What is the distance between spiritual practice and social action? Derek has weighed this question for decades. This unscripted meditation on the topic uses Aubrey Marcus's new "documentary," Anti-Cult, as a jump-off point. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Here's what I struggle with, and I'm going to use a recent example of something that happened to initiate a much broader conversation. | |
| Something I've been thinking about and turning over in my head for decades, really, and honestly will probably be doing so for the rest of my life. | |
| So last week I started getting pings from listeners and from friends. | |
| Aubrey Marcus, who we've covered on and off for years now, he executive produced a documentary, I guess we can call it. | |
| It's called Anti-Cult, Healing in a Mad World, and I'll get to that in a moment. | |
| If you're not familiar with Aubrey Marcus, You might know him as the founder of Alpha Nails, which was a men's nail polish from about 12 years ago. | |
| It was marketed to help men peacock, to display themselves. | |
| The marketing copy for the company was, quote, the more noticeable the male is within a positive context, the more he humps. | |
| Aubrey Marcus, you might know his father, Michael Marcus, who was a commodities trader who made $80 million predominantly by trading futures starting in the Nixon administration. | |
| Interestingly, Marcus was elected to the board of directors of a biotechnology company called Virex Medical Corp. | |
| They did what I consider very important work. | |
| They developed pharmaceutical drugs for the treatment of cancers and chronic viral infections, probably doing really essential work in Western medicine. | |
| Aubrey, his stepfather, Steve Shubin, the founder of Interactive Life Forms, which created the Fleshlight, which Shubin designed. | |
| That's the masturbation sleeve, which is a plastic casing with a variety of skin tones that men can stick their penis into. | |
| Some of those tones are molded by the bodies of pornographic actresses. | |
| Most people know Aubrey as the founder of Onnit. | |
| They created AlphaBrain, which was marketed heavily by the co-founder Joe Rogan based on a very low quality, we'll call it a study, that was conducted in part by Onnit consultants. | |
| And the success of that supplement that wasn't really ever clinically tested led to them being sold to Unilever for a reported hundreds of millions of dollars. | |
| Unilever, everyone knows Unilever, one of their companies was cited for dumping two tons of mercury waste into a river in India for which they had to settle with hundreds of employees. | |
| Another one of their companies is credited with devastating forest in Cote d'Ivoire in the production of palm oil. | |
| There's the other Unilever company in Sri Lanka that promoted skin whiteners to try to influence the indigenous Sri Lankans to look more like white people. | |
| And then there's Unilever as a company, which was named one of the top 10 plastic polluters in the world. | |
| That's who bought Onnit. | |
| Very famous sale there. | |
| Today, Aubrey Marcus runs Fit for Service, which is a retreat company that offers, quote, profound personal growth in an atmosphere of celebrations and community. | |
| They offer four retreats every year, I believe. | |
| They cost $3,500 per retreat, not including travel and lodging from what I've read in comment sections. | |
| Now, it's a personal development company, basically, that gets people together in sort of Burning Man environments, which nothing wrong with that. | |
| There's a lot of psychedelic usage that is done there. | |
| The sort of founding reason is ayahuasca. | |
| They talk about it often in the promotional materials. | |
| Now, I'm a fan of ayahuasca. | |
| I'm a fan of psychedelics. | |
| I've been doing them for over 30 years. | |
| So this is not a critique of that because I think in the right context, they are wonderful tools for humans to use. | |
| Perhaps not for everyone. | |
| There are definitely contraindications depending on mental health, depending on certain drugs that you take for medical conditions. | |
| So this isn't a blanket statement saying that psychedelics are just great, but They're very powerful motivational agents, and while we're living in an age where there's a lot of talk about the legalization of psychedelics in certain contexts, I have nothing particularly wrong with going to places and doing them with friends or with guides. | |
| That's only how I've ever done them, and I've been fortunate to have I've had many powerful experiences in my life with them, | |
| and some pretty dangerous ones as well, but that's kind of the dice that you roll with this. | |
| So that's not really the focus here. | |
| No, we got pinged about Anti-Cult, the film that you can now see on YouTube, and we'll probably do a larger analysis | |
| of the film itself. | |
| I've watched the preview and parts of it, but not the entire thing. | |
| So this bonus episode is not about the documentary, but it's about one very specific aspect that's prominent in what I've seen so far. | |
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