Conspirituality started with Julian and Matthew as guests on Derek’s EarthRise podcast. We’re reposting these episodes for you to hear the origins of this project.
In episode 0.2, we discuss suspect medical claims made by Kelly Brogan and Sayer Ji. We also talk about Julian’s new essay, “The Red Pill Overlap.”
Show Notes
The Red Pill Overlap
Why We Stay Asleep When COVID-19 Is Trying To Wake Us Up
What Mandatory Vaccination and the 5G Rollout Have In Common
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Last week's conversation was excellent and a lot of people said they would like to hear more and we agree because we love talking to one another.
A couple quick housekeeping things before we start.
Jay Brown, who was on this podcast last year I believe, asked me to be on his podcast So I'll be recording that tomorrow.
I really like talking to Jay, so that will be out probably sometime next week.
And my latest project is the Substack newsletter that you can find at DerekBarris.Substack.com.
It goes out every Monday morning, so you can check that out.
Matthew Remsky is at MatthewRemsky.com.
Julian is at JulianWalkerYoga.com.
So you can sign up for their mailing lists and find everything else there as well.
When we were talking about what to discuss this week, we have two ideas.
Julian wrote an excellent essay on Medium about red pills, which we'll get to, but I want to open with Kelly Brogan and Sayerji, who I am not that familiar with, but Matthew is.
He's written about cultish behavior there, and I'm going to let him lead it, but I want to start with this, because having seen her and knowing green med info and just kind of been on my periphery, but nothing I've ever focused on.
I went to last week, I went to her Facebook page and the very first thing I did was open up the video, like her feature video is her talking about the problems with antidepressants and psychiatric drugs for treating antidepressant and anxiety.
And it was a good video.
Like I agreed with everything she said, for example, because my book on psychedelics actually takes a very similar attack that we have to question SSRIs and SNRIs.
And that there's very much part of my argument.
So as someone who, you know, just kind of would fall into a world that, I see this and I'm like, yeah, that is a real problem.
And I think it should be discussed.
But then the very next thing I see is her saying, don't wear your masks in public.
Sheltering at home is BS.
And then I go to her site and find out that Viruses, this is one of the sites she's involved with.
Viruses might not actually cause disease.
Disease is being caused by 5G.
There's a whole rabbit hole that I fell into from that initial video where I was like, oh, okay, I get this.
So I would love, Matthew, you to take it over and kind of explain what you think they're coming from and what they're trying to get out of this, this whole questioning COVID right now.
Right.
Well, Questioning COVID seems to be a side project that's coming out of the GreenMedInfo platform.
So Kelly Progan is life partners with Sayerji, who's the founder there.
The front page of the questioning COVID site says right up front germ theory.
I've got it here.
Germ theory is a scientifically bankrupt paradigm based in warfare models of pathogenic invasion.
This theory has been leveraged as an instrument for geopolitical and social control, largely in the form of a vaccination agenda to subdue the populace through coerced and forced bodily penetration and associated disability, mortality and surveillance.
So they kind of wrap it all up right on the front page.
So it's nice that it's transparent, that they're honest about where they stand, but your introductory experience, you know, in this sort of jump between what she has to say about psychiatric medication and the practice of psychiatry and what she has to say about infectious diseases, kind of sums up the conundrum of somebody really willing to move outside of their lane really quickly.
She doesn't have any formal training in epidemiology or infectious infectious diseases.
And I don't think Sarah G does either.
But, but yeah, there's something there's, there's, there's a number of sort of like gateways into that world.
One of them is through her critique from the perspective of a trained psychiatrist of psychiatry.
And the other direction is through, the other gateway is through the yoga world.
And that's where I first, she first came across my, my radar.
So, you know, it's like, it's not like I know that much about their world, but because I study and research cults and abuse crises and, and, you know, I keep on top of that particular, that particular world, I was very interested to see posted in my feed a I was very interested to see posted in my feed a review that she did of a book by a woman named Pamela Dyson, who was one of Yogi Bhajan's, And so I read through this blog and I got to this point.
servants and a victim of clerical sexual abuse for about 16 years, I believe.
And she finally published her memoir.
And so I read through this blog and I got to this point, I've got it here again, where she kind of shows her, Brogan shows her card.
She says, 10 years ago, I would have jumped all over the scandalous expose that is rocking the Kundalini Yoga community.
Okay, so the minimizing language is clear up front.
I would have read Premka, White Bird in a Golden Cage, My Life with Yogi Bhajan, and learned the story of a 25-year-old seeker who, in the 1970s, was held hostage by a malignant guru who held indentured slaves For several decades of his tenure as a self-proclaimed spiritual master, a sexual predator, liar, and manipulator who played with his devotees' lives like pieces on a chessboard.
You know, okay, so that's my moment of your moment where she's criticizing psychiatry, where she's like, she actually sums it up pretty well, and then she flips that into an entire piece of self-promotion with regard to her own affiliation to Kundalini Yoga.
But she does it through a kind of victim-blaming ballet move that comes next.
She says, I would have felt confirmed in my already held belief that men are fundamentally incapable of handling power without corrupting it and abusing those in their midst.
I would have roiled in disgust and indignation Had I already been certified as a Kundalini Yoga teacher as I am today, link, I might have even thrown out all my books, abandoned my early morning meditation practice, and erased the video files in my online program, another link.
By the way, she's reviewing this book and she doesn't link to it, but there's 17 links posted to her own materials on her website.
And then she finishes by saying, and I would have wrapped another cozy layer around my many layers of felt victimhood dependency.
So victimhood is felt.
It's not like a legal term.
It's not that somebody did something to you.
It's something that you've created.
Dependency and ultimate powerlessness that themselves reflected the pain of my own self-judgment, recrimination, and rejection.
So what she does is she basically aggressively misreads Dyson's book.
She even puts the title of her own book into the title of her blog piece, which is amazing.
She's really good actually at flipping this amazing material to her own devices.
But what she does is she basically erases the possibility that Dyson is talking about institutional abuse.
She erases the possibility that Yogi Bhajan was enabled by people who facilitated, who benefited from Like an abusive cultic structure for decades.
That's like, Yogi Bhajan in this sort of review, this non-review of the book, becomes kind of like this trickster figure that Pamela Dyson, through her own internal willpower and her capacity to like overcome and connect with true spirit inside that she's able to sort of, you know, she's able to grasp the benefit of the teaching anyway.
And so what's really interesting is that as a COVID-19 truther, there's this contradiction with that mindset of victim blaming and and denialism, but there's also a continuity there's this contradiction with that mindset of victim blaming and And the contradiction is that the entire
COVID-19 truther perspective is built on notions of organized institutional abuse.
That's like a firm part of the storyline that they have going.
But then the continuity is, but that wouldn't apply to Kundalini Yoga, of course.
But then the continuity that runs through is that somehow the power of the individual is going to see the truth, is going to intuit the nature of reality, is going to do their own research, is going to overcome, is going to find a kind of wholeness within themselves and therefore overcome everything.
And so that really struck me.
And then, I mean, maybe you've seen some other things that you, I've probably spoken for long enough, but there's some other notable things that I think she's doing that are actually comparable to some of the things that Mickey Willis was doing that we discussed last week about Clandemic.
Well, I do wonder, in terms of both I read the review that you had reposted of that book, which wasn't actually a review.
It was a marketing platform for her book.
And then the one that someone had shared on your feed this morning, that her most recent post, why we stay asleep when COVID-19 is trying to wake us up, which she wrote with Sarah Gee, her partner.
And I'm reading, it's just, I mean, it's like 20 bullet points.
And it's every conspiracy theory currently out there with links to Green Med Info and journals of alternative medicine and all of this.
And I'm really trying to wonder what the point is.
What actually are you arguing?
Because one thing I did pick up as I was going through and watching some of her videos is she refers to herself as a renegade doctor.
And there's this sense of like us renegade doctors who have spoken up against the system.
And this seems persistent right now with wellness, yoga, everyone in this.
It's just like, I'm rebelling, but I don't understand truly what they're rebelling against.
Like except some structure, you know?
They're rebelling against the quote-unquote mainstream narrative, right?
They're rebelling against authority figures telling them and us what to do in some kind of way.
I found that particular article fascinating.
I've never seen anything by either of these two people, and I thought of you a lot while I was reading it, Matthew, because she is constantly... I feel like she spends the first half of that article establishing herself as a psychological authority.
So she spends that half talking about attachment disorders, talking about trauma psychology, talking about family dynamics, talking about deep-seated needs that we have that make us vulnerable to a cult-like control But for her, the cult-like control is coming from the government.
It's coming from the mainstream media.
It's coming from the medical establishment, right?
And then she is the one in the second half Who is going to support you in growing up psychologically and one would assume spiritually, but she's very focused on this kind of psychological medicalized language about how she's here to support you in waking up out of that parental Out of being enthralled to some kind of parental authority and really thinking for yourself, but even more than that, feeling for yourself.
So she does, again, that bait-and-switch kind of ballet move that you talked about, Matthew, where she goes from, I see you in your trauma, I believe you in your emotional truth, where the corrupt system and your family and the society and the medical establishment, whatever, have failed you, and I'm here to tell you That you can go deeper into that place and trust your true feeling about what's going on right now.
So there's this intuitive revelation that she's suggesting is possible where you become a sovereign being who completely trusts their perception and their emotions.
And it's your emotional and intuitive perception that's been robbed from you in your trauma and your dysfunctional family and society experience And so all of this becomes woven together again into this heroic narrative where you're going to take the red pill.
And in this case, the red pill is waking up to trusting your resonance about how none of this official story about COVID-19 adds up.
Right.
But the dual presentation of The victim position is really bizarre, because on one hand, victimhood in this discourse is
is weaponized against the person who has a poor self-attitude, but then it's made very real by the person who is subjected to vast impersonal forces that are hell-bent on controlling and removing agency and sovereignty.
So I'm very confused about that actually, that paradox.
It's almost as if it's It's illegal to consider yourself to be a victim psychologically, but it's mandatory that you understand that you have been oppressed by a very vague impersonal force called the government or the WHO or technology.
I'm not quite sure how that pans out.
I mean for me that's kind of the tip-off that we're in spiritual bypass territory where essentially we're gonna talk about painful emotions and traumatic experiences through this lens that These things may have happened and you may rise up and fight back against them to regain your sovereign kind of spiritual warriorhood, but you should never act like a victim.
And it's believing that you're a victim that is the real sin.
And that is the real thing that keeps you stuck.
So you're right.
It's like you are at the effect of this horrible, nefarious plot against you, but the way to fight against it is not to be a victim.
Now, that flip between the two meanings of victimhood and the, it seems to mirror, I don't know if this is a stretch, but it seems to mirror this rhythmic flip that I think I started to bring up a little bit in discussing clandemic last week between I'm going to scare the shit out of you, and then I'm going to be loving and caring and maternal towards you.
Because the other thing that strikes me about looking through most of the materials, and even within sort of the microcosm of each article, is there are content blocks that say you are being You are being harmed in this way and then content blocks almost interchangeably that are saying, but also I have some sort of answer for you or I'm going to take care of you.
Somatically, in interviews or in the selfie videos or the sermons that are so popular, you know, hi everybody, I'd like to tell you something about, you know, how, what's coming up for me with regard to my self-sovereignty.
Like whatever, whatever, there's a standard format for sermonizers like this to go forward and soothe their viewership, their readership.
And it always takes the form of, I am the caregiver, I see you, I'm going to gaze at you lovingly, and I'm going to bring you back into contact with me after we've established this bond through the supposition that things are terrifying.
So yeah.
So yeah, yeah. - I wanna ask this question, something and it relates because of their GreenNet info being an obvious anti-vax site.
Right before we jumped on this call, the last article I was reading, the New York Times just published it talking about how Trump's new vaccine chief works for the pharmaceutical industry, because of course he does, because that's everything in this administration.
And I'm wondering when, when you see, These initiatives that people, and the upswell of the anti-vaxxers right now, why people cannot understand that both the fact that we have a corrupt government that is installing lackeys for industry is true, but vaccines work is also true.
Why people can't understand that both of those things are true?
Well, I think it really points to one of the things that kind of really blew my mind about your essay, Julian, which is that when this sort of intersecting Venn diagram of New Agers and alt-right people start talking about taking the red pill and waking up to reality, they're not actually
There seems to be this notion that they're waking up to something whole, or something wholesome, or that they're going to open their eyes and be in homeopathic New Zealand or something like that, and everything's going to be okay.
And the real story of the Matrix is that Neo wakes up into the devastation of technologized capitalism.
So I don't understand when Elon Musk says, take the red pill, and then uses the rose emoji, as though it's a gift or something like that.
And Ivanka Trump is like, yeah, that's wonderful.
I don't really know, have they- If it's MDMA, the red pill is MDMA, right?
Right.
I suppose, I mean, I suppose that it seems that what they're doing is imagining that this transformational experience wakes them up to something other than the fact that, yes, we live in utter corruption.
I don't know where the second part of the empowerment story is.
Like, what does Neo learn how to do?
He basically just learns how to manage.
You know, he's condemned to a, you know, like in Plato's Cave, he's condemned to a life awake amidst an illusory reality and he just has to manage.
Like, I think I watched through the entire series.
Is there much more of a plot development?
It's not like he rebirths the world, does he?
I think that what is really, the thing that grabbed our subculture so, so completely about The Matrix when it came out, is that after he takes the red pill, he then goes through this period of a kind of spiritual initiation that draws heavily on mythology that we have about martial arts.
Where through the discipline of martial arts, you come into some kind of harmony with the You come into some kind of awareness of your energy that makes you almost superhuman.
You learn how to just relax and flow like water and feel what's coming at you and deflect it, right?
You develop this kind of superhuman, superhero, spiritual quality.
What usually gets left out and forgotten is that he only has that when he's in the simulation.
When he's inside the Matrix, he learns how to bend the rules of the Matrix.
But the real world is horrible.
When he's not in the Matrix, the reality he's been woken up into is really, really scary and dark.
So I think somehow those things get glossed over.
And there's just this idea that fits with the you create your own reality and you can control reality with your mind if you believe, right?
And that that is what the red pill represents, that you're waking up into it.
Now, I think in our current context with how many different People from how many different perspectives are using the notion of the red pill.
When Elon Musk says take the red pill, he just means staying economically shut down for this long is unnecessary.
You know, wake up and realize that we need to reopen and we need to be, you know, commerce needs to start up again, otherwise I'm gonna move my factory.
And that's really what he means, right?
When Ivanka Trump says already taken, she's nodding and winking towards the alt-right.
And the conspiracy theorists and all the people who think that her dad is, you know, this heroic figure who's somehow, you know, whatever the current QAnon version of his busting of pedophile rings and stopping the spread of adrenochrome and whatever else.
Right.
Yeah, so it's classic postmodern material, right?
Because the signifier of the red pill Starts to be, has the content of whatever is projected upon it in terms of the person's perspective.
I mean that's one way of, that's yes, I appreciate the floating signifier aspect of the red pill and I also realize as we're talking about it that we're really asking these folks to have a kind of consistency or to have understood the Matrix or to, you know, or to want to hue to the story in some way or to be Or to be coherent.
And really, it's become a meme that can be fragmented and used in any particular way.
And that gives me, that sort of brings me back to, you know, when any of these people use something like this, what are they actually triggering?
Are they referencing a story or are they referencing an immediate sort of, Jolting affect that people can feel about something related to something that they saw 15 years ago and was about, yeah, self-sovereignty or creating one's own reality.
There's also this phenomenon that's happening with pop culture now where Brad Pascal, Trump's social media writer, says he's created the Death Star and then Trump shares a video of him as Thanos.
And then you have The Matrix, and I was listening to some pundits on Morning Joe, which is Joe I appreciate, talk about this and saying that, trying to explain why they're using imagery of people who ultimately are defeated.
Right.
And it really didn't come across, like I couldn't really understand the points they were trying to make because this is kind of circuitous.
But part of me just feels like it goes back to they just want to own the libs.
Like it doesn't matter.
Like anything that triggers people that don't agree with them.
Right.
And it sounds so simplistic.
And the fact that people who their best interests are being thwarted by what's happening in administration, it doesn't matter.
They just get some sort of dopamine rush from putting out something.
That will just, they feel like it just owns the other side.
I mean, I know that's simplistic, but I really can't make much more sense out of it at this moment.
Yeah, I mean, I think you're just talking about edgelord stuff, right?
I mean, I mean, the sort of needless excessive complication, right?
Yeah, so that in that sense, it's like when they're using Red Pill or any of these popular, it doesn't have to have consistency, right?
How much Of what we're seeing right now.
Again, take Brogan's rambling essay right there.
And I actually thought of you, Julian, because at the end of this just ridiculous mismatched stuff, she posts the logical fallacy.
Like, it was something you've gone to often.
As if she just created this coherent narrative and here's what you have to watch out for.
She says at the beginning of that final section, or maybe it's towards the final section, she says, if you go down the rabbit hole of critical thinking, Then you start to realize all these things, and in the very next little mini paragraph, she references whether it's extraterrestrial reptiles who are trying to control us, or it's 5G.
So she starts spinning these incredibly fanciful kind of options, this menu of options you can choose from.
That would be a more plausible alternative narrative based on the fact that you're going down the rabbit hole of critical thinking.
So the double speak is really wild.
Are you seeing it?
Yeah, yeah.
I'm on that paragraph now.
You know, we're all roughly the same age.
And one of my favorite shows growing up was that miniseries B. It was a movie and then a miniseries.
Oh, right.
And I loved that growing up.
But you know what?
At some point I realized it was science fiction.
Like, when I see people saying, like, in your essay, Julian, the London Real, Brian from London Real, like the whole Brian, we talked about this last week, the David Ick thing, like, if your foundational platform is that we're controlled by reptiles, how am I going to take much else of what you say seriously?
Well, that's because you're not very open-minded, you see.
Yeah, I just don't think... I think that we keep coming around to trying to answer that question from the perspective of plausibility rather than the perspective of what particular emotional need is being either provoked or fulfilled.
And that's why, you know, honestly, you did the work to read through Brogan's last essay.
I really couldn't because what I get from texts like this, this is part of what I said about Eisenstein's essay too.
They're actually good friends.
He went to their wedding.
Which brings up a whole other question around what communities are proximal to each other, and how does information skip over from one demographic to another.
But anyway, the thing that comes across, and maybe this is really a perspective from a cult survivor who knows a lot about charismatic personalities, It's the personality stuff that comes across super clearly.
So when, at the top of the webpage, there's the introductory video where there's this sort of intrusive eye gaze into the webcam and, you know, this kind of angelic
Presentation and absolute certainty to the point of grandiosity with regard to what I'm going to tell you about the nature of reality and the world and the entire medical industry and, you know, pharmaceuticals and COVID-19 and your heart.
Like, there's no scope of practice, there's no boundary around the expertise.
There's a whole sort of, like, totalizing feeling that comes through the performance of the person themselves.
And I can't get beyond that, like, because I know for myself, and I know for, you know, the dozens of Cult survivors that I've spoken to, that was a key sort of attachment feature of their recruitment was, oh, this person seemed to have everything.
They radiated a kind of total knowledge.
And so I don't think it's a matter of what the person says, but how much they say.
Or it's not a matter of whether they make sense But whether they have the correct vocal cadence, you know?
I just hear and feel rhythm and cadence, as I said, and affect, and the eyes are a big thing for me.
So it's that stuff that I, and I also just don't see, I don't see a lot of analysis of it because I think it's very difficult.
You can't, it's very difficult to start getting particular about what you're picking up from the charismatic personality.
And it inevitably sounds like it's ad hominem.
Until you hear somebody say, as I try to say on a regular basis, you know, I'm clued into this stuff because I recognize it in myself, right?
Like, I know what it feels like to inflate myself and to want to sound like I'm an expert in everything.
Let me ask you this, Matthew.
In 1995, I believe, my last two years at Rutgers, I was the religion columnist for the Daily Targum, the school newspaper there.
And one of the assignments that I got was to go to a Sri Sri Ravi Shankar event.
Right.
This was in the suburbs of New Jersey.
And there was just, you know, a group of like, I don't know, 100 people who are all suburban there.
And I was probably the youngest being a college student at the time.
And being there and listening to him, And doing the breathing exercises.
I got it.
I felt amazing after that because I didn't really have, I wasn't practicing yoga.
I was very much an athlete at that point in my life.
And I totally got that.
But at the end, they did a lineup where everyone in the room went around and went down and bowed and touched his feet.
And even then I didn't do that because I was like, this is weird.
Like, why do I appreciate what he said and everything, but, but people were fawning.
I mean, just like crying in front of him and all this.
So I get that.
Charismatic appeal when you're in person.
You mentioned this a few times and I wonder if you've done any work when you talk about the people that gaze into the camera Right.
Does that have the same aspect with people when they when they're watching this?
Oh, I don't, I mean, that's a great question for some, you know, cognitive scientist out there or like, like, neuropsychologist is to, and I think it's going to become more important as we go further into lockdown and, and You know, Zoom is going to have to create protective controls around intrusive gazing or something like that.
I don't know, but like, it's a real thing.
Like, you can tell when the person's doing it and when they have figured out how to, you know, in a theatrical sense, they've figured out how to basically be intimate with the little green dot.
But yeah, but in person, and this brings up this whole question of like, You know, what's going to happen to these high demand groups when lockdown progresses?
Maybe that's another episode, but in person, the intrusive eye gaze is like classic.
It's, you know, and it has like ancient roots as well that are legit.
One of the forms of tantric initiation in a number of Indian wisdom traditions is through diksha, is through the No, what's it called?
I'm getting the wrong word.
Anyway, it's through the gaze.
It's through the sort of lightning-like stare of the preceptor into the student's eyes.
The feeling that you're being seen, but not only seen, but penetrated.
And that the subjectivity of the master is being poured out and becomes unified with your own so that you grasp the same kind of You know, intuitive capacity that they have.
So yeah, it's a real thing.
And there's framing involved.
I mean, take a look at what she does.
She's excellent at it.
She really, really hits all of the aesthetic markers really well.
And yeah, so there's that whole sort of Pre-verbal, non-verbal stuff that I think has to be accounted for as well.
And I think we'll start to answer the question of how could we possibly believe that?
Well, it wasn't really about belief.
It was about a particular kind of, yeah.
It sounds like what we're getting at here is a brain state, right?
That there's some kind of brain state that gets evoked through a certain set of cues and a prolonged experience of those cues.
And then at a certain point, There's this amorphous sense that whatever it is you most deeply needed, that you didn't even know you deeply needed, that pre-verbal place that you're referring to, is somehow then alive in that moment.
It's being met, and it's being known, and it's being tended to, so that Derek, when you're at that Sri Sri Ravi Shankar event, so many of those people are, they're just broken open into feeling like, this man, Seize me.
This man just introduced me to the thing I've been seeking without even knowing I was seeking.
Right.
Right, and the only thing... I have that experience, and I'm similar.
I've been to... Sorry, Julian.
Can you... Julian, sorry.
Your Wi-Fi... You gotta back up.
Your Wi-Fi is, uh... Your Wi-Fi didn't think it through.
Not yet.
Have I returned?
There you are.
Okay, so the last, like, 30 seconds.
Sorry.
It sounded good, but it's just...
There's this brain state in which as the receiver of those cues, of that intense gaze, of that intense presence, of that intense sense of intimacy, my deepest needs, the things I've always wanted to feel but didn't even know I wanted to feel or that I needed are somehow being seen and known and met so that this person seems like they're the one.
They really get it.
It's a kind of falling in love.
It's a falling in love then with all of the additional baggage of the The leader of the tribe, the parent, the one who is in touch with the supernatural.
I think even of Ernest Becker, you know how Ernest Becker talks about how cult leaders, one of the things cult leaders do is they convey subconsciously the notion that they have transcended fear of death.
- Oh, for sure, yeah. - Right.
- Yeah, and the only thing, so what, from the cult literature, what would distinguish you, Derek, from the people who did fawn, and who did bow down, and who were wept, The only research that we really have on that points to something called situational vulnerability.
Meaning that you were probably well resourced in the rest of your life socially, intellectually, and financially.
You knew where you were going, you might have been more or less settled, and other people in the room may not have been.
So I just want to make that point, is that, you know, yeah, we're probably talking about a brain state, but the conditions for plunging into that brain state are, you know, there are some social markers for that.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know if you have listened to The Rabbit Hole yet, produced by New York Times, but it's a fantastic podcast series in which the reporter is able to have access To the entire YouTube view history of a guy who got radicalized to the alt-right and farther over about three years.
So he actually did this forensic study of how this guy followed, went from Stefan Molyneux to all the way down to Gavin McInnes, all the way down to real white nationalists.
But one thing that wasn't covered in the series was the fact that he went through a period where he was actually on YouTube listening to YouTube videos while he was at work for something like 12 to 15 hours per day.
And so not only are we talking about, at this point, are we talking about brain states that can be emotionally contagious within a room, we're also talking about a technology that is designed to feed them to us.
Like, there's no way that you listen to Stefan Molyneux for 12 hours in a day and learn something new.
What's happening, what's got to be happening is that you're being comforted by the guy's voice, by his affect.
You're in love with his body in some way.
That is probably very difficult to describe, very difficult to talk about or analyze.
And that's what I feel is going on with a lot of these influencers that gain such prominence.
I mean, I was even thinking about the fact that it seems... I did read enough of Brogan's material over the last couple of weeks to see that she's using the phrase over and over again.
Where is it?
Let me see.
It's...
Mommy medical system and daddy government, right?
So she's very contemptuous attitude towards people who believe what public health officials tell them.
That's the mommy medical system.
So she infantilizes the reader and then the daddy government.
And so, first of all, I just want to throw in another Canadian comment here.
Like, that is like, The grain of truth in that is that mommy medical system in the United States is completely neglectful and abusive, and daddy government is totally absent.
And so there's a way in which the opportunism of this kind of language slides into a completely dystopian environment and is able to sort of grab hold of these basic archetypal disappointments or failures.
But the thing is, is that like, you know, it's really rich hearing this language coming from somebody who then on the Instagram platform puts up a basic, basically a glamour video of her wedding to Sayer G. And I'm like, You know, as opposed to Mommy Medical System and Daddy Government, there's also this performance of Mommy New Age Healer and Daddy Content Aggregator or something like that.
It's like they offer, too, also a vision of A relationship of communication and sort of messianic work in the world.
And I think that's very attractive as well.
Because the lifestyle stuff is not just about clothes and, you know, and locations and privilege and wealth and stuff like that.
It's also about, oh, are they healthy looking?
And do they have a good relationship?
Or do they seem to have a good relationship?
And could I get married in a place like that as well?
It's aspirational.
Totally aspirational.
So you mentioned how does this deepen as we go further into lockdown, and obviously here we're starting.
States are opening up.
I think it's pretty obvious that they will close down again, which will create more problems, if not in the summer, in the fall and winter, going off past precedent.
The one through line that I saw specifically between one of the Brogan videos and then Plandemic, Mickey specifically says, he links 2020 to Perfect Vision and this is the year we all wake up.
As we go back to the Red Pill in a bit.
But Brogan also says, you know, that's, I mean, that's the name of this is just like, Why we stay asleep when COVID is waking us up.
Again, this is constant throughout religious literature about the next stage happening.
I have no interest, really, in what that next stage is, because the next stage never comes, or else they lose their business.
So, the question is, in a year's time, in two years' time, when people realize that the homeopathic New Zealand is not here, Does this just keep perpetuating?
Do people get fed up?
Or is there another messianic figure who comes in to say, oh, now this is what's happening?
When I think about what I know about cultic dynamics in the brick-and-mortar flesh world, I'm having a hard time understanding what the transition will be like into online spaces.
It's funny, I've reported on, not funny really, but I've reported on maybe four major cultic organizations going through abuse crises over the last three years or something like that.
And all of them are locked down now.
Nobody's going to those retreat centers.
Nobody's going to those local yoga shalas.
Nobody is going on residential retreats.
Nobody's working as a karma yogi.
Nobody is going for satsang or darshan.
Somebody told me that Muji's big ashram in Portugal is falling to pieces.
The garbage is piling up.
There's nobody to clean anything up.
It's just going to be him sitting on a tin pot.
at some point in September, asking for Venmo or something like that.
And so I really wonder what, I mean, cultic control has always been wrapped up in being able to mandate what people do with their bodies, When they do it, how they do it, what they eat, how much they eat, how much they sleep.
Of course online activity disturbs our sleep and our dietary rhythms and stuff like that, but it doesn't do so in an organized way.
And I think it would take some real amazing Intrusive technological control to be able to create a kind of virtual ashram setting in which people are sleeping three hours a night and then I don't what would they even clean would they be would they be would they be mopping their own apartments with with you know Exuberant fascination or something like that?
So I'm not quite sure.
What this leads me to is the hope that somehow the fascination with the online charismatic personality We'll have a time limit to it.
You know, it's like the reason that somebody like Brogan can keep attracting people to Instagram is because she makes public appearances.
Maybe this is a theory.
The reason that Yeah, the reason that the charismatic leader is able to draw people to their online platform is because they're able to communicate some sort of in real life experience.
And my prediction would be that it's going to be harder to recruit people.
And that gives me some sort of hope that this entire sort of screen life that is becoming more and more pervasive is just going to lose its sheen for more and more people.
That, you know, I don't know, people will do more gardening or something like that if they have access to that.
I'm not sure.
I just don't know how the somatic control is going to be maintained.
You mean post-lockdown?
Yeah.
There was the Atlantic, my friend Ben posted this piece that I'm in the middle of reading from the Atlantic today that talked about predicting that after this is over, two years time, whatever, it's actually going to be a very good phase.
They used the precedent of the 1918-19 flu, but then went on to what the Roaring Twenties represented, which of course led to a depression.
But the fact that people actually came together more and were about more lived experiences.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Can we talk about the masks for a moment?
Do you want me to get mine on?
Sure.
I just, I don't want to let this pass.
One of the, as you scroll through, I mean this is all over the place, but I think Brogan has an Instagram post that says, it's just a text post.
I know because I get, I do have Twitter on my phone and I'll get like a notification, but all it'll say is, I don't have Instagram, all it'll say is, she'll post, I posted a picture I'm like, oh, okay, I gotta go find Instagram and see what that is.
Anyway, the thing says, I do not consent to wearing a mask.
Yeah, I saw that.
My body, my choice.
Okay.
I don't think we should let it slide that a basic premise of New Age messianic wellness is the The primacy of subjective experience.
And so it's like, first of all, the meme is based on this misunderstanding that somehow you're wearing it for yourself.
And that it's going to keep you from getting sick.
And that's not what all of the reams and reams of literature say.
And if somebody like Brogan has heard or has an inkling of this idea that, well, actually it's about lowering your own possible rate of transmission or the amount of viral load that you're exhaling, or however they're phrasing it, if that's getting in, then what the person has to do who holds that position is they have to say to themselves, oh, I might actually be sick.
And not know it.
And that violates, like, the prime directive of messianic wellness.
Which is, I know my body.
I know when I am sick and when I'm not sick.
I have done my pranayama.
I have purified my cells.
Or whatever.
I don't believe in bacteria.
We are bacteria.
Whatever the rationalization is.
The conviction is that it's impossible for me to not be well and me not know it.
And that's so incredibly wrong.
Like, anybody who has been diagnosed with cancer, anybody who has... I have a deep vein thrombosis.
You know, my approach to that with the cramping in my calf and the swelling in the bottom of my foot was to massage it.
Like, I knew that something was wrong.
Yeah.
And I didn't have a clue what to do.
It would never have occurred to me that, oh, I just blew up a vein in my leg, and I'm in serious trouble.
But it is intensely insulting to the person who believes absolutely in their intuitive power to understand their inner body, which, to be frank, is a black box to us.
Uh, you know, it's just so insulting.
And that's what, that's what I think that meme is saying.
It's not, it's, it's dressed up in terms of, well, you know, this is symbolic of me being blocked from my free speech, or, you know, I'm not, I'm not scared of coronavirus, so I don't need to protect myself against it.
But really, the message is, no, You're sick.
You might be sick.
And so don't breathe on people.
And when somebody has spent their life, I think, or at least a good part of their adulthood, believing that they exhale rainbows, that's really going to be totally, totally insulting to them.
Hey, we're back!
Go ahead.
Oh, yeah, and I wanted to jump to you, Julian.
But when I When my oncologist looked at my markers when I was diagnosed, I had testicular cancer.
Right.
She had said I probably had had it for growing for two years.
Right.
And I had been vegetarian for 20.
I had been doing yoga for so like, and when you're faced with those moments, you're just like, yeah, there's a lot about biology we don't know.
But Joanne, I wanted to, I want you to say what you want to say, but I also wanted to ask you this too, because you've probably noticed this, this trend of people saying, I take care of my immune system, so I'm not going to wear a mask.
What is that?
Yeah, so there's so many ways in which these These nuances are just completely erased.
And with what you were saying a moment ago, Matthew, I feel like it's both the sense that I reject the idea that I could be sick and not know it because I'm so in tune, right?
But also, I reject the idea that as a sovereign spiritual being, I should be burdened by having to take responsibility for anyone else.
Right.
No one else's work.
Yeah, exactly.
We each create our own reality, each responsible for our own lives and our own feelings and our own experience, and whatever is happening to us is happening through some sort of divine perfection that helps us to learn the lessons that will help us to continue to wake up.
Right, and continue to be enlightened around both the sort of biological scientific understanding of reality but also a community You know, human family kind of sense of like, we're actually doing this for one another.
And that's a beautiful thing.
You could actually frame that as a profoundly spiritual thing.
To say, I care enough about my fellow human beings, but I'm going to wear a mask.
Right.
And I think that there's another connection that I think is really super important, which is the way in which The disbelief that one could be ill and one could be a danger to other people would intersect with forms of unrecognized privilege because the outrage is kind of the same.
Oh, what do you mean that being white and middle class or being male or, you know, having conventionally good looks or something like that can contribute to some sort of harm or some kind of systemic Oppression, what do you mean?
It's like, it's this other sort of unseen thing that feels so natural to you.
It's your own breath.
Oh, it's the color of my own skin.
You wouldn't, you know, how could it possibly be something that I was guilty about?
Which is the misprision.
It's not that you're guilty for perhaps being asymptomatically infectious.
It's that you're responsible for it.
Um, it's, it's, it's not that you're, it's, you know, you don't have to be, you don't have to be a snowflake about being asymptomatically infectious.
It's not about you.
It's not a moral failing.
Which is what really blows me away is that this is proliferated in the yoga...
Oh, we're gonna get your Wi-Fi fixed for next time.
But that this is...
This ideology has proliferated in the yoga community, this sense that this constant for years idea of compassion Altruism, empathy, these higher order emotions, but then when you're actually called upon to use them or put them into practice, it becomes about your personal freedom.
I, you know, yoga was created in such a, one of the most collectivist cultures that we know of historically.
And this idea that, you know, it's an impingement upon freedom is ridiculous.
Uh, I see you moving in real time now, Julian.
So yeah, cause I cut out.
Yeah.
Good.
Yeah, no, I heard you.
Yeah, you know, it goes back to your question right at the beginning, Derek.
And I feel like this is throughout all of these topics that I know we're all sort of passionate about and deeply immersed in our lives, is this failure of being able to recognize nuanced valuing of different things, right?
So, for example, yes, Americans are over-medicalized and don't get enough exercise and should eat more healthy food.
That doesn't mean everything that the medical establishment tells us is dangerous and is a lie.
You can value both sides of that equation.
Yes, it's really good to keep your immune system as healthy as you possibly can and do things that help you to de-stress.
That doesn't magically mean that you don't need a vaccine.
The two exist side by side.
You can value a deep psychological and spiritual contemplative inquiry of the inner life, but that doesn't mean that the laws of physics and the reality of our body politic, that you somehow become immune from those things through whatever you discover in your psycho-spiritual process.
So how to keep talking about these things in ways that doesn't buy into the false dichotomies, to me, seems really important.
I think it's difficult for dichotomies not to escalate in such a period, however, because one of the things that has characterized, you know, the wellness industry and its extreme version of messianic wellness, I just made that up, maybe, I don't know if that's accurate, but like, but it's, why wouldn't, why wouldn't the Brogan crew escalate
In a time of increasing public health crisis and governmental neglect.
Like, it's almost as if the worst an administration does with A public health issue, the more people will turn to this kind of grandiose notion of self-reliance in order to get by.
Like, it makes sense.
It makes sense that there's a there's kind of a feedback loop going, oh, well, we're not going to be taken care of.
And so, you know, we have to connect to source.
We're not going to be told the truth from the White House.
So we're going to have to do our own research.
I mean, the terrible sort of irony of all of this is that people who really do want to connect with their own internal, I don't know, immunity or their invulnerability or their strength or their courage, they have really good reason to want to do it because they're not being taken care of.
