Today we’re looking at a lavish infomercial put out by New Age oligarch and RFK Jr superfan Aubrey Marcus, in which he tries to show the world that his very expensive encounter group, Fit For Service, is definitely not a cult. And at how Matthew got quoted in the opening montage as though he endorsed FFS as an “anti-cult.” He hasn’t.
Marcus might be protesting too much. Because no one with any credibility has actually called FFS a cult, and they couldn’t, because no one has done the investigative work that would take. In a lot of ways, that question is beside the point. It’s not the ‘70s anymore. If you have 604K YouTube subscribers, and millions in the bank from oil money and supplement sales, you don’t need to coerce anyone into staying on your ashram compound and working on your spiritual ideas for free. You too can have an unlimited supply of well-heeled seekers cycling through your coaching encounter group.
So the real questions are: what is it really worth, and what does it really serve?
Show Notes
87: The Aubrey Marcus Spectacle
Brief: The New Age Origin Story of RFK Jr’s Campaign
107: An Open Letter to Aubrey Marcu
86: Charles Eisenstein, New Age Q
Why Kyle Kingsbury Quit The UFC
Myths That Make Us | Godsey Montana Summit talk
The music festival that wants to know your deepest secrets
[Annihilation] Can someone explain the shimmer from the movie scientifically?
Dharma Artist Collective—Godsey’s online community
The Poet Queen
'I Was 13 When Marc Gafni's Abuse Began'
Former Rabbi Accused of Improper Sexual Conduct Now Rising Star in U.S. Spiritual Movement
Gafni Faces Fallout From New Age Community
Marc Gafni Named In Latest Sexual Abuse Lawsuit Against Yeshiva University
Popular New Age author Marc Gafni molested 13-year-old girl in 1980, lawsuit says
Sara Kabakov lawsuit docket
Aaron Rogers in Marc Gafni’s library
Has Aaron Rodgers been learning Torah at his offseason retreat?
My Dad Died: The Blessings Of The Father Pt 1 w/ Dr. Marc Gafni
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
So I'm listening to the opening of the film that records all of this, and I'm watching the beautiful people dance and tremble and hyperventilate, and I hear a familiar voice.
So for Fit for Service, we have this melting pot of neoliberal pseudo-therapy that pretends it is serving the world.
So that's me criticizing the politics through which the content is presented.
And then in this next bit, I have a go at how Fit for Service promises engagement in local community action.
Fit for service.
Fit for service.
But what are they going to serve in the end?
And then there's this real zinger.
It sounds like you really want to not be a cult leader.
At some point, the conscious people have to say, like, I hear you.
I don't necessarily agree.
Here's my point of view.
But I'm going to love you.
I'm going to love you as if you were me.
Fit for service is an anti-cult.
And that sounds a lot like me not only vetting his program, but implying that it's some kind of antidote
in a world of high demand groups.
♪♪ ♪♪
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Hey, everyone. Welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersections 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.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes over on Patreon.
You can also grab our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
shorts.
superfan Aubrey Marcus, in which he tries to show the world that his very expensive encounter group, Fit for Service, is definitely not a cult.
And at how Matthew got quoted in the opening montage as though he endorsed Fit for Service as an anti-cult, he hasn't.
Marcus might be protesting too much, because no one with any credibility has actually called Fit for Service a cult.
And they couldn't, because no one has done the investigative work that would take.
And in a lot of ways, that question is beside the point.
It's not the 70s anymore.
If you have 604,000 YouTube subscribers and millions in the bank from oil money and supplement sales, you don't need to coerce anyone into staying on your ashram compound and working on your spiritual ideas for free.
You too can have an unlimited supply of well-heeled seekers cycling through your coaching encounter group.
So the real questions are, what is it really worth and what does it really serve?
All right, Derek, can you remind everyone who Aubrey Marcus is?
I certainly can, and we've covered him for the last few years, so we will include some past episodes in the show notes.
But Aubrey is the son of Michael Marcus, who was a commodities trader who made $80 million predominantly by trading futures.
He was also a devout follower of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, likely when Aubrey was a small child in the early 70s.
Now, Aubrey's mother, Kathleen Harder, was a nationally ranked tennis player in the 60s, so Aubrey was Seems gifted with some athletic genes, and which makes sense given his later turn to physical fitness.
Kathleen remarried a man named Steven Shubin, who she co-founded Interactive Lifeforms with, which is a sex toy company responsible for creating the silicone masturbation tool called the Can I just say interactive life forms?
It sounds like we're talking about a biotech research company.
And this does play a role in the story because they were the very first sponsor
of the Joe Rogan podcast.
We'll get there in a moment.
Awesome.
Can I just say interactive life forms?
Sounds like we're talking about a biotech research company.
It's like, no, it's about fake vaginas.
Well, interestingly, Michael, his father, was on the board of a biotech firm later in life as well.
So there's a lot going on here.
Back to Aubrey, after graduating from the University of Richmond with a degree in philosophy and classical civilization, he founded Alpha Nails, which was men's nail polish.
It was based on the concept of peacocking, and the ad copy was, quote, The more noticeable the male is within a positive context, the more he humps.
Now, after that didn't take off, Aubrey tinkered with a hangover supplement, which eventually led him to co-founding Onnit, the supplements company in Jim and Austin, with Joe Rogan.
Now, their marquee product was called AlphaBrain, and it was heavily promoted on the Joe Rogan experience.
The science that Rogan always held up as indicative of how good it was, was one low-quality study conducted in part by Anna
consultants, but the heavy promotion on the podcast helped because Marcus and Rogan sold Anna to
Unilever for a reported hundreds of millions of dollars.
Now, Aubrey did sell the Anna gym in Austin, but he ended up retaking control of it.
He also owns Black Swan Yoga with J.P.
Sears.
Now, his main project today is the focus of this episode, which is Fit for Service, which is a sort of coaching program that offers multiple retreats every year out in the desert.
And they have an online academy, which I'll break down a little bit later in this episode.
They also produce the music festival Arcadia, Which, like Fit for Service, is sort of this Burning Man hodgepodge of electronic music and self-help with spiritual seekers.
I wrote a piece in May 2022, and I linked to that in the show notes, because unlike any other music festival that I've ever seen, and I've worked on them, I've played in them, I've produced them, and so I've been around that scene a long time.
But for this one, you had to apply to Fit for Service to attend And it included a number of very personal questions.
Things like, describe a time when you pushed yourself out of your comfort zone and how you managed the emotional experience of that.
And describe a time when your needs did not align with that of a group experience and what resolution you arrived at so both the self and the group found a harmonious resolution.
And again, as a reminder, this was to go see a fucking music show.
Yeah, so Marcus has been a frequent subject on the pod because of his programming, his politics, and his outsized influence, namely his COVID contrarianism and anti-vax dog whistles during the height of the pandemic.
He puts out spoken word poetry material with a lot of ableist and anti-trans messaging.
He platforms cranks like Kelly Brogan, Zach Bush, Brett Weinstein, and Heather Haying to his long-form podcast.
And he also stages these borderline kind of cosplays of Maori haka rituals to advertise fit-for-service events.
We covered that as well.
And he got New Age muse Charles Eisenstein to bless his coaching group with a fairy tale about how they're all shamanic healers from outer space.
And later, the duo shared to their base of hundreds of thousands of followers how RFK Jr.' 's candidacy is a form of divine intervention, which is something that Marcus realized following a psychedelic trip.
So, with all this background, we've also had this subtext question, which is, what kind of group is Fit for Service?
And Aubrey Marcus is aware of this question, too.
And on June 20th, he dropped a flashy new documentary-type thing for Fit for Service, and the title is Anti-Cult Healing in a Mad World.
And it was shot over the course of three Fit for Service summit events in 2023 in these boutique destinations. So
Lockhart, Texas, Paradise Valley, Arizona, Sedona, Arizona, gorgeous places. Event attendance is
around 150 to 200 people. And the cost for the five days plus the online course leading up to it
is $4,000 plus travel and accommodation.
And so I'm listening to the opening of the film that records all of this. And I'm watching
the beautiful people dance and tremble and hyperventilate and I hear a familiar voice.
So for Fit for Service, we have this melting pot of neoliberal pseudo-therapy that pretends it is serving the world.
So that's me criticizing the politics through which the content is presented.
And then in this next bit, I have a go at how Fit for Service promises engagement in local community action.
Fit for service.
Fit for service.
But what are they going to serve in the end?
And then there's this real zinger.
It sounds like you really want to not be a cult leader.
At some point, the conscious people have to say, like, I hear you.
I don't necessarily agree.
Here's my point of view, but I'm going to love you.
I'm going to love you as if you were me.
Fit for service is an anti-cult.
And that sounds a lot like me not only vetting his program, but implying that it's some kind of antidote in a world of high-demand groups.
So, I don't know, like what is going on here?
We went over and over this in Slack.
He's opening what looks like a six-figure infomercial.
It's 84 minutes long, super glossy, tons of drone shots, heavy editing, this really rich musical score.
But he's opening it by ripping my voice off from our episode 107, Open Letter to Aubrey Marcus, which I'll get to in a moment.
But the funny thing is that that final seeming endorsement comes from me reading his own ad copy
for Fit for Service as it was written on their website in 2022. So here's the original text from
the Fit for Service FAQ page under the heading, Is FFS a Cult? Now that page is gone now, but I've
got it saved in my notes. Julian, can you read that? It's super fascinating that you're actually
reading his copy and then he used your voice.
Exactly, right?
Yeah.
I also like that his response is almost like a little bit of a love letter I just realized or, you know, the conscious people are going to push back and say, I hear you, but I disagree and I'm going to love you as if you are me and you're speaking my words.
This is getting very personal.
I know.
All right.
Here's the copy.
Fit for Service is an anti-cult.
The word cult comes from the Latin cultus, which means to worship.
But in our colloquial language, a cult is always something negative that usually amounts to the subjugation of individual sovereignty.
Historically, cults end up enforcing conformity to the dogmatic dictates of central figures who take advantage of the power granted them.
This is literally the opposite of Fit for Service.
Fit for Service is an anti-cult.
Yeah, so as you say, Julian, that's what I was reading.
I'm a cult journalist, and he used my fair use critical quotation of his content against my meaning to enter the robust cult discourse space.
So well played, Aubrey.
Well played.
When I first saw it, it was really jarring to me.
I mean, I think you guys processed it a little differently than I did.
The fact that he used your voice in the first few minutes of this piece And right as the title comes on screen, right, which is drawn from what you said, and now I understand you were reading his words, it made it seem as if the voiceover was an endorsement.
I can almost guarantee that a lot of viewers will actually think it is, or they'll actually think you're just another voice that's part of the montage.
You're not credited.
There's no commentary on your criticisms.
It's a complete non sequitur.
I'll also say that looking back, when I wrote that article on Arcadia, I did not call it a cult, but I did bring up The Cult-like qualities of Burning Man and then I went into and shared those questions on the essay to or the questionnaire to get into the Arcadia Music Festival and a couple days later, Aubrey published a newsletter from his personal feed saying that Arcadia is definitely not a cult.
So, I don't know the exact timeline here, but I'm wondering if that appeared on the Fit for Service page after the Arcadia.
And he also did not credit, he talked about my article, but didn't credit it.
So, that seems to be in his wheelhouse as well.
You know, I think we can do one better for Aubrey to clip for the next film that he does before we get going with all of this.
This might be a little variation on Manchurian Candidate.
So, Derek, let's take a beat before and after this so that his AV guys can get a clean cut.
Quiet on the set, quiet on the set.
Aubrey Marcus is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've known in my life.
There we go, all right.
Okay, so I hope they got that.
Some of our kind listeners reached out in protective outrage on my behalf, wondering how I felt about the quoting.
I mean, honestly, I just wasn't surprised that he used it to lean into a straw man.
And, you know, if lifting my voice is his way of saying, fuck you, I'm okay with that.
It doesn't change the fact that he's the guy who's selling expensive but banal self-help advice while holding up an alleged sex predator as his spiritual guide, and I'm the guy who said it two years ago.
If it was a straight-up troll, it would sum up a lot of Aubrey Marcus's vibe, which is It feels like this.
It feels that when you're so rich and likely surrounded by yes-men and women, just everything can be done on a whim.
I get this sense that he's kind of playing at things a lot of the time, that there's no real angst or skin in the game.
In the documentary, he plays this combination of event manager for these summit events.
He facilitates the hyperventilation exercises.
He's a DJ, he's a camp counselor, getting participants to engage in American Gladiator style, like whacking each other with sticks while he talks about being a warrior.
And cult leaders aren't typically so free to just follow their bliss.
They are generally desperate for attention.
And, you know, Aubrey Marcus might have some of that going on, I don't know.
But they're also desperate for money, for patronage, for power.
And Marcus has no problem in those categories.
Yeah, it's nice to be a millionaire.
Yeah, so to cut to the chase, what was clear two years ago is still pretty clear now.
We don't know enough about Aubrey Marcus to know whether he's truly acting like a cult leader.
It doesn't look like Fit for Service is set up as any kind of cult in a technical sense.
What we will be able to say, however, is that in some ways it might be worse.
It might be a more marketable form of aspirational capitalism.
Yeah, I mean, for me, going on the content of the infomercial, I don't see good evidence or even warning signs that this is a cult for several of the reasons you've mentioned.
To me so far it kind of looks like Fit for Service is some combination of life coaching and part of why I was confused initially is like I'm not familiar with anyone else who does coaching retreats unless they're actually training coaches.
It's like come and get coached in a big group setting where we're going to do all these transformational practices.
So it's some combination of life coaching and then this highly organized big spiritual bonding experience retreat model.
And the demographic is Burning Man psychedelic counterculture.
That's also about being super fit and entrepreneurial prosperity gospel kind of stuff in here with a hearty dose of post pandemic conspirituality flavor.
I don't see Aubrey positioning himself as having inerrant access to enlightened, transcendent wisdom, even though he does sort of talk about how I did this trip and I realized this thing about Bobby Kennedy.
Right.
But the messaging in his really banal poetry performances, which you flag, Matthew, his podcast interviews, and in a gathering of the tribe, which was his last big budget marketing and very artsy video that we'll talk about, his messaging carries these explicit anti-woke and anti-vax and anti-psychiatry messages.
Not to mention magical thinking and pseudoscience claims in a way that sits parallel to the plant medicine and cathartic breathwork and ecstatic dance and interpersonal process work.
So as is so often the case, I detect this implicit sense that awakening and healing trauma and being of service to the world through this transformational process entails discovering the truth of reactionary political and anti-scientific perspectives.
These things are kind of woven together in some way.
I think that these folks likely want to vote for RFK based on Marcus's statements and based on their center of gravity.
But I also feel that they've been red-pilled to see Trump as a better option than Biden.
And they sort of see the spiritual virtue in ignoring that evangelical Republicans probably find them and their most meaningful rituals and spiritual values culturally repugnant.
and they're also airheaded enough not to know that their anti-woke sympathies lead,
what they'll lead to for women and gays and trans folks and people of color under a Trump administration.
So that's a little taste of what's to come from me.
But Matthew, let's pick up first on how the quote in this new promo video comes from this
open letter style episode that you had created a couple of years ago.
Yeah, two years ago.
So what did I say in the episode?
I was responding to his own ad copy for Fit for Service and the newsletter about Arcadia in which he really wanted to make clear that he wasn't running a cult.
So I basically said, well, if you're not, you can make sure that you don't do the following things.
Recycle content from other culty sources.
Surround yourself with attractive younger women under the pretense that they're qualified to offer therapy or other skilled labor to your customers if they have no qualifications.
Hire people who are smarter and more qualified than you.
Like, you'll do that if you're not running a cult.
You won't spend more money on image management than you do on content development.
You won't build what's called a false safe haven into your group by suggesting that it belongs to another dimension or that everyone outside it is lost or insane.
Like, this is the basic messaging of A Gathering of the Tribe.
So, Julian, we've flagged this before, but maybe you can give a little summary on that film that we covered.
Yeah, so A Gathering of the Tribe is a nine-minute film.
It was published to YouTube in December of 2021.
It featured an animation by Eldis Massey and a score by very well-known ambient composer John Hopkins.
It's based on a short story by Charles Eisenstein and essentially it's about a tribe of enlightened aliens on another planet whose shaman sends a group of heroes to Earth to help wake people up.
Once arriving in their human lives, they will forget where they came from, and they'll forget the love and wisdom of their much more beautiful world.
They will feel alone and despairing in their intuitive sense that something is lacking.
But through powerful face-to-face gatherings, and this is, you know, we're during pandemic times here, through powerful face-to-face gatherings, they will find one another and awaken All of humanity from the illusion of separation.
Now, part of this entails, as illustrated through the animation, rebelling against pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines.
But the aliens were wearing masks, though, right?
No, they weren't.
No, no.
The idea here, as far as I can tell, is that viewers who resonate with this nine-minute message May in some way be part of this cosmic mission from another planet.
And this is validated for me by how the video ends, because as the animation dissolves, we find Aubrey Marcus and Charles Eisenstein sitting face to face in the podcast studio where we've seen them before.
And Charles says, here we are.
And Aubrey says, here we are.
And then Charles repeats back to him, here we are, right?
We've arrived.
We've arrived from our other planet to be on our mission.
I've so far not seen other signs, you know, watching this 90 minute documentary included that Fit for Service is a cult.
But this piece of artistic marketing is certainly the most cultish thing that he's put out.
And listeners can go to our YouTube channel if you want to see this really short video I did back then with a shot for shot comparison to a specific animated propaganda film put out by the murderous Aum Shinrikyo.
So one of my points would have been don't do messianic cartoons if you don't want to create the impression that you're running a cult.
Everybody, you did a great job with that, Julian.
Yeah, okay. So, one of my points would have been, don't do messianic cartoons.
If you don't want to, you know, create the impression that you're running a cult. Also, don't over-promise
in terms of physical, mental, and spiritual health.
If you say it's about service, specifically social or community service, you gotta be specific
about skills and programs and values.
you.
Don't pretend to offer mental health support by using jargon like trauma-informed.
If you're going to use jargon like radical self-sovereignty, you've got to really define it.
And then finally, don't platform gurus like Mark Guffney, who is extremely credibly accused of decades of sexual predation.
We'll get to that at the end.
You know, so like some pretty simple advice.
All right.
So coming from me, if Fit for Service is not really a cult, where does it fit into the spirituality marketplace?
On first viewing of the documentary, I got heavy multi-level marketing vibes, but there's no sign that participants are recruiting people into any kind of downline.
So that then made me wonder, does this fit another model of spiritual capitalism, the large group awareness training?
You know, I'm talking like, I'm talking about organizations like the Forum and Lifespring.
Listeners will probably be familiar with these.
Yeah.
These are like two to five day personal growth seminars for maybe a hundred people in a hotel ballroom.
And there are strict rules, there are long days, there are charismatic presenters, group bonding.
You sometimes see it jokingly referred to in movies as the seminar where you can't go to the bathroom, right?
Right, yeah.
Long days, charismatic presenters, all of this kind of stuff.
There are these exercises that create emotional catharsis, just like we're seeing, and that's through this metaphysics-infused cognitive psychology lens, which kind of fits with contemporary coaching models.
Take personal responsibility, drop your victim stories, and then intentionally create the life that you say you want.
Fit for Service looks very similar to this, except it's more expensive and the locations are more captivating.
But with large group awareness trainings like the ones I've mentioned, there ends up being a lot of manipulative psychological pressure to sign up for the next level of the training, to recruit your friends and family.
You're going to bring them to a graduation and, you know, to give a testimonial about how three days at the Hyatt has changed your life.
We don't see evidence of that here.
And I think it's partially because the buy-in might be front loaded and we're in a different time.
The pool of potential participants is Aubrey's 604,000 YouTube subscribers and the 3 million people who watched his best performing interview, which is with Joe Dispenza.
The second most viewed video on his channel is with Gaia TV star Matthias DeStefano about how to remember your past lives in other dimensions, wouldn't you know it?
Yeah, now that high-intensity catharsis element especially rings a big bell for the fit-for-service group therapy rituals as they're depicted in all of the marketing.
And that always brings up issues of like informed consent for me because I've been in like too many Yeah, it can be really wild in a big group setting to have so many people doing that kind of breathwork and just like freaking out.
The facilitators are coaches, but Fit for Service is not yet, maybe, giving out coaching certificates.
A large group of participants are being facilitated through what is referred to as coursework.
And what is presented as equal parts transformational and educational journey designed to integrate mind, body and spirit so as to then also be financially fit, making money by living in alignment with your purpose and being of service to the world.
So it's hard to categorize, right?
Here's the important piece for me.
While spiritual practices and mind-body healing techniques and group process and celebratory bonding through dance and talking stick style, sharing circles, All of which I'm kind of a fan of myself.
They can be framed as politically neutral, universal, perennial, culture transcending doorways into your true nature.
Fit for service participants are actually swimming in a stew of anti-woke, anti-vax, anti-psychiatry, conspiritualist messaging, which is likely part of what they're also sharing in their communities that they're going home to serve.
So this post-pandemic conspiritualist framework implicitly gives spiritual awakening.
A paranoid fantastical and reactionary quality.
And for me, this is more Russell Brand than Thich Nhat Hanh.
So, this is really important.
You're saying that Fit for Service is set up, kind of, to trigger peak experiences of awakening that are then subtly hijacked towards a particular political valence, as in, like, no one is going to a summit and waking up to the metaphysical truth of intersectional feminism, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And I'm not even saying that they're having lectures on these kinds of political positions.
I'm just saying it's the culture.
It's Aubrey Marcus's persona in the world.
It's the kind of content that is all over his YouTube channel, which is where he's probably making first contact with people through YouTube and Instagram and what have you.
When I look at his YouTube channel, I'm struck by actually just how similar it is to looking at Gaia TV's mashup of boilerplate conspiracism and science fiction spiritual kitsch.
So like one of his latest video interviews is with a green beret on the topic of what happened to truth, value, gender, and fathers.
And that's alongside an interview with someone named Paul Levy.
This is interesting.
It's about something he calls Wetiko, with a capital W, and that's also referred to by Aubrey as the anti-you.
What is that?
Well, it's a remixed version of the personification of evil called Satan.
The anti-you, I also find, is a key concept mentioned in the description of the Fit for Service module called Spiritually Fit.
Now I toggle over on the YouTube page to the top performing videos, and these all have between 300,000 and 3 million views.
The subjects are psychedelics, extraterrestrials, interdimensional past lives, Atlantis, the dangers of vaccines, wisdom from the Rosicrucians, and the hidden truths of the Hermetic tradition.
And of course he's got Huberman, RFK Jr., and Jordan Peterson, of course, Joe Rogan makes an interview appearance, and also the crypto-archaeologist Graham Hancock, and then the Died Suddenly guy who claims that athletes are just dropping dead from the COVID vaccine, also anti-vax star Robert Malone.
There's titles in there on how to cast spells and develop magical abilities through tantric sex, and how you chose to come here spiritually during this time to be part of a revolution.
Okay, so near the end of the documentary, in a very important sequence in which the
Fit for Service coaches and community directors are protesting the straw man complaint that
Fit for Service is being stigmatized as a cult, Eric Godsey, he's the Mentally Fit
coach and we'll get to him, he says this about the courses and the summit experiences.
If 200 people go through an experience that you think is wrong, and then you get to talk to all 200 of those people and ask them, what was that like for you?
If all 200 people say it was one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened to me, you had two options.
One option is to be so incredibly arrogant to believe that all 200 of them are brainwashed or admit that you were wrong.
And the truth is 1000 people will tell you it was one of the most beautiful things that they've ever done.
So the question is, Are you gonna put yourself in a position to say all 1,000 of those people are brainwashed in a cult?
Or...
Your snap judgment is incorrect.
On one level, Godsey is right.
And this presents a real journalism paradox because we can't speak really to the Fit for Service experience with regard to its participants without a lot of interviews, ideally longitudinal, where you're not only asking people what they feel in the moment, but you're also tracking how they look back on the event six months and maybe even a year later.
But on another level, and this is why I think his thought experiment doesn't really suit his purpose, We know that in high-intensity groups, there are high incentives for saying that your life has changed forever, and that it was the precise cocktail of this event that did it.
Not the vacation, or, you know, Paradise Valley, or the break from the kids, or the relief from isolation, or the hookup on day three, or the group activities you could have done anywhere.
Yeah, it's really a fallacious argument because you can immediately think up all kinds of different counterexamples.
Sure.
Right?
Of like situations where terrible things were happening and people had been brainwashed and all of them were saying it was absolutely wonderful.
It's argumentum ad populum.
If everyone says that it's great, how can they be wrong?
You must be arrogant.
Your argument, Matthew, reminds me of how people, Americans, travel to Europe and they eat pasta and they're like, oh my God, the weed is so much better.
Not realizing that something like 40% of the wheat in Europe comes from America.
But it's because of the vacation aspects.
But you're correct that we can't tell what it's like to be in that environment.
I love retreats.
I love music festivals.
I love psychedelics.
There are probably many good aspects of this, but what we can do is we can assess the Fit for Service course, which is called the Academy.
It's a nine-week online series and it's marketed as six foundational courses to support your path in life, taught by masterful coaches.
And if you've ever listened to this podcast before, coaches is a big red flag because no actual training is necessary to call yourself one.
So let's use this six-part curriculum structure to explore the Fit for Service content and promises and the coaches delivering it based on what they present in the web copy and in the videos they include on their site.
Now, we're not going to talk about Financially Fit.
It's led by a marketer named Clay Herb Hebert.
I imagine it fits into this larger course because it offers an angle to monetize the sort of coaching services that you're getting into in the rest of the program.
But honestly, it reads as pretty standard financial advice.
You can find a lot of places.
I've worked for four financial companies in my life.
Clay seems fine, but it's nothing groundbreaking for what I'm seeing.
So we're going to avoid that one.
Now, every course costs $1,500.
Some have upcharges.
I won't go over every aspect of every module, but I kind of want to just point out my substantial red flags in this, and I know you guys will kind of interject with some of what happened from the documentary.
So the first is Physically Fit.
It's taught by former UFC fighter Kyle Kingsbury.
He is apparently one of Aubrey's best friends, and he's a regular collaborator and yes-man to Aubrey from what I've seen online and in podcasts.
Now for context, Kyle shares an Instagram with his wife Natasha, and I remember during the peak of COVID, they shared a fake meme of a CNN article with a picture of a fat lady in a hospital bed blaming the unvaccinated for her impending death.
Now, even though some people on the feed pointed out that it was fake, it's been well known that this is fake, it's still on their page today.
I just screenshotted it this morning.
So I think this offers some insight into his take on health.
Yeah, and in one of the opening shots of the documentary, he's wearing a red Make Milk Raw Again Trump-style hat.
Later on, he has another fashion statement with this black T-shirt that has a psilocybin mushroom on it, and the name Kennedy written into the pink swirls on the mushroom cap, Grateful Dead style, because as we said, they all became RFK Jr.
stands after getting high.
Yeah, and when we talk about that opening shot with the red hat on, he's welcoming people wearing that hat.
So that's very interesting.
And it's just sort of in the background, but it's an interesting statement.
Out of all the courses, Kyle's honestly probably the most experienced in terms of the module that he's teaching for physical training.
MMA fighting is no joke.
That said, In the course, we're told that we're going to be invited to invest in a CGM, which is a continuous glucose monitor, a DNA test, diet changes, and supplementation.
Now, the CGM is currently one of the biggest influencer grifts because it's inviting people to begin their path to an eating disorder.
Diabetics need to continually monitor blood glucose.
I can imagine high-level elite athletes might want to for a variety of reasons, but what we see in the wellness world is coaches using it to sell supplements and diet programs.
And I've seen some arguments that CGMs are useful for people concerned about the possibility of developing diabetes or who may be pre-diabetic.
And that's fine.
I don't take issue with that.
But there is a population of longevity optimizers who are using them in their quest to some sort of ideal health state.
And that's where disordered eating could enter the picture.
In this case, it's likely being used as proof of why this or that supplement is needed for that person.
Now, you learn that when you see the modules that are all listed on the site.
Kyle is coaching people on personalized diet and nutrition for your genetics, which is a bullshit word salad led by someone who, as far as I'm aware, is not clinically trained in nutrition or genetics.
There's a course on metabolic longevity and cellular function.
He also has modules on tai chi, sleep supplements, and an old conspirituality favorite, detoxing, cleanses, parasites, candida.
Now, besides the $1,500 you're going to shell out, you're almost certainly going to be advised into a supplements downline.
I mean, I'm guessing that because it's listed in like three of the courses.
So, my feeling is that everyone who signs up for this program will be prescribed some regimen based on recommendations by someone who likely doesn't know how to read diagnostics tests and is certainly not certified in any profession that would allow him to safely prescribe anything.
But to go back to Kingsbury's UFC origin story, I think that's really key because the whole feeling of MMA, along with, you know, a lot of CrossFit influence, just dominates the fit-for-surface physical culture scene and the very, like, testosterone-heavy, like, bro-science network that Joe Rogan's studio provides a hub for.
And there's no question that Kingsbury knows how to train.
And then this penchant for pseudoscience is, I think, related to that phenomenon we've commented on before, which is that elite fighters, like, need to try anything and everything, including superstitious stuff, to get any kind of edge they can, because they're trying not to get pounded to hamburger.
And Kingsbury had that edge for a while.
He went 11-6 in the UFC.
He retired after losing his last four fights.
I spent some time watching the losses, which were really hard to watch.
They're brutal.
And that made me wonder whether his transition into self-care and spirituality, which is a really interesting pivot, evolved out of some, you know, realization of vulnerability or the vanity of warriorship in this ugly industry.
But then I come across this clip of him being asked why he bowed out of the UFC, and he said, you know, it just came down to money.
The losses made it unfeasible to maintain full-time training.
And so I thought that was interesting, that the focus on quitting MMA was about realizing that that form of capitalism wasn't working out, because making money, but in a spiritual way, and lots of it, is this huge part of the Fit for Service promise.
I also want to qualify this section by saying I was a group fitness instructor for 17 years, not just yoga, but kettlebell cycling, weight training.
I am all about physical training.
I think there are great ways of doing it, but I do know that in all those years, if someone came up to me and asked me a diet question or some sort of question about an injury, my initial and only response would be to see a professional and I will offer what I can from my knowledge base.
And that's the biggest red flag to me here because people speaking outside
of their knowledge base is really dangerous to people who are
in a vulnerable position because they're wanting some change in their life
to begin with. And supplements are kind of the merchandising, you know, for whether you're talking about
a concert or a movie, supplements are can become a way of generating
so much more income proportionally than you might otherwise imagine, right?
If you imagine all of these people coming in and spending $4,000 for this course, If they get into these downlines and they get into thinking they need all of these supplements in order to optimize their lives, and they're basing this on the pseudoscience of the continuous glucose monitor, that ends up actually being a ton of money.
It can be very expensive.
I do want to say that we don't know that they're into some sort of specific downline from Kingsbury.
He might just recommend them and move on, but I would be surprised if he didn't have some stake.
But, you know, we can't tell not being in the course.
The next module is Mentally Fit.
It's taught by Eric Godsey, who tells us that, quote, we're more mentally sick than we've ever been.
Does he provide context, historical examples, data?
Of course not, because Eric is just teaching vibes, baby.
He wants us to navigate the shimmer of the internet.
Matthew, you'll get to that a little more in a moment because it's a little more detailed, but from watching the video, man, he's right doing the beat poetry with Aubrey right there.
Now, Gazi's got an undergraduate degree, a BS, not ironically, in cognitive psychology and fit for service land.
Apparently, this qualifies you to blend Jungian psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhism into a New Age goulash and charge you $1,500 for it.
I am Hungarian.
I love goulash.
Let me just say that.
This one would not be on the menu.
Now, during the last week, you'll be able to install the Dharma Artist Operating System right into your cranium.
And soul, I guess.
Now, there is a section called Who the Course is Not For in every module.
And for Godsees, it includes this gem.
Quote, This course is also not for people who think making money or using technology is evil, because we're going to learn how to use technology artistically to help people And people are going to want to give you money when you help them.
Which is why at first I was like, this sounds like an MLM.
Yeah, the language is definitely there, Julian.
So, you know, I understand that instinct.
So there it is.
Start the pitch by saying we're living through the worst time ever without qualifying it.
I mean, pretty much every measurable piece of data is false.
And that's not to paint a rosy picture of today.
But at the same time, read some fucking history books.
And this is in large part because of technological and medical advancements.
And then he ends up by saying, I'm going to teach you tech that makes you rich.
Yeah, so in the film, Godsey is given the mic almost as often as Marcus is, if not more.
Like, he does a lot of heavy lifting, but it doesn't start off on the right foot.
Because one of the first lines in the doc is him saying that if the fit-for-service ecstatic breathing practices had been examined by the Catholic Church a hundred years ago, that all the members would be burned at the stake as witches.
And that's off by about six or seven centuries.
You know, the witch burnings of the 1920s.
Yeah, but then I had an email exchange with him about that and other things, and he told me that he actually cringed when he saw that in the final cut because he knew he misspoke.
But that made me a little bit sad because I think it points to how much attention is paid to facts by Fit for Service on the whole.
So I wanted to learn a little bit more, and I listened to Godsey's talk at the May Fit for Service Summit in Montana, which he posted to his podcast, and I think it gives a solid picture of the vibe and quality of the event.
Now, first of all, he's entertaining, he's obviously thoughtful, he's entrepreneurial, he's jocular, he uses a lot of catchy but throwback psychology, a lot of Jung especially, to bolster his pop references to cognitive science.
He reminds me of kind of like a young Alan Watts in his syncretism, but with the add-on of like tech bro spirituality optimization language.
Like for example, in one of the online paid coaching communities, they meet every morning in what he calls a gym or monastery and they do Dharma sprints.
And his core message in the Montana talk relies on his take on living in what he calls the Shimmer.
But this is a term that he borrows from the 2018 film Annihilation, in which a catastrophic meteor strike opens up a zone of alien DNA mutation that scientists enter and then try to figure out, and then they get changed in the process.
And Godsey's take is that the Shimmer is the Internet itself.
Which has struck humanity in a similar way, making us ripe for disaster and transformation.
And he unpacks this allegory, which I think works really well, after about 45 minutes of talking about how important meditation is for attention and focus, and how statistically, if most people are checking their phones every four minutes, no one on the planet has access to deep concentration anymore.
This, he says, is the shimmer.
And this is the basis of his claim, Derek, that we're more mentally injured than we ever have been.
And his answer to it is that we must meditate to become mentally fit, as his module prescribes.
And he makes reference to a lot of Buddhist content to do it.
And that pricked up my ears because I know a few things in that zone.
I'm not a specialist, but I'm a little bit familiar.
And as I'm listening and I'm appreciating his central point, I'm also hearing these common generalizations and errors.
Mainly what he does is what every Buddhist influencer enthusiast does who doesn't read Pali or Sanskrit or Tibetan, what they've done for decades, which is that people tend to collapse countless philosophies of practice into this monolithic Orientalist, you know, know, Buddhism says this or the Buddha said that and this
gives this false impression of mastery which really nobody has. Then there's positive idealization
like at one point he's he's talking about how brilliant the Tibetans are at everything compared
to dumb Westerners and he says that all Tibetans learn to meditate as children which is just
totally not true. I think the most important thing is that he gloms on to this eccentric translation of
the Pali word dukkha that he He picks up from a Harvard psychologist who published two
books on Tibetan Buddhism.
This is the late Daniel P. Brown.
I'm not familiar with him, but I can see that he wasn't a translator.
But his argument was that dukkha does not mean suffering or unsatisfactoriness, as almost everyone else translates it.
He says that it means reactivity.
And that was news to me.
So I asked Buddhism scholar and friend of the pod, Professor Anne Glaig, if she'd ever heard of that, and she hadn't.
And so, it's a fringe translation, and that's important because there's a huge difference between suffering, which can encompass the entire gamut of human experience, including social ills and political cruelties, and reactivity, which really centers the problem of life in the individual.
And this kind of cherry-picking, or this distortion, I think, is consistent with two trends that Glaig and others in Buddhist studies illustrate, which are very meaningful to the fit-for-service space.
And one is that there are a ton of white Buddhist converts who got interested in Buddhism first in the 60s and 70s who say that the brain science of this ancient religion is the only real important thing, but the moral, cultural, and religious contexts of Buddhism are contingent and conditioned.
They can really be sort of stripped away.
But what happens when you lift meditation out of Buddhism?
I think the most on-point example for Fit for Service is that when many U.S.
Buddhist communities in the 2010s tried to institute DEI or anti-racism trainings, the mainly white and middle-aged, like, Buddhism is cognitive science only crowd would object.
They would say, Buddhism isn't political.
There's no room for identity politics in Buddhism.
But in fact, Buddhism arose in part as a rebellion against caste oppression.
So it always has had some kind of politics to it, usually very complex, and it's not the politics of libertarianism.
And meanwhile, Asian Buddhist communities around the world don't isolate or foreground meditation in the same way because they're focused on community ethics and social service.
Well, let me...
I'll interject here.
I mean, first off, meditation wasn't a big part of Buddhism in the early years.
That wasn't until really the 19th century.
Yeah.
And the politics is a lot more complex because Buddha had to actually work with and advise political leaders of certain areas in order to have his sanghas be permitted into those areas.
So.
Right.
I think people who actually look into Buddhism will be surprised by some of his politics.
But you definitely cannot, you know, you can't, it's not, it's not libertarian, it's not conservative, but it's also definitely not liberal.
Now, closer to the bone for Godsey and Fit for Service is that the Buddhist focus on behavioral ethics is particularly intense because many lineages consider ethics to be prerequisites to being able to meditate at all.
So that's where the hundreds of very old vows controlling sex, inebriance, wealth accumulation, all of these things come from.
These are all said to be foundational to being able to focus your mind.
So there are big swaths of Buddhist culture that would say you just won't be able to meditate if you're doing psychedelics or practicing polyamory or trying to increase your passive income.
You'll just be too distracted.
So, I said before that I emailed with Godsey with some questions about this talk, and so I was frank about the generalizations and the errors that I've listed, and he was really receptive, saying that he appreciated the fact-checking and that his main point really was to inspire people to meditate.
And I think he succeeded in that, and who knows, maybe we'll talk more about it.
I just feel like this position he has is emblematic of the coaching world, but then particularly the fit-for-service brand.
Coaches who are expected to do more than they're able because inspiring people somehow isn't enough.
Like Kingsbury is expected to know nutrition, Godsey is presented as someone who understands Buddhism, and we're going to see that Caitlin Howe is positioned as an expert in emotions.
It's similar to what you were saying earlier, Julian, that it isn't enough in these spheres to give people inspiring group experiences.
They must be attached to something to give them meaning.
So taking ayahuasca is tied to understanding geopolitics, and then promoting meditation is tied to understanding Buddhism.
Yeah, and some of those links are more implicit.
Than explicit, but it's the kind of the water that you're swimming in.
It's like you're always wanting to point out, right?
It's not really possible for something to exist floating free from political context.
Yeah, now all that said, I also want to be careful about gatekeeping here, because as we know from the board-certified quack doctors who show up on Aubrey Marcus's podcast to deliver like anti-vax talking points, qualifications don't offer, you know, perfect safety or predictability.
And here's where Dr. Kelly Brogan enters the chat.
Yeah, qualifications certainly don't translate to being completely trustworthy.
So I want to actually drill down on this piece.
In the anti-cult video, it's just six minutes, but it's where anti-psychiatry rears its head.
This section is the most didactic in that it has the classic propaganda film, like B-roll and voiceover style delivery with the ominous music, etc.
It's intercut with excerpts from a live presentation by Kelly Brogan, who was identified on the screen as being a guest speaker at Fit for Service.
Her message is, That psych meds don't work.
They induce terrible side effects and they often perpetuate the very problem they're supposed to be treating.
Now to support this claim, she quotes Fiona Godley, who's a former editor of the British Medical Journal.
But when we run down the quote that she uses very authoritatively, it turns out to be about the risks versus the benefits of statins, which are medications used for high cholesterol, and pain medications.
There's actually nothing in the article about psych meds.
And then when I look up Godley's interviews and online lectures, what I find is she talks a lot about conflicts of interest in medical research.
But it turns out that more often than not she uses Andrew Wakefield as her opening example of why this can have such terrible impact.
Yeah, LOL, all right.
Now the second quote that Kelly Brogan uses to bolster her argument is from Marsha Angel.
She's kind of a famous former editor at the New England Journal of Medicine.
She's well known and widely published, even has a book on this topic.
She's extremely critical of conflicts of interest in medical science, especially in the field of psychiatry.
So this person actually is in the correct wheelhouse.
The quote is from a powerful article she wrote for the New York Review of Books in 2009 that points out exactly these problems.
And it essentially says that medical research and physicians prescribing practices are hopelessly corrupted by big pharma.
It's really sobering stuff.
And it's indicative of an urgent need still today for reform.
In her interviews, when she talks to people, she hammers home that for-profit medicine and pharmaceutical advertising should be completely reformed and overhauled.
It's great stuff.
But here's the thing.
In their lectures and interviews, neither Angel nor Godly say that psychiatric conditions don't exist.
Or that big experience spiritual retreats have been shown to be more effective than psych meds or boring old therapy with an uncharismatic but licensed provider.
And let's make a note here too, that unlike Godly and Angel, Kelly Brogan, Eric Godsey and Aubrey Marcus are not calling for legislative change around health insurance, pharma advertising and corruption.
They have a different solution and this is the classic sleight of hand.
Disparage the reliability of mainstream science in general, as if that counts as evidence for the untested, unregulated alternative that you are selling.
Next up is my favorite part, just because I'm fascinated by these kinds of arguments.
Eric Godsey explains that the problem with the psychiatric model of what he calls quote unquote mental disorders, is that it has a materialistic concept of consciousness arising from biology.
That's what it is.
He calls this a type of gaslighting that denies how sick our society is.
And it's done so sort of quietly, it just slips in there and it disguises what a huge metaphysical claim he's making about consciousness being non-biological and so psychological suffering requiring non-materialist cures.
And then Brogan claims that psych meds are much more addictive than crack or heroin.
So there's that.
Here's my main worry here.
I feel like people who watch this video, who may have suicidal depression, people who may have bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, they may hear this type of rhetoric and decide that going off their meds and going all in on something like Fit for Service, You know, to be fair, I brought this segment up in my email exchange with Godsey, and he said that he hadn't known his comments would be mixed in with Kelly's content, and he didn't know much about Brogan's views at all.
But he also hedged.
He said, to his credit, I would have advocated for some more nuance like how for a certain percentage of people, psychiatric meds are life-saving and that getting off them without medical supervision is dangerous and not recommended.
And that's important because that's not what Brogan says.
And I'll refer listeners to my reporting on what she actually has done with clients because back when she was a certified psychiatrist, she advocated for some clients to stop all medication cold turkey, no tapering.
And I interviewed one of those clients who said that that led her into a very dangerous place.
And to your previous point, Julian, I think this is where the real danger of Marcus's anti-cult theme comes in, because the gist of Brogan's talk is that psychiatry and evidence-based medicine, on the whole, is the real cult from which everyone has to wake up, and that we can all use peak spiritual experiences to realize this.
But in order to make that claim, you basically have to set yourself up as a divine conduit of knowledge that transcends the scientific work of everyone else in the
world, you have to act like a cult leader.
Next up in the modules is Emotionally Fit, and the coach is Kaitlin Howe, who is fit for service's
quote, resident poetess, ritual artist, and ecstatic dance facilitator.
All good things, but she promises that the course will help you, quote, look into your shadow with love and play.
And correct me if I'm wrong, guys, but this is all not-so-coded language promising that you're going to deal with Possible mental health issues.
Yeah, it is.
She also says that it'll help people work through shame, fear, and guilt.
I mean, in the Who It's Not For section, it states, this is not for anyone who does not want to take personal responsibility for your emotional experiences.
And that is very right-leaning bootstraps language right there.
And it's coming from someone with no listed psychiatric credentials that I could find.
Now, the course module includes titles like, Navigate Emotional Numbness or Intensity with Greater Intelligence, which certainly sounds pseudo-therapeutic, to borrow your term, Matthew.
Then again, I'm still trying to figure out what this one means.
Quote, learn the universal language of emotion to understand anyone more.
Derek, you just have to connect more.
Just really sink into it.
Caitlin Howe is central to the leadership team.
Like, she used to be engaged to Aubrey Marcus.
She's now engaged to Eric Godsey.
And the inner circle kind of plays on the openly acknowledged history and subtle tensions between them all.
Now, she's not an MMA vet like Kingsbury.
She's not like a polymathic, verbose guy like Godsey.
I really think her pathway to leadership has been more defined by gender demands.
And I'm not just noting her appearance and the fact that Fit for Service is definitely a beautiful people parade, but that a lot of the Fit for Service marketing positions her and Violana, Aubrey's wife, as being divine feminine caregivers.
Now, her Instagram and website handle is at thepoetqueen, and here's what she does in the summit setting as far as the documentary shows us.
So this sequence is from the film.
She's first contextualizing her poetry writing workshop in spiritual and therapeutic terms, and then we hear the fruit of her coaching from a participant.
I feel like art is the voice of the soul.
They're inextricable, the voice in art.
And they're intimately connected in the sense that if you practice one, the other one opens as well.
If you're feeling like you just want a doorway in, we start with whatever's alive in the heart.
When I work with people in a creative capacity, I always encourage them to share.
It's the scariest thing for most people.
I didn't think I was going to get nervous.
My heart just sped up.
I am passing through.
Sometimes me, sometimes you.
Here or there, I'm always true.
The more I cling and grip my truth, the path I lose from me to you.
A palm is opened, a grip is loose.
A heart is calming in its truth.
Amazing.
So beautiful, right?
And it is so vulnerable, what he spoke to.
There's a reason, like, we shake with our art.
It's coming from here, and we're not used to revealing that most of the time.
It takes practice and exercise to get comfortable, which is what we're doing here together in Fit for Service.
I appreciate the guy's poem.
You know, it might be a first effort, but we really don't know what a first poke like that will release in a person.
I do roll my eyes a little at the vibe that Howe is doing something, like, unique or skilled here.
Like, I started doing writing classes in 1988, and you learn the most when things aren't so precious, right?
And charged.
But Howe is a writer without a book, now leading other people into writing.
I mean, there are two poems on her website, and there's one blog post, and in my opinion, they show that she could be, you know, a better writer than Marcus is.
But between Kingsbury, Godsey, and Howe, I have this question at this point.
Like if you enrolled at University of Austin, Texas for a full undergrad year,
you'd pay 11,698 tuition in state.
A full course load minus summer, 10 courses, that's 1,169 per course.
You could take courses in Buddhism, nutrition and creative writing.
And who would be teaching you?
Somebody who went through a process to prove that they knew how to research.
Somebody who went through a process that proved that they knew how to get feedback
and work on something towards completion.
Like, your instructor would be somebody paid stably enough that they didn't have to use every public appearance plus their whole social media identities to generate marketing and gig work leads.
Next up is Spiritually Fit.
We'll go through this quick because it's taught by all five coaches, which includes Aubrey and his wife Alana.
It's as generic New Agey and bland as you would imagine by the title.
I can't apply, sadly, because I'm specifically told Oh!
that it's not for atheists or anyone who thinks they know everything about the mystery.
But if I want to know God, wield magic, and compete with darkness, I can apply.
So I have to rethink my entire life philosophy now.
Finally is Romantically Fit.
It is led by Aubrey and Vilana.
The most interesting part to me is Vilana's bio which tells me that she's currently co-authoring
a source code changing book on the subject of pleasure as ethics with Dr. Mark Gaffney
and Caitlin Howes.
So there's your book, Matthew.
It's coming out.
You mentioned Gaffney earlier.
How do you feel about him specifically co-authoring a book about the pleasure of ethics?
I think this is the weakest brick in the Marcus-dominated pyramid.
And I would implore Caitlin and Violana to reconsider this collaboration because I just don't think they should do it.
Sharing an authorship citation with Mark Gaffney is not worth it for about a thousand reasons.
Whatever the two of these women have to say about pleasure and ethics will have a thousand percent more integrity without his fingerprints on it.
And that's because Goffney, who's a New Age ex-rabbi, brings with him a pleasure and ethics train wreck of highly credible, always denied but never refuted sexual misconduct allegations going back decades.
He's currently being sued by two women under the New York Child Victims Act for allegedly abusing them in the 1980s when they were 13 and 14 years old.
Gafni was stripped of his Orthodox rabbinical status over abuse allegations.
There were later accusations in other communities as well, not involving girls, but women.
And he's only ever doubled down on his Tantric Jewish mysticism shtick, part of which is presented as a kind of vigorous self-defense.
Now, Marcus says that he's been through all of the documentation about Gafni, and we'll put it in the show notes.
It'll make your eyes bleed.
But he still believes in the goodness of the man.
Now, whether this is reckless, stubborn, or just tone-deaf to his female audience, I really think this is Marcus's worst decision.
All right, so about two-thirds of the way through, Claire Spencer, who's the director of community for Fit for Service, is given several minutes to articulate a very careful response to the accusation, which no one is making, that Fit for Service is a cult.
And she takes an historical point of view.
There's an interesting parallel right now between what's going on in the world and what happened in the 60s and 70s.
Right now, the world absolutely feels like it's in chaos.
There are terrifying wars.
There are pandemics.
There is a lot of instability in the economy.
If you look back in the 60s and 70s, there was the Vietnam War.
There was also a lot of instability.
And in these times of deep instability, It's a sign that in some ways culture is failing.
It's a big overarching culture.
The rules that we live by are not working.
We're not safe.
It's not leading us to have happy lives.
And so people become disillusioned and they are more attracted to alternative subcultures or cults.
We want to find meaning.
We want to find things that are aligned with us.
And so as those subcultures start to develop in these different groups with different ideas, there are really well-intentioned people. And just as there are good
people, there's also force of bad or evil in a balancing way. We're now in a
time in history where there's a lot of opportunity to take advantage of people who are lost,
who don't know how to navigate everything that's going on. I think that's a great segment.
And I think that she should be paid very well by Fifth First Service for that.
She goes on to say that the way to tell whether a group is exploitative or generative is whether it heightens connection and freedom and whether it returns resources to the world, which is all true.
And in this four-minute segment, Fit for Service participants are also on screen saying things like, I'm free here.
No one is making me think in any particular way.
Nobody wants me to stay.
But then closer to the end, Aubrey Marcus comes on screen to say something very important, which I also actually agree with very strongly.
People need discretion.
So I don't even blame people for having that skeptical eye and wondering what's going on.
But to not have clear discretion to be able to tell the difference, that's a problem because then everything in the world is dangerous.
And if everything in the world is dangerous, you're going to stay isolated.
You're going to stay alone.
I think he should phone up RFK Jr., who's the most paranoid man in the world, I think, and tell him exactly that.
But seriously, I think Marcus is right here, that paranoia does lead to insular conspiracy theorizing about how everyone in the world is against your special project.
And that's why I think it's really important for him to avoid responding to a straw man and understand that the criticism is that he's selling a pig's ear and calling it a purse.
He's rehashing a bunch of 40-year-old stuff as though he invented deep breathing and journaling.
He's platforming a Class A creep in Gufni and spreading anti-vax propaganda, all while claiming to support some kind of spiritual renaissance.
But I would argue that you can't support people by selling them pseudoscience or pseudotherapy.
You can't support democracy or public health by supporting RFK Jr.
So, you know, a fairly banal and poorly researched self-help program run by influencers may not be a cult, but the claim of the video is that Fit for Service is an anti-cult.
So, is it?
My take is that a real anti-cult would not do the following.
It wouldn't cost $20,000 a year to attend with no scholarships.
It wouldn't endorse conspiracy theories or conspiracy theorists.
It wouldn't promise to change every aspect of your existence through meditation, journaling, and supplements as though things like inequality and oppression are all in your mind.
It wouldn't influence people against taking medications and vaccines.
It wouldn't shame fat people for food choices or health problems.
It wouldn't endorse a politics of libertarianism or spread ableist ideas and anti-trans rhetoric.
I mean, when I think about what an anti-cult would do, first of all, it would have a rotating leadership, especially making sure that women run it at least half the time.
It would run soup kitchens.
It would press Austin City Council to accommodate the unhoused in real housing.
It would support labor unions.
It would offer free yoga and fitness classes to nurses and social workers.
It would fight for a living wage statewide.
I mean, it would fight for universal healthcare.
It would set up safe houses for women who need abortions and must travel across state lines at this point, risking harassment or arrest.
It might form relationships with First Nations folks.
Like, the anti-cult would invent new ways of spreading wealth around and decreasing inequality and cruelty.
And it would be so cool, I don't think it would have to make an expensive infomercial.
Say yes to all that and then say pick one.
I think part of the challenge of being an anti-cult by definition is the antithesis of a cult.
They have always been responses to certain groups or situations historically.
And so when you're up against something like Fit for Service, because they promise so much, you know they're probably delivering very little, especially as we've gone through.
These coaches are not qualified to teach the things that they do.
And even within the modules, you have such a wide range of things.
Like if Kyle Kingsbury was teaching physically fit, great!
Lead people to understand the workout you did to train for MMA.
Don't throw in glucose monitors and everything.
And so like, I would say like, You just named a dozen anti-cults, but pick one.
Start the soup kitchen.
That's it.
Do that thing really well.
Support labor unions.
Do that thing really well.
Because in the conspirituality world, we always see such a vast array of promises, but we always find that when people can do one thing well and they stick with it, that's where actual change happens.
Yeah, really well put.
Thanks, Derek.
That's awesome.
Yeah, and I would say too, Matthew, I really enjoyed all of those linkages of progressive sort of political initiatives to what a spiritual group could be doing to really be of service to the world.
And I agree with and endorse all of that.
And at the same time, I don't think an anti-cult necessarily has to do all those things.
What I would ask of an anti-cult is that they take the question of what is a cult, why is a cult problematic seriously enough to actually have modules on that as part of their coursework.
Yeah, at minimum.
And actually be saying, hey, here are all of the very specific ways in which we want to bulletproof you against cults and in which we want to spread the idea of spiritual communities that are working on a specific model that is different about how to not be cultish.
Yeah, are you pitching Aubrey Marcus right now?
Yeah, yeah, I'm looking for a job.
Yeah, what's our fee?
It's gonna be very high because we don't have a lot of time.
Yeah, that's right.
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