Women journalists spend years meticulously investigating, corroborating and fact-checking allegations that Russell Brand is a serial sex offender. The result? A 6600-word masterpiece of survivor-centered concision, battle-tested by a legion of editors and lawyers.
But the manosphere responds! With logorrheic defenses, conspiracy theories, and rationalizations. Peak posting through it.
We look at choice man-stan statements from Charles Eisenstein (RFK Jr’s Director of Messaging), and psychonaut Daniel Pinchbeck. We also look at a pre-allegations interview Brand did with meditation guru Jack Kornfield to learn more about how Brand has ingratiated himself to wellness entrepreneurs flattered by his attention.
Show Notes
BBC and police begin inquiries as Russell Brand faces more claims
‘Jimmy Savile police unit’ helps Met with Russell Brand investigation
Russell Brand quizzed by cops 9 YEARS ago over claims he sexually assaulted masseuse and treated her 'like a prostitute'
On Mobs, Cults, and Russell Brand - Charles Eisenstein
Brand and Circuses - Daniel Pinchbeck’s Newsletter
Open Letter to Russell Brand — Daniel Pinchbeck's Newsletter
A Cultural Crucible - Daniel Pinchbeck’s Newsletter
Alyssa Milano on the #MeToo movement: 'We're not going to stand for it any more'
Writer blames ‘predatory’ ways on women | Page Six
#6 - Abusing Power: Taking Predatory Daniel Pinchbeck At His Word
We Refuse to Endorse Daniel Pinchbeck as a Credible Voice in the Psychedelic Movement
Community, Transparency and Accountability—Dr. Ann Gleig in conversation with Egyoku Nakao Roshi & Tenku Ruff Roshi
Jack Kornfield (Morality, Spirituality & AI) - Stay Free with Russell Brand
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
We are on Instagram at ConspiritualityPod, where you can mostly find us in terms of social media.
You can access all new episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes through Patreon.
And you can also snag our Monday bonus episodes through Apple Podcast subscriptions.
And we have a little reminder for you that our book, Conspirituality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, is now out in print, ebook, and audiobook form.
So if you have read it, if you've listened to it, please review it.
If you haven't yet, go out and buy it.
And a brief note before we begin with this episode, we'll be discussing sexual assault and rape
and some really dumb dudes minimizing and deflecting and rationalizing.
Conspiratuality 176, Russell Brand's Man Stands.
stands.
So it feels a little strange to backtrack by a month to follow up on this morbid story because since it broke, the Middle East has erupted in fire and is burning through every news feed.
Eventually, we will cover it, but not to add to all of the geopolitical analysis out there already.
What we'll do is analyze how, for the conspiracy theorists, especially the narcissistic and grandiose influencers that we study, Hamas' attack on Israel and Israel's overwhelming response How it's actually all about them, and how, in their endless provocation shtick, they enact a secondary war online that further confounds the capacity to see things clearly, along with whatever slim potential there is for de-escalation.
So, rolling back to, I guess we could say, simpler times, Russell Brand.
So a four-year investigation by the UK Times, the Sunday Times, and Channel 4, which was published on September 16th, revealed the stories of numerous women who variously allege that Brand raped, sexually assaulted, or sexually abused them.
One of the women alleges that she was raped by Brand when she was 16 years old.
The Metropolitan Police in London have said they have opened an investigation into the allegations against Brand.
Now, the lead journalists in this investigation, Rosamund Irwin and Charlotte Weiss, are following up.
The day after their investigation dropped, they wrote that more women had come forward with claims dating back to the early 2000s.
The Times is also reporting that the Special Police Unit formed in 2014 to investigate Jimmy Savile, called Operation Hydrant, has been advising the Met.
The UK tabloids are also picking up on various threads.
The Sun, for instance, details a police report from 2014.
Brand allegedly assaulted a masseuse for 40 minutes.
The woman filed a report, and the Thames Valley Police interrogated Brand, but did not charge him.
So Derek, first off, what did you think about the reporting from Irwin, Wace, and their colleague Paul Morgan Bentley, and the publications that supported and ran it?
Well, it's pretty well-covered territory, and I hope everyone has read it, and if perhaps you're able to, watch the documentary.
But it is the epitome of investigative journalism, and I think that's what really frazzles a lot of people.
It's a joint investigation, as you mentioned.
You had the Sunday Times and the Times.
And interestingly, both of those papers are owned by Rupert Murdoch.
He bought them both in 1981.
And it's important, given that we're going to cover a lot of conservatives who've replied
and come out in favor of Brand, with this idea that the mainstream media is corrupt when it's
Murdoch publications, which they usually cite favorably.
The other one was Channel 4 Dispatches, which is a British current affairs documentary
Siri that's been running since.
They've done a lot of great work over the years.
In 2005, they ran an investigation called What They Didn't Tell You, which featured Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer, who is the single man responsible for uncovering Andrew Wakefield's falsified data that linked vaccines with autism.
So these are real investigative outlets.
That put a lot behind their reporting.
Now, a lot has been made about these reports about the women remaining anonymous and using pseudonyms.
In the documentary, some women are blacked out with lighting, and some actually had actresses read their words because they didn't even want to be heard.
And Brand's defenders jumped out on this as evidence that this whole thing was a hoax or a ruse.
And I won't speak for these women, but knowing personally women who have been sexually abused and
emotionally manipulated, I only know what they've told me, which is how hard it is
to discuss these topics, much less go public with them in a social media environment
that has fueled and accelerated horrendous misogyny and sexism. Case in point, everything
happening on Twitter.
Now one thing women in my life have shown me through their eyes is that me, as a tall white man,
walks through this world much differently than they do, with fewer concerns,
especially when it comes from other men.
And I think that's a lesson that all men need to learn, especially the blowhards we're going to cover soon with their hot takes on this situation.
Now, we'll link to the reporting in the show notes and I encourage everyone to read it, but this also gets into the wariness around experts and media.
People really believe that watching a YouTube video or following a contrarian on Twitter is research and that their hot takes are just as valuable to the discourse as journalists who spend years reporting stories out like this.
Now, sadly, there are fewer and fewer outlets that even allow for a journalist or a small team of reporters to pursue stories for months or years at a time.
Now, an investigation like this one into Russell Brand could easily run into hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars of labor for what turns out to be one story.
And the funny thing is that these extremely online contrarians who constantly talk about how you can't trust government or corporations only know that because of previous investigative journalism efforts by the media.
You don't get Nixon out of office without Woodward and Bernstein.
You don't know how many Catholic priests abuse children without the Boston Globe.
So the people we're going to cover today add nothing to the public discourse about this topic except confusion, as you flagged, Matthew, self-promotion, and that's really dangerous for society given how many people follow these men.
So the time story dropped, as I said, on September 16th.
Now, the night before, if you remember, Brand posted a preemptive strike against the coming reporting, suggesting that he was the victim of a coordinated attack by mainstream media outlets, not because the women have alleged abuse, but because he's speaking out against governments and the Ukraine war and vaccines.
Two minutes of raw bullshit.
We won't play it again here, but I did cover it in our September 23rd brief, which focuses on his rhetorical style.
But Derek, who were the first responders to Brand's victim siren, and what did they say?
Yeah, there were a lot, and tracking all of them would be impossible, but these jumped out.
One of the first was, surprise, Andrew Tate, who replied to Brand's video that preempted the Times article, as you mentioned.
He wrote, Matrix attack.
And that's something that Tate often says.
The Matrix reference implies anything mainstream or political is part of the system.
That also is how he replied to allegations of sexual abuse and rape against him, that
it's the Matrix coming after him.
Brand's buddy Tucker Carlson quickly jumped on that video as well.
He retweeted it with the commentary, criticize the drug companies, question the war in Ukraine,
and you can be pretty sure this is going to happen.
Piers Morgan warned that his viewers should not describe Brand's accusers as victims and survivors, because that implies Brand has been convicted.
This gets into the whole thing of journalism is not court, and they conflated that, thinking that people who supported Or at least wanted to look into what the potential victims have said are telling the truth.
They were spinning it as being like the media is the court and that was never implied.
Yeah.
Ben Shapiro took this angle.
Is sleeping with a 16-year-old as a 30-year-old scumbaggy?
Sure, but it's not criminal.
So that was his deflection on it.
Elon Musk of course weighed in.
He replied to Brand's first video.
The ambiguous and scary they coming out as usual.
Alex Jones always needs attention.
He says that Brand's allegations are because the comedian is fighting globalists.
Right-wing radio host and three-time failed congressional nominee Dan Bongino used it as an opportunity to promote Rumble.
Which is where his show now lives.
Wait, wait, wait, Derek.
In your script, you say where he now lives.
And I think that's a little bit more appropriate.
Well, yeah.
I was trying to update that in real time because I do think he lives there as well.
I was trying to give him a little bit of a benefit.
He's got a URL, actually.
And then you'll notice that so far I've just been saying that it's men, but women have come out too.
One is Pearl Davis, who goes by the female Andrew Tate.
She also said that The Matrix is after Brand.
And her logic is that since Brand has been loved by many for 20 years, this sudden comeuppance is pretty suspect.
Again, as you flagged, it's a four-year investigation.
But let's end on a bit of a good note.
Megyn Kelly, for once, came out and yelled at conservatives for immediately rushing to Brand's defense.
So I guess maybe all hope is not lost?
Julian, were you surprised by any of the knee-jerk responses?
Let me just say, too, if our one single shining ray of hope is Megyn Kelly, we're probably A pretty bad situation.
No, I'm not surprised at all because this is precisely how conspiracy-based rhetoric works.
It's both self-deceptive and self-serving.
Bear with me here as I take one of my standard detours because I want to point out that one of my arguments for why many spiritual people are so susceptible to conspiracism Is this, if you really want to believe that paranormal phenomena are real, for example, despite there being no strong evidence at all, then there are always the nuclear options that either say it's being suppressed by mainstream science, that's why there's no evidence for it, or that all of science itself is actually a kind of religious fundamentalism that denies the nature of reality.
It turns out that you can use jargon from postmodern philosophy, certain branches of theology, and despite science being corrupted, you can still grab some mangled concepts from quantum physics to form a pseudo-intellectual argument for false beliefs.
In fact, Russell Brand does exactly this.
Yeah, all the time.
Once you've crossed over that really significant epistemic line, whether it's about paranormal phenomena, whatever people's various opinions might be experientially, or alternative medicine, and I would add other supernatural, prophetic, metaphysical explanations, purposes, or claims about reality, then how you interact with the world can be radically impacted when it comes to questions of facts and evidence.
So, of course, you know, I should say, and preempt you a little bit here, Matthew, that how consistent and coherent people's beliefs are varies from person to person.
They might have a compartment for certain kinds of spiritual beliefs that doesn't bleed over into how they think about, say, investigative journalism.
But I argue that one very strong downside to this style of belief is that it tends to be both anti-psychological And anti-political.
This is kind of the old spiritual bypass Saul, but with some elaboration.
Why?
Because it has built-in circular, metaphysical, and conspiratorial explanations that are actually thought-terminating cliches as sort of defaults against anything that might be threatening.
So these protect against any facts or feelings that could go against these core articles of faith.
And in fact, my sense is that this protection is part of why the belief system is so appealing in the first place.
So, all of that to say, in the case of someone like Russell Brand, and the whole contrarian, conspiratorial, science-denying, pseudo-skeptical ecosystem he now inhabits, he's gradually become more and more ensconced in, nothing is as it seems.
Everything is connected, and everything happens for a reason, usually a kind of dark, paranoid reason.
The paranoid version of these New Age tenets means that those free-thinking mavericks who dare to expose the mainstream narrative and tell fantastical truths will always be targeted by the cabal.
And even the most carefully reported and investigated story that fits a panoply of well-established and even self-reported biographical facts must really be about silencing the heroic victim.
I'll add as an aside here that The Bad Stats is the title of this guy on Twitter, and I still call it Twitter, continues tracking, clipping, and commenting upon another significant conspiritualist figure, Brett Weinstein, who we kind of alluded to at the top here.
As of late, Weinstein has been wondering out loud to his audience of almost half a million on YouTube, and of course he gets more elsewhere, if the Israel-Hamas war actually serves the function of driving a wedge between the contrarian and conspiracist alt-media community, just as they were getting so powerfully aligned.
Like that's the real purpose, right?
Isn't it fishy?
That just as we were all starting to get our ducks in a row and defeat the Matrix, here comes this war in which we can now disagree with one another.
So, same thing here.
The entire world will inevitably organize itself against you when you've dared to wake up.
So I don't think anyone moderately online is surprised that Brand has attracted this melted A-list of supporters and that the result is yet another iteration of the online culture war spectacle.
But for this episode, we're going to dig a little deeper into the kind of discourse that does a subtler sort of brand laundering by implying that the allegations are a sign of spiritual divisiveness.
or of the need to return to the divine ideals of the masculine and feminine, or that we need more of William Farrell's wisdom in the world, or that we should all pause and consider how canceling Brand is actually an iteration of an ancient tribal sacrifice ritual.
We're going to circle downwards in the Man Stand Mind, starting with comments from Charles Eisenstein, and then from Daniel Pinchbeck, and then we'll go to the subtlest level of all, meditation guru Jack Kornfield, who Cut a mutual back-slapping podcast with Brandt about six weeks before the allegations dropped.
So, Kornfield's team has since removed it from his feed, but the fact that it was done at all gives us some good clues about how vulnerable the meditation industrial complex is to celebrity attention.
You know, you can learn to relax, surrender, and breathe in just anything.
So, in Cornfield's case, to be fair, we're not examining an endorsement of Brand after the Times exposed him, but we're looking at how a beloved spiritual influencer winds up offering tacit endorsement to a massive bullshitter.
I mean, it's obvious that Musk and Jordan Peterson, who we didn't mention but also jumped on the bandwagon, will push a fellow con.
But with these three charismatic men we'll look at today, we get to see how abuse-blind and bullshit-tolerant the New Age crowd is, and how that is a powerful gateway to brand normalization.
Well, Charles Eisenstein came out pretty quickly with an essay, or actually a transcription, on Mob's Colts and Russell brand, and his hot take is truly special.
It is based on an interview that he had with his friend, Benjamin Life.
Who I cut a video about, and he started following me on Instagram, so that'll be interesting.
I don't know of him, though.
Life asks Eisenstein a few questions, and Charles just riffs.
And riffs is the right word, in that Eisenstein admits off the top he hasn't even looked into the allegations against Brand before he decided to hit publish and substack.
So, of course he's not looking at the claims by the women in any capacity.
It's all a rant against cancel culture.
Yeah, and this exchange is published on September 25th, so it's five days after the news drops.
So, Eisenstein knew what to say right away, of course.
Or did he?
Because from the beginning of our engagement with Eisenstein's content, This has kind of been the thing.
He's totally and shamelessly comfortable with riffing about anything.
Not just with friends while getting high, but in public and in print.
I mean, you know, this all started, our project basically started by looking at him being willing to publish 9,000 words on the grand meaning of the COVID pandemic just days after it was declared a pandemic by the WHO.
Yeah, well that's the kind of foresight that gets you to be on the RFK election committee or whatever the fuck he's doing.
I think you and RFK have the same editor.
They have the same editor.
I think they're each other's editors.
So on this sub stack, you know off the top it's going to be special.
Life puts me too in quotes in his very first question, framing it by saying that accusations against Brand weaponizes the quote, process of deconstruction, deconstructing patriarchy.
He then says, quote, "...the way in which the old story of separation is leveraging the, quote, Me Too, quote within quotes, movement to delegitimize someone who's speaking truth to power seems like a very hollow ritual that is very easy to see through."
It's amazing that there's so much mirror world stuff here, compressed almost down into like mantra form.
I think we should slow it down a bit because life is actually saying that the investigation can be understood through Eisenstein's greatest and only hook, which is the old story of separation.
Which is what should actually be in quotes.
Right.
So, life here is pitching Eisenstein a softball so that Eisenstein can find his bearings because, of course, he hasn't been paying attention to the news, which he's going to comment on.
The Sunday Times, in other words, is working in the same place that Eisenstein is, the realm of myth.
And that the real investigation exposes patriarchal and misogynistic abuse is actually a hollow ritual or the wrong kind of myth.
But usually what happens with these guys is that they have to have their cake and eat it too.
The investigation may be a hollow ritual that disturbs the real process of deconstructing patriarchy, which they pretend to be interested in, because these New Age man-stan hacks can't say that deconstructing patriarchy is in itself bad.
They have to say that these women investigators are doing it incorrectly.
Yeah, thanks for the context.
It's hard for me to take that first question seriously, but Eisenstein does.
And the first thing he says is that he's barely gotten a whiff of the story, and he hasn't even looked into it.
So again, why the fuck are you talking about it?
His impulse is to then say he has no idea how credible the women are.
First thing he says, I don't know if they're credible.
And then he goes on to say it could be a deliberately orchestrated attempt to discredit brand.
Then, as the third bullet point, he cedes some ground, saying it could be true, but then immediately follows that up, saying whether it's true or not, they provoke a mob impulse.
Yeah, so they might be lying.
But if they aren't, people shouldn't be so angry that the UK entertainment industry propped up a known sexual predator for decades, basically.
No, of course not.
And then he goes on, and this actually comes out of his mouth hole.
Albert Einstein was apparently horrible to his first wife.
Does that mean we should discard the theory of relativity?
To compare anything that Russell Brand has done to Einstein is ludicrous, but it speaks volumes that his brain searched for another man who supposedly acted poorly around a woman to stretch this comparison, and that's where he landed.
Yeah, it also begs the question of who even asked about the value of Brand's content, right?
I guess that's assumed, that it's Einstein-level.
It's assumed by metrics.
Yeah, well, Einstein didn't have that many YouTube followers, so I would actually put Brand above him, you know?
Right.
So, Life goes on now to frame this incident in terms of a collective projection of shadow.
These guys can't avoid Young.
And then he states people accusing Brand are guilty of cult-like behavior.
Now, Eisenstein pretends he's on the moral high ground here, stating that those rushing to defend Brand are guilty of cult-like behavior, but so are those accusing him of the sexual abuse.
He even provides a definition of cult, which is as follows.
The word cult and the word culture are obviously related.
That's not a definition.
I would say that the dominant culture could be called a cult.
And the word cult means a culture that is separate from the dominant culture, therefore it is called a cult.
What makes a cult toxic and the dominant culture is toxic is when there's severe punishment for deviance, when you face ostracism and even retribution if you fail to profess the beliefs that the cult mandates.
If you don't exhibit the behaviors imbibed by the taboos and rituals of the cult, you get in big trouble.
Matthew, how does this definition hold up?
I think like most of Eisenstein's ideas, along with the ideas produced with a lot of the sense-making crowd, it's really like bullshit wordplay with no real sense of history, no real interest in definitions, but a real enthusiasm for pithy but really false equivalencies.
I mean, they really love good metaphors.
And bad ones.
Yeah, and I think it's part of the TED talkification of the way the media works in these landscapes.
So, he's saying that the accusations that Russell Brand is at the center of a cult of influence is mirrored by another cult.
But what would it be?
A cult with no center or leader?
Somehow coerced into believing that Rosamund Irwin and Charlotte Weiss are infallible as journalists, or that they must be obeyed, or that they are extracting their readers' money or obedience?
Is he suggesting that the Me Too movement, which is broad and diverse as a social uprising, is coercive?
And on what basis?
Is Tarana Burke its leader?
I mean, the only bit of evidence is that when Me Too erupts in social spaces in 2017, it did become kind of hard for cis men to go online and push back against it.
Because a dialectic emerged, and some guys felt, for a little while at least, like there was a social cost to saying whatever the fuck they wanted.
But if we take this question seriously, like, is Russell Brand running a cult?
I think you can argue that based on how many people's jobs depended on enabling him, how loyal his fan base is, and how much money he brought to the table for BBC and Hollywood over the years.
Okay.
I mean, the parallel story within the same infrastructure is somebody like Jimmy Savile.
Was Savile running a cult?
I mean, not in the way that Yogi Bhajan was.
And one complicating factor here is the common phrase of cult of personality, which, I mean, we could apply to Leonard Cohen or Nick Cave as much as we could apply to Russell Brand.
So I don't know what the benefit is to using cult language in relation to Brand at all, actually.
So far as we know, He isn't doing anything much different from any other powerful and narcissistic alleged sex abuser.
So, what does cult actually add to that conversation except for unnecessary drama?
Or maybe even it complicates things because it exoticizes a kind of bog-standard misogyny and predatory capitalism.
I mean, that's becoming my question about legitimate cults as well.
In the sense that, you know, the more that you make NXIVM sound uniquely bad because it's a cult, the less you recognize that Keith Raniere isn't acting all that differently from any titan of capitalism.
So, in general, I think the usage of cult is lazy and dumb, but it also works for Eisenstein's demographic because his biz model is rooted in pop psychological meme making.
Now people have always noted that the etymological roots shared by cult and culture have been there for a long time.
We remember that cult was a synonym for any devotional group back in the early days of religious studies.
But here, Eisenstein is taking advantage as well of how popular modern cult studies has become, just this enormous industry in its own right through people like Steve Hassan and his mentor Robert Lifton.
And there the focus is on distinctly sealed groups where your physical activities and freedoms are curtailed, where all of your labor, all of your emotional capital is expropriated and funneled to the top in a systematic way, and all of your social relations from work to marriage are coercive.
And in the 80s, theorists who started breaking down what happened at Jonestown or with the Moonies developed very detailed models for how that machine works.
And a lot of that stuff is really helpful when you're in a high-demand group like that or if you have a family member who's been caught up, but it's also a kind of edgy, And rigid discourse that depends on diagnostic checklists that can be just too easy to turn into, you know, TED talk type insights that are centered on banal epiphanies.
And they can be folded into like social media survey posts like 10 signs you're in a cult.
So, there's been, you know, this kind of inshittification, to use Cory Doctorow's term, of cult theory, where suddenly it's just everywhere, but it doesn't really mean much.
It begins to break down in explanatory power.
It becomes a rhetorical device.
But I think one of the hard parts is that some of that insidification has been driven by anti-cult influencers themselves.
So, we had Steve Hasen on early on, soon after the publication of his book, The Cult of Trump, and he was actively expanding his purview, his theme, to find what he's always been looking for, which is ever-growing contexts for what he's created.
And he's convincing enough, with an attractive enough discourse, That's both novel and intricate, and he can instantly be on major networks talking about how MAGA supporters are behaving like cult members.
And the thing about journalists and broadcasters is that if you use an interesting heuristic that's new to them, and it helps them seem to grab hold of a complex phenomenon, they'll love you.
I mean, I myself have felt this happen, where, like, the Rolling Stone person or the New York Times reporter is asking me about QAnon as a cult, and I'll say, well, in cult studies, we say that indoctrination, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, and then at the end of the line, I hear them, you know, sort of typing furiously, and I feel this sort of silence of recognition, and I think, oh, I really impressed them.
But then I wonder, like, oh, what did I really say?
And how did it really apply to the subject?
Or is it really that it's just an effective soundbite, right?
It fits a particular form.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think Eisenstein is grabbing onto that.
He's done it in other essays as well in the COVID period.
So the upshot is That somebody like Hassan then gets drawn into talking about all kinds of things, like trans activism is a cult.
And then he winds up basking in the attention of J.K.
Rowling on Twitter.
And then just a few weeks ago, we have Hillary Clinton, in characteristically unhelpful comments, fretting over Trump supporters on CNN, saying, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members.
So, Derek, that's a very long answer to the question of whether Eisenstein is making sense.
No, I think he's recycling internet trash that just sort of breaks down in meaning with each cycle until, you know, it's all just vibes and resentment.
Well, I would much rather be in Nick Cave's cult than Russell Bryant's.
We turn now to Daniel Pinchbeck, who was at one time a very prominent exponent of the
spiritual value of psychedelic shamanism as a way to wake up to deeper and higher truths
of being human.
He published a celebrated book to this effect called Breaking Open the Head.
But he appears to have actually broken open his head maybe a little too much.
Because the follow-up book included accounts of supposed direct communication with the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl.
And that voice in his head apparently convinced him that the 2012 endpoint of the Mayan calendar prophesied a cosmic cataclysm and subsequent awakening to a range of paranormal and extraterrestrial realities.
I am still waiting.
Okay, so can we just clarify, he took plant medicine and believed that Quetzalcoatl was telling him the world as we know it was ending in 2012?
Yeah, and this became actually a very significant cultural, media, and commercial phenomenon.
In New Age publishing, in workshops and popular beliefs in the years preceding the fateful date.
It was really a big part of the zeitgeist and sounds true.
And David Wilcock and, you know, a lot of people made a lot of money off of like how to prepare for the coming changes of 2012.
Did he get a cut?
Like, like when you, when you make that prediction and everybody jumps on the 2012 bandwagon, I don't know how unique his narrative was.
I think what was unique is that he claimed that he got it directly from Quetzalcoatl.
All right.
Now, we should say here, too, that he's also written a series of book review articles about conspirituality that complement our analysis of certain problems with the New Age that he agrees with, but then criticize our rejection of the grab bag of fantastical beliefs that he finds plausible.
I want to bullet point the highlights of these three articles on Russell Brand.
Yeah, so the first is called Brandon's Circuses.
It's dated September 17th.
This is one day after the news breaks, and it's subtitled, What's Behind the Media Accusations Against Russell Brand?
So for sure, we're gonna get some original investigative reporting on this one, right?
He spent four years on this dubstack post and hundreds of interviews, so yes, absolutely, Matthew.
And he starts by acknowledging the allegations against Brand, which is more than some others have done, but he quickly serves into the larger cultural movement instead of staying with the heart of the Times story.
So it's riffing.
The 100% riffs.
This is a lot of riffing.
He discusses his own relationship with Brand.
I've actually noticed he does this often.
He plants his flag with these figures.
He recently wrote about Brian Murarescu, and before quoting him, he spent a paragraph complaining about how he supposedly didn't get credit for influencing Brian's books on psychedelics, which It was a fantastic book.
Pinchback likes to insert himself when it's not needed and his own previous relationship with Brand, like apparently he was cited in one of Brand's books, is just another example of needing to talk about himself in unnecessary context.
You know, one of the things that Chris and Matt over at Decoding the Gurus have been really strong on is the social etiquette of the contrarian guru class.
There's a lot of dinners, drinks, this emphasis on good conversation, which the readership has led to believe they're simply eavesdropping on.
So it's a new kind of media that way.
You know, hearing guys talking to other guys about the news of the day.
But it's not journalism.
There's no editorial oversight outside of the spontaneity that usually reproduces the preexisting values.
So this creates scenarios in which bromances between influencers are the actual product, the commodity.
And one of them can always say about the other, well, we don't need to agree on everything because we're good friends.
We're part of the same discourse.
We're having good conversations.
But, you know, I think we're going to see that there's another good reason for the tendency towards self-identification in Pinchback's takes here.
Yeah, and again, he's self-referencing before he even goes into really any of the allegations.
He doesn't really touch the allegations, and that's been my biggest frustration about this, is how many different ways men are approaching Russell Brand without talking about the women.
So Pinchback then invokes Claire Dedere's book, Monsters of Fans' Dilemma, which looks
at male public figures who have been cancelled for previous sexual abuse allegations, meaning
like going back years or decades.
And what I find interesting about Pinchback's analysis that is he doesn't focus, again,
on the allegations, but he then decides to focus on the cancellation.
And in fact, that seems to be the focus of all of the articles.
The women play almost a secondary role throughout the series.
While he does say men should be held accountable, women almost seem more like a nuisance that are trying to force too much change too quickly.
Yeah, and as I started to mention, in this regard, I think his position isn't neutral.
It may reflect his personal experience and his own alleged behavior.
So, we have to digress here just a bit to drill down.
The context is that in October of 2017, Alyssa Milano took to Twitter and she turned Tarana Burke's 2006 phrase, Me Too, which she had coined in 2006 on MySpace, into a hashtag attached to her allegations against Harvey Weinstein.
Now very soon after that, Pinchbeck published a long Facebook post that read like a strategic, preemptive confession regarding his own treatment of women.
He then deleted the Facebook post, and it's been scrubbed from the web.
You can't really find it.
That it's quoted at length in a page six article dated October 23rd from that year, so we'll link to it.
And basically the report describes how in the Facebook post, Pinchbeck acknowledged that he used psychedelic substances as tools of seduction, that he made unwanted and high-pressure advances towards women volunteers within the psychedelics organization he founded.
Some of those women were much younger than him.
And he also offered up a very detailed self-analysis for his behavior, and that was related to how women caregivers in his childhood treated him, according to his description.
Now, some followers applauded his apparent transparency, others were scathing.
Quote, Freud will not save you, Daniel, unquote, wrote one commenter referring to the rationale
that Pinchbeck used for his actions. Quote, and new age covert self-victimization and escapism
is unbecoming of an explorer of consciousness who has glimpsed beyond, unquote. Now, just over two
years after that, the folks at Symposia, you just interviewed some of them, Derek, for your piece
on commodifying psychedelics.
I don't think they're the same authors, but they're from that group.
They released a more detailed insider commentary on the very mixed fallout from this incident in the psychedelic community that Pinchbeck was at the center of.
In the text for their podcast episode, they recite the allegations and then conclude with a question.
Pinchbeck has made it exhaustingly clear in his own words that as soon as he gained a modicum of power and status, he used it to exploit women.
Why are some members of the psychedelic community so insistent that he get it back?
Okay, so on that point, and before we move on, I want to bring up a concept coined by friend of the podcast, Dr. Anne Glaig.
She's a scholar of modern Buddhism who appeared on our episode about Buddhobros.
She's done a ton of research with her colleague, Dr. Amy Langenberg, and others on abuse crises involving sexual exploitation in Buddhist communities.
And what they found was That in the midst of the crisis that unfolds around allegations that spiritual leaders have been abusing their power, either the leader or the institution or both will often come up with statements that partially acknowledge the allegations and then suggest that there may be something to them.
Now, if it's the leader himself, this might be a kind of performance of openness and self-referentiality.
And on one hand, it shows true believers that he's earnest and he's, quote-unquote, doing the work.
But on the other hand, it also allows him to avoid disclosing the full truth of what he's up to.
So, the trick is to say enough to gain trust, but not so much that you lose it.
And there's an aspect of this in play in Bran's preemptive strike.
Which dropped the day before the Times report dropped because the admission which he makes continually that he was promiscuous and a sex addict is put forward as a form of transparency in advance of the allegations.
And then sure enough, anyone who sees a benefit in continuing their relationship with him will point to that.
They'll say, look, he admitted he had a problem.
And that also casts him in a low-key victim position.
You know, he wasn't assaulting people.
You see, he was bravely dealing with a psychic wound born out of childhood trauma that almost tore him apart.
And I think we might hear the same narrative arc in the Pinchback story.
Because the self-analysis he offers on Facebook might all be true, but I think the more important function of the writing is to center the writer.
And I think that's characteristic of this whole thing that we look at.
Like, how can I use this cultural moment to say something about myself?
To self-disclose?
And in fairness, I think we all have to grapple with this because social media has given us the perfect vehicle for self-centering in the midst of any social movement or catastrophe.
And I definitely don't want to digress anymore here, but I think that about 80% of what's going on on Twitter in relation to the war in Gaza is pretty much exactly that.
You know, this is a moment.
I must say something emotional about this huge thing.
And I can imagine that back when Me Too exploded, there were a lot of men in Pinchbeck's position who felt almost like moths to the flame and wanted to not miss a cultural moment, partly because They were aware that they had helped to create it.
Well, good digression.
Let's get back into the Pinchback essay where it really starts getting into speculation without evidence.
He spends a paragraph trying to decide the motivation of the British media.
He writes, The UK media company Consortium was driven by different conscious and unconscious motivations.
Now, Matthew, this was actually done by one woman for years before the others joined in, correct?
Yeah, Irwin started in 2019, and her colleagues came on in the final year.
Now, you know, my investigative journalism is not in this league at all, but I have been on stories that have lasted for years.
And one thing that we have to understand is the incredible grinding, sometimes boring, extremely frustrating work
that that entails. The record keeping.
All of the receipts that you have to compile.
It's an incredibly long, often tedious, very emotionally taxing job.
And, you know, for Irwin, it's four years.
And then when her colleagues joined in, they wound up producing an article that was only 6,600 words in length.
Like, our episode we have a script for is about 8,000 words in length.
That's what hacks we are.
Anyway, zero wasted words in this article.
Zero data points left unburnished by fact checkers and lawyers.
And meanwhile, The brand man stands are publishing thousands of words every week.
Yeah, that's what makes the whole why is it coming out now theory bullshit because it's coming out now because it took four years.
Yeah.
But back to Pinchback, he really makes a cognitive leap now stating that he suspects the journalists are envious of brand sexuality.
He writes, I would imagine some of the male editors and journalists, perhaps feeling a bit stifled in long-term monogamous marriages, found this a bit infuriating.
I would imagine.
Yes, you would imagine.
Yeah, okay, so that's why this four-year investigation came to print, because editor men were feeling like cucks.
Yeah, so what, did he check the masthead?
Did he run down everyone's gender and marital status?
Well, think about it, Matthew, think about it.
It was two women reporters, one of them started, so it had to be the men who put the women up to it as a cover for their own insecurities about brand sexuality.
It's all so clear now.
Pinch Peck's leaps continue.
He then says that for men to really reckon with Me Too, there should be something set up akin to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Nelson Mandela set up in South Africa in the wake of apartheid.
Now remember, we're talking about men who can't discipline themselves enough to just take no for an answer, and he thinks this rises to the level of apartheid.
Well, I think there's a couple of things to note here.
I imagine with that comment, there must be the fantasy that you could take the stand and make your case publicly in a dignified set of proceedings.
But, you know, the other thing is that there's a lot of sexual assault experts who do describe a two-tiered society of sexual violence and rape culture enforced by social norms, policing the courts.
But, I mean, what's totally dumb about this is the generalization that compares I don't know, Julian, you live through South African apartheid.
Does this comparison hit at all?
It's inflated and ill-considered.
Thank you, Julian.
Thank you.
So, if you think the next thing Pinchbeck does is talk about alpha males, you got it.
You are right.
It's our birthright, apparently.
Now, you might not be surprised to learn that his reading of evolutionary biology, as popularized by E.O.
Wilson, is not on solid ground.
Pinchbeck says that an alpha male gets all the ladies until a group of betas conspire against him when that alpha gets older.
This is a half-truth.
That would be us right now, actually.
Isn't that what our whole podcast is about?
Are we the three betas?
We're kind of a mix of alphas and betas and we'll let the listeners decide who's who.
So in this reading, the alpha male has the women.
Now, in terms of nature, there are prides with lions that are like that, but this is not chimpanzee behavior.
Other males have access to females.
They have to broker that out on their own terms.
They're not shut out.
A courtship process is necessary.
It's very social.
It's political.
You can watch Chimp Empire on Netflix, which breaks it down very well, or E.O.
Wilson's work breaks it down very well.
So it's not a group of beta males, but one beta male who's usually considered the number two in the group, who then brokers relationships with other male chimps.
Julian, that's like you between me and Derek.
I'm just so glad we're clearing this very important reference to English mythology.
I did not know that this episode was going to be about us.
Yeah, well, you're welcome.
Right, thank you.
It's a long process in the chimpanzee world and in the human world.
It often takes years and sometimes the lead male maintains power even after an attack So, Wilson himself recently came out and said that most people got the alpha male theory completely wrong, and what Pinchback is doing is indicative of this phenomenon.
Now, Wilson interestingly noted, and this was in the 1980s, that American Republicans and muscleheads got all of it wrong by saying it was the one male.
And this misreading of complex chimp dynamics is all over Pinchback's analysis.
Okay, so they reduced it to social Darwinism because it sounds like the more complex view is that the beta is more fragile in his social relations because, oh no, sorry, that the dominant male is more fragile in his social relations because he doesn't have to learn caregiving and negotiation skills.
Yeah, that's completely false.
It is extremely complex.
And again, without getting too into it, just watch Chimp Empire.
It's fantastic.
So, Pinchback feels it's a primal impulse that's beyond the male's ability to control.
He writes, quote, I feel there is almost an archetypal, subliminal force that pulls male behavior in this direction to transgress and break taboos once the man has been lionized as a public figure, leader, or guru of some sort, and also inevitably gets drunk on their own power and charisma.
I mean, it's kind of strange how in this essay he's kind of doing that still.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
That's what this whole series seems to be about.
He uses this point to then point out that some people really want the bad boy who's willing to break rules, and there's a real issue that men have to grapple with in this assumption.
I've talked about for a while wanting to do an episode called Men on Podcasts Discussing What Women Want.
Gross.
With no women or actually consulting women, because that's what actually happens in these spaces, and this accounts for much of the manosphere.
First, men and women, or women and men, are not monolithic when it comes to sexuality or relationships or the courting process or anything.
So, if Pinchback had experience with someone at some point, or maybe multiple women, who knows, who wanted a bad boy, that doesn't mean every woman feels the same way.
And to assume based on past experiences is unfair to the person in front of you.
And this assertion by Pinchback seems to give him clearance, at least in his mind, for suggesting that men have no impulse control and you just kind of got to deal with that.
Right?
The boys will be boys thing is exactly the type of thinking that got us where we are.
And a lot of this could be cleared up if men just talked to the women they were courting or in a relationship with about their desires and needs and acted accordingly, but that's being completely brushed aside here.
Just want to add really quickly that, you know, this is also an example of one of the shadow aspects of getting really, really involved in psychedelics, is that it becomes really easy to generalize your profound internal revelations while you're in these intense altered states to being ultimate truths about everyone's experience, about the human condition, about the reality of men and women.
Oh, can I just back up a little bit?
Because we're looking at Eisenstein, who I know has psychedelic experience, and then Pinchbeck, who is a psychedelic sort of expert.
And would you say that this quality of centering or inflating personal experience and allowing it to generalize, I mean, it seems to be characteristic of both of their Yes.
And so you're saying that's a pattern, Julian.
Yeah, I'm saying that the, you know, the J.P.
Sears statement that you should never outsource your truth, that your truth comes from your heart.
I'm saying the thing that we've heard in the yoga community for decades about how you access What is ultimately true about the nature of reality is through your own introspection.
Psychedelics put that on steroids.
And I think it can be it can they can be as healing and as revelatory and as beneficial as they can be amplifying of certain narcissistic tendencies along the lines of what we're talking about.
Wow.
Yeah, that's the whole idea.
Like, psychedelics, we went over this a couple episodes ago with Symposia.
Psychedelics do not necessarily change you.
The nonspecific amplifier is the term.
So, if he's going in with that and then has this experience, it's going to seem to validate everything going on inside of pinchback eyes.
Anyone, really.
It's a nightmare for me to think about becoming more of myself, actually.
It doesn't only work that way.
There is some humility that happens.
You know, it kind of really depends.
Like, I'm enough.
I'm enough, man.
I'm enough for myself.
I've been humbled, and I've also had my ego stroked in those experiences all by myself.
Like, it really just—setting is really everything in those terms.
But yes, Julian's analysis is spot on right there.
Now, that has all been Essay 1 of 3.
We're not going to go through everything in the next two, but in the second one, it's an open letter to Russell Brand where Pinchback pleads with him to live up to his ideals of enlightenment and consciousness that he's been publicly discussing for so many years.
Now, at the very least, there is an acknowledgement that Brand Strategy is pretty suspect and
Pinchback writes, I am sure you know in your heart, I'm not so sure, that these people
you have courted who are now defending you are more or less terrible.
I don't think you want to spend the next decade having endless roundtables with Andrew Tate
That is hell.
Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and the like.
Even hell has nicer rooms than that.
So, point there.
That's a good line.
Yeah, yeah.
And then the last one I'll say is this line appears.
I've been rereading Warren Farrell's books, The Myth of Male Power and Why Men Are the Way They Are.
I definitely believe Farrell is onto something important.
I find it astonishing there aren't more better efforts to unpack and understand male psychology and subjectivity from this perspective.
Farrell shows how men do not actually have much freedom or power.
That is quite a statement.
Julian, who is Warren Farrell and what is he really writing about?
Well, he's being re-read by Daniel Pinchbeck, so that tells you something.
So, Warren Farrell is widely considered to be one of the founders of the modern men's rights movement.
He's a very odd person to reference in the context of this story.
He starts off in the 70s as a pro-feminist organizer and theorist who essentially argues for men also becoming liberated from patriarchy themselves.
But then, over time, he gradually moved towards being more critical of feminism, most notably around his sense that child custody laws discriminate against fathers in divorces.
The books that Pinchbeck specifically references here as rereading as he considers Russell's situation,
are why men are the way they are and the myth of male power.
So it's just what's on the shelf, right?
It's just right there.
It's just right there, it's very convenient.
It's synchronistically located right next to his writing desk.
The first of those books was helped to bestseller status by Oprah Winfrey in the 80s,
and it purports to help women understand gender differences in ways that ring true for men.
So it's like men agree with these differences we're about to talk about.
But then in 1993, he writes The Myth of Male Power.
And this solidifies a central set of arguments that are now very familiar, unfortunately, in the manosphere.
And they're about how, in today's world, women carry all the privileges, while men do the most dangerous work, they make the most sacrifices, they die younger, they're drafted into wars, they're pressured to make more money, and they're generally seen as disposable.
Yeah, so I think it's always cool when the thing that should be a criticism of capitalism I mean, the two emblematic quotes from that text, which is now standard in the men's rights movement, are that men feel pressured to make more money someone else spends while they die younger.
And men's weakness is their facade of strength.
And women's strength is their facade of weakness.
There's a soundbite for you.
Well, it's for the new merch that we need that sums up our whole archive with false dichotomies.
I mean, we have to come up with our own hook, but we need some shit like that.
So that's Warren Farrell as a kind of granddaddy of a lot of stuff we see now with the online manosphere, which does branch off from the men's rights movement and does end up including the pickup artist scene that we've referenced before, which uses Evolutionary psychology to scam men into paying to learn how to scam high value women into becoming sexual conquests.
And this in turn also gives rise both to the ultra reactionary and toxic sociopathy of figures like Andrew Tate and his PhD or Pimpin' Hoes degree style online course that has made him millions.
As well as on the other side of the spectrum, all of those black pilled incels who at times I gotta say that it's really depressing to see that, effectively, Tucker Max evolved into Andrew Tate.
Right.
And Tucker Max was kind of the revival of Farrell's ideas about pickup artists here, and then really made his mark about, you know, writing about getting drunk and learning how to pick up women.
And it was bad, but it wasn't violent.
And to see that it kept going through the social media world to the PhD you just referenced, that's a really sad state for, I would say, young men and men of any age to try to emulate.
Yeah, it's also really sad if you trace the line all the way back to Warren Farrell being inspired by his feminist colleagues to start a group for men to talk about how they could integrate the insights of feminism into their lives more fully and into the society.
Now, it may be unfair to lump him in With all of this really overt misogynist discourse, but his initial work does lay the foundations for a rejection of feminist analysis of power and for the assertion that men are the real victims.
Here's the point, right?
Men are the real victims of domestic abuse, false rape accusations, unfair treatment in divorce cases, and actual structural discrimination.
And I guess the fact that this remains a go-to book for Pinchback tells us a lot about what
we're covering in this episode.
All right.
Next up is a July 19th podcast appearance that meditation superstar Jack Kornfield put
in on Russell Brand's podcast under the title of Jack Kornfield, Morality, Spirituality
and AI.
Now, just as a reminder, this is a month before the allegations drop, so we have a different angle here, which is primarily that Kornfield, who presents himself as a sane and rational spiritual teacher, is willing to collaborate with this guy at all.
Given his conspiracy theory, deep end antics over the previous years during COVID.
Yeah, that's a good setup.
I should make full disclosure here, I've long been a huge fan of Jack Kornfield.
Since my late 20s, he's part of that generation of boomers who went to South Asia in the late 60s and studied Buddhism very seriously.
Long before it was chic, he actually worked in Thailand with the Peace Corps, then he became a monk there and then also spent time in monasteries in Burma and India.
Then he came back to the US and co-founded the first Vipassana meditation center here.
He would then go on to get his PhD in clinical psychology.
So for me, his 1993 book called A Path With Heart, It represented exactly the kind of rare synthesis of meditation and psychotherapy that I was looking for at that time as an antidote to superficial new age spiritual bypass and magical dilettantism.
I've recommended that book to many hundreds of people and assigned readings from it in all of the many yoga teacher trainings I have led.
I've also been on a silent 10-day meditation retreat with Jack Kornfield and I loved it.
So, what did you love about it, Julian, like compared to similar events like that?
Well, I had been on another silent 10-day retreat that was very fundamentalist and rigid and not at all compassionate.
And Cornfield's approach is just very much about sitting and practicing meditation techniques as a way of Being with your own inner life, and there's a lot of room made for unresolved emotions and for gaining a kind of insight into your own psyche through the practice.
So, those things are not seen as being distractions from the real transcendent goal.
Right.
So, all of that to say...
That hearing Jack Orfield talking to Russell Brand was incredibly jarring to me.
We should say that we originally heard this on the Be Here Now network, and they have since taken down that episode.
They must have gotten permission from Russell to sort of run it concurrently.
And the original that we heard started with this cutesy little intro from a guy who called himself Jack's media manager, content specialist, and kombucha-sipping elephant.
So he describes the conversation between Brand and Cornfield as touching on taboo topics that are on the tip of the zeitgeist of anyone who wants to take a discerning look at the state of politics, media, and technology in today's society.
And he then encourages anyone sparked by the conversation to go to Russell's website so as to stay awake with his blooming assortment of guided So, obviously, this guy is a little bit red-billed, and it makes me think that Boomer Jack has perhaps been led down the garden path a little bit by a guy who's, you know, has more digital savvy but is kind of a heterodox in his leanings.
Well, and we did reach out to the media manager for comment, and he didn't respond, but as you say, the episode did come down.
Maybe our query had something to do with it.
I don't know.
Perhaps, perhaps.
The full episode, though, sadly, is still up on Brand's Stay Free podcast feed.
And after about 20 minutes of Russell's typical preamble about the news of the day and how it all comes back to censorship and freedom, He launches right into the Kornfield interview by asking him what he thinks about what Russell's just been saying, which is that Trump might be the only opportunity we have to stand up against the establishment's hypocrisy and corruption.
And isn't it interesting that both Trump and Noam Chomsky opposed the war in Ukraine?
And Kornfield basically sidesteps the entire political part of this question.
And goes on to explain that even though we can get better weapons or we can elect better people, unless the inner change happens, war will never end because its source is in the human heart.
Well, and of course, that's always eloquent.
But what does it actually mean?
I mean, in the context of that actual interview, I mean, is he saying that if everyone becomes Buddhist, we'll be fine?
I mean, how is it meant to happen?
I mean, one thing that I notice about these encounters is that, you know, people are in the position to present things that sound like strategy when really it's kind of an aspiration that's on thin ice.
I remember this quote, you probably both remember it, attributed to the Dalai Lama, who might as well be roomy, for all we know, because we can't find, I can't find the original source of this quote anywhere.
It might well be made up.
But the quote is, quote, if every eight-year-old in the world is taught meditation, we will eliminate violence from the world within one generation.
Oh, no, that's Nikola Tesla.
I've seen it.
I've seen the meme.
It's Nikola Tesla.
Okay.
Whoever said it, it's extremely dumb.
No evidence to it at all.
I mean, I would like to see children be able to, you know, quietly, you know, be mindful for periods during their day.
But I mean, I don't know.
But this ties in back to what you were saying, what we were saying about psychedelics before.
Because remember what I said about Rick Doblin in a couple episodes ago with MAPS, where he said their aim is net zero trauma.
If everyone takes MDMA by 2070, then there will be no more Trump in the world.
So it's that same theme.
It's taking that anecdote of I've had this experience with this substance, therefore everyone should have it, and therefore the results will be the same as what happened to me.
Oh, damn.
Okay, so this is coming around again.
It's almost like the substance, the psychedelic substance actually flips a switch in cognition and even sort of the personality and the willing to be extroverted about, you know, your own solution being right for everybody.
And what did Russell Brand say when he started doing Kundalini Yoga?
It was the Kriyas that gave him the same feeling, that same jolt that he got from doing drugs, and so it just took the same process of addiction.
Of course, I don't know this for sure.
Addiction is something that's very challenging, but he was able to get the same energetic release and therefore he went deep into yoga at that point.
Yeah, there's so many things happening, right?
When you take a very powerful drug or you engage in very powerful practices, especially if you have a fairly labile kind of psychology and neurology, there's multiple things happening.
So, you might, in fact, have enhanced cognitive function where you get in touch with certain insights that you didn't have before.
You might, in fact, feel a kind of de-armoring of your defense structure such that you're able to be vulnerable in a way that you haven't been before.
You might have experiences of emotional healing, but you're also on drugs.
And one of the things that the drugs do, now, of course, you might be on the drug of like hyperventilating, but one of the things that's happening in that altered state, which I think psychedelics are the strongest example of, is that you're flooded with dopamine in a way that makes you feel, it enhances your sense of certainty.
This is right.
I know.
I feel it in my bones.
I know it in my heart.
This is a universal truth.
And that can be, you know, further extrapolated into the universe is talking to me or what, whatever the formulation might be.
I can't tell you how many people in my twenties I interacted with who were psychonauts who said, you know, if only we could dose the water supply.
with acid or with MDMA and it would just, it would change everything. If everyone could have this
experience, then we'd all be in a place to really solve the problems of the world.
What a nightmare.
I think, I think the only way we're really going to get to the root of this is to have
Matthew do some psychedelics and then report back to us to really see if our ideas here, Julian,
Yeah, well, definitely you do not want me to be more of myself.
That is way more Slack messages, way more prickliness in editorial meetings.
It's a totally bad idea.
Part of the problem here, and as much as I love Jack Kornfield, which I've already elaborated upon, he has books to sell, he has meditation retreats to fill, he has his own business model, he has his own family, like whatever the situation he's in is, and it's just very on message to be that this is What I've discovered, speaking as Jack Kornfield through my spiritual path, is that underneath all of this is a spiritual problem that can be directly engaged with through contemplative practice.
And that's the thing that's missing.
And so that's what he's always going to come back around to.
And I think You know, what happens next is Russell tries again, lionizing Tucker Carlson as a person who comes from a place of integrity and authenticity.
Maybe it's preemptive because he knows Tucker's about to come out in defense of him.
Unlike the rest of the corporate globalist mainstream media.
What does Jack think about that?
And to Jack's credit, although there's a double edge there, he doesn't really bite, but there's a liability in not biting.
You can bite in different ways, right?
And that's my point.
In a way, it's like he has the media training that says, say the thing that you're there to say and sidestep the inconvenient question.
He's not going to say, well, now hang on a second, Russell.
Tucker Carlson is not going to go there.
He's not going to talk about Tucker Carlson's lack of compassion and what he's really feeding into.
He's just going to say, well, yes, what the world needs more of is integrity and authenticity.
So I agree with you on that.
And then he says it's all about a society addicted to consumerism and a war-like America committed to keeping wars going.
He goes back to talk about his time in South Asia and like American wars of aggression there and how the Buddhist monks related to those.
So, interspersed with all of this, of course, then we have Russell, because he's obviously very prepared to impress Jack, doing these extended spiritual diatribes that are obviously pre-written and, you know, he's reading at length.
Yeah, and I have some guilty pleasure at those moments.
They give a little bit of consolation.
At some point, we're going to cover this live podcast that Aubrey Marcus did with RFK Jr.
And the funniest part of it, to me, is knowing that Bobby has to sit through Marcus's very quiet opening.
Spoken word poem.
I mean, that is the price you pay, my friend, for being willing to be backed by just anyone.
You have to sit there and look like you're hearing something really profound.
I think RFK Jr.
even kind of closes his eyes.
Oh, he has to.
He has to.
He's got to do push-ups or something.
So this was really disappointing to me because Jack really never pushes back.
He never interrupts.
He never engages with the political conversation.
He never clarifies.
He's even in a gentle and open-ended way that he might do as a kind of skillful teacher.
He doesn't have any follow-up questions or distinctions.
He just plays along with Russell's weird synthesis of like non-dual transcendent superior both sides-ism and then conspiratorial populism.
and the deluded idealizing of anti-democratic right-wing figures, seemingly unaware that repeating aphorisms about stopping the war within and the hungry ghosts of consumer culture actually is not going to help Brand or his audience to wake up and get free of their red-pilled fever dream.
But what it will help them feel like is that their engagement with Brand is being blessed by a modern sage.
And that's the real issue, is that, you know, I don't blame Kornfield for showing up here, but it does feel as though figures like that have to be more careful about legitimizing and validating figures like this.
They have to realize that by standing there and nodding and keeping on point and not challenging or pushing back, they're actually Throwing open a gateway between... They're legitimizing the figure that they're speaking to.
And that gateway swings both ways.
It allows Cornfield's followers to think that Brand is on to something similar, but a little bit more spicy, and it allows Brand's followers to think that Brand is on to something, you know, sage, and also backed up by the evidence of somebody who's been meditating for 40 years.
Yeah, and so as the media expert says at the beginning, the media consultant says at the beginning, if something about this sparks you, something about this edgy, taboo conversation sparks you, definitely go over to RussellBrand.com.
And vice versa, it'd be interesting to see if there's an influx of red-pilled, heterodox, manosphere types showing up at Cornfield Meditation Madrid.
Yeah, so what do we think, though?
How do we round this up?
What's happened, you know, in the last little while?
We know that Brandt has been demonetized by YouTube.
Has he lost followers?
No, he hasn't lost followers.
His management company dropped him.
He's lost some deals.
The tour that he was supposed to be on was canceled, or at least postponed.
So there was definitely a feeling of urgency around some people being associated with him that they felt they had to create some distance.
But that doesn't seem to have affected his YouTube numbers.
It hasn't affected Rumble.
They've only gone up.
And in the current environment we're in, that's what we have to deal with with this polarization, is that his star will continue to rise to a more bifurcated media audience at this point.
I don't really know how you solve that.
I was thinking, though, about, you know, we're planning on doing an episode on this Project 2025.
If people haven't heard of it, we're going to do more of a deep dive.
And then Marc Andreessen just published the Techno Optimist Manifesto, which I also want to discuss in that episode, because I think what has happened Increasingly in America, but definitely since the time of Trump, is that what was hidden is no longer hidden.
And that's sort of, I think, from my perspective, thematic in this episode we want to work on.
And I think that's very thematic in Bran too.
When all of these YouTube clips have come out over the last couple of weeks, showing that Brand was always telling you who he was.
We have him on tape saying that he raped someone as a joke, and the host is laughing.
We have him pulling women onto his lap on Jimmy Kimmel, and it's all a joke.
And he was always showing us, but now the gloves can be off.
And I have been watching his episodes.
He never addressed the allegations except to say that it was conspiracy against him and he has only amped up his rhetoric at this point and his followers will continue to follow him and I don't really know how any of those get converted to being suspicious of the means here and that's a really shitty way to end but that's just what I see at this moment.
Yeah, he's doubled down, he's continued the fire hose of content, he's continued interpreting current events, including what's happening in Israel right now, through the lens of, you know, essentially the same conspiracist narrative.
He's business as usual.
Probably with more turbo-boosted, you know, fuel.
Thank you everybody for listening to another episode of Conspirituality Podcast.
