20: The Second Wave: Pastel Q Goes Undercover (w/Ben Lee)
The reality of a second COVID wave started back in the Spring. Now that With over half of American states are experiencing increased cases, the conspiracy theories are surging. At least 32 White House staff and allies, as well as the president and his wife, have tested positive, likely originating in an unmasked close-quartered super-spreader Rose Garden celebration of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
As Trump poses for wheezing conquering hero propaganda following his questionable return from Walter Reed, another type of second wave is being led by brandwashed conspiritualists. Yoga and wellness loyalists are pushing back against criticism of their use of Q hashtags while reveling in mask opposition, anti-vaxxer agendas, and a distorted slacktivist approach to child trafficking that forms the foundation of QAnon. Pastel Q is surging.
This week, Julian investigates the terrifying Line In The Sand online conference, which featured friends of the pod, Mikki Willis, Zach Bush, Christiane Northrup, and many others. Matthew focuses on the chaos of charismatic leadership, weighing Trumpian tactics with the likes of Chogyam Trungpa and Yogi Bhajan. Derek explores the importance of creativity in the time of quarantine, leading into his interview with musician and former cult member, Ben Lee.
The entire crew also discusses Yoga Journal following the lead of the NY Times and Rolling Stone by reporting (and then bearing the backlash) on yoga community leaders taking a stand against QAnon—and getting trolled by Q devotees in the process.
Show Notes
Julie Salter describes Swami Vishnudevananda, abuser.
NewEarth Haven bio-resonant investment pitch
Trump Supporter Wears ‘COVID Diaper’ to Prevent Coronavirus Farts
Episode 94: The New Age to QAnon Pipeline by QAnon Anonymous
The Case against Swami Rama of the Himalayas
Future Self Summit
Reclaim Your Lives Conference
Leaders in the Yoga Community Speak Out Against QAnon
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We are on plenty of social media.
Including Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, where we seem to be most active recently, and that is awesome.
And you can support us at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where we also offer bonus content every weekend for subscribers.
And I just want to mention that we have been rolling out Monday bonus episodes.
That's an opportunity for us to take some of the ideas we have and explore them.
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Matthew had a wonderful
Episode this week about bullying and I think maybe as we progress in this episode, we'll talk a little bit about I know some ideas about last night's vice presidential debate, how that came through, but he offered a wonderful big picture synopsis on the nature of bullying and then how that has played into our perceptions of Bill Gates and Joe Biden over these last couple of years, especially heating up now as we head toward the election and a possible COVID vaccine as we keep that
Yeah, really nice work, Matthew.
I highly recommend everyone check that out.
Well, thank you both.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Episode 20, the second wave.
Pastel Q goes undercover.
The reality of a second COVID wave started back in the spring.
Now that over half of American states are experiencing increased cases, the conspiracy theories are surging.
At least 32 White House staff and allies, as well as the President and his wife, have tested positive, likely originating in an unmasked, close-quartered super-spreader Rose Garden celebration of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
As Trump poses for wheezing conquering hero propaganda following his questionable return from Walter Reed, Another type of second wave is being led by brand-washed conspiritualists.
Yoga and wellness loyalists are pushing back against criticism of their use of Q hashtags while reveling in mask opposition, anti-vaxxer agendas, and the distorted slacktivist approach to child trafficking that forms the foundation of QAnon.
Pastel Q is surging.
This week, I investigate the truly terrifying Line in the Sand online conference, which featured Friends of the Pod, Mickey Willis, Zach Bush, Christiane Northrup, and many others.
Matthew focuses on the chaos of charismatic leadership weighing Trumpian dynamics with the likes of Chogyam Trungpa and Yogi Bhajan.
Derek explores the importance of creativity in the time of quarantine as a lead-in to his interview with musician and former cult member Ben Lee.
The entire crew also discusses Yoga Journal following the lead of the New York Times and Rolling Stone by reporting and then bearing the backlash on yoga community leaders taking a stand against QAnon and then getting trolled by Q devotees in the process.
This weekend, I took a look at the Line in the Sand online conference that was hosted for four hours by a website or a group called Reclaim Your Lives.
The banner at the top of the website has these three phrases, health, sovereignty, civil liberties, and freedom of speech.
Guests included Mickey Willis, RFK Jr., Zach Bush, Christiane Northrup, Pam Popper, Rashad Botar, Del Bigtree, and many others.
A veritable who's who of our conspirituality pantheon.
Here are some examples or contextual quotes that I pulled out just to give you a flavor guys.
This was something else.
This is from Sasha Stone, who's the main host.
So he was on camera the whole time talking to each of these different people.
We are involved in civil disobedience for our health and basic human freedoms, which some say makes us domestic terrorists.
We welcome domestic terrorists to this panel.
That was as he was bringing in a new guest.
Wow, that's tasteful.
I know, fantastic.
And then Tara Thornton, who has a group called Freedom Angel, had this to say, all COVID vaccines will use nanotechnology to forever alter what human beings are.
And once we step through that door, we can't go back.
So we need to be there, not just in Congress, but in churches and neighborhoods, because public health is the hub of the wheel through which they are implementing these control measures.
So does everybody just nod their heads and say, yes, of course, nanotechnology is going to be a feature of all COVID vaccines, and we know that to be a fact?
Oh, yeah.
No, that was actually a really... I'm so glad you asked that, Matthew, because that was a distinguishing feature of this event, is that there were mostly two guys, Sasha Stone and David Martin, who were sitting there the whole time talking to guests, and they just would nod and say yes or go beautiful to whatever people said.
There wasn't really a whole lot of back and forth, unless it was to reinforce and up the ante on the crazy.
Right, so were the beautiful comments kind of like a thank you for sharing as though it was kind of like a therapy circle as well?
Not so much therapy, more like we have this shared dark utopian vision, right?
Right, and David Martin, he's the guy in Plandemic who we see suiting up in cufflink, in the bowtie, and the cufflinks and stuff like that, and the really beautiful shoes, and he kind of comes off like a CIA agent or something like that.
Absolutely.
Clean-shaven, bowtied, and the whole men's magazine sort of preview.
Right, but he was the most confusing character of the bunch because he was there ostensibly to talk about patent law and how pharma companies have to actually patent their research in order to protect their IP as they develop medications, but there was some convoluted argument about how that meant that they kind of came to own the viruses so that they could promulgate them through the world or something like that.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to understand.
I think that besides his appearance in Plandemic, he's most well known for a really long YouTube video, again, suited up, wearing the bow tie, standing outside, basically just spouting legalese for 20 or 30 minutes about all the different ways, all these different allegations against the government and the CDC and Big Pharma, just using, I think, intentionally confusing legal language.
Right.
One of the people that I know, listeners of the podcast have actually DM'd us about most is Sasha Stone, who is somebody I don't know much about.
Do you have some insights into who he is and his role in all of this?
Yeah, you know, I actually wanted to focus in on an interaction that Sasha and David have with someone named Kevin Jenkins.
So let me talk about Sasha a little bit here.
So Sasha used to be, I'm not familiar with this period of his career or with the band, but he was in a rock band called Stone.
And so he's still Sasha Stone still looks like a rock star.
He looks like he's just come back from Burning Man.
He's got the outfit.
He's got the like vest and the exposed shirt.
He's got the long hair.
He's that kind of guy about 55 now, but he's still he's still really rocks that look and it works.
He's the founder of something called the New Earth Festival.
Which happens now, I think it's happened a couple times before in other places, but last year it happened at the luxury eco-resort that he owns called Akasha New Earth Haven, which of course is in hippie New Age sanctuary, Bali.
Ubud to be exact, right?
Which is where they had the COVID curtain a couple of months ago, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
So this is a seven day super spiritual, hippie, psychedelic, you know, spiritual new age seeming festival.
The focus is listed as being beauty, art, consciousness in action through the mediums of film, music, fashion show, international DJs, meditation workshops, and festivals.
And then at this huge event, he has speakers like Del Bigtree and other lesser-known conspiracists and purveyors of pseudoscience.
But most notably, one of the guests listed, I think, for last year was Russell Simmons.
I found that there were, in 2017, 2,000 attendees to this seven-day event, and that they had expected 5,000 last year, although I didn't find any numbers on what the attendance ended up being.
So, interesting guy.
And in a way, he's the kind of guy you could imagine we would have dreamed up as a perfect exemplar of conspirituality, right?
What did he talk with David and Kevin about?
So they're interviewing Kevin Jenkins and Kevin Jenkins runs something called the Urban Health Alliance.
And their mission statement is advancing nonpartisan policies that try to help urban families.
If you really look at it and you listen to him for a little bit, you find it's basically anti-vax for black folks and encouragement to begin homeschooling.
And here's how you do it, right?
Wow.
They also have a current lawsuit against the state of New Jersey seeking to, quote unquote, preserve the right to go back to school.
Homestay, shout out to Christy Todd Whitman, who came out against Trump.
Having grown up under her reign, I will be, this is the first time in my life that I agree with her.
But there are, yeah, there are definitely segments of New Jersey that would agree with the anti-vax sentiments, unfortunately.
I don't really get it though.
So, the Urban Health Alliance is both advocating for homeschooling, but also the right to go back to schools because lockdown should end?
So, both at the same time?
Both at the same time.
Yeah, I think the homeschooling is probably preparation for the fascism of a mandated vaccine, right?
So, if your kids are not able to go to school, you'll be prepared to keep them in the home sort of thing.
So, you know, they're having their kind of predictable conversation about this sort of stuff, but this is the point that really jumps out at me.
This is Sasha Stone, and he did this multiple times over the four hours where he would basically pull back and say, OK, I'm going to say the thing that you are not allowed to say.
Right.
So like a nod and a wink, like we're both on board with this.
And this really fits with what we're talking about today with regard to Pastel Q kind of going undercover, because no one talks about QAnon.
No one mentioned any QAnon hashtags that I found.
I didn't watch the whole four hours, but that was not the tone.
So, after some discussion, here he is.
Rather than pushing back against legislators, and let me also say this guy is from my home country, he's from Zimbabwe, so it's very weird, and I'm a former rock musician too, it's very weird to hear his accent saying this stuff with the long hair.
Rather than pushing back against legislators, Why not get rid of them altogether?
I mean, for the love of God, when we're dealing with treason, it doesn't get more serious than that when we deal with agendas which are leading to genocide by any other name.
It's about eradication.
It's about a wholesale takedown of the godless, goddamn toxin in our civilizational midst.
We should not be negotiating with any ambiguity.
This is a Leviathan.
This is a Medusa, and we need to take it out altogether.
Now, I love the beautiful messaging we've gotten from all the experts coming on today, building up a holographic picture of Christed consciousness, of the righteous aspects of the human spirit.
We all know how this thing ends.
We all know that righteousness and good prevails.
We even wrote that script in some ways at the collective oversoul level.
Everyone nods and smiles.
Kevin responds, Kevin Jenkins, you bring in a good point.
I was in Trenton with some freedom patriots, people fighting for their medical freedoms, fighting for their religious and constitutional rights.
One of the things I remember saying is, don't let them be comfortable.
Go where they live.
Go where they eat.
They should not feel comfortable.
We should fight them everywhere they live.
If they go to the bathroom, we should be there.
Sasha.
Right!
Jenkins, if they go to get a cup of coffee, you know every time I talk to you, you bring this out of me, Sasha.
And I actually agree with you.
This is a fight for everything we hold dear.
I want to say to all the parents who are wondering what to do, one simple thing.
You have to fight for your children.
These elected officials believe they can get away with anything because we will intellectualize our narrative as opposed to challenging them.
And then he leans forward with a smirk and says, We can challenge them in a very interesting way.
Let's just put it that way.
It's time to stop being politically correct.
It's time to start looking them in the face and saying, if I can't live my humanity, you won't survive.
Oh my god.
David Martin, beautiful.
Okay, that's an example of the beautiful.
Thank you for sharing.
Right.
So, at what point during the four hours does this come in, and do any of the following speakers kind of log off and say, I don't really want to take part anymore?
Absolutely not.
The thing that was fascinating about that is, this is at about an hour and 40 minutes in, and When he finishes that, they bring in the next guest.
And Sasha immediately pivots to introducing the next guest, who's a guy from South Africa, by the way, whose part of his sort of bio and his mission statement is that he's committed to nonviolent change.
So they immediately shift to like, oh, let's talk about this really wonderful spiritual political activist in South Africa who's committed to a nonviolent vision of our beautiful future.
And they bring him in and he doesn't say anything about what was just said, but goes right into his conspiracy theory.
Wow, that's incredible!
I can't believe what you just read.
It's so incredibly menacing and threatening, and do you have the sense that it's play acting, or do you have the sense that he's got some underworld, I don't know, ex-rockstar connections that, you know, want to kidnap, you know, Governor Whitman?
Well, I mean, that's that's where I was going to go in response to what you're saying.
You know, it doesn't seem like play acting.
It does sound like hyperbole.
It's definitely very, uh, uh, militant, right?
And then, and then come to find out this morning that there was this, uh, this plan, this actual plan that was thwarted.
Yeah.
Were you rough?
Did you mistake Whitman for Widmore there?
Okay.
No, no, just because I said Whitman before probably seated Julian now.
A number of the people that you mentioned are Trump adjacent here.
And, you know, last night in the vice presidential debate, Pence was lying about how soon a vaccine is coming.
Trump today recorded a video saying that all seniors in America will receive the same exact medication that I got for free.
And then he qualified it by saying soon.
So there's this constant, you know, the administration is obviously pushing for a vaccine.
They're lying about it because they want the American people to think that they're going to magically spin it up and we'll all be safe by election day.
Did you notice any pushback because a lot of these people are Trump-aligned?
This is a question we've asked before, but how does the QAnon set square the fact that their savior is also very aggressive in terms of vaccine development right now?
Well, again, I think part of what's going on right now, and this conference for me was a perfect example of it, is that there's no mention of Donald Trump.
There's no mention of QAnon.
There's none of the hashtags.
There's none of the rallying cries.
There's just this conversation about civil rights, freedom of speech, health, sovereignty, and just about everyone has something to say about vaccines that is ominous and negative.
So yeah, how they square that stuff is beyond me.
Did you get any sense of who the they are then?
Because when you were reading Stone's quote, you kept saying, they, they, if it's not the Trump administration, do you know who it is?
Was that at all made explicit?
Well, let me, let me continue on a little bit here because he had some other things to say.
Overall, I would say this was the classic tone through the, through the couple hours that I was able to sit through without, you know, having a, having to completely.
Thank you for your sacrifice.
The overall tone was very much that classic paranoid explanatory style, right, where everything leads back to some shadowy cabal of people, follow the money, but nothing is being Explicitly claimed about their identity, even though incredibly gruesome and dark agendas and actions are being ascribed to them, right?
Very, very strange.
So, of course, our friend Christiane Northrup made an appearance as well.
Here's a little exchange that her and Sasha had.
Actually, her, Sasha, and David again.
She says, when you give birth normally, you arise from the birthing bed so empowered that no one can talk you into this vaccine nonsense.
Women need men to stand up and protect the innocent.
That's masculinity.
When this started, I didn't know where it would end, but I knew astrologically we were in a chrysalis, and we'd all come out of this like a butterfly around December 21st.
But now they're trying to separate COVID-positive women from their babies.
Please, God, make it stop.
So again, they, right?
Now they're trying to separate.
Please, God, make it stop.
The mother's body is the earth to the baby.
And then the earth is the microbiome that Zach Bush talked about.
Sasha, "Thanks, Christiane.
You know, 2300 years ago before Islam, the Arabic people discovered that by forcing people to cover their nose and mouth, you broke their will and depersonalized them.
It made them submissive.
Modern psychology now understands that without a face, you are not an independent being.
The child between two and three years old looks in the mirror and discovers themselves as an independent being.
The mask is the beginning of deleting individuality, and he who does not know his history is doomed to repeat it.
So, was that a backhand criticism of Islam?
Was he basically saying the whole tradition of masking, which predominantly affects women but in Taurid culture affects men, was he being Islamophobic in that sense?
He was actually quite careful in terms of some of the surrounding language and the way he navigated the possibility of that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, David Martin, this is how they gain control over our minds at such an early age.
They're mandating masks for two-year-olds.
Christiane, people are very spiritual.
They go to their yoga retreats and everything, but when it comes to their physical body, they cave in every time.
That's how effective the medical-industrial complex has been.
Wait, wait, didn't they go to the retreats in their physical bodies?
I don't know.
Didn't they go to the Akasha New Earth Haven in their bodies, or did they teleport there?
Or are they doing all of the retreats now by Zoom, or?
Well, it's some combination of Zoom and, you know, out-of-body astral traveling, right?
That's incredible.
Okay, alright, yes.
Sorry, Dr. Northrup, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
They believe in affirmations in Jesus!
This is very interesting.
She's weaving in, right?
Yoga retreat, Jesus, affirmations.
But when it comes to their body, Father Pharmaceutical knows better.
Then she goes off on how the Rockefellers shut down homeopathy and naturopathy in the 20s and how she became an insider in the medical establishment so as to be able to help people take back their sovereignty.
Then Sasha says, I can say things that maybe you can't.
So let's call this what it is.
We are being cult-programmed.
This is satanic programming, and it gets very gory in the basement.
This is baphomet, and many millions of souls have been ritually sacrificed.
Does she nod?
Oh yeah, she's just nodding.
There was no follow-up question to that statement.
And they specifically said the Rockefellers shut down homeopathy?
Yep.
That's what she said.
Because that's not actually what happened.
Homeopathy was a burgeoning industry.
Wait a minute, are you fact-checking that?
Get out of here.
Come on.
Homeopathy in the 19th century, there were a number of homeopathy hospitals and clinics in the 19th century in America, and then germ theory became more widespread in actual hospitals.
Actual hospitals didn't actually start until about 100 years ago around the world, but in America, and that's when homeopathy started to sputter, so it didn't have anything to do with the... I mean, of course, like anything, they might have promoted hospitals, they might have had a hand in healthcare, but that was already a dying train.
It wasn't until I think about the 50s when homeopathy started having a resurgence, so that's just absolute nonsense, that claim.
Not that all the other claims aren't, but when these things, it's just, they just make things up all the time.
She probably had Rockefellers and Rothschilds on like flashcards just to try and get them in at some point because that's the audience, right?
Yeah.
So that's my, that's my assorted tale of learning about the line in the sand conference.
So, but it does sound like Stone is kind of like the hub for a very solid, soft cue push, and is anchoring every conversation back to, well, this is what I'm allowed to say and you're not allowed to say from the perspective of your discipline.
What allows him to say what he's saying?
Why is he so free?
I think it's that he doesn't give a fuck.
They have careers, like he's gotten to the point where he's uncancellable or something, and they have careers where they have to be very politically correct, up to a point.
This is where I have some questions about the money, because I took a look at Akasha New Earth Haven, at least a brief look at some of their materials, their marketing materials, and then also their investment pitch.
The buildings that they are, I think they're offering on site, but also they are offering the designs for export as well.
Anyway, it's an eco resort.
I don't really know what that term means, especially when it's something that you have to fly to.
You know, it's obviously set up for the global wealthy.
For Trustafarians and whoever else can spend the money to do there, it also means that, like, you know, we know who's doing the laundry.
But, you know, if you have 5,000 people coming to your, was it, oh, no, sorry, that was the expected attendance of this year's?
Yeah, 2019.
Yeah, 2017 was 2000.
So 2017.
Now, I don't think that it doesn't look like that center would have accommodated all of those people, but certainly that would have been a huge revenue generator for a center like that.
And I'm wondering if the pandemic has crashed revenues at a place that's now very vulnerable because he's been doing a lot of building.
I think that they only opened in 2016 and it's gorgeously appointed.
Well, I tell you what, this, well one thing jumped out at me that I thought was, that's completely like, sort of off topic, but it's just noticing when you, there's a way that this group of people together almost sound like they should actually be at a porn conference, right?
It's Pam Popper and Del Bigtree and Sasha Stone.
Zach Bush.
They all have these names, these lurid names.
And then for many of them, there's the double, or for some of them, there's the double, you know, like Pam Popper, right?
And this makes me think of how since the 90s or like the early 2000s, a big kind of convention that in the first wave of like online sales and becoming a coach who has a huge following is that you have one of these kinds of names, right?
You change your name.
You have an online persona that has a name with the first and the last name both starting with the same letter and that has some kind of edgy kind of quality like this.
And what you were just saying made me think of how the model in the last five or ten years has been that you have these huge free online summits.
And what's the point of the online summit?
You bring all these different people together and you get their email lists, right?
So I have a feeling you're right, that Sasha Stone is probably desperate that this thing is going to fall through because of the loss of revenue due to the pandemic, and he's probably doing everything he can to try and build a bigger audience and sell things.
He might be independently wealthy.
We have no idea how his raw career went.
I mean, who knows?
There might be money there and this might be actually a labor of love.
But it's an interesting thing to think of, that basically a hospitality business has now launched into the online summit environment.
There might be a linkage there.
Well, there's definitely something there Business and marketing and this political conspiritualist kind of narrative.
I mean, you know, if if this does have to if this does have the sort of driver or the driving behind it of We need a new project and we have to go online and create new online streams.
I mean, we're in the yoga industry and that's collapsed and so I empathize with that and here I am with you both trying to make this work in some way.
I get the improvising thing, I get the feeling of treading water, but You know, it's like, you know how gross it feels to know that Trump is $400 million in debt to somebody?
Like, what might be going on when a, you know, the drive to assemble this all-star cast is actually financial?
I also think it makes me think about the fact that these guys always go on and on about how big pharma is monetizing illness.
But, you know, this is happening all over the place and none of these folks are absolved of the gross paradoxes of capitalism.
Um, you know, and as for eco resort folks, the, the paradoxes are actually worse because, you know, a place like new Haven, uh, or is it called new earth Haven?
It carries the promise of world renewal, uh, I mean, that's the entire marketing pitch is, you know, this is a place of bio-resonance and bio-harmony and, you know, we seek to create, it's very vague, we seek to create, you know, elevated community.
But, I mean, it's a tourist venue in Ubud and that makes it just as dirty and carbon-heavy as everything else.
So, I don't know, I was just thinking about this this week, that when I watch a commercial for Pfizer, you know, like Lyrica or something like that, what's being sold to me in the visuals is a kind of relaxation and relief that would come from the medication.
And there might be some sort of pathetic fallacy in the way that it's shot, like some sort of resonance between how the medication is making me feel better and how the weather is improving or something like that.
But Pfizer isn't telling me that it's going to change the world or bring about a new era of human consciousness.
So really, you know, all these people complaining about big pharma making money.
Yes, of course, many, many problems.
But what's worse?
Pfizer trying to sell you pills?
Well, and I'll add to that, Matthew, is that at the end of that commercial, what you're going to hear is someone at very rapid speed telling you all of the god-awful things that could happen to you if you take the drug that probably happen to like one out of 100,000 people, but they're required to tell you.
Right, yeah, I mean, so in order to sell you the pills, they have some obligation to tell you about side effects, but what does the messianic wellness influencer, what do they have to tell you in terms of their due diligence or their responsibility?
You know, Pfizer's selling you pills and the influencer is trying to sell you your soul back to you in some sort of future state.
I think it comes back to something you point out in your article about Brogan, which is If something bad happens due to their program or their prescription, then it's on you.
Something you weren't doing correctly.
Right.
At the very least, and again, I am in no way a fan of pharmaceutical companies in general and some of their practices, especially related to marketing.
There is at least some level of accountability.
Whether or not it's enforced is another question.
But Julian is right.
I mean, the way that they do it is they run off the side effects really quickly while they're showing you like these really purple images on the screen.
So it's kind of very, there's a lot of dissonance in it.
But there is at least some oversight there.
What we're talking about is a world that is enclosed, and it has no oversight whatsoever, and as we've noticed more and more, is just deflecting criticism pretty much on every level right now.
Shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 2011, I visited the Krishnamurti Foundation in Ojai.
I remember looking across the vast field next to the parking lot and imagining the philosopher reflecting on life while doing the same.
Having read at least six of Krishnamurti's books, I always appreciated his no-nonsense approach to philosophy.
Earlier on in my life, I had read the works of Helena Blavatsky, so I was aware of Krishnamurti's connection to an ultimate abandonment of theosophy.
Then I came across Pushkin's new podcast, Into the Zone, posted by Harry Kunzru.
It's a show about opposites.
And how borders are never as clear as we think.
As a novelist with a keen eye for a good story, he takes the listener around the world to talk to philosophers and punk musicians, new age gurus and space explorers, and investigates the grey zone between life and death, public and private, and black and white.
And really, he touches upon some of the same topics that we do here at Conspirituality.
I highly suggest starting with The Guru of Ojai, where he talks about his family's own relationship to theosophy and how Krishnamurti effectively ended the organization.
I was also fascinated that as deep as a philosopher as he was, Krishnamurti was also a huge fan of spy novels.
Kunz re-humanizes him in a way that I had never yet heard.
You can subscribe to Into The Zone wherever you get your podcasts.
Okay, so for this week in Conspiratuality from here in Toronto, I want to talk a little bit about how we mistake chaos for power in the bodies of charismatic men, and of course this is in the shadow of Trump's hospitalization and all of the incredible confusion that's swirled around it.
I was thinking that back in 2016, there was a lot of people, and especially women, who remarked online on the horror of realizing that our president has a Twitter account and he's going to be tweeting at us at all hours of the day and night, and it's going to feel like living with an abuser.
Like, you never know what's going to happen, but it's going to be bad, and the timing will be volatile, and your ability to recover from it is going to be really challenged, and it's going to wear out over time.
Now, I've noticed that that has kind of slowed up.
Sometimes it's remarked upon, but for the most part, I think people are used to it, and they're numb.
It's been normalized.
You know, as somebody who researches cult leaders, I have a parallel feeling about Trump and what his body does to the bodies of people around him.
Some of it is speculative, but I think there's some clear linkages to be made.
And I can feel this most Acutely, when I forget about what he's saying, I mute his voice and I just sort of contemplate how he lurches around within space.
You know, there's this core paradox at the heart of it, which is that this guy needs to project infinite power whilst being completely helpless with regard to basic daily tasks and bodily responsibilities.
So there's this kind of like desperate projection of a thing that can't be accomplished.
This guy never prepares a meal, never goes shopping, never does any real child care.
There's no real life experience.
If he had to camp, it would be all over.
It would just be done.
Behind being $400 million in debt, being owned by someone else, is this feeling that if he were to be penniless, that he would be completely helpless.
He wouldn't be able to wipe his ass unless someone was cleaning his bathroom for him.
There's all of this work that has to go on around him and, you know, cult leaders end up, if they're gonna burn hot and fast and burn out really quickly, then they go through a lot of people, they fire them, they get rid of them.
The ones that have longevity keep their best lieutenants close to them and at least modulate the abuse with a little bit of social reward so that there's more security.
With Trump, there's this revolving door because obviously he has had no limits on who he's been able to recruit and pay.
And when we're talking about class, or if we think about class, the people that are around him constantly doing the actual physical labor of keeping him alive, they're the Mexicans who work for him in his various businesses, they're the Mexicans who work for him in his various businesses, the same people that he called rapists and murderers as he came down that gold And technically,
Taking care of him, whoever is responsible for it, is an incredibly difficult task because he's totally out of control.
We know that there's no emotional or social regulation, but You know, we also know in bits and pieces from reporting, and then we can probably just feel it to be true, that that all has a bodily root.
That this is a person who doesn't sleep, he eats crap, he's on TV and Twitter all the time.
You know, he's just this kind of like totally hollow shell of puffed up performative anxiety.
And so of course he's going to leave hospital while he's gasping for breath and try to convince himself that he's okay.
In fact, it's probably essential for him that he appears on that balcony to get some sort of feedback from his followers to make him feel like he is alive.
And, you know, I'm watching all of this because I've seen it over and over and over again in the charismatic male leaders.
And I want to just emphasize that.
There might be women cultic figures out there who are similar in their disorganization.
I just haven't heard any of the stories.
Like, I'd really like to know what Teal Swan's daily schedule was like, or what her diet is like, or, you know, whether there's, you know, substance issues or whatever.
But I can tell you that from personal experience...
Michael Roach, who ran the Neo-Buddhist cult that I was recruited into, he basically never slept.
He was never alone.
He had young women basically tethered to him at 10 to 15 feet at all times, doing everything for him.
I mean, carrying his bags and his books and making sure he had Cheerios in the morning and making sure that he knew what gate he was going to at the airport.
This is a guy who basically could just float through the world as a brain in a robe, really.
And that was it.
Then we have all these stories about Bikram Chowdhury who also never slept, also was never alone.
He's giving training programs to people over eight weeks in heated tents and he's forcing them to stay up till three in the morning watching Bollywood films with him while he makes pornographic jokes.
Like, completely, absolutely dysregulated person.
Yogi Bhajan was this hurricane of constant, puerile demands, gorging himself at all hours until his toes fell off from diabetes.
Chogyam Trungpa, who I just reported on, I wish I had been able to include some of the incredible stuff that I heard about his daily life.
One of the interview subjects told me about being 15 years old and going over to have dinner with the Mukpo family and watching Trungpa smashed out of his head, trying to finish his dinner, nodding off, falling over into his plate.
And then finally gaining his balance and sitting up and kind of murmuring to himself with a piece of cabbage sticking out of his mouth and saying, and the kid at the time that the subject was 15.
And they describe how, you know, they were completely horrified and terrified of this man.
And they asked somebody who was actually a leader in the community at the time and very close to them, they said, what's going on?
What's wrong with him?
And they were told that this was his form of meditation.
Right?
And then he's like sleeping until six o'clock in the evening and everybody has to serve him high tea at two o'clock in the morning but in full like dress wear and it's just like there's no day, there's no night, these people don't even live on a planet, right?
And so, Sogyal Lokar, also known as Sogyal Rinpoche, the wonderful book, Tibetan book of living and dying, which was a bestseller.
This guy is ordering filet mignon at midnight and he's sending his people out to get, you know, wine from shops at four in the morning, but bribing the shopkeepers to keep them open.
And all of these men obviously are also sexually abusing everyone they can at all times.
It's just incredible.
Swami Vishnudevananda, same thing.
Julie Salter told an incredible story about how much work she had to do to keep this guy together.
You know, she, when they were in India, he insisted on going to India, although they didn't have any of his medications there and he had to, you know, have dialysis and there wasn't any way of doing that.
And so she's holed up in Delhi trying to get, you know, sort of portable dialysis equipment while he's almost dying, but he needs to go to a sacred cave and so on and so forth.
And so there's a story after story of mainly women keeping Like complete blizzards of chaotic volatility in male form under control or even alive in order to continue to have this incredible influence over their circles.
And, you know, it's just, it's insane how these misogynist sociopaths, they all also preach self-responsibility while they're constantly falling apart and depending on their servants, depending on women to mop them up.
And the thing that is so ironic is that whatever social power their organizations have, It's in spite of their own personal chaos.
It's because of the silent and invisible work of the mainly women who keep them together.
This is one of the things that I realized talking to Julie Salter about Swami Vishnu Devananda was that There would be no Shivananda Yoga organization without the women who kept this dude alive and made it look like he was actually the lineage holder of some reasonable content.
At the end of his life, He was so addled by stroke that he couldn't even speak in a way that anybody but her could comprehend.
And so she actually translated for him.
So she was the voice of Swami Vishnudevananda at the end.
She was the one who made him look good.
Or made him look like he was intelligent.
She was the ventriloquist.
She was the ventriloquist, exactly.
I mean, except that, you know, she's doing her best to, you know, really seize the essence or whatever she feels she can save from whatever it was that he once was able to offer the world as a gift, right?
So, anyway, it's just brought back a lot of watching the total chaos around this guy and his impending death or his fragile recovery, however it works out.
It just brought back a lot of memories.
There's something in this about charismatic men who can't actually exist on their own.
I think last night the vice presidential debate offered an insight into how most women experience it.
I want to qualify that because with Trump on the debate, he's just chaos and we know that.
A good amount of, I'm sure a high percentage of women have had characters like Trump in their lives.
The barometer of this for me is my wife, who I've been with for over six years, and hearing her stories, being a beautiful woman who was in the modeling industry and in hospitality and being around people for most of her career until the pandemic.
And hearing about she's at a director level in her career and just the way that men shut her down.
And it's almost like I can't believe the story sometimes.
But last night's debate really offered insight into how it happens because Trump just steamrolls over everyone.
But the way that Pence actually did it is how most men, I think, do it.
And the fact that Kamala just kept saying, hey, I'm talking now...
It was so refreshing.
And I know from talking to my wife as it was happening and her cheering, and then texting with my friends who are female during that or this morning about that and being like, Thankfully, there's somebody who just finally put someone in their place over and over again as it deserves.
But it says, and I want to ask you this, Matthew, and I want to go into just a brief story because I don't think I've ever told this one, but I trained at a school called Atmananda.
I think it still exists.
I don't know.
I'm not going to say any names, but if people want to research it, I don't have any problem with that.
And when I did my teacher training in 2003, there were 28 people in the program.
26 were women.
There was one other man and he was in his mid or late 50s.
So, I was in my late 20s.
So, I was sort of the de facto default guy around the studio with the male leader of the studio.
So, he would Sometimes take privilege and tell me things that he wouldn't say to anyone else because I was kind of the other guy around and I was always Eeked out by it, but I remember near the end of the program.
It was a six-month program.
He sat there one day His spiritual partner slash kind of wife was sitting next to him because she helped lead the program He held up a stack of unpaid Rent bills.
And he said that he made up some spiritual excuse of why he hasn't paid rent in the studio for like a year.
And in my head, the first thing that happens is like 20 people, $3,000 a person for the program.
Right.
Where did that money go?
But more to the point of this is, he then talked about How he could not control himself around other women and that he just felt like he should be free to have sex with whoever he wants as his partner who is supposedly pregnant.
And I only say that because they never did a test and then she lost the baby in her head.
So that was a weird time.
But sitting next to her listening to him say this, He ended up getting arrested because he sexually abused one of the women in the program, and we still completed the program.
I guess he got off.
I don't even know how all that happened.
At that point, I was totally checked out and just needed to get my certificate so I could go on and leave.
Yeah.
But what just fascinates me by the stories that you're telling and then what I live through And I know this is a naive question in some way, but how do people get so consumed by power or whatever that is that they don't do what Kamala did last night?
They don't say, hey man, what are you doing right now?
What is it going to take to shift the culture, this society to be able to do that?
And what is it about that power that they hold that just holds people in this sort of deer in headlights phase?
Oh, you mean like when you're 23 and you're wondering, like, why weren't you able to intervene or to stand up or to say, you know, I think you're off your rocker or that's really insulting to your partner or why weren't you?
I don't know.
I mean, well, what did it feel like at the time?
It felt gross.
I was very close friends.
We all had a partner, and my partner in that program became a very close friend of mine, so we confided with each other.
And as it was happening, we were just looking at each other.
This was before the arrest, so this was a different thing, but we were just both like, we need to get out of here as soon as possible.
That was our sentiment about it.
Yeah, I mean, that's half, that's halfway towards a, you know, a restorative response because it rejects bystanderism.
It says, at least I want to, I don't want to witness this anymore.
Right.
But yeah, I mean, you're talking about somebody who's, who's twice your age, somebody who, you know, was teaching you something that you felt had esoteric value or that was, you know, or they gave him some sort of special psychological status.
And so you were prepared over months to uh not speak with him as though you were equals or as though you could give feedback or as though you know you were you were um I don't know that as though as though you were friends or even colleagues uh the power dynamic sets that in motion from months prior uh and yeah I mean if you think about if you think about long-term patterning I mean who around somebody like
Trungpa or Yogi Bhajan or Sogyalakar or Donald Trump has had the time and the practice and the support to be able to stand their ground and say, no, I'm speaking.
Everything in the guy's life is organized to eliminate the possibility that somebody is going to stand and resist, right?
Yeah, I mean, I want to suggest here that people who have a kind of grandiose, narcissistic, Machiavellian, power-hungry personality type will actively seek out positions in which they will be able to enact that way of relating and not be challenged.
And I think the corporate world and politics and Bingo, bright lights flashing all over the place, being a spiritual leader.
These are perfect places where there's some kind of way that you can veil abusive power dynamics through either the special identity of being enlightened or the special status of being the boss, right?
Yeah, and the less regulation that the particular subculture has, the less peer review, the more charisma is the coin of the realm instead of anything that anybody can objectively point to and say, oh, you're skilled at that, and that gives you value.
This dude you were learning from, Derek, it's not like anybody got together and sort of confirmed that he had some kind of social value or intellectual value that was going to allow him to also be an asshole and get away with it.
Yeah, the less regulation, the more charisma, the more vulnerability those positions are to, I believe you're right, the person who seeks the position out because they'll be able to dominate with impunity.
What amazed me too is he was able to get out of that and he kept getting people to invest in the studio, buy a retreat center upstate.
It just kept going and the stories kept repeating over and over and that's what's fascinating.
I'm really fascinated by, and when I talked to Ben Lee, he mentions that he's friends with Mark and Bonnie who made the NXIVM documentary, two of the main figures in it.
And watching that documentary, Keith Raniere, I have to check this, but my wife said he's getting out of jail soon.
And I'm actually fascinated by What will happen?
Will he try to reinvent himself?
Like, has he learned?
Oh, no, no.
No, 100% not.
No.
Always goes that way.
Absolutely not.
No, no.
No, and I think— This is Judith Arthur Ray.
This is Peter Popov.
Right, right.
And also, I would just like to say from the perspective of, you know, Me Too journalism, which I've been connected with through my work on abuse in the yoga world, There really isn't any accountability.
We seem to be in a golden age of cultic reporting.
There have been major independent investigations into New Age spiritual organizations.
There's been at least three over the last three years, and that's very new.
And, you know, with Shambhala International, for example, big independent investigation that basically verifies all of the accusations against the current leader, Mipam Mukpo, as being, you know, a serial abuser.
And what do you know?
He's being invited back to be everybody's tantric guru, or at least those people who are hanging around.
Now, you know, there are statutes of limitations that have expired, and there are people who, you know, won't be able to, or it would be very difficult for them to prosecute or bring civil suits.
But, you know, there's very little accountability in the world, I'm sorry to say.
And so I try to turn my attention to, okay, how do we educate people around the red flags of toxic community?
Apologies, he is being sentenced in October.
He's been in holding.
So maybe that's what she was referencing.
So he faces life in prison.
He'll reinvent himself from there.
- That's a possibility as well, yeah. - Last week after the podcast, we were guests at the Future Self Summit And I want to say right off the bat, this is not to knock the people who organized the summit.
They're lovely people.
And they wanted to have us there, to be absolutely fair, to really introduce people who were at the summit to our perspective.
But it was a very interesting conversation.
And I think, you know, we presented for a little bit, and then we took questions.
I think as the Q&A unfolded, We sort of had this realization, right, that we thought we were there to talk to the people at the summit about their friends and colleagues, about how to understand that their friends and colleagues had been red-pilled and what this really meant.
But really, we realized we were talking to their friends and colleagues.
And they were lovely people.
It was a very kind of respectful, sacred space type of conversation that went down, but it was fascinating.
And it underlined again the The understanding that there's no mistake happening here, right?
That people who see themselves as members of a spiritual community that's heading towards a utopian world where we're going to create our future selves through the power of intention and love
That was really well put, and I do want to add something I've mentioned before, but it's just indicative of the fact that when people can at least see each other, because it was on Zoom and we can all see one another, It was respectful, even if we didn't agree.
Everyone listened.
I even think one of the people, when he made his point and then I reflected back about, I think it was germ theory or something, he was just like, or it might have been vaccines, I don't know, but he was like, he's shaking his head, yes.
It was always masking.
That's what it was, the anti-masking thing.
And everyone was really cool.
And that's why I'm always promoting actually talking to people instead of just yelling at each other on a screen.
And this event was a good But it's just indicative of that.
Yeah, even the face-to-face aspect of it being a Zoom room is different than just, you know, typing on a social media site, right?
Oh, for sure, for sure it is.
Yeah, I mean, you can see people's, you can see people breathe, you can see how activated they are, you can see, you know, how your words land.
Right, exactly, exactly.
I wanted to just say here, too, that I had this sense of a second wave, as we talked about in the show notes, both of an awareness of QAnon, like there's a whole new group of people who are like, oh, there's this thing called QAnon and it's making incursions into our space, but also the pushback from people who have been affected by it, but they're like, hey, Not all conspiracies, dude.
Don't lump this stuff that I'm into in with your QAnon stuff, because I'm not about all of that.
I feel like it's important to recognize that QAnon is not a finely tuned master plot.
And it's not our own conspiracy theory, right, that like Q is behind everything, like they're actually pulling all the strings.
It's much more insidious because it's an organic way of just exploiting something very ancient in us during this perfect time of a perfect storm of collective stress.
So one of the guys who raised his hand said, I'm not anti-mask, I'm pro-freedom.
Right?
And then someone in the chat said, yes, and then wait.
So are you saying that wearing a mask means you support QAnon?
Like it was just sort of dismissing this, right?
And then when that guy's turn came, he says, you know, people like me just think science and Western medicine have taken us on the wrong path away from nature.
A vaccine is not going to be the answer to the pandemic that that wrong path led to.
So why don't you just let us take our own path?
Yeah, so it's just that wonderful appeal to nature and that sense of, we want balance and we're not monsters, and I'm not on board with whatever this QAnon thing is that you're talking about.
Another person said, you know, I don't want to take too long with this, but what about Wayfair?
Sex trafficking is real, and surely we have to do something about it.
So these sorts of comments came up, but by far the most airtime was taken up by this very intense guy, and you know, bless his heart, who told us the thing that we keep hearing lately.
You can't just lump all these things together, he said.
I've been into all of these topics for years, way before this QAnon bullshit.
There is a satanic elite.
I believe in the great awakening that is coming, and vaccines should be questioned.
I mean, follow the money.
It all goes back to Big Pharma.
Some of this stuff sounds crazy, like chemtrails.
I never believed in them, but then I saw it for myself.
I had my own visceral experience, and I knew it was real.
I mean, he basically painted a rapid-fire self-portrait of someone who never met a wild conspiracy he didn't fall in love with right away, and then scolded us for not being nuanced enough to do our own research.
You know, and because he wasn't giving a sermon on maybe the Reclaim Your Life network, or he wasn't on, you know, Del Bigtree, because he was in a conversation, that torrent of gish-galloped sort of observations It did not feel to me like a discourse technique.
It felt to me like I have an outpouring of feelings that I want to share with you in this group, and I know you're going to listen because that's what we're here for.
And so I felt like I almost in a, you know, it definitely wasn't group therapy, but what I was listening for, what I was listening for underneath was, oh, there is a thread of anxiety that has been attached to a number of issues that are extremely inflammatory.
And I can really feel how agitating that is to you and how much you worry about this stuff.
You did a great job of walking that line, of actually listening empathically and sort of reflecting back without being in any way patronizing or psychoanalyzing.
It was great.
Well, yeah, I mean, because I could just feel it.
I mean, and I think it's really the benefit of the format.
And I think that if The more we get out of Facebook threads where it's text block after text block and link dump after link dump, and the more we get out of the sort of passive consumption of people giving their sermons into YouTube, and the more we get into conversations, I think we're gonna make headway in some small way because we can actually
I don't know, open ourselves up to each other's feelings, which are for the most part shared.
I mean, I'm anxious about... I'm anxious in other ways, but I could resonate with a whole feeling sense for sure.
Yeah.
And he would, the self-awareness was, was, you know, great too.
Cause he said, I, as I listened to you, I feel my blood boiling and it was like, yeah, we could, we could tell.
He also, one thing that I, because it honestly took me about two minutes into it before I realized what, I don't want to say side, but whether he was, you know, kind of agreeing with us or not.
And it wasn't until the chem trail comment where I was like, okay, now I see what's happening.
But in that video that Trump put out this morning, You can go watch it.
It's on his Twitter feed if you can stomach the two minutes of it.
He says, seniors are not vulnerable.
The next sentence, seniors are the most vulnerable population.
Right back and forth.
And you're watching it in real time being like, well, wait a second.
What am I listening to?
What am I and that's what I felt like listening to him.
And it did take me a while to kind of Parse it and piece together the threads he was trying, and that's actually, I think, indicative of QAnon in general.
When you see people being interviewed at Trump rallies and they're like, Kofeve was a secret message, what did it mean?
They're like, well, he'll reveal it when it's time.
There's no actual bearing to what they're saying.
Well, but, and there's, so there's cognitive jamming going on.
There's, you know, there's almost, there's a sense when contradictory ideas are slammed up against each other that the only resolution is a kind of, I don't know, sort of transrational feeling that you would get that gives the sense that something intuitive is being said or something beyond regular discourse is being offered This doesn't make sense rationally, but goddammit, it rhymes.
Yeah, exactly.
Somehow.
There's also, I don't want to lose this before we move on to Yoga Journal, but there was something you said about the vaccine and the nature.
And this is a point I make in my book and I've talked about before, but it's so important.
If you are a holistic, wellness-minded person, vaccines are one of the most natural ways of healing.
I'm sure that for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, People were getting inoculated with small amounts of virus, which would then protect them further.
And I know that the conversation tends to be around adjuvants in general and what they're being preserved with.
Julian did a wonderful job many episodes ago breaking down why most of them have no actual effects, negative effects in your body, and the ones that did, they've taken them out at this point.
But that is actually, a vaccine is one of the most perfect examples of how nature works.
You get a little of something.
That's how homeopathy works.
It's how most medicines that are effective work.
So, I don't understand this argument from people who are like, I want to get back to nature.
And then here is what nature does.
And you're like, no, not that part.
Yeah, I want to get back to nature, but the medical advance that came from a farmer taking the pus from a cow and rubbing it on the wounds of his children is unnatural.
You know, one other thing that I'd like to pick up before we go to Yoga Journal is the comment... I'm really obsessed with the anti-mask logic, and another angle came up this week when I actually interviewed for a piece that I'm doing on assignment.
I was able to interview two SoftQ, well one's a QAnon group moderator, Facebook moderator, who's just been booted off, so I'm going to have a call with him after we get off to see how he's doing.
But the other one is actually a SoftQ group leader who said when we got into his views on masks, I proposed that
You know, isn't it just the way that science goes that the public health officials were, you know, going back and forth on, you know, relative benefits versus, you know, whether or not the fomites are going to be spread by people touching their masks?
And isn't it, hasn't it just been worked out very slowly?
And isn't that the reason why, you know, people believe that the scientists are lying?
And he just waved that all away over Zoom.
He literally waved his hand.
He said, we don't care about masks.
We care about freedom and the symbology of self-sovereignty.
He said, so what he basically expressed was that for his faction of soft cue ideology, That the mask is a wedge issue.
It's not, yes, they can talk about covering the face and whether or not two-year-olds are going to be programmed.
David Martin obviously doesn't have a two-year-old because what parent or what two-year-old would be having their mask on all the time?
That doesn't even make sense.
It's not like the two-year-old would be wearing their mask 24 hours a day and would never understand that they had a Alone in front of the mirror with the mask on.
What's all the exaggeration about?
It doesn't make sense.
It doesn't make sense.
Anyway, he basically said, we don't care about the science of masks.
We care about symbols of resistance.
And I was like, oh, okay, that's starting to make a little bit more sense.
But then the other thing that I keep obsessing about is this misunderstanding of what The mask means in terms of one's own health.
And so when the guy says, I'm not anti-mask, I'm pro-freedom, I also hear not from this guy particularly, but in other ways that that said, which is, I'm not anti-mask, I don't want to feel ashamed of my own body.
And, you know, I always think, I don't know if you guys saw the COVID protester, COVID denialist protester diaper guy.
He went to a rally in Tulsa and he wore this diaper and it's in the show notes and the diaper says, The diaper says something like, uh, check out my COVID fart prevent prevention diaper.
Uh, and it's written, he's wearing it in public and, and his idea, his, his, his, his, uh, argument is that because there was some evidence that suggested that, you know, uh, That coronavirus was carried in fecal matter or in farts, that he would cover himself up and that would be his mask.
And it just brought together these themes of, oh, for you, the mask is an object of shame because it indicates some sort of dirtiness.
And I think
This is particularly like aggravating to Americans for some reason because I see the same sort of connection with I don't know if you remember the parades of guys who would drive pickups with sort of they would they would be souped up so that they would belch out black smoke and they would wave around drill baby drill signs and they would they would just they would just make their vehicles as polluting as possible so that they could own the libs.
You know, so there's this like anal fascination with filth and dirt and whether it's in me or not in me or, and there's some idea that American exceptionalism, you know, means that I couldn't possibly smell bad or I couldn't possibly be polluting the world just by living, just by existing here.
Don't tell me what to do.
Not only don't tell me what to do, don't tell me that I'm dirty.
But Mr. American baby man, I'm sorry, but you are dirty.
You are a little bit smelly.
And instead of stamping your foot like you're three years old and saying, I don't need a wipe, meaning I'm self-sufficient.
I don't need to be cared for, which is of course an American theme by force now, because nobody's caring for Americans.
The lack of perspective has always been, because there are certain cultures in America in general that we associate with smelling and dirty, and what we don't realize is when you go to those countries, they have the same feelings about Americans.
Exactly right.
And a lot of those people use bidets.
Yoga Journal last week had a really quite good article, specifically, you know, covering the the Sean Corn and our other friends.
Yeah, it seemed like she had done her homework.
She may have listened to a few of our episodes.
I caught a few things in there.
Pastel Q.
And I feel like the woman who wrote it, I'm forgetting her name.
Oh, it's Jennifer Davis Flynn.
Yeah.
Yeah, it seemed like she had done her homework.
She may have listened to a few of our episodes.
I caught a few things in there.
So really, really nice job and so great to see it in that specific publication.
They mentioned how Pastel Q might take the form of covert posts that mentioned COVID denialism, Second Amendment rights, sex trafficking, or 45 as being a lightworker.
But the really noteworthy thing about this was that...
When I looked through the highest ranked comments, right, so the comments that had gotten the most number of likes, and it was in the hundreds, some of them up around, I think, 400, 500, don't tell us how to think.
Sex trafficking is real.
Now we know who's paying you.
This is not yogic.
Stick to yoga, please.
You're out of your lane.
You're censoring free speech and questioning of corporations.
Who do you think you are?
How can you just accept the mainstream media dismissal of QAnon when they're helping people to think about what's really happening?
Right.
This is all on Instagram, right?
This was on Instagram, and I saw some of this on Facebook as well.
So a lot of similar stuff.
Now, when I'm looking at this, I'm thinking, okay, this is people who follow Yoga Journal already, right?
These were not accounts with trolling names.
These were not anonymous accounts.
This was Miss Pretty Pants.
Rocky Love 100, Literary Chick, Blissful Athlete, and a lot of just like straight up first name, last name, like people who are just sincere social media users who use their name, right?
These are Yoga Journal followers because they teach yoga or they're really into yoga.
And a lot of the comments were like, I'm unsubscribing.
I'm not going to buy your magazine ever again.
How dare you be so political?
We all started yoga in the 90s.
Right.
Everything changes, and especially when money is injected, things change.
I mean, Yoga Journal is the premier example of that because I've been reading it since the 90s.
And even before that, if you go back to issues from the 80s and look at how different it was.
But the arguments that used to happen in the 90s were how long a proper Shavasana is.
And what poses to start in or not to start in and such.
Is power yoga legitimate?
Yeah, and these were, honestly, for listeners who are newer to yoga, these were the serious questions that were being asked and debated all the time and we didn't have the same channels.
But whenever, anytime money comes in, it doesn't matter if it's spiritual or if it's corporate, there really is no difference.
When money is injected, it's going to skew the product.
It's going to make vested interests by certain parties.
I'm very happy.
I mean, honestly, Yoga Journal has written about me.
I've written for them before.
I appreciate them, but I was always wary of certain aspects of it.
But the comments, because I read the threads, not as closely as you, but the comments specifically about The fact that they're corporately owned and the mainstream media aspect, I'm sorry, YouTube is not a source of information.
And if you're listening to the show on YouTube, you can check our notes and our sources too, that's fine.
But when you're immediately viscerally reactive against anything that you don't agree with, there is a problem.
And I think if there's any overarching theme that we're trying to help to not even solve, but just to ask questions about and think more critically about, it's that.
It's like, what are these things that poke you and why are you so immediately reactive?
And when I was reading that, I guarantee that a lot of those comments, the people didn't actually read the article.
They just saw the lead and then made their assumption based on that.
And that is a problem we have to talk about.
Just these face to face conversations.
That is a problem we have to solve as well.
Right.
I reached out to actually Jennifer Davis Flynn for a comment and by email she replied as follows.
I just asked her what it was like to watch those comments flood in.
She said, I was shocked when the comments started immediately pouring in.
Initially they were mostly in support of QAnon and Trump and criticized us for talking about politics.
When we were objectively reporting news that affects the yoga and wellness community, there are two themes I saw in the negative comments of the post.
The idea that yoga is, quote, not political, unquote, and how dare we venture beyond poses and pretty pictures to impose our agenda on an audience.
I would argue that yoga is inherently political with a spiritual philosophy rooted in oneness, inclusion, equality, and justice, but What the disparaging comments really illustrate for me is the degradation of critical thinking due in part to a relentless attack on the media, journalism, and science from the current administration.
And whereas I feel like the spiritual community was already susceptible to magical thinking, it's simply gotten worse because we are no longer operating from a shared set of facts.
Reading anything on the mainstream media that contradicts your opinions has become fake news, and somehow, the existence of a child-eating cabal of satanic Democrats is now believable.
In the end, I was happy to see many people come out in support of the Post, who were obviously concerned about the crazy stuff they'd been hearing and reading from members of their community.
I think it helped many people connect the dots back to QAnon.
So thank you, Jennifer Davis Flynn, for writing that in.
Pretty good summation.
I was happy, personally, to see one name in there.
Did you see Sadie Nardini in that common thread getting in there and kicking some butt?
No, that's awesome.
Oh yeah, the original rockstar yoga business person.
She was arguing powerfully for critical thinking and for Yoga Journal's right to promote it.
I met Sadie the day she moved to New York.
She was one of my first teachers.
She I have a long history with her.
I'm not in touch with her nearly as much.
But I will say that she does step up and she has a certain public persona that you know, some people love some people don't.
But I've just known her for decades now.
And she always I'm glad to hear that she stepped up like that because that is her person.
Well, you know, it also gave me the sense that there's, I feel, a typology emerging, at least within me, of leaders in this zone that, you know, there are charismatic personalities who are, you know, self-aware about the fact that they are business people and that means that they retain a certain amount of bullshit radar and they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.
They're making conscious choices.
about their celebrity status, and it seems that Nardini is kind of in that category.
And then there's Charismatics, who just totally get high on their own supply.
And, you know, they will be blown about by the wind, and if things seem to work in terms of content, they'll just, you know, catch a wave.
Slaves to the SEO.
Right.
Crystaltini showed up as well in the thread.
Did you see that?
Do you guys know who Crystaltini is?
Yeah, the LA yoga teacher who owns a yoga mat company called My Soul Mat.
She was featured in one of the QAnon Anonymous podcasts, the one where they talked about new age influencers to QAnon Pipeline.
They really, in a very sort of poignant way, they covered her experience of red pilling, but also how she openly references her struggles with eating disorders and depression.
But, you know, stepping back for a moment and in, you know, response to or in reflection of what Jennifer wrote, you know, Yoga Journal is actually in a pretty weak position with regard to making moral arguments about anything.
You know, it has been, as you pointed out, Derek, it's been through a lot of changes, but, you know, I'd say for the last 15 years, it's really been a consumer lifestyle You know, catalog body-shaming white lady consumption magazine for, you know, a very privileged population.
It's made money by running advertising for abusive yoga organizations, you know, and it's lost something of its pedigree.
It reminded me, reading this, about You know, why there's actually two main yoga media organizations going now.
Do you guys know how Yoga International came to be and why?
No.
So, in 1990, Katherine Webster was hired by Yoga Journal back when it was actually, you know, a magazine that funded investigations and, you know, had fact checkers and stuff like that.
to write the article about Swami Rama which is called the I think it's called the the case against Swami Rama and Webster uncovered you know decades of abuse within the organization and as soon as the Himalayan Institute realized that this meant that they couldn't advertise in Yoga Journal anymore they created their own magazine called Yoga International and so if you are
If you're signed up to both of those, now you know why there's kind of like the two-party system in yoga big media.
But I mean, I just say in general, with regard to Yoga Journal, expectations should be very low.
And the basic cultural value is its power to make conspicuous consumption of wellness products and retreats feel like it has spiritual benefit.
And, you know, every time over the last several years that Yoga Journal has made any gesture towards critical thinking or social justice, it's broken all of the rules of its own marketing.
And, you know, of course it's going to feel to a bunch of its readership like it's, you know, just blown a big fart in the aromatherapy room.
The year is 1995. - Five.
Smartphones aren't a thing, and cell phones are rare.
I won't get into what you needed to connect to actually play music, but I was a proud member of BMG Music Club.
Well, sort of.
There were ways as a college student to get your first 11 CDs for a penny without being obligated to make further purchases.
I'm not saying that was me, so I'm speaking for a friend.
The 11 choices were never what you really wanted, so you took chances.
One of mine was an album called Night Song, a collaboration between a Pakistani Qawwali singer named Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Canadian guitarist and producer Michael Brook.
Let's just say I have no idea what the other 10 albums were, but Night Song changed my life. but Night Song changed my life.
I'm going to save my detailed thoughts on global music for a Monday bonus episode.
Suffice to say, my journey into world music, or music from places other than America, began the day I slid that album into my CD player.
I ended up spending a decade of my life as an international music journalist, talking to hundreds of musicians from around the world, attending hundreds of concerts, listening to thousands of albums, and being absorbed by the sounds and cultures of the planet. - Yeah.
Music is how a kid that grew up in a racist white suburban community was transformed into someone who has spent decades advocating not only for tolerance, but active participation and communication with other cultures.
My college years were spent studying music and religion, and really, there's not a lot of difference between the two.
If you want to know one, you study the other.
To understand the soul of a people, listen to their music.
When I was communicating with Ben Lee for today's episode, I saw in an old email that we had actually talked in 2015.
I mentioned that at the beginning of our conversation.
Ben is an Australian singer and songwriter who cut his teeth playing in a youthful punk band, Noise Addict.
This Sydney-based band was signed to Grand Royal Records, the Beastie Boys label, that also released the awesome Luscious Jackson.
When a man can take a stand and wash his hands off his skin.
Watch his women stand on the feet, feed her in a fight to get beat.
Help her get her medicines leave, let her step on out of the street.
Ben has since created, produced, and scored dozens of projects.
Most recently, that includes a collaborative record with Josh Radner, a musical with Tom Robbins, and seven years ago, an album dedicated to Ayahuasca.
His 2019 album is called Quarter Century Classics.
Can you treat it like an oil well?
When it's underground, out of sight.
And if the sight is just a horse sign.
Can it make enough sense to me?
Pretend the table is a trust now.
We'll put our labels down, favors down.
I asked Ben to be on the podcast due to his relentless political work on social media.
He somehow found Conspirituality and we started a conversation online, one I feel that will last for some time.
That comes up during our talk, how you need to communicate with members of your tribe right now, because despite what us more liberal-minded people like to believe, we're living through tribal warfare.
It might be on a new battlefield, but out in the real world, Americans are dying by the hundreds of thousands, and cults like QAnon are actively indoctrinating people to think that that's okay, it's part of a Great Awakening.
When I come across someone willing to speak up against such atrocities, I want to talk to them, because they're allies, just like many people I've DMed with since the inception of Conspirituality are.
I start a conversation discussing the state of music.
Being a musician has never been easy.
What we're living through right now, with Patreon and Kickstarter and tip jars, is really just an incarnation of another old artistic model.
Sponsorship.
Buying albums is a relatively new phenomenon.
Not even 100 years old, at least not on a mainstream level.
The first subscription music service was through the telephone at the turn of the 20th century.
And that didn't go so well.
Other calls would seep in over the orchestra you were listening to.
Before that, you had to rely on your community to survive as an artist.
And so here we are again.
Thinkers like Stephen Mithen believe that music was the precursor to language.
The vocalizations we used to assign meaning in the form of words originated with sounds we made with our bodies, and these sounds had rhythm and melody.
That's likely why music is so deeply embedded in our consciousness, and why this pandemic has sucked so much.
Not being able to go to concerts hurts.
But there are other ways to support your artists.
So please, remember that when the musicians you love are in need.
Okay, I can talk about this topic all day, and I will soon share a deeper dive on the importance of music and global cultures.
But for now, here's my talk with Ben Lee.
Going through my email, we did chat in 2015, but it wasn't for your music, it was for Silver Lake Chorus.
Oh, cool.
I didn't realize that.
So I interviewed you and I went back.
I used to work for Six Degrees Records doing all of their press releases and bios.
And so I found our clips when we talked in 2015.
So it's nice to have a five year catch up now.
Yeah, that was a great project.
That was really fun.
I've been friends with Bob Duskus for 20 years now and I've followed everything they've ever produced and that was one of the more unique projects and it really came to light because of you.
So that was really good.
I don't know if they're still together.
That's the only thing I remember about them.
They are and they're trying.
The thing is like, you know, when you have people doing something part-time and there's 25 of them Doing gigs together and making an album.
That album took us three years or something because of the logistics of making it.
And then you bring in all these rock stars and songwriters and it was kind of nuts.
But I do have that side of me that looks for the most interesting and difficult challenge in the room and then goes, let's see if we can figure it out.
And it's almost like the more behemoth, the sort of imaginative skill required in conceptualizing it, the more excited I get.
So that's one of those challenges.
Before we get into the more conspirituality stuff, because I think this is also an important topic and since we have you here, I know you recently recorded a video for sort of a little fundraiser for the Bootleg Theater and with so many venues closing right now, as an artist who has spent your entire life performing,
How do you feel about this moment musically, both in terms of what is coming out creatively, perhaps, or what you've been working on, but also about some speculation about the future of live music and what you think we can do with the circumstances?
The marginalization of musicians in terms of the value that we feel they deserve for their content in our society, that's been a steady decline for a number of years now in the sense that like, I just don't think the average person believes or values music as a commodity in the way they might have in the 70s or 80s.
So like a lot of young people, music is something that's consumed through TikTok or through video games, but it's basically like a Peripheral consumption of music, you know, as opposed to like the old audiophile thing where you get the new album and put it on headphones and listen to it over and over and memorize the lyrics.
So, from that perspective, what we've continued to see through COVID, the lack of concern, essentially, by our wider society for what's happening to artists doesn't seem that surprising.
We're headed back to Australia in December for At least for 2021.
And partly that's because I'm going to be able to work there.
And I don't think... I know so many musicians who just haven't been able to work.
And I don't know what's going to happen to... creatively, do you then get... I think you sort of get this Sort of spread where you get either people that are already relatively privileged and can continue to make their work without worrying about live performance and royalties and that sort of thing.
Or you get the Dostoevskys of the world who like the chaos of it, it spurs them into more creativity and they sit in the madness with no money and unable to pay their rent and they create their like genius statements on, you know, on humanity.
So I think those two types of artists are sort of the ones the ones who are continuing to be very dynamic and prolific, but for the majority of artists who are like working artists, it's a very hard time to be able to continue.
How have you found that it's affected your own creativity?
It's quite funny, like in the beginning of quarantine and everything, when everyone was like, this is the chance to like make your masterpiece and write your novel and all of I thought that's actually good advice for people that have already built those skills, but you're not suddenly going to get the ability to conceptualize and manifest work in such chaos without having built those muscles.
And I'm someone who I go from project to project.
So for me, rolling this atmosphere into that felt easier.
But I have other friends who have been completely creatively paralyzed.
I think at the moment, honestly, at the moment, all I can think about is the election.
And I'm putting all of my creativity into Encouraging people that voted third party or didn't vote in the last election to vote and vote blue.
And that's where I'm putting my creativity.
I'm halfway through making an album, but I've put it all on hold for the moment because I just can't justify putting energy into anything other than this very important cause right now.
I was reading an article this morning about the idea that influencers can no longer remain politically neutral.
And realistically, I mean, that's a debate we can have.
But a longstanding argument I've heard is that entertainers should not be political.
And you'll see sometimes someone will come out and then people will be like, just play your music or just act, don't talk.
And this whole idea, which I've always found completely nuts because everyone is a citizen and has a voice.
But you have definitely been very vocal and is that something you've, have you always felt it important to speak out politically or have you felt that it's ramped up over 2020?
Yeah, I mean, I've always felt it important to speak up about what I was passionate about.
That historically hasn't been politics, with the exception of there's been movements that I felt very connected with or inspired by, but they were sort of these periodic things that I would get, you know, feel like I wanted to speak up and share my voice in.
But, I don't know, at the moment it's funny, like being an immigrant to America, you know, I moved here when I was 18, so that's 24 years ago.
Sometimes you find immigrants are more patriotic than people that were born in a certain country because we had to choose to come, and in some ways, perhaps naively, I kind of still America, in like a fundamental sense of what it could be.
I mean, I remember at 12 years old, coming with my parents, and I was a huge Spike Lee fan.
And all I wanted to do in LA was go to the 40 Acres and a Mule store and buy Spike Lee merchandise.
Because to me, coming from Australia, I viewed America as a container that could tolerate intense dialogue about race and art and revolution.
Have the potential for just like healing and radical change and you know just this amazing momentum and I've got to say that optimism has it's been worn worn down in me over the years because I kind of thought there were more people like me than the other way that actually wanted things to maintain the status quo or go backwards.
For me there was obviously all of Trump's presidency I've been incredibly disheartened but there was a moment And it was connected to Black Lives Matter.
I found that the emergence of that movement to be so emotional and inspiring for me.
And I know the conversations that I was having with black friends and with white friends within my family, we were having new conversations.
There was actually something happening that the complete lack of support for that dialogue from the current administration, I found to be criminal, let alone sending the military in to quell protests and to share the message that essentially dissent is unpatriotic.
I mean, I found it all so disturbing.
And then moving into the QAnon thing where not only was there a disregard for Black Lives Matter, but actively there was this counter-argument that it was a, whatever they call it, a sigh-up or that it was somehow a distraction from the real issues.
I found so personally insulting.
And I think that was the moment when it sort of became inconceivable for me to stand on the sidelines of this conversation.
I I felt drawn into it in such an emotional way and with such veracity and belief in my My understanding of the authenticity of this conversation that we need to be having.
It was like, it was just undeniable to me.
And so all of this kind of got me more and more pumped up.
And I was just like, I am going to do my part to get this guy out of office.
Yeah.
I've noticed some pushback on your feed, but not a lot.
It's mostly overwhelming support, which is great, but obviously there's trolls, there's operatives, and there's just people who don't agree, which is fine.
There, there is room I've found online for some critique and debate that remains civil, but obviously most of the time it's not.
And when you read about people pushing back on you, how do you feel and how do you respond to that?
I've always had a kind of mixed reaction to criticism.
There's a part of me that, like everybody, I want to be heard, I want to be understood, I want to connect.
But there's also like a punk rocker in me that is, you know, I come from underground music.
I come from the idea that Um, pushing buttons is good and that art and that speaking the truth and poetry and, you know, ideas are not meant to be, uh, you're not meant to receive total, uh, just, you know, unfettered support from who you're talking to.
That some pushback is healthy, but that doesn't mean that I need to engage with it.
You're in a different world in that you're, you know, with this podcast and everything, this project is really about creating conversation.
I'm an individual and my platform is not a democracy and I'm not interested in giving space.
I'll often give, there'll be one attempt at engagement if I think the person's sincere but if they use a hashtag like Trump 2020 or something it's done right away because as soon as you use a hashtag you're basically drawing other people with like minds on social media drawing their attention to the post And that, I feel, is an aggressive act.
And I block and delete all of those types of people.
I've noticed that the second amount of listeners to the podcast are actually from Australia.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I also have a music project called Earthrise Sound System, and we've been around for 10 years.
We do it occasionally.
But interestingly, the second number of listeners we have is from Australia, and we're Our first record was called The Yoga Session, so it's beat-driven, but it's made for that community.
And so I've always had some relationship.
And so the wellness community, obviously there's something in Australia.
I know you've lived in the US for a long time, but you do go back.
And I'm wondering, what are the parallels that you found between the, we use the term wellness community, obviously that's a big term, but between what you experience in the States and what you see in Australia?
Yeah.
Australia definitely has a large group of people that I don't know if you've played the Byron Bay Blues and Roots Festival, and there's a lot of hippies on the central coast, on the east coast, and there's a big yoga, kirtan, that sort of world that I've always been sort of peripherally involved in for different reasons.
But I think one of the things that's interesting about Australia is our experience of racism Is very different because, you know, Aboriginal people in Australia are more like the Native Americans in America in that it's a little bit out of sight, out of mind.
The genocide already happened.
We do, while we still make gestures of reconciliation, they really are gestures at this point.
It's not the same as dealing with the relationships between black and white Americans who, this is an active, dynamic, Massive population within America.
So, in some ways the racism within Australia, or even if it's like more covert and it's just obliviousness to the reality of racism, is like, it's very conceptual.
It's very conceptual.
You know, I had never really, I mean, one of the things I really credit your podcast with is
Helping me and a lot of people I know think about the inherent privilege that's based in sort of new age communities and how a lot of the people who kind of drop out of, you know, going to law school and their parents dying and everything and then get into like macrobiotic foods and move and open a yoga center and all that, that is an incredibly privileged position to be in.
And I think the new age world in Australia is quite Part of the reason I know I have the analytics tracking, but I also, a lot of people from Australia reach out to us, the number one is always Pete Evans that they're pointing out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But there are a number of yoga instructors who are kind of towing this line.
And even though we do have what you said, that conflict, it's more in your face in America, I would imagine, than Australia in terms of racial dynamics.
It's still easy to fall into pockets, even here in Los Angeles.
In New York City, on the subway, I would hear 10 languages every time I got on.
In Los Angeles, you have to drive to different areas to experience different cultures, so it's a little bit different.
And have you noticed with the QAnon, I don't know how much in touch you are, you said you have some family in Australia, so maybe some, have you seen a proliferation of QAnon to the degree that you've seen it here in Australia?
Yeah, I actually have and it's concerned me.
So for your, you know, I guess part of this conversation in terms of my involvement in sort of fighting QAnon and their disinformation That your listeners for the most part, and even a lot of my fans don't know about me, is my kind of journey as a quote-unquote spiritual seeker over the years has taken me through a lot of different worlds.
I was born Jewish, But I always had this kind of just, you know, thirst for knowledge that I'm sure we all did and was like, I was like, I want to, I want to find out the truth.
I want to experience different viewpoints.
I want to tap into the occult wisdom of the ages and you know, all these kind of things.
I can now look back on those experiences go, oh, that's called moving through different cults.
In fact, I've sort of come to the belief that There is no way for spiritual knowledge, and again in quotes, to be taught or shared in a group without it being a cult.
My feeling is that all of that real inner knowing is an incredibly It's any type of group dynamic.
It's naturally going to be a cult dynamic.
It's just in its nature.
As I've moved through these different explorations, and that's the thing, when I tell people, oh yeah, I've been in cults, they imagine I moved onto some sort of homestead and, I don't know, had nine wives or whatever I was doing.
But for me, it was more like, I think I've sort of, I was in a Qigong, I studied Qigong at a place called the American Taoist Healing Center in New York that for a number of years that I view as having, you know, kind of cult-like qualities.
My wife and I actually got married by a Hindu guru called Narayani Amma, who's like a male manifestation of the Divine Mother energy that was very, that was a cult.
I studied this thing called the Numa system with this teacher called Juan Ruiz Nalpari that was a mixture between like Gnostic Christianity and Ayahuasca work and Peruvian, you know, all this kind of a cult sort of weirdness, you know.
And then even through that, I got involved with doTERRA and essential oils.
And so I've had the experience of that whole thing.
And what's interesting about that is the debate, the ongoing debate of are MLMs cult-like I feel like the QAnon thing, it's the nail in the coffin.
All we have to look at is how many people from that world have bought into QAnon.
The perception of that world being cult-like was like completely accurate and that there's a, those people involved in that are prone to that type of thinking, you know, take out even the economic side of it and that, you know.
So, anyway, all of that's background knowledge on why I have quite a broad connection to people in these different worlds and with each of them, I came to different moments of realizing I was in a cult with cult-like behavior.
It's almost like the QAnon thing has allowed me to see it clearly, because I'm so diametrically opposed to its values.
And I'm watching people drop like flies around me in Australia and America.
And I'm going like, oh, this is what it feels like when you choose not to get on the bus and just go in the direction that it's going.
But it's given me, amongst my community, a unique skill set in being able to... I'm also good mates with You know, Bonnie and Mark, who were in that show, The Vow, who were in NXIVM.
So like, you know, so I've been involved in these conversations, you know, over the last decade and it's like, now what I'm seeing is like, it's this mixture.
It's probably much like what you're feeling.
it's both the inevitability of this experience, that the seed was planted for this type of thinking and for these type of people to get involved in fascism long ago and we were all directly involved in it.
Like we all helped cultivate this atmosphere.
I love that piece that Julian did that little piece on Instagram about the complex implications of being told to trust your intuition and your heart over logic, and that's a lesson that I was directly involved in Disseminating and sharing and telling people as I was like gaslighting them so I could continue to gaslight myself and stay involved in all these various different programs.
I feel a sense of like personal responsibility in terms of the contribution.
It's almost like I think when like Limp Bizkit came out after the Beastie Boys and you go the Beastie Boys had to honestly look at themselves and go look we didn't want it to end up here but we can't deny our behavior helped laid the track for Yeah, I actually, that just brings up a memory.
I was in the college organization at Rutgers when I was there, and we had a Biohazard and House of Pain headline, and there was this little band that hadn't had an album yet called Korn that opened.
And I ended up, I don't know if you know Korn, but basically of the Limp Bizkit variety, but that's just, yeah, that was an interesting moment in time.
Yeah, and it's like, this is what happens, like ideas Come that have some sort of like they could go either way depending how they used like an idea like trust your intuition above science or logic that idea
For good, at times, if the logic you were being faced with was, for instance, like, the logic of the tribe in organized religion, when they're telling you, oh no, don't read that book, don't do, you know, and you're like, my intuition's, it's like Kermit the Frog, like the rainbow connection, like, my intuition's telling me to leave the tribe and to experience what's out there, but it can also be used, as we're seeing now, to become a total distrust of logic.
We are living in the result of too many people turning away from logic.
Yeah, well logic is, I mean, people have to remember that logic is a skill that you have to study for.
Intuition is an evolutionary skill that we developed over time and it's just, it's environmental You learn certain patterns and then you notice the glitches in the patterns.
And that's really what intuition is.
It's just your own personal training and then applied to different moments.
So you're basing every new experience off of what you've experienced before.
And if something seems a little bit off, then you get that feeling of like, wait a second, this feels weird to me.
And this whole thing is disorienting.
You brought up NXIVM, which is a fantastic documentary.
Watching the first one with my wife, we were both like, you know what?
Just watching the first episode, if we were around this sort of group 10 years ago, we might've been like, yeah, I'll check this out.
There was nothing religious around it at first.
It was a little corporate for me.
It was a little corporate for me.
I like the sexiness, the psychedelic exoticism when I pick a cult.
But I have a lot of friends who are lawyers and a number of them got into like Landmark Forum, for example, which is very that corporate same, you know, they suit different temperaments, I guess you could say.
I'm with you on the psychedelic side.
But the idea of promoting clarity and focus and ways to excel in your career, those are all things that people, productivity, that's all things that people are looking for now.
But then you watch how it slides down that rabbit hole of that show.
But at least with NXIVM, there was a very clear leader, and you might not yet, even it's not all out yet, so you don't yet know the totality of the intentions.
I mean, you might because you're friends with them, but with QAnon, there is no leader.
There's something completely different happening now, and I just would like to get your thoughts on what you think the real dangers of QAnon are.
The dangers of cult-like thinking are that they Encourage you to make allowances for things that you wouldn't when you're in your right grounded mind, right?
So, the example I keep coming back to is like, once the QAnon, the spiritual QAnon people went down this Trump is a lightworker thing, right?
Because they did this with gurus.
There was always like with Osho, there was the crazy wisdom.
Right?
And I experienced this because I've been around gurus, and there is an incredible devaluation of one's personal experience.
The guru said this to me.
It didn't make sense, but obviously, they were trying to tweak me and twist me and reveal things to me.
What do you think of men?
And ultimately, there is a placing of the guru's agenda or behavior as far above one's own perception of what's right and wrong.
And when we're living in a time when, for instance, like climate change and race relations, I mean, they're two that jump to mind, but there are so many issues that need to be dealt with, with clarity, with tenderness, with compassion, with logic, with science.
The real, the biggest danger is that we're going to run out of time.
Yeah.
That we're going to be so sidetracked Whatever Q is saying, that we don't do what we're meant to be doing, which is...
Getting our asses in gear and fixing these problems, because this is not an infinite runway we've got to deal with this stuff.
And I'm just seeing this massive distraction.
So I know other people are focused on violence and the potential threats of violence from QAnon, and I'm there with that too, but the bigger issue for me is this distraction.
So yeah, we were talking about in Australia, how is QAnon manifesting?
I have a friend down there who's an essential oils person, Jessie Reimers, and she's quite famous in that world.
And she reached out to me after seeing my post, and she was like, these people are driving me crazy.
There's people all through doTERRA who have lost it, and they're all aboard this Trump is a lightworker thing.
And I said, well, look, I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I invite you, if you feel authentically about this, to make a statement, because I do think as many of us There is power in numbers and the more of us who simply say, not feeling it.
It's literally like 1941, just like waving a hand going, um, not for me.
You know, literally the more of us that do that, because I actually think people that have already gone QAnon, you're not getting them back.
They've made their mind up.
But there are people with one toe in and every day going in further.
I feel like you guys, me, Sean Conn, all those, we can catch some of those guys.
We can catch some of them and just be like, Look, there's an alternative.
That's not the only slope you can go down here.
I know Mickey Willis.
I've met Charles Eisenstein.
I've done an event with J.P.
Sears.
All of these people are in my broader community, and they are people who have... I I'm not someone who thinks a platform is a small thing.
Look, if you're an Instagram influencer who just takes photos in bikinis, then maybe there is a limit to how seriously your ideas will be taken.
But if you are someone that has built a platform based on your voice having resonance, I think the negligence associated with not tackling climate change, tackling racism, getting Trump out of office, I am absolutely shocked.
And obviously, these people we're mentioning have gone the other direction.
And not only are they not dealing with it, they're actually promoting ideas that are counterproductive to us finding solutions.
But I've just found it, it's bewildering.
It's absolutely bewildering.
Sorry, I tend to get hopped up.
I mean, I know everyone does talking about this.
No, it's great.
We actually were on this online summit last night, the three of us, and there was like 20 some people on the call and we started and then there was Q&A and it just turned into a free for all in a good way because people are emotional right now and you need that.
But one thing that I love working with Matthew and Julian.
They are infinitely more patient and compassionate than I am.
I have a very short fuse at some times, especially with my bullshit detector.
Right.
And it's a skill that I have to work on because sometimes I'm too upfront.
But I wonder how Because you deal with this situation.
So say you are engaging, and I think with the one-tone people, it is because there's still room for conversation and dialogue.
And I've actually had a number of people reach out and request phone calls to talk these things through, which I've taken all of them because that's healthy.
Because then you can actually look at someone and talk to them and have a real dialogue, which is something that's obviously missing.
So how do you approach those situations?
You mentioned a few people I've worked on with Mickey on something years ago.
So these people are around and I get it, but Mickey specifically has closed off communications with people that don't agree with him.
I mean, he's admitted that online, so I'm not like revealing anything here.
And how, so those people who are kind of hovering, how would you approach them and how do you talk to them?
Well, I think there's, look, I've had people reach out to me and say, Thank you.
I was thinking I was the crazy one.
And the validation we received through speaking up and reflecting back at people, hey, you're not crazy.
This is crazy.
What's happening?
That's huge.
I just look for little opportunities.
I mean, I bumped into the other day, someone who you run his podcast, Jeff, who does Commune.
Right?
And I was, until he had you guys on, I was, because I knew they'd had Charles Eisenstein on, and I was like a little concerned, like, which direction is this going to go?
And I saw him and I thanked him for having you guys And I just said it to him, and he looked flustered because he's obviously getting a lot of heat after having you guys up there.
And he said, it's really been stressful.
I want to get out of being involved in this whole conversation.
I was like, that's fine, but no QAnon people on our platforms.
We cannot do it.
It is crucial that we call each other out on that.
There are these people like Nikki Willis who are relentless in their quest for being a leader and having their voice heard and having a lot of resonance at the We just like have different platforms and then go like, oh, let's be open-minded.
Let's hear what this person, and they're not used to.
I mean, this is the thing.
It's like, you know, someone said that the other day, you can be so open-minded, your brains fall out.
But, you know, we sort of pride ourselves within this quote-unquote conscious community of being open-minded.
And it's really, I think, difficult for people to Accept the idea that perhaps this isn't the time to be open-minded.
And I think that is a very challenging concept.
That was a 90s idea.
That was like Nirvana, like Lollapalooza.
Hey, let's just put every freak, let's give them a microphone, let's put them on a stage, I don't care how weird their ideas are.
It's going to be great to have dialogue and everyone gets heard and people are smart enough to decide for themselves.
Well, firstly, I'm not sure.
I think it's proven that I'm not sure we are smart enough to decide for ourselves, given all the information.
I think we often gravitate to mistaken info.
But also, it's very difficult for liberal people to have boundaries in that way.
And I think I've kind of co-opted the, you know, Ringo Starr Howard Stern, peace and love, peace and love, but with boundaries.
You know what I mean?
It's like, I'm sorry, this is not a moment where I am going to play any part in giving these types of arguments more airtime or more platform.
And I'm encouraging everyone I come in contact with to do the same.
You mentioned earlier, I mean we've been talking here and there and going in and out of spirituality and I grew up without a religion.
I have a degree in religion because I'm fascinated by it, but I've been an atheist for a long time.
I'm more interested in storytelling and that's moved me through as a journalist and as just someone who's around a lot of different circles and specifically speaking of Judaism, My ex-wife is Jewish, my music partner is, my DJ partner, one of them was.
I've been around that culture a lot and one thing I've always appreciated about it is how open-minded everyone I know at least is and the exploration of all these various spiritualities and how they fit into the pre-existing culture is so valuable.
And so, when you have something like QAnon, which has its roots in anti-Semitism, how does that make you feel personally?
It's complicated because, okay, take Israel as an example, which is a conversation that I think, societally, we're almost not quite ready to have yet.
Yeah.
be had about the ties between Western capitalist governments and Israel.
I don't think these are necessarily clearly black and white things, but there are conversations and we're not having them.
And I think in a lot of ways that has created a breeding ground for anti-Semitism in a new way because Jewish people have not necessarily been held accountable coming out of the Holocaust for some of the policies of Israel or whatever that we should be able to talk about and just go, hey, I'm Jewish.
I love the Jewish people.
I want them to survive and thrive.
Let's talk about what that really looks like in the most just way possible as a liberal, as a progressive.
How do we do that?
And we haven't been having those conversations, so I think in a lot of ways that's echoing what I was saying before, that that's the part where our side of the street has created the sort of fermentation of this type of anti-Semitism.
All that being said, these arguments are so old, and the idea that there's Shylock pulling strings and, you know, I mean, it's like, But the people who are falling for QAnon, they don't realize the anti-Semitic or the racist nature, the white supremacist roots of it.
It's not, especially now, I was just listening to your last episode about the, because I was also following that last week, the dampening down of the message and the keywords and all of that.
And we're going to see QAnon theories In a way, becoming more mainstreamed and having the edge taken off them, much like we have yoga, the yoga community.
It's like it has infiltrated the mainstream in ways that edgy ideas do.
They kind of like, they have the edges taken off them and they kind of, and it might become a little harder to spot the hidden agendas of white supremacy and anti-semitism.
But we need to continue to Remember that being open to critique and being open to refinement and that's another thing I love about what you guys are doing that it does not imply that everything is okay in the world of big pharma or in the world of capitalism.
It's like these are problematic areas and if we become just like staunch defenders of the system, we're not doing anyone any favors.
Yeah.
So I have complicated feelings about all of it.
Yeah, no, first off, I agree with you.
I've learned long ago, coming from religion, from an academic and just a storytelling perspective, Theodor Herzl originally picked Uganda for the place the Jews to go and then chose Israel.
Well, it happened after his death, actually.
Point being, when you hear the sacred land argument, you're like, well, you have to, you know, but when you invoke that, you're immediately pushed into this category of anti-Semitism instead of actually having that discussion.
And there's so many discussions that are difficult to have.
So here's one I would like to entertain with how you act in your community and your friends with this.
In the discussion last night in that summit, I brought up the fact that in 2017, I thought that there would just be a groundswell of people voting in Los Angeles.
And it turns out that the election that put Garcetti in office, only 13% of Angelenos voted in that election.
And that was a year after Trump.
And I was just banging my head, I'm like, what's it going to take to get people to have civic participation?
Because voting is, that's just the very first entry point into being a civilian.
And I think part of the problem has been that we, we're talking of privilege, we've enjoyed the fruits Of democracy without having to engage for so long now that we're being asked to, I think that that has opened up avenues for conspiracy theories to creep in.
So when you talk to, say you have some friends who aren't voters or think the whole system is rigged, so why even partake in it?
How do you respond to them?
Yeah, I do have some friends who are disenfranchised and friends of friends I hear about.
I don't get as concerned about the ones in California because it is a blue state, but when you hear about, you know, young black creative people in Pennsylvania or in Florida feeling that what's the point, that does concern me.
But I also take a That I have always liked that Buddha idea, you know, it doesn't matter, I forget what it was, it doesn't matter how long you've been off the path, it's when you get started or whatever.
And I do think that engagement, because for myself, political awareness has been a slow growth process.
And I think that's okay.
I have a stepdaughter who's 19, who, you know, me and my wife have been This is about getting Trump out of office, guys.
I could not care less what your ideals are at this moment because we have a very real threat that needs to be neutralized.
But I see how 19 year olds think differently.
And I try, in the same way artistically, I think when you're 19, you should be destroying structures, and when you're 42, like I am, you should be going, how do we work within the structures?
And probably when you're in your 70s and 80s, you're like, how do we protect the structures?
So I try not to be judgmental of that, because I understand it, I have empathy for it, but I try and kind of lead I don't think there's anything corporate or weak or sellout about throwing your weight behind Biden right now.
Joe Biden's brave.
I think taking on this current moment in American politics requires immense courage.
And the characterization of him as somewhat feeble or lacking chutzpah or something, I was like, dude, it's not possible.
He could not be running this campaign right now if he wasn't full of moxie.
You know, and so I just kind of try and lead by example.
I go like, let's make it cool.
Let's go, hey, you know, it's kind of like who's going to stand up to the school bully.
I don't care who they are, and I don't care what they did yesterday.
If they're gonna go up and stand up to the school bully, I'm with them.
Yeah.
And that's kind of just my attitude I take with it.
Yeah, that's a good attitude.
You mentioned climate change earlier, and I've been a columnist at Big Think for eight years now, and one thing that I know, because again, seeing all the analytics of the columns, is I've talked about that column ever since I started writing there, about that topic.
And it doesn't perform well analytically.
People just don't click on that.
I can pretty much tell what stories are going to take off and which ones aren't at this point.
And so we still cover the topic because it needs to be covered, but the engagement factor isn't there when really that is going to decide everything as we're learning in California right now.
So how What do you think it's going to take to get people to really care about that issue and inspire them to take action so that we don't have to wait until 5 million acres are burned down in this state in order to understand that there's actually a problem happening right now?
Well, the conversation about language as a songwriter, it's really interesting because we're essentially talking about marketing and hooks in songs.
Like, why do certain song titles make you feel good about yourself?
Why are certain types of lyrical terms, are they hooky?
Why are they memorable?
And I was involved in an interesting conversation with a bunch of different lefty activists recently about why isn't the word fascism doing it?
Like literally, when you look at what fascism is and who's it doing it for, it is motivating people 40 and up.
Yeah.
It is not motivating people under 40.
And there's a conversation about language and certain words like Certain words that have become so crude and so violent in our society, like the n-word, that word has an emotional charge to it.
If someone uses it, we feel in our bodies the violence and the danger that's present.
Whereas if we say fascism, that isn't there yet, for some reason.
And similarly with climate change, For some reason has not captured the imagination of the masses to the degree that it needs to, to create the change that we're going to need to see.
So what I really think that is about is more creative people, more out of the Fox thinkers putting their heads together and buckling down and doing what we're doing now, which is discussing messaging and discussing how do we stop our world going off the deep end, whether it's on a local level or on a global level.
We need more people involved in the conversation and more interesting ideas about how to talk about these things.
Well, you mentioned you're an optimist, so let's end on what could be an optimistic outlook.
We'll see, I don't know, I haven't asked it yet.
But one thing that I've heard is that, okay, say Trump is voted out, hopefully, and he does actually leave.
And we do have an administration, a new one, and we start to course correct, but of course, that 40% base isn't leaving.
There are a number of QAnon candidates who are going to be in Congress, who are going to be taking these ideas forward.
We are potentially dealing with a very frightening Supreme Court, which could have real-world implications for tens of millions of people, if not the entire country, obviously.
So, let's take best-case scenario, where he has voted out.
What does America look like in 2021, and how do we start to steer this ship in another direction?
I mean, obviously, I don't know.
And I'm scared, too.
I think what I like to focus on is that what America needs more of is discernment.
Grab for these headlines and these glamorous conspiracy theories or catchphrases, make America great again, because we don't have the courage or haven't had the courage to get into the weeds and be discerning with policy, with which representatives we're electing, with what ideas we're going to allow into The consciousness that we're sharing.
And one of the things that I've been interested in with this QAnon, the mystics who are getting involved in QAnon, right?
So the channelers and all of that.
What I realized about my attraction to cult leaders is that I was seduced by power.
That if I met a Qigong master who could do magical shit, you know, like put an acupuncture needle in someone, then their arm would shake or whatever.
I mean, all this stuff seems to happen.
It seems to be just part of nature that we don't really understand.
I would get seduced and go, this person has all the answers.
If I met a guru who could sit perfectly for 12 hours and seem to know psychic things, whether it's like, you know, whether that's manipulation or whether that's genuine some kind of like intuitive power, I was seduced by that power.
When I was in an ayahuasca ceremony and I would experience entities coming to me and telling me things, because they were non-physical, They existed within this imagination realm.
I was seduced by their power and I gave their messages credit.
And what I learned from reading about the Dalai Lama was, you know, the Dalai Lama does lots of weird channeling mediumship ceremonies where different Buddhas will enter different monks bodies and the Dalai Lama will go to them for advice about different things.
But he also disagrees with some of the spirits.
And he doesn't follow all their advice.
Because ultimately, he believes in the autonomy of his own experience, and you know, takes it all in, but doesn't accept it blindly.
And I realize personally, I have certainly erred in the being seduced by power.
And I think America on the whole, and Australia too, but we've all been seduced by power.
So you get these larger than life people and larger than life ideas that are sweeping us off our feet.
And I think QAnon is that.
I think QAnon is whoever Q or whatever Q is, is an entity.
It's a conceptual idea that, you know, I'm sure someone's just sitting typing up these things or whatever.
But I don't like to discount the power Of ideas and the seductive quality of them.
I also love that QAnon anonymous podcast.
And I think they're so funny because they tease.
And there is immense value in that.
And I do that too.
I agitate QAnon by teasing them because I think that's another way of disempowering them.
But I also like to recognize the power of these seductive tools.
And some of these mediums, I don't know what mediums are.
I don't know what they're doing.
I tend to think Perhaps the naive side of me.
I tend to think they're not making things up.
I believe they genuinely think they are hearing voices and they are communicating with these concepts or whatever, you know?
But I would argue that the tool of discernment of saying, well, which voices do you want to follow?
Which intuitive impulses are the ones that are going to lead you to liberation?
And which ones are just going to bind you to Maya for many more lifetimes?
That is a conversation within the spiritual community and within the wider social and political community that we need to be having about how seduced we are, how easily seduced we are into nonsense.
And I think my optimism at this moment is in, I know I'm having this conversation With you today, with much more transparency, honesty and accountability than I would have a year ago, regarding my past and my decisions and my involvement in different things.
Because I see it as like the only way out of this is going to be honest, being honest about the ways we've succumbed to these types of things before.
And my hope is that that will broaden.
And just like Black Lives Matter has forced conversations into communities and into our homes, into our families, even though it's received pushback, it has forced those conversations in.
I hope this battle with QAnon is doing the same thing, where within our wider communities and Trump in general, going, us really looking at ourselves and going, what's wrong with us?
What is wrong with us?
Something's obviously wrong with us or we would not find ourselves in this situation and it's very easy to point fingers externally and go, oh it's because of them, it's because of them, they fell for Trump and they like the red hats and they are on meth or whatever it is, you know, or they're uneducated or they're racist and all of that stuff.
There's a truth to it too but what's wrong with us?
We are a community, a society that has allowed this to happen and I think That conversation, I still believe it has the potential for healing.
If we can ask it honestly and answer it honestly, I think good can come from it.
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