You may be the victim of a grift.
We apparently live in the era of the con, the scam, the grift. Podcasters, YouTubers, and social media influencers have no qualms in referring to anyone that is selling you something that is not backed up by good evidence as a lying grifter.
Anti-vaxxers? Grifters! The Instagram mama with an affiliate link for fluoride-free toothpaste? Grifter! Podcast giant Andrew Huberman who is sponsored by a slew of supplement companies? Grifter!
While denouncing the things you will waste your money on is worthy and needed, I worry that we鈥檝e taken a slippery turn along the way.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the verb聽聽as 鈥渢o obtain (money or property)聽颈濒濒颈肠颈迟濒测听(as in a confidence game),鈥� emphasis mine. 鈥淚llicit,鈥� to be clear, means that it is not permitted and goes against the law. Every definition I鈥檝e seen of grifting mentions some form of lying: it鈥檚 a confidence game, a swindle, a deception meant to extract value from you knowing full well that the entire thing is a charade.
The world view that often emerges from the movement pushing back against pseudoscience and conspiracy theories is that the people selling you this nonsense know in every respect that they are lying, but they are manipulating you for your money.
It assigns them a clear motivation.
The problem with motivation is that it鈥檚 hard enough to figure out your own and almost impossible to know someone else鈥檚. We can only know other people through what they choose to reveal (and what they might let slip through), but people lie, obfuscate, distort. Figuring out an anti-vaxxer鈥檚 true motivation is almost impossible.
I watched聽over 50 hours聽of recorded conversations between Dr. Joe Mercola鈥攐ne of the biggest and most successful alternative medicine snake oil salesmen鈥攁nd his personal medium, Christopher Johnson, where they discussed business strategy, scientific discoveries, and romantic relationships. Based on his online footprint, it would be easy to call Mercola a grifter鈥攕omeone who profits from lying to you鈥攁nd going in I expected a confession. 鈥淟ook at all these morons buying my supplements!鈥� he would say, laughing. 鈥淚 tell them the last one I hyped up turned out to be a dud but this new one is a revelation, and they keep giving me money!鈥� I was waiting for that admission to come up. It never did.
Instead, what emerged was this sad portrait of a true believer who chastised himself for once promoting putting ozone up your butt鈥� and who now was forcing聽carbon dioxide聽up his butt, including one time (it seems to me) in front of the camera while speaking to Johnson. The problem hadn鈥檛 been the nonsensical notion of putting gas up your derri猫re but聽which gas聽was the right one.
But if Mercola is simply deluded, surely his medium鈥攚ho barely pretends to go into a trance鈥攎ust be a con artist, right? Following the publication of my expos茅, new sources came forward and after long conversations with them, I must say that, contrary to my earlier conviction, Christopher Johnson also appears to be a true believer. Play pretend often enough and soon you鈥檒l be fooling yourself.
And that鈥檚 key: there is nothing the human brain can鈥檛 be convinced of. While we鈥檙e out unmasking mustache-twirling hucksters, we forget that the path to believing fantastical things is so much shorter and unencumbered. We like to think we are rational creatures, but as psychologist Elliot Aronson and author Robert A. Heinlein have said before, we are rationalizing animals. We attach ourselves to a belief first, then tell ourselves a story as to why we鈥檙e being logical.
When we point to the goods that health gurus are selling as proof of the grift, we鈥檙e missing the point that, under capitalism, why wouldn鈥檛 you monetize what you truly believe in? As the old saying goes, choose a job you love and you鈥檒l never have to work a day in your life. If you were convinced that mushroom powder expanded your mental faculties, and if regulations in your country allowed you to easily sell a mushroom supplement under the vague claim that it 鈥渉elps with mental focus,鈥� why wouldn鈥檛 you leave a dreadful job behind to become a health entrepreneur? It鈥檚 not evidence of a lie; in this context, it shows benevolence within a capitalistic system. You have to make money. Might as well make money helping others.
That鈥檚 not to say that liars don鈥檛 exist in this space. Netflix recently spotlit Belle Gibson in their series聽Apple Cider Vinegar.聽Gibson lied: she pretended to have multiple cancers and she made money selling an app and a book鈥攐ver聽聽before she was caught. The real question, and one that is almost impossible to answer, is how many wellness influencers peddling misinformation are liars and how many are true believers鈥� and how many simply do not care about the truth value of what they are saying.
Motivation is complex. Given the fortune Joe Mercola has made selling his wares鈥攈e is worth, by his own admission, over 300 million US dollars鈥擨 strongly suspect that profits are a motivating factor. But just because someone profits doesn鈥檛 mean they are deceiving you.
You may argue, what鈥檚 the difference? The service or gadget doesn鈥檛 work. Should we care what goes on inside the brain of these people? I think it does matter. We can鈥檛 expose lies that don鈥檛 exist. We should also strive to have an accurate model of the world around us, and the same biases that can tempt the public into buying 鈥渁ll-natural鈥� solutions can also skew the thinking of the entrepreneurs selling these solutions. Consequently, it can, dare I say, create empathy. Natural health influencers have caused substantial harm, peddling supplements that are not infrequently contaminated, steering people away from medical care, and promoting anti-vaccine talking points. But they too can be the victim of bad thinking: seeing natural things as inherently virtuous, finding relief in ancient, traditional ideas coming from exotic places, and sniffing out grand conspiracies where there are none. These are, whether we like it or not, very human traits. We鈥檙e a lot more like them than we often care to admit.
And finally, there is an irony here worth exploring. If we follow this 鈥済rifter鈥� discourse to its logical conclusion, we may end up adopting a worldview that is very similar to the one wrongly espoused by these so-called scammers. Those who decry modern medicine and sell all-natural supplements very often buy into a grand conspiracy theory: that every doctor and public health official is in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry. It鈥檚 corruption all the way down, and your doctor is聽actively lying to you聽because their bank account is being fattened by a corporation.
If all wellness entrepreneurs are painted as swindlers, we are simply recreating the black-and-white story on the other side.聽We聽are good and honest, but the others are villains part of a grand cabal and they鈥檙e all secretly manipulating you to get to your wallet.
The truth is that believing drivel is easy and making a career out of selling it will be seen as virtuous by the true believer. Not everything is a grift. We can look out for consumers without painting the other side as conniving liars.
