32: Both Sides Pt 2: Healing & Sense-making in the New Year (w/Charles Eisenstein)
A rough tally of our labor from the inception of this podcast in May puts us at over 1,100 hours of treading water in the content sea of JP Sears, Mikki Willis, Christiane Northrup, and the rest of the gang. Are we getting our bearings yet? Will we see land soon?This episode is centered on Part 2 of Matthew’s discussion with Charles Eisenstein — a bellwether for the possibility that wellness and spirituality culture can communicate clearly about conspirituality. In the discussion and analysis that follows the interview, we look at who gets to say what and from which platform, what it means to be brave versus what it means to be evidence-based, and whether South Park really did predict the Trump-Biden choice.In the Ticker, we’ll peek into the bizarro world of Guru Jagat, run down what anti-vaxxers believe about ingredients, ogle at Michael Flynn’s QAnon merch shop, and dive into Lori Ladd’s recent video where she rallies the troops after a revelatory nap. In The Jab, Julian unravels the facts around the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Finally, in a New Year’s Eve closer, Matthew wonders, from the quietude of a recent home hospice experience, about how we might be able to slow down.Show NotesGuru Jagat camp grace talkWeaving Dharma Art: Guru Jagat x MandevMandev’s Yogi Bhajan propaganda film put out to counter abuse testimonyHarper’s profile on Jagat (pre abuse scandal)Deslippe rocks the Kundalini backstoryAn Olive Branch’s independent investigation into KY and 3HO historical abuse (an initial effort)Harijiwan’s hagiography of Bhajan via Mandev’s video skillz (one example)Harijiwan, “toner bandit”@ramawrong’s excellent IG feedPhil Good Life discloses three mental health related hospitalizationsHere’s How the Anti-Vaxxers’ Strongest Argument Falls ApartWhy the Government Pays Billions to People Who Claim Injury by VaccinesVaccine Court: The Law an
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This is Conspirituality32.
Both sides, two.
Healing and sensemaking in the new year.
A rough tally of our labor from the inception of this podcast in May puts us at over 1,100 hours of treading water in the constant sea of JP Sears, Mickey Willis, Christiane Northrup, and the rest of the gang.
Are we getting our bearings yet?
Will we see land soon?
Today's episode is centered on part two of Matthew's discussion with Charles Eisenstein, a bellwether for the possibility that wellness and spirituality culture can communicate clearly about conspirituality.
In the discussion and analysis that follows the interview, We look at who gets to say what and from which platform, what it means to be brave versus what it means to be evidence based, and whether South Park really did predict the Trump-Biden choice.
We'll peek into the bizarro world of Guru Jagat, run down what anti-vaxxers believe about ingredients, ogle at Michael Flynn's QAnon merch shop, and dive into Lori Ladd's recent video where she rallies the troops after a revelatory nap.
In the jab, I unravel the facts around the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
Finally, in a New Year's Eve closer, Matthew wonders from the quietitude of a recent home hospice experience about how we might be able to slow down.
Happy New Year, dear listeners.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
First up in the ticker this week, it turns out that the Moderna vaccination does have side effects if you have cheek or lip fillers.
Doctors have noticed an inflammatory reaction in a small number of patients who have had fillers put into their faces.
Now, since your immune system attacks foreign agents in your body, it's probably wondering why anyone would inject hyaluronic acid into their faces.
Now, this acid is naturally occurring in our bodies and is used medically to replenish supplies during eye and knee surgeries.
Using it to purposely puff up your face is another story.
At the very least, this isn't occurring in the anti-vax crowd, as these are people actually getting vaccines, so let's just recognize that's a good thing.
But seriously, the amount of scrutiny that too many Americans apply to adjuvants in vaccines compared to the complete lack of scrutiny about getting a little work done is one of the most glaring examples of ignorance in this industry today.
Last week, NBC News reported that a source close to a meeting inside the Oval Office had said that retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn advocated that Trump declare martial law as a way to overturn the November election result.
Now Flynn, of course, is the disgraced former national security advisor as well, who pled guilty to lying about his communications with the Russian ambassador to the Mueller probe, turned state's evidence, was sent to jail anyway, and then pardoned by 45 just before Thanksgiving.
This martial law fantasy is not unique to Flynn.
He's also a prominent character in the QAnon conspiracy prophecy, But it's also been supported by QAnon influencers online with the hashtag cross the Rubicon.
This is an historical reference to Julius Caesar acting against the wishes of the Roman Senate during the Roman Civil War and instituting his dictatorship.
Arizona Republican Chair Kelly Ward also retweeted this tag, which was popularized by former 8coon boss Ron Watkins, wouldn't you know, who called on the Q faithful to use it to show POTUS how you feel about it.
Q conspiracists got all caught up in fake reports that China was moving tanks into Maine through Canada, and that the small earthquake in Maine in early December was actually the result of Trump's triumphant aerial assault against these Chinese troops.
Alternate reality.
The author of a forthcoming book about QAnon, named, as luck would have it, Mike Rothschild, told NBC News, these people have worked themselves into such a frenzied state of thinking Trump won in a landslide, and that the truth will be revealed any moment.
But when Joe Biden is sworn in, and none of the miracles they've been told are about to happen actually take place, it will be a life-shattering event.
You know, I constantly wonder if these characters, I'm thinking also of Josh Hawley who said he's going to contest the election results on the floor on January 6th, if they really understand or will ever take responsibility for their actions and what they're saying.
Because this constant push toward a dictatorship, which is a very real thing, they're promoting this, but do they even understand what that means?
And when it manifests, if they find themselves not in power, are they ever going to own up to what they've been promoting for these last few years?
I don't think so, no.
It feels like an absolute sort of alternate splintered off reality at this point.
And yeah, reality in which there's no accountability, there's no real sort of review.
And everything can kind of exist in this weird nebulous, always changing, but continually emotionally provocative state.
I just also wanted to point out that Mike Rothschild has done excellent, excellent work on QAnon for the last two years, I think.
You can follow him on Twitter at at RothschildMD.
He's awesome.
Well, that's because he's funded by George Soros, so of course he has the time to do the work.
He's also an heir to the entire legacy of central banking control, right?
Yeah, I think about 75% of his hate mail is related to this unfortunate overlap in names.
Well, taking the QAnon pledge wasn't enough for Mike Flynn, the disgraced former National Security Advisor as Julian just laid out, but now he's also monetizing the Q crowd by selling $35 trucker hats and overpriced t-shirts.
His son, Mike Jr., says the money helps his father and his army of digital soldiers in the fight against fake news.
If that sounds like bogus rhetoric to hide the fun pipeline, that's because it is.
But Flynn is also launching a news outlet called Digital Soldiers alongside Q devotee Tracy Beans because, of course he is, it's a citizen journalism website which we know is certain to be fair and balanced.
Now, as much as I shake my head in disbelief over initiatives like a QAnon merch store and a news website based in QAnon, and no matter how much I want to laugh it off, it's having real-world consequences.
And I'll link to this in the show notes, both of these stories.
But an NPR Ipsos poll asked nine questions with the range of responses being true, don't know, and false.
So let's take a look at a few of these numbers.
38% of respondents knew that the majority of protests this past summer were not violent, while only 32% understand that COVID-19 was not made in a lab.
Wow.
Now 53% either believe or don't know if QAnon is true, while 69% of respondents realize that humans are behind climate change.
That still leaves nearly a third uncertain or denying the fact.
And then finally, moving on, 59% of Americans recognize that Barack Obama was born in the US.
So, think about that.
4 out of 10 don't know or say no.
And only 51% of Americans, according to this poll, understand that vaccines do not cause autism.
But you know, as a little bit of a preview of what we'll talk about later, Derek, how do you know?
How do you know?
Have you looked at both sides?
Yes, we will be discussing that post-Eisenstein interview because that is, I mean right there, that question, again we'll laugh it off, but that is behind so much of the rhetoric and propaganda that we experience now.
This idea that no one knows at the same time people devote their lives, and we'll also get to this in the channeling, to knowing the things we're asking and yet they spend decades of their lives doing this and we're like, yeah, but they don't really know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I had a really funny moment that I'll just share quickly on social media where someone commented on a post of mine and, you know, the standard thing that it's really arrogant to claim you can know because the real truth is that nobody knows.
And I delighted in my response, which was that if the real truth is that nobody knows, how do you know?
It's like, is that the real truth?
So you have the real truth, which is that nobody knows the real truth.
And that's always the infinite regression on these kinds of positions.
We're about to play you the beginning of a video put up this week that several people sent to us by Lori Ladd, who is the channel that Christiane Northrup references a lot in her daily, often daily, usually weekly transmissions.
So let's hear Lori Ladd.
Hello everyone, happy Sunday evening.
So I want to share a quick message that came in from my guides.
So I connect with the Galactic Federation of Light and they showed me a really powerful message that I want to share with you.
I was lying on my floor listening to music and they said, they jolted me out of my like chill state and they said, do you want us to share with you what's going on with humanity right now?
Really important, powerful message.
And I was like, sure.
I closed my eyes and instantaneously they showed me this.
Now this is what is to come but of course they didn't give me specifics and anything is possible.
But they wanted me to remind all of us that what is coming for humanity is a new leveling up for us in terms of how we show up.
Now we have free will so you get to choose how you want to be in every now moment.
But the next leveling up for a lot of us is to start to recognize and understand that just knowing what's going on, just knowing the systems that we're collapsing, knowing about, you know, information and things that have been hidden from us, these kind of what people used to call conspiracy theory information, right?
All these things that are starting to boil up to the surface for us to read about and learn about, It's no longer going to be enough for us to just know about it.
They were showing me tonight that humans are going to have to start to take action.
That they're going to have to start to uprise.
There's going to be an uprising and it's totally okay and normal they were saying.
Like It's not a bad thing.
It's not about a civil war or civil upset or unrest or violence or any of that.
They were saying that there is literally a leveling up of the light worker and the warrior of light that we, in order for us to continue moving into these higher states of consciousness and literally dismantling the consciousnesses That are not only trying to keep us in these lower states, but the consciousnesses that can't come along into the higher states, meaning they're not shifting with us.
They're being dismantled or collapsed.
We have to start to level up against them.
Yeah, so she keeps going in that vein.
The beginning is just so classic to me, you know, they jolted me out of my like chill state and said, do you want us to share with you what's going on with humanity right now?
A really powerful, important message.
And I was like, sure.
And then it's so incredibly vague.
It's so up-leveling, uprising, up-leveling, and then consciousnesses and consciousnesses.
Well, you know, I've looked at this kind of stuff a lot, as I'm sure you guys have too, over time.
And this is always the style of so-called channeled information.
It's a lot of vague language.
It's a lot of Barnum statements, right?
It's a lot of repeating whatever the buzzwords are in that current zeitgeist.
Can you just roll back and define Barnum statements for the listener?
Sure.
So a Barnum statement, you know, you'll hear Barnum statements in a lot of different contexts that have to do with people who are claiming knowledge about you and your life or about reality in some secret way where they'll say something like, you know, Matthew, as I sit here, And I pick up on your energy.
I can tell that you're someone who really likes being around people.
But you feel...
You feel most like yourself when you're alone.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's a classic Barnum statement.
And most people would be like, yeah, that's so true.
How would they know?
So here, so my question is, is, is it, have we, have we witnessed in this present age of the selfie sermon, a decline in the quality of the Barnum statement in the sense that it's not really receiving any real time feedback?
Because I understand that when people are doing, People are doing tarot readings or they're doing astrology or whatever that they're going to be picking up on sort of receptive clues from the client about what prediction or what kind of personality statement is being made and whether or not it's being received.
That's a great point, because in the one-on-one setting where there is that feedback loop, the cold reading techniques, which is a technique where whether you know you're doing it or not, you're picking up on all the little cues that you get from people, which range from everything from their age, to the way they're dressed, to their facial expressions, to the tone of their voice in response to what you say to them.
So yeah, I think more and more you have this online phenomenon of the person who gets in front of the camera and just starts talking.
In this very vague kind of generalized way.
As she goes on through this video, she talks about how the New World Order, the Cabal, and the Illuminati are all really the same group, right?
So let's just bundle all these different things together.
They're just these consciousnesses that have manipulated us.
And then of course 2020 is the time that lightworkers are becoming aware of this hidden reality.
But then she goes into this place and I have to say a couple of people who sent this video to us, they refer to it as her calling for a kind of new age jihad, which some will find an unfortunate choice of words.
But, but, you know, you get the, you get the general idea.
And I find her, especially even in that little clip we just shared, she sort of hedges her bets a lot, right?
She says, we're up-leveling, it's all good, none of it is going to be violent, but then she starts talking about uprising and there are consciousnesses that can't come along with us and we have to resist them.
We have to fight against them.
And later on in the video, she said, realize that there is no good or bad from the higher perspective.
She almost starts channeling the Gita, if you will, right?
That from the high up perspective, it's all pure spirit and we're energy beings.
From the lower down perspective, there's a fight that has to happen and none of it is really good or bad.
So, you know, and we're going to be rushing into battle with our armor on.
She uses a lot of these kinds of metaphors.
So that's an interesting piece.
Now are the opponents, are they named ever?
Or does this all stay on the level of abstract sort of humanoid type forms of like people identified as consciousnesses?
So if you think about killing consciousnesses or rising up against them, you don't really have to bear the sort of guilt.
It's kind of like stormtroopers in Star Wars.
Yeah, at no point does she talk about people.
Everything is about this battle.
It's like we're avatars, right, for this battle between light and darkness.
But I wanted to add one other thing here, which is that I scrolled back through her Instagram because I wanted to get more of a sense of like, you know, who is this person?
Who is this representation that we have on social media?
I'm really curious, like when did the Galactic Federation start talking to her?
And I couldn't find that video specifically, but I scrolled back and her Instagram begins in 2016.
And for the first several months, there's not much video content.
She starts doing videos every now and again, and they're very short videos.
But let me read you some stuff here.
So this could be from yesterday.
The message I received is that we came down here as volunteers to wake up humanity at this specific time in history.
Which we know, and if you don't know this, you volunteered to come down here with a specific purpose.
There are thousands of individuals who contracted with you to wake up from hearing your message.
Now, again, it's actually quite mild in a way that a lot of people would say, well, you know, that's kind of harmless and nice.
It's the same prophetic thing that this is this very special time and I have an important message for you.
So that's 2016.
2017, I love to speak.
I love to just talk and share what Adama, who apparently is who she was channeling just a couple of years ago, a few years ago, Are they part of a federation?
It's not clear.
It's not clear, but you know, I did this IG live.
I thought we were going to be talking about empathy, but it turned out what he wanted to get across was a much deeper message about connecting for empaths, about realizing that other people's energy really can't affect you at all.
And as we shift up to higher frequencies, it becomes possible to live with no one doing anything to our energy.
And then she says, Adama tricked me into talking about this because I would have shied away, but he tricked me, and so here I am talking about what some may find a little edgy.
So that's an interesting thing in terms of like, okay, it's a male presence that I'm channeling, and the male presence gets me to say the things that I'm too scared to say because it's too edgy, right?
Tricks me into saying that.
But what's edgy about it?
There's nothing edgy about any of this, really.
It's so terribly vague, and it seems like the content is just recycled and recycled.
Exactly.
and recycled.
And so what we have going into the, you know, conspirituality, COVID, and QAnon era is just kind of what, a growth in market share for this kind of thing.
And the videos get longer and they take more space.
More frequent.
Yeah, so more frequent videos, more IGT videos, which are much longer.
And I think over time, she starts to find her niche.
So here's 2018.
It's a really, really, really interesting time we're moving through right now.
There's a huge amount of shifting that humanity is going through.
It's like we're in between realities.
It's almost like they're showing me these light beings that we're in between worlds right now.
So, you know, at some point... That was 2016, though.
I don't get it, Laurie.
Like, that was... I don't get it.
I'm lost, I don't know what chapter we're in, really.
Exactly.
It's the same grift, again and again and again, as if something really profound is being said, but by the time we get to this quarantine period, there's a lot of people at home, there's a lot of people on social media, she started to get a big enough audience, and boom, now there really is something going on that presents enough hooks that we can hang this Really superficial, really generalized fantasy metaphysics on.
In your research of her, did you come across anything about her military service?
No.
Yeah, no, I'm just wondering because again, this militarized language that people use, and I've said this a while ago on the podcast, but I remember the one time I had a gun pointed in my face that wasn't in the military and how disarming that is when you realize that's how close you are to death.
And again, I just go back to what we were saying before about these Republican legislators.
Do they really understand what they're saying, especially when they use militarized language like that?
And you can't then just say, but it's all good, everyone's going to be okay, because that's complete nonsense.
Yeah, and the reason why I wanted to go back and just riff on a couple of her previous posts was to say, You know, we can look at content and we can critique content.
And I think it's very, very important to critique the content of what's being said.
But underneath all of that is the structure of what's being said and the claim that I am in touch with some ultimate authority and you should listen to me.
And I think that certain people get lulled into that in a way that feels harmless.
And then next thing you know, she's talking about rising up against the cabal that rules the world.
Well, I like that you use the word lull because I think the other thing that's going on is a kind of rhythmic consolation.
If the content is just repeated over and over again from 2016 through to the present and it just lengthens out, she becomes better at it, she becomes a more confident presenter, what have you, then really we're talking about daily consolations that her followers are tuning into.
And I get the same thing from Northrop's Great Awakening videos.
It's like, oh, it's tea time with Aunt Christiane.
Totally.
And so there's this really mystifying relationship between the rhythm, the content, whether or not the content is actually escalating or more and more provocative.
Yeah, and to your point earlier, even though there isn't the immediate feedback of personal interaction, there's the feedback over time of likes and comments, right?
And one-on-one sessions that you start doing with these people and how the content evolves based on the algorithms and based on what other quote-unquote channels are saying.
And so I think with someone like Laurie Lett, I look at her trajectory and I'm like, okay, here's a woman who's figuring out how to find an audience for herself and make a living.
And who knows what's really going on inside of her?
Um, I don't think it's super taboo to speculate about that.
We may differ slightly there, but you know, she doesn't seem to me to be someone who I'm watching go through phases of some kind of psychiatric process.
She seems to me to be someone who maybe has an overactive imagination and has figured out how to turn that into a grift.
When we look at someone like Phil Goodlife, I haven't done a deep dive into his stuff yet, but based on some things that were shared with us and based on some things I know that you've seen in his content, there's more of a sense that you have a window into someone who is just going through a lot in terms of states of being.
Well, to that point, I mean, on Instagram, if you follow us there, you will have seen that we each gave our perspectives on channeling, and we have some different things to say about that.
But one of the things that we're kind of butting heads a little bit about is whether or not It's reasonable or useful to speculate on the psychological state or the psychiatric, you know, challenges, the mental health issues of particular channelers.
I look at that as kind of like the same category of question as Does it make sense to speculate on what the motivations or the psychological profiles of like cult leaders who never submit themselves to psychiatric evaluation so you can't actually know.
But we have with Phil Goodlife, we have him disclosing on his bio that he's had several mental health related hospitalizations.
And this brings up a question I wanted to ask both of you, which is that That if this is a thing, that influencers in this kind of messianic channeling role actually are dealing with untreated issues or what have you.
I think it would be really interesting to try to understand why they gravitate to what they gravitate towards because, you know, it's come up several times in my sort of circle, in my personal history, that somebody going through a mental health crisis has latched on to simply what has been available to them in order to make sense of it.
And here I go right back to remembering what happened with Michael Roach.
who was the leader of the cult that I was in for about three years.
And he had as his sort of origin story for his spiritual life a description of basically losing his mind one day in the temple in relation to serving tea to his teacher, to this old Rinpoche.
But he had just come through this terrible time in which Several family members had died.
Somebody had committed suicide, I believe.
I would imagine that he has had, you know, mental health issues of one kind or another.
And not to stigmatize any of that, but if he did have some kind of break in that temple, what access would he have had to mental health services or to anything that would have helped him explain what was happening?
Well, he happened to be in a circumstance in which there was, you know, it wasn't like he was going to turn to therapy necessarily.
He was going to turn to the devotional kind of landscape and relationship that he had with his Tibetan Lama and the most plausible framework for what happened to him would have been provided in terms of, oh, well, there's this meditative experience that certain bodhisattvas go through when they're transitioning from one bhumi to the other.
And that's obviously what happened.
Now, I don't know whether he got that explanation from Ken Rinpoche or whether he just found it in a book somewhere.
So, when I was remembering that, I was thinking about, okay, well what happened to Phil Goodlife if he had real difficulties at a certain point?
Come out of a hospitalization and somebody handed him a Galactic Federation card?
Like, is it just as simple as that?
Like, that anything that was around you in a society, in a care system basically bereft of meaning and care, that you kind of jumped in and you were able to almost miraculously make something out of what was just available, you know?
You bring up long-standing questions in mental health, and I'll just give a brief overview.
In the 19th century, the Quakers, using guidance from the sort of bathhouse-spa system, meaning like the saunas, not like the local spas, but in Europe.
We're talking about Quakers after all.
Quakers, yeah.
And they had one of the best models for mental health treatment in America.
It was simply like, What were the houses called?
What were the houses that they set up?
Because they were communal living environments, right?
Where people lived as kind of found family, right?
The recovery rate was phenomenal.
And then pharmacology comes into play.
So if you're- What were the houses called?
What were the houses that they set up?
Because they were communal living environments, right?
Where people lived as kind of found family, right?
Yes, Robert- It's Whitaker.
Whitaker writes about them.
Yeah, Robert Whitaker writes about them.
And I'll look those up because I want to keep going with this thought.
Because what happened- If you're someone like the Hungarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, he argues there is no such thing as mental health problems.
And which is a little extreme, but if you look at the DSM from the 1950s when it started until now, you go from dozens of psychiatric additions to hundreds.
And part of the argument is that we have created pharmacology to address issues that aren't actually really issues.
And I bring all of this up to point out that Especially in something you talk about a lot, Matthew, is digital hygiene and how we relate to one another and how these people don't have guardrails on these mediums, meaning media.
And the problem with that is when you're so separated from nature and with people going through things like you are, with some sort of guidance but without this constant pharmacological intervention, It's, you know, it's going to be A, very hard to identify what the problems are, and B, recovery is going to be almost impossible because we've had over a century of this model and it doesn't work.
So, is it surprising that, I mean, people have been hearing voices inside, we all hear voices inside of our heads, like every person, that's part of consciousness.
How far you recognize those voices as other is the question, and apparently these figures we're talking about really believe that this voice that is just a natural part of consciousness is an other.
And where you draw that line of what the mental health break is, is going to be very difficult without, as you said, if they're not going to go and actually seek help, it's going to be very hard for anyone to really decipher that.
You know, when I was looking at Phil Goode's bio, he describes his hospitalizations happening in his early 20s.
And, you know, I just have to say, I think I mentioned it in one of our first episodes, I was 20 or 21 years old and under, you know, from a number of angles, I was under a lot of emotional stress.
And I went through a series of, you know, I don't know, six months or so of grand mal seizures, where I would wake up in my apartment with my furniture pulled down and books all over the floor and completely confused, but also somewhat elated.
And when I finally, you know, took myself to a neurologist, there was nothing found.
You know, all of whatever scans they did came back clean, but I have to say that those experiences really did mark The beginning of my fascination with spiritual subjects and with yoga and with meditation and so on.
And if I had been in a different context, if I had come from a family, for example, where seeking out mental health counseling or psychotherapy or psychiatry was a thing, I might have had a very, very different life.
I know we've geeked out a little bit about Professor Ramachandran on here before and you know Ramachandran has a fascinating consultation that he did that's part of a documentary I believe called Phantoms in the Brain but he's talked about it in other places where
He's called in, you know Ramachandran is often referred to as the Sherlock Holmes of neurology, people call him in when they can't figure out what's going on with someone's brain and usually it's someone who's had a brain injury but sometimes not and he covers this case and in the documentary they show him interviewing both the father and the son in this particular case and the son
Suddenly started having intense religious visions and being incredibly preoccupied in a highly emotional way with religious themes.
And what was noteworthy about it is that the father was an atheist, I believe if I'm remembering correctly, this was quite a while ago, and the son had been raised without any real religion.
And the son actually, when he was not in those states, didn't really believe any of this stuff and was very confused by it.
But when he was in that state, he would be absolutely consumed with all of this.
Right.
And so this is where I first heard about temporal lobe epilepsy and how there's something that can happen where, and this is neurological, right?
We're talking about biology here, but it manifests in terms of states of consciousness and the lens through which we perceive reality.
And the things that Ramachandran talks about in terms of a lot of the cases he was looking at with temporal lobe epilepsy was that there were three main characteristics when there was spiritual or religious preoccupation.
One was a sense that God is talking directly to me and telling me something really, really important.
And Ramachandran says when the temporal lobe is misfiring in this way and there's this intense surge of energy, all of this connectivity between the emotional centers, the language centers, and the sense of meaning, it's so amplified and it's so intense that the only way our psyches know how to interpret it is this must be some higher level intelligence that's trying to come through me because it's
Everything I normally experience but amplified in such an intense and powerful way.
So that was one piece.
The second piece was that very often there is an intense sort of moralism and often a distaste or a disgust for sexuality.
That was really interesting in terms of, you know, potential prophetic religious figures having this.
And the third was developing hypergraphia, which is this intense need to write and write and write and which I would imagine could also be this intense need to make lots of IGTV videos, but you know that's purely speculation.
So to me that was all really interesting.
The last thing I'll say about that, and I know we're spending a lot of time on this topic, is just that Often people with temporal lobe epilepsy don't have seizures that are visible from the outside.
The seizures are only happening in the brain and it's only affecting, at certain times, how they're experiencing their stream of awareness.
It gives me a lot to think about.
I mean, I track with all three of those things and I think it's Geschwind who names them as Geschwind syndrome.
I don't know when, but yeah, hypergraphia, Jesus Christ.
I mean, how many words have I written in my life?
Fucking hell, like it's just, but I'm not to the point where, you know, I'm covering the walls with, you know, fine, you know, cursive or filling up notebook after notebook that I throw away.
It has to be productive.
It's not like, It is soothing, for sure, self-soothing, but it can't disappear.
Well, I would also argue that all of this stuff exists on a spectrum, right?
All of us are a little bit paranoid.
All of us are somewhat narcissistic.
All of us have a tendency to be really erratic and have emotional outbursts when we're under the right kind of pressure, right?
In ways that could seem like a personality disorder.
It's the extent to which it gets amplified.
And I just want to say,
The unpopular thing here on this topic which is that I do think there are things like bipolar disorder and there are things like schizophrenia or schizotypal affective disorder that we don't fully know how to treat perfectly but we do know that without treatment the outcomes are usually not good and that medication is often the saving grace even though it's still you know deeply problematic and imperfect.
No headline here, just a name, Guru Jagat.
Now at some point we'll do a full episode on her and the influence of Kundalini Yoga not only on conspirituality but on the networked mutual support systems between cults and conspiracy movements.
Jagat is super popular.
She's got a yoga center called the Rama Institute that she founded in 2013.
It's in Venice Beach.
Amongst her celebrity students are or have been Kate Hudson, Goldie Hawn, and Alicia Keys.
Now we've got a clip of her here lined up.
She's speaking to a retreat group this past summer.
It'll give you a sense of how she rules.
Participating during this vigil, the more we can beam this power of prayer and miracles.
And let's see what we can do.
This is a good yogic science experiment, and let's see what we can do.
Because we know that if, you know, we're beaming ourselves up to the place where we were going to be physically, and we can do that very easily.
We have the power to do that.
So if you weren't going to be there physically with us, we're going to beam in.
Well, now we're all going to beam, and it's not just, you know, the Western United States.
This is the part where if you start to put together some of the pieces of the news that's getting not reported on and all this stuff, there's explosions all over the planet in ways that people, we don't know what's going on.
So you could say, okay, are we, I mean, is the reason why we're being told to stay home that we're actually in some sort of alien war?
You should be asking yourself that question.
Not that there's not a virus, but if you piece together all of the things that are happening in all of these cities simultaneously around the world, there's some weird shit going on.
Right?
So we just want to, we're going to use the pure potential of the beam prayer to anybody who is hurt right now, anybody who's lost, anybody who's in an emergency, anybody who needs healing, anybody who feels desperate, anybody who's on the verge of taking their own life.
We're going to do everything we can to put this energy through the matrix.
And we know the miracles that happen.
So I'm excited to spend this weekend with you.
Bring your palms together, please.
Yeah, okay so one thing that you guys can help me understand is how does Guru Jagat make this shit work in LA?
Like she's so...
She's so interesting.
She's so plain spoken.
She trips over her words.
She's super excited.
She seems really, really earnest, but she's not very coherent.
I mean, the subject matter aside, it's even hard to understand what she is saying within the bizarre theme that she's unfolding.
She seems unprepared.
She's totally unprepared.
She's winging it.
But that's not L.A., is it?
Well, yes, but first off, let me give a little context because you're not here.
So Rama Institute... I'm not.
Except for when you psychically travel and visit me, which I appreciate.
Rama Institute... Freaks out the cats, though.
I was right next door to this, vegan ice cream is mostly bullshit, but there was this really good vegan ice cream place that did coconut vegan ice cream.
But how do you know?
It was right next door to Rama Institute, so I spent a good amount of time there.
Not at the Rama, but I'd walk by and I was always just like, because outside is the, the mirrors are black and they're painted with all these cryptic, like, you know, just symbols.
But there was always like the ancient science Of Kundalini.
She really created a place that led with, you know what?
This is an ancient technology, it's a science, and we have it here.
And I know two things in LA.
There are a lot of Kundalini Yogis because there are a lot of former addicts and that's not a judgment.
Addicts really take to Kundalini and you know what?
Awesome.
If that's what helps you get over your addiction and you become addicted to that instead because of the feelings, I'm fine with that.
Is that because they were really good at marketing to recovery communities or because they say the same thing?
Same thing about Ashtanga Yoga, right?
I think it's because it's another way of getting high, frankly.
Yeah, I think so too.
Because remember, the Kriyas, there is speculation that the Kriyas came in India when you couldn't get access to the psilocybin anymore.
So there's a long-standing potential of getting out of your mind, and that is very much part of that.
So exactly how, because it started with Golden Bridge, and then you have Rama, and then there was the other one in Santa Monica on 4th Street that I'm forgetting.
It was a black yoga teacher, the man from African Man.
Oh yeah.
I should know that.
But before that you have Golden Bridge.
Is it Golden Bridge?
Or Yoga West?
Yoga West, I didn't know that was Kundalini.
Golden Bridge was also in New York, so I know there's that connection.
Oh, gotcha.
Yoga West is where it all starts in LA.
Okay.
Okay.
Um, where did Russell Brand go?
Wasn't that Golden Bridge though?
Yes, I believe so.
Yeah.
So, so anyway, you have this, so you have this very captive community of a lot of formatics, not purely, of course.
I mean, people, I did Kundalini for a while.
I loved feeling after I got it.
I hated the music, but I love the feeling of the Kriyas.
What's good is the Kriyas help you dissociate from the music.
And then you have the catchwords, the buzzwords, which I think, personally, just from an outsider perspective, is one of the things that she capitalized on.
It's like, oh, I'm downloading Source.
Like Julian referenced before, the constant adoption of whatever is hot at that moment in language.
And obviously, you are literally buffered up against Like, Silicon Valley West in LA, where her institute is.
So, you have this very technology-forward languaging that's showing you, you connect to a source, but we're doing it in a very new way.
And even though, you know, on your channel or video, you used the word banal, Matthew, which I thought was the perfect word for a lot of this.
And even though the language is banal, the marketing and the way That you bring you in, and then just what you're actually doing through the Kriyas, you know, you're after an hour of breath of fire or whatever they're doing, they're in a very suggestive state.
And I think that's where people like that can really capitalize is when people are so physiologically open.
Totally.
You can see pretty much anything.
Aliens are here?
Sure.
Okay.
Yeah, I'm setting aside all of my critical thinking now because I've never felt so open and so good before.
You know, I think this is something that I've witnessed happen in different communities around yoga, which is you go through this phase, what's happened is You know, when I first started practicing yoga, it was like Chuck and Mati here in LA and Anna Forrest and, oh God, I'm forgetting his name.
There's people like Rod Stryker.
There's this group who were of a certain generation and there was a small number of them and they had a lot of students.
And then their students all started taking teacher trainings and teacher trainings started becoming more and more people.
Less and less barrier to entry.
Anyone can take the training if you have the money.
And so you have this new generation of teachers who come up.
And then that generation ruled for a while, and there were a larger number of them, but still a relatively small group.
But if you have more and more people taking teacher training, and you have more and more of a pop culture sensibility and less of a sense of authoritarian hierarchy, Um, sometimes it takes a little longer to break down like in Kundalini Yoga, which I will straight up say is a cult.
That authoritarian cult, everyone wearing the same clothes, everyone having the same hairstyle, everyone taking the same last name, all of that kind of stuff.
Still, it's been permeable to this sense of pop culture evolution.
And so I think that Guru Jagat came along at a particular moment, she's young, she's She has some kind of charismatic thing going on that appeals to a certain sort of person.
She's female, and it was like, oh, this is the new leader in this kind of community, and she sort of broke off and did her own thing, right?
I guess I'm wondering, just from a regional perspective, do you think she does well in L.A.
because of the kind of earnestness that she affects?
Like, she presents as though she's coming from Wisconsin or something, I don't think it's the earnestness.
I think it's the regular chick.
It's like we are these empowered females who get these downloads and we're going to just share it with you in this very sort of matter-of-fact like hip language.
Now the main thing, just back to the ticker story here, the main thing everybody should know about Guru Jagat is that she has come up As Julian has referenced already, I'll go a little bit farther and call it a criminal religious organization called Kundalini Yoga, founded and directed by the late sociopath known as Yogi Bhajan.
I love the tea.
Come on, don't kill all my idols.
Earlier this year, Bhajan was cancelled from beyond the grave by an outpouring of survivor reports of his abuse, beginning with a memoir published by one of his personal secretaries.
We could also substitute terms like slave or assault survivor.
Her name is Pamela Dyson.
She wrote kind of an incredible memoir.
Her revelations were not news, however.
Kundalini Yoga and 3HO, which are kind of almost intrinsic to each other, had already settled and suppressed civil cases against Bhajan in the 1990s, one involving a minor who accused Bhajan of forcible confinement and rape.
But behind the institutional systemic abuse and all of its enabling, the yoga school itself is pretty much built on a house of cards.
We'll post, once again, Philip Deslip's excellent academic work on the super sketchy claims made by Bhajan about where his techniques came from, and whether or not there really is such a thing as Sikh Tantra.
There is not, really.
So that's where Jagat is coming from.
More specifically, she has risen to influence in association with a guy named Harijuan.
Harijuan.
Do you know him?
The Toner Bandit.
The Toner Bandit.
I do know him, and I believe Derek knows him, too.
Do you actually know him personally?
Yes!
Oh my gosh, okay.
Alright, never mind.
You should do the reporting.
Anyway, he's 64, so he's first-generation kundalini yoga.
He says he's taught since 1975, which means that he's benefited from a very long tenure with this organization, which is very wealthy, by the way.
And about 20 years ago... Is he not also Russell Brand's The main guy?
Oh jeez, I really hope not.
I think he is.
No, no.
I know it was a female teacher because when he bought her a car, there was a big thing in LA.
It's like, oh, you can't accept a car.
He appeared.
Russell Brand appeared on some talk show with Hari Jawan.
I'm pretty sure.
I'll dig it out.
Oh, gosh.
All right.
Anyway, Hari Jawan was sentenced in 2002, I believe, or 2000 to two years in prison for fraud as the lead defendant and one of, you know, The many 3HO related business operations that have undergone legal scrutiny.
Bhajan himself was extremely entrepreneurial and his lead students all participated in that.
Hari Jwan fraudulently billed 520 companies for This is all while he's in the organization.
He had a terrible pass and then he found Kundalini Yoga.
This is like what he's doing while he's in 3HO.
Right, right.
So among 3HO dissidents, as Julian points out, he's known as the Toner Bandit.
And he has firmly taken his present-day sect and Jagat along with him into double-down territory with regard to Bajan's abuse history.
He's called the whistleblowing and ancient strategies for suppressing Bajan's light and so on.
Likewise, Jagat's whole vibe throughout the scandal cycle has been to stay the course.
Now, is she in the news?
No.
Not really for anything notable or off-brand, but a listener did send us a late December video conversation from her series called Reality Riffing, which is pretty much on point.
It's kind of what she does.
She has a guest on this conversation.
Her name is Mandev.
She's a filmmaker.
Now, Mandev is a diminutive, soft-spoken devotee, and she's made a bunch of little films to protect the honor of bhajan in light of the attacks by the people he raped and abused.
Attacks in commas there.
So I'll say more about the films at a later time, but it's enough to say for now that they are classic cult propaganda.
They're not films in any public sense of the word.
They're terribly shot.
They're terribly spliced together.
They're crushingly boring.
It's a real sign of cult content when you know that the only possible way anyone could consider to be competent would be is if they were total devotees themselves.
So there's a lot to say about Guru Jagat and I'm sure we'll do an episode on her, but I'm going to quote
What she allows Mandev to say in this conversation about why she produces propaganda films for the Rama Institute and Bhajan because here she is speaking about a film called The Futile Flow of Fate and the film revolves around a teaching that Hari Jwan gave after Pamela Dyson's book came out and he's sitting in front of this enormous brass symbol that looks like a comms satellite.
Jagat says that it was made for Van Halen.
I don't know about I guess that's LA too, right?
Then without context or dates, the cuts in this little film whiplash back and forth between weird text scrolls and archive footage of Bajan and Mandev in this conversation says,
The film started where you know all this stuff started coming out about Yogi Bhajan and no one was saying anything and that was heartbreaking and so I had to do something because one of the things I've learned you know I love reading about you know history and the French Crusades and like the different churches and this is a pattern that's happened over and over and over again like you know there's one community in the south of France back in the Middle Ages Yoga, they did yoga meditations.
Women had positions of power.
And what happened was, you know, everybody became too conscious.
And so what they did, they went in and destroyed it, right?
And the whole lineage disappeared into song, into art.
And that pattern has been happening over and over again throughout history.
And I found it interesting that everybody just ignored that, right?
And it was just such a mind control operation.
It was so obvious to me.
So, does this sound familiar a little bit?
Because, you know, what we're going to be able to look at as we go deeper into Guru Jagat is how a cult that, you know, here we have a cult that blends conspiracy theory about false accusations against their founder, and they blend that with conspiracy theories about the pandemic, that the fires are starting from space, that there's explosions happening all over the planet, and that we're being told to shelter in place because of an alien attack.
And what it does is it conveniently removes the focus from Kundalini Yoga, 3HO, Yogi Bhajan, and the complicity of Hari Jwan and the abuse benefits accrued by everybody who's still in the organization.
And this is something that we really shouldn't forget, that some conspiritualists might not really give a shit about the pandemic or masks or vaccines, but they'll nonetheless seize on that moment and that content you know, in terms of cultural disruption to hide their own dirty laundry or to push their own stuff.
So this is the whole principle of disaster spirituality that you capitalize on chaos to bolster your own transcendent promises.
And on that note, she also did an online conference last weekend with the headliner, David Icke.
Oh, wow, really?
And I also want to point, well first off, Julian, Tej was Russell Brand's teacher.
Tej from Calacasa.
Tej.
Tej, thank you.
But one thing I want to point out in that video too, because it was actually the most disturbing point of the video with Mandev where she goes, Says something to the effect, and she was using the Dalai Lama as an example at this time, where say your teacher abused you in some capacity that they did it for your own good.
So, she's basically giving license for someone to do sexual abuse and saying, but they're working from a place of higher power.
And again, I know this is repetitive throughout cults, But to see it like just happen last week and for her to say, oh, it's all good was really that part just jumped out to me and actually hurt.
I think she's misquoting the Dalai Lama who was asked about whether it was whether whether it's okay to Separate yourself from a teacher who is unethical.
And he said, yes, it is, but you have difficulties if it's a tantric relationship, and that has to be renegotiated.
But this is also where Mandov goes and talks about how, you know, Chogyam Trungpa was this wonderful, you know, person who, you know, healed everybody through his crazy wisdom.
So there's kind of like a pileup of stories around, you know, beneficent sociopaths that really kind of occlude your own history.
I think what she actually says is you have free will to leave that teacher if you feel, if you have issues with them and if you feel they've hurt you in some way, but you are not allowed to talk shit about them.
Oh, that's right, exactly.
Or question their methods, yeah.
Yeah, but I need to see the quote from HHDL because we gotta get that accurate.
He doesn't tend to say stupid things.
The jab.
Our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
A common point raised by people arguing against the safety of vaccines is the existence of the vaccine court.
Well, if they are so safe, then why is there this court where the government has so far paid out 4.4 billion dollars to people injured by vaccines, they will ask.
Sometimes it's even framed as the court being secret.
Sounds pretty ominous.
So for the jab this week, I took a look.
A quick note here, amongst other sources, I'll be referencing reporting that you'll find included in the show notes by Jeffrey Kluger in Time, James Hablon in The Atlantic, as well as a lecture by Professor Anna Kirkland on her book called Vaccine Court.
It turns out that the origins of what is more formally called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program are closely intertwined with controversy over the DTP, ...or diphtheria tetanus pertussis vaccine during the 70s and 80s.
It was believed that roughly 1 in 310,000 children vaccinated were at risk for a brain injury called vaccine encephalopathy.
Encephalopathy.
Is the right way to say that word, which could result in permanent damage.
Because pertussis killed on average 6,000 kids per year, and the claimed brain injury at roughly 50 per 15 million had not been demonstrated as causally connected, and because the vaccine was so effective at preventing the disease, vaccination nonetheless continued.
Now by 1990, it will be shown that the vaccine was completely unrelated to that brain injury, which was actually caused by infantile epilepsy.
But due to public outcry and sensationalist media coverage, vaccine manufacturers were inundated with time- and money-consuming lawsuits, and therefore had a hard time securing liability insurance.
Because the profit margins with vaccines are so small, it was likely that because of these logistics, they would decide to stop production on this vaccine even though it was saving thousands of lives.
The solution was to levy a 75 cent per dose excise tax on all vaccines as a way to fund a court set up in 1988 by the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services to handle these claims.
And that's your vaccine court.
It functions on the civil law preponderance of evidence standard that requires only a 51% likelihood.
Make a note here too that the court also allocates payment of legal fees for petitioners providing minimum standards are met regardless of the ruling.
So that means everyone who petitions the court gets paid from that fund that comes from the excise tax whether the court agrees or disagrees with their petition in the end.
Now far from being secret, The establishment of this court was widely publicized and the public website to this day devoted to it includes a long list of all the lawyers available in each state to pursue these claims.
Because the lawyers are paid by the court as well, no matter what, In terms of the ruling, there's no real expense or risk on the part of the lawyers or the petitioners.
There is a $250 filing fee, but that can be waived if you show that you can't afford it.
So there's no reason really for the lawyers who make their living, or at least part of their living this way, to screen the claims beyond just meeting minimum requirements.
As I said, the standards of evidence for the court also fall far below scientific standards of evidence.
And if anything, the court, as described by Professor Anna Kirkland, author of the 2016 book, Vaccine Court, The Law and Politics of Injury, as very generous in its interpretation of evidence and awarding of funds.
After the DTP vaccine was shown in fact to not be related at all to the brain injury, even though awards for those claims still account to this day for 20% of all the money so far dispersed, there were now very few legitimate cases and still a lot of money accumulating in the fund.
Enter Andrew Wakefield.
After the now-known-to-be-falsified 1998 claims that former Dr. Andrew Wakefield made about the MMR vaccine and autism, the proceedings of the court were dominated by this perceived connection, which was shown by scientific consensus and the ruling of the court
The Vaccine Court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the FDA, CDC, the Institute of Medicine, all shown to be completely without validity by 2009.
Nonetheless, big awards had been made for autism claims before that time, especially due to a plausible link with pre-existing conditions like mitochondrial disorders, even though no causal link had been or has since then been proven.
Since the autism phase of the court, the preponderance of cases started to tilt towards the flu vaccine, with a shift toward more adult claimants, because even though the court was set up to deal with children, and child vaccinations.
Because kids are required to get the flu vaccine as part of their regular schedule, the flu vaccine itself is included.
So there's this technicality now that allows a lot of adults to petition the court with their claims.
Most of the payouts for the flu vaccine are due to fainting, which sounds minor, but it turns out a small number of people who do faint end up getting seriously hurt when they fall down.
Or perhaps in some cases, they faint while they're driving and have a terrible car accident after receiving their shot.
There's also an incidence of shoulder injury Due to poor injection technique which causes a puncture in the shoulder bursa.
Now this of course is unrelated to the vaccine itself.
It's just someone giving the injection who puts the needle in the wrong place and so that could happen with whatever the injection contents actually were.
But that's something that gets paid out and is recognized as something that should be compensated routinely by the court.
Also listed as a plausible side effect is the autoimmune condition Guillain-Barre syndrome, another difficult to pronounce word, which may have an increased likelihood in about one person per million vaccinated.
And interestingly, this is still a lower percentage of those that will develop that autoimmune syndrome after having the flu.
So we have a one person per million of people who receive the flu vaccine who might go on to have a higher likelihood of developing Guillain-Barre.
That's still lower than people who develop it as a result of having the flu.
Additional instances in which the court automatically awards claims have to do with rare transient arthritis associated with the rubella vaccine and even more rare anaphylactic shock from the chickenpox vaccine.
80% of cases awarded are via settlement and do not fall into any of those previous categories that I just mentioned.
They're not agreed upon by the court with regard to actually showing vaccine causation because the scientific evidence is very weak for that.
And they're settled based on the intention of the court to allocate the funds that are accumulating all the time in the event of any possibility that there was an injury from the vaccine.
Of course, the scientific community finds these awards deeply problematic because the civil law standards of evidence and the legal procedures in this unique court are so different than those of science.
And so these rulings create an unwarranted public perception of vaccine dangers.
Now another common point that you'll hear brought up by those arguing against the safety of vaccines is that there are far more valid cases that exist than those that are compensated by the court.
There's something called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System or VAERS, V-A-E-R-S, and that's often pointed to as evidence that there are way more cases of injury than the mainstream narrative acknowledges, right?
Okay, so here's the problem with that.
Theirs is a completely unregulated public database that anyone can just go on and report any belief that they have that a vaccine injury has occurred with no supporting evidence required, no bar for entry.
Manufacturers and doctors are actually required to report to the database anytime they think that an adverse reaction may have occurred and lawyers can also report to it as well every time they pick up a new case with a new claim of vaccine injury.
So this makes the numbers on that database hugely inflated.
With no causal test in place, there's no test that validates, oh, this is actually a claim where causality has been proven.
The vaccine court actually within their standards of evidence allows the VAERS database to be cited and often what is being cited by the lawyers is their own reporting to VAERS of the claim that the plaintiff they're representing has made.
So there's this circularity that makes it seem as if there is strong evidence when Really, there isn't.
This is just part of how the court functions and the perception that I've formed from looking into this is that it's very much about wanting to err on the side of the petitioners and wanting to use the money to help people who are, you know, experiencing something difficult, whether or not it can be demonstrated that it's because of the vaccine.
Lawyers, incidentally, are also permitted by the court to use papers from discredited journals created by anti-vaccine activists, as well as parental or anecdotal reporting that in scientific terms falls into a high likelihood of being merely correlation and not causation.
Evidence of plausible causality is also accepted in the form of package inserts from the manufacturers themselves that list all possible adverse reactions, however rare those might be.
Nonetheless, with all of these facts in place about the vaccine court, which again seems to me to bend over backwards so as to err on the side of petitioners whenever possible, that huge sounding $4.4 billion awarded over the last 30 years or so is still consistent with the estimated roughly 1 per million incidence of adverse reactions based on the billions of doses of vaccines delivered.
For example, with 2.5 billion doses of vaccines administered between 2006 and 2014, 2,976 claims came before the court and 1,876 were compensated.
So that's out of 2.5 billion, right?
came before the court and 1,876 were compensated.
So that's out of 2.5 billion, right?
Between 1988, when the court began, and 2014, a total of 4,150 cases were compensated, with of course, that 26 year period seeing several billion doses of multiple types that 26 year period seeing several billion doses of multiple types of vaccines
So there are some facts, there are some figures, some data on the vaccine court and the vaccine adverse event reporting system.
Hopefully that shines a little bit of a light on this topic that comes up a lot when discussing the safety of vaccines with people who are either hesitant or anti-vax activists.
All right, coming up is part two of my interview/conversation with Charles Eisenstein.
Once again, 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.
In this two-part discussion, we looked at his recent writing, especially four essays that he's published since the pandemic crashed down upon our lives.
And in the discussion afterwards, Derek and Julian and I will be looking at things like What does it mean to be a writer with and without guardrails?
What does it mean to be brave as a writer?
What does it mean to be transgressive as a writer?
And also, what the nature of evidence is.
So, here it is.
Once again, I'd like to thank Charles for coming onto the podcast and also Dr. Lisa Rankin for connecting us.
I hope you enjoy it.
Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm being a little naive, you know, just to, and not appreciating, like the, the team.
Oh, it's incredible.
That I would, that wouldn't 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 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?
I mean, most of the anti-vax literature is like, 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 And then they spend the next 30 years doing the research And they they you know are there's a community of these people but none of them are 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.
I mean, to me, it comes also down to a very personal question about, like, what is the genre that I'm writing in?
And what I have found is that, you know, it's only been over the last five or six years that I have submitted myself to the rigor and the discipline of investigative journalism and, you know, handed stuff over to an editor.
And so what it has done is, and here's where I guess maybe I have a challenging comment for you, is what it's done for me is it's put me into a territory of great circumspection with regard to
Making allusions or pronouncements or giving opinions about matters of public health that I just don't like, that as a citizen I'm entitled to, but if I had a platform where 100,000 people were going to read my work, I would be like, I would be really, really worried about getting it wrong.
And so I'm wondering like how you conceive of, because you describe what you do as philosophy, but you enter into this very like, Contested and volatile territory.
And at this point with a pandemic, your views actually have public health consequences, right?
Such as they are.
People may live or die according to the way in which they are activated by popular culture or humanity's views on the pandemic.
Where are your, like, yeah, where are your guardrails for that?
Like, what do you, you know, what do you, like, I'm very happy when I publish something on an organization that the publication's gonna stand behind me, like 100%.
And so, like, how do you manage that terrible freedom, let's call it?
Yeah, I mean, I've gone through, in the last nine months, I've gone through, I'm in phases of pretty intense doubt where I'm like, oh my God, what if I'm wrong?
What if I've killed people because I'm wrong?
And not only about COVID, but you know, for the last 18 years, I've been, Writing, you know, pretty radical critiques of civilization.
Right.
You know, like in my most recent book, for example, I make a pretty strong case that, I mean, I think it's strong.
It's not without research, but it's not a whole investigative team.
A pretty strong case that small-scale organic agriculture can actually outproduce industrialized agriculture in terms of yield per hectare.
Right.
Not in terms of yield per unit of labor.
Right.
In that regard, industrial agriculture is much better.
Right.
But what if I'm wrong about that?
What if I'm just, you know, predisposed to believe these hippie farmers, you know, and these, you know, the Rodale Institute and these kind of fringe organizations?
Like, who am I to disbelieve agronomy departments?
And, you know- Or what if the hippie farmers are your friends?
And that's just your social set, and you, you know.
Right, and what if I'm influenced by the fact that my father was an organic gardener?
Right.
You know, and my grandfather, and like, so like, am I really basing this on, again, like, dispassionate review of the evidence and stuff?
All I can do is to, is my best.
Like, all I can do is to try to be aware of my, Biases as best I can, and no one can fully be aware of their biases.
But that's why- Well, okay, let me point out- But I'm careful, so as far as COVID goes, at some point, see, that's the other thing.
I feel like I can never be entirely 100% certain about anything.
Does that mean that therefore I never, I never say anything that might, you know, cause somebody to make a bad decision.
I mean, at some point, I think we have to understand that That, you know, the audience, they're going to hear my viewpoint and they're going to hear other viewpoints as well.
And I have to, as long as I'm honest, I mean, that's what's the most important, is to not pretend to have knowledge that I don't have, but to say, here's how things look from where I'm sitting.
Here's who I'm, Listening to, here's what's not being said in the discussion.
And really that's my role, I think, that I'm refining, but it's to say what isn't being said.
But your whole confession that you just gave there, that would be an additional very powerful framework around like a reflection On what does the individual content producer, who happens to be male, who happens to be white, who happens to have charismatic appeal to people, what is their responsibility as they come to the fore as somebody who has
You know, some kind of social power, like, like it's, is it, is it, is it enough to say, well, you know, it's my opinion or my work is going to be one bit of work amongst many other bits of work and people just have to sort through it themselves or, you know, as your platform grows, do you have to like knock your own kind of sense of the importance of your opinions down in, in, in tandem and then focus on like,
I don't know what, which, I mean, cause you obviously want to, you obviously want to speak to the issues of the day, but you know, Charles, like the thing that I hear in your essays the most is like this yearning for peace amongst people, right?
And like, that's what you want.
Like everything that I read and it seems to boil down to like, can't we just get along?
It feels like you have a very sort of, intimate grasp of the psychological issues at play within yourself and maybe in your circle of relations.
And that's where the heart is.
And then you use that, I'm just giving a bunch of opinions now, but you use that to look out into the world and see what you don't like happening and try to visualize what you would like to happen.
And that's different from participating in a research team that's going to try to find out the best, the closest to the truth about a matter that they can find out.
Those are different processes.
But we're living in an age in which people might spend more time reading you on COVID than they read the material from their public health officials, you know what I mean?
It's a weird environment.
Yeah.
And I think that Reading what I write on COVID is going to help them evaluate all of the different kinds of information they're getting in a different way.
I hope that's the case anyway.
Right.
Because what the health authorities are saying about it is grounded in these unconscious paradigms, these myths that are not the only way to see things.
And again, it's like, just bringing in some, like, how are you ever going to...
Evaluate this whirlwind of contradictory information without some awareness of the deeper stories, if I can use that word again, that the disparate viewpoints are coming from.
To identify patterns in the noise, I think, helps people's cognitive discernment.
It also helps to focus, I think, on sort of discrete patches of granular data.
So for instance, last week, we, in the news ticker that we do, or maybe it was the week before, but we were talking about, the subject was called bro science.
And we were talking about men, especially who bring a kind of unearned confidence to speaking about epidemiological or public health issues.
Now, one of them, the guy's name is Adam Skelly, and he very proudly tried to open his barbecue restaurant here in Toronto, even though there was a lockdown order against inside dining.
And he gives this Instagram speech in which he talks about how the PCR test is wrong, right?
This guy's a barbecue guy.
And he's talking about how the PCR test, they're running it at a cycle threshold at more than 40.
And then he goes on to claim that if the PCR tests run at a cycle threshold of more than 40, then it's picking up all kinds of other things like, you know, bits of the flu vaccine and the common cold and so on and so forth.
He is like totally 100% absolutely wrong about that because the, you know, the microbiologist that I, who works with the PCR tests who I talked to says, no, it's like the test is coded for the particular genome, which has been isolated and it will, it will find it.
And if it can't find it in 35 cycles, it finds it in 40 cycles or whatever.
But that's what the threshold is about.
And so this guy was just totally wrong about something that's actually crucial with regard to how we assess the progress of the pandemic in a local environment.
And so- How do you know he's wrong?
Because I've read, I can't remember where it was, I could probably find it on my computer somewhere, You know, a qualified microbiologist saying almost the same thing.
I mean, what it sounds like that guy is saying is really, if he were being honest, he would say, I read somewhere that such and such and such and such.
If he was being honest, right, right.
Right.
Did he actually also go and look at the counter argument to that?
Right.
How many people do that?
Like, even like this little bit of rudimentary investigative journalism to look at both sides on their own terms.
Well here's the thing is that what's really super activating and I think dangerous about what he's doing with that bit of information is that it feels transgressive and that's sexy and he's also going to open his restaurant, there's going to be protest and people are going to get meat.
And it's like, and so there's something provocative about the transgression and, you know, it very easily fits into a kind of anti-authoritarianism that describes its greatest freedom as being able to eat meat inside instead of like doing curbside pickup.
And, you know, meanwhile, all of the information that's coming out from public health on Toronto is like fucking boring.
It's just boring.
It's not some guy on Instagram saying, ah, those guys are full of shit.
It's like, well, the current science says that aerosolization suggests that we really should be concerned about being in closed spaces, and this is why, and da-da-da-da-da-da.
And so it's almost like the scales are tilted towards the spectacular disinformative.
And here's where I wanted to like just say how sometimes I think you do that too, because like in the conspiracy myth essay, you...
There's a lot of what you do that appeals to neutrality.
Look at both sides.
Come together.
But then in the Conspiracy Myth essay, you say, you know, if you want to look at the work of people who are speaking against the conventional narrative around the pandemic, you should look at the work of Zach Bush and Christiane Northrup, and you name somebody else.
I don't think I named Christiane Northrup.
You did, you definitely did.
You for sure did.
You absolutely did.
I think I named Zach Bush.
Yes.
I think I named Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
You did, you named him as well.
Yeah, so Kennedy, but absolutely, Northrop is in there.
And I'm like, okay, well, did he, I mean, maybe you want to take that, I don't know, maybe you want to go and scrub that, I don't know.
I don't know.
Like it seems like you, there I ask who your audience is, like who you're gonna push people towards sources that are, I like who you're gonna push people towards sources that are, I don't know, that they seem to be saying something And I think,
And so sometimes I feel like you resonate with that as a social function.
It's like, I'm going to say something revolutionary here.
I'm going to get above the fray and I'm going to give a new type of story, right?
And so there's maybe an identification with people who are doing that in their various fields as well.
I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, I do identify with people who are, Bravely defying conventional wisdom.
Whether they're right or wrong, they're still brave.
A lot of these people are- But might they just also be nihilistic or disruptive or, you know, like- Yeah, sometimes that could be true too.
But, you know, There is, so okay, like let's do a thought experiment and say, let's pretend that the dominant narratives of society or the established truths are deeply flawed or fundamentally wrong.
Okay.
Suppose that's true, and part of us knows that.
Then when we encounter somebody who's saying that in a very unequivocal way, it's going to light up that indignant, rebellious part.
Sure.
And we might even project heroic attributes to that person.
For sure.
When really it's our own energy that wants to be liberated and wants to be validated and saying, yeah, I knew it.
I knew something was wrong all along here.
And this person is saying it.
Now, that can be easily hijacked by manipulative people who can then say, oh, and here's what's wrong and then give your money to me or something like that.
And here's how I'm gonna fix it, right.
And here's how I'm gonna fix it.
But the basic energy, I have to say that, I mean, this is, you know, going back to my teenage years.
I have a deep belief that something is fundamentally wrong about civilization and the direction it's going in.
I mean, I could tell you a bit of my intellectual history and stuff.
So, what I'm saying is that this charisma or the passions that are aroused by people who are saying this in an unequivocal way may not just be some psychological manipulation or some personal quality that they have, but it's because they're co-resonating with a liberatory Impulse within people that's valid.
And also, it could be about their rebelling against their father.
Like, that's there too.
Okay, so what I see, the guardrails for that, I totally resonate with what you're saying.
To me, the guardrails for that in investigative journalism is, you're on a team, you're accountable to your editors, and you've got a fact checker, and you're gonna provide two fucking footnotes for every sentence you write.
and then the lawyer's gonna go over it and they're going to hedge wherever they can without destroying the arc of the story.
In science, it seems like there's a lot of procedures that control for the mitigate or that mitigate that kind of charismatic punch where we acknowledge that it's very easy for us to be biased.
It's very easy for us to allow ourselves to, you know, be artistic when we're in the lab.
But that doesn't get us any closer to what the Petri dish is trying to tell us.
And so, you know, it's like...
I guess what I get from your overall arguments is that those things aren't working, like those guardrails aren't working because they can be corporately manipulated or they can be, or institutions can sort of become embedded with ideas about how reality is that just can't be challenged.
But like having worked just a little bit within some journalistic institutions, Nobody has ever told me what to write.
Nobody has ever guided my hand.
Nobody has ever... People have more often than not expressed their own limitations around, okay, well, this is what our publication can do.
This is what we have the resources to cover.
But a lot of what you're doing is not radically disruptive to the status quo.
Yes.
If it were, then you might bump up against those problematic artists.
I don't want to pat myself on the back, but the stuff that I've done with yoga cults is just orders of celebrity different than what happened with Larry Nassar or Harvey Weinstein.
And so those have deep cultural impacts and, you know, Ronan Farrow has to cross his T's and dot his I's and there can't be anything that is, there can't be a single sentence that is misplaced or is opinionated even really.
And so I see it working.
I see the process in many cases working when there is a sense of, Mutual cooperation with regard to truth production, whether it be with, you know, and so I'm not a scientist, but I have the sense that that's happening in science.
And I am a journalist and I know that that's happening, that's happening in journalism.
And so I don't have, I do have civilizational disgust.
And I probably had it, you know, at 17 or earlier, just like you did.
But I don't have this sense that all of the tools that we have are kind of fatally flawed, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, I'm thinking now of one of the most obvious examples of journalistic failure in the last 20 years, which was the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction fiasco.
Right.
Where, you know, if you tried I mean, why was it that almost no journalist, certainly no mainstream journalist, questioned that narrative in a strong way?
Right.
Why?
Like, that's an example of massive failure of the system of journalism.
And was that just an isolated incident, or is that the tip of an iceberg?
Where, yeah, like the ideals of investigative journalism, if it's something that is not deeply disruptive to the status quo, they work.
Harvey Weinstein, you know, if this is about one rotten apple, one bad actor, then like, yeah, like the system doesn't care if Harvey Weinstein goes and some new guy replaces him.
Yeah, except that, well, okay, so this is a longer conversation about how neither journalism nor law is set up to really deal with cults or with networks of abuse, right?
The biases towards the bad apple and sensationalizing the story and not looking at systemic causes And so one of the things that it was so incredible about the Me Too movement was not just the groundswell of confession that was actually a massive amount of emotional labor, but also the fact that
What was implicit was not just that everybody has, so many people have experience with this, but that it's networked and it's systemic, right?
Yeah.
But speaking of the networked and the systemic, we've been at this for a while, and I do not want to miss out on the QAnon essay.
Oh, yes.
Now, okay, so remember I was doing my synopses.
Here's what I think you're saying in your essay called, From QAnon's Dark Mirror, Hope.
QAnon illuminates the darkest repressions of our imaginarium.
It's a traumatized, authoritarian response to a highly controlled and hypocritical ordering of power and wealth in technological corporatism, which seems to steal away childhood and innocence.
It has also shown the terrifying extent to which our social contracts have eroded, but it also provides insight How's that?
to the cultishness of mainstream life, where we sleepwalk away from creativity and peacemaking towards addictive and polarizing consolations.
How's that? - Well, that's very eloquently put, Matthew.
Very nice writing.
Oh, good.
Alright, good.
Is it accurate?
I don't think it's an accurate synopsis, but I think that it is an accurate description of what you see our common ground as being.
Alright, good.
So, but here's where, you introduced the subject a while back, but here's where the
I think the criticism that you face, not just from myself, but from a lot of people in your work, is the throwing up of false equivalencies and the flattening of difference, especially when phenomena are being compared, and that that can, you know, maybe show or reveal a kind of Do you have something to say about that notion of the false equivalency?
around positionality or something like that.
So yeah, do you have something to say about that notion of the false equivalency?
Because in the QAnon essay, you take the very bold step of saying, there is an alt-right cult and then there is a center-left cult of reality and meaning production.
And we have to see beyond both of those.
Yes.
I mean, I think that the center-left cult is, Really left in name only, but more and more certain traditionally left issues are used to brand a new version of corporatism.
Right.
Where, you know, the media celebrates, for example, what's his name?
Lloyd Austin's appointment to Secretary of Defense because he's a black man.
And he's also, you know, on the board of Raytheon.
And, you know, like all these people in the Biden administration, they're diverse, but still... But they're hawks.
Yeah.
Or they're hawks or they're, you know, doing favors for Wall Street, you know, or et cetera, et cetera.
Right.
So so I'm like, is this actually left?
Is this is is what the civil rights movement, the feminist movement is, what they want to achieve is to allow their members to operate the levels of the world destroying machine.
Right.
That's not what Martin Luther King was talking about.
No, no, no.
He was he was We're talking about a much deeper revolution than that.
So this is so as far as like, you know, neutrality and false equivalency goes.
I'm reminded of a South Park episode.
Okay.
Where they're electing the school mascot.
Right.
And the candidates are a giant douche and a turd sandwich.
And passions are running high.
Right.
And I'm like, wow, they predicted the election so many years ago.
Right.
Which actually isn't a very nice thing to say about either the douche in chief or the turd sandwich.
No, actually, like, actually, I don't even like to joke about it because Well, it's good, because South Park can joke about it.
it you can be you can be you can be serious right so anyway um so passions are running high in this election now it may be that the turd sandwich is preferable to the giant douche for for various reasons but if you say okay take a stand charles uh and which do you support the turd sandwich or the giant douche because actually people's lives are at stake here i'm like okay yeah all other things equal maybe i prefer the turd sandwich
but um what is left out of even asking me that question right so Right.
So, you could ask me about, do I support the border wall?
So if that's the only question I'm asked, I'm like, no, I think it's horrendous.
I mean, even for disrupting wildlife corridors, you know, like even on that level, like who's being left out of that?
But really, the question is like border wall or not.
If we don't look at the reasons why immigration is happening, then we're going to have to have some kind of wall, either a literal wall or all kinds of control systems, immigration control systems.
to keep out the immigrants.
Right.
So you rebel against the reductionism of the question, right?
Yes.
And the framing of the debate.
And I'm saying like, what we should be talking about is the neoliberal policies, the austerity, the military imperialism, the support that pervades democratic and republican administrations, the support for regime changes of any Latin American leader the support for regime changes of any Latin American leader who tries to institute land reform, who tries to institute labor reform, who tries to protect the environment.
Right.
You know, we talk about exporting, you know, talk about sweatshops in places with worse environmental protections and shame on them as if they should protect their environment better when we regime change them when they even try, like all of that is left out.
Right.
Right.
And this is just, so I'm offering this.
This isn't like, oh, I'm going to be neutral and not take a position about immigration.
I'm saying that this isn't the conversation that we should be focusing all our energy on, because if this deeper level doesn't stop, then we're always going to have this tension between one group of exploited people and another group of exploited people.
Okay, well, this brings me to, because I totally with everything that you're saying, that there's a superficialization of political theater that allows us to, you know, be really happy when Biden and Kamala Harris, or liberals anyway, to be really happy when they're elected, and to believe that there's going to be some sort of return to sanity when really there's probably going to be business as usual, but it's going to look a little bit more civilized.
It feels to me like you have a method for approaching that reductionism, which is, let's see who's put in opposition and let's try to see beyond that.
And you've got a paragraph here in the QAnon essay that I just want to quote because I think it gets to the point of this false equivalency problem that you get criticized for, and I just wanted to see what your response is.
So you say, you write, for any of this to change, all of, you know, Conflict, conspiratorial thinking, social paranoia in general.
We must be willing to see past the caricatures.
Caricatures are not without truth, but they tend to exaggerate what is superficial and unflattering while ignoring what is beautiful and subtle.
Social media, as described in Netflix's documentary, The Social Dilemma, tends to do the same, chiefly by herding users into reality-proof echo chambers and keeping them on platform by hijacking their limbic systems.
They are part of the apparatus that channels popular rage, a precious resource into populist hate.
I'm with you.
Then you write, QAnon's and Black Lives Matter protesters actually have a lot in common, starting with a profound alienation from mainstream politics and loss of faith in the system.
But having been maneuvered into false opposition, they cancel each other out.
That is why compassion, seeing the human beneath the judgments, categories, and projections is the only way out of the social dilemma.
So I think you know the sentence that I'm focused on, right?
Which is, QAnons and Black Lives Matter protesters actually have a lot in common, starting with a profound alienation from mainstream politics and loss of faith in the system.
But having been maneuvered into false opposition, they cancel each other out.
I'm with you with the alienation, the distrust of institutions.
But like on one hand, we're talking about a, we're talking about an internet generated brain worm that has indoctrinated the most sort of ardent devotees in ways that are like almost irredeemable with regard to the impacts upon their personal lives and families.
It's also not a in real life movement when there are marches and some gatherings and a couple of conventions.
But BLM uses online technology in like a very generative way in the sense that it has completely changed both the online and the on the street discussion around what our police department's actually for and who bears the brunt of carceral violence and what
And so like, I just, I got there and I was like, is your longing for peace stronger than your, like, was it worth making that comparison?
You know, because they seem to be so incredibly different to me.
And then there's also the passive voice.
You say like, you know, they've been maneuvered into false opposition.
And I don't know who's maneuvering.
Like on one hand, they're both active groups, like agented people.
And so anyway, yeah, I got stuck there.
Yeah.
So it's not so much a longing.
Okay.
It's more of a longing for justice here than a longing for peace.
So, you know, when I'm talking about QAnon in this essay, I'm also using that as a signifier for a broad and growing group of dispossessed people who are Who were originally not among the dispossessed.
Right.
I'm talking about- You're talking about the destruction of the white middle class, right?
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
And the mechanisms of their destruction and the economic backdrop of their dispossession is akin to the historical exploitation of Immigrants and people of color and African-Americans especially.
Capitalism needs an underclass.
It needs to keep wages down.
Right.
When it runs out of new markets, it begins to hollow out its own body.
Right.
And so, the same dynamics of exploitation now And the same experience, not the same experience, but a similar experience of dispossession are afflicting these subgroups who are, I guess I can't name a conscious agency that's doing the maneuvering.
It's more of the product of a system.
Yeah, like I was wondering about that passive voice, like because you say, because they're maneuvered into false opposition, they cancel each other out.
And I'm like, that feels like that's happening inside you, the writer.
You know what I mean?
Well, yeah, I mean, maybe, yeah, I mean, this is, it's hard to, I mean, if I wanted to really draw it out, I would say that, Unconscious institutional forces are doing the quote maneuvering It's not it's not like, you know, George Soros and Bill Gates are there saying how do we?
Cancel out popular discontent, right?
From both sides from both sides, right or whatever both sides are right.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I Where was I here?
Right, and so the way that they cancel each other out is through the conversion of popular anger into populist hate, or the channeling of Discontent than revolutionary energy that could go toward changing the system into blaming some other person who's actually a victim of the system.
This is especially obvious.
You're not saying Black Lives Matter does that, do you?
That somehow they've channeled populist hate?
Well, look at at least a very common diagnosis of why people voted for Donald Trump.
On the liberal, in the liberal commentariat, there's a lot of, well, it's racism.
These are racist people and Trump is giving voice to their racism and blowing dog whistles and stuff.
And, and.
Which is true.
I mean, it's true.
It may not be all the only reason they're voting for it.
Right.
Right.
It's not the only reason.
I mean, it's, it's there.
I mean, there's definitely racism in America.
Absolutely.
That's, you know, um, I'm glad we don't have to debate that.
No, not at all.
Right.
And he's flagged Wave for it.
He dog whistled it the whole time.
Right.
Okay.
But then why are, like, but if you take it a level deeper, well, where does this racism come from?
Why did so many people who voted for Obama then turn around and vote for Donald Trump?
Is it that they suddenly became racist?
Like that, there's a lot left out of that picture.
And what is left out is the very thing that can unite people in, like, even where does racism come from?
You know, why do people displace their anger onto another set of victims?
Like, these are the questions we have to look at if we're ever going to have healing that doesn't involve finally silencing and shutting down and suppressing and dominating those who have Racist attitudes.
So this is in the interest of justice.
It's not to say, oh, give them a free pass and be indulgent and tolerant.
It's to say, where is this really coming from?
What is the real cause of this?
Because then, once we don't have these hate-generating filters applied on both sides, There's a possibility of a real populist movement, and it's gonna take a real populist movement to undo our current economic unequal system.
Right.
Okay, well, let's put it, I mean, maybe we can come back to putting a pin, I guess, in whether or not, as a political movement, Black Lives Matter is contributing to Populist hate or rather that their politics are sort of like, or their actions are negatively impacting the perceptions of liberal voters or something like that.
I mean, because I guess, like I'm not gonna buy off on like the political movement I know from here in Toronto as well is it's naming the things, the causes of racism that you're talking about.
That's what it's doing.
I think Black Lives Matter is doing, yeah, I think Black Lives Matter is doing a lot of really good work.
So I'm not like anti-Black Lives Matter, but I do see a danger as it, a danger of it conforming to the template of Black Lives Matter.
Set up enemies and take them down.
Yeah.
I just, I, I, yeah.
I mean, I, I guess we can, we can agree to disagree there because like I, what I get is, is a political movement that's found a language to say, Oh, Hey, a white guy, can you look at this and your participation in this and how you benefit from this a little bit more closely?
And that's pretty much all I've, all I've gotten from it.
I think that, I think that, I think that's true too.
Like I, I, I definitely see that.
Yeah.
And this is the basic, the deeper principle of healing that I don't think I had in that essay so much, but it's that the stories have to be surfaced.
The invisible has to be seen.
And I think that like one thing that Black Lives Matter has done and can do even more and is to Bring the experience of African Americans into visibility.
Because- Well, for us, for us, I mean, it's visible for them, but it's visible for us.
It's like the broader social visibility, because a lot of the, like say on the right, a lot of the prejudices and racist tropes about, you know, welfare moms and black people being lazy or whatever, those come from not actually seeing Not hearing the stories.
Oh, of course, of course.
They're horrible, right.
Yeah, it's a lack of information.
It's not the personal evil.
Right, it's also a complete displacement of shame coming from, you know, middle and lower class whites who have been taught to just displace what they can't stand about themselves or to find it outside and yeah, it's garbage.
Yeah, that is a whole other conversation.
Well, you know, I said, I think 15 minutes ago, we've spent a lot of time, but there's one last thing.
Do you have time for one more thing?
Sure.
Okay.
Thanks for your time, by the way, Charles.
This has been really productive, I think.
And the last thing that I wanted to ask you about was, you wrote an essay called Numb that was By a girl here in Toronto, actually, who goes to Etobicoke School of the Arts.
Her name is Liv McNeil.
So this was a film that I'd seen before.
And I hadn't seen that you'd written the article until I went to your page.
One thing that I wanted to ask you about was, well, in this film, it's a three minute gorgeous, beautiful art film about the feeling of isolation during COVID as it's experienced by teenagers.
Now, you use the film to talk about how children are suffering from COVID.
And what I don't get from your essay is a sense of, and maybe you might say something about your own children or children that you know as well, I don't get a sense in your writing of people being able to adapt to these difficult situations and to, you know, see that a light at the end of the tunnel is coming.
You know, in the essay you say that, you basically say that, look at this tragic portrayal of her experience and you basically argue for Mitigating it, or perhaps stopping it.
The question that you're asking is, how much are we losing by taking this suppressive approach to COVID?
But like, with two kids myself, it's been shit.
Like, I've hated it.
I've hated everything that we have had to do, and yet they've still shined in their way.
And I see this girl doing it as well, and I'm just wondering if you're not seeing that.
Yeah.
I mean, I think we are.
Yeah, I mean, I am seeing the beauty and creativity and power of human adaptivity in this.
Really, the purpose of that essay is, and I had this a bit in The Coronation, I think, also, Like, when we guide policy on epidemiological statistics.
Or on any set of statistics, actually.
I mean, this is a more general criticism of metrics-based policymaking.
What are we leaving out of our metrics that are actually important?
What values are we emphasizing as a matter of public policy simply because they are easier to measure?
Or simply because we choose to measure those things because those measurements reflect values that may actually, like where, like why do we, Emphasize those values and not other values.
And so the point of that essay is saying, what about the value of sociality?
What about the value of babies seeing expressions of human faces?
What about the value of singing together?
And yeah, you could say, well, this is just temporary and we're going to go back.
But do you ever, Charles, do you ever hear anybody say that they don't mind it?
Isn't it implicit in people's responses to the public health measures that, wow, this sucks, and I don't like this, and it's gonna be really... I don't see anybody... There's this phrase that Kelly Brogan uses, submission signaling, that that's what wearing the mask is about, and I'm like, Who are we talking about here?
Who conforms to these difficult restrictions with a sense of like, well, this is what we're doing now.
And it's hard and everybody knows it's hard.
And so, aren't we already making that value judgment?
Aren't we already saying that, yeah, we're gonna cover up our faces, but it's because we don't want old people to die.
Yeah, and certainly, you know, we don't want old people to die is... Or immunocompromised people or, you know, people who... I mean, young people are dying too.
Or young people are transmitting it.
Right.
No, I think that...
Most of what people are doing is not out of personal fear for themselves.
I think it's out of compassion.
Yeah.
And a lot of it also, but a lot of that compassion is coming from a buy-in to the way that the situation is narrated to them.
And coming from an internalization of a certain calculus of social values that leaves important things out.
So, for example, to look at lockdown, quarantine, masking, distancing, suppose the mRNA vaccines actually are safe and effective and life can go back To pre-COVID normal.
Well, what if the infections and deaths go down by 75%?
Then you still could save those other 25% of the people, maybe, by continuing this way of life forever.
You know, I have heard projections.
Yeah, that's a very difficult, ethical question, but I have heard projections that it's not like we're gonna know that the MNRA vaccine is gonna provide enough protection that we can stop doing some distancing measures or masks in closed spaces and stuff like that, yeah.
It's a matter of relative values and one of the points I made in the coronation is that because of the deep mythology of the separate self, our society makes life extension and death prevention and risk minimization into a much higher priority than any society ever has.
And when you make that argument, and when other people make the argument, I think often it comes along with a sense of, well, and this means that our babies aren't gonna see human faces or something like that, or it means that our kids aren't gonna figure out a way to play together.
And there's this totality that's kind of paranoid to me in those statements, because the masks come off when people go into their homes and the babies have their parents' faces faces just as they did before.
So they get to see the faces of a few people.
Right.
Okay.
So that's not, that's not, that's not ideal.
It's not black and white.
It's not, you know, yeah.
And I think that it's important to acknowledge like the shades of gray, the complexity of this, because otherwise people do get into like these, these extreme, distilled, you know, you know, apoplectic versions of what's happening and what could happen that lead to, it makes communication impossible.
Right, right.
Yeah, nowhere is that happening more clearly than in your poor country, actually.
It's really difficult to be up here and to watch how But that said, I think that the value of seeing faces, the value of singing together, the value of summer camp.
My teenager's summer camp looks like it's canceled forever now.
They couldn't hold it together for another year.
Because they ran out of money?
I think so, yeah.
So he went bankrupt, right.
Yeah, I mean they could sustain one year, but now it looks like they're not going to be able to do it next year either, you know, just to get everything prepared in time.
And the executive director quit, and this person quit, you know, and it's like...
I just want to put other values that tend to get neglected in this environment back into visibility.
Right.
But you would, naturally anyway, wouldn't you?
I mean, so the summer camp has intense financial pressures.
It doesn't know when, you know, for your area or for its constituency, when the vaccine is going to be rolled out or how effective it's going to be.
And so there's a question of like, are these camp houses or the tents, are these going to be safe?
And we're not going to be able to answer that question for 2021.
And so we've got to put it off.
They run up, but, but the values that everybody has for going to camp, they're not going to go anywhere, right?
Like you're going to even more probably in a more with even more yearning, you're going to figure out how to give your, give your kids, give your kids outdoor experiences that are safe, but also capture some of the, I guess I don't know what the problem is and whose values are being lost.
Basically, the problem is that the reasons that we have right now for not having summer camp anymore may never go away.
And also, the trend toward social distancing and isolation and the migration of life online, this did not start with COVID-19.
Right, no, it's been intensified by it, right.
Yeah, it has been intensified by it.
So the necessity to bring out these values is also intensified at this time.
I see what you're saying.
I've been talking about this stuff for a long time.
You know, like the decline of childhood play, for example.
And this is part of my book on economics.
conversion of functions of life that were part of gift culture, part of the commons, into services.
Like, this is part of it.
Like, to have a conversation now, you have to engage technology.
Right.
So anyway, this is... But to be fair, I mean, we live thousands of miles away, so I mean, that's like, we wouldn't engage the conversation if you're talking about us right now, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Well, I do hope, I hope that you're able to, yeah, when you say the conditions for summer camp might be, you know, inimical for continuing at all, I really hear that.
And it's not that different from the reality checking of Climate collapse either though, right?
It's like the conditions for us being able to sustain, you know, a two car family or, you know, um, do you know what I mean?
It's like, there are, there are material realities, uh, that are existential in scope that are, that are challenging our, that are challenging our values from all, from all sides.
Right.
And it's, but right.
So what I'm saying is that, is that, Okay, so like if this were the bubonic plague, and 50% of the people were dying, no one would have any problem with any of this.
If it were one person might die if we don't shut down all society, then I don't think anyone would say that we should do that.
But don't you have compassion for that one person?
And why not?
Why shouldn't you shut down all society if it would save just one precious life?
Sure, sure.
Okay, so here are the two extremes.
Yeah, I don't know, but between two extremes, we've got the reality of like almost 3000 people a day dying in the States, which is extraordinary.
And it's because I mean, part of it, part of part of part of me believes that it's because The philosophizing and the cultural warriorship over the issue has been so much louder than everywhere else in the world, right?
And so it's been harder for people to talk about it.
I mean, this would open up a whole other conversation.
anomalies and unexplainable data points in the entire COVID phenomenon that, again, like, as you say, I'm not, you know, a trained epidemiologist or virologist.
All I can note is things that don't fit what I've been told.
Especially people who I know from so-called third-world countries, you know, where they're like, ah, we're not wearing masks here, you know, we're not, we're, you know.
And their COVID rates are way lower.
Like, what's going on there?
There's so many things that we don't understand about it.
And so that uncertainty, you know, plus, like, these values that I hold dear, that I'd be, like, personally, I'd be willing to have a bigger risk of premature death, to a certain point.
I wouldn't be willing to take a 50% risk.
I'd be willing to take a 1% risk.
And then as a social decision, like, you know, where do we stand on that continuum?
And what the coronation is really about is, or one thing it's about is what Unconscious assumptions and values are feeding our collective decision to lock down at 3,000 deaths a day, but not 300.
a day, but not 300. - Right. - Or not, or you know, 30,000.
Like this is like, It's not a black and white thing.
No, it's not.
But you have seen, and I could just speak from the point of view of Ontario, you have seen the variability of lockdown measures applied exactly to those metrics, right?
It's like our cases are going up, hospitalizations are going to go up, we're going to tamp down on activities.
So there is a dynamic at play that involves political and ethical considerations.
It's already happening.
I guess, yeah.
It can't hurt, though, to put the values on display and to talk about them openly and transparently.
All right.
Thank you, Charles.
We might have to break this up into two episodes.
We'll see.
I don't know.
But thank you so much for your time.
Yeah.
I just want to say I really appreciate your sincerity and your willingness to engage in a fair and sincere way.
Yeah, I mean, and likewise, likewise.
And it also marks a turning point for me, too, I think, personally, because I have, you know, I am, in my own way, very interested in depolarization because things are just very chaotic and dangerous.
And I think if modeling good exchanges is productive, then that's really good.
Right at the start of this, of the second half, there's a moment that I have labeled in my notes as the lone thinker without guardrails.
And Derek, I was really curious to hear your reflections on this because, you know, Matthew asks, and he coins this great term, he asks Charles about the terrible freedom of having no editor, no fact checker, no one demanding accuracy or research.
And his response is, I can never be entirely 100% certain about anything.
Does that mean I never say anything that might cause someone to make a bad decision?
I started my writing career at college, but then as a stringer for some newspapers in New Jersey, the Star-Ledger and the Home News Tribune.
And then I would go into the office after reporting the story and write it.
And what came out afterward in the paper the next day was my words, but dramatically different.
Because they were professional writers.
I was 19, 20, just starting out.
And then being a writer, this kept happening.
And then when I became a magazine editor, I was amazed at how open some writers were to my edits.
And yet some writers, if I changed one word, they freaked out.
And there are many reasons that you do this as an editor.
I mean, stylistically and also factually.
But what we have today is much different.
And this is why I always differentiate between bloggers and writers, because they're very different.
Or at least bloggers and reporters are very different things.
You need a team, as Matthew referenced in the interview, you need a team of people to fur those guardrails.
And when one of the most frustrating aspects of, you know, I have editors at some of my publications, but some of my writing is don't, and I really dislike it.
Like I want that feedback.
I want someone to reflect it back at me.
So that was one thing that jumps out.
When he says that because it's just like anything in life.
You need those mirror neurons reflecting back at you when someone looks you in the eyes and tells you, you know, that's kind of crazy or maybe you should rethink that.
And when you don't have that, it's only you in your head and then maybe you get the feedback of people that you trust because you only ask people who aren't going to push you too hard on it.
And it's one of the saddest parts of where writing is, I believe, today.
Yeah, I thought it was a really good line that you were taking, Matthew.
I mean, this leads me into this.
You're asking him in this little section about considering, in a way, his positionality, right?
The limits of his scope or perspective or expertise.
And you reference his utopian longing for peace.
You say, Matthew, it seems to boil down to, can't we just get along?
You seem to have an intimate grasp of the psychological issues at play within yourself, perhaps within your circle of relations, and that's where the heart is.
And you use that to look out into the world and see what you don't like happening and try to visualize what you would like to happen.
And then he says something really interesting about, I think that reading what I write about COVID is going to help people to evaluate all of the kinds of information they're getting in a different way.
What the public health authorities are saying about it is grounded in these unconscious paradigms, these myths, that aren't the only way to see things.
I just found this set of transitions really interesting.
What were your thoughts on it, Matthew?
I think it's pretty self-evident, and I think it ties back to Um, something that Derek said about this, these sort of two categories of writers that he would encounter as a magazine editor, because I've been both of those writers.
I started by writing books of poetry, I published two novels, and I remember with my, the manuscript of my first novel, sitting at the kitchen table of my publisher editor in Toronto, Four days in person, arguing and chain smoking and drinking coffee after coffee, arguing over every sentence.
And it was this, and it was, I did not put that book into his hands.
I don't know why he put up with it.
His name is Mike O'Connor, Insomniac Press.
Hi, Mike.
Long time, no see.
But he, Yeah, but the feeling of this other guy over my sheaf of paper making marks was like being tattooed or something like that.
It was this embodied invasive experience and there was something so very precious about everything that was internal to me that was represented by those marks on the page.
And so the question that I needed my editor to ask was, is this going to be true to me?
And he was asking, is anybody going to understand what the fuck you're talking about?
And those are two very basic questions.
And if he had asked me them so explicitly, I would have said, no, I don't actually care if people understand what I'm talking about.
I literally would have answered him that way as a 22-year-old, 24-year-old, something like that.
Now, totally different.
Completely, utterly different.
I have no interest whatsoever in baffling anybody or in being precious about personal internal meanings.
But you're asking me, like, you know, where I mean, that's like a core question of positionality.
Regardless of identity, are you as a writer, are you taking dictation from your higher self and therefore it can't be touched?
Or are you considering data And trying to organize it in a way, in a novel way, that perhaps sheds some new light on something, but it has to conform to consensus realities of discourse.
Those are two very, very different positions, and I think they probably even precede the positions of identity, really, because they're just kind of raw internal attitudes, and kind of like, yeah, just attitudes towards other people, really.
Absolutely, and I think, you know, we can talk about it in terms of guardrails and checks and balances and, you know, the process that you go through of refining.
I think there's also something there that has to do with initiation and paying your dues and actually going through a process of learning to be a more responsible, mature thinker and writer that, you know, unless you have people who initiate you into that and hold you to that account and put you through that ordeal, you're not going to do it.
I had a really, I think I haven't thought about this yet until this moment, but I think the turning point for me with that was moving into a kind of reporting that was very personal because it was related to my own cult experience, but it had to do with writing a bunch of very frantic articles for Elephant Journal as soon as I found out that Ian Thorson had died because Michael Roach had thrown him out.
And those articles are like They, you know, there were errors in them that I had to correct, there's all kinds of editorializing, you know, they got a lot of traction and people were very grateful that I was saying some things out loud, but I was really crossing over a threshold from an internal space into a space of, like, public responsibility and it was really, really messy.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the important thing here I wanted to come back to as well is that, you know, when he says this, I think that reading what I write about COVID is going to help them to evaluate all the other things they're hearing.
This is in response to you noting that we live in a time where a lot of people might read him More about COVID than they would read communication from public health officials.
Oh, right, which is incredible to think about, actually.
That's one thing that jumped out at me in the line of thought he was taking about that.
But it speaks to a bigger problem.
I don't think it was on Charles.
I think it's about the readers looking to him for that advice, is that people don't know where to find information.
And so when he says, Later on when you're talking about like, I know you're getting into this, but how do you know the question of how do you know there are places I think of, for example, when he when he pushes Matthew about the vaccine question, go to ProPublica.
They are one of the best, listen to their mission statement, to expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing.
They're still... Yeah, yeah, how do we know they're not propagandizing there, Derek, right?
They are a newsroom of over 100 investigative journalists.
They'll spend a year or two on a story and they are mostly publicly funded by donations and then some private money coming in, but they disclose everything every year.
And so there are places that you can look.
The problem is we don't have the right places that people aren't empowered to know where to look.
Well, let me say this, you know, as a quick commentary.
To me, a lot of this, especially in the last chunk I quoted from him, it's a reiteration of the bad reading of postmodernism as it applies to how you attain knowledge, right?
He says public health authorities, which is an interesting choice of words, according to him, are not communicating the best information.
I'm sort of paraphrasing and extrapolating.
Based on current epidemiology and current medical research, they are imparting an unconscious paradigm, is literally what he says, which seems like it's rooted in the false and narrow-minded pride of Western materialist science.
Journalists are not telling us the facts as best they can be ascertained using investigative journalism and consulting with experts, no.
According to Charles, they're reiterating narratives embedded in metaphysics, wrapped up in a myth of a separate self that is hypnotized by the unwarranted fear of death.
Now, I'm being poetic there, but I think that's a fair representation of things he says.
And then, Matthew, you hold his feet to the fire about endorsing Bush and Kennedy and Northrop, which he kind of contests a little.
I'm not sure where you landed on that.
But you talk about how boring real public health communications are.
And how he, Charles, seems to fall into the trap of amplifying the voices that are contrarian and transgressive.
And he has this moment where he says whether they are right or wrong, people who say the defiant thing are still brave.
Yeah, I mean... And that's the moment where your Canadian politeness cracks, right?
You can't help the laugh that you utter in that moment.
Oh yeah, the laugh is fantastic.
And then you give the barbecue example, which seems to go right over his head.
Well, you know, I mean, whether they are, it's such a complex statement, whether they are right or wrong, people who say the defiant thing are brave.
I mean, if I laughed, I think, I'm trying to understand that statement, but it's also, it's exasperating.
You laughed because leading into that, you were saying how public health official statements are boring as hell, and then there were these people who are saying the provocative thing, and Charles, you fall into this trap too, where you seem to want to say the provocative thing or support the people who are defying the status quo, right?
There's also a part of me laughing there that is identifying with the terrible freedom that I describe the sort of independent writer having, which sort of demands that visibility is predicated upon Transgression.
Coming up with something new.
I mean, and this has only become more accelerated and more sensationalized in the social media era of hot takes where it's like, you know, if you're a content producer, your value is really It settles upon how many bright or interesting or sort of off-kilter things you can produce, you can put out into the environment.
And so there's a way in which he's actually accurately capturing the media context.
Whether people are right or wrong, people who say the defiant thing are Brave in the sense that they're taking a risk upon their own oblivion.
They're taking a risk in order to be visible.
Yeah, for clicks.
Right, right.
And to what?
What did you say?
For clicks.
Yeah, for clicks.
But also, I mean, not to, as a writer, feel as though you are disappearing.
Right?
Into the overwhelming waves of data that are just impossible to process.
Or into less sensationalized kind of ways of talking about things that are perhaps boring or confusing or that we know some things about and we don't know other things about, right?
Or that don't have satisfying conclusions.
Or that don't fit an actual narrative that you're framing in which you get to be the heroic figure.
I want to say something in regards to the boring aspect, though.
Julian, you had marked one of Charles' statements when he says, what are we leaving out?
What values are we emphasizing when we let metrics drive policies instead of emphasize the values of letting babies see faces or getting together singing?
This is one of the hardest things to understand and it's really why humans are not built for globalization as we have constructed it or for social media to be honest.
Right.
Because if you are one of those million people who are injured by a vaccine and a real injury, which do happen, If you're one of those people, your child, say, is hurt by that, then your entire reality is now constructed through the lens of, I have a vaccine-injured child, and it's a real pain that you have to contend with.
You will not understand that that is part of the sacrifice that the other one million minus one people are benefiting from.
And so we don't think in statistical terms.
And it's really hard to grapple with that because we take everything personally.
And there are, as we've always said, there are forces that are trying to monetize everything about us that we have to contend and grapple with as a society.
There is definitely shady business practices in the pharmaceutical industries, but it's very hard not to take everything so personally and understanding that there are many biological forces for something like that to happen.
But at the end of the day, most people are not and we just are not built for statistical analysis.
And to not take it personally in a really depersonalized world, because what's jumping out at me about the one in a million is that while that terrible event would focus the issue into very personal terms for the person, they're not within the sort of
You know, community number or scope or scale of society that would allow their individual story to be made meaningful within a smaller circle.
I'm thinking about what's the number of relations?
Some neuropsychiatrist or neuropsychologist figured it out that 150.
It's Robert Dunbar, he's an anthropologist.
Yeah, Dunbar's number, right.
So if the, you know, your invocation of the notion of sacrifice, Derek, is really poignant because if it's one in a million and you don't know who the other million are, sacrifice could
Couldn't possibly be meaningful, but if we're talking about, you know, an interconnected society in which it's understood as a social contract before going into something like mass vaccination that there will be some people who will be injured and, you know, we don't know who it's going to be and this is what we, this is what we, our higher values are, that's a lot easier to process.
It's a lot more personalized.
And it's also the result of being in an individualist society because what jumped out when you said is thinking about World War II and the suicide bombers or people you know in Islam who are so fanatical and they believe that they're going somewhere else that they'll take the hit for what they believe is the greater good and we just are not built that way in America specifically.
I think it's also important just to, just to add in here and we'll see what you guys think about this is that, you know, the one in a million, it's like one in a million might have a severe adverse reaction.
It's not that one in a million with vaccines, you know, ends up with a lifelong condition or dies or, you know, so, so even, you know, I think there'll be a lot of people listening going, well, gee, if it's one in a million that I have to sacrifice my kid on the altar of the collective good, I'm not signing up for that.
It's, it's not, It's not even really that, right?
It's that one in a million might have a severe allergic reaction and there isn't much else that's really been linked to vaccines in a causal way.
Let's move on because we're running out of time here.
And I wanted to just say, on this topic of journalism, and I'll just paraphrase this a little bit.
Charles comes back at you, Matthew, about how you talk about real journalism and what that process is like.
And he says, well, yeah, that's fine.
And you say, I've never felt censored or shut up at any of the organizations that I've published.
And he says, well, that's because you're not really challenging the status quo.
And you come back, well, yeah, actually, I write about cults.
I expose cults.
And then you come back, what about Ronan Farrow writing about Harvey Weinstein and the process that that had to go through in terms of a journalistic expose like that?
And I just thought that whole section was really fascinating, too, because it really does seem to me that he doesn't know a great deal about how journalism functions and what happens when people really do break big stories.
quote unquote buck the status quo.
I suppose it could be, things could be filed in terms of, you know, well Ronan Farrow was allowed to decapitate Harvey Weinstein as a kind of offering to liberal left or something like that.
But if Ronan Farrow wanted to write an article about Hunter Biden or about, exactly, or about, you know, or skullduggery at Harper's Bazaar or at New York Magazine or something like that, that that wouldn't be allowed.
And so I don't know how anybody wins that argument.
And, you know, I think the truth is about being a freelancer is that nobody has dictated what I am going to write about because I get my contracts on the basis of the strength of the pitch.
And so, it's like, if the editor is interested, then we go forward and maybe there are some changes that are made or an angle that's further developed.
But I suppose somebody could always say that I'm pitching an unchallenging story, and I don't really know how to face that down, really.
There's a moment here that was very confusing to me.
He correctly assesses corporate hawkish Democrats as not really being on the left.
And you were agreeing with him there, Matthew.
But then he does this sort of political non sequitur where he starts talking about the false equivalency that we sort of find in a lot of places in his writing.
And so here he references the South Park example of the giant douche versus the turd sandwich.
And he's using this as a sort of a metaphor for the, as South Park was, whatever election they were talking about at the time, that the choice in this case between Trump and Biden was like a choice between the giant douche and the turd sandwich.
So that they're really very much the same and Biden is not really very, very much better than Trump.
And he does these moments where he talks about South American farmers and Asian sweatshop workers, where you think he's about to say, what about giving the real left a strong voice?
But then where he goes with it is into talking about how we need to understand QAnon better.
That's what's missing.
What's missing is the conspiracy theories.
I think the thing about the South Park example is I end up thinking a lot about South Park instead of thinking about the substantive differences between Trump and Biden.
Yeah, and so the focus of his writing is not some sort of left-wing progressive.
Maybe in the past he's done more of this, but instead I see him elevating conspiracy nonsense into being some kind of nuanced mythology, amplifying anti-vax and COVID denialist voices, And falling in love with every false equivalency that winks at him and invites him to share a stage with Mickey Willis, Del Bigtree, Sasha Stone, and whomever else is wrong but brave and defiant.
Now, one thing that I want to make sure I read is that Charles was very interested to make sure that he was not misunderstood about his comments about BLM, and so he sent this follow-up statement after we communicated by email.
So he wrote, BLM is a hateful movement, but to warn of the dangers of letting hate hijack anger.
Overall, I believe BLM has been one of the bright spots of the last few years, along with Me Too, a surfacing of stories that need to be heard if compassion is to have accurate bearings.
It has raised awareness of the present legacy of racism and brought new urgency to the need to repair it.
Okay, and that's in relation to some of the things he said that he was concerned might be Misconstrued or inflammatory in some way?
Right, like I had questions about whether or not he was saying, and this is in the essay I think, the last essay that he was suggesting, that by comparing, there's a sentence in there where he compares BLM with QAnon, and I think I asked him directly about that in the interview, so you can go back and listen to that.
Well, that was to me the one sentence that jumped out of the entire essay as in poor taste in terms of not understanding the cultural temperature or having an understanding of what BLM was saying.
But I will say that I am very happy to hear that follow up and to think about that topic and put it forward in that way.
It is what we need.
I don't want to belabor a point or rip apart too much that because if you're making progress on the topic and hopefully with the understanding that the people with skin in the game on that topic have a lot to say about it, then I think that's a positive move forward.
During the slowed down grief of doing home hospice care, I've had a really good opportunity to make an accounting of my hours and days.
I don't know.
I'm betting it's kind of hard to avoid that listening to a person breathe on the bed they'll never get up from, one can't help but to meditate on the question of what's important given how quickly time passes.
Time has always passed quickly, but I think a lot of us feel that these days we've contrived an acceleration, as if the pedal is on the floor all the time and we're heading straight for a cliff.
So, from a meta view and at a meta pace, here are a few questions and thoughts that have come up for me.
And I look at this as partly a six-month review of my work on Conspirituality Podcast, and partly a New Year's resolution.
So the three of us have often remarked on how the work in this subject area will be endless.
There's just no way we can even look at everything our listeners send our way.
We're constantly triaging subjects and stories according to what seems to be important, developing, impactful.
I think we have some feel for this, but there's also sometimes a crapshoot vibe.
Throughout, I think this has brought up some essential questions for all of us about sustainability, relevance, impact, and service.
How does a person decide what is important?
At the beginning of the Trump presidency, my basic premonition was that, policy aside, we were embarking on a psychological war of attrition, that the daily absurd disruptions would be ongoing, impossible to counter, let alone process.
I remember a ton of women on my social media feeds commenting very early on that it was like living with an abusive or alcoholic father.
Now this resonated with me as a cult survivor.
And of course the chaos has only escalated and no number of investigative or think pieces have slowed it down.
The good reporting, and there's been a lot of it.
It's really functioned to make those who pay attention to it more aware of abject cruelty, and to sometimes feel more paralyzed, I think.
So, here we are, the podcast, breathlessly covering very powerful viral storms, trying to do the best we can in a very small sector of the online world.
I think all three of us in our way are tired out or have been at certain times.
And while we're totally encouraged and buoyed up by the support we receive, it's really hard to assess whether we're moving any particular needle.
I remember when I did that interview with Steve Hassan and I asked him how he stayed the course, now 40 years into doing the work he does, given that the influence of cults is so much more powerful than the influence of cultic studies.
And of course that influence is now metastasizing.
He gave a kind of Bhagavad Gita answer, that you don't do this work because you're confident of winning, but because you're paying a debt to existence itself, and because it's just the best way to spend your time.
So, in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna's argument eventually persuades Arjuna to dive into battle.
And he performs nobly.
But if you read through to the end of the Mahabharata, you know that that war came to nothing, that Arjuna lost everything in the end, so did his brothers, and that no one won anything.
Now perhaps from God's point of view, that's all well and good.
I think that the main problem with the sustainability question is that we're talking about online work.
Conspirituality has really emerged in the age of influence, and it lives on this online frictionless virality.
Without the internet, conspirituality is just ashrams and obscure spirituality cults fucking people up in loosely connected but geographically boundary locations.
What the internet has done is that it's allowed the New Age world to connect and monetize and cross-promote far more efficiently by several orders of magnitude.
But along with creating new consumer markets, it's also created new markets of vulnerability to indoctrination.
It really used to be that you had to be more of a wanderer to be vulnerable to cults.
But the conspirituality to QAnon online pipeline has really shown us that effective indoctrination can red pill even slightly depressed but otherwise well-adjusted soccer moms.
And it can do it really quickly.
Social media has given charismatics an intoxicating vision of limitless reach.
And so it wasn't just that the aspirational language of the new age and wellness was a veil over its hollowness.
It has also blended seamlessly with the aspirations of the technology itself, to reach everyone, all the time, without barrier, and to promise the world and beyond.
And, the more it fails, the louder it becomes.
It seems like the online world is the very definition of unsustainable, because it thrives on spinning the wheels of endless emotional and relational provocation, the vast majority of which doesn't do anything or go anywhere.
It deludes people.
It destroys sleep.
It opens up strange, dissociative gaps in households.
It governs transitions between activities to provide the illusion of never-ending immersion in a world that's not quite there.
So I'm a little embarrassed to admit that it took a death in the family to feel what is actually here.
I mean, I'm not vacant with my kids or my partner for the most part, but still, amidst the rush of work, it often feels like I'm communicating with them across some kind of roaring river.
Ironically, I use Twitter and Instagram to post about the slow work zone of hospice and how it might temper the giddy rush of online conspirituality, where, kind of like as we see in video games or on Netflix, we can consume the idea of illness and death without really feeling it.
So here's the resolution part.
Going forward, I want to try to strategically split my brain.
To understand, on one hand, that online conspirituality is ephemeral.
It's designed to proliferate, multiply itself, overflow, overwhelm, to pivot and dodge.
There will be no holding J.P.
Sears to account because online, he doesn't really need to exist.
So, in that first-order online impact, conspirituality only really monetizes attention and emotional manipulation, but then also it is real in a second-order sense, because it does encourage people to refuse to wear masks, to get tested, or to be vaccinated.
It's in this second-order space that I want to spend more time and effort.
But I've got to figure out where it is.
Some of the most moving moments of this hospice event for me were watching and helping the personal care workers with washing, changing, and turning.
Here in Ontario, our basic provincial socialized medicine provided for something like 40 hours per week of personal care work.
And we are privileged enough to be able to afford the extra money it took to have overnight help for several of those nights.
Now, of course, all of these women who came had mobile phones so that they could coordinate appointments and keep in touch with family and call for their rides when they needed them.
Now the middle-aged woman who stayed overnight also would use her phone for a little bit of entertainment throughout the long hours of sleeping.
But as soon as they heard the breath changing or any expression of pain, the phone was away.
They were instantly on their feet with washcloths or pillows or in the end that little blue sponge on a stick for wetting the lips.
There's a slow and steady urgency to that job that pushes back, I could see it in real time, against any tendency to dissociate, to take pleasure in a kind of apathy.
So, I really aspire to that.
The capacity to switch gears away from the online haze as though snapping out of a daydream.
Of course, parenting should be like this, and gardening, and community organizing.
I'm currently trying to find out if the City of Toronto is organizing or will organize some kind of door-to-door or phone bank campaign to promote vaccine awareness and uptake.
I think it would be so good to knock on doors.
We could stand safely in the thresholds and communicate clarity and friendship through those masks.
And unlike the online conspiritualist, I would really be standing somewhere.
In a place.
The last thing I'll say is that almost every dusk during those ten days, I was able to go for a walk in my childhood neighborhood.
There's a route that leads through the local cemetery, and I liked standing there in the fading light and looking out over the hundreds of stones and imagining each deathbed scene, each deathbed tableau.
Now there's a lot of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants buried in the most recent generations, and I also enjoyed trying to imagine what the Cyrillic letters sounded out as.
There were some very devoted family members who would come to light votive candles every few days, and so as the sky darkened, the flames glowed brighter.
Going back in the timeline of the cemetery, the names are English, Scottish, Irish.
The whole scene was very comforting.
Except for the numbers.
Because there was just way too many men dying at age 51, 61, 64, 67.
Some women too, but way more men in my unscientific survey.
Maybe that was just what I was looking for.
But I'm like 12 years off of 61.
So part of standing there really drove home the absurdity of talking about an online wellness space confounded by aspirational marketing and supplement schemes.
So I'd like to pitch an idea to any app developers who are listening.
This would be a very simple screen time recorder that every day shows you your screen usage, but it brings it up on a tombstone design of your choice.
So you could like curate your own tombstone kind of thing.
And the engraving could list your name, your birth date, your place of birth maybe, and then the number of hours you've been alive.
And then, after a tally of daily screen time, the accumulated lifetime screen time right under your total hours lived, so that you could compare those two numbers.
This idea is totally free.
Just please make it.
go for it and to be honest I think these are banal observations happens.
That conspirituality is online, while spirituality is under one's feet.
But for me, this isn't always easy to remember.
So, as the new year approaches, I'm really grateful to life, but also to death, that in some ways, clarity is always on offer.
Thanks for listening and for supporting us through this year.
