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’ve taken a slippery turn along the way.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the verb “grift” as “to obtain (money or property) illicitly (as in a confidence game),” emphasis mine. “Illicit,” to be clear, means that it is not permitted and goes against the law. Every definition I’ve seen of grifting mentions some form of lying: it’s 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’s hard enough to figure out your own and almost impossible to know someone else’s. 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’s true motivation is almost impossible.
I watched over 50 hours of recorded conversations between Dr. Joe Mercola—one of the biggest and most successful alternative medicine snake oil salesmen—and 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—someone who profits from lying to you—and going in I expected a confession. “Look at all these morons buying my supplements!” he would say, laughing. “I 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!” 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… and who now was forcing carbon dioxide up his butt, including one time (it seems to me) in front of the camera while speaking to Johnson. The problem hadn’t been the nonsensical notion of putting gas up your derrière but which gas was the right one.
But if Mercola is simply deluded, surely his medium—who barely pretends to go into a trance—must be a con artist, right? Following the publication of my exposé, 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’ll be fooling yourself.
And that’s key: there is nothing the human brain can’t be convinced of. While we’re 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’re being logical.
When we point to the goods that health gurus are selling as proof of the grift, we’re missing the point that, under capitalism, why wouldn’t you monetize what you truly believe in? As the old saying goes, choose a job you love and you’ll 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 “helps with mental focus,” why wouldn’t you leave a dreadful job behind to become a health entrepreneur? It’s 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’s not to say that liars don’t exist in this space. Netflix recently spotlit Belle Gibson in their series Apple Cider Vinegar. Gibson lied: she pretended to have multiple cancers and she made money selling an app and a book—over 1 million Australian dollars 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… 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—he is worth, by his own admission, over 300 million US dollars—I strongly suspect that profits are a motivating factor. But just because someone profits doesn’t mean they are deceiving you.
You may argue, what’s the difference? The service or gadget doesn’t work. Should we care what goes on inside the brain of these people? I think it does matter. We can’t expose lies that don’t 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 “all-natural” 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’re a lot more like them than we often care to admit.
And finally, there is an irony here worth exploring. If we follow this “grifter” 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’s corruption all the way down, and your doctor is actively lying to you 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. We are good and honest, but the others are villains part of a grand cabal and they’re 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.
