Aubrey Marcus really wants to not be a cult leader. He really wants Fit For Service to not be labeled a cult. He’s come out and said so, in a bold but vague response to criticism of his content from our podcast. Matthew takes him at his word, and puts on his cult research hat to give some pointers on how Aubrey can avoid abusing his power. Key bits of advice include: rejecting high intensity recruitment techniques, not depicting the world outside Fit For Service as “upside down” or insane, and not platforming alleged child molesters like Marc Gafni.While this open letter is addressed to Aubrey, his Fit For Service clients might also find it useful as they decide whether to keep spending up to 20K USD per year participating in the program. Also, if Aubrey feels that this episode contains information that will help current and future participants assess whether he is really making good on his promise to provide “radical self-sovereignty,” we at Conspirituality Podcast would happily give permission for this episode to be included with Fit For Service materials, pro bono.This letter is also open in a broader sense, because it contains solid tips for all earnest charismatic influencers who want to improve their ethics game. We believe you can do it, influencers! You can dig deep, and live your better life, by fucking over fewer people!Show NotesA Holocaust Denier Is Travelling Across Canada Building Up The Country's Newest Far-Right Militia Movement - Canadian Anti-Hate Network 'I Was 13 When Marc Gafni's Abuse Began' – The Forward Former Rabbi Accused of Improper Sexual Conduct Now Rising Star in U.S. Spiritual Movement Gafni Faces Fallout From New Age Community Marc Gafni Named In Latest Sexual Abuse Lawsuit Against Yeshiva University Popular New Age author Marc Gafni molested 13-year-old girl in 1980, lawsuit says Sara Kabakov lawsuit docket“Jane Doe” lawsuit
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Episode 107, Open Letter to Aubrey Marcus.
How not to become a cult leader.
Aubrey Marcus really wants to not be a cult leader.
He really wants fit for service to not be labeled a cult.
He's come out and said so in a bold but vague response to criticism of his content from our podcast.
Now, today I'm going to take him at his word and I'm going to put on my cult research hat to give some pointers on how Aubrey can avoid abusing his power.
Key bits of advice include rejecting high-intensity recruitment techniques, not depicting the world outside of fit-for-service as upside-down or insane, and not platforming alleged child rapists like Mark Gaffney.
While this open letter is addressed to Aubrey, his fit-for-service clients might also find it useful as they decide whether to keep spending up to $20,000 per year participating in the program.
Also, if Aubrey feels that this episode contains information that will help current and future participants assess whether he is really making good on his promise to provide, quote, radical self-sovereignty, unquote, We at the podcast would happily give permission for this episode to be included with fit-for-service materials pro bono.
This letter is also open in a broader sense because it contains solid tips for all earnest charismatic influencers who want to improve their ethics game.
We believe you can do it, influencers.
You can dig deep and live your better life by fucking over fewer people.
So I'll kick off with a little context.
A few weeks ago, we were handed an amazing opportunity by Aubrey Marcus.
Now, regular listeners will recognize the name as that of Austin-based multi-millionaire founder of Onnit and director of the Fit for Service coaching school.
We've studied his content in numerous episodes here on the podcast.
The first thing to say is that it's unclear whether he was a true conspirituality believer.
He plays around a lot with the bipolar theme of the world is collapsing and so now is the time for spiritual transformation.
And on that transformation front, in personal terms, he speaks of big spiritual experiences following a road accident and he journeys with ayahuasca on the regular.
But with regard to Collapse, to be honest, there's a lack of urgency.
It never really feels like he has much skin in the game.
He doesn't burst into tears like Jordan Peterson when talking about the collapse of meaning in civilization.
He doesn't sink as deep into the revelatory trance that Zach Bush uses to channel the alternative medicine doctor, also known as Jesus.
You weren't going to see Aubrey Marcus alongside Mickey Willis playing spiritual tourist at the January 6th insurrection, transfixing his phone's selfie camera with the blue steel gaze.
And you're unlikely to see Aubrey test the terms of service of the social media platforms he uses so well.
This is a guy who talks about being fully committed to, quote, radical self-sovereignty, unquote, we have to sort out what that means, but who also seems to take only conservative risks.
And he never takes them first.
He's less a content creator than a content DJ.
At times, it appears that Marcus wants to be a mystic or a preacher, like when he publishes his spoken word poetry or cosplays as a shaman in fake haka rituals.
You can hear more about that in episode 87.
And he loves holding court.
But so do a lot of alpha males.
Marcus's real strength seems to be money and marketing.
He comes from an oil investment family and he's made the most out of that freedom as a kind of carpetbagger in the new age alternative medicine bro science world and now increasingly the nouveau men's movement space where there's a lot of discussion of warrior poets which might give some of them a leg up on some more normie crossfit bros.
And because Marcus's medium is mainly media, we at the podcast have dubbed him the Joe Rogan of conspirituality.
He's a savvy pitchman who seems to hover above it all, floating on a cloud of money made by just asking questions of a very narrow slice of contrarian meaning makers.
Accordingly, as with Joe Rogan, our criticism hasn't been about his beliefs, and it's not about not liking his vibe.
It's about recognizing that when somebody with a lot of money platforms Kelly Brogan, Zach Bush, Brett Weinstein, Heather Haying, and Charles Eisenstein during a pandemic, they will raise the needle on vaccine hesitancy, depress public health communications, spread the message that COVID was never that serious and that mitigation measures were intrusive and pointless, rather than values that protect the vulnerable.
All of this is blood on hands territory, given that over 1 million people have died of the virus in the U.S.
alone.
Now, I mentioned at the top that Marcus handed us an opportunity, which is that he responded to some of this criticism.
Sort of.
After my colleague Derek published an article about Marcus's new fit-for-service business venture, which is a music festival coming up this July in Wyoming called Arcadia, Marcus sent out a newsletter in the key of, well, if the wrong people are criticizing you, you're on the right track.
Marcus's newsletter focused on a touchy theme, that haters were calling his business a cult, and implying that he is a cult leader.
Now, none of us have ever said that Fit for Service is a cult, or that Marcus is a cult leader, because we just don't know, and it would be libelous if untrue.
We're just not there, and early attempts in investigation have indicated that many former employees have signed NDAs, and so it's going to be hard to find out.
Now to clarify, these are non-disparagement agreements, not non-disclosure, so it's not about proprietary secrets, but about feelings and impressions people might have.
All of which is to say, our comments have been in the cultural criticism category rather than the investigative genre.
That said, in the essay I previously published about Marcus, I did reflect on how his content reminded me of certain cultic dynamics.
I said that his penchant for recycling content from other influencers reminded me of how, historically, cult leaders never come up with anything new.
And I also mentioned that he has a skill for surrounding himself with attractive women followers who seem to do the work of reflecting his desirability back to him in public.
And this is very characteristic of some of the cult leaders I've reported on.
In a similar vein, in his article, Derek noted that it was weird for Arcadia to require an application alongside the $1,111 US price to attend a music festival.
The application asked all kinds of questions that are really more appropriate for therapy.
Here are the questions.
Fit for Service aims to provide not just tools for growth, but transformation.
These activities can be challenging, intentionally placing you in a position to face fears, core stories, and other unconscious reactions within the safety of the container.
It is important that all participants both be willing to face the challenge and also feel safe enough in their own know to take necessary time to decompress and process.
Describe a time when you pushed yourself out of your comfort zone and how you managed the emotional experience of that.
Paul Cech describes happiness not as a mood, but as having a vision of our life, a purpose, that is so great it makes our challenges bearable because they become part of the waking dream of our life.
Imagine the biggest, most powerful version of yourself in your life.
Tell us, in five sentences or less, what the waking dream of your life looks like and feels like.
With that in mind, what is your intention for joining Fit for Service and what do you hope to gain from this experience as a whole?
Provide one example of how you have committed to the betterment of yourself and how that has positively impacted the world around you.
Each member of our experiences contributes a unique being that is irreplaceable, and in community, we must always honor the experiences of others.
Describe a time when your needs did not align with that of a group experience, and what solution you arrived at so that both the self and the group found a harmonious resolution.
Just a footnote here on Paul Cech.
We did an episode on him.
It was number 68.
We called him the Jordan Peterson of fitness bros.
It was with Antonio Valadares.
Cech is the guy who makes guys like JP Sears feel like they're on a spiritual path.
Now Derek's point is Ticketmaster isn't asking questions like these before the checkout page, so what's up?
What's up is that participants in this music festival are being selected for and funneled into Marcus' coaching business.
The most provocative thing that Derek writes about this is, These questions read eerily close to those used by organizations like the MLM cult Nexium, whose ringleader, Keith Raniere, reportedly leveraged collateral from prospective members to keep them tethered and quiet.
This technique isn't unique to Raniere, it's a classic blueprint for inviting and then confining members inside of an inner circle.
It's a fair observation, I think, if a little harsh.
And apparently it left a mark, because shortly after, Marcus sent out this very defensive newsletter.
So I'm going to start my open letter to Marcus here.
I'll read from the newsletter and comment on it step by step.
Some of it might get technical or feel pedantic, but I hope all in all that it's helpful.
Hey, Aubrey.
It was cool to get your newsletter.
And it sounds like you really want to not be a cult leader.
That you really want Fit for Service to not be labeled a cult.
You've come out and said so.
You even answer the question, is this a cult?
In your frequently asked questions, writing, fit for service is an anti-cult.
The word cult comes from the Latin cultus, which means to worship.
But in our colloquial language, a cult is always something negative that usually amounts to the subjugation of individual sovereignty.
Historically, cults end up enforcing conformity to the dogmatic dictates of central figures who take advantage of the power granted them.
This is literally the opposite of fit-for-service.
Fit-for-service is an anti-cult.
So, I'm going to take you at your word and, as a cult researcher, offer some pointers on how you can avoid abusing your considerable power.
And while this open letter is addressed to you, I believe it contains solid tips for all earnest influencers who want to improve their ethics game.
So, reading from your newsletter, you write, In the upside-down world, you get accused of the opposite of what you stand for.
This is the case with Fit for Service.
If there is a single ethos that Fit for Service stands for, it is the cultivation of radical self-sovereignty of mind, body, and spirit.
It is literally the antithesis of a cult.
For the last four years, our programs have been dedicated to helping thousands by offering the tools, support, and community to live their own sacred name story.
And so the accusation, following the law of the upside-down world, is that Fit for Service is a cult.
The irony, of course, is that these criticisms are coming from the folks who are brainwashed in the cult of the mainstream narrative.
Okay, so we already have a lot to work with there, and we can start with In the Upside Down World, which is how you open.
If you don't want to be a cult leader, you really don't want to depict everything beyond your circle as being insane.
Because what cult leaders often do is what Alexandra Stein calls creating a false safe haven.
By the way, I'll post all the resources in the show notes because I'm sure you'll want to dig into them.
This depends not only on promising members that the group is safe or liberatory, but by claiming that the rest of the world is dangerous or crazy.
In both of the cults I was in, the leader divided the world into those who were asleep and those who were awake.
And the fact that there was no bridge or possible communication between these two meant that the member had to cross a threshold into identification with the group and the group alone.
Now, I'm sure this wasn't your intention when you commissioned that animation for the Charles Eisenstein story, the one where he helps you imagine that your group is a band of shaman aliens who have come down to save planet Earth.
The story was called A Gathering of the Tribe and it really hammered home the point that the chosen few are so different from the rest of humanity that they don't even come from this cursed planet.
Now, it was a cool cartoon, but I gotta say that that type of polarization is red meat for cult leaders because it gradually teaches people to identify with a group that they cannot imagine leaving.
Okay, so the next point is a little bit technical.
Your first sentence employs a standard cultic grammar that you might want to be aware of.
It says, in the upside-down world, you get accused of the opposite of what you stand for.
But who's the you in this sentence?
Well, it's you, Aubrey.
You're talking about yourself.
But when a writer uses you in a context like this, it immediately presumes a merging identification with the reader.
And before the reader knows it, they're being absorbed into the writer's experience and view on the world and whatever claims they're going to make about it.
I've called this grammar second-person omniscient intrusive because it presumes to know who the reader is and what they need.
So, how can this be avoided, you might ask?
One can use the third person address of one or the subjunctive mood, which would make the claim hypothetical.
And that could sound like, if the world feels upside down, one may at times feel accused of the opposite of what one stands for.
Now, that doesn't slap so hard, does it?
Because if you strike that second-person address, it just knocks the intensity down a few notches.
But the payoff is that it also leaves the reader space to consider, to ponder, and to challenge the claim.
And it seems that that is something you would value if the product is self-sovereignty.
Good marketing language does not usually offer good care.
And that brings me to your next point.
You write, If there is a single ethos that Fit for Service stands for, it is the cultivation of radical self-sovereignty of mind, body, and spirit.
It's literally the antithesis of a cult.
So this sounds good, but it's incorrect, because the antithesis of a cult is not defined by ideology, but by the group behavior.
And the ideology you name here, radical self-sovereignty, is just content.
A cult can organize itself around any kind of content whatsoever, up to and including the content that claims it is not a cult.
Now, just to underline the point, here's a brief tour through the diversity of ideologies that cults can form around and disguise themselves with.
Lyndon LaRouche ran a political cult to help him run for president multiple times on a platform of conspiracy theories.
John Jalalich and Alexandra Stein, they're both researchers now, they each belonged to leftist political cults that controlled members every movement and dollar.
Marshall Applewhite and his partner formed their cult around the belief in a UFO rescue ship.
And the leader of the first cult I was in, Michael Roach, used the medieval teachings of Tibetan Buddhism.
So did Chogyam Trungpa, the founder of Shambhala Buddhism.
And the leader of the second cult I was in, Charles Anderson, used A Course in Miracles.
Teal Swan's in the news because of the Deep End documentary.
She uses the ideas of channeling, satanic ritual abuse, and extraterrestrial prophecy to communicate something very close to the same message as Charles Eisenstein presents in Gathering of the Tribe.
The late Amy Carlson of Love Has Won said that she was God.
That was the content.
And then John Roger, the founder of Santa Monica University, used transpersonal psychology and psychotherapy as his content.
I could go on.
But the point is that all of these content packets have something in common.
They all make big salvation promises.
They all present the outside world as insane.
The frameworks may be different, liberatory politics, psychotherapy, spirituality, but the theme is copypasta, that this content will give you everything that you need.
So if you say Fit for Service preaches radical self-sovereignty, that tells me about a big promise that you're making in the coaching landscape, but it tells me nothing about what really matters, which is how you treat people as a leader, how power in the group is organized, who gets to do what with whom, who gets insider status, who gets paid, who gets isolated or kicked out, what it costs to criticize, rebel, or leave.
I could even go farther than that, actually, and say that radical self-sovereignty as a content packet could operate as a very efficient cover for a high-demand group.
Because a person with enough charisma could, ironically, easily use the concept of radical self-sovereignty to dominate and control other people.
While promising to make each person their own boss.
Now, I'm sure you're not doing that, so you might want to clarify your messaging there.
The next thing you say is that, for the last four years, our programs have been dedicated to helping thousands by offering the tools, support, and community to live their own sacred name story.
Now, on one hand, this sounds like marketing boilerplate, except for some jargon, which I'll get to, but from a cult awareness point of view, there's a red flag here you might want to stop waving.
Every clinical definition of cults begins with highlighting the problem of deception.
In its advertising, image-making, founder's origin story, finances, lieutenant structure, the cult is always a deceptive organization.
It's always saying one thing and doing another.
And this is at the heart of recruiting, because no one would join otherwise.
It's why the Scientologists don't lay out the whole story of Zunu during the first several years of auditing.
Turning back to your statement then, using phrases like, dedicated to helping thousands by offering, unquote, and so on, makes it sound like you're running a soup kitchen.
There are online reports from participants that Fit for Service can cost up to $20,000 per year.
In the Arcadia application, it mentions that fit-for-service programs range from $777 to $5,555 U.S.
dollars.
Seems like the numbers are hinting at numerology here.
And in the Frequently Asked Questions, you make it abundantly clear that you offer no sliding scale work exchange or scholarships.
So actually, the appropriate term is selling, and it's best to be absolutely truthful about it.
It's not offering.
Now there's another small, but I think crucial bit of fudging related to the application.
The first question mentions challenging activities that will bring up unconscious responses within the safety of the container.
So you're making a claim about safety in a therapeutic sense, but then in the frequently asked questions sheet attached to the application, you list the question, are you mental health professionals?
And the answer is, No.
We offer coaching and a trauma-informed community container.
We do not provide professional mental health services and our applications screen to ensure that we remain within scope.
We welcome a broad range of individuals, but we are not, nor do we claim to be, a substitute for professional resources.
So, you get some points for the honesty about not being mental health professionals, although that would be foolish to try to fake.
However, the application implies safety, but then the disclaimer basically says that participants are on their own.
But even within the disclaimer, you seem to make a quasi-promise of offering, quote, a trauma-informed community container, unquote.
Searching your various sites for the phrase trauma-informed brings up nothing that indicates how you or any of your employees have been trained for that.
And one thing you should know is that the very idea of trauma-informed is being bled dry of all meaning by people throwing it around in marketing copy with nothing to back it up.
Searching your various sites for the terms scope or scope of practice also turns up nothing that would tell anyone, at least on the outside or in front of the paywall, what you believe the boundaries of fit-for-service are.
So it's all very confusing.
The more straightforward presentation of your products and services, and this would be true of many coaching and personal development programs, would be something like this.
We do a bunch of confrontational and defamiliarizing activities that can bring up a lot of anxiety or even reopen old wounds.
We want this to be a net positive experience, but without formal education or training, we really don't know how it's going to turn out for you, and we won't be able to take care of you if you have some kind of breakdown.
Results may vary.
It's an experiential gamble, but we think it's worth it for you.
Now on one hand, phrasing like that makes the whole thing sound dodgy.
But the thing about honesty is that it can also make a brand sound kind of badass and edgy.
I mean, what if Fit for Service really was like Johnny Knoxville Jackass School of Group Therapy?
Like, why not?
Why not do that?
Would not enough women come?
Okay, so you're selling things.
What things?
Things that give access to what you call a sacred name story.
So I also searched this.
I googled your name and sacred name story and came up with nothing on your various sites.
And so the phrase might be proprietary IP you only let out of the box at high-end retreats, or it might be something that you've thought up just recently and are beta testing.
But what it sounds like is jargon.
And one thing I can tell you for sure is that cults run on jargon.
The more mysterious sounding, the better.
And the analyst who did the most famous work on this was Robert J. Lifton, who identified why jargon is essential to cults.
It provides, he argued, the thought-terminating cliché.
Now, the thought-terminating cliché is something that sounds very impressive, but it's actually incomprehensible.
It stops conversation with the affect of certainty and closure.
Writing in a book called Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, a study of brainwashing in China, this is back in 1961, Lipton wrote the following.
The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché.
The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed.
Totalist language, then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull.
Now, that deadly dull part is funny, and maybe it's an artifact of Lifton's ennui at plowing through all the bullshit he analyzed.
I mean, he's right that cultic jargon is dull, but only after it's lost its magic glow.
It has to spark something in the recruit, after all.
Like, I have to hear the phrase, sacred name story, and feel something click inside me, whether that's a good click or not.
Another way of describing what you're doing here, unintentionally of course, is that you are creating what some postmodern theorists call a transcendental signifier.
And this would be any term or phrase that has high emotional impact but low definitional value.
And this is why Lifton uses the phrase definitive sounding.
The low definitional value creates a paradox, because the term or phrase can actually mean anything, but it delivers such an emotional punch that listeners and readers absorb the impression that everyone knows what the meaning is.
In other words, the transcendental signifier is a secret, but that secret is about nothing.
It's extremely important for all cults and cult leaders to conceal the fact that they have nothing to offer.
No practical skills, no accepted credentials, no clear opportunities for personal advancement in the group.
The Emperor never has clothes, so he always must cover his ass.
And I'd say that one reason cultic dynamics are in a surge state right now is that social media provides heretofore unknown levels of ass coverage for emperors.
It's amazing what people can disguise behind imagery.
It's also essential that cults use mirage-like aspirational terms to cover over the fact that they are exploiting members for money, sex, or labor.
So, my advice would be that if you're going to use a phrase that sounds like cultic jargon, sacred name story, or radical self-sovereignty, that you provide concrete definitions so that those secrets can be evaluated by the people you're selling them to.
You can footnote the terms even, and then in those footnotes, link to the relevant literature.
Because surely, you're not just making this stuff up, right?
So, I don't know what sacred name story means, but if it involves a group or a group leader renaming new members, that is super culty.
And if the naming happens through a special ritual or high-intensity event, it's mega culty.
It's a classic technique for diminishing or even erasing the history and relationships of the person beyond the group.
It creates a sense of life-defining identification with the group and sometimes an infantile relationship to the leader for who but parents bestow names.
So, I'm sure you're not doing that.
Now, let's get back to the newsletter.
You write.
You might be familiar with your own version of attack from the cult of Backwardation.
If you believe in the freedom to make your own health decisions, you have been called a terrorist.
If you desire to maintain a strong body, you are demonstrating toxic masculinity.
If you believe in individual liberty, you are a fascist.
Alright, so cult of backwardation.
I mean, very creative, but I'll just flag that as jargon you'll want to define with a footnote for the sake of transparency.
But with this pattern, we move into some very black and white thinking, also characteristic of cults, which have to maintain super rigid boundaries between insiders and outsiders.
And sometimes, this takes the form of an exaggerated sense of persecution.
Now, you've got three claims here that seem exaggerated.
You write, If you believe in the freedom to make your own health decisions, you've been called a terrorist.
If you desire to maintain a strong body, you are demonstrating toxic masculinity.
If you believe in individual liberty, you are a fascist.
Now, speaking as someone who's reviewed and criticized your content, but also has been following the scene really closely for over two years now, I think I can address these three claims not about what has happened to you personally or been said to you personally because I don't know, I wasn't there, but you're saying here that this has happened in general to people who share your COVID-minimizing views because, after all, you're using that second-person omniscient intrusive address.
Now I might have missed it, but I can't recall anyone, even on Facebook, calling anti-vaxxers, for instance, terrorists.
That word was applied to January 6th insurrectionists, and sometimes histrionically to anti-mask activists who would raid public spaces and make a joke out of coughing on people.
You write, if you desire to maintain a strong body, you are demonstrating toxic masculinity.
Okay, so nobody who understands what toxic masculinity means would argue that it's about wanting to be ripped.
Jordan Peterson is the modern prophet of toxic masculinity and he's a string bean.
Expressing toxic masculinity is about holding a range of conservative and heteronormative beliefs about how men should be in the world Especially in relation to women and the environment, how they should prove their worthiness through individualistic exploits of domination.
It can be homophobic and transphobic when it relies on the hierarchy of gender norms to consolidate social power.
It can hide vulnerability through habits of emotional repression that are taught intergenerationally, such as boys don't cry and boys will be boys as a response to bullying.
But this one is tricky these days because we have good examples of how toxic masculinity can also be emotionally incontinent.
Jordan Peterson, for instance, can't seem to last 10 minutes on a podcast these days without bursting into tears, and this provides a lot of psychosocial cover for his foundational aggression.
It encourages his followers to believe that he feels all of his reactionary views deeply and sincerely, that his concerns over whether cultural Marxists will force him to reconsider his pronoun usage Or whether Sports Illustrated will force him to have a boner over a body type that he doesn't approve of.
These things are causing him deep pain and he is mourning the fate of civilization.
It's very maudlin.
The way to tell whether emotional displays from charismatic men indicate actual vulnerability is, I think, whether or not they attract more attention and care, whether they center the man and his experiences even more.
And all that said, to the extent that toxic masculinity is grounded in unexamined aggression and shame, it can certainly show up in the fitness space, in the affect of men who get ripped to either intimidate or compensate, or who use their ripped status as a form of social armor.
The third thing that you say is that if you believe in individual liberty, you are a fascist.
You're speaking to your reader here with that second-person address.
And here I empathize, because if anyone has called you a fascist because you value individual liberty, they're just wrong.
Fascism scholar Jason Stanley, we had him on the show, it was great, Julian interviewed him, defines fascism this way in How Fascism Works.
That it invokes a pure mythic past, tragically destroyed.
Depending on how the nation is defined, that mythic past may be religiously pure, racially pure, culturally pure, or all of the above.
Now by that definition, your framing of Charles Eisenstein's Gathering of the Tribe for that movie you made has heavy-duty fascist themes in it.
The aliens you identify with as coming from some unspoiled Eden express a kind of cultural and bodily purity that they must preserve and evangelize.
Jason Stanley also describes how anti-intellectualism rejects cooperative and institutional forms of knowledge under fascism.
So you might in this instance want to look at your attitudes towards institutional medicine, like when you're chatting with Kelly Brogan about how science doesn't really work or about how viruses are kind of illusory.
Stanley also points out that fascism is easily expressed by a dominant group portraying itself as victimized, which brings us full circle because backing up You say that people have called you a terrorist, a fascist, and that you display toxic masculinity.
If those things are true, you don't really say why people think these things.
That makes these statements sound a little strawman-y and possibly hyped so as to promote a sense of victimhood.
Here's the next big thing to watch out for if you want to avoid the guru trap.
It's called grievance mongering.
And it's a concept developed by anthropologist Chris Cavanaugh and psychologist Matt Brown in a forthcoming paper about their guru measurement tool, the Gurometer, which rolls out on a podcast that's called Decoding the Gurus.
It's excellent.
I highly recommend it.
Gurus sometimes also engage in personal grievance narratives.
These are especially convenient in that they not only encourage emotional connection and sympathy for the guru, but they provide a convenient explanation for why someone of their unique talents has not been well supported or given the recognition they deserve by the outside world.
They also relate to conspiratorial ideation in explaining why the special ideas and perspectives shared with followers have not been recognized and accepted by the outside world.
It is because their ideas have been suppressed by malevolent and powerful actors for selfish reasons.
And right on cue, your newsletter quotes Orwell.
George Orwell understood that this was the mechanism of mind control you would find in a dystopian society.
The famous motto from 1984 is, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.
And much of our culture has taken the bait.
When sensemaking itself is degraded to this level, it's hard to use logic.
And brute force will not work either, so what is there left to do?
Create a parallel dimension.
Which is where you move into the sales pitch.
Continuing on.
So we're doing it.
And we're calling it Arcadia.
On the surface, Arcadia is a transformational music festival that Fit for Service is throwing this summer in Alpine, Wyoming.
But while our feet might be dancing between the lakes and mountains, our hearts and minds will be anchored in an alternate reality.
The guiding principles of Arcadia are different from the default world.
In Arcadia, we celebrate our uniqueness while honouring our shared source.
Everywhere we touch with language, energy, or presence, we leave better than when we found it.
We lean into community, knowing that our wholeness is a group project.
We understand that laughter holds the answer to the paradox of life.
We dance as an act of prayer to our own inner divinity.
We praise music as the mathematics of the spirit.
We believe in the magic held within the miracle of our body.
From July 14th to 17th, the myth of Arcadia will be written, and those who attend will know that this myth is true.
So definitely you're a good marketer.
And while that list of Arcadia value propositions sound like they come from the Deepak Chopra quote generator, it's all fine in a vague and aspirational way.
Except for the notion of a parallel dimension, which is a huge cult red flag.
Related to the false safe haven concept I mentioned before, every cult relies on the claim that they create a parallel reality in which, you even say it, the rules of the default world don't apply.
In your application, you underline this by adding that participants commit to surrendering their prior knowledge in order to attend.
Quote, many of us come to Fit for Service, the application states, quote, because we are experts in one way or another.
Are you committed to setting aside knowing and approaching all activities and offerings with a student mindset?
And then there's a box to tick to indicate willingness to enter a parallel dimension.
But let's go back to deception for a moment.
If you were simply saying that Arcadia was an awesome vacation and music festival destination experience with a focus on spirituality, no problem.
But you're saying it's much more than that.
It's a parallel dimension.
You call it a myth, but then you say it's real.
I mean, you've really mastered the mythopoeic men's movement, Robert Bly vibe with this, and I know that you had Michael Mead on your podcast recently, and all of that stuff is cool, it's fine in itself, but using this stuff is not a persuasive way to sign off on a letter in which you're complaining about being accused of running a cult.
I'm sure you know that the cult literature is filled with examples of leaders and groups who used the premise of a parallel dimension or transformational space to rationalize all kinds of things that wouldn't fly in the reality-based world.
Take the example of Chogyam Trungpa, who convinced his followers that they were creating a tantric paradise on earth called Shambhala.
This was meant to be a society of noble warriorship and householding virtue.
The guiding principles were dignity, creativity, and active meditation.
The organization gave members new names and even printed passports for this parallel dimension.
They issued imaginary currency.
I mean, if it hadn't been just the 1980s, Trungpa would have 100% minted a Shambhala crypto token.
Meanwhile, what was really going on was a flood of systemic sexual and financial abuse led by Trungpa himself, who regularly visited his parallel dimension by drinking quarts of sake every day and reportedly snorting a lot of coke to level him out.
He would get completely ripped and tell his spiritual wives, he had seven of them, that he was chatting with ancient kings in heaven.
His main lieutenant and then later his son, they both mimicked the drinking and also the sexual domination of group members.
On your Fit for Service website, you clearly state that the group meetings are substance-free, so I'm not making a comparison here to substance abuse and Shambhala.
But the general idea that a group is creating and inhabiting a parallel dimension is so tainted by cult history, I would personally stay away from it altogether, unless you articulated very explicit guardrails that I'll get into in a bit.
I mean, Jim Jones visualized a parallel dimension, and then he tried to make it real in the jungle of Guiana.
And it's worth noting, to return to the points about fascism, that fascist movements over the past century have consistently fantasized about and tried to invent parallel dimensions in which all of their values were somehow embodied.
Currently, there's a fascist movement in North America called Diagalon, and quoting from an article put out by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, running southeast from Alaska, capturing most of the western provinces, and ending in Florida.
It envisions absorbing the sane regions of North America into a new country in the shape of a slash.
It's become the symbol and identifier for plaid army fans who push each other to train and prepare for a coming conflict.
They are especially animated by their belief that there's a sinister plot behind COVID-19 and public health measures. - Yes.
So yeah, Parallel Dimension?
Not exactly anti-cult material, especially in an age of spectacular, and at times violent, fantasy.
Now you sign off the newsletter with, I love you all madly.
And I mean, I'm flattered, but that can't be true.
And it's a little bit boundary blurry, but all right, that's, that's the newsletter.
Okay.
So to review, I've suggested a number of things.
That you really want to avoid creating the impression that the world outside of your group is insane, because this breeds a kind of in-group, house-of-mirrors mania that can never lead to a good place.
Secondly, it's better to check your grammar for signs of pressuring the reader or listener into merging with you.
Third, it's much better to be utterly honest about the transactional nature of your business, because it's not a charity or a service to humanity, and that's fine.
Just say so.
Don't strawman criticisms, because grievance-mongering is just a bad look.
Also, inviting people into a parallel dimension is very sus.
But zooming out a little bit, I'm going to close with some more general thoughts about avoiding cultic dynamics that might help you live your best life, and could set you apart within an industry that defaults towards the cultic as a common mode of organization.
And I also think this material applies to all influencers in your world.
Kelly Brogan, I'm looking at you.
So, here's a structural fact, just for a step.
At the heart of any cult is the mystery of charisma, which you have a lot of, Aubrey, I'm not gonna lie.
And I think you know it, too, given how hard you work the Instagram.
And it's not your fault that you have a lot of it, but since it is the core fuel of cults and you really don't want to be a cult leader, it's worth learning a little about its nature and impact.
Charisma is a religious term that Max Weber used in the 20th century early on to describe one of these bases for leadership.
He said that organizational leadership can be authorized through tradition, like the pope, through rational legal means, like the election of a prime minister, or through charisma, which is a lot more unstable.
And his famous quote is that charisma is, quote, a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.
These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.
How the quality in question would be ultimately judged from an ethical, aesthetic, or other such point of view is naturally indifferent for the purpose of definition.
So two crucial aspects here.
Charisma has something to do with a personal attribute, but it only becomes a thing through social contagion.
It's a social event.
And that should be of interest to you, Aubrey, because you're in the business of creating social events.
Second, it is ethically neutral and it can show up in any form.
And a third issue, which Weber doesn't include in the definition, is that given the instability of charisma not being supported by traditional or rational legal means, its quality of leadership must find ways of regulating itself so that its power can extend beyond the founder.
So people can be charismatic in politics, academia, law firms, but their power and reach will be hedged by institutional and cultural rules and boundaries.
They'll have to negotiate with social and structural norms.
But in unregulated fields like coaching, raw charismatic leadership is the only real currency, the main mechanism of recruitment, and the only way of broadcasting success.
But measure isn't quite the right word because you can't actually measure the effectiveness of Fit for Service in any solid way beyond the testimonials which are self-reported and thin on data.
For instance, on your site you list some results from a 2021 survey of participants and the first result given says 100% made one or more lifelong friendships.
Now, what does this even mean?
How could the respondents possibly know if this was true unless they or their friends were already dead?
Another result says, 100% feel more fit for service.
This is after doing the Fit for Service program, which is a good illustration of the charismatic, self-referential, content-free feedback loop.
Now an unregulated coaching school won't be able to point to standardized test scores that validate skills, or numbers of licenses, or job placements attained by graduates.
Absent these concrete results, testimonials will mainly reflect the vibes of the experience itself.
And where this gets into culty territory is when the testimonials are impacted by the parasocial relationships that participants have with leaders.
In general, the difference between disciplines where the majority of practitioners want to have more running the show than charisma, and those who are just fine with that, is whether that discipline organizes itself towards regulation.
So, medicine has done it, psychotherapy has done it, massage has done it, even traditional Chinese medicine has done it.
But the yoga world?
No.
Coaching?
No.
Why?
It's hard to say, but it might be because these disciplines simply have less to regulate.
Fewer defined skills.
More vague outcomes.
If you were to make a life coaching program equivalent in depth and structure to a master's of arts degree, for example, it might look a lot like counseling psychology, which is regulated.
And if you were to make yoga training grad-level equivalent, it might look like a physiotherapy degree or a degree in religious studies.
In any case, it's really hard to regulate what you can't define within economies built on rapid and constant invention, recruitment and sales, some of which is creative and generative, a lot of which is hype and copypasta, most of which is presented as proprietary revolutions of intuition.
So, neither yoga nor coaching shows any sign of wanting to regulate itself in ways that would promote standards and accountability.
And I'm going to speculate here that this is why we see a lot more cults in the yoga and coaching worlds.
As I mentioned before, cults can parasitize any space.
But, anecdotally, I hear about a lot fewer cults based around psychotherapy or traditional Chinese medicine or massage.
But I get hundreds of emails from cult survivors, with the vast majority coming from people who are recovering from yoga, coaching, New Age, and Buddhist groups.
The next issue is that Weber wrote that charisma poses a problem of the transferability of power.
Who's next in line, but not competitive with the leader?
How will this thing continue beyond the leader's life or after he's disgraced or thrown in jail?
Any organization that builds itself around a charismatic leader, he suggests, will have to institutionalize that spark to make it routine and regulated.
That might mean rituals of mimicry that remember the original moment, and then struggle to invest that mimicry with meaning down through the years.
In my own birth religion of Catholicism, we took Jesus' blessing of the food at his Last Supper as a turning point in history by which he gave his body and blood for the life of the world.
So, the Catholic Mass, which mimics this moment at Communion, during Masses that are held at every hour of every day, is an attempt to rekindle the emotional gravitas of that moment that followers and descendants will never have direct contact with.
In this light, we might view the authoritarian or repressive aspects of Catholic history and culture as expressive of the anxiety of having to replicate and mimic an original charisma and being terrified that it isn't quite working.
I'm going to argue that this essential groundlessness of charisma—it seems to come from nowhere, it's validated by nothing, it can't predict how it will continue—is very anxious.
And I believe that these factors can really exacerbate the leader's need for control.
In the absence of a network of truly equal co-workers, which the leader's narcissism has often prevented from forming, it's all on him to make everything work.
It's a real recipe for authoritarian dominance.
So, Aubrey, I don't know if you struggle with this or not, but it might resonate.
And then the rest of my comments are really about this.
Whether an organization develops ways of escaping from the domination of its leadership.
Oh, and I'm going to talk about whether or not it's a good idea for you to keep Mark Gaffney's podcast up as well.
Here are some basic questions about hedging against charismatic domination.
If you were to go radio silent for a year, you personally, Aubrey, would Fit for Service continue working without you?
Are there people around you who can run the organization as if you were there?
Who gives you feedback?
Who edits your social posts?
Or that poem you put out where you mourn the fact that children are sex-trafficked, quote, because they are moist?
Was there anyone in your circle with enough power and leeway to say to you, dude, that is super cheesy, it's a little bit gross, you shouldn't put that on the internet?
Who listens to your podcast episodes before releasing and fact checks them?
Do you have a sensitivity reader who can point out how you might be using ableist, sexist, or racializing language or ideas?
On the structural level, Fit for Service doesn't seem to have a board of directors.
So my question is, how can you be fired or placed on leave if you fuck up, even unintentionally?
What have you done to ensure that if you go down in a blaze of shame or corruption that everyone who helped you get there won't be fucked over as well?
Do you have an HR department?
If participants paying up to $20,000 per year to attend your programs have complaints or grievances, how are they handled?
If they accuse a staffer of wrongdoing, what's the investigative process you deploy?
Ways in which charisma can be boundaried by regulation and corporate structure is a pretty useful and revealing topic, but it's also a little bit nerdy.
So I'll move on to some more direct observations of your content and self-presentation.
And I just want to reiterate that I don't know how you are actually treating people on the ground, so these are notes made from your brand advertising, your social media feeds, and how these resonate through your client base within social media.
Firstly, the central event of Fit for Service seems to be the high-intensity Summit.
These are gatherings that seem to be crucial in charismatic spaces that rely on experiential recruitment.
So some things to keep in mind are as follows.
High-intensity group exercises have been a staple of cultic dynamics forever.
They were central to the group bonds at Rajneeshpuram, the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, because I know you had Joe Dispenza on your pod.
Tony Robbins uses them, likely inspired by Est and Landmark.
They have been big in Scientology, and we see them at play in large sales conferences for MLMs, where tens of thousands of people will gather in arenas in Utah.
The gatherings are based on the premise of miraculous transformation.
To your credit, in your FAQs you explicitly warn under the question of, is this a cult, that you, quote, deeply encourage people to refrain from starting new romantic relationships or making major life changes during and immediately after our events to allow space for integration, unquote.
And a few graphs later you state, quote, we don't want people to stay, unquote.
Great you have that stuff in there, but I would follow up with a few more points related to whether telling participants that they should integrate is enough given that, as you say, you're not providing mental health services.
Now, the high-intensity techniques of cults include physical exertion or intensity through rigorous yoga, ice baths, sweat lodges, physical restraint through hours of meditation or silence, dietary ideology, especially caloric restriction.
There's also creating environments in which participants are encouraged to de-emphasize or even turn away from conventional medical or psychotherapeutic support.
There's also boundaryless interpersonal intensity, like working in pairs with a stranger, for example, and engaging in long periods of intrusive eye contact.
When this feels uncomfortable, the participant is often encouraged to stay with it to pursue a breakthrough, whatever that is.
Pseudo-psychotherapy in a group setting that involves disclosures and confessions is also big red flag territory.
And all of these techniques can be very effective at generating what feel like peak states, which are often associated with vague but impressive ideas like transformation.
They are highly prized within cultic environments because they engage participants with a sense of urgency, totality, and they can be very addictive.
The problem is that it takes a lot of care and research to determine whether any given peak state is actually productive or not, or what in fact it produces.
And there's actually growing evidence out there that peak experiences are easy to confuse with trauma responses.
Back when I was researching the subject of pain experienced through intense yoga practice by members of a yoga cult, they would say a number of interesting things.
They would say that they believed the pain was a pathway to transcendence.
Sometimes they experienced it that way and they maintained that belief even after repeated and chronic injury.
And then if they didn't experience the pain as transcendent, they felt that they were falling short or they were not committed enough.
The best explanation I've come across for why an intense, painful, or confrontational experience in a cultic setting can be so easily confused with transcendence or breaking through is through the theory of disorganized attachment proposed by Alexandra Stein, who I referenced earlier.
In her book, Terror, Love, and Brainwashing, she explains that environments in which intense confrontations that are meant to break down barriers and so on, but that also promise love and acceptance, can create this kind of split pressure cooker of fear and apparent love coming from the same source, the leadership. can create this kind of split pressure cooker of fear And the follower can wind up feeling equal drives to move towards and merge with the leader, but also to move away from and escape their power.
And if this tension gets too intense, the person might dissociate, which can feel pleasurable, and that can be conflated with healing.
So that's all very theoretical.
The practical question is, do fit-for-service participants wind up engaging in extreme or intense activities that provoke breakdowns, emotional flooding, and the sense that one is making lifelong friends, as your survey says, within a few hours of meeting?
Either this is very, very cool, or it's a trauma response that creates in-group bonds.
Another major thing that I'd flag for you just from reviewing your socials is the potential problem of relationship influence and meddling.
Now, again, I'm not speaking to whether you're actually doing this, but it's definitely something you want to avoid even the appearance of.
The background here is that one of the primary ways in which high-demand groups isolate individuals and insulate the leader from competitive relationships is by encouraging them to change their sexual lives.
And this can go either way.
Groups can encourage promiscuity, polyamory, or celibacy.
Because sex isn't the point.
The point is to control intimate relations.
What the cult leader must do is to squash the possibility that a pair bond becomes a site of resistance or a way for followers to be quote-unquote unfaithful to him.
So, two things I've noticed about the optics of your brand here.
First of all, everyone is magazine-level hot, and everyone is presented as single in the advertising.
From the outside, fit-for-service looks like a thirst-trap bingo, and this is understandable if you're marketing fitness.
Secondly, you personally spend a lot of time platforming and commodifying your own sexual relationships.
I'm thinking not only about the position of your current life partner, Violana, in the company and on podcast episodes, but of the episode where you had both her and your ex on for spicy disclosures and then previous episodes with another ex about poly life.
I'm not being a prude here.
This is not about your sex life, which I don't care about.
It's about whether you are sending messages to your followers that Fit for Service will or should be altering their intimate pair bonds.
Here's another thing that it's about.
How high in the Fit for Service organization can women really climb, and how closely is that potential tied to their relationships with you?
I have to say that I've noticed that neither Violana nor Caitlin Howe seem to have professional or online presences that are not dependent on you and fit for service.
Now a real anti-cult organization, from the outside, would look a lot more like a collective of equals.
And if it's run by a man, that equality will show up in the independent leadership profiles of the women.
So, what I would like to see as a prospective client of Fit for Service is that the women in a company like this clearly have their own agency and pathways.
So, something to think about.
Finally, fair warning that I'll be ending on a more somber note.
Now I know you're a big fan of mythology.
I know you've studied classics.
And maybe you came across the proverb from Aesop.
You are the company you keep.
So you recently had Mark Gaffney on as an expert in the cosmic erotic universe.
And this is not a good look, because not only is Gaffney a top-tier bullshit artist who obviously can't shut up, he's also been accused multiple times over decades of sexual misconduct and has admitted to having sex with girls as young as 14, and is currently being sued for having sex with a 13-year-old in 1980.
Now, having sex here is also known as child rape.
This is not in any way a secret.
I'm assuming someone let you know after publishing the episode that's still up because you added this to the show notes.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that following the recording of this podcast, I became aware of claims against him that have populated the internet.
How modest of you to not say what those allegations are.
And populated the internet is a really interesting turn of phrase.
It makes it sound like somebody's just throwing stuff out there to see what sticks.
You go on.
In subsequent intimate conversations with him, meaning Gaffney, and after checking out the sources that refute the claims here, including polygraphs and independent investigations, I can say that for what it is worth, I trust him.
This note aside, this conversation is in every sense of the word, mind-blowing.
For more from Gaffney, check out his masterpiece of a book, Return to Eros.
I guess you got even more feedback because then there's an addendum which says, there is a cognitive bias that leads us to believe that in a situation like this the truth is somewhere in the middle, or where there is smoke there is fire.
And while this is sometimes the case, sometimes it is not.
What I can say with certainty is that Gaffney's wisdom is timeless and important for the healing of our world.
With certainty?
Really?
Okay, well, here's another thing people who don't want to be cult leaders avoid.
They avoid making ultra-confident statements, especially when they're on shaky ground.
You go on.
No person should be cancelled forever, especially without a fair forum to deploy evidence to refute claims that may be false or distorted.
How we gather information and judge is the essence of our society.
In light of this, we intend to discuss his personal story and associated meta-theory on a follow-up podcast towards the end of the year.
Until then, if you don't wish to dive into the evidence yourself to make an informed judgment, perhaps afford yourself the gift of leaving an open question mark about the man and receiving just his words without bias.
Alright, for what it's worth, you trust him after talking to him, linking to his own website, where he's published tens of thousands of words of pure denial written by somebody named Clint Fuse, who describes himself as a senior student of Ken Wilber, which makes sense because Gaffney himself came to prominence in pseudo-intellectual, spiritual self-help circles through Wilber's Integral Community.
Wilbur stood by Gaffney even after decades of allegations came to light.
Interesting note, you use the phrase, quote, where there's smoke there's fire to illustrate a cognitive bias.
And this same phrase shows up in Clint Few's novella Six Times.
You also write, I mean, why all the mystery?
I mean, why all the mystery? why all the mystery?
The reporting on Gaffney is freely available.
You could have published the many links to the journalism on complaints against him.
But because you didn't, I'll list them in the show notes. - Yeah.
You could have reached out to Sarah Kabakov, who is on public record as having alleged that Gaffney raped her when she was 13 and has filed a lawsuit against Gaffney in March of 2019 under New York State's Child Victims Act.
You wrote about, quote, a fair forum to deploy evidence to refute claims that may be false or distorted.
Well, as far as I can tell, the suit is still ongoing, so that's where the fair forum is.
Wouldn't it be interesting to hear what Sarah Kabakov has to say?
I reached out to her, by the way, and to her lawyer, Jordan Merson.
Haven't heard back from them after several attempts, but I'll keep trying, and I'll keep you posted.
Aubrey, here's what it looks like.
You recorded the podcast without doing a basic Google search.
And I mean basic.
When confronted with Gaffney's history, you didn't pull the episode back into drafts.
You didn't take down the Instagram clip's pending review.
You talked with him.
You reviewed the materials he provided you.
You told your hundreds of thousands of followers that you trust him, but without disclosing what the public record actually says.
You announce you're planning a meta-theory follow-up, whatever that means.
Back at the top of the episode, I described how we've dubbed you the Joe Rogan of conspirituality.
And besides your media firepower, here's another way in which you resemble your fellow Austinite.
That when faced with fact-checking or a problem with a publication, the impulse seems to be to value the content over the impact, and to shrug and kick the can down the road.
For what it's worth, you write.
Well, how much is your belief in Gaffney worth?
One of the most common things that cult leaders do is to control the information that followers can access.
Now, you're not doing that here because your followers have the internet and the data on Gaffney is everywhere.
But you're doing something on that spectrum, which is to present the problem euphemistically without giving nuts and bolts, while reassuring your followers that they can bask in the glory of Mark Gaffney without worrying too much about questions like, what does it mean to listen to a sermon on the erotic cosmos from an accused sexual predator?
If you're doing PR on this question of whether Fit for Service is a cult, I think it's worth your hearing the most cynical explanation possible here to consider what kind of branding issues Fit for Service might face in the future.
So I'll just verbalize here the two worst possible views.
Firstly, promoting Gaffney who admitted to his quote-unquote love for very young women to none other than Dr. Phil on air, and then you're not taking that episode down when informed of the allegations, it might ring a bell for skeptics who remember that the illustrator for your Gathering of the Tribe film with Charles Eisenstein produces countless anime-type images of extremely young women in the nude.
What threads exactly are you leaving out there for skeptics to pull on?
Two, finding out that Gaffney has been accused multiple times of child rape and sexual misconduct, and saying that you believe his denials while not referencing the accusers at all, and doing so under the guise of pushing back against cancel culture, may look to some people like you are building a preemptive rationalization for denying accusations against yourself or your organization.
If you model that listening primarily to the accused in the spirit of acceptance and forgiveness is the ethical thing to do, this is a big red flag for leadership health.
If you suggest that Gaffney's actions in life are separable from the quote-unquote timeless wisdom he has to offer about life, well, maybe you would make the same argument about yourself when the time came.
Now, because I'm absolutely positive that this is not what you're doing, what I suggest is that you take the following honest and transparent steps, which are about the Gafney issue, but if you really take them to heart, they might begin to reframe other aspects of your content.
Take down the Gaffney episode with a statement saying that you don't know enough about the case against him to feel comfortable about endorsing an accused sex offender as a cosmic sex expert.
2.
Post a blog in which you gather all of the professional journalism on Gaffney and link to it, alongside his defense site if you want to, but posting the whole thing without comment except to say, these are the materials I'm studying as I consider what's right here.
Thirdly, invite an expert in sexual violence to host an episode in which she discusses the research on what happens when a survivor of sexual violence attempts to come forward.
Invite her to invite another guest, perhaps a survivor advocate.
You can be on the panel too, but only to ask questions, not to set the agenda.
Now the perfect person for this would be Dr. Nicole Bedera.
I'll post her site in the notes.
She's had amazing reflections on the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp case.
Fourth, invite Jennifer Frey to host an episode on the concepts that she has developed.
One of them is DARVO, the other one is Institutional Betrayal and Institutional Courage.
Now you can look all of that up.
I'll post the links for you.
But I just want to end by saying that the Institutional Courage material just slaps super hard.
I'll just give a few points that Freight recommends for organizations.
First of all, she says that organizations should cherish whistleblowers.
Which is kind of amazing.
She says that executives should be engaged in self-study around power dynamics and equity on a constant basis.
That they should conduct anonymous surveys of their membership and employees to test the temperature of how people feel about dynamics, power dynamics in the group.
One of her suggestions is that the company uses its power to address the societal problems.
So this isn't like some HR exercise where it's about getting your own house in order, but that the company actually becomes exemplary in leading social change in terms of, you know, better power dynamics and so on.
And then finally, she says that, you know, the company has to commit resources to all of these steps, like these have to be budget line items.
So, it's pretty good stuff.
And isn't it amazing that we live in this post-MeToo world in which there are so many resources available, mainly produced by women, who we can platform and promote?
