All Episodes
March 19, 2021 - Conspirituality
01:32:52
43: How to Redpill a Yoga Podcaster

Back in December, a certified anesthesiologist named Dr. Madhava Setty posted a long critique of our podcast to the New Age website Collective Evolution. While cordial and apparently well-meaning, Setty’s essay failed to quote a single episode. Setty filled in his own blanks with outright misrepresentations, leading with: “Matthew, Derek and Julian… assume that there are no large conspiracies in play in our world at this time. To state it flatly, to them the idea of a large conspiracy is so preposterous that they cannot even see that they are making an assumption when dismissing the possibility.”There’s no planet on which any of our episodes have said anything of the kind. In fact, we’ve repeatedly affirmed the opposite: that conspiracy theories and conspiritualists that monetize them exist because real conspiracies traumatize people. Tuskegee happened. MKUltra was real. #savethechildren took hold in part because Jeffery Epstein’s network has not yet been fully understood or prosecuted.Setty is so well-mannered and convincing, however, that New Age influencers who might be feeling a little defensive about how the yoga and wellness world has shown its ass in 2020 have welcomed his dulcet tones with open arms. In one appearance, he guested on J. Brown’s Yoga Talks podcast, and provided a master class on how to lead an anxious and altruistic yoga devotee into conspirituality. We didn’t respond to Setty’s initial essay because there was nothing to respond to: he didn’t offer any data. But now we think it’s worth examining in detail how, in real time — and before he winds up on Joe Rogan — he seductively spins together theories about divine consciousness, 9/11, COVID, and how everything is not as it seems.In the Jab, Julian reviews the scare-mongering of the newest seemingly-qualified anti-vax doc, Geert Vanden Bossche. In the Ticker, Derek looks at the empty religions of Instagram and the truth seekers of tomorrow—and today.Show NotesWho is Geert Vanden Bossche?Dr. Mobeen Syed on Vanden Bossche.Dr. Zubin Damania on Vanden Bossche.America Without GodThe Empty Religions of InstagramThe Truth Seekers Are ComingMadhava Setty distorts our podcast contentMadhava Setty redpills J Brown i -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
- Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Rebski.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can keep up to date with us on all of our social media handles, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Clubhouse, where every Sunday afternoon at 1pm Pacific, we have conversations.
It's been really nice lately having recurring characters come on and talk, but of course it's open to anyone, so please join.
And at patreon.com slash conspirituality for as little as $5 a month, you can access our Monday bonus episodes.
Conspirituality 43 How to Red Pill a Yoga Podcaster Back in December, a certified anesthesiologist named Dr. Madhava Sethi posted a long critique of our podcast to the New Age website Collective Evolution, which has 5.2 million followers on Facebook.
While cordial and apparently well-meaning, Seti's essay failed to quote a single episode.
Seti filled in his own blanks with outright misrepresentations, leading with, Matthew, Derek, and Julian assume that there are no large conspiracies in play in our world at this time.
To state it flatly, he continued, to them, the idea of a large conspiracy is so preposterous that they cannot even see that they're making an assumption when dismissing The possibility.
Now, there is no planet on which any of our episodes have said anything of the kind.
In fact, we've repeatedly affirmed the opposite, that conspiracy theories and the conspiritualists that monetize them exist because real conspiracies traumatize people.
Hashtag Save the Children took hold in part because Jeffrey Epstein's work has not yet been fully understood or prosecuted.
Seti is so well-mannered and convincing, however, that New Age influencers who might be feeling a little defensive about how the yoga and wellness world has shown its ass in 2020 have welcomed his dulcet tones with open arms.
In a recent appearance, he guested on Jay Brown's Yoga Talks podcast and provided a masterclass on how to lead an anxious and altruistic yoga devotee into conspirituality.
Now, we didn't respond to Seti's initial essay because there was nothing to respond to.
He didn't quote us or offer any data.
But now, we think it's worth examining in detail how he seductively spins together theories about divine consciousness, 9-11, COVID, and how everything is not as it seems.
In the jab today, I'll be reviewing the scaremongering of the newest, seemingly qualified anti-vax doctor, Kirk von den Borsche.
In the ticker, Derek looks at the empty religions of Instagram.
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.
In a recent New York Times article, the writer Lee Stein asks a seemingly simple question.
How did influencers become our moral authorities?
It's a question that, in many ways, we've been asking on this podcast since inception.
Stein writes that 22% of millennials are known as nuns.
That's N-O-N-E-S.
And we'll be the only nuns that I'm referring to in this piece.
In fact, the broader religious landscape in America has shifted dramatically in the last generation.
According to a 2019 Pew poll, American adults identifying as Christian dropped 12 points in the last decade.
To be clear, 65% identify as Christian, so they're still a majority force.
Overall, they found 26% of adults identify as none.
None is an umbrella term signifying atheist, agnostic, or just not interested in anything in particular.
Sometimes this includes dabblers who pull from a variety of traditions without feeling invested in any of them.
This frames my stance on the topic.
An atheist in terms of being a non-theist, while also recognizing that you can find value in most traditions.
Stein noticed that wellness influencers fill a void of sorts.
She writes, quote, I was once one of those millennials who made politics her religion.
I lasted three years as a feminist activist and organizer before I burned out in 2017.
And that's when I began noticing how many wellness products and programs were marketed to women in pain and how the social media industry relies on keeping us outraged and engaged.
It's no wonder we're seeking relief.
End quote.
Over at The Atlantic, Shadi Hamid finds himself occupying a similar space.
He falls on a quarter of American adults identifying as none, though states that less than half of adults are traditionally religious, i.e.
Christian church attendees, based on a 2019 Gallup poll.
Hamid argues that politics has rushed in to fill the void of religion.
As Christianity's hold, in particular, has weakened, ideological intensity and fragmentation have risen.
American faith, it turns out, is as fervent as ever.
It's just that what was once religious belief has now been channeled into political belief.
Political debates over what America is supposed to mean have taken on the character of theological disputations.
This is what religion without religion looks like.
Hamid argues that the left and right have channeled their religions differently.
The woke left repurpose original sin, atonement, ritual, and excommunication as pathways to creating a more just society on this earth, not a heaven above, while the right has stripped much of the religion from their religion while focusing their existential angst into blood and soil themes.
QAnon is essentially a religious doctrine, requiring of its devotees the same leaps of faith.
Hamid notes that while the stain and sting of World War II still hover over Europe, America hasn't experienced a similar existential crisis since the Civil War.
When people say they want peace on Earth, they sometimes mean we'll only find peace when everyone believes what I do.
And then some people just like to fight, be it on a screen or on a field.
And we have to learn how to negotiate that.
Can we truly find unity after January 6th?
Hamid doubts it.
Turning conflicting politics into religious dogma doesn't end well, especially when believers place their faith in leaders who plunder and pillage.
Perhaps this will remain America's existential dilemma, always at war with itself.
So Stein looks at the politicization of religion, or rather the religiosity of politics, as a failure of imagination.
Why, she wonders, have people put their faith in memoir-selling, supplement-slinging influencers instead of people who have actually accomplished something in their lives other than turnkey marketing campaigns?
Why would we turn to these so-called leaders, i.e.
influencers, who are incapable of even attempting to answer life's big questions, or at the very least offer solace in the face of uncertainty?
She writes, quote, There is a chasm between the vast scope of our needs and what influencers can provide.
We're looking for guidance in the wrong places.
Instead of helping us engage with our most important questions, our screens might be distracting us from them.
Maybe we actually need to go to something like church?
End quote.
Something like, perhaps.
But we don't usually fare well when we march backwards.
I do agree with Stein that our purpose is definitely not to optimize our one wild and precious life, as she writes.
She wants us to not be alienated from what matters most to us, which is our closest kin.
That is certainly an idea to have faith in, but as with any belief, it's only going to manifest by taking action.
While I applaud both of these efforts and the ways that they arrive there, I also feel that these writers give a little too much weight to traditional religion.
The romantization of a religious past where things were more cohesive doesn't really make sense.
Religion is a living, breathing ideological framework that helps form and takes cues from cultures.
You can't disentangle religion from society.
Taking America and Christianity alone as a study, when has there ever been a golden age in this nation?
Religion has always been exclusionary, by race, gender, economic class, and principle.
Whatever unifying force it has had, it has always been for a select group of people.
The shift in focus away from metaphysics by the nones is in degrees of kind, not form.
We seem wired to believe in ideas far beyond our capacities to confirm.
Religion is a manifestation of biological impulse, so it's not surprising that the themes of secularism rhyme with these previous ideas.
Perhaps what we're really heading toward is an enduring battle for truth, as Caitlyn Tiffany writes in The Atlantic.
She points out the uptick in the term truth seeker on Instagram as a replacement for conspiracy theorists and QAnon devotees.
And it is a perfect ruse.
No actual research is needed, no debates, no intellectual rigor, just the spreading of memes that you can in turn monetize in your downline.
I'll close with her quote on these seekers, as it might not reflect the religion of yesterday, but it perfectly captures where the intersection between politics and religion has found itself today.
How it evolves from here is anyone's guess, but I'll argue that a little more vetting in our influencer process seems pretty necessary right now.
A truth movement, like the one created by the 9-11 truthers, implies a belief in a single, manifest truth that must be realized and distributed.
The truth seekers of today aren't always as committed to a given theory or idea.
Oftentimes, they don't bother to assert specific truths at all, instead just insisting that their followers question everything they're told.
Others stash their truths in temporary Instagram stories, then move on quickly to something else.
One week they might post a truth about child trafficking, and the next week one about voter fraud or vaccines.
Even the truth-seekers who do maintain one more or less consistent belief in a grand theory about, say, the deep state or globalist elites, tend to speak about it vaguely, covering it in a friendly gloss.
Their focus is less on the troubling stories they unfurl than on what the ability to comprehend those stories says about them and their audience by extension.
Their brand is based on the act of seeking itself.
It has the glow of girl power rhetoric and carries the implicit promise of being part of a lovable underdog in-group." End quote.
And I'll just point out, as we get into this discussion today, that the themes that Tiffany brings up right there perfectly define the podcast that we're going to be dissecting.
The Jab, our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
The anti-vax megaphone amplified a new voice this week, as everyone tweeted about, shared and interviewed a man named Geert van den Morsche.
He insisted that mass vaccination in the midst of a pandemic would lead to inevitable civilizational collapse.
Now, he posted an open letter to the WHO on LinkedIn and Twitter, as all legit scientific researchers do, urging an immediate halt to vaccination.
The letter begins, I am not anti-vaccine, something which no one who is not anti-vaccine ever needs to say.
Predictably, his message then confirms the fears and malformed assertions of anti-vaxxers, and so he immediately ascended to being the expert among experts to whom, according to them, we should all listen.
Okay, so who is Gerd van den Borsche and what is his argument?
His background as it turns out is in veterinary medicine and he describes himself as being a certified expert in microbiology and infectious diseases.
He does have a PhD in virology and it's noteworthy that he's worked at various companies including for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in a managerial role involved with vaccine development.
He has not himself published any papers on vaccine research.
Van den Bosch's argument is a new version of the call for allowing natural herd immunity.
He says that during a pandemic all of the quarantine measures and mass vaccination efforts will be counterproductive and disastrous.
Now he calls the disease that has so far killed over 2.6 million people a harmless virus that should be allowed to run its course so that people can develop natural immunity.
He claims that mass vaccination enhances the process whereby the virus learns to mutate in ways that avoid the immune response the vaccines give us, thus becoming more deadly.
This, of course, is catnip to those who don't trust any experts until an outlier comes along who validates their worst fears and suspicions.
Several doctors and scientists have critiqued the scientific mistakes and incorrect premises in Vandenbosch's argument.
The two that I'm drawing from the most are Zubin Damania and Mobin Saeed.
I'll include links to their critiques in the show notes.
The claims he makes that vaccination will not reduce or prevent viral replication and transmissions is false.
Vaccinating individuals does reduce transmission as well as replication, especially if people get their full dose, which in some cases means getting that second shot.
He argues that vaccination uniquely accelerates better adapted strains, but that's wrong.
The data shows that the more dangerous variants that have emerged so far have done so in the absence of vaccines because more infections and more replication is actually what results in more evolutionary adaptation.
The existing vaccines in circulation are still effective against the new variants and do support our immune systems in ramping up so as to prevent severe illness.
It just takes a little longer.
The more people are vaccinated, the fewer variants will arise.
But when they do, we can develop effective vaccine response.
Van den Bosch claims that the current vaccines prevent the development of an innate immune response.
You can tell how that would be appealing to conspiritualists, but that's a false dichotomy.
The vaccines in circulation actually promote innate immune system activation.
In fact, some studies show that they do so better than in those who have just survived the natural infection.
And finally what's relevant to note here as well is that van den Bosch's letter also mentions a new type of vaccine that he has apparently invented which he claims will be much more effective at eradicating COVID for good.
So far, no research data has been published on this new vaccine.
All right, so Derek, Julian, we're going to approach our review of this Jay Brown Yoga Talks podcast, where he speaks with Madhavassati, and we're going to take a look at his claims where he speaks with Madhavassati, and we're going to take a look at his claims from I'm going to provide an overview of the setting, the structure, the dynamics of the interview.
Julian, I think you're going to tug on the loose threads that unravel Seti's soft blanket of logical fallacies, and Derek is going to take a look at Seti's incoherent presentation of his own profession, anesthesiology, as well as some of his red herrings on vaccines.
But I'm going to start by introducing Seti here.
He's a board-certified Physician in anesthesiology and he works in the Department of Anesthesia and Perioperative Medicine at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts.
He has self-published a book called Woke, An Anesthesiologist's View and he says that it is, quote, a rigorous and entertaining critique of how we think about our world.
In this book, I seek to offer a solution to navigating an increasingly divergent set of narratives coming from our media sources.
Rather than adding to the noise, I instead suggest that we have forgotten or ignored a fundamental reality, or sorry, fundamental ability we each possess to discern fact from fiction.
So, sounds like an interesting guy, but you first bumped up against him, Julian, in a Facebook thread.
So, how did that happen?
Well, yeah, you know, it's kind of funny because it's just it's one of those Facebook threads where someone had posted a very appreciative post about what we were doing and saying people should check us out.
And then that same person tagged Seti on the thread, just inviting him to comment.
And he came on and invited me pretty quickly to debate him on his rather substantial platform, as we've pointed out, called Collective Evolution, with their huge following.
And so I considered it, but after seeing that he was deeply invested in 9-11 truth, and that the website has a demographic that looks like it's dedicated to conspiracy material, I demurred.
Some attempts were made to persuade me to do otherwise, but I made it clear that I thought it would be a waste of time, and just tried to leave it there as politely as I could.
Honestly, for me, there are few things more time-consuming and pointless than submitting to the gish-gallop of dutifully debunking the endless stream of conspiracy claims, websites, and homemade documentaries on YouTube and people who say, you know, unless you're willing to do that, you're closed-minded or, you know, dogmatic.
Yeah, and then speaking to Collective Evolution, which I haven't really perused that much, because, you know, within the first couple of seconds of being on the homepage, I was invited to, quote, join us on Telegram because of censorship, unquote.
So I had the feeling of where that was going to be going.
Yeah, you can get the flavor pretty quickly.
And honestly, over the years, I mean, I've been doing this online for a long time, as I know you guys have too.
For me, it's even worse when the person has some kind of advanced education, because then the bad reasoning, the pseudoscience, the paranoid patternicity, it just gets even more convoluted.
And it's sophisticated and impenetrable.
It's well-practiced.
But honestly, And I've been very polite thus far, but guys, it's the same bullshit the average Joe conspiritualist serves up, but now it's on a really beautiful hand-painted piece of china and it's garnished elaborately.
And it gets even worse if they're spiritual, because then the epistemology has this added mystique draped over it like a translucent silk tablecloth.
I'm not impressed.
Well, let's, let me just briefly, uh, you know, I first found out about it from that thread and said he had published a essay about us, something about signal or noise.
And it was that essay that uncollective evolution kicked off this whole thing.
And it's a critical essay, which is, which is all good.
I mean, on clubhouse every week, people come on and criticize us and we have talks and then that's actually really good feedback because it helps me to understand some Some of the things I or we might be saying.
So criticism is always welcome.
And Seti starts his essay on us, but turned it into a 90-minute podcast between him and the site's founder.
And in the beginning of both of them, it's very cordial and saying, hey, they're trying to do some good work, but then it goes off the rails.
And on the essay and the podcast, or specifically on the essay, he writes, Quote, they assume that there are no large conspiracies in play in our world at this time.
To state it flatly, to them the idea of a large conspiracy is so preposterous that they cannot even see that they are making an assumption when dismissing the possibility.
And it's a very long essay, and I did read it, but I'm less interested in a synopsis of that essay than the techniques that he uses in it
Yeah, and I want to briefly note to a kind of overriding assumption that Seti makes about how we're supposed to communicate, and even farther than that, how we're all supposed to understand the world together for mutual benefit, given that You know, we are all interested in yoga.
So at the end of that essay, he writes, and this is addressing Julian directly because he uses part of his essay to quote from the Facebook thread, he writes, wouldn't it be more constructive to come together and unify under a common understanding and purpose?
As two practitioners of yoga, a science that is steeped in the ancient wisdom of embodying unity, shouldn't seeking common ground be our primary intention?
Namaste, he ends.
Now, throughout discussions and debates in the Yoga and New Age worlds, this is a really common passive-aggressive shaming technique that usually tries to brush conflict away with an appeal to moral superiority.
It's kind of like, aren't we supposed to be committed to spiritual unity?
And, you know, first of all, we might all have an interest in yoga, but historically, yoga practitioners have always held wildly divergent views.
There are plenty of schools and sects of yoga that have nothing to do with either embodiment or unity.
Yoga has been practiced by all kinds of people, including atheists, Buddhists, Muslims, and it's worth pointing out that there are really, as far as I can tell, only two main groups of yoga people who appeal to this kind of reductive and incorrect universalist definition of yoga.
So first of all we have like very idealistic non-Indians who believe that the discipline can somehow be a unifying answer for all people at all times.
And then on the other side we have Hindu nationalists who insist that yoga only ever means one thing and that one thing is intrinsic to Hindu theology and identity, and both groups are wrong.
So, I appreciate Seti's sentiment and the appeal to unity, but it's kind of disingenuous.
And regardless, if you are bullshitting during a pandemic, we should probably address that before we talk about how much we all love yoga.
Just to interrupt you for a second there, Matthew, you know, it's amongst the non-Indians, it's that kind of weird, oversimplified, relativist interpretation of what non-duality means, right?
Totally.
Non-duality means that everybody's right, and if you say someone's wrong, if you ever disagree with me and say I'm wrong, I thought you were a yogi, I thought you were trying to become enlightened, look at how judgmental you are, and it's just complete pablum.
Or something about, like, if we have the correct spirit about communicating together, we will both arrive at the same truth.
And I think that I want to mention, too, that a little bit of background here is that this appeal for unity burns brighter in the New Age context because of Seti's Indian heritage.
So, right off the top, there's some cultural coding involved.
He doesn't bring it up, but it's just there with regard to him appearing on Jay Brown's yoga podcast.
There's this unspoken deference that's paid to his background.
In the podcast we'll cover he even, in the beginning, he gives Jay this little lesson in the Sanskrit pronunciation of his name, which happens to be one of the names of Vishnu.
It also means born in It's a beautiful name and it's a nice exchange, but the setting provides this whiff of the kind of idealized Orientalism that's not necessarily important to Jay's brand.
Although Jay does claim affiliation with the founder of modern yoga, the Indian master Krishnamacharya, but there's this hint of idealization that will be familiar to his audience.
So, in a broader context, the non-resident Indian scientist or doctor who's still in touch with their yoga roots can easily be a superstar icon in the yoga world because they embody the best of both worlds.
They'll talk about yoga as being a science, for example.
So, like the top dog example there is Deepak Chopra, who is, you know, like a super beneficiary of positive Orientalist idealization.
You know, I think it would be good if we just put the straw man to bed that we've mentioned already.
SETI likes to paint us as holding a central belief that there are simply no conspiracies in the world.
But we've often talked about real conspiracies, and there are others that I think we're also clear about as well.
So, for example, I'll lead us off.
We talked about Tuskegee.
On the podcast a couple times and for anyone who's not familiar, this was an awful 40-year chapter in medicine from 1932 to 1972 in which researchers offered free medical care to about 600 poor black sharecroppers in Alabama while actually just studying them to track the progress of their untreated syphilis.
They administered placebos and treatments they already knew to be ineffective.
128 people died.
And many of the men's wives and children were infected as well as a result of this completely horrific, malevolent, racist and absolutely shameful conspiracy and something that we've covered on the podcast.
So yeah, that's just one.
I mean, the other one that I'll bring up is relevant.
We haven't talked about it before, but it's relevant in terms of some of what we'll get into today.
Which is the Valerie Plame affair.
For anyone who doesn't know about this, it was a fascinating episode.
In 2003, episode in our history, I mean, the Bush administration sent a former diplomat named Joe Wilson to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq had purchased, had arranged to purchase Yellow Cake Uranium to make nuclear weapons.
Wilson later wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times saying he'd found no evidence that the claims had any merit at all.
And this slowed down the Bush and Cheney agenda of trying to legitimize invading Iraq by claiming that Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction.
And it just so happened that Joe Wilson had a wife named Valerie Plame who was a CIA operative, undercover agent.
So, in retaliation, Dick Cheney's aide, Scooter Libby, so the story goes, the story they ended up telling later, leaked her identity to syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who then casually outed her in an article about Wilson as a kind of aside, just mentioning her wife, who happens to be a CIA agent.
And this directly put her life at risk, it blew her cover as an agent, it effectively ended her career, and it was shown to have been malevolently ...planted in that way to punish him for not helping with their conspiratorial agenda.
I'm comfortable adding here, too, that the neocon core of the Bush administration opportunistically seized upon 9-11 as a pretext to go into Iraq and gain control of the $12 trillion worth of oil there and establish lucrative contracts for Halliburton, which was the company Cheney had been CEO of until 2000.
They also lied about Hussein's ties to Al-Qaeda to get into the war, try and blame 9-11 on him, and in the end, Scooter Libby took the fall, but he had his sentence commuted very conveniently by Bush, and was later pardoned in full by Trump.
So, do I sound like a conspiracy theorist?
Well, kind of, but all of this stuff is supported by solid evidence, and we know that it actually happened.
We've also spoken about the fact that there is obviously has been an ongoing conspiracy to cover up the extent of Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking network.
We don't know the extent of it.
It's going to take a lot of investigative journalism, a lot of prying into what levels of law enforcement and You know, state level, you know, attorneys general's offices, I think, in Florida have worked against trying to uncover that material.
And it's because, and we've brought up that case over and over again, because the lack of resolution, the suppression of information that's probably going on.
The questions surrounding Jeffrey Epstein's death, all of these are very, very difficult matters to digest, to process culturally, to be able to understand.
And QAnon provides a lot of answers very quickly.
It fills in the gaps.
Save the Children flies in and takes over, turns what's a very, very difficult set of data points into a resolvable or an understandable story.
We've also brought up the reality of the conspiracy of MKUltra and its impact upon thousands of people in both Canada and the United States, but also abroad in the CIA's attempt to try to figure out how to administer brainwashing techniques, ultimately but also abroad in the CIA's attempt to try to figure But yeah, I mean, these things happen and they have to be dug into and it's very difficult for them to be understood.
And they are the reason that conspiracy theories take off to fill in the gaps.
Speaking of MKUltra, one that I've butted up against for 10 months of this podcast is we cover vaccines a lot and then people will claim that we're big pharma shills.
But one thing I've repeatedly brought up is the conspiracy of forces that led to the antidepressant boom.
Which involved the government working with the psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry.
And I document all of that in my last book.
It's something I'm very passionate about because being a fan of where psychedelic therapy is potentially heading.
And you can look at the documents of the different ways that Basically, psychology and pharmacology strong-armed insurance agencies and the government to downplay the efficacy of talk therapy and psychotherapy and then to get people on a pill they have to consume every day.
And the one thing about this too that I'll point out as we lead into this podcast, we're going to discuss and dissect.
Is that something like what I just brought up is heavily footnoted with reputable sources that have done the research.
And when I look at the podcast and all of the claims that were made that we're going to get into and listen to some clips of, there's no footnotes in Jay's liner notes.
He repeatedly says, I've looked at both sides and never states Any of his resources of where he's looking, and that to me is at least if you're going to touch upon things that are potentially conspiratorial in nature, bring the receipts and show it.
Don't just say, I've looked at things.
That means absolutely nothing.
That's why we offer extensive show notes in our podcast every week so that people who actually want to see where we're getting information can go and look for it.
Yeah, and the thing I want to add here, too, because, you know, we just each laid out conspiracies that we accept and that we know actually happened.
The mistake that people who fold down the conspiracy rabbit hole make is they come across something like this that has been shown to be the case or that looks suspicious enough and then tend to generalize outward.
So everything you just said about that antidepressant kind of, you know, underhandedness, Derek, easily then becomes, well, look at what they did with antidepressants.
So it wouldn't surprise me if, and that's the mistake, you can't generalize from the specifics.
You need receipts every time.
Well, I'm glad that you brought up the receipts issue in footnoting because it gives an opportunity to introduce a little bit of the context for Jay Brown's podcast.
He's not a footnote guy.
It's not that kind of thing.
It's content production that straddles this line between knowledge production and influence in a very interesting way.
He's a staple content creator in the yoga world.
And his podcast is well-liked, it's folksy, he's been running it for a bunch of years now, releasing a weekly interview.
He used to own a beautiful little yoga studio in Williamsburg in Brooklyn before the rents there got insane.
And now with the pandemic, I think most of his teaching work is online.
But the main thing to know about Jay's podcast is that he frames every interview as a learning conversation for himself.
So he's transparent about this process, even when he has misgivings about, you know, the topics.
But this gives the whole podcast an easygoing approach that goes along with his yoga branding tagline, which is, Gentle is the new advanced.
So a couple of weeks back, he made some very red pilly comments about the COVID crisis, and Julian responded to them, and that was on Instagram.
But what he was doing back then was he was priming his audience for this episode with Seti, which he opens this way.
So we'll hear him now.
Two weeks ago, I made some comments in the intro, and I let myself go to a place that was risky, that crossed a boundary, and I was like, And, you know, it's something I've done before here on this show.
I don't script these intros.
I want them to be real.
But just because there's something in my head and it's honest in the moment doesn't mean it's a good idea to just put it out into the world.
And I haven't done that in a while, you know?
I haven't tried to get into sticky stuff or let myself just spout off on difficult stuff that I might not think is a good idea later, you know?
I haven't done that in a while, and I did do that two weeks ago.
Because I think part of me wanted somebody to call me out or push back on me or dispel me of ideas that are maybe misguided.
So I guess here we are.
And, you know, you're welcome.
Right.
So Jay, as you can see, is all about the process.
It's about his process.
And that's the hook of the podcast, is that he's learning in public, in real time.
He's identifying with his listeners in that.
The brand is positioned as public student with all of the vulnerability and intimacy that that entails.
So when the content brushes up against journalism territory, he provides a kind of responsibility disclaimer that he's just asking questions.
But as we know, that kind of just asking questions vibe really intersects with the conspiratorial gambit.
So, he goes on in the introduction to read some positive feedback he received on his intro from the two weeks prior, and then he also appreciates much of what Julian offered on Instagram, and then he also pushed back against the idea that he was a wellness influencer, because as he says, he's not on social media much.
And this adds another layer of disclaimer, which is, I'm just a guy with a podcast, and this is just a conversation.
And then he ends by distancing himself from the notion of influence altogether, like this.
I wonder, whoever you are that are listening to this right now, do you consider yourself a follower of me?
Because if you listen to this, are you influenced by what I say?
Like, are you modeling how you are in the world or who you're being because of me and what I say?
I don't know.
I wouldn't think that would be the case.
In my mind, I think of you as being a very discerning person who maybe agrees with me sometimes, or I think there's a lot of you out there who actually don't even like me very much who still listen.
I know that's crazy, but I believe it happens.
Like, and you know, some of these people that they talk about on the Conspiratuality Podcast, I wouldn't even know who those people were.
So, after A number of disclaimers, then Seti comes on, they exchange pleasantries, they recount the Facebook thread that Julian was involved in, and then Seti really opens the main conversation with Jay by flattering him.
Well, Jay, you know, you're not giving yourself enough credit.
You're not just some random guy.
Number one, you know, you have the Oh, the clear vision and ear to see what was going on on that particular thread.
And you also took the time to read some of my writing.
So I grant you a lot of, you know, latitude that way.
So SETI immediately aligns and bonds with Jay in a way that by the end of the podcast, we'll have them sounding like they're like staring at the stars together after popping ecstasy, like they get really close by the end.
And it sounds sweet and tender.
And I think this is really appealing to a yoga audience of probably 80% women to see here two men speak in such intimate tones.
It's very different from the, you know, J.P.
Sears and Tim Kennedy muscular bromance stuff that we've covered.
It's much more yoga.
But it also means that Jay is in no way interviewing this guy.
That's not what it's about.
Setti goes on to flatter him consistently through the 90 minutes, saying that's the wise perspective that you have.
Great questions, good questions.
You're in a rare group of people who looks at both sides.
Setti brought up the term most people 18 times in the podcast.
And I bring this up now because he's saying that most people don't do this, therefore I am one of the people that do.
And that's a repetitive thing.
And that's a bonding mechanism that he uses with Jay throughout an 18-second 18 separate times he calls out the most people.
I want to point out that Chris Cavanaugh and Matt Brown on Decoding the Gurus have pegged this kind of identification with listeners as a key technique amongst internet gurus.
So J.P.
Sears does it constantly, like, you're special, you're smart enough to know, you and I have done the work to understand that, we're not going to be fooled by mainstream media.
But the result is that there's this deepened feeling that SETI is the master in the house and Jay is really sitting at his feet.
Also, I counted eight times where Jay gives a kind of rush of excited and anxious revelation comments in which he confesses his doubts about vaccines or about how the World Trade Center Building 7 came down, and SETI responds by slowing everything down and quietly saying, Like giving a benediction.
So it's really interesting how it starts to play out.
And SETI then moves on to his origin story, which is really cool.
It centers on a conversion moment with regard to ecology.
He says that in his 20s he was an engineer for the military and he was on a mission in Antarctica developing submarine surveillance.
It's an exciting trip, it's fulfilling, but then the expedition ends with something that's horrifying to him.
At the end of the experiment, you know, the ice was starting to break up.
This was in early May by the time we had concluded.
And we just dropped all of our equipment into the ocean.
You know, it's just too expensive to fly it all the way back home.
And the rest of it, we just started burning.
And I looked at that, and that was a moment for me where I said, holy moly, what am I doing with my life?
I somehow have been tricked, or because I'm not really paying attention to how things go, I find myself building weapon systems.
And I, when I returned to the States, I immediately dropped what I was doing.
I quit my job and started taking classes in organic chemistry in order to apply to medical school.
So this is like super poignant because everything that follows, and I'm totally with him too, right on this.
Everything that follows is now positioned as a rejection of some really bad things.
Militarism, environmental obscenity, wastefulness.
SETI is charting this noble path out of modernity and its abuses and who wouldn't be on his side?
The military industrial complex is abhorrent.
But then he goes into medicine to help people and he becomes disillusioned by what he sees as a similar ignorance.
I just have to say too, it's such a strikingly cinematic moment.
He's able to position himself in terms of a narrative, in terms of an emotional kind of identity and the identification that you describe us forming with him right away.
Through this existential imagery of the technology getting submerged in the water, the scientific equipment on fire as he watches it burn.
He's offended by it, right?
It's wasteful.
It's meaningless.
It's about him having been tricked into something.
There's no nobility there.
Then he decides to go into medicine and as he'll continue, unlike his fellow students, because he's this rare person as an engineer, he realizes that medical science knows nothing.
And why do they know nothing?
Because they don't know everything about the body.
He disdains their overconfidence and we'll come to find out that this is probably because of his metaphysical investments.
And that was where he introduced the most people, because he says, unlike most of my colleagues in medical school, I was approaching it from engineering, trained in high-level mathematics, and immediately he says, right away, what are we doing here?
We don't know anything about the human body.
Well, maybe his colleagues in medical school had studied biology, perhaps, or physiology or anatomy, and so maybe that could play into why, as an engineer, he didn't think he knew anything about the human body.
Yeah, I mean, he's going to start making this compelling link between the intrusive impact of imperialism on the environment and the intrusive impact of materialistic medicine on the body.
And that's a really good hook.
I actually, there's a part of me that endorses that hook, but not the way that he goes on to use it.
So overall, the framing is Jay is earnestly asking questions and Seti is introducing in steps the notion that Everything is not as it seems.
But the problem is, he merges the deception that industrial militarism is about peace with a supposed deception that his field of anesthesiology is bankrupt because, as Derek says, they don't know exactly how the various gases work to affect the brain.
So then within another 30 minutes, he's talking like he's an expert in viruses.
And this is exactly what Kelly Brogan did as well.
I don't know if she's still doing it, but the reason that she got traction at the beginning of the pandemic is she went from a cogent critique of psychopharmacology to criticizing epidemiologists.
So, after we arrive at the place in the story where SETI figures his new profession out, he makes his first galaxy brain claim.
Julian, why don't you read that?
After a lot of contemplation and looking at the research, it became very clear that we're never going to find the answer.
Because our model of how consciousness and our bodies actually work is based on a paradigm that is not rigorous, you know?
We're looking at it completely wrong.
We assume, you know, basically Western medicine is based on the concept of materialism in philosophy, right?
Which is that material gives rise to everything.
interaction with other material gives rise to it all, all detectable phenomena, including, say, awareness.
But this is where the puzzle of anesthesia destroys that paradigm.
Yeah.
So we've got now what seems to be a learned example from a practice in medicine that he's board certified in of how nothing is as it seems.
And then we can be off to the races.
But, you know, I want to point out that this question of what consciousness is and whether it transcends the body ends up by the end of the podcast being SETI's primary concern.
So So much so that he actually kind of guides the interview back to this point at the end.
And so the sandwich bread of this podcast are the spiritual beliefs that he has, and then conspiracies are the sandwich filling, really.
So then it becomes this master class on making conspirituality digestible.
I want to point out that anesthesiology is an extremely intense career, and there's a reason that that field is among the highest paid doctors in the world.
They average between $328,000 and $445,000 a year, and it's partly due to the risks that they take on.
So, I'm not going to debate an expert in this domain.
You do not want to put me in a room with gases with people.
It's not going to work out well.
But I did really appreciate Humphrey Davy, who I wrote about an entire section of my last book, whose fascination with nitrous oxide led to the development of anesthesia in the first place.
There were some predating him, but he was He wrote a book in 1900 that I love the title.
It's called Researches Chemical and Philosophical, chiefly concerning nitrous oxide or deflogisticated nitrous air and its respiration.
And true story, he used to show up at parties with nitrous and everyone loved him because he would dose them at the parties.
That was like a thing.
But think about what anesthesia is actually in practice.
It's a way for us to not experience pain while undergoing surgery.
So imagine having your body cut open and your organs removed or being stitched up while being conscious.
And humans endured that for a very long time.
So, there are side effects of anesthesia.
Setti actually writes about it in one of his essays, but I would argue it's generally been a net positive for humanity.
So, his story revolves around this idea that because we don't know how the mechanisms of anesthesia works, We won't ever know how it works.
And he champions a disembodied consciousness and he believes that physical systems cannot possibly lead to awareness.
And first off, this view seems so defeatist to me.
I mean, imagine if we were still treating patients based on miasma theory today, right?
The pandemic we're undergoing would last for generations like the bubonic plague did because miasma theory was in fashion then.
And so, not knowing how something works is cause for curiosity, inquiry, and research, not metaphysics.
And on the face of it, his disdain for materialism just doesn't make any sense.
He's claiming that physiology alone does not produce consciousness, yet he's using gases to induce unconsciousness.
And it seems to me that if consciousness was transcendent, then we might not actually be so susceptible to anesthesia.
The reason that anesthesiologists are successful is that they've dialed in the exact ratios to produce unconsciousness, which is the very definition of the materialism that he rails against so hard.
Okay, but so what does he think he's doing as he applies the gases, though?
So when he dials up the gas and people drop out of consciousness, what would the explanation for that be?
Well, in an essay he published about two weeks ago on collective evolution about this topic, I don't know if it coincided with the Jay Brown talk or he wrote it after, I don't know the exact timing of it, but he basically says that consciousness can just appear and disappear at will as if there's some mechanism beyond our understanding of it.
Well wait, so if somebody gives me anesthesia, for general anesthesia, am I to believe that my conscious faculty sort of on its own will retreats as though we're scared or shy or kind of just disdainful of the whole process?
But it wouldn't be because the actual gases were dimming its light.
I'm going to apply logic to your statement and say yes.
That's what it would seem to be saying.
But again, I can't actually follow his argument because there is no logical thread there.
So it's very difficult to tease apart.
It does seem that being an anesthesiologist would be sort of the, I don't know, ideal window for seeing in real time the materiality of consciousness on a daily basis, right?
Who else has access to that where you're actually turning a dial on a machine, I guess?
I'm kind of picturing it as the Jetsons or something.
I don't know what it looks like.
But they're turning a dial and the person is shutting down.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I'd love to break this down if I can insert this right here.
I mean, it's this, first of all, Derek, you pointed this out on Slack.
It's this off-brand covert experimental methodology that's completely unethical, right?
That he applies as the core of his argument.
He describes how the increasing dosage of anesthetic results in decreased responsiveness progressively, but then he says this is all purely subjective.
The only way we can know is by asking the person, right?
It's hard to see his point because he's talking about the progressive chemical effects of anesthetic chemicals on the brain.
But then he just leaps in and says the Western medical paradigm I'm quoting here is you need a functioning body to be conscious that certain neural pathways have to be functioning in order to be aware But based on my observations, I flip it on its head to say that those neural circuits are active as a sign that awareness is present.
Well, that's very impressive and bold.
So, okay, let's hear your supporting observation.
Then he talks about Administering temporary amnesia-inducing benzodiazepines in addition to local anesthetic during the routine surgery removal of a cyst on someone's hand.
So he distracts the patient by encouraging them into conversation about their lives.
They've been put on local anesthetic that stops them from feeling what's happening and they can't see what's happening, presumably, unless they really want to watch and they have a gory fascination.
And then they're also on amnesia-inducing benzodiazepines that help calm them down.
But then later on, the fact that the patient who was given these drugs has been rendered completely unaware that the surgery has happened, they're disoriented, this is supposedly the mind-blowing punchline.
Somehow this is supposed to validate the claim that consciousness is not brain-dependent.
And I'm sorry, but it's completely incoherent.
The problem with that particular episode, moment, is that the patient was expecting to go under.
And he actually says, "I play a little experiment with the patients." If you're a medical doctor and you're doing anecdotal research in the context of Yeah, he says, and everybody in the operating room was like, this is a direct quote, come on, dude, aren't you gonna put this guy down?
Yeah, he says, he says, and everybody in the operating room was like, this is a direct quote, come on, dude, aren't you going to, aren't you going to put this guy down?
And I'm like, no, I don't have to do that.
He doesn't know what's going on and he's having a great time.
And you know, it's another data point in my study to challenge what's going on.
Okay, so he's not talking about informed consent.
I guess if it works, I mean, if he's the only anesthesiologist in the room, is everybody Trusting him to employ best practices, I guess, but I don't know how these things work.
But it reminds me of Zach Bush saying that he doesn't give standard pain medicine to people in hospice, but rather he has his nurses do Reiki on people and he says that it works.
Which is fine if that's what they know that they're going in for, what they're getting signed up for.
I mean, that episode actually, to go back to Julian's point about Tuskegee, people thought they were getting something that they weren't.
That is not right.
And for him to just openly say that on a podcast that you can access publicly when you've taken the Hippocratic Oath, that's problematic to me.
I mean, I was trying to translate that into other circumstances, like, you know, it's standard practice for me to give platelets to my leukemia patients, but I like to challenge the narrative by giving them saline instead, and the patient's always fine!
They never know the difference!
Like, I can't, I don't even know.
I don't even know what to say about that.
Yeah, it's deeply concerning.
I wanted to go back to what you said earlier too, Matthew, because he does, you called it the sandwich, the bread on either side of the sandwich, he begins and ends with consciousness and this strawman of scientific materialism.
And honestly, and there'll be people who will push back on this, but anytime I hear someone start talking about scientific materialism, I start tuning out because I know where it's going.
He establishes for us quite clearly that science is an insufficient arbiter of his core beliefs about the world.
In fact, mere Western materialist science has an agenda that obscures, denies, or lies about the most important questions.
And this is a type of conspirituality that we haven't really yet covered on the pod because it's kind of sophisticated and philosophical.
It's essentially a conspiracy theory that says science has a dogmatic bias and a suppressive attitude towards transcendent immaterial consciousness.
It's the territory of those who are convinced that there is strong, well-established, undeniable evidence for an array of paranormal phenomena, for example, but science ignores it.
And to confirm that I did know where he was going, he transitions into talking about near-death experiences pretty soon here.
Yeah, I mean, this also positions science, from SETI's point of view, at heart as supposedly a mystical activity, but a different kind of science than the one that depends on peer review and replication studies and stuff.
This is where we get into the language of yogic science, or Vedic science.
I wanted to just bring up a couple of the fallacies that run throughout.
The primary fallacy, and this is a very common one that I hear Seti using, it's a version of the argument from ignorance fallacy.
There's a variation of that called the God of the gaps.
Very, very common amongst spiritualists especially.
In this case we could also call it something like the conspiracy of the gaps or the consciousness of the gaps in terms of the example we were just talking about.
Here's how it works.
Step one, identify a gap in current understanding.
And then, step two, make it seem as if that gap in current understanding counts as evidence for your radical alternative explanation, but you never present any actual evidence for what you're saying.
Then in step three, explain the lack of evidence or the consensus rejection of your position by saying that this represents a radical new paradigm that only a few people can comprehend.
And I'm going to expose the corruption, the conspiracy, the narrow mindedness of the mainstream who you then claim are in a plot to suppress you or censor you because you're the bold truth teller.
It's a version two of what sometimes gets called the Galileo fallacy where, you know, they laughed at Galileo too, but he turned out to be right.
So, instantly sort of putting yourself as this rare genius.
And it has a neat circularity about it, in that any objections anyone makes can always be rebuffed as closed-minded, fundamentalist, stuck in the old paradigm.
And for someone who's new to this rhetoric, like I think Jay might be, it's quite easy to be tricked into thinking, yeah, I mean, how else do you explain it, right?
There's this gap here and you have a plausible reason, even though it's like radical and outlandish.
This is a very common response to anecdotes repeated so as to support all kinds of paranormal and conspiratorial beliefs.
But here's the key.
The absence of an explanation for some interesting occurrence in no way counts as evidence for, or increases the likelihood of, a novel explanation for it that violates everything we already know.
Yeah, and I would just like to add that the notion that the knowledge is being suppressed by a fundamentalist or, you know, blind or hyper-materialistic scientific community has this flavor or echo of how, you know, the mystic practitioner of the Middle Ages might have been suppressed by their institutional religion.
You know, how Rumi was cast out or not listened to, or how Hildegard of Bingen was marginalized, and so on.
So there's this kind of like almost shadow history behind this as well, which is, well, mystics and true scientists have always been oppressed, have always been marginalized.
Yes, so therefore, if your ideas are being rejected, it must be because you're being oppressed and marginalized.
It can't be because they actually are incorrect.
And the thing is, there are millions of crackpots for every one Galileo.
And then, of course, the sleight of hand that you were just gesturing towards to some extent, Matthew, which is that typically people who are into pseudoscience will compare themselves to Galileo, but Galileo was the scientist and he was being suppressed by religion.
And the pseudoscientist in this case is actually making religious type claims that the scientific community is rejecting.
So that is, there's just, the whole thing falls apart at that point.
But we notice throughout this conversation, Stetsi positions himself as the bold maverick on each topic.
So some examples, consciousness.
He flips the conventional Western medical paradigm on its head by positing immaterial consciousness as activating neural pathways.
Vaccines?
Well, he says I take a vaccine-cautious approach based on being open-minded enough to read both sides and expert enough to really understand the science.
Building 7 in the 9-11 story, I reject the mainstream narrative because no building ever collapsed from fire alone.
It had to be a controlled demolition.
So in all cases, he positions the fact that he disagrees with the scientific consensus as proof of how smart, penetrating, and eventually, we'll see, spiritually awakened his point of view is.
And then, of course, Jay also gets to be in that special club because he's agreeing with him.
So I wanted to say here, we don't have time to go into all the details, but 9-11 actually ends up taking a considerable chunk of this conversation between Seti and Jay Brown.
We don't have time to go into all the details, but for anyone interested, Popular Mechanics did the definitive analysis of this popular mainstay of the 9-11 truth movement.
How do you explain what happened to Building 7?
And I'll just leave it there.
Go and have a look.
Now there's another big chunk of this podcast that is preoccupied with vaccines, and Jay expresses his confusion, his consternation, and a kind of unknowingness, and said he soothes this anxiety by telling Jay that he can trust his intuition, but not experts, except, I guess, implicitly, him.
You know, we can't expect everyone to understand the science.
We expect people to trust the experts now.
What are we to do when you have an expert that disagrees?
That puts us into an extremely uncomfortable position, right?
And, you know, and this is where it's important to consider the importance of feeling.
You know, how does it feel?
We have come as a species to be extremely uncomfortable when it comes to uncertainty.
We don't like the way that feels.
And for good reason, right?
Because when you are confident in a position, it leads to a feeling of courageousness.
It's like, I know what I'm doing, I know what the science says, I know this is the right path, and you live a life that allows you to actualize much better.
On the other hand, if you are in a position of uncertainty, That makes it really hard to take chances.
So, we've forgotten what it means to feel when it comes to data and our opinion.
And here's the thing, you know, our cognition and the way our body feels and the way our psyche feels is extremely connected, but we tend to ignore those connections.
And because we do, this particular situation leads to a very, very common distortion, which we would call confirmation We don't look at the opposing view.
We only look at stuff that confirms what we want to believe.
Right.
And I agree with what you're saying in terms of like, it has to do with how we feel also, but the criticism of that would be that how you feel can be manipulated by people of charismatic influence.
And I think that's sort of where the Conspirituality Podcast folks have, you know, doing their work in terms of identifying Cueing on and how that has really been kind of like a social media cult that's infected a lot of people in the yoga world.
And I love, I love that moment because, because he, because he's saying, he's saying, uh, you know, feelings can be manipulated and you kind of, you're sitting in the background saying, uh-huh, not sort of, not really correct.
It's not really correct.
Right.
But he goes, yeah, by charismatic influence.
Uh-huh.
Right.
Amazing, amazing.
It's all out on the table there.
To be fair, Jay actually does pretty well here playing Devil's Advocate.
You can tell that he does actually read both sides.
He may be somewhat disoriented and confused, and I don't want to be too unfair to him.
I know it sounds harsh to say it, guys, but this last clip has Seti's incoherence on full display.
I mean, he contradicts himself mid-sentence.
Let me parse it out a little.
So, what happens, he asks, when you have an expert that disagrees?
Then it's important to consider the importance of feeling.
So I'm going to imagine that I'm inside Jay or my own head here, if I was really wanting to learn from him.
Okay, so trust my feelings, Jedi Master, instead of the merely rational mind, right?
How does it feel?
We've come as a species to be very uncomfortable with uncertainty.
When we're confident in a position, it leads to a feeling of courageousness, like I know what I am doing.
I know what the science says.
Sounds like a bad thing, Master Jedi?
On the other hand, if you're in a position of uncertainty, it makes it really hard to take chances.
Huh?
So we've forgotten what it means to feel when it comes to data.
Okay, so trust my feelings, Jedi?
You know, our cognition and the way our body feels and the way our psyche feels is all connected.
Yes, Master, I'm getting it now.
Trust my body, follow my feelings.
But we tend to ignore those connections, which leads to what we might call confirmation bias.
Huh?
To be fair, maybe in his own roundabout way, Seti is trying to say that checking your emotional investments is important so as not to fall prey to confirmation bias.
I agree.
I wonder if he's applied that lens to his bizarre motivated reasoning around anesthesia and consciousness.
So what are we to do when an expert disagrees?
Well, before you pick that apart, I just want to mention that SETI focuses on the feeling of the disagreement.
So the quote was, when you have an expert that disagrees, that puts us into an extremely uncomfortable position, right?
And what I hear in there is an overtone of what the challenge of spiritual transformation is said to feel like.
So the whole context here is That the deluded sheep feel safer being deluded and that it's going to be painful to wake up.
We heard this throughout 2020 from all of the conspiritualists.
Christiane Northrup went on about it over and over and over again.
She went on long rants about how, you know, if people were having migraines or if they had, you know, stomach troubles or something like that, that these were signs of painful transformation and ascension.
Ascension.
Right, the pain of enlightenment is conflated with the pain of realizing that conspiracies are true.
So then, by that interpretation, which I think is a very good one, he's saying notice when you feel overly confident, and he talks about that confidence as making you better able to self-actualize in the world.
So he talks about it having a kind of evolutionary utility, but you need to be really suspicious of it in the end is what he's saying.
But what do we do when we have an expert that disagrees?
I just want to ask listeners to consider that we can line up whole conference stages full of people with advanced degrees in various subjects who will speak authoritatively on the existence of Bigfoot, alien abductions, how climate science is a hoax, and that quantum physics proves the paranormal.
They are experts!
They do disagree with the mainstream narrative, but that doesn't make them right.
You can't have it both ways, Mr. Seti.
You can't say that only experts who can read the studies are legitimate, as you say at some moments about vaccines, and then deny the validity of experts, and then bring up your favorite wannabe Galileos, and then pivot to the key importance of trusting your feelings with regard to data, and then say that your feelings lead to confirmation bias.
Something going on here that's a juggling that I think is inherently disorienting.
Right where this last clip left off, he goes on to Big Pharma and the straw man that we, and people generally, are overlooking, completely overlooking the facts of conflict of interest, which Derek already scuppered early on here, and the conspiracist's chestnut that obviously it's more profitable to keep us sick and medicated than to actually cure
Again, here's one of these big generalizations that then becomes a catchall from which you can say, so, it wouldn't surprise me if, even though I don't have any evidence for whatever I just said.
And again, Jay plays decent devil's advocate on this too.
He talks about checks and balances within the scientific community.
You know, I'm thinking about that very strange particular pathology, I think it's called Munchausen Syndrome, where... No, no, no, no, no.
Is that the one where a parent will actually actively poison the child in order to care for it, but also to be... It's in there.
There's Munchausen's by proxy, right?
Right, something like that.
I'm just thinking about how it seems like that very argument that, you know, the pharmaceutical industry actually wants as a unified whole for everybody to be sick so that it can continue to care for it and make money is kind of like an inflation of that very particular pathology that I think people feel in one way or another in their personal lives and then it just gets blown to this scale that just is completely implausible and unreasonable.
Oh, that's right.
And Jay then says, well, you know, other people would say that there are checks and balances within the scientific community and that's why it works well, or that's why you could say it works well.
And Seti then says, that's impossible to argue against.
This is one of those moments where he slows it down, like you've described.
That's impossible to argue against.
And then he opens up his hand to reveal the red pill.
Until you realize it is based on the assumption that scientists would never lie.
And so, you know, Strawman noted, okay, but do you have a specific receipt you're referring to, Morpheus?
Well, Neo, we can only see this through looking at it indirectly.
And as conscious beings in the yoga community who espouse the practice of seeing the big picture, that's what we're being called to do in this time.
Wow.
We're back to, as you predicted, to the quasi-religious claims of truth beyond evidence and knowledge attained through revelation and the indirect gaze of pattern-tunistic intuition.
One thing that Seti talked about in the podcast on collective evolution and then talks about in Jbrown, he brings up nuance a lot.
And I want to address that specifically to Vaccine.
He consistently relies on claiming to follow the data, but he never really offers any.
And he paints science, as you just said, with giant broad strokes.
Yet he wants the listener to believe he's combed over the evidence with extreme granularity.
And his rhetoric relies on alienation.
He wants you to believe most people aren't in on the truth except you and him, either Jay or the listener.
But since he's such a big fan of data, let's actually look at some.
So when discussing the chickenpox vaccine, Setti says that if you get sick from something, you should be more resistant to it than if you get a vaccine, and he uses the example of chickenpox.
So in the first decade after 1995, when infants aged 12 to 18 months began getting the single-dose chickenpox vaccine, the incidence, hospitalization rate, and death rate due to the virus that causes chickenpox and shingles dropped by 90% in America.
And then in 2006, the CDC began recommending a second chicken pox shot for children between the ages of 4 and 6 years old.
And the incidence rate once again dropped 81% lower through 2013.
And so as of 2016, what I'm pulling this data from, no one under the age of 20 had died of chicken pox that entire decade.
But yeah, basically, SETI is saying, let the virus ravage the population and gamble with your child's life.
That's a great idea.
And he calls for nuanced thinking, but he shows little sign of it.
Yes, he does the cursory, all vaccines are a bad bit, but then continues to make the case against them.
So let's think about nuance for a moment more.
Because with a vaccine, timing really matters.
And there's no better example of this than congenital rubella, which in the 1960s was a huge concern for women.
Babies born with this disease are often deaf, blinded by cataracts, and suffer from heart problems that require multiple surgeries.
And so if an expecting mother gets rubella in her second month of pregnancy, there's a 90% chance that their child will suffer fetal damage.
If the virus occurs in the third month, there's a 50% chance.
And if she's infected in the fourth month, odds are that her child will be born perfectly healthy because at that point the fetus has built up enough antibodies to fight it off.
Children born with congenital rubella have lifelong risks, including an increased chance of encephalitis, which is a form of brain inflammation, type 1 diabetes because an autoimmune reaction in which the body's own antibodies attack the pancreas is more likely, and glaucoma and chronic inflammation of the iris are all risk factors.
So ask a mother if she wants to risk all of this for her child because she'd rather let nature Take its way and get her infected and let me know the answer that you get.
But the effects don't stop there, so let's add just a little bit more nuance to this mix.
So remember, this is all in the 1960s when these vaccines were being developed.
And this is also when abortions were becoming an option for a growing number of women.
And when they discovered that their child could suffer from congenital rubella, a lot of women decided not to let them suffer at all and got abortions.
Now...
At this time, vaccines were made from different animals, including the African green monkey, which was used in the polio vaccine.
And there's been a long-time debate over whether the African monkey cells caused cancer.
While reports in 2002 said that the answer was no, they found that the Institute of Medicine called the research sufficiently flawed.
So I mention this because the African green monkey cells were possibly causing cancer through the vaccinations.
So, thanks to Leonard Hayflick's work on the human cell strain called W138, which is derived from the lungs of an aborted three-month-old fetus, that eventually replaced the monkey cells not only in the polio vaccine, but also in vaccines for rubella, rubioella, varicella, mumps, rabies, adenoviruses, and hepatitis A.
One billion people have been vaccinated from hayflick cell line that was produced from one aborted fetus.
So this is where it comes together.
Catholics are often anti-abortion and anti-stem cell research.
But even the Catholic Church looked at the data and they weighed it out.
They saw that there were going to be tens of thousands of abortions because of the possibility of congenital rubella, or they could use a vaccine produced from one aborted fetus.
And in this case, they made the right choice and endorsed the vaccine.
So again, letting nature take its way or allowing mothers to decide to protect their children.
And let me finish with one more piece of nuance since this is SETI's domain.
Every year 59,000 people around the world die from rabies, mostly in developing countries.
That's up to 30,000 people a year in India die from rabies.
How many people die in the United States every year where the rabies vaccine is widely available?
Two.
Two people.
So when Jay asks, why is there so much confidence in this vaccine, referring to the current vaccine, that over 100 million people in America, 100 million doses have been administered, it's because there is precedent.
And it's not a perfect track record, but we haven't had a single death in 100 million doses.
So I'm feeling pretty confident right now.
Yeah.
I mean, Jay acknowledges that he's confused.
He says he's gone down a few rabbit holes about terrain theory.
We could have saved you a lot of time, Jay.
And gain-of-function research.
So essentially, he's listening to Zach Bush and he's listening to the Dark Horse podcast with Heather.
Haying and Brett Weinstein.
He's unsure about the new vaccines, but they seem really different.
He bemoans that reading dissenting opinions gets you labeled an anti-vaxxer.
And the thing is, no, Jay, it's not that if you read something other than the mainstream narrative, you're an anti-vaxxer.
It's that if you become convinced of the false narrative spread by anti-vaxxers, you've taken a wrong turn.
That's all.
Yeah, so SETI says, I mean, it's one thing, you know, to proclaim that your position, that a vaccine cautionary sort of position, and that invites the label of anti-vaxxer, but even asking a question of the ascendant narrative is also, will also invite the same kind of labeling.
And we can all hopefully agree that this particular environment where attacks come so quickly is not conducive to open inquiry of anything.
There's this continual appeal to, you know, if I just raise objections or I just ask questions, I will be shamed.
And I want to point a finger at that shame piece a little bit.
We'll play a clip at the end where Jay implies that his questions and misgivings will make him sound crazy.
Now, if people are rude, that's shitty.
But we've also got to be adults enough to be able to say, no, you are wrong about this data point or at this way of looking at things and here's why.
And have that not be a personal attack or some kind of like, I don't know, slight against character.
Yeah, and no, Madhava, it's not that people are not reading both sides.
It's that they're comfortable dismissing one side of the argument if it's unreasonable or flat-out false.
You don't actually belong to some rarefied strata of people who read both sides and have the correct nuanced analysis.
Show us your data if you're going to claim that.
There's a difference between the flatland of undiscerning open inquiry and the healthy hierarchy of well-informed inquiry.
Some questions deliver answers that have true-false binaries.
Rational people move forward with that ground underneath their feet instead of Endlessly taking these tangents down rabbit holes.
And I had a question for Jay.
If you don't understand the scientific language and what it means with regard to vaccines, why not educate yourself by listening to the well-established experts that can give you the consensus information on vaccines instead of jumping via your ill-formed intuitions and half-baked questions into talking to conspiracy theorists?
I want to add here too, and this is very important.
At some point in the vaccine conversation, SETI makes a flat-out false statement.
He says that the vaccines in circulation have completely skipped phase three trials.
And that's either just completely embarrassing ignorance or irresponsible, fear-mongering dishonesty, because the vaccines have gone through phase three trials.
They've been tested on hundreds of thousands of people.
Those people continue to be monitored.
So there's an exchange at the end that really wraps up not only the subject matter but the whole encounter as a kind of red-pilling event, a ritual experience.
Remember that SETI started with his ideas about immaterial consciousness, and then throughout conflated the process of being open to fringe ideas with the process of spiritual awakening.
So the yoga part is Jay's wheelhouse, so it's unsurprising that the climax of the conversation sounds like this.
And look, you know, we're speaking to presumably a yoga community here, and we all fundamentally would believe that we have an infinite nature, a transcendent nature to us, right?
And so if we hold on to that as one of our fundamental foundational belief systems, what do you think happens to us after we die?
Do you think that's the end?
No!
We go someplace.
Where do we go?
Is there a heaven?
Well, maybe, who knows?
But what about the fact we have all this evidence about reincarnation?
Now, that becomes a more reasonable perspective to have.
So, if we're reincarnating Jay, we have to eventually arrive at the conclusion that everybody that we see in front of us constructed our past, including us, and we right now are constructing our future.
We're making it happen.
We keep coming back to figure something out.
What is it?
I don't know.
This is the, these are the questions, but if we are now accept the fact that we're a species that reincarnates, how logical is it that we continue to torment each other?
I mean, we eventually have to wake up and say, Oh my God, the person who's tormenting me is probably somebody that I tormented before.
So, I believe that every advanced civilization, and I believe there are many out there, comes to this fundamental realization that they're reincarnating.
And therefore, the only logical thing to do is to accept and love each other and share.
And until we come to that, you know, perspective, that conclusion, we're just going to keep going like we're going right now, where we're trying to control other people.
We're like, you know, looking out for our safety.
We're willing to wage war in order to have peace.
I mean, how absurd is that?
Yes, and I want to tie us up here by saying that what you just said, in the context of our societies, is a very radical position.
It's a radical position because if you embrace this idea of interconnectedness, it also means having to question these official narratives.
Absolutely right.
Absolutely right.
I mean, I believe these official narratives are, is in fact, the source of the illusion.
Because they're forcing us to consider ourselves to be weak, finite, and something that we have to defend at all costs.
And this is leading to the kind of world that we have.
It's unbelievable.
Where he goes.
It's like, so it's not, so the official narratives, consensus science, journalism that is fact-checked, it's not just questionable.
It's now the source of the illusion that prevents us from seeing that we're reincarnating beings that are coming back over and over again to figure out our mistakes and they've given us this sort of negative self-view that's preventing us from understanding our divine nature.
It's amazing how he rounds this up.
If, as someone listening to this podcast, who identifies as a yogi, who is kind of on board with most of this reincarnation talk, you're hearing what I'm saying, then it stands to reason, logically, he would accept everything else that I'm saying, right?
Right, and also for the listener, I think, who may have been in the weeds when they're in the discussion of vaccines and the World Trade Center and the virus, if this is really resonant, there would be a retroactive validation of the content, right?
It's like, well, that stuff was very confusing, but you can kind of hear it in Jay's voice where he's like nodding and he's like, Almost, yeah.
He's relieved that they're out of the weeds of the science and they're back into the warm embrace of the Divine Mother called yoga.
Yeah, it's what you said before too, right?
That enlightenment is pain.
There's suffering entailed in this waking up, in this red pilling we would identify it as.
And so, yes, it's been difficult, but now we're back at a soothing, very resonant kind of place where we all feel good again.
Yeah, so Jay outros the entire podcast with some questions.
Okay, how are we doing?
Are we okay?
I hope that you appreciated that for what it was.
I will say that to me, I feel like There needs to be a way to question official narratives without being vilified as some crazy person.
There's got to be some middle ground between people who think Hillary Clinton's eating babies or whatever, and people who just I have a hard time believing the official story about how WTC7 fell down.
You know, we're not crazy people who are thinking that.
And I just think that sometimes when it's just disregarded out of hand, it feels to me in the same way that people say, oh, like somebody's been red-pilled.
Well, I think some people are blue-pilled or whatever.
That if we are going to address the stranglehold on the environment and on interests that benefit very few rather than the many, We have to be able to question.
Now, that's not to say we should be irresponsible and...
You know, that's the question that remains.
Was I irresponsible for making those comments?
Am I irresponsible for putting this conversation with Madhva out in the world?
I don't think so.
I really don't.
I don't think it's irresponsible of me to simply have the conversation and to ask you to not, like I said in the intro, not just take whatever I say because I say it, but Because you are a discerning person and you'll think for yourself.
So, I appreciated this conversation with Madhava and his perspective and I encourage you to go read his writings because I think there's valuable stuff there.
Okay, so what's our take?
Irresponsible?
Just a conversation?
What do we think?
I think it's what I mentioned at the very beginning, that it's irresponsible to not cite your sources or never even to bring them up.
And what's fascinating about this particular podcast, because we didn't even play anything from the intro, was Jay's dilemma on both ends of this.
He felt the need to intro it and outro it with conflict.
I think that uncertainty is an important principle that is part of humility, and it's really important.
SETI doesn't really show any of that, and that's fine, and there are topics we don't show any of that, and that's totally fine, but I just question why you would put something out into the world that you're so Well, in a way, it goes to the brand that you discussed, Matthew, right?
Yeah, it's the influencer's dilemma, right?
Like, whether this adds to Jay's brand or not, it is on-brand in the sense that uncertainty, doubt, and the strange emotional connections that all of these things can engender is part of the yogic exploration that's at the heart of this project.
And so, it's almost like it has to...
Putting out disinformation is worth the risk in terms of branding, because dealing with disinformation and the journey of that is ultimately worthwhile.
But in the end, what we have is, you know, Jay platformed a guy with plausible medical credentials who claimed that anesthesiology proves that consciousness is immaterial.
We didn't even say this.
He says, actually, that masks don't do anything to protect from infection, even when when people are wearing them in surgery.
Well, but then he also even contradicts himself when he's saying that, because he says you have to sneeze straight into the mask while you're over the person you're doing surgery on in order for it to have any effect.
Because if you turn your head to the side, it'll go out the side, but then goes on to say that masks are not effective for COVID.
He's not talking about like aerosols at that point.
He's not talking about N95s.
Anyway, he also says, you know, immunity developed from natural exposure is better than immunity conferred by vaccines.
He says that mainstream news sources can't be trusted.
He says that experts can't be trusted.
He says that yogic intuition is the highest form of knowledge with regard to complex problems.
He says that WTC7 came down through controlled demolition.
And he said that reincarnation is a fact.
And now there's a bunch of those things that don't really have much bearing on everyday life.
But there's a number of those things that are actually life and death issues during a pandemic.
And to bring it up, I made a short Instagram video about this, though.
It just goes again to show something that's been shown in conspiracy theory research is that when you believe in one, you're more susceptible to them all.
And to me, SETI embodies that.
This podcast embodies that research in one two hour clip.
And Jay does the thing here, and Madhava's doing it too during the conversation, this misunderstanding of what open-mindedness is, right?
And it's based on something called the middle ground fallacy, that if you're being open-minded, you will see the truth as inevitably lying somewhere in the middle between two supposedly extreme points of view.
And that's just not true.
There's a real difference between flatland openness to all perspectives.
Of course, ask the questions, but get better informed so that you can be more responsible in terms of the questions you're asking and who you're asking them of.
I came across this quote from Jaron Lanier, who is one of the founders of virtual reality, when I was just
Export Selection