Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 843: Jonathan Jarry - Joseph Mercola and His Medium

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

Discover the magic of Bad MGM Casino, where the excitement is always on deck! Pull up a seat and check out a wide variety of table games with a live dealer! From Roulette to Blackjack, watch as a dealer hosts your table game and live chat with them throughout your experience to feel like you're actually at the casino! The excitement doesn't stop there, with over 3,000 games to choose from, including fan favorites like Cash Eruption, UFC Gold Blitz, and more! Make deposits instantly to jump in on the fun, and make same-day withdrawals if you win!

Download the BetMGM Ontario app today! You don't want to miss out! Visit betmgm.com for terms and conditions. 19 plus to wager, Ontario only, please gamble responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. Bet MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily Recording live from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way.

We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad. It's skeptical, it's political, and there is no welcome mat. There is also no Tom this week, and I don't want that to sound too dramatic as Tom is recovering from surgery. So people who showed up last week, we talked about Tom possibly missing this week. Almost certainly he was not going to be, we weren't going to do a show with him live because on Wednesday he had neck surgery. If

you weren't familiar, he had some problems with some vertebrae in his neck. They were squishing a nerve. He was in intense pain for about 20 days, really, really debilitating, couldn't function very well. And, and he was able to get in to get this surgery relatively quick. He went in on, he went on Wednesday, the surgery was late in the day. So the doctor decided to keep him overnight. He was released from the hospital the following day around noon and he is recovering. He's up walking around. He was up and walking around the next morning. He had a, so he is, he, the surgery was not only successful, but it looks like it's really

starting to help his quality of life. While the pain is still there, the doctor said that it would lessen over time. So if you're curious about what happened to Tom, that's what happened to Tom over the last couple of days. And he's feeling much better. Hopefully we will record next week. We were a little worried because they have to sort of move a bunch of bits

out of the way in order to get to the back of the neck. They go in through the front. The doctor had said that there might be a possibility he might lose his voice or then get a sore throat or something. He had none of that. But Tom is feeling better and he's on the mend and hopefully he'll be back next week.

So this week I decided to reach out to Jonathan Jerry. Jonathan Jerry is a science communicator with McGill University's Office for Science and Society. He is someone who I've been familiar with his work since I started working on this other podcast I've been working on, I've been reading some of the things he's put together because they're very useful for that particular show.

But I was turned on to this very specific video. Now I'm gonna put the video in the show notes and we're gonna talk about it extensively. It's about an hour long video, but really worth your time. It's a video of Joseph Mercola and it's a behind the scenes sort of look at what he's, who he's talking to, where he's getting his ideas from. These are sort of leaked Zoom calls that he has on his,

that were leaked to Jonathan Jerry from someone else. And we'll get into all that as we talk about it, but it's a really interesting bit of tape and Jonathan Jerry edited a video about it. I had an opportunity to watch it. I'm gonna put it in the show notes along with some other work that he's done. If you get a chance, check it out.

I mean, it's totally worth your time. And then we're gonna talk about it now in this interview. I am joined by Jonathan Jerry, who is the science communicator with McGill University's Office for Science and Society. Jonathan, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining me. Well, thank you very much for having me, Cecil. So Jonathan, before we get started, I know we have a lot to talk about today, but we wanted to before we get started, why don't you introduce yourself, tell people what you

do and who you are. So I'm a science communicator. I have a master's degree in molecular biology. I've worked in many labs. I've worked in molecular pathology and research labs, cancer labs, all kinds of labs. And now I basically try and translate science for the public and make it accessible. I also denounce pseudoscience and the conspiracy theories that often emerge around it.

And I have the privilege of doing this at an office at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, which is dedicated to exactly this. So the Office for Science and Society has existed since 1999. And so that's what we do. We separate sense from nonsense on scientific issues. That is really amazing. And the university itself seems to be dedicated to something like that.

Is this a tradition at McGill? No, it was. I mean, I would say it was sort of a happenstance. There were three chemistry professors at McGill that were sort of brought together and who wanted to sort of, you know, do a better job of sort of disentangling the facts from the myths around chemistry at the time. And that mandate sort of broadened very quickly after that. Wonderful, wonderful.

So the reason why I'm talking to you today, Jonathan, is there's a video that I was turned onto that I'll link in the show notes. This is a video about a gentleman who runs a sort of wellness empire and Someone who if I say his name people will know who he is by listening to our show because we've often connected into some really vast Anti-vaccination campaigns so

the vast anti-vaccination campaigns. So during the pandemic specifically, he was one of the top super spreaders of misinformation about COVID vaccines and other vaccines. His name's Mercola is his last name. Let's talk about him to start. Before we get into the video itself, let's sort of unpack who Mercola is. If someone had never heard of this person,

who is he and what does he do? It's hard to sort of underestimate how important Joseph Mercola is. We don't hear his name a lot outside of skeptical circles. When you speak to the average person, they might say, oh yeah, I remember this guy from like 20 years ago. Is he still doing stuff? It's like, yeah, he's extremely active.

He sells every dietary supplement he can think of. So he's an osteopathic physician, which in the United States is comparable to a medical doctor. And he was one of the early adopters of the internet. Like he saw the promise of the internet to disseminate health knowledge. So he created a website, mercola.com, in the mid to late 90s.

And very, very quickly, he came to embrace what he would call sort of natural medicine, natural healing practices. And he became the antithesis of the medical doctor by rejecting a lot of medical practices, by endorsing vitamin supplements and all kinds of dietary supplements and demonizing vaccines.

He's a major anti-vaxxer, all that kind of stuff. So that's the kind of guy that he is. But what's interesting about him is that he looks very avuncular. He's now around 70, 71 years old. Usually wears his lab coat when he makes videos. And he just sounds like a really nice guy. Like you want him to be your grandpa or your uncle

who's gonna give you some health advice. So he sounds very sort of innocuous, but also very smart and sort of having his finger on the pulse of what's really happening out there and denouncing these big conspiracies that he sees everywhere. It's interesting because you say he's an osteopath. Now that to me says that he's not only a medical doctor, like someone who would have got an

MD, but he's also a chiropractor as well. Is that correct? No. So osteopathy is this really weird discipline that is an offshoot of chiropractic, like here in Canada and in the UK. In the United States, what ended up happening is that they pass some regulations to make sure that the curriculum that osteopathic physicians go through in the US specifically is almost indistinguishable from what medical students go through.

Oh, okay. And so they do learn a little bit about these manipulations, like with their hands, of soft tissue. But a lot of osteopaths in the US will report that they don't use them in their everyday practice. So it's an interesting case of something that started out as a pseudoscience that became sort of not normalized, but it became sort of rectified

and brought into a more evidence-based pathway. Interesting. So when we talk about osteopaths in Canada versus in the US, these are two different types of practitioners. I see, okay. So Joseph Mercola is this, he's like, like we suggested he has this, he's wellness empire. He's been doing this for decades, convincing people to take supplements, convincing people to stay away from vaccines,

to possibly try different therapies that most people might not want to try if they were suggested by, they wouldn't be suggested by let let's say, like a regular physician, but in this case, this video that has Mercola in it, this is sort of behind the scenes footage. This isn't just him on a video talking to people. This is him in his everyday sort of working life. Let's talk about the video itself. What happened for you to sort of,

what opened the doors for you to get a hold of this sort of behind the scenes footage? So in, I wanna say spring of 2024, a journalist for a trade publication in the dietary supplements industry, his name is Rick Polito, published an article that really made me go, wait, what? At the time I was working on a comprehensive video on Joe Mercola because I couldn't find anything on YouTube that really delved deeply into all the claims that he's made and the

kind of influencer that he is. And as I was preparing for this video, this thing comes out where it says, oh, by the way, he's now consulting with a medium and he has fired his entire executive staff, including his own sister. Oh my gosh. Who's been with him since the 1980s, I believe. And so this kind of like radical change moving in a completely different direction. And this journalist had access to video sessions between Joe Mercola and this medium who claims to be channeling a spirit and a spirit's name is Balon. B-A-H-L-O-N.

And I did not see the videos. I couldn't I didn't have access to them, but I followed his multiple articles that he released about this. My video comes out on YouTube. And then months later, I receive an email out of the blue from a whistleblower from inside Mercola's company, who tells me the situation is really, really bad. This story needs to come out.

Here are links to a bunch of these videos. So what happens is that Mercola every day, early in the morning, will sit down inside of his home. He has this home office. He's in Florida. And he will have a Zoom session of two hours and a half or something with the Chandler himself, who was also in Florida, but about four hours away. And the way that these videos are structured is that they, you know, they shoot the shit for a few minutes. And then the Chandler who goes by the name of Kai Clay will close his eyes, enter a trance and I put giant quotation marks here, enter a trance in the

least convincing way possible. And then he is possessed by this all-knowing spirit called Balan and Joe Mercola will ask him a bunch of questions about his personal life, about his business, about medical facts that he wants to report on on his website, what everything you can think of. And then at the end, the trans ends, and then Mercola brings Kai Klee up to date on what just happened, because of course Kai has no idea. Sure, yeah.

No idea what just happened. Yeah, I know, that makes sense. That's insane that we're using, like at this point now, that there's people out there that have utilized this kind of technology, voiceover internet protocol in order to do this sort of thing is one of the most amusing things about this whole story. But it's actually, in a lot of ways, it's kind of tragic, right?

I mean, you see a person who has sort of a business person who's clearly being taken advantage of by somebody who's pretending to channel a spirit. Let's talk a little bit about some of the things that you find out as you watch these videos. You get how many hours worth of footage that you think you had? Initially I had over 50 hours of footage and I watched all of it, Cecil. All of it. And then I got a second dump of files, which I have not touched.

And so I have well over a hundred of these videos. You see, like as a guy who has to listen to Joe Rogan, like every week, let me tell you, two hours feels insurmountable. So I couldn't- And then when you're taking notes. Yeah, I couldn't imagine 50 hours of any of that. I would both.

There's an anthropological or rather like there's something about it that tickles the would be anthropologists inside of me who as a skeptic, I'm always curious to know how does a person like this think? Sure. Right? Because one of the biggest questions within the skeptic community is about attributing motivation to these people. Are they true believers? Are they scam artists? Are they bullshit artists, meaning they don't care what the truth value is, they're just gonna do whatever is helpful for them,

they believe some of it, not all of it. You never really know. And so this is one of those very rare opportunities to get us close to being inside the brain of one of these massive anti-vaxxers alt-med influencers. And so I was watching initially thinking, I'm just waiting for that bit where Mercola says, look at all those people that I'm scamming.

Look at all the money that I'm making. They have no idea. I change my mind every few months. They have no clue. It just enrich mind every few months, they have no clue. It just enriches me. Yeah, yeah. That never came up. I never heard him say anything like,

and quite the opposite is what I realized that this guy is a true believer. Sure. He at some point says, you know, I was so stupid. I was telling people to put ozone up their bum. I mean, you'd have to be an idiot to do that. No, the real thing you have to put up your bum is CO2. It's carbon dioxide, which he does every day.

1.5 liter at a time. He inserts a tube up his anus and rectum, and he just pushes that gas up in there, and he thinks it's giving him a force field that protects him against electromagnetic frequencies. And there are multiple videos where he is telling Kai, and that's not his real name, but we'll get to that, where he's telling Kai, you have to do,

you should be doing this. And Kai says, yeah, I need to buy the right regulator for the CO2 canister. I sent you the link, and you should, and he's doing this to his dog. Come on now. Now that's a piece. Yeah. Mercola has a puppy and he is talking about inserting the catheter up his dog's bum to push the CO2 up there. Not 1.5 liter, obviously, because he's smaller, but some

quantity of it. Come on. So when you reach that point, you go, okay, so this is somebody who, it will be very easy for us skeptics from the outside to paint him as a liar, as a grifter, right? He is lying to people. No, he's not. Like he really believes this stuff.

And I think that we forget how easy it is to be self-deluded. Yeah. Right, there's this whole trend, not just in skepticism, but elsewhere, of like people denouncing grifts and cons and all that kind of stuff. And we're always attributing this motivation to people and we don't know what they're really thinking. And in this particular case, I can say, I don't think he's a grifter.

I don't think he's lying to people. He really believes what he's saying. Even as he keeps changing his mind to him, he's just discovering new science that makes him change how he thinks about things. Yeah, that is a really interesting perspective. You get a chance to see him, and you always kind of expect him to sort of turn to the camera and twist his mustache a little, you know?

And he never does it throughout all that time. He's clean shaven, Cecil. Ha ha ha! There's no mustache to twirl. Impossible, impossible. That's how you know. But, but okay. So, but there is a point in those, in those tapes where you get an opportunity to see

him. He certainly does have what I would think would be something like, it feels a little unethical because there's a point where he realizes that olive oil is bad. That what he has is a bunch of olive oil that he's been selling people for a very long time. And now he's decided he's somehow come across some literature or maybe even Belon suggested that olive oil is bad. And now he's not interested in olive oil.

And he says, I won't tell people right away, I'll dump my stocks quick in it and then I'll tell people that it's bad. Right. Yeah. Now he says this as a joke, he laughs. I did try to use a way back machine, but it doesn't archive most of his websites.

So I wasn't able to see the timing like when did he stop? You know, I did check, but you know, and that takes me to the next point, which is that motivation is a complicated thing, right? It is layered. We are not these like simple rational agents. We are very irrational to begin with. And there are different things that motivate us. And Mercola, of course, I mean, I'm not saying that Mercola is not motivated at all by money. And I'm just

looking over my notes here to make sure. Yeah. So it had been reported by the Washington Post that he was worth over $100 million. And this was based on an affidavit that they had on Earth. Upon watching these videos, he comments on this to Balan and says, well, you know, anybody who's worth anything is not going to tell you exactly how much they're worth, even when they're under oath. So, you know, I said over 100, but actually I'm worth over $300 million.

So this is a guy who is a multimillionaire, like worth over $300 million, and I'm sure that the kind of money that's coming in is an incentive for him. Like I'm not gonna be so stupid as to say that's not the case. But just because somebody is profiting from what they're selling you

doesn't mean that they don't believe in it. Yeah, so he's getting a bunch of advice, and you said on some of even the most mundane things in his life from this spiritual medium who is clearly grifting him. Now there's a really wonderful thing. I would suggest anybody watches the... Well, you're hedging on whether or not he's clearly grifting over now. We'll talk about that in a second. But I want to mention that I really love the video because there's a great edit that you do where you show this spiritual medium going into the trance and they go into the trance so practice that you could, you put it on the screen

four times and they match themselves perfectly to the tone four times in a row. So they do it exactly the same each time. It's very simple. It's a very simple way to go into a trance, but it is something that they're doing a good job of mimicking it every single time they do it. Yeah, so if you're scrolling through a video

and you wanna know if Mercola is speaking to Kai, the human, or to Balan, the spirit, you just have to look at Kai's eyes, and if they're closed, it means he's channeling, and so it's Balan speaking. I see. And if they're open, it's him. So yeah, as you pointed out, whenever he goes into a trance, it's the exact same thing. He closes his eyes, he laughs in this weird way twice, and then he kind of goes, and then he says, how are you? And then that's it. So now,

Mercola is like, okay, I've got my guy. I'm gonna ask my questions, got his little outline on his computer screen, and he just goes and talks to him. And at the end of the trance, basically, Kai stretches out like this, and rubs his eyes very quickly, like, oh, what'd I miss? What'd I miss? And I mean, it is comical.

I mean, it is so silly. And yet, this $300 million worth major all health influencer who has ties to RFK Jr. and a bunch of people believes in it hook, line and sinker. What is, so they talk about all these different things. They're talking about big strokes to the company too. And this is probably why you even were approached by a whistleblower, my suspicion is,

is because this spiritual medium starts going after many different people in the company and there's some major firings and things that happen. Yeah, there was a major upheaval at Mercola's company. So he fired his CEO, well, rather he had his CEO fired. Mercola didn't do the bloody handiwork. He had other people do it for him. But yeah, so his CEO was gone. I mean, pretty much his entire C-suite was gone, including his sister. And then a bunch of other people were fired

afterwards. There seems to be a huge churn of the company now where people are brought in, they don't work out and they are fired. And the one who's sort of inception is even the clearest in the videos is his CFO. Her name is Amy and it's very interesting to see what's happening there because this is all in one session, like one two hour plus session where the beginning Mercola tells Kai,

hey, you know, Amy is just, she's my life, she's everything, I trust her implicitly. But by the way, she flagged this check for you, it wasn't gonna go to you because she thought there was a mistake, but then I had to tell her, no, no, no, it's okay, we're paying him in advance. And then Kai goes into a trance, and now it's Balon speaking.

And out of the blue, Balon says, oh yeah, this CFO Amy, you better watch out for her. I'm sensing that her energy is sort of conflicted right now. And Mercola's like, well, I don't know what you're talking about. I mean, I couldn't reach her over the weekend, but I mean, surely there must have been some explanation for this and oh, she's really, she's being pulled in different directions. And by the end of the trance, Mercola is convinced that he can't trust his CFO anymore. And so it's interesting because, of course, this all started because a payment to Kai was flagged by her and now she's getting out of the picture, right? So it's very interesting to see how easy Mercola is to influence,

like starting from a position of I trust this person implicitly as she has worked for me for 20 plus years and two hours later I don't think she's going to make it. Wow. You know what's interesting when you say that is, you know, I think about how easy he is to manipulate. And then I think about how powerful you have to be to have $300 million at your disposal. How many people's lives hang in the balance because you employ them or because you buy things from them

or all those other things, all the different powerful people you may know. I think of all that and I think, if this person is so easy to manipulate here, how easy are they manipulate on all these other fronts that they're involved in? You know, I mean, clearly he's meeting with powerful people if he's $300 million worth. Yeah, somebody years ago told me that the biggest realization that they'd had in their very young life was that we're all winging it.

And it's sort of the sign that you've entered adulthood is you realize that, yeah, the adults are in charge, but they're just winging it. And so you're right. Like when you look at Mercola, he is by all accounts as successful as you could possibly be. I mean, it's just, I mean, the wealth that he has, the influence he has, the number of books that he's published. I mean, this guy is just, he's everywhere.

He's extremely rich. And yet you can see that he is just winging it and now he is hanging onto the words of a medium to tell him what to do with his personal life, his finances, his giant corporation, his dog, medical diagnoses that he might have had, all kinds of stuff. He's just, yeah, he's just a guy who's winging it.

Yeah. Does he, well, before we move off Mercola, there's one thing that I was curious about. He has some really strong words for veterinarians in this. Does he, he is not a veterinarian fan, it sounds like. Yeah, this was, I mean, this was the, this is the most violent thing in all of these videos, which is that there is this, this weird call to violence

that comes out of nowhere, where Mercola gets really worked up against veterinarians. And it's not made clear in the videos I watch why that is, other than Mercola saying, you know, I have a plan. And of course, it's not his plan. He has spiritual guides, Cecil. So he's not just listening to Balan, but he also has over 1500 spiritual guides who put ideas into his head.

So any idea that Mercola has, he goes, oh, well, that's one of my spiritual guides. And he says, you know, they gave me the plan, and it's a beautiful plan. And we're going to have a campaign, and we're going to recruit millions of people. And they will walk on the streets with weapons on these creatures.

And by creatures, he means veterinarians. For some reason, he is so against the veterinary industry. He thinks that they're poisoning our pets, they're killing our pets. So we're going to recruit people to march with weapons on veterinarians who already have a very high rate of suicide, by the way, because it's not easy being a vet. And now there he is calling for violence against them. And then Balan doesn't say, hold on, hold on, Joe. Maybe not. Yeah. No, he goes, yeah, but also don't forget the industrial side, meaning I guess agriculture or the meat

industry. It's left kind of unclear. So he's not only saying yes, he's saying yes and wow. So it's a very violent game of improv Okay, well let's we've talked a lot about blonde Let's talk about blonde and let's talk about who is channeling him. What did you find out when you started digging into this? Yeah, let's talk about his his human receptacle so the guy goes by Kai clay, but his real name is Christopher Johnson and This was this was uncovered by Rick Polito, the journalist that I mentioned earlier, and I did my own investigation and I confirmed that this is indeed, this guy, his real name is really Christopher W. Johnson, who is the former CEO of

a branding agency in New York City called the White Horn Group. And this was the most mysterious part of this whole thing because it's not just about Mercola and the fact that he seems to be scammed by this medium. It's who is this medium and why is he doing this? Because that was not his life before that. This is a guy who by all appearances was very successful, was not, didn't seem to be a psychic, a medium of any sort at the time.

He was on the US Afghan Women's Council. He had major clients, claims to be the guy who did the JetBlue Airways redesign in the late 90s, which won acclaim within the branding world, claims to have worked with a number of celebrities, I later learned, Lady Gaga, Diddy, Jay-Z, Beyonce, a bunch of others.

Most of what he is saying seems to be supported by evidence that I've gathered since the video was made. So this is a very, very strange thing where this guy, Chris Johnson, he's from Maryland and he goes to university and then he goes to Europe to work on branding and marketing and then he comes to New York City, is in charge of the White Horn Group, is supposedly very successful. He was interviewed in a PBS documentary that aired in 2013, I believe, where he reveals that he's gay and he's single and he wants to adopt, well, not adopt, he wants to have a biological child, very important to him.

And so manages to get this done through surrogacy and in vitro fertilization. So he's covered by PBS. And, and then years later, he pops up in Florida. And now he's doing this dog and pony show of saying, Hey, I'm Kai Klee, and I channel Belon, and he has a website, Belon.com. And he is the medium of the CEOs. And so if you need financial advice, investment advice, structural advice, whatever, just hire me and I will channel Balaan and I'll give you all this.

So it was this question that I couldn't answer by the time the video came out of like, why did this guy pivot like this? And since the video came out, a number of new sources have reached out to me and I've had long conversations with them. And it turns out that Chris Johnson has been channeling for a while. And Balan is not the first entity that he has channeled. And there's evidence

online of another entity called and he is all in one word. So it kind of looks like and heist but but apparently it was pronounced and he is. So he has had like other monikers over the years. He's had a slew of internet addresses, like email addresses and different websites. So this is somebody who reinvents himself all the time. And after hearing more and more about who this guy was before he met Mercola, I can't help but conclude, at least temporarily,

that this guy is also a true believer. You think he's a believer, huh? I was watching these videos thinking like, clearly this guy is a con artist. Like you can't, I mean, this is so low effort, like they're going through the trance. And the fact that most of the time he just says, yes, we concur. You know, like he provides so little information to Mercola. He's just a sounding board and a yes man. Um, and so I thought, well, clearly this is a con and it does not appear to be the case. It appears that he really does believe that he is channeling an entity. So you have two true believers who are influencing each other. And from the outside, they look like, like con artists. And yet they, as yet, as far as I can tell,

they really believe what they're saying. Wow. What is so interesting that both of them are influencing each other. Do you have any inkling on how they met? So, other interesting thing that I learned after the video came out is that this is not Mercola's first medium.

This is a sequel, see? So there was a medium before that. So Mercola has a history of relying on mediums until things don't work out and then he fires them and then he replaces them and there was somebody who was putting him in touch. Hold on. Hold on. Wouldn't it be amazing though, if he fires the medium or the ghost, but not the medium himself. So if he fires Belan, but then asks the guy who does it to get a new demon in there or whatever,

to talk to him. No, it's Tabula Rasa. Okay, it's the whole thing. He wipes the slate clean. All right, okay. Exactly. All right, well that's fair. So there was a woman who allegedly

was introducing Mercola to these different mediums. And so she is the one, I believe, who put him in touch with this type of... She's the medium, Adam. Okay. Yes, yes. So, okay. Might be a lucrative gig. Who knows?

So, what you said, I concur is kind of what he says. What kind of stuff? He's getting asked questions like, should I buy this company? Should I invest in this product? Should we do, and not just that, at certain points you've got tape of him saying, am I gonna write a paper on some sort of really complex scientific thing?

And the medium will say, yeah, you will, and so will the Jamie or whatever. Right, yeah, because when it's Balon, Balon always puts the in front of people's names. That's also how you know that guy is Jamie. Yeah, sure. So a lot of the answers are, yes, looks like it, we agree.

He's a magic eight ball. Yes, yes. You just shake the guy and then the you know, the response comes out. And but also there, it's not just that he often agrees with Mercola. Sometimes he disagrees, but it's very rare. But it's also that he is sort of, he is pushing Mercola up and he is sort of fluffing him up and telling him you're going to be the best thing every year. You're the new Jesus.

Like literally, you are the new Jesus and you're gonna be more famous than all the geniuses combined and you're gonna have more Nobel prizes than anybody has ever won and you're gonna publish in Nature and Cell and Science, all the big journals. And so he has this habit of feeding Mercola's ego and making him like look at like shiny thing,

shiny thing, shiny thing. Look, you're gonna be, you're gonna have clinics all over the world and people from every country are gonna come and see you to be treated at your clinics. And that I think also is probably a big reason why Mercola still has him around because when you have somebody like that, you know, magic mirror on the wall, on the wall, tell me like who's the fairest of them all.

Like that's exactly what Belon is doing. He's telling him like, you're the most amazing person that, and you will be the most famous person in the world. It's a burden, but someone's got to do it. Don't you think though, at a certain point, he's going to finally get to the wardrobe and they're going to open it up and there's nothing inside? I mean, at a certain point, there's gonna, he's gonna finally get to the wardrobe and they're gonna open it up and there's nothing inside? I mean, at a certain point, there's got to stack of lies. You've got to eventually look at it and say,

none of this stuff has come true. It might be, and it might be the, at that point that he fires, you know, Kai Clay or Christopher Johnson, I should say. But what's happening in those videos is that things are moving very, very quickly. And that was also another reason why I thought that this was a scam,

because it's like, look at this shiny thing. And then when that thing doesn't look all that promising anymore, look at this other shiny thing. Oh, I see. And so there's always something new, right? Yeah. At some point they discuss, you know,

buying a cheese factory. And they spend like an hour discussing how cheese is made and why the cheese that you buy is actually toxic. But Mercola is going to buy a cheese factory and he's going to make non-toxic cheese. And that lasts one day and the next day they're moving on talking about clinics or something else. And so you have this succession of shiny things that are always distracting Mercola. So. I see. So let's, you know, here's a guy who's a, whether or not, I wonder whether intent matters if you're a grifter.

I'm not sure that intent matters. If you're still grifting the public, you're still a grifter, right? Why do you feel about that? So I've looked up definitions of grift and grifter and they all imply lying. Okay. So if we're going to stick to that for like legal reasons, if we're accusing somebody

of grifting us, we are implying that they are lying. What would you say that Mercola is? Mercola is a true believer who is in some ways instilling these bad beliefs on all the people who are listening to him? Yeah, he is a misinformation super spreader. He's a pseudoscience peddler. He's a snake oil salesman. The dietary supplements that he sells, you know, for most people don't need them.

They're not even regulated in the United States. You don't even know what you're buying. He's an anti-vaxxer. I see. All of those things are true. Yeah. So, let's say he's a snake oil salesman, because that's an easy way to put this. We think we all, we both agree that the things he's selling don't, don't, probably don't do anything for you.

And I think most people with any kind of science background would agree with us. What do you think about someone who's a snake oil salesman, who's being targeted by someone who's also doing something that is, you know, what we would call bullshit. He's a medium, somebody you, clearly there is no evidence whatsoever that there's an ancient spirit called Balan who happens to speak the same language, just happens to use the definite article in front of people's names.

So what do you think about that dynamic between those two? And why should we as the public, why should we care? He also says human because the word human is too hard. Yeah, I mean we're stacking the evidence. I mean, if we're stacking the evidence, Jonathan, we might as well go there too, right? So you bring up a very interesting point and my answer to that is that, you know,

what we often see in wellness and alternative medicine and conspiracy theories especially is this rejection of the mainstream. Mainstream is bad, modernity is bad, what institutions tell us is bad. And so we have to believe the alternative, whatever the alternative is. People who do investigations into the flat earth movement will know that all of these flat earthers, they might have different ideas as to what the earth really looks like and those models are not

compatible with each other, but it's okay because they all reject the mainstream model. And so what Mercola and Chris Johnson are doing is again is rejecting the mainstream and when you do that wholeheartedly and you embrace anything that is labeled alternative Then you are vulnerable to charlatans and to other true believers who are are Deluded and who are going to exploit you exploit you in some way and waste your time waste your money and give you bad advice Because you've you've opened your mind up so much that your brains have fallen out, right? You're ready to accept anything that's true as long as it's not mainstream.

Do you think that if you expose this connection between somebody who's supposed to be a doctor or someone who's supposed to have it together, right? Here's a person who has health claims that they're making constantly and people who look to Joseph Mercola, they see someone who puts himself off as professional, who seems to understand these sorts of things.

If you expose that he's asking these really mundane and very strange things behind the scenes, do you hope that that will have an effect on the people who pay attention to Mercola? Do you think that that might snap some of those people away and say, who was I listening to all these years? I think so, but also we have to realize that there's a spectrum.

And so there's a spectrum of followers that he has, and there are people at one end of the spectrum who are sort of Mercola curious, perhaps. Uh, and who, you know, they just, they want a few supplements. Oh, there you go, this guy seems legit. He's been around for a long time, and those are the easiest people to convince and go like no no this guy is

Profoundly diluted and this is where he's getting his information from by the way. It's not just for long. It's also chat GPT But any other people at the other end of the spectrum who are like hardcore fans of Mercola's Who who will say well, this is this is just a ploy in fact Mercola's who will say, well, this is just a ploy. In fact, Mercola's ex-girlfriend, who is also a snake peddler, posted on X when my video came out that this was very interesting that my video was coming out the day that the JFK documents were being released. What? that the JFK documents were being released.

And there's a professor at McGill University who got a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So, hmm, that's very suspicious. So that's what I mean when I talk about the other end of the spectrum is that there are people you will never convince. The motivated reasoning is going to lead them to think, well, this is false, and how is this false? The videos were made up using AI, or it's Bill Gates' money, they made those fakes,

like the moon landing, it's all fakes, made it a studio, blah, blah, blah. But there are people at that other end of the spectrum that, yes, I am hoping to reach, and who hopefully will look at this and go, nope, not anymore. Yeah, I wanna stop, you stop. You mentioned JFK, but I want to switch to RFK for a second. We've seen some of these appointments to Trump's cabinet, RFK, Casey Means, Dr. Oz.

Do you think that there's a possibility that Joseph Mercola might get some sort of appointment on Trump's cabinet. Cause you know, if I were to say something like that in July of 2024, I would have definitely laughed at myself. I wouldn't have thought that that would have been something that could have possibly happened. So my thoughts on this have evolved over time. So, it turns out that apparently I am told by an insider that Mercola told his staff

at the last Christmas party that he had been offered a position within HHS. Now, can we trust what he's saying? Is this what Balon told them or his spiritual guides or is this a dream that he had? I'm also told that he is not as close to RFK Jr. as we might think that he is. Okay. I also know that he had a meeting with them

a few months ago. So I kept waiting for an announcement for some kind of formal position or some kind of consultant on some commissioner, what have you, as part of the Maha movement, that has not happened yet. It could, again, he is part of that larger group of people. So it could very well happen.

It might not. Just like anybody else, these people have, they seem to be allies, but I'm sure there's like bickering behind the scenes and you hear Mercola bad mouth some of his allies in the videos that I watched. And so, they're human beings. So, who knows what the real state of his relationship

with RFK Jr. really is. You seem to have, there's an article that I read recently of yours. It's a title, I'll put it in the show notes, but the title is Kennedy's Coalition of Quacks Wants to Feed America a Diet of Lies. Excellent title, by the way. Good use of alliteration.

I really appreciate that. I just wanna say that. I'm worried it was too long, but hey, you know. I guess it works. It's a really great article and so prescient to see some of these people that are deep in the metabolic health scene, you seem to have your finger on early.

This is November of last year, right after Trump got selected, you kind of sort of picked some of these people in RFK sphere. Like, I mean, gosh, you should have gone, we should have gone to like fan duel or whatever. And then odds on this, you seem like you would have had a really,

a really good chance of getting some of these people on. What kind of insight led you to believe that these people would be part of Trump's administration? Well, I have a lot of spiritual guides, Cecil, and they speak to me. Do you have 1500 spiritual guides? Not quite. It's like Magic the Gathering. I still have to buy the expansion packs. It's like Pokemon. You have to steal all of your colas and then you'll have 1500. No, I mean, look, I've been doing this work for over a decade now, even like from before McGill. I've been interested in the

skeptical movement and sort of conspiracy theories and anti-vaxxers, all that kind of stuff. So I'm familiar with that landscape. I've been following these people closely. What worried me the most about the second Trump regime is the fact that they are much better organized now than they were the first time around. His party is really fully behind him, which was not the case the first time around. And when I saw that Casey Means and Callie Means organized, I forget what it was called, that Senator Ron Johnson hosted like table discussion with like Jordan B. Peterson and Marty McCary, all those people, you could see like this was gonna go somewhere.

And the mean siblings, as you pointed out recently on the Noar Rogen experience, they're really like the glue of the Maha movement. I mean, R.F.K. Jr. is the face of it, but they're the behind the scenes siblings who are like bringing people together. And I also watched the rise of the COVID contrarians during the pandemic.

People like Jay Bhattacharya and Vinay Prasad and Marty McCary. And when one of them started getting a position within HHS, it's like, well, let's see how long it takes before the others get a position there. And of course, they all got a position there. So I know these people, I've been watching them for a very long time

and it felt like all the nexus is there. Like they're ready to institutionalize pseudoscience within the US government. And these are the people who are gonna do this. I wasn't sure, I didn't know that Casey Means would be nominated to be the surgeon general, but when her name came up last week, a year ago, I, time is just so weird now, but very recently when she was nominated, I was like, well, yeah, duh, of course. Um, you know, it wasn't her initially, but then, you know, there we go. Here we are. So,

yeah, I really, uh, kind of blown away. And it seems like the thing that they're focusing on does seem a little different than sort of Mercola's angle. They're focusing very specifically on metabolic health, at least the stuff that I'm hearing from RFK, the things that I hear on the Joe Rogan experience. A lot of different guests have come on and have suggested all the same sort of tropes and ideas behind metabolism and how that's really the key to good health. Callie and Casey Means came on and did that.

Mercola is, he strikes me as somebody who might not be in that sphere, but I could be ignorant on this. Is he someone who is in that metabolic sphere or would you think he's someone who's a little bit outside of that? It's hard to say because yeah, I mean, you're right that he doesn't talk about this a lot,

but at the same time, like what we're seeing with this metabolic dysfunction and with mitochondrial dysfunction specifically is this idea that we've seen pseudoscience all the time of like taking very preliminary findings and say, oh, there we go. We figured it out. It's a paradigm shift. Yeah. And Mercola does that too. But for other things, like we haven't mentioned this, but like he's super into photo biomodulation, which is a use of like red

light therapy. You may remember that Tucker Carlson video where the guy was tanning his balls. Yeah. So he was not technically tanning his box. It wasn't UV light, but it was infrared light, right? So that's photobiomodulation. And there are people that are researching this. And you know, my opinion of the field is that it's very nascent and there's nothing clear so far. But but Mercola is all in on that. So all of these, you know, whether they're grifters or true believers, all of these people, they will latch onto the next big thing, whether it's epigenetics or the microbiome or mitochondrial dysfunction. They will find their thing, which is sort of like this new field of research that is

just on the horizon. And they will just jump to the conclusion that this is it. This is a paradigm shift in us understanding human health. And so I'm going to be all in on this. I'm going to write a book about this. I'm going to sell supplements to solve this issue. And so it's this one true cause of all diseases, right? Yeah. Which is so prevalent in pseudoscience. As I'm sure you know by now, like human health is just so much more complicated than this. But these people have oversimplified everything. And so for

somebody, it's, oh, the mitochondrion is where health is. And other people, no, no, no, it's red light. It's all about red light. And in fact, now that I'm talking about this out loud, Mercola does mention mitochondria because if I remember correctly from the videos, he thinks that the red light is hitting our mitochondria and the mitochondria do a version of photosynthesis. And he's gonna write an article about this, which should have been written by now, and he's gonna win his first Nobel Prize for this.

So he has placed a stake in the mitochondrion. And so there is room for a rapprochement between him and the mean siblings over that. So if they're reaching towards this brand new horizons, these emerging technologies, what strikes me, and maybe you don't have any comment on this at all, but what initially strikes me is, then why be so against some of these emerging things

we saw during COVID, perhaps like an mRNA technology that we've never really used to actually create a vaccine before? Why be so against that, but then also be on the cutting edge, what seems to be on the cutting edge at least, of some of these other technologies that might be emerging? That's a very good question. And I don't have a clear answer to that yet. The vaccines were part of COVID mitigation measures, which were often portrayed by COVID contrarians as the state is running, trying to control you.

They want to force us to wear masks and they want to force our kids to stay away from schools and they want to force us to stay six feet away from each other and they want to force us to get the jab. And there's something very visceral about a vaccine, right? Because you're, as I think it was Matthew Remski from Conspirituality who put it, like, it's the state who is penetrating you. Right? The state is penetrating the holy envelope of the body and is injecting you with something that you don't understand that is going to mess with your biology in some way. So there's something that is very, that provokes this feeling of revulsion in a lot of people when it comes to the vaccine. And because of the COVID contraindications

like Vinay Prasad and Jay Bhattacharya, there's a lot of fear that's been communicated about these messenger RNA vaccines. Oh, they were not properly tested and young people didn't even need them. So we saw this emergence of this new class of anti-vaxxers during the pandemic of people who were like, well, the childhood vaccines are fine for now anyway, but it's the new ones,

it's the COVID vaccines that we don't like. And I think that has really seeped into, you know, pop cultures, the common discourse. And it probably is affecting people who were not necessarily COVID contrarians per se, but who are in this kind of wellness space. And wellness has always attracted a lot of anti-vaxxers. Yeah. Because there's this idea that, you know, immunity should be natural. You know, you get the disease and then you make antibodies

or you go out into the sun and you're like Kaleo and the sun is like helping your immune system somehow. But as long as it's natural, right? And vaccines are seen as unnatural. And vaccines have always had anti-vaxxers claiming that they're unnatural, they're going to turn you into a cow because, you know, cowpox blah, blah, blah. So I think a lot of it is that. And again, we were saying that motivation is this very layered, complicated thing.

But so are these beliefs as well of like, which new scientific technology do you pick as a good one, promising I'm all in, and which one do you say, no, this one is bad? I think it depends on, I think it's vibes. I'm sure a lot of it is vibes. Yeah. So we're seeing some of these people who are in this sphere, this metabolic health sphere,

start to get higher offices in the land. RFK, we mentioned him, Casey Means, who is going to have to go through... Nominated for now. Nominated now, but have to go through a nomination process, which may or may not lead to her getting the position. It probably will. I can't imagine they're going to find... I mean, if they couldn't find something for RFK, I don't know that they're going to find

anything for Casey Means. But, you know, so we have these people who are sort of entering that space. You seem to be able to pick out that those people would be part of this. Let's play another prediction game. What do you think is going to happen in the United States when these people get in and start to really turn the levers in these places. We're seeing right now they want to roll back COVID shots. They're saying that COVID shots need to go through a much more rigorous testing process than we do and they want to roll back the sort of the availability of those COVID shots. We know that they're going after some certain types of drugs. They want to take some of these drugs,, they wanna take drug commercials off the air.

They wanna start eliminating some of these things like food dyes and things that are in our system that probably try to limit some pesticides. Is there anything else that you see when you look forward and you think they're probably gonna go for some of this stuff? What do you think they're gonna try to do with the health system in the United States?

Well, I mean, ADHD medication and all kinds of medications for mental health because they see those things as being poisonous. And so you're gonna have a lot of young people and older people who depend on these medications who might have a harder time getting them. My big worry is vaccines. And there's already been this announcement that

they want to change the way that vaccine manufacturers can't be sued in the United States. And the reason why that happened in the first place is because there were people who were alleging these vaccine injuries decades ago. And vaccine manufacturers were saying, well, if we're getting sued over these vaccines, even if the claims are false, why should we keep making these vaccines? We're making so little money off of them. And so the US government came in, it was like, no, no, okay, so we're going to take over and we're going to have a fund and we're going to give that money away to people who claim to have a vaccine injury. And now there's this plan to roll that back. And so you can imagine that, you know,

how do you get rid of vaccines in the United States? You could just ban them, but that wouldn't be popular. So there's a much softer approach, which is to make sure that vaccine manufacturers can be sued in the United States. There is a very well-installed anti-vax movement in the U.S., which was led by, in part, RFK Jr. He's a major leader of this movement.

And these people are just ready to sue these vaccine manufacturers. And as the lawsuits pile up, I can imagine that vaccine manufacturers will say, well, why should we keep making vaccines for the US market and pull out? Yeah. What do you think about,

I just listened to, it was my first introduction to Casey Means through the listening to Joe Rogan, and we also listened to a piece from Tucker Carlson. It does seem to me that Casey Means and some of these people might also have a problem with contraception. Do you think that that might be on the table

to sort of go after? Yeah, well, it's something, I mean, I learned a lot from listening to that episode of the No Rogan Experience, but I had not listened to that full Joe Rogan episode. And I learned that Casey Beans had even like sort of wild or bizarre ideas than I thought that she did. Yeah, I think that's on the table.

And I think that you being American know probably even better than I do, that there's a lot of misogyny. There's a misogynistic current underlying the United States. There's white supremacy. There's misogyny. And all of those things are coming back to the surface now. And so, yeah, I think they're going after trans people.

They're going after gay people. They're going after women. They're going after anybody who is not a cis, white, heterosexual man. And it's gonna be subtle in some ways, it's gonna be not subtle at all in other ways, but that's what I'm seeing. So Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me,

I really do appreciate it. I'll direct people to this video that we mentioned throughout. What do you, is there anything that you do that you wanna direct people to, that you wanna send people to, anywhere that they could find you on the internet? Sure, I don't always write about really bad things.

Sometimes I just explain really cool things. Like this week I wrote about a blood test for Alzheimer's disease and explained how that came about. So if people want to read that, and it's not just me, there are other people who work at the OSS who write really cool stuff. So mcgill.ca slash O-S-S is our website. We have a free weekly newsletter as well.

And for people who want to see me on social media, at this point I'm only on Blue Sky. So you can look for my name on Blue Sky. Thanks so much for joining me, Jonathan. I really do appreciate it. Thank you for having me. So I want to thank Jonathan Jerry from McGill University's office of science and society for joining me today.

It was an amazing interview, super fun. I can't wait to have him back on the show. Really knowledgeable guy and really wonderful with his time. There was some really, some scheduling snafus that might've happened and he was really wonderful and very accommodating. And I can't say enough about his willingness to work around my schedule.

So thank you, Jonathan, for coming on. I'll leave links in the show notes to all his stuff. So go check it out. Really smart guy doing really great work. So it's somebody you should probably keep on your social media feed and definitely check out the work that he puts out periodically. We'll be back next week, hopefully, with Tom,

and we're gonna leave you, like we always do, with the Skeptics Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno Babylon bullshit. Couched in scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo quasi alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water downward spiral, brain deadpan dead pan sales pitch late night info

Doctainment Leo Pisces cancer cures detox reflex foot massage death and towers tarot cards Psychic healing crystal balls bigfoot yeti aliens churches mosques and synagogues temples dragons giant worms Atlantis dolphins truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, doublespeak, stigmata, nonsense. Expose your signs. Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive.

Doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash DissonancePod. Help us spread the word by sharing our content. Find us on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Pritz, all under the handle at DissonancePod. on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Pretz, all under the handle at DissonancePod. This show is CAN credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm on their hotline at 617-249-4255 or on their website at creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org. network.