85: Gaia Buys Yoga International, Stocks Rise on Uranus
On the day after the Winter Solstice, as the world tucked in for an Omicron staycation, a news flash came over the wire. Yoga International—one of the largest yoga media companies in the world—had been acquired by Gaia—one of the largest pseudoscience, pseudointellectual, conspiracy theory platforms in the world. While the CEO of Yoga International immediately assured nervous content providers that the platform will remain editorially independent, only time will tell. What we do know is that countless print articles written by earnest yogis and thousands of hours of classes created by earnest yoga instructors will now share space with David Icke, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who believes lizard people have coopted world governments—and that’s only the start. The acquisition predicts even more brain-melting in yogaland, exposing even more vulnerable and credulous seekers to a dumpster fire of meaning dressed up in a simulation of spirituality. Julian covers some Gaia history. Derek makes us suffer through some Gaia content. Matthew opens by tracking the century-long descent of yoga media to this conspiritualistic nadir.Show NotesRob Price Interview on Gaia and Conspiracy TheoriesGaia Acquires Yoga International, a Leading Digital Yoga Service Yoga guru in compromising position / Celebrity instructor Rodney Yee faces allegations of misconduct with students The Case against Swami Rama of the Himalayas How to Respond to Sexual Abuse Within a Yoga or Spiritual Community
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Conspiratuality 85.
Gaia buys Yoga International.
Stocks rise on Uranus.
On the day after the winter solstice, as the world tucked in for an Omicron staycation, a newsflash came over the wire.
Yoga International, one of the largest yoga media companies in the world, had been acquired by Gaia, one of the largest pseudo-science, pseudo-intellectual conspiracy theory platforms in the world.
While the CEO of Yoga International immediately assured nervous content providers that the platform will remain editorially independent, only time will tell.
What we do know is that countless print articles written by earnest yogis and thousands of hours of classes created by earnest yoga instructors will now share space with David Icke, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist who believes lizard people have co-opted world governments.
And that's only the start.
The acquisition predicts even more brain-melting in Yogaland, exposing even more vulnerable and credulous seekers to a dumpster fire of meaning dressed up in a simulation of spirituality.
I'll be covering some of Gaia's history while Derek makes us suffer through their content.
Matthew opens it up by tracking the century-long descent of yoga media to this conspiritualistic nadir.
Right, so okay guys, I'm going to start with some zoomed out context on yoga media.
But before that, I want to get your top line responses to this press release that announced the sale.
So I've got it here.
I'll just read from it.
Issued Boulder, December 22nd.
Gaia, a subscription video streaming service dedicated to conscious media and serving a global conscious community, we've got to put a flag in those words, acquired Yoga International today.
Yoga International is considered the authentic voice of yoga in the West, capital W. Originally started as a print magazine 30 years ago by the Himalayan Institute, Yoga International has since transformed into a digital-only platform and community with paid subscribers around the world.
The acquisition adds 4,000 hours of unique yoga content to Gaia's library.
Quote, here are the two poll quotes, one from the Gaia guy and one from the Himalayan Institute guy.
Over 250,000 of our members globally practice yoga on Gaia while also enjoying our broader content offerings, which we'll be talking about, said Paul Terrell, Gaia's CFO.
As we continue to create and find meaningful content, increase subscribers, and grow internationally, we are excited to welcome the Yoga International community to Gaia.
We look forward to carrying on the legacy that Yoga International and the Himalayan Institute have built over the decades.
Like Gaia, they have celebrated the practice of yoga as more than a purely physical pursuit, while connecting back to the deeper roots of yoga traditions." Himalayan Institute CEO and Yoga International Chairman Ishan Taguna it commented quote, we are pleased that Yoga International has found its new home with Gaia as a leader in consciousness
media, including online yoga content, Gaia shares Yoga International's passion for empowering its members' personal growth.
Yoga has transformed from a niche discipline into a culturally relevant conscious lifestyle and is the quintessential embodiment of wellness in the 21st century.
The Himalayan Institute is excited to transition stewardship of Yoga International to Gaia and looks forward to the positive impact Gaia will have on the world as it continues to share the the practice of yoga worldwide.
Okay, so what do you think of that?
I'm sorry, I couldn't help laughing at the niche practice that has now gone global.
Right, right.
As a lifestyle, now it's a conscious lifestyle discipline, right?
As opposed to part of the religion of one of the most populous countries in the world.
Right, exactly.
So this does seem like a really huge and alarming moment in the yoga community.
I mean, not only has Yoga International jumped the shark into this paranormal kind of wild landscape, but they're also getting, their people are now potentially being red-pilled into conspirituality and a lot of very, very dark material.
I know you're going to say more about the history of Yoga International and the Himalayan Institute and Swami Rama.
So we'll leave that there.
But this is, yeah, this is all pretty wild.
Purely from a content perspective, thinking about Netflix, you can watch a more progressive documentary about the problems with Trump.
And then you can then watch a reality show that's about Trump's family history that people who like Donald Trump would then enjoy.
Right.
And this is a challenge of platforms across the board.
You'll have something like Amazon, which isn't really a content provider, and they'll just throw anything up there.
Netflix, HBO will be a little more discerning in general.
They have to think about their audience.
And part of what I think the issue here is, is that Gaia is just presenting itself as a streaming service, and therefore we're just adding yoga to this service that already exists.
But when you look at their content, as we'll be doing throughout this episode, you will find dozens of episodes from different providers who are anti-vaccination I could not find one, not even pro-vaccine, I couldn't even find one credible health offering on the entire site as I went through it.
I just want to kind of plant that right now that they have an agenda and so the content we're talking about, the Yoga International that they're now going to be taking in, ...is becoming part of that agenda, and I want to be clear on that, because it's not just a streaming platform.
Yeah, totally agreed.
You know, it's safe to say that we could go back a century or more to just reflect on something fundamental about yoga media, which is that there's always been a ton of it.
Specifically, there's always been a ton of yoga writing.
These online platforms are new and video content production is fairly new.
But just in terms of media output in the yoga world, it's always been an entire It's just a huge thing.
There's something about the category itself that just churns out endless content in ways that I don't think we find in other discourses.
And I think that's because yoga is like super evocative.
It's also super vague.
It blends disciplines into this big sort of aspirational smoothie.
And if you're a writer who's excitable, you can write about all of these things without specializing in any of them, so long as you use the frame of yoga to do it.
So, you know, yoga also has this long and twisting history that's told through competing sources, which means that any story or any sort of content that you pull out of the distant past carries this invitation for someone else to come along which means that any story or any sort of content that you pull out of the distant past carries this invitation for someone else to come along and say, well, on the other hand, you know, we're not talking
So there's something very DIY about it.
And there are a lot of yoga people that love to pretend the opposite, that there is a clear and authentic sort of centrality to be grasped about the subject.
And they love to pretend even more, I think, that they've grasped it.
But in the end, there's no yoga pope that determines any ultimate doctrine or way of practicing.
And so the whole topic is a paradox, really.
Yoga is this very evocative but also empty signifier that can be used to write about Pretty much anything that a person is interested in.
But it's also a transcendent signifier that conveys emotional gravitas and the impression that everyone should know what it means.
So it's this word and this topic that means nothing and everything at the same time.
And likewise, it's a practice that seems to give a number of people this neurological condition where they think that they're writers.
And they can't stop writing.
And, you know, all of those qualities are really valuable when it comes to conspirituality.
But maybe I'll pause here and just say, you know, like, what do you guys think about yoga literature in general?
Like, what percentage of the yoga books out there are worth the trees?
Well, probably very few.
I mean, look, I consumed so much of this content in my 20s and I remember reading Paramahansa Yogananda and all of that romance and mystery of him, you know, attaining to self-realization.
But I was also reading, like, books about Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and the Seth books that were supposedly channeled by Jane Roberts and even Bringers of the Dawn by Barbara Marciniak, who I think created The reptilian alien meme that David Icke ended up popularizing and making his own.
There was a connecting, there was a connective tissue between all of these which was that there was some kind of deeply personal subjective revelation that one could come to And usually it sort of disclosed very similar things about the ultimate nature of reality.
And so I would say any of the books that include that BS, yeah, they're not worth the trees that have been cut down to print them.
But Julian, the aliens talked to David Icke, so I think you're a little off in that.
Ah yes, he went to the original source.
Yes, exactly.
Maybe they both were dipping into that.
In terms of books, I'm looking at about 40 or 50 next to me that I've still held onto, and my interest has always been historical.
In general, I like to understand the history of things, but one thing when you study history, and I've learned this a lot through predominantly evolutionary biology, which I'm also kind of a geek on, Is that to try to pinpoint a specific source of anything is just going to run you in circles.
And it's a very territorial, even when you were reading in the beginning about Yoga International, they're planting a flag.
It reminded me of in 2018 when Lululemon hired Vice's in-house marketing firm to rebrand them.
The guy who was running that firm said to whoever the Marketing guy at Lululemon was, you know, Lululemon owns yoga so you can do whatever you want with it.
And it has very much that same sentiment there.
So, you know, I say all that because to try to find some historical roots is just, it's really just filled with bluster and ego for the most part.
I do think there are valuable books if you're interested in instruction or history.
But I also think, as you said, Matthew, some people just say way too much and know way Yeah, and I think what has happened is that we have wound up with mountains of popular yoga books, like warehouses full of popular yoga books.
I'm reminded that my nine-year-old recently got into drawing comics and I wanted to give him plenty of material all at once to absorb, and you can go on eBay.
And find, you know, people in Kansas who have full storage units or maybe it's their mom's basements, but they're stacked to the ceiling with these file boxes filled with comic books and for 50 bucks, they'll ship you a box with 100 comics.
And I feel yoga books are almost like that.
For a while, I collected them when people would post their throwaways on Facebook.
Like you could PayPal some disillusioned middle-aged yoga teacher 20 bucks and you'll get a whole box of musty, crappy yoga books.
Or go to a record store and look through their Eastern section and you'll find old vinyl records from the 50s for like a dollar as well.
Nice, yeah.
I mean, the thing about the books, and about yoga literature in general, is that they're written by enthusiasts, often very nerdy, earnest, introvert types, who are often also teachers writing about their special insights and techniques.
In a way that's indistinguishable from marketing.
So it's actually pretty rare to come across a popular yoga book that's not a combination memoir and calling card for the person's teaching career.
And I remember in the early 2000s when I first got started that this was kind of a threshold question that determined whether you were like making it as a yoga teacher.
Like do you have a book out?
And, you know, let's do some full disclosure here.
I think all three of us went down that road somewhat, right?
Like, I published a book on the Yoga Sutras in 2012.
That led to me getting some YTT work.
What about you guys?
Well, I mean, I have to say, I self-published one book as a companion to a workshop series that I taught every year for probably seven or eight years.
And sold at the workshops, of course.
And another one, which was the manual for, for a teacher training that I did for about eight years as well.
So those are out there in the world and I stand behind certain aspects of them.
And I'm very embarrassed by other aspects of them because, you know, that's where I was at.
And that was also the thing is like, when you, if you have a book, then that somehow legitimizes, it gives you a product that's an upsell, but it also legitimizes a kind of body of work That you're building towards, that I felt I was trying to build towards, and a way to get the message out into the world.
And it's definitely a marketing, the marketing piece is not insubstantial.
Right.
I self-published two, one on yoga and atheism that was just a brain dump that you can no longer find.
One on the yamas and the yamas that, you know, like same thing.
I stand behind some of it, not all of it at this point.
And then my neuroscience and movement book had a chapter of yoga, which I stand behind a little more as that's more recent.
It's amazing stuff.
I appreciate that, as writers, we turned our attention to this thing that we were all so interested in.
I'm also troubled by this overlap into the marketing aspect in this unregulated space where It's not like anybody was looking over my shoulder or doing editorial work on how I was giving this commentary on this root text of yoga philosophy.
So now I have some misgivings about it, but what was that thing?
It wasn't just a book about my personal interest in something.
There was something more to it, right?
I was trying to do something more to it.
I was trying to say, hey, this is my particular hot take on this culture.
And, hey, do you want to, you know, you want to hire me in to talk more about it?
Because I think that might be interesting.
So, anyway, it means that yoga media in general is bloated by and conflated often with yoga media advertising and it always has been.
And sometimes in this strangely deceptive way in which the book is presented as being about the subject but is really about the author.
Right?
Like, the best-selling yoga book ever is by B.K.S.
Iyengar with, like, over three million copies in print in English.
It's called Light on Yoga.
But it's really just a manual of Iyengar's idiosyncratic style and his own takes on philosophy in which he was an autodidact.
And people to this day who study in Iyengar schools think that, you know, he was some great translator of Sanskrit or something like that.
It's just not true.
Here's another factor, which is that the means of book production—this is very weird—for yoga books were democratized by technology, but then also cultified from the 1970s onwards.
Because one of the main ways in which yoga cults recruited Was by pumping out reams of dog shit books by the resident guru on their in-house presses.
You know, sometimes it would just be Xerox machines with saddle staplers or there'd be an ashram designer who took the materials to the local offset press and they would cut the cheapest printing deal they could find.
You can tell, you know, when it's an ashram book because the binding is usually crap and the colophon, if there is one, is usually just the name of the ashram and the PO box.
If you use a bibliographic service online to find these books, you're not going to find them because they never had ISBN numbers.
They were never listed in the Library of Congress.
They never got into stores or libraries.
They were printed to be sold in the Ashram tuck shop.
Or handed out in airports.
Can I just say here, Matthew, that you're just making me think of Adi Da, formerly known as Baba Frijon, who made his whole career talking in the back of a bookshop that printed his just millions and millions of words.
So many, so many books.
Yeah.
Right.
And he didn't actually write them down, most likely.
I'm sure that there were audio tapes that he had devotees who were unpaid using those trundle machines to transcribe those fucking things.
And it took them ages and ages.
And then he would probably, I don't know, I'm making this up now, but I'm betting that he would like read the manuscript and say, well, okay, this is pretty good, but you have to capitalize every other word now.
And then the person would have to go back through with a typewriter and do that shit.
Oh my god.
Anyway, this is a big, this is, it's a whole other episode we could do on like the ghost writing that's done for, you know, narcissists.
But, I mean, here's an organized example of this racket was that the Bihar School of Yoga You probably have some of their books, right guys?
They would do a book called, you know, Pranayama in Hatha Yoga or something like that.
They had these, like, solid color, very, like, just really ugly cover art that, you know, I don't know who would do it, but they were said, these books were all said to be authored by Swami Satyananda Saraswati of the Bihar School.
And he definitely didn't write all of the books personally.
I have, you know, really good sources who've told me that there were a battery of unpaid ghostwriters.
But there was something about these books and their gnarly cover art that you could only really get in India that ironically became a mark of highbrow quality in the wider yoga world, not because they went through any peer review process, not because there was any editorial consistency, but because they were just from this hallowed place.
Okay, so that's a little bit on yoga books because that sets the stage for talking about yoga magazines that emerged in the pre-digital era in English and then led to these online yoga platforms.
The main point being that in the wild there is no functional difference and no real way for lay readers to tell the difference between writing about yoga and advertising for yoga.
And more often than not, popular yoga books are trying to recruit you into the monetized technique of the author.
So where this combo really comes together and goes public is in the realm of yoga magazines.
There's two main ones, Yoga Journal and then Yoga International formed many years later.
This is the magazine that just got sold to Gaia.
And both carry this legacy of earnest hypergraphia and overreaching marketing.
And as we'll see, they're connected to each other through a conflict in advertising.
But let me pause just here so I can get your takes on these magazines, especially Yoga Journal.
What do you think?
They've been in the periphery of your life for years.
I've never been able to stand Yoga Journal.
I haven't kept up with them.
I know there are good writers there and there are good people doing some stuff.
My impression has always been that it was somewhat superficial and benign, apart from perpetuating commercialized portrayal of the yoga ideal as acrobatic and hyperflexible and thin and usually white, but I know they've been making attempts to correct that in the last few years, which is good.
I just always saw it more as a catalog to sell expensive yoga clothes with some vaguely interesting articles in between and occasionally something substantive.
I would put myself in the same category.
I did write for them for a while as a music reviewer at the time when I was doing Earthrise Sound Systems, so yoga and music and neuroscience was my thing.
They covered me on that a bit.
And it was nice, but I can't say I ever actually read a full issue.
They would occasionally have a good story, and they would have a philosophy section that I would turn to, but for the most part, it was mostly unmemorable.
You know, a first crack at the title that we settled on for this episode was Yoga Media.
Maybe a river rolls downhill because I think that's kind of the story that takes shape when we look at some of the early history of Yoga Journal which, because both of you are kind of referring to the modern rebranding which happened in 1999.
But back when it was founded in 75 by a few really keen practitioners at the California Yoga Teachers Association including Judith Lasseter, it was a really DIY project.
300 photocopied copies went out hand-delivered of the first issue.
And it kind of continued the earnest modernization project of the yoga movement by bringing together this assortment of topics and takes like scientizing yoga, psychologizing practice, sometimes there was articles on ethics, rarely anything That was in any way political, and there was always a lot of advertising, but the early Yoga Journal did something interesting.
They actually were a non-profit with a very strong board of directors, and they had this policy that they wouldn't advertise or promote teachers with unresolved abuse allegations.
So, I have a really good source who tells me that this policy actually kept Manu Somanos out of the ad pages.
Now, Yoga Journal was eventually bought up by a money guy and turned into a for-profit publication.
And when that happened, the policy started to slip and some of the old guard were very disturbed, for instance, to see that Rodney Yee, just as an example, was still being advertised in and promoted by Yoga Journal even after serious allegations of sexual abuse against him were published.
So, there was this, I have a PDF of a petition letter that was actually sent to the new Yoga Journal admin from the old Yoga Journal guard that demands they reinstate this no abusers policy that they install an ethics board and stuff like that.
That they actually sort of return to their roots as being a journal that is trying to foster some kind of safety and reasonability.
I also have a PDF of the response from the CEO at the time, who is John Abbott.
And basically, he says, you know, Yoga Journal is a special interest consumer magazine.
It is not our place or business to rule on moral and ethical issues.
I believe it inappropriate for Yoga Journal to organize an ethical development team to formulate ethical guidelines.
These guidelines are documented in the Yamas and Niyamas.
Fair enough.
You know, I mean, basically what he's saying is that yoga media is just like any other media, but it's guided by the yamas and niyamas, right?
Or the ethical principles from the Iron Age, which isn't very specific, but at least there's some sort of like moral center there, it seems to be.
Anyway, why do we care about this particular policy and how it went away?
Because when they enforced it, it led to the creation of their competition, which was Yoga International.
Before the corporatization of Yoga Journal in late 1990, they actually published a fact-checked and legally vetted investigative piece by the journalist Catherine Webster about the sexual abuse committed by Swami Rama, who was the founder of the Himalayan Institute.
So we'll hook you up with that in the show notes.
It's long, it's detailed, it's a devastating account of a cult leader abusing students, abusing women, abusing trust, and being defended by his lieutenants after being sued by the family of a 19-year-old woman he unduly influenced into a relationship.
Now, one of those lieutenants is Rajmani Taguna It.
And, you know, he said some pretty, like, disgusting things about the women who accused Rama of abuse.
So I've got an excerpt here from Webster's piece.
It starts with Taguna It answering Webster about whether he believes the women who are accusing his guru of sexual abuse, whether he believes them.
So Julian, can you read that?
Believing such stories means disbelieving in myself because that's my whole life.
My relationship with Swami Rama is purely divine and spiritual.
There cannot be impurity in it and there's no room for such thoughts.
I might doubt my own perception, I might doubt my own eyes, but I cannot doubt that strength which has given me everything.
Even if I found out, how can I find out?
Because I do not want to find out.
There's no need for finding out if I know it is completely wrong.
Yeah, he totally really said all of that shit.
You know, and to be honest, I think maybe we should be grateful to him for being so clear.
And to my knowledge, Taguna It has not retracted any of those statements.
And you may recall this name, actually, from the top of the show, because Himalayan Institute has kept things in the family.
The current CEO, Ishan Taguna It, is Rajmani's son, and of course, you know, the sins of the father are not those of the son, but business is business, and history seems to trundle on.
So, Yoga International was founded in 1991, just a few months after Webster's piece drops.
I don't know what happened in those months, but it would seem that the old policy of not advertising influencers with allegations against them put the Himalayan Institute into a rough position.
And even if that advertising cancellation policy wasn't in effect, was the Himalayan Institute really going to promo its programs in a magazine that had just eviscerated its administration?
Not likely.
So, Yoga International is a media company founded by a yoga school that needed to change the channel in order to keep advertising and revenue flowing.
And maybe that will start to sound familiar.
Now, here's the thing.
The real tragedy is that Yoga International has gone on to create this content library that rivals the seriousness and integrity of the early Yoga Journal days, although in a totally different climate.
Now, it never rose to the investigative journalism level of Webster.
That was kind of a high point in an industry that's allergic to self-examination, but at the same time, young and social justice savvy editors have done a lot of work over the past few years to platform really interesting content on accessible yoga, and anti-ableism, trauma awareness, racial inclusivity, and decolonization, and Even though they turned down every pitch I made when I had a yoga abuse or yoga cult story to pitch that, I mean, it's fine.
It takes a ton of resources for a media company to get into that stuff, and it wasn't their beat.
They did do a great job in platforming some of the most important materials to emerge out of the Yoga in Me Too movement, and we'll connect with some of those in the notes.
Now, originally for this episode, I was going to ask my friends and colleagues who publish with Yoga International what they thought of the sale and what they thought about sharing digital space with COVID minimizers, anti-vaxxers and so on.
I reached out to a bunch.
I got a bunch of anxious and angry and disappointed responses.
Some of the disappointment was specifically about how Yoga International had felt like a progressive platform for their work.
And now that was in question.
But many also expressed a lot of tentative feelings about going on record.
And some of them, I don't know how many, have royalty deals on the content they've provided, which means they're now faced with the decision of whether to let that content wither from their end or actively promote on this new platform.
Some of them referred to non-disparagement clauses in their contracts.
So I don't need to increase their stress by putting them on the spot.
I know it's a bad situation for them, because I'm in it too!
Like, I didn't give them video content, but I was commissioned to write five articles for them about things like the social psychology of pain and yoga practice and cultic dynamics.
They're good articles.
And they now will provide added credibility to Gaia.
So what do you think, Derek, Julian, what would you do?
What would you do if you found out that your content was suddenly going to be making money for Gaia?
This all brings to mind a very challenging situation.
I do not rely on yoga anymore to make a living.
And I purposefully did that during the pandemic and partly because of this podcast because It's just because of what the world has become.
But if my financial well-being was tied into that, I honestly don't know how I can answer.
I think I would be upset that my content went there.
I imagine that I would have a real trouble filming any more for them, knowing that my image and content was going to monetize their real agendas, which we'll get into when we play the clips.
All of that being said, when you are back up against the wall and you have your rent to pay, it's a very difficult decision and I honestly can't give a clear answer here since I'm not in that situation.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I would be mortified and I would have great empathy for people in that situation who Yeah, I mean, for me, it's especially disturbing that, I mean, for the friends that I have who produce, like, social justice-oriented content, they will now potentially be doing the work of laundering conspiracy theory content.
And we know that that happens because that's already an established pattern for fever dreams like QAnon, which, for instance, weaponizes the reality of sex trafficking to serve the macabre fantasies of political retribution.
I'm going to talk about Gaia and their history in a moment, but I wanted to start by sort of pulling back and introducing some metaphor here.
And you'll see why.
To me, the content that Gaia creates ends up amounting to what I think of as a map to nowhere.
There's an infamous, very short story, it's only a paragraph long, by Jorge Luis Borges, that describes the art and science of mapmaking, becoming so precise that a map the exact size of an empire could come to match it entirely point by point.
This map, though, turns out to be useless and, in the story, is abandoned to the forces of nature.
Now, only tattered remains of this relic of cartography can be found, he says, sheltering the occasional beast or beggar.
Some see this story as an elaboration on an idea from Lewis Carroll's story, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, in which a map of this clearly unwieldy size is described that has never been fully laid out.
Instead, inhabitants decided to use the country itself as the map, and they said, it does nearly as well.
The 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard admires the Borges story as what he calls the finest allegory for simulation, describing how an aging double ends up being confused for the real thing.
Covering the very thing it was meant to represent, which leads then to Baudrillard's concept of hyper-reality, or the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies.
Hyper-reality is seen as a condition in which what is real And what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there's no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.
Much has been made of how the internet, video games, and virtual reality are the technological manifestation of what Baudrillard described, and he's had a huge influence on science fiction, especially The Matrix films, whose red pill metaphor, as you know, hovered behind narratives of waking up to various formulations of obscured truth throughout 2020.
The Matrix, says Morpheus, is an illusion that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Baudrillard also influenced a generation of mathematicians, philosophers, coders, and physicists who have become obsessed with the idea that our reality itself could be a simulation.
Now, in his book title, we are clear on what a simulation is.
It's a representation of something real.
But what if this strange word simulacra Well, one definition that he uses for simulacra is that it is a copy of something that never existed.
A simulacra differs from fiction in that it purports to represent something real.
To extend the map metaphor that I started with here, it claims to be a map of something that actually exists, but does not.
You know, I'm just so overjoyed, Julian, that you've come out as an enthusiastic postmodernist.
I knew that we would be fast friends for life.
Baudrillard is perfect here because Simulacra is actually pretty elegant when we're talking about how yoga is conceived by its industry.
It's always a kind of reconstruction of something that was never quite there, or at least never quite like that.
Conspiracy theories are, in a way, maps that describe an alternate reality.
And as we saw in 2020, QAnon utilized a gamified online strategy that wove together several perennial conspiracy themes like the secret cabal, blood libel, satanic panic, evil elites, and a gothic fear of technology and medicine into a paranoid landscape that overlaid our real-world crisis.
We could say that the online conspiracy space simulated a community, but it also created a simulated sense of doing research and discovering truths, and that the postmodern tapestry of braided conspiracy themes and supernatural terrors also simulates some sense of investigative or even spiritual epiphany that comes from discovering authentic insights.
What it delivers, though, is this simulacra, a map to nowhere.
Instead of epiphany, we have what is called apophenia, the tendency to perceive meaningful connections that are actually not there.
This is true of course of so much New Age spirituality, from numerology, to synchronicity, to palmistry, to astrology, to being earnestly on the lookout for signs from the universe, to a swage and endless stream of petty anxieties and legitimate existential dilemmas.
As elaborate as these maps can and do become, they're untethered to any meaningful landmarks or reference points outside of the ritual of cold reading and pseudo-profundity.
The epiphany is that apophanies are actually meaningless.
But that's okay.
Let them go and come back to your breath.
Now, what I've been reading so far is an excerpt from a Patreon bonus episode I created last April.
It's called Gaia and the Map to Nowhere.
And for that episode, just like Derek has done this week, I took a brain-numbingly deep dive into this website via their seven-day free trial and reported back on what I found about how ghosts, cryptids, dogmen, Bigfoot, and interdimensional time travel intersect with 9-11, JFK, evil cabals, and shadow governments.
And I just want to clarify, you're not exaggerating any of those data points, right?
Those are actual names that you can find in any of the videos and content areas on the website.
It really just sounds like we're making shit up, doesn't it?
Yeah, it does.
But we're not.
I also have a little bit of personal beef here, and I won't get into it too much.
You know, Gaia used to be called Gaiam, which some will remember from the late 90s as this mail order catalog.
I used to actually use it.
You could get anything from yoga mats to mala beads to zen alarm clocks or incense holders.
It was very convenient.
But in 2007, Gaia purchased what was an early prototype of social media for grown-ups, right?
And it was started by some friends of mine.
It was called Zod's, just the Dutch word for seeds.
A couple friends of mine started it and it was my first experience of being on social media and blogging.
I had a great time there.
It grew from 3,000 to 300,000 members in a couple short years.
This is before all the yogis were on Facebook.
The golden years!
Guy M. saw the potential and they snapped it up.
And I mention this because within about six months of buying it, they just shut the whole thing down.
It's just all of those profiles, all of those articles, all of the debates we had.
It was all just gone.
So all of that work disappeared.
All of that labor?
Yeah, just overnight.
Overnight without any warning, it was just all gone.
Yeah, so I still haven't forgiven them for that.
Yeah, that's like an amputation.
In 2009, Gaia started their video streaming service.
And by 2016, the rebranded Gaia TV sold off the mail order catalog side of the business for $167 million.
By 2019, they were not only hosting thousands of hours of video content, I'm going to talk about exactly what that content contains, but also live streaming events by pseudoscience luminaries like Greg Brayden, Carolyn Mace, and Bruce Lipton in 185 countries with simultaneous translation into the language It's like the U.N.
Where?
It's like the UN.
They also did another kind of seven day trial.
Beloved quantum woo author Lynn McTaggart coordinated thousands of participants in a week long meditation intention experiment broadcast by Gaia with the aim of decreasing violent crime.
Where?
Just everywhere?
Everywhere!
No, I think they were focused actually on a particular area.
The results, let's just say, were largely inconclusive.
Okay, so the saga we've explored so far has all been masterminded by a Czechoslovakian immigrant named Jerka Rysavy.
He's a former champion hurdler who came to the US in 1984 and then made a substantial fortune in Boulder by selling office supplies, of course.
He transformed a small company that he had bought into a $5 billion a year business, which he then sold for a billion in 1999 and plowed all of that money eventually into Gaia TV.
They now have close to 700,000 paying subscribers, And at $11.99 a month, that already adds up to over $107 million a year being pulled in just from that revenue.
Who knows what else they have going.
That's before factoring in now whatever slice of Yoga International's additional yield.
I saw on their website that they have 300,000 subscribers.
And they're paying either $9.99 a month or bundling up for $99 a year for their subscription.
That adds up to between $29 and $35 million.
So, how much of that Gaia ends up being able to grab onto, as anyone's guessed?
Well, all of it.
That's what the sale is, right?
All of it.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, how many people stay with them?
How many people then end up getting upsold into whatever the new package deal is to also get all of the Gaia content, right?
It's an amazing pie.
To find out more about the culture inside this company, there's an excellent Business Insider article by Rob Price, who interviewed 30 existing or former employees at Gaia.
I'll include a link in the show notes for more detail, but suffice it to say that as the platform's already far out paranormal, UFO, and cryptozoological, that's a real word, if you want to look it up,
As their content has plunged deeper into that area and then further into dark conspiracy theories, it sounds from the article like being red-pilled at the 12-acre campus near Boulder, Colorado, which is apparently festooned with enormous crystals everywhere, has become a necessary initiation for staff as well as customers.
That article includes some incendiary accounts of the organizational dynamics, lawsuits, and accusations of Luciferian propaganda, but I'm going to leave that up to the listeners to go and read about if they're so inclined.
Now, if you've never watched any of the content on Gaia TV, you probably already do know about them based on their extensive social media advertising.
They've apparently spent tens of millions on Facebook alone, and in fact, in 2017, Facebook used them as a case study of success in their own pitch to entice other people to advertise on Facebook.
Oh man.
Gaia's revenue has increased by 28% per year during the pandemic.
And their CFO predicts that by 2024, they could have as many as 26 million paying subscribers.
Well, let's get into some of the content.
But since we're recording this on the one-year anniversary of the insurrection, I wanted to point out a quote that I found last night.
I've been watching Lularich, which is the four-part documentary series on LuLaRoe, the leggings company.
It's on Amazon Prime.
I suggest everyone watch it.
If you're interested in understanding just how insidious MLMs are, this will take Matthew's Exceptional reporting on the oils, you know, stuff we've covered before and really put into perspective because you're going to get to see how MLMs bankrupt communities and women specifically in terms of Lula Rich, but they have an MLM expert on the show and I should have remembered his name.
I apologize.
I'll try to find that.
But at some point he said, if everything is possible, nothing is real.
Now also yesterday I was watching Dan Bongino, because the New Yorker Evan Osnos did an exceptional deep dive into this Cretan of a character, and I was watching his transmission yesterday on YouTube where He just glazes over the insurrection as being something that the left made up.
It's not even something he focuses on.
And he has 8.5 million listeners a week.
And it reminded me that later that night when I heard that quote, if everything is possible, nothing is real.
Bifurcated, our country is truncated.
There's so many terms we can talk about division and splitting of our country, but also of our consciousness and our awareness right now.
And so to circle back to what I was saying earlier about Gaia and the content they produce, when you're platforming something like David Icke, who is very much a sort of new age version of Dan Bongino, Nothing is real.
And that's what comes across, and you'll hear in some of these clips, about people's understanding of reality.
And I don't have any answers for how to combat that, but we'll just keep producing what I hope to be good information here.
So just as a broad overview, here are a few of the topics that Gaia expresses as truth on their network.
Akashic records, the pineal glands, Matthew's favorite, the pineal glands role in psychic energy, disproven, but that's been around for centuries.
Quantum physics, one of our favorites here.
The dangers of EMF, electromagnetic frequencies.
They have many episodes on fasting and some on keto.
They have the Law of Attraction, of course, channeling astrology, crystals, starseeds, angel guidance, UFOs.
Yeah, amazing.
Alright, so we've got Rudolf Steiner in the house with Akashic Records.
Where does the pineal glands role in psychic energy?
Where does that come from?
And why does it calcify that gland?
Where does this come from?
It's a yoga thing.
Does it go right back to Arthur Avalon?
Yeah, I was just reading Serpent Power recently.
It's in Avalon.
Arthur Avalon does a very early sketch of physiology and anatomy in terms of the chakras.
And so the pineal gland was being cited.
This is Late 19th century, but I think it predates that as well.
The idea that the third eye is the place where the spirit enters, basically.
Of course, there was that idea that you, what was it, 28 grams or something, where you lose a certain amount of weight when you die.
It's all disproven shit, but you lose a certain amount, and that was supposed to be through the pineal gland exiting, and so it's been around for a long time.
I was really into all of this stuff too.
It's sort of mapping the chakra system onto the neuroendocrine system.
So the chakra system is kind of like the energetic software and the neuroendocrine system as the physical hardware.
And so you have a major gland or a nerve bundle everywhere that a chakra is supposed to be.
And it makes some sense experientially in terms of certain, you know, sensations you might have, but beyond that, not so much.
Yeah, well, then there's quantum physics, which has also been around a long time.
I mean, this is the stuff that has always boiled my blood.
You know, quantum mechanics is weird, but it's not new.
It's been around since the 1920s.
And the thing about quantum mechanics is that the behavior of subatomic particles is perplexing precisely because it doesn't fit with how matter behaves at the macro level.
Where we live and then what a lot of people will try and do they'll play this little trick where they'll say these perplexing anomalies from quantum physics explain things like paranormal phenomena forgetting the fact that there's no evidence for any paranormal phenomena they've come up with an explanation that seems scientific because it ties in with quantum mechanics and then very often quantum mechanics is used as a way to try and undermine quote-unquote materialist science and this is where I have a beef with the postmodernist Matthew is that
You know, you end up with people like Deepak Chopra and Rupert Sheldrake repurposing those kinds of critiques of the Enlightenment and of science and reason.
If you can find Chopra quoting reasonably Derrida or Foucault or somebody like that, I would love to see that.
I don't know, man.
That's another conversation.
I know that we won't find that, but someone like Rupert Sheldrake certainly is trying to put himself out there with that level of academic clout.
Nice.
Yeah.
I mean, he's not necessarily directly quoting the primary sources, but there is This particular critique of knowledge as a way of maintaining power and of the Enlightenment as actually being a way of robbing us of the mystery and the magic of the sort of the pre-scientific world in a way.
Right.
What you said, Julian, reminds me of one of the episodes we've just started sketching out, which is there is this contingent of climate change activists who are also anti-vax.
So the message is trust the science, not that science.
And that's what I feel like when people say, you cannot measure psychic energy, but oh, here it is in the body.
See, we can measure it at this level, but not at that level.
It's just, it's so absurd.
Yeah, so then we have like the Law of Attraction, which is bundled up with the secret and all kinds of hyper-idealistic philosophies, including Course in Miracles.
There must be a lot of Course in Miracles stuff on Gaia.
Am I right about that?
Yes.
Did you come across?
Yeah, okay.
We've got to do an astrology episode soon.
Starseeds, angel guidance, okay, UFOs.
Right, alright, so that's a big line-up.
So, here are some of the figures that are presented as Gaia experts.
We have Andrew Wakefield, who you'll hear in a moment.
Great.
Joe Dispenza, who you'll hear in a moment.
Awesome.
Ty and Charlene Bollinger, some of the Insurrectionist fans.
They don't believe that cancer is real, right?
They think that they can cure cancer with something?
Yes, correct.
Yes.
Sherry Tenpenny, the woman who became very famous for trying to stick a spoon on herself in front of Congress, or wherever it was.
Carolyn Mace.
Mace, thank you.
Rashid Buttar, the osteopath who was one of the big anti-vaxxers.
David Icke.
So let's begin with a few clips.
And I spent too much of last weekend going through shows, and I'm telling you, I barely scratched the surface.
I picked a few, I went in, and What you're hearing is just such a small percent of what is actually in there.
I just want to flag before you jump in, Derek, is that three of the people on the list you just gave us are on the disinformation dozen.
Yeah, thank you.
So, this show is called Passage to Real Immunity.
Do your own research, that's actually the show.
And it's part of a series, and it opens with Ravi Roy and Karola Lage Roy.
They are the authors of The Homeopathic Guide to Travelers, among other books.
They make a big thing about not having vaccinated their children in the 1980s, but they say that all of their friends who vaccinated their kids in the 80s, their kids all ended up getting sick.
They also claim to live in the least vaccinated city in the world, in Germany.
It's a market town of 12,000 people on the edge of the Bavarian Alps.
It does appear to be a little bit of an artist's commune, but let's hear what she has to say.
In all other books, we have written about 20 books as homeopathic guides.
We mention the possibility of protecting yourself with homeopathy.
And now we discovered a new method, a little bit like homoeopathy, but it is with flower chakra essences.
And they are also a tremendous help to detect vaccine damages.
This homoeopathy is a booster to activate the immune system.
So, if you didn't catch that, that was homeopathy flower chakra essences, that word salad that just came out.
I wasn't sure what they're saying, but they are actually saying don't get vaccinated, which is what the entire series is about.
And they're talking about homeopathic prophylaxis, which is what Aaron Rodgers Used, for example.
So this is something that's been around.
It was also why the Napa-based homeopathist, Julie Matsi, was arrested for in July 2021 because she was selling homeoprophylaxis pellets.
Amazing.
Okay, but what is going on with the music in that clip and the dogshit audio?
It's like they don't even care about the content and the names.
I'm assuming that the person is German, but Ravi seems to... He's Indian, she's German.
He's Indian, he's German.
Okay, so does passage to real immunity have some kind of orientalist sort of ring to it, that this is the passage to India?
Is it pointing people towards homeopathy in the motherland too?
I only watched this episode.
There are many episodes.
Our free trial ended today, Matthew, but if you want to make your own free trial, because Julian and myself have now exhausted ours.
You've blown it.
You can have a weekend.
And we get advertising on every fucking YouTube video we click on.
We're Gaia now.
Let me say this, you know, as someone I've worked in documentaries before, it's very important that you film with the same camera, even if you have crews all over, so that it looks the same no matter where you're filming in the world.
So if you have different crews, you want to coordinate lenses and cameras and audio equipment, for example.
They don't do that.
They don't do that in anything that I watch.
This is just something that was filmed haphazardly.
There's all sorts of lighting.
So let's move on, but ignore the actual quality of content because you're not going to find it.
We turn to Mike and Andrea Moonen, whose son was born prematurely.
According to Andrea, she didn't like the vaccine response, so they turned to homeoprophylaxis.
I found this interesting because the video is shot By someone who's offering a class on homeopathy.
These are the students who paid for the course who are then talking about how awesome the course is, which makes me think this is a sales funnel, this whole entire series.
I'm speculating on that, but that's what it seemed like.
I don't know what guys' interests are, but as you're going to hear Mike say right now, he appreciates the whole program.
I like the idea that there was a full program, too.
There was a clearing of the vaccine.
Oh, and then there was the bringing in of the HP program.
It was a full system and that we could go from start to finish with one thing and we're still protecting our children and doing the things that we feel necessary to, right?
Not just not doing anything.
So, that's a very important point because we're going to Andrew Wakefield next, who is in this episode.
And what Wakefield did was he found mothers of children for his falsified study whose children had a variety of problems that loosely fit into what he was trying to prove.
Now, if you put yourself in the parent's position, they had a premature son.
That's rough.
I'm sure it's hard to deal with.
And so they need an answer to why something is wrong with their child.
Wakefield monetized this throughout his study.
That's what the whole purpose was.
And so you see here homeopathy is being shown as clearing a vaccine, as we know.
We've encountered this before, which is insane.
It's this idea that, oh, you did this thing that harmed your child.
Well, first, we're going to take it out of them, and then we're going to protect them with immunity with this homeoprophylaxis.
And that's where Andrew Wakefield comes into this episode.
As I said, he calls infant immunity in a nascent stage of research, which is ridiculous.
I am fascinated by the concept.
But also, he is so trained at saying things that fit the agenda that he's trying to put forward.
So let's hear this clip when he's talking about homeoprophylaxis.
I am fascinated by the concept.
And of course, it's almost impossible to define how it works.
Because it's probably sufficient to say if it did work.
It's not inducing antibodies, it's not inducing, as far as one's aware, cell-mediated immunity, but what it is doing is In a statistically significant way, protecting a population from infectious disease.
You got that.
He doesn't know what it does, but statistically significant, it works.
Yeah.
Can I just ask, are there show notes for these episodes?
Like when you sign on to this program?
Yes.
So, do they consist of links?
Are there studies that are available for download?
Oh, no, no, no.
It's marketing notes.
They're marketing notes.
Come on, man.
So, when he's trying to say homeoprophylaxis somehow statistically works, you're not going to go to the show notes and find any kind of substantiation for that?
No.
No, not at all.
So, the Gaia content user is expected to just sort of buy what he says on that episode?
I would imagine that's what it's being presented at.
I mean, this is part of the genre, right?
This genre that's been around for, I don't know, 10 or 20 years now, in which you have pseudo-scientific experts, you have scientific contrarians, Put on the screen it gives their academic qualifications and then they just say things that are complete minority, you know, opinions that the scientific consensus doesn't agree with and that's it.
That's all you ever hear of it is that this person who is a scientist has said this thing and so you should just believe it.
Let me add that for this episode, at least, because as I said, Matthew's going to watch the series and report back.
Great.
No, I'm not.
I'm not fucking watching it.
That is pretty much Andrew Wakefield's role.
There's not much more that he says.
So, they're talking to him about homeopathy and that's what they chose.
I don't know how it works, but it works.
I know it doesn't create antibodies.
Right.
Right.
Special appearance by.
Exactly.
Okay, so let's move on to the current darling of the conspiritualist world, Joe Dispenza.
He's a chiropractor.
Not just a chiropractor.
He was a chiropractor who I think was the chiropractor in residence for the Rompha School of Enlightenment and may have made his bones by adjusting Rompha himself out of his 35,000 year sleep.
That was good.
He also claims to be a researcher of epigenetics, quantum physics, and neuroscience.
Of course, right.
So, if you ever think about the term charismatic, he is it.
And he whizzes so many buzzwords by you that it's impossible to keep up.
And there's such a force of certainty that you just instinctually know he has to be onto something.
That's how this works.
This is part of Becoming Supernatural, which is a video version of a course that Dispensa presents for Gaia.
You can tell it's serious because if you only sign up for the free trial, you only get the first of the seven day of the episodes.
I'm sorry, the entire event is actually 15 episodes, in which I'm told, quote, Dr. Dispenza addresses the neuroscience of personal transformation by blending quantum physics with the science of the mind-body connection to help you understand what is truly possible in your life.
Legit.
Amazing.
The pitch continues because I'm told in the show notes, this is what the show notes are, Matthew, not research studies.
They're sales pitches for the rest of the program.
Yes.
Yes, so the three day workshop, I will learn how to enter deeper levels of the subconscious mind and learn how to be your own placebo.
That's amazing.
That's an amazing turn of phrase, actually.
Hats off to whoever did that fucking copy, because that's that's amazing.
Learn how to be your own placebo.
Yes.
Wow.
The ultimate sovereign achievement.
Wait, wait, wait.
That means that means learn how to be your own sugar pill.
That does nothing that controls in an actual experiment where something real is being tested.
That's what you want to be.
You want to be your own sugar pill.
That's cool.
That does nothing.
Gaslighting yourself.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay, good.
Step two, liberate emotional energy stored in your body, then use it to create a new destiny.
Oh no, I just want to do the first part, that's all right.
I don't want to use it to create a new destiny.
Wait, if it's your destiny, how do you create it anew?
I don't understand!
Maybe it's a time travel thing.
Yeah, maybe.
Step three, broadcast new electromagnetic signatures to create new opportunities in your life.
I need a vaccine to do that with like a microchip, right?
Step four, open your heart to broadcast and strengthen your immune system by changing your attitude.
And step five, balance your autonomic nervous system by thought alone.
Okay, so let's start with the moment he pitches the program.
This is a room full of people, by the way, predominantly women, just an observation, but something I noticed in the crowd when they were there.
And you immediately get pulled in with his common people sentiment.
Common people around the world are doing the uncommon.
And they are doing supernatural things.
And we are going to combine quantum physics with neuroscience, with neuroendocrinology, with Psychoneuroimmunology with epigenetics.
All of those particular sciences, the new sciences, point the finger at possibility.
Oh, it's so perfect, right?
Because he combines the appeal to the common man doing uncommon things, and you hear the person testifying in the crowd, right?
Yes!
Yes!
Common people are doing uncommon things!
But then he throws in all of that, all of that gishgallop language that's supposed to convince you that he's a scientific expert of some kind.
This is the stuff that really breaks my heart, you know?
I have a dear friend, a really wonderful person who I love, who's a psychotherapist, and she had grown tired of what many people perceive as the psychotherapeutic focus on suffering and trauma and, you know, the mundane details of helping people to live functional lives and face the challenges of relationship and work and the complex world.
She'd just gotten divorced, she was in midlife, she was seeking a new direction, and she excitedly told me about this Joe Dispenza week-long retreat on an island somewhere exotic.
It's just so hard for me in those moments to know what to say because of course she's been reading all of his books, she's been watching content like this, and to her it all sounds legit and really hopeful and backed by science and like it's the next step forward in the cutting edge of mind-body medicine that connects physical and mental and spiritual health.
But it just isn't.
And I often don't know how to say to someone, I'm sorry to break this to you, but this is a hodgepodge of partially true claims and manipulative dishonesty and then absolute bullshit as well.
And she's just one of many over the years who've expected me to be right on board with this kind of thing.
And then I end up just thinking to myself, well, here's another wonderful and kind therapist that is probably, you know, not going to help all the people she otherwise would have.
That is a really tough story.
And I think what is additionally heartbreaking is that it's based on this very empty, very fragile parasocial relationship that is imagined with this charismatic person.
It's not going to pan out.
It's going to be transactional, it's going to be monetized, and then who's going to be left holding the bag?
What I really loved about the clip is that it's transparently a religious incantation.
He says, we're going to combine quantum physics with neuroscience, with neuroendocrinology, with psychoneuroimmunology, with epigenetics.
First of all, what do you mean, we?
Like, oh, actually, you can tell because there's a crowd there.
He means the people in the ritual workshop space.
And he could have gone on.
You know, it kind of reminds me of the Ganesha Astotram that I used to chant in Vedic astrology class.
You know, the 108 names of Ganesha.
You know, we're going to praise the elephant-faced Lord, the Lord of all gods, Lord of all hindrances, one who has two mothers, Lord with two heads.
He could just fucking go on, right?
Becomes hypnotic.
Right, he just needs a series of evocative terms, just like the names of God, that carry special power precisely because neither he nor the followers can ever quite define what they mean.
And that's the point of the whole intro of the common people, right?
Because these aren't scientific terms he's using.
There's spells, really.
And what is the one word he doesn't use is epidemiology.
Right.
So you're expecting all of these people to believe that you're going to use this vast wealth of science to transform your life, but the one science that can save your life, we're just going to not even talk about that one.
Yeah, and I have to say in that regard, that was the thing that first had my hairs on the back of my neck stand up when my friend was telling me about this course, is that the claim was that we're going to, you're going to learn how to never get sick through this scientific spiritual technology.
And that's just as deeply unethical as I can imagine.
All of these sciences kind of attending to your question, Matthew, they have to lead somewhere.
So the next clip will, we can identify them with the yoga gurus and the charismatic preachers from Christianity and the prosperity gospel that we've identified before, but it's wrapped up in a particularly egregious ignorance when he presents it like this.
And as I said, common people around the world are doing the uncommon.
And if you asked Joe Dispenza a year ago or two years ago if he thought he would be witnessing what I'm witnessing now, I probably would have said no.
I'm talking about transformation in one week.
Blind people seeing.
Deaf people hearing.
Tumors disappearing in one week.
People with leukemia.
Rare genetic disorders.
Stage 4 cancers going into complete recovery.
I'm witnessing that.
And we get testimonial after testimonial.
And it is a movement.
And it has momentum.
Chiropractor.
Yeah, don't trust the big tent preacher who refers to himself in the third person, first of all.
What the fuck?
This just kills people.
It just kills people.
Yeah.
You know, and I have to say in discussing this stuff over the years, I've had so many people telling me I was being too rigid when I would say, no, no, no, no, this, this is, this is not real.
And a lot of people who, you know, I really like would say, you know, this is an in between step.
Maybe people still need to hold on to their magical thinking, and if you can combine it with science, well, at least that's moving forward a little.
But I don't see people ever transitioning out of this over the last 20 years.
There's too much psychological and intellectual dishonesty.
There are cultish dynamics at play that maybe you can speak to, Matthew.
I just see people getting sucked in, and it's like a new operating system.
And built into the operating system are the ways to defend against ever letting it go.
Yeah, and just going back to Yoga International for a moment, I think possibly the worst thing that could happen to their subscribers is to be exposed to more of this, because the yoga industry as a whole has been struggling over the last century really for legitimacy, mainly by doing the hard janitorial work of cleaning up the claims of miracle cures and snake oil, and then more recently,
looking very carefully at the problem of charismatic influence and cultic dynamics.
So it's just a backward step for 300,000 subscribers.
And I just want to remind people, because we've gone a lot of places in this episode, but we're considering the sale of what is considered one of the premier publications and, well, streaming services of yoga in America and the West and globally with their subscriber base to this organization.
And again, I'm not advocating for anything because I don't know what I would be like if my content was there, but I just felt it important to know what type of content they're leading with.
This specifically, the Dispenza one, is a Gaia produced.
It's not like something they just bought.
They are putting this actively out there in the world.
And with that, let's go to David Icke for the last clip.
He is a former soccer player and sports broadcaster, and he's turned into a leading conspiracy theorist.
We've talked to him about him before.
Particularly when he was boosted by Guru Jagat about a year ago, or almost a year ago.
His conversion origin myth dates back to 1990 when a psychic told him he was put on Earth for a purpose and the spirit world would contact him and he's believed it ever since.
Among many offenses, he's shown support for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in two of his books.
And he is very much on board with the idea of a secret Jewish-led cabal pulling the strings of global finance.
He also believes that interdimensional reptilian aliens have hijacked Earth and are really the elite.
Oh, and the collective human mind is controlled from the moon where the reptilians have set up a space station.
Don't leave that part out.
And if you think this is plain nonsense, he's also a scientist because the Moon Matrix specifically sends signals to the human brain's left hemisphere.
So, very specific here.
He also believes that 5G is about control of the population.
COVID-19 obviously is nonsense.
You see where this is going.
So, Gaia is producing, again, paying for 30 episodes of his series Beyond the Matrix.
Can you imagine, like, writing up that sales contract?
Like, this is what we would like.
But what it actually is, and I think they've been like 10 or 12 so far, it's him on a chair, just spitballing.
Bullshitting.
That's it.
He just takes a guy a mug, and I guess he has some water, maybe, I don't know what else could be in it.
He drinks it and he just talks.
There's no teleprompter.
This is all coming out of his head at that moment.
In some sense, it's ignorable and laughable, but he has an influence, and it really fits the conspiritualist template, which is that there's a normal world, but then there's this amazingly rich and complex world beyond it that the true believers can operate in if only you stop resisting, and especially you resist the they that are always trying to hold you down.
In terms of In my life, the relationship between the perceived normal, what I'll call the human normal, this is the normal that is nothing more than a construct.
It's taught in schools and universities, It's what the mainstream media pound out 24-7.
It's what you get through mainstream science and mainstream medicine and mainstream academia.
And basically, it is a version of life, reality, everything that has been constructed.
But because it's now termed normal, people tend to believe that Anything outside of that must therefore not be normal.
And you have to give events, happenings, that can't be explained by human normal, another tag name called the paranormal.
Well, as my life experience has shown me, the paranormal is the normal.
And the human normal is the illusion.
I just want to add that those pauses are part of it.
Usually I edit things down for clarity.
That is how he talks.
I think it resets people's heart rates, actually.
Like, there's a really heavy ASMR quality there that there's something rhythmically going on.
I don't want to tinfoil hat it too much, but there's some, like, I mean, he is sitting there bullshitting, and so that's how it's coming out.
But he's figured out a way It's a way of, like, mobilizing those pauses for some kind of synecdoche effect that is, yeah.
Because I can feel myself sort of falling into each one of those silences in some weird way.
That was a minute and a half.
Imagine listening to dozens of hours that are on the surface.
Yeah, yeah, 30 episodes.
Imagine paying for them and then selling them to other people.
Imagine that!
Hey, look at this thing that we have!
Join David Icke for Beyond the Matrix.
We're not quite sure what the fuck he's saying, but boy.
And that speech is a...
You know, he owes a lot to the writers of The Matrix.
That is Matrix, that is Morpheus' moment where he talks about how the Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes and it's repeated by the media, etc, etc.
But this is exactly it, right?
All of this so-called new paradigm stuff, the books and the films and the workshops over the last 30 or so years in the New Age West, They really did explicitly till the soil for this anti-science, anti-realist, contrarian undermining of any standard of knowledge or reason or evidence in the name of spiritual revelation, in the name of esoteric knowledge that's available when you believe these outrageous falsehoods.
And also encouraging people to adopt what I call freshman skepticism about the basic facts of reality.
And contrary to what a lot of people might think, you can't just compartmentalize this stuff into a charming spiritual belief.
It has implications in the real world.
It can't simultaneously be so important and sacred that it's too taboo to critique, but so trivial that it has no impact on the real world.
For me, that's come home to roost in spades the last couple of years, and it's devastating.
I really appreciate going back to his technique here, how mountaintop sage it is.
He doesn't even have to be anxious about bullshitting.
He's fully confident that he's going to pass.
And it reminds me of what you brought up, Derek.
You know, his appearance on Guru Jagat's podcast, the late Guru Jagat last year, where that sage-like quality was the entire vibe.
She, throughout that hour and a half or whatever it is, is just absolutely deferent.
You know, she would ask a kind of rambling non-question, and then he would just start soapboxing while she nodded, you know, and her eyes went glassy.
I mean, maybe that was the COVID, I don't know.
But in that scenario, Ike is just the latest in a series of older, pathologically competent men who have told her what to do with her life.
And the other thing I want to say is that I don't think he'd have such an international career without that accent.
Which my British informants tell me is like vaguely middle class, but like also he was a BBC announcer.
But he is from this working class family in Leicester.
I just think there's this a lot of North American English speakers who hear Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan or Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard or like Richard Harris as Dumbledore in that.
But I also lived in England a little.
I lived in Ireland for longer and there's always a dozen guys like this.
Sitting in the corner like dressed hams of the pub, surrounded by empty pint glasses, getting more and more red faced as they hold court.
Like that's what comes up as well.
There's two other things I want to add.
One of them, Derek, you've already touched upon, which is that this is not just a streaming service like Netflix with a range of diverse content, right?
With lots of different entertainment and multiple perspectives and stuff that you'll find that satisfies people with different interests or political orientations.
This is a very specific in-house propaganda production machine.
And this is somewhat obvious structurally, right?
But the content, as I looked through it, is what really started to drive it home for me because as I watched, I had this really interesting revelation.
I saw that In each of the pieces of content I was checking into, the stories would find ways to reinforce and maintain legitimacy in relationship to one another.
So they're not competing and they're not contradicting one another.
There's this weird escalating absurdity that moves the viewer toward a patchwork tapestry of a worldview in which, you know, like Bigfoot sightings apparently happen in the same places where UFO encounters have occurred.
And unexpected cryptid sightings must therefore be interdimensional travelers because this is being covered up by the government as well.
And so it must be evidence of the cabal.
So all of it starts to increasingly create this intense labyrinth and this intense map to nowhere.
I don't think it's planned out necessarily.
It's just a great example of the organic interplay between extremely odd beliefs and ideas that even when they're unrelated, they're all in that same technical category that I refer to as bullshit.
And the second thing is that what's even more disturbing here for me is that it makes me think of venues like Fox News, you know, where amongst countless other instances of duplicity, people like Tucker and Hannity might spout anti-vax messaging and COVID denialism while behind the scenes, everyone is actually required to be vaccinated to even show up for work.
And it's this, at Gaia, how much sociopathic disdain and lack of care must you feel for your audience if you know deep down that you're just blasting them with a firehose of bullshit, as if it was revelatory and spiritually profound?
How disconnected from the impact on the world and on real people must you be to participate in deranging the minds of others?
And this comes back to something a lot of people don't think really matters, but I can't ignore it.
Because I think that some of these creators are just delusional or simply mistaken, but others absolutely know that they're making all of this up and they're grifting.
And even if the impact is the same, the latter camp really sickens me more.
So, bringing it home, I reached out to the brass at Yoga International and at the Himalayan Institute with a couple of questions.
So, I asked them the following.
You've assured Yoga International content providers that you will maintain editorial control over your publications.
How will you do that if you're financially responsible to Gaia?
Second, Gaia platforms anti-vax and conspiracy theory content.
How can you justify exposing your current subscribers to David Icke?
Third, a number of assets cultivated over the past several years have brought a social justice awareness to the yoga media of Yoga International.
This content morally, politically, and epistemologically opposes much of the material on Gaia.
Have you heard from providers who do not want their content earning profits for Gaia?
What have you said to them, if so?
Four, can you ensure that a body positive yoga content provider will not have their image repurposed for Gaia weight loss programming?
Can you ensure that an accessible yoga content provider will not have their image repurposed for ableist yoga programming by Gaia?
And lastly, if a yoga international content provider asks to have their content removed in protest of the sale, Can they do that?
