Decoding the Gurus - Gwyneth Paltrow: Crawling with parasites and in need of a cleanse

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

Who would have thought it, the Hollywood A-lister and founder of the luxury lifestyle brand 'Goop', Gwyneth Paltrow also finds time to host a podcast. Making her a prime target for Matt and Chris, who simply cannot stomach the competition!Fans have the option to join Paltrow in questing for the eternal and well-guarded secrets of health and wellness. But unless you're only after some lip-balm, this total holistic and integrative lifestyle is not going to come cheap! As we learn from her special guest Kristine Gedroic you are also going to need some precision medical diagnostics to balance with your biome, cleanse your cell membranes, and undo the horrors of 5G. And that isn't even addressing the panoply of parasites that we are all (apparently) infested with. So this is why Matt and Chris haven't been actualising their spiritual selves recently. In some ways, this health and wellness space is familiar stomping ground for Matt and Chris (and maybe for many listeners too). However, the duo reckon that Paltrow, Goop, and the whole industry is very 'Now' and might even hint at some exciting new directions elite culture is taking. Check it out! And get yourself checked for bespoke parasites while you're at it. Seriously... we are all riddled with them.LinksHow do we deal with- and prevent- chronic illness? Goop Podcast with Kristine GedroicGwyneth Paltrow: Ask Me AnythingHard Talk interview with Gwyneth Paltrow

Hello and hello and welcome to decoding the gurus the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try our very best to understand what they're talking about i'm professor matt brown famous for my bronze australian glow and with me is dr chris kavanagh, also famous for his Northern Irish melanin deficient power. Welcome Chris. Matt, Matt, how dare you open with a disparaging racial comment. My skin tone is not a topic of conversation in this 21st century era. I can't believe it. It sounds like you're a bit sensitive about it,

but that's understandable. I appreciate that. All I'll say is that I believe my people may have the complexion that serves as the prototype for vampire fiction. We are the alabaster creatures that people look at askew and say are they human or does the sun kill them that's the question yeah so a little bit like gamers no exposure to the sun yes vampires and gamers the two great motifs of western literature

and both based on irish people both based on irish people little known fact your rich culture has given so much to the world it's amazing it's hard to overstate it is hard to overstate james joyce vampires gamers the troubles the trouble the list goes on the name of the follower the pikeys and lock stock and two smoking barrels many things man many things oh i just thought of a bit of irish culture that i like the guard have you seen that oh that's great yeah it's good that's i think excellent film and very funny yeah stop what you're doing what now everybody go ahead and watch it for a bit of use of your time i think that's what all irish people aspire to be is like that character that's that's the goal for your life

if you haven't seen the movie you'll get it so you need to go watch it i do love that actor but he really does seem like he's on the verge of a heart attack at any given moment yeah this opening segment it's been very heavy on the body shaming. I think you Australians, with your beach culture obsession, you're just lording it over people and swimming around with your reef sharks and whatnot. It's got to stop. It's got to stop. It's an intervention, Matt. Take your thongs off, both types, and step away from the mirror. That's true actually waddling around wearing a thong and a pair of thongs i can't think of anything more australian than that all right that's uh that's enough banter

let's get to it that's a banter quote and complete three minutes of banter that's it we've used it up it can't be any more banter for the rest of the episode so you'll have to show some restraint chris so we're not going to do reviews because we don't have time is that right well we also said we'll shift them to the end of the podcast so we're sticking to it we're not going to change things up we're consistent people yeah we made a commitment and we're sticking to it but but we did get reviews in the sense of we got some more feedback about the candy episode this is actually from before and if you haven't heard us discuss candy in the bonus garometer episode that we released i think that would be worth your time if you wanted to hear more of our thoughts but two points that

people brought up that i think are just worth discussing briefly and to be clear we're not still receiving candy correspondence like this is from around the episode so we're not avalanche them with people still uh giving us hot takes on candy but so one thing that people brought up was that we didn't cover that he thought white people were potentially space aliens i believe when he was a grad student or teenager at some point around there apparently in one of his, he explains that he legitimately believed that white people in general may not be humans, may be aliens, and that people thought we probably should have mentioned that.

Now, it didn't come up in the content that we covered, but it is a kind of amusing story. And I think it does suggest a rather extreme and somewhat credulous state of mind into at least early adulthood or teenage life. So, yeah, I don't really know what people were expecting. But yes, I think that's stupid if he thought that. I don't know how much that he legitimately thought that versus just trying to be controversial. legitimately thought that versus just trying to be controversial and well i'll just say that it's a good thing that we live in the kind of culture where nobody would ever get cancelled for something stupid they thought or said when they were 17 or 18 yes that's good people understand these things are in the past and there's no no kinds of double standards in play as to how these controversies go.

So that's good that we don't live in a society like that. Very good. Moving swiftly on. The second point with Kendi that we got, when it came to his discussion of inheritance, although I think in general people agreed that he was pretty decent when he was discussing the issues around the race and ethnicity. His comments about inheritance veered towards an almost strong level of denialism in regards to any influence from genetics from parents towards children. And some feedback was that if James Lindsay was to do something similar that

we would take him to task for that and we kind of let Kendi off softly perhaps because of our political bias or lack of desire to offend and I think there's some legitimacy to that criticism I think a lot of it depends on how extreme you interpret his comments to be, like, well, or not, you take him as saying that there's no evidence that parents genetically impact their children. That would obviously be definitely wrong. But if he's making the point that it's wrong to draw too strong of a correlation between the behavior of parents and children that's a valid point but there are aspects of inheritance to addictive tendencies and various other personality and behavioral traits so yeah what do you think matt my understanding is a little bit slight but

it's that there's pretty strong evidence that a bunch of behavioral traits, personality, mental illness, even addictive behaviors do have a strong heritable component, and that's not particularly controversial. So yes, for the record, we think he is wrong about that okay before we get into our victim for this week i want to just do a short segment that i'm going to call weinstein watch let's just fucking do it what have the weinsteins been up to now chris not to spoil our surprise but we are going to get back into the Weinstein world in the next episode with the incredible crossover between the revolutionary thinkers of Brett Weinstein and Jordan Peterson, where they had their crossover episode and it was glorious. But that's for the future. We're only human, folks. We could not resist.

It is just too tempting. This is a great crossover, right? Like Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein. What more could you ask for? we could not resist it is just too tempting this is a great crossover right like jordan peterson and brett weinstein what more could you ask for and this is jordan post coma i think it's good to dip our toes back in those waters but the other bouffant haired brother has been up to some business he's not only waffling around on Clubhouse, but he's been active on Twitter this morning. And I just thought this is just classic Eric. And since you haven't seen it, I thought I'd read it for you. This was his tweet. We technical people give the US president

and other leaders the power of gods, and we can't take it back but these types can't hold this together they are not wise they are not skilled and they are not modest in their self-assessments they shouldn't have fusion technology oh my goodness so good so good there's another fred where he does a whole bit on the left, but let's not get into that mess. I think just that tweet alone, which has follow-ups is just, it's just sublime Weinsteinian content.

Any comment on it would just diminish its perfection. Just be impressed at the sheer amount of Weinsteinism is compressed into 280 characters. It's amazing. Yeah. I will note, though, in case people misheard, they shouldn't have fusion technology. Not fission technology, right? So he's talking about nuclear fusion, the holy grail of energy production, which doesn't exist.

At least we cannot produce it in a stable energy producing manner so when he says they shouldn't have fusion technology it's somewhat implying that you know he knows how they should get that but he's not gonna let them have it he's not gonna tell them yeah it would be like giving a machine gun to a monkey chris it would be irresponsible just put that one in the file drawer when we're ready for it when we've evolved yeah yeah so we technical people give them fission we the manhattan project and eric the u.s presidents the power of fission but they can't let them in on the secret of fusion.

This would also explain why he's withholding StarDrive technology from us. Yes, it would. And you've actually hit on what part of the motivation for this message. This was a response to somebody inquiring about if we unlock let's call it higher dimensional travel how do we combat the rise of higher dimensional weaponry this was the question that spurred the explanation of what we cannot let the u.s presidents have so this is serious serious stuff chris i don't understand why some people describe him as a fantasist. Don't take him seriously, no. And the problem is with American presidents,

they're just not modest, unlike Eric. If they were more modest, they might be deserving of fusion technology, but Eric's quite right to call out people for not having enough modesty. It's, yeah, it's an epidemic. You couldn't help yourself, could chris it was perfect it was perfect and you had to analyze it well i'm not saying anything but i'm just i'm just agreeing

with his critique so yeah i i can't couldn't resist i'm sorry you got me eric and it's done so with that curly haired hero out of the way let's move on to a straight-haired woman how was that for a transition matt the segue was seamless chris seamless so we are covering gwyneth paltrow in this episode which is a bit of a change of pace for us everyone knows who ms paltrow is a very famous actress, a very good actress, wouldn't you say, Chris? Yes, most of the time, yes. She's better than me. She probably could pronounce her T-H better, probably.

She's probably been taught that in Hollywood enunciation school. And what does that have to do with anything, Matt? I don't get no reference. I don't know, Chris. You know, just a random compliment for Gwyneth. She probably doesn't say i'm as much as some people do as well uh right right she has a natural skin tone there's just plenty of things that she has which are better than other people i'll i'll grant that okay but

of course we're not focusing too heavily on her career, we're more interested in the turn her career took somewhere around 2008, where she planted both feet squarely in the health and wellness sphere. So she has a company called Goop, which encourages the customers and readers of their material to nourish their inner aspects and that's been somewhat controversial because that has moved into a lot of medically and scientifically questionable shall we say, treatments and products, most famously things like vaginal steaming, jade eggs for inserting in various orifices, and enemas, wearable stickers that do things to you, that kind of thing. So what would you add to that? Well, I could explain a little bit about the content that we'll cover this week,

which I think is relevant. So Gwyneth Paltrow, as you say, she has her group brand, which is kind of a luxury health and wellness, alternative spirituality and health site, but her role in it as the CEO and founder, and in part selling her particular stamp of approval on things. So in the content we are looking at, part of the issue was that she's really a conduit for whoever she's speaking to. There's some material where she's talking about her own role, and I'll play a couple of clips that she did with the BBC hard talk and there are some content that Goop has produced there's a Goop lab show on Netflix for example where they promote various alternative or pseudo-scientific stuff but also look at

sexuality products so there's a lot of that stuff kind of mixed in, but we are focusing on the hard talk episode and also an interview that she did with a chronic illness expert, self-proclaimed called Christine Sedgwick, a doctor. And we'll see when we look at the content that a lot of it is going to be from that expert as well, Christine Gedrick, because Gwyneth Paltrow is really giving her the space to speak. But I think in the way that she frames things and also the content that they choose to promote, it's wrong to view her as just like a passive receiver or that kind of thing because as we'll see she frames things in a very specific way and we'll also look at some of the answers she give in an AMA podcast where listeners wrote in and asked questions so we're taking a bit of a

smorgasbord approach to her content today but the main focus will be on the Christine Gaddrick episode. Yeah, that's right. I mean, we would have a similar problem, say, in covering Joe Rogan as a guru, because like Gwyneth, he in many ways acts as a conduit. But people quite rightly say that these people who may not be writing their own books so much or giving their own innovative theories about things are playing an important role as the channel to promote a whole bunch of ideas which tends to cluster in a very particular space. So it's hardly a coincidence that the guests on her podcast are all promoting alternative health views of one kind or another and Gwyneth Paltrow runs Goop which also promotes alternative health problems one another so I think

we can cover and attribute at least some of the stuff that she covers to Gwyneth. Yes although I will make a caveat here that I listened to quite a lot of her content over the past two weeks, and there's a substantial portion of it, which is interviews with celebrities or female entrepreneur types. And in those interviews, although there's occasionally references to alternative spirituality or pseudoscience-y stuff, they tend to be more focused just on self-empowerment and discussions about activism and the entertainment industry and so on. And so I think it would be wrong to present it as that all of group's content revolves around alternative wellness-based. That's a big component of it. But there's the celebrity culture aspect and there's also

that she interviews occasionally mainstream scientists or psychologists usually people who have released some popular science book and in those cases the interview tends to stay away from the more controversial topics so there is an aspect of it where a lot of the content is depending on dare I say the energy that's being offered by the other guests so I think there's still a lot of stuff that's worthy of pointing out with her worldview but I just want to flag up that if people were to subscribe to the group podcast, they might go a couple of weeks where they're just getting interviews with Cara Delevingne or Robin Wright or discussion with a CEO of a food company or something like that. Yeah, no, I don't think there's any contradiction there. And the analogy with Joe Rogan also

stands up, I think, because I believe that he also does straight down the line, Rogan also stands up, I think, because I believe that he also does straight down the line informative interviews. And then the tone changes a lot depending on who he's talking to. And I think it's one of the most interesting aspects about the alternative health and wellness sphere is the role that it plays in a much broader worldview. Not all of which have anything to do with being anti-scientific or alternative health or whatever, but it's still a very coherent worldview in which certain unscientific beliefs fit very comfortably within. I think you're completely right with the Joe Rogan comparison works because there's a clear editorial line, even if there is scientists on talking about coronavirus

from a scientific perspective joe rogan also does that where he'll have peter hotez or somebody on and they'll give very good info and he'll raise anti-vax talking points and allow them to respond but then in the next 15 weeks rogan will be pumping out his views about vitamin D being the key thing and the various views that he has about the safety of vaccines. So I think it's the same. Individual content can be fine, but the overall editorial line is what you should look at. And we could be seen to be cherry picking an episode, is particularly bad and i think to a certain extent that's a valid point but i don't think this is unrepresentative of the worldview that she has in general yep i agree with all that the only thing i'd pull you up on is that i'm

surprised that you of all people would not skeptical of the benefits of vitamin d i'm skeptical at the amount of emphasis that brett weinstein and joe rogan has placed on this as the key factor that would prevent the coronavirus pandemic from being as anywhere near as bad as it is but anyway i i have nothing against vitamin d personally. It's a fine thing. Yes. Yes. They put it in the milk in Northern Ireland for the school kids, don't they? Enough with your racism, Matt. Let's get to some clips. So I think a good place to start might be the introduction spiel to the podcast. Pioneering anything or introducing new ideas to the culture.

You get criticized. You do? do yeah did you hear about that i didn't find the one i found someone i respected and we made it the one in the sort of longing kind of view of love people understand each other as if by magic nothing in itself is addictive on the one hand and on the other hand everything could be addictive if there's an emptiness in that person that needs to be filled okay good illustration of the worldview we were just talking about the mindset of a seeker of someone who's looking to self-actualize and optimize their health and well-being yeah and i also noticed a bit where they start off by highlighting that people will criticize you for having bold ideas and it speaks to the fact that they understand that they get criticism and just like many of the gurus we see they use that as a yeah but you see past that right you see past

those fairly shallow criticisms yes it's very much like that Freudian idea where people are resisting because it's too confronting for them to accept. If they integrated this, it would totally change their worldview and they're just not psychically and spiritually ready for it, Chris. That's what it is. Yeah. The pseudo-profound bullshit of those clips feels quite transparent as well. They're basically taking clips which sound deep and profound but when you break it down it's

saying like yeah people need to settle in relationships and not have perfectionism or look anything can be addictive chris i mean it's just a coincidence that people find themselves more addicted to heroin than bread some japanese bread i i don't know what heroin or bread if you give me a choice we need to do a little brief thing about japanese bread because it's so good you know like i like the bread that has like like savory bread which has mayonnaise and corn and cheese and some kind of ultra processed sausage on it so good i trust you to pick the worst kind of bread. Just a single item. But yes, and if you add code DECODINGTHEGURUS

to Japanesebread.com, you'll get 10% off your first order. But Japanese bread is excellent. So anyway, let me finish this introduction. Here's the second part. I now know that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when you change your energy, you change your life.

I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. This is The Goop Podcast, bringing together thought leaders, culture changers, creatives, founders and CEOs, scientists, doctors, healers and seekers, here to start conversations. Because simply asking questions and listening has the power to change the way we see the world. Here we go. Just asking questions, Matt. I'm just asking questions. That's all.

I knew you would seize upon that, Chris. Maybe if you adopted some of that positive energy, you might find that your life improves. When you change your energy, Matt, you change everything. The world changes with you. Yeah, that's some pretty good pseudo-profound bullshit there. I can't wait to get into this. It's a goldmine. The list of people that they interview also carves out the niche. CEOs, culture changers.

Influencers influences the grandiosity it just it speaks to who the target audience this is for this is the wealthy the well-heeled they are at a pinnacle of social cachet and financial wealth of course as you would expect right this is super heavy on shilling supplements and vitamin pills and various companies that are affiliated there's a company called sakara health which the podcast seems to be produced in affiliation with the woman that we'll focus on the interview christine gedrick she's actually not that famous if you look her up there isn't that many articles about her book is not that famous so I was wondering how did she come into the radar of Gwyneth Paltrow now maybe just in the health and wellness space and so on

but I did notice that some episodes and they tend to be the episodes that have the pseudo-scientific alternative wellness people on have a little thing saying produced in affiliation with sakura health so i don't know i don't know if that's related to the company having some relationships or whatever i don't know that's just my conspiratorial mindset at work but i just want to play how they return to the conversation at the end of those segments okay let's get back to the conversation you know the the soothing this that's like asmr shit right no the okay let's get back to the conversation matt after that clip yeah it does feel very good i'm seeing lots of consistencies here with the very nice voices is a thing with gurus sounding good and in the case of hollywood celebrities

looking good too yes indeed and so gwyneth paltrow is famous hollywood celebrity uh i think coming from wealthy background and whatnot but but also voted most beautiful woman in the world at one point. So she's very charismatic, right? I just want to flag up that when people are interviewing her, there's such a nice, friendly vibe, even when people are putting the pointer, are you just exploiting people? And aren't you cashing in on your cultural success to make yourself richer? And there's just like a lot of aren't you cashing in on your cultural success to make yourself richer and there's just like a lot of laughing and you know i even felt charmed by her in the interviews where she's promoting quite pseudo science so yeah i just i'm just flagging up that charismatic

people they do have a privilege somebody who was much less charismatic and potentially less attractive wouldn't get such soft questions i think i'm sure that if i was in conversation with granite i'd find it very difficult to be mean to her not because necessarily because she's attractive but maybe part of it but she comes across as nice she speaks nicely very softly you get the feeling that she wouldn't hurt a fly so it does give you a pass doesn't it to get away with an awful lot yeah and okay so one of the criticisms that the website gets is that it's very expensive the goods that it sells are out of the reach of most people it's something that seems legitimate to bring up like who is this for and one of the interviewers the guy on hard talk raised this issue like that i just took a look at the group website on the way in here and you know

you you're you're offering people an extraordinary range of stuff you know from skincare products to to clothing to jewelry and you have sponsors and all that sort of stuff but the prices are pretty extraordinary a one piece well they call it a onesie a sort of pajama suit for a thousand bucks i mean that that seems there really is. You know, we the truth of the matter is we have a complete range of price points on the site. So, you know, we have an $8 lip balm. We have $12 non-toxic deodorant. Yeah, the lip balm is only $8.

So what's the issue? This lip balm point comes up again in a separate interview. So let me play that because I think it might highlight how useful this lip balm product is. what would you buy? I would buy five lip balms and I would keep some and pass some out to my friends. There you go. So what you wouldn't get for a hundred dollars is really anything that I'm looking at on the front page of Goop at the moment. It's not all health and wellness stuff, is it? It's clothing and jewelry and accessories, all kinds of things. It's very much an exclusive. Lifestyle. Lifestyle brand.

That's right. It's certainly not the only overpriced, exclusive lifestyle brand targeted at pretty wealthy people. Right, Chris? No. In an interview with Hard Talk, she also also brought up in response to this point about the cost that to a certain extent they lean into the criticisms and use it as a way to generate attention that kind of clickbait trolling and i i think it's interesting to hear that because i

think we also heard that in the intro where they're talking about just asking questions and being criticized for daring to challenge paradigms. So it feels like this is a way of using the controversy just to sell more stuff. You dig in the site. There are definitely things at every price point. I think it's an easy criticism to make and also to be honest, we have a bit of fun now and we'll sort of affiliate link to a $15,000 gold dildo just to troll people

back. I did wonder about that, whether you are quite aware of this. Well, there you go, Chris. It's okay because it's ironic as long as your overpriced stuff is offered in an ironic fashion um yeah yeah so it's not a very complex point but it's essentially that they know that they're shit posters and that it gets them clicks and

and so they're going to do that and i think that would relate to there was attention a while back when she released a candle that was supposed to be scented like her vagina somebody's buying it yes but i think it's entirely done with a wink and a nod that our critics won't like this yeah certainly it's quite a clever viral marketing tactic. It really doesn't matter whether the attention is good attention or bad attention. It still raises your brand awareness, right? So that makes sense.

And I guess it's not so dissimilar from what some of our other gurus do in terms of courting controversy in order to gain more attention. We live in an attention economy chris that's what it's all about yeah here's a clip about her talking a little bit it talks about how things have changed i have had i have had every crap taken on my back basically i mean you get the worst of you get the worst of it in this field yeah yeah i can relate even just writing about it we get especially back in the early days we used to get a worst of it in this field yeah yeah i can relate even just writing about it we get especially back in the early days we used to get a ton of crap for writing about any kind of

alternate alternative modality etc okay so that's a clip the first person you heard was christine gedrick but the interesting thing for me was that she framed that they used to get more criticism back in the day for writing about alternative modalities and that strikes me as something i've noticed that you used to see a lot more criticism about homeopathy and acupuncture alternative medicine and the lack of evidence for it and Gwyneth Paltrow would have been criticized on shows like Bullshit or so on. But it feels a bit like there's been a shift in the culture towards regarding those criticisms as slightly mean or alternatively that, yes, we all know that that stuff isn't true, but maybe there's value to offering people alternative ways to look at the world and especially we shouldn't be overly critical of enterprises run by female entrepreneurs

and women's lifestyles those kind of things if you put aside the specific claims, then the broader worldview is intentionally targeted to be one that is extremely congruent with what people value these days. So autonomy and self-actualization, taking responsibility for your own wellness, thinking about how to grasp for the more important things of life and embracing spirituality. These are all big ticks in terms of the modern culture. And that criticism, which you and I are basically doing of the unscientific claims, is increasingly seen as a kind of rationalist bro, po-faced, nitpicky thing, which even reflects a closed-minded Western chauvinist way of thinking rather than allowing for a diversity of different ways of looking at the world.

So I think it does reflect a bit of a cultural shift that's going on. And I think that's sort of played out with that shift with atheism and skepticism used to be popular that that shift towards atheism plus it's really kind of frowned upon these days it's just a bit on the nose um yeah if he is plus is the is the response to that right if he is plus social justice concerns oh i see right you might be i think the people you're thinking of are the brights yes the brights perhaps the worst possible branding prior to the intellectual dark web but yeah that is reflective of a shift in the zeitgeist about how valuable those approaches are yeah so i think we'll definitely get into that as we focus on the

christine gedrick interview but before that then there is a couple of other aspects i wanted to touch on that are more general so one of the things is related to the philosophical worldview that gwyneth paltrow and by extension group. A lot of it seems on the face of it to be innocuous self-help problem, advice to make you feel better. And I think some of it could be helpful to people, give them more confidence and so on. But there's a couple of clips I wanted to play that highlight some of the issues with a worldview. And, and here's the first one, you know, if, for example, if you make a mistake with parenting, I had was talking to a friend the other day who really was regretting something that she had said as a parent. And, you know, I,

I feel that all parents feel that way sometimes. But in a way, if you think about it, like your children choose you and they choose your flaws to overcome the things that they need to overcome in this lifetime. And that everything that you see as a mistake is really just giving them a little obstacle or a tool that they need to use to overcome something. You're shaking your head, Matt. Why is that? Yeah, that's some discourse right there, isn't it? Isn't it interesting how that kind of messaging is so popular, isn't it? It's the kind of thing you'll see in a lot of bad magazines, which is that you're perfect just the way you are. Your children choose you. You shouldn't feel guilty about whatever it is that's bothering you.

Shame and guilt are toxic emotions. Everything that happens was meant to be. It's a particular type of discourse that is designed to make you feel better about literally anything. Yeah, so it's understanding why it's appealing, but it is pablum. Yeah, and there's something darker about it that I see. So you can take this on one level of, oh, it's just encouragement for individuals, but you know, everybody gets angry when they're a parent and shouts at their kids and feels bad about it. And this is saying, no, don't feel bad. Everybody needs these little hiccups to develop as a person. Nothing wrong with that sentiment, but the sentiment that the children choose you. So I think that's tied into a worldview that sees reincarnation and the obstacles they need in this life to progress spiritually.

So that's a worldview where you're seeing some spirit or soul or essence choosing the kind of situation that it is born into for whatever its long-term spiritual purposes are. That's fine. But how about homes where there's sexual abuse or physical abuse in general, or there's addiction problems, or in worst cases, children killed. So did the children choose those circumstances in order to develop spiritually? Is what you're saying that this kind of fluffy feel-good language could easily be used to justify really quite bad behavior? Yeah, this is an issue that has come up actually with the doctrines of Buddhist traditions, that in some Buddhist cultures, the way that disabled people were treated was negatively,

right? Because it was seen as a manifestation of their karmic circumstances from previous lives. So I just want to flag off that there's a dark side to that, to seeing that everything is the result of the individual's past lives and actions. That's fine if you're a Hollywood A-lister, but not so great if you're somebody living in poverty with abuse. Well, there are Protestant religions in which that idea of predestination, you get what you deserve. And if you're at the bottom, you deserve to be there, that kind of thing. So I really feel like that's an issue in all of those religious worldviews. Most of them have that feature, which is everything that happens, happens for a reason. Bad thing happened to you, It's because God wanted it. And it maybe feels

good on the surface because it helps people feel better about the situation they're in. Fate has ordained that it should be so, but it's not healthy. It's not a good thing. Let me play one more clip on this topic, which I think I might put in the application myself. Then I think you end up being a little bit more forgiving on yourself. It's not that we shouldn't try to always be the best that we can, but when we can't, when we make a mistake, when we hurt someone, when we do something that we regret, I think it's more important to fully embrace it and understand that you've done it for a reason and it's a gift to the other person. I think calling it a gift might be a stretch, Chris. Yeah, that's what I've got to do next time I forget the keys and lock people out of the house or whatever. And I'm going to say, you know, I understand that in one way of looking at that, that was a bad thing and my fault, a mistake I made.

In another way, I've give you a circumstance to overcome a challenge. Recently, my son locked the door to the balcony when I was out on the balcony with my youngest son who's two years old and then he went outside to play so I was trapped on the balcony with a baby who once they discovered that they couldn't get back inside was very upset about this situation for about 40 minutes and that was a challenge I had to overcome that it was a gift of my son to me well likewise i almost but not quite forgot to pick up my son from soccer practice and fortunately i did remember just in time but if i hadn't and if he had been standing there in the dark for 40 minutes or an hour say i'm gonna put this in the bank i'll tell him consider that as a gift and consider what you've learned from this experiment yeah i think this last clip

is linking us to the broader worldview about the universe and what it does for us this is also something that happens to me in my practice i'll get like a rash of the same problem like three or four patients will come in with very similar stories right at the same moment. And there's some teaching pearl that I have to know in order to figure out how to help them. But I get enough of them in at one time that it pushes me to kind of go and do the research.

Yeah. So again, that voice change, that's Christine Gedrick, I didn't realize, but it's highlighting the same way of thinking right that you have some problem you need to work out so somehow you end up with these patients coming in and they just just enough to give you the insight like it's the universe provides the energy that you put out the universe provides it's a magical worldview isn't it one other thing we've talked about the extent to which gurus love jargon they love technical sounding words or references to classical literature and in the ask me anything there was a question about how Gwyneth Paltrow

relaxes and she gave it generally nice answers but I just want to play this clip to highlight the reliance on jargon. I like to walk. And when I really take the pressure off myself, I find I feel more creative again and more motivated. When I can kind of mentally extract myself from the rat race of worrying about all of the things that I have to worry about, and I kind of get into my parasympathetic nervous system, then I feel inspiration come and creativity and motivation come. It's not enough to walk around, Matt. You have to get into your parasympathetic nervous system. Then the creativity will flow. That's good advice. So this is something that I was meaning to bring up because it occurred to me when I was listening to these that she reminded me in a weird way of Jordan Peterson in that a lot of it is just vague and general, self-helpy, feel-good stuff.

But it's coming at it from that new age point of view and tailored towards a different demographic or a different cultural niche. Jordan does a lot of similar things, but he's tailoring it more to people who are attracted to the more conservative, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and take responsibility. You know, life is hard, but you've got the strength to overcome it. And this is tailored towards people who don't like that kind of narrative, overcome it and this is tailored towards people who don't like that kind of narrative but enjoy a different kind of narrative around balancing your spiritual energies and chakras and yeah so on hello there is an overlap with the cookie treatments and practices through Michaela Peterson the all meat diet and sparkling water and red meat that he has. But

I think Jordan Peterson has a tendency towards this as well. And Matt, there's not going to be a good point to put this in. So let me just put in one of the clips about a practice that Gwyneth Paltrow doesn't do, but she wishes that she had more time for doing because I just enjoyed it. I will tell you that I wish that I did oil pulling every morning that Ayurvedic practice of holding raw coconut oil or some other kind of oil in your mouth in the morning. I think it's really cool. And I don't know if it works, but I like it. And I just I can't I just don't I don't know why it never sticks there. There are a few like that. And I just, I can't, I just don't, I don't know why it never sticks. There are a few like that, but that's definitely one. Yeah. So I wonder why she's failing to stick at the

holding a mouthful of oil and swishing it around in your mouth every morning. But putting that aside, when I listened to that, it sent me down a little rabbit hole, Chris, because I'd never heard of that particular thing. You also were interested i was interested in that and it's obviously a silly thing that doesn't work but it made me think about the attraction towards it which is a big tablespoon or more of of oil in swishing around your mouth is a slightly confronting experience so the parallel that i made was to when I was prescribed some traditional medicines, Chinese medicines in Japan, actually, and they would invariably be delivered to you in a little sachet and as a powder. Now, the powder always seemed to be extremely bitter, like really horrible and just an awful experience to actually

ingest that stuff. And I always wondered why on earth they just didn't put this stuff in a capsule so that you could just swallow it and wouldn't have to deal with the really quite confronting experience of having this bitter stuff in your mouth. And my Japanese friends at the time suggested that our idea with this kind of traditional medicine is that it's got to feel like medicine. It's got to have that punch. If it was just easy to take, then it wouldn't feel like it was doing anything. And that made me think, wow, that's a really interesting example of a placebo.

The thing is that placebos work better when they're doing something confronting to your body, feels as if something must happen as a result, and therefore it's known that that kind of placebo works better. So my suspicion is that the attraction of this Ayurvedic practice of swishing around oil in your mouth parallels that with the very bitter Japanese medicine, and it's because people are attracted to strong placebos. Yeah. I think, you know, the more ritual that is involved in an event, the more you attribute meaning to what you do and the greater the challenge, the higher the level of discomfort or pain and so on. You know, the classic, there's a classic work on

cognitive dissonance from fasting or Ahrens and Mills did studies about initiation into groups. And if they're painful or unpleasant or psychologically uncomfortable, you will afterwards regard the group as being more valuable because you need to make that idea consistent with what you've done so why would you do that if the group wasn't valuable um but yeah one of the things that came up when i heard that thing about the oil was i i had a desire to just swish around olive oil in my mouth and see what that is like you take olive oil with bread it's kind of tasty so maybe it's good but i haven't done it yet but i'll maybe i'll do it before the next episode and let you know how it's like all right and again matt before we get to christine gedrick you mentioned the parallel

with jordan peterson i wanted to flag up a parallel withP. Sears and the whole realm of conspiratoriality, which we've already covered, it fits right in here with Goop. Maybe the political side is less than with J.P. Sears, but you remember that long clip about him talking about you should just go by your instincts. That's the way that you find truth, right? Don't be spoon-fed what the man wants you to believe. So here's Gwyneth Paltrow talking about something very similar. I think the most powerful little bit of wisdom that I return to over and over again is how important it is to be in integrity with yourself, how important it is to really listen to your own inner voice and truth and how to act from that place. I observed that when I don't do

that, or I haven't done that in the past, it's a breeding ground for toxicity. And if your word and your deed are really close together, you are who you say you are. And you're coming from that place of honesty. Life is so much easier than if you don't. Yeah, sometimes it's tempting to suspect that in modern Western culture, we're in the process of creating a new kind of secular religion. It's not a religion in any traditional sense, but you keep coming across these admittedly somewhat vague and intangible ideas, but they describe values and the value of being authentic to your true self. It sounds like a platitude, but it comes up again and again, doesn't it? And it's appealing across the political spectrum. So someone like JPC is representing a more libertarian, anti-government kind of thing. someone like Gwyneth Paltrow is representing a particular brand of progressive culture I suppose very much at the upper end of the social echelon but there is a common attraction to a set of values focused on health and well-being but it also encompasses

spirituality and ethics and just basically an entire worldview. And in fact, one really can't understand particular beliefs around, say, something like vaccination or believing that some type of supplement is going to do amazing things for you without any evidence. You won't do very well convincing people that it's wrong by making recourse to empirical positivist science because that kind of language that she's using which is about that internal knowledge that you personally are the one that can intuitively know whether or not this is a good or a bad decision and what's right for you and your child that's exactly the kind of language you see across those websites now i'm not accusing gwyneth paltrow of being an anti-vaxxer but i'm saying that this is a world view that can promote all manner of non-evidence-based beliefs and they hold those beliefs not because they want to be delusional or want to do anything wrong. It's more that it is their personal

epistemology of revealed truth and intuitive wisdom is congruent with believing, for instance, that vaccines don't do anything for you and really you should be balancing your energies. Believing that that nasty, unpleasant, mean thing you did was actually meant to happen and it was actually all for the best. These are all specific beliefs that make you feel better. People are attracted to worldviews because they make them feel good. No, I think there's definitely that kind of appeal to that message. And as with all of the things we cover, there's an element where you can be charitable and regarded as just more focused about self-empowerment and trying to help people deal with depression and reduce anxiety. But on the other hand, there's

an element where it encourages narcissism and viewing the universe as revolving around your wants and desires and that other people who don't hold those things are less morally worthy. So it kind of depends how strongly you take it, but the motte and bailey is always available. A lot of that positive self-help talk can be construed as white lies and that they're easily seen to be not literally true. But the argument I think would go that it's it's a helpful delusion to have because that can help you deal with adversity be a better person whatever those white lies do more harm than good they almost invariably seem to get twisted to do exactly what you said which is to justify self-interested narcissistic and yeah selfish behavior people rightly criticize the post-truth

era and q anon right obviously false conspiracy theories but the proponents are although they don't always go to the well of saying you know well this is just my truth but there's certainly an element of that where they're defending that this is my interpretation and you shouldn't discriminate against people just because they're willing to challenge paradigm. So I feel that a lot of people on the left are more comfortable with challenging things like QAnon and less comfortable with challenging Ayurvedic medicine or alternative modalities that are not automatically associated with high-wing political cult so there's a clear reason for that but the logic underlying them

the argument is often very similar in the structure of the argument so so problems there's problems but it's problematic it's all very problematic it is look you pull oil and you end up with q anon that's the causal pathway here it's it's a gateway oil olive oil it'll lead to very bad things well so now let's get into the meat of the content that we looked at this week which is the christine gedrick and we've already heard her voice a couple of times. But who is she? Well, let's let Gwyneth do the hard work for us. My guest today is Dr. Christine Gedrick. Christine is a fellow of the American Board of Family Medicine, an associate professor at Rutgers University and author of the new book, A Nation of Unwell, What's Gone Wrong?

University and author of the new book, A Nation of Unwell, What's Gone Wrong? At her practice in New Jersey, she has spent over a decade recovering thousands of patients with chronic illnesses. She's the kind of doctor people turn to when they feel like they've tried everything but still have no answers. Yeah, so she's sort of like house MD for chronic illness, according to that presentation. And just in case, Matt, those credentials passed you by, just one more short clip for you. Well, you're obviously an MD. You went to Harvard. You're on the board of the American board of the, is it the family practice, et cetera. So you're a highly accredited person, very well respected. And she also studied in Germany, which I think

was emphasized a little bit later on. Yes, it does come up once or twice. One thing that they didn't mention that I came across in my research when I was looking up who is this person. So she was interviewed on Fox by Laura Ingram to promote hydroxychloroquine. We probably, through the practice, touched a couple hundred now that have either had early signs. You know, we do a lot with immune supportive therapies for practice, and many of our patients are coming through absolutely unscathed. I've sent nobody to the hospital yet, which has been amazing. But in the patients that we have felt that we needed to start the hydroxychloroquine absolutely on the mark. Within 48 hours, they had defraudasts. And it's been shocking to me that there have been a couple cases where I've

had to fight with primary care physicians that have been involved with these patients. And they're sitting at home with fever, just bouncing around, you know, taking Tylenol, and days are going on and on, and they're starting to get very short of breath. And I'm the one arguing to say, try the hydroxychloroquine. Just in case that wasn't clear enough about what her view is, here's a clip from a little bit later in that interview. Perhaps there should be EKG machines at COVID testing sites so people can get EKGs and we can understand better who might be at risk.

But if 95 plus percent of the population has absolutely no risk, why would we be denying them a very bona fide treatment strategy that could really be effective in staving off the first part of the disease? Okay, so we, you know, there were legitimate doctors advocating that to some extent but the overall consensus was the evidence is very weak and we need to do trials and the people who were promoting that treatment almost universally were either people with vested interests or they were partisans who were promoting it because Trump started the advocate for it. So it's by no means an automatic sign that the medical position cannot be trusted, but it's at least a concern that somebody would go on Fox News and promote it as a bona fide, verified treatment when it was not. Yeah, interesting isn't it when i think about

the response on the left when we looked at these quack treatments that were pushed generally by trump we're very quick to put on our scientific hats and go this is complete nonsense follow the science this is terribly irresponsible but when it's presented in a more crunchy, new agey kind of way, it doesn't attract the same criticism from the same quarters, does it? No, it does not. And they get into a lot of this topic in this discussion. Here is how it was introduced. Today, she explains the science behind how the environment impacts our toxic load

and what we can do to reverse some of the damage. We talk about how intricately linked our microbiome is to both our immunity and our mental health and she shares the key foods and herbal remedies that she recommends to all her patients. Yeah so if you were playing alternative medicine, bingo, you would almost have won in one go because you've got microbiome, toxins, herbal remedies, the whole shebang. And they really do get on almost all of the canards in this area. We're going to look at stuff to do with toxins chronic Lyme disease parasites the microbiome and and even a little bit of coronavirus stuff um as we go on this might be obvious to our listeners but detoxification and toxins in the sense that they are referring to them is utter nonsense. I will say Matt, before you even have a chance to respond, I'm going to let them

explain why you are wrong. The inception of someone's illness was after they had an installation done in their home. If you inhale the chemicals that are in there, and you have a system that's already potentially susceptible, and you're not getting outside of the home, and you're not sweating, and you're not exercising, and you have no way to get those chemicals out, that's when stuff can start to fall back towards a chronic state. Okay, so there's one that environmental toxins can cause a problem.

And here's a slightly longer elaboration on the role of toxification. Oftentimes, we are starting before any type of real treatment with just detoxification to get... It's like the idea of cleaning up the kitchen counter with a big spill. You're going to go across half and have to go wash the sponge out before you can get the other half up. That is exactly what happens to our bodies it gets chock full of toxins and there's ways to test for this and then that's what you have to start working on in order to get the flow back in the system okay i can see you're our rising map but you've got one last clip so this is

gwyneth paltrow's just short just a a neat second clip for you, this last one. In that case, it's a chronic state because the chemical causes inflammation in the body. And then it's just like a feedback. Yeah. So toxins cause inflammation, which causes chronic illness. What's wrong, Matt? What have you got your Western medicine bee in your bonnet about with that? Have you never heard of asbestos?

Okay, so we'll have to resist the temptation to go on a big deep dive into debunking detoxification. So let me restrain myself and just point out very briefly that yes, there are toxins in the world. There are things like mercury but that's not what these people are referring to they're referring to just this extremely nebulous and vague set of things that can't be measured that don't really exist that your body seems to need to be in a continual process of detoxificating. And they talk about these toxins like coming out in the sweat, even the oil in the mouth.

Apparently that's going to detoxify you as well. This is all just pure quackery, complete pseudoscience, detox diets, cleaning your intestines, colonic irrigation, putting your feet in those little bubbling baths that will suck toxins out of your feet. It's all complete nonsense. It's not even remotely connected to anything real. You said the hydroxychloroquine was a red flag. The fact that she's talking about toxins is a massive red flag. So we've already had the hydroxychloroquine issue. Here's one that's very common when it comes to

advocates for organic food. I claim about chemicals. I tell patients, if you can't figure out how to make a food in your own kitchen, you probably shouldn't be eating it, right? It's like, how did a Dorito ever, how does it ever get made, right? Forget it. Like the same thing with reading a label. If you get to three lines in and you can't pronounce any of the ingredients, that's all chemical that's going into your body. So, okay. So back to the vitamins, phospholipids and essential oils are not well understood.

When I say that, there's a supplement we give orally called phosphatidylcholine that plays a very big role in helping keep patients detoxified helping keeping the cellular membrane strong so that you know this is bringing me back to shades of the food to be but chemical is used as a negative description but of course everything organic is made from chemicals everything you consume has chemicals in it, but they mean synthetic or processed food. So they use this very familiar thing of saying, if you can't pronounce it, what is it that you're putting in your body? But then immediately pivot to, here's the scientifically sounding supplements that we recommend. So when it comes to supplements, that we recommend. So when it comes to supplements, the scientific sounding terminology and names, all good. But when it's food, you shouldn't be putting that in your body if it

has a scientifically sounding name for an ingredient. So there's just a convenience shift in the rules at play. Well, exactly. At the beginning of the episode they emphasized her credentials her orthodox scientific credentials well-respected academic training in orthodox medicine but yeah can pivot towards it or against it at will seemingly so that does remind me a lot of people like the Weinsteins, who lean extremely heavily on credentials when it suits them, and then disparage them when it suits them. The contradiction there doesn't seem to bother anybody. Yes, allopathic medicine, right? Western medicine is generally the punching bag. And here's them talking about how Western medicine deals with chronic illness. Somehow, it seems that you've developed this practice.

It's really treating people with chronic illness, which is, in my experience anyway, not something that Western doctors do with great gusto, right? It's like they want the end in sight. Yeah. This is a criticism that's often raised that Western medicine only focuses on the symptoms. It doesn't care about the underlying cause, which is generally not true. The thing that you usually see in this case is that the symptoms are non-specific and generalized, right? And they're associated with these illnesses which are controversial or difficult to define.

Sometimes even psychosomatic? Sometimes even psychosomatic, yes. Sometimes not. This is the problem that you run into. But like chronic Lyme disease, for example, is generally regarded as not a real thing. Lyme disease is a real disease, but the chronic version has become a cultural phenomenon for which there is not medical evidence that it exists. So it is true that people with unspecific maladies and chronic pain and so on are difficult for medical systems to deal with, but that's for a good reason, because in a lot of cases, as you mentioned, it's psychosomatic or it's related to general health issues. So it can be the case that focusing on diet or changing your habits or just generally

being healthier, exercising can be the solution. But Western medicine does not say that improving your diet, exercising, relaxing more are negative things. exercising relaxing more are negative things it's just that the doctor can't spend hours advising people on which retreat would be most beneficial to them but your alternative therapist who you pay a lot of money to will happily sit down and discuss which chakra therapy would work best for you you're trying to square that circle of their relationship to evidence and evidence-based medicine, where they sort of rely on their credentials, sometimes talk in a very science-y kind of way, and then at other times disparage the whole framework in favor of a kind of spiritual

revelatory framework. I think you can only really understand this when you realize that ultimately what they're doing is promoting themselves they've got something to sell i think that's true of a lot of our gurus who have a similar mixed hot and cold relationship with various orthodoxies will rely on them sometimes sometimes undercut them it just depends whether they're standing on the shoulders of the orthodoxy or undercutting it and presenting themselves as an alternative. So the person she is interviewing is perhaps related to some commercial interests and promoting them. Yes.

And I think it makes sense when you realize that the real purpose here is to sell themselves, their products, their treatments. Yeah. So like I mentioned before, there's some warning signs for the interview and we'll get into the other content, but here would be one that would raise a very large red flag for me whenever anybody says it. Because if we keep going the way we are,

we're going to erode it. And now there's questions of the impact 5G is having on the biome. Some researchers say that we're just going to oblode it. And now there's questions of the impact 5G is having on the biome. Some researchers say that we're just going to obliterate the bacteria. I mean, this is really serious stuff. Jeez. I know. I know.

There's always an answer, right? So some people are saying 5G has an impact on the biome. Food for thought. Worth it. Just asking questions, Chris. Just asking questions.ris just asking questions are you saying we should ask questions about 5g chris i don't know you know there's a lot of people in a lot of coffee shops talking about 5g and the biome and the here's another warning flag

i think this is when she's talking about a book that she was going to release book that i'm working on now's original title was the autoimmune cure because we've worked so successfully with autoimmune diseases but we're retitling it right now because it turns out when i was in the middle of working through the immunology of what actually drives an autoimmune reaction, the very tenets of it are so applicable to COVID that it's actually showing how we could have avoided a large part of this pandemic by understanding immunology so much better. And none of my patients have gone on to get very sick. I mean, I've had hundreds and we've kept them all out of the hospital and all that. Yeah. So there's a slight pivot in the focus of how the book is going to be marketed, right?

You might even regard that as an opportunistic pivot. I feel like creating that meme of the two hands clasping and having JPC is on one forum, Gwyneth Paltrow on the other forum, and they're clasping over COVID. COVID is the issue that brings everybody together Chris well the interesting thing is Gwyneth Paltrow had COVID and apparently she had some long tail symptoms and she got criticism because she released a blog post that discussed in some respect you know good raising issue to the fact that you can have long tail symptoms but she also managed to promote like 20 alternative treatments and supplements in her blog post from goop vitamins and so on that might help so she got some criticism for that but i will say she hasn't gone in on the full coronavirus denialism that JP Sears and others have like she

seems to have not done that at least that I could find you know that style of messaging where she's talking about her lived experience and oh I did these things and it worked really well for me and promoting things in that respect. That's a common thing in the alternative health sphere. And there's obviously big problems with that epistemic frame of that subjective lived experience, which is increasingly well regarded, I suppose. I think as a culture we're less sceptical of those personal narrative accounts and the thing that was true for them and the feeling that important knowledge can be

gleaned from that as opposed to these stuffy boring expensive randomized control trials. Yeah. And so lest we be accused of focusing on Christine Gedrick and ignoring Gwyneth Paltrow's role there, because often she's serving as the catalyst, right, with her just asking questions formula. But here's her talking about a similar point in regards to the body and responses to coronavirus? You feel that maybe because the, for lack of a better word or to call out an old reference from, I forget which doctor, but that the kind of the soil of the body in your patients is more nutrient dense, therefore the immune system works better. Like you're getting the pathways all working and functioning the way they're supposed to so that theoretically, the patient doesn't go down quite as hard with a virus like COVID? Yeah, the key, the key with COVID, I believe, is understanding the innate

immune system and the tools that we have to boost it. So all the natural supplements, there's a drug that's made a lot of popular acclaim lately, the ivermectin drug. I don't know if you've heard about it or not. They go on in that topic. So there's parts which aren't that controversial, right? Saying that the natural immune system is the thing that's important when understanding the coronavirus. Yes, it is. But the thing is that the doctor and Gwyneth Paltrow are under the impression that there are very specific ways that she outlined related to supplements and microbiome treatments that will essentially power up your immune system such that you almost can't be susceptible to COVID if you're part of it. It's the same with Joe Rogan and vitamin D I think they see it a bit like freaking Popeye yeah this relates to effective messaging around

vaccination right so the the community's been aware for a long time there's a problem around public acceptance of vaccinations and this perception that they are an artificial chemical treatment made in some horrible laboratory. And then these foreign particles are then injected into and then contaminated and violating your bodily integrity. So this is contrasted with the kind of messaging and language that you just saw there, where they talk about boosting your body's natural defenses against whatever. So as you said, seen in a certain way, they could be said to be saying exactly the same thing. Vaccines obviously boost your natural immune system. That's how they work. But it's all in the framing. And when it comes to being congruent with this cultural worldview, the facts or the scientific details of how things work isn't as important as the presentation. I think that was

a pretty good example of that. Yeah. You know, like a lot of people, I had been interested in these debates between alternative medicine practitioners and skeptics back in the day, but I haven't paid that much attention in recent years. And I didn't notice that there was a rebranding. There's always rebrandings of holistic medicine or alternative and complementary medicine or naturopathic. Integrative. Integrative. Yes, that's a current one. But I heard another two in this interview. So the first clip is also giving a general overview about this kind of approach to medicine. And the second one is asking about the way that Dr. Gedrick describes herself. So here's the first one.

But I had to change my diet. He figured out I had all these food sensitivities. I had to take gluten out. I had to take dairy out. That was out I had all these food sensitivities. I had to take gluten out. I had to take dairy out. That was causing my headaches. And this was what year? Right after Y2K. I got sick right around 2000, 2001. So pretty early in the trajectory of like cultural acceptance of functional medicine,

et cetera. Functional medicine. That's a useful branding. Functional medicine. Yeah. I think the branding issue is a really interesting one it's probably worth lingering on it slightly i have one more for your map so you've got functional and holistic integrative here's uh another one for you so then so then what did that spark in you what was the kind of synapse when you witnessed your own healing that made you want to go integrative or functional?

Do you describe yourself? Do you characterize yourself as that sort of MD? I do. But I would say at this point, it's really moved into what I call more precision medicine, like really studying the epigenetics of patients, the biome, the microbiome. We have some assays we've been working on in-house to develop. And that's the way to split the difference between the left and the right side right now. Toss my head in. What can I say?

What's the matter, Matt? It's functional and precise. What's your problem with science? Oh, dear. It is is interesting that evolution in the branding so it was originally called alternative medicine as an alternative to orthodox conventional medicine but my take on all of that rebranding is essentially a long journey in pursuit of legitimacy so when it was contrasted with evidence-based medicine, that caused obvious problems. So even complementary, right? The idea is, oh, no, you shouldn't use this in place of the thing that actually has been proven to work.

It's something you can do as well as, right? So more innocuous. And then it's gotten even more abstract and more sales brandy with these functional and precision terms. They sound good, don't they? Who wouldn't want precision medicine, Matt? I don't want imprecise medicine. That sounds terrible. Just like hack at me with a scalpel, just anywhere.

The way that people are seen as responsible for their own care within holistic medicine, it relates to that point we made at the start that you are seen as the center of the universe for your interactions with other people and what kind of energy you bring with you. In the same way, your health is a function of you and how much you invest in self care and spiritual cleansing and consideration of all of these factors of your life. So it's kind of an extension of that philosophy. Yeah, I mean, those ideas have been studied in psychology for some time. So there's phrases like health locus of control.

And there's another one, the term eludes me, but it captures this idea of self-efficacy in relation to health. So it's been studied for a long time in terms of people's health behavior and traditionally has been regarded by psychologists as a good thing. So people who feel more able to take control of their health and take active steps to do things is naturally a good thing in principle. But I think more and more, it's been taken too far in the sense that getting on the internet, doing your own research, getting your supplements and disregarding the health

authorities whose legitimacy has been undermined. And it's a worldview and a philosophy that sits very neatly with wealthy, liberal, rich people who do have the luxury and the time to go and source locally grown kale and have the mental and the time to go and source locally grown kale and have the mental and physical energy to do healthy things like exercise now these are good things these are still good things generally so kale is good for you getting regular exercise is good for you meditating i'm sure is good for you but it is a world view that fits very well with the well-heeled leisure class of which Gwyneth Paltrow is a part of. And it has its dark side, as we've seen in this episode. It just has a dark side as well.

And one needs to acknowledge that it has good things about it in terms of that autonomy. But we've seen it with vaccinations in particular, because we did a survey in Australia and found that the lowest rates of vaccination were observed in the richest postcodes, the postcodes who just blitzed all of the indices of socioeconomic status. These are the people who are actually vaccinating at lower rates than the rest of Australia. Now, this goes against our knowledge of or models of how this works. It's meant to be these poor people who don't have the education and the knowledge and the resources to get vaccinated.

It's the opposite of that. And I believe that it's because of that cultural worldview, which is embodied pretty well by Gwyneth Paltrow, where they see that kind of medicine for everybody, one size fits all, it's very imperson impersonal it's not bespoke it's just you know easy needle bam there you go you get the same over-the-counter drug that everyone else gets that's not good enough for them they want personalized medicine that acknowledges them as a vastly important spiritual being that they so clearly are so yeah i think i think it's just fascinating this interplay between

cultural worldview and actual concrete health behaviors and like obviously the holy grail of western medicine as well as it progresses is that we would have an individualized approach that it would be your specific genetics your specific maladies that are the way that the medicine is targeted. But you get there when you can. We're not there yet where we take scans of each person's genetics and treat them according to their specific genetic and biomarker makeup. But a lot of people are claiming we are. Yeah, although when they are thinking about bespoke treatments for themselves,

they mean it in a more ineffable kind of way. Oh, no, I know. I know, but we'll see that the two bleed in when she starts talking about the battery of tests that they run. So I'm just pointing out that there's a potential blocker that people come for up and say, well, you don't want individualized medicine. And no, you do. You want individualized medicine that has good science behind it that's the

difference but so this is there's just a brief point i want to make before we get a bit more into those tests for toxins and parasites and whatnot is a lot of people in this space like to present themselves in the way that you noted, that they have credentials in the traditional Western allopathic scientific medicine sphere, and that they got into the integrative holistic sphere by being convinced of its efficacy and that they didn't want to admit it initially. And we find that story here. Really, I had to take medical leave. I was just messed up. I mean, messed up. And I went to a holistic physician, but I went kicking and

screaming. I mean, I was not happy about the idea that I was going to go see a holistic, like how, how is a holistic doctor going to fix me when I've been at Cornell and Columbia and like the best of have just failed, right? And who brought you to this? It was my parents. So I included that, Matt, because I wanted to note that the narrative doesn't exactly work because when Greta Paltrow asks, who brought you there? Her parents, which suggests that her parents had a positive view towards holistic medicine. So that struck me as it doesn't sound like your home was super negative towards this worldview. But she actually credits

that her parents aren't responsible. They didn't know well enough about this world. So another point here is that when she's talking about the integrative practitioner that treated her, I just wanted to note this description of him. So very unusual and probably, you know, more the spiritual realm and angel because of how he intersected in my life and just totally turned me around. Yeah, so spiritually an angel. We're talking about warning flags when somebody says you know well yeah and he was really interesting and you know in a spiritual sense he was an angel it's just just a small warning flag pops into my mind like i think that kind

of language i'll be showing my prejudice against all of this stuff but if you go to see some kind of spiritual holistic healer i'll invariably look deep into your soul and find out that the inner you is just this wonderful shining light this warm glow there's an angel within you it just needs to come out it's there's just something to my mind extremely narcissistic about the way it all works. It feels like telling people very much what they want to hear, that they are just wonderful, unique beacon of light. Oh, wow. I think you're wrong. So let me just allow the good doctor to explain a little bit more about her approach and why you're wrong.

There's like an algorithm that we follow. So we have a data analysis. There's a way of getting through the infections or inflammation in the biome. There's a bacterial layer, there's a fungal layer, there's a parasitic layer. And knowing how to work through that and each kind of treatment I do is geared towards which layer is causing the most trouble. But as a result of that whole process, the innate immune system has generally been enhanced, improved. And that's by standard labs. So there's no disputing that. Sorry, Matt. There's no disputing that. Standard labs show improvement. So I don't know what you're talking about. There's an algorithm involved and there's layers, parasites, toxins. You're a skeptic mind, Matt. It's blinding you. And even right before

you get all upset and worked up, let's just hear what actually matters here. I don't care what therapy you want to use. if you have data that shows what the problem was and the fact that the problem is now fixed it doesn't matter whether you used an herb or a pharmaceutical if you're open to that idea because the data sort of speaks for itself yes ma the data is what matters what so what have you got to say to that science man you don't like data data oh that's me told you know the interesting thing about western medicine is that a lot of the time they don't know how things work like a lot of rcts are done to test things where the precise mechanism by which it works is not completely clear there might be some anecdotal or some clinical tentative evidence that this seems to

help with such and such so they'll go ahead and do exactly what she's describing in terms of just seeing whether or not it works not necessarily knowing all the details of all the different mechanisms um because guess what biology is very complex so yeah we're on the same page with that and like i'm actually on board with the claim that she makes the data is what matters if you have a treatment then it works and it can be shown to work it doesn't matter which system it comes from that's true well that's what i'm saying that's conventional medicine in a nutshell yes that's true the sentiment is in that clip is correct but the bit that's slightly wrong is her criteria for what has been proven with data and i want to dwell on this a little bit, because I think it

speaks to a bigger issue about potentially touching on the replication crisis in the social sciences as well. So here is her discussing a little bit about what her approach entails specifically. What kind of tests, give me the whole battery of tests that you give to somebody who's coming in to see you with some kind of chronic illness. So we look at all of the standard labs. So that's one thing that's very important, because I want to represent the most academic approach to my work so that I'm not doing specialty tests at the expense of the standard tests. And I will have to tell you every, probably every day that I'm with patients, I will find standard medical tests that have not been interpreted properly. Slight warning sign at the end there, Matt, right?

I rely on the standard tests, the results, it's all standard. at the end there, Matt, right? I rely on the standard tests, the results, it's all standard. Of course, the results have been interpreted incorrectly by other doctors almost daily, but standard tests. The thing that I keep picking up is just that back and forth between undercutting conventional medicine, but also leaning on legitimacy of it with the standard tests and the standard labs and the data speaking for itself there's that backwards and forwards of undercutting it leaning on it then undercutting it leaning on it and it's an interesting tap dance it just reminds me so much of the weinstein's who do the same thing as well yeah yeah you know oh this is all very sciencey and there's a you

don't understand it it's all very technical and all the science is wrong. It's just amazing. Yale is completely corrupt. But did I mention that my PhD is from the prestigious Yale institution? The one purpose behind all of it is to sell the guru themselves. I think that's what it is. Call me cynical, Chris. Call me cynical. Very cynical of you, Matt. Very cynical. But that was only the first part of the test,

Matt. That was the baseline. So what comes next? And then there are some proprietary assays that we've worked on that we're developing to bring them to clinical recognition. And then we overlay other tests that look at toxins and some of the epigenetics. So it's like a whole battery of stuff that's different from what you would normally get. And are you looking at the standard range of the Western blood tests or the functional range? I would say probably the easiest way to be answered would probably be the functional range so my eye is refined around what i think the ratio or the range should be i like that but i love that especially you have to remember functional means alternative integrative holistic so there's the standards which people might have, but I have a more refined set of standards,

which I use to decide whether something is normal. And that's on top of the fact that I'm running proprietary tests, which are, you know, they're not clinically validated yet, but you know, in the future we have hopes and we run a lot of special tests. And what's the issue, Mark? More info, right? More data, more info info why would that be in any way problematic from another angle too you described some of our previous gurus as these

ideas hipsters and i'd be just taking a wild guess here but i suspect that the treatments this doctor offers are expensive it's exclusive i'm sure having this huge battery of tests would not be cheap, or of their interpretation by them. I'm sure this is not a community clinic, Chris, that they're operating out of, right? Now, add to that, of course, the extremely expensive stuff that gets sold on the Goop website. So the common theme for me is that this is bespoke, prestige,

So the common theme for me is that this is bespoke prestige hipster medicine for the really deserving people who have the moral courage to take responsibility for their health and wellness into their own hands. Indeed, indeed. And you might have picked up on my very subtle hint of the potential problem of running a large amount of tests. And the reason being, in case it isn't clear for people, that that gives you a lot of numbers, a lot of data that you can pick out specific things from and that you are likely just by chance to have false positives on.

And to add to that, the replication crisis, a lot of it has been tied to this issue about a focus on statistical significance and what people do to try and achieve that and also how flexibly they interpret what statistical significance means. And this small segment completely raised more warning alarms. If they weren't going off before, the klaxon was hit hard with this description. And the other thing I'm doing too is I process so much data that the way my mind works is I see statistical likelihood and I see statistical relevance.

So if I start to see something that isn't going in the right direction, that points me to something going on with that particular patient that we need to dig further in to figure out why. focused on statistical analysis or those kind of things but it's the same problem it's looking for trends that confirm what you suspect and the numbers look like they're heading in this direction so maybe they're not exactly clinically significant yet but i've just got a sense that something's up and yeah look it's definitely hard to understand what statistical significance means in the context of a single patient. So what she's talking about is basically running a huge number of tests, doing these stool samples and assays of gut biomes. Yeah. And the thing is with all these numbers and multiple tests and stuff,

what is helpful with it is when you're dealing with diseases that are vaguely defined, ill-defined, or have a lot of general symptoms. And we already mentioned earlier a little bit about the fact that chronic Lyme is a topic that comes up. And to highlight Gwyneth's role as the kind of instigator, the person who's just asking questions, this is her teeing up this topic for Dr. Gedrick. What I did want to ask you about Lyme disease, because you have so many chronic Lyme patients, or you have people who think they have Lyme or being treated for chronic Lyme and not getting better and come to you and it turns out that they don't necessarily have Lyme. So how did you get to be the Lyme expert? And what is Lyme? And how do you treat it?

Giving ample scope to get into what Dr. Gedrick's position is on Lyme and chronic illnesses and so on. And I think this is her discussing not that specific question, but in general, the kinds of things that she's treating. The biggest wastebasket of what I get is the chronic fatigue, chronic Lyme, fibromyalgia, and then the sister to those are autoimmune diseases, because the longer you've gone on with infection, the more likely you are to develop an autoimmune issue. I guess it's quite typical for integrative health practitioners to specialize in these kinds of chronic, difficult to diagnose, difficult to treat, poorly understood, somewhat vague complaints that don't have a good conventional treatment. So people who are

feeling just generally bad, run down, tired, will naturally gravitate towards alternative treatments. Yes, they will. And I think these kind of illnesses and diseases, it isn't like they aren't real. People do have autoimmune diseases and they do have chronic illnesses, but the unspecified nature of them gives a lot of room for people to run a lot of tests, provide a lot of different hypotheses and so on. Yeah. Well, the other aspect of it too is that there are conditions for which conventional treatments simply don't exist, yet people naturally want to be cured.

So in these situations, it's quite understandable that people look at other alternatives. So for instance, there's a whole industry in South America of various extremely dubious and very expensive treatments for cancer. Now, the people who are attracted to that and go down to South America and pay $100,000 for some treatment from the US, it's not like they have a special affinity for alternative treatments or that they're particularly credulous. It's simply that they really, really would like to be cured of cancer.

And they know that there is no option for them within the conventional system, simply because we don't have a treatment for their particular situation. So I guess what I'm saying is that science extends so far, and then there's this area where knowledge and expertise just simply doesn't cover. Yet people still have needs across that area. And those areas tend to get filled in by people who are offering non-scientific approaches. So I think there's a pretty good analogy with religion

there. Physical explanations have gradually been encroaching on religious explanations, but there are still topics that are important to people around consciousness, about what happens after you die, that kind of thing, that people still would like to have answers for. So that area is naturally going to be the domain of non-material, non-scientific approaches. Yeah. And so we saw with the description of the kind of battery of tests that were being run and how this was presented as a kind of good thing, that there's a combination of conventional or scientific medicine approaches

and a degree of scientism or just the trappings of science welded on top to a more mystical spiritual framework. And I think a good illustration of this is that the good doctor claims to be able to basically cure chronic Lyme, which is quite an achievement because these are unspecific symptoms that often when they are running tests to look for the presence of parasites and whatnot, they can't find them or evidence that they were there even initially. But here is how she was able to identify the cure for chronic Lyme. So it's been maybe five years now since this whole, it really was a vision. I mean, it literally came to me as a vision. I almost drove off the road when I saw it and I stopped

my car and I thought about, I didn't even know what to do. And then eventually I sort of settled with it. And then we've done a whole bunch of things in our clinic to, to work on the research behind it. But suffice it to say, from that point on, I really wouldn't say I have had a chronic Lyme patient since. I mean, it's just, you can get it to go away. Let's put it that way. So it's been great. I mean, it's been really great. Yeah. So, you know, insight can flash suddenly for scientific topics as well. But there was a real sort of sense that it's almost divine inspiration that it just become clear and now she can cure chronic Lyme, which is true, would be quite remarkable given how

resilient it's proven to being diagnosed or treated by pretty much anyone. Yeah. There's an old cliche, which is that alternative treatments that have been shown to work are simply conventional treatments, right? The distinction between conventional and alternative treatments is simply that one of them has evidence underlying it and one doesn't. So if she really did have a vision and whatever she discovered in that vision provided her with pretty much a foolproof 100% success rate on treating Lyme, then one would think that it should be pretty easy to gather evidence for the efficacy of that treatment. Yet I suspect it hasn't been published or presented. I do have a clip that speaks to that, Matt. So let's hear her explain some of that.

What happened was I started getting my first Lyme patients and they had different labs than I'd ever seen them before. And I researched all that and I got involved with an organization called iLabs, which represents sort of the presence in this country to argue about Lyme disease, chronic Lyme, and then the use of antibiotics, etc. So that was her talking about involvement with some kind of clinic or company that does special tests that I think claim to verify the existence of Lyme disease. It's not clear, but there's perhaps a business relationship there now from what she says. But again, it's the kind of notion that there's special tests to detect things.

And I would imagine like you suggest, Matt, that these are unconventional tests. Yeah, it's actually quite common. It's not just in medicine. Across a number of fields, you see this kind of scientism, especially when there are commercial interests at play. There are obviously strong motivations for providing a solution, a diagnosis method that purports to have extraordinarily effective results. So to take a completely different example, I'm supervising a PhD student who is studying the use of lie detection methods. So things like the polygraph and also other versions that are based on the electroencephalogram.

So there are people in the legal and law enforcement communities who would very much like a magic box that they can use to tell when people are lying or not. And there are companies who would very much like to sell them a solution to their problem. And they are quite willing to really inflate the claims. inflate the claims and they know that they need to present a veneer of scientific rigor and the impression of evidence for the proposition these things work and so they do and this seems like another example of the same thing yeah and so just to remind people because we're getting into the weeds here but we know this is not Gwyneth Paltrow saying these things, but as you can hear and you will hear in some of the clips moving forward,

she is there as a kind of instigating voice or a voice just asking questions and editorializing the response to say, wow, that's really amazing. And I think this is illustrative of the kind of content that Goop is offering. So there is the interviews with celebrities and conventional stuff, but this kind of stuff is common. Another example where this is potentially harmful,

or at least encouraging people towards paranoia, is when the discussion gets onto the topics of bacteria, parasites, and the biome. And in one respect, this is a narrative which has been very popular in recent years to emphasize the extent to which there are bacteria and healthy, not so much parasites. They tend not to feature in these narratives. But the microbiome has been an area which has been the subject of much interest in mainstream science in recent years. But that's also created a space for a lot of quite extreme claims to be attached to it in the same way that quantum physics is a real field. But the amount of people discussing quantum physics and adding on their own interpretations

is quite huge. It doesn't mean the actual field is out. So here is a little description about what bacteria and fungi actually might be doing to our bodies. and fungi actually might be doing to our bodies? Like the gut brain axis is so powerful. So bacteria tend to project into the brain with depression. So if there's bacterial inflammation related to bacteria, that's how it presents. Inflammation related to fungi presents with anxiety.

Okay. So bacteria creates depression, fungi creates anxiety. And also, Matt, this is wild parasites project into the brain with a lot of our anger, rage issues, and then sort of altered thought patterns. So when people have paranoid thoughts and things like that, it can be parasitic. The parasite physiology of our biome is barely being touched and it's so real it's always a good sign when you have to add in it's so real well i agree with it which says it's so wild because that's a pretty wild have you ever heard of a game called the last of us yes yes yeah so the

story in that is that there is a fungal infection which is causing humans to become these monsters these half human half fungus things and spread their spores around and it's based on the fungus that infects ants and alters the behavior to make them go and stand on the top of leaves and grow a thing out of their head and be consumed by birds. So it sounds very similar to that game, parasites and bacteria and fungi. They're all projecting their energy waves into our brains and taking over us. And I don't think that's what the majority of mainstream research is showing. No, it reminds me of a mashup between some of those traditional conceptions of illness, like the different humors in the body. And you've got an excessive bile and it's going

to make you grumpy or even the different elements going a bit further back or talking about chakras and so on that kind of model but just with some slightly sciencey and trendy stuff about the biome the inner ecology of it's just super imposed the point you raise matt about like a layering on top of the more spiritual or ancient descriptions about diseases that fits nicely because here's Gwyneth riffing on this point about parasites and how they've been overlooked as an important cause of illness many ancients or there are lots of cultures who have done who have recipes for parasite cleanses, like in so many third world countries, for example, to this day, or you hear about milk cleanse or there with herbs, there are so many, there are a lot of alternative treatments

for parasites that are kind of in indigenous cultures. Do you know about those? You know, when I heard her talk about that, the point that seems to be missing from that consideration is why developing countries would have a greater emphasis on parasites. And it might have something to do with public health development and sanitation systems and the fact that parasites are a genuine health risk in much of the developing world. Whereas while they do exist and perhaps their impact is overlooked to a certain extent in the Western world, the reason that people don't invest so much time in it is because there's a lot of filtration and public health systems that essentially take care of the most dangerous parasites.

Yeah, that seems plausible. That might be it, Matt. But maybe we're wrong because here's Dr. Gedrick again, talking about her intuitions in regards to the presence of parasites. The amount of parasites people carry, and I've treated them now for years. I can see them. People bring them to me,

so I don't need to be told that they're there. Yes, yes. It's crazy, crazy. Okay, so she knows that they're there, but one problem, Matt, just one problem. That's when I started really looking seriously at the parasites. And then I had this one woman who was just crawling with them and kept bringing them to me. And I kept sending them to the lab.

And lab, just a regular lab, kept coming back saying there's no parasite. I was like, I'm sending you a worm. I mean, how can you tell? So I quickly figured that we were not getting good information with our tests. And we had to start. So that was what started the journey. That's just the image of somebody coming to her crawling with parasites. And then what kind of just?

I mean, yes, that's one. What a horrific image. But two, the notion that she sent a physical worm to a lab and they were like, no, parasites detected. I suspect it wasn't so obvious. Yeah, we have to suspect so. Anyway, so the people that purport to test for parasites can't do it, so they do their in-house testing,

which I guess would be convenient in more ways than one. Yeah there's a part where they go into the story where basically Dr. Gedrick starts talking about her nanny and how when her son was grinding his teeth that the nanny explained that in her culture that was a sign of parasitic infection. And after she treated him with an anti-parasite drug, within two days, he stopped grinding his teeth, which he'd been doing for years. And this revealed their untapped wisdom. And that story as well, again, this is going to illustrate my classism, but I just haven't been around that many people that have so casually dropped the concept of nannies.

And the image of taking the wisdom from indigenous cultures or these people who are working in domestic roles for the upper class or middle class elites. or the upper class or middle class elites. And then they revealed to them the wisdom, which they can then create in the scientific tests and market to people. Like, it just rubs me the wrong way. And there is an element where I'm just not from the class that deals with nannies. So, yeah, the casualness of the mention.

Yeah, there's something about the scenario that is a little bit irritating to me too. And I think it's because that this excessive concern with health and chronic complaints is so much a concern of the upper class. And her business is definitely targeted at that same group and these these are the same people who like to valorize the wisdom of the ancients um and will except for talib except for talib yes that's true yeah and then just sort of pick that up casually uh from from your nanny and and then incorporate it into your business something about it that's irritating can't quite put my finger on it and i i grow my teeth as a child a young person probably riddled with parasites

crawling all over me i remember looking into it and i mean you know everyone's got their theory you know some people think it's all it's stress you've got some unresolved psychological issues which i do but i don't think they're causing the teeth grinding i think the conventional explanation is that it's due to just the way your jaw is set up and the way the teeth are kind of whether or not they lock together nicely at night anyway sorry matt wrong it's parasites it's parasites fungus fungus infection and the your recovery from your chronic Lyme and I'm sorry to be the one to break it but that's the way it goes if only I had an indigenous nanny with ancient wisdom I could have asked her or him they could have set me straight they could have sent me a lot of dental bills

yeah so let's let's hear a little bit more about the biome, which you so cavalier dismiss as an important factor in our lives, Matt. Maybe this will educate you. Because if we keep going the way we are, we're going to erode it. And now there's questions of the impact 5G is having on the biome. Some researchers say that we're just going to obliterate the bacteria. I mean, this is really serious stuff. Jeez. I know. I know. There's always an answer, right? Oh, sorry. That was the 5G clip. Or perhaps another one. I can't remember if that's the

same one or a different one. But this is the notion that the current environment is obliterating our natural health. And 5G is just the icing on the top to that stew of toxins. And it's all really classic health and alternative medicine stuff. But that's the point, right? That's what she's offering. It's just in a luxury brand bowl. Yeah, they're very

much first world problems, aren't they? They're luxury complaints. I'm not dismissing chronic disease generally. And it's very natural for people who do suffer from some kind of difficult to treat chronic disease to search for alternatives. And sometimes they try stuff out and it seems to work. I had a really bad sore neck for a while and nothing else was working and i had acupuncture and then it just seemed to work for me i looked into the literature later and it doesn't at least when they do meta-analyses of the many times it's been studied apparently there's very little evidence for it but anyway it worked for me is my point so yeah that's a placebo effect is powerful and like i've had acupuncture

when i was a teenager as well and there's a whole ritualistic aspect to it so it does have impact you know being around people then spending time on you and then sticking needles into you yeah i agree so i'm not having a go at people who are attracted to those sorts of treatments because it's natural out of desperation if nothing nothing else. But the excessive concern, some of which can be psychosomatic, and the excessive concern with optimizing your wellness, I think has a kind of annoying aspect to it, which is that it's something that really quite wealthy people occupy themselves with. And they indulge, I guess, this anxiety through a bunch of very bespoke treatments and things that take a lot of time or money to do. So it's understandable,

because your health is very much one of these existential concerns. And when there aren't a lot of other threats in your environment, we can get clean drinking water. We've got vaccinations against most of the things that used to kill off our children with great regularity in the past. It feels a little bit that people are now re-diverting all of this concern to more and more abstract and difficult to pin down problems. It's normal for people to be preoccupied by these kinds of things, right? And I think it would happen in every society that there are health concerns that might not have any clear empirical reality, but they're kind of cultural phenomenon. in Korea and East Asia in general, the concern that if you're in an enclosed room with a fan on, that this can lead to your death. And statistically, there's no evidence that this is a big problem, right?

Like the only potential way is if you've got hypothermia, if the fan was blowing directly at you, but there's still tons of cultural anxiety around that and the dangers of being in rooms and fans and the potential that fans might chop up particles too small and so on. So I'm just saying that in every society, there's versions of this that develop. And like you say, in developed societies, there might be a bit more neurosis towards it because the people do not have the actual concerns when it comes to like just getting clean drinking water and that kind of thing. Yeah, I guess the charge of leveling is that perhaps it speaks to a kind of decadence to have excessive concern with these ritualistic kind of behavior which doesn't really serve any function i'm gonna say though as a scholar of ritual that like all societies have a

propensity and fascination with rituals so i think it's like i'm completely with you but i think it's just an iteration of a more generalized tendency. And it just, in developed societies, it gets expressed in this specific way. And there is a whole ecosystem devoted to exploiting those fears. That's what we're looking at here. And whether or not the doctor is fully bought in on this, and I think she is, but she's making a lot of money from pandering to people's concerns about this and people are feeling better probably along the way. So it's like with the gurus that we've looked at, this is a reinforcing system and where it's being led from the top down or the bottom up or what the interactions are, it's hard to say, it's wrong to to suggest that like people aren't actually

being helped or people aren't having genuine concerns it's all very real in the sense that people definitely feel these things the physical reality of the parasites and whatnot is is a much more questionable assumption however yeah no i'm completely with you and i i agree with you and I agree with you that I think it is a kind of modern iteration of this universal human phenomena, which is to want to engage in self-affirming and self-preserving rituals, often sort of interacting with a holy person or a special alternative healer. And that the fact that a lot of this alternative medicine has an explicitly spiritual dimension to it is a huge red flag. We can have a philosophical discussion about whether people need ritual and stuff like that. But the thing that modern medicine and the whole scientific evidence-based approach doesn't provide is that affirmation and social support

and positive interactions. It does treat people like a piece of meat, essentially, like an animal, an automaton. And people hate that, even though it does actually work most of the time. I mean, I'll just contrast like my typical visit to a GP or a specialist is brusque, impersonal, you come out feeling somehow diminished. And compare that with one time in Japan, I went to see a friend of a friend who was a color therapist. Have you ever heard of color therapy, Chris? No, but I think the name speaks for itself. Oh, it is truly wonderful. So there's a company out there that sells essential oils to practitioners of different colors. And they're quite expensive.

They cost about $60 each for each of these bottles. And a practitioner will generally have hundreds of beautifully colored, all the colors of the rainbow. And you visit the color therapist and they will diagnose you and treat you by asking you what colors appeal to you at the moment. And you choose two colors and then they'll take those bottles down and then proceed to talk to you about what's wrong with your life, what sort of things might be making you feel bad, both physically and mentally, and what your future is going to look like and all that stuff. And I have to tell you, Chris, I went along completely skeptical. I left skeptical, totally skeptical naturally, but it was great. It was a

very enjoyable experience sitting down with this friend of a friend. She spent all this time holding my hand, asking me lots of questions, telling me what was going to happen, but just basically agreeing with you in a very elaborate way that people do get something from this. And there's this huge commercial and sometimes exploitative aspect to it. But it's definitely delivering something. Yeah. And, you know, it sounds like a kind of variation on build your own lightsaber or getting a wand at the Harry Potter shop in Universal Studios, you know, which I suspect are enjoyable things to do, regardless of the fact that you don't actually get a working

wand at the end. So to speak to that point, there's a clip where they're kind of contrasting what the doctor does to what people do when they're, for example, traveling to developing countries and getting treatments for parasites. So this is a quite nice contrast between those two approaches. So when you're remodeling the biome, you're using slightly different principles than when you're diagnosing an infection. So I tell this to patients all the time, because it's really, I at least want to be as clear as I can be academically. So if you had a patient that went off to Africa and got diarrhea, you need to know the specific worm that they got because you have

to pick the right medicine. But when you're taking a biome that has been dysregulated with a lot of inflammation and fungus and all these other things, I'm using a generalized approach, and that involves a rotation of parasite medications, more of an empiric nature to restore the immunology and lower inflammation and all the rest. It's basically her saying that if you get a parasitic infection in Africa, it's for a specific parasite. But when it comes to theirs, they just use broad treatments to treat everything she uses non-specific parasite treatments because they don't know what parasite it is and it doesn't matter yeah i thought they had their own in-house testing facility that could sort that out now yes well it doesn't matter because there's literally so many parasites so it's hard to

narrow it down and you know you're just better to go with the nuke strategy you know arsenic whatever just just just get those parasites out of your body so well you know we literally could spend hours and hours shooting various metaphorical fish in barrels here discussing the issues with their approach. And for anybody who's been around this stuff for a long time, I think a lot of this will have echoes of stuff they've heard many times before. But the point I would like to make before we switch just to wrapping up and giving our overall thoughts is that it's still around it's still

influential it's still big business and if anything now i think the modern moment is a lot more sympathetic towards this kind of stuff than five or ten years ago so dealing with it now in the manifestation of Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop brand. We were talking about, is it too straightforward for us to do? But I think this kind of thing probably does need to be said. Yeah, I think you're right. I know we sound like a pair of stick-in-the-muds just taking potshots at everything and being annoyingly sceptical.

But as you say, this is Gwyneth Paltrow's business, which is providing the conduit for all manner of evidence-free stuff, which is a business. And if people get something out of it, that's great. But in the end, they're selling something for which there is no evidence that it actually works. So yeah, Kavir Demptor.

So I think people get it they they understand why we might take an issue with some of the things that they say so now is probably as good a time as any to shift to overall thoughts about where in the pantheon of gurus, Gwyneth Paltrow finds herself situated. And this is not the grommeter. There'll be a separate episode released for patrons where we do the scoring, but I will offer some general reflections about where she fits in and then allow you the final word on Mrs. Paltrow. I actually have one last clip I want to play because I think this highlights essentially the role that I see her playing as a guru. So one part is entrepreneur selling luxury lifestyle to people and elite health and wellness goods and supplements and so on. But this is another aspect

that I want to highlight. I think that there's a tendency to generalize, especially if somebody's introducing a new concept or asking a question and people don't know what it is or they're uncomfortable, they push back, they generalize. And that's okay. I completely accept that this is my path. And this is what I'm here to do. And I'm here to ask these questions. And sometimes, you know, piss people off. The element I want to highlight there is I'm here to ask questions. I'm just jacking off in public all the time. That's, That's my role. And I think that's what she is very good at, is framing what she is offering as an open-minded exploration of issues.

I don't have all the answers. I just have questions. But as we've seen over looking at this content, there is a lot of answers offered. And there is a lot of claims made. It's just dressed up with enough ambiguity to make it palatable to people. And the last point I would make is that as we've discussed a couple of times on this episode, I get the feeling that criticism of people like Gwyneth Paltrow and the group space used to be a relatively popular position that people were fine being critical of this kind of

hyper capitalist health and wellness exploitative capitalism. But I think there has been a cultural shift towards seeing that as potentially more negative, misogynistic, and toxic. And while there might be some validity to some aspects of that, I think it's overstated how much that criticizing this kind of output is invalid or something that is an unfair criticism of women because I don't think it's fair to lump this into a kind of category of this is what women want this is women's spaces right because there's very good criticism from various female scientists. Or there's one, Jen Gunter, who's quite famous for her criticisms of Goop and Guadalpatro. She often makes the point that she wields the feminist angle as a shield to deflect criticism. One thing that I consider at least positive is that she doesn't seem super active in the political sphere. So I suppose that's one thing, you knowindulgent and very non-self-reflective

despite presenting itself as being about self-awareness and all that kind of thing so so yeah i do not like and i don't think she's the most harmful guru in the world but i certainly don't think what she's peddling is harmless and christine gedrick is perhaps worse yeah that's uh that's my take yeah yeah yeah i agree with most of that i think she's not aggressively harmful or dangerous the delusional anti-science stuff is kind of incidental to the main point which is to promote a lifestyle, I think mainly for commercial reasons. But, yeah, it's still not good, though, is it? I think in many ways you can think of her as a Joe Rogan character, but talking to a very different audience.

So Joe Rogan's very similar. He acts as a conduit. He presents himself as someone who's just asking questions, as a seeker, someone who is just interested in exploring ideas and is quite seemingly driven by his guests. But, of course, Joe picks and chooses the guests and gets very excited and interested when they're exploring certain themes. So he's certainly not just a neutral conduit. So I think Gwyneth Paltrow is exactly the same. And really, they are just targeting different cultural groups.

That's one thing. The other thing is that she's first and foremost a lifestyle guru. And that health and wellness is the product. We know this kind of thing in terms of these internet influences because she's already famous and has such a strong background as an actress. She was off to a racing start. And, you know, Lifestyle Guru, it's a business. It's a matter of selling yourself and presenting yourself as the epitome of spiritual fulfillment and total holistic health and well-being. And she's very good at that because she sounds good. She looks

good. She comes across as somebody who is comfortable in her skin and is leading a wonderful life. And that's what people want. So that's all very understandable. But yeah, I think you just cannot separate what she's doing with podcasts or any public opinions, I think, from the commercial aspect, which is she's in it as a business. To analyze it a little bit, I think it's interesting how this health and wellness and the spirituality that goes along with it is fast becoming the culture of, I'm not sure what to call it, elite liberalism, I suppose. It's been around for a while. And it's a cultural shift. You see it in many different respects. You see it with hipster type movements and so on. It's no longer cool

for rich and successful people to have all those Trump-esque trappings of wealth and success, big cars and fancy houses and gold-plated bathtubs. I don't know. What is cool is to be investing in yourself, eating kale and spending lots of time at the gym and wearing organic clothes made of hemp that are just right, noty but just right so it's a special kind of signaling but it is still definitely a culture of the elites which does what elite culture has always done which is to show how much better you are than other people frankly and there's nothing new about that it's just something that i think there is probably a bit of a lack of self-awareness in it. So you say that it's refreshing that she's disconnected from politics, and it is.

That's a good thing. But I think the fact that it's completely disconnected from politics is a feature, not a bug. That's the point. It has lots of feel-good things about respecting yourself and respecting others and all kinds of warm, fuzzy things. But it's deliberately disconnected from politics, I think, because that would be highly problematic

because it is ultimately an exclusionary elite culture, which isn't for everybody. Most people do not get to access it. Except the Dr. Gedrick appearance on Fox and hydroxychloroquine endorsement and that. But that's not going to pelt you. But I'm just saying, the conspirituality sphere is growing. And it feels like it overlaps a lot with the communities that group is active in. I don't

know, you know, we haven't looked enough content, I don't know how much there is that of that kind of content appearing. But you might be right that it isn't an element of this sphere but i i just think that the there's a vulnerability to that kind of political infection a parasite a parasite taking over the brain well i don't necessarily disagree when i say it's disconnected from politics it's disconnected from traditional progressive politics. It actually has strong resonances with that individualistic, libertarian, success is good and successful people are good by definition and an anti-communitarian kind of thinking. So it's the reason why they are so interested in and embrace these bespoke, hip, expensive, and time consuming practices to improve their health. But they have very little interest in things like vaccinations, which are for everybody, essentially. JPCs, of course,

epitomizes it. For people who aren't familiar with all this stuff it seems a bit weird this confluence of this sort of he seems like a hippie surfer dude and seems to project a lot of ideas from the 60s but at the same time is really this kind of red and tooth and claw libertarian look out for yourself and business business so it seems like a contradiction but really what's going on I think in terms of the cultural movement is that disconnect some of those spiritual health and wellness stuff that became extremely popular in the 60s has evolved and become completely separated from its roots i think to become something that if it is political it's aligning itself with an individualistic and elite political outlook but

yeah i think gwyneth paltrow is quite smart she's a bit like some other figures who quite clearly avoid talking about politics so anyway what's my take yeah i don't like her like you i didn't expect to like the material at best it's kind of fluff at worst misleading and delusional yeah but worth dipping our toe into this neck of the woods that's uh yeah the beautiful metaphors i come up with it's strange that you know i i'm not a guru dipping your toe into this neck of the woods anyway so the next gurus that we're looking at pair of gurus matt will take us to familiar stomping ground, but I think it's going to be enjoyable because we are heading back to the big daddy Jordan Peterson well, post-coma Jordan Peterson, back in the public sphere, talking to one of the gurus who launched the podcast, Brett Weinstein, but this time without his ever present domineering shadow of a brother, Eric Weinstein. So we're going to have pure breath takes alongside pure recovered jordan takes and they do not disappoint that's the next

episode that's it this is going to be the very next one the very next one correct but yeah yeah so that's that's this week done and now that we are in the end zone where we're circling the drain of the the episode i thought i would look at the reviews that we have received and we have got some new ones and we have balance because i have a negative one and I have a positive one. And yeah. Lovely. Just one to take us down to size and then the other one to build our confidence back up and, you know, pat us on the back and push us out the door. Yes.

And is it a friendly negative one? I'll let you be the judge of that. Okay. So that the username is prettyfunneverreallyends. Interesting username. And the title, political biases are very present. Let me break down every episode for you. If the hosts agree with the politics of the guru,

then the guru is based in logic and makes sound arguments. If they disagree, then the guru is a fraud and you should be wary. Full stop. That's it. That's the review. Low-quality criticism, Chris. Low quality. Yeah.

I think it cuts too close to the bone, right? You're just rejecting it outright. You can't hear it. La, la, la. And it's two stars. Two stars, not one. No, talk to the hand because the face isn't listening. The face is chewing gum and looking in the other direction.

Political biases, what are those? I transcended political biases long ago. Yes. Sorry, we'll do better. We'll harder he's probably right they probably have they have some point like a kernel of a point except that that's that's not how the system goes that is not the way as you will see as time progresses there are plenty of gurus that that we are fond of who are gurus so sorry yes and oh yeah i'm political like you know you you like ricka bregman but we we had our issues and whatnot so yeah yes yeah no you're just wrong pretty fun never really ends i think the fun does end with you sorry that's that's a harsh that's harsh put down but he well deserved okay good all right let's let's

switch to the good one we need our egos stroked and our bodies rubbed and salve i'm not sure how that saying yeah so here's a promising title this is by gustav m uh hypocrisy through preposterous claims to FOS such as the pseudoscientific terms anthropology and Australian academic this podcast is a smokescreen to constant feverish

pro-colonial endorsement of the fake nations of Northern Ireland and Australia I look forward to these gurus decoding themselves and that's from Denmark. Gustav is from Denmark. Well, that's excellent. That's exactly what we're after in a review, I think. Unlike, yeah, the fun never ends. This is how you do a review. Yeah, that second review just threw the poor quality of the first review

in sharp relief. Stark relief. Stark relief, yes. Look, that's very good threw the poor quality of the first review in sharp relief. Stark relief. Stark relief, yes. Look, that's very good. But what have you got to say to that, Chris? Is Northern Ireland a fake nation? I didn't think it was a nation at all. I thought it was like a province of Great Britain or something.

Yeah, I believe you want disparage that by being unsure whether it had a colonial history or was itself the the colonizer and i i had to educate you that yes we are the occupied six counties uh but that's that would be a partisan republican viewing of the status of northern ireland that should be occupied territory occupied territory yes and the same could well be said of australia of course yeah we look i lived in a colony that's i'm like a science fiction thing come to life the the evil alien overlords still rule over my peaceful hamlet share i'm just imagining i've got the black and tans just kicking your door in and then just coming in and giving you a swirly or something.

Knocking over my Guinness and stealing my pots of gold. They do. And we've took a strange political turn into Irish Republicanism at the final stages of the podcast. But, yes, that's quite accurate, that portrayal of Ireland. It's very much like the Hobbits. And there's nothing more guaranteed to send you into a killing fury than to knock over your tin of Guinness.

Guinness doesn't come in a tin. It does in Australia, mate. We have it all on tap. There's like the hot water, the cold water and the Guinness tap. So yes, anyway, thank you for that review, and the Guinness tab. So, yes. Anyway, thank you for that review, Gustav. Very nice. And Matt, we haven't been tracking our progress on

the charts, and I feel that's an oversight because I wanted to know that we actually broke into the top 200 for like one day in Ireland in my whole mission. Oh, that's impressive. I was very excited.

Yeah. I don't want to disparage Iceland or the Baltic. Romania. Finland. Finland. These are fine countries, but it is nice to score some runs on the home ground, eh? Yeah, that's right.

So we've only had New Zealand. What's up with australia work harder matt hey can i ask you another irish question do you guys play cricket what's cricket what is a cricket you mean the small animal that chirps how can i play with that because like you know is that something, self-respecting Irishman football or a sticky wicket or whatever? Yes, indeed. At least in Northern Ireland, the recreational games,

as with all aspects of life, have been politicized. So in my school, we played Gaelic hurling football. And then I believe the Protestant schools, they play cricket, rugby, and polo. I don't know, whatever, croquet, whatever those guys are playing in elite clubhouses. I wouldn't know my house with with the rough and tumble salt of the earth being terrified of hurling and gillick yeah there's that i love that doesn't extend the south of ireland i mean it does you know there's there's hurling and gillick in the south of ireland as well but as as is well known ireland has a quite formidable rugby team but uh at least

when i was a kid none of of the Catholic schools were playing rugby. Okay. Well, I have no idea what hurling is, but I don't want you to explain it to me. I think we should just leave that one for the ages. Oh, we'll do a bonus episode. Matt gets introduced to hurling. The terrifying, terrifying sport to play as a kid.

But all right. So what's the other thing we need to do, Matt? We tell our Patreons how much we admire and respect what they do for us. Playing them little clips that insult them in the words of all our gurus. Sounds good. Let's do it. All right. it. All right. So first we have Michael Wells, who is a conspiracy hypothesizer. Thank you,

Michael. Thank you, Michael. Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Yes. So thank you very much, Michael. And next, we have Anne Comfort, who is a conspiracy hypothesizer. Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. That's good. I've forgotten what all of these ranks mean, but like what tier they are and stuff like that.

But it doesn't matter. We just, we appreciate you all. Yes, we do. We appreciate them all. Conspiracy hypothesizers, revolutionary geniuses, galaxy brains alike. I mean, you know, we are human, so we do appreciate the people who pay us more, a little bit more.

But, you know, in another way, all the same. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I sign on to that, yeah. Okay. And we have another contributor who is Chad Wiley. Chad Wiley. I like that name.

Like, you know, Wiley Coyote combined with a Chad. Yeah, that's a good name. It sounds like someone who would go to parties and, you know, be like the life of the party. He'd be called the Kegmeister. And he would also be called a conspiracy hypothesizer. Thank you, Chad. He would. He would. Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.

Okay. And somebody who has contributed drawings and a nice review of the show previously who is a revolutionary thinker, Gretchen Kock. Gretchen. Thank you very much, Gretchen. We appreciate the artwork and the essays too. Yeah. Yes.

You know, there aren't tiers. There aren't ranks. Everyone is in the circle and equal but some people are more equal than others if you do like a cartoon for instance or write nice things about us on the internet you you know you're in the inner circle you get this lover and she is a revolutionary thinker maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking. What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker the world doesn't know. So the last person final for this week is a null another conspiracy hypothesizer, Mike Hunt.

Mike Hunt, who is also the name of a very famous New Zealand MMA fighter. So there we go. Yes. Yes. I recognize that. So it could be that Mike Hunt. Might be him. Anyway, thank you, Mike.

That's a good name. Another good name. Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Yes, we will. All right. So that's the shout-out for this week.

We'll have a little bit of editing to do in this week's episode. Yes. Okay. And how can people contact us? Let's see if I can do it, Chris. We can be found at, oh, I have no idea, guruspod on Twitter. Chris is C underscore Kavanagh on Twitter. I am Arthur C Dent, confusingly.

And how else can we be contacted, Chris? Or they could go to the Gmail account, which you never check, but I am on top of it, decodingoding the gurus at gmail.com um various insightful people send us emails there and i respond and have chats with them and you know nothing about them so that's where all my good ideas come from yeah all right i'm gonna check i'm gonna check it and i'm gonna reply oh you can join the patreon which is nice and you can go to the subreddit which is active and has actually very good discussions on it. Oh,

that's another place to steal ideas. Yeah. The subreddit is actually good. Oh, Matt. And the very last thing before I tell you to gravel at the feet of your muscle master, muscle master,

muscle master, muscle master is that I want to recommend that people listen to Very Bad Wizards because it's a podcast that I really like. It has Tamler Summers and David Pizarro on it and they're philosopher and a psychologist and they're talking about a whole bunch of things and they sometimes touch on culture war stuff but I've really enjoyed the last few episodes. And so I really like those guys. And our subreddit is a spinoff from their subreddit. So, yeah, people go listen to Very Bad Wizards. If you like us, you'll probably like them.

They're better. Yep. Yeah, they are better. And they've been doing it for longer. I completely agree with that. Yeah, don't listen to gurus. Don't waste your time. Go and listen to people like that yeah great message to end this week on uh and thank you

for listening for so long if you're listening to this we've edited this down to a manageable level so hopefully yeah you you aren't too pissed with us and we promise next week we'll try to be a bit shorter so yeah thank you all and bye bye bye bye don't forget about bread for the morning. Yes, okay. Yes, got it.

All right. Tell her the thing about your important science. I'm doing important science, Roman. Yeah.