Conspirituality started with Julian and Matthew as guests on Derek’s EarthRise podcast. We’re reposting these episodes for you to hear the origins of this project.
In episode 0.1, we discuss the anti-vax propaganda film, Plandemic, as well as the intersection between conspiracy theories and cults. We also talk about the “red pill” video by comedian JP Sears.
Show Notes
7 reasons to be very wary of “Plandemic”
What It’s Like To Believe Everything the Media Tells You: JP Sears
Blue Pill People: JP Sears
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Hey everyone, welcome to the Earthrise Podcast number eight.
This is Derek Barris coming to you in video and audio form.
And if you're watching video, you'll see two old friends of mine who I'm very old, meaning I've known them for years.
We're all getting a little gray in our beards now, but this is Julian Walker and Matthew Remsky.
We are all yoga instructors, and we all actually happen to be writers as well, and we all have our various different components of what make up our career.
But the reason I asked Matthew and Julian to be on today and to have this discussion is because
All of us have in some capacity over the decade that I've known them Discussed the problems with cult dynamics and conspiracy theories and this has been Something that I've been studying since the 90s when I got my degree in religion Matthew has gone through this he's written books on this and really studied this in depth and Julian is constantly talking about this and take we all take it very seriously and I think it's important and right now
The accuracy level that is happening is really problematic.
And that's why I wanted to facilitate this discussion.
And it really kicked off about a week ago when, just over a week ago, when the mini, the video, one video of the potential documentary now called Plandemic came out.
And it really is people that I I didn't expect to take things without merit so seriously all of a sudden.
The amount of traction on social media it's getting is really problematic.
The Atlantic has just launched a section about conspiracy theories.
The New York Times has been doing a lot of reporting.
I've been talking to the reporter over there about some of the problems they're having and showing her some of the depth of what's going on with Mickey Willis, for example.
I really just wanted to have this conversation.
I'll punt it over to you, Julian, and I want to start by asking what happened in your mind the moment you saw Plandemic?
What did you think?
Well, I thought, here we go.
Here we go.
This is going to be a wild ride.
I think that we're in this sort of Unprecedented moment where people on the left and people on the right are finding this Venn diagram overlap that has this style of conspiracy reasoning.
And I think that we, all of us, can be vulnerable to that kind of reasoning and that way of trying to explain what's going on in a world that can be scary and chaotic when stuff like this arises.
And so it was simultaneously dismaying And disappointing and scary.
And I also felt like, well, I can't just turn it off.
I felt a sort of obligation to engage and try to stay calm and non-reactive and talk about the differences between healthy skepticism and conspiracy reasoning.
And yeah, just try to be in the mix a little bit because I was pretty sure that it was going to be huge.
A lot of people are going to latch onto it, and it's this moment of recognizing that yoga people who tend to be liberal and progressive, and who tend not to fit the mold of, say, an alt-right, you know, anti-science or conservative religious sort of Republican, we're going to be vulnerable to this particular version of how to look at the world through a conspiracy lens.
Why do you think that is, Matthew?
Why are more people now, we'll start with Plandemic and then go out from there, but looking at conspiracies where maybe before they never really paid attention to them?
Well, you started with a great question for Julian about first thoughts on looking at the film.
You know, the first impression that I had was that Mickey Willis is not making a film.
It's not a documentary.
He's obviously not interviewing Judy Michovitz.
He's not digging for facts.
He's not cross-checking.
He's not corroborating.
The entire polish of the production had this aura of
charismatic radiance to it and so it was it was almost sort of instantly obvious like within about five seconds that there's this glow coming off of the screen that that is really using the discourse of COVID-19 for something else for a kind of emotional bonding and so so the other but
Now, I have some questions about, Julian, what you said about what the political demographic is of yoga and wellness.
That's not that clear to me, and I just wish we had some more solid data on that going into this.
But on a personal note, or within my wedge of social media sort of discourse, The thing that I found most painful about the immediate uptake of this video is the conflation of Judy Mikovits with a kind of survivor persona or archetype who must be believed
uh who is trying to get a a story of abuse really out and uncovered and who's being listened to by you know this um you know silver fox kind of guy who is going to with his beautiful blue eyes take everything in and listen to her in a way that nobody has listened to her before and so there's i i there's this immediate kind of
um, overlap between, uh, the work that I do with, um, people who really have been conspired against, uh, in situations of institutional abuse in, in the yoga world, in the Buddhist world, and the figure of Mike of it's who, you know, and the figure of Mike of it's who, you know, who I, I have no idea what her, what her, uh, you know, personal story is beyond what's been reported in dozens of, you know, fact-checked sources that at least outline the contours
fact-checked sources that at So I don't know anything about her personally, but it seems like the structure of the interview is set up to kind of mirror a The empowerment of the survivor.
And so that creates a really weird kind of friction or static between two of my worlds, right?
The world of critical thinking and the world of supporting survivors of institutional abuse.
So that's super, super difficult for me to see and to navigate and really painful.
Because the people that I write about, the people that I interview, the people whose stories I corroborate, as I said, they were conspired against.
But reporting really involves finding the receipts for that.
And when you know that Mickey Willis isn't producing receipts, then something else is happening.
May I jump in right there?
Do you mind?
I think what you're saying is so interesting, and those distinctions are worth kind of teasing apart even further, and I'm curious to hear more from you, Matthew, and any thoughts you may have, Derek.
You know, it's almost like there are these two categories, and then there's a third, right?
In one category, you are actively doing some kind of investigation, whether it is criminal or scientific or journalistic, where you're seeking to discover the facts that then will add up to the conclusion or the explanation.
In another form, You have your conclusion or explanation that you're trying to arrive at, and then you go in search of whatever cherry-picked data or evidence you can find to fit that narrative.
This seems almost to be a third to me, where the conclusion or the explanation is not well fleshed out, but the feeling that we want to have and that we want to bond in together about us against the evil power structure that's conspiring against us, Uh, is already there.
And so in the documentary style, and I've noticed this since, since 9-11, these, these internet documentaries that are made usually by, by small, you know, people who have relatively small budgets and are doing it out of their, out of their home office or their garage.
There tends to be this, it's almost like they've absorbed a vocabulary that has to do with how to create a paranoid, emotional manipulation.
That people very easily can get caught up in, which is quite cultish.
Right.
Well, you know, and I'm glad that you identify that kind of third category, because I think it's really at play.
And when I wrote a little bit about it, I drew it out against the backdrop of Willis, less than 24 hours after releasing the trailer, releasing a kind of selfie sermon onto his Facebook page.
Where the where the the the basic thrust was I'm here to gaze into your eyes and to speak to you in the second-person address and to calm your fears sort of By talking about how I'm not afraid to die Right.
So there was this there was this flip between I'm gonna scare The living daylights out of you with one of the most terrifying stories that I'm not really articulating.
So as you said, it's left vague, right?
It's not like he's finding data to match his conclusion.
The conclusion is an affect.
The conclusion is a mood.
And that mood is sort of made circular by this rhythm between I'm going to terrify you and then I'm going to console you.
I'm going to console you with a kind of neo-spiritual language around the fact that we can know something more deeply, the fact that we can rely upon our intuition, the fact that we can really focus upon the necessity for us to have Sovereignty or but but all within internal terms.
I mean these have all of the terms that are used are they have political implications but but there's kind of a New Age hyper spiritualized language used to describe a way of knowing that rationalizes the complete abandonment not only of evidence but also of Of the notion that there should be a conclusion.
And I think that's where your third framework, I think, is really valuable.
Because if nobody is going to press Willis for, okay, well, what's your actual point?
I think there was an investigative journalist who actually did press him on that, and I think he dodged.
He said, we're in the exploratory phase.
Right, we're in the exploratory phase.
Which also includes crowdsourcing, asking all his Facebook friends, who should I talk to?
Right, right.
He also specifically said something, which I actually find a through line with what we were talking about in email with the JP Sears thing, is just, it was this
Indication that this is my truth and we're exploring a, with Willis specifically, we're exploring other viewpoints as if, I always think of the creationism versus evolutionary biology, like how creationists got to equal playing field with biology because they just kept saying it was a debate.
And that particular piece I see rampant right now is just like, Well, it's my truth.
Here's another side of the story.
Why don't we talk about this?
As if it's equally valid to all of the other people.
Right.
And so that particular rhetorical strategy also allows the speaker to say, look, I'm open.
I'm receptive.
My consciousness can hold multiple truths.
I'm humble!
Pardon me?
I'm humble!
Yeah, it provides the pretense of humility.
Whereas real not knowing is just not knowing, right?
Copying to the fact that you're going to have to figure out what your epistemology is and who your experts actually are.
But yeah, so every rhetorical device in this sector of the argument really positions the speaker, the user of conspiracy discourse, as somebody who's following a kind of spiritual path into the unknown.
And you're right, Derek, that this has been, we've seen this, we've seen this happen like over and over again.
I think with this particular With this subject matter, with this content, with the material of the virus and the potential treatments or the absence of treatments, we really hit on all of the tender notes of wellness, economy, and substances, right?
It's like, so now we're talking about our body and we're talking about something that's unseen and we're talking about whether or not the government is going to enter our bodies.
And we're talking like, it seems to be this perfect storm in terms of content.
And at the same time, the people like Willis are openly admitting that they don't really respect what the content is enough to figure out what evidence actually is.
This is a feeling, or an intuition, or something I've noticed.
If I think about What Americans, and I know you're Canadian, but actually I don't know if your country has had as big of a sacrifice since World War II either.
We have entered a phase where I know in my lifetime, I'm 44, this is the first time I'm being asked to sacrifice something.
And part of it is tough because there is the economy and the question and as I was telling Julian, my wife lost her job and we lost our healthcare and you know, that's really tough to deal with and we're navigating that space.
But what I'm being asked to sacrifice is I'm in the demographic that probably would survive the disease, but I'm being asked not to go out and help spread it.
I feel like I'm looking at a group of people, and every time I write wellness, I do put it in quotes because I want to make it understood that there is no such thing as a wellness community, but it is people who generally, whether it's yoga or food or things, they're taking care of themselves.
They care about themselves.
But this is the first time I think a lot of people in America are being asked to sacrifice something.
Watching their reaction, it feels like a bunch of little children reacting out.
And I don't know, of course if I write that, and I probably have somewhere, but when you write that, I understand you get that immediate visceral reaction and people are upset.
And there's a lot of different articles about how to talk to skeptics right now coming out, and some of them might have some efficacy, some I don't.
But Julian, how do you talk to people to try to educate them without immediately triggering them?
It's incredibly, incredibly difficult.
There's so many things that each of you said that I wanted to touch on.
One is the notion that you're being red-pilled, right?
So the Matrix becomes this metaphor for the spiritual quest of waking up out of the dream of the mainstream media, Big Pharma, what the government wants you to believe, all that kind of stuff.
So there is this heroic narrative.
Another is, you know, I grew up in apartheid-era South Africa and, you know, played in a protest rock band, had to play under an assumed name because it was illegal to protest the government.
Fled the country knowing I would be put in jail for six years if I'd stuck around because I had officially become a conscientious objector and filled out those documents.
And so growing up in a situation like that, I feel like it gave me a sort of reference point for, I don't know, just being in a culture that really isn't a kind of turmoil where your everyday sense of things being okay is never really that secure.
And I observe exactly the same thing that you're saying, Derek.
I had a thought about it the other day where I just went, oh, I wonder if for a lot of people, this is the first time it's ever been right in their face that there's this uncertainty and there's this need for sacrifice that feels like an imposition on their quote-unquote freedom, which really is their sense of security and that they can do whatever they want and everything's going to be okay because America is so wonderful.
And then in terms of, you know, you use the word skeptic again, and I want to I want to just make that distinction that I think there is such a thing as healthy skepticism, but I think healthy skepticism proceeds along a path of inquiry that's really interested in evidence and Being self-critical about whether or not your logic makes sense and relying on reason and being in a kind of dialogue with the community of people who are adequate to the task to say, hey, is this making sense?
Does this hold up?
And there's something about that sort of healthy skepticism that I think leads to changing your mind in the direction of where the consensus is going based on evidence and reason.
Whereas the conspiracy mindset tends to overlook a lot of that.
There's a lot of speculation, there's a lot of Taking correlation to mean causation, there's a lot of making leaps and ignoring the evidence or stacking all sorts of claims that have not been proven because, yeah, yeah, remember JFK and 9-11 and this and that, as if those somehow have something to do, say, with COVID-19.
So it is very tricky.
I find that, in answer to your question, I've intuitively been much more drawn to Trying to craft posts and videos that speak to people who might be interacting with the conspiracy material and are unsure of how to process it more than trying to reach people who are really, really gung-ho into the conspiracy theories, because I don't know that I necessarily can.
So I've been focusing more on Logical fallacies and how science works and the difference between correlation and causation, things like Occam's Grazer, which argument has more unsubstantiated assumptions in it.
It's probably not going to be true if it has a whole lot of that.
But I love how, Matthew, you've been sort of adding a really important piece that I think sort of is underneath that or maybe arches over that, that has to do with this more emotional, psychological, maybe even trauma.
Yeah, well, let me back up and say something related to the childishness that you referred to.
Speaking from Canada, my response isn't initially that, oh, People are being asked to sacrifice and so they're going nuts because they're entitled or they're bratty or they... What I see is a whipsaw in American culture between absolute and criminal governmental neglect of the population.
And then the public health sort of You know, network, being asked to ask that same population to commit to certain ideals.
So we go from complete abandonment to really rigid social constraints.
And those social constraints, especially when they impact the
The fundamental ideology that I should be able to take care of myself and me and my own, it's like Americans have been deprived through lockdowns of this thing that they were brainwashed to believe was, you know, the only thing that was going to help them out, which was self-care, which was focusing upon individual wellness or Or sovereignty, right?
So I'm not really that surprised at, on one level, at the extreme response.
But with regard to speaking with people who are I mean, my framework is cult research, and so if I think about the person who is enmeshed in, has been recruited into, is repeating, is recruiting others into conspiracy discourse, And there seems to be a strong emotional charge around that.
You know, the person on social media who you can see, they actually haven't been off all day, or the last time they commented on your thread it was four o'clock in the morning where they were, or they just seem to always be there posting some stuff, or what have you.
You know that and that whole that's that whole sort of scene is indicative of perhaps a kind of behavioral control and as well that then is accentuated by social media and it's and it's mechanism.
But when I think about the person who has been deceived and is Holding on to and espousing a deception as though they are dependent upon it.
Then I think in cultic frameworks.
And the thing that you can't do with the person who is the member of a high demand group.
And here, the high demands are, you know, here are the things that you're going to reject.
The mainstream media, Dr. Fauci, the notion that, you know, Bill Gates actually might be a philanthropist.
You know, If you're engaged with somebody who's enmeshed with that, you're not going to argue them out of it.
You're not going to show them that somehow they've made mistakes.
They've made errors because actually that was part of the recruitment process.
They were told by the conspiracy theorist that they had it wrong.
They were told by Mickey Willis that they weren't seeing things correctly and that he was going to open the gateway into a new way of seeing things.
Right, exactly.
I think the person who advocates for critical thinking runs the risk of repeating that structure in interchanges.
I didn't go this far in my writing on Mickey Willis, but I'll just say it here.
You know, that loop between scaring the hell out of his viewership and then consoling them the day after is familiar to anybody who studies abuse cycles.
But it's familiar in terms of cultic research to anybody who studies how leadership forms around disorganized attachment patterns, where you are drawn to the leader because of their emotional control, not because they give you care, but because you're actually confused about the difference between the care that they show and the terror that they wield over you.
And so, you know, it's not like somebody who's really into Mickey Willis is going to listen to a lecture on logical fallacies.
What they're going to, what they're going to, what they might listen to, and it's not even really listening, what they might See modeled and it's harder to expose this because it's not as shiny as what Mickey Willis does what they might see modeled is a reasonable form of secure attachment and and that's why everybody who works in cult recovery
That that area says that what's really really important for the person who's trying to make their way out of indoctrination is that they try to if if they have the opportunity to connect with Secure attachments outside of the group that model for them a non-exploitative emotional relationship and that's really gold and if and if especially
I think for the viewers, the listeners, this might be helpful to think about.
If you've seen a friend go down a rabbit hole and become no longer recognizable, you know, The cult literature speaks about that.
That's like watching your friend join Scientology.
It's like watching your friend join an MLM.
It's like watching your friend join, you know, Michael Roach's cult in Arizona or whatever.
What are you going to do?
Are you going to tell them that they're wrong?
Are you going to tell them that they're not thinking clearly?
Or are you going to say, How are you?
How are you doing?
Like, how are you feeling?
I'm feeling kind of scared about all of this stuff.
What about you?
Because, you know, the researchers that I know say that re-establishing some kind of emotional transparency and trust is like That's what the Willis film takes away.
Because as an emotional abuse cycle, to scare somebody and then to try to console them, or to pretend that you're consoling them, or to put on a show of consolation, that's not love, that's not care, that's not trust.
That's creating a trauma bond.
So let's think about one of the specifics, and you just brought it up, Matthew, with that fear of death, because My entryway into Plandemic was an article I wrote for Big Think.
It has about 1.6 million views at this point, and I think the reason is that I was the first to get out there.
Because as soon as I saw it, I knew I had to write something about it, because I knew what was happening.
But you can imagine my Twitter feed after that kind of traffic.
And besides the ad hominem attacks that came at me, I mean, most of the attacks were at my character, not at what I was saying, which is common when you don't have a defense.
That is a huge clue that the film isn't about the data.
It's about Mickey Willis, right?
Yes.
Like if immediately the critic gets faced with ad hominem attack, you know that the entire spectacle is about relationships.
It's not about data.
Yes, good point, yeah.
So it was mostly about the fact that I'm writing this and I'm a yoga instructor and no one bothered to see that I was a journalist for a decade before that and I've been ever since.
But that's irrelevant.
But one thing, I mean it is relevant, but right now One thing that I've noticed, and this isn't just, this did come at me, but I also noticed it from other people who are skeptical of the shelter-at-home orders, is that they say, I don't fear death, I know there's something after.
And I've seen this repeated over and over again, but if they're saying that, I'm trying to find, and not that logic is going to work here, but it's like this, what I'm seeing is, Throw in 5G, throw in Bill Gates, throw in, like somebody, somebody commented the other day, is this, are they trying to kill everyone or institute a new world order or trying to microchip?
I mean, those are very different things, but it was all responding to the same thing.
So with the fear of death specifically, it's just like, you shouldn't fear death.
And these are people, again, in the wellness community that are saying this.
And I'm trying to, I feel like there's so many different things and trying to tease them apart and explain them one by one, it's impossible, first of all.
But how do you manage to even have conversations when there's so many different conflicting ideas coming at you at one time?
Well, it's like a hero looking for a narrative, right?
I'm going to be a hero.
Yeah, very well put.
to be a heroic figure as opposed to someone who feels helpless, disoriented and confused.
Let me find a narrative within which I get to buy into a cause for which I would be willing to die.
Because what could be more heroic than that?
And I was thinking earlier, Matthew, it's like this two sided coin.
And I know, you know, one thing I should acknowledge, because you're in Canada, what we refer to as liberal here, is probably to the right of the spectrum in Canada.
So there's this weird, and I've noticed this in the yoga community for a long time, there's this libertarian, entrepreneurial, I'm gonna manifest wealth, where wealth and success is a reflection of my spiritual accomplishments.
And my health is also something that makes me better than other people because I take care of myself, because I think the right thoughts, and I do these practices.
And my beauty is also a reflection.
I find the body beautiful and healthy.
All of this is a reflection of some kind of grand quest.
quest for spiritual enlightenment.
So, so all of that then also is, it's kind of antithetical to a certain type of more liberal and progressive care for all citizens because it's wanting to set yourself apart and, and, and win at the game of life.
And that is sort of the other side of a coin of what I see coming from the right, which is more the self-reliance, you know, keep your big government out of, out of my life.
I'm going to do whatever the hell I want to do.
I want to be free to carry my gun in public.
I don't want to have to listen to any of the rules that you're putting on me because that's the beginning of tyranny.
You trying, Obama, you trying to give me affordable health care means that you're actually Hitler.
So it's all so confused, right?
The Hitler mustache is because of that.
That is the sort of political overlap that I'm finding fascinating and yet, of course, really disturbing.
And then there's the spiritual-religious piece, right, which I think is part of what you're alluding to there, Derek, where somehow because I'm in this quest And it has to do with epistemology as well, right?
How do I know what's true?
Will I trust my intuition?
Will I trust what the cultish kind of leader figure tells me?
And I'm going to distrust these over-generalized groups like Big Pharma and the mainstream media and anyone who might be a career-long public servant who has a graduate degree in the topic of epidemiology or more public health.
But I am going to trust this person just for, almost for purely emotional and grand narrative heroic reasons.
All of that sort of adds up to then this notion that I'm part of an in-group who will go to heaven when I die.
Or, you know, who has sacrificed myself for a really noble cause and taken the red pill.
So those are what gets sort of triggered in my mind as you talk.
Yeah, Derek, like what I wonder about, it was a feature refrain of Willis's sermon to talk about or to claim that he wasn't afraid of death.
And this was also a big feature.
It was probably the keynote in Charles Eisenstein's very, very long novella-length essay called The Coronation, where his basic argument two weeks into lockdown was that, you know, the real pandemic is fear.
That actually it's the fear that human beings foster within them and within communities that is really going to do us all in.
And there's... I don't think we can look at those claims without understanding the privilege from which they're made, you know?
I don't...
You know, I don't think I'm not afraid to die is something that you say on Facebook if your family member just got shot jogging.
Yeah, that's right.
And so there's something deceptive about the The notion itself, it's almost as though it's spoken by the person who's confident enough to know that they are well enough taken care of, and that death can therefore be some sort of metaphor for red-pilling, or for transformation, or that it's conflated with the death of one's identity, or ego, or something like that.
Because all of those terms and themes get wound together.
I think that this guy has children, and I think when it came down to it, he probably doesn't want to be intubated all alone, never see them again.
I mean, we all come to our own, you know, peace with that, but like, There's something very manipulative about the usage of that term and that whole framework, and I just don't buy it.
I think it's kind of a leisure class.
Theatrical, too.
Yeah, it's theatrical.
It's absolutely theatrical.
Right, the leisure class, that's a great way to put it.
It's also so incredibly patronizing to be told, incredibly patronizing to be told that I'm Taking care of myself, or I'm listening to public health officials, or I'm wearing a mask out in public, or I'm washing my hands, or I'm homeschooling my children because I'm afraid of death.
Like, that's, it's just, the insult is extraordinary as well.
And that's, I mean, we could also just talk about manners too, right?
Is that really something that you want to, being Canadian, that's kind of big for me, is that really something you want to tell people?
Is that the reason that they are acting in, you know, a socially aware or at least somewhat, you know, dedicated to the commons fashion is because they're afraid of death?
Incredible!
Yeah, and not to mention the incredible insult to all of the frontline healthcare workers who are putting themselves at risk every day, who are dying, who, you know, are exhausted.
It's just absolutely wild.
I wanted to ask you both something because I can imagine someone who would be listening or watching saying, "Well, all of this is well and good.
"You're telling us not to be patronizing.
"You're being patronizing 'cause you think you know "what the truth is and we're deluded." And you think that you can't talk about this in relationship to cult dynamics.
Well, what if we're the ones who've woken up from the cult of the mainstream media and Big Pharma and all of their lies, and you're actually just shills who are trying to keep us locked in?
You compare it to cult as if there's an overlap there, but you're not taking that overlap far enough.
You're comparing it to someone who really has suffered abuse at the hands of the cult.
I love that you're doing that, speaking as myself, because there's so much nuance there, right?
In terms of the empathy and the curiosity about, okay, why might someone feel that they have been deceived and therefore latch onto this.
But I'm curious, any thoughts you each might have about that?
Well, I'll start with the media part because I have worked in media for almost 30 years.
And someone replied, I mean, what is it?
Mainstream, MSM.
I get that a lot.
Like, you're just falling.
Or, you know, the show part, I'm like, I broadcast everything from this apartment.
This is what I have.
Like, there's no one paying me to come in and do this for Big Pharma.
As I mentioned in the article, I'm working on a book on psychedelics, but also mental health and the chemical imbalance of mental health.
It is a seriously flawed ideology that was specifically promoted by pharmaceutical companies to get us to get hooked onto their pills.
So that's something I've been investigating for a while.
It's not like this inability to weigh well, if you don't believe this, then this also must be true.
No, I actually think vaccines work.
But with the media, I posed this to someone who came at me with that.
And of course, they didn't reply.
But do you really think that CNBC, ABC, CBS, Vice, Science, The Lancet, PubMed.
All of these different people are conspiring.
It's absurd to think that journalists from around, we'll throw in The Guardian, right?
We can go internationally.
We can like Al Jazeera, BBC, like all of these people are secretly texting one another to get a narrative to drive home.
It's, it's absolutely insane that that's, but the MSM, again, it's, it's just, it's easy to compartmentalize and it becomes the fact that people who I, and I'll use the American term of liberal, who I thought were more liberal and socially minded are parroting who I thought were more liberal and socially minded are parroting talking points of
The Falun Gong network, who is a Trump supporter in China, and then they're taking those ideas and putting them, which is where Mickey Willis found out about Mikovits, by the way.
It was an interview that she did on OAN.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah, this is all coming from a very particular deceptive stance, and to find that all these people, again, in the wellness community, are parroting these lines, I don't think they understand how propaganda works, or how deeply enmeshed and confusing all of it is, and that is troublesome.
So from the media side, it makes no sense, as most of this doesn't.
I think it's a great question, Julian, and it really sort of It makes me wonder about the filter bubble that this broadcast will go out into, you know, as defined by, you know, Derek's lists, but also it might be broader too.
Oops, I just dropped my light.
It might be broader as well because of this recent article.
And if you get the hashtags right or whatever, but why don't we just, why don't I try an experiment here, which is, Why don't I speak directly to that person?
And, you know, it'll feel maybe a little bit contrived or something like that, but... Okay, well, I mean, I'll just try it.
I'll say, I would say... It's a really good question.
It's very difficult to figure out what is true.
We've got a lot of data coming at us from a lot of different angles.
And...
If, like me, you have been, you are a survivor of institutional abuse, then you know that your intuition has been a survival skill.
And that's been super important for you.
And, you know, from the work I do, I know that the prickles up the back of the neck, The sense of hyper-vigilance that overtakes us when we encounter certain stories or certain figures, we've relied on that in very crucial ways in order to keep us safe.
And my concern is that that intuition can also be manipulated.
And so what I am really sad about is watching folks who have used intuitive ways of knowing for a very long time to keep themselves safe, be at the same time, have that weaponized against them.
In order for somebody to really create a kind of emotional manipulation.
And, you know, I don't know what else.
I wouldn't know what else.
So I mean, I'll trail off there.
But because I was going to start to go into, you know, my description or my particular take on what Mickey was doing in that film and then in his sermon.
But then we might get into data, then we might get into facts.
Well, it's easy as the person who you're talking to.
It's easier to see.
Why the mainstream media, big government, big pharma might be lying to me so as to control me and have monetary gain and power.
Yes, but that was always true.
Sounds like we're role-playing now.
But that was always true.
That was always true.
Capitalism has always been.
What does Mickey Willis have to gain from me listening to his story?
Attention.
Attention.
He has to gain attention.
And attention is money.
It's also a good amount of social power and narcissistic feedback and supply.
If you look at the comment thread on his page, it is people saying all kinds of things that they can't possibly verify about him.
What a wonderful human being you are.
What a wonderful father.
I can't believe how calm and relaxing your eyes are.
It's fantastic.
So, yeah, what does he want?
You know, we'd have to ask his therapist and they would have to break confidentiality.
I don't know what he wants, but he's getting attention.
He's getting attention.
There is something called the attention economy, and that is one of the most valuable resources.
Yeah, I mean, technocratically, that's absolutely true.
In terms of charismatic leadership, from a cult dynamics perspective, Attention is kind of like the feedback loop currency, where, you know, the more views, the more, you know, adoring comments he gets, the more that cycle may be personally gratifying and rewarding to him.
But also to his viewership, because they're able then to engage in the next round of, oh my god, what is he going to tell us about our horrible world?
Oh my god, how wise is he to also be able to assist us after that's done?
Yeah, and what's the next opportunity for us all to bond with him and with one another?
Exactly, exactly.
And so another sort of element to this perfect storm is increased social isolation at this particular time, right?
It's almost as if the pandemic, distancing, lockdown has created this hunger That is profound for new forms of bonding and so and so that that I think is very poignant to to reflect upon.
Yeah, yeah, and then of course there's the other really banal piece which is, you know, his interview subject has the Amazon number one bestseller in the world right now as a result of that interview that's been seen by... Is it really number one?
Yeah, it was the number one.
Is it self-published, Derek?
No, it was on the same publishing house that published my last book, actually, called Sky Horse.
And what was interesting about that, I brought this up in my post and I also tweeted this at the New York Times reporter who replied and was just like, oh boy.
Shortly after my book was published, I just did some research on the house and found out that the founder and president of that publishing house is specifically focusing the profits of that house to help fund books and projects that prove the link between vaccines and autism.
Oh man.
So it's baked into that.
And that's actually what the Forbes writer said about my article, like when she linked to it said baked into it.
And that's what I was specifically referring to is, It's the anti-vaccination agenda is baked into everything at least from Mickiewicz's point.
I don't know what Willis has to gain from that but that could also be part of the dynamic is The anti-vaxxers, as Nature just published in the Times and Atlantic picked up, they're a smaller group but they are gaining in influence very rapidly and there's something about not having a voice and then suddenly people start listening to you.
It's addictive.
Right.
And that is actually one question I want to make sure we want to get in.
This argument that I keep seeing pop up, I've seen it for years because I've covered the anti-vax movement for a number of years, is that Well, if I don't want to get vaccinated and you're vaccinated, how does that hurt you?
And again, I think it's first of all, it's people not understanding how vaccines work and what's necessary for herd immunity and things of that nature.
The fact that we are seeing polio outbreaks in Afghanistan and Africa right now, that we are seeing the 2000 and 2019 was the highest number of measles cases in the United States since 1992, which was the year before Andrew Wakefeld published his first false study.
All these connections are there, but again, that takes research and understanding.
So, I don't know your feelings, Matthew, on vaccines.
Julie and I have talked about it a bit, but when you see that particular framing, this is My choice, it's not going to affect you.
How do you counter that argument?
And we can take it beyond vaccines, but I do think that there is an important, and I'll just throw this in too because so we're not stuck on vaccines.
Another thing that I've written about, and I've found libertarians especially hate this argument, but Collectivist societies think different than individualist societies, and America is the epitome of an individualistic society.
Well, that's where I would start, is that health is not some sort of, you know, personal race.
That health is actually a collective activity, it's a social activity.
You know, we have public health Networks because health is public We don't nobody nobody gets sick alone.
Nobody dies alone.
Nobody gets well alone.
Nobody gets better alone you don't you know, you're yes your body has an immune system and you have capacity to recover but You know, it's like you're too we're dependent on each other We're just dependent on each other and and that informs my thinking on on vaccines and everything else.
I mean like But I also grew up with a mother who remembered polio outbreaks.
You did too, right?
In South Africa?
I mean, just my grandparents, yeah.
Right.
I mean, it's like... But what's incredible to me is that I will have people within my social media feeds who are that old, who have living memory of polio outbreaks.
Uh, who are, are, you know, rejecting vaccine science.
Anyway, it's incredible.
Um, I forgot the question though.
Well, it was, how do you, no, you just answered it.
It was the, I know I went into two different directions because they were in my head, but the basic parameters were, how do you respond to someone who said, well, it's my choice.
It doesn't affect your health.
Yeah, it's really tough.
I mean, the vaccine conversation in general, I've been hesitant of ever wading into because...
Where, as with a lot of very, very organized kind of conspiracy reasoning, there's a Gish Gallop effect where just the number of different things that you're now having to spend hours and hours looking into and debunking and all of the different links to articles on PubMed that have since, you know, research papers that have since been invalidated or have failed to be replicated or have been shown to have poor methodology.
The amount of stuff that you have to do on each of these different Talking points is, it's just so difficult.
Saying to people, well, if you learn about how vaccines work, if you learn about the history, if you recognize that we're in this unprecedented moment of privilege where we live in a society where diseases, in which diseases that have decimated human beings for all, you know, for so long, for hundreds if not thousands of years, and we We don't even know about them anymore.
We've heard the name but we don't know what it's like when someone has polio or diphtheria or a really serious case of measles, whooping cough, on and on.
They've been so spectacularly successful that we have no idea how bad life is without them, and so therefore we think maybe we don't need them, especially if we come from this mindset that, well, I do all of these different things to be healthy and have a strong immune system, so why should I have to take this thing that might potentially be poisonous?
It's so, there's just so much there.
It's almost an impossible conversation.
I think explaining herd immunity is one good thing.
The specific question that you're asking where if someone says, well, it's my choice and if I choose not to vaccinate myself, how does it affect you?
You believe you're protected.
I believe I don't need protection.
If you're protected, how am I negatively impacting you?
And explaining that, well, there are people within the society who may be immunocompromised, who may be too young, who may be too old, for whom the vaccine would not be safe, because we do actually understand what makes vaccines safe or unsafe.
You're protecting them in the same way that the social distancing measures we're taking right now would protect people like that, even though, you know, three of us would probably be fine after a few weeks of hell.
And that herd immunity is a real thing.
That to get above 70% of the population vaccinated starts to take us in a direction where the likelihood of having serious outbreaks that could lead to terrible effects becomes lower and lower.
I also want to throw out there that vaccination and its purported injuries really center upon something iconic and primal, which is the child.
And, and, and it's just as just to armchair psychologize a little bit.
It's pretty clear to me that children are being used as self objects within a lot of these discourses, amongst a lot of these speakers to, to make a point about bodily autonomy that perhaps the adult to make a point about bodily autonomy that perhaps the adult doesn't feel they I'm not going to let the state touch my child.
My child?
Yes, our child, my child, which is really me, right?
And then the flip side of that is that the pathologization of the neuroatypical child through Wakefield's bullshit argument, which is that autism is a disease or it's a negative impact that has been caused by a medical injury, that whole framework has at the root of it the neuroatypical child.
Who is, has to be framed as like a victim, instead of somebody who might have another approach to life, or might have other skills, or might be, you know, might might tell us something different about knowledge or creativity or being in the world.
So there's some weird stuff going on with the child as the projection of the self within the discourse where we don't, you know, obviously the parent is consenting for the child and making decisions on behalf of the child and has guardianship and all of those legal rights, but
They can take it to the extent where they are able to tell medical experts that they will not participate.
But they're making that choice on behalf of a child who isn't able to understand or isn't able to rock the science themselves or what have you.
So it's fascinating.
It's fascinating.
There's something going on with children.
I guess that's my comment.
And the inability of the adult to differentiate as well.
Yeah.
To be able to say, oh, you have rights, you have rights, and you should receive care.
And maybe my ability to do that is not sovereign.
Maybe I don't have all of the answers with regard to how you should be taken care of.
Maybe my parenting isn't total.
Maybe my parenting, this is what I'm getting at, maybe my parenting isn't Maybe I'm not the final authority on how my child is going to be healthy in the world.
That's something that's going on in this discourse as well, is that parents are reckoned with something called humility, which is, I really don't know exactly, I know how to love this child, but I don't know exactly what's going to be right for them.
That's difficult to come to, actually, as a parent.
But it's honest.
One last point I wanted to touch on.
We're coming up on the hour and we discussed this on email but and I touched upon it earlier with the JP Sears video and he wrote and who I've always liked and think he's funny and charismatic.
Me too.
He's great and he did this video about a week ago of basically In a sense, poking fun at a lot of what we've been talking about, just taking this whole thing seriously, like listening to experts, listening to the media, trying to put some of our faith in people who are there and they are educated in this.
And he did a video poking fun at that, but on a level that was slightly disturbing, because it just, it didn't seem how much of it was joking and not.
And then I was like, okay, well, how much of it is me being triggered by it and how much of it is just satire?
But then you read the comments and you're like, oh, he touched a nerve that a lot of people really feel about the media and experts right now.
And then I watched his response video this morning and it actually doubled down on it.
Where he basically, and I mentioned this before, where he's like, well, this is my truth and How, you know, again, how do we get this point where there is no such thing as my truth?
I mean, even truth itself is relative, but besides that, this whole idea, I can take care of myself.
And that's fine until someone's breaking into your house or until you have a heart attack when you, like we said, you have to rely on other people.
And I just want to get both of your reactions to what he's done in the last week.
Well, there's so many thoughts that I've had on exactly this line.
I feel like we're in this moment where, through the last five years, we've had from the Trump Machine, this idea of alternative facts, this idea that if you don't like what someone says that's true about you, you just say it's fake news, right?
This idea that you just say, well that's all the mainstream media, that's the failing New York Times, that's the terrible CNN, everyone there is just an absolutely horrible person.
So this continuous muddying of the water and this continuous gaslighting around Well, is there such a thing as truth, right?
When you're confronted directly on it, you just say, well, we happen to have alternative facts.
What the hell is an alternative fact?
So that's been coming at us from the right since the Trump campaign.
And then from the left, I've seen something sort of building since the 90s, which is the influence of a postmodern way of looking at things, which I think has a lot, you can say a lot of good things about it.
About how postmodernism allows us to see things through different lenses and look at discourses in different ways.
But the negative influence that it's had, I think, has been this extreme relativism, where there's no such thing as a fact.
Everything is relative.
Even science is just another myth that we have made up.
Science has tried to do this totalitarian power grab on our understanding of the world.
I think amongst more New Age circles, that postmodern way of thinking has taken root.
And amongst more sort of traditional religious circles, the more kind of Trumpian thing that I described has taken root in this odd way where there are mirror images of one another, where ultimately you're left with this idea that whatever anyone says is sort of true where ultimately you're left with this idea that whatever anyone says is And who are you to say that it isn't?
And there's nowhere you can plant the flag of anything objective or evidence-based or actually being logically coherent.
And that is a very odd moment to be in.
And it coincides, of course, with the internet becoming as huge as it has, where now anyone with a few minutes they can spend on Google dubs themselves a researcher.
I've done my research on this.
You haven't done research, you've hopped from link to link to link on a bunch of websites that already have the worldview that you wanted to flesh out, and now you're calling it research.
And it's, it's just, it's a weird time.
Derek, I think your initial response to J.P.
Sears was quite generous.
Because I saw the day after, or maybe... I didn't see the behind-the-scenes video.
I haven't watched that through yet.
I don't think it'll take 15 minutes to do that.
His partner, Amber Sears, posted either to Instagram or Facebook the day after a photograph of them together with her own sermon of self-sovereignty.
Like, how much freedom do you want to give up for this?
I mean, it was basically all of the Mickey Willis talking points.
If he ever comes up with clear talking points, that's what they would be.
And so, I don't think he was satirizing us.
I think he was making a political statement under the cover of satire.
And that tells me that he was never really a satirist, actually.
And there's a really ingenious flip, too, because to spend years sort of poking fun at you know, new age, logical fallacies and, you know, privileged affects of, you know, the leisure class yogi or whatever, to sort of mock that archetype as being foolish and then flip it and to say, actually, you know, who's really foolish
right now are the people who are taking the public health advice seriously.
And then he, but he opens that video and he peppers it with his own research, right?
Like he doesn't quote the Bakersfield doctors, but he talks about, you know, transmission rates in California and various counties and stuff like that.
So he's actually trying to make an argument.
He's trying to, He's trying to debunk the support that the public health consensus is trying to communicate.
He's doing a serious job at that.
I think those are his real views.
And they align with, I believe he also collaborated with Tony Robbins just in the past year on a number of projects.
Wasn't he promoting kind of like a life coach platform for a while as well?
Uh, so I think there's yeah, I think there's I think there's an aspect to to his media content, uh, which is a first of all just really about attention, but then but then secondly, there's this through line of well Individual rights and responsibilities are actually at the top of the pecking order in terms of moral value so so it I it felt consistent to me and yeah, and it really pissed me off because um
Yeah, I mean, he's good at it.
Some of those talking points that you're referencing was what, when I first saw it, I tried to sort of go, rather like Derek, I tried to go along with it, like, okay, this is satire, and, you know, he does take lots of different positions in terms of who he's pretending to speak as in terms of the satire at different times, and a lot of it I really appreciated, and sometimes I'm like, oh, that struck a little close to home, but maybe that's just me, and humor, you know, humor should have
Whatever targets it wants to have but those talking points were I think Almost subconsciously making me uncomfortable like oh it sounds like he really believes this and when he did the follow-up video and Thanks everyone for reaching a million subscribers and if you look at his list of videos that video about I think everyone should trust the mainstream media is I mean it has Probably four to eight times more than any of his other videos that I saw on that list.
So there's been a huge response to it and he kept saying things like, I'm realizing that so many of you out there actually think like me and want to support me.
I know you're trying to wrap up, Derek, but it reminds me of the fact that nobody knew who the hell Jordan Peterson was until he went to the Canadian Parliament and said a bunch of lies about the new law against hate speech involving trans people, right?
It's like he's not, you know, J.P.
Sears has a kind of like Demographic and a bubble around his satire, but I think it proves that what he's done with the video is actually he's made a series of political statements that are resonant and that's what's pushed him to a million subscribers.
And now he's going to be known for something else.
Now he's got to carry that.
Now he's a political actor.
Well let me just say, I called him out on exactly that.
I called him out on exactly that and said, you know, maybe I'm wrong.
Why don't you do your next video speaking as a conspiracy theorist and sort of do satire on that.
And in that case, I'll forgive you.
And that's the only comment he responded to of mine.
He said, I'm not looking for forgiveness.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, any points we didn't touch on?
I'm not, I'm not in total hurry.
I just know that, you know, Tresh trying to keep it within limits and we've touched upon a lot, but I want to wrap this up with anything you would like to say.
I want to ask each of you again, because I think, I think this is useful and in terms of the people that I've been interacting with, just in a nutshell, what, what is the reason why You are not sort of captivated by any of the number of mishmash of conspiracy theories going around right now.
Why are you so confident that the perspective I think we pretty much all three share is accurate and worthy of your trust?
I can speak from Being educated as a journalist, my undergraduate studies was in religion, and one of the things I'm very grateful for in my life is that I was not raised with religion.
I am an atheist, but I also very much value what religion brings to communities.
And that sort of existential question that was coming up for me throughout my college years and then after, and when I looked at it in terms of investigation was, well,
As having spent so long of my life as a health and science journalist the last 10-12 years now, I can understand the function of evolutionary biology and how we got where we are and all of those things and the metaphysical questions no longer really sit in the back of my mind because I've done this study and yet I can also look at this foundational tribal communities that spring up around ideas and how important and relevant that is to the emotional well-being of a community.
And I think being able to weigh those things, and it's something I try to get across, is that nothing is binary.
You're dancing in this gray area all the time.
there's always that you're playing, you're dancing in this gray area all the time.
And in terms of what we're expressing, we've really just looked at very isolated.
We've really just been talking about very isolated things right now.
Again, we could have an entirely different talk about the problems with government and surveillance overreach.
Possibly in the history of our country right now, that should be the focus.
The fact that we are the wealthiest nation on earth, and we're only just getting the 300,000 tests a day, whereas China just ordered another 5 billion or whatever tests they did for Wuhan because a few cases came up.
Like, that is failure at every level, and the fact that every American isn't united around that is a big part of the problem right now.
So, and we can also have a conversation about the failings of pharmaceuticals.
Like, we can look at these different things, but we're talking specifically about really two, Plandemic and JPCs.
We're talking about two very specific things.
And I think one of the dangers, you know, all of these conversations require texture and nuance.
And I think we've brought it out in some ways here.
We can have this conversation and we can have an entirely different conversation about the problems with big pharma and government.
And that is also true, or at least as far as our research has carried us.
And I think being able to suss that out and understand what you're really talking about is important.
And that's why when all of us have responded to some people who come at us with actually trying to suss out exactly what they're saying, they either get mad or they don't reply.
And I don't know how to correct that, but in terms of what I feel about how I'm presenting is that I go to trusted sources.
I try to listen to people who have spent their lives doing this work.
Every time I cover, for example, I'll finish with this, every time that I cover a story for Big Think, if I don't know the journal that it was published in, I go and I research that journal before I cover that study.
Because I don't want to cover an acupuncture study that was funded by acupuncturists.
That's not going to give me an actual reflection of what's going on with that particular industry.
And it's not always easy to do, but you have to spend the time to do it.
And with everything that I wrote, nine days later, whatever it is, everything in my article, I'm confident behind.
And that's why I feel the way that I do.
It's almost like the three of us have a shared background in skepticism.
We've been doing skepticism long enough and are curious about the layers and not actually taking things at face value.
And interestingly enough, that lands us up in this place where we have a fairly similar perspective on the current crisis.
Yeah, to add to what you're saying, Derek, you know, I haven't done as much journalism as you have, but the incredible experience of going through with mainstream publications and like feature articles that I've that I've written for about, you know, Ashtanga Yoga or Shivananda Yoga.
To hand something in that is 8,000 words long and has 300 footnotes to it, and to know that your fact checker is gonna take three weeks to go through all of those footnotes, and then to send you 85 emails asking you for a second source if you've only provided one.
If you do that kind of work, if you do graduate-level academic work, Now, these are all sort of avenues of privilege as well, so we have to consider that.
You recognize that knowledge is actually super hard.
Producing something that's true and that reflects a small aspect of reality is a really difficult thing to do.
And when we're talking about people's health and well-being, when we're talking about their Their search for justice, when we're talking about testimony they have that they need to get out around institutional abuse.
You have to be super, super careful that you can stand behind everything that you say.
And so one argument that I've tried to offer to some people that I'm usually allied with in social media Is that, had I done anything like what Mickey Willis did with Judy Mikovits, I would have harmed the abuse survivors that I was trying, whose stories I was trying to platform.
If I didn't have those stories corroborated, if I didn't make sure that they were going to be able to support them in multiple ways, if I wasn't absolutely clear that I could stand behind the story, then what I would be doing is I'd be using those abuse survivors for my own gain.
And I think one last thing that we should think about with regard to Plandemic is what Willis has actually done to Maikiewicz in that film by not vetting her story in a proper way, by not corroborating it.
How he's actually used her.
Who knows what her experience of institutional abuse has been on a personal level?
We know what the paper trail is, right?
But here's somebody who obviously wants to share a story of victimization, of survivorship, and she's found a person who's willing to make her look like she's lying.
and uh just through carelessness uh and you know perhaps for for their own gain so so that's why that's that's what comes to mind when i when i when i hear your question julian is yeah how are you confident how are you confident i'm confident because um because It takes a long time to understand something.
I think there's probably a good correlation between solid journalism and good epidemiology, you know?
You have to take a lot of time.
You can't spit stuff out.
And part of what we're seeing with Pandemic and the responses to it is, like,
