Some wellness influencers offer compelling critiques of Big Pharma, factory farming, and psychiatric malpractice. What happens when their arguments become honeypots for snake oil? In this episode, Derek provides an overview of modern pharma practice and its discontents. Julian delves into the muddy culture of yoga and antidepressants—the bad advice, the stigma, the magical thinking. He also reviews the latest Q-adjacent content of Canadian self-help celebrity Danielle LaPorte, and checks in on Kate Northrup’s interview with Zach Bush.
Derek and Julian interview Matthew about his recent feature investigation on conspirituality power couple, Dr. Kelly Brogan and Sayer Ji. There’s lots of material that didn’t make the final copy, like how Brogan’s conspirituality could endanger the mental health of her online clients, and how her usage of Kundalini Yoga as a supplemental therapy is riddled with false historical and medical claims. Also: why didn’t Sayer Ji denounce QAnon when given the chance?
Finally, Derek digs into the podcast origin story with an interview of Jules Evans, who helped “conspirituality” become an almost-household term.
Show Notes
Inside Kelly Brogan’s Covid-Denying, Vax-Resistant Conspiracy Machine
Popular Health Guru Sayer Ji Curates the Scientific Literature with His Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy
Matthew’s review of Brogan’s “review” of Yogi Bhajan survivor Pamela Dyson’s memoir
From Maharaj to Mahan Tantric: The Construction of Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga
Cognitive Errors and Diagnostic Mistakes: A Case-Based Guide to Critical Thinking in Medicine
An Olive Branch Report on Yogi Bhajan, the abuser
White Bird in a Golden Cage: My Life with Yogi Bhajan
Trump Claims He Invented the Term “Fake News”—Here’ s an Interview With the Guy Who Actually Helped Popularize It
Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content
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As well as our Patreon page at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where every Friday or Saturday we post supporter content, and we try to extend that out.
And in that spirit, we are now also going to launch a Monday podcast.
There is so much information coming at us all of the time, just trying to narrow it down to Thursdays was a little much.
Monday will be a little differently.
They won't be numbered like this one.
Thursday will still be the main podcast, but we're going to do shorts and interviews.
Like this week we have an interview coming up that Matthew conducted with a demonologist, which is fascinating.
And just different ideas and research that we're coming across for the Thursday podcast.
So you don't have to do anything for that.
It's just going to show up in your feed.
Conspiratuality 18.
Psych Pills to Red Pills.
Some wellness influencers offer compelling critiques of big pharma, factory farming, and psychiatric malpractice.
But what happens when their arguments become honey pots for snake oil?
In this episode, Derek provides an overview of modern pharma practice and its discontents.
I'm going to delve into the muddy culture of yoga and psychiatric diagnoses, the bad advice, the stigma, the magical thinking.
I'm also reviewing the latest Q-adjacent content of Canadian self-help celebrity Danielle Laporte and checking in on Kate Northrup, that's Christiane's daughter's interview with Zach Bush.
Derek and I are going to interview Matthew about his recent feature investigation on conspirituality power couple Dr. Kelly Brogan and Sayer G. There's lots of material that didn't make that final copy, like how Brogan's conspirituality could endanger the mental health of her online clients, and how her usage of Kundalini Yoga as a supplemental therapy is riddled with false historical and medical claims.
Also, why didn't Sayerji denounce QAnon when given the chance?
Finally, Derek digs into our podcast origin story with an interview of Jules Evans, who helped make the word conspirituality an almost household term.
When, in January of 2017, the 45th president of our United States referred to CNN as fake news, he co-opted a term that had been popularized by Columbia researcher and later BuzzFeed editor Craig Silverman.
As part of his research, Silverman had been studying the rise of dodgy news websites online, you know, those with a complete lack of journalistic integrity, fact-checking, or grounding in reality.
With regard to online news in general, Silverman also observed a dominant tendency to move too quickly on rumors and promote misinformation to drive traffic and engagement.
As we talk about every week, those mistakes can end up sowing the kinds of conspiracy whispers that metastasize over time and go viral as the spawn of deviant idea sex with other malformed claims.
But of course, now the term fake news usually refers to anything Trump and his supporters don't like.
And that is usually true news.
His gaslighting strategy from the start has been to create misdirected confusion that can both shield him from the ugly facts of his incompetence and corruption and platform his habitual lying as somehow plausible.
Increasing the fog around the information war is a key tactic in conspirituality discourse as well.
We see figures like Mickey Willis in his latest piece preemptively discrediting all fact-checking sites, thus perpetuating the sense that any assessments of truth and falsehood are biased and corrupt.
In the blind kingdom of the Mickey, only the pristine paranoid speculations from within a vacuum of self-contained gonzo research can rise to validity on the tide of his earnest blue eyes.
Which brings me back to Oprah Supersoul 100 leader, Danielle Laporte.
If you don't know her, she's a hugely successful inspirational author of three bestsellers and has a top-ranked website viewed by millions of monthly visitors.
So we can only imagine the size, then, of her email list.
In an August 31st email to her subscribers, Laporte observed that the truly explosive times we are in have been predicted by astrologers and sages and represent the importance of both personal and collective shadow work.
Okay.
Then, of course, she shares a link to a QStyle video of a John Paul Rice movie about child sex trafficking.
But it is her response to this being pointed out to her by a fan as being dangerous misinformation that is really telling.
She writes back, I'm always looking everywhere to find patterns.
Many days I just feel like I am finding shards of truth in a big pile of brokenness.
I'm considering the darkest scenarios.
Now this continues the trend from her IGTV video we talked about a few weeks ago shared to her 247,000 followers in which Laporte described her process of eschewing the label conspiracy theory and finding truth by taking in all information regardless of the source and then looking for patterns.
I noticed too this week that our friend Zach Bush had appeared earlier this month on Christiane Northrup's daughter Kate's podcast to repeat his shtick under the new title, Solutions to the Pandemic You Won't Find in the Mainstream.
It's the same thing, essentially.
Viruses are our friends.
COVID is not a big deal, you know, the usual.
But there is some new sloganeering that emerges about not being anti-vaccine, but instead being pro-immunity, which, by the way, of course, includes his invitation to sign a petition against vaccines.
Oh, and newsflash!
In the same vein, Bush utilizes his inspired emotional oratory to urge, this time, his liberal friends to not vote against Trump, but to vote for something.
What would that something be?
Why?
Less dependence on Big Pharma.
You see, we have created this pandemic story, he calls it, to create the impression that we need a vaccine.
Basically, a vote for Trump is somehow a vote for Zach's brand of natural health, while voting Biden gets us universal health care, and, I kid you not, because we will be so sick under the Dems, we are going to really need universal health care.
Meanwhile, this week, Trump desperately promises a vaccine in time for the election, way before any experts say that it's even possible.
When you mentioned Mickey Willis preemptively striking back against any criticism, obviously we've been dealing with that for four years and now it's reaching a fever pitch with this election and just automatically saying all the ballots are not going to be counted or they're going to be counterfeit or like we're in serious trouble.
And one thing that I thought of when Trump was elected was that Everything filters from the top down.
I've worked for a lot of companies in the past.
And when the top is corrupt, it filters down in ways that you don't even recognize because the environment allows for it.
And we've been living in that right now.
Aspects of the conspirituality field, and I don't know how many of them understand that that's happening, is that we are now living in an environment where that sort of conspiratorial thinking can flourish as well as the fact that The same tactics are happening by these people.
It's just like preemptively strike every time and just say you're going to be criticized.
I mean, Willis was doing that when he said, this is going to get taken off of YouTube and then posting copyrighted material in order for that to happen.
Well, of course it was because that's a tactic.
And if we don't call out these tactics and recognize them for what they are, then we're constantly going to feel blindsided when they actually happen.
I really appreciated, Julian, your focus on Danielle LaPorte and I hope that we link in the podcast notes to a couple of her very intimate selfie sermons.
They're extraordinary.
All of the sort of typical techniques apply of A kind of unearned intimacy and this supreme confidence that, you know, the person is able to speak directly into the soul of each and every one of the 270,000, 247,000 followers.
And there's a lot of the usage of the second person plural omniscient, which I think we've covered before.
So, you know, I know you're feeling like this, I know you're feeling like that.
But the focus on patterns and her appeal to pattern making is really, really a deep issue.
I came across a really wonderful article in Hazlet by Let's see, it's Jess Zimmerman, and it's called This Goes All the Way to the Queen, The Puzzle Book that Drove England to Madness.
We'll put that into the show notes.
But it's about a book called Masquerade, which in 1979 in the UK sent a whole country onto a treasure hunt.
And it was based upon the provocation of what is called apophany.
So there's this paragraph in here that I wanted to share, which is, In 1958, German neurologist Klaus Konrad coined the term apophany to describe schizophrenic patients' tendency to imbue random events with personal meaning.
And apophany has the form factor of an epiphany, the sense of breakthrough, of events finally coming together and making sense, but without any relationship to real explanations.
But though Conrad focused on instances of apophany occurring with psychosis, the phenomenon he described applies to the ill and the well alike.
Now called apophenia, the instinct to pick out patterns from meaningless information is essentially So, we'll put that into the show notes and it's a great essay and it reminded me of my entire training in Vedic or East Indian astrology because that was the entire
ballgame, which was if you were able to meditate lucidly enough or in such an enraptured state on the angles, the relationships, the views, the houses, the constellations, the particular houses of the moon, if you were able to meditate on that incredible kind of
Necker cube of data points that were always spinning around and always moving like some big Rube Goldberg machine.
The idea was that eventually you would have some kind of paranormal insight into what was going to happen next week.
And you can actually get to the point where in being with that material where you're so entranced and almost have this worshipful attitude towards the movement of the cosmos that You really do conflate that with a sense of I know what is happening instead of I'm in a trance with the beauty of the world.
It's this confusion of art with divination as well, which I think is really tricky because it feels like a beautiful activity.
And I don't know whether Laporte actually knows anything about astrology or went into it big time.
Like, its pattern making and its art forms are extraordinarily powerful, and they can be gamed, obviously, as we're seeing now.
Yeah, and the literal, the crossing over the threshold into the literal sense that the cosmos is talking to me, right?
That something has been revealed to me that is coming from somewhere other than my trance state.
That's a powerful step that I wish more people would sort of pull back from.
And there's two pieces too, right, Matthew?
There's the seeking of patterns and the revelatory apophany.
And then there's the other side of what we've just been talking about, which is what Stephen Law, the philosopher, calls going nuclear in any kind of argument.
And when you go nuclear, basically you just blow up any possible way of referencing facts or evidence or logic.
Right.
And you say, well, no, this is beyond all of that.
And besides, you can't trust any of that because that's all part of some kind of biased propaganda, Western materialist, you know, you name it.
You can slander any attempt to find a common sense of truth.
And once you're there, You know, then anything goes.
And then claims of revelation, dressed up in whatever way you like, can become the norm.
Right.
And I think that, like, I'm able to see that, you know, having gone through this process as it unfolds in, you know, the hurried time of social media when I'm looking at something like what Laporte is delivering.
You know, there is something, however, to the fact that The entrainment processes of pattern finding in pre-modern forms of divination don't go quickly.
They're not fast.
They depend upon the induction of a trance state, really, and that happens in a ritual context and it happens You know, in a communal context.
And so, there's also something really odd about the fact that this pattern formation and divination that happens online is just unearned as well.
It's not even like, it's not even drawing on the graciousness of the older art form.
It's not like that.
It's like asking people to make this charismatic leap into Daniel Laporte's eyes.
Well, and the more superficial the trance, the more likely the literalist interpretation.
Yeah, I bet.
I would like to see some data to show that, but my gut says that that's probably on point, yeah.
There is also, I want to reference the end of my interview with Jules Evans.
First off, he brings up the I don't know if he coins this term, but critical spirituality, which I am going to steal, as I stole conspirituality from him in the first place, and you'll hear about all that.
I bring up, because he's writing a book on Algis Huxley and Julian Huxley and the Huxley family, about non-specific amplifiers.
I brought up psychedelics into the conversation, and he made the really important point that We often view spirituality as a way, a liberal way of being where everyone is included, but historically that's not how it played out and he references the Nazis embodying yoga and yogis embodying nationalism.
And when you get into, when I hear these, This rhetorical style that LaPorte has and others we've talked about, like Zach Bush has, where they kind of spin around a lot of words and they're really just, in my eyes, amping people up to project whatever's going on in them already is just kind of whirled up and projected forward.
It doesn't lead you to somewhere that necessarily brings people together.
And in some ways, when I listened to that LaPorte clip, it just It makes me think that it's actually creating a deeper wedge between what needs to be expressed and what people's pre-existing biases already express.
You know, I did actually just watch the first, you know, with kids we can never watch anything all the way through, so I've gotten through the first hour or so of The Social Dilemma, and I don't know whether I should watch the last 20 minutes, but they're kind of rolling their heads if you can't see.
So one thing that just occurred to me is that there's a There's a psychological feedback loop that begins to manifest through what you're describing in terms of this amping up that coincides with the algorithm's accentuating engagement
And the phrase, you know, you are the product of social media comes to mind and there's a really powerful intersection there because with the self-help guru who is really not giving you any data but amping you up, you have become the product of their content.
Not only that, you're also the recruiter and the salesperson, right?
Right, exactly.
So with all of the sharing and the validation and the emojis and all of that, it's incredible.
I didn't think about that until this moment, actually, of the intersection of those two feedback loops.
Well, that actually leads into my piece this week because it's something I want to discuss with you when we talk about your article.
And I think it is also important to recognize that one of the chronic problems that I know I have, and I'm sure that both of you have suffered from, is because if you try to express your interest in one thing, you're is because if you try to express your interest in one thing, you're automatically pushed to the furthest edge of Again, I've mentioned this numerous times, vaccines.
Vaccines, work, and pharmaceutical companies are corrupt.
And I think that's especially important to point out this week because as I've mentioned, my book on psychedelic therapy is coming out soon and I've spent the last year really digging into the pharmaceutical industry and how it actually became an industry.
And I want to briefly touch upon that now leading up to our discussion of the main topic, which is Matthew's article.
The pharmacological revolution begins with the synthesizing of phenothiazines in 1880 This bit of alchemy occurred when Nobel Prize winning chemist Paul Ehrlich tinkered with methylene blue, an ingredient in a textile dye.
He speculated that it could treat malaria, but that didn't work out.
Yet something was happening.
The medical community began investigating an entirely new class of chemicals for potential treatments in mental health.
In 1946, an enterprising researcher discovered that a phenothiazine called promethazine helped alleviate the distress of allergies.
Three years later, patients in a maritime hospital in Tunisia were given promethazine to address histaminic responses during surgery.
The doctors noticed it had a peculiar side effect.
It made soldiers calm and somnolent.
So the pharmacological revolution in mental health had begun.
The status of psychiatrists who were previously engaged in various forms of talk therapy grew along with these drugs.
Patients started turning toward them for advice in a manner similar to heart attack victims seeking counsel from a cardiac surgeon.
This was not a random occurrence.
Psychiatrists were hungry for acceptance in the medical community.
They wanted prescribing power just like other doctors.
And this trend reached an apex in 1947 when NYU professor Howard Rusk wrote in a New York Times column, We must realize that mental problems are just as real as physical disease and that anxiety and depression require active therapy as much as appendicitis or pneumonia.
And this was a watershed moment for the discipline of psychiatry.
I just want to point out that Howard Rusk is the father of rehabilitation medicine.
He did a lot of amazing work.
I think that he was just going along with the times at this moment when he said that and he could not have foreseen what was going to happen.
Now, cancer is visible underneath a microscope, which affords oncologists a certain stature.
You can physically point out cancer cells while explaining how they're causing the body to attack itself.
But by pinning issues like anxiety and depression to the brain, psychiatrists were placed on the same pedestal even though there was nothing physical to point to.
Without the ability to read blood work or x-rays, psychiatrists began treating the consequences of anxiety as the causes of anxiety.
And this of course resulted in the chemical imbalance theory of the brain, which says that serotonin levels are compromised.
I'm not going to spend all of my time discussing pharmacology because that would take this entire episode and then probably a few more.
So suffice to say for now, this chemical imbalance theory has been disproven since the 70s.
There has been little difference between the control groups and the drug groups when they're measuring brain chemistry.
Yet a conspiracy of forces have kept this notion alive for generations.
So, let's rewind and see how that happened.
The American Medical Association was founded in 1847, and it served as a watchdog, overseeing the increasing number of pharmacological products that were hitting pharmacy shelves.
But that role stopped in 1952, when the AMA began accepting advertising dollars from drug manufacturers even for unvetted substances.
And then they began working with doctors and pharmaceutical companies to actively promote new drugs.
The pharmaceutical industry, in conjunction with the psychiatry industry, enjoyed its first billion-dollar year in 1957 in large part due to the first blockbuster drug ever called Miltown.
By 1960, the AMA was raking in $10 million in advertising revenue alone, even though a 1959 review found that 89% of those ads offered no information regarding side effects.
Now here's why I got interested in this entire story in the first place.
I grew up in Milltown.
The Czechoslovakia pharmacologist Frank Berger believed that the drug offered the same sedative effects as being in the borough that I grew up in, and he had moved to New Jersey from Czechoslovakia in 1950.
And he was right.
Milltown is like living in a twilight state.
But it's also a profoundly racist community.
So this is all a fitting metaphor for the history of pharmaceuticals.
The targeted effect of these drugs have side effects we don't discuss nearly enough.
Milltown was huge.
The pharmaceutical company behind it even paid Salvador Dali $35,000 to create an exhibit called Chrysalida that captured the feeling of being on that tranquilizer.
And as this keeps happening though, doctors eventually realized the risks of the drug outweighed the benefits, and so Milltown addicts started flooding treatment centers.
In reality, we don't have an opioid crisis today.
We've had many opioid crises over the last century and Milltown was the blueprint.
And in fact, way more Americans were on tranquilizers in the 1960s, up to one in three adults, than were doing psychedelics.
But we just happen to focus on the hippie revolution and we've kept the story of our tranquilization quiet for decades.
So, every decade since, there have been blockbuster drugs that take the edge off, that calm anxiety, that treat depression, a whole list of whatever's wrong with society at the time.
And don't get me wrong, there are serious mental health issues that pharmacological interventions help, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
But somehow in the pharmacology talk, all mental health issues tend to get lumped together.
Antidepressants even show efficacy over short-term use.
It's how I used Xanax for six months while dealing with the worst stretch of my panic disorder.
The problem is that there has never been any long-term studies done on these drugs.
The entire approval process is misleading.
In order to be considered for FDA approval, a new drug must outperform placebo in two clinical trials.
How much better is irrelevant?
If the placebo works 10% of the time and the drug 15%, that's a pass.
Now, even worse, if drug companies don't like the result of a trial, they can just scrap it, not report it, and do it again.
They simply don't report the data they don't like.
Researchers scoured 47 unpublished studies on six popular antidepressants, Celexa, Avexor, Paxil, Prozac, Serzone, and Zoloft, and discovered that only 20 of those studies showed efficacy over placebo.
You would think a $17 billion industry could do better than 43%.
And here's another thing.
There has never been any tapering protocols that we know work.
I was fortunate in that I never took Xanic more than twice a week and usually less when I was on it.
I only took it on days when I felt especially jittery, which is how these drugs are tested to be consumed, but that's not how they're sold.
We've been a medicated nation for nearly 80 years, and for the most part, we've been flying blind the entire time.
So, this is where we get to this week's focus.
As I mentioned, I've spent the last year writing a book on psychedelics and psychedelic therapy.
And as of this coming weekend, I'll be on my last edit, which means I'll be able to publish it in October, finally.
But I realized a year ago, if I wanted to make the case for psychedelics, I had to understand the current protocols on the market.
Like I said, antidepressants do help some people, but not nearly the amount of people that take them.
You can't have increasing numbers of prescriptions and increasing numbers of patients every year.
And there is no way that 6 million children in America need to be on ADHD medication, which is completely altering their neurochemistry during their developmental phase and setting them up for a lifetime of dependence.
That is not medicine.
It's the medical industry unchecked in a for-profit healthcare market.
But what I've also noticed in this year are the equally dangerous messages about mental health from the other side.
The notion that if you suffer from a mental health disorder, the fault lies not in your neurochemistry, but in your willpower.
The idea that your mental health is all on you, not the environment, not racism, not your financial situation or that of the country, not trauma or abuse.
This idea that you should be able to rise above all of these factors with a few well-timed Instagram memes and transcend your victim narrative.
So I've pulled those examples specifically from one character and now I'm going to ask Matthew.
Why did you choose to investigate one of the biggest proponents of this mindset, Kelly Brogan, in your recent article?
Well, it's a bit of a story and I didn't really choose it so much as fall into it through this adjacent research category.
I don't know anything, I didn't know anything about the world that you just really cogently described.
But as a cult researcher, I've been monitoring and watching all of the various stories break about institutional abuse in various yoga groups.
And so I came across Brogan back in February of this year, which seems like a million years ago, when she published this strange review of a book called, well, it's a strange review.
And the review was called Yogi Bhajan and the Kundalini Community, Premka's Own Yourself Journey.
Now, Premka's Own Yourself Journey, Premka is actually in the title of the book that she's reviewing, but she kind of overlooks that entirely.
And the review itself is extraordinarily sophisticated and self-serving at the same time.
And I was just fascinated as a cultic studies researcher.
So Pamela Dyson is the author of the book called Premka One.
White Bird in a Golden Cage, My Life with Yogi Bhajan.
Her last name is Dyson, so it's Pamela Dyson.
And the memoir covers her 16 years as Yogi Bhajan's secretary.
He's the founder of Kundalini Yoga.
But, of course, being his secretary means, and we know more details now even, that she was also a survivor of near-constant sexual, psychological, and financial abuse.
Now, her memoir followed on other public documentation of Bhajan as an abuser, including testimony, court testimony from a woman named Catherine Felt, who accused Bhajan of abusing her as a child.
And since then, since Premka's book has been released, and partially because of it, there's been an independent investigation that found that Bhajan sexually abused women and minors constantly throughout his yoga evangelical career.
So, Brogan didn't have that investigation report back then, so her review might have looked differently if she had, so there's that.
But nonetheless, I was fascinated by what Brogan's blog did, which was to use Dyson's book, which, you know, for her took decades to write, to validate and advertise her own self-help book.
And it's right there in the blog title.
Own Yourself, as I mentioned, is Brogan's latest book published in 2019.
And her blog even pings Dyson's subtitle in the last line of the first paragraph where she writes, I couldn't see then how my yes, all men narrative only served to lock me more securely in my own cage.
Dyson's subtitle, as I mentioned, is White Bird in a Golden Cage.
And then I saw that Brogan linked to the title of Dyson's book But then the link is to a search page for the keyword Kundalini on her own site.
And so I was like, who does this?
Like, what's going on here?
Charles Eisenstein does this.
Oh, like internal linking only?
Yeah.
Well, remember when the critique of his was posted and he linked to it when he critiqued it, yeah.
Right, okay.
So, you know, it was really sort of almost perfect blog-sploitation formula.
You know, it opens with personal detail to create intimacy, and then she made these broad-brush statements to clearly establish her brand, and it was all built on the back of a prominent story, which of course increases the reach of the blog post.
So, you know, in it she says that Dyson's book is a scandalous expose, Not a disclosure of abuse, but something contrived to, you know, provoke outrage or pearl-clutching.
She says that Brogan is a certified Kundalini instructor and that if she was less mature, Dyson's revelations would make her question her affiliation with the group in practice and maybe consider pulling back from monetizing it.
She also references Byron Katie as being a great reference for You know, a Kundalini psychiatrist to use.
If you don't know, Katie is the self-help guru who once asked, you know, quote, can you know that Hitler didn't bring more people to realization than Jesus?
And then it just goes on and on.
And as you referenced, Derek, the main focus is that, you know, Pamela Dyson avoids You know, producing her memoir through a quote-unquote victim narrative and that's why it's a great book.
And she does all of this while linking to her own website 17 times.
Here's one paragraph just to give you a taste.
She says, 10 years ago I would have jumped all over the scandalous expose that is rocking the kundalini yoga community
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.
That's all actually accurate.
But then she says, I would have felt, then she pivots and 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.
And that's how she sort of frames the entire argument, which was just incredible.
And so I wrote a little sort of critique of this review that was incredulous.
And one of Dr. Brogan's ex-clients got in touch with me and said, you know, you're really onto something.
And so we started talking and that's how it progressed from there.
So yeah, that's a little bit of the background.
And, you know, then of course the role that Kundalini Yoga and spirituality actually plays in her therapeutic approach is, you know, a key point of the article, but then also a lot of the background that didn't get into it.
How do you go from, and I set this up for a reason because I wanted to point out the fact that I am extremely wary of the pharmaceutical industry and the psychiatry industry, and I've seen interviews with Kelly where I'm totally like, yes, totally on point.
You're saying so many things.
But how do you go from there to COVID being a PSYOP?
And how are you even, as a psychiatrist, how are you qualified to even say such a thing?
Well, it's a really great question, but there's a really powerful through-line that makes a lot of sense.
She describes in very moving terms in many blog posts and in her 2019 book, and also in an interview that she does with her friend Charles Eisenstein, her growing Almost nausea at the recognition of the bankruptcy of psychiatric practice and polypharmacy.
Basically, you gave a great introduction to her own psychiatric critical position in this lead-in, Derek, and I think she would be agreeing with everything that you said as well.
What she says to Eisenstein is that basically she was horrified that on very weak evidence and very flawed training and the undue influence of the pharmaceutical industry that she was empowered as a physician to
um forcibly confine or commit or institutionalize somebody who is having uh mental health issues that she could deprive them of liberty that she could shoot them against their consent up with you know a sedative drug if if you know if cause was given uh and and deprive them of their civil liberties and so the notion that
That she wielded a kind of authority over her patients was something that was, she describes as being very distasteful and she also very poignantly describes the possibility of that authority leading to very distorted power dynamics within the therapeutic relationship.
And so that's all on point.
Then there's this sort of Macrocosmic leap that gets made once COVID comes around to suggest that actually everybody who holds a position of authority or, you know, knowledge or credibility within public health is actually in the same position that psychiatrists are in.
They have these very weak criteria for being able to determine how People's liberties should be handled, and they can also be lied to by what she describes as the hexes of modern medicine.
So, one of the huge through lines in her writing is that all of the language that comes from the DSM actually contributes to this self-fulfilling prophecy.
That as soon as you, you know, say that somebody is, you know, has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, the label transcends or over, you know, it wipes out their humanity.
It deprives them of agency.
It makes them enslaved to the therapeutic process and to the drugs that attend it.
And so, she takes that analysis and then sort of just bumps it up, you know, to the global category of worldwide epidemiology and makes this assumption that everybody in public health is abusing their power in the same way.
There's other elements in there as well, but I think that's the basic structure of how that happens.
Yeah, I mean, it's this black and white thinking that Derek was speaking to earlier in terms of being able to recognize that, for example, vaccines work and big pharma has a lot of things that we can critique.
The totalizing kind of intensity of her black and white analysis is so striking to me and I want to go back to something that we shouldn't gloss over, right, which is that in the article that you're describing where she's talking about, was it Premka's book?
Right, Pamela Dyson.
When she's talking about Pamela Dyson's book, here we have a gut-wrenching account of many years, decades of abuse.
And here's someone who is supposed to be a psychiatric, psychological professional who is co-opting that story in order to push this very bizarre notion that the way in which you become a spiritual adult who's not prone to victim narrative is you really psychological professional who is co-opting that story in order to push this very bizarre notion that the way in which you become a spiritual adult So I'm trying to grapple with all of this, right?
Because there's this horrible anti-psychological spiritual bypass kind of messaging and then it's combined with a different kind of victim mentality around anything that has to do with medication, right?
And that you're being victimized by anyone who has any kind of power over you, whether it's public health or psychiatry.
And of course, there are valid criticisms mixed in, which always makes it more dangerous.
It's the half-truth that kills you.
And so in that category, the way to be really empowered and adult and liberated and own your journey is to refuse any of that kind of imposition on you.
It's just all very confusing and weird.
Right.
Well, I'm really glad that you brought out that paradox, which, you know, I probably could have spent more time on had I, you know, been given more space within the article.
That, you know, victim narratives around what has happened to you and, you know, victim narratives in scare quotes around what has happened to you or what another person has done to you or, you know, self-perceptions or self...
You know self self-respect issues that have built up over time in negative ways All of those are illegal but to to imagine yourself as the victim of an authoritarian state and a public health system that is out to
Harm your health through vaccination, is out to biotag you, is out to simply make money off of your belief that you are ill.
It's kind of incredible and it's a real clash.
It was something that I struggled to understand.
Being scared of the virus was illegal, but being scared of the public health official, or being scared of the CDC, or at least doubting the CDC and the WHO because they are so corrupt, that that fear, that notion that you're being victimized, that that was okay, that that was something to promote, actually.
Yeah, and the other thing I want to just toss in here too, which is just screaming in my head, is the ethical issues here are just thick and ugly.
I think there are good reasons why psychological professionals are kept within some fairly tight guidelines about how much influence they can have over people's beliefs and over confidentiality.
I mean, not that she broke confidentiality with Dyson's book, but nonetheless, she's exploiting someone else's deeply personal, painful narrative in order to push her own agenda.
It's just...
I didn't actually consider that.
That's a really good point, that to use her professional credential as a kind of point of validation for psychoanalyzing Pamela Dyson through her book, that's problematic.
One thing that I wasn't able to dig too much into was what kind of Supervision or support structure Brogan would have been beholden to through her certifications with the ABPN.
So I'm still not clear on that.
But yeah, it just seemed like in everything that I encountered, it seemed like she was making her own decisions based upon, you know, her own sort of very passionate beliefs.
It was all her.
It was all her.
Keep hold of the thread here and also for listeners for some information because part of what you said about Brogan, part of her perception of this is correct.
Part of it, though, and that's the key point.
In 1962, the Kefauver-Harris amendments were passed, which required that disease specificity be made for mental health conditions.
In the 1950s, I could go to a doctor and say I have the Blas and get a tranquilizer.
The BLAS was something that people... I just feel bad.
I want to tranquilize.
That was totally fine.
In 1962, that changed.
The first DSM, and the DSM for people who don't know is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
It's the Bible of psychiatry.
Basically, it's updated every 15 years or so to just keep up with what the science has learned, but here's the problem, and this is where the intersection happens.
In 1952, DSM-1 came out and it listed 106 mental health conditions over 130 pages.
The last edition was published in 2013, that was the DSM-5, and it lists somewhere between 157 and 600 mental health conditions.
So, there's 600, but experts disagree over how many of them can really be chopped up into different conditions, but it's 947 pages compared to 130 pages.
And so, there is a real problem of over-diagnosing or creating diagnoses to fit conditions to sell pills.
That is a really valid criticism.
The problem is, there's two problems.
One is It doesn't apply to everyone.
Bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, those are real conditions.
And the other problem is that the people on the board, two-thirds of people on the DSM task force and 56% of panel members have ties with the pharmaceutical industry.
So that is, again, really a problem.
The thing is people actually need these pills.
And I don't want to get too caught up on pharmacology because I want to get back to your piece, but this is My question about this, those are valid concerns.
Some people need pharmacological intervention.
It's been shown that in conjunction with psychotherapy, the pills are more effective than if you just give the pills and let the patient go on their own.
But the biggest challenge that has been talked about for a long time in psychiatry is the environment, what I mentioned in my prologue to this.
And so I want to know, in your research, does Kelly Brogan, do they bring up racism?
Do they bring up trauma?
As people needing help from it not being their own willpower, do they talk about the environment in the mental health space?
Well, yes and no.
I mean, trauma is an often used term within Brogan's writing, but there's a vagueness to it that generally tends towards the personal and the childhood related.
I didn't come across any material that suggested that, you know, systemic injustice could be traumatizing or that
uh or or that or that you know the social determinants of health and mental health were something to really focus on um so so i i can't say that i i i saw anything like that there is a a video that came from that didn't get into the article that came from Her online group called Vital Life Project, in which I'll paraphrase here very carefully.
She bays 12 minutes long.
She would release these kind of little sermons as quote unquote musings every once in a while to these online groups.
And in one of them, she actually talks about how she, during the Black Lives Matter sort of season that we had and after George Floyd's death, she doesn't reference that directly.
But she opens her musing by saying, it is of interest to me, this is a paraphrase, not a direct quote, that most of the members in these online communities are not people of color.
And I'm wondering, and then she goes on to speculate that maybe the collective victim narratives are too thick at this point or too heavy at this point to really grasp hold of the personal empowerment aspects of mental health and then she goes on to speculate that maybe the collective
And so, yeah, there was at least an attempt to address the fact that the groups are very non-diverse, but also it was a very clumsy attempt. but also it was a very clumsy attempt.
She even references the fact that she gave her programming materials, some of her programming materials, to some friends of her who were people of color, and she was really mystified when they didn't complete the materials, and she wondered why, you know, she kind of speculated on why they might be blocked, and I'm like, I can think of a number of reasons.
Maybe it wasn't good for them.
Anyway, there's no real engagement.
Maybe it wasn't good for them.
Anyway, yeah, that was, yeah.
So anyway, there's no real engagement.
In fact, there was one source for the article.
This also went the way of editorial trimming just because, I mean, it was a long article and this would have required another three paragraphs, but one of the sources described how when Brogan did not address but one of the sources described how when Brogan did not address BLM using her platform on Instagram, she was called out on
And then there were deletions of comments and blockages of comments, and I believe that also happened in some of the online groups as well.
So yeah, there isn't a clear engagement with the social determinants of health at all.
This is always, I think, such a huge red flag around the self-empowerment, you know, overcome the victim narrative, become sovereign.
You can be the master of your own destiny kind of languaging is that it not only does it often overlook the reality of trauma and how trauma really affects people, but it overlooks Oppression and racism and all the different reasons why people cannot do that and what you just said in terms of what you shared in that group, she's echoing Carolyn Mace from the 90s.
I remember when all my friends were deep into Carolyn Mace in the 1990s and I remember hearing on one of her lectures her saying, it does not surprise me that African Americans and gays are people with the highest rate of HIV because they carry the most victim mentality in our culture.
Oh my god.
Yeah, that was just straight right out blatant.
I suppose that messaging has had to get more sophisticated.
But it always serves the same purpose, right?
Which is to convince people with privilege that their karma has made them so, right?
That somehow you're exactly where you're meant to be and don't bother yourself too much with concerns about people less privileged than yourself.
They're just manifesting where they're at in their state of consciousness or some shit, right?
Yeah, it's incredible.
It's really incredible.
I wanted to ask you, Matthew, because I'm really curious, did you talk to any psychiatrists in terms of their perspective?
You know, it's really interesting that you ask because, and I'll loop something back into what Derek said, all of the sources for this article, you know, have experience with recovering from and dealing with mental health issues.
Within the online groups through which they're consuming Brogan's content, there's a big focus upon tapering away from the medications that they're on, and there are some speed and ethical and tactical issues to explore there as well.
But one of the things that became apparent in speaking to the sources who were all extraordinarily educated.
And one of the wonderful things I found out, I mean it's kind of tragic at the same time, is that the highest amount of support, the strongest support that anybody gets within these communities, so long-term psychiatric diagnoses, mental health challenges, long-term interaction with You know, polypharmacy and psychopharmacy, many different therapists, really, you know, difficult, difficult pathways and stories.
They all say that the most support and education they have ever received is from each other.
And that happens in online forums.
And, you know, some of them will refer me, some of them referred me on to the research of A psychiatrist who's also somebody who has recovered from withdrawal sickness and his name is Mark Horowitz and I believe he's in Australia and I tried reaching out to him a number of times.
I don't know if he got my emails but he published some very compelling research that suggested that
Tapering protocols in general are probably for most people ill-conceived if they play out over two to four months or whatever the standard is, that safe tapering for most of these medications might take up to a year or two years or five years because of course the tapering process has to be actually an infinitesimally
You know, reducing process over time.
So, I reached out to him.
There was another doctor who I was able to speak to about tapering who's published some good research, but they were not willing to go on record because I think the state of the industry is, or the discipline right now, is such that
Tapering as a necessity for many people is seen as a generally good thing and to strongly criticize somebody's way of doing it within the discipline might cause more harm to that general project than good.
So there was a lot of, I felt a lot of hesitancy around, you know, the Psychiatric professionals that I sort of got close to, to say, you know, no, this is not a safe protocol, or this is not good practice, if I was to feed them the details.
Like even Robert Whitaker, who gave me a lot of great background and a wonderful interview, He was very polite and hesitant to criticize the general landscape of Brogan's practice and I think that's because it's just widely acknowledged within recovery and tapering communities that this has to happen and we have to be very careful about how we
You know, potentially demonize the process or equate the process with some kind of quackery.
People are learning how to do it on their own, and they are learning to do it in very unique ways, and they're learning to do it from a whole bunch of different sources.
I think a lot of people are, yeah, as I said, just hesitant to invalidate the need, the desperate need that this population feels to break free of really psychiatric malpractice.
I'll point people to the documentary, Medicating Normal.
I talked to the director on my own podcast a few weeks ago, but there's a whole section in that where they talk about tapering protocols, where the people who are the subjects of the documentary show their tapering protocols.
And it's insane.
It's insane what they have to do, the way they chop it up and weigh it by just a 0.10 of a milligram.
It's really disconcerting and part of the problem is we don't know what these drugs do to the brain.
We don't know.
We've only observed behavioral effects.
We don't know what actually is happening.
I covered this study a few months ago for Big Think.
It's really disconcerting that a lot of the major antidepressants were showing side effects two years and longer after people got off of them.
Trouble sleeping, trouble having sex, falling back into depression, worse suicidal ideation afterwards.
Which brings me to the question in your article you write about.
There's a moment where I don't know where she posted it, but comparing what is happening right now with the pandemic and lockdown to the beginnings of a holocaust, that language itself is just super troubling.
But besides that, what dangers of this type of prescriptive advice that she's giving do you see that people can fall into because of this sort of advice?
I think it's difficult to say because my interview data was with the single ex-patient, Jillian.
So in a clinical sense, it's hard for me to say.
And of course, she describes a terrible outcome.
And to be fair, Brogan in her book, Own Yourself, goes on at length at the difficulty of the tapering process.
She calls it a, you know, a Herculean effort.
She says that it will provoke a dark night of the soul.
And here is where the, here's where the, I think the danger point lies is not necessarily in what any individual client
you know experiences it would be very hard to to track them all there's some other things around like you know whether or not people feel that they have been encouraged too strongly to taper too quickly because of the aspirational advice so that's kind of another issue but the way in which Brogan describes the sort of ultimate meaning of the tapering process is in terms of a spiritual transformation
And so it allows her to, it allows her to, you know, suggest that, well, you know, either you're ready for it or you're not, or, you know, this is a very difficult path that you have to walk.
And, you know, she's saying these types of things to the woman that we call Jillian in my article while she's suffering from akathisia and can't, you know, control her shaking.
And so it's almost like, There's a really amazing deconstruction that Brogan offers of contemporary psychiatry and its discontents.
And then when it comes to, well, what are we actually going to offer in its place?
What is offered eventually, or at the edge of one's knowledge, at the edge of her knowledge, at the edge of the discipline's knowledge, is religion, is religion and spiritual transformation.
And what that means is that You know, the person who fails, and I had a number of clients tell me that she would say that she had a 100% success rate.
So that was a common thing that was said.
And in fact, I think Jillian is quoted in the article as saying, you know, I didn't want to be the one person that had failed the tapering process.
So I think like the fact that the fact of the matter is, is that nobody really knows how Tapering should progress.
There's no standard for it.
What I suss out is attitudes, right?
There are attitudes of extreme caution, extreme, you know, here are all of the social supports and the familial supports and the work and the lifestyle supports that you will need as you go through this.
And you're also going to need tight monitoring, and maybe, you know, you're going to have to go back on a certain medication at a certain point.
Like, the most conservative advice really feels like it's helping a person very gingerly, as though they are blind, step slowly away from the edge of a cliff, very slowly, in the middle of the night, and going step by step and having their hand held all the way.
And I think in Brogan's book, to be honest, and in the language that she puts out, to think that people are going to hold your hand through that step by step would be an indication that you weren't doing the work yourself.
She does say a lot about the community support online is going to be really helpful as you contemplate this process.
But when it comes down to it, the attitude is kind of like, well, we've reached the end of our knowledge.
Now you're on your own with God.
And if you're not square with God, then, you know, I don't know, maybe you're not ready for it.
One of the metaphors that I didn't put into the article that she uses in her book is, you know, she suggests that the way in which you taper from a medication is quite impacted by how you perceive that medication to be.
And if you understand that the medication you're taking is like rat poison, then you would stop immediately.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
Right, right.
So, I mean, it's like, on one level, it's plausible.
There's all of this stuff around how people have medication injuries and people are poisoned by this stuff, and there can be all kinds of terrible outcomes.
But then to suggest that it's a substance that you were sort of...
I mean, it's more that intense black and white thinking, right?
than that you could heal yourself by stopping taking it.
It's an incredible leap.
And so that rat poison metaphor came up quite often in my interviews. - Yeah, I mean, it's more of that intense black and white thinking, right?
I have to ask though, 'cause this is burning in me, like when she's talking about tapering and when she's guiding all of the people in these communities and forums around tapering, What are we tapering from?
And what are the diagnoses that these people have?
Because there's an area here that I think is so, so incredibly dangerous.
Yeah.
You know, it's all over the map.
It's a very, very long list of of, of medications that people are coming into these online programs with, you know, very diverse experiences, you know, diagnostic histories that again are extraordinarily diverse.
So it's really, I mean, that's another thing that is kind of like interesting about this, which is I couldn't get an answer from the, the APBN or the ABPN rather about whether the, the, the credentials the APBN or the ABPN rather about whether the, the, the credentials offered through their body required any kind of, I don't know, extra training or supervision the credentials offered through their body required any kind of, I
and And so, I don't know, it's a really gray area.
I don't really know how all of that works.
But yeah, the diagnostic sort of spectrum was full.
I mean, we're talking about, in Vital Mind Reset, over 2,300 members.
And so yeah, lots and lots of people, lots of conditions, lots of histories, lots of, you know, very, very incredible stories.
Well, the thing that comes up for me right away is the biggest red flag around all of that is I feel like there's a long history of people with bipolar disorder, people who maybe go into psychotic states for various reasons, people who have certain neurological conditions that make them prone to certain types of reverie, even schizophrenics, where there's so much religious Content there's such a sense of epiphany.
There's such a sense of seeing patterns There's such a sense of waking up to a new reality and and and you know as you ride that rocket ship of mania There's an ecstasy about it.
There's a sense of knowing finally knowing the truth There's so much overlap there between spiritual revelation and actually really dangerous psychiatric symptoms that to be
I've come across, just in my own 25 years as a yoga teacher, I've had multiple experiences with people who try to enlist my support in them getting off of their bipolar medication because they have listened to something I've said and taken it as meaning that
Maybe their bipolar mania was a spiritual awakening or a Kundalini awakening, or maybe it's some kind of dark night of the soul that they need to go through in order to really know themselves and really become spiritually free.
And I've had to really sit down and talk to them and ask them, you know, can I have caregivers, phone numbers?
Can I talk to anyone in your family?
Like, I want to help, but I want to help from this more sort of grounded, responsible point of view because I don't think it's a good idea.
To just go off of your medication.
So I just, given the whole territory that she's in and the messianic, conspiritualist tone of what she's doing, it just sounds like a big disaster waiting to happen in quite a few people's psyches and brains and lives because a lot of people it just sounds like a big disaster waiting to happen in quite a You know, I hadn't made that connection between, you know, a tapering protocol that kind of offers...
spiritualized or religious solutions and the actual content of you know some forms of psychiatric distress which I'm not familiar with but I'm like I get that I that's a that's a really that's a really amazing overlap so last thing Matthew I'm really curious about Kelly's partner Kelly's husband Sayerji I'm
I know that there have been interactions that you two have had where he's had ample opportunity to differentiate himself from QAnon, and it seems that he has kind of slipped in a very slippery and cryptic way, chosen not to do that.
Yeah, I mean, we reached out, I personally reached out several times over several weeks, and then also the fact checker reached out, and it was all coordinated with editorial and legal and stuff like that.
To, yeah, give SayerG, and we should just mention that as Kelly Brogan's husband, they've also melded their business models since the pandemic has started.
They've migrated their, you can see in the article that they've started to migrate their social platforms over to MeWe and to Telegram, where they, I think they believe that they will be less, well, they will be less subject to, you know, community standards and so on.
And as the proprietor of GreenMedInfo, Sayurji has a huge digital footprint in the alt-health world and in what some say is the pseudoscience world, and we'll link to an article by Jonathan Jari of McGill University that breaks that down really well.
And, you know, Sayre is an amazing marketer and has a very powerful email newsletter database, etc, etc, that goes out every day, sometimes twice a day.
I'm signed up for it.
It's kind of amazing.
And I'm one of the 475,000 people who gets one or two emails a day.
And about a third of them relate to COVID being a hoax and therefore watch my video.
And then the other two thirds are like, are about a particular, you know, wonderful form of turmeric that you can take or how, you know, walnuts look like your brain so you should eat them to be smart or something like that.
So there's there's lots of stuff lots of stuff that that goes but he's like extraordinarily good at marketing and and and you know I I use the term power couple in the article because um you know she really uh helps his I think I called it biohacker website.
It's kind of like old school do-it-yourself, you know, here you can look up a bunch of cherry-picked research to, you know, figure out the properties of certain mushrooms in relation to certain diseases and so on.
But, you know, Kelly's whole aesthetic really, I think, will up-level what G has to offer and will make it that much more beautiful.
But one of the things that in their conspirituality language has started to happen, at least through G's platforms, is that he started to use, sprinkle in, some very QAnon related or adjacent terms and so yeah I reached out to him to ask him to clarify his use of the term red pill
so there was a number of posts where you know he was saying you know take the red pill and join us over on telegram you know for that that that and And then he also reposted a meme that carried the PizzagateIsReal hashtag, which of course is the QAnon revamping of the Pizzagate scandal or conspiracy theory.
And its assertion that PizzagateIsReal means that the fact that You're being so literal.
in the basement at ping pong, whatever pizza, that obviously the case is closed.
But I mean, the hashtag Pizzagate is real is meant to suggest that, well, this needs to be further investigated because it actually happened.
You're being so literal.
He's just using it as a metaphor.
Well, okay.
Well, this is what he says.
This is what he's, I quoted briefly from an email he, but I have the full email here where he says that, you know, for me, red pill is simply a metaphor for being willing to take responsibility for researching and experiencing topics firsthand that either conventional authorities have presented narratively to be beyond question or having only one official set of truths, principles, or meanings.
And he goes on, but he says, but it is like all metaphors, rich and open to various interpretations, which is the point.
And then he says that, you know, with regard to reposting, Pizzagate is real.
He says, forwarding memes from other channels, which may include a hashtag, does not constitute an official endorsement of those I am forwarding, nor even the content per se.
So there's kind of a hand-washing there.
And he says the association with a piece of content with a hashtag is not something that is necessarily intentional.
And there has never been a case where I have publicly announced support for such a hashtag.
And so he doesn't, you know, but there's nothing in the email that comes out and says, I find QAnon to be abhorrent and it's distorting our discourse and I would never associate myself or my brand with it.
He words it very carefully.
So what that means, I think, You know, we can speculate on.
But it will be speculation only, I think.
I'm still caught up on this walnut thing.
You know, Paracelsus was known for chemistry, but he treated venereal diseases with orchids because they looked like testicles.
Right.
Did it work?
I was on his email list and then he addressed eye diseases with the eye bright flower because of the name.
I mean that's some real middle-aged sort of thinking.
Yeah it has it has a long long pedigree in in pre-modern medicine from all over the place.
Like I, I mean, I'm very familiar with that line of thinking just for Ayurveda and the theory of Dravyaguna, which, which is like the properties of things, you know, their, their smoothness, their roughness, their heat, their cold, their sweet, their sourness are,
are in themselves healing are in themselves healing in a, you know, sensuous sense that, that, that the application of the opposite thing, uh, according to quality is at the root of both diagnosis and treatment.
Um, but then that also goes into like, what does this thing look like?
And what kind of qualities does it suggest to you?
And why would, you know, and so we have like certain rootstock, you know, vegetables that are said to be good for erectile dysfunction.
And then we have, you know, the lotus flower in various forms is really good for you know, women's reproductive health.
And, and, uh, so it goes on and on, it goes on and on, but this, this sort of like, um, really poetic and I think beautiful, uh, relationship made between things in the world and things in the body, uh, is a very powerful driver, uh, not only of pre-modern medicine, is a very powerful driver, uh, not only of pre-modern medicine, but also of the GreenMedInfo
Everyone loves a good origin myth, which brings us to this week's guest.
In April I read an article on Medium about this concept called conspirituality, and you don't need to be filled in with what happened next.
The piece was by Jules Evans, a writer, speaker, and practical philosopher.
He's the author of Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations and The Art of Losing Control, as well as a forthcoming book on the Huxley family.
His essay, Conspiratuality, The Overlap Between the New Age and Conspiracy Beliefs, provided context for the name of this podcast.
We also discussed his more recent essay, Nazi Hippies, When the New Age and Far Right Overlap.
In the beginning of our talk, you'll hear me say that I read his piece in February when it was in fact published on April 17th.
That just goes to show you how little grasp of time I have at the moment.
But it was awesome to talk to Jules and hear his insights into how conspirituality and QAnon is taking hold in the UK and around the world.
Thank you, Jules, for taking the time out, especially to talk on conspirituality, because in terms of an origin story, I can point to you as the reason that I found out about the term.
I think it was something around February, and I became fascinated by the research that you pulled from that, both your story and then Charlotte Ward's research with David Voas.
I didn't know that it had a name, but it's something that I've thought about for a long time.
How did you come across the term in the first place?
the term, but this, I didn't know that it had a name, but it's something that I've thought about for a long time.
How did you come across the term in the first place?
- That week.
- Oh really? - Yeah.
Yeah, I write kind of history of ideas pieces and I work in a place called the Centre for the History of the Emotions and I've been researching, I wrote a book about the history of ecstatic experiences and I'm writing a book about the history of kind of new age spirituality and the human potential movement based around the life of Aldous Huxley.
I began to look at conspiracy theories.
They were a little bit on my radar of my research.
I guess in my research I came across some of the dark side of New Age spirituality and the overlap between New Age spirituality and eugenics.
So the fact that Aldous Huxley was quite into eugenics and his brother Julian Huxley was very into eugenics.
And through that, that got me into some like right-wing conspiracy theory books from the 90s, particularly like Christian fundamentalist conspiracy theories.
Who, you know, had this very paranoid view of New Age spirituality, that actually they're all trying to, you know, it's all these people, this hidden elite trying to create a one world government and trying to control the population and trying to kind of brainwash us and get us all to accept some kind of global spirituality.
And I realised that they weren't entirely wrong, that this conspiracy theory had some kind of accuracy to it.
So this year I've been beginning to kind of look at conspiracy theories and then basically in short, at the start of the lockdown I, like you, saw a massive rise in conspiracy theories.
It was in March and April, just after we were all stuck at home and just in front of our computers, And I saw people I quite respected in New Age spirituality circles coming out and saying COVID is a hoax and using their platforms to promote people like David Icke, who I considered very fringe.
I knew I wanted to write something about it and it was basically that week that I just came across the term conspirituality in some of the papers and it just perfectly encapsulated what was happening, I guess what we both saw emerging in kind of March, April, which was
People going from, you know, saying, hey, be true to yourself and let your inner light shine, to saying this is a scam and don't trust the government and COVID was made up.
And I still see it now because people are discovering your essay still and people are discovering our podcast and naming something gives it form.
You don't have a concept until you give it a name.
And at least once you have that umbrella, now you can start to understand, oh, this, I'm not crazy.
There is actually something here.
And in your essay, you write that, you point out that the leading influencers in my community, Western spirituality, were going into this.
And I'm just wondering who some of your influences are Both for your own work in the Center for Emotions, which I never knew existed, and I find that idea fascinating, but as well as your own practice or belief system.
My first book was about Stoicism.
I wrote that in 2012 about the revival of Stoicism today.
In terms of spirituality, I suppose Aldous Huxley and that kind of British Californian crossover, so people like Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts.
My second book was about the history of ecstatic experiences and Aldous Huxley was just a big influence on that.
I was so impressed with his take on spiritual experiences, the way he had a historical take on it, You know, he was one of the first to say that Western society has kind of marginalized these experiences and pathologized them and that this was a bad thing.
He had a kind of spiritual theological take, he had a political take, you know, he said we need to reorder British society, Western society to create more space for contemplation.
He really promoted this kind of fusion of what I call empirical spirituality, you know, trying to use evidence-based techniques to test out different I'm sure perhaps you've come across the book Amusing Ourselves to Death.
No!
He makes the argument, and I'll actually send this to you, his son did a piece a couple of years ago in The Guardian talking about this.
about how we all point to Orwell in 1984 as being what has happened where he makes the argument in the book that it's Huxley who really because we the book amusing ourselves to death it's like Huxley was like it's there isn't this totalitarian government it's the technologies all these toys are coming about we're happily doing it where it's a kind of hedonic enslavement And an attention enslavement.
I mean, he was writing in the 30s.
This is the age of noise and the age of distraction.
And it's a pity he never, you know, saw social media.
Well, that was the Guardian.
Yeah, the Guardian piece talks about that from his son, talking about the evolution of that idea.
Going a little aside now, but being a Huxley fan, if you're going to give Island the attention it deserves, finally.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, I mean, like, I massively like Huxley as a novelist.
And I think even his close friends said he wasn't a great novelist.
And I think he even he knew it.
But his ideas were amazing.
And You know, Michael Murphy, who founded Esalen, talks about Island as kind of an inspiration for Esalen as well.
And maybe even he was an inspiration for Huxley, because Huxley wrote Island just around the time we first met Murphy, just when Murphy was setting up Esalen.
It's also interesting to look at Island and think that his utopia, his ideal society, is not that far, or at least has some similarities with his supposed dystopia, Brave New World.
They're both completely static societies, which don't change.
They're in some ways, you know, where people are very soaked in the traditions of their culture.
In Brave New World, you have this kind of hidden radios repeating kind of, you know, the wisdom of the tribe.
Whilst in Ireland you have these minor birds, you know, saying here and now, here and now.
So I don't know, there are similarities.
I adore Huxley, but there is a dark side to him and to his brother as well.
He was quite authoritarian and he was quite elitist.
And this is, I guess, what I'm exploring in this book, is the elitism of spirituality.
The idea of the superman, you know, that we will develop our human potential.
Us, the special people, will develop our human potential and become godlike.
And then the flip side of that is there are other people who are kind of inferior and subhuman and they should be kind of And, you know, through things like population control or eugenics.
There's just a fascinating, you know, overlap between the Huxley brothers and conspiracy culture.
Let me give you two examples.
So you know the tinfoil hat thing?
The classic symbol of conspiracy theories.
So that comes from a short story by Julian Huxley.
From, called The Culture Tissue King.
So he came up with this idea of the kind of silly tinfoil hat.
And the other thing is, you know, in the QAnon conspiracy theory, they believe that children are being harvested for adrenochrome.
Yes.
So that comes from Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception.
And then Hunter S. Thompson took it and turned it into this fictional drug.
And now people think it's true.
There are just various ways where the dreams of the Huxleys have become weird beliefs in people's actual conspiracy theories.
I knew that about Adrenochrome.
I didn't know that connection with Julian, though.
That's fascinating.
Talking about Island wasn't a total aside because It sort of reminds me of Dante, you know, everyone remembers Inferno, but it was a trilogy, but we tend to focus on the dystopia, and the same thing has happened with Huxley, and I agree with you about his novel writing, but his ideas are fascinating.
But you also recently wrote about Krishnamurti, and so talking about California spirituality, and what was fascinating was that theosophy also intersected with politics, and it went from anti-colonialism or pro-colonialism to anti-colonialism and Krishnamurti had a big part in the role of actually, you know, deconstructing the theosophy in the end.
It makes me wonder, you know, and I want to get to your piece on Nazis and relating to yoga and vegetarianism as well, but to conspiritualists and what you're noticing right now, what is their utopia?
I mean, I said in that conspirituality piece that you can think of, in some ways, a paranoid conspiracy theory.
It's like a mystical experience, but flipped.
So a mystical experience is this sense of we are all connected, we are all one, we are the elite, the universe is working through us, everything is happening for a reason and it's all good.
Conspiracy theory is a bit like what William James called paranoid mysticism.
Everything is connected, there is a hidden elite, but I'm outside of it and this hidden elite is controlling me.
Nothing happens by chance.
They control everything about it.
So it's a bit like a bad trip version of the good trip of kind of, you know, a euphoric mystical experience.
So I think its main mood is one of paranoia and horror and fear and loathing at the present system and in the evil people controlling it.
But I suppose there is this kind of, I don't know, there's a sense, I mean look, there are different types of conspirituality theories.
If you read David Icke, have you ever read a kind of David Icke?
I actually struggled through a couple of them recently and they're so long because like many conspiracy theories, why say, you know, why say in one page what you can say in a hundred pages?
So They're kind of like graphomania.
You know, it links everything together.
It's this all-encompassing theory of everything.
It's like that classic picture of a wall with just like pieces of paper stuck and lines going through all the pieces of paper.
It's amazing.
Reading his books he has like basically 500 pages about how there's this evil lizard elite controlling everything and enslaving us all and it's a very dark picture and then he has like 50 pages at the end where he says but actually we are creatures of light and we are divine and all we need to do is to change our beliefs and attitudes and we will be free and all is love.
And so that's the kind of Gnostic hope, but it's so outweighed by the dark stuff in his vision.
You know, you think, well, what hope is there of liberation if we're completely controlled by this alien species?
So in him, there is this kind of glimmer of hope of some kind of Gnostic liberation.
And it's a very Gnostic kind of vision, the idea that, you know, the universe, we're basically enslaved by some kind of archons or some kind of other beings.
And then in I think something like QAnon, it reminds me of the kind of millenarian conspiracy that really flourished like maybe in the late Middle Ages or in the Reformation, a similar kind of time where you had a breakdown in the ruling myth of our society.
A breakdown in the kind of church's monopoly on truth, similar to now we have a kind of breakdown of TV's monopoly on truth.
So this flourishing of alternate realities.
And what you get in QAnon is this idea that we're in a time of trouble and suffering, but there is this messianic figure This divinely inspired figure in Trump and some of his allies, and they will purge the landscape of the baddies, you know, and there will be this, I guess, this kind of Glorious age of peace and love afterwards.
So in some ways it's millenarian, a bit like Nazism.
Nazism is this idea that we're being controlled by these evil demonic figures, but this glorious leader will purge the nation of these evil demons and then there'll be a thousand year reich of peace and love.
So I think it's that kind of theory.
It's quite medieval in a way.
Well, we haven't really evolved as much as I think we think we do sometimes.
Yeah.
Everything that I look at is always through the lens of evolutionary biology.
My background is in religious studies.
Right.
At some point in my studies, I didn't just want to understand why people believe things.
I wanted to know what made us believe in the first place.
And then you have to look at biology, you have to look at history to understand that.
So I started looking at everything through that lens.
And we're still operating with very old operating systems, no matter how easily we talk to one another right now.
That's true.
We love stories and we love stories of good versus evil and myths and I think Maybe people who get drawn into conspiracy theories, maybe they have this kind of capacity of absorption, where perhaps they get very absorbed in a story to the extent where they can't tell the difference between fiction and reality.
So a lot of conspiracy theories, they have elements that they took from novels.
Or from sci-fi or from movies.
And it's like they kind of leaped category and people started believing that they were really true.
And you see that in religions as well.
Something starts off as a story and then people start thinking it's really, really true.
But I think it's also the case that conspiracy theories wouldn't spread unless they did have some truth to them.
At least some grain of truth.
And I suppose, you know, it is true that There are people with lots of power, lots more power than other people and lots more money than other people, and there are people who feel really left behind and kind of laughed at and exploited by more powerful people.
And all of that is, you know, probably true.
It's just, so the despair is real, the hardship is real, but the solution is totally magical.
And in some ways the kind of, the analysis as well is is not quite right.
I mean, you know, yes, okay, maybe there is an elite exploiting people, but that doesn't mean that Tom Hanks is a satanic pedophile or something, you know. - One thing we talk about is the indoctrination process.
And one thing I am fascinated by this is, compared to old cults where there was a charismatic leader, first off, there is no leader, second off, the indoctrination process happens so quickly and it's happening through hashtags.
Now you open your piece on conspirituality talking about David Icke but you also point out that he was on London Real.
And I found Brian's show a few years ago when he interviewed Ido Portal.
I also work in fitness and movement and I love Ido Portal.
So I was like, this is fascinating.
And I was like, oh, okay, this guy, I like him.
I like that he's spending an hour talking to Ido and I've watched some of his stuff since and I've been up and down with it.
But this year, something changed with that show.
And I'm wondering if you have any insight into or ideas of why someone like Brian can go from You know, being a charismatic figure and a journalist and talking about things, but then going so hard pivoting into the territory that he has with David and with the pandemic recently.
Yeah, that was an example of, it was really disappointing to see, because I don't know what it's like in the States, but in the UK, spirituality and spiritual teachers don't get much play.
The BBC hardly ever features anything on spirituality, positive or negative.
Likewise, our kind of intelligent media don't really feature anything on spirituality.
So I like these relatively professional YouTube channels, like London Real was, that would be a platform for people I respect, like Rupert Sheldrake, say.
Graham Hancock, I'm not so sure, but definitely I respect Rupert Sheldrake.
And likewise, the channels like Rebel Wisdom, it's a good platform for spirituality, transpersonal psychology.
So again, yes, it was disappointing when London Real, you know, kind of went full conspiracy.
I don't know him, so I don't know why, but I wonder if there's a certain market dynamic and there's a feedback of audience and kind of likes, which can reinforce certain behaviour.
And I think a lot of Influencers learned this year, they kind of started dabbling with conspiracy stuff and they learned that they could really monetize it.
that there could be a huge audience.
We have both kind of had success just writing secondhand about this kind of phenomenon.
So if you're in the belly of the beast and kind of saying, you know, tapping into that anxiety and suspicion and distrust and need for alternative stories, you can get a huge amount of likes and views.
So I don't know if it was as cynical as that or whether he, you know, he genuinely believed the kind of, you know, that COVID is a hoax and so on and that the government is trying to control us.
But let me...
I don't know how many views Plandemic got, but it was millions, no?
8 million before it got taken down.
Yeah, and I remember there was this silly Pizzagate type documentary called Out of Shadows around the same time.
And it also did so well and got millions of views.
And I think that's what lots of Wellness influencers and Instagrammers, you know, they just experiment.
Oh, if I put kind of COVID hoax or if I put where we go one, we go all hashtag, I get loads of likes.
And, you know, and maybe half of those likes are Russian bots or whatever.
But, you know, suddenly they go from getting a thousand likes per post to ten thousand or more.
So I think there's a feedback loop whereby they might even You know, really start believing it because it's being so affirmed.
And I think what's so interesting about these conspiracy theories is they are cult-like, but they're not like a normal cult, because a normal cult is controlled from above.
In a very authoritarian structure and your beliefs and your behaviour is very controlled and so on.
Whilst this is much more decentralised, I think people are being radicalised very quickly through algorithms and feedback loops and social media bubbles.
So it's not like there's people like a cult leader, I think, exactly pulling the strings.
Maybe there is.
Maybe there's a room of KGB agents who came up with QAnon.
But I think it's more like it's actually just tech algorithms designed to keep us watching That is actually radicalizing people.
You write about universal basic income as one of an interesting idea for real social change.
And that's something I think about often.
We brought it up in the episode on child trafficking, where I linked to at least 10 organizations that are actually doing work in the field.
And I interviewed someone who has worked in that field for a long time compared to the hashtag.
I feel like I'm doing something, actually doing real work.
And I also read an article during Andrew Yang's campaign about universal basic income being an antidepressant and how that would actually help mental health across the board.
So you'd mentioned, you know, first of all, in America, wellness influencers probably have outsized influence comparatively.
We don't have anything like the BBC, for example, which I love and respect and the different layers of it.
But in the UK, Do you see pushback for people actually trying to tackle QAnon and these conspiracy theories?
And what sort of work are they doing, besides combating disinformation, to actually push social change forward?
You mean tackling the kind of economic roots of it?
Yes.
Well, I mean, not much at the moment.
I think the government is trying to keep the economy from collapsing.
So there was like what they called a furlough scheme where they would Pay companies to carry on paying people rather than laying them off.
But we're seeing huge, every day, thousands of people being made unemployed.
So it's pretty worrying because we're in the equivalent of 1929.
We haven't even got into the 30s bit yet, of chronic unemployment and hardship.
And so if you're worried about extremist ideologies, it's pretty worrying because we saw what 2008 created in terms of polarization and, you know, the strengthening of the far left and far right.
So, yeah, I mean, and we're not even seeing much in terms of disinformation, sorry, anti-disinformation campaigns.
Like, I think people are just beginning to kind of clock You know, that conspiracy theories are an extremist ideology is a proper political threat.
It's still a bit weird even to talk about conspiracy theories.
So in mainstream politics, it's only in the last kind of month That you see articles about, kind of, QAnon, that conspiracy theories have gone a bit more mainstream.
And when people talk about them, they tend to just say, God, how ridiculous, how absurd.
So there's a detachment, I think, between mainstream politics and people who are into mainstream politics, and they're quite rational and evidence-based.
And the problem is that this is often, this is just what they see about spiritual people, as it were.
So they will easily write off all of spirituality as just kind of woo-woo and dangerous and quasi-fascist.
And they will say, oh, if only we were just more rational.
We need to just be completely rational and secular and evidence-based.
But there's a problem with that too, which is it's not a very satisfying narrative.
People want something more meaty.
People want something more mythical.
Something that gets them in the heart, rather than just in their rationality.
It's funny, my brother wrote a book called The Myth Gap, talking about how we needed more than evidence-based politics, we needed powerful myths to speak to our hearts and souls.
And it's unfortunate that the myths people have kind of gone for are these conspiracy myths.
I mean, this is what they are.
They are myths that are giving meaning to people's lives, but they are pretty toxic myths.
But the solution to that is not just complete disenchantment.
It's to try and find a more kind of healthy myth, a more healthy form of enchantment.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, absolutely.
And you actually write about, towards the end of your piece, about What happens when a vaccine for COVID-19 happens, and if we keep going on the path we are, and America is indicative of this, a lot of people won't take it.
What else besides a vaccine do you see as the stakes?
What is going to be damaged if we keep going down this path of constant conspiracy?
The centre ground of politics, the ability to trust that someone who disagrees with you might just disagree with you, but is still worth listening to and being treated with respect.
If that goes, I mean, I think you're already seeing it in the States.
If someone disagrees with you, they don't just disagree with you, they're an existential threat to your core values and your core identity.
And there can be no talking with them.
An existential threat must be destroyed.
And so you kind of see militias in the street.
Yeah, that's what I guess is at stake, is democracy.
In a much smaller way, I think what's great, what you're doing and what your podcast is doing, and what I've been involved with and others, is the attempt, and it's not quite as high stakes but it's still important and it's involved in it, is to try and take care of our culture.
Just this culture of spirituality, and to try and keep it healthy.
Because otherwise, you could look back at this year and think, God, our culture really failed this test.
In difficult times, it went off the reservation and actually didn't help our society.
It actually harmed our society.
So I think it's great that your podcast and now we see yoga influences taking a stand against QAnon.
And I think it's trying to develop a kind of balance between Spiritual intuition and critical thinking.
So it's trying to develop a kind of critical spirituality and I suppose to some extent a kind of centrist liberal spirituality as well.
Because there is this lure of right-wing and particularly far-right spirituality which has a long heritage and history.
If the centre and the left aren't giving people soul and myths And that kind of thing.
Then the right will and the far right will.
They will capture that by saying, oh, the left is soulless materialism.
Only we can give you kind of soul and myth and heroism and meaning.
You know, it gives me hope.
The fact that, you know, your podcast is doing well and influences are stepping up.
And it gives me hope for our culture.
And your writing as well, I don't know the metrics, but just in terms of, you can tell a medium on claps, your recent piece on Nazism and spirituality doubled what I see on the first piece.
I feel like you kind of put it out there and then you kept going with it, which I love and it's so important.
And I wanted you to talk a little bit about those parallels that you found between what's happening now.
Well, you wrote specifically about the 60s counterculture and Nazism, but you can extrapolate from that and put it to now.
So when did that come into your head to tackle the Nazis and show how dangerous all of this is?
Well again, it was like I was just doing my research for this book, so me being kind of a bookworm nerd, just burrowing away, and I'd got to the point in this life of Aldous Huxley, I got to World War II, and I was interested
I'm interested in the history of the Human Potential Movement and I saw that some of the ideas in the Human Potential Movement and in Western spirituality were also popular in Nazi Germany.
So I was just looking at that and around that time There are a couple of anti-lockdown rallies.
There was one in Berlin and there was one in London where you saw both New Age figures and far-right figures.
A friend of mine in Berlin shared a photo on Facebook of this woman with a flower making a heart sign with her fingers and she was also holding a Prussian flag which is very popular with far-right people.
And people were saying, what's going on?
Why is there this coalition between new age hippies and the far right?
So I wanted to just say in this piece, we shouldn't be too surprised by this.
This has happened before.
And I basically drew on, particularly on the research of a historian called Eric Kurlander, who wrote a book called Hitler's Monsters, looking at the The popularity of occult ideas and of alternative spirituality in the Nazi area and with certain Nazi leaders.
So it's quite a controversial debate with historians of the occult and historians of Nazi Germany.
But it's certainly the case that some leading Nazis were very into what we would call New Age spirituality, particularly Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, who always carried a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and wanted to get his leading SS soldiers to do yoga.
and was fascinated by Tibetan Buddhism and sent a kind of Nazi explorers to Tibet to try and kind of gather its wisdom.
Rudolf Hess as well, the deputy Führer, was very into alternative medicine and various ideas from theosophy and anthroposophy.
He even had inmates at the Dachau concentration camp Working on growing alternative medicine and there were actually kind of experiments, non-consenting experiments on inmates in Dachau to try and find like herbal cures for cancer and things like that.
So there were things like the Nazis set up, well, supported institutes for parapsychology, a pendulum institute, so there would be people, you know, swinging pendulums over maps of the North Sea to try and discover enemy positions.
There was also things like, the Nazis would draw on conspiracy theories as well.
They saw Jews, or they described Jews often using supernatural language, like they are demonic or vampires.
They are engaging in these kind of blood rituals.
There are these all-powerful kinds of hidden people who control the world.
And then they also had this guru, kind of messianic view of the Führer.
as this person of great spiritual insight and power who would channel the will of the people and kind of heal the land.
The point of the article was it was called Nazi Hippies and I think again like You know, both those pieces, in a way, it's a lesson in, you know, what goes viral.
It's just very useful to have just a very short, catchy title.
So, like, whether it's Conspiratoriality or Nazi Hippies.
But, you know, the piece was, it got very widely shared.
It was the most read piece I've ever written, the most read kind of essay.
And it got translated into different languages.
One dark thing was, There's even a far right kind of bookshop and clothes shop and they even made a t-shirt saying I'm a Nazi hippie.
So they turned it into a kind of thing of pride with a kind of tie-dye Hitler.
Wow.
I got a certain amount of pushback from people in the New Age community who, you know, can often get ridiculed by mainstream culture for being woo and so on.
And they said, oh, what, so you're just saying that, you know, if you're New Age, you're inevitably fascist.
So every person who's a New Age hippie is a fascist.
You know, so just because, you know, a few leading Nazis were into Steiner's, Rudolf Steiner's theories of agriculture, then every follower of Steiner is a Nazi.
Which I wasn't saying at all.
I said in the piece, there are, you know, there's a kind of New Age left, There's a kind of feminist occult, so there's all different kind of political strands but there is a long history, it's not just the Nazis, there's a long history of kind of right-wing spirituality and a far-right spirituality and many beloved figures
in New Age spirituality were pretty right-wing, if not far-right.
Joseph Campbell was anti-Semitic.
Mircea Eliade was kind of connected to the Romanian far-right.
DT Suzuki flirted with nationalism.
And in some ways it's part of the popularity of Jordan Peterson, I would say.
He's that kind of right-wing spirituality.
Heroic values, quite military, but a sense of re-engaging with myths and traditionalism.
So that's what it was about and I guess I'm still thinking about those issues and I'm probably going to write a piece later this week just talking more about right-wing spirituality and far-right spirituality just to explore that idea for my own interest.
I mean, for example, Are you in the States, Derek?
Los Angeles, yes.
Los Angeles, yeah.
So as you probably know, Steve Bannon, the dark mind behind Trumpism, is very into the New Age spirituality and he's into the occult and he's particularly into a school called traditionalism and a writer called Julius Evola who, you know, and these traditionists were into the perennial philosophy and so on, but they were, I mean certainly Evola was also
Quasi-fascist.
So it's good to just be aware, like, we can have this idea that New Age spirituality is always progressive and left-wing.
And it sometimes is, but it sometimes isn't.
It makes me think of the term from psychedelics talking about Huxley, nonspecific amplifier, which is what psychedelics are.
They don't inject you with something, they bring things out of you that were already there.
And you mentioned the Bhagavad Gita earlier, and that's obviously a very big one in modern yoga circles, especially here in California.
And sometimes when I hear people talk about it, I wonder, If they realize that it's part of the greatest war epic ever written, and that in the Gita itself, Krishna is instructing Arjuna to go kill his friends.
That's not a metaphor.
The time that it was written and the tribalism that existed, it's very real.
Yoga was very much a way of calming yourself before battle.
Yeah, and that's why Himna loved it.
The way that we experience it here is this sense of privilege that we can go to Whole Foods and then yoga and then, well not right now, but in general, but yoga served a very different purpose for a long time.
Yeah.
Now, you mentioned a little pushback and you got a little bit on my page as well and I wanted to close with this because I think it's I think it's an interesting way that people view writing in their own voice all the time.
I like conversations because you can hear the inflections in our voice and pantomimes and you can see the person, but you can't do that in writing.
And when I posted the Nazi hippie article on Conspiratuality on my own page, some people brought up the fact that you brought up Black Lives Matter, which is obviously a very sensitive subject here for a lot of reasons.
Rereading it a number of times, I think you're completely right in the sense that you were just pointing out that the ability to go into extremes is not a right-wing issue.
It's left-right.
It doesn't matter.
It's this slide into cultish thinking.
Yeah.
And your overall tenor was just think critically about these things.
And I wonder if you can close.
We've talked so much about the right, but maybe Talk about some of the ways that the left move into the same ideological mindset where they go so far to their side that it does become extreme.
Well, for example, I think we're in a breakdown of the old technocratic bureaucratic order and that's leading to the rise of charismatic politics on right and left.
Which can mean, for example, a kind of ascribing or assigning almost magical powers, you know, and it kind of completely, they can't do anything wrong.
And if ever they get criticism in the press, it's because the press are the lying press and the evil press.
So we saw that here in the UK with, there was a bit of a cult around Jeremy Corbyn.
He could do no wrong.
Any mistakes he made was the evil press.
He would also have these kind of rallies as well, where were extremely emotional, almost kind of ecstatic.
There was a podcast here by Novara Media recently about the cosmic right, worth having a look at, because it's talking about this kind of overlap between conspiracy theories and kind of right-wing thinking.
And they interviewed Eric Davis, the great religious scholar.
He'll be on our podcast soon.
Yeah, but this podcast that they set up was originally to promote an idea called acid Corbynism, which is basically psychedelic Corbynism and in the early episodes of the podcast are these pictures of this boring man who is completely out of his depth against this kind of psychedelic background as if he's like
You know, the Messiah, or as if he's Timothy Leary, rather than just a really boring, you know, sorry, sorry, sorry, if anyone's listening, and they're a fan of his, but like, in other words, this was like, it was similar, it was the cosmic left and a similar kind of charismatic cult.
And these people are still going, Oh, you know, Jeremy, he was such a great leader, you know, like he did the worst in election for years.
In terms of Black Lives Matter, you know, it's, it's, It's tricky for a kind of foreigner to comment, you know, because you're more likely to get it wrong, you know, American politics than to get it right.
When you see it here in Britain, in times of trouble and in times of plague, you get all these different weird charismatic cults rising.
And one of them in the Middle Ages was a cult of flagellants.
So people would go through the street beating themselves and the idea is through punishing themselves they would purge the land of plague and of evil.
And when I see kind of a procession of white liberals kind of ritually abasing themselves and saying I have been I have been racist in thought and in word and in deed.
I'm literally kind of quoting some of these kind of public declarations.
I have not been an ally.
I have been violent in my thoughts.
And there's this kind of ritualistic self-flagellation right at the time of a pandemic.
And I just wonder if there is some of the aspect of that.
Maybe that's unfair.
But there's also what you see is a kind of elimination of the grey zone.
That's a comment that ISIS, that was ISIS's strategy.
Eliminate the grey zone.
So you're either for ISIS or you're against them.
And you see that in Trumpism.
Either you're for us or you're against us.
And you see that, say, in BLM protesters marching through Portland, you know, ripping down American flags and saying, you know, either you're with us or you're against us.
There can be no in-between.
So this is the kind of polarisation of politics and black and white thinking.
You know, there are definitely differences.
It's probably a bit less supernatural, in a way, than the Cubanon.
It's funny, when the left lost the election in the UK so badly, they came out and said it was because of the oligarchic press.
You know, if we could only free the people from the evil oligarchic press, rather than the fact that actually British people are just quite center-right, you know, so if you have a far-left program you're probably going to lose.
So that, you know, the words they kind of, they had their own conspiracy theory.
I just want to say one last thing though, because it just it goes back to a point we were talking about earlier about non-specific amplifiers.
There is a certain kind of idea which came out in California, and you can find it with like Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley, was if people just have a mystical experience, if enough people have a mystical experience, You know, society will be renewed and will become liberal.
So if enough people take psychedelics and have a mystical non-dual experience, we will overcome our egocentricity and fear and prejudice.
And we will become kind of liberal.
And you still see this idea in kind of like MAPS, for example, which is a psychedelic organisation, you know, just give people non-dual experiences of oneness and interconnectedness, and we'll realise, you know, we're all one.
But I mean, there's real problems.
Like the Aztecs, That culture was a psychedelic culture and it was highly hierarchical and based on human sacrifice.
So they were doing lots of psychedelics and they didn't become liberals.
Likewise, the Nazis had very much this sense of Interconnected ecological vision of humans as part of an interconnected ecosystem.
And again, they weren't liberal.
So I think it's this idea that if we just have this right experience, everything will be better.
And so in other words, it's a politics that puts too much emphasis on special experiences.
As being enough to kind of heal the world.
And they're not, because unfortunately, as people like Charles Manson showed, you can have lots of special experiences and still be pretty, like, dark in your politics.
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