Alright, let’s back up a bit. John Tavares is the former captain, current assistant/alternate captain of the NHL’s Toronto Maple Leafs. He’s an Olympic gold medalist. His uncle is the highest scoring player in the entire history of the National Lacrosse League, and when he left Long Island to play for his hometown team he earned the derisive nickname ‘Pajama Boy’ based on a childhood photo.

He, like many more recent NHL greats, has a bit of a reputation for being a hockey robot. And with that comes the attempted optimization of his training, lifestyle, and health. Teammates say he brings his own olive oil and pink himalayan salt on the road unless he gets to choose a restaurant whose quality he trusts. He insists on keeping his window on the team plane open at all times to perfect his circadian rhythm. He has a kombucha keg in his summer cottage.

All of these things are totally fine and probably do help him in his extremely strenuous and stressful job. But last year he went a little too woo when he endorsed an anti-5G amulet.

Aires Technology’s Lifetune Flex is a pendant that you wear around your neck, where its silicon-based resonator will protect you from “Wi-Fi and all sorts of evil energies,” according to former comedian and current conspiracy theorist Russel Brand, who also endorsed the product. These ‘evil energies’ are the electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) emitted from cell phones and other electronic devices. Alternatively, you could invest in the Lifetune One or Zone Max, options that you either stick directly to your electronic devices or place in a stand where it will be able to cleanse your whole living room of that pesky radiation.

Tavares has apparently been a long-time Aires customer before he became a spokesperson, the company says. In the company’s June 2024 press release, he said that since discovering the product four years ago, he had seen “tremendous benefits to my recovery and overall health.”

He even got Leafs teammate Max Domi into it. His endorsement on Aires’ website reads, “As a pro athlete and a Type 1 diabetic, I’m always surrounded by devices, there’s no way around it. Aires gave me something I could actually feel working, and it’s been part of my routine for years now.”

Over time, Aires says, “constant EMF exposure was quietly wearing him down,” causing such maladies as tremors, dizziness, restlessness, anxiety, loss of concentration, and chronic headaches. Huh… Maybe I actually should give it a shot for the last one, see if it’ll cure my migraines. It’s only $240 for the amulet, and it’s on sale from $480, so if you think about it I’d really be saving money…

This is exactly how people fall down these rabbit holes and end up shilling for grifters.

It’s hard to explain the psychological impact of managing chronic conditions. Day after day it’s there, sometimes changing, fluctuating. You try everything, changing your diet, your sleep, your routines, supplements, medications, injections, infusions, hoping that something will steady it. And when you’re a professional athlete dependent on the peak performance of your body, there is very little room for error.

It’s comforting to be told that all your ailments are caused by one big bad thing, and that this one quick fix will solve it. But alas, EMF is not the boogeyman that conspiracy theorists think it is. There is no scientific evidence to show that electromagnetic radiation from our phones is harmful to us.

As Alexandre Legros, medical biophysics professor at Western University says, Aires’ patented silicon-based resonator with 22 global patents is bullshit. “These are very technical words that are put together and don’t mean anything to me.”

Companies like this which produce very expensive devices served on a nice bed of technobabble are almost never produced in good faith. The extended Goop-iverse is full of grifters, taking advantage of the millions of people consistently failed by our medical systems. How do I know Aires is more than just sketchy? Because their Board recently demanded that their CEO Dimitry Serov resign based on serious misconduct.

Serov paid his father multiple times for consultuing services, a move that could be totally fine (though it definitely smells a bit like nepotism), except for the fact that his dad died in January 2021. Serov kept sending him money even after that, and the Board alleges that it was all actually funnelled back to Serov. Another charge against Serov was that he had hidden the fact that his wife, Jelena Tkacenko, was co-owner of Technano, Aires’ exclusive manufacturer. It is starting to positively reek in here.

The health and wellness space attracts grifters like this because there are always desperate people looking for relief from their pain. While I haven’t tried all the things people have suggested for my migraines (“swallow 8-10 cloves of raw garlic per day.” - my Lyft driver), I have tried more than I’d like to admit, and have far too many half-empty bottles of supplements in my bathroom.

I don’t think that Tavares and Domi are just in it for the grift, though maybe I’m giving them too much benefit of the doubt. Either way, they have enough money from their NHL careers that it doesn’t matter to them if the product is scientifically backed. What’s $240 or $480 to a guy that gets paid $4.39 million a year (down from $10 million for the last seven years)? Tavares is really just hedging his bets, trying to mitigate anything that “throws off his routine,” as he says on Aires’ website, “and if something like Aires can help with that, it’s just a really easy thing to do.” Note that he doesn’t even outright say that it does work, just that the cost-benefit analysis came out favorably.

But not everyone has that much money. And especially with the state of health insurance in the US, spending those $240, or the $700 for the full-price Lifetune Zone Max, might be the difference between someone being able to see a real medical professional or not.

John Tavares and Max Domi don’t need to be amulet spokespeople. Please stop being amulet spokespeople. Goodnight Pajama Boy.