Do visiting inter-dimensional spirits and stowaway UFO passengers use the LAX Airport to touch down among us? Well they do if they're in town for the Conscious Life Expo, conveniently located at the LAX Airport Hilton for those who rely on otherwise mundane modes of travel.
The Valentine's Day weekend crystals and angel cards fest of disjointed spirituality meets dodgy science just celebrated its 21st year as the premiere gathering point for awakened seekers choosing to come out of sovereign superposition and manifest in space-time reality.
But, as visiting Vice News correspondent Anna Merlan tells us, it turns out the organizers have grappled for years with how to reconcile the tensions between obvious charlatans and those who really, truly can talk to the dead, psychics who can diagnose your dog's mystery ailments, and those making artificial claims about all-natural elixirs, prophets of light and love, and QAnon promoting anti-vax conspiritualists.
This year's solution? Tuck the most radicalized New Age hate-preachers away in the Rabbit Hole Room, and charge top-dollar for the red-pilled faithful to swoon at their feet.
Show Notes
Thrive review by Eric Johnson
COVID-19 misinformation contributed to 2800 Canadian deaths, report suggests
Fault Lines Report: Canadian Council for Academics
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I think the other guys are still on Facebook holding that down, so we're over there.
Once in a while.
Okay.
Independently, we're on Twitter.
Our correspondent Mallory is on TikTok, so for you youngins, if you want to check in there.
And of course we're on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where for as little as $5 a month you can help support us, get access to our Monday bonus episodes.
And then, of course, we have tiers that go up from there.
We're also on Apple Podcasts and noticing more subscriptions coming through from there.
You only get our Monday bonus episodes there if that is of interest to you.
And finally, we are quickly approaching book publication date on June 13th, so you can find a pre-order link to our book in the show notes below.
Spirituality 142, Destination Rabbit Hole, with Anna Merlin.
Do visiting interdimensional spirits and stowaway UFO passengers use the LAX airport to touch down among us?
Well, they do if they're in town for the Conscious Life Expo, conveniently located at the LAX Airport Hilton Hotel for those who rely on otherwise mundane modes of travel.
This Valentine's Day weekend, crystals and angel cards festival of disjointed spirituality meets dodgy science just celebrated its 21st year.
It's the premier gathering point for awakened seekers choosing to come out of sovereign superposition and manifest in space-time reality.
But as visiting Vice News correspondent Anna Merlin tells us, it turns out the organizers have grappled for years with how to reconcile the tensions between obvious charlatans and those who really, truly can talk to the dead, between psychics who can diagnose your dog's mystery ailments and those making artificial claims about all-natural elixirs.
How to tell the difference between prophets of light and love and QAnon-promoting anti-vax conspiritualists.
This year's solution?
Tuck the most radicalized new age hate preachers away in the rabbit hole room
and charge top dollar for the red-pilled faithful to swoon at their feet.
This is an excerpt from a video just uploaded to YouTube titled Drumming at 2am.
At the LAX Hilton after the Conscious Life Expo.
It's three white guys enthusiastically jumping around as they bang on drums.
One in a kind of velour tiger-striped sweatsuit and reflective sunglasses.
Another in a black leather jacket and dark shades with a scarf draped over his head.
And a third, bearded guy, kind of dressed like a trucker from the Pacific Northwest.
He's got a plaid shirt, jeans, a baseball cap.
Now, there are two women dancing nearby, and then the real star of the show comes into shot.
He's a shirtless, maximally dreadlocked guy in flip-flops, just skipping around.
He's weaving magic, and I imagine a quite pungent scent through the scene as they occupy the lobby of this hotel.
At two in the morning.
You know, Julian, that's a little bit of body odor shaming right there.
I know.
I stand by it.
I know you have to take a shower before and probably after every recording that we do, but I think you should accept that not everyone is like that.
Some of us use dry soap, dry shampoo.
Some of us keep the natural oils really close to the skin.
Come on.
You know, someone commented on Twitter that they could smell this video.
That's a pretty impressive feat of synesthesia, but it's also pretty amazing in this clip.
And I've also seen other clips from the Expo that all of the Hilton workers are masked.
Yeah.
And I wonder how the festival attendees felt about that.
Yeah, there's something else there, as I watched that video, about the only people in the shot who likely have some kind of indigenous background, being the button-down hotel staff just sort of trying to do their work around these raucous tribal drummers at dances, you know, so late into the night.
Totally dystopian, especially like exhaling on masked staff.
I think this is a good way to open for me because I think it really gets at something immediate I confront in all of this reporting.
Like, what do I do, gentlemen, with this prickly feeling?
That I just wouldn't fit in with a bunch of weirdos who look like they're having such fun in their dance circles and their rebirthing ceremonies.
Like, do I really begrudge these people their fun?
No, I don't think so.
I mean, look, as funny as it looks to us contextually, people dancing in the forest or in a hotel, whatever, dancing is good.
Sure.
But when you broaden out from the context of it, I think that's what makes it a little bit absurd.
Yeah, I just feel like a misanthrope, actually.
And this is like a deep question, I think.
Like, am I more of a misanthrope than, let's say, Julian Field or Travis View over at QAA?
Because they've done this many times before, like risking COVID, intrusive eye contact sessions, and then also just boredom to visit a gig like this in person.
And then they end up collecting all this great tape for their latest episodes.
They chat with vendors, they eavesdrop on the lectures from Starseeds and Mickey Willis.
QAnon Anonymous is dedicated to intense ethnography.
Hats off.
Yeah, nice work on those two episodes, as always, to the guys at QAA.
I don't know if you're more of a misanthrope, Matthew.
Maybe you are.
Maybe you're more of a Puritan.
Maybe you have your own sort of background that you're grappling with there.
I do know that all three of us have done plenty of time at New Age festivals, conferences, expos, retreat centers, and ashrams.
It's not like it's new to us, right?
Yeah, but it's in the past, man.
It's in the past.
Yes, it is.
But, you know, a lot of the spectacle, the associated kookiness, the hunger for belonging, the oversimplified, if outlandish, fake solutions to the problems of being human, these are all super familiar to us.
So I think we have less of a sense of like, let's go see what's going on, you know?
In terms of the podcast, you know, it's...
Very interesting to be able to see that it turns out the main characters in the rabbit hole room at this year's Conscious Live Expo are the people that we've been following and profiling and researching and providing the internet with like background on for all this time.
So, but you know, I will say you can't beat boots on the ground reporting.
So I salute Travis and Julian for their service alongside Anna Merlin and Noel Cook who were there too.
And we're going to talk to them.
Yeah, I'm glad that all of them do what they do so that I can stay home in my cozy basement.
I've got my toucan, I've got my chai, and I can connect the ideological dots between the sage and the crystals, the Jesus and the colon cleansing, the Reiki and the quantum, the star seed, and the January 6th yoga mom.
From a safe distance.
Yeah, from a safe distance.
I mean, bottom line is I'm not a drum circle guy.
I can get pretty high just by dancing in a club, so what is it that immediately feels weird to me about the drum circle here?
Like, I'm literally saying inside, like, fuck off, stop being so goofy and happy.
It's a little bit depressive, I admit, but also, at the same time, I want people to be in ecstasy.
Like, I want everyone to feel unrepressed.
I guess I just have to be careful with who that happens around because I think that's a legacy of cults.
I think what bothers you about this is that they keep falling off rhythm, which usually happens in these circumstances.
I used to go to drum circles in Brooklyn, which was a bunch of Rastas doing it.
They never fell off rhythm.
Even the San Francisco Golden Gate Park drum circle, when I lived there, I used to go all the time and they had better rhythm.
In these sort of situations, that's usually what gets me is the lack of musicality.
So it's poor musicality, poor musicality that's really getting me.
Okay.
Well, and how that affects you, right?
Whether you're naming it consciously as that or not, there is a feeling of like, this is just, this is not perhaps like what it's supposed to be.
And you know, to be fair, I chose this clip specifically because it's basically these three guys who would probably be kicked out of any of the drum circles I used to go to.
In my younger years, because they're just not that great, and they're trying to create a rave under the fluorescent lights in the lobby of a hotel at two in the morning while the staff are trying to do their jobs, and probably the other people who are staying there are like, what's all this god-awful noise?
Yeah, you see that's bold too, though, don't you think?
You gotta give it to them.
Yeah, they're trying to red pill everyone in the vicinity, but just through a very weird pathway.
Right.
So for me, you know, this is the perfect juxtaposition.
It's not a Saturday afternoon drum circle on the boardwalk of the kind that I've been to at Venice Beach many times.
It's a place I've joyfully, if carefully, been one of the semi-weirdos, Matthew.
Or it's also not a designated ecstatic dance event where I've been a dancer and DJ countless times as well.
It's these three clueless guys.
They're wanting attention.
They don't really have a good grasp of rhythm, as Derek said.
And yeah, then this one shirtless dreadlock guy and white guy, of course, who, you know, you just have the sense he's always ready to dance.
Okay, so as three white guys, I'm going to ask you to carefully define or define careful weirdo, Julian, because it sounds like what you really want to say is, I was never like that.
Well, you know, when I think of those Venice Beach drum circles, it can actually be kind of a rough scene.
So for a kid in their 20s who's just got stars in their eyes and is looking for an ecstatic experience, what I learned quite quickly is that those places were also magnets for a range of outsider characters, not just privileged spiritual seekers.
So there's drugs, there's alcohol, there's In Venice, there are gang members.
And they're not fortunate enough to have psychiatric conditions.
So that's in the swirl of what's happening in the drum circle.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't think people realize, because Venice Beach has this sort of mystique around it,
especially from the Gold's Gym days in the 70s and still to this day,
I don't think they realize just how much of a homeless encampment it is.
And if you go one block off of what's called the boardwalk, into the $2 million basically cottage shacks that are there,
The residents are constantly dealing with Homeless people just setting up tents and then defecating, urinating there.
It's not very romantic for people who don't really understand that city.
Yeah, and we're experiencing a real rash of that right now, and it's sort of a culture war football for a lot of people on the right to say, look at all these Democrat cities and how they have this terrible homeless problem.
When really what's going on is in a post-pandemic landscape, you have all these people who lost everything and they have nowhere to go.
And they come to places like Venice Beach because the climate is warmer and, you know, maybe they have some resonance with some of that romance and mystique, but it's a pretty grim reality they're dealing with.
And you also have more infrastructure and community.
I mean, if you're, if I couldn't imagine and I hope to never imagine being in that situation, but if you are, you'd probably want to be somewhere with the skeletons of a support system at least.
And it just so happens those are predominantly democratic cities that have those.
Exactly.
Yeah, but let's back up and clarify for any listeners who've never heard of this expo.
What is the Conscious Life Expo?
Well, it's a three-day weekend event.
It's been happening annually here in LA for 21 years.
This year there were 200 exhibitors, each with their own little booths and tables in a large shared space.
And they offer things like dream interpretation, clairvoyant mediumship, ancestral healing, and UFO virtual reality experiences.
They're also selling things like EMF protection pendants, chakra balancing crystals, and of course aroma oils for health and wellness.
There were also 250 speakers on the schedule, and we'll get into that some more in a bit.
The Expo, it turns out, gave out awards for the best books by their speakers, and this year's first place went to none other than Elizabeth April.
Oh, man.
Let's point out that her book is called You're Not Dying, You're Just Waking Up.
This was someone who during the pandemic got COVID and thought it was contact, right, from an alien from the Galactic Federation.
And in the description of this book that won the award, April writes, even if you have seen my content before, it's time to strap in and hold on tight because this is not your average text.
It's your soul's reminder of how powerful you are and how much you already know.
So, once again, we have an influencer who both wants to tell you that you know everything you need to know, but the only way to know that is to buy my book.
Derek, if you had a soul, you would know how much reminding souls need, so I want you to be more inclusive, please.
I have a course that you can sign up for if you just follow the link and it will teach you how to remember that everything you already need is within you if you do my course.
Here's how the Expo describes themselves on the About page of their website.
We live in an evolving universe, in an orgasmic nuclear dance of consciousness.
Everything is changing, evolving, transforming.
Wise men and women throughout history have tried to define the nature of the reality in which they found themselves.
Myriad models have existed.
Most have fallen into the historical garbage heap.
Often, others cling by threads.
We, these generations, are creating a new model.
Did they put this into chat, GPT?
Is it all figured out and defined?
No.
Do we know some of the elements of what this future model might look like?
Yes.
The primary intention of the Conscious Life Expo Conference and Exposition is to participate in the conscious co-creation of a new world.
A world based on new paradigms in science, in spirituality, in longevity, in local and global community, in relationship, in health and well-being.
Yeah, so they're basically saying it's Hogwarts, but with all of the pseudo-medievalist stuff subbed out for William Reich and Gary Zukav.
Orgasmic nuclear dance of consciousness.
Awesome.
Also, there's this hint of Vivekananda's universalism, you know, all wise men say the same thing.
You printed out the copy for our document here, so I have been staring at this line for a while.
Wait, wait, wait, I think I get it.
world, a world based on new paradigms in science, in spirituality, longevity, and so on. Okay, so it's gibberish.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. I think I get it. It's a new world based on new paradigms of new paradigm worlds in which we
will be new.
Yeah, it's gibberish, but I'm getting to the evangelical criticism of the new age, actually, a little bit more
clearly, because they're really saying, they really are saying that they want to be God, yeah?
Mm-hmm.
Like, so it.
But I'm left with, like, is there any world in which, stoned or not, either of you would say you wanted to consciously co-create a world based on new paradigms?
I mean, that's the question we have to answer.
Well, it's interesting because the term paradigm comes from the Greek, and it means to show.
Oh, very classy.
Okay.
And yet, everything in the Expo is not actually about showing, but either feeling or anticipating a future that is bound to happen.
In a little while, we're going to run a clip from this dude, Bashar, or Channels Bashar, that he expresses a sentiment.
And in the conspiritualist sense, there's nothing to actually show because it's all intuited.
It's not an exposition, in other words.
It's not an expo.
Yeah, exactly!
What would you call it?
What's the opposite word?
Like the insposition?
The tell and hide, the point toward the layers of what is to be revealed without directly naming it, I don't know.
So look, new paradigms sound exciting.
They're always set against the foil of what isn't working today, right?
Here are all these problems and we have the solution which, you know, we're not going to do any exposition on.
Right.
At this point the term, and they're borrowing it of course from Thomas Kuhn, is always code for wishful thinking that's completely unsupported by evidence.
So when you call something new paradigm you're saying there's no evidence for this but all of us are Galileo and the rest of the world is the uptight Christian church.
Oh, I should also point out that Kuhn later admitted that he used the term paradigm 22 different ways in the structure of scientific revolutions.
Yeah.
And in fact, a lot of scientists now say the term is effectively meaningless because of that, which is actually probably why conspiritualists use it so freely.
It's been bastardized to the point that it basically means nothing.
You know, I feel the same way about the word yoga, and I guess what we're saying is that New Agers have culturally appropriated the term paradigm and that we really must return it to its authentic source meaning.
Yeah.
I was definitely wrong.
Did I just pass sequentially on that?
I think you did.
Gotta go off script sometimes.
Well, I mean, it's like when you talk about paradigm in that culturally appropriated way, the other word that goes with it is quantum.
Right.
Yeah.
And so you're comparing that to yoga in terms of how yoga has an original cultural, perhaps spiritual meaning that's just been watered down and lost.
Exactly.
Well, but we have to reinvest these terms with the meaning that they can hold, right?
I mean, I think that's part of the project of our podcast, no?
Absolutely.
So today we're going to define quantum paradigm for everyone.
Quantum paradigm yoga.
I wonder if that URL exists.
Julian, you should jump on that.
Yeah, we'll jump on it.
Ecstatic Quantum Paradigm Yoga.
There's your new brand.
Yeah, I guess.
I mean, the way that I would put my desire for conscious co-creation would be that I want to learn new strategies in the humanities and sciences that would help me dialogue with others about ways of improving our relationships and conditions.
But that's not where the exposition Sadly, no.
As with all community building in the name of commerce, bonding over shared values is key.
So here's another musical performance, this time officially scheduled.
The artist you're about to hear has a luminous blue and purple representation of chakras and aliens and eastern religious symbols behind him, and he's foregrounded by what looks like a packed house of mostly white, mostly boomers.
They're not the greatest dancers, but that's me being judgmental.
They're a bit stiff, but they do seem to be loving it.
Alright, so it's a good thing we have a world music journalist and accomplished producer
here that I can turn to.
Derek, what did we just hear?
Well, strap in, and let me just flag that when we got to this part of the script, I had to go ahead and write an entire other brief that's dropping on Saturday about this, because half this episode would be about this topic.
It's a 25-minute brief that's dropping that will address the topic of white reggae and what whiteness does to folk musics.
And yes, reggae qualifies as a folk music of Jamaica.
Anyway, what you did just hear was a live version by Grant This is how he opens his bio.
Grant is a multi-instrumentalist, record producer, and artist from Sedona.
His recent truth bomb, Scam—that was the song you just heard—was censored from Spotify within a week of release.
After making waves with Scam, he collaborated with Dickie Barrett Dude from the Mighty Mighty Boss Stones, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
on a song featured in The High Wire.
What?
Dickie Barrett is the old singer from Mighty Mighty Boss Stones.
Yeah, yeah, but what is Kennedy doing on the track?
He collaborated, I guess he took inspiration from, I don't know.
But Grant also brags about having perfect pitch and being a gifted musician and a piano prodigy before switching to guitar.
This line from his bio, Julian, it's for you.
Within a few years, he could play the technical music of guitar legends such as Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Ignae Malmsteen, and Eddie Van Halen.
Amazing.
So he's like saying he's the best guitarist ever, but... Yeah, so he could have been the next on that list, but he chose not to because he had a higher calling, right?
Right.
Exactly.
Everything filters down towards that.
So, I mean, at heart, Grant is an anti-vax, white reggae bro with a van lifestyle YouTube presence.
It's a really sweet van, too, right?
It's completely kitted out.
He does all of his production recording in there.
We should say, too, that he plays all instruments, so that when we see him on stage, he's singing to a track, right?
And he's recorded all of those?
What you had heard before, yeah.
He is multi-instrumentalist.
As I get into, he's not a bad musician in some ways, but the thing is, he certainly seems to have found his audience with conspiritualists.
You know, when you posted that clip originally on Instagram last week, Matthew, some people responded that he has a good voice.
I won't deny that, even though he does use some autotune in some of his tracks.
Yeah.
Can you just explain what the fuck autotune is?
Because I still don't understand that.
Autotune is actually a very helpful piece of software that was created in 97.
And basically it changes the pitch.
So if you fall off key, you can rekey yourself.
Awesome.
Now, to be fair, whether or not Grant has perfect pitch, that's fine.
I know people with perfect pitch.
And as a singer, sometimes you don't even notice you fall off pitch.
So autotune is very helpful.
It's just that autotune became its own sound that people use.
And that's what I referenced on his tracks.
It's a stylistic thing to use it to make that sound.
So sometimes you might sing one track and then multitrack it maybe an octave higher or lower and then autotune that to play with sounds.
That's all fine.
It's personally a sound that I can't stand when it's used intentionally.
Like, Beyonce uses it.
Beyonce probably will never fall off key, but she uses it because it's part of the style of the moment.
Yeah, it's interesting.
It became a stylistic thing with that huge song by Cher, back in the day, Do You Believe in Life After Love.
You keep pushing me aside and I can't break through There's no talking to you
And then T-Pain released probably like, you know, 20 different singles that all use that
wow, wow, wow, kind of weird sound on his voice.
Baby girl, what's your name?
Let me talk to you, let me buy you a drink I'm T-Pain
Yeah.
I mean, the new Lil Yachty record, who I was not a fan of as a hip hop artist, he went psychedelic and it's a great record.
He uses autotune throughout because he can't sing, but he's actually using it to pitch himself to match the music.
And you know what?
But in that context, it actually works.
This is why you're doing a brief, Derek.
This is why you're doing a brief on Saturday.
Let's get back to white reggae because that is important.
I think what we're actually saying is we really hate this expo and we want to talk about music nerdery.
I want to talk about how misanthropic I feel when I see people dancing in the park.
Yeah.
Yeah, so Grant is the perfect embodiment of what this expo is, but the white reggae point is important.
So on a musical level, you can immediately tell it's quote-unquote white because he's playing on the beat the whole time.
Now anyone can play reggae, but as I'll explore in the brief, Grant completely overlooks the cultural history of the music in his co-optation of reggae.
And I'll sum it up briefly by stating that he's cosplaying being an oppressed person When in reality, he's advocating against the social tools that the oppressed have long been fighting for.
So we've seen this over and over in the last few years.
The notion that the unvaccinated are really the oppressed members of society, which is fucking laughable.
But this song is a perfect example of fetishizing the oppressed in what I call privilege porn in the brief.
Nice.
Also, some other points.
There's the line, my health is my true wealth.
That's Swami Sivananda stuff, Divine Life Society.
But then also, the response is interesting to me because aside from the music, we put the clip up on our IG.
We credited Brad Abraham with a shot.
He's the documentarian of, like, all kinds of amazing fringe things who does correspondent stuff with QAA.
And in the first round of comments, we heard from our own crew, and then the singer's posse showed up.
So here's a sample.
We've got a couple of quotes here.
This is amazing, beautiful music from a beautiful human.
Do not judge or you too will be judged.
For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged.
And with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
Okay.
All right.
So some golden rule there.
But then there's standard, like, bliss in any comment.
Wow.
No, no, no, no, no.
Lower tone.
It's like, wow, wow, wow, man.
Wow.
It takes a lot of courage.
Wow, man.
It takes a lot of courage to stand up and speak this truth in a world so blinded by the Maya.
Quote the illusion.
Yeah.
Bless this brother for sharing.
I'm going to put my, I'm going to put my fist over my heart.
Bless this brother for sharing the wisdom that resides in the heart, for being a breathing creative expression and for shining light on just how far we have to go as a collective.
Never stop what you're misspelled doing.
It's pure, it's clear, and it's profound.
Hands up, heart emoji, hands together, star emoji.
My favorite part is when people use a term like Maya and then they put it in parentheses, like what the English translation is, like they're like a scholar who's schooling us.
I mean, it's just, it's great.
I mean, I think it's heartwarming that they support presence.
It's also really notable that creativity and artistic expression like runs cover for the content.
And it just made me think, it's like, it would be interesting as a thought experiment to wonder about how far they would stretch that.
Like, if Presence set, like, Matt Walsh-style transphobia to reggae, like, would the comments be the same?
Well, uh, let's point people towards Derek's brief again, because he actually has an answer to that in the brief, right?
Oh, oh God.
Yeah, there's a track that has a whole bunch of interesting reactionary, uh, shall we put it in quotation, rap lyrics going on.
Yeah, rap.
Back to the expo.
Listeners might remember Sasha Stone.
He's the eco-resort entrepreneur and founder of the International Tribunal for Natural Justice, which, as you might guess, exposes satanic pedophilia everywhere.
And failed musician who pivoted to Bali in order to make his career.
Yeah, to continue the theme.
In this video, he invites viewers to his keynote workshop at the Expo.
So this is a promo he did ahead of time by way of previewing his talk.
I'm preparing a generic form, a dynamic slideshow with multimedia in it so that I can try to
distill into one event a summation of all the elements.
Of what it is that I'm working on and what interests me, which is of course the trifecta of cosmogenesis, archaeocosmology, making its way through corrected history to the status quo and then understanding the Sabbatean invisible and to our To our holonomic dream spell, so to speak, and then understanding how to breach that and activate what I've loosely called the mechanics of ascension, which sounds a bit trite, frankly.
I should stop using that.
A little bit.
Yeah, you should stop using a lot of terms, Sasha.
I got to point out to listeners, because we don't do video, Julian, you were playing an excellent air violin there for a moment.
That is a common sort of tension building clip in a lot of marketing music these days.
Have you heard that?
I've heard that before, like a thousand times in a loop.
Okay.
So the expo always has a large contingent of psychics, ufologists, pseudoscience peddlers, and channelers.
Here's a rather famous channel I remember from the 90s.
He goes by Bashar.
He's telling us what to expect in the years to come.
Oh boy.
Even some of your more sensitive psychics have begun to pick up on this probability and are starting to announce it.
Somewhere near the end, middle to end of 2026, beginning, middle to beginning to the idea of 2027.
Somewhere right in there.
Somewhere in that.
You will experience on your planet a major contact event.
2026, 2027 will be a major contact event happening that everyone on your planet will become aware of.
So, be prepared, allow yourselves to be true to yourselves, be open, be flowing, and allow yourselves to know that when this major contact event occurs, 26, 27, It will herald in an awakening for many people on your planet, not all, but many people on your planet to really create a new momentum heading towards a shift in your realities individually and collectively that will begin to allow you to move even faster toward the idea of open contact
and becoming members of your galactic family.
So, prepare for those years.
Allow yourself to move forward.
It is very important for you to be yourself now, to allow this moment to your perception.
Thank you, everyone, for co-creating this experience with us.
Our unconditional love to you all, and we will see you again.
Oh god, there it is.
Yeah, I kept waiting for, like, there's commas, commas, commas, the next phrase comes, the next phrase comes.
Wow.
This is coming in three or four years, right?
This is, again, going back to Paradigm.
Who from this conference is going to even remember this talk?
When a major contact event doesn't happen.
What excuses will Bashar invent by the time to cover for his failed prophecy?
A paradigm is to show, and he showed nothing.
I mean, you remember this guy from the 90s, right, Julian?
Yeah, he was one of the first really revered channelers I became aware of.
I was just amazed at how many people I knew both took him seriously and were also, of course, offended when I pointed out that he was most likely a charlatan.
It's this guy Daryl Anka.
He claims to have had two UFO experiences in the same week in 1973.
And then, like 10 years later, he begins channeling the alien entity named Bashar, who, as it turns out, was actually on the UFO that he saw, which is pretty cool.
Yeah.
So now, in addition to free lectures and paid keynote workshops like the one held by Bashar in the La Jolla room, there are also panel discussions at the Expo.
So here's Foster Gamble kicking off the panel discussion on the New Earth.
Watching the video, I'm struck by the sight of Sasha Stone seated next to Jason Shurka and then Foster Gamble on stage with some other lesser-known psychics and prophets that are sort of padding the panel.
They all are serene and nodding along with whatever any of their allies have to say.
I mean, this is the thing that always stuns me about these sorts of gatherings of people, is they'll say contradictory things, they'll say wildly disconnected things that are tangential to what, you know, the last person may have just said, but they're all sort of maintaining.
Okay, but Julian, can you remind us who Foster Gamble is?
we're unfolding a coherent narrative here that has been discovered somehow ontologically, right?
Okay, but Julian, can you remind us who Foster Gamble is?
He sounds like a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.
It's funny you should say that.
I have on good authority that in a past life, Foster Gamble really was the mysterious 1920s millionaire
upon whom Fitzgerald based the great Gatsby.
But in this incarnation, Foster chose to be born the great great grandson of 19th century industrialist.
James Gamble, co-founder of the multinational consumer goods company Procter & Gamble.
Today, Foster is 78.
He's of course a former Aikido instructor, aspiring inventor, and has his own production company
called Clear Compass Media, which is behind the popular pseudoscience
new age documentary, in air quotes, Thrive, and its sequel, Thrive 2.
Now those films predictably recycle themes of shadowy banking conspiracies, evil reptilians,
things like that, in amongst the claims of breakthrough free energy technology
that would change the world if only the sheep would wake up.
Right.
There's also a ringing endorsement of a narco-capitalist economics,
and claims that taxation is just theft, which is something that always seems
to come up in this stuff as well.
I'll actually share the link in the show notes to a brilliant 2012 review that we've touched on before that debunks the Thrive documentary.
It's by Eric Johnson.
Okay, so the trio here is a trust fund guy, an ex-rocker living in a bamboo palace in Bali like Captain Kurtz, or Beefheart, and Jason Schurke is from a real estate magnate family, correct?
Yeah, you nailed it.
We've got some fortunate son hobbyists cosplaying as renegade enlightened disruptors.
Awesome.
priests to the Kings to ultimately to the presidents and prime ministers and
so forth that's the arc of the moral universe that that Martin Luther King
said is wrong but it bends toward justice what is that bending toward it's
bending toward more and more individual sovereignty all of that theme has been
and so people think well we can't live without government We have to learn to live without government.
Everything that they claim to do for us will be done better by independent organizations, individuals competing in a true free market with honest money to provide the best services at the best prices.
And that, when we allow that in, That will unleash creativity of humanity.
The energy devices, the medical devices, the truth media, all of this is starting to get unleashed now.
Wow.
So basically this is the New Age version of what Gorski and Perry from our White Christian Nationalism episode referred to as Christian Libertarianism, huh?
It's the arc of freedom bends toward free market capitalism for pseudoscience scams.
What a perfect example of the very definition of conspirituality.
The rights free market ethos receiving claps and shouts from a group of Southern California hippies.
It all collides in sovereignty here.
And I also want to point out that it's where People like all the stuff we see in JP Sears and Sherka, for example, and all of their talks about capitalism, what happens when you just rely on the free market is that you can move away from regulations that actually help people who need it most.
So everywhere on the right they're trying to deconstruct government as much as possible and they use this idea of freedom and liberation coming from the free market.
In order to obscure the fact that, as always, the people who most need the money and the resources are going to be further pushed aside, which is going to create more homelessness in the democratic cities, which they can then point to as the problem, and that cycle continues.
Yeah, and the amazing thing about that is they point to the crisis of unhoused people in democratic cities as being evidence of what?
Communism.
I mean, like, the incoherence is incredible.
And then when you hear Foster Gamble talking, it's just littered with all of these, you know, different right-wing reference points.
I'm always amazed by people who never had to actually work.
I'm not saying he didn't.
Same with, like, Scherko.
Like, these people might actually work, but when you don't have to, When you know at any time, no matter what, you're going to be okay financially, the types of ideologies that you come up with are vastly different from people who've spent their entire lives just staying above zero in hopes of not falling victim to something like homelessness.
Yeah, I wonder how that happens.
And since you brought up F. Scott Fitzgerald, I mean, the rich are not like us, you and I. They are different.
Yeah, absolutely.
And then of course we also see how all of that right-wing libertarian philosophy is very appealing to people who are trying to get even more wealthy from products that are making pseudoscience claims and that will then see any kind of attempt to regulate their pseudoscience claims as either censorship or tyranny, right?
Yeah, so here we are at the panel discussion.
Sasha Stone picks up the baton as they're all sort of introducing each other of weird, non-sequitur racial appropriation, which we didn't say anything about yet, right?
This is his using MLK as a sort of touchstone Foster Gamble is for his mission.
Here's Sasha Stone's version of that.
What can we look forward to in the next few years?
Well, thank you in the first instance to the Expo.
It's the first time I've attended this and it's a little scary for a white African boy like me.
But I've done a fair bit of public speaking so I don't get nervous in front of crowds any longer.
I'm not sure that I'm that qualified to be here.
I'm a bona fide schizophrenic.
You're looking at someone who is his mother's nemesis, because she told me when I turned 16, she took me aside in Southern Africa, in the kitchen, and she said, look, do what you like in life, but don't ever become a jack of all trades and a master of none.
Alas, I've become a jack of all trades and a master of none.
But that's the burden that I bear.
So indeed, I do wear a number of hats, which is what makes me a schizophrenic.
And that's because my own integration, being a war child and growing up in a war for the first 16 years of my life and being on the wrong end of grenades and bullets and what have you, seeing what a child should never see and being in an environment that a child should never live through.
Cut me the cloth that I needed to wear in life as an activist, but that activism necessarily makes its way toward consciousness.
How could it do anything but lead us toward consciousness?
So that's where I stand.
The work I do with the Arise Guerrilla News Network is, block your ears anyone who's a liberal intellectual, that is my cleverly crafted Fuck you to the establishment.
And it's a very necessary one.
Because there is no consciousness activation until we've dealt with the shit in the basement.
So that's the position that I come from.
I'm not holier than thou.
I wish I were, but I'm not.
The Lazarus Symposium, which I launched, deals with sciences, innovation, breakthrough physics, and I'm very excited and honored to work with some of the leading minds in the world, from mathematics to physics and so on.
And Humanitarian Foundation has done, as some of you attended my talk this morning know, I've done 23 years now of high-end diplomacy dealing with heads of state, dealing with many of the so-called white hats, the so-called dragons and kings of kings and all of that hoo-ha.
It's real.
It's not Yeah, so that was kind of long, I apologize to listeners, but I wanted to let him just unfold his thing, right?
Because there's so much self-deprecation and self-contradiction mixed in with all of this.
just delusional grandiosity that, you know, this is these he's cut his teeth on high level diplomacy working with the
most important dragons and kings of the world. But that's not that doesn't really matter because really it's about
consciousness and I'm just a schizo.
Yeah, I was honestly going to ask you to cut this clip because it amounts to nothing but those contradictions. The
holier than now but listen to me ramble endlessly. But it really did make me realize how much Sasha is basically a
poor man's Russell brand.
And he's drowning people in words that sound important, but don't actually effectively lead to anywhere.
And then you have the liberal intellectual, the coming out of basically, he keeps coming back to these hooks that kind of make you think, you know, what's going on before he just goes back into this weird place.
I think there's something about the accent, the antiquated references.
I mean, earlier, I remember way back in the beginning of our archive, we have a show in which he's talking about... The basement.
Well, no, Beelzebub has to be decapitated or eviscerated or something like that.
And it all sounds like it comes out of some strange Victorian novel.
And I think that wins something for him.
I think it's, like, disconcerting.
There's nothing there, but there's a kind of monocled affect, you know?
And I think it impresses people somehow.
Yeah, yeah.
He says, this is a Leviathan, this is a Medusa, and it must be beheaded, it must be eviscerated.
And then he says, there are very dark things going on in the basement involving, you know, blood and babies and all.
This image of the basement is something he returns to a lot.
Yeah, dime store novel stuff too, right?
Okay, so Jason Shurka is up next to introduce himself on the panel, and yeah, as is necessary in this kind of sequence, he ups the ante in his own way.
Yeah, fascinating.
COVID is the greatest blessing that's ever happened to this planet.
It's the greatest blessing that's ever happened to this planet because we're finally cleansing.
We're finally detoxing.
But we have to shift our perspective in terms of how we see the obstacles that come our way.
We have to understand that COVID, yes, on the surface, and the past three years, has been here on the surface to control and whatnot.
But what did it really do?
What did Bill Gates do?
What did Anthony Fauci do?
What did the Rockefellers do?
What did the Rothschilds do?
They woke us up!
They're a part of us.
They're not outside of us.
They're not against us.
On the surface, they are.
But they're the reason why the Great Awakening is happening.
They're the reason why we add a catalyst to the fast that we're going through right now and waking up.
This new earth, we owe it to them because they're the dark part of ourselves that's finally waking us up and bringing us back to where we once were.
So the second we can start to see that we lose victimhood, the second we lose victimhood, this world changes.
and we start to change who we are, and we will see a reflection in the change
of the reality that we see.
So we're on a beautiful path.
I hope it keeps getting crazier because the fast is only going to get us cleaner.
And the crazier it gets, the quicker we're going to get to exactly where we need to be.
And we are exactly where we need to be if we choose to see it that way.
Yeah, so the crazier it gets, the better.
I'm going to sprinkle in some good anti-Semitic and really intense conspiratorial tropes about the Rothschilds and about Fauci, demonizing Fauci, which is a really popular thing on the right right now.
But it's also all going to be cloaked in this language of overcoming victimhood and waking up to new consciousness.
Yeah, he's such a douchebag.
For his bar mitzvah, his father bought him this ancient scroll from Israel.
I don't know how expensive it was, but I'm so sick of these self-proclaimed spiritual figures like him.
As Matthew flagged before, he comes from a wealthy New York City real estate family.
He's an executive there.
I never hear him ever talk about that, but you can find it on his family's websites.
And he's spouting that COVID is the greatest thing ever.
I mean, 7 million deaths worldwide now we're approaching.
Some countries underreport or don't report, so we're probably over that number.
So, fucking douchebag.
Tell the families of these victims how COVID is going so great while verbally masturbating about your spiritual revolution.
Tell me how that's going.
Yeah, you know, I think we also have to appreciate all of the rich themes and unrelenting rhythm he's got here.
He's really good at this.
That was a minute and 20 seconds, and he fit a whole string of things in really succinctly.
So COVID is a cleansing.
Not because it exists, but because it exposed what the elites want to do to us.
But we're really doing it to ourselves.
Fauci and Gates are parts of ourselves that are waking us up from victimhood.
And it should all happen more quickly now, and everything should transform.
But also, quote, we are exactly where we need to be if we choose to see it that way.
Bashar said something similar, which is, you just have to be yourselves.
Stay loose, stay ready, stay fluid.
It's so amazing because their advice is actually to do nothing, right?
It's to do nothing except listen to me.
It's to do nothing very urgently.
Very urgently to do nothing.
The last line in particular, I don't think it can be underestimated in terms of rhetorical genius and amazing capacity of piety to cover over bullshit.
Like, we are exactly where we need to be if we choose to see it that way is logically the same as our turds are ham sandwiches if we choose to taste them that way.
He's awesome at making you think he's saying something that makes more sense than that, but it really doesn't.
It's extraordinary.
I would even go one step further and say I'm going to describe to you in detail a lot of paranoid, fanciful aspects of the turds, and then I'm going to tell you that the turds on the bread are actually a ham sandwich because ultimately you can choose to look at it that way.
You know, finding these clips online after the conference made me want to talk to someone who was really there.
So I reached out to Anna Merlin.
She's the author of Republic of Lies.
She's a journalist at Vice.
We've had her on before.
It turns out that Merlin has been to the Conscious Life Expo more than once.
And she tells me about how it has evolved over the last six years.
Anna Merlin, welcome back to Conspiratuality Podcast.
Thanks for having me.
You were just at the 2023 Conscious Life Expo.
And so I want to ask you about that.
But first, it turns out this was not your first Unicorn Rodeo.
And I know this because the last time you were here, it was to talk about your excellent book, Republic of Lies.
In chapter one of that book, you recount being at the 2017 Conscious Life Expo.
It appears that you scooped us by a good three years on writing about how New Age spiritual seekers had more than a passing penchant for conspiracy theories.
You write about how Trump had just been inaugurated?
The QAnon precursor, Democrat pedophile conspiracy theory, Pizzagate, was gaining traction.
And wouldn't you know it, RFK Jr., who has now had a starring role during the pandemic, had been asked at that time by the Donald to chair a panel on vaccine safety due to his misinformed activism around vaccines and autism.
So tell me more about that time and what your experience was like at the expo circa 2017.
I was trying to remember how I ended up at Conscious Life in the first place, and I believe it was because I had just gone on a cruise for Conspiracy Theorists a few months ago.
It was literally called The Conspiracy, and several of the presenters had mentioned that they were going to be attending Conscious Life as either, you know, presenters or, you know, just because it's a big Social event in the new age health and wellness world.
So when I was there in 2017, there was, as I wrote in my book, a real sort of energy and optimism in the air.
And it was very much tied to Donald Trump.
There's just no getting around that there was this excitement, there was this sense that he was going to kind of unlock these secrets, you know, disclose these kind of
corrupt power structures, and you know, perhaps as presenter David Wilcox suggested at the time, you know,
lead these mass arrests of the secret pedophiles working within government, which of
course became you know, an enormous facet of
QAnon as a conspiracy theory.
So it was sort of impossible not to notice that energy in the air and the ways that right-wing politics were making an incursion into conscious life at the time.
And then your next visit was in 2020.
You wrote about this for Vice and about how the founder, Robert Quicksilver, whose name is straight out of Central Casting, right?
Yeah.
He told you he'd been trying to drive out the conspiracists.
And I want to just give a big shout out here to Catherine Virginia, who did the illustration For the article, and it's of this person who's purple, lying down with their eyes covered, they have a big spiritual medallion around their neck that's sort of resting on their belly, and they're surrounded by giant crystals, and there's a trio of green aliens treating them to a sound bath.
Yeah.
They're using a tuning fork and a gong and a singing bowl.
I mean, it's just an epic image.
It's a really good one.
Your opening sentence I also thought was really classic.
You say, the point we seemed to be gently approaching The several hundred of us sitting together in this ballroom was that Jesus is an extraterrestrial.
So how was the confluence of conspiracies, politics, UFOs, pseudoscience and spirituality at the Conscious Life Expo for you in 2020?
Yeah, so 2020 was kind of my big visit where I went with the sole intention of just going to as many lectures as possible.
And of course, it's funny because it was February 2020.
So you think about, you know, being in a room with 12,000 people with unusual ideas about how disease spreads at that time.
And of course, even a month later, it would not have been something I would have been excited to do.
So the Jesus was an extraterrestrial lecture was Linda Moulton Howe, who is, of course, a really famous UFOs sort of journalist and activist and like a lot of
folks in that world There's a lot of religious stuff a lot of Christianity kind
of seeded through What she talks about and a lot of kind of exploration of
the ways that in her work there is a confluence of
Disclosure, you know the idea of trying to discover what we know about aliens and UFOs and alien visitation and kind of
religious stuff But as I wrote about in my piece for vice my kind of bigger
interest was going back to the Expo and really trying to understand the role of what most people would refer to as
conspiracy theories because Conscious life has already always had kind of a fraught
relationship with conspiratorial thinking There are years when it is really present.
You know, when I went in 2017, they screened Vaxxed, which was a huge anti-vaccine documentary.
In 2020, as I talked to Robert Quicksilver about, there was a little bit more of a defensiveness about the idea of Conscious Life as a site for conspiratorial thinking.
He really wanted me to know that he was trying to have that not be a big part of the expo.
I think at the time he said something like, you know, I like art and beauty and spiritual
things and that's what we want at the expo.
At the same time, there was an exhibitor who were these two guys who are kind of figures
in the QAnon world and they were selling these kind of like maps that map out kind of the
conspiratorial universe as they see it.
I was told this year that they were actually banned from the expo this year because according to the organizers, they Conscious Life 2020 was really interesting.
of the kind of evil cabal that they're trying to uncover.
Right, of course. And so they weren't allowed, they weren't invited back. So yeah, Conscious Life 2020
was really interesting. It was really like a look at you know, how this world tries to decide what is allowed
in and sort of what is harmful, so to speak. And then this year
of course was an extension of that. Yeah, so another three years have gone by
and true to the synchronistic pattern that connects all things, you recently
returned. Yeah.
Every three years you're going to make your pilgrimage to the holy site of the LA Airport Hilton.
And this time, despite Robert Quicksilver assuring you that QAnon style beliefs were just silly and not welcome, one of the event halls was named the Rabbit Hole Room.
And it featured, you know, these are all characters that we talk about all the time, Oliver Stone's son, Sean Stone, speaking on The Great Awakening, no relation to QAnon, of course.
Mickey Willis, debuting the latest installment of his Plandemic series, as well as a raft of other to-and-on-adjacent conspiritualist types, Sacha Sohn, Laurie Ladd, Jason Schurke, and Del Bigtree.
So, tell us, how is the state of the Conscious Life Expo in 2023?
So I have one bit of disclaimer here, which is that I decided to just go for part of Sunday because I am still pretty COVID cautious and Conscious Life is not.
I don't think anyone would disagree with me on that.
And so I had to make some decisions about Coverage of the event versus not wanting to get sick before a holiday weekend and not wanting to bring that home.
I hope no one got sick.
Judging by how crowded the event was, though, I think, you know, I think it's reasonable to.
To wonder.
So I went to see Del Bigtree speak because I was very interested in what he would have to say to a Conscious Life audience, and I went to talk to some exhibitors.
I decided not to stay for Mickey Willis's Plandemic premiere.
I am not convinced that this installment of Plandemic is going to be significantly different than any previous ones, but Perhaps I'm wrong.
He's like, he's like Lil Wayne at this point.
He has so many different versions of Plandemic and so many, you know, remixes of Plandemic and so many short videos that are, it's very unclear how they fit in with Plandemic as a project and God bless him.
This year though, before I attended, I spoke to Robert Quicksilver, the founder, and Michael Satva, his son, who is now one of, he's like a big organizer in the event.
I talked to them about the Rabbit Hole Room as a concept and sort of their goals with conscious life and they're kind of thinking right now about where conspiracy theories fit in.
This year was interesting because they are no longer saying, you know, that conspiratorial thinking doesn't have a place at the expo.
Their approach this year was to say, you know, we allow that conspiratorial thinking as part of the kind of new age universe and what we're going to do is we're going to put it in this Special room, the rabbit hole room.
We're going to set it off.
And so if folks want to have those conversations, they're going to have them there.
But, um, Mr. Quicksilver told me pretty explicitly several times that he doesn't want what he calls that QAnon bullshit at Conscious Life, that he is comfortable with conspiratorial thinking.
He's comfortable with, you know, conversations about anti-vaccine beliefs, which do not mirror his own.
He's vaccinated.
But he really didn't want QAnon stuff, and he sees that as a hard line.
His son, Michael Satva, meanwhile, was pretty clear that what he finds sort of troubling or harmful are anti-Semitic belief systems, right?
But as I talked to both of them about, and as I kind of outlined in the article, and as any listeners of your show would know, the line between QAnon stuff and other types of conspiratorial thinking is not, is not all that clear.
It's not all that bright.
And so while I would say that it's probably accurate that there was nobody specifically in the Radbihol room or elsewhere in the expo saying, you know, we should all be following QAnon.
Um, there are a lot of sentiments about, you know, the sort of like satanic Luciferian one world cabal that needs to be uncovered.
And, you know, where people like Bill Gates and Fauci, fit into that. And then of course, you know, you have
people like Sasha Stone who talk a lot about things that to me sound very QAnon-y but dressed up in much
more new age language.
I'm sure he would disagree with that characterization though.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And in the article you talk about, of course he would, in the article you talk about how Quicksilver, I don't know if it was Quicksilver or Sattva, was saying, you know, we put the rabbit hole room in the very bowels of the hotel.
So you have to go down this long hallway.
It's going to be like sort of in the basement lowest area.
So in a way, we're almost kind of poking fun at it, but at the same time, it's like we still
want to have it be part of what we do.
And they did.
I mean, it was down this long hallway that they put these purple curtains up.
There was a white rabbit wearing a suit, kind of nonchalantly examining its nails.
That was like the kind of figurehead for the rabbit hole room, and there was figurines of him, or cutouts of him
in a couple of places.
So they are very clear on the reputation at this part of the expo, and they were playing with it.
But at the same time, and both of them talked to me about this,
they were very concerned with the idea that they would be acting as censors
and that they would be inadvertently keeping some discussion out of the expo that people would want to
have.
And so it seems like their sentiment is erring on the side of having presenters be involved who
people want to see and promoting what they think of as open dialogue.
Yeah, and I'll just say by way of my own commentary, sort of gamifying the location of the rabbit hole room in such a way that you heighten the anticipation of now we're heading down the long and winding road with the purple curtains and the rabbit cutouts.
I'm not so sure that that qualifies as distancing themselves somehow.
Well, it's an interesting conundrum, too, because obviously people want People want this stuff.
The Dell BigTree lecture was packed.
Every seat was full.
Folks were standing in the back.
Also, these people charge money for their lectures.
You're not, you're not getting in just with a day pass for the expo.
You know, most of these folks were charging 45 bucks ahead for their tickets on top of the day pass.
You know, you're going to pay $100 to attend the entire week of the expo and then add on, you know, $80 if you want to see Del Bigtree and Mickey Willis.
So, um, I have to assume that it makes money.
So earlier you heard from some speakers on one of several panel discussions that cost
just $10 in advance to attend $20 at the door.
These still also required the baseline $40 Sunday day pass to the expo to attend.
But now, let's say you wanted to go to Sasha Stone's full talk in the Rabbit Hole Room, or Sean Stone, or Mickey Willis, or Del Bigtrees.
Well, in addition to the day pass necessary to even be in the expo, those Rabbit Hole Room talks were $45 in advance and $55 at the door each time.
So you'd have to exit and come back in and pay again to see each of those figures.
You could pay five, $600 easily just on talks throughout this weekend, right?
Absolutely.
And to even attend those talks, you're first buying the day pass or you're buying the three-day sort of festival pass.
So while the getting to this all organic, non-GMO, mind-melting, great awakenings, conspirituality venue may have required a pilgrimage into the bowels of the hotel through the purple curtains and past the winking white rabbit cardboard cutouts, And while there may be some pretense from the organizers that this deprioritizes conspiracism, in the words of my esteemed colleague, watch what they say and then watch what they sell.
Or in this case, look at how they price and profit from the ideology they claim not to fully support.
For context here, with 53 listed presentations being free with a day pass, That bigger ticket pricing applied only to what the Expo designated as Keynote Workshops.
There were 32 Keynote Workshops over the three-day weekend, and 13 of those were in the rabbit hole room.
Yeah, I find the segregated rabbit hole really interesting because the Expo seems to be having its cake and eating it, but also barfing it all at the same time.
Like, we don't accept QAnon, although maybe a little bit in the basement.
And we don't want to alienate the red pill, but we also want them, like, away from the main stage.
And so we'll buy into it, but we'll also cover our asses with irony and put cutouts of rabbits, you know, in the hallway.
Yeah, it's very, very interesting.
Let's make them find it like it's a game.
I think it really goes to show how volatile QAnon and QAdjacent content is.
It seems to go through these waves where it derives engagement and then it curdles with a kind of stigma and then it gets rebranded or laundered or it gets like just completely isolated onto Telegram, but then it'll come back, it'll gain steam, the cycle continues.
I don't see how it would be possible for a gathering like this to not have a rabbit hole, and to signal to those people that they weren't welcome.
So, I guess the really sort of bourgeois task is to find a way to exploit an economic winner without getting your hands dirty, right?
Yeah, I mean, I would imagine that if they tried to remove any of that QAnon, anti-vax, conspiritualist element, There would be some kind of insurrection, right?
Yeah, there would be online trolling, there would be all kinds of attacks, there'd be conspiracy theories around the Expo.
Exactly, that the Expo has now been captured by the mainstream narrative.
They're held hostage.
They're funded by Soros.
Exactly.
So as she told us, Anna Merlin specifically wanted to see what Del Bigtree had to say at the expo.
So here's footage of him from his keynote workshop, giving a little of his anti-vax backstory at the start of his talk in the rabbit hole room.
Big Tree, as you may know, is a former TV producer who worked on Dr. Phil and then on a spinoff show called The Doctors, which gave medical advice, which as it turned out was assessed by the British Medical Journal as being about 63% supported by evidence.
That number was apparently too high for Big Tree, who had a crisis of conscience when a guest on that show, The Doctors, was in favor of the 2015 California Senate Bill 277, which removed personal belief as an exemption for kids being required to be vaccinated in order to enter public schools and daycare facilities.
So here's how Big Tree describes what happened next.
It got to a point where I couldn't see straight.
I was so frustrated, having trouble eating.
My stomach was bothering me.
And I sat down in my office and I prayed deeply.
And I said, I feel like there's a reason you've led me into this world and this medical talk show.
I've never been to a doctor in my life.
I won an Emmy Award.
I am grateful.
I feel blessed.
But in all honesty, I feel like I'm the one that has the media understanding to be able to go after and stop SB 277.
I feel like I should be telling this whistleblower's story and I don't, you know, who else is going to do it?
Please, I'm praying, give me a sign on what I'm supposed to do.
And... 30 seconds later, my phone rings.
And it's Donna Shuman.
Amazing.
Amazing saying.
She says, uh, do you remember me as a guest?
Donna, what do you want?
Would you like to meet Dr. Andrew Wakefield?
I can't tell you what that moment was like.
It was clear at that moment that something divine was taking place, and it has truly been divine.
So let's get started.
I think everyone should remember also that Del Bigtree is so dedicated to his shtick.
I mean, if we're going to sort of consider the earnestness here, He almost bled out from hemorrhoids as he raced around looking for unvaccinated blood.
He finally found it at some cancer clinic in Tijuana.
This is about a year ago now.
So, you know, Jordan Peterson would rather start moral panics instead of going to therapy.
And Del Bigtree would rather die of a bleeding butt than to become a cuck of the Red Cross.
Also, the crowd, like, clapping that he'd never been to a doctor.
That's just fucking weird.
Like, how weird is that?
And to Dell, if you think getting an opportunity to meet Andrew Wakefield is divine, you need to find a new religion.
I don't know, man, because Wakefield has, like, a Roman god, statuesque kind of vibe going on.
I love his accent.
Makes him seem very smart.
You can never really account for the mystery of devotion, and I think you atheists should just stay in your lane.
So, Del pivots next to starting his slideshow, which quite naturally begins with page one of the Bible.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word created Del Bigtree.
He makes an argument for the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil that Adam and Eve were forbidden from eating, referring to the arrogance of humans in thinking they can interfere with God's perfect balance by using antibacterial soap.
And vaccines!
It's the usual stuff.
The pandemic was manufactured so that big pharma could take over the world and exponentially increase their profits.
The vaccines are horribly dangerous.
And Dell's got the cherry-picked and misinterpreted science to prove it.
We don't have to rehash all of that.
But here's one more point in his oratory as he inspires the crowd to action with dodgy science and alternative facts.
But is there anyone in this room that did not compromise your truth at some point through this, looking at a loved one, a brother, a sister, a mother, a father, a friend, and say, you know what?
I should tell them everything I know about this, but it's really going to fuck up their day.
Or it's going to really mess up this dinner.
Or maybe they won't speak to me again.
How are we any different when we did that?
This evil is our separation from who we are.
Our birthright.
And what we're supposed to be.
So Ivermectin is dead.
Who paid for it?
Unitaid is funded by France, the United Kingdom, Norway, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Like you couldn't have guessed that.
And by the way, since then, now 90 studies, 963 scientists, 133,842 patients in 27 countries, all proving that ivermectin works.
And we still haven't seen that paper get changed by Andrew Hill or the WHO, and no one is supporting ivermectin all around the world.
Because at this point, think about it.
If they do, Then they're going to prison for having kept us from using it when we should have.
So don't tell me about the million people, Del, that died and you're out there spreading misinformation.
No!
New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, the blood is on your hands!
You killed and lied and propagandized for the murder of over a half a million Americans and millions all around the world and we will never For that.
Right.
That you did that.
Just a nice spiritual gathering in sunny California.
I think it's important as we listen to his soaring oratory that he grew up in unity of Boulder Church with his dad, who's the veteran preacher, Jack Groverland, and his mom, Norma Bigtree, who's the choir director.
He has been known to preach there on the dangers of vaccines.
So, you know, you can take the anti-vaxxer out of the church, but you can't take the church out of the anti-vaxxer.
I just want to emphasize how, at least from my seat here in Canada, in the U.S.
context, this rhetorical and affect crossover between preaching and politics, just, it's like everywhere.
Like, you can't unhear it.
We hear it in, you know, Zach Bush, Christiane Northrup wouldn't be anywhere without it.
We're going to look at Willis in a moment, and I'm willing to bet he picked that up somewhere too.
Yeah, this clip reminds me of when Deepak Chopra was on stage debating Sam Harris, and Sam tells Deepak, just because you're screaming something doesn't make it true.
But Dell relies on such theatrics to rile up his base, which makes sense, as you said, given his church training.
I just really hope that people realize it's a tried and true technique.
Yeah, well, there's lots of techniques, Derek, and I would like to defend Deepak here and say that just because Harris maintains that super anal, holier-than-thou monotone while he's talking about how meditation can cure racism doesn't make him right.
But that's another episode.
Oh, so we're finally going to do a Sam Harris episode?
Okay.
All right.
I don't know.
I don't know.
That was a very Biden move of you there, Derek.
I like to see conversions.
So, a radicalizing fervor seems to hum underneath all of these talks.
As the weekend unfolded, researchers we follow on Twitter started sharing a couple threads by a woman named Noelle Cook, and she's doing an ethnographic study of female January 6th defendants, from whom she actually learned for the first time about the Conscious Life Expo as a gathering point for their conspiritualist family.
So, here's a researcher discovering the pipeline we cover, essentially, but in the opposite direction, going from Far Right toward New Age.
One really interesting thing was watching Cook learn in real time about the New Age concept of being a starseed.
And recognizing the overlapping appeal for middle-aged empty nesters like herself, and the insurrectionist women she studies.
Characteristics like falling out of place in the world, longing to find purpose and shared values in community, and seeking spiritual meaning.
So, drawn in by these similarities, Noelle Cook went to the Expo.
Here's what she told me about attending Mickey Willis' Rabbit Hole Room talk.
It's when you get Mickey Willis on stage, who starts to ask everyone in the audience, what are you willing to live and die for?
And he says it louder and louder, five or six times.
It's a war cry.
It's a rallying cry.
And everyone's starting to yell out, children!
This!
God!
My country!
And then he's like, that's right.
That's right.
So what are you going to do now?
Right?
That kind of thing.
And then he starts to tell us about their new learning center they're going to build and how they're trying to spread it through the country.
And I keep thinking to myself, where is everyone else here countering this?
For two years now, these people are taking over public education.
You know, Moms for Liberty has been at it.
And the best the left has been able to do is do some Zoom meetings with glasses of wine and just talk about the problem.
We're not organizing and running.
We're just sitting back watching it happen.
You know, Matthew, you said earlier, like, where is Mickey Willis going from here?
And if we watch the trajectory of...
From the pandemic being focused in part on children to then evolving to really focusing on that, to where he's posting photos on social media, where he has his little homeschooling network, wherever he's living right now, and they're showing the kids and the parents, and then the Medical Freedom Compound in Lake Travis, which was presented as a place where you can raise your children free of Western medicine interventions.
And now hearing how she describes what he's doing, Focusing on children, it feels like he's really going harder and harder in that direction.
He wants to be the—all of the inability to string coherent sentences together in his speeches, all that aside, he's going to be the ultimate father figure of, like, we need to save the children.
You know, it might be a good angle for him because it's so clear that he doesn't know what he's talking about, but from day to day he is actually parenting.
So I wonder if there's actually some relief in moving into something like that is more close to home, a little bit more mundane, it's a little bit more, you know, feet on the ground, a little bit more touching earth.
So, yeah, there's something tragic about that, that maybe vaccines shouldn't really be the focus because he doesn't know what he's talking about.
But, you know, he's around children and maybe he can be an influencer in that sphere and maybe he'll be more credible.
Yeah, and in these QA episodes that you referenced earlier, Matthew, they shared their own live recordings from being in the room that day, and there's an interesting transitive property here, right, which goes from alternative medicine to alternative education.
And he has a moment from one of their recordings where he talks about, you know, they're creating these prides, they're raising young lions, and they say, we're not allowed to call them schools.
Oh, no, no, we'll get in big trouble if we call them schools.
And someone shouts from the audience, so you call them, like, learning centers, right?
So, again, there's a sense of, like, being outside of the mainstream.
Translates across all of these domains, including how you educate children.
And also, Young Lion's calling them prides.
His clothing company is called Rebel Lion.
So, there's the monetization angle from how he's framing it as well.
Yeah.
So on those QAA recordings, they show Mickey kind of ad-libbing with the crowd.
And as he does, he just plays along with the range of wild answers that he elicits using his questions.
Things like, COVID is a bioweapon.
Vaccines are about depopulation.
This is a slave pilot, like all the stuff that we've heard before, but he just draws it all in and recycles it and gives it back to them.
And he was doing this to fill time because it looks like Mercury may have been in retrograde that day.
The tech crew couldn't get his latest Rumble video to play live in the room, which was how he really wanted to start.
So while he's speaking, we're going to play you a little bit of that video.
This is what Mickey wanted to use at the start of his talk, but was unable to.
In this clip, while he's speaking, there's a montage of Agitprop style filmmaking, which alternates with super close shots of Mickey's face bathed in blue light from different, obviously flattering angles.
I've been a human rights activist for almost 20 years as a documentary filmmaker.
I've been on the front lines of many of our nation's biggest scandals and protests.
From that perspective, I've been an eyewitness to the rise and fall of numerous people-powered movements.
Nearly every organized resistance I've been a part of has ended just inches from victory for the same critical mistake.
Infighting.
When members of the same group turn against each other.
It often begins with whispers about the most prominent spokespeople of the cause.
These rumors typically sound like, I hear John is controlled opposition.
Or, some people are saying Jane is compromised.
While the use of infiltrators and agitators is a very real thing, I've yet to experience one scenario where such a label was accurately applied.
And suspiciously, these labels are always branded on the people who are making the most progress.
With the degradation of their reputation goes their contribution to your life.
Prior to social media, people actually sat down to dialogue through their differences.
Today, without solid evidence or sufficient inquiry, we go directly to our keyboards to vent our suspicions.
Even after the rumor is proven false or simply fades away, some level of doubt and division always remains.
This is all by design.
That goes on for another four minutes.
It's more of the same, but I found the angle really fascinating.
It's like we've come in partway through a paranoid discussion about power struggles and dark intrigue, government infiltrations, CIA double agents.
He's talking about, he's alluding towards infighting without being specific about the details, but then is implying all of this other stuff.
He's referencing how the paranoid style inherent to conspiracy content and community actually, telling on himself, defines the interpersonal dynamics as well.
And then he's calling for unity in this video amongst a group of followers whose epistemology has been poisoned by the exact misinformation he's ridden to fame and fortune.
It's also kind of the shadow side of prophetic grandiosity, right?
Like what I'm doing is so important that all of these forces are trying to discredit me and others in our quote-unquote movement.
Julian, I think it's really generous of you to call it an angle.
I what I hear what I hear is somebody who has like a knob in the back of his head and as he turns it slowly it bumps from channel to channel and it just bumps from from topic to topic.
Yeah.
It's just to me it's a jumbled sort of gish gallop of.
I agree with that, but he has those little moments where he has himself whispering in his own ear, so-and-so is controlled opposition.
This person is a double agent, like things like that.
It seems like he is actually trying to talk to his community about some dynamic that he's observed in which there's all of this sort of mistrust and a set of accusations, right?
And also, you pointed out his lack of coherence in his live speeches, but he is a skilled producer, and I find it pretty rich that he talks about propaganda when that is a propaganda video on every level.
So, if he wants to bring Orwell into this, he knows the actual techniques that he's using.
I just, I want to go back to this thing about maybe he will retreat back into sort of family life themes and maybe, I don't know, but that's not good either because the film, the camera will still be running.
I mean, he really is the Zoolander of New Age anons, right?
Like, there's really, he knows how to make things look good.
Do you remember the very first thing he did that went viral and got him famous?
His kids in the car when his son was playing with a doll.
Yeah.
So it's this video of him being the sensitive dad who's comfortable with a gender nonconforming
toy choice from his son.
And that got him featured on like national news and on like a local daytime talk show.
That's better content, right?
But again, that's what he jumped on, and then the knob turns in the back of his head, and like Zoolander, he's on to whatever the next thing is.
Well, wherever the audience is, wherever the audience capture is.
After that video went viral, he's like, oh, there's something here.
And he started pursuing it, but he never caught that same wave.
And then later on, you just see him over and over from Elevate and then through the rest of his career looking for that wave to catch music videos, different documentaries about regenerative soil, whatever he was focused on at that time.
And then he catches this wave of pandemic and now he's really found his audience.
Yeah, he's been a human rights activist for 30 years.
In every people-powered movement that has failed just inches from victory, it's been for one reason and one reason only, that it didn't represent the exact opposite point of view that he was about to get involved in.
Guys, I feel so nauseous and demoralized by this whole episode, and I hope we don't publish it at all.
Except, I would, you know, maybe if we can answer, why are we covering this damn thing?
Like, our influencers are not doing a January 6th at the moment.
The protests have waned.
Social feeds are a little bit quieter than last year, certainly than the year before.
Do we really begrudge the fact that these folks have to retreat into the workshop economy circuit?
Like, you know, they're in a money-making conference phase, perhaps.
I do know, obviously, the political and policy impacts of conspirituality are seeping in.
You know, Florida is set to prosecute doctors who advocated for vaccination.
QAnon has laundered itself into, like, the OK Groomer movement, and is swarming school board meetings to yell about trans people.
What does the conference have to do with it?
Like, does the expo reflect on all of that real-world stuff?
We know from these spaces, I mean, individually and collectively, that they provide an in-real-life community that's dominated wellness for at least decades.
Yeah, and I suppose wellness people are always saying they want to create community, and this is a touchstone for that.
Yeah, well, usually the community is, I want to be around a bunch of the people that I get along with.
It's not an actual community, which has conflict and which tension and where you have to actually work things out at zoning board meetings and school board meetings and actually do politics with people, right?
That's an actual community.
They just want small groups where they can Drink juice and do yoga on the beach.
But my question is, is it dangerous that a crowd gathers to dance to terrible reggae and wax poetic about aliens?
And honestly, not necessarily, but how do these conferences act as a catalyst in a post-COVID, and I know it's still going on, obviously.
The virus is not gone, but in their minds, it's post-COVID world.
What does an emboldened Mickey Willis accomplish when networking at these conferences to create his anti-public school agenda?
Because we've had conferences and workshops forever, and we've had social media for just over a decade, so now we have to wonder, what is this juggernaut that's created out of these two phenomena moving forward, if one even exists?
Yeah, and I guess now we are getting some hard data about the blood on the hands of these folks.
There's a headline from CTV News in Canada over the last week, which is,
COVID-19 Misinformation Contributed to 2,800 Canadian Deaths, report suggests.
Now the report in question comes from the Canadian Council of Academics.
It was written and peer reviewed by dozens of public health scholars and disinfo researchers.
It measured the impact of media consumption on vaccine uptake over 18 months.
I'm gonna try to cover this report more in depth soon, but maybe to give a taste from a world
that could not be farther from the LAX Expo, here's some paragraphs from Alex Himelfarb.
He was the chair of the report.
He's writing in the executive summary.
While it's true that misinformation and deception are not new, we are arguably more vulnerable than ever to its consequences.
The personal consequences are relatively easy to document.
Hospitalizations, deaths, and financial costs.
The collective costs are more difficult to quantify, but no less important to public health, the public purse, the social fabric, and the planet.
We are none of us immune to misinformation and its consequences, though the most vulnerable, as always, bear the greatest costs.
While the explosion of misinformation didn't create the social cleavages that divide us, it's quite evident that it has deepened them, resulting in increased conflict and even violence.
As misinformation has become entwined with identity and ideology, some politicians have amplified it to build their political coalitions.
Misinformation and division are locked in a vicious cycle that needs to be broken.
Rebuilding trust, once lost or broken, is a difficult long-term process, but a number of strategies have proven to be helpful.
These include improving direct access to academic research, communicating research accurately and conveying uncertainty where it exists, and carefully selecting the messenger and the medium to reach diverse audiences most effectively.
Many jurisdictions have developed innovative approaches to labeling and reducing online misinformation and to promoting greater media literacy.
More fundamentally, what's needed are policies that yield less inequality and more democracy, and a politics that seeks to heal our divisions rather than exploit them.
Just as none of us is immune to misinformation and its impacts, all of us must be part of the solution.
Thank you for joining us for another episode of Good Spirituality Podcast.
