When we left our Austin conspirituality heroes in the last episode, Charles Eisenstein, New Age Q, was locking in his position as the philosopher—or jester—in the court of Aubrey Marcus. But what of this court? Matthew’s scene by scene analysis of some prime Marcus marketing porn will give us some clues. The video in question is for Marcus’s life-coaching programme, which is called “Fit for Service.” The visuals centre around what looks like a haka ritual dance, through which customers release their inner warriors, nurture their affiliate links and jazz up their socials. On point for the influencer age, the ritual plays out in a narcissistic hall of mirrors, choreographed for performance by programme participants in order to promote the programme they are performing in. Naturally, Matthew will be using the analytical frameworks of spectacle and simulation from Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard to make sense of it. He’ll also apply Renato Rosaldo’s concept of “imperialist nostalgia” to explore the ugly conflicts in Marcus’s indigenous cosplay.Show NotesFit for Service homepagefit.for.service: A Dandelion In A Field Is Un-killableA poet’s plea to save our planet | IN-Q | TED Institute "Revolution": The FORGOTTEN Voices of The Pandemic Will Have You In TearsThe 5 Desires: Marcus on FFS promises Aubrey Marcus - Fit For Service Mastermind - Review – Max HugThe Wellness Pornographers. Gamifying intimacy, abusing public… | by Matthew Remski | Medium Heresy Labs on HeilungRenato Rosaldo: Imperialist Nostalgia
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It's Matthew here, flying solo this week as Julian and Derek are neck deep in research for some upcoming projects.
You can catch us on Twitter under our own names.
You can catch us intermittently and ambivalently on Facebook.
You can support us on Patreon, where subscribers get access to our bonus episodes for $5 a month.
Very soon, you will also be able to support us by bidding on some audio NFTs.
We are optimizing one of my best wheezy laughs.
We've got one of Julian saying, I'm curious, in an endless loop.
And then a behind-the-scenes clip of Derek editing and swearing as we bump our mics and pronounce things wrong.
In reality though, we're also on Instagram, at ConspiritualityPod, where in the recent feed you can enjoy Derek's review of the alt-health podcasting grift of Luke's story, also Julian's recent side-by-side analysis of that Charles Eisenstein-Aubrey Marcus Gathering of the Tribe video, with a 1991 Aum Shinrikyo recruitment video.
He talked about it in the episode, but then he really went and put them head-to-head.
He cracked open the iMovie and got to work.
You can also bear witness and hold space for a difficult conversation between myself and Amber Sears, partner of JP.
She posted this selfie story sitting without a mask in an IV vitamin bar where she was being injected with all-natural supplements after coming down with COVID.
Reportedly, after a mask-off jaunt with the family to Cabo for a wedding.
Very tough situation.
So I took the opportunity to reflect on the painful dilemmas of the conspirituality influencer who gets sick.
Do you lay low?
Do you keep posting?
Do you commodify your vulnerability in your moment of need?
How do you live with the contradiction of touting your immaculate immune system while describing all the useless bespoke drugs you're taking, guided by your intuition?
Is it a risk to put on the brave face of transformation and recovery?
What happens if you decompensate?
I mean, one minute you're watching the likes light up on your posts, and then you're watching the terrifying blink of your pulse oximeter as your SAT levels dip below 90.
Amber replied to my analysis by calling me a piece of shit, but also by reposting my entire critique, and I took that as an expression of solidarity.
A sign that she's not only ill with COVID, but nauseated by this performative hall of mirrors that we all share.
in which we face-tune our fever into a glow of transformation so that we don't have to take responsibility for how our selfishness might be killing other people.
I think it's time we acknowledge that conspirituality influencers possibly have a moral center and that engaging with it transparently and directly will start to bridge that gap.
Episode 87, The Aubrey Marcus Spectacle.
So when we left our Austin Conspirituality Heroes in the last episode, Charles Eisenstein, New Age Q, was locking in his position as the philosopher or jester in the court of Aubrey Marcus.
But what of this court?
I'm going to do a scene-by-scene analysis of some prime Marcus marketing porn, and I think it'll give us some clues.
The video in question is for Marcus's life coaching program, which is called Fit for Service.
And the visuals center around what looks like a haka ritual dance, but isn't, through which customers release their inner warriors, nurture their affiliate links, and jazz up their socials.
On point for the Influencer Age, the ritual plays out in a narcissistic hall of mirrors, choreographed for performance by program participants in order to promote the program they are performing in.
Naturally, I'll be using the analytical frameworks of spectacle and simulation from Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard to make sense of it all.
I'll also apply Renato Rosaldo's concept of imperialist nostalgia to explore the ugly conflicts in Marcus's indigenous cosplay.
So here are the three frameworks.
in 1936.
In 1967's Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord articulated a critique of the dissociation of late capitalism, describing how, in a hyper-mediated environment, the accumulation of capital was no longer measurable simply in resources.
It was measurable in appearances and performances.
In 1981's Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard zeroed in on the technology of the appearance, the image, to explore its cold irony.
It presumes to represent something real, but it also obscures and perverts and eventually erases that real thing.
As for the third framework, imperialist nostalgia, you might remember that we analyzed Charles Eisenstein's unfortunate use of the term tribe to describe his imagined network of mostly white hipsters, yoga moms, and bro-scientists as shamanic aliens who have come to Earth to reawaken humanity.
Now I referred very briefly to some of the literature that criticizes the term tribe as an appropriative and disrespectful term that echoes with racist 19th century generalizations.
But I also flagged a few paragraphs in Eisenstein's book where the story first appears.
And those graphs indicate that he has, in the past at least, been somewhat sensitive to this territory.
So this is from 2013.
From 2013, he wrote, None of the principles enunciated herein are new at all.
I am wary, however, of appealing to indigenous wisdom as a way to legitimize my beliefs.
First, because that would imply a uniformity across Indigenous belief systems that trivializes their diversity.
Second, because various elements of Indigenous spirituality have often been ripped from their context and used as sales props for all manner of questionable products and ideas.
Then the three of us discussed how somehow between 2013 and hitting the big money in Austin, Eisenstein has dropped that nuance, as evidenced by his willingness to work with Aubrey Marcus, who seems quite fond of exactly ripping off quote indigenous spirituality from its context to use as sales props for all manner of questionable products and ideas.
So, I will read from a stunning essay by the American cultural anthropologist Renato Rosaldo.
It's called Imperialist Nostalgia.
And I want to shout out to listener Cheyenne Twist for pointing me towards it.
The top line is that Rosaldo ruthlessly dissects the psychology of guilt that underlies cultural appropriation or LARPing.
He says that at the root of all this dressing up and all of this pious authenticity play is the harrowing realization that you are yearning for what you have actually destroyed.
Now, Rosaldo's domain-specific critique centers on the conflict of interest evident in early 20th century anthropology, such as those works written by colonial administrators who also sidelined as scholars and seemed to sympathize with their subjects.
Now, with the fit-for-service crew, the paradoxes are at a further remove.
Marcus and Eisenstein are generating a kind of imperialist nostalgia long after the work of imperialism has erased what they are trying to social media back into existence.
Okay, so that all might be a little heady, so let's get to the actual footage.
We start with a drone shot panning over a Hacienda-style sprawling mansion with a roundabout entrance, a fountain, white columns and arches, and terracotta tiles.
Extremely attractive men and women are gathering on the lawn and greeting each other with small talk before a bridging shot shows them walking and reveals more about the demographic.
Everyone is between about 20 and 45.
It looks like there are more men on the older edge, and the group seems to number about 150.
Throughout the film, we see a total of four people of color, and the camera returns to them over and over again, as if to underline their presence, like, we're cool on the diversity thing.
Now the parade lands us in a purply-red convention hall adorned with Buddhist statuary and with a golden disco ball turning slowly overhead.
Marcus is introducing someone who will be leading a workshop session.
This is In-Kyu, a spoken word artist.
Marcus introduces In-Kyu as my brother.
People are often surprised at what they create because they have no expectations.
And so, I feel like poetry is a Trojan horse for transformation.
As long as you choose something that's moving and meaningful to you, you will have a transformative experience.
So I'll just say a little bit about NQ to describe his schtick from the outside, but also add a little inside baseball.
Somehow this guy has taken the banal art of white guy spoken word into the bro optimization and TED talk space.
For those of you unfamiliar with spoken word, it started to emerge in the early 1990s in North American urban venues.
I don't know if it was happening in Europe.
And these were also venues that hosted open mic poetry evenings.
So here in Toronto, this would be places like the Art Bar Reading Series that started out in the old Gladstone Hotel and then wound up at the Free Times Café.
So back then, spoken word caused a stir on open mic night because it shook up the typical lineup of inebriated boomers reading out of their moleskin notebooks or rolls of dot matrix printouts.
They would read very slowly and with a lot of overbearing emphasis and often repetitive hand gestures.
Now suddenly there were Gen X kids doing something that sounded like rap.
If they were white, it was usually cringy.
And it took me a moment to realize, because I was just ignorant, that the Black and Latino folks who were doing it really well were importing it from actual rap spaces.
And this had two impacts, it seemed.
It let them slow down what they were communicating and have it ring in a quieter space.
But they were also coming into white liberal pretentiousness and saying, fuck you.
Regarding that cringe stream, it took me another number of years to realize that they were actually trying to mimic POC artists.
Now, apparently, that has continued on, and it looks like it's made bank.
So, here's a bit of NQ's stylings and sanctimony from a 2018 TED Talk called, A Poet's Plea to Save the Earth.
How can something this big be invisible?
The ozone is everywhere and yet it isn't visible.
Maybe if we saw it, we would see it's not invincible and have to take responsibility as individuals.
How can something this big be invisible?
If it's all around us, it should show itself on pure principle.
The scientists are claiming that the damage is residual and climate change data is reaching levels that are critical, yet somehow that's political.
We argue over math.
Our citizens are too cynical to believe in facts.
We make excuses and hold on to the recent past.
We don't want to sacrifice, so we refuse to ask.
I grew up in a city.
It's all I ever knew.
So even now I have nothing to compare it to.
I have to hit the park to see more than a tree or two.
I have to visit nature like it's in a freakin' zoo.
But California was wild before the parking lots, before the mass malls, before designer shops, before the strip clubs, before the sea change, when mountain lions roam freely over freeways, before the fast food, before the freeze frames.
We live around a bunch of dead things these days.
All right.
Good job on that elongated A.
We've got some rhythm, some internal rhyming, pretty simple reading level.
In cues like Hallmark cards for men's groups.
Yes.
Now, to explain what In-Q was doing at Fit for Service, Marcus writes in the caption for the promo video, quote, Our journey through the Austin Summit started with a poetry workshop by the great In-Q, where we learned to alchemize our grievances into gratitude through the medium of spoken word.
We entered workshops where we explored the complicated nuances of the psyche and prepared ourselves to retrain the harsh inner critic into a loving and supportive inner coach.
So that's really ambitious.
On the Fit for Service main page, in the Guest Coaching section, there are 8 Guest Coaches and 4 Master Coaches, all of them are white.
In cue is literally described as, World's Greatest Living Poet.
Like, that's actually written under his face.
World's Greatest Living Poet.
So, Marcus obviously holds him in high esteem.
But I played the in-cue clip so that you can compare it to what Marcus gets into by January of last year as a sample of a bit of in-cue's influence on Marcus.
So here's the first minute and a half of a filmed spoken word piece by Marcus called Revolution.
It's time for a revolution.
A new declaration of independence that starts and ends with unanimous reverence.
A constitution upheld by people of constitution rather than institutions who make billions off of selling you lies, pretending to keep you apprised while they supersize your fries and upsell Lipitor at the door.
All the while, greasing the palms of politicians with the spare change from the cash drawer.
Profiting from turmoil, but terrified of a revolution.
It's why the headlines, running down party lines, are the dealt drugs getting mainlined, carefully designed, to narcotize dysfunction.
Until we are resigned to live a basic function.
Keep watching, pay taxes, get vaxes, and do nothing.
Just whine a little bit.
And drink more wine.
But there are things worth fighting for with the same passion that we fought for racial equality, environmental accountability, our right to privacy, our sovereignty, ending poverty, for the five million traffic slaves.
The little boys and girls who don't have a voice.
Who don't have a choice.
Bought and sold because they are moist.
Bought and sold because they are moist.
Because they are moist.
Now, I think Aubrey Marcus must be as complicated as anyone else, but you know, sometimes the entire measure of a man becomes apparent from a single moment or a single line.
He really wrote that.
And read it over, presumably, during the editing process, if he had one, and then someone recorded it, produced it, set it to the visuals, and uploaded it.
All of that really happened.
In a poem called Revolution.
Now, my powers of observation say that this is a guy with no one around him who can say, Aubrey, that doesn't sound good.
It sounds like you're talking about Betty Crocker cupcakes.
I know you wanted a rhyme for choice, but it's not worth it because using a cute word in a trauma context is not cool.
Like, you use moist and people are going to think of the cupcakes.
So there's about five stages of production where someone could have said something like that.
And maybe they did, and it didn't work.
But my larger point is that what Marcus is doing here is utterly derivative of in-cue the Poetry Coach and Life Coach, which in itself is just such a weird double role.
The writing people I grew up with were all so dysfunctional and honest about it that none of them would have presumed to be giving anyone life or psychological advice.
They might have run a writing workshop, but the objective there was to encourage weirdness, not to alchemize our grievances into gratitude.
Artistic integrity might demand the opposite, that you recognize the diction and affect of gratitude as being part of a reactionary programming that turns poetry into just another bourgeois consolation.
So the video shows NQ presiding over soul-bearing spoken word workshops.
There are breakthroughs or meltdowns, it's hard to tell, but you can feel the catharsis in the air.
There's a lot of tears.
And it's clear from Aubrey Marcus' 2021 efforts that he loves this jam enough to mimic it, big time.
And it made me wonder what other mimicry there is.
Like, what is original about Aubrey Marcus's brand?
I mean, surely if Onnit, his supplement company, was bought up by Unilever for $100 million or more, they had to have done something new.
So I asked our resident business analyst, Derek, about what Onnit's magic or originality was.
Derek didn't ping anything original, but he did talk about networking.
It was pure AlphaBrain and Rogan, Derek wrote in Slack.
AlphaBrain being the supplement that Marcus and Rogan pushed very weak studies on.
That's how they got their name.
The On Gym in Austin is basically the modern Gold's Gym.
It has a vibe, and their trainers have huge followings on IG.
So as a cross-branding lifestyle move, they dialed it in.
Here's your protein to get strong.
Here's your mushroom functional whatever.
Here's your recovery.
Here's your nootropic.
None of the supplements are original, but the combination of having a supplement line and having a very Instagrammable gym with famous trainers, and whenever Rogan would post himself working out there, it worked for them.
Alright, so it sounds like Marcus is an entrepreneurial DJ.
And this is important to note as we head into his cultural co-optation material.
There's precedence for picking up and putting on whatever he wants and finds interesting.
And this is one reason why I think that criticism of cultural appropriation can fall on deaf ears in late capitalism.
Because it's not just that the influencer or the CEO is entitled and fragile.
It's that they're an opportunist.
They don't feel any moral charge around mimicking and co-opting indigenous culture, for example, because they're starting from the entrepreneurial ground zero of co-opting everything around them already.
Content, memes, anime, tech, the hotness of young people.
So what's so bad about nicking a little haka?
You might criticize the cultural insensitivity, but that's not what the guy will hear.
They're going to hear you challenging their entire business model, which is to select, repackage, and platform a newly branded pastiche.
So the video goes on to show that Marcus comes on stage after the poetry crying session with some words of wisdom.
And here, his theme begins to slide into Eisenstein-land.
So what we have is the spoken word vibe on one side of the Marcus pitch, and the Eisenstein, quote, new story, unquote, is on the other side.
And Marcus is right in the middle of his influences, like the meat in a mythical marketing sandwich.
Here, we have the opportunity to truly, truly rewrite all of those stories.
Sometimes you have to push into the dark places.
You have to go into the scary places.
You have to go into a place where you confront that judge, because that judge might judge you for something.
The judge might judge you for losing, for not winning, for not performing, for letting your team down, and you might internalize that.
Well, this is the opportunity and the invitation to write a new story for ourself.
A brand new story.
The juxtaposition shown in this speech is jarring because he's talking about scary places, about being judged on performance standards.
But at the same time, he's polished up like a muscle car at a car show, speaking in this sumptuous but also tacky conference hall with an indigo color palette, lots of Buddha icons, and Tex-Mex chinoiserie.
There's fluorescent glow strips on the ceiling that make the place look vaguely like a high-end strip club.
He's talking about the Dark Knight of the Soul in a pleasure palace.
And I get the real sense here that the trauma that must be overcome is over whether one made the best choices possible with one's trust fund.
Okay, this is getting a little shitposty.
So before I go further, I want to inoculate myself and maybe some of you against the inevitable misanthropy that can creep into this consideration, this growing sense that all of these people are silly and loathsome. - Yeah.
I mean, if you've already cruised to the Instagram to watch the video, it might be too late for you.
The cynicism here can, at least mine, can creep in with these hints that the aspirational therapy here is bankrupt or that somehow these folks who pay all of this money to hang out with a supplement bro are too privileged to deserve care and positive regard.
In structural terms, this rings kind of fair, but on the level of individual psychology, Marcus isn't lying here about internal work and its difficulties.
He's not lying about the superego, self-criticism, alienation, and the strange possibility that imagination can offer, that with help and support, you can dream yourself into a more resilient orientation.
But like the prickles of real evidence that make every conspiracy theory compelling, the bromides of New Age group therapy contain enough substance that you can't really argue them away.
The people that Marcus draws really do yearn to meet the five basic desires he spotlights in his promo for Fit for Service 2022.
I believe that you can break down all human needs, drives, and desires to five basic things.
To be seen.
To be seen for the entirety of who you are.
All the dark, all the light, all the shadow, all the brilliance.
I see you.
To be loved.
To know yourself as love.
To be able to access that plane of existence where you feel that love inside yourself and can share that love with the people and places and things of this amazing world.
To be safe.
To be safe is to know yourself as the energy that animates life, a force of consciousness that extends beyond just the safety of this physical body.
To matter.
To know that your life counts for something greater than just yourself.
To have that purpose.
And to be here.
To live.
To love.
To laugh.
To enjoy everything we have at our fingertips.
The Fit for Service community for 2022 is focused on bringing about access to all of these five basic human desires.
This is all pretty compelling, and you're not seeing the visual here, but I just have to say that when Aubrey Marcus is in talking head mode and using his teleprompter really well, he is about the most successfully connective muscle bro you will encounter.
He really does look like he's looking at you.
He really has mastered the encounter group affect of openness and confident relaxation.
So I'm having some moments here where even I'm feeling like it would be cool if he was my friend.
So good job, Aubrey.
You have managed to facebeam your way around some of my defenses, which are sewn up pretty tight, actually.
At least for a few moments, because then something flips in my brain and I realize I'm looking at a kind of peak smugness.
If you clip out the sales pitches, it's hard to argue with the model, in which you can hear the echoes of Viktor Frankl, Otto Rank, Rollo May, even Abraham Maslow.
Who can argue with these needs, and who doesn't love a five-part encapsulation?
The five part thing is also iconic within the Indian wisdom tradition pastiche that this discourse draws on.
Five elements, five Buddha families, five Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata, five true planets in astrology with the sun and the moon being luminaries.
I don't know if Marcus knows any of this, but he's tapping into a very old and efficient typology.
So what's the real complaint here?
Marcus isn't entirely full of shit, and his customers don't have fake needs, and Lord knows everyone is suffering in some profoundly incommunicable way.
Everyone needs help.
Friend of the podcast Philip Deeslip, he's the modern yoga scholar who has done more work on the Kundalini Yoga cult than anyone else in the world, has this description for what the malignant narcissist Yogi Bhajan offered the world through his psycho-spiritual content and then how it went on to proliferate.
DSLIP says that the content of Kundalini Yoga is like a, quote, photocopy of a counterfeit bill, unquote.
Counterfeit because the Kundalini Yoga curriculum was a mishmash of half-baked references to Indian traditions presented as being authentic.
Then it was a photocopy because it lost resolution with each workshop, each add-on, each training, each generation.
And what is left of the content is a series of affects, impressions, and echoes, which are captivating.
We're left with something that looks like spirituality, but functions more like banking.
What is much stronger than this degraded content in the legacy is the sales machine and the network of relationships that keep these impressions circulating with increasingly empty material.
So this brings me around to using Debord from the Society of the Spectacle to look at this.
That's sort of been implicit so far, but just to underline this exploration of superficiality and how it interacts with capital, here are a few quotes.
Quote, Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, Post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.
So that's the nugget.
More specifically, and with more detail, he writes, quote, The first stage of the economy's domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having.
Human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed.
The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing.
All having must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances." This movement from having to appearing is really on the nose when it comes to looking at the Marcus family transition from father to son, and from pre-digital to digital, and from corporate to social.
As Derek reported in the Charles Eisenstein as New Age Q episode, Aubrey's father, Michael, reportedly turned $7,000 into $80 million as a commodities trader beginning in 1972.
$80 million as a commodities trader beginning in 1972.
This is mainly oil money.
So let's just think about that from Marcus's point of view.
When you are born into that, when you have more money than you can spend, when the pressures of material consequence just disappear, leaving you in a world without gravity, what can you do?
Where does a person go to from there?
What more can a person accumulate or achieve?
Perhaps nothing is left but self-actualization, and this cannot be shared unless it is performed.
So a person like Marcus can dive right into appearances, biohacking, bodily optimization.
While the oil money investments continue to burble, Marcus can slackline.
He can do ayahuasca in Peru.
He can live his best life.
There's no more money to be gained.
And so now it's working out and selfies and high-end films of bad poems.
A person can become the shirtless super athlete who got ripped by scaling a mountain of money and doing CrossFit kipping on bars of solid gold.
Now, about the money for everyone else.
How much do people pay to play with Fit for Service?
According to one graduate of the 2019 cohort, it's between $20,000 and $30,000 all in for one year.
The guy writes, here is my calculation for those who want to join in 2020.
Tuition for 2020, $12,500.
Additional, attending all summits and meetups for U.S.
residents would run between $7,000 and $10,000, and for European Union residents between $12,500 and $17,500.
12,500, and 17,500.
The reviewer says that there were 150 in his cohort.
Now, if they paid an average of $25,000 each, which is the midpoint between his upper and lower estimate limits, that's a gross of $3.75 million for that program.
The The current fit-for-service material doesn't lay out a specific advancement ladder that I could see, but they do use the word coach a lot, and so it sounds like it's a short road between events consumption and professionalization.
Or between being devoted to Aubrey Marcus and acting like him.
There's also this funny con or drawback that the reviewer lists.
He says that the module that they call financially fit, I think this is one of a number of modules, emotionally fit, romantically fit, you know, spiritually fit, but financially fit in the 2019 class was poorly addressed.
and I wonder why.
Back to Guy Debald. - Yeah.
He writes, quote, The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life.
The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.
Okay, so there's two sentences there.
The first one, I think, is fairly straightforward.
But the second one, the image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism, needs some unpacking.
With that concept, Debord is using Marx's phrase, commodity fetishism from Das Kapital, to describe how relationships between money and merchandise can begin to trump relationships between people.
They can begin to seem organic as though they have a life of their own.
So it's a phrase that describes how capitalism begins to locate value in the objects rather than the people that produce them.
Debord and his readers and interlocutors squeeze more juice out of this by applying it to the economy of images of people, whereby photographs and films accrue more value than the people and actions they represent.
So, So it's very poignant that the first desire Marcus outlines is to be seen.
Now there's about five seconds in that last clip that really betray how being seen in this milieu is in itself commodity fetishization.
That five seconds will also steer us into a bit of feminist analysis.
To be seen.
To be seen for the entirety of who you are.
All the dark, all the light, all the shadow, all the brilliance.
I see you.
So that woman's voice is coming from fit-for-service master coach Caitlin Howe as she's gazing at a weeping Aubrey Marcus.
Her hand is on his shoulder.
They are both wearing pristine Peruvian ponchos that look like they just came out of the Eco Resort gift shop.
She's got Hollywood-grade makeup going on, awesome lashes, and the kicker is that they are both holding microphones to broadcast this incredibly private moment.
You can, at the end there, hear Marcus snorfel into the foam.
There's something very meta going on here.
It's not that Howe is just seeing Marcus.
She is performing seeing Marcus in a group setting, which is then filmed for broadcast to market more experiences in which people perform seeing and being seen.
So are they having a moment?
Or are they selling a moment?
I mean, the tragic question is, if you are selling the moment, do you ever get to have it?
And if that makes you feel empty, will you try to sell more moments?
The dynamic in this exchange is obviously gendered, with the powerful, intuitive female receiving the disarmed vulnerability of the warrior male.
But if you Google around a bit, you'll find that part of the marketing here is also that Howe and Marcus have been romantic partners.
They've been engaged, they've broken it off, and so on.
How goes by ThePoetQueen on Instagram, and being a former Marcus Paramore and present collaborator is a big chunk of her brand.
So there we have a form of wellness pornography centered around a spectacle relationship.
I'll link to the article I wrote about wellness pornography.
I was sad to find that How's website was only a homepage with a signup form.
All of the links actually bounced to the Squarespace homepage.
So then I looked up Violana Marcus, Aubrey's current wife, someone who is equally prominently featured in all of the fit-for-service media.
Like Howe, she is also at the top of the coaching tower for this business as a master coach.
Neither of them list any formal credentials in psychology or therapy.
Violana Marcus is a really good singer in the New Age singing bowls genre, but then I was sad to see that she doesn't have her own website.
Not that I could find.
She's got four singles out on Spotify, but that's about it.
When you Google her, it's hard to find a link that doesn't position her as Marcus's partner.
Now, all of this reminds me a bit of how Michael Roach, who ran the first cult I was recruited into, was always surrounded by beautiful young women who he seemed to support, I believe, to the extent that they validated his image.
And the proof of that was really in the pudding, because none of those intelligent, passionate, earnest people that I once knew became autonomously successful.
Now the main consort, as it were, in that constellation—I mean, they actually use that term—her name was Christy McNally, is Christy McNally.
She faded from the scene quite quickly after a public break with Roach, and it's quite possible that it's better for her life generally that she lives out her days in relative anonymity, just having a normal one.
But I can't shake this sadness that she and other women spent about two decades in his sphere, and their main social function was to make his organization look beautiful, and to make him look virile.
And part of the way he made it work was to lavish them with praise publicly, to call them queen and lady, and go on about how he would be lost without them.
He would convey this impression of dependence on the divine feminine.
But it was praise without payment.
Because at the end of the day, the actual women behind the idolization, the actual people, were interchangeable.
And they left empty-handed, at least in terms of the social capital of that sphere, and certainly financially.
And that was after all they did, all the emotional labor, all the caregiving, after generating all of that virginal maiden maternal iconography.
They were there for appearances, not for themselves.
And one indication that something similar might be going on in Fit for Service is in the raw aesthetics.
It's pretty obvious that these women have to look a particular way to gain status in this world.
And that for them, being fit for service means being super fit, maybe even in a calorie reduction mode, and being ready to serve the brand of Aubrey Marcus.
I'm also going to note here, although I'm going to give a big caveat to say I don't know whether Aubrey Marcus is running a cult and so I'm not saying that.
I hope you heard that.
I want to say that this absorption of women's labor into the sphere of masculine power is just ubiquitous in cults.
And it mobilizes a surface-level exploitation that I believe often serves a more hidden and shameful function.
Because in all of the yoga and Buddhism cults that I've done investigative journalism on, it's the beautiful women, many of whom are given new names and separated off from their families, It's them that are doing all of this front-facing work of feminizing and stylizing and emotionally supporting the organization, and at the same time, they are actually playing a more existential role as well.
Because without anyone really acknowledging it, they are often literally keeping the guru alive amidst periods of sleepless mania, paranoid attacks, substance abuse episodes, or even psychotic breaks.
What seems to be different about Marcus in this regard is that he presents as someone who would never need help, let alone ask for it.
But everyone grows old.
Everyone gets sick.
If Marcus hired Brene Brown as a guest coach, or literally any qualified female psychology expert in mid or late career, we'd be talking about something different here.
But the optics of Fit for Service make it pretty clear that the top value is that of the image.
So, once again, it's not about the content, which is becoming kind of a mantra for the show.
All right, I'm going to zoom back out of the gender analysis and back to the level of the spectacle.
Wonderful.
What are these images?
In In Q, we have the counterfeit of a poetry through spoken word, which is then photocopied onto Hallmark cardstock.
In Charles Eisenstein, we have the counterfeit of philosophy photocopied through countless blogs and podcasts, to the point at which there's really only one phrase left, the story of separation.
And in Aubrey Marcus, there's an aggressive image maker who has done an excellent job at mimicking the spectacle of group therapy to pseudo-serve a group with real therapeutic needs.
A few weeks ago, in our episode on the alternative universe created by the Gaia media platform, Julian referenced Jean Baudrillard's analysis of how representations can swallow up reality.
I'm going to return to that here with a little echo of DSLIP's photocopy of A Counterfeit Bill.
Fourteen years after Debord publishes Society of the Spectacle, Jean Baudrillard comes out with Simulacra and Simulation.
And in it, he focuses on the image as the abstracted and dissociative currency of late capitalism.
The thing that becomes easy to the point of free to produce and reproduce.
The representation that eventually obscures what is being represented.
Early in his book, he has an aphoristic workflow for this analysis.
He writes, These would be the successive phases of the image.
It is the reflection of a basic reality.
It masks and perverts a basic reality.
It masks the absence of a basic reality.
It bears no relation to any reality whatever.
It is its own pure simulacrum.
In the first case, the image is a good appearance.
The representation is of the order of sacrament.
In the second, it is an evil appearance, of the order of malifice.
In the third, it plays at being an appearance.
It is of the order of sorcery.
In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.
So, let me make this concrete by applying it to the history of yoga photography as we come to understand the material conditions of yoga as a commodity.
So, number one might be, as it emerges in the early 20th century, yoga photography is taken to reflect the reality of an extant spiritual practice culture.
Number two, as it focuses on depicting people in yoga postures as representative and reductive of that practice, some begin to understand that this is a masking and perversion of something richer, something beyond exercise instruction.
The images of the body are beginning to eclipse the sensibility of the soul.
Third, as the status of that authentic thing, yoga, that the picture is supposed to represent becomes harder and harder to find, we begin to suspect it may never have been there.
Was this always a show?
And then fourth, in the empty Instagram ecstasy of everything is yoga, There is no longer much of an attempt to refer back to anything real.
Making images of doing yoga becomes synonymous with doing yoga, and no one can tell them apart.
So, as late capitalism begins to live and die on the production and reproduction of images, the disconnect with reality grows more stark and ironic.
Through the lens of Aubrey Marcus's media, what this all shakes down to is, the more something appears to be therapeutic, the more it is covering over a vacuum of therapeutic care.
The more something appears to elevate pretty mundane heterosexuality into expressions of the divine masculine and divine feminine, the more it can erase the possibility of gender equality, fluidity, and solidarity.
So much for Debord and Baudrillard.
Here's what we're cruising towards.
You've been very patient.
Amidst all of this hollow ass-covering, it's just so easy for the hollow culture itself to turn to notions of the indigenous as being able to save us, to help us remember.
We get interested in ritual, drumming, body markings, songs in ancient languages.
These seem to fill up a hole.
But who made the hole?
The more something appears to be imbued with indigenous authenticity, the more it might cover over a horrible secret, which is that indigeneity has been erased by people who first lost it within themselves.
And this brings us back to the video and the arena.
So the film bounces back up to the drone to reveal a large covered corral, maybe the size of a hockey rink, maybe larger.
And I'm wondering whether this eco-resort is an equestrian center.
And a caption comes up.
On Monday, September 2nd, five tribes representing the five sacred elements entered the arena to remember what has been forgotten.
Now here's where we might want to check out the caption on Instagram written by Marcus himself.
The caption for the video is called, A dandelion in a field is unkillable, which is a line from the speech that Eisenstein gave at the end of the event.
So he writes, To test what we had been learning, he's talking about the workshops.
We created the Elemental Games.
Five teams were charged with representing the five Earth elements with costume and dance, and then offered the opportunity to represent their team in competition.
It was one of the most powerful ceremonies any of us have ever been a part of.
Before the paint washed off, we came together with a deeper appreciation for ourselves and for every single person who entered the arena.
We enjoyed a stunning private concert—this would be after it—with Satsang, a night of sober celebration, and one of the most potent speeches I have ever heard by the philosopher king, Charles Eisenstein.
So the fit-for-service customers walk in solemn procession, priestesses and gladiators, towards the arena, not exactly led by Aubrey Marcus, except that the camera picks him out of the crowd, along with Hau and Violana and Kyle Kingsbury, the former MMA professional and fit-for-service body optimization coach who seems to tower over everyone at 6'3 and maybe 225 pounds.
It really seems like there are costume designers involved.
I mean, it could be that they're carrying on what I understand was the original Burning Man do-it-yourself thrift store vibe, and that all of these folks are just really good at sewing their cosplays together.
But given how much attention was put into the filming of this thing, with not only the drone shots from above, but also from within the covered arena as the drone zips along the inside of the roof peak to scan the circle, And the constant steadicam shots from within the various scrums?
It's hard to imagine that the regalia was not overseen and directed.
This is a commercial made from the margins of a ritual event.
It's a commercial ritual.
So everyone is in costume, but those costumes are on top of but also hinting at a costume they're all wearing underneath.
And that is the costume of hotness.
Because did I mention that almost everyone in this video is uniformly hot?
I think you could say that there are three or four unconventionally hot larger body people in the group about the same ratio as people of color, but the general hotness quotient, defined mostly by thinness in women and rippedness in men, is uniformly high.
And just a personal remark, I find that the hotness parade is both boring and stressful.
It's boring because I know all of the bio-buttons that the imagery is trying to push in my brainstem, I'm 50.
Like, I grew up surrounded by hotness in pop culture that would tease the boundary into porn.
So I can feel the junk food dopamine hack coming from a mile away.
And I mainly feel actually insulted by the hotness display that tries to intimate intimacy, but of course also covers it over.
And I think it's stressful because I can see in the person of hotness how much work it takes, how much is at stake in relation to keeping it together, keeping it up, how much dedication the performance requires, how much the image actually demands.
So I feel it first, personally, in the stiff and armored postures of the men, the teeth-gritting and the butt-clenching walk, and the mimicking that bloated bicep feeling of just completing a motherload of reps.
I remember being a boy and a teenager and having to stand up straight, or wanting to stand up straight, and checking myself in the mirror with a mixture of feigned pride and repressed worry.
And all of that collapses into the quad stops of Kyle Kingsbury strutting around the arena in a cage of involuntary hotness.
I don't want to step out of my gender lane too much here, but I think it's fair to surmise that the hotness prison for the women in this arena is also very high.
But it's composed of different stuff, like bars of Gossamer and Ribbon, that demand a cocktail of exposure, extroversion, implicit receptivity, and that are also burdened with the sunken cost of the hours and hours of time it must take to maintain, not only for the special performances, but also in regular daily life.
I remember watching about ten minutes of Selling Sunset on Netflix and I was overwhelmed with anxiety for these people defined by an objectification that they have mastered or that has mastered them.
I don't see a lot of difference between the people of Selling Sunset and the Fit for Service participants who are selling Aubrey Marcus.
Except I guess it's Austin and the drugs are different.
So the costumes break down into five colors that seem to represent the elements.
Black, white, red, green, and blue.
The camera lingers on the master coaches because there's five of them, you see.
Remember the five desires, five elements, and so on.
And then the music crescendos.
And what seems to be the aping of haka with the squats and Aubrey Marcus menacing with his tongue, but also the male chorus chant that closely recalls the tikanga or protocols of Maori ceremony, but which is not as we'll see.
So here's a bit to listen to.
So in our last episode, Derek reported that when Fit for Service was called out for culturally appropriating haka, the feed handler denied it, kind of punted it.
And actually, they have a point because the music is cribbed from a German neofolk performance art group called Heilung.
And I want to shout out to Patrick Farnsworth, who...
Who made the identification for us on Facebook.
Now, I'll probably mispronounce the track title.
It says Hockerskalter, and it seems to be a war chant, although there are very divergent speculative translations online.
Speculative because what this orchestral band does is they reconstruct songs, duets, dialogues, and chants from very, very old runic inscriptions.
They say that their music is quote amplified history from early medieval northern Europe.
Now Heilung means healing in German and they start every show, which is really a liturgy, with a universalist pagan prayer.
And I gotta say, they are not doing cosplay like Fit for Service is.
They take this material very, very seriously.
Playing and wearing like actual bones and antlers, super intimidating war paint and masks, and these eye veils made of teeth and seashells.
I find it mesmerizing and quite moving, although I do have moments in which I wonder, how can you be so certain of what you're doing, so earnest and unironic about these things that you're clearly just splicing together?
But there is something that Heilung and Fit for Service have in common.
They can attract and implicitly cosign toxic political values, even while disclaiming them.
So, for fit for service, we have this melting pot of neoliberal pseudo-therapy that pretends it is serving the world while costing $25,000 per year for mainly white people.
Heilung has a more serious problem, albeit utterly predictable in this age of renewed populist neo-fascism, in that actual neo-Nazis are very drawn to their music and can fill their comment threads with racist bile.
The band is aware of this and says they reject it, but at the same time they kind of adopt a centrist position, or at least that's their first instinct in media relations, saying that they are apolitical, as if somehow their art dates from before politics or history.
Now, I think they must wonder how their music could not support or exhilarate animist nationalisms.
And as the Heresy Labs Twitter account says on Twitter, Heresy Labs is an autonomous media project exploring anti-authoritarian politics and monitoring fascist presence within cultural spaces.
They write, quote, considering that Heilung uses the Celtic Aryan cross symbol associated with white supremacists and the Zierscheibe, black sun symbol that the Nazi SS derived their Schwarzesonne or Sonnenrad symbol from, they should take more responsibility than just claiming to be beyond politics.
I saw one commenter on YouTube point out, and I thought this was very true, that they wouldn't use the Black Sun imagery if they didn't want that audience.
I suppose it's possible for anti-fascists to want to draw in neo-Nazis through symbols reclaimed for social values, but that's a really fine line to walk.
Now, while Heilung positions their work as prior to politics somehow, Fit for Service and Aubrey Marcus, like much of the yoga and wellness worlds, seem to position themselves as post-politics, especially through the rejection of quote-unquote mainstream narratives.
And I think this is an important general theme to note, that the political implications of conspirituality always swinging towards the right and towards hyper-individualism are typically obscured beneath the presumption of apolitical purity, which is an affect that has been nurtured in the yoga and wellness world for decades.
One last note on Fit for Service using Highloon's track.
We reached out to the band to ask if Marcus had paid a licensing fee to use it.
We haven't heard back, but we'll let you know if we do.
Okay, so the video continues with dancing, dance-offs, showdowns, twerking, and then a competition, which is, you know, some wrestling, tug-of-war.
It kind of seems like festivus feats of strength, although for hot people.
And it ends with a final blessing chant, fit for service, fit for service.
But what are they going to serve in the end?
Have we reached peak emptiness in the spectacle?
That not only have we watched images of therapy, intimacy, and now indigeneity be used to erase all three, the crowning touch is that this feedback loop of marketing is presented as service, So, the Fit for Service site presents this survey on their homepage and the results from questions they asked from customers about the benefits they say they derived.
And in the results, there's no concrete sense of what that service might be.
So, there are categories like, you made one or more lifelong relationships, or sorry, friendships, and 100% of the people said that.
I don't know how they're saying that unless I think you'd have to die to be able to know it was a lifelong friendship.
97% experienced significant emotional healing or spiritual growth.
47% entered a new business opportunity.
80% formed a business partnership with a member.
83% feel healthier in their body.
70% had their love life improved.
57% expanded their digital platform.
100% would recommend to a friend or family.
And 100% listen to this, feel more fit for service.
So the jargon seems militarized as if fit for service implied a bootcamp or basic training.
But in military economies, those experiences produce an actual readiness for something, for invasion or for war.
So in this sense, according to their own definition of success, the things they wanted to find out from their own clients, they've eliminated the actual product from the economy.
So at most, the survey is saying that people feel more fit for service.
But for what?
For all of the other things they want for themselves?
The digital platform and the business opportunities with fellow members?
The "S" part of "Fit for Service" seems to conceal the secret that there's no one to serve but yourself.
So here's what I want to end with.
Renato Rosaldo's 1989 essay "Imperialist Nostalgia" is haunting me.
In the same way that Baudrillard's 1981 analysis of image commodification haunts me.
Where Baudrillard argues that eventually the proliferation and ecstasy of images erases the reality they represent, Rosaldo argues that representations of indigeneity usually project a guilt cloaked in nostalgia around what the representer is complicit in destroying.
So I'm going to read the opening of Rosato's essay here.
My anger at recent films that portray imperialism with nostalgia informs this essay. - Okay.
Great opening.
Consider the enthusiastic reception of Heat and Dust, A Passage to India, Out of Africa, and The Gods Must Be Crazy.
The white colonial societies portrayed in these films appear decorous and orderly, as if constructed in accord with the norms of classic ethnography.
Hints of these societies coming collapse only appear at the margins where they create, not moral indignation, but an elegiac mode of perception.
Even politically progressive North American audiences have enjoyed the elegance of manners governing relations of dominance and subordination between the races.
Evidently, a mood of nostalgia makes racial domination appear innocent and pure.
And here I'll skip to the third paragraph.
Curiously enough, agents of colonialism—officials, constabulary officers, missionaries, and other figures from whom anthropologists ritually dissociate themselves—often display nostalgia for the colonized culture as it was traditionally, that is, when they first encountered it.
The peculiarity of their yearning, of course, is that agents of colonialism long for the very forms of life they intentionally altered or destroyed.
My concern thus resides with a particular kind of nostalgia, often found under imperialism, where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed.
Imperialist nostalgia thus revolves around a paradox.
A person kills somebody and then mourns his or her victim.
In more attenuated form, someone deliberately alters a form of life and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to his or her intervention.
At one more remove, people destroy their environment and then worship nature.
In any of its versions, imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of, quote, innocent yearning, unquote, both to capture people's imaginations and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination.
Incredible stuff.
And it is a very academic paper and he gets into the weeds of how anthropologists of the past and even himself have always found themselves interfering in the cultures they study and then mourning the results of that interference.
In this one account, he recalls talking with a Christian missionary woman who provided aid, quote-unquote, to the Ilongots in the Philippines, which Rosaldo studied in his fieldwork.
Now, these are indigenous people known for the practice of headhunting, which Rosaldo actually tried to understand instead of sensationalize, and he found that it expressed bereavement and rage and expiation.
So, he describes this conversation.
She began to reminisce, perhaps because she thought it would interest an anthropologist, about how things were when she first arrived about a decade earlier.
She spoke with nostalgia about threats on their lives from men she called headhunters, about how people always sang their indigenous songs, and about the absence of store-bought shirts.
These remarks puzzled me.
They seemed ill-fitting to a missionary.
Ilongot baptized believers, as the New Tribes missionaries called them, purposefully abandoned their songs, saying they tugged at their hearts and awakened their old ways.
The end of headhunting for the missionary marked the success of her evangelical efforts.
And many of the shirts were donations that she herself had distributed.
She had played a major role in producing, and evidently desired, the changes that took place.
At the time I puzzled that she could yearn for the Ilongots to be as they had been before she transformed their lives.
The notion of imperialist nostalgia had not yet occurred to me.
So, Aubrey Marcus is not a Christian missionary.
He isn't one of the early 20th century anthropologists that Rosaldo is criticizing.
Like, there's this one guy who was a constable charged with disciplining the indigenous population while in his spare time he wrote about them in scholarly terms.
And then he took on a white saviour role in adopting children under sketchy circumstances.
That's all very hands-on.
The fit-for-service scene is not on this level.
In Q isn't playing on this level.
Nor is Charles Eisenstein, although sometimes he seems to pretend he's an anthropologist.
This is not territorial stage capitalism anymore.
It's now the immersion stage, and our team is playing with copies of copies.
They're all a giant step removed from the very mechanical process of the soldier mourning the corpse of the person he has killed.
But I still believe that imperialist nostalgia, especially through the added lens of spectacle, is a powerful framework through which we can understand what this group is trafficking in and why it will eventually feel horrible to many of those who participated in it.
So yeah, it's imperialist not in the industrial nation-state sense that we're used to, but in a personal power sense, a nothing-will-get-in-the-way-of-my-perfect-life sense.
In Marcus's Austin Circle, this is where Joe Rogan and Elon Musk hold court as well, along with B-listers like J.P.
Sears and Mickey Willis, there are no borders.
Nothing that can't be bought or angled in on or expanded through algorithms.
These are guys who don't even need countries anymore.
They're flush with tech.
They're moving towards crypto.
As I wondered earlier, what is left to attain or co-opt?
This is not an imperialism that needs to flag wave or assert itself.
It's stronger than that, slicker than that.
It's implied.
It seems to be at home anywhere.
Vail, Cabo, Puerto Vallarta, Portugal, the French Riviera, Nossara.
It's global, man.
It's everywhere.
But it also comes from nowhere.
And it always needs more images.
And Aubrey Marcus opens the arena with the yearning, quote, to remember what has been forgotten.
But how was it forgotten?
Who forgot it?
And why do you think you remember it amidst all of this internet garbage?
How does anything that costs $25,000 per year help anyone remember anything beyond how good they feel about disposable income or how much credit they have left to burn?
Rosaldo's keynote is that imperialist nostalgia mourns the thing it has killed.
Now, is it overly dramatic to read the Marcus scene against this?
Perhaps, but only in the sense that today the corpse is always already invisible, offshore, outsourced, and globalized.
It's an imperialism that has no palpable contact with a world wounded and degraded by the oil money and consumption that gave this organization its position.
It's no wonder they're so into the body, into sensual experiences.
Because I think something has got to help prove that they are here.
So here's my punchline.
I feel like the spectacle of Fit for Service carries the imperialist nostalgia of global history, but it's also an imperialist nostalgia that is intra-psychic.
It seems that Fit for Service is mourning the self that existed before this proliferation of images, before this performance and spectacle and simulation.
It is nostalgic for the self it has erased through images of self-actualization.
There's this one moment near the end of the dance where someone who looks like a legit South American shaman is seen blowing on a wooden flute.
Now, to my eye, he's the only visibly indigenous person in the film.
I have no idea what his story is, or what he felt about the whole thing.
I do feel that he appeared to be very alone.
He might not have felt tokenized, but in the schema of this spectacle, that's the work his image performed.
And then last, we have Charles Eisenstein giving the day-ending benediction.
So there's an excerpt of his talk that they clip.
In the same way that a potted plant needs constant exquisite attention to keep it healthy, whereas a dandelion in a field is unkillable.
I mean, the kind of joke here is that Eisenstein is a potted plant standing on a stage of spiritual props.
Behind him is a postmodern buffet of temple icons imported from South Asia.
There's a kneeling Thai Buddha, two Ganeshas, one dancing, one sitting, a snow lion type statue, maybe it's a Garuda, and an enormous brass gong behind him.
These are, I repeat, temple fixtures and now they're on a workshop stage in an expensive retreat center.
And we're wondering why things are forgotten.
Objects like these might have once been the spoils of war and colonialism that would be put on display in the British Museum.
Now they are the spoils of globalized spiritual tourism available to anyone with the cash.
And while Eisenstein is speaking of dandelions, the icons are sitting there also like potted plants, not in the sense they need constant care, but in the sense they could just be plopped down anywhere to improve the vibe and the sightlines.
I feel embarrassed that I don't know exactly what these objects are, but I guess that for so long objects like this were just blended into the background of every yoga space I entered that I just stopped paying attention.
They became images, untethered from reality, and retethered to branding.
And we wonder why things are forgotten.
And when I say Eisenstein is also potted, I'm saying you can just plop him down anywhere and he'll bloom the same flowers.
Wanderlust, Burning Man, Esalen, New Year's Eve in Ithaca, and now this weird pseudo-coaching trance dance scheme in Austin.
And he's talking to people who have gathered from throughout the empire.
He's not actually talking to the dandelions in Texas.
The locals, the migrant workers, people who live in normal time frames and with normal income stresses instead of cosmic arts, trust funds, and outsized credit.
People who live in the world and not images of the world they can jump between on planes.
I don't think it's only indigeneity that is erased and then pined for here.
If people are yearning for community, they get a high-end video of a party they went to.
If people are yearning for poetry, they get In-Q telling them to alchemize and Aubrey Marcus talking about moist children.
If folks are yearning for therapy, they get banalities and intrusive eye contact.
If people long for intimacy, they get hotness.
If people want connection, they get business networking.
Image on image, simulation on simulation.
And of course they want to remember, because every short circuit of a real need with a hollow answer feels like oblivion.
So the drone in the video moved too quickly overhead to reveal whether there were any dandelions at that eco-resort.
But I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't any.
if they had been carefully rooted out by Mexican gardeners, paid minimum wage to landscape the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
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