False Ivermectin narratives, regulatory grift, wartime mentality in solving issues & more | LIVE from TPB Symposium!

The transcript opens with joking about how one host is dressed, with a mock night-out reference, before the standard intro and an open-source-to-the-fans line. The hosts then thank the crowd for coming to the production board Symposium 2021.

Asked to explain the event, Friedberg says it is the second symposium and brings scientists, engineers, people from academia and business, and some investors, for a couple of days of sharing ideas. He jokes that they would chase half the audience away by hosting the All-In pod that evening.

The first topic is Rolling Stone amplifying a false ivermectin story. A host asks Chamath (transcribed as Shamab) to summarize. He says that on September 1st an Oklahoma news station, transcribed as K4, published an article titled about patients overdosing on ivermectin and backing up rural hospitals and ambulances, quoting a rural doctor.

On September 3rd, he says, Rolling Stone amplified it and tweeted a picture of people lined up in the cold, which turned out to show people waiting for a vaccine shot back in January rather than people waiting for a hospital. These details are as he relays them from the reports.

Another host says the story is totally false. The speaker calls it beyond fake news, a conjured article meant to incite moral mania, and says its premise is ridiculous.

The speaker says that, as far as anyone knows, ivermectin has a handful of specific characteristics, one involving glutamate (the transcribed wording is unclear). He adds that while it can technically be used as a dewormer, it may act in four or five other ways that are unknown because no broad double-blind study has been done. The fairest thing to say, he argues, is that we do not know what it is.

Neither those proposing it for COVID nor those railing against it, he says, start from fact. People so turned off by others skipping vaccines, he continues, doctor up an article. That would matter little, since nobody reads Rolling Stone, but then people who think they are very smart amplify it: he names Rachel Maddow and a Kimmel comedy skit, and says outrage follows.

The genie cannot be put back once a fabricated story spreads, he says, and the people pushing it face no consequences because they are on the left screaming at the right. When it went the other way, he says, people were put in boxes and kicked off platforms, which he calls a compounding double standard and the worst part.

A host brings up Joe Rogan getting COVID and taking ivermectin as part of treatment, after which people amplified that he was taking a horse worm drug. Another speaker adds that the drug is, at best, an antimicrobial, that it is used for both humans and animals, that a doctor prescribed it to Rogan, and that Rogan is thinking of suing some people. The host asks what this says about communication around the pandemic.

A speaker says this is really a media story. In his account, Rolling Stone relied on a single source, a crank claiming ERs were turning away gunshot victims and heart-attack patients, when it could simply have called a hospital or checked the number of ivermectin toxicity cases. He says they did not because the article was too perfect and confirmed their priors.

The first prior, he says, was the war on ivermectin as a horse dewormer, even though it was designed for humans against parasites; he concedes it is not known whether it works against COVID and that double-blind studies are needed. The second prior was that it happened in Oklahoma, where Rolling Stone wants to believe in MAGA idiots eating horse paste.

He says Rachel Maddow loved it and spread it, and that after being called out, including by Glenn Greenwald, she had not taken it down as of the night before. In his view she knows there are no consequences for misinformation on the left because Twitter and Facebook enforce only against people who disagree with their biases. Another host calls this a secret cabal with a get-out-of-jail-free card; he replies it is not secret, just a shared culture, and asks why there is still no Twitter label on her post.

After some stage chatter and a joke about the live event, a host asks when anyone last heard a news story without bias that did not provoke an emotional reaction. Another cites a Wall Street Journal piece on the Democrats' tax proposal as emotionally charged but factual, with the House proposal, as he reads it, moving the capital gains rate from 20 to 25 percent and the corporate rate to 26.5 percent.

His distinction is between writers who convey facts and let you judge and those who manufacture content because, as he attributes to Matt Taibi, it creates moral mania. Another speaker says this drives emotion and is journalism's last grasp at relevance, making it a free-for-all.

A host says he owns old New York Times printouts from 1936 to 1944 that read like ticker stories with no attached narrative or implicit morality. He guesses that in ten years what is left will be the Economist and mob rule in the metaverse, while another notes podcasts allow a more honest discussion.

A host turns to a speaker he jokingly addresses as Mister anti-Facebook and asks about a Wall Street Journal report that a secret cabal gets a get-out-of-jail-free card there. The speaker answers that this is exactly his point: there are two sets of rules, and members of the in crowd who share the moderators' cultural, class or political biases get a pass.