To the layperson, Dr. Zach Bush’s vision of a resurrected microbiome as being the answer to modern illnesses sounds appealing. His basic argument: we’ve been weeding ourselves to death, externally and internally, depleting the biodiversity of our soils and bodies. He seems to have done typical clinical work (in mostly private settings) in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care. But with no publications or experience with epidemiology, why is he being tapped by anti-vax activists to speak on COVID-19.
Perhaps because when he runs up against the limit of his knowledge, he offers spiritual sermons. J.P. Sears does something similar, though from a different direction, without being signal-boosted by anti-vaxxers. Sears’s deeper colors show when he reaches the limits of his satire: he’s a life coach medical libertarian who’s willing to cherry-pick data and mock concerns about the immunocompromised in support of…we’re not quite sure.
Show Notes
Zach Bush interview with Del Bigtree
Zach Bush monologue with Rich Roll
JP Sears videos: Media | Response to Media | Blue Pill People
JP Sears’s podcasts: Tim Kennedy | Viral Video
Summary of Santa Clara study cited by Bush and Sears
Sayer Ji’s Instagram meme
Tim Kennedy and waterboarding
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And on behalf of all of us, I just want to say that we hope that all of you out there are keeping safe and that If you are protesting, that you're safe and supported.
If you're able to help protesters, that you're able to do that.
And I just also want to say personally, as a Canadian, it's horrific to watch full-on police state brutality south of the border.
But it really shouldn't let outsiders like myself lose focus on our own structural racism obscenities.
So I just wanted to start by saying that this week, our episode two, we're going to be looking at the conspirituality of Zack Bush and J.P.
Sears.
Seemingly different conspiratualities represented by these guys.
First, we've got holistic type MD, Dr. Zack Bush, who's made a big splash with a mesmerizing interview posted May 17th.
It's been viewed 1.4 million times on a top anti-vax platform.
Now he starts out talking about the microbiome, but he brings it home with a sermon about how we're actually beings made of light, and so we shouldn't fear a little old virus.
But then secondly, we're going to be looking at erstwhile satirist J.P.
Sears, known over the past several years for poking good-natured fun at the new age.
But strangely, and beginning with a viral video released on May 6th that mocks mainstream pandemic reporting, this has almost 4 million views.
Sears seems to have been rebranding himself into a COVID truther troll.
But first up, Derek is going to outline the research findings at the root of our project.
He's going to give us the rundown on a 2011 paper by sociologists Charlotte Ward and David Voss.
It's called The Emergence of Conspiratuality.
Then we'll do a few current events stories before we plunge into the worlds of Bush and Sears.
Okay, thanks Matthew.
So a few weeks ago, maybe a couple months ago now, my friend Ben forwarded me an article written by a philosopher on medium that was revamping this 2011 paper and I went and I researched it and read the paper and then published an article on Big Think about that and it kind of It just gave a name to what the three of us have been doing, right?
In our own research and looking at this intersection of conspiracy theories and the wellness community or spirituality.
And I wrote down a couple points through the paper.
I will link to the paper in the show notes.
you do need to get past the paywall for it.
That's why Sci-Hub is an awesome resource.
I'll leave it at that, but find Sci-Hub.tw and you are able to access a lot of scientific papers that way.
And they basically, one of the first things that jumped out at me was they, the very first sentence, they talk about the female dominated New Age intersecting with the male dominated realm of conspiracy theory.
And that is fascinating.
I mean, so much in the yoga and wellness space has been about goddess energy and the female energy.
Rightfully so, in a lot of ways.
I have definitely seen a lot of the women and that female energy turn to conspiracy theories and vice versa through this.
And it really jumped out to me reading their paper.
One thing that really struck me, and I've thought about this before, which is why is Alex Jones so hardcore in selling supplements?
And in the wellness community, supplements are basically everything.
I mean, it's the driver.
From the last number I read was something like $40 billion.
The alternative medicine space is worth $40 billion right now, and it goes up exponentially every year.
And they talk about That in this and what it made me realize was whether whatever, right and left isn't always the right way to look at this, but whether you're looking at the truthers or the sort of like the apocalypse is coming, buy my meal kits, buy this supplement to make you smarter, feel stronger.
Why I think they intersect is because the FDA doesn't regulate anything you call a supplement.
So in the US, we are supposed to have a very robust clinical system for approving any drugs.
So any drug that goes to market usually spends in the order of hundreds of millions to a billion dollars in research and clinical trials before it gets there.
With supplements, you can pretty much just say whatever you want about it, put it out there, say this has not been proven by the FDA and you can sell it.
And so this becomes a real economic driver for anyone who wants to partake in that.
And that was one of the most fascinating crossovers.
of these groups, right?
The economic incentive, because people wanna make money and not everyone is in it for that, but it becomes very appealing for people who get platforms.
Now, they write that three principles are found in nearly every conspiracy theory.
Nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected.
Now, that's conspiracy theories.
Now, that intersects very well with a lot of the holistic thinking about spirituality, that there's always this, I mean, if you remove the more religious understanding of God and put spirit in that place, it fills that vacuum that is created, what some people think is created by organized religions.
Um...
I found this line about conspiracy theories.
American conspiracy theorists seem to be primarily a white phenomenon and primarily a white male phenomenon.
Well, again, there's another intersection with the wellness community.
And again, I understand everyone on this podcast is white as well, but we also recognize the certain level of privilege we have in this country or in Canada, but the practice Bob Marley used to say that only white people can be spiritual because they can afford to be.
If you don't know where your next meal is coming from or if you're going to be pulled over by the cops every time you leave your home, it's a lot harder to be spiritual and think everything is in your favor.
Yeah, and to have the disposable income to be able to spend however many dollars a month on supplements that have questionable benefits but are touted by your Your favorite blogger or YouTube celebrity.
Yeah.
Now, they bring up four main sectors of the overlap, and this is kind of the heart of the paper.
And then one is speculation about specific episodes, right?
So they bring up like 9-11 being an inside job and, you know, Kennedy's assassination.
The second is bio and geoconspiracies.
And this is written in 2011, and one of the examples they bring up is, have diseases been manufactured?
The third is X-Files-type conspiracy theory.
And then the fourth is the radical right's belief in a shadow government and new world order.
Now, I want to point out one thing that I think people miss.
And we're going to actually, I'm going to bring this up when we talk about the Zach Bush thing, because it gets into this territory.
But if you've been paying attention, Trump has done everything in the open.
For four years, or three and a half years, however long.
He can't lie.
I mean, he does lie, obviously, but he exposes himself constantly.
And this fervor around this whole conspiracy around the American government, there are problems with America, obviously, but he has laid out everything he has done, and then he has done it.
Which I find amazing about this whole situation.
Again, we'll go into this in more detail.
I also like this line.
Conspiratuality appears to be a means by which political cynicism is tempered with spiritual optimism.
Right.
That is the single sentence that I think describes the Zach Bush video that we're going to get to.
Oh, the last piece, and this also will lead us in, is that conspirituality providers and audiences would argue that racism and anti-Semitism are part of the old paradigm, not the new.
In a moment, we're going to talk about this week in conspirituality, but I'll hand it off to you guys, but remember that line and I'll come back to it when I get to my piece.
You know, one of the things they mentioned In the article, Ward and Boash, is David Icke.
And David Icke has always stood out to me as a particularly important figure in terms of the confluence of conspiracy theories and New Age spirituality.
I don't know if he borrowed it from Barbara Marciniak, who wrote Ringers of the Dawn, which is a seminal New Age text, or if they somehow knew each other, which way that influence goes.
But David Icke's idea about the reptilian aliens who really are behind, they're the shadow government, right?
They're behind the elites, that the elites are actually reptilians.
And anytime there's a glitch in an interview or a news anchor's broadcast, that glitch is actually their reptilian face becoming visible for a moment before they shield it again, all of that kind of stuff.
It comes from David Icke, and then it becomes part of Alex Jones's sort of set of ideas that he draws from.
And the fascinating overlap here in what we're talking about today is that J.P.
Sears talks in one of his more recent podcasts about having his mind blown by David Icke's appearance on London Real, where he's basically talking about, okay, here's how 5G vaccines, the pandemic being a hoax or being manufactured, And the reptilian alien overlords, here's how this all fits together.
And JP Sears, instead of doing a satire video about how ludicrous this is, oh, this is what blew my mind and why I'm on the new track that I want.
So I just wanted to add that in.
Right.
Any thoughts on the paper, Matthew?
Well, no, I think he summarized it well, and I think this intersection between doomsaying and positive prophecy or transformational prophecy allows people to play this I'm going to scare the crap out of you, and then I'm going to offer you something that will help you become enlightened.
And, you know, in some of our pre-episode talks, I brought this up in terms of the disorganized attachment strategies that we see amongst many charismatic leaders in cultic organizations who play that double role.
And it's not by accident.
The purpose there is to is to inform the landscape with fear, but then also be the source of care.
But then to flip back and forth between those two things so that the viewer, the participant, the member, the recruit Never really knows what they're going to get in any given moment.
So neurologically, that has a lot of a number of effects, but also in terms of attachment, it can begin to create what the researchers call a trauma bond.
Yeah, so it's that deep bond with the person who is traumatizing you.
Right, right.
Who's also giving you love and praising you, and you don't know which you're going to get, so you're constantly sort of in that intense dynamic.
Right.
And one of the things when we look at Zach Bush's interview with Del Bigtree is that there's a distinct flip about 10 minutes before the end, I think it's an hour and 20 minutes long, where he goes Full on from doomsayer to giving you a sermon of everlasting light, which is incredible and amazing.
It's an amazing clip to watch.
So yeah, we'll catch that.
So what have we got for this week in conspirituality?
Well, let me interrupt you just one moment there because we're talking about a foundational thing.
I just want to say something I haven't said yet in these podcasts, which is I feel like the thing that all of this turns on is patterns.
And what both conspiracy theories and New Age beliefs tend to give people is a sense of how to connect the dots and see patterns that make apparent sense out of otherwise chaotic events.
That somehow it's not random, right?
Everything happens for a reason.
Everything is for some agenda.
Whether or not that agenda is paranoid or operating for your highest good, it's the attraction to finding patterns that give alternate explanations for reality.
That I think plays a very big role psychologically in terms of the function of these things.
Right.
Yeah.
Jumping into that, well, there's one other sentence I underlined there and say, but I think this also applied to what you were just saying about the Zach Bush Dell Big Tree talk, which is, can spirituality's success lies in its flexibility?
Well, I'll leave it at that because I don't want to preempt everything.
But for this week, I'll jump in because I think that what someone I've met recently through you guys on Facebook with Nora Harold, and neat meaning online, but she did a wonderful roundup of what a lot of these figures have been saying this week in support of all of the protests.
And pretty much nothing.
Right, like when you look at some of the figures, Zach Bush, Judy Mikovits, Andrew Wakefield, Del Bigtree, the QAnon, they have either, David Icke is in there, they have either said nothing at all, or they've used it to their own advantage in some way, like spinning it to say, like, I told you, I told you this.
And that to me, and you know what, in a sense, no one, is required to speak on topics that they aren't interested in.
And I will recognize that.
But we're dealing with a realm of characters who talk about the emergence of some new order in which people are truly liberated and for them to not be able to recognize the role that systemic racism, implicit bias, and political administrations play in people's liberation, I think, is a major failing.
First off, if you ever use tragedy or protest or someone else's fire To try to justify your own platform, that in itself is problematic.
But if your goal is truly for liberation and equality of all people, and that's what you kind of plant your flag, if you're not coming out and using your platform at a moment like right now to help others, I just think that's a failing.
And again, that's not any sort of like, People have a right to use their media for whatever they want, but I just think it's kind of sad.
Yeah, I agree.
Well, on that note, my This Week in Conspiratuality contribution is that on Sunday, Sayerji, who we've talked about in the last episode, he's the founder of the anti-vax site GreenMedInfo.
He's also the partner of Kelly Brogan, buddy of Charles Eisenstein.
He posted a meme to his IG account that we'll put into the show notes, and it has a basic three-image format.
So, you know top left image top right image and then punchline bottom image and the top left We have an image of the Proud Boys or the neo-nazis at Charlottesville back in 2017 the guys with the tiki torches who chanted You will not replace us and Jews will not replace us And the text says white power scares people who aren't white.
I guess the text maker forgot about the Jews statement and And then in the top right, there's an image of Black Lives Matter protesters.
You can see where this is going, right?
Raising fists in the Black Power sign, and the text says, Black Power scares people who aren't black.
And then the bottom panel is the punchline.
There's a black and white hand shaking, and the text says, This is the only power that scares the establishment.
First off, you know, I just want to say that by his name and profile pic, you know, G might not be white or identify as white.
So there might be subtexts here that I don't understand.
But having said that, this is a completely ignorant, inflammatory meme.
And in true spiritual bypassing tradition, it proposes this equivalency between... Oh, there it is.
You've got it.
It proposes this equivalency Let me just see my own notes here.
Let's see.
Yeah.
Between white supremacy and the protest of white supremacy.
And it conflates the power of nationalism with the power of resistance.
And, you know, it makes them not only, but here's like almost the worst part, it makes them not only morally and politically equal, but
Equally unenlightened from a conspirituality point of view because of course, you know if they could only just get along you know, there's there's a lot of it also echoes a lot of memes about you know, the the various political factions playing the populace like puppets or something like that and and really if we all Bind together and realize that Bill Gates is the true enemy then then you know, then the establishment would really be threatened and so Yeah, I mean
Like everything that these folks do, there's a crumb of reasonability or historical resonance that can provide a kind of plausible deniability.
Because, you know, obviously racism has been purposefully inflamed amongst working class whites to dissuade labor-based alliances.
But I don't get a sense that G is really up on his Marxist analysis.
Now, one thing that occurred to me as I was looking at this is that being a content provider, and you're speaking to this a little bit, Derek, who monetizes social media spaces, it's by nature opportunistic.
And at worst, it's parasitic.
I think it's very difficult to be an influencer on the level of G and not feel the need or the pressure to influence everything.
But the damage, of course, is that You know, this is not a person who seems to be invested in the issue, but in the performance of the issue, in the visibility of the platform.
We'll see this later when we turn our attention to Sears.
And the last thing that I've noticed is that when, and this is, you know, with a number of instances over the past week, when a messianic wellness influencer puts their foot in it, and when they get called on it, Because his Instagram feed is like jammed with comments about, you know, this doesn't work, this is completely insensitive, false equivalency, basically how I ran it down.
You know, there's a lot of educational pushback and he just doesn't answer.
Now, as somebody who tries to be educated and sensitized, if I get feedback like that on anything, I'm on there trying to learn about what I didn't understand before.
And even if I was defensive about it, it would indicate that I cared about engaging with the actual subject.
I might do more damage by defending myself.
Tossing out that meme and then just leaving it up in the air to let it stir people up and not give any indication that you care tells me that there's no real commitment to the content.
It's to the traffic.
So, you know, going to our main topic for today, I just want to note that JP Sears comes out and says in a podcast basically exactly that.
That his viral video made him really, really happy because it helped him push through one million YouTube subscribers, right?
Like, the game is not about the content.
The content is being used for traffic.
And like, yeah, that's my news.
That's absolutely right.
And that's a really clear distinction between someone who has a kind of social media platform where You know, you might make a post and then get a lot of pushback and then demonstrate a level of accountability and empathy within your next post says, you know what?
I've had some time to think about it.
Here's what I got wrong.
Here's what I learned.
Thank you very much.
Here's what I still stand by.
Right.
And there's that there's some interchange with the audience and with with dissent and with being someone who's transparent in that way, as opposed to just pushing content and always Just being in that position, I'm never gonna apologize for anything.
I'm never gonna change my mind.
Haters gonna hate, you know, suck it.
I got to a million subs.
I mean, Gene might not even have read the comments.
I mean, you have no indication that he's there at all.
It's just kind of like, let's stick this to the wall, right?
Yeah.
And so for me this week, you know, the protests are the big story.
It's hard to talk about without getting emotional.
So, you know, I think for all of us on the podcast, solidarity with the protesters, justice for George Floyd, incredible scenes around the country, a lot going on in LA, some of it fairly close to me, but I wasn't in any area where it got really out of hand in terms of confrontations with the police or looting.
It's always disappointing that the looting becomes something that's easy for people to focus on.
As if that lawlessness is really the thing when the amount of peaceful protest is so much bigger than that.
There were a couple things that stood out for me.
There was one, and I shared both of these on my social media, there was one incredible protest involving a group of people lying down in the George Floyd position for exactly the amount of time he was in that position.
I think it's 8 minutes and 46 seconds.
While they were sort of being guided, there was just a very powerful sort of ritual, emotional acknowledgement that brought it down to the reality of what this man's last minutes were like.
That really struck me.
And then the other thing that really struck me, and I posted this as well, was scenes of people dancing last night in Oakland.
And at this one corner, I believe 14th and Broadway.
And just the sense of, here are all of these people gathered together Protesting on moral grounds and just having this moment of unity and love and human, playful embodiment, which is what we all deserve to have.
So those two things really struck me.
As you said, J.P.
Sears continues to be active.
You know, after he did his video that got him so much exposure and then the follow-up set that we'll get to in a little bit, today he actually dropped something new.
I don't know if either of you saw it.
But today, he did a satire video that was essentially a parody sketch between a news anchor.
So, pretending to be a news anchor and pretending to be the guy at home who's watching the news anchor and being really influenced and overwhelmed and scared by it.
And the news anchor was basically saying, the lockdown needs to go on indefinitely.
And throughout it, he uses the conceit of Car accidents, that driving cars is dangerous and people have been killed from driving cars and so we must never drive cars and stay home.
And he keeps doing this counterpoint between the number of car deaths and then the number of things that are happening in people at home, suicides, whatever the various things are, people being depressed, as if the number of deaths that are being prevented from by quarantine are minuscule and unimportant, and it's a completely ridiculous measure, and that much worse things are happening as a result.
So that was, again, pretty telling in terms of the real hand that he's playing.
So that happened this week too, and I noticed it.
- Right.
- Yeah.
- All right, should we turn to Dr. Bush?
Let's do it.
All right, so Dr. Bush, Zach Bush, he appears on a show called The High Wire.
This is on May 17th, I believe, and the host is Del Bigtree, and maybe I'll throw it to Derek at some point to get some more info on Bigtree.
But the title of the video that was widely circulated is Doctor Who Predicted COVID Answers all now.
I just want to like underline those two words because There's kind of like this Superman hyper subjective this you know, this one person can answer everything about this this particular mystery That's at the heart of how this discourse works.
So I want to I don't want to forget that now big tree has a hundred and seventy five thousand YouTube subscribers 47,000 on Twitter 210,000 on Facebook and his interview with dr. Bush on has been viewed 1.4 million times.
Now, Dr. Bush owns a, or runs a private wellness clinic in Virginia.
It's been closed due to lockdown, but he has specialization training in internal medicine, endocrinology, and end of life care.
And he speaks eloquently about his favorite ideas, So in this particular interview, he opens with his Hymn to the Microbiome, and he speaks about that for a fairly long time.
His basic argument is that we in contemporary global agricultural systems and medicine, we've been weeding ourselves to death, both externally and internally.
Depleting the biodiversity of our soils and bodies with with pesticides and antibiotics to the point at which robust immunity and holistic resilience is beyond our reach.
And, you know, to me as a layperson, it all sounds very holistic, very reasonable.
It appeals to me as a gardener who composts.
I do like no-till gardening.
I also appreciate that he's clear about climate collapse, which seems oddly missing from the conspirituality landscape.
And throughout the interview, as he's going along, Big Tree isn't very responsive, and he tries, like, several times to sort of, like, poke at his core issues.
He asks leading questions about, you know, Wuhan and whether the virus was manufactured in a lab.
He asks about vaccines, and to his credit, Bush doesn't bite at any of those questions.
He's kind of in his own trance.
He does claim, however, that he predicted a pandemic emerging from Wuhan due to high rates of air and soil pollution, and he made this prediction a year ago.
He suggests that he made it at a conference, but I couldn't find any record of that.
He hasn't published on it.
I mean, he hasn't published anything according to PubMed, but this prediction winds up in BigTree's title that he predicted COVID-19.
He also hypothesizes that COVID treatment should be the same treatment that is applied to cyanide poisoning because it's a hypoxia disease and, you know, doctors need to correct hemoglobin and oxygen uptake.
I'm just quoting this.
I can't say that I understand it.
And again, it all sounds plausible to me.
Yeah.
And he also hypothesizes that venting patients is failing because inflamed lung tissue can't absorb pressurized oxygen.
Okay.
It all sounds like reasonable musings from a trained physician, albeit from somebody who's not treating or researching the disease directly.
I mean, this isn't even a guy who's saying, put me in coach.
Like I've got something to say.
He's not on the front lines.
He runs a private clinic that's been locked down.
It looks like the private clinic provides a range of sort of wellness services, including Ayurvedic appointments and stuff like that.
But really the pot shots that he takes, these general pot shots that he takes at how frontline workers are not responding correctly to a quickly changing situation, feeds into the general theme of distrust that BigTree is really trolling for.
And at one point, he throws Big Tree this really red meat.
He suggests that all medical professionals are brainwashed into ignoring their own senses in favor of looking at blood work or serological tests, specifically with relation to hypoxia-related blueness.
Although, like, even I know as a layperson that Italian doctors were talking about COVID toes back in the middle of April.
So it's not like they weren't seeing it.
He also says that COVID is unmasking the toxicity of our environment.
He says, direct quote, he says, there's something poetic about that.
Therefore, those who are dying, the implication is, are the polluted.
He doesn't really mention race or poverty or anything like that.
And when asked about the lockdown, he claims that this is the weirdest part.
He kind of, to me, he goes off the rails here.
He claims that viruses are carried on the wind since time before our mind and are concentrated by pollution in high-density areas.
He doesn't say anything about transmission rates.
You know, his answer to that sounds progressive.
He says, like, end carbon emissions during flu season.
But it's weird because it also, like, discounts droplet transmission.
And I came away thinking, well, if this is true, this would be a huge discovery.
So, you know, you should get some funding.
You should publish on this.
You should go make your review, right?
Yeah.
You know, so, and then the big thing is that, like, you know, about 20 minutes before the end, Everything grinds to a halt because he starts giving this, like, life-and-death sermon.
He leans in for, like, the big reveal.
We've got a few minutes of it here queued up and Derek can play it for us, I think, right from YouTube.
Gotta do the screen share first.
Sorry, everyone.
Here we go.
A heart attack that happened because they didn't have a hospital.
What, what is the, what is the hope for the future?
Is there hope in this?
What do we learn as we move forward?
Because on one level, you know, you described the weeds as being important.
They're just like viruses are important, but our human connection too is so important to this.
Do you have any thoughts on the, the, Result of the disease or the infection, which I would call our lockdown.
Our, as you said, our incorrect approach is its own disease of mindset.
What would you like people to know as you know, as a career, you stare in the eyes of these people that are going to have this transition period?
Should we be afraid of that?
Are we dying?
Is this inhumane?
Is there hope for us to move forward, or are we just looking to a dark world that's now out of our control?
If there's crimes against humanity being exercised right now, I don't believe that it's in a military lab.
I believe that it's in those ICUs of dying patients alone.
In what time in history have we decided that we need to, en masse, let people die alone?
Marines are taught to never leave a soldier on the battlefield.
Marines will literally charge into machine gun fire, into rocket fire, to go grab that injured soldier so that they don't die alone in enemy hands.
What level of fear have we induced in mankind that we are letting our revered elderly and our young people who are dying from these conditions die alone?
It is worse than rocket fire.
It is worse than this.
And we've generated that level of fear around a virus that looks to have a mortality similar to flu.
What are we doing with this tyranny of fear?
We are tearing apart the very fabric of what it means to be human.
There is an innate drive in us to stay connected, to stay in one another's presence, to have fellowship with one another.
It's written into our Constitution that you will not block public gatherings.
You will not block the ability for us to get together and practice our spiritual faith, to practice our spiritual experience.
And if anything is a hallowed ground of spiritual environment, it is the birthplace of a child and the birthplace of an elder person about to transition to the other side.
There are two births that happen to humankind, and the first, of course, must be extraordinary.
If we could remember it all, how amazing would it have been?
When you were in the womb of your mother, you can hear sounds muffled, and you can hear the voice of your family members, you can hear the bark of a dog, you can hear the closing of a door.
It's muffled, but you can hear it.
You can see the light filtering through in the morning through the skin of your mother's belly and through the wall of the womb.
You can see these transitions of shadows moving by.
You can see this beautiful world and it's all in red hues.
It's reds and oranges like an internal sunset happening around you and then there's peaceful darkness in the night and that's silent and you've got your mother's heartbeat right next to you and you've got this extraordinary holy of holies, this protected space that you're in.
Then suddenly at the end of nine months your entire human existence so far only knows this space.
You have this catastrophic event where intense pressure is put on you and you're being covered in microbes as you go down this and you're Your immune system has never seen this.
Your whole body has never seen this whole body of life that's coding you.
And you're in this transit of dark tunnel and compression.
Your heart rate is 180 and pushing 250 at moments because you are in this intense physiologic pressure state.
And you think you are dying.
I think that must pass the tissue levels possibilities.
I think I'm dying because the light is gone and all I hear is is crushing pressure and all i'm experiencing this and then suddenly you're in the light all the pressure is gone and you can't can't believe the beauty around you the face of your mother is mind-boggling There's a thousand colors in just the iris of her eye that's looking in your face.
And you're staring at that for a second.
And then there's this like halo of light and color from this explosion of filaments out of your mother's head that we call hair.
And it's creating these rainbows of color.
And so all you can do is stare above your mother's hair and look at that for a while.
And then suddenly there's this extraordinary scene as it unfolds of greens and blues and your first sunset.
You can't believe how beautiful the world is.
And then we can go through the magic that we are.
Okay, all right.
All right, so I think you get the point.
Like, this is incredible.
Like, this is why he's here.
Yes.
This is not about data.
It's not about first-hand expertise.
He's got this language of general competence that preps the ground for a kind of Shaktipat or spiritual transmission moment.
Like, he's in the spirit.
It just comes tumbling out.
Like, it's challenged.
It's inspired.
It's memorized.
It's really, really great poetry built on a whole bunch of speculations on what neonates feel and what they perceive and, you know, whether their eyes are developed or whatever.
But like, here's where the full package of the charismatic communicator comes online.
Like he's in a trance.
It's not stopping for nobody.
He's speaking from his heart.
Also, like he leans in big, beautiful green eyes.
I mean, like, he's a really good-looking guy.
Like, this is incredibly seductive.
Like, this is quite a moment, and it has nothing to do with the pandemic whatsoever, because that's not what these guys want to talk about, really.
The pandemic is an excuse to talk about something else.
There's a moment that is just before that where Zach asks Del, who in the media do you think is not lying now?
And Del laughs and says, nobody.
Now, after that, I stopped the video and I went over to Highwire, his show, and I went to the Twitter feed.
Since Monday, Del, who says nobody, has shared articles by the Guardian, CNBC, Science Mag, which is the magazine, the journal that discredited Judy Mikovits, USA Today, NPR, The Washington Post, The Hill, Seattle Times, and CNN.
Right.
That's this week alone.
I didn't go further back than that.
What struck me about that moment There has been some retraction this week by The Lancet about the study that showed that hydroxychloroquine could increase the death rate of COVID-19, of the coronavirus.
And it's been retracted, or it's being questioned right now.
It never ceases to amaze me how these people will jump, they will discredit everything, but as soon as something that seems like it's in their field, you know, backs up what they want to say, they turn to them as if it's the final word.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
To get that, there is a couple things I wanted to point out, but I just want to say this one and let Julian in because it shows Zach's style.
Early in the conversation when he's talking about his time because he worked on cancer developing chemotherapies, he says, there has never been a case of cancer in history caused by a lack of chemotherapy.
Right?
Now think about what he said because that's just one of many lines.
But having gone through cancer and chemo, that jumped out at me.
I have, you know, I pay attention to those.
There has never been a case of cancer caused by, that actually makes no sense.
Well, it's true.
I guess it is true.
But it's complete nonsense.
But that, that to me really jumped out as his sort of pedantic style, which you just heard a moment ago where Del, Del is, and Matthew is right.
Del is, keeps pushing him to try to, and he just goes off on his own, but he has this rhetorical style where he just goes off on these tangents and says a lot of words that if you actually put them into a transcription and then read them, you would be like, I have no idea what's happening right now.
Yeah.
Yeah, and as you said, Matthew, it just comes tumbling out, right?
It's so natural.
It's so memorized.
It's so emotive.
It feels so authentic.
He's the kind of guy you want to have a beer with.
He's the kind of guy you want your daughter to marry.
He's the kind of guy you trust because he tells you it like it is.
But guess what?
The whole thing is manipulated via this montage of beautiful video images that just happen to be ready to go at the end of the interview.
For his presentation!
Now he's going to do his presentation, right?
And it's so compelling.
Everyone who sent that particular video to me, that interview video, said you have to see the last 10 minutes.
If you can watch those last 10 minutes without crying, Julian, There's something wrong with you.
Like, it's so powerful.
It's so beautiful.
And here's the thing.
You know, just before we started, I was wondering aloud with Derek whether we could see analytics on how many people made it through to that last 10 minutes.
Because that's the conversion moment, right?
Yes.
Now, one interesting thing that happens is that this is not out of character for him.
In our research for this, I shared with you guys a similar sermon that he gives on the Rich Roll podcast in which he hits the same kind of sermonizing note, but this time he's claiming even more about his postmortem knowledge based upon anecdotes that he's picked up from patients that he's had in hospice.
You know, again, another beautiful sermon, nothing to do with medicine or ethics or anything beyond the very spiritual narrative about death as a transition into light that is obviously really important to him, maybe relieving to him.
But I think that conversion moment is really important.
And it's, it's, I think, I think Big Tree really should like flag that and maybe separate it out just the same way that Rich Roll did, you know, and say like, this is the best monologue that you'll ever hear about COVID-19.
Of course, it won't be about COVID-19 at all.
But yeah, and he uses too, like if you notice, this is a very, this is a clear sort of poetic conceit that I would call the second-person intrusive omniscient, right?
Where he's speculating about human experiences, but he's telling you about what happened to you when you were born and you came out of the birth canal and you saw your mother and like It's just, there's this merging, there's this merging with the viewer that's really really key to charismatic communication and I think is at the heart of why this spread like wildfire.
He also says a lot of really good things and that should be pointed out.
Like his take, I've been looking into the microbiome because I had a lot of digestive tract problems throughout my life and it was Probably the cause of my long-standing panic disorder because it was when I changed my diet that I stopped having panic attacks.
So I've been reading on the microbiome for 15 years and he says a lot of amazing things, but when he says that Americans are 90% deficient in their microbiome, Every single person has a unique microbiome, right?
And there are certain levels, but that's one of the problems with pharmaceuticals in general, is because you never know how it's going to react.
I'll give you a quick example.
A few years ago, there was a drug developed and it was under clinical trials in London, in the UK.
It was called Gabadoxal, Gaboxadol.
It had really good efficacy against placebo in the UK, so they brought it to the US, which was our last clinical try-ins before it went to market, and it bombed in the US.
And what they looked into was that the US meat consumption is much higher than the UK, so we get a lot more tryptophan in our diet than in the UK, which had a negative impact on that drug, so it didn't work As it was intended.
I say this because it shows the complexity of the microbiome and how what you eat does change your health profoundly.
And when Zach Bush is talking about that, he is completely right.
But then it just goes off into all of these other weird tangents.
He's selling microbiome supplements as well.
I mean, that's just, that's the main part of his business, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I wanted to say that for me, Bush has the most in common with Eisenstein of any of the people that we've talked about or looked at talking about so far, right?
Because what Bush is doing is essentially, he's coming from two angles.
One angle is back to nature.
All of our problems are the results of being disconnected from nature.
All of our problems are the result of not having the microbiome be healthy.
As you're going through the birth canal, you're exposed to all of these microorganisms, right?
He keeps referencing it.
So there's a natural way of living.
There's a natural way of giving birth.
There's a natural way of treating and understanding illness.
And if we could only get back to that, we'd all be so much better for it.
And somehow it's implied that the pandemic is caused by this lack of living in accord with nature in the way that we should, I love this guy.
So that's one angle.
The other angle is this emotive, spiritual angle.
Near-death experiences, as you were talking about in one of the interviews, and then this whole beautiful poetry about what happens when you're born.
And so it's just so, it's like if you're on board with this back-to-nature message, and you're on board with the emotional, spiritual, kind of inspiring message, then the pandemic Ideas that are being put across to you, the anti-vax ideas that are hovering in the background but never talked about directly, at least in this interview, they go down really easily because you've been seduced by all this other stuff.
That's, I think, how pseudoscience is really, really effective, certainly to people that I know and certainly to me in the past.
I get it.
I get the appeal.
Everyone who sent it to me, I said, oh, I get the appeal.
This is so beautiful.
There's one other point.
I have a lot of notes, but we want to move on to JPCS.
There's one other point about what Matthew pointed out where Zach Bush, the whole thing is framed around him predicting this pandemic.
I've pointed this out on my Big Think columns a couple times this year.
There was a 2007 A paper published by researchers in Hong Kong, warning of a coming pandemic from Wuhan and the surrounding area because of the wet markets.
That information has been around for at least 13 years.
So the idea, I mean, he could have read that paper, it doesn't matter.
It's not like that is something revolutionary that he said if he did say it a year ago.
Yeah, yeah.
It's not like he made a prediction.
Other people weren't making, experts in the field weren't making, movies weren't being made about already.
Barack Obama didn't say five and a half years ago, in five years we may indeed have a pandemic like this.
But people don't know that.
So they see a headline like that and they go, oh my god, this amazing enlightened doctor predicted this.
And what did he predict it based on?
The terrible, unnatural, technological pollution that's going on in that particular part of the world.
Just nutty.
Shall we move on to the next segment?
Well, any closing thoughts, Matthew?
I'm done with this.
Well, I think it is good to move on to J.P.
Sears and maybe what we can do is put a pin in Del Bigtree.
I had the same thought.
Not to put it in the subject and figure out where this is coming from because, you know, I know that you followed him for a long time, especially through his production with Andrew Wakefield.
Yes.
That's how I found out about him So I have a lot of notes I think he would actually make a good character because he is out there interviewing so many of these people and I think people should also know where he comes from So, let's see.
I'll put that pin in there Right, especially his roots in the Unity Church and his parents' participation in that.
Because this goes back a long way for him.
This is a deep personal mission, it seems, from the little biographical details that are available.
Yeah.
Agreed.
So, Julian, take it away.
All right.
So, J.P.
Sears is going to be our last segment, I believe.
So JP Sears, most people in our community, I think, are familiar with him to some extent.
He's built a really big following.
His most recent jump was to have a million subscribers.
I would say most of his videos, looking through his YouTube channel, He averages somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 views on a video that's been up for, say, between a month and a year, which is really, really significant.
But he does have videos that have been up for four or five years that have 10, 12 million views.
So the longer a video is up, the more it gets circulated.
I think his stuff is really clever.
He has a really nimble mind.
He excels at satirizing the new age from inside of the new age.
And that's what I think makes him so wonderful.
And that's why I've enjoyed so much of his stuff in the past, is that this really clever ability to reflect back to us and to people who are similar to him, the foibles of that particular worldview.
Turns out that he's a coach and that he uses his platform to get coaching clients, which is fine.
Why shouldn't he do that?
Seems like he's really into yoga and he's up on a lot of these sort of alternative health fads.
Some of his videos that did really, really well for him.
One was called Using Essential Oils, which is my personal favorite.
It's hilarious.
Passive-aggressive relationship techniques.
Becoming an expert yoga teacher.
So all of these There's an underlying friendliness that he's smiling and winking at something that he actually digs, but he's like, yeah, sometimes it gets a little ridiculous, people, right?
And so that feels really good.
And then all of a sudden, he comes out a few weeks ago with what it's like to believe everything the mainstream media tells you.
And in this video, I remember the first time watching it, there's really a sense of, oh, We don't have the smile and a wink anymore.
We have an obvious target that there's a nastiness about it.
There's a sense that if you are a sheep who trusts the mainstream media and believes everything they tell you, the mainstream media, which is this over-generalization that I'm so not fond of, then you're taking the blue pill, right?
Then you have, you're naive.
And it's, yeah, it's just a really powerful moment.
And for him, that video now has only been out a few weeks.
It has 4 million views.
So it's by far the best performing video of his in a short period of time.
And so he follows up on this with a behind-the-scenes video where he's basically saying, thank you so much for all the support.
I'm glad so many of you think like me.
And he's essentially confirming that this is perhaps his first video that was much more of an opinion piece Then a comedy piece.
And so we can talk more about where he goes from there, but that's sort of the background on J.P.
Sears that I wanted to sketch.
Derek, do you want to go?
Well, we briefly discussed it and the Everything that we're doing with this podcast is represented in that.
It's the merging of those worlds.
When I first watched that first video, I had to step back because Julian's right.
I've loved many of his videos.
Some are okay, some are amazing, and they're really insightful.
You can't have thin skin if you are a yoga instructor because you'll see it, and if you believe it, if you take offense to it, Then it's kind of like that's the point in a sense.
But so I've enjoyed them and he is right in so many ways in that this was just different and I'm wondering like how much of it was premeditated or because he's really working this angle right now, right, of freedom.
But really, what it shows to me is somebody who is super insightful and clever and has a good mind in a lot of ways, but is pretty scientifically illiterate.
And when you are that combination, well, that's what the wellness community thrives on.
It eats that.
But it's really dangerous.
I do stand by The fact, I think Joe Rogan is a good example of this, and I haven't listened to much Rogan lately, but I've listened to many hours, and Rogan's one of the people that I like a lot, and sometimes I'm like, dude, what are you talking about?
But he's never offended me to the point where I'm like, he still has good, really good conversations, but I'm using this comparison because sometimes, at least in the past, Rogan will take the view of like, I'm just asking these thoughts.
And when your podcast is listened to 12 million times a month or downloaded at that level, if you sign a crazy deal with Spotify, like you, Barry Weiss wrote a piece called, Joe Rogan is the mainstream media now.
And it's true, if you're defining mainstream media by influence of people read, he absolutely is.
And there is a certain level of responsibility you have to take at that point.
And I feel like JP has decided that he's going to use it to exploit his brand.
Fine.
But when you combine that with the scientific illiteracy, that's really problematic.
Right.
I mean, what was most revealing to me were really post-video releases.
He's got a couple of podcasts and one of them is, it might be the podcast recording of the thoughts behind my viral video or something like that, but it might be different.
No, it's different.
It's different?
Okay, so they don't sync up.
This is about 20 minutes where in the first half he rambles on about free speech and how he made the very edgy decision to publish to YouTube instead of Facebook because apparently he thinks that YouTube does less censorship when actually it's YouTube that took down the Plandemic film in, you know, no seconds flat.
So there's this weird kind of reflection on, you know, am I going to get censored for just having an opinion?
He does talk a little bit about censorship in a misinformed way as though Facebook is the government or intertwined with the government or something like that.
But he does speak a little bit about how, okay, well, this is a privately owned or it's a corporate social media company.
And so they have the right to their terms of service and stuff like that.
So if they de-platform me, I guess that's fair because it's their house.
So there's this discussion about like, am I going to be able to express my opinions?
But then he flips in the last 10 minutes to, because this is all just my opinion and I want people to think for themselves.
But then he says, here, look at David Icke because he really blows my mind.
So there's these two things where I really want people to think for themselves.
Look at these resources that I'm going to point you towards.
And really, it's not about freedom of speech because he's got that.
The content is about feeling good about maintaining this kind of jackass attitude towards social responsibility.
And then the second podcast that he releases is with a friend of his named Tim Kennedy, who I didn't know anything about, apparently because I don't watch enough MMA.
Guilty.
Yeah, Kennedy is a Navy SEAL and apparently he does some philanthropic things that I couldn't find out any information about.
I didn't dig that far because really I listened to the first half hour of it and I couldn't get through the rest, but basically everything you need to know about Sears' real politics and feelings is in this particular podcast, which we'll link to.
He identifies this interview with Tim Kennedy as really super important to him.
Uh, and, uh, Kennedy is more broadly famous for claiming that waterboarding isn't torture.
Uh, and he's doing that in support of Trump POW policies.
Uh, so, you know, this is the guy he's platforming and in the first 30 minutes alone, He lets Kennedy say that the only framework that makes sense to him in all of life is whether a choice leads to, quote, peaceful slavery or dangerous freedom.
And that also we should aspire to the rugged individualism of revolutionary era Americans who got tough by, this is a direct quote, by fighting Indians and fighting bears.
So apologies to First Nations listeners.
He doubts the public health data on the seriousness of COVID and then he compares citizens complying with pandemic lockdown measures, I'm not making this up, with Jews in the 1930s complying with measures that led to the Holocaust.
So there's this whole sort of like bizarre You know, borderline racist, borderline anti-Semitic, certainly victim-blaming set of comparisons made between genocide and Holocaust and public health measures in the age of COVID.
Borderline?
Well, not borderline, outright.
Alright, so the thing, I would say that the thing about understanding JP from this podcast is not only that he's choosing Kennedy as, you know, somebody who he really loves, but also listening to him fawn over Kennedy's macho-ness, his masculinity.
They go on at length about working out together and having transcendent experiences of pain And this all really brings, you know, it reminded me of the homoerotics at the heart of all fascist movements.
So if I were to have a prediction, it would be that Sears has built a now red pill light media brand, and he's going to be more frank about it.
It's not about the satire anymore.
That's kind of like over.
And with platforming Kennedy and gushing over Ike, I'd expect him to interview Tony Robbins about virology and supplements next week.
I want to wonder, because that Tony Robbins thing that came out the other day, or a couple weeks ago at the very end, and it's very much actually in the spirit of what we showed with Zack Bush, that momentum building moment after all the interviews with the Bakersfield doctors and everything.
It keeps coming back to this idea of freedom, and I really wonder what you think about this constant Usage of the term of we're being enslaved by a public health initiative.
Where is that coming from?
Because, you know what, when the president walked out on Monday and almost declared martial law, that's where enslavement begins.
And again, what I said earlier, I haven't seen anyone of these people come out and talk about that.
Yeah.
That's where it really happens.
But this idea that this public health initiative, however misguided it is, and it is in a lot of ways, but that that is the ultimate slavery.
Where is that coming from?
Yeah, so Fauci and Gates want to enslave us and the Democrats, but we're not critical of Trump at all in terms of all of his draconian measures.
I think it goes back to something each of you have touched on, right?
Which is that there's a level of being a messianic wellness influencer or someone who has a big following.
On sort of our side of the demographic spectrum, where there tends to not be a lot of scientific literacy, and that also tends to be not be a lot of very politically informed opinions.
So they've been checked out from science and politics for spiritual bypass reasons.
And so the spirituality is very heavy on individuality, on personal power.
On freeing yourself from the stories of your culture and your family, of being a warrior who can manifest whatever you want in your life and no one's gonna get in your way.
And that, they don't realize how much that plays into a kind of a libertarian, conservative worldview.
But when those kinds of, when the kinds of politics that someone like Tim Kennedy represents, or some of these other figures represent, come along, and they have enough of a resonance With that particular self-empowerment, self-reliant attitude, then these folks like J.P.
Sears, I think, tend to take in that political opinion and adopt it without realizing how at odds it is with everything else that they might stand for.
I mean, for example, J.P.
Sears did... I mean, it's very, very cursory.
He did post some stuff that suggested he supported Black Lives Matter this week.
He was one of the only ones.
Right?
So there's this weird thing where it's like, okay, I'm going to support all of this stuff that is really coming from the right, but then I'm also going to have this moment of doing some kind of obligatory posture as if I support something on the left.
And I know Matthew, you had some observations about that.
Well, he, he left, he put the black tile up and, but then he left the comment thread, which we can post to, to just run over with, Like, racist rants.
He just left it unmonitored.
Now, if that's coherent with his free speech position, I suppose so, but I mean, that's not what that thing is about.
Blackout Tuesday is not about, you know, having a big platform where you're, you know, your white audience can go off on the stupidity of the tile.
Or call you out.
I mean, interestingly, a lot of his audience is calling him out for virtue signaling, which is kind of what you're doing, but he's not backing himself up. - Mm-hmm.
It's not like he's saying, well, actually, this is what I really believe, and here are some resources that I'd like to share with you all.
Yeah.
Yeah, and he's also not intervening and saying, my page will not be a place where hateful, racist sentiments are expressed, because I reject those wholeheartedly.
Right, no.
No, he's not going to do that.
Yeah.
He's not going to do that.
Yeah.
And I wanted to mention too, the video from today and the other follow-up video we didn't touch on yet, they both have this attitude, this parodying of a figure.
In the first one, the figure is painted blue because they've taken the blue pill and they're living in fear.
In the second one, the person is watching the newscaster and they're living in fear.
So there's this, there's this pathetic caricature of the person who follows the health, the public health directives and listens to reputable news sources as someone who just is not empowered.
Well, this is why it's not satire anymore because it's punching down.
Because when he's making fun of wealthy vegans or people who are able to, I don't know, go to Costa Rica to harvest essential oils or something like that, he's doing some sort of political class comedy.
But when he's making fun of people who are immunocompromised, which he actually does, Outright, in the first follow-up podcast that he releases, there's a point at which he quotes people giving feedback, and he kind of does this effeminate, high, whiny voice, you know, what about the immunocompromised?
Or something like that.
Like, he's actually making fun of people who are fearful for their health.
But then, of course, he sort of backs that up or puts a stop in it by having Kennedy on to talk about how, you know, what we really need to do is build strong individuals.
Like, that's going to be the answer to all of our problems, as though health is some sort of individual achievement instead of a social reality.
Exactly.
The one thing you didn't mention, Matthew, about that is that the Waterboarding livestream That Tim Kennedy did was in support of Gina Haskell.
It was in support of getting this new Trump appointment to be head of the CIA by showing that waterboarding is not so bad, actually.
Right, right.
Well, and then he's called out by a CIA expert who says, no, you're not doing it right, actually.
It's a lot worse than what you've shown.
And yeah, incredible.
So anyway, we'll have all of that in the show notes, right, Derek?
Just send them to me.
I have some.
Yeah, I mean, the punching down is a real indication though, right?
Because who is he actually pushing back against with the blue paint of the blue pill swallower?
You know, it's the person who, regardless of what information they are taking in, is living cautiously, is living with a feeling of, you know, I'm going to have to protect myself.
Like, that's just not a target for comedy.
It's like the people in his world who are behaving cautiously are actually as invulnerable as he thinks himself to be, right?
And it's just a totally narcissistic position, right?
Yeah, they bought into the illusion because they want to be peaceful slaves.
Right.
When they could be free like him and realize there's nothing to fear.
