63: Yoga and the Jab (w/Colin Hall & Sarah Garden)
The YogaVaxGate Instagram post turns out to have been a bellwether for the $88B industry packed with science skeptics and spiritual bypassers. When Wolf Terry got trolled for daring to argue in Yoga Journal that getting vaccinated was an act of non-harming, the stormfront was clear. As thousands of yoga studios ponder opening amidst the stop-and-start waves of Delta and beyond, one question dominates staff meetings: “Will we ask our returning clients for proof of vaccination?”
Matthew interviews Sarah Garden and Colin Hall of Bodhi Tree Yoga in Saskatchewan, who made national news when they announced that yes, they would. Bodhi Tree clients will have to show their card; if they can’t or don’t want to be vaccinated, online classes are still available. Simple, right? Not in Yogaland. We’ll be reading from emails describing the backlash — from the absurd to the abhorrent — faced by studio owners who are taking the no-brainer Bodhi Tree path.
In the Ticker, Derek looks at Antisemitism in vaccine disinformation campaigns while Julian checks in with Joseph Mercola, who announced he’ll be removing all content from his website this week. In the Jab, Julian lays out the “base-rate fallacy” anti-vaxxers are using to falsely claim that vaccinations are not helping to stop COVID-19. And off the top, we’ll briefly flag the topic for next week: the sudden death of conspiritualist Kundalini leader Katie Griggs.
Show Notes
How About Not Using the Holocaust to Spread Vaccine Disinformation?
Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed
Inside the Dubious World of RA MA Yoga, and Its Girl Boss Guru to the Stars
Griggs LAMag obit
Matthew: Guru Jagat Dies. A Saint is Born.
‘Bold decisions’: Regina yoga studio cancels in-person classes, calls on others to follow suit – Regina | Globalnews.ca
Regina yoga studio requiring proof of vaccination to attend classes
Lawyer says yoga studio should be legally allowed to ask clients for vaccination status
Bodhi Tree Yoga, Regina SK
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Conspirituality 63, Yoga and the Jab with Colin Hall and Sarah Garden.
The Yoga Vaxgate Instagram post turns out to have been a bellwether for the $88 billion industry packed with science skeptics and spiritual bypassers.
When Wolf Terry got trolled for daring to argue in Yoga Journal that getting vaccinated was an act of non-harming, The storm front was clear as thousands of yoga studios ponder opening amidst the stop and start waves of Delta and beyond.
One question dominates staff meetings.
Will we ask our returning clients for proof of vaccination?
Matthew interviews Sarah Garden and Colin Hall of Bodhi Tree Yoga in Saskatchewan, who made national news when they announced that yes, they would.
Bodhi Tree clients will have to show their card.
If they can't or don't want to be vaccinated, online classes are still available.
Simple, right?
Not in Yogaland.
We'll be reading from the emails describing the backlash, from the absurd to the abhorrent, faced by studio owners who are taking the no-brainer Bodhi Tree path.
In the ticker, Derek looks at antisemitism in vaccine disinformation campaigns, while I'll be checking in with Joseph Mercola, who announced he'll be removing all content from his website this week.
We also see a return, sad to say, but happy to report in another way, of the jab, in which I'll lay out the base rate fallacy anti-vaxxers are using to falsely claim that vaccinations are not helping to stop COVID-19, And off the top, we'll briefly flag the topic for next week, the sudden death of conspiritualist Kundalini leader, Katie Griggs.
So before we kick off the show, we're just going to take a moment to acknowledge the sudden death of Katie Griggs, also known as Guru Jagat.
She died this past Sunday evening.
We saw the social media reports early Monday morning.
I tuned into the Zoom vigil for a while as the sun came up.
LA Magazine was the first outlet to confirm the death with the Rama Institute, which Griggs co-founded in Venice, California.
The cause of death has not been officially confirmed, but multiple sources on social media report that Griggs had recently undergone surgery on an injured ankle and subsequently developed a pulmonary embolism.
That took me aback, personally, because I've had thrombosis and pulmonary embolism, and I know that shortness of breath.
Long-time listeners will remember that we've done extensive reporting on Griggs and the Rama Institute and their kundalini yoga world backstory.
That was in episodes 36 and 37, with the expert help of kundalini yoga scholar Philip Deeslip and journalist Stacey Stukin.
We didn't pull any punches on those shows.
We detailed how, when the kundalini yoga world blew up over the at-long-last media coverage of the fact that Griggs' guru, Yogi Bhajan, was a criminal charlatan rapist, Griggs went on the offensive, publicly attacking his survivors.
We tracked how she effortlessly pivoted into conspiracy theories about COVID and BLM when the pandemic hit.
And we also did some initial reporting on the social media clues about the abusive environment at Rama, as posted to the Ramarong Instagram account.
And a lot of that preliminary work was confirmed by a full investigative piece published in Vice last month by Cassidy George.
Next week, we'll say goodbye to Katie Griggs.
Again, not pulling any punches, but we will adopt a more somber tone as Philip Deeslip and Stacey Stookin return, along with cult expert Janja Lalic and another guest, for a discussion of the lifetimes and death of Griggs and what her followers need going forward.
In the meantime, I've published a short analysis of some of the hagiographical posts that have popped up in the wake of Griggs' death, including from Marianne Williamson, who, when informed of the Vice article about Griggs, dismissed it as tabloid trash.
So I'll link to that in the show notes.
Death is always, in some ways, sudden, especially in circumstances like this.
And I was as taken aback as anyone.
And it always makes you reflect.
Makes me reflect on existence.
That's what the death of someone else does, is it makes you recognize your own mortality.
And in terms of what we cover in this show and being critical, being critical, I would say, of ourselves, I know in the self-reflective spaces that yoga at its best can offer, but being critical of others because you want people to Do good things in this world.
And sometimes it takes death to just stop you for a moment and say, what were we really fighting for?
That was my first thought.
But your article on Medium, Matthew, which was excellent, and I think done with care, but also critical, brings to mind another thought.
I remember in June when Donald Rumsfeld died, my Twitter feed was full of people saying, Fine, bye, goodbye, because of the damage he had done.
And I don't put Griggs in that space at all, but social media does create this world now that we live in where it's often presented as black and white, and it's not.
And what I was happy about, there's this running occurrence in America when there's gun violence on a mass level and immediately When we start to talk about gun legislation, the NRA and its supporters will say, it's too soon, it's too soon.
And that's constant.
And so we're in this weird limbo space right now in terms of, and I'm sure you're going to address this next week, but in terms of something like this, where you want to allow the friends and family and supporters to grieve because that's important to sit Shiva and to be with that pain and support that because grieving is hard for anyone.
But this is also when legacies are written.
And we're watching in real time all of the work that you've done and others on Yogi Bhajan.
That legacy was written and it took decades for people to be like, wait a second, for a lot of people, not everyone.
And so we're at a really weird pivotal point, culturally now, where since everything happens so fast and on social media, Can that legacy be written both in a way that honors the deceased, but also is honest with what damage was done and what was being put forward during the time in power?
And I don't have an answer to that.
I don't know how you move around such delicate space, but I do think it's important that people are remembered for their whole character And whatever kind of power play is going to move forward with Rama now, that will also inform that and the Kundalini community at large.
So I think it's best to report on it as it happens in as honest, compassionate, but critical way as possible.
Yeah, I mean, I echo all of that.
What you both said, I think, was really spot on.
I feel like death, and whenever a public figure dies, there's a tendency to idealize them and want to turn them into a saint.
This word, hagiography, that you talk about so well in your article, Matthew.
And I think that's doubly the case when the person has some kind of spiritual aura about them, regardless of anything else.
It's almost like their death is sort of this graduation into becoming a saint, into having an even more powerful aura around their now disembodied form.
And that's usually quite distorted.
So, yeah, to have all the respect and compassion in the world for the people who In some ways, the people who resist the criticism of instantaneous hagiography, which is what I've put out there because as a cult survivor, I know that
It takes a very short period of time before this kind of wall of radiant silence falls around the history at hand.
And it really inhibits people who are within the group, or people who are on the edge of leaving the group, or people who have to speak about or reckon with their experiences within the group.
It really inhibits their capacity to be able to speak freely about it.
So that was why I chose to do it.
But, I mean, In a very weird sense, the hagiographical impulse also can be a very powerful, driving, motivating force for the group and its identity going forward because actually, in some ways,
They are correct that she has more power dead than alive, that she's on the other side and that she's going to be protecting them.
Because as we know from the reporting from Vice and the reporting that we've done, while she's alive, She will generate controversy.
In a way, her sainthood allows the group, if it's not criticized, allows the group to completely sort of erase the reporting that's been produced already.
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.
On Monday, I released a bonus episode on anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers using anti-Semitic rhetoric to support their causes.
A lot of antis in there.
And the following day, I published an accompanying article on the website Ethos, which I'm now a columnist for.
While Holocaust memes are generally never a good idea, nor do they ever really live up to the purported evil being perpetrated, perpetrated?
Who wrote this?
I'll learn words.
I'm good with words.
Using concentration camp images and claims of Gestapo enforcement to frighten people about COVID vaccines is particularly cruel.
So you have David Wolf sharing a concentration camp meme, and then you have Sayer G and Del Bigtree rocking yellow stars as if the unvaccinated will soon be marked as untouchables.
There's Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
making an anti-vax film with a man who screams about wicked Jews and the Jewish controlled media and that the Jews are going to kill all African Americans.
J.P.
Sears posting a Holocaust video about the Biden administration destroying our democracy, something, something, J.P.
Now, just this week, as we're reaching a fever pitch with this, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, who we're all big fans of, released an extensive report that found that 84% of all anti-Semitic content goes unmoderated on social media.
And yes, using a Holocaust meme to spread vaccine disinformation is anti-Semitic.
And I'm sure these wellness warriors believe they're sirens warning us of impending danger, but in reality they're perpetuating millennia-old harm by comparing one of the 20th century's greatest tragedies to a highly efficacious series of vaccines that could have course-corrected our society during this pandemic, but because of their work it has not.
Conspiratuality is a living document that will never really catch up to all the grifts and disinformation out there, so just after I published the bonus episode and article, in walks Charles Eisenstein.
And I will always credit the man for coming on to this podcast, because most people we criticize will not, and he had a very thoughtful discussion with Matthew.
And I've previously felt that our differences were of degree, not of kind, but that is no longer the case.
His latest essay called Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed not only plays into many of the anti-vax tropes we've covered for months, he even starts it off by quoting, you guessed it, Josef Goebbels.
Now, many influencers we cover go all in on topics like vaccinations, but then there are some who attempt to sit above it all, philosophizing on the topic in real time as if translating secret scripts discovered during the procession to elusives.
Russell Brand plays this just-asking-questions role, as does Eisenstein.
But the questions you ask often reveal the narrative you're trying to tell.
Any journalist or philosopher worth their salt knows this.
In this essay, Eisenstein attempts to link untouchable classes, from the Dalit to Nazi-era Jews, to today's unvaccinated citizens.
He waxes poetic about sacrificial subjects being tossed into a pyre of righteousness by way of article deletion on social media.
And the essay reaches a fever pitch as he writes, This program is well underway toward the COVID unvaxxed who are being portrayed as walking cesspools of germs who might contaminate the sanctified brethren, the vaccinated.
My wife perused an acupuncture Facebook page today, which one would expect to be skeptical of mainstream medicine, where someone asked, what is the word that comes to mind to describe unvaccinated people?
The responses were things like filth, Assholes and death eaters.
This is precisely the dehumanization necessary to prepare a class of people for cleansing.
I know I've been critical of acupuncture before, but I also recognize that acupuncturists can actually follow science, too.
Even that link in that just blows me away, the assumption that because you're an acupuncturist you would automatically be into the Wu segment.
I also posted about chiropractors this week and people have said, I don't believe in all that shit and I'm a chiropractor.
Well, also the inverse assumption that if you are not critical of quote-unquote mainstream medicine, then it might be expected that you would say such horrible things, right?
I can't believe it was the acupuncture people saying it!
I mean, those are horrible things to say.
I don't endorse those things.
No, no.
Yeah, we'll get to that.
I mean, he goes on.
He said he writes that the science behind this portrayal is dubious and goes so far as to claim that the vaccinated are more likely to drive mutant variants.
And he links to RFK and Joseph Mercola as expert sources without explaining that if we had reached herd immunity, mutants wouldn't really be a concern.
So, a classic Eisenstein maneuver follows.
He's not here to present a scientific case, even though he's just presented the very case fueling the anti-vax movement, going so far as to link to their dear leaders.
You can't have it that way, man.
Seriously, you can't say, I'm just here, here's the science.
So if the Goebbels quote wasn't on the nose, he includes a photograph of children with stiff arms proudly raised in a Hitler salute and tries to wrap the essay up with a neat little bow with the closing sentence, and I'm not kidding, transcendence is in the human being.
I understand the literary impulse to create a world where everything is possible and to wrap up the gift of an essay in a neat package.
But sometimes, and in podcast form I believe, being explicit is more important.
So, Charles, this is below you.
165 million Americans are fully vaccinated right now, and there have been 347 million doses given.
97% of COVID hospitalizations are unvaccinated Americans.
And yes, while breakthrough cases are occurring, they're predominantly not severe, and severe cases are generally happening happening to immunocompromised Americans who have to deal with a disease that could have been avoided if the people you're celebrating in this essay weren't spreading fear and monetizing vaccine disinformation.
People are not trying to censor any of you.
We're simply looking for credible information which you're not providing.
Most of us certainly don't consider unvaccinated people polluted despite the one Facebook acupuncture thread you cite in the article as proof.
Miasma theory is dead regardless of how much Zach Bush wants to resurrect a version of it.
And the great cleansing that you are so fearful of isn't an approaching dystopia in which your medical freedom warriors are rounded up.
It's happening right now in emergency rooms across the country because the disinformation dozen you cite as heroes are doing real-world damage.
My tolerance for philosophy ends when common sense is abandoned.
But if you do want to talk about cleansing, there are places to turn.
Now, I know Eisenstein is a Jewish last name, and I know nothing about your personal religious beliefs.
But I do know that my DMs are filled with people disgusted by the increasing anti-Semitism being used by the very people you're citing as experts.
And to include Goebbels in a Nazi salute in an essay that favorably features them is to feed a fire that's been burning for thousands of years, and people are exhausted by it.
You can do better.
And for those that you cite, I only hope better is possible.
But unfortunately, nothing indicates that this future is ahead.
I know this is a very serious topic, but I do want to say that my tolerance for philosophy ends when common sense is abandoned is probably the next slogan we need on a t-shirt.
It's a good sentence.
I totally agree with it.
It's this, yeah, thank you, but it's this above the all, I am just looking at all of this as if I'm not participating in this old mythologizing of the moment.
Julian, you and I, we just shared, I shared with you this article on a female retake on Campbell's Hero's Journey.
Like, mythology is very important.
But dude, look at the fucking hospitals right now.
Like, this is such, I don't understand why he felt compelled to write this.
And the fact that he spends the first half of that essay really giving the appearance of some kind of religious history, kind of cultural anthropology analysis, it's amazing to me.
The pretentiousness around that.
When the Holocaust is monetized as an object of moral outrage porn, I think two things happen.
People who have some reasonable grasp of history and maybe have A family who perished in it or just people who have a soul are rightfully outraged and at the same time the imagery, the terms, the historical flow of how it actually occurred becomes
Kind of what Dale Barron was describing for us last week as a form of noxious internet garbage.
And in a sense, it's not surprising to me that J.P.
Sears is reaching for old, grainy, black and white footage of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, or whatever was in that film.
It's like there's nowhere for him to go but there.
And so, and if it's available, it doesn't really matter how disgusting it is.
It doesn't really matter how inappropriate it is.
If it's there, he has to go there.
He has to go there.
What else is going to fuel the ludic loop of his audience capture?
And that stuff is instantly available to anyone who has the impulse to go, oh, I'm going to make this link and create a post that will get a lot of attention, right?
I really appreciated your line that Americans who are immunocompromised are the ones who have to deal with a disease that could have been avoided if essays like this weren't being written, Derek, because that's the thing.
Narcissistic argumentation from a cultural niche like Eisenstein's platform and his Facebook groups and whatever, it spreads out from there.
And then it networks with other influencers and everyone launders for everybody else.
Everybody has a little piece of the pie.
I'm remembering when Kaelin Robertson was on, and I asked him about working with Tommy Robinson, and he was describing some scene where he was sitting in a pub with Milo, Tommy Robinson, and maybe Lauren Southern was there.
And they were laughing at people like Dave Rubin, who weren't as based as they were, or JP, you know, and calling them cucks and whatever, but also acknowledging that- Jordan Peterson, just be clear, we're talking about another JP.
Sears.
But acknowledging that everybody had a role to play and that everybody, if they were on the right side of the threshold, that they were contributing to the cause.
And so, like, Eisenstein is, you know, I don't know, presented to the public as this independent solo thinker and certainly when I spoke with him and that seemed to be cordial, well it was cordial, it didn't seem to be cordial, but it seemed like he wasn't
There's this, we have to deal with a problem of personalizing public figures, because one of the impulses to even do that interview was to say, well, you know, he must be a reasonable person.
He writes sensitively about so many things, and he's well-loved, and we had some mutual contacts, and there was somebody who put us in touch, and so there was a connective aspect to that.
Well, also to see what would he say if confronted with certain criticisms to his arguments, right?
Yeah, yeah, but I think that, I mean, geez, we probably published 90 minutes of me talking to him.
The whole framework for that is, let me try to understand you as a human being, and that's one level of discourse that obviously we have to have and that's never going to go away, but when it gets to a certain level of sort of influencer, I don't know, visibility or saturation, you know, your Patreon is at a certain level, you are a public figure and that kind of
Interpersonal almost theater has to be looked at a little bit more skeptically because he is now fitting into a the typology of conspiritualists like he speaks to the biohackers who you know want more than you know the shrooms at Burning Man.
Brett Weinstein speaks to nerdy You know, internet dark web followers who are in STEM, and Cyr speaks to do-it-yourself alt-healthers who think that blockchain is going to save the world, and Rogan and his guests speak to jocks and MMA fans.
Jordan Peterson speaks to more sensitive guys who wanted their undergrad psych and religion classes to go on forever.
Oh, I don't know.
I think he also speaks to, he also figured out early on That our last guest, that Dale Buran was referencing, right?
That with the whole sort of male, the new niche of previously blackpilled men seeking now meaning and self-development, right?
Right.
Meaning, if they were going to be celibate, then that was going to be monastic in some way.
Maybe that was part of what could be sold.
Also, if they can clean up their rooms and stand up straight and start to get a new kind of mythic understanding of what it means.
At the end of the day, to be a powerful white male, maybe they could graduate from the Incel Message Board.
Yeah, and if only Jordan would read his book.
So anyway, then there's Mickey Willis, who, you know, I don't know who he speaks to.
Like, drama kids, male models.
A lot of women.
Yes, a lot of, well, yes, okay.
Kelly Brogan speaks to white women who confuse white feminism for feminism.
Bauhauswife speaks to white women who are veering towards tradwife dreams of self-actualization through giving birth to a dozen babies.
Everybody works together.
It all works together.
all of it all works to it all works together.
It's media.
And, you know, I, I think that I know we're going to do a little bit more on Charles's essay.
Mm hmm.
I think that that sort of personal approach that is wondering, asking questions about psychology and so on, that's going to fade a little bit for me.
Well, let me ask you, Matthew, because you and I go back and forth on this, because I think you're actually not saying what some people might hear and what I sometimes hear, which is that when you say everyone works together, You're not saying they're all interacting with each other and planning and coordinating what they're going to do.
No, no, no, they're not.
The impact that they have has some kind of networked effect, yeah?
Absolutely.
There's nobody twirling their mustache.
And some of them don't like each other and maybe don't even really pay much attention to each other.
No, and the bonds that they have are based upon affiliate links and mutual sort of financial gain, and so they're very fragile.
They're just like with QAnon influencers, they will throw each other under the bus.
I mean, the one thing that I wanted to just bring up too is that, and this was in the quote that I read, Derek, in your piece, is that Charles is trying to argue that he and his views are being dehumanized.
And, you know, we fielded that same criticism on social media, some of it coming from my old friend B. Schofield, who makes a lot of good points.
And I think that there is a communications problem that we have to think carefully about.
Because when Eisenstein flags the post that is asking for names of anti-vaxxers in the acupuncture group, you know what's going to come.
There's going to be a torrent of rage at people who are basically prolonging the pandemic for ignorant and selfish reasons.
So, that rage gets then tone-policed as, oh, you're dehumanizing us, right?
I mean, I don't vent like that on social media, but I am not in the position to tell other people not to vent like that on social media when they're talking about a highly politicized and dangerous and now lethal issue.
So yeah, I did the same thing, right?
I did the same thing.
I posted on Twitter the other day, the post, conspiracy theorists sounds anodyne as a term, and some conspiracy theorists are, but for those who attack public health and harm people, the term is weak.
So, I vote to shift to something like Emotional Abuser Who Deploys Deadly Conspiracy Theories, and then I added the line, maybe you can think of something snappier, and of course we got the same results as the acupuncture thread, because our IG just filled up with a vent of rage.
So, Bea had these two related points, that me using the word, the term, emotional abuser, is inappropriate when we're talking about people like Sayre G.
I'm not going to agree with her about that for reasons that you can follow up on Twitter, but the second point was that this tweet implied that all conspiracy theorists were emotional abusers.
That's not what the tweet says, but what I learned from reading the responses is that it's just too easy for the distinction between a misinformation consumer and a misinformation producer to be lost, or the blurring of the two to be used to invalidate an argument.
And this comes up in anti-cult work.
You know, the criticism of the cultic structure is going to be personalized by people within that structure.
And that defensive dynamic is at the root of the existence of a whole, like, category in religious studies.
It's why scholars started to use the term new religious movements to describe cults, because cult was a poisoned word.
But the problem with that is that it forces scholars to talk about Scientology as if it's a legit religion.
But we, like, I really disagree that we dehumanize the victims of vaccine or QAnon disinformation.
You know, our topics, our guests speak to that.
But I think that we have to expect that this will be a common attack.
You are lumping us all together.
You are creating an outgroup.
And I think You know, I don't think it's fair.
I don't think it's true.
I think we have to do what we can to dispel that false accusation.
I mean, for those who argue in bad faith, dispelling it is hopeless, but perhaps not for those who are listening in or those that they convince.
My tolerance for philosophy also ends here because there's data.
And I think that's my biggest thing about this.
We don't need to talk about medical freedom and sovereignty.
We have data.
97% of people in American hospitals right now are unvaccinated.
That is predominantly the people who are dying right now.
The emerging variants are not because of vaccinated people.
It's because of this anti-vax movement that's fueling it and constantly spreading disinformation.
So the fact that the in-group, out-group just simply doesn't work in the face of data, but it's such a reptilian brain response system, and I don't know, data doesn't work.
When, if you're trying to build an argument there.
So we're going to have to endure variance.
Data doesn't work when you're trying to build an argument in lizard land.
Exactly.
Not at all.
Data is a prefrontal cortex.
It's not a limbic system.
The stronger your data, the more they dig their heels in because they're convinced at an emotional and instinctive and in-group level that they must be right.
So the reality is we're talking about these things.
There is going to be deadlier variants.
I hope one doesn't emerge that will cut through the vaccination and we have to start from square one, but that is a possibility.
And the educational process right now Unfortunately, the only thing that has been shown to work in terms of France as a test case is by saying, hey, you can't come in here if you're not going to be vaccinated.
And then you see the numbers go up.
And that is not a tyrannical government.
That's common sense public health policy.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with all of that.
And I think it is interesting, right?
There's like the difference between what we do in our planned segments here and the kinds of guests we have on who are often going to present a very nuanced and compassionate point of view about what might make someone vaccine hesitant, for example.
And then there's a post that is largely for people who already are on the same side of us who then feel like, oh, finally, I can say what I really think.
And they vent some of their rage.
And then there are people coming on that post saying, well, how can you let people do this?
You know, you guys are creating a toxic environment.
And what to do about that?
And then at the same time, we're creating a toxic environment.
I would just like to pause there and just memorialize that statement.
We are.
Yeah, right.
OK.
Yeah, let's put that one on the t-shirt.
But at the same time, there's also a valid concern being brought up, which is like if, which I don't think is necessarily B's point, which I won't try and make for her.
But rather just to say that if we are going to convince the portion of people who are vaccine hesitant, shall we say, who have been swayed by this deluge of propaganda, then it does sort of behoove us not to just tar them with the same brush as being, you know, horrible purveyors of disinformation who are awful people.
I guess just for the record, what I'd like to say is if you are not a major platform owner that is monetizing vaccine disinformation and conspiracy theories, but you are swayed by those ideas, I... but you are swayed by those ideas, I...
I respect you.
I understand the creativity and the life experience and the fondness for pattern making and perhaps the political experiences you might have had that point you into this incredible...
rich, creative, sometimes scary, sometimes anxiety-ridden world that you believe is going to be safe.
I totally respect how that has happened.
I am a cult survivor.
And so I have nothing against anybody who believes in conspiracy theories, but for people who manipulate those who are vulnerable to but for people who manipulate those who are vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking, you know, Yeah, not okay.
So your tweet, inviting an alternative term for conspiracy theorists and proposing your own which included emotional abuser, you were referring specifically to these highly influential figures.
Absolutely!
There's two sentences.
Yeah, that's exactly what it said.
It said, it said, for those who attack public health and harm people, the term is weak.
Now, it didn't say, didn't name people, it didn't say the disinformation doesn't, but I mean, the context of everything that we've done over the last 15 months is that.
We're talking about people who are using their intranet muscle to do exactly that.
The burning of the great library of Dr. Joseph Mercola. - A very interesting drama, or shall we say melodrama, has been playing out this week following a New York Times article about Joseph Mercola.
Now, you may remember, and Derek mentioned it, Mercola is at the very top of the disinformation dozen list, compiled based on research, which is why we love the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
They do extensive research, everything is data-driven.
That list was recently referenced by both Jen Psaki and the White House press room, and then separately by President Joe Biden in talking about efforts to combat the effects of anti-vax propaganda, which, you know, made all three of us go, finally, what took you so long?
The Times piece, which was written by Shira Frankel, but with a team of another six credited reporters and researchers, gives an in-depth rundown on Mercola's career and how he built his estimated $100 million empire.
The FDA warnings he received in 2005, 6, and 11 for selling unapproved health products The $2.95 million he had to refund customers after the Federal Trade Commission brought false advertising charges against him for claiming that his tanning beds, priced between $1,200 and $4,000 each, were safe and had been shown by research not to increase the risk of skin cancer.
Turns out not to be true and would instead reverse the appearance of aging.
Obviously not true.
As someone who grew up near the Jersey Shore, that is the most ludicrous.
People my parents' age now are just raisins.
Yeah, they look like iguanas.
But was he claiming that the tanning beds had health benefits?
He was claiming that they would reverse the appearance of aging and that they would not increase.
Basically, this is a safer way to get a tan.
It's a safer way.
Okay, so it was not a special tanning bed for your butthole or something like that where you derive extra benefit because you were naked or something?
No, it's more that this is a safe way to get a really good tan that will not stimulate the processes that lying in the sun do that would give you cancer!
Yeah, amazing.
So, Dr. Joseph Mercola, if you're unfamiliar, is a 67-year-old osteopath in Cape Coral, Florida.
He's originally from Chicago and he became one of the pioneers of supplement and old health products online marketing in the 90s.
His 2003 book, The No-Grain Diet, was a New York Times bestseller.
He has since published books almost yearly.
The New York Times article points out that he's made many far-fetched claims over the years, including, for example, that the springs in your mattress will amplify radiation.
And then, of course, he quickly turns around after any claim like this to give you his pitch for whatever the snake oil is that he claims will protect you from this made-up Threat to your health.
Take control of your health, urges his website banner.
And that's really the slogan he operates under.
Mercola Consulting Services has offices in Florida and the Philippines that churn out newsletters, blog posts, and videos to a network of websites across social media.
All of this stuff is A-B tested, so he's up on the latest marketing techniques, and it's all driven to go as viral as possible.
The messaging is distributed in almost a dozen languages around the world.
He has at least 2.7 million followers on Facebook.
About a third of those are on his Spanish language Facebook page.
And that's before you even factor in the 17 other pages that researchers cite as associated with his company.
He has 300,000 followers on Twitter, 400 on YouTube, 400,000.
And his top dog spot on the disinfo dozen list was earned in part for publishing over 600 articles to Facebook that cast doubt on COVID vaccines alone.
Keeping it all in the family, Mercola's girlfriend and one-time employee Erin Elizabeth clocks in at number seven on that list.
I am like 600 articles to Facebook.
So was there a share rate for those articles?
I mean, it must be in the millions.
Yeah, I would think so.
Reaching millions, millions and millions.
It's incredible.
I'm waiting for the data analysis that can start to link the amount of that material to exactly how the needle moved on Vax Hesitancy in various areas.
I don't know who's going to be able to do that.
It just so happens that Mercola also has the current best-selling book in any category.
So, book number one on Amazon, titled The Truth About COVID-19, Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal.
So, conspiracy theorist in chief.
Uh, noteworthy is that in Amazon's Frequently Bought Together section, you know, that appears underneath the product, uh, the recommendation there is to also get a book titled American Marxism by Stop the Steal proponent and COVID denialist right wing author and radio host Mark Levin.
Now, here's the twist in the tale.
Tuesday, Mercola releases a direct-to-camera video on his YouTube channel with haunting minor chord piano music playing behind him, lamenting the New York Times article and the disinformation dozen designation.
He claims the article is just filled with falsehoods, but he doesn't name or correct any of them.
It's just filled with falsehoods.
Right.
And then comes this.
So the course of action I am now forced to take is to remove my entire archive of articles.
25 years worth of blood, sweat, and tears coming down.
I know, I can hardly believe I am saying these words.
It's a testament to how radical things have degenerated in the recent past.
Going forward, each new article will only be available for 48 hours.
COVID-19 has activated emergency authorization powers that have weakened our constitutional rights.
Sadly, cyber warfare and authoritarian forces are beyond our abilities to withstand, and this is now the only way forward.
Over 15,000 articles full of vital information that has helped hundreds of millions of people across the world take control of their health will be removed.
There was a time when people could debate and respect each other freely.
That time is now gone.
The silence of free speech is now deafening.
The video weaves perhaps predictable B-roll footage of books being burned and Biden speaking at a podium, etc.
But then, and this goes with the anti-Semitic stuff we've been talking about, he also features old anti-communist McCarthy hearing footage.
As well as images of protesters clearly, if you know anything, engaged in the anti-police brutality hands-up-don't-shoot gesture while they carry pictures of Mike Brown.
He ends up by saying, Remember, your body was designed to stay healthy.
You hold in your hands the power to take control of your health and never, never let anyone take your right to health away from you.
This deep voice is great.
It's almost Morgan Freeman territory.
Over a montage of dizzying mainstream media logos, a creepy clip art portrait of, you guessed it, Bill Gates, and those same Mike Brown protesters, all wearing masks, by the way, and an Albert Einstein quote, science can only flourish in an atmosphere of free speech, which is again a statement against communist dictatorships.
He then lists all of his social newsletter and website links and the video fades with that haunting piano music.
So this is This is wild stuff.
I mean, it's free speech martyrdom, right?
It's pseudoscience is actually a form of free speech, but we're just going to call it science.
But then it's also this weird Like, obscurantist thing, because I have my own thoughts about why he may be taking down all of his content.
What do you guys think?
Did he get a letter from the AG?
I mean, there's got to be legal threats involved.
He's been sued a number of times, it's not just once.
The FDA has come after him a few times, so be clear on that.
And getting back to your question, Julian, what I want to point out is with charlatans like this, you don't Acquire or accumulate $100 million worth of wealth by being honest with your information in the way that he has.
I shared with you earlier, you probably haven't watched yet, but shout out to Jules Evans for sharing it with me, this video that two young men made in the UK.
The leading anti-vaxxer there is a guy named Piers Corbin.
They set up and filmed a meeting with him acting as businessmen who made a lot of money from AstraZeneca, and they offered him £10,000 to not stop anti-vax disinformation, but to only focus on Pfizer and Moderna and leave AstraZeneca alone, and he completely agrees to it.
And it's all on tape, and it's right there.
And you even see his thought process.
Well, since it's not an mRNA vaccine, I can focus on that and leave AstraZeneca alone.
And you watch it, and Mercola is the biggest huckster out there.
Like, all the disinformation does, and the rest of them wish they had his juju and what he's, you know, he is their godfather.
And for him to, first of all, of course he's not gonna Own up to any falsehoods.
Like, this is all documented.
Just go to his Wikipedia page and look at all the links to all the times.
I mean, you don't need to go deeper than that, but you can.
And it's so blatant.
And the fact that he's just getting even more support, a level of martyrdom during this time is so frustrating.
Yeah, he went on Dave Asprey's podcast today or yesterday and Asprey touted him as the most censored man in history and asked him, if you had a gun to your head, which of the vaccines would you take?
And he said, none of them.
And Asprey said, so you'd take the bullet.
And he said, yeah, I'm going to die anyway.
I'm old.
Oh my god.
Yeah, we'll have an Asprey episode coming up soon, because I've long wanted to cover that guy.
I mean, Mercola laid the blueprint for what Asprey has done, so it makes sense that they would get together.
Yeah, I mean, in terms of my question, I feel like it seems fairly transparent to me that he's like, oh shit, I'm getting all of this heat.
I better remove my entire 25 years of fallacious claims and bullshit things that I haven't been called out on yet.
Thank you for answering your question because I punted.
That's fine.
It's just like, he's going to tell this whole story and then be like, so the action we're forced to take is take down all of my 25 years worth of content and have anything new I put up only be available for 48 hours.
Like, and why is that exactly?
Well, fortunately the internet archive exists a way back machine, so I'm sure it will be captured for investigators who need to find that information down the line.
So one last question, was Eisenstein's link to Mercola in place before the New York Times article was published or after?
Before.
Right.
We'll see if there's an edit, I suppose.
And you guys get what I'm saying, right?
In terms of like, either it's the Jews are behind the conspiracies or we're being treated like Jews.
During the Holocaust, like you have to, you have to pick one or the other.
And the same thing with like, I'm going to, I'm going to be, I'm going to take all these right-wing positions, but then I'm going to say that this is similar to McCarthyism or that I'm going to like try and try and have a sort of affinity with Black Lives Matter, anti-police brutality protesters.
Yeah, it's political jabberwocky.
There's nothing but theater going on.
These are not people who really even care about these issues, and that's why I think Dale Barron really holds the keys to the kingdom here.
We're talking about internet garbage.
The Jab, our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
A tale of two headlines.
So this week in misleading headlines, on July 30th, CNBC published the headline saying, CDC study shows 74% of people infected in Massachusetts COVID outbreak were fully vaccinated.
That same day, CNN said, "Vaccination by itself is not enough to stop the spread of variants, study finds." And to add to the ominous and hopeless tone, several outlets also ran with a stat last week that 125,000 fully vaccinated Americans had tested positive for COVID.
Terrifying.
Of course, we started to then see these headlines and context-free statistics either quoted or just screenshot on social media in posts that support the contention that vaccines actually don't work anyway, and that any kind of quote-unquote vaccine mandate is not only a waste of time and an affront to civil liberties, but supposedly represents an unreasonable side-effect risk for very low immunity reward.
Everyone's favorite ivermectin proponent and vaccine alarmist, Brett Weinstein, tweeted the CNN headline, screenshot it, vaccination by itself is not enough, as evidence that he's been just so far ahead of the curve.
I mean, if vaccines are not enough, it turns out he has a horse dewormer that some have noted comes in a convenient paste with fruity flavors you can order directly from Amazon for you.
Spend some time in the review section on that Amazon page if you do look it up.
Here's my favorite.
It's from a user named Justin.
It works!
The flavor was kind of gross.
We mixed a pea-sized amount with peanut butter.
My whole farm felt better the next day.
This is so random.
This is from someone calling herself Lydia Loves Butterflies.
You probably know what slash why I used it and I do so prophylactically about every six weeks.
I put it with reg jelly on a spoon.
Easy peasy.
No side effects so far and been doing this almost a year.
No illnesses either.
Use the weight slash dosing line in syringe.
Well, no illnesses.
Now, Ivermectin is for horses only, of course, in this form, right?
In this paste, this fruity paste that you can imbibe.
But if you go to Google right now and enter Ivermectin paste, it will complete the sentence for you as Ivermectin paste dosage for humans.
Click on that.
You caught me, you caught me.
Click on that and there are websites giving instructions on how to self-administer.
And in that list, Amazon pops up with one of those auto-generated headlines that says, explore dewormers for humans.
So you can see what your options are in Amazon.
But I digress.
Brett was also happy because if you scan the CNN article, it does seem to support the idea he got from veterinary medicine expert and vaccine doomsday prophet Geert Vandenbosche that vaccines play a key role in the creation of variants.
But if you read more carefully, the reporting says that if vaccination efforts are slow and patchy, yes, the percentage of unvaccinated people in the population does then create a kind of selective pressure against the vaccinated people that may foster variants.
The answer to that problem is not animal remedies, though.
As the article points out, it's getting more people vaccinated faster, in addition to also adopting quarantine measures until the case numbers improve again, which is what they really meant by the headline.
Now, let's go back to that looming number of 125,000 vaccinated Americans testing positive.
At a bare minimum, to contextualize that large-seeming number, we need to consider how many Americans have been vaccinated.
That number is best understood, 125,000, as a percentage of the significantly larger number of 165 million.
Which means that actually, 0.075, that's 75 in a thousand, of vaccinated people have tested positive.
Because, turns out, the vaccines are still very effective against the Delta variant.
Now onto the scary Massachusetts story.
74% of people testing positive had been vaccinated.
This one got quoted to me a lot this week in comments on threads.
Here's more information.
This was a single instance of 900 people in Provincetown stemming from 4th of July gatherings in a state with the second highest vaccination rate in the country.
So yes, Delta is more contagious.
Yes, crowded indoor gatherings of predominantly vaccinated people led to breakthrough infections of mostly vaccinated people.
The total of those 900 cases that were hospitalized?
7.
Number of deaths?
0.
Now, if you zoom out a little, we find that overall in the state of Massachusetts with a 63% vaccination rate, the hospitalization rate for vaccinated people is 0.008%.
And COVID deaths make up 0.02% of the vaccinated population.
Now, I'll link to all of these sources along with a chart in the show notes that tracks the correlation between each state's vaccination rate and the new infection numbers.
And as Derek said, that data is very clear.
Lower vax rates, Indicate the largest new case numbers.
I'm not a statistician, but we should just mention that the technical term for the faulty intuition often at play with statistics here is called the base rate fallacy, which is the tendency to focus on individual data points without integrating them into the appropriate larger context, as I was just doing.
In this case, it's failing to see new infections amongst the vaccinated as a percentage of the total number of people who've been vaccinated.
It can also be really easy to overlook that the number of new infections is not really as significant as what the vaccines are over 90% effective at doing.
Which is preventing severe illness and death.
Those percentages are holding up really well, even in the face of the Delta variant, with the latest studies showing maybe a small percentage drop of 2-5%, which cannot yet be determined to be due to Delta or just how long ago someone received their vaccine.
Now to end on a hopeful note, New data also shows what researchers call a surprisingly short-lived cycle with regard to the spikes in new cases from the Delta variant in both India and the UK.
Wherever we go from here with emerging variants, continuing to get more people vaccinated has so far been the most effective strategy.
But media scaremongering that confuses people on vaccine efficacy for clicks is really shameful.
So our interview guests this week are Sarah Garden and Colin Hall of Bodhi Tree Yoga in Regina, Saskatchewan, which would be the setting of a CBC Prairie Saskatchewan, which would be the setting of a CBC Prairie Home Companion show, if that was a thing.
Sarah and Collin have made national news throughout the pandemic for being vocal advocates for first early closing and then reclosing when the second wave hit last fall and more recently for announcing a vaccination requirement for clients who want to return to in-person classes.
So, I asked them about their journey with all of that, which includes having one of their Facebook posts that was critical of governmental neglect read aloud in the Saskatchewan legislature as the Tory Premier Scott Moe nodded off.
And we wanted to find out how this reopening plus vaccine issue was impacting other studios out there, so we put a call out on social, and now we're going to dig into the mailbag.
I kind of wish it was a mailbag, to be honest.
The questions that I asked were six.
So, number one, given the contentiousness of vaccine politics, How did you come to decide on your vaccination policy for reopening?
2.
Can you say a little bit about your location and client demographics?
3.
How would you assess the level of vaccine hesitancy in your community?
4.
How has your policy been received?
5.
If there's been a backlash, what is it focused on?
Who has it come from?
6.
Will this experience impact other ways in which you conduct business or produce content?
So, we have some answers here, gentlemen.
Alright, so this first one is from Bruce Bear, who happens to be the owner of the studio I've been at for a very long time in Santa Monica.
He says, our demographic is a bit older than other studios that focus more on flow and hot yoga, and it's at least 75% women.
Santa Monica is about 80% vaccinated.
So I think vaccine hesitancy is very low in our community.
We do require vaccination for attendance.
The only backlash you've had was from a few people on our email list who hadn't been to classes in the last five years.
And he says, moving forward, we will do most classes in a hybrid format with students in the studio.
And for the time being, they will be masked while simultaneously offering the classes online.
So Santa Monica is 80%.
That surprises me because, A, I know parents in Santa Monica and the amount of controversy around schools there with children masking and vaccinations.
And then a few years ago, you had the measles outbreak, which was centered in Brentwood, which buts against Santa Monica.
And there, you know, that has been kind of a vector for anti-vax.
That actually makes me happy that it's that high.
Yeah, I was surprised and pleased by that as well.
Here's one from Wendy Landry on a different note in Parkville, Missouri.
She says, we're in Parkville, 10 minutes north of downtown Kansas City.
Students are between 58 and 83, so also an older demographic.
She says they work with cancer and cardiac patients, as well as preparing people for knee, hip and shoulder replacements.
The county my studio is in is reporting only 28.42% vaccinations.
Wow.
People outside of the yoga community have zero interest in getting vaccinated or wearing a mask.
The county did not provide vaccines consistently until the end of April of this year.
All of my students are fully vaccinated.
They've all taken COVID seriously because I did shut down the studio to in-person classes before the lockdown.
Finally, one student found a Walmart in a rural area that had openings all day in March.
So she contacted me and asked me to share the info with all our students so they could get vaccinated.
It's frustrating to have to drive that far.
It's just a different world, right?
Because of this aging population.
But they caravanned.
Yeah.
In winter weather in Missouri.
Yeah, amazing.
Amazing and great, great leadership.
She said that they just started in-person classes again in May and they require full vaccinations with a card for evidence so they can note the date of the second shot on the person's account and the students are fine with it.
The ones who've given some pushback are ones who haven't taken classes there in the past, and they've included some comments like, you are not my people.
She says her personal favorite was from someone who told her over the phone she would call back in a couple months when I changed my mind.
Her response, I will not change my mind.
Well, then also she goes on to talk about harassment from citizens coming in through the street.
So she says that the city requires I have a retail storefront.
I carry more than just yoga stuff that a normal studio would carry, I guess to satisfy that requirement.
And the Missouri governor basically said, use common sense with masking.
So she writes, my store has become problematic and that people are hostile.
I've had a group of women stand outside my building and scream into my open door because of mask requirements.
I've had anti-maskers get nasty in the store and run out customers who are going to purchase products.
This sounds like a viral YouTube disaster.
I've had women, always women, she notes, be really nasty to my employees.
I even had my studio's fully wrapped car egged while I was working in the shop.
Does wrapped mean that it's wrapped in advertising?
Is that what that implies?
Not sure if it means that or if it's got some sort of covering, you know, like a car covering blanket on it.
Right.
And then she says she was actually working with a client prepping for a new replacement outside on the bench when the screamers came by.
It was embarrassing and my client felt bad.
She was in a lot of personal pain.
Yeah, incredible situation that Wendy Landry of Omprana Yoga in, what is the Parkville, Missouri, 10 minutes north of downtown Kansas City.
Yeah, that's very difficult, Wendy.
All right, so we wish you luck with that.
Right.
All right.
Okay, so we have an anonymous studio owner who said that it was okay to state her location as Orange County, and she has invoked a vaccination requirement for a returning student.
She says, based on science and ethics, it's just that simple.
In Orange County, she says they were the first to close in-person class, even before Newsom shut down California.
She says that they were late to reopen because Newsom opened last June 15th and they waited until mid-July.
And she writes, sad to say this, but Orange County has been a conservative county for a long time.
We really had no idea that San Clemente, the next town south of us, nicknamed Kentucky by the sea, With the 2016 election, our neighborhood was pink instead of red.
But with the 2020 election, we became light blue.
And for a long time, we thought we were living in this laid-back, surf-and-beach area.
We had no idea.
And we're not alone.
So, what's the distance between Orange County and Santa Monica?
My California geography is that great.
20 minutes if there's no traffic, which there always is.
San Clemente is a little further down.
You're talking Rick Warren territory as well, so there's a big evangelical community in that area.
And if you push all the way to Huntington Beach, which is very conservative, that's maybe a 40-minute drive, I think.
But we're just, we're still talking about the greater LA area, right?
Yes, just past, so just to orient, just think of Long Beach, which is very the end of Los Angeles County, and then just as soon as you go south from there, you're in Orange County.
Yeah, and an important thing for anyone who is not local, it's sometimes referred to when you travel in that direction as heading behind the orange curtain.
She writes, with regard to her demographics, there are a lot of Hispanics in our area, as well as conservative Christian folks, and of last year, a lot of QAnon folks.
sigh who knew including a lot of yoga teachers and practitioners so sad and reading this made me sort of visualize a future census where QAnon might be an option with regard to filling out denomination I mean, it just feels plausible.
But she does describe that, you know, most of the students share the same politics and mindset, especially with regard to vaccination.
And yeah, we plan to continue to conduct in-person classes with limited capacity with fax card requirement and simultaneously Zoom the classes to provide that option.
And that's what Colin and Sarah are doing as well.
We have slowly built a yoga video library monthly unlimited students will eventually have access to that and this is something that I've heard from a lot of studio owners that there has been this process of building video capacity and and storage and a library and I just want to say how difficult that must have been and how You know Technologically challenging it must have been and also how Much competition these studios would have had from existing online platforms.
So I think anybody who managed to do that really has created a client base that wants to be with them, right?
Because the expense of online yoga through any of the larger platforms is almost non-existent.
I would say not necessarily.
You know, there's my neighborhood studios called Red Diamond and they just set up a laptop in the studio and hit play and record.
Right.
And they they kept alive doing that.
And that's not to negate that there is technical technological challenges for people who might not know that.
But there is a wide variety of of quality in the online video libraries.
But I would agree with Great.
And it really highlighted the importance of your local yoga studios.
I'm sure that Julian can attest to his Santa Monica Yoga, which is an institution there, that the people who are willing to support, it's going to be regional, whereas compared to the bigger yoga platforms you're trying to pick off people internationally, for example.
Yeah, we've been really appreciative of the local support and the willingness to stay with us when, of course, people could go to random platforms and spend much less.
But the other thing that's been really cool about it, actually, is people who used to come to classes maybe 10 or 20 years ago who had moved away are now taking the live stream classes.
And that's been really sweet to have a sort of returning community as well.
This is from Shelly Carroll, the founder of Dancing Dogs Yoga in Atlanta, a city I've been to twice and have enjoyed.
I'd like to visit again.
She is saying that there is a lot capital L-O-T, of spiritual bypassing in the yoga and wellness community in Atlanta, and she wants no part of it.
With the rise of the Delta variant and the amount of breakthrough cases that they're seeing in their area and personal lives, they opted to require vaccinations for all students.
And while they recognize that a very small segment of the population cannot get vaccinated, not choosing, but can't, They also realize they need to protect the entire community.
So over 90% of their members have already shown vaccination cards.
So that's a good sign.
So she says that their vaccination policy has been very, again, very capital.
So that's a good sign.
Well received, at least from their client base.
She also notes that they've been trolled on social media, which is interesting because, as you just pointed out a moment ago, Matthew, people from the community complaining, but not the students.
It seems to be the same case here.
People who have never been to the studio are the ones that are threatening boycott.
She says, I think it is amusing to threaten a boycott to a business you do not frequent.
That is not how boycotts work.
Yeah, I think it's either in the interview or on social media somewhere that Colin, who I interview later with Sarah, remarked that there's a lot of people from Florida who have said that they will never be coming to Bodhi Tree Yoga in Regina because of our vaccination policy.
They're very firm on that.
They're very firm on that.
How are they going to survive?
It's such a bizarre meeting of the real world and the not real world.
But the not real world is really impactful because it will gum up your social media feeds with all kinds of vitriol and controversy.
So this from Karen Perucha, who is the owner of Downward Dog Yoga Center in Toronto.
She says they started their vaccination policy in the third week of July for the following reasons.
The staff and teachers wanted to feel protected.
They were getting inquiries from the community about the vaccination policy.
And vaccination rates in Toronto were relatively high.
At the time, 70% had their first dose, almost 52% had their second.
I think we're closer to 85% now and maybe 65% on second dose.
Good.
She says we're in a popular area in Queen Street West.
The clientele is working urban professionals, anywhere from their mid-20s to their 60s.
She says, I think there's a general hesitancy of receiving vaccines within our community, which is not uncommon and is reflective of the general public.
We've had teachers ask us about their classes in the event that they receive symptoms, conversations about the efficacy of this and the side effects of that.
But overall, our community has been in support of the immunization and the discussions we've had.
We have received though many vitriolic comments and messages.
We do also have much more positive comments about how members feel more safe to come to in-person classes.
For instance, a member who is pregnant and another whose spouse has an autoimmune disease and was wary of going to places indoors.
The backlash has focused on how such a policy is discriminatory.
How shameful it is that we are in support of big pharma, and how in the wellness industry we should be promoting the body's natural immune system.
So these are all very familiar objections.
She says, I use quotes here because the messages we received used very similar keywords and phrases.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, from a small but highly vocal minority.
Yeah, who copy and paste, right?
Yeah.
They're posting, they're posting.
They're posting their research, Matthew.
Yeah, but those comments can be lifted from the Downward Dog DM thread to the next thing that they're going to comment on, right?
Or maybe they can exist on the stickies on the side or something like that and you can just grab them when you need them.
So we have Matthew Goff at Brewer Street Yoga in London.
Over the pond, who tells us that from day one of reopening he made it quite clear that anything other than fully complying with the vaccine rollout would not permit students to practice or teachers to teach at his studio.
Good job.
He's long fought conspiracy theories on the internet, so the only solution was to be clear and concise with his policy and stick to it.
I love that.
Here in Los Angeles, my former employer, Equinox, I have heard from a number of people, is extremely sticking to that.
They're sticking to that policy and making people wear masks, whereas where I now work out at LBCD, LA Fitness just doesn't give a shit.
So I'm glad when I hear people sticking with it.
He's vindicated as large companies are stipulating mandatory vaccinations and vaccine passports are being rolled out, which he seems to be in support of.
In terms of his clientele, it is a predominantly gay studio for gay men.
And he has a strict no spiritual stuff approach, as That's one of the biggest turnoffs for guys getting into yoga.
That is historically true from my anecdotal career in it.
His demographic is 99% male, ages 20 to 60, and they're not spiritual or interested in Wu, but they are very committed to their practice, which I personally think is more important than any of the metaphysics.
So in terms of the hesitancy, he has a mailing list of more than 2,000 people and a total number Of one said they weren't coming back because quote, the pandemic is over.
Okay.
I guess our podcast is done guys.
We've done it.
We can quit now.
We'll talk about, talk about drawing, like building and creating a really grounded community through, you know, healthy messaging and being consistent in your, in your beliefs and ideas.
Right.
Oh, absolutely.
One thing that I often got in the early aughts when I went from working at and practicing in yoga studios in New York to teaching at Equinox was this debate that there's gym yoga versus studio yoga.
And I was always like, if it's bringing them some benefit, what does this matter?
This is such a stupid conversation.
Whatever reason, if they're getting something emotionally and physically from it, that is awesome.
But it's not in our particular capitalist temple of devotion, right?
Yeah, well, that's another podcast episode.
Matthew did have one teacher resigned when he emailed asking for copies of vaccine cards, but otherwise it sounds like everything is going really well there.
And now we turn to rural Minnesota and Tricia Terinskis at Spring Yoga.
So much different demographic than London, for sure.
Hi, Tricia.
She lives and operates her yoga studio in a rural, I've always had trouble with that word, I'm sorry, New Jersey tongue here, rural area of Minnesota near South Dakota.
64% of voters in her county voted for Donald Trump, she wanted to point out.
But her husband is a local physician who treated COVID patients and was very vocal about the need for masks.
And he is also vocal about the need for vaccination.
So good family ethics there.
In terms of her client base, they tend to attract more of a traditionally labeled American liberal crowd.
But as we now know, many of those who previously would have been classified liberal have begun to lean toward the wellness industry inspired conspiracy theories.
Only 48% of her community is fully vaccinated.
She had one conversation on the doorstep of her studio with a woman who was hesitant to get the vaccine because she heard it was the mark of the beast. - Oh. - Oh.
Her policy right now is that if COVID cases increase in her local hospital, which they are preparing for, she will then implement a vaccination policy.
She has not, it appears, right now, but she does expect backlash from the 30% of attendees who are against the vaccine, many who have never stepped foot in the studio, so probably only took online.
She also expects headlines, which will ultimately lead to harassment, but I'm not sure I care about that anymore.
But she does also note that this yoga studio does not support her livelihood, that it is a passion project with the goal of growth.
So she recognizes that she's in a different situation from those who rely on their studios as a main source of income.
Finally, we have Anna Yazdan from Sukha Yoga in Thornhill, just north here in Toronto.
She writes, prior to being given the green light to open on July 16th, we had the conversation around implementing a vaccine policy as it felt to us like the morally and socially right thing to do.
However, after being closed for well over a year and wanting to get our opening just right, we were too trepidatious to put the policy in place out of fear of backlash and criticism.
We therefore opened without the policy in place on July 16th, but after being open for just one week without the policy, we decided that we simply could not let fear outweigh the health and safety of our teachers and students.
Well done.
It must be noted that we are primarily a hot yoga studio and it felt like we had an obligation to our community to provide a healthy and safe practice environment that we could stand behind with confidence and the courage to make this decision.
Was bolstered by conversations with our teachers and students who'd expressed concern over visiting the student without the policy, and they shared that they would feel much more comfortable practicing yoga in the way they did with a vaccine policy in place.
There's also the rise in the new Delta variant and other variants that may come in the near future, which also posed a very real concern and perhaps motivated us to take action more immediately.
So she describes an ethnically diverse community of students.
We pride ourselves on having a community made up of all ages between 35 and 60.
And they took into consideration that, now these are the more updated figures for the Toronto area, 80% and the country actually, 80% of Canadians 12 years and older at this stage have had their first dose of the vaccine and we felt confident their client base is reflective of the average Canadian
and would therefore presumably be on board but it's tough to make assumptions around this however it seems as though the majority of our community is supportive if not relieved by our decision and would lead us to believe that vaccine hesitancy in our community is therefore fairly low.
They've had overwhelmingly positive response from their community And that has reinforced their belief that they've done the right thing.
But social media, of course, is a funny beast, she writes.
We have been annihilated on social media with close to 800 comments, many of which are very hateful.
The reality is that most of these comments are coming from people that have never stepped foot in our studio.
So truthfully, the anger and misinformation being circulated on this platform has made us feel even more grounded in our decision.
Okay, so that's a great flip.
The backlash has been on Instagram, and it felt like a targeted attack on our business from people who are, for the most part, not a part of our community.
Privacy and discrimination were the main concerns expressed, along with this being a very anti-yogic decision.
Side note here, there is a Toronto-based website that advertised or that supported businesses by advertising their vaccination policy to the public.
They had to shut down last week because of targeted harassment that sought out those businesses and then flooded Yelp with negative reviews.
So yeah, so they had to close down.
um yeah so we stand by science that immunization reduces the spread of the virus uh and in this instance we believe that safety trumps privacy uh and yeah at this time we still provide three classes a week online for those who can't do in-person classes and they have a week-long recording links attached to them so we're trying our best to ensure everyone still has a way of practicing while we navigate these challenging times she concludes by saying the yoga world is ripe with ripe with dogma
And this has been a good reminder to be genuine humans and to conduct our business with as much integrity as we possibly can.
We remind ourselves in the practice that we are all connected and this has been the ultimate reminder that indeed we are all connected and we should do our part for the betterment of the whole.
So going forward, we will continue to listen and stay true to our own moral and ethical compass.
Sarah Garden and Colin Hall, it's so good to see you.
Welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast all the way from Regina.
What a treat.
Yes, thanks so much for having us.
It's pretty fun.
I like it.
Thank you.
We have a lot to talk about with regard to your international fame and the splash that Bodhi Tree Yoga has made as the pandemic winds down and we all think about reopening.
But I was wondering if you could Just start with giving our audience a little bit of a 101 introduction to your hometown of Regina, Saskatchewan.
Tell us a little bit about Regina.
Regina is a city in southern Saskatchewan.
I think we have about 200,000 people.
Somewhere in that neighborhood.
It's largely surrounded by farmland, farm and ranch land, and so we kind of service a lot of rural communities in the area.
There's a lot of farmers in the area, and yeah, it's not a real busy spot.
I think if anybody has seen the movie Fargo, you have a pretty good understanding of what Regina's like.
No, we're on Treaty 4 land, so we have a large Indigenous community as well in this area, and we just are kind of in the midst of dealing with a lot of, like, close to where we are.
There was a large residential school discovery of bodies, and there's a pretty There's a pretty big gap politically, I think, in our province as well and even in our city.
So yeah, there's a wide range of politics here and a wide range of people.
It's funny because it's wide and not.
There's two.
It's very polarized.
Yeah, it's polarized, I would say.
Yeah, like we have like people who I think, you know, you would like sort of associate with like Florida man, kind of that style of yeehaw.
Right.
And then I think there's also a lot of really old school socialists and just people who've been doing activism and community work for generations and their families.
So fortunately we live in a neighborhood where We're in a really nice little bubble and all our neighbours are like dropping off cards supporting us and being like, don't let them get you down!
So it's even though there is a lot of sort of conservative redneckery around Saskatchewan, there are some really phenomenal pockets.
Very thoughtful people, very conscious people, kind of making conscious choices about how to make Make the province, make our city more inclusive.
And how has yoga gone over there?
And what has it been like to run your studio, to run Bodhi Tree for the last, how many years has it been?
17?
Yeah, 17 and a half, I think.
Oh my gosh.
I know, it seems like it's crazy.
Think about how long we've been doing this.
Yeah, to be honest, it kind of is like a little bit disturbing.
Yeah.
That's 2004.
Yeah.
So that's actually prior to the sort of large-scale economic boom in Yogaland generally too, isn't it?
I mean, so you're not only It's not like you got your YTT certificate in, I don't know, Toronto or Montreal or something like that in 2010 when 100,000 other people did and then opened a studio in Regina.
How did you get there?
Well, Sarah didn't have any paper at all.
Yeah, I had apprenticed for a long time because I wasn't really trained, like yoga therapy, There was yoga therapy training, but there wasn't a really kind of organized yoga therapy training in Western Canada that I know of.
I don't even know.
There may have been.
I didn't know.
I didn't ever.
I knew what I wanted to do, but I didn't know.
I was wearing pajama pants.
Yeah, we were wearing pajama pants.
I remember when somebody was like, well, there's this thing called yoga pants.
And we're like, you mean we can trade in our pajama pants?
Like, this is exciting.
No, I think.
I would say Sarah's work has gone unbelievably well.
I think that she has been embraced by the medical community in Regina in a way that is pretty rare.
I don't see it happening in a lot of other places.
So if her work is a reflection of how Running Bodhi Tree is going, I would say Running Bodhi Tree is going very, very well.
It's I mean other than the yoga therapy stuff it's I think it's similar to a lot of places where it was really good for a little while we had a really nice little community and then all the sort of big box gyms and stuff started opening up and that shifted things Well, it just kind of digs in a little bit and kind of peels off some of your folks who are in the community who are more interested in yoga as fitness.
And so then you get down to, I always think the community that comes into the studio is very, They've been incredibly supportive during COVID.
We've had a really amazing number of folks who shifted over to doing online classes with us.
The therapeutic program, I think I actually, it built during COVID.
So I got more people into the program for online.
I started working with people from around the province, which was really great because then, you know, in terms of accessibility, that made a huge difference.
Colin teaches at our local university as well.
He lectures at the university.
So, you know, it's funny.
It's like we've kind of found ways to like integrate both like, you know, yoga in the studio itself into our community.
And we do a lot of work with different organizations in the broader community and fundraising for like local community fridges and, you know, different organizations, but then also I was going to say one of my favorite social media comments was, oh, I didn't even have to look at who this was.
I saw a local yoga studio does something like, oh, no, it was Bodhi.
This is with regard to your recent fame about your vaccination policy, which we're going to get to, right?
OK.
All right.
So 17 years, I guess it's 16 years running up to March of 2020.
I think here in Toronto, my family became aware of the WHO declaring the pandemic on the 12th or something like that.
I think it was a Thursday.
And then the Friday was a 13th.
I think our kids were out of school that day.
And then, of course, everything changed.
And my understanding is, I was looking through trying to find this initial post that you had made, but you closed up right away, didn't you?
Even before there was any kind of instruction to do so?
Yes.
Yeah.
It was actually, it's funny, it was a Yoga International article.
And there's somebody, I think maybe it was Amber Burke that wrote it, I can't remember, but just making the case for closing Yoga Studios back, like, I think March, right around the time, like March 12th, 13th, it was right around that was when I read it.
And my first thought was, this is just for America.
This doesn't count for us.
We don't have to worry about this.
Right.
And then as I brought it up with Sarah, we started talking about it.
And we're like, Why wait?
Yeah.
Like, why wait until we're forced to?
Until someone says, this is what you must do?
Or why wait until somebody gets sick in the studio?
Like, that's another thought where it's like, why would we want to risk our community?
You know, when we have, we can figure out some other choices here.
You know, like there's other ways to do this.
That was back when I was excited about online yoga.
I was like, ooh, this is going to be fun.
Well, I remember that.
Oh, that was back when you were excited.
I mean, you were working with Yoga International on their online programming before that, but that was, you know, adjacent to or supplemental to working with real people in your real space.
So, I guess the jump to going entirely online is a huge thing to face, but I guess I just want to get it out in the open that you're able to read that article on March 12th and probably run that through your family processing for a day and a half or something like that and decide that it's the right thing to do to close, but
I mean, you're not, this is not a common, this was not a common decision amongst yoga studio owners at that time.
Why do you think, what did you come prepared with that allowed you to say, oh, you know, epidemiologists are worried about this.
We don't know how the transmission is going to go.
We understand something about, you know, our rates and and it might be fomites and it might be airborne and we don't know like you you had to come with all of those considerations um is that fair to say like you didn't learn that all on the spot right yeah we learned a lot we did learn a lot on the spot it was it was a day or two of pretty heavy research research and reading just trying to figure out what
What actually is the right thing to do?
But I think that Sarah's work in yoga therapy circles was kind of the deciding factor.
We have She's been running a yoga for cancer program as a studio for years and years and so we have so many people have kind of graduated from that class that are now teaching and taking regular classes and it just felt like we can't do this.
Well and we also have a good number of nurses working at the studio.
We have A lot of like medical professionals, like physicians who come into the studio to take classes with us.
We have a really like a lot of contacts in the broader medical communities.
So we could also reach out to them and talk to them about like, what do you think is coming here?
Like, what are the potential outcomes of what's happening right now?
It's not just that you're able to reach out to them, but you're also prepared to listen to them because you've been working adjacent to what they've been doing for a long time.
I mean, it's kind of, you are in a very unique position, I think, to be in This yoga therapy space, which although it's unregulated, as it seeks to legitimize itself, you know, you working in it, you have to pay attention to what the nurses are saying.
And if somebody comes to you as part of their cancer recovery or, you know, as part of a palliative regime or whatever, you're going to know what their you know, immune function is like, and you're going to know what kind of precautions they have to take.
So, yeah, I imagine you were super sensitized going into that day and a half storm of research.
Not just sort of like sort of working adjacent to them, but I think very much working with them.
Like we get a lot of referrals in from the cancer clinic.
They refer into the program.
We get a lot of referrals in from the lymphedema program at our local hospital.
And that comes with a lot of responsibility in my mind.
It comes with like a huge responsibility of care.
So not only am I concerned about you know, what I'm teaching them and how I'm teaching them, but also like the environment that they're coming to practice in.
That's really, really important.
And we are already very conscientious of, you know, illness in the studio.
And if somebody comes in and they are, you know, like, I think I'm getting sick, it's like, we're happy to refund your clasps.
Please recognize that we have a lot of immunocompromised folks in the studio or like medically vulnerable people who are in here and that we take care of our community very seriously.
That's what you said about like just like there's I think a layer a level of responsibility sometimes that I think I think that we feel that maybe other yoga studios don't like if you if you kind of think of yourself as like a fitness place or just like a fun like a recreational kind of thing I think I think maybe this stuff lands a little bit differently And it does on us.
I think we spend a lot of time stressing, actually, trying to make sure that we have the safest and most inclusive and welcoming place because that's how you do therapy.
You can't really do therapy without that.
You need people to feel safe in your space if you're going to be able to run a yoga therapy program.
It's crucial.
Now, I think, I don't know exactly what the sequence was, but at a certain point, case counts went down.
even if you're not going to be able to do it.
You opened in the fall?
I think it was September.
September, so and you had a distanced setup and you limited class numbers and everybody was masked and so on.
And then you closed again.
And again, you were ahead of the curve.
And I remember a statement that you came out with on Facebook saying, you know, our leaders are not going to do what's necessary in this kind of like patchwork, everybody makes their own choices, neoliberal environment in which everybody's free to get sick or to protect themselves.
So it seems like you had to go through this ringer a bunch of times.
Did people get behind you that second closing when you made a more forceful statement that actually called on your fellow fitness professionals and yoga studio colleagues to take proactive action and close down?
That Facebook post actually got read.
Not kidding.
in our legislature, the provincial legislature. - You're kidding. - Not kidding.
So it was like many, many things that have happened in the past year and a half or so, kind of like we say something and then we're like, "Oh shit, should we have thought more about this before we said it?" So there was a huge amount of support.
And like in the same way that back in March, a lot of our students were just like, basically, we had people buying sort of full price passes.
When there was a much, much cheaper option that they could have gone for and they were just basically subsidizing us.
People making donations, people really working to make sure that we made it through.
So that was happening.
But the call that I made to other gyms and other yoga studios, I'm sure you can guess how that went, what the uptake was on that.
Right.
The uptake was zero.
Was it really zero?
Zero.
Really?
So there wasn't anybody who reached out and said, hey, thanks for giving me the nudge that I needed.
I need to be proactive as well.
No.
Wow.
I'm sorry to hear that.
Yeah.
I guess I didn't hear, I didn't get that part of the story.
I don't know that that was.
That would have been follow-up.
That's not a good headline.
The statement gets read in the legislature, what, by your local NDP?
By the official opposition.
Was Scott Moe, the Premier, sitting there, or was he on recess at that point?
He was sitting there listening.
What did he have to say, or did he say anything?
They don't actually answer questions.
No, because it's question period, right?
You don't answer questions in question period.
Of course not!
It's statement period.
My favorite Sass Party thing is what they do is it doesn't matter what you ask them, you're like, Mr. Speaker, I'd really like to know what the Premier had for lunch yesterday and the Premier will go, you know, back in 1993 the NDP nearly bankrupted this province and I couldn't afford lunch.
Okay, so you didn't get any support from that statement.
Now, was the landscape Was there more animosity than silence?
Did you have to navigate any... I don't think so, yeah.
There was like zero pushback.
People just didn't care.
Oh, so okay.
All right.
Yeah, so just fell on deaf ears.
Well, now, in sort of broader terms, was there an active resistance Within yoga circles or wellness circles in Regina to the lockdown measures and to the general notion that this was a pandemic that had to appeal to the common good for resolution.
I mean, I don't have the inside track into a lot of that.
I don't know what teachers are thinking, but I feel like if there was a bit of a freedom sentiment of like, don't do any restrictions on me, I feel like it was done in a very uniquely Regina kind of way.
Can you fill us in on that?
Right.
You don't, okay, what I did, what we did last week, you don't do that.
Yeah.
That caused a scene.
Okay.
That was, I got told many times, that was too cavalier.
You try to stay under the radar.
That's the Regina way.
So if you're going to do it, you do it quietly.
You keep it to yourself and And I think, you know, I think watching social media, mostly from gyms and things like that, you could see that people were not They were following guidelines loosely, like there was big groups of people getting photos taken together and things like that, like the distancing wasn't taken really seriously.
That sort of thing happened a fair bit.
I think, yeah, it was maybe done in a let's avoid a ticket way instead of a let's take public health serious kind of way.
Yeah, yeah.
Maybe.
I don't want to sort of assume what people were thinking, but that's definitely how it appeared to us, I think.
Yeah.
Okay, so now it would have been more Regina-esque for you to have been quieter about your... Everything.
Vaccination.
About everything we do, yeah.
About everything.
But how exactly were you going to announce your vaccination policy as pertaining to reopening in an unpublic way?
How was that going to happen?
I'm not sure.
Maybe it would have been better just to send out a newsletter To our students.
Just to our students.
We get people who don't come to the studio regularly.
And besides that, I think it needed to be public, actually, because we've felt for a while that there isn't really a place for people to go where they feel safe and welcome.
And we wanted to say to people, Hey, if all these health guidelines being eliminated really is freaking you out.
Here's something we're going to try, so you can actually have a place to relax.
Yeah, so let's back up a little bit.
You're, just to clarify, you have announced that you're going to be asking attendees to your studio to provide some assurance that they have been vaccinated.
And you're doing that in the context of the Saskatchewan government Rolling back a number of COVID safety restrictions.
100%.
It's over.
100% of the COVID restrictions.
Oh, 100%?
With the exception of the SHA, our Saskatchewan Health Authority, which has continued on with masking and screening.
Everywhere else, all public spaces, all the masking, all the distancing, everything has been removed.
It's all gone.
I did not realize that.
that.
I was a little bit less prepared for this interview than I should have been because, I mean, that's kind of astonishing to me.
We, here in Ontario, it's still only curbside pickup except for, you know, grocery stores, hardware stores, you know, marketplaces.
My partner and I actually went on our first patio date.
In 18 months or something like that, just yesterday.
But even there, the patio spacing is enormous and everybody's masked and you can't touch the menu and stuff like that.
So there's nothing in place in Regina or anywhere else in Saskatchewan anymore at this point.
It is like you break out your two-for-a-pill.
Get your Pilsners ready, boys, because we're going to rip it up.
That's where Saskatchewan's at.
And our case count here is about 175 or something like that, which is reasonably low.
It feels comfortably low in Ontario.
What are case counts like in your province now?
We're like somewhere around 30 to 40 new cases a day.
Yeah.
So that's proportional, if not higher than the Ontario rate per population.
It's sneaking up.
It's sneaking up.
And there's already been a number of relief.
Big outbreaks in smaller centers that are not vaccinated.
And that will continue to happen over the course of the summer, for sure.
Are there, in your area, distinctly anti-vax communities that are affiliated with religious groups or various churches?
Not that I'm aware of in Regina.
Which certainly could be one of those like under the radar sort of vagina things.
There's certainly communities of Mennonite and Hutterite folks who are, I think, have a much, much lower uptake and also though had really serious issues with COVID moving through them and making a number of people really sick and I think There was a number of people who actually died from those communities over the course of the summer and even into the winter.
But not that I'm really aware of within Regina.
There is, I would say, in the sort of like natural health community, not necessarily the like, and I'm going to put that like in quotes because I'm not totally sure what that means, but I would say like the Sort of broader wellness community, I guess I could call it.
There is a really strong, really strong And I would say it's not a big group, but a really strong group of anti-vaxxers out there who have been protesting all winter, who like would, you know, go from the ledge to vaccine clinics, to protest outside of them, to outside the hospitals, even in front of, you know, family members who are going in to say goodbye to loved ones and nurses who are
One of our good friends is a nurse who worked in ICU all winter, and you could see the strain on her.
You know, you could see how hard they were working.
Now, that kind of anti-vax protesting and harassment outside of clinics, that doesn't sound very Regina to me.
Yeah, it's a good point actually.
So are they having to get over some modesty there?
Is that out of character?
These are just individuals.
So the individuals involved are business owners and members of different communities, but they're not going to put the name of their business on what they're doing.
They're not going to put the name of their church on what they're doing.
That's sort of the, I think, something that's, it seems like there is very little in the way of a hub for anti-vax sentiment.
It seems It's very random and kind of scattered throughout the community and so it's, you know, when you're trying to answer questions online, it's like shots are just coming in from all over the map and there is no one central organizing critique that they have.
There's so many different things.
And maybe that's an indication that the impetus is coming from that fragmented online space and less from community organizing.
This is the impression that I get.
Yeah.
And then it's impossible to know.
It is.
It must be very very frustrating.
Well and I think that there's a the sort of like anti-vaxxers and then there's also the people who are upset about the choices we've made because they feel like their their personal freedom and they may even have been they may even have been vaccinated but their their personal freedom is is Bodily autonomy is important to them.
We are going to continue to have online classes.
So we have a space for people who either, you know, for whatever reason can't be vaccinated.
And we have had some conversations too with the very, very few people who have been recommended against vaccination by their health care workers, by their physicians, right, for whatever reason.
We're more than willing to accommodate those folks, but I think that's only been one or two people so far who are like, you know, my neurologist doesn't think this is a great idea at this point.
Right.
Having the ability to kind of accommodate You know, even in person, even if it's one-on-one for those folks.
When you issued that call in, well, I guess it was November or maybe December that you were going to close down and, you know, it made it all the way to the legislature.
Nobody came through and echoed your sentiments and got onto the same page.
Now, how about now?
Have you had other studio owners, whether they're in Saskatchewan or, you know, the Midwest generally or anywhere else, reach out and support or to ask for guidance in how to issue their own policies?
So we've had teachers, we've had teachers like individual teachers approach us and say, I think you're doing the right thing.
I'm like, I feel like this is the right choice and I'm really pleased that you've made it.
And, you know, teachers from, you know, other teachers from Yoga International who teach for Yoga International, you know, other like friends of ours who we've kind of met through, through teaching, you know, outside of the city.
And people certainly from, From Saskatoon, which is the other, you know, city, bigger city, I say bigger loosely, city in our province, you know, have reached out and said, like, I think this is a really great choice and I think you're making the right decision, but nobody asking for guidance on what they could do for their studio or how they could do this.
Honestly, I think a lot of people saw what happened and were like, No thank you.
Which is unfortunate because social media lies so much.
It's a liar.
If you go through and look at the comments, like actually look at them, overwhelmingly positive, by a long shot.
And you've got, I would say, maybe 10 people Who are each commenting 10 times.
Or more.
Or more, which really sort of amplifies the dissenting voice.
Yeah, I mean, I can tell you for certain, not a single person so far
I'm expecting it but nobody who I know goes to the studio we have a relationship with who really knows us and and and has been coming to the studio for a while not a single person has been like not even hmm I'm not so sure not even that everybody's been like right on this is awesome.
Also not surprising with YouTube sort of thing like we're thrilled about it and we're you know it fits with with Well, how you work in the community, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just because you're pinkos.
Zooming out a little bit, I'm happy to say And I know a lot of studio owners, and it's been a very difficult time.
I would say catastrophically difficult time.
You know, by hook or by crook, it looks like Bodhi Tree might have made it through COVID.
Seems that way.
Yeah.
It feels like you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
And at the same time, You're re-emerging into a different world.
And I'm wondering, what do you both think the fallout will be for the yoga world in general?
And, you know, has this all made you rethink big picture things?
Not for me.
No, I've always felt like a little bit of a freak.
And an outsider in yoga communities.
I've never, I've never once felt like, oh, these people really get me.
I've never, I've never had that feeling.
And so I wouldn't anticipate.
That's not true.
I feel like Yoga International gets us.
Yeah, there's communities out there folks who get us so yeah.
But I still ultimately like I felt before this situation went down I felt like what we were doing with yoga was something quite different.
Yeah.
And out of step with yoga more broadly.
Yeah.
And I feel like nothing has changed this is just more of the same.
Yeah.
Well, I, we have, you know, from time to time we have thought to ourselves, maybe this isn't the industry for us.
Like maybe this is, maybe this is not what we're doing because we are quite out of step with a lot of what's happening.
And then I think we have, we, we talk a lot about, you know, not only are we, do we own the studio together, we're, we're also, She's my best friend.
Yeah, we like each other quite a bit.
And we've got some kids together.
And we also don't want to pass off yoga into the hands of people who are maybe going to be anti-science.
I don't know.
We've talked a lot about it.
Yeah.
It gets to be almost like a martyrdom thing where I'm like, I can't let the superstitious people take over yoga.
It's just not right.
So I have to be here and just sort of absorb.
Yeah, you know, you bring up something that I actually haven't really thought of because maybe I like to think that I'm younger than I am, which is that You know, you've been doing this for 17 years, and it's one thing to feel like an outsider,
But then it's another thing to realize that there's something valuable to the outsider ship's status and it is its own legacy.
I'm just really moved by this statement.
I don't want to pass the baton to somebody or to a culture that's, I don't know, gonna chuck it in the ditch or Sell it on eBay or something.
They're going to bedazzle it with sacred gemstones and a bedazzled baton.
I'm like, damn, what you got to bedazzle that baton for?
Just run with the fuck.
So right now I'm working in our local, like our health authorities, chronic pain clinic.
I got pulled in to do the movement therapy programming.
At our chronic pain clinic.
And, and so I'm working with, with people who don't know much about yoga, um, physicians, anesthesiologists, nurse practitioners, you know, pharmacists.
And, um, and I think there's been like a real, it's been really interesting to see that like, you can, you can not fit with the other people who are doing, um, Doing yoga or teaching yoga, and that's not everybody by any means, but like a good portion of the people.
And yet, you know, have really like kind of in depth and deep conversations with people in medicine who can see the value of yoga and what yoga could bring to like the broader medical community.
And I, I worry as a yoga therapist that that will be lost if we,
If we let go of, if we let go of the practice into the hands of folks who are not just like, maybe not using, you know, research-based practices and evidence-based practices, but also are like, like anti evidence-based practice, you know, and so I feel like there are, there will be a lot of people who will not be able to benefit from the real, like,
gold that yoga has to offer.
I don't know if this is going to sound maudlin, but there's something, I just want to repeat that statement about what is there in what you've built that should be preserved.
And I feel like I, I feel like I hear something of what I understand of Regina in that statement as well.
There's like, um, it's, it's, it's an older form of conservatism, which is like, you know, there are good ways of doing things and they shouldn't disappear.
And And we have, you know, farmed this way for X number of generations, and it works.
And so I'm wondering if you're kind of almost suited for that task of longevity.
We shall see.
Yeah, we shall.
I don't know.
Just to be really honest with you.
I don't know a bunch of things.
I don't know if what we're doing is fully legal or not.
I don't know if there's going to be a legal challenge and basically someone says to us no.
You are not allowed to do that.
Period.
End of story.
I don't know.
I did see that it was either CTV or the CBC asked one or two legal experts for opinions on whether or not you're, you know, at the front desk, can you show us your vaccine card request was going to be challenged or not.
Yeah, so I guess I didn't realize that that's still up in the air.
Somebody could challenge you, I suppose.
Sure, and honestly, I think they would probably lose.
But I don't know.
It seems that, so like we've spoken to a number of lawyers, we've had it since we've made this, and even prior to it, we chatted with a number of People who know about medical privacy and your personal rights with regards to privacy about your medical information.
I take that really seriously working as a yoga therapist, taking in people's personal medical information all the time and making choices about how to proceed with practice and those sorts of things.
With human rights complaints, we're looking at all things that you have no choice over.
Your gender, your race, your sexual preferences, your sexual orientation.
It's all things you don't have a choice about.
So I think in a situation with vaccination, this is a personal choice.
That covers the human rights side of the thing.
The privacy side of the thing is different.
It is.
The human rights side, I think we are actually okay for real.
Actually, really legitimately okay.
The privacy thing, it remains to be seen.
So the challenge ostensibly would be the person comes to the desk and you ask for the vaccination status and they say that impinges upon my privacy for you to ask that and you say okay well
Our policy is that we would really like everybody to prove vaccination before entering, and they say, well, I don't have to pass that threshold, and you're excluding me if you try to make me, and then it goes from there.
That's the sticky part.
Do I understand it?
Yeah, that's the one.
So, you know, are we going to, like, take this all the way to the Supreme Court in Canada?
No, no.
We are literally a mom and pop business.
Like, for real, actually.
We have no budget at all.
Like, we have been working outside of the studio to subsidize it.
For over a year now.
Maybe even longer, actually.
Yeah, sometimes longer than that.
This is not, for us, this is not some big political hill to die on.
You know, it really is just like a decision that I think makes a lot of sense in terms of reopening.
I think it's just sensible.
And yeah, I'm not about to like start getting into fights about it.
I'm just like, I just want to try to reopen in a way that's safe.
And we have a, we, you know, one of the things that we kind of talked about was like, do we have, like, there's a good, good portion of people who are, you know, immunocompromised, you were told just to stay at home, you know, there's no space for you out in, in, you know, This is the new thing that people say is that if you don't feel safe, stay home.
Stay home.
And it's like, well, I don't have a choice, but to go out and get groceries and do other things.
If you're, you know, immunocompromised, you don't have, I mean, I guess you can get delivery, but like at a certain point, people are more concerned about being discriminated against because they have made a choice not to have a vaccine.
Rather than being concerned about people who have no choice about how they are, you know, their safety when they exit their homes.
And so we talked a lot about being like consciously inclusive for people who have been not just marginalized, but in a like broader way targeted by kind of a sense of like callous uncaring.
Like during this pandemic.
It's that classic neoliberal thing of like, you just deal.
Just deal with it.
Our premier just said it.
He was like, this pandemic is no longer our responsibility.
It's not our responsibility to keep you safe.
The only thing that can keep you safe is the vaccine.
Good luck and Godspeed.
Pandemic over, handshake, exit screen left.
Like it's just done.
And so if you don't feel safe, That's on you.
Yeah, I know.
You have just been abandoned by your government.
And at least you have not been abandoned by your yoga studio.
Yeah.
Well, and especially in a situation where it's like, this is a good chunk of our population that comes to the studio.
This is not like one or two people.
This is like, you know, I'm going to guess 30% of the population that comes to the studio is You know, more vulnerable than, than, and you know, certainly most of them are vaccinated.
I'm going to say that probably 99% of them are vaccinated, but we talk to them about, you know, as I'm talking to them weekly in my therapeutic practice, but you know, these conversations about this stuff comes up as we're working through other issues.
You know, it's like, I'm scared, like I'm scared to go out.
I don't know how I'm going to be safe.
And I was just starting to feel a little bit safe.
And then every, like, Everything kind of comes crashing down again.
You know, Scott Moe sort of brushing his hands and saying this is not our responsibility anymore is kind of the logical end point of The politics of abandonment or avoidance, and you're really describing a studio environment where that's just not an option, where there are too many people that you know and care about to take that attitude towards.
Yeah, it's really striking, that difference.
And it reflects back to your statement back in December, or whenever you made it, that these people are not going to take care of us, so we have to actually take care of each other.
Well, and I think we've had that attitude for a long time.
We met each other in the punk community, and that was a big part of the punk community, was the You might not get taken care of by the other folks out there.
So in the punk community, we always take care of each other.
And that sort of has transferred over into how we run a studio.
