How do we tease apart the gold from the dross? What can be salvaged from a subculture marred by charismatic con-artistry, power abuses, and the toxic ingredients that lead to conspirituality? Founder of the Flow Genome Project, Jamie Wheal joins Derek for a wide-ranging interview about his new book, Recapture the Rapture. Following up on his Pulitzer-nominated bestseller, Stealing Fire, Wheal makes an ambitious argument for a dazzling renewal of meaning and mystery through sacralized biohacking. Rapture can be recaptured, Wheal argues, through awe-thumping music, blessed sex, moderate psychedelic use, and conscious community, or as he puts it “ethical cults.” After the interview, we’ll discuss.In the Jab, Julian looks at clotting issues and emerging reports of vaccine impacts on women. In the Ticker, Matthew reviews the NY Times investigation of Alan Hofstetter’s wife and her January 6th adventure. Derek covers conspiritualism in fitness bro culture while Julian reports on Christiane Northrup’s latest junk science infomercial.Show NotesNew Jersey gym owners offer free membership to those who don’t get COVID-19 vaccineWhat We Know About Ian Smith, the New Jersey Gym Owner Defying Gov. Phil Murphy’s Executive OrdersAnti-mask gym finedFitness centers are struggling to rebound from the pandemicA Teacher Marched to the Capitol. When She Got Home, the Fight Began.White women’s role in white supremacy, explainedRecapture the Rapture — Jamie WhealCult Dynamics 101: a primerHypnotic Da Free John — Svengali of the truth-seeking set (San Francisco Examiner, 1985)Guru hit by sex-slave suit (San Francisco Examiner, 1985)Original Oregonian investigation into Osho and R
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Conspirituality 47, is an ethical cult possible?
How do we tease apart the gold from the dross?
What can be salvaged from a subculture marred by charismatic con artistry, power abuses, and the toxic ingredients that lead to conspirituality?
Founder of the Flow Genome Project, Jamie Wheal, joins Derek for a wide-ranging interview about his new book, Recapture the Rapture.
Following up on his Pulitzer-nominated bestseller, Stealing Fire, Weill makes an ambitious argument for a dazzling renewal of meaning and mystery through sacralized biohacking.
Rapture can be recaptured, Weill argues, through awe-thumping music, blessed sex, moderate psychedelic use, and conscious community, or as he puts it, ethical cults.
After the interview, Weill discuss.
In the jab, I'm looking at clotting issues and the emerging reports of vaccine impacts on women.
In the ticker, Matthew reviews the New York Times investigation of Alan Hofstetter's wife and her January 6th adventure, Derek covers conspiritualism in fitness bro culture, and I'll be reporting on Christiane Northrup's latest junk science infomercial.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
We often discuss conspiritualists in the yoga and wellness spaces, but there's another cohort that's been pushing out anti-vax, anti-mask propaganda, and that is gym owners.
So we have Frank Trombetti and Ian Smith, In my home country of New Jersey, who recently offered free memberships to Attila's Gym in Belmar, not to be confused with the beach town, Belmar, for anyone who didn't get a vaccination.
If that sounds strange, my hometown of Milltown also has a double in New Jersey called Milltown, so it's kind of a New Jersey thing, I guess.
Now, these are the same bros that were arrested last July for refusing to close their gym, and they've been quite vocal on local TV about their defiance, with Smith even going on Tucker Carlson last year to bro it out.
Smith recently posted a photo of a vaccination card with his name written out, here, fuck outta, which confirms my long-standing theory that this is often what happens when Jersey natives never leave the state.
Smith's GoFundMe for their gym has raised nearly $500,000 in order to battle Phil Murphy's evil empire.
And he also slings supplements on his downline, which are not linked to in the show notes.
But good news, you can purchase highly absorbable vitamins C and D for immune health from him.
That sounds familiar.
This is quite a rebound for a man who in 2008 was sentenced to five years in prison for vehicular manslaughter.
He woke up drunk one morning and his plea was that he didn't drink and drive because he was never told before that you can wake up drunk.
So that gives you some insight into this man.
Now, thankfully, I'm not the only conspirituality host whose homeland is infested with douchey bros.
Up in Kelowna, am I pronouncing that right, Matthew?
It's Kelowna.
Kelowna, thank you, which is located obviously in Canada and British Columbia, a martial arts and yoga facility known as Flow Academy announced that they will not be accepting any applications for membership from anyone who has received any of the vaccine options for COVID-19.
They also posted, quote, for the health, safety, and protection of us and our members, face coverings are not permitted in our facility, end quote.
Oh, my God.
After someone named Kane left a negative review based on their anti-vax, anti-mask policies, the gym replied, quote, Hi, Kane.
Or is it spelled Karen?
Thanks for reaching out.
Business is better than ever thanks to people like you publicly sharing our ethics and morals.
You'd be amazed how fast like-minded folks have reached out to join the Flow family.
We couldn't do it without you.
Keep up the great work.
Cheers, end quote.
I could go on, but you get the point.
Sadly, their business is probably doing better than ever, right?
The Jersey gym has received nearly a half million dollars in donations.
Now, I know how much time and effort my former employer, Equinox, has put into responsibly opening with their safety protocols, and I'm sure most gyms, at least the ones that have been able to survive, are taking this more seriously.
But then again, that's really only my hope.
I've viewed way too many yoga retreats, classes, and workshops on social media over this past year to be confident about my sentiment there.
And in some ways, I do get it.
A recent survey of 12,000 gym members found that cancellations are higher now than at any point during the lockdown.
Over one-third of Americans say they do not plan on returning, and gyms really rely on members that pay cash but never attend for their bottom line.
Perhaps famously, Planet Fitness had 90% of their clients who never showed up in a month to the gym, and that's how they were able to offer such a low price.
But those days are over.
People just don't have the cash for that anymore.
And adaptability is key for any business, but for those gym owners openly taunting public health officials and the public at large, there's only one way to respond.
Fuck out of here with that ignorance.
It's actually incredible that they flipped it, that they're not going to offer memberships to people who have received the vaccine.
And was it in that same statement that they were saying that their concern was about viral shedding?
Or their concern was about how the vaccine itself had somehow made people infectious?
What was the deal there?
No, there was no medical advice or science in the statement, at least not what I read.
I read their whole poster and it was just, it was completely a political statement, not a medical one.
Yeah, it's owning the libs and creating a reverse vaccine passport, right?
And it's also the same thing we've seen with all the conspiritualists in the wellness space.
It's, I need to work out, my immune system is so great, I'm healthy, and if you're not working out, that's your fault that you get sick.
That's pretty much the line that the fitness bros have towed as well.
I mean, it's consistent and it's kind of like a logical conclusion to the vaccine fear, isn't it?
That the vaccine itself somehow makes the vaccine recipient infectious, that they're going to become the diseased person, that they're going to infect the unvaccinated.
I mean, it makes sense that it would be completely turned upside down, wouldn't it?
Well, yeah, I mean, obviously that makes no logical sense or medical sense whatsoever, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's what they're turning to.
But it's consistent.
Yeah, it's consistent, yeah.
Yeah, it's consistent and it's also, I think, probably just a kind of trolling.
Like, if you're weak enough to think that you need the vaccine, we don't want you here anyway.
Although, like, why limit your bottom line like that?
Like, there has to be some They're restricting access, so they have to be gambling that somehow that's going to be beneficial.
Yeah, the marketing wisdom of the last several years is that you lose nothing by polarizing.
You gain loyalty from your demographic by taking a strong stand and not caring if it offends the people who you are not trying to draw in.
And as exemplified by this new scam that we're seeing, right, the new grift is we're being censored or we're being oppressed somehow through, you know, the requirement of safety measures or vaccines, and so therefore you should send us money, and people do!
These guys have raised a shit ton of money by taking that stance, so the gamble pays off.
But even logistically, like, how are they going to... It's not like it's enforceable.
It's not like they're going to be taking medical histories or looking at vaccine records and going inside the door.
So I suppose there can be really a troll factor going on there.
And they're betting that whoever is vaccinated isn't going to be that offended that somehow they would just hide their... It's the dark arts of Chan-influenced PR.
Right, okay.
And it's also fascinating that this has particularly infected the jiu-jitsu community.
I know I was on Stefan Kesting's podcast a while ago, Julian was as well, and he reached out after hearing our podcast because he wanted to let me know how bad it was in the martial arts community.
Flow Academy is a jiu-jitsu academy among other martial arts.
And think about all of the martial arts.
Jiu-Jitsu is arguably the most intimate, where you're actually grappling with someone, holding them against your body.
It's akin to wrestling.
So talk about becoming an infectious vector, a way to spread disease.
You couldn't find a more susceptible martial art to practice if you wanted to pass it around.
In fact, every jujitsu academy I've ever heard of goes through phases of having to deal with ringworm and staff.
Because there is so much of that, you know, just sharing of everything.
Yeah, so I don't know where or why that particular lineage has happened.
I mean, I don't know.
I don't want to speculate.
I only practiced jiu-jitsu briefly, and it definitely gives you a sense of power.
I mean, it's amazing in terms of—because most fights in the street end up on the ground within 10 seconds, so the whole, like, I'm going to stand up and punch and kick, that's not realistic in street fighting, so jiu-jitsu is a very It's a wonderful art for protection, self-protection, because it's more realistic, but I don't know what that does to people's psychology.
But then again, the Gracie brothers are notoriously controversial in their thoughts.
The structure of the scam.
Last week we covered Christiane Northrup's anticipated collaboration with Sasha Stone.
She referenced a cabal exposing roadshow that would also be a chance to flip the script on being named one of the disinformation dozen.
This week, Northrop and frequent Sasha Stone livestream co-host Imani Mamolution were part of a four-way conversation published to the Good Doctors Facebook page.
Ms.
Mamolution is also noteworthy as the one-time director of the Red Pill Expo where, you may remember, Mickey Willis last year gave the keynote address Which this year is happening, drumroll please, at Mount Rushmore, June 5th and 6th, which is the same place Sasha Stone's planned American tour is rumored to culminate.
But in addition to all of this auspicious conspiritualist synchronicity, we have a watch-what-they-say-and-then-see-what-they-sell moment here too, because the video of this four-way conference call is a full-blown sales pitch for so-called structured water.
The other two talking heads on the call were Gina Bria, head of something called the Hydration Foundation, and Kenny Liu, CEO of Spring Aqua.
The long and short of it all is that the water on the planet is broken, and structured water is the cure for what ails you.
Your aging joints, fascia, and the ability to generate electrical activity through your meridian system can all be given a new lease on life.
The experts proceed to explain the, of course, mind-blowing concept that the world, and also we humans, are made up mostly of water.
But no, not that yucky, dead water that comes out of your tap.
No, no, the living water we are here to sell you.
But wait, there's more.
This water will not only restore your radiant good health, but you can also be part of restoring the living water cycle on the planet by consuming and then I love the bigger vision that Kenny shared too.
I mean, in talking about as we're moving this water through our taps, that it's going out into the planet and actually doing that recovery and using it for farming practices, people using it for food production.
Well, if you think about it, there's all kinds of symptoms that are associated with not having adequate water.
Fatigue being a big one, muscle aches and pains, insomnia, those things, constipation.
Menstrual irregularities.
Because water is necessary for every biologic function in the body, if you don't have enough of it or you got the wrong kind of it, it's the list of symptoms is virtually endless.
So therefore, what we could say or what I could say with full confidence is that when you hydrate yourself optimally, Just be prepared to feel better.
And because water is essential as the electrical conducting system in the body along the fascial planes, along the acupuncture meridians, what you'll find is your thinking will be more clear.
Your intuition will wake up and you'll just start to be a human.
Now proponents of structured or hexagonal water claim that spectrographic analysis shows remarkable qualities that will allow for better hydration, absorption of nutrients, detoxing, and enhanced cellular communication.
However, independent spectrography shows no difference between tap water, structured water, and, say, urine.
I've taken some flak from time to time for my technical and vernacular use of the word bullshit on this podcast, so you'll be happy to hear that my final comment on this topic is that it really just is very expensive piss in the wind.
Well, there was a really interesting piece in the New York Times this week about Christine Hostetter, who is the partner of Alan Hostetter, who is the San Clemente ex-military, ex-police yoga teacher and gong bath artist.
As we've reported, Alan is obviously full Q. He He was at the Capitol siege.
He preceded that with a number of appearances at in-real-life Q events.
And now his wife, Christine, is under a lot of scrutiny and community pressure in San Clemente at this point because of her participation.
Alongside Alan in the January 6th insurrection.
Now, she's a beloved grade 4 teacher at the local school, but some parents now want her out.
And I feel the situation brings up some fascinating questions about speech, belief, safety, influence over children.
How individuals can become like bellwethers, lightning rods, or scapegoats for deeply repressed community tensions, and also how real-world conflicts around what you were up to in 2020 might play out in the coming years.
So from the article, it says, first, a student group organized a petition demanding the school district investigate whether Ms.
Hostet or 54 had taken part in the attack on the Capitol.
and whether her politics had crept into her teaching.
Then, when the district complied and suspended her, a group of parents put up a counter-petition.
Quote, if the district starts disciplinary action based on people's beliefs and politics, what's next?
Religious discrimination?
Unquote.
It warned.
Each petition attracted thousands of signatures and Sam Clementi has spent the months since embroiled in the divisive politics of post-Trump America, wrestling with uncomfortable questions about the limits of free speech and whether Ms.
Hostetter and those who share her views should be written off as conspiracy theorists and racists who have no place in public life, Not to mention shaping young minds in the classroom.
It has not been a polite debate.
Neighbors have taken to monitoring one another's social media posts.
Some have infiltrated private Facebook groups to figure out who is with them and who is not.
And they have the screenshots to prove it.
Even in the local yoga community where Ms.
Hostetter's husband was a fixture, it has found itself divided.
It goes deeper than just her.
Goes a quote from Katie Anderson, whose two children attend Ms.
Hostetter's school.
A lot of conversations between parents, between friends, have already been fractured by Trump, by the election, by Black Lives Matter.
So, in the article, We learned that Alan and Christine have only been married since 2016, so I think that indicates a rather rapid radicalization.
It doesn't say how long she's been a teacher, but long enough to be beloved and for parents to jockey for placement in her class.
And I said this thing about fast radicalization because the article also says that if Ms. Hostetter had any strong political leanings before last year, she did not let on, said her niece, Emma Hall.
She only picked up the first hint of her aunt's rightward drift at a small party to celebrate the Hostetter's wedding in 2016.
Quote, there were about six people, friends of theirs, that did not let up asking me if I was going to vote for Trump, unquote, recalled Ms. Hall's husband, Ryan.
So to me, it's fascinating all around because You know, clearly when you see him on video at the protests, at the Q conference in Phoenix, he's a dominant, Alan is a dominant personality.
And, you know, I think it's natural to wonder about the magnitude of his influence over his partner.
And, you know, the chances that their relationship would survive differences of opinion in these matters, I think, seem to be very low given what an extremist he is, but we can't know, really.
But I also wonder whether this is a case in which Christine, as a schoolteacher, actually normalizes and domesticates her husband's extremism.
The bias of the article and then the petitions that circulated against her was that her association with Alan, you know, made her this distrustful character.
But what about the other way around?
Like, does she not make him look good?
It kind of reminds me of the emerging literature on the role of white women in the KKK, that they basically make the violent racism of the movement seem wholesome and supported.
And she's a grade four teacher.
She's in this nurturing role.
You know, how could this kind and supportive person be involved in something that's truly dangerous?
But I gotta say that, you know, like if I was a parent in that school, I would want her out, like, no question about it, because, I mean, not just because of her politics.
I should mention, too, that Neighbors first started to be concerned when she actively participated in some of Alan's protests, including a mask-burning event, and then she also confronted a mask-wearing family at some point in the fall.
But, you know, regardless of whether she thinks Trump is Jesus or, you know, her beliefs in QAnon, I don't know how, you know, I would trust her to make safe decisions with regard to the health of my child and ultimately the rest of my family.
It's so emblematic of where we're at right now, that someone who was involved in basically a domestic terrorism Yeah, it's kind of like the domestic implications within domestic terrorism.
it's okay to not want her to have her be around your kids. - Yeah, it's kind of like the domestic implications within domestic terrorism, right?
It really, really comes close to home. - I remember in 2008, every time I met someone new, I would ask them if they were voting for Obama.
So there's no indication that there was an emerging cult in 2016 around Trump.
That's fascinating.
I can't imagine being somewhere where the first thing you do is start harassing someone about who they're voting for.
It really speaks to the temperament.
Should also point out for people who don't know the area of San Clemente is right near Newport Beach, right near Huntington Beach, which is sort of the vector for the anti-mask rallies that have been happening in Orange County in California.
And, you know, I've visited that area.
It's about an hour from here.
So there's a great dog beach there in Huntington Beach.
There's a lot of great restaurants.
There's a There's an art scene.
It's mostly, if you would think about the kind of art scene you'd see in Key West.
It's very similar, so it's very sort of boring, but it actually, there's something, you know, I like going down there once in a while, but it is very white and conservative.
It is close to Rick Warren's Saddlebrook Church, to give context to the sort of evangelical movement that exists there.
And it is a world away from The more progressive nature of Los Angeles.
So it people kind of conflated thinking, oh, it's California beach town.
But like right now, I was hiking in Palos Verdes last weekend, which is not that far.
It's about half the distance there.
And it is really once you go south of Long Beach, you're in a completely different world all the way to Mexico.
It's a very conservative area.
Yeah, sometimes referred to as being behind the orange curtain, right?
It's a different territory of California.
I had never been over there until about maybe 10-11 years ago.
I dated someone in Hudson Beach and I would go and spend the night there periodically and I remember Going out for breakfast one morning, we were in the parking lot of a strip mall, and this was in the midst of the early Obama presidency, and there was one of those tables with people giving out political propaganda that had the posters with Obama with the Hitler mustache.
And it was the first time I'd ever seen anything like that.
And I was like, oh, this is where I am right now.
This is the culture that I'm visiting.
There's also a strong, since the 60s, I believe, there's a contingent called Surfers for Jesus that is Huntington Beach.
I mean, that is the area where that scene grew up.
Numbers-wise, California will remain a progressive state because of the Bay Area and Los Angeles, but anytime you step out of these metro areas, I mean, think about Bakersfield, right?
It's extremely conservative.
The rest of California is a red state, and it's part of the identity of California.
So even though it's very close by, Trump is a huge footprint here.
Well, just really quickly, Matthew, the other thing about that is Huntington Beach is in some ways ground zero for mixed martial arts in California.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
You know, I think what's haunting to me about this article is that it brings up so many, I don't know, so many issues around what do we believe is happening in other people's houses.
Because, you know, it's not just, I don't think it's just, it's just that she went to the January 6th insurrection.
It's not just that she went to the mask burning.
doing.
She has this public life as a respected leader within the school.
And so, it's almost as if the community is dealing with somebody that they feel might have two sides to them.
They might have a sort of double identity.
And that they're trying to reconcile this nurturer with the person who shows up at the anti-mask protest or that goes to the Capitol.
And where that split happens would be behind the curtain of the Hofstadter home.
And I think people can't help but wonder, like, okay, well, what's going on between these two?
Like, who's influencing who?
And are his values Somehow contagious.
Do they rub off on her?
Like, where's her real self?
When you mentioned that too, Matthew, about not wanting her out, the one part of this conversation I couldn't imagine because I don't have children is how I would feel in that situation.
But I, I, I, maybe I'm being naive here, but I do remember growing up and you did keep politics out of the workplace, at least for my parents' generation in general.
And I don't remember the politics of my teachers in any capacity.
So how does that affect children at this point?
It's a question I'll ask both of you as parents because I can't answer that.
Well, I'll just go back to if the teacher of my kid in fourth grade was at a mask-burning rally and there was a mask mandate for taking the children to school, There's no way that I could send the child to the school because you know where she stands on this particular issue of public health.
And, you know, the thing about it is that I've even wondered about how those politics can be Trojan-horsed into other environments.
You know, when it became clear to me a year ago that there was a proliferation of anti-mask and anti-lockdown sentiment amongst the people who congregate around Waldorf schools, people who, you know, are really into Steiner education, and Tom Cowan releases this video saying that, you know, Rudolf Steiner says that viruses are not real.
It made me think, like, if my child was in a Waldorf school, what kind of insight would I have to have into the teacher's religious commitments to theosophy to be clear that, okay, well, they are going to respect the mask mandate?
for in-class health protocols, but if they don't actually believe that the virus is real, is that a dangerous space?
Because it comes down to if the child wants to take the mask down because they're uncomfortable, And the Steiner teacher is looking at them and overflowing with love and beatific projection and saying, well, this little angel should be able to breathe freely.
What's the instinct going to be?
Keep this discipline, which is actually really difficult to do, and nobody likes doing it.
And you have to believe in the science in order to do it.
And so, there was this really clear example of, oh, this person's quasi-religious investment in this educational philosophy might be really endangering to my child if the child were in that situation.
Yeah, I mean, it goes to the problem of quarantine measures being politicized because they shouldn't be.
Ideally, it would be that we all agree as a society that this is something we're taking on and we don't really like it, but we're doing it for the good of all because the science says that it might help.
Yeah, I mean, at what point are you aware that the person who's The caregiver for your child, whether they're in babysitting or in school.
At what point do you become aware that they feel they have better ideas about the world than you do and more holistic or spiritual ideas about the world than you do?
And because they feel that way, they're willing to actually shine their light onto your child in ways that they feel you as the parent can't offer.
You know, like, I might be paranoid, but I'm concerned about that sort of thing.
No, and I share your exact sentiments.
Everything you said about, you know, the teacher being involved in burning the masks, and the teacher maybe not actually believing it, but sort of following along just as a way of going through the motions.
I'd be very uncomfortable with that too.
I'm glad that my child is young enough right now that I'm not too worried about, you know, what someone might say around her in terms of political opinions.
Right.
But in terms of those sorts of safety things and like, what kind of person is this really in terms of their commitment to the social contract?
Those are, I think, completely legitimate concerns.
The Jab, our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
The pausing of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine over blood clots is of course the big story this week.
I want to start off by saying that anytime we're talking about vaccine side effects, it's important to recognize that most of us are not very good at making sense of statistical probabilities at the level of very large numbers.
But first, let's follow up on the AstraZeneca story from a couple of weeks ago because it does appear that AstraZeneca's COVID vaccine plays a causal role in the very rare blood clot disorder that has been reported in Europe, which of course is very unfortunate, sad, and scary.
Savvy observers were saying we should stay on the lookout for anything like this with Johnson & Johnson's vaccine because it also uses the adenovirus vector delivery system unlike Pfizer and Moderna who use the mRNA system.
It turns out that Johnson & Johnson looks like they have a similar problem and due to an abundance of caution use of that vaccine has been halted in the U.S.
as more research is being done.
Now, of course, as a vaccine advocate, this is an upsetting development.
But notice, the system is working.
The problems have been identified and reported, and a very cautious approach is being enacted to protect the public's well-being.
But let's get back to the numbers and how easy it is for something like this to get blown out of proportion.
We are, and I include myself here, not intuitively good at making sense of very large numbers.
AstraZeneca seems to have had an incidence of this blood clotting condition at about 1 per 100,000, which is unacceptably high, but still rare, and importantly, it is treatable.
It looks like this is related to a pre-existing antibody in those people's genetics.
So yeah, this is a real and dangerous adverse reaction, and it's being studied.
Johnson & Johnson seems to have a similar problem, but the incidence is much lower, at around 1 per million.
Now, statistically, the risks of going unvaccinated from serious illness, hospitalization or death and the potential long COVID syndrome are much higher.
Those numbers are between 1 and 7 per 100,000 depending on exposure.
For younger people in countries with low rates of infection who are well quarantined, that risk calculation might indeed mean don't get vaccinated if only AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson were currently available.
That would make sense.
Because vaccine side effects are a hot button topic though, it's reported on in a sensationalist way and so this makes it easy to form an inflated sense of the risk involved.
So by contrast, let's get a sense of the risks many people take daily without thinking twice.
For example, AstraZeneca's vaccine has shown a zero 0.0004% incidence of blood clots.
And remember, the Johnson & Johnson incidence is 10 times lower, while birth control pills show at least 0.05%.
It's over 100 times higher.
Smoking is at 0.18%, which is around 300 times higher.
which is around 300 times higher, and the risk of blood clots from actually contracting COVID is 16.5%, which is 140,000 times more likely than the incidence of AstraZeneca's blood clotting times more likely than the incidence of AstraZeneca's blood clotting disorder.
The facts remain that getting as many people as possible vaccinated is the way out of the pandemic, and in countries with high enough percentages of vaccination, the infection rates, hospitalizations, and deaths all plummet.
on On a different but related note, I also want to mention an excellent article by intrepid goop debunker and OBGYN Dr. Jen Gunter that I will link in the show notes.
It has to do with the lack of adequate study and reporting.
of menstrual irregularities as a side effect of the immune process elicited by the COVID vaccines and how scary that can be for women who are unprepared for this experience.
Gunter does an excellent job unpacking how she thinks this should be examined and communicated as well as her appropriate anger at it being mishandled.
She also dispels misinformation about fertility and pregnancy concerns that can easily piggyback on this phenomenon being unwisely swept under the rug.
*music* Jamie Weil is the executive director of the Flow Genome Project, and a leading expert in the neurophysiology of human performance.
The Flow Genome Project is arguably the most comprehensive flow state training protocol I've come across, and the ideas behind this project were represented in Weil's best-selling book, Stealing Fire, which he co-authored with journalist Steven Kotler, who had previously written The Rise of Superman.
So all books of a similar stripe.
The Stealing Fire looked at four forces—psychology, neurobiology, technology, and pharmacology—as means for expediting the pathways to optimal performance, pulling wisdom from world-class athletes, Navy SEALs, and high-performing tech executives to push forward new rituals.
I initially learned of Wheel's work through this book, as Flowstates have defined a lot of my own work over the last decade, first running a music, movement, and neuroscience training program for Equinox Fitness for two years, and more recently with my work at Centered, which is a Flowstate app.
As Jamie and I discussed early in our conversation, the groundbreaking work of Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term flow state in 1975, has been molded to fit into numerous disciplines, which often has diluted the meaning of the term, although Csikszentmihalyi himself recognized that people in every discipline could achieve flow.
So, when I heard that Jamie's forthcoming book, Recapture the Rapture, rethinking God, sex, and death in a world that's lost its mind, focused on and evolved the themes from Stealing Fire, I wanted to chat with him.
A lot of crossover in our work.
Psychedelics, music, breathwork, religion, sex.
Something that, as we discuss, is truly problematic in terms of America's squeamishness and outright immaturity around it.
In the book, Jamie puts forward the possibility of building an ethical cult.
During the first half of our talk, we lay the groundwork and the principles, but it is in the second half that we discuss what an ethical cult actually means and what it would entail.
As you'll hear, he's definitely more optimistic that such an endeavor is possible.
And to his credit, he recognizes the challenges anyone would face in attempting such a construction.
I'm not quite as optimistic, but the principles are sound.
We just have to see if they can actually scale.
But along the way, there are many points we connect on, and that makes such a conversation worth exploring.
The reality is that the way we've been chugging along, we meaning American society and arguably a lot of other societies, you know, being constantly distracted, overworked, not connecting, overstressed, unable to get into flow as often as we'd like, if ever, these need to be addressed.
And the ways that Jamie and I connect with ourselves certainly intersect, and it was a pleasure to chat with someone who knows both the value of deep work and focus, and also strives for the humility and knowledge you acquire when you let go during ritual.
I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jamie Wheel.
And afterwards, Matthew, Julian, and myself will discuss the topics that were brought up during our talk.
Instilling Fire was such a focus on flow states and how you can use...
Use the tools that higher performers have used for success in their lives or in their careers.
And in some ways, this seems like an extension to that, although it goes well beyond flow states.
You're still going for that sense of flow in so many ways and you do reference it.
But between the two books, what made you want to focus on creating a toolkit for people to recapture the rapture?
Yeah, I mean, and in fact, you know, even Stealing Fire, right?
I had collaborated with my co-author on his prior book, Rise of Superman, which was explicitly flow states and peak performance.
And then when it came time to write Stealing Fire, which was very much my sort of love letter to my own study and learning about this kind of wild, transformational culture that sort of forever seemed to be just kind of underneath the surface, but seemed like it was becoming More and more visible.
I was like, I do not want to get parked in the flow state ghetto.
you either end up stretching the term beyond Csikszentmihalyi's original academic definitions to fit all the other peak states and non-ordinary states you want to talk about to the point where you're distorting the concept beyond its helpfulness, or you create the bigger bucket.
And in searching for terms that didn't have baggage, that didn't have connotations, that kind of thing, I sort of defaulted back to the ancient Greeks by way of Tom Wolfe.
But I hadn't even remembered that Tom Wolfe used this in an electrocoilic acid test to talk about Ken Kesey and the Pranksters.
But he presents the term ecstasy.
I hadn't read it since college.
I gave it to my son to read in high school.
And he's like, Dad, get a load of this.
You know, here's ecstasis.
Here's these giant domes, you know, with strobe lights and, you know, gymnastics equipment.
He's like, all you're doing is just totally repeating that.
And I was like, holy shit, I hadn't read in 20 years.
I totally forgot.
So that was the deliberate introduction of the term ecstasis as a relatively fresh baggage-free term.
We could then kind of decide, you know, name it as positive non-ordinary states of consciousness.
And then in Stealing Fire, I looked back and I was like, well, wait.
Nominally, that was a book about peak states.
But if you look at all the examples as to why we said peak states might be valuable or helpful or worthwhile, there was some inspiration and innovation, right?
This is kind of what you actually glean in the state itself.
But there were also two very other clear buckets, which was healing and connection.
And so then I realized, oh wow, this whole time it wasn't a single category, ecstasis, it was actually a triangle.
It was ecstasis, the peak state, plus catharsis, the resolution of trauma or integration or growth, plus communitas, the deep kind of shared presence we can get when we co-create or co-participate in those states.
So that was kind of the sort of the bridge and what felt like a more fully dimensioned representation of kind of the lived experience of it all.
Even Csikszentmihalyi knew that it was applicable across a wide range.
His original research from the first 15 years of studies before The Flow was published, he interviewed a range of people for that purpose and then he even went on to apply it to business as in Good Business, his book, and trying to understand its mechanisms.
But I agree with you that a lot of people have Co-opted it and tried to just fit it into their own paradigm because it's something that is out there.
Obviously, I think a lot about this term.
I worked specifically in a program I ran for Equinox Fitness on flow states for two years in music in relationship to neuroscience and music.
And then with my current work, it's centered with creating technologies for it.
But one thing that I think about a lot in terms of flow states and that peak experience is how can you help people to attain that, think content-free of their passion and why they're doing it, but in an age where we're inundated with information from social media and constantly being plugged in, do you see a paradox there that in a time where there's information all the time, it becomes even harder to reach flow states in some capacities?
Well, yeah, I mean, and I think there's, I mean, there's, there's so many challenges with where we are right now.
And, and one of them is the sort of quick fix singular solutions, whether that's flow states or biohacking or meta, you know, meditation, you fill in the blank, right?
All tools for personal growth and development.
Have been poured into the quick fix, new thought, you know, info marketing bucket, which is just a sort of cesspool of failed expectations and delivery.
And fundamentally, I think a false assumption about what a fully dimension life actually looks like, which is, and I think this is true of the psychedelic renaissance and excuse me, all of the truth claims around that, which is just none of this gets us off the hook for figuring out the human condition.
I mean, we can expand the canvas, we can paint with brighter colors, we can do anything we want, but it all boils down.
The weak link is not our access to transcendent states.
The weak link is Monday morning.
It's the dishes.
It's the kid who won't sleep through the night.
It's can I make rent?
That's the weak link in the human condition.
And oh, by the way, and what are eight billion of my brothers and sisters doing as well?
And can we pull this thing off?
So, you know, and then, you know, quite recently, it feels like, you know, obviously the last 10, but really ramping and accelerating strongly in the last five is what I've been sort of loosely calling like the Ice Nine effect, you know, from Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, right?
So folks who aren't familiar with that story, there's, you know, a military clandestine operation to create Ice Nine, which turns all the water molecules on the planet to ice instantly, basically ending life.
And my sense is that there is a sort of digital narcissism version of Ice Nine now.
And so if you take some of the strongest, most potent ways for us to get beyond ourselves, and just take three examples like Burning Man, Peruvian, Ayahuascan, shaman dive in the jungle, and like wild nature, you know, crazy peaks, beautiful hot springs in the backcountry, etc.
They're co-opted by the capacity for somebody to have a truly ego-dissolving, all-filled, transcendent experience.
And then just out of habit or custom or transactional desire, they're on their phone posting almost instantly about that ego-dissolving experience they just had.
And maybe they're geotagging it, maybe they're inviting you for their weekend workshop, whatever.
So, when you see that, where you're like literally in the furthest, most extreme, most intense ends of the earth, our capacity to loop it back into self as selfie, digital narcissism, representational realities, I'm just, I'm staggered and somewhat horrified because there's literally nowhere else to go.
Like, this is as good as we got, friends, you know, and if Ice Nine is catching us, As fast as we're trying to run away from ourselves, then we're in a different kind of pickle.
I want to get into some of the chapters specifically for what you present as pieces of the toolkit and then go into the overall toolkit.
But one thing you write is, for a species that seems to forever trip over our own sense of importance, which you just referenced, a healthy dose of awe, wonder, and humility could be good for what ails us.
So let's start with awe.
What is your go-to to inject awe into Monday morning?
Well, I'm not very good at injecting awe into Monday mornings.
If a cup of good coffee.
No, but I would say what I'm doing between Friday at five and Monday morning would have a lot to do with it.
For me, The absolute go-to's is basically music, mountains, mushrooms, and marriage.
By marriage, you could just say long, dedicated dyadic partnership, quite likely with a physical, erotic, intimate connection.
Music speaks for itself.
There is no replacement for the capacity and power of both the beat and the groove, and then potentially the lyrics.
To unlock in us things that are primal and profound and can pick our asses broken off the floor and dancing again.
And I think it's such a commodity, it's so ubiquitous that we sort of miss the ancient and timeless power of that.
And then, you know, fundamentally, yes, for sure, psychedelics are awesome, within reason.
I mean, I think the worst people are doing the best drugs these days.
You know, we're all this sort of crawl up your own asshole and, you know, endless personal growth, self-absorbed, fill in the blank salty word that was about to come out of my mouth.
You know, and they end up just in these sensation-seeking loops, becoming sort of, you know, bliss junkies and epiphany whores.
Versus, could we get those substances to, you know, nurses, first responders, teachers, right?
The people who are in service already to something bigger and greater than themselves.
They're getting their shit kicked out of them, but they're dedicated to the cause, and they really need places to defragment nervous systems, to reboot, to reconnect to their purpose, their inspiration, et cetera.
And big nature.
I mean, I'm a, I think a pretty simple lad at heart.
I mean, I like, I love gravity sports in beautiful wild locations, natural hot spring.
You combine these things, you know, you're like, let's have, let's go to festivals and have beautiful, you know, communitas release.
Like there we are dancing with our tribe.
Like that's gorgeous, right?
And then combine psychedelics with beautiful nature and or action sports.
And have your, you know, special friend with benefits to explore the both, you know, intimacy but also potency of Couples Union.
And that covers an awful lot of bases, at least from where I sit.
Well, yeah, I mean, it covers many bases and all the bases that I love.
And let's take them one by one.
So let's go into psychedelics.
I've been using them since 1994.
I've been an advocate for responsible use, which is becoming more challenging.
It's something I find we're going to be covering more on this podcast because there are abuses in there.
But one thing that you referenced that made me very happy was pointing out, and this is something I've gotten a lot of pushback for, was that the antidepressant crisis is as relevant as the opioid crisis.
And I don't think that people understand the clinical trials that made Xanax Approved for FDA usage, for example.
There's a lot of baggage that comes with all of this.
So, as we start to talk a little more about psychedelics now, what made you want to include that about antidepressants in the current ways we treat mental health protocols in this country?
Well, I think in that instance, it was just that it was part of the The larger point that we've had this erosion in trustworthy authority, including even, you know, your friendly family physician.
And that family physician has been prescribing your kids amphetamines as their brains are knitting together in the form of Ritalin and Adderall.
It's like high strength amphetamines, just speed.
And it sometimes makes your kids sit still longer or study better, you know, but just bonging at them.
And then, you know, most folks are familiar with Prozac Nation and SSRIs as the antidepressants, but benzodiazepines, That's the Xanaxes, the Klonopins, that's the ones that took out Jordan Peterson and we actually have a dear friend whose wife was debilitated for years as a result of iatrogenic illness, which just means they were fine and then the doctor told them to do something or did something to them and then they were much, much worse.
And that is a massive, pervasive and significantly underreported issue.
So just in general, To say that, you know, we used, you know, I think the old Andy Griffith, and I don't remember who the dude was in the 50s with the black bag, he used to make the house calls, but like that notion, right, compared to like Managed Health Pharmaceutical Company, you know, high pressure sales, you know, Purdue Pharma and all the various players.
I think McKinsey just got popped, I think actually, for a significant fine, like tens of millions, potentially hundreds.
Having helped Purdue Pharma continue to market OxyContin well after the opioid epidemic was in place, established, and causes were known.
So you're just like, hell man, this is just important, especially in a book where I was going to say, hey, let's take a clear eyed look at the toolkit of inspiration and healing.
And there's no way we can talk about respiration, music, embodiment, sexuality, substances.
We can't talk about these things without culturally loaded judgment.
And, you know, so which lens are we wearing?
You know, we're either a hedonist, a purist, or a conformist.
And the hedonists are all about it.
They're like, bring it on.
And they probably need, you know, slowing down and some structure.
But the purists and conformists are often quite judgy.
And that sense of when you're talking about these things, A, they're potentially taboo topics, but it's not they're bad, that's why they're taboo, it's they're potent, that's why they're taboo, right?
They have to be controlled by a social structure or you don't get a civilization that's manageable.
So when we broach the topics, you're going to trigger everybody's latent social conditioning or the lens through which they look at things, and particularly for Conformist.
I mean, you know, we live here in Austin, Texas, which is kind of a, it's, you know, it's almost like a thermocline.
Like you've got super hip, progressive, edgy culture, and you've also got kind of surprisingly buttoned down, you know, fairly traditional culture.
And the number of times that we'll go to parties and, you know, people think nothing of knocking back four to six drinks of alcohol.
But, you know, if you're the one, you know, in the Tony part of town to bust out a joint, At a party, whoa, things are getting a little edgy.
Even now that happens there?
I mean, yeah, and we clearly don't self-select for the stodgiest bunch, and yet it's actually staggeringly stodgy in circles that you wouldn't think otherwise.
And then the same thing, their kids could be on Ritalin.
We were at one dinner party where we were literally the only couple that wasn't both using Ambien to go to sleep.
And I was like, what?
That's crazy.
Do you understand what Ambien is?
It's this mutant chemical structure.
It has all kinds of strange side effects.
And then going into marital conflicts.
And I'd be talking with friends and I'd be like, dude, if you guys could just, I mean, I can help connect you to the appropriate therapies.
You guys could do some MDMA couples therapy together.
It could be game changing.
And this is like half a dozen divorces in the 40s, kind of all clockwork textbook shit.
The thing that struck me was none of them were from a cataclysmic life event.
Not bankruptcy, not infidelity, not addiction, definitely not money issues.
It was just the accretion of frustration of midlife.
And in this particular tiny sample size, it was all the women saying, fuck this, I'm burning it all down.
And they would sign up for couples therapy because that's what someone who's trying to work on the marriage does, but it was all optics.
And yet they would reject doing something that book Love Drugs, which is an Oxford ethicist and a Yale ethicist making the case for pharmacological support for relationships, basically oxytocin, MDMA, other kind of compounds.
And they would turn their nose up.
At all of those things, either healthier recreational substances for intoxication, cleaner ways for their kids to ground themselves, be embodied and be able to focus, ways for them to get to sleep at night, or even ways for them to save their entire marriage and family.
And those were all considered other, but the things that they accepted, because somebody with a lab coat wrote a script for it, or it was socially endorsed and normed, there just seemed to be very little evidence-based or experience-based discernment between what we do and why.
And Ambien has been shown to only add an extra 8 to 11 minutes of sleep a night.
So even the fact that all the problems it has with your theta waves, and then it only adds the...
adds that and makes you, we can, we can, let's not go that way.
Cause I could talk for hours about that.
So you mentioned getting psychedelics to the nurses, for example, and getting it to more people, which I fully agree with in the right circumstances.
What, from your perspective in this toolkit, would psychedelics offer them to help them have a sense of awe and humility, perhaps?
Well, I mean, the simplest is it is, you know, programmable transcendence on demand, right?
To kind of paraphrase Oliver Sacks, right?
You can set aside a time, a location, a place.
You can create an environment.
You can program that with music, with light, with, you know, whatever you want to as far as your interior experience.
And you can have a reliable reboot.
Now, there's obviously wide variation across different classes and categories of what kind of gets bundled as psychedelics.
But, you know, it typically, you know, the Latin definition of ex-stasis is to step outside oneself.
Right?
And so it's really, as much as anything else, it's a momentary time to set, you know, to basically unzip the monkey suit.
of my waking, socially defined self, and step out into something more free, more expressive, potentially more inspired, perhaps more true, more authentic, any of those things, and just get to feel that for a moment to a few hours.
And Kyle Deisseroth actually at Stanford has just published a paper in Nature at the end of last year and it was specifically about, his study was with ketamine and it was with epileptic patients and mice.
So, he's doing two different populations, but apparently you can determine when mice are in the kale, right?
So, they were zapping them both.
I mean, I think they just do goofy shit and don't navigate mazes very well is my assumption, but they're like, oh, you're tripping balls.
They studied them both and they found that they were really trying to zero in on the dissociative experience.
So, literally the experience of stepping outside yourself.
And what role did it play in anti-depression?
So, did the getting outside yourself actually play a part versus just the pure neurochemistry of glutamate receptors and other kind of just chemical stimulation things?
And their conclusion was that it did.
And then they did something else that was interesting, which was they did EEG tracking on the human subjects and found that their brain waves, while In a deep ketamine state, we're right around three hertz, which is extremely low, right?
Zero hertz is brain dead.
And one to four hertz is basically the delta band of EEG activity.
And that is far beneath anything.
You reference theta, that's a click up.
You know, then there's alpha, which is often meditative and flow-like states.
And then there's beta, where we are all most of the time.
So a potential benefit of psychedelic states is that they can shift our set points.
They can expand our neurophysiological kind of Overton window from locked into 21st century normal, tired, wired, stressed.
Hyperactive prefrontal cortex, executive function, inner critic, very accelerated beta wave activity, typically stress arousal responses, sympathetic engagement, norepinephrine, cortisol, all the kind of things that are good to run away from the proverbial saber-toothed tiger and very bad to be still feeling at 3 a.m.
as you're rehashing the conversation with your boss or the flame war on social media, right?
And what Dysaroth found at Stanford that I think is critical, because it gets us out of the The judgy mechanism conversation.
Like, oh, that's just sexuality, or oh, that's drug use, or oh, that's the other.
Is that when he tracked the three hertz, they then went back in and neuro-stimulated, so electrically stimulated specific brain regions in the human subjects and optogenetically tweaked it in the mice, and then put them back into the same three hertz state without the ketamine.
And that three hertz state produced the same sense of disembodiment and the same positive return on depression.
So you're like, ah, so now this gets super interesting, right?
And then you see like, okay, delta waves, this is interesting.
Typically, that's deep dreamless sleep.
And so you can access that through, you know, crazy ass lucid dreaming protocols, some super esoteric Dzogchen, you know, Tibetan meditation stuff.
But in general, no one knows much about that space.
Most sleep researchers are really interested in REM sleep and dreaming.
Most waking state folks are interested in kind of beta to alpha theta.
Maybe they geek on gamma bursts and this and that.
But like waking delta?
You know, there's virtually nothing out there that highlights it or signposts to it.
And then you're like, okay, so ketamine does it.
You look at this, there was a team of an esiologist, MIT, that did a fascinating paper, I think it was in 2015, where they had found that under the influence of 50% oxygen, 50% nitrous oxide, that patients were going into waking delta-weight activity that patients were going into waking delta-weight activity with double amplitude cycles.
And they're like, hey, this molecule has an impact on the nervous system that no other known substance does, and it's putting people into 3 to 12 minutes of this double amplitude delta before their brains adapt and normalize and it goes away.
But they're like, holy shit, what's that?
And then I've seen a recent radar plot on 5-MeO DMT studies, and the same thing for literally as 5-MeO hits, you get completely cross-hemispheric, full saturation, like the entire crown of someone's head.
The radar plot looks down on the top of your skull and kind of maps what parts of your brain are lighting up, just all peak orange, like synchronous delta.
And then you juxtapose that against the subjective reports that people have in those states under the influence of those compounds.
And it's consistently balls-to-the-wall, information-rich, super inspiring, often profoundly life-shaping and altering.
And you're like, okay, now for all of us that have kind of signed up for this mortal coil, And are trying to figure out how do I maintain my hope, my inspiration, my enthusiasm when, you know, many, many things in life are just kicking the shit out of me.
The ability to step outside ourselves, the ability to healthily dissociate for a moment and then potentially connect to whatever accelerated or deeper information layer appears to be Apprehendable in that zone of neuroelectric activity?
Isn't that something that we would want for people to periodically, you know, whether it's rites of passage through a life or whether it's one, you know, one time a year, you know, we can kind of talk about, you know, the calendaring of these kind of things and how they might fit in a cultured context.
But like, my God, don't we all deserve to lay our burdens down?
For a moment, right?
And just go, glory, glory, you know, hallelujah.
That is one of the things with psychedelics specifically is that, you know, for some people, like the church experiment in the 60s at Harvard, where that one experience had such a profound impact that it was one of the top five experiences of their lives.
But what worries me at this moment is that pharmaceutical companies are dependent on people taking their product daily.
And there's a rush of money going into the research on psychedelics, which I'm very happy about, but I don't feel that all of it's purely benevolent.
They're going to want to see an ROI.
So, have you pinpointed or do you feel there are any dangers with the Future, not-so-future now, monetization of these substances, and do you think that's going to skew either the data or the experience for people and the ways that they're presented?
Yeah, I mean, there's an impossible reckoning and reconciliation that I think is going to... I mean, I was about to say it's going to have to happen, but then I know it's not, so we'll see, right?
You know, and I've talked with Rick Doblin at MAPS about this and a number of other kind of thoughtful folks that are dedicated to the, you know, fighting the good fight in the psychedelic renaissance.
But one, that there are unintended consequences to having pursued the medical, clinical, pharmacological path to access.
And one of them is, you know, it's almost like everybody sort of crossed their fingers behind their backs and said, you know, no one talk about the freaky shit.
We're going to talk about depression and anxiety and smoking cessation and dosages.
And this is all going to be buttoned down and entirely respectable.
And then God bless you, Michael Pollan.
You made this accessible to neurotic squares everywhere, right?
And I mean, God bless him.
I mean, I've quoted Michael Pollan probably more frequently in my career than any other single writer.
And at the same time, he did for psychedelics what...
What's Her Bucket did for Fifty Shades of Grey did for the BSDM community.
Like, she was an outsider fantasizing and fetishizing the kink scene, right?
And any of the folks who were sort of figureheads in that were like, you've got to be kidding me.
She's an introvert.
You know, and Pollen did the same thing to the psychedelic community.
He was an outsider peering through the plate glass window, and then occasionally describing his hesitant steps across that threshold.
Right?
So the question here is...
The medicalization model spitting out into venture capital and big pharma has certain almost impossible to beat.
Game theoretic and market mechanics driving it.
So we have seen and we will see more of the rush to patent protection, the rush to return on investment, the race to the bottom of what's the best bang for the buck care we can deliver with the highest margin, you know, which is anathema to many of the underground therapists who risk their career and their licensure over the last 30 years to keep Psychedelic therapy accessible to people who really needed it because it was purely what they believed in and it was typically high touch, highly relational.
There were egregious abusers in that world as well, but in general, that was a core community.
And now you're getting psychedelic novices on the helping professions, functional medicine doctors and psychiatrists and things who have never personally participated in any expression of the psychedelic counterculture.
Who are literally just coming to this because they read Pollen or coming to this because they've read the Hopkins or Imperial reviews and God bless them, they know they're out of bullets.
They know that SSRIs and the other element, the tools in their kit are inadequate.
So they're coming to it this way, but they are, you know, opening ketamine therapy clinics and they're sending people into spaces and places that they have little to no experience of themselves and then no phenomenological framework whatsoever.
To help people understand what it is they've just glimpsed.
And so that is just a train wreck.
And so now you have people, you know, and again with the pharmacological model, you're talking about how many patient turns can you get in a day, how long do they have to be in your office before you can release them and put someone else in that seat.
And then people are talking about integration as if it's, you know, oh yeah, I mean, I even asked a functional med doc here at Austin who was, who's been quite bullish on providing these experiences.
I was like, well, what are you doing for integration?
He's like, oh, no, no, don't worry.
We got that taped, you know, we do an hour interview beforehand, and we, and we follow up with them the day after.
And I was like, holy shit, you know, and so that's where, I mean, I think.
Through that model, and we're seeing it with esketamine, the Johnson & Johnson patenting of a slight tweak on the ketamine chemical because it had been patent expired, IP available.
So they're like, well, let's tweak it.
Let's patent the delivery system and then we can sell the shit out of that at literally 100x the pricing of compounding pharmacy generic ketamine.
The same thing with synthetic cannabinoids.
You can grow Cannabis anywhere you want, and it's available in 30 plus states, but Epidiolex, you know, is a synthetic cannabis tweak.
And once again, you get back to price jacked, proprietary trade and protectionism.
And, you know, a final one that I think will happen, like without a doubt, we're just going to get Prozac Nation 2.0, you know, now with new improved 5-HT2A receptors, you know, like that will happen.
Now what else happens is up to us, but like that's definitely happening.
And so I think we're not going to get as, you know, and then you take, that's the pharmacological model.
On the other side, you've got the religious sacramental model.
You know, you've got Native American Church, you've got Santo Daime, you've got these other institutions that have, you know, pursued a totally different path, which is religious sanction and approval and protection of, you know, basically religious right to worship and practice.
And that's a, that's a potentially I think a more accurate fit for the ineffability, the awe, the sanctity of what is potentially accessible.
However, you know, they're all syncretic faiths stuck in their reality tunnels.
So without diminishing respect and appreciation for folks who've come up through those lineages and traditions, for someone on the outside of that who's like, man, I am desperate to have that experience of awe, but in order for me to get to your Kool-Aid, I got to drink your Kool-Aid.
And in fact, that includes an entire, you know, from a sort of meta perspective, an epistemological shitshow of an amalgamation of beliefs, some of which have to do with the ineffability of the experience, some have to do with syncretic religious mashups over the last hundred years, the peculiarities of a founder, you name it.
And so, now my experience getting imprinted into the Arguably profoundly unique and personal sovereign experience of coming back to myself on this earth or beyond it.
is now being tainted by a whole bunch of other people's communal cultural baggage.
So those are some of the tricks and the challenges and kind of why in this book I was attempting to articulate an operating system that people could apply.
So how you still honor the uniquenesses of different cultures, but include more precise and more accurate meaning making You know, protocols or lenses or whatever it would be to help, you know, come up with clearer, cleaner insights with less faulty bugs in the code, I guess.
And I want to talk about that, but there's one part in that toolkit that I don't want to overlook because out of everything you wrote in the chapters leading up to the toolkit, this one was the most profound for me, probably just because all of the other ones have been my life for decades.
But the chapters on sex specifically, and this is something that I talk about a lot with my wife because it's something that she's been interested, like people's Hesitancies to even discuss sex openly, how reserved and puritanical we are as a culture.
And when you wrote that two U.S.
labs, there's only two, that are federally funded for sexual arousal, it seems so strange to me that such a primal component of who we are as As beings and as animals would not be studied more.
Why do you think at this point we are so hesitant to openly discuss sex?
And along with that, why did you include it as a way, as a piece of this toolkit that you're putting forward?
Yeah, I mean, like that point that you just mentioned, the kind of almost total marginalization of academic and clinical research on sexuality was something I came across in the research for the writing.
I didn't have that one, you know, like I was like, hopefully you should.
And then, and that's sort of, that section literally almost just kind of wrote itself in large part from featuring Dr. Helen Fisher and Dr. Nicole Prowse, who were both researchers at the Kinsey Institute, you know, pretty much one of the preeminent sexuality research centers.
And then both kind of had to do these workarounds to how to pursue their career unencumbered.
And And Helen Fisher took a position as chief scientist at Match.com.
Nicole Prowsey had done her postdocs at Harvard.
She was then at UCLA and she found just, she could not get through the studies she wanted to do.
So she actually set up an independent research lab.
So, and there's also, you know, there's a whole additional layer of misogyny of like smart women talking about sexuality and what happens to that and, you know, and do they get clipped in ways that a man may not in the academic field.
But it's basically, you know, it's heartbreaking, but it is also unique and peculiar to the United States.
So many researchers go to New Zealand, they go to Australia, they go to Canada, they go to the Netherlands, they pretty much got anywhere out of the US.
And I don't think it takes three degrees in comparative anthropology to say that the religious right has absolutely fucked this country in the head on everything from environmental care, all the way to relationships to some things as straightforward as women's reproductive rights, but then as far reaching as, you know, Unfiltered, healthy sexuality.
And so we're just wrestling with, and you know one of the funniest stats I've ever heard is that even in Puritan New England, 17th century, Where they would do these things called bundling, like they would take a courting couple in their late teens and they would bundle them, which is they'd put them in the bed side by side, but they'd strap them down with sheets so they couldn't move.
It was almost like a horizontal straight jacket.
And that was kind of how you were supposed to get to know your potential spouse.
But invariably, passion would take over.
And one in three children in 17th century Puritan New England were born out of wedlock.
So even the Puritans, who are like the standard characters for repressive sexuality, couldn't keep it in their pants.
See, you give a framework for leadership in these spaces.
And as I said, reading the book, I mean, I'm so on board and I'm sure if we were in person, we'd have a great weekend together in every capacity with music and psychedelics and all of that.
But when I think about my experiences and being a psychedelics advocate from the 90s, when I used to hush and not talk about it very often because of the stigmatization,
Looking at it more broadly to sort of put forward these lessons in the culture, I think of an organization like MAPS who is doing wonderful work at their MDMA training and their psilocybin training and what they're trying to create as therapists, which I think is going to take days for a session.
It's not just go and we'll call you tomorrow.
But your survey of cultic dynamics and specifically this idea of building an ethical cult, It seems to rely on charismatic leadership that stays noble and avoids the abuses that are pretty much standard features of cults that we've encountered for a long time.
So have we ever seen this sort of work before, and what kind of training would be required for the more comprehensive leadership that you're putting forward?
Yeah, that's a beautiful question.
I also realized I didn't fully answer your question about how come sexuality.
So we just talked about the repression part, right?
But the reason I had to like fall on that sword, I'm like, I think I have to write about this is because any road you look at, like if you look at the entire field of biohacking, personal optimization, all of that kind of stuff.
The core driving central regulators, you know, is our sexual arousal network.
And John Lilly discovered that back in like the early 50s, but he's like, holy shit, you know, he was working with rhesus monkeys and stuff.
He's like, our ecstatic arousal system maps one-to-one with our sexual arousal network.
So you're like, okay, so if people are talking about breathe more or stretch more or it's fascia or it's this or it's like, yeah, it's also probably in our healthy vital arousal cycle.
And for any doctor who checks hormone levels and the use it or lose it kind of notion is like, nothing is a sure path to the grave than involuntary celibacy, right?
Just the shutting down of your sexual arousal, right?
And when that is alive, you know, when that is thriving, your body's like, man, things are still happening.
We're still going, we're still growing.
And then, you know, you go back to... I hadn't connected the dots until I was on a panel with Rick Doblin at MAPS.
And we were discussing off, you know, in between speeches.
He's like, yeah, you know, I mean, it's several things.
He said, A, we're finding better therapeutic impact with 85 milligrams of MDMA instead of 150.
So basically, rather than being love bombed with a full serotonin, oxytocin dump, that kind of thing, people are actually We're getting more out of working with a therapist when they were just kind of in that threshold space, but still more cognizant, right?
Versus just, you know, starry-eyed and drooling.
But he said, hey, he said, interestingly, the closest we've found neurophysiologically to that super productive therapeutic state that is helping sufferers of trauma release and relieve it, Is the post-orgasmic state.
High vasopressin, high prolactin, high oxygen.
And I was like, oh shit.
Like, okay.
You know, like, how else could we get people to that post-orgasmic state?
And then you're like, oh my gosh, what if, you know, and then Nicole Prowsey's work, she was starting to study orgasm as prescription pharmaceutical.
Like, could it actually replace taking pills?
Can it force sleeplessness, for physical pain, for anxiety, for all these things?
And you're like, holy smokes.
The most ancient, strongly encoded response system we have in our body besides breathing and eating is reproducing.
Now that very fact has caused piles of grief in our collective life, right?
Sexual trauma is arguably at the heart of, you know, Half plus, half or more of all the world's trauma, impact, violence, and suffering.
So that's its default condition.
But if we could shine the light on it and bring sexual fitness as a tool to cycle through our nervous systems, to discharge stress and trauma, to promote bonding and to potentially, in its most intentional forms, put us in a super saturated state where inspiration and healing are more accessible without any external substances, that feels like a viable and essential missing link in our cultural toolkit. that feels like a viable and essential missing link in
And we sort of need, I think, to talk about it, bring it into the light of day.
Tell the story of human evolution and the central role that sexuality has placed in elevating our consciousness and self-awareness, but also into our daily lives, into our families, into our marriages, into all of these things.
You know, sexual fitness can be another uplifting experience.
And then you're like, okay, if you look at most indigenous cultures and communities, an awful lot of them, right, their origin myths aren't some crazy ass story.
It's like usually some, you know, apex predators or, you know, key animal totems of their area or some gods began the universe by getting it on.
And most anthropologists, like Victorian anthropologists, would kind of snicker, like, oh my gosh, these ribald natives, you know, all they ever think about.
But you're like, no, no, it kind of makes sense.
And what would it be like for us to be able to bring that re-sanctification and re-honoring it without getting squirrelly, without getting, you know, fetishizing it, just being like, yes, of course, this is how the world goes around and this is how
We can reclaim those impulses and energies and instead of being dancing on the strings of an indifferent evolution that's just looking for a spicy gene pool, never mind what carnage it sows, we can reclaim That system and that powerful force in our lives and deploy it for healing and integration and connection.
So that's the thought.
And basically if you pursue this to its end, if you just look at biohacking 101 and you go into like it with an open mind, no preconceptions and an unwillingness to flinch, you end up in one of two places.
You end up with super sexy biohacking or deeply nerdy kink.
You know, you just kind of do, right?
And that is the end of the road.
Like if you're saying, how do we optimize by tweaking and hacking and doing all the things that people like to do these days, you end up with some form of neotantric sex magic.
You know, but it's not for the faint of heart.
Well, you know, Fraser wrote The Golden Bow as a takedown of uncivilized cultures, and it ended up creating an entire discipline of religious studies.
So people will always be fascinated.
But bringing that into the question, and thank you for answering, I think I got so caught up in your response about that puritanical sheet.
Ritual that I just kind of lost track because I so fixated on that image.
But about the type of training and then adding to that, like, because we've seen so many abuses specifically around sexual abuse that is over and over, like, you know, we talk about yoga cults all the time, but it's pervasive.
So, this is the part where I think I diverge from you purely in the sense that I don't have as much optimism and hope as you put forward that humans could pull that off.
So, what type of training is possible to actually pull what you're putting forward off on a scalable level?
I mean, I wondered about this too, right?
I mean, even academically, like in grad school and everything, I studied utopian and visionary movements and indigenous cultures.
I was like, basically anything but mainstream Western civilization.
What are our other choices and who's been experimenting and how far did it go and what were the lessons learned?
When most people think of cults, they think of NXIVM, they think of Heaven's Gate, they think of Manson and Jonestown, right?
And those are all cautionary tales, and most folks moralize and kind of tut-tut afterwards.
And including the cult experts who deprogram people, it's actually quite a...
Narrow, judgy, incurious, monolithic frame.
They just put over the whole thing.
Like, those guys were hucksters, those people were dupes, we need to save them, deprogram them, that kind of thing.
Sort of like the cultic equivalent of AA.
You know, just a blunt instrument.
But those aren't, to me, the interesting ones.
You know, the interesting ones are Osho, Adi Da, like ones who were absolute wide-awake transmitters, and they were prodigies in their early lives, and they were actually absolutely slinging starlight for a while.
And then things went pear-shaped.
And so you're like, okay, what's that about?
What happens when somebody truly has talent, truly has prodigious insight, and then something else warps or twists?
What is that dynamic that keeps putting it in the ditch?
And my sense is that, for lack of a better term, we could kind of call it the Lucifer effect.
Right, which is as an adept starts harnessing ecstatic techniques and technology.
And it could be a yoga practice, it could be a breathwork practice, it could be sexuality, it could be substances, it could be bhakti yoga, it could be whatever, right?
There's lots of ways to get to God, right?
But they're doing it and they're accelerating their own experience.
And as they do so, they become more translucent.
They become more illumined, right?
They're just going off and they could have the gift of gab and speaking logos like McKenna or Leary.
They could have pure transmitting power where people in their physical presence Completely feel blown wide open like Adi Da did and others have, right?
And then at some point the Lucifer effect kicks in which is, you know, dare thee to look upon me and spot my imperfection.
And because they're so, you know, statistically unusually luminous, most people cow their eyes.
Most people say, oh my God, that's so bright.
I can't even take it all in.
And as that, the leader has now denied their own humanity.
Right?
Even if they were 99% done on the God Project, right?
They've got 1% shadow left, right?
It can metastasize and come back on sort of effectively Kundalini overdrive, because they're doing all the accelerating practices, they have all the psychic energy of a whole, you know, of a whole community, and they can go from one step away from Bodhisattva into Sith Lord.
You know, in the span of a few months.
And it feels like the only antidote to that is the kind of Christic archetype versus the Lucifer archetype.
Which is, you know, my humanity lies at the intersection of my mortality and my divinity.
And that's where we commit to meet each other.
So that to me, that's the metaphorical antidote.
And then the practical ones, we'll get increasingly kind of granular, is to assume that this is a feature, not a bug, of tribal primates gathering and that the compulsion or the instinct to Focus on an alpha, particularly one who is serving as an enactor or an activator, right?
There's A, there's the capacity to sort of imprint, you know, like little ducklings on a barnyard pig, like, you're my mommy, you know, like the first time somebody boots you into a higher level of consciousness, you're going to imprint.
In psychotherapy, the term is transference, right?
And then throw in a bunch more ecstatic technologies than a Freudian couch and you've got all kinds of exacerbators.
So there's the imprinting notion.
There's the tribal primate dynamics to defer to an alpha.
And then there's the impulse, which up until now has been nearly irresistible, which is grabbing the ring of power.
I mean, it's, are you not entertained?
And then we get into that Jungian notion of the golden shadow, which is, as a person in the presence of someone real or imagined, Who has more attainment, more power, closer access to insight, spirituality, source, whatever the truth claim is.
I am typically going to deny for myself what I celebrate or acknowledge in them.
So they are awakened, they are compassionate, they are inspired, they are, you know, whatever I could never be.
And many leaders in the front of a stage will willingly take that on.
They will say, yes, thank you, I deserve it.
I'll take your Malibis, I'll take your flowers, I'll take your offerings, I'll take your wife, I'll take your money, I'll take it because I deserve it.
And even if they are badass, over time, all of that shadow gold from the community will drop them to their knees, will take their community with them.
And so, you know, and I kind of got this insight.
From a conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett, who's a preeminent neuroscientist.
She's one of the top hundred most cited scientists in academia.
She's got appointments at Harvard and Northeastern, and she wrote a book called How Emotions Are Made.
And it basically undoes most neuropsychological theory on emotions and everything else.
We ascribe all fancy-pants terms like I'm happy, I'm sad, I'm anxious, I'm this and that, but really, it's only four things.
We're either actively engaged or passively retired, and it's either positive or negative.
And when I looked at that, I was like, oh, wow.
This matches perfectly to people's responses to an avatar, right?
To a guru, to someone who is an unusually awake, juiced person.
And it's typically, you know, they want to follow him.
If they, you know, because they're like, that's amazing.
And I'm the little barnyard duckling.
Or they get their wires crossed and they're like, I've never felt this strongly about someone ever, except maybe other with like romantic erotic arousal.
And if this person is bringing agape, let's say sort of pure, you know, almost androgynous love, right?
In that condition.
But people have never experienced the feelings that strongly.
They've only experienced with a sexual arousal, then they get their wires crossed.
And so they don't want to just follow them, they want to fuck them.
And then if people get freaked because they're in two deeper waters, they're experiencing the edges of their self-dissolving, family members are like, you're an occult, come back.
Then they start fearing them.
That's the passive negative.
Or if you get enough critical mass or a strong enough threat to someone's self-system, they want to fight them.
They want to crucify them or cancel them.
So fear, fight, follow, fuck are our default settings for how do we respond in that situation.
And that gives rise to almost all cultic dynamics and many tragic modern dynamics as well.
So there's the fifth path, which is what if we can feel?
What if we can feel it all?
So at an interceptive level, in the presence of another human that awakens, engages, or precipitates access to higher states of inspiration or deeper states of healing, can we actually own it and claim it?
And feel it without giving away our gold, without doing one of the other four, right?
And actually, hey, you reminded me, I'll turn around, I'll repay the favor, you know, we'll help wake each other up.
And once we do, we're all standing on our own two feet.
And a final thought of that, I think that that role of the hierophant, the role of the minister of the sacred, is so predictably problematic.
Right?
That we actually should treat that again as a feature, not a bug.
So rather than going, Oh yeah, well, Tony Robbins got a little sideways after things went to his head, you know, but that'll never happen to me.
Or that Hillsong minister guy, like he really overcooked, but that'll never happen to us.
You're like, no, no, no.
It happens to everyone.
And so my sense is, you know, your question, how do you scale this?
How do you train this?
I think some of the simplest is we create developmental models.
So Bob Keegan at Harvard is a longtime inspiration and mentor, right?
He's done an awful lot for how do you design a deliberately developmental organization.
And he's done fascinating work on this.
He's worked with lots of big organizations, you know, public, private, you know, nonprofits everywhere.
And the idea is how do you create a community?
Right around a shared mission or goal who's beyond that specific real world commitment.
Its goal is to help the people inside the organization develop from socially defined, meaning I'm living out the scripts that were handed to me of husband, mother, brother, you know, Christian, Muslim, Jew, whatever it would be, banker, you name it, but socially defined scripts to becoming a self-authoring human where I'm writing but socially defined scripts to becoming a self-authoring human where I'm writing my own story and potentially even a self-transforming person who can continue going through my stages
And a way to do that, obviously in conventional organizations, there's plenty of structures and boundaries and we just kind of would pour that concept in.
But if we're talking about transformational culture, some form of postmodern religiosity or spirituality, those kind of things.
I think another piece is you treat the hierophant like you would somebody like a nuclear worker or a nuclear power plant.
You'd literally almost have the equivalent of a Geiger counter, you know?
So it's like, okay, it's your turn on stage this week, right?
You're going to be the hierophant.
You're going to administer this ecstatic, cathartic community experience.
And then, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, you know, you need to go in the back and wash dishes for a while.
Like, you're not that special, right?
And potentially even, you know, because if you think of Cirque du Soleil, right?
No one follows the Ringmaster home, thinking that they're a demigod.
They understand that they put on a top hat, they put on tails, you know, they're the MC.
They are the facilitator of the magic.
But they themselves are not a wizard.
And, and I think that ideally what I would love to see would be like male and female dyads facilitating and potential, you know, and that's a rotating cast of characters so that you're constantly dumping the target.
You're not creating cults of personality.
And you could even, you know, back to Frasier and the Golden Bow and those kinds of things, and like European celebrations of the stag and the, you know, the stag and the prince, you know, the queen and those kinds of things, you could even have them be In costume, maybe even in mask, in role, in a sort of archetypal theatrical presentation.
And then if you come back the next week, let's say we're talking nominally about like a, you know, some form of like service, you know, or initiation, you come back the next time and it's the same characters, different people playing them.
And so baked into the social structuring, you're constantly reminding people, it's not about any one of us.
It's about all of us.
And the goal is not to give your gold and follow.
Your goal is to claim your gold and then turn around and help the next person.
I have no doubt that there are benevolent leaders.
I believe I studied under probably the only yoga teacher that I would say reached guru status but was completely selfless.
His name was Dharmamitra in New York.
And the funny thing about it is though, the people I've come across in the past that are selfless They're not marketing themselves, and so they make them a little bit harder to find.
I'm glad you brought up Osho because that's a good example of someone who I know people to this day still cling to his words.
I had written a piece that was just a rehashing of the Oregonian reporting from him back in the late 80s and 90s.
This was about seven years ago, and I had over a thousand people come at me in the comments section claiming that he didn't know about the poisoning of the area's water supply.
Which would be a very weird dynamic for an organization like his where he kind of had all encompassing power and the 88 Rolls Royces and everything that he, you know, he was involved with.
So it still brings to question of, have you seen any, like all of your, all of these ideas make sense, but have you seen these actually played out in practice?
I mean, your point about the folks that are playing it straight don't get a lot of airtime is really true.
I think it's critical for folks to realize that wisdom, truly authentic wisdom, has been completely captured in the spiritual marketplace.
So now, if you're judging a yogi on their number of Instagram followers, it's actually probably much more about what their ass looks like in a pair of Lululemons, right?
Than their dedication to an eight-limbed path.
And the same with personal growth and inspiration, you know, companies, organizations, personalities, right?
That sense of like, oh, they must be legit.
Look how many tens or hundreds of thousands of people Our following this thing is completely upside down.
So, and that is a real challenge, right?
Because most of the tools for gaining and boosting signal these days are, you know, nakedly transactional, narcissistic and cynical.
And even 10 years ago, but for sure 20, 30, 50 years ago, the kinds of behaviors that self-promoters are using to promote would have had you drummed out of any community of practice, ridiculed, you know, and shamed.
And now they're table stakes to even break through the noise.
And so, you know, I mean, my sense is, is that there are a handful, you know, I mean, I am always trying, because people always ask me this, because I spend a chunk of time deconstructing the ones that are wrong, right?
They're like, give us a sign.
And I haven't yet heard anything bad about Adyashanti.
I, for a long time, kind of had Chogyam Trungpa as one of my crazy wisdom, but generally, you know, like generally badass dudes.
And then that recent expose in Walrus came out that broke my heart that there was, you know, so much abuse in that system and, you know, so much impact on the kids.
I was like, oh, the wheels went off with his successor, but he was more or less wild but clean.
And I was like, ah, fuck, I have to downgrade that one.
Pema Chodron's experience, Pema is another one that I've always kind of held to a clean light, just bringing through her stuff and obviously her affiliation with that whole community.
You know, you're like, well, what do you think of it?
And what do you make of it?
And I know there was an interview with her and Shambhala, I think back in the 90s, where they were, I think, I'm assuming it was a woman interviewing her who constantly tried to get her to basically slag off Trungpao.
And she's kind of like, I knew he was wild and dangerous.
That's why I wanted to go study with him.
You know, like, that's why he was valuable.
And I think, you know, aside from the prudish moralizing, there is a role for the mad, bad, and dangerous to know, right?
Like the true crazy wisdom teachers.
But on the flip side, I'm not aware of any people who have self-identified or later been categorized as crazy wisdom teachers, meaning kind of left-hand path, like all things are permitted, We're going to push the limits and the boundaries.
We're going to use that as fuel to accelerate our development or, you know, you getting it.
I haven't seen any of those folks necessarily pull it off.
It seems like such a volatile and unstable element, you know, and when you shake it a bunch, at some point it goes nuclear.
And especially what you're prescribing too, I feel has a sense of community.
I mean, I, I, my best friends, my closest people in my life, my wife, my closest friends, my family, they're so close to me because they keep me in check and I am constantly calling people out and that's how I know how I filter friends because I'm, I will just say what's on my mind and that's not for everyone.
So that communal sense of like, hey, let's take it down a notch here and let's look at this is so important.
And I agree with you that putting the leader to wash dishes is a great idea.
Especially now, when we've seen the first real global indoctrination into a cult via QAnon, and there aren't as many opportunities for the actual physical spaces.
How do these ideas that you have translate into the digital spaces?
Have you thought about how, like, the ways that they're manipulated through social media, or the abuses of power that can happen through the platforms that we communicate on?
Yeah, funny you should ask that.
We're actually, you didn't hear it here, but we're launching an alternate reality game, but actually the infinite game.
So the infinite alternate reality game, which will be Y-anon to Culture Jam Q-anon.
And then to basically engage in the act of, well, I mean, A, like you can't beat a ripping yawn with a better Wikipedia page.
Right, so debunking QAnon, right, will never work because people are yearning for a grand explanatory metanarrative that addresses their concerns, that re-centers them in their own heroic unfolding, right, and gives them a promised utopian destination to hurry to.
Right.
And so we've even got friends who are working on this, you know, on some badass projects for organizing information ecology, providing better meta news analysis, all this kind of stuff.
And God bless them.
I hope it works, but I wouldn't bank on it.
And I wouldn't bank on it for that reason.
It's bringing a spoon to a gunfight.
You're like, but, but, but check out the footnotes, you know, like clearly QAnon is not an evidence-based phenomenon.
And, and so in the same way that there's, you know, I think been effective critiques of, you know, basically what that term stochastic terrorism, you know, where Bin Laden back in the day or Trump kind of lately will get on a public media platform and say, this is terrible and they're to blame and someone really ought to do something.
And then El Paso, Walmart happens and they're like, who'd have known it?
You know, going crazy.
That's stochastic terrorism, right?
You kind of incenting a thing that you then kind of, And try to plausibly deny had causality to you.
And so by launching an infinite ARG, an alternate reality game, we can engage in stochastic Gnosticism, which is like, we didn't say blow yourself to God consciousness and come back as a human in bodhisattvic service to the rest of humanity.
But we did just show you how, and we did it in the form of this, you know, again, postmodern Like, infinite game, fictional, exploratory, Gnostic metaverse.
And if you look at a lot of the alternate reality games that have come up, most of them have been backed by a company trying to launch a product.
Right?
So one of the most famous was Halo 2, and it was like this I Love Bees game.
There were others like Cicada 3301 that kind of even showed up in Assassin's Creed.
It showed up in video games.
It crossed boundaries and platforms.
And all of them have this consistently Gnostic plot.
We're like, reality is not as you think.
We're going to expand it.
We're going to show you the secrets behind the secrets.
Come along.
But then they almost all end like a Christmas story, you know, with the Roy Roger decoder and like, drink more Ovaltine.
What the fuck?
You know, like I thought I was part of a secret agent gang and I was listening to my radio to get the thing.
And all it told me was to go buy more of that goddamn chocolate milk powder.
And so, so our intention was like, oh, if you were going to launch a Disruptive postmodern religion in hyperspace.
What would it look like?
You know, and I think that an infinite ARG is about as close as my working assessment is for now, which would be a relief because I think I've taken narrative nonfiction to its absolute snapping point, right?
And this provides a really, really fun, again, multimedia vehicle to take Sleep No More in New York, to take Meow Wolf in Vegas, to take Burning Man, to take movies and books and the traditions be like, hey, there's this ripping yawn and we've all been missing it.
But you can connect those dots.
I mean, that's a fuck ton more interesting than Q drops.
Sleep No More as a religion could be quite interesting.
I agree with that.
Yeah, I mean, think about it, right?
I mean, we can even go as far as saying, hey, you know, because Sleep No More, The Box, there's all sorts of like edgy exploratory theater.
Meow Wolf has done the same for art museums, right?
They're all kicking down the fourth wall.
They're saying, hey, you're not just a passive audience, you know, member of an audience watching a performance in a curated, you know, boundary.
It's all interpermeable.
But I think we can go even further and actually kick down the fifth wall, you know, because you can be like, hey, part of the clues are like, hey, here's this private YouTube link to a playlist that's 45 minute long with, you know, Android Jones visuals.
And, you know, start here.
Here's the breathing protocol you found somewhere else.
Here's a QR code you found on your telephone pole.
Put them all together.
See you at six.
You know, do this in this order.
Do these things together.
Have that experience.
And we're actually going to continue the narrative.
Based on the interiority of the experience you just had in a non-ordinary state, right?
So then you can literally like, you know, done well, I mean, execution and timing is everything.
But if you, you know, done well, like truly transformative ARGs.
Could basically disrupt the entire gaming industry plus the movie industry.
You know, as far as like high stakes, truly visceral transformation economy play.
And that would be way more fun than a church with a fucking preacher.
You know, with a diamond earring and shoe game.
You know, you're like, let's get beyond that as fast as we can.
Well, I know that some investors in Los Angeles have taken over space at the Westfield Century City Mall because they believe that the movie theater is going the way of the dinosaur and they're investing in actual spaces for a larger physical space to Facilitate what you're talking about and they're kind of going all in on that, which is very interesting.
But the last question I want to ask, though, it goes along those lines, though, is one of the access.
You know, you talk about like even things of such like, you know, I have my Oculus right here.
And the sense of presence is incredible and it's only going to get better.
You talk a lot about biohacking, but at the moment, I mean, optimization tools are still very expensive and you have vast inequalities between a lot of the people that can enjoy the fruits of the wellness industry and partake in it as compared to a broader population.
And so you have this very limited privilege sack that can really dive into everything and wellness as presented.
At least in terms of marketed, not some of the basic practices.
And you have zero class solidarity going along those lines.
So if you want to actually implement this on a broader scale, how do you deal with that dichotomy of the income disparities that exist in our culture right now?
Yeah, I mean, I think that's central, right?
Because boutique, high cost, low serving population solutions are everywhere.
And, you know, that was kind of the premise of the middle of the book, which was like, if IDEO, the design firm, was trying to try and solve the meaning crisis, right?
We had this collapsed and shared reality and what's it all for?
At the same time that we're having, you know, increasingly wild and consequential world events, right?
The idea was that it had to be open source, scalable, and anti-fragile.
And open source meant anybody had access to it.
There weren't priest or gatekeepers telling you orthodoxies, what you can and can't do with these tools.
It had to be scalable, which speaks directly to your point, which means that basically to scale to the bottom four billion humans on this planet, it's got to be cheap, really cheap, or outright free.
And then anti-fragile means it can't be too precious.
It can't require 10 days in sitting in silence following my nostril breaths.
It can't require some esoteric toad venom from Sonora.
It can't require really unique and hard to recreate ideal conditions.
And as a result, that's what led Me and the research to be like, OK, well, we've got to focus as close to evolutionary drivers as possible.
That's the strongest stuff we've got to play with.
And if we can learn to interact with and modify those inputs and their outputs, we've got a chance, which led to kind of the identification of those big five, which was respiration, because we've all got to breathe and changing how we breathe changes our neurophysiology and our experience.
So super powerful.
And everyone can do it without spending a dime.
Sexuality, for all the reasons we've talked about, it's literally how we all got here.
It creates a ton of pain and heartache, misused and abused, but reappropriated can do profound things.
Our embodiment, and that's everything from movement, functional movement, fascia, sliding surfaces, palpation, you know, opening up all the way to Deeper dive elements like some of our core regulatory systems, music as profound and even more ancient than actually spoken language.
So you're like, holy smokes, you know, that's awesome.
And then intentional, appropriately timed and deployed substances.
And Ron Siegel at UCLA even called our desire to seek altered states is our fourth evolutionary drive.
It's that strong.
It shows up across the animal kingdom.
So you're like, okay, so if we're playing with, now we're playing with those, those are literally everyone's birthright.
And they don't cost any money.
And in fact, one of our core recommendations when we playfully replace the 10 commandments with 10 suggestions, and the very first suggestion is just do the obvious.
Get out, sleep more, move often, eat cleanly, make love, be grateful, get outside, grieve fully.
Those are the basics and they don't require anybody's biohacking auto debit to get set up.
And so that would be our hope is that not that there's a singular way to do any of this stuff or that you have to use all the elements.
It's just this is our cultural toolkit.
And then really encourage and hopefully inspire a thousand, ten thousand, a million micro experiments by people starting with partners, expanding into a close circle of friends.
And that's actually another piece of how do you prevent the leader from getting corrupted?
I think Tolkien had it right.
The one ring will corrupt everyone no matter what.
So build a fellowship that can hold that kind of power and potential.
Be like Gandalf and Galadriel.
Like Galadriel, just that famous in the movie, you know, like the Cate Blanchett character, the Elven Queen, she grabs and she turns into like black Kali.
And she's like, and she's like, Ed, I don't need this.
And thank you, I'm out.
You know, and the same with Gandalf, right?
So the capacity for us to take our diads and expand them to dozens and take our dozens and connect them to a dozen dozens.
You know, and that gets you to the Dunbar realm, 144, 150, right?
You're right there.
Like, that's a pretty good cohort.
And then let's revive, I mean, I think in some respects, you know, people on the progressive humanitarian side of things are like, oh, what we need is this push to a global centric consciousness, right?
We need everybody to kind of level up.
And, you know, if I was just a cynical historian, for instance, I would say, hey man, we had a good run at that.
That was the last 50 years, friends.
If we didn't pull it off in the optimal conditions coming out of World War II until now, we're not pulling it off coming soon.
And actually, I would make a case that what we need is actually, right now, I mean, like, yes, I agree with that.
But I think we're out of time.
And I think what we actually need right now is to self-arrest.
Like, how do we stop ourselves sliding down the mountain?
And that is actually, how do we regress into healthy tribalism?
Because we're seeing all sorts of unhealthy tribalism on both the far left and the far right.
Right?
Lots of ethno-tribalism.
Like, this is our people and we deserve what's coming to us and they don't.
But we need healthy tribalism, and I think the only healthy tribalism I'm aware of is community.
So let's get to know our neighbors again.
Let's double down on friends and family, and let's start taking responsibility for the people that we know and know us.
And invite everybody into the project.
So that would be my hope, you know, is that the toolkit is open source, it is accessible, cheap or free, and that we don't know which one of these or which thousand of these is going to work.
But we do know that if we unleash human creativity and community and connection, You know, supported by inspiration and healing, that there's a better chance that we're going to innovate and mutate things that work.
And once somebody gets it right for that space or place or time, other people can imitate.
And then hopefully we can find ways to stitch this whole thing back together.
So I want to start the discussion of this interview and of Jamie's book by saying I'm incredibly sympathetic to what he's doing.
I have for some years called my classes flow state yoga.
My three day retreats share that name.
I co-facilitated a teacher training called Awakened Heart Embodied Mind for eight years that sought to integrate neuroscience and somatic psychology with asana practice and meditation.
His three themes in the book of ecstasis, catharsis, and communitas are super resonant for me.
And the emphasis on ecstatic dance, bodywork, and the potency of altered states to access healing, inspiration, and group bonding, they all track quite closely to my own path and my own passions.
In a way, I feel like it describes a kind of fascinated obsession with what the landscape of inner work, embodiment, self-actualization, and getting outside of our conditioned habits and trauma defenses, the avoidance of vulnerability, what all of that can really look like in contemporary terms.
How it can be understood, optimized, and utilized to improve our lives and other people's lives.
I can also tell from some of his language that, and his ideas, that he spent time immersed in Ken Wilber's integral theory, and I did too.
I spent a lot of time reading and debating that stuff, and after about 15 years, eventually moved away.
And as I researched Jamie and looked at different interviews, I found that he had very similar criticisms of Ken's work in the final analysis, so to speak.
And you know, for me personally, I've said this in some of my Instagram videos and Patreon bonus materials, the conversation around what it is possible to salvage and clarify and optimize around embodied practices is very much alive for me in the aftermath of everything we've been discussing.
And I think that Will makes a significant contribution to that conversation, even if I don't fully agree with everything that he says.
Right, and we'll get to some of the disagreements.
I'm happy to hear about how his enthusiasm for cultural renew through embodiment is really resonant for you because I'm glad to be reminded that that's such a deep part of your life.
And it's, I don't know, it was never really part of my yoga world experience, which was much more kind of austere and, you know, it was less California, I suppose I could say, much more Buddhist and I think much more bookish as well.
So, yeah, I'm not coming from a place where Like, I'm immediately sort of tuned into his enthusiasm for renewal in these terms.
But I do have to say that I liked listening to him in the interview.
A little bit more than I liked reading the book, and I'll say why.
In the conversation, I can hear this really earnest excitement.
There's traces of this English schoolboy accent and nervous laughter.
Is he from England originally?
Yeah, yeah, he's from England and came over here as a young boy.
Yeah, we can still hear it.
Oh yeah.
And I like that he seems to feel like this kind of irreverent outsider in Austin society.
I was taken also by his description of moving through these professional and social circles where everybody's taking Ambien to sleep and he's mourning like the soul death of his class.
It's really awful, like, I mean, to hear that he... I mean, what did he say, he was at a dinner party where there were six other couples or something like that, and everybody was taking Ambien to get to sleep?
They thought nothing of having four to six drinks, they were all taking Ambien to get to sleep, and then he was the big weirdo for bringing up psychedelics, right?
Yeah, and so I feel, I really appreciate that he grasps the gravitas of the kind of social dumpster fire that we find ourselves in.
Even when I don't believe he's like really all that touched by it, he's kind of, he seems like this ironic observer in a lot of ways.
The book is, to my eye, a little bit thinner than he is in person.
It's a very entertaining, it's like a pep talk for people who are really into everything that you're describing, Julian.
And a pep talk for burners who maybe want to go a little bit deeper, who want to read a little bit more.
And I say if it gets people who have the money to, you know, slow down to be a little bit more moderate and ethical with their sex retreats and their psychedelics usage, that would be really cool.
I'm afraid sometimes that it also suffers from a kind of hot take reductionism.
Or oversimplification with a lot of the issues that it tackles in this very ambitious TED Talk format.
Like, he's obviously learned a lot about neurochemistry, but he's not a historian, anthropologist, ethnographer, and he tries to do all of those things in a kind of galaxy brain way.
So, it's interesting because he comes across an interview, like, much more sort of thoughtful than I found the writing to be.
And when he talks about the superficiality of, you know, Burning Man-type culture, and specifically when he said that all the worst people are taking all the best drugs.
I was like, yeah, I'm totally with you.
However, your book kind of sounds like it's written for them with its soundbite-y tone, but in person he is, and this is why I know you appreciate him, Derek, he's much more Joseph Campbell than he's like Joe Techbro.
Oh, I agree.
And I totally agree with that assessment.
He was wonderful to talk to.
I mean, I like the book a lot.
He's a polymath and that speaks to me personally.
You were talking both about your yoga histories.
I think being in New York, I was kind of between the two of you.
I liked certain elements of, you know, trance dances and letting go, but I also My original yoga was reading scripture.
It wasn't asana practice.
So I understand both of those.
The letting go aspect really helped me not be so in my head.
So that's where, you know, I eventually end up in California.
Although I never was a fan of, hey, let's stop the middle of an asana practice and do a free form dance.
That's definitely not my thing.
Not my vibe.
But I do agree in the sense that the book covers a lot of territory and it passes over things that could have been explored in more depth.
I don't think that's what he was going for.
Having worked in flow states, still working in flow states with technology now, I know where he's going with it.
And I appreciate certain stories.
And then there were others in the book that were a little lacking.
And what I really appreciated, though, is in the interview, when I pushed back on a few things, he was he he was like, he stopped to think about it and didn't just toe the line of what he was saying in the book, specifically around Osho, for example, which I which I think is important in terms of just reckoning with what you're putting out in the world.
Our episode is called, Is an Ethical Cult Possible?
Because the third part of his book is called Ethical Cult Building.
And that caught my eye in a kind of a what-the-fuck way.
And I actually, I didn't want to title this episode that because if I scrolled past that on iTunes, it would piss me off.
Because to me, the question is an oxymoron.
And so is the chapter heading.
For me, ethical cult building makes about as much sense as healthy cancer farming.
Well, hold on, hold on.
I get what you're saying, but I want to push back just a little bit.
You want me to wait?
I mean, there are popular usages of the term, but the context, if we're talking about yoga, wellness, New Age spirituality, we can't sort of default back to Latin meanings and, you know, discussion Hold on, hold on.
So I think to be charitable, I agree with you.
The idea of an ethical cult does sound terribly oxymoronic and maybe a little bit tone deaf, but he argues for ethical cults by invoking the original Latin meaning of the word cult, which has more in common with the roots of words like culture and cultivate has to do with You know, a group of people who are focusing on a particular practice or belief than the pejorative associations we have today.
And then here's a little quote where traditional cults, so he talks about three phases of this word cult.
Traditional cults, in terms of old world religion, demanded subjugation of the self to the lineage.
Culty cults, which he's talking about as the ones that we all love to hate, demanded subjugation of the self to the guru, right?
And that's actually, I think, more of a early post-modernist, like, Western, you know, interaction with Eastern culture phenomenon.
And then he talks about an ethical cult that does neither.
Instead, it seeks to enhance, oh dear, the sovereignty of the individual while increasing the intelligence of the collective.
But I get what he's reaching for, and so I give him some leeway instead of being super pedantic about the terminology.
And now, go ahead.
Well, you get what he's reaching for, and then there's a question of plausibility, and whether or not he's describing something that With enough background to actually have a vision going forward.
And I just want to bring up that there's some bad information, both in the book and in the interview.
And this is where I begin to have some questions about the depth of his reading, his character judgment when he's talking about various leaders, kind of unwarranted hopefulness, and how this impacts How this might impact his credibility more generally.
So, you know, when he says in the interview that most people who think about cults think about NXIVM or Heaven's Gate, he says are cautionary tales, and he says that most folks moralize and tut-tut afterwards.
And then he goes on to talk about that cult experts are kind of doing this superficial blow-by analysis where all they want to do is deprogram people and they're not really getting at the human needs involved.
And, you know, he says that cult research is like the equivalent of AA, that it's a blunt instrument.
And, you know, so it's like it's just not true.
Most of that isn't true.
You know, first of all, there's the issue of minimization that Heaven's Gate, Jonestown, Manson Family, these are not cautionary tales.
They're like mass casualty events.
The full extent of NXIVM criminality isn't really known.
There is a kind of pop culture pearl clutching and a propaganda that says, oh, these are outlier incidents, but that's not what cult studies does and that's what cult studies is trying to fight against and has done so for decades.
No one deprograms anyone anymore.
That hasn't happened for 30 years.
So the instruments aren't really blunt at all.
Now, so we'll link to a resource page on our site that runs down basic but actual legitimate cult research that's widely available.
But he wants to give an answer to this question of what an ethical cult is, but he wants to begin by pitching the idea that cultic groups are wonderful opportunities for revelatory community that have simply gone wrong.
That's kind of where he begins.
And this is where he says that, you know, interesting leaders include Osho and Adi Da.
He says, these were people who were absolute wide-awake transmitters, and they were progenies.
They were slinging starlight for a while, and then things went pear-shaped.
And then the question is, like, what happened?
What went wrong?
And, you know, I think when we both got to that part of the interview, Julie and NSlack were like, okay, uh-oh.
So, yeah, I mean, what do you hear when you hear that?
Especially, I think that, you know, you have a good framework for understanding Adidas a little bit through your connections with the Integral community.
Yeah, so this is the thing, and it goes to what Derek said, and I think Derek and I have more of this sort of polymath creative sensibility where we resonate with some of his temperament, right?
And so that's why he resonated with Ken Wilber as well, because Ken Wilber is the uber polymath.
And then he has all kinds of criticisms of Ken Wilber.
And the criticisms that come up a lot, especially in academic circles, is that Wilber tries to include too much in his model.
And so he summarizes a lot of subjects that he's not qualified to do or is not deeply enough educated in.
And he ends up making mistakes.
And so what happens is a bunch of people who like his polymath sensibility go, oh, this is amazing.
This is so interesting.
This is so deep.
And then anyone who's an expert in the various fields that he is presuming to integrate says, no, no, no, he gets this wrong and he gets this wrong.
I like all the other stuff.
And then someone else who's an expert in another field does the same thing.
So I feel like Jamie, there's an aspect of Ken's sort of perspective on spirituality and psycho-spirituality, which he has said he very much still appreciates.
And I do too, but there's an aspect of it that he hasn't critiqued enough.
And here's what it is for me.
It's the metaphysics that says there are sort of God-realized human beings walking around slinging starlight who can put you into states of incredible ecstatic self-realization through their Shaktipat, through being in their presence, and that that's a legitimate thing that we have to contend with, and that Arida and Osho were examples of that.
And then somehow things went wrong, right?
Somehow things went wrong at some point, and then what does he say?
He seems to be saying that One of the reasons things go wrong is a lack of emotional maturity in the students.
And that kind of rankled me.
They tend to project their golden shadow onto the guru in unintegrated and childlike ways, like they're just not ready for all of that starlight.
And so then their wires get crossed.
And instead of that, instead of him saying that the guru model and its claims, which for me is the real issue, the claims about special enlightened beings, that this is the central problem and that in a way over time, in some ways deliberate and in some ways just sort of evolving out of opportunism, it's been designed and perfected to exploit that very vulnerability in people to project their golden shadow or idealize in those ways, right?
He implies that perhaps the problem is a lack of legitimate path or lineage, and more so than there actually being some problem with some of the foundational assumptions in the lineage themselves.
And let me just say one more thing.
He overlooks the possibility that in both Adi-Da and Osho, we actually had Brilliant, narcissistic sociopaths who were power-hungry, superior, grandiose, and sadistic in ways that any more integrated psycho-spiritual model should actually deconstruct, not idealize.
The idea that they were God-realized adepts who somehow just had some small piece of shadow that hadn't been addressed yet, and then that shadow ended up taking over somehow because of some synergy between the group and the leader.
All of that to me is not good analysis.
I'm not down with it.
It's not just not good analysis, it's actually the echo of standard damage control propaganda about those leaders produced by those groups, right?
That's exactly right.
That's what they do, is to, you know, that he ends up believing the basic deception put out by the organizations of Osho and Adidas, that they were special people, as you say, with great gifts.
They maybe went astray or that they did great things for the world.
And I say that this is standard damage control propaganda because when I'm writing investigations of cults, this is the top roadblock, the foremost article of faith that prevents abuse victims from speaking, that terrifies them.
They don't want to risk telling the truth about someone who everyone else calls a saint.
about someone who an entire organization, sometimes it's global, sometimes it has tens of millions of dollars, depends on for its brand legitimacy.
But the thing is, like, what we actually know about Osho and Adida from legit investigative journalism and court cases is that, as you say, both of them headed up vicious, predatory organizations that destroyed lives.
So, who outside of former cult members who cling to the glory days thinks that they were slinging starlight?
There's two possibilities for that.
A person who just dug the literature, probably uncritically.
Without recognizing that the vast majority of late 20th century cult leaders are like banal writers and plagiarists.
But also, the thing is, is that when groups like this fall apart, their senior membership winds up doing, on the workshop circuit, usually concealing their past affiliations, usually hanging out at Esalen where they're going to talk with somebody like Jamie Wheel 15 years ago about how wonderful it was.
Now I'm speculating, but what I'm saying is that No, no, no, hold on, hold on, because he was involved with the Integral Institute at some capacity and the Integral Institute has several people who are former Adi Da devotees in the upper echelons and actually I heard him in an interview talking about everything that went wrong with Integral and saying with the exception of these few people who were with Adi Da, who were in his presence, who were lit up by being around that kind of energy.
So he does have some sense that Adidas gave an enduring gift to the world to certain people who were awakened by him.
That's upside down.
That's upside down.
I've been around those people and I think they're nuts.
Right.
See, it's upside down.
So what happens is that the people who scatter when a cult disperses, when the leader goes to jail or they die or they have to escape to Fiji or whatever, is that they have to be employed somewhere.
And usually they've spent 20 years stocking the closets for the guy who's now disappeared.
That's all they know how to do.
So, yes, of course they're going to go to Boulder.
Yes, of course they're going to go to the next ashram.
They're going to find a place to land in which their way of relating, their way of seeing the world, their way of marketing spirituality is going to work.
And they will carry with them, instead of saying, oh, yeah, I'm an abuse survivor from a cult, they will carry with them, oh, you know, I'm carrying with me the shards of glory that have unfortunately crashed to the ground, right?
So, yeah, I mean, it's the general feeling then that those ex-members will communicate is the feeling that I call I-got-mine-ism, which is this general sort of view of the organization as, well, it was really great for me.
And I really blossomed and I opened up and I had transcendent experiences.
I don't know what happened to those other people and really some crazy shit went down, but I really felt fulfilled and, you know, I know that everybody has to work out their own karma.
And sometimes not even that is earnest because often people will go through a stage of that and then they'll say, you know what, actually, it was really awful for me too.
And I'm still coming to grips with it.
There is a sense, you had mentioned Nick Clegg recently on our Slack, who is a Facebook executive, former democratic politician in the UK, and he's a great example of someone who is involved in politics and now he's paid by Facebook a lot of money to tell people that their social media addiction is their fault, not the algorithms.
And that was similar to the one issue I had when I was first told about Jamie's book with the idea of an ethical cult.
And I did ask him about it a bit, but it's, as I mentioned in the interview, I've been in wonderful ayahuasca circles, where there are no power struggles, where the people are there for good reasons.
I studied under Dharmamitra, who I will say, I think, is someone who just really is humble and tries to get across what he believes are authentic teachings.
Even when I studied with him, I didn't believe everything he was saying about psychic energy, perhaps.
But there was never any indication of any power struggles.
It was always four people.
Now the thing about all these is they're not marketed.
They're not big names in the same sense of some of the figures that we're talking about.
And so my fear is if you're going to actually scale something of this nature, it's just not understanding human nature and that there are going to be people who exploit it.
I don't see on a planet of 8 billion people that you're going to ever find pure benevolence arising out of this.
Well, I'd say that at this point, I would flip the bias that Jamie and others and maybe people at Integral and a lot of other very hopeful people show towards these figures and say that to claim that someone is an ethical spiritual leader in the New Age space is now officially an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
It's like saying that God exists.
It's like saying that near-death experiences mean that the soul is real.
If you're going to claim that Chogyam Trungpa, Yogi Bhajan, you know, Adi Da, Osho, were even useful human beings, show me the data that shows how their content has improved any social metric in the world.
Yoga tea has helped me sleep.
Okay, great.
But if you come up with data that says 80% of Chogyam Trungpa's students reported good results from Shambhala meditations, I reply, okay, prove that that's better or even different from going walking on the beach where you're way less likely to be ripped off or raped.
Yeah, like, it's really, the ball is in the, you know, ethical cult leader or ethical cult building court actually to show that this isn't at all possible.
But there was that moment, I have to ask you about though, because he didn't know it was you until after the interview I mentioned it, but he did cite your Walrus article as opening his eyes.
And I really appreciate that when I push back on Osho, or we mentioned Trungpa, like there is a willingness to be like, hey, maybe I should reinvestigate that.
When you heard that at that part, how did that make you feel?
I think it was good, although the framework was, I mean it was nice, it's nice to hear an article cited, but it seemed that the framework was that, I don't know, like I think I have witnessed, I think we've all witnessed
10, 15 years now of these articles, these revelations coming to light, being evidenced, becoming part of the sort of historical record, and the penny never quite dropping for the majority of people that, wow, this is actually a feature, not a bug,
That it's not about bad apples, it's not about the Lucifer effect, which he goes on to describe, and I actually just want to address that too, because I think that it's kind of a harmful idea.
And given the fact that, you know, he enjoyed the Walrus article, I know Jamie, if you're listening, you're gonna I think you'll appreciate this.
He says that, you know, in trying to explain how does it go wrong with these people who are, you know, obviously adepts, that they're very, very skilled, which I question, but nonetheless, he says, you know, these people start harnessing ascetic techniques and technologies, yoga practice, breathwork practice, it could be sexuality, it could be substances,
He says they are increasing their power, their shakti, they become more illumined, and they become more and more charismatic.
And at some point, he says, the Lucifer effect kicks in, which is, as you know, dare to look upon me and spot my imperfection.
And that begins the Great Fall.
Now, first of all, There's like zero evidence that big religious cult leaders of the late 20th century were at all practicing anything beyond the exercise of their own narcissism.
Basically everybody that I have studied, they didn't do what they were telling their students to do.
Yogi Bhajan did not do yoga.
Chogyam Trungpa was never sober.
He was bumping coke usually from early in the day.
Sending his henchmen out into retreat gatherings to target young women to bring back to his quarters.
Patabi Joyce never did yoga beyond his 40s, and then was assaulting his students day in, day out.
And what did Adida practice?
Like, beyond addictive behaviors and constant emotional abuse?
So, he's got this idea, not just that they are special people, but they were actually acting in good faith.
And that because they were shining so brightly, that was their problem.
People couldn't absorb all of their special jujube.
No, actually, it's Occam's razor.
It's much more plain and ugly than that.
And then, instead of quoting a cult researcher, It's interesting that he quotes Lisa Barrett about the attitude, the emotional attitudes that followers have, because she comes out last week, right, Derek?
She's the one that Russell Brand introduced.
Lisa, what's her middle name?
Lisa?
Feldman.
Feldman Barrett.
Okay, now what's her expertise?
She's like a neuropsychologist.
Yeah, she's a psychology professor at Northeastern.
Okay, so she has a typology of emotions that I don't, I don't, I'm not familiar with.
It sounds like it's really well researched and received and all of that.
And, and so her typology is that there are four, four emotional states actively or passively engaged, or sorry, actively engaged or passively retired and positive or negative.
But then Weill takes this to describe the four stages in which people respond to cult leaders.
And so he talks about that, you know, the follower will fall in love with them, or sorry, the follower will follow them, and that their wires will eventually get crossed, and that they'll develop romantic, erotic arousal.
And at a certain point, he says, you know, the follower will want to fuck the leader.
And then they will be fearful of the leader and then they will want to fight the leader.
And I just, I need to say that this is really bad because it says nothing about the well-recognized methods of social control, deception, dependency, all of that stuff.
It goes to what I was saying before, right?
It's that the problem is the lack of integration and self-development or emotional maturity in the students.
So if we had some better, more integrally informed, more neuroscience-derived ways of getting followers to be better, then this dynamic wouldn't happen because they wouldn't get into this thing with the teacher where they want to fuck them or fight them or run away from them, right?
And even that sounds like it would be, you know, afforded by a series of social controls, which is the essential problem here, right?
Is that by proposing that cult members want to fuck their leaders, it's just like, it's not a thing because, like, and it's actually really kind of gross to suggest.
Like, I've never heard of it.
Hundreds of interviews, conversations, the closest I ever heard Anyone saying anything other than, I was shocked, I was stunned, I was trapped, I didn't think I could say no, I tried to make it okay, I felt betrayed afterwards, was one person I spoke to who wouldn't go on record for the Shambhala Research.
And she disclosed having sex with Trungpa in positive terms, but she didn't say she wanted to fuck Trungpa.
She said that once it was clear that he intended to have sex with her, it became a tender and learning experience for her.
Now, I'm not saying I don't believe her.
I would say that the cognitive dissonance of being assaulted by your guru would be greatly relieved by that particular view, that post hoc description.
But when you scan that against 99% of the other stories that are out there, which are really about clerical sexual abuse, which is about violation of consent, this is not an appropriate model to look at what happens to followers because it really proposes that people are not being deceived or coerced.
Yeah, I mean I think central, I agree with all of that, I think central to all of this, and this is where I resonate with him but I feel like he goes off track here, it's the question of how do we work responsibly with powerful altered states and how do we differentiate those states from how they often get interpreted in more paranormal or supernatural ways or get ascribed to the magical essence of the person who knows how to evoke
I mean, with someone like Adi Da, because I was a big student of Ken Wilber's, I read Adi Da because Ken Wilber said, if there's one person, the most self-realized human being of all time, read his work.
If you can get to be in his presence, get to be in his presence.
I mean, in the 90s, that was his message.
And so I was like, I better read Adi Da!
And I read his stuff.
It was very clear to me fairly quickly that all was not well with this man, that he was probably bipolar.
Now, I know I'm speculating on diagnosing him, but he would go through these very, very intense phases where he didn't sleep and he wrote copiously.
He probably had some kind of seizure disorder because he would have cataclysmic events after which he would change his name and he would change everything about his work and he would go from being an ascetic to being a complete, Let's all just fuck each other and take drugs and I'll film all of it.
He did that within his communities.
And then he would change again.
And he's had like five names over the course of his life before he died.
And all was not well.
And so here's this person who seems deeply narcissistic, probably mentally ill, definitely very tortured.
And he has developed over time this incredibly strong ability to have an influence on people charismatically, to look deep into their eyes, to put them into a state where they feel like their whole existential tablecloth is being pulled out from underneath them.
So, So to me that's different than someone who is earnestly studying how to use say neuroscience and mindfulness and somatic experience experiencing trauma techniques to help someone navigate through beneficial altered states and handling that responsibly with a sort of scope of practice and a set of boundaries, right?
Yeah, I mean, that's what he wants.
That's what he wants.
And I guess it's a question of, like, well, what are the resources and references and what's the history that is going to be drawn on to point the way forward?
Yeah, and so I would say, Jamie, I'm glad that you're asking these questions, but what about one of the guardrails being if someone has a big, charismatic, you know, over-the-top, I'm-self-realized sort of presentation, that in itself is probably a huge red flag.
Well, he does describe a kind of musical chairs ritual context in which people could exchange the role of Hierophant and you could recognize that everybody was going to be a leader at a particular time.
Which kind of echoes what Theo has suggested about It does.
It does in her yoga field work.
Yeah, yeah.
And I get that, but the question then is, okay, so you're saying that this big, charismatic, starlight-slinging guru is going to be beholden somehow to the rules of the group and that someone is going to be able to hold them accountable and say, okay, now it's time for you to go peel potatoes.
Sounds good, but...
How do you put that into practice?
I think he's referencing, he does bring up Dunbar's number.
If you look at even, you know, there is research on hunting gathering cultures of today where, you know, the very famous research where they put the person in the middle whose ego has gotten too big and they either shame him or they love him or her in the middle as a way of bringing them back to group cohesion.
I do believe that that Probably happened when you had 80 people, 100 people around you at all times.
There had to have been a mechanism for keeping everything intact.
I just don't know how that actually gets applied to the world today.
Well, how would Adi Da have responded to that, you know, or Osho?
Well, exactly.
I mean, that's what I mean.
From my experience, I, again, have never been involved in a cult, but I've been around egotistical people, especially in the music industry, and one thing that happens is that they are surrounded by yes-men.
Only yes-men.
They only keep yes-men around them.
And so that's the barrier to me.
If you were to go up to someone like, let's say, Kanye West, who has made some questionable decisions, Right.
And, and I don't know his inner circle, but you can imagine it being yes, men.
And then you were to say, Hey, you try to make him wash dishes.
How do you think that's going to go?
And so that's, that's why I think, I think if the model was introduced from day one, that's fine, but that's not the culture we live in.
So that's where my problem with that model.
And the central question is one of power and how, how, how do you, how do you handle power dynamics in a situation where someone may have massive charismatic influence?
I mean, I want to be fair, too, and back up out of the ethical cult discussion, because it is one component of what Jamie is looking at.
But I also want to say that my reservations about how he approaches that cult question are related to a broader criticism of the set of ideas.
Wheal really loves, I think, the power of the individual.
And the capacity of personal impact of change, you know, the possibility that breakthrough people and breakthrough moments will turn things around.
I think he, it seems that he really wants to believe that certain leaders have a specialness to them that is ineffable.
So there's this focus on optimizing that for everybody, on brilliance, on achievement.
And I think that the idolization of I would say non-existent spiritual leaders, it meshes very neatly with the idealization of the individual hero and thought leader in a globalized, you know, techie economy.
The startup guru, the revolutionary thinker, the disruptor, the optimizer, you know, people who make big discoveries and then can embody and perform them.
And while he criticizes neoliberalism briefly up front in his book, and it's individualism, his recipe for rapture is fairly individualist down to the line, with the exception of musical gatherings, I think.
It's really about self-care, and he wants people to breathe, to play more music, To have better sex, to take moderate psychedelics, and to live in community.
And I'm reading this and I'm thinking, well, but people do all of these things.
They already do all of these things.
Doing them mediocrely is not what's ruining the planet.
Doing them better is not going to save the species.
No, but doing two things on that though.
First of all, with sex, I was really happy that he spent two chapters on that because that's something that I think a lot about, the repression of sex that we have.
And so that isn't actually an individualist pursuit that you need to partner with.
And he does advocate for a healthy partnership.
He even said that in the interview early on.
And with psychedelics as well, yes, it's an individual experience, but he's specifically talking about ayahuasca ceremonies and those sort of group cohesion techniques.
And I'll say this, I mean, the fascinating part of being in a circle with 20 people is that you are both tapped completely into yourself, but yet you are always in contact with everyone around you during those ceremonies.
And so I think he's looking at the Burning Man model, which from my two experiences were vastly different even a few years apart, going from something that was you look at everyone in the eyes and say hello and commune with them to a very individualist thing.
I think he's just trying to put forward a recipe for a better way of approaching that.
Right, I mean, okay, so I've never been to Ayahuasca.
I understand that it's a community event, that it's ritual and ceremony.
I would say that it's an individualistic solution in the sense that it's, you know, in the sense that there are accessibility issues.
Like, these things are presented as though they are free to everyone, and I just don't think that that's true.
Well, so with ayahuasca, I mean, because this is something that's obviously been a big part of my life.
First off, traditionally, the shaman would only take it and you would sit there and meditate or lie down or whatever.
So there's that aspect.
So access in a sense, yes.
And the way that it's imported into America currently, yes.
But there are There are religious communities that will help people to access that.
And I think that as private companies get into psychedelics and the ickiness of patents and all that is around is problematic.
There are also going to be more people who are opening it up.
I know of a few organizations specifically around ritual that are trying to bring it to BIPOC communities, for example.
So I think that that will be addressed moving forward, hopefully, and not be patented.
Well, I just like to take the breakdown of the tools, you know, breathing, music, better sex, moderate psychedelics, and living in community.
Those things are vastly improved and perhaps attain therapeutic value in some sort of sustainable material way based upon whether or not You know, folks have basic access to, you know, the materials of life.
And so, that's the sort of, like, haunting shadow that trails behind a book like this for me.
Like, I'm reading the book and I'm thinking about, like, whether the Amazon drivers who are shitting in plastic bags because they are pushed too hard, What they would say if they were told that they should breathe more deeply or set aside 15 more minutes for masturbation every day.
I mean, that's something we talked about on Slack and I'll bring it up because one thing that I've had from my experience in these communities is that there's a vast array of people who come to ceremony for different reasons.
And so some of those Amazon drivers will get down with that.
And in fact, if you read in Nomadland, Some of the 60-year-old workers who are trying to just deal with the drudgery of the work have meditation and breathing practices in order to help them.
But all that said, I completely agree because what you initially said, Andrew Yang has made this point that a basic income, a minimum income for people that the government gives them, is probably the most powerful antidepressant we can ever have.
And I agree with that.
I would like to ask Jamie a little bit more about politics because, you know, he does consult on peak performance for Google, Deloitte, Goldman Sachs, Lululemon, and, you know, I would imagine that his, if he didn't, I wonder what else would be in the book, right?
Because, you know, these are not the messages You know, there's been a lot, so much work done within the corporate world over the last 20 years to responsibilize workers instead of help them unionize.
And so every time I see kind of like These very personalized, here are things that you can do for yourself.
I mean, this is my general critique of the wellness world in total, right?
And it's not fair to pin it all on this book.
I'm just saying this is the landscape that I'm coming from.
Well, if you go to the Google campus, they actually give a lot of opportunities for meditation and yoga.
My circle knows the guy who runs that program at Google.
Oh, yeah.
I've always had an issue with the fact that their employees are taken care of in that fact, and yet they're specifically engineering distraction technology.
So that's a different conversation.
But again, I just worry about saying that because this person works in this job, they can't have this sort of practice.
Because in my experience, that just isn't true.
I'm not saying they can't have it.
Like, where is the focus of social transformation attention going to go, right?
So, yeah, I mean, but I also want to say that, like, there's something else that sort of intersects with the notion of, you know, very skilled leadership and
Self-empowerment and, you know, giving people individualized tools, which is that there's something about, and you can hear it in his voice, I think, when he's interviewed, there's something very fast about things, right?
Everything, every tool is something that can work really, really quickly.
That, you know, with certain breathing techniques, you can alter yourself, you know, psychochemically in these ways, and you can bring yourself into these waves and those waves.
And then, you know, 15 minutes of clitoral stimulation will do X, Y, and Z. And there's a focus on, like, Things that happen quickly.
And that's the other thing that I wonder about.
I want to learn a lot more about how people are using psychedelics and psychotherapy because I think that's where an interesting juncture between interpersonal and relational therapies and what's happening for an individual's experience.
But it's at that intersection of speed and slowness that I feel a little bit of tension.
I agree 100% with that.
In fact, just last night, I did a pre-interview with a documentary company based in Toronto for the Smithsonian Channel.
They're doing an episode on psychedelics.
The producer listened to the podcast and found my book through it, and so that's how I got involved.
I was bringing up that fact because she asked me specifically about the psychedelic model in psychotherapy.
And Jamie brings this up in our conversation where he says that some therapists he knows are like, yeah, you have the experience and the next day you call them.
And that is never going to work.
The psychedelic model, especially for people who've never done them, it's going to require weeks for one experience if you want to do it correctly for both preparatory, initiation, and then ritual, and then integration.
So on that front, Matthew, I couldn't agree more.
And actually, right before we got on, I posted something on our Instagram about that with the anti-vaxxers being like, they were like, vaccines have never been done this quickly before.
And then J&J does the responsible, I think, in fact, they overshot a little, but they do the responsible thing to be like, okay, let's look at this.
And then the anti-vaxxers, see, we told you it wasn't wrong.
And I'm like, Science is slow and social media is not designed to understand slow processes.
So, everything you just said, I agree with 100%.
You know, it ties into this thing, this pattern that I've noticed.
It's a little bit hard to articulate, but I feel like when we're talking about wellness techniques, there's this half story that we end up telling.
Like, we have some really good evidence that individual outcomes are changing because of an intervention, and we go, wow.
And we kind of forget about the rest, especially if we're in the business of marketing those interventions.
It reminds me of, I have this really good friend here in Toronto, and he was hired to teach yoga to the Toronto Marlies.
Now, this is the minor league team that feeds up to the Maple Leafs.
And for the last century, it has been known as where all of the goons in the NHL come from.
Like, it is the fighting team.
And so they hired him to teach yoga to the team so that they could reduce their injury recovery time.
Well, it worked.
He taught them yoga classes for a year.
Their injury recovery time went down.
But then they also stopped fighting.
And so he brings that story back to the yoga world and everybody goes, yay!
Isn't that wonderful?
Yoga reduces aggression, especially like, and the yoga women think that's so hot.
But the punchline of the story is that the Marleys fucking fired him because hockey isn't going anywhere.
And so it's like, We can talk about soldiers or the police, you know, getting therapy or, you know, losing their will to fight because of psychedelics, but they're going to be replaced because the state isn't going anywhere.
And so I'm just conscious of this sort of like, there's a sentence that's written about the wonderful possibility of things, and then there's like an ellipsis.
There's three periods, and I'm like, okay, and what's next?
What's next?
But I also want, last thing, last thing.
I've spoken a lot, but I want to own the fact that I come at this from a cranky standpoint that is kind of, is frankly depressive.
Because when, and I like it that way.
Because when I encounter an aspirational text, I realize that I don't actually have a lot of hope for social renewal, for any kind of broad-based, you know, for any kind of broad-based, you know, recapture the rapture program.
I I don't, I mean, maybe it's a lot of disillusionment, maybe it's a lot of betrayal, maybe I just have not seen the world work in that way, but I just want to own that and say that, you know, it's honest for me to I stand by my political analysis.
I stand by my criticism of, you know, how he treats cults.
But I also just want to be transparent that I'm not, you know, I think I'm too depressive to be really lit up by this kind of material.
And that should just be out on the table.
Yeah, and I'll own that I'm susceptible to being lit up by this kind of material because that's my temperament and I'm always looking for what is the inspiring, motivational, intuitive, creative thing that I can get behind that is grounded enough and has enough scientific and psychological kind of reference that I feel it's not woo-woo bullshit, but I have that ecstatic temperament.
I get off on it.
And if you found that thing that you could get behind, how wonderful would that be to support your profession, your life, your practice?
Exactly.
And I'm still a yoga teacher, aesthetic dance teacher, and mind-body bodyworker.
I'm still in that.
And I can get excited as Jamie sounds in the interview, but only when I'm criticizing something.
So if somebody says, like, you know, what do you have that's positive to offer?
I would stutter.
I would like, I'm not quite sure.
I'm not comfortable with that.
Well then that's the other thing I wanted to say too, Matthew, is that kind of like Derek, I've also been in communal, altered state seeking, ecstatic, embodied practice doing kind of groups that were not cultish and toxic and dysfunctional.
So I've had that experience.
Yeah, I mean, maybe I've got to figure out how to find it in some way.
You know, but when Jamie says, you know, we have to do these things in our neighborhoods, I'm like, you know, I'm not going to be doing psychedelics with my neighbors.
I'm not going to be having sex with my neighbors.
I'm not going to be doing deep breathing with my neighbors.
Oh, you should try it!
Maybe we will cooperate on... You see, this is the thing.
It's like much more mundane than that.
It's like, can we actually get through the small talk while we're gardening?
