If you get treated by someone who says they’re a doctor, but they’re not, can they still have a placebo effect? That’s the question we’d like to ask Dr. Joe Dispenza, who’s not a doctor, but who plays one on the internet, treating one and all with the placebo of his bafflegab about Quantum healing and TimeSpace.Placebo Joe. Who is he? How do you take the measure of a Quantum Man? We’ll shine our browsers into the slit experiment and observe a particle here, a wave there. The particles of video clips, the waves of affiliate links. We’ll run our signature experiment: Schrodinger’s Influencer, to find out just how many parallel Joe Dispenzas are populating the multiple universes he is trying to crack back to alignment with his chiropractic panache. There’s the Joe of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, Joe who starred in “What The Bleep Do We Know?” There’s faith healer Joe, and Joe who now headlines, alongside David Icke, for the Netflix of conspirituality, Gaia TV.Joking aside: in episode 89, we heard from Mary, whose husband almost gave up on chemotherapy for aggressive pancreatic cancer under the influence of Placebo Joe. And today we’ll watch him pretend to be able to cure infertility, and romance Aubrey Marcus. We’ll also puzzle over his strangely undramatic origin story. We’ll suss out the normalizing impact Joe has on a whole raft of bullshit. We’ll wonder why this boy from a nice working class famiglia in Jersey wanted to be a doctor so badly, he was willing to talk himself into it. Show NotesGaia Acquires Yoga International, a Leading Digital Yoga ServiceYou Are The Placebo Why Some People Are More Susceptible to Placebos$2.5B Spent by the NCCIH Placebo Myths DebunkedFeedback Monday Bonus: Responding to Lissa Rankin Merv Griffin Show JZ Knight As Ramtha - 1985 - 14 minutes RSE: 4 axioms Life University loses accreditationDispenza Quantum University bioJoe Dispenza "I am the Placebo"
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I am a non-local multidimensional quantum spirit consciousness energy of the universe expressing itself for a brief time on the earth plane as Julian Walker.
Yeah, and Derek is even more disembodied this week.
He's away today on assignment.
Well, he's with us non-locally so it works well.
He is.
He will be producing actually after the fact in another time continuum.
You can follow us individually on Twitter, sometimes on Facebook, although it's getting patchy there, and more often on Instagram.
And you can support us on Patreon, where subscribers get access to our weekly bonus episodes.
Conspirituality 98, Placebo Joe, Dispenza.
If you get treated by someone who says they're a doctor, but they're not, can they still have a placebo effect?
That's the question we'd like to ask Dr. Joe Dispenza, who's not a doctor, but he plays one on the internet, treating one and all with the placebo of his baffle-gab about quantum healing and time-space.
Placebo Joe.
Who is he?
How do you take the measure of a quantum man?
We'll shine our browsers into the slit experiment and observe a particle there and a wave here.
The particles of video clips, the waves of affiliate links.
We'll run our signature experiment, Schrodinger's Influencer, to find out just how many parallel Joe Dispensers are populating the multiple universes he is trying to crack back to the alignment with his chiropractic panache.
There's the Joe of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, Joe who starred in What the Bleep Do We Know?
There's the Faith Healer Joe, and Joe who now headlines, alongside David Icke, for the Netflix of Conspiratuality, Gaia TV.
Now, joking aside, in episode 89, we heard from Mary, whose husband almost gave up on chemotherapy for aggressive pancreatic cancer under the influence of that same placebo Joe.
Today, we'll watch him pretend to be able to cure infertility.
We'll also puzzle over his strangely undramatic origin story, and we'll suss out the normalizing impact Joe has on a whole raft of bullshit.
We'll wonder why this boy from a nice working class familia in Jersey wanted to be a doctor so badly he was willing to talk himself into it.
All right.
But before all of that, we do have a correction to make.
We also have some breaking news, and we're going to talk about a cartoon to start out.
But the correction is first.
Last week, in his review of Russell Brand's dubious sources, Derek made a mistake about a Caitlin Johnstone tweet regarding the Ukraine war.
He implied that Johnstone was actually calling for rivers of Ukrainian blood to be sacrificed to protect Ukrainian territory, and she did tweet words to that effect, but she was being sarcastic.
Other tweets in that thread made clear that her position is that the resistance to the Russian invasion is really a proxy war on behalf of U.S.
interests, and that therefore it is immoral to ask Ukrainians to sacrifice rivers of blood.
Now, I think Derek's larger point was that such a view does not help with Brand's claims to nuance, but it is true that Johnstone's sarcasm was lost, and so we apologize to her and to you all for getting that wrong.
And some breaking news.
You might remember, Julian, that in episode 85, how we reported out the story of how Gaia TV bought Yoga International.
Do you remember that?
Oh yeah, very disturbing news.
Yeah, that was December of 2021.
Now, Yoga International was a top-tier independent yoga media company founded in 1991, and the purchase by Gaia TV was for who knows how much money, probably quite a bit.
We noted that the purchase represented a Big stakes, institution-level slide towards right-wing conspiratorial brain melt for the erstwhile liberal yoga media world.
Yoga International's catalog of streaming classes will now be absorbed into a subscription structure and served up via algorithm alongside offerings from David Icke and the pretend doctor we're looking at today, Joe Dispenza.
We argued that while the yoga industry has always been compromised by pseudoscience and charismatic BS, this sale really is kind of a watershed moment after which it is just going to be harder for progressive, pro-public health and pro-social justice yoga content providers to be seen and heard.
Now, when the sale was announced, the Yoga International editorial team, along with executives at their umbrella organization, the Himalayan Institute, they assured all Yoga International content providers that the platform would maintain editorial independence.
So, as I said, this was late December of last year, but yesterday and then again today, we received word from insider sources that the top editorial and executive staff at Yoga International were all fired by Gaia.
Very independent.
Yeah, I guess that's it.
Now, as we exhaustively covered throughout 2020, pastel cue and cue-adjacent content disrupted mainstream yoga spaces on social media with a firehose of content.
But now, with one of the top mainstream yoga publications in the English-speaking world swallowed up and now decapitated by Gaia, that social media skirmish is now permanently transforming the infrastructure of the yoga world.
And I'd say that on a more granular level, this development now means that Gaia has increased editorial control over the content that Yoga International was producing to actually help reform the industry with an influx of critical thinking and anti-cult material.
But, you know, here at the podcast, we're really looking forward to reviewing Gaia's new productions like, you know, their series on Anunnaki Yoga.
They're going to be producing a series on poses to cast out Satan, an essential oils series to protect against vampires.
Also, they're offering a reptile restorative yoga teacher training because we all know that if we could just get the lizard people to relax into their breath, find their heart centers, become warm-blooded instead of cold-blooded, maybe they will find their divine source, accept the truth of oneness, and not have to build their ego strength through their little cabal.
This is really hilarious.
I feel like we should point out that that is all parody, but it is so close to a lot of the kind of content that you can readily find on Gaia.
Yeah, so close.
And in fact, you have a bonus episode that covers a lot of that, right?
What's it called?
The Map to Nowhere or something?
That's it.
Gaia and the Map to Nowhere.
Thanks for remembering I didn't.
But yeah, I did a deep dive on the history of Gaia and on their content, their current content, and it was profoundly disturbing and bizarre.
And to your point, like, we are witnessing the shift that I know myself, like 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I was always a little bit nervous about, like, wait, at what point do we hit this critical mass?
Where not only the most outrageous forms of New Age nonsense become the norm, kind of handed down from the sources of authority within the subculture, but also this really wacky conspiracy, alien disclosure, reptilian cabal, all of that stuff.
You know, it's now the case that shining-eyed young acolytes who get interested in spirituality, this is what the authority figures, kind of top to bottom, are likely to tell them.
And that is, it's a turn.
And if they don't tell them directly, they're networked in such a way and they're monetized in such a way that those enthusiasts are going to brush up against that material and risk being red-pilled really easily.
Exactly.
And one of the things I've always noticed about being in these kinds of subcultures is that Um, whoever has the biggest reach and the biggest kind of media presence gets perceived as more of an authority, like your success and your, and your level of exposure means you're the expert.
And so then if any, if anyone else talks about something that's vaguely related to that, like I used to love talking about neuroscience in relation to yoga and meditation.
Oh yeah.
Joe Dispenza talks about that.
Yeah.
Deepak Chopra talks.
It's like, yeah, but they get it wrong.
They're not actually talking about that.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Well, speaking of neuroscience and also the memory hole that your hours of viewing Gaia disappeared into, I wanted to talk with you about Inside Out.
Yeah.
Which I believe you've seen because you are also a dad.
I've seen it.
I watched it with my wife because she is also someone who loves to watch children's movies, whether or not there's a child in the room.
So we watched it when Isabel was much too little to be able to see it.
And I don't think she's seen it yet.
She's about to turn four.
But I remember the movie as extraordinary, like a really beautiful film about emotional intelligence.
Yeah, it was extraordinary for me to be able to watch it with my nine-year-old.
I have to say that in a world of really sad stories, children's movies are more and more a consistently, you know, relief source for me.
And so I'm really grateful for that.
Anyway, I'm bringing it up because in one of our last bonus episodes, we talked about some feedback that we'd received, which we'd received before, but this time it was kind of piloted by Lissa Rankin, who is an alternative medicine practitioner and writer, author.
And she expressed on Facebook- And also someone who's been a real friend of the pod.
Exactly, right.
And she expressed on Facebook that sometimes she finds our attitudes towards alternative medicine and alternative health practices and the practitioners to be dismissive and so on.
And so we talked about that.
The bonus episode is called Feedback Mondays.
We're really pitching Patreon today, aren't we?
And I briefly mentioned how When we talk about people's healing experiences in New Age wellness yoga milieus, we're talking about very precious things, and it made me think of this film and the way in which it depicts what it calls core memories.
So for listeners who haven't seen the film very, very briefly without giving too much away, Riley is 11 years old.
She has what seems to be a fairly uncomplicated bucolic life in Minnesota, skating on the lake whenever she wants to and being goofy with her parents.
And she's the apple of their eye, which turns out to be a little bit of a problem.
And then she undergoes this deep change, a real sort of heartbreaking shift as her dad gets some startup job in San Francisco and they have to drive all the way there and move into this old kind of dark and gloomy house.
And she loses all of her friends and she can't go skating on the lake.
And And it really strikes her with a kind of grief that she can't developmentally expresses grief because part of her personality structure is that, and her parents are involved in this, is that she is always supposed to be filled with joy, that joy is always supposed to be in control.
And that's internally depicted in this wonderful cartoon laboratory inside in which The emotions are personified, and there's five of them, so there's fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and joy.
And joy is really kind of like the executive function, even though she's really only supposed to be playing, you know, a cooperative role with everything else.
But what it made me think of was that when Riley goes through these difficult experiences, Joy wants her to access these core, joyful memories that are stored in the brainstem mechanism of this inner laboratory, and they're all colored gold.
They're like these beautiful Christmas ornaments.
And Joy really wants her, whenever she's experiencing something difficult or confusing, to shine the gold light of a core memory into the present moment so that she can feel better, so that she can start to recover.
And of course, this doesn't work.
That's not how, you know, you can't really force memory retrieval that way.
Or if you do, they're going to wear out or, you know, there are going to be complications.
So, but it just made me think about the fact that when we debunk or when we, for instance, say homeopathy cannot work in the way in which its practitioners claim it works,
And a person has had a healing experience with homeopathy, that memory might get very close to core memory zone, especially if that encounter with a homeopath and with a medication was attended by, you know, deep kind of life narrative significance, right?
Like if they We're going through something very, very difficult, and this was kind of like a turning point for them.
What we do by saying that, you know, homeopathy is sketchy in these six ways is, for some people, we're going to be plucking that core memory out of its pod and we're going to be asking the person to question it or to examine it in a new way.
And yeah, one of the things that happens in the film is that You know, eventually, the emotional team inside realizes that they have to work better together.
They have to be more integrated in order for the personality that's been fractured by this trauma to come back together.
And one of the things that Joy is always trying to do is she's trying to get sadness to stop touching the golden memories.
Because whenever sadness, who's voiced by Phyllis of The Office, which is fantastic, whenever sadness touches the golden memory, it starts to turn blue.
And Joy does not want that to happen.
But then she realizes that, you know, the joyful memory actually is more real to the extent that it contains the sadness that was part of that initial experience.
And so, the whole premise is about integrating positive experiences to arrive at a kind of ambivalent understanding of one's life, or more...ambivalent is kind of a technical term.
Ambivalent is not maybe the best word, right?
No.
It's a Melanie Klein term, but it doesn't sound right.
To me, it's more that bittersweetness, that mature kind of relationship both to our emotional lives and to life itself is always bittersweet because love and pleasure and joy and the experience of just sublime bliss, etc.
is always fleeting.
And it always exists in relationship to that which is the opposite.
That compassion is valuable because it is not guaranteed and because people really do suffer and can be absolutely horrible to one another.
That's why compassion is valuable.
So compassion actually gets deeper and richer and sweeter the more you acknowledge the bitterness that it exists in relationship to.
Yeah, I totally agree.
Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it.
And it put me in mind of the fact that it's not just that we might tinge a core memory with this kind of criticism or analysis with blue, but there might also be some green in there of disgust.
And this is something that has come up in my reporting on cultic groups for years, where people who believe, and perhaps earnestly so, that they had wonderful experiences within a group that is now being revealed to be rife with abuse intergenerationally and more,
That somehow the healing or transformational memory that has been so close to their heart and so deeply embedded within their memory, that's being kind of destroyed by this new reevaluation.
And it's not that it's just a little bit blue or bittersweet, it's that actually, wow, was it joyful at all anymore?
Or I'm a little bit disgusted now that Uh, this, this, you know, life-changing moment that I valued so much was wrapped up in the arms of a predator or a charlatan or a fraud or something like that.
Yeah, I mean, it's, there's, in a way, there's a spectrum that you're referring to here to some extent, right?
Because what you were just describing is very, very, very difficult.
To tease that stuff apart and find some way of integrating it neatly is very, very difficult, which is why it's so damaging.
But if you were to talk about your example when you started with a homeopath, maybe you are referred to a homeopath who is a wonderful human being.
And in their presence, you feel a new level of safety and trust and a connection with someone who empathizes with you in a really meaningful way.
And then they give you a remedy and then you get better.
And then you say, well, wow, homeopathy is just a gift to the world.
And I feel so confident referring anyone to it because I had such an amazing experience.
And then people like us come along and say, well, turns out, Homeopathy, in and of itself, can't possibly work, flies in the face of everything we're about science, and actually when we test it carefully it is shown to not really work.
It's been no better than placebo, which we'll talk about in a little bit.
Right, well that's why we're doing this too, because how we understand these experiences is like essential to the notion of how we process an idea like placebo.
Yeah, and so then when we come along and do that, then the person is thrust into the difficult process, and I've gone through this kind of process before too, where now it's like, okay, how do I disentangle what was meaningful and valid and
Remains actually untainted by whatever has been shown to sort of maybe not be true for example to keep it keep it really nice and how we're saying it right it's just well that's actually not true that homeopathy works in those ways you would have gotten better anyway or there was some other factor that made you get better.
And this was a really lovely person and you had a meaningful experience and that's great.
And you can continue to hold what remains true and meaningful about it in a golden light, whilst also sort of part of, I think, part of growth and healing and integration in any meaningful sense is being able to do that.
So then tease apart the strands that go, well, yeah, actually that piece maybe either wasn't true or wasn't so great, or maybe it was fucking terrible.
Right, and I think one of the criticisms or bits of feedback that we hear a lot is that, well, are you saying that everybody is a grifter?
Are you saying that everybody's a charlatan?
And that's where the disgust slides in because if we get to the point where the explanation around something like homeopathy is culturally understood to the extent where, you know, isn't the practitioner aware of the fact that it can't work in the way in which they say it's working?
Like, where's their integrity then?
Then the person who received that service might begin to think, oh, were they tricking me with something?
Were they tricking me with something?
And I think it's just really, really delicate territory.
And as we said, it's all wrapped up in how we understand a concept like placebo, which is one of our main themes today.
Because one of the questions I have is, is one of the impacts of doing this kind of analysis Is one of the outcomes that actually the meaning effect or the placebo effect actually goes down?
Because it can't be trusted anymore.
The particular intervention can't be trusted anymore.
So, I know you've got a lot to say about placebo.
So, I think the positive effects of placebo has been wildly overplayed by the cultural desire to believe in the mystery.
And this is actually something just like in the last 10 years or so.
I'll go into a little more depth about that in a minute.
I mean, the main thing that comes to mind, and this is, it's a, it's a, It's a sensitive example to use, but it's also a very clear example.
What about the many hundreds of men who believed they were getting medical care and medication in the study in Tuskegee that I think is accurately referred to as a medical atrocity?
You know, I mean, those guys were being given placebos.
They were being given aspirin.
And they were told that it was medicine to treat what they had going on.
I don't believe they were told that they had syphilis.
Many, many people died.
Many wives were infected, some of the wives died, some of the children were born with syphilis.
There was no miraculous healing that happened as a result of the ritual of being administered the medication and trusting the physician and, you know, the placebo in this case of the aspirin somehow magically turning out to be as effective as antibiotics would have been, as penicillin would have been for the syphilis, right?
Yeah, it's an amazing example because, I mean, Yeah, I'm a little bit speechless, actually, because in these discussions of, well, what about placebo effect?
Or, you know, what about the positive utilization of placebo effect?
Well, you know, I'm sure we have a bunch of glaring examples of Yeah, and the thing you'll notice is that anytime people are touting sort of positive data about the placebo effect, it usually is referring to a mild condition.
And it's often referring to a condition that has some kind of psychological component, right?
Some kind of neurochemical.
component more specifically.
And if we want to get really granular, a component that has to do with the autonomic nervous system and the chemical processes that go along with either being stressed or being de-stressed, being relaxed, right?
How aroused is your autonomic nervous system?
If you can use a wonderful bedside manner, empathic listening, something that soothes and calms the person down and they have those kinds of conditions.
And then in the context of that, you perform some kind of modality or you give them some kind of herb or whatever it is, you give them a sugar pill.
and they believe that it's going to help them, and that belief maintains that sort of relaxed, beneficial state, that is kind of innately healing in a certain way, and it does reduce symptoms.
And the same is true of anxiety and depression, things like that.
In those cases, what's going on is so complex, and there is such a kind of, quote-unquote, mind-body peace going on, that you can make a case for it being beneficial up to a point.
but there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support placebos as a cure for really serious disease processes.
- Right, like nobody references the positive placebo effects in cancer cases or cases in which obviously evidence-based treatments would be most effective.
Yeah, yeah.
And so there's another point here that is really important, which is that when people use the term the placebo effect.
It sounds as if they're referring to a very specific measurable effect that results from a particular type of like here's a pill or here we're doing this particular treatment modality but it's actually not that.
It's much more complex than that and it's sort of the baseline.
We know that in clinical trials like the medicine or the treatment modality has to perform better than placebo.
And what is really being talked about is this sort of baseline area in which a whole range of different things might happen that make the person's symptoms get better.
Or that maybe make the person, maybe have the person resolve whatever their illness is.
And it's very hard to disentangle those things.
So, one of those things is regression to the mean, which is basically just this principle of understanding in medical science that when you have a fluctuation in symptoms, when you have a strong flare-up of a certain kind of symptomology, it's probably going to come back down to your average kind of baseline by itself, even if you do nothing, right?
So, there's that piece.
There's the other piece which is self-limiting conditions.
So, if you get a cold, And you do nothing, the cold is going to resolve itself eventually.
Like unless you're really severely immunocompromised, all of us have had the experience of getting colds and then eventually the cold goes away.
Now, if you do nothing, the cold goes away.
If at the peak of your symptoms, you go, wow, I'm really sick.
I need to take some echinacea.
You take the echinacea.
And then because it's a self-limiting illness that has a fairly predictable lifespan, it goes away.
Well, you say the echinacea must have been the thing that cured it and so that's related then to the confusion between correlation and causation.
Was it really a cause or was it just correlated with the fact that you got better and you happen to have taken the echinacea the night before?
And the thing about all of this, Matthew, is we have this method for trying to like be as It's already there.
to try to confuse ourselves as little as possible about these very things, because there's such common mistakes in how human beings think about the world and how we interpret events and causes and these sorts of relationships.
So it's already there.
It's built into the science.
Our subject today is super interested in the placebo effect to the extent that he published an entire book in 2014 with Hay House, of course, titled You Are the Placebo.
You Are the Placebo.
So in 2014, Joe Dispenza publishes this book.
Through our frequently referenced publishing house of all things pseudoscience, Hay House.
And so in a blog post promoting the book, he recounts the origin story that cements his authority, and he no doubt wins the trust of many who really want to believe.
I think that when it comes to gurus who blur the line between spirituality and medicine, having a harrowing personal anecdote is really key.
And again, we're in the domain of anecdotes, and anecdotes don't really add up to evidence, but they sure make for very convincing storytelling.
So, this is kind of the archetype of the wounded healer, right?
The shaman who's initiated by the near-death experience, the ordinary individual just like you or I who is chosen by God to then go through the worst fires of human suffering in order to rise up like a phoenix from the ashes, reborn with savior-like healing powers and wisdom.
And, you know, you and I discussed in the run-up to the episode how It seems like there may be a gendered piece here, where for some of the female influencers we cover, their rising up from the ashes of adversity has sometimes a different flavor.
Totally, yeah.
And we'll get to that when we talk about how he talks about his own childhood, which is somewhat less dramatic than the phoenix rising from the ashes, although he does have this kind of miracle story.
But it doesn't necessarily have to go quite as far as some of the others that we've talked about on the show, right?
So for Joe, it's a cycling accident.
And he's doing like a triathlon sort of event.
And he's on his bike and he's hit by an SUV that's doing 55.
He's knocked up into the air, then he's dragged down the road.
As he avoids being run over, he holds onto the bumper very sort of intelligently.
This results in six broken vertebrae and bone fragments impinging his spinal cord and a warning from the doctor and the neurosurgeon that if he refuses surgery, he might very well experience a catastrophic collapse of his entire spinal column leading to paralysis the moment he sort of tries to stand upright and walk.
And at this point, as the story goes, he's already experiencing multiple forms of pain.
He's got tingling in his limbs.
He's got reduced bodily function and control of his hands and feet or, you know, along those sorts of lines.
He's 23 years old and Joe Dispenza refuses the surgery.
Can we just pause here and say that this is all his account, right?
This is his account, absolutely.
Let's just put a flag in that.
Yes, this is his account in a blog post on a website about healing where at the very bottom he links to his book just as like a little link on one of the final sentences.
So it's this interesting sort of...
It blurs the line between storytelling, article, and infomercial, right?
And we just want to make it clear that we do not have access to Joe Dispenza's medical records.
We don't know exactly the extent of it.
I mean, he might be telling absolutely the truth here, and he might not be.
We don't know.
So, according to his account, he spends the next nine and a half weeks consciously focusing.
He refuses the surgery and instead consciously focuses on harnessing the divine consciousness of his body to heal.
And he then gets up and walks out of the hospital ready to go back to seeing his chiropractic patients like a week later ready to lift weights and continues to live a mostly pain-free life.
You see, he says at the end of the article, I discovered that I was the placebo.
Now this of course makes no sense because what he would actually be saying literally is that he was the inert substance which has no medical effect but can fool people psychologically and temporarily into feeling relief from symptoms.
Wait, maybe he really is the placebo!
Well, yeah, I mean he's not a body, he's a spirit.
His reality is quantum consciousness.
We'll get into that, right?
Yep, yep.
I just want to point out again here that the reason placebos Are even part of the zeitgeist that we know what placebos are, is that they're used in double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials, and we use them to actually correct for this kind of misunderstanding of the efficacy of whatever's being tested, to find out if it really works.
So as much as placebo has ended up being touted as a magical concept in the last 10 years, like a symbol of the mysterious power of the mind, the truth is it's really usually short-lived, unreliable, hard to tease apart from the other intersecting factors that I listed.
It's quite impactful on highly subjective and hard to measure symptoms like pain, nausea, or depression, which are still kind of mysterious in terms of our understanding because science does acknowledge that some things are mysterious and we haven't got them all nailed down yet.
And, you know, it's the neurochemically mediated psychological mind body sort of area where we know placebos have a little bit more of an impact.
And actually that's also the same area in which when we test alternative medicines, that's the area where they have some impacts.
So, I just want to give this rundown very quickly because I said before, placebos have sort of become the buzzword in the last 10 years or so and here's why I think that is.
After 17 years and $2.5 billion spent by the NCCIH, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, which is a government agency set up to test alternative medical claims, after $2.5 billion, 17 years, the only remedy they had found positive evidence for was that ginger capsules help some people deal with chemotherapy nausea.
This is tests of many, many different preparations and alternative treatments.
$2.5 billion in 17 years worth of tests.
They also found that yoga and meditation help with pain, anxiety, and fatigue.
Again, that's in that category of sort of neurochemically driven symptomology.
And that acupuncture helps with those sorts of things as well.
But the caveat here is it doesn't matter where you put the needles.
We're going to get the mail.
I know.
One of the interpretations is that.
Where are we going to get the mail?
Are we going to get it in the proper place?
Those DMs, are they going to come into the proper box along the right meridian?
No, sorry.
Are the criticisms going to actually be on acupuncture points where we might be able to feel the zing or are they just going to be randomly piercing our skin in a way that releases some kind of analgesic chemical that allows us to continue being disbelievers?
Please, please, please, please forgive us.
Please be nice.
I mean, it's all in the notes, it's all in the show notes.
Let me just say this too.
The NCCIH, which is the group that did this for 17 years, the main criticism from outside of that agency was not what most people in our subculture would expect, which is that they're in the pocket of big pharma, but it's actually that they allowed so many of the studies to be designed and then executed and then self-reported by people who were already alternative medicine practitioners.
And even then, the results are so incredibly weak.
Now, I wish that was not the case, but it just happens to be the case.
Do you really, though?
I mean, because I just feel the schadenfreude just ripping off you.
As someone who's been in this particular world for as long as I have, I do wish that things like meditation and yoga and body work and aesthetic dance and breath work and, you know, eating the right food and taking these different supplements that have all kinds of, you know, wonderful names and origin stories and relationship to nature, I do wish that it was all a lot more impactful than it is.
It still is beneficial and healthy and life enriching, but it would be lovely if you could really say to someone, hey, if you commit to your meditation practice every day for 15 minutes or 20 minutes, it could be the difference between getting cancer and not getting cancer.
That would be really cool.
It's just not true.
Yeah, and to hear you say it, I can't imagine in which that could, any circumstance in which that could possibly be true, because, I mean, even the terms that we use are so undefinable.
Like, what would you be doing during those 15 minutes?
How many different types of meditation are there?
What does it actually feel like?
Yeah, and the difficulty here is that when you, so here's my point.
After those 17 years, after all that money spent, those are the results.
And so what is one of the ways of expressing the results?
When you look at what was published about it, we found that this whole long list of alternative claims performed no better than placebo.
Under experimental conditions.
But what about placebo?
Placebo is really magical.
Well, maybe they are placebos, but we just don't understand placebos well enough yet.
Maybe the power of the mind to influence the health of the body is so strong that we've been overlooking it through this dismissive attitude toward placebos.
And so that's the pivot that you see a lot of people make.
And that's why Joe Dispenza, when he publishes that book in 2014, Is saying, oh, you are the placebo.
This is the next wave of the messaging around mind over matter.
Yeah, so I guess I didn't follow the discourse carefully enough.
I wasn't aware of it enough back then.
But what you're saying is that that book title hits at a particular cultural moment in which placebo is a thing.
It's a word with a high cultural charge.
Yeah, that the hope before, well the claim before that is these things work but there's no scientific evidence because of the conspiracy of Big Pharma.
Then this government agency is created and it spends all this money and time and it tests everything and it's like the evidence is coming, the evidence is coming, you'll see.
And a lot of that comes from sincere belief.
Then the evidence turns out not to hold up even though it's a lot of alternative practitioners designing and performing the studies.
Then the pivot is to placebo.
Placebo really is powerful.
And so for the last thing I want to say about this is that believing that a substance or a healing modality will work can make some people with some types of symptoms feel as if it is working.
And that's valuable to some extent.
Things like fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, anxiety, depression that have a strong link to neurochemistry can be quite impacted by something that evokes deep relaxation, states of well-being, reduction in autonomic nervous system arousal.
But that's nowhere near the outrageous claim that the power of mental states is something that can be harnessed in a demonstrable way to cure other more serious and non-psychological diseases.
And that's what Joe Dispenza claims, literally.
And it's false and it's unethical to claim that.
Throughout his writing and his speaking on this topic, he will refer to scientific evidence.
But the evidence he's referring to is always of things like how meditation changes your brain states, because we hooked you up to fMRI and we see that it's true, right?
Or your heart rate variability shifts as a result of doing these meditations when you're, you know, at the six-day retreat, etc.
That's cool, but it doesn't translate across the numerous sleight-of-hand tricks he will then do to make it sound as if A. this causes an incredible new paradigm healing of severe illnesses, no evidence for that, or B.
That that healing happens because meditation and group energy fields open up doorways into other dimensions in which the higher truth of spiritualized quantum physics can exert a top-down conscious influence on the material world.
That's what he's selling, and that's what's making him millions.
All right, so let's get into some background on Placebo Joe.
And to do that, I think we have to take a trip back in time to consider the wisdom of the leader of the group where Joe Dispenza got his start.
So, Jay-Z Knight.
Greetings, we are with you here in your time.
What is this technology upon which we are speaking?
saleswoman claims to channel a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit named Ramtha.
Greetings.
We are with you here in your time.
What is this technology upon which we are speaking?
That sounds a little bit Alexander Dugan.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Do you think that's the link actually?
Oh man, she's going to start channeling Dugan from, anyway, from Yelm, Washington.
Okay, so you did actually a great episode of Ramtha, episode 35, if listeners want to Check that out.
But just as a preview of the kind of wisdom that we'll be hearing from Joe, here are some of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment beliefs.
They actually have four axioms and I'm going to just give them to you.
Hopefully, Julian, you can make eye contact with me as I do.
The first one is the statement, you are God.
Did you get that?
Yes.
I don't know.
You might not be ready for that one.
The second one is the mandate to make known the unknown.
Number three is the concept that consciousness and energy creates the nature of reality.
And the challenge to conquer yourself.
So those are the four axioms.
I'm here for it.
I saw those and I had this feeling that I always get about New Age wisdom and especially of the channeled variety, which is that it's always so banal.
It's always like super, super simplistic and reductive, infinitely interpretable.
Anyway, so there are some four goodies for you.
And yeah, we've got Also, this sense, I think, that there's no real position that the channel or the wisdom bringer is giving on anything, right?
I mean, occasionally, Rampha will let the mask slip and say racist or anti-Semitic things, as was reported in 2012.
But for the most part, you know, it seems like these figures basically They speak for the dominant culture.
They rationalize people's lives.
They help people feel better about living with individualistic ideologies.
And I think this translates into what we see in Dispenza's bio on one of the websites.
We've got a couple of them that we're going to read from.
But he says, and this kind of sounds like a boilerplate version of what he might get from Romp the School of Enlightenment, quote, We all have our own personal limits, whether they are related to our ability to create abundance in our life, our capacity to make some type of change in our health or our body, our inability to stop recreating the same outcomes, or just our ability to believe in ourselves.
When we step beyond our limitations, we become unlimited.
Hallelujah, brother!
Right, so when we step beyond our limitations, we become more unlimited, Julian.
Matthew, Matthew, when I step out of the bathtub... Go ahead.
I become a little cooler as the breeze goes on my legs.
When I eat broccoli, I become more broccoli-infused.
Yes.
So, this is where Dispenza comes from, but also go back to episode 35 and find whatever you can out about Jay-Z Knight, because she's incredible.
He was her chiropractor.
You know, maybe he worked on Ramtha himself.
He had some kinks.
And how did he arrive there, though?
Like, where did he come from before that?
There's not much to dig into.
But he does talk to Brian Rose of London Real about his childhood.
Now, for those of you who don't know Brian Rose, he's like the Don King of the conspiracy theory world, like a big-time showman and promoter, you know, responsible for platforming and monetizing Mickey Willis when he did his indoctrination, doxploitation movie.
Except, of course, you know, Brian Rose is extremely white and he dresses like Gordon Gekko.
You know, uh, Rose, I want to say a little bit more about Rose because he's an American dude.
He's an American dude who's about our age and he went, he moved to London and in London he started this show and it was not originally like conspiracy stuff.
It was kind of wide ranging and he would interview different guests.
And he would not always dress like that.
And over time, as he started making more money, a lot of it was about selling courses to people through the membership site to learn how to achieve their dream.
Because look, I achieved my dream, I have this big successful YouTube show.
And then he started dressing up to dressing the part of the guy who makes a lot of money.
Were the courses like business coaching courses or like click funnel courses or whatever?
Yeah, business coaching through the lens of like, you know, personal growth.
Believe in yourself.
You can achieve your goals if you have other people holding you accountable and you show up every day kind of thing.
But then at the beginning of the pandemic, he just went and it started with David Icke and it went from there.
He just went off the rails.
He got banned from YouTube, you know, and of course his profile only grew and grew as a result of all of that controversy.
Alright, well here he is with a sit-down with Joe Dispenza.
I'd love to talk a little bit about parenting.
I know you have two boys and a girl.
I have two boys and a girl as well.
But first, I'm curious about how you grew up.
Where did you grow up and what did your parents do?
My father came to the United States when he was 12 from a little city outside of Palermo called Ragusa in Sicily.
His mom and my grandmother and her two sisters were in a convent and they escaped out of the convent.
They were orphans.
They escaped out of the convent and left.
And she met my grandfather, who was an Italian suit designer.
And so they migrated to the United States in the 30s.
And so my mother, her father was from Siragusa, which is the eastern side of Sicily.
And my grandmother was just a very unique, very different person, was from Pugliese area and then ultimately Sicily.
Why was she unique or what was unique about her?
She was just different.
She was probably half African, very soulful rhythm, really like cool in a different way, just really unique.
And so my parents were, for the most part, my mother was first generation, my father, you know, from Italy, and they, you know, my father went to New York and my mother, New York, and then to the suburbs of New Jersey across the river there.
And so I think, you know, what made, so it was my brother and I, what made it so unique was that my parents were very simple people.
And they were also very progressive.
They always wanted to learn.
They always wanted to do the right thing or at least provide opportunities for my brother and I from a very early age.
And they just really supported our interests.
I mean, we had to do well in school.
I mean, that was just the way it had to be.
But they gave us a lot of freedom to explore, to discover, and family was a huge part of our lives.
I can't remember, maybe a couple times when my dad had to work late and we ate dinner without my dad.
It was like a big deal, right?
We were just a tight family.
They provided quite a bit of You know, a nice middle class, upper middle class family in the suburbs of New Jersey.
And whatever our interests were, like my brother's a fabulous artist and he's been doing oil paintings since he was four.
Like, that's still hanging, you know, in our homes.
Very, very, in an adult class.
And so whatever our interests were, Whatever it was I mean I talked my dad into seminars to come to seminars and pretend like he was a doctor when he when I was 16 I said don't talk let's just go and learn and I'd say don't say anything because he was a you know, he's more of a Manual labor technician, you know had his own business and So I was, he always talked my parents into doing crazy stuff.
Coming with you so you could go learn.
Yeah, so I can go learn.
I said, just say you're a doctor.
Just don't say a word.
Just go and I'll just be, you know.
And he would do it.
You know, he'd talk them into all kinds of stuff.
So my parents were fun like that.
They'd go, okay, okay, okay.
That's incredible.
Like, so yeah, dad, pretend you're a doctor.
Like, super prophetic.
That's amazing.
It's such an interesting, almost boringly bucolic sort of description of a very nice family, and then you've got this little mischievous thing at the end that's like, wait, what?
Yeah, right.
I mean, it tells us something about his class consciousness as well.
He knows his You know, Sicilian dad gives him love, but not necessarily the cultural access that he craves.
Later in the interview, we find out that he felt his childhood was so charmed that he didn't have a clue how much other people actually suffer until he was a young adult.
Which I find is interesting.
He said here that his parents were liberal and practical and allowed him to adventure and fail and even got into their juicing and fasting stuff.
He and his brother started going vegetarian at a certain point or whatever they were doing in alternative diets.
He says, too, that he fosters the same liberality with his own children, but when they cross a line into an adult decision, he lets them face adult consequences, and he calls this the stallion and paddock model, where the paddock should be big enough to let the stallion roam, but also it has a gate beyond which the stallion has to survive on solo.
So it sounds kind of like normal avoidant attachment patterning with a little bit of Italian culture thrown in, like, you know, la famiglia loves you and would do anything for you, but if you stray too far, you know, there are limits.
But what occurs to me, as you said, was that, you know, there's a kind of suburban normalcy here.
Like, there's nothing in his childhood or his past that is typical of Some mystical origin story.
And I was thinking about, you referenced this before, about how weird it is that somebody like Teal Swan could sit in Brian Rose's studio the very next day and record a special, and he'd ask her the same question, and she would just describe being sewn up into a corpse for 12 hours, and that would authenticate her to go on and deliver the same content that Dispenza has about quantum levels of healing.
Yeah, so it's like it's harder to come by for the female influencer who also doesn't have the chiropractic qualification to call themselves a doctor, right?
He plays fast and loose with that, with the term doctor in terms of like all the stuff he claims that that gives him authority for even though he's just a chiropractor.
There is something about a particular archetype of the younger female spiritual influencer where the origin story, it seems, has to be much, much more gory and traumatic and like supernatural.
Yeah, he doesn't need that.
And at the end, I'm going to talk about how I think Dispenza kind of represents a normalization or a routinization of Cool.
uh, mystical pseudoscience into mainstream discourse, but about his training, we know that he says he graduated from a place called Life University in Marietta, Georgia.
Uh, but that school actually lost its accreditation in 2002.
How bad do you have to be?
Well, it's a chiropractic school and the chiropractic accreditation society took away their certification.
Uh, There was a quote from a report at the time.
It says, although the Council on Chiropractic Education will not reveal the precise basis of its decision, its investigators apparently concluded that life students were not being taught how to detect and deal with problems that require medical attention.
CCE's investigative report noted that all patient charts reviewed revealed primary diagnoses of subluxation.
That sounds more like a scam that they're detecting, right?
It might just be.
We also know from a very helpful listener of the pod who just got this in before we filed that his chiropractic license expired in 2018 in Washington State.
He's never had one, or he had one in California, but that was quite a long time ago.
That's not renewed either.
He also stopped seeing patients, it looks like, one-on-one around 2018, so he's not really a chiropractor anymore.
It says in one of the bios, this is for Quantum University, that he studied biochemistry at Rutgers and has a bachelor's of science with an emphasis on neuroscience.
But in some places he is referred to as a neuroscientist, but there's no evidence that he does any kind of like research or clinical work in neuroscience.
And just a little side note on how murky this world is.
Guess who else is on the faculty of Quantum University listed as a guest speaker?
No!
This would be friend of the pod, Lisa Rankin.
So it was a little bit ouchy to see her listed on the faculty page next to, I hate to say it, David Avocado-Wolf.
Oh dear.
But maybe if there's a conference at Quantum U, she can talk some sense into him.
I know that that's part of the mission of her writing, is to reinvigorate these spaces.
But, you know, I think it's a tough road to hold.
You gotta sit down with those guys, Lissa, and tell them which of the double slits to go through.
Right, because it's all waves and particles, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dispenza makes his first big-league appearance on the New Age scene as a talking head for What the Bleep Do We Know?, which is a Romptha School of Enlightenment production, headed up by Mark Vicente, who is later a lieutenant of Keith Raniere in NXIVM, and now is actually an anti-cult advocate.
Now, word-of-mouth marketing got What the Bleep into 146 theaters across the U.S.
and brought in almost $16 million in earnings worldwide.
And when we say word-of-mouth, we really mean it, because it was actually word-of-mouth that got What the Bleep into my cult in Wisconsin, where I was living in... What year did it come out?
But I was there from like... I think it's 06?
No, it's before that.
Maybe 04?
I think it's 03, because I was at Endeavor Academy from 99 to 03, and it raced around the population there, like COVID, and then they actually got some theater manager in Madison, Wisconsin to give it a run.
So I've got two clips from What The Bleep.
First here is Joe talking about how he creates his day.
I wake up in the morning and I consciously create my day the way I want it to happen.
Now sometimes, because my mind is examining all the things that I need to get done, it takes me a little bit to settle down and get to the point of where I'm actually intentionally creating my day.
But here's the thing, when I create my day, And out of nowhere, little things happen that are so unexplainable.
I know that they are the process or the result of my creation.
And the more I do that, the more I build a neural net in my brain that I accept that that's possible.
It gives me the power and the incentive to do it the next day.
So that's Joe.
By the way, he looks and sounds like Jonah Hill.
Like it's just kind of uncanny.
Now, right after that scene, we have Jay-Z Knight herself talking about how boners prove that the mind is all there is.
And what we will learn is that addiction is the feeling of a chemical rush that is cascaded through the bodies, through a whole assortment of glands and ductless glands, and through the spinal fluid. through a whole assortment of glands and ductless glands, and A feeling that some would call a sexual fantasy, a sexual fantasy,
It only takes one sexual fantasy for a man to have a hard-on.
In other words, it only takes one thought here for a man to have an erection in his member.
And yet, there was nothing outside of him that gave him that.
It was what was within him that gave him that.
Yeah, and Mark's there in post-production laying down some funky bass to really let Jay-Z have a moment.
Jay-Z, you've brought such thirst and passion into our lives.
The movie slaps.
You know, all has not ended well between Knight and Dispenza.
They have sued each other.
Actually, in 2019 and 2020, the suits are sealed.
Or, you know, we haven't been to the courthouse.
Maybe?
Well, we don't know what it is.
But there's some bad blood there.
And Knight does seem to be extremely litigious, according to a former member site, so we're definitely not going to say she's running a cult on an 80-acre ranch with a staff that hosts large gatherings and offers pricey programs.
That would be wrong.
We're not going to speculate on that at all.
It would be totally wrong to speculate on that because, oddly, very few accounts from former members are in circulation, but we will link to a few that are so that you can review themselves.
You can review those yourself.
Let me just say too with regard to Joe, he's come a long way since that interview.
He's a much better speaker and his voice actually is, his voice sounds so sort of cute and there's just something about his voice in that clip that is really endearing.
He's become a much more practiced orator.
Yeah.
And you know what?
You know what else?
I didn't clip it, but in some of the stuff in the same talk that I have clipped for in a minute here, he also says in talking about the placebo that it turns out that if you name a medicine something that gives your brain like an associative connection to it, it's even more effective.
And he says, Viagra sounds like Niagara.
That's a lot of flow.
That, gosh, that reminds me of when I studied, um... Ayurveda?
What was it?
No, uh, it was either Jyotish or it was Hasta Samudrika with, with Hart Defoe.
And, and he tried to tell us that You know, the power of language was so palpable that people calling Lady Diana Lady Di for years and years prior to her dying was actually a portent.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If they had not called her that, she would never have died.
Yeah, that's right.
Okay, so we're going to get to the content here.
It's been a big warm-up.
You've got a talk that he did with Aubrey Marcus.
Just before that, we reviewed a couple of other pieces, one in which There's a large convention-style gathering.
We'll link to it for you.
But he tells this woman who has come for the various activities on the weekend or the retreat that she can fix her infertility with thought.
She confesses in front of this entire group that she believes that the guilt of waiting too long is holding her back from getting pregnant.
And then Dispenza immediately follows that with saying, the guilt is stored in that same center in her uterus.
And she nods and then he puts his hands on her shoulders.
He, you know, does the intrusive eye contact.
And he says, first of all, as she's trying not to cry, but then breaks into tears, first of all, he says, you're beautiful.
And then he promises to help her because she's going to do the training event Which involves lying on the ground and inviting the spirit babies to find her there.
And then he says, you know, that she really wants to have happy eggs and she nods and agrees.
And there's a feeling of bonding and connection.
There's another video that we looked at that is on immortality, where he identifies cancer cells as being immortal genes.
And then he says that your will to live has to be greater than your fear of dying in order to heal yourself from cancer.
He goes on to say that if immortality exists, it won't be chemical.
Then he says it has to be electromagnetic because it has to be a frequency greater than matter.
He says chemistry is a slow frequency of matter changing matter.
And he goes on to compare chemistry to a flower.
or He compares the soul to DNA, and he says that each of us is a divine sovereign being, which comes to be very common language over the last couple of years.
And then he goes on to give a scientific explanation of reincarnation, so some peak galaxy brain stuff.
Uh, but you watched him with Aubrey Marcus.
I did.
And I'm coming to this fresh, so I don't know what I'm going to add.
Yeah, that's right.
I wanted you to not actually hear any of these clips.
So I, I was, you know, looking at a lot of different material, but when I got to this Aubrey Marcus interview, I was just like, wow, the whole, it's all here.
It's all here.
So I've clipped a sequence of excerpts.
This is Joe Dispenza's appearance on Aubrey Marcus's podcast on December 9th, 2020.
The episode title is Use This Formula to Manifest Anything You Want and then Capitalized Again Today.
It has 726,000 views, which makes it the 8th most viewed on Orbi Marcus' channel.
Yeah.
And, but, but I'll add to that, that the most viewed video on the entire Aubrey Marcus YouTube channel at 2.5 million views is another Joe Dispenza video.
And that one's titled how to create the future you want.
So SEO.
Yeah.
SEO optimizers pay attention here.
How to create the future you want performs better than use this formula to manifest anything you want today.
Creating the future had there's something some kind of magic there.
So for context, I told you the date.
Now let's just remember this is after the summer of the George Floyd protests.
And even more recent than that, it is right after the election.
Trump has lost, but we are in full stop the steal.
Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell released the Kraken madness.
We are in peak eschatological QAnon prophecy hysteria.
People like us were on high alert for potential domestic terror events at this point.
And in fact, one happened about 28 days later at the Capitol.
And then there's the other little thing that's going on called COVID.
And that's really important for two reasons.
First of all, Dispenza's sales pitch throughout this interview, which is really like an hour-long infomercial, is that his pastiche of meditation, quantum physics, and neuroscience teaches people how to heal themselves and others from serious medical conditions.
I'll let you hear him say that.
And second, Aubrey starts off this whole interview by saying that he has just himself come back from being in Cancun at one of these large group six-day retreats with Dispenza.
The whole hour is really advertising to the audience to get them to go to one of these retreats.
And I checked the timeline.
Uh, this is December 2020.
It's the same month that the very first COVID vaccines were being administered to those in most danger from the pandemic.
Oh, wow.
Okay, so they're gathering, right?
Yeah, we know that Despenza was leading large group breath work is one of the things they talk about right off the top and meditation events marketed in part to very sick people.
This is where you're going to learn to heal yourselves during the scariest phase of the pandemic in countries like Mexico and Panama where he could get away with it.
There's so much to choose from here, recreating the clips, that I left out a section here in which he actually says that what he is teaching is better than a vaccine.
And that's very topical too, given the timing.
So I had a look too, the Cancun retreat on the official website that's currently scheduled is just under $2,000.
Uh, which sounds kind of reasonable.
That's also before accommodations though.
And when you have a look, that's another $1,500 or so for accommodation.
So you're talking about $3,500.
Uh, then you have whatever your travel expenses are to get there.
Uh, the official website doesn't give any information about the group size or about any COVID safety measures.
But I found a recent post from just last month on the Ordinary Traveler website which enthusiastically prepares people on what to expect when they go on a Jodo Spencer retreat and they say it'll usually be anywhere between 800 and 2500 people.
at each event.
It's safe to say that each of these week-long retreats is bringing in between 1.6 and 5 million dollars.
Yeah, and let's just track this whole thing as being on brand for Marcus at the moment, especially with the success of the SEO on his channel.
We were actually debating whether to give Marcus a chapter in this book that we've got coming out.
Yeah.
We actually said no for a number of reasons, mainly because like Joe Rogan, he's more of an enabler of conspirituality than he seems to be a true believer.
Yeah, I think of him really as the conspirituality Rogan.
Right.
Because Rogan has some overlap with conspirituality, but Marcus is the one who just platforms all of them.
Yeah, and he does it with a kind of entrepreneurial panache that's really unmatched and fueled by, you know, probably connections involving his oil money family and, you know, his ability to bounce from one pleasure-seeking startup to another.
And he's a business guy.
Um, you know, and we called, you know, Charles Eisenstein the New Age Q, and to run with that metaphor, uh, Aubrey Marcus, you know, might be the conspirituality Rogan, but he's also kind of like, you know, the Jim Watkins.
Yeah.
If, uh, Eisenstein is, is Q. Um, you know, and if, if, if Jim Watkins was buff and had better hair.
So, um, Marcus hosts Eisenstein, Brett, Weinstein, and Heather Haying just recently, a whole parade of conspiritualists.
The interviews all feel like they're pointed at expanding the brand.
So Eisenstein is like a content collaborator, but he's also a fit-for-service coach.
And so I think when Marcus sees somebody that he can bring into the sort of content production loop, At the very start of this episode, Aubrey Marcus has just raved about his experience in Cancun.
also will always emphasize the power of the group experience as well.
And that's going to feature as well.
At the very start of this episode, Aubrey Marcus has just raved about his experience in Cancun.
He doesn't really ask a question.
He just sort of tees up Joe.
And Dispenza launches into literally 15 minutes of opening comments, which start off like this.
Sure.
Well, I think people come to our work for all kinds of reasons.
Some people, like you said, have health conditions.
Some people want to create a new job, a new career, a new relationship.
Some people are craving a mystical experience.
Some people just want to understand life from a different perspective.
And I think science has become the contemporary language of mysticism.
I think it's science that demystifies the mystical.
And if you can combine a little quantum physics with a little neuroscience with Neuroendocrinology with psychoneuroimmunology, the mind-body connection, epigenetics, all of those sciences point the finger at possibility.
And if you talk about religion, if you talk about culture, if you talk about tradition, even spirituality, I noticed that you divide an audience.
But science, in a sense, creates community.
So people come for all kinds of reasons.
And what I've learned in the last year or so is that What people really want is wholeness.
Because when we want something, we're in separation or in lack, right?
And so when we started experimenting with doing different scientific measurements, one of the things we started to notice is that when a person somehow connects to something greater, and that has an influence on their nervous system, the side effect is that they feel so whole
So rejuvenated in that moment, so blessed by life in that moment from an inner experience that it's impossible for them to want.
I mean, how can you want when you feel whole, right?
And so when we started looking at heart coherence and we saw this tremendous changes in people's ability to be able to sustain A state of mind, a feeling in their heart for an extended period of time.
We have data to show you could be sick and do that.
You could be a vegetarian and do that.
You could be a carnivore and do that.
You could be rich, you could be poor.
If you're skinny, overweight doesn't matter.
Once you learn that skill of self-regulation and being able to experience a greater level of wholeness, that if you can create from wholeness, Instead of separation or lack, you can produce greater effects on the nature of reality.
Science has become the contemporary language of mysticism.
It's what bonds everyone together, right?
Yeah, and it's less divisive, actually.
That's incredible.
I haven't quite heard that yet.
I can see your rage burbling.
Yeah, and more what he's saying is that actually the language of pseudoscience can convince a wide range of people that what you're saying is true.
Right, exactly.
Right.
And so, you know, he's good at this well-practiced sales pitch of fallacious reasoning, supported by the false authority of his pseudoscience.
You can hear how he's about to braid the idea of manifestation and creating reality via your thoughts, which as we've said, he's been selling since What the Bleep, into this big tent, all-inclusive invitation.
It works for everyone.
You know, whether you're skinny or overweight, young or old, poor or rich, wherever you're from, the cutting edge of mystical science can introduce you to new realities.
So, we came from singularity and when you're oneness or when you're Source, there's no separation between cause and effect.
Your thoughts create experiences when you're in oneness.
We journeyed down the density and now we're really separate from Source.
And so what happens between cause and effect is called time.
So we're here now to prove to ourselves that the divine lives in us.
So why not practice shortening time or the interval between cause, the thought, and the effect, the experience?
And when you start seeing something appear in your life as a result of you at cause, You start getting more kind, more caring, more loving, more conscious, more present because you feel more whole.
And so, people in our work come for a lot of reasons, you know, and yes, they have challenges and health conditions.
But instead of wanting to heal, I want them to learn the formula on how to heal.
I want them to learn the formula on how to create reality.
I want them to learn the formula that there is a door to other dimensions that they can create independent of any exogenous substance.
and released latent systems in the brain, it causes them to realize they're not a linear being living a linear life.
They're a dimensional being living a dimensional life.
And it only takes one of those experiences where you have an alteration in your identity that you can't go back to being the same person again.
I want them to be responsible for everything that I'm promising, actually.
Yeah, and it's actually in the previous clip And in this most recent clip, both times he acknowledges some people come People come for a lot of different reasons, right?
Because I want everyone to come for the cure to what ails you.
But some of them have really serious medical conditions.
And then just the double speak of like, rather than wanting to heal, I want them to learn the formula of how to heal, which is what I'm teaching.
And then what is that?
It's going into other dimensions where you realize that You actually are not a human being.
Talk about moving goalposts, eh?
Because I'm going to present as a doctor.
And then I'm going to say, I want to teach you how to be your own doctor.
And everything is incredibly vague.
And built into that is, well, if you're just wanting to heal, that's not going to be enough.
So there's a way that you could fail and it would be your own fault, right?
Right.
But if you know how to repeat what I say, then...
Wow.
Yeah.
It's really thick.
Okay, what's next?
As he continues, we find that manifesting the sports car and creating the life of abundance, those are not really the main thing.
You know, it's like, what now?
He says.
And to me, Matthew, this is very reminiscent of book three of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which of course, everything comes back to.
You know, it's this idea that meditation can give you all these cities, these paranormal abilities, but look out, it can give you those and they're really Really cool, but they're just a distraction from the real gift of discovering enlightenment, right?
No, is it not just manifesting material goods like sports cars and stuff that he's talking about, but also, is he also saying that the material healing of curing your cancer is also distracting to this higher purpose as well?
No.
What he's saying is, you may come to the event wanting to learn how to manifest.
And once you've learned how to manifest, because I will teach you how to be a powerful manifester, you will get the sports car and then you'll, then you'll be bored.
Then you'll say, I want to be of service to the world.
I want to help people.
I want to heal people just for its own sake, because there's no better feeling than that.
We bring children in at the end of the event and we heal them of really serious health conditions.
And we have really profound and prestigious universities in the United States saying, what in the heck are you guys doing?
We want to come and study this because it's so phenomenological.
Citation, please.
Now you're being a part of something great.
So yeah, it may be the sports car, it may be the new relationship, it may be healing your body, but then when that happens, now what?
What are you going to do now?
What are you going to do when you have everything?
This is a great question for Aubrey Marcus, actually.
What are you going to do when you have everything?
The next thing is, how am I going to make a difference?
We're wired to care for one another, to be kind to one another, to heal one another, to shine for one another, to show other people they can shine.
That's what the living organism does when they're not in fear, when they're not in aggression and hatred and prejudice and all those things that create division.
Yeah, so here's the level above the ho-hum realization that you can be at cause in manifesting a new Ferrari and a massive bank account via becoming an interdimensional quantum Jedi meditator.
Now we go to this next level, which sounds very inspiring, right?
Wanting to be of service to people, wanting to connect, wanting to serve something, you know, greater than your ego greed for things.
But this is where I start to get angry.
We bring children up at the end of the event and we heal them from really serious illnesses and we have all of these prestigious universities which shall remain nameless and which will not have links in the fucking show notes that are saying, what the hell are you doing here?
I mean, this is...
And then in addition to that, he's kind of pitching, and I mentioned this is right after the George Floyd protests, he's kind of pitching this mystical experience as the cure for racism, right?
They're not in aggression and hatred and prejudice and all those things that create division.
So when that person runs into that experience of the divine, and their brain goes into an aroused state of gamma, they're getting a biological upgrade.
I can guarantee you that some health condition Will be eliminated because they just ran into wholeness, and their body will become more whole.
So, they could do all the diets, all the chemotherapy, all the nutrition, everything, and they're handling that health condition matter-to-matter.
And when you change that, anything in your life matter-to-matter, there's a long space between cause and effect, between thought and experience.
Sometimes so long you forget what your dream was.
But when you run into it, And you produce an immediate effect.
Now you're doing it in no time.
It's happening in the moment.
And if you can capture that, and you see the brain go into these elevated states of coherent gamma patterns, 200, 300, 400, 500 standard deviations outside of normal.
That person can't make their brain do that.
That's a subjective experience that we're capturing objectively.
And we say to that person, what was that?
And it's inevitable.
They don't have the words.
To describe what a mango tastes like.
They don't have the words to describe what the divine is.
You gotta just experience it.
So then... That person that stands on the stage...
That has Parkinson's disease, or had Parkinson's disease, that's a 76-year-old female that couldn't blow her nose, couldn't swallow, couldn't chew her food, couldn't stand up.
One moment, running into the Divine, and next thing you know, she's on the stage telling her story.
And she's not young, and she's not buffed, and she doesn't look like a vegan, and she's not dressed like everybody that cares about that.
She's just, you would walk right past her.
But when she's talking, and I'm looking out in the audience, I'm looking at 1,500 people leaning in.
Nobody has got their eyes off of her because she's the example of truth.
Uh-huh.
So I want to just connect the dots here because the way he does this, he weaves it all together so smoothly that it's easy to miss the kind of pinballing that he does in this charlatanical kind of shtick.
So first, we're moving beyond division via running into the divine.
Then, this is a biological upgrade, and Joe says, I can guarantee that some health condition will be eliminated because they just ran into the divine.
Also, is there some technique involved where you make an outrageous statement like, you ran into the divine, and you assume that everybody from that point on is just going to take that as read?
Like, what does that actually mean when you run into the divine?
I mean as a placeholder statement you could, I mean there's any one of a number of phrases you could use for that, but there's something strange there.
Is it like an LP technique where, is that anchoring?
Where you drop a phrase into a conversation that then becomes a point of kind of an article of faith later on?
I think so, and he keeps looping back to it, and he describes it as like, and then he links it to like, again, we're measuring the brain state, right, and the gamma waves are going, you know, to this incredibly high level, and so then it's an experience that you don't know how to put into words, and that's running into the divine, and therefore, now that we've created this anchor point of running into the divine as some kind of very special experience, we can then link it to these other claims that really, you know, are completely unsupported by evidence.
I can guarantee that some health condition will be eliminated.
He then says that this is more effective than nutrition or chemotherapy.
If you missed that, go back.
He says that.
And it's because those things are on a slow time scale of matter to matter.
And this is the immediate in the moment kind of quantum healing phenomenon.
It's faith healing though.
He's saying he's saying he's yeah, right.
Oh, absolutely.
This is Big Ten Faith Healing.
It's just dressed up in pseudoscience language for the modern day.
He claims you can capture evidence for this outrageous and irresponsible claim via reading the gamma waves of the brain state.
And I'm telling you, you can read those brain waves, Joe, but it doesn't prove any of the things that you're saying.
And all of that then leads, right?
The brain waves are there.
Great.
This leads to the 76-year-old woman who had Parkinson's And via one moment of running into the divine has been completely cured and she stands on the stage to testify and everyone knows that it's the truth.
Yeah, and with all of those altar call scenes throughout this culture, there is never any, nobody's ever on record, first of all.
Nobody has ever followed up with.
There's no sort of review or six-month checkup.
I just want to put that out there.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And if there is, he's certainly not telling you where you can go find out about it, right?
So, yeah.
And, you know, he's giving this kind of neuroscience research a bad name.
Of course, it's cutting-edge technology, but this faith healer performance has been around for a very long time.
And you're dressing it up in the clothing of quantum woo, which is also not that new.
That goes back to the 80s and 90s.
People like Gary Zukav, who wrote the Dancing Woolly Masters, and Fritjof Koppers' book Tao of Physics, and then What the Bleep and The Secret.
They've all done the same sort of routine.
He's just doing it in a specific way.
But, you know, Joe, I have to hand it to you.
You've figured out how to manifest massive abundance with this particular Waves and particles.
Rippling bills and sparkly coins.
But sadly you're exploiting sick and desperate people along the way.
Here's a clip that exemplifies where the woo goes.
When you pass through the eye of the needle into the quantum and you enter that realm of time-space, it's a different world.
There's an infinite amount of time.
Time is eternal.
There's an infinite amount.
Now think about this.
How much could we get done if we had an infinite amount of time?
We could get anything done we wanted, but we might not want to do anything at all.
Exactly, but if you had all the time in the world, there's infinite possibilities.
That's the quantum.
Deep.
And in the realm of time-space, there's no past, there is no future.
It's all happening now.
And so there's no past lives or future lives.
They're stacked on top of each other.
And as we move through time, as we time travel, we experience dimensions or spaces.
And we have all the latent systems in the brain once activated to open the door to that dimension.
And it only takes one experience of entering that place.
Okay, so there you see how far out he gets in terms of this science fiction, mystical kind of fantasy.
Let's come back down to earth, kind of, because now we're going to be in his evocative description of the faith healing big stage, and Aubrey Marcus asks about the importance of community.
How important is community in this really revolution of ideas that's going on right now?
Let's go back to the person who breaks through and stands on the stage that had metastatic carcinoma from breast cancer.
This cancer spread throughout her entire body.
All she wanted to do was be able to pray again.
Her father dragged her to the event.
And all she wanted to do was be able to get on her knees and pray.
She's a young girl.
Couldn't bend over, couldn't walk.
She was in so much pain because the cancer was spread through all of her spine.
One moment, one moment she was on the stage Couldn't feel any pain in her body.
Sobbing in tears.
I sent her for a PET scan.
Not an ounce of cancer in her bones.
Where did it go?
I mean, what happened there?
You see that person on the stage and our community gets closer.
You get people opening their heart.
Love bonds.
You can't not bond in love.
You have to hug.
You have to connect.
You have to bond.
Whether you're a man hugging a man, a woman hugging a woman, a man hugging a woman, something happens where we are connecting.
And so when you see that person, the first one, stand on the stage and tell that story, just like an infection can spread amongst the community and create disease, all of a sudden health and wellness are as infectious as disease.
And I just say to my staff, get out of the way.
Four people with Reynard's Syndrome in one event, all healed.
Two people with Parkinson's.
Psychiatrist and another lady.
Another lady allergic to everything in her life.
She came with a ventilator and a mask.
In the middle of the event, she's in front of the room dancing around, no mask, no nothing.
When you start seeing people freeing themselves from their own limitations, the energy in the room, it's not just the energy in the room.
It's the coherence in the room.
Because if your heart is coherent, and I'm sitting right next to you, and my field is coherent, and I'm interfering with your field, and those two fields come together, the union of those two fields, the interference, is going to create a higher wave.
Higher wave, higher energy.
Now there's energy in the room for healing.
Now there's energy in the room for the mystical.
And the interference starts creating doors.
Interference patterns of fractal geometry that are doors to dimensions.
Interference patterns of fractal geometry that are doorways to dimensions.
Yeah, those are words.
All of a sudden, health and wellness are as infectious as disease.
Just back up.
Get out of the way.
Just get out of the way for a moment here, Matthew, because I'm going to go off.
Here's the thing, Joe.
Just like the wheelchair-bound person rising up to walk across the stage in the charismatic Christian revival isn't so much proof of the Holy Spirit healing those who give their hearts to Jesus, but rather proof that a well-orchestrated group hysteria can temporarily convince people that they're healed via the massive flooding of neurochemistry, So too, your low percentage testimonials drawn from the many thousands of people who flock to these events don't really prove your New Age quantum mysticism claims.
Yes, there's a powerful experience happening.
There certainly is!
There is!
But the leaps over correlation and causation, spontaneous remission, and whatever other factors may be present to then claim that you have scientific evidence, this is not only fallacious and not really science, It's as unethical as anything we've seen from the litany of terrible televangelists who run the same shtick but with more conventional religious language.
Had to get that off my chest.
Yeah, but I, you know, I have to say here too, I always do this.
If you hear the catch in his throat and believe it on this next clip, maybe he's really caught up in all of this too.
You can hear the emotion in his voice as he recounts yet another remarkable, and I underline this word, anecdote.
You see a man show up in a wheelchair from a stroke, completely disabled.
His daughter wheeled him around that whole event.
And he had a profound moment the very last day.
And he went back, she wheeled him into the house, he could walk.
He got up in the morning, he showered for the first time in 10 years, got dressed, walked.
His wife was having breakfast.
He walked down to the store, to the restaurant, and asked if he could sit down and have breakfast.
She went absolutely crazy.
I don't know.
That's better than a sports car.
That feeling to me is worth all the gold in the world.
So we have people now that I have witnessed so many profound healings where people are healing other people because they know how to administer coherence and change the field of the person laying before them.
They understand the science, the quantum physics.
They understand what they're doing and why they're doing it.
And then all of a sudden they're healing all these people in our events.
Tumors disappearing, people stepping out of wheelchairs, crazy blind people seeing, deaf people hearing, crazy stuff.
This is biblical proportions stuff.
Oh there it is.
Now they're doing it non-locally because they can't be together, but they understand in the quantum there's no separation.
They can do it without being there.
So speaking of people doing things without being there, Julian has evaporated into the quantum ether of technical difficulties.
So I'm just going to close with the following remarks.
For me, the big takeaway is, or at least one of them.
And I kind of wish Julian was here because he could probably summarize the science and pseudoscience narratives very succinctly.
But for me, Dispenza is a great bridge between the 1980s cult world and the parasocial clusterfuck of influencers that we have today.
He's not quite a boomer, but he's as an older Gen X boy who's a good boy who got along with mom and dad and didn't drop out or do drugs that we know of.
somebody who wears nice tailored shirts and doesn't go in for the channeling.
It's just down home, straight up quantum sermons and faith healing.
And one thing that's worth noting is that Placebo Joe has been able to build a powerful online network by taking the basic woo of Jay-Z Knight and domesticating it for social media consumption. - Yeah.
He doesn't have to channel, actually.
Even in the laying on of hands in these public events, he's not really doing any trance induction that I've seen.
He can play it straight.
And unlike Boomer cult leaders, he also doesn't have the brick-and-mortar overhead, like the liability of an 80-acre ranch in Yelm, Washington that needs constant upkeep and an inflow of pilgrims shedding cash.
So the online operation can become very efficient.
Now, one prediction I'm going to hazard about the development of cult theory is that we're going to start to understand that the classic modes of material control—behavioral, financial, and relational forms of coercion—are all, in part, necessitated by the brick-and-mortar assets that are associated with traditional cultic
So, Shivananda Yoga, for example, that I've written about fairly extensively, has huge capital assets all over the world that an abuse crisis and then a pandemic pushed right to the brink of insolvency.
Now, that's the material price of empire.
And I believe that those material pressures actually predict the strength of material coercion.
Cults that have mortgages simply have to force more people to work for free for longer.
But then when that whole business model moves online, a lot of liabilities drop away.
Like you can't control who your followers are having sex with if they're coming to satsang online so much as when they were slept in dormitories.
And you don't need to because you're not maintaining the dormitories. - Yeah.
The cultic need to control followers can begin to merge seamlessly with the rest of influencer culture.
Cult leaders now must attract and control attention and drive up subscription levels.
That's the whole game now.
And Teal Swan can do it by pretending to channel, and Joe Dispenza can do it by pretending to be a doctor.
Max Weber, the founder of modern sociology, said that a primary organizational challenge for a group that orbits around charismatic leadership is succession.
So, whether he was murdered by the state or not, Jesus was always going to die at some point.
And then there's a continuity question, which is, what happens to all of that juice?
How will that inspiration be continued?
Weber's answer was the process that he called routinization, in which inspiration is systematized and codified into a series of rituals that can be sustained through time and throughout a less and less centralized network.
So, Dispenza did not inherit JZ Knight's church to run it, and it looks like they might hate each other's guts now, but in terms of the continuity of content and ideology, we can see that Dispenza has routinized the magic of Ramtha.
He's made it normal, everyday, institutional, regulated by subscriptions and affiliate links, instead of prophecies and initiations.
Joe Dispenza and Gaia are now just part of your online Facebook experience.
And in one way, this is extractive capitalism at its best.
You take the most monetizable aspects of any given content and just strip away everything that's inconvenient.
And in the transition from brick and mortar to something like Quantum University, that means getting rid of Jay-Z Knight's drunken auntie shtick, and Likewise, in the absorption of Yoga International into Gaia TV, you strip out the editorial and leadership liabilities and expenses that would hold you to reasonable standards, because what makes money is David Icke Lizard Yoga.
So, what are we going to do with all of these influencers, all of this content, all of these platforms, all of this bullshit?
We often are asked on this podcast, like, well, so what's your idea?
What's your solution?
So I've come up with a modest proposal.
Let's say that Bill Gates really wanted to suppress alternative medicine and push his all-vax-all-the-time agenda.
The best thing he could do would be to pour billions into something that looked like quantum university, only better.
He could buy a whole town in Costa Rica or Ecuador and build a full campus with broadcast centers and isolation tanks and juice bars by the infinity pools.
And then he could recruit all of our top conspirituality grifters there and give them each a villa and 24 access to the tech and all the green smoothies they could drink.
But here's the thing.
The whole campus is like the Truman Show.
All of the staff are actors.
The streaming studios only appear to be broadcasting, but really, as they're doing their sermons and workshops, no one is seeing them because Gates has set up a parallel zombie Facebook populated by 100% new age bots that just feed their narcissistic supply with a barrage of juicy, fawning comments.
And Gates also sets up a parallel news generator that plucks keywords from their sermons and generates fake geopolitical or public health news stories that they can then sermonize about.
So, nice feedback loop.
And for a while, the influencers will feel like they're in heaven and they won't be harming anybody.
But then, Gates could take it next level.
He could earn his investment back by going squid games on all of these guys, by introducing points of conflict, jealousies over social engagement, cage brawls between angel channelers and alien channelers.
And that's where the real livestream goes out.
And the workers of the world subscribe to watch them competitively water fast to the bitter, sacred end.
Or start poisoning each other with their cleansing wastes.
Or gnawing on raw beef.
And then Gates can take the cash and fund universal healthcare globally.
