Conspirituality - 307: Conspiracy Reflex Syndrome
Aired: 2026-05-07
Duration: 55:30


=== Launching Hyperfixed (01:27) ===

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=== Doctors vs Wellness Influencers (12:26) ===

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[00:02:01]  Conspirationality 307 Conspiracy Reflex Syndrome.
[00:02:07]  As Cole Allen's printed into the news cycle, social media accelerated to cover the story, and the conspiracy beast in the basement flexed his fast twitch muscle fibers.
[00:02:18]  The now third assassination attempt on Donald Trump, this time at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Had to be staged.
[00:02:24]  What else could explain it?
[00:02:25]  The one time Trump shows up, an assassin is waiting for him?
[00:02:28]  Like, what are the odds, man?
[00:02:30]  How about the guy who just calmly kept eating his salad?
[00:02:33]  A highly suspicious AI video showed a security guy's hat morph into his hair, while another video had Alan running faster than humanly possible, which fit with an elaborate story about the shooter actually being a time traveler.
[00:02:49]  I'll break down what happened and how quickly the conspiracy theories spread.
[00:02:53]  And Matthew will reflect on the cultural and political dynamics of this now ubiquitous reflex.
[00:02:58]  But first, Derek has a segment for us about the Pew Research data on just who becomes a health and wellness influencer.
[00:03:13]  Spirituality.
[00:03:15]  Last year, I had an opportunity to meet with the team over at Pew Research Center because they were working on an initiative looking into the influence of wellness and fitness coaches on Americans.
[00:03:27]  We chatted for an hour about conspirituality and wellness, and I told them the sorts of questions I'd ask based on their rudimentary sketches of this project.
[00:03:37]  I have no idea how impactful that call was, but I do know they reached out last week to let me know the report is done, and I had an opportunity to review it before publication.
[00:03:47]  As the embargo lifts today, the day we publish our weekly main feed episode, the timing worked out really well.
[00:03:54]  The report is called Moms, Coaches, Doctors, Entrepreneurs Who Are America's Health and Wellness Influencers?
[00:04:01]  And the lead is half of US adults under 50 say they get health and wellness information from social media influencers and podcasts.
[00:04:10]  About four in 10 of these influencers describe themselves as healthcare professionals.
[00:04:16]  Coaches and entrepreneurs are almost as common.
[00:04:20]  I want to go over some of the main findings and then share some of what I find personally interesting.
[00:04:25]  Now, the entire report is 56 pages long.
[00:04:28]  It could be found at purereesearch.org.
[00:04:31]  For the report, the team analyzed 12,800 social media accounts belonging to 6,828 health and wellness influencers, each of whom have at least one account with over 100,000 followers.
[00:04:47]  Then there was a second component of the report where they interviewed 10,134 American adults.
[00:04:55]  Here's what Pew highlights as their key findings.
[00:04:59]  Health and wellness influencers claim a wide range of backgrounds from inside and outside the world of medicine.
[00:05:05]  41% describe themselves as some sort of healthcare professional, and around 3 in 10 each say they are coaches, 31%, or entrepreneurs, 28%.
[00:05:16]  Around two thirds of these influencers are women, but men are more heavily represented for certain backgrounds, like doctors, and among the most popular health and wellness influencers.
[00:05:27]  Many draw on their life experiences.
[00:05:30]  Health and wellness influencers who are women are especially likely to cite their background as a parent.
[00:05:35]  So, as you can see, it's not just about wellness influencers, the type we usually cover on this podcast, but actual doctors who use social media to convey information as well.
[00:05:46]  Now, to be clear, that doesn't mean they're all trustworthy because we've covered the contrarian medical profession space often.
[00:05:53]  It also doesn't mean someone who's a wellness or fitness influencer is a scammer.
[00:05:58]  I don't have insights into who Pew analyzed, just that they all had large followings.
[00:06:05]  But in some ways, that makes the data all the more important because it's an aggregate across fields that I can't apply bias to by saying things like, oh, you analyzed that person.
[00:06:16]  A few things that I found interesting Instagram remains vital for health and wellness, with 86% of influencers posting there, compared to 62% on TikTok, 45% on YouTube, and 19% on Facebook.
[00:06:31]  Even LinkedIn has an influencer dynamic with 3% posting there.
[00:06:36]  And that is a site I hate logging into nearly as much as Facebook, but there we go.
[00:06:42]  Another one 64% are women and 34% men, which fits into general patterns that we see in wellness.
[00:06:49]  Slightly more men than women say they're conventional medical professionals, though I have to say, this is where lack of transparency could be an issue.
[00:06:58]  Pew looked at specific terms like doctors.
[00:07:01]  And as we know, chiropractors and naturopaths affiliated with unaccredited schools often use that term as well.
[00:07:08]  So there's likely some noise in that statistic.
[00:07:12]  The influencer side reveals something about numbers, but I'm really interested in influence.
[00:07:17]  Here's Pew's key takeaways from the surveys, which I find more interesting.
[00:07:23]  The desire to make a health or lifestyle change is a key motivating factor.
[00:07:28]  Some 41% of Americans who get health and wellness information from influencers say this is a major reason for doing so.
[00:07:35]  That's not particularly surprising.
[00:07:37]  We know a lot of people go to social media and they look for reasons they want to make a change in their life.
[00:07:42]  The next one, though, is a bit more intriguing to me.
[00:07:44]  Young adults are particularly likely to tune into health and wellness influencers for entertainment.
[00:07:51]  One third of these consumers, ages 18 to 29, say that entertainment is a major factor for them.
[00:07:57]  So I think that that plays into why Instagram and TikTok are sort of like overrepresented and where the content is.
[00:08:06]  Because, yeah, I mean, I associate the entertainment aspect with like, you know, visual practices or, you know, body stuff or, you know, workout routines that you're demonstrating, things like that.
[00:08:17]  Entertainment, yeah, that's where it gets dicey with health because it's fine for health to be entertaining.
[00:08:23]  I mean, one thing I know as a former fitness instructor is if you're not having fun doing a workout, it's likely not going to stick.
[00:08:29]  So I get that, but I also think it's exploited when they make medical claims that are on shaky ground and it's entertaining.
[00:08:38]  So you actually get indoctrinated into the pipeline that way.
[00:08:41]  And that's where the term charisma comes in when it comes to influencers and why it's such a challenge to push back.
[00:08:48]  Against health misinformation when a viewer has created parasocial bonds to one.
[00:08:54]  Okay, so there's two more.
[00:08:55]  Two thirds of these consumers say they mostly get information from health and wellness influencers because they happen to come across it.
[00:09:03]  Double the share who say they're usually looking for it.
[00:09:07]  About one in five say the information they get from these influencers is extremely or very different than what they get from healthcare providers.
[00:09:15]  Ding, ding, ding, ding.
[00:09:16]  Algorithmic capture.
[00:09:18]  Yeah, that's probably where the intersections with conspiratoriality lie.
[00:09:22]  For me, the most Surprising number was that only 10% of Americans fully trust information from health and wellness influencers, though 65% say they trust some of it.
[00:09:34]  And again, decontextualized from the actual influencers that are being analyzed, it's really difficult to assess those numbers.
[00:09:41]  But we do know that 26% of American adults are more worried about their health after listening to influencers, while 22% are less worried.
[00:09:52]  And, and, That's where I'd want to know more about the types of messaging that Pew looked at because the cohort we analyze on this podcast often uses fear based marketing designed to concern you.
[00:10:05]  My guess is that Pew looked at a wide range of influencers as fitness was the most cited information people come across, with weight loss and beauty next.
[00:10:15]  Our typical beats come further down mental health came in fourth, supplements, cleanses, fifth, followed by mainstream medicine and therapies outside mainstream medicine, which is Where I'm guessing shooting coffee up your asshole comes in.
[00:10:29]  You know, this thing about dividing up responses into more worried or less worried before and after you view influencer content.
[00:10:38]  I don't know.
[00:10:39]  I feel like there's some combination of both, which expresses kind of obsessed because, you know, the more worried also has to come along with this sort of promise that as you follow the protocol, you're going to improve.
[00:10:53]  You get excited because you're worried.
[00:10:55]  You found out that you had parasites and now you're excited because you can.
[00:10:59]  You know, get rid of them with this particular cleanse.
[00:11:01]  It's a very, very mixed category worry and not worry, I think.
[00:11:05]  I think the gap between viewing the content and being convinced that you have this terrible problem that you now have to deal with that your doctor's not telling you is an immediate response.
[00:11:13]  And then actually taking action requires more steps.
[00:11:17]  And that's how, sort of, the pipeline has to hook you, right?
[00:11:19]  Right, right.
[00:11:20]  The worry aspect, yeah.
[00:11:21]  I think while I fall more into the trust, for example, right before we were recorded, I was watching a squat university video about adductor training.
[00:11:29]  And he specifically, Aaron specifically shows an adductor exercise I do.
[00:11:34]  And he's like, this one's good, but this one's better.
[00:11:37]  And so I came away from the video being like, oh, I'm going to try that next time I'm working legs.
[00:11:41]  And so there's a bit of trust in there that I'm going to get a better workout.
[00:11:46]  I don't think that crosses over into worry, though.
[00:11:49]  Although I'm less worried about my adductors, I guess, now.
[00:11:52]  Yeah.
[00:11:53]  Well, and shout out to Squat University.
[00:11:55]  I like that channel.
[00:11:56]  Yeah.
[00:11:56]  Yeah.
[00:11:56]  It's great.
[00:11:57]  Well, you also didn't feel like, oh, I was doing that wrong, right?
[00:12:02]  And maybe that's a quality of the influencer himself, right?
[00:12:05]  Or themselves.
[00:12:06]  Yeah.
[00:12:06]  It's not wrong.
[00:12:07]  It's just there's better ways to do it, which is what I'm.
[00:12:10]  Generally, looking for because I watch a lot of videos about lifting and working out, but also for physical therapy purposes, which Aaron specifically focuses on.
[00:12:20]  And yes, you'll find a lot of bullshit there as well.
[00:12:23]  And depending on where you land, you'll be sold plenty of useless supplements, just like in the wellness spaces we look into.
[00:12:30]  At this point, as long as social platforms exist, we're not going to stop people turning to them for health advice, though.
[00:12:36]  I'm most concerned about the stat that so many people.
[00:12:40]  We weren't looking for advice, but were fed it, which is more dangerous because you have no idea who this person is.
[00:12:47]  And you're likely not going to bother discovering it's actually a chiropractor trying to sell you a book about cellular medicine, for example, looking at you, Will Cole.
[00:12:58]  You'll just see doctor and think the charismatic salesman has a point.
[00:13:02]  And that is one way that indoctrination begins.
[00:13:06]  And that's one I'd love to see more data on.
[00:13:21]  Learning English is hard.
[00:13:24]  That's why I make Easy Stories in English, where you can have fun while you learn.
[00:13:29]  You can listen to stories full of action, romance, and mystery.
[00:13:36]  Each episode, I tell stories for beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners, and there's a story for every mood.
[00:13:44]  Whether you want something to wake you up or relax before going to bed, Easy Stories in English is the podcast for you.
[00:13:53]  All right, our main story.

=== The Time Traveler Claim (04:25) ===

[00:13:55]  On the evening of Saturday, April 25th, an armed Cole Allen sprinted past a security checkpoint targeting Donald Trump and other senior officials.
[00:14:04]  No one was killed or wounded.
[00:14:06]  A security guard was hit, and it remains unclear who fired that particular shot in amongst the five or six shots that rang out.
[00:14:14]  The ease with which the would be assassin gained this level of access has raised serious questions about security protocols.
[00:14:21]  Now, roughly 30 minutes prior, Alan posed for a smirking mirror selfie in his room, and that photo shows how his weapons were strapped to his body.
[00:14:31]  As he traveled down an unguarded back stairway, his family received a previously scheduled email containing his 1,052 word manifesto, and then six minutes later, all hell broke loose.
[00:14:44]  The most notable sentence in that manifesto states I'm no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.
[00:14:55]  He also refers to himself as the friendly federal assassin.
[00:14:59]  His casual humorous tone seems well paired with the trademark smirk.
[00:15:04]  Some Reddit users noted that his syntax is characteristic of people who use an asterisk on either side of certain words or phrases to create italicization, which is a trick that doesn't then transfer over to most email applications.
[00:15:18]  The manifesto includes rules of engagement regarding who Alan saw as legitimate targets, though he concludes that he would kill anyone in his way as attending the event.
[00:15:29]  Represented complicity in Trump's crimes.
[00:15:32]  He also outlines potential objections, including based on him being a Christian and based on him being a black man.
[00:15:39]  And he gives rebuttals to those, which makes it clear that he believes he has a moral obligation to try to kill the president and other officials on behalf of the person raped in a detention camp, the fisherman executed without trial, the school kid blown up, the child starved, or the teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.
[00:16:02]  So, the real catalog there.
[00:16:04]  Yeah, and clearly, you know, morally completely understandable and coherent in terms of what he's referring to in each of those examples, right?
[00:16:14]  So, now let's get into how quickly a contrarian conspiratorial interpretation of the event emerged.
[00:16:23]  In the 24 hours after the shooting, 450,000 Twitter posts included the words staged, hoax, conspiracy, or false flag.
[00:16:34]  In the hours after the event, I noticed my own feed was filled with people saying things like, Trump never goes to the White House correspondence dinner during his presidency, but the one time he goes, someone tries to shoot him.
[00:16:48]  I'm not buying it.
[00:16:50]  Some speculated that this was a way for Trump to avoid having to give a speech or having to suffer through jokes being made about him while providing this rationale to lobby harder for his White House ballroom to be constructed.
[00:17:04]  Was buoyed by how quickly Trump and other officials actually did take to social media in concert to call for the $400 million ballroom to be completed.
[00:17:14]  Reddit had a surge of popular posts suggesting that believing it had not been staged was hopelessly naive.
[00:17:21]  And then many Instagram users speculated that Trump or the White House were somehow involved.
[00:17:27]  Political science professor and prominent academic expert Michael Barcoon said, I would have been surprised if they hadn't developed because we're in a society that is absolutely saturated with conspiracism.
[00:17:40]  You likely saw the video of Press Secretary Carolyn Leavitt saying, shots will be fired.
[00:17:46]  In reference to Trump's speech before the event.
[00:17:48]  How suspicious.
[00:17:49]  Then there were fake AI videos of Alan, as well as a fake photo that appeared to show him in an IDF sweatshirt.
[00:17:56]  You know, so that one got past me, actually.
[00:18:00]  I didn't realize that that had been debunked.
[00:18:02]  Yeah.
[00:18:02]  Yeah, it was debunked.
[00:18:03]  And then people posted other ones which showed him with various other insignia.
[00:18:07]  It just replaced the insignia?
[00:18:08]  Yeah, totally.
[00:18:09]  Okay, right.
[00:18:10]  Yeah.
[00:18:11]  There was an AI enhanced video that showed him running past security at an impossible speed as well.
[00:18:18]  Just, just, Wild.

=== Normie Extremism Explained (11:48) ===

[00:18:20]  A post on X claimed evidence of Alan as a time traveler.
[00:18:25]  And this got 1.2 million views.
[00:18:28]  So this is fascinating.
[00:18:29]  In 2014, the 19 year old Alan was involved in an undergrad jet propulsion lab fellowship at NASA.
[00:18:38]  Now, add to this that there's an account on X, see if you can follow this, guys.
[00:18:41]  There's an account on X in the name of Henry Martinez.
[00:18:44]  It has no followers and it features just one post that was made on September 21st, 2023.
[00:18:52]  Containing only two words, Cole Allen.
[00:18:58]  Start to feel like you're in a science fiction movie.
[00:18:59]  Now, this Henry Martinez is the same as the name, that name is the same as the name of a Lockheed Martin and NASA engineer, who's also a published scientific researcher, who apparently was in that same fellowship program with Allen.
[00:19:16]  And it gets more irresistible to conspiracy theorists when it turns out that the colorful abstract banner image on that Henry Martinez X account.
[00:19:24]  Exists originally on a WordPress website under the name Time Machine 3D Digitization.
[00:19:31]  And then that the iconic Butler, Pennsylvania image of a bloody faced Trump rising up among his security detail under the flag, you know, the previous assassination attempts, can be overlaid onto that image as if it is perhaps a scrambled version of it that was actually published a year or two before it took place.
[00:19:51]  Now, these pins on the cork board then also connect to the recent stories you may have come across about missing or mysteriously dead.
[00:19:58]  NASA scientists who may have invented or exposed secret technologies or UFO information.
[00:20:06]  And then the Henry Martinez account has a display name that features a set of numbers which add up to 48.
[00:20:13]  Trump is the 47th president, so if he were to be successfully assassinated, it would tee up the arrival of President 48.
[00:20:21]  So, guys, we've got number magic, epiphenia, pareidolia, time travel, and links to other uncanny events.
[00:20:28]  It's undeniable.
[00:20:29]  I now conclude Cole Thomas Allen is a time traveling assassin.
[00:20:33]  Okay, wait a minute.
[00:20:34]  What is pareidolia or pareidolia?
[00:20:38]  What is that?
[00:20:39]  Paradoilia is the common experience that we all have of looking up at the clouds and seeing a face.
[00:20:44]  Oh.
[00:20:44]  Or looking at a piece of burnt toast and seeing the Virgin Mary.
[00:20:47]  Okay, nice.
[00:20:47]  Yeah, so it's the tendency to kind of construct, it's the way our visual systems and our brains construct images that are humanoid or have faces out of random patterns.
[00:20:56]  It's specifically faces.
[00:20:58]  Yeah, I think that's the most common, instantly accessible one.
[00:21:02]  Yeah.
[00:21:03]  Right, okay.
[00:21:04]  So, while many right wingers will reflexively call every new mass shooting a false flag tactic to take away our guns, since the July 2024 assassination attempt on Trump and Butler, people on the left have joined in on speculating that the president is involved in staging these attempts as psyops for political gain.
[00:21:26]  Trump then seeming to lie on the 60 Minutes interview that happened right after the attempt about appearing to fall as Secret Service ushered him to safety, saying, no, no, no, he was just told to get lower.
[00:21:38]  Has been pointed to by some commentators as an example of how conflicting narratives emerge to explain discrepancies that are better explained by Trump just being a liar who always tries to make himself look good.
[00:21:51]  So it turns out Cole Allen was or is a 31 year old Caltech educated tutor.
[00:21:57]  He's a video game developer, a mechanical engineer.
[00:22:00]  He appeared on ABC News in 2017 pitching a new wheelchair emergency brake system that he had invented.
[00:22:07]  It looked really good.
[00:22:09]  His social media activity focused almost exclusively on Super Smash Brothers gaming content until 2024, and then his posts became more political.
[00:22:20]  So at that point, he started comparing Trump to Hitler.
[00:22:23]  And perhaps now, ironically, he shared posts about how both previous Trump assassination attempts had been staged.
[00:22:31]  He also posted about the 2024 election being illegitimate.
[00:22:35]  He posted then about buying guns, and then as recently as last month, he posted, Put a traitor back in office, get treason.
[00:22:44]  So, all of this combined with Allen's family saying he had attended No Kings rallies and that he may have been loosely involved with a progressive activist group called the Wide Awakes makes for a compelling case that the would be assassin was motivated by left wing political views, in addition to conspiracism and outrage about the Epstein files.
[00:23:03]  And he's certainly not alone in that.
[00:23:06]  But turned out he also posted criticisms of pro Palestine protests, as well as of controversial leftist streamer Hassan Piker, who he seems to really intensely dislike.
[00:23:16]  He's all over the place.
[00:23:18]  Yeah, like quite sort of, I don't know, like pretty mainstream actually with a variety of views.
[00:23:26]  Yeah, so this is where the term normie extremism starts to come in, right?
[00:23:30]  Right.
[00:23:31]  Alan appears somewhat similar to healthcare CEO Brian Thompson's killer, Luigi Mangione, who both right wing pundits and anarchist sympathizers painted as motivated by leftist political commitments, but who it turned out followed both Joe Rogan and AOC and Tim Urban on social media, and whose Goodreads history included.
[00:23:52]  Best selling radical material like Dr. Seuss and Michael Pollan and Yuval Noah Harari and Angela Duckworth, as well as self improvement and biohacking books like Tim Ferriss's Four Hour Workweek.
[00:24:06]  And then there was also the right wing terrorist Ted Kaczynski's Unabomber Manifesto titled Industrial Society and Its Future, which Mangione gave a four star review.
[00:24:15]  So again, all over the place.
[00:24:16]  Charlie Kirk's killer, Tyler Robinson, and the Butler PA shooter, Thomas Crooks, also look Like contradictory examples of what some are calling normie extremism.
[00:24:28]  And those sources, the reading sources, it's really sort of like an a la carte personal interest.
[00:24:35]  These are things that have sort of caught my eye.
[00:24:37]  And I think, with regard to describing whatever kind of leftist commitments these people might have, it really sort of doesn't give a sense that there's any kind of grounded, like strategic, I'm going to move towards a particular goal.
[00:24:53]  Like, these are really individual actions, right?
[00:24:55]  Like, they're adventurists.
[00:24:57]  And yeah, there's nothing, it doesn't seem to be much coherence holding things together here.
[00:25:02]  Yeah, there's not a timeline that you can map where you're saying this person is getting immersed in a particular ideology and thereby being radicalized.
[00:25:10]  Yeah, no.
[00:25:10]  So we've argued on this podcast before about motivations in these previous cases that I was just listing, you know, about rational political actors versus the role that perhaps mental illness or overwhelming life events situationally might play, and even the validity of political violence.
[00:25:29]  Maybe this is an example of such a thing.
[00:25:31]  To me, each of these cases underlines the need for better gun control laws and more socialized mental health services within communities that give families access to resources that might catch these kinds of crises earlier.
[00:25:48]  I think it's very hopeful.
[00:25:49]  And I think his rationale also seems pretty clear.
[00:25:54]  Like, you know, despite it being adventuristic and totally ineffective and just sort of like chaotic and it will provoke a backlash and all kinds of things.
[00:26:03]  Which helps no one.
[00:26:05]  But he says, I'm no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to cope my hands with his crimes.
[00:26:12]  I don't know what therapist is going to sort of.
[00:26:16]  I mean, he would have to go for one thing, he would have to show signs of something.
[00:26:20]  And then I don't know what kind of intervention there is on, yeah, those are really strong feelings you have about our actual pedophile, rapist, and traitor in office.
[00:26:33]  I would like to sit and listen to you.
[00:26:34]  I'm going to reflect those feelings back to you.
[00:26:36]  I don't, yeah, I don't know.
[00:26:38]  What you do with normie extremism, how do you even conceive of it?
[00:26:41]  Definitely, there are too many guns.
[00:26:44]  Can't see how that toothpaste is going back in the tube, though.
[00:26:47]  There's a case here in Portland unfolding where a former disgruntled employee of a fitness club, a high end fitness club, but an old school, almost like country club fitness club, drove a car overnight into the first floor and detonated a bomb that he made himself inside of it, with him inside, killing himself, but also destroying a large.
[00:27:10]  Part of the building.
[00:27:11]  And it just comes out that we knew he was a former employee, but it turns out that Portland City Mental Health Services had been working with him for five years leading up to that.
[00:27:22]  And they still, you know, whatever interventions there were did not stop him from doing what he did.
[00:27:29]  So I, you know, when we look at these things in reflection, it's always like, oh, why didn't we see the steps?
[00:27:35]  But then even when the steps are apparent to the point where the city is intervening, There's still often not enough, and no guns were involved.
[00:27:44]  Now, he obviously didn't want to hurt anyone because he did it overnight, and he knew the club would be empty being a former employee.
[00:27:50]  But he died.
[00:27:51]  He did make a statement, and he died doing so, which, like, how do you even start to try to help that?
[00:27:58]  Well, did they disclose anything about the resources that he accessed that they just sort of say abstract things like therapy or he was in treatment or something?
[00:28:08]  It just happened an hour before the article came out, so I don't know.
[00:28:12]  Oh, okay.
[00:28:13]  He rented the car, so it wasn't his car that I know the bomb was homemade.
[00:28:17]  All I know is that the city had been working with him on and off for five years.
[00:28:21]  And there was some level of therapeutic or public health services rendered to him.
[00:28:26]  I don't know what level that involved.
[00:28:28]  Right.
[00:28:28]  Yeah.
[00:28:29]  I mean, look, I'll keep dreaming about stronger gun control laws and community resources that work in conjunction with those.
[00:28:36]  So, really, I don't think that a therapist is going to talk a guy out of doing something like this.
[00:28:40]  I think a therapist can get a clear sense that his statements go beyond.
[00:28:45]  What otherwise, you know, healthy, normal people who are not going to end up making a choice like that would do.
[00:28:52]  And if he goes, if he goes.
[00:28:55]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:28:55]  And that if there are social work and socialized access to mental health resources that is then connected in a humane way, again, I'm dreaming with law enforcement in such a way that we can catch these things.
[00:29:10]  Because as you said, Derek, and this happens often, often, especially when there's a school shooter, it turns out that reports have been made, that police visits have happened, that they've had some kind of diagnosis in the past.
[00:29:22]  And it's wild to me that these people still are able to find a way to do the things that they do.
[00:29:28]  So, yeah, of course, I don't know what the answers are, but I will end here by saying that I think when someone, especially a young person, makes the decision to choose the day of their death or the day of ending up in prison for the rest of their lives, to throw away all their future ambitions, their hopes, their dreams, their plans, in and of itself, no matter how rational their thinking appears about why they say they're doing what they're doing, it indicates an unusual and extreme mental or emotional state.
[00:29:59]  So, and I think, you know, within therapeutic models, finding hope for the future, having something to live for, these are precisely what good therapy can foster.

=== Journalism Trust Crisis (08:28) ===

[00:30:08]  I just want to step back and say a general note about the event that it was at, because shortly after the incident unfolded, there was speculation that the correspondence dinner wouldn't happen this year.
[00:30:20]  And it's been canceled before.
[00:30:21]  In 1930, it was canceled when President Taft died in 42 due to America's entry into World War II in 51.
[00:30:29]  Due to what President Truman called the uncertainty of the world situation.
[00:30:34]  Personally, I would just be happy for it to go away permanently.
[00:30:39]  There are some things about this annual gathering that I like.
[00:30:42]  It serves as a funnel for a scholarship fund for young journalists.
[00:30:46]  That's awesome.
[00:30:47]  It's an award show that spotlights important investigative journalism.
[00:30:51]  There was some speculation that because there were awards about reporting on Trump specifically, we're getting awards, that was part of the conspiracy theory too, that they did that so the awards couldn't be handed out.
[00:31:04]  There's a roast aspect, which didn't start for over 60 years.
[00:31:08]  The dinner first happened in 1921, and the roast started in 83.
[00:31:13]  And it can be entertaining and politically poignant, for example, when Colbert confronted President Bush head on in a way that we'd rarely seen in public life.
[00:31:22]  And a lot of the Bush workers and assistants walked out during that.
[00:31:28]  In general, I'm a defender of journalism.
[00:31:30]  I fear a world without it more than I worry about the many gripes and rightful gripes that people have with the media.
[00:31:37]  But And I also have my own gripes.
[00:31:40]  The White House Correspondents Association, which hosts the annual dinner, needs to reckon with the fact that trust in mass media is at an all time low.
[00:31:49]  The latest Gallup poll from September 2025 found that only 28% of Americans have a great deal or fair amount of trust in newspapers, television, and radio to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.
[00:32:01]  And this is the first time the figure has fallen below 30% in the poll's 50 year history.
[00:32:07]  Derek, did that poll disaggregate?
[00:32:10]  Levels of trust and distrust based on subject area or?
[00:32:14]  No.
[00:32:14]  You know, no.
[00:32:15]  Okay.
[00:32:16]  The numbers are certainly partisan.
[00:32:18]  51% of Democrats express trust, while only 8% of Republicans do.
[00:32:23]  Though, you know, getting back to what I was saying about Pew before, I'd be interested to see if they consider Fox or Newsmax part of the mainstream media, which they most certainly are.
[00:32:33]  And they most certainly do not.
[00:32:34]  Yeah.
[00:32:35]  Well, yeah.
[00:32:35]  Republicans wouldn't.
[00:32:36]  Exactly.
[00:32:37]  Yeah.
[00:32:38]  And there's also a generational divide.
[00:32:40]  43% of adults over 65 trust the media.
[00:32:44]  Every other group tops out at 28%.
[00:32:47]  Polls from Pew and YouGov found slightly higher percentages than Gallup, but the trend is moving downward regardless of who's doing the polling.
[00:32:56]  A longstanding criticism of the Correspondents' Dinner is the coziness between the Fourth Estate and the politicians that they're tasked to cover.
[00:33:04]  Some level of relationship has to develop between parties, and I'm not going to get on a soapbox and pretend that's not part of the beat.
[00:33:11]  Developing and maintaining sources has been necessary for some of the most important investigative stories in our history.
[00:33:18]  But there's been a palpable shift in the way the media is covering Trump in his second term, tiptoeing around his administration's blatant corruption in an attempt to maintain some sort of imaginary balance.
[00:33:30]  Reporting from Forbes found that Trump's net worth in 2024, before assuming the presidency, was $3.9 billion, and today it's $7.3 billion.
[00:33:41]  Every piece of reporting on his actions, especially as it pertains to financial situations, should use that framework, but it's largely meant with a shrug at this point.
[00:33:51]  And so the issue with access journalism is that if anybody who uses that framing up front is just not going to be in the pool, right?
[00:33:58]  Yes.
[00:34:00]  Access journalism, I think, will be slightly different than what I'm saying.
[00:34:04]  It depends on how the term is used.
[00:34:05]  I usually relate that to people specifically currying favor in order to get the story.
[00:34:13]  And the way that Trump would use it would be like, yeah, almost like.
[00:34:18]  Are you allowed in the room?
[00:34:19]  You need to.
[00:34:20]  Yeah.
[00:34:20]  Are you allowed in the room?
[00:34:22]  Because you have to say nice things about me.
[00:34:24]  Although we also know that he regularly calls up reporters who talk shit about him or cover, I shouldn't even say that, who cover him properly just because he likes talking to reporters.
[00:34:36]  So it's a little more convoluted.
[00:34:38]  Yeah.
[00:34:38]  And what we see more and more with this Trump administration is that if you do say things that they don't want you to say, then they will start denying access and stack the White House press room with the people who they want in there.
[00:34:52]  And that's a departure from.
[00:34:55]  The way a lot of this stuff has happened in the past.
[00:34:57]  Yeah, it's such a tightrope for them, though, because if reporting is, you know, credibility in reporting is at an all time low, the notion that you could control your messaging through restricting the press pool is also really jeopardized, isn't it?
[00:35:15]  Right.
[00:35:16]  It's like they're working with the same problems.
[00:35:19]  Of course, you know, the right wing has captured the vast majority of like powerful media communication, but like they do also have this problem of.
[00:35:28]  You know, you restrict access and, you know, it might not matter that much because there might be too many people tuning you out.
[00:35:35]  I would argue that the numbers that Derek is reporting on, on people mistrusting the media, is it's generated by the White House.
[00:35:44]  It's generated by the White House and all of their allies.
[00:35:47]  And that's part of the rationale for their messaging.
[00:35:50]  It's like, oh, all these people are just so horribly biased, you can't trust them.
[00:35:53]  We're only going to have our people here.
[00:35:55]  It's not, it's not, amongst Republicans, it's not because they're going, oh, I don't know if we can trust the White House press corps because it's all people that Trump has handed.
[00:36:02]  Picked.
[00:36:02]  That's us.
[00:36:03]  Yeah.
[00:36:04]  When you spend over a decade just shitting on MSM, mainstream media, all the time, that's how you get to 8% of your party having any trust in the media.
[00:36:14]  And we also know because even the administration officials, even Kennedy, even Hegseth, will share articles from the New York Times or Washington Post when they agree with them.
[00:36:25]  Yeah.
[00:36:26]  And so, like I said, it's more convoluted than a simple trust or distrust issue.
[00:36:31]  And I also think it's important not to lose track of the fact that.
[00:36:34]  Presidents in the past, even Republican ones that we hate, have accepted a kind of established norm within the society that you have to sit there and deal with the heat from reporters who don't like you.
[00:36:48]  Like that's been part of the story.
[00:36:50]  This is a move away from that.
[00:36:52]  Bush did not get up and leave when Colbert did what he did in front of him, to his credit.
[00:36:57]  Nothing else would I credit him for during his administration, but his aides may have walked out, but he stomached it where you know Trump would have either walked out or gotten up and taken the microphone.
[00:37:06]  He also didn't try to get him fired.
[00:37:08]  Yeah.
[00:37:08]  Yeah, true.
[00:37:10]  So we're facing so many existential questions right now with the continued collapse of our democracy, with the destruction of the Voting Rights Act, just the latest in a series of attacks.
[00:37:21]  I want reporters to keep doing their jobs, and I believe a number of them are doing essential work.
[00:37:26]  I would love outlets to follow the lead of the New York Times when it comes to how they treat the correspondence dinner.
[00:37:32]  After the 2007 event, Times columnist Frank Rich wrote that the dinner had become a quote, Crystallization of the press's failures in the post 9 11 era because it illustrates how easily a propaganda driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows.
[00:37:51]  The Times then stopped sending reporters the following year.
[00:37:55]  And I think it's time for more outlets to follow suit if the association won't end it and focus on rebuilding trust with the public, which are the people they're actually supposed to serve.
[00:38:15]  So, guys, a few Saturdays ago, I was able to do this really great thing that I kind of wish you'd been in Toronto for, both of you, because I was able to take the 13 year old to see Friend of the Pod, Brad Abrahams' new documentary, Gimme Truth, at its world premiere at the Hot Dogs Festival here in Toronto.

=== Amplifying Disinformation (14:42) ===

[00:38:37]  Simon Ennis.
[00:38:37]  So fantastic.
[00:38:38]  Yeah, it was fantastic.
[00:38:39]  It was an incredible experience.
[00:38:41]  Simon Ennis is the co director.
[00:38:43]  Can't wait for you both to see it because it's kind of this super sensitive tour through our original stomping grounds on this podcast.
[00:38:50]  Including the LA Light Expo that you attended and reported on, Julian.
[00:38:54]  I wonder if they were there the same year, but a different day that you were at it, actually.
[00:39:01]  They have footage from the Austin debut of Plandemic, the musical, because Mickey Willis is actually a primary interview subject in the film, which is amazing that he sat and talked to them.
[00:39:14]  Alongside the New Age subjects, there's also a QAnon survivor named Erica who tells them.
[00:39:22]  Basically, everything.
[00:39:23]  The traumatic circumstances of her marriage pre pandemic to how she found her way into full blown conspirituality and what it did to her mental health and her relationships with her kids.
[00:39:36]  And then, how, for whatever reason, I'm not sure why she had this reaction.
[00:39:42]  I'd like to ask her actually, but January 6th horrified her as she watched it play out on the screen.
[00:39:49]  She thought that somehow she was part of a peaceful movement and that wasn't true and something snapped.
[00:39:56]  And then on the screen appears another friend of the pod, Stephanie Kemmerer, because she entered via Erica's story.
[00:40:07]  And I interviewed Stephanie back in 2022 when she was just starting up her support group for conspiracy theory refugees.
[00:40:15]  And Erica found Stephanie online and joined the circle of help and slowly climbed her way back out of the rabbit hole.
[00:40:21]  And that is such a rich story because when Brad and Simon go poking around, They find Stephanie.
[00:40:30]  Stephanie connects them with Erica.
[00:40:32]  And then, 18 months or however long it took, I'm sitting with my son in a theater with film lovers all around me, just having given a copy of my new book to Brad, and we're taking it all in.
[00:40:45]  And I'm bringing it all up because we're talking about a four or five year chapter in Erica and Stephanie's lives, in which there was this deep investment in a rich, high quality story environment.
[00:41:00]  We can say what we want about QAnon.
[00:41:02]  It was a deep story.
[00:41:03]  It was definitely a deep story.
[00:41:06]  I'm not sure about how high quality it was.
[00:41:08]  Well, enriching, like absorptive.
[00:41:12]  Meaningful.
[00:41:13]  Meaningful Dungeons and Dragons level quality.
[00:41:16]  There are some groups who do that, who keep a single dungeon going for five years.
[00:41:22]  And my point is that deep stories take time and commitment, and that's how they form communities.
[00:41:30]  Of toxic relationships, but also communities that emerge at the other end in recovery.
[00:41:34]  So when Ron Watkins says maybe QAnon was the friends we made along the way, he wasn't exactly wrong.
[00:41:41]  He's an asshole, but he wasn't wrong.
[00:41:42]  Totally.
[00:41:43]  But considering the speed of the conspiracy theorizing, this is all I could think about as I considered the, you know, Cole and the correspondence dinner, you know, this, this, all of this stuff spinning off of this potential assassination, as well as a whole string of previous events that have almost already been memory holds.
[00:42:01]  For me, like I'm starting to think less of theorizing and more in terms of a reflex, like a completely automatic political nervous system reaction.
[00:42:11]  And in one sense, like we've always had, you know, conspiratorial or paranoid reflexes at work and visible in US politics and beyond.
[00:42:21]  Like the John Birch Society didn't carefully theorize about fluoride, right?
[00:42:27]  So, you know, maybe what is changing is that there's a decoupling of the initial claim from the elaboration process that actually builds relationships between people and it takes, you know, almost a kind of literature to form.
[00:42:42]  A conspiracy theory, as we've said a bunch of times, might be paranoid, but it will have internal architecture.
[00:42:50]  It'll name actors, it'll describe mechanisms, it'll propose timelines, it'll accumulate evidence.
[00:42:58]  And in this way, I think it mimics a novel or a movie.
[00:43:01]  And I think this is why, actually, over at QAnon Anonymous, now QAA, they are so like Jake is sort of like the narrative expert there working in the movie industry, and all of his reference for how.
[00:43:15]  Conspiracy theories play out is through movie narratives and how movies will iterate and reiterate past movies.
[00:43:24]  And, you know, we have this accumulation of stories that follow these archetypal arcs.
[00:43:29]  The conspiracy reflex creates clips and memes, it creates verdicts, but no cases.
[00:43:36]  Like, I had to, you know, things, speaking of the things that have happened recently, I had to look up what was happening in the Mangione trial because this is a very important story and it seemed to trail off at the speed of memes, right?
[00:43:49]  Same with the Charlie Kirk shooter.
[00:43:51]  There are a lot of Kirkification memes, then there are shared knowledge about the shooter's legal status.
[00:43:57]  And I don't know if you guys have seen Kirkification, but like this is an incredible sort of cultural melting pot of just such different affects and attitudes and politics.
[00:44:11]  It's incredible.
[00:44:12]  Yeah.
[00:44:12]  And it's also like what you were saying about Manjiani, too.
[00:44:15]  It feels like the memes kind of have their climactic moment within their short storytelling arc.
[00:44:21]  Right.
[00:44:21]  And then it's like, okay, what else is in the news cycle now?
[00:44:24]  So it's like.
[00:44:24]  Then the actual story trails off.
[00:44:27]  Right.
[00:44:28]  Yeah.
[00:44:29]  It's such a bizarre thing.
[00:44:33]  So it made me think of Hofstetter and how, in the paranoid style, we've got storytellers still.
[00:44:42]  They're obsessed with hidden documents, they're craving the satisfaction of having figured it out.
[00:44:48]  And then he's working in 1964 and he's got like subjects with these elaborate backstories.
[00:44:53]  You know, the Masons, the Catholic nativists, the McCarthyites are doing their thing and they're producing pamphlets and manifestos and elaborate genealogies of conspiracy.
[00:45:03]  I suppose in some of the shooting cases of like the Auckland shooter and a number of other going back about eight to 10 years now, we have, you know, fleshed out manifestos.
[00:45:18]  And so that seems to give weight to, you know, a kind of building sense of like, well, I'm doing something and it's complete.
[00:45:26]  And now there's going to be a sort of a A climax to it.
[00:45:30]  Yeah.
[00:45:30]  And not only that, the manifestos start to create a sense of a coherent through line that connects the dots between these different events and characters and how they're inspired by one another, how they have shared sort of ways that they've been radicalized or shared grievances against the world.
[00:45:48]  They also create fan fiction, right?
[00:45:51]  So my question is is Cole's email going to create the same kind of thing?
[00:45:55]  And I have the feeling that everything's accelerating and there's less and less of a chance of that because the paranoid style was maximalist.
[00:46:03]  And now we have this minimalist style almost.
[00:46:06]  And I'm not talking about Marie Kondo.
[00:46:09]  And I see a relationship between the difference between the brick and mortar cult, you know, whether it's Synonon or Nexium, the dozens of yoga cults that we've covered that all produced social bonds and rituals and mutual accountability, however pathological they are.
[00:46:27]  They might have conspiracy theories as well that are part of the content that justified the form, but then the form also held space for life activities, living together, like, you know, having a garden and cooking and stuff.
[00:46:39]  But the reflex is.
[00:46:41]  Countless nameless people provoked to the same reaction at the same time, sometimes in online groups.
[00:46:47]  And I think that can feel like togetherness.
[00:46:50]  But I think people can participate in the reflex without self identifying as a conspiracy theorist, too.
[00:46:56]  So there's a plausible deniability built into the speed aspect because people can retreat, you know, interesting if true, big if true.
[00:47:06]  They can maintain some kind of distance from it.
[00:47:09]  And so if I'm right about this conspiracy reflex, the entry.
[00:47:13]  Cost for participating in this stuff is lowering.
[00:47:17]  And, you know, it possibly this stuff is spreading quicker and with more saturation than any organized, more elaborate conspiracy theory movement.
[00:47:26]  So it's another way of flooding the zone, right?
[00:47:29]  But with what?
[00:47:29]  Well, the reflex definitely lowers.
[00:47:32]  The entry is lowered because you don't have to even print pamphlets anymore.
[00:47:36]  You could just type on your phone.
[00:47:37]  Right.
[00:47:38]  I agree, people don't have to identify as a conspiracy theorist to participate in one, but that's to me where personal responsibility comes in.
[00:47:46]  Amplifying mis or disinformation because you glossed over a post and reshared it without thinking too much about it is part of the problem.
[00:47:54]  I've seen some people apologize for resharing things before understanding what it was that they were even doing.
[00:48:02]  And I really appreciate ownership.
[00:48:04]  It's good when you make a mistake.
[00:48:05]  But more often than not, people move on and are impervious to conflicting evidence.
[00:48:09]  And that's why I advocate so hard for science and media literacy.
[00:48:15]  Sadly, many of our relationships to the platforms don't.
[00:48:19]  Require it, however.
[00:48:20]  You know, when people do apologize for, you know, I shared that without checking into it, I'm really sorry, there's no engagement on that.
[00:48:29]  Yeah, that's the other problem.
[00:48:30]  Yeah, their first post gets tons of views.
[00:48:34]  Yeah, there's no payoff for being good.
[00:48:36]  At least they own it and hopefully they'll do better.
[00:48:39]  I, again, speaking personally, I have in the past shared articles without reading them, the full context, the full article.
[00:48:47]  I do not do that anymore.
[00:48:49]  And it's not like I don't.
[00:48:51]  Sometimes I want to, and then I say, No, remember your own rule here.
[00:48:55]  And then I go and read the article.
[00:48:56]  So I know on my own hygiene on social media, I've had to slow down and really monitor myself.
[00:49:04]  And my hope is that when people do apologize and they realize they implement the same guardrails of their own consciousness.
[00:49:12]  Guys, I've got the next thing for us, which is media hygiene wellness, which is we know how to.
[00:49:21]  Purify ourselves.
[00:49:24]  We know what's involved in keeping ourselves clean and fresh, and we know how to do purgations every once in a while.
[00:49:32]  I think it's a big hit.
[00:49:34]  What's in the pill?
[00:49:36]  John Oliver did his piece on gas station drugs this week, if anyone caught it.
[00:49:40]  And it showed how the pills bought in different gas stations in the same city have really different ingredients, even though it's the same company.
[00:49:47]  Oh, wow.
[00:49:48]  So we just got to make sure the pill contains the same thing every time, and I think we'll be okay.
[00:49:53]  We may have to fight over whether it's the Portland version or the LA version or the Toronto version.
[00:49:58]  That gets our oust stamp of approval.
[00:50:01]  So, I want to talk about the leaders as well because of conspiracy theories.
[00:50:07]  Because I'm starting to wonder if their days are numbered.
[00:50:09]  Because if I look at this string from, you know, just start anywhere, but Jim Jones to Osho to David Icke to Alex Jones to Q, like each iteration is becoming more and more digitized, more and more like they're fading into the matrix or something like that.
[00:50:28]  Jones, if just the one prior to Q, is still a body and you can still see him.
[00:50:34]  He's still.
[00:50:35]  Showing up and stumbling around drunk here and there.
[00:50:37]  But, you know, he's a legal entity that you can pin the effects of a conspiracy theory on.
[00:50:43]  And then we get to Q, we have full depersonalization.
[00:50:46]  He's an oracle who never existed.
[00:50:49]  I'm starting to wonder if there will be a guru position open anymore if we're more and more in reflex territory.
[00:50:56]  And to be clear here, when you say a guru, because you're kind of blurring the lines right between the guru and the propagator of a big conspiracy theory, in this case, You're wondering if the conspiracy guru position is open anymore or both?
[00:51:09]  Well, both.
[00:51:10]  I think because I started by thinking about this of, well, you know, the brick and mortar cult has kind of dissolved and become gaseous and, you know, digitized.
[00:51:23]  And I think that the same thing is happening with, like, can you imagine a figure like David Icke emerging again, whose entire industry was built upon these huge hard copy books that you can find in new age bookstores with torn, Dust jackets now.
[00:51:40]  Like, there's no, I don't think there's a will for that substance amongst the consuming population anymore.
[00:51:47]  I don't think anybody is going in to try to find the books.
[00:51:51]  And so, as things move online, the sort of attachments to both materials and to actual personalities, I think, gets looser.
[00:52:01]  Yeah, it's like we've, it's like collectively, we've realized what the tastiest aspect is of that kind of material.
[00:52:09]  I mean, no longer have to read through a 500 page book.
[00:52:13]  To get to it, it's like those scientists who engineer the junk food so that it has that particular taste that you just can't resist.
[00:52:21]  We figured that out now, and it's just an Instagram reel.
[00:52:25]  It's not a series of books.
[00:52:26]  Yeah, that's hilarious.
[00:52:27]  And also, you don't have to deal with, oh, David Icke is kind of weird, right?
[00:52:31]  Let me just read the lizard thing.
[00:52:33]  Alex Jones, do I really want to listen to him anymore?
[00:52:37]  But he knows the truth.
[00:52:38]  Well, Q is hardly even there, though.
[00:52:39]  Like, you don't actually have to, there's nothing you have to tolerate about Q except him being abstract, right?
[00:52:46]  Yeah.
[00:52:46]  So, all you get is the umami on the tongue.
[00:52:48]  Yeah, right.
[00:52:51]  I mean, we've been traveling on this arc for a long time on this podcast, but also, you know, in terms of past theory.
[00:53:00]  Like Hannah Arendt worried about the destruction of the common world through totalitarian lying.
[00:53:05]  And now that arc is decentralizing, you know, day by day through millions of users opting out of the common world simultaneously, like from below.
[00:53:16]  And I don't think the reflex is going to respond to expertise or.

=== Countering Conspiracy Reflex (02:10) ===

[00:53:19]  Counter expertise.
[00:53:21]  Last week, we were talking about, I was talking about my book, and one thing that connects that material to our study here is this meditation on speed as fascism becomes the norm.
[00:53:31]  And as a parent, I now have what will be a long term concern over how clearly my kids can identify bullshit.
[00:53:39]  And they need that skill because they're growing up among YouTube shorts, and YouTube shorts deliver this, you know, turd after turd of absurdity.
[00:53:50]  If the algorithm gets into a bad run.
[00:53:53]  So I think they need the counter reflex and they're developing it.
[00:53:57]  And the speed with which they can both ID AI is incredible, actually.
[00:54:02]  It's much faster than me.
[00:54:04]  But that's still the zone of the reflex.
[00:54:07]  And so I feel like it's the equivalent of learning the choreography of Neo in the Matrix movies.
[00:54:12]  Like you can dodge the bullets, but where do you wind up beyond like treading water in the simulation?
[00:54:17]  So I think the long, hard work that we have done, picking back through the details of any influencer's output, It's different.
[00:54:27]  It evolves a worldview.
[00:54:28]  Like, I didn't engage with Charles Eisenstein's 9,000 word coronation essay so that I could just like post a meme back at it.
[00:54:36]  Like, in deconstructing it and working with it in detail, I was developing and laying out a politics of opposition, a counter theory.
[00:54:45]  And I suppose this is one of the reasons that I emphasize games so hard in my book.
[00:54:51]  And the home here is full of games because when they're into a Dungeons and Dragons instance or deep into a narrative game, You know, Cyberpunk 2077 is excellent for this.
[00:55:03]  The older one plays that, not the younger one.
[00:55:05]  They get an experience of complexity, ambivalence, no easy answers, high investments in worlds that can develop and change.
[00:55:14]  And I think that the conspiracy theory reflex puts people in the opposite or null state in which it's hard to go forward.
[00:55:21]  Like all you can do is not lose your balance.
[00:55:24]  So I think any long form content engagement has got to be some kind of antidote.