As our access to vaccines eases the pandemic in the Global North, U.S.-based conspiritualists keep riding the wave of covid-denial influence—all the way to the bank. This week, Julian reports that Gen-Z spiritual entrepreneur Jason Shurka has launched a new media hub, The Academy of Divine Knowledge, and affiliating with the predictable rogue’s gallery—Christiane Northrup, Del Bigree, Sayer Ji, David Icke, and Judy Mikovits among them. This confederacy of dunces charges a $33 monthly membership because “33 is a Master Number that holds many divine meanings” that leads to “infinite possibilities,” such as magically draining your bank account. Of course, the pandemic is far from over. India is still going through the worst of it, and as Matthew discusses, one reason appears to be the influence of astrologers on Narendra Modi’s decision-making. Meanwhile, Derek unpacks the repeated fat-shaming being done by conspiritualists when boasting of their awesome immune systems. In this week’s interview, Derek talks with Venezuelan-American singer/songwriter Devendra Banhart about global music, anti-vaxxers, conspiritualist ideology, and paying $24 for a smoothie in Malibu. Next week will continue the theme, as we look at music’s influence in cult worship and indoctrination, with Alex Ebert of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros joining the discussion.Show NotesThe Racist and Problematic History of the Body Mass IndexFat shaming, BMI and alienation: COVID-19 brought new stigma to large-sized peopleFat-shamers have felt enabled by Covid, and it’s hard to fight backCDC: Obesity, Race/Ethnicity, and COVID-19The Bizarre and Racist History of the BMIUncovering and Destigmatizing Male Body Dysmorphia in Popular CultureJewish Star article about Jason Shurka’s “miracle Torah”Signature Investment Group team page w/Jason Shurka as VPMatthew on Modi and the starsThe Indian government is cracking down on harrowing
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I want to point out that I posted yesterday that there is an event happening in Los Angeles this Sunday that is a maskless Sunday meetup.
I tagged the people behind it, Andrew Genovese and Jeff Weitzman, who are planning on meeting at the Whole Foods parking lot.
And yes, the famous Whole Foods parking lot from the song from a few years ago, the very one.
On Rose Avenue, Sunday at 10 a.m.
Pacific.
If you are in the area, they are planning on going into local businesses.
I'm going to guess along Rose Avenue, which is kind of a hip shopping district now.
But they also mentioned Santa Monica.
This is especially troublesome, obviously, because it's going to disrupt businesses who are trying to enforce having masks In their place of business and potentially traumatizing workers and that's happening.
They're doing it, of course, all in the name of love and the right to breathe, which I wear a mask off and so I'm not sure how that has anything to do with it.
But I just want to point that out if you are an Angeleno.
Someone commented that there are a number of these going on around the country, which is especially ludicrous since the CDC just came out and said that if you are fully vaccinated, you pretty much don't have to wear masks indoors or outdoors in most situations now, so it makes it even more performative on their part.
But I do just want to give people a heads up about this, that it's happening, and to please warn any workers, business owners you know in the Santa Monica, Venice area about it this weekend.
Wow, that's been my neighborhood for 25 years.
This is Conspiratuality 51.
You can't force it with Devandra Banhart.
As our access to vaccines eases the pandemic in the global North, U.S.-based conspiritualists keep riding the wave of COVID denial influence all the way to the bank.
This week, I'll be reporting on Gen Z spiritual entrepreneur, Jason Shurka, who has launched a new media hub.
It's called the Academy of Divine Knowledge, and it's strategically affiliated with a predictable rogues gallery.
Christiane Northrup, Del Bigtree, Sayer G, David Icke, and Judy Mykovitz among them.
Premium content from this confederacy of dunces is available for a $33 monthly membership.
Because, you know, 33 is a master number that holds many divine meanings, says the website.
It leads to infinite possibilities, perhaps such as magically draining your bank account.
Of course, the pandemic is far from over and India is getting the worst of it.
As Matthew discusses, one reason appears to be the influence of astrologers on their Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, and his decision-making.
Meanwhile, Derek unpacks the repeated fat shaming done by conspiritualists when boasting of their awesome immune systems.
In this week's interview, Derek talks with Venezuelan-American singer-songwriter Devondra Banhart about global music, anti-vaxxers, conspiritualist ideology, and paying $24 for a smoothie in Malibu.
Next week, we'll continue with this theme as we look at music's influence in cult worship and indoctrination, and we'll have Alex Ebert of Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros joining the discussion.
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.
Well, guys, it appears that conspiritualism has a rising poster boy, as we noted, in 23-year-old Jason Shurka.
I've been tracking him for a while, and if Christiane Northrup is the grand dame of crystal-carrying COVID denialism, Mickey Willis, then, its protagonist, its propagandist-in-chief, Laurie Ladd, the appointed oracular prophet, and Sasha Stone, their minister of holy war, Then, Jason Shurka has cast himself as the indigo chosen child coming straight out of the cosmic portal with entrepreneurial savvy as his superpower.
The New York native has a degree in business administration from Baruch College, and he's the heir apparent to a commercial real estate investment firm with branches in the US and Israel.
Now, according to the website of Signature Investment Group, he is a vice president Underneath a CEO and chairman who both share his last name.
If we go back 10 years though, Jason, as it turns out, was featured in a front page story of the Nassau County New York Jewish Star newspaper, which noted that his bar mitzvah featured a 175-year-old Torah.
Which, via a chain of events referred to by the paper as the Miracle of Port Washington, had mysteriously found its way to Jason's father, Manny Shurka, who on a research trip to Jerusalem discovered that his wife, and therefore his son, Jason, are direct descendants of this document's scribe.
Is this like Joseph Smith and the Golden Tablets?
Is that this kind of story?
It's wild.
Either that or a Nicolas Cage movie, right?
Now, the younger Shurka's origin story that he features in the bio on his website involves multiple shoulder injuries and a staph infection, which led to almost having his leg amputated.
And this apparently gave him ample time in bed rest between 2011 and 2015 to meditate and have his own great awakening.
Then, in 2018, He was approached by what he refers to as a clandestine organization called the Light System, which is apparently a powerful divine group made up of 7,000 agents around the world.
Then, in June of 2020, TLS, as he calls the Light System, gave him a secret document called the Pyramid Code, which he went public with on September 9th, 2020 at 9 a.m.
Eastern Standard Time.
Apparently, secret texts and divine destiny run in the Sherka family.
But why does any of this make him newsworthy for us?
Well, Sherka is in the midst of selling himself as a major hub for conspirituality.
He has a website called the Academy of Divine Knowledge that hosts videos and scheduled live streams from a collection of quote-unquote teachers That includes Del Bigtree, Christiane Northrup, Sherry Tenpenny, David Icke, Judy Mikovits, Sayer G, Lori Ladd, Larry Plevlevski, Sean Stone, and around 40 others.
At the moment, this looks like a boutique version of Gaia, which I sometimes call the map to nowhere, but with the collective social and email reach of this particular crew, I would guess the growth potential is massive.
This is the next level Gen Z grift in action.
The back-end affiliate marketing, origin story, and pathway to launch on a monetized platform are all super slick.
This is your classic subscription site featuring free interviews with Zeitgeist superstars like RFK Jr., Maikiewicz, and Ike, To get you started, and then the magical $33 a month fee, as well as a merch store with tote bags, mugs, and t-shirts emblazoned with images like a crossed out sheep, like no sheep welcome here, or an alien flashing a peace sign, it's all good man, or the word woke crossed out and replaced with the word awake.
Front and center of all of this is the one-man show interviewer, teacher, and website owner himself, flag firmly planted in prime conspiritualist digital real estate.
Now the Instagram for this Academy of Divine Knowledge was started on April 16th, It has garnered around 5,000 members in less than a month, 5,000 followers on Instagram.
But the real launch started last week and came to my attention via Dr. Northrup's posting about it on her brand new, not-so-secret, after deplatforming Instagram account that popped up on May 4th and already has 8,000 followers.
Lastly, I just want to add that it's disconcerting to me that Jason appears to have no qualms about overlooking the threads of antisemitism at the heart of these figures' perennial remixed conspiracy theories, especially with regard to David Icke, who's been particularly egregious on this count.
Shurka seems happy to repurpose all of it into evergreen monetized content.
Can we just talk about the fact that he's 23?
23!
I'm just trying to, like, remember what I was doing when I was 23.
I'd rather not.
Well, I mean, I think I was in Dublin at that point.
I was one year into my first marriage.
That relationship lasted 17 years.
I can't remember knowing anything.
That was before I'd published my first novel.
It's like I've seen Jason, you know, give some speeches and stuff and he clearly knows the secrets of the universe.
And I'm just wondering where that where that confidence comes from.
Well, I'll say this.
When I was 20, that was the year that I did probably about 100 hits of LSD and psilocybin over a 15 month period.
Right.
And if I had access to social media at that time, if I was in that environment, I could imagine platforming myself in such a way.
My atheism didn't just happen, right?
And there was definitely a feeling that I was tapping into something during that time.
And so I could imagine at that age trying to do something like this.
But did you proselytize to your friends?
No.
No.
Well, I led a number of people on their first experiences, but I didn't try to bring them in.
It was only people who asked about it.
I was never an evangelist, evangelical in that sense.
I never went out and sought people To take it was just in the community and the people like just as I was brought into it.
I didn't go to college saying, I'm going to do psychedelics, but I happened into a crowd and it was just there and some people became curious.
So there was no, there was never any sermonizing and there was never, there was never any idea that I was tapping into, into secret knowledge in the sense that it was about me.
It was more about the universe and all of that.
So My situation is different, but I also could imagine if I had access to social media, it would affect me differently at that time.
Well, it's interesting because let's say you had had a social media account for like a few years at that point already, like most people of his age probably have, right?
He grew up with it.
Yeah.
And then you sort of, I think it's unavoidable to look around you and say, oh, look, here are these people who are gaining influence.
They're using various experiences.
I mean, we've talked about people this week on Slack who are like, you know, you go off and you do your vision quest and it's great material for your social media posts about the revelations that you've had and the new course that you're selling because you, you know, you starved yourself and drank no water for three days in the forest or something.
Well, and I was also constantly paranoid about being arrested at that time.
This is 94, 95, and two of my friends were arrested for LSD, one of them being my dealer who I hung out with all the time.
So, there was always a sense of, it was almost highlighted in the sense that there's this secret knowledge and there are these forces who are willing to arrest you if you're tapping into it, but that didn't You were quiet about it, though.
You didn't go out blasting it at the time.
It took me a long time to talk openly about psychedelics because the culture wasn't ready for it.
There was always a fear about that.
Did they have the, what do they call it, the carrier weight legislation in Jersey at that time?
I do not remember to be honest.
You know what I'm talking about, right?
Like they had it in the state of Nevada and I remember like 19 year old kids at Nevada Grateful Dead shows getting arrested and they were charged.
Maybe they had like a couple hits of acid in a matchbook or something and you get charged for the weight of the matchbook as if that also counts as how much drugs you were carrying.
No, but I'll say this, my friend who was the dealer was being followed for a while and he actually gave it all up and got rid of his supply and then they caught him when he had a pipe and they scraped the pipe and the cops actually told him, we know about what you did, we're gonna make an example of you even though you barely have anything on you.
So it was a little more insidious in that way.
Just back to his age though, for a moment it's like, Well, I listened to this interview on the CBC a couple of days ago in the morning, and it was like one of the most hopeful things that I've heard.
I've lost this person's name, but I've got to look it up.
She won a science competition here in the country.
She has a South Asian name.
She's 16 years old, so it was a competition for young people.
And the product that she made modified like a Fitbit to, you know, pick up Markers for like, I guess, what is it?
Skin surface tension and stuff like that that would indicate that a person might be feeling anxious or they might be in some sort of mental distress and then the Fitbit sends a series of sort of codes to the smartphone and the smartphone advises breathing exercises or some sort of like cognitive behavioral therapy thing.
It just sounded, I was like, this kid is 16 years old and she's done this incredibly empathetic thing in relation to, you know, her science education, but also in relation to notions of public health.
This is somebody who's like plugged into what Other people might need and you know, I don't know if the product is going to come to market or if it's any good or if there are problems with it, but like that's extraordinary to me and I'm thinking about how the only thing that a person a young person could do in the new age sphere would be to become a really good mimic, right?
Like, at 23, if you wind up attracting all of these people to your hub, it's because you have infrastructure or you have networking power.
And if you can talk the talk, it's not because you have something unique to offer, because they're all sort of 50 shades of crystal, right?
So, what's the actual creativity here?
It would just be the capacity to mimic, I think.
There's something tragic about that.
How many years does this kid spend in his early 20s saying, oh, I am one of 7,000 secret agents of the system of light?
How do you recover from that?
I suppose somebody would let him back into school when he turns 30 or something if he needs to.
Well, it appears that he's poised to become one of the heads of the company that his family has...
Right, right.
And that father-son thing, I think, is pretty intriguing.
And I just wanted to flag it briefly because the other father-son constellation I started learning about this week is Sayerji's dad.
His name is Seungchulji, and he teaches microbiology at your alma mater.
Derek Rutgers.
And, you know, he's got this bio note on his researchgate.net site where, I'll put it into the show notes, but basically he sounds like Sayer G.
So there's this weird sort of Freudian stuff going on.
It's actually like Alice Walker kind of stuff, right?
It's drama of the gifted child stuff.
It's putting all of your narcissistic ethics onto the kid to be like the special chosen one who follows in your footsteps in a way.
Yeah, no, but I don't know because, you know, Sung Jil Ji is like a legitimate scientist.
Oh, gotcha.
Who's cited all over the world.
I see.
And so there's some kind of mimicry going on where... But it's an inversion.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I mean, it's common knowledge that we are oppressed by, you know, celebrity family dynamics.
You know, the Kardashians and so on.
But in the conspirituality world, I think we also have these power relationships and families.
You know, three generations of the Northrop selling MLMs.
And so I think we're also seeing the sort of overflow of family drama in some of these circumstances.
I want to point out in the notes, you mentioned Charlene and Ty Bollinger, which you didn't mention, but it's actually tied in here in a sense, because this is obviously a grift that's happening with the membership fees and all of that.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate sent out a tweet earlier today from an AP story that in an unlisted YouTube video, they found the Bollingers are Talking about how promoting disease disinformation about vaccines and cancers has earned them millions of dollars, and they're kind of showing it how you can, too.
Oh my god!
Yeah, it's on my Twitter feed.
I'll share it on our Conspiratuality Socials later, but that was another great piece of work that the Center for Countering Digital Hate is doing.
And lastly, you just invoked anorthropsin.
Can we talk for a moment about this Stockholm Syndrome that these figures have with social media?
You know, Northrop for months is like, they're gonna ban me, they're gonna ban me, join me on Telegram, now I can be censorship-free, and then goes up and spins up another account where it's just her vanilla harp playing and promotional book stuff, but it's like they can't get off of the thing they said are oppressing them.
Yeah, but there's also some psychic splitting that goes on with that, too, because I'm following her on Telegram and she's just out in the open.
There's nothing guarded about her cue-adjacent and, you know, blatant anti-vax information.
I mean, she really is sort of letting loose on Telegram.
She even, I think I quoted her in a little article on Medium the other day, talking about how she isn't going to tolerate anybody You know, commenting negatively on Telegram.
She actually says in this voice memo that she released on the first day, I think, of her Telegram account, she said, I came here to get away from you fuckers.
And I was like, that's great.
Grandma's letting loose, right?
There she is, right?
The mask comes off.
I mean, there's something good about it, right?
I mean, I think we all have elderly family members who get to a certain point and then they just don't give a fuck anymore.
And you can really see what they're like and what they're thinking.
And I think that's a good turn.
Well, for a lot of people, it's just wearing socks with their sandals.
But I guess for Northrop, it's yelling fuckers at Telegram.
Right.
You've likely seen the commentary.
The predominant number of people dying of COVID are obese.
And let's be honest, being obese does triple the risk of hospitalization from COVID-19 and is linked to impaired immune function and decreased lung capacity, which is especially problematic with respiratory viruses.
But those statistics are secondary to the point conspiritualists are making in their, I'm-proud-of-my-amazing-immune-system posts, which effectively translate as, if you're fat, that's your fault, so suffer the consequences of your inability to be as amazing as me.
Zoe Williams explains it pretty well in The Guardian, writing that for fat shamers, obesity conjures a fairytale world in which bad things happen only to bad people, and this mindset allows them to dehumanize the targets of their rage.
According to the CDC, over 70% of American adults are overweight or obese, a statistic that is fraught with problems which I'll get to in a moment.
As this is such an emotional topic, let me preface it by stating that having grown up overweight, I know both the biases waged against fat people Such as I was bullied well into high school for my weight, and the emotional impact it has as I suffered from orthorexia until my early 30s due to that bullying, even though I thinned out by age 15.
In some ways, my history with being overweight makes this topic especially difficult to discuss, because I recognize that one of the greatest diseases of affluence, which is obesity, is a serious problem in America and increasingly around the world.
And that for most of history, food on demand was not a thing, especially with so many sugar-rich carbohydrates available to us at all times.
And I also recognize that obesity is a leading cause of mortality in COVID as well as many other diseases.
All of these data points can easily be surfaced.
Well, behind data are people, and behind people are systemic conditions, which is what the wellness influencer fails to consider.
Besides being over age 65, the obese comprise the second most dangerous cohort when it comes to dying of COVID, and being over 65 and obese often leads to the worst fate.
But then you drill down into the data and discover that Black and Latino populations are overrepresented in terms of obesity and COVID deaths in America.
Even the CDC recognizes this, writing, "...racial and ethnic minority groups have historically not had broad opportunities for economic, physical and emotional health, and these inequities have increased the risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19 for some groups.
Many of these same factors are contributing to the higher level of obesity in some racial and ethnic minority groups." Fat bias has serious downstream effects.
A 2020 research article in Metabolism Clinical and Experimental notes that the higher a person's body mass index, BMI, the more negatively that person is viewed, which affects both their care and their willingness to seek healthcare.
The authors write, the implications of weight stigma are particularly alarming in the context of COVID-19.
Individuals with obesity are especially likely to delay care or avoid it completely because of bias and humiliation experienced in healthcare settings.
But what is obesity?
And how do you know when you're overweight?
Surely it must rest on some sound science, correct?
Well, no, it doesn't.
And it likely won't surprise you that the same immune system-cheering conspiritualists fat-shaming the less fortunate on their Instagram memes likely aren't aware of the blatant racist and xenophobic measuring stick known as BMI, even though that is the tool used to measure obesity.
The measurement was devised nearly 200 years ago by Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer and sociologist.
Oh no!
Yeah, no background in medicine or physiology, and he co-founded a school of positivist criminology that stated people of other races are a different species.
Quetelet also founded anthropometry, a pseudoscience that correlated physical features with racial and psychological traits.
So Quetelet's theories also laid the foundation for phrenology and, as you might have already guessed, eugenics.
And he's Belgian, so he becomes like Kurtz, right?
Or something like that.
Yeah, yeah.
He was extremely influential.
Now, incredibly, even Quetelet never intended BMI to be used as a measure of individual body fat or health.
He was also a statistician, and so he believed his tool was perfect for population measurement, not people, but a certain type of people.
In the early 20th century, life insurance companies began using his height and weight charts based on Quetelet's Index, which was the original name for BMI.
Doctors picked up on this in the 1950s, and the index only became known as BMI thanks to Ancel Keys in the 70s.
And his research, unsurprisingly, also skewed very white.
And as with Quetelet's ideas, Keyes thought that white men determine the ideal height and weight.
So I want to reference Adele Jackson Gibson, who sums up this awful history very well in Good Housekeeping magazine, which is linked to in the show notes.
And she writes, around 170 years ago, a white guy in Belgium, who was never interested in health to begin with, We came up with a ratio that years later was adopted by health experts to decide whether or not to treat or insure a person.
A ratio that insurance companies and doctors still use today.
It's the ratio we still use to discriminate against others and harshly judge ourselves.
This is the ratio that we are told to be concerned about because body fat is supposedly killing us, but this is not the truth.
So, measurements based on ideal white bodies are recurring themes throughout history.
Different BMIs work for different populations, which is actually what Quetelet was suggesting in the first place, leaving the ideal part aside.
But being a culture obsessed with looks, Which has biased not only popular society, it's really affected healthcare as well.
And this circle is vicious.
While obesity causes the physiological markers of stress, so does weight stigmatism, such as being told it's your fault for being fat and dying of COVID and you wouldn't be so fat if you buy my supplements.
Conspiritualists are fueled by fear, the fear that they could be fat or viewed as such one day, as well as their own ignorance.
Obesity is a complex issue, but one thing is certain.
Conspiritualists are not taking into account the biased history of weight measurement, or the reasons why certain populations are more likely to be obese and less likely to receive adequate healthcare, or the fact that many autoimmune diseases are not the result of bad habits or unhealthy lifestyles.
Complexity isn't in the cards for these supplement shills, and the more and more we do the podcast, it seems that nothing of value really is.
Well, I learned something.
I had not heard about this guy before, and that's eye-opening and appalling.
Yeah, thanks, Derek.
That's a great explainer.
And, you know, you said that it was difficult to talk about because of your personal background, but I think actually it puts you in a really good position because I think you have this personal contact with it and then, you know, a real obsessive approach to data.
And yeah, that's not easy to do, but I really appreciate it.
What makes it difficult is that I've been writing about health and science for a long time now, and I've published a number of articles that talk about the problems with obesity and being in the fitness world and being healthy.
There is a perception that when I write that obesity is an issue in disease pathology, People who have weight problems get triggered.
And that's where I said it was difficult because I know the emotional impact and I am empathetic toward it because I lived it and it still affects my psychology.
We do need to look at it As a problem, food deserts are a problem, the racial history with it.
Where I got my vaccine was actually in Southgate, which is a predominantly Mexican and black neighborhood in Los Angeles.
It's near South Central.
Going into the stores around there when I was in that area, I went into one of the supermarkets There was barely anything healthy in that.
I mean, it was so much processed food.
And you hear the term food desert and you don't really recognize what it's actually like.
I don't recognize what it's like to live in one.
I don't.
But when I'm in them and I see the offerings, how hard it is for people to understand.
If you're working two jobs and trying to take care of kids, this is all you have to eat.
And those conditions are really difficult.
So, it's hard weighing actual science and talking about the problems.
but the real systemic and emotional impact.
It's very hard to talk about this issue in that sense.
Well, and two things.
In addition to everything that you just said, there's also probably a Mickey D's closer than the supermarket and you can get really, really bad food for very little money, super conveniently.
But the other thing I wanted to say, Derek, is I also really appreciate it when you talk about this stuff for several reasons, not the least of which is that there's kind of a taboo against mentioning any kind of eating disordered or exercise disordered activity for men.
It's not something that often gets talked about or revealed.
So, thanks for sharing that.
Yeah, and I think that orthorexia amongst men is definitely a thing and it's very rare to hear testimonials about it.
I sent myself into a panic attack during that period because I was following the zone diet which is one of the just those measuring your protein to fat to carb ratio like every single meal and that's when it really impacted me when I was just like everything I was eating I was I was obsessively looking at the stats, making sure I wasn't eating too much of anything.
And it triggered me off into one of the two panic attacks that sent me to the hospital.
That's how bad it was.
And only after that second time being hospitalized for panic attacks did I start to come out of it realizing how insane it was that I was doing that to what I was putting in my body.
My understanding is that that level of stress has a metabolic effect in terms of making metabolism more thrifty in general, right?
No, you'll, I mean, stress has this, so, you know, thinking about it evolutionarily, you want to store fat in your body for lean times.
That's how humans were able to survive droughts or famines or things like that.
So we have that trigger in us.
And if you're stressed, You will tend to store more body fat.
And so, that's the thing.
It's like the stress of the thing that's making you psychotic adds the thing that you're trying to avoid.
Unless you just starve yourself, which is another eating disorder, and then you just, you know, that's a whole other topic.
But with orthorexia specifically, you actually, if your intention is to lose fat, you're going to do the opposite by being so stressed about it.
It's funny, it makes me wonder whether certain dietary practices that I followed and restrictions that I followed bumped up against orthorexia as well in the sense that I became afraid of eating or even tasting or sometimes even smelling certain foods when I was deep into it.
When I was deep into yoga and Ayurveda.
I mean, I don't think that I became... Well, actually, in some ways, I was negatively physically impacted by some of that stuff, for sure.
But yeah, I've never really ever actually thought about it that way in terms of my own history.
Having spent a lot of time here in the Santa Monica vegan and raw food scene, just going to those restaurants because I really liked the food for a long time, I often would feel like, wow, there's something really, there's an obsessive like purity thing going on here around what kinds of foods are okay to eat and what kinds of foods are, you know, verboten.
It's very intense.
I've just started a new plateau of my exercise workout where I'm doing more endurance training just for longer bike rides because I really enjoy riding and I'm trying to push it.
The fascinating thing about it is when you're out, like I'll ride from here 15 miles over into the valley and go over all these hills and you get there and you stop at a coffee shop And it's just croissants, donuts, whatever.
You put it in your body because it's just pure fuel at that point.
And so, what's really nice about this is that that obsessiveness about any food is just gone.
And again, but that's only because of the workouts that I'm doing.
But the mind switch, because I know exactly what you're talking about.
What was that vegan spot on Main Street in Santa Monica?
Rawvolution?
Revolution, you go in there and you see every shade of eating disorder possible.
And everyone looks so unhealthy.
I would always be like, wait, I thought these were the healthiest people on the planet because they're eating living food, right?
Yeah, but isn't the look also, I mean, unhealthy to me.
I walked into some places like that and I didn't really want to say unhealthy when I was looking at what I was looking at.
But what I did have the feeling of was that People carried the affect of austerity and piety.
There was a seriousness about things and we were doing serious healing.
I'm just talking about somewhat emaciated, no muscle tone, big bags under the eyes, just looking like you probably need a good infusion of some.
It's funny though, because the person might actually have those symptomologies and they wound up at Rawvolution because they want to take care of them.
The unhealthiest place I've ever been to, and I am not I am fine with vegan diets, let me be fair on that.
Like seriously, if people can do a healthy vegan diet, awesome.
But the unhealthiest place I was ever at was the Vegan Beer Festival in Hollywood in second year.
And I can't tell you how many people were smoking cigarettes there!
Nice.
But they were non-GMO cigarettes, right?
I want to also say, I mean, there's something about you talk about growing up, growing up overweight.
I feel like, I don't know about you, Julian, but I was not skinny, but I was slender as a boy.
And I remember the abuse that was hurled at larger kids.
And there's such incredible sadness around that, too, because there was a feedback loop where the more isolated the child became, the more they became targeted, it seemed.
And I remember there was a couple of larger kids who became aggressive in some way that allowed them a certain amount of social status, and so they deflected the hazing towards others.
I guess, Derek, I just want to say on behalf of... I don't know.
Thin guys?
Thin guys.
You know, I am very sorry that that happened.
And it's awful.
It's just awful.
All right, so last week, Shinasud just blew my mind by flagging the fact that the BJP's decision to allow the Kumbh Mela to go ahead this year was driven by the advice of astrologers or Jyotishis, people who practice the Vedic art or the East Indian art of astrology.
They're called Jyotishis.
So, I've posted an article on Medium to collect sources on this together and to comment on what it implies, and I'm doing it through the lens of the fact—I don't know if I've said this on the podcast yet, but I myself used to study and briefly practice Jyotish.
So I'll post an essay about that to the show notes as well.
But I'll bullet point the Jyotish in India stuff here.
So we know that Modi's government is cracking down on the most harrowing news about the country's COVID catastrophe.
about the country's COVID catastrophe.
They've demanded that, successfully as well, they've demanded that Facebook and Twitter delete posts about oxygen shortages, underestimated casualties, and infrastructure collapse.
They've demanded that, successfully as well, they've demanded that Facebook and Twitter delete posts about oxygen shortages, underestimated casualties, and infrastructure collapse.
We know now that the crisis may claim as many as 1.2 million lives by August.
Now, I think the global death rate at this point is 3.2 or 3.5 or something like that.
Anyway, as many as a quarter of COVID's casualties by August might be Indian.
Now, how has this happened when...
Well, it turns out that this Kumbh Mela, which is the largest religious festival in the world, it took place this year.
Now, this happens on a succession of Ganges river fords every 12 years.
I think there's four cities in total.
It was slated or it occurred this year in Haridwar.
But, it was supposed to have taken place next year, but astrologers insisted on a schedule change in June of 2019, and I'll get to why in a moment.
So, the festival draws millions of pilgrims.
It's happened.
It started in late March and went through April.
And Haridwar is in Uttarakhand.
There's about 230,000 population there regularly, but of course millions come.
And Haridwar is where the Ganges River descends from the Himalayas.
So, it's also geographically, and I guess in terms of geomancy, it's very important as well.
Now, after the festival ended, the evidence of super-spreading was clear.
There's a number of reports.
The most devastating one I came across was that a region 1,000 kilometers south of Haridwar reported a 99% infection rate amongst the returning pilgrims.
There is a lot of independent journalism going on in India that is obviously very difficult to do and probably it's physically dangerous to do.
But in The Caravan, there's an independent journalist named Srishti Joswal who wrote that the reasons for bumping up the Kumbh Mela to this year, we're also political and economic.
By-elections are coming up, and the Kumbh Mela makes loads of money, and Uttarakhand is a BJP stronghold, and they didn't want to threaten that.
Wait, can I ask that with the loads of money, so is there an organization, is it a governmental organization that sponsors and runs this, or are you talking about like tourism?
No, it's tourism, but there is a council of what's known as Akharas, and the Akharas are sects of militant ascetics who have organized over the centuries according to their devotional streams, but they have, since the colonial period, had a sort of
Organizational institution that administers the Kumbh Mela, but also collects taxes from the pilgrims.
It administers the religious teachings for which people give donations.
So it generates a lot of income.
And, of course, you know, when you go as a pilgrim to the Kumbh Mela, you're giving out donations to everybody who's there as an ascetic representation of sort of like peak devotion, right?
So, for ascetics, it's also the main sort of money-making festival of the ritual calendar.
Can I ask you something, Matthew?
I was under the impression there was something called the Kumbh Mela, and then there was the Maha Kumbh Mela.
My understanding is that Maha Kumbh Mela is every 12 years, and its popularity has been so beneficial to, I guess, its participants, but also to the regions involved, that At some point, something called the Arda Kumbh Mela was instituted that takes place every six years.
But this is the really, really big one?
This is the big one, and it dates back to the 8th century.
So, back this winter, the chief minister of Uttarakhand pleaded, now he's a BJP guy, but he didn't want this to happen, and he pleaded with the central authorities that the festival be limited or performed symbolically in light of the pandemic dangers.
Well, they fired him in March, right before the festival began.
And his BJP flunky replacement toured the Haridwar grounds in March right before the beginning of the festival and declared that, quote, nobody will be stopped in the name of COVID-19 as we were sure that faith in God will overcome the fear of the virus.
What could go wrong?
Right.
So, just a little bit of background, kumbh mela translates from the Sanskrit as pot, and it refers to the captured nectar that is distilled from the cosmic ocean at the heart of one of Hinduism's origin stories that features the devas and the asuras churning the ocean and producing all things, all material things.
Now, since the 8th century, devotees have gathered every 12 years to reenact this churning.
That's part of what the ritual bathing is about, and they do this in four different sites.
And at the head of the line are the akharas that I mentioned, or sects of militant Now, in the conversation, Tulasi Srinivas reports that they've been at the center of the Mela for centuries and they put on quite a show.
She writes, tens of thousands of ascetics, some dressed in saffron robes, some nude and covered in ash with wild dreadlocks, come riding on horseback or in golden seats on elephants.
The processions are accompanied by loud drumming, conch blowing, and the sound of gongs as they enter the sacred water in wave upon wave of humanity.
Now, the schedule, so why did it get bumped from 2022 to 2021?
The schedule of the Mela has always been set by the stars.
So, just a little background on Vedic astrology or Jyotisha.
It purports to describe causal links, I mean like other forms of astrology, between the positions of planets against the stars and personal, national, or even global events.
So, on the basis of the sky chart at the moment of a person's birth, The skilled astrologer is said to be able to tell when and who they will marry, what kind of jobs and sicknesses they'll have, which doctors to go to and when, how many sons and daughters they will have, and also when they will die and of what.
Now, a majority of Indian politicians, including Narendra Modi, consult with astrologers on things like the timing of events, the signing of laws, how to decorate their homes, and, you know, which of their aides is likely to betray them.
Now, the astrological advice that pitched the Kumbh Mela against the virus was based upon the allegedly auspicious positions of Jupiter and the Sun.
So, it was this year, and not 2022, that Jupiter would be in the constellation of Aquarius and the Sun would be in the constellation of Aries, and that would happen at the same time, and that was the important thing.
I am an ex-student and practitioner of Jyotish, and so I can say that when the Sun is in Aries, it is said to be exalted.
And when Jupiter is in Aquarius, it's believed to Release a downpour of wealth and good fortune.
So, both configurations are said to be actually really good for immunity from disease.
So, you can see where this is going.
And with the Sun in particular representing a kind of invulnerable constancy.
So, you know, an exalted Sun in Aries, as opposed to a regular Sun in another planet, is kind of like Superman compared to Clark Kent, which is something my teacher used to say.
Additionally, there are some interpreters that suggest that other astrological factors in the spring of 2021 produced something called an Amrit Yoga between the planets, and this is a rare combination that's said to grant immortality to the virtuous.
So, this doesn't mean that everyone going to the Kumbh Mela under these, you know, asterisms would become immortal.
It's more like, you know, if your karma lines up right with all of this possibility, you'll have a shot at becoming immortal.
Hasn't happened yet, but maybe, maybe.
But maybe, maybe.
Well, we wouldn't know, right?
How can one know?
Right.
In general, Jupiter is the planet of wealth, prosperity, and the Sun is the planet of health, but also governance.
We've got to see that the interpretations of this ancient divination technique don't ever stop.
They actually never stop.
The planets always mean multiple things and then something more.
This allows for astrologers to continually adjust predictions They can rationalize their ubiquitous errors in hindsight.
So, Jupiter is also the planet of beneficent government and stability in public institutions.
It's said to govern family health and marital cohesion.
The Sun, on the other hand, is the patriarch, the monarch, the admiral in the cosmic battle between order and disorder.
So, the opening of the Parashara Hora goes, Sarvatmacha Divanato, which translates roughly as, The Sun is the Lord of All.
This is a thousand-year-old guidebook to astrology.
So, okay, the techniques that I was taught for, quote-unquote, reading birth charts, they were really about self-help or, you know, individual fate.
And, you know, my classmates and I were always told that this elite level of public astrology where you would be advising, you know, prime ministers and so on, was way beyond our grasp in this lifetime, especially because we were, you know, stupid and Western.
However, I am able to confidently retrodict exactly what the astrologers told Modi.
Okay, this is what they told him, that if the Kumbh Mela was blessed by a—and I might get a job out of this actually—if the Kumbh Mela was blessed by a strong Jupiter and an exalted Sun, that the health of the country would surge under the gaze of a leader whose perfect strength and authority would never be questioned.
Jupiter would bless him with health and adulation, and the sun would uphold his reign, and flood his soul with so much wisdom it would overflow in his paternal gaze upon the nation.
Oh, you're good at that.
Yeah, well... You have the training.
Yeah, I could have run with it, and I didn't.
I mean, I could hear a million little thumbs tapping on phones right now that are going to correct all of the things you got wrong.
Absolutely there are!
Well, that's the thing, is that, well, there's the famous statement from Petrarch, which is, you know, the stars never lie, but astrologers lie about the stars, right?
So, look, there's all these meanings.
Have you guys ever heard, however, of the boon of Vaak Siddhi?
No.
Okay, so this basically translates as the boon of perfect speech.
And here's where I think we have to really, you know, dig into what's happening with public communications and the Modi government, okay?
So, you know, beyond all of the meanings of the Jupiter and the Sun, You know, there's a confluence going on between astrology and propaganda.
And I'll just sort of preface this by saying that when I learned Jyotish, one of the main things that I had to do as a budding student was to recite tens of thousands of mantras.
So, this is, remember, in the oral pedagogy of Iron Age Vedic culture where chanting texts is at the root of holding the culture's knowledge.
And you don't just hold the knowledge, you become the knowledge by your ability to chant and pronounce.
Now, the theory was that if you wanted to really understand the meaning of the Sun and all of its interconnections, all of its meanings, all of its relevances, you had to call upon the name of the Sun you know, many, many times that that's how you could empower the planet or the planet would empower you with its special knowledge.
So the sun required a tribute of 40,000 repetitions of Om Surya Yanamaha or something like that.
That would be the simplest one.
And then if you, if you wanted some special insight, you know, particular insight into the way the sun influenced the health of people's bodies, then the mantra would have to be longer and it would have to loop in one of the tissues.
Sun governs bone tissue, by the way.
So, for Mars, there was 27,000 that you had to recite to understand.
For Jupiter, there were 18,000.
Derek, it feels like you're exasperated.
I'm wondering how many Chiron you have.
Is Chiron part of this system?
No.
It's not.
We avoided that.
So anyway, if you committed yourself to this really obsessive, and I have to say like really evocative too, like I would put myself into a trance state and meditate on the beauty of Jupiter.
And all of its colors, and all of its meanings, and its connections, and yeah.
But anyway, if you did that, the planet would begin to speak to you about the past and the future.
Wow, this is like plant medicine stuff, like the plants speaking to you.
I mean, it's very, it's always this idea that there are these entities speaking to you through initiations.
So dude, you've done that.
That's your whole thing, right?
No plant has ever spoken to me.
No, but the animism translates across these different methodologies.
Yes, exactly.
So, I mean, back at this point, this zealous study wasn't about analyzing people or situations.
It was really about absorbing a kind of mythological paradigm in a language.
A language of archetypes, to find those archetypal energies within myself, to see what aspects of the Sun or Jupiter or Mars or the Moon needed help within me.
So, it was like this grad level course in ancient literature and Jungian psychology.
Okay, next question.
Have you guys heard of Prashna?
Okay.
Prashna means basically, I think it just means to ask a question.
And so this is a form of sort of like instant divination where the astrologer kind of takes a bet on whether or not they can tell something interesting about a person based upon not about their birth chart, but about what's happening right now in the sky.
And so we used to be tested on this, you know, where in class the teacher would draw up the chart for that moment and he would put it on the board, you know, 4.18 p.m., the date and so on.
And he would draw out the chart and then he would point to me and he would say, okay, what does this chart tell you about your fellow student?
Right.
And so this was also there's also a kind of like, you know, unskilled group psychotherapy dynamic going on in this as well.
And so, you know, I would look at the I would look at the all of the combinations and where everything was and I would like sort of make this I would go inside and I would I would chant some mantras and I would make and I would make a guess and I remember the first time I did this I hit the jackpot.
Because he had asked me, you know, can you can you tell me something about your fellow student?
And I said, I think she has injured her shoulder, her right shoulder.
And of course, she turns around and she says, how did you know what happened?
How did you do that?
And it was in moments like that, which, by the way, kind of marked through Just sort of repetition and sort of cultural accumulation.
Who had power in Jyotish circles, right?
So, the people who were at the top of my society were Robert Svoboda and Hart Defoe.
By the way, both of them thought that David Frawley was full of shit, right?
So, the other thing is that Especially around like white, you know, sort of importers of this.
They're also competing with each other about, you know, who's got the lineage.
Exactly, who's got the lineage.
Anyway, the thing was is that if Prashna was this kind of like show trick That the important astrologers would be able to pull off in public spaces in order to sort of validate their skills.
I remember one time, Hart Defoe pointed at somebody and said, you know, I think you should call your partner at home and see whether or not the milk in the fridge has gone off.
And this person got up and phoned their partner and said, and the partner said, yeah, the milk just was past due like yesterday and it's all chunky and stuff.
And how do you know?
And I don't know.
I don't know.
They had a conniption.
It's the position of Jupiter.
Right, I don't know, something happened with the moon.
Anyway, I'm telling all of this because the capacity to have this intuitive insight is actually the goal, it's the prize of the contemplative practice.
Right?
So the only reason that I got the shoulder thing right according to this framework was that I had devoted myself to the contemplation of the factors that played heavily within that chart, right?
Yeah.
So, I'm telling you this because at the highest ranks, Indian astrologers convince themselves that this type of intensive mantra practice can bestow them with something called Vaak Siddhi, which is the boon of speech.
And what it means is that it's a divine guarantee that whatever comes out of the astrologer's mouth will either be true or it will become true.
So if you think about that for a moment, it's like here is a contemplative spiritual training system that holds out the possibility that the adept will be able to open their mouths at a certain point and intuitively say something and that it will be reality or it will become reality, right?
So people who think they possess this gift also believe that it's impossible for them to lie.
So if you flip this on its head and you consider what it means for the BJP government to tell people to stop saying things on Facebook or Twitter, it's not just run-of-the-mill suppression.
What's happening is that we're also looking at this deeply devotional culture in which speech has mystical power, and in which the reporting of bad news can be seen as uttering a curse.
And conversely, if you fill the world with divine sounds, and of course the Kumbh Mela would have been this mass gathering of You know, the production, the oral production of billions of mantras, that that in itself would purify the world.
It's so strange, this battle between astrologers, because no American yogis claim to have any insights, divine insights into yoga.
There's no competition there.
You know, I don't want to take away anything from your obvious psychic powers, Matthew.
Right.
But talking of intuition, talking of Talking of intuition about that shoulder injury, and this is something someone like Ramachandran would point out.
was that you could have just noticed their movement patterns and filed it subconsciously at some point.
And that's the thing, that's what gets me about this whole intuition that people get so ruffled by the fact that it's just pattern recognition.
It's pattern recognition and repetition that becomes intuition that develops your framework.
Well, and the thing is that the repetition of the mantra study might actually be, I don't know, it might prime one neurologically for pattern recognition.
I mean, the whole study of Joe Tish is about pattern recognition, but the patterns don't actually reflect anything in the real world, right?
And so they have to become more intense, they have to become more complex, they have to be more and more interpretable because they don't actually refer to anything.
That's what I, I worked for a year.
My first job in New York City was as a crossword puzzle editor and I worked for a magazine called Dell, which is.
You've done so many weird things, man.
You say after just telling that story.
Right, right.
Yeah.
It's what you find at every supermarket, the 99-cent Crossword Puzzle books.
And they have a number of magazines and one of them is Dell Astrology, which was at the time at least the biggest astrology magazine in the country.
So, I became friends with the editor and I got quite into it at that time.
She would read my chart and talk to me about things.
And so, I have this history with it.
But, you know, and I actually read a number of books at it at that time and I got really into it, not in terms of reading, just by fascination.
But what you realize is that when you read these books about this conjunction caused this and that was a wonderful time or a horrible time, that when it was a wonderful time that they're pointing out, They just don't talk about the horrible time it was for people in other countries.
You can always find good things and bad things on any day for any given number of people, so talk about pattern recognition.
You're saying it does this, and then you're going out and finding it.
The Jyotish answer to that is on the cross-referencing between the natal chart and the chart of the day.
Sure.
No, no, but there is a way.
I mean, they've gotten around that problem by creating this very complex way of having what's happening in the sky at the present moment intersect with the natal chart, and that would produce, obviously, an infinite variety of impacts.
Yeah, if you are sophisticated enough in your complex analysis, you can explain how anything, right, constellates in these particularly complicated ways.
I was really interested, Derek, and I feel like I don't know how it is for you.
I know for myself, in my 20s, even though I was taking plenty of psychedelics, I was also reading a lot of Alan Watts, and I was reading a lot of Joseph Campbell.
And I feel like those influences took me in 100% the opposite direction of any of this kind of stuff.
Even though I was in the New Age world, none of it ever hooked me.
I was always like, no, it's not about that.
It's about these other, you know, fascinating, more psychological or even like contemplative, Alan Watts' approach to Zen always seemed to be pointing at something that was so far beyond the kind of kitsch New Age literalism, that that always, you know, appealed to me so much more.
Well, exactly.
I was reading the same things and I was also reading astrology.
I've always been interested in a lot of different things, but let's think about Jung, for example, who actually crosses these worlds in many ways.
And even when he, one of his last books, which a lot of people don't know about, was on UFOs.
And even his interpretation of it was that UFOs are a collective archetypal projection as we started space travel.
So even within the mysticism, there was always something grounding about a lot of his analyses.
Besides, you can argue, maybe dreams.
But besides that, And that, again, Campbell could get a little more into the mystic, but Watts did such a good job of bringing you back into and grounding you.
And that, when I mentioned earlier about the psychedelics and how I could have gone into that world, but I was pulled back, I definitely attribute a lot of that to Watts, because what he instilled is something that I find so little of in this whole industry we talk about, which is humility.
Two of the, I would say, wayward directions that I've gone in my life weren't about any kind of attraction to anything that I felt was outlandish.
When I was attracted to Tibetan Buddhism through Michael Roach, I thought that his understanding of medieval Tibetan philosophy was legitimate, and I thought that it came out of a monastic that resonated with my own Catholic scholasticism and my respect for monastic knowledge and stuff like that.
And the thing about Jyotish is that I was taught by a guy who was also in medical school and who did not present charismatically and who was very, very careful interpersonally
and was very conservative, it seemed, with his approach to this thing and really laid it out as though it were a reasonable intervention.
intellectual and psychological endeavor.
And so I think I was really snagged by pseudo-intellectualism, not by mysticism.
The Jab, our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
One persistent theme in how misinformation is spread about vaccines centers around misunderstandings or distortions of jargon-laden scientific documents.
I've talked on the podcast before about the practice of cherry-picking studies from PubMed without any surrounding context, as if these represent a kind of smoking gun on the dangers of vaccines.
As you may know, PubMed is the searchable database that gives open access to a vast digital archive of studies that originate as often in highly reputable journals as in the misleading in-house materials created by anti-vax groups, alternative medicine projects, or paranormal societies.
Merely looking at a single link on PubMed does not necessarily give one any kind of comparative basis or timeline history on which to evaluate what that study appears to demonstrate and whether or not it is even relevant today.
Propaganda websites like SayerG's GreenMedInfo, for example, will still host collections of PubMed links to back up their pseudoscience claims because, obviously, top-secret big pharma conspiracies are best exposed by Google searches of publicly available databases.
Now related to this is another topic I've covered here, which is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, which is again a completely open online resource that accepts any and all reports of any possible side effect with zero barrier to entry.
This system is easily manipulated by the cadre of specialized personal injury lawyers who in turn exploit the vaccine court's very permissive attitude towards evidence in terms of awarding claims with an abundance of generosity and benefit of the doubt.
This led to immunologist and vaccine expert Paul Offit writing in his 2008 book, Autism's False Prophets, that public health officials were disappointed to learn that reports of autism to VAERS weren't coming from parents, doctors, nurses, or nurse practitioners, they were coming from personal injury lawyers.
For the lawyers, VAERS reports hadn't been a self-fulfilling prophecy, they'd been a self-generated prophecy.
The quote ends there.
Anna Kirkland's book, Vaccine Court, describes how these same reports can be, and are then cited, as evidence by those same lawyers.
Now VAERS is also vulnerable to being slanted by fabricated, exaggerated, or just mistaken claims of vaccine injury.
Anti-vax activists will then indiscriminately tally up all of these numbers to make outrageous and inflated statistical claims, while framing more carefully researched data as obviously an orchestrated cover-up.
Sadly, this is the price we pay, societally, for a government oversight seeking to gather and follow up on any potential unknown side effects, which was actually effective in the recent Johnson & Johnson case.
Which brings me to what started last month.
The latest anti-vax propaganda memes have targeted women's fears of losing pregnancies or becoming infertile.
But the data shows no fertility or pregnancy complications from the COVID vaccines.
And the alarming menstrual symptoms some women have experienced are in fact normal and temporary.
So the next wave of this fear-mongering posited that the spike proteins vaccinated people would create magically caused side effects in the unvaccinated.
This led to bizarre events like the Miami Sentinels Academy's policy against teachers getting their shots, which Matthew reported on, and some businesses posting signs saying they would refuse service to people who've been vaccinated.
I guess these folks feel that turnabout is fair play, and suddenly these fearless anti-mask COVID denialists are terrified of some kind of secondary contagion via vaccines.
Last week, Pfizer safety data sheets that have been circulated amongst medical professionals became the new smoking gun for this dreaded vaccine contagion because, of course, The sneaky medical cover-up would be on a printed document with the company letterhead at the top.
In this case, the focus was on Pfizer advising medical staff to report any incidents of what is called occupational exposure and also alerting staff to the danger of contagion with family members.
Along with this was the statement that such reports would be kept separate from trial data as they were seen as unrelated.
Sounds pretty ominous.
Well, not so much.
Digging into this, I found that occupational exposure is a general term that refers to any kind of contact with potentially hazardous materials in the workplace.
With regard to professionals who administer injections, the concern is largely about blood-borne pathogens like hepatitis and HIV.
Now as it turns out, coming into contact with other people's blood, especially while wielding a sharp instrument that might accidentally penetrate your own skin, does have potential hazards to healthcare workers.
And unlike HIV and hepatitis, COVID appears not to be spread by blood, but during a pandemic, standing close enough to vaccinate people, of course, carries some risk of airborne exposure.
Any of these pathogens, so COVID, hepatitis, HIV, would then potentially put family members and friends at risk, but not because of something dangerous about the vaccines themselves or the spike proteins that the vaccinated people are producing, which is why these sorts of reports would not be included in trial data.
So, let's put that one to bed.
And remember, cherry-picked data is often a source of confusing scientific terminology that can create a false impression, especially when we're psychologically primed to interpret it that way.
Context, definitions, and sources really matter in terms of considering what scary-sounding information actually means.
After a long trip across a tumultuous Atlantic Ocean, the Blundell Hunter lands on the shore of Old Harbor, Jamaica. - Yeah.
After two days in Morant Bay, the old ship proceeded to another part of the island to transport indentured servants to the Clarendon Plantation.
261 Indian natives set foot on island soil for the first time.
Never again would Jamaica be the same.
An article in the Falmouth Post states that these Indians were immediately embraced by Africans on the island, themselves ancestors of men and women transported across the same ocean, but as slaves.
Indian relations with the colonizing British, like the Africans, would not be sympathetic or friendly, and so the oppressed brethren became fast friends.
Among other things, they began sharing songs.
We often think that music moves in a straight line, but that's rarely ever the case.
This unique story about the history of reggae is a case in point.
Slavery ended in 1834 in Jamaica, which was followed by a six-year apprenticeship in which former slaves would basically be indentured servants.
As that time ran up, many Africans stayed on the farms to work for low wages as they had nowhere else to turn.
Yet groups of freed slaves began forming what would eventually become Nyabinghi communities, living from the soil and sun the way their ancestors had, reconnecting with the land and tossing aside the forced religion of their keepers.
British-controlled India became a prime target for laborers as Jamaican farm owners needed cheap workers.
Employed for a 54-hour work week, the newcomers were quickly tasked with grueling field duties for meager pay.
Some were transported with promises of employment on tea farms, like those in Calcutta.
Only to be disappointed to find themselves in the thick of coffee and sugar fields, of which they had no experience farming.
The Indians and Africans were not fully people in the political sense of the word, so their camaraderie was part of a necessary social cohesion.
In the book Home Away From Home, a compelling look at the complex history of Indians in Jamaica, Lakshmi and Ajay Mansingh tell us that both of these cultures were the product of natural theologies.
Which would go on to help define the great revival movement on the island in the 1860s and 70 years later, the Rastafari movement.
Rastas were in many ways cross-cultural yogis, though that history is rarely told.
Today, Rastas are known globally in large part due to the late dreadlocked cannabis-smoking Bob Marley.
Few images have made an impact as broad and as important to liberation movements across the world as this warrior, and his music continues to be shared, explored, listened to, and remixed.
Yet few people realize the influence India had on the movement behind the man, which in turn helped to create the music.
Consider Samson, one of the most important figures in Rastafarian symbolism.
Born to a sterile woman as prophesied by an angel, Samson's father was told not to shave or cut the child's hair.
The young warrior ended up killing numerous Philistines before being tricked by a second wife and forced to have his matted hair sheared.
Samson's unbounded strength rested in his locks.
The act of shaving it annulled him of his invincibility.
The Philistines then gouged out his eyes.
He was eventually murdered, although while in prison his dreadlocked hair had returned.
This symbolism meant that this great warrior was ultimately freed.
He was no longer psychologically captive to the forces that oppressed him.
Rasta's champion Samson as an act of defiance to British authority, growing their hair in what the elders called zagavi.
But we need look no further than to Hindu sadhus to find a correlation.
These mendicants, inspired by the god Shiva, had been growing their hair in dreads for thousands of years in a style called jatawi.
Shiva also twisted his hair when paying homage to snakes, which are considered to be symbolic of sacred energy inherent in human beings.
Interestingly, early Rastas did not often grow dreadlocks.
The symbol of their defiance was in unkempt woolly beards, which was another tribute to Samson.
As the mythologies of Christianity and Hinduism entwined, however, Rastas began to wear their hair in long locks.
Numerous other symbols became so integrated into Rasta consciousness that they were attributed to the exclusive territory of Africa instead of the fusion of forms with India.
One is Tandi, a cold drink that Indians made from Bang or Ganja.
Indians have long had a strong affinity towards sweets, and this blend of sugar, milk, and cannabis was a common beverage choice.
In fact, marijuana wasn't even on the island of Jamaica until Indians brought it with them.
Another sadhu trait, smoking the sacred chalice, also found a home in Jamaica.
Cannabis' 5,000 year history in the Indus Valley as a stimulant and medicine predates usage in Jamaica or anywhere in the Caribbean, making it an important introduction to what will become an autonomous society.
Besides this exhilarating drink, Indian cuisine heavily influenced Ital cooking.
The Ayurvedic concept of balanced food preparation proved important for the strict dietary guidelines of the Nyabinghi and later Rastas.
For the most part, it excluded chemicals, additives, and preservatives, and often some forms of meat, and sometimes even all forms of meat.
Again, the arrow points toward biblical diet in popular texts.
But realistically, a 2,000-year-old book with brief, rather general passages about nutrition could not have inspired the exquisite and well-spiced dishes that Indians helped create.
Let's consider one more idea.
While some African traditions were passed down over the four centuries since being enslaved in the Caribbean, chances are many spiritual practices were destroyed by Christian missionaries.
The easiest way to indoctrinate an individual, and by extension their culture, is to rewrite their understanding of the universe.
This can be done through physical intimidation and forced education, though the most effective means is through language.
Africans went from having a rich philosophy that taught regeneration of existence, as well as a deep respect for all aspects of nature, into a specific form of religion that explicitly states that no matter what you do in this life, it's only preparatory for what lies after.
What the Indians brought with them, and what changed the psychology of Jamaicans, was the concept of karma.
The word comes from the Sanskrit karman, and implies that your actions affect what happens to you.
They leave imprints on the present moment that essentially create who you are.
When these imprints become a pattern, the individual is habituated into believing their way of reality is a reflection of how reality is supposed to be.
Through right action and effort, you can liberate your mind from dangerous cycles such as this.
This is really where the intersection of Buddhism and the philosophy that inspired Buddha, which was yoga, come into contact with Christian thinking.
So the philosophy that Indian workers brought with them, which empowered African Jamaicans to form their own communities, was the notion that liberation was available right here in this lifetime.
None of this is to downplay the obvious African connection that future generations of Rastas felt toward Ethiopia, for example.
Yet the influence of Indians has been forgotten over time.
which is a shame given the beautiful merging of cultures that resulted in Jamaica's great expression to the world, musically and philosophically, which is reggae.
In many ways, reggae is the forefather of hip-hop, given the Caribbean roots of some of the genre's founders, as well given the Caribbean roots of some of the genre's founders, as well as the toasters speaking and rhyming over records at dance halls in Kingston Yards, making the undiscovered influence of Indian culture a truly
That's another story for another time.
I'm sharing this story because it points to another relic from ancient Indian philosophy that in today's heavily bifurcated world we often overlook.
The interconnectedness of the people of this world.
Music defines us.
Some of the oldest archaeological wares ever discovered are instruments.
It's highly likely that language evolved from the musical impulse, a trait humans share with whales, birds, and insects to varying degrees.
Although music and language are separate domains now, music is and always will be a form of communication.
Sometimes tribalistic, sometimes romantic.
Sometimes universal.
Always aspirational.
And that's why, as we'll explore in more depth in next week's episode, music has been used by cults as an indoctrination device, a secret language shared by initiates, and one that sometimes connects devotees to a charismatic leader.
I could honestly geek out on music all day, and thankfully I get to during my conversation with Devandra Banhart, who's another big fan of international music.
The first half of the talk you're about to hear is about our shared passion for world artists, and then we get into the conspiritualist world of anti-vaxxers, charlatans, and $24 smoothies in Malibu during the second half of our talk.
Born in Houston, Devandro was raised by his Venezuelan mother in her homeland before returning to live in California as a teenager.
He's toured extensively, playing at renowned venues like Carnegie Hall, Bonnaroo, Coachella, and the Hollywood Bowl.
Besides numerous collaborations, he's released 10 albums, including 2013's Mala, 2016's Ape in Pink Marble, and 2019's Ma.
And, as he reveals during his talk, he just finished work on his 11th record, his first Ambien album.
Besides music, Devandra is an artist whose work has been featured in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Center for Fine Arts in Brussels, and recently his first solo show at Nicodeme Gallery right here in Los Angeles.
His sound and life are as diverse as one can imagine, in part fueled by his lifelong love of Brazilian music, kawali, jazz, and I have to say he's always posting great vinyl on his Instagram page.
It was a real pleasure chatting with Devandra, and I hope you enjoy this long-ranging conversation about music, life, conspirituality, and the passion that we all share for the things that we love the most.
and how, of course, we keep pursuing them.
It's getting too late to tell if it's too soon And the future's being born right here in this room Press the button of world peace And wipe out everything but the moon Thank you for joining.
I've been a fan for a very long time, so when we started communicating on Instagram, it was just a surprise, and it was awesome to see that we both live in Los Angeles, first of all, but that we also share so many musical similarities.
I mean, you're influenced by Nusrat.
Caetano Veloso, which was huge, and I want to talk a little bit actually about Tropicalia.
Alla Farcatore, who I actually produced one of Via's records.
Molly is my musical haven.
Let's kind of start with music and expand out from there.
But I know you grew up a fan of Caetano and ended up working with him.
So, how was that?
Oh wow, that was amazing, of course!
What a wild dream come true.
I still can't really believe that that even happened.
Because I've been alive for long and say like that happened some time ago when I first met him and Then I've been alive.
I feel like I just should have kind of died right then, you know Wow, I met this person who I kind of modeled everything I ever wanted to do by you know, this person I was so deeply influenced by as a kid So I'm very grateful for my father,
who played me Nuzra Fatelicana, Ali Farkaturé, who played me Nuzra Fatelicana, Ali Farkaturé, César Évora.
And then he bought that compilation that David Byrne made called Tropical Truth, that had basically a wonderful introduction to so much Brazilian music.
like Giberto Gil, Osmo Tantes, George Bing, and Caetano, right?
And so I just hear Caetano go, oh this is it.
It was just that moment, you know, this is what I want to do, this is it.
Then, of course, he's just Such an incredible lyricist, such an incredible writer.
I read his book, his film.
He's an incredible filmmaker and just this very erudite kind of pedagogue, you know, I think is like just so interesting.
Talk about every subject.
And when we went to Brazil, we were Introduced.
And it was an awkward introduction because it was like in, like at a press conference.
So there's just like, you know, and it almost looked like those, you know, 60s and 70s press conference they would do with bands and where there's, you're on a table and there's a bunch of microphones and a bunch of press, you know, it's this classic kind of cinematic press conference.
And there I am kind of meeting Kaitano like that the first time.
So it was really awkward.
First meeting, certainly wasn't able to actually be myself.
But then later we're playing a show and it's a festival in Brazil and it's going on and on.
We kept getting bumped, you know, because of whatever.
The bands kept playing longer and longer, and I know Gaetano's there, and I'm so nervous.
I'm so nervous.
The whole band's nervous.
We're so excited Gaetano's there.
We see him.
Oh, hi, Gaetano.
So thanks for coming to the show.
Okay, well, we're playing around, you know, 11, and then it turns into 11.30, 12, 1, 2 in the morning.
And we're exhausted.
We're falling asleep.
And at least we're thinking, at least Guy Dino's not here.
So this is great.
So we play this show.
We're just trying not to fall asleep.
We're also jet lagged.
And we're done at 3.30 in the morning.
And we're all seriously just, like we have jaundice.
We're so out of it.
And we're so happy.
He couldn't have seen that show because it was so awful.
And who comes walking backstage?
Gaetano.
And he goes, guys, that was awful, but I loved it.
That was my first meeting with Gaetano.
Then the next day we rearranged to go to a favela with Gaetano.
So going to a favela of Caetano is like so heavy, so profound.
A favela is, of course, the most impoverished, dangerous part of Brazil.
It's really not recommended to just kind of wander into a favela because it has its own kind of rules, you know, its own kind of policing system and the whole thing.
But we're there with Caetano Veloso, you know, this is the kind of iconic, you know, One of the greatest living artists of all of Brazilian history, you know, and we're there with him and people cannot believe it.
It was really like seeing Santa Claus.
People were so happy to see Gaetano there.
He was very charming, very, very nice.
And we're just kind of popping in houses because so many of these houses are all built right next to each other with kind of a lot of open windows that seem to kind of, it's like this, it's almost like the Medina in Morocco or something.
You know, everything's kind of weaving and winding into it and as you walk through you can see into people's houses and suddenly Cayetano's walking by and just kind of waving and just bringing this joy to people.
And then it's getting late and suddenly we start to see fireworks and we're like, wow, fireworks!
This is like so joyful, this incredible experience.
We've heard that, you know, favelas are so kind of dangerous.
And then they're like, no, no, no, I'm sorry, that's machine guns.
They're shooting at us because they heard that there's someone kind of very big over here.
And then like, but and we're like, OK, and I go, don't worry.
And then they pull out their guns and like, OK, we're safe.
All right, great.
Well, if I'm going to get shot, I want it to be with Gaetano at least.
So I pulled this out because I knew I was going to be I was flipping through.
Flipping through it again, and I will go as far to say as I almost enjoy his writing more than his music, and I love his music.
But what a writer.
Yeah, incredible writer.
What an intro.
It's been quite some time, but if I remember correctly, the intro is something like, if I'd had it my way, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe would have never been stars.
The first line of his autobiography is hilarious.
Um, and also, you also, I was listening this morning to Red Hot in Rio.
Marissa Monte is just Tribalistas, that record the first one, I mean they have three, but that first record Constant but that first record Constant
repeat the entire year it came out and I actually, I mean you're half Venezuelan and I know a little about Venezuelan music but it has not broken through internationally to the level of you're right next to Colombia and Peru and Brazil and but you seem to have really embedded in Brazilian music.
And I wonder if, is there a lot of crossover with Venezuelan music, or is that just something out of life's path you happen to stumble into? - I grew up in Venezuela and the main music of Venezuela, there aren't that many kind of individual songwriters that are doing their individual there aren't that many kind of individual songwriters that are doing
There's, of course, there's a lot, but it's, there's a lot of the kind of, like, the main genre is salsa and merengue and cumbia, and it's kind of party music, you know?
And so there isn't that many people doing this, like, the voice of the poet kind of thing.
The main person, the most famous one, is named Simon Diaz.
And Simon Diaz, in fact, Caetano covers one of his songs and has written about Simon.
Simon had the most incredible voice and he was kind of this Father figure in many ways.
A cultural father figure for sure.
He was like on cereal boxes and on TV.
He had a TV show.
He's a comedian.
All around person who made you kind of feel that there was some hope and made you feel kind of proud to be Venezuelan because nothing else in the culture makes you feel any optimism for the way that the country operates or is going or for your own safety.
At one point it was the most dangerous place on the planet.
So I'd say it's a very, very horrible situation, but it's been horrible since I've been alive.
But the Brazilian music, it wasn't something that was on the airwaves.
It was more kind of, it's like the very fabric of Venezuelan existence is salsa, cumbia and merengue.
I mean, it's like so ubiquitous, almost impossible to kind of go down the street.
My associations with Venezuela, if I get into a very kind of just sensual memory zone, it's diesel and manure and salsa.
Yeah.
It's also a funny place because it's pretty much the Caribbean and the unsustainability of the human footprint is so prevalent when you're in a tropical setting because the jungle is eating you.
It's like entropy at its most tangential and visceral because once the night time hits, and I'm sure you've been in many tropical settings, you can hear those crickets.
Yeah, and they sound like the violins in Psycho.
And they're just slowly getting you.
Everything is rusting.
Everything is just getting eaten up by the land.
And you see it really clearly there.
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
There's one other artist that I don't know if you have any relationship with or I haven't seen you sight, but when I listen to some of your music, it really, it also connects me with him.
It's Ardo Lindsay.
No, Ardo's a friend.
Art is a friend. - That's good to hear that there was some, I mean, it's just, there's something with the way you play because I don't hear I mean, it's just, there's something with the way you play because I don't hear in, even in your non-Brazilian music, but there's a way that he plays with the bass and the drum and the sound of it with the guitar and the vocal that I hear
So that connection has always struck me Wow, that's very that's a huge compliment, but I'm so far from as innovative and original and Interesting, as Ardo is, in every respect.
And watching him play is like, wow, it really is an incredible balance between something very avant-garde and something that is completely mellifluous and accessible.
You know, it's very difficult to do that.
Yes.
And it's taking him a long time.
Early with DNA is a little bit maybe more confrontational, a little A little less melodic, but then over the years it's just evolved into something where it's, you're seeing a new way of playing the guitar, a very unorthodox way of playing the guitar, a very dynamic way of playing the guitar, a very punk way of playing the guitar, but then also something you can really, but also melodic and something you can really enjoy and something sensual.
That's really hard to do.
You know, it's like, wow, it's really hard to be jagged and and smooth and soft at the same time.
- Our artist does it quite.
- Yeah, I love that guy.
And you have a band, I mean, you have a musical project, which is, like, tell me about that.
- I'm a producer in the traditional sense, and I don't play an instrument, I DJ, but I think of instrumentation, I write the lyrics, some of the lyrics.
I work on parts and things like that.
My partner in that, Duke, he was a founding member of Stomp on Broadway.
He's kind of a percussion master and he plays every instrument.
So it's just fantastic.
So, yeah, that that was sort of our we don't we don't we might have a new single coming out, but in generally we've kind of drifted.
He's on a whole other path.
And I'd focus on my Podcasting my full-time work, but yeah, it was just that was always a fun project for me Do you do you do the interstitial music on conspiratoriality?
Yes, that's all stuff we've created.
Yeah, that flute gets stuck in my head all the time.
The end part, I'm like... It's fabulous.
And so yeah, as you were saying at the beginning about knowing a little, maybe a bit, of my music, I am a huge fan, since the beginning of Conspiratuality.
It's such important work, I gotta say, it's really important work.
Thank you.
I really appreciate that.
That means a lot.
And it's that we didn't create the music for the pod.
Those are all songs that we have that I just chopped up for the pod.
So I'll I'll I'll send you the track with the flute so you can hear it in context.
Yeah, yeah.
That'd be great.
That'd be great.
But but one more musician and then I want to open up into a broader conversation.
But I mean, Nosrat is my life.
I don't think it's strange sometimes when I meet people and a white kid from New Jersey's favorite music in the world is Qawwali music.
I
can't explain being in a Kuali, whether it's in someone's living room in that community or at an actual concert performance in Queens where most of them happened in New York.
There's Nothing.
We're in Morocco.
I saw the artist I sent you, Faiz Ali Faiz, I got to see perform twice in Fez, which was mind blowing.
So how did you get into Qawwali in Nusrat?
How was that introduced to you?
And how do you feel about Qawwali in general?
Well, I was introduced by my father who got that record, the Peter Gabriel record.
My father played it for me when we were just driving around and I really felt like the seat was levitating, you know?
I really felt like the seat was levitating.
I had one of my first experiences where I could see the architecture of a song.
You know, I could see how a song is being built in real time.
And in some sense, that is kind of how those a lot of quality and a lot of, I suppose, ecstatic kind of ritual music is kind of created, right?
You begin with a very gentle setting of the scene.
You're kind of building the foundations of the building, and then slowly, slowly, slowly bringing things to a finer, finer, more concentrated point until there's this explosion of energy.
����
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That from then on I felt like I could, I had a better understanding of the shape of a song and you see the structure of the song seems so important and it doesn't have to be a particular way it just has to have aspire to even get to that spot you know kind of blew my mind I'd never heard anything like that.
One thing you said reminded me of an interview I did a long time ago with Bill Oswell which was when he said that three minute songs are not Is not music.
It's an invention, which, I mean, is arguable.
We wouldn't have Manu Chao without a three minute song.
So, you know, I don't fully agree with it, but it is two minutes, 59 seconds long.
The song, me, by the way, I like short.
His point was we were talking about the ritual of music and we were actually, I believe, talking about Felicuti at the time, for example, because an Afrobeat song, it takes 10 minutes for them to actually get into the groove.
It's all preliminary getting into that, which makes me think about the ritual aspect of music.
So I'll pull back a little bit and ask you, like, what is it about music that sucked you in and made you devote your life to it?
Well, I totally understand the purpose of a very, very long song.
Like you said, there's a preliminary mood being set before we get to the real teaching, which is, you know, that's a structure that is implemented in a variety of different practices.
I mean, it's just how you learn anything.
You start off nice and slow, here's the general idea, and then let's get into the main teaching.
And whatever discipline it is.
I mean, you just cook rice until you can learn how to make sushi or something.
Something like that, right?
So, Othello's song is of course about The time, it's like there's no quick fix either, too.
You know, you got to work it out.
Like, you know, I think I've heard you mention the word flow, flow state, right?
And it's like you cannot just immediately get into the flow state.
You're just immediately there.
It takes some time.
You're moving into it.
And it's kind of a little bit of a trudge.
It's a little tough sometimes.
Maybe you're not in the mood.
Maybe you don't want to do it.
And then, you know, 10, 15, 20 minutes.
Then, whoa, there you are.
Suddenly you've entered this space.
So, you know, that's those initial chords, the initial scene being set.
Okay.
Like, Thela is a perfect example.
It's like a NewsRad song kind of thing, too, where we just get into pure ecstatic Presence that's just vibratory at such a physical level.
And I need to listen to more Fela.
I really need more Fela right now.
So thank you for that.
I think I'm going to listen to "Fella" for the rest of the afternoon.
My go-to is "Trouble Sleep, Young Awake Young Awake AM" which is, I think, one of the greatest songs ever written.
And that song, it's like 10 minutes in where the chorus even begins, right?
But that's 10 minutes in!
And you know, another person that did that Actually, in a different way, it was Arthur Russell, where the song is just going, going, going, going, and then the hook comes in for two seconds and disappears, too.
So this kind of music, too, that requires, like, you know, put you in a trance, and yet it requires a type of attention.
So that's kind of an interesting thing to be able to accomplish.
But my experience with music is that it all was born through poetry.
My interest in poetry.
I just care about poetry.
I care about getting Do a little bit of music as the platform for the words.
And my favorite type of poetry is short.
Haikus.
I like it real short.
Give me four words.
I mean, give me like one word.
One of my favorite poems.
Is it Oswaldo de Andrade or Mario de Andrade?
Oh, I'm going to mess this up.
But the poem is Amor.
It's titled Amor.
And the poem is Humor.
Okay.
It's a title and one word poem.
Perfect.
And so I kind of feel like that's where I've been coming from with the music.
It's like, how do you make it as short as possible?
And all of my favorite songs, in terms of like a pop song or a songwriter song, I love the short song.
I love the simple song.
And my kind of musical heroes, I think do that really beautifully, like, obviously, um, Caetano Veloso and, um, you know, Laurie Anderson.
I have a Laurie shirt.
And, um, you know, like, like someone who I think also uses poetry to express sorrow in a humorous way is, um, Don Van Vliet.
And Captain Beefheart did that really, really beautifully.
You know, and this is like an interesting and this is like an interesting song, but it's still accessible.
And the poem and the words are the most important element.
And so that's always been like, okay, that's what I'm trying to do with the music I make.
Now she's leaving.
Congregation.
Congregation.
Left the abyss.
Suppocation.
She's been dreaming.
Relocation.
There's this spiritual bypassing that has been happening.
And if you've listened to the podcast, we point it out often.
But, you know, you were born in a sense given a name of the variation of Indra and your parents had a guru that they followed.
And so, you know, and I love your middle name being a Star Wars reference personally.
So, um...
I don't know what your connection to India was, but there was something there and early on.
And then you you see all these people we talk about, these people who espouse a yoga lifestyle, but they're putting their efforts right now at anti-vaccination and monetizing fear.
And then I see crickets mentioning anything what's happening in India right now.
So how does that make you feel?
Oh, well, it's you actually said it in a Very coherent way.
You had a post where you mentioned that you don't often talk about privilege, but to see somebody practicing yoga and just saying that all you need is some vitamin D and a little downward dog and you don't need a vaccine, where, you know, all the while somebody's entire families are being wiped away every moment in the birthplace of yoga.
It's incredibly harmful.
It's so harmful.
It's incredibly dangerous.
And it's one of those things where I've been thinking about the vaccine.
I'm vaccinated.
I'm very happy to be vaccinated.
I don't know why I never for a second thought.
I mean, all you have to do is look up what the history of what is a vaccine.
And there you go.
It seemed pretty simple.
Why not get vaccinated?
But I also it's been a tough one because I got some I have friends that are that I'm close with that are not being vaccinated.
That's one thing.
I have thoughts about that.
But then to be somebody who's encouraging others to not get vaccinated, or trying to propose some alternative to it, is so incredibly dangerous.
You have to fully double down on believing that you're correct.
Because if not, you'll be faced with the reality that you're really harming other people.
So it creates this extra madness.
And that's what's really interesting about about even conspirituality and the subject itself, the intersection between New Age and the kind of conspiracies and New Age exploitation and abuse of people's economic existence and the intersection between New Age and the kind of conspiracies and New Exploitation and abuse of people's economic existence and lives themselves.
I mean, the cult element to it, absolutely.
And I often think about this, like, when I'm listening to Conspirituality, I'm thinking, oh, geez Louise, like, am I in a cult?
Let me go for a jog.
And then I get back and I go, you know what, I should probably do yoga.
And maybe I'm in a cult.
So maybe like, Derek and Julian can like help me how to like learn how to do yoga and Matthew can just help deprogram me when I'm ready to get out of my cult.
So I don't know but like with the anti-vaxxing thing this obsession too with anti-vaxxing is really strange too.
It's almost like the Q thing too like they're very very passionate and obsessed with it And it's baseline very, very sad that that obsession, that passion isn't being channeled into helping provide homes and treatment for homeless people, or ending domestic abuse, or ending the exploitation of indigenous people, or deforestation, or climate change.
Wouldn't that be amazing if Q or CodeMonkey, I guess, would start posting these totally philanthropic and compassionate posts?
You know what I mean?
But then, sadly, I think that people would move on immediately.
It's really seductive to think you've got the special information that no one else does, and it's really, really easy to hate.
To just hate something?
Hating is, like, really easy.
It makes life easier.
Like, high school you think was so difficult.
Oh, I hated high school.
But in reality, no, you probably think, most people think, like, oh, high school, like, I had it easy then, maybe.
But I've been thinking about this lately.
But really, it was actually horrible.
You were constantly being pressured.
And you had to write all these papers about shit that you don't care about and subjects that you weren't interested in.
But you hated some of those people.
And that made things really easy.
And then you get out of high school and you go, Oh, I'm meeting more community of people and it's possible that all my friends, the only thing we had in common is that we hated the same stuff.
So maybe now I can make relationships.
I can, I can, I can have relationships based on loving the same things.
How interesting, how nice.
And so you kind of like grow out of hating something.
You're supposed to grow out of hating things.
But it's also quite frightening because, you know, it makes life easier to hate something, is what I'm trying to say.
But back to how weird it feels to be vaccinated and to have some friends that are not being vaccinated.
Because I have at least four friends, maybe three or four friends who aren't getting vaccinated and I thought about how weird it feels to hear that from people that I genuinely love and respect.
And I know that they're fully aware of what a vaccine is and how it works.
You know, conspirituality has really helped me with how to approach that or, you know, how to speak to them about it.
And personally, one of the thoughts that I've had is that it's possible.
One of the reasons why they have that apprehension is because they're artists in America.
A place where it's so humiliating and laughed at to be an artist.
Where there's so little support for its artistic institutions that unless you're extremely successful, your work is a joke.
So maybe there's this kind of built-in, if all those people are doing it, no fucking way I'm doing it, reaction to getting vaxxed.
Meaning that when the society you grew up in has been devaluing you your whole life and is now telling you to do something, perhaps you subconsciously resist it.
You know, this is a small little thought, possibly.
Because it's like, I know my friends are aware of the science.
They must be aware that a vaccine is an incredible, incredible... It's like a magical invention when you look at it.
The way it works, it's like the way that people would write about alchemy and sorcery.
I've got the protein, and then we add this thing, and the way we learn how to program these bacteria, and then they shed their skin, and then it opens.
The entire drama and, yeah, I think almost near-magical process of creating a vaccine isn't something that science is hiding from the world and doesn't want to share.
It's all very, very easily accessible.
All you have to do is, you know, look it up, cross-check it, and then, you know, look towards the people that you admire that are doing it.
So, it seems so obvious to just take the vaccine.
Why are they not taking it?
That's actually one of the more interesting angles.
I think that could be an angle that I hadn't thought about.
I'm reading a book called The Musical Human right now by Michael Spitzer, which is it's about evolutionary biology and music and how biology evolution happened in great part because of music.
And there's there's a lot of previous.
Oh, look at that.
Okay, so did you get to the point?
I haven't started yet.
Okay, so part of the argument he's making in the book is that musical genius is a part of a disability culture.
Wow.
So his argument is that We raise up these very few heroes of music in part because we tell children they can't do music for their life.
Like, it's such not a part.
Whereas if you go back evolutionarily, music, language, dancing, culture, nature were all parts of the same thing.
It was a communication system.
So that devaluation that you talked about is very real, especially if you have the impulse, the biological impulse to want to create music, as it seems that you have.
Even though I don't play an instrument, I have it, which is why I take part in any capacity that I can.
Have you had conversations with them or has you seen any breakthroughs?
Well, I wish we were having this conversation just in a little bit because I'm approaching it very delicately because I don't want to attack anyone.
I don't want them to feel judged and I don't want to ostracize them or kind of further push them away from what I'm suspecting is that I've been an outsider my whole life just because I'm an artist and now even my artist friends are kind of against me.
So I'm just really don't want to push anyone away.
So I'm just doing this very gentle like so so Yeah, I just got my first shot Jeez, that was kind of hurt a little bit but excited for the second one.
No, I'm not saying anything.
Okay, okay and You what about you thinking you thinking of doing it?
I'm not so sure.
Oh, okay well Why?
Oh, you know, it's just, uh, maybe we don't know enough about it.
Okay.
Well, we do know that it's like almost 90, it's like 97 something percent effective.
And that's kind of how you protect other people as well, because obviously you could have it and not know it.
And then you give it to someone else.
No, I know about that stuff, but you just, you know, it's not, it's not out there.
Who knows what could happen.
Okay.
Okay.
So I'm not going to push, I'm pushing it.
And so then got my second shot.
Woo!
And then it's like the nerves of, I don't want to judge, but why are you not going to take it?
And it's just, maybe better we do it in person.
It's just very hard to see people in person right now.
It's this strange kind of slow, hopefully soon I'll get the full skivvy as to what it is, but I want to get an honest answer.
The few friends that I have that are vaccine either hesitant or definitely not going to take it, I want to hear the real honest answer and we're close enough that they could possibly tell me the real reason why they don't want to take it.
But I have to approach it in a way where they can really trust that I will not just make fun of them or something.
I don't know.
I've never been in this position in my entire life.
None of us have.
That's what's so challenging.
And I think that's kind of what I also find so interesting about conspirituality is that I, like you said, I grew up, I have an Indian name.
You know, I was named by my parents' guru, who then later became my teacher.
But I resisted that, of course, through my entire adolescence.
That's how it works, right?
Uh, and so, you know, and I had, and I'm, and I'm kind of, you know, I am a great candidate for conspirituality in that I go to Erewhon and ask to, can I pay double for this bark?
Because it just sounds cool.
Like I am into as esoteric a thing as can possibly be.
When I read the Wikipedia page for Kachari Mudra, I texted every friend I had and I was like, get your razor blades.
We're chopping our tongue.
We're chopping that thing in our tongue.
We're going to, we're going to stimulate the pineal gland, man.
We're doing it.
You know, like I'm so into it.
And, and, and so I think I'm like a good candidate for it.
There's a difference between spiritual practices and we can debate things like that, which isn't really the purpose and right wing extremism, which is the intersection.
I, I, I'm not seeing any racism or xenophobia coming from you, so.
Or purposeful anti-science monetization.
These are not things that I've ever seen coming from you.
But what is fascinating is seeing that those ideologies have infiltrated a scene that for my entire life has either been really helpful and really, really incredibly powerful and or totally harmless and kooky.
For most of my life, really up to this year, it's either something like, I don't want to say the real deal, but let's say a type of contemplative practice that's based on, you know, thousands of years of research and tradition, and then this like kooky, harmless New Age world.
And that's how those, it was a binary thing.
So then this new thing enters the scene, right?
And, and it was when actually the person I made this last record, this record with, uh, as one of my oldest friends and collaborators, but this ambient record is half his compositions, half mine.
And he started, he started noticing that there was this strange kind of QAnon anti-vax, like spiritual heart chakra, Trumpy bro appearing on social media.
And it was like these low cut shirts and a necklace with a bullet and a feather on it and like long drooping, I'm making fun, I'm sorry, long drooping beanies and big muscles and ohm tattoos.
By the way, it's one thing you do very well.
There's so much opportunity to make fun of so many of these people and you really do it in a very gentle way if you ever do it.
I really commend you to that.
I could never do that.
It's not easy.
It's not easy, honestly.
Honestly, because sometimes I'm a very sarcastic person, and sometimes I have that impulse, and sometimes I let it go a bit, and sometimes I draw it back.
Well, I think you do that dance really quite beautifully, because the opportunity is there.
there.
Yeah.
But it's that, yeah, this, this kind of, it's like, it is an appropriation of a tribal techno future primitive slash like come at me, bro, kind of guy generally that, that he started to notice, which seems strange to us. that he started to notice, which seems strange to us.
We're not used to seeing these, like, very big, muscly, kind of jockey guys with Sanskrit tattoos kind of vibe, you know?
Even though it makes sense now, but at the time it was very, very strange.
This Q thing is the quick fix that New Age tries to sell the world.
And actual spirituality is like the boring humdrum, unglamorous political process.
And because, like I was saying earlier, like getting into a flow state, it requires some effort.
There isn't, is there a pill called flow state?
No, but I'm sure that if I went to Erewhon, there's 500 bottles that say like, bliss state flow 100% now.
You know what I mean?
Featuring Shilajit and, and, and, and 500 mushrooms and that's it.
It's so seductive and easy and fun to just be able to buy the pill.
I mean, that's the classic thing.
But the reality of spiritual practice is that it's super unglamorous and boring.
Very much so.
You know, one thing that recurred throughout my many years of teaching is that a student, a new student who's a week or two into yoga would come up to me and they'd be super excited being like, this is changing my life.
I am, this is it.
I am going to be a new person, et cetera, et cetera.
And my response, which always didn't go over well, to be honest, sometimes, but I would look at them and say, that's so awesome.
Come back to me in six months and tell me the same thing.
Yeah.
Come back to me in a year and repeat what you just said, and then we'll see if it's sticking.
And I didn't want to deflate them because I love the enthusiasm, but that new relationship feeling is something that's so pervasive in our culture.
But the sustained, decades-long marriage that's successful takes a lot of work.
Yeah.
And the spiritual practice Is that, like any of these practices, requires that sort of attention and detail?
It takes 22 minutes to get into a flow state.
That's what Csikszentmihalyi and further research has shown.
So it doesn't happen.
22 minutes in is when you can snap in and get into that state.
But sometimes you're right.
strudgery work up until then.
for 10 years now, and you grew up in Venezuela, but you moved here as a teenager, then you moved around a bit, but you have been in L.A.
a bit, and how has L.A.
specifically, being someone who has traveled and lived other places, how has the spiritual communities in L.A.
struck you in general?
Yeah, it's a good question, because it's so, there's so much here, there's so much, there's so many opportunities to kind of get into a different scene down, you know, just walking down the street.
You can find a different style of yoga being taught, a different type of meditation being taught, and a different store full of all the accoutrements that are necessary in order to reach your ultimate goal and perfect yourself, whatever it is.
Interesting question about LA.
The minute you asked me that question, all I could think about was how I paid, I think I paid $24 for a smoothie in Malibu.
And it had ingredients that I'd never heard of.
And people will put that in a body, but not a vaccine because they haven't, even though they haven't heard of the ingredients.
Exactly.
I love that.
See, that's the thing too.
That's the other side of the spectrum of like, I don't know what's in it, but I will put in, I will just ingest I'll pay $50 for some pine pollen in whatever that is.
Okay, sure.
I don't know what it is, and it's expensive, so I'll take it.
And I am definitely guilty of that.
So that's one side of it.
And the other side of not doing the vaccine is the thing of like, My body, my choice, which I can't argue against that, but I can find a little disgusting and hypocritical when on the other end, it's less hippie side, it's the more the person kind of canvassing and harassing people at a Planned Parenthood, yelling, you know, basically, They're not pro-life, by the way.
They're pro-no-choice, which I've always thought that was strange.
It shouldn't be pro-choice, pro-no-choice.
But the point is, they're the ones going like, oh, how can you do this?
And then they're the ones saying, my body, my choice.
I'm not taking the vaccine.
So that kind of hypocrisy is kind of what lies on the other side of stuff.
But that's not so shocking or strange.
What's weird is when you get people that should have some sense of how a vaccine works, yada, yada.
Anyways, I'll pay the 50 bucks for 50 ingredients that I've never heard of.
And feel and have diarrhea.
But of course, the vaccine, I don't know what's going in it.
Even though we do know what's in it, that's what's so funny too.
It's like, actually there is, you can see the whole process of how it works and what goes in the thing.
That's what's even so funny.
It's transparency.
It's like, no, no, no.
Transparency somehow is like, is even more of a, it's more fuel for the fire of it.
No, well, the truth is, they don't want us to know all that's really in it.
Somehow, you know what I mean?
Well, you have to keep going.
He's become quite a controversial figure in some ways, but I've read most of Sam Harris's work.
He wrote a wonderful little book called Lying, which is about the neuroscience of lying.
He makes the argument that what starts as a white lie, in order to perpetuate it, You have to keep remembering to lie.
And so the further you get along in the lie, the more likely you are to trip up because you have to reference back to when the lie originated.
And there are so many steps along the way and humans naturally don't have good memories.
So, that's how people get caught in lies and that's how I feel with a lot of this.
It's just like the shifting goals of QAnon and what it represents.
I mean, now, basically anything is a PSYOP.
That's the attitude that they've taken.
Like, whatever comes out, there's a problem with it and we're going to identify the problem.
And if it doesn't turn out to be true, we're just going to ignore that and we're going to keep creating this problem.
And I personally, I mean...
This podcast offers a wonderful opportunity for dialogues with people like you and people that I love and then Matthew and Julian on the regular basis, but I don't have any answers.
I'm just trying to figure out how to navigate this environment right now because it's really frustrating and hard.
Having taught for Equinox for so long, which there are definitely some, you know, there was plenty of Trump supporters there, even here in Los Angeles.
And now once the world opens back up and starting to see people again, I wonder how we're going to be able to communicate with people we know who are on the other side.
Yeah, yeah.
Because of what we experienced.
And I don't know how I'm going to navigate that terrain.
Yeah, well, that actually, that brings me to something else that I don't know, I'm still kind of grappling with, that it still lives in this weird, unnerving space in the periphery of my mind.
And it's the fact that two, like, extremely well-respected, like, hip and artistically left-field artists, Ariel Pink and John Mouse, were at the rally for Trump.
And later, Arielle appeared on Carlson Tucker.
As a kind of poster boy for how out of hand cancel culture has become, right?
Like, that just was so... What the fuck?
I haven't even figured out how to verbalize the surreal weirdness of that reality.
I've never really looked into Ariel's career, but given his work, the aesthetic reference points, the association with bands that I'm actually friends with, and working with labels that I respect, I always assumed that it was some kind of avant-garde disruption performance, like when he played Coachella but didn't sing.
Like it was all eccentric and mercurial and harmless.
But to see someone in the art world at a, or yeah, someone in the art world at a march for Trump, it just makes no sense and spooks the hell out of me.
It's because I want to be a part of a community where everyone's opinions and beliefs are respected, but the reality is incredibly weird because as much as you want to make room for everyone, you can't make room for someone who doesn't believe in making room for everyone.
Yeah.
I'm like that.
I'm just, I'm just like saying like and blah and I freeze and I don't know how to even react.
That was such a surreal thing to see.
But anyways, yeah, one thing I did want to say is, you know, I was thinking about this and, like, my name and my process and actual spiritual practice.
This is what I was thinking.
Yes.
The initial reality of starting off on the path of sitting practice, mantra work, or yoga doesn't stand a chance against the ultra sci-fi thrill of Breathatarian Kachari Mutra Vortex Intergalactic Federation Cacao Book of Yarancha bizarroness.
I also don't want to put down any contemplative practice based on rigorous research and discipline as totally mundane.
I know that advanced practitioners, or even beginners, can have extraordinary, seemingly unexplainable experience.
It's just not entirely my experience.
I remember as a little kid seeing my parents meditating in the living room and thinking, wow, they must be somewhere else, far, far away, flying through the cosmos, encountering all kinds of magical beings.
And to some extent, my entire outward aesthetic mirrored all of that.
But of course, my internal world was a total fucking disaster.
It wasn't until years later, broken down by the quick fix but ultimately destructive reality of drug addiction, that something said look deeper.
Behind all the hippy dippy trappings, what's the actual practice here?
How can it actually help me?
And I remember that once that actual journey began, which for me meant having to go through every single ego humiliating thing imaginable, going to rehab, relapsing, having revelatory ayahuasca experiences, but with no follow-up support system, So relapsing again.
And actually, I want to quote your book.
So this is from The Hero's Dose.
The lessons learned during a psychedelic ritual become disciplines to implement during normal life.
Something I did not do, which led to relapse, to going on methadone, to going back to rehab, going to AA, going to the Self-Realization Fellowship, which, as you know, is hilariously right next to the Scientology Center here on Sunset.
A few different ones, but that was the one I was going to.
Then going to Green Gulch trying to follow in the footsteps of Alan Watts.
Then going to India and visiting Arunachala and the Ramana Maharshi Ashram in Tiruvannamalai and the Ramakrishna Ashram, Vivekananda House, the Burning Ghat in Varanasi.
Only to end up back home asking the person who named me, Prem Rawat, to teach me how to meditate.
Which only required the promise not to share the particular mudras of the technique, to actually practice it, and to give it a shot.
And of course, the adrenochrome of my firstborn child.
And nothing else!
As I began my practice, it blew my mind that it was really just about being there, sitting with it.
Basically, no flying around through that cool thing your computer does when it goes to sleep.
Just being totally there.
Basically, a path of slow cultivation and occasional insight and the rare, rare, rare transcendent moment.
Something slow and gentle.
A few years later, after I happened to attend a lecture by Robert Thurman, that started me on the path of Buddhism.
Taking refuge, meeting my second teacher, and beginning a formal practice in an educational system that I found extremely beautiful and useful.
You really need to distinguish between rigidity and discipline with this.
There's no room for growth with rigidity.
No space there.
And a certain type of inner space is a big part of it.
So it's an educational and ethical system where there should be no forcing it.
Where forcing it is impossible.
You can't force your way into wisdom or compassion.
Anyways, my point is, it's all quite down to earth.
At least I think it is.
And even if that isn't entirely true, I know this because through the day I go between wanting to reside in infinite super samadhi bliss or just trying to be a better driver.
And although I haven't yet experienced anything remotely like it, I'm completely aware that within the yoga, wellness, mindfulness, and most uncomfortably for me, Buddhist world, there are cases of abuse of power, sexual exploitation, and greed.
And what's always really bummed me out is that many of these teachings are what people who have suffered these violations of their bodies and minds would normally turn to and benefit from had it not been that the perpetrators of their trauma were these very teachers.
It's only this year that I saw how dangerous and cultic and deeply divisive the people you cover on the podcast are.
At this very moment, it's like the holy hells Buddhafield, Jonestown, and Aum Shinrikyo are being reborn.
And at first, the Q-New Age connection just seemed totally implausible to me.
But as I listened to Conspirituality more, it made a lot more sense that, as I was saying earlier, Q represents the quick fix of New Age, while the ordinary and unglamorous reality of spiritual practice represents the humdrum political process.
Never seen such good things go so wrong And everywhere we turn, they're playing our song
