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April 20, 2023 - Conspirituality
01:10:37
150: Spiritual Influencer Theory

Julian and Matthew go big-picture in this tour through all the elements that construct and drive spiritual Influencers. At the center of the parasocial storm is charisma, which covers over the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of wellness content. Charisma is the only real currency in unregulated spaces. It’s compensatory, and very anxious. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, everybody.
Welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast.
My name is Matthew Rumske.
I'm Julian Walker.
And you can follow us on Instagram at ConspiratualityPod.
You can follow us on Twitter.
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You can also subscribe at Patreon and through Apple Podcasts.
And on Patreon, we want you to know that we have some really great stuff.
We have listener stories, including I just interviewed a woman named Jagris Hodson, who is a digital communication specialist who contracted an aggressive cancer during the pandemic, and then she fell far enough into the alt-health rabbit hole That as she emerged, she began a whole new misinformation research project where she works at Royal Roads University in Victoria, where she's a Canada Research Chair in Digital Communications for the Public Interest.
So, very interesting conversation.
Julian, what have you been up to on Patreon?
Well, not too much recently since my, uh, since my Waco, Donald Trump announces his candidacy or like kicks off his campaign in Waco.
Um, although I will be posting some videos, uh, giving a behind the scenes look at some stuff that I'm, that I'm planning that are, that's sort of following up on my Alexander Dugan episode from last year in terms of what's happening in Eastern Europe and, and people on Patreon sort of have been hearing, Whisperings of this over the last couple months, but there's more and I'm excited to sort of update people.
Yeah, that's great.
Okay, well, I am too.
Now, you can pre-order our book through the link at the bottom of the show notes for this episode, and that would help us greatly in terms of starting to get the word out.
Here's an endorsement we got from Dr. Anne Gleg, Associate Professor of Religion and Cultural Studies, specializing in Buddhism at the University of Central Florida.
She writes, Conspirituality is an urgently needed, compelling, and accessible analysis of the deeply troubling proliferation and promotion of conspiracy theories within contemporary spirituality and wellness culture.
Combining cutting-edge critique with empathetic context, it illuminates the financial incentives of the conspiracy producers and the underlying facilitating conditions of neoliberal precarity.
The authors should be congratulated.
Thank you, Anne, for identifying the real threats of conspirituality to societal bonds,
public health, and participatory democracy.
Yes, Julian.
Today is a day for thinking deep, historically situating, economically and psychologically contextualizing and theorizing about how influencers do what they do and why and how they got there and how our digisphere selects for some very human, but I think we can
say also cursed qualities and behaviors. So today we're going to explore something I
think we are dubbing or coining as spiritual influencer theory. Yeah, and this is part of a
continuing sort of exploration we're doing of how we can distill some of the central ideas in
our forthcoming book into these sorts of discussions that introduce perhaps new listeners to the
work we've done over the last three years.
A lot of the focus will be on the primary currency of the spirituality marketplace, the mystery of charisma, the anxiety that charisma conceals, and what it means when an influencer professionalizes into that anxiety.
Right, because charisma, as we'll see, creates a strange kind of economy.
And I think this becomes clear when we start to ask very simple questions like, what the fuck kind of job does Eckhart Tolle do?
Well, he sits on a bench and waits for, you know, the ultimate wisdom to drop.
Okay, well, how would we then describe the labor value that Marianne Williamson adds to the marketplace?
Is Zach Bush a doctor or is he a preacher?
Does Kelly Brogan make more money as an MD or from being an affiliate marketer for Vaginal Kung Fu?
So, this episode will be a little bit theory heavy, so I think it makes sense to just telegraph our steps a little bit here.
Okay, we're going to define charisma and promote our book, of course, by reading a few pages on how we use that term.
Okay, and then we'll take a brief tour through some of the figures that we've covered and how they mobilize charisma over content.
Yes, we'll drill down on the nuts and bolts of why charisma is so valuable in unregulated economies.
Yeah, and I think then we'll turn to some developmental ideas about how charisma emerges around certain people and the directions it can take.
And some of this will piggyback on the themes that I just worked out in a recent bonus episode about how when I was a yoga teacher, I drew on a bunch of skills that I developed in music performance to make myself larger than life.
And Julian, I think you have your own skill set there, and we'll talk about the various ways it could have gone for you, too.
Okay, so let's start with an excerpt from our book on charisma, and we'll just go back and forth with this passage.
So we write, If there's a mystery at the heart of conspirituality leadership, a magic powder or special sauce, charisma is it.
The word charisma carries more than the pizazz meaning of it that we hear in casual conversation, the glamour of a celebrity, or the glow of someone like Barack Obama.
Up until the last hundred years, charisma was mainly a theological term, meaning grace or gift of divine origin.
But in an essay published in 1920, so this is 123 years ago, or 103 years ago, sorry, modern sociology founder Max Weber secularized and generalized the term to describe a contagious charm that orbits a standout individual and is magnified by a mirror house of social validation.
Charisma is, he explained, a ring of shared perception around a person that makes them seem superhuman.
Charisma explains the aura of prophets, saints, mythic warriors, and now glowing social media influencers.
Now, Weber didn't talk about them, but I think he'd be right at home.
Crucially, Weber makes no claim about the essence of the charismatic person, what they're really like inside, and whether their glow is objectively real.
Charisma is in the eye of the beholder in Weber's world.
It's a social feedback loop in which the attribution of specialness goes viral.
This description provides insight for how one person's charismatic icon can be another person's lunatic.
Consider Tony Robbins.
Some hear his horse shout for two seconds and feel like they need to take a shower or hide, but for a critical mass of others, that same two seconds initiates a hypnotic trance that careens towards walking over hot coals and investing thousands of dollars in a self-help pyramid scheme.
Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote about cult leaders as cultivating a charisma that plays as being free from death anxiety and by performatively transgressing taboos in front of the group.
This tracks with the influencers we followed who exhorted their followers to, like them, not buy into the fear of COVID as symbolized by masks and social distancing.
Charisma is not something a person has so much as something that swirls around them like weather.
In its benign form, it flows outward to motivate, inspire, and nourish a community.
But when used as a tool of recruitment to glorify the eye of a storm, its social capital, adulation, deference, obedience, compliance, Crystalizes into a self-protective economy that hoards power for its own sake.
The proof is in the pudding.
On the blessed end of the charismatic spectrum, taking Black Liberation Movement leaders as examples, Martin Luther King Jr.
left behind a vibrant democratic discourse.
On the cursed end, Louis Farrakhan built an anti-Semitic UFO cult of lackeys dedicated to carrying out his authoritarian whims.
So it's no surprise that Weber's model is used both to describe effective political leadership And to understand a cultic organization.
And cult survivor and researcher Janja Lalic lists charismatic authority as one of her four pillars of a cult.
Following Weber, Lalic frames charisma as a social economy, not as a special property of the person.
Charisma is not to be confused with personal creativity or originality, and this is a key point for understanding how the old themes of conspirituality get reanimated during a social crisis.
Charismatics, especially in their ultimate form as cult leaders, are like theatre directors, always searching for new scripts.
Without new content, their magic grows old.
They are notorious magpies and plagiarists, compelled to pick up any shiny thing that works to refresh the spell they cast and the control they seek.
Followers are usually deceived by the idea that the leader has unique insight and intuition that has given them access to things no one else can see.
In reality, the leader is much less a visionary than a DJ, sampling and remixing tight hooks and dope beats, not necessarily out of any love for or commitment to the artists or their work, but to keep everyone dancing as fast as they can.
Pretty good book, Julian.
That's pretty awesome.
Where can we get a copy of that?
Thanks so much.
Yes, we worked hard on it.
Okay, so who are we talking about here?
Let's review some names, some faces, and some scenes.
And maybe first, at the top of the list, we've got to mention Guru Jagat.
She won numerous long-form profiles in glossy magazines.
She rode on claims of guru authorization, which, you know, upon investigation probably weren't true.
She may not have met Yogi Bhajan at all.
She had stage names, a number of them.
She studied theater in high school and college.
She openly wanted to be famous.
And for her, the capacity to influence people spiritually was not separable from the way in which she influenced people through fashion and design.
So there were the photo shoots at Venice Beach.
There was, you know, her splendor sitting on the dais in her studio, the ornamentation at the Rama Meditation Center, the enormous gong that they said had been bought from Van Halen, which was about like eight feet in diameter or something like that.
You know, she had this style of or this way of super confidence that allowed her to engage in a kind of endless improvisation on her content.
Her YouTube series was called Reality Riffing, like people were going to show up and just listen to her solo over a theme for X number of, you know, And that really involved, because nobody can improvise on nothing, a constant sort of supply of content that she had to magpie, you know, whatever was interesting to her.
And, you know, there's something really effective about Guru Jagat in terms of her capacity for spiritual influencership, which is that She had a sense of humor, which is actually pretty rare amongst the crowd that we study.
So I guess there's bonus points for that.
Mickey Willis, our new age Zoolander, cosplaying journalism after a modeling career of sorts.
The color palette of his selfies.
Right.
Hyper-romantic self-insertions into 9-11.
Standing Rock.
January 6th.
If there's an unfolding disaster that requires a dose of spiritual duck face, Mickey will be there.
Right.
As far as form versus content goes, he's a mixed bag.
On one hand, he produced some content, Plandemic, which has had an enormous material impact.
On the other hand, he's left a trail of crowdfunded but incomplete projects, perhaps before finding his ultimate calling.
Right, and really a lot of very pissed-off donors, we could say, too, if you go back into the comments that accompanied the preview videos for these projects that never actually got done, but, you know, he received lots and lots of cash for.
Okay, then there's Aubrey Marcus.
I mean, there's a lot of flexing.
He's kind of like an ubermensch of the bro science scene.
He engages in a lot of cosplay with shamanic accoutrements.
He's incredibly overconfident in the way that Guru Jagat is, but his particular deal is spoken word that's kind of really dodgy in terms of its quality.
So bad!
But an interesting kind of side note to Marcus is that he also is susceptible to charismatic enthrallment.
And I'm saying this because he has recently made an alliance with a guy named Mark Gaffney, who is playing a kind of father figure role and a mentorship role with him.
And, you know, I'm sure that will be a whole episode in the future.
But Mark Gaffney is kind of like a cultish figure with a decades-long history of blowing up community after community, and a very strange person for somebody like Marcus to hitch his star to, unless there was a lot of earnestness in play in his spiritual aspirations, I think.
Yeah, I mean, you make a really good point there about Marcus.
As you're saying that, I'm picturing all the different guests he's had on.
And Marcus, he rides that really interesting line that I think makes him somewhat unique within the sphere
that we cover, in that he's very much in the fit, buff, masculine bro kind of role.
But he also does the I'm a very spiritually sensitive, awakened, somewhat eloquent character compared to a lot
of the other bro influencers.
And then as part of that, he is a very willing dance partner
for whichever charismatic he interviews to pass that charismatic baton back and forth
and really generate a swirl.
So he does it with Zack Bush, he does it with Kelly Brogan, he does it with Charles Eisenstein, he does it with Joe Dispenza, and he's good at entering into that charisma jazz, if you will.
Yeah, and I think, I mean, to his credit, That kind of radiance that he generates is not dominant in those moments.
It really is participatory, and I think he's very skilled, actually, at generating the duo as more than the sum of its parts.
Yeah, there's a soft receptivity.
It's very interesting.
So, the shades of charisma.
We're on to Kelly Brogan, who we think of as a goddess of avoidant attachment.
She's so beautiful and so above it all that she really doesn't have to concern herself with something like Roe versus Wade.
Seems to have this prosthetic ring light on her at all times with the filters, right?
And then she has sort of transitioned of late into this thing she calls erotic blueprints, which is a kind of sexual empowerment coaching, maybe somehow related to her recent divorce?
Somehow related.
But yeah.
a very, very radiant and captivating character.
And then we get to Zack Bush, who we've described as the smokeless Marlboro man
of the gut biome.
He was a missionary kid.
He's a wellness lady whisperer.
All the wellness ladies just melt at the sound of his vocal fry.
He's so wise, so world-weary.
Best sermon game in the business.
But you know that he could make really big money by selling his pre-worn jeans as well, I think.
There'd be quite a micro biome in there.
Um...
You know, in a way, I almost feel like Zach Bush's facility with language and imagery is what someone like Orbie Marcus aspires to.
Yeah, definitely.
But just cannot reach because someone like Bush is just so gifted.
I don't know what that is, how much of it is genetic, how much of it is growing up in a kind of church.
Yeah.
So, next topic.
You know, it's like the new age, any of the new age kind of slam poet, you know, wannabe
preachers that I see, if they don't have some of that churchy kind of background, they just,
they don't quite get there.
It's always a little bit lame.
Or if they're not as bookish as somebody like Charles Eisenstein is, who's the other person
that Marcus is drawing on for a kind of literary, you know, validation, I think.
Yeah.
Next topic, what wellness charismatics have to hide.
As we've been doing, as you can tell, it's kind of fun to dunk on the aesthetics, but
the aesthetics have a function, which is to hide some very real vulnerabilities.
Each one of these people is pretending to sell something of value, but they can't quite substantiate it.
Right, so with Guru Jagat, for example, she's trying to sell the authenticity of Kundalini Yoga.
Unfortunately, that's not a thing.
We'll link once again, maybe for the 30th time, to the study produced by Philip D. Slip on the origins of Kundalini Yoga, beginning in about 1968.
The ancient tradition.
With Mickey Willis, we have somebody who's trying to sell the aura of journalism to a credulous demographic of the disillusioned.
But he's not doing journalism.
Like, he doesn't even have spellcheck on when he's writing his title cards.
Aubrey Marcus is trying to sell the benefits of his supplements, but the research is really bad.
He's trying to do poetry, as we just said, but he can't.
With Kelly Brogan, here's somebody who was qualified and quite praised and respected as a psychiatrist.
But when she pivoted to pretending that she could speak to epidemiology and render judgments on the reality
of germ theory, she really lost contact with that kind of grounding.
And she had to concoct a kind of strength from contrarianism, not from peer review,
not from her college, not from colleagues in her industry.
So, like, what does she really have now besides these kind of side products?
She's going to do organic gardening with Tom Cowan.
She's going to talk about pole dancing.
She's going to continue to talk about coffee enemas and then also Bitcoin.
Yeah, and let's also just identify here that in a way, the pivot point for her
is I'm this very, very credentialed psychiatrist who started to develop a little bit of a presence,
a kind of being a little bit of a celebrity in that field.
And I...
I'm going to pivot into offering off-label ways of tapering off of your psych meds because I have this alternate view on whether or not you need psych meds.
I don't know how to be like an emotional grown-up or something.
There's a whole weird like shaming of psychiatric diagnoses and she really starts stepping out on the limb and from there it's easy to see how COVID contrarianism becomes the next grift.
It's very true that she didn't kind of step off of a cliff.
She walked down a stairwell into COVID contrarianism.
Okay, so Zack Bush is still a doctor, but it appears that he's withdrawn from things like medical pain management and hospice because, as he said, he feels that that interferes with the passage of the soul.
Well, and let's be really clear about this here.
You're referring, for anyone who's not familiar, with Zack Bush extolling the virtues of offering Reiki to terminally ill people, even when they request painkillers, without their consent, right?
I mean, the consent issue is a little bit up in the air in terms of how he described it, but he's definitely encouraging his care workers, his nurses, to provide Reiki and suggesting that it's not a good idea to let pain medication obstruct the passage of the soul.
So if someone is on their deathbed...
bed in excruciating pain, he has his own value system that says it's better to let them die
in excruciating pain because it'll be worse for their soul if they're given the relief
of a morphine drip.
Right.
So he also has a lot of thoughts about soil and gut health, but he can't really help himself from making those thoughts more important than public health best practices.
He also can't help himself from criticizing doctors for not being spiritual enough.
Each one of these figures has carved out a contrarian or heterodox position.
I don't think we reflect enough on the anxiety that drives contrarian or heterodox output.
It has a double edge.
We see the exhilaration of audience capture and algorithmic rewards, but we can forget just how lonely it must be to be stamping your foot all day asserting that your cranky intuitions are true.
I think with someone like Jordan Peterson, you can hear it in the pleading and haranguing tone and at times that really ragged, angry way that he is, there's like a bitterness and you can, it correlates with how exhausted he looks and how disheveled he is.
It's like he goes through these cycles.
Yeah.
Yeah.
On one level, he's desperate to have people lock in to his content, but on a deeper level, He seems to sound like he's demanding that people love him.
Right.
A lot of these people are shouty in the way that preteen boys are shouty.
Yeah, and there might also be a more generous view because all of these people have something or believe they have something very creative to offer.
Maybe even artistic.
in terms of how they push the boundaries of whatever discourse that they're in, except that with their subjects, with their categories, the stakes are higher.
They do not see themselves as being on the public stage just to entertain or to soothe people or to edify.
That's not good enough.
they really have to be there to change the world, and that's a lot of pressure.
As we're reflecting on this, I just can't help because I'm obsessed with this particular
angle right now. I can't help but think back to like whenever it was, 2008, 2009,
as these new ways of sharing videos, sharing photos, the social media becoming something
that adults are involved in, as all of that is emerging.
the discourse is essentially like, this is the greatest thing ever because it empowers people
to share their creativity and their opinions without having to go through the middleman
of some kind of media company or record company or big art gallery or whatever it is, right?
You can get your stuff out there.
And it feels so democratizing to the information age or to the dissemination of information.
Like it's like the printing press on steroids.
But I don't know who at that time was predicting that we would end up here,
where the art of creating yourself as an influencer who is just putting out a constant stream of material
that is being shaped by the algorithmic reward system and not only the algorithmic reward system,
but the financial rewards that come from developing an engaged audience,
that all of that...
would lead us to this place where the difference between facts and fiction is so blurry, where conspiracy theories are so easy to spread, and where entering into a collective crisis of the kind we've been through becomes sort of the test case for like, okay, what's it really like when everyone has a microphone and is plugged into, you know, the most Well-developed distribution network we've ever had.
Right.
And to remember back into that 2008-2009 space, part of the promise of the democratization of media was a promise or a kind of the aspiration to honor everybody's creativity.
Yeah.
Their capacity to self-express, their capacity to be artists, as it were.
And so this bridge between free expression or freedom and creative expression and the capacity to monetize content that begins to point in a certain direction, it's a very strange kind of accelerating Yeah, and I think we're slap-bang in the middle right now, culturally, of the struggle around how to manage that.
And there are two camps.
There's a camp who's saying, oh, wow, we see the problem with this.
We see how disinformation is so virulent right now.
We see how state-sponsored campaigns to disrupt and sow chaos are really effective in the
West because of the open architecture of social media and all of the incentives that are there
and how people can hijack that.
It's been going on since 2016.
There are people who recognize this and are trying to really study it and understand it.
People like Renee DiResta and her colleagues.
And then there's a whole other group who are convinced that the promise that we're sort of hearkening back to 2008-2009 really has borne fruit and really has been the right way to go.
and any attempt to sort of acknowledge that, oh, there are some guardrails necessary here
because we are basically memeing ourselves into oblivion, into an incredibly dangerous situation,
that all of that is just censorship and authoritarianism.
Meanwhile, what they're advocating pushes us further and further towards authoritarianism.
Right. It's crazy.
Well, let's get back to this connection between charisma and maybe the fundamental motivator of creative expression.
If we look at these figures in a generous way, they want to make things, and they also want to change the world and there's kind of like a bridge that
gets crossed there.
And, you know, I know we're gonna circle around to this point again,
but when we're talking about artistry in the context of the nascent spiritual influencer, isn't this part of what
makes the figure of Adi Da, who's all pre-internet,
but I think predictive of a lot of this stuff, pretty interesting.
I mean, by the end, yeah, he's, you know, still in his cult living with his nine wives or whatever on a Fijian island.
But he's changed jobs.
He's gone out of talking about the nature of reality or predicting the end of the world, and he's just doing paintings.
So I just wonder if he stopped, thankfully, getting high on his own supply.
You know, anyone not familiar, I did do a full bonus episode probably about two years ago about Adi Da.
I think he's a really fascinating character.
A lot of people nowadays are not that familiar with him.
I think he is perhaps a hyper-expressed version of several different dynamics that most of our familiar conspiritualists have.
Even the ones who are guru-esque might only have one or two of these.
But he's got the jackpot.
Yeah, exactly.
He's holding the royal flush of this shit.
He's written extensively about, he's written personally about his own multiple name changes that correlate with major spiritual and physical crises, which if you read between the lines, sound a lot like major neurological seizures or psychotic episodes.
But for him, there are these moments where he goes into deep trance and he realizes that the world is not receiving his gift because his teaching His teaching hasn't emphasized enough these truths and he's going to radically change everything he does and he just steers his whole community in these crazy directions as a result of these epiphanies that he's had.
He's written extensively about it because he's written many thousands of words since he was in his 20s and even before he became revered as a god by his followers, he had a particular expertise in finding women This is going back to his early 20s who would pay his way so he could just stay in the back room and ruminate and write thousands and thousands of pages about the ultimate meaning of life.
Yeah, nice gig if you can get it.
So his withdrawal from the public may have more to do with his other prodigious gift, which is criminally exploiting and abusing people to the point that any move off of the island would likely have resulted in high stakes legal jeopardy.
He did die a few years back, I should mention.
He was still living, even though he wasn't like really, you know, Actively being a spiritual teacher in the way that he had been a couple decades before.
He was still living like a depraved, enlightened mob boss who had his every whim catered to, who could be like, you know, vicious in his punitive rage.
And he still had pilgrims coming to touch his feet.
But look, his entire career is based on a highly unusual ability to generate charismatic presence so intensely.
That a significant percentage of people, especially seekers in the 70s and 80s who would see him talk publicly, would become convinced that he was God on Earth.
And one of those people, for better or for worse, was the famous sort of self-anointed philosopher Ken Wilber.
You know, and I have to empathize with Ken Wilber, because there was probably about three or four weeks when I was quite smitten with Adi Da, because of all of the weirdos I've come across, he is arresting.
Really gross, but also arresting.
And anyway... Well, hold on.
I mean, Matthew, part of that, we have to say, Is because it's you talking is that his, um, his writing is just not, not only Byzantine and like engrossing, but there's a, there's a luminosity.
There's a, there's a, there's something about his writing that I think a lot of people who are quite literary were drawn to him.
Georg Feuerstein.
I know.
Kind of top of the yoga scholar, you know, hierarchy was, was equally captivated.
Alan Watts was captivated by, by Adida.
Yeah.
Yeah, amazing to remember.
And also, it's like, I probably had temporal lobe epilepsy fits for a couple of years that went undiagnosed, that resolved after a while, but I would connect that to my writing life for sure.
And so, there was something very resonant there.
And that's very interesting because, you know, in that case, had I been younger, or sorry, older, had I been closer to him, I might have seen in him a kind of kindred spirit or somebody who reflected my own neurology.
And because of that reflection or that consonance, I might have thought that he was able to confer spiritual meaning or blessing upon me.
And that's really bizarre because he's just a guy.
who might have the same neurodiversity that I have, but then, like, you know, he's in
a condition in which he's rewarded for exploiting people and then it just spirals from there.
Yeah, he's taken that as evidence of his narcissistic grandiosity and then looped in
some sociopathic manipulation of every relationship he could foster.
Yeah, I guess that was protective.
It never would have occurred to me to think that my endless writing was some sort of gift to humanity.
If anything, it was just something that kept me awake all the time.
And it was something that I wanted to, I got resentful about it sometimes because, you know, how was I going to make money doing this?
Obviously, it had to have some kind of cultural value.
So, it was a little bit, like, entitled and resentful.
But it's not like I ever thought I'm going to go into a group of people and you're going to understand reality because I've written a bunch of shit down and I can't even keep track of it.
Yeah, it didn't make you the culky avatar.
No, it did not.
Okay, next topic, how does charisma become central to unregulated wellness economies?
And the TLDR here is, you know, there's no way to measure how good you are.
as a Reiki practitioner.
Like, nobody says, wow, your hands are super close to my body
and yet so still it feels creepy, but it might be spiritual.
You must be a master.
You know, like there are no exams.
There's no random controlled studies.
There's no insurance audits.
How good you are at Reiki is a function of how much charisma
you can generate around you and underneath your hands.
And the fatal flaws in wellness practice that charisma therefore covers over are not bugs, but features of the milieu.
From the outset of the wellness industry that we cover, going back about a century, all of these modalities set themselves up in opposition to mainstream discourse, in opposition to the scientific method, in opposition to public health.
And there are many roots for this, but Julian, let's just consider for a moment how Rudolf Steiner thought about things like evidence and authority.
So, we quote him in our book as follows.
Steiner was keen to undermine the basics of evidentiary research and the scientific method.
His 1911 pseudo-history of the submerged continents of Atlantis and Lemuria opens with a self-serving attack on the legitimate discipline of history.
He derides the idea that scholarly opinions can change when confronted with new evidence.
Sacrilege.
He argues that the eternal truth of what happened can only be accessed through meditation.
According to Steiner, if knowledge accumulates in stages or must be synchronized from different perspectives or be updated when new evidence emerges, it can't have real value.
Oh God, he's upside down, right?
Luckily, Steiner argues, the eternal is accessible to the man who trains himself to see beyond the husk of the mundane world and into the vibrant tableau of oneness.
And wouldn't you know it, he thinks he's just the man for the job!
Yeah, so on one hand, like, total narcissistic kook.
On the other hand, how much pressure is involved there in being the sole arbiter of truthiness?
Heavy lies the crown.
Yeah, and every single yoga and wellness celebrity is somewhere along the spectrum of that anxious, you know, situation because all of them are operating in this heterodox space where they cannot make their mark on the basis of a shared project or a shared epistemology or a shared notion of how you would come to, you know, a consensus around the functioning of a thing.
Yeah, yeah, or a professional association in which there are checks and balances and... Yeah, to state it more plainly, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, many are not 100% going, I'm channeling all of this directly.
But everyone is on the pipeline running in that direction, and often trying desperately to create legitimizing cover for what they're doing.
And I just want to say, too, that there's a way in which when I interact with any of these types that we're describing, I always want to step back and I have the impulse, but then I don't do it because I've tried enough times and it hasn't worked.
I have the impulse to step back and say, hold on a second.
Do you realize that this claim you're making in a kind of offhanded way about the nature of reality and, you know, the truth of what exists beyond science and the nature of healing and the products you're selling.
If any one of these things were true, it would be massive, massive news.
It would be historic.
It would be in the history books as like the day the world changed.
Your picture would be next to it.
You would win the Nobel Prize.
But there's a way in which there's some kind of weird tension between the grandiosity of the outrageous claims and the kind of blithe attitude of like, yeah, this is just received wisdom that people in the know already are hip to, right?
Well, isn't there also a certain type of modesty involved, too?
Because if you're too grandiose about the claim, then somebody will check it.
Somebody will challenge you on it.
And so, we've got some examples here.
So, somebody like B.K.S.
Iyengar, probably the most central evangelist of the modern yoga global movement, He publishes Light on Yoga.
I've talked about this a bunch of times, but it's 300 pages, 600 photographs of him in postures.
The photographs are laid out as if in a medical encyclopedia and each posture is endowed with an unsighted medical benefit.
Yeah, it's like if any one of those were true, that posture would be patented.
It would be like, I mean, talk about, you know, what Big Pharma would would profit from.
Well, but hold on, because if thyroxin is replaced by Headstand for curing thyroid disorders, well, Big Pharma would be in trouble.
So, you know.
I guess, right.
Good point.
Okay, then Yogi Bhajan, here's another example.
His students create this enormous and comprehensive library of his talks and practices as though they're kind of like rebuilding Alexandria to house ancient knowledge.
But Bhajan makes up most of those practices in the 1970s.
And then the clout chasing just gets passed down because this is the guy who Guru Jagat wants to claim authority through.
Then there's Chögyam Trungpa and his students create a whole printing press to produce beautiful volumes of what appears to be antique scripture, but it was all innovated by the man himself.
Right, and then there's Teal Swan who covers over her outrageous claims about satanic ritual abuse and her ability to channel or to read energy with kind of like a Coles Notes version of pop psychology theory.
Is that what they call Cliffs Notes in Canada?
Yeah, is that what I said?
Coles Notes?
Yeah.
Yeah, Coles is the bookstore here that produces the notes, yeah.
Okay, so more on the anxiety of charisma, digging in here.
We're developing a picture of the spiritual influencer as being anxious because the charisma is compensatory.
If you scratch the surface of the influencer's skill set, you'll find a heterodox loneliness.
If you scratch the surface of their content, you'll find, as Philip D. Slip says about Kundalini Yoga, a photocopy of a counterfeit bill.
But I'm going to argue that it's not just about people with imposter syndrome improvising content.
I'm going to say that there's a deeper source of anxiety in the whole business and that that comes from the fact that yoga and New Age spirituality and wellness are capitalistic endeavors with this huge problem, which is that they have no real concrete product.
So, let me get a little bit French theory over here.
Jean Baudrillard, in The Ecstasy of Communication, published in 1987, is reflecting on the dissociative feelings of trying to do work in late capitalism, on labor and production.
He writes, There is never anything to produce.
In spite of all its materialist efforts, production remains a utopia.
We wear ourselves out in materializing things, in rendering them visible, but we will never cancel the secret.
And the secret here, just to interpret a bit, is that Baudrillard claims that there is no originality in postmodernism.
There's nothing but ironic simulacra all the way down, and everything is infinitely replicable from pop tarts to yoga retreats.
In Selling Yoga, modern yoga scholar Andrea Jane argues that yoga was amongst the first products of globalism, and that its history cannot be separated out from capitalistic models of growth, marketing, and profit.
But what exactly was it selling?
And by extension, wellness, modern Buddhism, holistic healing, etc.
What is for sale?
What I'm saying is that beyond stretching and relaxation and some self-reflection, you're buying all of those things in those economies, but you're mainly buying something ephemeral, which is the aspirational self.
That's the main product.
You are being shown or told about an image of what you could be, and that image has a price tag.
And paying for it doesn't translate into being it.
You pay in order to engage with the fantasy.
And here's what we can say about the aspirational self.
You know, Matthew, this is, this is just putting me in mind of Natalia Petrozzella's amazing work, you know, her history of, of fitness culture in America and how fitness culture has been sold over.
She, she goes through like a thousand year history in, I'm sorry, a 100 year history in FitNation, not a thousand year history.
That would be the sales.
It feels like a very long time.
But that would be the sales pitch, right?
This is a history goes back into the, into the mists of antiquity.
No, It's a hundred year history, well cited and well demarcated with very clear analysis.
And the thing about it is, this aspirational self, it's not unique to the sort of trans-global selling of yoga. It's not unique
to a postmodern kind of multicultural spirituality and sort of new age cultural appropriation or
however you want to frame that. It's just that it has this unique expression within
the subculture that you and I happen to come from. But the idea that we can sell you various
products all organized around the idea that you are becoming the best you that you could
become in some kind of virtuous way through using our products and through engaging in
whatever it is.
Jogging, aerobics, yoga.
This is water that we're swimming in.
It seems to be a vulnerability that emerges in a very well-expressed way in consumer culture.
And I think vulnerability is a good way of expressing the sort of basic features or encapsulating the basic features of the aspirational self because here's a few things that we can say about it.
It doesn't exist yet.
Your aspirational self may never exist in real terms.
It can take many forms that you aspire to mimic.
No one can know if anyone has achieved the aspirational self except that they perform it.
It's not an accident that many of the A-list teachers of globalized yoga came from theater, music, or movie backgrounds.
Yeah, exactly, and then also the value of the aspirational self is an alchemy of how much effort you put into its performance and then how much social meaning it creates.
And so some performances of the aspirational self are deemed to be worth more than others, and this creates competition over something that doesn't really exist.
So, okay, so main takeaways with regard to the aspirational self.
It's always out of reach.
It always costs more to pursue.
Other people must have it, but do they really?
This is all extremely anxious.
And it gets even worse when the aspirational self is the aspirational no-self,
and the way of performing it is the prolonged eye contact in which you're seeing who has less of a self
than the other to aspire to.
♪♪ Okay, on the same note of anxiousness,
I want to throw in here a brief reference to Jared Holt's podcast.
Holt is a disinformation and extremism researcher, and his podcast is great and his podcast title is hilarious.
It's called Posting Through It.
So, a lot of meanings in that title, but from a charismatic anxiety point of view, What this adds is the notion that social media and algorithmic economies provide a huge incentive to increase the performance of chasing after the aspirational self and especially to increase the volume of your posting while
You're under stress or while there is social stress, so something stressful happens and you post through it.
We've seen this like a thousand times, like people Twitter-storming or IG-living their mental breaks, which isn't funny, but it's just, well...
Yeah.
Just bizarre.
And when you're a spiritual influencer, it's really hard not to turn anxiety and personal turmoil into its own form of clickbait.
And usually the real story underneath it all is pretty transparent, like we've already referenced.
Kelly Brogan starts a lot of her new content initiatives on IG as she's heading towards divorce, or the sheer volume of posts that Northrop puts out when she's named as a Disinformation Dozen member just shoots way up.
Like, hey, Tribe, I'm going through a completely self-generated crisis right now, and I want to use my panicked arousal to sell you on this next thing, my next mastermind, my next Yeah.
And in fact, I would even add that there's a whole industry organized around training people.
You know, you can pay people to coach you in how to do this.
And it's all about using whatever's going on personally as a way to keep hooking people in and using a polarizing conflict as a way to solidify your identity and your, and your audience, um, uh, resonance, you know?
So that's a whole coaching division or a whole coaching sort of subject, okay.
Absolutely.
Everything is fodder for content and the more difficult or sensationalist it is, the better.
Keep going, keep going.
Post through it.
Definitely post through it.
All right, so charisma, a developmental theory.
So if we build out spiritual influencer theory from the point at which the charismatic economy of a given influencer is already rolling, we can say all of these empirical things.
Influencers influence based on charisma over content.
Charisma covers over the bankruptcy of wellness content.
It is compensatory.
Charisma is the only real currency in unregulated spaces.
But who is more susceptible to getting aboard the charisma train?
Where does it start?
Here's where we might want to think about having someone like Matt Brown from Decoding the Gurus on to ask him.
So Matt, if you're listening, we'll anticipate your responses.
First, is there any robust research on personality predictors or social conditions?
And second, how would you go about studying this?
If there wasn't.
So who is susceptible to getting on the charisma train?
For now, we can do a little bit of speculation from personal and anecdotal experience.
And, you know, we can use our intuitive faculties to investigate the mysterious personal origins of charisma.
I see what you did there.
Yeah, where does it come from and how does it get locked in?
So I referenced at the top, I did a bonus episode a few weeks ago where I looked at this territory in the context of performing our audiobook and this brought up all kinds of memories about learning how to do music theatre and all of those skills flowed over into this brief part of my life
in which I was teaching courses in Buddhism, a course in miracles, and then I matured
into yoga teaching, which of course was super legit.
I basically described in the episode a kind of inner fracture that developed
between being a self and performing a self.
And I related it to being both loved by my mother and then also serving her expectations.
And I related it to what Jacques Lacan says about the mirror stage, or the point at which a child
feels exhilarated by self-awareness, but then also overwhelmed by it,
and then forced into a series of performative stress positions
as they try to match the expectations and distortions of others.
And...
My basic takeaway was that, like, I myself have charisma and I think that it developed in order to perform, in order to seek love, to form relationships, but that it didn't cross over into seeking followers or letting myself have an elevated status because I could see that that was part of the cultic fabric that I had become so vigilant around.
And I could see what happened with people like my late friend Michael Stone, who at a certain point began to believe some of what people were saying about him, how brilliant he was, and so on.
Or, you know, maybe he didn't believe it, and maybe it was too stressful to live up to it, and maybe that contributed to his death by fentanyl poisoning.
What about you, Julian?
Like, how does this play out in your life?
Well...
You know, I always remember the first time I got up on a stage.
I was a relatively shy, introverted kid, but I got to do this nativity play.
And I had this moment in a white shirt, standing at a microphone, sort of stage left, gesturing toward the action.
And I still remember very clearly reciting, from the East they came, Gaspar, Melchiord, Balthasar, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
Wow.
It was my first experience of seeming calm and composed and commanding while feeling kind of terrified and disembodied and getting praise and admiration for it.
Okay, can we just underline that?
Okay, so you present as calm and composed while feeling disembodied and anxious.
Yep, yep.
So the mastery over the anxious state in terms of appearance, that's my first moment of going, oh wow, okay.
Here's what I'm willing to bet is that if you weren't disembodied and anxious, the actual polish wouldn't have been so bright.
Most likely, yeah.
Incredible.
Yeah, I later would realize a talent, maybe you can relate to this, Matthew, that I had a capacity to memorize verses of poetry that far exceeded my peers.
It's not something I worked on.
I remember sitting in a classroom, we each had about five minutes to memorize one eight line verse, and there were like 10 eight line verses on the page.
When it was my turn, I got up and recited the whole thing.
Wow.
To everyone's shock.
And I remember very clearly that I focused Over everyone's head on a small window just below the ceiling at the back of the room.
Knowing, so I was nervous and I was finding a way to control my nervousness, but I knew I was flexing.
I knew I'm going to do this thing that's going to blow all these people away.
But it was like, look at me, but don't really look at me.
Well, if you look at me, it will distract me.
Yep, yep.
Because the interpersonal sort of contact will break the trance.
Yes, the performative trance.
But then the thing is, is that with you looking into the sort of middle distance over everybody's head, it looks like you are in an enlightened state, right?
Totally.
Totally.
This is fucking Adi Da.
At 12 years old, he probably did something like this.
Sure.
Yeah.
But then you didn't wind up on Fiji with nine wives.
No, I did not.
I did not.
I started playing guitar at 12.
So maybe that was my saving grace.
But I got really serious about it at 16.
I practiced for hours every day in front of the mirror.
And then I performed my fast licks and bluesy bends for friends and eventually for audiences.
And that culminated in having my own band and also playing in another band behind a very political, Afrikaans, anti-apartheid singer-songwriter.
I was on television.
I was on huge stages by the time I was 19.
And, you know, again, it's that experience of, like, preparing to perform something, being really, really nervous before it happens, and then figuring out how to pull it together and play the role.
Amazing.
And when I got to the US, it was first of all to avoid military service and to get out of that police state South African pressure cooker.
But it was also to follow my dream and go to music school.
So I brought all of that performance and practice for performance and sense of creating an experience for an audience eventually into teaching yoga and into DJing ecstatic dance.
And you never would have thought that that's where it would have led you, but somehow the economy of yoga teaching is there to receive those skills and make the most of them.
Yeah, and I've stood in front of countless teacher training audiences or audiences, teacher training groups.
And said, uh, I never could have guessed that this particular group of interests and, and talents and things that I've worked on would have led me here.
And isn't it wonderful?
Because for me, really in my mid twenties, it was like, well, shit, I'm not going to be a rock star.
Like that's disappointing.
How do I, how do I find a gig?
You know, how do I find something that doesn't feel like, like drudgery?
Um, And you know, I've used music and poetry and language and charismatic presence as an asset in that particular career.
What I found as I've talked about in the podcast with Anna Forrest was that, and I met her when I was about 23, was that she had a very intense command of the room.
and of everyone's attention. But then also there were these iconic moments that I think,
especially the small number of big name teachers of her generation, so I'm talking like people who
maybe were in their 40s in the mid 90s, they relied on the acrobatic mastery of demonstrating
the most visually impressive versions of yoga poses in ways that was both aspirational,
like you too could do this, but also really dominating, like you can't do this, you know.
And it was highly effective, especially when combined with, as we've covered, the kind of satanic panic backstory that she had and this sort of heroic narrative that she was enrolling us into as her students.
And then as for me, by the time I was in my early 30s, I was creating workshop series about how the chakras intersected with anatomy and transpersonal psychology and performing that.
You were citing excellent research with all of that, I imagine.
Absolutely.
Yeah, amazing.
Yeah, kind of.
And then eventually, you know, I would get up and speak to like a thousand therapists at a time at this big UCLA conference, which happened to be run by someone who came to my classes.
That was my doorway in.
They were sort of through the side door.
And there was always this tension between extreme anticipatory anxiety and then the empowering high of managing to find my way home.
Two last sections here.
you know, have the sort of experience and get the kind of feedback and validation that
that you know, this is just part of my psyche to crave I think.
Two last sections here.
We've already touched on these things but let's round up on first of all charisma and
performance.
Okay, so for both of us, our stage chops set us up for success in the yoga world.
It's not uncommon.
In fact, there's loads of successful teachers in the yoga industry in the 1990s that had similar backgrounds, sometimes elite artistic or performance backgrounds.
There was, there's Shiva Ray, who comes from a dance background.
Sean Korn, I think.
Also, dance.
Sharon Gannon and David Leif, dance.
They're also avant-garde grunge musicians.
David Leif ran the Life Cafe where the musical, what's it called?
Rent was written.
The Broadway musical was written on the piano on the Life Cafe.
Right.
Elena Brower used to be in fashion and interior design, and her spiritual teaching now revolves around concepts like elegance.
And what that literally means is that if you open up one of her live streams, she'll say, today we're going to practice the concept of elegance in our lives and in our spirits, right?
There is no product.
Right.
Then there's Rod Stryker.
Some of you might be familiar with him.
That's his excellent stage name.
His real name is Nimrod Gross.
He had a few appearances on the A-Team back in probably the mid-'80s.
And then Rodney Yee was a huge ballet guy.
And if you want to hear more about this, back in episode 80, a friend of the podcast, Jill Miller, came on to discuss this whole phenomenon and how her own performance training in college and Hollywood played a big role in her yoga teaching and yoga-adjacent teaching career.
She talked about, you know, learning vocal presence, stage blocking, like how you would sort of command the Just the spatial qualities of the room as you moved through it, generating tension through a range of emotions and contrasts.
And Jill and I first talked about all of this back in 2016 because I was helping her prepare a TED-style talk called Lights, Camera, Yoga.
And here's the opening of that talk.
If a yoga selfie happened on Instagram and no one was following, would it have any meaning?
If Swami Kripalu Vananda had succeeded as an actor instead of a yoga master, would Kripalu Yoga exist?
If Krishnamacharya hadn't pushed his students to perform asana demos all over India, would a non-performance-based yoga practice have emerged?
Probably not, because no one would have seen it.
His most famous student, Iyengar, went on to become the original selfie guru.
And in 1984, this is Jill Miller talking, if this 12-year-old tween and her mom hadn't bought a copy of Raquel Welch's yoga video, Raquel Welch Total Beauty and Fitness, might I have never been transformed by this journey of yoga.
It's such a great story.
Finally, charisma and labor value.
All right, once again, backtracking, summarizing.
Charisma is at the heart of the influencer economy.
Weber defined it as a special social grace.
All of the jerks we cover have it going on.
And it's really good that they have it going on because they really don't have anything else.
When charisma covers over a lack of content or competency, things get anxious.
On the developmental level, there's a strong resonance between performance training and successful spiritual influencing.
Lots of top wellness gurus are former actors or musicians or dancers now putting on a spiritual show.
And I think that leads us to our final sort of open discussion questions, which is what happens when these performative, charismatic, artistic skills are reframed and upsold as spiritual products and that identity is professionalized?
What happens when the artist becomes a Spiritual teacher.
It's interesting, I'm just thinking about Teal Swan here, too, and about how she maintains a status and identity as an artist.
So she plays both of those roles.
So that's one question that I think we are bringing up, maybe to answer in future episodes, maybe to get your feedback on, dear listeners.
Here's another one.
This is to the wellness influencer themselves.
If you are selling charisma, rather than an evidence-based practice.
What is your job?
Like, what are you actually getting paid for?
What is the labor value of your work?
Yeah, Eckhart Tolle, what is your job?
How do you add value to the world?
Marianne Williamson, same question.
I think you both make some people feel better and enough can feel it or buy into the expectation of it that you will get paid.
Yeah.
But what's the difference between artistic production and spiritual production, between the artistic experience and the spiritual experience?
Maybe comfort, curiosity, imagination versus reassurance and certainty.
Are modern spiritual teachers really artists and pop stars who don't want to be artists or pop stars?
Here's a scenario to end with.
I think about how Marianne Williamson, Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, Charles Eisenstein, Pema Chodron all get on to Super Soul Sunday.
And then what Oprah Winfrey asks them when they get there.
It's one long variation on what can your wisdom tell us?
But how did they get there?
Did they get there through producing original knowledge?
Through investigative reporting or insightful cultural critique?
Not really through any of those things.
They got to Spiritual Soul Sunday through... I think Super Soul Sunday.
Yeah, what did I say?
Spiritual Soul Sunday.
Yeah, okay.
They got into Super Soul Sunday through the feedback loop of charisma, and that rolled them all the way up the ladder.
If you ask an artist about the state of the world or where things are going, you might get grandiose and overconfident and gross answers from people like Ye or Kid Rock.
You said artist, right?
I mean, on a higher level, you'll have Leonard Cohen, who, you know, would be willing to hold court.
Maybe somebody like Nick Cave would be given to philosophizing a bit.
So, with the exception of, you know, people like Kid Rock, I don't think that any of those subjects would really take the bait of that question, as in they're not going to sit down in front of Oprah Winfrey and feel qualified to answer the question and then feel emboldened enough to do so.
But for the spiritual influencer, however they got there, however they constructed or had that identity constructed for them, Their sort of project is to rise to meet the challenge of that question.
They would be compelled to give it their best shot.
I just realized that Super Soul Sunday is a play on Super Bowl Sunday, and this is the Super Bowl for each of them.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah.
And every performative, overconfident instinct within them would swell to the moment.
They have to summon belief in themselves.
They have to muster their best guru face, and when they're listening to Oprah, it would be resting guru face.
It is their moment.
It is transformative.
This is where they can finally be maximally seen and loved.
This is where their performance reaches a peak, where they can give the perfect galaxy-brained answer Where they'll be rewarded by Oprah and the TV audience and then they'll go backstage and they'll have really nice fizzy drinks and then the book sales and the speaking fees will just skyrocket and then online there will be sweet viral engagement.
Totally irresistible.
Thanks everyone for listening to Conspirituality.
We'll see you on the main feed and on patreon.com.
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