52: The Clerical Class of the Right (w/Alex Ebert)
This week we learned that Melinda Gates was disturbed by Bill’s men’s-club relationship with Jeffrey Epstein all the way back in 2011. And for fuck sake: when Bill visited Epstein’s Manhattan lair, reports say, he counseled the predator on image rehab while Epstein counseled Bill on his loveless marriage. Are the conspiritualists right, and about what? Matthew will revisit an earlier essay on Gates, and fill in some blind spots.Derek tackles the obscene co-optation of trans activism by anti-vaxxers who now pledge to lie about their status by “identifying as vaccinated.” In keeping with our musical theme, Julian reminisces about playing protest rock under an assumed name and the threat of a bomb under the stage during the Apartheid years in South Africa.In our feature interview, world-weary rock star Alex Ebert—frontman for Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros—joins Derek to map out the late 20th-century slide into infinitely co-opted creativity and revolution. They discuss the reasons America could use death rituals, the rise of Trump as the ultimate New Ager, wellness influencers as “the clerical class of the right,” and to ask if critical thinking and open-eyed spirituality are the new punk rock—and for how long.Show NotesThe NYT reported in the fall of 2019 that Gates was a frequent guest of Epstein in ManhattanA description from Town and Country of Epstein’s mansionSources at many meetings describe the Gates-Epstein vibeSex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly SimplisticThe Gene: An Intimate History | Siddhartha MukherjeeInside the Republican Anti-Transgender MachineGender-affirming surgery linked to better mental health, study finds“Identify As” Twitter thread
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Matthew and Julian were just explaining to me this week's episode they're going to do together, so that'll be unique, and I think you'll want to hear that Episode 52, The Clerical Class of the Rite with Alex Ebert.
Hey!
What?
52, that means it's a year!
Oh right, plus the two that we did on the front end, yeah.
Officially, the first two were the Earthrise podcast guests.
But congratulations!
Happy birthday!
Yeah, happy birthday.
This is one year officially as Conspirituality.
I'm like, what did I screw up?
Good lord.
Okay, let's go for it.
Wow.
Amazing, guys.
Thank you.
This week, we learned that Melinda Gates was disturbed by Bill's men's club relationship with Jeffrey Epstein all the way back to 2011.
And for fuck's sake, when Bill visited Epstein's Manhattan lair, reports say he counseled the predator on image rehab while Epstein counseled Bill on his loveless marriage.
Are the conspiritualists right and about what?
Matthew will revisit an earlier essay on Gates and fill in some blind spots.
Derek tackles the obscene co-option of trans activism by anti-vaxxers who now pledge to lie about their status by identifying as vaccinated.
In keeping with our musical theme, I'm going to be reminiscing about playing protest rock under an assumed name and with the threat of a bomb under the stage during the apartheid years in South Africa.
In our feature interview, world-wary rock star Alex Ebert, frontman for Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros, joins Derek to map out the late 20th century slide into infinitely co-opted creativity and revolution.
They discuss the reasons America could use death rituals, the rise of Trump as the ultimate New Ager, wellness influencers as the clerical class of the right, And to ask if critical thinking and open-eyed spirituality are the new punk rock, and for how long.
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.
Okay, so back in October, I produced a bonus episode called Bullying Gates, Bullying Biden, and I'm going to revisit it here in light of the gathering news.
And I think revisiting it will provide a pretty good study in how a conspiracy theory begins to slip over into legit conspiracy territory.
And because we're critics towards both Categories, both genres, like conspiracy theories distort reality by exploiting anxiety and racism and so on.
Conspiracies themselves destroy lives.
So I've got some updating to do.
So the show notes from that bonus episode read in part as follows.
Bill Gates is unknowable except to close and estranged friends, family members, His therapist, if he has one.
His empire sprawls and his philanthropy is tangled.
He's clearly not any one thing.
But what is the one thing conspiritualists fantasize him to be?
What archetypal role does he play for those who hate him?
In this meditation, Matthew zeroes in on the briefly mentioned biographical datum that Gates was bullied as a boy to unfold his symbolic power as neuroatypical scapegoat.
If we listen carefully, I argue, we'll hear something very high school-ish laced with homophobia and latent violence in the lazy defamations slung at gates.
I was going to say, you're starting to talk in third person now.
Yeah, right, I know.
So then in the essay itself, I pulled up the script and this is what I said.
I've read a little bit of the available Gates biography out there and I scrubbed through the Netflix special Inside Bill's Brain.
He's obviously a complex character.
There's a great investigative article from The Nation on the money maze of his philanthropy and how much of it is a self-serving closed loop.
I'm going to focus mainly on what he seems to symbolize.
work in the world.
But I won't rely on that data too much.
Those who assert that he's evil incarnate aren't interested in who he really is or the real complexities of his role in the world, so there's no point in trying to set that record straight.
I'm going to focus mainly on what he seems to symbolize.
There is one biographical detail I'll focus on, aside from what's commonly known of his industry accomplishments, which is that as a small boy, he was bullied.
And this could be continuous with speculation that he is neuroatypical.
We know that the neuroatypical are targeted in school settings.
And also, I've never heard anyone say this, but I believe I hear in the anti-vaxxers hatred for Bill Gates and unspoken loathing for the neuroatypical.
They're the ones who believe autism is a disease, after all.
I hear in their hatred of Gates' vaccine work, do not make my children like you.
Okay, so that's all okay, but then there's another section where I said this.
Gates became a master of a world virtually no one can see into or understand, and yet everyone winds up living in it.
If there is a revenge of the nerd, how much greater could it be than that the entire world is forced to look through his windows?
becomes beholden to his introversion, his ability to create life outside of the body, a universe in a plastic box, to route language and emotions through binary code, to guide missiles, to run surveillance, to create artificial economies of short-selling stocks.
And of course that's not all.
The personal computer, networked, is also the source and driver of an infinite amount of fraud, abuse, state propaganda, disinformation, and porn.
On that note, Bill Gates was photographed with Epstein.
He hasn't commented much on that and has denied business collaborations, but more important than any rationalization or bystanderism in relation to Epstein is Gates' impact on the most powerful trafficking network tool in history.
And how enraging that his contribution is indirect, superstructural, impersonal.
He's the guy who stands next to Epstein just as easily as beside the captains of industry at Davos.
Okay, so I think there are some updates in order.
It was definitely an understatement on my part to write that Gates was merely photographed with Epstein.
The New York Times reported in the fall of 2019, so this is a year before I published the essay, that Gates was a frequent guest of Epstein in Manhattan.
And I'm looking back through that now and wondering why I missed that.
I don't recall reading that article, although it should have come up in the basic vetting I do for every data point.
So, yes, I can miss things.
I can also not want to look, and I don't really have an answer for that.
And it's also really easy, I don't know about you guys, but for me it's easy to slide into a kind of bullshit dismissive master mode when you are soaking up the work of conspiracy theory influencers.
Let me ask you something really quickly, Matthew, just for clarity for myself and someone else might need this too.
At this point, when you published this essay, where were we at in the Epstein arc?
Oh, it was fully concluded.
I mean, when did he, when he, he died in the summer, right?
So, so Epstein already arrested, charged.
Oh, for sure.
Quote, unquote, suicided.
Right.
Right.
So it's that, that, that part of the story is, is over, but for all of the investigation to come, Um, but, you know, the conspiracy theorists were focused on this relationship, uh, in, to various levels of detail.
Uh, they knew that Gates had flown on Epstein's jet.
This is not something that I paid much attention to.
Uh, they might have had fantasies about Ghislaine Maxwell serving him highballs and making him, making dirty jokes.
Um, but were they really that far off?
Why shouldn't they connect the dots between techno-capitalism, high finance, the abuse of children, super-tight patents that maximize profits, and medical policy through the lens of Microsoft?
I mean, the wider they cast that net, the more mistakes they make.
But who can really blame them?
And they knew, as I'm supposed to know, because I'm a cult dynamics researcher, after all, that no one goes to Epstein's palace in Manhattan repeatedly and doesn't know what's going on with the hundreds of pictures of nude women and girls on the walls, with that fresco he had painted of himself in prison.
There's a description in Town & Country of Epstein's mansion.
Guests described chairs upholstered in leopard print, a twice-life-sized sculpture of a naked African warrior, and a framed picture of a woman holding an opium pipe and caressing a lion's skin.
In addition to photographs of pals like Woody Allen, Bill Clinton, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, the Times reported a life-size female doll hanging from a chandelier.
So yeah, it's cocktail hour under the chandelier sex doll.
Totally normal.
So not looking closer at this at the time is not easy for me to admit because a lot of my journalism begins from the point of view of skepticism with regard to powerful men and the wreckage that they leave behind.
So just to update this, if you didn't see the latest reporting from the Daily Beast and a couple of other sources, the news now is that Melinda was quite disturbed by Bill's relationship with Epstein going back over a decade.
Bill actually severed ties with Epstein because of it in around 2014.
Sources at many of those meetings say that Bill held court at the mansion.
He told Epstein, apparently, that he should try to rehabilitate his image.
So this was after he'd already served prison time because of the prosecution in Florida, I believe.
Uh, and he had also complained to Epstein about his loveless marriage.
Melinda started talking to divorce lawyers in 2019 as the noose around Epstein tightened, which tells me that, uh, internally, it continued to be an explicit conversation in the Gates home, uh, and that either Bill just didn't back down on his moral support for the guy or that he's implicated in some more serious way and that she wanted out.
Also, as a side note, it's entirely possible that the public optics of the divorce are being influenced by lawyers and PR firms, because the two sides are going to be angling for advantage with regard to settlement.
But where do the rumors about Gates go off the rails?
He didn't cook up COVID in his home lab.
He's not putting microchips into vaccines.
How do you know?
Right.
Well, we know from the research on real conspiracies that the numbers of people involved are limited and that the objectives are narrow.
Now, Epstein's abuses fit that profile, not to say there aren't hundreds if not thousands of survivors, but the scope and the MO are pretty focused.
You know, he's a financial con man who wanted to dominate women and girls and to create a network of power and influence around that.
It's a pretty narrow focus.
And to that extent, or to the extent that Bill Gates looked the other way and offered him PR tips, he's implicated in that, if the reporting is true.
Now, does that have any bearing on him sending mosquito nets or polio vaccines to Africa?
Only in the sense that big money weaves together both the abject and the good.
So, I'll end by mentioning that we've often noted the research on conspiratorial thinking that shows that being vulnerable to one theory increases vulnerability to believing in other theories.
So, if you're a 9-11 truther, you're going to be more susceptible to QAnon.
Now, if we just do a thought experiment and imagine that Bill Gates is the world, I'm betting that the willingness to accept that he enabled Epstein might also predict an attraction to the belief that he wants to track people with microchips and vaccines or poison them.
Because if the Epstein collusion or complicity is solid, The people who believed that from the outset are starting at, you know, Gates is in the cabal kind of positioning.
Now, if you didn't believe that, if you don't believe it, if you didn't want to believe it, if you didn't want to look at that, or if you say, oh, he just had a few pictures taken with Epstein, all of the rich people do that.
It's just pictures.
What is the person who is quite sure of their gut feelings going to say next?
I think it's really possible that they have to expand the fictions out to Gates's network of influence because nobody believed or nobody took seriously a more central betrayal.
We continually, and in some ways in my next segment on anti-vaxxers and the trans community, we're going to get into a very similar issue.
With stories like this where people just think that everyone is monolithic and if they're just evil, that's all that can possibly come out of them.
Even besides the conspiratorial thinking, which then creates stories and spins webs from there.
But I was watching a segment of Katie Porter, a representative here in California, grilling a pharma executive the other day.
About the amount of money that they spend on R&D compared to the amount of money that they spend on stock buybacks and executive compensation and bonuses.
And I've even said myself that there's a good amount of money that goes into R&D, so it's not like Pharmaceutical drugs can just be free.
But even seeing the chart that she made, it was really eye-opening.
It was like, Jesus.
And I get the impulse to want to think, man, they just do everything wrong.
And yet, that still doesn't mean that the current vaccines aren't efficacious and they're not working, because we have data on that that it is.
And so when you say this entire story, it is completely possible that Gates Had some relations with Epstein, you know, more than what we know at this point.
It's absolutely, there is evidence pointing to that.
But how you get from there to microchipping vaccine is still the leap that's so disturbing in this story and how people are just willing to buy into it.
Yeah, I guess what I'm saying is that the disbelief in that scenario is like an invitation to elaborate into other areas, right?
It's like, you know, this very highly emotionally charged, extremely painful story that a very powerful man is implicated in, uh, is, you know, ignored or it's deflected from or it's dismissed or, you know, or, or somebody like me, uh, just doesn't look carefully enough.
Like I, I didn't know that when I, when I published, uh, in October that the New York Times had just flat out reported that he had visited dozens of times.
I didn't know it was dozens of times.
And that's like, so, so how, how do I make that mistake?
I hear you talking about both things, right?
You're talking on the one hand about how when there are rumors or when there is some establishing evidence of something that is really not kosher and it gets poo-pooed or dismissed, that that can drive people further into And that's just what happened last year.
We have a great evidence for that with Andrew Cuomo.
too, which is kind of what we referred to once as being blue-pilled, right?
That there's a tendency to ignore certain facts because we associate them with something that we've already dismissed.
And that's just what happened last year.
We have a great evidence with that with Andrew Cuomo.
Or go back to Giuliani when he was America's mayor.
Like there was plenty of corruption going on then, but events put them in the spotlight.
So Cuomo steps up for a moment and...
You know, now they think that he might be making up to $5 million on his upcoming book about how well he did dealing with the vaccine, and we know that that's not true.
So yeah, that impulse on the blue-pilled aspect is real.
And again, it just keeps going back to the fact of why we're not built for social media.
Because there's no allowance for nuance.
I think to sort of really think through the possibility of somebody listening to that bonus episode and coming to a fork in the road with the content of this podcast is kind of disquieting to me.
Um, you know, a person could legitimately think, oh, you're, you're, you're, you are, you are giving him a pass.
Uh, you are avoiding known data about this guy, uh, that comes from your so-called legitimate journalistic sources.
And, uh, so why are you going to look carefully at his, you know, at his, at his I don't know, big pharma connections.
Why would I trust you to look carefully at what he's actually done in Africa, which may or may not be true, but why should I trust you?
Why should I trust you?
Especially if you're going to downplay the Epstein stuff and lean on the, oh, he was bullied, poor guy, and maybe he's neurotypical.
Absolutely, right.
Exactly.
I mean, I still, I stand by those applications or those attacks and overtones in the discourse around Bill Gates.
Yeah.
But it's just sort of, there's a bit of unintentional misdirection that ends up happening there that ends up driving sympathy in one direction and not the other.
Well, maybe this is also a podcast of admissions.
Right.
Because in my next segment, I've talked to you guys privately before because, Matthew, you're much more familiar with the transgender community than I am because I don't have too many people In that community.
So I have never paid that much attention to it.
But then I started to be like, well, there's some things I need to pay attention to.
So let me educate myself.
And my next segment is that just like this is your segment being like, wow, I kind of overlooked that.
So what more can you do then if you've kind of overlooked something and they go back and say, Oh, I missed that.
Let's explore it further.
And I think that's a healthy, that's healthy for society.
It's healthy for individuals.
I think the unhealthy aspect is, is coming to a conclusion and then refusing to ever change that conclusion.
For sure.
And I think too, maybe what I'll just finish by saying is that, like, I just want to reaffirm that some of the basic anxieties that we see expressed Within the language of conspirituality and the social movements like QAnon, they're reasonable.
They are reasonable in terms of offering a critique of global surveillance capitalism and difficult to understand power structures.
Have an enormous amount of control or wield an enormous amount of influence over our lives that we can't understand.
All of that, the instincts are right, the instincts are correct, they're understandable.
Yeah, and then sadly they get, they are right, and then they get animated later by a kind of Caricature-ish, wild, fantastical notion that at the highest levels of power, somehow the most diabolical abuse is woven together into how people maintain power and wealth and influence in ways that it's too far out.
And I also think it's possible that there were layers in terms of people around Epstein to varying degrees and how much they knew or how much they wondered about, how much they'd seen, how much they may have just thought he was an unusual, quirky Well, that came out in the documentary when they talk about, I mean, his, his, everything about him seems to have been about power and power doesn't, isn't always sexual.
So getting with the most powerful people in the world doesn't necessarily mean that you're also inviting them into the other aspects.
Yeah, exactly.
So if it's just about power, that takes many forms.
We're also in speculative territory always when we're talking about what did he know, what did Bill Gates notice during dinner parties.
There will always be a plausible deniability that he can put forward.
And then it comes down to social trust, and that's a really vulnerable thing.
Well, you know, a life-sized doll hanging from a chandelier, though, is a little hard to ignore.
But at the same time, I do have a sense, call me naive, but I have a sense that most people are fundamentally decent and also most people who are in the public eye are very, very scared of ever appearing to be involved in something that nefarious and grotesque.
So it's hard for me to believe that all these people would have been complicit.
Earlier this week, social sciences scholar Carolyn Orr posted a number of examples of right-wing figures, including Fox Nation host Tommy Loren, actor Terrence K. Williams, big Trump supporter as well, national security expert Brigitte Gabriel, Michael Ruffo, who's running for Congress close to where I grew up in New Jersey, as well as another congressional candidate from Florida, Willie J. Montague.
All these people thought it would be a good idea to punch down at the transgender community on Twitter.
Their new anti-vax talking point is to identify as being vaccinated.
This is not a new trope.
JP Sears, for example, has posted about identifying as being a doctor as well as a vegetarian in recent months.
So this is only the latest in a series of insecure men and women thinking they're being clever by spinning a talking point to their own advantage.
But if you step back a few feet, the callousness and ignorance in these sentiments becomes quite clear.
Let's leave aside the ridiculousness of the CDC expecting that Americans will abide by an honor system in terms of vaccinations, or the idea that the aforementioned figures have any honor to begin with given their rhetoric.
And let's also leave aside anti-vax sentiments for this segment.
We cover it very often on this podcast.
I want to reflect on what they're really saying, and if you're not familiar with the science, I'm going to zoom out for a moment and look at that.
So, their contention is that if you're born a male and identify as female, or vice versa, there's something wrong with you.
And this is an overly simplistic and even false rendering of gender.
Gender is not binary, though it makes sense that this topic is culture war fodder in Christian America.
Christians are accustomed to binaries like good and evil and black and white compared to, say, Asian religions which recognize the complexity of interdependence.
Life is easier if everything is either this or that, and ignoring nuance must make life less confusing in some manner.
So it makes sense that anti-vaxxers would latch onto this trope.
Epidemiology, like all science, is complex.
But so is gender.
We grew up learning that if you have a Y chromosome, you're male, and if you're not, you're female.
We were taught, at least I'm speaking for myself, in the 80s when my gym teacher taught sex ed for some reason, that every fetus essentially starts out female, then you either get a Y or not.
Case closed.
Only it's not, because none of that is true.
Recent research shows that roughly 1% of children are born with DSDs, which are differences of sex development.
Advancements in DNA sequencing and cell biology show that almost everyone has a patchwork of genetically distinct cells from those determining the gender binary.
The genetic line between male and female is much more porous than anyone imagined.
Gene mutations can cause typically female characteristics to develop in babies with XY chromosomes and vice versa.
There are many variations of sex development, such as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which someone's cells become insensitive to male sex hormones.
They are born with internal testes and external female genitalia.
Anatomical sex does not always comport with chromosomal sex.
There's also congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which causes the body to produce excessive male sex hormones.
Causing chromosomal females to be born with an enlarged clitoris and fused labia that looks like a scrotum.
Some people even end up with two distinct cellular chromosomal sets, as when embryonic twins fuse in the womb and become one person.
This is known as the Chimera, a term Julian will remember in covering Christiane Northrup a while ago.
That's not what she meant by it.
She wasn't referring to... That's the real definition of it.
Chimera, Chimera, yes.
As the physician and author Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in The Gene in Intimate History, gender has never been binary.
We're only now discovering its complexity.
So I'll quote from him for a moment.
Imagine a gene, call it TGY, that determines how the brain responds to SRY.
One child might inherit Inherit a TGY gene variant that is highly resistant to the action of SRY on the brain, resulting in a body that is anatomically male, but a brain that does not read or interpret that male signal.
Such a brain might recognize itself as psychologically female.
It might consider itself neither male or female or imagine itself belonging to a third gender altogether." So 1% of the population born with a DSD is no small number.
And if you're old enough to remember when gay rights really began taking form in post-Reagan America, it suddenly seemed like there were so many more gay people than before, just as it sometimes feels like there are so many more transgender people today.
But the truth is that the culture caught up to the reality of gender and sex differences and became more accepting of them.
That is, if you're not a bigoted anti-vaxxer on Twitter, I guess.
Oh boy.
That gender is so complex forces Christians to confront another uncomfortable truth that essentially upends their worldview.
If gender is in large part dictated by genes and hormones, that means it's an emergent phenomenon, not a choice.
So, that is, gender is biologically determined by the physiological properties of the body.
We've discussed this before when contemplating consciousness, and here we are again.
The psychology of gender is in part determined by chemistry.
This makes total sense.
Besides cosmetic surgeries, some transgender people undergo hormonal therapy as well.
The combination of testosterone replacement with reconstructive surgery has repeatedly shown improvements in their mental health.
It's yet another reminder that you can't separate physicality and psychology from biology.
Who we are is determined by our genes as much as our environment, not anything other inside of us.
This, of course, threatens the Christian notion of a transcendent soul.
I'm not sure how much that factors into the uptick in Christian nationalist anti-trans bills occurring in a number of states right now, because I'm not sure they think that deeply about it.
The usual refrain is, it's just not right, or it's not how God created us, but that link is there.
Speaking of legislation, Kara Swisher recently reported that there are more than 100 anti-transgender bills, the bulk of them aimed at kids, have been introduced by Republican legislators in 2021 alone.
This co-opting of a sentiment, the right of identification, in an oppressed community is yet another example of the conspiritualist merging of right-wingers and wellness influencers.
I don't know what more I would expect from people who chant all lives matter or consistently distort vaccine information to sell supplements, but I just don't understand why people, and Americans in particular, are so deeply disturbed by issues of sex, whether that involves gender, lust, or romance.
But for a bunch of supposed freedom-loving patriots and immune system bragging yogis, they sure do spend a lot of time belittling, and now even legislating against, people who experience life differently from them.
Thanks Derek, I'm glad to get some of the science into the record here.
It's such a paradoxical but also predictable move on the part of these folks that, you know, they're willing to make up science about vaccines but then ignore the science about trans realities.
Yeah, there's something here too that ties together both of these items from each of you, which was the news story this past week that Jacob Chansley's lawyer is trying to use the Aspergian spectrum defense to say that his client is not responsible for his actions, and then some really horrible language around saying basically all of the people who have been arrested for attacking the Capitol were somehow
sort of delayed in their development or suffering from various kinds of psychiatric disorders.
And so, you know, how, how can we, how can we blame them?
And then also doing the, doing the kind of Fox news, you know, Trump, Trump as Hitler propagandist defense to try and get them off the hook.
Very just disturbing and ugly.
It's been very troubling to watch this unfold.
I mean, it really is.
I really losing my grip on reality here.
When you watch a freshman congressman say that if you watch the video from January 6th, it was like any other tourist tourist and he and there's actually I've seen the screenshots.
There's video and screenshots of him blocking the doors of that day in the Senate chamber and being very scared by this.
Yeah.
And this dissonance is really overwhelming.
And also overwhelming, I published part of this on my Substack last night.
I just wanted to get it out to people because I wanted to while the Twitter feed was still going on.
And as expected, I got some pushback.
But what amazed me about it was that all of the people who were DMing me, yelling at me about the piece, None of them addressed the transgender issue at all.
None of them said one word about it.
They said, it was just a vaccine thing.
It was just like, stop focusing on this.
You're tearing people apart.
We should be about unity, et cetera, et cetera.
And I'm like, this segment is about transgender people.
Yes, it's anti-vaxxers who are doing this, but it's really about what they're going through right now.
And none of them even touched that issue, which is just startling to me.
You know, you mentioned that it seems to be Certainly right-wing and Christian political forces that are putting all of these bills up, and obviously that's true.
And, you know, what I see and sense in all of it is a certain type of unfocused and certainly
Incoherent disgust, which is projective because the language of identification doesn't just point to the subjectivities involved in assigning gender or identifying as gendered one way or another.
It also points to the argument, and this is beyond the science a little bit, that gender is influenced if not created by forms of social construction.
And so why does that bother conservatives?
And my sense is that it suggests that the overwhelming predominance of, you know, cisgendered heteronormative images, stories, romances, divisions of labor, that these are not natural so much as they are conventional.
and all.
And if the person who views themselves as being normal starts to open that doorway, of consideration, like how are they really going to consider all of the effort that they've put into their gender training, into their gendered dreams, especially if that's been important in their parenting.
All of the toys, the sports, the hair, the makeup, and then how is the cisgendered adult?
And I think it feels to me I don't know who's more impacted, actually, whether it's men or women, but how are cisgendered adults supposed to understand all of the labor that goes into performing femininity and masculinity?
I mean, my understanding of Judith Butler and other writers like that is that they're saying there's a lot of LARPing going on in that performance, and the terror
Of the anti-trans position is that, oh no, you know, the radicals are going to tell our boys and girls that they are not boys and girls when what actually has been happening from time out of mind is that the culture has been teaching boys how to be boys and the girls how to be girls.
I mean, it's very, very tricky territory, right?
Because then we get into questions of like, You know, ways of explaining, for example, boys being gay as you didn't have a strong enough father and your mother was too domineering, and the notion that you could go through therapy and come out on the other side straight because really it's just socially constructed or it's just something that has had to do with bad influences or unresolved traumas or a lack of some kind of developmental input, right?
For sure.
So yeah, the social construction argument can be used in a very oppressive way as well, and certainly against... But I think it plays into those oppressive narratives which say that it is a choice, and it is a result of a broken family or social system, as opposed to, well, it's a biological reality that actually you were born this way.
And a big part of the problem is that religions create their mythos, their origin myth, and then decide that that's the way we're supposed to be.
Which, if you track it, very rarely comports with biological reality.
Even now, I'm finishing up Richard Portney's book about evolution and his argument is that, you know, survival of this fittest is only half of Darwin's theory, but that's the half that we latched onto.
It's a very male-dominating sort of ideology.
Like, only the fittest survive, but he clearly shows that beauty is also a big driver in evolution throughout species.
It has no necessarily utility.
In fact, sometimes Like, birds who are able to grow these very beautiful feathers, it harms them biologically in the long run, but it's beautiful.
But it doesn't fit into the narrative we've been taught, and we're going to constantly buffer up against this.
Alex Ebert, who everyone will hear in a little while in my interview with him just today, Some fossils that were found in Israel, this is an older story, but he was making the point that here's a human fossil that's 170,000 years old and yet we're only looking at books and religions that are a couple of thousand years old.
And we take that to be the defining truth of what humans are supposed to be or our relationship to the divine when there's a whole history before that we don't even have any knowledge of.
And when we do, gain some knowledge like in what i mentioned about um gender throughout this segment uh it it's it upends people's world views and they'll rebel against that
at every turn my father awkwardly placed the acoustic guitar that was my 12th birthday present on his thigh as he stepped his foot up onto the couch and ran his hand over the nylon strings he
He smiled and shook his head, well my boy, if you can learn how to play this, you'll have done something I never could.
Challenge accepted.
By the time I was 16, I was devoting at least three hours a day to practicing guitar.
I had been sneaking into underground mixed-race nightclubs to see live music get shit-faced and lose my separate and white self in the embodied crush and synchronized heartbeat of a sweaty, overcrowded dance floor since I was 14.
Here, luminous saxophones, trumpets, and trombones, syncopated drums, screaming distorted guitars, and sweet township vocal harmonies mirrored the merger of races both on stage and in the crowd that defied the enforced everyday separation of apartheid.
Just humans getting loose and primal.
It was more fierce and cathartic than utopian, though.
You know, more CBGB than Woodstock.
That flavor of implicitly shared permission is its own kind of elemental fierce magic.
I now recognize it as a demilitarized zone created by courageous good faith.
It is always music that allows people under impossible conditions to set aside the entire tangled network of unresolved real-world constraints and meet one another with a raw, unpretentious honesty that carries neither pity nor blame.
We become possessed by the universal language that animates and electrifies the marrow in our bones, the fire in our meaty tissues, the goosebumps that map where nerves meet shared skin.
At that time, I bonded with both black and white heroes who bounced on that tiny, barely raised stage, so close you could see in their eyes the bloodshot evidence of alcohol and the pungent weed whose smoke saturated the air we shared.
And eventually, I got to play on that stage too.
At first I learned how to play on my nylon string acoustic and then on a really cheap homemade electric guitar I bought from a friend until eventually my dad got me my first Fender Stratocaster for my 16th birthday.
I fell asleep for weeks, gazing at that guitar propped up against my amplifier in the moonlight.
By the time I was 19 and in my first year of university, South Africa was in absolute political turmoil.
Police and tear gas on campus, student council leaders arrested, held for weeks without trial, tortured, and returned with hollow eyes.
The head of our sociology department was assassinated on his doorstep by a police hit squad.
I became part of a brand new movement of protest rock that used the language of the oppressor.
You see, white people in South Africa were generally English or Afrikaans.
There was a significant group of Italian, Greek, Lebanese, and Portuguese immigrants but the bulk of us traced our lineage back either to Dutch settlers who had started colonizing in the late 1600s or British ones who had arrived in the early 1800s.
Those Dutch settlers would end up dominating the country and speaking a version of that language unique to South Africa called Afrikaans.
The Afrikaners were generally religious Puritans, traditionally white supremacists.
The Old Testament God had in their personal mythology allowed them to prevail over the savages and the British.
I met Paul Rickert in the smoke-filled student union at lunchtime in between my psychology and philosophy classes.
He wanted to start a band.
For the first time in South Africa, a generation of Afrikaans kids who were opposed to apartheid, which is an Afrikaans word, were not only playing rock music but writing and singing lyrics in their home language that unflinchingly criticized their parents' politics and religion and spoke frankly This was a stretch for me.
English-speaking kids were strongly prejudiced against Afrikaans kids.
We may have despised them almost as much as most of them despised blacks.
We called them rocks or rock spiders and caricatured them as unintelligent, brutish, and regressive.
But Paul was brilliant, funny, cultured.
He wanted to light the fuse on an artistic bomb that would blow his own culture wide open.
Our first demo tape, recorded within an hour of setting up in a garage to jam together, got circulated to all the major newspapers and within a couple weeks we were fielding calls to perform all over the country.
We toured nightclubs, played art festivals, and eventually got booked to play a kind of flagship outdoor concert created to showcase this new movement.
What we were doing was not legal.
Under the state of emergency laws of the 1980s, political gatherings were forbidden.
All of the interviews and newspaper coverage referred to band members under assumed names that were usually funny and often had sexual connotations.
Mine was Chiekol Chos, which translates roughly to G-Spot Jerry.
The name of the band was a kind of sacrilegious play on words that only really makes sense in Afrikaans, but it played off double meanings that framed us as a perverse and revolutionary reincarnation of the Founding Fathers.
This big concert was on Republic Day, the equivalent of the 4th of July, and took place about 20 minutes away from the location of an essentially neo-Nazi rally organized by the far-right AWB group that was mobilizing armed resistance against any move to end apartheid.
The organizers of the concert received a phone call that there was a bomb under the stage, but the show went on anyway.
I have two really strong memories of that day.
One is of standing on that huge stage in between songs looking out over 20,000 people under a brilliant blue sky reflecting on the sublime flow state I was experiencing.
It was like none of us could play a wrong note if we tried.
Everything was perfect.
Cesare, one of my best school friends who was only 16 at the time, looked over at me as he held his bass guitar and shook his head with a huge grin on his fleshy face.
Paul had worked the crowd into a frenzy.
The high of all of that energy coming at us as we played was unlike anything I had ever, or would ever, experience again.
We were on the national news that night as if we had headlined the show.
The response was so positive that the organizers told us to sit tight afterwards and that they would try to get us on for another performance in the evening sandwiched in between two much more famous acts.
So, instead of partying ourselves into oblivion, as we had done after all of our previous performances, we stayed sober and waited in the hotel room about a quarter mile from the stage.
But we didn't get to go on stage again.
The waiting is the other thing I really remember from that day.
The contrast was stark between pure flow being the focal point of 20,000 people screaming, applauding, dancing, responding ecstatically to the music we had written and rehearsed and were blasting at them through massive speakers and the aftermath of anticlimactic waiting.
Empty.
Sober.
Lonely.
I found myself quietly crying in that liminal space about the turmoil of that transitional time, the threats of violence, and the knowledge that I had a draft notice hanging over my head and I would likely be fleeing the country and leaving everything I knew behind to avoid jail time.
Knowing too that this was a difficult choice that was still a privilege unavailable to my truly oppressed and desperate black countrymen.
It was like the pinnacle of creative gratification and expression receded into the undeniable facts of my own life, but also of how the country remained poised on a knife edge that we could articulate and rage against and all too but also of how the country remained poised on a knife edge that we could articulate and rage against and all too
Good morning.
I'd like to speak with you today about why New Agers are supporting Trump.
You see, it has to do with something called control.
Religions once offered us a reprieve from the pain of ignorance.
Why is it raining?
Because God is sad.
Why is it cold?
Because God is shivering.
Why did so-and-so die?
Because God was mad.
And that gave us some comfort and a sense of somebody being in control.
We didn't like the idea of chaos.
And eventually, some other ideas wound their way into our hearts and suddenly we felt there was another path forward.
Empowerment.
Self-empowerment.
Not someone else in control.
Me.
In control.
In control of my own destiny.
In control of my own reality, the secret, etc.
Personal manifestation.
Manifestation.
Control.
Last July, Alex Ebert, the charismatic founder and singer of Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros, recorded "How COVID Helped Convert New Agers to Trump." It was shortly after we started this podcast, and we immediately found ourselves addressing similar issues.
Alex dropped into a few of our clubhouses and shared his wisdom, so I was excited that he agreed to sit down for an actual interview.
Now, as misfortune would have it, our connection was not the best.
The mishaps of wireless technology, I guess.
Thankfully, I only lost the last 10 minutes or so of our conversation, which is actually when we discussed music.
So what you're about to hear is our conversation about death, living, his upcoming book Cool, and conspirituality in the age of Trump and now beyond that.
It was a pleasure chatting with Alex, and perhaps we'll do another music interview in the future.
And if you're not following him on Instagram, change that right now.
He's at Alex underscore Ebert, aka Bad Guru.
I promise you will not be disappointed.
I was a red man and my passion made no sound.
You were the white man and you dropped me in the ground.
Now I'm a wooden Indian standing silent in the rain.
Swept by my grandfather's father, we're gonna rise again.
Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na.
Alex, thank you for taking some time out today to join Conspirituality.
I've enjoyed your posts and music for a very long time, but your posts more recently especially.
And I want to start, pull back, because your last couple of posts have actually been about a topic everyone loves, which is death and apoptosis and cancer and all the good stuff that I should say, this all started when I was five.
spirituality in so many ways.
Just know why, you know, maybe in the last week, this tattoo, this has been in your head. - I should say when I was, this all started when I was five.
When I was five years old, I realized I was gonna die.
I was drawing a picture of a sitting bowl.
I was in my dad's office and suddenly I just realized I was going to die.
And I went up to his chair and I asked him.
He's a therapist.
He looked over his like little spectacles and he said, yes.
And that was it.
And I turned around and I went back and sat down on the pillows and kept drawing.
And my life changed at that point.
I became like a sanguine You know uh fellow and um ever since then really I've been trying to understand what is this whole death what is this whole death thing and how does it relate to our behavior and and and what is it and of course I wasn't thinking very deeply about it I was more just sort of mystified until I was a little older uh until I was about
18 and I I only understand what I was doing now in reflection, but when I was 18, I decided whether I wanted to be a monk or a Heroin addict and I chose to be a heroin addict and then later I Got sober and I started doing these art installations and one of them was me hanging by a noose balancing on these books for five hours and another was me throwing up for five hours and
And even then I didn't quite understand that these were sort of unconscious death initiations.
Because our society has sort of robbed itself of that integration.
And so these things started manifesting in me.
And I think in a lot of ways punk rock itself was an unconscious manifestation.
A reintegration of sort of a death initiation.
Starting right around the Bay of Pigs, you start to see spikes, like massive spikes, in drug use and self-inflicted harm.
The specter of potential mass casualty at any moment.
We had death In our mainframe again and it had been missing for so long which is why we let go of all our death initiations.
A long time I've sort of seen this connection between our negation of death and our extractive behaviors and so more recently when you know we start thinking about starting in 2006 really for me the secret and this idea of like extractive spirituality I start to think you know what Why?
And why in The Matrix, when he says humans are like a virus, why is that so compelling?
And what is it about our extractive behavior that is somehow related to death?
And then the other night I was just musing on cancer.
And just suddenly realize, oh, cancer cells, that's how they're basically defined.
They refuse apoptosis.
They refuse programmed cell death and decide to just self replicate.
And that's what we're doing.
Given America's guard about death and all that we do to try to avoid it.
What are some rituals that you think that could be helpful for Americans around death at this point in our history?
One of the most ironically quintessentially American places that I've ever been is actually right here in New Orleans where I am.
And something I didn't realize until I lived here is that, you know, if you visit and you see the parades going down the street, the brass bands, the celebration, you just sort of think, oh, this is this really jubilant city and how do they remain so jubilant after something like, you know, Katrina or...
You know, whatever the case is.
And the reality is that the second line, which is, that's what those parades are called when they march down the street and celebrating.
The first line is the procession of death, is the funeral procession.
The second line is the band coming up behind it, backing it up, so you have the grief, and then the celebration, and the grief, and the celebration, and the grief then spills into an all-out celebration of the life that was lived, the lives we're living, that we're going to die.
If you come to New Orleans, you'll never see a bigger party in the streets than after somebody has died.
I mean, the biggest party I've probably been to in the streets was after Trumpet Black died.
It's an amazing integration that we have here of death as celebration.
And there's sort of almost a defiance to it.
There's like a real confrontation there.
A real spilling of self.
And so you have this, uh, this, this, this full integration of death as celebration that I don't feel like, you know, like when I used to explain New Orleans before I moved here and before I knew any of that, that it's darkness was warm.
That's how I would say it.
Cause I didn't know how else to explain it to people.
I'd be like, it's the only place I've been where the darkness, the dark energy feels warm.
I didn't know how else to explain it.
Everywhere else I've been, I grew up in L.A.
and there's darkness in L.A., but it never felt warm.
It always just felt purely dangerous.
But somehow here it felt warm and integrated.
And now I understand it's because there's an integration of the death here as celebration.
So I guess my point in that is that when we integrate death, it doesn't necessarily just have to be a morose affair.
It can be anything.
It can be a creative event.
It can be celebration.
It can be defiant jubilation.
It can be, it can take all kinds of forms.
And I think, and that led me into another thought, which is a while ago I was talking to, and I, which is something I rarely do, and I do it reluctantly.
And I think he knows it every time we speak, which was talking to a healer and, um, you know, a quote unquote healer.
And, but, but, you know, he's got some, uh, he's got some skills and he told me I needed to grieve.
And I needed to come up with a ritual.
And at the time I was like, I hate rituals.
I don't want to do rituals because I had confused ritual with tradition.
I had confused event with process.
I had confused distortion with compression.
I had confused novelty with redundancy.
To me, a ritual at that point was just something that you repeat, that almost sort of is robbed of its contents, that's just a shell, a simulacrum of something that was at one time something inspirational.
He said, no, a ritual is a creative event.
Be creative.
Come up with a ritual.
And it can be different every time.
And suddenly I started looking at ritual in contradiction to tradition.
And at ritual as sort of a thing that exists in the moment.
And so I guess I'm saying that all to...
Just as a reference point, if anyone who's listening wants to check out, there's a documentary by Alejandro Jodorowsky, who's the director of Holy Mountain and a number of other movies.
He almost did Dune, so maybe you've seen this movie called Jodorowsky's Dune.
And he invented a kind of therapy called Psychomagic.
And the documentary is called Psychomagic.
And in it he just gets really creative with these people who have these neuroses.
And he tries to sort of, you know, he just kind of invents these things.
So in one case he Strips a guy of his clothes, buries him deep in the earth with just his head sticking out, puts a blast bowl over his head, then throws raw meat all over the dirt that's covering his body, and then all of these vultures come and start pecking at the meat, and he's just sitting there for, you know, I don't know.
I don't know and I'm not necessarily advising any of you guys to do this because it actually sounds fairly dangerous but then so they unpack him and then he's naked and he pours all this milk all over him so he's just now naked in this milk and then they burn his old clothes and put on this new suit and then they check in with him a couple months later and you know he's um he's been somewhat transformed um significantly transformed and um
I guess the point in all that is that we have this creative capacity, and we don't use it that much for purposes of transformation.
And this gets into difficult territory, especially conspirituality-type territory, where it's like, you're your own guru, man, you got this.
But at the same time, on a level, when we're talking about death, it's such a personal relationship.
Each of us have our own relationship to death.
There's no sort of one size fits all and so what that means to me is that it's sort of up to each of us to understand how we want to integrate death, to what extent we need to, to what extent we haven't yet, to what extent we're living in an avoidance state.
And to give ourselves permission to experiment with ritualizing some of that relationship in safe and intentional ways.
I spent two years in college as a patient monitor where I would monitor suicidal patients.
I would sit with them for eight hours a shift to make sure they didn't try to flee or hurt themselves.
And at the same time, I was studying for a degree in religion.
So I think at that moment in my life, death was very much a theme and understanding it.
And since then, it's remained a theme as well as continuing to try to comprehend it.
But I also wonder how much of it is the fear of death compared to, especially in American culture, just the fear of aging.
That's a really important distinction, you know, because I think that this brings in status anxiety as almost a separate tantamount function.
Like status anxiety still is related to death because, in my view, because The whole reason we're anxious about our status is so that we, you know, biologically speaking anyway, so we don't end up outside of the tribe and shivering and dying in the tundra by ourselves.
So we're very concerned with status anxiety.
But in the modern era, status anxiety, especially post, you know, teenage invention.
So post like 1954 or something when the, or 1940 is when the term teenager was invented.
And suddenly you have this new struggle cluster.
And then suddenly in 1964, you have more teenagers, more 16-year-olds in America than any other age group.
And so suddenly now commerce has to sort of invert and now speak the language of cool.
And so now commerce is pitching everything to the youth.
And suddenly we begin to commodify youth itself as opposed to beauty.
And then suddenly now we're in this, this, this trap that you're mentioning where, where we're just desk, our status anxiety is actually tied to looking and being perceived as younger.
That fear, so our status anxiety being wrapped up in youthfulness, Shit.
I don't know.
We could do 12 Days.
It's a really interesting thing, right?
Because it's almost like, you know, you want to... What's that phrase?
At least Tarantino says it.
I think he's quoting Elvis.
But, live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse.
You know, it's almost like we'd rather die looking good.
It's better to burn out than fade away.
all of these tropes of essentially anti-aging.
It's better to burn out than to fade away.
King is gone, but he's not forgotten.
That was a segment I did this week on Nomadland, which is if you read the book Nomadland compared to the movie, the movie just presents this version of aging as being resilient and bootstrapping and all of that stuff.
And the book itself was just like, we need to change our labor laws.
We have a fucked up political system that is not Not honoring seniors in any capacity, just trying to shove them to the desert.
Like literally.
But as you were talking, I was thinking someone should write a book named Cool.
Maybe that would help people better understand what you're talking about.
I'm writing a book on cool.
Yeah.
It's yeah.
Yeah, I think cool is a big deal.
Yeah, I think it's a bigger deal than we all understand.
I think status anxiety, in my view, is actually the invisible hand.
And cool came along to sort of mitigate the status anxiety and make us feel like we're individuals living in a society.
It commodified dissent, is what it did.
So once you commodify dissent, Then, you know, there's a cascade of consequences.
One of them is you no longer have dissent.
Or you can't differentiate between real dissent and not dissent.
It all gets recuperated into the capitalist sort of mainframe.
And this is where it really dovetails with individualism and conspirituality from my vantage point.
One of the main tenants of cool is exclusivity of membership and esoteric knowledge.
So it's a handshake or whatever it is, but you know, a password.
But the most reduced grouping to which we can belong, the most reduced and exclusive exclusive club to which any of us can belong is ourselves.
And so you have this total reduction that cool sort of forces us into.
And then you have that as, and presented as sort of branding.
So who are you?
Find out who you are.
What kind of shirt do you want?
Who's, who really is Derek?
What kind of hat do you like?
What kind of car do you drive?
Who are you?
And so suddenly the I-contain-multitudes notion of transmutation and growing and being a sort of multitudinous, multifaceted being becomes a liability, socially.
And you have this necessity to reduce and find yourself as this sort of impermeable, so like this sovereign, you start to introduce some of the New Age rhetoric into this, but this totally impermeable, eternalized self, irreducible form, that repeats itself, As a brand, and any deviations from that center, engender distrust, societally.
So, for instance, for me, I was in a punk rock band, and I was, like, super ironic and sarcastic and sardonic, and then I had a fucking awakening, and I was like, no, you know what?
The most punk rock thing I can do right now is be earnest.
This is, like, 2006 and seven.
I was like, I'm gonna be an earnest child.
That is the lamest thing I could do, and therefore, it's the most punk rock thing I can do.
It's the thing I'm most afraid of, Is being uncool.
So I'm going to go ahead and do it.
And I got lambasted by the gatekeepers of cool for for change.
How could he have been this?
And now that he must be faking it, he's an untrustworthy performer.
And that's when I started to really think about cool in a different way and understand its aggression toward essentially the reality of our of our existence as, you know, being a a transitory existence.
You mentioned Invisible Hand and Sovereign, which is where I wanted to slightly pivot to the conversation to because in July, and this is around when we started communicating with the podcast on Instagram and saw what you were doing, and you released the video, How COVID Helped Convert New Agers to Trump, with your big bowl and just Brilliant in every capacity.
And I'm wondering at that time, you know, we're a few months into the pandemic, and that was a really, really on point and insightful clip of what was happening at that moment.
And I wanted to know why you recorded that.
So leading up to that, I had been doing a bunch of sort of recordings that were about, I was calling them declarations of interdependence.
And, you know, in 2006, when The Secret came out and I read Rhonda Byrne's whole theory of the law of attraction working in reverse, i.e., or e.g., Katrina.
She literally said Katrina and 9-11 is an example of when the victims were vibrating at the same frequency of the events.
So they attracted the events.
Hence, the victims like brought that on themselves, which, of course, obviates co-responsibility and co-creations.
So the idea that anything we have done may be responsible for the degradation of our neighbor is now erased.
Our neighbor created all of their, you know, conditions themselves vis-a-vis the law of attraction, working in, quote, reverse.
And that relieves us of any responsibility.
So you have this perfect buttressing of late capitalism, and it's so fucking obvious, and yet no one is taking it seriously in 2006, because, well, New Agers, like, what are they?
Some fringe group, right?
Well, now fast forward to Donald Trump, who literally is a second-generation New Ager, becomes the President of the United States, and then, you know, when he says, this is what it, this is what, I'll tell you what happened for me, Derek.
As soon as Kellyanne Conway uttered the phrase alternative facts, it all came together for me.
I was like, oh, I saw, I understood the whole thing.
He was not lying that his, that he thought his inauguration crowd size was bigger than Obama's, when in fact, even if you, you can just look at the photos and see that it was about one third the size.
He was not lying.
Kellyanne Conway said, He's offering alternative facts.
She uttered that phrase in response to people who were saying, wait a minute, his inauguration crowd size was a third of the size of Obama's, not bigger.
And she said, well, he's giving you alternative facts.
And suddenly I understood what was happening.
And that sort of started my wheels spinning.
And then around late 2019, probably just like you guys, I started to see it actualized.
At scale, where you started to see like, oh, new agers.
And you know what it really was, man?
And it's just so obvious.
And you guys have done such an amazing job of pointing this out.
I mean, thank God.
You guys have done such an amazing job of pointing this out.
COVID.
Any pandemic.
is a, has a universalizing effect.
It makes the interconnectivity painfully apparent.
This, the very, you create your own reality, personal sovereignty, personal reality, like siloed existence, is obviously going to be threatened by a universalizing catastrophe.
And when they saw They're president behaving just like they wanted to and saying, no, I'm, I'm impervious.
I'm immune to it.
Um, and behaving like the new ager he is.
Because, you know, his, his, I'm sure you guys have gone through this a billion times, but his pastor as a child is Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking.
One of the best lines in that book and one that clearly Trump has followed to a T all his life is a powerful and positive thought can overcome the fact altogether.
So when he's asked in 2007 a deposition how much money he's worth and he answers to the lawyer, Michael Cernesny, it depends how I feel.
And the, and the lawyer says, let me get that straight.
It depends how you feel.
And he says, yes, it depends how I feel, but I try quote unquote.
He's not bullshitting.
That's him literally just applying his schooling to his life.
And so in late 2019, you know, I think we all saw, or some of us saw this, this pivot happen.
And suddenly we saw the retribalizing of reality, where reality itself, it was no longer competitions for reality or competitions within reality, but competitions of reality.
And so when I did that, that, you know, initially the bad guru thing, the whole thing was going to be because I felt that That comedy could have an inoculation effect.
That somehow we could help, you know, I wouldn't, I kind of recognized early on we wouldn't be able to save people who had already been captured, but we might be able to You know, this was going to be a war of attrition.
And we might be able to save people who were on the fence and bring them back into the fold of, not mainstream narrative, not scientism, of interconnectivity.
Of the fundamental underlying operation of the universe, which is interconnectivity.
That's all I argue for.
I can grant all kinds of positions.
The one thing I won't grant is when someone tries to obviate the fact that we are all interrelated.
And I feel like, you know, I still feel like that is the fundamental problem with this current strand of New Ageism that we're sort of fighting against.
Yeah, and the sovereignty angle of Trump and the New Agers is so on point.
And there's also, though, the level of privilege because Trump can afford to believe that way.
And while I don't want to get into the trope that everyone who takes care of their bodies and eats well and practices yoga is well off, they're definitely not.
But in terms of a lot of the influencers that we cover and that we see, Who are out there monetizing the fears around COVID, pushing anti-vaccination so they could sell supplements, things like that.
These are people who are in a well-off demographic and they're continuing to enjoy the fruits of that.
So from your perspective, how do you push back against that?
How do you get information past those gatekeepers?
So, so far in my experience, those who have been captured are unpersuadable.
The only thing that will persuade someone who's been captured is sort of a breach event.
I think Alexander Beiner calls it breach, I call it sort of a uniject, or an interjection, a mass interjection.
So we have these, they're basically, if you can imagine, These influencers have created their own sort of abstract shell, like Psylo.
If you look at Phil Goodlife and the way that he speaks about himself, being a sovereign, entirely independent of relationality being.
Someone who is not affected by what he does not want to be affected by.
Then what you can imagine him as, or the way he views himself, is within an egg of sovereignty.
And that egg is impermeable.
And so he's got this sort of membrane around himself.
And that's why, you know, myself and some philosophers I like speaking with call this concept like membranics.
The different kinds of membranes, the permeability of membranes, the tribal membrane, the individual atomized membrane.
And these new ages are essentially operating on an individualized atomistic membrane level.
And someone like Phil Goodlife thinks that this is his life, right?
And The only thing that I see that is going to break that is a collision event.
So he's going to have to, reality is going to have to collide with him and those interjections at some saturation point are going to be inevitable.
And I don't know what that looks like, I don't know what that is, I don't know if it's a mass event of so many siloed hubs of reality that, you know, they all just have experience a uniject.
Interjection.
Or if his life personally will be interrupted by something that will have him, you know, have a quote, come to Jesus moment.
In my experiences, because early on I was going, I was going in hard and trying to argue with these people.
And my experience is it's not possible.
They're, they're fundamentalists.
I'd be curious, have you, have you guys had, I know you guys have featured people who have like come back.
Yes.
But they had their own sort of like aha, right?
Yeah, because that's all you can really do.
I mean, we've even talked behind the scenes to the few people we criticize.
And the funny thing is that on one-on-one communications, they're much different.
They don't puff their chest in the same way.
And you can actually have what you believe to be a conversation that is a little more logical.
but I was actually conversing with one in a DM at the same time that he was posting on my Facebook page with getting his community riled up after me and then having a conversation with him in a DM that was completely, not totally cordial, but completely different.
So that sense of manipulation is something that you always have to watch out for as well.
I'm wondering if you've had any personal casualties Like, have you lost any friends to this?
Has there been a lot of pushback to your videos?
I mean, I see a lot of the cheering, which is great, but I also wonder what kind of conflict you've faced.
I haven't had a full-blown confrontation with anyone close to me.
I feel like I've essentially lucked out in that sense.
I do know a couple people that are acquaintances that I've been like, oh, okay, you're on Like, you've gone that way.
But, you know, unlike some other friends that I have who've lost significant others to it, or family members.
Like, I have a friend whose sister went so far as to, you know, she went all the way.
But, you know, all the way.
Into the full-blown QAnon, you know, threatened, like, ended up in a total psychic break and had to end up in the hospital because she was trying to access a shotgun to kill her own family because she thought they had all been captured by, you know, the Deep State.
You know, and that brings up something that I think is fairly important and links back to the death work.
Because at the end of the day, our shadow work, I think, is so intimately tied up in our death work.
And that is mass neurosis.
I think it's pretty obvious that we're seeing mass neurotic projection onto, you know, whoever.
And I'm not one to defend Bill Gates or anybody with a bazillion dollars.
But these projections onto, you know, Hollywood as baby eaters or whatever the case is, these sort of fantastical, hyperbolic, demonic hellscape projections are very clearly from demonic hellscape projections are very clearly from the outside a sublimation or regurgitation of biblical, a seeming need to sort of identify demonic forces.
And the disappearance of like, you know, our ability to project those onto abstractions like, quote, the devil, then ends up just transmuting onto Bill Gates and other people.
And I think it's, you know, I would disagree with a lot of theologians, I suppose, who would say that, well, our need for sort of mythos and good and evil is baked into us.
I would disagree, actually.
I would say that it's baked into us if we do not confront death.
If we insist on being and living in an avoidant state where we don't deal with our shadows, then yeah, we need to project our fear and neuroses somewhere.
But if we do live and integrate shadow work and death, I think there's a chance that we don't need to do these fairly insane projections.
You mentioned the second line, which is, again, It is the premier example in America of the death ritual, I would argue, done right.
There's also the latest Notorious B.I.G.
documentary where there's basically a second line in the procession you see when he dies, which is amazing to see.
What other death rituals or cultures have you studied or looked into?
I mean, you know, there's the Sundance walkabout and not that the walkabout is necessarily like a death ritual, but it is.
These initiatory confrontations with the elements are what we're talking about in a sense.
In cultures, you know, and it's so important always to acknowledge privilege, in cultures within America that are less privileged, you still have a certain kind of death initiation.
It's called getting jumped into a gang.
In prison, you get jumped into a gang.
In college, you know, you have a really shitty version of it.
It's called collegiate hazing.
You know, we have these sort of unconscious manifestations of these things.
And I guess the idea is to make them sort of more conscious.
In terms of, you know, and I think that the Sundance is one that's really striking.
And the Vision Quest too.
In terms of other ones that are working right now, I just did a podcast with someone and I really should have looked this up.
I didn't know this conversation was going to go this way, otherwise I would have looked this up.
But are you familiar with You're Going to Die?
Is that a podcast?
Yeah.
Oh, no, I don't know.
If I'm not if I'm not mistaken, that's I think that may also be the name of the organization, but but I'll I'll.
Clarify that in a moment.
He goes around and they do events everywhere.
They do events, just event events, like in the public, where people discuss and disclose their experiences with death.
They go to jails and deal with people in prison and let them express their sort of feelings about death and do sort of you know impromptu ritualistic death initiation type work you know obviously hospice you know that would be an organization to sort of check out in terms of like you know an American equivalent to to an intentionalized uh and celebratory you know an attempt at re-institutionalizing death
I mean, here's one that's coming to mind that I, and I use this imagery all the time for myself in terms of, you know, like I have a song called Man on Fire.
I'm a man on fire Walking through your street With one guitar And two dancing feet Only one desire That's left in me I want the whole damn world To come dance with me Not to quote myself, but to quote myself, I'm a man on fire walking down the street with only one desire left in me.
I want the whole damn world to come dance with me.
So you have the self-immolation, the sort of re-permeation of the self-membrane, so that I can dance with the whole world.
And, you know, when I see monks self-immolate in protest, or, you know, is it...
Harry Caray?
Is that how you say it?
In Japan?
In Japan, yes.
Not that those are positive death rituals, but there's a certain... You know, I think when a Westerner sees a monk having self-immolated, like there's the famous one, Vietnam protest.
Uh, but there were a number of them.
I think to the Western mind, it's just so fucking incomprehensible.
Not only that someone can sit there, heh, being burned, but that someone would... that someone would have that kind of relationship to death.
I think it's all part of the same conversation.
And then of course, you know, this gets into, you know, we have extreme levels of suicide in the United States.
And I was going to do a, you know, and suicide is increasingly prevalent, not only in younger generations, which it is, but obviously in degraded communities.
And I think that, you know, obviously there's a correlation between total degradation and hopelessness and the desire to die or the death drive.
But there's also the ability, I think, for us to have a mental health component to this where instead of having an unstable, unconscious death drive, to sort of Freud's term, you to sort of Freud's term, you know, death drive in some sense being the fear of death manifesting as a need to re-control, reassert control over death by running at death ourselves.
So sort of recuperating the death, the fear of death.
The specter of death by running directly at death.
So now we're in control of death and it gives us a sort of sense of control.
Instead of having all those operations happen unconsciously, which I think, you know, having been, by the way, I should say suicidal, maybe three quarters of my life, tons of suicidal ideation in my experience, in my life, until I finally just fucking realized that I was afraid of dying and confronted that over and over again and still confronted it.
I was unable to shake the death drive, the suicidal ideation.
So I think some people might be afraid, like, well, we're going to normalize what?
We're going to normalize death?
And then what?
Everyone's just going to start killing themselves?
No, actually, like so many things, it would be the reverse.
You know, we would bring it into the sunshine, into the light, and it would no longer manifest in unconscious and chaotic ways.
That's not a really great way of answering your question.
No, no.
And I believe it would give us a much firmer grasp on our spirituality and not be so opportunistic and completely divorced from the reality.
You had said recently about, you had cited that American Psychological Association study in the 70s where racism is normative in America and not be classified as pathological, which was fascinating.
And I think about, you know, the fact that one thing that has kept coming up from these influencers is they're like, well, if you weren't obese, then you, you know, you wouldn't be that struck that hard by COVID.
And of course, if we look at who's dying from COVID in America, and then we look at The systemic conditions of why obesity proliferates in those communities, we would get a firmer grasp on the political situation and the privilege, again, to get back to that.
But that just seems to be a blind spot.
And so you get that, well, I can eat organic, I can work out six days a week, so it's your fault if you can't.
And I think from my perspective, that's been one of the more frustrating aspects of this past year.
Yeah.
What becomes apparent is something we, you know, any of us in the spiritual community kind of have known forever, which is that most of the spiritual community is decidedly ignorant about politics.
And I don't just, I don't mean elections.
I mean, you know, socio-political realities.
And then suddenly they find themselves like the clerical class of the right.
And suddenly now they are at the epicenter of, you know, political ideologies on the right.
And yet they have almost no history of understanding of how these things actually work.
Yeah, exactly.
How does obesity come to pass?
Well, I have news for you.
It's not karmic.
It's not karmic.
It's not inter-life karmic.
It's not intra-life karmic.
It is because of certain socio-economic implementations of economic predation and subjugation.
And that's it.
It's just so frustrating, bro.
It's just so frustrating.
I was in an argument with a guy... Look, we're at a point right now... I think this is something you guys have probably spoken about a bunch, but...
We're at a point right now where these influencers and all of their followers, apparently, trust an obscure, single-page, uncredited, anonymous, one-page letter over 12 decades of research from 12,000 different contributors.
When you try and bring up the conditionalities, the contexts, all of the socio-economic and political realities that formed and underpinned these things, they don't want to hear it.
Why?
Because it would implicate them.
When we live in an interrelated world of socioeconomic realities, everybody is implicated, especially the affluent.
So it's much easier to say, oh, it was a conspiracy between these external forces that created this thing.
And as opposed to, oh, well, you know, it's like that meme going around, like, maybe you manifested it, maybe it's white privilege.
It's just that these guys don't want to look at the real conspiracies, because the real conspiracies are things like, hey, did you know that Chiquita Banana, headed by Alan Dulles, is actually, that's why we even intervened in Central America, that's why people are even coming to America, is because we fucked up democratically elected leaders in Guatemala, like our Benz, and then put in dictators that would allow us to have our fucking bananas for US fruit, for United Fruit.
That's why people are coming here because we completely disturbed their equilibrium for financial gain.
And that's why we have, you know, set off a cascade.
But it's just too much work and it's not fantastical enough.