Why Smart Women Podcast
Welcome to the Why Smart Women Podcast, hosted by Annie McCubbin. We explore why women sometimes make the wrong choices and offer insightful guidance for better, informed decisions. Through engaging discussions, interviews, and real-life stories, we empower women to harness their intelligence, question their instincts, and navigate life's complexities with confidence. Join us each week to uncover the secrets of smarter decision-making and celebrate the brilliance of women everywhere.
Why Smart Women Podcast
Rabbit hole. What rabbit hole ?
"It's kind of the most important time in my life to be a skeptic," declares Michael Marshall in this thought-provoking exploration of conspiracy theories and disinformation in the digital age. From infiltrating flat Earth conventions to tracking cancer treatment crowdfunding campaigns, Marshall offers unprecedented insights into how misinformation spreads—and what we can do about it.
Wellness CuratedWellness Curated is a go-to resource for anyone who wants to improve their quality of life
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But no, I think it is a very scary time and in a way it's kind of the most important time in my life to be a sceptic.
Speaker 2:From relationships, career choices, finances, to faux fur jackets and kale smoothies. Every moment of every day, we're making decisions. Let's make them good ones. I'm your host, annie McCubbin, and as a woman of a certain age, I've made my own share of really bad decisions. Not my husband, I don't mean him, though. I did go through some shockers to find him, and I wish this podcast had been around to save me from myself. This podcast will give you insights into the working of your own brain, which will blow your mind. I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land in which I'm recording and you are listening on this day. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. This is part two of my interview with the brilliant Michael Marshall. If you haven't listened to part one, I suggest you do Enjoy.
Speaker 3:The why Smart Women podcast is brought to you by KOO, a boutique training, coaching and media production company. A KOO, spelt C-O-U-P, is a decisive act of leadership, and decisive leadership requires critical thinking. So well done you for investing time to think about your thinking, if your leadership or relationships would benefit from some grounded and creative support. If you want team training or a conference presentation, reach out for a confidential one-on-one conversation using the link in the description or go to coupco.
Speaker 2:I have had conspiracy theorists offer to come on the podcast and I can't have them on. I'm an actor. I don't have a science background. I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. Like, if you hand me a study, that's something you know. Whatever that's got scientific terms I don't know could be right. I cannot counter those arguments. I guess what you're saying is though, um, I I could say please help me to understand how it is exactly what?
Speaker 1:what does that term mean? This term that I don't understand. I don't understand it, so my listeners won't understand it. Could you explain this term? And what you might find is no, they don't have a good explanation for that term because they're using the science paper as a shield and not as a light. They're not trying to illuminate, they're trying to defend themselves, using this paper to deflect any kind of criticism, and so I wanted to stay undercover there, but what I found was almost everybody, every speaker that got up on stage. Partly, they talked very little about the flat Earth. They talked about other conspiracy theories, nasa's, a tool of the New World Order, and all this kind of stuff. Moon landing was faked. They would bring up different models of the flat Earth that were in conflict with one another, and point out why each other's models is wrong.
Speaker 1:And the audience would sit and listen to one model and then they'd sit and listen to the next model, which is fundamentally incompatible with what they just heard, and they wouldn't in any way see the incompatibility, because the important thing is everyone else is wrong, it doesn't matter what version is right as long as everyone else is wrong.
Speaker 2:And that is that sort of confirmation bias, identity protective cognition. The most important thing here for me is that I belong and I feel right and you're wrong.
Speaker 1:It's the whole othering thing yeah, it is, and I think that's why it will lead to extremism. Um, or it can be led into extremism. Things like you can almost draw a straight line. The algorithm tweaks slightly and people go from being flat earthers to q and on supporters to covid conspiracy theorists to 15 minutes city conspiracy theorists to central bank digital currencies and into the trans panic and and the pink panic for which will, which will sort of follow um.
Speaker 1:so I think there is a sort of a line there and I think one of the reasons it will lead to extremism is because you've left mainstream society. You become a flat earther, say. You talk to your friends and family, they think that's ridiculous.
Speaker 1:If you're sat down in the pub with your mates. They're not going to listen and in many ways, historically, that would have kept you from going too far because, yeah, you're right, maybe I won't keep talking about those things. And eventually, if you don't talk about something for long enough, your focus is going to shift somewhere else and you become, you know, your, your views will shift without you realizing.
Speaker 1:But now everybody can just go and find a group, who will? A group, exactly a group that will completely agree with them, that will affirm, that will say well, it's not just that, it's even more actually. And if you're in that group and you're isolated away from your friends and family, you spend more and more time in this group and be on. Telegram or something, and you come across stuff that you find repugnant, morally objectionable, stuff that you can't get on board with, are you going to leave that group as well?
Speaker 3:Because once you've left a second society.
Speaker 1:Will you find a third society? I don't think you will. So maybe you will sit there and in the metaphorical online pub and let Dave go on about Jewish people more than you would have done in your previous friendship group, because you can't afford to leave this. That becomes a drumbeat that you become first. You become deaf to.
Speaker 1:You're no longer spotted when it becomes bad, and, before you know it, you're allowing people to parrot it, and maybe even parroting bits of it yourself. Look, I don't believe in everything he says, but he's got a point about this thing over here.
Speaker 2:I'm not racist, but Exactly, I'm not racist, but right, they're taking our jobs, it's not all.
Speaker 1:Jewish people? It's just the powerful, wealthy elites who are the ones who are eating babies and drinking adrenochrome and things?
Speaker 2:And in the caverns underneath the synagogues.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I, that's I think it's so interesting that that notion that once you are isolated from your family, then it gets really because the more time you spend online, the more time they'll be able to serve you ads I mean one of the things that made QAnon become such a huge phenomenon when it was posting to 4chan, people weren't picking it up, people weren't spreading it particularly. It didn't go wild. It didn't really go wild until it left 4chan into spaces like YouTube and Facebook.
Speaker 1:It didn't go wild, it didn't really go wild until it left 4chan into spaces like YouTube and Facebook, and Facebook at one point was actively recommending QAnon groups to people who were yoga lovers and various other things.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's, interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they didn't want people to believe in QAnon. They didn't know what QAnon was. They weren't looking at the words, they were looking at the numbers. This group has this many people. It's got this many comments. This regular like back and forth going on. The conversation is going on this kind of regularly back and forth. This is a high engagement group. If we get people into this high engagement group, they will stay engaged in our platform and we can serve them more ads and they were essentially content neutral, value neutral. On the content, we don't care what the, the words or the images are what we care about is the structure of the group and can we keep you in it.
Speaker 1:And the problem is they would therefore go off and be whispering to people essentially hey, I know you're looking at baby photos from your friend from school, but have you ever thought about joining this conspiracy theory about jewish, jewish elites drinking the blood of babies you might be interested in? Youtube was doing the same thing, and these platforms grew those movements and then, when those movements got out of control, they said, oh, I'll just tweak the algorithm to be something else, but it didn't fundamentally change their incentive structure, and so it stopped turning people into flat earthers and started turning them into QAnoners, and it started turning them into the next thing. And so, when I was even at the Flat Earth Convention, I said the Flat Earth is just.
Speaker 1:I wrote about this, I think, for the Guardian or gizmodo. At the time. I wrote a couple of articles for each um. I was saying the the flat earth is just the most visible of the beliefs that they have that are outside of the mainstream, and it will only take a spark to light this into something really dangerous. And I wrote that, I think in late 2018, and 12 months later there was a wet market in china that provided the spark, and you know march 2020.
Speaker 2:We saw how dangerous this kind of conspiracy, theorizing, can become yeah, and of course, I think, in a way, q anon has um sort of morphed into maga. Do you think it's like, uh yeah, make america great again.
Speaker 1:Is is now absolutely it's become mainstreamed in and I had a really interesting I won't go into too much of the theory I had a really fascinating theory from a uh uh researcher who looks into, um, the way that these extremist movements build, and he was saying, essentially when it was on places like 4chan, everybody 4chan, for people who don't know, is this pretty awful website where kind of anything goes and people pretend to be anything. But because people are saying, oh, actually I'm a really famous actor and I I know this about hollywood, everyone knows they're not. It's just kind of a collective fiction of people coming along and pretending to be something and writing this collective fiction. Um, and that's kind of what 4chan, what q anon was.
Speaker 1:There were lots of people who were anonymously being lots of different things. I'm definitely this person here and everyone's like, yes, you aren't, but we're going to pretend like you are and just join in this kind of collective fiction game. When that spilled from a website whose grammatical structure is we know not to take this too seriously into Facebook, where it was. There's my friend who's celebrating her wedding anniversary and there's someone from work who's gone to the park today and there's a piece of information about the Democrats and the deep state, and here's someone's new dog. It's removed from the.
Speaker 1:The structure of we know this isn't true and it's suffused through your real life and people therefore lost all of the, the signs that this isn't to be taken really seriously as literal. It just becomes normalized. It just becomes normalized in the sea of all of the, the signs that this isn't to be taken really seriously as literal and it just becomes normalized.
Speaker 2:It just becomes normalized in the sea of all of all the other things. What do you think about sort of? There's english cardiologists that come out because I find that really difficult and talk to joe rogan and go, I'm a cardiologist and um, covet has caused you know whatever it's called. I think what's the heart condition?
Speaker 1:I think it's caused myocarditis yeah so so I know I know the cardiologist you, uh, you have in mind. Our um magazine awarded him the pseudoscientist of the year a couple of years ago because he did use his not just his um medical background, but he was really I'm not going to say famous, but he was very well connected in the media. So he was one of these people that if you saw a newspaper article about this latest dietary thing, they'd always have a quote from a doctor and he'd be the quote in there.
Speaker 1:And he'd written a diet book previously. He's a cardiologist. He'd written a diet book about how to extend your life, based on the diet of people from a small Italian village called Pioppi, and it was ridiculed by the Britishish dietetic association for being one of the worst fad diets imaginable because it was on the premise that you like the italians, have to cut all carbs out of your diet. That people in this italian village had no carbs like famously italian food, quite carby pasta, pizza, things like that.
Speaker 1:So it was just this ridiculous thing. But yeah, you have these people who I think and I won't talk too much about the doctor in person, I've not named him, I know he can be quite litigious- yes, yes, I'm not naming him either deliberately.
Speaker 1:Yeah exactly, but I do think it's interesting when these people who, when there are people who've got, um, a level of background, of expertise, um, that certainly can parlay into a strong media, uh, presence. Even if you didn't spend a particularly long time being a professional medical doctor, so you, even if you hadn't spent many years in hospitals and things, but it was actually a relatively short time before you go into private practice say, yeah, and now you are a doctor and you can be in the newspapers talking about diet when you're a cardiologist and you can then talk about the vaccine when you're not a virologist, you can publish papers about how the vaccine is ineffective, and I think there was a paper that was published in which, which made claims about the dangers of the vaccine.
Speaker 1:And I know it was published in a journal for diabetes.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And maybe that's because you're on the editorial board of that journal, and maybe that's why you can publish a virology paper in a diabetes journal, so like you can use access to these structures, um, but without necessarily going through what other colleagues would call the most rigorous of science. But the average person can't tell the difference between a doctor who's speaking out because they are steeped in virology and a doctor who's? Speaking out because they have personal experiences that lead them to believe things that aren't true.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we just see the word doctor and it's an immediate argument from authority. Right, it just goes straight into the emotional, especially when they can do the lingo.
Speaker 1:They can talk about specific heart conditions. They can talk about specific proteins and receptors and things because they've got the medical training.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right, and it sounds absolutely valid, doesn't it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I watched the Joe Rogan episode, in fact.
Speaker 2:So one of the other things that I've been doing this year is I've got a show called.
Speaker 1:The no Rogan Experience, where I watch Joe Rogan and then point out exactly what are the conversational tactics that are happening here, cause Joe Rogan is the perfect sponge for misinformation, because he doesn't yeah, he's not going into most of those conversations deliberately trying to spread misinformation, but he's kind of if, as misinformation washes to the bottom of the barrel, it's going to hit someone like Joe Rogan, who is just a perfect kind of avatar for it.
Speaker 2:Um and he sounds so certain. Right, there's something about that low. You know that voice and those they're. Certain americans just have it all over, I reckon the english and the australians, because of the certainty. They're just everything they say sounds really right, whereas we always think true yep, whereas we sort of sound like we're trying hard.
Speaker 1:But I think the other thing that's interesting with yeah, the other thing that's interesting with Joe is that I think he is onto something in that he has these long conversations and he thinks that makes things seem more authentic.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I think he's right. I think you do get to something more interesting you know two hours, three hours into a conversation where people have have exhausted the talking points they wanted to bring up on the show and you can start to have a conversation about who they really are, but the problem that always comes up with with joe rogan in those conversations is he has no sense of whether the person talking to him is being honest or not, is being accurate or not, does he care I?
Speaker 1:think he does. I think he does to a degree. I think he like it's hard. I think he is genuinely. He wants to be told things that are true, but he also wants to be told things that agree with him, and if there's a conflict there, he'll favor the latter every single time yeah and I think that is the the problem.
Speaker 1:We all want to be told things that agree with us, but we all have to also train ourselves to want to be told things that are true, that disagree with us. Um, even if that causes us an amount of small amounts of emotional distress, we have to kind of embrace that rather than protect ourselves from it. And joe is all about protecting himself from those, those moments, unfortunately.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's such a big part of of of skepticism, or just trying to lead a fairly decent, constructive life is just understanding that. Um, a strong feeling is not necessarily an arbiter of whether you're right or not. It's just a strong feeling and yet it's so easy to go um, you've said this. I'm really offended. I don't agree. I've got a strong feeling. I'm not going to act on it. Trying to manage or calibrate your way through your emotions, I think is so important and I think for us now, especially in the face of RFK in the States, I think we sceptics have to really be prepared to do the best job we can to start to counter the arguments. And I don't know, I guess that's what's worried me the most is when rfk took the reins um, because of fun, besides, just because of funding for starters, or what do you think?
Speaker 1:yeah, no, I, I completely agree. I mean at the start that you were talking about kind of the emotion of it as well. I think first of all, as skeptics, we have to admit that we also have emotions and that emotions aren't aren't necessarily bad. You know people will say well, you know that you've got too emotional in this argument and therefore you've lost, and it's like, no, we're all emotional about this. If you're, yeah, if you think you aren't being emotional, you're being self-deceptive at that point and you're gonna get into some yeah, exactly, we're all powered our emotions, that's kind of what our brain does.
Speaker 1:But no, I think it is a very scary time and in a way, it's kind of the most important time in my life to be a skeptic, because before, when I first got involved in skepticism, it was a lot about things like psychics and I care an awful lot about people being deceptive about their psychic abilities like psychics and I care an awful lot about people being deceptive about their psychic abilities yeah, but there are fewer harms to that than there are to anti-vax rhetoric yeah
Speaker 1:than there are, to having an anti-vaxxer in power, with the, the bullhorn, being able to say anything that they want. So it is. It can feel like the hardest time to be a skeptic, but it's also the most essential time to be a skeptic to be able to, to be pushed back, to be pushing back, but also to be pushing back effectively, because there are people who there are people who believe what rfk is saying, and if we say, well, rfk is awful, anyone who believes him is an idiot. What we're saying is you know, let's say there's 15 percent of america.
Speaker 3:That we're now saying is an idiot.
Speaker 1:Yeah that 15 could probably be useful to a political project or a project of rationalism if you could persuade some of them to question why they believe in rfk. If you call them an idiot, they're definitely not going to. So do you want to write them, those people, off? Or do you want to fish in that pool to see who are the ones you can bring back? And I, I'd always much, much rather bring people back to, even if we can't get them over the line into pure rationality or into, you know, net rationality. I'd rather get them closer to a, further away from irrationality, to kind of.
Speaker 2:Okay, you may be not gonna be perfect about everything, but we can stop you falling worse and worse on the on these particular topics so I guess what you're talking about is using the principles we've discussed in the in the last 40 minutes, but but using them in a larger pool. Because how do you do that? How do we influence when there is so many people now that are in danger and are vulnerable to this disinformation? How do we do that in a larger sense?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's incredibly difficult and I don't have the perfect answer, because if I did, the world would be working so much better.
Speaker 2:if I was in charge, you'd be running the world, michael, and then everything would be fine. I'd be the vice president and I'd be awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'd have it nailed. But I think one of the things we can do is recognize where are people's needs, where are people's fears, insecurities? You know people aren't following rfk because he's the most convincing person with the best evidence. They're following him and they're following, you know, the people around him because, um, he is speaking to something that they are scared of. He's speaking to something that they are concerned about and you know he he may not, he's not, giving the right answers to those things, but he's, he's, recognized that they exist. And so we first have to recognize how to spot and recognize what those, those fears are, what those insecurities are, before we can start filling them with with the right answers. So and partly that that kind of has to come from listening to people as well we have to actually have, we actually be in the spaces where people are expressing what it is they're worried about.
Speaker 1:It's so easy for us to find people who are anti-vaxxers, for example, or even not, I'm not gonna say anti-vaxxers with a capital a of, like you are committed to the lifestyle, but people who are, um, persuaded by some of this rhetoric, who are parroting some of this rhetoric, who would have been on the fence but have been kicked over the fence onto onto the other side. We need to be able to hear what they're saying and hear what they're worried about, without focusing that conversation first on correcting them, because otherwise what happens is we come in with a list of talking points and say, okay, who are you? And they tell me something. And I read off my first talking point about why they're wrong, and then they say something else, maybe my second point. I have no idea what the bit in between was, but they may have said something that would actually have changed the way I talked to them, that would actually change my perception of them, and make me more effective at communicating.
Speaker 1:So we have to listen first. It's why I go undercover to Flat Earth meetings. It's why I go along to anti-vax rallies and listen and hear what people are saying. It's why I go and spend a year and a half in an anti-vax telegram group. I need to understand who they are before I can explain why they're wrong, or explain to them why they're wrong. So I think, yeah, one of the most important things we can do as skeptics is listen first, for whether, whether insecurities are yeah. The more we listen, the more we'll be able to distinguish between the stuff that's just thrown out as flack to stop you paying attention to the, the real vulnerabilities yeah, yeah stuff that's genuinely true and genuinely who they are and what they're worried about.
Speaker 1:Once we get to that bit, that's when we can actually be effective. We can actually hear what their real concerns are and try and do something about it.
Speaker 2:Because certainly, if you look at MAGA, there'd have to be such a high level of people, the population being disenfranchised, being marginalized, you know, losing their jobs, you know there's no health care. I mean, there'd be a large portion of them that have really struggled for a really long time. They didn't just arise out of a sort of a privileged environment where everything was going swimmingly right yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Um, I think you know I'm not american. I haven't spent a huge amount of time in america. I would say the insecurity around health care is something that is going to have huge downstream effects on people. Once your ability to stay healthy is inherently tied to your job and your job may not be secure, then your world isn't secure, because if those, if one goes away and then the second one goes away, you are very quickly plunged into a level of insecurity.
Speaker 1:And if somebody comes along and says first of all, I'm going to give you a perfect healthcare. What the previous guy did had gaps around the edges and it was difficult and complicated. And I've talked to American friends and the American healthcare system seems wildly overcomplicated, even to people who have good health insurance Sure absolutely.
Speaker 1:You have to fight uphill battles. You have to. Yeah, you know there's bureaucracy, every stage designed to stop you getting the help that you need. That is something that is, if you're privileged enough to have a good education and the time to be able to have those conversations, you might be able to navigate. But I know that if my parents are american, they left school without an education. They don't work in jobs where they use literacy a great deal. Um, I think they'd struggle to navigate those systems and they'd find themselves in health care insecurity and who knows what that would make them vulnerable to.
Speaker 2:So and then, of course, I'm offering you a supplement. I'm saying you've got these issues, have this supplement, yeah absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, make america healthy again. We'll stop the. The answer isn't it's to prevent you from being ever ill in the first place. Well, we'd all love to be prevented from being ill. If what RFK was saying was true, it'd be great. The problem is it isn't. The problem is it's the soundbite that is persuasive 100%.
Speaker 2:And you know this notion that if everybody just ate better because it's a very you know it's a big banner statement, isn't it? That food is medicine. I hear it all the time. You know, food is not medicine. Food is food, medicine is medicine. You know but this notion that if you can just eat properly and then just take all the dyes out of the food and the preservatives, so then the focus goes onto the dyes and the preservatives and besides anything else, most people can't afford to eat. You know, five vegetables and five portions of fruit and lean protein a day, they can't afford to. So it's a nonsense statement in the first place, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when you, in RFK's case, were born into the Kennedy family, it's maybe not hard to be able to find good access to good food and maybe even the time to spend to cook it. I mean, RFK has never been a single parent who had to work two jobs to be able to keep the lights on and keep their kid going to school.
Speaker 1:These kinds of extra pressures have downstream impacts on people, and I think it's incredibly important that we provide a safety net for those people. I live in a country where everybody gets health care and you know that's a hugely good thing and here in australia as well.
Speaker 1:It's amazing yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, and I think it would. It would. It wouldn't cover everything, but it would cover a huge amount of, uh, of the gaps that people can fall into. But the other thing that the the rfk style of you know food is medicine. What that allows is, if you did fall ill, it was your own fault.
Speaker 1:If somebody, if you see somebody who's ill, it's their fault. They should have eaten better. Yeah, which allows you to absolve yourself of yeah, not just of responsibility for compassion, but also of compassion, yeah, exactly yeah, you're, you're this way.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's that whole. That's why I've spent so much time swimming around in the whole um spiritual arena where you create your illness. You know you haven't resolved something, you've created this illness. If you actually did the right amount of meditation, the right amount of manifestation, the right amount of visualization, you cue us off. It's your fault and that I find incredibly frustrating, and it's the same thing. There's no compassion in that for the fact that people. Often, most of the problems that beset us are structural and it's.
Speaker 1:It's something that I spent a while looking into around. Um fake cancer cures there was um uh one in particular gerson therapy was I know gerson for a while yeah, and it's, it's, it's set up to be, and I don't think it was designed this way, like cynically, but the way that the regime works is that you have to take, you know, 12 different coffee enemas a day 12 different fruit juices, eight coffee enemas yeah, incredibly difficult to do, even if you were well to take a fruit juice every hour on the hour yeah um, if you were well, that'd be a difficult thing to do without slipping, without making mistakes somewhere down the line.
Speaker 1:If you're unwell, you're going to make a mistake. If you make a mistake, well.
Speaker 3:That's why it didn't work that's why you still died of cancer you didn't do the regime properly, if you do the regime right.
Speaker 1:I I was once in a room in like an event space in a holiday inn uh here in liverpool where an american gerson therapist had come over to talk about gerson therapy to a room about 100 people in the room again, we were undercover in the room and he said, who here's got cancer? And half the room upsets me it's.
Speaker 1:It was one of the hardest rooms I've ever been in, genuinely the hardest room ever been in because then he was asking people in the front row what chemotherapeutic chemotherapeutic drugs are you on? And they would name the drug and he would say, okay, yeah, you need to stop taking that, because if you're taking that with my thing, it won't save you. It won't save you at all then they die people in that room didn't survive, though.
Speaker 1:I know of people who were in that room who who are no longer with us. But if you were to say to anyone in that room this guy is having you on, this will kill you. You're the bad guy, bad guy who's going to take away hope from them. Why are you trying? You know what? What harm could it do?
Speaker 2:yeah, where's the harm is the big cry of the people that I talk to that are sort of promoting alt-med. It's where's the harm? Well, I'll tell you where the harm is, because it takes your focus over here and maybe you're taking a supplementary vitamin, but then maybe you stop the chemo and then you've only got the vitamins and then you're nowhere. I had a friend recently who had discovered very fit person but discovered he needed a triple bypass. And he rang me. He said I've just read a book I won't name the doctor by this doctor who says that the problems for all of us with heart disease is leptins in the food. Yeah, you know who the doctor is. And he said so I'm thinking of trying that. And I said well, so then we went to the surgeon and the surgeon said showed him a picture and said here's these three blockages. Um, my advice to you is don't run for the bus.
Speaker 2:and you can come in for surgery because it's awesome, it's australia, and he had a triple bypass. I think it was like five days later, but that's the danger. He was thinking I don't want to have surgery. Surgery is scary, right it's horrible they've got to open your chest up who?
Speaker 1:I just want to take a vitamin and stop eating leptins yeah, yeah, and I can understand again you have compassion, you know, especially if you look at something like cancer, you go and see a doctor and the doctor will say you know, oh, this is, this is good. There is a 80 chance of a five-year survival. On this, you know, 80, 85 percent and people at that point don't hear 80, they hear 20 percent 20 chance I'm not around in five years yeah and then you talk to a cancer quack.
Speaker 1:They don't have to talk in couched improbabilities, they can talk in certainties, because they're not burdened by the, the the need to be accurate yes because they're not regulated, they don't have the oversight of the right answer of things that are actually true. So they say, no, it's fine, you do this and you will survive and that's what we want.
Speaker 2:It's back to that notion of the higher, high appeal of certainty we all want certainty I would like it, would love certainty, but we don't have it. It is, we live in this life. It is uncertain. We do the best we can, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, completely that. And I think the other thing is the what's the harm? People will say, like people who are patients will say, well, I've already got a terminal diagnosis, so what's the harm in trying this? And so I spent time looking through. There were a lot of people who were doing things like crowdfunders to go to germany for the miracle cure. What's the harm in trying this miracle cure? And they'd be in the newspapers all the time. This person raising money. There's a local fundraisers, all that. You know local football team is auctioning off equipment, all sorts of things like this. And when you follow those stories through, the one thing the media never does, even if they do say which clinic they're going to or which country or what they're getting, never does a follow-up never what the evidence is never.
Speaker 1:And so if you look at individual stories and you say to that person that that cancer patient, this isn't going to work, you're the bad guy.
Speaker 1:If you set their friends and family. You're the bad guy if you say the people who stick a you know five dollars in their gofundme. You're still a bad guy because someone who's throwing five dollars in because they were moved by a story they saw in the newspaper doesn't hasn't got the time or the inclination to engage in what's the evidence for this, you know. Necessarily they just want to do a nice thing for someone they've not met. Yeah, so the way that I tackled this problem in the uk was to look on gofundme, on just giving on every crowdfunding page for every single story like that that I could find. Over a year period, I think I spent six months looking for every single one that I could find to see how many of these stories are there, how much is being raised, where is it going, and then also what happened to this person after they went to the clinic. And I was able to find I forget the numbers maybe about 300 stories, something like that, wow. And I was able to find more than hundred of them were promoted as positive stories cure stories in the newspaper. I was able to find more than 80, I think obituaries within the timeframe that the doctors had said this is what you've got and when you see some of the personal stories in there, what you see is people had raised £50,000 on GoFundMe to go to this German clinic and to stay there because it's incredibly expensive and you stay on site and your friends and family stay there and a huge, expensive thing.
Speaker 1:You don't turn first to GoFundMe. The first thing you do isn't go to a crowdfunder. You spend your own money. You remortgage your house, you talk to your parents, you do anything where there's sources of money. So what happens is when the person does go to these clinics and they pass away in the time that the doctors initially gave them. You know they initially feel better because they stopped taking chemotherapy. So they feel better, they they're told that means they're getting better. And then they're suddenly terminal and not only are they going to die, but they also haven't dealt with the fact they're going to die because they've been told they aren't dying. Their family have been told you're not dying. You go there with your, your wife's got cancer, your husband as a husband, you're there to support her and then she dies. You've been told that's not going to happen. And then you also realize that you're now in huge amounts of debt because you spent every penny on this treatment.
Speaker 1:What's the harm in trying it if it could possibly work? I've got nothing to lose. Well, what you have to lose is the time with the person that you love. Yeah, accepting that what's going on and you know. If you wanted to spend 50 grand, there's better ways to spend 50 grand than to to go to a clinic in germany and pay for uncomfortable treatments and so did you take the that um that exploratory, so you did that exploration did you was that did.
Speaker 2:Was that um disseminated anywhere? Did people read that?
Speaker 1:yeah, so it was the cover story of the bmj in september 2018, I think it was, and then it was in a whole range of national newspapers. We had on the bbc as well, and there was a bbc kind of film about it too, um, in which the clinic actually pushed back and, uh, and the bbc removed the the story, um, because of the legal threats from the clinic, because this was a huge source of money for one of these clinics and if you've got that kind of money, you've got the lawyers that the money gives you access to. But once we published this, I wrote to every journalist who'd ever written one of these stories and the health editor of every single newspaper who'd ever published one of these stories to say you don't realize this, but your stories here were being used as advertising for these clinics. In the uk, if you took out a full page in a newspaper saying I can cure your cancer, that would be illegal. We have literally a law called the cancer act against the advertising of cancer cures.
Speaker 1:These clinics didn't need to take out adverts, because they had something even more powerful than adverts they had patient testimonies. The patients were going to these yeah, these uh papers.
Speaker 1:The clinic was encouraging patients to go to the papers. If you're, if you're low on money and you need to pay for this, here's a great route, here's a great way of doing it. Here's, here's how you set up a gofundme. Here's how you talk to your local journalists. So they were doing this and so I said, without you realizing, your stories have been used to recruit patients to these clinics and I saw heartbreaking chains. Where a patient would go to this clinic, they'd stop taking chemotherapy. They'd become a testimony about how great they're feeling. Somebody would say in their second, second, another fundraiser. I didn't think there was hope until I saw that story and that's why I knew to go to this clinic.
Speaker 1:By the time this second patient gets to the clinic, I've already seen the obituary for the first person and I saw that chain happen with three links. There was a third patient who saw the second patient and I sent this to the journalist to say your story is the one, this second person who they said they saw your story. That's how they went.
Speaker 2:And did the story stop.
Speaker 1:We don't see anywhere near as many of those stories anymore. So, it used to be. You'd see one of those stories in the British press every week, and now we will go months without seeing any of them. And I'm not saying it was directly, just because I wrote to those journalists.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I bet it helped, michael, I bet that helped.
Speaker 1:Getting it all out there, getting the other side of it out there, yeah, and this is why I was saying about how, if you were to talk to the talk to the patient, you're the bad guy. To their friends and family, you're the bad guy. To the donors, you're the bad guy. Even just writing to the journalist at that point to say I think this is irresponsible. They may or may not listen because they've got so much else to do. There's so much pressure in journalism to write seven stories a day. But by doing that incredibly painstaking and at times quite harrowing work of looking through hundreds and hundreds of these cases and documenting the trends and showing the data using that kind of bigger picture, we actually have had an appreciable uh success here. And even the platforms have stopped allowing some of these clinics or certain types of therapy to be mentioned in goFundMes, which means it cuts off that supply line of victims to these clinics.
Speaker 2:That is awesome. That is really and truly. That's a really really positive, fantastic story. Difficult, I'm sure, and grueling and quite heartbreaking, but the fact that you did that makes me feel like I'm going to keep going, Michael. I'm going to keep fighting, Michael.
Speaker 1:I'm going to keep fighting the good fight.
Speaker 2:Well, on that note, um, it has been an absolute delight to talk to you and thank you for getting up at the crack of dawn at 8, 30 am in the morning, in.
Speaker 1:Britain. That makes me sound so bad because other people get up routinely at that time. I'm a very much a night person, but I was very happy to do it.
Speaker 2:It's been a pleasure chatting to you, thank you so much and I'll let you know when this is up and running. It will be quite soon and thank you. Thank you so much, smart women. Thank you for tuning in. I hope you found that instructive. I certainly did. It's challenged quite a bit of my thinking, which is what I'm always up for. So have a lovely day, stay safe, keep your critical thinking hats on. Talk soon Bye. Thanks for tuning into why? Smart Women with me.
Speaker 2:Annie McCubbin, I hope today's episode has ignited your curiosity and left you feeling inspired by my anti-motivational style. Join me next time as we continue to unravel the fascinating layers of our brains and develop ways to sort out the fact from the fiction and the over 6,000 thoughts we have in the course of every day. Remember, intelligence isn't enough. You can be as smart as paint, but it's not just about what you know, it's about how you think. And in all this talk of whether or not you can trust your gut, if you ever feel unsafe, whether it's in the street, at work, in a car park, in a bar or in your own home, please, please, respect that gut feeling. Staying safe needs to be our primary objective. We can build better lives, but we have to stay safe to do that and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast and share it with your fellow smart women and allies. Together, we're hopefully reshaping the narrative around women and making better decisions. So until next time, stay sharp, stay savvy and keep your critical thinking hat shiny.
Speaker 2:This is Annie McCubbin signing off from why Smart Women. See you later. This episode was produced by Harrison Hess. It was executive produced and written by me, annie McCubbin.
