30: Are There Really Two Sides? (w/Charles Eisenstein)
Who gets to take up space in critical times? How do we orient ourselves toward expertise? In a culture dominated by “experts” on social media, do charismatics outperform fact-checkers?This episode marks a milestone for our podcast, as Matthew interviews Charles Eisenstein, whose essay “The Coronation” has cast a long shadow on our ongoing critique of how New Age and spiritual spaces interact with public health. It’s a respectful but robust conversation about the limits of what laypeople can know about science and journalism, the intersection between conspiracy theory and myth, what the word “narrative” really means, and whether activism on the left and conspiracy theories on the right can be equally misguided. The conversation ran long: we dish up and comment on the first hour here.In the Ticker, we cover Gaiam TV—Netflix for the Q-adjacent—and JP Sears keeping it classy by using the birth announcement of his son to punch down at trans people. On The Jab, Julian reports on Robert F Kennedy Jr’s role in flooding social media with anti-vax ads, and targeting propaganda at minority and immigrant communities, to their detriment.Show NotesSuzanne Humphries on Rational WikiWhy Dr Suzanne Humphries, an anti-vaccine activist, is lying to you about measlesJP Sears’s transphobic postJP Sears’s squat workout / Bill Gates postOverlap between conspirituality and anti-trans politicsInvite from the “Awarehouse”, oh and this one tooWhy this mainstream yoga site is now a hub for QAnon influencersA Thrive interviewee regrets his participationBell’s Palsy, Allergic Reactions, and Deaths in Covid Vaccine TrialsFunding for anti-vax ads on FacebookRFK is
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Conspirituality 30.
Are there really two sides?
Who gets to take up space in critical times?
How do we orient ourselves toward expertise?
In a culture dominated by experts on social media, do charismatics outperform fact-checkers?
This episode marks a milestone for our podcast as Matthew interviews Charles Eisenstein, whose essay, The Coronation, has cast a long shadow on our ongoing critique of how New Age and spiritual spaces interact with public health.
It's a respectful but robust conversation about the limits of what lay people can know about science and journalism, the intersection between conspiracy theory and myth, what the word narrative really means, and whether activism on the left and conspiracy theories on the right can be equally misguided.
The conversation ran long.
We dish up and comment on the first hour here today.
In the ticker, we cover Gaiam TV, Netflix for the Q adjacent, and J.P.
Sears keeping it classy by using the birth announcement of his son to punch down at trans people.
On the jab, I'll be reporting on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.' 's role in flooding social media with anti-vax ads and targeting his propaganda at minority and immigrant communities to their detriment.
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.
To begin the ticker this week, I want to look at something a little bigger.
And just coming from my own experience with social media, I absolutely love the forums and the comments when they facilitate positive commentary, but as well as debating.
I think it's a very important aspect of how we use our media.
But then there's trolling, and we all know the problems with that.
And what's really confusing me right now is why certain figures that we've covered often and who have gotten big boosts this year are using their time to specifically gaslight and troll other communities.
So I'm speaking specifically of Mickey Willis and J.P.
Sears.
So, first of all, for trolling, Mickey Willis recently jumped on a Fox News announcement of Joe Biden winning the presidency, which took a few weeks, but hey, they actually lived up to it.
And his comment was, curious, will Joe be sworn in, or the Chinese Communist Party?
And then he went on Brene Brown's post who was talking about her Dare to Lead podcast and she had Barack Obama, you might have heard of him, he was a guest promoting his new book.
And Mickey writes, love you Brene, but you are clearly unaware of the damage that man has done to our nation and I voted for him.
Now, this is purposeful trolling, but then we get to JP Sears, who a few weeks ago posted about his workout, and I did a comment on this on Instagram, but talking about his ring dips and squats, totally fine.
I love Instagram for workouts, actually.
But then he relates it to being Bill Gates' And it has nothing to do with the workout.
It's really stretching in every capacity.
But the one that really got me and what Matthew is going to address that inspired wanting to cover this is the day after his son was born, his first child, his birth announcement included a transphobic slur.
And so, leave aside the fact that we have serious disagreements with these men on topics like vaccination, public health, and politics, but looking at it from that bigger picture view, we have, again, this trolling and then another one inserting wedge issues into topics that are completely unrelated.
And I'm really finding it hard to identify a goal.
I don't have a point in this to come to a conclusion, but I really feel like I'm missing something.
We're watching two of this year's Breakout wellness influencers, and it just seems like they're so badly in need of validation.
And how insecure do you have to be to talk about the birth of your child by punching down at trans people?
And before Matthew discusses that specifically, I just want to Reference a book that was very influential on me by the journalist Eric Schlosser and Reefer Madness, which is about almost 20 years old now.
It's a fantastic book, but he has an entire chapter on pornography.
And I never forgot this because he talks about how Pornography has been around for a very long time, and it really helped to facilitate, for example, cameras, technology, and then VCRs, and the internet.
Every step of the way, porn has been there, regardless of your feelings on it.
I'm just talking about the fact that technology has often been led by porn, but what Eric points out is that First, you have sort of just the basic showing some skin, and then you get to nipples, and then you get to genitals, and then you get to missionary position, and then you get to oral, and then you get to violence.
And what happens is that at every step of the way, it's just people get so accustomed to seeing one thing that they need more and more and more.
And I'm at a point where I'm kind of feeling like that with some of these wellness influences.
It's like, how can I one-up?
How can I own the libs a little bit in a different way?
How can I keep standing out?
And that's really all I got with this, but that's what this whole phenomenon that I'm noticing for them using their social media feeds feels like right now.
You know, before, I know Matthew has plenty to say on this, I just want to say as someone who not too long ago was a new dad, how you get so desensitized to the emotional, the emotionally overwhelming power of holding your newborn child that you can use it as a moment to reflect politically incorrect, bad boy, transphobic posturing.
It's just, it's beyond me.
Yeah, it's beyond me too, but to speak to Derek's point about what the goal is, it seems primarily that it's disruption.
That through acting out this kind of extended adolescence, there's a provocative capital that's built.
And it means that in responding to this particular Instagram post, I kind of don't want to I want to avoid the rage on this one for a couple of reasons.
First of all, it plays into his business model, which is just cheap provocation.
Like, really cheap and lazy.
I mean, if we think about the fact that it took him literally 30 seconds to make that shitty joke and about two and a half seconds to snap the picture, it's like the worst form of capitalism.
He controls the means of, like, You know, laugh out loud production.
That's all he has, right?
And here we are, we do all of this labor to clean up what he dumps into the river.
And I was thinking about this, too, in terms of the uselessness of this endless stream of content production.
Just from a legacy perspective, if you'll indulge a fantasy for a moment, what happens when, let's say, a couple of weeks from now, J.P.
Sears drops dead?
What happens to the millions of followers?
What happens to those accounts?
What happens to Christiane Northrup's 500,000 Facebook followers if she suddenly disappears?
There's something about this material that's being produced that's so ephemeral that it feels like it's just a spectacle laid on top of the world that doesn't really go anywhere or do anything except provoke emotional responses, usually through cruelty.
And anyway, that's the first thing that I thought.
And then the second thing is that we really don't know.
He's obviously a stone-cold killer through his business practices, and he may well have taken a personal or private day when the baby was born, on the day of the birth, to actually be a human being about it.
And then consciously decided, you know, as he seems to do with everything else, to make this part of his life like a prop for his brand.
I mean, he does that with his body, so we just don't know.
But what we do know is that the artifact that the Post leaves behind is a joke at the expense of trans people.
And I posted to Facebook, there's a good question that came up on Instagram about what the overlap is between conspirituality and anti-trans politics, so we'll put that into the notes.
But, you know, I just wanted to end by saying that I feel a little bit strange saying this, but I think it's actually good that we're seeing this anti-trans transparency out in the open amongst wellness influencers because it shows us something very particular about alt-health hypocrisy.
The alt-health libertarian mindset is all about autonomy and agency and sovereignty, and what they really want, however, is a certain type of sovereignty, a certain type of autonomy that actually only validates and reflects their own.
There was one commentator on Instagram, on our account, who pointed out that awakening into trans consciousness could be considered almost the most anti-authoritarian You know, awaken stance a person could possibly take or achieve.
And so here's where we see that for a lot of these people it's not so much freedom that J.P.
Sears and Bauhaus' wife and Mickey Willis want, but rather the freedom to assert their own superiority.
Yeah, and not only is it this courageous anti-authoritarian process, but can you think of anything more emblematic of listening to your own deepest inner truth, even though it doesn't fit with what everyone else is demanding of you, and then going through a transformational process in order to become who you truly are as a sovereign self, than the journey that transgender people go through?
I mean, come on!
It's incredible.
Yeah, and so just to your point, Julian, there's also, you know, here's JP who's monetizing privacy, really, through this little baby and the miraculous aspect of it, and here we have a little boy now swaddled in this kind of overdetermination of patriarchy, and what is it going to cost him For him to be gay or trans, if he is gay or trans.
Sure.
And I also thought like, you know, I got the feeling of a father who is almost transcendentally avoidant, whose connection with even like the closest things to him will always be mediated through phones and jokes.
In line, we have this is this hasn't been reported.
So we're kind of we kind of have a scoop here and we're not really reporting it because we received it from a listener who wishes to remain anonymous.
but we checked out the emails and they're legit.
The title here is, Sounds True Responds to a Query Asking Them to Reconsider Business Relations with J.P.
Sears.
So, I've got the letter here, and what it says is, from the listener, Who wrote in subject JPCears message, Dear Sounds True Team, did you consider moving JPCears from your catalog now that he openly promotes QAnon conspiracy theories, Trump election fraud conspiracy theories, and other disturbing content in a very obvious non-satirical manner?
I bought the Becoming the Hero of Your Journey course last year and feel at least betrayed now.
Kind regards from a listener.
And then here is the classic customer service response.
I'm not going to say the representative's name.
There's no point in shaming here.
Hello, listener.
Thank you for taking time to share your feedback.
Your insight has been shared with management.
As a publisher, we are not here to offend, but rather we are committed to meeting people where they are on their spiritual journey.
As people enter their spiritual journey from a multitude of areas, we understand that not every title on our list will be a fit for every customer, and that is part of our effort to be both inclusive and comprehensive.
Offering a variety of perspectives and empowering many voices is part of our mission to wake up the world.
If we can be of additional assistance, please let us know.
And as a dedicated listener, we will offer you a discount to our new program, Enlightenment with Indrinochrome.
Right, so it's an incredible answer because, I mean, poor customer service rep who has to do this shitty job, but like, I mean, you know, the pat answer that comes out is that even J.P.
Sears' content could be a doorway or a gateway into the great unification of whatever awakening means.
Pretty amazing.
Tammy Simon, get on this stuff, please.
So there's a place in Austin called Indra's Awarehouse, which calls itself a ministry of sacred geometry and a church for people who share a reverence for life.
So naturally they're hosting a free 19 hour solstice ball with all manner of ritual meditation and dance.
So far, 81 people had said they were going on the Facebook event page.
But look, on a positive note, Or should I say a sane note?
The event posting got a lot of pushback, with more than half of the 300 clickable responses being an angry face.
- COVID positive note, yeah.
Or should I say actually a sane note.
The event posting got a lot of pushback with more than half of the 300 clickable responses being an angry face and plenty, plenty of critical comments to be fair.
But a lot of the comments then were replied to mostly by people who worked for or who own Indra's A Warehouse with classic predictable denial, spiritual gaslighting.
On an upshot though, I'm grateful to be able to report that as of about two hours ago, I noticed that the event has been cancelled.
But the initial response to the pushback that was posted about four days ago was just classic.
I want to read you some of the quotes.
Those of us on the front lines of human connection have witnessed The deep healing that sharing our space has given to individuals seeking it out at this time of distancing, suspicion, blame, and fear.
I mean the passive aggression is just dripping off of that thing like whiskey sauce.
It's awesome.
If you are someone who has a low risk tolerance and or a high amount of fear in relation to connecting with other humans right now, we understand and encourage you to stay home.
Lastly, masks are encouraged and optional.
Social distancing is encouraged for those desiring a greater degree of safety.
Wow, so what are they actually saying?
What are they actually saying?
That yes there's aerosolization, yes there's community transmission, yes this is a bad idea, but that we are on the front lines of human connection and we can provide deep healing anyway?
Well, part of the messaging as well is we encourage you to take responsibility for your own health and make your own choices.
So, we're not anti-mask.
Wear a mask if you're a scared little pussy.
But it's not required because we want human connection as part of healing and courage, right?
Right, right.
I love that those of us on the front lines of human connection because the megalomania is amazing.
It's fantastic.
Like, we are so incredibly important.
We're doing the real work here.
Yeah, and what a slap in the face to real frontline medical workers right now.
You may have noticed posts on social media this week that depicted people with Bell's palsy, a virus which causes a temporary unilateral face paralysis, along with news that four people in a COVID vaccine trial had experienced this.
Now, news media tended to treat this with a sensationalist tone, and of course, anti-vaxxers were all over it.
It sounds pretty scary.
The people shown in the photo, though, were not the actual participants in the trial.
And if we look a little more closely at the data, we find that four people, yes, out of a 22,000 person study, is actually consistent with the 0.02% of what is called the background rate of Bell's palsy in the general population.
What that's really saying is if you took 22,000 people randomly and just observed them over a period of whatever the time is, weeks or months, 0.02% of them would have Bell's palsy because that's the frequency with which it arises.
Because of how science works, when done properly, all of these sorts of variables are taken into account and then checked for a causal relationship.
So far, there isn't one with the COVID vaccine.
This is a great example though of how scary or suspicious something can seem when taken out of context and not accounting for the large numbers we're dealing with and the statistical probability of a variety of correlated illnesses or conditions having no causal relationship to the vaccine emerging as they could have anyway by just being alive and being human and happily going about your business picking cherries.
Likewise, there have been a normal and to be expected smattering of serious allergic reactions from people who previously had not known they were allergic to any of the ingredients, which is usually how that happens.
And these can sound alarm bells, especially when reported with sensationalism, but they're totally normal.
Lastly, two people in Israel even died who were in a COVID study.
But we can do a little bit of flawed cherry picking here too to exemplify how this works.
To say that in this study, two who received the vaccine died.
And they died of causes unrelated to the vaccine.
But four in the control group who received the placebo also died.
Therefore, the placebo is clearly twice as deadly as the vaccine.
Oh man.
I know that it's our nature to identify outliers, and that's an evolutionary trait.
There were four people who unfortunately had this reaction, but we never talk about the 21,996 people who just went on living their life.
It's a constant frustration when we're talking about vaccine science, and we brought up the two people dying, one three days after and one 62 days, I believe, after last week, and we're not talking about the 40,000 other people who are now immune I did not have these reactions.
Now we know about the two people who died reported by the Jerusalem Post because the FDA requires that Pfizer does the reporting and so it's not this scandalous thing.
Exactly.
They have to tabulate all of the results or do all of the tracking.
All of the deepest secrets that reveal the truth of conspiracies are freely available on the internet.
Yeah, it's a huge cover up.
And to add to what you just said, Derek, none of those cases have been causally linked to the vaccine.
And in fact, there are explanations for why they had those reactions or why those two people died that have nothing to do with the vaccine and would have happened anyway.
When you're dealing with really big numbers, someone in the study is going to die.
Then you have to go, oh, shit, let's check and see if that was caused by the vaccine.
Of course.
But it turns out not to have been the case.
Finally on the ticker this week, why this mainstream yoga site is now a hub for QAnon influencers.
So we've got some good coverage from the Daily Dot on Gaia TV.
And the article's really well done.
We'll post it in the show notes.
And it details that the online fitness world is now on track to grow from 6 billion to 59 billion over the next 7 years, just to contextualize the landscape that Gaia is working in.
And then the reporter found that Gaia has seen 100,000 new subscribers in 2020, obviously many of them pandemic-related or You know, the people are housebound and looking for more content.
Now they total 700,000 subscribers in 185 countries.
A couple of quotes from the article.
On May 3rd, both Facebook and YouTube announced that they had deleted David Icke's pages off of their platforms after the well-known conspiracy theorist repeatedly spread COVID-19 misinformation to his hundreds of thousands of followers.
About one month later, Ike debuted a series of new videos on Gaia.
And if you didn't notice, I've seen posted that he will be at the Kundalini event hosted by Guru Jagat at the Lama Institute.
He is one of the featured people at the Winter Solstice event this weekend.
Alright, and then the article also says that in one heavily recommended series, Buzzsaw with Sean Stone, the son of the famous movie director Oliver Stone, but unrelated to Sasha Stone, friend of the pod, however also implicated in QAnon content production, that's another story, but Sean Stone interviews fringe theorists like Kerry Cassidy, who is regularly called coronavirus a hoax on Twitter,
During Stone's 2017 interview with Cassidy, they discussed Trump's election and which main alien factions were behind the New World Order.
I've been thinking about that for decades.
Right, now we should also note that Gaia is also the host of the Q Predictive Thrive documentary.
That was in 2012.
In 2020's queue adjacent Thrive 2, both produced by Foster Gamble.
Now the 2012 film was repudiated by nine of its star interview subjects.
Can you imagine making a film with a whole I don't know how many there were, but there must be a substantial portion come out and say, this film is bullshit!
I didn't want to be in this film!
You should take me out of this film!
Anyway, they objected to this promotion of conspiracy theories through this documentary.
One of the guys was John Robbins, who I don't know anything about, but he wrote a full debunkery letter we'll post to The Notes.
I guess Gaia TV got some sort of assurance that Foster Gamble had learned how not to abuse his sources when agreeing to host Thrive 2.
Yeah, it reminds me of What the Bleep after What the Bleep came out.
I think his name is David Albert, but they interviewed this physicist and he said he had sat for a three-hour interview.
And the deeper they got into it, the more he was like, no, no, this doesn't mean any of the things you're saying.
And he was really arguing with them.
And then they included all the stuff where he seems to be agreeing with them, cutting it back and forth between their nutty claims and his expertise, right?
The jab.
Our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
One person we get a lot of queries about with regard to vaccines is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Next week, we'll be looking in some depth at his recent Instagram Live conversation with Zack Bush, which now has over 130,000 views.
RFK Jr.
is a prominent anti-vax activist, but that's not all.
In August, it was widely publicized that RFK appeared at a rally in Berlin to protest the minimal COVID-19 restrictions of the German government.
Hundreds who were part of that event were arrested for trying to storm the parliament building.
The day before that event, Kennedy appeared at the Brandenburg Gate, and consistent with his statements to True Pundit podcast that Anthony Fauci seeks to poison an entire generation of Americans with a COVID vaccine,
He proceeded to tell onlookers that he was expecting over 1 million people from every nation in Europe to protest Bill Gates' biosecurity agenda and the pharma-sponsored coup d'etat against liberal democracy.
Unsurprising, perhaps, in hindsight, that Kennedy arrived the next day to find that the crowd featured prominently displayed QAnon and far-right-wing symbols, and that he shared the stage with Nikolai Nerling, a well-known Holocaust denier, nor that his host, Kierdenkin 7-1-1 leader Michael Bollweg, appeared to dog-whistle support for Germany's equivalent of the sovereign citizen movement called Reichsbürger.
Back home, a November study from the journal Vaccine, the first study of its kind actually, showed that the majority of Facebook ads spreading misinformation about vaccines were funded by just two anti-vaccine groups, one of which
It turns out that 54% of anti-vax ads were accounted for between his World Mercury Project and another group called Stop Mandatory Vaccination.
Though the cultivated impression appears to be one of grassroots, parent-led, neighborhood movement, the truth about these kinds of ads on social media is that they are driven by a small number of groups who spend large sums of money.
This kind of advertising has a significant impact.
It's been linked to the nearly year-long measles outbreak that ended just this past October in America with 1261 cases.
That's the highest number we've had in nearly 30 years.
Though rare in the U.S.
and actually declared eliminated here in 2000 before unvaccinated communities saw a resurgence in 2015, The disease killed 110,000 people worldwide in 2017 alone and there is new research showing that measles can cause long-term damage to the immune system.
One of the biggest problems with this type of misinformation as in the Facebook ad campaigns is that it downplays the dangers of vaccine preventable diseases.
On a side note, the other group I mentioned, called Stop Mandatory Vaccination, is headed by one Larry Cook, who solicits donations that he has openly stated go directly into his personal bank account and are used to cover his living expenses.
Those would be donations solicited using pictures of kids and babies who he claims have been horribly injured by vaccines.
The combined efforts of discredited former Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who's really patient zero in the current anti-vax contagion, along with Cook and RFK Jr., have resulted in measles outbreaks in the Somali refugee population in Minnesota and Orthodox Jewish communities in New York, both of which were targeted by misinformation about a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
In an ABC News interview, Harriet Washington, former science journalist and author of Medical Apartheid, recounted RFK Jr.' 's attempts to, as she says, enlist her with unfounded claims of African-American boys being used for secret vaccine experiments, evoking, of course, the painful specter of the infamous Tuskegee experiment from the 1930s.
Upon being asked for proof, Washington says that Kennedy became very angry and started shouting at her.
This seems to be part of a disturbing new trend of evoking civil rights to push an anti-vaccine agenda on the black community.
Intellectuals like Washington see this as an exploitation of a very real history of medical discrimination.
In July of this year, RFK lent his support to Eric Underwood, an African-American former candidate for governor in Colorado, and also made inroads into Black Lives Matter and NAACP leadership there by falsely claiming that vaccines disproportionately injure black kids.
While I remain personally open to the possibility that RFK Jr.
is sincere in his quest, the irony of his family name now being linked to misinforming and putting minority groups at greater medical risk through his misguided yet well-funded activism is tragic.
Next up is part one of my interview conversation with Charles Eisenstein.
He's an American writer and philosopher best known for books like Climate, A New Story, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, The Ascent of Humanity, and Sacred Economics.
And just to say off the top, I'm about as surprised as anyone else that this came off at all.
As you'll hear, we have Dr. Lissa Rankin to thank for this because she backchanneled some faith and trust that it could work out well.
So yeah, I'm surprised because it's rare to openly criticize a person's work and then have them agree to sit down with you.
And I'm also personally surprised because I've done so much oppositional work in my investigation of cults and institutional abuse and new age fraud that I just never expect people to respond to that request for comment.
So it's kind of a new role for me to stick to my principles but also welcome a person whose work I oppose.
So, we got going, as you'll hear, and we didn't actually stop for almost two hours.
And it doesn't make sense to edit that down, really, so we're going to run half of the conversation now, and then half of it just before the New Year.
And after we run it, the three of us will reflect on and discuss what we heard, and where we think difficult conversations like this can lead.
So, the second half of my interview with Charles will drop, I think, on New Year's Eve, and that's the part where we get into the potential his non-dual and forgiveness-oriented philosophy runs the risk of suggesting false equivalencies between right and left, skeptics and believers, and the cynical and the hopeful.
Well, welcome Charles.
Thanks so much for taking the time to do this.
Yeah, thank you for having me on.
It's kind of unusual.
Yeah, it's unusual.
And I wanted to note before we began that this isn't the first time we've spoken.
We've been connected because your friend over, I think, a number of years, who I haven't met in person, but it's Dr. Lisa Rankin, she was a guest on our podcast and she proposed several months back that You and I might be closer in point of view than I thought.
And so she reached out, I think, because the three of us all share the space of New Age and spirituality criticism, and she knew that I'd been critical of your public work during the pandemic, but she also had some sort of faith that We could have a good conversation.
So we've been in touch through email.
Then I heard you were writing about QAnon, and we Zoomed about that because it's such a vast subject.
And it's been really nice to communicate with you so far.
Yeah, I think it's been fruitful so far and also just gives me hope in a situation like in our general political situation where the reflex is to categorize somebody into an irredeemable category, to actually even be in conversation I think, because I do think we have substantive disagreements.
Yeah.
But it's also true that we agree on more than might have been apparent at the first interaction.
I think so.
Yeah, I think so.
You know, and I thought just as a sign of good faith and to the extent that we do hold opposing views on how to approach, you know, not only the topics, but intellectual activity in general during the pandemic, Which is an extremely privileged activity, I wanna note, and therefore I think it's really important to get right.
I thought that starting with an exercise where I took a shot at giving like a three-sentence summary of three different articles that you've written since the pandemic struck would give a sense that, like, I do take your arguments seriously and I try to hear the strongest parts of them.
And you know, when I do this, it'll set aside a lot of your previous writings, your books, but this is kind of where we are right now.
So I think it's on point.
And so is it okay if I go ahead?
Yeah, that's a good idea.
Okay, all right.
Yeah, have at it.
Okay, so I've chosen The Coronation and The Conspiracy Myth and then from QAnon's Dark Mirror, Hope.
Okay, so you can let me know if I'm getting things in the ballpark and then we can get into the weeds.
All right, so the coronation.
Here's my synopsis.
The pandemic offers a potentially globally unifying opportunity for the re-evaluation of all human and non-human relationships.
It can shine a light on the various ways in which we respond to crisis, especially the tendency to drift towards authoritarian answers.
And if we look carefully at how biomedicine approaches the disease, we'll gain insight into how human consciousness approaches problems in war-like fashion to our detriment.
That definitely captures at least some of the important themes of that.
Okay, cool.
I mean, that was a super long essay.
So, well, one of the, yeah.
And I mean, one of the, one of the sort of, one of the criticisms that I had was, was, you know, about length and complexity and the whole project of philosophizing, especially so early on in a global event when so little was known.
But I mean, we can get to that.
But I also, like, I really appreciated doing this exercise because like, I do think your, your articles they, they, There should be abstracts maybe, you know what I mean?
I don't know if you wanna do that, but I find it, maybe it's my brain on social media, but it's been helpful for me to try to boil things down.
Okay, so conspiracy myth.
Conspiracy theories may lack the substance of real conspiracies, but they hold the power of myth and cannot be dismissed.
They show us the failure of institutional knowledge and the potency of unresolved trauma and the mutual creativity of belief and reality.
Yeah, in that essay I'm making a distinction between literal truth and mythic truth and saying that when we discard something as just a myth, We're missing out on what it's trying to tell us.
Right.
So conspiracy myths or conspiracy theories, for one thing, to call it a myth doesn't mean that it's also not literally true or that it doesn't have threads of truth that are woven into the narrative.
Right.
Whereas another narrative could take those threads and maybe discard them or maybe use them, but we have a completely different Narrative from them, right?
So so so that's the one point one point that's important even at the outset because the modern mind associates myth with fantasy But myth is a lot You know deeper than fantasy so then I in the essay I'm like, okay well what what are the truths that ride upon this myth and one of them would be that Society is
Under the control of an inhuman power that is inimical to human well-being.
Right.
Now, that power, you could identify it as a diabolical cabal of Illuminati, or you could identify that inhuman power as capitalism, patriarchy, or The way I do, the story of separation.
But however you identify it, there's something true there.
Right.
Another truth.
I'm not sure if you want me to go through all of the truths that I think ride the myth, but.
Well, why don't I, I mean, let me pick out a couple of things so that I make sure that I'm understanding you.
I think you said that, you just said that, according to the modern mind, myth is, What did you say?
Dismissible?
It's kind of like fantasy, you know?
It's like there's little truth and then there's myth.
It seems that the prevalence of mythic discourse in various entertainments and You know, the cultural artifacts that, you know, so many people enjoy suggest to me that myth isn't really dismissed so much as it's continually worked with.
And so, I guess I'm pulling that out because I often hear in your writing a kind of description of the modern mind or the materialistic mind or I don't think you use the word Western mind.
So much, but there's a very sort of definite picture that you paint of a kind of disassociated or disembodied mind that's out there, but it's sort of collectivized.
And sometimes I don't really resonate with that because I meet all kinds of people who have Various sensitivities, even as they're very modern or they're committed to the process of science or whatever.
So, yeah, but you do have a very strong vision of modernity or what it means to be not pre-modern anyway.
Is that right?
Is that fair?
Yeah, I mean, we could, I mean, this could get into a very abstract conversation about, you know, like certainly myth is very, very fruitfully in psychology and cultural studies and stuff like that.
Right.
But there's still a, if you call, just in normal discourse, if you say, well, the idea that vaccines cause harm is a myth, what you are generally saying is that that is literally what you are generally saying is that that is literally untrue.
It's just a myth.
Right, okay.
I understand that intellectuals certainly work with myth in a more sophisticated way than that.
Right.
Yeah, and then if we have like, you know, everything from J.K.
Rowling to Game of Thrones sort of overtake the popular imagination, you know, we're not really talking about... I think there's a general sensitivity around what mythic structures do for many people.
And people interact with them with richness and with variability.
And what I'm saying in that essay is that these conspiracy theories, these are not just some random derangement.
These are myths.
Right.
Now you also, if I can pick out one other word that, because you use it a lot, and I just want to make sure that I understand it, you use the word narrative.
You know, your podcast is called The New and Ancient Story.
You speak about the narrative of modern medicine or the modern scientific revolution or something like that.
And so narrative is like a key sort of technique for you to focus in on and to try to discern how not only individuals but a culture is kind of I mean, one reason I use narrative is because it makes me sound smarter than if I just say story.
Right.
But also, I mean something quite specific with narrative.
It has a plot line that usually you could put into a sentence.
Right.
The narrative of immigrants are rife with criminal elements, and they're disobeying our laws to come to this country.
That would be a narrative.
And a narrative offers an interpretive lens to view multitudes of data points, and it also assigns roles for human beings.
So, if I call something a narrative, if I'm being precise with my language, those are the things that it includes.
Right.
So, the narrative, for example, of modern medicine conquering disease toward a future of better and better health.
Like, that's a narrative.
Well, let me ask about that one, because it may be that the...
The capitalism of contemporary medicine produces marketing materials in which, or really the conjunction of capitalism with fundraising in modern medicine produces marketing materials in which, you know, the quest to overcome cancer, for example, is presented as a battle or is, you know, we're going to triumph over such and such.
I just, it just feels like, to me, there's a little bit of strawmanning going on in, if we use a framework of modern medicine, the narrative of modern medicine is to overcome disease, because I don't really see public health officials or, you know, the oncologists who work with my family members talk in those terms.
There can be like this kind of zero-sum game of, well, we're going to keep treating because we know how to treat, and that gets into all kinds of strange problems.
But I very rarely hear, and especially during the pandemic, epidemiologists or virologists say, well, we're going to overcome You know, COVID-19 or viruses in general.
It's more like we would like to create a more workable situation.
And so, I guess, you know, in preparing for this interview, these are the kind of phrases that stuck out that I wanted to make sure that we sort of talked about because Like the narrative of medicine overcoming disease.
I'm just wondering if that's a rhetorical reduction or is that something that you like really stand by or?
That narrative, which I just used the word narrative.
Yeah.
That starts to edge into the territory of a myth in that it's not explicit in a lot of people's consciousness.
Okay.
It kind of underlies a lot of the Technologies and mindsets and goals and just the basic unquestioned assumptions of medicine.
Right.
That, like, we are making progress, for example.
That medical practices are much evolved over one generation ago and two generations and ten generations ago.
And it's pretty much taken for granted and there's certainly, again, truth in that myth.
But from its interpretive lens, one thing that a lens does is it can blind us to things that don't, or maybe a better metaphor is a polarizing lens that filters out all of the photons that aren't spinning in the direction of the polarization.
So what gets left out of that narrative or of that myth Then we could talk about lost traditions of herbalism or other medicines that certainly have their deficiencies.
Modern medicine is capable of miracles, of things that were just unthinkable a generation ago.
If we are hypnotized by those, then we're not gonna see its severe deficiencies that are pounding on the door right now.
Right.
Well, you go into this, now I didn't do a little summary of this essay, but I think the recent essay is called The Banquet of Whiteness, and it opens with reviewing what happened to the figure of Dr. Stella Emanuel in the public eye, right?
Okay, now what I really appreciated there was that, yes, here is somebody who is coming into the discourse of biomedicine with a West African It seems to have blended some indigenous elements with some Christian elements as well.
I'm not quite sure exactly what the entire provenance is, but I think you correctly point out that what immediately happens to this person is that she is marginalized for what she carries with her from her non-biomedical heritage, and she's seen as somebody who can't possibly be practicing biomedicine because she has this cultural memory.
And you point out, I think, sensitively the racism of that framework.
And so you give, and then there's a lot of the essay that is about how you're respecting where that indigenous medicine might come from and what it might hold to be true, and you talk about being in Taiwan and learning about Taoist medicine and stuff like that.
But your process there is to really respect the healing discourse from the culture that it emerges from, right?
And to say, you know, this stuff makes sense in the land where it was born and amongst communities for which it's functional and so on.
So, but I guess the question that it leaves me with is that, When you as a philosopher look at something like medicine or the scientific process, don't you have to apply the same kind of process and to sort of speak about it in its own terms?
Because, you know, the scientist who You know, has a narrative going into hypothesis testing and observation and results.
They're not doing science.
They have something preordained that the whole scientific process is designed to And so, it seems like when it comes to the culture of West African medicine, you want to say, well, it makes sense, it has an internal logic to it.
But then, I'm not seeing like a concomitant, I don't know, interest in, well, what's the internal logic of what it's like to be a scientist?
I wrote a book on climate change, and one of the chapters in it is about, well, what actually is science?
And I compared it to a religion, in that it has a method for attaining truth, it has a body of ritual that we could call technology, it has metaphysical principles, such as the isolability of variables
The idea that all things can be measured, quantified, the independence of the possibility of observer independence, things like that.
There's invisible entities called forces, you know, and electrons and things.
There's, I mean, every, pretty much all of the, even the regalia of the scientist has a certain religiosity to it.
This sounds like a very, this sounds like a very postmodern book, by the way.
Yeah, we could talk about that too.
There's one key difference between the way I look at things and conventional postmodernism.
Sorry to interrupt.
And then I say, but to then disparage science as, oh, it's just religion, actually is using science's own conception of religion to disparage it.
And if you take religion as a universal and valid way of being human, then we can ask, okay, what does this particular religion carry as its core essential truth?
And so, in science, I think that the essence of the religion is humility.
Because it says, we do not know, so we shall ask.
That's what an experiment does.
We have a hypothesis, but I'm going to humble myself before reality and see what the results of this experiment is.
And unfortunately, and this is probably true of every institutional religion, The expression, ultimately, of that religion ends up to be the opposite of its core essence.
So, science can become very, very arrogant just as Christianity, which is at its core about forgiveness, becomes extremely intolerant.
And accusatory, right.
Yeah.
And accusatory, right.
So, like, you could ask, okay, well, you know, why By the same token, as you're saying, Charles, respect West African religious and medical traditions.
Why not do the same for those of our civilization?
And my response to that would be, That even mythologies or civilization-defining narratives or the archetypes that they contain, these have a lifespan and ours aren't working very well anymore.
Our technology, our medicine, our basic modern approach to ordering and domesticating the world that was supposed to bring us onto paradise has more and more obviously failed us.
Okay, can I just stop?
I've heard you say things like this that was supposed to bring us onto paradise.
Who says that, though, Charles?
Like, who makes- Well, Descartes, for one.
Okay.
I mean, this was one of the founding statements of modernity.
When he said, you know, in the famous passage where he talks about becoming the lords and possessors of nature.
Sure, okay.
If you read the whole thing.
Right.
That paragraph is about the wonders of technology.
And we see throughout history, if you look at, you know, say the slogan of the 19, I can't remember the date, but 1935 World Fair.
Right.
You know, it's something like science discovers Industry applies, man conforms.
Right, right.
So there's a lot of aspirational language that would contaminate the scientific project.
Okay, I get that, I get that.
But when you say things like the Green Revolution was meant to, you know, or technology, let's just say, was meant to bring us to paradise, or that Or that, just going back to our early example, that our medical practices were supposed to defeat disease altogether.
I mean, I suppose you can trace back a kind of aspirational and idealistic route to Renaissance philosophers, but Or to Enlightenment literature, but in practice, isn't it really in the nuts and bolts of people's daily activities that people are just making incremental improvements on procedures and processes?
I mean, they might be aware of Descartes, but the Green Revolution is just about, we would rather not people starve.
You know, and so then, you know, it contributes to an overpopulation problem, and then that's the new, you know, and then we're gonna blow past carrying capacity, or we already have.
And so I just, I don't know, I don't know what you're accusing people of today in terms of their idealism.
Maybe marketers, yes, but I don't hear- It's not an accusation, really.
I'm just trying to illuminate Patterns of thought that are mostly unconscious.
Okay.
So it's not like there's somebody out there saying, you know, the onward march of modern medicine will cure all disease in the near future.
Although people were saying that in the fifties.
They were saying that and that's what, okay.
So this is, this is what I, I guess this is what I'm hearing is I'm hearing the echo of kind of like the, the general electric black and white, you know, leave it to beaver advertisement on the television in 1955 and that you're, you're, you're pushing back against that.
And so I get that.
I totally get that.
And then, you know, especially in pharmaceutical advertisements where, you know, the senior citizens are cavorting through the meadows because they have blood pressure medication, we have that same kind of thing.
But, I mean, the people who actually do the work, it seems that they are in a practice of humility most of the time.
Yeah, most scientists that I know are scrupulous, sincere, intelligent.
I mean, this is one of my criticisms of conspiracy theories, is that they posit a human nature that I just don't see very much.
Oh yeah, right.
But, and that's what's, that's what, that's, you know, what led me to write some of, I mean, I've been writing even many, many years ago, I wrote an essay on conspiracy theories.
So this has been a thread for a long time because I see that, that the fixation on conspiracy Identifying a bad guy, a culprit, is, as I said in the QAnon article, it's comforting, you know, because now, in theory, at least we know what to do.
Right.
But it's another one of these lenses that blinds us to systemic tendencies and deep ideologies that are normally invisible, such as the civilizational tilt toward control.
Such as the mindset of a technical fix, which, you know, solves the problems caused by technology with even more technology, and then solves the problems coming from that with even more and more and more.
Like, these are patterns that are operating that if we don't look at them, then we're going to end up fighting an endless war on the symptoms of those patterns.
That last sentence that you just said, that has a mythic resonance with some of the way in which you have spoken about the pandemic itself.
That COVID is obviously a problem, but it's indicative of systemic breakdown in biological or agricultural or zoological terms.
And that, you know, we have to get to the root of the problem and stop treating the symptoms.
But the thing is, is that... It's not to stop treating the symptoms.
I mean, sometimes, you know, the symptoms can kill you.
Like, there is definitely a role to treat the symptoms.
The problem is when you fixate on the symptoms and ignore the cause.
For example, the war on crime.
For example, the war on drugs.
For example, building a wall to keep out the immigrants.
Sure.
You were gonna talk to me about false equivalencies and stuff and neutrality.
I was, yeah.
So maybe I'll save that for that part.
Yeah, we can do that.
Let me just pick up a thread where you said that most of the scientists that you know are scrupulous, hardworking people who evince a kind of humility in their work.
Now, in your conspiracy myth essay, I'm wondering what scientists you're talking about and who you're referring to and whether you write about them because what I've noticed in the references that you make is that
You don't point to the work of anybody who's in public health, or to Atish Jha at Harvard, or wherever he is now, or to... I mean, I know that Fauci is kind of a boogeyman character in so many circles, but the people that you refer to are pretty much consistently within the alt-health or the medical libertarian side of things.
And so, is that who you're referring to when you're talking about hardworking scientists who...
I'm talking about people who I, you know, I'm thinking of a woman, you know, a molecular biologist, you know, at a university.
I just know her personally.
You know, she's helped me set up events on economics, you know, not having to do with science, you know, but we talk about her work and stuff.
I mean, she's, you know, just in the lab every day, you know, doing her research.
Right.
You know, just trying to get funding, you know.
I mean, it's just, these are normal people.
These are not... Right.
There's people like that I'm talking about.
I don't know, you know, Andrew Fauci.
I have no idea what kind of person he is.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, because what struck me about most of the public health officials that I have seen both here in Ontario, the Toronto Public Health, you know, at the federal level here as well, is they fit that framework of, oh, here are career You know, academics and scholars and researchers who, you know, are doing amazingly difficult work in a very confusing time.
And there's a sense from some of the literature that we study, well, there's a strong sense from the literature that we study on the podcast of them all being grouped together Within, I think, what you would call the scientific narrative of progress that is somehow missing the point or that isn't expressing that kind of humility.
But it sounds like you're saying you know people who are in those positions who are doing great work.
They're doing it, yeah.
And they also...
Many of them are frustrated by the institutions that they're in.
Right.
By the increasing dysfunction of academic publishing.
Right.
I mean, there's, you know, the institution of science is not sound, even though most of the people in it are good people.
Right.
I just was reading a book by A dissident, Susanne Humphreys, and she was talking about how she originally came to question vaccines.
Oh, is this Susanne Humphreys?
Did she co-write with Thomas Cowan?
No, I don't think so.
That's not, that's not the same person.
That would be Sally Fallon Morel.
Okay, sorry, yes, right.
Wrong S. No, right.
No, she was, Suzanne Humphreys was a nephrologist, you know, working in a hospital, and she starts noticing that patients are coming in who just were vaccinated with something or other who are having kidney failure.
And she's noticing a pattern.
So she goes to her colleague, to her, you know, the head of the department or whatever, or her colleagues, you know, and if it's anything else, they're like totally willing to listen to her, but they are completely unwilling to look into this.
So she starts doing research and she discovers more patterns, you know, and eventually she's... I haven't actually gotten to that part, but she's no longer in the profession.
And I think that institutions can have almost a will of their own, or a confirmation bias at an institutional level, even though everybody in the institution is doing their very best to be open-minded.
Right.
So, for example, you have funding bias.
Like, suppose you're an aspiring graduate student trying to build a career in a very competitive academic environment.
And you need to get your name on papers, you need to get funding.
So are you going to study something that challenges the very foundational paradigms of your funders?
And that will get you intense scrutiny and criticism.
Or are you going to play it safe?
Because there's lots of interesting stuff within the orthodox mainstream as well.
You're probably going to, generally, you're going to play it safe.
So there's like these, this is the, I think that a lot of conspiracy theory comes from a lack of understanding of systems theory and emergent behavior and the way that institutions take on a life of their own.
Right.
Okay, well, just to pull back a little bit and rewind to Suzanne Humphreys, so I haven't heard of her or her work and I don't know what the book is, But the first thing that comes to mind is if in an internet age in which more people than ever before have been engaged in online discussion of their medical conditions,
Was there, were the patients that she was seeing having kidney problems, were they telling other doctors or researchers about this?
And if so, my question would be, let's say that pharmaceutical companies are invested in the research let's say that pharmaceutical companies are invested in the research hospital, not going farther with testing for that.
Don't they want to find out what potential injuries vaccines are causing?
Because as a journalist, what you've just told me is that she said she brought up this controversial idea, she couldn't get funding for research, and so she's out of the profession.
I'm not sure if that's exactly the story, but it's something along those lines.
To get to the bottom of how that actually, because that sounds like almost like a, not a conspiracy theory, but a very sort of neat story about what would happen to a renegade doctor, to somebody who is going against the norm.
But I also know, as an investigative journalist, there are 10,000 data points that would have to be assessed to see whether or not What she's talking about is what actually happened.
From the outside, if she had just lost her marbles, just from reading that book, you don't know.
You don't know.
Have you actually talked to the doctors who wouldn't listen to her?
Was she acting deranged at the same time?
We don't know.
Ultimately, for me, it's come down to Like, for example, I'm not sure how much we want to talk about vaccines.
Well, you know, I have to confess that I don't have a lot of background in vaccines except for the sort of maybe what would be called the consensus kind of reality narrative, to use I have to confess that I don't have a lot of background in vaccines except for the
However, they are relatively rare and that the most pernicious correlation made between injury and disorder, namely, you know, childhood autism, you know, childhood autism, has been like, seems to have been refuted in, you know, numerous studies.
And the guy at the center of it, Andrew Wakefield, is, you know, again, is now an outsider and has kind of been isolated.
Isolated for various reasons.
So then not being a virologist or a scientist, but being a journalist and saying, okay, well, the way I've evaluated my sources means that in my life, my children are vaccinated.
The COVID vaccine is being shipped in Canada and I'll be in line to get it.
I don't find it plausible that the companies that are doing the research and producing the vaccine would be willing to be substandard in their processes.
And also, I'm in Canada and there's a general sense in countries with socialized medicine that you're actually being taken care of.
I always point out, amongst my other two colleagues on the podcast, that being the Canadian on staff means that I'm actually sitting in the privileged, but also, I think, For liberal democracies, the majority position of like, hey, you know, your government is not, and your medical system is not trying to bankrupt you, and you know, they haven't abdicated care, and there is such a thing as a commons.
So that's my general, that's not vaccine science, but that's my set of attitudes.
Right.
Yeah, I definitely think that one reason that conspiracy theorists, and again, I'm trying to, I don't know what term to use that, Doesn't have the negative connotations of conspiracy theory.
But anyway, one reason that it's so prevalent in the U.S.
is because the government has given us a lot of good reasons not to trust it.
Not to trust that it's looking after our well-being.
Very true.
Not to trust that it's telling us the truth.
Very true.
So, you know, what do you expect?
It's also, yes, what do you expect?
And it's also like a very cruel stroke of historical luck that American cultural imperialism is a thing, which means that this particular kind of anti-authoritarianism or really institutional distrust or feeling of betrayal is something that is exported throughout the entire world.
And, you know, QAnon is a great example of that, actually, is that it's an American product, commodity, perhaps the only export during the It's the pandemic era, actually.
It's one of our most successful exports right now.
Exactly.
Right, right.
I just wanted to just comment on your, I think it would be interesting for someone with investigative journalism skills like you to actually look into vaccines, because I don't necessarily, I'm not without those skills, but I'm not, you know, I haven't developed those skills a whole lot.
That's not really my interest.
I'm more of a philosopher.
But from, You know, reading, I was just on an Instagram page where the poster said, hey, does anyone here have a story of vaccine damage that, you know, from vaccinating your children that happened within 72 hours of the vaccination?
And just like the outpouring of stories and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments Often saying, and the doctor said it was coincidence, and the doctor said it was coincidence, and the doctor said, oh, you must have been reading the internet.
Like, you know, if it were like one or two of those, but there's so many of them.
Right.
And there are websites with, you know, tens of thousands of them, and only a tiny fraction of them end up actually getting awarded compensation in the vaccine court.
And then, like, when you go down the rabbit hole of Andrew Wakefield and all that stuff, then, you know, there is another side to it and you end up choosing, well, do I trust authority or not?
Do I trust what medical authority is telling me or don't I?
And how does someone make that decision?
Of who to trust.
I don't think that one party is superior in their open-minded, dispassionate review of evidence and application of logic.
I think that this is one reason why I'm writing, why I bring spirituality into political conversations, because it's like, how do we see past our blind spots?
How do we extricate ourselves from the narrative warfare and information warfare, limbic hijack, you know, that's going on in the political and social media realm?
And where do our beliefs come from?
Right, well, to go back a little bit more granular to the sheaf of comments about vaccine injuries or reported vaccine injuries coming in on social media threads.
I mean, you said, now it raises the question of how do we trust authority?
And I think one principle that I learned just in textual studies and religious studies was, you know, absence of evidence doesn't mean evidence of absence.
And, you know, if there are vaccine injuries that have not been investigated, then obviously that's problematic.
But I don't see why they There wouldn't be the impetus to investigate them.
And I also, because if there isn't, then we're really constructing a world in which the pharmaceutical company really doesn't care about the damage that it causes.
But it's not so simple.
It's not that they don't care.
I mean, sometimes they don't care.
Like Vioxx, right?
You know about the Vioxx scandal?
A little bit, a little bit.
Where they purposely suppressed information that was telling them that tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people were dying.
But I think that that's the exception.
I think normally, I mean, I've met, I've had pharmaceutical company executives in my workshops back in the day when I had in-person workshops.
These were not evil people.
This conversation, Matthew, is a rarity.
Usually, I'm talking to people who are chill.
Farther out than I am.
Right.
Okay.
And I'm like, if your hypothesis is that it's the personal evil of people in pharmaceutical companies that's causing the problem, then I'm sorry, but I have a lot of my personal experience that contradicts that.
Right.
However, so it's not that black and white.
Suppose you're a pharmaceutical company executive and you are fully inculcated in the belief that vaccines have been a wonder of modern medicine that ended the great plagues of the 19th century.
You fully believe that and here's like maybe a little bit of disturbing stuff.
And you've got to make a decision.
Where am I going to put the company's priorities?
Where am I going to put our funding?
Where am I going to put our research?
And Pfizer, they're developing this new vaccine and we're competing with them and here's some hysterical mom.
Everything in my story is telling me that this couldn't be true.
It's rare that somebody is going to not only go against their received knowledge, but also go against their Their financial interests and their culture, the company culture surrounding them, like that takes courage.
Right.
And you do have some whistleblowers who come out and do that.
But I think that my point is that if vaccine harm is indeed much more prevalent than conventionally recognized, we wouldn't necessarily know it.
And the reason we wouldn't know it isn't because of the turpitude of Pharmaceutical companies, executives, it's just the way that institutions work and the way that human beings are.
Okay, on that note, let me, I want to make a sort of a meta-observation about how you and I are, as non-scientists, are talking about this material.
You know, a few minutes ago you said it would be interesting for somebody with investigative journalism skills to look into vaccines.
Well, I think that that's Happened, but I don't know that literature.
I can't imagine that it hasn't happened in the, I know that there's a good book on Wakefield.
I know that there's some very broad studies on vaccine communications and how big meta studies are used and so on.
But, like, when you said that, you know, you might take an interest in this, the first thing that I'm aware of is I wouldn't know where to begin at all, and I wouldn't have any of the resources required to undertake something so complex.
And the example that comes to mind, and this came up in your essay, your QAnon essay, where you were talking about, you know, the state of modern journalism, of contemporary journalism.
You said that, it was kind of an offhand comment, you said that there's nobody, More, you know, on the money now than people who have gone rogue or independent like Glenn Greenwald or Matt Tebe.
There was a third name there.
Diane of Johnstone, I think.
That's right, that's right.
Now I'm not familiar with her very much.
Seymour Hersh also I mentioned, yeah.
Right, Seymour Hersh.
And the first thing that I thought was, okay, these are all sort of controversial figures who have managed to pivot to the independence of substack, let's say, and that's how they're monetizing their work.
And then I think about how one of the most impactful bits of reporting that I read over the last couple of years just because of its incredible depth and complexity was those three or four investigators for the New York Times who worked on the Trump family finances over like two years with freedom of information requests and everything is like nailed down to the door with footnotes
You know, in every sentence.
And, you know, I think Trump challenged the paper and threatened to sue, you know, of course, and nothing ever came of it because they were just on the money.
And then I think about how, in a very small way, I go through the same process as I investigate a cult.
And, you know, or I wrote an investigative piece about Kelly Brogan and Sayer G. And that's a fairly small project.
And I can You know, I'll have an angle, I will have a particular approach to it, but everything has to be nailed down, not by me, but by the platform that's going to publish it, because they're going to take responsibility as well, and that's going to involve fact-checking and
And I just want to say that in our lives, you and I as writers, when we're not in that zone of fact checking, we're kind of giving
We're kind of giving opinions within a new sort of expertise that is generated by social media exposure and, I don't know, the capacity to just, through a certain type of attractive writing, to gain a large following.
Do you know what I mean?
And so when you ask me, like, maybe you should investigate vaccines, I'm like, well, maybe we both should, or better than that, maybe we should figure out, like, Who that work has really been done by because what I hear in the discourse generally is not a lot of epistemological clarity about where things come from and what reasonable sources are and how things are fact-checked.
And so, yeah, that's not really a question.
Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm being a little naive and not appreciating like the team.
Oh, it's incredible.
The investigative team that would be needed to take on a topic like that, which then leads me to think, you know, the kind of money, like, so to investigate the Trump family, there's certainly a lot of powerful and wealthy institutions that there's certainly a lot of powerful and wealthy institutions that are very happy to fund the kind of, to have the resources necessary to do that kind of investigative journalism.
Okay.
Where is the news organization and where's the funding to do that for vaccines?
That might be a lot harder to persuade or for anything that is radically dissenting from conventional narratives.
But aren't there, isn't there a slew of anti-vax literature that's sort of, that's at least attempting to, or perhaps pretending to do just that?
Most of the, it's like, you know, some person who had an awakening, either, there's two categories, usually either it's a doctor who noticed, you know, damage happening in their patients, or it's a mom.
Uh, and then they spend the next 30 years doing the research, uh, and they, they, you know, are, there's a community of these people, but none of them are, uh, have that kind of institutional resource.
Right.
That you're talking about.
Right.
And it's another situation of...
We can't know.
And this goes not only for vaccines, but for anything that is radically counter-cultural.
You know, there's just not the resource, because almost by definition, the resource is in the existing institutions.
So, we have a very powerful system of paradigm protection in place right now.
That doesn't mean that all the paradigms protected are wrong.
Probably most of them are right, but we won't know until their failure is so evident that from direct experience we start to question the unquestionable.
The challenge of the writer is that you'll always hear their words in your voice, and the voices that you create, not the author.
And listening to Charles is different than reading Charles.
Matthew's interview is such a great example of how two people with different beliefs can come together to discuss topics in a civil manner, and something we know we all sorely need more of.
And like both Matthew and Charles said in the beginning of that interview, they agree on more than they disagree.
And that's how I felt listening to Charles for this hour and then for the entire interview.
He's incredibly thoughtful and he thinks very deeply on topics.
So I just want to touch on two of the points that jumped out to me and then we'll open this up into a broader discussion.
And one is very basic.
He talks about myths and mythologies and as someone whose background is in religious studies, I just think it's personally helpful to go with the common idea that a myth is something false and a mythology represents the narrative storytelling.
Of course, this isn't in common usage, that's my own feelings on it, but that helps to differentiate between the two, and I found that as a useful guide as I talk about those two.
But what I really want to focus on is when Charles talks about his comparison of science and religion, and he had mentioned that they intersect at being a method for attaining truth, a body of ritual, which in science he calls technology, having metaphysical principles.
I really loved when he said the regalia of scientists, that's absolutely true.
But I agree to what he said to a degree, but I do feel there are some things he overlooks, and that's what I want to hone in on for a moment.
I currently work in technology for a software company and I've previously worked for a blockchain company, so I've been in tech for a while.
And while there might be metaphysical reasons for, say, a founder's intention, there's nothing metaphysical about code.
Now currently I spend half of my day working with engineers who are solving problems with our application as we roll out new features and we try to keep up with current operating systems.
And it's not that there's not a beauty to code, there absolutely is.
But it's not speculative in the way that religious metaphysics are.
Eisenstein conflates science as a term with the varied sciences.
So, it's true when he implies that observer independence is impossible, for example.
Yet, that has been addressed with the concept of the double blind trial.
The entire premise of the gold standard addresses observer independence.
That's why it was dreamed up and put into action.
So, we should be able to understand that we have progressed scientifically and also be able to talk about the replication problem with the double-blind trial and work on ways to address it.
So, in this regard, the problem is really a lack of government oversight that allows pharmaceutical companies to throw out the trial data that they don't like, but it's not really an existential problem in science.
So, he talks about the solubility of variables from chemistry, and he talks about forces and electrons from physics, but these are wildly different than biology.
And this is where he was heading with his discussion of vaccination.
Capital-S science is not a thing in the same way that capital-R religion isn't a thing, and the way that the mainstream media is not a thing.
There's nuance in all of our belief systems and institutions.
But I often hear this argument from the vaccine-hesitant and anti-vaxxers.
They love to invoke physics because it's a speculative nature of certain principles like string theory.
Yes, theoretical physics.
Yes, yes, and that's what they usually go to.
We have to be able to differentiate between theoretical frameworks about quarks and biological principles like the efficacy of vaccination.
So, again, I totally agree with Charles.
Vioxx was a terrible situation, as was OxyContin, and I've often discussed the chronic problems with antidepressants that remain under-discussed in our society.
And again, Charles is right when he says our government and corporate interests have given us plenty of reason to be skeptical of their intentions.
I'm fully on board with that.
But we can't always focus on that.
Seriously, I'm so glad you pinned him down, Matthew, when he was discussing Descartes and the World's Fair as the basis of the romanticized language of science.
Grandiose claims are usually made by charlatans and marketers, not scientists and researchers.
So, when he said that our mythologies aren't working well anymore, that broad statement is probably what I disagreed most in that entire 53-minute conversation we just heard.
Now, one last thing.
I don't want to belabor the point of, say, population growth and average life age and the fact that not nearly as many babies die as 150 years ago.
We've made a lot of progress.
And I also don't want to do an entire takedown of Suzanne Humphreys, who is a former kidney doctor who studied homeopathy and has become a leading anti-vax activist.
And I've linked to two articles in the show notes about her history.
But in one of them, Humphreys has in the past in one of her books called Measles Deaths Negligible.
And so in 1980 when I was five years old, 2.6 million people died of the measles.
Now by 2014, 73,000 people had died globally.
They only started rising in terms of deaths to measles in 2019 specifically because of anti-vaccination efforts.
So yes, measles deaths were negligible thanks to vaccination.
So, to claim that our technologies and science aren't working anymore is to confuse technology and science with corporate interests.
And while I'm with Charles that corporate interests are something we need to address, that doesn't mean the narratives we tell through science aren't working.
Yeah, there's a lot of blurring of the lines, and to your point, I would say that theoretical physics does not translate well into philosophy, as far as I'm concerned, and every time people try to do that, you end up with what gets called, usually, quantum woo, which is where you use really, really magical-sounding quantum physics ideas and try to assert that they tell us something about The nature of reality, psychology, whether or not we can have paranormal powers and so on.
I want to just say that, I wanted to quote the inimitable Tim Minchin.
I don't know if you guys know Tim Minchin, but he's a singer and a performer, very talented, freaky dude.
He has a great song in which he says, science adjusts its views based on what is observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.
And the thing with this tendency, this is a classic postmodern move actually that Charles makes, to compare science to just being another narrative, just being another religion, just being another fundamentalist claim of objective truth, is that it overlooks the central question of what do we base our claims of truth on?
And the reason why science is such a huge breakthrough in terms of human knowledge is it's constructed a method for getting as close as we possibly have been able to so far to correcting for biases, to changing our views in an ever-evolving process, to finding out if our work is good by having peer review.
Now, of course, institutionally, some of these things are corrupted by other interests and by other kinds of agendas.
But that doesn't make science a failed enterprise.
And it doesn't make science just another mythology and another relative perspective on the world.
Science seeks to find out what is true regardless of your opinion, your culture, your bias, your preferences, your feelings.
I wanted to just go to the mythology piece.
And what I'm hearing is that Charles really wants to have a meta inquiry about the deeper meaning of conspiracy theories as if they are a form of mythology, as if they emerge from the collective unconscious in a sort of Jungian sense, as if they emerge from the collective unconscious in a sort of Jungian sense.
And what I hear in that is him saying, and you guys can correct me if you think I'm getting this wrong, that conspiracy theories ought not to just be taken literally.
But they should be seen in a kind of Joseph Campbell-esque way as having psychological and cultural import, right?
I appreciate the intent, but for me, this elevates conspiracy theories to having a higher or deeper symbolic significance, a kind of wisdom or religious importance.
And it sort of falls into the no true Scotsman fallacy where obviously we shouldn't believe literally all of these crazy claims about adrenochrome, etc.
But, you know, what is the deeper meaning of this myth if we look at it allegorically?
I think it's overly, it's giving too much dignity to ideas that are actually believed literally by conspiritualists.
You know, it's interesting that you suggest that the tendency here is to elevate conspiracy theory to a kind of religious significance.
And to me, this brings back something that I wanted to pick up in Derek's comments about how there's a pivot in some of Eisenstein's reasoning, but it's also characteristic of the genre of literature that takes us from indeterminate or inconclusive discussions in science towards a religious realm.
It's almost like for the layperson or for the person who's really interested in the humanities or the person who's always been interested in spiritual things, when they encounter scientific concepts that are very difficult to understand and they encounter a kind of elitist framework for working with those concepts and educational barriers and all that kind of thing,
If they can't see their way through to the end of the process, something like quantum physics is really suggestive of a kind of, you know, ultimate indeterminacy whereby even the scientists are throwing up their hands and saying, well, we don't know.
And so then the primary discipline can then be philosophical or spiritual.
It's like it gets elevated that way and I see that same tendency in not studying the conspiracy theory on a sociological or a material level, how it evolves, you know, the technology that fuels it, but rather elevating it to a kind of religious significance.
It kind of, because now I'm realizing that in a lot of the kind of woke discourse around conspiracy theories that want to be sort of kind and receptive towards them, that what we often hear is this kind of a lack of analysis of things like technological and political manipulation, for example.
We're not actually talking about how the things are generated or pushed or We didn't really talk about algorithms in this interview or anything like that, so it's kind of interesting how spirituality becomes almost a default catch-all discourse that we wind up in if we can't really see the data clearly.
Yeah, so if we can either invalidate some aspect of the scientific process, or we can say, well quantum physics has completely changed that scientific worldview, then it creates a gap into which we can then insert whatever other way of arriving at truth that is our sort of preference, right?
Right, right.
One other difference that popped out at me too is I'm reading a very long book on the history of the Evangelical movement in America right now, and what has happened over and over, and this isn't the only religion, Christianity isn't the only religion it's happened to of course, But when there becomes some sort of doctrinal or social difference, there are factions that break off and become new religions.
I mean, there's something like tens of thousands of forms of Christianity that come from one book, which is kind of insane if you think about it.
That doesn't happen in science.
And instead, well it will, like Suzanne Humphrey is a good example who was a nephrologist and was like, I want to go look at homeopathy and then I'm going to go off this train.
I mean, that does happen, but the agreed body of science doesn't just break off and you don't see two Darwinisms kind of break off.
You do have some discussions about specifics.
Lamarckianism, yeah.
Yeah, but you have evolutionary biology as a pretty standard and something we can go to in science and then you see creationism be the response which comes from the evangelical movement.
Isn't there also a parallel with, you know, I wasn't familiar with Humphreys when Charles brought her up.
But I noted two things that seemed to be parallel within that part of the conversation which was on one hand Humphreys got into vaccines as a topic of interest because she had a lot of anecdotal evidence from her own practice as a nephrologist that
You know children were coming to her who seemed to be having adverse reactions or or you know they had sustained vaccine injuries and she wanted to look farther and so she took her she took this kind of anecdotal personal experience in the field into her sort of research rabbit hole
And then I think Charles paralleled that kind of intuitive turn by talking about how he was in a particular social media thread and somebody asked a question, you know, how many people do you know have been injured by vaccines?
And he talked about the flood of comments coming in and so it feels like there's moments for people even if they're in the sciences where the standard ways of collecting data
are just not um they they seem uh perhaps repressive or they're not they don't carry an emotional punch or they're not satisfying they're not they're not satisfying and and uh so so there's so so i'm realizing that there's this pattern of i'm hearing a lot of things right uh and and that a lot of people are saying
A lot of people are saying, and so I'm going to go out and study some more, and I'm sure that valid hypotheses, or testable hypotheses, are generated from that kind of intuition, but what I'm hearing from the anti-vax discourse really is that that is really the kind of gateway into really awakening.
It's the religious experience of intuitively understanding that all of vaccine science is bankrupt.
Yeah, let me just get this in really quickly, because I wanted to follow on from what Derek said.
I think that it's a really good distinction that you're making, right?
That within the history of, say, Christianity, you see all of these moments of bifurcation where something gets decided that it's a heresy by the mainstream, and then you have a new sect that gets formed that says, no, we're holding on to that.
We don't interpret it the way that you interpret it.
And so within science, does that happen?
Well, yes, it happens, but it splits off into pseudoscience and the consensus interpretation of what the data actually shows.
And that does happen repeatedly.
And you do have people who end up going away and saying, no, I'm going to keep believing what I want to believe.
And I just want to say something as clearly as I can, which is that I think that there is a tendency If you don't understand the science well enough to interpret someone having been discredited by mainstream scientific consensus as being not about their not following the data in a way that most people agree is reasonable, but about them being somehow persecuted.
And I think that tendency always comes down to not adequately understanding the science and buying into the emotional interpretation because it fits a narrative, to coin a term.
Oh, for sure.
One thing I loved was when Charles had a bit of humility when he said, I just prefer the term narrative because it makes me sound smart.
Before we keep going with this, I do want to just say personally, I'm so grateful that he came on to have this discussion because it's something, you know, it is rare and he's not in the same camp and he never has been on our podcast or in my thoughts about it of being someone wildly irresponsible with his platform.
So it's not about that, but we're drilling down on something specific that goes beyond this specific interview about just the relating to science.
And one thing that when Matthew was talking about the storytelling aspect here, vaccinations make a very just convenient and they give, like say you're a parent and then something happens to your child and you don't know and it might be a complex biologic reaction like say you're a parent and then something happens to your child and you don't know And then you find someone like Andrew Wakefield who just comes out and said, oh, it's this.
And then you're like, okay, that's a story.
Great, I can latch on to that.
We do it all the time.
In every capacity, I talked to my wife about this a lot, but this fall she's had a recurring cough.
And every time she would come across an article that talks about it, so oh, maybe it's this because we want an explanation I'd be like, it could be, but we don't know.
And she finally got to a doctor and it's cleared up now.
But it's this need for verification and that is a human tendency that the anti-vaccination movement has exploited.
And it also just messes up, again, the people who really have been harmed by vaccine injury.
It also takes away from their story and our understanding of what the problems are.
Because people just will latch onto something in order to fulfill that quirk that we have in the way that we think, that we need that verification.
We need cognitive closure.
And I wanted to say, Matthew, if you don't mind, because you brought it up.
To me, it was a classic moment, a telling moment.
And again, thank you, Charles, for appearing and for being willing to come into the lion's den with us, knowing that we've been so critical of you.
It actually takes a lot of courage and humility to do that.
So thanks so much.
But when he brings up the Instagram thread, there was a question posted.
How many of you have had kids who've had an adverse reaction within 72 hours of having received the vaccine?
And there were just all these people who commented.
First of all, that's anecdotal evidence, okay?
That's a whole lot of people having a story.
Are those stories important?
Should anecdotes be followed up on?
Of course, but we don't know for sure that any of those correlations had a causative component that would have to be tested.
And you know what?
We have a scientific method that does test that and those sorts of things are followed up upon and you know, it's part of how the system functions and I don't think that it's broken the way that he seems to be claiming.
So correlation is not causation, as in the other examples that we've talked about today already.
The plural, here's a great soundbite, the plural of anecdote is not evidence.
No matter how many anecdotes you stack up in a pile, none of it necessarily amounts to evidence until you go to the next step.
And then we're also talking about the problem of really large numbers, that the larger the number of people are that receive something like a vaccine, the more likely there are going to be all sorts of anomalous things that people think are associated with it.
And again, you have to, more evidence is required, more research is required.
It's just such, just to pull back a little bit to The symbology of the vaccine, it seems so, I mean I've said this before, but it's such an incredibly potent issue for this demographic because it involves both the sanctity and the vulnerability and also the pathology of the child.
And I just want to note that, you know, yes, while anti-vax activism bringing up or exaggerating claims of vaccine injury actually overrides or it occludes the real vaccine injuries that happen.
And there's a parallel there with, like, Save the Children actually obscuring the fact that sex trafficking is real.
Right, so there's that sort of covering over but I just want to note again for the folks who have autistic children in their lives that the pathologization of autism through this specter of the vaccine injury is just incredibly cruel and also it belies the
Individualism of alt-health ideology as well, because who would be, you know, more symbolic of freedom from perhaps social constraints or from, you know, typical ways of thinking about things than the person who's neurodivergent?
I mean, it's like, it's like, talk about, talk about independent, you know?
So anyway, It's related to your transgender comments from earlier.
Right.
And yeah, just to be really clear, there are vaccine injuries, they're incredibly rare, they do happen and it must be absolutely awful for the parents of those kids.
But if we shift the lens onto a different topic but with a similar process, if you take something, and there may of course be listeners who believe in homeopathy, I'm pretty clear that homeopathy is not really a thing.
It doesn't really work.
But if you posted a question on social media, especially within the communities that we move in, and you said, how many of you have taken a homeopathic remedy and experienced a complete healing of your symptoms within 72 hours?
You likewise will get hundreds and hundreds of comments of people saying that it worked.
And if you have the kind of mindset that most of us naturally have, you actually have to work hard to get out of this mindset, that you're going to read that and go, well, it must work.
Look, look at all the evidence.
Look at all these people who say they got better.
And I'm going to trust my own experience and see what happens for me.
Which is fine as far as it goes, but it's not a way of discovering truth in a scientific manner.
Do you know one thing that I haven't really thought of until you said exactly that is that while we focused a lot on the podcast on the fetishization of intuitive knowledge and of of personal awareness, like I had an awakening.
And so I understand what's going on in my body and I couldn't possibly be infected with COVID.
So fuck the mask, I'm not as sick.
There's also in this phenomenon of the kind of, the wave of anecdotal evidence that we can encounter on social media.
There's also a way in which intuition can be shared and become a very powerful community force.
And I've never really thought about it that way.
That's kind of, that's beautiful in a way that's also very disruptive and makes it even more difficult, I think, to kind of educate ourselves out of.
And we also, I think, need to differentiate between an injury and an allergic reaction.
Because that's getting conflated right now, too.
When I was in college, I had an allergic reaction to penicillin, and it sucked.
And I realized then that I'm allergic to penicillin, as my father is, because there's usually a genetic component to that.
And so, guess what?
I never took penicillin again.
And, you know, it moved on.
But this pointing out of Oh, this person had an allergic reaction as if that's something that makes that vaccine a non-starter is really irresponsible as well, and we're seeing that confusion right now.
Yeah, and the other numbers, as you said earlier, Derek, are so important, right?
110,000 people received the vaccine in this particular group, and a couple of them had an allergic reaction.
You need to report both aspects of that because it's really, really significant.
I wanted to add here too that I had a sense in the section of the interview where you talked about vaccines, Matthew, that it doesn't sound like Charles has maybe availed himself of too much of the literature on vaccines, except for what we would consider the more left field anti-vax stuff, like the person you were discussing earlier.
So I wanted to just mention, you pointed out Brian Deer's excellent piece of investigative journalism on Andrew Wakefield, which is called The Doctor Who Fooled The World.
That's a pretty clear title, right?
It's a good place to start.
Derek has an interview coming up next week that's excellent with John Berman.
Am I saying his name correctly?
Jonathan Berman, yeah.
Jonathan Berman, who wrote, what is it called, Anti-Vax?
Anti-Vax is how to challenge a misinformed movement.
Yeah, and part of what's tricky here is that with any claim of conspiracy or cover-up, the hugely underestimated numbers of adverse reactions when it comes to vaccines don't even rise to the level of requiring a lot of investigative journalism, right?
Because there's just not good evidence for any of that kind of thing.
It's kind of like 9-11.
You're not going to find a lot of books out there published that are really taking to task with investigative journalism the conspiracy claims of 9-11.
11 people.
What you will find is an amazing popular mechanics article.
That's many, many pages long that goes into all of the reasons why the architects and engineers for 9 11 truths are wrong using, using their scientific analysis.
Um, what you'll find with, uh, with the vaccine stuff is that there are people like Berman.
There's a website called science-based medicine that's run by Steven Novella that routinely takes all of the anti-vax stuff apart.
Uh, There's the McGill Office for Science and Society which I believe interviewed Derek recently.
And then there's another website called the Skeptical Raptor, which is again, just someone who's really into science, looking at these kinds of topics in depth.
But the paucity of investigative journalism about baseless conspiracy claims doesn't strengthen those conspiracy claims.
You know, I wanted to add, I'm going to speak a little bit more about this in my bit, but I wanted to add something about the discussion around investigative journalism and Charles' invitation to, well, you have experience in this field, it would be interesting if you looked into it.
And I think I said in the interview I wouldn't know where to start or I wouldn't be qualified to do that, I'm not science literate enough.
I was thinking about it more afterwards, and I was thinking about how if I was to be contracted as a freelancer to investigate something around the anti-vax movement, I would sign on to it if I was on a team with somebody who I would sign on to it if I was on a team with somebody who could be, you know, I would sign on with Jonathan Jari, who would be
I would sign on with somebody who had access to, you know, financial records or knew how to look at the taxes or the funding streams of various pharmaceutical industries or how many grants they got, or in countries like Canada, how much government funding they're able to or in countries like Canada, how much government funding they're able to avail And then I would have to
also be on a team with somebody who was able to do the data science on anti-vax activism on social media because I can't use all those crowdtangle tools I don't know what the hell they do like I don't understand how to how to suss all of that stuff up
and so if I was on a team my job would be to I could investigate and interview people about their belief systems and their their their their modes of influence and their networks and how they relate to the new age and to spiritual communities and how they relate to cultic organizations like MLMs and stuff like that And that would be a very, very small piece of the pie, right?
And so there'd be no way that I would attempt to do a project like that without an incredible amount of qualified help.
And I guess when I do my piece, that's the main thing that I'm going to focus on, which is, like, what is the plight of the solitary heroic writer in the Age of Influence?
I wanted to comment just to add some facts and figures, and Derek this is something you mentioned earlier, that of course medical science has its imperfections, it has its serious problems, but I'm not sure what kind of data Charles would be using here to point to it being a failed endeavor.
That our myths have failed us, medical science has failed us.
I can find plenty that points in the exact opposite direction.
For example, in 1900, 30% of all deaths in the United States occurred to children less than 5, compared to just 1.4% in 1999.
We've eradicated smallpox from the planet, a disease that, for hundreds if not thousands of years, killed as many as 25% of the population.
And I defy anyone to watch one, any one of the hundreds of YouTube videos you can find of young people born deaf hearing for the first time in their lives using cochlear implants.
It is to say that, and this list could go on and on and on, we could spend, you know, two hours reading this kind of stuff out, to say that medical science is a failed endeavor when these are the Features of that landscape is just, it's just incorrect to me.
One thing that I asked Jonathan Berman, who we'll hear next week, is do you feel that we've just become too comfortable?
That we've just become so ignorant of our history and our biological and scientific history that we can Just think about the fact that getting strawberries in the winter is a new phenomenon if you live in most of the United States.
And I know that seems like an aside, but that's what refrigeration and agriculture techniques provide for us.
So, when you can go to the supermarket and buy things that are not seasonal, you say, oh, when they're not there, you're like, oh, what's going on?
Why aren't they here right now?
And so, that's why education is so important when it comes to science, and especially around biology, to understand our actual relationship to the planet, which is obviously tenuous.
We live in an age of we know that there's a lot of problems that are going to happen, and we've lived a lifestyle of a level of comfort that has never been seen before.
And because of that, So much of what we talk about on this podcast all stem from the fact that we haven't had to live with natural disasters on a level that previous societies have had to endure throughout their entire lives.
And just to play devil's advocate or argue from Charles's perspective for a little bit, all of those incredible improvements, the green revolution, the strawberries in winter are also, you know, they're a knife in our heart in the sense that they indulge the more baser instincts of, you know, capitalist consumerism
Without any kind of regard for the offshoring or offloading of environmental effects.
And so, progress is something that he's constantly trying to deconstruct as a goal or as an ideal.
And, you know, he's in line with a lot of ecological thinkers that way, but I guess maybe where The three of us part ways with that particular discourse is when arguments are presented in overly rhetorical or black and white terms.
I just need to bring up an example because I completely agree with Charles and it's something that as a fitness instructor I've advocated for most of my career.
Padded heeled shoes are one of the worst things that have ever happened to humans.
The fact that we cannot use our feet, that they're as dexterous as our hands, but we just don't know that because we've been... Katie Bowman calls them foot coffins, shoes.
And it's a great example of... I mean, Charles is obviously looking at supply chains and capitalism, but just purely from biomechanics.
The fact that we do that to our feet, it leads to all sorts of problems, including neck pain, headaches, all these sorts of problems.
And so, to deconstruct and systematically look at all of the things we've done in the name of convenience and comfort, it really has affected us in negative ways.
And so much of our healthcare system is plagued by these problems of convenience.
So, I completely agree with Charles on that level.
And if what you mean, Matthew, by stated in an overly rhetorical way is this kind of exaggerated tendency to really generalize and blow it up into this, I'm going to critique science as an enterprise and medicine as an enterprise altogether because of these nuanced, really valid nuanced critiques that we can get into, then yes, that is where we park company.
And as part of that, I heard him talking about the scientific narrative and the narrative of medical science.
And you two talked about Stella Emanuel briefly.
I just wanted to say, I understand the desire to be culturally sensitive here, but I really think it misses the point.
Stella Emanuel, Dr. Stella, or maybe former doctor, I don't really know what her status is, was not critiqued in the media because of her race.
She was not critiqued in the media because of her culture, but because of the things she said that were absolutely outlandish.
And they were being critiqued because she was given that platform and she was found very impressive by Trump.
In the midst of a global pandemic, she claimed to have an easy cure that was being suppressed.
She also, as it turned out, had made public statements about demon semen, alien DNA, and being herself a prophet of God.
So reasonable people finding all of that very alarming and bizarre is not evidence of cultural bias or a narrative that is too closed-minded.
The fact that she even had that platform is indicative of the circus of the Trump era, and that's all.
What I wasn't comfortable with is that that circus exposed her in a very vulnerable way.
She was exploited!
Yeah, she was exploited.
The criticism of her was not invalid.
She was being exploited by the people who pushed her to the front of the stage.
Yeah, and there ends up being this strange shadow over it that associates her cultural heritage or wherever her ideas come from as being backward or useless.
There's something to it.
She's exploited and she's a woman of color and that's a thing.
But I also just want to say that all human cultures, all races of people, had pre-scientific superstitious ways of looking at the world at some point.
That's just the facts.
And being critical of that need not necessarily have any bigoted overtones.
There is research that has been done by musicologists about West African drumming and its healing powers, and it has validity, and there's something about the ritual aspect that has provoked shamanic healing in those cultures.
That shouldn't be confused with alien DNA.
That's part of the postmodern circus as well, is that you can't really tell where the data is coming from when she's speaking.
I don't know whether the alien DNA has West African roots as much as the demon sex stuff does.
Yeah, very confusing.
But I hated it.
I just hated that she was exposed like that.
I hated that, you know, probably against her own better judgment, she took the stage and ran with it.
Yeah, it was not a good scene.
I understand your impulse, Matthew, but she made a number of videos after that day doubling down, so I think she was also taking advantage of the platform.
I completely agree with you of being pushed and being exploited in that way, but she also ran with it, so it's not that easy.
Yeah, it brings up a question of who doesn't run with it when they become virally famous through intelligence or absurdity.
We have no one to talk about.
Right.
Yeah, so anyway, I mean, I think, first of all, I also want to echo both of you and to say that, you know, it was really great to interview Charles and that also, as I said in the introduction to the interview, the second part will play on New Year's Eve and we get into more material.
And there's so much more to say about the content, mainly because Charles produces so much of it, and he attempts to speak to so many things.
And he also really attempts to thread the entire world together into a coherent framework.
So, when he was talking about science as a narrative, I joked that he sounded pretty postmodern, and he said that there was a crucial difference between him and postmodernism, but I didn't follow up on that.
But one difference that's clear is that he truly believes in the metanarrative of salvation, that by hook or by crook, we must move away from what he calls separation and towards what I think he calls the reunion.
Aside from the content, the main thing I come away with is a sense of uneasiness between Charles' message and the method that he's both using, but that is also using him.
Now, on the message side, as I've noted before, he's committed to pluralistic and communitarian ideas, gift economies, networked relationships.
He's inspired by the collectivism of First Nations culture, or at least what he understands of it.
And as I reflected in our conversation, he's mainly appealing to compassion, empathy, and love as pathways to greater human connection and communion.
And I'm down with all of that, except when he strays into seeming as though he's speaking for all of humanity and using the royal we.
But from the method point of view, he's really the kind of standalone writer of the self-publishing age that I think we're all familiar with.
You know, through blogging and social media, it's very contemporary, but it also has this strange romantic root, because as we know, so much of that 19th century literature was self-published, usually by men with means and connections, and it wasn't a meritocracy back then.
And it isn't now either.
And I know that this zone that Charles is in, I know it pretty well because I've been in it too.
Because I've been self-publishing for 25 years now.
And I've also more recently been published and paid as not an artist, but now as an investigative journalist.
And I've built a readership that way, and part of that, part of it is that readers appreciate what I do, but then part of it is also that I have enormous privileges that give me the time and the space to develop content.
So this technology has served me.
But the thing is, is that when my work became, as I view it, adult, and it ventured out of Artistry, the novels that I wrote, or commentary, or opinion, and into the world of things and people and policy.
I just needed help.
I need colleagues like you guys.
I need editors.
I need fact-checkers.
I need lawyers.
I need people who are not my friends, whose professional fortunes and liabilities are on the line with my own.
So, pursuing worldly truth in writing is not an independent adventure.
It's collaborative.
So, yeah, I mean, I'll just reflect back on his suggestion that I do investigative work on vaccines.
I would need to work in a team.
I would only commit to a really small slice of that pie.
And so, this is the paradox I see, which is of a lone heroic writer And I'm glad that in the interview we touched on his admiration for the renegade or the revolutionary.
But he's a lone heroic writer, in my view, who wants to produce pro-social content, who really does want more people to get along more better.
But the writing seems to be self-reliant, without the shared effort necessarily that creates mutual risk and responsibility.
And additionally, what happens when a writerly identity is crafted around being a contrarian?
How would you know you weren't writing from a kind of habitual position?
And what I noticed is that in talking with Charles, some of the lines in his writing that stick out so jaggedly, like a sentence that we'll talk about in the next episode, where he makes a comparison between how QAnon and BLM are positioned in the political spectrum.
When we're talking about stuff like that, he's able to finesse, he's able to add nuance in a way that would have happened during writing if there were eight people standing in between his laptop and publication, and any one of them could have said, you don't really mean that, do you?
So, in a strange way, I think that Dr. Alyssa Rankin was right when she connected us, that we're probably closer in point of view than it would first appear, but I think when you're out on your own, which is the, I think it's the context of...
A little protection from your own blind spots would go a long way.
And so I think if you have an ideal that a kind of communitarian and collectivist and, you know,
