Panic World - When the internet convinces you you're sick

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

From Goop to MAHA, health/wellness movements might just look like a grift, but each features a real critique of the healthcare industry or medical science at their core. Today we’re talking about wellness and how it connects to the spread of fascism across the globe. Bridget Todd and Heather Holdridge join us to talk about how these wellness trends take advantage of misinformation and exploit our fears, and ultimately can lead people down much darker, conspiratorial paths online. Our guests are Bridget Todd, host of There Are No Girls on the Internet — listen to it here or wherever you get your podcasts — and Heather Holdridge, Managing Director of Real Voices Media. Check out their work at https://realvoicesmedia.com/. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So to start, what are you guys' favorite wellness trends? Well, this is kind of funny. Heather and I have talked about this, that, like, I am, I have never met a wellness scam that I am not, like, susceptible to falling for. Mine is probably guasha. What is that? Oh, guasha is this, I see Grant smiling because I feel like he knows what it is. It's this.

Well, Grant's like a crazy wellness person. Yes, I believe this. He's obsessed with this thing called. Creeteen. Oh my God, I've got my preteen right here. Yeah, I take it every day. Ryan, can you go. We got a, we can we can easily talk about creatine for an hour. Honestly, you guys take it. Yeah, take it. Go, go. We're just going to compare our stacks and see who takes what. But yeah, Washa is this art of moving like liquid that collects in your face,

like through your face to sort of drain the liquid. And it's, if you do it correctly, it's supposed to make your face look spelt and tight. Well, yeah, your face, doesn't look like it's full of excess liquid. So that's great. A nicest compliment I've ever gotten. Well, I'm the wellness skeptic, although I have taken creatine, because I'm a woman of a certain age at this point. And so that's what they tell us, you know, slightly older ladies to do so our muscles

don't completely deteriorate in like six months. That's, oh, so, okay, that's what Grant's doing too. Okay, I understand now. That's cool. I just recently got on the protein powder train. So, yeah, very excited to see what happens to my muscles, I guess. I asked that because today we're going to be talking about wellness and how it connects to the creep of global fascism, of course,

as we do in every episode of Panic World. I'm Ryan Broderick. With me, as always, is my creatine-loving body. building producer Grant Irving, who will come out of his CrossFit cave every once in a while to ask a few questions. And joining us today is Bridget Todd, host of There Are No Girls in the internet and managing director of Real Voices Media, Heather Holdridge. Welcome to the show. Thank you guys for coming on. You guys are currently working on a wellness project together. And before we get started, I'd love for you to just sort of spin through what you're working on. Yeah. So Heather and I first met

while we were working on the digital team at Planned Parenthood. And so we really cared quite a bit about how women are, what kind of content speaks to women as it pertains to our health, our bodies, our wellness. And, you know, as I got more and more into the wellness world, I really saw the ways that it's this specific vector of both information that can be helpful, but then also information that can be really meant to radicalize women specifically down this, you know, down this ever-increasing pipeline of scam content and then like extremist content. And so we're really working on how we change the conversation as it pertains to women talking about our health and our

bodies. Yeah, I think, but Ryan, I really appreciate that you connected it to the rise of global fascism because I think what the Maha movement represents or maybe it's misrepresents. and I think it kind of depends on the person you're talking about, is that they consistently and sometimes deliberately ignore the overarching systems, right, that this all plugs into. And so when they talk about, you know, ultra-processed foods and food dyes and all of these kinds of things, they talk about removing them from systems,

but it's all ad hoc. And when you actually talk about policies, they are silent on it because you have these large corporations that actually control those systems and run them. And they're not actually willing to challenge them in any meaningful way. Yeah. What you're touching on is something that we've covered a couple times on the show now, which is the idea that a successful conspiracy theory, a successful grift, a successful bit of misinformation online has to have some basis in reality.

So, you know, for instance, the American health care system wants to rob us and it doesn't care if we die or, you know, tap water is poison or microplastics are clogging up our bodies. Like, those things all do have a foot in reality. The American health care system is a disaster. The fluoride is being taken out of our water. I'm pretty soon we're going to have the same type of mouths that British people have, which is terrifying to me. And yes, we are full of microplastics. That's kind of what you're talking about here, is that like there is a genuine interest and there's an obviously like a genuine audience for people who are curious about this stuff. But most of what they find online just takes them down darker and darker paths.

Yeah. Exactly. And I think especially as it pertains to traditionally marginalized communities, communities of color, black folks, women, I think that it's so successful exactly because of what you just said, Ryan, because it is true. Black folks have real reason to be skeptical of the healthcare industry. They have real reason to be a little bit mistrustful of medical science, right? Same goes for women. And so I think that the way that these marginalized communities are particularly targeted by wellness cryptors, they're basically exploiting and blowing up that grain of truth you

were speaking to in order to further exploit us. Right. I've talked about him on the show before, but my dad is on a real maha kick right now, and he stopped using sunscreen because he decided that that's what actually gives you skin cancer, not the sun. There's a real anti-chemical, quote-unquote, movement within a lot of these communities. But what are the kinds of people that you're meeting working on this stuff? Like, what does the average person at the beginning of the wellness pipeline look like?

Oh, I can definitely speak to that. It's people like myself, right? Like, you know, we're bombarded with so many different, often conflicting pieces of information, sometimes from experts, sometimes from fucking podcasters, people who don't know what they're talking about, about how to take control of our health and our wellness and our bodies. And so it can be so confusing to wade through that. And then you have those same voices. Some of them are just grifter.

Some of them are saying, oh, yes, if you eat this, you are really sick. You're basically going to die. But luckily, if you buy my course or if you buy my supplement or whatever, I can help you. And so I think it's people like me who are genuinely do care quite a bit about our health, our bodies, all of that. But it's almost impossible to wade through what is actual fact-based medical advice and what is just someone trying to scam you and make you fearful and then exploit that fear. Right. And I would add on to that. I think that's all exactly right.

But in addition to that, you talk about the broken health care system. when you have issues like, you know, you're going through something in your health care and you don't have access to a physician or a regular health care provider, guess what? The Internet's right in front of you. And you have people who are providing easy solutions to your problems and their immediate and instant. And that is very alluring and tempting for people. Oh, my gosh. I'm so glad you said that, Heather. I have to just add.

I, so I was looking, I wanted to lose a little bit of weight and gain. muscle and I was like looking like what is the secret what is the secret every person who I knew who did it was like oh I just it was just diet and exercise and like not drinking every night and like sleeping and I was like no you were supposed to be a magic pill that can't be that can't be what it is I don't want to have to do any of those things I can program a workout plan specifically for you just like it may have afterwards we're Ryan and we'll put that mass on all right we're gonna we're gonna mute grant's microphone for the rest of the episode because we've clearly touched on something very dark within him.

No, I, what you're talking about, though, came up in a previous episode. We recently recorded about conspiracy theories and climate change. And I think it's the same idea, which is that we can all sort of see the structural issues to a degree that are causing problems in our lives. But fixing those structural issues for the average person is impossible. And for people in charge, they're not really interested. They just like don't care anymore. So what you end up with are.

a lot of people promising you or selling you a very easy solution. So instead of saying, like, you have to have a functioning healthcare industry and you need to have a work life balance that allows you to work out or take care of yourself or a mental health regimen that allows you to get in control of sort of your sleep schedule and all that, well, no. Actually, you could drink your own pee. You could put onions on your feet. You could do any of the other things that like the men on my Instagram feed want me to do. But we wanted to talk about when this first started. Like when did the internet start to fill in the cracks in in this information landscape? And I, I thought of one that has been kicking around forever and I feel like it's sort of

been lost of time. And I wanted to start with this one. Have you heard of Morgelian's disease? I have not. Awesome. Fuck yeah. Let's go. Okay. So, Morgelius. I first encountered it like on a news desk like in 2011, 2012, maybe. And I remember like having to explain to an editor what it was. But we'll get there in just a second. So the name of the condition is named by Sir Thomas Brown in 1690. He traveled to a medical school in the south of France where there was like war and plague and food shortages. And he reported on a very odd condition.

So he wrote hares, which has. have most amused me have not been in the face or head, but on the back, and not in men, but children. Children in Langdok called the Morgelans, where they critically break out with harsh hairs on their backs, which takes off the unicate symptoms of the disease and delivers them from coughs and convulsion. So basically, like, he's gone to this part of France and he realized that the kids are growing hair on their back and, like, they're coughing. And it's like, 1600. doctor thinks that like this is all connected. And now we need to fast forward to 1999.

But I promise this will all tie together in a moment. So here's a foreign post that tells the story of a man named Elliot who commits suicide after suffering from a skin disease. And small communities start popping up with people who also claim they suffer from the skin disease, which they're now calling Elliot's disease. And so this is the foreign post that reads, Elliot first noticed his own symptoms of the disease following a trip from Colorado where he purchased a number of horses that were infested with ticks.

doctors didn't believe him. He was full of silica. He had fiber things coming out of his hands and underneath his nails and all over his body. He sat in the bathtub for hours at a time and soaked in salt and soda water and anything non-toxic that would relieve the pain. His wife moved out, taking their kid.

And here we were, this group of normal, emotionally healthy adults, anyone on the internet that says, I'm a normal, emotionally healthy adult. Like, you got to log out. Get out of there. Get out of there. Get out of there.

With our lives being torn apart. And no amount of effort on our part could convince the doctors we were telling the truth. Did anyone ever do a skin scraping? No. Biopsies were done. Reports were ridiculous. And usually somewhere in there, the reference to the delusions of parasitosis would further add to our pain. The answer is right under their noses, the doctors.

They are looking but not seeing. We have to lead them out of their own closed minds with irrefutable proof that this exists. That's the only way to change the situation and turn the tide in our. our favor. So this is 99. Message boards have sort of taken control of the way we communicate. And we see the first like real big instance of like effectively health disinfo. All of these people are starting to believe that they have more Gellon's disease, which they claim is like little hairs coming out of their skin and driving them insane.

How are you guys feeling? Oh my gosh. I think I might have little hairs coming out of my skin. I don't feel. I mean, I'm a totally well-adjusted person and very normal. but I do feel like I have little hairs coming out of my skin. That's right. I also feel that way.

As the wellness skeptic or the scully in this situation, I don't believe any of it. I'm glad because it is not real. I should just say right off the back. None of this is real. But I think the important part of this is the desire for this internet community to convince doctors of this thing that they have convinced themselves is real. So in 2001, Mary Laytow, a mom from Pittsburgh, tries to get a diagnosis for her toddler's skin condition. He's diagnosed with scabies, but treatment doesn't really seem to help. And she writes about it on the internet a little bit.

There's a letter to George W. Bush on Elliott's disease from a woman named Sue Erickson in 2001 that reads, Dear President Bush, Senator's Boxer and Feinstein and Representative Horn, I'm writing to inform you of an emerging health problem to ask for your assistance, the most imposing problem facing those with this disease and a lack of diagnosis. In the worst cases, the patients are made to feel mentally ill and diagnosis delusional paracytosis victims. The disease referred to as Elliott's disease, and delusional parasitosis share a great deal in common in terms of symptoms and artifacts. However, there can be not such a widespread folio to account. Wow, this actually has dated very badly.

However, there cannot be such a widespread. Ed Follier to account for the thousands of individuals who are now ill and those innumerable who may become ill in the future. Yeah, there's no way to account for thousands of strangers on the internet making themselves ill. There's no way to explain that and we'll never deal with that again. All done, right? I mean, yeah, there were a thousand people, there were over a thousand people in my high school.

So if a small all girls high school, if the population of a small all girls high school, all experience is something, we have to sink our entire, like the whole government, to be on it figuring out what this thing is. Once again, these people start doing their own research in 2002. This Mary Woman finds the Thomas Brown source and decides to call the disease Morgellons disease to make it sound more thematically legitimate. And she creates morgelons.orgelans.org and the Moregellons Research Foundation. They believe that they are suffering and then no one will believe them.

So talk me through how you're feeling about sort of the patient zero. I guess you will of this entire world. This is fascinating. I will say the dynamic of I know my body and I know that I'm suffering from somebody and these horrible doctors are silencing me and they will not listen to me and they won't take me seriously. That shit is effective. Like that's like there is like it.

I mean, it doesn't surprise me that that was the undercurrent running through this. A hundred percent. The other interesting thing to me is that you went all the way back to the 1600s to find this original, the OG of all of this. And it comes back into the 21st century as the example from history that I create as a through line that legitimizes what I'm talking about today. Exactly. Right.

It's wild. I don't think the timing is an accident either because a lot of the things that we've poked out on this show over the last year or so. If you go really far back, what you end up seeing is a lot of crazy nonsense on the internet in the 90s that like people aren't really paying attention to. And then 9-11 happens. And a lot of those early conspiracy theories just become gigantic. And you can see this like time and time again with a lot of internet culture where it was this fringe idea and then communities form in 2001, 2002, 2003. And I don't think that timing is an accent because I do think conspiracy theories,

really flourish in times of like doubt, chaos, grief, panic. In fact, actually, David Cronenberg, the director, just made a movie about this called The Shrouds, which I'd recommend checking out. And it's all about sort of like the embrace of conspiracy theories in the midst of like intense grief. And so I don't think it's an accident that these people have latched onto what was effectively like one blog, like one forum post from a mentally unwell person and like turned it into like an entire scientific quote unquote research center in the early 2000. It makes sense to me.

Having listened to some of your other episodes, it seems like this is a recurring theme. I listened to the no-fap episode, and that was something I found. I'm so sorry. I mean, you and me both. No, I'm kidding. I mean, you're welcome. Nowhere. You can give us $5 if you want.

I should. But no, that, I mean, the idea that like a handful of people talking about an issue that they're experiencing online can be blown up into an entire movement, and that becomes so easy. hijacked and weaponized for, you know, political control. It just really seems like something that we're seeing again and again and again. That's right. You get these spaces where there's no institutional support. The institutions aren't even aware half the time that these people are having these

conversations. And by the time the scale kicks in, you either embrace it or you try to fight it. That's sort of like the only options that institutions have, I think, right now. And then that obviously, you know, eventually, as you say, gets weaponized, you know, it gets used for political purposes. And we're going to be talking more about how that happens to this community after the break. But first, a word from our sponsor, producer grants, hardcore workout tape. You can buy that and he will mail you a personal tape of him working out.

There's no tips in there. He just wants you to watch him work out. That's all he wants. I would actually do this one. This is the first fake ad. He just could be a real ad. He wants to silently work out and film it. and he wants to send you a VHS tape of that.

You're watching Grant. Grant is actually jacked. I feel like people who are not watching the video need to understand that like, you are like jacked. It's all water weight. It's all just creatine water weight. That's all that is. I end every call with Ryan saying,

do you want me to personally train you? And he says it so aggressively. He's like, I'll train you, bro. And like, I've seen the Patriot Front members that he works out with. Like, I know that this is a pipeline to darker and darker space. faces. And I'm just, Grant's so masculine and it scares me. That's what, that's what, that's what,

all right, word from our sponsors. I want to read a list of the reported symptoms from morgelons.org which is created in 2002. So symptoms of this disease are typical of other skin disorders, such as eczema, psoriasis, alopecia, and dermatitis, to name a few, individuals with the Mergelons experience, itchy, inflamed, non-healing skin lesions, singing sensations are common, unexplained hair loss is seen in a segment of the patient population, as well as a hardening or thickening of skin. One of the most striking features of the Morgelons is the presence of fibers or filaments of unknown origin on or within skin lesions.

Do you guys want to look at some gross pictures? Always. Can I say no? You can. I can describe these gross pictures too, if you want. No, let's do it. Okay. Grant is smiling because he has Morgellons pictures to show you.

So this is what the Morgellons people believe is happening to them. That is unique. And the way that I first encountered this was it described to me as these people believe that thread is growing underneath their skin. These are the lesions that they claim are full of filaments and fiber. Fibers. Yeah, that's gross than I remember, actually. What's wild to me is that it's exactly the kind of symptom that, like, they're saying, oh, people just think I'm delusional and crazy.

But when you're like, oh, I can't stop scratching, there's fiber under my skin. It kind of, I mean, I understand what people are saying, oh, you sound delusional and crazy. Yeah. Grant, take these off my screen. I hate looking at this. Does somebody want to describe them? I will describe them. They're crusty and gross and pink.

And it looks like someone who's really unwell digging at their skin. because they think that there's thread underneath it. I never want to look at it ever again. I saw a house episode kind of like that, you know. I recently rewatched all of house last winter, and I remember that episode. It's a great episode. So the Morgellans people, they're like trying to turn this into a foundation. The Elliott's disease community people, they find it, and these two communities kind of collide.

Between 2002 and 2006, they start getting bigger and bigger, and they generate enough medical interest that it's able to get like a real foothold in culture. In 2005, Mary's Morgellon's Research Foundation gets actual 501c3 accreditation and starts calling itself a nonprofit. It has an advisory board, quote unquote, of real doctors. And by the mid-aughts, there are a ton of mainstream articles about this, and they're all framed exactly the same way. Do you want to guess how the mainstream media reports on this? Do you have a lot? Do you have any sort of thoughts about like how they pick this up? No, I was going to say they don't.

But if they, we have to assume they did. I bet they legit, I bet they legitimize it. They're like, oh, we've got it. Yeah. I mean, I know, I know this story. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Yep. So one 2006 Texas monthly article says, listen to this nightmare.

You wake up one day, I notice some reddish spots on your body. They it, sting a little. You think you've been bitten by bedbugs or something, but the next day the spots are oozing. Now you reach for the neosporum, but instead of healing, the sores brought tiny black granules in red, blue, and translucent threads. You feel as if bugs are crawling all over you. By the time you get to the doctor, you develop severe pain and swelling in your joints, a weird mental fogginess and an understandable depression. The doctor runs through a lot of tests and thinks it's all in your head. Then you wake up or not.

For 4,500 Americans, this is a nightmare they can't awaken. Glad to see they were going for like a measured, you know, let's not, let's not scare anybody here. Very normal. It's Texas monthly. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

They did some real good journals in there. Psychology Today publishes almost the exact same lead, basically, focusing on Mary, saying that she plucked fibers that looked like dandelion fluff from a sore underneath her two-year-old's lip. And I'm not going to read it anymore because it's grossing me out. But basically, NBC News in 2016. they write about it, and they say, it might sound like macabre science fiction, but a growing legion of Americans say they suffer from this condition. And then after these very creative nonfiction openings, they throw water on it. For instance, Texas Monthly says, here's evidence that some degree of mental illness exists

in many patients. A good example is 23-year-old Travis Wilson of Leander, who died of a toxic reaction to medication last spring after a month's-long bout with morgellons. He had had depression and a problem with heroin, his mother Lisa told me recently, but it was more gallons that killed him. He couldn't finish school, couldn't work, stopped going out because of his lesions. But all any doctor said was that it was delusional. One of the things, just like a detail about the interactions that people had with doctors, was that people kept bringing Ziploc bags of the supposed fibers to doctors thinking that it provided evidence, and they became really

frustrated that they were being dismissed when they thought that they were showing up with evidence. but doctors were taught in medical school if somebody just shows up with evidence like just try to give them an antipsychotic which I right it is it's funny but it also is just like I don't know what you do with that

because somebody is genuinely sick like they are showing you thank them right you thank them for their bag of of skin stuff and you say have a I'm so curious what kinds of bags, what kind of evidence of people been showing up with in bags at doctor's office? I mean, it is, but it actually points out the very real critique of the medical establishment that they take advantage of, right? Which is to be dismissive. And it's like, you know what? You're psychotic because you brought me a bag of stuff.

and so I'm going to give you drugs and to make you well because you're obviously mentally unwell as opposed to physically unwell. And that dismissiveness that historically has been more of a feature of the medical establishment is part of what got us. One doctor was said to say, you know, there's new evidence that antipsychotics

really help with itching is like a thing that they were like like a trism they were told to say to patients. Oh. Like it does, it does raise a, like, it just gets back at the real conflict where you're like, this person is unwell and they need to be treated for something and it's not the thing. And that's kind of an impossible situation for everyone involved. Like, I don't know how you get a doctor to like hold their hand through whatever went wrong to get them to that place to think that they're ill though. I think we just give, we create like a sugar pill. It gets a new name for every insane thing that people the internet think they have and we give it to them.

and then it goes away. Look at Ryan, soften all the problems. And then finally, the Morgellans people get their big break in 2006 when the New York Times covers it because the CDC investigates. And so we get this article from 2006 after an avalanche of panicked inquiries from patients across the country who claim to have been stricken with a mysterious skin disease. The federal centers for disease control and prevention is pairing to, preparing to begin a full investigation.

The patients cluster in California, Texas, and Florida, all report something that they call a new bug. We're going to find it pretty quickly. He says Dan Rutz, a spokesman for the CDC task force. Our minds were open to all possibilities, he said. And do you want to guess the results of the CDC investigation? They found no cause to legitimize this. disease because it's the CDC and RFK's not running it yet I mean god that that was so nice that was so nice to to have that world to have lived in that world briefly was so nice so they investigate

and they start investigating in 2006 but here's a problem with science it takes time this This investigation will take years in the community is obviously growing nonstop online in the meantime. They do not publish the results in 2012. So let me just run through quickly what happens. In the meantime, 2007, another nonprofit springs up in 2008. There's now an annual medical conference in Austin, Texas. In 2008, again, the NPR starts interviewing doctors working on the study, blah, blah, blah, and then it brings us to the results.

So, here we go. No source was identified. That's what they found. After all that, no source. That's both the executive summary and the substance of the entire report. So you may be saying now, what about the fibers, the thread underneath people's skin? Well, 23 fiber and other material specimens were obtained from diverse, intact, skin, insights in 12 case patients.

The materials were largely composed of protein, 83%, likely dead skin, or 43% were largely composed of cotton fiber. I knew it! So they were from their clothes. And the colors will red, blue, green, pretty common for clothing. So these people basically had scabs that were pulling. fibers off their clothes and getting, you know, scabs can do that. And so that's what these people were obsessing over for almost 20 years.

And if you, if you've got, if you are a constant, especially for kids, if you've got a child who has like itchy scabs, they're not going to stop scratching at them. So of course they're not going to heal. It's not a magic scab that resists healing. It's a scab that your kid won't stop picking at. And then you put a shirt on a wet scab. Of course it's going to pull the fibers. Yep, exactly. And this was backed up also by a Mayo Clinic study that said that conclusion in patients with suspected delusional infestation,

neither skin biopsies nor examination of patient provided specimens, provided objective evidence of skin infestation. So that's that. The community does not go away. And as you guys probably know this, this is not something that can knock this kind of thing down. In April 2015, Joni Mitchell goes to the hospital, and in her recent memoir, she said that she believed that she had Morgellons. And there is, though, a scientific name for this. And I think it's very important for when we're talking about the wellness industry. We're talking about the wellness industry's ties to fascism.

We're talking about the way people communicate about wellness and about health, which is in 2012, a scientific study on Morgellons and sort of similar incidents. creates the term munchausen by internet. Are you familiar with this idea? Oh, yes. Can you talk a little bit about it? Basically, you convince yourself by reading information on the internet that other people have written about what they're experiencing, that you are experiencing something that you are not actually experiencing.

Is that a fair assessment? Yeah. You are sort of making yourself sick, you know, and the internet is doing it. So Munchausen by proxy would be like, you are making someone else sick. And then I remember years ago, I reported on a one. woman who was basically just like poisoning her toddler to get traffic on her blog to like cover the medical journey that she had been on for years. And she was like feeding her child like detergent or something and creating like a fake

thing so that she'd have something to blog about. And she eventually had to admit it to the authorities. Like I was doing it because I wasn't getting enough traction in my blog. God, the internet is a hell of a drug. It's what I've been doing to Grant's creatine as I've been poisoning it every week. So we have something to talk about on the show. So just to run through a couple like well-known munchausen by internet trends, have you heard of the TikTok Tourette's phenomenon?

Yes. Young people who spend a lot of time on TikTok start illustrating symptoms of Tourette's and it seems to be connected to the TikTok content that they're consuming. Exactly, exactly. Another big one on TikTok was dissociative identity disorder or the idea that TikTok users were all reporting that they had what is commonly called sometimes multiple personality disorder and that they had multiple personalities living within them. That is sort of what I think is like really interesting about this stuff is that there is no way to knock it down.

So I want to ask you guys, you know, like what are some of the weirder rabbit holes that you've found yourself in? What are some examples of like people convincing themselves something is real, I guess, that you've seen? Well, some of the TikTok ones that you mentioned, I think are particularly, resident with me because we're talking about very young people, like 14, 15 year olds who will record themselves, they're trying to capture like the evidence that they have these disassociative personality disorders and such. And it's just the kind of thing that makes me very grateful that when I was 14 and kind of just being given the internet and my parents to saying, go nuts, do whatever you want to do, that we didn't have the kind of internet landscape that would have me put videos

like this online. Like I don't, I genuinely do, because I, like, what? What some of these, we're talking about, like, very young people who are still, their brains are still developing. And it makes me sad that we have an internet landscape that, I mean, if you scroll, like, cringe subreddits, these kids, like, all of this content, it fills these subreddits of adults making fun of them. And what they're doing is legitimately very cringy, but it's, I mean, they're kids. And I guess it just makes me sad that we have a landscape that where they can stumble upon content that makes them do this stuff, put it on the. internet and then that same internet is like hey here's fodder to make fun of these kids right right i want to i want to talk deeper about sort of how you've seen the wellness world and the sort of do your own research crowd and how they fit into like the new the new political landscape the

new post-trump administration but how would you how would you describe like the the wellness world online in the 2010's pre-trump comparatively to now like what is what is the biggest difference. I would say for me, it's just so much easier for it to be connected to a kind of political extremism, you know, especially for women, right? Like, if you look at some of the conversations that women have been having online about our health and our bodies for the longest time, it's things like, is birth control safe for me? What kind of birth control method should I be using? I'm trying to get pregnant, fertility, right? All of these very common standard questions that any woman might have about their bodies. It is so much a very specific kind of pipeline today. So in 2010, if I googled,

is birth control safe, I might get some information written by people who had an agenda to push, people who, you know, had a particular political agenda. I feel like if I Googled, is birth control safe today in 2025, right? A few swipes away. And it's like, well, you know, women shouldn't even really vote or, you know, hold property and they should all be submitting to their husbands and birth control. I think. we have a much worse landscape for finding accurate information about our health and bodies as women today than we did back in 2010. And I would connect that. And Bridget and I worked together when we actually saw the shift from fringe ideological organizations that were, you know, anti-abortion, anti-birth control, had very traditional notions of what women's role should be in society. and they were pushing research that they had themselves conducted,

which was not actual science. It was like fake science. And so they were the basis for it, but they weren't getting that much traction because you ask about the wellness industry. And, you know, if you want to like the goop conversation, it was largely led by celebrities, attractive people who just, you know, wanted to sell not just their heads.

health, but like their style and their standard of living, right? Like that you could be rich and thin and pretty and all of that stuff and live in a home with all beige furniture, if that was kind of your jam. And so that, it was more benign. And I think the, the grifty side of it was always there beneath Gwyneth Poutro's kind of chief spokeswoman situation. but it kind of shifted where the right wing, frankly, figured out how to merge the two. And RFK kind of represents the perfect, he's like the perfect representative of someone who is on the far, you know,

conspiracy theory anti-vax chain. And then he melds his anti-vax movement to the food, the, you know, clean, you know, clean food movement. and, you know, we're off to the races. Yeah, and I want to talk more about sort of that evolution from Morgelians to Goop to RFK, which, and we're going to talk about that right after the break. But first, a word from our sponsors, colloidal silver. You should drink it and it'll make you healthy.

Okay, so I'm really glad you brought up Goop. So Goop, like, launches in 2008 as a newsletter. But as we sort of understand it, it becomes very popular in the mid-2010s when Gwyneth Paltrow spins it off to be its own standalone brand. And so from like 2015 on is when we get the Goup that we all know and love. So like, how do you make sense of the rise of Goup in the 2010? I hate Gwyneth Peltro. And I think the way that people forget how she successfully utilized rage bait marketing, there

was her jade yami egg all of her oh yeah the vagina egg the vagina egg yeah she really successfully knows how to kind of manipulate both the media and audiences by doing these little stunts and i do think she's because she's thin and blonde and rich people don't see it this way but she is a stunt queen the same way that right wing rifters are able to manipulate and hijack the internet and the conversation and media she does it very effectively people just don't see it because she's pretty i also think that she was like very, she was very clever in how she marketed to these existing wellness and munchausen by internet communities. Like she was constantly sort of figuring out where the line was and being able to say,

you know, like she could never sell like a at home Lyme disease testing kit or something, but she could absolutely figure out how to lean in to whatever kind of misinformation was circulating at the time. the yoni egg being like a perfect example where it's like you can like align your chakras by sticking this egg up your vagina and it only costs you $70. And and I feel like it is so indicative of a lot of companies in the 2010s laying the groundwork for the political environment we're in now where they were all sort of going, okay, what is the line? How close can we get to directly profiting off of the mania that's happening online? And in fact, like, I totally forgot about this. Goop ended up partnering at one point with Google to like make like a smart home speaker

and like they're like selling their smart home speakers in Goop Lab which was the brick and mortar store and so there you see like exactly like okay we've got all these crazy people on the internet we've created a company that can then like sell to them and then we're going to partner with the tech companies themselves to like close the loop on that and It's maddening. You had mentioned sort of RFK's connection here, and I want to go there next before we wrap up today because I think this is really important where it's like he comes in and he knows how to connect all these different communities because they've already sort of been connected. But I would love to hear your thoughts on sort of the rise of RFK and how you make sense of it because I'll admit, like he came out of nowhere from me. He was not on my radar in any way.

What's interesting to me is his journey, when he first, you know, started doing work in the public sector, it was riverkeepers, right? Which was a nonprofit organization. And his whole thing was about maintaining, like, clean water and wild spaces for people. And he successfully sued many, many companies in order to clean up our waters, our shared water spaces and the commons in those areas. and he won. And so his orientation towards this is coming from a skepticism of corporations. But then that started shifting over into the vaccine stuff. And so when he started Children's House Defense, they were, I love how you were talking about Gwyneth Paltrow, like walking right up to the line. That's what they were doing consistently. They said, we're not an anti-Vax.

We just, we have these, we have these examples of these kids who are having negative and adverse reactions to vaccines. And so we need to investigate this and look into it. And the corporate bad guy in those scenarios, of course, was the pharmaceutical companies, right? And so now you can see like the direct line from his work starting with children's health defense and chronic disease, which he still to this day speaks very passionately about, even as his own Health and Human Services Department is not actually offering anything that's systemic solutions for people and saying nothing when, for example, the Trump administration is cutting $200 billion, $186 billion from, you know, SNAP programs, which allow families to feed themselves. And so his rise from, you know, environmental do-good or lawyer, you know, if you want to, like, break it down into a simplistic archetype, to I'm the guy who is staying anti-corporate, right?

And I'm going to hold these powerful people and systems to account. But in fact, he's actually dismantling all of the systems that actually can protect people, writ large. And to my mind, I think he's using sort of the Maha moms and the food, the healthy food communities to do that. But I want to say one other thing,

which is if you look at his vice presidential nominee because you connected all three of those systems there. Ryan, his vice presidential nominee last year was this woman named Nicole Shanahan. Sure. Right. And her background, of course,

is as kind of like, you know, grifter wannabe, like anything and everything to get famous, Mary Sergey Brin, divorces Sergey Brin, becomes a billionaire in her own right, and she connects him to the Maha moms and movement and the Silicon Valley connection. So my researcher, Adam, has been digging into the Maha world

with an investigator of ours, Ellie Hall, for this project we're working on. And what we've sort of initially uncovered, for about a month or two of looking at what you would call Maha internet is at this point, all of these different groups that were off in their own bubbles in the 90s, the 2000s, because some of these communities are very old. Like, Morgallians people still exist.

I'm sure one of them will become like the head of the Department of Community of, like, education soon or something. But these communities have existed for decades. As of right now, if you are just trying to like go and find medical misinformation, which is usually branded as wellness content on a place. platform like Instagram or Facebook, nine times out of ten in our experience, after about a month or two of looking, is that RFK is the central node and that basically all these communities

have discovered that they can get better engagement and better traffic by listening to him and following him in the same way that he is getting support and he's getting traffic and engagement by dog whistling to them. Yes. And it's shocking how quickly these communities have aligned because like these were not, I mean, As we saw with the Margillian's anecdote, like, they're not super political. They just thought they had like weird, like, fabric under their skin or whatever. They thought they were, like, becoming dull people or something.

Like, they were not like crazy libertarian anarchists or something. But now these communities are becoming more politicized. And in fact, we were sort of doing a preliminary dig into, like, their reaction to the Charlie Kirk shooting this month. And all of these maha moms started switching on content. and posting content about homeschool. Because they were saying, oh, don't send your kid to college. He's being indoctrinated by, you know, big education. Right.

So you're seeing, so the way I tend to think about it is like if the 2010s were the commercialization of these internet communities, the 2020s is the politicization of these communities. And they are becoming more political because they know that it's good for their engagement and to continue to grow on platforms like Facebook or Instagram or youth. Yeah. I did want to say something about RFK that I do think relates to Kirk, which is that when you hear him speak, he is so good. And I'll give this to him. He is so good at making everything that he says sound reasonable. I'm not anti-vax. You know, thank you for not doing the voice. Oh, my God. Don't even get me started. I have people in my life who are anti-Trump. They still like what he has to say because I have to admit. It does sound reasonable and measure. If you are someone who has felt ignored and not listened to by, you know, the medical system, what he is saying connects. And I think he really is the person who is good at, it makes sense to me that he would be at the middle of all of this.

And then knowing how to wink, wink to the people who don't sound so reasonable, right? Like, it's really them working together. And I also wanted to add that on my podcast, I did an interview with this woman, Isoma Uzoma, who used to work for Pinterest. and she authored the first ever social media platform health misinfoam, health misinfoil policy. And one of the things that she told me was that nine times out of 10, when health misinformation showed up on Pinterest, it was connected to somebody who was like doing a personal grift to enrich themselves, whether it was selling courses, you know, supplement. And I just, I think that RFK has been able to make it seem like he is this, this person who is just out to look out for the little guy in their health. But we really should be talking about the ways that he has personally enriched himself and grown his footprint in doing all of this, right? While still maintaining this kind of moral authority voice of reason type.

He's very good at this. Yeah. RFK's lifts suck. Yes. He's horrible. What kind of jeans do you wear when you work out, Grant? Tight ones, but that's just my thing. But he's bad at every.

every lift. If your, if your whole thing is going to be being that guy, learn how to do a fucking pull up. Completely agree. Bridget, does your family know that he loves eating roadkill? Like, for their support of him? Are they aware of the roadkill factor? So the only thing that kind of makes it through is that he's a guy who looks fit and lifts weights just like me. Like, like, the more ridiculous stuff that he says and does, like doesn't make it through, the things that just seem reasonable and cool. Those are the only things they know about him. Yeah, my dad's the same way with him, he just thinks he's really cool. I think it's because like he looks like beef jerky, but he looks like slightly younger beef jerky than he should look for his age. So I think a lot of boomers in

particular are like kind of impressed by him. Yeah. It just tells him. It sounds like the HGA, isn't he? Yeah. He like, yeah. I mean, nobody looks like that normally at 70 or what a horrible he is. He's 45 years old. He should have washed out. He wouldn't be in this best. He's 45 years old. To sort of like start to wind down and look back, you know, at the story we told at the top here, you know, I think the network effects, even though the internet is a different landscape than it was 30 years ago, the network effects are fairly similar where it's like you, there's something wrong with you or you're sort of lost in your life and you look for an internet community that validates that or helps. helps you through it. It leads you down some weird paths. And if there isn't sort of like,

I think for a lot of people, there's then this feeling of like, well, like, I could be the face of this community. Like, I could take over this community because there's no one in charge. I could make a website for like my made up health condition and like turn it into a nonprofit and then start funneling money into it. I could do that. And then I could then petition the government to care about this. And I could become an activist for this thing that I like found out about a year ago or whatever. Like, and my fear now, though, is that since Trump has entered office the second time, a lot of those people are now just in our government.

And so, you know, the Bush administration's CDC investigates Moregellons in 2006. They spent six years studying a thing that is not real, which is, God bless them. And then when Obama's president, they put out a thing being like, yeah, this isn't real. My fear is we are now in a world where that's possibly not what's going to happen. Like if there is some wellness influencer that's like, oh, I lick batteries and that like gives me telepathy and that protects me from like trans people on the internet or whatever. And then the CDC is like, I guess we'll study that to see if that's real. And they're like can't confirm or deny or whatever or like something even crazier. Like, that's kind of the world we're in there right now where, like, the weird internet people are now at the center of our institutions.

And that really does worry me. RFK being sort of the biggest example of all of those. Yeah, it's a problem. All right. Great. And see. Nailed it. We did it.

No, I just. The food pyramid is going to be replaced by liver and pee. Just eat raw. And drink pee and drink pee. People would do it. People would happily do it and film themselves making content of it. of them doing it to own the libs. They would happily drink piss.

Do they love drinking pee? Well, actually, this isn't really tied to like sort of, I mean, I guess it's sort of tied to the larger conversation. But why do wellness people like to drink their own pee so much? Because that comes up so often. You'd be shocked telling me like weird yoga guys on Instagram. They're like, I drink my own pee and now I'm really strong. Like, why is it just because it's there?

It's like easily accessible. I don't get it. I don't get the drinking peeve it. It's like the Everett. It's organic. 100% organic. Could be. Yeah, that's true.

My theory is is that if you do. it as a wellness trend that then when somebody leaks the video of you doing it sexually, you can't be black. They're all just already drinking their pee and it and it was their thing and now they're just like, you know, now they've got

a following. So the Venn diagram is like just a total overlap. Oh. Around the sexual kink and the... You know that we've just... We've talked about I was asking on the show before that like a lot of people are just trying to like turn their fetish into

political activism. Like that's like a thing that's absolutely happening. No, but to close things out, like, I mean, how these kinds of questions I've been, I've been getting them asked on podcast recently and I hate them and I'm sorry that I'm doing this to you too because it just feels so overwhelming to even imagine. But like, how do you start to decouple people who are just genuinely trying to find information out about their bodies or about like how they feel versus essentially just like cargo cults all over the internet that are now like trying to turn them into white nationalist tradwives or something. I don't know how you how you start to fix this.

I mean, my answer is not a not a good, an easy one, but I think we need an entirely different internet and media landscape. I think right now, until we make it so that bad actors and liars and scammers, until that behavior is financially costly, I don't think we'll have any, we'll get anywhere, right? Right now it is so financially incentivized to lie specifically to people about their health on the internet. And I don't think we're going to get anywhere until that's not the case. I know that does not, it's not a, you know, magic pill answer.

But I think the problem is really that deep. That if you Google weightlifting, you're just a few swipes away from like some of the most odious political content out there. That is really a problem. Well, yeah. I mean, 100 percent. That is true until we disincentivize that. I don't see how we get out of it in the Internet landscape. but I'm going to maybe offer something that is a lot harder to do, but I think necessary,

which is we need to figure out how we're using online spaces to encourage people to connect offline and have there be some kind of feedback loop there so that when you come, you get offline with people in other spaces, it has that opportunity to kind of break the spell of going into these rabbit holes over and over again and connecting with real people in the real world because writ large,

RFK and Trump and all of these people are trying to, and the Kirk shooting, I think, is a really good example where they're trying to construct JD Vance. They're trying to construct

this alternate reality that is not what is happening on the ground. I live in Washington, D.C. When Trump's says, I couldn't go to restaurants and now the restaurants are full and everyone's eating out and dining and happy. And it's like the actual opposite is happening here in Washington, D.C.

People are not going out because we are. Because your restaurants are bad. What? I'm sorry. Yeah. Because it's, yeah, well, you know. Right. Under the occupation.

Right. Patation. And so that's, you know, it's taking people offline. eliminates or mitigates some of the effect that these people who are spinning stories online have. And I think that's like doubly true for stuff involving your body or your health, actually. Like I do wonder like how quickly something like, I don't know, I mean, TikTok Tourette's, it died a pretty quick death once doctors started looking at it. And then I think more so when like news crews filmed it and a lot of other kids were like,

you people don't look normal. I don't want to have this made up disease anymore. Um, like it, a lot of these things, I think, kind of vanish the minute you put any kind of scrutiny on them. Uh, but you just sort of have to have to pick your battles with it because there's so many now. Shaming. Bullying. I would say, I would say, I would just say bullying. Like, I think it's important to bully people for what they believe and how they feel.

Bring back bullying. I think we got to bring it back. Um, I want to thank you guys. I kind of don't agree. I want to thank you guys for coming on the show. This was super fun. gross. I guess like the last thing I'd say here is like talk to your doctor more if you have a good one, I guess. Does that feel like a good thing to sign off on? Find a doctor and then

find a doctor and if they're good, talk to them more. Don't use chat. You bett probably, I would say. We haven't even talked about AI because that's a whole that will bring you on for a sequel. Oh, yeah. I just did a whole episode about don't if you're pregnant or thinking about pregnancy, Don't rely on ChatGPT to coach you through a pregnancy. Privacy nightmares galore. Don't do it. Oh, oh, God, don't do that. Go to Planned Parenthood.com. Don't do that. Don't tell the AI you're pregnant. You can use, though, Chad Chhabit to name your baby, and you should. You should take a photo of your baby and send it to chat GPT and ask it what your baby looks like in terms of like what should you name it. I think you should do that. Have you tried that? I don't have a baby to name, but if I did, you know what I'd be doing. I don't need a baby. You just use a baby. Just use a baby. Just use a baby.

Hey, dear list, if any of our listeners have a baby that I could borrow, I want to see what Chachibit names it. Yes. Just looking back at the sort of like stage one internet sickness story give you any insight into like the world we're living in today that like you didn't, that like was a connection to miss when we're not, when you know, we're just like caught up in the soup of it now. Oh gosh, yes. I mean, I think that story really illustrates kind of what Heather was saying that even a small, even a small. group of people who feel unheard, you know, that can be so easily harnessed and spun up into something so much bigger, so much more powerful with so much with like real, like staying power. I think that connecting that story to the rise of Maha and Goup, I think really illustrates just

how how powerful of a weapon feeling unheard and maybe even really truly being unheard is. A hundred million percent to that. I mean, that's Trump's movement. It's people who have felt unheard and unseen, and now they are burn it all down. And then you have people like RFK who has an ideological agenda versus I want my life to be better. And those two things together is, you know, it's why we're where we are. In spending time in this sort of maha world, how many of the people that are interacting in this space that are not the grifters, would you, would you, would you, would you armchair diagnose them with Munchausen by internet? Like, like, how much is that at the core of, of people that are like are misguided and probably doing something really toxic now, but are like suffering?

Um, God, I don't know. That's a great question. The other thing I will say is there's a difference between kind of the upper echelons of the of the Mahamams and the ones that everybody thinks of and knows and sort of the middle and lower tiers. And those folks are really just we're just looking for answers. So I don't know, as a percentage. I don't know, maybe, maybe half. I was going to go 50, 50. That's wild. I mean, even that's wild.

Like, even if that's the ballpark, that's crazy. Yeah. Sorry to make this fun, gross podcast sad, but I do think there is something just like underlyingly sad about all of it when you like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, uh, can I add something?

Please. Which is that I don't know, I don't know if you want to touch on this, but something that's been sort of looming large in my mind is, do you all know about Ananda Lewis? She used to be an MTV Vijay and she died in cancer recently. Yeah. People should look into her story because it's very tragic to me. She was sort of a maha before maha was a thing, really.

And she really believed in this idea that it's a very common idea that your body was designed by God and that nothing could ever go wrong in your body because it's all designed by a higher power. She didn't get mammograms. She really believed that the radiation from mammograms would cause cancer. She went on to get cancer. Had she gotten her mammogram as like medically suggested, she would have found it early. She ended up dying really early. And before she died, she basically renounced so much of her, you know,

attitudes about sort of being able to cure cancer from diet and all of that. And what makes me so sad is there are people who are now, even after her death, even after she went out of her way to be like, yeah, I got it wrong. And if I had done things differently and listened to medical doctors and not like Rifters, I might not be dying, but here we are. There are still people who say, well, I still wouldn't get mammograms. I still wouldn't do chemotherapy. I still wouldn't listen to doctors advice.

And I think that that story really shows how ingrained some of this stuff is, that even somebody who is from beyond the grave trying to warn you and saying, this is what led to me dying in my 40s. I'm not going to see my kid grow up. People still are like, well, I'm not going to go to the doctor. Well, also, like, once you do that, you've, you've been compromised. Right. So you'll either say, you'll see people either say, like, well, she actually, she died because she

renounced it. Or they'll be like, well, big pharma got to her or, or whatever. There's always one other layer. But there's a bigger piece, too, I think, which is that becomes a part of your identity. Like, in her, as an influencer, right, that was her identity. But for other people who might not even be influencers, but they're bought in. And now they're a part of this tribe. They're a part of the Maha tribe.

And so when, you know, as someone who's done politics my whole life, the ways in which people now think of their not even political party because that's a separate conversation, but their political belief system as identity, you can't if you start, it's the Q&ONN thing too, probably, right? Which is like, once you're in it, you can't leave because your entire identity is built. around. And that's the real, I don't know how the hell we're going to get out of that. That's a huge problem. Well, this is sun. No, no, no, thank you. Yay. Thank you guys so much.

Do people want to follow you guys on the internet? Where can they do that? Well, you can listen to my podcast on IHeart Radio called There Are No Girls on the internet, all about the intersection of technology, gender, race, identity, and social media. You can follow me on Instagram at Bridgett, Marie, and D.C. or at YouTube at there are no girls on the internet. My company is called Real Voices Media,

and we're actually a network of 3.8 million spread across Facebook, Instagram, some TikTok and YouTube thrown in there for good measure, but we're kind of micro communities. So if you want to find out more about us, and if you're a creator who may be interested in spending more time, creating content that is not misinformation about health care, then you can check us out at Real VoiceMedia.com. Excellent.

Now to give our own shoutouts, Bridget, Heather, thanks for coming on. Listeners, if you haven't followed this show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever else, you get your content. Now is the time. Oh, Kitty Cat. She's making no. I hope you didn't hear her in the episode. She was really trying to add her two cents. I hope we did.

Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Marianne Couga is their Director of Marketing.

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