The podcast “Conspirituality” digs into the conspiracy theories arising at the intersection of health, wellness and spirituality.
As reported in Willamette Week, the show’s three co-hosts combine their expertise in health journalism, psychology and cult research to “discuss the stories, cognitive dissonances, and cultic dynamics tearing through the yoga, wellness, and new spirituality worlds.”
Portlander Derek Beres is one of the co-hosts of “Conspirituality.” He joins us to talk about analyzing and debunking pseudoscience in a time of unprecedented health misinformation.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. For the last six years, the podcast “Conspirituality” has explored the intersection of conspiracy theories and the worlds of wellness and cults and spirituality. As reported recently in Willamette Week, one of the show’s three co-hosts lives in Portland. Derek Beres focuses on health and science. He joins me to talk about the work of analyzing and debunking pseudoscience at a time of rampant misinformation. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Derek Beres: Thanks for having me, Dave.
Miller: How did you first get involved in what we now call the health and wellness space?
Beres: I actually got my degree in religion with a focus on Eastern religions from Rutgers in 1997. I became very interested in yoga back then, and by 2004 I was teaching yoga and ended up doing that for 17 years of my career. So the wellness world has always appealed to me as someone who practices and likes to teach movement and is very interested in the philosophies behind it.
Miller: Is there an alternate version of your life in which you became a wellness influencer yourself as opposed to more of a BS debunker?
Beres: Completely possible, and I will definitely say that some of what is now espoused, from HHS on down, were things that I actually believed in myself. But as my career went, at some point I went from being a music journalist to health and science journalism. So I was kind of living in these two worlds where I was practicing and teaching yoga, but then I was talking to researchers and doctors and public health officials. That is what encompassed my career, and I couldn’t square what was being said in yoga spaces because I was talking to experts in those fields.
Miller: So even 20 years ago, you would hear things from fellow teachers or in the world of yoga that were questionable, sort of similar to today?
Beres: I would say this dates back to the 19th century, easily, in these actual proto-wellness spaces. But yes, absolutely. Sentiments like you are your own best doctor, no one knows your body better than you. That was being said in brick and mortar yoga spaces in the ‘90s when I began my practice
Miller: And snake oil or whatever was being sold – 150 various patent medicines or miracle cure-alls.
Beres: Yes, absolutely.
Miller: And now we’re sort of seeing the combination of those steroidally enhanced.
Beres: Yes, because it’s coming, actually, from the administration. And it’s a completely untested space when we’re talking about things like supplements, and it’s practically unregulated.
Miller: What made you want to start “Conspirituality”?
Beres: We were locked down like everyone else, and I had my own personal podcast at the time that I updated infrequently. And a pseudo-documentary called “Plandemic” came out, and I had been covering the anti-vaccine as a health journalist since 2014 when the measles outbreak happened around Disney World and I was living in Los Angeles at the time.
So I invited Matthew and Julian onto my podcast to discuss “Plandemic,” and I had also had some relations with the filmmaker back in Los Angeles, and I just knew, given the sort of cultural climate and the ascension of the anti-vax movement over the years, that it was going to take off and boy, did it.
Miller: What do you think has changed in those six years?
Beres: I would say it’s just actually that the movement has radicalized people more than I ever imagined possible in my life. I always knew it would be a danger, but there are people, I mean, we’re seeing declining vaccination rates year over year now, and we no longer can reach herd immunity in kindergarten, for example.
We’re about to no longer officially have conquered measles in this country. We’re about to be thrown off those rolls. So everything that I had been seeing for the last three decades of my life is now being espoused as actual science.
Miller: Do you see a different way that responsible public health authorities at the federal level and at the state level could have proceeded in March, April, May of 2020 and going two years into the pandemic, that would have both been responsible, as I said, but also not led to a backlash? Do you think, in retrospect, that the anti-vax explosion was at all preventable?
Beres: I think given that, at the time, the Trump administration was telling people to inject bleach, it would have been very difficult. Because there were responsible public health officials, but public health works best when you have no idea it’s working. It is a bureaucracy but it also takes the work of people working behind the scenes to prevent things, and people generally only find out about public health when it reaches this sort of apex moment like it did during COVID. I think the messaging could have been better, but I think it would have been very difficult given the groundswell of sentiment due to lockdowns.
Miller: It does also seem like there’s something just really asymmetrical about the information fight right now. On the one hand, there are wildly popular and often slick influencers, along with, now, the power of the federal government. And on the other hand, there are sober public health authorities or people like you who are different versions of either healthcare professionals or educated journalists who are constrained by facts, which makes it harder to say stuff. How does that affect everything that you’re trying to do, that imbalance?
Beres: Just as public health is boring, actual health advice is very boring. Get good sleep, try to eat wholesome foods, try not to be stressed, maintain relationships, you can’t monetize that. And what wellness has always done, especially wellness influencers, is they make health seem sexier because they have found this molecule, they have this peptide – that’s the current one – that is going to change your life. And if you look back every year or two, it cycles out to something different, but what they’re very good at is marketing, and what public health officials and doctors broadly are not good at is marketing. I think a number of them have gotten much better.
The Washington State Department of Health on social media right now is crushing it. They’re doing very good work because they’re not making learning about health feel like school. And unfortunately, I think, too many doctors and too many public health officials come from an academic background, and they make learning feel kind of like you’re slogging through things. I think the best officials and educators right now are able to stay with the media that’s current and be able to present in a way that makes sense to people.
Miller: There’s also just the question of the amount of misinformation that’s out there. How do you think about the scale of it? How do you describe the scale of it?
Beres: It’s impossible. We humans can’t think in terms of millions and billions. You can’t think, so you need synthesizers. And what the wellness influencers and MAHAs are able to do very well is capture a sentiment of feeling which is not constrained by facts. That’s almost why it’s religious in nature. There’s a certain sense of faith that exists within that, “There are these powers that are trying to oppress me,” and that’s all they need. When you bring facts into it, you have to make it equally relatable, which is very challenging in this field.
Miller: Make America Healthy Again, MAHA, this, I guess you can call it a movement, but I actually think it can feel amorphous to me once you get past maybe what’s the unifying tent pole of anti-vaxness. What do you see as the coherent stable aspects of MAHA?
Beres: They would not be allowed into this administration if they weren’t deregulatory. So there’s a sleight of hand going on right now, in the sense that they’re talking about America’s chronic health problems, which is true, but if you look at population health statistics, it is often about people in rural minority communities or impoverished communities who have the worst health effects.
And what they’re doing is, they’re moving more and more of healthcare into the private market to things like supplement manufacturers. Kennedy is on record saying we need less oppression of supplements, which is crazy, because since 1994’s DSHEA ruling, they are not oppressed whatsoever. And so they are just shuffling more public dollars into private healthcare, and that is the unifying underlying foundation of this movement.
Miller: When you say that, are you talking about the people in the administration who have maybe more of an anti-government philosophy, and a desire to deregulate? Or some of the other sort of very popular worker bees of the MAHA movement? I guess I’m still trying to figure out if you see the extent to which the movement is aligned and working in the same direction?
Beres: I was talking about the administrative level predominantly, although some influencers are monetized through that same idea of discrediting healthcare in order to monetize their products and services. Their unifying message is that they want people to be healthier, which of course, who wouldn’t agree with that?
But just try to find instances where Kennedy or the others actually take seriously the social determinants of health, which public health officials believe account for 40 to 60% of individual health outcomes. They don’t address them. When they do, it’s always kicking the can down the road. So they’ll take soda and candy off of SNAP benefits, and they say we’re going to replace this with nutritious foods, which has not happened. So they’ve removed foods from SNAP benefits but the supply chain infrastructure that actually is needed to get people nutritious food, funding is being cut from that, too. So they’re not seriously addressing what would actually make people healthier.
Miller: We live in an increasingly globalized world in terms of political movements. Nationalist, populist, and anti-immigration parties have had success in a lot of countries, including in the U.S. Is the same true for what you’re talking about here? Are wellness trends or health information, are they also globalized, or is this a very American phenomenon?
Beres: Well, our listenership is predominantly in America, but most listeners come from other wealthy white nations. Australia, Europe, Canada are generally where most of our listeners come from. So we hear from them. And these are all countries that have some level of socialized medicine, universal healthcare, which the U.S. does not.
But we’ve heard from listeners that there is an upswell of the wellness movement that’s happening in those places as well. And some of the figures that we track will go over to different countries and sell out stadiums. So it is definitely having an impact overseas.
Miller: We are exporting these ideas.
Beres: Yes.
Miller: You mentioned that big difference between the U.S., it is the only rich industrialized nation that doesn’t have some version of the government paying for healthcare in a massive way, as opposed to just for the people in the VA or once they get older. To what extent is that an explanation for what you’re describing?
Beres: I don’t think we get an RFK Jr. without that fact, because so much of the sentiment against healthcare is rooted in the fact that we have the most expensive healthcare and the outcomes are not good. And the biggest frustration that I have is, I am not a fan of our system, but I am a fan of doctors and scientists and researchers. And what MAHA does is it confuses those things. It says that anyone involved in the system is therefore helping that system along, when I’ve interviewed hundreds of doctors and public health officials, and I have not met one who loves the system they’re operating in.
Miller: If one of the projects, or at least ways to accomplish its broader goals of MAHA world, is to sow distrust of expertise, what advice do you have for people who are being bombarded with that messaging in all kinds of different ways?
Beres: To me, the best solution is finding experts you can actually trust and that is challenging. But there are a lot of doctors and researchers who, usually without pay, because they don’t have the sort of incentives that wellness influencers have to monetize things, they will go out and they build social media following. I recently interviewed Dr. Jessica Knurick at a live event, for example. She’s doing fantastic work. They will go and they will try to combat this upswell of misinformation.
And unfortunately, I just don’t see it happening from a lot of agencies at this moment, and it’s definitely not happening from this administration. So to me, creating sort of parasocial relationships with people you can actually trust is one of the best ways, as well, of course, actually talking to your doctor and trying to create a relationship there.
Miller: How much do you think about media literacy and what kids should be learning about how to navigate these issues?
Beres: I think about it all the time. I started in journalism in 1993, so I’ve been at this a long time. I’ve watched the evolution of media in general, and even something as simple as understanding that there’s a difference between an opinion page and reporting in a newspaper – a lot of people don’t understand that. So they’ll read opinions as if it’s reporting and then get mad at the newspaper. If people don’t understand that basics of media literacy, getting them to understand how to read a scientific study, and to understand how influencers are manipulating those studies, it’s a Herculean task.
Miller: Just briefly, what do you think is the next wellness trend that’s going to sweep the misinformation wave?
Beres: It’s peptides, they’re all over the place. 2026 will be the year of peptides.
Miller: Derek Beres, thanks very much.
Beres: Thank you, Dave.
Miller: Derek Beres is a co-host of the podcast “Conspirituality.”
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