Two episodes in our catalog haunt this podcast. In episode 6, Steve Hassan advised listeners to treat people under the undue influence of QAnon and conspirituality with welcome and respect. Castigation won’t work. Shame will make things worse. He told this story about how his elderly neighbor brought him homemade cookies when he finally returned home after years in the cult of Rev. Moon. No questions asked—just cookies.But in episode 10, Imran Ahmed pointed out that any engagement of disinformation peddlers is actually a win for them because it boosts their visibility. His strategy—and he has the data to prove it works—is to block, isolate, and clear the public space for content that is actually helpful. Where Hassan offers an open hand, Ahmed says, “Talk to the hand.”We’re nine months on from those interviews. Are we living up to either of them? Are we isolating and deplatforming propagandists? Are we adding good vibes to the scene and leaving the door open for earnest people to be forgiven? Or does the frustration of the content trend us towards cynicism and snark? A recent Instagram thread by dedicated listeners really brought the point home for discussion.In the Ticker, we cover the whitewashing of global cuisine by wellness influencers, bauhauswife’s upleveling of COVID denialism with yellow journalism, and Target-store QAnon vandal Melissa Lively trying to make amends-with-benefits for past outbursts. In the Jab, Julian looks at the facts around the PCR test. (Hint: it works.)Show NotesLost in the BrineA Death in Yolande Norris-Clarke’s Free Birth WorldKelly Brogan ditches her psychiatry cred with COVID-denialismWho wants to eat magic dirt from a COVID minimizer?Melissa Lively un-cancels herself from QAnonBauhauswife free births the news in Canada, from Costa Rica (video)Bauhauswife free births the news in Canada, from Costa Rica
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You can stay up to date with us on all of our social media channels including Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Clubhouse, where every Sunday at 1pm Pacific I hold an open forum about every week's episode as well as patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality where for as little as five dollars a month you can access our monday bonus episodes as well as our special weekend content episode 41 snark tank two episodes in our
catalog haunt this podcast and In episode 6, Steve Hassan advised listeners to treat people under the undue influence of QAnon and conspirituality with welcome and respect.
Castigation won't work.
Shame will make things worse.
He told this story about how his elderly neighbor brought him homemade cookies when he finally returned home after years in the cult of Reverend Moon.
No questions asked, just cookies.
But in episode 10, Imran Ahmed pointed out that any engagement of disinformation peddlers is actually a win for them because it boosts their visibility.
His strategy, and he has the data to prove it works, is to block, isolate, and clear the public space for content that is actually helpful.
When Hassan offers an open hand, Ahmed says, talk to the hand.
We're nine months on from those interviews.
Are we living up to either of them?
Are we isolating and de-platforming propagandists?
Are we adding good vibes to the scene and leaving the door open for earnest people to be forgiven?
Or does the frustration of the content trend us towards cynicism and snark?
A recent Instagram thread by dedicated listeners really brought the point home for discussion.
In the ticker, we cover the whitewashing of global cuisine by wellness influencers, Bauhauswife's upleveling of COVID denialism with yellow journalism, and Target store QAnon vandal Melissa Lively trying to make amends with benefits for past outbursts.
In the jab, I'll be looking at the facts around the PCR test.
Hint.
It works.
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.
Let's start with a definition.
Superfood.
Noun.
Otherwise known as food.
Except you really want to market it to make it seem to be much more than it is.
No one has marketed and romanticized food like the American wellness community.
Part of the reason is that since we have no real national cuisine, we have regional cuisines, but those are usually variations of the dishes immigrants brought here, we've never developed a proper food identity.
And since supersizing isn't a category but a quantity, we've borrowed our dishes from everywhere else.
There's something really nice about this.
It represents the melting pot that this country aspires to become.
But it also means that the dominant population, white people, steal and often bastardize international cuisines while assigning food with medicinal qualities that are purely invented.
That's one take on a wonderful article in Eater by Min Chan, Lost in the Brine.
Americans always seem to quest for clean.
Clean eating, intuitive fasting, freshly caught.
We obsess over fresh.
Bite into the kale before it leaves the ground fresh.
This is not how humans consumed food for most of history.
Our ancestors were more scavengers than expert hunters.
We were middle of the food chain before cities and gunpowder, which is most of the time we've been here.
We killed some prey, but often we were waiting for the real hunters to leave to gnaw at the scraps.
And our ancestors predominantly ate nutrient-dense organs, leaving the meat behind.
In recent times, America as a whole has suffered from a bit of an eating disorder, however.
Chan, who is of Chinese-Malaysian descent, writes about her experiences living in Australia in the 90s, when her friends referred to the fermented food she grew up with as smelly, gross, and weird.
Fast forward a few decades, and GT Dave is a billionaire for exotifying kombucha, and Gwyneth Paltrow is extolling the health benefits of kimchi, a market that has increased by 952% since COVID began, Thanks to these goopy wellness influencers heralding its immune-boosting effects.
Now to be clear, there's nothing wrong with enjoying international cuisine, or cooking it, or even creating a business out of it.
And fermentation is definitely not bad.
It's very healthy.
Food should generally take a few days to ripen.
Mold on cheese is often a feature.
My Eastern European ancestors would have been lost without sauerkraut.
But Chan highlights a few real problems with the whitening of fermentation, which is really shorthand for the whitening of global cuisine and cultures.
She writes that the romanticizing of, quote, BIPOC traditions and the accompanying failure to provide historical or sociocultural context that centers BIPOC and their relationship with these ferments is rife in the health and wellness space, end quote.
Not only are the Atlantish health claims attached to super, uh, food problematic, but she writes that the editing of flavor profiles to appeal to white audiences offers a false glimpse of those cultures.
But what can you expect in a nation that generally goes no further than salt and pepper, with even black pepper being too spicy for many tongues?
Chan writes that taking fish sauce out of kimchi because it's smelly robs you of an opportunity to experience one of the most profound tastes on the planet.
One thing I've learned from my wife, who is half Thai, is that adding fish sauce to most any dish is certain to make it better.
The region her mother is from, Isan, has some of the most pungent and delicious flavor profiles on the planet.
Though most Americans will only ever know Metro Thai.
Chan writes that an illusion of culture is being created in white-dominated fermentation circles, appealing to our desire for a clean, pure, and fresh, which is, again, not how our digestive systems developed.
The marketing claims on the package will say things like brewed in ancient China or Asian wisdom without expressing what these products actually are to those cultures.
Food.
Just food.
Often quite good food if you don't strip it of the essential elements that honor the tradition.
She even notes that researchers are trying to engineer the smell out of kimchi to appeal to western palates.
Gut microbes benefit from diversity, however, and that seems to be the profile that Western audiences are intent on editing out.
We just seem to monocrop everything, and this is having real downline effects.
Writing about her community of fermenters, Chan notes, quote, when BIPOC fermenters are given access to Western audiences, Such as when they're invited to attend fermentation events.
They are often tokenized and compartmentalized, used as authenticity props to center white experts." End quote.
And this is a recurring theme on our podcast.
The claim of expertise when none is really warranted.
But we know that social media thrives on certainty.
And if you declare something often and loudly enough, you're likely to gain a following.
Chan points to Master Fermenters, the Japanese, for guidance.
If you go to Japan, she writes, real masters never call themselves masters.
This is true in any culture, but sadly we've offloaded the quest for knowledge to charismatic charlatans who know more about selling than science, and so any promise seems to warrant the click of an affiliate link.
I think often of a quote by James Baldwin discussing racism on The Dick Cavett Show in 1969.
I don't want to be given anything by you.
I just want you to leave me alone so I can do it myself.
Conspiritualist wellness circles dependent on their downlines with false claims and shoddy science could learn a lot from Baldwin and from Chan.
Quit exotifying food.
If we spent half the time addressing the problems of food deserts instead of selling overpriced elixirs in artisanal mason jars that don't deliver anything promised on the packaging, we might actually achieve some sense of nutritional and cultural equality.
So stop exotifying food and start platforming those who know best.
The grandmother stuffing cabbage into a jar that's been reused and loved for decades.
Hi everyone.
I'm Yolanda Norris-Clark.
I started speaking out against the totalitarian coup that has been ongoing in Canada for over a year now, back in February of 2020.
I was ridiculed, laughed at, and threatened for doing so.
A few weeks later, I began talking about the impending Canadian quarantine isolation centres that were being built or refurbished, and that was met with even more derision and mockery.
And here we are.
Here we are.
Again with Yolande Norris-Clark, aka Bauhauswife.
In episode 27, our esteemed guest, Alex O'Dare, sat down with me to dish on Bauhauswife's conspirituality vibes and general sadism.
You can check that out.
In her recent salvo, we can hear all the same style elements at play.
The ASMR intimacy with all of her sibling S's.
It's now accented by ambient sounds from the jungle of Costa Rica, where she's fled With her many children to escape, which he calls the Hellscape of Canada.
So, the news bit of this ticker item isn't Yolanda Norris-Clark's COVID denialism couture.
The news is about her own distortion of the news.
Now, I wrote this up for the Conspirituality Podcast transmissions page, and I'll link to that in the notes, but I'll also quote from it here.
Norris Clark's sermon purports to comment on recent stories in the Canadian media about two women who allege they were sexually assaulted while under recently adopted travel-related quarantine orders.
One incident took place in a government-approved hotel in Montreal.
The alleged assaulter was a fellow guest, who has now been charged.
The other incident involves a man hired from a private security firm and trained by Canada's federal health agency.
He allegedly attempted to extort cash from a woman during an at-home quarantine check, and when she didn't comply, she says the man sexually assaulted her.
Both cases are being investigated by the police.
Government officials have expressed concern, and opposition politicians are calling for a suspension of the hotel quarantine program.
Now, the news coverage has been robust, with local outlets in Montreal and Windsor, which is the home of the alleged hotel assault, are filing reports, and also national and international outlets covering the political and agency response have weighed in.
Now, Norris Clark cites only one of the available reports, and her summary of the stories is just rife with falsehoods and exaggerations, such as she calls the quarantine hotels camps and gulags, but the one featured in the Montreal report was a Sheraton Inn.
She says that travelers are being held against their will as prisoners, but she leaves out the fact that travelers are also skipping out on the quarantine altogether in favor of paying a fine that would cost less than the three-day hotel stay.
She quotes the Montreal accuser as claiming that under quarantine she wasn't allowed to communicate with family or on social media, but there's no official instruction on that from the Canadian government.
And a commenter to our Instagram feed reported that her family member went to, or goes to, university in Montreal, and that she was in hotel quarantine in September for two weeks, that she posted on social every day that they had constant contact with her, as well as speaking many times with a front desk just to check in.
After winter break in January, she was in an Airbnb two weeks quarantine with three other international arriving friends.
And all of this was approved at customs upon entering Canada.
She posted again on social media every day, we spoke to her every day, and so on.
The commenter also says that obviously a new solution is immediately needed for women quarantining alone.
Now, Bauhaus' wife also calls the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, a dictator, which is funnier than calling Obama or Biden a dictator.
These are all neoliberal manager types who are basically trying to make the disasters of late capitalism seem a little more palatable than they are.
These are not dictators.
She calls Canada a hellscape because of lockdowns and vaccine plans.
But another commenter on Instagram pointed out that they live in Costa Rica.
They said, you can't go inside any public building here without wearing a mask.
The land borders are still closed as one of the measures.
They're on phase two of vaccinations.
The socialized medicine people are going to call me when it's my turn to get the vaccine.
There have been no large public gatherings here since March, so I don't know why she doesn't think that this, meaning Costa Rica, is a hellscape too.
But something finally hit me this week about the damage that conspiritualists do to their own areas of innovation and creativity and supposed expertise.
How they will ultimately derail any good work they do, which is tragic.
I posted the following to Twitter.
If Bauhaus' wife is willing to fudge data that everyone can see, what would she be willing to make up about her own field of free birthing?
Birth activism isn't my lane, but I get that a medical practice with a patriarchal history needs to have assumptions challenged.
But what happens when those challenges come from a COVID-minimizing birth coach who makes a BS about basic news reports?
Who does this help?
Why would anyone believe anything the influencer said about their work?
Did they make up the testimonials, even?
It sucks that an influencer confuses followers about COVID, but it also sucks that toileting disinfo over everybody on social media discredits any valuable anecdotal or intuitive data they might have to offer.
Now, we see similar patterns with Kelly Brogan, who does the same thing.
She offers this really good critique of excesses in her own field of psychiatry, but then she comes out and she says that germ theory is wrong.
So, why should anybody believe anything she says, even the interesting, the good, the legitimate stuff about psychiatry?
Zach Bush has great things to say about agriculture and the gut biome.
And then he damages the credibility of everyone else who works earnestly on those things by talking shit about vaccines.
I'm going to end with another clip, which follows this bizarre turn in the post where she goes off on an in-law who asked her to tone down the Canada bashing on Facebook.
From where I sit, this is an important bit because I think it gives some insight into the personal drivers at play in the Bauhaus wife COVID denialism Costa Rican drama, and it also reveals something about what any influencer might be afraid of.
Maybe you'll hear Bauhauswife, under the cloak of irony, protesting just a little too much about the pointed criticisms she fields about her choice to have eight children, whether that impacts the environment or not, about her privilege as a Canadian, and about whether her free birth coaching is a scam.
I do adore it when people fold into their gaslighting a little attempted shaming for women like me who just won't keep our legs closed.
I mean, come on!
Not only are we responsible for global warming and overpopulation, but surely we've really only been procreating in order to line our pockets with state bribes.
Loud and clear.
Ultimately, we're grifters for having played the system via our fertility as well as through the work that we do.
Of course, as a health coach and birth consultant with a focus on supporting the healing of others outside of the industrial medical paradigm, I am automatically seen by many as the most abject of charlatans.
What happens when the journey down the rabbit hole leads to the psych ward?
As reality comes back into focus, how does someone make sense of the dark visions brought on by their red-pilled radicalization into QAnon and COVID denialism?
Vice News just did a short feature on the Scottsdale, Arizona woman who you might remember went viral for her 4th of July expletive-laden live-streamed rant at Target, where she destroyed a mask display that she now says she felt represented her freedoms being taken away at the time.
Melissa Lively's next viral moment would come just a day later in another live video of her interacting with the police who had been called to her home by her husband as she spiraled out of control.
She tells cops in this video that they don't have security clearance to interact with her, that she's a spokesperson for the White House who has a direct line to President Trump.
Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and bipolar disorder, Ms.
Lively needed inpatient treatment to recover.
She's now also been interviewed and featured on CNN panel discussions as someone recently de-radicalized from QAnon beliefs.
The Vice piece finds her reflecting on how YouTube algorithms served up content that targeted her as a woman interested in wellness and spirituality.
She describes an escalating click trail from videos about which foods to eat for healthy immunity, to anti-vax material, to the narrative that a genocidal pedophiliac cabal was behind the pandemic, and also how her belief in the coming age of Aquarius dovetailed with QAnon's prophecy of a Great Awakening.
Now, given her very polished, media-ready appearance, she's a thin, white, platinum blonde public relations rep whose forehead never moves, given her wealthy presentation, she bragged about her $40,000 Rolex in the Target video, and that she has a book and movie deal now that has ensued from all of these events, it's easy to see her as an opportunist.
And perhaps to some extent she is.
But she's also performing a kind of public service as someone openly reflecting on how the perfect storm of early childhood trauma, the overwhelming initial stress and disorientation of the pandemic, self-reinforcing social media algorithms, and desperate doom-scrolling all led not only to her radicalization, but also to a mental break with reality and ensuing hospitalization.
Lively also reflects on the courage and loyalty shown by her husband in finally getting her the help she needed, saying it was the ultimate act of love and selfless service.
In her case, the path to deradicalization seems to have been through addressing mental health issues.
That won't be the case for everyone, but supportive relationships with those outside the cult may well be a common denominator for those able to recover.
The Jab, our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
One claim that shows up consistently amongst those either asserting or flirting with the belief that we're being lied to about the pandemic is that the PCR test is hopelessly inaccurate.
Your social feeds may have served up a spate of articles to this effect based on a recent paper COVID denialists see as a slam dunk.
The paper critiques the first scientific publication back in January of 2020 on PCR tests for COVID-19.
It points out that the original experiments were conducted without access to any samples of the actual virus.
Sounds fishy.
Until you remember that very early on Chinese scientists were able to sequence and then publish COVID-19's genetic code online.
This allowed these types of testing protocols to be developed using synthetic codes.
It would also lead to vaccines being developed at record speed.
But what is PCR or polyamoryase chain reaction testing anyway?
The research that developed PCR has been heralded as one of the most significant advances in molecular biology.
It won Carey B. Mullis a Nobel Prize in 1993 and revolutionized the study of DNA.
Sometimes, also called molecular photocopying, PCR gives scientists a way to detect specific pieces of tiny genetic code by seeking out and making copies of them from a sample.
The copies amplify the signal to make it detectable, but if the specific pieces of code are not there, no amplification happens.
This process played a key role in the science that led to the landmark 2003 sequencing of the human genome.
It's also used for detecting genetic disorders and for the presence of bacterial and viral infections.
Which brings us back to COVID-19.
The PCR critique you may have seen on Facebook is more demonstrative of a lack of scientific understanding than of actual problems with the COVID test.
For more about this, I will link in the show notes to an excellent analysis by a former guest on the pod, molecular and structural biologist, Dr. Wilson.
The claim you may have heard repeated by COVID truthers is that the CT value, or cycle threshold, of the test is so high that it will pick up the presence of random genetic material as if it was evidence for COVID, resulting in rampant false positives.
This is just not true.
Higher cycle thresholds just mean the test is performing multiple amplifications to find the virus.
If someone is pre-symptomatic, or if they had been infected up to a month earlier, they would have much smaller concentrations of the virus in their system.
Lower cycle thresholds might not detect viral material that actually is still there, but is only visible with more amplification.
Positive PCR tests should be taken seriously and misinformation about the test being completely unreliable is dangerous and irresponsible.
Now, legitimate confusion did ensue via a January 2021 communication from the WHO to testing labs that they should follow the specific instructions from the various companies who make the tests about how to calibrate the cycle threshold so as to avoid both false positives and false negatives, of which there had been a few reports.
Different manufacturers do make slightly different tests, and so this had been an occasional issue at labs.
But conspiracy theorists jumped on this public communication as evidence of inflated COVID numbers.
This was not true.
So the bottom line from me here at the Jab is this.
We live in an imperfect world, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Keep observing quarantine guidelines, get tested when necessary, and get vaccinated as soon as you can.
we will get through this together. - Okay, team conspirituality. team conspirituality.
We got some really interesting and, I think, generous feedback on Instagram the other day about whether or not we're too snarky.
I'll just read a couple of comments.
They come from long-time listeners and I really appreciate them because they're obviously in really good faith.
At times, I wish that rather than thoroughly trashing the deserving disinfonots, we could examine the essentially valid spiritual aspiration at the core of their roleplaying and explain how, if they really understood it, their attitude, message, and public posture would be something very different, more loving, more tolerant, more humble, More forgiving, more truthful.
I realize that's asking a lot, it might risk false assumptions and require the burden of extensive inquiry, but it comes up often enough so I thought I'd share.
And then, you know, there's a big comment thread, but two more comments that I'll just pick out that I think are really you know, salient for us that we should pay attention to.
Uh, one person said, could not agree more.
Whilst I really appreciate the work of this team, the trashing makes it hard for me to risk, listen, read, or listen much of the time.
Uh, and then a third person said, I'm afraid the show is much more snarky than its hosts care to admit.
If I heard them own their snarkiness, it would be more palatable, uh, Still, it's an interesting listen to get ideas and to see cultural trends, but for me the tone is off.
Let me just jump in real quick to say something, and it's understanding that I don't expect any listener to have listened to our entire catalog, but I have owned my snarkiness many times, so I just want to be clear on that.
And what I love about these comments is that You know, I think they really get at the uber issue behind this episode and behind the podcast as a whole, which is how does de-radicalization happen?
How does healing happen?
How do we think about and talk to opponents?
You know, going back to Steve Hassan in episode 6, we have this echo of don't laugh at people, don't make people feel stupid, and of course I just cut a ticker item basically snarking on Bauhaus wife.
Now I don't feel bad about it because her whole brand is based on contempt for opponents, but that doesn't mean it's effective.
So anyway, how do you guys feel about this?
I know we're going to get into a rich conversation about this, but I want to point out that regional differences in language is something that is both honored and often the subject of ridicule.
But I think it's important to frame this in understanding that just as people learn different languages in their upbringing and just as they learn different variations of those languages for regional dialects, people Where they grow up and how they are brought up with things like cynicism and snark, that's cultural as well.
And that was very much a part of my upbringing.
It's how I related to my family.
It's how I related to my friends.
And it's not so much of something as Putting someone down all the time as recognizing boundaries, kind of like play and wrestling, how little kids wrestle, because there's some fun element of it, but there's also some level of dominance hierarchy that needs to be worked out as you age.
That is also part of it.
So, I think that should be brought up off the top because we are talking about a global platform where we have listeners around the world But you have to understand that each of us have different regional dialects, and that's where we're coming from when we're expressing our viewpoints.
It also brings to mind something that I've dealt with as a yoga instructor for a long time, which is when someone has said that If their yoga class is made for everyone, then in my head I always hear, I don't actually know what I'm doing right now.
Like, I'm just pandering to a crowd instead of actually saying that because there are many styles of yoga and there are many different teachers who own those styles and you know what?
My class was never for everyone and I never made any distinction about that.
It was a very specific thing and if someone was looking for someone else, then they go and find them and that's a good thing.
I think that diversity is important and what part of the core of what I think we're getting at here is there are different ways of expressing criticism and that it's not like When I hear certain criticism, and some criticism is great, don't get me wrong, but when I hear some of it, I'm like, you're assuming that there's some sort of moral high road that you've found that you expect everyone to present information as, and that's missing the entire point of the diversity of responses.
If you can only speak one language, you're not going to be able to communicate with a lot of people very well.
Yeah, and this is the tricky, one of the very tricky aspects of what we're trying to do, right?
We're critiquing the yoga and wellness culture to some extent from within it, and one of the things that I think has made the yoga and wellness culture susceptible to conspirituality is this taboo against critical thinking, against judgment, against ever saying that something is wrong and something else is right, so it's like there's this way of
Communicating this idealized that kind of borrows from nonviolent communication or couples therapy or you know some way of really being in an active listening mode which is beautiful and very very useful and necessary I think in the right context but it sometimes privileges that at the expense of healthy critique and and robust debate and some of that I actually wish there were more people who were willing to just roll their eyes at some of these people we cover and say, come on, what are you talking about?
That's clearly nonsense.
But in a culture that just goes, well, it's their truth.
And who are we to say that their truth is invalid?
And it's just a narrative.
People are saying that the influencer's truth should be respected.
But I think they're also from this position of identifying with the influencer's spirituality content.
They're also saying there's something in the way this person has spoken that has touched me in a way that I haven't been able to find anywhere else.
And so when people are profoundly moved by Zach Bush and, you know, his sermon about swimming with the fishes, or when people are profoundly moved... See, you just laughed.
No, but isn't this the thing, right?
I'm glad we're actually doing this.
It just happened.
You said swimming with the fishes with just a little bit of hot sauce.
Did I really?
Just a tiny bit.
Is it about swimming with the fishes?
Because that's a way of saying it that sort of already indicates that there's an underlying Okay, okay, okay, alright, alright.
So, I could have said, because if I really wanted to honor the fact that Zack is talking about something that was very important in his life, I would say, when the consumer of the influencer's content is talking about listening to Zack Bush describe his mystical experience, then they are talking about something that's become precious to them.
And then, when Somebody comes in, when I come in and say, well actually he's using that as a point of manipulation in order to support his disinformation brand, I'm in this terrible role of Labeling and calling out a kind of spiritual betrayal that might even be abusive.
It's something that spoke to the most altruistic part of the consumer's psyche or their spirituality, when perhaps they haven't had access to things that have inspired them in the same way.
And I'm saying, no, don't be fooled.
And that's a really terrible job, actually, to do.
I don't know how to... I don't know how to do it politely.
It's a great insight.
It's a great insight because essentially what you're doing is you're taking someone who they associate with all of the feelings they might have in hearing that kind of account of something very poetic and very spiritual and you're saying, ah, but actually here are some other angles on this person and for them so far all they have is like, wow, this person really inspired me and touched me in a place that feels sacred.
Because they shared a mystical experience.
And they shared it in a very compelling way.
And there's a whole ton of transference going on within that very intimate environment.
Which is why it's such a thankless task.
Absolutely, and actually so in some cases I think we're interrupting like actually love affairs in a way and we're throwing, I'm starting to laugh here, we're throwing the door open on this kind of like altar bedroom where people are communing with their influencer heroes and we're saying actually There's no close here.
That didn't sound right.
Julian, you pointed out, and this coincides with this, a few weeks ago when I did that segment on traditional Chinese medicine, and there was some criticism, and that's fine.
But then some people were saying, you didn't do this.
And I point out in the text where I actually said the thing, and then you would point it out to me that people don't remember what you say.
They remember how they made you feel.
Absolutely, right.
And when I listened to some of these influencers, these people were talking about, how I feel is just completely like, this is bullshit.
My good friends, if I'm saying something, they will cut me off in the middle and call out bullshit.
And that's why they're my good friends.
Because it's just like, and then there's either that moment where I decide to double down and be like, no, I'm right on this point, or laugh at myself.
Which is very therapeutic.
That sense of humility is really important.
And I think overall, when I look at a lot of these people, the level of self-importance they assign to themselves is so overwhelming to me that I'm just like, do you just not have people around you to pull you back at all?
Oh yeah, that's a huge problem.
But let me ask you something, Derek.
What if you were saying something in the midst of your friend's company that was difficult for you to articulate, and maybe you made some overstatements, and maybe those overstatements were symbolic of the fact that you hadn't quite found the most
Clear or rational way of presenting something and those and and so your whole statement gets dismissed as bullshit What if what you were actually trying to express was was something?
Emotionally complex and you know perhaps rationally I don't know, incoherent for the moment.
What happens if you get cut off at that point?
Like, is that still friendship?
Does that feel supportive?
Because I can imagine some instances in which you're not saying, it's not necessarily bullshit, but it's also not clear.
I understand.
I mean, I think that good friendships also have forms of safe words.
Right?
So if that happens, it's just, you just let the other person know, hey, I'm working through something.
And if it's an actual friendship, they're like, oh, okay, totally understand.
Like, so that's not really territory among friendships.
I think though, as I've expressed often, like these mediums, the social media that we have, we are not designed to communicate through these.
Not at all.
This is brand new.
So, I think sometimes, and especially you made the point, when people read any of us, they're going to most likely read our words in their voice.
So, some of the inflections, some of the ways that things are expressed are going to come across differently.
But because of this medium, there's a sense of immediacy, and I've never gotten messages from people who think they relate to me from my writing as much as through this medium.
And in some ways that's very powerful, but in other ways that opens up the door for a lot of misunderstanding if you don't know who I really am.
Well, it also opens up the door for the same kind of transference that we're picking into when we examine the influence of influencers.
And I made this point on Slack a couple of weeks ago that especially the long-form podcast medium is a super hot medium in the McLuhan terms of it is right there in the listener's head.
It feels very intimate.
It feels extremely intimate and people will bond with long-form podcasters in ways that they just don't with writers.
And that happens very quick.
And I think from our point of view, with a podcast that has done relatively well in a short period of time, that advantage has paid off.
And it's also something that we have to be super aware of, The way in which we, you know, sort of use that access to people's inner spaces, especially when we're talking about spirituality, especially when we're talking about like the meaning of consciousness or, you know, whether or not the influencer's mystical experience is reasonable or not.
Yeah, it's a real tangle.
Well, there's two things I want to say.
I mean, because we're spending a lot of time in this zone right here, and there are several zones to this conversation.
And I want to say that I think that we actually have gone out of our way over the last 40 weeks to be thoughtful and to look at things from multiple angles and to think about what vulnerabilities may be present in people who are susceptible to various kinds of cultish and conspiritualist ideas and beliefs, right?
How do people get swept up in this?
What are some legitimate complaints they might have?
We've looked at privilege, we've looked at oppression, we've looked at trauma history, having bad experiences with the medical establishment or with government.
And I feel like we do try to really be sensitive and not punch down.
I think that there's a big distinction to be made between critiquing influencers who are spreading misinformation and maybe hateful or toxic ideologies, being critical of what they're saying and debunking it.
And then also, as part of that, kind of having some opinions about the person about their delivery and perhaps their motivations, all of that kind of stuff, which can sometimes get messy.
I think there's a real difference between that and being hurtful towards people who have been taken advantage of.
And so having said that, I also want to say that the thing that we've focused in on for these first 20 minutes is the snarkiness or the laughter that happens sometimes.
And so I wanted to ask you guys, when that happens, what are we laughing at?
You know, sometimes we laugh over clips when we play clips of some of these figures that we cover, and sometimes we laugh at certain ideas that they have.
What's your sense of what we're actually laughing at?
Well, that's funny.
I want to jump in because we didn't know who was going to go next, and I pointed to you, and that was the exact point I was going to make.
But you said it much more elegantly, so I'm glad you went.
And I have read those comments, too.
And again, that gets back to my original point personally, because if I were just sitting here by myself listening to those clips for the first time, I would have had the same reaction as I'm having.
I'm not filtering when I'm on this microphone in any capacity.
And so, my laughter comes from the ridiculousness of what they're saying.
And this is the thing, and this also points to the initial comment, which was very thoughtful that you opened with, Matthew, and I know that's from a dedicated listener who comments often and I appreciate that, but I don't see any value in trying to take these charlatans and these people who are manipulative and trying to hold them up to some level of Of criticism, and they don't deserve it.
They don't deserve it.
And the thing that I hope we would recognize as a society, whereas I have serious issues with the concept of bullying, for example, and I actually just wrote up an academic paper on possible ways of addressing dominance hierarchies and bullying for Big Think.
So we can make better, you know, not have such lifelong chronic issues with children.
But the thing that we know about bullies is you, you don't kowtow to them.
You stand up to them and you know what sometimes laughter is the right response because it's so ridiculous that it needs to be called out.
And it just gets back to my point about The teacher not being for everyone.
If that's not your thing, there are a lot of podcasts you could find.
I'm not trying to drive people away, but I'm just saying, just sitting there typing out your pissiness about some people you don't agree with instead of actually just trying to understand where we're coming from to me is kind of useless.
Laughter too, I think the laughter is also a way, we cover really heavy topics.
Sometimes the laughter is a welcome relief and there are certainly people who comment saying that they love it when we make each other laugh.
And I think the laughter too is sometimes a way of managing the frustration and the rage that we might feel.
The laughter is also a way of just saying, this is It's absolutely ridiculous and I can't believe so many people are willing to take this seriously and make decisions about their lives based on this utter bullshit.
But I think that often, to answer my own question just briefly Matthew, I think we laugh at the things that are being said, sometimes we laugh at the tone.
Because it feels pretentious or manipulative in a way that seems really obvious to us and clashes.
There's like a massive contradiction or irony or hypocrisy going on that clearly is our perception, right?
It's subjective.
But I stand by that.
You know, I think that some of that is healthy.
And I honestly do think that if there was more of that in the discourse in the wellness community, it would be a healthier community.
You know, I was gonna say that, um, you asked, you know, how do we feel when we laugh, and I feel something, um, like, certainly I'm discharging stress, uh, but I also feel that, I feel actually despair often, and, and I can't, um, you know, I'm not going to... It's a rueful laugh, right?
I'm not going to, I'm not going to, um, You know, I'm not going to weep while we record.
Generally, there isn't the time.
You can leave that to me.
Well, you may be, but I mean, there isn't generally, there just isn't the time to do that.
The only time, okay, so here's something that I want to point people towards is that there's an episode of QAnon Anonymous.
I think it's in their bonus stream and it's where they cover the relationship between the social media platform or the LARP program, Second Life.
and QAnon and 4chan spaces.
And Jake Rokotansky gets to the end of his description of him being a player in Second Life and how he plays with his friend and how his friend's mother also was on Second Life, but she died.
But her avatar in Second Life was still sort of hanging around or her house that they built and it was filled with all of her stuff.
Anyway, he's talking about visiting online with his friend his dead mother's house in this fake world, And he just loses it.
He completely loses his composure, and it's one of the most touching pieces of podcasting that I've ever heard because he has the time within the story to do that, but of course in the reporting segment of what they're doing, and they take their sort of humor and satire and absurdity to like the nth degree, and that's not everybody's cup of tea for sure, but there isn't really the time to do that.
There isn't the space to do it when there's so much news happening.
But I guess the reason that the question of, you know, You said, Derek, that the laughter is also unfiltered.
It's like you're responding in the chair spontaneously, and there's something sort of refreshing and improvising about that.
You know, we're getting natural responses, and from a production standpoint and a media standpoint, that can be really gold.
But at the same time, You know, there's this collapse between the influencer that we're laughing about and the person that is devoted to them.
And what I'm concerned about is that the person who's devoted to them, the person who thinks that Yolan Norris-Clark has given them their feminist freedom, that person, I am going to be laughing at them as well, just through the nature of the tight transference and the collapse between influencer and follower.
And so that concerns me, that gives me pause.
I don't really know how to solve that problem.
I'm not gonna start, I'm not gonna stop, I don't think.
I don't know how to do a report on what she did with the Canadian news segments in any other way than I did.
So, yeah, I'm not quite sure.
I'm disturbed by the medium, and I'm not quite sure what else to do.
Well, maybe part of it is making statements like the one you just made.
I know this is messy and difficult, so it is to wade into topics like this that are highly charged and can have so much personal resonance, and here's what I'm not doing, but here's what I think is really important to say.
When I brought up the level of self-importance earlier, the thing that was in my head was what you clipped from her for this episode.
Just this sense of just ultimate superiority that comes across that and I purposefully don't listen to, when we're going to play clips live on the podcast, I don't listen to what you guys send me on purpose because I want to hear it as if I were a listener for the first time and react that way.
And to me, that's quite valuable in some ways because you are getting that unfiltered reaction.
But in terms of the bigger picture of addressing it, it's again going back to the class thing.
There is no way that you are going to appeal to everyone, and I don't know why that's a thing.
I don't know why.
It just reminds me of those yoga meditations to heal the world, that every soul will be uplifted.
To me, it's just like, let's actually focus on palpable change that's going on right now, instead of thinking that we're going to affect everyone by our thought waves.
I think I'm understanding that you're saying, Derek, that trying to overthink this is a kind of cognitive fallacy because it's not going to ultimately work and people are free to walk away.
It's kind of a free market approach.
But you're also saying that it's just untrue to oneself and perhaps to the medium to think that you're going to set the perfect tone.
Oh yeah, I don't think there's anything that's perfect in life, period.
Structure, right.
That idea is troublesome.
You know, when we were coming across ideas for this week's episode and we landed on the word cynicism, and I want to inject that into the conversation now because cynicism is a Greek school of thought that is comparable to Jainism in the sense of return to nature, live in poverty, but also just Don't have a lot of faith in institutions and overarching figures who declare things.
And that led to contemporary cynicism, which is more characterized by having a distrust of other people's motives.
And I think that in the wellness community and the yoga community, that is one of the most useful tools to have.
Because I will tell you, if I come across someone and One example is when someone meets me for the first time and says they want to work with me.
My bullshit detector is immediately up.
I'm like, you don't know what I do.
And that to me is a salesman coming at me and extrapolate from that and then put a teacher in front of 100 people in a room and they're talking about how their whole life mission is to care about everyone in the room.
I'm like, no it's not!
No, it's not!
So, let's start somewhere where we can all get along and agree.
There's going to have to be a sniff test here, and cynicism is a powerful sniff test that I wish more people applied in this industry.
You know, I might be wrong in my Greek literary history, but I think that it's Diogenes who's the founder of cynicism.
And so, no, I'm not the founder.
Not the founder.
No, but one of the primary practitioners.
And Asthenes, I'm probably saying it wrong, was the founder.
Diogenes is the most well-known.
Right, and he's well-known because not only is he, I mean, you compared the movement to Jainism, But he did something a little bit different, as I remember.
He lived in a wine vat that was empty in the middle of Athens, and cynicism itself is from Kainos, isn't it?
Which is, we should live as dogs.
And so he was known for public masturbation and peeing here and there.
Yeah, and eating and stealing food and shit like that.
And some of the, I'm bringing this up because some of the feedback that we've gotten sort of compares our cynicism and our satire to that kind of toileting into the public space.
That when we're laughing, that we're urinating as well.
So I'm not agreeing with that necessarily given what media is out there.
I'm okay with it.
You're okay with that?
Because I am!
Because I am, again.
I'm distancing myself from Diogenes completely.
But I'm saying, okay, so you're absolutely right, and some of it could have been a mental health issue, but he was trying to point people toward the fact that they're thinking too highly of themselves.
He was constantly knowing to do that, yes.
Yeah, so yes, no, I'm not going to sit here and urinate while we're recording a podcast.
But that being said, the overall idea, sometimes, again, I think there's utility to it.
Yeah, I mean, what's interesting there is that even the figure of Diogenes could become a charismatic influencer in today's wellness culture through a kind of bullshit neo-tantra, right?
So it's not like...
It's not even the content that's really the thing, it's whether people feel that there's some kind of earnest care being expressed, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And again, I want to come back to this note because my sense is that you never ever will hear us quote-unquote trashing the vulnerable followers of someone like Kelly Brogan.
No, never.
Even though we will have a very pointed critique of her brand and how she manipulates and profits off of their vulnerability.
Now, is that hard for them to hear if they're one of those people?
Yeah, I would imagine so.
But I actually believe in our sincerity in a way that flies in the face of a more conventional everyday use of the word cynicism.
You know, and I'm glad that you brought up Dr. Brogan and it made me think of, I think this thought experiment could be applied to her as well, but I was thinking about Yolan Norris-Clark and whether how much of Is there a distinction between the content and the delivery for us?
What is it that inspires the snark?
What if we stripped back the ASMR presentation, the passive-aggressive smugness, the artful curation, you know, all of that stuff that, like me personally, just makes me feel totally uncomfortable.
What if we found something that was more or less Straight and so I went to her website she's also a writer and she published this blog in 2018 and you know I'll just read a little bit of it because I don't get the same feeling and I'm not going to do her voice.
Midwifery has changed considerably in the past 50 years.
Along with its elevated profile and legitimacy the profession has undergone a significant shift towards medicalization.
In many cases midwives work hand in hand with obstetricians and hospitals.
For some women, this is a good thing, but for others who may be expecting midwifery to resemble a holistic, woman-centered relationship in which the mother is the complete authority, as was the case with traditional independent midwifery, regulated midwifery can present unexpected restrictions for women that may not always be made clear to them by their midwives.
It goes on a little bit, And what she does, the title is something like, I think it's 10 things to be aware of as you're engaging a midwife.
And so she lists them, and I won't read the descriptions, but the list seems pretty reasonable.
So number one, ultrasound carries risk.
Two, there's no such thing as a natural induction.
Three, your midwife may not be allowed to attend your home birth if you refuse induction.
So anyway, As an outsider to a non-specialist, to me these sound like kind of edgy claims that could be reasonably discussed with an OBGYN who had some hard data on hand, given the fact that Norris Clark is an unaccredited birth coach, you know, and she's not like referencing her statements, she's not proving her claims.
She does say or claim that she comes from a kind of community of practice, and this is the anecdotal evidence that they've accumulated, and I am willing to respect that to a certain extent, but here's the thing.
I ran that blog post through CrowdTangle to see just how popular it was.
So, CrowdTangle is like a social media analysis tool, and it had 149 interactions on Facebook.
Okay, so likes, you know, probably likes and comments, but that's it.
149.
It actually showed that there were no shares, actually.
Okay, so two and a half years later, after she publishes this, she opens her YouTube channel.
This is 11 months ago, and she gives her first ASMR sermon about... You just did it.
See, that's the thing.
We love creating clever turns of phrases that encode humor in them, and I stand by it, and I love you for it, and I never want you to stop.
Wait, wait, did you just bust me?
What did I do?
What did I do?
Yes!
ASMR sermon!
Well come on, that's accurate.
Is it funny?
Of course!
Wait, just to defend myself, I have said that often enough that I hope the humor is completely broken.
Never stop!
Anyway, anyway, 11 months ago she opens her YouTube channel with a post, okay post, very neutral term, in which she's discussing home birth practices or free birth practices during the pandemic.
That's the point at which things take off.
So now, on Instagram, her videos can earn up to like 20,000 views, and also she posts these text memes that say things like, midwives and OBGYNs are brainwashed.
That's not what this post says.
Right?
There's been a clear escalation of the rhetoric.
So, it's like the inflammation that gets the clicks.
And so, I don't think that we are... Okay, so in terms of her content, she is a COVID denier, and that is dangerous.
She's an anti-masker.
That is going to kill people if it influences the population in any significant way.
But it's like...
Her actual free birth content is not what she is famous for.
She is now a self-marketing leader, not a thought leader.
I think the marketing and the attitude is front-forward, and that's why I think I have the instinct to focus in on that primarily, but of course the collateral damage is that people will say, oh, well, you know, you're criticizing this good work that this person is doing in order to, you know, reform obstetrics.
And I'm like, well...
That's not what she's doing.
That's not actually what she's doing.
She's famous for something else.
You're nailing something so important here.
I'm so glad you went to this place because a huge chunk of what we talk about on this podcast is charismatic influence, right?
Yeah, right.
And so we're not only talking about the untruths, we're not only debunking the misinformation, we're actually talking about a particular persuasive style of social media communication that relies on charisma, that relies on edginess, that relies on manipulating people in a certain way and gaining a certain amount of fame and fortune as a result.
And so I think that's a legitimate aspect of the sort of, I don't know, media literacy that we encourage in people.
And I don't actually see it as ad hominem.
And that was one of the questions I had for you guys, you know, do we engage in ad hominem in a way that weakens what we are saying?
Are we just attacking the person?
So you brought up, and you brought it up a couple times, Matthew, the linkage between maybe something noble or liberating or empowering and then the stuff we're critiquing and how we can seem to get tangled up in that, right?
But there's the other piece, which is that people might say, well, you're just attacking the person.
You're not attacking their ideas.
And I personally don't think that we engage in homonym.
I hope we don't.
I think there's a really significant overlap between critiquing someone's track record of public statements and actions and being critical of them personally because those things are related to each other in significant ways, right?
Yeah, well, with regard to ad hominem and specifically Yolanda Norris-Clark, I think Alex Odair's comment back on episode whatever it was where I interviewed her about her satire, You know, we talked about, are we attacking the person?
And she said, well, we can't see what the person is.
We can see, she didn't, this is not a direct quote, but like the entire thing is absolutely performed.
And so what is the person actually?
How do we know?
There's this obfuscating word that everybody uses in this industry, which is authenticity.
And it's completely confounded by the fact that people are on stage all the time.
And so, yeah, I don't feel ever that I'm attacking in an ad hominem way because I really don't have any insight into what these people are like in their personal lives or how they're treating their friends and family or I have no idea what kind of person Sayer G is in life.
I don't have any interest, actually, in saying Sayer G is a bad person.
We don't go in search of that kind of content.
For me, it's a little bit complicated because as a cult dynamics researcher, I do have to get into how are people treating each other, but I haven't really done that on this podcast.
Well, and I just want to make a technical point here, which is that an ad hominem attack is the tactic of saying, the person is horrible, so you can't trust anything they say.
It's not the tactic of carefully analyzing and critiquing what they say, and then suggesting, this actually might make them a horrible person.
There is a difference there.
Like, when I look at Sasha Stone inciting violence against public health officials in a way that's menacing and graphic and explicit, yeah, I'm going to critique what he said and why he said it, but I'm not going to pretend I don't think this is good evidence that he's a pretty awful and scary person.
What he says is not wrong and dangerous because I think he's awful.
I think he's awful because of what he says.
Well, one thing I learned as a music reviewer who knows a lot of musicians is when you critique someone's art, they often take it as if it's their person that you're critiquing.
Oh yes, absolutely.
And I would say that that spills across very heavily into the yoga and wellness industries because people don't know how to detach from their presentation or their ideas.
Even more so in yoga and wellness, because as I've made the point before, the product of this industry is the aspirational self.
And so there's literally no distance between the product of the yoga teacher and who their internal selves are conceived as, either by themselves or by their followers.
I remember when I wrote an initial article about Keno MacGregor having a hip injury, and then we did an interview in which she told me that she didn't think that extreme range of motion practice had anything to do with the injury.
And that was fine, but the main feedback around that article from her followers was that somehow I was attacking her person for suggesting that the way in which she promoted yoga practice might have some drawbacks with regard to encouraging people to do but the main feedback around that article from her followers was that somehow I was attacking her person
So what was really weird was that the capacity of the performer to do this gymnastic thing was associated with the deepest layers of her identity as a kind of spiritual entrepreneur.
And so if you look at that critically, you really are attacking something close to the bone.
Well yeah and you're also saying you're very like viral, extremely high view count videos in which you're demonstrating extreme acts of flexibility, which has made you famous, which has created your career, which makes people value you as a teacher, you are saying, huh, maybe that's not the best thing for the bodies of the people who are maybe that's not the best thing for the bodies of the people And yeah, that's a very difficult thing to grapple with.
That actually brings up a really good point of something that's going on now, because Julian, you created that beautiful, I think, response to Jay Brown recently, a 35 minute video, and Jay responded on his podcast very nicely.
I mean, this is such a good example of how people don't agree, but they're having a dialogue even without talking to one another in a very respectful way.
And I remember Well before Conspirituality, I had Jay on my personal podcast years ago because he did something that I thought was wonderful because he responded to that Instagram yoga of just extreme strength and flexibility and arm balances and handstands and he's like, this isn't what a lot of people need.
Why aren't there more people doing Shavasana photos and meditation?
Like, can we dial it back a bit?
And that's what he led with.
And the challenge of that is that it's not going to get the same response as the extreme flexibility and the feats that people can monetize in the ways that they do.
But what I really appreciated about What that particular moment was that he was just like, I don't care.
I'm going to actually talk about what I think is helpful to people.
Well, let me say this about that because I feel like there's an approach that I've taken, and listen, I'm sure this is true for you guys as well, maybe it's more true for me, I don't know, but I've gotten feedback my whole life that, oh, you're being condescending, oh, I can't believe you're being so dismissive, the way that you act when you think something is ridiculous just really doesn't feel good, and I've really actually tried to work on it interpersonally.
Some of it comes from the culture I grew up in.
I grew up in a culture where that was just part of how we communicated.
I also grew up surrounded by a bunch of racists with very principled parents who said, you know, they are wrong.
What they're saying is actually wrong and there's no problem with going at them.
Wow, I did not actually put that into your profile, but I get that, Julian.
Oh my gosh, okay, yeah.
You just unlocked something for me about you.
That's amazing.
Because yeah, if you're kind of like in a... Minority is not the best word here, but if you're in an outnumbered situation and your parents have to be absolutely clear I'm talking about neighbors throwing rocks at me when I walk down the street.
I'm talking about being threatened with knives for having black friends.
It was very real in terms of the connection between beliefs and actions and what was going on in the society.
But that aside, I don't want to grandstand about that kind of stuff.
What I've tried to do with the Jay Brown video that's more recent and more topical, but also with my two videos called Dear Dr. Northrup, is really take an approach of stripping away anything that could be perceived as a personal is really take an approach of stripping away anything that could
Anything that could feel in any way snarky and just really address the person as respectfully and in as conciliatory a way as possible while still being absolutely clear about what I disagreed with or what I found was potentially dangerous.
It's a deliberate style and I think it's worked and I've enjoyed doing it.
People seem to respond well to it.
In a way, it's an invitation to say, hey, if you ever want to walk some of this stuff back, the door is open and I'm here to discuss that.
I don't feel like that's the kind of message I want to give all of the people that we cover on the show.
Well, with Christiane Northrup though, I mean, it's true that you got good feedback from where we were sitting.
I don't think we've had any indication that... No, of course not.
That it moved the needle!
Here's a sticky question.
As you're putting that together, you have your own personal history with, okay, well, people have thought X, Y, and Z about me.
I'm going to try a different approach.
And also, I'm going to model a form of communication in a volatile landscape that might be new and might open a door to some other new possibility.
So there's something very deliberate about it, you execute it really well.
And at the same time, I have this question, not that you shouldn't have done it at all, but who is it for?
It does model for our listeners, for sure, but it's almost as if It's almost as if there's the pretense of a relationship where there is none.
And this is somebody with 480,000 followers who's like fucking over their brains with disinformation that's really, really dangerous.
But then you take the same approach to Jay Brown, and I would say you're much more likely to actually have a real conversation, not just in terms of scale, because we're sort of on the same level in the influencer game.
Uh, but also because, you know, we're coming from the same place, we're, you know, we're both men, we're all men, and you're speaking in really sort of an understandable way that I think he's going to be receptive to.
And so, same technique, different subjects.
In both cases, what I'm trying to do is speak to them as a person.
It's like person to person, respectful, I don't really know...
There are things I don't know about you and I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and just talk to you in this kind of way and of course with Christiane Northrup I don't expect her to reach out but honestly when I made those videos addressing her
There was a part of me who thought some months or years from now she might get to the point where, like, I really did think that might happen because to go from being a women's health icon to being someone who's getting behind militia threats of violence toward the state, that's quite an arc.
I wonder how long that can be sustainable for her.
It depends on whether there's a reality principle embedded in it, or whether it's LARPing, or whether the violent stuff is metaphorical, and whether it folds into her addressing her, you know, Great Awakening audience in terms of, you know, she opens every single one with, hello dear warriors, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, let's land this plane with something I think forward-seeking that was also in the notes that I was thinking about.
First, I'll preface it with saying that, again, speaking to people who are predominantly involved in the holistic communities, One thing that's always gotten to me is I think there's a profound misunderstanding of quote, Eastern wisdom that we've mistranslated in America for a long time.
And that is the sense of that self-realization always leads to something good.
And I think specifically, I was thinking of Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching when he talks about the straw dogs and basically says that heaven and earth, every animal is just like a ceremonial straw dog.
It will be burned up and discarded at some time.
And I feel like people read that and they forget to include humans in the animal part, as if we were separate from nature.
Which brings up the question of hope, which is where I was getting with what we were talking about, like how we feel about moving forward into the future.
And I'll just say that all of these things that so many of these topics of conversations that we're having About both within our circles and then about wokeness and cancel culture and then you can talk about what we're experiencing now with fucking potato heads and Dr. Seuss and all of these things.
All of these things when I look at them and I think about the greater challenges that we have with climate change and what we've actually done to the environment that we were born into.
I think we just spend so much time spinning our wheels about nonsense when there are very real, solvable problems that we're not addressing.
We'll see that in Texas right now with what happened and then the government saying, yeah, we're not going to actually fix the energy grid.
We'll just keep letting this happen, which is going to get worse because of what's happening in the Arctic right now.
And in California, where we live, Julian and I, and it's just over and over, we are just reactive animals.
We are not proactive.
We don't actually think holistically.
We don't actually look into the future and make changes on a grand level.
And when the question of hope comes in there, I hope that I can live out my days in relative peace and security.
I don't know if that'll happen, but in terms of the longer term past that, unless serious action is taken and we actually mobilize to make a change, I don't know where we go from here.
I heard a really interesting thought on a new podcast I started listening to.
It's called the Trillbillies Workers Collective.
I don't know the names of the guys, but one of them, they were talking about Robin DiAngelo's white fragility seminars and whether or not they were really going to have an impact on the culture of Appalachia, where they're from.
Their answer is no, pretty much.
One of them commented just sort of offhand, and it kind of took my breath away.
He said that for some white liberals, isn't this what happens, and progressives, could this be what happens after 20 years of After 20 years of not actually seeing any substantial structural material changes happening in our societies, doesn't it make sense that there would be this kind of internal turn where
People would begin to focus on micromanaging their internal environments and their attitudes and stressing out over the smallest sort of signs of non-virtue in very sort of panicked ways as a kind of displacement.
I'm saying way more than he did, but this is what I got from it.
As a kind of displacement for a despair over the fact that actually the entire bus is driving off the cliff at full speed and nothing seems to stop it.
I mean, yeah, you're right, Derek.
It's like Texas isn't going to fix its electrical grid and the governor comes out and declares that somehow COVID is over and all mask restrictions are lifted.
It goes in the opposite direction.
And so, what do people of good conscience do in the absence of political power and with a sense of overwhelming apathy and impasse?
What do they do except go inside and say, well, how can I become the most virtuous person I can?
How can I eliminate my own impurities, right?
Like, isn't that part of what we're seeing?
And related too to the beat that we cover, how can I become more empowered and more sovereign, right?
More immune to all of these things that affect other people.
Right.
Yeah, you know, I wanted to go back to just the two episodes that you mentioned in the show notes, because we haven't really touched on that too much.
And I think that with someone like Steve Hassan, who's talking about cults and really giving advice about how to relate interpersonally to someone who is in your life, who you're trying to reach, who has fallen into a cult, or in our case, become under the sway of conspiracism, You know, he was really giving good advice.
Maintain an empathic connection, remind them of their identity before and perhaps underneath the indoctrination, talk with them about other topics.
You don't have to get into long and protracted debates, which of course is all very wise if your focus is on eventually de-radicalizing an individual with whom you have a personal connection.
But I want to say, you know, I think it's a little different.
Then a lot of what we do here, the influencers we cover on the pod, they're not our friends and family.
Really, if we're looking at Steve Hassan's model, they would be the authority figures within the cult.
So our approach to critiquing them is going to be quite different.
Right, and so maybe the thing that, just to come back to the intimacy of the podcast, is that to the extent that this format is able to make people feel like they've got friends, you know, who are doing something sane, that maybe we are in this position in some way of talking to people as though, you know, we have relationships that we don't.
And yeah, I guess we're just gonna have to deal with that.
Yeah, I mean there is something there and honestly I think a lot of the vast majority of the interaction that we get on social media is from people who say thank you so much for the work you're doing and the things that you're saying and here's not just thank you so much in some kind of, you know, fawning way where I'm congratulating us but in a way where they're saying this is what I've gone through and they share their experience and they share coming out of cults and they share
finding their way out of the conspiracy theories of the last year or so, and that we've played a role in helping with that.
So that's wonderful.
I mean, that makes me feel really good.
It's been very validating, but I have this negativity bias that seems to bypass that on a regular basis.
And I think Derek is always on Slack saying, you know, don't take it so hard, and also focus on the good feedback that we get.
And I'm realizing that maybe I've got a little bit of that Trillbilly thing going on as well where if I feel like I can perfect responses to feedback that somehow that will make material change in the world, you know, if I hit it absolutely right, if I make sure that You know, I don't go too far with that particular joke or that inference or something like that, that maybe, maybe, maybe conspirituality will go away.
And it just won't, for fuck's sake, it just won't.
It's not going anywhere.
Look, if you ever go to open mic nights at the Comedy Store or in Santa Monica, there's one where Well-known comedians are there working out their sets, then you'd understand that most of their jokes bomb.
And the Netflix specials only come once in a while for a reason.
And I would say, honestly, especially a day like today where we barely have any notes and we're just having a discussion.
This is not our special.
We're working things out as we come across them in their conversations.
I don't see anything in life as a failure.
I got over that attitude a long time ago because it's a constant building process and you learn from it.
And I think that these conversations are part of that process.
You see, Derek, I love failure.
Disillusionment and failure is actually my religion.
You can take the boy out of Catholic school and you can't take the Catholic school out of the boy.
Yeah, and I wanted to say to listeners as well that we spend a lot of time preparing for these episodes, and this is actually one of the topics that we go back and forth on quite a bit.
Like, are we being thoughtful enough about these different things?
And I would suggest that, Matthew, you're probably the most conscientious and careful about asking those questions, and I really appreciate it.
And I want to say to listeners as well, if you have specific instances In which you feel like we have been unfair or nasty or been punching down or been using snark in a way that just felt really, really inappropriate, definitely let us know.
