Here’s an episode that’s been micro-brewing for a while: Bro Science: where conspirituality meets the manosphere. We’ve even got a working definition! Here’s a taste.Bro Science is junk science spewed by men who believe their charisma is a substitute for training. It brags, mocks, overreaches. It’s self-serving and self-interested. It can carry hints of toxic masculinity: entitlement, unearned confidence, no qualms about taking up space, repressing emotion or hiding it behind humour or grandiosity. It preaches individualism and self-sufficiency from the lonely triumph of Bro.We’ll listen to some top “Bro scientists” to see how bro-ness reduces, minimizes, and mocks science. We’ll listen to pearls of bro-dom from JP Sears, Kyle Kingsbury, Aubrey Marcus, Sayer Ji, Toronto’s very own BBQAnon, Adam Skelly, and Zach Bush, doctor to the bros. Dear listeners: you might feel at the end of our tour like you need a coffee colon cleanse or testosterone nootropic. But we’ve got something better: an interview with Dr. Dan Wilson, who does the opposite of Bro Science. He’s a molecular biologist who by day works in the lab at Carnegie Mellon University, but by night crushes out Dr. Wilson Debunks the Funk videos, cutting conspiritualists down to size. Show NotesThe Lonely Descent into QAnon, Pt 1Analysts create AI tool that can distinguish between conspiracy theories and real conspiraciesFormer Israeli space security chief says aliens exist, humanity not readyIn 2020, Disinformation Broke the USBBQAnon thinks he knows something about PCR testsPublic Health Ontario: false positivity rate is 0.01%,Sayer Ji geeks out with Michael SandlerSayer Ji’s GreenMedInfo cherry-picks a vaccine study reportHere’s the actual source that GMI distortedDr. Maria Sundaram Twitter thread on how to talk with vaccine-hesitant people.Covid-19, Remote Work
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Here's a taste.
Bro science is junk science spewed by men who believe their charisma is a substitute for training.
It brags, mocks, overreaches.
It's self-serving and self-interested.
It can carry hints of toxic masculinity, entitlement, unearned confidence, no qualms about taking up space, repressing emotion, or hiding it behind humor or grandiosity.
It preaches individualism and self-sufficiency from the lonely triumph of bro.
We'll listen to some top bro scientists to see how bro-ness reduces, minimizes, and mocks science.
We'll listen to pearls of bro-dom from JP Sears, Kyle Kingsbury, Aubrey Marcus, Sayer G, Toronto's very own BB QAnon, Adam Skelly, and Zach Bush, doctor to the bros.
Dear listeners, you might feel at the end of our tour like you need a coffee colon cleanse or testosterone nootropic, but we've got something better.
An interview with Dr. Dan Wilson, who does the opposite of bro science.
He's a molecular biologist who by day works in the lab at Carnegie Mellon University, but by night crushes out Dr. Wilson debunks the funk videos, cutting conspiritualists down to size.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
First up this week on The Ticker, we're talking about Lonely Lingerie, a New Zealand-based fashion company that received numerous accolades for its body-positive imagery.
And then it got a serious bump by endorsements from Lena Dunham and Kylie Jenner.
But it turns out that the owners have been curious of late.
The line is owned by husband and wife Steve Ferguson and Amy McFarlane.
Of late, Steve has been posting things like the Cabal wanted to populate the planet, Agenda 2030, Xbox X-22.
Okay, no Xbox.
I don't know what X-22 is.
Now we have another one we gotta find out.
WHO, UN, Big Pharma is all owned by the cabal.
He's also used the Pizzagate hashtag and posted, Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, is a transsexual elite cabalist.
Just that.
Climate change is also fake news.
And interestingly, they haven't owned up to the fact that they've been posting this because Amy said that her husband's account has been hacked for two years.
And oh yeah, it's two accounts that have been hacked.
And the hacking apparently didn't stop them from communicating with intergalactic aliens.
But I can go on about this for the whole show because the website WebWorm has done a deep dive into this and you can find part one that we've linked to, but there's part two and it goes on, it's all in the show notes, if you dare to find out about the cabal.
Yeah, I mean, jokes aside, that's a horrible thing to say about Jacinda Ardern, and it makes me wonder about, like, you're in New Zealand, you're walking around Auckland or Christchurch or wherever you are, and the restaurants are full, and everybody's going to school, and life is carrying on as normal because they haven't had a case in, what, how many months or something like that?
What exactly are New Zealand Q folks rebelling against?
Doesn't it seem like The more, I don't know, accelerated and exacerbated the virus is, the more evidence there would be of authoritarian lockdown.
What are they doing?
It's like they have to make it up, given where they're actually living.
I mean, they're making it up anyway, right?
There's also a giant music festival in Australia last week.
Ben Lee is there, and I saw him, I think he's playing at one, but then I also saw some posts of like tens of thousands of people together because they have functional governments.
And that's where Pete Evans is, and that's where there's a huge Q contingent.
And so I just feel like some people just need a conspiracy theory in their lives.
All right, next up, analysts create AI tool that can distinguish between conspiracy theories and real conspiracies.
This comes from Daily Kos.
You can file this under if AI can do this, so can we.
From the article, Cal Berkeley cultural analyst Timothy Tangerlini and his team developed an automated approach to determining when conversations on social media reflect the telltale signs of conspiracy theorizing.
They used machine learning tools capable of identifying narratives based on sets of people, places, and things, and their relationships.
And what they found, and this piece in Daily Kos was by David Newart, who wrote a book called Red Pill, Blue Pill, Or how to counteract the conspiracy theories that are killing us.
And he just matches up these findings with his own research.
And he says that, I found this really interesting, real conspiracies by their very nature have three major limitations.
Scope, time, and number.
And all three of these things have to be pretty narrow.
So the scope of a conspiracy means that the purpose of it is Usually to achieve only one or two ends, often narrow in nature, the timing of a conspiratorial action has to play out within a relatively short period of time, and there has to be a low number of participants.
And if any of those metrics stretch out too far, we have a real problem, because the information will leak, the objective won't be, you know, won't be attained, and it'll just fall apart.
But then he says that conspiracy theories, on the other hand, almost universally feature qualities that contrast sharply with these same limits.
So they're broad-reaching in nature and frequently boiled down to a massive plot to enslave, murder, or politically oppress all kinds of people, that they're believed to have existed for long periods of time, in some cases for hundreds of years—
Now, this is something that I hadn't considered before, actually, is the longevity of the conspiracy theory and how, you know, if you believe, you know, theories like the Illuminati, you have to believe in kind of this magical succession, almost like a religious order passing on its doctrine from generation to generation in high fidelity.
So anyway, it was a really great article because it showed that, well, we can actually train our machine learning in social media to identify, I don't know what might be done with this, but I think it's pretty cool that the narratives themselves have metrics that can be seen and measured.
Well, if you think about the moon landing being faked, I mean, that's persisted for over 50 years now.
Right, and all of the, yeah, and all of those would apply, including, but most, I think most notably would be the number of people involved, right?
Yeah, yeah.
With 9-11 conspiracy theorists, I would always just send them this, Oh God, I'm spacing out his name.
Noam Chomsky, I would always send him this Noam Chomsky video where he responds to someone who asks about 9-11 and of course Noam Chomsky can't really find any bigger critic of American imperialism and any bigger critic of the Bush administration who was in power at the time and he always just says, for an event like this, it's so massive.
that there's always going to be all sorts of loose ends.
And the sheer complexity of the event rules out the possibility of a conspiracy that could be plausible.
If you think about how many leaks there were during the Trump administration from within the White House, and extrapolate from that and just understand that that's human nature, The idea that anything, because I remember reading about the Noam Chomsky, and I think there was many thousands of people who would have had to have known, been in on it, if correct, if they were to pull that off.
And the idea that thousands of people would not come forward is just absurd.
Yeah, or not just slip in pillow talk or, you know, at a bar one night.
Also, all of those people leaving paper trails, communicating by email, you know, DMs and voice messages that would obviously wander out into cyberspace.
Next up on the ticker, an amazing article from BuzzFeed reporter Jane Litvinenko.
It's called In 2020 Disinformation Broke the U.S.
and I'm including it here just because she just does an amazing job tracing out the linkages between conspiracy theories this year from the beginning of lockdown going forward and it's quite amazing to see the sort of the parade all laid out like this.
So she talks about the first theories involving basic misinformation about COVID and its origins.
Do you remember the conspiracy theories about the hospitals actually being empty when in fact they were being prepped for ICU overruns?
Conspiracy theories about suppressed cures like hydroxychloroquine.
And then of course, conspiracy theories about whether George Floyd was George Floyd or whether he was murdered or what BLM is or whether Antifa is actually...
You know, state-funded or something like that, or Soros-funded.
Conspiracy theories in reopen groups on Facebook, and then Plandemic hitting in May.
Armed protests over lockdowns being driven by conspiracy theories.
And then all of the Election Day stuff, including around Dominion voting machines, and then of course Hunter Biden's stuff.
It's kind of amazing to see the linkages.
It almost feels as though there's a kind of an energy that recedes itself and escalates and turns over.
And just one excerpt that I wanted to read from the article because it's so moving with regard to You know, just the devastating impacts upon earnest people trying to do good work.
She writes about a nurse in an Arizona hospital named Eric Sartori, and he named, this is quoting from the article, Plandemic, as one of the most damaging pieces of disinformation he's seen.
He's an ICU nurse who's regularly stationed in his hospital's COVID island, which has room for 180 patients and has recently had to expand.
Misinformation, he said, has put himself and his colleagues in jeopardy.
Sartori runs a Facebook page where he attempts to fight disinformation.
As a result, he and other outspoken colleagues have faced doxing and calls for their firing.
Quote, we're being ridiculed if we're posting anywhere, unquote, he said.
Sartori has been fighting vaccine disinformation since before the global pandemic was declared, but the miasma of falsehoods and anxiety swirling around COVID-19 meant that as people lost trust in medical institutions, they took it out on frontline workers.
In the spring, people who believed the virus was a hoax targeted him with death threats and anti-gay slurs, even as he cared for sick patients.
Usually, the discussion on his posts will start out civil and interesting, then two or three days later, people will drop in comments against vaccinations.
Quote, sit down and shut the fuck up.
Isn't science, wrote one person on Twitter.
TikTok dances from your fellow nurses aren't science.
You're not helping your cause.
Sartori lives on an urban farm with his children whom he was cooking breakfast for as he spoke with BuzzFeed News.
I like chickens more than people these days, he joked.
We are feeling like our community, at least a good section of them, have turned on us, he said.
It's just amazing that nurses have gone from the number one trusted profession in the United States to now realizing that there's this subsection of the population that thinks we're trying to kill everyone.
I was so happy to see that the Time Magazine Reader's Poll this year voted healthcare workers the Purpose Student of the Year.
Right.
I mentioned this when I posted about the Fauci effect, that there was a massive surge in enrollment in medical students because they see what's going on and they want to help.
Because I know personally, I spend so much time Reading the bro scientists that we're going to be talking about and just being immersed in this world for research that I sometimes forget that there is a lot good happening right now.
But every time it kills me when I see nurses and doctors who have to endure this on the level that they do.
Well, there's two really, really tragic pieces here.
One is, is that what you've just been describing?
And the other is these, uh, all these patients who are in the ICU and, and with their dying breaths are saying that COVID is not real.
And this is not really what they're dying from because they're so caught up in it.
That's also tragic.
The comedic part, uh, I think will be if, uh, if enough of the, Trump QAnon folks are able to persuade people in Georgia not to vote in those runoff elections because they believe that everything is fixed, right?
It's hard to imagine the distress of that person who is calling their practitioner a liar as they are drowning with fluid in their lungs.
with fluid in their lungs.
I'm wondering what that...
So the moment of death then is characterized by just absolute and utter betrayal and confusion, I guess.
I mean, death is kind of existentially like that anyway for some people, but if you imagine that being the sort of cognitive, I don't know, aura around those moments, I can't imagine anything worse.
Yeah, it's awful to be so thoroughly invested in and identified with a perception of reality as literally being a trick that's being played against you so that even on your deathbed, you stick to it.
Austin is blowing up.
Last this week on The Ticker, a few weeks ago, A few weeks ago, I speculated that Austin will become home to a new cult.
And there's certainly a rush right now happening to this Texas city.
Joe Rogan moved there.
Elon Musk has now announced he's moved there and is moving his operations there, at least part of it.
And there's long been an energy in that city.
I've visited four times and it always felt like a city I could live in, save for the fact that it's quite a distance from any ocean, which is kind of a deal breaker for me.
But there's something more happening.
It's a boom town right now.
The Wall Street Journal, which is linked to in the show notes, they write that workers are flocking there and that 10,000 jobs were recently created by a state that's welcoming to businesses and that features no state income tax.
And so, on one level, we know what's going to happen already.
Rents are going to skyrocket, home prices are going to skyrocket, and it'll have its moment for a few years and then fade.
It's the human condition.
But right now, this is a city we have to watch for a number of reasons.
And part of one of the reasons is this wellness libertarian movement that so many of the people we cover on this podcast seem to intersect at.
As we reported a few weeks ago, Austin is where Joyous Heart and Mickey Willis are building their commune, an eco-luxe village called Home Ranch and Gold Star Oasis that has buy-ins from, yeah, I won't get into the name, that has buy-ins from JP Sears and Del Bigtree, among others.
And then you have Onnit founder Marcus Aubrey and a fellow Onnit podcast host, Carl Kingsbury, were in the room at the time.
So this is all right and it's the epicenter of what we talk about.
And this crossover between tech, wellness, and conspiracy theories, it's going to make for some strange brew moving forward.
And I'm not just talking about the ayahuasca many of them are doing, but I can't quite put my finger on it yet, but if there was ever real potential for secession in the coming years in America, I'm truly keeping my eye on Texas, especially as they're leading this 18-state Supreme Court rush right now with the election overturned.
But I stick by the fact that a cult is going to emerge there in some capacity, and I'm really kind of interested to see what that looks like.
So as Derek mentioned, the Conspiratualist Bros are migrating to Austin these days.
We covered that election night Trump prayer meeting real estate pitch party there in episode 25.
Since then, J.P.
Sears has posted pics of he and Willis palling around And preparing something he told his followers they weren't even ready for.
JP also posed proudly with a gun on his hip alongside his ex-special forces sniper, ex-UFC fighter bro Tim Kennedy, having just taken his multi-day paramilitary training course.
JP also posted a photo of a large maskless gathering with a caption that defiantly proclaimed, this is what freedom looks like, zero social distancing, suck it Newsome.
We see around 50 people all huddled together inside for a group photo in front of a table covered with potluck style dishes they'll no doubt be breathing on and sharing together.
It's unclear if that photo was in California, as the caption might suggest, or in Austin, but we did notice that in attendance was a certain Aubrey Marcus, who lives in Austin and is CEO of Onnit, a high-performance lifestyle company built on the bro science of biohacking, supplements, nutrition, and fitness.
And as Derek mentioned, podcast Mac Daddy and UFC color commentator Joe Rogan also recently moved to that city and is a major shareholder in Onnit.
And has for several years been their most prominent affiliate.
He's like the face of Onnit for a lot of people.
Which leads me to wonder at what point are we going to discover some kind of intersection here with Joe Rogan.
That's something I'm going to be keeping an eye on.
So as we get into this topic of bro science and start discussing some of our major figures, maybe.
Matthew, I know you have a little bit of a nugget for us in terms of defining what bro science is.
Yeah, I started out with a bit of a definition that turned into a manifesto and we're going to tack the entire thing to the end of the episode after the interview that I did with Dr. Dan Wilson.
We did a little bit of the definition in the show notes.
Bro science is junk science spewed by men who believe their charisma is a substitute for training.
There's another little bit here that I'll give a taste of.
The target of bro-science is not public health, but sales of supplements, self-empowerment regimes, confidence building, all proposed as totalizing and perfect answers.
This is why bro-scientists must reject the reality of a novel virus they cannot solve.
Because for them, the fact that highly trained doctors struggle to understand and treat COVID-19 is not a sign that science is a grueling, endless, and thankless process, but that experts are loathsome nerds dedicated to killing high vibes.
So it goes on, but you can check that out at the end.
Aubrey Marcus.
Who we mentioned hosts his own podcast that recently featured Zach Bush, MD.
And I'm going to kick off my part of this segment in which we'll cover the phenomenon of conspiritualist bro science by discussing that interview.
I want to just observe kind of for fun as an aside here that within this particular genre, each of the bros we will look at Play different roles.
So, for example, J.P.
Sears is the satirical funny guy or satirical super spreader.
Mickey Willis is the earnest documentary filmmaker.
Zach Bush, I refer to as the nature mystic doctor.
He brings the seeming legitimacy of medical credentials to a rare gift for hypnotic storytelling and spiritual poetics.
Now, as Zach's foil in this interview, I see Aubrey Marcus as holding the space of the holding the space.
There's no disease that's ever leapt up and attacked a healthy human cell.
entrepreneur who can match Zach's spiritual passion for Mother Earth.
Here are a few highlights.
There's no disease that's ever leapt up and attacked a healthy human cell.
You don't get disease with a Fain's angle of 13.
You are so resilient, you can repair faster than any injury can imagine itself.
Here we go.
And you're really in the quantum state of energy at that point where repair is so instantaneous because it's all built around coherent waveform of energy.
So it doesn't even take like protein synthesis and genomics.
You're literally just in a wave state, that harmonic we were talking about earlier.
You can phase shift that cell so that it's at this high harmonic level.
And if we can get that and really feel that, have that felt sense of like, tatwa masi, I am that too.
I am that beetle.
I am that rhinoceros.
I am that other human on the other side of the world.
We're all the fucking same.
Let's go.
Team, you know, team revival of this beautiful game board where all souls can incarnate.
Let's keep this thing going.
And plants love our music.
We've shown that if you put Yo-Yo Ma next to a tree, it's going to be a happy tree.
And so with our vibration, with that creative vibration, if we created agriculture with the same mindset of, we are going to send farmers into the fields to sing, And not just vocal, but they're going to sing with their energy field that's responding in this spiritual reactivity to the planet itself.
And I feel like each of us right now have the ability to put that kind of song into the universe of, I am alive right now.
Humankind may decay and go into its extinction event over the next few decades.
The earth may collapse in its sixth great extinction.
But I am alive right now.
Just that.
And I'm going to participate in that through my vibration, through my effort to hit a new harmonic for myself.
And I am not going to be dragged down by this, as you said, the most intense fear and guilt paradigm we've ever seen on the planet.
Despite that tenor, despite that extreme volume of those two vibrations, which are among the lowest we know, how many of us are finding this new freedom to vibrate higher?
Can I just point out that he has absolutely no idea how agriculture was started?
We'll put a pin in that.
Our monetary system, as many people know, was created on the concept of death.
It was all through life insurance.
And so by betting on death, we created great wealth, and New York Life became the Fed, ultimately, and all of this.
And so the Federal Reserve built its wealth on death, and we still do this.
And so we have a monetary system that's built on death, which of course is fueled by fear and guilt, and this belief that there's some sort of end point.
When we let go of all of that, vibrate at this higher level, we can create a new monetary system that's built on life.
Because we now know that the biggest, most resilient form of energy on the planet is biology.
And so we just need a biologically backed currency.
And so we're working on the idea of a currency that's backed by biologic resources.
So we're ready to turn the whole world into a Petri dish of intelligence there.
I know in the beginning, and this is for listeners, I advocated for not too much talking and laughing over it, It's hard, yeah.
Because it's also not how the monetary system was created, because it just shows you he knows nothing about agriculture, because both writing and the monetary system started to facilitate agricultural demand.
Yeah, no need to go back in there.
He just says you can find out about all of this at ZackBush.com and you hear him there saying we're working on this and we're working on that.
There's a way that he's beginning his pitch pivot in some of those moments.
I wanted to just pull back a little bit from the details and we'll go into it in more depth in a minute here, but I want to mention that there's this kind of Cultish grandiosity that we've commented on before throughout their discussion that is organized around a sense of this being a momentous destiny that we're involved in together, right?
We who are awakened.
It's equal parts apocalyptic prophecy and coach speak from the personal growth milieu in which the promise is that an instantaneous breakthrough moment can absolutely change everything.
These guys really hammer this word event.
They talk about at the beginning this being an extinction event or comparing what's happening right now to extinction events that have happened in the past.
This ominous sort of approaching thing.
They talk about ecstatic events.
It's very interesting.
It made me wonder actually if Bush had done some ayahuasca with Aubrey like in the days preceding because he's very like into this.
The ecstatic event is a moment of healing in which you become more resilient and then you have a longevity event And he actually coins this term longevity event in describing Aubrey's recounting of how he and his family used to dance together when they were kids.
He said that that was a longevity event you were having together by by dancing.
He talks about symphonic events that happen in nature and in our bodies when we connect via music and then The last one, he calls Biden winning the election an anti-event, that nothing good can come from because it was based on a platform of being anti-something instead of being pro-something.
That's an interesting thread.
So he's completely politically ignorant as well because he hasn't read Biden's platform or all of the things he put forward, what he's going to do.
So, I have a couple of questions about things that I just didn't understand.
So, he opens in this highlight reel with talking about how healing can be miraculously fast at a particular phase angle.
Yes, let's go into this.
Yeah, this is his detour into quantum woo.
Now I've heard him flirting with pseudoscience when he, when he, and some of it is just like, it's a, it's a gish gallop, right?
He throws so much sciencey, medically sounding information that you're like, well, maybe he is really cutting edge, but here he goes the full Monty in terms of quantum woo.
And it's also a classic example of what I'm referring to as a pivot.
So they all have these pivots that they do.
He says, in my clinic, for example, one of the primary tools we use at an initial visit is something called the phase angle, which measures the critical potential, excuse me, the electrical potential across a single membrane.
It shows how much charged energy, how much electromagnetic field are you producing.
And then he rattles off the numbers.
A healthy body measures out at between 10 and 13.
Cancer always occurs at around 4 to 5, and death occurs at 2.5.
Chronic disease emerges as a result of this failed energy production.
There is no disease that has ever leapt up and attacked a healthy human cell.
You don't get disease with a phase angle of 13.
You're so resilient. - Is he talking about touching electrodes?
He's having his patients touch electrodes So he's talking about a machine which measures bioelectrical impedance and essentially it gives you a sense of how strong the cell membranes are based on the difference between how much electricity is able to pass in and how much is able to pass out as best I can currently understand.
So, he's giving these numbers, right?
This is classic pseudoscience charlatanism where you give specific numbers that supposedly you're able to then dial in in order to give people perfect health.
He says, you are so resilient at a phase angle of 13 that you can repair faster than any injury can even imagine itself and you're really in the quantum state of energy at that point where repair is instantaneous.
It's a coherent waveform, it doesn't even require protein synthesis or genomics, and on and on.
So here's his sale pitch, right?
He's deftly planting the suggestion of what your first office visit will be like, and then making these outrageous claims about what he can do in terms of magical diagnosis and healing.
And it has the smell of pure pseudoscience.
I mean, I looked into it a little bit.
And just very briefly, the phase angle reading he's talking about has to do with something called bioelectrical resistance, as I said.
It's mostly used for measuring how much muscle mass to fat tissue you have in your body.
It's mostly like something that's used by nutritionists and by people who are supporting those who need to lose a lot of weight.
evidence that it's a good indicator of how progressed certain cancers are.
And it is something that's used to predict how many months you have left to live.
But I didn't see anything about this kind of off-label usage of these machines as indicating your overall energetic well-being.
Or the fact that you would become somehow post-human or extra-human by healing faster than you were injured.
I mean, it's really, the picture that I got was of the Borg machine being fired upon by the Enterprise and somehow like mending itself in space just by thinking.
Yeah, it's that kind of thing.
But it kind of turns the sort of existential condition on its head because there's this promise of, well it's a certain attainment of phase level quantum consciousness or whatever.
Exactly.
You're not actually suffering, you're not actually dying, you're not actually in a condition in which you will grow old and sick and pass away.
So there's actually, we're not just Yeah, so you won't need protein synthesis or genomics to instantaneously repair faster than the injury can even imagine itself.
death fetish that's wrapped up in that too.
- Absolutely, yeah, yeah.
So you won't need protein synthesis or genomics to instantaneously repair faster than the injury can even imagine itself. - Whatever happens. - I know, right?
It's personifying the injury.
When asked how we can affect, Aubrey is now interested in this, right?
How can we affect our phase angle for optimum health?
Bush pauses and then says, ecstasy, and goes on to talk about singing and dancing and being in nature.
But I have no doubt that part of this process and that initial consultation would be to then prescribe the supplements that are going to help you to attain a phase angle of 13.
And I wonder how much farming he's actually done in his life.
Me too.
It's one of the hardest professions.
That's why people don't go into it anymore.
Well, there's also but there's also there's a kind of spite that's being expressed for.
Common working class people as well and I hear this in a lot of the discourse where there's this impression given that people aren't actually doing what they can to lift themselves up or people don't have their own music or people aren't actually trying to find relief or or you know the relief of stress as they go through their days.
There's this picture painted of the world that everybody except for me is sleepwalking.
Everybody except for me is a zombie.
And if you could just wake up and be more like me, you wouldn't be such zombies.
It's very spiteful.
And straw man-y because I don't see the world like that.
When I go out into the world, you know, I see people of varying socioeconomic backgrounds who seem to be undergoing various levels of stress who are doing things for themselves to find relief and to find security and to comfort themselves and they're going to the mosque and they are You know, they're singing and they're listening to their music on their headphones and stuff like that.
People are doing things to help themselves all the time.
And I don't know where this contempt comes from.
I feel like it's characteristic.
I recognize it in myself and perhaps you guys can relate.
It's characteristic of the initial years of becoming blissed out spiritually.
Getting into some kind of spiritual transformation where there is this kind of self-importance around I've discovered something that everyone else is out of touch with.
Totally.
And I remember that really creating a kind of, I don't know, regrettable set of attitudes towards people that I was actually close to, close to, including judgments that I would cast upon my family members who hadn't learned how to meditate or to do this wonderful thing that I was doing.
And it took me many years to back myself out of that grandiosity and realize that if you're a human being who's alive for long enough on the planet, you learn how to manage.
You have your ways of relieving tension and stress and seeking, you know, some kind of You know, relaxation.
Relaxation from grief.
People do it.
People do it.
And just because you think you're doing it more efficiently doesn't mean that other people are lost.
Yeah, I wanted to ask Derek about the Tattvamasi moment because I haven't ever heard it quite interpreted that way.
No, and actually I can't even quite understand how that came up.
I have some thoughts.
One of the first things that I'm going to get to is just this Because I'm going to be featuring Kyle Kingsbury podcast with JP Sears and Kyle Kingsbury just pulls shit out all the time, just throws in things.
It's a constant barrage of this and this and this, and it makes you sound deep.
And I don't understand how he took that thou and then just applied it to that moment.
Yeah.
You know, I'm not a Sanskrit scholar.
I'm not a scholar of Indian philosophy, But my understanding of Tattva Masi from the Upanishads that later begins to weave itself into Advaita Vedanta or the non-dual end of thinking or the end of knowledge is that it's not like a rally cry for we're all in this together against the forces of fear and despair.
It's not, you know, I am you and there's no difference between us and we're all on the same team of life and I'm one with the sardines.
That's not what that means.
What it means is that, I think, is that at the heart of human experience there is something nameless and radiant and perfect and indescribable, and that doesn't necessarily lead to moments of heroism or despair.
It's beyond those things.
And so, he's kind of quoting it as this cheer, almost like a neuroscience cheerleader.
Exactly.
And it's not that at all.
It kind of reminded me of somebody It was more like he was yelling out, give me freedom or give me death, instead of, you know, something that's just not crude like that.
It's a much different statement that comes out of several millennia of contemplation.
So, one last note, and I'll do a longer segment on this for our weekend Patreon materials, is that Zach reveals something I've never heard him talk about before.
He talks about having been in a deep suicidal depression.
So much so that he had planned which bridge he was gonna drive off and he had gotten the life insurance policy.
And what interrupts this suicidal arc for him is he meets an acupuncturist and he doesn't know anything about acupuncture.
He has an experience on her table.
He sees a white cloud floating over the skylight and he believes that he instantaneously was healed from his depression in that moment.
So he tells a beautiful story.
He lays it all out.
There's even a moment of him with the shirt off with a construction belt on, beautiful stuff.
But then he transitions, he does another one of these pivots and this pivot is into talking about how we need to invest in something that has to do with life and ecstasy and spiritual revelation instead of our medical system that is built primarily on death.
And I'll describe that more in what I'll do for this weekend.
But let me just say at the very end, they do this talking stick moment about like a meditative closing together.
And Aubrey Marcus says, may we look into the eyes of those we love when it's time to die and look up into the heavens and say it's a good day to die because I really fucking lived.
So recently, JP Sears was a guest on Kyle Kingsbury's podcast, Kyle Kingsbury is a former MMA martial artist.
It's sponsored by Onnit, so he's close with Marcus Aubrey, and they've been interfacing and friends for a number of months now.
It's a real bro-fest.
But I want to start, this was from early September, and I came across it because a friend shared it with me and said you have to listen, and I did, to the detriment of my mental health.
But I want to start with this moment where Kyle is explaining to JP about Mickey Willis' forthcoming documentary.
His third film is going to be all on that.
I don't know much about it.
It's on a couple of things.
It's on George Soros, and it's on all of the media that's controlled and in bed.
And I think he did a great job of showing how social media, Google, the whole Silicon Valley is in bed with Big Pharma.
And the way he points that out, it's pretty unmistakable.
One thing that we know about conspiracy theories is that when you believe in one, you start to believe in more of them.
And this entire podcast was indicative of that, how conspiracy theories just started rolling over one another.
So just even that alone, he pivots from George Soros to all of Silicon Valley being in bed with Big Pharma.
Now, I've worked for Silicon Valley companies, I currently do right now, and we have competitors.
It's like this idea of mainstream media, how everyone is just working with one another behind the scenes to manipulate your lives.
That doesn't actually exist.
And the idea that Silicon Valley as an entity is in bed with Big Pharma to what end?
- As an entity. - Yeah, to what ends?
They actually don't even go into that.
It's just this constant picture of everyone is against you.
And it points back to what was mentioned earlier about the savior, what Matthew was saying about this bitterness that exists.
It's like, we're the ones who know the truth.
They don't reveal what the truth is, but they're just gonna constantly tell you you should be scared, which is the exact thing they're saying about the media and these other companies. - The context too.
The context, too, is that they're hyping Mickey Willis's unreleased film.
And who is it in that clip who says, I'll be really interested in seeing how he's going to do all of this?
Is it JP who makes that remark?
Yes.
Yeah, so I think the way Mickey Willis is going to do it is maybe by clipping out what Kyle Kingsbury just said about Mickey Willis' film, because that's as thin as it ever is, right?
You can imagine that line actually just sitting into that film, that, well, social media is in bed with Big Pharma, or Silicon Valley is completely in cahoots with so-and-so.
And it makes me wonder about the kind of elite status that is given to certain types of content.
Like, why is it that Mickey Willis' film ends up being talked about as though it's going to be special and revelatory in some way when you know that It's going to be just as, you know, uncorroborated, unresearched as everything else that he's done.
It's also going to be sort of like him reading off his last few Facebook posts.
What is it?
I don't really understand, but I guess I do.
It indicates that the hype around the type of media is actually the point.
It's not the content.
The content is all the same.
This next piece, I'm going to play part of it because it just speaks back to what Zach Bush was saying.
This is J.P.
Sears.
We got to get out of our heads and into our hearts.
We know, this is proven by heart math, the electromagnetic field of the heart is 5,000 times stronger than that of the brain.
And if you just imagine what that could mean, Maybe the real truth isn't harbored in our head, memorized by our left brain.
Maybe that's like facts and stats, it does things like that.
But maybe the bigger, less tangible truths that therefore matter more, those come through our heart, you know, our biofeedback mechanism of our body.
So we have the ignorance of how agriculture works, the ignorance of the monetary system, the ignorance of the political system, and now ignorance of basic biology.
I think what jumps out at me most when we listen to these particular clips is how hard it is to take him seriously because it's as much of a parody as everything else he does when he's being sincere.
Because it's just such sheer, clueless nonsense.
But a little bit of facts will help.
I think HeartMath is developed by Joe Dispenza, who's a doctor of chiropractic.
And I think he was the chiropractor of Jay-Z Knight.
What the Bleep.
Right, and What the Bleep.
He's in The Secret too, very heavily.
You know, I posted a meme to Facebook that said, there's no point in arguing with anybody who describes having gone through an awakening because they're actually telling you that they live in a different world.
They live according to different principles.
And I think what JP is always telling his audience is that his notion of Spiritual awakening is the ground zero for how he's going to understand or know anything and therefore how you are going to connect with him or not.
And so, that's why everything that comes out of his mouth is like coming from this super subjective, this is my truth and therefore it is the truth that I'm going to live by.
It all comes back to this notion of I've woken up from something and that's good enough for me.
You know what, it reminds me, too, of something that you commented on, Derek, about when we talked about Jordan Peterson, that I had said, you know, it's so much about this masculine emphasis, and yet underneath it, it's very emotional, right?
In a way that's often rejected as being too feminine by a lot of bros.
And the same thing here, it's all about J.P.
Sears' feelings, about his heart, about what he really feels is true.
That's much deeper than the mere rational left brain, right?
Yeah, but it's maudlin because he only It's a kind of preciousness around internal intuition.
self-centeredness and like, uh, I, my, it's, it's a kind of, um, preciousness around, around internal intuition that I, I can't see a lot, a range of feelings there actually.
And there's not.
And throughout this entire episode, which was I think almost two hours, that is his fallback.
His truth is his feelings.
He keeps saying this term, I don't outsource my truth.
That's his, he keeps going back to that.
And so that just, that just becomes de facto, like whatever it is, I'm going to fall back to that as his explanation when he can't actually explain what's happening.
Outsourcing is an interesting idea because it kind of folds into an economic populist critique, doesn't it?
It picks up this thread of, well, the corporations outsource labor, and we don't have a strong connection to the earth anymore, and we are giving away or outsourcing our power to social media, and so there's a kind of You know, return to the earth and to the authenticity of the true self, just in that language itself.
It's pretty interesting how he does that.
Yeah.
Well, so far, the first couple of clips were sort of like their feelings, but now we're going to get to where they start their hero's journey and them explaining in the last two clips I'm going to play about their, their warrior ship.
Don't let anyone tell you that a COVID-19 vaccine is safe or that it's well-known.
It is not understood.
Even through the trials, they might have three months of data of what happens afterwards.
That is not long-term.
No.
No, we haven't seen it a year, we haven't seen it 10 years from now.
I want to point out too that these are both men who monetize their platforms by selling supplements that have never been scientifically studied for efficacy whether in the short or long term.
So put that into perspective when you think about the critique of vaccines here.
We haven't seen it 20 years from now, we haven't seen it six months from now.
months of what happens afterwards, right?
And it also has to be kept at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit in order for it to remain effective.
But the whole point in bringing that up is, these doctors are talking about this as like, we don't really know.
And now I'm being asked to do this thing.
What else happened that looked kind of like that?
Right, where people were asked to serve country, to do it for the greater good, for the good of the all.
Are your neighbors hiding Jews?
Let us know because you're serving your country.
You're doing good.
Maybe the heart says, dude, calling on my neighbors because they're hiding Jews, like that doesn't feel, but I'm told that's good.
Okay, I'll outsource my truth and I'll be obedient.
Dude, yeah, it rhymes.
It rhymes big time.
Yeah, I don't know how to reply to that either.
And it's like he teed it up, they had planned that, right?
What else might have possibly sounded like this?
He was leading a bond at the very least.
So, I mean, it's Godwin's Law, but with the T up, but there's like equal parts absurdity and offensiveness.
I mean, the thing about Godwin's Law is that it's also a description of laziness too, right?
Yes, very much.
You can't really imagine a different endpoint of extremism to any kind of narrative, and so you default to Hitler and the Holocaust.
Yeah, it's a trump card.
You know, this philosopher Stephen Law has a concept, too, called going nuclear, where if you know that you just don't have a strong enough case, you just blow everything up.
You blow up the whole structure of how knowledge is even possible in the first place.
Going to the Nazis is very similar, because how do you come back from that?
Well, speaking of that, the last tweet we're going to hear, right before J.P.
Sears was on, Joyous Heart was on Kyle Kingsbury's podcast.
So here is Kyle explaining something that Joyous had brought forward during that episode.
You know, something that Joyous told me, he was on the podcast last, which I think was absolutely brilliant, was that, you know, I asked him, what happens on either side of the coin flip?
Right, because depending on who you're listening to now, you will hear Trump's got him by the balls.
He figured this out in 2018, that there was election meddling, and he baited him.
And we're going to see this come to fruition, and Trump is for sure going to be president.
Or, all that's QAnon bullshit, right-wing conspiracy theory stuff, and Biden's getting in no matter what.
So what happens on either side of that coin?
And what he said is, we either get to see beauty come from more truth being unveiled, or we get to see beauty come from more truth being unveiled.
You know, that's paraphrasing, but it's like, either way, if shit hits the fan, we have fucking more lockdowns, whatever the case is, we're gonna know what we're up against really quickly.
It might feel abrupt.
All of this has felt abrupt.
Or we might get to see some arrests being made and shit actually hitting the fan and the weeding of the garden that Trump has claimed he was doing all along.
Either way, we're going to see massive change happen.
And one of the things that he talked about that really resonated with me was Life is a ceremony and this whole year has been a ceremony and what this is right now, what we're experiencing as a collective is the purge.
We're in the purge.
This isn't the fun part, but we all know what happens after the purge, right?
We know what comes after that, the grace, the beauty, the understanding.
If only in history there had been religious or spiritual movements that thought that we were coming to a great awakening.
So, is this unique for, kind of, Q gestures and Kyle Kingsbury?
Because, I mean, he's talking about the flip side of more lockdowns, more authoritarian control being the arrests and the weeding that Trump is working on.
Is that, have you heard that in other places?
There's this general concern that we're moving towards an authoritarian state that I see often, but of course they think that Biden is bringing that forward, which has been part of the most disconcerting aspect of this entire year.
The person who's actually trying to implement that is their savior.
So I guess there has to be some sort of transference that has been happening, but that is a common motif that we're heading to this place.
Yes.
And just to be clear for listeners who may not be following all of the characters, Joyous Heart is the person from the Trump prayer meeting who actually stood up and did that prayer on election night, right?
It just seems like with that Binary being presented that either we're going to see more lockdowns or we're going to see arrests.
This really allows for somebody who is Q adjacent or Q devoted to split the difference on the prophecy.
And to expect that, you know, if the drops don't come to bear fruit, that, well, we will still work.
And if they do, we will still work.
But it really seems like the series of statements is hedging bets around QAnon prophecies, really.
Well, when the earth didn't end on the day that the prophet said it was, oh, there was a four instead of an eight in that passage.
I messed that up.
Now it's coming this time.
It's the same.
It's a kicking can down the road mentality.
Well, it's also a game, too, because what they're saying is that there's going to be pain and suffering in either situation.
But but it's all for the good.
It's all for the good.
And that's really, I mean, it's a statement of people who, you know, probably aren't touched by lockdown all that much.
Lockdown all that much, that's also, again, using the language of the ayahuasca community to explain reality, which Kingsbury, I mean, he has a number of episodes where he talks about it, so it's something that's part of his life, which is totally, you know, it's part of my life, I get that.
But I don't bring it into every facet of my reality to explain every time I'm running up against some tension, the purge.
And that's very much, that is something that is a thread in the bro science community, particularly in Austin, but it extends far out beyond that.
All right, well, first up for the two clips that I have, we have Adam Skelly of Adamson's Barbecue and And if you remember from last week, he's the guy whose current mission in life is to provide delicious barbecue meat to inside diners who don't have to wear masks.
And that involves Adam saying a big fuck you to Toronto Public Health and the provincial regulators who have mandated no in-house dining.
So he's facing multiple charges, enormous funds.
He's also become an anti-lockdown crowdfunding juggernaut with his GoFundMe campaign raising over $400,000 now.
Also remember that the queue-adjacent Canadian protest group called The Line Canada was a heavy presence at the Adamson protests.
So, here Skelly is making his defiant announcement on Instagram before the first day of illegal openings.
Derek?
Now, for anybody out there who's going, what is this guy doing?
And you're questioning my motives here?
Look, top to bottom, this thing stinks.
It reeks of corruption.
There's... I don't have enough time and you guys don't want to watch a 15 minute long video of me going on about this.
But I'm going to start with just one point.
We're using PCR tests with a cycle threshold of over 40 to drive hysteria around case counts.
Now, if we go past a certain case count per 100,000 or if we go past 2.5% positivity rate, we are in the red zone and the whole province or region is locked down.
Bars, restaurants, and gyms have to close.
If you guys understand what's going on with these PCR tests and their cycle thresholds, and you know that they're picking up all sorts of other stuff that's not COVID, bacterial infections, other coronaviruses, including the common cold, fragments from the flu shot.
If you know that, then you know we're going to be above 2.5% positivity rate until the end of spring.
How many businesses, how many people are going to lose everything?
They're going to lose their businesses, more people will be out of work.
This is enough.
I complied with the two weeks to flatten the curve.
I complied again during the second wave when we locked down when Doug Ford promised us that there would be supporting evidence to shut down the restaurants, bars, and gyms.
He didn't provide it.
We got something a little bit later talking about outbreaks.
But the data from Toronto Public Health that came out two weeks ago show that two That's right.
Two of the over 10,000 Ontario COVID deaths were linked to bars, restaurants, and retails.
So why are we getting singled out and the big multinational corporations are all essential while they're packed?
Come on, guys!
Enough is enough.
We're opening for anybody who's a fan of freedom and sovereignty, the right to choose what you wear, where to go, who to have over at your house, what businesses you can go to.
I'd love to meet you tomorrow.
I'll be there at the door in Etobicoke at 11.
Thank you guys very much for listening and have a wonderful day.
Oh, so guys, I just have to tell you that I totally grew up with guys like this in West Toronto.
You know, this just really brings me back to the fact that I was never really a good hockey player.
I was bullied a lot.
It's hard to listen to, actually.
But there's some classic stuff in here.
He opens with I don't have time and you don't really want to watch a 15 minute video meaning like if you know what I'm going to talk about is not really that complex after all I'm the barbecue guy but I can figure it out and you can trust me.
Right.
And then he says that Toronto Public Health is using PCR tests that have a cycle threshold rate of over 40.
Now, I can't find that data, but I'm going to say a little bit about cycle threshold that I found out from Dan Wilson when I ran this by him in a little bit.
But, you know, this notion that the PCR test would be picking up other stuff is, like, totally false.
It's very precisely programmed.
To the genome of COVID-19.
And he's just like deciding when he thinks the virus should be over as if saying enough is enough will be like heard and respected by the virus.
Now he doesn't cite where Toronto Public Health assigns two deaths.
Now he notes that it's deaths.
He's not talking about infection rates but people who've actually died.
You know, as the result of being exposed in restaurants, bars, and retail.
But what he's leaving out is that during various phases of lockdown, it's only been things like outdoor dining has been permissible or curbside pickup.
Everyone's been fully masked.
And what he's proposing in his anti-lockdown open up is that he just opens up with no restrictions whatsoever, with no masks, and just he's not going to follow any of the precautions at all.
So anyway, I asked Dr. Wilson about the cycle threshold stuff because I sent him Skelly's rant, and I found out, I think I understand this, which is that the cycle threshold is the number of times the test is set to run and look for the virus in the sample, and so when it finds a match Within a low cycle rate, that means there's more virus in the sample.
And when it takes more cycles to go through, that the infection is less dense or it's less progressed or stuff like that.
So basically, his summary was, if there's a high CT value in the PCR test, it could mean that the patient is at an early stage of infection.
and the amount of the virus will increase over time or secondly that the patient is in the late stage of infection and the virus is currently being cleared from the body and this can take you know up to 60 days or so or that the test was a false positive due to minor contamination of the sample during processing so you know if wherever Skelly is getting this number of you know over 40 cycle threshold tests we don't know where he's getting that from but even if
The cycle threshold of a particular test is that high.
It is showing an accurate result of the presence of infection.
It just might be not that serious or it might be progressing in a certain way.
So anyway, the other thing is that he is trying to make out that the PCR tests are inaccurate or driving false positives.
But Public Health Ontario itself published a report just recently that said in August Their false positivity rate was less than 0.01%.
And so, you know, it's like we hear from all of these characters that the PCR tests either don't look for the virus, which is false, or there's, you know, high false positivity, or the cycle threshold is wrong, or something like that.
Because, you know, bro scientists are just, you know, they naturally know what all of these things mean.
And none of that is true.
It seems from what people who actually do these tests are saying that they're extremely accurate.
And yeah, things are working.
But when you want to open up your barbecue stand, then there's a lot to doubt, I suppose.
I think it should be pointed out that the ways that regional governments have handled this has been very bad, and there's a number of reasons, one of them being that for generations we haven't had to deal with something like this, and when the last time We did 100 years ago, we had a much different infrastructure.
So there's a learning curve that's happening here.
And hopefully, some businesses and governments have learned because the prediction is with climate change, there'll be more pandemics at a higher frequency moving forward, probably, I'm guessing the three of us are going to see another one in our lives.
And then you have the fact that at least in the United States, There has been no national leadership, and so states and regions within those states have had to fend for themselves and fight one another over tests and equipment and all of these things.
And all of this is a valid criticism to have, but when you conflate that with
The idea that the virus isn't as bad as you think it is or the hospitals aren't really going through this and all of those things, that's the wedge that I think we try to point out because there's a difference between you being critical of certain aspects of what's happening but then to just say that it's all nonsense is the exact, it's only perpetuating the virus as we see right now 3,000 deaths plus a day in the United States.
It's also really having the courage of your Dunning-Kruger convictions, right?
That on a topic that you know very little, if something just doesn't quite sound right to your common sense, well then everyone else is just being stupid that they don't see it and don't just hitch their wagon to that misperception based on an oversimplification, right?
Alright, so second clip is Sayerji, founder of GreenMedInfo, speaking with Michael Sandler.
And this is from a YouTube video and we've put it into the show notes, but the title is something like, you know, How to Use the Sun to Transmute Energy and Gain.
I don't know, Infinite Power or something like that.
It's a very grandiose title.
And this is a little bit different in terms of the flavor of bro science.
It kind of feels benign, almost like, I don't know, Dungeons and Dragons play or gaming or something like that.
Let's take a listen.
Exactly.
It's so fascinating.
but some of the new research on the electromagnetic charge of the cytosol shows that there's almost, what is it, 15 million volts per meter is the potential energy in the cell.
And this is a new finding.
They used to think there was no electrical potential.
Now they're finding that it has what is equivalent to half a lightning volts worth of potential energy.
And that's what I mean by the water is potentially able to transduce from the quantum vacuum, which has a near infinite amount of energy within it.
See, and that makes sense to me, because when we look at energy, first off, it isn't what it seems to be.
If we can crack one atom and have the atom bomb, and we wonder what's holding that together, then we realize in space, There is so much energy, which means each of us... Look, I'm not having that good of a life.
I'm struggling.
I'm this.
I'm that.
Do you realize you have the power of the entire universe in your body?
It's a great example because, you know, there are different types of energy that can be accessed on the physical plane and, you know, fission using, you know, nuclear fission is one way to create vast explosions, but there's something called water cavitation, which is so interesting.
Yes.
If you're in a boat and the propeller, you know, is spinning, it produces these little steam bubbles and they actually implode upon themselves and produce what's known as a It's like an explosion but with cavitation it's more of an implosive type of energy generation and that's what our body is comprised of.
on the surface of the sun.
And so that type of energy is coming from within the quantum vacuum.
It's different from vision, right?
It's like an explosion, but with cavitation, it's more of an implosive type of energy generation.
And that's what our body is comprised of.
In fact, I looked at this research and found recently that our own voice goes to ultrasound frequencies and ultrasound is what you can use to induce water cavitation events, which then creates this little micro, if you will, supernat.
Grrrr.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Did you stop it?
Did you stop it?
No, did the power of our brains shut it down?
I created a mini implosion that destroyed Derek's playback.
All I can think about is that old saying that like if you unraveled all the cells of your intestine it could reach the moon and and something like that and yeah great but then it's not your intestines anymore so when I hear stuff like this I like the power of the universe in your what are you talking about yeah and there's and it's that quick It's a big flip, right, from like these weird science factoids that are supposed to be really profound into psychology.
You're feeling like you don't have a good life.
Do you not realize this higher sort of pseudoscience truth?
You know, I watched the whole hour of this and I didn't really know what it was.
I didn't really know what it was about.
I mean, I've got the title here.
I want to make sure I've got it.
How to Transmute Energy and Regenerate Your Body Through the Power of the Sun with Sayer G.
So that's a really big promise.
At some point he's talking about, you know, if you go out into the sun but you haven't eaten enough chlorophyll that you will age more quickly and stuff like that.
But there's no real kind of measurements or dosages spoken about or anything like that.
It's all very vague.
It's kind of, and it's like Play, right?
That's what I wanted to, you know, sort of unpack with regard to this particular brand of bro science is that some of it can seem like really precocious ten-year-olds entering a kind of play state where they're going to pass the baton of fascination back and forth as kind of like the golden snitch or something.
But the thing is that this was recorded in July as Sayerji and GreenMedInfo are ramping up their COVID denialism.
Now, I listened through this entire podcast with Sandler and I'll put a little thing about him in the show notes.
They don't talk about COVID.
They don't talk about the virus.
Maybe Sandler isn't interested in that.
Maybe they made a deal to stay away from it.
Maybe Sandler is a vigorous supporter of masks and vaccines.
I don't know.
But whatever is going on, Sayre is able to present himself here as kind of like a harmless, excitable, bro-science nerd.
Meanwhile, to give you a sense of how much damage his company is able to cause, just yesterday I got a newsletter from GreenMedInfo, because I'm signed up, and the header was, Breaking!
FDA announces two deaths of Pfizer vaccine trial participants from, quote, serious adverse events, unquote.
The newsletter goes out to over 400,000 recipients, and this is almost every day.
And there's kind of like a vaccine scare article going out Pretty much every day.
And this article referred to a post in the Jerusalem Post that reported that Pfizer had disclosed to the FDA, as it was supposed to, that two patients in its vaccine trial had died.
But the details are that one death happened 63 days after the vaccine, and the other death was from arteriosclerosis.
That happened, what, two or three days after, right?
Two or three days after the vaccine was administered, and there was no evidence provided in the report that the deaths were linked to the vaccine.
And this was a trial with 43,000 people.
And so, you know, I think there was a statement from Pfizer saying, you know, unfortunate things happen in large trials to people who participate in trials because life carries on and things happen.
What's weird to me about this interview with Sandler is that it shows that in some contexts a kind of fascination with pseudoscience that is all aspirational and is about psychological renewal and about, you know, comparing yourself to, you know, an atom bomb and therefore you shouldn't be so glum chum.
It's also the comic book version, right?
It's the Like, we can be superheroes because water cavitation can be done by the power of your mind.
Right, right.
Kind of like that.
And there's a harmlessness to that, I think, that goes along with the cheeriness of buying into supplements that maybe don't cost that much, so they're just going to give you a little bit of boost.
And so I found that very interesting, that there can be kind of a front for pseudoscience or bro-science that feels very appealing or very benign.
But as you're saying, as benign and childlike and maybe comic book-y as it might seem, this is all related to a worldview and a way of influencing people that does immense harm.
I don't know how we untangle them.
Yeah, I don't know either.
I mean, 450,000 people or whatever getting a newsletter that is trying to scare them about the vaccine killing them is, that's a public health crime in my book.
Well, I think I know one thing for sure, and that's that we had to get rid of more audio than we wanted to use for this episode.
I think this is going to be a topic we're going to have to return to.
The jab.
Our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
So as an abbreviated quick resource today, I want to give a shout out to Maria Sundaram, PhD, who Matthew turned me on to.
She posted a Twitter thread of advice on how to talk to the vaccine hesitant.
Now, Sundaram is a Canadian infectious disease epidemiologist and a postdoc working on respiratory viruses and vaccines.
And I'll go to her Twitter feed right now, a second to pull that up.
And I'm not going to read out the whole thing.
It's about 10 points.
So, you can go and have a look and I'll link to it in the show notes, but let's see.
Start by acknowledging the person's individual fears and concerns about vaccines.
Ultimately, many of these things, many of these are things we share.
Otherwise, we wouldn't do clinical trials to assess safety and effectiveness.
She says, acknowledge a common goal.
That we all have.
If they are a member of an underserved community, I think it's only fair to acknowledge they may have a right to distrust public health authorities and white male physicians.
She says that leads me to the importance of being a real person when talking to them.
Start from the common ground of both of you all being humans.
Don't be a science robot feeding information into an empty vessel.
That's just not how people work." She says, I talk about my own life experience and what I would do in a certain situation.
And then the last one I'll read out, you can go and have a look, it's a really helpful thread and she has some good resources linked as well.
She says, be honest.
If you don't know, say.
Now bro science guys could learn from this.
Oh, that's a very good question.
I don't know off the top of my head, but let me look into it and get back to you.
Do not pretend to know if you don't.
All right.
Well, after all of that bro science, we might need to do a coffee colon cleanse, maybe a bitter greens liver purge to get that all out of our systems.
But we have something better.
We have an interview with Dr. Dan Wilson.
Who does the opposite of the bros.
He's a molecular biologist who by day works in the lab at Carnegie Mellon, but by night he crushes out Dr. Wilson debunks the funk videos, where he's neatly tidied up after some friends of the pod including Christiane Northrup and Tom Cowan and JP.
Dan is clear, respectful, meticulous with evidence, and clearly devoted to the common good, and I've learned a lot from his YouTube channel, which we'll link to, not just about the science, but about how good science communication works.
And I think he's so good at it because, as he discloses, he was a bit of a conspiracy theorist in high school, and he kindly shares that story here.
I'm actually gonna start a hashtag Biden debunk the funk movement to get Dan appointed to the cabinet.
I hope you enjoy the interview.
Dr. Wilson, thank you so much for taking the time to be on Conspiratuality Podcast.
It's a real pleasure to meet you.
Thank you so much, Matthew.
It's a real pleasure to meet you too.
And I'm very excited to be on the show.
I'm a recent listener of the show and I'm really excited to be a part of it now.
Well, that's really cool.
I mean, just to start, maybe you can tell us a little bit about where you work, what you do all day, the jobs that you've held.
How did you get into the media aspect of public health at this point?
Yeah, so currently I'm still at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
This is where I earned my PhD in biological sciences, and I earned my PhD actually relatively recently.
I know on my channel it's Dr. Wilson, but for the first Few months of that.
I had not officially earned my PhD, but I was scheduled to defend so it was coming up and I knew I wanted to get into The YouTube scene.
I wanted to start doing that as a hobby and we'll talk a little bit about that later yeah, but I'm currently still at CMU and what I do all day is I I do laboratory work.
I split my time between laboratory work and analyzing data on the computer.
And in my PhD work, I mostly worked with yeast, so baker's yeast as a model organism to study the general mechanisms that keep cells running every day.
Specifically, I studied how nanomachines in your cells called ribosomes are built.
You might remember ribosomes from biology classes.
Just a little bit, I do.
I remember the term, yeah.
But little machines, I don't think we had such evocative language when we were in high school.
Yeah, that's how I like to describe them, because they're really complicated pieces of molecular biology that include multiple different molecules, over a hundred different proteins and RNA molecules, After all is said and done.
And their main purpose is to translate the genetic code.
So read the genetic code and make protein.
And those factories, those machines, essentially had to be built by the cell.
So that was the puzzle that I was working on in graduate school.
That's amazing.
And it also sounds like you're answering my question about the connection between molecular biology and structural biology.
I mean, are we talking about the ways in which the chemistry emerges into sort of structural function?
Yeah, exactly.
So, the ways to study these incredibly tiny nanomachines include methods that span from molecular biology to biochemistry to structural biology and Structural biology is a field that includes techniques like x-ray crystallography a technique called NMR and what I'm most familiar with is cryo electron microscopy and
So, with the biochemistry and molecular biology, we can infer functions for molecules, but seeing them is a whole other ballgame.
And with cryo-electron microscopy, which has become incredibly advanced just in the past less than 10 years, We can actually see molecules on the order of two to three angstroms.
And I'll tell you, an angstrom is about a thousand times smaller than a single viral particle.
I mean, I know micron and viral particles are often measured in microns, but angstroms are just like levels or orders of magnitude smaller than that.
Yeah, so viruses are actually measured in the order of nanometers.
A virus is about 100 nanometers on average in diameter, and a micron is 0.1 nanometers.
Yeah, or sorry, sorry, angstrom is 0.1 nanometers.
You're looking at really, really small things and looking at how they work in great detail.
And so, I guess when you pop out of the lab and you see how scientific discourse is being used, abused, manipulated in popular media, it must be very disorienting and disturbing.
It is.
It's really concerning and sad to me as a scientist especially knowing how much work scientists put into discovering basic principles about something like molecular biology and then how many people just will insert their own beliefs where we have already worked really hard to find answers.
And to find answers at the level of the angstrom, like in really small pieces of reality, because I think a lot of the influencers that you're talking about in your work are making incredibly broad, sweeping statements where not only are there a lot of errors, but the assumptions about how much can be known at any one time seem to be overly grandiose.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's...
It's like a lot of these influencers are just ignoring or not aware of the level of detail that science is able to show us these days.
Because it really has advanced a lot in the past even five years.
Right.
So when did you decide to take this stuff on?
Is there a personal story here that you're willing to share?
How did you wind up on YouTube debunking influencers?
Definitely, yeah.
I have a long history, actually, with conspiracy theories and conspirituality-type material.
From a really young age, I was always interested in Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.
I remember ridiculous stories of printing out pictures and bringing them into my grade school classes and showing them to people like, oh, look at these pictures of these cryptids.
They're amazing.
And then when I got older, I discovered YouTube and was really kind of pulled in by documentaries like Loose Change, which claimed that 9-11 was an inside job.
I was just swept away by those.
And so for a while I believed things like 9-11 was an inside job.
And I was really interested in the ancient aliens hypothesis.
And I thought that there were hidden cancer cures.
All of that stuff just really captured my attention for a very long time.
Wow.
Yeah.
Wow.
What ages are we talking about here?
So I first watched Loose Change when I was in middle school.
Right.
And then I kept those beliefs throughout a lot of high school until I think I entered undergraduate college.
So probably up until age like 18, 19, I was thinking along those lines, at least to some extent.
Now, you're talking about the field of conspiracy theory, but was there also an avid interest in the science, or at least the pseudoscience, of what you were investigating?
Was science still your primary interest, but you just kind of got the wrong channel?
Definitely.
I was always a really curious person.
My father has a master's in education, and my mother has a master's in environmental biology.
And so they always encouraged me to educate myself and go the science route.
And I was very interested in science, but it wasn't until I had a really great high school teacher in an AP biology course who really kind of helped me get a handle on the science.
And once I got a window into how science is done and what science actually is, that's when the gears kind of started turning for me, I think.
And I kind of came out of that conspirituality mindset, where I started saying, okay, if this is really true, then I should be able to investigate, investigate, and Find these answers.
And the more I learned about biology, the more those answers were saying, this isn't true.
Specifically, maybe a hidden cancer cure.
It just wasn't there.
The science did not make sense with that belief.
And so the gears, like I said, just started turning for me.
And I still remember something that AP Biology teacher said to me was, He said that what we need are good science journalists.
He said, we have a lot of good scientists.
We need good science journalists because the society connection with science is being lost.
And we can talk more about this later, but that stuck with me.
And so as I went on through my undergraduate studies, studying biotechnology and molecular biology, Learning more about this, about how science is done and what science really is, getting further out of that mindset of believing these conspiracies.
I always looked to YouTube and internet forums as great places to kind of practice discussion with people who used to be like me.
I enjoyed talking in comment sections or writing forum posts on Things like metabunk.org that Mick West runs.
I enjoyed those kinds of forums where people could just talk with each other.
And it was really an interest that stayed with me because I Viewed myself as someone who used to be like this.
So I never viewed these people I was talking to who maybe still believed conspiracy type things to be like unreachable.
I didn't want to consider them that way.
Right.
And so I always had fun reaching out.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah, no, I'm so intrigued by hearing this part of your story because, I mean, it makes sense going forward to how well you're doing these video spots, which are like, you know, They can be sharp and witty, but never really disrespectful or dismissive.
And also, just sort of, they're welcoming, right?
And notably, with a couple of the people that you Yeah, I really try to not be dismissive.
of the video by saying, uh, Hey, you know, JP Sears, if you, you know, want to talk about this, please get in touch.
It doesn't have to be a big thing.
It can be off record, but you know, I think it might be good to have a conversation and, um, yeah, that's an amazing sort of arc.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I, I really try to not be dismissive too, because I think that a lot of these people who, uh, fall into these conspiracy traps, um, we're, Listening to them is a really good way to reach them.
Because if they feel like they're just being made fun of or ridiculed or not taken seriously, then that can backfire, push them further into the trench.
But if someone listens to them and says, okay, look, you know, this is what you believe.
Okay, hey, you know, I'm a scientist.
And this is my experience as a scientist, and this is how we think.
This is how we go through problems, and this is how we find answers to those problems.
And what this person on YouTube told you, ironically I'm on YouTube now, but what this person on YouTube told you, that's just not how we do things.
That's not accurate.
And so I think being listened to and then being talked to on a human level is really important for reaching people.
Reaching those bubbles of conspirituality.
Now, when you withdrew from Loose Change and 9-11 trutherism, did you feel that you were losing anything?
Did you feel like you had to reorient yourself politically or emotionally in the world?
Was there a cost to that, or was it a relief?
I think that it was empowering to me.
It wasn't a quick transition.
It was kind of slow to kind of work my way out of it, because it wasn't like everything, suddenly I just don't believe 9-11's an inside job.
It didn't go like that.
It went from, okay, there are some really fringe ideas in this 9-11 conspiracy realm that I don't believe, but I do believe these ones.
And then, but then one by one, it just was like, okay, well, maybe, maybe that one's not so credible.
I guess that one's not really true.
I won't use that as an argument anymore.
And then it just got whittled down until I said, okay, you know, this, this is just, it's just not holding up.
The more I talk with people, the more I challenge my own beliefs, it's just not holding up.
Now you use the word empowering, but is that feeling related to while you're in the midst of believing something that you cannot evidence or support, you actually aren't empowered, you actually can't, what you have is the strength and the force of your emotions or commitments or sentiments or something like that, but you don't actually have power over the data.
Yeah, so I think what I mean by empowered is You're right.
In a sense, when you're, at least for me, when I was in that conspiracy realm, I never felt like I was doing my own research.
I wasn't in control of the data.
I was looking at other people's research and calling that research, you know?
Right.
But when you become trained as a scientist, when you enter the realm of data-driven research, is totally different.
And I think as a conspiritualist who maybe believes in something like 9-11 conspiracies, it's easy to Not see that and to think that you are in pursuit of truth and that you're getting closer to the real truth.
And while you're a conspiritual, a conspiritualist, it's empowering thinking that you're getting closer to that truth, but then realizing that you're on the wrong path, that you're not really following the evidence.
You're following people.
Yeah.
You're following a social sort of contagion.
Yeah, so getting out of that and realizing, okay, this is how people follow the evidence.
This is how scientists follow the evidence and gather data and analyze data.
That was really empowering.
That made me feel like, okay, now I'm On the path towards truth, or as close as we're going to come to a truth.
Because that's what science does.
It brings you as close as you can to a truth as you can get.
So you turn from evidence towards evidence, but away from the kind of secondary sources that other conspiracists are providing as data.
But you must lose relationships as well.
Yeah, you know, there are definitely people who I
Fell out of touch with as I pulled away from that there were some difficult conversations with friends that I had who shared the same beliefs but weirdly I was always it wasn't even though I was online reading about all these things and watching videos about conspiracies I was never really part of any internet community
It was always just a few people I knew in person who I would talk about these things with.
And those relationships, of course, did kind of change after I pulled away from those beliefs.
What happened was I entered into the scientific community.
I made new friends who I could work with in the lab, friends who I could study with, and friends I could talk about these conspiracy beliefs with in the context of, are they true or not?
Let's look at the real science, the real evidence, and discuss how we can talk to people to address these claims.
You know, hearing this story, I'm getting a much clearer picture than I think I ever have before about how there seem to be at least two very strongly identifiable streams or approaches to the notion of truth that we're talking about.
So often, and you refer to it in one of your videos, that there's often amongst the COVID denialists or the COVID contrarians, this feeling of the blind pursuit of intuition or blindly following intuition.
And that in itself feels, I think, to many of them, like it is the pursuit of truth, but almost in a mystical or spiritual sense.
But then I think about the direction your life has taken, and you're describing, you know, looking at things that measure in angstroms, like with your own eyes, and then you're looking at raw data, and it's almost like, you know, you just said that science really wants to get us as close to the truth of something as it possibly can, and so
You know, whereas I think people in spirituality think that they are sort of intuiting something directly, the irony is, is that you've got to use really, you know, fine microscopes to get to looking at something directly.
Yeah.
It's bizarre.
Yeah, it is.
And I think that for scientists, having blindly following intuition is Something that we all realize at some point we're doing, in some sense.
For me, at the beginning of my PhD projects, we had made an observation based on these, you know, Angstrom-level resolution structures.
We made a hypothesis that A particular interaction between a protein and the structure we were studying was really important.
And we were absolutely convinced that that interaction has to be important.
It just looked like it had to be.
And my advisor and I, we were just so carried away with this.
Convinced it had to be true.
And as I started doing experiments to test that hypothesis, it turned out that, well, that interaction doesn't seem to be very exciting.
It doesn't seem to be as important as we thought it was.
And so then we had to come back down to Earth and seriously evaluate our results, and then design new experiments to, one, confirm our findings, and two, help us decide where to go next.
And it did end up turning into a good story, but it started with thinking that the interaction was important, but the interaction was not nearly as important as we had thought.
And we had to go through the testing process to figure that out.
So you're talking about a kind of shared failure in intuition.
But that it doesn't stop you.
Actually, in fact, that might feel deflating for a while, but I'm not hearing in the story that your whole world is shaken, or that you can't possibly back out of what you believed in this hypothesis because you've invested too much into it.
Yeah, when it comes to hypotheses that you can actually test, You just get used to the idea of not becoming emotionally attached to whatever answer you might find.
Whether it's what you originally thought it to be, whether your hypothesis was correct, or whether your hypothesis was rejected, you just have to go with the evidence.
And that, I think, Right, right.
Well, I mean, turning, you know, I'm really grateful for the personal background here.
It's really fascinating.
As I said, I think it really speaks to how effectively you're able to communicate this material.
But to get specific into some of your content, I just have a couple of things that I've pulled out that I wanted to ask a little bit more about.
One was that you covered Dr. Yan's non-peer-reviewed paper that circulated throughout the medical libertarian sphere and anti-vaxxers.
that suggested that COVID was lab manufactured in China.
And you explained why that couldn't be possibly so.
But you also mentioned that there was a rumor that Steve Bannon had funded that study.
And you said, you remarked that it wasn't kind of that interesting to you.
And I'm wondering, why did you say that?
Why do you sort of put that to the side?
Yeah, so almost always, whenever I start to debunk someone, I don't really try to verify their credentials or look into who funded them or try to figure out too much about their background as a person.
I do this because I want to remain unbiased, and I want to just check their facts.
I want to check their story.
And so the story about Bannon funding non-peer-reviewed report that claimed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is man-made.
That's something I heard on accident while discovering the story, so I thought it was worth mentioning in the video, but I wanted to make it clear that that didn't influence my researching.
It did not bias my analysis of that EN report, because ultimately It shouldn't matter who said something, what kind of degree they had, where they earned it, or who's funding them.
Obviously those things can be important, but at face value it doesn't change the quality of their data or their argument.
And if their data and their argument is publicly available and you can analyze it yourself, then all the more so it doesn't make sense to go into that ad hominem territory.
And I think that's really powerful because so much of the conspiratorial rhetoric is kind of couched in this Overwhelming disbelief of sources with regard to where they're coming from.
If they're mainstream media, then they have to be thrown out the window.
If the studies are backed by pharmaceutical companies, then they have to be junked.
But I guess what I've picked up in looking at your content is that it really is possible to, as a trained scientist, look at data even outside of your field and to evaluate it and to see whether it checks out.
Yeah, definitely.
The point of earning a PhD, ideally, is to learn how to learn and be able to analyze data and assess its quality.
Obviously, it takes some background understanding to do that in a lot of cases, but It shouldn't be impossible to put in the time to understand that background so you can understand the data and assess its quality.
And if you have trouble doing that, the beauty of science is that there's some expert out there who has put in that time.
And you can find that person and listen to them or read their work and see if it lines up with whatever claim you're investigating.
And if you do that again and again, not just with one expert, but with multiple, with several, then you can easily Find whether or not you can feel confident in saying that a claim is reliable or not or true or not.
Right.
Right.
Well, you know, one of the things I've also picked up through your content is that I just didn't know that there were so many kind of DIY research tools online where, you know, people can go and look up genomic codes and stuff like that.
But I guess the question that that brings up is, Given the fact that there are so many people out there who are either passively or actively manipulating public perception on public health issues through the maxim of do your research, which is a QAnon saying, there's which is a QAnon saying, there's obviously a risk in citizen science.
So, So, what makes the tools that you use as a scientist safe from manipulation?
Is there a way to do that?
Yeah, it's interesting because the do your own research thing, If taken literally, it's really powerful for someone to be able to investigate for themselves and come to the same conclusion as someone else has come to while looking at the same set of data.
In many cases, doing your own research is prone to a lot of error from the average citizen.
That's because it takes a trained understanding of both the background behind the tools and how the tools work themselves in order to properly understand and interpret data.
And so, in the video you're referencing, I did my best to kind of give a concise how-to guide when it comes to looking at where in the genome the COVID primers that are used in the PCR test bind.
Right.
But as the The idea that I was debunking in that very video demonstrates, if you have an incomplete understanding of these tools and the background behind them, it can lead to misinterpretation of the data.
So the original claim was that one of the COVID PCR primers binds to human chromosome 8.
And so the claim therefore goes that We are the virus, and all these positive PCR tests are detecting human DNA.
I mean, if that were true, then every single PCR test would be positive.
There would be very few negatives.
But it just misses the understanding that one primer, which might be able to bind to a human chromosome, which you can see using the tools that I demonstrate on that video, which you can see using the tools that I demonstrate on that video, One primer binding in a PCR is not enough to give you a positive result reliably.
And so, if you don't have a good understanding of the background and the tools, then it can absolutely be used to misinform and misinterpret data.
And that's another reason why we really need scientists who have been trained in these tools and understand them to come into these bubbles and offer these explanations.
Because otherwise, these people will just keep saying what they're saying.
Maybe they know they're wrong and they're lying, or maybe they just don't realize it and they just keep spreading it because they think it's right.
Right.
And by these bubbles, you mean the YouTube bubble, but I'm also, I mean, in your case anyway, but I'm also wondering, like, are you going to have to get a Parler account and start, like, and start putting your stuff on BitChute?
And I mean, because that's where the, because that's where the, the, the, the shit hits the fan, right?
Yeah.
You know, I haven't, I haven't thought about that.
I actually regret saying it.
I don't think I'm not saying you should, but I'm just wondering about that because if we're talking about where is the misinformation metastasizing, that's shifting.
Is that it?
Is that where they're coming from now?
Well, I mean, as more and more conspiracy theorists and COVID denialists and medical libertarians move off of Twitter and Facebook and into MeWe and Parler and Telegram, then yeah.
So anyway, that might be another conversation to have.
Maybe, yeah.
I mean, I know that Del Bigtree, for example, he was a big topic of my channel before I shifted mainly to COVID just because the COVID misinformation just keeps piling on.
But now he's on YouTube and Facebook now, so I was wondering where he went.
Well, yeah, and where are your audiences going to overlap?
Like, is there a YouTube BitChute Venn diagram now?
I don't know that there is, right?
Yeah, well, you know, back to the PCR test, I really, really appreciated the rundown of the accuracy because, you know, in the wellness world, I hear everything from, you know, 80% false positive rate to, you know, on and on and on.
But I didn't know.
I also heard over and over again that the inventor, Cary Mullis, you know, had apparently said something that cast doubt on whether it was a diagnostic tool.
But I didn't know until Until your review that he was also a little bit eccentric, that he dropped a lot of acid.
And I wanted to ask whether, and this is about who scientists are as they become better known and sometimes as they enter into the celebrity sphere, what they get up to.
But I've heard, I have some data that's not published yet, that suggests some of the conspirituality doctors that we study on the podcast are experimenting personally with like plant medicines including ayahuasca.
And so, there's also this overlap between plant medicine folks and conspirituality generally.
So, is this something that you're hearing about kind of behind the scenes socially as a doctor as a factor in how some of these folks might go off the rails?
You know, I don't see things like ayahuasca and psychedelics as something that maybe increases someone's propensity towards these kinds of beliefs.
I have no data on that.
That's just how I feel.
You know, I almost regret how my coverage of Carey Mullis kind of came across because I didn't want to make it seem like I was discounting what he was saying because he had dropped a lot of acid and talked to green glowing space raccoons.
My only point that I really wanted to get across is that no one person is infallible.
Yeah, I mean, I appreciated the point.
I can understand your reticence, but I mean, we're looking at, you know, a several decades long history going back to, you know, Timothy O'Leary of people with scientific backgrounds who almost build new identities out of the rejection Timothy O'Leary of people with scientific backgrounds who almost build new identities And they might do so through substances, but as they do so, they are taking on different social roles.
They're becoming, you know, shamans or priests or medicine people.
And so I'm just wondering whether, like, I was wondering whether even like at Carnegie Mellon, whether like in the background there's sort of like, oh yeah, that guy might be going off to, you know, to ceremony or something like that.
And we better check his research afterwards.
Oh no, I haven't heard about any of that.
I've never heard I've never personally heard about anybody talking about a colleague like that in that way.
And you know, even if someone does hold beliefs like that, someone does go off to ceremony or do whatever they want to do in their personal life, To me, in my experience, we never hold that against people.
I've experienced very smart scientists who are good at their jobs, who also believe in homeopathy.
But I don't let that affect how I might view their work.
Because if it's solid work, then it is solid work.
And their personal beliefs that are separate from that are not related.
It's really, I love the way you talk about this because, you know, you probably know that a major theme on our podcast is kind of like the proximity of one culture to another, and how a way of thinking about Yoga or Buddhism or personal development can kind of make its way into alt-health or medical libertarian beliefs.
And so, we look a lot at how boundaries are blurred, but I think, you know, you have really clear boundaries around, okay, well, if you have something to say, you should be able to show it and I should be able to see it.
Done, finished, like that should be enough.
And I don't really have to worry about whether or not you're dragging your beliefs in because I'll see them.
You know, the scientific community is not perfect.
Definitely not everybody shares the same viewpoint as I do.
There are definitely scientists who might judge others for their personal beliefs, but I personally have not experienced that.
Yeah.
Where there's a bias towards someone's science because of their outside activities.
Right.
Well, you know, I did have this question about, which is related, about the impact and the sort of the social weight of credentials, because
In one of your videos, you looked at Andrew Kaufman's theory of exosomes as being viruses, and you do a really brilliant job of picking that apart, and I'm really glad that you do, because exosome has kind of become this, I don't know, mystical particle amongst the conspirituality crowd that is actually a good thing, and it's the communicator between cells.
I really think that they're talking about the Metachlorians, actually, in Star Wars.
Do you know what I mean?
It's not like we're swimming in viruses, but we're actually swimming in the force and we just don't recognize it.
But during this video, you show some clips of this talk that he gives on a panel and it's on Zoom and he flashes this title card and he gives his credentials.
And it's kind of like what happens when Christiane Northrup reads off her credentials as well.
It's really impressive.
So it says, I'm reading from the bottom, he got his Bachelor's of Science in Biology at MIT, Doctor of Medicine, Medical University of South Carolina, Psychiatry Residency at Duke.
former medical instructor of hematology and oncology, South Carolina, former assistant professor of psychiatry at SUNY, and then currently licensed and board certified in psychiatry and forensic psychiatry.
And so, then he takes all of that, and the title on that card is, What I Think COVID-19 Really Is.
And for me as a humanities person, I'm like, Well, cool!
This guy obviously has been in sciences all of his life.
I'm going to listen to him because he's not going to be just talking out of his ass, but I'm realizing as you go through what he actually says that basically denies, it seems, the last 50 years of virology.
I'm realizing that that's not true at all.
And so how does this work, Doctor?
Like, please explain this to me.
Like, how is it that somebody, because so many people that I study, that we study, like Kelly Brogan is like this.
Northrop, as I said, is like this.
I think Cowan is kind of compromised already by disciplinary actions against him.
But like, all of these people, they have training.
And is it that they just, did they only have a few credits?
You know, it's a really great question, because it's so hard to know, right?
They didn't have to really pass?
Like, what happened?
I, you know, it's a really great question because it's so hard to know, right?
Like, how someone ended up, like, Kaufman, for example.
And, you know, I don't know too much about Kaufman as a person or, you know, what his path was really like.
So I can't comment on him specifically, but I will say that the education system is definitely not foolproof.
And scientists, you know, are not always immune to the enticing power of conspiratorial beliefs.
You know, when I was swept away from 9-11, by 9-11 and ancient aliens theories, hypotheses.
That happened a lot because I didn't have foundational understanding to argue against those claims.
Which were appealing to you for some reason, psychologically or otherwise, right?
Yeah, and so basically it was because I didn't know.
I didn't know these things.
I had questions in my mind and these Ideas were giving me enticing answers that were fascinating and different and exciting, you know, out of this world.
And as a scientist, you get that basic understanding in the field you're studying, but you also learn along the way that there's a lot we don't know.
Yeah.
Even in science, you know, you can work in a field all your life and still there are so many unanswered questions.
Even though we can see molecules at high resolution, just a couple of angstroms, we still don't know so much.
And sometimes I think that not knowing can be satisfied, can be filled with these weird kind of fringe explanations that Really are exciting.
It would be cool, sometimes, if some of this stuff was true.
Right.
You can see the attractiveness of it, but if you do the follow-through, it's just not there.
It really makes me wonder though, like, with Kauffman being licensed and board certified in psychiatry and forensic psychiatry presently, that's the latest sort of listed credential, it really makes me wonder, like, does he feel like all his questions are answered there?
Because if you were at the top of your field and your specialty, ideally you would have that humility there, perhaps even more so.
In fact, the depth of your learning would be signified by how humble you were about how much you didn't know.
That's what it would seem to be.
That would be the ethical position.
But I'm really wondering whether The person who, you know, so with Christiane Northrup, it's like, obviously, everybody says, well, she's an expert in, you know, obstetrics and gynecology, but I'm like wondering, actually, well, is she?
Because if she's able to bullshit about vaccines, what is she actually, what is she, what is she doing in her actual field, right?
Complicated and mind-boggling to me sometimes how this happens, but we see examples of it so often.
I mean, we know in creationism that there are people who will go and get higher degrees in order to have the credentials to make their creationist claims look better.
Do they actually sort of hide their beliefs close to the chest while going through the paleontology or whatever?
You know, I'm not sure exactly how it happens, but I do know that Probably, their beliefs are left at the door.
And like I said earlier, that is the attitude that most scientists have.
Okay, you know, you can believe these other things, you can believe what you want, but when you come into the lab, you know, your work is your work.
And I think a lot of places have that attitude.
So, if someone were to come in with creationist beliefs, Maybe they just never talk about it.
Maybe they know and they just say, okay, well, you're working for me and you're doing fine, so whatever.
Right.
I don't think that that's really a common topic of conversation.
I know that I've never talked to my advisor, for example, about any personal spiritual beliefs that we might have or share or disagree with.
We just don't go there.
But it also goes to show that, like I said earlier, that credentials really only go so far.
We've seen it in Kaufman's case, Northrop's case, and we've also seen it in, we already touched on Kerry Mullis, who was a Nobel Laureate, who said things that were odd, eccentric, and also his words are being twisted to support this crazy idea that COVID PCR tests are useless.
But we also see it throughout history in other Nobel laureates, like Linus Pauling, who is a Nobel laureate in both biology and chemistry, and he believes that vitamin C is a cure-all.
How did that happen?
How did James Watson, another Nobel laureate, go from Being an important part of discovering the structure of DNA to being a senile racist bigot and a sexist.
I mean it's just because these people have high degrees does not mean that they will be correct in everything they say.
Right.
Oh, my goodness.
You know, I think given your last reference, I kind of want to swing around to the elephant in the room question, which, you know, it's not going to be lost on anyone that all of your subjects so far, at least during lockdown, are white.
Now, have you come across many or even any people of color COVID denialists?
I mean, I know that there's Stella Emanuel, but she seems to be a very complicated character.
I mean, there's West African Christian beliefs in there, but on the whole, does COVID-related conspirituality seem to be a white thing?
You know, from my viewpoint, I hadn't really thought about this before you had asked, but Yeah, it kind of does seem to be a predominantly white affluent people who are spreading these beliefs.
That's kind of surprising to me.
I almost would expect there to be more Black representation or minority representation in these things.
You know, given the history with Tuskegee experiments and Henrietta Hacks and long-standing issues of institutionalized racism, both in science and medicine, I would expect more black people to justifiably so be suspicious, but also be susceptible to these conspirituality beliefs.
And maybe there are.
Maybe there are more people than I can guess who follow that, but they don't seem to be leaders, or maybe they just don't have a platform.
I can't really say.
Yeah, it might be market-driven.
I mean, we've kind of hammered home over and over again on the podcast that, you know, the wellness alt-health worlds are, you know, very, very white, and they are middle class, and they are substantially educated.
And so, if they're going to elevate influencers, those influencers are probably going to look like them.
Yeah, and it's interesting that you ask that because I know that Mickey Willis touched on this in the Plandemic II documentary, where I think it was a New Jersey congressman who was featured in the video as saying something like,
Black people are being targeted, and we are guinea pigs, and we need to rise up.
It was really sad to me to see that from Mickey Willis, especially because Due to things like institutionalized racism in medicine and science, where decades, centuries ago, it was science that black people were fundamentally not the same as white humans.
And that has had ripple effects to where now, If people in a black community, for example, refuse vaccines, they'll be at such greater risk of vaccine-preventable diseases and deaths.
And so it was really sad to see a white affluent influencer like Mickey Willis saying, you know, black people, you know, you need to You need to be wary of this stuff.
That was just really, really sad for me.
Well, it's also like an appropriation of social justice rhetoric to, yeah, to put forward the point.
You know, maybe to round off, I'll return to your question about needing, or your mentors, Your teacher in high school was the one who said that we really need good science journalists.
And I'm really hearing that.
And it makes me remember that there's this point in your debunking of J.P.
Sears where you respond to his strawman quasi-funny argument that public health officials are insisting that we live in paralyzing fear.
He's making a point, he's trying to make it funny, it's not really funny, he's punching down.
But anyway, you reject this strawman argument that people like you are asking the public to live in fear, and you invoke a kind of common sense.
Your comments are very much in line with what I've heard from basically every public health official in the world.
Which is, you know, you don't have to panic, you just have to be smart, you have to take care of each other, wash your hands, wear your mask, you know, socially distance.
But it made me wonder whether, like, where the Sears accusation is really coming from, aside from his own opportunism and grandiosity.
Like, Is it possible that the media coverage of COVID has been unnecessarily sensational or fear-mongering?
Is it that JP is conflating media about public health with public health itself?
And if so, what would we do about that?
To be honest, I don't watch media coverage very often.
I guess mainstream media, I guess I don't really pay attention too much about that.
But I do get the sense that the media does tend to focus on bad news a lot.
And to an average person, The idea of a pandemic virus spreading rapidly throughout communities, causing spikes in cases and spikes in deaths and spikes in hospitalizations, that can really stand out and stick with viewers and be scary.
I mean, I was afraid, too, during this pandemic.
I'm not going to lie about that.
It was scary how Just how widespread it was going to be and whether or not anyone I knew would get sick.
It's not easy.
But along with that, it needs to be balanced with this message of we can do this.
We can beat the virus.
It is possible.
And there are relatively simple methods that we can use to prevent its spread and reduce death and reduce illness.
And I think that what it comes down to is we need more scientists communicating these things in public health sectors.
So it's really unfortunate.
An unfortunate thing about science is that this kind of practice is I'll say not really encouraged in the scientific community.
This practice of going out and communicating science effectively to the public.
Doing public scholarship?
Yeah.
Right, I mean, because nobody told you at CMU to get on YouTube and do your part.
Right, and I've, you know, even encountered colleagues who might see me as an unfocused scientist because I'm doing so many extra things outside of the lab, because I'm not dedicating my whole life to bench work.
Which I don't think any scientist should do.
I think we have a responsibility to communicate to the public.
As Carl Sagan said, we have a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, and yet hardly anybody understands science and technology.
Do you think, last thing, do you think that in the federal or the state spheres, public relations spheres, could you imagine yourself standing next to or doing the presser next to Tony Fauci?
And not just being responsible for, okay, well, this is what our recommendations are now, but also to say, you know, you might have heard people saying that the PCR test has a high false positive rate, and I want to tell you why that's not true at all, and to do your thing with that.
I mean, I'm not asking you to fantasize, but is that kind of like, do you imagine that that would be very effective, like on a mass scale?
That you don't just tell people what to do, but you actually address the misconceptions in, you know, a very detailed, but also relaxed and familiar way.
You know, I'll be honest, I do fantasize about something like that sometimes.
I think it would be so cool just to have something like that.
I mean, I think Neil deGrasse Tyson floated the idea of a truth force before on social media.
And I think there's use for that.
I mean, these concepts in science that Build the foundation for the messaging that is given by the WHO, by the CDC.
Those concepts are not always intuitive.
They're not always easy to understand.
I mean immunology is By far one of the most complicated fields in biology.
Anytime an immunologist is speaking at a seminar, we all go, oh god, here we go.
We roll our eyes like, oh man, he's going to be talking about IL-7, 22, 6, and These different kinds of TH helper cells, all these different kinds of immune functions, and it's complicated.
It's hard to follow.
So, distilling these concepts down to digestible messages for the general public that not only explain why we are messaging the way we are, but also explaining away certain things that can be really grabbing, if not opposed.
Well, that's the thing, is that the propaganda around the bad PCR test is really grabbing.
And so that's what you're up against, is a very sort of poignant and easy to tell and sensationalized story.
That leads people into strange directions, and I think a kind of oppositional energy to that, which is, you've been really, you know, hey everybody, you've kind of been suckered by a simplistic story.
What makes it more complicated is X, Y, and Z, and we're working hard on it, and we want you to know that, you know, we've got your back, kind of thing.
Yes, exactly.
That would be, I think that would be so powerful.
Bro Science, a manifesto in progress.
Yes.
Bro science is junk science spewed by men who believe their charisma is a substitute for training.
It brags, mocks, overreaches.
It's self-serving and self-interested.
It can carry hints of toxic masculinity, entitlement, unearned confidence, no qualms about taking up space, repressing emotion or hiding it behind humor or grandiosity.
It preaches individualism and self-sufficiency from the lonely triumph of bro.
Its target is not public health, but sales of supplements, self-improvement regimes, confidence building, all proposed as totalizing and perfect answers.
This is why pro-scientists must reject the reality of a novel virus they cannot solve.
For them, the fact that highly trained doctors struggle to understand and treat COVID-19 is not a sign that science is a grueling, endless, and thankless process, but that experts are loathsome nerds dedicated to killing high vibes.
This loathing takes on a misogynistic flavor when the expert is a woman, and a homophobic flavor when they are a man.
It's hard for bro-scientists to imagine a world in which hard work is rewarded more by a sense of dignity than cash, or where scientific advancement happens incrementally and is not accompanied by huge gains on social media.
When Banting and Best sold the patent for insulin for $1 to the University of Toronto in 1923, they modeled the antithesis of bro-science.
Their work was actual science that demonstrably saved lives, and their very low bro-index prevented them from claiming that work as personal property.
After all, the work emerged from a network of relational and economic privileges, Why should they extract more than their fair wages?
By contrast, the banal health products of bro-science can never be oriented towards the commons.
There's no money in it.
Everything they pitch as being good for bodies and minds is a consumer item.
Purchasing is the pathway to virtue.
And if the bro-scientist is pushing an MLM, the virtue proposition is increased by networked recruitment.
You become a better bro by eating the supplement, and you become a super bro by building your supplement downline.
For the bro scientist, health is the outcome of personal choices, not public policy, which is why he cannot conceive of the logic of masks or vaccines, which are not useful as personal choices, but as social commitments.
In the rugged country of bros, there are no communities, but rather collections of homogenous, self-contained, self-responsible individuals.
They mirror each other's strong and silent bro-ness.
They owe each other nothing but affiliate links.
The reality principle of bro-science is clicks and sales as opposed to evidence, peer review, and the hard work of consensus.
Science must not trump the bro.
This means that mutual emotional validation, awkward though it is, is a constant condition of loyalty.
Bro-science has a very low threshold for internal disagreement, a sign that critical thinking is being valued over marketing and messaging.
Disagreement is seen as betrayal rather than a process of refining knowledge.
Disagreement feels personal because the only backing that bro-science really has is unearned confidence.
This fragility will sharply define the bro-in-group and trigger sharp ostracism measures.
Scaled up to the political sphere, bro-science could only ever appoint a demagogue as a candidate.
Diplomacy and compromise are less efficient sales techniques.
Bro science says that people get sick and die either naturally, no big deal bro, or because they didn't do enough self-care and self-improvement.
It spitefully rejects the vulnerability of the human condition.
But there is anxiety in this spite, for bro scientists secretly know, somewhere inside, that their supplements will not save them.
In the COVID age, bro science has become more claustrophobic and resentful with lockdown, turning podcast and YouTube spaces into sweaty hangouts of the pseudo-oppressed.
When bros can't manspread in real life, they'll do it unopposed online.
In this space, declarations of health are conflated with health itself.
Duck, duck, go searches are conflated with holy crusades.
And the technology allows for endless content production with zero outside input.
And so the gateways to consensus reality narrow.
The algorithms bend bro-science autoplay options towards the alt-right, topping up and doubling down on the warehouse of grievances.
Bro-science reminds us that while we dream of a liberatory and educational internet, in reality, it's best at transmitting memes and selling porn.
Ultimately, bro-science is not science at all.
It is bro-ritual, bro-bonding, and mutual compensatory bro-support.
Bro-scientists engage a performance of friendship that helps build trust in the marketing of yet more bro-ness and bro-products.
They seem to love each other, but only in health, not sickness.
Only in wealth, not poverty.
Their masturbatory excitement over the dream of invulnerability conceals their competition for the alpha position.
The love shared by bro-scientists, built on products and promises, does not deepen with intimacy or suffering, but rather must expand like capitalism itself, or it will stagnate and sour.
