prescribed ADHD medications when they were
not medically necessary. And this is important. The allegations are that they knew these medications were not necessary, but there was a push from above to get as many quote monthly subscriptions as they possibly could. And all of these medical providers, because they did actually hire medical providers to do these telehealth these interviews basically, and they were pushed and pressured to give the green light to a subscription
rather than you do anything else. Oh and they were also pushed from above to only have one meeting, one medical visit, right, shake and bake.
I do wonder if there's something in the way they talk to their patients or the boxes they tick on their intakes that cover their butts in some way, because I describe my situation with anxiety stuff.
But when I go into the.
Office, they don't like probe me about it. They don't really test anything. They just look at me and make sure I'm not cuckoo bananas, and then they give me my script, you know, and even getting it in the first place, like wasn't insanely hard. I'm not saying that I'm going in and trying to you know, fleece doctors
for like prescription meds. But I just said, you know, I've been experiencing some pretty significant stresses with work, and and you know, just as simple as that, here you go, my boy, have this low dose of alpraz lamb or whatever. So I would argue this isn't that far off from the way the model's supposed to work, But there is a little extra level of oversight in the legitimate form. I just wonder what they're asking to cover their butts, because they have to have some on paper reason they're
giving these out. Or do they just throw caution into the wind and not give a flip.
They have a medical professional make an assessment, what.
I mean, But it's up to their discretion, you know. Yeah, but on's defend themselves.
I guess once you have that as the company, I'm assuming they just chose to say this is good enough, right.
It's like a president mm hmm.
It's like when sometimes when we're performing interviews or something and we're doing it more man on the street style. Officially, we need to get some document signed that says, hey, this is who I am, and I give you permission to use this interview. But if we can't get that, or we don't have one of those on us, or we're in a rush, you can do something where a human being looks into the camera and records themselves saying, Hi, I am X, and you can use this footage of
me in your interview. That way, it covers our butts if we ever use that interview, right.
And it's also ethical for us to do that at the end, so they know what they're agreeing to share.
Yes, absolutely, and the butt covering involves in case they change their mind or regret something they said.
But even in those situations, we're more.
Likely to like work with someone and be like, you know, we're not going to like drag you.
Or whatever exactly. But guys, just to take this back to the top one more time, to twenty twenty two. In this statement from Anne Milgrim, she puts this towards the end. There was a shortage of adderall and other stimulants in twenty twenty two. The FDA issued to notice about this. It was a big deal. It was all
over the news. We even mentioned it. I think back back then and this pill mill style thing that was not necessary anymore because in twenty twenty two, I don't know if y'all remember, we could drive places again, we could go to places again, and if we really, if a human being needed to go get a prescription, you
could go see a medical professional. Doesn't mean it wasn't necessary for a lot of people, right, But it does mean that the vast majority of humans didn't need or have those restrictions anyway.
Right.
But another thing we could argue, we see this in other industries, prices have prices spike during similar supply chain issues. In the pandemic, however, all that really happened is corporations figured out they could shift the overton window. The prices
didn't go down. So if you have a rule that's supposed to be a limited time i'm rule for a global catastrophe, why would you dial it back as the corport It's like to say, if it is advantageous to you, that's the pickle, right, that's the bag of badgers here? Why would you step that back? You could even if
you want to play along at home. If you have a doctor that you feel maybe somehow incentivized to go a little hard on stuff that might be a solution you ask yourself about after a couple of other interventions, then there's nothing wrong with asking the doctor. Are there steps between this, like steps between ADHD or heavy psychoactive meds? Depending on how you feel about your doctor, you could even ask have you been in any way incentivized to immediately recommend this?
It seems like if if they are they wouldn't tell you. I know there are honorable people in the medical profession. I know there are dishonorable people in the medical profession,
as there are in any profession. But I just you know, you got me thinking, guys, how many think about how many things just kind of stayed around after COVID, Like it just became the new norm, you know, like not going into the office, and then there became all of these kind of mitigating efforts to try to push back the clock and make things like they used to be. But it's really hard once you got that critical mass. So now you do have companies like Hymn's and hers.
I mean there's always been prescription male things, but it seems.
Like now it's really taken off.
And we're also going to get into another discussion soon about how this supply chain shortage thing for drugs like a jozepic and manjarro are now affecting the folks that have needed those drugs for a long time for reasons other than you know, dropping some pounds.
Yeah, again, the Overton window of normalization and that I don't want to derail us here, but I feel what you're saying, like the larger context of this. If anything, the scary thing, the scared very aspect of this story is the extraordinary part being individual human beings were arrested, got in trouble at criminal court. That is by far, unfortunately the most anomalous part of this.
Yeah, it's a big deal. It's a really big deal. This comes from court documents and this is how I want to end it.
Guys.
These individuals in the company are accused of structuring the company's platform to quote facilitate access to adderall and other stimulants, including by limiting the information available to the prescribers, the
people who bought the monthly subscription, instructing DONE prescribers. Prescribers these are the medical professionals to prescribe adderall and other stimulants even if the DONE member did not qualify, like according to the assessment, did not qualify, and by mandating that those medical professionals, those prescribers in their initial encounters, limited them to thirty minutes or less. So literally, you've we've got thirty minutes. Make sure this person gets an adderall.
Prescription, make sure they walk out the door with it.
Mm hmm, and are paying us monthly because we need to make over one hundred million dollars at least according to the documents there. Good golly, no, thanks.
Right, I mean, and it is you know, it is a function of several active conspiracies, right, the privatization, the monetization, commodification of basic human rights like healthcare. It's something, Matt, you tell us, is this something that you think will set precedent for other similar activities in the world of medicine.
Yeah, I think it's already happening. And this is one of many companies that are doing this precise thing. Maybe not in the same way, right, maybe they are actually attempting to get people prescribed the medications that they need. But kind of what you're saying, the window is open now, right, and anybody with enough capital to get in there and start a company and you tackle this stuff and capture it can do that.
But on the flip side, do you think, with this attention being brought to this case, if others are going to start coming out of the woodwork and then there's going to be more of a crackdown on this type of behavior. Is this like just the first step in a series of chess moves that ultimately could topple this kind of structure.
Well, we were talking about how Cerebral got in big trouble for doing something very similar to this, and I think I think ADHD medications are just one of those things that can be used in this way. Right now, There's gonna be others, and there have been others. I'm sure I just don't know them right now. Guys, this
is the response from DONE Global really quickly. They strongly disagree with the criminal charges filed last week against their founder, which are based on events that principally occurred between twenty twenty and twenty twenty three. Since our founding, guys, they've worked to make mental health care accessible for tens of
thousands of Americans trapped in a spiraling national crisis. Done Global will continue to operate and do everything in their power to ensure that tens of thousands of Americans that rely on us do not lose access to their mental health care.
By paying their subscription.
Well, guys, I don't know about you, but I take them at their word. I'm satisfied. I think we should move on.
No, I really I think you're right.
And with this, folks, we are ending our exploration of strange news for the moment. We will return with even more bizarre things in the future. We can't wait for you to join us. We want to hear your thoughts. We always get fantastic feedback from our fellow listeners, who are the most important part of the show. Just going to get in front of the emails real quick, running behind. Got to write to several people in place of a night walk this evening. But there are some breaking news
that happened as we were recording. The US Supreme Court just today struck down the anti corruption law that makes it a cry to take gifts from donors.
Yeah, who needs anti corruption? Me corrupt? It's fine.
Yeah, it's a non surprising six 's three vote. Shout out to our George boy Clarence. I hope he writes the I hope he writes a poetic defense of recreational vehicles.
But those those vacations, does any boys?
Our views are so cool though objectively I'm with him on that on that part. But again, more news to come. We can't wait to explore some even stranger things with you in upcoming episodes and our weekly listener mail segment. Join the cause, folks, We want you let us know what's on your mind. We try to be easy to find online.
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