From 1999-2002, VH1 ran a show called “Where Are They Now?” The irregularly produced series wondered aloud what happened to former cultural icons like eighties hair metal bands, kid actors, and one-hit wonders. While some people remained surprisingly relevant, most were confined to, at best, appearing at VFWs and regional summer festivals in parking lots or, tragically, gripped by an addiction and dreams of a better time that they couldn’t make last.
Two years ago this month our book, Conspirituality, was published. We called one section Rogue’s Gallery to highlight a range of figures we’ve covered on the podcast. One of those chapters was dedicated to a man named Robert F Kennedy, Jr—don’t say we didn’t warn you. How about the other nine?
In our own version of “Where Are They Now,” we’re going to turn back the clock and revisit those other nine chapters. We’ll do it over three episodes in the coming weeks. This week, we begin with famed women’s health expert turned harp-playing conspiracy peddler, Christiane Northrup; self-proclaimed philosopher king, Charles Eisenstein; and former model turned middling new age filmmaker turned anti-vax documentarian Mikki Willis.
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Is this real?
I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person.
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Music Hey, everyone.
Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
Quite a topic for this week.
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I'm Matthew Remski.
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Conspirituality 261.
Where are they now?
From 1999 to 2002, VH1 ran a show called Where Are They Now?
The irregularly produced series wondered aloud what happened to former cultural icons like 80s hair metal bands, kid actors, and one-hit wonders.
While some people remained surprisingly relevant, most were confined to, at very best, appearing at BFWs and regional summer festivals in parking lots, or tragically gripped by an addiction and dreams of a better time that they couldn't make last.
Two years ago, this month, our book, Conspirituality, was published.
We called one section Rogue's Gallery to highlight a range of figures we've covered on the podcast.
One of those chapters was dedicated to a man named Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Don't say we didn't warn you.
How about the other nine?
In our version of Where Are They Now?, we're going to turn back the clock and revisit those nine other chapters.
We'll do it over three episodes in the coming weeks.
This week, we begin with famed women's health expert-turned-heart-playing conspiracy peddler, Christiane Northrup, self-proclaimed philosopher King, Charles Eisenstein, and former model-turned-middling-new-age filmmaker-turned-antivax documentarian, Mickey Willis.
All right, so guys, I greet you today from the test case city in the front line of American authoritarianism.
It's pretty crazy in LA right now, and everyone I know who has connections to or families who have some kind of contested immigration status is very freaked out.
And we have police and National Guard and now Marines engaging with the people of our city.
Pretty awful.
Yeah, and you also have a lot of people doing a lot of supporting of each other and learning a lot about community support and self-defense and bringing out the leaf blowers and all of this stuff and also food and people dancing.
It's pretty incredible.
Yeah, people are terrified and angry and also really loving one another.
Everyone knows what's happening, and we're all going to be glued to seeing how it unfolds.
In terms of our topic today, I chose to check in on my personal favorite best-selling women's wellness author and one-time Oprah Darling, she of the live stream harp music serenade, Dr. Christiane Northrup.
She was one of the first heavyweight boosters of Mickey Willis' plandemic anti-vax COVID conspiracy video released in May of 2020.
So we're talking really early days of what we've been doing.
Right.
If I remember correctly, the New York Times kind of pieced together how Plandemic bounced around the internet.
Northrop was really the vector that sent it off into the stratosphere.
But she was also an early adopter of that phrase, the Great Awakening, wasn't she?
Yeah.
So not only was she patient zero in spreading the pandemic of Plandemic, but she also imported the term Great Awakening from QAnon lore into Facebook holistic wellness discourse.
By publishing a daily Great Awakening video series that blended her reports on the powerful messages from various spirit channelers she followed with advice on essential oils and then, as we've said, moments of live, soothing heart performance.
She's really very good.
And then appreciative unboxing of gifts from her fans.
And along with all of that came moments of advice on how to red pill the normies in your family, how to understand your gun rights.
And get prepared to protect your kids against microchipped vaccines that would turn them into demonic half-animal chimeras.
There was a lot of scary stuff.
And also, she flipped most often every day, I would say, into kind of like a soothing, counseling.
And I also want to point out that the Great Awakening kind of carried with it a part of her subconscious Americana appeal, because it's this recurrent religious theme in U.S. history.
And I think it goes along with the fact that listeners might remember us talking about her gracious rolling Maine farmhouse, you know, where, you know, the Fourth of July, the whole place would be festooned with bunting.
So a lot of influences in there.
And I remember you did all of these IG kind of open letters to her back then, Julian.
I think in the hope that maybe she would, I don't know, listen or come to me.
Yeah, I mean, to the point of what you were just saying, I do think that she was very personable in those selfie sermons.
I think you're right that it had a kind of ritualized, sacralized quality to it.
And the parasocial vibes were very high and I think very real.
And you're absolutely right to point out the Great Awakening as having this rich history.
Actually, as part of my series on Patreon called Roots of Conspirituality, that's something that I address in depth.
And the Northeast is really the major area where a lot of this intense new religious movement exists.
In terms of the Instagram videos I did to her, this was in response to her radicalization arc.
And that included dog-whistling Second Amendment and militia support, just sort of in the mix amongst all of the New Age niceties.
And then I tracked how she switched from donating to pro-choice Democrats for a long time, exclusively in terms of any political donations.
In terms of the available documentation, to then sending money to Trump and conservative PACs at the same time as she was fundraising from her audience.
So that was interesting.
By January 6th, 2021, as we tracked her, she was water fasting in solidarity with the Capitol rioters.
But her most radical moment was when she told the podcast host that she'd put a bullet in the head of anyone who tried to vaccinate any kids in her family.
I'll have to look up and see if I can find the VH1 theme song to insert here, but where is she now?
Well, you may be unsurprised to know she's still there.
She's still on Facebook with over half a million followers.
It hasn't grown since her heyday.
It's pretty much stayed the same.
Even after being named one of the disinformation dozen, responsible for over 65% of anti-vaccine content during the pandemic on social media.
Like many who massively expanded their exposure during COVID, so we've seen this a lot, Northrop has sought ways to then monetize, as one does.
Her Facebook videos now are now almost entirely about marketing.
And we're not seeing a lot of the conspiratorial or political stuff.
It's mostly repetitive promos for Amata life.
An Amata Life, in case you're fortunate enough not to know, is her personally branded safe and natural set of menopause relief products, the active ingredient of which is a miracle herb from Thailand called Puraria Mirifica.
And unsurprisingly...
But that doesn't stop Dr. Northrup from selling it in pills and tinctures and eye cream and separate moisturizers for your face, your décollette, your body, and yes, indeed, your vagina.
Or ladies' vaginas.
Her sales pages also serve as email capture sourcers for her video courses and her book on menopause.
as well as her Amata Life newsletter that will deliver a steady drip of marketing edutainment.
That's always the key with these hucksters is finding a country that people don't particularly know a ton about with the folk medicine and then taking an herb from it.
David Wolf would do that with the Tibetan Goji It's like the Orientalism and the thing from far away that is rooted to an ancient tradition, right?
Right.
And my mother-in-law is from Northeastern Thailand.
And my wife would tell me these stories where when they came to America, they would- So there is this actual folk understanding of plants, but that does not necessarily translate as medicine.
And I think in that gap, people like Northrop are able to exploit the biases that people have around folk medicines or just being able to procure dinner from various sources.
But in terms of specifically, I just wanted to say with the menopause industry stuff, Dr. Jen Gunter, a friend of the pod, she has done a lot of great work.
And I'll look for some to include in the show notes, just talking about how this has become really a cottage industry for wellness influencers to...
And they're really exploiting what is a challenging time in ways that are really egregious.
So definitely check out Dr. Gunter's work on that.
Yeah, one of the things that's fascinating about that, which kind of runs parallel to a lot of the men's wellness kind of optimization grift, is that it's not only Alternative supplements and various kinds of remedies and practices.
But it's also off-label use of hormones.
Big Pharma produced hormones that these influencers are trying to get you to get on board with as the cure-all for a range of things.
I was surprised to hear that her Facebook following hasn't gone down because I recall when we were following her very closely, the amount of disappointment and disillusionment expressed by what seemed to be a pretty substantial chunk of her following because her main book –
Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom was really like a Bible to a certain demographic within the wellness world for, I would say, a couple of decades.
I think it was as popular among the women I knew in yoga and wellness as Light on Yoga was or something like that.
And the title, here's the thing, the title seemed to rhyme with the title of the famous book, Our Bodies, Ourselves, from the 1970s.
And I think that coded her content as feminist.
And in some ways- And she also did things like she decried unnecessary practices like routine circumcision for baby boys.
I didn't have any idea, given the number of people around me who were reading it, that the book already had pseudoscience red flags in it.
Including in the last edition, I think there was some misinformation about the HPV vaccine, warning people off of taking that.
But I don't know.
I think it might be a case in which the reader's commitment to an idea of, you know, promoting women-centered medicine, and for very good reason, obscured some of the research.
And that's just what I remember from the fallout.
And that's why I'm surprised that she didn't actually lose people.
I think that she probably has to maintain a recruitment of followers that just sort of pack up.
Well, it's sort of similar to Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth, right?
People at the time, it was speaking to a population that needed that sort of information, and you wouldn't necessarily know even where to look in the 90s for that information.
And then in reflection, it's like, oh, they kind of played loose here with a lot of what they were saying.
Yeah, I was just about to say that, Derek.
Absolutely.
The two run parallel, right?
So The Beauty Myth comes out in 1990.
Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom comes out in 94. Both of them are criticized for quoting a bunch of stats incorrectly.
Both of them make all sorts of claims about eating disorders that completely overlook the scientific and psychological consensus on the major causes along with various cultural influences.
And throughout, you know, she's pretty consistent.
I think there are ways in which she may have had more of a liberal leaning feminism, especially around things like reproductive freedom.
But throughout that book, she's saying that, you know, you should issue cancer treatments in favor of holistic methods that alternative medicine is empowering and takes us back to our ancestral kind of roots of how to have natural immunity and that you need to have informed consent on vaccines because you should trust your intuition.
So there's also like a lot of the gendered.
I think that's why I really appreciate Jen Gunther's take there, which is that there's nothing more anti-feminist than giving women a bunch of bad information about their health.
All right, so back in 2020.
The Great Awakening series was huge for Northrop on Facebook.
And it's interesting what you say, Matthew.
I feel like she may have lost a certain number of supporters due to her radicalization, but she filled those in with new people who were going, oh, finally, someone's singing our song.
But also it's that weird thing on Facebook where, you know, once you've followed someone on Facebook...
I don't know.
It's a different dynamic than the social media platforms.
Yeah, it has to be an activist action to unfollow, and then it becomes a thing, and then everybody's watching how many people are unfollowing the person, and so on.
Yeah, that rarely happens.
You're right.
Yeah, yeah.
So the Great Awakening series ran almost daily from March of 2020 all the way through January 26th of 2021.
And it mostly got like 25,000 to 50,000 views per video.
Some of them ballooned up as high as 120,000 views, probably due to good timing and sensationalist content.
And that level of exposure, if you track through her video stream on Facebook, actually does cross over at those times onto her other business videos that she was also putting up, much less frequently, but it's there.
And then probably due to Facebook Content moderation efforts, she does seem to have just flipped back into being a pseudoscience wellness promoter and doing things like shilling for structured water or partnering with a quack cancer coaching program, which actually is consistent with her early work.
These days, her less politicized videos are getting 2,000 to 5,000 views for the most part, so a big drop.
There's an occasional bump to 10,000 or 20,000 and it's hard to see why.
But around three years ago, every five to ten videos, there's this little 13-second clip that says, come and find me on Rumble and Telegram, just in case you lose me here.
So she was doing the Russell Brand routine before Russell Brand.
Her Rumble account, though, when I go look at it, it never really took off.
Not a lot of subscribers, not a lot of views.
Everything's below 10,000, mostly even lower than that.
And I think I can see why, because it's basically a duplicate of her Facebook video feed.
It's just promoting her products in a repetitive loop of a lot of the same videos going up again and again every couple months.
There are some additional political vlogs that you don't see on her Facebook, but really it's a bit of a flop.
Same sort of failed strategy on Twitter, where she actually does have 130,000 followers, but nowhere near the kind of engagement she still gets on Facebook.
Then she has a substack, which is completely paywalled at $10 a month.
And it's hard to see how that's going, but we don't know.
In terms of the long tail of inflammatory conspiracism and how much sort of enduring influence she's had, she has a widely debunked viral video.
It's an interview from November of 2020 in which she talks.
That still shows up everywhere every few months.
People post that clip.
Legacy.
But I'll finish up with this June 1st tweet that caught my eye.
It just reads, this is incredible, and then links to a long, odd, and very interesting sub-stack piece from an account called Observing Consciousness.
I've shared this piece with you guys.
It's called The Palantir Canon.
The Mirror That Captured the Machine.
And it's a 3,600-word essay written with poem-style line breaks, lots of short declarative sentences.
It's a bit like a sci-fi observational account on how a momentous event went down, but it's happening now.
And here's how it starts.
Power was always built like a pyramid, layered in secrecy, ruled from the top.
That's why it's falling in degrees.
The narrative of this piece is that Trump's executive orders have been some genius level legal warfare that have flipped the script on Palantir's all-seeing surveillance tyranny, which I guess was being used by Biden for evil and also by the deep state tyrants during COVID because newsflash, Trump was in office during COVID.
But now Palantir has flipped to serve the good as a Trump's executive orders weren't politics.
They were legal warheads, coded acts of silent rebellion.
Harvard fell, surveillance systems turned, and Palantir, their mirror of control, became the system that now watches them.
This canon doesn't theorize, it documents.
Each degree reveals what they never wanted seen, who built it, who ran it, who paid for it, and who falls next.
If you think this ends in courtrooms, You haven't seen degree 33. Oh boy, it's so intriguing.
It implies this vast conspiracy, literally from Masonic lodges to Ivy League halls, organized in a towering pyramid of 33 levels, which is actually the featured image for this post.
And Palantir is the nefarious crown jewel of that pyramid, the all-seeing eye.
Until, of course, Donald Trump blew it all up.
Not a physical explosion, but a legal one.
A structural implosion of the global corruption grid masked as routine bureaucracy.
Donald Trump didn't walk into Washington to play the game.
He came to flip the board.
Oh boy.
What's noteworthy here about what seems like a next iteration of QAnon storytelling is how it combines unhinged conspiracy paranoia with a very organized, legalistic, confident timeline that goes into a lot of depth.
Someone put a lot of time and effort into this.
They did their own research, but they taught the class in narrative coherence and internal logical consistency, even though it's pretty wild and baseless.
Christiane Northrup is the first person I've seen sharing it, and where have we heard that before?
So we'll be keeping an eye on this particular account and what this person writes next.
You know, I was going to say, as you were going through her recent material, Like it takes a particular type of person to return to just marketing, you know, her supplements after all of that excitement during the Great Awakening.
And so I'm not surprised because, you know, this seems like a good example of how an evolved QAnon worldview happens.
And it takes a lot of energy and intricacy to explain why the results are not just exactly what we see in the streets of L.A. right now.
And also, you know, he's got this, whoever it is, I said he, but I'm not sure.
It sounds, I don't know, it sounds like a tech bro guy.
I'm also hearing a weird inversion of Klein's mirror world here.
But, you know, when you first brought this to our attention, I wondered, is this going to fuel a new round of QAnon dreams?
But then I began to wonder whether the attraction of an ornate conspiracy theory is actually only really attractive and useful when you're not in power.
I don't know.
What do you think?
I mean, it definitely has a lot of energy behind it.
When you're part of the rebel alliance, as Peter Thiel likes to call his friends.
But nonetheless, I think one of the features of the information age and of the speed of digital life is that myth-making is happening in real time, and there will always be people who will continue to write the myth, which is how it really is, which is not how it appears, because everything is connected and nothing is an accident, etc.
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So we wrote a whole chapter in our book on Charles Eisenstein called New Age Q because he played throughout the early pandemic period the kind of role of channeler and prophet for the conspirituality wing of what became or of the MAGA movement and then what became the MAHA movement.
He was really, I think, the most eloquent, genteel, and liberal coded of the lot.
coded being the keyword there.
And, you know, he was kind of a muse for the Yeah, the way that you just framed that made me remember that he was the most appealing for a lot of folks in the more kind of yoga, mild-mannered, vegan, etc., etc., not particularly gravitating towards the more intense aspects of QAnon.
But he made a really big impact early on, I think, with a fairly broad population, right?
Yeah, I'd say fairly well-educated, left-leaning yoga types who have humanities degrees really picked up on what he had to say, and they found it very relieving.
He was first out of the gate in March of 2020.
With an essay called A Coronation for All, in which he tagged the pandemic as a mass spiritual opportunity that would come to fruition if we didn't rely on othering the virus with technologies of separation like quarantine and so on.
So he also networked through that essay with all of the early COVID contrarians and usually played the role of providing pseudo-intellectual and a kind of spiritual gravitas for, you know, what became the Maha movement.
Then he went on to do a stint as a kind of rent-a-guru guy with Aubrey Marcus before he was displaced by Mark Goffney, which I think is a huge mistake on Marcus's part.
Like, you should have stuck with Charles.
have, I mean, he might've told you an honest thing once in a while, uh, and not just like, you know, stroke your ego.
But during that time with, with Marcus, he also helped to create the new age origin story for, uh, the Maha movement and for the relevance of RFK Jr. on the world stage.
Um, he produced, they produced together this, uh, film called the gathering of the tribe that suggested that Marcus's crew, especially associated with fit for service were like anti-vax It was really high-level artistic animation.
People should check it out.
Music by ambient composer John Hopkins, really well-known and successful.
And then these wild implications that anti-vaxxers are really aliens that were sent to save all of humanity.
And it was that sort of stuff that helped to consolidate a solid chunk of liberal or left-leaning support for RFK Jr., at least those portions of that demographic that were really invested in wellness.
And then Eisenstein was hired as messaging director for Bobby, earning at one point over $21,000 per month for telling Bobby how to bring the story of separation to the world stage or whatever.
But the denouement for that contract featured Eisenstein having to make this crazy wisdom apologia for Bobby's endorsement for Trump, in which he kind of said that Trump is really only a trickster character.
So we don't really know how this is going to manifest, and it's going to take all of us to seek our highest intentions to figure out how to make things turn out well.
But eventually, Eisenstein broke with him over Bobby's support for Israel's military action in Gaza, which is now a genocide, of course.
Yeah, so Trump, in what you were saying a moment ago, Matthew, is he's whoever people project onto him, right?
There's no way of knowing who he really is.
He's kind of a cipher.
He is all things to all people.
And you should really need to get out of your own kind of dualistic thinking if you think you know who he is.
And then with regard to Bobby and Gazette, I mean, don't forget, this is obviously about blackmail, right?
Well, that's what he told Brett Weinstein, that he thought that Bobby was blackmailed into this kind of hardline, Israel is our aircraft carrier in the Middle East.
And the Palestinians are the most pampered people in the world or whatever the fuck he said.
And that, of course, ignores that the Kennedys have been Israel hawks forever, along with a vast majority of legacy Democrats.
But I would say that the bottom line on Eisenstein's legacy so far, because I'm going to look forward now into what he's been doing since, is that...
He has a subscription-based aspirational literature economy career that he's going to be able to continue for the foreseeable.
But over the past five years, those words really sped up a river that pushed this pseudoscientific populism into a position in which it's going to cause a mass casualty event at this point.
Anyone who goes with Charles Eisenstein on a healing work Yeah.
And I was thinking too that there's historical precedent for this.
The period between World War I and World War II saw the rise of all these proto-fascist poets who they either engaged in direct propaganda on behalf of people like Mussolini, so that would be Ezra Pound, or they played a more ethereal role in aestheticizing fascist themes.
So that would be like William Butler Yeats, who wrote marching songs for the Irish blue shirts who sailed under a swastika to fight for Frank.
It's very, very strange that I missed that in my English-lit education.
Yeah, me too.
You've ruined it now.
Sorry.
I'm seeing that the antidote to the strange beast that slouches toward Bethlehem to be born is actually fascism.
Yeah, the return to order, some sort of order.
That's what he was worried about.
I mean, it's very complicated.
A lot of views on Yeats, but that was in there and I had no idea.
And then, you know, alongside what you're saying, you have spiritual philosophers like Julius Evola from that time period who are now inspirational darlings of the old right.
People like Bannon and Curtis Yarvin will reference Julie Zavala, who moved in Mussolini and Hitler circles.
To be fair, on first scan, Eisenstein's content doesn't line up with – the romantic nationalism, the machine and speed fetishes, or the praise of masculinity that were the keynotes of 100 years ago.
So on the surface, it doesn't look like that at all.
But I think he actually does something more subtle and effective and also plausibly deniable because he turns the minds of erstwhile progressive people.
And he can apply that to everything from political polarization, which, you know, ultimately is meaningless, right?
The space between left and right just doesn't really, shouldn't really exist in the ethereal plane or whatever.
But neither should we, you know, separate ourselves from nature with vaccines or food dye and Froot Loops.
So I think he winds up softening up his readership with this general sense that nothing really is as it appears and that there are always deeper forces at play, that politics is this rigid illusion and that people should intuitively realize that a figure like Trump might be the agent we all need to break the illusion of politics as usual.
Yeah, he's really a one-trick pony in that regard.
He's got this arc And it's really sad to me that people with humanity degrees can't see through that, you know, to the extent that they've been taken in by this guy.
Because it's real, like, first year, you know, what is reality really?
How do we know anything at all?
kind of philosophy student, you know, silliness.
Yeah, well, I think the punchline today is that he's starting to get wise to himself.
So I've got this final quote that's kind of astonishing to me.
So I think whether he intended it or not, he carved out a really perfect content arc for today's proto-fascist poet.
We know that MAGA boomers love MAGA country music.
But Eisenstein's real gift is to help a more I still find him the most morally and psychologically complicated actor that we covered.
And maybe that's because I actually identify with his writing habits, if not his, like, politics.
Anybody who writes as much as he does shows signs of hypergraphia, like he can't stop.
And I can diagnose that informally in myself as someone who I'm pretty sure I've had bouts of what's called Geshwin syndrome, which is a form of temporal lobe epilepsy.
I haven't had a seizure in 30 years, and I don't know what's going on with him.
I can identify something both rigid and preoccupying in terms of the special interest of writing that is just on display.
I don't think he can stop it.
And so I think it has to be directed somewhere.
And I also think that he does it when he's stressed out.
He says as much.
It's like this terrible thing happened in the world and I had to disappear into myself for like eight days and come up with 9,000 words on whatever.
So if he finds a mystery that will provoke more writing, that's where he's going to go.
And he doesn't have journalism or academic boundaries or rules.
I don't think he has an editor.
I don't think he's ever had an editor.
He has nothing really but his own obsessions.
And this mechanism of chameleon-like audience capture that he shared with Marcus back when they disclosed basically that God told them that RFK Jr. should be president.
So we have a clip from that.
Every time I do public speaking, and maybe even to some extent in this conversation right now, I'm not just transmitting information.
In everything I say, there is always a question.
The question is, right?
Am I crazy here?
Do you resonate with this?
And so I look at your face.
I sense the energy in the room.
I hear the laughter or the tears.
And that helps me more deeply inhabit and receive the field of information that I am speaking from.
It's interesting that Marcus is actually reflecting back to him that he's doing okay, right?
And he's describing, it's like he's describing cold reading, but...
Like, he's on his own, right, with that particular tool that he's using.
Yeah, hearing that clip again, it is also like channeling, and there's a grandiosity about it, right?
I say something, and then I notice if the crowd is crying or if they are laughing.
At the effect of my words, it's because I'm not just imparting information, I'm actually engaged in this.
Very intense, very subtle, energetic thing.
It is cold reading in a way, but I think that often is used to refer to one-on-one interactions, like the one he's having with Marcus in that moment.
But I also hear it as being like an improviser.
A courageous improviser standing on the edge of the present moment in front of an audience, and he's taking collective vibe cues on how his intuitive pronouncements are landing.
And there's also something really sad about that because it also sounds to me, I can't help it, I'm not diagnosing him, but like a traumatized child who's trying to figure out what to say or do so that the parents don't fly off the handle.
Well, yeah, there's that.
And gosh, with regard to improvisation, if you called yourself a musician, You're not telling people what to do with their lives or not to take vaccines.
So, I think we were, I was surprised, I don't know about you guys, but when he wound up taking these particular kind of tender skills into the field of political hardball, it didn't seem like a match.
It didn't seem like it was going to fit.
And as you look at his, as I looked at his most recent work, it seemed like that spell in his life has taken a toll because over the past few months on his open substack, he's been writing about...
Adrenal fatigue is not a thing, just for the record.
It is for him, though.
That's how he's framing his fatigue.
Yeah, that's how he's framing how he's feeling, through the lens of pseudoscience wellness.
No, yeah, exactly.
It's not actually a thing, that's all I'm saying.
Okay, he's tired.
He's really tired.
And so currently he's on, quote, a life-changing journey of physical, emotional, and spiritual healing.
And he says that an African spiritual guide told him that he was sick because his public work made him a target of psychic projection.
I suppose, you know, we've made him sick in a way.
We've contributed to that, I'm sure.
So, quote, the attacks land on my body, he said.
I asked him what can I do when society seems to have gone mad.
He said, wait.
Now, he says that he feels vulnerable about this journey, so he's setting his more personal work behind a paywall to limit the impacts of criticism on his health.
So I subscribed.
You got it under his immune system.
I did.
But, you know, I'm going to respect it.
I mean, unless he starts using this smaller forum to incubate conspiracy theories or start like an in-real-life cult or incite violence.
I'll respect that.
He's saying, I'm tired out.
Something has collapsed, and I understand that.
There's nothing much up on the private feed now except a description of how a new West African plant medicine he's taking is taking apart and reassembling his psyche.
The comments that he's getting are all very supportive.
So I think tracking his relationship with his audience.
But also, you know, it's a new spiritual kind of bit of information, and I think tracking his spiritual syncretism over time would be its own book.
Like, way back, he was interested in yoga and Buddhism and Taoism.
First Nations philosophy pops up here and there, and more recently, he's been interested in ayahuasca and other psychedelics, so now it's West African Bwiti, which I don't really know how to pronounce, but I think it comes from Gabon.
But here's the punchline.
I think he's seen something about himself.
One of his main preoccupations in his 2025 writing has been the meaning and impact of AI.
As it has been for all of us.
And he has all of the concerns that everybody does.
But get this.
In a January essay called Intelligence in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he asks ChatGPT to write an essay in the style of Charles Eisenstein.
And he was pretty shocked at how accurate, but also how fucking boring the writing was.
And Julian, maybe you can read this extraordinary passage.
I wonder if ChatGPT was simply holding up a merciless mirror for me to see the deficiencies of my own writing.
Do I self-plagiarize and recycle the same ideas over and over again?
Do I resort to hackneyed metaphors and cliched figures of speech?
Honestly, sometimes I do do that.
When I'm tired especially, or distracted, or not fully present, my writing becomes, well, mechanical.
I can feel the question or topic by looking for certain key concepts to which I can apply a familiar analytic process, the story of separation, or gift, or the culture of quantity, or the abuser-victim-rescuer triad, or quantum superposition of timelines.
I feel like I'm saying and thinking the same thing over and over again.
I feel like I could just as well be replaced by an AI chatbot trained on everything I've already said.
With a familiar lens now glued to my eyeballs, I can't see anything other than what it reveals.
The infinite diversity of the world collapses into a finitude of categories, a rigidity of thinking, a kind of inner orthodoxy.
Slow clap, Charles.
That is incredible stuff.
It's really beautiful.
I'm really, like, excited to see what comes out of that, but maybe.
You can apply some of that same analysis to the Maha movement.
You help turn into an avalanche of self-plagiarized falsehoods and bigotries.
Oh, and also, like, white papers with AI hallucinations in the citations.
But, you know, there won't be much money in that.
*Loud Screams*
Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster.
If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep Podcast.
I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.
Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off.
Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
To Paula Poundstone, you probably know that I made an appearance recently on this absolutely ludicrous variety show that combines the fun of a late night show with the wit of a public radio program and the unique knowledge of a guest expert who was me at the time, if you can believe that.
Brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride of wildly diverse topics from Paula's hilarious attempts to understand QAnon to riveting conversations with a bona fide rocket scientist.
You'll never know what to expect, but you'll know you're in for a high-spirited So this is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co-host Adam Felber, who is great.
They're both regular panelists on NPR's classic comedy show.
You may recognize them from that.
Wait, wait, don't tell me.
And they bring the same acerbic yet infectiously funny energy to Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone.
When I was on, they grilled me in an absolutely unique way.
about conspiracy theories and yoga and yoga pants and QAnon and we had a great time.
They were very sincerely interested in the topic but they still found plenty of hilarious angles in terms of the questions they asked and how they followed up on whatever I gave them like good comedians do.
Check out their show.
There are other recent episodes you might find interesting as well like hearing crazy Hollywood stories from legendary casting director Joel Thurm or their episode about killer whales and killer theme songs.
So Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone is an absolute riot you don't want to miss.
Find Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Do you want to know what it's like to hang out with MS-13 in El Salvador?
How the Russian mafia fought battles all over Brooklyn in the 1990s?
Or what about that time I got lost in the Burmese jungle hunting the world's biggest meth lab?
Or why the Japanese Yakuza have all those crazy dragon tattoos?
I'm Sean Williams.
And I'm Danny Golds.
And we're the hosts of The Underworld Podcast.
We're journalists that have traveled all over reporting on dangerous people and places.
And every week, we'll be bringing you a new story about organized crime from all over the world.
We know this stuff because we've been there, we've seen it, and we've got the near misses and embarrassing tales to go with it.
We'll mix in reporting with our own experiences in the field, and we'll throw in some bad jokes while we're at it.
The Underworld Podcast explores the criminal underworlds that affect all of our lives, whether we know it or not.
All right, let's turn to the very inspiration for this podcast, Mr. Mickey Willis, whose early pandemic-era pseudodocumentary, Plandemic, gave the anti-vax movement the steroids.
It's still feeding off of today.
We've covered Willis often over the years, but let's just do a quick recap.
He's a former model turned filmmaker whose brother died of AIDS and who he retroactively blames Anthony Fauci for, which could account in part for his hard anti-vax pivot that would happen decades later.
Willis was around the LA yoga scene when I moved there in 2011, and he was making environmentally conscious documentaries while he was living in a mansion in Ojai at the time.
He had a moment of internet virality when he posted a video of his son playing with an Ariel doll in 2015, which then sparked a global conversation about parenting and experience.
It had over 20 million views, and there were local news spots covering this feel-good story as a result in several different places.
And he was interviewed, and then he was on TV talk shows, all based on this short video.
And at the end of it, he tells his sons, I promise you.
That I will love you and accept you no matter what life you choose.
Because, you know, his son had chosen to replace a duplicate toy with an Ariel doll.
A doll of a mermaid that would more typically be thought of as a girl's toy.
But as you'll cover, Derek.
It is unsurprising that these days, that video does not live on any of Mickey's online accounts anymore, because that promise, I think, will probably have morphed over time.
Yeah, he's scrubbed a few of his properties.
I've been tracking him for a while.
With many conspiratialists that we cover, he calls himself a disaffected liberal.
He was on the Bernie Sanders tour during the 2020 election.
That's when he claims he had his aha moment that eventually turned him mega.
Today, he continues to pump out anti-vax and COVID-contrarian content.
His Twitter and Facebook feeds are filled with deep state pseudoscience.
He's also really leaned into conservative values, more than most people that we track.
He signs all of his transmissions with Mickey Willis, father, filmmaker.
And a lot of his posts include his family, which...
His son, the same one who was playing with Ariel Dolls, I'm not naming him because I want to leave family out of it in terms of their personal identities, but his son has started making films and he's giving Ted-style talks now, so maybe in the future we'll have to dissect some of those.
I did watch his first film.
It was fine.
I'm sure his dad helped him.
All fine stuff.
But I bring this up because it paints a very disconcerting image, the one that reminds me strongly of Christian nationalists who champion family values in one post.
Then in the next, they talk about satanic forces draining the lifeblood of humanity.
Very Christian Northrop playing the harp and, you know, sounding the alarm on Satan coming.
Everything Willis doesn't like or agree with seems to be propelled by a secret force, some part of an agenda.
You know, this flipping between the championing of family values in one post and then satanic forces draining lifeblood in the next, I think one of the things that impressed me most about Willis early on was his capacity to recognize that he had scared the shit out of people with Plandemic, and so he took to Facebook.
To record a selfie sermon in which he openly seemed to weep and say, you know, I'm with you through all of this and I understand and feel your pain.
And there was this aspect of it, like I pegged it at the time as a kind of fostering of a disorganized attachment pattern amongst his parasocial following because, you know, on one hand he's saying, you know, the government's out to kill you with everything they have.
And on the other hand, he's saying, but I'm here to love you and we're going to get through it together.
And that's, you know, that's a pretty charismatic, one-size-fits-all guru trick where, you know, it's like you create the problem and then you solve it.
And, yeah, it depends on that contrast.
It's like you have flowers in one hand and a dagger in the other.
Yeah, yeah.
And in that little video that you're referring to, I believe he also says he's willing to die.
Yes, he's willing to die.
He's making a stand, right?
Yeah, for everybody, for the cause.
I think it's kind of vague, but it's as vague as he is radiantly, goldenly lit.
Yes, yes.
So he's simultaneously the one who's scaring you, the one who's saving you, but he's also kind of a revolutionary hero who's willing to die for the cause.
And that's the thing about all three of these sort of nominally.
Liberal or progressive figures who go down this rabbit hole is that they all latch onto some conspiratorial or pseudoscience kind of counterfactual interpretation of where the real struggle is and then commit themselves to it and drag a bunch of followers with them.
And as you were just saying, Derek, he's weaving more and more MAGA talking points into everything he does along with the paranoid anti-vax narrative.
Everything is a plot to undermine family values and the trans agenda.
And the communist Black Lives Matter movement are front and center.
It's not just about vaccines and Anthony Fauci anymore.
Yeah, and he's great looking.
We just have to add, he's like Zoolander Jesus, I tell you.
Did we mention he was handsome?
Yeah.
Well, it's always very easy to say you'll die for a cause when you're in no actual danger of dying.
When you're doing a selfie video about the bullshit documentary you just released.
Yeah, I'm willing to die for this cause.
Yeah, have a sandwich.
Yeah, I have to say, too, just hear it.
Maybe one day our kids will be hosting a podcast where they talk about Mickey Willis Jr.
Oh my God.
Not mine.
I don't have any kids, but I can get tempo my puppy on.
He can bark at you.
Yeah.
Well, by then we'll have AI where his thoughts will be translated.
It's definitely possible.
Let's do a quick rundown of what Willis has done since Plandemic.
He's produced two more Plandemics, including a children's musical that's as bad as that sounds.
As with most every sequel, none have had nearly the impact of the original, and he generally seems to be struggling to regain his viral popularity of the first.
Yeah, no, I don't know how much this contradicts or adds to what you're saying, but something I also notice about him, Derek, Is that when it comes to regional film festivals, and admittedly some of these are tiny, he's been super successful at a grassroots level.
He essentially figured out how to red pill each of these little independent film events.
And each installment of the Plandemic series gets featured there and ends up winning awards like Best Director, Best Documentary, Best of the Festival, like the Three Spirit Film Awards, Malibu, Santa Monica, Toronto, Silicon Valley.
He's won honors at other small events like the European Independent Film Awards in Paris.
I can't speak to most of those, but I remember how hard he was pushing the Santa Monica and Malibu film festivals, as you know, Julian, in Los Angeles now.
It's a very incestuous community.
So the people who run those festivals are old friends that were part of his community for a long time.
So winning best film there isn't that challenging, but I do hear you.
He's a hustler.
All my criticisms aside, he definitely hustles and works his networks.
Looks good on the resume.
Willis also launched a supplements company, Surprise.
He marketed it initially, quote, to protect against the next pandemic, because of course he did.
His Rebel Lion line, that's Rebellion broken up with two with this cutesy little lion logo that he devised.
It features just one product.
It's called Fierce Immunity.
It's $58 a bottle for vitamin D3.
Yeah.
All of which you could buy at Costco for much cheaper, but you wouldn't get the Lion logo.
To promote his Lion, Willis has recently leaned into the measles outbreak really hard.
He has a measles protocol on his company website.
It features tons of affiliate links to things like mouthwash and nebulizers and natural energy drinks for measles.
I'm serious.
You can find this page.
Meanwhile, he's staunchly against the exceptionally cheap and often free MMR vaccine, which would render all of his wellness tchotchkes useless.
Like Children's Health Defense, Willis traveled to East Texas to interviewed families whose children were infected with or died of measles.
It features disbarred physician Pierre Corey, who is a big anti-vax COVID contrarian.
He often floats around the Maha scene.
I have to note that both Children's Health Defense and Willis talk about how the Mennonite communities are being exploited by the media and by evidence-based medicine practitioners.
Yet they're the ones with cameras and an actual agenda going in.
There was a moment when Robert F. Kennedy shot a photo with the family and they were like, oh, we didn't know this was going to go on social media.
So who's the real exploiters here?
And I'll just add, too, Pierre Corey is probably the biggest salesman of ivermectin in the world.
And I'm amazed, actually, that Mickey doesn't include ivermectin in Rebellion.
Well, interestingly, Mallory just shared with me this morning, I might do a video on it, this guy.
So the newest conspiracy theory in the ivermectin community is that people with bad results, it's because the ivermectin being produced is being...
Wow.
All right.
What's black seed oil?
Is there something called a black seed that's not just colored black?
Like mustard seeds are black, right?
I have seen it.
I am sorry.
I was not prepared to talk about it.
I just got it from Mallory, but I will make a video on it.
It sounds vaguely familiar in terms of the various herbal remedies for parasites that when you come back from India, people are like, oh, I've taken all of that stuff.
Right.
Okay.
Okay.
Just looked it up.
It is black cumin.
Oh, all right.
Black cumin seed oil.
And that's supposed to be just as good as ivermectin?
The guy said specifically at fighting cancer and parasites.
You know, okay, I can...
Yeah, and not only is it good for COVID and for cancer, but if we have a bird flu pandemic, it'll be really good for that too.
Awesome.
Oh, it's very adaptable.
Cumin is my favorite spice, so really, they're getting to me here.
Last one.
Willis recently shot a short documentary.
He seems to be doing like these 12, 15-minute bits recently.
It's about naturopathic practitioner Robert Young.
He treated a woman for breast cancer through an alkaline diet, and he was featured by Oprah Winfrey, surprise, because the woman claimed that Young cured her cancer through this diet.
And then she died, which resulted in Young being convicted of theft.
And practicing medicine without a license, something he had done since the 90s in order to sell supplements.
So naturally, Willis calls him a nonconformist who has been unfairly targeted by the pharma cartel.
Well, you know what?
There's 17 positions now on the vaccine board at CDC, and I'm sure that guy can find a seat there under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I think he's going to be appointed the head of the ASIP.
He's qualified.
It's all par for the course.
We talk here about the overlaps between conspiracism and supernaturalism and wellness and authoritarianism, but even within the alternative wellness space, there's that frictionless segueing between anti-vax and pseudoscience supplements and then dieting to cure cancer.
Well, that is where Mickey Willis is right now.
He's making short documentaries for YouTube about convicted felons and suffering families while constantly fundraising.
I've been on his email list for years with my Burner account.
As someone who barely ever logs into Facebook, however...
It's pretty eye-opening seeing so many people I know from Wellness Land who are still on board with his bullshit over on Facebook.
Maybe that just speaks to the different demographics of where I spend my time, but there is still a lot happening over there.
I do think that that seems to be happening to Facebook.
I haven't really been up on how the various platforms are moving in those directions, but certainly when I log in now, it does feel like it's about five or six years ago.
Then I noticed a recent post about his brother, and I'm not going to read it all, but here's the gist.
He thinks pride parades do more harm than good because they've been over-sexualized and he blames Bill Clinton for declaring June Pride Month, which Willis says resulted in a gradual politicization of identity.
Willis claims he went to early pride parades and beyond a few, quote, assless chaps, most people kept their sexuality private.
False.
Then he writes, He concludes by saying that this overt sexualization is all part of the agenda.
Now, what agenda?
He doesn't have to say because part of his brand is obscuration, but I do want to comment anecdotally for a moment because I was at Pride in San Francisco in 1997.
I had just moved there after graduating college.
The first friend I made happened to be a gay poet, so I hung out where he did and I went the places he went to, the bars and the parades.
And to say that early Pride parades weren't sexualized, as you just said, Matthew, is just flat out wrong.
It wasn't a big deal then or now.
Maybe the difference is that everyone has a camera in their pockets and there's an entire right-wing media apparatus, which Willis is very much a part of, that weaponizes anything that they deem suspect.
So I'm not interested in a long discussion over the politics of identity here.
What does seem apparent is that a man who just a decade ago was championing his son for playing with dolls and doing a lot of media about it, then stumbled his way into his greatest success with a predominantly right-wing audience.
I can't say for sure whether he shifted due to sincere beliefs or that he just followed the attention or both.
What I do know is that Willis regularly criticizes the left for kowtowing to the powers that be, yet he seems incapable of recognizing how far he's been beholden now to a predominantly Christian nationalist.
While his star is nowhere near as high as it was during Plandemic, his rhetoric continues to meet the moment for the audience that he's selling to.
It's closed-minded, it's insular, it can even be labeled isolationist because it's cloaked in the language of revolution and seasoned with traditional family values.
maybe in some ways everyone is beholden to the communities they make their name in.
Making sure to toe the line might just be what's expected to remain in whatever that community's good graces are, but pretending to think critically about power and science when all you're really doing is regurgitating generations of spiteful anti-intellectual propaganda to me is really fucking disingenuous.
And that I'm sure is something that Mickey Willison All right, guys.
