Did you know that Joe Biden is a Satanic alien Nazi pedophile intent on bringing about the New World Order? Or that Donald Trump is the only thing that will save us from complete tyranny? How about the fact that COVID vaccines are bioweapons destroying the global population? But that’s okay, because colloidal silver is the magic bullet that will boost your immune system to help you fend off this scamdemic. Add that to your herbal stack alongside Lung Health Organic Herbal Spray which is definitively proven to boost your immunity even though it’s never been clinically tested.Oh, and have we mentioned that chocolate is an octave of the sun?Strap in, folks, because this week we’re finally looking at David “Avocado” Wolfe, whose paranoid Telegram channel boasts all of the above claims and much, much more. And we’re not just clipping recent podcast talks and driver’s seat rants. We’re joined by longtime journalist, health food marketing guru, and co-founder of the website, Ethos, Jill Ettinger, who worked side-by-side with David for many years. She’ll tell her side of it—and honestly, it’s not all bad, except for recent years. In effect, we’re looking at a conspiracy-prone health food guru turn full conspiritualist over the last two decades. Bonus: Jill brought Derek along to many events across the country in the aughts, and David was often there, so we’ll hear about this descent from people who watched it happen.
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Alright, another guest host and old friend, and we're going to get into a topic that many of you probably didn't know that you wanted to hear about, but we were going to take you through some clips.
That said, for now, you can stay up to date with us on all of our social media channels, including independently or on Twitter.
Collectively, we are on Instagram.
Occasionally, I will put something up on TikTok.
And of course, we are at Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where for $5 a month, you can help support us and keep us editorially independent, as well as access our Monday bonus episodes, including this Monday, what do we have coming up, Julian?
This Monday, we're starting a new series that will run from time to time, which is stories from our listeners, especially from our Patreon supporters.
So we find there's a ton of overlap between our journeys and the people who are really resonant with the message that we put out there, the work that we've been doing over the last two and a half years.
And so we're wanting to hear some of these stories.
And that's what we'll be doing this Monday.
So check it out.
This is the first time I'm hearing about this series.
So thank you.
I guess I'm not in that Slack channel.
It's an official announcement.
Conspirituality 120, overripe avocado with Jill Ettinger.
Did you know that Joe Biden is a satanic alien Nazi pedophile intent on bringing about the new world order?
Or that Donald Trump is the only thing that will save us from complete tyranny?
How about the fact that COVID vaccines are bioweapons destroying the global population?
But that's okay, don't panic, because colloidal silver is the magic bullet that will boost your immune system to help you fend off this scam-demic.
Add that to your herbal stack alongside Lung Health Organic Herbal Spray, which is definitively proven to boost your immunity, even though it's never been clinically tested.
Oh, and have we mentioned that chocolate is an octave of the sun?
Strap in, folks, because this week we're finally looking at David Avocado Wolf, whose paranoid Telegram channel boasts all of the above claims and much, much more.
And we're not just clipping recent podcast talks and driver's seat rants.
We're joined by long-time journalist, health food marketing guru, and co-founder of the website Ethos, Jill Ettinger, who worked side-by-side with David for many years.
She'll tell her side of it.
And honestly, it's not all bad, except for recent years.
In effect, we're looking at a conspiracy-prone health food guru turn full-conspiratualist over the last two decades.
Bonus, Joel brought Derek along to many events across the country in the aughts, and David was often there.
So we'll hear about this dissent from people who watched it happen.
Something our regular listeners will know is that we've been neck deep in the process of writing our book for the last year or so.
Thankfully, we're very close to submitting the final manuscript to the publisher.
A question that comes up a lot for us internally and also for the editors as they interact with our analysis is this.
How do we tell the difference between the true grifters and the sincere but misguided charismatics?
You know, like, who's just cashing in cynically while being fully aware that they're monetizing dangerous misinformation?
And on the other hand, who are the earnest true believers who think they're saving the world from the dangers of 5G, vaccine nanobots, and a fake pandemic masterminded by satanic vampires with alien overlords?
What drives the transformation into becoming a vessel for spiritualized politics and incendiary misinformation, especially in the high-stakes dynamics of pandemic public health?
For so many of our listeners and their friends and family, these are such tender questions.
What happened to my Reiki master aunt, my inspiring yoga teacher, the women's empowerment coach I used to rely on for personal growth truth bombs?
Did they just lose their way?
Or are they right?
Do figures claiming to be telling forbidden truths and exposing mainstream lies know that deep down they're betraying their trusting followers?
The journalistic but unsatisfying answer is that it is impossible to know.
We don't have psychic access to the true hearts and minds of anyone.
All we can do is track their actions and words and, yes, their sales funnels, and weigh them against the facts and the evidence.
But there's another answer here, which is that there's a complex feedback loop between charisma and commerce, especially considering the phenomenon of audience capture, in which the responses of an audience or a customer base can shape the direction of a creator's ideology in which the responses of an audience or a customer base can shape the So not only do charismatic influencers hold sway over their audiences,
But in the interactive digital and social media age, the audiences in turn exert their own powerful gravitational dynamics on the influencer.
Now, someone like Joseph Mercola has built his Mac Daddy top spot on the disinformation dozen, anti-vax list, hundred million dollar net worth on so many false claims.
He's been slammed with so many legal actions, it's hard to believe that his turn to COVID denialism is not just an extension of that opportunistic, parasitic exploitation of false hope and medical ignorance.
But someone like JP Sears, who Derek you recently covered for a great Patreon bonus episode, It may be the perfect conspirituality case study for this audience capture feedback loop.
If we just look chronologically at his YouTube channel, we see the overlapping stages of his content and personae as he transitions from politically liberal emotional healing coach to clever but still wholesome wicked satirist of New Age spirituality.
To then going full red-pilled, anti-vax, gun-nut, election fraud, anti-abortion, loud and proud transphobe.
If you look at each of these stages, you can actually see each new stage predicted by an earlier, somewhat out-of-place video that produces a sudden leap in view count.
And then that style of video content becomes the new normal as the earlier style gets phased out.
Now of course we can explain this in part by saying that he's evolving as a person, but his public voice is clearly being shaped by the jumps in income that accompany increasing exposure and popularity.
We saw something similar with Instagram alien channeler Lori Ladd, whose vanilla spiritual messages from the so-called Galactic Federation about how to live your best life eventually morphed as her reach increased via conspirituality-themed content into an almost Bhagavad Gita-style January 6th call to New Age Jihad against the dark cabal.
Of course, there's Jordan Peterson's arc from embattled but inspired mythopoetic university professor, to his sharp-dressed self-help saviour of the incels, to his current strung-out but overproduced daily-wire climate-denialist ultra-right-wing rants from what looks like a secure bunker in the Canadian wilderness.
This seems to be similarly defined by evolving audience expectations and financial opportunities.
We've also watched best-selling feminist health advocate and angels and essential oils enthusiast Dr. Christiane Northrup first take the QAnon red pill during the pandemic and then gradually become an explicit advocate of political violence in the name of God, guns, and so-called health freedom.
So today, As we turn to raw chocolate touting, inspired public speaker and self-proclaimed nutritional expert David Wolf, many in the yoga and wellness space might wonder, what happened to him?
How did he go from urging vegan yogis around the world to have their best day ever through diet and positive thinking to the disheveled character we'll hear in a moment filming an expletive-laden video of himself while driving from an airport in which he calls for nothing less than civil war over masks, germ theory, corrupt Joe Biden's supposed pedophilia, and the fake pandemic?
Was he a well-balanced beacon of alternative health wisdom who got blindsided by conspiracy propaganda during 2020?
Or was he always a bit unhinged and trafficking in conspiracism to market dodgy products?
Perhaps, like Ladd, Sears, Peterson, and Northrup, his ride down the rabbit hole was to some extent defined by the feedback loop of audience capture.
We can't know for certain, but we do have clips of the man in his own words.
We also have in Derek and our guest today, Jill Ettinger, two people who have known David Wolf and worked with him in different ways.
And we have our, hopefully, somewhat finely tuned at this point lens, our familiarity with the dynamics of conspirituality that we can use to focus in today on the strange case of David Avocado Wolf.
So Jill, there was a time before social media.
Really?
There was, there really was.
All three of us are old enough to remember that.
And I probably spent more time with you than most anyone else in my New York City years.
And we also traveled extensively to health food conferences.
I mean, I should say I tagged along with you because you brought me into that world in many ways.
And we worked with a number of companies.
I'm thinking of like Guayaquil, Yerba Mate, Sambazon, Acai, Manitoba's Harvest, Autumn there.
You knew the owners and I got to meet them through you.
But David was always someone a little bit different.
I would say out of that entire crew that traveled together and met up at different places, he was more of a charismatic in many ways.
Let's begin, let's pull back and talk a little bit first about how you got into the health food world and then how you eventually came to work with David.
I mean it starts way way back really in middle school and not wanting to eat animals and not really knowing what that was.
There wasn't really a word for that.
I mean there was vegetarian.
That sent me to years later working in a health food store and that kind of really opened my eyes to food.
You know I grew up in Western Pennsylvania and a pretty normal American diet there and I had never had Carrot juice or kale or anything like that.
And I found myself just kind of swept up in that in that movement, you know, at that time, people were becoming more interested in their health and organic food.
I was working in retail, I became manager of health food stores.
And then I was working for a health food store where I was recruited by a brokerage team that represented a lot of top tier brands.
like Clif Bar and Sambazon was one of them in the later years.
And so they brought me to South Florida and I was covering that area, working different.
Whole Foods was kind of my main account.
And I was dealing with the regional buyers and a local distributor and just selling all these different products and kind of coming up with some fun campaigns for them.
And I had some roommates there that were big fans of this Saturday farmer's market called Glacier Farms, which I think might still be there.
It is in the Coconut Grove area.
And it's just incredible.
You have all this great produce that grows there.
And they'd also do some really lovely prepared food that was all raw.
Which was kind of the first time I'd heard about raw food.
I'd been eating vegan and very healthy for a while.
Here in this warm climate, very different than Western Pennsylvania, everyone was just eating these raw salads.
And the yoga community, particularly the Ashtanga yogis, were really big in on this market and eating all this raw food.
And my roommates Went to an event by this guy named Dave Wolf and they they shared a book his first book with me and you know he was just kind of in the background but it wasn't until that company that I was working with asked me to move to New York and take on the Northeast for the company when someone left and I had met you shortly after arriving there Derek and you know it was just kind of finding my way and making some friends and then David was doing an event I want to say it was in Brooklyn
And we ended up at a mutual connections house, Kudrat's house with David.
I don't think you were there, but ended up just staying up all night drinking these.
He was making these crazy chocolate drinks and a friendship quickly formed.
And we spent a lot of time together that while he was in New York for that week or so, which then evolved into me essentially writing a business plan.
To take his products from where, you know, he was selling them at events and it was the early days of this thing called the Internet.
So he was selling online when nobody was really selling online.
And he had created so much excitement for his products at these events.
People would come away extremely ready to change their lives.
And so they would buy at the event and then go online and buy them.
And that's how we kind of said, OK, well, they also need to be in stores because somebody else is going to do it.
And that's how I started to work with him.
As we said in the beginning, you know, we want to take a fair look at him.
And I remember at that time, I mean, he is very much responsible for why raw cacao and goji berries are in the American consciousness.
Is that a fair statement?
Yeah.
I mean, that was, I was kind of tasked with that and we got placement in Whole Foods across the country.
Those were our two flagship products.
The company had hundreds of products, but He was very passionate about cacao.
And so that became, he wrote a book, Sacred Chocolate.
So that kind of became our flagship product.
And then there were, you know, many others that came after and it's, it's widely available.
But yeah, we were the first to get it out there.
I always enjoyed the events we did with him.
I hung out with him a number of times.
I always felt there was a salesman in him.
I think that's a fair statement.
He's definitely a charismatic, but he also makes you feel involved.
I remember a big dinner we did at Pure Food and Wine one night where he was the center of attention because that restaurant probably couldn't exist without him.
But I'm wondering, in your early years with him, were there any red flags in terms of, you know, hindsight is 20-20, but where he would go with his more sort of paranoid political rants, I'm thinking specifically.
What are some of your experiences in that environment, or do you think this was a gradual evolution over the years?
I mean, I think it was always there.
I mean, one of the main reasons that he was pushing this diet is that the belief that, you know, we were being cooked by big food and big pharma and that, and you know, I don't disagree necessarily that the way we were eating and living our lives was not the greatest.
And I mean, this is 20 years ago, right?
Or nearly 20 years ago.
He was very kind of apolitical.
I don't remember him getting involved in any presidential race.
I don't I don't think he voted.
I'm not entirely sure.
But, you know, he bought property in Canada as a way to kind of get away from American politics.
You know, there were definitely red flags elsewhere.
I mean, I think one of the first things that he made me do when I finally up and moved out to San Diego was sit down and watch a conspiracy theory on the moon landing.
And I was like, what does this have to do with, you know, kale?
Like, I was so confused.
It's all connected, Jill.
It's all, I mean, that is the party line is that it is all connected.
One thing that I was amazed by in just doing some light research for this episode was, you know, his educational background.
According to an article I found from a newspaper in San Diego area from about 20 years ago was that he has a Bachelor's of Science in Mechanical and Environmental Engineering and Political Science.
From the University of California, Santa Barbara.
He also has his Juris Doctor in Law from the University of San Diego.
I think that'll play into what we're going to talk about, because David seems to profess himself as an expert in every subject in the clips we're going to play, and that's something we're going to go into.
Did he always have that sense of feeling like when he got hold of a topic, he was going to explain it to its nth degree?
He did.
I mean, he's a voracious reader.
I remember we were on the bus.
There was a veggie oil powered tour bus that he took across the country for his events.
And then he had a band.
He was in a band that traveled with him.
So in the early days, we were traveling to events where I was talking with people about coming to work with us and selling the product.
You know, this was before the internet, really.
And so he would have his nose in books all the time.
And I think he's very intelligent and loves to very much dive into, you know, lots of different subjects.
One question that I have is, in these early days, and it still sounds like today, there's a kind of orientation that you have towards, shall we say, healthy diet and lifestyle, right?
Like, really recognizing that, oh, there are ways that we can make better choices, and 20 years ago, maybe I wasn't living that way, and now I am, and in part it's thanks to, you know, someone like David Wolf.
At the same time, in these early years of getting to know him and working with him, Are there moments where you feel like he's crossing over the line between, Hey, this is a, this is a really fantastic food that is tasty and that may have some health benefits that you're not going to get from some other food into like, this is going to transform you in all of these ways that then start to have, you know, pseudoscientific kind of magical, fantastical claims.
Like how were you interacting with those distinctions at that time?
I mean, probably I was foolishly, you know, I would say drink the Kool-Aid, but we didn't drink Kool-Aid.
It would have been a green juice.
I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head with that is everything.
Everything was a do or die choice.
Really, it was either this food is going to poison you or this food is going to transform your life.
I mean, the chocolate is such a great and interesting subject.
I think most people would say chocolate has something magic.
You know, we all love it.
Kids love it.
Older people love it.
Everybody loves it.
And he was the first to kind of isolate that it had these incredible health properties, Just questionable.
I was very happy.
I was very much in, uh, in that orbit and felt like never had, I never felt better and having been a lifelong, um, or not lifelong, but you know, since my teens not eating animals and you know, now I was eating even Healthier food, but I think there was kind of that philosophy about every single thing, whether it was avocado or hemp seeds.
I look at it now and I don't think he's raw anymore.
I know most people aren't raw anymore.
I think it was very important at that time because people had been eating so poorly and obesity rates were so high and diabetes was so high.
And I would see, I just had a conversation last night with someone who I've known for almost five years that didn't know.
I had worked with David and He had changed their life, you know, in those early days.
And it was that antidote to eating so much processed food.
And in that way, yeah, everything was kind of magic.
If it wasn't a Pringle, you know, everything is going to be magical.
So he took that stance on pretty much everything, whether he sold it or not.
Which sounds very exciting, right?
It's like, it's a very compelling when someone's telling you this is do or die.
This is like, you know, virtual immortality and like eternal, like, like being happy all the time because you're so healthy versus like being poisoned by the, by these corporations who have a vested interest in keeping you unhealthy.
That seems to me not only incredibly compelling in a charismatic speaker who's eloquent and who can go deep in terms of his research references, however credible they are in the long run, but it also seems like you're describing being in the orbit of someone who but it also seems like you're describing being in the orbit of someone who is creating a community around them of people who are buying in and who are oh, now we belong to this group of I mean, you know, people would follow him from event to event.
and living this different kind of lifestyle that feels transformational.
It was very much a community.
I mean, people would follow him from event to event.
Everybody who worked there was kind of living the lifestyle and eating that way.
His enthusiasm is infectious.
I mean, he can sell, he can sell you anything.
And, and I know as we'll hear in some of the clips, I mean, some of it doesn't even make any sense, but when you're in his presence and you're hearing him talk about it and, and then you feel great, you're losing weight.
You know, I can't tell you how many people have told me over the years, like how much he changed their lives and got them healthier.
And that's, You know, I wrote that rebuttal to Science Babe and in like 2017 about that, because, you know, I mean, he's definitely got some some questionable comments lately that we're going to dive into.
But I mean, he really brought health to a lot of people.
And whether a raw food diet is something that is sustainable long term.
I'm not a dietician.
I'm not one to say, but is eating more kale and fewer Pringles better for you?
I think every everybody's going to agree with that.
So people very much latched on to him.
There were always people around and always people making food, experimenting.
He had relationships with all these great chefs, some of whom are still out there making food today.
But there is something different.
When I think about the Power Food Pavilion, we would go to the conferences and I would DJ those events.
Who did you have there?
You had David Bronner from Bronner Soaps.
You had the Sambazon guys, as we said, the Guayaqui, the Manitoba.
You had a number of people who I think we're pretty level-headed when it came to health.
Like, they had their products.
I remember Michael explaining to me what Mate did once, you know, when we were sitting at Fabian's apartment, for example.
And I was like, wow, these are really knowledgeable people about their product.
But I never felt like they were overselling.
They were just being like, this is something really cool that we latched onto and now we're sharing it with the world.
But David was always different.
There was always something more.
He always seemed to be the center of attention.
He does, yes.
He is very much, I think you call that an alpha male.
He is very much the center of attention.
People, for the most part, let him do that, and he's so passionate.
It's hard to not give him your attention, even if it's just in the moment, whether or not you go home and live that way.
And I agree.
I mean, I worked with Guayaquil, I worked with, you know, Jeremy and Ryan at Sambazon and, you know, what, what great people that are still doing great work to this day and have families and are, you know, just trying, I think Sambazon just hit a big milestone with their rainforest acreage preserved, you know, from, from deforestation.
So he's definitely not like those guys, not like the others.
In this industry.
I don't even know.
I mean, he's selling some products, but he's not talking about the food nearly as much as he was.
And I think that suited him, whether it was incorrect or even inappropriate.
I think getting people excited about eating healthy food is a much better look than calling Biden Hitler.
Yeah, I mean, two things stand out to me.
One, and I'm curious what you think about this.
One is that it almost seems like, well, the distinction that you and Derek were just naming is that he was more of a guru type.
He was more of a charismatic, like, I'm the center of attention.
I have all of this knowledge to impart.
I'm going to lay this on you and it's going to kind of like blow your minds in a way, right?
Is the vibe that I've gotten from watching videos of him talking to people.
But the other is that it almost seems like he might have a sort of personality type that whatever he had gravitated towards, that would have been the style, right?
He would have been able to sell you a used car and have you leave the lot feeling like you had an amazing deal and your life was going to be changed by this Subaru, right?
Yeah, I mean, he studied with Tony Robbins, the motivational speaker.
I mean, that is very much his style.
I totally agree.
I think whatever, I mean, you know, he went to law school.
I think whatever he would have gotten into would have probably had the same kind of effect and, you know, group of people that were very committed to him.
I don't think it had to be food.
We were talking about chocolate a couple minutes ago and you said he isolated what the sort of special benefits were.
Do you mean he was doing actual research or he was reading other people's research?
How did he do that?
I mean, he would say that he studied it and researched it and done his own research, but nothing peer reviewed.
And anything that was in the book was from his own Google research.
I don't think he had any scientists that he was working with.
Let's move on and listen to him because we've been talking about him for a while.
And this was my reintroduction.
I think this was a lot of people's reintroduction to him was the infamous car rant.
Oh, yeah.
That is now harder to find because I think he deleted it, but some other people kept it up.
But thinking about, again, a charismatic, maybe overselling life of the party and has done some good to people.
And then all of a sudden, this is where we arrive.
Greetings, Telegram.
David Avocado Wolf here.
Made it to Texas.
First time through a scare port in quite some time.
Let me tell you what's going on in there.
I almost got kicked out of that airport several times.
It's an absolute abomination.
It's an affront to our rights, and I'm not going to take it.
You shouldn't take it.
We're going to fight this all the way.
I had a friend of mine, he's like, we don't want a civil war.
We got to avoid it.
No, we need a civil war.
Fuck these people.
These people are destroying our freedoms.
And once they're gone, they're gone.
You're not going to get them back.
The United States is the last free place on earth.
Canada's turning into a socialist nightmare.
Australia gone.
I'm in Texas right now.
This may be where we make our last stand.
I'm not even kidding.
The only thing standing between You and them is Donald Trump right now.
This jackass Joe Biden is the biggest piece of garbage, the biggest traitor.
He's extorted by the Chinese government.
He's been extorted by the Ukrainian government.
He's been extorted by the Russian government.
He's just an absolute mess.
And you know what?
I'm not going to allow him to become president over my fucking dead body.
Fuck that guy.
This is an abomination, what's going on at these airports.
They're like, the airlines, you have to wear a mask in this airline.
I'm like, you know what?
Fuck you and your airline.
Fuck your bullshit.
Fuck your fake, scandemic, plandemic bullshit.
Your germ theory.
Take that germ theory and shove it up your ass.
There is a little bit in there.
You know, I often think of you, Julian, in circumstances like this.
Not that you would say any of those things, but the sort of Ken Wilber theory of everything, right?
You just have someone here who's just grasping at things.
If we could spend an entire episode just teasing apart every sentence there from where he gets from one place to the other.
Jill, is this the David that you knew?
I mean, yeah, it is.
But what's the big deal?
Just wear a mask.
You're so afraid of the cooked people in the world and their toxic lifestyle.
Just put on a mask.
Why is this such an issue?
I don't understand.
Julian, we remember when this first came out.
When you saw that, what did you think?
Well, I mean, it's conspiracy theory bingo, right?
It's like, okay, let's see how many of these different things he's going to hit.
Because as we said, Jill, it is all connected.
I did find myself curious to ask you, like, in his more private moments, if he was sort of this, you know, passionately angry or vitriolic about who he perceived as his enemies.
Yeah, I mean, there were there were some enemies over time.
I mean, you know, when you're that big and that busy and, you know, the market was competitive and there was a big breakup with his business partner.
And I mean, you know, he did some big rants about that when they had said they would not do that was in the court documents.
I've just not heard him so political before.
It was, you know, like I said earlier, I mean, he kind of Checked out and went to Canada and was not really involved in that.
And this is just very out of character.
I mean, the tone is character, but the topic is not.
Yeah.
I mean, two things about that.
One thing I noticed in sort of looking over his stuff, and I've been familiar with him over the years, is the anti-vaccine theme.
It doesn't seem to be that new.
It seems to be something he would touch on when he would do public speaking at different events and gatherings.
Is that something you would hear him talk about?
Many times, yeah.
Vaccines were linked to a lot of issues according to him.
And that seems to be something that a lot of the people we cover, if they already were anti-vaccine, then this kind of righteous indignation about how dare the powers that be, you know, collude with Big Pharma to force us to get vaccinated, that does seem to raise a lot of this kind of intense vitriol.
The other thing was that I was listening to an interview with him in which he talked about, and I wondered if he ever talked to you about this, he talked about a neighbor when he was growing up Who, like one of his friends in the neighborhood, whose mother, I think, it might have been mother or grandmother, was very, he describes them as being sort of politically very, very well informed.
And basically when they would come over to the house after being at school and this woman would say, what did you learn at school?
And they'd say, well, we learned about the constitution and we did civics.
And she'd say, ah, well, let me tell you the truth about that.
Here's all the way that the government is corrupt.
Here are these different presidents who actually did awful things.
You won't learn that in school.
Did you ever hear about that influence on him?
I don't.
I don't remember that.
No, no.
But I mean, there was always a distrust of anything.
I mean, I think, you know, the diet was kind of the starting point.
Like, you've got to you've got to get healthy so you can kind of see clearly and take the take the blinders off.
You know, there were all the conspiracy theories, anything that it was left of.
of center was on his radar immediately and almost believed it without fail.
Whether or not there was anything, moon landing, there's just one VCR video that we watched.
Why is that more believable than all of the many hundreds, if not thousands of photos that NASA took?
A real, you know, that whole like David Icke and all of that conspiracy theory stuff was there early on, which I knew nothing of.
I came in, you know, solely as just a vegan wanting to be healthy and all of that was new to me and never really resonated.
I mean, you just kind of like, he has that puppy energy, right?
Like he's just so enthusiastic and everybody, and you have to look at like most of his Customers or, you know, attendees at events at that time were either like, you know, young people looking for a guru or like housewives that were trying to get their lives back now that their kids were back to school and they maybe weren't as healthy.
And everyone just kind of was like, oh, David, you know, and his conspiracy theory.
It seemed kind of harmless at the time, but you could get him worked up.
I mean, it doesn't take much to get him excited, but it was never I just want to flag something because you said anything left of center.
And I find that really interesting, right?
Because that's one of our key themes in writing the book and in doing the podcast is that so many things used to be in terms of wellness and alternative medicine, etc.
associated With the left and with sort of a left-wing critique of a dominant, you know, conservative power structure, which was often then also associated with quote-unquote Western science, right?
But how that has shifted during the pandemic, I think is fascinating.
And we just heard in that rant, he's endorsing Trump and, you know, calling Biden the worst possible human being.
And calling for a civil war.
I mean, this is someone who repeatedly says, you know, he won't kill for his food, but he's going to kill over political ideology.
It's just fascinating.
Now, one thing I do remember is David telling me his father was an obstetrician, actually delivered babies at the same hospital I was born in.
We were at Cush doing an event in the Lower East Side.
I remember that conversation, which is interesting to me because if he comes from a medical family, that adds another layer of his origin myth.
And this next clip talks about where his hero's myth comes from, in a sense.
This whole thing for me, the whole dilemma of the world, and it's basically a worldwide takeover maneuver by Big Pharma.
For me, it's been actually great because I've been trying to get this message out my whole career.
Right.
About the medical tyranny.
This is not something new for me.
It's been going on my whole life, all our lives.
And so it just put a spotlight on the area that I've been focusing on.
So actually, it's been great in that sense.
I mean, it's bad news, but in a way, it's good news because if we don't get over this, I call it medical scientism, which is that it's designed to look like science.
It's marketed just like science.
But when you actually look underneath the covers behind the curtain, there's no science there.
Right.
And, you know, so it's been interesting.
You know, this is what I've been dealing with my whole career, you know, and I was attacked, crucified for decades for it.
But now people are suddenly going, they all came back.
It's so funny, man.
So there we have, they all came back, which is interesting.
That's a more recent podcast as well.
So here we have this situation where he sets himself up as being the martyr complex, it sounds like to me.
Yeah, I mean, he's always been fighting the fight so we don't have to.
We just get to enjoy the chocolate smoothies and he's out there battling.
But yeah, I mean, both of his parents were doctors, I think.
So I don't know if that put a bad taste in his mouth, but I mean, the contempt for conventional medicine was always, always there.
I got my fillings, my mercury fillings removed because of David and it has cracked my teeth.
I'm in like dental hell because of it now.
And that was because of the, you know, the mercury is going to kill you and you should get these out.
And what a regret.
I'm in the same club.
I'm in the same club.
Fortunately, I didn't have any negative effects from it, but I had my mercury fillings removed as well on the advice of someone who, you know, had this whole kind of holistic notion that included nutrition and cleansing and all of that sort of stuff.
You know, in that clip, it kind of It kind of rules out the hypothesis that he was basically okay and then the pandemic came along and he got red-pilled because that's actually an interview in January of this year and he's talking to a guy from a podcast called Wellness Force.
And he's essentially saying, you know, yeah, I'm actually good with all of this because finally the message I've been trying to get out there for 20, 30 years is front and center.
And a lot of people are coming back around to it in a way that, you know, in the past they used to attack me for having that message.
So I found that really revealing.
There was always a new crop of people.
I think there was always one thing or another, whether it was diet or vaccines or now COVID, that would bring him kind of a fresh new roster of followers and devotees.
And that was always really important.
I think that was part of the reason that there was such a focus on current things and attacking these different areas, because they're all customers, potentially.
Yeah, that's what I was about to say.
They're not just devotees, they're people who are buying his stuff, right?
And he's had a pretty lucrative run, as best I can tell.
Back to your mercury fillings, what I think the problem is, is that your energy wasn't right at the time.
And David has a solution for that, which we're going to hear, but I do want to point out Wellness Force.
Interestingly, the host, Josh Trent, has come onto our Instagram feed before in a very passive-aggressive way of that sort of, He's an interesting one.
He's a Christian influencer who's also into wellness, so in his feed you're going to see these conspiratorial anti-COVID vaccine rants combined with Jesus, which is something we're going to get into more here.
Not Jesus, but actually talking about Christian nationalism in the coming weeks, which I'm excited about.
But the next clip also comes from that podcast, and it is the longest clip we're going to run, but I think it's important because This is his galaxy brain, right?
This is really where you're going to hear just reaching for things.
It very much reminded me of Eric Weinstein when you found this clip, Julian, so let's hear it.
Talk to us about how you promote this realism.
Because the realism is beyond our fear.
The realism is beyond our ancient brain.
I mean, we're sovereign beings.
We're extraterrestrial beings that came down here to have a human experience in a meat suit.
So how do you lead that conversation away from fear and into loving oneself, loving others, and freedom?
Well, I'm a nutritionist, so I get to handle that in a really interesting way, which is one of the great teachings that I've received from the great Taoist masters who taught me and the Chinese medical people who taught me was the Jing energy, which is the black Kidney energy, right?
It's the battery pack of your life.
This is the energy that drives us, that gives us energy in the 12th round, the 13th round, the 14th round, the 15th round, like Muhammad Ali, versus the first round.
Now, the first round's chi.
That's your firepower.
That's how you mobilize your immune system.
It's how you mobilize your energy quickly.
But jing is the long-term power, and that's a kidney energy.
Now, kidney is the home of fear.
Right.
So the reason why we're so easily driven into fear, especially in the Western world, is because typical Western pattern is very high in chi.
Like I think of Jim Morrison, very high in chi, very high in shen, which is this aura, but there's nothing in the gas tank at like 30 years old, or in his case, 27 years old, that you run out of gas.
And that's called a jing.
Deficiency.
And Westerners are notoriously deficient in Jing.
That was noted, for example, I first became aware of that in the Second World War research that the Russians could survive three times as fatal of a series of gunshot wounds than a Westerner.
Westerners would die quickly and Russians would hang in there.
That's Jing energy.
That's your ability to survive.
So that's also your kidney energy.
So it's easy to manipulate Westerners with fear because their kidneys are deficient.
So, what we go for is we go for the Jing energy and we go to nourish the kidneys.
So, there's a number of ways to do that.
One of them is the hot colds, which we're, of course, I think you're a huge fan of.
Huge, yeah.
And swimming.
I was swimming in the Atlantic Ocean two days ago.
That was phenomenal.
And another way to build Jing, I just want to keep on that point and on that frequency, is black foods.
Black foods are always higher in gene.
So blackberries, if you have a choice, it's like, let's do the black rice instead of the brown rice.
Let's do the black beans instead of the other color beans.
So there it is, Jim Morrison.
It wasn't the drugs.
He just didn't need enough black rice.
I was going to say, it's not a gene deficiency, brother.
It's called heroin.
And I wanted to find out about this control group that they had for these Russians and Americans who are being shot to death and seeing who dies sooner than the other.
Oh my God, that's quite an experiment.
That is something.
I mean, it's, you know, when I said that the car rant was conspiracy theory, bingo.
This is different, right?
This is more inspirational, you know, alternative medicine kind of mythology, but it's a similar thing where he bounces from topic to topic to topic.
He's bouncing from swimming in the ocean, to eating black foods, to talking about Jim Morrison and Russian soldiers.
It's like all over the place.
And I think that there's, for people who are in search of someone with this kind of gift of the gab and charisma, there's something about that that's sort of deliciously Disorienting, right?
Where it's just like, you just, eventually you just go along for the ride.
I have no idea what he's talking about, but it's exciting, right?
Yeah, it's that puppy bouncing from wall to wall and jumping in your face.
And you're like, what, Jim Morrison didn't eat enough black beans and black rice?
And it's that, oh, David, and you know, I mean, that is his greatest gift, I think, is that enthusiasm, if it's directed towards something that is really to our benefit.
And I mean, of course, he would argue that it is now as it was, you know, 15, 20 years ago.
But I mean, I think there is a big difference between telling people to eat more rice versus start a civil war.
Yeah, yeah.
And Derek, I wanted to ask you, I did not know that Josh Trent was a Christian.
Yeah.
Those are some interesting statements he made at the top.
I wonder how he squares that with Christianity.
He was the one talking about the aliens who came down in a meat suit to experience we're sovereign beings.
Can I just say I love anytime someone says meat suit.
It's just so fun.
You know, there's an amazing band.
There's an amazing band from the 90s called the Meat Puppets.
Yeah, I know the Meat Puppets.
Not as good as the Meat Suits, though.
I was DJing.
I just picture red dripping meat soup.
So another moment in our shared history that stands out is we were doing an event, I think, at Kai Nygaard's house in California.
And David was the guest of honor.
I was DJing.
I didn't live in LA at the time.
And I believe this is the first time I heard David tell me directly, I think there were some mushrooms involved that night as well, that cacao resonated on the same frequency as the sun. - Yeah.
Yeah, I actually was researching for the show and I read the piece that I wrote and Science Babes piece and so I did all this research into octaves of the sun.
I got really curious and it's very much astrology related and I mean everything is an octave of the sun on the planet.
If If you're looking at it that way, and I can't make heads or tails of it.
I mean, I think what he's going for there is that it's just like, you know, full of good stuff.
I mean, if we want to oversimplify it, but you know, when you say it like that.
Makes people want to buy your shit.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
So as I'm scrolling through Josh Trent's Instagram feed right now, who pops up first and second?
JP Sears and Paul Czech.
Oh my god.
So it's very much in this.
I'd have to scroll back a little bit as I'm doing to find the, it was mostly around the birth of his child and his wife with the Christianity came out.
So it's, yeah, it's in there.
Oh, and there's some Dr. Fauci memes.
He's right on point with these guys.
He's right there.
But for the next few clips, let's Let's get into some of his health stuff.
And again, I do agree with what Jill said before about his influence on this industry and it being important for a lot of people.
I will understand that.
Now, these are recent talks on his takes on health, and this is where it gets, as Julian said, deliciously disorienting.
Chocolate lines up planetarily with the sun.
Chocolate is an octave of sun energy.
In fact, it's the energy of the center of the sun.
It's a male energy that comes down off the sun, and it actually, out of all the plants, the cacao is right on line, targeted at the center of the sun, which we call, in our body, the heart.
And actually, cacao's right up with the center of the sun, which is the center of the heart, which is called the sacred heart.
Jill, is this how you were able to sell it to Whole Foods when you first got his products into stores?
We bring in telescopes, high power telescopes.
No, I mean, you know, fortunately for chocolate, there are scientifically proven benefits.
It tastes good, but you know, raw cacao does not taste great.
I was recently in Hawaii with my almost nine-year-old daughter and we found a, you know, at a farmer's market, a cacao fruit.
I was so excited and we peel it open and I'm savoring it and she was absolutely disgusted.
Yeah, she was like, this is bitter and gross.
But it was the nutrition benefits and then the ability to use it in a bunch of different recipes.
Well, I did run a study, actually.
Julian, you'll find this interesting.
At the 63rd Street Equinox, I had a bunch of students who talked about how much they love chocolate.
We'd often talk about chocolate.
And then, Jill, you got me into the raw cacao beans, which, as bitter as it is, I actually quite love.
And I remember bringing a bag in one day, and I said to a bunch of the students, oh, you guys like chocolate, right?
Like, yeah, yeah.
I'm like, here's actual chocolate.
Let's have some.
And everyone ate a bean.
And I think I might have traumatized my class.
It's pretty traumatic.
It's pretty bad.
It's not what you expect.
I think once you get used to it and put it in, you know, in certain smoothies or whatever, it can, it's more palatable.
Yeah.
You know, listening to that moment.
I almost, I had this flash where I'm like, Oh, it's like being a gambler.
Someone, this is, this is just me riffing now.
This is my speculation.
Someone who gets up in front of people like that and make statements.
And with each statement you up the ante and you up the ante.
Chocolate is an octave of the sun.
That's, that's a big bet.
Not only that, it lines up with the center of the sun.
Okay, we just doubled the bet.
Not only that, that lines up with the human heart.
Okay.
All right.
I want to see your cards.
Hold on.
It's the center of the heart, which is the sacred heart.
It's like, dude, where are we going with this?
And the sacred heart is where God lives.
So chocolate is God.
It reminds me of Stephen Colbert will do this sometimes where he'll just like go off on one of those tangents where he like connects all these things that are disconnected.
Well, you also have to put it in perspective where he, you know, in a lecture, probably right before or right after that, he'll talk about what he calls the doctrine of signatures.
You know, if you eat a walnut, it's brain food because it looks like a brain.
If you eat a fig, it's good for the testicles because it looks like a testicle, you know.
So he's making these connections and then there is some science to correspond, you know, walnuts have omega fatty acids, which are good for the brain.
So he often is not isolated in those statements.
It's very much cushioned by things where people either can understand it or relate to it or, you know, know for a fact that that is the case.
So it's It's kind of thrown in there a little bit like that rant about Jim Morrison and like, oh, I was doing hot cold treatment and black foods are healthy for your kidneys.
And, you know, and then this World War II thing and Jim Morrison not having enough Jing energy.
It's just like in the middle.
And sometimes that's more the enthusiasm than it is what's going to get you to buy the product at the end of the day.
You just remember feeling like, wow, he knows so much.
He's so smart.
He has so much more information about me.
But also, yeah, OK, I get it.
Walnuts are healthy.
I was watching I was watching yesterday the PBS special.
I don't know if either of you had a chance to see it.
The lies, lies, deception and democracy or something like that is the title.
It's about Trump and what he essentially did to the GOP and then what happened with the election.
It's really, really good.
And there's that scene of him holding up that image of him at the presidential podium, holding up the newspaper.
The Washington Post that says he was acquitted of, you know, his impeachment attempt.
And what I thought about that moment, you'll see why I'm mentioning it in a moment, is that he's going to call everything fake news, especially the Washington Post and the New York Times.
But when they say that he's acquitted, he's going to hold it up and say, look, it's legit.
Right.
And I feel like so many of the people we cover and so many of the people that I've been critical of within the wellness space, There's all this anti-science kind of rhetoric and there's all this like, no, this is beyond what mere reductionist materialistic science can understand.
But then there's also at the same time leaning very heavily on either pseudo-scientific claims or scientific reference points that don't really prove what you're saying, but that make it seem like it might be legit if someone doesn't really know, you know, the subject that you're talking about.
And that seems to me, You know, he perfectly exemplifies that with some of these things like you were just saying, like the walnuts actually do have omega fatty acids, but that doesn't mean it's because the walnut is shaped like a brain that it's good for your brain.
Makes me think of Joe Dispenza as well, who we've covered a bit on the pod, right, where his huge popularity comes from people being like, no, it's all based on neuroscience.
He's saying that you can open up portals into the quantum realm from where you can heal cancer, but we've got the neuroscience to prove it.
It's like, how would neuroscience ever prove that?
Good question.
Yeah, I think that's spot on.
I mean, I hear that all the time, like on one hand, I mean, we heard it so much during the pandemic, you know, on the one hand, science is telling us vaccines can prevent infection.
But then other people are saying no, no, no, you know, that they're proving just the opposite.
I've seen there was a lot of drama at my daughter's school and a group of parents that didn't want to vaccinate and there was stuff circulating and it's very alarming using science that way.
Well, even in one of the previous clips, David says, I'm a nutritionist.
I don't know if he is or not, but in all the certifications, I didn't come across any sort of actual nutrition training.
Yeah, I don't remember that either.
But there you have a case of, I'm an expert in this field that I'll always criticize because it's really just about me.
Here he has an interesting take on veganism.
I'm really looking forward to your thoughts on this one, Jill.
Like for example, the other day, ants.
I got the big black ant here.
They're beautiful.
I love them so much.
They live right here with me.
They come around and they clean up my desk.
And they're just so friendly.
But every now and then, they'll drown in my honey.
And I do eat honey, so I'm not vegan in that respect.
I'm a beekeeper.
So they drown in the honey.
So I got a bunch the other day.
I was like, scoop that goes into the food.
That gets blended in.
You need something from the animal world.
I just don't want to be responsible for killing it.
I'm not going to kill it.
I don't want to have that karma of killing it.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
So you have to come right.
Relationship with that right there is very important.
That is actually my, my thing.
Like I don't need to go out there and kill something to eat.
No way.
I'll never do that.
I don't need to do that.
But if they drown in the honey, they had a good death.
And I know the power of ants medicinally, and especially that type of ant, the big black ant.
A lot of thoughts.
Well, let me just say one thing that's been fascinating to watch.
I hosted a poll recently on Twitter about the most annoying wellness influencer evil right now, which was either sunscreen, oat milk, or what was the third one, Julian?
I don't remember.
Wait, what's wrong with oat milk?
Oh, thank you.
Seed oils.
That's the third.
Seed oils.
So, oat milk contains seed oils and there's some other problems.
So, there's a big anti-oat milk thing right now.
People voted sunscreen.
But the fourth I should have included is insects because now there's all this fear and it's also, again, perfect conspirituality.
It's coming from the wrong side and the right wing side.
Oh, we're going to have to eat insects soon.
Well, 2 billion people a year, 2 billion people on the earth eat insects all the time.
My wife's family, half of the family is from Thailand, and that's just part of the cuisine there.
So we look at it in these very weird ways.
But David's making an argument here that I've heard often.
You know, there's always been always honey vegan or not.
So there's that layer.
But beyond that, it's just like, I'm trying to understand his line of like, I won't kill it, but I will eat it if it's already dead, then that can pretty much be any meat in the store.
If you're going to follow that argument with logical conclusion.
That's what I was gonna say.
Yeah.
Most people don't kill their food, at least not in the US.
So yeah, it totally sounded like he was a little bit making the case for eating meat.
But they had a good death.
They drowned in my honey.
Yeah, but I mean, that just sounds to me like he doesn't want to throw away good honey and is just going to eat the ants because, like, you know, there wasn't any anything left.
Especially the black ants are very medicinal.
I mean, I am not an expert in bugs, nutrients, but I think Isn't it in Chinese medicine that there's ants?
Yeah, and you eat some ants, and I don't know, but I would not eat ant-infested anything, personally.
Whether or not I'm vegan, I think that I would not want to eat a mouthful of ants, but to each his own, I guess.
Alright, well, we have cacao, we have ants.
Let's move on to the last health benefit one.
I find this one rather interesting.
From the seed up, I've just worked through it.
How do you deal with the leaves?
How do you ferment it?
How do you smoke it?
How do you prepare it?
What if you're going to do a rapé?
Blow it up your nose?
What if you're going to create it into an anvil and put it into a lozenge in your cheek and gum?
I've been through all of that plant alchemy and love it all.
Um, so that's where I'm coming from direct experience.
Tobacco takes your prayer straight to heaven.
That's why there's a whole entire world trying to stop that.
That's the power of it.
And that's why we have to chemicalize it.
We have all these evil corporations trying to control it, all this stuff that they're doing.
800 additives, 4,000 chemicals.
It's so bad, man.
And I was like, let's go to zero chemicals, zero anything.
The longest lived people in the world are tobacco smokers to the letter.
You take the person, you look at their history, you'll find out that they've been a tobacco smoker since they were 12 years old and smoked all the way till they're 114, 116, 117, 120, 121, et cetera.
I mean, that's a pretty big statement.
I don't know too many 120-year-olds, let alone smokers.
But he's also, you know, again, just looking at what he's doing here, he's moving plant alchemy, he's talking chemistry, he's talking physiology, and then he's talking anthropology through all of this.
And this is what I got out before when I was saying, like, he does have degrees in these Different and seemingly disparate fields.
And so he then takes a little bit of knowledge about something and then tries to wrap it all together and present it as if he's an expert in every field, even the way he set that up.
I've spent a lot of time with this plan.
You know, it was the same thing with the cacao.
It's the same thing as we'll get into in these last clips coming up with politics.
It's like, I do this all the time.
And it's the thing, you know, I have a, I enjoy people who Whose knowledge is shallow but broad, because that's very much what I consider myself.
I like to know a little bit of a lot of things.
But I find it really problematic that he positions himself as an expert in all of those things.
Yeah, I mean we should say that tobacco is regarded as a sacred plant in many cultures.
I interviewed Jeremy Narby early this year about some research he just did and you know this is like spending months and years in South America with people that feel like tobacco is an important spiritual plant.
And it's far and away nothing like the tobacco that we get today.
I think David's spot on with that.
But I mean, I don't get what he's trying to sell here to people that they should just go and experiment with tobacco to send their prayers right to heaven.
I mean, that sounds a little... Well, that's the other thing is that it's that's also on the nose conspirituality, right?
Because tobacco takes your prayers straight to God.
They want to control it.
They want to come in and add 4,000 chemicals and 8,000 additives.
That sounds like a very big cigarette if you've got that many things in it.
He might be exaggerating.
Gary Taubes' book, The Case Against Sugar, has an excellent chapter on tobacco where he talks about how sugar is what actually makes tobacco.
Addictive qualities of tobacco come out because of the sugar that's added in the processing of the plant.
So that's fascinating.
And Jeremy Narby's book, The Cosmic Serpent, he was very early in the ayahuasca studies, at least in this newer wave.
So I highly recommend looking at his work as well.
But let's move on to something else that David's an expert in as we start to wind down here.
PCR tests.
Everything hinges on that test.
And if that test is faulty, all the numbers, all cases, everything reported is faulty.
And so people are having to face that, having to go, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, what did this test?
It's not even accurate.
What's the deal here?
And I did just, I've been looking at this every day for months now.
The latest one is A bunch of nurses got together and they started sending tests in that were never even swabbed, all coming back as positive.
We know the racket now, right?
They're gearing up for a big sales job and it's big money at stake.
A trillion dollars.
Was that the New York Times expose about the nurses?
I forget what media source he was reading every day to find out that information.
I've heard a lot of, and as we all have, this COVID conspiracy and not a lot of grace, not a lot of just saying people are doing the best that we can.
I've heard of conspiracy theorists who have gotten COVID and gotten it multiple times.
Still don't seem to have any real respect for the people who lost their lives, the families that have been traumatized by it.
It's just, you know, whether or not these nurses did that, I just can't get past that.
I feel like there's, where's the humanity in all of this?
Yeah, we've covered anti-vax propagandists and COVID denialists who on their deathbed For me, it's the pseudo-skepticism, right?
And this runs through everything that we've been talking about.
Once you have the motivated reasoning that says, I want certain things to be true, either because I am actually making money from it or my popularity, my fame, my status within a particular circle of people rests upon me believing that these things are true, even if the evidence is not really there.
Then you actually have gone down a road where there's going to be a lot of things you are claiming are true that you can't prove.
And then the only way to explain that is that there's a conspiracy against you.
The only way to explain that is to say those people are corrupt.
Those people have their own profit motive in mind.
And this is the thing that I think is so hard to tease apart, especially on social media, is that this is not only with regard to conspirituality, it's with regard to politics on the right as well.
It's the big lie from Trump, right?
There's so much of this.
thinking that you've had an awakening into an authentic skepticism, but it's actually like textbook confirmation bias and motivated reasoning.
Even though they're saying that's what we're doing, it's very, very, it's very difficult predicament.
I agree.
I mean, why do they get to sell their products and the other side doesn't?
I mean, it's mind-blowing.
The three of us, Julian, Matthew and myself, have had the opportunity, thankfully, to do a lot of podcasts and press over the two and a half years now we've been doing this.
And one thing that I know I take as my own practice is, if they bring up an episode or a topic, And they asked me a question about it, but it wasn't my field.
I say, oh, you know what, that was Julian or that was Matthew's real focus.
I can only speak either a little bit or I can't really speak about those things.
And I think that's important because, again, shallow but broad in terms of my range of knowledge.
I also don't feel comfortable starting to riff on topics that I don't know a lot about.
I believe that that's part of the strength of this podcast is that the three of us bring different facets of the same industry and we all try to stay within our lanes and we learn from one another.
failed businesses in terms of his partnerships that have gone south and there's been a lot of bad feelings between the parties there.
Have you ever seen any sense of humility?
Have you ever seen David say, you know what, I don't know, and then look for further expertise?
I have.
Maybe not publicly, but I knew him personally, and he has his humble moments.
I do want to say, to his credit, there are a lot of experts and these health people in any field, really, that it's not a party unless the venue is fully packed and there's hundreds of people.
He's not like that.
I remember being really impressed that he would just give it his all if only one person showed up in a snowstorm to one of his talks or lectures.
Having these personal connections with people and sometimes people came to him very sick.
I mean, people with cancer and with like lots of problems and he would kind of say, okay, I, you know, I don't know.
It wasn't all the time and I wasn't really there for the split with the investors.
So, you know, I can't speak firsthand to that, but I definitely saw some humble moments from him for sure.
That's good to hear.
It is.
Okay, but no, that's good to hear, because we've covered figures who you never see any evidence of that whatsoever.
And I know in your piece defending him a few years ago, you said that about him always giving it his all, and I think that is an important quality to highlight.
I think so.
I do wonder, though, when he starts talking about 5G, though, it seems to go a little bit off the rails, so let's listen.
Because scientism doesn't do safety studies.
Because scientism is masquerading as science, but when it comes down to the scientific method, they're actually trying to avoid the scientific method.
That's the whole 5G rollout.
So whenever you put a flashlight on a big money rollout like that, whether it's true or not that 5G is causing whatever, any of that, They don't want the flashlight there.
They don't want anybody to look and go.
There's no safety studies.
You see what I'm saying?
So even though the conspiracy stuff that's built up on top of that might be over the top.
For lack of a better pun.
Nevertheless, the actual flashlight going on to the whole subject in general is what the tech industry does not want to have happen.
And this is why we have the managing of all these events, because they're driving us towards big sales days.
And they've invested a lot.
Bill Gates has invested a lot of money in his vaccine program and the World Health Organization, all these different things.
And he's looking for a payday down the road.
There has been extensive research in 4G, 5G, the upcoming 6G, which will happen, and I'm sure we'll have plenty of material for that.
But that has been studied.
But just again, notice the pivot.
He's talking about 5G, and then Bill Gates and vaccines have to come into this picture somehow.
Yeah, Bill Gates, for a period of time at least, eliminating polio from the world stage through his vaccine initiatives.
Terrible.
He's the worst.
Let's close it up with his latest area of expertise, which is foreign policy, which is good to hear.
Personally, I went through all the data.
You know, I'm obviously running a media show, you know, like a show.
Basically, I'm investigating every single day, all day long.
In fact, I posted personally on my Telegram site for two years and two months straight, every single day.
Now I have a Gallus helping me, so it's taking the burden off a little bit, but that's how hardcore I am.
I doubt personally that Beijing Biden got 30 million votes.
I doubt it.
That's how much cheating is going on.
And so what is being revealed in the apocalypse of the moment that we're in is that we're like, Oh my God, it's all cheating.
It's all lies.
It's going to 100% lies, right?
In terms of what's being pushed out there.
So I, of course, immediately polarized against lies and I'm like, well, we're going to tell the truth.
And we're going to tell the truth from hell or high water.
And that's what I love doing.
You know, that's what I've always been trying to do as a health advocate is like, look, you can't be injected with health.
You actually have to go out and do things.
You know, it makes me think of gurus.
Who we've been critical of, and how those gurus who wield a kind of undue influence over their followers have gurus in turn who have undue influence over them.
And it feels to me like if Donald Trump is the ultimate kind of political con artist, someone like David Wolf, who with all of his good intentions also has that kind of snake oil salesman vibe, in my opinion, he's also susceptible to people who are running the same kind of I think so.
conspiratorial alternative facts, kind of a charismatic bluster and bravado, like the same thing he does, he's probably susceptible to.
I think so.
I think that's a really good observation because there are always, you know, he's always referencing it and throwing it to someone else.
Yeah.
And just to, to, to be clear, we, we, the clips that we've been using, one was from wellness force, as we've, as we've noted the other, or one of the sources that, There are several clips from each of these podcasts.
The other podcast is called Yoga, Heart and Mind.
I just want to make sure I give them credit for some of the stuff we've been sourcing.
When David says he posts every day on Telegram, I'm talking dozens of times a day.
His Telegram is the biggest dumpster fire of conspiracies and just horrible, really horrible stuff.
I want to be clear on that.
There's his sales opportunity, there's always links to whatever he's selling at the moment.
The day after Biden's speech, the pedophile stuff, it's just so absurd and ridiculous.
I don't think we can really ever capture how dangerous this stuff really is, because people follow him.
A lot of people follow him, and they're in on that inside joke about these things, which isn't really a joke.
Jill, thank you for joining.
I'm with you in saying that there was an influence there on people's health that I do agree with, Grifter or not.
There are plenty of charismatic figures who I might not like their overt salesmanship, but you can hang out with and you don't have to agree on everything.
But when it gets to this level of paranoia and distrust and just pure hatred that he's spreading right now, I don't see anything good coming from it down the road.
It's going to be something to watch.
I mean, where do you go from here is the question I keep asking.
Number one, how did we get here?
And like I said, I think it was always underlying, but it's gotten so tense.
And the person I was talking with last night, she was saying how he played a big role in her getting healthy.
And then she said something I hadn't even really thought of.
She was like, Gen Z has no idea who he is, and so I think there's this trying to stay relevant and trying to find an audience, but it seems like it could be dangerous, and I hope that's not the case, but I don't really know where he goes from here.
Yeah, one of the questions we've asked a lot of these different Figures who've taken this kind of arc is, is there a way back?
And what might the way back look like?
You know, I think some of it actually requires a lot of support and empathy to be like, okay, you know, you went down that road and now we're on the other side of that and we're seeing a lot of those things actually weren't true.
You know, he also was someone who put a lot of stock in the whole 2012.
You know, supposed big cataclysmic moment of transformation.
I wanted to ask you though, in terms of other people that you might have in common with him, do you have a sense that there are people who followed his nutritional stuff, his sort of spiritual nutrition routine, who then have been influenced by him into this more conspiratorial political worldview?
And or do you know people who have gone, you know, all of that stuff was good, kind of like yourself, right?
But this new turn, I'm not, I'm not staying with you.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not so involved.
And I'm not, you know, we're not really in touch anymore.
So I don't know who's come and gone.
But I mean, I think there were a lot of adjacent ones, like I know you've touched on Mickey Willis, and that kind of very much your audience.
Or your subjects, rather, of who you go and look at, we're all kind of aligned with him.
And I was shocked, because of your podcast, just how many people in the wellness realm have gone to this side.
Denise Mari from Organic Avenue and Doug Evans, I think, are two that are very much, you know, still, and they're old friends with David and are still very much
