If the world has become too much to bear—and the bots know it from your search history— you will likely find Teal Swan. She will appear, an angel of the algorithms, part icon and part anime avenger. Against a backdrop of flowing water or turning constellations, she will gaze into your despair. She will speak in a drone at once hypnotic and relieving, giving words to feelings you thought were taboo. At 3am, this might feel like mystical luck, but it’s no accident. Swan is open about recruiting suicidal seekers to her content, and she has the tech chops to do it.Now, with Jon Kasbe’s series, “The Deep End” airing on Hulu, Swan has entered some A-list limelight. But what do we really learn from this docutainment event, radiating out from an embedment in Swan’s inner circle? According to Kasbe’s own words, we don’t learn the “Capital T Truth” of Swan’s day-to-day, but rather the immersive feeling of what it is like to be under her spell. Or do we? Swan accuses Kasbe of casting his own spell, with deceptive editing that scrambles timelines and conflates interactions, and even different people. And it appears she might not be wrong. We talk to Kasbe in this episode about his vision and blindspots, and the ironic risk of creating a film of Satanic-Panic level false memories about an influencer who says she specializes in retrieving past trauma. This episode will pilot a series of Patreon bonus episodes in which we’ll study the Teal Swan spectacle in detail, and how important it is to not only report on it well, but to be fair to an influencer like Swan and her dedicated followers, lest they lose even more trust in the real world.CORRECTION: Matthew referred to Jennings Brown's role on The Deep End production incorrectly during the episode. His title is "Development Executive Producer."Show NotesThe Deep EndThe Gateway Podcast Teal Swan 2014 interview on her backstory.Teal Swan: Gucci Guru article by Be ScofieldBarbara Snow’s seminal Satanic Panic article: Ritualistic Child Abuse In A Neighborhood SettingRecovered Memory Therapist Placed on ProbationMichelle Remembers & The Satanic PanicTeal’s Responses to The Deep End Start HERETeal Swan Defense :Testimonial Deep End Defamation—Sylvan
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That's right, all three of us back together again.
The book has been filed and we have a number of projects ongoing, but leave it to Teal Swan to bring us back together.
Right.
So you can stay up to date with us on all social media channels, including predominantly Instagram.
And individually, we are all on Twitter.
We are on Facebook sometimes.
And if you are an Apple podcast, you can give us a rating and help us in the analytics boost.
That would be greatly appreciated or drop a few words in about us.
Whatever you feel about it is fine.
And we are on Patreon, of course, at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where for five dollars a month, You can help support us, keep us ad-free and editorially independent, and you get access to our Monday bonus episodes.
In fact, this week on the Patreon bonus, I looked at Noel Perrin's 1979 book, Giving Up the Gun, which investigated the two centuries in which Japan, which at the time was one of the world's leading gun manufacturers,
Completely abandoned firearms, and I kind of look at what the implications of such a move for a culture could mean for America today, and that preempts two episodes we have coming up on the intersection of gun culture and wellness culture, including the first one which will be next week.
Coming up this Monday on The Bonus, Julian and Matthew will be discussing the inner safety and claustrophobia of religious responses.
And before we get going, I also want to flag at the end of today's episode, we're going to be introducing the Swan Song series, and this is the first installment today.
And this will include a bundle of early access bonus episodes on all things teal for our Patreon feed.
So thanks, Derek.
It's Matthew here, and we just want to mention two things off the top.
Firstly, in this episode, we'll be talking about stories of child sexual abuse, so please take care of yourself.
And secondly, we want to welcome new listeners because we know that those who have been following or who are still following Teal Swan will probably find This episode through the magic of the algorithm.
So welcome to you.
We know that some of you value Swan's content so highly you may feel that it's been life-saving and we just want to say off the top that we're not going to take that away or tell you how to feel about her or her work, but we are going to examine Where it comes from, why we think it's so powerful, and why seeing it clearly through good reporting and solid analysis is important in this particular cultural moment.
And if you are new to this podcast, here's the 101.
We've been here since the start of the pandemic because we saw an explosion in conspiracy theories around COVID, QAnon, and Trump that all gained traction in the yoga, wellness, and spirituality communities.
So that's where the name comes from.
It also has an academic source to it, which you can learn about more in some of our other episodes.
And what we found as we've tried to understand this phenomenon is that its beliefs about evil, hidden forces, combined with the promise of awakening and renewal goes back a long way.
It has a long history to it.
And this combination is at the heart of several religious and political movements and it's played out in many spiritual cults as well.
Now, Teal Swan's encouragement towards enlightenment is fueled by some very extreme claims about evil forces in the world that she says she has survived and that have given her the specialized insights and the techniques that she offers.
So she appeals to seekers desperate to heal who may be captivated by that double message of terror and promise.
Now, as we say, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people, we know adore what she does.
And the wisdom that they say that she's brought into their lives has been very, very precious.
But then there are others, and I think we can include ourselves in this camp, who are skeptical of her lack of credentials, her charisma, the way in which she almost eroticizes depression.
And I don't think that these are unreasonable critiques.
Some have found her online communities echo chambery.
There have been a few people who have left her inner circle under dark clouds and also a few former friends who have spoken out against her influence and credibility.
So we're going to try to keep all of this in mind.
There's no doubt that her content and persona is complex and sometimes problematic, but we believe that conspirituality exists because conspiritualists like Teal Swan are not entirely wrong about the world.
And the thing is, she isn't even 40 yet.
She certainly hasn't peaked.
So calling her a liar and a cult leader or a lying cult leader or producing dodgy media about her, it's not going to cancel her.
It's definitely not going to make her quit or go away.
And it certainly isn't going to be of benefit to the many of you out there who love her.
So we're going to be aiming higher than all of that.
Conspirituality 109, who's afraid of teal swan?
with John Casby, director of The Deep End.
If the world has become too much to bear, and the bots know it from your search history, you will likely find Tealswan.
She will appear, an angel of the algorithms, part icon and part anime avenger.
Against the backdrop of flowing water or turning constellations, she will gaze into your despair.
She will speak in a drone, at once hypnotic and relieving, giving words to feelings you thought were taboo.
At 3am, this might feel like mystical luck, but it's no accident.
Swan is open about recruiting suicidal seekers to her content, and she has the tech chops to do it.
Swan's message is about loneliness, but her superpower is engagement.
Terabytes of teal-colored digital ink are spilled every day on social about Swan and by journos who splash a spectrum of takes from gotcha profiles to deep-dive podcasts with the resources to fact-check.
We've added to that signal, or the noise, depending on your point of view, ourselves.
In episode 48, we studied the economy that Swan has helped pioneer, the monetization of trauma discourse.
In our upcoming book, we argue that networked conspirituality cannot be fully understood without grokking how SWAN embodies the mega-certainty of New Age intuition, blends multiple techniques into a charismatic smoothie, and resurrects satanic panic fantasies for the Age of Influence.
Now, with John Casby's series The Deep End airing on Hulu, SWAN has entered some A-list limelight.
But what do we really learn from this docutainment event radiating out from an embedment in Swan's inner circle?
According to Casby's own words, we don't learn the capital-T truth of Swan's day-to-day, but rather the immersive feeling of what it was like to be under her spell.
Or do we?
Swan accuses Casby of casting his own spell with deceptive editing that scrambles timelines and conflates interactions, and even different people, with one another.
And it appears she might not be wrong.
We talked to Casby in this episode about his vision and blind spots, and the ironic risk of creating a film of satanic panic level false memories about an influencer who says she specializes in retrieving past trauma.
Now, this episode will pilot a series of Patreon bonus episodes in which we'll study the Teal Swan spectacle in detail.
And how important it is to not only report on it well, but to be fair to an influencer like Swan and her dedicated followers, lest they lose even more trust in the real world.
So I think it's best to start with what we know about Teal's life story as she tells it and her career.
Julian, we did a basic intro to Swan in episode 48, but can you boil down the essentials here off the top?
I can.
It's a tangled tale.
Mary Teal Bosworth was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1984, and she was then raised in Logan, Utah, which is some 83 miles outside of Salt Lake City.
Now, this is Mormon country, but her family was not Mormon.
Teal has said in interviews that she was bullied for this reason, and also felt she didn't fit in, because once she started going to school, she realized just how different she was.
For example, she says she could see things like an entity walking around the room, as well as the color of people's auras.
And she was surprised to discover that this was not the case for other kids.
Teal claims to have been born with several psychic abilities, clairsentience, clairaudience, being able to heal people with energy and channel people's dead relatives.
She describes, for example, trying to convey a message to her schoolteacher from that teacher's dead father during her first few days in school.
Teal says that her psychic gifts were rejected and condemned amongst her largely Mormon community, Because these were given supposedly only to the Prophet Joseph Smith and certainly were not acceptable for women.
Her parents have said that she was hypersensitive as a kid and that throughout her childhood they took her around to different psychiatrists to no avail in attempts to understand and help her.
And Teal actually attempted suicide at least twice by her own account.
When she was 17, her parents took her to a Qigong healing center in China, where the master, who claims to be able to energetically heal conditions like cancer, immediately recognized her as having a special gift that was difficult to live with.
It is here that the stories Teal tells about her childhood start to become discontinuous with what her parents, her closest childhood friend, who we'll cover in another episode, and others can corroborate.
In what will become a seminal 2014 two and a half hour interview given to a man named Chris Oswalt and published by Idaho News, Thiel details being caught between a brutally punitive fundamentalist Mormon group called Blood Covenant and an evil satanic cult.
Now, Teal is around 30 years old when she sits down to talk to Oswald.
And she starts by describing being covered in cow's blood at age four in the basement of her kindergarten friend's house.
And that kindergarten friend's father then apparently photographs them in sexually suggestive ways.
In that scenario, she says she's also introduced to the man who would become her keeper.
This keeper would then program her to automatically wake up in the middle of the night so as to attend satanic rituals where she says she saw children and babies sacrificed.
Her keeper would steal her away from school and then return her before her unknowing parents came to pick her up.
She tells of truly horrific abuse and mind control at the hands of this man who was both a fundamentalist Mormon and a Satanist, depending on which of his split personalities was dominant.
He then also infiltrated her family when she was eight by becoming the holistic veterinarian to her horse.
He told her parents that he understood her gifts and could mentor her in the healing arts.
Teal says that from age 6 to 19, she was completely under this man's control, treated like a dog who had to eat and drink from bowls on the floor and pee outside, used as a child prostitute, and also taught how to lure other children in and then torture them as part of a trauma-bonding mind control process.
She speculates that she may have been saved from sacrificial death herself because satanic cults are, as it turns out, matriarchal.
She speculates that they might have been grooming her to one day be the leader.
When her keeper was in his Mormon personality, he would take her to that group who would ritualistically bleed her in order to exorcise her demon and bring her back to Christ.
So, in her 2014 telling of this story, one thing I noticed is that Thiel flips back and forth between first-person accounts, on the one hand, and on the other, more educational overviews about how cults work, the satanic ritual calendar, the systemic reasons why foster parents and illegal immigrants don't report their missing kids to the authorities, and how the psychology of mind control programming works.
She also talks about the metaphysics of Mormon fundamentalism in some detail.
So, though of course we cannot know her internal state and motivation as she tells this story, I noticed she's also very calm and poised.
She only ever really shows emotion in the form of wry smiles and brief laughter at the ironies or contradictions in the statements and beliefs of her adult abusers.
There are no visible shifts or audible shifts in emotion, and she's able to describe horrific violence and trauma in incredible detail, including how human hair and skin melted in sacrificial fires looks when children are killed in front of her.
And about 40 minutes in, Teal refers to the therapy method she has developed based on this personal experience and how she can now train psychologists working in the field of ritual trauma on how to deprogram victims.
Apparently at 19, after having been made to have sex with the corpse of a man who died by a suicide gunshot wound to the head, Teal explains that she escaped the cult by fleeing into the arms of a young man, who we learn about later, named Blake.
Based on the accounts of others from this point on, Teal would end up doing energy healing in the back room of a Salt Lake City New Age bookstore called the Cosmic Spiral and living in a house on a street named Teal Drive.
One friend, named Tori, who she met at the Cosmic Spiral, said she tried to convince her in 2012 that they not only knew one another from past lives, but also had met in this life as children in a satanic ritual, and that Tori must be repressing memories Of having lived through a similarly gruesome childhood ordeal.
Now we know this from the stellar reporting of Jennings Brown on his 2018 podcast, The Gateway.
And I should flag here, Jennings will be our guest in two weeks.
Now as it turns out, this cosmic spiral period is when Teal appears to have been in therapy with someone named Barbara Snow, who she refers to as a trauma specialist in ritual abuse.
Barbara Snow, as it turns out, is well known to the police, and indeed to journalists and sociologists in Utah, because she was very involved in the satanic panic phenomenon that swept through America in the 80s and 90s.
It was publicized by daytime talk show hosts like Oprah and Geraldo Rivera.
And the satanic panic involved people in therapy suddenly recovering memories that had previously been completely repressed of having been childhood victims of satanic ritual abuse.
Now the panic in satanic panic is about the ensuing picture formed in the cultural mind of elaborate secret networks of devil worshipping groups Abducting large numbers of children in quiet suburban neighborhoods, torturing them sexually, and then returning them home with no one noticing.
Those kids then would seem fine until showing up in therapy, say with eating disorders or more run-of-the-mill problems like depression or low self-esteem, where the repressed memories would then be uncovered.
Sociologists who've studied this track the causes of the satanic panic as including Christian fundamentalist fears that America was becoming less religious and more socially progressive and permissive.
And as part of this change, middle-class, mostly white women were also entering the workplace in growing numbers and dropping their kids off with strangers at daycare.
Who knows what happens there?
Lurid talk shows that focused on social ills, painful psychological issues, and family dysfunction were also newly popular on daytime TV.
A hugely influential book titled Michelle Remembers contained the ideas that would sprout in this fertile soil.
This book was co-authored by psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient, Michelle Smith, in 1980.
Following a bout of depression after a miscarriage, Michelle spent more than 600 hours in extended sessions with Pazder, probably using hypnotherapy to help her recover memories of satanic ritual abuse at the hands of cult members.
A quick side note here, Pazder and Smith later married after each divorcing the partners they were with at the time, and after Smith had converted to Catholicism.
Now Pazder, the psychiatrist, was a devout Catholic.
In an upcoming episode of the Swan Song series, we'll be doing a deep reading and deconstruction of this extremely important book.
Due to the success of the written account of the story, Lawrence Pashen would be elevated in the coming years as the foremost expert on these topics.
He helped educate law enforcement as well as therapists, he appeared on television specials, and acted as a consultant on the longest-running trial in American history, the McMartin Preschool Trial, And in that case, the family who operated that preschool center were accused of hundreds of acts of sexual abuse on children in their care.
Now, as with the other roughly 12,000 documented accusations that swept America in this period, no evidence to substantiate allegations of organized cult abuse was ever found.
Not in one of those cases.
In the end, Police interviewers and therapists who had been trained by people like Pazder to be on the lookout for signs of satanic ritual abuse were found, via their faulty beliefs about the nature of memory, to have had an outsized role in influencing vulnerable children and adults to come up with elaborate accounts of horrific trauma that never really happened that way.
Along with Pazder, Barbara Snow was a central figure in this phenomenon.
She published a key research paper on satanic ritual abuse and was involved in multiple prosecutions in Utah based on recovered memories.
These cases involved the Mormon Church, Satanism and sexual abuse of children.
Snow was found over time to have used unsound therapeutic methods, coercive interview techniques, and to have coached children to say what she wanted them to say in police and court settings.
The sense I get is that she was convinced that she was uncovering a far-reaching hidden satanic cult network and that kids with more ordinary problems who didn't answer the right way at first were simply identified by her as being dissociated and in denial.
So, from what we know, it seems that Teal Swan began therapy with Barbara Snow in her early 20s, and within a year or so of that, she tried to convince her new friend, Tori, that she had similar repressed memories.
Tori was then referred to Snow by Teal, and she says Snow then told her, in turn, that she may have been drugged with ketamine like Teal was, so as to forget what had happened to her A few years after treating Swan in 2008, Snow had been put on probation by the state licensing board for convincing her own relatives that they were victims of satanic ritual abuse and had also been used for secret military testing.
And during this saga, she apparently destroyed the computer of one of her relatives with a baseball bat.
So, at this point, you might start hearing some threads that are braiding together in the present.
According to an email that Jennings Brown and his producer, Jessica Glaser, received from Teal Swan in 2017 in response to a request for comment, Snow doubled down on her belief that ritual abuse was widespread in the U.S., but she also then expanded the definition to include things like military psyops and something called multidimensional trafficking.
In other words, Snow had connected the dots between her satanic panic fixations and the mainstreamed preoccupations of Gaia TV subscribers and QAnon enthusiasts.
So, over the years between 2014 and now, Teal would build an enormous following online, mostly through her YouTube presence.
She would blaze a trail as representing perhaps the new generation of spiritual influencers who become internet famous via well-crafted content that fosters parasocial intimacy driven by precise algorithmic targeting.
In place of formal education or qualifications, Teal leaned on claims about her genius level intelligence, her paranormal abilities that she's had since birth, which allowed her to have instantly downloadable access to all of human knowledge as well as inerrant psychic insight into her clients.
Teal would position herself as a survivor of horrific abuse that had led her to attempt suicide and then to discover a way to stay alive and heal.
Her origin story would go through iterations, sometimes including the revelation that she's actually an alien sent to heal humanity, other times just adding in even more gruesome details, if you can imagine that, to what we've already discussed.
This would lead spiritual seekers with painful traumatic backgrounds, suicidal depression, or just seeking guidance and community to flock to her charismatic and confident presence, to enroll in her online courses, to show up at her packed public appearances, attend her exclusive retreats, and seek certification as practitioners of her completion process healing modality, and for a very small number to become part of her tight inner circle Great job, Julian.
I mean, what did that take?
About four minutes to stitch that all together?
documentary, The Deep End, which mentions almost none of the story that I've just laid out.
Great job, Julian.
I mean, what did that take?
About four minutes to stitch that all together?
I mean, it took you hours and hours and hours, but I mean, to hear it laid out in more or less a linear fashion when it's so complex is really compelling and very clarifying for sure.
Thanks.
Yeah, it's a lot of sources distilled down into those points.
It's also a story, I just have to say, that's so lurid and transparently compromised by the aftershocks of the Satanic Panic that I can understand why people write Swanoff as either a pathological liar or an extremely naive charismatic who happens to be strikingly good at what she does, attractive and tech-savvy, and who has learned to operationalize this sensational theme in a really vulnerable time.
I can understand why people categorize her as a cult leader to her inner core and also as an online cultic personality to her more than one million followers.
So I think those takes are understandable.
I think they might be fair.
I think they also might be too easy because we have some reporting and analysis coming up in the series that points to some more nuanced and empathetic pathways.
I think that Swan's origin story from her own lips may be less than credible, but we also have reason to believe that aspects of it can be supported from outside sources.
So, we're going to explore those aspects in the same spirit that we explore the fact that conspiracy theories contain fragments of truth that compel their champions in reasonable ways, and that at a root level, the impulses that drive conspirituality are very real and human.
But, Derek, I wanted to turn to what we know about how Swan's online influence has grown, because that's a really important piece of this picture.
She's been a juggernaut, especially since it seems like the summer of 2021.
But she launched her YouTube page, and it seems like her whole social media campaign, in January 2011.
And this was around the time she published The Sculptor in the Sky, when she was still known as Teal Scott.
And her first piece of content on YouTube was a live talk that she gave in Salt Lake City, which according to reporting, about 20 people attended.
And as I said, to call her a content machine would be an understatement.
So I don't have access to month over month growth, but tracking a few of the articles about her, I found that in November of 2017, she had 403,000 followers on YouTube, 57,500 on Instagram, 23,000 on Facebook.
followers on YouTube, 57,500 on Instagram, 23,000 on Facebook.
And then by June of 2018, her YouTube had grown to 460,000.
Now, just two months later in August 2018, she had 474,000 on YouTube, 77.4,000 on Instagram.
And I noticed at that point, her Twitter following was just over 15,000 followers.
And Facebook was at 160,000 followers.
So, So again, that was August of 2018.
2018.
Now jump ahead to June of this year right now.
And her following in YouTube is 1.3 million, Instagram 631,000, Twitter 30,000 plus, and Facebook at 1.6 million.
Facebook is her most stark growth during that last stretch.
That's 10x in under three years.
But most people, at least from what I've seen, know her through YouTube.
And you will find a pretty dramatic increase in view counts over the last year.
So going back to September of 2019, she had 590,000 overall video views for everything on her page that month.
Now, by April of 2022, it was 6.8 million.
So that's over, it's like 12x.
And let me just interrupt here to say like, looking at her YouTube videos, it's not uncommon for her to get 500,000 or more views on a single video now.
Yeah, in like two or three days sometimes.
I mean, some of them, yes.
And also with the subscribers in September of 2019, she had 8,785 new subscribers that month.
Now jump ahead to September 2021.
She had 69,000 new subscribers that month.
And in April and May of this year, she gained 50,000 per month.
So there's obviously a lot of people finding her at this particular moment.
Now, at this moment, it's still too early to tell what impact the deep end has made.
But like I said, the last year has been pretty consistent growth in subscribers and views.
So I think we'll get real data in the next month or two about how this docuseries has or hasn't impacted her following.
Yeah, and along with her own growth, she's also attracted some very close commentarial and journalistic attention.
And you referenced the work of Jennings Brown in your introduction or your bio note there, Julian, and he's really done exemplary reporting.
He's going to be joining us in two weeks to talk about all of this.
His podcast was called The Gateway.
It came out in 2018, and it provided really thorough coverage of Swan's backstory and present impacts.
And just to preview some of Jennings' findings, we'll also link to the podcast in our notes, He builds his reporting on tracking down the conditions surrounding the death by suicide of Swan's first client, Lisa.
And this is a really solid hook.
Not because he's able to nail down an answer, but because it produces really good questions about how Swan influences and impacts people.
And he also delves into Swan's childhood story, going so far as to track down and interview Doc, who you referred to, Julian, as her keeper.
That's how she refers to him as well.
She sometimes calls him Doc, too.
She's never used his name in public.
And she says was his or she she says was was her main abuser.
He also, Brown also contextualizes the social dynamics swirling around Swan by talking with Steve Hassan, but also a suicidology researcher.
Again, with no real solid answers, he maintains very sort of clear You know, neutrality throughout, and I think that's really powerful.
But then he also connects the dots between Barbara Snow treating Swan and then Swan's subsequent fascination with ritual abuse.
He also interviews Swan several times and directly challenges her self-professed confidence, and it's really fascinating to hear how she responds when she's on the hot seat.
Now, Jennings Brown is listed as the executive producer for content for The Deep End, and there couldn't be a better choice, I think.
And we're going to hear from him about what that role actually meant and what its limitations were.
But the first thing to say about The Deep End is that it seems to make almost no use of Brown's work.
And as John Casby explains to us in the interview we'll roll in a bit, He wanted to create an immersive, present-tense experience.
And, in fact, on the June 20th episode of A Little Bit Culty, his producer, Bit Sola, said that they consciously chose to go into the filming experience without the benefit of absorbing the prior journalism.
And when host Sarah Edmondson asked for clarification on whether John had listened to The Gateway, he said, a little.
And so just Matthew, for listeners, I just feel it might be good to clarify.
So The Gateway Created by Jennings Brown.
Yeah.
How is it related to The Deep End?
Okay, he's going to tell us the story about how the IP was actually owned by Gizmodo.
Yeah.
Who sold it on to development, and I think it went through several turnovers before it wound up with Freeform, which then assigned Casby as the director.
I'm not exactly sure of the logistics of all of that.
But Jennings gets headhunted in the pitching process and then probably as it starts going into production as executive producer for content.
Yeah, so we're going to go into more detail on all of that, but just to say the deep end comes about because of the gateway and Jennings Brown ends up being, what did you say, executive producer, getting executive producer credit.
For content.
For content, yeah.
That's right, but he's going to tell us what that actually meant, what that was like in reality.
The last thing you said was that, on a little bit culty, when Sarah Edmondson asked for clarification on whether John had listened to The Gateway, Which is sort of the source material.
He said, a little.
Right, right.
So, alright.
So, what did we think?
We watched the docuseries.
Derek, what were your first responses to The Deep End?
I did watch it, and I'm gonna take my critique from the media side of things.
You were just mentioning executive producer.
It's funny because executive producers are very often the people who fund, uh, documentaries or different projects.
Uh, they get the credit for the money.
So the fact that he's there, yeah, it's not always the deal there.
That is very often the case.
Uh, so that's one media aspect that is pretty funny, but, um, you know, I will take issue with any spiritual influencer who wants to be bigger than the Pope and honestly, spiritual influencing in general.
So I have my thoughts on Teal, but because industry is my media, here's what struck me most.
So to backtrack a little, in the cultural imagination, there's this idea of a golden age of media.
When there were only three channels and everything was more fairly covered.
And yeah, it's true.
Growing up, for all of us, everything seemed more unified, but there's a serious problem when you only have three sources of information.
And so the fact that the media became decentralized is not a bad thing.
But when cable news really got going in the 90s, the incentives were skewed from day one because everyone was competing for eyeballs.
To be honest, I'm not really sure if humans can really ever pull off an objective media because we're all biased in some manner, but the biases at that time in the 90s heralded what would become the attention economy with the internet taking over everything.
So, three news outlets is a problem.
Everyone being a news outlet is a problem, right?
And that's what I thought about when watching The Deep End, and I'll get more into my thoughts on Casby later after the interview, but it was a chopped up and severely edited docuseries, which to me seemed like it had an agenda.
But the thing is, I'm not really clear on what the agenda was.
I did know that the editing was suspect before I even saw the response videos from Teal or her followers because I've seen these tactics before.
And again, I'm not going to get into specifics because you two analyze it in depth today and over this series, but I want to briefly speak about the broader topic of integrity and responsibility.
So a moment ago, when I referenced objectivity and journalism as not being realistic, that doesn't mean we can't try.
For example, we all have different levels of journalistic experience.
I had some studies in it when I was in college, and that was my field.
You might set out with an agenda.
But as you come across conflicting evidence, you have to change the story as that information becomes available.
And in fact, my favorite part of The Deep End was Molly, the private investigator, because you see that actually happen to her.
She starts out thinking everything is fine, and yeah, maybe Teal is a little overconfident, but she doesn't seem to be doing harm.
And then she changes her tune.
But this is important, because even in the end, Molly doesn't go as far as calling it a cult or her a cult leader, because to her, the evidence didn't fully implicate Teal.
She did make it clear that it was too close for comfort, however.
So to me, she was being honest with the evidence made available to her, which is indicative of good media, good journalism, good investigation, all of that.
But for the series itself, it felt too much like a Hollywood script and not enough like a serious investigation.
And that's a shame because as Julian expressed throughout all the beginning of this, there are a lot of important stories here that may have got captured in the footage, but they certainly didn't give a holistic picture of what's happening here.
And I think that's a real missed opportunity.
I've got to agree with you about Molly, at least at first blush, because I enjoyed her character as well.
But there's actually an issue with the way in which Molly was presented and transparency.
But what about you, Julian?
Well, I mean, it was really a ride, wasn't it?
We were anticipating the series coming out.
I was, of course, influenced, or you could say informed, depending on your point of view, by what I already knew about Teal Swan and her methods.
So, in watching the first three episodes, I was left with the feeling that they had kind of dropped the ball.
They'd been too generous or too superficial.
It felt like reality TV to me, more so than a serious piece of journalism.
And then, of course, we waited for episode four to be released, which was an interesting device.
You were texting me saying, I am very concerned that they are making her entire environment look extremely attractive.
Totally, totally.
I felt like it was going to be like, oh, it's really amazing.
She's really sincere.
She's doing powerful work.
And then there are these people who are sort of worried about her or concerned, you know.
But who knows?
But who knows what the truth is?
Exactly.
Exactly.
It's all sort of like a both sides thing.
And then of course, episode four comes out and it's much more narrative driven in terms of the filmmaking.
And it ends up, I think, being pretty damning for Teal.
And so then I was like, oh, they delivered.
It was powerful.
It made more of a statement.
And that's where my bias is apparent, because that's what I wanted.
That's the place I wanted them to end up, was that there was some kind of exposing of like, yeah, this is deeply problematic.
But then came the responses about the manipulative edits from Teal and her crew.
And I think both you and I, Matthew, we started to dig into a real sense of irony about all of this and realize, you know, maybe this is a big part of the story that we have to cover here because we've talked about false memories and how central they are to this landscape that sprung up around Teal.
And so to then, as you mentioned, or as you wrote in the show notes that I read, to have a kind of false record or false memory of the climactic events at the heart of the deep end, that made me very uneasy.
And in a way, it speaks sort of tangentially to the political climate we live in, where perhaps dishonest slander of an enemy can be rationalized as somehow justifiable, because they're bad.
Instead of recognizing that what gives us any slim grasp on a moral high ground as progressives or rationalists or humanists or journalists or documentarians is having fairness and truth be sort of consistent North Stars no matter who we're talking about.
Especially if we're talking about a crisis of trust in which the people that we're recording or we're documenting have very little sort of reason to trust mainstream sources that are not already invested in their worldview, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So not only might we be paranoid, but you might actually be out to get us in demonstrable ways with your dishonest reporting.
So we've identified some problems.
Swan has released four response videos, one per episode.
There have also been a few video responses from followers and the usual, and I think predictable, super polarized social media storms between followers and critics.
The signal in all of the noise here is that there are several valid complaints that Swan has raised about the accuracy of the film and how it portrays her through specific events.
Now, narrowed down, the most important objections are that in episode three, Uh, which centers around a workshop participant named Sabrina.
It appears as though Sabrina is being subjected to a kind of baptism by water birth, which kind of looks like waterboarding torture, and she's being subjected to it because of a kind of resistance or recalcitrance that she has with regard to Teal's message.
Now, there's a point in that scene where after she struggles to sort of regain her breath after she comes out of the water, it looks like Teal is bending over her forehead and kissing her, and the woman says, and we think it's Sabrina, says, I love you, and Teal says, I love you back.
It turns out that there's a woman named Sylvana, I think it's Caradonna, Who releases a video within a few days of that episode airing saying actually that woman at the end and that final shot is me and so I'm shocked to see that personally because as a cult researcher
to watch somebody get singled out and scapegoated in a scenario like that, and then be sort of shown in a submissive, deferent posture where they are saying that they love the leader who appears to have simply abused them.
As a cult researcher, I say, slam dunk, that's really bad.
You know, This is pretty clear what's going on here.
I'm shocked to learn that it's not only a different person, but that this was actually a group exercise that many people participated in, and not everybody had to.
So, that was the big part in episode three.
There's a bunch of different things that Teal Swan brings up, but I'm just gonna focus on a few.
But how did that particular one strike you, Derek and Julian?
Well, I just wanted to say something here, Matthew, which is that, you know, you describe it as this kind of torturous waterboarding thing, and it does look a little alarming.
But, to be fair, From some familiarity with, with some of these modalities, my sense is that she's doing something that's often called rebirthing, which is kind of like holotropic breathwork in the water.
And it's, there's, it's a very, very popular in new age circles and it's very cathartic and it's very intense and you know, it's more so than just being punitively kind of tortured there.
It seems like based on what you've just said, there's sort of a group rebirthing type of experience going on.
Right.
And yeah, then the fact that it sounds like there's one person who's been kind of the main focus of the entire episode.
Yeah, the entire, she gets a dialogue, a monologue that she makes actually names the episode very poignantly.
She says, I feel like I'm on a carousel going to all of these workshops and nothing is working, none of this shit is making me feel better.
And they're posed as being in conflict with each other, teacher and student, and somehow Sabrina just isn't getting it, and so she's going to have to be drowned within an inch of her life, and then she'll finally learn.
She'll be reborn into the love of her new life.
And then according to that narrative, then what is what is shown to us would be a sense of like, oh, she had this climactic moment.
Now she's had her breakthrough.
She's healed whatever was behind her resistance to Teal.
And now Teal is supporting her and healing her.
And she's saying, I love you.
Right.
I mean, so so pretty, pretty shocking that that's a different person.
And Sylvana's pretty clear about it.
She's like, do you see that that's my mole?
Do you see that's actually, that's my color of nail polish?
It's not Sabrina.
Okay, so that's a major one.
The second major distortion perhaps is even more important because it happens in the episode four timeline.
Again, for listeners, if you haven't seen the series, we suggest that you do it because these are pretty technical things that we're talking about.
But I think you'll be able to identify them when we name them.
That whole sequence where it seems to begin in the morning of this communal home that we think that they're living in, or at least I did throughout most of the series, They are gathering to sort of work out the tensions with Juliana having moved into the group coming to a head.
And there's kind of this ritual scapegoat murder of Juliana that's spearheaded by the rage, apparently, of Teal Swan at, you know, this opposing and competitive force now in her inner circle.
And there's a very brutal discussion that happens in the inner core.
And then it looks like that right after that, Blake and Juliana are packing up their possessions, and my assumption is that it's in that house.
That now they have to move out.
And then the scene that comes after that is in the kitchen again of what seems to be this shared house.
And in the kitchen, Teal Swan is presented as verbally abusing Blake, and what she says afterwards in her response video, like she says, you know, you're a loser, you're never going to amount to anything, and, you know, he is defeated, he's demoralized, and he says, you know, I love you anyway, and kind of walks out, and it's really crushing.
What she says afterwards is that, I did say those things.
I think she's kind of ambivalent about whether she regrets saying those things, but she says, I said them in a different context, not in that scene.
I didn't say them in the kitchen.
It wasn't about him leaving.
And then she says, in fact, he moved out before Giuliani even came to Germany.
And in fact, Nobody really even lives in that big house together except when we're on retreats and doing events.
Everybody's living in their own residences.
So the entire sort of episode four arc of Juliana is scapegoated, Blake has to pack up his stuff, Teal scrapes his name off of the window as though she's saying goodbye to a child or something like that, and then they kind of forlornly move into this hotel room.
None of that happens.
in the day that it seems to be unfolding in.
And that's kind of important, I think.
Well, not only that, the day that it seems to be unfolding in as the climax of everything we've seen so far.
Exactly, exactly.
To learn that.
Now, we, you know, We will hear, because we're going to ask John Casby about this in the interview that we did, and he's not going to speak specifically to those points.
And so, we actually don't know what the actual truth is, but we do know that no one has really responded to these very serious complaints that have been made.
This is also what I was referencing when I said Hollywood, because that whole montage was extremely problematic to me, especially when Blake leaves and there's the moment where his fish die when he tries to transport them.
Right.
And they show him in this very emotional scene with this swirl of music coming up.
And he's burying the fish.
And then they're cutting in images of teal.
It's some sort of psychic issue that's happening with him.
She's poisoned the fish with her brain.
He's going through this.
And you get this really experience.
And I'm like, to me, the most powerful moment, if you wanted to capture that sentiment, was when she's removing his name from the wall.
You could have just done that and it would have actually gotten the point across, but it was very poorly done in my estimation in terms of it was made so explicit and it was so forced.
And there was also a moment there in the kitchen We're talking about editing.
That conversation when he's deciding to leave, if you look at it closely, Teal is wearing two different things.
Oh.
She's wearing a dress in one, and in another she has a sweater over it.
And she might have been over the dress, but it doesn't look like it because it was off one shoulder.
And I'm watching it, and I actually went back, and I'm like, this is actually spliced.
And again, this was before I saw Teal's response videos.
And I'm like, this is really problematic if you're going to stitch together to tell this story.
So again, that was my main issue with this entire thing, is that there was an agenda there.
There was a story that was being pieced together.
But it wasn't the story that actually happened, and that's where all this contention comes from.
Yeah, and it's so unnecessary because the things she says to him in the kitchen Whenever they happened, and whatever the reason was, are unacceptable.
They are brutal.
They are demeaning.
She really, really is just attacking him in incredibly abusive, damning, kind of evil spell-casting ways.
Basically, you're absolutely worthless.
You'll never amount to anything.
You have no spine.
You're a terrible, terrible, weak failure of a human being.
That's enough!
You know, I just want to interject here and say that I'm not exactly sure when we're going to put it into the series, but I was able to interview Paolo Marino, who made another documentary in 2017 about Teal Swan.
And there's a whole story about that, and she had a much different approach.
But when I asked her about the Deep End, one of the things that she said was, you know, she's—Teal Swan is not all of that.
You know, you can capture those moments, and you are going to capture a very small part of what happens in the day-to-day.
And then I actually referenced this part from the bonus footage that she released to Open Shadow, where she has 20 minutes of Teal and Blake, I don't know, like in 2016 or something like that, just hanging out in the kitchen cooking.
You know, and it's boring.
And when you say those things that she said to him were unacceptable, they were spellcasting, it's true.
And then also in the span of an actual life, There's a lot of other moments that are just, you know, just normal.
They're banal, actually.
They feel familial.
It's like, you know, if the style really is verite, then there's going to be boredom in it as well.
Julian, you and I bring these issues into our conversation with John.
He gives some very careful answers.
There's also some other issues we don't bring up because patience has its limits.
One is that the issue of whether the non-negotiables, these are the written agreements, we have not seen a copy of these, but they apparently govern the behaviors of the inner core, whether they actually dissuade core members from having children at all versus having children who live in shared whether they actually dissuade core members from having children at all That's a huge distinction.
Thiel says it's not that inner core members can't have children, it's that when we're all doing an event together, I can't have children living in the same house because that'll disturb my sleep.
Those are very different things.
There's also the issue of whether or not there are licensed therapists that are attending intensive events.
To my eye, if she actually does have licensed therapists at these fairly extreme exercises that we watch them do, that's...
Some measure of safety.
Of course, you know, we can have licensed therapists who believe in everything that she believes in, and so that might not be a protection.
But I mean, it would be an important thing, I think, to suggest that she is sharing power in some way or sharing authority.
As long as they didn't go to the same school as Laurence Pastor.
Exactly.
Which we'll get to.
Okay, then, to speak to Derek's point earlier, I enjoyed Molly Monaghan as well.
And then there's this question if she really is an independent investigator who's focused, as the series suggests, on accountability work.
Because we see Matthias hiring her to find out, well, is it true that we're running a cult around her?
So, we find out in an interview on A Little Bit Culty that I referenced just recently that Swan found out about Molly from a report that She produced on another spiritual group, and this report served them well from a public relations standpoint.
Now, I can't find any report that Molly Monaghan has done on any spiritual group, except the one that she uses to smear the work of cult buster B. Schofield.
So we'll put some notes in the show notes about that.
But the bottom line is that Um, if Teal thought that she was paying for public relations help instead of, like, an accountability process, her response to Molly's, you know, statement, oh, you know, maybe you're doing some questionable things, makes a little bit more sense from a business point of view.
The deep end makes it look like she has paid for accountability work that then she is rejecting.
And this has led to a lot of online commentary says that, oh, well, they got busted by their own investigator.
So there's some transparency issues there.
My impression of that is more that they've hired Molly to do an investigation to see if They will be able to do a defamation lawsuit.
Would people be able to actually say that we are cultish?
Or can you give us a clean bill of health so we can go forward?
Yeah, it was set up, the hiring sequence especially, to give us the impression, I think, that they actually wanted to have the truth instead of they were looking for a series of business strategies.
Give us some feedback so we can get better.
Anyway, with all of that in mind, we're going to roll the interview and then we'll pop back in at the end with a few final words.
John Casby, welcome to Conspirituality Podcasts.
Thanks so much for taking the time.
Thanks for having me on, Matthew.
I'm excited to be here.
And Julian is with me here, and we just want to open by saying that this is a major event in cult studies, your film The Deep End.
You know, you've taken what we imagine might be millions of people into an experience of being inside Teal Swan's unique world, grappling with its stakes and tensions and contradictions.
We wanted to start by asking about the format, because you could have taken the route of didacticism.
You could have put talking heads in cult studies on the screen.
You could have brought Jennings Brown onto the screen.
You could have had a narrator.
You could have quoted some of the published journalism on Teal Swan, but instead you opted for really intimate storytelling, often framed through dyads.
So we wanted to ask, at what point in the three years of compiling, reviewing, and editing the footage did you feel that framework take shape?
That framework of letting it be an experience for the audience rather than just taking in information.
Was there from the beginning.
And that's that's a constraint I have in all of my work.
And it ties back to the types of films and stories and documentaries that I like watching.
Like I like the experiences where you you're watching something and you don't know where it's going to go and you're having to kind of do the work and you're figuring it out as you go.
And there's enough respect from the storytellers to allow you to decide for yourself what you think.
And I personally I find that most compelling when I'm thrown into an experience and I'm just in it.
And so from the beginning, you know, and we had conversations with Teal about this, you know, before we even started, that it would be verite, that it would be experiential, that we were going to try to bring audiences front and center into what it's like to be in her community.
And that's how I like to watch films and it's also how I like to make them and it's a part of kind of all the projects I do.
We followed the run-up to The Deep End being released fairly closely and with great interest.
And one of the things that I noticed a lot was that initially when the trailer came out and when it was first available, there were a fair number of people making comparisons to Nine Perfect Strangers, the other fictional Hulu show that was about a retreat center and had, of course, a great deal
More intensity and drama and intrigue because it was scripted and and sort of carefully crafted in that way and and we've had we've had our own just full disclosure like little flirtatious interactions with with the potential of perhaps crossing over into this kind of content into producing something like this and so
It certainly made me wonder if, based on conversations that we've had, if there were market influences early on in terms of either people who are representing you or streaming services themselves saying, hey, you know, we think what would really work would be a narrative arc here that would involve interpersonal drama along the lines of like the Teal, Blake, Juliana triad.
Was there some of that going on or was it purely just like, this is the kind of material I like to make?
That's a good question.
No, I mean, I feel really lucky in this situation because I partnered with the documentary group and Freeform is the network that put this out and they were both really supportive of my and the production team's creative vision here.
And I think what was really special about it was that when we came into this story, we didn't know what this was going to be.
It was really important to me and the people I brought into the team that You know, I didn't want us to have preconceived notions.
I didn't want us to know the story we were going to tell.
We didn't know.
We were open.
We were curious about Teal's work and we were fascinated by the dichotomy where you've got, you know, a very large group of people who are following Teal, who are saying that she saved their lives, who are saying that she speaks truth in ways that no one else does.
And then you also have a group of people who are very critical, saying that, you know, the practices she's doing are not safe and that she's attracting a lot of vulnerable people.
And that, you know, that whole I think Teal's world is a very big question mark.
And coming into this, we didn't know what we were going to find.
And we were up front with the production company and the network about that, saying, you know, this is a risk.
We don't know what the story is going to be.
We have no idea how this is going to unfold.
And I remember the very first time I interviewed Blake, there was no way in my mind I thought that what ends up happening at the end of the series was going to happen.
I couldn't have seen that coming.
And when it did start happening, I was kind of in disbelief.
So no, you know, the network, the production company, they were super supportive of us figuring out as we go and remaining open and really trying to let go of our preconceived notions.
And again, it goes back to the types of stories we're trying to tell here.
I love experiences where you can tell that the filmmakers were changed by the process.
Those are the films that really stand out to me, because I actually think that reflects in the audience, and it gives the audience the chance to change through the process.
Whereas when you have a film where you know what you're going to do, and you're looking for the pieces to achieve that, and that's all that's done, it doesn't do as much for me.
Can I ask, just as a quick follow-up, how you feel you were changed through the process?
Oh my goodness.
I didn't know a lot about Teal Swan or the spiritual community.
I grew up very religiously, so I'd had my own personal experiences in Christianity.
My parents were Christian missionaries, and a lot of my childhood was spent traveling the world, convincing people to become Christians.
I knew what it was like to be in an environment where you're with a community that believes what they're doing is the most important thing in the world.
That felt familiar.
Um, but the ways in which Teal was using the internet and the ways in which people were coming to her, um, and the ways in which she was on stage, you know, doing an hour of therapy with someone and then afterwards me hearing them say like that transformed my life.
I felt like I just did five years of therapy compressed into one hour.
Like that, those were things that I, you know, I hadn't experienced that kind of stuff before.
In the same breath, I should also mention that I also hadn't experienced as many critical voices coming after her.
I hadn't been in an environment where You know, even before we started this, it felt like there was kind of this, like, just trying to stay above water mentality within Teal's community and with their group, where it's like there's so many critics and they're always trying to explain away why they're saying what they're saying.
And there are times, you know, we were in Teal's world for a while, and when you're around that environment for a long time, it starts to sink in.
You start thinking, like, wow, these people really have something against her.
You know, why are they trying to tear her down?
What are they afraid of?
What is it that they're not looking at in themselves?
And you start to kind of get it, and we went through that.
We went through that experience, and it was really intense, and it was very confusing at times, and it was not always easy to see things clearly.
And, you know, I don't know if you all want to talk more, but I can get more into that.
That kind of gets into the whole process of how you get space, and how you stay grounded, and how you get perspective.
Well, speaking of space and grounding and perspective, you spoke quite eloquently about your love for the vérité.
sensibility and the immersive experience.
And I can understand from an artistic point of view the kind of purity of that, but there's also a sense in which the reporting aspect of what you're coming into can be really important.
And I listened to you on a podcast with Kate Casey I think she interviewed you and then she interviewed Sarah Edmondson, and she was talking about how it was very interesting to have the kind of viewer Represented by or foiled by Molly, the investigator, who is, you know, bringing a skeptical view.
And I think Kate asked you, did you feel that you were in a race to the truth with Molly in order to figure out what was going on with this group?
You thought that was an interesting question.
And then you said this, you described that your jobs were different.
You said, I think we were a lot less focused on the facts and what actually happened in the past and the truth with a capital T. I think we were much more interested in embracing the emotional process people are going through and finding ways to capture what it feels like to be in this group.
So, that was clear to me, and probably you too, Julian, from the outset, that it was an immersive experience.
Aesthetically, music-wise, it really did feel like being in that space.
My concern is that there is an awful lot of reporting that precedes this documentary, things that are known.
I know that Jennings Brown worked in executive production on the content side early on, and he had a lot of data that he brought to that stage.
And the one concern that I have, and I want to hear how you respond to this, is that if we're not concerned about facts so much, so much of Teal Swan's epistemology So much of the way in which she communicates her message is based upon the intuitive capacity that she says she has to know the truth about what happened.
And so it's almost as if The risk that you take by drawing people into the same experience that her followers would have is to really sink into that same way of knowing things, which is, it's very emotional.
We're not quite sure what's true.
The thing is, is that we kind of do know some things going into that experience because there's been a lot of reporting.
So, what do you think about that?
Yeah, this is great.
There's a lot of questions.
I feel like we could talk about this one thing for a few days.
I mean, I think at its core, it goes back to the idea that this... I mean, there's two pieces here.
One is the piece of, like, what are you trying to add to the conversation, right?
Like, I think, you know, Jennings made the podcast, The Gateway, which I think really gets into her past and really explores that that exists.
And I think we wanted to do something that was different here.
I think we wanted to add to the conversation in a way that actually reflected Much more of what it's like to be someone who falls into Teal's world.
Because most of the people falling into Teal's world don't listen to those podcasts.
They don't watch the BBC piece.
They don't watch the Vice piece.
They don't have that context.
They aren't coming in with those preconceived notions.
So I actually think they have a very different experience than, say, you all or I would, where you might go and research something and read about it and form preconceived notions beforehand.
So for me, I was much more interested in creating an experience that reflected what it's like And I think that Molly is an incredible foil in giving us that kind of grounding outside perspective where she is really focused on the facts and she really is focused on what did happen and what didn't happen.
I think Jared, you know, someone who left the group, provides some of that as well.
But what I found really interesting is that when you're in this community, you're not hearing about those things, like those things.
And when you are hearing about them, it's from a very certain perspective that's really trying to dismantle them.
So, on one hand, I think your argument is valid here.
I think you're making a great argument, but I think it goes back to the idea of what are we setting out to do here.
This wasn't set out to be a holistic documentary where we show everything and talk about every single fact and try to discern whether the past is true or not.
I didn't feel like that was my responsibility.
I actually don't think it's possible.
But what I did see an opportunity to do here was to tell a story that's present tense in a way that I hadn't seen done before with any group like this.
You know, anytime I've seen a documentary about groups like this, it's always past tense.
It's always people have gotten out reflecting on it.
And what I thought would be really impactful would be to create an experience where people can see what it's actually like when you're falling into a group or when you're trying to leave it, when you're wrestling with the leader in an unfolding way.
That was something that I'd never seen done before.
And this felt like an opportunity to do that in a way that could, you know, break through and actually add to the conversation.
That's one of the reasons that I opened with this is kind of a unique event because I think you're right about that.
I don't think we have seen an immersive, subjective, first-person exploration without training wheels in that sense.
But I think you're making the argument that you're presenting the experience as though it is factual, as though this is what happened, as though this is exactly what it feels like.
And that brings up, you know, how both Teal and the group have responded to you since its release, but we can get to that in a moment.
I wanted to say that one really notable thing about the close interpersonal material is that it drives home that Teal Swan's followers are encouraged to kind of embody what she does, to mimic her in a way.
And at the same time, she's the master of those techniques.
So they can do those things, they can be trained in the completion process, but she's really going to be the master of it.
And so we get to see them channeling, we get to see them role-playing in various scenarios.
In a way, they become not only participants, but if there is something negative going on in terms of power dynamics, they also become complicit in that.
And so, I often, you know, I imagine that you got waivers from everybody, that everybody was freely participating, but did you ever feel in filming some scenes that perhaps you were capturing and then broadcasting dangerous or abusive situations that were being committed by unwitting participants?
I think there's definitely moments where we're filming abuse unfolding.
I don't have any doubt about that.
In terms of unwilling participants, we went to great lengths to have multiple conversations with everyone before we even started filming.
And that includes the participants that came to these workshops.
And those were conversations around what it's like to be filmed, why we were making this project, what our process is like, sharing our past work, hearing any concerns that people could have, and giving everyone an out, giving everyone an opportunity to say no.
What does that look like?
Does that mean that in the middle of a particular activity where the cameras are rolling, was there a safe word?
Absolutely.
And that happened quite a bit.
There were quite a bit of moments where people would be going through an emotional process and we'd be filming.
It could have been for hours.
I don't feel comfortable being filmed right now.
I'd really like you to stop and step back.
There was no questions asked.
Put the cameras down straight away.
Happened all the time.
I don't think you can really be in an environment like this and not have a system of trust set up like that and for it to work.
Without that, you wouldn't be able to film anything real or true.
Everyone would feel this pressure to To go along with it, whether they felt comfortable with it or not.
So it was really important to us that everyone kind of had an out at every step.
Hearing that, John, it really underlines the sort of immersion that you went into.
And I can just imagine that, you know, you have perhaps many hundreds of hours of footage and within those hundreds of hours, a good percentage that is like stuff you can't use because you hit some of those limits with people where they said, you know, this is not something I want the world to see.
Yeah.
And just to be clear, that conversation happened with Teal and her team as well.
It wasn't just participants.
There would be times that Teal and her team would be filming something and they'd be like, oh, we're worried about how that's going to make us look.
We want to have a conversation around it.
We'd spend half a day, a whole day talking about it.
And one thing I'd say to them all the time is, do you want this to stop?
Like, you've chosen to do this documentary.
And this goes back to, you know, the beginning of this whole project.
I mean, I don't know if y'all are interested in that.
I can tell you how this whole thing began.
I think it kind of gives some context for the relationship and for how everything came about the way it did.
But, you know, I started this whole thing by going out there and just spending time with Teal and her community.
and telling them about the types of stories I like to tell and what the process is like to see if they're even interested, to see if there was actually any opportunity to have a relationship of trust and to actually see what's going on.
And so during that, I like to start out by telling them everything that can go wrong and why it's really hard.
And so I told them, we'll be filming all the time.
It'll be exhausting.
You're going to want us to stop at times.
You're not going to have any creative control.
There's an editing process that'll take place where thousands of hours of footage is going to get turned into four hours.
And you might feel misunderstood.
You know, I can't say how people are going to react to this.
I don't know how people are going to react to this.
And what they kept telling me was, you know, we have nothing to hide here.
And we feel like oftentimes the media gets it wrong.
They don't show what's really going on here.
And we want that to come out.
We've got nothing to hide.
And one thing that Teal told me really early on that I found interesting was she was like, you know, John, you seem really concerned that we're going to get exhausted by you filming all the time.
But I just want you to know that I've been through so much abuse that I actually feel safer when the camera's pointed at me.
And so I'm never going to ask you to turn your camera off.
And that, for me, was a moment where it started to click, and I realized, you know, like, Teal believes the things she's saying.
She believes the things she's doing.
She's unapologetic about her processes, and I think she really believes she has nothing to hide.
And so, in a lot of ways, I think she saw this project as an opportunity to be seen by the world.
And I think what's been tough about the reaction from their community is that, you know, now that we've shown it and kind of mirrored back to Teal who she is, they've rejected it.
They don't like it.
Initially, when we booked the interview, we weren't going to navigate any of that feedback, but she's made some response videos that are eyebrow-raising.
We were also supposed to speak with you on Monday, but then we had to postpone and some new information dropped during the delay and rescheduling.
So a couple of things that she's mentioned is that she discusses a lot of fraternization between her group and your crew, which led them to believe that you were positively invested in her platforms and methods and not necessarily there to sort of provide an open-ended, neutral presentation.
But then I think what has gotten most traction is she enumerates a number of edits that she says are deceptive.
And I think the most important sequence in our view comes because we've discussed this a lot and we've watched and sort of evaluated what she said.
It really comes in episode four during what appears to be the day that Juliana is like ritually scapegoated.
And that seems like it happens in the morning.
And then I think shortly after there, it seems like Blake is packing up his room.
And from my perspective, and I think Julian, you felt this as well, that we thought that everybody was living together in this communal house, which we now have found out is rented, especially for these events.
And it looks like he's packing up the boxes and then there's this climactic scene in the kitchen in which Teal verbally abuses him and then she says that those lines are actually imported from other audio that she didn't actually say those things at that time as he was leaving the house.
And then we see them going sort of very dejectedly and in a lonely way into this motel I guess.
And she says that they never lived in the house.
Blake had moved out before Juliana arrived.
And so, you know, I'm not asking you to litigate that, but if she is right about those inaccuracies or those depictions, which for me, they created a particular impression, Then, this question of, like, are we capturing something verite, and are we really representing what's the immersive experience, that comes into question.
So I'm wondering how you're dealing with that.
First off, I just need to start by saying, I think anytime you let a camera crew or a documentary crew into your life, it's a brave thing.
It's a vulnerable process to undertake.
It takes a lot of courage.
And that's not lost on me.
And what I told Teal at the beginning of this process was, What is going to drive this for us is going to be the emotion.
You know, this is not a talking head documentary where we're going to get information.
This is not a, you know, this happened Monday, this happened Tuesday, this happened Wednesday.
I was like, this is going to be an emotional experience.
And what we are going to do in the edit is reflect what it was like to be there.
So our experience in the field is what is going to be reflected.
Um, and I think any time you're seeing, you know, four years of your life compressed into a series, it's terrifying, and it's scary, and it's overwhelming, and it's beautiful, and it's emotional.
Um, and I think that they're all going through that right now, and I think for Teal, what she's doing, um, in these reaction videos is, is, I think she feels like she's under attack by the response to this documentary, and she's doing what she needs to do to feel like she's surviving.
And I think she's doing everything she can to find any piece of this documentary to kind of call out and to point out and to pick apart to try to invalidate the whole thing.
But, you know, I stand very strongly by this.
And we've had a lot of people work on this.
A lot of people look at this.
You know, we had six editors working on this.
So six editors, and fact-checkers, and legal, and... Oh, yeah, it's a whole, yeah, a whole, whole, whole buttoned-up process.
It's very, very intensive, and we put a lot of time and care into it.
With fact-checkers, are they looking at, like, because we know this from producing books, we've never been involved in film, but are fact-checkers looking at raw footage and dailies and comparing them with the edits?
I can't talk to what the fact checkers do.
That's kind of a separate process and a legal process.
I don't really feel like I can speak to that.
But I can speak to my experience.
I can speak to what it was like being there and what I saw.
I stand by the series.
It really does show what it's like.
I think what's interesting about some of these reactions is that Teal is such a strong character.
She's so strong.
She's so who she is.
That's not something you can create in an edit.
You can't create... Teal, you can't make her say the things that she's saying.
Like this is...
This is who she is.
And I think, you know, her reaction to this, it's interesting.
It's interesting seeing the reaction.
It's interesting seeing the way her community is, you know, responding to it.
I think there's a lot of people who are buckling down and, you know, coming through stronger.
I think there's some people who are really starting to question it and who are saying things like, well, you know, Yeah, I understand that editing's going on, but also like how do you explain these things that you're saying that feel abusive or feel narcissistic or feel like... I would agree with you absolutely in terms of general personality profiling, right?
That when a person's I don't know if we said this off the top, but Julian and I are both, you know, I'm a two-time cult survivor.
What I would say as, I don't know if we said this off the top, but Julian and I are both, you know, I'm a two-time cult survivor.
Julian was in a cultic environment.
We study this in depth.
What I would say is that there are certain sort of data points with regard to how a story is put together that give clear indications in a definitional sense as to what is going on.
So for instance, when It is clear that, or when it seems to be clear in episode four, that that sequence of Juliana being scapegoated, Blake packing up and leaving, and then being verbally abused on the way out the door, that provides a very sort of clear pathway for the cult researcher to say, yeah, that's a classic dynamic.
There's another one that's even more, I think, important, which is that, and this just came up on Monday, because a participant named Sylvana Caradonna posted to YouTube screenshots of an apparent, we don't know what it actually is, but it looks like an apparent cease and desist that she's served the production with, and I don't know what the merits of that are, but she says her main claim is that an edit in episode three
Makes it appear as though she and another participant, Sabrina, who was the main focus of episode three, are actually the same person.
She says, you know, this is actually me.
These are my, look at my fingernail polish, look at the mole.
I was personally shocked because I thought that absolutely the person depicted being kissed on the forehead by Teal saying, I love you to Teal, Teal saying, I love you back.
I thought that that was Sabrina.
I thought that Sabrina was the central character of the episode.
I think she gets to title it, in fact, and that It seemed that that entire water ritual was something that she alone was put through to be punished for her recalcitrance.
And what Sylvana actually says is that, no, this was a group experience.
Not everybody participated in it.
It was wonderful for me.
And the thing about it is that When Teal kisses her on the forehead, and I think, as a cult researcher, that she's bonding with Sabrina, I think that is slam-dunk cult dynamics 101 trauma bonding with somebody who you've actually terrified, and now you're saying that you love them.
And so, I guess my concern is that I was fooled.
You know, like I look at this stuff all day long and so I just wanted to get your response to that.
Again, as I said earlier, we stand pretty strongly by the series.
I'm not going to get into a scene by scene with you.
If you want to do that, I won't.
But I think it comes down to how you felt, you know?
One thing I've said from the beginning of this is we didn't come into this trying to convince people of what to think.
That's not our goal here.
Our goal here is to show what we saw and to show what the experience felt like and to let people wrestle with that and decide for themselves what they think.
So the thing that strikes me is that there's this immersive verite kind of style, which, which I think runs throughout.
And then by the time we get to episode four, the, the narrative, the way the filmmaking is really shaping a story starts, I think, to step more.
Forward.
And it's there that there's then this critique that somehow the footage has been edited together in a way that what I think that what the way Teal is saying it is that it creates a story That depicts something that never actually happened, because these things are out of sequence, and there's audio here that actually comes from a different scene, and that these things actually happen on different days, or there are people who are shown as being in the room who weren't actually in the room.
And that, that I think is the most tricky thing to try and make sense of.
Like, I know you've said you really stand by what you've presented in terms of the feeling it conveys.
Is there anything you want to say about that?
Like I said earlier, I think Teal's surviving.
I think she's doing what she needs to do to survive.
I think she's doing what she needs to do to keep her followers with her.
And I think that... I think she'll always do that.
I think we've seen her do that many times.
I think she'll continue to do it.
It makes me sad.
I can say that.
You know, it makes me sad.
I hope that she would watch this and see herself and reflect.
But there seems to be no self-reflection so far.
There seems to mostly be resistance.
You know, I would say, I can't speak to her self-reflection or resistance, but I can say that she navigates the territory of how do we know things about ourselves and how are perspectives and perceptions formed And what is memory?
And what happened when?
Like, that's her wheelhouse, right?
Like, her authority is built upon a series of stories that people have picked apart as to whether or not they actually happened.
And so, I guess the risk that is run in this approach is that You know, it would be it would be like a real bitter irony if she's able to say, oh, this documentary created a series of false memories about me.
You know, it's like because that's her because that's her kind of field.
And so I'm hoping my hope is that what you wanted to communicate at the end, which is where your thesis really comes together like that, that last five minutes, is a very, very clear statement and sort of concluding argument, and it's not dissimilar from the argument that Jennings makes at the end of The Gateway where you use Teal's words to describe the
The need to be transparent and the need to be honest and the need to move towards emotions instead of running away from them.
And I understand that she's, you know, she has complained that, you know, she didn't know that the running footage would be used.
And I think that I think that that doesn't concern me as much because to me, That's where you are making a very clear editorial intervention and saying, this is what I believe about this situation at this point.
That here is a person who needs to get clearer about what she's actually doing, and she needs to stop running, she needs to slow down a little bit and look at it.
And so, I hope that that message does come through.
Me too, and I think what you're touching on is sort of what makes this whole situation really complicated and confusing when you're in it.
There's a lot of teaching here that's valuable.
She's saying a lot of things that are valuable.
And that's what's so hard, is to separate that from the parts that are dangerous and unsettling.
If you were to pick the top three things that you feel are really valuable, what would they be for you?
I think Teal pushing people to be honest is something that I found value in.
That was something she was always pushing me to do, is to be more honest.
And I don't mean honest in the sense of like, What do you want to eat, but honest into who you are and what do you want your life to look like?
Emotionally honest, I would imagine.
Emotionally honest, yeah.
There was a lot of talk about spiritual bypassing.
There was a lot of talk about determining what your truth is.
When you're around people who are doing that work so often, it rubs off.
It rubs off and it makes you start to question your own life and your own choices and your own path.
So that was one of them.
What else was there?
I mean, she was big on communicating.
You know, communicating effectively, communicating honestly.
But again, you know, it's so hard to, like, talk about these things and just thinking about it as positive or negative.
Because on one hand, she'll be like, it's important that you communicate honestly.
Like, you can't get the things you want in life if you don't communicate honestly.
But then, she'll also say things like what she said to Ileana in episode four, behind the mask of, I'm communicating honestly.
And that's the right thing to do.
And I have to do that.
And so it's...
Yeah, it's very easy to conflate communicating honestly with being dominant.
And I think that's what it's for people in this community.
They're going through that, where it's like at every step something might feel wrong, but there's always a surface level explanation as to why it's okay, and why it's actually the right thing, and to why Teal is doing it, or why someone else is doing it.
And again, you know, that's in part what we wanted to show with this series, is just how murky it can get and how big the gray space is, because I think when people look at communities like this, they often think about them in black and white, good and evil, in very simple terms, and it's so far from simple.
Well, there's something very of the essence there that I feel you sort of encountering directly for yourself.
I would suggest that in any Successful cultic environment, right?
Anything that is blurring the lines in terms of whether or not it's a group that you might characterize as a cult, technically, there's always benefit and there's always insight and there are always ways in which the people in the community have become loyal to the messaging and the leader and the practices because
Something profound is happening, something beautiful is happening, something that feels healing or revelatory or life-changing has to be in the mix in order for then the other, the more sort of process analysis, the things we could analyze more through like the lens of process and authority and power to carry on the way that they do.
If the good stuff wasn't there, people would just be like, Screw you, you're too aggressive.
Totally, totally.
And it goes back to the idea, too, that I think we're in a time where more and more people, especially young people, are looking beyond the traditional avenues for help.
People aren't going to therapists in the same way that they used to.
People are looking for alternative sources of healing and help, and I think when you go to the internet, Teal's one of the first people you find there.
So there's something about that that I wanted to ask you because in the way that we're taken into her world, we really get the feeling of like the real life experience.
But who she is, as you're just alluding to now, and you actually mentioned it earlier before, is that she is who she is because of her online presence, right?
The kind of empire that she's built through video.
And it comes through to me a little bit in terms of how starstruck people are when they're in her live presence.
And I imagine it's tough to really like cover and make sense of that parasocial relationship that people form by watching hundreds of hours of just one-way video where they're consuming her charisma and her messaging and the way that she sort of strings together these different ideas and guides people into almost hypnotic experiences.
It seems to me that it would be hard to really You know, convey that as part of what you were doing.
Did you make a choice to not focus on that as much or are there logistical concerns there?
Like, I'm just curious about that piece.
You mean like focusing on the online presence?
Yeah, yeah.
On that as sort of the way that so many people end up showing.
It's almost like she has these live events with hundreds or thousands of people and then she has her small community and the people who come on the retreats, which is even a smaller group.
But then there's this massive outer circle of people who are just aware of her charisma and her messaging and what she offers to the world through the online presence.
Yeah, I mean, we tried to embrace the online presence in ways that felt organic.
And I think, you know, Molly touches on it.
She starts interviewing people and starts reading articles online.
And I think, you know, there's an element of it with Sabrina when you meet her through a stage event and you see her kind of looking teal up online.
That's right.
But again, it was one of those things that, you know, is kind of felt but isn't seen.
You know, it's like you can always feel this presence of like she's got all these people who are on the Internet supporting her, following her, showing up to these events.
And we talked about that early on, you know, is this more of a documentary where we go and we film with a bunch of people all over the world who are connected to Teal?
And then, you know, we made the choice.
We made the creative constraint of like, no, we want this to feel organic.
We want this to feel present tense.
We want this to feel like what it's like to be in the center of this vortex and give people that experience.
That's something I haven't seen before.
That's something that I think could add to the conversation.
Yeah, and you did that really, really well.
I mean, it is that.
It is what you set out to accomplish in terms of that feeling, that experience.
One thing that you've lucidly presented is the portrait of someone who seems to be able to flip from a caregiving role to a kind of authoritarian or somebody who can avenge.
And I'm just wondering what that felt like in person.
It was intense.
It was very intense.
You never knew what you were going to get.
Um, and there are times, you know, there are times, and I think this is, this is kind of the power of Teal.
There's times where she's incredibly empathetic and incredibly intuitive.
Um, and she, I think one of her, one of her superpowers is that she's really good at making people feel seen and understood.
Um, and I think that's why she's so effective.
I think that's why she has so many followers.
Um, at the same time, you know, she's a human and there is an ego there and there is a, an element of wanting to be seen and admired and, Celebrated.
And I think when that switch happens, what I would see a lot of was people steering clear.
You know, her inner circle steering clear.
You know, trying not to be the one closest to her.
Trying not to be the one that takes the emotional punch.
That was really apparent to me in the scenes where Molly is sort of delivering her findings over the computer to Teal and the two men who are in the room, Blake, and I forget the other man's name, Matias.
To me, watching that scene, my impression was these two guys are terrified right now that they're about to get in trouble, that they're about to get, you know, just scorched by the rage.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And it's hard because I think it goes back to the core issue and I think we're experiencing it now and I think many people have seen it in the past with Teal is where does the responsibility lie?
Because anytime there's an issue, it's someone else's fault and someone else is kind of under fire.
And I think that was something we saw throughout this process and I think it's all over the series.
And it's one of those things I had a hard time making peace with.
It's hard to watch.
It's hard to watch those conversations play out in front of you and to not intervene, to not say anything.
Um, but yeah, you know, I felt for both of them throughout.
One of the things, you know, as someone with my background and the things I'm interested in that has always stood out to me about Teal is that she has these extraordinary claims.
I know we touched on this a little bit earlier and how you wanted to do something current, but there is all of this sort of energy around her that has to do with ritual satanic abuse memories, saying she's an alien and that she sort of speaks and can write in alien language, that she's been clairvoyant since she was a child, that one of the reasons why she's infallible is not just that she's an intuitive human being who's done deep work on herself, but it's because she can tap into the Akashic Records, she knows every thought that's ever been thunk.
You know, she doesn't have to have qualifications as a therapist because she can just download that sort of stuff because that's kind of her spiritual authority in a way.
And I've seen many times where she's very frank about that.
I didn't see any of that except for one little mention of her sort of claiming to be psychic in these episodes.
No, I think it's actually Sabrina who says she's psychic, so she should know, which is kind of like the downstream effect of all of that narrativizing, actually, right?
Is the acolyte saying, well, I believe that she's psychic because this is what she said over the years.
Yeah, which seems to me to be the, you know, a sort of central dynamic of her phenomenon and her community and how she has authority.
In addition to being able to deliver the goods, as you were saying, being really gifted in that empathic and intuitive way in people's presence, in very personal conversations, usually in front of an audience.
So I'm curious about that.
Is that a choice for you to not really focus on that as much, or is that something that she is kind of de-emphasizing these days and she was wanting to be on a bigger platform without all of that baggage?
She's been de-emphasizing it quite a bit.
During the years that we were filming with her, she did not bring that up.
She didn't bring it up in interviews.
She really steered clear of it.
And so, you know, Sabrina's mention of it was really one of the few times that it came up.
Like, people at retreats weren't really talking about it.
I think it's something that she would talk about a lot more in her past, and I think with the ways in which the media and other people have responded to it, she's learned that, you know, this isn't something that I should tell people.
It's interesting to have the downstream comment that while she's psychic, does represent a kind of laundering of that past sort of authoritative source, right?
That if she is de-emphasizing the stories because they don't work, or they can't be corroborated, or because people are making connections between Barbara Snow and her origin story,
There's an interesting way in which then her simple certainty about her therapeutic techniques becomes the laundered version of how she gives this kind of presence that says, I know what people need when they are thinking about suicide at three o'clock in the morning.
I think it's possible to not need that back story at a certain point if you feel really confident.
That's not really a question, I guess.
I missed the question part, but I think everything you're saying is very interesting.
I think it's very, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, we're painting with the colors Teal gave us.
We can't create colors.
You know, she gave us the colors and we painted with them and she's talking less about those things.
And I think, you know, in episode one she gets into her abuse and she explains where the completion process was born out of and we explore that.
We explain that.
I think it's important to understand her.
But again, you know, I think there's a lot of things on the internet that really go into our backstory and really, you know, question the abuse and all of those things.
And in a lot of ways, we saw this series as a kicking off point.
My hope is that when people finish watching this, the conversation begins.
You know, this was not designed to be able to answer all the questions, because I don't think we can answer all the questions, but I do think we can start asking the questions.
You know, it's occurring to me that there's something generous about the approach that I haven't thought about before, which is that if you leave off the backstory, the viewer does get to encounter a person as though they appear in the world currently.
And that has risks, of course, because there can be deceptions or ways in which the person has come to prominence or they're visible at all that you're not aware of and therefore you don't know where you might be led to.
As a viewer, you mean?
As a viewer, yeah.
But at the same time, it's like, when we meet people in the world, we don't have their backstory.
Right, when someone meets you, they don't know what you did 20 years ago, or what you said about yourself.
No, I mean, I talk about it an awful lot, but that's unfortunately for them.
They may not have been listening, though, so far.
Yeah, or they didn't care.
This series was designed to be like, you know, if you went into Teal's community right now, what would you experience?
What would you see?
What would you feel?
I mean, in a similar way, I think that while because of the stress that Sabrina was under in episode three, there is a discussion of do these methods and these teachings increase or decrease or relieve suicidal ideation?
That's a valid conversation about Teal Swan's work, and I also think that it's overplayed in the sense that the correlations between what she does and actual suicide events within her community seem to be kind of weak.
We can't say for sure that, you know, contact with Teal Swan is why Leslie, her first client, died by suicide.
We can't You know, make causal relationships between her teachings and other tragedies like that.
But I think there's been a focus on suicidality because if we can pin that down, there will be a smoking gun that will tell us exactly what to do about this problem called Teal Swan.
I don't think it's there.
I think that avoids the larger conversation of what does it mean to grow up in America with zero mental health care and a culture of misogyny and patriarchal abuse and There being very few outlets for that, and there also then, as she rightly criticizes, being a psychiatric community that can overprescribe, especially for women.
Those are all sort of the cultural issues that she points towards.
With a certain amount of skill and a certain amount of problems.
And I think discussing whether or not she causes people to die of suicide seems to overshadow those larger issues.
One part of this process was really interesting was seeing Molly go down this journey.
You know, Molly was brought on to try to figure exactly what you're talking about out.
And early on, I think it's in episode two, you see her Do an interview with Jonathan Singer, you know, the head of the American Association of Suicidology.
And I think what he said was really insightful, which was that on one hand, you know, the way in which he's talking about suicide is reckless.
You know, this is not a one-on-one interaction.
Once you're putting a video out on the internet, this is a one-to-million interaction.
You don't know the state of the person watching this video, and you don't know where they're going to be at.
And so I don't think this is safe.
It feels reckless.
On the other hand, he said you'd be really hard-pressed to hold Teal responsible for those deaths.
You can't make that link and hold her responsible for them.
So, you know, to Molly, she made the case of like, no, I don't think you can hold Teal responsible for this.
The occult question was a separate thing.
But I found that really interesting.
And I think the way she handled that was with a lot of thought and a lot of care.
And I agree with you, Matthew.
It is easy to look at that whole situation and try to pin it down and make it really simplified.
And fit the true crime profile.
Exactly, fit the true crime profile.
But I totally agree, it's more complicated than that.
It's much more complicated than that.
Well, thank you for your time, John.
We appreciate your candor.
And what's next for you?
I actually just put out a film at Tribeca this past weekend called Sophia, about a robot.
Fascinating.
Is that another documentary or is it a fictional piece?
Yeah, it's a documentary film.
Well, check that out.
Thank you so much for your time.
We'll put all of the details into the show notes.
Really appreciate it.
It's been great talking to you, John.
Thank you all.
Take care.
I was really sad that I couldn't make this interview all the time.
All of my furniture had arrived from Los Angeles after a month, and that was the day it was.
But it was really enlightening and illuminating about the series, so great job on that, guys.
I am going to start off with a little criticism, but also turn it back on myself, of the actual interview.
It's why I left political reporting, which was my first gig out of college.
I am very bad at confrontational interviews, and I like feature writing.
That's why I got into music and all the arts, because I like talking to people about the art and not trying to pull things out of them in the same way.
But he didn't answer.
He didn't answer things.
And you did try to do it from different angles.
That's the thing.
It's not like, but there were moments where I was just like, I wanted to be like, just drill down on this one.
Just drill down on this one.
And he just refused.
And you know, he says that the audience will decide what it means.
And you know, that's a common refrain that you'll hear in the art world.
With Jackson Pollock, for example, it's like, you can decide.
But as I said earlier, he very clearly crafted a Hollywood type story.
So you can't both say, I, you know, the audience will decide, but here is the story that I very clearly edited.
So that really stuck with me.
You know, I do appreciate his openness to criticism.
I think he was a great sport from hearing everything.
I also really liked, and you pointed this out, Matthew, that this is rare.
He captured a community as it's happening.
And most of the cult documentaries, and I know we're not using that term specifically, but this sort of investigative look at potential cult or cultic activity is in reflection.
And I've always thought that in the moment would be more powerful, and that I love.
But it did strike me when he said he went into this with a little knowledge of spirituality or spiritual, the world that we broker in and operate in.
And he said he went in with an eyes wide open approach, but that's just dangerous territory when you're dealing with charismatic figures, as you both know.
And as you flagged, both of you flagged, if this is based on the gateway, listen to the gateway before you do it.
And I think all of that criticism shows through in the way that Teal and her community is responding, and rightfully so, because without hearing from them, I flagged some things, like I said earlier, and now hearing how we went about it, it was a little troublesome to me.
Now, finally, my last thought on it was, When he said, we've mirrored who Teal is back to Teal and her community and they don't like it, that was really powerful.
I was like, yeah, you know, one thing we often talk about is how some of the people we cover are immune to criticism and they will reject it in every capacity.
But he also says that there seems to be no self-reflection, there seems to be only resistance.
And that sounds like Teal!
Right, so the fact that he went in as someone who was naive of this, he definitely partook in some, or his team partook in some of the rituals, which is fine, you know what I mean?
I was like Julian, I didn't say this earlier, but I was like Julian, I was looking for a takedown.
And the fact that I didn't get that just speaks to my own expectations, and I'll own that.
If you're going to do what he did, and then you might have been influenced in these ways, I think there's a lot to unpack.
That's why I'm glad this is going to be a series and not just this one episode.
Well, I listened to this many times while editing it, and I think our pushback stands on its own, but I do agree with you, Derek, that it's hard to do.
I've kind of thought about that, but one comment I want to add is that it's dawning on me that John's super subjective approach begins to blend this project of documentation with the project of transformation.
He even says as much, that I really love movies that, you know, transform the viewer, but also where you can tell that the filmmaker's gone through a transformational process.
But it does so, in this case, in such a way that he and Thiel begin to have kind of an equal footing.
They're doing the same thing in a way.
And there's this key example that came up in the interview when we were talking about processes of consent.
He described these long, informed conversations with participants in which it sounds like he was as transparent as he could be, but then he recalled that he said, do you want this to stop when things got intense?
And, you know, I might be reading too much in here, but that question and even more so the way he echoed himself asking it sounded like it could have come from a spiritual leader, perhaps even Teal herself, who is presenting the challenge of being documented as something that's hard, maybe terrifying, but ultimately worth going through.
So, I think, you know, we can file that in the category of, you know, ways in which subjective and immersive filmmaking can merge with, you know, at least the accouterments of the spiritual path and then really wonder about whether that's a good approach.
And then, you know, I also, to speak to Derek's point about how much did we press, I want to point out that as I'm editing it, I get about two-thirds of the way in, and I think, Julian, it's after you asked the question about online influencers, and I start to get uncomfortable because we've pressed him, you know, it got cagey, and we've backed off, and so now we're finding interesting and semi-validating things to say about the documentary.
Yeah, totally.
I mean, let me, let me just interject here and say, um, I'm texting you saying like, stop, stop looking down your nose over your glasses at him.
Oh, wait, wait.
This is, this is awesome.
You're you, you did text me that stop looking down your nose.
Do you know what was fucking happening?
I just got, I just got progressive lenses and I can't figure out how to use them.
And you think I'm looking snotty at him over, over, Riverside.
I think that from his, I know you, so I don't care what your face looks like, but he's, I was like, from his perspective, it's going to look like you're like, yeah, really, you know, like, just like, like squinting at him.
That was one piece.
And the other piece is I texted you at one point, Hey, we should back off a little.
Right.
Partially because in going into the interview, we knew that some of these controversies had arisen about Thiel's responses, and we knew that there were perhaps some things that he was not going to feel comfortable talking about.
And he happened to have a manager or a handler or a scheduler, whoever that person was, on the line with us at the same time, just silently listening.
And to be fair, maybe just to make sure he stayed on track for his next media interviews.
But it was a feeling of like, if we step over the line too much, the interview might be over.
Might be, right.
I mean, so we did back out, and then I'm in the position where This was interesting.
Like, I think one of the things that the film actually did well is that it captured a personality that can flip between love and rage.
And I happen to believe that this is plausible with Teal Swan.
Like, I've seen enough of Her onstage interactions, I know enough about the scene, I know enough about, you know, charismatic influence and how it plays out when people are in performance mode, that it's very easy for the energy of a person to flip between, you know, caregiving and wrath.
And the problem is, is that if that depiction has been manipulated with editing, that plausible fact might now be in doubt.
And it's unnecessary, as you mentioned before, Julian, because really, the content should speak for itself.
And in this other part, you agree with me in referencing how Blake and Mathias respond to Teal watching the report from Molly, but for all we know, that scene might not have happened in that sequence either, if the kitchen scene featured her in two different sweaters or dresses, and the reactions might have been stitched together in an unfair way.
They may have been terrified of the Wrath of Teal for different reasons.
Nonetheless, they look terrified.
Exactly.
But, I mean, bottom line, it just shows how many downstream problems there are that come from this riverhead of compromised reporting.
And not the least of which is how Uh, this reporting can then get boosted and replicated.
So, in that same episode that I've referred to twice now of A Little Bit Culty, Sarah and Nippy are praising John's capture of Teal ostensibly abusing Blake as he's leaving in that kitchen scene.
And this is where things get really messy.
So, let's have a listen.
She berated him and he says, I love you.
And like, ugh, what a good soul.
I cried a lot.
That moment, I remember filming that, there was something so real about just how complicated that moment is for both sides.
Yeah.
For both T.L.
and for Blake.
And yeah, I think you can watch that scene a number of times and see a different thing in it each time depending on, you know, whose perspective you're in.
But like the fact that you captured that, I mean, you can't, I guess you could write something like that in a drama, but like to be there for that moment of somebody, what I perceive as verbally degrading, like Nippy said, or abusing someone, and then for him to say, and I still, I'm leaving and I still love you.
It encapsulated so much of this, of at least for even for us, even when we left, we were leaving a community that we loved.
In that moment, he seemed to embody more of what Teal professes to embody, and her love seemed conditional.
These are the conditions under which you can stay and love me.
And he didn't meet him anymore, and she was dismissing him, and he actually embodied what I think she pretends to embody.
Unconditional love, and still held space for her.
Which was, to me, interesting.
The message had worked on him, but not her necessarily.
So, it's incredible How complex this gets because here's John remembering how powerful it was to film that real scene in the kitchen that maybe didn't happen.
And then Sarah and Nippy self-referring to their own leaving experience, which of course is incredibly like close to the surface for them and super powerful.
talking about how powerful it was for John to capture that very real moment.
Because, of course, their very real moment of leaving wasn't captured.
So, part of what's going on is they're saying, wow, you really captured the actual moment.
And then, maybe he didn't?
Yeah, you really captured the actual complicated moment of those split loyalties and the deep, deep ambivalence and conflict.
And, and, and, And so now they're remembering a scene that they watched, that they believe happened a certain way in a certain sequence, and he's commenting on that scene and what it was like to capture it.
Oh my goodness.
Boldriad, where are you?
Where are you?
It's really, it's really thick.
Derek, what do you make of that?
It just goes again, well first off it goes back to the scripted nature of it, and you hear him saying right there, people will make what they make of it, and yet I made it be this way.
And if he's actually misremembering what happened, an event that didn't happen, then we're going another layer of recursion down that could be what happens when you spend three years embedded in this community.
Exactly right.
Well, Guys, that's a wrap for today.
We're going to keep following the story through early access bonus episodes on Patreon.
We don't know the contours of every episode yet, but we do know that this is such rich material.
We're going to be doing things like an episode called Close to Home, where Julian, you're going to do a little bit more detail on the similar experience you had of quote-unquote recovered memories in another cultic environment.
Am I right about that?
Yeah, the group I was in in my 20s, I think was also, let's just say, were also probably influenced by the satanic panic and some of those therapeutic methods, and I certainly went through my own deeply confusing experience of that.
Right.
We've got an episode, as I mentioned, with Paola Marino, the director of Open Shadow, and we're going to look specifically at her interviewing of Mr. and Mrs. Bosworth.
We're going to look deeply at Michelle Remembers as the initiating incident of the Satanic Panic, but also an unwitting piece of traditional Catholic propaganda.
We're going to be looking at Catholic demonology film reviews.
We're going to be doing a review of The Exorcist and things like that and how it set the Satanic Panic stage.
We're going to look at Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass, which was a handbook for satanic panic psychotherapists.
And I think it was, was it required reading in your group, Julian?
Yeah, I don't, I don't remember if it was specifically required reading for the teacher training.
I think it may have been, but it was certainly a book that was on the reading list and was, you know, widely circulated and talked about at the yoga studio at that time in the 90s.
Wow, so come for the yoga teacher training, stay for the recovered memories.
Yep, yep.
And we even had, I don't know if it was necessary, I forget the name of that author, but there were people in that whole field who were writing self-help workbooks like that to help people recover memories.
Some of those people came and taught workshops at the studio, so we're definitely embedded in that scene.
We're going to do an episode on the 2014 interview that Teal gives to the Idaho News Network.
We're also going to do a full review of The Gateway by Jennings Brown.
We're going to look at the account of Diana We're going to look at the arguments and conclusions that follow from people taking the deep end at face value, and that's going to be something that will probably unfold over a while.
And then also, we find out from Diane Hanson-Ribera that Teal Swan's favorite movie, apparently, was Girl Interrupted from 1999, starring Winona Ryder, so we'll have a movie review of that.
