This week, California Governor Gavin Newsom rode sane pandemic messaging to victory against the Republican-led recall election by a huge margin. Unsurprisingly, voting patterns perfectly matched the state COVID heat map, with fans of the recall suffering the worst outbreaks. Meanwhile, a strict lockdown in Australia, which is experiencing a Delta outbreak, led to American libertarians and right-wing commentators screaming fascism! We talk to Decoding the Gurus co-host (and real-life Australian) Matthew Browne about the situation on the ground. Later in the episode, Julian interviews another Aussie, Dr. Izzy Smith, about her online anti-conspiracy theory activism and science advocacy.In the Ticker, Derek looks at JP Sears’s new cryptocurrency grift, which appears to be inspired by fellow Austinite Mikki Willis—who also announced a supplement grift this week. Matthew talks briefly to Toronto video journalist Morgan Yew to begin making sense of the alarming convergence of racist alt-right groups with aggressive anti-mask, anti-vaccine protestors at medical facilities in Canada.Show NotesHow the media helped fuel the anti-vaxx movementThe Non-Fungible Freedom ColumnAtlantic article “Australia Traded Away Too Much Liberty”Josh Szeps Twitter thread response to The AtlanticFederalist article Pursuing Covid-Zero Has Turned Australia into an Authoritarian StateOpinion | Meet the police chief turned yoga instructor prodding wealthy suburbanites to civil warEx-La Habra police chief Alan Hostetter, 5 others charged in Jan. 6 Capitol riotWhen QAnon Came to CanadaGlowing Mama Anti-Masker. Toronto Influencer Socially Toilets in… | by Matthew Remski | MediumMorgan Yew (@weynagrom)Morgan Yew interviewing Sarah Choujounian of Canadian Frontline NursesMorgan Yew: Plan to “Interview” Racist Anti-Lockdown Influencer Ends in Violence
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Conspiratuality 69, Fascism Down Under.
This week, California Governor Gavin Newsom rode sane pandemic messaging to victory against the Republican-led recall election by a huge margin.
Unsurprisingly, voting patterns perfectly matched the state COVID heat map, with fans of the recall suffering the worst outbreaks.
Meanwhile, a strict lockdown in Australia, which is experiencing a delta outbreak, led to American libertarians and right-wing commentators screaming, fascism!
We talked to Decoding the Guru's co-host and real-life Australian Matthew Brown about the situation on the ground.
Later in the episode, I'll be interviewing another Aussie, Dr. Izzy Smith, about her online anti-conspiracy theory activism and science advocacy.
In the ticker this week, Derek looks at J.P.
Sears' new cryptocurrency, Grift, which appears to be inspired by fellow Austinite, Mickey Willis, who also announced a supplement, Grift, this week.
Matthew talks briefly to Toronto video journalist, Morgan Yu, to begin making sense of the alarming convergence of racist alt-right groups with aggressive anti-mask, anti-vaccine protesters at medical facilities in Canada.
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.
Anti-vaxxers have overlooked a lot of important data about their champion, the OG vaccine grifter known as Andrew Wakefield.
The 12 children in the original study were hand-picked, and this is the study that proved that there was a connection between vaccines and autism in the 90s.
And so handpicking your subjects are antithetical to clinical research.
Wakefield falsified the results that he received from the pediatricians about those children and he used something called microscopic level stains when there is a more reliable method which is the molecular method which actually further research was done and that found no connection between vaccines and autism.
The parents of those study subjects, some had their own agendas such as litigation.
They kept changing the timeline of their child's conditions from when the study started and then afterwards when they would talk to press.
But the most egregious Wakefield grift was filing for two patents on single measles shots while raging against the MMR vaccine.
So while he was telling everyone that the well-known vaccine didn't work, he was trying to introduce his own.
Cue Mickey Willis.
Two decades later, the fellow Austin resident whose propaganda film, Plandemic, fueled the current anti-COVID vaccine fervor, announced last Friday that he's formulating a new supplement with Vladimir Zelenko, who is the family physician who infamously touted hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure for COVID in 2020, and there has been a link the New York Times made between him touting it directly to former President Trump.
So even though Willis calls the pandemic a plandemic, he's about to start selling a supplement, which remember, doesn't require FDA approval to steal your body for the next pandemic.
That's just good planning.
That's just good planning.
Yeah.
If the verbiage is a little confusing, well, join the party here.
But Austin is the grift that keeps on giving.
So earlier this week, I noticed that fellow Austinite and friend of Mickey Willis, JP Sears, has identified his latest grift.
Non-fungible tokens or NFTs.
And if you need context for this blockchain-based project, you can revisit our episode 60 where we talk about cryptocurrency, blockchain, and NFTs.
So Sears recently cut an hour-long iPhone video talking about cryptocurrency as community building for freedom lovers and right on cue, his new non-fungible freedom column.
Do you love freedom?
Do you get annoyed any time freedoms get eroded away?
Me too.
Well, I've got a new way you can get in on the freedom movement.
But the new way I have for you to join the freedom movement at a deeper level is through my new Non-Fungible Freedom column.
What that means is, I'm going to periodically publish my perspectives on current events Uncensored, memorialized to the blockchain, and make them available to own, collect, tout, and trade as NFTs by freedom lovers.
So Matthew, can you translate that?
No, but I'll have to listen to episode 60 again.
You've got to help us out here.
Well, I would like to help, but I really can't translate.
I'll do my best.
JP is going to do what he usually does on video, shitposts on video, except now as shitty artwork and sell it for cryptocurrency.
And if you think I'm exaggerating, I'm really not.
That is the entire grift.
Honestly, he's not even trying on this one.
Even better, the main NFT that he's currently pimping is called Plandemic 4.
Oh, sorry, go ahead.
You're going to describe it.
Yeah, it's a horrible piece of, it looks like something a child would make, which is a lot of NFTs to be fair.
They go for this retro video game look.
But it is featuring Bill Gates holding a needle, Mark Zuckerberg next to him on a laptop, and then next to him is Joe Biden as a marionette.
And then finally, Dr. Fauci is across from Bill leaning back and smiling.
That is what he is selling.
Did he draw it?
I don't know for sure.
So there's two NFTs that I'm going to describe in a moment.
I don't know who actually drew them.
There are ways of just putting photos into programs, which I feel like he might've done on the first one because the first one is just a photo of him saluting.
But I watched his videos.
I've read his site.
I've joined his mailing list about this project.
And I went to the OpenSea page, which is where he's selling it, looking for some hook on this project, like a charity he's donating to.
At very least, Mickey is giving the proceeds to his upcoming book to...
Well, a non-profit 501c3 dedicated to creating new and healthier educational curriculums for our next generation.
That sounds really specific.
It sounds like it has a well-formed board of directors.
I'm sure the finances are going to be just totally cooked.
That's great.
At the very least, he's trying.
No, he's just better.
He's just better at it.
Yeah, I guess so.
I guess that's true.
But that's a step too much for JP.
So I looked into what he's selling and the first one is just called the J-Pixel.
And it originally went up for sale for 17 Ethereum, 17 ETH.
So at the time when I first wrote this was Tuesday, he was selling it for $58,000.
$58,000.
Okay.
Wait, we have to stop here.
So, so this is like, like NFTs, it seems to me are like digital art investing or something like that.
Is that a fair way to say it?
Okay.
And so, cause they've been in the news a lot for like the last couple of months and I'm still not entirely sure, but that's the concept I've gleaned.
I'll give you a bit, because I was working on NFTs three plus years ago when I worked in blockchain.
Of course you were.
I didn't make my own though.
Think of it like Farmville, how in Farmville you could spend real money to buy a tractor, right?
And people spent tens of thousands of dollars in a video game.
So it's just, it's just somebody, earlier this year, someone paid $500,000 real dollars for a virtual house.
Okay.
You know, and then famously, Beeple sold his artwork for $59 million or whatever it went for.
So that's when the NFT craze broke.
The non-fungible part is that it's unique in some way.
It could be copy-pasted, it could be duplicated in some way, but it has some sort of digital signature attached to it that means that it is original.
It has some originality.
It's an attempt at creating originality in a copy-paste world, right?
Exactly.
And so Jack Dorsey famously sold his first tweet as an NFT, which was the first tweet ever on Twitter.
So when you get that thing, so when you get the NFT, let's say I bought Jack Dorsey's tweet.
There are screenshots of that tweet everywhere.
What lets me show my friends that I have the original or the one that Jack says is original or the one that's signed by Jack?
It is a signature kind of?
You can call it a signature.
So even right now, if you go to the Bitcoin blockchain, if you go to a tracker, you can see all of the Bitcoin activity.
Now, your proof is a 17 to 33 or whatever it is number letter combo that is That is your proof and that's how you see all the transactions.
Basically, you can go back to the very first ever Bitcoin transaction and you can publicly view every single Bitcoin transaction that has ever happened.
If you don't know someone's wallet number, though, you're not going to know whose it is, but there are ways of making it known.
You can show your proof through that digital signature.
Okay, alright, so this week in almost impossible to penetrate digital crazes.
Let's just roll this back because we're talking about JP Sears selling his memes, his shitty memes, as pieces of eternal art in cyberspace.
That he's basically saying, this is a good investment, you should buy this, right?
Because it's an original piece of me.
Yes.
So, well, no, no, Matthew, I thought, okay, I thought I made this clear.
It's about freedom.
It's about freedom and loving freedom.
It's not about changing.
I get so annoyed at anything that disrupts my freedom.
On Tuesday, it was for sale.
Think of it like eBay.
You can bid on it or you can just buy it outright at a certain price.
It was on sale for $17,858.
Right now, you can purchase it for the bargain basement price of $3.6 ETH or $12,700 at the moment.
or $12,700 at the moment.
The highest bid on the page is 0.11 ETH, $380.
Oh, so he dropped the price from 58 to 12?
Yes.
17 to 3.6.
He dropped the eBay buy now price.
See, I get eBay because I'm a lot closer to boomers than JP is, I guess.
But like, OK, got it.
And still, it's not even a tiny fraction of the new price.
No, not at all.
And even then... So who bid $341 for his... So that is by someone... Don't dox them, don't dox them.
No shaming.
But really, we need to send help.
Their avatar name is Freedom Fan.
It's him!
It's him trying to drive up the price slowly and carefully.
Most of the bids, there are about 10 here, most of them, or maybe a few more, most of them, banana habit.
There are a few people who use their name, which is brave.
I won't dox them, but if you go to OpenSea, you can see it for yourself.
And so the big draw, like this was all like a pre-release to the Plandemic And what's funny is I'm looking at it right now and the price that it was listed as was, no, it was a minimum bid of $100.
And as of now, three days after this huge launch, there is no offers yet.
But seriously, this is the laziest grift I've ever seen.
It is completely trying to take advantage of something.
There's no attempt here.
I'm going to sell you shit art on a tech platform I don't really understand because freedom.
That's the synopsis.
That's the total synopsis.
And it's falling flat on YouTube, and I wanted to ask you how you even got the URL, because it's unlisted, and it only has 7,000 views, which would be like a fraction of what he typically wins.
What's going on with the unlisted part?
He has a website, or it's a page on jbseries.com, and the link is available there.
Right.
Yeah, well, whoever has bothered to comment on YouTube is just not impressed.
They're complaining about the Ethereum transfer fees.
They're saying, you know, I'm unfortunately too old to understand anything you said in this video except freedom and commune and constitution.
You know, what's the... I think there's a stinging one.
So this is the price at which JP's integrity can be bought.
Noted.
Yeah, so what's the end point here?
Because it seems like a non-starter.
Is this just a market test?
There was a company I was working with called Proof, and I don't know if they're still around.
They had what I think is an honorable idea, which was an attempt at combating misinformation.
And again, this was 2018, I was working with them.
And they were doing it through the blockchain.
So they were working on a verification system.
And there are others.
There's one that just spun up recently that's gotten a few million dollars in, this isn't blockchain based, but in capital behind them to do this.
So this idea has been around for a while.
And I'm saying this because in that hour long video where JP was on his iPhone in front of a crowd, a small crowd talking about it.
The idea behind blockchain, what you said before, is that you can trace it back to its origins.
So you can, in a sense, prove ownership.
You can prove where things started.
It's a trademark.
It's just a digital hash.
The problem is, A couple problems.
First of all, if I buy artwork and then the servers that that artwork is hosted on crashes, if I spent $59 million on people's art and it crashes, I lose it.
So that's something we don't think enough about when we're going to have a solar flare or some serious power outages.
Now to get back to JP, the way he's pivoting it is that There is a lot of media disinformation, ironically, and he's trying to solve it from his perspective, basically.
And so he thinks blockchain is a vehicle.
How much he actually believes that is true and how much he's just trying to, as evidenced by this project that's failing tremendously, just make a quick buck remains to be seen.
But that is at least the reasoning, is that it's just like Gab, Parler, it's another attempt at creating an echo chamber that using the buzzwords of the day to say like, but this is the actual truth is going to be hosted here.
You know, I had two thoughts coming out of this and maybe I'm I'm over overthinking or pretending that there's something deeper going on.
But it seems like blockchain also carries the metaphoric power of I don't know, like pure immunity.
It's not something that can be corrupted.
It's almost, to hear the word in JP's mouth when, you know, we hear so much about sovereignty and, you know, building your sort of natural self-authorization for things.
Blockchain itself seems to be an internet space that is like Analogous to that, it's pure in some way.
It's going to never be invaded by outside influences, and so I thought that there was some sort of weird resonance there.
It's like they have to, as they dream of their own perfected bodies, they have to dream about the perfected internet as well.
The irony is, first off, there can be a 51% attack and a 33% attack, so there are ways of invading the immunity in that sense.
But the irony here is that the way that you've just positioned it as this sort of sovereignty, you need 17 separate verifications on a lot of blockchain networks, which is a community spread.
It's collectivist.
Yes, it is a collectivist.
It is a socialist, basically, platform.
But again, we're looking for some sort of logic behind what they're doing.
And when they see a lot of money and they're just going for it, they're not going to actually think about that.
They're going to rewrite it how they want to write it.
And that's exactly everything I've seen coming out of him and others talking about blockchain and cryptocurrency.
Yeah, I mean, the other thing was a piece of armchair psychology that I have around.
What does it feel like to, if you had any shred of self-awareness, to realize that you were producing hot garbage every day of your life and polluting the digisphere with it?
And there's something about the NFT that seems to push back against that idea.
That seems to say, well, there can be something of value in all of this disposable Stuff.
And it made me think of the fact that when I was starting out as a writer, I had this really lucky encounter here in Toronto with this older writing community that was formed around a place called Coach House Press, which is actually where, if anybody watches Handmaid's Tale, it's where Margaret Atwood published her first books, her first books of poems.
And the place was founded by a guy named Stan Bevington, who started making art print flags to wave around in Yorkville, which was kind of like the Haight-Ashbury district of Toronto back in the 60s.
But then he bought, what's it called?
It's called the Challenge Gordon Patent Press.
Have you ever seen a printing press that's, it's like, it looks like a piece of farm equipment almost, But very, very elegant with a huge iron flywheel.
It's very heavy.
It has to be sort of mounted into concrete pylons.
And when you spin the wheel, the patent very slowly and perfectly accurately brings the stamp down on whatever you're embossing.
And I had the privilege of having my first book printed in part on that press, the covers of it embossed.
Um and Stan was there and he did it and it was this like it's this really kind of special moment in in my life but it was also this special place where the whole kind of economy was built upon uniqueness and scarcity because there was only like 250 copies of this thing this thing published and I was thinking about how rare that
Kind of small press, you know, we're making very very small runs of very beautiful books.
Feeling is, and it's not something that I think my children will grow up with and it's certainly not something that the, you know, addicted shit poster will have contact with and I just wonder if the NFT is some kind of Reaction formation against this notion that everything is disappearing and nothing is of value.
It makes sense to me that you'd want to say, oh, this is really my legacy and you can have it and it can be a better or more solid or more concrete way of communicating with you.
You think I'm overthinking that?
I think you're romanticizing it.
I actually think that some people could look at it that way, but from what I've seen, it's about bragging rights.
Yeah.
And there's the other piece here too, that I think for most of these influencer figures that we cover, they've come up in a time of internet marketing where the whole idea of content marketing is, And we're to some extent part of this, right?
You put stuff out into the world for free that resonates with an audience, you build the audience, and then you figure out how to monetize based on that.
And folks like JP, who've exponentially increased his audience through the pandemic, it just seems like a lot of people are going to be approaching him saying, hey, why don't you do this?
Why don't you do that?
You could monetize your audience, a percentage of your audience in these ways, right?
Oh, so somebody maybe said, oh, you've crossed the threshold into creating an artwork that's actually originally valuable and you have the audience base to do that.
And he says, okay, what the fuck?
Let me do it.
Exactly.
Exactly.
If 2% of your audience spends money on this, you'll cash in big time.
Yeah.
So then it becomes a question of how much time are you going to invest in trying to monetize that 2% and so on.
Yeah, I can see that.
I can see that.
Whether or not this becomes successful remains to be seen, because who knows?
It could.
You never know, but I will be interested to see how he reacts and if he reacts and if he continues with this, noticing that his big, huge launch of the Plandemic 4 is completely bombing.
No one cares.
So that's something to track just out of pure curiosity.
I wonder too, to what extent he's trying to hitch a ride on on Mickey Willis' coattails with his book about to come out, right?
On to authoritarian Australia.
Oh right, yeah.
On August 26th, the man who gets my vote for the pandemic's most rapid and complete descent into becoming a paranoid barking seal retweeted a benign 41-second PR video about a new quarantine hotel being built at Wellcamp Airport close to Toomba Woomba in Queensland, Australia.
The name of that paranoid barking seal, in case you're wondering, is James Lindsay.
Camps.
They're making it happen, said his commentary.
In the comments, his followers dutifully latched onto the name Wellcamp, as if it had, you guessed it, either Orwellian or Nazi overtones, not quite realizing that it was just the name of the town.
And that the facility is intended to be a pleasant 14-day quarantine stay for travelers, with a video mentioning how each room will have a nice balcony and that the development will be a boon for construction jobs and local food suppliers who would be tasked with providing 3,000 meals a day.
Sounds like some ominously secret public relations.
Then there's that right-wing tweet machine and incoherent podcaster Tim Pool, who you may know is the guy who always has a beanie on pulled down to his eyebrows.
He's notorious for all manner of bad faith hot takes, including, for example, last week's GEMS that trolled pro-choice activists incensed by the Texas abortion ban for also believing that the government had a right to mandate COVID vaccines, right?
Like, decide you're pro-choice in which way now.
So, Poole posted a different 40 second PR clip about Wellcamp on the same day as James Lindsay with the comment, Nazis took over Australia.
A few days later, Poole retweeted an aerial photograph, this is all getting very bizarre, of the Howard Springs quarantine facility, which Wellcamp is actually based upon, outside of Darwin in Australia's Northern Territory.
And these tend to be quite remote because they're repurposed like old mining encampments, right?
Where citizens who've just returned from overseas are required to quarantine for 14 days.
His commentary was just two words.
Concentration camp.
Now the fact that Australia has very tight gun control compelled alt-right conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich to tweet about Australia's lockdown as demonstrating to Americans what happens when the population is not able to take up arms against their oppressor.
So, next, conservative outlets like Fox News and The Federalist sounded the alarm, and then a widely-read September 2nd article by libertarian staff writer Conor Friesdorf at The Atlantic fanned the flames of this panic about Australia's supposed slide into fascism.
It was titled, Australia Traded Away Too Much Liberty, and this piece argued that travel restrictions, lockdown measures, and a new app that uses facial recognition software to ensure newly returned Aussies are abiding by their quarantine all amount to an ominous turn away from liberal democracy.
I have a question about Conor's article.
Does he interview or quote any Australians for the piece?
Not that I remember.
It's a very speculative piece of analysis where he's basically saying, well, how do we know that these civil liberties won't be held onto way past the pandemic?
Very, very sharp outsider perceptions then.
Now, the use of police and even military presence to enforce curfews and break up protests only strengthened this perception of creeping authoritarianism.
But there are some important facts that add context here to the Australian lockdown.
As of September 8th, Australia ranked 117th in the world with a total of 65,000 cases and a whopping 1,052 deaths in a population close to 26 million.
So very small numbers.
But they are even more unique in comparison to most of the world in that they were spared the first wave of COVID deaths and had significantly lower numbers prior to the emergence of Delta.
As our interview subject Dr. Izzy Smith will explain later, Australia focused on AstraZeneca as its vaccine of choice, but then stopped distributing it when the rare blood clotting disorder was identified earlier this year, as everyone remembers.
With AstraZeneca sitting there unused, they quickly used up what was a much smaller supply of the Pfizer vaccine.
And as recently as August 20th, which was the day I spoke to Dr. Smith, less than 20% of the population had been fully vaccinated.
So that was worrying.
This lack of immunity from either vaccination or prior infection meant that without strict lockdowns, the danger of a death toll similar to New York or Italy during the first COVID wave was almost certain.
But with vaccine supply now increased, Australia has raced to 30% fully vaccinated and without the additional complication of an anti-vaccine political party like the one we have here, they look on track to reach the goal of 70 to 80% fully vaccinated by December and then radically reducing their quarantine measures which is written into all of the legislation that put those measures in place.
Australian TV presenter and podcaster Josh Zeps did an excellent Twitter thread that I will include in the show notes, really unpacking point by point and responding to the Atlantic article, including acknowledging the heavy handedness of how lockdown measures had in a few cases been enforced, but
Our friends over at Decoding the Gurus featured a rant from Matt Brown, the podcast's resident Australian, in reply to the country being flagged as scary government overreach flavor of the month for American libertarians and conservatives.
So I thought I'd ask him to elaborate a little.
Matthew Brown, you are our correspondent on the ground in the dystopian hellscape that is Australia right now.
What can you tell us?
How bad is it really?
G'day mate, it's terrible.
They're oppressing us.
It's like a boot stamping on our face for all eternity.
What are we going to do?
Send troops.
Send Blackhawks.
Concentration camps.
You've got the face recognition software on the app.
You've got people being handcuffed and arrested for breaking curfew.
What on earth is going on?
Oh, well.
There's nothing going on where I am, in fact, because I'm in Queensland and we do have border restrictions between the states.
There is lockdown happening in the affected cities of Sydney and Melbourne.
And it's working well enough that people like myself have essentially no restrictions whatsoever.
So large parts of Australia are continuing on the way we have been for like most of the last 18 months, which is basically being COVID free and having no restrictions at all.
So with the entry of Delta, of course, that's brought in restrictions as they've tried to slow it down in order to essentially give us time to get everybody or at least 80% of the population vaccinated.
And so my understanding is that the vaccines have been in short supply because you sort of relied on AstraZeneca and then decided that it wasn't safe enough, yeah?
Yeah, look, the government, well, the government screwed up really on acquiring vaccines and didn't push hard enough to get to the front of the queue for international supply.
Yeah, so that's been rectified.
Supply is now pretty good and vaccinations are happening very quickly.
There's very little vaccine scepticism here in Australia, thankfully.
But otherwise, it can be helpful to think of Australia as being a bit like Sort of six or nine months sort of behind everyone else because we're kind of we've delayed a lot of you know, say Delta for instance for a period of time and we're kind of having to do some of the things that we didn't have to do at the same time as Europe and the US were.
So yeah, look the things that have triggered some people of a libertarian or I'm an institution skeptic, Ben, shall we say.
Yeah, as you say, things like restrictions on international travel and quarantine centres.
But, you know, like To my mind anyway, they are just logical.
Like the quarantine process, I mean, Australia has relied on strong international border restrictions to essentially stay COVID free.
So, and the ability to process people through with quarantine is very limited.
So, you certainly can fly out of the country and come back and so on.
You know, essentially you can get a permit or whatever, but they obviously need to prevent people going overseas just for recreational or non-essential purposes because they don't have the capacity to process them back in.
In two or three weeks.
So, so things like, you know, the concentration camps that some people are talking about online are, yes, there are, you know, we, they were processing people in quarantine, basically, for the duration in metropolitan hotels, which again, screwed up regularly in terms of, you know, escapes from that.
It just makes sense that it's not a very, especially with the contagiousness of Delta, you can imagine a metropolitan hotel just sort of repurposed as a quarantine thing doesn't work particularly well.
So in order to increase the amount of people that can be shuffled in and out, you know, they're again, you know, building facilities or repurposing larger, less central facilities.
Yeah, so what's going on with this fascist panic?
you know there's nothing you know and the the temporary it's just for for a couple of weeks day and have a swim get free meals and move on yeah so what what's going on with this uh this fascist panic i mean i i i was just talking about the atlantic article and then the federalist also did something um there's there there seems to be an american desire to see creeping authoritarianism in in these measures is is
Is there a similar kind of reaction happening in Australia itself, and how big is it?
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, that's the really interesting part about the story.
There is no real story, in my opinion, but the interesting story is the perceptions.
Yeah, it's really shown, Australia is similar to the United States culturally in so many ways, but it's in a way, looking at each other, it's a little bit like the uncanny valley, because we're similar enough to be super familiar, and then when there are these differences, they're jarring.
And this is one of these instances where Americans in general, you know, not just crazy conspiracy theorists or hardcore libertarians, but Americans in general are suspicious of their government.
And, you know, highly sceptical of government powers and restrictions on freedoms and so on.
And there's nothing inherently wrong or right about that, I think.
It's just Australians don't have the same level of distrust of our government.
Yeah, we think they're incompetent.
We think they're a bunch of numbskulls, but we don't generally fear that they're going to oppress us.
And I think, I think that's the difference.
Yeah.
So, so that the kind of reaction that we're seeing, say on Fox News or, you know, in some of these articles is not really.
Something that's coming out of the press as much in Australia itself?
Oh, look, you can certainly find, you know, as you'd expect, you know, just continuing robust debate about, you know, is this a good idea?
Is that a good idea?
There are heaps of instances of individual people who, you know, haven't been, you know, the rules haven't been fair in those particular case, you know, as you can imagine, there's heaps of talk about it.
But no, there isn't the same level of Concern about the general policies at all.
Australians, apart from complaining a lot, which is a very natural thing to do, there isn't that sort of strong feeling that you're seeing in the American media at all.
No, I think it's actually pretty positive.
Australians do have a bit of a A kind of a communitarian or collective kind of spirit, which is, you know, do your part.
Let's all pull together.
Let's let's get this done.
Let's get to 80% so we can go to the pub and all that stuff.
So, yeah, I think generally it's it's pretty it's there just isn't the same level of concern domestically.
I do feel it's a case of projection where, you know, these culture war issues, these ideological issues that are really hot button things in the US, you know, foreign countries can kind of serve as a bit of a prop to kind of be like a moral lesson of, but really it's not about us, it's really about what's happening over there and, you know, it is a little bit annoying when
I mean, you know, it's not through any great skill or brilliance on our part, but, you know, as it's happened, we've managed to avoid having lots of people die from COVID.
I think the per capita rates of death, I think, what is it, like, at least 50 times higher in the United States than here.
We've had about a thousand people die from COVID.
In total, over the entire country, for the entire pandemic.
So, to say that we're doing the wrong thing by attempting to stay that way for a few more months until we can get everybody vaccinated, it's a little bit rich.
Yeah, it is interesting that contrast, right?
Because the American, it seems exactly what you were just flagging, the American There's a suspicion that if we take this lying down, right, if we accept this set of quarantine measures or lockdowns or infringements on civil liberties as they're often framed, then maybe they'll never go away.
Yeah.
And we'll never get our freedom back, right?
And that was the tone that I heard in some of the paragraphs of the Atlantic article.
Yeah, yeah, it's a real cultural difference.
How do Australians know that this is really going to be okay?
Meanwhile, Australians are going, no, this is what we need to do to fight the pandemic until we're all vaccinated.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a real cultural difference.
And yeah, like, you know, yeah, you know, America is, you know, is founded on these quite strong principles of liberty and freedom and so on.
Like, you know, America had a revolution to achieve that.
You know, Australia did have one political revolution and it was fought over rum.
Restriction of rum.
And so temporarily the Sydney colony was overthrown by the military because their rum rations had been and the governor had to hide under the bed for like a couple of days.
But I think that sums up the difference in many ways.
Americans just take things a lot more seriously.
Look, there's a whole spectrum of criticism here.
Hey, like you've got the like, you know, bottom feeders like Tim Pool or James Lindsay on one end and you know you've got much more reasonable people like Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic and you know I wouldn't dismiss any of those yeah I wouldn't dismiss those concerns outright like you know it is important to pay careful attention to to exactly what one we're getting used to and what we're accepting and to pay careful attention and expect that they but
Partly, one has to not be completely paranoid.
The Australian governments are extremely moderate, centrist governments who are running the show in the various states and at the federal level, and most of them are centre-right.
So they are pro-economy, pro-liberal type people.
They've come to the restrictions kicking and screaming.
It was not their instinct to seize the opportunity to control people.
So, yeah, it's an interesting one.
Look, on the other hand, I mean, you know, Americans, the advantage that Americans have in worrying about this stuff is that Americans do have a real sensitivity to important Liberties and things like freedom of the press being protected and Australians take that stuff pretty casually.
So for instance a little while ago the Australian Federal Police raided the offices of the ABC, like the British BBC here, because they had been doing investigative reporting on war crimes in Afghanistan by Australian troops.
And the Australian Federal Police decided they were going to raid the offices of the ABC and sequester a whole bunch of documents under some spurious kind of, you know, protection of secrets or national interest type grounds.
And now that is bullshit.
And Australians should have gotten a lot more upset about that than they did.
But likewise, you're not going to see the likes of Tim Pool or James Lindsay taking stories like that and running with them.
It doesn't seem to fit their narrative.
Can I just say I really love Matt's British accent? - That's a Decoding the Guru's deep cut there.
You gotta go search that one out.
Go ahead, Julian.
So meanwhile, the same Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax-consuming Trumpists who think that critical race theory is ushering in a communist dictatorship and vaccine mandates are tyrannical applaud the new Texas legal measure that pays $10,000 rewards, or even though it's complicated in terms of how that works, to people who report anyone breaking the draconian new abortion legislation.
To which I say, tell me without telling me that you've never read a single thing about life under actual authoritarian regimes.
Just incredible.
I did a post about that this week in which I mentioned the incredible Oscar winning movie, The Lives of Others, which is about the East German surveillance state and what life is really like under tyranny, under authoritarian regime.
Fantastic and frightening film.
Yeah.
You know, the American right-wing response to basic social contract measures in other countries is nothing new.
I really appreciated that Matt Brown pointed out that it's mostly hysterical, projective, xenophobic.
He said a little bit more on the DTG episode.
You know, Australia summoning the military to encourage lockdown compliance, that's a heavy look, but Really, is that going to be the target of criticism from people who have advocated for the militarization of the police for generations?
Or, you know, folks who are happy when Tim Kennedy goes to Portland in tactical gear to drag off BLM protesters in unmarked minivans?
The basic, like, foreign desk policy of right-wing media in the U.S.
is to deflect and project.
And a similar, I would say, projective illness really anchors right-wing exaggerations of the failings of universal health care in other countries.
And I wanted to bring this up because in this great interview that you did with Dr. Smith, Julian, we'll hear how she had to have her colonoscopy delayed.
And that was complicated, of course, by COVID.
You know, with these discussions in universal healthcare places, there's always this question of like, well, you know, are we getting the best services that we can?
You know, we'll hear from Fox and similar outlets that, you know, bureaucracy in universal healthcare environments, you know, fails, that it isn't nimble, that it's not a buyer's market.
And, you know, it's true that there can be waiting lists for procedures here in Canada.
You can't buy your way to the front of the line in the public system.
There is private care that you can pay for if you've got the money.
But why are there delays?
Why are there waiting lists?
It's because the organization of universal health care is an expression of political will.
It's not just that governments can't do healthcare, it's that governments can do healthcare when they are supported by the political will of their constituents.
So waiting lists go up in parts where zones of a universal healthcare system is underfunded.
And usually that happens.
Here in Canada, that's typical in center-right provinces who, you know, are looking at the predatory inequality of U.S.
capitalism and thinking that, oh, that's a great idea.
Or they're pushed in that direction by their own funders who are large employers who want to pay less or less taxes or, you know, you know, or doctors associations that, you know, want to be paid more.
So, universal healthcare systems can be cumbersome, overly bureaucratic, but that's just like any vast organizational effort.
Their efficiency is really impacted by values politics more than anything else, because we all know that when we value something, or that when those in power value something, it gets paid for.
The military, the Gulf War, the abortion bounty in Texas, that's going to get paid for.
Because people value that or some enough people in Texas value it that they that they were able to sort of game it into law.
So confusing that order of operations, ironically, it complicates the entire project of universal health care.
So, you know, when you complain about efficiency as though it were a feature of socialized organization instead of an ongoing expression of values, that's a mistake.
And so and what's really, really awful is that When Canadians listen to Fox News.
And when Canadians listen to Rush Limbaugh, or when they did, and when they get told that their universal healthcare is broken in some way, Fox is actually helping to break it.
Because the whole system depends upon political will.
I mean, we saw the same thing happen when the Brexit dipshits in the UK started claiming that Privatizing healthcare was going to create better services, which is a total lie.
It just never works that way.
So anyway, I just wanted to say we get the system we value and what Americans on the right most love to do is to shit on the values that other people hold, especially if those values reveal their own moral poverty.
Yeah, and there's another fallacy at play there too, right, which is that usually it's this criticism of, it's this comparing of kind of boutique healthcare for the super wealthy and everyone else can basically get fucked versus like, you know, really good healthcare that may be somewhat inconvenient and not on tap for you the moment you, you know, sign up for your knee replacement or something.
Totally.
The sense of proportion is completely screwed up.
I should say as well that with that $10,000 bounty, however it's framed, it's hard to see how they're going to apply it.
Someone did point out to me that apparently the private citizen who is suing is actually suing the person who helps the woman to get the abortion.
Right.
And that maybe somehow that person is supposed to pay the money.
It's just, you know, it's all insane.
Speaking of Brexit dipshits, this morning Piers Morgan announced he's returning to Fox News, which he's very happy about.
So the spread of further misinformation will find its echo chamber.
And what you were saying, Matthew, this week I had to renew my health care benefits here for my wife and I through my employer.
And it costs me roughly $10,000 a year and we use it sparingly.
But of course, for emergency reasons, we need it.
So you pay it.
And as I was going through the five different options that I had, just seeing the amount of money That I still have to pay on top of all of these services and what $10,000 a year, what kind of discounts on the services, not coverage, discounts on most services it gives me is appalling.
And so when I hear stories like what Julian expressed, and just the big picture view of Everything happening around vaccinations, if Americans were really aiming at the enemy, we would be talking about the horrible, horrible healthcare system that we have in this country.
You know, and I think I've said this before, but I just want to, if there are American listeners who need validation that it is That you are in fact living in a predatory and low-level traumatizing context with regard to the economics of healthcare.
I would just like to affirm that because every single experience that I've had with healthcare in a universal healthcare country has been one of extraordinary Grace and gratitude.
Me too.
It's like I developed a very dangerous blood clot and as I was in the emergency triage there was a man next to me who was clearly experiencing homelessness and drug addiction and he was having trouble not soiling the bed and the nurses were taking care of him and he was right beside me and the doctor
spent as much time with him as he did with me, and neither of us got a bill.
Like, there was something about
That just sort of basic level of social contract expression that is playing out day in and day out that everybody walks through the hospital doors and they know they are not going to walk out bankrupt and they know that through no fault of their own if they are 42 weeks pregnant and the baby looks like they're going to be 10 pounds and things are not progressing the way they should and you wind up with an emergency c-section,
That you're not going to be handed a $60,000 bill.
I can't express how much worse my life would be if I had to tolerate the stress of that.
So anyway, I don't know how you all do it and I'm really sorry you have to and I love you all.
Phil Gaiman is an ex-professional cyclist and he's wonderful on social media about cycling.
He was in an accident, I guess, maybe about two years ago now.
And because you're talking about like national, nationalized universal health care, Matthew, because he was in a different state than California, where he lives here in Los Angeles County, he's stuck with $150,000 in bills right now, even though he was fully insured.
But because of The ambulance he used, which wasn't covered in his out-of-network, and because of the hospital he went to, he now is stuck with that bill in the country that he's already paying for healthcare in.
Yeah, so talk about bureaucratic red tape and just getting completely screwed over.
It's not like we do actually have some sort of straight-shot, uncomplicated situation.
And the thing is you'll never hear a poor person in America complain About, well, gee, you know, if I lived in some country that has socialized medicine, I'd have to wait a few weeks for this procedure that otherwise, you know, will bankrupt me and my future generation.
To me, I'll say this again, I'm sure I've said this on the podcast a couple of times, but like, it makes absolute sense that QAnon is born in America.
Like, because what could be more...
What could be more sort of networked and opaque and life-controlling and nefarious than such an incredibly chaotic system in which your vulnerabilities are always just ready to be pierced?
Like, it's just, I mean, why wouldn't you be paranoid?
And yet the politicians who pander to them somehow persuade them to vote against their own best interests, and they use the exact grift that J.P.
Sears is using.
They link the concept, some abstract and low nutritional value concept of freedom, to voting against your own better interests because, you know, it would be, we'd live under communism if you were actually taken care of by your government.
It's really a feat of imagination because you have to put whatever the moral panic is, you have to craft it in such an incredibly creative and persuasive way that it overrides what's actually happening to your life on a day-by-day basis.
It has to completely make you forget that you actually are being oppressed by a cabal of neglect, really.
I just want to just really quick anecdote.
I was once in Orange County for reasons that I won't go into right now.
I don't go to Orange County very often during the Obama years.
And I saw one of those one of those tables that was handing out leaflets that had a picture of Obama with the Nazi mustache.
And all of that sort of sprung up around Obamacare, that you were being forced to get health insurance.
And so Obama was actually Hitler.
That sticker was regularly featured on the Santa Monica Promenade.
So a little closer to home.
I used to see it there.
We are ad-free and listener-supported here at Conspiratuality and plan on remaining that way.
That said, occasionally we have an opportunity to do a trade with a podcast that is like-minded and speaks to many of the same topics.
Last year, we did one with Pushkin, which was founded by Malcolm Gladwell, which I'm a huge fan of.
And we had another opportunity, and I'm only interested in talking about podcasts that I actually listen to.
So when Crooked Media contacted us, I was like, of course, because I listen to most Crooked Media podcasts.
The one I'm interested in right now has been talking about the COVID-19 pandemic, which showed us how a microscopic virus could upend our lives and how unprepared our society was for it.
Let's face it, there's so much more out there that we need to understand about the pandemic and society in general, which is why on Crooked Media's America Dissected, former Detroit Health Commissioner Dr. Abdul El-Sayed sits down with doctors, scientists,
Culture makers and policy leaders to ask questions such as how new genetic discoveries change our relationship with our own genes, how addiction to social media changes our brains, something I've talked about it on our podcast, and even how climate change could make the next pandemic even more likely.
Just yesterday, I listened to Abdul's interview with Tony Fauci, the second time he was on the podcast, catching Americans up about where we are right now with the variants and vaccines, and I highly recommend that one.
So to hear discussions on topics like these and more, check out America Dissected, which drop every Tuesday on your favorite podcast provider, including Apple, Spotify, wherever.
Just like you find us, find them.
So, alright, here's my bit.
We've noted with consternation, sometimes discussed, often discussed, the incredible spectacle of aggressive anti-mask and anti-lockdown protests that have proliferated over the last year.
And a lot of our focus has been on American events, especially if they feature, you know, clear conspirituality icons like Alan Hostetter, who we first meet, I think, in San Clemente as he's shuttling back and forth between his Singing Bulls concerts in yoga studios and mask-burning protests.
And, of course, he rides that wave all the way to January 6th, and now he's due back in federal court sometime soon on felony conspiracy charges.
We don't know if he's going to be allowed to bring his Singing Bulls.
Here in Toronto, I've covered the absurdity of the BBQinOn guy Scott Adamson, who cost the Toronto Police Services $165,000 in expenses over the near riots caused by him really needing to keep his rib joint open illegally during lockdown for in In-house dining.
I've also talked about Lamont Daigle and George Roach and how they run the protest group called The Line as a kind of Canadian QAnon offshoot and a quasi-religious revival movement as well.
They hosted one of the world's worst alt-health shit posters in David Wolf on one of their Saturday events last fall.
But as the fever of QAnon has burned off a little bit and the conspirituality focus has really narrowed down to the tip of the vaccine needle, there's been a new type or I would say like a doubling down on a type of direct action protests targeted specifically at health care workers.
You know, through the spring and summer of last year, there were large parts of Toronto here and I think a lot of other cities that had an appointed time where we would go out onto our porches and we would bang pots.
We're not doing that anymore, but the health care workers are getting a lot of attention nonetheless because protesters are showing up to harass them, to hurl insults, to call them murderers.
And I think the first time I saw this really explicitly was from a couple of stories in LA County where you guys are small protest groups harassing outpatients that were coming to cancer appointments, which was just like incredible to think about.
But here in Toronto, I've been following, you know, similar protesters like fellow or I guess ex-fellow that she's kind of moved in circles parallel to me.
She's a yoga teacher and she's the quote-unquote glowing mama life coach.
Her name is Stephanie Sibio.
She is known for ranting and raving outside of vaccine pop-ups.
But it's really, I think it just really sunk in this week enough for me to take a deep breath and really try to consider the question, what is going on with the capacity for people to protest with those optics? what is going on with the capacity for people to Like, how socially reprehensible can this get?
It's like Westboro Baptist Church levels of grotesquerie.
So do you guys have any impression, any thoughts about why folks are opting to express themselves this way when it really doesn't seem like it offers any kind of gateway to real political influence?
Two things come to mind.
First off, in my bonus episode this past Monday on Mickey Willis and him coming after us a bit on Paul Cech's podcast, he constantly, as I was going through hours of him talking, he constantly conflates communism and socialism.
Or he at least doesn't make any distinctions.
It's like, "Communist China, we can't be Communist China, we can't be Karl Marx." And he'll often say it in the same sentence, essentially, and there are completely conflicting ideologies.
So there's that level of ignorance where people just don't really care.
So that's how you get people protesting outside of a cancer clinic about vaccines.
The other thing, I've done this for a long time, but especially since Trump is in office, When I think about some of the topics that we cover, I go back and I think about my childhood and being like, how did we act then?
And there was around 7th, 8th, 9th grade.
Like, if you were a Nirvana fan, did you know them when they released Bleach, or did it only happen after they were on MTV in Nevermind?
This happened with a lot of bands, hip-hop and across the board, and it was this sense of ownership of, I knew them before.
This was mine, and now it's out there everywhere.
And it creates a sense of what I believe is this false oppression that predominantly whites in America are expressing in some ways as a form of LARPing.
They have this sense that something is Taken away from me that I didn't, that I had and now I no longer do it, though I was an OG here and I'm going to yell about it.
And it plays into the ignorance.
They don't actually know what they're talking about, but they'll go out and they're just loud.
And that loudness really came through this week when you look at all of the online social media chatter around the election, Larry Elder releasing the day before saying it was already, you know, doing the Trump and saying it was, It was rigged, thank you.
And the fact that 70% of Californians think Newsom's vaccine mandates are the right way, and I just shared with you guys before we started recording, California right now is the only state in the nation that is no longer in critical level COVID cases.
We've gone down one notch.
And that is because of mask mandates and vaccine mandates that are even more forthcoming.
Most Californians agree with that, but there's so much oxygen given to the lesser percentage of people who are out there on the corners yelling.
And this is where I do agree with people like Mickey Willis and the problems with the media.
We have very different takes on what they are.
Giving so much oxygen.
When I come across a Huffington Post or BuzzFeed article that is just a bunch of tweets by people with 50 followers that are just yelling, I'm like, why are you doing this?
The clickbait aspect of that is really frustrating.
So it's multi-layered, the issue that has created and given so much oxygen to these people protesting.
But overall, I feel like even, Matthew, in your interview with Morgan, They've gotten a little bit of oxygen now and they're going to run with it and they're going to try to get as loud as possible using that breath.
Well, and there's another piece here too to me which just seems like, I think the Westboro Baptist Church is a really good comparison, right?
It's that these people have gotten I think so deeply invested in a counterfactual kind of perception of reality itself and in identifying whole groups of people as being the enemy, like the medical establishment, they're behind vaccine, Big Pharma, Fauci, etc.
Oh, here's a medical place.
Never mind that it's a place where people are getting cancer treatment.
I'm going to make a bunch of noise outside of it because I'm essentially I'm protesting against Quote-unquote mainstream reality or something.
It's this bizarre kind of cult mentality.
And from that place, they don't care about the optics.
They are proud.
They're making a stand for this bizarre set of beliefs.
We have a federal election here, a snap election coming up on Monday, and just last week on the campaign trail, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was actually pelted, assaulted with gravel by a supporter of the People's Party of Canada, I believe.
I don't know if they've arrested the person, but this is Maxime Bernier's party.
It's basically the QAnon Party of Canada.
I understand, this is a strange thing to say, I understand assaulting politicians much more than I understand harassing doctors or cancer patients.
So there's got to be some way in which I can overthink some sense into this because there's something about maybe the heroic status that these workers have been accorded throughout the span of the pandemic.
That really sort of turns them into the most appropriate foil for the crusading real healthcare worker who is the anti-vaxxer, right?
It's not so much about political power as it is about I want to confront my sort of situation.
Psychological doppelganger, the person who thinks they are doing earnest work and they think they're really helping people but I'm actually the one who should be conceived of in that role so maybe they even want to occupy the same space.
Anyway, I want to learn more about it.
I expect to follow up over time.
And I think that, you know, getting real answers about what those protesters want, even if they are a tiny minority, I think there's something there about the structure of conspiracy theory driven behavior that is worth learning about.
You know, and so the people who do this on-the-ground work, trying to figure out what protesters actually think or why they've attended something, there's a lot of good people who are doing that.
There's Doni Sullivan at CNN, there's Julian Travis and Jake at QAnon Anonymous, and Annie Kelly goes to these QAnon protests in the UK, and she engages these fulsome conversations with, you know, women waving Save the Children and, you know, Jordan Klepper, too, at the Daily Show, I would also put in that category.
and she speaks to them like they're real people, and she gets very interesting answers.
Anyway, they've all done this really brave open mic work.
Jordan Klepper, too, at The Daily Show, I would also put in that category.
Although he messes with them a little, but he actually brings out a lot of truth from them.
He messes with them, yeah, I agree.
I think I know who you're talking about.
He messes with them in the sense that he's not disguising his questions at all, and he's not pretending to be a friend.
But his questions are open enough that he is really getting people to say what they feel.
So, the person who does really amazing work, who I've really enjoyed getting to know a little bit on Twitter, is a guy named Morgan Yu.
He's a Toronto resident.
He produces community-based anti-racist video journalism.
He's produced print journalism for the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, so I'll link to that.
And despite COVID disruptions, he has continued to work in the arts in the city.
He facilitates life drawing classes.
You know, music improvisation, and he DJs as well.
He is Chinese, Swiss, and First Nations from Kamloops, BC, and I'm going to introduce you to his work by linking to his Twitter feed because he does these really close and very transparent interviews with protesters just to really sort of illuminate the diversity of views that are actually out there.
So I encourage you to take a tour through the Twitter feed.
So this following conversation that I was able to have with him this week is a little bit brief, but it comes on the heels of a series of hospital protests organized in part by a renegade pseudo healthcare worker group called the Canadian Frontline Nurses.
Now, these are all nurses that have been fired for their anti-science views and their name, Canadian Frontline Nurses kind of echoes the American Frontline Doctors.
There's a lot of frontline.
There's also the frontline COVID care coalition or whatever.
I don't know.
I think if we just filtered front...
Maybe if Twitter filtered the word frontline entirely, they would lose coverage.
Why is it that the doctors actually on the frontline never say that?
Right, right.
That they're not on the front line?
It really goes, it goes to the point you were raising earlier, Matthew, that's like, inhabiting that space, right?
Yeah, they want, they really want to be, they're on the front line of the information war, not the front line of, they're on the front line of reality, actually.
Right.
Anyway, Morgan and I only had 10 minutes to spend in this chat, but we've agreed that it's going to serve as a preview to a more fulsome episode where what I would like to do is put together with him a panel on the complexities of these protest movements with a couple of people from the Anti-Hate Network of Canada and to figure out, you know, who these people are a little bit more and who's really getting harmed the most.
Morgan, you do this really excellent work in recording the on-the-ground realities of COVID protests, and I consider this to be a theme in development for our work here, and I hope that you come back to explore it more fully with us.
But for now, if you can give us a snapshot, These are some of the strangest and saddest phenomenons of the Covid era.
These protests of anti-lockdown and anti-mask sentiments, featuring the harassment of people at vaccine sites and outside hospitals.
You know, if this is a movement that wants political power or visibility, the optics seem to be terrible.
So I'm wondering what you can tell us about how they view this activism.
As very normal.
I think sometimes they actually see it as somehow innovative.
If we think about Abortion protests in years past and compare the two we can see that they're not upset with the way that they're perceived by the public I don't think that Optics are a concern as they as they shift their their narrative into a kind of mainstream of What we would consider to be morally reprehensible, the more that they do it, the more normalized it becomes over time.
Even their messaging becomes something that people become familiar with, I think, subconsciously.
And they begin to adopt some of the rationale that they think is represented in these protests.
An example being that early on in the lockdown protest, which of course have now spiraled into demonstrations at clinics and hospitals, is that the public was largely satisfied with perceiving them as just simply being expressions of population upset with lockdown.
And they chose to largely not see any other dimension of the protest.
Which is why I think that this stuff all seems so surprising the way that it's manifesting now, but it has continuously been not about what it looks like on the surface, and it will continue to be that.
So I think that You know, looking at other sides of what they've been saying from the beginning would help anybody understand that optics are really not a concern.
And if anything, I think that their public optics have actually been improving despite the fact that the hospital protests have been offensive to a large segment of the public.
It has everyone talking about it.
And that still has an effect of spreading their message through the mainstream and gaining some kind of recognition, even if it is a little bit sad for them and hard at times.
You know, like Kristen Nagel from Kenyan Frontline Nurses was crying on stream last night because she felt like she was receiving a lot of negative attention for it and it seemed to be upsetting for her.
But, you know, yeah, they've achieved something.
What are these other aspects of the protest thematics that you feel have been neglected in other reporting?
Well, different kinds of racism that groups experience.
Like in person, I have experienced racism as a identifiable minority.
I appear Asian, and so I often get treated as if I'm from China.
And so, you know, because of Wuhan and COVID, I experienced a lot of pointed questions and allegations about that.
People just simply assume that I'm, let's say, like...
Either pro or anti-communist and that I'm inherently tied somehow to my ethnic heritage.
So yeah, there have been a lot of individuals from groups with historical ties to private organizations such as Proud Boys, Urban Infidels.
Paul Frum has shown up.
He's a noted neo-Nazi.
Obviously you have different personalities such as Chris Guy who's himself a Holocaust denier.
Kevin J. Johnston, who has a two point something million dollar lawsuit against him for making Islamophobic remarks against the owner of Paramount Foods.
There's a variety of people who are fixtures of this movement, and even if they don't show up every single week, they continue to play a large role in where they get, I think, some of the language, where they think their concerns are being addressed, even right now with a gentleman named Pat King out in Calgary.
Who alleges that he has exposed that COVID is not real in a court case, that he evidently doesn't understand himself.
He's losing every single battle, but he keeps portraying himself as being this warrior to his fans who adore him and who don't seem to notice the fact that he has not proved at all that COVID is alive, for example.
Now, going back to this question of the normalization of the optics and how, you know, you're not seeing protesters express any kind of consternation about how they appear, Chris Nagel notwithstanding, and that seems to be a new development, is protesting at hospitals and vaccination sites good for recruitment or is it good for shoring up
I think in the short term, probably not.
I mean, we saw the difference between September 1st and yesterday's protest outside of Toronto General.
And September 1st, I don't know what the numbers were, but it was a very large gathering.
It was enough to take up four lanes of traffic, including opposing traffic.
It was enough to lead a very large march around the city.
But it seems like a lot of people privately must have experienced backlash from delaying cancer patients arriving at their appointments and things like that.
So that yesterday's vigil, pale in comparison.
There was maybe less than 100 people in attendance.
So I think in the short term, it was probably not great for attracting new people to the cause.
But what I saw yesterday was, because they weren't disrupting anything, and once Sarah from Canadian Frontline Nurses showed up, The media scrum around her was enormous.
Every single organization had their cameras and microphones in her face and they asked her some pretty softball questions about, let's say, her work history and
questions about her current state of employment and asked her what the protest was about, which ends up actually, you know, giving them a platform, you know, like I think that maybe media expected it to be to maybe they expected to witness something that was going to be more traumatic to the public than it actually was.
It ended up being a very tame kind of protest compared to protests in the past.
They did achieve something yesterday, I think, by getting all that attention and all those questions and all that national coverage, which, honestly, the movement has been wanting for months.
So maybe sometimes the bad press has been good press for them.
And so them crossing lines and raising big questions to the public, Like, whether or not these are good forms of protest, I think that it did end up having a net result that they wanted, which was national media attention, which they simply haven't been getting.
It's a bizarre dynamic where a kind of softer approach, where they're not obstructing entrances and perhaps they're taming their language a little bit, Probably provokes this kind of softball media environment, so why are you here anyway?
Which in turn gives them more platforming to actually express their views than they had before.
What a bizarre circumstance, yeah.
Yeah, and I don't know if that was a planned strategy or not.
It might have just worked out in their favor.
Because the truth is, I don't think that they ever really know when the media's gonna show up.
But from conversations I've had with professionals, it does sound like the media reacts to extremes when it comes to protest movements.
And so the way that they went out and blocked traffic last time did capture attention.
And I guess it was incumbent on media to send people out to investigate what the follow-up was going to be.
And I really don't think that they could have anticipated media attention, just because they don't ever get it.
They almost never get it.
Or when they do get it, it's usually a camera that's 50 feet away, it's across the street, or it's an aerial view.
It's not often that the protest leaders themselves have access to the opportunity to speak directly to media.
And that's what's kind of unique about what you do, because you tend to get people on camera and then feed that footage to Twitter.
And you're asking very open-ended, and I would say not necessarily empathetic, but just transparent questions about, you know, why are you here and what do you believe?
And I think that it brings up this question of You know, how to appropriately respond, not just as media figures, but as human beings.
Because on one hand, you know, it's hard to imagine anything more chaotic and disrespectful than a hospital protest, but on the other, expressing disgust or sensationalizing or shaming protesters is likely to backfire.
So, how do you see this going from here on out?
Well, you know, a couple months ago, I thought that the protests were dying down.
I thought that their numbers were flagging.
It looked to me like major leaders were all shifting their grifts to private enterprises and people were moving away out of different cities where they were previously located.
Some personalities were on tour.
It didn't really look like they had a home base anymore.
You know, what ends up happening is local movements will start to lose some of their steam when they don't have a nucleus to center around.
Because there are a lot of fights that take place on the inside of all of their organizational teams, which I think is kind of like a prelude to Where these protests are likely to go, which is that as numbers ultimately do end up in the future flagging, there will be breaks.
There are already schisms that have taken place, and there are different factions.
You know, people sort of seek each other out, and even if they are willing to stand with 2,000 other people, that doesn't mean that they're all friends, you know?
So even if they have common cause, They ultimately will end up breaking off into sort of subgroups.
What that leaves opportunity for is entryism into extremism, because there are, as I said, like different hate groups that are kind of trolling the margins.
But even then, that being said, I admit, like in my coverage, I haven't seen some of those groups since, let's say May, for example.
But those groups also, I noticed they tend to show up when they think the numbers are going to be The highest.
And I think that they probably assume that no one's going to pay attention to them.
But because of some of the work that I've done, I am in search of those people.
I do try to isolate them and I try to ask them questions.
So we'll turn now to my interview with Dr. Izzy Smith.
As I mentioned earlier, I talked to her on August 20th when a new Australian lockdown had been introduced due to Delta, and anti-vax, anti-lockdown protests were making headlines there, along with the newly emerging concern trolling about authoritarianism largely from American right-wing outlets.
Australia's vaccination rates were very low at that time, and I wanted to know what was going on.
So, I thought I'd ask this doctor, with a strong anti-conspiracy theory presence on social media, to tell us.
My guest today is Dr. Izzy Smith.
Welcome, Doctor.
Thank you so much.
I've been a fan of the podcast for a while, so I'm very excited to now be a guest.
It's great to have you on.
I've been following what you're doing on social media, so it's a pleasure.
Dr. Izzy Smith is an Australian-based endocrinology doctor with a passion for sharing health advice that is easy to digest.
She's promoting evidence-based advice on exercise, nutrition, and medicine, whilst busting silly health myths by calling out some of the dangerous fads in the wellness and weight loss industry.
Izzy is also the co-host of the Mental Health Podcast, Behind the Uniform Podcast.
You can find out more about her work at drizysmith.com.
So there's your blurb.
Hi, it's so great to have you here.
Thanks for making time.
Because of the many pseudoscience influencers that we cover, as you know, at Conspirituality, and the way that they claim to be experts and even beyond experts, right?
They have knowledge that the mainstream experts won't tell you.
I have to say, it was really refreshing when we first connected that you wanted to make it really clear to me that you don't consider yourself an expert.
Because you've only been a doctor for a mere seven years and you're still in the process of getting double certified in endocrinology and internal medicine.
I'd just love to hear, as we're starting here, more about what you do, where you are in Australia.
Yeah, so I grew up on a little island, Tasmania, that was made famous from the Looney Tunes and the Tazzy Devil.
And that's where I did my medical school and then I lived in Melbourne and Sydney.
And doing, as you said, my dual training in endocrinology and general medicine.
I had a bit of a curvy pathway.
I wanted to be a blood cancer specialist initially.
My own dad died of lymphoma when I was quite young.
And coming from a non-medical background, that was probably my first taste of the misinformation around health and also what People will do when they are desperate and I've seen that in my own personal family and then also in my career when I was working in hematology.
I think I found that, to be honest, a bit too sad and depressing and I also have such a passion for physical activity and preventative health.
Yeah.
And that's how I ended up doing endocrinology, which is, you know, a lot of diabetes, thyroid disease, polycystic ovarian syndrome, And a few years ago, coming from a non-medical family and also most of my friends being non-medical, I really saw how difficult it is for people, you know, smart, reasonable people to navigate what is fact versus fiction when there's so much conflicting advice.
And I saw all the people capitalizing on this confusion, you know, the influences, the I've got friends who are yoga teachers, who own smoothie bars, who are great people, but how that was for those people in those worlds, how hard it was.
And I started this Instagram page just so I could provide unbiased information that was easy for people to understand because we are seeing in this conspiracy wellness world, people Overly making things so complicated to sound educated and make them seem like experts and it's so hard what to know.
And then I used to love just talking about hormones and all the rubbish I see of, you know, hormone coaches.
But unfortunately, with COVID happening, I have had far too much content than I would ever like to cover on Miss Busting.
Yeah, well, you do a great job on your page.
I'm curious where you would situate yourself on the spectrum of a kind of integrative or holistic approach to medicine.
It's funny how we have this dichotomy between Holistic medicine and mainstream medicine.
All doctors should be practicing holistically.
Holistically doesn't mean, you know, aligning your chakras and using crystals.
Holistic to me is treating the person as a whole person and what their individual needs and wants are.
And maybe you could say in the mainstream medical model, I am quite holistic, especially with my interest in mental health.
I understand that there is no point giving someone a treatment management plan if they don't trust you, they don't understand why it's important and you aren't on the same page as the doctor and patient.
And I've understood this from my own experiences.
I actually got into medicine because I developed a chronic kidney disease and I had some good and bad experiences with the healthcare system.
So I think I would put myself On that spectrum, quite holistic.
And I also identify that even though I think Reiki therapy or acupuncture doesn't have a scientific evidence base, people feel good from it and people benefit from it because of the relationship between the practitioner and them.
And I'm not going to say that if that makes you feel good, you leave walking out, you know, feeling like you're cared for and looked after, that that doesn't have some therapeutic benefit.
What I don't like is all the false claims behind that it can decrease your cancer or do all these other things.
So I'm open minded in the benefit that those types of treatments can offer people from a more spiritual, psychosocial perspective, but then pretty evidence based when it comes to saying Making a claim and what it can do to help someone's physical health.
That's crystal clear.
And I'm very, very aligned with you with regard to that.
You know, one of the things that made me want to talk with you is that you do take quite a strong stand on social media against misinformation and conspiracy theories.
I especially noticed you posting about the COVID-19 vaccines in relation to pregnancy and fertility.
As well as correcting conspiracy theorist misinterpretations.
This was actually like a really interesting post you had.
Correcting the misinterpretation of new PCR testing methods and some of the stuff that had come out about that.
As well as your own frustration about anti-vax protests and the peddling of fake cures.
So this is like just scrolling through your Instagram.
I was like, wow, one post after another.
And I'm sure they take some time to put together.
What's the story there?
What do you want to talk about with regard to that stuff?
We'll start off with the PCR claim.
And I also have the benefit that my partner is a molecular biologist and a lecturer, a PhD supervisor in this field.
So I've got a pretty good person to run things off as well with the misinformation in that space.
There was the CDC announced that they were going to change their PCR testing for COVID so that they could use a multiplex panel and that's something we've been using in medicine for ages.
Someone comes in with a cough or a cold, we do a multiplex panel PCR, we see do they have influenza A, do they have Adenovirus is their rhinovirus, melanomavirus and we can test all of those common respiratory pathogens in one swab.
And the CDC announced we're going to replace the COVID swabs with a multiplex respiratory panel that now includes COVID.
So it's saying COVID is just becoming part of that standard respiratory symptom swab we do.
And this was then interpreted as the COVID test can't tell the difference between the influenza and the COVID.
So it's just a big scam.
All these people that have had COVID actually had influenza.
Yeah.
So it's inflated the COVID numbers, right?
Yes.
Which I actually said would be scarier because if half the people who had been diagnosed with COVID had influenza, That would mean that the mortality rate of COVID is actually much higher.
Right.
But I think it doesn't, the facts about it don't really matter that much.
What it really demonstrated is that, you know, anyone with a scientific background that uses PCR, that works in hospitals and does these swabs, could see in a minute, or not even a minute, you know, five seconds, that this is nothing.
This isn't even a conspiracy.
This is just, you know, changing a test.
But this was inflated and, you know, all these social medias, there was articles saying, look at this, this conspiracy has been wrong all the time.
Um, you know, this is this big lie and people were believing it and it was, you know, so ridiculous.
It wasn't even, you know, complicated science-y words that if someone didn't understand they could think it was maybe legitimate.
Something that was announced by the CDC that was, you know, really nothing to do with Whether COVID is real or not, just a different way of testing, blew up.
And it just shows how easy things that have no scientific merit, people with, you know, out of that scientific background or, you know, working in these fields can make any claims.
And they really do just have so much power.
They spread like wildfire.
And examples like that demonstrate how important it is for scientific literacy to be shared on social media by people like myself.
And I really think government organisations need to do a better job of improving scientific literacy and having, you know, Trying to dismiss these myths because they do, they spread so quickly.
So that was one example.
And then the other one is fertility in women's health, which as an endocrinologist, I work with polycystic ovarian syndrome, often infertility.
I also do a lot of work with gestational diabetes.
And I had been talking about women's health myths far before COVID.
And I think women Women are particularly sensitive to conspiracy theories because medicine has had a history of being very male-centric.
The research studies have been typically on men, the doctors have been particularly males, and so women for centuries have felt disenfranchised, not listened to by the medical system.
And now a pushback to this is With this conspiracy and misinformation about women's health, essentially people are seeing that there's this opportunity to take advantage of the fact that women have felt disenfranchised by the medical system by then, you know, profiting.
You know, look at Goop.
That's a perfect example.
Yeah.
They've seen that women have felt disenfranchised by the medical system and they are taking, you know, advantage of that.
And classically, also some health conditions that are more female predominant, autoimmune diseases are an example, don't have as good treatments.
Polycystic ovarian syndrome, endometriosis, they're so common and they haven't had enough funding.
So I think women are particularly good targets when it comes to misinformation.
And I think even sensible people can see some myths and know that's, you know, that's bullshit and that's rubbish.
but our fertility is just so precious and so important.
And I've had friends who are pregnant, who work in health, who are even worried about getting the COVID vaccine because, you know, it's the most sacred thing, you know, having a child.
And I think that's such a sensitive, important topic that even very reasonable Absolutely, because it's so vulnerable and it's so sacred and so mysterious, right?
You're dealing with something that's so of the essence.
I think, and correct me if I'm wrong in this, but I think especially for women.
That there's just a vulnerability, especially if various conditions, as you're saying, have historically not been researched sufficiently, not been dealt with well within the medical establishment.
So there's a legacy of people seeking help outside of medical science and maybe even finding some help outside of medical science.
And I think we cannot slam wellness world and health coaches and naturopaths if we don't discuss why are people feeling that this is their best option in the first place.
And in Australia, we have a predominantly public healthcare system, which is good because it means people will never go without cancer treatment, insulin for their type 1 diabetes.
However, conditions like polycystic ovarian syndrome, endometriosis that may be disabling but not fatal, They're not looked after very well.
A patient goes in for a five minute appointment and they get a script and told, like the PCOS, they're put on the pill and said, you know, come back if you want to have a baby.
And so women feel that their issues aren't cared about or looked after.
And so of course they're going to look for better care and better treatment.
And I think if we look at what the wellness world does so well is that they make people feel important and cared for and they also give them hope.
And whether that hope is false or not, that's something that the medical industry needs to learn from the wellness world because science and medicine is absolutely amazing.
It blows me away what we can do, but we're letting ourselves down with the delivery and the communication and the people skills.
Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more.
The bedside manner, the environmental cues, the spending time with someone in a way where they feel cared for and they feel really heard.
I think it's become something that is not well included in conventional medicine.
And in a way, I understand why, right?
Because you have limited time and you're trying to do everything in a very kind of precise fashion.
We put blame on individual doctors, but it's the system.
I have a morning clinic and I get 15 minutes with each of my reviews where I need to examine the patient, look at their bloods, write a letter, give them scripts, give them the next blood test forms.
I can either run two hours late or not give any you know, care and nurturing to my patients.
I usually end up running two hours late, which means I end up getting home very late and my family life suffers.
But it's, you know, system issues and we need to put more time into preventative care.
So yeah, I think we've had in the last, and there's been a cultural shift as well of, you know, standing up to authority, which I think definitely has benefits.
And And combined with that women feeling disenfranchised by the healthcare system, it has just been this perfect environment for misinformation and conspiracies.
And that's why As someone like me, who has been the patient and also had family members being the patient, I'm so passionate about not losing people to those conspiracies and the poor health care in the alternative health world, rather than getting, you know, good treatment they need, whether that's cancer treatment, fertility treatment, vaccines for COVID.
And that's why I started my page.
And it's, you know, a very small community in the scheme of things.
But if I can help a few thousand people, that to me is quite powerful.
I was going to ask you, and you've sort of touched on it already, but if there were factors already in place pre-pandemic, specifically in Australia, in terms of pseudoscience beliefs about health and wellness, I mean, you've touched on it to some extent about, specifically from a women's point of view, and then some of the stuff about, you know, that we see all over the world about political freedom and feeling like quarantine and vaccines are sort of, You know, ushering in some kind of tyranny.
Was that sort of stuff already brewing in Australia, do you think?
I think it's been probably brewing all around the world.
If we look at, we're in an age of anti-experts.
Look at Trump getting elected and people wanting to vote for politicians who aren't politicians and people wanting to get health advice from people that aren't experts.
I think that has been brewing in developed countries across the world in an age of climate science.
Climate change is another example of dismissing experts if the information they're presenting doesn't agree with the life that we want to live.
So I think there has been for quite some time an age of dismissing experts.
And then, as we are also seeing in Australia and in the younger generation, and we've got young nieces and nephews and it's been quite interesting to see their opinion about the pandemic as this next generation of teenagers of, you know, individual rights and Almost being able to make your own reality based on what suits you.
And I think there's definitely benefits of younger people, you know, not, you know, climate change is another example that we're seeing younger people go, no, I'm not happy with the government and what they're doing.
And I'm going to use my power as an individual.
So it's definitely got benefits because, you know, they're going to be the generation that really is impacted by climate change, but then it goes, um, As we are also seeing with COVID vaccines in young people now, there's lots of people that, you know, and like I say, we've got family members, I'm a doctor, I work in this and regardless of what I say, you know, they're like, no, I'm sticking to my, you know, my morals and my views and this is what I'm going with.
And I think we've also had an age where people's Beliefs and opinions are given so much weight when it's an offensive thing to say, your opinion doesn't matter.
And that shouldn't be a rude thing.
If I walked into a physiotherapist and said, well, my opinion is this is how you should hamstring or rehab a hamstring.
My opinion doesn't matter.
But we're getting to this age that it's offensive to even say to someone, your opinion doesn't matter.
And that shouldn't be rude because we all, you know, are experts in our own things.
Yeah, it's an interesting confluence of things that you're describing, right?
One is the anti-expert mentality.
Another is sort of social media influence and people claiming to be experts when they're not really.
And then the third is this sort of sense that in a way everyone feels entitled to create their own reality and have their own opinion and it shouldn't be criticized because that's oppressive or offensive or something.
I think there's pros and cons to both.
And I guess we're seeing it.
We're seeing the cons unfold, but we're also seeing the benefits.
Yeah.
With climate change.
I think that's the best example I can come across is that this new generation of our individual rights and opinions and, you know, not agreeing with experts And something I've been trying to explain to people is that even though I work for the government, I do not represent the government as doctors.
You know, Australia has a, to be honest, an abysmal climate change policy.
Doctors have been rallying against climate change for decades.
We've also been rallying for better rights for refugees and asylum seekers.
Australia also has a completely shameful refugee policy.
We lock people up in hotels for, you know, up to a decade.
And that's something I've been wanting to communicate that as a doctor and a health organisation, I do not work for the government.
I do not represent the government views and doctors have been, you know, stepping up against the government for other issues.
But at this time, you know, in a health space, we are, you know, doing what, you know, we're working with the government very well because it's such a critical situation.
And so I guess we have an age of, yes, Pushing back against government.
And I've been wanting to make it clear that health is not, you know, is not the same as government organizations.
One of the interesting things is that you are having, you are having protests.
I mean, it seems like up until now, part of why I was really curious to talk to someone on the ground there is that Australia has been spared the worst of the pandemic.
When I checked on August 9th, you had 36,000 total cases.
I think it's up to about 42,000 now, so that's significant, but still under 1,000 deaths.
Delta variants is definitely having an impact, but the worrying data point is you have less than 20% of the population fully vaccinated.
It's kind of scary.
What do you think has driven the low uptake of vaccines?
And do you see what's happening with the Delta variant maybe changing people's minds on that?
Yes, it's definitely an interesting time in Australia when it comes to COVID.
So, essentially our government took a gamble on the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is the adenovirus-based vaccine that has been associated with the rare clotting syndrome.
And we also had some Pfizer vaccine as well.
When the evidence came that it was associated with this clotting syndrome, the government advice was people under 50 should now get the AstraZeneca.
Then there was a couple more deaths.
I think there's been in total seven deaths in Australia from the AstraZeneca vaccine.
That's after six million doses that have been administered.
But we didn't have enough Pfizer vaccine to reach the rest of the population.
So the advice was initially, if you're under 60, wait for Pfizer.
And then we had the Delta strain come.
So it was very hard for young people because then they were told, no, go get the AstraZeneca vaccine.
So the advice changed.
And I can understand why there was not a good take up of the AstraZeneca because a month earlier, there was medical organizations on television saying, Don't get AZ.
And as a doctor, it's interesting.
It's been very politicised and all politicians are saying, you know, go and get AstraZeneca.
However, there's places like where I'm from, Tasmania, which is an island state, has pretty much closed their borders.
They don't have any COVID.
And it's harder as a doctor for me to say, You should get the AstraZeneca when I know there is a safer option.
There's Pfizer.
And, you know, in any other situation, if a patient came into my room and I had two treatment options with the same efficacy, if one was more safe, of course I would go with the safe option.
So I think that has been a dilemma that doctors and, you know, health practitioners have had in Australia and trying to weigh up the benefits of someone getting COVID and then their risk of having a bad outcome.
But now with the Delta strain, We are seeing a, you know, a much bigger uptake of vaccination with both vaccines.
I think we're, I think around coming up to close to 50% of the population having had one dose.
And we've had, you know, Pfizer vaccine and Moderna is now available as well.
But we are having those bloody protests and it's just so frustrating because so many people, we are still, our government has taken a very hardline approach.
And we are aiming for, you know, as minimal deaths as possible.
So businesses have been in lockdown for, you know, months.
Melbourne, city where a lot of my family are from, have been in lockdown, hard lockdown for over 200 days.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that because it seemed like toward the end of July from over here, we were sort of aware that it was getting a little heated with the protests.
And I guess these were predominantly anti-lockdown or were they also anti-vaccine protests?
anti-mask, anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine protests, this, you know, these, you know, the oppression and their rights to freedom.
It's funny, I was discussing with my partner the other night that our rights are actually something we have created by the government, which is from being a society's So these rights are these things we have created.
They don't actually exist unless you are part of a society with a government to oversee those rights.
So you can't really protest against your rights being Um, you know, impacted if you're not following the rules of the government and a society because you can't have them separated.
That's kind of the social contract, right?
Yeah.
And, um, the protests have been in the major cities and it's, so I'm quite involved in the fitness and running and fitness world.
And I'm, I do rope climbing of all thing with a bunch of guys in Sydney and we're part of an Instagram group.
And one of them shared a link to the protest.
And it's hard, you've got friends, I'm, not all my friends are doctors and there's this, you know, it's very divisive amongst this group and they've shared, I had a look and this person is, you know, QAnon, she's saying the government is run by pedophiles and they're the type of people that are leading these protests and it's sad because in some way, you know, there's people that haven't been able to work for months at a time, their kids haven't been able to go to childcare, people are really suffering from these lockdowns and
It's a very complex ethical question, and I don't have the answer of what is the right thing.
And our government has gone with a direction of, you know, limiting the most amount of deaths as possible, which I think is the right decision.
However, you can't ignore that many people are suffering.
And I'm sure some of these people that protest are, you know, can't have their mortgage repayments.
Their kids are trying to be homeschooled.
We've seen increased rates of domestic violence, young people presenting with self-harm, suicide ideation.
So you can't ignore the impact that the lockdowns are having.
But the reality is the majority of these people are at lockdowns are from places in Queensland, which haven't had COVID, haven't had lockdowns.
And it is this kind of wellness I think you made a post or a podcast called Wellness Porn and I really like that.
It's that group.
We have a big group of anti-vaxxers in an area called Byron Bay.
They've had outbursts of measles and it is wealthy, white, privileged people that will have excellent access to healthcare.
They're the ones that are leading these protests.
Yeah.
Byron Bay is a real hub for a lot of spirituality type.
Yeah.
Now in response to that, you know, we hear people over here pointing to Australia and saying, oh my God, look at what they're doing because apparently the military has been out on the street enforcing the lockdowns.
What can you tell us about that?
That is true.
We had helicopters circling around the city in Melbourne last year.
So my partner and I actually got separated for five months last year.
He was in Melbourne and I was working in Sydney.
And it was like, oh, there's a lockdown for four weeks.
Oh, I'll see you in four weeks.
And I was like, oh, I'll see you in two months.
And then it was like, oh my goodness, is this ever going to end?
But there were curfews.
There was helicopters circling around the city.
And my partner, Paul, said it was Terrifying.
And you'd walk down the street and people wouldn't make eye contact because you're all wearing masks.
Yeah, really.
And I think Melbourne is still impacted by that very hard lockdown.
And as I said, you know, I support the lockdowns.
I think our hospital healthcare system would not have kept up.
You know, we've seen in America one in 500 people have died.
It would have been absolutely devastating.
I work in hospitals.
It is hard enough to find an ICU bed for patients of the best of times, let alone if half of them were taken up for COVID beds.
And I think this is where this dichotomy has come that It's either from the lockdown protesters and the anti-mask and the anti-vaccines as if it's either COVID is serious and bad and, you know, we shall be in lockdown versus this is devastating, it's bad for our economy.
And it's not this dichotomy that it's one or the other.
COVID has been devastating across so many levels to, you know, the young children that can't go to school, the families separated, the people, millions of people that have died.
So I really tried to, in my social media and in my own personal community, talk about we can't have this separation of it's one or the other.
Yeah, I mean it raises so many interesting questions and I totally hear what you're saying in terms of it's all one big catastrophe that's happening and it's all legitimate, like the lockdowns are really, really hard and COVID is really hard.
It sounds like, on the one hand, that very strict lockdown approach is part of what has kept your numbers down so low, but it also sounds like it's been somewhat necessitated by a lack of access to vaccines, which underlines how incredibly privileged we are here that we have vaccine going to waste, right?
There's been such frustration from young people because there's this advertising, go and get vaccinated, and then they call up clinics wanting to be vaccinated and they can't You know, get the shot.
And so that is putting people in this bind.
And you're right.
This is why we have been in these extended lockdowns.
The government took a gamble on AstraZeneca.
Then when the clots came, you know, we made the decision we weren't going to take that risk, which unlike the UK, the UK just kept using AstraZeneca.
And I'm not saying one is right or wrong.
If we let, you know, if AstraZeneca has obviously saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives, But our government made the decision we weren't going to accept that risk.
And now we are in, you know, the outcome of that, which we don't have enough Pfizer vaccine.
We're trying to get Moderna.
People are desperate to get vaccinated.
You know, I've had so many of my friends and family say, is there any way?
And I've even got, I can't go into too much details for patient privacy, but I have A pregnant lady who is immunocompromised and I had a big discussion with her about the vaccination and she was worried.
She'd been reading the myths about miscarriage and impaired fertility and I had a big discussion with her and I was empathetic of her concerns and she's contacted me saying she wants to get vaccinated but she can't get one for another two months.
And we are now having outbreaks in my city and someone who is pregnant and immunocompromised can't get access to a vaccine?
It's just unbelievable.
Terrible situation and it's a weird irony too because my impression is that That the healthcare system such as it is in the United States is actually a lot worse, a lot less humane, a lot less sort of socially responsible than what you have in Australia.
Is that your perception?
Like, how do you think about the difference?
Yeah, when I first, I guess, learned about the American healthcare system, especially as an endocrine doctor working with people with type 1 diabetes, I was horrified that people needed insurance.
Like that's something in Australia.
We have a very big public health care system.
We have something called Medicare and You don't need insurance, essentially, for excellent healthcare.
And I've had my own family, my sister have babies, cancer treatments, all in public hospital.
And then we have a scheme called the PBS, which is a pharmaceutical benefit scheme, where the government does deals with drug companies to get medications at a guaranteed price.
You'll pay the same medication in America double what you'll pay in Australia because it means that we can't access as many medications at a cheap price.
But, you know, we know I guess it's an interesting discussion about pharmaceutical companies.
But I'll just go back to what you said about healthcare.
In Australia, we do have, I think, one of probably the best healthcare systems if you're really unwell.
No one will ever die if they can't afford healthcare.
And people, if they've got type 1 diabetes, their insulin will cost them $6 a month or $6 a script.
So people will never die due to not being, you know, financially not having health care insurance.
And just talking about drug companies, I can see why in America it would be a perfect recipe for conspiracies about pharmaceutical companies because They can charge whatever they want and, you know, insurance at cost.
People die because they can't access medications.
Whereas in Australia, yes, the government pays for all medications at a reduced price that they make a deal with the drug companies.
And yet, shortage of vaccines, right?
Yeah, and it has pros and cons.
The cons are maybe the standard of health care in America might be better.
Because of, you know, insurance, and I've had people like me who have good jobs, who work over there, and they say, oh, the healthcare system's great.
But if you're poor, it's shit, and you can die because you can't access, you know, life-saving World Health Organization, you know, important list of medications.
But it does come at a cost, and it is public.
So the government needs to pay for everything.
And, you know, for example, actually, I was waiting for a colonoscopy a while ago.
And in the public healthcare system, I would have had to have waited six months because, you know, and I had some really worrying symptoms.
So people that can't afford, you know, it has pros and cons, the public system, but I definitely think it looks after people that are socially disadvantaged.
And with the vaccines with our country, you know, I think they really, they made the wrong gamble.
And we're seeing the result of it now.
Yeah.
Pretty crappy government messaging about vaccine safety as well.
I know that Australia is fourth in the world behind the USA, UK and Canada in terms of allegiance to QAnon, which I find really fascinating.
For a second I was like, are we talking about the Olympics and how many gold medals?
I thought Australia came fifth and what about that like Russian, you know, organization?
Yeah it's amazing when you look into conspiracy theories when some of them are just so mad and it makes you realize how atrocities and things have happened you know cults or you know World War II, in the Nazi era, you think, how could people have been so deluded and done such horrific things?
And then you see how conspiracy theories and how easy it is to brainwash people.
And it makes you realize the power of propaganda.
This person I told you about, as I said I'm very involved in the health and fitness industry.
I used to work as an aerobics instructor and this person in my rope climbing group sharing a QAnon, you know, person sharing QAnon information about how we're run by a pedophile cult and this is something I have no exposure or experience to until this, you know, message in my kind of fitness group.
I guess it's probably come from the States and, you know, the people that invented the internet, they invented it to share knowledge and information.
And, you know, there's been interviews with the people that, you know, invented Google and they said, we never realised that this would be a platform for any type of conspiracies, hatefulness, misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism.
someone has some funny ideas that, you know, they're angry, someone's done something wrong to them, then you can go online and you can have a whole community back you up and make those views feel justified.
And I think when we look at whether it's the anti-vaccines or QAnon, it demonstrates how people, they need to feel part of something.
And they need a community.
And that's, you know, religion and sport.
You know, I'm not personally religious, but I'm very involved in sport.
It gives me purpose.
It makes me feel part of something.
I'm accepted by my peers.
And I think we can really see some parallels with The anti-vaccine movement and also people are feeling powerful and maybe people that in a traditional sense in our society wouldn't have the opportunity to have power and have power over other people.
Very easily you can share some ideas and share some Facebook posts and then you have this sense of authority and power and that It feels great.
You know, I'm a doctor.
I know that when I sell people I'm a doctor and they go, oh wow.
And they're, you know, impressed by it.
Yeah.
It feels good, you know, and I've worked 15 years to get that.
And I don't necessarily think it's valid.
I could have been a personal trainer and that probably would have paid me more and been more rewarding.
But, you know, there is something nice about being respected by other people and being part of the community.
And I think How so many young vulnerable people are so easily swayed to these QAnons, the anti-vaccine groups.
It demonstrates that as a society, we're so individualised that we are letting, you know, we're not looking after and nurturing people in communities that they are then going towards QAnon, racism, misogyny, other dangerous ideas because then they're part of something.
Absolutely.
I'm curious, In terms of your awareness of it, because it sounds like you maybe weren't paying a lot of attention to it, and perhaps until fairly recently, but do you have a sense of who the biggest conspiracy theory kind of influences are there?
Is it stuff that comes straight from the U.S.?
Like, you know, Alex Jones, although, you know, he's on his own kind of weird trip and has sort of disavowed some of the QAnon stuff at this point, but people like David Icke, Is it anti-vax proponents like Joseph Mercola or Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
or Christiane Northrup that we talk about who you probably have some opinions about?
Or is it more of like the homegrown stuff like someone like Pete Evans or Malcolm George?
It's interesting because this is something I've obviously paid a lot more attention to.
I think in some ways it's the Pete Evans and this appeal to nature and this Mixing of spirituality which really upsets me because I think some spirituality and I come from You know, a family that was very, you know, very left wing.
My dad was protested against, you know, was arrested for protesting against, you know, forestation in Tasmania.
So I actually come from this hippie kind of spiritual background.
Yeah.
And it really upsets me that this, which I think has lots of benefits and is an important part of our society, that then this is being mixed with this anti-public health.
And anti-authority ideas.
But it's very much, to me, very female-centred.
Young mums and lots of the footballers and rugby players, wives and girlfriends.
And then we're actually seeing some politicians.
There's a far-right political party in Australia called One Nation.
And It's, what's his name?
Robert someone.
And he's been sharing, you know, QAnon ideas and far-right ideas by people like the, you know, Robert F. Kennedy.
So you're seeing it being mainstreamed in a political sense?
These parties are not mainstream.
Okay, okay.
But they have elected people.
Queensland is classically a very right-wing state.
My mum is from Queensland and what does she say?
What's the difference between Queensland and yoghurt?
And she says, Queensland, yoghurt has culture.
Yes.
So it's very right and very right wing.
Yeah.
And there's some of their political leaders.
And the irony is that people, you know, they're anti-climate change, anti, you know, asylum seeker refugees and now anti, you know, COVID and vaccination and lockdowns.
The irony is that we're seeing all these spiritual, wellness, nature-loving, you know, mamas Then share these far-right political people's Instagram posts who, you know, 20 posts before they were saying climate change is a hoax and these conflicts of ideas.
So yes, from what I see, it is more the local leaders in Australia of the football wags, the naturopaths, and they might be then getting their inspiration from overseas.
You know, they're Robert F. Kennedy's.
And then the other side is the kind of far-right politicians.
Yeah, yeah.
And so even though they're not dominating mainstream politics, nonetheless, they're sitting in, what do you have, a House of Representatives or a Parliament?
We have an upper and a lower house, yes.
So they're usually Senate positions, which is the upper house.
And that means they're elected for a longer period of time.
But yeah, they voted in and they're here for six years and it's just unbelievable, these politicians that, you know, you see that the stuff that they're saying is just utter bullshit.
And it calls to authority in the same way we're seeing Doctors or scientists that have shared conspiracy information, there's an authority bias, and it's the same with politicians.
Yeah.
And it's really sad because we have a right, our right-wing party is in power at the moment, but they don't have a majority, so they actually rely on the support of those smaller right-wing parties, with the One Nation and also the National Party.
And so it means that the Liberal government, which is our government in power at the moment, hasn't really openly condemned them because they rely on them to get bills through Parliament.
And because we have a very different political system to the states that we don't vote for our Prime Minister or our President.
We vote for our local leader in our electorate.
And then whoever has the most electorates won by the party They then elect the head, which is the Prime Minister.
So it means I might vote for my local Liberal, which is the right-wing leader in my own electorate, but that's not who I'm actually voting for as the Prime Minister.
So they rely on the support of the smaller parties to get bills through.
And I think that's why, yeah, there hasn't been openly condemning of some of the really just utter incorrect misinformation that's being shared by some of these politicians.
Well, shifting gears and probably in a most welcome way for you and for our listeners, I noticed that mental health is something that you focus on in your profession, your culture, as well as in relationship to the pandemic.
It's the emphasis of your podcast.
Tell us a little bit about that.
I am a ambassador for the Movember charity, which is the men's health charity.
My dad died when I was quite young and I started raising money in memory of him.
You might be able to see I have a tattoo on my finger of a mustache.
This podcast doesn't have video, but I have a little mustache on my finger.
I actually got that tattoo in, I was in New York in 2019 for the New York marathon and It's funny, that's obviously the last overseas trip I did.
But yeah, so I've been very involved with Movember for 10 years and initially it was all about, you know, I was younger back then, I was in my early 20s, I didn't know much about the world, you know, physical health.
And then as I got older, I realised that our mental health And our cultures that make men not go to the doctor and have things checked up.
It's actually their mental health and the cultural attitudes of what is masculine and manly that is, you know, causing the bad physical health.
And I have got quite involved in the mental health space.
And also as a doctor, our conditions probably aren't as bad as it is in the States with residency and working 90 hours a week.
But they're not that much worse.
And likewise to Australia, we have tragically quite high rates of physician suicide and suiciding medical students.
And that is something I really wanted to talk about more.
And, you know, for my own mental health and well-being, I really had to learn I had to learn how to look after my well-being and that wasn't something that was taught to me in medical school or when I was young.
And I started making a podcast with one of the other Movember ambassadors who is in the army and the idea was behind the uniform, he wears an army uniform, I wear a doctor uniform.
And we've interviewed lots of amazing people in Australia in the mental health space.
We've got an interview tomorrow with the global head of Mental health and suicide prevention for Movember.
And it's been interesting having a background in the mental health space during the pandemic because some people that I have worked with for Movember or Lululemon, I've seen share misinformation about the vaccine.
And most people in the mental health space are people that have had their own periods of poor mental health.
Periods of maybe feeling that What society makes us feel like we should be wanting to do and how we should be behaving didn't feel right for us.
I know for me as a doctor, I had to have a year off at one point just because my own mental health was, you know, really badly impacted.
And I wonder if people that have had that feeling of not belonging in society And their mental health being impacted and then swayed to not wanting to follow government advice, not wanting to go along with the norm.
And I've seen a lot of people in the mental health space say, you know, I've always liked, you know, being different.
I've always liked pushing the boundaries of what was expected of me.
And I think some great people in the mental health space do do that.
Look at females and weight.
All women for decades have been made to feel like they need to be really skinny and diet.
And a few amazing people have said, you know, fuck that.
I'm not going to do that.
Or I'm not going to work this nine to nine p.m.
job that I hate.
And that has been in the mental health space, but that's now carrying into health.
And I'm not going to do what the government says and I'm not going to Be told what I should be doing in my life.
That's been an interesting observation for me and one that has made me quite sad because I think mental health is such an important topic but this is a minority but I think it goes back to what we talked about of belonging and being part of something and often when our mental health isn't good we don't have that, we don't feel like purpose, we don't feel belonging and community and part of something and the anti-vaccine and conspiracy world
Is very good at making people feel like they belong and they're part of something and they have purpose.
Yeah.
And I can only imagine, I mean, if, if it's hard for, for people who are providing medical services for others to practice good self care under the best of conditions during the pandemic, I'm sure that, uh, that that's only gotten much worse and much more difficult.
So I'm really glad that you're, that you're doing that work.
Thank you.
When I think about my role and what I'm meant to do in my life, I think being a doctor is just one part of me and mental health and health advocacy is just as important and something that I also think the mainstream medical world needs to recognise that we can't treat someone's physical health without treating their mental health.
They're not separate identities, you know, they go together.
Yeah.
And then the people behind the uniform also need those kinds of resources.
And there's, there's a, I just wanted to say, there's a, there's something that you keep doing that I want to acknowledge, which is you keep pointing out the valid complaints and struggles that people have, as well as the,
The really positive attributes that may have to do with swimming against the stream, with being rebellious, with speaking truth to power, with calling out the bullshit, and how that can have this sort of shadow side if people don't have enough critical thinking or if people are just vulnerable to certain types of misinformation or manipulation.
And yeah, I think that's a really important point that you keep making in different ways.
I think that's so important for the scientists and the doctors and government organisations to recognise because if we shame and shun and push people away and tell them they're stupid for not agreeing to be vaccinated, that's only going to push them further and it's only going to create more divisiveness and I think we've seen more than ever in the last 18 months or so The tragic power of divisiveness and what we've seen in our community.
And you know, I'm not going to have empathy for everybody.
The people sharing outright dangerous lies to large platforms.
But I do have empathy for the people that are vulnerable and don't have, as you said, the Health literacy and the critical thinking to maybe recognize why they're acting or behaving in a certain way.
Well, to finish, Izzy, if you could wave a magic wand and have people in your country understand one thing with more clarity right now in the situation that you're all in, what do you imagine that might be?
I think it would be that doctors and scientists and the immunologists who have been working their absolute butts off in the last 18 months are just normal people.
They are people that want to go back to a normal life, that have dedicated their lives to helping others.
Yes, big pharmaceutical companies might make money, but the average person sitting all hours in a lab trying to come up with a cure for this tragic pandemic They're just passionate about helping people and improving science and doing good.
And I can see why people are annoyed with the government and annoyed with how things have been, but I really want people to understand that all the people working so hard and wanting people to be vaccinated and trying to look after people's health,
I just normal, normal people with kids, with families, with a pet dog that like going on holidays and they just do, they care for other people and they care for science and helping us get out of this pandemic and there's no agendas.
We just are like everyone else and want to be healthy and we want to look after our loved ones.
And you know, I think that's my important message and I've been sharing and I think for people Like me, doctors on social media.
People realise that doctors are just like everyone else.
