Soulmates gone wrong. High-pressure sexual orientation and gender conversion in an MLM coaching cult. Journalist and producer Alice Hines discusses the “master Christ” young couple at the center of Twin Flames Universe and the alarming story that unfolds in the documentary based on her Vanity Fair expose. Show Notes Inside the All-Consuming World of Twin Flames Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism. | |
| I'm Julian Walker. | |
| I'm Matthew Remsky. | |
| For today's brief, we're joined by Alice Hines, who is an investigative journalist, documentary film producer, and an Emmy-winning news correspondent. | |
| You may know her from some of her stuff in Vice News, Vanity Fair, or the New York Times. | |
| Hi, Alice. | |
| Welcome. | |
| Hey, how's it going? | |
| Thanks for having me. | |
| Great to have you. | |
| I just watched your really engaging three-part docuseries on Amazon Prime. | |
| It's called Desperately Seeking Soulmate Escaping Twin Flames Universe. | |
| And I understand that this project started as a lengthy feature article for Vanity Fair, for which you did some pretty deep investigative journalism. | |
| Excellent article, by the way. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Yeah, agreed. | |
| At the center of this story, which is becoming pretty widely exposed at this point, is a couple named Jeff and Shalia, who've become, it seems, extremely wealthy from an online business model based on the claim that they can help people find true love through their Twin Flame Ascension School. | |
| What exactly do they offer? | |
| They offer true love and they actually say that they guarantee it. | |
| So if you join their organization and you either are unsure if the person that you're with is who you're meant to be with, or maybe you just got through a breakup, or maybe you're really unlucky in love and you haven't found anyone, these are all reasons for joining. | |
| And I think, you know, their claim is really big. | |
| It's that, yeah, they'll guarantee you'll find this one person, this one true love, this supposed twin flame, who's a match made for you by God across multiple lifetimes. | |
| That's the promise. | |
| And you naturally have to pay a lot of money to get it. | |
| That makes sense in terms of the business model. | |
| One thing that really strikes me here watching it is that you have Jeff and Shalia starting this business when they're quite young. | |
| I think they're in their 20s. | |
| Jeff has already had a previous business where he was claiming to be able to cure cancer through some kind of spiritual insight that he had. | |
| This business is based, as you said, on this kind of fuzzy New Age claim that there is a predestined divine soulmate who is waiting just for you. | |
| And that through this special spiritual coaching process, you can work out how to essentially get out of your own way and come into what they call harmonic union with this twin flame. | |
| Tell us about the technique that they offer to help people go down that path. | |
| Yeah, I mean it's very appealing because I mean not only do they claim to have this direct channel to some type of divine authority that helps them determine whether and who is your twin flame, they also say that you can basically enroll in these classes which are sort of a pseudo-therapy technique and then by doing introspection and by working through your own baggage, they call it upsets, you will kind of start to magnetically attract this person who's your twin flame. | |
| Basically, and I think that's what ends up kind of roping people in at the beginning is especially if you don't have a practice of journaling or doing any type of traditional therapy, you know, doing introspection and kind of figuring out, well, what am I doing in my life? | |
| And talking about that with other like-minded people can be can be actually helpful in the beginning. | |
| And so I think people sort of get sucked in that way. | |
| But then it really goes off the rails. | |
| I think that's a really insightful observation, Alice. | |
| I've noticed that too, that like, if people are new to any kind of meditation or self-reflection or journaling, and then they get in a group or they get in touch with a teacher who introduces them to that, regardless of the surrounding kind of trappings or even what the technique is, just the act of starting to self-reflect like that can be profound and it can be beneficial. | |
| And then I think you're kind of vulnerable to taking on board whatever the extra baggage is. | |
| Yeah, I think that's exactly what happens in this group. | |
| And then I will just kind of caveat that by saying, you know, the introspection that they do teach, I mean, it's a type of like radical self responsibility for all of the circumstances in your life. | |
| And while that may be helpful for most people, I do think that that ends up being more baggage and actually quite harmful for others. | |
| Because, for example, if there are Problems in your life that are, for example, you got evicted or you are a victim of systemic racism, or there could be all of these. | |
| Maybe your partner is a domestic abuser. | |
| I mean, all of these things aren't actually able to be fixed by self-introspection and by kind of seeking for the deep reasons in your soul and in your karma that you might have. | |
| Why you are responsible for all these things that are happening to you. | |
| That can also set people up to be abused, right? | |
| In many situations. | |
| Now that flipping around or the self-responsibility technique, it's rooted in a specific mechanism that I think is called mirroring, right? | |
| That's right. | |
| So Jeff and Shalia call this the mirror exercise. | |
| And this is the signature technique of Twin Flames Universe. | |
| So this technique is basically a way to change Sort of view different situations and see what your own responsibility is. | |
| And they teach that you should look at a problem, change all of the names and pronouns in the situation. | |
| So like if you if you just went through a breakup, like your partner broke up with you, you ask yourself, why did I break up with myself? | |
| What did I do in order to basically provoke this situation? | |
| Like what is my responsibility in it? | |
| Which can sometimes be helpful, but oftentimes is just sending you down a wild goose chase and causing you to blame yourself for things that aren't your fault. | |
| There's something about it that must be very impressive and captivating because I'm watching these guys and it's pretty transparent that they're not very smart, they're not very skilled or charismatic. | |
| They have nothing on Teal Swan, by comparison. | |
| It kind of reminds me of the Mother God leader who built her empire on Facebook alone, also somebody who's like transparently inept. | |
| So, I have this feeling that this new crop of charismatic or non-charismatic leaders, they just don't compare. | |
| To the presence and the verve of, you know, the 1980s-style brick-and-mortar cult leaders like Yogi Bhajan or Osho or, you know, Trungpa Rinpoche. | |
| Like, what do you think it is about social media or the way they're marketing their materials that is just so forgiving with these low-effort folks? | |
| That's really funny how you characterize them. | |
| I mean, they would definitely disagree. | |
| They think they say... I bet they would. | |
| I bet they would. | |
| They think they've got the magic, but we are kind of experts in charisma, and they're not throwing off a lot, I can tell you. | |
| Matthew, they're the Master Christ. | |
| What are you talking about? | |
| Oh, come on. | |
| Anybody can say it. | |
| Anybody can say it. | |
| Well, I think that's actually what's going on. | |
| And I feel like what we're realizing with this new generation of accused cult leaders on the internet is that it's actually a lot maybe more about the techniques and a set of practices that we've seen harnessed over and over again than it is about raw charisma. | |
| I think that maybe that's what the lesson of this is. | |
| And I think part of it is about relatability and influencer culture. | |
| Jeff and Shalia really recruit people from Instagram, from Facebook especially, also from YouTube. | |
| A lot of people start out watching their videos on YouTube. | |
| And these videos are really middle of the road. | |
| Five things to do to have great sex with your twin flame. | |
| Stuff like that. | |
| And they're twin flames, right? | |
| They're a couple. | |
| And they do seem in love in these videos. | |
| I mean, they seem affectionate with each other. | |
| They seem to have something with each other. | |
| And they also maybe don't seem like that intimidating. | |
| Which, in a weird way, if you're looking to find love and you're looking for all of the answers, that actually might be appealing to you. | |
| Because Okay, yeah, like Teal Swan, like, she's like, looks like a model, like, if everybody's in love with her, like, that's not necessarily teaching you something about yourself. | |
| But Jeff and Shalia are maybe more relatable, right? | |
| They're like the suburban Michigan couple who you could like, meet at your yoga studio. | |
| Fair points. | |
| All right. | |
| I will readjust my expectations and my standards for charismatic control. | |
| It may be a feature of this current crop of people running this particular kind of routine, which is that it is that paradox that we're just like you, but we know this extra special secret that you don't know. | |
| Well, here's a test, though. | |
| They have had two in-person events, right? | |
| At least two. | |
| I mean, I think they had two big ones. | |
| They had one in Sedona and one in Toronto. | |
| How did those go? | |
| Can they actually hold physical space? | |
| Oh, and I forgot. | |
| They also had one in New York City. | |
| So that was the first one, actually. | |
| And it was kind of this very it's funny that that one maybe actually speaks to what we're all talking about, because it was very impromptu. | |
| They were they it was kind of it just felt it was in like a Bushwick Airbnb. | |
| Yeah, it was. | |
| You know, and it was like a bunch of people sitting in the room in a room together and just talking about how much they love each other. | |
| And Jeff and Shalia were facilitating the conversation, but they were also participants. | |
| Right. | |
| And I think I think for any of these groups, it's all also as much about the community as it is about the leaders. | |
| I mean, the leaders are what keep are the are part of the coercive equation, but not the entire thing. | |
| And I feel like actually, what Jeff and Shalia maybe lack in personal charisma, they also have a really, actually a really interesting group of followers from all over the world. | |
| And that's partially because it is mostly a digital organization, which can attract all of these different types of people who, like, kind of are out of place in their own in their in their physical environments. | |
| Like, But, like, when I, like, was meeting people who were former and current members of Twin Flames Universe, I didn't, I was sort of like, yeah, I couldn't see myself actually being friends with a lot of these people. | |
| Like, they're, they're actually kind of interesting. | |
| Not Jeff and Shalia themselves, but their followers. | |
| And I think, Yeah, there's an interesting thing going on there, too, which I think does translate between these different models or different eras that we're talking about, which is that very often you're going to have concentric circles, right? | |
| There's a there's an inner circle where if you really get in there, you see, oh, wow, this is this is high demand. | |
| This is toxic. | |
| This is abusive. | |
| This is there's a there's a lot there's a real power imbalance. | |
| And then with each expanding concentric circle outward, eventually you get to people who are just like, yeah, yeah, they talk about You know, finding true love as a spiritual quest. | |
| I like them. | |
| They're, you know, they're cool. | |
| Well, like, also, okay, I'm, I'm, I'm obviously, like, if you look at any of my work, I'm similar to you all. | |
| I've, like, done a bunch of work, it's kind of exposing spiritual manipulation. | |
| And so I obviously have like a very high bullshit meter. | |
| But I feel like love is one is the one thing that I feel like not one, not the only thing that is one of the concepts which in modern society, people still are really turning to spirituality to explain. | |
| Because it really, the feeling that you get of being in love, which is the feeling that people want when they join Twin Flames Universe, that's a big reason why even like friends of mine are still reading like their horoscopes and like why astrology is having a really big moment even among people who are like data scientists and work in STEM and it doesn't really make sense. | |
| Why is that? | |
| And I think there is something about love that makes people more to these kind of metaphysical, um, | |
| like, mysterious explanations. | |
| And I, and that's a big part of Twin Flames universe as well. | |
| They do seem to be tapping into a deep cultural nausea in relation to, you know, consumer relationship | |
| and swipe left, you know, hookup culture. | |
| So, they might not, like, in reality, have a direct line to Jesus the matchmaker, | |
| but they are savvy about how, you know, difficult and maybe even depressing | |
| Millennial and Zoomer dating seems to be... | |
| What do you think? | |
| Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. | |
| I think as much as our society has become in certain, well, in certain parts of our society has become more secular, I don't think that people, I don't think people want to see dating as something that can just be consumeristic, just swiping as something like you are shopping for like something on Amazon. | |
| And that's what the apps make it feel like, I think. | |
| Right. | |
| We've we've we are living in a time where to meet someone is sort of just like like ordering something online and we kind of see ourselves not people want to see each other as souls right not as products and the current Dating platforms do not enable that. | |
| And the current dating platforms are one of the main ways and pretty much the main way that you can meet someone as a millennial or as a Gen Z. So it's like, yeah, I do think that they are tapping into something that is really relevant and that people don't like and for good reason. | |
| Yeah, and so the mystery and the romance and the magic of finding your twin flame becomes the new consumerism. | |
| It looks like the community, as I'm watching the documentary and as I'm reading your article, over time, as you're sort of getting us into what's really going on, it looks more cult-like. | |
| As the business develops, it becomes more of an exploitive, multi-level marketing scheme. | |
| the proponents at the center of it all get more wealthy and grandiose, | |
| but there's also this evolving ad hoc process of trying to manage the lie at the heart of the entire enterprise. | |
| And I would frame it this way that, you know, It's so grim. | |
| basically nonsense. But one way this is demonstrated is that most of the vulnerable and lonely | |
| people who've made Jeff and Shalia quite wealthy remain unhappily single. Some even have restraining | |
| orders against them after being instructed to aggressively stalk their non-receptive | |
| twin flames as identified by Jeff and Shalia. | |
| It's so grim. We are chuckling defensively here, but that is grim. | |
| I know. | |
| Yeah. | |
| How does this lead as we watch Jeff and Shalia adapt to the failure of their quite expensive | |
| This is where the docuseries and my article get to the points that I think people find really disturbing and really shocking, where they started, like, actually matchmaking. | |
| They'd say, well, we actually made a mistake. | |
| The person that has rejected you and has blocked you on all social media platforms turns out the person is not your twin flame. | |
| And actually, your twin flame is within this organization, which makes a lot of sense. | |
| And you might wonder, well, OK, maybe that could Actually work out for some people. | |
| I mean, they have something in common. | |
| They're already like super leveraged within this group and have cut in many, in most cases, cut off friends and family. | |
| And they're, you know, they're spending all of their time talking to other Twin Flame Ascension School participants. | |
| So, you know, it actually kind of makes sense. | |
| But the problem is People's they weren't able to do that for everybody because there's not enough people in the group. | |
| The group is Jeff told me that the viewers of his YouTube platform are 80% women and many of the people in Twin Flames universe are heterosexual women. | |
| And so what Twin Flames universe began to do was actually pair people up and say, yeah, actually this holy union might not be what you thought your sexual orientation is, but don't worry. | |
| I don't know. | |
| is going to change their gender identity. | |
| So they started doing this like really fucked up kind of ad hoc conversion therapy where, you know, | |
| usually when you hear about conversion therapy, it's always trying to force trans people to be cisgender | |
| or trying to force gay people to be straight, which as we know, doesn't work, | |
| but people still try, right? | |
| And so what happens in Twin Flames Universe is kind of just throwing everything at the wall. | |
| Let's apply these techniques to actually just get people to be in the unions that we've channeled | |
| to get people to stay in the group. | |
| Do you feel that there was a turning point where they realized the business model | |
| was not producing results and that they wanted to pursue the matchmaking aspect | |
| as an actual concrete strategy? | |
| It's difficult to know how much this was like a really craven master plan to get people to stay in and make more money. | |
| I mean, I also think people were already staying in even, you know, many people had to get to the point where you're blocked on all platforms and you're pursuing this person and you're paying this teacher thousands of dollars and they say they're Christ and you're attending their church services. | |
| I mean, to get to that point, people are already, like, again, so leveraged. | |
| So, I also think, like, maybe, you know, it could be partially, you know, just another way to force people to stay into the group. | |
| I also think it was just love of power. | |
| Like, they were on a giant power trip, and they were having fun, like, basically telling people to live their lives in certain ways and watching them do it, right? | |
| Watching them actually take their advice and go for it. | |
| And they were getting off on that in a weird way, and you can see it in some of the videos that we show in our series, these videos that they were filming themselves, where, you know, Jeff's really laughing at people, like people are crying, people are having the worst day of their life, and Jeff and Shalia look like they're having fun. | |
| Can I just award you some sort of cult reporting prize for the use of the word leveraged? | |
| Because I haven't heard that before, but it's perfect. | |
| We usually use words like indoctrinated, you know, fooled, red-pilled. | |
| They've gone down the rabbit hole, but leveraged is a brainwashed. | |
| Yes, brainwashed. | |
| Leveraged. | |
| Leveraged is an amazing word. | |
| So thanks. | |
| Thanks for that. | |
| I've of course used many of the previous lists of words that you just described, but I think they can be a little bit obfuscating. | |
| And what I mean by leveraged is that, you know, by the point in which people are doing things that really harm themselves and the people around them, they are They have already, in many cases, quit their jobs to become Ascension coaches. | |
| They don't talk to their family and friends, right? | |
| They've accepted Jeff and Shalia as Christ, right? | |
| I mean, and they've been through hours and hours and hours of these pseudo therapy techniques, which teach them that love actually means this other thing. | |
| And that, okay, like what everything that I do is my fault. | |
| So if I do something that Jeff and Shalia, if I do something against Jeff and Shalia, like that's part of my trauma and I'm the one at fault. | |
| Right. | |
| So like they they've been like this is this is where they are. | |
| And I think it's important to know that in order for people to accept stuff like Jeff Ian is the master Christ, which I completely agree with you is a ridiculous claim. | |
| And if you just look at their social media, you're like, how could anyone believe this? | |
| But people start to believe it because they honestly have no other choice. | |
| There are these really moments in which it came across to me as a kind of sadistic enjoyment of the power of saying, no, I'm going to call you by this different name now. | |
| And I saw this sort of transition from like, okay, we're going to start matchmaking and tell you that actually you're supposed to be in a gay relationship. | |
| And then the participants coming back and saying, but I'm not gay. | |
| Well, no, it's okay that you're not gay because actually you're the opposite gender. | |
| And it's interesting, Matthew, because, you know, we've covered more sort of old school cult leaders where, you know, this is a new spin on a very familiar thing, which is intruding on people's romantic relationships and pairing people up saying you should be with this person. | |
| Yeah, it's the inverse to what is, you know, you know, typically an enforced gender essentialism. | |
| But I would say it's not even an inversion because essentially that's how they get around it. | |
| They say, well, actually. | |
| In your in your basic nature. | |
| You are masculine. | |
| You're not what you thought you were. | |
| You just haven't realized it yet. | |
| Yes, you just haven't realized it yet. | |
| And that's the thing that's been getting in the way of you finding your twin flame. | |
| So I thought it was really admirable. | |
| I really appreciated, Alice, how you brought in this historian of sexuality and gender, Jules Gil Peterson, who I just thought was so cautious and contained and careful in saying, okay, what's really going on here? | |
| Is there anything you want to share about what you learned from her? | |
| Yeah, I mean, I learned about how similar Twin Flames Universe methods of basically saying that we know what your gender is and you need to change it are to the history of Christian conversion therapy. | |
| I mean, there's the whole enforced heterosexuality aspect of it where Jeff and Shalia will say, you know, Every twin flame couple has to be a divine masculine and a divine feminine, which is, of course, code for a guy and a girl, right? | |
| So there's that. | |
| Whereas on the surface, this seems like a very kind of open LGBTQ affirming organization. | |
| It's actually not. | |
| And so Jules pointed that out really well. | |
| The other thing that I really liked about her interview was that she really restrained from making judgment about the current members of Twin Flames universe who have transitioned under the guidance of Jeff and Shalia. | |
| And part of that is not wanting to fall back into the same trap of that kind of lineage of, you know, as a society saying, we know what gender someone else is, right? | |
| The ultimate thing that I think people should take away from the documentary or one of the ultimate things is that, you know, it's, this should never be done, right? | |
| People should be able, no, but, but we shouldn't do it either as viewers, right? | |
| Like we cannot look at Somebody's narrative, like Gabe, who's a person we feature and say, okay, well, we know that because he went through this coaching and Jeff and Shalia told him to transition that today, you know, he's not trans. | |
| Like that's something that we should all be careful of because ultimately we're then going to be no different from Jeff and Shalia. | |
| I feel like with some cult stories that we've covered and some leaders that we've known, we can understand the malignant narcissism, we can understand the charismatic authority, we can understand the way in which the leaders are so filled with self-regard that they create a | |
| particular image of themselves that forces their followers into subservience in some way. | |
| But this new age conversion therapy bullshit, this is just super gross. | |
| There's that moment, Alice, where Jeff is berating someone on one of these coaching calls, | |
| who is a woman who is saying, I don't want to be a man. | |
| I'm very happy being a woman and saying, don't you want to be more like me? | |
| Don't you look at me and say, he is such an amazing man. | |
| I wish I could be like that. | |
| It's extremely cringe. | |
| And also their understanding of gender is so superficial. | |
| When they talk about what it means to be a man, they're like, you need to do yard work. | |
| I've seen them say stuff like, didn't you like playing baseball as a child? | |
| It's stuff that actually has nothing to do with whether you identify as a man or not. | |
| That's not what gender is. | |
| And they have this ridiculously Like, they have these laughable definitions of what it means to be a man or a woman. | |
| And even worse, they're forcing them down people's throats. | |
| And for me, I would sort of argue that this is consistent all the way through, right? | |
| You have an oversimplified idea of how you can solve a set of problems, a general set of problems that a lot of people have in terms of finding love and romance. | |
| You create a false sort of claim that you have some special inside or some special spiritual access to be able to channel what the ultimate truth is about who your twin flame is. | |
| And then as things don't work out, there's just a whole set, as we've said, of ad hoc adjustments and explanations and ways of trying to work around the fact that all of it is just empty. | |
| And sadly, the content is so searingly vulnerable and serious in terms of people's lives all the way through. | |
| And that's what I find so tragic about it. | |
| There's a lot of attention on them. | |
| They made it to Vanity Fair. | |
| They're on Amazon Prime. | |
| There's a Netflix series as well. | |
| How is the group responding? | |
| How are Jeff and Shalaya responding? | |
| Are they still in business? | |
| Is business growing? | |
| What's going on? | |
| What's the future hold for them? | |
| Yeah, so the group is still active. | |
| Jeff and Shalia just had a baby. | |
| They are posting lots of pictures of their supposedly harmonious union. | |
| The main Twin Flames Universe account is pumping out content about how to find your love. | |
| So this is very much still something that's going on. | |
| They're deleting comments by the, you know, millions of people who have watched The documentary series and who have, you know, read the articles about this group. | |
| And so there's obviously a lot of criticism, but they seem to have their heads really buried in the sand. | |
| Our guest today has been Alice Hines. | |
| The documentary is called Desperately Seeking Soulmate, Escaping Twin Flames Universe. | |
| It's on Prime Video. | |
| Alice, thanks so much for your time. | |
| Thanks for having me. | |
| Thanks for your great reporting work. | |
| Thank you. |