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Sept. 5, 2024 - Conspirituality

01:06:56

222: RFK Jr: As the Worm Turns

RFK Jr has dropped out of the presidential race and thrown his weight behind Trump. In our 10th episode on the man in the last year-and-a-half, we look at the potential dangers of this unholy alliance, and what it means for America. Show notes are extensive, visit patreon.com/conspirituality or conspirituality.net for more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	Maybe the worms gave him that distant look that so many confused for mystical insight.
	Aubrey Marcus and Charles Eisenstein gazing into his baby blues when they thought they were seeing a transcendent intelligence.
	And they were, but it was the ecstasy of mindless parasites.
	I'm nearing the end of my latest Butcherbox shipment and I had some boneless skinless
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	Hey everyone, welcome to conspirituality where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and
	spiritual influence to uncover cults pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism
	I'm Derek Barris.
	I'm Matthew Rimsky.
	I'm Julian Walker.
	You can find us on Instagram and threads at conspiritualitypod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes over on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
	If you use Apple Podcasts, you can also get our bonus episodes there every Monday.
	As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
	And just a brief note before we go on, this coming Tuesday we'll be airing the first episode of a new project called the Conspirituality Relief Project, and it will basically be my attempt to provide regular timeline cleanser interviews in which super interesting guests reflect on hope, faith, resilience, and building community in a hard time.
	So, you know, all of the things that I can assure you that we're not going to be asking Bobby Kennedy on to answer that question.
	Looking forward to the series.
	interviews, everyone gets the same five questions, and I try to stay out of the way.
	The first question that came to me when I was thinking about this was, what is the most
	meaningful and supportive idea or story you return to for reliable wisdom and relief?
	And I can assure you that we're not going to be asking Bobby Kennedy on to answer that
	question.
	Looking forward to the series.
	It's exciting, Matthew.
	No one knows when the worm penetrated his brain, or how many there were.
	The wrigglers of Norman Rockwell Catholicism, the grubs of family mythology, the creepy-crawlies of being a Kennedy.
	Maybe the ICU where he sat with his dying father wasn't sterile.
	Maybe it was a Harlem heroin needle, a dirty bed in a sex work flophouse, a gnarly old river trout pulled from the Hudson by one of his falcons.
	Maybe some of that juice from that whale's head he chainsawed off and tied to the roof of his car rained down through cracks in the steel and dripped into his ear.
	Maybe it was a raw meat dinner with the fitness bros in Malibu.
	It hasn't been all bad for him.
	The Worms might have kept his body fat down, squeezed his speech centers to the point of continual charismatic monologue, given him an excuse to slash alimony to his second wife, kept him up through the nights to file a thousand lawsuits and chase hundreds of women, and gifted him the ability to turn every fact into compost.
	Maybe the Worms gave him that distant look that so many confused for mystical insight.
	Aubrey Marcus and Charles Eisenstein gazing into his baby blues when they thought they were seeing a transcendent intelligence.
	And they were, but it was the ecstasy of mindless parasites.
	And the worms are now fat and bold from devouring his own campaign.
	And so they can turn him towards Trump and force him to his knees to lick the boots for that HHS job, to imply he should replace JD Vance on the ticket, to rail against censorship while he's on Tucker Carlson, and to stumble like a zombie towards the next crypto fundraiser.
	So Derek and Julian, I think we can see him as we roll down the highway to November.
	He's lying on the side of the road.
	He's quivering.
	And maybe we should just, like, snatch his body up and put it in the trunk and bring it to the cold room for analysis.
	But let's not dump him in Central Park afterwards.
	Let's plan out a proper burial for the uniquely American symbol he is.
	I mean, that is unless he escapes our lab and slithers into the White House.
	This past week saw news stories about a resurgent back-to-nature product promoted by wellness influencers like Gwyneth Paltrow, Kristen Cavallari, Paul Saladino, and yes, RFK Jr.
	All right.
	That product is raw milk.
	To be more specific, milk that has not been subjected to pasteurization in which it is heated sufficiently to kill bacteria which may be present that can cause a range of unpleasant illnesses.
	We're talking about the mere unpleasant fevers, stomach cramps, and potential kidney failure of bugs like E. coli, salmonella, as well as typhoid fever, tuberculosis, and diphtheria.
	Then there's something called listeria, which can have catastrophic effects on pregnant women and their babies, as well as older people with weakened immunity.
	CBS reported that 170 people have been sickened by a raw milk-linked salmonella outbreak on the West Coast this year, and that scientists have seen high concentrations of the bird flu virus in some raw milk.
	Meanwhile, in Idaho, 18 people have had confirmed cases of campylobacter infection linked to a specific raw milk producer over the last month.
	And a raw milk creamery in Washington State was ordered to recall a batch from last week that was found to be just swimming with E. coli.
	So gross.
	Of the 170 people so far affected by that West Coast Salmonella outbreak, 40% were children under five and 20 people altogether had to be hospitalized.
	What is pasteurization?
	It's been around since Louis Pasteur discovered its effects in the 1860s, but it had been used in some form to purify a variety of food and drink by heating it up for hundreds of years prior to that.
	But proponents of raw milk have bought into this vague mystique that it is somehow
	more natural and therefore more healthy, tastes better.
	It has immune-boosting qualities which were never clearly defined.
	Supposedly, it aids in digestion and microbiome health.
	It's the cure for what ails you and helps to prevent a range of illnesses.
	They argue that in its raw state, milk has a nutritional profile
	that is somehow diminished by pasteurizing it.
	And you said the magic word there, because what else did Louis Pasteur do?
	Vaccines!
	Prove the efficacy of vaccines.
	Along with Edward Jenner, there was a host of men, but Pasteur developed the vaccines against foul cholera, anthrax, and rabies, and the anti-vax movement Yeah, it's not even a pipeline.
	It's just two tabs.
	work and Edward Jenner's work. So the anti-vax to raw milk crossover also has long precedent.
	Yeah, it's not even a pipeline. It's just two tabs on here.
	It's an udder. It's an udder.
	It's two of them actually. You pull them down and say, yeah.
	So, there's no evidence to support a single one of these claims about either the health benefits or the dangers of pasteurization or the drawbacks of pasteurization.
	The CDC, the American Medical Association, the American Association of Pediatrics all recommend only ingesting pasteurized dairy products.
	But raw milk is a legislative culture war football that some in the overlapping conservative media And holistic podcast fears champion as representing freedom of choice from institutional tyranny.
	You should be free to put yourself at severe risk for illnesses that, you know, we haven't had for decades and decades.
	It really feels like the six or seven year old saying, no, I'm not going to wash my hands.
	No, I don't want to wash my hands.
	You can tell me what to do.
	You're not my dad.
	You're not my dad.
	As I've expressed before, when I lived in Brooklyn in 2008-2009, my ex and I used to get raw milk deliveries from the Amish in Pennsylvania who would drive into Brooklyn once a week to make these deliveries.
	And I will say that we never got sick, which is not an excuse because that's the whole thing.
	It is possible to drink it.
	And I know I see influencers talking about how they drink it all the time.
	Sure, you're rolling the dice though.
	Because as you said, when the outbreak happens, that's really going to come for them.
	So, pasteurization is just a product.
	You don't lose nutrients.
	You don't lose anything.
	You only gain when you drink actual homogenized milk or pasteurized milk.
	Russian roulette.
	Five out of six people can't be wrong.
	So more and more states have been lifting restrictions on these products, with the Raw Milk Institute celebrating a 27% increase in sales since 2021.
	And critics have cited opportunism riding on COVID-era increase in institutional distrust as a driving factor.
	And then there is, of course, the rhyming tragedy here with kids being put at risks in the same way that they are by parents refusing to vaccinate.
	And we already covered how Louis Pasteur is involved in both of those scientific advances.
	Then there's also the irony amongst conspiritualists that a hyper focus on natural living, dietary purity, detoxification and cleansing can lead to this supreme ignorance that mistakes ingesting
	known dangerous food-borne pathogens for a wise, healthy lifestyle choice.
	Well, my wife and I were recently talking about our prior careers as yoga instructors,
	and she had mentioned how ill-prepared she was based on her teacher training
	to understand what it actually takes to survive financially doing this sort of work.
	Now, I started teaching over a decade before her, so I had less competition, but also even less guidance, as it really was a figure-it-out mentality.
	Now, her school just avoided talking about the economics of yoga, but I knew how dangerous that was when I co-led three trainings at Equinox.
	I made it very clear on the first day of each program that most of the people in the room would never make a career in this field.
	Buzzkill!
	Yeah, that's really good though.
	I'm sure you have a lot of grateful people for saying that.
	And it came out to be true.
	Out of that first cohort of 36 students, I think one or two went on to actually become yoga instructors.
	I was just being honest.
	My partner, Stephanie Cohen, in those trainings and I also offered a one-week free trial where they can get their money back if they realize the program wasn't for them.
	And I also included a module on the finances of teaching yoga When I was leading those trainings.
	Because this transparency is really important to me.
	Because when you're charging people to learn from you, you should take that responsibility.
	Right.
	In my training, most people were there for personal knowledge or to add a certification to their personal training careers.
	And as I said, only a few went on to do that.
	But then I read, the day after my wife and I were talking about this, a new report by Oregon Public Broadcasting.
	And it highlights a really disturbing trend also in the broader wellness umbrella, and that's that the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine shut down and the predominant number of graduates are stuck with high debt and low prospects for earning a career.
	Now the acupuncture school blames its downfall on pandemic-era costs and the city's growing homeless population.
	But current and former students talk to OPB and they report something very different, which includes high staff turnover and predatory student loans.
	Hold on though, what do the unhoused people have to do with why an acupuncture college closes?
	What did they, what happened there?
	It's, it's right on the border of Chinatown and it is in an area that has seen an influx of the predominant amount of downtown homeless in Oregon.
	So they're saying that all these people are outside our doors making it less likely that people are going to attend our school.
	That's the argument.
	Oh, it's a NIMBY argument.
	Okay.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So the administrators of the school reportedly encouraged prospective students to take out loans for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
	And here's what OPB reports, quote, A student who graduated from OCOM, that's the school, in 2015 and 16 borrowed a median of about $175,000 in federal Stafford and Grad Plus loans to complete their degrees, according to the U.S.
	Department of Education data.
	Tuition and fees at the college cost upwards of $25,000 per year at the time, according to the Princeton Review.
	Then the article goes on to say that the average annual salary after graduation during this time was just $27,000 per year.
	One student took out $108,000 in student loans in 2007 to pay for her degree, yet because of compound interest, she owes $230,000 now.
	2007 to pay for her degree, yet because of compound interest, she owes $230,000 now.
	And another student's loan has grown to over $400,000 due to compound interest.
	Now, to be clear, this is a problem with all colleges and the predatory nature of student
	It's not just on this one.
	It's not isolated to yoga or acupuncture.
	But it points to something troubling in the broader wellness space, and that's this longstanding notion that following your dream in these industries will automatically result in financial success, or at the very least, just paying your rent.
	And I know it sounds like basic common sense, but I still see all of these financial abundance marketing techniques being used throughout the wellness space as if the very premise of pursuing a career and helping people means you're guaranteed a livable income.
	It makes a lot of sense, though, that they've turned to that because, like, that's the gap that people are seeing and feeling and they know they need to fill that in somehow with some kind of bullshit.
	Yeah, there's an aspirational quality here of do what you love and the money will follow, trust the universe, etc, etc.
	It's part of the marketing shtick.
	Yes.
	And, you know, we see it with influencers and their coaching services as we covered, but to see like an old institution like this college doing it, it just, I don't know, it just hits on another level.
	It's a little more gross to me.
	So my advice is someone who spent A few decades as a yoga instructor, just realize it's a hustle like any other career path.
	And since there are actually fewer protections than going into, say, the business world, or you don't have a union, there's no benefits like health insurance, just know that you're really taking a big risk.
	And it's definitely possible to forge a career doing it, but it's really challenging.
	And if you are someone who is leading these courses or trainings, Just be honest about the amount of work that it takes.
	I used to tell everyone my salary and what I was making per hour, how many classes I had to teach and how much subway travel time that took, just so they understood what they were getting into.
	So don't market your course as a path to financial freedom if you're not going to discuss the exceptional time and effort that it takes or you're just adding to that problem.
	Yeah, really good advice.
	Okay, so for this week's Matthews Grumpy This Week in Conspiratuality, our tagline
	talks about the intersection of conspiracy theories, spiritual influence, and authoritarian
	extremism.
	And we have cut a pretty clear path there when looking at the rise of Donald Trump, blessed by evangelicals as the hammer of the Lord, but then also by the New Age as the light worker who will dispel all illusions.
	But we've also spent a lot of time on the problem of spiritual bypassing, where the politics can really go in any direction because the purpose is to use spirituality to make things appear to be better than they are.
	So, my ears really pricked up this past week when journalist and former Bernie Sanders speechwriter David Sirota described the DNC, which he attended, as a religious gathering.
	He stated the obvious.
	You know, it's a coronation convention.
	We knew what the outcome was going to be.
	It wasn't surprising that the event was like a pilgrimage for a lot of people and that the content was praise and benediction.
	And then we had DJ Cassidy turn the typically boring roll call into like an altar call.
	Can I just point out that Pod Save America recently did a really good episode where they talked to someone about the history of the convention.
	I'm sorry, it was Jon Stewart actually.
	Last week's Jon Stewart.
	Yeah.
	And they talked about how the convention used to actually be about, you didn't know who you were nominating going in.
	Right.
	And how that changed in the 1960s.
	68.
	So really fascinating conversation around that and how it has, as you say, we're turned into something much more religious where it used to be much more bureaucratic.
	Now, there were, in this event, really explicit aspects of that religiosity that I think represent a crucial reclamation of religious space and power from the right.
	And you could hear it throughout the four days.
	The opening blessings were really clear.
	They were delivered by Hindu priests, imams, rabbis, Christian ministers.
	But then it was Baptist preacher, Senator Warnock of Georgia, who hit the Martin Luther King Jr.
	style high note When he sermonized about Trump's ignorance of the Bible, particularly his ignorance of the social gospel.
	And yes, I saw him.
	I saw him holding the Bible and endorsing a Bible as if it needed his endorsement.
	He should try reading it.
	It says, do justice, love, kindness, and walk humbly with your God.
	He should try reading it.
	It says, love your neighbor as yourself.
	It says, inasmuch as you've done it unto the least of these, you have done it also unto me.
	Amazing stuff there.
	However, I would argue that in this event of high emotion and fuzzy details, the political instincts of MLK Jr., which, you know, Warnock is evoking here, which were sharp enough to get him assassinated, are a little bit removed from the situation and the key
	aspects of the center liberal orthodoxy are utilizing the same mechanism of spiritual bypassing
	that can allow right-wing operators to pretend that faith in God will help capitalism become
	more equitable. Well and and you know isn't part of the reason for that that regardless of the party
	most of this is for show it's This is the Democrats trying to say, we're not going to cede all of this territory of like patriotism and freedom and religiosity and values, family values, etc.
	We're not going to just let you keep claiming that because you're full of shit.
	And so we're going to do our own version of it, which has elements of sincerity and elements of just being performance, right?
	Yeah, and I think where the real test is, is where those same elements of sincerity and performance have to somehow elevate themselves through this sense that they're also rational, when maybe they are performative.
	And so, there's three areas in which the DNC, if we think about it as a revival meeting, I think really buried the lead of political urgency.
	So one is kind of wonky, but the other two are existential.
	The first is, no one talked about the filibuster, understandably, because it's boring,
	but it's the procedural boondoggle that stands in the way of every piece of domestic policy
	that Harris Walls are promising.
	So they wanna codify Roe v. Wade, they wanna end voter suppression,
	expand affordable housing, childcare, paid family, and medical leave.
	They wanna reduce childhood poverty, and every one of those initiatives will fail or be gutted
	if the Democrats have less than the 60 Senate votes, or unless they use the so-called nuclear option
	of a simple majority vote to change that rule.
	But a lot of people are really reluctant to do that.
	And when pressed on this during a side panel of the convention,
	this is a report in Jacobin, several senators, including Warnock,
	expressed ambivalence about committing to filibuster reform because it means foregrounding
	a kind of wonky, boring process over the promises that they need to make.
	Secondly, Harris gave one lonely ping of climate in her big speech.
	Deb Haaland of the Pueblo in New Mexico and then Representative Maxwell Frost of Florida, who's I think the youngest member of Congress or youngest legislator in the country, he's 27.
	They were both given two minutes to discuss environmental issues.
	Otherwise, there's nothing.
	The priority, I think this is the most important one, the priority of maintaining a cohesive religious experience was so high that the DNC couldn't risk allowing a single Palestinian American to take the stage, even from among the 80 plus local, state, and federally elected officials who are Muslim, the vast majority of them Democrats.
	Who are, in their words, champing at the bit to enthusiastically endorse Harris, while also speaking to the desire for an arms embargo to stop Israel's actions in Gaza.
	So, I just want to point out that we're really big on fostering critical thinking, calling things what they are, avoiding spiritual bypassing, taking in all the evidence with clear eyes, not giving anybody a pass.
	Assuming a skeptical stance on religious leaders and policymakers until they really show that they're not fucking something up in a major way.
	We tell listeners to be better media consumers, to question everything, to learn how to read scientific papers.
	So, I'm going to say that it will be interesting, at least for me, to expand this focus to zero
	in on where a kind of religious faith can also obscure reality in center liberal, even
	left-leaning politics.
	Okay, Julian, Derek, I wrote that worm food intro dream in a kind of a mood, honestly
	hoping that Bobby's pivot to lick Trump's boots would spell the end of him.
	I think it was right after I got the hit, right after the New York ballot lawsuit dropped, and he was not going to be on the ballot there, but it was before his declaration.
	But, you know, the reality is that Things are pretty fluid, and I think RFK Jr.
	might be adding real substance, however cursed it is, to Trump's campaign, to the point at which he's looking better, in the estimation of many in the MAGA world, in that lineup than Vance is.
	And the DNC glow is fading to reveal what we always knew was going to be the case, the stark reality that we're in a dead heat, there's going to be guaranteed electoral fraud claims, and the real possibility that Bobby winds up as AG or Secretary of Health and Human Services or the fucking Vice President.
	So how did we get here?
	Like, why did this podcast focus on this guy?
	Well, you know, we still don't have any solid polling to tell us how many Joe Rogan listeners gave money to RFK Jr.' 's campaign.
	How many raw milk moms, yoga teachers, coaches who coach coaches, anti-vax food purists, you know, Burning Man crypto body optimizers, but also like former Bernie meme warriors.
	We don't know like what those numbers are, but we have always known that this diagonalist bunch of contrarians has been at the impassioned core of his movement, even If at this point he's ready to completely debase their pretensions of organic naturalism and link arms with Trump.
	And we've also known that Bobby has given his New Age wellness 12-step conspiracist demographic an entry point back into political enthusiasm.
	Julian, you've said a lot that's really eloquent about that.
	That they're actually redeemed through participation in his campaign after decades of being checked out, believing that politics is low-vibe or irrelevant to the great project of the self.
	You know, we've got headline backers like Aubrey Marcus, who said he realized that Bobby was his political savior after an ayahuasca session, but he admitted also to never voting before.
	And then Charles Eisenstein has definitely made, never made, sorry, $21,000 per month as a political advisor before.
	And, you know, given his limpid disagreement with Bobby over Israel's flattening of Gaza, I hope he's sending those paychecks to the WHO to help with polio vaccine distribution, but I'm not sure.
	Yeah, don't hold your breath.
	But yeah, this is a really wild development, right?
	Because all of these people who we cover, who previously were not that politically engaged, but were culturally liberal, started trending more and more towards Trump just because of conspirituality, essentially, right?
	Because of conspiracy theories, COVID, vaccines, etc.
	And then with the rise of Bobby, there was a sense of like, oh, no, we're actually liberals.
	We're actually Democrats.
	We're actually part of this.
	We're Kennedy Democrats.
	Yes.
	We're part of this grand tradition that goes back to the 1960s, where the timeline was broken.
	And now through quantum physics and ayahuasca, we can finally see the prophecy coming true.
	And so we're not Trumpists.
	We're Kennedy Democrats.
	Well, now the Kennedy Democrat is on the Trump ticket.
	Yeah, so he gave them a lot of gratification, you know, to this IG, Facebook, and podcasting crowd.
	This sense of possibility and legitimacy, you know, especially, as you're saying, after they all flirted with QAnon during the pandemic, which is still ongoing, partly because of them, partly because our governments have given up on it.
	Bobby brought them all in from the wilderness of Esalen and Omega and the boredom of self-improvement, and he gave them what appeared to be a mission.
	And so, you know, the question before us today, gentlemen, is where do they go now?
	What will they do?
	I'm sorry, but you have to call it the opulent wilderness.
	It's the Esalen and Omega.
	It's not the wilderness, right?
	Sure, it's the wilderness in terms of, like, political engagement, but it's also, like, incredibly privileged.
	This is making me think of like our own project and how we need to better define terms.
	I mean, we've had an internal argument, we've made public before, but about like the validity of the horseshoe theory, right?
	The idea that go far enough left and you get to the right, right?
	And we came across, you guys did a wonderful episode with the guys who coined diagonalism, which I think is a better heuristic for understanding what's going on.
	But we're in this space where we talk about this and being like, wow, where do we find these touch points?
	But then at other times, we use terms like centrist, liberal, or center-left, and we say these things.
	And if you're going to negate the idea of horseshoe theory, then you kind of got to get rid of the spectrum altogether.
	So I think as commenters on this podcast, either we abandon the terms and we
	have to have a case-by-case argument for the different topics that we're discussing, or we use that spectrum
	but make very clear the sort of parameters we're working with.
	Because when we come across, well, yeah, we don't have polling data on all those people who are now
	supporting Trump from RFK.
	We know it's something, and we know it can be substantial.
	But where do they fall on the actual spectrum?
	It's going to be kind of difficult to actually even talk about a spectrum at this point.
	Well, except the spectrum of personality disorders.
	You know, narcissism and stuff like that.
	But Derek, I mean, if we get rid of, if we sort of abandon heuristics, you know, a central criticism that I would make of what we see at the DNC, which is like, how does the centrism of the Democratic Party interrogate or act towards its progressive left flank,
	that all goes out the window.
	That's like a very stable, very clear set of ideas pitched against each other with long histories on both
	sides.
	So yeah, I don't know how I would give that up.
	I guess what I find difficulty in, and this is something I've noticed in online discourse,
	when you get to something like, what are your topics on foreign policy?
	I relate to social democracy, social Democrats.
	I don't like the actual party, but when you talk about government and its function, I believe that education and healthcare and transportation should all be centralized in the government.
	I think it's going to take a long time to get there, but I don't like free market ideas in those domains, which pushes me way to the left.
	Yeah.
	But then when you get to other topics, like people will say that I'm a centrist and I'm like, no, I'm not.
	I just have a disagreement of how we land in the same place that you're trying to get to, which is not a centrist argument.
	And that's why I have problems with the way that the spectrum is being used in public discourse when it is so confusing.
	Yeah, sure.
	I think maybe if we depersonalize things, always, right?
	That X idea moves left or is associated with a particular progressive tradition.
	X idea often responds to that progressive initiative with some sort of pulling back to the center.
	But you're right.
	Like, describing ourselves individually in terms of those identities is really hard.
	Yeah, it's hard.
	I mean, one thing I will say, Derek, is, you know, the Pew Research Project, the Beyond Red and Blue, Which has been going on for quite a few years now, I think.
	Roughly 10,000 people participating, very, very careful figuring out which 10,000 people to use, like a whole process to get into that group.
	And they identify nine different positions along the spectrum, which do have to do with how you cluster around specific issues, where you see them this way or that way.
	And I find that actually very useful in terms of understanding I guess the spectrum and not just thinking of it as red and blue.
	Well, we're talking about Bobby's chaos, identitarian and political chaos.
	And maybe a good way into that is that, you know, Derek, we should ping how it came about because, you know, you're going to be covering this this coming Saturday, which is the growing influence of the means duo in this series.
	And just yesterday, we learned from a New York Times report that, surprise, surprise, the Trump-Kennedy alliance was actually catalyzed by a representative of this whole goober sphere that we've been covering for years.
	So what can you tell us about the means?
	It's pretty funny because you dropped into Slack that New York Times article about how Kennedy ended up moving into Trump and it opens with Callie Means.
	And I had just finished recording the brief on Callie and Casey Means for Saturday.
	No, it's okay.
	This is a two-parter then.
	Cassie Means was a Stanford-trained physician who was in her fifth year of surgical residency and she left.
	She abandoned it and she did a very conspiritualist pivot saying that the healthcare system is broken.
	I'm going to start a continuous glucose monitoring subscription service.
	Now, this is very big in the biohacking and wellness sphere.
	I cover all this Saturday.
	Her brother has been riding on the coattails of her rise to fame through her company Levels.
	Callie Means is the person that's talked about in this because he was an advisor to RFK.
	Now, Callie has a company called TruMed, which I go into depth on on Saturday, but let's just say that He is someone, and he was recently on Tucker Carlson's podcast with his sister Casey, and they were just railing against pharma, food, everything.
	There's so much misinformation in there.
	But his company is basically doing the same exact thing he's criticizing pharmaceutical and food industry of, which is he's saying that Through his company, you can get access to true healthcare and then you go to his site and there's 104 partnerships with supplements companies.
	There's ice plunge manufacturers.
	There's red light therapy.
	There's sleep tech.
	It's all stuff that's not regulated and never been proven to work.
	He very much falls into the conspirituality space.
	And again, listeners, you can hear more about this on Saturday.
	But it turns out, as you flagged in this article, that he is the person that called RFK and said,
	hey, maybe you should consider moving over to Trump's camp.
	And he facilitated that along with Tucker Carlson.
	Yes.
	Yeah. This is two hours.
	That first phone call comes two hours after the assassination attempt on that Saturday in mid-July.
	Yeah, it's wild.
	And then in terms of Bobby's pivot, I couldn't help noticing this past weekend,
	he was at the limitless financial freedom expo.
	I say limitless because it has an exclamation point.
	Financial Freedom Expo that happened at the 1800 room Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center in Dallas.
	And this has investment podcaster and entrepreneur Ken McElroy front and center.
	It's his event.
	It's sponsored mostly by real estate and capital investment companies.
	So there's some there's some rhyming here with what Derek was just talking about.
	The speakers list was made up of all people from those fields, most of whom work then for the various sponsors.
	And then also Robert Kiyosaki, the guy who wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad like 30 years ago.
	Oh boy.
	And who's a billion dollars in debt right now.
	So he's poor dad.
	He's big.
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, no, he's he's.
	It was always it was always a grift.
	But he is over a billion dollars in debt.
	And he laughed about it when it came out publicly.
	Oh, my God.
	I did not know that.
	And then, of course, top billing goes to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., because, of course, he's going to be at this thing right after it's announced, right after he's been on big stages with Trump as as one of his supporters.
	One telling bullet point I found in the website's list of what you'd get out of the conference should you have chosen to attend, you know, there's things like tax wealth, starting a business, raising a capitalist, how to talk to your kids.
	Oh, that's a parenting workshop?
	That's a parenting workshop.
	Yeah.
	Was also health and wellness.
	No health equals no wealth.
	And given that this was his first non-campaign related event, I was aware of Kennedy appearing at his first time.
	I saw him appear at something.
	I found it characteristically odd, you know, and not surprising given who we're talking about.
	He live streamed his hour long appearance with Kiyosaki and Ken McElroy on the stage to his personal account.
	And it has almost 90,000 views so far.
	And as you might imagine, in terms of health and wellness, it features his usual gish gallop
	of impressive-seeming conspiracy claims, phony statistics, fear-mongering about vaccines,
	antidepressants, chronic illness, I listened, as well as supposed big tech censorship of speech,
	which is the real boogeyman.
	The most telling moment had one of those hosts, I believe it was Kiyosaki,
	pitching him a softball that went like this.
	You're in a better position than anyone to be able to tell us about the deep state.
	Oh, God, because that's it.
	That's yeah, that's like that's like wrong and a little bit right.
	And Kennedy is a master at blending those two together.
	So I want to ask you, what do you know of the swamp and what do you think of Tony Fauci?
	Not loaded at all.
	So then everyone on the stage has this moment of kind of theatrical villain laughter as the crowd joins in and applauds because we know that Kennedy has written a book about Fauci as being sort of the main criminal that needs to be prosecuted of the pandemic parrot.
	Comments under that YouTube video included plenty of supporters saying, I'm voting for Trump in order to get Bobby into the White House for the health of our babies.
	Okay, so we get to August 23rd and this is Bobby's, uh, I'm withdrawing my independent candidacy.
	Uh, I'm taking my name off the ballots in, uh, in I guess red states.
	Uh, and I'm going to be joining the Trump team and it's an hour long speech.
	You know, it's like, it's full of bullshit.
	Fact-checking a paragraph of it takes hours and hours and hours.
	But in rationalizing his Trump endorsement, he focused on three issues.
	And so maybe we can just briefly, like, speed around this.
	So censorship is number one, and of course he's doing this while he's always on the biggest platforms in the world.
	Then forever wars, except for Israel.
	And then the chronic disease epidemic, which of course is kind of his mainstay.
	This is how he ended it, which I think is pretty salient for our beat, but also for his followers.
	This is a spiritual journey for me.
	I reached my decision through deep prayer, through hard-nosed logic, and I asked myself, what choices must I make to maximize my chances to save America's children and restore national health?
	I felt that if I refused this opportunity, I would not be able to look myself in the Knowing that I could have saved lives of countless children and reversed this country's chronic disease epidemic.
	I'm 70 years old.
	I may have a decade to be effective.
	I can't imagine that President Harris, a President Harris, would allow me or anyone to solve these, these dire problems.
	After eight years of President Harris, Any opportunity for me to fix the problem will be out of my reach forever.
	President Trump has told me that he wants this to be his legacy.
	I'm choosing to believe that this time he will follow through.
	His son, his biggest donors, his closest friends, all support this objective.
	My joining the Trump campaign will be a difficult sacrifice.
	My wife and children, but worthwhile if there's even a small chance of saving these kids.
	Ultimately, the only thing that will save our country and our children is if we choose to love our kids more than we hate each other.
	Yeah, well, if you chose to love those 83 mostly kids in Samoa who died because of your vaccine misinformation, then maybe you would not have such a hard time looking yourself in the mirror as saving the children.
	Yeah, this is why I have a whole, like, bonus series called Conspirituality and the Imaginary Children.
	It's because of rhetoric like this that focuses obsessively about imagined onslaughts against children.
	Like, this is his mainstay.
	This is what he comes back to.
	He's yelling, you know, they're coming for your children from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
	It's all about children for him, which, you know, we can put him on the couch maybe in another episode.
	Yeah, it's very obvious.
	There's a crossover I identify on Saturday, which jumped out at me early, which is Casey Means, who I mentioned earlier, Callie's sister, is not a parent, but she says she looks forward to having children one day.
	Awesome.
	But she says something which really plays into this, into the right right now, which is there is no greater service you can do for humanity than having children.
	Yeah.
	And I would imagine if you're a parent, you can completely believe that.
	There's a whole bunch of us who aren't parents who are also doing service to this world or trying to do.
	When I hear stuff like that, it strikes the difference between saying, this is what I really believe and I want to focus my life on, which is fine, versus this is the way that everyone should focus their lives and it is the thing that we should all do, which gets very religious to me.
	It strikes the same chord, like so much on the right and what I'm hearing on podcasts and the way it's framing is around this very Christian idea.
	And it's playing for that base, but I think it's going to be really problematic for them moving forward.
	Oh yeah, that's Vance and everything that Vance has been raked over the coals for.
	But you know, with Bobby, it's just like, You're trying to get yourself into the position of the greatest amount of influence to actually endanger the lives of as many kids as you possibly can because of your false conspiratorial beliefs.
	And that's, that's the massive glaring.
	Well, you have to imagine children under threat.
	You have to imagine all children being ultimately vulnerable all the time.
	Yeah.
	And then, and then of course, you know, we can point out that he, he doesn't extend the same care and concern.
	So, very interesting little capstone to that speech.
	I found it funny that it wasn't enough for him to mortify his extended Kennedy family, like now he has to go and humiliate some of his closest followers as well.
	He's talking about the great sacrifice to his wife and his children.
	It is not clear to me how the majority of his hardcore followers, like the ones we have most familiarity with, are breaking.
	There seem to be equal measures of consternation and approval in all of the typical Facebook and IG comment locations.
	There's some yoga people who are horrified, but there are others, and I would say especially those who got sucked into various aspects of culture war BS, like anti-trans rhetoric over the past two years, are pretty excited at the same time.
	I think I'm waiting for Aubrey Marcus to release some spoken word poetry
	in which he pledges his sword to Trump.
	I would like Charles Eisenstein to update his opus, The Trumpier World Our Hearts Know Is Possible.
	But honestly, I don't think that Bobby's allegiance is to his base anymore.
	And I think this is the mark of the ultimately, sort of, princely, privileged person
	who can really throw people away whenever he needs to.
	I think he used them to get into a position in which he could access more mainstream voters.
	I mean, we do know that Stella Eisenstein is all on board for Trump. This is Charles' partner.
	But there isn't a lot of open, sort of, discussion.
	I think people are trying to figure it out.
	They're chewing on it.
	I think you're right that he never had allegiance.
	He just followed where the attention was going and when he was he was getting momentum.
	I also make that same comment on on the brief Saturday because I'm seeing Tucker Carlson really go into the health and wellness space right now.
	I mean, yes, he did the ball tanning thing a while ago, but now he's making a much more concerted effort, especially with RFK coming in.
	No, they don't.
	He's honestly finding a lot of suckers in the wellness space
	to pick off at this point.
	Because when I see yoga teachers sharing Tucker Carlson videos,
	I'm like, do you not realize what he spent his entire life doing?
	And no, I don't think they have.
	Yeah.
	No, they don't.
	They don't.
	I wanna say, I think that if Eisenstein does end up taking this turn publicly,
	it'll be through an archetypal analysis.
	Yes, exactly.
	Yes, exactly!
	It'll be the trickster and the new parade for freedom or something like that.
	Yeah, and enlivening the shadows of all of us and reconciling with our, I don't know, our patriarchs or whatever, yeah.
	Yeah, it's the ultimate non-dual awakening is to embrace the trickster and the shadow.
	So, we've got a huge Bobby archive.
	We've done nine episodes.
	I think this is the 10th now, so we're gonna put those into the show notes as well as our Time Magazine piece.
	We've got a good chapter on him in our book, so you can, you know, run down his history there, especially with regard to how his influence unfolded during the pandemic.
	We wanna add to that, we didn't really focus on this that much, you know, he's now an admitted sexual assaulter, which is not surprising given his history of philandering, innovation here is actually a non-denial.
	He's kind of shrugging.
	He's like saying, you're not voting for me because I'm a church boy
	when the news comes out that he assaulted one of the family's nannies.
	It's kind of like a French turn away from the relevance of sexual behavior
	amongst public figures and even sexual crimes.
	I want to really make sure that everybody is aware that he has a kind of disgusting ableist rhetoric
	with regard to autistic people and fat people.
	He actually says to Carlson, obese people were so rare back in the day that they didn't exist.
	I never saw them.
	If they did exist, we used to put them in the circus.
	Like, he just ends the sentence there.
	There's no follow-up.
	He does this consistent horrible dehumanization of 25% of autistic people
	who are nonverbal.
	He focuses on the fact that they'll never throw a baseball, kiss a girl, write a poem or a play or things like that.
	It's like he's absolutely fixated with the sort of decrepitude of disabled people.
	This is...
	There's nothing about this at all that, to me, is Christian or especially Catholic.
	It's just incredible to me, actually, how he speaks about people.
	Yeah, he talks about autistic kids as having no light in their eyes, right?
	Oh my god, unbelievable.
	has been extinguished.
	And we have a lot of measurable data on the impact of their movement, especially around spreading disinformation.
	So, case in point, the Annenberg Public Policy Center recently published a report, and it's called, More in U.S.
	Accept COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation and Willingness to Vaccinate Has Declined.
	Side note, I'm getting my new COVID vaccine on Thursday.
	This new booster is really important, so I highly recommend it to anyone listening.
	It is out now.
	Okay, so as one of the worst COVID surges since 2021 rages on right now, here are a few highlights, well, really lowlights of this Annenberg Report.
	So, 28% of American adults incorrectly believe that the COVID-19 vaccines have been responsible for thousands of deaths.
	That's up from 22% in June of 2021.
	22% believe the false idea that it is safer to get COVID-19 than the vaccine.
	That's up from 10% in April 2021.
	15% of people incorrectly believe that the COVID-19 vaccine changes your DNA, and that's almost double.
	That was 8% in 2021.
	This is so bad.
	20% of people are somewhat or very worried about themselves or a family member contracting COVID.
	That's down from 35% less than a year ago, last October.
	And finally, 44% say they're somewhat or very likely to get a yearly COVID vaccine, and that's down from 52% just a year ago.
	So the anti-vaccine movement really played up fear and doubt around COVID vaccines, and that does show in the data.
	People generally do have more faith in MMR, shingles, flu, and pneumonia vaccines, but all four of those vaccine beliefs are down as well.
	So 45% state that they'll get a flu vaccine this year, It was 50% last year.
	RSV vaccine, which is for adults over 60, took a six-point percentage hit in one year.
	And as I've reported on a few times, the measles vaccine has dropped one percentage point each year for the last two years in kindergartners.
	But that represents hundreds of thousands of kindergartners not getting protection from a formerly eradicated disease.
	And I live now in Oregon, which has One of the highest exemption rates in the country, if not the highest now for childhood vaccines.
	Yeah, and big outbreaks too, right?
	Yes.
	So this movement shows no sign of slowing.
	Side note, but also related, Jay Bhattacharya, who Julian's a big fan of, he co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for herd immunity and an end to lockdowns in October 2020.
	He makes no mention of social distancing, contact tracing, or masks.
	He's behind a symposium that's being held at Stanford on the four-year anniversary of that document.
	Now, most of Bhattacharya's events have been sponsored by the conservative branch of the Hoover Institution on Stanford's campus, but this one is being sponsored by the Stanford School of Medicine and Freeman Spogli Institute And it features opening remarks by the newly appointed Stanford president, Jonathan Levin, who has co-published papers with Bhattacharya in the past.
	So basically, we're watching one of the most prestigious universities in the country endorse an event that purports to be a debate about pandemic measures.
	But here's what the LA Times says.
	Julian, can you read this?
	No one can doubt that a sober examination of the policies of the recent past with an eye toward doing better in the next pandemic is warranted.
	This symposium is nothing like that.
	Most of its participants have been associated with discredited approaches to the COVID pandemic, including minimizing its severity and calling for widespread infection to achieve herd immunity.
	Some have been sources of rank misinformation or disinformation.
	Advocates of scientifically validated policies are all but absent.
	Misinformation researcher Alison Neitzel, who does great work, she wrote a great summary of the anti-vax histories of every participant in this symposium.
	I'll include it in the show notes.
	I can't say I'm surprised that the university has turned a blind eye because this is the same place that, I mean, I mentioned Casey Means, she was educated there, but Andrew Huberman and all his anti-science behavior.
	They don't talk about any of that.
	And with RFK's decades of chipping away at public trust in vaccines, this is just another example about how misinformation spreaders are being platformed.
	And if their influence continues, the next pandemic, or honestly, the spread of any virus at this point, is going to inflict far greater damage than it otherwise would have.
	And I think that the normalization of just the forever virus, where we've lost tracking data, we don't really know how it's circulating, we know when emergency departments are overflowing, but now we have anti-mask mandates coming down in Democratic, in blue states from Democratic governors.
	It makes it extremely difficult for anybody to maintain any kind of hygiene around this or any kind of self-protection.
	Like, I feel very, very personally isolated in trying to maintain some kind of, you know, awareness of not getting sick or not Spreading sickness, and it's because of this normalization.
	It's because we have not just RFK Jr.
	going at it, but also these very respected liberal institutions and neoliberal governments arm-in-arm saying, yeah, well, let's get on with it.
	Let's try to get back to normal somehow.
	But there's no fucking normal, right?
	There's no normal in capitalism.
	Well, you know, I do try to apply a general understanding of history, and the Black Plague circulated for centuries, and there were outbreaks in specific places.
	I mean, I do believe you do have to move society on at certain points.
	We can debate whether or not we're there with COVID, but viruses are part of life.
	What is really important to me is that the experts, the public health institutions that should know best are getting ahead of this and doing the work.
	And I would hope that institutions like universities would follow that guidance.
	But what we're seeing is we're seeing hamstrung departments in the government for budgetary reasons,
	for a number of, for some of their own problems, for their capitalist problems that you cited, Matthew,
	there are problems there, not relaying good public health information.
	So it really relies on experts that you have to follow on social media.
	And then on top of that, when you see institutions like Stanford,
	which is supposed to be a beacon of enlightenment values, coming out and supporting with the president
	actually speaking at a just straight up anti-vax propaganda symposium,
	I don't know how you get around that.
	You know, all of this is extremely demoralizing, but I want to point to some pivots that Bobby has made.
	I mean, obviously, he's essential to the story that you're telling here, Derek, and that we've been unpacking for years.
	But he has said throughout his campaign that he stands by his anti-vax bullshit, but he's not foregrounding that material.
	He says over and over again, I'm not running on that.
	Now, that claim is complicated because he has to say something about warp speed, and I don't know how he's going to reconcile his followers to Trump's vaccination record.
	But he's said hundreds of times that he doesn't want to run on vaccines.
	And that's because he's trying to pivot to something else that I'm trying to learn more about.
	There's a Tucker Carlson interview that you and I, Derek, are both working on from different angles, and in one crucial part of it, he goes off about how the carbon orthodoxy, is what he calls it, That is, the focus of democratic green politics is literally the work of the devil because it involves quantifying God's green earth.
	So, I'm going to be looking at a future episode at the twisted theology of that, but his main focus, what he wants us to think about instead of carbon or vaccines, is the following.
	The best thing that you can do for climate is to restore the soils.
	The soils are the solution to everything.
	The soil will absorb all that carbon.
	And it'll absorb the water.
	It'll stop the flooding.
	It'll give us healthy food.
	And that's what our national policy has to be.
	It has to be restoring the soil.
	He's talking about carbon sequestration in better managed agricultural lands.
	And as per usual, he is partially correct because properly managed soil health will, can play a huge role in carbon drawdown.
	But the problem here is that this allows him to not talk about fuel consumption, the military, the energy required by his crypto bros, and the feedback loops that are already torching the ice.
	It's like the vaccine bait and switch.
	Of course our general health can stand improvement, but that's not going to make viruses disappear.
	But as it happens, this is what really worries me.
	His focus, which he really is putting at the center in displacing vaccine talk with, is coinciding with legitimate growing alarm over U.S.
	soil health.
	The New York Times just published a really deep investigation into the Pandora's box of the forever chemicals, the PFASs, so the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances that are soaking into rural soils through the process of using urban sewage as fertilizer.
	Poisoning farms across the country to the extent that entire cow herds can't be sold for beef.
	Now, for Bobby and his followers, this is a red meat issue because we're talking about, like, urban decay, literal shit from the city centers poisoning the land, right?
	And he might be correct here that he's been ahead of mainstream reporting and politics on this, So he's got this Cassandra Complex sort of persona.
	Maybe sometimes it's not unwarranted.
	And my particular fear is that with this issue, he's going to make a lot of sense to that sector of independent or soft Republican voters who are not actually that bothered by, or they're not comfortable with climate denialism, but they don't actually really want to do anything about it except maintain their own hunting grounds.
	It gets back to something Naomi Klein said we say now often, which is, gets the feeling right, but the fact's wrong.
	It gets back to what Casey means and Kaylee means.
	There are problems with American health, but their solutions are always wrong.
	I wrote an article, I did a report in 1999 or 98 on soil fertility based on a study I talked to.
	I was one of the researchers at Rutgers, my alma mater, when I was working in Princeton.
	And it was about the problem of soil health and how tomatoes weren't getting the right
	nutrients because soil health is decaying.
	Now, this is a generation ago.
	We are still dealing with this.
	So it absolutely is a problem.
	The solutions are going to come from government regulations.
	And Project 2025 wants to disband the EPA.
	It wants to gut the EPA and the HHS, which is the one that RFK wants to oversee now.
	So the idea that, like, again, he's putting forward these very, like, what is his solution for health?
	People need to go to camps, right, to get healthy, to go back to nature.
	It's a very individualized solution.
	They're not going to look at actually the problem.
	With all this runoff is predominantly coming from corporations that are polluting, but they don't want to look at that.
	Yeah.
	And as we covered in our recent brief, Derek, you know, a big part of the agenda for Project 2025 is to get loyalists in place who will start erasing certain words that they believe are like these dangerous, anti-patriotic, like part of the woke agenda.
	And one of those words is climate.
	One of those words is environmentalism.
	And if we're going to gut all these different agencies, Bobby can talk all he wants about how he's going to purify the blood and soil, oops, of America.
	I think you're right.
	With what apparatus, buddy?
	Well, be clear, Julian.
	Like, what did they say exactly?
	They want to remove the term climate or climate change from every government website document in existence.
	That's what Project 2025 calls for.
	Yeah, yeah, because it's part of the woke conspiracy of changing the language and thereby changing the culture, so they're going to do it in reverse because they're good postmodernists.
	Well, guys, predictions?
	Where's he going?
	Where is this going to wind up?
	I am concerned.
	I'm not going to lie.
	Like, I don't know what his impact will be, but I think some votes will go to Trump from his camp.
	My bigger fear is that if Trump wins or somehow works with this voter cheating scam that he's
	working on already and somehow gets through, is RFK heading the HHS.
	He already flagged over a year ago we covered this that he wants to blacklist any scientists
	who have gotten their pharmaceuticals FDA approved.
	He wants to take them, basically not let them work anymore.
	That's like everybody.
	That's everybody. Yeah. I mean, so this is very frightening.
	This to me is existential.
	Like having someone like that place to now at the same time, the idea that Trump would give
	him something is highly debatable because, you know, he has no loyalty to anyone. But either way,
	this has definitely, they, they played it very well.
	They saw everyone coming off the Democratic convention on a high, and the next day they did this to try to take some of the momentum away.
	And I don't think it took a ton of momentum away, but I did think it takes some.
	And just reviewing the conspiritualists, the wellness influencers, the people, the hundreds of comments on some of these people, it is a little frightening.
	So I do have concerns.
	A hunch.
	Maybe it's just wishful thinking that overall it won't have much impact on the election.
	But I think probably Trump and Bobby are going to have some more heart to hearts.
	And in addition to Trump's crazy all over the place flip flops as he attempts to find some kind of message that he thinks is going to save him with certain demographics.
	He's probably gonna start spouting some of this stuff about, we gotta save our beautiful babies from this terrible crisis of chronic illness and vaccine death.
	So, I think that's gonna happen.
	You know, I have some thoughts about, like, his continued attractiveness as a candidate and as somebody who speaks to, you know, a range of independent voters and conspiritualists and diagonalists.
	Our first big episode on him was called The Two Faces of RFK Jr.
	And in it, we juxtapose the spiritualist, the muscular Catholic, the new age 12-stepper against the conspiracy guy.
	That's one salient split, but there are others, and the one that I'm thinking of now is possibly defined by the hinge point of his father's murder, but that's only the timeline piece.
	So, in June of 1968, that assassination marks this dividing line between what he remembers as a feral childhood made sensible by the natural world, And then 14 years of chaos and addiction and compensatory behaviors that still seem to be alive in him today, even while he's sober, and that have driven him to the peak of his influence.
	He seems to carry these two wolves inside him.
	And if you listen to a lot of Bobby, as I have, you'll hear a kind of Maurice Sendak, where the wild things are child, who may never have wanted the burden of his father's name.
	There was a boy who tramped through the woods of Virginia.
	He remembers being overcome by the songs of frogs in the spring.
	And I'm guessing he was the kid who poured over the carcasses of crayfish and little rodents.
	He originally wanted to be a veterinarian, but no Kennedy becomes a veterinarian.
	And, you know, it seems his self-regard also wouldn't be satisfied just by the attention of animals.
	And so there's a destiny that wouldn't allow him to simply be satisfied with the power of nature.
	He's compelled to pursue power itself.
	This father of his bought him lizards and a terrarium and then a falcon.
	And he knew his dad was a statesman, but he frames his core connection with him in pioneering terms as if they lived in pre-modern America.
	And then, the father is publicly murdered.
	And the mom goes mad.
	But in the midst of everything that follows, we have these stories of an aging, feral boy needing to show his union with, but also his dominance over, but also his restless frustration with the natural world.
	Like, did you guys, like, really think about that chainsaw whale head story?
	Like, you can't chainsaw the head off a whale.
	Like, have you guys used a chainsaw?
	Yes.
	Yeah, right.
	You can't chainsaw the head off a whale without being at war with the god you think governs nature.
	And then there's the bear story, the roadkill in his freezer, the house full of taxidermy.
	Like, animals and death are a special interest, and on that note, we may not be talking about a neurotypical guy here, which makes his clear disgust for neurodiverse people even more interesting to me.
	The conventional logic is that all of these stories prove that he's unhinged and disqualifying.
	Like, who does these things?
	But I think it might be the opposite.
	That his strange wildness is part of the attraction that he holds over this barstool and bro-scientist influence type.
	These man-children who are perpetually disenchanted with adulthood and with institutions.
	So, I'll leave it there for now, but I'm working on something that looks more closely at this spirituality of the pharaoh and his dedication to Saint Francis of Assisi, who is not a social gospel type.
	I think Francis provides a religious vision of environmentalism that's tailor-made for American hyper-individualism.
	And very much tuned into this pervasive feeling that the environment is the thing that you have dominion over.
	It's not the thing that you share.
	Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
	We'll see you here on Saturday for a brief, over on Patreon on Monday for a bonus episode, or of course every Thursday right here in your main podcast feed.

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