68: The Jordan Peterson of Fitness Bros (w/Antonio Valladares)
Paul Chek will tell you how much he’s influenced the fitness industry. He’ll tell you that he popularized Swiss Balls, and about his time working with the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls and then the championship Lakers. The kinesiologist and founder of the Chek Institute, which offers numerous training programs under the slogan, “We teach the science of living well,” claims that he’s always taken a holistic approach to weightlifting and the gym. In fact, the man does not mind telling you how vast his influence is.Embedded in Chek’s holistic approach is a penchant for conspiratorial thinking. He trained JP Sears, traded podcasts with biohacker Ben Greenfield, hung with anus sunshiner Troy Casey, and hosted Mikki Willis twice in the last year on his own podcast, Living 4D with Paul Chek. Today’s co-host, NYC-based fitness expert Antonio Valladares, also trained with Chek, but unlike many of Chek’s acolytes, Antonio has used his time and knowledge debunking conspiracy theories in nutrition and fitness, not adding to the fire. In this week’s closer, Matthew reviews and contextualizes a Facebook post from the charismatic dissectionist Gil Hedley. Hedley’s post leaned into familiar anti-vax territory. But he deleted it — and, in a positive email exchange, revealed some earnest motivations and empathetic impulses. A good lesson that you never quite know where people are coming from, or where they’re going.Show NotesDeconstructing Paul ChekWho is Paul Chek: Holistic Lifestyle CoachPlandemic Director Mikki Willis Explains His Presence at Capitol Riot — Matthew RemskiAbout Gil HedleyGil Hedley: Fascia and stretching: The Fuzz Speech
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Conspirituality 68, the Jordan Peterson of fitness bros with Antonio Valadares.
Paul Cech will tell you how much he's influenced the fitness industry.
He'll tell you that he popularized Swiss balls and about his time working with the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls and then the Championship Lakers.
The kinesiologist and founder of the Czech Institute, which offers numerous training programs under the slogan, we teach the science of living well, claims that he's always taken a holistic approach to weightlifting and the gym.
In fact, the man does not mind telling you how vast his influence is.
Embedded in Cech's holistic approach is a penchant for conspiratorial thinking.
He trained JPCers, traded podcasts with biohacker Ben Greenfield, hung with anus-sunshiner Troy Casey, and hosted Mickey Willis twice in the last year on his own podcast.
Living 4D with Paul Cech.
Today's co-host, New York City-based fitness expert Antonio Valadares, also trained with Cech, but unlike many of Cech's acolytes, Antonio has used his time and knowledge debunking conspiracy theories in nutrition and fitness, not adding to the fire.
In this week's closer, Matthew reviews a Facebook post from the charismatic dissectionist Gil Hedley.
Hedley's post leaned into familiar anti-vax territory, but he deleted it, and in a positive email exchange revealed some earnest motivations and empathetic impulses.
It's a good lesson in, first, you never quite know where people are coming from, and second, where they may be going.
So as Julia mentioned, you never know where people are coming from or going.
And having known of Paul Cech for a couple of years now, and more urgently recently since the pandemic started and seeing some of the characters he's had on his podcast, I will say that And Antonio will chime in and say if I'm wrong on any of this, but he seems very knowledgeable in terms of fitness.
In fact, when I hear him, many of my own experiences having worked in fitness but also had a love for and degree in religious studies, it's very much informed my life and my work for so many decades at this point.
The idea that Your spirituality comes through in not just yoga, but in weightlifting, in any sort of endurance exercise.
Whatever you do has always been part of my own psychology and how I approach movement in general.
So sometimes when I hear Paul talk, I'm like, yeah, I'm totally on board with that.
And this often happens with the figures we cover where we have crossover.
But there are times where this is completely insane, some of the things that he's saying, and that's really what we're going to focus on today.
Not so much his fitness knowledge, although that may come into play, but really where his background.
He went to a seventh-day Adventist school growing up without a father, and his mother supported three children.
But then his mother discovered the Self-Realization Fellowship, When he was very young and he started meditating at an early age, so he has been informed by this.
And that crossover is really where conspirituality sometimes gets in, where you have a certain amount of knowledge, but maybe you're not so knowledgeable in other topics but think you are, and then you apply it erroneously to your own
Would you say, Antonio, that that is a fair summation of Cech and how he treats mysticism in his movement?
Yeah, I think that's fair.
He was influenced, like you said, when he was a kid by Self-Realization Fellowship.
As a fitness professional or fitness expert, Now he was very influential in a few ways.
His professional trajectory went from, you know, fitness and exercise and progressively became more spiritual.
So he went from like an expert instructor to a guru over time.
So my personal experience in life is that I went from spiritual to skeptical.
You know, I became a personal trainer.
Um, eventually I got into Czech.
I had already been exposed to and I had already practiced and you know, like I went to India in the early nineties.
I got into Czech in the late 90s and then I became a Czech practitioner, like, you know, certified Czech coach.
So I think overall, first thing I want to say is overall, I had a very positive experience.
I have no, like, regrets or any bad blood or anything like that.
But I got skeptical over time.
So over time you reject some of these claims and the extremely unnecessary assessments.
A lot of these ideas are spiritual ideas that he sort of put together with fitness.
His background, just so we're clear, I don't think he's a proper kinesiologist.
I think his only qualification was he's a massage therapist.
Then he got into the military.
I forget which was it, military first or massage therapist later.
But he was in the military.
He was a boxing coach or he was a boxer.
And he talks about his past all the time and how important it was in development.
This is what all gurus do, right?
They're constantly talking about their fucking history and these monumental moments or epiphanies or whatever.
I believe he did St. John's neuromuscular therapy.
I think that was the thing.
And then he worked with chiropractors and worked with physical therapists.
And that's kind of common.
Then he eventually developed his institute.
He called it the CHEC.
Apparently that's his last name, but he used it as an acronym.
So CHEC is C-H-E-K and it stands for Corrective High Performance Exercise Kinesiology.
So he just made that shit up.
Then he developed a bunch of different certification programs.
And this is sort of, this is all common.
This is standard and you know, in different fitness camps.
Within fitness, there's different types of certifications.
And now there's, you know, health coach certification, life coach.
It's absurd how many different certifications are now.
But at the time in the 90s, he was very innovative or influential.
The reason I was attracted to Paul and his work at the time was because it was alternative to the standard or the contemporary fitness industry.
The fitness industry mostly comes from bodybuilding in the 80s.
So we're not talking about 19th century stuff yet, just the modern history, the very modern, the 1980s bodybuilding culture and then some sports coach elements as well.
This is what sort of became fitness industry, personal training industry in the late 80s and 90s.
Well, let's let me let me jump in for a second.
I because I am interested in your own history here, because what you've just described about going from spirituality to skeptic, I think summates in different ways, all three of us as well.
And you played music as well, correct?
With Ray Capo.
I'm glad you brought that up.
I don't know how many people know about this, but yeah, so I'm a hardcore kid, like, you know, grew up in a hardcore punk scene.
And then I played in a few bands.
I toured for a few years.
I toured Europe and North America.
I went to India a few times with the guys in the band I was playing with.
I had an overall awesome experience.
There's like subtle differences in these yoga schools, right?
Like if you're familiar, some of your, I'm sure a lot of your listeners are familiar with like the different schools of yoga.
In the 1980s, in the hardcore punk rock scene, There were some influencers, if you will, that got into Hare Krishna.
During the 80s, late 80s and early 90s, there was a Krishna hardcore community.
And it was fairly popular in the late 80s and early 90s.
And then it continued into, you know, just like with yoga, its own mini culture within a broader, you know, its own sub-genre within a bigger culture of music or alternative music or whatever.
Is that kind of Hindu straight Yeah, so you could say, if you want to get technical, you could say it's like bullshit neo-Hinduism, you know, modern cult shit with hardcore punk got inspired by it.
There was two main bands, the Cro-Mags, and they were like more, they were a little bit older, they were like hardcore, real hardcore, and then there was the Straight Edge Community.
I mean, my friends were all a big part of this straight edge culture.
Shelter was the big band.
Well, Youth of Today was a big band.
Ray Capo was the influencer.
And then after Youth of Today broke up, he did Shelter.
So I played bass in Shelter for their first European tour.
I then was a founding member of a band called 108.
And you all are familiar with 108.
It's an auspicious number.
I'm still good friends with a lot of these people, despite the fact that I got skeptical over time, and I distanced myself from all these organizations and all these gurus and people.
And, you know, a lot of people ask me, like, oh, how come you used to be spiritual?
You know, what happened?
So there was no, like, I didn't have any major breakdown or any, you know, trauma or anything.
I just got skeptical over time.
I was becoming more science literate over this time.
Ray Capo, for listeners, also more commonly known as Raghunath, who actually I know because he led the chanting portion of my teacher training program that I used to run at Equinox.
He would come in and teach Sanskrit to my students.
So Raghunath is a lovely human being.
He's still very much in that world as far as I'm aware of.
But, you know, it's something interesting what you described about this turning point that you had when you became more scientifically literate.
And, you know, a lot of people actually go the other way where there might be more science-based and they get into yoga and they hear their teachers say crazy shit and then they start to buy into it.
But from what I've seen, Czechs acolytes seem to be really into that conspiracy, and not all of them, of course, but He seems to be a vector for this conspiritual thinking.
Do you have any sense of why that is?
It's all superstitious and pseudoscience, and it's very appealing to a lot of people.
If you study history sincerely, it will debunk all this bullshit, but it takes a lot of work.
And you have to be really dedicated to really understanding and, you know, doing aggressive, deep research.
There's nothing Paul Czech teaches that's like militant or nationalist or anything in particular.
It's just very general, vague, spiritual stuff.
And, you know, my opinion is I have a strong opinion and not everyone likes that.
Over time, Yeah, you learn and you see that a lot of these spiritual concepts are just fucking made up.
But most of those spiritual activities are all happening at the body.
Your dieting, or your fasting, or your exercising, your prayer, your meditation, all of this is happening with you and your body, or it's happening through consumerism.
You're buying clothing or books or literature or classes or certification courses or wellness retreats.
So Paul Cech, he was influential.
He was very inspirational.
But then you start really looking at the material he teaches or encourages, like Course in Miracles, Byron Katie, all of the stuff you guys have covered, all of the New Age spiritual, you know, Hay House and Gaiam authors and all of the most popular New Age spiritual teachers, he Hay House and Gaiam authors and all of the most popular New So you learn all these ideas, and you really learn a lot from any teacher or guru.
And there's like this admiration, there's, you know, most all these people have never really done any deep research on history.
So there's nothing in particular.
It's just that these ideas, most of these, as you guys know, a lot of these ideas come from 19th century, early 20th century.
There's a lot of eugenics mixed in, a lot of social Darwin ideas that are sort of like a part of all this philosophy.
And people can't discern, they don't know what the fuck they're listening to or reading.
It just sounds, you know, empowering or whatever.
I mean it strikes me too that if you're going to position yourself as an expert on all things, and as this kind of guru figure, and there is a lack of actual expertise and training and background, then it's a fairly easy slide to move into that place where anything that runs contrary to what I'm saying must be part of some conspiracy, must be part of some mainstream agenda, must be part of the people who are asleep and are scared to hear what I'm really saying, right?
Yeah.
So like the, one of the first things you learn when you get into alternative health or wellness is this main, the main narrative is a binary.
Like, you know, we are alternative to the world.
You know, we're, you know, a little smarter, a little better, more responsible, more spiritual.
We take better care of ourselves.
We're bootstrapping, yada, yada, yada.
This ideology and identity that you learn and develop is based, it's just made up like, oh, these people are fat and lazy.
They're all diseased.
And we're the ones who are taking responsibility.
So when you get into bodybuilding or yoga or fitness, you sort of learn this idea that we're an alternative culture being better than you take more responsibility than mainstream regular people.
And part of the reason that the ideas are so attractive is that they're presented in an extremely charismatic way.
And this first clip that we have to look at really kind of, I think, sets the stage for how Paul presents himself.
So we found this YouTube video from February of 2019.
It's called, "Who is Paul Cech?
Holistic Lifestyle Coach." The account that it was posted on is called Barbell Shrugged.
And I'm wondering if that's a play on Atlas Shrugged.
- Oh yeah. - I can't, I don't know. - Probably.
- Oh yeah. - I mean, because the shrug as you're using barbells is something that you actually do, right?
I don't lift weights, but I'm imagining there's a lot of shrugging involved.
There is, but you don't call them shrugged.
All right, okay, so the account has 206,000 followers.
Their header video is a promo for their Diesel Dads program.
This caught my eye.
There's this guy, Anders Varner, who I think is the main barbell shrugger.
And he says, we're talking about the number one thing that is holding you back from the transformation that you desire.
That's going from soft, slow, and sluggish to strong, lean, and athletic without sacrificing family, fatherhood, or fitness.
And that really kind of actually, I have to confess, appealed to me.
A little bit, but we can see that there's this bio-morality theme that's set up just in the account.
There's sort of hints of muscular Christianity.
Anyway, in this clip that I have lined up, Vanders has gone to visit Czech at his residence.
I believe it's San Diego.
Is that right, Antonio?
It's Orange County.
He used to be in Encinitas.
Now he's somewhere close to Encinitas.
Right so it's it looks like a huge estate where he's got like space to do rock piles and he talks about having orange trees uh and anyway the barbell shrugged guys go uh and check just monologues at them on and on about his accomplishments and they kind of like shift from foot to foot and nod and you know well you can hear it.
The first instructional videos in the world on how to integrate weightlifting and Swiss balls how to use them in a gym and I built the first videos in the world on how to use a Swiss ball for athletic rehabilitation and probably pioneered the whole concept so I did a lot of my research on the Swiss ball in 88 and had developed my routines and techniques by 89 when I started developing the first videos
Yes.
And the first professional sports team to hire me to teach them my system of core conditioning and how to use Swiss balls was the Chicago Bulls.
And I did seven consultations with the Bulls.
Al Vermeule, I don't know if you know Al Vermeule, but he's a famous strength, he's got more championship rings than any strength coach in the world, 13 of them, between football and basketball.
And he had an open door policy.
His policy was anytime you got something cool to teach us, I'll pay it, come on down.
So I was during the Jordan era and then the Lakers saw how they were training and doing all this stuff so the Lakers bought stuff and prior to that the Um, you know, not there anymore.
Raiders.
The Raiders bought all my correspondence courses because one of their strength coaches had studied some of my material and I actually still have the check because they were the first professional football team to get into my stuff and this is like, you know, It doesn't stop for 13, it is that.
Yeah, and we were discussing the title for this episode.
We came up with the Jordan Peterson of Fitness Bros in part because he's logorrheic.
It doesn't seem like he can stop talking.
There's this one published interview, actually you sent it to us Antonio, we'll post it in the notes, but the reporter talks about booking one hour with him and it wound up being four hours.
So there's this kind of like endless content production, which we also see in, you know, a number of charismatics like Jordan Peterson, but it's also a function of the whole open mic of influence technology.
But one of the things that I noted was that as you watch this video, you can see that Cech is aware that the barbell shrugged guys are there, but he isn't really talking to them or making solid eye contact.
Like he's in monologue mode, but there's something like sort of bubbled about it.
So they say nothing during the entire like 11 plus minutes.
That's how they've edited it.
But it also conveys this phenomenon that we've noted elsewhere that That people become prominent if they can go into some sort of trance state as they speak about their accomplishments or about their content.
And it seems that asking him any question would, like, intrude into some kind of, you know, riff that he's radiating outwards.
So, you know, I guess I wanted to ask you, Antonio, whether that sounds like what you remember being around him.
Anyone who's in a guru position?
You either have to be narcissistic or you become narcissistic.
Chances are, the more you're in that position, like he is, and he's got a lot of extremely devoted religious disciples.
I don't think it's anything deeper than just complete fucking narcissism when you're in that kind of position of authority.
But the thing is, is that all of us had this admiration for an inspirational teacher or guru.
This is a problem on a social level, but for a lot of people, that's a normal function of being a human.
You seek out a teacher and you want to learn some things.
As far as him talking about himself and his accomplishments, most all of these people in a similar position do the same thing.
First of all, anyone who calls themselves a healer and boasts about being a healer, that's extremely arrogant, number one.
But these people who are in a leadership or guru position, this is one of the reasons why I got skeptical and I distanced myself, is because Like, there's a lot of disturbing dynamics of people who are seeking out, extremely vulnerable people seeking out some guru, and there's all kinds of power dynamics that go on.
Well, I wanted to mention that he, you know, that's what I've got from him.
Sometimes his advice, like, he says something like, it takes an average of eight hours of sleep per night for the human immune system to kill down the bacteria population to a safe level, because every single bacterium in your body is urinating and defecating in your body 24-7.
And I just, I don't know how that's going to hold up.
I have a few more that I want to tackle, but I think, Matthew, you wanted to keep going with his origin story.
Well, yeah, I did.
But because we're talking about origin stories and how he talks about himself and his self-presentation, one other little brief question is, Antonio, if somebody was actually to go in and fact check any of these things, what would they find?
Yeah, a lot of it's bullshit or not supported by evidence.
In terms of the exercise stuff, what Paul Cech did is he took the Chakra system and sort of integrated it with assessments and program design.
So in other words, if you come to see me or you go to see a Cech practitioner and you have some discrepancies in your posture, you don't have ideal posture, These are problems.
And this is actually a problem, not just with Czech, but all throughout.
It's a part of yoga and a part of corrective exercise or functional exercise.
It's a big part of massage therapy.
If you guys go see a massage therapist or Czech practitioner or yoga, some yoga people, you're going to get a list of imbalances and movement dysfunctions and disordered and postural.
I can fix that for you.
Yes, first of all listen to the language.
Postural distortion, disorder, pathology, movement distortion, imbalance.
So this is a big thing, one of the biggest components of all wellness, all of it.
Is that you are never going to be good enough you are always perpetually broken and we have a perpetually fixing your bullshit system.
That's one thing but in all of these subgenres or subcultures or cultures or whatever you want to call it.
There's an enormous amount of problems you already have.
And your eating patterns are wrong.
Your sleeping is wrong.
Your thinking is wrong.
This isn't chakra yoga.
This goes back to naturopathy in the early 19th century, early 20th century.
Like if you look at the philosophy of some of the early naturopaths, all of this stuff is a religious creation.
All of these people were religious fanatics.
Chiropractic, osteopathy, naturopathy, what was homeopathy?
All of these systems were created by religious fanatics with the intent of converting and saving others from the degeneracy of the modern world.
This is a eugenics concept.
All of that stuff comes from eugenics.
Like, it's a weakling who was saved by something And now you're a superhuman and an idealist and nationalist, yadda yadda yadda.
And you became a better father in the process.
That's very important as well.
All these are assumptions.
These assumptions are all built into.
People don't know this.
You think you're going to go lose weight.
No, you're actually going to get a whole bunch of assumptions packaged into one idea like, oh, fitness or diet or healing.
Derek wanted to sort of lay out his basic mystical position, but I think we can preview that by rounding out this autobiography video where Cech tells the Barbell Shrug guy some of his hardscrabble origin story, how he had this revelation about the spiritual fitness applications of lifting rocks after talking with the translator of Rumi, Coleman Banks.
You know, I grew up on a farm lifting a lot of rocks because our plows would always hit, we had a lot of rocks in the soil.
And I used to hate lifting rocks.
But, an interesting thing, this is how life works, how the soul works.
I love Rumi's poetry and I studied Rumi's poetry for years and there's a famous translator of Rumi's poetry called Coleman Barks.
Are you familiar with Coleman Barks?
Rumi's poetry is very, very deep and profound.
Familiar with Rumi?
Yeah.
Coleman Barks.
So I got a hold of Coleman Barks and I happened to be talking to him and I said, I was just talking to him and I was looking for a mentor, someone who could be like a spiritual teacher to me to take me into a deeper understanding of Rumi's poetry and any spiritual practices I could use to grow myself.
And he just happened to say, well, what do you do for exercise?
He didn't know who I was, you know?
And I said, well, I do a lot of exercise.
He said, well, I lift stones.
He said, that's all I do is lift stones.
And it just, a lightning bolt went through me.
I said, fuck, I gotta start lifting stones again.
I used to hate it as a kid, but I had to lift stones all day long for hours.
It was just boring, pouring fucking rain picking the stones up and carrying them to the edge of the field.
It was not fun.
But something inside of me felt that it was time to go back to the stones.
So, I started lifting stones again and I was blown away at how wildly athletic it was and how far more challenging it is than anything you can do in the gym.
And I used to, you know, I still do, but I used to build, I've built stacks at home 16 feet tall, like as tall as our orange trees.
I have to stand on the very tops of 10 foot ladders to finish them off.
And it's dangerous.
You can get killed.
You know, those stones are heavy.
And when those things hit the ground, they'll bounce sometimes three feet in the air.
And I've had fingers smashed, toes smashed.
I've been cut right open.
I've flown backwards.
Landed in the rocks.
Almost concussed myself before.
So you have to go into a very Zen state to do this kind of stone sculptures or you'll get hurt.
I want to play a shorter clip to follow up on that because Antonio, earlier you mentioned how benign what he says is.
And this right here is from a more recent podcast, Living 4D, where I think anyone who's ever taken a yoga class has probably heard this about a thousand times.
People forget that we as souls all choose to be here, and that we're all co-contributors in the creation, not only of everything in our lives, but in our relationships and in the world, and that the universe is completely and utterly involved in this whole process.
So, Antona, you chose to be here today with us on this podcast, and when you're in the room, are people just Eating this up, because I've been around charismatic figures who say extremely pedestrian things and people are writing it down.
Is that the sort of environment that he facilitates?
Yeah, and I don't think that's any different than yoga class for the super spiritual yoga people as well.
It's the same shit.
You can just talk about something mundane and people are like, oh my god, that's amazing.
So I think this is a problem with everyone being enamored by influencers or leaders or, you know, the charismatic authoritarian types have a lot of social power in our culture.
It's unfortunate.
I just want to be clear that I had an overall good or positive experience.
I didn't have anything bad.
But then over time you start to think about things he used to say or things you know he recommended or whatever.
Pre-COVID there's a way that a lot of these kind of spiritual subculture things to a lot of people would have just seemed you know somewhat harmless like live and let live whatever but when we get to COVID it becomes really clear.
Yeah.
How dangerous this stuff is.
And of course, it was dangerous before, too.
So this clip that I want to share first is from early on in the pandemic.
It's March 16th of 2020.
It's from a lecture that he titled Your COVID-19 Coronavirus Protection Plan.
Yeah, I was right there.
Don't ever fucking listen to anything.
Let's just let's let's also just note the date.
That's March 16th.
March 16th.
I mean, the W.H.O.
declares a pandemic on March 12th.
But he's already...
Did he pull all-nighters to come up with a plan?
Yeah, I mean, who knows?
Or did he just have the plan on hand because it's the same thing that he was teaching before?
It's marketing.
It doesn't matter what public event happens, they have a solution for fucking everything.
All of these people, whether they're a guru or just a coach, Even the fitness industry tried that throughout COVID.
They were like, Oh, obesity, you know, makes you sick.
So let me just say, this is a really common thing.
Obesity is used as a weapon to market and brand and shame others or dehumanize others.
And we saw it very clearly.
These dudes have nothing to say.
They do not contribute at all to society.
There's a pandemic and they're all, you know, weird or whatever.
They're like, Oh, hey, obesity is a problem.
So people need to recognize that wellness and fitness culture largely do not care about you and do not care about public health.
You know, so you work out big fucking deal.
It doesn't has nothing to do with a global pandemic.
It's not going to save you or prevent or protect.
And all of these people are extremely overstating these points.
And they really, I don't think they really know.
I think they're just And so what he does here is he positions himself, as I've seen in multiple videos, in front of a large lecture hall-style chalkboard.
It's filled with elaborately written and organized notes, lots of bullet points and subheadings.
He has a colorful and creative illustration for yin and yang in the middle of the board that has fire coming up out of the yang and the yin kind of submerged in beautiful blue watery waves.
He's inventing his own religious system.
Totally.
Yeah, so he spends the first eight minutes or so establishing this familiar quasi-holistic theme of our bodies and minds are analogous to Mother Nature, the principles of yin and yang, the importance of staying in balance, and all illness is really being out of touch with our connection to the earth.
So let's just roll this clip because this is a very – it's a great example.
If you look at the statistics on who is actually getting hit the hardest from the coronavirus and getting wiped out and dying, it's people above 40 years of age and people that have already got health problems such as obesity, any number of illnesses.
And the more drugs you're taking, the more illnesses you have, and the more challenges you have, the weaker your system is, the less reserves you have, and the more overloaded your immune system is.
And then you throw toxicity in there, and toxicity disables the immune system.
Then you throw in statistics like research shows that about 90% of the world population has both a fungal infection and a parasite infection.
And fungal infections are very dangerous because the fungus produce mycotoxins to downregulate the immune system, which then opens the door wide for parasite infections.
And fungal and parasite infections happen when people's diet and lifestyle and way of living is weakening them so much that Mother Nature really says, you're not fit.
...to add to the evolutionary process of life.
Therefore, you're going to be put back into the soil, dismantled, and you will be food for the microorganisms to grow new life.
And that's just how nature works.
That's not me being critical or rude.
That's just how it works.
No, first of all, that's fucking eugenics, number one.
It's also karma.
Karma is very similar, like, to just world theory.
Like, oh, people are getting sick.
Hey, it's your fucking fault for eating junk food or whatever.
Oh, you have some pre-existing condition?
Haha, it's your fucking fault.
You know, that's this is deep philosophy that runs through all of these.
The thread that runs through all of it is blaming Dehumanizing others who don't live like you or look like you.
Yeah, anytime I hear this kind of stuff, especially lately, I think like, what are we really saying here?
Are we implying that all of the poor, genetically disadvantaged, overweight, immunocompromised, older people need to radically transform their lives and get into perfect physical health in record time during the pandemic?
Yes, that's what they're saying.
Because the overarching ideology, the metanarrative or whatever, It's extremely fucking, excuse my language, it's extremely oversimplified, number one.
But it's all based on, and you guys know this from studying history, you know, like a lot of these yoga gurus that became very popular, very influential.
There's a lot of eugenics and social Darwinism built into these ideas because they were all, not all, but a lot of them were educated under British Rosh.
So these ideas are embedded in the philosophy, the ideology, and yes, it's just world theory or karma or you deserve whatever happens to you because you didn't live like me.
You didn't meditate like me.
You didn't eat organic kale juice or celery juice or whatever.
That portion of the talk in terms of how he has this plan for you to prepare and protect yourself from COVID, he's talking about diet and exercise and all of the familiar stuff that we've been nailing down.
Here's where he goes in the next direction, explaining how not sweating the small stuff or getting caught in fear is part of keeping your immune system strong.
And at this point, we're about three quarters of the way through a 52-minute presentation, which obviously, as you said, Antonio, he was ready to go with.
It's kind of disaster spirituality, right?
It's opportunistic marketing based on what we're going through.
Now, we're firmly ensconced.
in his version of the power of the mind.
It's a Christian science style manifestation rhetoric around how to supposedly protect yourself from COVID.
Let's roll that. - The highest scientists in the world know the placebo effect is real because for drugs to be approved, they have to actually perform as good or better than the placebo effect.
The point is the placebo effect works backwards.
If you keep telling yourself you're going to get sick, or you're negatively thinking about it, or you're being frantic about it, you're actually programming your belief into yourself that you have a problem, and you'll probably get it.
So the same statistical reality, 34-68%, now becomes a negative factor, 34-68% chance you'll manifest the illness or the disease, or you'll open yourself up to it.
So learning to think whenever you think a negative thought like, Oh, I'm going to get this.
I'm afraid I would immediately say, thank you, dear pain teacher for showing me where I'm creating a mind virus or where I have a mind virus.
And then immediately replace the thought I am with that negative thought with, I am happy.
I am healthy.
I am whole.
I am happy, I am healthy, I am whole, and visualize yourself and feel yourself as happy, healthy, and whole, and then you will induce a positive psychological effect.
And remember, the cells of your body believe your mind like it's God.
Yeah, that's all secret, the secret.
All of these dudes do the same thing.
All they're doing is repackaging the most popular ideas, Course in Miracles, the secret.
It's important for people to realize there isn't much difference.
There isn't a lot of variation.
It seems like there's variation and nuance with a lot of these gurus and their teachings and it's really not.
New Age spiritual concepts are extremely popular.
Their primary purpose is to drive consumerism and or enable this guru-disciple relationship.
People who are in fitness and wellness have this gap.
They don't understand that other people live on this planet that do not live like them, that don't have the same circumstances.
Well, there's a favorite gambit here, which is the pseudoscience sort of angle, where you take something that's legitimate, like a legitimate observation about the autonomic nervous system, the science on placebos and nocebos, but then extrapolate it out into this grandiose hyperbole that really doesn't hold up at all, even though it seems to be supported by those earlier premises.
And then he'll just throw in like, here are some statistical numbers that are absolutely meaningless that make it all seem authoritative.
Yeah, seem real.
And I think that for the vast majority of Americans that, you know, it's very easy.
It's very appealing.
And this is why it's dangerous is because like some of these, all of these ideas are extremely overstated.
The benefits are overstated.
They're exaggerated.
Like this whole idea that your disease is your fault because your thoughts were negative.
It doesn't matter if there's cholera or COVID or yellow fever or whatever.
If you got sick, it's because you were thinking bad thoughts or you didn't eat the right foods.
Or you're somehow at fault.
And I think this is really damaging and dangerous and underlying almost all of fitness and wellness and yoga culture.
And what's really mystifying is the marketing technique of contempt that seems to work.
Because as you say, Antonio, you were pretty emphatic about it a few minutes ago when you said that, you know, these guys don't care about you if you're, if you, if you have health problems.
They don't care about your, you know, uh, You know, your structural injustice that you deal with.
And they're almost open about that, in the sense that as the sort of blame structure of the argument, you know, it's your fault that you get sick, is repeated over and over again.
And I'm just wondering, like, how that can work?
What is being sold except, I guess, a vision of the person's confidence?
Because You know, it's not like there's any real empathy that's being offered.
There's empathy if you're a consumer, if you're a customer.
You got money, you get plenty of empathy.
But everybody else, you're already dehumanized because of the ideology.
So somehow the consumer has to sort of step over the threshold of that dehumanizing argument and buy into it.
Do you know what I mean?
That's a weird moment.
In order to self-improve, right?
In order to become...
Right, you have to admit that you suck as bad as the influencer says you do.
Yes, and a lot of people already accept this.
James Corbin, I think this is the celebrity, the dude that does the songs and stuff like this.
He did a video like a year ago, one or two years ago, and he said he was doing a video about Bill Maher fat shaming people on his show.
So what a lot of people missed on that video There's two things.
Number one, Bill Maher is trash.
He's always a conservative trash can, number one.
Number two is what that dude said, I think it was James Corbin, is he said, oh, Bill Maher, fat shaming is bad.
We already know we're supposed to do this.
We believe we're supposed to.
He listed a whole bunch of things he believes he should feel in order that we get it.
We understand we're bad, but we struggle.
So there's two layers.
There's first, the fat shaming is very common.
You cannot have these body hierarchies and these cultures without shaming others.
It doesn't exist.
It's part of the ideology.
And dehumanizing others, It already began in the early 20th century by dehumanizing fat people, number one.
Number two, if you listen to that video, he says, he reveals deep beliefs that he believes and that are very widespread, is what we're talking about.
It's all, I'm unworthy, we should feel shame, we should suffer, we should be miserable.
That's what he's saying.
So that's an important point.
Is that people already believe these ideas and overweight people, poor people, people without health care, these people are already dehumanized in this country.
This country doesn't give a fuck about poor people.
Look at what's happening right now.
There's a whole bunch of people that are unvaccinated, underserved.
Then you have a whole bunch of privileged assholes that are going on these anti-mask, anti-vax stuff.
Like that shit is just deranged.
One thing that I've noticed with Cech is that he positions himself very often as the victim or as the savior figure, like it's either or.
So some quotes that he said, people with sheep mentality immediately think that's all I do, when he was specifically citing Swiss balls as if that's all he was.
Or, I don't like little goals because little goals are for little minds and I don't have one.
This all very much sounds like just very childish rhetoric that comes out.
Yeah, exactly.
And so I wanted to start to close this with his talk with Mickey Willis because Mickey Willis was on last December and then again in June.
And I'm going to do my Monday bonus episode this week because Mickey comes after us a bit from the Vice article and our reporting.
So I want to address some of that because I don't think he realizes we have the original audio from the election night party.
So I'm going to put what he says with Paul Cech compared to what he actually said that night.
So we have a record of that.
But in June, he goes on to Paul Cech's podcast to explain what really happened at the Capitol.
One thing that jumped out was that Paul Cech, this is in June 2021.
Paul Cech had to ask Mickey what MAGA was.
So it's possible that when you're so deeply absorbed in this healer spiritual world that you're disconnected from the world because you believe the world is maya, an illusion.
So when you believe all these so-called Vedic or Hindu ideas, like you're trying to detach or disconnect.
Well, but he lives in Orange County, which is the headquarters of MAGA for California.
So it's a little suspect.
Oh, it's totally suspect.
And it's also my opinion that the whole show was performative.
Let me play some of the clips because it's important to have context here.
So the first one is Mickey talking about heading back to the Capitol, to the back of the building, which he claims was not as intense as the front.
And then he tries to explain what he calls the single line that had got him in trouble for being at the Capitol that day.
And I got on stage and I said, I used an unfortunate statement that I didn't even know at the time was something that would be so criticized.
But I was very inspired because I was like, that's the way people need to protest.
They were using their voices, conscious language.
And I got up on stage and I said, I just witnessed something that was beautiful.
I witnessed people very peacefully push through.
And that's what I mean when they were leaning forward.
I said, as peacefully as that could possibly happen.
I witnessed these proud patriots use their voice to move to the stairs of the Capitol, to have their voices heard.
And that line, just me saying proud patriots has been so criticized.
I had no idea it was such a weaponized term.
For me, simply meaning people who love our nation and people that were behaving civilly.
That's all I meant by proud patriots.
What else would it mean?
I don't get it.
Well, I am being told by people now that it's a Co-opted by the right and that it signifies, or it's a dog whistle for white supremacy.
And I'm like, this is just insanity.
This is not, you know, I mean, all of our words are being weaponized such that mother and father is being pulled out of the lexicon that, you know, love, God, prayer, freedom.
So this is a very famous pivot that people like Mickey and Mickey specifically does where they'll talk about one topic and then they'll pivot to try to make it seem like a broader topic.
He goes and he gives his speech at that Health Freedom anti-vax rally that was going on.
He claims to have tried to stop one or two men from pushing forward.
He positions himself as the hero in his hero's journey, and then this is him then explaining to Paul what was really happening when the crowd started to chant, Hang Mike Pence.
Now I'm back to the moment where I'm listening to this squabbling in my headset and I'm filming.
And they start chanting something.
I had no idea what they were chanting because I was too busy going, is that my team talking to me in my ear?
But it turns out there, and it was also, I've analyzed the video with audio software to isolate certain voices and to really listen.
And there were like three or four different things being said at the time.
People were, a lady next to me was saying, where's Mike Pence?
Someone was saying, hey Mike Pence.
Someone, I don't know, they only said it once, but they said, free Mike Pence?
I have no idea what that means.
But the majority were, I now know, and I later found out, they were saying, hang Mike Pence.
No, I didn't know at the time exactly.
I was too busy with my speaking and all that to even know why this crowd would have turned on Mike Pence.
I didn't have all the intel of what was actually going on and why that would even make sense.
Let me say that Mickey explains that he went there for the anti-vax rally, and I do believe him.
I don't think that he went there to help overthrow the government.
Again, this is someone who there are probably things we agree with in a lot of ways, but then there's this divergence point, which we have to address.
But the way that Mickey constantly positions himself as the victim, this episode is two hours of Mickey saying, the world is against me, and here's why I am right.
Willis claims that he was filming people from former communist nations who were there protesting that the Democrats are trying to do the same thing here.
What is most interesting to me about him is he keeps trying to He claimed his credentials of being over 30 years as a journalist, but that all of the media in the US is corrupt, but he made it out to tell the truth.
And that's how he sets it up.
So then in this final clip, Paul Cech chimes in and he says that he had a world-leading parapsychologist researcher on the show, this is Cech speaking, who trusts the New York Times.
And Cech can't believe this intelligent man would believe anything that the Times says.
And then Cech moves into COVID territory, claiming that a guest on his podcast should not trust the CDC.
And unlike Julian's clips that he pulled from March 2020, this is from June 2021.
I was talking to an artist I was interviewing.
And she said, well, I can come meet with you if you're, if you're all right.
I don't know what your feelings are about COVID and all that.
I said, well, you know, I shared my opinion and she said, well, I, I just go by what the CDC says.
And I'm like, well, great, but you might want to look who who's involved in that and who's got their hooks in the CDC, but.
She wasn't even willing to discuss it.
It was just like, no, you know, so people aren't open to any level of truth.
They're not.
And, you know, I understand.
I have compassion for those people.
But, you know, the people tend to just call them sheep or stupid or whatever.
And I don't like to go there.
Although you just went there, Mickey.
So, Antonio, when you say that, Paul Cech, you bring up the idea of going into self-immersion and closing off the world.
What strikes me about him is he doesn't claim to know what MAGA means.
He doesn't claim to know who Roger Stone is.
He's constantly playing ignorant.
But then he has opinions on these agencies that he shouldn't actually have any knowledge of.
Is this a common pattern with him and his work?
Absolutely.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's just oversimplified lack of understanding of the government and all these conspiracy theories.
So there's an important point.
Like you said, there are some things that Mickey or Paul, a lot of people will say that have some truth in them.
There's lots of problems with the media.
It's not being addressed.
It is a little bit, but it's not obvious.
There are very significant problems with lobbying in the U.S.
government and corporate industry.
These are very significant problems.
All of these dudes, these two in particular, but all of these conspiracy theorists, they have a very vague or very superficial understanding of the world's problems.
And so, they'll occasionally bring up a problem, but then, you know, it's couched in all these other nonsense ideas.
And when they criticize, you actually listen to their criticisms, and they're not well-researched, they don't have an in-depth understanding.
It's very common.
These people live in fear of, like, Red Scare from the 50s and shit.
Like, they're living in their past, they have trauma, and they're living in their past.
Or they're just rehashing these conspiracy theories, You know that makes them feel special, makes other people feel special.
That whole interview was a complete waste of time.
I'm glad I listened to it.
That's a great statement.
The whole interview was a big waste of time.
I'm glad I listened to it.
Do you know there's one?
There's there's there's one.
I don't know how we're gonna round this up and obviously we could talk about Paul Czech all day, but there's one Paradox that you brought out Antonio, which I don't know.
It's really kind of electrifying to me, which is that in one moment
The influencer can position themselves as an expert and then the next moment they can feign ignorance or humility or a kind of false humility and sort of appeal to this notion that, well, they're just asking questions, which I know we've studied as a trope on the podcast before, but then it also invokes this sort of spirit of, well, you know, we're just in the flow of our experience and we're just kind of,
Seeing what comes up and we're open to all possibilities.
So there's this sort of paradox and whiplash between, you know, over-asserting scientific bro-science facts, but then also this false humility.
And I'm just wondering, like, It seems to be unconscious, but also strategic.
And I'm just wondering what you think about that.
Like, why does that happen and what's the use there?
I would only guess and say that when you're in those moments and you're in a position of authority or guru, you're just going with the flow.
And you have to make sense of things you don't know.
That's where the conspiracy theories come in.
So, like, they're not deep or well thought out ideas.
The false humility, the fake humility, that's performative.
It's hard for me to be, to imagine myself into the position where I, I am over selling my knowledge.
I mean, I'm very conservative in general with regard to what I'm, you know, and I have become more so over time with regard to what I allow myself to claim or to speak to.
And so I'm wondering if the person who is bullshitting feels that as they are, you know, logoreic, as they can't stop talking.
And then there's a moment in which they can also give themselves some relief by pulling back and saying, well, actually, I don't know.
Yeah, I would agree.
It's a bit manipulative and it's probably a little bit unconscious.
Like, Paul Czech is sincere.
He believes in what he's doing.
He wants to help people.
A lot of people or gurus are like this.
Not all of them, obviously.
But I think it's a little manipulation and they're probably unaware that they're doing it because you've already bought into these ideas over the years.
You read all these books.
All of the sales and marketing and self-help and law of attraction stuff, there's all sorts of Manipulation or coercive persuasion techniques built in.
So when you learn these and you admire these people and you learn from all these, you know, hodgepodge mix of people and their spiritual beliefs, you come to accept a lot of these marketing or persuasion techniques.
And some of it is unconscious.
There's no doubt.
Then there's people like Mercola, who's just a complete fraudster.
Or Bulletproof Coffee guy, Dave Asprey.
There is no ambiguity there.
There's no sincerity.
These dudes are frauds.
There is a difference between a spectrum with all of these gurus or spiritual seekers or healers or whatever.
And some of them are very sincere, but you've got to cover up.
and I do think that a lot of it is unconscious, like you were saying. - Hello, it's Matthew here.
I'd like to close out this week with a meditation on trust, influence, scope of practice, vaccine hesitancy, and emotional Facebook use.
A number of long-term listeners and personal friends sent us a Facebook post by Gil Headley from August 30th.
Headley is a uniquely respected figure in what we might call the unregulated somatics world where people enthusiastically study the mysteries of fascia, movement, injury, recovery, pleasure and pain.
And he's famous for leading workshops in which attendees helped dissect human cadavers for contemplative study.
Now, he's not a doctor, and he doesn't list any formal medical training.
His bio says that he has a doctorate in theological ethics from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.
So, here's his post.
Bodily integrity is not a chip on the table with which to coerce someone.
It is a fundamental human right for those of us who dare to believe and maintain that such things as human rights and ethics still deserve their central place in civil society.
The Nuremberg Code has provided the most foundational principles to medical ethics since the doctor's trial of Nazi physicians who conducted human experimentation during the Second World War.
Lest we repeat the transgressions of the past, we would do well to remember that informed consent is not a principle to be lightly or ever dismissed.
Consent is never consent if it is obtained through coercion.
Coercion involves all forms of manipulation of someone's will to act, such as the threat or implementation of exclusion and shunning of healthy people, the withholding of basic freedom of movement and travel, self-care, right to work, and provide for one's family, etc.
Not understanding that you are being coerced does not mitigate the fact that you are being coerced.
That's why the Nuremberg Code enshrines not just consent, but informed consent. - Please consider for a moment.
The current climate of governments around the planet is an unexpected enthusiasm for subjecting their entire populations to an injection of substances, the lasting effects of which remain indisputably scientifically indeterminate.
That unbridled push is happening by means of increasingly coercive measures.
This by definition constitutes medical experimentation without informed consent at a scale that even the most enthusiastic of researchers impervious to morality prior to the doctor's trials ever dared to dream up.
The slippery slope into the worst humanity has to offer is an incremental one that begins with fear, a craving for safety, and the rationalization of overreach, and ends with the abrogation of the human rights which distinguish civil societies from totalitarian nightmares.
When we forego our own bodily integrity in the face of coercive threats, or when we impose our idea of what is right for the body and health of another person against their conscious and informed consent, we are sliding down that slippery slope.
When we remove healthy tissues from a person who cannot give their informed consent, as in the case of infant circumcision, or surgeries upon the mixed, yet functioning genitals of the intersex, we are teetering on that slope.
When we reclassify basic life interactions as privileges and then withhold them from those who refuse to give their consent to a medical procedure upon their bodies, we are speeding aggressively down that slippery slope.
When we classify and place individuals into group categories and treat them with disdain and otherness and put them out of civil discourse and community based on those classifications, we've actually arrived at the bottom of the slope.
Dare to imagine and create better for ourselves and one another.
Dare to resist the temptation to allay discomfort and fear for your safety with the demonization of others.
Hold steady in your conviction that there is room for a beautiful version of human society that embraces each and every one of us embodying our own uniqueness as the intended sum of that society.
We are capable of growing beyond our fears.
We are capable of stepping into a shared consciousness that elevates all.
So the first thing to say is that he deleted the post.
After it won hundreds of positive engagements, it also attracted stern rebukes, but then also a really sensitive pushback comment from my colleague Julian, who has taken Hedley's workshops.
So I'll share that in the notes.
The reasons for the blowback are pretty clear, because this is standard anti-vax discourse, but in an intellectual and quite poetic tone.
The Nazi comparison leaps out right away, this is all over the materials of the Disinformation Dozen, and he's right.
Nuremberg articulated informed consent in a very clear way, but so does every licensed medical profession, so there's really no reason to go there.
He also uses the phrase, lest we repeat the transgressions of the past, which dog-whistles the standard comparison in anti-vax rhetoric between vaccination programs and genocide.
But he goes even farther than the Nazi comparison by writing that the quote-unquote experimentation of COVID-19 vaccines is being conducted beyond the morality of the most enthusiastic pre-Nuremberg doctors.
He also speaks of the quote slippery slope to the worst humanity has to offer.
So this is brain melted and paranoiac.
The post also implies that vaccine requirements lead to the, quote, shunning of healthy people, unquote, which conveys another common trope in anti-vax language, namely that healthy people are not the problem, or that they're simply minding their business, or they're not vulnerable to infection and transmission, even asymptomatically.
But topping it all off is a very libertarian and consumerist definition of coercion and basic life interactions, when what we're really talking about is whether people have the right to board an airtight plane or work in an elementary school or hospital without being vaccinated, which, while it won't eliminate transmission, will reduce it and, moreover, signals to fellow citizens that you're invested in community health.
But then there's also a few non-standard points for an anti-vax post.
Because Headley categorizes vaccine coercion alongside unnecessary surgical interventions on intersex babies, for example, and infant circumcision.
And this hints at an appreciation of human differences and the sanctity of the body that collective medical programs like vaccine drives can be seen to de-emphasize.
And that led me to wonder whether he really meant all of this.
And I was inclined to pursue it because Hedley is really influential in the highly educated sector of the professionalized yoga scene, which as we know is not immune to anti-vax or even QAnon rhetoric, but it should have some resistance to it.
And I'm spending time with this also because back in the early 2000 and teens, there was this groundswell of educated, mainly women yoga teachers who started to realize a number of things about the postures they had learned as a spiritual practice.
Firstly, these postures were basically innovated by men reconstructing Indian medieval yoga according to the fascinations of European gymnastics culture, which fetishized geometrical movements that require militarized symmetry.
Also, they realized that the training they had taken was not really any different from the ballet or gymnastics training that they were already familiar with, although yoga had this pretense of being different because of a veneer of Eastern spirituality.
They started to realize that their teachers didn't know shit about anatomy or biomechanics, but they pretended to.
They also started talking openly about how they were getting injured by working at hyperflexibility, which signified spiritual openness.
They started talking about how they had been taught to pull their joints apart to find God.
And even worse than the ignorance of their teachers, they realized that there was this distinctly sadomasochistic relationship to the body in the yoga that they had learned.
Even worse than this were the fact that many of the teachers that they had, you know, committed themselves to were literal, physical, and sexual abusers.
And then, 2017, 18, Me Too blew that open.
Now all of these very positive but difficult realizations flowed together to create a hunger for a more educated, more materialistic, a gentler, more body positive education.
And into that gap flowed people like Gil Headley, but also the Anatomy Trains guy, Tom Myers if you've heard of him, and there are other figures as well.
And these are folks who appeal to the rationalism of conventional medicine, physiotherapy, evidence-based practices.
They might have some training in these things, but they're not in lab coats.
They're not strictly clinicians.
They're not published researchers, for the most part.
They are there to replace the metaphysics of yoga with the poetry of anatomical studies at this key historical moment.
They served a need for wellness professionals who weren't going to retool and go to med school.
People who wanted to teach better yoga.
And it made total sense that the focus of this demographic would turn to things like connective tissues or fascia because that's where the early modern yoga methods had forced a kind of spiritual discipline that led to injury.
So, they were moving from instructions that were about isolating movements and perfecting physical forms to deep meditations on how everything internally is connected.
And this is what made Gil Headley's dissection workshops so attractive.
And for some of my closest friends, they were a rite of passage out of a strangely disembodied vision of yoga based on the performance of shapes and into something that felt paradoxically more materialistic but also more spiritually fulfilling.
Now, I never went to one of Hedley's six-day dissection workshops, but I really considered it when I came to a similar fork in the road in my own wellness professional life.
Like, do I try to become a better yoga teacher, or is yoga teaching a little bit too much bullshitty to want to become better at?
I had heard that Hedley created an atmosphere of deep respect around the cadavers, that he was endlessly encouraging and inspiring, but I never went.
The workshops were very expensive, they were far from my home, and I also got some tingles about other things that I heard from friends who came back from them, who uniformly said that it was a transformative experience, that Hedley was a master, that they'd never learned so much in all of their lives.
They said he was very charismatic and that made me a little bit allergic for obvious reasons given my history.
But they also said that there was a lot of impromptu processing and circles and reading poems and sharing all within this familiar wellness scene of not really qualified group therapy.
I also didn't understand how someone without medical training had gained access to the super-regulated world of cadaver dissection, or whether, honestly, having 30 amateurs cutting into 3 or 4 cadavers over a week in the spirit of contemplative learning made sense.
Now, central to this vibe, and those like it, is a kind of rebellious, playful, scientific hipsterism.
What the professors at Decoding the Gurus describe as the fetish of the breakthrough, the belief that through hands-on and subjective experience that independent geniuses can learn more than institutions can ever teach.
And I think this is particularly captivating in complicated fields like pain science and fascia, which is about as well understood as those vast underground fungal networks that biologists are beginning to believe trees communicate through with each other in forests.
The idea behind these workshops is that your orthopedic surgeon has been taught to treat your body as a car with interchangeable parts, whereas the poetry of the cadaver can show you the mysticism of interconnection.
And this, I feel, is the context for Hedley's post.
It's the background.
The language might be anti-vax, but the attitude driving it, I think, is more important.
Which is that medicine has disenchanted the body and failed to celebrate differences and uniqueness.
And what better symbol of that disenchantment could we have than everyone in the world receiving the same 0.3 milliliters of a liquid promoted by whitecoats who assiduously cleanse their language of all poetry and they offer this vaccine as a generalized solution?
So there's a happy ending to this story because I wrote to Gil Hedley to ask if his deletion of the post indicated that he didn't stand by it.
And he didn't really walk it back, and I didn't persuade him that he was wrong.
But we did have a productive exchange.
He wrote that he wasn't at all aware that he was hitting anti-vax hashtags.
And he also said that the main impulse behind the post was a kind of agitated empathy.
He described hearing from a vax-hesitant person who was feeling pressured by their family and was coming to a kind of crisis point as the pressure was also going to start coming from their jurisdiction's vax certification program.
Now I take him at his word that he wasn't conscious of the anti-vax tropes, and it might be Godwin's Law that bends an earnest argument towards the Nazis, but we also have to acknowledge that this stuff is just in the water now, and it would be surprising if he hadn't heard it, whether it registered or not.
And the insight here might be that really inflammatory rhetoric is like COVID itself.
You might just catch it, and you might be asymptomatic, and you might just pass it along just by going about your business.
He also wrote in our email exchange that he really didn't want to kick a hornet's nest, that he sees himself as a unifier, and he also acknowledged that epidemiology really isn't his lane.
And I wanted to include this specifically because we've said for more than a year now that we haven't seen any of the influencers that we cover walk anything back.
Not a single one.
Nor has anybody said, oh, that's out of my lane.
And so this is really notable.
I've spent a lot of time on this podcast identifying the structural issues in wellness economies that become petri dishes for conspirituality, and I believe that Hedley's platform exemplifies many of them.
He offers charismatic, aspirational teaching that straddles the threshold between medicine and theology.
But what I learned from this post and the exchange is that even when that vulnerability is on show, or even exploited, it's not necessarily because a person has swallowed a red pill or is trying in any way to foster chaos.
It may be that red pill lingo was just the most compelling lingo available when the person had a strong empathetic response to a complicated situation, and they have a platform built on the capacity to provide a unique view, and they use it.
Headley could go farther and post to Facebook, you know, hey, the other day I lost my head a bit and spoke outside my lane.
