Medical Medium, aka Anthony William, gained many of his 4.4M IG followers thanks to his declaration that celery juice can heal you from many ailments that science hasn’t figured out. William proudly displays his numerous celebrity endorsements and hundreds of anecdotal healing stories on his library-esque website. Yet when one reporter—Vanity Fair’s Dan Adler—had the audacity to report on one now-deceased confidante of William, the self-proclaimed medium went on the defense, releasing a four-part podcast series and posting on social media in a frenzy about how there’s a plot to “take down Medical Medium.”
Yes, William speaks of himself often in the third person, and wears his lack of any medical training whatsoever as a badge of honor. Today, we look at some of the most outrageous claims that he’s made and discuss the rhetorical techniques that have made him an alt-health celebrity. We’re also joined by Dan Adler to discuss his in-depth reporting on the man who claims angels give him medical advice decades ahead of modern science—and somehow gets away with it.
Show Notes
The Medical Medium and the True Believer
Medical Medium Survivors
Medical Medium: Miracle Healer or Quack? (The Celery Juice Guy)
Why Is Everyone Drinking Celery Juice as if It Will Save Them From Dying?
The Truth About The Celery Juice Craze
Everyone Is Drinking Celery Juice — But Is It Healthy? We Dive Into The Science Behind The Trend
Alex Ebert on Conspirituality
Matthew’s reply to Alex
Alex’s follow-up
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
You can stay up to date with us online, all over, but predominantly on Instagram at ConspiratualityPod.
And as of the date of this episode drop, we are less than two weeks away from our book being published.
Worldwide on Hachette Public Affairs and Random House in Canada, so you can pre-order.
We will be covering some of the topics on the books in the coming weeks, but for a holistic view of what we've been doing for three years now and to help us juice the algorithmic robots a little bit, we'd love a pre-order on the book.
On Patreon, Julian and I have just dropped the first of a two-part Monday bonus series, a little bit in kind of emergency mode.
It's called Conspirituality Marches on the White House, and it's about how Marianne Williamson, the New Age matriarch, popularizer of A Course in Miracles, is polling at 9%, and then muscular Catholic anti-vax Bobby Kennedy Jr. is polling at 20% or more,
and Charles Eisenstein has just disclosed that he's working on Bobby's campaign
as director of messaging.
So we've got three subjects from our book who are now going to be disrupting
the Democratic primary.
Conspiratuality 156, Medical Medium with Dan Adler.
Medical Medium, also known as Anthony Williams, gained many of his 4.4 million Instagram followers
thanks to his declaration that celery juice can heal you from many ailments
that science hasn't yet figured out.
figure it out.
William proudly displays his numerous celebrity endorsements from hundreds of anecdotal healing stories on his library-esque website.
Yet when one reporter, Vanity Fair's Dan Adler, had the audacity to report on one now-deceased confidant of William, the self-proclaimed medium went on the defense, releasing a four-part podcast series and posting on social media in a frenzy about how there's a plot to, quote, take down medical medium.
Yes, William speaks of himself often in the third person and wears his lack of any medical training whatsoever as a badge of honor.
So today, we're going to look at some of the most outrageous claims that he's made and discuss the rhetorical techniques that have made him an alt-health celebrity.
Later on, we're also joined by Dan Adler to discuss his in-depth reporting on the man
who claims angels give him medical advice decades ahead of modern science,
and somehow he gets away with it.
♪ All right, Derek, so there's a lot to talk about
with medical medium, but I want to start with some excitement we've had on Instagram
in dialogue with Alex Ebert, who is a one-time guest of ours.
Ebert, if you don't know him, is a musician, former or maybe even present frontman for Edward What was his name?
What's the... Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros.
Yeah, Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros, yeah.
So we'll link to the posts that go back and forth between us, but here's the thumbnail, and I think it's a good lead-in for some of the issues at the heart of what William is up to, especially the way he exploits medical illiteracy or the strangeness of newly reported conditions that aren't thoroughly researched yet.
So, Alex posted a satirical critique of our output and later he admitted it was only really about our Instagram page.
And just to steel man his argument here, I would say that he was mainly saying that by focusing really heavily on the problems with alternative medicine, by omission and by default We just wind up promoting the pharmaceutical industry and institutional medicine.
But that's not really true.
And so Derek, you replied on his Instagram with a bunch of citations to show that our criticism of alternative health is a lot more nuanced than dunking on parasite cleanses, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
In that satirical critique, he said that we never talk about the replication crisis or placebo theory on our podcast, so I shared episodes where we specifically discussed those topics.
He also said that we don't criticize pharmaceutical companies, which is ridiculous as we've done this often, so I replied with links to that claim as well and told him that My last book before the book we have coming out was about psychedelic therapy and pointed out many of the problems with the mental health over-medicalization and over-prescription problems that some people believe we have.
Right.
And what became clear in our back and forth, and I want to point out it's very civil and Alex has criticized this before both publicly and in DMs to me, and they've also always been civil even if we don't agree.
But I realized, as you pointed out, that he doesn't listen to our podcast, and he's making assumptions based solely from social media, and he effectively omitted this.
And that's fine.
Matthew, you've pointed out before that a number of people on our Instagram don't listen to the show.
That's their choice.
And maybe they get something from our socials and aren't podcast fans or maybe they just don't want to hear us talking for hours and that's fine.
But what's unfair is to say we're not saying things when we clearly are and we can't be held accountable for their inattention.
And that's basically what Alex's argument came down to as the dialogue progressed.
He thinks we should unpack nuance and subtleties in all of our posts, and he wants it done in memetic fashion or meme form.
And those are conflicting statements.
He uses memes often, some of which are very sarcastic or ironic.
Totally fine.
We do that too.
But when people ask him about his intention, he'll say things like, well, it's whatever you want it to be.
So he seems okay asking for nuance from other people in their posts, but doesn't want to assume that responsibility in his own.
Yeah, I think social media is just weird that way.
And I think it's hard for folks to pick apart, you know, our Instagram is a pointer to our platform from our Instagram is its own media stream.
And, you know, to be fair to some of that criticism, we do a bit of both on that account where we sometimes post about topics we don't fully cover here in the episodes.
To speak to Alex's broader political concerns, which I actually share a lot of, we pointed out that we talk about things like the moral horror of people going bankrupt from emergency visits or trying to afford their insulin.
You know, often this stuff amounts to saying that medicine organized by capitalism has a lot of problems and cruelty is just baked into the cake.
But part of what Alex is saying, too, is that if conventional and evidence-based medicine cannot address a novel disease or condition, it's literally dangerous to stigmatize alternative medicine by implying that it's sold only by quacks and grifters.
So, listeners, you can wade through that dialogue if you like.
We'll post the links.
But On the cab ride out of that exchange, I realized something about how the dialogue went, which is that when you're in a defensive position, you can start to miss out on how your interlocutor is framing things, and how certain narrow and maybe uncritical terms start to dominate the discourse.
And this happened through, it's really interesting, it happened through dozens and dozens of comments, and through many of Alex's own comments, And the main term that came up that started to kind of irk me is pharma with a capital P. Now, this is nothing new.
It's a contraction of the larger phrase that's dominant within the anti-vax discourse, like big pharma.
And it functions in much the same way, which is to broadly condemn pharmaceutical economies, but then also like the whole discipline.
And I don't think that Alex would be using it in this way consciously, but nevertheless, it starts to become like a transcendental signifier or an unquestioned term of really heavy emotional weight.
And we're going to hear Anthony William do this kind of thing as well.
But there's another thing that pharma or, you know, in Williams' lexicon, celery juice does, which is that it creates a kind of thought-stopping process.
A thought-stopping cliché is Robert Lifton's term.
I think what Alex really means by the term pharma, and all of the commenters who use it as well, is they're talking about those aspects of the pharmaceutical industry and discipline that take the most efficient advantage of the citizenry through capitalism.
Like they're talking about fraud.
They're talking about MDs promoting menthol cigarettes back in the day.
They're talking about Merck lying about Vioxx.
They're talking about male OBGYNs opting to medicate birthing women just by default, regardless of what their wishes are.
They're talking about doctors incentivized to prescribed innovative medications in conjunction with marketing campaigns for those medications.
But the problem is that using the term pharma instead of qualifying it as predatory pharma or capitalistic pharma is that you wind up stigmatizing or dismissing whole fields of research and treatment that save people's lives like every day.
And that's way more dangerous than dismissing and dunking on Worm Queen who is trying to peddle a new anti-mold powder.
So we have 34,000 Instagram followers.
Alex has 40,000.
And while some of those 74,000 people have surely been harmed or bankrupted by bad medical care, I would say that the vast majority are probably alive through basic evidence-based health care that's been developed over decades, whether it's birth support, vaccination, antibiotics, or acute care, like after a car crashes.
But I mean, we can just start with us.
You know, like Derek, would it be an exaggeration to say that you're alive today and like we're doing this podcast together because you had access to chemotherapy?
Not exactly.
Fortunately, because my testicular cancer hadn't metastasized.
So when I looked at my therapeutics, the surgery, which was removing a testicle, took the cancer out.
And when I sat down and talked with my oncologist, basically, If I just did the surgery, I had a 90% chance of not having a relapse further down the line.
Right.
If I did one round of chemotherapy, I had a 97% chance of not relapsing.
And if I did two rounds of chemotherapy, I had a 98% chance of not relapsing.
So in a sense, it was preventative chemotherapy.
I did one round.
I was going to do the other because my oncologist suggested it.
I don't know.
One of my closest friends did 12 rounds after intense intestinal cancer.
That one round knocked me on my ass for three days.
And so people who have to go through it, they have to go through it to save their lives, but man, it's rough, and I opted out of the second round.
So in my case, fortunately, I was lucky.
Some people have testicular cancer.
It does metastasize, and then it is life-saving.
Right.
I have a number of friends and a few family members who are here today because of chemotherapy.
Well, in this house here in Toronto, like I've said before, I've survived a potentially deadly deep vein thrombosis because I got emergency care and then I took six months of warfarin, which is basically rat poison, to help it dissolve.
And now I wear a pharma-created compression sock because if I didn't, my left leg would be like twice as thick as my right.
On both legs?
I don't have to wear it on both, no.
I mean, I have a dermatologist who finally sort of said, oh, you're getting this rash on your ankle and you've got a little bit of neuropathy in the bottom of your foot.
It's because your hematologist didn't insist that you wear the compression stocking and you should wear them on both legs and then I got another opinion and like it's really uncomfortable so at least at the beginning so my GP said that one side was fine and now actually both calves are almost the same diameter.
It's funny.
I go in every six months and get them measured.
It's kind of interesting.
It's amazing, though, like just the compression sock actually
shrunk my leg right back up.
Incredible.
But the rest of my family, I mean, in no particular order, both of our children weighed in the ballpark of 11 pounds
at birth.
And that meant that everybody needed substantial help to avoid dying.
The doctors at Sick Kids just reset my six-year-old's broken arm after putting him under with ketamine.
My other son has needed antibiotics for severe infections.
My mom got several more years of life from biologics therapy that treated her spondylosis.
And then when she died in home hospice, I was able to give her like six subcutaneous meds for pain, anxiety, psychosis while I held her hand.
I mean, this is the type of thing that Dr. Zach Bush would have told me not to do because hospice medications would disrupt the passage of her soul, right?
But you must have stuff in your family, right?
Yeah, I was also an 11-pound, 23-inch baby.
No!
Yeah, I put a lot on my mom.
Oh, gosh.
And at least three of my four grandparents benefited from quote unquote Western medicine.
My paternal grandfather legally died and was brought back and then lived for another seven or eight years after a bleeding ulcer in his stomach.
And two family members are currently dealing with prostate cancer.
One of my family members has a rare blood disorder, and after her second pregnancy nearly died and she had to have her uterus removed, she lost pints of blood, which was especially tricky to navigate given her disorder.
Most people in my family have either benefited or are here because of pharmaceuticals.
And that ranges from intense emergency care to lifestyle management.
Because I know one thing that all health fans like to say is, well, it's great if it's an acute emergency, but it's not sustainable.
And that's also just not true.
Yeah, now Julian isn't here, but, you know, he's disclosed that his family has needed a lot of evidence-based care.
And, you know, he's spoken quite a bit about how he recovered from years of Lyme disease, during which he tried every alt-health trick that was on sale, when actually antibiotics did the job.
But I wanted to mention that because Alex's original complaint was that we had made fun Of an influencer who was selling a new magic powder to deal with mold toxicity.
And Alex has had the shitty experience of doctors not being able to assess or treat his own issue with mold.
So that's what he said.
And you know, it was interesting because I think like Lyme disease, this is one of those not well-known conditions that takes a while for research and treatment to catch up with.
And in the meantime, I think there are just too many impatient doctors who will hand wave and dismiss people.
They'll think you're a hypochondriac.
They'll send you home with Tylenol.
And that really sucks.
And it's happening right now with long COVID.
This is going to be a decade-long experience for a lot of people.
And this is exactly where the grifters will edge their way in.
into this gap between something being a real experience and it being well understood.
And, you know, that means that it's a sure thing that Alex Jones and Anthony William
are going to be offering long COVID remedies until, like, the science is really complete.
And the wellness company is already doing that, Peter McCullough's company,
because they have supplements for being...
around people who shed vaccines.
Oh, wow.
They have supplements for spike protein and long COVID.
They've already started on this market, so it's already there.
And I have no idea how much they've monetized it yet, but given their reach, I'm sure they've been doing okay
with it.
Right.
I mean, all of this said, Alex's main point might be correct
that like a certain threshold of mockery or anger at these exploitations might be alienating or humiliating
or counterproductive, especially when we're talking about people
who are reaching for anything.
And I think that he's right.
That we should always concede that people do report benefits from alternative therapies, and we should do it not because we endorse them, but because those anecdotal reports have cultural and eventually political meaning.
Like, they're important to keep track of and to give a certain amount of respect to because people, real people, are offering them.
But I think if he or anyone thinks that we unfairly stigmatize the alternative health world, We have to keep the empathetic vibe going, but my challenge for him would be that if he's going to use the term pharma, capital P, that he either qualify it with hypercapitalistic or predatory because
Alex can also contribute to the destigmatization project by making sure that he lists all the evidence-based benefits of pharmaceutical interventions over the last century, especially, and I think this might be very attuned to his leftist sensibilities, in the way that pharmaceutical care has been a major part of social justice and equality work in many parts of the world, including India and Africa, and including big parts of the Black Liberation Movement here in the States.
Because I think, you know, we've got to remember things like the Black Panthers running free vaccine clinics because their problem wasn't with pharmaceuticals or with evidence-based medicine.
Their problem was with capitalism and white supremacy.
And we can probably agree that their analysis is as on point as ever.
A few years ago, I was visiting a friend who suffers from chronic digestive problems, and she asked if I had heard of medical medium while pulling out his first medical-sized textbook.
She was trying his magical celery juice prescription, which, spoiler alert, is drinking 16 ounces of celery juice on an empty stomach as soon as you wake up.
According to Medical Medium, this seemingly simple and benign instruction actually holds the secret to ultimate health and vitality.
In fact, he calls it the most powerful medicine of our time, healing millions worldwide.
Now, is he going on book sales for that claim?
Like he sold millions of books and so millions of people are being healed?
He never offers any data on any of his claims, period.
Besides the fact that he has a lot of YouTube endorsements.
I will not ask you any more questions about citations from Anthony William.
No, no, do not.
Please don't.
But the question is, what are you healing from when you're drinking celery juice?
So medical medium, also known as, as I said earlier, Anthony William, claims pretty much anything.
He positions himself as a chronic illness expert, but as I said earlier, he has no medical credentials and he lavishes in that.
So according to his self-proclaimed origin story, he started receiving messages from an angel at age four who continues to whisper groundbreaking scientific knowledge decades ahead of modern science in his ear.
So there's a sea of red flags already waving over the celery fields, I think.
Yes, but I found this fantastic description by Anna Reed, who runs a popular YouTube channel called Anna's Analysis, and she's going to talk about here, and I'll link to the full video in her show notes, it's like 70 minutes long, about his origin story.
So let's look at the alleged origins of Spirit and Anthony's gift.
He says, My introduction to cancer came at age four, at the same time that I first received my gift from Spirit.
I was seated at the dinner table when Spirit appeared to me, instructing me to inform my grandmother that she had lung cancer.
Though I didn't know what the term meant, I repeated it, much to the shock of everyone at the table.
The doctor soon confirmed that the revelation was true.
Afterward, I asked Spirit how it had happened.
Why had my grandmother gotten cancer?
Spirit answered that it was a combination of a virus, Epstein-Barr virus, plus a variety of toxins in the form of heavy metals, DDT, and other pesticides, solvents, plastics, and petroleum.
The words were foreign to me at that young age, though I could tell they were serious.
Since then, for the entire time I've had this gift, I've taken cancer personally.
Over the decades, I've helped countless people who are battling cancer to find answers, safety, and healing.
This didn't happen, Derek.
Like, a four-year-old did not hear and remember, quote, a combination of a virus, Epstein-Barr virus, plus a variety of toxins in the form of heavy metals, DDT, and other pesticides, solvents, plastics, and petroleum.
Like, he didn't hear and remember that.
He wasn't hearing God or spirit.
I think if he knew the word cancer, that sounds plausible.
But, I mean, I think we should just be clear off the top that no matter how exceptional or neurodivergent you are as a four-year-old, I've been around a lot of four-year-olds, your understanding of sickness and health is going to revolve around things like the following.
So, first of all, cooties.
Secondly, not touching your bum and putting your fingers in your mouth.
Do not spit on your sister, would be another thing.
The fact that you hate barfing.
You have a way of measuring which band-aids are most sticky.
You know that Flintstones are magic vitamin pills that make you strong.
But if you eat Fred, you'll get taller.
If you eat Barney, you'll get smaller.
And carrots make you see really good.
But, like, the other thing is going to be imaginary friend stuff going on, Derek.
I mean, he's referring to himself in the third person, and this is a, like, I mean, it's a very young way of being in the world, and I would say that for somebody in his 50s now, it's not a very integrated way.
But I think that if you really own the bit, and I think this is what we're going to see, it can make your clients feel all kinds of things.
Like, what is wrong with me that I can't walk around like a four-year-old telling adults what their problems are, right?
We don't know how old he is.
There's actually another YouTube thread about going down that rabbit hole of him being between like 28 and 70.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah.
It's actually extremely hard or impossible to find actual biographical information about this man.
Yeah.
And some people have pointed out that he changes his story and they track that, so he'll reference different things.
But this origin story pretty much stays true.
You have spirit, spirit of compassion.
You have him saying angels sometimes.
He's described in a lot of ways.
He has, but also his fervent community of followers.
And I want to be clear that this man is Very popular.
4.4 million Instagram followers.
308,000 on YouTube.
A list of celebrity endorsements.
Gwyneth Paltrow.
I shared with you, Matthew, the Kim Kardashian episode where he was healing her psoriasis by waving his hands around her body.
Incredible stuff.
Yeah.
Novak Djokovic, the notoriously famous anti-vax tennis star, but also like Robert De Niro and Pharrell Williams, who might be into pseudoscience.
I didn't know about that, but there are new characters coming into this field.
Regardless, William has a lot of eyeballs on him.
To be honest, this is pretty surprising because we often talk about charisma and techniques, and medical mediums techniques are obviously working, but let's just listen for a moment at how he presents his so-called medical information.
And let me point out that I've listened to and watched hours of this man in preparation for this episode, and this is basically how he always acts.
We're talking about adrenaline.
We're talking about adrenalized emotions.
Did you ever get an adrenaline rush?
You got the adrenaline moving, you're shaking, you feel it, you feel it, the adrenaline, right?
Maybe it's just like something, could be anything that happens, anything that happens and it's like your adrenaline's going.
It's going.
You get a phone call, you feel your adrenaline going, something's happening, you feel your adrenaline going, right?
The whole bit.
We're going to talk about adrenalized emotions is what we're going to talk about, which is actually kind of a really good topic.
We're going to talk about it right here in Brainsaver, the Brainsaver books.
Oh my God.
Where have they been?
The Brainsaver books.
Anyway.
Okay.
Recipe.
Boom.
Right there.
Got a recipe right there.
It's an Asian-inspired potato skillet.
Now, if you're not familiar with William's shtick, yes, he did start by talking about adrenalized emotions, followed by a recipe for an Asian-inspired potato skillet.
The video is 65 minutes of what you've just heard.
Yeah.
OK, so let me take back my earlier comments because this isn't quite four years old.
It's more like it's more like you handed an iPhone to a seven year old who just came back from theater summer camp and you gave them a live stream and you told them to improvise something.
Right.
Like it has that kind of manic.
What am I going to say now?
I've got to say something and I'm going to make it really big.
Yes, and it is a live stream that's recorded.
He does take part of that time to answer some of the comments that are coming through.
It's all part of the theater of what he's doing.
But let's listen to what the description for this particular video states.
Okay, so it says, learn how adrenaline affects the electricity in our brain and how our emotions are affected.
Medical science and research are unaware of so much about how the brain works, but understanding the truth about what happens inside your brain can make all the difference in your ability to support and protect yourself both physically and emotionally.
So that part about medical science being unaware is his only gambit.
That's it.
Across all of his prescriptions.
So unlike our normal gallery of charlatans like chiropractors playing neuroscientists and naturopaths playing epidemiologists, At least those grifters are certified in something.
William bypasses that altogether because he's not certified in anything and he only repetitively says that science is unaware, but I have the knowledge.
In fact, in his first book, he writes, quote, I receive health information that's incredibly accurate, much more so than any other medium alive.
Yeah, OK, so I guess that would include John of God now in prison for rape and fraud.
It would include when Abraham Hicks or Jay-Z Knight as Ramtha give give health advice.
Lori Ladd, Phil Good, Elizabeth April, you know, they all have health tips.
You know, Derek, actually, it's kind of a low bar with regard to being incredibly accurate in comparison with other mediums.
That's true, and I don't know any other one who has had such a phenomenon by juicing celery, so maybe that adds to it.
It's what he does.
Basically saying, they out there don't know what I know.
Not only do I know it, and I'm giving you futuristic healing advice.
This is important, but you have to do it exactly how I say, and that's the case with celery juice.
Exactly 16 ounces, no food as soon as you wake up.
Other remedies aren't as clear, however.
I watched one live stream about healing from toxic fragrances.
And someone asked in the chat if you have to take his brain saver shot on an empty stomach.
In the livestream, he said, no, you don't have to, but when I went and looked at the actual recipe, it specifically says that you have to avoid food for 15 to 20 minutes on either end of the shot.
Well, I think he's probably just improvising his answer, right?
Or he's forgotten what he's written in the book, maybe?
Even though the book is open to the page, yes, it does seem to be that's the case.
Right.
Okay, so 16 ounces of celery juice is the remedy for everything.
Like, that's the Flintstone vitamin.
Well, this was from the Brainsaver book, so now we're talking about shots.
I started with celery juice, but now we're talking about a shot of juice.
And he takes one, and then he does this whole, bartender, give me another thing, and then takes another, and he's basically like, you can take multiples.
So there's no clarity in his responses about dosage.
Yeah, okay.
So I did see the bartender shtick.
But with regard to the 16 ounces of celery juice, is this something you've ever done?
Because I haven't.
I can imagine it's cold, bitter, astringent.
It would make you feel pretty depressed at the start of the day.
Or have you picked up on how people feel as they're glugging it back?
I can't watch other people drink because of my esophonia.
So that sound, even just having to watch William do it was enough.
But I used to get this drink when I lived in Brooklyn.
It was called the Seventh Avenue Cooler, and this was back in like 2008.
And the base was celery and lemon, and the lemon cut the celery, which made it palatable, and there were other things in it.
I couldn't imagine drinking just straight celery juice.
Even if I eat celery, it's usually with almond butter.
I don't just gnaw on celery.
I also drank it because it was delicious on a hot summer day, not because I thought I was healing myself.
You know, Derek, I think it was actually pre-healing you from the cancer and that the chemotherapy would not have worked otherwise.
I think you're being a little bit ungrateful to the spirit of celery here.
So the celery was an adjuvant that would eventually allow the chemo to bind to my mitochondria.
You got it!
You got it.
You are now being the medium yourself.
And I think you got to watch out, too, because there's a competitive field.
It is.
What am I going to juice?
Radishes.
Maybe I'll juice the radishes.
That's only radish.
But in terms of contradictions, his audience doesn't care.
There's just no evidence that they actually care that he never actually says the same thing.
It's not just ridiculous claims like celery juice will heal a chronic illness.
He invents minerals.
Constantly.
For example, Matthew, can you take this?
Celery contains a multitude of undiscovered mineral salts that act together as an antiseptic.
Medical research and science have not yet discovered the different varieties of sodium in celery, nor how beneficial they are.
So, let's hear William describe this undiscovered miracle.
Awesome.
Celery by itself is so medicinal, it's literally the undiscovered medicine of our age.
What it does for the body, how it works is really just profound.
Celery juice is cleaning up the mess inside your body and that's one of the things it does.
It has a sodium cluster salt, an undiscovered sodium cluster salt.
This is a subgroup of mineral salts.
This mineral salt strips pathogens down.
It damages them.
It kills them.
It destroys them.
It kills off bugs, bugs behind your autoimmune condition.
That's why people are getting better so fast and rapidly with celery juice.
It's that powerful.
Wow.
You might not believe this, but science hasn't discovered these cluster salts.
Because they don't exist.
So is he adding cluster to the notion of salt to describe something that he's saying is just like chemically novel that they haven't seen yet?
Yeah, basically he's saying that there's salt, which is the mineral.
Right.
But yet there are a whole bunch of other versions of this mineral.
I see.
That are clustering around The salt that we all know and love.
Got it.
I'm pretty sure science has a grasp of basic chemistry.
Even more incredibly, Williams says only celery juice contains these cluster salts, not whole celery stalks.
No, I know cooking with fire changes the nutritional composition of food, but this seems pretty suspect.
But that's because it's actually impossible.
Or another word for it would be magic.
But in the in the delivery.
You can hear the kind of bloat and repetition in the rhetoric that I think might create a kind of trance.
Like he says, how it works is really just profound.
Celery juice is cleaning up the mess inside your body.
And that's one of the things it does.
It has sodium cluster salts.
Undiscovered sodium cluster salts.
Nice repeat there.
This is a subgroup of... Anyway, it is word salad or I guess word celery, but there isn't a lot there.
There's a lot of repetitions and recursions in the basic statements, right?
A lot of repetition and recursion.
You know, one thing that doctors are sometimes criticized for, and I think that good medical influencers are trying to push back
against this is they speak in a very medicalized language.
And you have someone like William saying, the mess inside your body,
that could mean absolutely anything.
But if you're feeling a little bit off, then that's gonna be appealing to you.
Yes, my body is a mess too.
But I wanna do, even though William doesn't, I wanna do a little bit of looking into what celery is.
It's 95% water, it's 3% carbohydrates, and 0.7% protein and negligible amounts of fat.
It does provide 28% of the recommended daily allowance of vitamin K and a host of other vitamins and minerals,
though in greatly reduced amounts.
There is sodium in there at 80 mg per 100 g of celery, but sodium chloride, the type of sodium we consume and is commonly known as salt, It's just one sodium ion and one chloride ion.
If you add or subtract anything, it's a different compound.
So the clustering is ridiculous.
It becomes something else.
So I'm not sure what kind of cluster you can make of it, but it's not going to be salt anymore.
And I was initially going to do a science takedown of medical medium like I did recently with J.P.
Sears' ridiculous CBD company.
Here's the claim.
Here's what actually happens.
But then I was like, why?
He just makes shit up all the time on the fly through hours of videos I've watched and many that I haven't.
He has a 20-day brain saver challenge where each day you take a vegetable or fruit juice
shot to cleanse yourself of toxins.
This is what I've been reading from besides celery juice.
And as I said, he cuts a video for each one up to 90 minutes in length and he's just riffing
the entire time.
Well, I wonder if that's a component of the magic of the shot is that you have to watch
the video at the same time.
But I mean, I think the riffing part is interesting, that it works, that he sustains attention.
I can only think of two other people who really get away with it while being so banal, and one is David Wolff.
Who's pretty good at it.
And then the late Guru Jagat, of course, who was actually transparent about what she was doing because she called her podcast Reality Riffing.
But yeah, it really is, you know, seven year old with a Fisher Price karaoke set.
I'd also say J.P.
Sears with his J.P.
Reacts, even though it's still produced, it is him watching something and reacting without the normal scripted videos that he does.
So.
But does he ever go for 90 minutes, though?
No, I've never seen anything over 20.
So for length, no.
Right.
Like, it takes a certain amount of mania, really, to sustain it.
You have to be really, really committed to the bit.
Really committed to the trance state, I think.
That's true.
That's true.
So Medium has brain shots for chemtrail exposure, relationship breakups, trauma, pesticides, finding your purpose, which I didn't know was an affliction you need to be healed from, but that's in there.
So do you need to detox for pharmaceuticals?
Well, which one?
Doesn't matter.
At the very least, he admits pharmaceuticals are needed for injuries or severe infections, as I hinted at before, but most of them are bullshit, especially when we ingest pharmaceuticals by being in a park.
No worries, however, because a shot of lemon, lime, green onion, cilantro, asparagus, celery, and apple, and it must be juiced in that order, We'll detoxify you from, and I'm not kidding.
Okay, so you've got a list here.
Antibiotic treatments for infections, numbing agents for dental work, birth control, painkiller surgeries, cosmetic enhancements and procedures such as filler, botulinum toxin injections or other applications, medical testing, which can include contrasts, sedatives or numbing agents, new medical treatments of any kind.
I mean, I think we should add some bullets to the list that I could actually go for.
Like, you know, celery juice will I mean, I can see also how effective this is because I've had contrast injection for, it wasn't MRI, it was the other one.
What's the other imaging thing?
CT scan?
Yeah, CT scan.
It felt gross, like it coursed through my whole body.
I had like a kind of a rash for a couple of days.
I could feel somewhat poisoned and I can imagine that that would be like a really effective selling point if you thought that somehow, you know, your liver didn't get rid of that stuff for you, right?
Well, what's amazing is I had that done every six months for five years after cancer.
That was part of what they had to check to make sure it hadn't come back, and they had to inject me with that.
And the thing is, every time I was there, the nurse's assistant explained to me what it was doing, how it would feel, and how it would not last in my body.
If you have that affect, that feeling of it, yes, exactly.
I consider how it would be right for exploitation by someone like William.
Right.
But you can't take him seriously on any medical level because that's not what he's actually about.
He's taking advantage of people who are suffering and have nowhere else to turn, which is really tragic.
It sucks.
to have something wrong and not be able to identify and to treat it.
And then he also takes advantage of the fact that celebrities are all gaga for him.
And then he'll throw in ridiculous weight loss claims because he does that as well because
that seems always you need that in the toolkit in order to expand your audience.
So or, you know, people, the millions of people will have watched him on the Kardashians where
he waves around his hands around Kim's body and says psoriasis is caused by copper in
her liver.
I used to do a psoriasis walk in the Bronx when I lived in New York every year for charity because someone close to me had it.
And the amount of time and attention that people with it take to cure and how much time doctors spend on it It's tens of millions of dollars and yet he's just waving his hands around and people will take him seriously.
I think there's something in that, though, because if there is a difficult condition to treat, the hand-waving, I think, enhances the magic.
It was a very odd scene because, you know, he's walking onto Kardashian's reality show.
He hardly looks at the little rash on her calf.
Like, I don't think the camera even picks it up.
But he immediately starts doing this flurry rush Reiki all over for about three seconds.
And then he's sitting down.
He's not really looking at her even.
And then he gives his reading.
He prescribes celery juice.
There's something disarming about it.
And, you know, it makes me think about whether celebrities might be uniquely vulnerable to stuff like this because they already live in an artificial world to begin with.
And and they themselves probably have some awareness that they, too, are eccentric.
So who are they to judge the flurry rush Reiki guy?
But on the other hand, I think there's something like soothing in that scene as well, because health care can become like an unserious, a playful thing, a kind of magic that children are enacting on each other.
Like, okay, you're the doctor, I'm the patient.
But of course they could easily switch, but whatever they're doing, it feels like a game.
And I imagine that the public gets something out of that.
They're like, oh, medicine could be like that.
In terms of psoriasis, it is also on a spectrum.
So the person that I knew had it had occasional bad flare ups on certain parts of her upper body.
Some people will have it all the time on almost their entire body.
It really looks debilitating.
It's extremely painful.
In Kim's case, what she says is, it's on my leg and I've dealt with it,
but then it started to creep up to my face and that's where I make my money.
So that's why I need to find something to deal with that.
Ah, right. She turns to William.
Makes sense. Yeah, yeah.
So William, besides all of the insanity we've been talking about,
he also seems to have that thing where he just cannot stop talking, moving, or writing.
He has published eight textbook-sized books since 2015.
Wow.
He has over 150 supplements on sale through affiliate links on his website.
He used to charge $500 for a 30-minute phone consultation.
Which is also now the going rate for the QAnon rebranded America Shaman is now doing consultations for $500.
Oh, I did not see the price.
Yes, yeah.
Oh, wow.
But William abandoned that as his fame rose and he could scale more.
I know, Matthew, you like the term fever dream, and that's what I felt like during all of the research that I was doing for this episode.
Yeah, and I imagine, too, that, like, he is creating a kind of whirlwind around him, too, because I can pretty much guarantee that he's not fully writing sort of, you know, text-to-screen, typing-to-screen, all of those books.
Like, there's a small industry there, and he's got to be keeping a lot of people working at top speed, I imagine.
Oh, absolutely.
Usually, one person never writes a textbook, and these are ridiculously large, right?
So, it's always a group project, absolutely.
Right.
So, celery juice got him his fame, but his big claim is that Epstein-Varr virus, which is from one of the most common virus families in the world, the herpes viruses, is the root cause of almost every illness known to man.
He constantly says no one knows this before stating something that is either impossible or that everyone in that discipline already knows.
Right.
So, for example, in his brain saver shot for trauma, which I shared on our Instagram, it's for trauma, shock, and loss, he claims with a straight face that no one knows that trauma has a physical correlation in the brain.
This is such common knowledge in neuroscience, I don't even know how to approach that, but he's relying on the fact that his followers don't know that or don't care.
So Epstein-Barr virus is like his main cootie.
That's what everybody gets.
That's what all the boys and girls get.
Which leads to every disease known to man.
I mean, again, I'm not gonna refute his science, but here are a few other claims that he makes just to round out his medical knowledge.
He says that low glucose levels play a role in whether or not you get PTSD.
He claims there are over 60 varieties of Epstein-Barr virus and currently 31 varieties of shingles that science doesn't yet know about.
Wow.
He says that science has not yet discovered That hydrochloric acid isn't actually one acid, but a complex blend of seven acids.
So again, he's a real chemist here.
He's breaking the laws of chemistry constantly.
He says that Epstein-Barr virus is the virus responsible for the following cancers.
Breast, colon, liver, almost all lung, pancreatic, prostate, thyroid, women's reproductive cancers, oh, and leukemia.
He promotes the idea that genes are responsible for cancer being part of the narrative believed by the sheeple.
The real equation is virus plus toxins equal cancer.
And he says that the following diseases are all mysteries to modern medicine, but he has secret knowledge of all of them.
Tingles are a mystery when you get tingles on your, like goosebumps.
Okay, all right.
Yeah, yeah, so that's a mystery to modern medicine.
There are at least 15 more.
And as you flagged, Julian stupidly thought Lyme disease was transmitted by ticks.
Nope, nope, nope.
Part of Epstein-Barr or toxins, fragrances, perfumes.
Or tingles.
So what's really going on?
I can only trace it back to a lack of science knowledge by the general population willing to fall for this mixed with, importantly, the fact that there are many health issues that we have that have not been cured or we don't have a pathology for yet.
And I get that.
We're going to repeat here, but again, getting back to the beginning, we've said the American healthcare system and pharmaceutical industries and the ties between them have a lot of problems.
We don't know what causes every disease.
We over-pathologize, what could be passing stains of mental affliction.
So I get why people would turn to someone promising miracles when institutions have failed them.
Going back to Ebert, totally makes sense.
I've talked about my own bad experiences when I was young, which resulted in all of my pains.
We are not perfect science animals, and we probably never will be.
But to say pharma this and Western medicine that, as if every healthcare professional is the same, is unfair and untrue, yet it's common across the wellness world.
And I want to listen to a clip of Medium doing his sales pitch.
When you see people who have gone to 10 or 20 doctors looking for answers and years are passing in their life and they don't have that quality of life, and yet it turns around from celery juice alone, just from this very humble herb, celery.
Celery juice revives liver cells.
It helps bring them back.
It flushes out toxins, flushes out old pharmaceuticals, metals, petrochemicals, pesticides, herbicides, different toxins that we get every day in our life that are inside your liver.
You know, I was going to remark on the music backing him here because it reminded me of the walk-up music for Tom Cruise as he's going to make a speech at the Scientology AGM, but there's a way in which he also has a patter of listing things that I think is very common amongst Uh, you know, rhetoricians in this, in this field, it creates this entranced, I think, pattern, not only for the speaker, but for the listener.
And it gives the sense that, uh, he's making all kinds of wild connections, like he's capturing the whole universe in his shtick.
Uh, but I think that it's the, the repetition itself that is the functional part and not necessarily like how all the words gel together, right?
No, absolutely.
We've pointed out before, the reason that people were able to memorize 100,000 shloka was because of the rhyming patterns, which made it easier for us and induced a trance-like state.
I've pointed out that La Morte Author was written in a style called amplificatio, which was more about the repetition and the sonorous nature of the words, not what they actually mean.
So that is very common.
These people don't need to know that history to be able to do it and see the effect it has on people.
Everything he's saying, I would agree.
We need to hold our healthcare system and pharmaceutical industries accountable regulatorily.
But it's important to note that we already do in the American healthcare system.
Not enough, but there are guardrails.
William, he has no guardrails.
He can just say, I'm a chronic illness expert and monetize it to millions of dollars and no one's coming after him.
So yeah, we do need more regulations, but the regulators have to have some teeth with wellness grifters and charlatans as well, and right now they have none.
Because no one reads the tiny font that you have to follow from the asterisk on the supplement bottle.
And there are medical claims being made on those bottles.
Sure, William has a disclaimer on his website stating the usual trite, this is not medical information, verbiage.
The problem is he's constantly making medical claims, and it's hurting people.
Not because the juice shots are likely doing any damage, but because some of his followers are being hurt, and we'll get to that in the conversation with Dan Adler soon.
But he also promotes himself as helping people get off medication.
Oh boy.
Now as a reminder, one more time, he's not trained in anything.
So listen to his pitch here.
I'm off all my medicine.
I have no symptoms.
A year and a half later, I am off of all medication for everything.
It's an amazing pitch.
my medications by 50% within one year.
Everybody has a different story.
They have different things happening in their life.
But celery is the one thing, though, that everybody has that they're doing that's all
united and combined that's making everybody move forward, regardless of where they are.
It's an amazing pitch.
I mean, it could as well be Dwight Schrute and Beats, right?
Yeah.
You know, and I want to say like I edited that clip from a two minute longer clip, but it's all from the same clip.
And I was just trying to show how what he does is he'll say he'll have someone say, I come off my meds.
He won't say that specifically, but he'll say what he does right after they come off.
Be like, it's kind of like Joe Dispenza, right?
People are healing from all sorts of things.
There are miracles after the endorsement.
So there's also some legal protection built into the discourse as well.
Like he's figured out a way of presenting the testimonial in a way that doesn't accentuate the claim directly or suggest that he has given distinct therapeutic advice to particular people.
Absolutely, you know, and at the end of the episode today, we're going to get into another thing he does where it comes to recording people on phone conversations, which will run after the interview.
But I think he's very aware of his personal boundaries and what he can get away with, even though he seems to be just going off the handle.
I mean, Trump was also extremely good at that, right?
Like using ambiguity as a tool to be able to snake your way out without making specific claims, which is why people are so caught up on the Georgia case right now because finding 11,000 or 7,000 votes or whatever that was, that's where he actually slipped up.
And what I just played, that's not even Williams' most egregious malpractice.
At least one of his acolytes died, and that is the focus of the interview today.
So let's get to that.
A little context.
In late April, Vanity Fair published The Medical Medium and the True Believer by staff writer Dan Adler.
It's linked in the show notes.
I recommend it highly.
Whether or not you care about William, it's just a fantastic piece of investigative journalism.
Adler tells the story of Stephanie Tizon, a woman who, in 2013, was told by William that heavy metals from vaccines were causing her migraines and Epstein-Barr virus was hiding out in her liver.
Oh, man.
He said to Kim Kardashian, copper was hiding out in her liver.
That's kind of one of his, you know, hiding out.
Again, it seems like it's this thing that science can't find it, but it's there.
It's seven years old, Derek.
It's seven years old.
Now, a moment ago I said juice likely won't hurt you, but supplements definitely can and zinc is one culprit that has been shown to do damage when you take too much of it.
Stephanie's story is really sad.
Spoiler alert.
She died of advanced breast cancer.
Now, remember what I said a moment ago.
William says that breast cancer is caused by Epstein-Barr virus, so that was likely in her consciousness as she was going through this.
While she initially paid him for consultations, they became close friends.
She worked for him on occasion as an assistant.
She stopped paying him for the consultations.
Adler received Stephanie's phone from her brother, so he had access to hundreds if not thousands of text messages directly to William and people in those circles.
And he also talked to over a dozen people for this story, which is a reconstruction of Stephanie's demise.
Suffice to say that William had plenty of advice for Stephanie until her cancer progressed.
Then he ghosted her.
He was nowhere to be found.
His wife or someone in the circle was like, oh, we're really busy right now and wouldn't reply to her.
And so she died without him there.
Now, William has come out hard against Adler's claims.
He's dedicated, currently, right now, the top of his homepage to that four-part podcast series, which is called The Plot to Take Down Medical Medium.
So, we're gonna close this episode in a few minutes, talking about how William responds to criticism, and that's how part of his shtick.
But let's roll my interview with Dan Adler now.
When did you first hear of medical medium?
When I started reporting this story, the first thing I did when I heard about the story that had happened, this relationship between these two people that was tragic and disturbing, is I went to the Medical Medium's Instagram page.
And, you know, he has, of course, a ton of followers, over 4 million, and lots of celebrity followers.
And I saw that it wasn't just celebrities that I follow on Instagram.
Who follow him, you know, in sort of like the mutual follow section, but also people I know just like friends, people in my life.
It made me really interested in the spectrum of belief.
I asked friends who follow him, you know, what do you get out of this?
And the answer tended to be, yeah, the unobjectionable part, the kind of like, oh, he says to drink celery juice, he says to eat apples.
Those are things that I like doing and that he serves as sort of an entry point into that kind of lifestyle.
And I was interested in contrasting that with The story of Stephanie Tisone.
How long did you spend on this story?
It's extremely well reported.
It's, I think, 4,000 words.
So there's a lot there.
About a year ago.
As with any story, there's sort of like quieter periods and louder periods.
Altogether, I've been reporting on Anthony William one way or another for about a year.
And I would say, you know, of course, the story published a few weeks ago.
Over the past few months is sort of what I've been putting together.
You know, I talk to a lot of people, read a lot.
Before this interview runs, the three of us will have talked a bit about medical medium and his history and some of the pseudoscience around what he does.
And your article will be linked to in the show notes.
And as I told you before we started recording, a number of our listeners have already read it and contacted us about it, which is wonderful.
But can you give me a 101 overview of the story that you wanted to tell through I'd say there were two main things I wanted to do.
I heard about this relationship between these two people, Stephanie and Anthony, and I really wanted to reconstruct that relationship.
As best I could.
And I understand that people will view that relationship in different ways and have different takeaways from it.
But as best as I could, I wanted to offer a really faithful representation of what happened between those two people.
As I did that, I came to understand that a lot of the relationship had to do with the authority Anthony has in this world, in this community.
And so the second thing I really wanted to do with the story is, as best I could, Offer an account of how that came to be, how he came to operate, came to occupy, excuse me, this very elevated place in a really crowded, competitive ecosystem.
What is it about him that you think has gotten him so many followers, especially among the celebrity set?
It's really hard to answer.
I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out.
One person I posed that question to is someone who I quote in the story, Steve Novella, I don't know if you've come across him, but neurologist and skeptic, the editor of the Journal of Scientific Medicine, he cautioned me
Wisely, I think, against assigning success in this world to any one factor.
It's a very crowded space.
There are lots of people trying different things.
Anthony, as I talk about throughout the story, tried a few things before he got to the place he is now.
I'm hesitant to sort of pick out one particular phenomenon or tactic, but I think there are a few things we could look at.
Big picture, historically, there's a sort of archetype.
I'm going to talk about this a bit in the story, whether it's Edgar Cayce or Franz Mesmer.
As far as I can tell, for the vast majority of human history, there have been people who are good at playing that archetype.
I think the medical medium has done that well.
I think there's also been a shift in the culture of wellness in recent years, the culture of social media as it pertains to wellness.
And these were also conditions that played to his favor.
And allowed him to succeed in this ecosystem.
I think as far as the celebrity aspect that you asked about, I spent a lot of time trying to, you know, write for Vanity Fair.
I came to the story in large part because of the intense and pretty expansive celebrity following.
Steve Novella gave what I think is the best answer to that question of why is there such a following?
What he suggested is that if you're someone who's doing this kind of work, offering this kind of information, offering this claim that you have information that is ahead of science, celebrities historically are people who are apt to receive that sort of claim.
They're being presented information that is being portrayed as extremely effective and authoritative.
I think like any other person, There's a natural susceptibility to that.
But in this case, celebrities are hearing more of it because, as Steve says in the portion that I quote him in, this information is being disproportionately directed at them because of the influence that they bear.
Now, you tell the story of Stephanie, who is a raw foodist.
She finds Anthony at some point in her wellness journey.
At some point, she discovers a lump in her breast.
Basically, you make the case that Anthony tries to steer her away from doctors through natural healing.
At some point, it appears that he does say to go to the doctor, but then it seems that he then shirks any responsibility as she gets worse and worse and stops contacting her.
How did you get access to all the information like her text messages and all of the conversations she was having?
There's a lot more to work with.
But it also gave me an opportunity to look at what was happening in a really granular way on a day-by-day basis.
So, the one thing in your question that I pushed back on a little bit is that she was steered away from medical care.
The tricky thing about all of this is that it's hard to interpret what's going on at all.
And I think it goes back to the foundational claim of the medical medium practice, which is that, A, I have information that is 20 years ahead of science.
But B, I'm not offering medical advice.
I'm not a doctor.
It shouldn't be taken as diagnostic or prognostic or anything like that.
So yeah, there are moments where Anthony says to Stephanie, you could see a doctor, you should see a doctor.
Those moments, as I try to communicate in the story, all take place within a context in which one person understands the other to be really a godlike figure as far as medical information.
The texts, I think, gave me the ability to do a really close reading of how that dynamic The dynamic of, A, I have all this information.
B, it's not medical advice.
How that dynamic actually plays out in the life of one person.
How many people did you talk to for this story overall, would you say?
Probably upwards of 15 or 20 altogether.
I don't know if you've followed up, but Anthony has released four podcast episodes talking about this article.
It's pretty extensive.
I spent a good part of my weekend listening to them.
One thing that strikes me, and I've actually seen this before with other top-tier wellness influencers, they never say Vanity Fair, they never say your name, they never say anyone in all of these different communications that they're presenting as they're trying to build their own narrative, which is the opposite of journalism.
Occasionally, as a journalist, you can't cite sources who want to go off the record, and that makes sense.
So, when you were reporting this out, did you talk to Anthony or anyone in his inner circle?
As I say in the story, I made repeated attempts to get in contact with Anthony.
I don't think this part's in the story, but I sent him a lengthy list of questions addressing Everything that's addressed in the story.
Before I did that, I reached out to him asking if he wanted to have a conversation about his work.
And as I say in the story, he declined to comment on the record.
He was given ample opportunity to comment for the story on the record and chose not to.
Have you had any pushback from the article?
Yeah, I mean, I've gotten a fair amount of angry DMs, Instagram comments, that kind of thing.
I would say the pushback is, um, As far as I can tell, narrowly confined to people who are really committed followers of the medical medium.
When you look at someone like Anthony William, what is it about them or their charisma that you think has such a hold on their followers that would make them come out against you instead of actually, say, reading your article and then sussing it out for themselves?
I think it's hard to answer in the abstract, but one thing that I can say is that I think what the story shows is that the bond that's formed Between medical medium followers and the medical medium is really, really strong.
Not just in cases like Stephanie, where there's a personal bond, but even in cases where the relationship is just an online one, or sort of a parasocial one.
I can say from my reporting, talking to people who have really devoted their time, their energy, their money to the medical medium, there's a strong sense that he can deliver them from something that's quite literally painful.
As I said earlier on the story, the vast majority of the follower base, according to people who have been close to him, is women dealing with chronic illness, chronic pain.
And I think his ability to position himself as someone who can provide advanced information About those conditions.
It's a really powerful message to someone who's looking for that kind of information.
Especially in a time when so many people don't trust the medical industry.
And we often say on the podcast, there are many things to not like about the American health care system.
But that also doesn't mean that you can then go promoting bunk science to people.
In the course of your reporting, What sort of criticisms around his either techniques or his advice did you receive?
I think the main thing is the pseudoscience.
And that was sort of a question I put to the side, both because it's been covered fairly extensively by people with scientific backgrounds that I don't have.
And also because I felt that the aspects of this particular relationship that I was trying to reconstruct,
and some of the other relationships I discussed in the story,
if you think about them in terms of their human components, and put to the side the questions of pseudoscience and what
the information actually is, you can see a lot about how authority is developed, how
that authority is received.
I looked a lot at the criticism.
I looked a lot at the reporting around pseudoscience and looked at his books and what he was saying.
But I think one thing that also came across in the text messages that I reported on and in many of the conversations I had with sources is that a lot of it is just very confusing.
There's a lot of information being conveyed.
There's a lot of jargon being used.
There are lots of supplements talking to sources about their interpretation of the information.
More than anything else, I think there's just a lot of confusion.
There's a lot of a sense of If I could just understand what's being conveyed through this figure who's portraying himself as, as I say in the story, just under God.
If I could just understand what the message is, that would help me.
But when you try to look at what the message is, it's very, very murky.
I think of the Tom Nichols book about the death of expertise, and that's becoming more and more prevalent as social media accelerates and pushes the idea.
I actually recently saw someone say that, I've learned more on YouTube and Twitter
than I ever would have at a university.
And when you have that mindset, it's really hard to distinguish between
someone who is a medical expert or Anthony William, who says that he started channeling
scientific information at age four, for example.
Now, you said earlier with Vanity Fair, you cover a lot of celebrities.
What sort of connections did you see, if any, between someone who is in this wellness space as he is and some of the other celebrities that you cover?
The slipperiness of it all, you know, these fine lines between any social community, but I suppose especially in a social community having to do with fame, who's in and who's out and someone can show up and be part of it and the next day not be part of it and how you sort of insert yourself into community and no one notices or no one cares or no one thinks to ask.
How you got there?
I think Anthony William, as I tried to convey the story, just slowly amassed a little bit of word of mouth.
It started to snowball in the way any celebrity trend would.
And then once one person is vouching for you and a couple or more, that dynamic to me was fundamentally the dynamic of a celebrity.
You know, if you're a famous musician, you're not just making albums, you're telling a story of From my perspective, I mean, he calls himself a chronic illness expert.
As I just said, he has no medical training whatsoever.
We see this often with grifters.
and feeling successful, I think that's one answer too, is that he's made very effective use of the tools of celebrity,
particularly social media.
From my perspective, I mean, he calls himself a chronic illness expert, as I just said, he has no medical training
whatsoever.
We see this often with grifters. Instead of listing actual credentials, they'll use vague terminology to provoke
emotional responses in their readers.
When you got some of the criticism that you did on the social media channels, whatever, was any of it looking at
actual science-backed claims of what he's making?
Or was it generally, as I experienced this past weekend, as some of his fans came onto my Instagram feed, just calling me out as a bullshit artist, basically.
It's been either that sort of like an attack, or it's been a personal experience.
You know, one message I got said that, um, I can't remember if it was mother or grandmother, but someone messaged me saying that this person's mother or grandmother wouldn't be alive if not for Anthony Williams.
I received messages along those lines.
And one thing I should say while we're on the subject is, um, I don't engage with those messages as a matter of how I practice my work, but I'm sympathetic to these people.
When they've lashed out at me, in most cases, I assume someone who's dealing with some sort of chronic condition or pain in their life otherwise, and They have come to believe that this person can offer some sort of deliverance from that.
If I'm perceived or if Anthony Ferris is perceived as oppositional to that, it makes all the sense in the world that they would understand me to be a threat.
If any of those people are listening to this, I'd like to say, I'm not responding because I think it's just best practice, but I do hear where they're coming from.
The ability to draw the line between expressing empathy, but also pointing out criticisms, I think is especially important.
Especially given these frayed relationships that we're dealing with.
But it's very hard when someone feels, because people feel personally attacked when you're attacking someone they perceive to have helped them.
Yeah.
And then another answer to your great question of how did Anthony William become successful to the extent he has, is I think anyone in life, you, me, someone dealing with chronic illness or pain is looking for purpose, right?
I think he's been very, very good at offering a sense of not just health information, but purpose.
And that's one thing that really came across in the texts I reported on.
Stephanie at one point said, I'm paraphrasing here, I'm always behind you.
You're my purpose." And she believed this.
And we know this because we can read it in her text messages.
She believed this really up until the moment she died.
One thing that's really hard to get across sometimes is the fact-checking process that people have to go through.
We have a book coming out in a few weeks on Hachette Public Affairs.
There are 730 footnotes.
We spent hours in calls with lawyers before any of this was able to get published.
We had to go back and check numerous sources.
It is a process.
It is extremely easy to Just say something online and let it go without accountability.
But when you're actually trying to do journalism, there is a lot required, and it's much harder to get to the source.
That's why these stories will take a year.
What was the overall fact-checking process with your editors and lawyers and such?
Well, if I could backtrack a few steps from that, just the beginning of the reporting process.
Like I said earlier, there were kind of two main strands of reporting.
The one around This relationship between these two people and then the bigger picture one of how the medical medium came to occupy the place in the world that he does.
So I was sort of gathering as much information on both of those.
For instance, I could, you know, as far as Stephanie's relationship with Anthony, that involves talking to people close to her, talking to people close to Anthony at the time that he was close to Stephanie.
And then as far as the sort of bigger picture, personal backstory, celebrity aspects, that was talking to celebrity publicists, talking to people who were operating in some of the spaces, some of the same spaces that the medical medium is operated in.
And then from there, as far as sort of the fact checking and editing process, there's the most immediate thing, which is just to make sure everything is really, really buttoned up and correct.
And that takes a significant amount of time because the story is focused on the minutia of people's lives.
So making sure to have all that straight, of course, because that's saying from a bigger picture.
One thing I worked with my editor on a lot, not just being factually accurate, but faithful to the truth of this relationship and the truth of this dynamic.
To kind of convey the emotional trajectory of it, how it developed, how it disintegrated, and how the people in this orbit were thinking at the same time.
This is another thing I worked with my editor to try to figure out the best way to convey it, is situating all of this in the broader culture.
Because as you and I have been discussing, there are a few different currents.
There's the way social media has developed, the way wellness culture has developed, it's the way celebrity-adjacent wellness culture has developed.
So to sort of locate the medical medium within those currents, I understand how that fits in relation to everything else.
I know you expressed that you don't have a science background as a journalist, but I'm wondering, as you were going through his material, did anything really jump out at you when reading his books or seeing his blog posts as being especially egregious?
Yeah, I was struck, and the story touches on this a bit, there are a few certain buzzwords Epstein-Barr virus, wild blueberries, cilantro.
Epstein-Barr virus being the biggest one.
A portion of his book that I quote in the story says that the true cause of breast cancer is the Epstein-Barr virus.
And that's been one of the predominant criticisms of him from the science community is that Epstein-Barr virus has been sort of Portrayed as a catch-all explanation for everything.
That's the main one, I would say.
Also, to go back to the point I was making a few minutes ago, also just the amount of pseudo-scientific information, the sheer quantity.
You know, there are these textbooks, there are five, six, seven of them, and they're just a lot of ideas.
And they're presented as wisdom coming from a spirit.
So they have a lot of authority, but it's hard At least for me, to figure out what's being said.
And then you also have the layers of authority within the community.
I talk about this a little bit in the story.
You know, people who were at one point listed on his practitioner referral page as trusted interpreters of medical media information.
On the other hand, he says on that page that there's a disclaimer that they're not actually endorsed by him.
just sort of the layers of authority, the layers of information and
the stew of it all and the difficulty of walking
away from that feeling like you have some sort of clarity.
Derek, it's a great interview.
He got amazing access with that phone, like that whole sort of
possibility now of I got the mobile phone of a deceased person.
I was able to clock their text history.
Like, I've never been in a position like that as a reporter.
I don't think you have.
No, not at all.
It would be a very eerie thing.
Amazing reporting reality these days.
And, you know, we're going to get to William's response or, like, non-response in a moment, but I wanted to throw one more piece of context in here.
I was thinking about this analysis that we've worked away on for years that says that people like William are exploiting the gaps in evidence-based research or common complaints with clinical medicine that have to do with rapport or the feeling that a patient is, you know, honored with their agency or the general medical illiteracy of the public.
And I think we know that argument.
I think we know how that works.
You know, these people see an insufficiency in healthcare, and they meet that need with charisma, with good vibes, shifting goalposts, and therapies that are both magical but also simple to understand.
But what I want to think more about, and it comes from this, like, gnawing awareness that I think we've pinged a bunch of times but not really fleshed out, which is that so many of the quacks we cover are American.
And that it's not an accident, nor is it accidental that the U.S.
leads the world in alt-health economy and the impacts of anti-vax propaganda.
Now, we know that American culture is hyper-individualistic, but are Americans more gullible or something like that?
I think, and I've been thinking, that the word really is vulnerable because William has the advantage of playing against a for-profit healthcare system in which consumers might get ignored, they might get bankrupted, they might get told that their real power comes through making consumer choices about what they want.
So they're constantly having to say, am I going to pay for this level of insurance with this crazy deductible?
Am I going to pay for these expensive interventions that are evidence-based?
Or am I going to hand my money over to somebody who makes me feel better more quickly?
Through the meeting or through the rapport or whatever.
And in a for-profit healthcare system, evidence-based institutions are basically asking for somebody to come in and compete with them on the basis of sales.
And I think evidence is going to be only one of many selling points.
Now, you know, I'm sitting here in Canada and socialized medicine, as under attack as it is currently, is rooted in the cultural value of this is the type of treatment that we're all deciding we're going to fund together.
And folks here or in Scandinavia, we might personally disagree with what those choices might be.
We might complain about access.
We might complain about wait times.
But there's an overall emphasis upon deciding together how best to spend our money, and I think that process alone is going to resist profit motivations or consumerist desires being driving forces.
So, William is exploiting evidentiary gaps, but he's also just playing by for-profit rules.
He's saying, like, I can offer a shinier service for better, maybe comparable money, And then, you know, after all of that, you have consumer choice being a marker of empowerment and health.
Anyway, I'm sure we'll develop this theme more.
I've been thinking a lot about it, but let's get back to William because, you know, he's responded to Adler, you know, what does he have to say for himself?
Like, hey, I, you know, I'm only four years old.
Well, we don't know that.
He could be four years old.
Right.
Could be 400 years old.
That could also come out as well.
So what he says to himself, I mean, he's playing the victim the entire way.
Anytime there's any criticism, he is the victim.
Because Stephanie Tisone isn't the only person who has likely been harmed by Anthony William.
There are Instagram groups, Facebook groups that are Pushing back against him, that's where he draws some of the plot idea from.
But there are people who are like, hey, you're a dangerous fuck.
We need to do something about it because they've been harmed by him.
The Instagram account called William Survivors has about 500 followers.
And this is the community that is the plotters, right?
But I want to close out by looking specifically at how he responds to them and the type of cult that he's built around him.
And one thing that comes up often from people who spend a lot of time with medical mediums content or has been in his community is his ego.
You can tell that's an issue by this response he had to others jumping on the celery juice bandwagon.
He says, every time an expert tries to make celery juice their own by changing it.
Uh, they are robbing people of their right to heal with celery juice.
They're also preventing the people who are living with symptoms and conditions from knowing the source celery juice came from, which means they won't have access to other advanced medical medium healing information that could help them.
Oh, okay, so he's saying If someone other than my imaginary friend recommends celery juice, it's not really celery juice, basically.
It started because there were other celery juice recipes where they're either mixing them or they weren't specifically saying don't Do it when you wake up without having eaten for a half an hour.
So he was using that as a being like, no, no, it doesn't work that way.
It has to be exactly how I say it.
Let's look at another example.
He went into even more depth about what he's owed for bringing the supposed miracle of celery juice to the world in a Facebook comment.
There have been a slew of articles and press on celery juice from naysayers who are still using the lack of funded research studies on celery juice to dismiss the obvious health benefits it provides.
Every time a health expert, guru, doctor, dietician, nutritionist, TV show, or any other person or source dismisses the healing properties of celery juice, Or says it's the same as eating a few stalks of celery or drinking a glass of water?
They are also dismissing the chronically ill people who have shared their stories of healing with celery juice.
They are saying that hundreds of thousands of people are liars and that their healing experiences don't count or matter.
They are digressing back to the 1950s to 1990s when women were told by their doctors that they were crazy.
Lying and making up their symptoms and medical science and research weren't offering any solutions.
The naysayers of today are once again dismissing the chronically ill by ignoring their healing experiences with celery juice.
They're telling hundreds of thousands of people who have shared their positive experiences that they are wrong.
They aren't healing.
They've never healed.
They weren't really sick in the first place.
It's downright disrespectful.
This is a hell of a pivot, actually.
This is kind of like somebody saying, oh, you've provided conclusive evidence that there is no forensic detail behind, you know, tens of thousands of accusations of satanic ritual abuse.
That really insults Everybody who tells their story of satanic ritual abuse.
And I want to just point out, gently, that there's a symmetry here between this complaint and Alex Ebert's because if you criticize the implied or explicit medical claims of the alt-health influencer and the testimonials that they've racked up, you're disrespecting all of the suffering people who say that he's helped them.
But it's really kind of an endless, recursive, empty loop.
Yeah, and it also makes me think about, specifically with Alex's, the way that he's asking for nuance.
Would that also imply that every time that a wellness influencer makes a claim about how an herb can heal a condition, they also have to qualify it by saying there are some pharmaceuticals that could also heal this condition?
Or that this works for some of the people some of the time.
Or, I mean, Worm Queen could say, you know, I really don't have any credentials.
I really think that parasites are a problem.
I can't really prove that to you.
And I really like taking this powder because it makes me feel like I shit out a lot of parasites.
Maybe you want to try it too, like that.
It would be honest, right?
Yeah, it would be honest, but they're not going to do that.
Like, William is the perfect example.
Everything is just like, I am the only one with the knowledge.
You have to do it exactly as I say.
And that's why I feel comfortable bringing cult leader or cult around him, at least, into the conversation because these are the techniques.
You know, the wounded hero archetype is one that he wears often.
He's carrying the burden of advanced medical knowledge on his shoulders like Sisyphus, and all these doctors and journalists and haters just keep pushing him back down the hill, and he goes to extreme lengths to push back.
So, as I talked about with Dan, he replied to this one article with a four-part podcast series, and this is where I want to close out this episode.
The whole thing is about five hours long, and it features him being interviewed in part by one of his acolytes, whose name is Amber Vizicaro.
She's another untrained alt-medicine practitioner who claims to, quote, help people recover from chronic health problems naturally.
Vizicaro cosplays an investigative reporter, While an aggrieved William plays the victim the entire time.
I mean, he just can't believe a community of people would want to take him down since he's communicating with spirit to heal the world.
Interestingly, Visicaro repeatedly says that she legally recorded the people featured in the series.
Now from what I can tell on her LinkedIn page and website, she lives in Florida.
She was definitely born there.
She ended up moving away for school, but I do believe she's back there from what I could tell.
Florida is a two-party consent state.
Yes, it is.
And if you don't know what that means, that means You can only record people with their permission.
I live in Oregon now, which is sometimes a single-party consent state, meaning only I have to give myself permission to record a conversation.
It's a little weird here.
Sometimes it's an all-party consent state because that's usually applied to in-person situations.
But the point being, I don't do that because I'm not unethical.
But legally, I would likely be within my rights to record phone conversations without consent.
If VisiCaro was in Florida while recording people and they didn't know about it, that's a third-degree felony in that state.
So if that's the case, Amber, saying it's legal doesn't make it so.
Though given your entire set of medical credentials for prescribing cleanses to chronically ill people is Having a mother who also is a medium, along with Reiki and holistic health certifications, and a bachelor's degree in integrative medicine, not really sure you care about journalistic ethics.
Throughout these episodes, The two of them never named Vanity Fair, they never named Ann Adler, or any of the people she's recorded.
It's all off record.
Yeah, I actually have a little experience with this, and I admit that I'm speculating here, but we've discussed this before.
Both Mickey Willis and Aubrey Marcus have spoken on podcasts or sent out newsletters about my coverage of them without naming me or where it came from.
You've noted this before with Charles Eisenstein and Kelly Brogren.
They've done this in their essays.
They discuss critics, but they won't link back to them.
Let's listen to how it's framed on the Medical Medium podcast.
I have a guest with me today.
She uncovered a plot by a group of rivals to take down Medical Medium and our community by spreading false claims to a major media outlet.
To be safe, she chose to record the calls legally.
And they were caught red-handed.
We're talking about something awful.
Terrible.
Really the unimaginable.
Attempting to take the medical medium down.
Which really means trying to take down the medical medium community.
All of this began with the number one plotter who put out a really inflammatory false storyline about a deceased woman named Stephanie three years ago.
She hurt a lot of people with her misinformation.
This led to rumors and false narratives that have circulated amongst health communities since.
Number one plotter, mainstream publication.
That's the language they use the entire time.
They will not name anyone.
They're a plotter or the number one plotter.
Right.
And I'm guessing here that they're able to do this because they exist in closed ecosystems.
For sure, yeah.
If you can create the image of an evil without naming it, your followers are unlikely to turn to the source material to weigh it out for themselves if your argument has validity in their eyes.
Critics are actually more valuable to them unnamed and ambiguous because they're depersonalized.
They become the cabal, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
That's exactly what they are.
It's, again, going back to the beginning, it's Pharma with a capital P. All of the nurses assistants, all the doctors, all the researchers, the millions of people who work in healthcare, the people designing the websites, the people manufacturing, they're just cabal.
They're not people who are working for a living and trying to do good things.
They just become part of this undercover operative that we have to push back
against at every step.
Right.
And in the case of medical medium, the focus remains on the grifter and the
grift, which is where they want it.
And while that's really great for their downline, the grifter and the grift,
meaning them and their focus, whatever they're selling to be clear.
But while it helps their sales, it really sucks for the people who might want a more holistic view of what's really going on.
I think it's crucial to what they do because they're not actually responding to criticism, which is like, it's a challenging thing to do because you have to quote accurately.
You have to bring receipts.
Maybe scariest of all, you have to look your critic in the eye.
I mean, I think you're right, that what they're doing is shoring up their base.
And maybe that's a good place to leave it, because ultimately the four-year-old channeler of God, now in his fifties maybe, but somebody who hasn't appreciably changed or learned much, but who became successful at monetizing that persona, they can only sustain that within a bubble, within a kind of sealed system.
It reminds me of what Donald Winnicott said about what some stressed out children wind up doing to comfort themselves, which is another thing that I kind of hear echoing in his manic discourse.
I hear a lot of, I'm trying to make myself feel better.
But Winnicott described how, you know, a child can become aware of what he called the incommunicado core, or like an inner place of primary aloneness where it feels like there is support and safety.
And I think that the sort of ghostly image of medical medium is in that central place in his discourse, in the imaginarium that he weaves.
And so if I get generous, I can imagine Anthony William never really leaving the inside of his head, like just muttering to himself, but he's on a live stream.
Trying constantly to keep that feeling of comfort going and not really having any other words to name that feeling with besides, you know, celery and juice.
Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
We'll see you again here next week on the main feed or over on Patreon.
Don't forget, we're two weeks away from our book release.
