Citation Needed - The Cobra Effect

Episode Date: October 4, 2017

The cobra effect occurs when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse,[1][2] as a type of unintended consequence. The term is used to illustrate the causes of incorrect stimulation in economy and politics.[2] --- Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details.

So this episode may be the first episode we ever recorded of the show. So it was recorded a while ago. Recorded before the show released, it has never been released, even though we released some of our pre-stuff to patrons before we actually launched. This has never been released, only about maybe 10 people have heard it. But this was the first episode of this show that we ever recorded. And this was the turning point episode for us to make us realize that this was sort of the format that we were going to go with. There's some dated stuff in here

and some placeholder stuff that you're going to hear. We didn't really formulate the Twitter question and answer yet. We certainly hadn't figured out what our Patreon page was going to be called yet. So there's going to be some talk about that that that seems like it's not formulated yet. And also, Heath makes several jokes about eugenics being the next episode. And we did eventually do eugenics. We initially, we were gonna release this episode within the first five,

but we wanted to do some more and different things in the first five. So this episode got pushed back. And so it wound up getting pushed back as a bank episode. And luckily, we had it in the bank and we could reproduce an episode this week because the puzzle guys just got back on a tour.

They had been gone for 14 days and they could not record. So this, luckily we had this episode that we could play for people. We hope you enjoyed it. It's a look back at the very beginnings of this show for our 25th episode. I think it's probably one of the funniest episodes

we have ever done, read a single Wikipedia article about it and pretend we're experts because this is the internet. That's how it works now. Ami Lai Bosnick and I'll be your guide through this never ending cavity of dubious knowledge and partial understanding because reading a whole week of media every week is a lot to ask. We'll be dividing the work up five ways. So join me from the pizza deprived murderous housecape of Chicago, Illinois, from the cognitive dissonance podcast and the bad touch training videos for school nurses.

Please welcome Tom and Cecil. We love you too, he. Yeah, I gotta say, I've seen a lot of bad touch nurse videos, but I've never until now considered any of those training. But I'm willing to renegotiate my stance on this. They are. Wax on, so. Okay, all right, trained.

I feel very well trained. The student has become the master. It's her fault for not sweeping leg. And also joining me from the only volcano layer that's required to disclose its sexual history to its neighbors from all the podcast with me on them, please make some noise for Heath and Wright and no illusions. We live in a weird place. Everyone is just walking around knocking on doors. It's like adult Halloween.

We're going to call it yesterday's fam. Yeah. But trick or treat has a whole different meaning in our neighborhood. Not a fun trick. All right, gentlemen, we're about to drop some knowledge, but before we did, I wanted to thank our Patreon supporters for making this show possible. If you want to know how to join their ranks, stick around to the end of the show. And with that other way, Cecil, tell us what person, place, thing, event, concept, or

phenomenon brings us together today. Today, we're going to be covering the cobra effect. And know, since the name comes first alphabetically, if you start from the middle, you get the honor of kicking things off. You read the Wikipedia article on the cobra effect, correct? All 306 words of it. Yes, I sure did. good enough. You are an expert now. Teach us all there is to know. All right. All right. So the Cobra effect is a term used in economics and various easier A versions of economics like sociology to denote an intended solution that actually makes the target problem worse. Are you sure you're not reading the Wikipedia for page

for Republicans? Yeah. It's a subheading. Yeah. I'm actually going to go ahead and rename my autobiography rights now. Or maybe you were looking at the page for eugenics. I'm not saying the Jew problem got bigger. I feel like that's what it sounded like. I was saying, but seriously, shotgun, Jennings next time I go. Heath, I hate to give feedback on air, but you suggest you, Jennings too often.

Pugs are unethical. I mean, I don't tell you. It was a tie. It's a tie. Noah, why is it called the co-oper effect? Well, to answer that question, I have to take you back to the 17th century when India was a backwards and barbaric peninsula filled with misguided non-whites that worshiped the wrong gods. Not sure we need the time machine, but luckily for those primitives, though, see this is what I'm talking about.

The British East India company hefted the white man's burden and set out to do something about all that in the early 1600s. I'll take kill and enslave them for eight for 300 Alex. You always pick kill and enslave them. I'm starting to get a little worried about this actually. This is always your suggestion. Tom, we should trade quiet, but funnier than us guys. They could start their own race war.

Skirt, beard, and the tall. Let's start our own empire. Skirt. I think we're all tiny little mustache. Get your very own right. Everyone gets their own right. You could not grow a tiny mustache. Any mustache you grow would be massive and epic and face defining. You could grow a tiny mustache. Okay, so a stolen mustache. Okay. Yeah. That'll work. All right.

Would you, Janik's mustache? Well, not only got that all short, but I with your back to our cobra facts story. Now according to an anecdote or bright bar or presidential. Different ways of saying the same thing or maybe even a true story. The wiki authors didn't bother to annotate. Anyway, during British colonial rule in India, the government was concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi. And let's face it, if that number isn't zero, this seems like a well-founded fear. I feel sort of bad for cobra actually incompetent leadership on flattering outfits poor marksmanship training. I'm not the right thing.

You're thinking about the one where you go left, right, left, right up down. The ABA slash start is similar for the audience who can pee all the time whenever they want to. That was a cartoon from the 40s about racism. What is that racism? Keith and Cecil are kids. My name's the black one. Nobody buys my toys.

You're gonna die before me. I will last laugh because you'll be dead. Yeah, exactly. So, uh, the British government office decided to do something about this cobra problem. And their, their idea was to offer a bounty for every dead cobra the locals could bring in. Yeah, I just was real. And now you know, initially this was a successful strategy. As a large number of snakes were killed for the reward, eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. Right, right. Just like poor people with welfare. So, so you're saying the bounty part is what we're missing. It's a bad experience again. I think our cops are already good at catching them. They're

already killed in large numbers. They're venomous. You know, if you teach a poor person to breed cobras, they'll throw away that stupid fishing pole. So well, there's that. Yeah. You know, I, I don't even care that they're gaming the system. I think if you're breeding fucking cobras, if things get really tough, you can just sell your enormous steel balls for scrap matter.

Well, they probably had to because eventually the government became aware of this and then the reward program was scrapped, which in turn led to a bunch of out of work co-braiders going like, well, fuck, these guys are useless now. Might as well release them into the wild. All right. And they ended up with all these co-bragettoes. I'm assuming. That's what I know. This is his right, Kim.

I think he got onto YouTube again. I thought we only were letting him watch cat videos. I got to say this. This does seem short-sighted for the people who now have to live around wild cobra. Right. You think they could have just gone ahead and killed them all anyway? I don't need them. They're unbelievably dangerous. Let's just let them outside like a dog that has to go pee. Now the end result, of course, is that the British government ended up paying the people of India to make the venomous cobra problem worse because those brown people couldn't

be trusted to govern themselves intelligently, you see. I am nailing this. Make India great again. So, we're paying people to make things worse. Are we sure this isn't the ban and effect? Paul, we're a cleaning lady. Really? You couldn't reach under the couch. No way now. I'm not entirely sure Steve Bennett isn't a co-broad. So it might be we might just be using different terms for the same thing. When he takes his mask off, he looks like that guy on dreamscape. The world's first dreamscape reference. And I was here for it. Awesome. All right. So now, if you look hard enough or you continue reading a little further down the Wikipedia article, you're learning that there are other examples of this same effect.

Take for example, an incident in Hanoi Vietnam this time under French colonial rule. Oh, just a bunch of people breeding baguettes. What? What have been way better? No, actually it was singing chef mice. So no, it was horny Asian hookers. Maybe venomous long time. Not that long a time.

Not a lot of time. Can we pro-read it? Pro-reads. That'd be great. That's a thing serious questions. Yeah, I'm taking notes now. Tom's just sitting here doing the math. I've been saying when this shit up, I've never even out. I'm going to save a fortune guys. I'm fortunate. All right. So now this time, this Vietnamese time, the colonial regime was worried about rats instead of cobras proving that as shitty as Vietnam is at least it's not India. So the government created a bounty program this time that paid a reward for each rat killed. And so they wouldn't be stuck

with rooms full of dead rats. I don't know, they're French. I would think they'd want that anyway. They didn't. How would they know? Yeah, right? Exactly. Well, that's probably what it is. This people kept eating them. They're going guys.

They need those for inventory later. Yeah. So what they decided to do though was to pay the bounty based on how many rat tails you could bring in. Okay. All right. I'm not positive, but I think this is where my analogy kind of unravels because poor people don't have tails.

I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know. I don't associate with them. Go to sales and squeeze some asses. I really care. They're just counting rad tails that could clean up in Kentucky or really any monster truck you back. Now, as you probably already guessed, unless you've been listening to some other podcast

up to this point, this didn't work out great for the French. As it happens, the Vietnamese rat catchers learn pretty quickly. They were better off catching rats, lopping off their tails and then send it back out to breed more to make more rats that still have tails on. I know comments. And he says I know comments. He saves the edit again, just like Kentucky, lots of horrifying past breeding out of control. Oh, Jesus. Now, I have an interesting additional note here from Wikipedia, depending on how liberally

we define interesting historian Michael van argues that since the Cobra example from British India can't be proven, but the rats in Vietnam can be proven. The term should be changed to the rat effect. This is the kind of shit that keeps historians up at night apparently. All right. Well, obviously there's still plenty more to say about the Cobra effect, but we're going to take a quick. Oh, actually, that's all the Wikipedia article said that's where it ended. And yet Noah's going to come up with more interesting stuff to say about it, including

a few modern examples. And then we're going to quiz him on his knowledge. But first, we're going to take a quick break for everybody's favorite mid-episode use of the interstitial music, apropos of nothing. We now connect to the microwave in the Oval Office to hear a top secret discussion on health care. So then I said, you can't trust him when he isn't joking about it. Right. So, so Speaker Ryan, what is our plan for healthcare? Did we bother to write one up yet?

Or are we still just getting a ton of retweets on that repeal and replace line? Well, Sean, that that tweet is killing it. But, but, but yeah, our plan is to group everyone that is sick with everyone else that is sick. We're calling it the lepre colony PPO. It isn't really a PPO, but nobody needs to know that. Okay. It's a real leper colony though, right? Well, not initially, but we're not going to rule that out. Oh, okay. Not a fan, not a fan. I came up with the best idea. It's so good. I spent like several minutes thinking about it. And I said to myself, this is a really good idea. We could fix

the whole thing all we have to do is repeal and replace Obamacare. No, yeah, we were already, um, we, we did that good terrible plan. Obamacare, it's a disaster to many people, too, too many what? My comprehensive plan is to renegotiate each individual claim for each patient and each doctor in each city, in each state for each line item. Do you realize how long that's going to take, Mr. President? Each one, not sure if you read the book I go throat out of the deal and make a pretty good

medical billing assistant, not as good as you, but pretty good. But the reality is that I am a negotiator. That's why a minority of Americans elected me. I'm also going to open the borders for medicine for years. The American people have had to pay excessive amounts of money for healthcare and they can get a cheaper. They can get a cheaper. They can get a cheaper across the border. Not anymore. We're going to let people go to Mexico for cheaper coverage or to Canada. I hear it's free there. And the prime minister has the hearts for my daughter. What, what, what, what in that, what in that, uh, competition is the heart of the American economy. Doctors should be knife fighting in the street for patients.

If I killed one of those doctors, front of a huge audience, nobody would even care. Somebody call ban and see if he can bring a few doctors, overlaid at a murder, but the point is we're going to make Mexico pay for all our sick people through tariffs on our own healthcare because I'm smart. Okay. Okay. I don't think that's how any of this works. And for my final solution, we replace cobra. The consolidated omnibus budget reconciliation act, the act that lets people stay on their health insurance after they become unemployed. Absolutely. We replace Cobra with actual Cobra's.

The unemployment rate will plummet. How? They go to see a doctor. We have tiny doors, tiny little doors built into the examination rooms. After they're dead, we deport them. But a whole lot of people are going to die. How is this different than your plan? Good point. Let's roll with it.

And we're back to learn more about the cobra effect. No, what question could I ask you that would best lead you into the next bullet point on your notes there? What are some modern day versions of the cobra effect? So what are modern day some versions of the cobra effect? So what are modern day some versions of the cobra effect? I'm glad you almost asked you like particular hilarious example I found with the case of the du- du- pluses I don't know du- pluses orphans. Oh my god. Did we cut off their tails too?

I knew this basement full of orphans was going to come in handy. And if you'd like to support the mercy side, skip this. Just don't let them all out at once. Now, see, back in the 1940s, the Quebec government offered hospitals a dollar 25 a day to take care of orphans, but 275 a day to take care of psychiatric patients, creating a perverse incentive for churches to breed crazy orphans. Yes, I don't think they thought of that. No, for the churches that took

care of the orphans to misdiagnose the hell out of them and call them mentally unstable when they weren't. Oh, this is a end up with a city of Batman. It's very often how Quebec is described in the modern day. So according to a very reliable, unsourced thing on ranker.com, this led to 80% of the misdiagnosed patients to report that they underwent a traumatic experience between the ages of seven and 18 and over 50% underwent physical, mental or sexual abuse. Well, they might have been crazy, but at least they were still fuckable. Oh, wow. Arguably more so.

Check out incredulous. No reason. Straight out. Okay. Who wants to take bets? These were Catholic hospitals. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, they were definitely Catholic hospitals. Somebody, no, no, they were definitely Catholic hospitals.

So what he's doing, the raping like the Congress and the rats. The end result is the government ups their money from mental health services and thereby increases the number of mentally unhealthy people. Doesn't it? It feels like Monsanto was involved. And this is why the government shouldn't pay for healthcare or orphans, which is good because the government does not. Nope. Not this one. I believe that's called nailing it. Now another great example of the co-bro effect from American history is prohibition.

The saddest period in American history. And yes, I am including slavery. Oh, shit. At least the slaves got to drink. Yeah, no. Oh, God. All right, so the belief that led to it was the idea that drinking led to other illicit behaviors,

and that caused Puritans to push for the criminalization of alcohol in the 1920s. Ridiculous. Tom threw a lesbian atheeth at QED. I, I plead truth. I did that. I caught her. It was a good throw.

It was a good cat. Everything was safe. So in turn, organized crime took over the alcohol trade and was so well-funded that they could invest heavily in all kinds of prostitution bookmaking gun running and all the other stuff that the Puritans were trying to avoid by making alcohol illegal. I so feel like I was born in the wrong era right now. But don't it is not a virtue.

By the way, there's another example this in Ireland. My people are crazy. Apparently, the church ran a campaign against alcohol around like 1840 and it made a bunch of people start drinking ether. I feel a loathing style ether. Like, you have to give me an Irish for you. An Irish tradition that continues to this very day. That's right.

That's why you don't see made an iron lid on anything. No, you do, no, you do orphans. Yeah, right. Sceptic tanks filled with orphans. Truth bomb. You heard it here on info wars. All right. So I got one final example if you guys don't mind. And it's one that might have already occurred to some of the people in the audience. That would be the war on drugs here in the good old U S of A. Obviously,

there are plenty of aspects on the war on drugs that are controversial, but I don't think any serious observer would disagree when I said that America's war on drugs policy is created wider availability of drugs and field decades of cartel violence in Mexico and other south of the wall type countries. Yeah. I feel like the wall is going to do the same thing. Like all of a sudden, if you're a rapist drug dealer, you better get to the United States now, right?

Mm-hmm. And then the wall goes up and they're stuck here. Cobras all over again. Yeah. I'm just comforted by the fact that there's now wider availability of drugs. I feel like this is a win for the American consumer. Is it really because I'm stuck with a guy who makes become to try and a town, Tom. So one interesting way that the war on drugs falls into this cobra, a fact heading, is the way that it criminalizes small possession, which makes people less employable and more

likely to turn to drug dealing, which makes people less employable and more likely to turn to drug dealing, which leads to stiffer criminal penalties in a cycle that creates a permanent underclass that probably does a lot of drugs. So if you had to summarize what you learned, what would you say? The cobra effect, nowhere near as cool as the name would imply, but the uniform with that chrome face plate is lit. Look, I watched a lot of G.I. Joe as a kid. I do. I believe you.

I believe me as half the battle. Believing was the whole battle, buddy. I landed under the right circumstances. My cobra farm is marketable. I just need to buy my time. Don't shake it. Just Tom got a box of dead cobra in his face. It is me now. By the same token, I have an orphan farm. By the same token, I have an orphan farm. Wait. Wait.

Wait a minute. It's a future sport, Folio. It's very good. Well, since you've consumed hundreds of words on the subject, I think it would be safe to say you're now an expert. And since we heard those words and make dick jokes about them, that makes us experts too. So it's time to throw it to the panel to see if one of our experts can stump you with a cobra effect related question. But since that's too boring

to build good questions around, I decided to ask everybody to write questions about cobras instead. Are you ready? Not even remotely. That's a completely different subject. All right, well, I'll go to world, gentlemen, and I use that term loosely and with no discretion. What are a few here to for unknown uses for cobras? Hey, put them in a peanut brittle canister and be the life of the party. He's life should be in quotes.

There. There. B, C, grandma again. C, release them during the chicken dance at the next wedding reception and watch the crowd go wild. D, no, there are no uses for fucking preter naturally fast venom and agony producing meat juice Alright, so I feel like yeah here to for unknown. I've done a and see I have to go with D here I feel like that is accurate D here. I feel like that is accurate. Yeah.

Yeah. All right, I got one. Which of the following is the correct response? If you get bit by a cobra on your penis. You're a fuck a pentacostle person in the face. That's excuse I always use. Cobra by, Cobra by, get over here. Yeah.

All right, strong's a strong response for a, all right, but be convert to Pena, costalism and mastery. So, see, that's tricky, A and B are tricky, right? Yeah, no, this is like Thomas takes the bar, see, sit cross-legged and play the oboe until you climb Or D It does not involve coming The poison out and answer C was racist All right D is tempting D is tempting. I feel like But but I feel like I can't be walking away from here saying the answer was not fuck a penalty costal person in the face.

That's usually a pretty strong answer. I'm going to go with A. Believe it or not, A is great. I'm going to cost a person in the face. Awesome. That's real. I'm good at this. I got one.

I got one. So, so Noah, which of the following is the coolest cobra vehicle? And I'm talking about cobra from GI Joe here. Of course you are. All right, so, so the claw CLAW, the covert light aerial weapon, which is basically a big metal jet hang plighter with missiles, and it offered no armor for the driver except for recovering the portion of his back, the people from the third Matrix movie probably designed it actually. Be the snake, SNAK or system neutralizer armed and cloaking equipment and cloaking his bubble decay here. Oh, okay. It basically looked like an underwater sarcophagus that no shit was used to mine Arctic ice from underwater.

See the air chariot. I'm still so confused about me. Which is serpentine. Flying thrown. It looks like a cobra fucked the jet's piece. And then finally, finally, Zartan's chameleon. It looked like a praying mantis. It had four skis and no discernible means propulsion.

No, it's this thing from real and it looked like it would just be good at syncing. So which one is the best? Yeah, I get it. It was really good at syncing. Oh, put it in the bathtub, it. Yeah. This is a tough one. Yeah. I'm going to go with the snake because of the audacity to just spoke, walking with a cave and pretend you're done.

No, I'm sorry, it was air chariot. It's a sorpentor. You can't go against a sorpentor. It's cobra la la la la. Sorpentor is the only one that delivers a nearly mortal wound. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, everybody else is snake-th Yeah, everybody else just shoots lasers near every while. Yeah.

We get spayed up by Sergeant slaughtered. The only injury that's ever sustained on that show. It's her Pentor throwing a snake into someone's shoulder. Nobody else ever gets a sprayed ankle. That's why he wins and you lose. Yeah, even when their airplane blows up. Yeah, it when their airplane blows up. Yeah, I was like, ah shit, parachute on. All right. Well, now that we've strolled down Mary Lane to win toys, we're 85% lead paint and the rest was asbestos.

Now that we really locked in that key component of our audience that makes up 16 to 75 year olds Those leave podcasts on to die to There's got to Margaret thatcher trips you want to throw up before I wrap this thing up so many before I wrap this thing up so many. If somebody's a tie for a Margaret that your just to leave podcasts on to die to is you're gonna do that like next. Does it count if you're hosting it at the time? This little Asian lady who's keeping my blood pumping could stop at any moment. All right.

Well, Cecil, you were the first to stump our expert this week. So Cecil and part of your prize package is that you get to decide who has to read next week's article. We're reading these things requires a high level of ingenuity. So I'm going to go with the only guy I know to life hack a squatty potty, tag your at Heath. I just got duct tape running at all different angles. Perfect. All right, eugenics. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, So put that in the table. And of course, also including your victory gift bag is getting to read the answer to this week's question or whatever that thing I was talking about last week with Twitter in the last week's thing because I think that's a good idea, but I can't remember what

it was exactly. And the winner this week is at T and the B with you throw it up in the air and I'll shoot it. What the hell? I never said this segment at all. I don't know what's happening here. The question of course was, what did he say to his wife when she told him about the baby?

Oh no. Good for that. All right, well, Tom, she's a thief and Noah. I mean, my boss, he'll a long enough to see it for. That's so cool. And I could take its heart. It's probably a ship ton of stem cells still in that thing. Ah, recent con. I'm your my boss.

Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week and by then, Heath will be an expert on something else. If you'd like to hear more from us between now and then, you can hear Tom and Cecil on the cognitive dissonance podcast and you can hear me, Heath and Noah on the scathing atheist, the scepticrat and God awful movies because we have more podcasts than them. Way more! If you'd like to keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com, slash whatever we end up calling it.

For more information, check the show notes for for handy links and think of all the orphans we won't have to miss diagnosed if you donate and now we attack the geogel base and rule the world battle stations attack. Cobra. Lalalalala. Whoa, wait, what, what are you doing there? I'm attacking the geodgeo base. Like you said, no, what, what, what was that war cry? Oh, what, you don't like it?

No, no, that's, that's not the work we've been shouting just Cobra for, for years. I know, but you know, we just made serpentine with this new place we're off from Cobra for years. I know, but you know, we just made Sarpenter and we have this new place we're all from Kong Cobra Laws. I just thought, you know, improvised. No, we've had this branding for years. You can't just change it like that. I know, but you know, it's a penter and stuff. He's the new leader.

I thought it'd be good change. Okay. Okay, even even if I give you that, why the Lala Lala bit at the end, can't you just do like Cobra Lala, you know, like carry the a across not the lala. Okay, I was honestly, I was caught in the moment. You do this all the time, Destro. We have branding standards. It's on the sheet.

You tried to change the logo last year to sunflower yellow. You know it's blood red. That didn't make any sense. Look, do we have to bring this stuff up on the brink of victory? Can we just get this battle over with, and then we talk about it? We work it out from there, man. Okay, okay, fine, fine, let's go. All right, here we go.

Mm. Cobra! Cobra! I quit the co-obra. Oh, don't do that.