22: Racism & Fraud in New Age Publishing (w/Rebekah Borucki & Dr Jay Mohan)
Author and publisher Rebekah Borucki joins the Conspirituality team as our first co-host for this episode. She’s got a story to tell: the culture of her publisher, Hay House, was so resistant to taking a position on the racist attitudes of some of their leading cash-cow authors that she ditched her contract and her job with the company as a diversity mentor.
We’ll be talking about the money and politics of New Age media, as well as editorial standards, ghostwriting, cult apologetics, and the responsibility of publishers to deplatform authors that are hurtling toward QAnon. New Age media isn’t all love and light—it’s a pathway into consumers’ vulnerability, and sometimes a recruitment gateway for cults.
Also this week: Derek interviews Dr Jay Mohan on his gruelling COVID front-line work as an interventional cardiologist in a Detroit suburb.
Show notes
Rebekah on toxic White Women Wellness
Rebekah on the silence of Hay House authors
Rebekah on leaving Hay House
A Critique of Abraham Hicks & the Law of Attraction
Celery Juice: The big problem with a viral Instagram ‘cure
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First co-host, thank you so much for joining, Rebecca.
As I was saying before we started, we know each other briefly from Shrala Yoga Days, Tara Stiles, so it's so nice and refreshing to see you publishing what you've been publishing, which is what we're going to mainly be talking about today.
Thank you.
I feel so privileged to be here, a little bit scared, but I'm ready.
Let's do this.
Nothing to be scared about.
So, for Conspirituality listeners, you can find us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as on our Patreon site, patreon.com slash conspirituality, where you can support us if you're finding value in these podcasts.
We do offer extra content each weekend along that channel as well.
Conspirituality 22.
Racism and Fraud in New Age Publishing.
Author and publisher Rebecca Baruchi joins the Conspiratuality team as our first co-host.
Welcome for this episode.
She's got a story to tell.
The culture of her publisher Hay House was so resistant to taking a position on the racist attitudes of some of their leading cash cow authors that she ditched her contract and her job with the company as a diversity mentor.
We'll be talking about the money and politics of the New Age agenda, as well as editorial standards, ghostwriting, cult apologetics, and the responsibility of publishers to de-platform authors that are hurtling toward QAnon.
New Age media isn't all love and light.
It's a pathway into consumers' vulnerability, and sometimes a recruitment gateway for cults.
Also this week, Derek interviews Dr. Jay Mohan on his grueling COVID frontline work as an interventional cardiologist in a Detroit suburb.
So Rebecca, when I go to Hay House's site, I see that Hay House is a mission-driven company I see that Hay House is a mission-driven company dedicated to supporting positive change in the world by helping all people to grow in mind, body, and spirit.
With a diverse roster of customers, authors, and points of view, Hay House offers products and resources that empower, educate, and inspire.
And then a little further down, they specifically have a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
That's a full paragraph.
I'm not going to read it.
People can go to heyhouse.com, but it very much makes the case that they've been advocating for these topics for many decades.
Now, I reached out to you after your Instagram posts that are wonderful.
I may have so many questions just on three of them that we can go to many places, but let's start with that messaging and if you can explain a little bit the distance between what they're promoting and what you actually saw when the sausage was being made.
I think it's really interesting, starting with the diverse customer base, that statement in particular, because in May 2018, I was invited with a group of 39 other authors.
They were the up-and-coming authors, they were the best-selling authors in Hay House for the Hay House Mastermind.
I think it was the first one and that was in Brooklyn.
As you know, I'm biracial black.
My father's black.
My mother's white.
And as black and brown people tend to do when they walk into a room, we look around for other black and brown people.
And you can see me now that some people would say that I'm white presenting.
I'm very, very light and, you know, ambiguous.
And I walked into that room and I was the brownest person in the room out of 40 authors and probably 75 people total.
And that was something that...
It was hurtful.
It was scary.
It was uncomfortable.
And I'll fast forward to the end of the weekend getting to the point of the customer base when I presented along with Kyle Gray, who is an angel.
He speaks to angels.
I don't want to get his title wrong because he's actually a lovely gentleman who is a Hay House author in the UK.
But he was advocating for me and the black and brown people not in the room.
And he asked, you know, Reed Tracy, the CEO, what was up with that?
And why did we not see people of color there?
And then he let me take over the conversation.
Reed's answer to me was, you have to understand, Rebecca, that we cater to an affluent audience.
And you have to understand, Rebecca, that black people just don't submit their books to Hay House, that they were just not getting the submissions.
You know, to which I countered that, you know, maybe they feel as uncomfortable as I do right now, and they wouldn't think that they were welcome here.
But when he said affluent audience, I think that any black or brown person listening right now will understand what that is code for.
And that means a white audience, a rich white audience.
He knows what their customer base was and he wasn't making any attempts to cater to that customer base by providing diverse authors, diverse materials.
So that in and of itself is just a flat-out lie.
It's not the mission of Hay House and it doesn't represent the truth about their audience.
Going on to the diversity, equity, inclusion part of that statement.
You know, they recently, after that mastermind, I went into immediate discussion with my contacts at Hay House about what are we going to do about this.
It lasted, it was back and forth, and I finally got a meeting in October, but As a result of that, I said, you either make a public statement or I walk by the end of this year.
That was 2018.
2019, they hired.
They contracted with a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant who I am sure helped them craft that statement for their website because it did not exist before.
And that's when they brought me back and said, please be a mentor in this program that we're developing, the Diverse Wisdom Initiative.
And they asked me to stay on and We can go from there.
But that's where it started.
That's why I know that that statement is just not true, and it's not the spirit of Hay House.
It was a Band-Aid, an emergency measure, because it was brought to the attention of a roomful of people, but not only that, to the public, because I did post about that conversation when I went home that day.
I posted about it on Instagram.
Rebecca, was that answer that the CEO gave you, was that in a public forum or was that a private conversation?
Was that just out in the open that he was throwing that around?
It was out in the open.
It was in the room full of the 75 approximate people that were in attendance.
You know, it's hard for me to say that I was shocked because I know that there's gonna be people in the audience that are like, why, how could you be shocked that a white middle-aged man from California gave that kind of answer?
But I'm still under the illusion, or at that point I was still under the illusion, that I was truly part of an organization, of a company, that was created and operated in the interests of people being healed.
And, you know, that I was dealing with my people, with open-minded people, with progressive thinking people, right?
With big hearts.
And it was...
It was a shock to me.
So I think I blacked out after that, but something that was brought to my attention afterward was what happened after those words and how the conversation continued.
A woman who's no longer with the company, but she was there that day working for the company and she said, you know, Rebecca, he also went on to say that, you know, we bring on authors with big platforms and you were bringing up the fact that You know, social media is inherently biased, inherently racist.
So how are we ever going to get black and brown authors if you're only giving contracts to people with the biggest platforms?
And truthfully, I think it was just a runaround.
I think that how people get deals with Hay House, you know, it's not really like an open submission process.
You know, I got my deal because Jessica Ortner from the Tapping Solution, from the Ortners, introduced me to Patty Gift, who is a publisher there.
So when I got this meeting, this exclusive meeting, I didn't even have a proposal when I walked into her office.
So, and I think that's how it is in a lot of businesses.
It's who you know.
But he was also just not being truthful, not being genuine and how the process even works in a room full of people who have been through the process.
That was a tough one.
That was a tough conversation.
And he did say it openly.
And I don't even think that he knows why that was the wrong thing to say.
Or if it was a wrong thing to say.
So, Rebecca, you may have clarified this already, but I just wanted to check for my own sake, and maybe this will help others as well.
Was the purpose of the Mastermind to address these particular issues?
No.
That's interesting, too, because when I thought we were getting together as Hay House authors, it was going to be more mission-driven, talk about our roles in society and how we're serving our audience, and it was really a marketing seminar.
It was a weekend-long marketing seminar, how to grow your platform.
Yeah, so that was disappointing, but that was my problem, that I thought it was going to be something different.
And then one follow-up question, because it sort of jumps out at me, the big gap between what's really being talked about, how much awareness there is, what's really happening in practice, and then this diversity and inclusion statement.
It seems to me to be a little bit of a trend.
A little bit of a trend where there's like a PR gesture.
Someone gets paid to come in and use all the right jargon to make a PR gesture towards some kind of, it's basically like covering their ass politically, but nothing actually changes within the organization.
Is that accurate?
Nothing changes.
No real investment beyond paying the consultant was made.
I'll tell you with the Diverse Wisdom Initiative, and I just shared an email.
I kept the author anonymous, but it was one of the participants In the first Diverse Wisdom Initiative, where I was a mentor, I was the only person of color who was a mentor.
There was originally three white authors and me.
I asked one of the white authors to step down because she had some problematic interactions with people over her spirit animal program.
I know, you're all laughing, don't make me laugh!
But to her credit, I told her, look, I saw the interactions.
I don't think you handled it well.
I don't think that you're ready to mentor black and brown people.
And she said, you're absolutely right, and immediately stepped down from the program.
So this Diverse Wisdom Initiative, though, I shared this anonymous letter.
The mentors are not paid.
We are, we volunteer, which I was happy to do, but it's, that is problematic in and of itself.
I mean, there needs to be an investment and that, you know, the participants didn't know that, and when they found out, you know, these participants, people of color, are like, wait a minute, you're not, Like you're investing nothing into this.
There was no marketing done.
I would say that at least half of the people in the first program came through my personal efforts.
I knew them personally.
And in the second program, 7 of the 12 people were actually my personal coaching clients.
There's absolutely no marketing done.
It was basically a logo that they recycled from the UK program.
That was it.
It was just a logo and no financial investment whatsoever.
Or energetic investment, really.
Rebecca, did you get close enough to various parts of the company to understand what it's worth and what yearly revenues are and how much it would have meant to the company to actually invest in that mentorship program to pay people a living wage or something reasonable to do that?
No, I mean, I don't have any insight.
I'm an author there and a volunteer.
Basically a volunteer consultant.
So the way I'm hearing it is as a huge publishing company, we're going to try and address the problem of a lack of diversity and not actually helping to lift up black and brown people by inviting black and brown people to volunteer.
In order to be part of a program in which we try and change this.
And it was a scholarship.
Initially they were calling it a scholarship, it was really a contest.
Both of those things I took issue with.
Well, as a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant, so it became the Diverse Wisdom Initiative.
And it really wasn't an initiative, because initiative takes thought, it takes process, it takes people getting involved and really talking about what the desired outcome.
At the end of this, it was going to be one winner that got a $10,000 contract.
That was the whole point.
It ended up being two winners.
Both were my mentees.
We could probably figure out why, because I want my people to win, and the other people did not get the attention that I think that they deserved at all.
But yeah, that was Hay House's investment, and it was deeply disappointing, but Me not wanting to appear or be the person who grabs her toys and walks away.
I really thought that there was a way to change it from the inside.
And it was a hurtful process.
I can't say that I'm smiling today, but these past two weeks especially, it's been a loss of identity.
It's been a loss of who I thought were my family for the past five years.
It's been incredibly painful and I'm going through a grieving process.
I think it's important to point out briefly how the publishing industry works because they really took a cue from the record industry, which is instead of investing in artists, they throw a little bit of money at a bunch of people And then when one makes it, they invest more in that person and the others, they just kind of let go.
And that's traditionally how a lot of the bigger publishers, I'm going to guess Hay House works on that model, because just seeing their churn and how they turn over authors, it seems like that would be the case.
But you mentioned anonymity before.
And you bring that up in your first post that I saw that made me want you to be on this episode.
You actually bring up a close friend to the bod, Dr. Christiane Northrup.
Julian has recently...
The all-powerful, the all-powerful Dr. Christiane Northrup, my goodness.
Specifically, you say the white women wellness and you call that out and for them of not stepping up.
So, you're talking about having a family there, you really invested in your mentees, you wanted this to work, you wanted there to be a bigger voice for diversity inclusion, but You stepped away.
So what drove that decision and for you to write these initial messages about it on your Instagram?
So, it wasn't the lack of investment in the Diverse Wisdom Initiative that made me leave, because I was there for, I'm there for the second round.
I was there and, you know, two weeks ago I was a mentor signed up.
I have not followed Dr. Christiane Northrup since her Super Bowl comments about Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, because her racist, sexist Super Bowl comments I bow to J-Lo.
I had some communication with her that she kind of sloughed off as, you know, you're making a big deal about nothing.
I was just asking my audience what they thought about this sex trafficking inspired... It was the most absurd comment I ever met in like being indecent and showing themselves as kids and all of that nonsense after she had praised Madonna's Super Bowl performance.
Another 50 year old woman just happened to be white So I had this interaction with her.
She kind of laughed it off and then she deleted the post.
But as black and brown women know how to do on social media is that we screen grab it immediately.
Because this is also a pattern of white women that are confronted.
They immediately become defensive and then they delete.
They delete the evidence, the labor, all the comments.
So thousands of comments for this post.
So I had that.
So I stopped following her.
I was like, I'm done with this woman.
So I only threw, I went to a Unity Church, because believe it or not, I have a deep connection to my creator.
I'm a deeply spiritual person.
I pray every day.
I meditate every day.
So I was at Hay House for a reason.
I was attracted to the content.
But I left my Unity Church because of this, they were promoting anti-vaxxer events.
And when I raised issue with the church saying that this was irresponsible to the community, they said, well, aren't you, you're with Hay House and, and Dr., you know, Dr. Northrup and she, you know, endorsed your book.
And I was like, wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, what?
I don't understand why you're bringing this up.
Oh, she's an anti-vaxxer?
So I didn't actually know anything about QAnon really in detail until I started listening to your podcast.
And I did a little bit more research though when I found out about the anti-vaxxing stuff and then I'm seeing all this Just to me, bizarre, weird, out-of-left-field stuff from her.
And someone directed me to your podcast.
Oh, you're about to get blamed for all of this.
Someone directed me.
They're like, you need to listen to episodes 7 and 8 of Conspiratuality.
And I was floored.
I had a physical response.
I'm like shaken a little bit thinking about it because I could not believe what I was hearing.
And then I went to her platform and I'm looking through this and I was like, surely Hay House has to be doing something about this.
Like, they have to know.
So I wrote to Patty Gift, who is the publisher, and my agent, Wendy Sherman, and I said, um, we need to have a talk.
About Christy and Northrup.
Like, this is a huge problem.
And to Patty's credit, she gave me an immediate meeting.
We met the next day, and that was the conversation that where in that conversation I said I had to leave.
Because their position was, we are not currently in contract.
Like, we're not publishing a book.
Like, there's not a book coming out for Dr. Northrup or Dr. Brogan.
I also brought up Kelly Brogan.
And I said, my response, what would you have us do?
And I said, well, I've never been in contract with Dr. Northrup, but I have an audience overlap and they follow her.
I have people at my church that follow her and I feel a responsibility to distance myself, especially when there has been an endorsement in the past.
And I mean, to say that they're not financially tied to her right now is ridiculous.
They still sell her books and make a great deal of money off of them.
But so there was this, they said they weren't gonna do anything, they couldn't do anything.
They understood my position, supported it.
I think that's maybe why Patty's not involved in conversations right now and only Reed is with other authors that are raising stuff because maybe he sees that as a failure of a conversation.
And I was like, I have to go.
And they understood, there was no pushback.
Is it that there was no pushback or that it wasn't worth arguing the point with you?
You know, I haven't talked, I haven't used Patti's name publicly before, but I feel an obligation to.
There was no pushback.
She has, from the very beginning, and I'll say this, and something that I haven't said before, when I was at the Mastermind talking to Reed Tracy, before I even sat down, or when I sat down, I opened my phone and there was already an email from Patti saying, we need to talk about this.
So she has been an absolute ally, an advocate, and a supporter.
I think that she's maybe someone that doesn't understand her power, which I also encounter a lot with white women.
They don't know their positionality, the level of power that they actually have.
But the organization, the people within the organization have been amazing.
I think that they feel powerless To say anything.
I think that they feel powerless under Reed Tracy.
I don't know why.
He's not a very intimidating person, but you know, I've had many conversations with him now at this point, but it's, um...
Yeah, I think there was no defense for it, and I think that she was in agreement with me.
So, the comment around it not being clear that she knew how powerful she was is also kind of tempered by the fact that it doesn't seem like Hay House or many publishers in this genre know how powerful their platforms are, or there's little acknowledgement for that.
I mean, you know, Northrop is one thing, But, you know, we also, you know, looking down the Hay House list, we have books by Joseph Merkula, right?
And, you know, so if the FDA sends out a warning about Merkula advising people to huff hydrogen peroxide to protect against COVID, It's like a tree falling in the forest story.
If Hay House isn't listening, will it make a dent in sales?
We're talking about a company that is actively profiting off of somebody who could be endangering the public.
There's a whole list.
There's Dr. Mercola, there's the medical medium, there's Vani Hari, there's Kelly Brogan.
And Kelly Brogan and Christiane Northrup were both at that mastermind.
Yeah, I mean, we are talking about a publishing platform as, you know, a vector for public endangerment, right?
It's not just about bad ideas.
It's not about spiritual bypassing.
It's not about, you know, unresearched, you know, and appropriated spiritualities.
It's about... Not just about... It's not just about that.
All of those things have been sort of critiqued and investigated over the last five or ten years or so by some pretty insightful, you know, wellness space critics.
But, you know, in the COVID era, we're talking about, you know, the consequences are deadly for anti-mask activism.
And deadly for black people, deadly for black and brown people.
That's, and that's what I'm saying.
So when I'm talking about Christiane Northrup and her being, you know, this QAnon conspiracy theorist, whatever, I was like, you have to understand, you know, and I'm talking to, to Patty Gift, a white woman, and I'm talking to my agent, a white woman, and I'm saying like, this affects my community directly.
This, this disease, the death rates, it's impacting the black and brown community.
Harder than any other community.
You have to understand why I'm involved here and why this is a problem for me.
It's not about, I just, like, I think she's wacky and she has bad ideas.
It's like, it's killing my people and you are complicit.
And whether or not you technically have a contract with her or not is really neither here nor there.
Because, see, here's, this is what happens with Hay House, is that every time I bring these issues up to them, suddenly they become a company.
They become a publisher and they're dealing with dollars and cents and contracts but in and you see it even in their mission statement.
They're an organization, a community for healing and for people you know so they're attracting people saying if you come here you are safe and you will be healed and you'll find solutions for your problems but then when you say oh people are coming here and getting hurt now they're like oh it's just a business it's just dollars and cents.
No it's a culture and I kept saying that to them it's a culture you are not a company and you need to get that and that's why I cannot bring my people here anymore.
That's it.
That's a recurring theme, and I think it's indicative of the culture, though it's longstanding.
It was really, it came out last week in the town hall with Trump, where Savannah Guthrie asked about his retweets, and he goes, but it's just a retweet, I don't take any responsibility for that.
And then, you know, Julian, I don't know if you checked it out, we have to verify, I haven't verified it, but someone on her Instagram today said that Christiane Northrup discussed your video to her, And that she wasn't going to watch it.
And we also saw a pivot in her recent videos about her basically toning down the QAnon rhetoric, trying to say, it's this constant lack of responsibility.
I'm going to say things, but when I'm called out for them, I'm going to revert.
Is this something, Rebecca, that you found pervasive?
Or was this the isolated incidents with the authors that you're mentioning?
Well, here's the thing, is that everyone's complicit.
Every single one of them is complicit.
And there are so many authors, big and small, who have profited from their relationship with Dr. Christiane Northrup.
Her endorsement is on my second book.
It's coming off.
That's something that Hay House offered to me graciously.
It's coming off immediately off the e-book and then in the next printing.
But The Tapping Solution didn't welcome her back on their summit because of her relationship with QAnon.
It's bad business for them.
Yet, they've said nothing publicly.
And they won't.
So this is where I take personal issue, where I take an issue With their ethics, because they're protecting themselves and distancing themselves, but they're not protecting their audiences.
And there is this huge overlap.
And these people were my good friends.
I have seen them through births.
I'm a birth doula.
I've given them advice.
I've been in their homes.
I've stayed in their homes.
And I haven't heard a peep.
I've gotten some private, I've gotten emails from people within the company through their private emails and saying that we see you, we believe you, we hear you, we're with you.
But as far as the authors go, it's like, it's complete silence.
And that's complicity.
It's not just Christiane Northrup.
It is pervasive, because they're all upholding the system and they'll do it again.
Matthew, I know you've done some research with Shambhala House.
I don't know if you could speak to any of that, because I think it's important to point out that it's not just Hay House.
It seems to be indicative of other spiritual-minded publishing companies.
Yeah, I mean, with Shambhala Publications, which has functioned as the sort of content arm for Shambhala International and Vajradhatu before that, although there's no legal ties, formal legal ties between them, there's been, you know, a pretty constant pattern of utilizing the content from a, you know,
What is what is known in through whisper networks and now is known publicly as an abusive organization, a cultic organization to platform to platform that organization to a huge market.
So we've got, you know, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism as Chögyam Trungpa's best-selling and best-known book published by Shambhala Publications from the mid-70s or something like that, maybe the late 70s.
It sold 200,000 copies.
And it has functioned as a recruiting tool for Shambhala International, the group, for all of that time.
But then there's this secondary industry that grows up around the ostensible spiritual wisdom of that book, which actually was delivered in talks and then mainly ghost-writed and edited together by his students.
But that secondary industry includes the biographies that are produced around Chogyam Trungpa's life.
And when you scratch the surface, as I've done in a little bit of investigative research and journalism, you realize that nobody's fact-checking the biographies.
Nobody's fact-checking the statements that are made about the community or its early culture.
Nobody's reaching out to people that they know have suffered harm within the organization to get a rounder picture.
We don't have, you know, within the publishing company any kind of sort of editorial direction with regard to, okay, are we going to tell the truth about a modern Buddhist community, or are we going to platform its content and continue to sell it?
And so, you know, when you ask questions as a journalist of, you know, editors or, you know, or publishers in this realm, what you get is what Rebecca's talking about, which is, You know, kind of this brick wall of, well, you know, this is a business, we're not quite sure, you know, how those processes work.
You know, authors are responsible for their own fact-checking, that sort of thing.
So, it's not, you know, I never get the sense when I'm dealing with large New Age or, you know, modern spirituality publishing companies that there's any kind of sort of Editorial guidance or protocol that is, or morality really, that's guiding the process of content production other than what's going to be shiny, what's going to be marketable, what's going to sell, who has the charisma to push the product forward.
And that's where I wanted to turn back, Rebecca, to your description of getting that first contract, which kind of just blows my mind because I think there's this assumption that publishing invites a kind of meritocracy through the submission portal.
I mean, we know that you have to be connected, we know that who you know is everything, but you walk into that meeting and you come out with a deal and you didn't have a proposal?
Is that really what happened?
So I walked in with a one sheet.
Amazing.
I didn't even know what a proposal was.
And to Patty Giff's credit, she said, you're lovely.
I'll give you a deal right now, but I think that you should go get an agent and then come back with a proposal.
And that's what I did.
And I got a great deal.
I got a great deal.
And now looking at, um, You know, we're not supposed to talk about how much we get for our advances.
And, you know, we all know why, because that protects the publisher, not us.
And I have been talking to other black and brown authors at Hay House and what their deals have been.
I talked to one who outsold my first book by at least 10 times.
And for our second deals, she got half as much as I did for my second deal.
And I'll tell you that, just to make this very clear though, so I am a biracial black woman.
I present to many people as white, or white passing, or ambiguous.
Hay House had no idea about biracial makeup.
We did not have these conversations.
I kind of went in there, started having these conversations, and immediately the tone changed around like how they were going to deal with me.
Um and it was uh it it's been uncomfortable since so I got by on my relationships and kind of like as one of them but then it's you know once the the like not the mask I mean I've always been who I've been but once they found out it was it was a very different vibe so I I think that I was getting paid as a white author quite frankly.
Were you also getting paid as somebody who came with a social media presence already?
Her comment to you is that you're lovely, and I'm imagining that she senses that you're going to be well-spoken, you're going to do good media, that you've got a certain kind of charisma, and she's willing to work with that off the bat, proposal or no proposal.
Sure, I had a great social media presence at that time, and I got paid for it, so that was fair.
So that's why I bring up the second deal.
The second deal where it's, I've sold a certain amount of books, I know how many I've sold, I know how this other woman, a woman of color, how many she sold, phenomenal by the way, outselling me by leaps and bounds, and at least 10 times the amount of books, gets half the deal that I get for the second book.
Now, she's embroiled in a lot of conflict and stepping away, and she also stepped down from the Diverse Wisdom Initiative and made that public.
And all of this to say, as disappointing and as hurtful as it is, I don't know if it's going to even affect them.
Because Reed Tracy, in a conversation with someone, said, as much as you have already been replaced, You have already been replaced, and we're moving ahead with the program.
So, they've made no public statement.
They've said nothing.
I don't know if this is going to have any impact at all.
They're moving ahead with the mentorship program.
The mentorship program.
They have replaced us.
And I will say, though, because his assertion was, or what I gathered from his words, was that they have replaced us with other black Or Brown mentors, I only know of one of them.
One of the mentors reached out to me, and she did it with great hesitation, and we had long talks about it, and her stance is basically, I'm coming in because there are people still involved, and whether it's, you know, 10 or one, I want to be there, because black people stand for black people.
Like, that's what we do.
And when, you know, this, she did not want to replace a black woman that was harmed.
And she was very clear on that.
So him saying that, you know, they're coming in and they have no problem and they're familiar with the situation is absolutely untrue.
It's just that black people don't talk to white people about their stuff.
It's not going to happen.
And no one's going to speak honestly to Reid about, you know, our conversations.
The content seems like gasoline for the machine.
It doesn't seem like, I mean, if it can be replaced, if we can find a new source somewhere else, if we can figure out what can make the machine go, then that's what's going to work.
It sounds like that's the message that I'm getting from the CEO.
It's absolutely what's going to work.
And you know, now, and this is really tough because I did receive this feedback from a Black woman, a healer, that I have a tremendous amount of respect for.
And she doesn't, you know, while Hay House is tokenizing the Black and Brown authors, I don't want it, you know, and I have to say this for me, I have to say that the medicine is real.
The work is real, especially when it's coming from the source, especially when it's coming from black and indigenous communities.
The fact that they have signed deals with Hay House doesn't make it any less real.
The fact that Hay House is using them doesn't make it any less real.
And I don't want to make these people seem, you know, disempowered or like they're not aware of their own power.
I think it's a really sticky situation.
People in our industry want to be with Hay House.
I sold them my books on exclusive.
I didn't go to anyone else.
That was my dream.
So I have a tremendous amount of respect for people that are still there, that have books coming out with them.
I want them to sell really well.
But I think that the white folks there...
No one has said anything.
And I'm in the same boat as a lot of other white authors there, and they haven't said a word.
So they are in agreement with me.
They're sending me all those, like, congrats, or you're so brave.
And I said in one of my Instagram posts, I don't want to be brave.
I want you to make this easy for me.
Stand with me.
And this isn't just Hay House.
This is a white women wellness issue.
And, you know, I know there's guys involved, but white women are driving this train and they're complicit in harm, in spiritual harm and physical harm.
There are also white women who have been driving QAnon, predominantly because of the anti-vax connection that's there.
What do you see as a solution?
You mentioned in the post to stop staying complicit and to stand up and speak, but what would you like to hear them say?
Okay, I'm not going to curse.
This is so funny because, you know, and, you know, all due respect, I keep hearing this, you know, Patty and my agent both said this, they're like, you know, we're, they use the word solution.
They're like, we're solution based.
Like, what would you have us do?
We want to get to a solution.
I'm like, the solution ladies is black liberation.
And there's been people smarter and stronger and braver than us working on this for 400 years.
So what I would have you do is just say that it's not cool.
That's it!
Separate yourself and make your position known.
That's the first and easiest step.
And I don't think it's really that complicated.
I kept getting from Hay House during those talks when I was just desperate to get a meeting between May 2018 and October 2018.
And by the way, at the end of that, in October, I got a meeting with A person of color that worked with in Hay House and her message was, I said, where's Patty?
And she said, Oh, you know, there's some things that I, that I need to say out of the gaze of my white boss.
You know, like we had to have a real honest conversation.
Um, but they kept saying, this is complicated.
This is complicated.
And I said, the only thing that's complicated is you taking the steps and trying to look good while you're doing it.
That's what it is.
You want to look good so bad.
I mean, I think it looks good to say.
I don't align myself with racists and conspiracy theorists.
I think that that's a good look.
But it's so easy.
It's just like, hey, we don't, look, we sold her books in the past.
We still see that there's some value in her books, but what she's saying right now, it's not, it's not our, our Steve's.
It's not what we're about.
That's it.
They won't do it.
Do you know of anything contractually that would have... I mean, you're speaking very freely now, but I'm just wondering whether or not there are any legal liabilities involved in the editor, the publisher, the CEO coming out and saying, you know, we are going to keep Christiane Northrup's book on our roster because we find it's valuable, but we don't support her current social media presence.
We want to make that clear as a company.
Anything contractually in the way of that, do you think?
There's nothing in my contract that would prevent them.
I was saying something that was deeply problematic.
And they did say as much as if she was posting on their platforms, because we do have opportunities when our books are coming out to go on their platforms, promote them, and do lives and stuff that they wouldn't allow that to happen on their platform.
Um, my position is, is that, you know, she is an extension of their platform because of her position there and, um, you know, how big her relationship with them.
Um, so they did say that, no, there's, there's nothing in my contract.
No, it's that relationship.
Is that interpersonal as well?
Because I'm, I'm wondering about, uh, the extent to which at larger new age spirituality media companies, um, what we have or what we're looking at is, is, you know, a certain, Set of not only cultural expectations that are difficult to challenge, but also like leadership issues.
I mean, when I think about the interview that we did with Jeff Krasnow for Commune, he's got a very large platform that is, doesn't have, I mean, there's some overlap with Hay House.
I think, you know, the Venn diagram, Marianne Williamson is right in the middle there.
But You know, he's taking an active and activist role and I would say a lot of social risk in coming out and saying, you know, this type of culture jamming, conspiratorial thinking is not only Ripping through wellness communities, but it's also tearing at the fabric of our democracy and it's hurting very vulnerable people.
He's saying all of those things out loud.
Now, maybe he's doing that also as a private citizen.
I think he's very independent that way.
I know Derek knows him personally better than I do, but it seems to me like there can be leadership modes in this landscape.
In which individuals can actually steer the ship in some way, that it doesn't have to be about, you know, shareholders or income entirely, and that, you know, when it becomes a good look to say, actually, I'm cutting Dr. Northrop free, is something that can be provoked from the top instead of from the bottom.
Do you think that, like, individual leadership is relevant?
I think absolutely it's relevant.
I think that this is, this, you know, this is why I had the conversation with Hay House and not Dr. Northrup, is because Hay House has a huge influence in this industry.
All they have to do is make a move and everyone else is going to follow.
It's not, it's, again, this isn't complicated for me.
And as far as the risk, I mean, I mean, remember back in May when everyone was like really about black lives and they mattered and all of that.
I think that there's still some residual, there's still some like, there's still some merit in saying, you know, supporting these efforts.
And I just, I don't get the resistance.
I don't get the resistance to stepping up and saying things.
I think it's good on all angles.
I think from a financial angle, I think from a social angle, I think going forward what's inevitable in the future.
I think that they're positioning themselves very poorly.
I think a lot of people are positioning themselves very poorly.
And that for me only says, I'm sorry if I'm not answering your question, but that for me only says is that I don't think that they really do get it.
I think it's very short-sighted.
And I don't think that they understand where people are headed as far as the conventional wisdom mindset.
My whole thing is that people are dying.
I mean, I got to be real.
People are dying.
This is an emergency.
I don't care about your bottom line.
And the truth of the matter is that the only person that lost any money here Is a brown woman.
Like, no, everybody else is cool right now, and I was willing to do it, but, and I said this to Patty, like, I'm just sitting over here in my house in the woods with my five kids.
Like, I support this family, and it's really frustrating for me.
I'm happy to give up whatever I have, but it's really frustrating for me that people have, that would lose not a dollar by saying something, have not.
They should be speaking up, it's appalling.
Matthew, I'm curious, in terms of the stuff that you've looked at over time and what you were just saying about Shambhala, what are the commonalities that you're seeing here and how do you understand it?
Relationships between the profit motive material that purports to be about healing and community and awakening and these sorts of messages, and then the complete sort of inability to handle the reality of abuse, the reality of political situations, right?
The reality of... Or just simple feedback, just simple feedback, right?
It relates to that thing that I said several episodes ago, which is I feel like there's this issue around how we think of spirituality as being too sacred to criticize, but too ineffectual in terms of the real world to really matter.
It's like this stuff matters, this stuff actually affects people's lives.
Yeah, okay, so I just took some notes and I'll try to connect three things together in terms of how I feel like Rebecca's story is resonating with other sort of publishing narratives that I know.
And I'm just thinking about how, you know, Hay House goes back to Louise Hay, of course, who died with a net worth of $81 million, I think, and whose You know, alt-health prosperity gospel was essentially libertarian.
And it wasn't about empathy, it wasn't about the social determinants of health, it wasn't about, you know, who's going to, you know, who's going to help people share well-being around and how we actually do that and, you know, how we provide community care.
It didn't acknowledge trauma, it didn't acknowledge the fact that AIDS was an actual virus.
I mean, this person came from a very particular point of view.
And there was an aura, I've seen her at least in video and I've interviewed a number of people who knew her.
There was at least an aura around her of unimpeachability, of untouchability, that whatever she was able to say or channel came from some sort of magnificent place that reinforced the libertarianism of her message because it seemed to be coming from within her from within her holy selfie self right so there's that uh kind of you know centrality of a main charismatic figure
and if we just sort of translate uh over to the parallel example of of shambhala international in conjunction with shambhala publications that's exactly how trunpa rinpoche was was uh looked at is that he was this sort of un uh interrogatable unimpeachable genius who spoke from uh you know the divine realms all the time That's exactly how Trungpa Rinpoche was looked at, is that he was this sort of uninterrogatable, unimpeachable genius who spoke from the divine realms all the time.
And so there wasn't at the beginning of the publishing enterprises that ended up becoming cultish in Shambhala International terms and then corporate in Hay House terms.
There wasn't this sense at the beginning that, hey, you know, we're getting together as a community to discuss interesting ideas and to see which ones actually work when we put them into play.
It wasn't really like that.
Everybody who makes their way in this publishing world really has to fit the mold of the individual sort of atomically perfect influencer, you know, the Marianne Williamson or Gabrielle Bernstein or, you know, or Kelly Brogan, who are the Marianne Williamson or Gabrielle Bernstein or, you know, or Kelly Brogan, who are perfect in and of themselves and therefore in the And they've got something essential to offer from their hearts.
And it's about individuality and personal choice and sovereignty and integrity.
You know, taking control of everything in your life, but really that's a lot of your privilege talking, but you're not really going to talk about that.
And then, so that's the whole sort of orientation towards the author.
So when it comes down to the editor saying, hmm, I wonder whether there's something about this author that isn't perfect and completely haloed in radiance and whether their charisma isn't actually the main thing that I'm selling.
I'm wondering whether my integrity is based on a performance of radiant wholeness rather than, you know, some sort of ethical message.
That's a really hard conversation to have.
And so, you know, it's like in the midst of all of that, there's the way in which authors, I believe, through these platforms.
And Rebecca, you know, you're one and I'm not, but I'm just as an observer, is that there's a lot of social capital and financial capital that's built up through the networking of this environment.
People are testimonialing for each other.
They are blurming each other's books.
They are forming alliances.
They are, and then when the internet age starts up, holy shit, they're affiliating for each other's courses.
I just got an email from Kelly Brogan that was trying to boot me to a thousand dollar natural birth, you know, sort of home birth Nazi course by Kim Amani.
I'm sorry, I'm going off a little bit.
It's worth $16,000, though.
Well, she says it's worth $16,000.
And as I click, there's a referral code.
And I know that if there's a conversion there, that Kelly Brogan's going to get paid a chunk of that thousand.
And I know that affiliate rates can go up to 50%.
Yeah, usually for digital, yeah.
Digital products are 50%.
50% standard, and it's like, so we've got these, you know, when we talk about why aren't women, why aren't the authors on Hay House speaking out against other women, maybe it's because they have affiliate deals with them, maybe it's because the networking isn't just about the protection of, or let me put it this way,
Maybe what's being protected is the affiliate-based income streams and then the mutual respect that is sort of bartered back and forth through testimonials and so on, and that's all sort of economically locked in in a way that supports the white supremacy of the network.
I am so glad that you said that.
I've worked at different companies and I've been part of different organizations and I've never had a leader positioned in the way that Louise Hay was because she is a god-like figure, a goddess-like figure within the company.
She is infallible.
She is untouchable.
It was a great privilege to be able to To sit on stage with her or to get an audience with her.
It was, you know, it was a really super big deal.
And at the time when I was first coming in and she was, you know, pulling back because of her health, I was disappointed.
I'm like, wow, I'm never going to, I'm never going to be with Louise Hay.
I'm never going to be able to sit down with her.
Because there's this, and that's the thing that's like so ridiculous.
Like what I'm saying, it's a culture.
You come in and it's your expectation as an author is.
This author is having a book come out and this doesn't happen In other publishing houses.
This author, you know, Christian Northrop's having a book, we're all writing testimonials.
Exactly!
And that's happening for me, too.
That was what was really exciting for me about being with Hay House.
That's why they get to pay really low advances, because they promise you, like, we're not going to give you as much on an advance, and everyone knows that.
Hay House doesn't pay a lot of money for advances, you know.
Usually.
Because you're going to have this huge network and that's exciting.
It's like, oh, I feel like I'm in an MLM all of a sudden now that I'm talking about it.
That's a really good point, though.
That's a really good point because the MLM structure grows up at the same time that these media companies grow up.
And the mutual influence and cross-marketing and selling That's all part of the game.
That's all shared.
And there's going to be a lot of authors on the Hay House list.
I haven't been, or lists like it, I haven't looked specifically, but there's going to be a lot of authors who learned how to do that shizzle through their MLM participation.
That's how they grew up.
I mean, Esther Hicks!
Esther Hicks learned how to market Abraham Hicks because of her affiliation with Amway.
Absolutely.
So then there's this affiliate deal, which is, and you know, again, I can only speak from my Hay House experience, that's the holy grail.
If you can get Hay House to promote one of your programs, help you to develop a program, that's where the real money is.
That's where they're making hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.
And they're putting these programs to the audiences that are, you know, $1,000 and I'm going to make $500.
So to be an affiliate for Hay House, like we have the opportunity, all of the authors, To be affiliates for all their books, for all their programs, for their summits.
We get, you know, if you're invited to be a speaker on one of their summits, I've been on two Heal Your Life summits.
You know, that's a really big deal for my sales and there's all these ways that we're so much of a community and it's so based on a hierarchy and positioning and who you know within the community.
I've heard that the angel card readers being They're like, well, we don't get invited to these things.
And it's like, they're a click.
It's so insane that now that I'm saying this, I'm like, wow.
I'm glad that you brought up the word community again, because it's actually a toxic mimic of community, if I may say, because it's not really about whether or not you share values, that you share content and you share a market.
But it sounds like everybody is organized in such a way that the network can kind of operate as a series of individual, radiant, charismatic nodes that need each other, can't speak out against each other, they're not going to check each other, they're not going to hold each other responsible for anything, because what's in it for them?
Why would they?
I mean, maybe going back to my question about leadership, I guess it comes back to, is there really any leadership?
Or are we watching something that's been set up as kind of a networking charisma machine that is very difficult to interrogate?
Like, nobody would actually Say from a leadership position, oh, actually, you know what?
I'm in charge here and I'm going to step in and I'm going to do something which nobody has done before, which is to tell this charismatic author that there's actually a limit to their expertise.
Oh, there absolutely is leadership.
It's just that they're not leading people toward being ethical and responsible and being independent and speaking over themselves.
The leadership is saying, We stick together.
Right.
Like, we're not, and you don't let this out, and you don't speak against the company.
And, you know, for, I just didn't get the memo.
Because I've always kind of been an outlier.
I don't come from, I come from poverty.
I don't come from a lot of education.
I didn't know about this world.
I walked into it as someone that, you know, I'm offering my meditations on YouTube.
And I just happened to grow a very big audience without that network.
So when I came in, too, people didn't know who I was, and I didn't know who they were.
And I didn't really get the rules.
I didn't get that memo.
So when I'm sitting at the Mastermind, even three years into being in the company, I didn't know why I wasn't allowed to ask Tracy why there were no black people in the room.
And I was shocked by the response that I got.
Gabby Bernstein was sitting next to me at that table, and we got into it on the microphones.
Because, you know, I didn't know that I wasn't allowed to question Gabby Bernstein.
I just didn't.
Get it?
I didn't get it.
I learned.
I learned real quick.
So they really poached the wrong writer.
I mean, it's like, it's like, because, because in a way, well, I mean, maybe this is a cultural question, like when you're sitting there with the 45 other, you know, top, top authors, are you getting the sense that you're, that you're sitting within a culture that has been trained to, you know, as to what the, as to what the show is?
Well, I'll tell you the first day I went back to my Airbnb and I just cried.
And I'm not a crier.
I didn't know what was happening to me.
And this is where I want to speak to the trauma that when you said that spirituality isn't that important, that it carries this actual weight, but people are going in there and being traumatized on a spiritual level.
And that's what happened to me.
Like I came in there.
I have a belief system.
I have a practice.
I am very dedicated to it.
It did save my life.
This is what I teach my people and or what I actually I show my people.
So I didn't have an understanding of this disconnect.
So I go in there and I'm seeing this and we're talking about marketing and we're talking about membership sites.
And I'm like, what, what, what is happening here?
I went back home and I cried.
And the next day I got that sense when I was sitting at a table with Kelly Brogan.
I'll just say it because I'm not with Hay House anymore.
She was the most obnoxious, condescending, rude, nasty person I've ever met.
And I'm sitting there with a very extensive mental health history.
From the time that I was a little girl, and something I'm very vocal about and I talk about, someone that has taken medication, someone that tells people to do what they need to do to heal themselves and to live, to stay alive.
And I had never been so hurt, so offended.
She was attacking me.
And it was just, so then, so then I got the idea of like, okay, who we were and who they are and, and who we were.
Yes.
And then also what Hay House was willing to put out there and put up with and, and promote.
So yeah, I got it.
Was that a, sorry, that was around a dinner part, dinner table or something?
It was, it was, at the first day we were all sitting in a big circle around the room on the perimeter of the room.
And the second day we broke up into little tables.
This is the mastermind event.
This is the mastermind event.
And that's when I was sitting with them.
So there was some sharing.
And so you disclosed something and then you got a sermon about how you shouldn't have taken medication or something?
Yeah, psychiatric drugs.
She's not into those.
She's not into that.
Matthew did an extensive report on her recently.
And it blows my mind because I have a book out last week on psychedelic therapy.
And I think it's very important that it replace a large amount of antidepressants.
But I make explicit in the book that it doesn't replace all of them and that we create better models.
And that's something that gets lost in that situation because I suffered from anxiety disorder for 25 years and I was on medication.
And it actually did help me for a while.
And then I was able to taper off.
And when I see these Hay House authors, not all of them because I have friends who are on them, but this hardline path of this is the way, that's the biggest indicator to me that I need to run the other direction.
Yeah.
And that's where I was the outlier.
That's where I'm coming from this position of, I'm this mom.
I'm from New Jersey.
This is a thing that I use.
It worked for me, but I totally have respect for your method or whatever gets you by in the day.
I was about surviving.
I'm still about surviving.
I did get some pushback from people in my audience where they were saying, well, like, wait, so you're saying that the pharmaceutical industry isn't messed up or it's not this, like, terrible, patriarchal, you know, consumerist capitalist.
I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
That's not at all what I'm saying.
You know, I am a critical thinker and I'm someone that knows how to read and understand the media and I came into Hay House having had a spiritual background and someone who has healed from her meditation practice and also I love antibiotics when I need them and this is where I couldn't believe what
MDs that were being published by this company.
And again, it's not just Hay House.
I mean, this is a problem across many different spiritual publishers.
I gave bunny ears there, quotation marks.
I just, do they really care?
That's the question that I want to get to.
It's like, do they actually really care?
And the answer that I'm coming up with is absolutely not.
Well, and that also goes to, you know, part of what, of what we're puzzling over is like, why won't these people stand up and say something and stand, stand alongside you?
And part of it is that they probably have, they probably share a significant amount of beliefs with Northrop and Brogan.
It's basically all sorts of ways to affect your diet and to cleanse in ways that will make you ageless, right?
Sorry, I was on my phone if I seemed disrespectful.
I was looking this up because Hay House has a list of their New York Times bestsellers.
And I'm seeing, you know, right, it's basically all sorts of ways to affect your diet and to cleanse in ways that will make you ageless, right?
It's so it's that, it's like, let's try and be ageless and be really healthy through various kinds of cleansing and dietary changes.
And then it's The Ultimate Guide for Retirement After 50, which is all about finances.
That's a Suze Orman book.
A lot of it is Anthony William, the medical medium, right?
And then it's- He's the celery guy, right?
He's the celery guy, exactly.
I buy all the celery juice and go to the store.
You buy it all.
You buy it all.
You drink the celery juice until you have- Explosive D. That's what it all says, it's Explosive D. And then you read the color of the Explosive D according to planetary energy.
So there's all of that, and then there's a bunch of Gabby Bernstein books, and you know, I don't know... Wait, did you see, is Paul McKenna's book on there?
It's called, I Can Make You Thin.
No, so what I'm seeing so far, I'll keep scrolling, is Cleanse to Heal, Limitless, right?
And the reason why I'm flagging this is how much of this plays into the kind of libertarian, privileged fantasy of what spirituality is, right?
Limitless.
Cleanse to Heal, The Ultimate Retirement Guide for 50+, Medical Medium Celery Juice, and then all the Gabby books.
Again, I don't know her, I'm not familiar with her work, but Gabrielle Bernstein, but it's like... Course in Miracles stuff, Course in Miracles.
Yeah, super attractor, how to manifest what you want in your life.
And of course, some of that stuff might be useful in terms of setting goals and having a positive outlook.
But again, we're talking about classic spiritual bypass, unconscious privilege, spirituality that's about how I get everything that I want and somehow am able to sidestep the medical issues that mere mortals have because I'm so spiritual and my diet is so pure, right?
I eat so clean.
So yeah, just scrolling through the truth about cancer.
Wow.
Somebody has the truth about cancer.
They have a couple of cancer books.
It's time longer.
Yeah.
And by the time we get to Christiane, who I'm going to guess is about 10th or 11th on the list, goddesses never age.
Oh, it's not her sort of encyclopedia, Women's Bodies, Women's Health.
That is, that does not seem to be on the bestseller list.
Yeah.
So I'm not sure.
Yeah.
It's to me, it's, it's sort of acknowledging that the messaging, the ideas, the beliefs, the market that they know they're selling to, which, you know, they're in a slip, we're completely transparent with you about back.
So they're just like, yeah, this is our, this is what our people buy, you know, and these are our people.
I have a question, just I'm a little bit fascinated by the, was it Mind Masters or Masterminds?
Mastermind.
Masterminds, yeah, so the meeting, like I had a little bodily chill when you said that you met in a circle first, and I thought of that there might be like, I don't know, a check-in or a go-around or something like that, and then there were other circles.
Did like, I mean, I'm not, I always feel bad in situations like that, but you're describing really feeling like an outsider being the only brown or black person there.
But I'm just wondering, what else did that feel like?
It was about marketing, but why were people meeting at all?
Why wasn't it a conference call?
Because it's a community!
Well, it would have been a really messy conversation.
Because it's community.
And, you know, it's that message from...
The top that says, you are the chosen ones.
You are the ones that we deem to be important.
You get this exclusive invitation.
When it was presented to me, Jess Ortner from The Tapping Solution, she called me up and she's like, Rebecca, I saw your name on the list.
This is such a big honor.
This is such a big deal.
Aren't you so excited?
And I'm like, I guess I am, you know, and it makes me sound kind of like naive, but it's nice to be for someone, you know, you know, my issue is I'm like, you know, the Jenny from the block girl, you know, like I'm coming in who doesn't, I don't always have the right words and I don't always use the right pronunciation because I have that Philly accent and I'm walking into this space thinking, wow, I've arrived, like they've, they've acknowledged me.
So I'm sitting in this circle feeling uncomfortable because I'm there by myself, but then also like, oh, I belong here.
Now, what happened was, on the second day, is that we all get together for a group photo, and that's when I went.
Oh, shoot.
This is going to go out on social media.
And I'm going to be sitting in this sea of white women with beach curls, like, smiling away.
Like, this is a bad look.
And I feel bad.
And people are going to feel bad when they see it.
And I was completely right.
I mean, people saw it and freaked out.
Well, black people saw it and freaked out, black people in the community, in the spiritual wellness community.
But so how I felt, I don't know.
It was mixed.
I felt happy to be there.
I felt privileged.
I felt lucky.
And then also felt like, why I cried at the end of the day, I don't belong here.
This is wrong.
And it has, yeah, it's not about business for me.
It was really, really about like, The spiritual, energetic aspect of it that just felt like crap.
Well, let me point out as a fellow Jersey native that I understand your pronunciation perfectly.
Oh, so you say Trenton too?
I was born in Trenton.
And water, which gives my wife endless pleasure of hearing me say water.
I just want to point out as we're running up on time, because I want to make sure to get this in.
First off, as I mentioned in the beginning, Matthew has done a lot of work on this, and this Monday's bonus episode, he is going to offer a lot more on his research specifics, so listeners, check that out.
I know, Rebecca, that you launched an imprint with Hay House called Wheat Penny Press in 2019.
No, that's my own.
Well, it was an imprint, but now it's your own, correct?
Or it was always your own?
It's always, it's always my own because Hay House rejected the book that the children's book I wanted to do.
And then the deal that I walked away from was them publishing the second book in that exact series.
Got it.
Okay.
And you can, you can think about that.
You could go with that.
How you will.
Well, no, please just, just, well, I mean, so you were an author and you decided you'd started your own company.
So you're already making that move.
So I'd love for you to just talk about what you have planned with that.
Just what you have on your own.
Thank you so much.
Okay.
So I have a imprint, a children's imprint called Wheat Penny Press.
And it's also coupled with a nonprofit called the Little Readers Big Change Initiative.
And we give thousands of books.
You can't see this behind me, but my whole studio is filled with Thousands of books right now.
Thousands of books to well-deserving children in schools that don't get enough attention from the local tax base.
That's so amazing.
So we travel to schools, we give free author visits, which is something that they never get, and we publish books that are inspired by the Own Voices campaign.
So it's a campaign that was started online, it's a hashtag, and They are books where the author matches the identity with the protagonist in the story.
So my book series, Zara's Big Messy, I have Big Messy Day, Big Messy Bedtime, features a biracial little girl who struggles with big messy emotions.
The books are not about racism or anti-racism.
They feature kids, the black and brown kids, LGBTQ kids, I'm a mother of a trans son, disabled kids, I'm a mother of three disabled children, That deal with regular everyday stuff.
It's not about what's, you know, it's not about their identity as much as like just the stuff that they deal with and representation.
So it's a really, it is the coolest thing I've ever done.
All my love is behind it.
The nonprofit is thriving and we're doing so well and we are doing a program right now.
With authors, New York Times best-selling authors of The Black Persuasion that are coming in and talking to kids for free, and we're doing a whole online workshop.
It's been great, and I'm so, so, so, so happy to get out of that deal with Hay House.
And what I said to them when I walked away was, because they only took one book, and I did it for distribution and recognition of the whole series and my other authors that I publish, but I said Zara is like my sixth baby.
There's no way I could give my little brown baby to people that don't know her, don't care about her, don't care about her life or care about her future.
So it was a blessing.
It was a blessing.
It's a really good ending and new beginning.
I'm so happy that you're doing your own thing like in a totally different context.
I grew up in small press here in Toronto.
And it's just super exciting when you can work with people that you choose and that you're in relationship with.
And you can go out and you can find the illustrator who's gonna get it exactly right and you're gonna have, you know, them feel like they're part of your family and, and yeah.
That's just, I, that's, there's a lot of freedom in that and I'm, I'm really happy for you.
That's awesome.
Can I say one more thing?
One more thing, if I may?
I really want to get this out here.
And the next step of this is that we are, I publish other authors as well, but we are starting an imprint for adults and we have investors and we are starting with an equitable advanced model so every single one of our authors are going to get the same advance and the same exact deal and it is going to be merit-based and we are bringing people in with tiny or no platforms and we are going to help them build their careers.
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, hosted 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.
On October 19th, Michigan reached its highest total number of COVID cases to date, with 4,718 being recorded.
This is the state in which a white supremacist militia group was planning on kidnapping and potentially executing the state's governor, Gretchen Whitmer, only two weeks ago.
The same governor that Donald Trump encouraged supporters to lock up earlier this week.
You got to get your governor to open up your state, okay?
And get your schools open.
Get your schools open.
The schools have to be open, right?
Lock them all up.
Classy.
To him and his supporters.
We can't become numb to the fact that our president is regularly inciting violence, yet refuses to take responsibility for his words.
And sadly, that trend extends out to much of his audience.
It's how we've reached, at the time of this recording on October 21st, 222,000 deaths in America, and yet still believe we're the greatest country in the world.
There are great people here, and some of the greatest work in our healthcare system.
I've long expressed criticisms about our for-profit healthcare model, but the majority of the people who work within it do incredible work.
And that's why I wanted to talk with some of them about their experiences working on the frontlines during the coronavirus.
Recently, Dr. Danielle Bilardo introduced me to Dr. Jay Mohan, who is an interventional cardiologist at McLaren Cardiovascular Institute in Mount Clemens, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit.
So, thank you, Danielle.
Jay is certified in internal medicine, cardiology, echocardiography, and nuclear cardiology, and is a registered physician in vascular interpretation.
He's also very active on Twitter and Instagram, at Dr. J. Mohan and Cardiology On Call, respectively, where he regularly provides educational slides and videos.
And as you'll hear during our talk, he didn't expect to be on the front lines of COVID-19, but a few months ago he was thrust into that role in a matter of hours.
As I've mentioned on the podcast before, I worked in an emergency room for two years while in college.
While my role was monitoring suicidal patients, I did get a front row seat of what happens in that environment, how quickly a hospital can go from calm to overwhelmed, and how hard doctors and nurses work.
And that was not during a pandemic.
Many of the topics we've discussed over the months on conspirituality really frustrate me.
But the anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-science, COVID is a hoax crowd really gets to me.
Not only because they refuse to even consider basic science, but also because they discredit the work that many hard-working healthcare professionals perform every single day in our service.
And so I'll be talking with them over the coming months as we enter this third wave, or second wave, or continuation of the first wave of COVID in America, depending on how you're counting.
I want to thank Dr. J. Mohan for taking time from his busy schedule to talk, as well as thank him for his service.
And I hope that you don't have to see him or his colleagues anytime soon.
But I know that I feel better knowing that doctors like him are out there for us.
I'm really interested in understanding from people who are on the ground working with COVID patients and people who are experiencing this and just getting some real world insight into what this virus is and what the people actually go through who get it.
And so to begin, I would just, Love to hear a little bit about some of your experiences and how many patients you've treated and what you've noticed about this virus that may be unique in your own experience as a doctor so far.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, my initial experience with COVID was, you know, I just finished my fellowship training and, you know, I started my real job recently, about a month ago.
I was an interventional fellow at Beaumont Hospital in Detroit.
I graduated in July, but during the end of my fellowship, so basically from February to July, I had direct contact with COVID because, you know, like many other parts of the country, Southeast Michigan and Detroit in particular was Ravaged by COVID and we had a huge amount of numbers.
My hospital was about a 1200 bed hospital and, you know, at one point in late March, early April, we were at about 80 to 90% COVID positive.
We were basically turned into a COVID hospital.
And I remember in late February, early March, you know, as an interventional fellow, I was one of the most, uh, seniored, um, training staff.
I was at, you know, I'm eight years post grad.
I figured, you know, I would have no, no interaction with COVID because my main role as a fellow was, you know, to be in the cath lab and to do procedures and, you know, things changed and evolved so quickly.
It was, it just was mind blowing.
I remember, uh, I was, I just got home.
Late day, I knew COVID was going on.
It was really starting to hit Michigan and I get a phone call from one of the hospital administrators and they called me and they asked me, you know, they needed my help.
They needed me to come in that night to help run the COVID floors.
And my initial reaction was, you know, I was surprised they were asking me.
I was actually Taken back, I didn't think that they thought they knew that I was an interventional fellow and not, you know, a medicine resident.
You know, I said that to them and they're like, no, we know you're an interventional fellow, but you know, we just want to let you know that we're completely, we're almost at capacity and we don't have enough staff to man the entire hospital.
And you know, that really hit me hard.
I was like, wow, this, this happened within a matter of hours.
And so the next day I went into work and you know, my program director told me, You know, listen, Jay, um, I'm sorry to tell you, but you know, the cath lab has been closed and you know, we need your help on the COVID floors.
And because you're so highly trained, um, and you're used to dealing with really sick people, we need you to run the COVID ICU.
Um, and it's just taken back because You know, I have experience with critically ill patients, but you know, I, I'm, I'm not a pulmonary critical care fellow.
So I didn't know really, you know, how to manage a vent and I had to totally refresh my memory on how to treat infectious disease and, you know, kidney failure and all these things that I learned as a medicine resident, but I've been, you know, four or five years removed from that.
And I remember my first day on the unit, I was just quiet.
I was letting the medicine residents on my team kind of run the show because, you know, at that point they knew more than me.
Um, but as time went on and each day went on, you know, I was my, I was responsible for running the unit of about, uh, 25, uh, intensive, intensive care patients.
So they were all intubated.
They were all, uh, the sick of the sick.
Um, and every day during that, that week, it was, You know, the treatment was evolving.
And I really felt like I, I brought something to the table because COVID affects the cardiovascular system pretty hard.
And especially in regards to thrombosis and stroke and kidney failure.
And so, you know, I had the ideas of why don't we start anticoagulation earlier?
Why are we doing this?
And why are we doing that?
And I had a, I had an inquisitive mind and I think a lot of it had to do with Danielle and Ali and, You know, I luckily have a very big social media following and when this was all happening, I actually found social media to be super helpful because they were giving me the newest information at the minute it happened.
And my team really appreciated that because I felt like we were up to date with patient care, which evolved pretty much by the second.
You know, worldwide, but we were up to date because I was getting information fed to me.
That was my initial experience with COVID.
And I remember one of the craziest memories I had was I was asked to do a central line on a patient and their dialysis catheters always clotted off.
And so we had to go constantly replace their lines.
That's simple stuff for me.
I'm used to doing more complex stuff, but I remember sitting there in the room, N95 on, mask on top of that, goggles on top of my glasses, double layer of gowns.
And I'm sweating and my glasses are fogging up and I'm, my hands are shaking, you know, trying to get access on this patient.
And, um, and I just kept thinking to myself, I'm like, wow, you know, this is so hard just because I'm so scared for myself, uh, to infect myself and my family that, you know, it was, it was making me low and not as, you know, well forget my training almost.
And, um, I actually, you know, I got the job done, but you know, it took me a long time to do it.
And, Um, it just made me realize how scary this thing was and how other people in my situation, like mentally, how it can really affect you.
Just because you're highly trained, that doesn't mean you know how to deal with something we've never seen before.
Now your training is in cardiology, and have you noticed, specifically with this virus, anything new that it does to patients that you hadn't seen?
I know you're newer on the floor, but you've been training for a long time, so you have pretty good awareness of How people's immune systems and how they react to different viruses.
So what can you tell us about this that maybe opened your eyes that we were dealing with something different?
You know, the major thing, especially as an interventional cardiologist, is we deal with heart attacks or what's called STEMIs all the time.
And what that usually entails is that there's a plaque rupture and You know, a thrombosis in a, in a major heart vessel that we go in and fix with stunts.
But when COVID started, uh, we kept getting these STEMI activations from the ER with, with their EKGs look like these big ST elevations.
And then we would take them to the lab and their arteries would be completely normal.
And, um, you know, right when that happened, we'd be like, okay, this is COVID, this is COVID.
And it happened, you know, three, four times a day and actually, I remember the University of Miami came out with a protocol that said, you know, when they suspected COVID with ST elevation, they said, give thrombolytics instead of taking people to the cath lab and potentially infecting your staff.
And that's when I knew this was different.
I was like, this is, you know, unlike anything I had ever seen in my life.
You know, influenza and Coxsackie and other infectious agents can cause myocarditis, but I've never seen something that acted so much like a heart attack that, uh, and then when you take them to the lab, everything's completely normal.
And it's just basically, uh, you know, COVID affecting the heart muscle and causing myocarditis and heart failure.
And also this idea that it really causes wreaks havoc on the vascular system and causes microembolism and pulmonary embolism and deep vein thrombosis and you know, I've never seen an infectious agent wreak havoc like this has with in terms of clotting and all of the destruction that comes from clotting.
So you are very outspoken on social media, which I've appreciated going through and following your feed on Instagram.
When you hear someone, and in this case it will be the president, but it's not limited to him in any capacity, when they say, do not fear COVID-19, and also people advocating for herd immunity right now, how does that make you feel?
It truthfully it really frustrates me because I wish they could they could see my everyday life and you know the fact that when COVID was really ravaging Michigan that I had to change in my cold garage every day out of my scrubs and you know spray myself with Lysol before I went into my house where I have a two-year-old and a one-year-old and you know now I have my mother-in-law living with us but
Every day it's a battle to think, like, am I going to infect my family?
And, you know, it's just it's just blows my mind that, you know, people are complaining about wearing a mask and, you know, there's nothing to fear.
And this is just the flu.
It's like a complete, complete and utter slap in the face to all health care workers, because, you know, we have to wear masks every day and we take the utmost precautions and we're out there on the front lines taking care of people.
And one of the things that's frustrated me the most is there was this initial, uh, you know, really everyone's like, Oh, healthcare workers are heroes.
And then all of a sudden everyone's kind of turned their backs on us and they think that we're trying to push some political agenda.
that we're trying to ruin the economy.
And what they always forget is that we care more about the health of our population than the pocketbooks of our population.
The economy doesn't work with a sick population.
So at the end of the day, I care more about if my patients are healthy and they can survive to live to work versus just let everyone kind of run rampant Like, that's not a scientific method for me.
And in regards to the herd immunity, it doesn't work.
It's already been proven.
Sweden is a prime example of that, where it doesn't work.
And, you know, their per capita case fatality rate is one of the highest in the world.
And they've shown that it doesn't work, and they've been criticized for that.
But somehow, there's still this idea that herd immunity is the way to go, even though we've had multiple papers demonstrate that the antibody production post-infection is less than 20%.
So, even though people are getting infected, that doesn't mean their chance of reinfection and death are lower.
There's no evidence of that.
So this idea that herd immunity is a possibility, I don't think it is unless we have a vaccine that can produce an antibody response that can protect a large proportion of our population.
Right, but you're dealing with a country that has a growing anti-vax sentiment for reasons I've covered as a journalist for a long time that is, from my perspective, extremely frustrating.
Now, I really appreciate that you talk about the positive aspects of social media because I think that gets lost sometimes and it's really nice to hear that it really helped you through that difficult time and continues to do so.
And being so active and having so many followers, I'm wondering though, do you get pushback on your feed?
And if so, how do you respond to it?
I get pushed back every single day.
I can't imagine it's probably not more than Danielle gets because I think she's a little bit she's got a bigger following but she's also very very vocal and I love it and I love hearing her opinion but Um, you know, my best, my dad always taught me, you know, people push back to things that they don't know much about.
And you should always attack things like that with education.
So if they're, if they're coming at you with, you know, they don't agree with your opinion, I always ask why.
And I always ask them to give me examples.
And when they do, I have my own examples to give them.
And my opinion is, I always want to hear what the other side is thinking.
You should never just write them off.
And we've kind of turned into a society of right and left, and there's no in between.
And I'm trying to be an advocate for people to be more moderate and see the both sides of the picture.
But, you know, a lot of the times when people Write me off.
I'm always like, you know, I'm on the front lines.
I see this every day.
There's no reason for me to make it up.
And, you know, if I could, you know, change the way that the disease course is going, I would.
But the best way I can do that for the general public is to just educate them as much as I can.
And with social media, the good and the bad is the bad is that there's a lot of misinformation out there.
And my goal, and I know a lot of other people have been advocates for trying to eliminate or help the public sift through all of the misinformation and to give them the sites and the resources that we use that can be trustworthy and that they can really make educated decisions on.
Well, speaking of education, in July, you made a post about COVID-19 saying, it's not about mortality, it's about morbidity.
And I wonder if you could just explain that in a little more depth.
So, whenever anyone speaks about this disease or any other infectious disease, the thing that really gets people's blood going, I guess, is mortality.
So, if people are dying, it must be bad, which is definitely true, but like every other condition we treat in medicine, it comes with a fact that mortality isn't everything.
So, The idea of morbidity is the fact that a disease can wreak havoc in different ways besides killing you.
So, whether it be long-term adverse outcomes or outcomes that a lot of people don't think about.
And one of the biggest things, I think, is cardiovascular disease.
And there's a great paper by Jack that was, I think, I think it was titled, Where Have All the Stemmies Gone?
What we found was very interesting during the months of March through pretty much June, the percentage of patients that presented with acute MI that was actually due to plaque rupture, the amount reduced in the hospital was astonishing.
I think it was over 50 or 60 percent.
And that's because people were literally sitting at home with chest pain and infarcting at home because they were too scared to come to the emergency room because of COVID.
So that's what morbidity is.
The morbidity of COVID is the fact that all of these other chronic diseases are suffering because of COVID.
So the more that COVID, the more patients we have with COVID in the hospital, the less likely patients with COPD, heart failure, Heart attacks, cancer, GI illnesses.
They're less likely to come to the hospital and they're also less likely to receive adequate care because so many of the facilities and resources are dedicated towards COVID.
So it's really going to hurt.
You'll see in years to years to come how COVID-19 is going to affect multiple other comorbid conditions and how People that had cancer and heart disease, they have suffered because of COVID-19.
Yeah, it's a hard point I try to get across because up until recently, I was a fitness instructor as well as this life, and I take care of myself, but I had testicular cancer, and I had to deal with that, and I have different immune problems too, and there's such a seemingly lack of empathy.
One thing that I'm grateful for though was while I was in college, I got to spend two years working in an emergency room, More of as a fly on the wall.
I was a patient monitor who would sit with suicidal patients and make sure they didn't run away.
But it's hard to really explain what it's like when an emergency room can be extremely quiet for hours and then all of a sudden it just gets slammed and what that energy is like.
And has that been a consistent thing for you over these last few months?
Has it gone in waves?
Do you see it picking up now as we head towards flu season?
You know, I had never seen anything like it back in March and April.
I mean, it was literally like there was a natural disaster.
It's what you always heard about when, you know, it's all hands on deck kind of thing, where one day it was, you know, a normal day and the next day it was, holy crap, the hospital's at capacity and they're all COVID patients.
Um, and then luckily with, with education of the public and learning more about what the disease does and how to treat it and how to prevent it, which one of the major things was wearing a mask and also preventing large gatherings.
Um, you know, I think Michigan did a great job, uh, personally, um, with, with instituting that and being one of the harsher states with lockdowns.
So from, Probably from June until end of June until recently, it's been very good.
You know, the ER is not slammed.
We're not overwhelmed.
The cath labs opened back up.
Outpatient procedures are being performed.
But I have noticed And sadly, I have noticed over the last, you know, maybe two, three weeks, the numbers are climbing up again.
And a lot of it has to do with the resentment and COVID fatigue and people thinking that, you know, COVID is not a big deal.
And unfortunately, our president's kind of pushed that agenda.
And I'm not sure why that is.
But unfortunately, a lot of his followers and supporters have kind of followed suit and they're kind of thinking that maybe they're not at risk and we're starting to see that affect our hospital, especially we're seeing higher infection rates.
And, you know, now one ICU, we previously had no COVID ICUs.
Now we have another COVID ICUs back.
So, you know, unfortunately it's starting to see a second wave and I'm a little bit nervous as flu season approaches, especially because I think people will kind of write off and everyone in America has this idea that we need to go to work and we need to, you know, we can't be sick.
And, you know, You know, we have allergies and you're starting to write off these, some of these symptoms that you have.
Um, and it's got a little bit scary cause you, you may be the common cold and maybe the flu, uh, but it may be COVID and you don't know.
So I think we have to have more, uh, robust testing.
I think we have to go back to that.
How has testing been in your hospital, in your area in general?
Um, it, it was really good and then it's tapered off again.
Um, And then as of recently, we are now reinstituting testing all outpatient procedures coming into the hospital to rule out COVID.
It really has been very, very hit or miss.
And one of the things I've noticed is a lot of people are almost like nervous to test patients because if a patient gets under this PUI or patient under investigation status, a lot of resources have to be allocated to that patient.
They have to be moved to isolation.
They have to get more close nursing care.
You know, all of the PPE that's necessary to see them until the test is negative.
So I think as physicians, they're a little bit nervous to even test patients for COVID because they don't want to be the guy that's allocating all these resources to everybody.
To close, I just would love to hear, you know, you are about education and trying to get people to understand the seriousness of this.
So as we do head into flu season, what are the best steps that people can take right now?
You know, I think even as a physician, I've gotten COVID fatigue, you know, I, You have to remember that this is a pandemic and it's not isolated to our country.
It's not political.
This is a real thing going on and over 200,000 people are dead in our country and over a million in the world.
So we have to get this COVID fatigue out of there.
Uh, out of the people's minds and out of everybody's minds.
And we have to start being more diligent, take our due diligence and be very cautious with, you know, be at a mask advocate, be a patient advocate.
And, you know, we have to push the idea that the vaccine is going to be the solution and end to the pandemic.
And it will be done in a scientific way.
It will be done in a safe way.
And we got to take the politics out of it.
You know, I want the public To regain trust in the healthcare profession and, you know, the nurses and the doctors and the janitors and the respiratory therapists that are on the front lines.
Listen to them.
They know what's going on every day and listen to them for the information.
There's take the politics out of it.
And remember that this is a health crisis.
And so listen to the healthcare workers when it, when it is in regards to that, and we will get you through this.
We will keep you educated and informed, but we need your trust and we need you guys to really believe in us that we will do the right thing for you and your families.
Thank you for listening to Conspirituality.
You can find show notes, resources, and more at Conspirituality.net.
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