354: ZDoggMD | Debunking Plandemic COVID-19 Pseudoscience

Transcript for ZDoggMD - Debunking Plandemic COVID-19 Pseudoscience (Episode 354)

ZDoggMD: [00:00:00] You go down a rabbit hole that takes you in a vortex, that then creates a bubble of misinformation around you, that confirms you're a pre-existing bias. I mean, there's a reason you're watching that video. You probably have some bias. You don't trust the government. You don't trust pharma. You don't trust corporations. Anything that feeds that emotional bias of yours is going to feed your confirmation bias, and your desire to be right and your desire to have a tribe around you -- that it feels like your people -- and the desire to feel exclusive, the desire to feel in control. They want to believe these ideas.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:33] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's sharpest minds and most fascinating people, and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. We want to help you see the Matrix when it comes to how these amazing people think and behave. And our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker so you can get a much deeper understanding of how the world works and make sense of what's really happening. If you're new to the show, we've got episodes with spies and CEOs, athletes and authors, thinkers and performers, as well as toolboxes for skills like negotiation, body language, persuasion, and more. So if you're smart and you like to learn and improve, you're going to be right at home here with us. 

[00:01:14] Today's a little departure from our usual fare. I'm actually bringing a buddy of mine, Zubin Damania, aka ZDoggMD from YouTube to help debunk this Plandemic crap. If you haven't seen Plandemic, it is a nonsense piece of anti-science propaganda that is making its way through social media and through various video hosting networks and makes the case -- well attempts to make the case, makes the claim the ridiculous claim that COVID-19 was created in a lab. That it was being allowed to get out of hand because of collusion between scientists and politicians, including Anthony Fauci and all these Illuminati-type people, whatever it is. It's your standard conspiracy nonsense except this fake documentary has gone absolutely viral, no pun intended. It is being shared wildly by people who are both gullible and/or dense or people who are just uninformed. 

[00:02:05] And so what we're going to do today is inform you. If you haven't seen it at all, it doesn't really matter. It's a hundred percent nonsense, literally. I watched stuff like this because you send it to me to debunk. And I also want to know the ingredients of bad thinking and conspiracy theory, nonsense, that's going around online, especially if it hits mainstream popularity. Because as your counsel -- I mean, although I'm a lawyer, but not your lawyer -- I need to be able to advise you on what is out there and threats against your wellbeing as beloved listeners of the Jordan harbinger show. This video has been banned on all of the major social media platforms, which to be honest, I think it's a mistake. I think people with lower critical thinking ability tend to see things that get banned as evidence of a grand conspiracy being true. Instead of these platforms making a halfhearted attempt to try to protect us from our own stupidity, which is why they've done this, personally,  I think they should just put warnings and real information on top of or beside these videos to debunk the insane claims made, but that's more work for them of course. 

[00:03:08] This isn't a discussion of censorship today. This is about debunking bogus health claims that can actually kill you and those around you if we are negligent on how we respond to them. And of course, these people are doing this for cash. We're going to go through part one of Plandemic and go more or less point by point so that when someone sends you this to watch, or if you know someone who doesn't know what to believe and thinks there just might be a kernel of truth in that thing, you can play this in the car with them or send this to them and they can listen to voices of reason who are not just trying to get famous or sell books like the grifters, like the fraudulent hucksters who are doing this anti-science disservice to humanity in the name of dollars and fame. I really couldn't despise these people any more than I do.

[00:03:52] And if you want to know how I network and create great relationships around me, I have a free course that you can use for business or personal reasons. A lot of people are using it for the job hunt right now. If you've been laid off, a few of you, check out our Six-Minute Networking course. It is free. It always will be free. It's not enter-your-credit-card free. It's just free-free. That's at jordanharbinger.com/course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course. So come join us, you'll be in smart company where you belong. All right, now let's debunk Plandemic. 

[00:04:22] I want to say thanks for joining me because it's funny, you know, I was at home watching this fake documentary everyone's been sending to me and sharing around called Plandemic. A very clever title, it's Plandemic. I just want to roll a joint up, even just saying, Plandemic, man. Rarely do I feel such an urgency to get a show out, but this one really bugged me because it's not only pure bullshit. But it's also designed to sell books full of even more BS by this disgraced former scientist, Judy Mikovits. Now I say former because you're no longer, in my opinion, a scientist if you are pedaling things, you know to be false or if you're just straight-up mentally ill and decide that you don't know what reality is anymore. I can't back you as a scientist.

[00:05:08] And because people who believe this stuff, they stand to harm others and be harmed themselves by this Judy Mikovits' irresponsible and dangerously terrible advice, which we will go over here in a bit. I don't know where you stand on this ZDogg, but I am not one for censorship. This might be one of the dumbest things I've seen in a while, even on YouTube, which is saying a lot. I mean, you're more or less a YouTuber. You know how much dumb crap is on YouTube? It's like 90 percent dumb crap. 

ZDoggMD: [00:05:35] It's an infinite pool and unceasing source of dumbness in the universe, like a black hole, like smartness cannot escape from the center, you know? 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:43] Right. 

ZDoggMD: [00:05:44] But I agree with you, censorship is not the answer to this because it actually backfires. The conspiracy theorists actually start to say, "Well, see. We were right." And the powers that be aka Google, YouTube, Facebook, Zuckerberg, the conspiracy are trying to silence us. Well, that's the worst possible outcome. And I've actually talked to YouTube leadership about this and said, "You know, the way that you do this is maybe you link to credible sources that are also entertaining." You don't link to the WHO. You link to somebody who's made a video that actually debunks what misinformation is there, you know? 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:17] Yeah. I agree with that. I know that that's harder for them because then they have to actually consume content. But here's the thing, if they really aren't glued to the dollars they get from bringing people into conspiracy theory rabbit holes -- and I think that they are candidly but they say they're not, and if they're not addicted to that, it's sort of rabbit hole money, then they do need to do that. They need to find hot topics and go, okay. This is the kind of thing that we need to point to. Like, look, you can have stupid ass Plandemic on YouTube, but you need a warning that goes over the bottom with like fact-checking from actual experts that says like, "This is patently false. Here's a link to a source that says this is false. Here's a video that debunks this." And then the next thing and the playlist shouldn't be Out of the Shadows or some other dumb fake documentary. It should be a video where it's like, "Hey, that thing you just watched, here's why all the stuff you just heard was garbage."

ZDoggMD: [00:07:06] That's exactly it. And I think they don't even understand how their own algorithm works. It's kind of gotten away from them. So the way the algorithm feeds on this conspiracy rabbit hole, so you click one, it feeds up 30 others. Vaccine misinformation is a great example of this. We've been working with this since I started doing videos in 2010. You go down a rabbit hole that takes you in a vortex, that then creates a bubble of misinformation around you, that confirms you're a pre-existing bias. I mean, there's a reason you're watching that video. You probably have some bias. You don't trust the government. You don't trust pharma. You don't trust corporations. And so as a result, anything that feeds that emotional bias of yours is going to feed your confirmation bias, and your desire to be right, and your desire to have a tribe around you that it feels like your people, and the desire to feel exclusive, the desire to feel in control. And so the algorithm loves that because it knows you're going to keep watching, keep clicking. I don't even think the humans running these algorithms know how these things work. It's almost out of their control. So doing what you're saying is actually harder than it might appear. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:07] It's no easy task. I do feel like YouTube has their work cut out for them, and I blame YouTube specifically for the spread of a lot of this misinformation. They've removed Plandemic from YouTube for good reason. Well, you know, for good reason. Again, it's censorship, so not really. 

ZDoggMD: [00:08:22] Yeah. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:22] They removed it according to their policies, and for that reason, it's a good reason. But for me, I think you should literally be able to put almost anything up there. Again, you know, back to our earlier point about educating people, not just hiding things that are stupid. Because then when people find them, they think they've discovered something instead of just heaping shit into their mouth. 

ZDoggMD: [00:08:38] That's exactly right. And I think part of the problem is then for someone like myself to say, whose mission is partially to bring rational thought, wisdom, whatever it is, by talking to smart people, because I'm not smart enough to do that, but I can communicate it --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:51] I hear you.

ZDoggMD: [00:08:51] -- on YouTube. If you're able to bring wisdom that way, well, what's to stop YouTube from saying, "I don't like that wisdom." Like for example, you know, I took a stance that I thought cloth masks were really dumb because people are using them wrong. They're putting them over their mouth. They're getting a false sense of security. They're plastering their cell phone to their face. They're wearing them with gloves, touching stuff, and touching their face and their wallet and their purse. And so I went out and said, "You know, I think having people wear cloth masks -- it might backfire." Now, that in itself could get you banned from YouTube. Even though I think if everybody wore surgical-grade masks, which we can't because we don't have enough PPE, we would actually really bend the curve quite dramatically but we don't have that ability. And I say that in the video. 

[00:09:29] But you worry if YouTube is relying on, you know, what are their measures of misinformation? Now, I think we can talk today a little bit of that too, about how do you determine what is a conspiracy theory without validity? How do you apply critical thinking to watching any video? And I think that's where you and I agree on this Plandemic thing. Man, when people were sending it to us and we're like, "Are you high? Like what do you have to be smoking to think this is legit?" Right? 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:53] I would like to go through some of the points in here because I want people who are like, "Oh, well, they said this is going to debunk Plandemic." Because I'm going to call it this episode debunking Plandemic and we can go through critical thinking ideas and things like that as well later in the show, and I think we should. But I really want to dig into why Plandemic itself was actually just complete horse crap. 

ZDoggMD: [00:10:12] Perfect. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:12] This former scientist -- again, I say former because she's officially just abandoned scientific reasoning and traded whole-hog her ethics for money because she's got her stupid book on Amazon right now, which is just nonsense. She makes absolutely head-scratching assertions about this virus. For instance, that it's "activated by face masks," which is ridiculous. Correct me if I'm wrong, doctor, but you don't activate a virus. You certainly don't do it by wearing a mask if your body's been exposed to it, then you have antibodies or you don't. You don't reactivate it by having it live in your mask. It's not alive anyway. 

ZDoggMD: [00:10:48] This is one of the most perplexing statements that she makes that masks somehow make this disease worse. You can theorize what she meant, but it's kind of mind-reading, and you're reading the mind of someone who is absolutely perplexingly confused about this topic in immunology.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:01] Right.

ZDoggMD: [00:11:02] I think what she was saying is you have the virus in your nose and in your mouth and you're putting it into a mask and then re-inhaling it and re-infecting yourself. That is abject nonsense because you already are infected. Breathing your own inoculum, your own population of virus back in is not going to change anything. And you're already firing up an immune response to it already. It's nonsensical from a scientific standpoint. Now, not everybody would understand that. So you do need to give the public sort of critical scientific knowledge, like, okay, no, that's nonsense. You should be suspicious when she's saying something that goes so contrary to what the public of health officials have said. But that degree of skepticism or suspicion isn't really there in the public. They want to believe these ideas. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:48] Right, and also, look, if I said, "Oh my God, but if I breathe out a germ and it goes into a mask and then I breathe it back in, aren't I reinfecting myself?" And you might go, "Well, no." But if I'm purporting to be one of the foremost global experts on infectious diseases or HIV or CFS, which Judy Mikovits says she knows all about because she researched it and now she's claiming to be an expert when it comes to COVID-19, you should know that. You should have learned that in like the first year, second year of medical school, or at least during your residence. If you're one of the foremost research scientists of our generation, you should know that that's complete garbage. 

[00:12:24] Like my wife and I might not know that, "Oh yeah, you know, your body will breathe that out and then you breathe in and it doesn't matter because you're already building antibodies. It's your own immune response. Okay, that makes sense." That's something that a layman might not know. But if you're seeing somebody who's supposed to be an expert on a subject making lay mistakes, that should be a huge red flag. And Judy Mikovits goes on to make all kinds of wild mistakes and accusations. 

[00:12:47] One of which she says that Anthony Fauci, one of -- by the way, the only voices of reason and media these days because it's his job to keep us all calm and to make sure that we know what's actually going on. She's accusing him of being responsible for the deaths of millions of people during the early years of HIV/AIDS. And the video or this Plandemic thing claims Mikovits was part of the team that discovered HIV, revolutionized HIV treatment, and that she was jailed without charges for her scientific positions. Not one of those things is true. Not one of them is true.

ZDoggMD: [00:13:21] Not a single thing in that statement is true. And what's fascinating is all of this is easily researchable. So websites have already debunked this. So she was a laboratory technician, it's somebody who helps. I was a research assistant at Berkeley in molecular biology when I was an undergraduate, and I co-published a paper on genetics in Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly. Now, if I went out and said, I'm a world innovator in fruit fly, integrin wing, cell-cell adhesion, even that would be insanity because I was basically a technician on a team that did a lot of work. In her case, it's a complete confabulate. She's just making this stuff up and aggrandizing herself because if you're trying to sell an idea, a conspiratorial idea, credentials, and credibility, or perceived credibility matters a lot in the tribe you're trying to convince, and so she makes herself bigger than she is. 

[00:14:15] The Fauci thing where she's attacking Fauci is perfect because he's too big to actually bother trying to defend against crazy baseless charges. Even though he did send an email to Snopes and saying, "I have no idea what this woman's talking about. I have no record of any email where I threatened her with being fired if she speaks out or not publishing a paper." It's really almost a kind of strain of mental illness that she's displaying. But again, how does the public detect that? Well, you got to turn to reliable sources and go, okay, well, what are people that we trust on this actually think? Well, they've published a billion reasons why this is all just made up.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:51] The movie Plandemic promises to "expose" the scientific and political elite who run the scam, that is our global health system. So there is no global health system. I think most people know that and even if we give a sort of charitable interpretation of what that phrase means, this presupposes that there is a scientific community aligned with a political community that is both sort of Illuminati in nature and they're running a "scam" to keep people down, which is a lot harder to believe than governments are kind of incompetent and have mixed responses to disease outbreaks.

ZDoggMD: [00:15:24] You nailed it because the latter -- look, I was a tenure at Stanford as a hospital doctor. I've worked in medicine since 1999 when I graduated from UCF Medical School. I am deep in the medical-industrial complex, and I am the first to tell you that it is a complete shit show. Like there's absolutely not a shred of a system there. There's not a shred of coordination. Leadership is totally disjointed. It's a non-system that has trouble tying its own laces. And that's why we have such bad outcomes in this country because we don't have a health system that's capable of pulling off a conspiracy of the magnitude that this woman talks about, which is why I think most healthcare professionals watch the beginning of that video and go, "Pff."

Jordan Harbinger: [00:16:09] Yeah. 

ZDoggMD: [00:16:09] I know these people, they're not capable of pulling this off because human systems are fallible. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:16:14] Right.

ZDoggMD: [00:16:14] Like Fauci is a smart guy. I've been on calls with Fauci during Ebola. He reached out to influencers. We had calls like, "How do we talk to the public about Ebola?" I found him to be rational, calm, very smart, and actually was very good at diffusing the fear around Ebola. Which again, if he's there to profit from vaccines and things like that, he would have been like, "Guys, this is a mess. We're all going to die. We need to do something. We need to work on a vaccine right now." He was like, "Guys, this has a very low reproductive number when treated correctly. We need to talk to people and just diffuse some of this fear." So again, anybody in the loop of this who is again, who we ought to be looking to for the second opinion, when you see something that you're concerned about, would tell you right away, man, this smells of crazy sauce within the first 10 seconds.

[00:16:57] Jordan Harbinger: [00:16:57] Exactly. Exactly. And I think a lot of people don't necessarily have maybe it's a life experience or expertise to think critically about a lot of this stuff, but most of us don't pause to parse the language that we're using or that they are using to describe this. So if I see something that says, "We're going to expose the scientific and political elite who run the scam, that is our global health system," I usually go, "Yeah, that sounds like some kind of conspiratorial BS. Like, Sandy Hook never happened. The frogs are turning gay." Like that's some Alex Jones garbage. I mean, I still watched Plandemic because, you know, I want to see what people are looking at. But yeah, within the first few seconds I was like, "Okay, Jordan, don't close your mind up. Watch the whole thing but this is just absolutely crazy." And then of course the credentials of the guy running it are like father, activist, and interviewer. And I'm like, "Hmm. Not credentials." 

ZDoggMD: [00:17:49] Right.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:17:49] Not credentials.

ZDoggMD: [00:17:50] Actually, it's interesting, this cuts to the heart of what differentiates a conspiracy from a conspiracy theory, right? 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:17:56] Right.

ZDoggMD: [00:17:57] So here's a film. Most conspiracies that are actually, you know, have been figured out, like say the Volkswagen Diesel Emission conspiracy. That one where like this company really hid the fact that there are diesel engines work polluting like heck, but they fudged everything. And how was that caught? It was caught by engineers who looked at data and go, "This doesn't add up." So actually parsing through the data. Watergate caught by journalists. It's usually either a journalist, a real credible whistleblower along with the press, who oust things, because it's in their interest to do that.

[00:18:30] Actually talk about clicks, if you add a real conspiracy, that's a lot of juice, right? 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:34] Right.

ZDoggMD: [00:18:35] So you're actually incentivized to do it, but conspiracy theories are more often some uncredible person on the Internet who has a hundred percent skepticism of anything the authorities or the establishment says, and it's that 100 percent skepticism that should make you skeptical because a scientist skepticism is appropriate. It's like, I don't know until you prove me wrong. "Oh, I see evidence now. Okay. I changed my mind. You're right." Good example was with this coronavirus thing, myself, I'm a condition doctor, meaning I know -- okay, someone has a low blood oxygen level. You put them on a ventilator quickly because you need to relieve the stress and make sure their organs don't fail because that's how we're trained.

[00:19:15] Well, early on in this thing, there was a video from a Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell. He's in New York, he's on the frontlines and he's like, "Guys, this is a different disease. We're seeing that we shouldn't be intubating people so quickly and this and this and this." And you watch the quality of the video is crappy. It looks like a conspiracy video. It's getting tons of views. People are sending it to you going, "You see what they're saying? It's all a scam, man." And I watched it and my spider-sense tingled because I said, "Oh, you know, I've seen so many of these conspiracy videos, it's nonsense." But then I watched carefully and I said, okay, let me look at his credentials. He's on the frontlines. He's an ICU critical care ER doc. He actually knows people that I actually respect, so I can reach out to them. I can look at the data and then watch. And what ended up happening is he was actually right for certain patients. We were doing them harm by intubating early, and that's now becoming accepted scientific wisdom. That's how science works. Show us evidence, show us data, show us numbers, and we'll make it work. 

[00:20:09] Now with Plandemic, immediately you have a hundred percent skepticism on the part of the audience. There is nothing that you can show them -- everything we do here today, they're going to put up walls and say, "Well, you're in the pocket of the Illuminati or you're paid by big pharma."

Jordan Harbinger: [00:20:24] You're a big pharma shill because you're a doctor and I'm a big pharma shill because I -- they'll have to figure out a reason for why a podcaster who works from home in his underwear and just wears a button-up shirt for videos is somehow a big pharma shill. I'll let them do the leg work on that one. I'm not going to give them anything else to go on -- but it's ridiculous. Right, they're going to have to sort of figure out why we might be biased. I think though I will sort of debate you on one point. I think you're right, the majority of people who watch something like Plandemic or a huge number of them anyway are going to go, "I believe this because I already wanted to believe this. I already had some of those beliefs and this confirms them. So that makes me feel good." 

[00:21:03] But there's still a large band of people when anything goes this viral, no pun intended, where people that you know that are -- this is a little disrespectful, but I'm going to say it anyway -- you're kind of gullible/your dumb friends on Facebook who share this stuff, they are not necessarily Illuminati believers. They don't necessarily watch InfoWars or all this garbage online. They got this because somebody shared it with them who shared it with them and they don't have enough medical knowledge and they go, "Huh, I wonder if this is true. Like some of it doesn't seem true, but maybe some of it is true. I don't really know. It's well-produced." You know, they'll say something like that.

[00:21:38] The reason we're making this right now is because I want people who listen to my show, who are rational, skeptical thinkers most of the time to go, "Let's take a drive and listen to this, or why don't you listen to this or watch this and it refutes some of the points in Plandemic. Just keep your mind open on this." And there's a lot of people sending it to me that go, "I know that this is probably bunk. I just don't know how to debunk it. And I want to do that because I get a feeling that it's not true because of the claim she's making." So that's what we're delivering, hopefully, here right now is knowledge and why this stuff is false. And we'll go into some more points here in a second. 

[00:22:14] Conspiracists love this stuff because it seems like credible people are starting to believe the things that they believe. What Judy Mikovits is actually doing? She's using these people because she knows that they are gullible. She's using them for fame and cash because she just happens to be selling a book that's anti-vax right now, and just happens to be debunking the Big Pharma conspiracy and goes in this documentary. She also goes and speaks on these -- she's on the circuit of crazy people, selling books and speaking at conventions for cash. This is a person who has disgraced and cannot work in laboratories because she's known as a quack and as a fraud. So what do you do when you're a quack and a fraud? You lean in. You lean into that ish and you go, "You know what, I'm unhinged. I'm going to work with people who don't care." And that's what she's doing.

ZDoggMD: [00:23:03] You kind of nailed something really important here, which is that conspiracy theorists always will put forth that there's a financial reason often for these conspiracies. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:13] Right.

ZDoggMD: [00:23:13] But they have enough cognitive dissonance there able to ignore vast contradictions in their own case. For example, Judy Mikovits, she's selling the book. So she has a huge contradiction right there, a huge conflict right there. She's selling you something. 

[00:23:28] Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:28] Right. 

ZDoggMD: [00:23:28] Ask the documentary maker, right? He's selling you this documentary. That's how they do their thing. And so that's a huge sort of disconnect. The other thing you can do then is go, all right. If you're thinking critically, look for ideas and their reasoning where -- and by the way, Jordan, we don't teach this stuff in school. We teach memorization. We teach to the test, and so we can't really blame our dumb friends on Facebook, even though we look at them and go, "What's wrong with you?"

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:54] Yeah.

ZDoggMD: [00:23:55] Maybe we're lucky and had some training in critical thinking, but they weren't able to do that because if you did, you could look at the video and go, "Look, they're saying contradictory things." She's saying Wuhan coronavirus was created in a lab and escaped or was released from a lab, and that's causing COVID. Then in the next part of the video, she says, "No, what's causing this syndrome is actually vaccination. It's the vaccines in Italy that are causing the syndrome." So these are contradictory, incompatible statements, right? So you can immediately go, "Well, how can I believe anything she says when she contradicted herself within the course of the video." 

Jason DeFillippo: [00:24:31] You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back. 

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:28:10] What they're hoping is, well, you can hold these two conflicting ideas in your mind, or you just forgot about one. Like when I speak to a lot of people who are supposed to be well-versed in this stuff, they can never really bring up concrete examples. They just tell me to go watch the thing that they watched because they're getting a feeling that that was persuasive. They can't actually then turn around and persuade. And that's a big red flag. Like if somebody says, "Oh, you know, this, this, this, and this." I'll go, "Okay, tell me why." And if they go, "Well, you got to watch this whole documentary." And then I watched the documentary and I go, "What in there that was convincing?" And they go, "Well, you know, it's just like -- watch it again." "No. If you actually don't even know why you have formed your beliefs other than you feel and generally kind of persuaded by this thing you watched on YouTube, you don't have a rational basis for those beliefs at all." 

ZDoggMD: [00:28:57] And what you, I think are pointing out, which is quite clear, and this is something we advocate on my show all the time. This idea that we are emotional, unconsciously driven creatures based on beliefs that are conditioned, genetic, you know, whether they're political, religious, ideological beliefs. We're emotional creatures with a little bit of rationality that evolved recently. You know, Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist -- I think you've had him on the show -- he talks about this -- 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:23] Yes, I have.

ZDoggMD: [00:29:23] -- this paradigm of the elephant, this unconscious emotional creature that's big and conditioned and unconscious. And the rider, the little person on top who's trying to ride, that's our neocortex, our frontal cortex is trying to reason. But we seem to think that that reason overrides this big elephant, but it doesn't. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:39] It doesn't. 

ZDoggMD: [00:29:40] This guy is the elephant's press secretary. He's designed to actually take what you feel, find data to support it, or take data that actually opposes it and spin it in a way that supports it. That's why your friends are like, "Hey, check out Plandemic, bro. See?" And you're like, "Yeah, I did." "See." 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:58] Yeah. 

ZDoggMD: [00:29:58] And they're like, "Yeah, see?" But you have totally different beliefs. But they spin it to support what they already believe. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:03] Exactly. So as a skeptic, I go, "Okay, tell me what exactly was convincing." So I dug in more because I was like, well, what parts of what she's saying is true? So I started to look again at her credentials, and Mikovits co-authored a paper in science, which is a very reputable scientific journal. So at first, I was like, "Wow, okay. She was in science." And she suggested that an obscure agent named xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus, which is XMRV -- so let's just call it XMRV because the rest of it is a mouthful -- caused something called chronic fatigue syndrome. What is that? It's a disease that people or a condition that we haven't quite figured out. Correct? 

ZDoggMD: [00:30:38] So chronic fatigue syndrome is one of those diseases that when you mentioned it to both physicians and patients, they go, "Augh," because it's real symptoms. I cost billions of dollars a year in lost productivity. It often comes on suddenly. We have no idea, no idea what causes it. It's characterized by really bad fatigue and sleep that doesn't actually regenerate you. So really abnormal sleep, some aches, and pains, some imbalanced when you stand up, different dizziness symptoms, things like that. But it's really tough because all your lab tests are often normal. Your physical exam is normal, and so people often blow these patients off as crazy. They're not crazy. Something's going on. We don't know what it is. It may be a result of emotional trauma, but that doesn't mean the patient is crazy. It means they have a syndrome we haven't figured out.

[00:31:28] Now, one of the main reasons people love conspiracy theories is they want certainty. They want something to blame. And in this case, she comes up and says, "Hey, there's this mouse virus that is associated with chronic fatigue syndrome." She publishes it in science and everyone's like, "XMRV, oh my God, we finally have a cause. It's an infection. I bet we could take antivirals." People were taking HIV medication for this thing who had -- so you think these things are harmless? They're not now. I don't think she intentionally did this. But the scientific process then rolls on. People tried to replicate the study. They said, oh, this is important and they couldn't.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:32:05] So explain what replication is because that sounds like a fancy word for a lot of people. That just rolls right by in one ear and out the other. But replication is important. This is the key to good science. 

ZDoggMD: [00:32:16] It is. Replication means that you can do it again. So you do a study, you do a trial, and then you get results. Well, okay, if that's an important finding, someone should try to do it again to make sure it wasn't the result of chance or error or fraud, something else that could actually confound the results. And this is how the scientific process should work. It doesn't always work this well, but when it does, in this case, it did because people said this is a big deal. So then they searched and other scientists could not replicate. They could not find this virus in chronic fatigue syndrome patients. And it was determined through a series of experiments that. It was a contaminant in the cells they were using. It was not the cause of chronic fatigue. And a new paper came out in 2011 that Judy Mikovits actually said, "Oh yeah, I guess, it is an XMRV," which by the way, she changed her tune later. 

[00:33:06] At that point, something remarkable happened, which is science retracted the original paper. And for people who don't know what retraction is, what it means is it gets published in peer-reviewed, other people review it. And go, yeah, okay, this is worthy of publication in science. Big deal. It goes out in the world, becomes part of the literature, gets cited by other scientists when they're doing their own research, guides research in certain directions. Well, at this point, science realizes, "Wait, this was a screw up because it wasn't replicable, it was a contaminant. So we don't want this influencing other scientists in the wrong direction. We are going to publicly say, this paper is retracted. We're going to remove it from our database, and we're going to say why? We're going to either apologize or not, and we're going to explain what's going on." That happens. There's a website called Retraction Watch, where you can look at articles that have been retracted.

[00:33:53] The most famous one is Andrew Wakefield, a former physician in Great Britain who had a paper that said autism is associated with MMR vaccination. That was retracted due to fraud. So it was actually fraudulent. And in Mikovits' case, it was just sloppy science.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:10] Yeah. 

ZDoggMD: [00:34:11] Shoddy science. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:12] Sloppy bad science. So it turned out she'd actually sort of made this virus by, we think, accidentally contaminating her own samples in the lab. People might go, "Oh, she did it on purpose." Most scientists are not going to do something like this on purpose because it is so easy to get caught. And she, of course, later on did get caught. If it was an accident, I guess you don't get caught. She later on was humiliated by this whole thing because they retract the paper. She has to come out and say, this was bad science, and her own lab tries to replicate it. It's not like, oh, we got the answer, and some other guys disproved you and they worked for the government. Her own lab was like, yeah, our methodology was not working. We did it again. We spent three million of our own dollars and it didn't work. And then she was like, "Yeah, this was problematic. My bad." 

[00:34:56] And then later on she goes cuckoo. She has a dramatic -- well, she was already cuckoo, I think, but she has a dramatic breakup with her lab. They ended up filing a lawsuit against her in 2011 for allegedly stealing laboratory notebooks, stealing proprietary information on her laptop, flash drives, interpersonal email accounts. She gets arrested in California on felony charges because she freaking ran away, fugitive from justice. She was jailed for several days. The charges were later dropped, but I think we can start to see somebody who's a little unhinged here. It wasn't, "Hey, you can't talk about this secret thing." It's like, "Hey, you're fired because you are crappy at your job." And then she's like, "I'm taking all the equipment I need to work in my garage." "No." So she gets arrested and then suddenly. Being an unhinged mess of a clown in the conspiracy community -- well, that's just what the doctor ordered. Hashtag dad jokes.

ZDoggMD: [00:35:46] You know, all I could think of when you're telling that story is like the trailer for Plandemic as it should play out in movie theaters like, "This summer." And you see Judy Mikovits is running in slow motion from the lab and the lab explodes behind her and she's holding all the notebooks. So here's the thing though, this was something, when I watched Plandemic with a critical mind, I said, "Wait. She's saying she was arrested and thrown in jail without any charges." 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:12] Right, she says, "I was charged with nothing."

ZDoggMD: [00:36:14] Charged with nothing. Now, this should be a red flag because this is searchable. So in America at least, my understanding is you're supposed to be charged with a crime if you're arrested. So that already made my spider-sense tingle and go, "Wait, how can that be?" And that was in the first like just a minute of the video, right? Arrested with no charges. I'm like, "This doesn't sound right." And then you do a quick google search and you realize, "No, the charges were she stole notebooks and laboratory proprietary equipment from a lab she was working for, which by the way, is in Reno. I don't know if you've been to Reno, Jordan. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:44] Yeah. 

ZDoggMD: [00:36:45] But it is not a hotbed of biomedical research. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:47] No. 

ZDoggMD: [00:36:48] So already you know anybody working in the space, it's like, "Wait, but wait, but what?" And so again, you should start asking these questions just thinking critically. Now the thing is you may actually have a bias towards this film in terms of your politics. So you may say, "I am tired of the liberal nanny state trying to tell me to wear masks and that this thing is going to close my business and all of that." That's fine. You can have that bias. That's your elephant, right? But then to allow it to blind you to evidence, that's clear. That's very, very tough. And the truth is you can still have your feelings about that and find evidence to support that while accepting that this woman is cuckoo crazy. 

[00:37:25] By the way, one thing you said, was it intentional or not? I actually have a firm belief that these people are not intentionally trying to fool people. I think they have a deep mental illness where it's almost like a Munchausen by proxy. They're unconsciously seeking either attention or fame or money, and they do these things blind to the fact that they're lying because she can lie with a straight face, meaning she believes her lies. And I think one reason I think humans actually evolve to be able to lie very well because they have to deceive members of their own tribe. The only way you can do that is to believe your own BS and I think she does. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:37:59] I see this. There are other YouTubers I think that are going through this right now. We can talk offline about that because I don't want to name -- I don't want to derail this conversation, but I see this happening now where you see somebody who says, "5G causes coronavirus." And then you get five million views, and normally your videos get 5,000 views and you're just like, "You know what? That sounds good and I'm going to buy a yacht. All I have to do is convince myself that that's not harmful for society and I'm going to be rich for the rest of my life." I could see that being an easy sell on yourself. 

ZDoggMD: [00:38:30] This is so interesting to me because the incentives were humans are often only as good as our incentives. And what I noticed too, this is very seductive, Jordan, because, look, when the Plandemic thing came out in a thousand people sent it to me. My first instinct was, "Oh, this is total rubbish. I can't believe how dumb people are being." Right?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:48] Yeah.

ZDoggMD: [00:38:48] And then my second instinct was I should do a point by point debunking of this video rationally and carefully. And then I said, but wait, that's a lot of work. Other people are already doing it online. I'm just going to go and tell people how I feel. And I did a video called Why Plandemic is BS, or whatever on YouTube. Three million views later, right? I'm like, this is like the emperor saying, "Unleash your hatred." It's just so easy to just say, "People are dumb. These conspiracy theories of dumb. If you believe this, you're an idiot." Which is basically what I said and it's so easy because it's polarizing. And what it does, it's confirmation for the side that agrees with you and it's just, oh, let's all pile in on the side that doesn't. And that video has more like 60 percent dislikes on a three million video. They're all from the conspiracy buffs who believed Plandemic. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:39:37] Sure.

ZDoggMD: [00:39:37] So it's easy. It's easy views and ad revenue and all that. But then I went and did a followup because I have to live with myself. It's kind of like, are we doing good in the world? Now, if you were a young YouTuber and you're trying to make a living and you know you have all these different allegiances, it creates a kind of moral distress. But we do what we think is right at the time, and sometimes that's making money, which I think can be incredibly harmful.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:40:01] I agree. I agree. Going back to the Plandemic movie itself, in Plandemic, they talk about her arrest and they show this video of a SWAT team writing a house, and you're supposed to think that this is her getting arrested. The news footage company that actually shot the footage has denounced Plandemic saying, "This is from an unrelated SWAT raid. This is B roll from a completely different thing." And, of course, she was charged with theft, not charged with nothing as she tries to claim. Bear in mind, Mikovits has never published anything scientific again, not one thing. So she starts saying, her old hypothesis about CFS is actually still valid despite her admitting evidence that was contaminated. No other team around the world being able to reproduce her results. She starts saying, "It's all a big cover-up." And then she goes one further and goes, "You know what, vaccines cause autism," which makes no sense because one, we all know that's not true to begin with. There's no evidence for this other than Andrew Wakefield's fraud. And two, she is not a vaccine researcher and never was. She's just in my mind jumping on the conspiracy bandwagon because she's out of the job. She's disgraced, her reputation is in the toilet. She sees the potential for a boatload of cash, bilking people in the conspiracy and anti-vax community and goes -- you know what? Again, to our earlier point -- "I'm going to lean in." 

[00:41:15] So in case you still need more information before you stop believing a single word of what this woman says -- we can go point by point on a bunch of other stuff -- because Science Magazine goes and they said, "Okay, we published your original study and retracted it." This is not a random health website. This is the scientific journal. And they basically took down Plandemic because they're like, "Ugh, we kind of created this monster. We got to debunk her revisionist history." Her 1991 doctoral thesis revolutionized the treatment of HIV/AIDS. That's what she says, and they're just like, "No. It wasn't impactful at all." And grifters use revisionist history, as you'd mentioned before. So she makes all these studies before she got ripped down and says like, "Oh, this causes this and this causes that. CFS is caused by this." A lot of people, especially in conspiracy communities, will say, a study says something when it does not, because they know that the other people who are listening are not going to read that study.

ZDoggMD: [00:42:09] Yeah, that's exactly right. They're not going to follow up and you can look at Judy Mikovits and go, okay, well then let's just really look at what she's saying, because like you said, she hasn't published -- and actually from a standpoint of pure compassion, I feel for this woman before I realized that she's actually harming lives by telling people don't wear masks and this kind of thing and that vaccines are dangerous, right? That's a harm in the world. She's going to cost lives saying that because people believe this garbage. But going back to just her, it's kind of like, well, here's a woman who tried, she put out a paper. I think she did it with good intent. It gets retracted. That is a stab wound in the heart for a scientist. And her career was derailed. And I think that was maybe -- and again, I'm mind reading here which you shouldn't do -- but you could imagine from a place of love and look at her and go, what an ordeal that must have been if she didn't intend it to be.

[00:42:56] And now she's gone full Batman villain crazy and as plausible, an explanation is not. Now one thing I would say to it relating to that, I just made up an alternative path for her. Conspiracy theories suffer from something that Scott Adams has called a failure of imagination. So you can say, okay, you know what? Well, Fauci is running a conspiracy to make extra money from vaccine patents, and that's the only explanation for why he's pushing a vaccine for COVID-19 right now. Well, that's a simple failure of imagination because there's about a thousand other reasons that Fauci would be promoting a vaccine, but you have not brought those to the table. And that's a cardinal sign of a BS conspiracy theory is there's no opposing viewpoint in it. They just don't give air to any other alternative explanations. And this is a good example of that. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:43:44] Mikovits also goes and says, well, Anthony Fauci directed this cover-up. Everyone's paid off. Millions of dollars in funding from Tony Fauci and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. All of these investigators, they committed fraud and they're being paid big time, she says. There's no evidence for any fraud. There's no evidence of any cover-up. There's no evidence of any payments. There's no evidence of any funding from his institute. No one has been charged with fraud. No one's been charged with anything other than her actually. So this is just like classic redirection garbage from Judy Mikovits. 

ZDoggMD: [00:44:15] Yeah, it's complete nonsense. And the stuff is, again, it requires a suspension of disbelief that someone in government wouldn't leak this. That it wouldn't come out in the press. That this guy was some sinister figure. And it's just clear that she's grasping and trying to support her discredited beliefs. Again, if you apply that critical thinking in the video, you see it from the beginning because they start the video with, "I was wrongfully convicted or wrongfully imprisoned without charges." So already, you know, okay, it's being spun in a certain way to try to portray this woman simultaneously as a hero and a victim, which is a cardinal characteristic of conspiracy theories. So the conspiracy theory hero is both the hero trying to enlighten the world and a victim of a massive cover-up, persecution, whatever. It's a pattern that you can see time and time again. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:06] She later blames Fauci for millions of HIV deaths because he supposedly like has patents and is profiting from this. And it's like, look, you're blaming the head of CDC for taking credit for something that you say you discovered. She says that she discovered this at age 25 when she was a lab tech and not a researcher. So going back to your point about revisionist history, she's a lab tech. She's literally like washing pipettes and moving stuff around and do -- she's probably documenting things for sure as a lab assistant, but she's not a researcher per se. She did not discover a damn thing. 

ZDoggMD: [00:45:37] Yeah, I think that's accurate to say. And whatever she did do, whatever science she did do has been overblown or it did not have a big impact on HIV research. To accuse Fauci of costing millions of lives for HIV is pretty crazy. Now, Fauci was always kind of early on pushing for HIV vaccine, which never came to fruition, but everybody was trying it in those days and it was tough. There's so much stuff that she says in that video, for example, there's never been a vaccine against a retrovirus that's worked. Okay. What about measles? 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:07] Yeah. 

ZDoggMD: [00:46:07] Mumps, polio. It's like you could go through a list. So this is easy stuff. What else did she say? She said Italians are dying because they have hyperinflammatory states. They're older and they were vaccinated with a four-component, dog-based influenza  vaccine. All right, yes, they were vaccinated with a quadrivalent, meaning there are four different targets that the vaccine targets for flu. And actually we have that in the US too, it's a better flu vaccine because it targets more potential flu strains. And yes, it was grown in a clone of dog cells and that's another mechanism of actually producing the virus that causes influenza. And then the next step in that is to attenuate the virus. What that means is you make it inactive -- It's not attenuated, sorry, with flu. I misspoke. It's inactivating the virus. So you actually take these virus particles and you kill them so they don't cause disease. That's why when people say, "I got the flu from the flu shot." They're just making stuff up. They either had bad luck, they got flu despite the vaccination, or they had a cold or something nearby their flu shot. And it takes two weeks for flu shot typically to kick in. So yes, it was grown in dog cells and she's saying dogs have a ton of coronavirus, therefore getting the shot infected these people with coronavirus and now they're getting sick. 

[00:47:30] Okay, this is crazy on several levels. One is by inactivating virus, you kill every virus in the population there. These are dead viruses. So even if their work dog coronaviruses, which this is a cell culture, not a living dog, that you're growing it in, you would kill those viruses so they wouldn't have any power to infect you. And it's just absolutely crazy because in the same video, she says, "No, actually this coronavirus was released from a Wuhan lab." So the internal inconsistency, the scientific inconsistency is all can easily be debunked. 

Jason DeFillippo: [00:48:02] You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back after this. 

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:58] Mikovits goes down to say, "They'll be killing, the scientific community will kill millions of people as they already have with their vaccines." She's pandering to the anti-vax crowd. "There is no vaccine currently on the schedule for any RNA virus that works." As you mentioned, that's BS, measles, mumps, rubella, rabies, yellow fever, Ebola. These are all RNA viruses that have vaccines that are on the market that work well. But to her point here? Vaccines have not killed millions of people. They have saved millions of people. If someone gets in a car crash and passes away and they were wearing their seatbelt, we don't go, "Well, that seatbelt killed them." This claim is so ridiculous. This is the type of nonsense that takes me from, "Well, this person is just mentally ill," to, "Oh, oh, okay. She knows what she's doing." She knows that what she's telling people is false, and she simply does not care because she has the ability to parse this critical thinking. She just doesn't give a crap about the people that she's talking to. She doesn't care if you get vaccinated. She wants to make money from selling her crap, period. 

ZDoggMD: [00:53:02] Yeah. I think you're right. I think what she's found in the anti-vax population is an audience that's sympathetic to her other crazy ideas. So she's then glommed onto that, right? Because no legitimate scientist who is worth their stripes in anything has profoundly anti-vaccine belief. They may say there are side effects and we have to look at risk and benefit, and that's fine. One thing you mentioned about seatbelts is an interesting thing when you're talking to anti-vaccine activists. By the way, there's one thing to be on the fence, right? Be a mother who's concerned because of all the misinformation online and you're concerned about government is one thing. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:53:32] Sure. 

ZDoggMD: [00:53:32] It's another thing to be a hardcore, I call them anti-vax cult members. So these are hardcore conspiracy theorists. You cannot disabuse them of their beliefs no matter what. So no amount of evidence will change them, which means they're beyond hope, which means at that point you block them on Twitter. You personally de-platform them. So you say, "No, I can't argue with you. I'm going to continue to talk about information that will influence people on the fence." 

[00:53:58] And as far as seatbelts go, it's interesting because the anti-vaccine advocates say, "Well, vaccines have killed people rarely." One in a million will have a severe reaction to a vaccine, right? So that's the equivalent of saying, "Well, one in a million times when a car crashes, it's the seatbelt that actually causes the harm." It decapitates you or causes harm to a child. So what scientists do is go, well, that's a risk worth taking because more often it will save your life and the risk is so tiny and you can't predict where the risk is. So it's better on the whole to be compassionate and wear your seatbelt. But what the anti-vax stance will say, this is distorted conspiracy thinking is, "No, we need now to tell people, stop wearing your seatbelt because it's a choice and there's a chance," however small, "There's a chance that your child will die from a seatbelt." That's crazy and dangerous. And that's what these cult people are doing. 

[00:54:48] Exactly. And then they go, "Well, freedom man." Something about -- because it's like, "Well my logical arguments aren't working. Because they're garbage. And so I'm just going to say, my body, my choice, or something like that, and just say freedom and like, you know, Bill Gates isn't going to inject me as nanorobots. Oh wait, sorry. I sound crazy again. No, no, no. Freedom." Something about freedom. And it's like, all right, whatever. And look the seatbelt thing, if you want to kill yourself by not wearing a seatbelt, maybe you should be free to do that, but you're not free to infect my old neighbors and parents and family because you're like, "Masks are bad for you because I saw Plandemic." Like, "No, take your dirty ass home and stay there."

[00:55:25] Yeah, that's right. That's right. I think one of the problems, Jordan, overall, and this is a more philosophical issue as we go point by point through this video, is we, in western medicine, have failed profoundly at developing a trusting relationship with our patients in the face of all this misinformation. And part of the reason is we no longer have the time to spend with our patients, to talk to them, to get to know them, to develop trust, to go to their house, to exchange a chicken for our services. Instead, it's this massive industrialization and commodification of us where we have 10 minutes to see the patient and 20 minutes taking to document in this electronic cash register. They call a health record. And that sucks the soul out of us. So we become kind of a-holes. 

[00:56:06] The patients then go, "I'm not being heard, but I am being heard in natural news or health nut news. These communities on Facebook where they hear that I'm concerned and they have answers for me that are black and white." Vaccines are bad whereas the doctor says other risks are very, very small -- the benefits. No, they're saying there is nothing but risk, so it's much easier to wrap my head around a black and white answer that fits my belief of Liberty versus oppression, my body, my right, my children. There's nothing wrong with having that belief, but applying distorted critical thinking to it. That's where the harm comes in, I think. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:56:38] I agree. Another claim that I think is dangerous that she's making. She says, "Why would you close the beach? You've got sequences in the soil, in the sand. You've got healing microbes in the ocean, in the saltwater." I'm going to be generous here. It's unclear on what she means by sand or soil sequences. Sequences of what? What does she mean by sequences? There's no evidence that microbes in the ocean, sand, or anything can heal COVID-19. You can definitely spread it by being with a bunch of people on the beach. This sounds to me like dog-whistle bullshit for people that believe nature can magically heal anything, and this is classic pseudoscience thinking. We call it the appeal to ancient wisdom. We sort of say, "Oh, Aztecs had this thing that could cure this disease that you have, that has been since the dawn of time." Like if you have a child that's born with a disability, you know you do this and this and this, and it's like, "Oh, they had ancient wisdom that big pharma has tried to eradicate from our knowledge base." And it's like, no, we had wives' tales that never did anything and sometimes cause more harm than good and we don't do them anymore because we have science and medicine now. 

ZDoggMD: [00:57:37] Yeah, exactly right. This beach thing that she says, and I think I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt here and say, when she says sequences, she's talking about viral DNA or RNA sequences. 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:57:47] Right. That's why I said I'll be generous with it. 

ZDoggMD: [00:57:48] We'll be generous. We'll be as generous as we can here. This is what she's doing. She's making this argument -- and by the way, this is where it becomes a public health threat because she's basically telling people to go to the beach, which we know from our considerable data pool now about how COVID-19 is transmitted, that being closer than six feet in a crowded public location would be bad. Now, beach would be lower risk because you're outdoors. There's UV radiation. You can distance yourself. So I'm not saying don't go to the beach, but a bay whatever ordinances are out there. But here's what she's saying, "No, no, no. There are other microbes at the beach that will change your own microbiome to allow you to develop immunity and fight off this coronavirus." 

[00:58:29] Now, this is an interesting gambit because she's conflating, she's mixing two scientific principles here that are actually real that our microbiome, in other words, our own body's collection of microorganisms does affect our health, and that there's something called the hygiene hypothesis, which says, as we've sterilized our environment and become more clean, we're seeing more autoimmune disease. We're seeing more allergies because our immune system is going haywire, not getting the usual inputs that it becomes used to, and it starts amping up. Now, this is again, just a theory, but she's pulling these in with enough sowing, enough doubt within pure pseudoscience, which is what coronavirus sequences on the beach can help fight regular coronavirus, which is nonsense crazy. And that's what makes it really dangerous, is the mixing of a little bit of science with a ton of pseudoscience, with a 100 percent certainty. So she's just like, "Well, dah, dah, dah, dah," and she says it directly to your face, black and white. Never trust anyone who says something like that. Even us if we're saying, "No. A hundred percent vaccines are safe." That's not true. They'll always be a small risk with any medication. So you have to ask those questions, but at the same time, you look at her, she's a hundred percent certain.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:59:38] She also says some ridiculousness about -- the interviewer in this documentary in Plandemic goes, "Do we have any idea of where this occurred?" Well, I mean, viruses occur in different areas. We have forensic biologists that look for this, but she says, "Oh, yeah, I'm sure it occurred between North Carolina Laboratory, Fort Detrick, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and the Wuhan Laboratory. Bear in mind, she's never worked at any of these places. She has no real idea of what goes on in there. She just says, "Yeah, I'm sure it happened there." No evidence is given, of course, because you know, then you'd have to prove that you're not freaking crazy. And then she goes another step further and she says, "The coronavirus was somehow cooked up in collusion between United States government labs and Chinese researchers." And then the narrator voice somehow suggests that Anthony Fauci is somehow involved in cooking up coronaviruses. She also says she taught -- and I don't know if air quotes are needed for this. "We taught Ebola cells in a US Army Laboratory at Fort Detrick, how to infect human cells in 1999, effectively."

[01:00:38] So like she claims now that she taught Ebola cells how to infect humans, which there's no evidence for this. There's no evidence that she did that. And also wait a minute, "Until we taught them," so are you saying that you, Mikovits, are partially responsible for 11,300 deaths from the Ebola outbreak. So you did that? But your claim makes no sense because the first recorded claims of human infection of Ebola were in freaking 1976 when you were nowhere near even being allowed to go into a lab. Come on. 

ZDoggMD: [01:01:08] You know, Jordan, she meant the royal we, okay. 

Jordan Harbinger: [01:01:11] The royal we.

ZDoggMD: [01:01:11] She means we, industrial complex. Yeah. I know, this is crazy talk. So like you said, 1976 Ebola. We didn't teach a virus anything. First of all, a virus doesn't personify a virus. It's not a person, you can't teach it, an old virus new tricks. 

Jordan Harbinger: [01:01:24] Right. 

ZDoggMD: [01:01:24] But speaking of that, how can you tell whether this virus came from animals or the wild or whether it was manufactured? Well, it turns out there are ways to do that, that have to do with science. And one of the ways is you look at the genetic sequence and you compare it to known animal-derived viruses, and that's what they did with this virus. It has a lot of what they call homology, meaning its similarity, sameness to bat coronaviruses that are known. Now, the changes to this virus that differentiate it from the original SARS -- because this is SARS-2, the sequel -- the changes are again, in how it's binding and different things like that. In order to engineer those changes, you would do them in a certain way, right? That would be rational and based on our understanding. The way the changes actually show up in the genetic code, it's just like looking at evolution. Why do we still have a vestigial tail when we're developing as an embryo, it makes no sense, but it's part of the evolutionary path. 

[01:02:19] When you look at this virus, you can see the evolutionary path that takes, which means a lot of mutations that make no sense that wouldn't actually add any danger to the virus, but they're there, which then again show, this is not something consciously created in a lab, and pretty much the scientists agree on this, which is unusual. Now, could it have escaped? Could it have be a natural virus that escaped from a Wuhan lab that was studying it? Well, sure, but what's that got to do with than anything. That wasn't like an intentional release. I mean, who cares? It has nothing to do with the particular conspiracy at hand. And I don't think that happened because you don't need to invoke that to explain how this thing started in bats. Maybe move to pangolin and then ends up jumping to humans.

[01:03:02] Which by the way, one of the thing, Jordan, when it jumps to humans, it can either already be dangerous to humans and spread human to human, or it can acquire that after it replicates within a human host. And we don't know the answer with this virus, but it does change the dynamic because if it acquired it once, getting into humans, we can actually extinguish it in humans and it's gone. If it's already very virulent and damaging to humans, while it's in an animal host, it's going to keep coming back because that animal host would have to be extinct in order to stop it. 

Jordan Harbinger: [01:03:36] What I think is interesting is Plandemic has even been denounced by these two doctors who are cited in the film as experts. You know, these Bakersfield California Urgent Care doctors who came out and they became stars on Fox News for being like this whole thing is overblown because they wanted to reopen their clinic. And I look at these guys and I'm kind of like, "You guys are a-holes because you're choosing to open your business and you're trying to use your expertise to state things that you know are kind of false so that you can continue making money. Now, even if we don't assume that these guys are complete a-holes, they are seeing themselves in Plandemic and they were like, "Oh shoot, we did not want it." So they're distancing themselves in there, like, "We have nothing to do with Plandemic. The creator of this film never asked to use our footage. He's skewed our study. He's skewed our interviews to fit his agenda. We do not agree. We are not interested in being associated with the conspiracy theory against the current administration." It's kind of funny and fun for me to see these two guys who are just out for profit and who didn't care about people like five minutes ago, ended up in the turn it up to 11 version of their own bullshit and then be like, "Oh, we look really dumb now." And it's like yeah, well, you dipped your toe in that water and you can't get that stank off. Can you guys? 

ZDoggMD: [01:04:49] It's really funny, Jordan, because we were talking about people sending us dumb videos and a bunch of my own followers, many of whom are healthcare professionals, sent me that video saying, "Look, these guys are saying reopened." And they've done a study in the two Bakersfield docs. So I did a video debunking their video. Initially, as an angry video and then as a point by point, and the thing with them is I actually think they believe what they're saying because they're so motivated to open up because again, their business is going out of business. And they have this data, which they're spinning in the wrong way and incorrectly. And in my video, I go through and debunk that. But it's funny, now. You're exactly right because they know, they're not dummies. They don't want to be associated with anti-vaccine conspiracy lunatics. They're fine being associated with the right because a lot of their moral pallet is saying, "Hey, the economy matters. Liberty versus oppression and big science is holding us down." Okay, fine, fine. That's your moral pallet. But they don't want to be associated with cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and that's probably why they made that statement. 

Jordan Harbinger: [01:05:47] I agree. I just thought it was kind of interesting because I looked at these guys and I thought it's a little disingenuous. They must know some of it is, but they're like, "Look, we're going to get some publicity for this. It's going to help our business." Kind of no harm, no foul -- I disagree with that, but I think that's where they were. Someone just took their thing and turned it up again, turned it up to 11 and they were just like, "Oh crap."  Because they didn't know that that was going to happen. They thought "We're safe. We're going to get a bunch of accolades from people who saw us on right-wing news sources or right-leaning news sources." And now it's like, "Oh, you had no idea what you were getting yourselves into." Like they went over to the dark side for a second and thought they could just come back home and things were covered and it's like, "Nope, you are now officially these guys who are on the -- you're hip to big pharma shills. It's a Plandemic, man." Good luck getting that off. 

ZDoggMD: [01:06:35] These are fellow physicians I was reluctant to come out just blasting, but I did. I called them clowns and I went through this whole thing. And what's interesting is their video has telltale signs of conspiracy thinking, which one of them was, they ask a question towards the end in this mock press conference in Bakersfield. And by the way, these guys are docs in a box. They run an urgent care. They have no business talking about mass epidemiology or what happens in hospitals because they don't go to hospitals. So they don't see how deadly this thing is, right? So they're skewed. And they may actually believe it because they're only seeing a part of it. So they said something to the effect of, "Now, when Fauci tells you they're trying to keep you safe, what are they meaning is they're trying to control you. Any time someone says they're trying to keep you safe, they're trying to control you." That's what Erickson said at one point in the press conference, and that's when I finally said, "I'm going to go really hard because these guys are showing their bias on the table. They're putting it right out there and they're not acknowledging that it's a bias."

[01:07:30] Often when I do a video, Jordan, I go, "Look here, I have a few libertarian biases. I have a few liberal biases. I have some conservative bias. I'm going to put it out in advance. This is where my elephant is, so here's the data." Now you can come at me and see what you come up with, but at least acknowledge what your biases are. 

Jordan Harbinger: [01:07:43] Exactly. I have a rationalism bias. I want things to be scientific, and sometimes when we don't have science to prove something, either way I go, "Well, in that case, I'm not going to look at it," which is not necessarily good. We should be looking at things even as early evidence comes in, we can't have double-blind placebo-controlled, dah, dah, dah for everything. But that doesn't mean believe everything that you see on the internet. And right now, look at the pure incentives, as you said before, in closing here, humans really are only as good as our incentives. It pays right now to be a COVID-19 conspiracy theorist because before Mikovits and all these other horrible grifters glommed onto this, particularly, she was a second or third-string anti-vaccine crank. And now look, she is a celebrity in that world, going to give talks, going to give interviews, going to sell books. She's going to make millions of dollars from people who don't know any better, and this is now her business model because she cannot get a job doing anything else. 

[01:08:42] Plandemic throws out so many false claims in 20 to 24 minutes. It's difficult for any lay viewer to keep track of what's true. And I hope that we have helped a little bit with that today. So thank you very much, doctor, for coming on the show. 

ZDoggMD: [01:08:54] Hey, thanks, Jordan. We got to stay away from that addictive drug of social media success because it's easy to do this and make money, but you have to think about your bigger impact in the world and the people that you're harming. 

Jordan Harbinger: [01:09:05] Amen to that, man. Thank you so much.

ZDoggMD: [01:09:06] Thanks, brother. 

Jordan Harbinger: [01:09:09] Big thank you to ZDoggMD. We'll link to his YouTube channel in our show notes. He's got some funny stuff. He's got some serious stuff. Please use our website links if you buy books from any of the guests on the show, it does help support the show, and that works for audiobooks as well. So please, if you buy any word from the guest, please use our links in the show notes. Also in the show notes, there are worksheets for each episode, so you can review what you have learned here from ZDogg and myself today about Plandemic. We also now have transcripts for each episode and those can be found in the show notes as well. 

[01:09:40] A lot of people are thinking, "Why didn't you like Plandemic in the show notes?" It keeps getting removed, so any link I put up is going to change. Also, it's a complete effing waste of your time unless you're just trying to go see it to see what grifters look like in this day and age. Again, we have transcripts for the episode. Those are on the show notes. There's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at jordanharbinger.com/youtube. We had some good high-quality video there.

[01:10:05] I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems, using tiny habits over at our Six-Minute Networking course. It takes a couple of minutes per day. It's a free course over at jordanharbinger.com/course. Dig the well before you are thirsty people. Make sure you build those relationships and your network before you need it, even if it means starting from scratch. Now, these drills take six minutes a day seriously. It's not fluff. It's crucial. It's free. jordanharbinger.com/course. 

[01:10:33] By the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribed to the course, so come join us, you'll be in smart company. You can reach out to ZDogg on social media. Tell him you love this episode of the show. You never know what'll shake out of reaching out to a show guest. And speaking of building relationships, reach out and follow me on social. I'm at @JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram and add me on LinkedIn. I posted more there than anywhere right now probably. And it's a lot more intelligent people that know how to spell, so I kind of like it right now. I'm just Jordan Harbinger on LinkedIn, easy to find. 

[01:11:02] This show is created in association with PodcastOne. This episode was produced by Jen Harbinger, engineered by Jase Sanderson. The ads were fun because of Peter Oldring, show notes and worksheets by Robert Fogarty, music by Evan Viola. I'm your host Jordan Harbinger. Our advice and opinions, and those of our guests are their own, and yeah I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. I'm sure as heck not a doctor or a therapist. So do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. And remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

[01:11:34] So if you know somebody who's on the fence about this Plandemic BS, send it to them. If you know somebody who's bought it, whole-hog send it to them. This may not change their mind, they maybe a lost cause but seriously. And if you know anybody who just wants to know how to debunk something, well, we tried. Let us know what you think. Hopefully you find something great in every episode, so please do share the show with those you love. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time.

[01:12:00] Dan (An Anti-Vaxxer Parody of Eminem's Stan)

My soy's gone cold I'm wondering why I

Need a doc at all

My Google search pops up these windows

And I believe it all

And even if I don't it'll be OK

Cuz I vape essential oils

They remind me you're a pharma shill

A pharma shill

 

 

Dear Z, I Facebook-messaged but you must've missed it

I sent some links to prove vaccines'll turn your dog autistic

It's peer-reviewed, Natural News is hella journalistic

Their editor is gluten-free, a vegan psychic mystic

Sometimes I wonder if you might know more than Gwyneth Paltrow

But anyways, fuck it, you're a shill and she's on Netflix bro

My girlfriend's pregnant too, don't think I'll vax her tho

Those toxins block the natural weed I make her smoke

Here's some links

I read about this heroin addict that was vaccinated

They said it's the aluminum in ‘em that exacerbates it

I know you probably hear this everyday but you're the biggest sham

I read your Turntable Health clinic was just some pharma scam

I've got a room full of these articles, did my research man

I like to send em to you, cuz Dogg you know your shit is wack

Anyways, I hope you get this Z, hit me back

Facebook chat, you pharma whore, love your jamz

This is Dan

 

My chi won't flow I'm wondering why I

Need a doc at all

My Google search pops up these windows

And I believe it all

And even if I don't it'll be OK

Cuz I take these fake hormones

They remind me you're a pharma shill

A pharma shill

 

Dear Dogg, you still ain't called or wrote, I hope I wasn't blocked

I ain't mad, I just think it's fucked up you think I'm a Russian bot

If you didn't wanna talk to me outside Taco Bell

You didn't have to, but you coulda signed a vaccine exemption for Matthew

That's my service weasel man, he's my closest bro

We waited outside the drive thru for you

With a cheese burrito and you just said "No."

That's pretty shitty man, we packed it full of measles

Natural exposure, cuz little Matthew's scared of needles

Aw he's foamin' at the mouth now, I probably just need to feed him

Remember when we met on Twitter, you said if I tweet you you would tweet back

See I'm just like you in a way

I don't connect with doctors neither

I got chronic lyme but still got no believers

I can relate to what you're saying in your songs

So when I have a shitty day, I google cures and grab a bong

Cuz I don't really got shit else but that shit helps when I'm fatigued

Even got a script from a homeopath for kombucha weed

Sometimes I feel better when I meet more folks like me

I joined a Facebook group called Health Nut News they hate MDs

But every time I watch your vids, it's real the way you tell it

Health 3.0's so legit next to the bullshit that they sellin'

See they don't know you like I know you Z, no one does

I just wish the system would get better but it NEVER does,

You gotta reply man

I'll listen too, Natural News

Is pretty dumb, Dan

P.S. That weasel bit my hand

 

My arm's gone numb I'm wondering why I

Need a doc at all

My Google search pops up these windows

And I believe it all

And even if I don't it'll be OK

Cuz I bought these supplements

They remind me that Big Pharma's bad

Big Pharma's bad

 

Dear Mister "Internet celebrity, I'm a pharma shill for cash"

This will be the last message I ever send your ass

It's been six hours and still no word, you don't respond quick?

I sent 40 DMs and still get this autoresponse shit

So this is my last Twitter message I hope you get it

I'm in the car right now, on my way to a tetanus party

Hey Z, I put a jade egg up my butt dare me to drive

You know those moms who feed bleach to their kids just cuz it might

Cure their autism cuz they saw it on some site

All the while desperate cuz no doctor would help ‘em right

That's kinda how this is, you could have rescued me from woo woo

Now it's too late, I'm on a pound of CBD now, I'm cuckoo

And all I wanted was a stupid message or a call

Just to let me know that my pain is real, I'm not some kinda fraud

I needed you ZDogg, celebrities ain't docs, think about it

You ruined it now, I hope you can't sleep and you seethe about it

And when you live stream antivaccine freaks scream about it

Hope your kids get vaccine injured and you dream about me

See Z, shut up Matthew! I'm talkin' to Siri!

Hey Z, that my service weasel screamin' in the trunk

He got autistic from vaccines, so I gave him a mercury enema

But he's been acting nuts and hasn't pood so I'ma blame you

Well, gotta go, Mercola's posting now

Oh shit, my phone froze, how am I supposed to tweet this shit out?

 

My soy's gone cold I'm wondering why I

Need a doc at all

My Google search pops up these windows

And I believe it all

And even if I don't it'll be OK

Cuz I vape essential oils

They remind me you're a pharma shill

A pharma shill

 

Dear Dan, I meant to write you sooner but I just been slammed

Nothing I type will change your mind about vaccines man

Look, I wish I had the time that you deserve

This system sucks, ain't paid to talk,

We're paid to do procedures

I'm sorry your girl won't get her shots, don't get confused

Trust her OB doc, not all that weed and Natural News

And what's this bit you said about burritos full of measles?

That's a serious disease, and I'm uneasy about that weasel

You got real issues Dan, chronic lyme notwithstanding

I think you've had some trauma and wanna doc that's understanding

It makes me sad when those celebrities spread advice that kills

But docs who do it out of love get branded pharma shills

I'm really hurt about the stuff you heard about my clinic

We worked hard to do care right but of course insurance killed it

I think we could've helped calm the fears that you're attached to

Before you hurt yourself, your girl, or your weasel Matthew

I know you're mad, Dan, I'm sad you don't feel heard

But I get mad when kids get hurt, cuz these damn vaccines work

I just don't want you to do some crazy shit

I saw this one bit on the news a couple weeks ago that made me sick

Some dude was on his phone and drove his car over a bridge

And had a rabid weasel in the trunk, with bunch of mercury in it

And on his phone they found a text, but they didn't say who it was to

Come to think about, his name was, it was you

 

Dan…

Jordan Harbinger: [01:18:21] A lot of people ask me what shows I recommend, and one of those is the One You Feed. This is, of course, the wolf parable, and I have the host of the one you feed Eric Zimmer here with me today. Thanks for joining me. 

Eric Zimmer: [01:18:33] Thanks, Jordan, for having me on. I'm glad to be here. 

Jordan Harbinger: [01:18:35] You did an episode called Connecting to What Matters with Mark Nepo. Tell us about Mark's journey here. 

Eric Zimmer: [01:18:41] Yeah, Mark's a poet, a philosopher, and a cancer survivor, and a multiple New York Times bestselling author. And this episode is a really great healing for a lot of the suffering that we're facing right now. It offers some really liberating wisdom that when we take it in, it can release us from the grip of fear that we're living from right now. And he talks about the value of cooperating and listening and working with things rather than trying to bend our will to them. We talk about rightsizing our perspective on troubles by putting them into a larger perspective of vastness and wholeness. And we also talk about how as a culture, we've become addicted to the noise of things falling apart. And so it's a really great discussion, particularly for these times, but really any time about dealing with fear and other difficult emotions. 

Jordan Harbinger: [01:19:29] That's the One You Feed episode number 329 and we'll link to that in the show notes as well. Thanks, Eric. 

Eric Zimmer: [01:19:35] Thank you.