Sears’ videos are often funny and witty and have proved popular with skeptics and rationalists because they effectively lampoon various fad diets and new age spirituality, highlighting the hypocrisy and logical leaps made by supporters. This has led many to assume that he is a comedian with a critical thinking or skeptical bent. Unfortunately, this seems to be an unwarranted assumption.

The first warning flag is that Sears not only lampoons new age spirituality and self-help, he also is a genuine life coach (about to launch a premium subscription service).

Sears personal website describes him as a “an emotional healing coach” who offers one-to-one sessions and organises retreats “to empower people to live more meaningful lives”. It also explains that he holds “certification as a Holistic Coach Advanced Practitioner through the Holistic Coaching Institute in Columbus” and “served as a faculty member for the C.H.E.K. Institute from 2006–2013”. The Holistic Coaching Institute is ‘real’, as is the Corrective High Performance Exercise Kinesiology Institute and both are chock-a-block with dubious pseudoscience. John McMullin, the head of the Holistic Coaching Institute, promotes courses on ‘bionetic homeopathics’ and Paul Chek (the man who put the Chek in CHEK institute) endorses every pseudoscientific position he can find, including hardcore anti-vaccine conspiracies.

It would be unfair to damn Sears for his associations, despite his glowing endorsements of McMullin as a “powerful mentor” who “changed his life” and promotional videos for the CHEK Holisitic Lifestyle Coach program. But couldn’t his satirical videos be indicative of how his views have changed based on his experiences within the ‘holistic lifestyle’ industry?

Maybe… but probably not.

Sears’ qualifications and chosen career are warning flags but the actual content of his videos are what set off the usual pseudoscience klaxons. He might be best known for his satirical parodies of egotistical new agers but if you look a bit deeper into his content you start to see elements of the anti-science sentiment and fondness for conspiracy theories prevalent throughout the ‘holistic’ community.

Take, for example, his ‘How to be Mind Controlled’ video, posted just a month ago.

Here Sears offers a sardonic monologue ‘arguing’ for the benefits of not thinking for yourself and letting the daily horrors promoted in the media leave you fearful and easy to control. It might be tempting to interpret a video like this as a welcome call for people to think critically about what they see and avoid sensationalist media coverage but Sears’ advice seems to go further than this and mid-way through the video he inserts the line:

I want to be heavily vaccinated so I can be protected from the diseases that I’ve been told to be extremely afraid of.

The implication here is not subtle. Sears’ likens vaccinations to terrorism and other fears exaggerated in the media order to keep control the gullible. But is he just joking? Again, it is possible. But it seems unlikely that he threw a random jibe at the anti-vaccine movement in the middle of a video which otherwise relentlessly hammers the message that mainstream narratives cannot be trusted.

Sears’ commented on the issue on his facebook group by poking fun at those voicing concerns at the anti-vaccine line saying: “I think it’s the end of the world because JP said something about vaccines.” Thus clarifying nothing and providing the necessary ambiguity to both promote standard anti-vaccine rhetoric and sidestep criticism with ‘lolz, I’m just joking… (or am I)?’

If this was just an isolated example then it wouldn’t be worth mentioning but conspiracy sentiments are actually relatively common in Sears’ content. Below is another recent video of him discussing the controversy around coconut oil and the American Heart Association’s (AHA) recommendation- that consuming it in any significant quantity is likely to be bad for your health:

Following Sears’ standard approach, the video is a satirical endorsement of the AHA’s advice by his mindless ultra spiritual alter-ego, who proceeds to lay out all of the ‘good’ reasons to follow their recommendations. The actual message Sears wants to convey is the inverse; coconut oil is good for you and the AHA is issuing harmful recommendations due to being in the pocket of big aggro-business.

The video is a hodgepodge of conspiracy thinking and bad logic with Sears using his satirical monologue to argue (in order of appearance) that:

Because he is fit and healthy and has used coconut oil for years it must be fine. 1 in 2 Americans get some form of heart disease therefore the American Heart Association (AHA) is ineffective, untrustworthy, and better to ignore. The French eat high levels of saturated fats and still have low levels of heart disease. The AHA is corrupt and is tied to the food industry; it earned 704 million dollars in 2014 and is run by untrustworthy business people. The AHA previously endorsed food products with hydrogenated oils and trans fat as healthy, changed their opinions, and now lie about their previous bad advice. The recommended alternatives of vegetable oils and margarine are ‘incredibly unstable’ and ’cause a tremendous amount of inflammation and free radical damage’. Coconut oil is disparaged not because of the health issues but because vegetable oil is more lucrative for the US food industry since coconuts are imported. The Soybean board and US Canola Association have undue influence over the AHA as they are part of its ‘nutrition advisory panel’. Heeding the AHA recommendation makes you an unthinking conformist.

That’s quite an impressive gamut of logical fallacies and conspiracy mongering to pack into a short 4 minute video but, aside from the ironic delivery, the content is completely in line with what you would expect to find with the Food Babe or any other health food guru. It’s the standard heady mix of evil corporations, industrial conspiracies, cherry picked factoids, and pseudoscience. Exactly the kind of thing that Sears pokes fun at in other videos. He does acknowledge issues with the over-hyping of coconut oil in another video but even there he still emphasises that coconut oil only looks healthy in comparison to vegetable oil which ‘is disastrous for your health’.

To respond adequately to all of the issues with Sears’ arguments about the AHA advice would take a whole other blog post (see the bottom of this post and this article on science based medicine) but my goal here is not to offer a rebuttal to this specific video but to illustrate that the JP Sears is not really the advocate of critical thinking that some imagine. He might be unusually self-aware for a life coach but that isn’t exactly a hotly contested field.

Sears has commented repeatedly on the confusion caused by his apparent dual identity and explained that he sees no incongruity between them; likening them to having a left and right hand . He can be serious and he can be comedic but fundamentally he believes that his comedic videos serve to communicate his more serious messages(see this article and this extended out-of-character video). In an interview with the personal development guru Lewis Howes, he also explains how the exposure from his comedy videos proved an effective means at promoting his life coaching services.

Sears’ comedy is both an extension of his personality and an effective marketing gimmick. Therefore it is not that surprising that he would use that delivery method to poke fun at himself and his community AND to promote his beliefs. Conspiracies about inter-dimensional reptiles, the illuminati, or 2-Pac being alive can be safely mocked for comedic effect but when it comes to things like GMO food, vaccines, or the health value of coconut oil, his positions seem to be in line with those he parodies.

None of the above is to argue that Sears is a bad guy or that his videos should be avoided. A lot of his genuine coaching videos seem to offer decent advice and his comedic videos demonstrate that he is acutely aware of a lot of the bullshit surrounding self-help and new age fads. However, the examples above illustrate why (as always) it is a good idea to approach content critically, especially when it panders to your biases. Advocates for science and critical thinking should thus be wary of recommending his videos outright.

*I’m also not the only person to notice his problematic tendencies. See this thoughtful article by the skeptic blogger Cherry Teresa and this (slightly fawning) interview by an atheist YouTuber.