16: So You Want to Save the Earth? (w/John Roulac)
Yoga-crazed Hindu nationalists murder Muslims for eating beef, believing that the cow embodies the religious gift of India’s soil. American white supremacists chug gallons of local milk to prove their lactose tolerance and their claim that they alone should occupy the Global North.
Extreme examples aside: it’s clear that key elements of the alt-right and the New Age agree that the Earth is sacred. Bountiful and healing, the Earth preserves everything lost to industrialization, Big Pharma, and globalization. Home is where the soil is. But whose home? Who’s welcome here? Who can afford it? Who’s allowed to own it, and who has to slave-labor on it? For all the supposed concern for ecology, why aren’t we seeing conspiritualists and QAnon devotees marching against carbon emissions, celebrating the carbon drops of lockdown, supporting the migrant workers who pick their arugula, or starting community gardens in their food-desert cities?
This week Matthew reviews the soft-fascist “blood and soil” themes of conspirituality culture. Derek gives some background and context on the romanticization problem with agriculture. And Julian looks at the quasi-scientific premises and promises that podcast fave Dr. Zach Bush offers in response. We also bring you an interview with farming activist John Roulac, who’s incensed at how conspirituality is ripping up progressive foodie movements. In a recent article, he called out his old friends and associates (like Mikki Willis and Christiane Northrup) for what he calls their “body-snatching” beliefs. Matthew closes with a view from Manitoulin Island.
Show Notes
Is the Wellness Movement Being Tainted by QAnon and the New Age Right?
John Roulac tangles with Mikki Willis
John’s projects: Kiss the Ground | Nutiva | Rebotanicals
Matthew’s feature on Pattabhi Jois, yoga guru and serial sexual abuser
When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers
A reflection on the lasting legacy of 1970s USDA Secretary Earl Butz
Why factory farms are a “perfect storm” for disease pandemics
Brian Rose on Zach Bush
Our COVID-19
-- -- --
Support us on Patreon
Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada
Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian
Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
And you can keep up with us at our Facebook page on YouTube at Conspirituality.net and as well at our Patreon page, patreon.com slash Conspirituality, where we are building out, we are asking for help so we can build out more resources.
We have recently released Two new additions to our resources page that Matthew really spearheaded, the Conspiratuality to QAnon Keywords and Phrases and the Cult Dynamics 101 pages, where you can find out a lot more background information about what's going on with all of these conspiracy theories, as well as how it relates to the wellness world.
Yeah, we have more stuff than we can get to every week, and there's a lot of good things happening in that Patreon section.
And I'm not going to give any spoilers, but I think the next couple of weeks are going to be kind of wild.
Just going to say that.
You think?
I do think so.
All right, so episode 16.
So you want to save the Earth.
Yoga-crazed Hindu nationalists murder Muslims for eating beef, believing that the cow embodies the religious gift of India's soil.
American white supremacists chug gallons of local milk to prove their lactose tolerance and their claim that they alone should occupy the global north.
Extreme examples aside, it's clear that key elements of the alt-right and the New Age agree that the Earth is sacred, bountiful, and healing.
The Earth preserves everything lost to industrialization, big pharma, and globalization.
Home is where the soil is.
But who's home?
Who's welcome here?
Who can afford it?
Who's allowed to own it?
And who has to slave labor on it?
For all the supposed concern for ecology, why aren't we seeing conspiritualists and QAnon devotees marching against carbon emissions, celebrating the carbon drops of lockdown, supporting the migrant workers who pick their arugula, or starting community gardens in their food desert cities?
This week, Matthew reviews the soft fascist blood and soil themes of conspirituality culture.
Derek gives some background and context on the romanticization problem with agriculture.
And I'm having a look, again, at the quasi-scientific premises and promises that podcast fave Dr. Zach Bush offers in response.
We also bring you an interview with farming activist John Rulek, who's incensed at how conspirituality is ripping up progressive foodie movements.
In a recent article, he called out his old friends and associates, like Mickey Willis and Christine Ann Northrup, for what he calls their body-snatching beliefs.
Matthew closes with a view from Manitoulin Island.
For this week in conspirituality, my focus, as you mentioned, is on the blood and soil themes of the globalized as you mentioned, is on the blood and soil themes of the globalized religion and new agey stuff that conspirituality is I'll start with something personal.
When I got out of the cults I was in, in my early thirties, I didn't have a lot of relationships to return to or to repair.
And I really needed something grounding.
I needed to get my hands dirty in the real world, wherever that was.
And if I'd been living rurally at that point, I might have recommitted to the organic farming I'd been involved with 10 years before, in Vermont.
I used to work on vegetable farms in the summer, and I did maple sugar harvesting in early spring.
But I was living here in Toronto and was still kind of connected to the sociology and the economics of New Age and Yoga cults.
So, the closest thing to farming that was accessible to me that I could connect with was the largely symbolic farming, I would call it, of Ayurvedic study.
And Ayurveda is the pre-modern medicine of India.
So I plunged into studying whatever I could find out about this ancient naturopathy, and I was particularly taken by the lore around medicinal tastes, times of day, the sensual qualities of food, and the dependability of the solar and lunar cycles.
And within a few years, I kind of became a lay expert of sorts, and I got a distance degree in an unregulated modality called Ayurvedic Health Educator, and that came from the American Institute of Vedic Studies, founded by a guy named David Frawley, who I'll say a little bit more about in a bit.
So, I gave intro courses on the material in yoga teacher training programs, I did consults, and over time, however, something fell off about it.
And I think it boiled down to a couple of major things.
First of all, there was this growing split between the idealized holistic life I had valued and then what my city and environment actually was and could actually offer.
It was like my body was living in postmodern Toronto, but I was almost hallucinating myself into living in pre-modern India.
Secondly, I started to realize that the attempt to reconstruct holism from another era, not to mention another continent, actually fed the globalization machine.
Suddenly, it became totally absurd to be learning about mixing and marketing herbs imported from India under the guise of valuing local or earth-based health supplements.
Then I also started to realize the historical connections between Yoga, Ayurveda, and Hindu nationalism and how political parties like the BJP in India were beginning to use these art forms as a kind of soft political power.
I was increasingly horrified to see that the transcendent, inspiring, Seemingly authoritative and hyper-orderly prose of David Frawley and other white Hindu evangelists was also openly promoting anti-Muslim sentiments.
So, Frawley and Modi are now big fans of each other.
And imagine that.
It's like, I'm a lifelong NDP voter.
Here in Canada that's like, well for US listeners that would be like way left of Bernie.
And I'm spending all kinds of intellectual and emotional capital on a guy who turns out to be like a soft power neo-fascist shill.
Now, there's a lot of people waking up to this at the moment, and I think it's especially hard for people who identify as progressive, and also, maybe even more so, people who identify as feminist, to wake up to the fact that their religious heroes, their wellness heroes, are more patriarchal than the Christian and Jewish families they grew up in.
Lastly, I had two major medical experiences that showed me something profound about how my fetishization of Ayurveda had stimulated a strange antipathy towards biomedicine.
There were a lot of crucial interventions with the birth of our first son that allowed my partner and him to survive.
She wrote an amazing article about the stigmatization of hospital birthing and yoga land.
So we'll put that in the show notes.
And then after a series of long haul flights, where I was traveling around teaching yoga stuff.
I developed a DVT and pulmonary embolism, like hundreds of blood clots in my lungs.
So I was carrying our son up a flight of stairs and I felt strangely short of breath.
And they diagnosed me in emergency within a few hours.
And I'll never forget feeling puzzled by the news and saying to the emergency doctor, so can I go home and get a second opinion tomorrow?
And she gritted her teeth, and I think she had to restrain herself from smacking my head.
She said, no, you need to stay here and get treatment immediately.
So that was my mild case of biomedical distrust, and I don't know if I ever would have gone full anti-vax.
But I totally understand how people can get there even without having negative medical experiences.
Because all it takes is the combination of being earnestly fascinated by alt-health ideas, in my case Ayurveda, and then being told by alt-health influencers over and over again that they can solve all your problems and restore the planet at the same time.
So, but why was I fascinated?
Ayurveda seemed to recover something for me.
It gave me a vision of harmonious living, but really only a vision.
It appealed to my Marxist side as well, like one of his key ideas for me was that we are alienated from the means of production, which means that we don't even know where that potato we're eating came from.
We're not connected with or invested in the material mystery of the potato.
So the labor and love that brought the potato to us has become invisiblized by the money we paid for it.
Now Ayurveda allowed me to believe that I was less alienated, that I was getting closer to the earth, but what was weird is that it was, you know, by going to the Indian vegetable market and buying bitter melon in my cosmopolitan city, And I believe this kind of confusion is happening throughout the alt-health world.
People are flying to eco-retreats in Costa Rica.
They're flying to Peru to take plant medicine.
They're importing goji berries from China for their salads picked by Mexican migrant workers.
So we've got a lot of yearnings here for the real, the authentic, the natural, the wholesome, but the way it actually plays out in consumer capitalism is like this dumpster fire of waste and cognitive dissonance and global inequality.
Now here's another aspect of the soil plus spirituality equation that was resonant for me for a while.
One mantra within the Ayurvedic texts is that the earth you are from, like the specific climate, actually like your local area will support and sustain you.
And the whole pharmacopoeia of ancient India, this is probably true of other pre-modern herbalisms, is based on what you could wild harvest in a single day by walking around.
And that was super resonant with me.
And I wondered about how many of us were feeling ill at heart because we were actually homesick, because we didn't live anywhere, or if we were suburban and white especially, we didn't come from anywhere it seemed.
But then I saw a little bit of what all of this meant in so-called traditional practice.
When I started researching and interviewing people about how the late yoga guru, Pattabhi Joyce, sexually assaulted his yoga students basically every day.
He's the founder of Ashtanga Yoga.
There was a detail about his travel schedule that stood out to me.
His wife of 40 years would have to pack up all of their food for any world travel they did.
So this is suitcases full of dal, rice, ghee, spices.
Like, I don't know what she did for vegetables.
And when I asked around about it, I found out that it wasn't just some patriarchal control freak thing.
It was reflective of their Brahminical laws that you can't eat food from outside of your homeland, or you can't eat food prepared by someone of a lower caste.
So Joyce was already breaking a very old rule that said Brahmins couldn't travel over the sea, lest they be disconnected from their ancestors and their temples.
But there was something both compelling and disturbing about this.
Here was a religious devotion to the land that made ecological sense actually, but it was also paralyzing in how it allowed him to understand and live in that world.
And then he also just gamed it by, I don't know, getting special dispensation to get on the plane if he could put his doll in a suitcase.
It was also xenophobic.
Joyce repeatedly said that he would never teach Muslims yoga.
In fact, according to some reports, he only tolerated American spiritual tourists on his land and eating his food because they came with money.
One senior Joyce student told me that he considered his American students, Mlecha, or outcasts, lower than butchers, very unclean people.
Why?
Because they were wanderers.
They had no land.
They had no family.
They had no religious practice.
Now of course there's also some post-colonial disgust and perhaps revenge in there, but my source said that white people, in the Joyce family's estimation, could become honorary Brahmins by enduring the pain of yoga practice, and by paying him.
So just think about this for a minute.
Think about white hippies seeking enlightenment in India and provoking disgust from those who feel in their bones that spirituality requires staying at home, worshipping the local divinities, and eating the food that you can grow.
So this brings me around to blood and soil.
It's a German phrase, Blut und Boden, emerging from the infamous Dark Chapter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where notions of nationalism and racial purity, of course, collide.
And in previous episodes, we've covered the overlaps between European and Indian fascisms.
The Germans didn't call themselves Aryans for nothing.
The basic idea is that racial strength and purity, or blood, flows from a sacred location, that would be the soil, that must be protected against all invaders.
And in medieval to 19th century Europe, those invaders were brown or Muslim.
But then the Romantic poets add a different spin, and things get blended.
Time and industrial progress is the invader.
And that's what William Blake is writing about in his poem Jerusalem when he says, And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the Holy Lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here among these dark satanic mills?
So a little preview of things to come, of course.
And Blake, we see this weird contradiction as well, that the dark satanic mills have stripped England of its sacred soil nature, but he's going to restore it by importing the ancient world into England's pleasant pastures.
This is just like, I think, how I used to import triphala powder from India to Toronto.
And Jesus, of course, will walk on England's mountains with his bare feet.
Now, like many alt-health ideas that get scrubbed on their way into mainstream consumerism, the contemporary resonance of blood and soil isn't overtly now about racial purity.
It's much more about reconstructing some kind of pre-industrial harmony.
So we see this very powerfully in the sermons of Zach Bush about the richness of microbial soil.
But even that is connected with the globalist project, or at least its opportunities and its excesses.
Because he cites his time in a rural birthing clinic in the Philippines as his come-to-Jesus moment.
His own clinic offers Ayurvedic treatments as well.
But we also see this stuff in the claims of doTERRA women who, or sellers, you know, because it's everybody, who recruit their downlines at McMansion soirees while sitting on IKEA furniture extolling the virtues of the purest oils.
So, the basic conspirituality mythology is both plausible and appealing, which is why I think we're discovering it has such a history behind it.
It basically says there's a problem with time, with things changing and developing.
So, like, no wonder there's a feverish discussion of children and autism, which in the broadest sense is really about change and development that's hard to communicate about and hard to understand.
And conspirituality says also that there's a problem with space, with moving away from home, with things falling apart, with losing touch with the earth.
And obviously these are good problems to reflect on, but without making them into the only problems there are, or without making them into problems that can somehow be solved by pretending you're not alive because of the Green Revolution, or because of the oil economy, or because diphtheria isn't a thing really anymore.
So there's a strange place where a very natural and poignant devotion to the earth, to the soil, and a courage or an ardency that is connected with one's passion or one's blood crosses over into territorialism, into a panic about change.
And also into a hatred for anyone who would live on it in a different way.
And fascists are experts at finding that line and then pushing people over it.
Left of Bernie?
Absolutely.
Wow.
Well, I mean, we already have universal healthcare.
The right wing party's in Canada.
So left of Bernie means you just say, you just say, we're going to make that better.
We're actually going to, we're going to include dental care.
Left of Bernie says, you know, why is there anybody who's paying for any medications at all?
Yeah.
The right wing party in Canada probably is in favor of universal healthcare.
They longingly look south to privatization, but it's one of the third rails of Canadian politics.
They haven't yet done significant damage against it, despite being in power in many places.
Yeah, I'm often pointing out to friends that in the rest of the world, in other democratic countries, America's left would really be the center.
For sure.
And that's what came up when you were talking is this reminder, and I think it'll spill over into this entire episode in some ways, but the fact that air travel is really new, right?
Getting to India would require a month or more just, what, 120, 130 years ago?
120, 130 years ago.
Right.
Right.
Whereas, you know, now we can get there in a matter of hours.
And I always, one sort of wedge I always think about when I'm contemplating these topics is the relationship between technology and evolutionary biology.
For sure.
Because we're still operating with very old operating systems compared to our technology.
And we usually relate that in terms of what we're doing now, like talking on Zoom or online, but just basic things like indoor climate control and electricity and travel and how that's changed.
And it hasn't really necessarily caught up with what.
So we have this wedge where you say something like, but Tabi Joyce, the obviously longstanding anti-Muslim Hindu and vice versa fervor that has happened since partition and well before partition, but how that bleeds into the spirituality.
And that's a really, in a globalized society and with what we're trying to accomplish in terms of relationships versus our biological impulses, that's something we don't, I don't think talk about enough.
I'm going to start a little personally as well for my This Week in Conspiratuality and then broaden out from there.
So for about a decade, I was heavily involved in the international music scene as a journalist and DJ.
My gateway drug into this world was the Asian Massive Crew in New York City in 2001.
I spent a lot of time writing about, touring with, and hanging out with the Indian and Indian-American artists on this scene.
And I always remembered one conversation I had with DJ Reka, the founder of the epic Basement Bhangra parties.
So, a little context.
Missy Elliott had just dropped Get Your Freak On that year, and the song featured a tabla, so there was a lot of attention given to it in this circle.
It was really one of the first times a mainstream hip-hop song embraced Indian music in any capacity.
putting it down.
I'm the hottest round.
I told y'all mother .
Y'all can't stop me now.
But it was the following year when Jay-Z dropped Beware, the song that took a five-year-old Bhangra hit by Punjabi MC and remade it in his image.
And then all of a sudden Indian music was everywhere.
- All in the house.
- In the house.
- In the house.
Live from the United States, Brooklyn, New York, it's your boy!
The Nephews is in the house!
Yes, yes.
As soon as the beat dropped, we got the streets locked overseas.
And in the circle I was in, there was a lot of talk about the exotification of Indian music, as a lot of the DJs were also classically trained as well.
Rekha told me she couldn't stand the happy natives myth about Bhangra.
Bhangra is rooted in agricultural rituals created by Punjabi farmers singing and playing field songs during the harvest season.
The more modern electronic recreations of Bhangra are certainly upbeat and cheerful, but people often overlook the fact that folk music is created by the class, or in India the caste, that suffers the most.
So folk music is the music of struggle.
In fact, when slavery was becoming illegal around the world in the 19th century, India sent indentured servants to work on farms in slave-like conditions.
And in Jamaica, a group of Indians received a seven-year contract to work on tea plantations.
The problem was Jamaica was filled with banana and sugar plantations, not tea.
The colonial owners lied to get that cheap labor shipped over to them, and many of these Indians never left.
And the roots of Rastafarianism are actually deeply Indian, but that's another story for another episode.
So let's go back to agriculture.
We romanticize the notion of the idyllic farm in America.
And indeed, I know a few people who moved off the grid to start small farms.
They love getting their hands dirty and watching their food grow from seeds.
But here's the irony.
American farmers have repeatedly attempted to hire Americans in order to replace migrant labor.
That's a huge Republican talking point, getting jobs back to Americans that were stolen by the Mexicans.
But beginning in 1965 and continuing to just a few years ago, whenever farms invited Americans to come work there, Americans refused.
Growing food is hard.
And I say all of this because our agricultural system really has problems and the romanticization of the family farm is deeply misguided.
In the early 70s, USDA Secretary Earl Butz famously asked farmers to plant fence row to fence row in order to feed the American public.
That meant farmers needed higher yields per acre to stay in business, which meant using fertilizers, which meant Monsanto.
And I have no love for a lot of fertilizers or an agro-giant patenting seeds or even monocropping, which is one of the biggest problems we face in terms of nutritional density and soil health.
But here we come face-to-face with two problems.
Food production giants strong-arming smaller farms out of business and smaller farmers deciding it's just not worth the effort.
And so here we are.
And where we are is in the middle of a global pandemic.
Well, a lot of countries have it under control, but this is Trump's America.
Viruses are ancient, but pandemics are not.
They're roughly 12,000 years old.
It was only after the last ice age when humans began congregating in nation states and then giant cities that our food supply dramatically changed.
You no longer picked your food out of the backyard or hunted down your dinner.
When you domesticate animals and grow crops so close together for so many people, pandemics are inevitable.
Viruses proliferate under such conditions.
Now when we talked about focusing on the environment for this episode, I recalled an article I wrote about soil health in 1999 for a newspaper in Princeton about how monocropping was killing the nutritional value of tomatoes specifically.
And as you'll hear later in Matthew's interview, Nativa founder John Wulak was into health food in the early 80s.
So people have long been concerned about our ailing food production and supply system.
But the reality is supply chains are really hard to manage.
And a world of family farms is infeasible.
There's no way Americans are going to start tilling the land en masse.
But the corporate structure is also killing us.
So how do you feed nearly 8 billion people?
The pandemic has exposed many failures in the modern world, agriculture and supply chains being two giant yet under-discussed ones.
Unfortunately, I cannot wrap this segment up with a neat bow.
As I said, I've reported on this topic for decades, and if anything, things are getting worse, even though there are local examples where they do get better.
But I do know that the more times people spend hashtagging conspiracy theories instead of paying attention to the world that's literally burning outside of my window right now in California, the less time we have to focus on issues that matter.
This planet will treat us how it's treated any other animal that's abused it.
We're going to lose our privilege one way or the other.
And sadly, as animals, we seem incapable of making proactive choices that actually benefit the greatest number of people.
As Alan Watts once said, we were not born into this world, we grew up out of it.
And we need to grapple with this fact.
Yeah, and you're back to where you started, around the tension between modern life and our evolutionary history, right?
Yeah, very much so.
Yeah.
I'm curious to hear from you, given that you've been writing about this for so long, Gary.
Is there sort of a thumbnail sketch of what is so evil about Monsanto, and do you have a similar kind of quickie on GMO?
Monsanto specifically, I mean, my biggest contention is with the patenting of seeds.
I mean, that's really, and their argument is that it's their technology so that they should be able to patent it.
But it's been documented many times, winds will blow seeds from other farms onto other farms.
And so farms that didn't even plant those seeds were getting sued by Monsanto.
Yeah, it's really disgusting.
And I can't say that the actual premise of what they're trying to do is wrong, which is just creating seeds that are drought resistant or that can fight viruses.
I mean, it's just technology.
It's an application of technology.
But this, to me, is the sort of reason why government needs to step in and help to solve these problems when it comes to supply chain issues, especially when it comes to food, food and health care specifically, those two.
If we had a nationalized food program where the research was put into actually looking at how to create these seeds so that everyone could have access to them, we wouldn't run into this problem.
The other thing with that is that farmers are required to buy new seeds every year from Monsanto.
So, think about that.
How food usually grows is the plants drop the seeds.
They're not allowed by contract to use those seeds.
They have to buy new ones.
That is literally insane.
Those are some of the serious problems that we have with the food supply chain and how capitalism influences the food we eat.
I know later on with John's interview we'll get into GMOs and that is, that's what we're talking before.
It's like the vaccine issue with people.
We've been genetically modifying food in some capacity forever.
The first GMO was in 1973 and ever since then we've had a number of successes with genetically modified organisms.
So it actually comes very much Along the same lines with the whole thing that I've said about vaccines before, where you have to separate the efficacy of vaccines with the pharmaceutical companies, it's very similar here.
You have to talk about the fact that most GMOs, should they be studied?
Absolutely.
Should we look at long-term health effects of potential problems?
Absolutely.
But we've been eating GMOs, again, my entire life at least.
And so, when it gets wrapped up with that corporate structure, then we lose sight of what the actual problem is.
Yeah, yeah.
So we're talking, I mean it sounds like with Monsanto, we're talking about aggressive attempts to use technology to establish a kind of absolutely rapacious monopoly and to be litigious against people, you know, in ways that are completely unfair and go against, you know, everything we've done in farming forever.
But I do sometimes feel like You know, the sense that I have is that GMOs have been such an incredible success story in the developing world and in countries that are famine stricken and, you know, really, really poor.
And it's, I sometimes feel like it's a sort of boutique Western, you know, privileged stance to be opposed to GMO just based on like the intuitive objection that it seems unnatural.
The first attempt at golden rice in the 90s was a failure.
And that was just, you know, there was a serious problem with rural farmers and people in China with vision problems.
So they attempted to inject carotene into the rice in order to help their vision.
And what happened was they didn't put enough carotene into the rice.
So anti-activists were like, see, it's never gonna happen, it's a failure.
Well, the next round, they got it right.
And that's one success story ever since.
So that's a great example of that.
But I see absolutely no problem with initiatives like that, especially like you said.
Again, so much of what happens is, we have to remember, most of the world is not within driving distance of Whole Foods.
Uh-huh.
And when you can't put that into perspective, then it's going to create that serious problem that you were talking about right there.
Yeah.
I don't think it's just about people's intuition with regard to GMO.
It's also, I think it carries the weight of a kind of alienation.
I don't know a lot about farming except from my own sort of small-scale organic community cultures that I've been involved with rurally.
But I do know that the actual food that gets to the big stores, that gets to not only Whole Foods, but then to your sort of generic grocery stores, is now grown in such a way and at such a scale that the involvement, the personal involvement that any given community can have with its production is almost nil, certainly invisible.
I remember having my mind blown by talking with a farming family in Saskatchewan Who described, like they had, Saskatchewan is part of the Canadian breadbasket, and so they are talking about farming like tens of thousands of acres with machines that drive themselves.
Uh, and at seeding and at harvest time, they are operating 20 or 22 hours a day.
These are machines that are like as wide as a football field, uh, when their arms, when their arms are out and they're guided by fucking satellite and, and, and it's not just that they're guided by satellite.
While the farmer is sitting there, the farmer is sitting there looking at like an iPad, and the satellite is showing them where on their acreage they need to change the chemical structure of the fertilizer that they're applying, and it's like color-coded.
Yeah.
So if you can imagine, like, if you can imagine a picture, like, on your retina screen of a weather map that's showing, like, you know, blues and greens and then a little bit of yellow and orange and red, that's what they're getting on their screen.
And that's a picture of their very thing, of their property.
And the machine is mixing the chemicals according to the color coding beamed from this.
Like, what the fuck does this have to do with bread?
Yeah.
It's like, it's like, it is so, like, I couldn't believe, and these guys were talking to me and, and, and I said, I said, so, you know, is it profitable?
And, you know, they said, they rolled their eyes and they were like, well, you know, we're always, you know, we're always right on the edge and the machines are so expensive.
The other thing that they told me was that, was that they're, they can't even fix their machines.
Did you guys know this?
No.
The new agricultural machines that basically everybody with a large acreage is driving around are basically sealed up just like Teslas are.
The basic thing that used to distinguish most farmers in North America, which is, I'm going to learn how to fix my own equipment, and I'm going to be able to get in there and change the clutch and whatever, that's completely out of their hands.
And so not only like from the consumer side, we have mystery meat showing up on the shelf and we don't know, we're alienated from where the potato comes from, but on the producer side as well, it's like...
It's like we don't, it's almost a total abstraction.
And I think that this point around the yearning for re-enchantment, because what I hear is really important, because when I hear GMO, I can't pretend to understand the science of it, but I think what people are saying, what they're bringing to the table with that concern is, where does this come from and what are we doing?
Yeah.
And how is this coming out of nothing?
And why does there seem to be this creepy relationship between these initials and the fact that my life seems to be run by computers now?
So, I think we're really talking about the problems of disenchantment, too.
Yeah, disenchantment, alienation.
Thanks for that.
That was an insight into that world that I'm completely unfamiliar with.
I mean, the things, and it like, it ties back to Derek, you were saying that, you know, I've heard these stories, these news reports of we've tried to get Americans to work on farms.
And like, I know here in Southwestern Ontario that the farm harvesting labor force is all immigrant as well.
So I'm not sure, I guess we have the same story going on here, but it's like, I wonder, What kind of pay they're offering, and I'm wondering what the work is actually like and how fulfilling it can actually be when it gets up to this factory-scale farm level, right?
Oh, there's, I mean, you know, I don't know how it is in Canada, but in the U.S.
we have what are called the ag-gag laws, where you cannot get into these agricultural institutions.
You will be arrested.
They have police forces.
There was one journalist... Oh, what, as journalists, you mean?
Oh yeah, that's one of the great things about what PETA has done, which is going inside with hidden cameras, but they're risking their lives doing that.
There have been instances where people are actually just outside of the farm trying to take photographs on public property and the police will come by and tell them to leave.
There was a journalist, I believe Will Potter, no, Will Potter, I'm forgetting his name right now, but he had a project that I supported on Kickstarter where he flew drones over large-scale farms to show what was happening because that's the only way that, and that was even illegal, probably in some capacity.
I mean, they've actually restricted those laws under Bush, under Obama, I'm sure under Trump.
I mean, I know under Trump.
So, we can't see how the sausage is being made.
That's part of the problem as well.
Right.
But there is enough footage out there to horrify anybody about what actually goes into the process.
I'm just thinking of the sort of random footage that I've seen of large meat processing plants.
I think there's a lot of reasons for people to want to reject the basic sort of moral implications of how most of us are actually alive.
It makes sense.
It makes sense that we would try to dream of something else and hopefully work a little bit towards it without throwing a whole bunch of people under the bus.
I'll just, I'll close with this because I know Julian has his segment, but the one thing I remember, I think it was Steven Ranella talking on the Joe Rogan podcast years ago, and then I read Steven's book, but he talks about, or they talked about the idea that if you are a meat eater, then you should be required to hunt at least once to see the whole process.
Like what it's like to kill an animal, to gut it, to skin it, to do the whole process to really understand what you're eating.
And it's something that I, after being vegetarian for 20 years and coming back to eating meat, it's something I've actually asked friends about.
I've tried to find friends that hunt, but where I live, there's not a lot.
But I'm like, you know what?
Since I am eating it again, I want to do this at some point.
I want to actually live that process because I think it's important.
Because at least then the disenchantment would be gone and then I'd actually really see the process.
And I think that's really important.
Well, I wanted to talk about Zach Bush today a little bit.
We've talked about him before, but he's very topical in terms of what we're getting into today.
In the opening weeks of quarantine, there were videos from one person more than anyone else that all my yoga friends were sending me, and those were all of Zach Bush, MD, and he's still kind of making the rounds.
I wanted to take a fresh look at him because Zach Bush is an enigma to me.
If there's one thing I've learned again and again during pandemic is that people are complex.
And the beliefs, the values, the impressions I may associate with someone, they can turn on a dime under this kind of collective pressure.
Part of me wants to just say, Bush is a con man, and you'll see why.
A snake oil salesman, you know, we've seen this schtick before.
But that's not perhaps entirely fair.
Here are some things we do know.
His audience clearly exploded as a result of being featured on anti-vax mogul Dell Bigtree's now-removed YouTube channel, Highwire.
He was also featured on Brian Rose's London Reel in June,
And this is another channel that is slowly migrating off of YouTube because of quote-unquote censorship, and he appeared just as that channel was jumping the shark with David Icke, Andrew Wakefield, Rashid Buttar, Del Bigtree, and it led to Rose's new off-YouTube platform last month becoming the host of Mickey Willis' long-form Plandemic 2 release that was otherwise very effectively banned from social media.
But of course, it's not fair to judge a man only by the company he keeps.
People are, after all, complicated.
Here's the thing that I noticed, though.
With public figures, when I'm trying to make sense of them by learning more, there's usually just four outcomes.
So the first outcome is they may seem insightful and interesting or not.
And the more I read, the more I watch or listen, the more my initial impression is confirmed.
They, in fact, are completely uninteresting or full of shit.
Or they're insightful and compelling.
Or, as I learn more about them, my opinion slowly reverses.
I realize, yeah, actually, it's not what I thought.
They maybe are not as interesting or as full of shit as I was thinking.
But often, as I pay more attention, it leads to kind of this mixed sense that they're really on point about certain things, and on other things, they might just be dead wrong.
There is a rare fourth outcome.
And it's this.
No matter how much time I spend reading, listening, or watching, I consistently find that I walk away With this confused sense of not really being clear about their ideas.
It's confusing, maybe it seems kind of empty, like there's no there there.
As Shakespeare said, sort of full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.
Or in the case of Zach Bush, perhaps full of alternative science and mystical nature poetry, but leading only to his online supplement store.
In terms of why he ruled my Facebook Messenger inbox for a hot minute, there are two aspects I see him really tapping into.
The first is the idealization of the natural cure, right?
It's this repeated refrain that we're all familiar with, that all of our modern ills have to do with being disconnected from nature.
The second is the idea that we should be proactive about our health.
We should become more intuitively attuned, take supplements, engage in lifestyle choices that are preventative, and, yes, you can guess, immune boosting.
In a way, I see Bush as inhabiting a quite carefully crafted position.
He's the MD who can wax spiritual about near-death experiences while positioning himself as something of an entrepreneurial, motivational speaker.
He can smoothly switch from sounding authoritative about the science of the biome, the importance of healthy soil, how farmers will transform humanity, to then riffing on Mother Nature as a supreme intelligence that uses viruses to package beneficial updates to our genome.
Mother Earth, as it turns out, sent the pandemic, these are literal statements of his, sent the pandemic as a message that we have grown so out of balance with the planet and are stressing our ecosystems.
But then he'll turn around and critique the bizarrely unfairly framed kind of COVID denialist punching bag, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and he'll critique their huge philanthropic efforts and investment in eradicating polio.
He dooms it as a game of whack-a-mole, because clearly a vaccine is not the answer.
And of course, this was just months before it was announced in July, this past July, that new wild polio infections had in fact reached zero in Africa after four years without a single new case.
And polio, as you might remember, typically kills or paralyzes between 5,000 and 6,000 people per million when moving through a population.
But his rhetoric is appealing, right?
His romantic, our romantic, holistic sensibilities want, perhaps at times justifiably as we were just talking about, to believe there must be ways to return to a utopian sense of harmony with nature, in which magically health and wellness could once again be our birthright.
Bush dances around poetic claims, and I'm so glad you mentioned the romantic poets, Matthew.
He dances around poetic claims like, if we can just restore the microbiome, then the epidemic of cancer can be quelled.
If we can overcome the outdated notion that we are at war with and demonizing of the very viruses that built us, And get over the delusion of putting humans at the center of the natural world, we can transform humanity and save the planet.
If we can look past the biomedical model to see the higher spiritual dimension represented by near-death experiences, this, this could change everything.
Now, to be fair, Bush does have a non-profit with a documentary film that appears to be about encouraging ecological farming.
I haven't watched the whole thing, but I don't see any references to this non-profit or to the film anywhere else online when I look.
What a quick Google search does reveal is that he has been criticized for claiming at a conference that one of his microbiome supplements that he sells through his website could be part of curing autism.
Or as he puts it, could rebirth that child into a state of health.
Because he always has that poetic flourish, right?
On his website, the well-designed knowledge section has an autism heading and it panders to notions that autistic kids are angelic beings who have chosen to come to earth to teach us lessons through their unique perspectives.
There's also a video and paragraph on fasting, which just by the way is seen as dangerous pseudoscience in any medical context, but Bush touts how it provides an opportunity to pause and reflect, to heal and to detox.
And of course, you can be guided into this via something it turns out you can pay between $500 and $1,500 for to be part of a 4-8 week immersion called Biology Base Camp.
The quote on that page says, Western medicine, since its inception, has largely ignored the reality of biophysics.
In this same knowledge base, on Bush's website, there's an odd, non-sequitur paragraph with the heading, Business Leadership, this is one of the sections, that suggests we should lean more heavily on a collaborative, feminine business style, as exemplified, no doubt, by the stock photo of a black woman sitting in front of a laptop.
No course to sign up on that page for, it's just sort of this random thing.
So, I begin to see Zach Bush, MD, as casting a really broad net.
Clearly, he's comfortable reaching a massive anti-vax audience by cozying up on shows hosted by heavy hitters in that space.
He seems to want to sell stuff to parents with autistic kids, and appeal to heartland farmers, as well as the overlap between New Agers and Christians compelled by stories of the white light of near-death experiences.
And now, recently, on August 13th, he penned a very thoughtful Facebook post about the free press that decried media monopolies and our age of camera-ready news anchors who lack the heft of a Brokaw, McNeil, or Lehrer.
Sounds good.
The attached video he described as the most clear and concise dissenting voice he had heard in months.
And it featured a rant about the supposed tyranny, the blatant dishonesty, distortion of the statistics, and science denial of quarantine measures.
Sadly, this video was by controversial Australian media personality Alan Jones.
Well known for his open misogyny and Islamophobia, he has incited violence against Middle Eastern immigrants and joked about violence towards female leaders on the Australian left, as well as New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
Ironically, of course, it is Arden who incidentally has presided over an extraordinarily successful containment of COVID-19 in New Zealand via swift and careful application of the exact measures Bush is praising Jones for decrying as science denial and creeping fascism.
I have to be honest here.
At the end of the day, I don't personally know enough about the microbiome or Bush's metaphorical claims about viruses as helpful downloads from Mother Nature, or how much he's really doing for farmers.
Truth is, maybe all of that is legit.
But in some ways, I think it is even worse if he's right about all of that.
And if he is doing amazing ecological community outreach and even pushing the edges of how we understand health and medicine holistically, if we give him all that, and I'm not sure we should, it still works.
Because that makes it seem as if the other public figures he associates with, like Del Bigtree, Alan Jones, Brian Rose, and his cast of renegade red-pilled COVID deniers like Mickey Willis, David Icke, and RFK Jr., could be legit too.
As could Bush's own flowery but dangerous messaging about the pandemic.
In closing, I want to share that I have often thought that when it comes to cults and conspiracy theories and political operators, the obvious outright lie is nowhere near as toxic or dangerous as the contagious half-truth that appeals to our emotional identifications.
There was a teacher who was a friend of mine at Equinox who always talks about yoga as bringing you into the moment and present, very active on social media about being present, being there, etc.
Just basics, all fine.
She would comment on my posts very nicely sometimes.
I counted four consecutive times where I walked directly by her in the gym, and she didn't see me because she was walking down the entire row through the gym with her phone staring at it.
When I see someone like Bush, and with a lot of what I'm seeing, I can't help but I feel that there's this sense of, there's this persona and then there's this life that, it doesn't, the persona doesn't match life.
It doesn't match reality.
Walking and texting or staring at Instagram, whatever it is, is one thing.
It's something I think people have attentional deficits and I think it's a serious problem.
But if that's what you do, it's what you do.
But when you go and say the opposite of what you do, well, that's our president, right?
I mean, this is the sort of neuroses that is spreading throughout our culture in a very dangerous way.
And when I hear things like this with Bush and the microbiome and talking about, because there has been medical research looking at the microbiome and autism or relationship between it.
There's nothing conclusive.
But they are looking because they're trying to figure out what's causing this disorder and it makes sense.
But when you take a little bit of information and then you put that up as the final word without actually having done the research or considered The people who suffer from autism and what you're actually doing to them by sharing this misinformation, it's worse than... I don't even... It's really hard to stomach.
It's hard to watch.
And whenever I've watched his videos, and you're right, these are all complex, because some people do wonderful work.
And then there's just some things that are a little bit off.
But I'm fully with you.
I had this friend once that I listened to for over an hour talk about the Masonic architecture of Washington, D.C., going back to Egypt, and how the capital was the penis of Osiris.
That's my cat right behind me, Osiris.
And all of this symbolism.
And after the end of hour of listening to him without him taking a breath, I had no idea what the point was.
I had no clue.
I just was like, okay, what is that?
Where do we go from there?
And Bush is so representative of that.
Anytime I've seen something, I'm like, I, it's a lot of stuff that doesn't seem to me to lead anywhere.
Yeah.
It's like, it's like, it feels to me like he's created and you know, Fair play to him.
He's a guy who's trying to make a living, who has all these ideas, right?
He's a passionate thinker, and he has a certain background and a certain education, and he's trying to make his way in the world.
But it feels to me like we're seeing this very rapidly ramped up sort of uh media personality in terms of how he's portraying himself that where there's a big set of romantic ideas uh and then and then not a lot that comes from that or not a lot of implications that seem to make sense in terms of where he ends up taking it and at the end of the day I do feel like okay it leads to the website where you can buy my supplements.
Well, it's, there is amazing performativity.
Like, it's clear that he can speak in full paragraphs, that the poetry can be extraordinary.
I remember when we analyzed that flip that he made, I think, with Del Bigtree into, or on Rick Ross, I think, where he flipped, not Rick Ross, that's the cult guy, see what I'm thinking about, Rick Roll, so anyway, he He flipped into this transcendental sermon which was extraordinary.
And yeah, so there's an entranced quality, there is a repetitious quality, there's incredible rhythm.
Derek, I think if you had just sort of listened to your friend talk about Osiris in Washington, D.C.
as if you were listening to a rap or something like that, it would have been more effective or pleasurable.
And yeah, and that's part of it, I think, of what's going on.
But I have two other things to note.
One is, let's just acknowledge how incredibly good looking he is.
And how that plays into the performativity of these spaces and how it plays into the fact that, you know, alt-health economies are like yoga and other wellness economies are, you know, over-represented by women consumers.
And there's an eroticism that he is attributed with by his viewership, and I think we've got to take that seriously.
And the other thing that I wanted to ask you is, because you spend so much time on his websites, You know, the split between the online personality or the media personality and the person you would know is really accentuated when we're talking about somebody who we know works as a clinician or a therapist, and we don't know what it's like to be their patient.
And this is one thing that I'm very interested in because in all of the medical personnel that are making a mark in this particular space as COVID contrarians, We don't really hear about how they treat their patients.
Is there a patient who I can talk to who can tell me whether Rashid Batar is a good... What does he do?
He's an osteopath?
I don't even remember.
I can't remember.
Are there Yelp reviews on what it was like to go to Zach Bush's clinic?
Does Christiane Northrup see patients anymore?
This is this strange disconnect that is emerging in the age of the doctor as talking head and COVID contrarian pundit.
It's like, I want to know, like, what does it feel like to be taken care of by you?
Because, you know, there's a whole range of experiences there.
They all of them love to talk about how, you know, uncaring and, you know, hyper rationalistic or non-intuitive the medical profession can be.
And I want to know, well, how the fuck is it to sit with you?
Like, what is it, you know, what is it like to get a script from you?
Is it, is, are you going to, are you going to give me a sermon for 20 minutes when we have a 25 minute appointment?
Or, you know, are you going to learn something about me?
Like, um, so, so I find that to be a very strange part of this whole phenomenon is who Who are these doctors actually treating, and what does it feel like, and what happens when they fuck up?
Because I'm betting that some of them do.
Sure, sure.
And it makes me wonder, too, if it's a uniquely American phenomenon, you know?
Like, the idea of a Of an MD who is sort of a pitchman, right?
He's selling his alternative perspective and he's spinning things to try and persuade you to buy in a way that ideally I don't think we should associate with medical care.
It's really true.
I can't actually think of Canadian medical personnel who are entrepreneurial that way.
There's a couple of naturopaths who are big, but not people who are board certified.
We just don't have that, and that's because there's nothing in it for them, right?
They're already getting paid.
They're getting paid, right?
They're getting paid properly.
I get it.
All the time.
As a journalist, I get every week a number of publicists reaching out to me about the doctor they're representing and how they can talk about COVID or something of that nature.
Oh, wow.
And it's constant.
I've never written about it, but it's actually Oh you should man, that's awesome.
And I think about doctors like Atul Gawande or Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctors who do deserve to be, they're incredible writers, or Daniel Offrey is one who wrote a fantastic book about, it's called What Doctors Say, What Patients Hear.
And it's about the distance between those two things, and it's about non-compliance, and the fact that doctors average cutting off their patients 12 seconds into their dialogue because they just want to get something in.
I mean, when you actually see the statistics, it's mind-boggling, so it makes sense.
And she also discusses about how healing conversation is, about how patients are much more compliant when they have time and their doctors listen to them.
But in terms of the media thing, yeah, it's actually, it's a real problem how many press releases I get that doctors just want to get press.
I've never even heard about that, Derek.
You've got to write about that.
You've got to totally write about that.
That's so weird.
And it was Rich Roll.
A Rickroll is when you... - When you said someone's never gonna give you up. - Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down. - I got it wrong twice.
It's not Rick Ross.
It's not Rick Rule.
Sorry, Rich.
Sorry, Rich.
I just noticed something in listening to that interview, Matthew, is that when you mentioned, you mentioned a few different figures, including Zach Bush.
To John Roulak.
And given that they both seem to be moving in these circles and concerned with soil quality and with farming, and that they both have documentary movies, I would have expected something.
And nothing came back.
There was no sense of like, oh yeah, Zach, he's a friend of mine, or oh yeah, he has a movie too.
Right, I don't know if they're, yeah, they might be aligned.
I should follow up with John and see what he thinks about, as you were mentioning, the company that Dr. Bush keeps.
Yeah, and given that, I think the movie came out in the fall of last year, and I don't see anything about it anywhere.
Actually, I did see that it had been selected by Vimeo as something that they're featuring, so that's a point of praise.
Yeah, because John's movie is coming out fairly soon too, yeah?
It is, I think September 22nd, so that'll be in the show notes.
Yeah, I really appreciated talking to John, especially because he really highlighted the incredible cultural diversity of the, you know, organic food movement and its various political impulses and, you know, what's shared and what's not shared. you know, what's shared and what's not shared.
It's a really, really fascinating landscape.
And I also like just listening to somebody watching, and this is just becoming a theme for our podcast.
We're constantly talking to people who have 20 or 25 years in one sector of the wellness industry who are saying, wow, you know, the cracks have really shown at this particular point.
And, you know, what I thought we all agreed on is actually a lot weaker or more volatile than it appeared to be.
I mean, the conversations that I've had with naturopaths over, you know, people like Northrup are really, really sad and kind of, everybody seems to be in the place where they're pointing towards, oh, okay, well, how am I going to really define my alliances and my friendships and my values going forward?
Yeah, yeah, and I feel like as time goes by, more and more, I'm noticing the emotional toll that that is taking, and I'm recognizing that, I don't know about for you guys, but for me, it's more something I've been observing, like we've been reporting on it and observing and thinking about it, analyzing it, but there's a little bit of a remove for me.
There's intersection, but it's not my close friends, it's not my colleagues that I've known for decades.
In the way that that we're hearing from some of these other folks and what a what a tough tough thing to go through and the way in which John is stepping up on social media and you know that thread where he talks about Mickey Willis, holy shit.
Right, we'll link to that in the show notes and and you know and also it um maybe we can call it the uh the Ahmed problem because it really highlighted in that exchange Willis came on and said you know thanks so much for your criticism every time somebody calls me out for you know with their own propaganda uh you know I get more followers and more people get directed to uh here's my website clickety click uh and so yeah it's it's very very it's a very strange
Strange environment.
And it takes a lot to risk what he risks.
And especially when it's not clear how it's going to pan out, you know?
Exactly.
There's a certain amount of pushback.
And honestly, I was stunned by that opening response from Mickey that it was like a troll level kind of nastiness of like, oh, oh, you really don't like what I'm doing.
Well, thank you so much for helping to promote it because you don't realize that you're actually doing my bidding.
Yeah, I mean, credit to him, he believes that he's in a ground war and social media is not going to be about conversation or persuasion or, you know...
Yeah, no.
He's got a position and he's sticking by it.
And at least that's clear.
And I think, you know, just I will reference Ahmed again.
It makes it really more apparent that in certain circumstances, you really have to just isolate and block and cut people out and de-platform where you can.
So I was happy to be able to sit down and speak with John Rulak and we'll send the link to his bio, but here it is for you.
He's the founder and chief visionary officer of Nutiva, which is the world's leading organic superfoods brand of hemp, coconut, chia, and red palm superfoods.
He founded it in 1999, and he is dedicated to nourishing the people and the planet.
He also has a movie coming out that he's executive produced, which we'll drop into the show notes.
I think it releases on September 22nd.
It's called Kiss the Earth.
Thanks, John, for joining us here on Conspirituality Podcast EGN.
You founded Nutiva in 1999, and as I read, it was really through a fascination with hemp.
How would you describe your roots in alt-health and organic foods in general?
How did that come to be?
Yeah, thanks.
First off, it's great to be on the show.
Thank you for the invite.
Yeah, it started out interesting.
Basketball is like something that I really love to play and enjoy and still do.
And when I was 21, I started cramping in my legs.
I didn't understand.
I'd run down the court and go, wow, what's that about?
It turned out my diet really sucked, really bad diet, and that led me to looking at nutrition.
Ironically, my grandfather was into health food in the 1920s and 30s, so kind of skipped a generation.
So that kind of led me to learn about organic foods and then from the interest in like, okay, if it's important to eat organic foods, and there wasn't a lot of organic foods in 1980s, that led me to study organic farming and went to a lot of the workshops and conferences around organic farming and worked on some organic farms just Mainly to get access to some food and work a little and study permaculture.
Did you have access to your own land at a certain point?
Did you start buying up acreage?
No, no.
When I was living in Northern California, I would just go visit farms.
I knew when it was cherry season where to go at the cherry farm.
Or I had friends in the Cape A Valley and would do that.
So that got my interest in organic foods.
And then also I started getting into acupuncture to deal with any basketball injuries and found that very effective.
So really been interested in fasting and cleansing and other plant medicines and explored vegetarianism for a while and herbs and things.
So it's been definitely part of my life.
I'm kind of a, some people call me a health nut.
Right.
And who have you done this with?
Like, who has your community been through all of that time?
And what's the demographic?
Well, you know, it's all sorts of different, you know, types of people.
I mean, I've been involved in various, in the organic farming, you know, farmers, that a lot of them are smaller farmers that want to create a better food system.
Activists in the Like non-GMO activists, we spent a lot of time on like trying to put labeling on for products in the last five or six years.
Also been involved in hemp, so working in the hemp community.
And then the natural food business, you know, I've been going to the Expo West where they have last year like, you know, 100,000 people almost.
So in a lot of different communities as well as a permaculture as well.
And just a lot of people who are interested in something different than the mainstream kind of big, you know, using chemicals to grow foods or using pharma to solve the problem.
So that's been part of my community.
And with this natural foods community as it's evolved, have you associated it with any kind of coherent or identifiable politics?
Obviously, you know, the values of Moving away from monoculture or, you know, trying to go organic or building healthy soil, you know, these are all, you know, deeply held, you know, articles of faith for so many people.
But are there other ways in which politically your community has bonded?
Well, you know, in the non-GMO movement, we put a lot of, we put ballot initiatives in the state of Washington, California, Oregon.
It was passed in Vermont.
So we got a little involved in politics.
And then, you know, there was a, there was a bad, kind of a bad deal that went down where, where Where there was going to be a national, there was going to be regulations to label GMO foods in Vermont.
That was going to spread across the country.
And then several Democratic senators, you know, kind of jumped over with the Republicans and endorsed, you know, throwing out all these GMO labeling.
And that kind of set off a lot of people about how to, you know, distrusting So I'd say that the one theme is a lot of people in this movement distrust government from the actions and kind of see it as a corrupt process.
And everybody's got a different shade of what degree they're involved in.
But you know, definitely libertarian Kind of non-conformist.
Right.
Sometimes aligned with Democrats, because they tend to have a much better environmental record, for instance, than Donald Trump, which is fast-tracking labels of GMO foods.
They want to allow diseased chickens, which never have been allowed to be sold, for them to be sold, etc.
Right.
But the libertarianism means that when there's governmental distrust, it's bipartisan, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, it's complex, but there's not one way to describe it, actually.
There's a lot of people who are interested in health that vote Republican.
A lot of people are interested in healthier foods and being healthier, so it goes across the spectrum of all parties, really, I think.
Right.
I mean, I'm asking these questions as a build-up to, you know, our main topic, which is what the hell has been happening to, you know, the wellness and natural food movement since March?
Like, what have you been watching happening?
And we'll link to your Medium essay in the show notes, but what's going on?
What are you seeing happening in your community?
It's kind of like invasion of the body snatchers.
People, a lot of people were supportive of Bernie Sanders.
And when Bernie, when it appeared that the, you know, much of the establishment, the media, the Democratic Party, really, even though Bernie got the most people would show up and a lot of support, You know he didn't ended up not getting the nomination, and I think people felt a little burned and upset And I was upset too, I supported Bernie.
So the combination of that and then the COVID really quickly, the kind of non-conformist distrust of government, distrust of pharmaceutical, immediately went to anti-mask without a lot of clarity or rational reason.
And then once that happened, many just kept falling, tumbling down the rabbit hole into this kind of New Age right.
They all have a different label.
Like some of them are totally in New Age, right?
Others like say, oh no, you know, it was all a conspiracy, but you know, I don't like Biden or Trump either.
So it's all a different, it's like on a continuum.
So it's complex, but essentially, If you look at the people who supported organic foods and non-GMO that has high profiles in the non-GMO organic wellness foodie space, so many of them have gone either full Q And at least anti-mask and definitely not supporting Biden.
Right.
Not all, not all.
And there's many, actually many of us who are in the environmental food movement are working now to how to communicate and, you know, because We all feel like four more years of Trump in the United States will destroy whatever's left of our social fabric of this country, and we may lose what we hold dear.
So it's all on the line in the next 60 days, and that's the reason why I wrote the piece.
Right.
Well, I appreciate that.
But stepping back just a little bit, you know, people who dedicate their lives to, you know, undoing the damage of monoculture in big agribusiness and people who dedicate their lives to studying soil structure, they can't be anti-scientific, can they?
I mean, like, you can't come to an understanding of good crop rotation and, you know, the effects of of good farming practices on local communities while at the same time rejecting evidence.
So how do you think, how does this happen where, you know, people might be distrusting their political leaders because they're corporate backed or in the end, they're all going to support, you know, big, big agro, but like, Why is it so easy for people who are interested in the biochemistry of food to suddenly not be interested in the biochemistry of COVID?
How does that happen, do you think?
That's a very good question.
I think it's complex, and for different people, it's different reasons.
But part of it is the corruption.
They see the corruption of Monsanto, And the agricultural industry, where toxic pesticides are just saying, well, they're actually not that toxic.
And we did studies and so it really doesn't cause cancer when actually we see there are a lot of health concerns.
So they make that and then now COVID brings it all up about pharmaceutical.
Is there going to be a vaccine?
Do we trust the CDC, the FDA?
So, they don't trust the FDA and Department of Ag and federal government around organic foods.
And so, then they just logically conclude with some good evidence that Let's face it, the New England Journal of Medicine has said up to 50% of the research that's turned in for medicines, pharmaceutical drugs, was actually inaccurate and was influenced by financial interests.
Right, you're right.
So they jump to that, so the pharmaceutical industry is corrupt, so then when the messengers who they see as corrupt say, wear a mask, it's effective.
They see it through a different lens.
And then you have whoever's behind Q and who's ever behind electing Donald Trump and whoever wants to see that climate change is denied, then they're micro-targeting and spreading memes and playing off of that divide.
And they've been very effective.
Right.
And part of that effectiveness that I'm wondering if you can speak to is whether or not some of these ideas are able to move along the same kinds of media lines that You know, you've watched communicate beneficial alt-health information.
It's like there's already a network of people that are connected through this, you know, shared value of improved health and health autonomy and, you know, improving local soils and so on.
But that network also seems to be very receptive to A whole sort of, as you say, body-snatching set of ideas that can run along those same networks.
Yeah.
Also, to understand, in the last year or two, Google and Facebook, especially Google, has been targeting organizations that are critical of Monsanto, you know, definitely that are critical of pharmaceutical.
So like, those who are like, maybe spreading unfounded conspiracies about certain things, People who actually have good information are being lumped together, so that's pissed them off even more so.
But we're seeing a lot of the leading influencers in the food and wellness movement now are anti-mask and are against social distancing, and they've taken that up as their rallying cry.
You know, they spread the meme like, um, only 6% of deaths from COVID are actually tied to COVID.
It's all these other, you know, impacts because they don't understand how to read a death certificate.
You know, they just, and those memes are created, artwork is created, um, messaging, and it's, then it spreads through and our, and this community is sharing that all the time.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I guess it feels like the pathways are etched already that the same kind of network that would have, you know, shared information about the benefits of turmeric or something like that is now instantly set up to pass along a meme about, you know, Tony Fauci or something like that.
Exactly and and so we're yeah it's a it's You know, kind of that environment is set that way.
So we're, some of us are working to create information that supports voting out Donald Trump.
And from it, you know, for some of the reasons I mentioned earlier, you know, about how they want to fast track GMOs.
But most of these food activists who are now pro-Trump are chewing on, they have no idea that Trump is actually working on behalf of Monsanto.
They have no idea that That the meat industry is working to sell diseased animals that would never have been sold, they never would get away in a Democratic administration.
But a Republican administration, under Bush, under Trump, they're now pushing that forward.
So we need to communicate more on that and so we, so for people to be aware of it.
Right.
Now, my understanding is that some of your wider aspirations are really about soil health in the broadest terms.
And one of the questions I had for you was, why do you think ecological concerns are seem to be almost missing, especially, you know, the wider perspective, ecological concern, climate change.
Why is this missing from this discourse that spans from conspirituality to QAnon?
There's a couple of people who stand out as proponents of the wider ecological argument, like Zach Bush seems to be on that trip, but, you know, Why is this off the map, as far as you can tell?
I say it's by design.
And the New Age right, whoever is directing or funding it, they want to change the narrative.
And I would say going back five years ago, I started to see this, where if you talked about climate change, if you were conservative or you were in the Midwest, they'd say it's sunspots.
Yeah, the climate's maybe changing, but it's caused by sunspots.
If you're in the West Coast, in permaculture, you know, at a co-op or you're a non-conformist, let's say hippie, Or in that kind of genre, you'd say, oh, it's caused by HAARP and it's geoengineering.
And when they had the fires here in Northern California in 2018, that was started by space weapons, not by climate change.
So this has been going on for a while.
The powerful movement that whoever's behind this doesn't want to talk about climate change.
I mean, bottom line, unless we address climate change, it's going to be, everything else is going to be irrelevant.
I mean, we're now in California, we're seeing record temperatures, you know, breaking, you know, you know, where it's 100 to 115.
At our current rate, you know, in 10 or 15 years, instead of, you know, Southern California being 112 or the Valley, it'll be, you know, 121.
Yeah.
And our systems are not set up for that.
And, you know, nature really wants the bat last.
And that's really my interest is focusing on the solution.
Which, to those of us who have been involved in the environmental movement and have broken away from the orthodoxy of the mainstream environmental movement, which is coal and oil is bad, Solar, wind, and Tesla is good.
End of subject.
That's the meme that the Sierra Club, 350.org, Michael Bloomberg, and most talk about.
But there's a new focus, combine the ranchers, farmers, and environmentalists, permaculture, and soil geeks, and scientists, and saying, we need regeneration.
And we can take that carbon, which we think is our The thing I think is bad is really a resource, an ally, return that back into the soil through keeping the ground covered, planned grazing using animals, planting trees, cover crops, reinforcing mangroves, which I'm involved in several projects.
Wow, yeah.
This is what we need to focus on, but as long as we're distracted from Q, and are masks working or not, or is climate change a hoax or not, we're not focused.
So, the irony is, many of the people that I've met, Over the years, you would think would be a natural ally to say, wow, you mean we can work with farmers and ranchers and they can spend less money on chemical inputs and improve their farm and it's going to be good for the environment.
So farmers and ranchers can be environmentalists.
So kind of the Trump country and the West Coast or, you know, more the organic community can be on the same page.
That's an exciting opportunity.
Right well okay so this this begs a question for me which is you know you've been at this for you know 20-25 years and you know when ecologists environmentalists burn out in my experience you know there's not a lot of winning going on and I'm wondering whether part of what might be going on in your networks is that
The real work of soil regeneration and of, you know, systemic ecological change is just really hard and in some ways boring and pedantic, but also absolutely necessary in this existential way.
And, you know, and then in place of all of that work, we have this fever dream instead that offers us a way of, you know, solving all problems at once in some kind of apocalyptic finale.
And, and so I'm wondering, do you think there are, do you have former friends and colleagues who maybe have migrated into a conspirituality or QAnon land just because they're, they're exhausted?
I think you bring up a very good point.
If you look at the data, and you look at the news reports for the last 25 years on the environment, it's not a good situation.
What scientists said was going to happen 10 years ago, or 3 years ago, it's way worse now than they predicted.
Right.
The fascination of the New Right, the Golden Dawn, which is kind of like this Golden Dawn New Age thinking, has elements of Nazism and Fascism, where they kind of come together in this fantastic, pure, new reality.
It's a way for them to opt out.
It's like a religion.
It's a way for them to opt out to do the hard work.
And yeah, we need to work with our local organic farmers and we need to change policies in Washington, D.C.
And we need to encourage people to eat better and all of those things.
But if they can just let all of that go, all of that concern and worry and just go, oh, We believe in this conspiracy vision of an elevated way of being, a golden dawn, a 5G reality.
It's escapism, and it's very dangerous.
We're, I mean, we're living in a social society that's collapsing.
And the one thing I wanted just to mention is, that's the reason why I did this film called Kiss Me.
Yeah, tell us about the film a little bit.
In 2014, one of my mentors, Will Allen, who wrote a book called The War on Bugs, who's a great organic farmer in Vermont, and I've been going to the conference, he's part of EcoFarm since my 20s, so I've been going for over 35 years.
He gave a talk, said that the largest contributor to climate change is really land use and agriculture, and that chemical fertilizers are contributing significantly, you know, through nitric oxide, which are, you know, 280 times worse than carbon.
And we're using this.
And so the idea, when I learned that, and I was like, Why is it, you know, I've been going to these organic farming conferences and hanging out with all the pioneers and I'm in the organic food business and no one's talking about this.
I literally for six months thought I'd, I started talking to a few others.
I thought I'd lost my mind.
How is it the organic food movement doesn't talk about soil health, doesn't talk about that, how we, how we raise our food can change how we, how, you know, we can draw down that carbon, how we can change climate change and for the better over, over, over, over the years for society.
And finally I just said...
Why not do a film?
I met the film directors, Josh and Rebecca Tekel in Ojai, and I said, let's do a film.
And they said, well, we got some other films.
I said, but this is the film we're going to do.
And they kind of looked at me, and they've done it, and they've done a great job.
Woody Harrelson's the narrator.
We have great, we've got celebrities in it to really draw, like Ian Somerhalder, I mentioned Woody, Jason Mraz, Gisele, and Tom Brady.
A football superstar, as well as lots of farmers and ranchers and people working in composting and soil health.
Wow, so that really is across the aisle, that lineup, eh?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the stars in the film are Trump supporters.
You know, when we get together, we don't talk politics.
We don't talk climate change.
We talk about soil health.
We talk about sequestration.
We talk about how could we, we could regenerate the middle of the country, restore the tall grass prairies by having the farmers park their, their John Deere tractors and instead do plan grazing with, with animals, hoofed animals, whether it's Buffalo or, or, or cows hoofed animals, whether it's Buffalo or, or, or cows and build up that grass.
So that's what we do.
And that, that movie is coming out September 22nd on Netflix.
And so that's what I really want to be focusing on and less about who's got down the rabbit But I'm so concerned about this QAnon, what I'm seeing, it's body snatching.
I mean, two ex-girlfriends have been snatched.
My editor, my main editor for my books and articles the last 25 years have gone down the hole.
Seriously?
Seriously!
These are, so okay, now, well you have mentioned, now I know that your Medium article has, you know, ruffled feathers within your immediate milieu, and I know that you mentioned in one post on Facebook that you know Mickey Willis, for example, personally, you've known him for 10 years.
So how's it going with you speaking out on behalf of, you know, sanity?
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I've known Mickey and we worked on a music video together for Hemp called Hemp Will Save the World.
We did a non-GMO video, you know, and I've liked Mickey and I've noticed the last couple years he started to kind of get a little radicalized in different ways and kind of, you know, he's He feels like the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry and so he's kind of launched from there.
But I decided some of the work people are spreading on this, I call them super spreaders of disinformation.
And so I called him out and Dr. Christine Northrup, which I also know, she used to promote Nativa's coconut oil.
And I'd say, I mean, we had 350 or 400 comments on my post yesterday talking about this.
I'd say about 60% of the comments are positive for, you know, like, yeah, we should be wearing masks and some of the stuff is BS, but 40% and people who know me, you know, attack me and say, you know, they say I'm corrupt or this, they project a lot of stuff.
You know, but then we also have a lot of scientists that come on and people in medical professions are just saying, there's no there there.
This is all just BS.
It's gotta be, it's gotta be really weird for, you know, you to be attacked after a career like this as some kind of shill for big pharma or something like that.
Like, I don't, how does that?
How does that, are you actually being, are you actually, are people making concrete claims about where you must be coming from that just don't line up with reality at all?
Yeah.
You know, the irony is I published it like something called, I think a publication in 1990 called 12 Ways to Personal and Planetary Health or something.
It was like a little, a little brochure for the Earth Day.
I was a producer of one of the largest Earth Day festivals in 1990.
And it said, We'll seek more holistic methods instead of relying on drugs and surgery.
And we had these all printed up with the City of LA's logo and someone reached out and didn't like it and they banned it and said you can't distribute it.
So I've already been banned by this.
It's so rich for people to say, oh yeah, you're corrupted by pharmaceuticals, you don't see it.
I mean, my dad was poisoned by a pharmaceutical drug and died at 76.
He cut his oxygen supply by 95%.
My grandmother was on happy pills when I saw her in her last five years of her life.
So, I'm very clear on what the pharmaceutical industry, how dangerous it is.
I don't take things personally.
I've been doing this a long time.
I just try to focus and listen, but not take it personally.
People are under stress, so I'm not worried about people attacking me.
Yeah, well, I'm glad to hear that.
That's not an easy space to hold.
You know, I want to finish with maybe a more personal question on my behalf.
I don't know whether you have kids, but I have two little boys.
They're four and seven.
Because the province of Ontario here has really screwed up the back to school planning and it's not safe, we're going to do some homeschooling.
We're lucky to be able to do it.
But one of the things we're going to do, I've got a pretty active garden out back and we're going to do some composting projects.
And we just planted some romaine on September 7th in the greenhouse.
We're going to see if we can get through to 72 days and see if we can harvest it.
But I guess my question for you is what lessons have you taken away from just having your hands in the earth about how to be clear about what you need to do or what the nature of evidence is.
Like, is there a relationship between the way in which the world makes sense and you know, how you, you are now really conducting this activism against irrationality?
Yeah, that's a good, it's a good, it's a good point.
A good question.
I, I saw a video, um, uh, it talked about what we consider as truth and evidence.
And it's someone who's a very deep philosophical and coming from science point of view.
And he said, unfortunately, our modern system is not really grounded in really truth and there's so much influence.
For example, virtually all when you do tests for feeding trials for GMO foods, Both the control and the subject that the rats are feeding, the chemicals, they're both being fed GMO, Roundup sprayed corn for the feed.
Right.
So what we think is not compromise, it's independent science a lot of times.
So it's a challenge when you kind of dive down, you see that it's not always so easy to assess this.
So it definitely makes it, you know, we just need to do the best that we can.
And these are complex subjects and we want to be able to You know, how does a layperson analyze information watching a couple YouTube videos?
The social media is really accelerating this misinformation and never would have happened.
Somebody might have just gone to a coffee shop and ranted a little, and today they have 500,000 followers.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's a great point because most of the child psychology and neurology recommendations around screen time, for example, are The kid's four years old, it should be no more than half an hour a day.
And it's like, when I think about sending the four-year-old out to learn something about how the compost pile is doing, that takes time.
And it's going to be a day-to-day thing.
And we're going to watch slow changes take place.
And they're going to be meaningful.
And that's just a different learning You know, arc from, you know, the speed of the rabbit hole.
Yeah, and I think a lot of kids, you know, historically, the youth, they learned a lot from their parents, based on what the parents were doing.
You know, like your seven-year-old, if he was, you know, 10 or 11, learning, you know, how do you go about, you know, organizing, you know, your work life, and how do you treat people, and how do you organize, and how do you, some of those things are important, and we've kind of outsourced that to the schools.
So maybe there'll be some benefit there.
I don't have any kids, but I know a lot of friends who have and they're going through some challenging times.
I wrote a book called Backyard Composting, so composting is a love of mine.
Oh man, we've got to get that.
We need all the books we can over here.
John, any last thoughts?
You've got the film coming out that you've produced, September 22nd, so we'll link to that in the show notes and then we'll boost it.
What do you think the next year is going to look like?
We've got to get through November, and then what?
Yeah, well, I think, you know, it's challenging times.
I think it's important to find out, you know, what brings us joy, what brings us curiosity, and to feed that.
We, I believe, the number one job on planet Earth, if we want to have society, is to take the legacy load of carbon that is falling into the oceans and is causing ocean acidification, has all those impacts, is we have that opportunity to take that carbon, which is a resource, not a waste, and return it back into the soil, improving the water cycle,
improving the nutrition, helping farmers and ranchers, that if we get that right, a lot of things will change.
We'll improve our health care system.
We'll improve our budget.
We won't need as much subsidies.
We're going to reduce toxic chemicals.
People are going to be more healthier.
To me, that is the most important thing, this regeneration.
And it starts with...
We can do it on our own.
Don't buy industrial meat that's grown in factory farms.
If you're a vegetarian, support farmers who are doing more organic.
There's a lot of industrial Uh, chemical grown foods like the Impossible Burger that vegetarians are purchasing.
So, just because it's vegetarian doesn't necessarily mean it's healthier.
So, whether you eat meat or not, whatever your diet, the more you can do is the better around that.
And let's regenerate planet Earth.
So I want to close this episode with a little reflection about the types of stories that are being stolen from public view because conspirituality to QAnon is just so goddamn loud and venal.
I think it's ironic that the alt-health influencers that crusade against junk food also dish out so many junk food emotions.
So, as I mentioned in absentia last week, my family and I went up to Manitoulin Island, and a couple of hours before our family got off the ferry, There was a 48-year-old man out swimming in Lake Huron at a place called Carter Bay, which is close to the place where we stay.
So he's the same age as me.
He was with his 11-year-old son and the son's friend, and there was a strong undertow that day, and the three swimmers got pulled out into the lake.
Now the man managed to rescue the two boys from the pull, But then he succumbed, exhausted, and his wife and older son watched from the beach, and the boy had to be restrained from racing in after him.
The wife plunged in to attempt a rescue, but she had to give up and turn back.
So he died.
And we read this story four days later in a paper called the Manitoulin Expositor.
This is the locally printed paper.
It's been in circulation since 1879.
The man's father was quoted as saying that he remembered swimming in the same spot as a boy and clinging onto the rocks and daring the undertow to sweep him out.
The report said that the first responders did CPR for 30 minutes, but they admitted that they were really just waiting for the coroner.
So that's it.
That's the story.
A quiet, absolutely natural disaster that I think basically everybody on the planet can relate to.
And it was printed in ink, and it was delivered by hand to residents of a rural island.
Now I suppose you could politicize it somehow if you had to, like if you were delusional, but it resonated with me because what I'm noticing in the news cycles that we cover is a distinct lack of simple grief.
Like, I know it's being written and produced, and, you know, I remember that a while back, the New York Times published the names of COVID victims, along with one-sentence bio notes.
I think it was on the front page.
I also saw a news story about the portraits of Black COVID casualties lining a road in some town in Michigan.
But one thing that's characteristic of this timeline is that, for the most part, these quieter stories are drowned out.
I think that for conspiritualists to sell their wares, they have to be alarmist about death and state oppression, but only in the abstract.
I see them speculating about rising suicide rates because of lockdown, but I never really hear the story, like in simple terms, about the person who died of suicide.
So months ago on this podcast, we discussed how Mickey Willis rooted his post-viral pandemic selfie sermon in a lot of deep eye gazing into the camera.
He assured us that he was ready to die and that if we could only all be as mature as him, the fear that was more dangerous than the virus would be defeated.
But I'd say that by spinning everyone's heads away from natural catastrophes, a divorce, cancer diagnosis, an undertow, a pandemic, Willis and his friends lead us into the realm of pseudo-emotion, where everything only seems to be at stake.
Where everything happens so quickly.
Where everything happens quickly, but it's also quickly forgotten.
So that the next crisis can, you know, be manipulated.
It's also a place where accountability is meted out by overworked Facebook mods, if at all.
I keep thinking about the EMTs giving that guy CPR until the coroner arrived.
Uh, probably driving from an hour away, probably from the other side of the island.
Like, keeping those compressions going is probably standard practice, but you know how exhausting it is.
And they probably weren't expecting any miracle.
But they also knew that his two sons were watching, and his wife.
And it makes me think about all the frontliners for COVID, and all of the grinding, boring, demoralizing work that attends the sick and dying.
How long it all takes, but how I imagine it also offers fleeting moments of clarity, intimacy, and contact.
And we're not hearing about any of that from the influencer soapbox.
We're hearing about elites and masks as submission signaling and Bill Gates and the WHO and so many symbolic things in places that we'll never see and on a scale that's always larger than life.
And meanwhile, the tragic moments of those recruited to support the president are all waved away.
We know that the MAGA ralliers are watching neighbors and family members fall ill and die.
And what does their media offer them?
Finger pointing and flag waving.
Sound and fury, as Julian said earlier, signifying nothing.
Although not like in Hamlet, which is weighted down by actual time creeping in its petty pace from day to day.
Sound and fury that erupts and disappears, signifying nothing.
So here's where I think of how quiet her stories are buried under the doom scrolling and how the scrolling itself has devastated local print media.
The masthead on the Manitoulin Expositor lists the publisher, editor, and two staff writers who are probably like in their cars every day, driving from one end of the island to another to report on the school board meeting, to interview the First Nations chief about the government's position on some land usage issue, or to visit the one hospital to interview the one doctor on whether the island has enough PPE, or to stop in at the funeral home to ask after that father that drowned.
So it's a job of shoe lever and the hum of the tires and a reasonable amount of time between revelations, and not too many revelations, and you get to know people, and you get a sense of the web, and you get to sit with your emotions in silence.
And not too long ago, this was just the way it was in what is now the Rust Belt, in what is still the Bible Belt.
And everywhere else, this data stream has gobbled up all the silence.
But you know, there's still newsprint for now.
I noticed that as I was rolling it up for the fireplace, it still darkens, you know, your fingertips.
And if you crumple it up after the story is well digested, you know, it can help light that fire, a quiet fire to sit beside and to gaze at.
Thank you for listening to Conspiratuality.
You can find us on any major podcast player, as well as Conspiratuality.net where you'll find our YouTube videos, resources, and other fun material.
You can also find us on YouTube directly at YouTube.com slash Conspiratuality on our Facebook page at Facebook.com slash Conspiratuality podcast.
And finally on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
If you are interested in supporting us and helping us grow this project into something larger, which we are looking to do, we would appreciate it very much.
