British entrepreneur and investor Steven Bartlett launched his podcast, Diary of a CEO, in 2017. He quickly found an audience in the tech world, which gave him access to a wide range of celebrities and businesspeople from various domains. By 2024, the podcast became one of the top 5 in the world, netting Bartlett and his team a reported $25M this year alone.
Yet as Bartlett’s star rose, his guest list began becoming more and more suspect. Pertinent to our beat, contrarian wellness influencers and philosophers appeared, spreading Covid conspiracies and health misinformation. In his role as curious everyman, Bartlett rarely challenged their narratives, sometimes playing along with their conspiratorial hot takes to an audience in the millions.
We look at a few conspiritualist crossovers this week, and discuss what it really takes to become a top 5 podcaster—and the information and integrity that’s sacrificed along the way.
Show Notes
The Canonization of St. Luigi
Sacred Heart of Luigi hanging up at Vito's Pizza
Extremist “Saints Culture”
Catholic ethicists condemn ‘indifference to suffering’ shown by those celebrating Luigi Mangione
41% of young voters say UnitedHealthcare CEO killing "acceptable"
69% Blame CEO Murder on US Healthcare System
Mainstreaming of Violent Accelerationism
December Wave 2 2024 AmeriSpeak Omnibus | NORC at the University of Chicago
Steven Bartlett sharing harmful health misinformation in Diary of CEO podcast
What the Most Famous Book About Trauma Gets Wrong
Teal Swan Collection—Patreon
Bessel van der Kolk: Role in the Satanic Panic
He Built a Wellness Empire While Adventuring With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Only 7% of American Adults Have Good Cardiometabolic Health
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, as well as individually on Blue Sky.
You can search our names there.
You can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon at patreon.com slash Conspirituality.
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And as independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
So Conspirituality 238, Diary of a CEO Bro.
British entrepreneur and investor Stephen Bartlett launched his podcast, Diary of a CEO, in 2017. He quickly found an audience in the tech world, which gave him access to a wide range of celebrities and And business people from various domains.
By 2024, the podcast became one of the top five in the world, netting Bartlett and his team a reported $25 million this year alone.
Yet, as Bartlett's star rose, his guest list began becoming more and more suspect.
Pertinent to our beat, contrarian wellness influencers and philosophers appeared, spreading COVID conspiracies and health misinformation.
In his role as Curious Everyman, Bartlett rarely challenged their narratives, sometimes playing along with their conspiratorial hot takes to an audience in the millions.
We look at a few conspiritualist crossovers this week and discuss what it really takes to become a top five podcaster and the information and integrity that's sacrificed along the way.
All right, so this one is actually from a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to loop back and cover it because of what I think it represents.
CNN did an almost five-minute puff piece on someone named Zen Honeycutt.
She's a Maha activist who previously founded an organization called Moms Across America and volunteered on the Bobby Kennedy campaign.
The short segment started with B-roll of Honeycutt gathering fresh eggs and goat milk on her small farm and I was like millions of moms all across America, she says, dealing with food allergies and autoimmune issues.
She goes on without any pushback to say that GMOs, glyphosate, And vaccines are the cause of these problems.
I've really been enjoying your goat milk videos, Julian, in your backyard, too.
I gotta say, it's a good way to start the new year.
So there was no pushback at all?
No.
Okay.
There is some pushback that comes a little bit later, but the opening is just all, here's Sen Honeycutt in her natural domain, and then here are the statements she makes.
Yeah, it's idyllic.
Yeah.
Then CNN showed Zen visiting Congress to testify about supposedly dangerous chemicals in school food, with clips of Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders decrying this crisis.
Then they showed her on her laptop doing a live stream with one of Del Bigtree's books prominently displayed on the screen.
And here's some of what she said.
If Kennedy is able to do what he wants to do at the head of the HHS, we won't even need health care.
I'm saying we won't be going to the doctors because we won't be sick.
We need to get rid of the concept of mandating the vaccines in order to attend school, I believe.
Well, I think the next administration is going to be on board with you with that.
To her credit, the interviewer, Meena Derson, did list off next how the CDC, the FDA, the EPA, the NIH, and the USDA refute many of the claims of Honeycutt's activism, and then asks, that doesn't move you at all?
Now, Honeycutt answers that she's seen too much independent science that negates those agencies.
She then says that, Those same government agencies refute these claims about vaccines.
But then she goes on to say that Zen's food activism is finding mainstream allies and that the FDA, as evidence of this, may soon ban red food dye.
The segment ends with Honeycutt saying, I don't feel like a conspiracy theorist.
I feel the real conspiracy is to shut down information in order to protect the profits of corporations.
So there's a couple things going on here that sounded alarm bells for me.
The first is that this is a very sympathetic treatment of an anti-vax activist mom.
Even the one moment of pushback is a bit of a softball that sets Honeycutt up to assert her well-practiced talking points, which are then followed by a reiteration of the scientific consensus.
But starting with that word, unsurprisingly, it kind of plays to me like a bit of a caveat.
Yeah, the phrase, doesn't that move you at all?
It sounds like she's asking about some sort of personal judgment or something like that.
What do you think about society's view of what you're doing instead of what the real question is?
That's right, that's right.
It's also what Bartlett does with a lot, like Glucose Goddess.
We'll play some clips from that later in the show, but it's the same sort of technique.
He will push back, but it often feels like a setup.
Yeah, this is what all of these people say.
Why don't you agree with them, right?
And then what a lot of people don't realize is how well rehearsed these kind of activists are.
They're very good at then switching to their talking points.
When the piece shifts towards how Senators Booker and Sanders are on board with Honeycutt's toxic food crusade and points to the small victory of the FDA potentially banning red food coloring, I think we see a dynamic here.
This is sort of the Trojan horse reality, or sometimes people call it the Mott and Bailey, of how Maha messaging is infiltrating the discourse and becoming normalized.
Because it's an outrageous claim that millions of moms are dealing with food allergies and autoimmune conditions and that those are caused by GMOs, glyphosate, and vaccines.
But then she can retreat to the more normalized, and CNN actually enables this.
We can retreat to the more normalized, common-sense appeal to the dangers of toxic chemicals in our food.
And that has wide appeal to anyone who doesn't really know how distorted and pseudoscientific the arguments for that are.
And this is evidenced by the senators themselves, who are just like, yes, of course, we must fight against this.
This is very bad.
I think it represents a sea change in how many Americans are going to get behind Maha and how much soft normalization via the media is going to play a role in that.
And how well their rhetoric is going to play, because I think this is a banging line.
She says, I don't feel like a conspiracy theorist.
I feel that the real conspiracy is to shut down the information in order to protect the profits of the corporations.
It's like...
That is going to resonate with so many people about so many issues.
It's so transitive to other domains in which silencing is actually a key tactic in corruption.
It's like if the details fade into the background, the sentiment and emotion can come to the foreground.
Oh, that's exactly right.
And the only thing new about this is that it's on CNN. People who traffic in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories have been making these kinds of statements for a long time.
It's just like, oh, now it's coming at you from CNN. Yeah.
It's actually not new on CNN, because the CNN Health Reporter has been repeating Environmental Working Group press releases for years.
They do this annually when they release their Dirty Dozen, and CNN is one of the organizations that does this.
And it's a banging line if you don't know whose honey cut is, but as soon as you start to peel away who she is...
It falls apart very quickly because she does the same thing.
Her mom's across America.
Her executive compensation, I looked this up right before we recorded, is about $56,000 a year for a nonprofit.
That's what she took in, which is not egregious whatsoever.
It actually tracks along with a lot of startup executive pay in the early stages.
But when you go to the Moms Across America website and you look at Zen's social media feeds, you quickly realize she's selling supplements.
And the supplements are positioned in ways that are sort of detoxing from all of the pseudoscience she's spreading.
So once again, you have someone who is like...
Yeah, this is the corporations coming at us and she's using the exact same playbook that they use.
So I can't take her seriously whatsoever because she fits very well into the Maha framework, but it's just the same exact grifting technique that she's doing that she's criticizing others of.
Okay, so I've got three memes or images of CEO assassin Luigi Mangione that I want to consider seriously, as in like assuming they're not just internet sloppy.
I mean, they could be slop, but I don't think they'd hit as hard if they were the work of simple shitposters.
There's something behind them, I think.
And I think they show something new in our coverage of the volatile and syncretic intersection of religious and political aspirations and passions and extremism.
Luigi Mangione's Italian-American Catholic roots come to the foreground here.
And also this process of the unofficial canonization of people seen as avengers for the downtrodden as Catholic saints.
So this is a different expression of religious sentiment than what we get with the muscular Jesus of evangelical extremism who takes vengeance on gay and trans people and wants to establish a white Christian ethnostate.
The first image you probably all saw, Mancione is taken on a perp walk coming off the helicopter from Pennsylvania on his way to Rikers.
and many people compared it to a lot of Arrest of Christ paintings dating back to the Middle Ages.
They brought up several examples and put them side by side.
They're quite striking because Jesus, you know, like Luigi, is surrounded by elite military and corrupt government officials.
And so mimicking Jesus's road to a kangaroo court goes to show, I think, just how much the state assumes that the propaganda of the last 40 years of film and TV has worked, especially when we see Eric Adams showing up for the parade, I think.
So when you say mimicking, Are you implying that they're deliberately mimicking a biblical scene and that this then backfired?
No, I mean it backfired.
And what was deliberate is the SWAT-level show of force, the expenditure of resources, which...
Along with the NYPD force-wide manhunt, I think, sent a clear message to people with money, which is like, we've got your back.
We're going to find this guy really quickly.
But I don't think they really thought through how many people that would play to.
Like, biblical scene or not, it did backfire.
So the second image is Mangione, and this is his mugshot, but it's altered by AI. He's depicted as a saint wearing an amulet of the three shell casings.
Now, this is kind of striking, but it's also nothing new, especially in Global South Catholicism, because the Haitian Revolution remembers its armed saints in a kind of syncretic Catholic Vodo paradigm.
And in Latin America, Simon Bolivar is lauded as a Catholic liberator from imperial rule.
Of course, he's a soldier, you know, general.
And Che Guevara is seen in iconic or saintly poses with a rifle or a machine gun sometimes topped with a halo, which is very odd.
And these are images that are disconcerting to mainstream Catholics who generally align with centrist and liberal politics.
But they do resonate with black liberation theology, which agreed with leaders like Malcolm X that Christianity is a white man's religion because of its emphases on pious nonviolence and forgiveness, which can be easily weaponized against the oppressed, right?
Like forgive your oppressor.
So today, you know, we can see the inspiration of this in some thinkers who theorized Jesus as a brown-armed revolutionary from Palestine.
Yeah, it's, I mean, in some ways it's troubling stuff too, because we know that going into this election year, there was some polling that reported that almost a quarter of Americans, and this was up from 15% the year previous, felt that political violence may be necessary in order to get the country felt that political violence may be necessary in order to get the country back on And that was, you know, 23% of all people polled, but like a third of Republicans.
And if people who supported MAGA were more likely to support that idea...
And these are the people with the most extreme religion and the most guns.
I'll also direct listeners to a link in the show notes about what is called saints culture in counter-extremism research, which is said to go back around 150 years, but in white supremacist circles.
And it manifests today online via shooters who are venerated as saints and martyrs for the greater good by being placed on calendars that designate It also brings to mind Steven Protero,
who's a religious historian, his book, American Jesus, when he writes about the fact he traces Jesus throughout American history and just basically says that every group has claimed ownership of him in some way, and that if you want to, you can find sort of I think?
Yeah, I mean, I think we're very familiar with Christian extremists that have that version of an armed and muscular Jesus from, you know, the evangelical and right-wing pastors that we know of, like John Hagee.
Yeah.
Their aim is about establishing and protecting U.S. empire.
It's quite a bit more rare, at least in these parts, to see that Jesus transformed or that kind of imagery transformed towards the impetus of freeing slaves or seeking justice for the weak.
Yeah, it's much more rare in the U.S., for sure.
I mean, when you take someone like John Hagee...
His weaponized political religion, I think, is less about preserving American empire and more about an accelerationism towards bringing about the apocalypse so that Jesus will come again, and so being in favor of trying to stoke the flames of a massive war in the Middle East.
Right.
So we come to image number three, and I think this is the one that stands out as different because Mangione is represented as the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
It's the most prominent image so far.
It's showed up in wheat-pasted posters on the walls close to the crime scene.
It's also on T-shirts.
And I think this is the most important part.
It's hanging in a local favorite pizza shop, Vito's, which is in Mangione's hometown of Baltimore, where his family has been big financial supporters of the archdiocese.
If we take the symbolism on the terms likely understood at vetoes and the majority of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics, the sacred heart is an image of vulnerable love.
The divine heart is on fire.
It's crowned with thorns.
self-sacrifice is the primary sort of impetus.
It's pierced in the side by the Roman guards.
One old prayer that I remember from school had this line, protect me in the midst of danger, comfort me in my afflictions, give me health of body, assistance in my temporal needs, thy blessing on all that I do in the grace of a holy death.
Now, this depiction, I think, of Mangione reframes and I would say launders his murder of Thompson as a work of mercy for which he's going to sacrifice his own life.
And I'd also say it's a distortion because, of course, Jesus doesn't kill Pontius Pilate or anybody else.
If he had, I don't think Christianity would be a thing.
His moral authority comes from dying and not from killing.
But...
This is why, I think in part, mainstream Catholics don't like the lionization.
The progressive Catholic America magazine interviewed three Catholic ethicists about it, and they all emphasized the commandments to love even those who have harmed us, and so on.
But I think that centrist Catholics who believe that personal morality is the highest good because God is taking care of the structural stuff may not be the best audience for this presentation of Mangione as the Sacred Heart.
from a woman who said that her therapist, this is no reference to Catholicism at all here, but the therapist specializes in somatic experiencing.
I think we're going to talk about Vander Kolk in a bit, said that for many victimized people, especially women, Mangione was able to offer a kind of catharsis of resolution.
That's in her opinion.
A man risked everything to exact accountability in an era in which there is no accountability, and this unleashed a torrent of emotion and love.
So I think this icon says more than, you know, bring on the class war or violence is good.
I think it also says, you know, we yearn for a more compassionate world.
We really don't know how to go about getting it.
It will probably involve suffering.
And we now have polls that show 41% of voters under 45 say that the assassination was acceptable, which is a very weird word, and that 69% of respondents say that health insurance claim denials had a great deal or a moderate amount of responsibility for the killing of Brian Thompson.
I think those are pretty big numbers that respond to very complex questions at a charged time.
And so my take is that that is why this mysterious sacred heart image is broad enough to capture this wide range of feelings.
So a couple things.
I mean, the first is that...
With Mangione, there's nothing about his online footprint, there's nothing about his manifesto, there's nothing about anything we know regarding his life that shows him to be overtly religious or at all a leftist, or to have been a customer of UnitedHealthcare, or to have had claims denied.
He appears more to just be a deeply troubled trust fund kid who was able to have a very expensive back surgery that left him in pain, who was impressed with the ideas of the Unabomber.
And with regards to the polls that we're talking about, you know, there have been two reported in the news so far.
And summarizing across the two, the overall numbers are very similar in terms of negative perceptions of Mangione or his actions.
Around 70% of all respondents feel that way.
In both polls, younger people were as much as four times more likely to be positive or to find his actions acceptable.
And what's interesting is that people over 60 who, I think it's safe to speculate, would generally have more experience with the healthcare system.
They're more likely to need it and to use it.
But 80% of those find the murdering of Brian Thompson unacceptable.
The larger and more recent Emerson poll that you're referencing, Matthew, is interesting because it also showed that men and those respondents aged 18 to 29, who 41% of them found the killing acceptable or somewhat acceptable, were likewise bullish on cryptocurrency and opposed to banning TikTok.
And it also had approval ratings of Elon Musk and J.D. Vance neck and neck.
So in terms of the political temperature that it's taking, I'm just not sure it's that convincing if we're making a leftist argument for the rising of class consciousness.
Well, I'm not making that argument.
I'm just describing the imagery.
But I would say that it's enough for me to know that a significant portion, maybe half of young people, are ambivalent about this issue.
I'm satisfied that that's not a fringe view.
And that social media responses are not a mirage.
And about the poll itself, I was listening to David Graeber giving this talk about anthropology, his field, and he said something very humble that even the deepest field work within a culture will give you about 2% insight into what's going on.
And that's living with people for years.
And if you do theory work on how you write about that 2%, then you're going to be addressing a fraction of that 2%.
When I think about those incredibly tough questions that probe mixed feelings of an activated population, like if I was asked, do you think the actions of the killer of the UHCCIO are acceptable or unacceptable?
It's like...
That's not easy for me.
That's not easy for me.
Because acceptable in the context of what?
Unacceptable in the context of what?
I would probably think about it for a while and bail and be in that big chunk in the middle who were neutral on the question, right?
And so I think that what I'm satisfied with is that the actual sentiment is not unified at all and that young people are a little bit more clued into the ambivalence of violence between social and individual murder.
Nearly five years into this podcast, we're often asked for the 101 on how wellness influencers and right-wing operatives have merged with Being steeped in a niche subject sometimes blinds you to the fact that most people are not paying attention to a field of study called conspirituality, even as the consequences of this field become more mainstream.
I think about balancing this when I'm writing episodes, how to not continually repeat myself so that long-time listeners don't fall asleep in boredom, but also recognizing we're constantly being introduced to new listeners who don't have the context of 600-plus episodes and a book in our catalog.
And the urgency of conspirituality is being felt on a national level with RFK Jr. probably being given the keys to run the massive bureaucracy known as the Department of Health and Human Services where he's going to lord over other like-minded contrarian appointees that are going to fill important cabinet positions.
But conspiracy seeps into other domains, including the one that I want to look at today, the entrepreneurial tech world.
Now, we've looked at this through a variety of angles, including episodes on cryptocurrency.
We've talked about longevity protocols.
We often talk about the different aspects of wellness that are involved in longevity as well.
But I want to look at one of the most popular podcasters in the world who...
for a variety of reasons, has hosted a wide range of conspiracy-adjacent figures in the past year, and he offers no pushback when they spread health misinformation.
And he has one of the top five podcasts in the world as of this year.
So his name is Stephen Bartlett, and he hosts Diary of a CEO, which he said will net him $25 million in revenue this year.
All right, a quick bio to set the stage.
Bartlett is a Botswana-born British entrepreneur and investor.
He was born to an English father and Nigerian mother, and his family moved to England when he was two.
And that although he's British and he has generally always lived there, he fits into a popular American tech lore mold that has dominated Silicon Valley for generations.
He was expelled from secondary school, and he dropped out of college after one lecture.
He then decided he was going to make a name in tech.
So he founded the messaging board called Wallpark in 2013, and he co-founded a social media marketing firm called Social Chain in 2014.
He left his position as CEO there in 2020.
and he sold his ownership stake to his co-founder in 2023 for $9.6 million.
So that's where the CEO part of his podcast title comes from, which he launched in 2017. He's also one of the Dragon investors on a Shark Tank style show called Dragon's Den, which actually precedes the American version, Shark Tank.
It's actually based on a Japanese series.
And in 2023, Bartlett launched the $100 million flight fund for tech investments.
Now, he's interviewed a range of high-profile guests such as Boris Johnson, Seth Rogen, Richard Branson, and yes, some conspiracy favorites like Andrew Huberman and Brett Weinstein.
Now, unlike prolific podcasters, I'm thinking like Joe Rogan, Bartlett comes across as more earnest.
He's a little softer spoken, although he gets a little hyper sometimes.
He's a guy who's truly just asking questions.
But a recent BBC investigative report discovered that those questions have led to a lot of misinformation, especially around health.
So among their findings, they discovered the following stories being shared.
There are anti-vaccine conspiracies stating that COVID was an engineered weapon.
Polycystic ovarian syndrome, autism, and other disorders can be reversed with diet.
Those are some of the claims here.
And that evidence-based medication is toxic for patients, and he's downplayed the role of successful proven treatments.
And so here we have someone who's wildly popular in the tech entrepreneurial space, and he's platforming a rogue's gallery of misinformation peddlers.
And given his team's penchant for taking scare quotes for YouTube banners for each episode, I kind of get the feeling that he's not that earnest about all this stuff.
You know, I look through the thumbnails and the headlines are pretty uniform.
So he'll say things like, 95% of your mind is controlled.
And this is Joe Dispenza.
Aliens live among us.
Medicating kids can harm brain development.
Why scientists are afraid to talk about God.
So the keyword, which I'm shouting, is always block highlighted.
And it reminds me of two things.
Like, Alex Jones does clickbait titles like that.
But also, there is the enormous sector of whiz-bang, subscribe-now YouTube slop that's directed at kids.
Like, if I scroll through—you guys probably do not know because you don't have the same kids in your house— Preston Plays, his YouTube feed.
He has 16 million followers, so this is twice as many as Bartlett.
So I think there might be some influence coming from the bottom up in some cases.
But anyway, he'll have titles like Escaping Doors in Minecraft, Myths That Will Destroy Your Trust in Minecraft.
You Will Never See This in Minecraft.
There's a same sort of punctuation.
The titles are all of a similar length.
There's always a single punch in capitals.
It's really fascinating, actually, how the forms just are transitive across all of these domains.
Yeah, I wouldn't say Bartlett is being groundbreaking in any way, but he's definitely exploiting a cognitive bias that people have toward those title cards.
And maybe I'll check out your friend Preston.
Preston Plays.
Yeah, you'll love him.
But you know what?
You won't get the full sort of DL unless you spend like an hour.
You have to just scroll and scroll and scroll, man.
I have to say, I mean, I love my friends with kids, but when I see their Spotify playlists and their algorithms, I don't know how I could do it.
That is the least of their problems, Derek.
So Bartlett hosts a range of guests, as I said, and not all spread misinformation.
He's hosted people I respect.
There's Trevor Noah was on, Esther Perel, Dr. Mike Busta Rhymes was on.
And like Rogan, it's a catch-all show that seems dependent both on high-profile names but also Bartlett's interests.
So I just want to be clear that my framework in this episode isn't that Bartlett's bad, but more like what happens when you have a top five podcast in the world and you don't take the time to properly vet information?
Well, also, I mean, my framing thought from the outset is like, what else are we to expect from a podcast empire growing on the principle of uncovering novel or controversial ideas?
Like, it just seems inevitable that this is what viral success looks like, that it's going to be about disruption in some ways, which, you know, links back to probably his investment days.
I agree.
I mean, I wish it weren't true.
And I don't know.
I don't know if like your example with Preston, like he's obviously or that show is obviously using a technique to draw people in.
But once you get inside Preston Plays, is there misinformation there?
About Minecraft?
No, I don't think so.
No, there's just endless affiliate deals that are not quite on the level that are hidden and that sort of thing, yeah.
Okay, got it, got it.
So what I'd like to look at is a few episodes and get your guys' thought on what's being shared and discuss the techniques he might be using to build one of the biggest podcast brands in the world.
We're not going to clip from this first one because we discussed it and Matthew, this actually is ripe territory for a full episode or something more in depth.
So we're not going to pull from it.
But on December 23rd, he hosted Bessel van der Kolk.
of the wildly popular book, The Body Keeps the Score, a book that I, like millions of others, read and incorporated into my life until I read some serious pushback about the science being on shaky ground.
Having previewed a bunch of the episode with Bartlett, he doesn't really push back on the theories that are presented.
So I just want to ask for now, do you guys have any high-level thoughts on hosting Van Der Kolk uncritically or maybe the impact that his book has had on the field of trauma studies?
Well, it's par for the course.
He's pretty much always hosted uncritically.
And we've been thinking about Van Der Kolk for years, I think at least since the Swan Song series.
It's called the Teal Swan Collection.
It's on our Patreon.
And I still get a lot of emails from therapists who say that Body Keeps the Score has kind of like dumbed down everything in the profession with its titular formula because, of course, yes, the body remembers things, but that's not the whole story.
And there is some broader coverage that's starting up in addition to some of the scientific pushback.
There's a recent Mother Jones article by Emmy Nightfield that was pretty strong in the neoliberalism critique category, which is he presents this theory, which basically means that all of your troubles are internal.
They are historical.
They are remembered.
They are there for you and you alone to purify and resolve.
But hold on, Matthew, I'm just curious about that.
I'm hearing you right now.
Like, isn't that a critique that can be made of psychotherapy in general in terms of the political angle that is being taken there?
Well, it depends what school you're talking about.
But I mean, I think a lot of psychotherapy is not about rehashing trauma, but about forming better attachments and, you know, neutral relationships, supportive relationships and alliances.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Yeah, yeah.
So there's maybe like three concentric circles there, right?
There's like the concentric circle that says, it's all just inside you.
And then there's the like, oh, but wait, we're deeply relational beings, right?
And then there's another circle that says, well, you know, some of this has to do with I think that where van der Kolk is really important is that he has connections with this particular branch of psychotherapy that goes right back into the 90s that involves a lot of intrusive and activist therapeutics that influences the satanic panic movement.
Because there is, yes, you have to examine your body for these hidden secrets, and I'm going to sort of lead you into an examination of what they might be, and it's a process that is really vulnerable to confirmation bias and projection, and people like Barbara Snow strongly encouraging Teal Swan to believe, for example, that she was the victim of of satanic ritual abuse.
So this idea that you intuitively know what has happened to you is really, really compelling and really pernicious because it can be true in general, but often not in detail.
And I think it's like so many other methods that we examine on our beat because it really relies on hijacking and emphasizing and spotlighting something that feels very natural and But it can be really politically or epistemologically unstable or volatile, but also extremely catchy.
So I'm not surprised at all he shows up on Stephen Bartlett because he's just perfect for podcasting.
Yeah, and just to do a callback to the early days of the podcast, this maps really, really well onto J.P. Sears' journey from being an emotional healing coach to being someone who says trust your heart about all manner of conspiracy theories and anti-vax and MAGA, etc.
Yeah.
We'll look for that in the coming weeks.
Let's move into Julian's wheelhouse with the next guest, Mr. Brett Weinstein.
Does he have to be in my wheelhouse?
This guy, this guy, for anyone who doesn't know Brett Weinstein, here's a quick synopsis and I'll truncate it as much as I can.
He's a former tenured professor of evolutionary biology.
Some people will know that he was involved in the Evergreen State College controversy.
He was at the center of it.
He and his wife, Heather Hang, were there for 15 years.
He was a tenured professor, but they ended up resigning from Evergreen after a series of campus protests, which alleged racism in certain statements he had made.
He leveraged that controversy to take what we sometimes call the censorship free speech martyr pathway into the digital media limelight, where of course he gets a lot more exposure and gets to have a lot of free speech.
And then at the same time, he sort of downplayed the fact that between the two of them, they were given half a million dollars from the college to walk away from that situation.
He was then held up as a paragon of courage in the face of the woke takeover of higher education on the podcast circuit.
It turned out that Brett was, in fact, tailor-made, as we would come to see.
For the largely male contrarian podcast circuit, he had alternative ideas about evolution that he said were being suppressed.
And likewise, he had a brother named Eric whose alternative views about mathematical physics had apparently been suppressed as well.
They both believed they had unfairly been cheated out of Nobel Prizes.
You said had, it's has.
Don't put him in the past.
Yeah.
Yeah, and not only that, I think they have an uncle who they say should have a Nobel as well.
This is a very aggrieved family of geniuses who have been just shut down and cheated out of all of the accolades they deserve.
By the time COVID rolled around, Brett and Heather were early adopters of the lab leak theory.
They promoted it on Bill Maher's talk show, which was a really big moment for them in terms of TV exposure.
And then always ahead of the crackpot curve, the couple also raised concerns about COVID vaccines.
They then touted ivermectin as the real cure and the prophylactic preventative of COVID that had been smeared by Big Pharma.
Even when the evidence showed otherwise.
They platformed the biggest ivermectin salesmen who, oddly enough, were also anti-vaxxers on their Dark Horse podcast, which then served as a kind of pipeline for each of those folks to then end up spewing their dangerous lies for profit to Joe Rogan's millions of listeners.
And then over the last few years, Brett Weinstein has been a guest on Alex Jones' Infowars.
He's also proposed that the Israelis had foreknowledge But then allowed October 7th to happen as a distraction from the COVID grievance and anti-vax efforts of himself and his circle of brilliant mavericks.
Sounds absolutely ludicrous, but he has said this.
He also proposed that Biden had disappeared from public view after pulling out of the 2024 election so as to bait conspiracy theorists into thinking he was dead, all so that they could then later humiliate the conspiracy hypothesizers by reappearing and being healthy and healthy.
I love that video because he was next to a lake.
The breeze and the birds were in the background the whole time.
It was very serene.
It's so weird.
It's like something created for the Lost TV series, or I don't know.
This is all to say that if Stephen Bartlett and his team at Diary of a CEO were doing any sincere vetting of guests beyond just looking at their audience reach, and Weinstein does have significant audience reach, they'd know better than to platform him.
In this specific interview, Stephen gave Weinstein free reign to ramble and segue at will between his current favorite fringe beliefs and conspiracy theories.
And here's like a little summary.
It turns out that Brett is actually less worried about climate change than space weather.
He argues that the catastrophic dangers of solar flares and the reversal of the Earth's magnetic poles, haven't heard that one in a while, dwarfs anthropogenic climate change.
And in typical Brett fashion, these are alarming but speculative prognoses based on what experts in the relevant fields describe as pseudoscience.
But they serve his purpose very well as the lone genius warning that the sky is falling, and only he and a small group of daring mavericks have predicted it.
He gets right into all of this from about four minutes into the interview and then rambles authoritatively on it.
This is about the shifting of the poles and what's going to happen with solar flares.
He does this for about 40 minutes.
Now, for his part, Bartlett does, as you've referenced, Derek, his usual careful listening, and then he asks extremely basic clarifying questions like, what is a solar flare?
And there's no reference to evidence or scientific consensus at all.
Then Brett gives a prepper-style explanation Welcome to my show!
They knew that the virus was going to put them in a position to make billions of dollars.
And then, plot twist, this is the reason why all the universities are woke.
Didn't see that coming.
Why?
Well, let's have Brett explain how he connects the dots.
Was their first instinct to tell the public?
No.
There's a perverse incentive against it.
Any place where you can get the jump on the public with respect to knowing what's coming is an opportunity to make millions into billions.
So maybe you don't want the public to have truth-seeking institutions that work.
So this, I think, is liable to be the reason that there's not a single university in the US that still functions.
Really?
You think that's why?
Yeah.
I think if you had one university that functioned, then certainly that would be the place everybody wanted to send their kids.
I mean, I have two college-age kids.
If there was a university that still made sense, it's the obvious place for them to go.
Why don't they make sense anymore, in your view?
They don't make sense because...
Well, there's multiple layers.
You've got a scientific apparatus that is very powerful when it comes to finding the truth and very fragile when it comes to resisting perverse incentives.
As in like wokeism.
Wokeism and pressures to be politically correct.
Exactly.
So where is the American university that stood up and said...
I'm sorry, but men can't become women.
They can live as women.
They can dress as women.
There are surgeries.
There are pharmaceuticals.
There's nothing you can do that takes your birth sex and changes it to the opposite one.
Not a single university said that anywhere else.
How is the university going to say that?
Like, who in the university?
Were they going to put that on their website?
Was it going to be in the student manual?
I don't understand that.
We're talking about professors at colleges who would be developing scientific hypotheses and research and stuff like that.
Anyway, what universities were going to make money by withholding COVID information from the public?
And how were they going to do that?
Like...
Is he talking about vaccine profitability?
There are several layers.
There's several layers.
So somebody with his affect of sort of pseudo-intelligence, he's going to have to walk a really fine line going forward to keep his audience because he's going to have to push the envelope and find the solar flares and the reversal of the poles, and he's going to have to find more and more scary, weird things to talk about.
And at the same time, he's going to have to maintain his composure so that he doesn't look like Alex Jones, right.
He's going to have to find some sort of pathway of respectability there.
That's his brand.
Yeah, but the powers that be had a vested interest in universities no longer being bastions of truth.
And hence wokeness, because therefore the powers that be can make all this money off of the COVID vaccine.
It's completely nutty.
I also love the anecdotal response he gives about how nobody wants to send their kids to any universities.
Sure.
Nobody.
Nobody wants to go.
They don't want to go.
Have you asked people?
I mean, it's just a common sense fact.
I don't think he knows any people.
Yeah.
After this clip, Brett says that the mainstream media was also destroyed by no longer pursuing truth due to a combination of wokeness and COVID cover-ups.
So everything comes back to the same stuff.
It's all trans people and the lab leak essentially and vaccines being dangerous and ivermectin being the cure.
About an hour later, in this three-hour conversation, Brett comes back around to the failures of COVID, the lab leak hypothesis, and smearing Anthony Fauci after saying that AI is dangerous, but regulating AI would be even more dangerous.
Oh, and by the way, the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic was actually not such a big deal.
He ends by giving some life advice on how to be happier and healthier.
And this includes avoiding seed oils and being really careful about pornography.
You know, three hours, Julian.
I sat through a lot of the four hours between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Huberman yesterday.
Many sections which included pornography, interestingly.
I guess it's a thing with these guys.
They really like talking about it.
My takeaway in all of this would be that Stephen Bartlett has the perfect platform for a Weinstein-style crank to pontificate.
He can ramble at length on his corkboard segues.
All he gets in response, as you could tell, I wanted to include those in that somewhat long clip, right?
All he gets is these polite clarifying questions, as well as access to almost 9 million subscribers who trust Bartlett's judgment, and that's the big problem.
Okay, next up we have Jessie Inchopse.
I can hear my wife screaming with her French literature degree from upstairs.
Let's just call her glucose goddess because that's her name that she goes by.
She is a French biochemist who has amassed a huge following for her glucose hacks.
She's also the author of the bestselling 2022 pop sci book, Glucose Revolution, The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar.
And if you think medical experts and clinical nutritionists rush to use the book in their practice and curriculum, you'd be very wrong.
Glucose Goddess also sells an anti-spike formula, which is a supplement that claims is the best to support your glucose levels.
Is there clinical evidence to support this claim?
What do you think?
Let's listen to what she has to say on Bartlett's podcast.
Are there any foods that you have been surprised at when you've tested them?
Because this is one of the really shocking things that I discovered when I wore a continuous glucose monitor, is I would eat some things that I've been eating for a long, long time.
And they would cause a spike.
And I was like, what?
I thought that was healthy.
Yeah.
But what are those things, I guess, for the general...
The surprising ones?
Yeah, the surprising ones.
Not just for you, but for people that message you and go, oh my God, Jesse, I've been lied to about my tomato ketchup or...
Okay, I think the biggest ones are honey and grapes.
Okay.
So, grapes first.
You think, it's a fruit.
It's healthy.
It's natural.
It's good for me, right?
Well, actually, all the fruit that we find today in supermarkets is not natural.
It is the product of human breeding for thousands and thousands of years to make them extra sweet, extra juicy.
In the same way that humans have been breeding dogs from the time of the gray wolves into chihuahuas and golden retrievers.
These are not natural types of dogs.
We've bred wolves into these dogs.
Fruit is the same thing.
We've bred pieces of fruit to make these beautiful grapes without any seeds and just this little pocket of sugar.
And so a grape, when you look at it, actually, it's just a big dose of sugar.
It's in the fruit format, so people think it's good for them.
But actually, when it comes to your glucose levels, it's just...
Big glucose spike.
Another reason why we shouldn't be eating the dogs and eating the cats.
Oh my God.
So you might be surprised to learn that grapes have a moderate glycemic index and a low glycemic load, which means that grapes do not cause rapid or extreme increases in blood sugar levels for most people.
I didn't include the part about honey.
Interestingly, there's been this thing recently in wellness world, I know Matt Lurie has covered it a little bit, where wellness influencers are saying, don't feed your babies formula because it has high frucose corn syrup.
Give them honey instead.
And honey is completely toxic to babies and these are the toxic people, the toxicity people.
So that's a trend that's happening right now.
I have.
High fructose corn syrup in it.
Yeah, exactly.
It's fake.
In this, Bartlett also references continuous glucose monitors, which I've covered extensively.
They are really not useful for non-diabetics.
But Bartlett does this thing where he's like, I ate this food and then I looked at my monitor and I spiked.
And you can't actually reference how your sugar works in your body.
From just eating foods and then checking with a non-puncture monitor, which is what the CGMs are doing.
So it's really all to say it's leading people more and more towards disordered eating with this type of rhetoric.
And just to summarize all of your work on the CGM, it's basically giving poor but alarmist feedback that people are overreacting to in general, and there's this neurotic over-reliance on it, and it's not accurate.
Exactly.
It's not accurate.
It's really a tool for diabetics that they can use to monitor their sugar, but it's another way of not having to puncture themselves.
But that is the general best test to use.
So when the biohackers are using it, they're getting very ineffective feedback on what's actually happening in their body.
But they want any feedback.
They want feedback because they can do something.
Then they can do something, right?
They feel like they can do something.
But again, what happens is when you turn people away from grapes, which does have numerous health benefits, you're just creating another food category for people to avoid.
And that's what's really dangerous to me.
And it's this whole idea.
It goes back to the naturalistic fallacy that live under, oh, there was once when fruits were perfect to be eaten, but now man has manufactured them.
She uses this bogus analogy with dogs, which are the product of selective breeding over time.
And to pretend that grapes are no longer healthy is just bullshit.
So...
Next up, we have Yvonne Burkhart, which is a great example of fear-mongering for headlines.
So she is a toxicologist who brands herself as a low-tox expert.
And during the episode, Bartlett pulls out a variety of everyday products and shows them to her, and she rates them on the spot for toxicity.
And so not only now, we were talking just a moment ago at eating disorders, now you have a whole range of Candles and lotions and different products that they are now rating of whether or not you should have.
Is she consulting charts or something like that?
Like, is she reading the chemicals or is she consulting studies as she does that?
No.
Bartlett is reading the ingredients to her and she's riffing on air right in the moment.
So there's no consulting happening.
Okay.
So it's kind of like muscle testing for products.
Yeah.
Very well played.
So as cosmetic chemist and friend of the pod, Michelle Wong, who goes by Lab Muffin, she has posted, and specifically using this podcast episode, that Burkhart gets a lot wrong.
Burkhart's social media feed is filled with things to avoid, but then her link tree directs you to a whole host of supplements and products that she has personally vetted for her and her family.
And if you guys are interested, and I know you are, you can join her 12-month Low-Tox University program for just $597.
Oh, man.
So instead of breaking down Burkhardt's misinformation, I'm going to let Michelle Wong do it.
I'm going to clip from her because she's already done that work.
And I want to flag something that I've discussed personally with Michelle as well as Michelle's friend and now a friend of mine who's a cosmetic chemist named Jen Novakovich who runs the EcoWell podcast.
And that is Yvonne's demonization of phthalates.
Now, we don't talk much about cosmetics on this podcast.
I know they're important to all of us, but we just really don't get into them.
But phthalates are demonized in the clean beauty world as much as seed oils are in nutrition.
And both Jen and Michelle recently told me that they are one of the most studied and regulated chemicals in cosmetics.
But as with everything, the dose makes the poison.
So what you'll see is these clean beauty influencers find these studies about high phthalate levels and then saying that they cause cancer when that is not what's in the actual products that are being sold.
But if you have a detox program or a clean beauty product to sell, they become easy targets.
Does this have phthalates in it?
Do you see a word fragrance slash parfum?
Yeah.
That's what you're looking for.
There is a lot that isn't true in this shocking truth.
Deodorants and all cosmetic products are regulated for safety, there are regulatory toxicologists checking if there are safe levels of ingredients and products, and there are laws against unsafe products.
You've probably heard a lot about phthalates being bad, but there are a lot of different phthalates.
It's like berries, some phthalates are fine, some phthalates are really bad.
The only phthalate used in fragrances is diethyl phthalate and that's because it's been repeatedly found to be very safe.
If you actually look at the studies on phthalates and health concerns, it's always the phthalates in plastics and not the ones in fragrances.
And of course the dose matters for every individual phthalate as well.
And the worst part is the so-called safer alternative she recommends is essential oils and she was just talking about allergens.
Essential oils are one of the main sources of allergens in fragrances.
Yes, benzene is a known carcinogen, but that doesn't mean that any amount is meaningfully harmful.
Sunlight is a known carcinogen.
Benzene is already in the air everywhere.
The amount that you're getting from normal use of a deodorant is not adding much to the amount that you're already breathing.
Yes, she is a toxicologist and this is exactly why I always recommend looking for the consensus of relevant experts.
There are experts in every field that didn't learn their subject well and just barely passed, or they might be ignoring what the regulations and evidence say, Possibly to sell a course, for example.
They're just taking advantage of the fact you trust them because they have an expert label.
Instead, follow Mo Skinlab.
He's a toxicologist who makes far more accurate content.
Mo Skinlab is very good.
Phthalate.
I've been binging The Sopranos with my wife again for the last five seasons in the last two months, and so I've watched my pronunciations go down and down as I'm reminded of what I grew up in.
Phthalate.
Thank you, Michelle, for that.
And we have one more.
And this guy has been in the news a lot lately.
I've covered him on a recent bonus episode, Mark Hyman, who is the leading star in the functional medicine circuit.
He is behind a lot of the talk around functional medicine, looking for the root cause of disease, as if evidence-based medicine didn't also do that.
He's a mixed bag because he does say true things and his advice is often...
Fine.
It's not revelatory.
It's just things like eat whole foods and move your body.
But unlike a lot of wellness influencers, he's actually trained as a physician, although I would argue he's more of a marketer at this point.
His interview with Bartlett touches upon a lot of topics.
Some, again, fine, but others are really questionable.
And This past Monday, I released a bonus episode that included Hyman's thoughts on Ozempek from a recent podcast.
And here too, he's playing a bit loose with the data.
But I want to look at this one moment in his conversation when Bartlett says that Brits are always getting fat when they travel to the US. And then Hyman goes into a sermon on our food system.
Yeah, we live in a toxic nutritional landscape.
It's a nutritional wasteland, a carnival of enticing, colorful, addictive, highly processed food-like substances that drive our biology in all the wrong ways.
And so it's very difficult to be healthy in America, which is why 93% of us have some metabolic dysfunction.
This is according to what we call the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey the government does, which is hundreds of thousands of people looking at their blood work over many, many years.
And we're messed up.
And it's not an accident.
It has to do with the food we produce, how we grow it, what we grow, how it's processed, how it's made into different food-like substances, how it's marketed, sold in grocery stores, restaurants.
So it's very difficult, unless you really know what you're doing, to stay out of trouble in America.
I mean, I do it because I'm highly educated, but it's very tough, and it's easy to make the wrong choice.
So when Hyman says we live in a toxic nutritional landscape, he's being very disingenuous, especially when he's referring to we.
Because as the New York Times recently reported in a mostly puff piece about Hyman and his friendship with RFK Jr., the man made $28.8 million in 2023. And a large chunk of that comes from his supplement line's 300,000 customers.
I'll return to that in a moment, but claiming that our food is toxic at every opportunity is a great marketing pitch if you run a supplement line.
Now, I know your point is that he's going to be focusing on the data that he can market to and he's going to distort it or he's going to misappropriate it.
But I do think, like here's the challenge, like what we referenced before.
What was the other one at the top?
There are all of these killer lines in this discourse.
One of them is toxic nutritional landscape, food-like products.
I think it's pretty easy to invoke disgust this way.
Because if you're not up on the chemistry, he's going to be speaking to a kind of generalized alienation that I think cuts across many experiences, many class experiences.
You know, I'm thinking of memories of grocery aisles stocked with limitless products, hospital meals, school lunches, buffet lines with like reheated slop food.
You know, as a Gen X person, I have memories of Boomer desserts filled with gelatin and marshmallows.
Mm-hmm.
There's also this moral undercurrent here about the guilt of consumption itself.
There's a hidden critique of capitalism even, without actually naming it, that makes people gluttonous and engorged on garbage.
It's tough.
He's naming something, I think.
I agree with broad contours of that.
I don't think Hyman is critiquing capitalism whatsoever because he is one of the biggest capitalists that I can see.
And it goes back earlier about the killer line aspect.
I don't think it is if you put it into the context of who's saying it.
But especially because also this is what the wellness influencers like Hyman do so well – America actually ranks third out of 113 countries for quality and safety in the Global Food Index.
Toxicity, the word, has a meaning, and he's distorting that meaning because we actually rank much lower on all the other scores in the Global Food Index, like affordability and availability.
But what wellness influencers do is latch onto the bullshit term like toxicity to sell their products, even as the This is very similar to how the right-wing media echo chamber functions.
There are talking points, and when those talking points hit, everyone starts using them.
And that's what's going on right now with this whole thing that America's food system is hopelessly toxic, and it's so much worse than Europe.
And it's garbage, but everyone's saying it now, and so people are believing that it's true.
I forget which doctor I follow.
It's someone I've recently come across, but she pointed out that the influencers are hanging on the fact that the US has five food dyes that are banned in Europe, but they never bring up the fact that Europe has 16 food dyes that are banned in the US. Exactly.
And to the second one that you flagged, Matthew, food-like products.
That is true because there is a lot of shit on shelves and I appreciated your invoking the school line.
I actually became a vegetarian because of the Rutgers University Food Hall.
So I very much appreciate that.
But it's not like the US is alone in producing that.
My wife and I predominantly shop at, or about half of our shopping is at stores like H Mart and Hong Fat here in Portland.
And these are Asian super stores.
And the amount of imported ultra processed foods that are sold in other countries and brought here, it's not like we're alone in that.
So what he's not speaking to is affordability and availability, which I think is really important because that gets into the social determinants of health.
So Hyman basically markets to people who can afford what he is selling to them.
So they're killer lines, I think, to those people, but not to the people whose only options are buying the ultra processed foods.
Yeah, but don't you think there are poor people out there who will resonate with the message that they're being given shit options in the Walmart grocery aisles?
Like this is how RFK Jr. makes inroads with like black urban farmers who are trying to fill in food deserts.
Like the paradox might be that there might be a segment of low income people who are really moved by this rhetoric, even though Hyman doesn't give a shit about them.
I would say it's possible there's a segment, but that is not the audience that's going to be sold to the supplements.
So, yeah, I mean, there's always a segment of people who resonate with any power structure that is against them.
And in this case, it's absolutely true.
But I don't see much of that in any – I don't see them represented in any meaningful way in any of the activists around Maha.
And as I've said before, another disingenuous aspect is that these are the people with the poorest health outcomes, which is like that 93% number that I'll get to in a moment, that mostly experience those health outcomes, but they're not being represented in the people that can actually make a difference and live a healthy lifestyle.
And that's why I find so much of what Hyman and others doing really, really egregious.
So about that 93% number where he's saying that 93% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy.
And remember here, he blames this purely on the food system.
And the fact that he's metabolically healthy is because he's highly educated, which again, pulls into the social determinants of health.
But This number is true, but it comes from a team at Tufts University in 2022, and it was published in the Journal of American College of Cardiology.
Now, the number comes from a study of 55,000 people, not hundreds of thousands, as Hyman stated.
And in the announcement, a Tufts Now journalist covering the team at Tufts writes, Researchers evaluated Americans across five components of health.
levels of blood pressure, blood sugar, blood cholesterol, adiposity, overweight and obesity, and presence or absence of cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke, etc.
They found that only 6.8% of US adults had optimal levels of all five components as of 2017 to 2018.
Here's what I want to point out.
The team identified the reasons for this with the lead author concluding, quote, We need a complete overhaul of our healthcare system, food system, and built environment because this is a crisis for everyone, not just one segment of the population.
They also noted, Researchers also identified large health disparities between people of different sexes, ages, races, and ethnicities and education levels.
For example, adults with less education were half as likely to have optimal cardiometabolic health compared with adults with more education, and Mexican-Americans had one-third the optimal levels versus non-Hispanic white adults.
To bring this back to Hyman's tactics, the driver of all of our health problems is the toxic food system, and he remains metabolically healthy because he's highly educated.
Now, if every accusation is a confession, it's pretty obvious what his claims obscure, which as I flagged are the social determinants of health, a well-studied public health field that's been looking at the root cause of diseases for generations.
It also obscures the privileges of a man whose company earns $28.8 million in one year and is at the very upper end of health outcomes according to those social determinants.
So while the 93% number is accurate, Hyman's reasoning is flawed as it's only discussing one aspect of a much larger problem.
Don't even think about all the upstream problems when discussing these topics, especially when the people who enjoy the privileges of those upper levels of income are the target audience for the products, like spending hundreds of dollars a month on supplements to combat the toxic nutrition environment that is America.
And yes, the researchers on metabolic health concluded the same when they wrote Between 1999 and 2018, while the percentage of adults with good cardiometabolic health modestly increased among non-Hispanic white Americans, it went down for Mexican-American, other Hispanic, non-Hispanic Black, and adults of all other races.
There it is.
Hyman's target market actually increased their metabolic health markers during the same period that he and others used to fearmonger and sell products.
And they'll often attribute their great health to things like supplements and fitness regimens, and they're blind or they're ignoring how the determinants play a role in all this.
So once again, they're using data that affects the poorest and most vulnerable Americans in order to market to those whose health is pretty good already.
I think that's a great breakdown, Derek.
And I see two challenges, huge challenges, aside from all of the scientific difficulty of it.
And they both have to do with rhetoric.
These people make sense not because they tell the truth, But because they strike these deep emotional chords.
And I think the trick is going to be coming up with similar memes and formulae that strike the same chords as toxic nutritional landscape.
I don't know what that is, but it's like there has to be some kind of thing that hits, that drops in the same way.
Especially when we think about the focus on words like toxic, which...
I think can mean so much more than what a toxicologist can speak to within their domain.
Because showing how Hyman is wrong, like in one of those meanings, which is probably the most important one, it appeals to cognition, like to people's desire to overcome their epistemological instincts.
And not everyone is going to have energy for that.
Like when he's speaking to something actually that's really easy to grasp, which is the feeling of being alienated.
And the second thing that I wanted to say is that he might be a piece of shit grifter, but his rhetoric is really effective in the sense that he is speaking to parental experiences as well.
And I think that flooding Walmart with ultra-processed foods or having only ultra-processed foods available in food deserts because of pricing and time constraints, it is part of this country's abuse of the poor.
But Hyman does not have to care about them to abuse their data.
He also doesn't have to care about them if he's speaking to this kind of parental anxiety, which is at the basis, I think, of the maha mama side of things.
Because what you get as a parent, what I hear from his, because I'm actually moved by his description of like the carnival of addictive colors and flavors, what you get is you walk through this world of low-density, high-calorie foods, Because what you get as a parent, what I hear from his, because I'm actually moved by his description of like the carnival of addictive colors and flavors, what you get is you walk through this world of low density, high calorie foods, and your life is hijacked by your high calorie foods, and your life is hijacked by your children's honest desires, pulling in a thousand different ways towards the colors and the flavors.
And you can be relaxed about this as we are in our home and not turn your kids into orthorexics, but it's not a neutral experience.
It's like overwhelming and nauseating.
It takes a ton of energy to constantly negotiate this and to push back against this kind of relentless world of marketing, targeting these really young brains.
So I think the thing about his phrase, toxic nutritional landscape, is that parents especially are going to hear this very generalized thing.
And that's why I think, I wonder what the opposing term is that, I don't know, instantly communicates the possibility of like a safer, less grifting world.
Do you know what I mean?
Well, first you just identify Brandolini's law, which everyone is well familiar with.
Just the fact that the amount of energy expended to push back on bullshit is immense and often not nearly as effective.
And so it just flags the exact problem that health and science communicators face when they're faced with this.
And finding a sort of silver bullet message, it might be impossible.
It might be really, if not challenging, impossible.
Just like the fact that the liberals on the left have said, some people, that the left needs a Joe Rogan, which is just kind of ludicrous.
It's like, no, we need to create new ways of communication in our own way.
We don't need to mimic what's out there.
And the irony is that what Hyman is doing and others in this space are doing is they are mimicking We're good to go.
I don't have an answer and neither do most of the doctors and researchers that I talk to, but we are still trying.
