WTW56: Jon Ronson's Things Fell Apart Falls Apart

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:41 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Chex Notes. What's this podcast called? It's been so long. No, Where There's Woke. I'm Thomas. That is Lydia.

0:00:50 Lydia: I'm Lydia.

0:00:51 Thomas: How are you? Yeah, I see. It's been so long.

0:00:53 Lydia: It's been a while. I don't know

0:00:55 Thomas: We have no idea.

0:00:55 Lydia: If you remember my name.

0:00:56 Thomas: Yeah, it's just like, ah, which thing do I talk into?

0:00:58 Lydia: Do we do this?

0:01:01 Thomas: No. How's it going?

0:01:04 Lydia: Pretty good. My head is spinning a little bit because of everything that's been going on over here that we can't wait to tell everybody about.

0:01:09 Thomas: Yeah. Do you mean the like 10 hours of series we've been trying to get out for two months?

0:01:16 Lydia: Least. Yeah.

0:01:18 Thomas: Yeah, it's, it's a lot. Folks, it's here. Here's the thing. It's here, and here's an even better thing. I have made so much emotional growth that I'm going to tell you about that instead of doing a painfully long intro where we talk about conceptually what's going on here for like 30 minutes. I'm not doing that. We actually did that, and then I was like, "No, we got to not do it.

0:01:40 Lydia: To the chase.

0:01:40 Thomas: Yeah, we can save that till after, because it's, that's fine. Why not just show folks what's going on first and then afterwards say what happened

0:01:40 Lydia: Yeah, Yeah. We'll break it down a little bit.

0:01:51 Thomas: And why. Yeah. But do need to give enough context for folks. So this is the beginning of what will be a quite long and very painfully agonizingly researched and, you -checked story, Yeah, we're still, So I'm going to be fact checking this like 10 years from now, just to make sure like, wait, because, I'll tell you why. Porque the subject of our investigation this time was not Bill Maher or, you Shapiro, some Fox News asshole with seven wives, ex -wives rambling about family values. No, none of that. It is someone who I would never have thought would be the subject of Where There's Woke. John Ronson. John Ronson is an author that I have been a fan of for a really long time, ever So I went to college with Carrie Poppy and we've been friends and she is friends with John Rronson. And at some point I got into his books because of her.

I don't remember when, but it's been a long time. Least 10 years, if not more. And I really loved his his books, uh, really, I still still do, I guess. Um, ones he might have heard of are The Men Who Stare Goats, which was made into a movie, but there's also The Psychopath Test, I think, was maybe his most popular in terms of just the book. Um,

0:01:51 Lydia: Yeah. Still not done to this day. We're still going. Yeah.

0:02:18 Lydia: Shapiro.

0:03:09 Lydia: Yeah, allegations,

0:03:09 Thomas: I've talked about that one a lot of times. Uh, then also, So You've Been Publicly Shamed was a really was an interesting one. Um, So You've Been Publicly Ashamed was at a perfect time and and just preceded a lot of the backlash to you people call cancel culture and what I think you and I would call more consequence culture, I suppose, or consequences. Uh, it preceded that. And it's I like it because it wasn't like some right wing attack on consequences. It was, I think, a nuanced look at that, especially because a lot of the or at least some of the cases in So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which, of course, talked about like massive, you know, online kind of public cancellations and stuff like that. A few of them were mistaken identity.

0:03:54 Thomas: And and that's like inarguable. There's no there's argument that's like, well, yeah, but still people, if you have like the same name, then you're also canceled. It's it's inargueable that if we get got to the point or if the Internet is at the point where people who are misidentified are then like having massive consequences in their lives and publicly shamed, fired, that kind of stuff. That's everyone would agree that's that's wrong.

So it was a nuanced look at, you yes, know, this is a thing that is bad consequences. And I never took his book to be any sort of like anti left or even even really like terribly centrist. I just thought it was kind of a empathetic, compassionate look at this stuff. And that's kind of how I've always thought of his work now, now, until things fell apart. Season two. He has a podcast series called Things Fell Apart, which you. It's a good a technique. Storytelling technique.

I can't remember much about season other than I listened to it, enjoyed it whenever that was. But season two came out this year and I started listening to it and very quickly was just shocked by the shoddiness of it. I mean, there are stories in there where he just lets the anti -woke person talk, doesn't challenge it, and also just endorses it and co -signs their version of the story.

And it'll what really set me off with it was there were times when, not only other times when I was was pretty sure stuff was bullshit before researching it, and spoiler alert, it was bullshit, but also there are times when his own show didn't really even hold up, like, like someone would make a claim, and then the way they would justify it a minute later in the very episode doesn't actually demonstrate the claim they were making, like it I was very worried and I was upset about it because John Ronson is specifically because he's someone I like so much, and I couldn't believe it, but like, like the more we delved into it, the worse it got.

It it wasn't the kind of thing where we looked into it and was like, oh, okay, yeah, I guess. No, it was like it got worse and worse and worse. And the point where we also somehow roped in Dr. Jenessa Seymour. If you are a Serious Inquiries is only listener. You may recognize a fantastic guest. Um, Doctorate in neuroscience. Um. Just all -star researcher, uh. And amazingly Amazingly fun person to do podcasts with. She got involved too. Somehow. Somehow we roped her in.

I don't remember how. Maybe she'll tell us. Uh... And And she started looking at a particular episode involving a lot of kind of medical stuff and science-y stuff that's way better for, you know, an actual medically scientist-y person to look at.

0:03:54 Lydia: Oh right.

0:06:29 Thomas: And so that's, first

0:06:30 Lydia: You mean not the person who calls it medical scientisty stuff but it's

0:06:34 Thomas: Of all, how dare you? Secondly, yes. And so she's going to be the first several episodes. And this is the thing about bullshit. It. It takes way more time to unwind it than it does to just it. So, was me transitioning to saying she's in the first four episodes that are debunking the one episode that he did. It's a four to one ratio for this one. Well, plus five to one with the extra that we're going to do. That's what this series is. And we're basically going to go through it in order. We're not covering every episode, but we're covering several of them because they're pretty bad. There's, there's several of whom that are, that are real bad. And so I figure we might as well, um, go in order if we're going to do a number of them. And so the first one we're doing is episode two. Episode one, The

0:06:48 Lydia: Fun

0:07:24 Thomas: Was I think a pretty good episode and there was nothing that immediately caused alarm bells. And while I now don't feel like I can for sure say it's 100 % all accurate, I also don't, there was nothing, I don't have any reason to believe anything was wrong. So we kind of let that one be because it seemed like a pretty good episode. And again, I love John Ronson.

So I enjoyed that episode and I'm know, this isn't about taking down someone like we don't like or something. Episode two is where it starts to get quite bad. That one's called We're Coming After You, Honey. I want to set it up. We're going to get to it with Jenessa. She's going to take us through a lot of why this is not good reporting.

It centers around someone named Judy Mikovits, who, even though you'll hear it's kind of a little bit of a reveal in the recording, I think it's important to just tell you now because otherwise we're talking about someone you don't really have context for, for like a half hour. Um, is someone who eventually was a part of the Plandemic bullshit series. There's now three of those fucking things. Yeah,

0:08:22 Lydia: Somehow

0:08:32 Thomas: That definitely, uh, got people killed and is horrible, just misinformation of the worst kind

0:08:31 Lydia: Yeah, the second one is called Indoctrination, just so you know.

0:08:44 Thomas: That's, that is like one that I would try to think of as a joke punchline for something and be like, no. I didn't quite get there in Doctor in, in Doctor Nation, though. That does, it's close, it dies. Okay, um, and so talks about her story as of, if not the main reason he wanted to do this series, because in his mind, there must be a reason that this person went from being at one time a real scientist to what she became, which is a purveyor of the worst kind of scientific misinformation. And that's what we're going to look at. And that's that's the structure that Ronson has in his mind, that this person was at one time one thing and then something happened and she became another thing. The thing she became is horrific. So I think that's The Context we need to bring on Jenessa and get this ball rolling.

0:08:46 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Grab

0:09:40 Thomas: So further ado finally let's hear why this just does not stack up

0:09:46 Lydia: Waters, hydrate, you're in for a ride.

0:09:50 Thomas: And Jenessa, welcome back to the show. So good to have you. Yeah, remind me how did how did we get on to this, did I just ask you to do this? I don't know where I am at any given moment, that's

0:09:53 Lydia: Mm -hmm.

0:09:53 Jenessa: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, So, well, kind of what happened was I never heard of the show, but I saw people mentioning specifically the episode about the parent of a trans child that People were picking up on a lot of concern. This is the, the messaging I picked up was, hey, this sounds like maybe you just right-wing propaganda and it sounds like people, you know, why isn't he challenging this person? Why are you taking this person at their word? So I just kind of went like, okay, this is not for me, I'm not interested, but

0:10:01 Lydia: Yeah,

0:10:14 Thomas: Right now.

0:10:36 Thomas: Was it that because I had talked about a different episode, right, and then did you just check out the whole series and you heard this first or I

0:10:44 Jenessa: No, so what happened is I happened, so happened to be listening to an episode of Knowledge Fight, and he, I listen to that show all the time, and there happened to be an episode where one of the hosts, Dan, was out, so the other host, Jordan, often interviews other people when that's happening, and he was interviewing John Ronson. And I was like, oh, you know what? Maybe this will be the only exposure I decide to have to this show. Fine. Let's hear it out. They talked about episodes one and two of Things Fell Apart.

0:11:05 Thomas: -huh, okay. Okay.

0:11:17 Jenessa: And I heard some stuff that I was, like, that doesn't sound right, just based on my experience working in science. Just picking up certain things that, not having listened to the episode, not knowing much about Bronson or the show, kind of felt like, knowing what I know from having worked as a scientist for years and also knowing what I know about the law, having just graduated law school, like, I know a whole story about her arrest that just seemed like it can't possibly be true, the thing you're saying that didn't sound right, and so there was one thing I decided to, it was just bugging me and I was like, I'm gonna real quick fact check this, and thought I was maybe gonna find an answer that your average journalist wouldn't know how to find because of a secret little thing that your averaged scientist might know to look for, and then it turned out the first hit on Google answered the question question immediately that He was saying he didn't have an answer for Jordan's question. And I was like, oh no. Then we started talking and I went and I, what I did is like, here's my little journalistic process as not a journalist.

0:11:49 Thomas: Yeah. Oh boy. God.

0:12:12 Lydia: Wow wow yep

0:12:25 Thomas: You are now, baby.

0:12:27 Jenessa: Apparently, geez, I, um, I listened to the episode and I took notes and I just wrote like, okay, if I'm not going to stop and look look anything up. What would I think the story was if I didn't look anything up?

0:12:40 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. We do that a lot on this show and it's really instructive. Yeah.

0:12:44 Jenessa: Yes. Yeah. Like, I'm taking this at face value. And then I just made little notes of like, flag, red flag, I want to check this. And then it consumed my life. I kept doing the like, I have a job in law school, I I will only be doing this in my free time, which is quite limited, and then it turns out, I don't know what mentally healthy people do with their free time. Like, sleep, I guess, and I was just doing, yeah, Yeah. Presumably, I just did this. I just kept googling. I was losing my mind. I glad we're going to get to talk about this so that like all my friends and my partner and my family don't have to listen to me yell. I'm losing, losing my mind.

0:13:13 Thomas: Podcasts. I think they do podcasts.

0:13:30 Thomas: Oh my God, that is so you fit right in here because I'm reminded a lot of the thing that consumed my life on the fucking Michael Powell, James Webb, where I kept having to be like, okay, just listening to that, what would you think? What would you think? Just listening to that. And then it was like completely, you wrong. Know, You You know, Lydia would just reasonably be like, oh, it sounds like this. And it's like, no, total lie. And with that as the kind of teaser, I think we're going to be talking about this for likely a number of episodes. Why don't we get it started? Sure.

0:13:34 Lydia: James webb yeah yeah official

0:14:01 Jenessa: So let me, I guess we'll do exactly what I was saying I did to myself, really Let what I think you would have heard if you listen to this, and, you know, I guess if people want to get the full experience, you can go listen to episode two. Correct?

0:14:05 Thomas: Season Two, episode two of Things, uh, Fell Apart. Just is, we're coming after you, honey. I

0:14:19 Jenessa: What you're gonna get in this story, um, Mike of. She has, has a PhD in biochemistry. She gives up her whole career as a biochemist who studied cancer and HIV. She's a virologist by her, you know, experience. Gives it all up, moves to California for love, and then in 2006 meets someone in a bar who, a funny little chain here, of like an, an accountant for a wealthy person with a sick child who knows a wealthy couple who have a daughter sick with chronic fatigue syndrome, which I will inevitably start calling CFS because they start doing it too.

0:14:50 Thomas: Mm. -hmm. Sure. Relatable.

0:15:01 Jenessa: And there's this story where like she is working in the yacht club as a bartender. And yeah, sure.

0:15:08 Thomas: No. I don' know. Yeah.

0:15:09 Jenessa: Right. Like how many of us with a PhD haven't quit our job and fantasized about being a bartender? I am not kidding. How many people do you know? Relatable, for sure. She is talking about, as she says, curing cancer and curing AIDS and, you know, all kinds of interests she has, and this person mentions to her, "Yeah, there's this, this very wealthy couple who have this daughter with chronic fatigue. You should meet them." So she agrees to meet them. She flies out to Reno. They, they become friends, yada yada. She becomes the director of the Whittemore-Peterson Institute, the Whittlemores being that wealthy couple.

0:15:17 Thomas: This Sounds like something from Lost. Sorry Yeah, it's like the Whitmore or whatever. Yeah, they go to an island and they, yeah, okay.

0:15:53 Jenessa: It though? Oh, You don't know how right you are. So discovers in research, she's looking at these CFS patients and she discovers XMRV, which is a mouse virus, and it's in the blood samples of 67% of the CFS patients and it has also been 3% of healthy controls, which gets everybody up in arms of, like, oh my god, is there a virus in the supply? And it is actually super concerning. This

0:16:21 Thomas: Sorry blood supply, like for transfusions or something? Oh, okay. Gotcha.

0:16:35 Jenessa: Yes. Like this whole thing comes out, the papers published in 2009, and this is like the next potential, like, AIDS panic of like AIDS, hepatitis, like, oh my God, something's in the blood, it's giving some people CFS and then other people might be like just carriers. Oh God, oh God. And then nobody can replicate the study. Pretty

0:16:44 Thomas: Oh, I see. Okay. Sure. That sounds scary. Yeah.

0:16:56 Thomas: Interesting. Now, I just want to make sure... So, she wasn't at, like, a university or a whatever. She was just, like... Funded by some rich villain from Lost and did... Is that what it is? Or, like… What is…

0:17:10 Jenessa: Much. Well, that's the, that's what we're hearing so far. Um, in this story she

0:17:10 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Sure. What was her actual, like qualifications?

0:17:18 Jenessa: Has a PhD in biochemistry and she has worked as a virologist, so like, she is qualified to be looking at this, for sure. Evidence starts coming out. Why can't we replicate this? There's some evidence it's an accidental contaminant. These patients don't actually have this virus. Maybe nobody has this virus. It's a lab contamination. It does.

0:17:20 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Okay. Sure. Hmm. Okay, wow. And that happens, happens, happens, right? I mean, yeah.

0:17:41 Jenessa: It does, yes, true. This is going on. Oh my god, what is it? Is it false data? Is it a contamination? What do we do? What do, everybody's trying to study the blood supply just in case. It's the whole thing, it's blowing up. This is like science famous, which means nobody else knew any of this going on. But scientists are freaking out, and then as it's getting questioned more and more and more, she won't turn over the cell lines.

0:17:59 Thomas: Yeah.

0:17:59 Lydia: Interesting.

0:18:08 Jenessa: And then she gets fired. Yes.

0:18:08 Thomas: Very interesting. Okay. She gets fired even by the billionaire -centric whatevers.

0:18:14 Jenessa: Yes. They fire her, and then her research assistant Max retrieves her notebooks for her from the lab after she's been fired and suddenly Judy is arrested. She is civilly sued for stealing, stealing her own notebooks. How terrible, how unimaginable. Yep. And the charges do eventually get dropped, um, because Harvey Whittemore, the husband in this couple, he gets into some legal troubles of his own, um, like many rich people.

0:18:14 Thomas: Okay? Okay. Hmm. Wow. Okay. Sure. Sure?

0:18:46 Jenessa: He is eventually accused of embezzlement and campaign finance violations. Um And so the way that it is finally capped off in the podcast, Judy is feeling really persecuted. You know, there was this accidental, accidental contamination, and everybody dogpiles.

0:18:49 Thomas: Oh, wow, okay.

0:19:04 Thomas: Oh, does she admit that, or does she commit that it was a contamination, or no?

0:19:11 Jenessa: Yes, let's just put a pin in that. Let's put it that way.

0:19:13 Lydia: Pin in that. It

0:19:14 Thomas: Okay. Well, what is, I don't, yeah. What does the show say her feeling about it is we don't know.

0:19:21 Jenessa: Show says that she is getting defensive, and she feels persecuted. She wants these notebooks because she's really worried someone's going to tamper with her data, and so she just, you know, tried to get her own personal notebooks and then it all blows up and the widowers get her arrested and she feels persecuted and

0:19:26 Thomas: Uh, huh. Right off the bat, if you are employed, usually the stuff, your work product doesn't belong to you. Like you don't get to just take everything you do unless it's specifically like your contract allows it or something like, I pretty standard. You're not allowed to just, yeah.

0:19:58 Lydia: Belongs to your employer. Yeah.

0:19:59 Thomas: If, when I worked for the state, if I just took all the, the kind of the programs I wrote to help people be able to do stuff faster. If I was like, all right, I'm leaving. Give me all that. I'm taking it. It's like, no, you can't just take it. Like, what are you talking about?

0:19:52 Jenessa: Yes. This was my first tip-off that I was like, oh, this person doesn't know how science works, because any scientist would tell you your grants don't belong to you, your data does not belong to It feels so, like, it's yours, but it isn't. Your grants, if you move universities, your grant stays at your university. You usually can't take it with you, which is arguably, you know, very frustrating for people. You put all this effort in, your university who made you get this grant, because they won't finance your research, is gonna get to keep it like, yeah it sucks I'm not saying it doesn't. Yes.

0:20:42 Lydia: They benefit. Yeah, it's

0:20:17 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Sure. Yeah. Right. Yeah, but this is even less bad than that, which is like literally the stuff that this place has paid her to do is like, well, no that that would belong to us. I would think we hired you to do that. Yeah

0:20:57 Jenessa: Yes. Yes. So this was my first tip-off that I was like, that sounds a little, um, biased in her favor to portray this as, like, her own notebooks, and she was arrested and I was like, that's not usually... I mean, I know our cops are not exactly the most on it, but, um, that even that seems a little extreme.

0:21:02 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. Right.

0:21:17 Thomas: And like you say, it's a tip off. Like we deal with a lot of these stories where it's like, I'm not saying there's no circumstances in the world where that wouldn't be bad. Like, yeah, like you could, you could come up with plenty of scenarios, but it's one of those tip offs. We see this a lot where it'S like, God doesn't quite sound right. Like maybe we'll research into it and we'll be like, Oh no, it was like her personal notebooks and it had pictures of her kids and that's all it was. And it's Like, Yeah, well, okay. Nevermind. You know, but it's like, it's a little fishy, a little fishy.

0:21:43 Jenessa: Yeah, so basically it all caps off with, like, yeah, she took these because she was worried, she's getting paranoid, she feels, you know, persecuted by the science community, and then she feels persecuted by the police and the DA because she got arrested for this, and she's being civilly sued for this. She drifts out of view, she goes underground, eight years later re-emerges. Uh, Judy Mikovits is the subject of Plandemic in 2020. That's

0:22:09 Thomas: Right. That's right. And, and it's important. I should have noted this, like the whole point of season two was that, oh, there are these culture war issues, culture war, little firestorms. And principle, it is a really fascinating podcast. Like, oh John Ronson has researched and gone found back in the chain of causation and, like, oh, this person here who, you know, know you would think this is unrelated, like somebody, you know, a yacht bartender, whatever the hell, and, like, then fast forward and now, and usually then he links it to something you've probably heard of, which is Plandemic. Totally fascinating, interesting thing to do for a podcast. Love it. Nothing, nothing wrong with that. Um, but

0:22:11 Jenessa: Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

0:22:48 Jenessa: So, and actually, on the interview on Knowledge Fight he said Judy's story was why he wanted to make the second season Like, that was the jumping off. He heard about Plandemic and was like, how did a virologist, not just, like, a smart person, an educated person, um, because, you know, there is, if you want to play the clip, uh, at about about 3257 he'll is actually where he'll tie it all together and give us, like, our theme that I think is important. So

0:23:17 Clip: And that's the story of Judy Makovits. What began with a chance encounter in a yacht club, ended with the first great anti-vax conspiracy theory, a new battlefront in the culture wars. It's a story that, I think, touches on a great mystery of our times. What happens to some smart people tumbling down rabbit holes? It's such a mystery that experts in medicalization say that for people like Judy, ideology can be so mixed up with personal grievance, it can be difficult to know the driving notice

0:23:55 Jenessa: I think that's, to me, the theme that we're going for here. Um, what happens to send smart people down rabbit holes? I do want to challenge the general idea of, like, oh, that smart people can't believe a dumb thing, or, like, educated people can't believe an uneducated thing. Like, if anything, believing that makes you, I think, more susceptible to this stuff, because you're not immune. Nobody's immune. You have to be critical thinker all the time, right? That

0:24:02 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. But I'll totally grant, like, okay, if, if he was interested in the question of, of that, what very thing, like, oh, how could it be, because I'll certainly grant that, like, basically everyone's intuition is, like, no, how could a smart person fall for this? And if that's what he's looking to investigate, nothing wrong with that. Yeah.

0:24:38 Lydia: Like a similar thing when you talk about how smart people end up getting involved in cults, right? You know, like perfectly normal, reasonable people. How did, how did you get there? What happened?

0:24:43 Thomas: And Right away I think people might be thinking, maybe, okay, but it sounds like she's a villain in this story. It so sounds, does that kind of explain what might be going on here? Yeah.

0:24:59 Jenessa: That Ronson is really trying to humanize her, which I don't, I'm not opposed to. Um, like, certainly not, um, trying to figure out, you know, at the end, I guess, it's, it's not difficult to say a villain. I mean, to put out Plandemic, if people aren't aware, is a documentary, documentary. I don't even want to say that

0:25:17 Lydia: Yeah.

0:25:18 Thomas: It's a work of fiction. That, yeah.

0:25:19 Jenessa: Um Yes. That claims COVID is made in a lab, COVID is, uh, a conspiracy by the government to make you take vaccines, and vaccines are bad, and masks actually activate the virus and make you more likely to get it, and you should really go to the beach, because microbes in the sand will cure COVID, and it's, it's nonsense. It's complete nonsense. Yes.

0:25:42 Thomas: But Big Not the beach doesn't want you to know that. Big skiing

0:25:46 Jenessa: Yes. Yes. They're clearly trying to shut down the cotton candy industry. Um, You person who, I mean, putting out pandemic, if it convinced one person not to get vaccinated, it easily could have gotten people killed. Like, it's not a joke that she did this.

0:25:49 Lydia: Of

0:25:52 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Oh It absolutely got a lot of people killed. It got taken down. Like, it was that bad that they took it down from YouTube. Right. They didn't even let you.

0:26:04 Jenessa: Yeah. Undeniably. Right? They actually talked about, um, the guys on God Awful Movies covered it and they said when they tried to share it so that they could watch it to critique it, by sharing it through Facebook Messenger, it got, like, take deleted off their Messenger, and like Facebook who notoriously will not take down anything took this down. Was like, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, nobody was like, everybody was like, this is getting people killed. So Judy is not a sympathetic character in the year 2020. The idea seems to be that Judy IS sympathetic in the, the year 2009 when this paper comes out and what happened to her and very specifically he attributes it to her unnecessarily cruel arrest. That's the exact words.

0:26:12 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, wow.

0:26:27 Thomas: Holy shit. Yeah.

0:26:49 Thomas: Mm hmm. Right? Mm hmm? And that's him in narrator voice saying that.

0:27:01 Jenessa: Yes. That is, she, I, I'm sure she would also characterize it that way. Uh, Wouldn't who has been arrested, who says, yeah, fair. Um,

0:27:07 Lydia: Course. Yeah.

0:27:07 Thomas: Yeah? Right. And this is I don't know if it's worth getting into. I will just signpost this because my episode that I did on the one that I researched, it's it's going to be a fine line to just kind of signpost this. He or his defenders, Ronson's, would be able to say, well, storytelling, you know, he likes to just listen to stories and whatever. But it's very weird that always the really awful conspiracy theorist, conservative or worse, you person is presented as, at a certain point in time, their story is actually just, like, factual.

Like, it's than say, how did, you upstanding scientist go from that to this? It's a little little bit different. You're like, actually, well, if you look at the facts, how did this total asshole who's always been a conspiracy theorist turn into a conspiracy theorist? That's important. Like you shouldn't leave that out. And still don't know your the, story, but for mine, it doesn't kind work to always someone's story without times he chooses to fact check stuff, and there's times he choices to you tie up some ends or or at least present the other view, and there're times he definitely doesn't.

0:27:13 Jenessa: Right. Yeah.

0:27:49 Lydia: Oh

0:28:09 Jenessa: Yeah, and so the fundamental problem when you have someone like Judy, who in Plandemic she makes claims, not just these false factual scientific claims, she makes false autobiographical claims. She claims, for example, that she worked in Frank Rossetti's lab at the the National Institutes of Health, and they were the first to discover HIV-1, and Dr. Fauci showed up and took that and stopped them from publishing it because his friend was going to be the first to discover hiv, damn it, not them.

0:28:38 Thomas: Oh Sure

0:28:38 Lydia: My god Oh That sounds real

0:28:45 Thomas: That makes sense. Yeah.

0:28:46 Lydia: Oh

0:28:48 Jenessa: Hiv was first discovered, she did not yet work in Dr. Rossetti's lab. So it is physically impossible for it to even be true. She would have to at least be working in Dr Rossetti lab for this to be remotely plausible. She is not a reliable narrator of her own story.

0:28:52 Thomas: Right To clarify though, that's from Plandemic, right? And that's not something that Ronson co-signed or anything, just making clear.

0:29:15 Jenessa: No, no. Yeah, of course not. But the point being, if you know about Plandemic, and we will later find out in the Knowledge Fight interview, he does know all about it. He knows about that claim. He knows, or should know, she is an unreliable narrator. She You cannot trust her to tell her own story accurately. She will tell you that she was at one point hired to engineer the Ebola virus to be better at attacking people like this woman makes stuff up. Okay.

0:29:23 Thomas: Oh, sure. Yeah, of course. Yeah.

0:29:39 Lydia: My God Oh My G -d, yeah.

0:29:46 Thomas: Yeah.

0:29:46 Jenessa: Like, you can't trust that the words coming out of, I don't know know if she believes what she's saying or not, but

0:29:53 Thomas: Either she believes it and she's delusional or she doesn't believe in she's a pathological liar. Like, there's no, you know, there's no good option there.

0:29:59 Lydia: But I mean, like, the responsible thing to do there, even if he is interested in the storytelling perspective and letting her tell her own story, you have to couple that with truth. Otherwise you are just starting to misinform a whole lot of people, and you never provide any buttress to what, what's happening. There

0:30:19 Jenessa: Uh

0:30:13 Thomas: Mm -hmm. Well If you're Picking an arbitrary moment in time to decide, well, this is where she actually was still reliable, but she wasn't. Why would you pick that, that moment in time? Wouldn't why her lies from early in her life just be another extension of her lying that is now currently happening? To frame it this way, it's misleading.

0:30:20 Lydia: Yeah.

0:30:36 Jenessa: You have perfectly hit where I want to go, because that was my very first question. Was, okay, if the story is she was a rational, reasonable person, then there was this unnecessarily cruel arrest and jailing, she felt the world had turned against her. This is a quote from Ronson narrating, and then, um, he says she was turning, looking for a new community. What this tells us is that if, if it was the jailing, the arrest, the world turning against her, now she's looking for new community, okay, that means she wasn't like this once upon a time And now that's, that's the moment, right? We were trying to study this question: how does a smart person fall down a rabbit hole? And we have answered our question. It's getting arrested for something ridiculous. It's feeling like everyone's trying to debunk my paper, and I didn't even do anything wrong.

0:31:16 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

0:31:33 Jenessa: So the question is, was Judy once upon a time a rational, reasonable person, and then she got arrested? No, no. No, and I'm about to tell you all the reasons we know that's not true. From, so this paper was published in 2009, it will get retracted in 2011, and she begins expressing extreme resistance and conspiratorial thinking about the people debunking her paper from the very beginning. Like, the absolute second people are saying, hmm, I'm not so sure, she is saying this is a government conspiracy to cover

0:31:42 Lydia: Oh. My.

0:31:42 Thomas: Yeah, yikes.

0:32:13 Lydia: God.

0:32:13 Jenessa: Up the cure for CFS. She's saying this as early as, like, early, and the paper won't be retracted until December 2011. So, and way before the arrest, she was also expressing anti-vaccine beliefs. Way before the arrest, yeah.

0:32:13 Lydia: Oh.

0:32:30 Thomas: That's interesting.

0:32:32 Jenessa: Before she was arrested, before she was fired, before the paper was retracted, she was making claims that this XMRV virus she had discovered, well, not that she had discovered but she had covered, in CFS was also linked to autism, to cancer, to MS. She was saying that the link between XMV and autism, which, to be clear, there is no evidence for this, that that link might explain the link between autism and the MMR vaccine, which again, there is not one, just to make everybody knows, in case we gotta repeat it. Yeah.

0:32:48 Lydia: Geez. Okay, okay, Right.

0:32:50 Thomas: Okay, yeah which there also is not. Boy, that just took me down a weird brain. That's like dividing by zero. Well, can one imaginary thing explain another imaginary thing? I don't know. They're both imaginary. So I guess, yes, like you could say, well, dwarves living here explains elves living there, I guess. Yeah. They're all imaginary. There's nothing, no sense in which that's true.

0:33:23 Lydia: Yeah, yeah.

0:33:25 Jenessa: Yeah. So Right off the bat we have this narrative that it was the arrest and the paper retraction, that's what sent her down a rabbit hole. She was making claims about autism and the MMR vaccine before any of that happened. This was conspiratorial thinking on a level that in 2011 to talk about autism in MMR this is not 1990, when, when that paper just came out and people were, like, questioning the paper. Like, this has been debunked 20 years ago. We're done with this theory, this non-theory.

0:33:41 Thomas: Wow. No kidding. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:34:03 Thomas: Yeah. It's like saying, man, you know what caused Andrew Wakefield? That's the name of the guy who did the thing, right? The first study. You know what cause Andrew Wakefeld? He got his house broken into and he already believed that vaccines caused autism. And you're like, that's okay. I don't think the the house car thing matters.

0:34:04 Jenessa: Yes, correct.

0:34:15 Lydia: That's not the origin story. Yeah. Right

0:34:21 Jenessa: It's not.

0:34:22 Thomas: I think he already seems to have believed that.

0:34:25 Jenessa: Just not. Judy believes the arrest was a conspiracy because she was already conspiratorial in her thinking. That's also interesting, the more I dug, good lord, I had to stop myself. If anyone would like to dig more into everyone around Judy, Lombardi, one of her co -authors, the first author on the paper who also worked at the Whittemore Peterson Institute, in 2009 was presenting on this XMRV and autism link, which again, there is no evidence of, her PhD advisor, Rossetti, at the National Cancer Institute. There were either people saying, saying, gosh, Judy just ruined his reputation. Or isn't it interesting how quiet he is? Or isn'T it reasonable how quiet He is? He doesn't want to be linked to this person. Or I saw people saying he's kind of a quack too. Well, I don't know what he used to be like. But what I can tell you is that in 2021, after Plandemic came out, he wrote a book with Judy about anti-vaccine and conspiracy movements within science. Their, me, that her PhD advisor, who is, who worked at the National Cancer Institute until 2013, after Judy put Plandemic

0:34:30 Thomas: Yeah hmm.

0:34:31 Lydia: Right, and

0:35:46 Thomas: Man boy

0:35:47 Jenessa: Out, you should know she's nuts. He wrote a book with her. Could pull the title of it real quick.

0:35:53 Thomas: Maybe he got arrested too when

0:35:55 Lydia: With another anti-vaxxer though. Yeah.

0:35:57 Jenessa: That's what I'm wondering is like, maybe just maybe the reason Judy got so far into her scientific career as an anti -vaxxer, instead of somebody going, you can't be a virologist anti -vaxxer, what if her PhD advisor was too? He Just wasn't until the year 2021, maybe. Yeah.

0:35:59 Lydia: Yeah.

0:36:12 Lydia: Happened to be another anti-vaxxer. Yeah.

0:36:19 Thomas: He was arrested in a way that was unfair hmm

0:36:23 Jenessa: So, like, you've got this co-author Lombardi who is talking about XMRB and autism, which there is no evidence of. You've got her PhD advisor, who I heard little inklings, and he was very, very quiet during this whole thing, and then after Plandemic comes out, he's writing an anti-vax book with Judy. And He wrote and retired from the National Cancer Institute, and then wrote a book with her. I know, something's not right there. And then it turns out maybe the Whittemores are also a little bit anti-vaccine.

0:36:43 Thomas: Plandemic wow well

0:36:57 Lydia: Yeah.

0:36:58 Jenessa: So it turns OUT, so the Whittlemore Peterson Institute, there's Annette Whittlemoore and Harvey Whittlemore. They are the parents of Andrea Whittlemaore Goad, who's 31 at the time the paper is published, and she is the daughter with CFS. If you go read, can I provide the source, but it's where Annette is talking about the founding of the Whittemore Peterson Institute. She mentions, among things, her daughter's condition was showing, quote, modest improvement until she decided to enroll at the University of Nevada, Reno. The admissions policy required the MMR vaccine prior prior to starting classes.

0:37:33 Thomas: -huh. Oh my God.

0:37:35 Jenessa: Within five days, Andrea had a severe relapse and never regained her previous health. So if your kid is going to university and now needs the MMR, that means you didn't get it as a kid. If you date back, they're 31-year-old in 2009, that means right around 1980 is when she should have gotten her first MMR. She's been anti-vax for like three decades when this paper came out cool Before Wakefield unless you kNo,w if there was some medical reason well, then she would still have some medical

0:37:36 Thomas: Come on.

0:37:47 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

0:38:02 Thomas: Before it was cool. Yeah that's wow. Yeah

0:38:12 Jenessa: Reasons

0:38:12 Thomas: You'd be able to opt out of it in college right? Yeah.

0:38:12 Jenessa: Right And they say her CFS didn't start till she was 11 which is well after you would have gotten your first MMR There's no real explanation for this, and then even if you set all that aside, at the end of the day, this person says within five days of vaccination she had a relapse and never regained her previous level of health. There is no evidence that CFS has anything to do with vaccination. This is an anti-vax talking point. These people are at least vaccine hesitant, people might call them, um, she's surrounded by other anti-vax people before the arrest, before the retraction, before possibly before publication, before she... this is the whole narrative. It's not correct, so

0:38:25 Thomas: It's a good catch.

0:38:38 Thomas: Yeah mm -hmm.

0:38:58 Jenessa: That's our first big piece here. We're not even close to done. Yes.

0:39:03 Thomas: That's Our first one, and there's more. Yeah, already, already. Framing of the story should be how a group of anti-vax assholes astroturfed Samantra, you know, like that. You can't, you can't just buy into this, their narrative. Like you got to tell, it's fine if you want to reference what their narrative is, that's fine, yeah, tell us, tell us what she thinks happened, but like, come on, this is bad.

0:39:14 Jenessa: Yes dude that was my whole, I had to stop myself because it was like the real reporting I want is, I want to know what Russetti was up to, because he worked at the National Institutes of Health for decades, and if he was anti-vax that whole time, that

0:39:25 Thomas: Jeez yeah

0:39:41 Lydia: What, what, what projects was he involved with? What, like, that's the conspiracy. I love

0:39:44 Thomas: Wow Yeah, it could be like uncovers a lot of hidden anti-vax people through history, like, that is the story. Yeah.

0:39:53 Jenessa: Would have an amazing story. Now, for all I know, maybe it turns out Russetti was totally normal, and then he watched Plandemic and was convinced. I don't know. It's an awful coincidence that she's just had so many anti-vax adjacent, anti-vaccine-ing people around her. What we know for certain is she made anti-vax and conspiratorial statements about the government and CFS way before any of this went down. Narrative is incorrect.

0:40:26 Jenessa: I've, I've got a little fun piece about the, of the meeting in the yacht club. It's among the least consequential, but it is also among the silliest.

0:40:04 Thomas: Yeah okay

0:40:36 Lydia: Silly

0:40:36 Jenessa: I guess so you're going to hear a little bit of Ronson narrating, a little bit of Judy talking about how she met the Whittemores.

0:40:36 Lydia: She

0:40:45 Thomas: Are We're way back in the start of this thing. I

0:40:48 Clip: Judy's background and expertise in science, while she tended by, she chatted to the customers about viruses and what. And given her credentials, people listened. Oh yes, I absolutely talked about not just viruses, but curing cancer, curing AIDS. Yeah, everybody knew who I was. And something happened one day at the Yacht Club. You were making drinks, and a couple of people came in, and this chance encounter, just this chance conversation, really changed your life. Why yes. At the Yacht Club, Judy got chatting to an accountant for a very rich woman with a very sick daughter. The woman was friends with another very wealthy couple, who also had a very thick daughter. They had a similar age daughter who was bedridden, very very ill, simply two very wealthy women with a passion to heal their children.

0:41:50 Clip: The wealthy couple recorded met in Harvey Whittemore. Harvey was Nevada's gaming industry and their daughter was sick with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or CFS. They were feeling fobbed off by the medical establishment who were labelling the condition Yuppie Flu, and that Wittemar was convinced that what her daughter had was an infection.

0:42:16 Clip: Judy had never heard of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but she had a passion for science and 20 years experience at the National Cancer Institute, where she had worked on treatments for HIV, and so she agreed to meet the Whittemores. She flew to Reno and became friends.

0:42:33 Jenessa: Okay, so I guess the narrative you would probably get from there. I guess maybe you tell me, like, how do you think they met? How do you Think This All Happened?

0:42:44 Lydia: She was tending bar, making some delicious cocktails maybe who knows

0:42:46 Jenessa: Sure, sure.

0:42:49 Thomas: He was a skater boy, she said see you later, boy. It

0:42:54 Lydia: And was Ronson saying that it wasn't the Whittemores that came to the bar, it was like, like the accountant of the Whittemore.

0:42:55 Jenessa: Yeah

0:43:03 Thomas: Sounded like it was a double daughter with a, whatever, this person had a daughter who knew this person who had a daughter or something yeah

0:43:04 Lydia: Yeah,

0:43:06 Jenessa: It was The, so he says in the podcast, it's the accountant of a wealthy person with a sick daughter, and that wealthy person knew a wealthy couple who also had a sick daughter, so we're like four degrees of separation, right? And there's this encounter in the bar, the, the description, here's our one-sentence description of the podcast, like if you were to just pick the episode up in your podcatcher: how a chance encounter in a yacht club in the early 2000s between a bartender and a very wealthy couple with a daughter sick with a mystery disease ended with the creation of the first great COVID conspiracy theory, right?

0:43:23 Thomas: Okay

0:43:46 Lydia: So from that, I would be thinking that the wealthy couple are the ones getting served at this bar.

0:43:53 Thomas: You would think but I'd

0:43:53 Lydia: Yeah.

0:43:53 Jenessa: So not That, so what if I told you this wasn't in the early 2000s, it wasn't a chance encounter, it didn't happen in a yacht club, and it wasn't the wealthy couple that, that she met in that bar. Yeah,

0:44:05 Thomas: Say, are you sure you didn't just look up a different story, is what I would ask. Okay.

0:44:10 Jenessa: Let me tell you what probably really happened. I'm going to put a big allegedly on everything because Judy is such an unreliable narrator. There is one source I can find. It's in the New York Times article about the first publication of this paper, when everybody was very excited that we maybe had the cause of CFS nailed down. They do say that Judy met someone in a bar, and that that person mentioned the Whittemores. That's it. The part that is verifiable, multiple sources reiterate this, including Annette Whittemore. So many, so many sources will repeat that this is what happened. So the HHV-6 Foundation, HHV-6 is human herpes virus six, it's a strain, it's a foundation co-founded by Annette Whittemore, um, claims, I don't know if this is true, that the foundation believes HHV6 is the sole cause of CFS, uh, don't know why she's

0:44:42 Thomas: That's all right huh yeah

0:45:15 Jenessa: Then studying this other, by whatever, so she founds this, this that is investigating maybe a fringe idea about CFS, um, Judy was hired as a consultant for the, the organization part-time while she worked at the National Cancer Institute. And then in May of 2006, so not the early 2000s, she goes to an HHV-6 Foundation conference in Barcelona. And that is where Judy goes to a presentation by Daniel Peterson of the Whittemore Peterson Institute, where he is speaking about a, um, particular cancer that is associated with CFS, pin in that, I guess, um, is exhausting, um, everybody's, everybody's out of their mind in this whole story

0:45:17 Thomas: I I know, I get so bored with these things because they all go, in my mind, it's all, "Right, someone thinks, not the real cause of something is the cause of something another person thinks something is caused by something it's not." Got it, all right, but

0:46:12 Lydia: Liar McLiarson. Yeah.

0:46:13 Jenessa: Yeah probably yeah so Peterson of Whittemore Peterson is presenting on HHV6 and a type of cancer and maybe CFS, and Judy stands up and asks a question, and this gets the attention of the Whittemores. That is how they met. She worked part-time for a foundation that Annette Whittemore co-founded, she went to a conference for that foundation, which makes sense because she works for the foundation, she watches a presentation by Peterson of Whittemore Peterson, stands up to ask a question, and Annette goes, oh, what an interesting person.

0:46:20 Lydia: Huh.

0:46:55 Jenessa: Let me return you oh No, this, they met, she met an accountant who knew a guy who knew, in a bar, she agreed to meet the Whittemores and flew to Reno where they became friends. What about that is true. I

0:46:55 Thomas: There there's no way that the timing yeah, yeah. Yeah. However The only thing is, like, I don't understand what the purpose of that lie would be. So like, are we missing something?

0:47:17 Lydia: Yeah.

0:47:20 Jenessa: I can, I tried so hard to make that timeline line up, and I can't, nothing about it lines up to say that she agreed to meet the Whittemores, she flew to Reno, and they became friends. That's not what happened. It just isn't. It's not a chance encounter. I think what it is, is it's a fun story, it's exciting, a chance encounter, she quit her science career, which also, no she didn't, um, she didn't move to California for love and quit her job, she moved to California to work at a cancer drug company that ended up failing, and then got a part-time job at the Whittemores, or maybe got a part-time job at, before it failed, or maybe not a part-time job at the Whittemores

0:47:55 Thomas: Hmm. When was the yacht club? When, when the hell's any of that?

0:48:05 Jenessa: No She's such an unreliable narrator, there were 15 narrations of what Judy was up to at one time, but What we definitely know, because it's reported by other people, and more because it's coming from other sources, is she went to this foundation conference, she worked there part-time already, she was going there, if anything, if she got tipped off by this accountant in the bar, then she went there on purpose to try to meet them because Annette already believed a virus caused CFS, and Judy already believed the virus caused CFS, and now we're going to go prove that a virus causes CFS.

And that is a really important thing that we're missing, is that these two people came in with a preconceived notion and are trying to pursue this research direction. And in the meanwhile, we've got, but isn't it such a fun story? If she was working as a bartender, would she quit her science job for love? And then she just gets she dragged back into it because of a chance encounter, she's just talking about AIDS and HIV at the bar for no real reason, just 'cause, like, if somebody, if a bartender started being like, you want to know about the cure for AIDS, I'm leaving here

0:48:16 Thomas: Huh? Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Oh Yeah. God. You know,

0:49:08 Lydia: It's more of a movie. Yeah.

0:49:19 Lydia: I think

0:49:28 Jenessa: You

0:49:28 Thomas: Those people, did you know they have a cure for whatever, locked in and whatever? The only other thing I can think of is, is it part, and I really don't know, but is it part of like some sort of astroturfing attempt, of rather than, yeah, there's a group of us assholes who are trying to make anti-vax a thing, and we've had this, you know, organization that was anti-vax, and we were organized in this way, it's more like, no, there's so many of us, we meet in the wild, and it's a natural organic event or something, I don't, that's the only thing I can think of yeah

0:49:55 Jenessa: Know yeah

0:50:00 Lydia: It also maybe makes her more sympathetic, right? If the way that you're setting up the story is, I changed my life, we became friends, and then my friends turned on me, rather than my employer had issues with how I was conducting science, I think that is more sympathetic, right? Because then it's a friendship that's broken as a result of this, too.

0:50:01 Jenessa: Oh yeah yeah

0:50:19 Thomas: Maybe maybe well That's weird.

0:50:26 Jenessa: No, I, it was, I know it's like, it's nitpicking, it's silly, but it's also just like, it's incorrect and not backed up by anything as far as I can tell. And it is, I think, again, when you have this person who, you know, has lied and lied and lied and is an unreliable narrator, I don't know, wouldn't it be fun to fact check her story and be like, Judy, what, what about this thing that everybody else is saying oh

0:50:46 Thomas: Well again And as you say, you bring up the, the description of the episode, like, it's just, I don't know how much rides on this, sure, this one thing, sure, like whether the chance encounter at the, whatever, but if you've branded your whole episode as that, a chance encounter at a thing, that's pretty important. Like, I don't think there's room to say, oh, well. Well, yeah, she believes it happened that way, but, you know, whatever, it probably didn't happen. No, I mean, you, the narrator God voice, is saying this happened. Like, you can't just do that.

0:50:56 Lydia: Yeah.

0:51:25 Jenessa: If He ended that with, or did it, I'd have been like, so, judy

0:51:28 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Right, well, we're going to end part one there. That was mainly about some of the weird biographical inconsistencies and stuff, Yeah, but next time on Where There's Woke, joke, my favorite part, because Jenessa takes us through this thing that happened with this virus and the results that were not right, and a lot of the science of that, and it is a wild story, I cannot wait for you to hear the next episode, uh, part two of this Ronson episode, two, God, it's so crazy, it's crazy to do this many things on another, but it's, you have to, it's so much. We'll see you then for part two.

0:51:39 Lydia: Y'all know about Judy now. You're welcome.

0:52:01 Lydia: Yeah.

0:52:14 Lydia: Ya.

0:52:14 Thomas: I