How did “following the science” get so confusing during the pandemic? As the publication of our book draws closer, Derek shares his best practices for science literacy, and examples of where grifters and conspiracists maximized confusion to exploit wellness consumers.
This is the first in a three-part series on what we’ve learned though writing our book and working on the podcast. Each episode is piloted by one host with commentary by the other two.
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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.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can stay up to date with us all over the internet and soon in Apple's version of the metaverse, but for now, Instagram will suit you well.
And a reminder, this is our last episode before our book is on sale next week.
Yes, our book is turning out to be prescient because conspiritualists continue to be mainstreamed, and not only in right-wing politics.
It probably shouldn't have caught me off guard, but it still did.
With anti-vax Graham Poobah, RFK Jr.
entering the Democratic primary race alongside Marianne Williamson, we then had this kind of breaking news in our world, which was that he appointed none other than Charles Eisenstein as his director of communications.
Right.
So, Julian and I explored what all of this might mean, and we got into the weeds on these three figures for any new listeners in our last two Patreon Monday bonus episodes.
Now, we've got a packed episode for you today, but we also have to mention some other key news cycle items that we will definitely be following up on in the coming weeks.
This past weekend, Mickey Willis and his team released The Great Awakening, which is the third installment of his Plandemic series, and it takes the Willis Pilled crowd deep into G. Edward Griffin's Red Scare Land With hilarious segments on dictator Justin Trudeau.
Derek pointed out that they did a really good job on creating Hollywood Texas in Austin with a red carpet gala dominated by a very pink, moist, and shouty Alex Jones.
Yeah.
Oh, I can't wait.
In other news, Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey have both endorsed Bobby Kennedy for president with Musk yesterday hosting him in a demented Twitter spaces event.
We have to try and find the recording where Bobby went full mask off about vaccines and autism and COVID being a bioweapon.
And finally, Michael Schellenberger, Russell Brand and Matt Taibbi are expressing their repression by taking their Censorship Industrial Complex show on the road for live events, which begins in June in London.
Interesting to note that the event is positioned as a fundraiser for Schellenberger's non-profit, which is called Environmental Progress.
I spent a lot of time on their site yesterday and I think it's pretty much something that you pay and then Schellenberger writes an op-ed somewhere about something.
And those things include him stating that climate change is not responsible for the increasingly disastrous weather patterns.
Matthew and I were just talking about the wildfires going on outside of Quebec right now and New York City is orange.
He also argues for nuclear power over wind and solar, which is a credible argument in
some ways, although that has definitely turned into a right-wing talking point in recent
years.
Conspiratuality 157, science and sensibility.
How did following the science get so confusing and contested during the pandemic?
As the publication of our book draws closer, Derek shares his best practices for science literacy, as well as examples of where grifters and conspiracists maximized confusion to exploit wellness consumers.
This is the first in a three-part series on what we've learned through writing our book and working on the podcast, talking to experts.
We'll take turns leading the conversation for each episode.
Yes, with our book officially on the market in five days, we thought long and hard about how best to celebrate that in these weeks before and after.
We wanted to communicate some of its essentials, but also interrogate some of its premises.
So, one cool thing we'll do in the Celebration category is that we're going to release the opening 50 minutes or so of the audiobook, narrated by me, and that will be a standalone episode.
I think it'll be fun.
But in the Critique Zone, we're also preparing an episode called, Is Our Book a Conspiracy Theory?, which looks at the possibility That we apply this term, conspirituality, to anything and everything, with the net result being that we replicate the problem we're describing by creating an abstract class of religious believers who are fucking up everything.
So, I think that's a really important topic.
How dare you?
Right.
But today, and for the next two weeks, we're going to be camped out in the essentials zone, prompted by this really great question that came in over the wire from IG.
Hello, I just started listening to your podcast and it's my new obsession.
Thank you so much for the clear and illuminating information and analysis.
I've been into yoga, meditation and nutrition for years and always had reservations about some of the themes you so clearly articulate.
However, I've gotten so many benefits from many of these practices and philosophies.
Have you ever done or will you do a podcast on how to discern between helpful advice, education, and more dubious or nefarious claims?
Is there a template or guidance for how to assess whether information we consume, especially online, to make sure we aren't being duped or led astray, like a do's and don'ts episode?
Well, thank you, IG person.
We are happy to announce we'll deliver Not just one episode, but three actually.
We're going to answer to the three categories of questions that our material usually brings up, and we're going to do it with one of us taking the helm each week.
So, as we've said, Derek is piloting today with How Does Conspiritually Make Use of Pseudoscience?
That's the general theme.
Julian, next week, is going to look at the question, How Does Conspirituality Manipulate and Monetize Spiritual Needs Through Cognitive Fallacies?
And then I'm going to follow up in the third week with how does conspirituality feed on and recreate cultic social dynamics.
So, let's turn to Derek's wheelhouse this week for the first in our three-part book
essentials series, Sense and Science Literacy.
All right, Derek, to start with, how would you describe the general orientation of the
wellness influencers that we cover towards science?
Aren't they quoting scientific studies all the time, or don't they think they're doing that?
They absolutely are, but the science they're quoting is often misrepresented by them and not always from the most reputable sources.
We also live in a culture that is I don't want to say addicted, maybe trained to read a headline and maybe a lead and then assume they know everything about it.
So that's partly what we're going to be breaking down.
Cool.
Understanding the niche language of science or the sciences really is what we should be talking about.
It's challenging in any discipline, but there isn't just one discipline within the science and being fluent in one of the sciences doesn't necessarily translate to being literate in the other ones.
So that said, the basics of research papers are accessible to pretty much everyone, but you do need to know what you're looking at.
So this is kind of how I approach it as a journalist who has written up hundreds of scientific studies in my time covering health and sciences.
You don't always have to read a study from the beginning to the end.
If it's a topic you're really interested in, totally go for it, but much of the language is specific to that discipline.
Experts need this information to suss out details, but for a layperson who's developing a heuristic about it, the gist really is enough, but you should be aware that some of the nuance will be missed if you only skim.
So researchers know that most readers will not read every word closely or even understand the details.
Like when I see math across a scientific study, I definitely get a little bit lost.
And that's why they write in abstract, which is where they reveal the major findings and why those findings matter.
So for a 101 understanding, you can just read the abstract, though that will likely not give you enough of a grasp on the topic, to be honest.
So to me, it's the bookends that are the heart of it.
That's the abstract and the conclusion.
And that's really what they want their audience to understand, but I also personally always read the introduction of the study to have an understanding.
That follows the abstract and that usually sets up the stage both holistically about why they're doing it as well as with some of the details.
And if you do those three things, which is abstract, intro, and conclusion, you move from 101 to 102.
And if that satisfies your craving, it might be enough, but I honestly think there are two more steps that you should think about before you really take the information you're gleaning and presenting it on social media, which is read the conflicts of interest, which is in every study, and look up the publication's journal ranking.
So, conflicts of interest offer you insight into why those findings were sought in the first place, and they can potentially raise red flags about the findings.
So, for example, reading the AlphaBrain study that was championed by Onnit founders Aubrey Marcus and Joe Rogan, you discover that two of the seven researchers involved in that study were paid consultants for Onnit.
Paid consultants producing positive results for a for-profit supplements company should immediately raise a red flag.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I've actually found that just saying to people, look, take those extra few clicks, Maybe Google the name of the lead researchers.
Get a sense of what else they've done.
On several occasions, I've had these smoking gun scientific papers sent to me that an acquaintance thinks is finally going to be the thing that proves an anti-vax or a magical thinking or an alternative medicine claim, right?
And then I look and I find that the people involved only publish papers on these topics.
Or they are part of niche societies with a specific fringe agenda who self-publish their own journal with no peer review.
Or if they have published on other topics, hmm, what are those topics?
Is it the paranormal?
Is it climate denial?
Now, of course, this is not enough to dismiss the paper, right?
But it is a really big red flag.
Who are these scientists?
How often is their work cited?
How reputable and qualified are they?
What do they generally work on?
Has the study been replicated is another question.
How big was the sample size?
So all of this goes into assessing just, you can do it quite quickly, the robustness and validity of the paper and what the person citing it thinks it actually shows as a slam dunk.
And look, just because the paper's on PubMed and is formatted like all the other studies you find there doesn't necessarily mean it's legit.
You know what I love about this story, Julian, is that I'm sure when somebody sends you a smoking gun paper and they really think it's a slam dunk, what they really want from you is just some validation that you like them, that you can validate their intelligence.
You probably give that to them as well, and then you go on to talk about the paper itself, right?
More and more as I've gotten used to how the other approach really backfires.
But you know, I'll also say too that there's within our community, there is this contested area that has to do with the tension between humility and arrogance.
And humility is often interpreted by people in wellness and spiritual and yoga spaces as being like, we just don't know anything.
Anything is possible.
And so if you if you look at something with a critical eye, That very easily gets interpreted as arrogance.
So figuring out how to make that equation work out so that there's enough of a Honesty about humility and what we don't know, while also saying here are some good heuristics for evaluating knowledge claims.
The other thing that comes up, Derek, this just seems so obvious to me, the conflict of interest thing.
If it has to be declared, why do people go through with doing the paper?
If they know they're going to have to put that down there, it just seems like it would be embarrassing.
So why does that happen?
Shouldn't consultants simply have to recuse themselves?
Not necessarily.
If you are working for a pharmaceutical company and you're doing a study on a pharmaceutical that might actually be unrelated to the pharmaceutical company, you should also list that you have conflicts of interest.
If you hold stock in the company, they're not always bad.
This actually addresses something Julian says about researchers and only publishing on one topic.
That's not always a bad thing.
Because if your expertise is in this one thing, most of your papers are probably going to be that one thing.
So then you have to weigh out these other areas.
I think what Julian was referencing was more of like, if they're part of a society or foundation that only publishes on this one thing, I Notice that acupuncture often does that.
They have their own little cottage industry.
You know, there are some acupuncture studies in major journals, but a lot of them go into acupuncture-specific journals, and the people who publish them are acupuncturists who are part of the foundation.
You know, that's something to consider when weighing it all out.
So, it's just a mechanism that we have to be able to assess how deeply tied in someone is.
And to me, like the Onnit study, they're paid consultants by Onnit trying to prove AlphaBrain's validity and they're part of the research team.
That's a red flag as compared to someone who might have done some consulting work for a company and is now working on something.
And especially if they didn't find positive results and they're still a consultant, that's a little bit different.
So, there's a lot of nuance in there.
Okay, cool.
That helps.
The second part of what I was talking about was journal rankings, and they help readers understand the quality of the publication.
A number of metrics help rank journals, including the impact factor, which is the mean number of citations the journal has received in the past two years, and altmetrics, which is a means for assessing the journal's impact across academic social media sites.
10 and above is a great impact factor.
3 is generally considered the benchmark.
If it's 3 or above, you're legitimate.
And 1 is average, but you've got to really think about whether you want to quote that.
So, for perspective, Human Psychopharmacology, which is the journal that the A4 mentioned on its study was published in, had an impact factor of 1.672 last year.
Uh-oh.
Paid consultants publishing in a mediocre journal is more cause for alarm.
Okay, so those are the two things that you can look on.
But now, if you want to get to 201 level of research, we got to keep reading.
After an initial skim and reading the abstract and discussion, then we analyze the graphs and tables as you read the rest of the study.
And if the topic matter is important to you, take notes and compare them to other studies of a similar nature.
This is what researchers do.
And of course, keep your eyes out for further research on the field as science is always evolving.
And it's really important to note that I would say like three quarters or more of the studies that I've read in my life conclude by saying more research is needed.
And what you were saying, Julian, about when you get shared those studies, I think 100% of the studies that I've gotten from anti-vaxxers and the contrarians say more research is needed.
Now, this also is a topic that I know, Julian, you took to task, which is publishing preprints, which became very popular during the pandemic.
And it might appear sound as people were scrambling to make sense of the virus and researchers wanted to point to potential treatments as early as possible, but we really shouldn't be doing this.
Preprints are studies that have not been verified by other researchers.
As we saw in unvetted studies on unproven COVID interventions, preprints became weaponized by anti-vaxxers as evidence of a conspiracy, which is really just bad data.
It's funny to think about the New York Times running a preprint of an article.
Before it goes through fact checking or legal or something like that.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, the thing here for me is that the crises that are brought about by the information age are not just limited to social media propaganda and algorithmic filter bubbles.
The ability that we have now to rapidly disseminate information that could be misleading or premature or sensationalist is really at the heart of a fake news problem that I think arose in part from 24-hour cable news, but also the competition for clicks online.
Without guardrails on what counts as robust scientific data, it's a manipulative pseudoscience, potentially free-for-all.
Contrarians decide what they believe or want to believe, and then in an amplified and incentivized version of everyday confirmation bias that we all have to some extent, they scan their feeds for evidence and then boost the stuff that they think.
You know, is going to increase their sense of legitimacy.
Right.
As you mentioned, Derek, there were these preprints on ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine that both showed initial promise, but they were too quickly rushed into circulation.
And they were later shown in some cases to be fraudulent, and in some cases just victims of bad methodology.
Now, someone who's really earnest in their following and reporting on science is going to go back and say, hey, you know what?
That study I showed you on ivermectin turned out that it was Faked, or it turns out that the methodology was not particularly strong.
But you know, I'm looking at Brett Weinstein here.
These sorts of corrections didn't really happen over time.
And that's at the heart of really honoring science.
On the other hand, there were preprints that because they became so prevalent in the first few months of the pandemic, as scientists were trying to discover and share the data as it emerged widely and quickly to get a handle on this thing.
In some cases, those preprints made a huge difference.
Like there's this cheap and widely available corticosteroid called dexamethasone that is estimated to have saved a million lives globally during COVID.
And its effectiveness was publicized via preprint from clinical research.
But in this climate of already half-cocked science literacy, the unfolding process of scientific knowledge already looks like a self-contradictory scam to the pseudo-skeptics, right?
Or just to earnest people who are not really familiar with how that process unfolds.
In a way, preprints played a role in stoking those fires and making public health measures seem, you know, not really scientific because later on they would change.
And it also gave legitimacy to fraudulent claims.
You know, what you're saying about the correction not being forthcoming from a lot of the people that we cover, it's almost as if the thing that you would do to restore integrity or to guard integrity in the system is the thing that you can't do.
And it's the thing that the public health officials tried to do that then made them vulnerable to, well, you're getting it wrong and you don't know what you're talking about and you made us wear a mask and now you're saying masks do work and then you're saying masks don't work, right?
Okay, final piece.
As we became painfully aware during the pandemic, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, is not a collection of scientific data, but it is important.
It's a safety monitoring system that allows any member of the public to submit claims.
Until each claim is vetted and moves through the system, they remain nothing more than anecdotes.
And it is important to maintain, but it is not one indicative of nefarious dealings as it's often made out to be.
I mean, a public transparency system is part of the power of checks and balances that are necessary for understanding vaccination in the first place.
Absolutely. And it really doesn't help when activists like Bobby Kennedy cite statistical
data from VAERS as if it proves massive rates of horrible side effects and death.
Related to scientific literacy, I think, is media literacy.
And this one is really difficult in the age of social media when headlines are treated as
the entire story, as I said in the in the last segment.
But it's also where you have to put some responsibility on the reader and not just the spreader of mis- or disinformation.
If you're going to accept a headline, or worse, commentary from an influencer who also did not do any due diligence to check out whether or not the story was legitimate in the first place, that is partly on you.
And I feel sometimes like we treat media, and by extension social media, as a one-way street when it comes to sourcing information, and that's simply not true.
I think I 70% agree with that.
And I also think that we're living in a completely new age of bullshit and neo-fascist propaganda where deception is the actual point.
So I think it's really hard to protect yourself against willful deception.
Like, what do you think?
No, I still think that people have to take some responsibility, I really do, because there is a system for getting these stories out that are vetted, that go through a process as we flagged, and what influencers do is they take One big idea and then they pretend that the entirety of anyone that works within say the pharmaceutical industry is part of that corrupt system and therefore must be corrupt.
And that's really dangerous when it comes to anything personally, but especially to public health.
So if you're going to be willing to Just share something and claim something as true.
I think a little bit of diligence is important.
I mean, we saw this recently with the news clip where that woman tried to define Woke, right?
Like, her whole thing was like, Woke is terrible, Woke, Woke, Woke.
Her book.
Yeah, her book!
And it was like, define it.
And she couldn't do it.
And I think that's really a bad look.
If your platform is this thing, you should be able to back up what you're claiming.
I would add here, too, that the whole reason we're doing this episode, why it's necessary, is that not only is anything we're not experts in confusing by its very nature, but science is especially so due to the jargon and the formatting and the references in papers like the ones we were discussing a little bit ago.
And then we also have to deal with the dishonesty of people using what looks like science to sell us on false claims, untrue beliefs, products and services that are probably a scam.
Those people have a vested interest in the public being confused, and to be fair, some of them are also deeply confused.
You know, science is this culturally contested and incendiary topic.
It is, and that's why in past episodes we've tried to make clear the difference between misinformation and disinformation.
Many of us.
I would say I've been confused by misinformation before, too, and had to take time to suss out.
I've shared things too quickly, and I try to do better with that, especially coming from the media side of things.
But let's look at an example.
So recently, Amber Sears, the wife of J.P.
Sears, shared a viral post from the Epoch Times, and it reads, FDA detects serious safety signal for COVID-19 vaccination among children.
And here's what Amber said.
Matthew, would you do the honors?
You don't say.
And these shots are now part of the childhood jab schedule that most schools require for kids to attend?
So let me point out a red flag within a red flag.
What kind of data is she drawing from to claim most schools?
Well, I think it's vibes, but she goes on.
She says, let me repeat myself again.
The government doesn't care about anyone's health.
They care about profits, power and control.
Tragically, it's children who will pay the ultimate price.
Now, there's a lot to unpack there.
I mean, the idea that the government wants everyone sick when the government is also this nefarious neoliberal industry that wants everyone to be productive at the top level, those things don't match.
So that's first and foremost.
But let's stay focused on the Epoch Times article, and I want to look at two layers.
So there's the claim itself.
FDA detects serious safety signal.
Okay, all safety signals are serious, so that's redundant.
But safety signal is also just saying that more investigation is needed for a new or known adverse effect.
So in this case, the authors of the study, which I went back and read, which I don't think Amber did, that the Epoch Times is citing, they write, This cohort study monitored 20 health outcomes in near real-time and identified a safety signal only for myocarditis or pericarditis, which was consistent with other published reports.
So in this case, the authors are only repeating what has actually been known since late 2021.
Now, while any adverse event sucks, That's the case with every medicine ever produced.
So, in this case, The Epic Reporter notes that there were 153 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis in the 12 to 17 year age cohort, but they don't mention that's out of 5.9 million doses administrated to over 3 million children.
Wow.
Wait a minute, let's just underline that.
So, 153 cases?
in 3 million children who've had almost two doses each.
Correct, yes. Okay.
Which is way below what even the reported adverse reaction for COVID.
For most people are.
And I can imagine that actually disambiguating the actual causes of myocarditis or pericarditis in those cases is difficult because there's so few of them, right?
Like you'd really have to eliminate other factors and you really have to, this is like, it's a hint that it might be related to the vaccine schedule, but that's about it.
Well, and there's another thing here, which is that the very important data point in the vast majority, like 90% or more of these cases from what I remember from looking at these different studies, the myocarditis that they believed was vaccine-related was mild.
It didn't require an overnight stay in hospital.
They were brought in because they had symptoms and it subsided quickly and they made a complete recovery and they were fine.
Whereas COVID-related myocarditis tended to be much more severe across all age groups.
So in total, as there were some cases in the younger cohort, but it did not trigger a safety signal, you have 170 records of adverse events out of 5,901,825 administered doses.
So that's 0.00002%.
and 825 administered doses.
So that's 0.00002%.
That's an extremely effective vaccine.
And it sucks for those 170 children, to be clear.
But the authors of the study write, these results provide additional evidence
for the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines in the pediatric population.
But the Epoch Times reporter goes on to interview known anti-vaxxer Peter McCullough.
So that's where someone like Amber is pulling their data from.
I also, I'm so sorry to interrupt here, but I just want to say like, like the moves that you are so clearly like dissecting here also include that the FDA is being referenced as their source of authority that finally proves that the FDA has been lying to us all along when the study is the FDA confirming what the FDA already said two years ago.
And then, and now we'll bring on Peter McCullough.
Yeah, but scary headline.
Scary headline, and that's why I say you have to have some responsibility.
Second layer of this, the Epoch Times is a known propaganda arm of the Falun Gong New Religious Movement, which is an anti-communist Chinese cult that opposes homosexuality and doesn't believe in evolution.
The group has been around since the early 90s.
I remember seeing them regularly in Union Square in New York City.
They practiced Taoist breathing exercising and moving meditation on some days.
Other days, they were holding anti-Chinese government rallies by standing still for hours at a time.
So even back then, just out of college, when I was walking around, I was like, what's going on with this group?
Epic was the second largest funder of pro-Trump Facebook advertising, according to a 2019 report.
They've spread QAnon's conspiracy theories, and they have seemed to have found a really fervent audience on the right in America.
Yeah, it's interesting how effective this kind of stuff can be.
I had a very close friend forward me something that he found really compelling, and it was from Epoch Times.
And I asked if he knew that everything that, you know, if he knew everything that you just said about, you know, who these folks actually is.
He said he didn't know any about that stuff, but then said with a sudden awakening of skepticism it appeared.
Are you saying that anything they print can be written off immediately because of that?
Oh, okay.
Okay, well, I have a devil's advocate question or point to make, because Amber Sears quoting the Epoch Times, like, really isn't that surprising.
Like, she lives with J.P.
Sears.
She probably believes at least some of what he says.
So, this is kind of like an Alex Ebert-style proposal for you, going back to our last episode.
If we spend a lot of time saying that Epoch Times or Breitbart or The Daily Wire is bullshit, are we implicitly endorsing mainstream sources like The New York Times or The Atlantic?
Because, you know, We've got issues like the New York Times being dogshit on trans politics or the Atlantic seeming to be in the midst of rewriting COVID history to say that we all overreacted.
So is it fair to single out particular types of media this way?
I think so, and I'll push back a bit on your commentary about the Times and Atlantic.
Yes, you are correct, but I don't think that represents the totality of the staff or their reporting on it.
So, in the case of something like the New York Times, which has op-ed sections, yeah, they've posted some questionable stuff, but they've also covered it in a different light as well.
The Atlantic, yeah, there's Sometimes I read The Oranic every month, and sometimes I'm like, where are you coming from with this?
But again, they have a wide variety of staff and freelancers, and they sort of, they're older school in that sense, that they want to represent a wider variety of voices.
Whether or not that's always good, we can debate.
But something like The Epic Times, and I know you're saying Epoch, I've heard it pronounced Epic, I don't really care overall, but like... You know what?
Do you know what?
I think Amber Sears' former business is called Epic Adventures.
And I think she probably pronounces it epic times because it's epic.
It's epic, man!
The information is epic.
I'm taking it from a great segment that John Oliver did a few years ago, and he was calling it epic the whole time, so I've just gone with that ever since.
So, when you look at a publication that has a stated goal that is not to present information in a broad way, like The Epic Times, like a Breitbart Then, I think you have to take that with a grain of salt, whereas compared to more institutionalized forms of media, which do have their problems, but I think if you were to look at... I mean, it's like the influencers saying, no one's covering this, and you search New York Times and you see two dozen articles about it.
That happened all the time.
But it's because only certain articles trend and really capture the public attention if you don't read those publications.
I think there is a separation in forms of media.
I think it goes back to what you opened with saying about that red carpet event with The Great Awakening, how right-wing conspiratorial media is replicating what more traditional standardized institutionalized media has been doing for a long time.
They just want the spotlight for themselves, but they don't take all of the facets of what a media organization is into consideration.
It's also a false equivalency.
You know, when we talked about Russell Brand's appearance on Bill Maher, right, where he goes on there and it was right after the Dominion lawsuit news had broken that of these Hannity texts in which, you know, he said that they knew all along they were lying about the election fraud.
And Russell Brand goes on and says, no, no, no, no, you can't say that.
About Fox News.
What about MSNBC and CNN?
They're also completely dishonest.
You're saying if you criticize Fox for these allegations that are coming out, you're saying that CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, NPR are lily white and we should just like trust them completely and they only ever speak the truth.
It's like, it's such a fallacious argument.
The, what was his name who was on there with him?
Was it John Heilman?
Yes.
Yeah, so John Heilman says to him, okay, Russell, show me one example of any of the media
that you just listed doing anything like this and us having evidence for it.
Like you look at the actual evidence and you look at is the media source overall reputable?
You're not saying it's perfect.
You're not saying they don't sometimes publish editorials that you don't agree with.
You're not saying they sometimes don't get stories wrong or sometimes aren't shown to be biased in certain ways.
But there is a categorical difference between reputable media and media that is obviously a source of propaganda and conspiracy theories and is doing that particular right-wing kind of shuffle.
And what did Russell do when Heilemann kept pressing him is he got louder, he talked faster, and he waved his arms more to distract from the fact that he couldn't answer the question.
Okay, third topic.
A few moments ago in the last segment, I invoked Peter McCullough.
Let's continue with him as he's a great example of something I've been saying since shortly after the inception of this podcast.
Watch what they say, then watch what they sell.
So Peter McCullough and the supplement company he helps run, which is called The Wellness Company, uses this technique often.
The crew over at TWC write about Big Pharma, or Pharma, capital P, as an ambiguous but definitively evil construct.
They never mention its diversity.
There are over 13,000 FDA-approved domestic and foreign pharmaceuticals in America, and one-third of the FDA's $6 billion annual budget goes to overseeing their manufacturing, distribution, and testing.
Now, that is such a broad range of therapeutics that they are trying to pigeonhole into one category, and that's just an impossible endeavor.
But grifters like McCullough are going after emotional pull, not facts.
So here's the marketing copy from the company's Freedom From Big Pharma webpage.
Are you tired of being dependent on big pharma?
Start your all-natural solution with our Freedom from Pharma program when you purchase the One Wellness membership.
Our pharmacists team up with providers to provide a plan to build a plan for you to de-prescribe from Big Pharma once and for all.
Become empowered to take charge of your health.
Did I just read de-prescribe?
Yes.
Holy crap.
That sounds really dangerous.
You know, someone got someone got paid some big bucks for that marketing copy.
One wellness and deep prescribed.
I also love, come listen to our pharmacists get you off of pharmaceuticals.
So yeah, a subscription tapering service sounds really suspect when you're doing it online or anytime, but especially through this website.
While the company is going for a holistic approach to health by offering services like exercise protocols and sleep optimization, it also lists Detoxing on its patient journey roadmap with, of course, plenty of supplements to prescribe.
Now, in fact, the wellness company's Spike Support, actual name, it promises that you'll get to that pre-COVID feeling.
So, little more marketing copy for this $65.99 bottle.
That's a 30-day supply.
It's pretty bonkers.
Julian?
Vaccinated or not.
Toxic spike.
For everyone, vaccinated or not, toxic spike proteins pose a long-term threat to your health.
This revolutionary spike support formula is the only product that contains natokinase and dandelion root, researched to block and dissolve spike proteins inside your body.
Buy daily spike support and support you and your family against the effects of COVID, vaccines and shedding.
So basically, if you're vaxxed, This will help you really clear yourself of COVID, and if you're not, well, someone might have shed all over you.
Now, there was a study done on natokinase's effects on a protein of SARS-CoV-2, and it found it potentially had a degradation effect in vitro.
Which is in a culture dish.
So that is an important first step, but obviously has no bearing on whether or not there's efficacy in the human body.
You know, I hear things like that, and I think it's kind of like if the thing was in the Petri dish and you peed in it, it might have a degradation effect, right?
Yeah.
Like it could be anything.
Okay, right.
Now, this is derived from natto, which is fermented Japanese soybeans.
It does have some potential therapeutic usage.
It seems like it prevents clot formations and reduces blood pressure, but there's no research on what it does for COVID in the actual human body or on the person next to you on the train who's shedding spike proteins all over you.
I don't really care.
I just like it on udon noodles.
It helps me imagine living in Kyoto where everyone wears a mask in public and I have tasty food every day.
And I also have a Pokemon bed.
Well, when you're on your Pokemon bed, do you like chewing on dandelion roots?
Well, I mean, no, but I did actually learn from an older farmer that if I leave the dandelion roots untouched in my vegetable beds, they actually fix nitrogen.
So I'm not predisposed to eating them.
Bring back that pre-COVID feeling.
Hey, you might have a future in creating a theme song for The Wellness Company.
So we can see that science does not matter.
Individual members of the company and the company as a whole have pushed anti-vax messages hard.
They write copy-like Medicine your old doctor won't tell you about.
They never name the doctors or the drugs, or the COVID vaccines generally.
I mean, it's all ambiguity because that is their strength and they know specificity will not play in their favor.
If their members take the time to research their findings, that is, like I did just going and looking up the effects of the ingredients in their supplements, Now, I've covered this company before, and every time I break down the claims on their marketing site with what's really in the bottle, I get a lot of, this could possibly work, but it hasn't been proven, to shedding isn't real.
But they are a perfect example of saying that an evil, vague thing out there is out to get you, and oh, would you look at that?
I just happened to sell a protective amulet over here, and it works like a charm.
Yeah, reverse contagion anxiety, right?
And it's also repetitive, because I think we should just note that one key thing that these folks do all the time is that they move from thing to thing.
And sometimes I wonder if there's like actually a researched timing ratio between like the extinction rate of
the consumer realizing that the therapy doesn't work and then being pitched a new product because the companies are
always cycling through stuff that that probably doesn't work for most people.
But then those same people have to keep buying.
Do you think there's a formula for that?
Yeah, absolutely.
I remember, I've mentioned this before, I did some work with David Wolf and he had his raw food company back in the mid-aughts and what happened was he hit it big with goji berries.
He really did help that health food movement.
And he was also very influential with raw cacao.
So what happens is every quarter a new product would be cycled through, like yacon syrup.
He pushed hard on that as a low-glycemic alternative to sugar for a while.
That never really caught on.
But working with a number of health food companies, what I've realized is that what they would do, how every quarter they would either improve upon their existing product or introduce a new product into their line, this is exactly what's happening with health companies now.
And it makes sense because a lot of the players from that industry have moved over here because there's such crossover of quote-unquote natural products.
Right.
Yeah, and Matthew, just because we'll probably get emails about this otherwise, the in vitro testing of substances to see what they do, like for example with Ivermectin.
Ivermectin was tested in vitro And shown to have some promising effects.
It's an early stage that then identifies which of these substances should we now go to the next stage of testing to see how effective they really are.
So it's similar to the preprint thing in that it's like, okay, you had some early positive results that, you know, indicate that this thing is something that more research is required on, but it's not like now the miracle cure, right?
Right, we tested it in the bathtub, now we can move on to the more specific instruments.
Kind of, yeah.
Let me just say here too, on the topic that we've been on, I got really elbow deep, as you guys know, into exploring the world of the Antivax Ivermectin group.
Grift, specifically of Pierre Kory, who was made hugely famous by Bret Weinstein and Joe Rogan
and his associates. Basically, it amounted to a secondary economy of pseudoscience medicine
during the pandemic. I mean, you go to that website, you can find lists of tele-sessions
that you can get that'll give you prescriptions, pharmacies that will fill those specific
FLCCC is frontline COVID critical care doctors.
I've got it.
By the way, here's a prophylactic protocol that you can just take ongoingly so you don't get COVID.
it or not, we've got the spike protein antidote and then here too. You need the treatment
for the COVID, we've got it. By the way, here's a prophylactic protocol that you can just
take on going so you don't get COVID. All of this on that website worldwide, networked
right on the website. So clearly you're going to imagine that the doctors who are offering
the telehealth prescriptions and then the pharmacies that are filling them are probably
giving kickbacks because they're getting exposure through Pierre Corey's website.
But then that is separate from the merch pages that sell t-shirts and caps and onesies with their snazzy branding and COVID-contrarian messaging.
So the onesies are for babies, right?
Not for late career quacks.
No, no.
They're just for the children.
No, it's not a kink thing.
This is specifically for babies.
And then they have a beautiful 3D rendering of the ivermectin molecule.
Awesome.
That your baby can wear.
We've been talking a lot about the anti-vax here, but let's look at it from a different angle, which I think is important.
And since I just invoked health foods, it makes sense to talk about someone I've been threatening to do an episode on for a while.
He ultimately bores me, though, and that's Dave Asprey.
And he really wants to warn you about coffee mold.
He's gone to great pains in writing about the carcinogenic dangers of mycotoxins that are likely lurking in every cup that you drink.
He points to one study that found 91.7% of Brazilian coffee have produced these toxins, and he's especially concerned that they will negatively impact human brain performance.
But great news!
Bulletproof sells coffee that's guaranteed to be freed of these mycotoxins, or mysotoxins.
The company's Brain Octane MCT oil, which is an essential ingredient in Bulletproof's infamous butter coffee, is marketed to improve cognitive performance.
So whatever you lost at Starbucks, you'll certainly regain by switching to this performance hacker's pure brew.
Now, of course, you have to ask, does coffee really contain mycotoxins?
And yeah, a little.
Decades ago, coffee manufacturers got hip to this issue and developed a wet processing technique that eliminated virtually all of them.
Now, as for the remaining toxins, one study in Spain found that a four-cup-a-day coffee drinker will ingest only 2% of what is considered a safe level of such toxins.
But you won't find that study on Bulletproof's website.
You mean he's exaggerating the problem?
Just a little.
I remember because this is back when I read his first book in earnest because I was interested in performance more then.
And I mean, you would think that everyone's about to drop dead from drinking coffee and he's here to save you.
That is how the book is written.
He identified a supposedly widespread but under-discussed or undiscussed problem, he positioned himself to capitalize by providing the solution, and never mind that the problem doesn't actually affect anyone.
Now the same holds true for his vendetta against household and computer screen lighting, But good news, he runs an eyewear company that shills blue light blocking glasses, which is also a big thing that Luke's story has jumped on recently.
So create a problem, sell the solution.
Now of course, as we've pointed out over and over, every conspiracy relies on some level of truth.
Toxins are a real problem, they're just not much of a problem as wellness influencers selling cleanses and coffee beans make them out to be.
Blue light can be an issue and it has been showed to mess up our circadian rhythm and cause eye strain.
Now, do the glasses help?
There's no proof, and I looked into studies on blue light blocking glasses.
But proof is not a good sales model in The Conspiritual's downline, and this cuts across this entire episode.
We witnessed this during COVID with the anti-vaxxers selling all these therapeutics and cures, colloidal silver, prayer rituals, ivermectin, auto-urine therapy, big favorite of Matthew's up there in Canada.
Exactly, right.
Keeps me warm.
At the end of each pitch, we find an affiliate code or a direct purchase link and their formula is extremely clear.
Vaccines don't work.
Here's a solution.
Watch what they say and watch what they sell.
Okay, last one.
And this is something that everyone, including the three of us, is susceptible to.
It's one of the most challenging issues that's widespread across every possible industry, and that is good old cognitive biases.
Now, we're well aware of the dangers of confirmation bias, which is only seeking out information that agrees with your pre-existing beliefs.
This is only one of many cognitive biases that plague our judgment and decision-making.
Now, hundreds have been identified, and a good number of them make people susceptible to conspiritualist influence.
In the digital age, cognitive biases present as artifacts from older modes of communication where reasoning skills are dampened by emotionally driven calls to action.
And since these biases are related to speed, which is the speed by which you make a judgment on the information presented to you, the infinite scroll of social media feeds makes spending too much time on any single post challenging, increasing the likelihood of snap decisions, as what you pointed out earlier, Matthew.
Yeah, you know, and also if the posts are aestheticized to sort of game that speed, I don't know, enrichment process, I imagine that just compounds the problem further, right?
It's like you because everything about the presentation of the material is poking at some sort of confirmation.
It's touching some sort of confirmation nerve.
That's what's going to get you to chase the algorithm, I imagine.
Yeah, and also the colors that are used to design, of course, famously is pastel QAnon.
But when you're following someone and they're doing the same exact sort of branded carousel or post every single time, you kind of get lulled into their rhythm.
And so therefore the words, you just read the words and ingest it as part of the entire brand and you just take it as an assumption that you would assume is true at that point.
There are two main categories of bias, and the first is memory-related.
The information you remember about an event influences how you treat that event, as well as future events based on that recall.
Decades of research have shown that humans generally have a shit ability to remember.
And we often misremember.
There's a famous study on 9-11 where they asked a bunch of people years later about watching the footage on 9-11, and the majority of people were like, oh yes, that was terrible watching it on that day, but none of that footage was actually shown until 9-12.
And so, people misremember all the time.
Now, when people are in a room together, they even see different things depending on their personal collection of memories, which influences their perception.
There's that old famous Zen, different blind monks touching an elephant and having a very different experience, whether you're touching the tail or the trunk or the leg.
Now, the further distance in time we are from any event, there's more room for error.
And not to go off topic here too much, but controversies over exactly this are at the heart of all of the satanic panic content that creeps into the beat that we cover because it's all about, you know, is memory reliable?
What are the thresholds of evidence?
How is it corroborated?
I think it's a very complex issue that gets deep into the souls of people.
And I think that we can say pretty clearly that the conspirituality crowd is deeply predisposed towards intuitive or bodily knowing.
Maybe because there's such a high premium placed on self-knowledge.
In the bonus episode that I did on the Dalai Lama spectacle, I covered the response of a somatic experiencing practitioner whose entire response video to the event was to say, based on the feelings that I had in my body as I watched this thing on video, I know that X is what happened.
She just sort of made this declaration of that was actually really important and consequential based upon how she felt watching a video.
Anyway, I mean, if all of these meditation and awareness practices that this culture engages in don't give their constituents perfect insight into their bodies, their minds, their histories, even their past lives, Um, there might be some sunken costs involved, like what are they really good for if I can't know that my own experience, my own memory is true?
Yeah, during my years where I was really deep reading a lot of neuroscience research, memory was the most fascinating one.
And I remember my first time in Mexico City, I was there with my DJ partners to do an event and we were in a cab at like midnight.
And there were a group of mariachis who saw Americans and they chased down and tried to physically stop the cab so that they could play for us and we could give them money.
And the taxi driver sped through a red light.
One of the mariachis was reaching through the window trying to grab me and pulling on the cab.
And my DJ partner doesn't remember this.
And it imprinted, like, how often do you get chased down the street in a foreign city by mariachis?
And when I brought it up a few years later, I'm like, I remember that night.
So then I'm thinking, like, did that really happen?
You can't remember that?
Anyway, a little different than satanic panic, but still the same pattern by what we choose to remember and not and how we see the event frames everything.
So that's one category.
The second is even more pertinent to the digital age, which is attentional issues.
So even before smartphones, we could only process so much information at one time.
It's been shown to see 120 bits per second, and that means that I could listen to what Matthew was saying, and then if Julian, if you break in, I could probably make sense of what you were saying while Matthew was talking.
But if a third person came in, I'm overloaded at that point.
I can't actually pay attention to all the voices.
So everyone has selective attention when it comes to experiencing the world around them.
So when you add in constant streams of distraction into the mix, we face a crisis of attention.
It then biases us more strongly to our pre-existing beliefs.
Apple Vision Pro, babies!
Apple Vision Pro!
But, you know, just to interrupt again, there's another spirituality-type issue in here, at least for me, because, well, the good part about having lived in a Buddhist cult was that I learned some legitimate bits of Buddhist psychology and cognitive theory.
One of the things that the Tibetans would say was that the human brain is doing 16 discrete mental functions in the time of a finger snap.
So, they would do that.
They would just snap their fingers with the lesson.
And they were also talking about attention and distractibility and how hard it is to slow that process down to the point where you can clearly see your brain, in their view of things, assembling reality.
And they would say that if you could do that slowing down process through meditation, you would pierce through the veil of illusion, you would experience a kind of enlightenment.
So, that is how I try to listen to podcasts.
Well, I didn't think you were going to reveal our follow-up book, The Good Part About Being in a Buddhist Cult, but I guess there it is, coming out June 2024.
So let's look at a few biases, and this is only a short list of some that we've noticed in our time doing this podcast, but I think they're important.
You have in-group favoritism, which is the fact that we favor people in our group Even if you don't know that person in real life, hashtags are a signal that lets us assume that we're sharing a sentiment with other like-minded people and anti-vaxxers don't have to know one another to be able to digitally bond.
Yeah, and flashing forward to the third part in our series, if we're talking about online bonds that verge on the cultic, we're talking about very limited and unstable relationships.
So the saddest display of the weakness of in-group favoritism or its inherent flaws was watching QAnon groups melt down in rage and recrimination against each other as they watched Biden get inaugurated.
There's the halo effect.
So this is when you observe a positive trait in someone, you then assume that all of their traits are positive.
And this bias is especially easy to exploit in digital spaces where you can cultivate and present a very specific persona that doesn't have to reflect who you are when the camera is off.
Yeah, and further than that, the halo effect is also what allows people to forget that Kelly Brogan isn't an epidemiologist because she had some good ideas about psychiatry.
Yeah, it's related to the- She's not?
It's related to the argument from authority fallacy, right?
So essentially, if someone has a PhD, nevermind the fact that you can travel to like any ballroom in any hotel across the great country of America in any week and you'll find someone with a PhD telling you that Bigfoot exists, Paranormal powers are real.
UFOs have landed and we have the evidence.
Living in Oregon now, there's a lot of Bigfoot bumper stickers, so they definitely exist.
Those do exist.
Totally.
There's false consensus, which is a bias that seems Taylor made for Twitter, and that's you believe more people agree with your point of view than is actually the case.
Social media mobs are indicative of this illusion.
Oh, and the companies, the platforms probably want to actually co-opt and accelerate that through the function of follow tools and algorithms because I'm sure that you are more participatory, you're giving over more of your attention if you feel like you're with a bigger crowd.
Right, and of course we feel good when someone likes something as compared to when they yell at us online.
So of course, yeah, that's exactly how the algorithm is designed.
Two more.
You have naive cynicism, which is another pervasive bias that we each believe we're being objective While everyone else's judgments and opinions are rooted in egocentrism, it's always they who cannot juggle multiple sources of information, while we are contemplating every angle before coming to a decision, because of course we always do the research.
Hey, what are you saying here?
I mean, I think the important thing is to show your work, right?
Right.
Show how you came to your assessment of what is true, what is false, what are good sources of information, etc.
Show notes.
Yep.
Receipts.
Exactly, exactly.
And that's the challenge that we all face and the famous sentiment that I'm paraphrasing here about that bullshit travels so quickly and then dispelling it.
In our anti-sunscreen episode, Andrew Huberman says some shit about sunscreen being in molecules.
Michelle Wong spends a week Researching whether or not sunscreen molecules persist in the brain 10 years after the application before she can confidently say, no, I've talked to a number of experts and we do not see this as true.
At that point, he's gone on to multiple other things.
So how are you really going to combat that?
It's impossible.
One of the most famous biases is the Dunning-Kruger effect.
And it's also one of the most prevalent, which is the less you know, the more your confidence increases.
Now recently, some social science research has pushed back against whether or not this is true, but it does persist in a lot of the social media spaces we cover.
And good science is inherently unconfident, as I just mentioned with Michelle, until enough data supports a conclusion.
But can spiritualists learn an idea one day or one second and they claim to be experts the next?
And then tell people who point out the flaws in their knowledge are being classic arrogant proponents of scientism or something.
Right, because they went to a yoga teacher training and so they know physiology.
I mean, it feels like Alt Health is almost set up for Dunning-Kruger.
That homeopaths, chiropractors, naturopaths, they're supposed to know about everything.
And moreover, they're doing a lot of their work in rapport, in sort of relational dynamics, which I think increases the charisma quotient that gives the patient, the client, the feeling of confidence about yoga teacher trainings.
I'm going to quote a passage from our book.
When earnest yoga people signed up for 200-hour trainings that let them teach, they were entering a Dunning-Kruger machine in which they'd be told that single lectures in diet and psychology would make them knowledgeable in both because the framework was the magic of yoga.
And that's really the key thing, right, Matthew?
It's such a great quote that it's in all of these cases, you said homeopaths, chiropractors and naturopathic doctors are supposed to know everything.
Same with people who've gone through like enough yoga teacher training.
Is that baked into that set of that sort of epistemic milieu is the notion that we are the ones who understand that there's a mystery at the center of all of this.
Yes, we understand the simple thing at the center of it all, which is that prana moves everything, or chi is in control.
So we have a placeholder that is mystery that both allows us to appear like spiritual authorities, but also always gives us a backdoor when we don't actually know something, or when someone points out that our knowledge claims are completely fraudulent.
Well, at the end of the day, It's all a mystery and I have faith in what I've experienced directly through my body.
All right, so rounding up Julian, Derek, with some real talk, how and why are the three of us personally biased?
So something that still comes up and will come up as long as we're doing a podcast and as long as I'm on social media is, you know, using certain forms of language in our talk, which is, for me, sarcasm.
And that was a challenge.
It's always a challenge because I was raised in a culture with a family and close friends who, when anyone was talking, You were always looking for an angle to get a jab in with sarcasm.
And that doesn't play well on a medium like social media.
I still use it with my friends, but for a while I was using that more often reflexively reacting to things.
And so I have this bias towards looking for holes in people all the time.
Which also translates to looking at holes in the arguments that they're making, and that is one of the challenges that I deal with because I really like debating.
People don't see what goes on behind this podcast, but we spend a lot of time hashing things out and debating on things.
As frustrating as that could be sometimes, I really like it because it helps you refine your arguments.
A lot of times I've noticed that when I go onto social media and I comment, I'm not being reactive.
I'm trying to be like, oh, this is a debate now, but you can't hear the inflections of the voice.
I'm biased towards being confrontational when it comes to subject areas that I'm passionate about.
The environment that we occupy, especially in digital spaces, is not set up for these sorts of biases, so it's very challenging.
Well, I don't think, you know, today I learned something, actually, because I don't think our Slack is set up for that either.
Because you saying, you saying, I look for the hole in something actually tells me a lot about how we interact sometimes and how you can be very brief and curt, sort of nailing down a A flaw or a problem in a particular argument that I've spent a lot of time on.
I mean, you know, we've gone back and forth on this and we know that we have temperamental differences, but I think if that actually gets extrapolated out into I have a style of relating to people that is biased towards Finding the flaw in social settings.
I can imagine how that would impact research processes, collaborations, how much information you get back from sources, who trusts you, who doesn't trust you.
That's really interesting, Derek.
That's amazing.
And it's totally true.
I mean, we know we have different working styles.
We've gone over that a lot, but it is.
It's like when I'm replying, sometimes I'm like, how can I say this in as few words as possible to get to the point?
And it's not, it really is.
I mean, sometimes I'm frustrated or upset, and this goes true on replies on Instagram too, and it's something that I work about and think about the best ways, but sometimes I'm just like, these seven words are what I mean, so I'm just going to say those.
It doesn't always work well in my love relationships either with my marriage, but we learn to navigate those spaces together.
Yeah, whereas Matthew's style is, how many words can I use to make sure that I'm understood?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, true, true.
All right, Julian, what's your problem?
We don't have enough time today.
But you know, with bias, I think it's such a tricky topic.
I think it's a topic that really deserves a lot of deep consideration.
We could do an entire episode just on the concept of bias and how I think bias plays out, how it's defined in different contexts.
On the one hand, I think It's very, it's kind of standard that any of us can be so convinced that our cultural conditioning, our unexamined beliefs, our intuitive and emotional reactions are just bedrock truth, right?
Like I just know what's up.
And there's something to be said for becoming disabused of that level of confidence, right?
For sure.
But I think, oddly, a lot of spiritual marketing and philosophy reinforces this kind of sleepwalking, where you just trust your gut, trust your intuition.
Like, your first thought about this is always the true one.
Don't go deeper into it than that.
But on the other hand, there's then the pseudo-skepticism of conspiracists, fundamentalists, magical thinkers, which sort of pretends at being skeptical.
And unbiased by being outside of the mainstream narrative, right?
The people who are invested in the mainstream narrative, that's just their bias.
And so by being a contrarian, you've somehow magically become free of bias.
But then there's like this weird third category, which is a tone I often hear from people on the activist left.
And it's here.
There's this bias becomes like this, this weird kind of magical, slippery, self-deceptive reality that you can never, ever really get a handle on or overcome through knowledge or reason or evidence.
It must always be there.
It must be hunted down or acknowledged as this powerful and invisible and kind of like this force that controls you from the depths of the unconscious.
It's shameful, it's shameful.
I think, personally, the best any of us can actually do is to be as honest with ourselves and others as we can about what we don't know, and therefore recognize, you know, I have intuitive hunches about this, but I'm not really sure, and it could be that I'm biased because this is the background I come from.
It could be my cultural condition.
It could be that I'm being kind of self-serving here.
So a kind of frankness about that, I think, is always refreshing.
Am I prone to being biased?
Yeah, absolutely.
But I think very often in the broader discourse, bias often is just shorthand for you disagree with me, and I don't understand your evidence or counter argument, you know, and that tends, I think, to just be a thought terminating cliche.
What about you, Matthew?
Where's your bias?
Well, I was going to say that feeling, that bias is something that has to be hunted down inside of you.
It's this shameful thing.
It becomes, in certain intellectual contexts, a kind of original sin that you're trying to atone for.
And it's that Kafka trap thing that we've talked about with people like Roman D'Angelo, right?
Right.
Saying that you don't have internalized white supremacy is evidence that you do.
Saying that you do is evidence that you're getting better.
It becomes this odd kind of... Or saying that you do in the wrong way is evidence that you're not getting better enough at it.
Yeah.
But, you know, I mean, I actually, as a postmodernist, don't ultimately believe that bias can be completely overcome.
Well, that's like totally your opinion, dude.
It is totally my opinion, dude.
But I do think, and I think this echoes what you just said that it is a noble task in science journalism and the law.
It's a discipline of intellectual humility to try as hard as you possibly can.
It's kind of like Trying to be the best person that you can for a loved one, actually.
To try to see through your own issues, to try to meet them where they are, to try to not prejudge.
So, I feel very intimate towards that sort of project.
I think the notion that bias is an ugly force comes in the wake of people we discover who really don't care enough to try.
That's when it becomes ugly.
That's when it feels shitty.
But for me, bias is unavoidable to a certain extent because you're always going to be from a particular place
and time.
You're going to have a gendered and languaged experience of the world.
That means that you're always going to see the thing through a limited lens.
So my answer, you know, ultimately is to be less of an asshole
about my lenses over time.
But my, Derek, you were asking about my bias confession.
Here it is.
There is a category of dude I inherently and instantly distrust.
I hear five seconds of Alex Jones, Tony Robbins, or Matthew McConaughey on his cursed cult recruitment live stream.
Oh, you can do his voice, too.
Shit.
And I just feel, like, sick.
I see five seconds of Andrew Tate's face, and I know that he is cruel.
That's not a bias.
That's true.
With Russell Brand, I have to hear, like, one run-on sentence.
These are actually really interesting reflections, because There might be sort of, there's almost like a, what's the skull measuring thing?
There might be like a form of phrenology going on here.
There might be some kind of like ableism as well with certain people.
There are subtler things as well.
Like I can't, I don't even have to hear Peterson's like Kermit voice to know that he's a clown because, you know, there's the posture and there's the vests.
But then even subtler than that, and I think this is where, especially in the early days of our podcast, we didn't really understand each other that well, I can see three minutes of Joe Rogan experience and feel like I'm in a smelly locker room about to get beaten up.
And even subtler than that, like I listened to Sam Harris or Bill Maher for like two minutes and all I hear is smugness.
I have to take a really like deep, I have to dig deep to try to listen carefully for the confirmation that actually always comes because I'm right about all those guys.
Well, let me first off say that my Monday bonus episode this week, I had to clip a podcast episode between Barry Weiss and Jordan Peterson talking about how to solve the race problem.
So I would say that was a little traumatic experience there.
I was experiencing last night while doing that.
I think this is actually a good example of where we've always disagreed on certain things, Matthew, because I've talked about before Loretta Ross's Circles of Influence, which I think is great.
How much do you agree with someone where you can work with them or listen to them?
What's that tip over point?
Okay, you're a Nazi.
There's nothing you can say I will ever quote.
Even if I agree with you on the financial system, I'm not going to use you as a reference as compared to a Sam Harris who is like, well, I don't really agree with you on gun control, but on Buddhism over here, I might agree with you.
Recently, I had to confront this in my full-time work, where I interviewed a founder of a pro-immigrant organization that goes and does really good work at the border in trying to bring immigrants supplies, get them housing in America, treat them as humans.
And here's the thing.
The organization is Evangelical Christian.
The people who are behind it are staunchly pro-life, and their argument is that if you're pro-life in the womb, you have to be pro-life through all the way to death.
Well, at least they're consistent.
Exactly!
And it was a wonderful interview, and the director had a lot of humility.
She would even preface being like, This part of the argument I agree with, but here's how I feel, and then moving to immigration, and I was like, at least you follow through your argument, logically, which is I don't see in a lot of conservative circles.
And it was just an example of how I'm in this situation where on one side, I don't agree with you
all about this thing, but on the other, I'm fully on board and you're actually doing
the activist work on the ground with the people, and that's really impressive.
And how do you weigh those sorts of things?
Like if you're gonna look at one side and then they're doing other,
and I think that really just brings up the complexity that we're trying to both criticize
but also promote throughout this podcast and the work of being like, hey,
there's work that we can all do together to help push society forward,
even if we don't agree on all of the separate aspects when it comes to what creates a spiritual
or even just an integrated life in this country.
Well, okay.
I thought through three seemingly simple steps to overcoming cognitive biases, and of course the map is not the territory as I just kind of laid out, but it's this.
Recognizing where and how you're biased, weigh out the factors involved in your decision-making process, and then challenge each bias.
And with diligence and honesty, shining a light on your biases can produce actionable results.
It can also result in humility.
Recognizing them is intellectually, and from my experiences, emotionally stimulating.
And if you're willing to think about not only the content of your thoughts, but even the style of thinking that led you to those thoughts, you can begin to consider other content and styles.
No, I don't want to do that.
No, I'm going to get you to write a 500-word essay and not a 5,000-word essay one day.
That is my life challenge.
You'd have to be my boss instead of my colleague.
I don't know what could make that happen.
No, I would actually have to emotionally submit to you, Derek.
I would have to say, yes, I have a lot to learn from Derek's brevity.
We've seen how you interact with editors.
Even if he was your boss, I'm not so sure.
Okay, whatever.
So, an easy way to do this is taught in every Intro to Debate class and why I think debating is so valuable.
Choose a side of an argument that you don't personally agree with, research it, study with it, try to empathize with the people who do believe in it, and then present their argument as if you passionately agree with their conclusions.
I am going to take psychedelics and enter the full experience of passionately agreeing with Amber Sears that her husband's career is going great.
Matthew, I know we have never met in person yet.
We will one day, but if we could do psychedelics on that day... Dude, I have kids, man.
I just can't flip like that.
I don't know what's going to happen.
My friends with kids take psychedelics?
Yeah, but don't they live in LA and Portland?
I'm from Toronto, my friend.
I used to be Catholic.
I think I was.
I mean, I went to CCD for a little while, so maybe.
So, all right.
So I might not change your mind on your topic, Matthew, but this sort of practice, this sort of understanding, debating, and trying to figure things out, it might inform you that the people on the other side that you're debating are working with their own heuristics.
And in the end, this process might even strengthen your feelings or help you come to
other conclusions. That 500-word essay while written on psilocybin is possible, Matthew. I
can do it in you.
There's also a selfish reason to do this if you're really committed to your point of view as well,
which is that the better you understand the other person's point of view and can get inside of it,
actually, the better you can... If you do come to the conclusion that you feel like you're still
be right in your opinion, the better you can actually argue for it persuasively.
I do do this, play this role.
I just want to point out before we end on this podcast in relation to certain religious sentiments more than you guys do, I think.
I lean into what earnestly are these people longing for and believing and how is it serving them with the assumption being that it is serving them perhaps in a positive way that I can't see.
Yep.
And yeah, I think it's great that we don't all do that because I don't think we would.
I don't think we would check each other as much.
Well, I talked about sarcasm and presentation and debate in my answer, but the other part of the answer, which I didn't respond to, but actually is a good place to end, is exactly what you just said, Matthew.
Like, I'm an atheist.
I've written a lot of articles about atheism that have gotten good responses, but then from religious people will say, you know, this is bullshit.
What about mysticism, magic, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But then, I've also written articles that I truly believe that religious communities can be a source of strength and inspiration for people, and that they oftentimes, in tragedies, religious groups are the ones that go out and do the on the ground work that governments don't do, that other people don't do.
And I've written arguments about why religious communities are a necessary part.
It's just part of our DNA, it seems, and how we construct social societies around them.
And I don't think that's a bad thing.
And then when I do that, atheists are like, oh, that's bullshit, blah, blah.
And I'm like, you know, it is possible to hold these thoughts in your head at the same time.
And it's challenging, but I think ultimately it's important.
