144: The Magic Spells of Wellness (w/Colleen Derkatch)
"Cleansing is no longer an option, it's a necessity.”
From wellness influencers obsessed about the meat-body, to Christofascists obsessed about the body politic, rhetoric bombards us from all sides.
Professor of Rhetoric Colleen Derkatch joins Julian to discuss the techniques of the meaning miasma. Her focus is on wellness rhetoric specifically, and how it points to incipient illness, encourages recreational diagnostics, and describes daily routines as liturgies that grant membership in divine communities.
Also we can't avoid talking about Russell Brand on Bill Maher. Sorry.
Show Notes
Meet Colleen Derkatch
Gish Gallop: When People Try to Win Debates by Using Overwhelming Nonsense
Pharma Wants In - Rina Raphael
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And Today we'll be discussing the rhetoric of wellness marketing and how it overlaps with our own work on conspirituality.
Okay, so one of the really nice things that's happening in the run-up to our book, Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, being published on June 13th, is that colleagues and friends of the pod who we've sent advanced copies to, some of whom have given us blurbs, they're not only giving us feedback, but are now riffing on some of our ideas in their own work, which is of course very flattering.
Yeah, it's really exciting.
For instance, Aaron Rabinowitz, who's the host of Embrace the Void podcast, you might know him from that great show.
We're going to have him on soon because he's working on a paper that breaks down this division we've been poking at between those who produce conspiracy theory material and those who consume conspiracy theory material. He argues that both sides are
victimized by bad epistemology, and I don't exactly know what he means by that, so that's
why we're going to have him on, but in the abstract for this paper, he writes, all conspiracism
profiteers are also conspiracism victims, and all conspiracism victims are also conspiracism
profiteers. Clearly, he's a philosopher.
Right.
Conspiracy theorists at every level of conspiracism report psychological benefits such as pleasure and a sense of community.
Furthermore, it's unlikely that a large number of conspiracism promoters are genuinely duplicitous simply because it's much easier to promote something you genuinely believe.
Even if we can prove that some individuals appear to confess to lying about some of the conspiracies they promote, we ultimately have to treat professions of conspiracism belief as sincere, and so must treat all conspiracism profiteers as conspiracism victims.
So, that's big if true, and he's really leaning into the anti-stigmatization argument, and that feels promising to me because, you know, I don't think you shift a shameful and unlucky supply-demand loop by just cutting off the supply, even if you could.
Yeah, I want to add here, too, that I really love Aaron's work, and one of his central concepts is luck.
is how, how it's the luck of the draw, how so many things work for each of us in our lives
and that that therefore drives a lot of the choices we make, including say becoming an anti-vaxxer.
So fascinating stuff. Right. At the same time, we're finding even more common cause with other
researchers and authors who are tackling similar or related themes.
For example, we got a very nice blurb from Mike Rothschild, thanks so much Mike, who we had on the podcast before to discuss his book, The Storm is Upon Us, and he just announced his next book, Jewish Space Lasers, which is out in the fall.
Yeah, cool.
So I'm going to read it because it's just so cool.
Conspirituality brilliantly exposes the fusion between conspiracy theories and wellness while emphasizing the con aspect at the heart of both.
Truly there are grifters and scammers everywhere in this world.
And the authors have their number revealing their psychological tricks and how they exploit the pain and trauma of their marks.
And, this is the best part, far from seeing themselves as too smart to fall for this nonsense, the authors mine their own experiences in cults and coercive movements, having seen them from the inside.
This book is required reading to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic became such a driver of both paranoia and commerce.
He gets us.
He really gets us.
I know, he gets us.
Right.
And pre-order is in the show notes at the bottom or on our website if you would like to help us boost that algorithmic juice.
would be wonderful.
Okay, so if you want to know why we're looking at rhetoric today, we're recording this five
days after dropping our episode with trans journalist Bo Brink, in which he laid out
the history and political theory of scapegoating queer people in America.
But it's also three days after Daily Wire's Michael Knowles stood in front of CPAC and The World and said, transgenderism must be eradicated from the country.
And when commentators made the obvious paraphrase that this was a call for eradicating trans people, Noel said, no, no, no, that's not what I meant.
I meant the idea, not the people who embody it.
Like, we should eradicate Judaism does not mean we should eradicate Jews.
And not to be outdone, but then the next day, Nick Fuentes, who's across the street doing a parallel presentation, actually went There, exactly, and said just as much.
So, here are guys who are saying absolutely morbid and outrageous things, and then outrageously disclaiming what they say.
I should also note that Nick Fuentes, at the end of that rant, said that he loves Hitler.
He was like, this is a long way of saying I love Hitler, and got a standing ovation from that comment.
Yeah, so these are carefully chosen, maybe not carefully chosen, but at least willful provocations that generate engagement at least twice.
Part of the deal for CPAC is that Knowles doesn't have to go all the way because Nick Fuentes in the building across the street is going all of the way.
And let's just also note here that this is just a predictable continuation of the escalating rhetoric that's been coming out of all of the Daily Wire hosts and pundits for months now.
It's not a surprise, and it's not happening in a vacuum, and it's not just Michael Knowles going off script.
This is coordinated, it's deliberate, and it's characteristic of these people.
Yeah, and it reminds me yet again of Sartre's take on the fascist uses of rhetoric.
He says back in 1948 or something like that, They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge, but they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.
The anti-Semites have the right to play.
They even like to play with discourse, for by giving ridiculous reasons they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.
They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument, but to intimidate and disconcert.
But I think every rhetoric that destroys meaning must also offer a hint that it could reestablish meaning.
And at CPAC, just like throughout the conspirituality world we cover, that glory hinges on keywords.
Sovereignty.
Naturalness.
Awakening.
Truth.
America.
These are all words that people like Derrida named as transcendental signifiers, which are basically words and phrases that are too big to fail.
Like, when they start to bankrupt themselves, the pundits rush in to bail them out.
The transcendental signifier is like anything with high emotional impact and low definitional value.
So you can never really pin the speaker down.
Do your research.
You have an immune system.
Fear is the virus.
These are all performative signifiers.
And as Colleen Durkacz starts to unpack for us in her study of wellness marketing, that performance often conceals something really anxious, really troubling.
I love that you said they're too big to fail.
I think that's a very concise and accurate way of thinking about it.
And you know, as you continue down that road, you get to authoritarian sloganeering, you get to the big banners that have these statements that could mean anything, because they mean everything, in terms of the intensity of emotional response they evoke.
They're also so absurd they can be disclaimed at any time.
Yeah.
Right.
All right.
So before we look at our main interview today, the news cycle has been particularly rich.
I know you have something else very topical for us that just kind of dropped into our laps, Derek.
Yeah, Russell Brand went on his big American trip last week, and I have to say that out of all the figures we've covered in three years, when I write about him, I never get so much trolling and pushback and conspiratorial comments on my feed, as with Russell.
It's pretty incredible, the niche he's carved out in his own life and career.
Can I just ask, Derek, what do you think is at the heart of that defensiveness?
Like, how has he really got people snookered?
Well, I'm going to get to that in this.
I think the rhetorical style that he uses is at the heart of it, which effectively, as I'll say, produces affect or emotion in people, and that is why they get so riled up.
So he was first spotted schmoozing with Donald Trump Jr.
and his girlfriend at the Rumble party in Florida about a week ago.
Then he was on to his big champion, Joe Rogan.
And then he landed on Bill Marshall.
And as I mentioned on social media last weekend, he utilized three charismatic techniques on Marshall, which was constant touching, intrusive eye contact, and name referencing, which are both ways of establishing relationship and then dominance.
And then finally, everyone's favorite, Gish Gallup.
In my substack on this, I included a definition because not everyone knows what Gish Gallup is, but Julian, I know a specialty of yours is understanding this.
Can you explain what it is?
Yeah, Gish Gallup is actually a technical term that's arisen to describe the rhetorical technique in which someone just throws a laundry list of examples at their debate opponent.
Such that it's really impossible to keep up with them all, let alone respond with facts, evidence, or well-reasoned rebuttal to any one of them.
It's a kind of scattershot technique that can hide the weakness of any single claim by bundling it together with other, usually weak claims, as if the sheer volume increases their veracity.
It's named after a creationist, Dwayne Gish, who, like Russell Brand, was a virtuosic proponent of this technique.
Dwayne.
Dwayne.
And I just said, Derek, can I just say, I'm so glad you picked up on the touching because the very first time he reached out and touched Heilemann's, he touched his hand.
He kind of held his hand for like two seconds.
You could see how uncomfortable it was.
And I think he even said, though, I've just met you.
I love you already.
And it's, it's, it's like manipulative as all get out.
Yeah, there's a lot of manipulation going in there.
Let me also preface what I'm about to get into by saying, Julian, you shared with me last night, which is not what I need to see before bed, a 17 minute video that Russell Brand created showing how he destroyed John Heilman, which really gets to the fact that he was not in his comfort zone with people who were actually pushing back on him.
And so it's like he needed to like, Continue to escalate beyond what I'm about to talk about.
So we've talked about Giskell for years.
So at one point in the show, Bill Maher is talking about the news story that's everywhere but on Fox News.
And that's the fact that Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, and others knowingly lied about Trump's election fraud lies in order to keep ratings and stock prices high.
And that's based on texts that were uncovered in the Dominion voting lawsuit.
Mar wanted to discuss this specifically, and it turned into a both-sides-are-equally-to-blame argument from Brand.
Now, I know that both Julian and I watch Bill Maher every week, and we've both been upset by some of his increasingly extreme and often uninformed views on certain topics.
There's crypto, which I've heard in the past, there's fat shaming, which often reappears, and then of course there's anti-vax adjacent commentary that comes from him often.
That said, I always think it's healthy to engage with people and their ideologies that you're not 100% on board with, like I talked about with Loretta Ross and her circles of influence a few weeks ago.
And in terms of being a more classical liberal, I'm closer to a number of Mars views and I often find value in understanding why I disagree with him when I do.
You know, Derek, I find a lot of value in understanding why I disagree with you about Marr, because I think he's an embittered, stoned crank who's losing ground in the comedian as pundit class.
I think he's trying to stay sexy to liberal centrists by punching down at caricatures of progressive millennials he has no interest in knowing or empathizing with.
Yeah, I think that's fair.
But also, you know, if there's any expertise I can glean from the figures we cover, I think over 10 years of weekly data sets from listening to someone provides that.
So, you know, I agree to an extent with that.
But then there are other times and other guests.
I mean, the show this past week started off with Bernie Sanders, you know, so he, you know, that that type of showcasing is very rare in our world today and I still do appreciate
that, even if I don't agree with everything he says.
But for this week, Russell was in between Mar and John Heileman, who is a political
pro.
He is the producer and one of the hosts of Showtime's The Circus.
He is a great and calm debater and he played a foil to Brand's frenetic energy.
He's seen much more formidable opponents on debate stages, whereas Brand has carved himself into his echo chamber.
And so Heilman at one point in the show says, I'd like to hear a specific example of an MSNBC correspondent or anchor being on television saying something they knew was false.
going again to the both sides claim about Fox.
It's a very specific question to which, spoiler alert, Brand can't answer.
I could hardly watch this, um, but I just wanted to, to pause and flag that
you're, you're, I think you're saying and you're gonna unpack that instead of answers,
he's doing the touching and the naming and the eye contact.
Now, I, I just wanna ask, and I think Julian, you might have some insight into this.
Are all of these things elements of, of what's known as anchoring in NLP?
I would say, I'm not an expert on the topic, I would say though that they're adjacent to that in that they're attempts to influence someone and get their guard down and have them sort of feel like maybe they go along with you to some extent even though they don't.
I think in the more Classical sense anchoring is like you're trying to elicit a particular response without the person realizing that you've done that.
But they're all in the category of persuasion, as far as I'm concerned.
Right.
And NLP is neuro-linguistic programming, in case anyone didn't catch that.
And to answer the first part of your question, Matthew, no, the touching, naming, and eye contact was done before what happens next, before the gish gallop.
He was establishing His presence and dominance there, because when he goes into preacher mode, that's all gone because he then becomes the center of attention.
Right.
So I did do a transcript of his wild response, but to summate it, he first says, MSNBC criticizing Joe Rogan promoting ivermectin, which Brand says is a valid therapeutic for COVID-19.
It's not.
Now again, this is his reply to Heilman's question, give me an example of an MSNBC correspondent or anchor Saying something they knew was false.
So he goes to Rogan first, which isn't an answer, and Heilman was like, that's not a response.
Brand then pivots to the, we're using an untested vaccine on people, also untrue as over 68,000 people in the world were tested before their releases, and he finally turns it back on Heilman by accusing him of participating in the same game as Fox.
So over the course of about two minutes, he doesn't answer the question—or in his 17-minute video, which you shared with me, Julian—and as I said, Heilmann keeps saying, not a response, not a response, not a response, because he was trying to hold Brand to account, but Brand would never actually reply to the actual question.
It was hard to hear him, though, because Brand is yelling.
Yeah, and that also messed up my transcript because I kept seeing both voices in there at the same time, so I had to actually listen to it numerous times to get out everything that was happening.
And I know people on Twitter have been replying to me saying, Brand, own Heilman, but that can only be if you're seduced by affect And you ignore logic, which gets to the point earlier, Matthew, about why I think people are so riled up by him, because that's what he's producing.
There's even a moment when Bran goes into anti-vax territory and Mar, as I said, has been increasingly skeptical about certain mandates and about vaccine efficacy.
stops Russell and says that the COVID vaccines were responsible for certain populations saving
millions of their lives.
So then Russell launches into another tirade because he's cornered and he can't argue reasonable
points in these situations.
And so he has to tap into his acting training in order to evoke emotions.
And he's very successful at that, but his logic falls apart at every turn because there
isn't any.
And he even tried to turn it back on Maher at one point by saying that he was engaging
in rhetorical games, which again, credit to Maher.
He just blew that off.
Quite a stunning example.
Let's move on to our expert.
Colleen Durkacz is an English professor in Toronto.
She specializes in the rhetoric of science, health, and medicine.
Her book, excellent book, I highly recommend it, is called Why Wellness Sells.
And we're excited to bring you my interview with her today.
What I found in listening back to our fascinating and deep discussion about the language games of wellness marketing is that there actually are many rich topics and areas of overlap with our own work.
So we're going to listen to excerpts from the interview and pause periodically to unpack and respond to her rich insights on wellness marketing rhetoric.
In concert with our parallel observations about the phenomenon of conspirituality.
I started off asking Derek Hatch about her academic field, which is rhetoric.
Here's how she described it.
So Aristotle defined rhetoric as the art of persuasion and the study of that art.
And that often takes place at the level of language, but not always.
So we can talk about, you know, buildings as persuasive, or we can talk about objects as persuasive.
So it's really just kind of looking at that sort of invisible sort of miasma That surrounds us at all times and sort of shapes our perceptions of the world.
And so when we look at rhetoric, we typically look at the rhetoric of things.
So we always have a kind of a prepositional relationship to our objects of study, which means we always look at the rhetoric of religion, rhetoric of health and medicine.
In my case, you can look at the rhetoric of music, etc.
So that's my general discipline and my courses are generally about communication.
The courses I teach are typically about communication in various spheres, but my own research looks at elements of persuasion within health and medicine.
I really like the broad definition.
Because I think it's rare that we see rhetoric isolated from aesthetics and affect, but those add-ons are hard to describe, it's hard to parse them out.
And I don't want to correct the good professor, but I believe the contemporary and maybe politically correct term for miasma is vibes.
And it comes up over and over again, and we always try to reach towards adequate descriptions of this.
I think with somebody like Brand, you know, we're talking about like, I don't know, cyberpunk, Rasputin vibes.
With Michael Knowles, he's backing up the F.A.S.H.
statements with something that's very scrubbed and youthful.
And then his old college mates show up on Twitter to say, oh yeah, he was a theater kid.
And you can kind of like feel that.
Peterson is incredible.
Some days, he's Willy Wonka.
Other days, he's the Two-Face villain.
But week by week, he shrivels a little bit more.
He vibes a little bit hotter and brighter.
I think even his stans are worried about the stress of his obvious sacrifices to the cause.
But you can feel all of that.
Regardless of the absurdity of what he's saying, there's a whole scene that is helping to put it together.
Then there's Kelly Brogan's visual rhetoric, and she's definitely not alone in this, but it really works to erase the line between alt-health and erotica.
She's got this soft core wellness vibe.
And then Zach Bush.
He has this gentle wince in his eyes all the time, as if he's either about to come or drop a deuce.
And he's melancholic, but his vocal fry is vibrating with this kind of deep pleasure that's hard to describe.
And then Christiane Northrup has her harp, chunky necklaces.
These are tableaus, they're scenes.
They have this very sort of totalizing impact, all of them, I find.
I also want to flag when she says buildings are persuasive.
That can be a hard thing to understand, but I want to point listeners to James C. Scott's book, Seeing Like a State, where he begins the book by talking about The difference is in how we understand natural forest as component of planned forestry, and then he moves into architecture from there.
We're not going to get too deep into that now, but if people wanted to better understand what she was talking about, that's a great resource to understand how natural and man-made architecture affects psychology and societies.
We talk next about a moment in her chapter titled, Wellness as Harm Reduction, in which Durkacz describes a banner ad in her local health food store that said, cleansing is no longer an option, it's a necessity.
Underneath that bold statement, she describes the list of reasons that were written there about why consumers need to purge toxins, and of course the benefits of a specific cleansing product.
I asked Colleen about the propagandistic quality of this messaging as well as about the concept of toxins as a kind of article of faith that motivates people to take action.
I'll use this word advisedly.
It does prey on insecurities and anxieties people might have.
And capitalizes on that, right?
And I think that for me, it's a consumer product first and that kind of ideological message.
I mean, all advertising, all marketing is ideological, like that's baked in.
That's, you know, advertising trades more than anything else on values.
Values that we hold in that case about bodily purity, about nature, you know, even in some ways returning to some kind of, you know, imagined pastoral Past, you know, I'm thinking here of like Williams, William Wordsworth, you know, looking out, you know, upon cities in the Industrial Revolution and thinking about wanting to withdraw to some kind of pure, you know, idyllic past.
And I think that that that's kind of a kernel that is built into an ad like that.
And that it's a necessity like we must be fearful.
The thing about toxins as an idea is that they're invisible and if they're invisible we can't ever know where they are and if they could be somewhere then they could be anywhere.
That is an ever-present fear I think many people have and lucky for us there's a product that's come along and is ready to fix that problem for us.
This analysis of rhetoric in terms of persuasive communication and indeed propaganda around wellness is fascinating and I think it intersects with my own experience of this very familiar ideology.
The world is filled with toxins.
The body is impure.
Cleansing is no longer an option, it's a necessity if you want to really wake up, right?
I have to flag when she's talking about rhetoric, you had invoked Zach Bush earlier, Matthew, and his preacher spell where he talks about the one billion to the one billionth power of viruses in the sand and you should rub yourself in and everything.
And I was thinking of him when I was reading, I'm reading a book called Virology by Joseph Asmunson right now, which is excellent.
And he is a virologist and he makes the point that yes, there are that many viruses and most of them destroy bacteria and they do nothing to us.
So I find it, what I find so fascinating about what he says in the marketing of it is how Zach Bush is using this idea that viruses are everywhere in the Billions and trillions all over the place, and then therefore that means we should just be able to get over COVID, whereas if you actually talk to a virologist, they will tell you why different viruses affect the human body where many others don't.
Because I guess they're not using rhetoric, right?
Yeah, that could be part of it.
Yeah, I guess for me it's starting to really sink in how deeply triggering the pandemic was when it came to this primal, like, really child-aged anxiety that I think we all have around filth and dirt.
I love what she says about the invisible miasma or vibes.
You know, like I remember.
Do you remember, guys, those early reports of COVID transmission in restaurants where people posted diagrams of the floor plan and the seating and how the ventilation systems reportedly circulated the virus perfectly to the point that everyone got sick?
It was like, how did this happen?
And then they showed you with little arrows and air flows and stuff like that.
Well, there's something very important that you're getting at here, which is that the use of the concept of toxins as this invisible, ever-present threat that could be everywhere, because you can't see it anywhere, it's very, very similar to viruses, except viruses are specific and real.
Right, but the diagrams themselves become, or any way that you come to represent the flow of COVID becomes like an eerie schema of interconnectedness and infection.
Like you're going to go to a restaurant and you're always going to be licking everyone else's plate, right?
We should also point out where miasma comes from, which is miasma theory, though.
So, while the more current rhetorical translation could be vibes, it's also coming from something that humans believed made everyone sick, which was this dense layer of invisible force from the clouds that was coming down on us that you had to avoid in order to not get the Black Plague, for example.
And it's central to homeopathy.
Right.
And like everything else that's invisible and impossible to understand, and that seems to be everywhere, coursing throughout all things, miasma seems to be naturally framed as a spiritual problem, which provokes the search for spiritual answers.
I want to remind readers that if you want a very old reading of this problem, just read the Decameron because it addresses all of these issues we're talking about in some ways.
I got actually quite excited here because Derkacz is gesturing towards how wellness language rhymes with fascist themes of body purity, blood and soil, and a lost golden age that we also spend quite some time unpacking in our book.
She also draws this interesting contrast between puritanical moralism around clean living and wellness promises of relief from exhaustion and a return to vitality versus transgressive seeming enjoyment of the senses.
That relief and enhanced energy, she says, are framed in neoliberal terms as allowing us to be more productive.
Yeah, that's so true.
on unhealthy, impure indulgences.
She writes, ultimately, natural health products do nothing to alleviate the penetrating exhaustion
that characterizes much of contemporary life.
Yeah, it's so true.
And she underlines it by making the point that purity rhetoric, like rhetoric about anything else,
conceals an anxiety about the opposite of its subjects.
So in this case, an anxiety about impurity.
And I wanted to point out that, you know, sometimes this hidden conflict, this fixation upon purity and an anxiety around impurity becomes explicit within wellness culture.
And sometimes I would say even I don't know, like performatively bipolar or something like that.
Like I'm thinking about cult leaders who drone on and on about getting clean and clear and they make everybody go through fasts and cleanses, but they don't bathe themselves.
You know, Chogyam Trungpa was very greasy and reportedly quite stinky for years.
Keith Raniere went through a phase like that while he's making everybody starve.
I'm willing to bet that L. Ron Hubbard was pretty musky.
But more broadly, you know, it feels like that conflict plays out in all natural body odor spaces where pungency is seen as natural.
You know, you're proving your connection to the earth.
But at the same time, we know that lowered hygiene is correlated with depression, anxiety, PTSD.
I've certainly gone through periods of low hygiene at low ebbs of mental health, where I'm thinking, the world doesn't care for me, why should I care for myself?
Or if you're not going to pay attention to my emotions, I'm going to make you pay attention to my funk.
I wonder how that works on a physiological level.
I have very acute hearing.
That's why I deal with troubles with sounds.
But my wife can smell things that I can't even imagine.
But I do know that two things in my life have given me superpowers of smell.
One of them was psychedelics.
Whenever I trip, I get crazy.
I'm like, oh, there's a whole world I don't explore.
But the other one was fasting, which I've done a few times in my life.
And that hunger drives real scent-making capabilities in me.
And I wonder how that plays into how these cults operate and function, if that's something that other people experience.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
Now, on psychedelics, are you smelling things that are there or are you smelling things that are not there?
More like enhanced smelling of things that were there.
I think the first time I remember that was someone handed me an orange when I was on acid and I ate it, but I remember even before, as soon as it came out of the refrigerator, just the scent just overwhelmed me and the whole experience was very sensual in that sense of like, it was not just eating, there was this whole other lighting up going on and that has continued with that.
Early on, people would hand me Starburst.
That was a big tripping tool back in the day that also enhanced the smell before you put it in your mouth.
Yeah, I mean one of the big misconceptions from people who have not had psychedelic experiences is that you're sort of hallucinating the whole time.
Most of what I think happens with psychedelics is that your sensory awareness of everything that actually is happening is just amplified and heightened and multiple layers are revealed that otherwise you're not in touch with.
That's what's so captivating about it.
I mean, back to Dirk Hatch and impurity and anxiety, I feel like everybody has to deal with it.
And we know that we have automatic responses to things that are filthy, and then there are certain circumstances in which it's heightened.
I know that it's especially heightened during pregnancy, for example.
Yes.
But I remember too, when I think about how does this get resolved, I have a sample of one in myself.
I can't say it's entirely, my purity pollution issues are not entirely resolved.
I do remember being more germaphobic before I went through a bunch of years of Buddhism, during which I was taught to meditate on my own body as a rotting corpse, as a kind of existential exposure therapy.
And then, you know, there's this moment where it came to this symbolic head where I'm staying at a monastery run by Tibetan Buddhists in exile in Karnataka, in Baila Kuppe, and my wife at the time drops the skeleton key to our room into the open toilet.
And then it fell to me to get down in there up to my elbows in like fermenting monk shit to retrieve it.
And then two days later, I got sicker than I'd ever been in my life.
Hallucinatory fever, green goo falling out of my ears.
And, you know, this was my Buddhist sort of epiphany of seeing that I could merge my consciousness with the interdependence of like all bacteria.
And I don't, yeah, like it was a transformative moment for me and I don't feel like I have had, you know, the same kind of feelings around purity and pollution since.
That was your Slumdog Millionaire moment.
Yeah, it was.
Yeah, I don't think, though, that this would be a therapy, really.
I don't think that, like, monk shit fever would do well.
Hard to package and sell.
Right.
I know.
These questions of virtue are kind of packaged and sold to us already, right?
Like, I think, and this was a driving argument within the whole book, is that for a lot of people engaging with different natural health products and services and wellness culture generally, They're often operating within the terms already available to us, you know, by the way that our lives are structured.
And so, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about the pharmaceutical industry.
And again, this is something that surprised me in all of the different, all of my different sort of sources of data in the book is I consistently saw the same message that I was surprised to see, which is that People are pretty savvy about what happens, for example, in the pharmaceutical industry.
And so part of what drives people's interest in supplements is actually they see the pharmaceutical industry doing dirty things, skewing trial evidence and stuff.
We hear these stories in the media, and we know a lot of them are true.
And of course, that doesn't address all the, you know, totally robust research and evidence that is out there.
But these become little moments that we kind of hang on to.
And we try to kind of get out of, but then we operate in the same terms of them.
And I think that that is a key part that drives like these, these rhetorics of exhaustion, trying to carve out some space for taking care of yourself and for getting out of the mainstream health system.
But in fact, we're operating in the same logics, just kind of shifting, you know, the sphere we're working in.
And the other thing is, is that, you know, now that so many mainstream pharmacies, um, you know, and like Walmart and things sell supplements, people have a lot of trust in where they buy products and they think, well, you know, okay.
You know, if it's being sold in like a dusty little natural food store in, you know, some deserted part of town, I might not trust it, but it's at Walgreens or it's in Canada at Shoppers Drive Mart.
Like, of course, you know, they wouldn't bring in a product that didn't work.
And then it doesn't have that like information leaflet that lists every possible thing that could go wrong.
You know, where we might look at that and say, well, yeah, because there's a lack of data or because there's no legal requirement.
For people who, you know, spend their time and their lives doing other things, not what we do, they just take that as a marker of trustworthiness.
I love this clip particularly.
It reminds me on February 17th, a friend of the show, Rina Raphael, who we had on for her Gospel of Wellness book.
She published an article on her well-to-do sub-stack called Pharma Once In
that highlights the point that Colleen makes here about the wellness
pharmaceutical advertising crossover.
But interestingly, she looks at it from the other side, which is pharma
manufacturers taking cues from the wellness industry.
This has been happening for a while, but it's happening a lot more right now. She highlights
Robitussin, that famous horrible-tasting syrup that I grew up
chugging as a child thanks to my numerous sinus infections.
Which has a Naturals Plus collection that
talks about immune health and that it's powered by nature.
I bet it tastes better, though, Derek.
I mean, you could have a whole new sort of childhood healing.
Monk shit Robitussin.
Raphael even says that her husband says one of the ads makes the bottle look like a druidic god, which is a spot-on observation.
Rina also writes about Metamucils, prebiotic gummy supplements, and collagen-infused And it's also that both industries are telling on themselves, right?
selling supplement gummies for immune system health as well.
I'll link to the article in the show notes, but suffice to say that advertising between pharma
and wellness is not a one-way street.
Oh my God, the erased boundaries that come from market research, right?
This is what's selling, guys.
Yeah, and it's also that both industries are telling on themselves, right?
I think the pharma companies want to appear natural.
The herbal companies want to appear scientific.
Like, why can't we all just get along?
But I think it's a real clue that there is a market for more than science and a market for more than intuition.
I think that tells us something very deep about, like, human culture, no?
Yeah, the more than science is, let's include the mystery and the vibes, and the more than intuition is, but it's been validated by the new science.
Right, yeah.
And I keep hearing the ghost of Derrida in all of this, Matthew, which I'm sure you appreciate.
Right.
So, Colleen often points out how the common experience of being drained Right that we all experience of getting older feeling a loss of vitality sometimes just not as mentally focused as i used to be or not as joyful is often then framed by the rhetoric of wellness marketing as indicating a loss of an idealized self that wouldn't you know it product x can restore.
And this is something that comes up in my research, and I'm going to get into homeopathy briefly in a moment, that a lot of homeopathic products are using ingredients that are in pharmaceuticals, but they're diluted so they're not actually there.
We know that.
And so this is not a new phenomenon of wellness being like, Fuck pharma, but we're also going to steal your playbook.
And we're even going to use some of your products, we're just going to package it differently.
And that's, I think, Colleen's point there, which I love and is so, so relevant.
But before we play the next clip, let me flag one thing she mentions, which is a rescue remedy.
So an old massage therapist turned me on to this intervention about 20 years ago, as she was aware of my problem with panic attacks.
And I know this is going to shock you guys, but it did nothing for me.
Uh, you know, you didn't resonate.
Did you take it properly at the right time?
I just did not.
The moon wasn't full when I took it, so.
It was on the tongue and not under the tongue.
But here's a little history.
The company trademarked the term rescue shortly after, as the mythology goes, Dr. Edward was treating soldiers during World War I when he collapsed
on the field, was given three months to live, and made a full recovery thanks to having a
positive attitude.
This was in 1917, and by the 30s this dude had identified 38 plant and flower remedies,
five of which are still in every rescue product today.
There's a radical disconnect there.
I don't understand.
He had a positive attitude and that's why he was cured.
And then he went out and identified 38 plant and flower remedies that what he had a positive attitude would cure others.
I don't understand.
I'm getting into it, Julian.
Maybe you should pre-read the script sometimes.
It probably won't surprise you as I flag that the mojo is homeopathy.
That's right.
He shunned medical research for his remedies and instead relied on intuition thanks to his psychic connection with the plants, which he found out after his own healing experience.
There we go.
Answer your question?
Good?
Okay.
So here's how Rescue Remedy was developed.
Bach would feel a negative emotion He would then hold his hand over different plants and whichever— Oh, muscle testing!
And whichever plant alleviated the emotion would go into the vial.
And what was in the vial?
Dew drops experiencing early morning sunlight, which obviously transferred the healing power of the flower into the water.
And the dew was then mixed with brandy to produce the mother tincture, though he later created an even stronger method of suspending flowers in spring water.
So he was Gandalf, but without a ring to destroy.
I don't know.
I mean, there is something in Rescue Remedy emerging out of the trauma of the First World War as an origin story, and I don't think we've really touched on this.
And I'd actually like to go into the history of it at some point, just how much modern mysticism Like, really flies up out of those trenches and sparks the spiritualism and the table tapping and all of that stuff in the 1920s.
I mean, that's what Harry Houdini was running around desperately trying to debunk, like us.
All the spirit mediums who said that they could talk with the customer's son whose head got blown off somewhere in France.
Well, to his credit, Bach was not a germ theory denialist, so he'd probably be outed today as a big pharma advocate.
But he did ultimately believe that treating a patient's personality was the only way to uncover the root cause of all disease.
The original five remedies, which I flagged a moment ago, that are still in use, you have Rock Rose for fearlessness, Clematis for focus.
Cherry plum for composure.
Impatience for impatience.
And Star of Bethlehem for comfort.
And yes, it is still homeopathic, meaning that only the flower's essence
is in the vial that you're paying $20 for.
I heard of it first when my midwife told me to take it.
And that was, at the time, I didn't really think a lot of it
because I had just had a baby and I was kind of losing my mind.
and I was kind of losing my mind.
In that context my midwife who I adored but she was like oh yeah you should get some rescue remedy and and so it was in that context that I came across these ads that I analyzed Well, I just found them so interesting because they were a series of commercials all shot in black and white of all exclusively white women in these sort of stereotypically stressful situations.
One is a bride who's about to be married but her pearl necklace falls and breaks.
One is a mother of a small child who comes running into a room wielding a sword and knocks over a glass of red wine onto a white carpet while this beautifully made-up mother is cooking dinner.
And in each case these are kind of ordinary, but stressful, but ordinary life events that Rescue Remedy is like poised as this Remedy for lack of a better word to come in and and like literally rescue these women in these scenarios and I try as much as possible to be generous of my readings of these different types of products but the commercials are kind of hilarious I have to be honest because it's like they drop these liquid drops on on their tongues and then like instantly they're cured of whatever stress they've been under
It's so playing to our fantasies of what Lauren Berlant calls the good life, right?
You know, that if we can just get through this, like, immediate hurdle, then, you know, the clouds will part and, you know, life will be good.
But the thing is, is our lives are always sort of, at least mine, you know, kind of a comically ridiculous sort of back-to-back set of scenarios that I'm always kind of, you know, trying to rescue myself from.
And I think that's true of everybody, you know, because Life is hard even when it's easy and so a product like Rescue Remedy is so well positioned to kind of pick up on and respond to those scenarios in a really appealing way.
We must reckon with the way marketing logics operate within the pharmaceutical industry and I think the wellness industry in a lot of ways is is those pharmaceutical logics coming home to roost.
These products, they're produced in often really the same way.
They're synthesized in labs.
They're, you know, sold by for-profit businesses.
They're, you know, often they're pills in bottles.
I mean, the cover of my book is like literally a bunch of pills.
And so they work in that way, but they don't have any of those guardrails or safeguards.
You even point out how they have similar packaging and similar ways of talking about the milligrams of the active ingredient.
Or in, I think the example I give, the product doesn't actually have an active ingredient.
So it shows like the milligrams of the total, you know, the total, uh, whatever's in, it's a liquid cap, but it doesn't actually contain an active ingredient that, that substance.
Yeah.
That was, that was a pretty fascinating one.
It's called Helixia.
And it's for cold and flu, and I found it on the shelf of my local pharmacy.
And, you know, I have a PhD in rhetoric of health and medicine, so health communication.
Like, it's my literal job.
I've been writing about natural health and wellness for, you know, 20 years.
And it took me probably a good five minutes to figure out if it was a legit drug or not.
Like, I could not tell.
I remember just standing there in the pharmacy flipping the package over and over and over because it was like it said it had like 20 milligrams or whatever and it showed liquid caps and it said it was a treatment for cold and flu but then I couldn't find an active ingredient and and I ended up actually hunting around looking for a drug identification number because at the time the regulations have changed since then but at the time Natural health products had natural product numbers and then pharmaceuticals had drug identification numbers and so that was like the only way I could tell that it wasn't a pharmaceutical.
So Colleen writes about her own experience of not being a morning person, waking up stiff and sore and taking a while to get clear-headed, I know very unusual, and how this is a pretty common experience that nonetheless made her vulnerable So what she now identifies as the rhetoric of incipient illness and how the shadowy side of the wellness zeitgeist can draw us into what she describes as a sort of paranoid self-surveillance in which every little imperfection might portend scary health problems.
Yeah, it's such a great phrase, incipient illness.
And I think that I think we also have to acknowledge that the paranoia is activating, like it gives you something to do, to look forward to, to manage, and all of those micro actions can congeal, I think, into a sense of having control, which is generally enhanced by the notion that you have consumer choice.
I don't know, not to get all Buddhist trash talk about it, but I think the anxiety of incipient illness can start to ebb.
Only if you really like lean into your condition.
Yeah, I agree with that.
The familiar ideological gambit that then comes along with all of this is that the mainstream experts don't know everything.
They're not holistic enough.
So you've got to take your health into your own hands.
And this feeds then into the emergent market for something she calls recreational diagnostics.
That's another great phrase, yeah.
Which is the kind of off-label use of private companies that do direct-to-consumer lab testing for self-optimization.
So that idea of incipient illness runs through all of wellness rhetoric in one way or another.
That idea that we need to protect ourselves.
We're not sick now, but it's inevitable and it could already be inside of us.
And so the idea of incipient illness is that if we're not ill, we could still be poised to be ill.
And so we need to take the appropriate steps to head that off.
When it comes to any of these ideas, it's kind of like pulling a loose thread on an old sweater, right?
Once you start pulling, it kind of connects to everything and everything kind of all comes apart.
You know, in my own case, I have migraine and most, but not all of my migraine attacks are caused by pressure changes.
I'm a human barometer.
We have like kind of a really good migraine clinic here in Toronto.
And when I was referred to it, they wanted me to get this app and track all of my migraines.
I really didn't want to do it, but I didn't want to give them the whole speech about like what I do for a living.
And here, you know, here are my concerns about tracking, you know, blah, blah, blah.
I just was an obedient patient.
There was no room in that clinical scenario for my input.
And so I had this like beautiful sort of archive of months of migraine attacks.
And the doctor has never asked to see this archive.
Ever.
A lot of that data just goes into the void and nothing really happens with it.
And the sort of the window of the data I was tracking got wider and wider.
You know, so at first it was like about a, you know, a medical symptom.
It was a health condition I have to like really, you know, track, you could track like what you ate and what was your mood and all of these other things.
And so, so it was interesting how it kind of grew.
And then I just kind of turned my back on the whole thing because it was like, this is a project I don't need to be doing.
But it was interesting to kind of build that self-awareness, you know, how even like a cranky, I wouldn't call myself a skeptic, but how like a cranky humanities professor like me could get caught up in that process.
Pretty easy, I think.
You know, I think Colleen really would have benefited from the Healy, which I think does a pretty good of quantifying the self.
Or no, it was that quantum-fying.
Colleen, if you're listening, I have a discount code for you.
So just DM me.
Yeah, and I mean something like the Healy is one step beyond, right?
Because it's not really tracking anything at all.
This idea of the quantified self comes sort of out of Silicon Valley and the California ideology and the idea that technology is going to solve all the world's problems but you know I just decided at the beginning of
the year every time I take my dog to the vet they say well it would be great if
he could shed some pounds he doesn't eat a lot he just doesn't get enough
exercise so I'm taking him on longer and longer walks and I thought you
know I think there's an app on my phone that tells me how many steps I've taken
each day and so I find that app and I log in and I think I'm probably gonna
have to set it up and No, no, no.
It tells me how many steps I've taken for all the years that I've had that fucking phone in my pocket.
It's that information is already there.
It tells me if my if my gait is off, if I'm resting more weight on one leg than the other for a certain percentage of the time.
It tells me my heart rate.
It tells me how many calories I'm burning.
It's like, whoa, my quantified self is already being recorded and stored in the cloud.
It's been recorded in the quantum for some time, so I don't know why you're not downloading, but what I love about that clip about incipient illness, she really identifies a contradiction we see often and we flagged before on this show.
Your immune system is strong enough to fend off any illness on its own, so you don't need pharma products, but oh hey, boost your immune system with our products here.
I mean, I've been thinking about it a lot and if only there were some type of preventive shot that would prepare your immune system for really bad diseases.
I mean, we need to get someone on that.
That is an excellent idea.
Alright, so we turned next to her chapter on, and you'll like this too, Matthew, the performativity.
Of wellness.
And one of the examples that she uses is of famed actor, and I'll just describe it here, Suzanne Somers, who we're all familiar with.
She's also became a workout equipment spokesperson for a while.
Remember those Thighmaster commercials?
Yeah.
And she has, in her later years, been a vocal proponent of alternative cancer cures and anti-aging treatments.
So, Colleen writes about her appearance on, of course, the Oprah Winfrey Show.
In which she performs her all-natural daily routine, which involves just a row of 60 different supplement bottles, and then rubbing two different hormonal rejuvenation creams into her arms, depending on where she's at in her cycle of that month.
And then she goes off camera briefly, where the viewers are informed that she's doing vaginal injections of bioidentical hormones.
Now, I mention this, not to be lurid, but because of Oprah's massive audience and the role she's played in platforming wellness figures, anti-vaxxers, New Age prosperity gospel hucksters like the Secret Folks, and both Suzanne Somers and Dr. Christiane Northrup's product placement segments.
For women's anti-aging products.
You know, these are like actual segments of the show that could be seen as infomercials if you're really looking at them critically.
So we're going to roll Colleen's thoughts about how bio-identical hormones specifically are marketed in a very particular way to female wellness consumers.
The case of bioidentical hormones is super, super interesting because they do a whole bunch of things at once.
So, Don Wright, according to Suzanne Somers and Christian Northrup, menopause is kind of this really interesting test case because it's not an illness, but it is a profound change in a human body that can be very distressing and very uncomfortable.
And it has a really, I want to use the word appealing, I don't think that's the right word, but there's this kind of appealing biochemical explanation for it, right?
And so something like a bioidentical hormone kind of comes at it in this really perfect way because, you know, of course, if you just correct the hormonal imbalance, then you'll kind of go back to normal.
And so bioidentical hormones have this appeal of being like kind of like pharmaceutical hormones.
So they kind of have that hormone replacement therapy sort of vibe.
But then they also have that kind of, but it's natural, but not just that because it's bioidentical.
And so it has that kind of precision medicine, you know, so this isn't a supplement you just buy off the shelf.
In order to take this supplement you have to do regular hormone tracking so that you get the supplement perfectly keyed to your own hormonal composition.
And so it's kind of appealing to all of these different planks of wellness culture at the same time.
It's the best of both worlds.
And I know, you know, I don't know about you guys, in my own, like when I was teaching a lot of yoga workshops and when I was offering teacher training, like I guilty as charged, I leaned into a lot of this stuff too, because it is very appealing.
It's the combination.
One thing she brings up that I think is really important there is, as we were preparing for this show, I thought about it.
One thing she brings up that I think is really important there is as we were preparing for the show, I thought about
it.
We're in this very interesting space in medicine right now, which I really think opens the door for the types of rhetorical
tricks she's talking about, which is that we had the 19th century where we had all of
these breakthroughs like vaccine, widespread vaccines, hand-washing antibiotics, germ theory, public health mandates across
different countries, like all of these things.
different countries.
And then with the discovery of DNA and all of these developments we had has led the way to individualized Medicine, which is becoming a reality, but we're not there yet.
So we still have these, like I'll use cancer for example, like chemotherapy.
Oncologists know it's not the ideal solution, but it's the best we have now.
In the future, you will probably have more specific treatments to your cancer in your body.
We are in that, we're kind of making that bridge between those spaces right now, but we're not there yet.
It leaves so much room for exploitations, especially when the anti-vaxxers will use one anecdote as if that should be extrapolated and used broadly because we haven't reached that other side yet.
That's so interesting about chemotherapy.
So you're saying that there's kind of like a plateau in terms of effectiveness, but also public understanding, and there might be a kind of cultural impatience with the slowness of advancement.
But as new technologies are being developed, and that takes time, that there's this window where the sort of mystification of how well chemotherapy actually does its job in many cases, that's worn off.
And people want more.
Is that kind of what you're saying?
Yeah, absolutely.
Especially, I mean, chemotherapy is like a bomb.
It just destroys everything and then rebuilds, so it destroys cancerous cells.
But I think Siddhartha Mukherjee in all of his books, but the most recent one, The Song of the Cell, really makes the point that there is not one cancer.
There are many types of cancer and sometimes even in a mole, for example, there are numerous cancer cells in there.
operating as an orchestra.
So to actually disentangle that for every specific person to understand what works best,
we're just not there yet.
So we have this solution, but we know that it destroys your immune system for 28 days
or so and you have to rebuild it.
So I feel like when I see a lot of wellness influencers just trying to wax poetic about
the immune system and they bring up chemotherapy.
They're like, you need your immune system.
And it's like, yeah, duh.
But that's the only way we can destroy those cancer cells right now.
So we're not quite at that space.
And I think in that wedge space where we're kind of used to chemotherapy, we know that it's not ideal.
But think of how many lives it's saved.
But there's that area in between that they're dancing in, which makes it very difficult to combat on a large scale.
Yeah, there's so much there.
I mean, one piece of it is that I think a lot of the wellness community, having been long invested in it myself, one of the misperceptions is that it's possible to find some kind of perfect Yeah, definitely.
That the ways in which medicine is an imperfect solution to the realities of the world is
hard to accept.
And so then it's very easy to pick at certain things and say, well, look, chemotherapy destroys
your immune system in the process of curing cancer.
That doesn't make any sense.
That's obviously lame.
Yeah, I think to the new age spiritual person, the notion of the compromises inherent in
dealing in the real world is just it's demoralizing, it's insulting in some way.
Yeah, and then there's the fact that, you know, as you're saying Derek, we're heading towards more personalized ways of addressing certain kinds of illness.
Ultimate claims to be able to do is to do that already right now.
And part of that is this rhetoric that says, well, mainstream medicine or Western medicine is going to treat everyone as if they're the same.
But we know that's not true because you're a unique human being.
And so we're going to do this extra special kind of holistic analysis on you that can really home in on what to specifically give you to create balance.
And it's a lie.
And it's, well, we're going to get into this because I did read your script in advance, but we're going to get to the rituals in a few clips, which is very much a part of that.
Yeah.
Well, one, one, you know, consistent critique I have for you, Derek, is you do need to go off script from time to time.
So just bear that in mind.
In relation back to performativity, Durkacz writes about rituals and routines and this blending that you heard her referencing of sciency language and then also tuning in on your own vibes and also about a kind of piety that characterizes the performativity of wellness.
So here's a quote from her, to understand Why wellness sells.
We need to understand why wellness became so charged with meaning that using a certain
supplement or remedy can feel akin to a spiritual or religious experience.
The idea of piety that I draw on in the book comes from rhetorical scholarship, particularly
someone named Kenneth Burke and some subsequent scholars who took up this idea.
and some subsequent scholars who took up this idea. And he talks about pieties as the kind of
And he talks about pieties as the kind of invisible scripts that animate our lives.
the invisible scripts that animate our lives. And we think about what is pious or appropriate to do
We think about what is pious or appropriate to do in a given situation.
in a given situation. So piety doesn't always actually refer in this context to being good
So piety doesn't always actually refer in this context to being good and kind of, you
and kind of, you know, a sense of religious piety. But it means acting in accordance with the script
of whatever sort of realm we're inhabiting. And so the example that Kenneth Burke gives is guys in a
street gang learn that it's appropriate to sort of harass or heckle women on the street. And so
when they do so, they're being pious or acting, you know, the piety of sort of being abusive on
the street is the example he gives. And And I talk about the different pieties of wellness and how when we look at how wellness rhetoric circulates we can get a sense of the invisible scripts that animate the performances of wellness.
When I use the word performance, I'm really, really careful not to use the word performance to mean that it's facetious or empty or that I think for a lot of people who are engaging in various self-optimizing and other strategies, maybe they're being narcissistic.
But I think maybe they're trying to think about what are the stories that they tell themselves about themselves and looking at the pieties of wellness I think get us there in a way that is richer because the one thing I didn't want to do is point fingers in this book which doesn't mean that I wanted to avoid controversy or anything like that but I think that When you point fingers, you're trying to say that there's a singular point of origin and what I'm trying to show is actually the stuff is in the air.
It's independent of any of the individual players, right?
So it's not just marketers, it's not just, you know, individuals taking supplements, but it's What are the big, broad, kind of invisible stories that surround us?
I had never thought that I would finish the book talking about ritual, particularly in the anthropological sense.
And how I ended up there, you know, it was a bit of a surprise to me, but I just kept seeing what I call the daily wellness routine over and over.
Everywhere I looked, whether it's Suzanne Somers, you know, recounting in like colorful detail all of the supplements she takes and the daily smoothies that her husband makes and all of these things that she does to maintain her wellness.
There's a connection with something that has become prominent on particularly TikTok, a little bit on Instagram, since I wrote that chapter and since my book edited the publishing process called the Get Ready With Me.
I don't know if you've seen this, but it's a genre of, you know, like, get ready with me before I, you know, go out for the day.
And it will include often it's young women, but not always.
Doing face routines and beauty routines and other things and I found that the daily health routine it was doing some interesting cultural work that I hadn't quite thought about how I wasn't sure how to explain it at first but the ritual process I'm drawing in particular on Mid-20th century anthropologist Victor Turner's work and he looked at rites of passage, you know, you can think about rites of passage everything from just something simple like you can think about a graduation ceremony or any of these other more mundane rituals like the daily health routine as a set of steps you take that move you from one state of being into another and they become charged with social significance
That is like, you know, spiritual or religious, because these are processes of transformation that could transform us from, you know, being like a gremlin or Garfield getting out of bed in the morning, coming to terms with being awake to a person that's presentable to the world.
But it could also be the person who, as they undertake this routine, they're able to perform those cultural scripts of wellness and goodness, you know, by taking all of these supplements and doing the taking these steps.
They know that they're doing what they can to support their health.
They're doing their part.
They're trying to be the best they could be because that's, you know, what we're all supposed to be doing.
And so, so these become really transformative ritual practices that change how people feel about themselves.
And I, again, I don't, I think maybe narcissism might be true in some cases, but I think for a lot of people, it's actually, there's a real earnest drive to Yeah, I'm really happy to hear her take on this because I find like it's a really gentle view on that particular
format of social media self-presentation, self-performance.
And this might be a little bit off topic, but I also want to refer back to my interview with Bo Brink from last week, because this whole thing about sharing how to make yourself into a person in the world, and like protecting yourself with a preparatory ritual, Like, the Instagram post or reel where the person is getting ready for the date, they're undertaking something very profound.
They're answering a very important question, which is, who will I be?
And they're doing so in the context of an entire system that's always saying, well, whoever it is, it's not good enough.
And so, I think that she's right that this Instagram and this TikTok genre is doing something profound.
And even though it's not coded queer generally, I think it shows nonetheless that normies, and just everyone, they have to construct themselves.
We have to construct themselves to go out into the world.
We have to take on an identity, and we have to do it while projecting confidence into an extremely judgmental world, and there's something healing about that.
That you can recognize that everyone should feel confident and supported about who they can be.
And then you take that getting ready from, you know, underwear to puffer coat as a trans person, if you think about it that way, and you consider what an act of bravery that would be as you define yourself, as you create the ritual of who you will be, then you get a little bit deeper into the heart of what Beau was talking Yeah, those are really great observations, Matthew, and they set us up nicely here because Colleen continued, we talked about how the blurring of the lines between influencer posts and ads for products can create the sense that through the screen of the phone, followers are participating in an online community as a doorway into aspirational transcendence.
And I have another quote from her book here that she refers to.
It's a great turn of phrase.
Natural health products are vessels of divine community.
You know, I had hoped when I started writing the book that I would not have to write about Gwyneth Paltrow or the Kardashians.
And I write about both in that chapter.
I failed.
I failed, but not too much.
I really tried to focus as much as possible on ordinary people throughout the book,
like everyday people, because that's what's really interesting to me
more than celebrity wellness culture or influencers is how do ordinary people take these ideas up.
But that idea of supplements being as vessels of divine community
came from a series of ads, sponsored content story on Instagram of the Kardashian sisters
taking a supplement called Sugar Bear Hair, which is I think a collagen supplement.
I can't remember, but it's supposed to help you grow amazing hair and amazing skin.
In all of these posts is this recurrent picture of them putting this supplement on their tongues like you would a communion wafer and it was just so fascinating to me because these images are ones like deeply kind of they have deep religious and spiritual significance because of this connection but they're also like very pornographic looking because they have the lighting.
I would say costume design but you know they're wearing their own clothes but the The clothing that they're wearing, the sort of semiotic codes of their makeup and their hairstyles and their sort of body positioning is kind of like softcore porn in a way.
Those posts, posts on Instagram and the comments, the captions, they really do have that idea of kind of their own sort of spiritual community.
If you look at any sort of health influencer or wellness influencers posts on On Instagram, the comments from ordinary Instagram users are often of a keeping with the post itself, and it's almost as if they're buddies or they're trying to get noticed by the influencer.
But they all connect in this way, not just to marketing, but also tapping into a religious lexicon.
So Julian, we had cut this interview down, and we all listened to your entire interview with Colleen, and you made this really nice association between putting the gummy on your tongue as compared to a psychedelic sacrament, which I really enjoyed.
Yeah, yeah.
And she actually even talked about how this is something she's looking into and considering writing a book about herself.
I commented how in the Kardashian Instagram content that she's describing, the imagery seemed not only both sexually and spiritually suggestive, as she had said, but also gestured towards wellness products as a kind of red pill, psychedelic sacrament.
And she loved that.
And, you know, we talked a little bit about how she wants to write this book.
It also just reminds us that psychedelics do not lean any way politically or even spiritually.
They just, as you said earlier about senses, they just enhance the content already inside of you, which I think a lot of people don't realize when they think about these substances.
I was also really psyched that the Kardashians finally made their way onto our podcast.
But we should note that sugar bear hair is not a collagen supplement.
It is a gummy that promotes zinc and biotin for hair growth.
As someone who hasn't had hair in 15 years, I don't need to comment on this except to say that too much zinc is never a good thing, and it can actually lead to hair loss.
But since I had to research sugar bear hair, the fucking ads are now showing up in my feeds all the time as a bald man, which makes no sense.
Let me just finish by saying that since she did mention collagen, it is a hot ingredient in many supplements.
I want to note that James Hamblin wrote in his book Clean that topical collagen for skin health is bullshit since your skin is designed to keep large molecules out and the collagen never penetrates your skin.
Drinking collagen is also bullshit Because it's broken down by enzymes in your gut.
It never makes its way back to your skin or your hair.
So don't fall for the marketing bullshit with collagen.
I do hear that it makes your poopy slippery though, like if that's your thing.
A definite benefit.
So by way of closing, I wanted to ask Colleen Derkach something that friend of the pod, Jonathan Jarry, who also wrote us a lovely blurb, by the way.
Thank you!
He requested that we touch on this.
It turned out that he and I were both reading why wellness sells at the same time.
And in the book, Derkach appeared to perhaps throw shade on the effectiveness of notable skeptic wellness debunkers, especially Tim Caulfield and Jen Gunther.
So, I asked her if she thought their public communication style was missing something.
I don't know that they're missing something.
You know, if you think about what different types of studies are, you know, their power to do different types of things, right?
Their projects, I think, are really good at isolating the problems and I'm not as up on scholarship about the effectiveness of debunking.
Tim Caulfield would be much better to talk about like what actually does work and what doesn't work than I am.
I mean the beauty of being a humanities scholar is we're really good at pointing out problems and not always so good at fixing them.
So I think I really admire what they do.
I don't know how they have the energy to do what they do.
I mean the number of op-eds that Tim Caulfield has written in Canadian media is like just astonishing to me.
And so he's got, yeah, they both have an incredible amount of energy and patience that I don't have, but they're doing a different thing.
They're sort of addressing misinformation head on.
And I think that that's important.
I want to ask prior questions about health and wellness.
And that idea of the prior question comes from Judy Siegel.
And so instead of asking, you know, do these, these products work?
We can ask, well, why are people interested in them in the first place?
And that's the piece that I'm supplying is trying to understand what are the drivers of wellness discourse?
Like what sits underneath it?
Like we can point to marketing and say, OK, well, marketing is dishonest.
And that's true, I think, in a lot of cases.
The interesting thing, though, I found is that my research participants often knew the marketing was dishonest.
They knew that they were being sold a bill of goods but they still were interested in the products and services anyway because they were meeting some kind of need that they recognized that it didn't fully meet that need but at least they partially met it and it was something that wasn't being addressed in other ways and so I think that's the piece that I'm bringing.
So it's no shade on debunking work It probably sounds like a bit of shade but it's more to say that for me that's not the urgent question because the thing is is debunking can do lots of things but for a lot of people they're not even looking in the places where the debunking is even happening, right?
And here I'm thinking about all of the kind of friends of friends and family who went really deep into anti-vax
territory during the pandemic and anti-masking and all of these other things.
And there are people who, frankly, I never would have guessed prior to the pandemic would end up going in that
direction.
These people are not looking at where the debunking is happening.
For a lot of the people I know that that ended up going down the anti-mask, anti-vax route or who do cleanses or
see naturopaths instead of or as well as doctors.
For a lot of them, debunking will never work anyway because what is driving their interest isn't information and facts, it's values, it's feelings, it's beliefs, which is different than knowledge or information.
What I wanted to do was get into the weeds and figure out, like, what are these drivers?
If we can access those, if we can see where the drivers are, we can intervene at maybe a higher point of intervention.
So rather than downstream where information is taken up, and that's important work for sure.
But if we went further upstream, we might be able to inform, for example, policy.
We might be able to inform medical education.
I don't think there's a quick fix at all because these are systemic problems, they're really deep problems.
But if we can, you know, for example, if like a doctor who teaches in a medical school reads this book and thinks about some of these issues, maybe when they're training student doctors they can talk a little bit more about areas where medicine is falling short.
We can access policy makers, you know, thinking about You know, how did they determine which public health measures to emphasize and which ones not, or how to allocate funding?
You can think about with mask mandates, for example.
There's been a lot of talk recently as COVID rates have gone up of people, you know, not wanting to wear masks because they're not required, but people actually wanting mandates because then that kind of choice, it just becomes a thing you just do.
And then it's, it's, Neutralizes kind of all the ideological charge.
And I think that's one of those kind of policymaker questions where if you put in more regulations about, for example, testing and advertising of natural health products, then that could address some of that kind of halo effect that we talked about earlier.
So, so I appreciate all that you say.
I'm very excited and a little nervous about people to read this thing, but we'll see what happens to it.
It's such a great question.
Like, how do you debunk without condescending?
How do you criticize religion and religious impulses without sounding dismissive?
How do you say, you know, actually acupuncture doesn't work the way you think it does and it may not work at all.
How do you say that without raising cultural sensitivity issues among other things?
I mean, I think some people are just smoother at doing this stuff than others.
Like, who would get mad at Dan Wilson?
You know, like, Dr. Dan, the most mild-mannered, slightly melancholic debunker on YouTube.
In this video, I show how this claim from Dr. Peter McCullough makes no sense at all.
Oh Matthew, you're not spending enough time on Twitter these days.
So, Alex Zek recently retweeted Dan Wilson, calling him...
Afro man Dan.
Oh, great.
Dan replied completely professionally, mild mannered, didn't even touch that casual racist insult.
There's no reason to actually cite Dan's hair as a lead into why COVID vaccines are bullshit, which is the point Alec was trying to make.
And I mean, that dude is just an ultimate troll in a really just fucking poor form there.
Yeah, okay, alright, so it's not about affect because even Dr. Dan will get racist New Age blowback, okay.
You know, I think the way we addressed this point in the book is that we referred to something called Navarasa, which is the old Indian aesthetic theory of nine tastes, and it's something that's used in classical music, dance, theater, going back centuries.
It's also part of Ayurvedic cooking and various medicinal therapies.
And I think in modern Ayurvedic efforts, it's been incorporated into psychological theory.
If you have these nine tastes or flavors in your life, And they're well balanced that you're going to be healthy.
I think that's like a modern interpolation, but it's kind of interesting.
But basically, the theory says that any satisfying work of art should contain a balance of these nine things.
So, love and beauty, laughter, sorrow, anger, heroism or courage, terror or fear, disgust, surprise or wonder, and then shanta, peace or tranquility.
And, I don't know, I think maybe Dirk Hatch, being an English prof, is asking for a fuller palate, and that maybe strict debunkers rely too much on anger, or anger plus courage.
And maybe that makes the presentation, I don't know, less than fully impacting, or impactful, or nourishing.
I think we tried to answer–the other thing is that as part of the commentariat, it is exhausting to maintain one particular affect, to maintain one particular position in our critical approach.
I think that What really works is to bring all of it, so beauty, laughter, disgust, terror, surprise, tranquility.
I mean, this is one of the reasons why I love QAnon Anonymous so much, because I think they really nail that bizarre combination of things.
I think we do a pretty good job Yeah, I mean it's something we definitely went back and forth on a lot in the writing of the book.
It's something we've talked a lot about behind the scenes in terms of feedback we've gotten over the three years that we've been doing the podcast.
There have been people who say, you know, you need to not be laughing.
while you're playing clips of these people that you're critiquing, because that's disrespectful and it makes it seem lowbrow.
Yeah, and Derek really shouldn't call anybody a douchebag.
And then other people will be like, we miss the gallows humor of how you're just like eviscerating how ludicrous
and also at times how abject this stuff is.
So yeah, we've thought about it a lot. We released that episode called Snark Tank in which we were thinking about
this and trying to talk through what place snarkiness has in our kind of critique.
And I think with the book, we really tried to give people the benefit of the doubt in terms of there being a certain amount of earnestness that goes on amongst conspiritualists.
And the thing that I have been, and I know you guys have too, the thing that just Stood out so much in the blurbs that we got back from people who we requested to read the advanced copies of the book is how many of them said that they thought we had succeeded in including a healthy dose of compassion with our debunking and analysis.
Yay for us!
Yeah, I'm proud of that.
Thank you everybody for listening to another episode of Conspirituality Podcast.
We'll catch you back here on the main feed on Thursdays or on Patreon.
