Nazis loved yoga. Rudolf Steiner set the stage for COVID denialism. Modern social justice warriors have a fondness for Hindu nationalism. Antivax activists are stuck in 19th century Gothic novels. Yoga, as the religion of neoliberalism, has actively depoliticized large swaths of the white middle class, making yoga moms vulnerable to fascism. Who’s responsible for these outrages? Conspiritualists? Who are they and what’s their evil plan?
No, our book is not a conspiracy theory. There’s no one piloting this plane. And yet, the patterns we’ve tracked on this podcast and in our book at times suggest something organized and coherent. Do we take this too far? At point does the intricacy of our research mimic the paranoia of what we’re researching? This week, we take a look.
Our Recent Op-Eds:
New age wellness takes a reactionary turn (The Boston Globe)
The Conspirituality of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Time)
Opinion: Danielle Smith’s alternative health proclamations are key to her populist messaging (The Globe and Mail)
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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast where we investigate the intersection
of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian
extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can follow us on Instagram at ConspiritualityPod.
And you can support us on Patreon, where for $5 a month you get ad-free new episodes, as well as all of our Monday bonus episodes.
And we also do regular live streams for our $10 per month supporters.
Our book is out.
It's called Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.
And since it came out, we've had two fairly prominent op-eds published.
The Boston Globe ran a piece about trans bigotry in the wellness world, and Time magazine printed an adaptation of our chapter on Bobby Kennedy this past week.
And here in Canada, the Globe and Mail ran a related article I wrote about the conspirituality driving the campaign of Alberta's new premier, Daniel Smith.
If you are reading the book or listening to the audiobook as narrated by Matthew, would you do us a huge favor?
Drop a review on Amazon or Goodreads just to help us boost visibility.
Now this past Monday, I shared a bonus episode called On Belief, which is inspired in part by my having devoured the Straight White American Jesus podcast co-host Bradley Onishi's fantastic book, which is titled Preparing for War.
In preparation for having him on soon, Matthew and I are excited to talk to him.
Yeah.
Now, in this bonus episode, I wanted to investigate the question of how our most sacred beliefs may inform our actions in the world.
And I start that whole exploration off, which is fairly wide ranging, with the following sentence.
When Jacob Chansley got dressed on the morning of January 6th, he put on his red, white, and blue face paint, his postmodern,
quasi-native, American, horned fur hat, and grabbed the spear to which he had attached an American
flag. Then, he headed out to join his fellow warriors of light at the Capitol. Classic. Yeah. And
okay, so while we're in the bonus category, two Mondays ago, I produced a listener stories
installment called, God Seemed Like a Dumb Reason to Break Up, and that was
with special guests Lynn and Justin Short.
They joined me to discuss how they met, grew up in, and grew out of a branch of a group called Gnosis, which was a theosophical cult founded in the 1950s in Colombia.
Now, they describe What it was like to wake up to their original marriage, the marriage they had gone in with, and to their normal lives after 17 years of being encouraged to practice non-orgasmic sex and
Missionary work or proselytizing work.
So it's very rare to interview a married couple where the relationship survived that kind of like perverted BS.
It's a really good episode.
Yeah, it strikes me as they had a lesser awakening, but perhaps a more valuable one.
Right.
Here are some notes on our main developing story in this period of time before we cruise.
So, Bobby Kennedy is in high gear.
He's on a whistle-stop tour of all of the Heterodox shows, including three brutal hours on Joe Rogan.
He not only gish galloped his way towards 50 million downloads on that show, but Joe tried to cajole a celebrated vaccine scientist, Peter Hotez, as most people probably heard, to debate Kennedy on the show, offering Hotez, that is, $100,000 toward a charity of his choice.
And within days, this caused a big stir on Twitter.
Helpful tech bros were raising the stakes to millions of dollars on offer to try and challenge Hotez into accepting it.
To underline a distinction we employ in the book, With Bobby, we have a conspirituality true believer who's leveraging the profile of Joe Rogan, a conspirituality booster, to turn our public health discussion into a cage fight.
And there's a physicality to it, and it's really on the nose.
So for that, be sure to check out our recent brief with Natalia Petrozzella on how Bobby teases at a kind of body fascism in a series of campaign videos from the iconic Gold's Gym in Venice, California.
Amidst all of it, the litany of outrageous claims keep coming.
Like, you know, Bobby can tell which children have been vaccinated because they don't have curiosity or light in their eyes.
Yeah, that really made me angry.
They can't express affection.
Yeah, amazing.
As Derek covered in his recent brief, Bobby convened a health advisory roundtable with a lineup of familiar offenders, several of whom, alongside Kennedy, either have their own entire chapters in the book or get some kind of dishonorable mention.
People like Joe Mercola, Mickey Willis, Sherry Tenpenny, Del Bigtree, Sayer G. And all of this, of course, was moderated by someone who does have a chapter in our book, Charles Eisenstein.
Now, as part of Kennedy's rambling discourse, he told the live stream that AIDS and the Spanish flu were likely caused not by viruses, but by vaccine experimentation.
Yeah.
So there's a fire hose coming from the Kennedy campaign.
It's a fast moving story, but in keeping with our style, We'll be taking the time to thoroughly mine it for depth and context, and we're going to be putting together a mega episode for later this month, just on Bobby.
Well, that does sound like we may be sitting at the corkboard, which is good for where we're going next.
Right.
Reality 162. Is our book a conspiracy theory? Nazis loved yoga.
Rudolf Steiner set the stage for COVID denialism.
Modern social justice warriors have a fondness for Hindu nationalism.
Anti-vax activists are stuck in 19th century Gothic novels.
Yoga, as the religion of neoliberalism, has actively depoliticized large swaths of the white middle class, making yoga moms vulnerable to fascism.
Who's responsible for these outrages?
Conspiritualists?
Who are they?
And what's their evil plan?
Right.
No, our book is not a conspiracy theory.
There's no one piloting this plane.
And yet the patterns we've tracked on the podcast and in our book at times suggest or may seem to suggest something organized and coherent.
Do we take this too far?
At what point does the intricacy of our research mimic the paranoia of what we're researching?
This week, we take a look.
I think the basic question is, can anyone write a 369-page book with 700 end notes about a complex socio-religious movement and not feel like a corkboard guy?
And, you know, if three guys try to do it together, will it at times feel like a connect-the-dots twister?
Because that's kind of what it felt like often for us while we researched and made choices and drafted this thing.
It was an 18 month process and I think we had to grapple with how much history and context to include and of course what to leave out.
It was a big story to tell, not easy to find the through line, and I think it was harder still to be sure that we weren't spinning that through line ourselves.
I think off the top we have to acknowledge that the way conspiracy theorists formulate a picture of the world using orienting generalizations and Hidden motives and including histories around multi-generational political projects and figures they see as playing secret key roles.
All of that can seem very similar to what we are doing.
Right, right.
Especially in a thumbnail summary, right?
If you just put two thumbnail summaries next to each other, maybe it's hard to tell them apart.
Right.
It makes total sense that someone might say, well, geez, It looks like these guys have their own anti-conspiracy conspiracy theory that explains everything about everything.
But...
Our position is that a closer look really does reveal the difference and we'll explore that today.
And then for us, as we prepped to do media for the book, we wondered how to find accessible and accurate doorways into aspects of the material.
So there are catchphrases like Nazis loved yoga, or the hinge point between spirituality and conspiracism is stigmatized knowledge, or the yoga world depoliticized its consumers.
Yeah.
Yep.
Maybe disaster spirituality is a core cult technique.
Right.
So, in that perhaps reductive process, it was worth asking whether we were making generalizations about a strange new group of people, perhaps that we had invented, called conspiritualists.
Who are they?
Are they the cabal of our podcast?
Yeah, indeed.
And it's actually a very disquieting thing to do, to notice a social trend, to research and define it so that hopefully it can be better understood, and then to evolve that definition over time.
But at the same time, play a role in creating a buzz around it, also to give it substance and legitimacy, and then on top of that, to become successful in it and professionalize through it.
Because after three years, you know, we're now being paid a sustainable wage, commenting on something we've not exactly invented, but we've certainly popularized.
And so in my more cynical, depressive moods, I can notice myself thinking, okay, you know, what will I do next with this angle?
And then, you know, sometimes I even sink into, oh, you know, this is really about me, isn't it?
And then, you know, beyond that, there's the question of impact.
Like, how does work like this move the needle, if at all?
And this is where I often slip into a kind of melancholic reverie on something that Matt Chrisman of Chapo Trap House said on a Jacobin panel called Log the Fuck Off, where He described in one of his absurdly long, very florid riffs, he used this metaphor.
He said that online discourse simulated in real life discourses and actions.
And, and he used the metaphor that in the old days, if you wanted to sail somewhere
across the sea, you had to get together with a group of people who had a diverse skill
set.
You had to build a boat, you work together, you argued over the details, and you got a
lot of splinters in your hands.
And then you got in the boat and you sailed somewhere.
Now, when you do all of that work on Facebook or Twitter, it's like you're building, he said, a ship in a bottle at a very small scale.
And actually that ship goes nowhere because it's sitting on the desk of Elon Musk where he just kind of looks at it.
You know, half bored, half interested.
He's playing like, I don't know, Halo on another screen.
You know, and sometimes he just gives it a shake to fuck things up.
So for me, in the background of all of the criticisms of our work is something that cuts really deep, which is the question, so what's your answer?
Like, what are you actually doing?
What is the cultural sort of meaning of critical work?
Well, first of all, that's a great analogy.
I don't know.
I wonder if that might be a reductionistic question.
I don't know that I buy that journalists and researchers of cultural phenomena are required to ante up practical solutions in order to justify their work and show that they've done something worthwhile.
Yeah, okay, well, let me put it a different way then.
What if it became clear that your subject depended on a kind of unsolvability?
It's interesting to think about.
I mean, perhaps there's a difference between research and analysis that solves some aspects of the puzzle, which I think, you know, we try to do and we have done at times, I hope.
Right.
And then, like, solutions that are prescriptive.
I think We do often ask the people we interview for expert opinions on how to address specific problems.
And I think because of our temperament, we also do an episode every few months in which we think out loud about what this all means and, you know, both how to practice some kind of self-care.
In relation to this disorienting and disquieting subject matter and enact best practices as we're understanding them with regard to cults and internet or social media hygiene and how to relate to conspiritualist friends and family.
But, you know, I hear in your question, Matthew, a kind of implication of something self-serving, right?
Right.
It's in our best interest for the subject matter that we're exploring to be unsolvable.
I don't know that the layered complexity of what we have found ourselves investigating means that we are intentionally perpetuating unsolvability in order to stay in business.
I mean, you can really levy that accusation at any philosopher, right?
What's your final answer?
Yeah, yeah, fine enough.
You can do it.
You could levy it at scientists.
Have you not figured out?
And a lot of people do, right?
You don't know what consciousness is.
You don't know what happened before the universe came into being.
And so what good is your science?
You could levy it at a political pundit.
You know, this is all like ongoing stuff.
We're not involved in a big crossword puzzle that's going to finally have a solution.
And in fact, I think the fetish for having final, complete solutions is one of the drivers of the appeal, the satisfying kind of quality of conspiracism.
Oh, snap.
Okay, so you got me there.
Maybe.
Maybe.
I'm not trying to get you.
The antidote to that appeal, I think, is being more comfortable with Yeah, well, and also having, like, the kind of better self-esteem that Julian has than the self-esteem that Matthew has.
Well, I don't know what to make of that.
But look, for today, We can explore these two perhaps simpler questions.
Number one, is our book a conspiracy theory?
Have we just gotten high on our own supply and told a paranoid blue pill story that demonizes all those people on the other side?
And number two, what are the social and financial pressures that encourage the cultural criticism that we do?
And can we be so sure that we're not as audience-captured and opportunistic as the heterodox alt-media folks we critique, or even worse than that, as the QAnon bakers who built online brands by filtering 4chan through their personal political preoccupations?
Yeah, it's good to clarify those questions.
Okay, so with regard to number one, is our book a conspiracy theory?
I mean, we're really quite conservative with our claims and with following and showing our evidence with high test sources.
I would say there isn't anything speculative in the book except when it comes to some mild psychologizing about what certain behaviors might mean or where they come from.
But, you know, when we do that, I think we're transparent about the speculation with hedging phrases like, you know, it may be that or perhaps.
I mean, one of the things that we've said is that conspirituality took off online during COVID because everyone was forced online to compete for eyeballs, and the more inflammatory content won the highest engagement.
Now, that's not a controversial statement.
That was easy to see.
It was easy to back up.
We have receipts for that.
But then I also would often go on to speculate that the wellness demographic finally had something to sink its teeth into that wasn't boring.
And so I would argue that QAnon was a lot more compelling than turmeric smoothies.
But I knew that was a hunch.
I hedged it that way.
That's not like it was based upon interviews, you know.
Were you bored with your turmeric smoothies and you decided that QAnon was a better subject?
That's not what I did.
But I guess, you know, you have to be really, really clear about the transition from this is a phenomenon that we're tracking and you know, the speculations or the speculative, you know,
wandering that that occurs after that, which is where you're trying to say, well, why might that
be happening? And that's an important thing to keep in mind because intentionality and psychologization
is also at the heart of conspiratorial thinking, right? Yeah. And I think as I
listen to you say that, Matthew, one of the things that comes to mind is that when we
interact with our listeners, whether that is via emails or direct messages on any of the platforms we're
on, whether it's through the comments on Patreon, what I never hear reflected back to us
are A really wild, speculative, concrete, you know, conspiracy style narrative that's woven out of our memes and catchphrases.
I don't.
I hear people who are either because of their temperament and their sort of intellectual skill set or because of how we're structuring what we're doing, not to pat ourselves on the back too much, That there is a measured ability to move back and forth between those different levels of analysis, one of which is based in more kind of social science research, one of which is based in hard scientific facts, and one of which is based on a more kind of open-ended cultural analysis that is clearly opinion.
I mean, another area in which the question of whether the book is conspiratorial or not can be sort of examined through how we make connections between events and movements.
And I think the rule here is that we have to be really careful to not claim causality.
For instance, a little bit later we'll talk about how we present an argument that conspirituality disrupted the yoga and wellness worlds during COVID in part because the demographic was enthusiastically depoliticized over 40 years of self-help consumerism.
Now, this can sound like it was planned by, you know, some group of people, and that when we went through 30 years of yoga journals to see whether the editors and writers addressed political issues at all, and then we came up mainly empty, that somehow there was some kind of explicit editorial
policy they were following.
But no, we didn't see any evidence for that.
There was no plan to make yoga and wellness folks into political nimrods.
It was just an impersonal outcome of the neoliberal zeitgeist.
Yeah, and along those lines, I think that we're clear that there's a distinction
between actual conspiracies and conspiracy theories.
Right.
Conspiracies are happening all the time.
They're part of reality.
But establishing their existence relies upon good journalistic, scientific, and even legal argumentation and evidence.
And without those processes, Conspiracy theories tend to be premature, imagined explanations for whatever is going on.
And importantly, they're explanations that show high degrees or they deliver high degrees of confirmation bias.
They carry intense emotional energy and they usually single out scapegoats and they propagate really, really quickly.
And on that effect note, they take root before in real life investigations take place.
And I think that's a critical thing we haven't really spoken of that much.
I think that it's common within the conspiracy theory investigation discourse.
That, you know, as soon as something happens, there's an instant tracking of the stories that begin to spin out from a particular event, whether it's about weather balloons or, I don't know, whatever else.
And the speed with which the theory takes root is a crucial aspect, but I haven't really heard You know, an analysis or comments on how it makes the theories and how they embed themselves so quickly into public discourse become difficult to displace.
Because when the real investigations are published, the conspiracy theory won't change.
Especially if it's refuted.
It might even strengthen.
And that's the most disheartening thing.
Because once the actual hard work of investigating has been done, The publication of the investigation can be instantly tarred as part of the original theory, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
So we're in that domain of unfalsifiability, right?
So if the claims that you're making, if you cannot answer the question, what would have to be the case in order for you to reconsider What would make you change your mind?
If you can't answer that question with some degree of clarity and honesty, I think that's a red flag.
I think, too, that this happens a lot when you start to get into, for example, discourse on the line between science and pseudoscience.
It's similar to conspiracy theory.
What is a conspiracy theory versus an actual conspiracy?
Is that very often I find that people on the other side of the argument will they'll accuse you of doing exactly what they're they're doing like you're well you're speculating too and where's your where's your study that proves that this thing happened in the yoga community like you're also just these are also your biases and there starts to be a kind of there starts to be a flattening out of Of truth claims in ways that that fails to understand that even when we're talking about science, like if you're science informed, there are going to be ways that you evaluate new claims about what's happening in reality based on what you think is more or less likely to be true.
So what we what we can say about things for which we have some unknowns or we don't have final resolved kind of facts of the matter.
is informed by the likelihood of what might be true or false based on a whole existing body of knowledge, you know.
Right.
And that's going on all the time. That goes on in science, it goes on in intellectual pursuits.
And I think that what happens with a really conspiratorial mindset or the mindset of someone who is captivated by pseudoscience
is that a lot of those sorts of categories and processes for thinking things through get distorted.
They're lacking in some of those skills, I would say.
Uh, you know, and I would, I would add to that conspiracy theories tend to generalize from specific, often unrelated.
So the classic example is, I don't trust what they said about 9-11.
Look at JFK.
Yes.
Right.
So there, so there's that kind of thing.
And of course, Bobby Kennedy does that.
And so you'll see these valid instances like Vioxx or like the Sackler family that then turn into blanket accusations thrown over entire groups.
That group could be big pharma and, you know, Obviously, big pharma is not, the pharmaceutical industry,
which again, takes it away from that generalization to one step removed, has all sorts of
problems, but you'll see it with any of the three-letter agencies, whether it's the FBI or
the FDA.
And really, I think what you start to see is a motivated prejudice.
We're now an entire, the mainstream media can now become just a smear.
It becomes a slur.
Right.
And you hear this in spades with how Bobby Kennedy transposes environmental pollution into the supposed cover-up of vaccines causing chronic illness.
It's all the same thing.
It's all the same thing.
It's all pollution.
He will often resolve to this statement of, we are swimming in a toxic soup of environmental pollution.
And then very quickly leap to, there's an epidemic of chronic disease.
And how else do you explain it?
I even heard him do this in a recent interview.
He was interviewed for The New Yorker.
By David Remnick, and he did that maneuver where David Remnick said, well, there's actually the scientific consensus is there's no connection between vaccines and autism.
And he did the classic conspiracy thing.
How else do you explain it then?
Right?
Which is argument from ignorance, you know, turning it around.
Do you know that was a stunning moment because Remnick had just disclosed previously in the interview that his own son or child was seriously autistic, and there was no love from Bobby about that disclosure.
There was no, I'm sorry to hear that.
I can imagine that this news about vaccines being connected to autism is quite disturbing to you.
No, he actually went on the offensive.
Yeah, so no empathy from the Crusader, which is, I think, really interesting.
He also does the thing that you were just mentioning, Matthew, where he goes nuclear on any disconfirming evidence by just labeling it as part of the conspiracy.
Yeah.
So I would just say this is not skepticism in the service of discovering facts.
It's pseudo-skepticism.
We always have to deal with this fork in the road, though, on the way to conspiratorial thinking.
If we take, for example, the fact that Jeffrey Epstein dies of strangulation in jail, I remember Julian Field of QAnon Anonymous emitting this three-minute sustained howl of horror at the news.
And in that howl, he's communicating that, firstly, foul play is plausible.
And secondly, the plausibility of foul play would create a raft of bullshit.
And thirdly, that that raft of bullshit would inhibit both accountability and the possibility of knowing the truth about what happened.
Because the reasonable gut response, given Epstein's network of compromised marks, is that he was silenced by murder.
That's just an idea, but it's a deeply pleasurable idea.
because it would confirm deep suspicions about the world and accountability held by many people,
especially if they've been victimized by institutions or the rich.
It is plausible.
And I think we intuitively calculate in an instant when we confront something like this
that the likelihood of fuckery seems incredibly high.
And that's fine.
It does seem really likely.
But I think we can stop short of conspiracism by just acknowledging that we still don't know for sure.
And I think it's also really bad thinking to gather up multiple instances
in which we just are really not sure, but something seems fishy,
as if together they all add up to evidence for some other claim.
That's the paranoid and somewhat dissociative style of world building.
Yeah, it's a really good construction that you've made there because you're using the term world building, and I'm hearing that word more in this house as the 10-year-old starts coding video games with, you know, programs like Blockbench and World Painter.
And these allow Minecraft players to modify worlds and create mods and, you know, other characters and stuff like that.
But when you talk about gathering up multiple instances of unverified data points, I'm imagining Minecraft blocks or materials in these worlds that are not completely coded in and of themselves, like each element is buggy, it doesn't behave in space the way it's supposed to, it's not going to hold up what it's supposed to, but maybe it works just enough to link up with other elements, and so the builder can continue putting things together into a world that they can sort of walk around in, but on aggregate, Yeah, it's a great analogy.
be unstable, you know, all of the stores will have false fronts, nothing is going to work,
none of the buttons are going to work, it's going to glitch out, and it's going to leave
you stranded in an empty space. And, you know, with all of that time and effort wasted.
Yeah, it's a great analogy. I mean, with this kind of world building, the materials are
not sound. So you kind of have to make up for that by both the emotional conviction
in the reality of the world you've built, and this kind of panoramic sweep of its explanatory
power and liberatory promise.
And that also then requires amping up the paranoid fantasy that you're claiming your new world and its sort of processes reveal and can save us from.
So, as with outrageous claims about alternative medicine or the paranormal, any one of these conspiracy claims, if shown to be undeniably true, just one of them via strong evidence, would be massive news.
Yeah.
But there's nothing like that.
There's a pile of half-truths and distortions.
And there's this sort of assumption that they can somehow stack up into a livable alternate reality.
So here's an example, classic example, of this sort of emotional white knuckling from RFK Jr.
at that famous, or infamous, Defeat the Mandates rally in DC.
This is going back to January of 2022.
Yeah, and we're playing this because, and it's funny because he's actually standing on a dais and don't they still have construction scaffolding up during that event?
That could be the case.
I'm not picturing it in my mind.
The main picture is the American flag behind him and behind that the very famous huge statue of Lincoln sitting in his throne, right?
Right.
Yeah.
But but that's interesting about the scaffolding.
I mean, because because our point here is that when you don't actually have something to stand on, you do shit like this.
Every capitulation is a signal to the oppressors to impose new forms of torment or torture or compliance or obedience.
Every time you comply, you get weaker.
The hill that you're gonna die on is the hill that you're on right now.
And they're coming for our children.
They're coming for your children, Julian.
I just have to say that, you know, I spent a lot of time with that speech.
I spent a lot of time clipping excerpts and using them in various analysis that I did.
I had forgotten about that particular section.
And also we live in such a fast moving, just fire hose of media and information that the Bobby Kennedy that we've seen over the last month or two.
Mm hmm.
Even though he can be sort of triggered into going onto one of his vaccine rants, it's not that guy.
It's not that guy who's talking about the oppressors and the hill you're going to die on and how they're coming for your children.
That is like, that is full mask off.
And I think it's super helpful for me.
And I imagine for a lot of other people to remember, like, this is the same guy.
So did you get Bobby washed over the last month?
I don't know that I got Bobby washed so much as that.
I just, I, My brain updated like his current content.
I still find him... You know?
You pressed update.
You got the Bobby update.
Holy fuck.
That's so grim.
Oh my God.
My mind is thinking about all the things he's saying now and it's...
The emphasis is different.
Well, OK, here's here's one way in which I got Bobby washed, because when I went back and I found that I remembered that I was like, what did he actually say?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, my gosh.
It directly contradicted several key pivots that he has had in recent interviews where he has been asked to comment on Donald Trump or on the Republican agenda or on QAnon believers and he or
on Biden and he with great discipline, he he'll say my campaign is not about talking down to
people or running people down.
We've had enough of that.
Oh, really?
Have we had enough of that?
Have we had enough of that?
Anyway.
That's the new hill.
That's the new hill he's willing to die on.
He's willing to live on or something.
I don't know.
Brought to you by Charles Eisenstein.
Right, exactly.
Anyway, so with a speech like that, you know, It's more than there's something wrong with vaccines or agency capture.
It's they're coming to kill you.
It's like we're in The Last of Us running away from the mushroom zombies.
And, you know, this is contrasted, as we're saying, with the guy who currently says he wants to bring Americans together.
You know, given that we sort of try to absorb and digest that content, Julian, do you ever have Bobby-type feelings about Bobby?
Like, do you ever have a gut feeling of understanding the intentionality of these characters and feeling like it's nefarious?
Like, do you ever feel that the moms of For Liberty are out there coming for our children?
Do you ever feel, like, clouded or confused in that way?
I don't really.
Not with these folks.
I see them as mostly super misguided.
I think they're deeply wrong, but I believe in their sincerity.
When we start to get to people like Roger Stone and Paul Manafort and Steve Bannon and the actual big money donors behind the Daily Wire and the people funneling dark money into the decades-long Supreme Court takeover, Yeah, sure.
I think that they have a very specific agenda.
I think that they believe it's a good agenda, but I think it's really, really bad for so many people, especially the most marginalized amongst us.
They're very open about that agenda, and I think its impacts are specific, and the destabilizing dynamics of conspirituality, which is our topic, happens to benefit those kinds of actors.
Oh, man.
Okay, so in some sense, wacky conspiracy theories can provide cover for longer-term intentional political movements that share the same valence.
So they're, they're not, I don't think they are actively instigating the conspiracy theories and sitting together in a room smoking cigars saying, you know, if we, if we get people to believe this, then that will help us in, you know, 20 years time.
Right.
You know, like going back to, going back to right after 9-11 that they were sitting there saying, you know, we can completely control the Supreme Court and get a guy into power who will be the most criminally corrupt president in the history of the United States. If we do X, Y, and Z with the
internet, it's this new technology.
That's not what's going on. But when something is to your advantage, well, you're certainly
not going to speak out against it or, you know, discourage it or debunk it.
We're in the weeds of intentionality.
And at this point, I've listened to about a hundred hours of Bobby and he really likes to say that he never tries to get into people's heads, which is kind of ripe for someone who wrote a whole book about what Dr. Fauci's real intentions are.
But it kind of makes sense that he does break his own rule in that book and everywhere else.
I just want to say that Anthony Fauci is in the title and Bill Gates is in the subtitle.
So.
Right.
You know, the conspiracy theorist has to or benefits from raising the stakes and their own charismatic profile by knowing why bad actors are doing bad things.
Like, it helps them if they can present the impression that they know the minds of the perpetrators.
And to this, they can then add urgency or the fact that it's like it's all happening now
because within personal actions, there's also a kind of uncertainty
about when things are going to unfold.
But if there are real villains, they're coming for you now.
You don't have time to really research.
You don't have time for doubt.
You're reacting to a feeling of disgust and vulnerability.
And this might be why the conspiracy theory mindset is also usually conservative or reactionary in nature.
It's responding to a sense of immediate disgust at intentional threats to the natural order.
And Bobby can have good standing with that disgust when it comes to ecological devastation
and the people who wield it.
But then to generalize it to all human medical activity is something else entirely.
Yeah, I would add there too, Matthew, is that there's a less conservative mistrust of power
that can absolutely be present here too.
Yeah.
And in a way, this is kind of the hinge point.
You know, the oppressors, is the language he's using, lied to us about pollution in the rivers to make the fat cat lobbyists that buy their mansions, that buy the mansions of the oppressors, happy.
And they lied to us about weapons of mass destruction.
And of course, the COVID mandates were just another way to enact turnkey totalitarianism and gaslight us.
So, you know, you can see how people who have a more liberal, renegade sort of mistrust of those machinations of power might also get sucked in.
Now, I see, as opposed to all of this, all of these Very competent people working within the legal system.
I'm thinking of Jack Smith and Alvin Bragg and Letitia James and Fannie Willis.
They're doing the really careful work as public servants to slowly build the cases against the most outrageously corrupt and criminal prisons in American history.
And that's, they're doing a kind of world building too, but it's a world building that maps onto reality based on all of these different data points that give it a solid footing.
So the activity in and of itself of world building or investigation or making connections is not the problem.
It's what you're basing those on.
And their world, let's just say, it has to be a brick shithouse, like it cannot fall apart.
Yeah, so their profession, their skill set, their chain of command, all of these things hold them to a very high standard in terms of what they're basing that world building upon.
And it's hard not to be impatient with that kind of rigor.
It doesn't have the same satisfying immediacy of conspiracism.
It's hard not to lose interest.
Or to get confused about the details of the cases, right?
Listen to all of those different figures that I just listed and each of the different cases that they're building in each of these different districts in the United States.
It's like, it's hard to keep it all straight with the conspiracists.
You know, as in the 30 percent of the country who believe Trump's big lie about election fraud, I think they have every reason psychologically and financially to double down, extending the bubble of their explanation to now include the corruption of the investigators.
Everybody's in on it.
And there are benefits to being in this discourse, to luxuriating and taking pleasure in conspiracy theories.
We've often cited Karen Douglas' trio of benefits that are netted by people in this zone.
So she talks about Epistemic benefits, or the feeling of having specialized, you know, stigmatized, rare knowledge.
Yeah, it's such good analysis.
She talks about the social benefits.
People will bake the drops.
I talked about, you know, QAnon bakers before constantly there's this interpreting and reinterpreting And then they form communities around that narrative that share cycles of anxiety and relief.
That feel kind of like friendship, right?
And then they also will sometimes feel that existential needs or anxieties are being soothed where people honestly feel that the theory will protect their lives.
And you know, as with saying the COVID vaccine is a bioweapon, And so they're going to avoid it, or that the theory will protect their dignity from some sort of grave moral injury.
They'll be able to live with themselves because they will know that I was right.
And I'll just add to Douglas' list here that, you know, early adoption of the conspiracy theory is quite comforting.
It delays or it shortens the time of living in uncertainty.
Yeah, and you also just, there's a little ping off of what you just said into that domain that I know is part of your analysis, or part of what you've coined some language around, which is, I'm going to scare the hell out of you with some, you know, fabricated or amplified kind of threat, and then I'm going to give you the solution.
Right.
I want to sum up here a little bit, if I can.
This is my key distinction, because I think this is important, and this is, we've dealt with these kinds of questions from the very beginning.
My sense is that conspiracism is actually pseudo-skepticism.
It's research porn, to kind of build on Tien Nguyen's idea.
It's ersatz power critique and cultural analysis.
It's a simulation of something that might otherwise be Be more real.
And what all of those descriptions have in common is that they're giving the appearance of rigorous inquiry while actually enacting a weakly argued, wholly un-evidenced discourse, or maybe partially or mostly un-evidenced discourse that relies on dodgy sources.
It usually floats free from existing literature and established science because all of that is part of the mainstream narrative.
And this creates a radically distorted reality, but it insists that it has actually found the hidden truth.
Now, when you try to sort out how and why all of this is going on, it requires getting your hands dirty.
But that doesn't inevitably lead to living in the same epistemic quicksand.
Any more, I would say, than rejecting the concept of supernatural beings equates with yourself becoming a fundamentalist.
There's a false dichotomy in there somewhere, right?
That's in order to be open-minded, you know, you have to adopt some kind of place in the middle.
So the phenomenon of conspirituality, I was just talking about conspiracism in general, conspirituality blends this superficial contrarianism with religious or spiritual extremism.
Which I would say is characterized by a reliance on ancient and or charismatic authority as a source of absolute metaphysical truth that dictates how we should act in the world.
This is a mythic mood that will often rely on conspiracism to justify its discourse when facts and evidence fail.
Now that's in keeping with a kind of populist, anti-elite, or faux-populist really would be more accurate, anti-elite, anti-intellectual appeals to faith, initiation, and intuition.
So one thing we do in the book is to suggest that this is an underlying template that different forms of conspirituality have followed in different times and places.
We're not saying they're all part of one big thing that's been going on by the anti-Illuminati all this time.
We're saying it's a template, it's a way of thinking about things, and it's a way that these things sort of inevitably fall into relation with one another.
And we've studied over the last three years A kind of unique variant that has manifested out of that template in our time.
We see this template as being organized also around money and power, which in today's manifestation leverages the entrepreneurial tools of social media.
So we do sound a bit like we're talking about an ever-present cabal and a corrupt power structure, just like conspiracy theorists do.
But I think the devil is really in the details.
We noticed that all of this dovetailed with right-trending politics.
We wanted to understand where those overlaps were because to us, as to a lot of other people, that seemed somewhat surprising at the very least.
We also wanted to look at the historical antecedents and what was unique about the contemporary manifestation.
So tracing those lines and making sense of those connections seeks to carefully explain and think about a phenomenon that we've already established exists.
Researching conspirituality should be the opposite of conspirituality itself.
And that's important because conspirituality imitates research into history and politics and science, right?
They're always going to be sending you those PubMed articles.
But it ends up with building a world that's much more like Game of Thrones.
Okay, I think we've done a good job at distinguishing real conspiracies from conspiracy
theories, but there's kind of a middle ground for the readership. And that's the space of what if it
feels like a conspiracy theory?
So, I want to look at an example, and really this is taken from a sentence from a very nice review that we got in Kirkus.
Do you want to read that line, Julian?
The book verges on conspiratorial thinking in trying to neatly connect them all through disparate accounts of sexual, racial, and bodily anxiety.
And them all refers to the various movements and themes that we've already been discussing.
Now, this is mild criticism, but it's really important because if the accounts that we put together are disparate, which is a great word, we've left the reader with that glitchy Minecraft world feeling.
What is the story of sexual, racial, and bodily anxiety that we outline as part of the background to COVID-era conspirituality?
Are the sources really disparate or do they connect solidly?
I think we can make it concise and then see if there's anything truly wacky.
So if we start in the COVID present, we have the specter of pedophilia as the backbone of QAnon and hashtag save the children outrage.
And this echoes the sexual depravity fascinations of the satanic panic.
We have the rise of groomer discourse, which then leads to a rise in anti-trans bigotry, which is a really light lift for a culture that's already steeped in the language of the divine feminine and divine masculine.
Interesting variations here include Dr. Christiane Northrup telling female followers to stop having sex with vaccinated partners and then countless influencers posting about COVID vaccines making them infertile.
Yeah, and an underlying idea here is that reproductive organs and fluids are not only essential to a person's life and identity, they also carry spiritual or esoteric powers and so you don't screw with them.
So there's this long history that we tag of linking sexual activities and fluids with divine nectar and superpowers.
So when the Proud Boys And other manosphere types start up things like NoFap November.
It's not just that they're trying to reduce the humiliations of their porn consumption.
They're also talking about bodily rejuvenation.
Not just, you know, spilling seed.
They're talking about cultivating bodily purity.
And then that has racial overtones that we'll get into in a moment.
I really like how you're unpacking this, Matthew, because, you know, it comes to me to say, really, and this is an argument that you primarily developed, that really what you're saying is, it's not so much that there is a deliberate sort of proto-fascist movement that was instigated amongst, say, the yoga and wellness community, it's more that certain types of preoccupations Yeah, with bodily purity, with a return to natural ways of living, with how to fully embody and inhabit the empowered sacred masculine or sacred feminine, that these preoccupations, unbeknownst to the persons who are getting hooked by them, have these echoes with fascist movements of the past and with ideas that
Sort of create a prime importance around that kind of bodily purity and what it means to really become an awakened, empowered self that we then traced historically and went, you know what, this is actually not so surprising.
And this is one of those areas of overlap where you're culturally liberal.
Yogis may have actually found themselves much closer bedfellows than they thought to right-wing politics.
Right.
Because they're drawing on materials from the self-help and wellness literature and zeitgeist.
And they may not realize what kind of politics are enmeshed in them.
And then when it comes to, you know, Proud Boys and NoFap November, We can't know what types of wellness books or yoga books they might be using, but we do know that the idea of not ejaculating to preserve your health is extremely common throughout all of the pre-modern health systems that come from Asia that have been so popular within contemporary global wellness.
As being a key to health and rejuvenation.
Like, so many of the old books teach it.
The Taoists, the Ayurveda people, the Chinese medicine people.
If you want to hear how this plays out in real life, check out that bonus episode we pinged at the top because Lin and Justin Short were in this group that for 17 years forbade them from having orgasms because they were supposed to use that energy for bio-spiritual enlightenment.
And let me just interject right here because I think it's a perfect place to just say this.
The caveat that people always seem to need to hear is we're not saying that if you get into yoga that you're inevitably getting into far right-wing politics.
We're not saying that if you go through a period of time experimenting with, you know, thinking about your sexuality
and your habits around maybe masturbation and porn, or like how you relate to orgasm
and whether or not you're able to sort of contain your arousal for extended periods.
Like there's all sorts of ways of exploring this subject matter that when you do that,
it doesn't mean you are inevitably being indoctrinated now into becoming this horrible right-wing person
or something like that.
That's not what we're saying.
No, it's more like the ideas are like sleeper cells that can be activated by a particular kind
of right-wing politics based in a fascination with purity and pollution and disgust.
Yeah.
That's what it is.
Yeah, we're not we're not saying we're not saying Hitler was a vegan.
Right.
Right.
Like that's that's not really the there's a there's a kind of fallacy that I think a lot of people can Assume is being enacted here where it's like, well, you know who else thought that that was really cool?
Nazis.
Yeah.
And and we don't want to be so crude.
But we do want to be funny because all of this stuff all produced, I think, one of the best passages in the book where we describe how the idea, the original idea, as far as we know, of seminal retention was practiced by yoga dudes in medieval India.
Julian, you want to read it?
According to Indian lore, The yogi strives to distill strong semen from his blood through a vegetarian diet, postures, breathing exercises, and strict celibacy.
A real keener can then drive this stored semen up his spine and into his head where it sublimates into glowing nectar.
He can then insert his tongue into the cavity at the back of his throat and sip it like a hummingbird.
You know what we left out?
We left out the fact that the guy will often take a razor blade and cut the, what's it called?
The frenulum or something?
You cut the bottom of your tongue so that you can actually flick your tongue back into your throat a little bit more easily.
Anyway, continue please.
You actually cut the little thing that connects the tongue to the bottom of your mouth so it gets longer.
But Matthew, it's a delicate process.
As the yogi's storehouse of magical semen swells, an increased vitality makes him horny and distracted from meditation.
And in this patriarchal context, Women are typically depicted as sex-obsessed sirens bent on dragging the upright man down into the prison of pleasure and domesticity.
According to legend, for example, the awakening of the Buddha was almost derailed when a demon made a booty call at the Bodhi tree.
The horniness increases the yogi's need for celibate discipline.
If he gets the balance just right, the yogi's body will overflow with bio-spiritual illumination, and at the time of choosing his death, he'll nut his consciousness across the Milky Way.
All right, so how do we possibly connect this fetishization of sex juices with racial anxieties?
Well, here's why.
Some of the biggest figures in European physical culture in the early 20th century were real perverts with this stuff.
They were really into the yoga sex stuff, or at least what they were able to imagine about it from the first translations of colonizer Sanskritists.
But they didn't just have an interest in stretching and getting swole.
They were worried about urbanization, gluttony, laziness.
They were worried about being out-reproduced by over-sexed brown immigrants.
And then when you fast forward to our era, these echoes that are just sort of embedded in the practices that get inherited and passed down the line without necessarily their political context, Um, the conspirituality racism becomes implicit.
Like, nobody we cover is posting the 14 words.
You know, nobody's offering free massages to Patriot Front, you know?
But they will promote conspiracy theories about George Floyd.
They will take the Chris Rufo bait on how critical race theory is poisoning minds in the same way that vaccines are poisoning bodies.
Or, the racism will just consist of validating current structures by doubling down uncritically on private, bespoke wellness economies that inevitably exclude the poor and the racialized.
And this is a place where I think you're really doing a good job of illustrating how this analysis is trying to make sense of something that is happening.
You know, we're seeing people, like you just described, the journey of beginning to promote conspiracy theories about George Floyd, taking the Chris Ruffero bait on critical race theory, how we watched people over the course of two years move in that direction, where they started off as yoga teachers or life coaches or, you know, female empowerment sexuality goddess coaches, and We don't see that kind of right-wing messaging in their initial conspiracism, and then a year later, we do see it.
Yeah.
What we're doing is trying to make sense of, okay, how do we account for that?
What may be some of the cultural underpinnings here?
Because I don't think other levels of analysis are really available.
I think the thing about these Practices creating feelings and impulses and sensations that people are trying to chase with regard to their self-care.
Having an implicit or hidden politics is really, really crucial because it really cuts to the heart of You know, there being no intentionality behind the move.
It's not like, you know, I definitely felt betrayed by, you know, swaths of our yoga and wellness community as they started to get red-pilled, you know, but I had to let go of that.
When I started to realize that, oh, you know, they've inherited a way of thinking about the world, a way of thinking about their bodies that actually is quite vulnerable to the moral panickery of anti-trans politics.
It's quite vulnerable to panics around, you know, the poisons, the so-called poisons of vaccines.
And, you know, and I was there too.
You know, I had very precious attitudes towards my body and what went into it and I was very distrustful of, you know, of evidence-based medicine for many years.
I know what that feels like and I know how I was set up to You really sort of expect that the worst was being foisted upon me by my public health care system.
I've noticed, too, that there have been many times over the past decades where I've said to someone, you know, this whole you create your own reality and there are no victims belief that you have that you think is so empowering and positive.
Well, I think you need to look at what it says about the child with leukemia, what it says about the person who suffers, you know, some sort of horrific abuse, what it says about what was done to the Jews during World War II, and they will automatically say, well, I'm not talking about any of that.
No, no, no, no.
I'm just talking about how you can choose to be positive and you can choose to see your life in these ways and you can recognize that everything that happens, you can either be a victim to it or you can let it make you stronger and make you learn lessons and keep becoming your best self.
As if not recognizing that this particular metaphysical statement has all of these problems inherent in it means that you can somehow float free from that, right?
Right, yeah.
So to sum up this coming out of the Kirkus Review.
The difficult and historical argument that we've made that I think the reviewer is sounding, it sounds to the reviewer like it's comprised of disparate elements.
The summary is basically this.
Yoga and wellness cultures emerge at the inception of modernity when the meaning and power of the white body is being contested by industrialization and immigration.
Fitness, therefore, is not just about personal health.
It's also about nationalistic ideals, and its pride and swagger conceals deep anxiety about pollution, impurity, and losing things.
And that brings us to our next Julian, I did a whole episode on this with Natalia Petrozzella but what did you immediately think of when you saw those images?
And we all got bombarded by those images of Bobby pumping iron and doing pushups at Gold's
Gym in Venice.
Julian, I did a whole episode on this with Natalia Petrozzella, but what did you immediately
think of when you saw those images?
I just thought of Putin.
I thought of Mussolini.
I thought of Joe Rogan.
I thought of Aubrey Marcus and all of the bros doing that faux-haka in their promotional
Modern yoga scholar Joseph Alter has a great word for it.
I don't know if he's coined it, but it just rings for me every time I come across stuff
like this.
Biomorality, because what his messaging is, is that he is going to be leading the nation
by example to a state of health that didn't depend, that doesn't depend on syringes and
pills.
And so my thread commenting on this, which was just like a basic, you know, analysis
through this framework of our book.
The thread went viral.
It attracted a lot of trolling.
And interestingly, Julian, we haven't talked about this in Slack, but my follower count has not gone up at all.
Like I had a mega Um, viral thread and Twitter is such that there's, there's a strange like kind of absence of, I know that Jordan Peterson is complaining about the same thing.
So I'm joining, I'm joining a weird company, but I found that very strange.
Anyway, there was a very thoughtful response to this thread on Instagram where I posted it as well.
So Julian, want to read that?
RFK's recent videos are cringe and his arguments full of holes, but this post feels pretty
conspiratorial, over-conflating the connections between perspectives and insisting that one
can't participate in or advocate for personal wellness without a yoke of bigoted legacy,
that one can't take personal responsibility for their own health while championing public
health programs.
It's not mutually exclusive.
Not every human drive is rooted in the same place as its historical forebears.
Similar ideas organically arise from varied branches of culture.
So what are your thoughts here, Julian?
I mean, it's kind of along the lines of one of the distinctions that we've been trying to make for the last few minutes.
You know, I like to work out.
I watch people, I watch videos of people with their shirts off working out and I learn things from them.
Sometimes that has to do with like You know, physical therapy or something like that as well.
Over the years, I've shared countless videos of myself doing yoga.
Some of them I've had my shirt off, you know?
Yeah, well, you're a body fascist and I feel ashamed of my dad bod in your shadow, Julian.
Okay.
But here's the thing.
Bobby, it's like necessary but not sufficient, right?
Here's what starts to build the argument.
Bobby exists inside a particular ecosystem right now.
He is networked with the bro science, contrarian, COVID dissident, natural medicine scene that has spent the last three years saying the virus was only really dangerous to fat people.
And so why didn't they just lose weight instead of us having to wear masks in quarantine, right?
It's only dangerous to fearful people.
So why should us bold, strong models of health have to take the vaccine?
And it also said that masks and vaccines were more dangerous, actually, than COVID, and natural cures were better than, you know, what you would get from corrupted big pharma.
So when that guy, who's in that ecosystem in this context now while running for president, posts a video to social media of his very fit and muscular 69-year-old physique, And when this guy then has a health policy roundtable that reiterates a lot of these memes that I just mentioned, the criticism is valid and actually not at all conspiratorial.
As Derek pointed out in his brief, Bobby seems pretty affable until he starts talking about prosecuting Fauci and enacting executive orders to restructure government agencies and get rid of the corrupt people at the top and to change how medical science is pursued and to start putting penalties on journals that have not, you know, I really appreciate this comment.
with his claims about vaccines and autism, he's actually a pretty scary dude.
I really appreciate this comment. I'll just point out that, you know, the small straw man in it is
that, you know, this feeling that we insist that one can't participate in or advocate for
personal wellness without a yoke of bigoted legacy.
Of course you can.
Of course you can.
There's nothing about the analysis that says this.
It's more like, You've inherited a set of tools that can make you vulnerable to a kind of political messaging because they create certain psychological beliefs about what your body is and what it's meant to do and how it's kept pure.
Could Bobby communicate his message without the body fascism?
Like, would it look more like Michelle Obama doing yoga stretches on the on the White House lawn?
I don't know.
I don't know.
And I want to I want to just briefly go back to the you create your own reality thing, because I think it's I think there are lots of relationships here or very similar dynamics happening.
The person who says you create your own reality and so stop being a victim and you can live your best life.
They're not saying I hate poor and oppressed people.
But the people who take on that belief system are, as you just suggested, going to be more susceptible to a kind of callousness with regard to the realities of oppression and inequality, where they're going to say, well, those people, you know, they're born with the same kind of spiritual sovereignty where they can create their own reality as well.
It's again, it's recognizing that the relationships here don't devolve into some kind of strawman oversimplification.
And I think there are stronger and weaker claims that we make in our work.
There's also, of course, a difference between a social media post and an episode topic.
And then, of course, a chapter for our book.
We're getting into increasing levels of complexity and nuance and caveats and exploration.
The similarities with strongman And authoritarian leaders and all of the historical notes that Bobby hits in those videos is striking to us and to anyone who's familiar with that set of set of ideas and artifacts.
But I do think a term like body fascism has very strong overtones, especially to anyone not familiar with the idea.
It's like, oh, my God, we're saying that that he's He's literally Mussolini or something.
We might seem to some to be overplaying the term.
So this is an instance where I think the caveats are a good thing.
So is the context.
We are, after all, talking about something that can be somewhat subconscious.
Absolutely subconscious.
On the one hand, he's just giving followers a glimpse behind the curtain.
I bet whoever is like in charge of his social media says, hey, this would be great.
People will really like it and they'll feel closer to you.
And you should show off how fit you are, dude.
You're 69 years old.
But on the other hand, we look at his attitudes toward COVID
and vaccines and natural immunity and Fauci and the implications that we've tracked over the last three
years.
All of it has a very familiar flavor.
But I don't think, I'm certainly, I'm not saying that Bobby is literally Putin in waiting.
Okay, last topic, Julian.
Very late in our preparation for this episode, we got the first part of a book review coming across the transom from Daniel Pinchbeck.
Julian, who is Pinchbeck?
So, Daniel Pinchbeck was a very influential author and speaker for about a decade.
He's continued to write and speak and have a profile, but there was this moment that he had culturally.
During this period of time, I would say from roughly 2002 to 2012, interestingly.
I describe him, and this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, about halfway between David Wolff and Ken Wilber.
So, you know, there's a level of New Age intellectualism combined with a penchant for conspiracy theories.
He starts off in New York as a journalist, but then has a crisis that he refers to in interviews as a spiritual emergency.
And after some intense psychedelic experiences, he publishes his first and fairly acclaimed book called Breaking Open the Head, A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, and that's in 2002.
So that's really trailblazing in terms of psychedelic literature, right?
Yeah.
In its current iteration?
Absolutely.
And then, so that's 2002.
In 2006, this is followed up by his book 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl.
And that book included a claim of receiving a prophecy directly from the aforementioned Mesoamerican deity.
That claim caused him to be dropped by his publisher, but also to become a celebrated public speaker and profit in New Age circles and sort of the overlapping, you know, more mainstream New Age curious community.
He then founded a social network called Evolver.net, which he saw as a movement preparing for the social transformation of 2012 as it was looming.
In the near future, as well as what is a still popular hub for writing about psychedelics called Reality Sandwich.
I'm sure you've been there at some point, Matthew.
Yeah.
He describes his experience with plant medicines as initiating him into aspects of reality beyond mere scientific materialism.
So I would describe his worldview as a kind of psychedelic techno-shamanism guided by revelatory faith.
In a 2010 interview, he suggested that by 2020 we would be hanging out with benevolent aliens, entering the psychic phase of human evolution, and contributing toward the universe as a work of art.
So, in many ways, I think we could say that he is almost our target market within the demographic that we're actually writing about because this is the kind of thinker who straddles the threshold between journalism and, you know, nonfiction, speculation, between science and magic.
I mean, someone we would want to persuade towards our analysis because he might actually be in the position of Yeah.
being a gateway into or out of the red-pilled world.
And maybe that's something that a reader like that would want to consider, yeah?
Yeah.
And we have to say that he's really gracious in his opening of the review.
He recommends the book highly, thank you very much.
But he's going to spend the first part of his review airing criticisms, and then in part two,
get to what he values about the book.
So it'll be nice to hear that.
We don't have that yet.
But his substantial objections relate to topics we've already covered today, namely how closely yoga and fascism are tied together in the modern era.
I think his best point is that in covering our analysis of the influence of Rudolf Steiner on the epistemology and body fascism of conspirituality, We don't take the time to clarify and do the history on the fact that Steiner himself was eventually targeted by the Nazi hierarchy.
So, Pinschbeck is right about that, although he misses the broader point that Steiner was profoundly influential to the eco-fascist elements of the Nazi movement through his ideas about organic farming and the blatant racism of his theory of the folk soul evolving through ever light-skinned bodies.
They liked his stuff.
Nazis liked Steiner, but they also cast him off as a kind of simp.
And Pinchbeck also quotes one excerpt about Steiner's narcissistic epistemology without showing that what we're actually talking about is that Steiner believed he understood all history and science from reading the Akashic Records or the imaginary library in the sky.
Well, Matthew, just as a shill who's totally cucked by scientific materialism, that's the kind of thing you would say.
Yeah, exactly.
He does, however, make one point that we haven't covered yet.
And it's not quite in the realm of, are we conspiracists?
But it is in the realm of, where are we coming from?
And what are our inner motivations?
And his comment, I think, nicely summarizes some of the feedback that we've received from the beginning of our project.
and really independently for years before.
So here it is, he's gonna tee it up by a discussion of how you and I have both had experiences
in cultic organizations.
Remsky and his fellow authors end up proselytizing for a different cult, violently ridiculing everything woo,
such as subtle energy or the possibility that we possess souls beyond our physical bodies.
They turn into reductive materialists and devout atheists, allergic to anything not backed by scientific evidence.
Although it has many millions of adherents, liberal progressivism still fits the definition of a cult.
It has a set of self-limiting beliefs and applies familiar rhetorical strategies, including the knee-jerk tendency to ridicule and mock anything that is not currently proven or accepted.
It's a shame that the authors and podcasters can't overcome this limit, as it makes their project much less effective than it might have been.
It appears they developed extreme counter-paranoia.
Alright, so let's set aside the anything-can-be-a-cult theme.
I want to set aside the tonal criticism about ridiculing and mocking.
I think that's highly subjective.
We also have rules about how we apply sarcasm.
We don't punch down, for instance.
I really want to zero in on this characterization because I think this is important.
What comes up for you when you hear this, Julian?
It's not an unfamiliar argument.
allergic to anything not backed by scientific evidence.
What comes up for you when you hear this, Julian?
It's not an unfamiliar argument.
I think I get where Pinchbeck is coming from here.
He's sort of in that postmodern new age vein of Rupert Sheldrake and Deepak Chopra,
you know, science is fundamentalist religion, whose dogmas carefully prevent recognizing
the reality of paranormal phenomena, and deny the immaterial nature of consciousness,
and insist that the universe is perfectly described by the superstitions of Newtonian physics.
So from that perspective, Our supposed lumping in of paranormal and supernatural claims with pseudoscience, cults, and charlatanry could be a telltale sign that we're just devout, closed-minded atheists.
I think the assumption here is that this is a kind of reaction formation on our part that comes from having been duped and hurt by cults, such that we are like new converts to rationality, who can't tell the difference between real psychic powers, accurate prophecies, and the actual voices of ancient Mesoamerican deities, on the one hand, and all the delusional second-rate stuff he'd obviously agree is bunk on the other.
I want to just point out that if there is a reaction formation on my part that is playing out through this podcast, it's not to the ideas of the cults I was in primarily.
It's to the sociology of traumatic narcissistic charisma.
It's my reaction formation is I don't want people treating each other badly.
I mean, he is sussing out a reaction formation, but it's not about the ideas so much.
The ideas are kind of easy to take apart.
So it might be that you have an overly happy trigger finger for identifying someone as a charismatic manipulator.
I would absolutely say that.
That's probably a real weakness on my part, and I've got to keep that in check.
I think for Daniel, the part of our argument that says, for example, and this would be where I would come from, a big reason that I identify Lori Ladd as a grifter is just foundationally that no one is really receiving messages from the Galactic Federation.
Period.
That to him would indicate a failure to make adequate distinctions between real channelers and fake channelers.
And that's where we're not being skeptical enough, perhaps.
Now, this could be because we're too dogmatic and too wounded from our past beliefs, becoming disillusioned.
And to speak for myself, no, that's not what's happening.
I've actually been an atheist my whole life, despite the fact that I got into a kind of cultish spiritual group.
I always found the nonsense and fantastical aspects of New Age culture silly and delusional.
And I did so in 1993, as much as I do in 2023, even after all of these, the last three years of doing this podcast, it hasn't increased the same amount.
For me, awareness practices have always been about cutting through all of that bullshit so as to be more grounded in reality, more at home in my body.
More emotionally resilient and able to think as clearly as possible, which I take as a kind of spiritual practice.
Yeah, so I think what you're getting at is that the comment contains, it seems to contain a hint of betrayal.
Like, hey, we used to be on the same side.
We used to do yoga together at Jeeva Mukti in Manhattan.
So, I get that.
And I think he's right that for me, scientific evidence, hard scientific evidence is important.
But I would also say there are other forms of softer scientific evidence.
There is literature, there is culture that are just as important to me when I'm trying to understand something.
Of course!
Yeah, not when discussing the objective effectiveness of vaccines, but perhaps when discussing how the premise of a vaccine might interact with a cultural landscape, for example.
So for me, scientific discipline attempts to remove cultural conditioning, but in part practicing in the world, it is communicated through deep
layers of cultural meaning and power that can be as persuasive to its users as any data.
If we take just the simple fact that 95% of all scientific papers in the world are published
in English, and what that might mean for the hegemony of Anglo-American intellectual power
in the world, we have, you know, a really good example of culture interacting with scientific
discourse in a very profound way.
There's no science, in my view, outside of its communication, and that means for me that science is never quite just a It's a hard materialist endeavor.
It's a social practice as well.
I agree with all of that.
The place I would stop short where I see a lot of people continuing on with that kind of argument is recognizing that the efficacy of the vaccines and of let's say the smallpox vaccine in accomplishing what it sets out to accomplish What is unique about science is that that is true or false regardless of the cultural or social context in which it is applied.
It either works against the polio virus or it doesn't.
Yeah, there isn't an indigenous polio disease versus a, you know, modern polio disease.
Okay, right.
So, I want to add here too that Pinchback does something in the review, which again I'll acknowledge is generous and praising in some nice ways.
He does something that other critics will also sometimes do.
He points out that we say conspiritualists are leveraging their social media popularity to make money.
And isn't that just the same as what we're doing, given we have a successful podcast and a book deal?
So I want to be really clear here.
We're not saying that making money per se is a sign of being corrupt or dangerous.
We are saying that profiting from irresponsible, false, sensationalist, paranoid, pseudoscience, paranormal, I am talking to aliens, QAnon adjacent, Fauci should be prosecuted, quarantine measures are creeping, communism, vaccines kill people and the government is covering it up, all of that type of content, using it to make money, while also taking PPP loans from the same government that you say is enacting turnkey totalitarianism, is corrupt and ugly and exploitive.
We're not saying that networks of colleagues are evidence of wrongdoing.
We are saying that doubling down on disinformation when you discover it is profitable and deluding ever higher numbers of followers through summits and conferences and email list sharing that gives conspiracy common cause priority Over the sanity, truthfulness, or political affiliation of your collaborators is gross.
And when we say any of this, we also provide receipts for what our analysis is based on, even as we also make value judgments that rely on our own worldview and ask people to support us in getting paid for the many hours of work that this takes.
I'm glad that you addressed that because that question of hypocrisy, I mean, we pinged it at the top.
It's good to return to it down here.
I've been struck by how important this question of our beliefs are is to the subsection of our listeners who are negotiating their way.
You know, either on the edge of or out of yoga and wellness, because if they hear cultural criticism in that zone, they really want to know for sure what the critics believe and feel in their deepest hearts, because that will somehow be the marker of trust and credibility.
I think for some people, finding out that a person is an atheist is a kind of deal breaker for friendship.
But for me, the issue kind of always is that I can't always say for sure what I believe because I've had too many changes in my life.
To be sure, I've detected too many inconsistencies in my own psyche and its needs and the ideas it's drawn to, to really be a belief normie, you know, coming down on the side of atheism or believing in the paranormal.
I think I'm belief queer, Julian.
I think I'm belief non-binary.
Are you coming out right now?
I am coming, I think so.
And I'm not talking about being agnostic in the sense of like, well I'm holding off judgment, I don't have enough information.
I'm talking about knowing that I'm fluid and that there are many ways of being and acting religiously that don't fit the categories of self-identifying as a Catholic or a Protestant or a Buddhist or whatever.
And, you know, in contrast to this beautiful bonus that you published this past week, I'm never actually confident in the lucidity of how people self-report when they say they do or don't believe in God, because the question itself seems like a bit of a trap.
For me, it's better put as, you know, to what extent do you feel moved to use religious language to express what is most deeply valuable to you.
And that's the place where I use the word sacred, and you often go, why are you using that word?
Yeah, exactly!
Like, do you really deserve to use that word?
Get that word out of your mouth, right?
The other response that I have to Pinchbeck's diagnosis of my supposed atheism is that my religious or non-religious orientation is private.
It's none of anybody's business.
I think thinking about my religious or non-religious beliefs without quoting me or sourcing a statement to a text is like thinking too much about my sex life.
Especially when you can hear this note of disgust in the diagnosis.
It's kind of a fantasy about another person's internal reality and there's something odd about that.
I actually really hope that Daniel Pinchbeck is listening to this.
I think he'd really appreciate what you're saying.
Um, and I get where you're coming from too, Matthew, but I mean, at the same time, I just have to say, we wrote a book with the word spirituality in the title.
You know, we talk about the yoga and wellness community and wild prophetic conspiracies.
We speculate about how certain types of spiritual beliefs might influence people psychologically and politically.
So yeah, I kind of get why it elicits the speculation on their end and I'm not too bothered by it.
The thing that I hear in comments like Pinchback's is, you know, for me to trust you, I need to know that you have space in your heart to believe in God.
And that's kind of funny, because it's kind of like saying, I need to know you have your have space in your heart to believe in something out there beyond comprehension, where someone or something is guiding things in a direction.
And, you know, like, we know, kind of know what that sounds like.
To me, it's very, yes, it sounds like where you might go with the conspiracy theory, but it's very similar to people I've known who talk about the mystery, how there has to be some, there's a humility, right?
That certain things are just a mystery and we will never know.
And I think that that's fine if it is genuinely humble.
I think where it goes wrong is where you use that appeal to mystery or to there being something out there that science can't know to then build a house of cards Around the fact that you're being, you know, spoken to by a Mesoamerican deity or that you know that 2012 is going to usher in this period in which we move towards having relationships with benevolent aliens.
Yeah, you took the word mystery and you put a capital M on it, right?
Because really, when you say mystery, you're talking about yourself, but when you use the capital M, you reify something outside and you say that that's out there and I've got to discover it or it's governing my life or something.
Yeah, you're saying your limited way of explaining or evidencing things can't measure up to this mystery, and then I'm going to use that as a placeholder to justify an outrageous set of claims as if I don't have to provide any evidence for them because it's a mystery.
And there's something deeply dishonest about that.
Here's the last thing I want to say.
The thing about what the cultural critic, the journalist, the analyst believes as a measure of character or credibility is This is terribly abstract, right?
Like when I'm trying to suss out whether I trust someone in my actual life, in my neighborhood, somebody I might want to work on with something, when I'm trying to like figure out what my kid's baseball coach is like, like the folks who run the summer camps, my criteria are like really simple.
Like how do they treat other people?
Um, and just on the street, like, and, and sometimes I get a sense of what a person is like by watching three minutes of them parenting.
Maybe you can, uh, you have this experience as well, Julian.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Um, but we don't have that access to people in the parasocial digiverse.
We don't see what they actually do.
We're looking at each other through layers and filters and conventions of abstraction and I'm not surprised that, well, two things.
I'm not surprised that conspiracism and its abstractions have taken off during the online age.
And I'm not surprised, going back a little bit farther, that, you know, before this particular era, the great wars over theism or atheism in the early aughts were fought in pitched battles online.
Julian, I'd like to end with a poem by Gwendolyn McEwan, a Canadian poet who still haunts me, I think, and everybody in Toronto and Canada.
And, you know, we can still feel her presence in the Toronto cafes where she used to write.
She died in her 40s in 1987, but she left some real gems behind.
And this one speaks to the uncertainty at the heart of what I think we do.
I can't find the precise year of publication, so we're just going to say it's 1971, the year I was born.
The poem is called Flight One.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
This is your captain speaking.
We are flying at an unknown altitude and an incalculable speed.
The temperature outside is beyond words.
If you look out the window, you will see many ruined cities and enduring seas.
But if you wish to sleep, please close the blinds.
My navigator has been ill for many years, and we are on automatic pilot.
Regrettably, I cannot foresee our ultimate destination.
