Megamillionaire supplements and New Age life coach tycoon Aubrey Marcus recently claimed the goddess Isis told him that he must impregnate both his wife and the third member of their throuple while doing spiritual tourism in Egypt.
During a nearly three-hour podcast, the three explain their polygamous plans and heartaches while their on-call guru, Marc Gafni—an old-school spiritualist most famous for the long list of sexual assault and misconduct allegations against him—frames their drama as a sacred crisis.
We pick apart the spectacle, assessing how badly Marcus is getting his ass beat.
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Music It's the Temple of Isis.
And beautiful temple.
And I'm just kind of cruising around and we're all cruising around.
Wow, this is...
This is beautiful.
And then we enter this one dark chamber.
And I'm in there in the dark chamber.
It's the Holy of Holies.
The Holy of Holies.
Like the sanctum sanctorum of this temple.
And Matthias is there and he's doing an activation in there.
And we're in the dark and Alana and Vi are in there.
And I receive a message.
As clear as any message I've ever received, and it felt to me coming through the voice of Isis.
She didn't announce herself, but that was implicit in my understanding, in this almost telekinetic understanding.
And it says, you need to have children with both of them.
And I go, excuse me?
That's mega-millionaire, anti-vaxxer, Trump-supporting, supplements and New Age life coach tycoon Aubrey Marcus, 44, telling the world that while doing spiritual tourism in Egypt, the goddess Isis commanded that he must impregnate both his wife,
Vailana, 37, and the third member of their thruple, Alana Beal, 28. Now, that would have to happen after he becomes fertile again, after almost a decade of taking tea, and maybe after doing the therapy that self-important men might need to do to become parents who realize they're not the actual baby anymore, because they're not going to get all the attention.
Now, the command from ISIS is not what he expected or wanted, he goes on to say.
And if we rolled a clip farther, we'd hear Violana weep, as she does a few times throughout this unbearable 2.5-hour podcast.
Talking about how the spiritual command to open up their sacred monogamish union salted her deepest betrayal wounds and made her feel like dying countless times.
Their episode is called A New Pattern of Sacred Relationship Emerges, and alongside Marcus guiding Vailana and Alana through accounts of their strained thruple experience, Marcus also has his on-call guru, Mark Gaffney.
An old-school spiritualist, most famous for the long list of sexual assault and misconduct allegations against him, on the panel to frame their drama as a sacred crisis and to preempt objections from Marcus's one million-plus followers across social platforms.
But whatever the strategy might have been in play, it didn't work.
So today, we'll use our coverage of Marcus over the years to see how it predicts this moment.
And we'll pick apart the spectacle itself and assess how badly he's getting his ass beat for it from several political angles.
You are listening to Conspirituality, 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.
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So, Derek and Julian, this is quite a moment, and I think for us the setup is unsurprising because this super-rich guy has been running a cultish operation in plain sight for a long time.
But, you know, not the 1970s brick-and-mortar ashram type.
It's the more fluid and monetized parasocial type organized around a core group of influencer underlings who specialize in fitness or dime store psychology or divine gender BS.
You know, all together with them, Marcus sells a lifestyle of new age bro science optimization.
And a central part of his gig has always been the public commodification of his own sex life as a blueprint for enlightened relationship.
But with this new crisis, the commentariat is outraged at his transparently cruel rationalizations for unilaterally reorganizing his public marriage, and that's because...
He's always been adaptable, pan-spiritual, a post-moral syncretist.
From 2012 on until his super-fast marriage to Vailana in 2019, and I have to resent how much brain space we have to devote to this to keep all of these years straight, he was in a fluid, sometimes mono, sometimes open or poly, but usually poorly defined for the public partnership with a woman named Whitney Miller, who we'll hear commentary from in the end.
And that provided a source of brand content as they talked about the relationship in various And so, what's different now?
Why such a backlash, even from his followers, or primarily from his followers?
Why is it in this age of seemingly absolute non-accountability is this guy crashing out?
And I think part of the story is that Marcus opportunistically recruited a reactionary new listenership as he pivoted into MAGA territory in 2020.
And as we're going to hear, a lot of those followers were particularly attached to his new invocations of Christian devotion and his performance of a more conservative, sacred monogamy union with Vailana, who from the beginning was clear that she wanted an exclusive relationship.
They even did fit-for-service workshops on the holiness of their commitment, and it seems that he's just not going to talk himself out of that now.
Well, I know, Matthew, you posted this podcast in our Slack shortly after it happened.
I was blissfully unaware as my wife and I and our puppy were on the coast yurt camping for a couple days where I got to actually be offline.
Nice.
And upon returning, I got a bunch of DMs from a whole...
And I'm like, oh, fuck.
Because I was happily forgetting about him for a while.
We haven't touched him in a while.
And to be honest, even doing this episode, if it was just about their throuple, I would not be involved in this because I think that the sort of relationship gossip that dominates so much...
The idea that you should care about someone else's relationship is absolute garbage to me.
And I can see how it functions, gossip, in terms of people around you.
To be aware of assholes, for example, or things going on, but the idea that I would care about an actor or actress together, or a life coach and a spiritual guy, like whatever.
It's just absolutely mind-boggling that that occupies people's space.
But the reactions that we saw to what had happened, I think, is worth covering.
And a few things that do jump out at me, first off, just broad picture about the podcast itself, because...
Aubrey obscuring his desire of just wanting to fuck a lot of women through spiritual language is something I've seen in the wellness yoga spaces for a while but the fact that people put him up on these platforms with hundreds of thousands of people following is a real red flag and the way that he manipulates the language not even the people is really demeaning.
And then having Gaffney, and I know we're going to get a little deeper into who he is, and we have covered him a little bit before, but having a 60-something-year-old man sitting there giving guidance to a 20-something woman who got pulled into this situation was just so fucking gross.
And then just the overall privilege of these people.
First of all, the idea that people would care, but apparently people do, so we're commenting.
But the level that they're able to talk about their experiences that we're going to hear in clips, and we'll also flag this later, but Gaffney's saying, you guys would be in this if you all were poor.
It's just absolute garbage, because the opening clip is the three of them.
Going through Egypt on Aubrey's dime from selling bullshit supplements for hundreds of millions of dollars.
So that's my general framework going into this.
It's absolute garbage people spouting nonsense, but it is actually dangerous.
And I will say the reason I'm partaking is to see the rawness and the beauty and the pushback that so many people, but especially women, to him in the comments.
Yeah, I mean, it's like one of those internet memes, right, where it's like nobody and then like, And then Mark Gaffney, well, I mean, if you guys were poor, he's like totally trying to preempt all of the obvious stuff of like, oh, yes, when you're sailing down the Nile and you suddenly realize you need to change your relationship structure.
And yeah, like both of you, Derek, you're saying it's so gross that there's this gossip culture and Matthew, you're saying – Why does this have to take up brain space, cataloging the history of these people's relationships?
But the thing is, we're covering a phenomenon, which is that this is the emergence of the social media influencer guru kind of culture in which cataloging.
That's part of reaching the audience.
That's part of then being able to pitch your products on the other side of that, as we're actually going to see during this episode.
But here we are again, the long list of male new religious movement leaders, especially, who just so happen to hear a divine voice that commands them to have multiple wives.
It's staggering, right?
Somehow, the gods are very interested not only in who does what to whom with which body part, as the evangelicals never tire of telling us, but also how certain very special chosen individuals should structure their sexual and power relations.
And bottom line, to me, even if they believe it, these guys who have tended to do this, which I doubt, I think it's always just a manipulative religious justification for living out what is the predictable narcissistic male fantasy of being at the top of the food chain and getting to have all the babes to yourself.
If Marcus can couch his infidelity and desire for more new sexual experiences in spiritual language, then that's only further strengthened by having this older male guru figure blessing his impulses and delusions.
As sacred and kind of translating them into his language of evolutionary, very, very important global spirituality.
Let's bear in mind, this is a podcast with almost 630,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Their top 10 videos have over 1 million views each.
The editing aesthetic of this episode is...
This is the evolution of this kind of media and culture.
Like, there's very slick production.
There's an almost four-minute lead into the two-and-a-half-hour video that has highlights and B-roll footage and carefully placed musical cues.
And, you know, some of the B-roll is candid, but some of it is, like, clearly staged.
Like, okay, let's go get the footage of you standing next to the pillar, pouring the water, you know, putting on your clothing.
I think you're absolutely right about the production values, because as I think of it, it's like what you would see on Dr. Phil or any kind of big daytime production.
I think that's all accessible to these people who are as wealthy, but they don't have mega studios, but they're able to assemble all of the resources.
they need.
Yeah.
And we're introducing you to these characters, not by asking them questions about their lives, but by showing a very emotive kind of aesthetic vibe of who they each are.
And then the conversation itself is on this beautiful professional set.
To your point, Matthew, there are different backdrops essentially for each speaker in terms of how the set has been built.
There's a multi-camera system that can cut back and forth and allow for compelling split screen moments between the characters as they get into their emotions.
So we're being invited into very intimate territory, but in a highly curated and produced format.
I just wanted to pick up on something that you said, Derek, which is that like, the excess of the lifestyle on display, and we'll get into this, it's a function of the escapism of the parasocial sort of connection that people cultivate with these figures.
And I wonder if there's a turning point with the...
Okay, so let's get into a series of clips that we have.
We're going to go sort of in order.
We're not going to spend a lot of time on the actual content because we can summarize a lot of that.
But I think it's important to sort of hit the main points.
And where we start is with how Aubrey Marcus frames and choreographs these very important messages that he has to deliver to his audience.
And so people are looking for different opportunities.
What are they?
Do they work?
Is it possible?
And for some people, the traditional models, monogamy as it has been for thousands of years, just works perfectly.
And so we're not here to be advocates of our way, but we're here to just humbly tell the story of our way.
And the reality is that we didn't plan to be here.
This was not like we set out with this intention.
We arrived at this intention through a variety of choices and mystical interventions and just the acceptance of what is and what is has really guided us to where we are now.
And where we are now is a story that we have not yet told.
And so here we are to tell the story and also tell the story in the context of a world, a planet that's...
Yeah, so that, I actually just realized, totally reminds me of the Aubrey Marcus and Charles Eisenstein moment.
Here we are.
Here we are.
Oh, it's this key moment in the present of incredible significance.
Right away, you have this artful linking, just in humility, right, of where we are, which is like him and his two sister wives, and the planet, because his love life is of ultimate significance to the spiritual evolution of humanity.
Yeah, exactly.
And then also, right, this topic of shame, which is what he has rationalized all of the confusion and the suffering that the trio, especially the two women, especially his wife, have been going through.
It's actually just about shame and learning how to overcome shame.
Especially his wife's struggle, right?
It requires some kind of spiritual courage to move through so as to get beyond the shame and the jealousy and the triggers of lower consciousness.
And that's a story I've heard a lot, frankly, in our overlapping subcultures.
They also keep playing this line, especially Aubrey, where they're talking about things that are ancient and they're not really going to change things, but they're offering a different perspective.
When he says monogamy as it's been for thousands of years, that just, I mean, you might be surprised to learn that Aubrey doesn't know anything about fucking history.
But the idea of romantic love that we think of as monogamy, bringing you into union with another person is relatively new historically because predominantly throughout history, Most cultures had that as part of—I mean, there's a whole bunch of Shakespeare about this stuff.
So it's not like we have had monogamy for thousands of years as we know it.
No, we have something new today, and I would argue that throughout time, or at least definitely in our time— Any sort of combination of relationship that you have takes a lot of work, and there is no perfect way to do it.
It's fluid.
It's always evolving.
And you've got to figure it out with the one partner or the multiple partners that you have.
But there's no framework that exists to work from that's going to just make it perfect.
Well, that's why, Derek, you would benefit from the guidance of Mark Gaffney.
because the reason that he's there in that room is interpretive.
It's to offer new frameworks, but also to And to preempt the objections that listeners might make.
So he brings all kinds of caveats.
And one of the things that he does, we'll listen to him in a moment, is that he wants to reassure Aubrey
And if it is radically redefined in a way that causes pain, then that will be good pain and it will be worth it and it will transform you.
And I think what everybody has to know about Mark Gaffney is that he is just excellent.
for this role, given his backstory.
He is a master of damage control and rationalization in relation to his own In 2004, two women accused him of sexual assault from the 1980s.
Gaffney has admitted a relationship with a 14-year-old girl when he was 19, and he called it consensual, but the victim does not.
A woman named Judy Mitzner alleged abuse in 1986 when she was 16 and Gaffney was 24. Then in 2006, he is in Israel, in Jaffa, and five women at the congregation that he's working at there accuse him of misconduct, and so he has to flee Israel.
He loses his rabbinical ordination, and there are currently open lawsuits against him under New York's Child Victims Act.
And so he's got a lot of experience with, you know, being in the position of the male spiritual teacher who is having to face down controversy and give a lot of explanations for it.
And so let's take a listen to how he kind of weaves himself in and positions himself as the master here.
Classical monogamy, which, again, I think is probably the best path for most people most of the time.
is filled with holy and broken hallelujahs.
And the reason why Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah has more covers made of it than any other story is because it's about, wow, love is not a victory march, right?
It's a cold and it's a broken, it's a holy and broken hallelujah, right?
It's a beautiful and gorgeous journey, which works for many people or doesn't, but it's a gorgeous, sacred possibility, which should be at the center of culture.
Beautiful.
We got that.
And it's a critical and.
Historically, what's happened is, the way monogamy has been lived is through deception.
Leonard Cohen would have to Yeah, except that that's what they did at that particular monastery.
They smacked themselves quite a bit.
Yeah, and he's misquoting that song, too, because that song is actually about infidelity.
It's about betrayal.
It's about absolute heartbreak.
It's not about how it's all actually wonderful.
Love is pain.
Monogamy is deception.
Leonard Cohen's song somehow refers to this new awakening.
Fire references to Old Testament stories.
And again, we have this ahistorical notion of classical monogamy.
This guy's really a talker if you've not heard him before, right?
And if you did not listen to all two hours and 40 minutes of this fucking podcast, he keeps referencing it over and over.
He keeps going back to it.
Well, there's a good reason for that, which is that Leonard Cohen is actually a Jewish poet.
Yeah.
And Gaffney isn't, right?
And I think that like it's almost like in the same way that Marcus needs Gaffney in the room to make him feel smart.
I think Gaffney needs Leonard Cohen in the background or in the ether somewhere to make him feel smart.
And I just want to say, too, that, you know.
So he's not wrong about that.
This is part of the thing that, you know, is always very irritating about him is that he can say things that sound true.
But we also don't know how he's defining deception or infidelity.
Like in some discourses, that includes one partner using porn but not disclosing it.
His suggestion is that somehow his three spiritual students here have achieved peak honesty.
That's what he's there to suggest.
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Okay, two more bits from Gaffney.
We have to do this one where he primes listeners to view the crisis and attachment wounds that are bleeding out all over this episode as ultimately positive.
Reality is, at its core structure, the evolutionary relationships.
And what moves reality forward from the molecular to the world of animals, of life, to the world of humans, is crisis.
Every crisis is always a crisis of relationship.
It's never not.
So every crisis is a crisis of intimacy.
You solve a crisis of intimacy by actually reaching for a next and new structure of intimacy.
Reality is the progressive deepening of intimacies.
Okay, I want to hear him explain physics so we can understand the crisis at the molecular level since these idiots love to invoke molecules and atoms all the time.
It's the relationship between electrons and protons.
They're having an intimacy issue and that leads to...
But this is the galaxy brain guru shtick, right?
From the single-celled amoeba to the self-realized union with the divine, it's all about relational crisis.
So the fact that you're struggling right now, it's actually part of a much bigger story that we can take solace in.
All the wounding, all the transgression, all the betrayal, all the chaotic relational trauma, it's ultimately the divine reaching for itself through eros and agape.
I'm reading a book about the history of chemistry right now.
And I'll just say that there was a moment in the 18th century where alchemy, which was the original study of chemicals, split apart and chemistry actually became its own field of study.
And what the new chemists realized were that the metaphorical language had use for understanding if you had a spiritual practice, but it was utterly useless as a science.
And that is when alchemy disappeared.
And that's just what I'm getting from this, this idea that you can alchemize things that actually don't have any bearing in reality.
Well, wait until I announce my side project of turning base metal into gold.
It's going to happen, bro.
So who has time to do all of this stuff?
One last preemption caveat from Goffney before we move on, where...
I think you can tell that in his notebook in front of him, he actually brought notes to the meeting.
He's ticking off the things that people will object to.
And here, I think he's anticipating that people will complain about these folks just living lives of leisure and pretending that their relationships are somehow important.
A strange thing to say, but let's say a strange thing.
The three of you would be at this table.
If you were poor.
And that's a really important thing to say.
This is not, oh, wow, we've got some dispensable time, a little extra income, you know, we're kind of in Miami.
No, no, no.
In other words, and we've been through these depths.
If you guys were like, for whatever reason, wow, right?
The whole world turned around and we were poor, God forbid, right?
Because everyone should be filled with plenty and we should take care of it.
But if you were, you would still be in this constellation.
And that's deep.
So there was a deep searching.
There was a deep integrity and there was a deep listening to the intimate universe.
And there's not a bone in my body.
That's not proud of that.
He's so good.
He's good because he realized how much of an asshole he was when saying, God forbid, we're poor, but everyone should have money.
Everyone.
Yeah, let's make everyone rich.
And hold on a second.
You'd all be sitting at this table if you were poor.
Well, they might be, but Mark Gaffney would not be sitting across.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
Because I bet he comes at a pretty fucking penny.
Well, I think he's really working for his dinner.
He's blessing whatever Marcus wants to do.
But he also, periodically in this episode, he throws in quips like, you guys are a real pain in the ass.
because he's describing getting like crisis texts from Egypt.
So he also gets to play this kind of hackathon hassled, spiritual dad who has to take care of all of the kids.
But here's my favorite Gaffney clip before we move on.
This is just a little taste of the kind of jargon that he's capable of.
We've given this a name.
We're calling it radical monogamy in the field of erotic mystics.
So paradoxically, this is not about polyamory.
That's the paradox.
It's actually about radical monogamy, meaning deep, exclusive life Lifelong, committed relationship.
Right?
But not in the classical monogamous sense.
It's an expanded monogamy.
But there's a radical monogamy.
But it's just not a monogamy of two.
It's a slightly bigger monogamy.
But it's not, okay, we're not like moving in and out of partner.
No.
It's not the polyamory road.
It's not the classical monogamy mode.
It's a radical monogamy of deep exclusivity between Aubrey and Vi.
And then there's going to be a new goddess who will step into the field.
We'll also step into this field of radical monogamy in the field of erotic mystics.
It's a pizza, but it's not really a pizza.
It's a sandwich.
But you see, it's a pizza that's a sandwich, but if you melt the cheese, It's from Bully.
The invoice is...
The line items on that, he's going to give himself a fucking stroke coming up with that shit.
Can you imagine twisting yourself up so hard and then going on a podcast that gets hundreds of thousands of views and showing your ass like that?
It's incredible.
There was a moment, and I'm sure, Julian, you remember this because I know it was in the LA yoga scene, but it was in the New York yoga scene in the 90s where these master teachers would say the most Just pedestrian bullshit that if you read it on paper, you would throw it out.
But they would say it in such a way that it had some deep spiritual insight.
And I feel like that's just what he's like.
How many times can you say radical monogamy as if that's going to stick?
It's going to become sticky, and that's what it felt like.
Well, the thing is that the second phrase, Derek, you don't understand, you didn't listen carefully enough, is that it's radical monogamy in the field of erotic mystics.
In the field of erotic mystics.
Yeah, you've got to get the two parts.
It's in the field because the radical monogamy is Marcus and the two Marcuses, right?
Aubrey and Vailana.
And then the field is what opens up to invite Alana in as the third goddess, really.
So anyway, we'll get to that because we have to actually tell their story now.
Yeah, it's like a portal into an ontological reality that's been discovered where the erotic mystics hang out.
And this is the thing.
This has always been the shtick.
It's the field, man.
Yeah, it's the field.
And this has always been the shtick, Derek.
This is the crazy wisdom shtick.
This is the misuse of non-dual philosophy from Vedanta.
It's essentially that you say that things are not what they are, and you find ways of constructing that with your language that make people go, wow, that's deep and profound.
It's mostly nonsense.
I've been away from this subculture for so long now that I forget.
I forget about this whole preoccupation with messages from spirit and how spirit really tells you everything that you need to do with your life.
And in a way, I actually find it really sad because it's like a parody of meaningfulness and authenticity to have every aspect of your life.
Spirit is just telling you what to do.
And very often, it's what you don't want to do, but you have to listen to spirit.
Matthew, did you know a story by Michael Roach about toothbrushes?
That was a thing in the Jeeva Mukti scene for a while, that he gave some sermon about toothbrushes that all the fucking teachers were repeating for months.
Well, he used to use specific sort of...
I don't want to know.
I don't want to know.
Like pencils and pens to make a point about the Buddhist theory of emptiness.
So it was a display object for teaching about the nature of reality and that you can't actually tell where the toothbrush actually is or what it's made out of.
So he watched MTV.
In the 90s.
Kind of.
He saw the Magritte reference that this is not really a pipe.
Something like that.
Yeah.
And I mean, I think that what Gaffney is trying to do here, I just want to pick out one kind of serious thing that we'll talk about a little bit later, is that he is actively, you know, muddying the waters with regard to what they are calling this particular relationship.
So it's not monogamy exactly.
It's also not polyamory.
He has to help them move the goalposts all over the relationship world so that whatever they do is fine and okay, and that nobody really has any rules or responsibilities, that you can make it up as you go along.
And the problem with that is that whoever has the most social And I think Gaffney is facilitating that complete removal.
Thank you very much, Mark Gaffney, for providing us with all of those good laughs and opportunities for analysis.
Matthew, I know you've looked into the backstory of the three main characters here in detail to help us understand how we got here.
So Aubrey previously had a very public, open relationship in the way that we've been discussing.
And then seem to pivot to monogamy in recent years.
Is that right?
Yeah, and we'll just give a little synopsis of the story that they tell in this podcast so that we understand what has been framed here for dinner.
So yeah, Aubrey Marcus and Violanna marry in 2019 with a monogamish commitment, and that's in contrast with Aubrey's recent years with a woman named Whitney Miller.
But at this point, Vailana is less interested and more triggered by relationship openness than Aubrey is.
And this timing or the switch to monogamy just happens to coincide with a right word political and social turn in 2020 as the pandemic gets going.
And Aubrey starts to change his market focus, his content focus over to MAGA type content.
And during this time, Aubrey, Marcus and Violana have open relationship experiences.
But it's not clear when those actually start.
it seems like they move from a kind of more committed to monogamy to to something that's more open over the five years.
Yeah, yeah, so that's not entirely clear.
And maybe that's sort of obscured deliberately given what you were just saying about the political utility of presenting as traditional monogamy.
Right, yeah.
But by the time we get to Miami, which seems like it's around 2023, It does seem like they're on the lookout for threesomes.
Yeah, definitely.
They're on a dating app.
And so this is when Alana enters the picture, right?
Yeah.
So they're holidaying in Miami for about a month.
They describe basically trawling for threesome partners.
Of course, he has to swipe once first because whoever pops up on the top is not good enough.
Not the right one.
And he kind of knows, I don't think he says this directly, but he knows that this is special because he never looks at his phone while working out because he's such a concentrated guy.
And so, yeah, so he's working out.
He never normally checks his phone, but then Spirit tells him he must look because someone really important is going to be there, and then I guess the first woman is not attractive or something.
He's like, eh, no thanks.
Right?
That's not the one.
No, this is the one that Spirit chose for me.
She's just right.
So he tells the story as having this kind of mystical cosmic connection, and then he sends her a message that basically says that.
He's like, oh, wow, I'm just going to go all in and say Spirit told me I should connect with you, right?
How does Alana receive that message?
Well, she's receptive to it.
I guess they have a good series of first interactions.
She describes herself as being in the middle of a career transition.
She's moving out of modeling.
She's trying to figure out what to do next with her life.
They connect, and on their second meeting, they all take...
And this ritual, they say, reveals how pure and worthy Alana is of their attention and inclusion in their relationship.
And before long, Alana says, Violana is a singer, and apparently she accesses greater range or tone or whatever.
Yeah, Marcus says, new octaves open up, which is pretty impressive.
That's pretty impressive, right.
Yeah, and the other thing I'll just add here is that Alana says this is her first time ever on a dating app.
It's her first day on the dating app.
It's the first message.
It sounds like, well, we don't know if that's necessarily true.
I may be speculating there.
But yeah, she's very fresh and innocent and new to all of this.
And wow, here comes, I can only imagine the hot millionaire guy is chatting her up and saying that Spirit said they should connect through Raya.
So that's amazing.
Then to go even further into this, Aubrey hears the voice of the goddess Isis in a temple in Egypt, as we've said.
And that's where things start to get really intense.
But, you know, as soon as they tell this part of the story, they're also describing a kind of swirling, incoherent drama because having children with another person are an even darker red line for Vailana.
And I just want to say, I think they should be aligned for everybody in this situation, because if Aubrey thinks that relationships are hard and transformative or that they should be, I just want to tell him that when children comes along, he's going to have a lot more to consider and to think about.
And then there are multiple references to Alana playing a mediating role between And then Marcus also discloses that he has given Vailana a soft ultimatum, which is that if she doesn't like the thruple arrangement, he of course would give her a buyout, which sounds like a red flag of power and consent to me.
So let's rewind a little bit because I think a key moment that we want to make sure we don't miss is this ritual god bomb induction part.
And this is how it gets described.
And there's been many people who've come on here and shared their experiences with the God Bomb.
You know, Layla who's shared it to, you know, Shaman Jen and Valko who's shared it and many people have shared it.
And we were in the developing of this and we let you know, we're like, hey, we have this particular type of ceremony.
It's quite intense, but it's really safe and we'll be there with you, you know, to guide you through this process.
And you're like, yeah, let's go.
We're like, really?
For sure.
Wow, she really trusts.
I was like, for sure, really?
Like, we're good and we deserve the trust.
But like, you also just met a, I mean, I know we're great, but.
Yeah.
So like, good read of character in that and good discretion.
And so you show up.
I just want to flag that I didn't hear this before, but I'm realizing by their reaction that them being surprised to her saying yes really gives me the sense that a lot of people have said no to them maybe recently, right?
They're like, oh, are you really going to do this?
I think they've pitched this before.
Well, they have.
For years.
And when we listened to this, we kind of speculated what the God Bomb was.
So I had to find out.
And I found it in a 2023 interview that Aubrey did with a self-proclaimed neo-tantra coach named Layla Martin.
Here it is.
We've kind of kept it a little bit secret.
It's been our own baby that we've been incubating that came to us from a variety of different cues from the universe.
But the core of it is the combination of two medicines, ketamine and cannabis, in conjunction.
And it forms this unbelievable, sacred handshake of Hyros Gamos.
And to me, ketamine is the ultimate divine masculine energy.
But it's not even like the divine masculine we've been talking about.
It's like this shivic universal energy.
Of all the possibility of all creation and just the life force energy that's available without even having to be form.
You know, so mater, matrix, it's like form is the mother.
And this is ultimate formlessness.
So much so that you would never say, oh, grandfather ketamine, like you would say grandfather wachuma or grandfather peyote.
No, it doesn't even have that energy of the masculine.
And it's so...
It's just the fine essence of ether and spirit.
And then you mix that with cannabis, which is the rich goddess.
It makes all the food taste better.
It makes your lovemaking taste better.
It makes the touch feel better.
It makes everything come alive in your body and the somatic awareness come.
And when we realize that those two things would pair together, and in the pairing of the Alpha and Omega, The chi was formed, which is the intersection.
And that intersection has to do with the heart that is available to come through when the masculine and the feminine meet.
You see, it's a pizza.
It's a pizza, but it's got truffle oil sprinkled on top of it.
And when you pair it with the Pinot Noir, there's something that happens.
Oh my God.
He's such a douchebag.
So, all right.
When I heard that, I have a history of these substances.
But dating back to the 90s, ketamine somehow got caught up in the psychedelic space.
And I think it was partly because of 80s culture, the club culture, because it became something that people were doing, taking bumps of while they were on psychedelics.
And then it became perceived as a psychedelic, which it is not.
It is chemically known as a disassociative.
It is used to treat animals or soldiers in Vietnam was the first usage after FDA approval.
One of the big reasons, Derek, actually, that I think it got woven into psychedelic culture is John Lilly.
All of John C. Lilly's early experiments with flotation tanks and working with dolphins.
He was using ketamine, and people got really caught up in this idea that ketamine, and that movie Altered States with John Hurt, William Hurt, is all about ketamine and how ketamine is sort of this doorway into being able to time travel and communicate with dolphins and aliens and all the rest of it.
Right, so I'm not gonna go into my anecdotes about it, but I just wanna Now, I don't know the dosage amount, and I will say that if you were to take a bump of ketamine and some cannabis, you could have a very lucid experience.
Absolutely.
I had great times.
My friends had great times.
If you were to do what we sold in college, which was a bag, a 20-bag of ketamine and cannabis, there was only one time in my life where I was lying down, sitting, then standing, and I couldn't physically tell where I was spatially.
That was the only time.
Out of all of the too many psychedelics experiences that I had, that I didn't know where I was spatially.
And I bring that up because, again, it is a disassociative, which basically...
So I don't know what doses she's using, but that makes it very suspect that they've dialed in the perfect amount for people.
Yeah, and then this whole idea that it's a lineage medicine practice.
It's like the combination of tech bros speak and psychedelic shaman wannabe, right?
And their personal spiritual experimentation then, of course, has these grandiose implications in framing.
And they've developed this ceremony using this very powerful combination of drugs, which, of course, they refer to as a god bomb.
it's going to show this vulnerable younger woman the ultimate nature of reality on their second date.
If you add to that the language of spirit is bringing us together undeniably and then on the second date you take a very, very powerful drug together.
There's shades of cult indoctrination here.
I'm sorry.
That's how it feels to me.
And it also gets me these anti-pharma, anti-vaccine people who consistently use pharmaceuticals.
Like Matthew, you flagged earlier, Aubrey couldn't produce enough sperm because he was on testosterone for a decade.
And now they're talking about a pure creation of the pharmaceutical industry that they're co-opting into some sort of spiritual lineage.
It's all just garbage.
Fine.
You want to do the drugs you want to do.
That's totally fine.
But understand there are chemical implications to everything you put in your body.
Yeah.
And there's a recent research actually making the rounds and a lot of stories, especially coming out of the UK, that if you use ketamine consistently over an extended period of time, probably a fair amount of it, you end up with lots of complications, including loss of bladder control, even in quite young people.
Is there a way in which Marcus is making some kind of metaphorical sense about ketamine?
You're saying that it's a dissociative.
I've seen it in action because my own son had his arm reset with ketamine and I could see that he disappeared.
He couldn't remember where he was.
And Marcus is describing that as well, right?
He's describing sort of vacating.
So that's sort of equated with a spiritual experience.
But then he's saying that the cannabis kind of like Do you think that's accurate, Derek?
At least in my personal experiences, cannabis has used as a sort of either accelerant or as some sort of enhancement to all sorts of psychedelic drugs.
So for my own use, doing psilocybin with...
I am not an experienced person with ketamine.
I only did it a few times, even though I had some crazy experiences.
That's mostly why I only did it a few times.
So it is totally possible that he's using it in some way that enhances it, but how that's using or how he's trying to manipulate the drugs or the people he's around, I can't really speak to.
Yeah, and I'll just add here that from my perspective, However much you're spiritualizing a certain combination of drugs, it's pretty common for drug users to experiment with how you combine different drugs and have one amazing, amazing experience and then be chasing trying to get the chemistry just right in your amateur apartment setting.
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Music by Ben Thede What I think is the most complex piece is that, you know, at 26, Alana is an adult choosing to throw her lot in with a cruiser on Raya, and it doesn't sound like anyone twisted her arm to take these drugs during this ritual.
But at the same time, to your point about cultic dynamics, Julian, we know that undue influence is real.
That social power always plays a role and that Alana is describing a kind of situational vulnerability with regard to her life stage and career path.
We also know from her IG feed she's consuming content from real new age trad wife dingbats like the sexual archetypes coach.
You know, these are the type of person who's doing their best to out-Brogan-Brogan.
You know, divine women become free from the demands of feminism by being dominated by divine men, and so on.
But, you know, overall, Alanis seems to be in this situation with the affect of a kind of inscrutable equipoise.
It's kind of hard to tell what the impact is.
And it seems that whatever the internal cost, she's presenting a fairly understandable and frictionless path, that she's going to be a peacemaker, she's going to be someone who respects the elder wife and seems unattached to the outcome.
But they are also positioning her as the pure goddess who may ultimately heal the rocky primary relationship.
And Aubrey makes this big deal of saying that when he's alone with Alanna because he and Vailanna are fighting...
That particular form of sexism isn't prominent because she was pursued by them together and because the focus is on Aubrey as a manipulator.
That complicates the perception of what Alana is or isn't choosing to do.
You can't really argue both sides, that he's a manipulator, but she's a homewrecker, although maybe there are some gray areas there.
but let's get to the emotional impacts of how this all plays out amongst the three.
At first, when you shared that with me, I felt pretty calm and collected and was able to hold it from a place.
But the more that our It was bringing up that piece of me that feels like I always get hit out of left field as soon as I feel safe.
Like there's something else.
And so it was a lot of that woundedness around this always fucking happens and I've been so open in the blessing and trusting and then the thing that I literally was the most afraid of.
And this is like, you know, I had a little bit of hesitancy about this podcast just because it's exposing, you know, the most vulnerable part of my journey.
And, you know, we had a really difficult day.
As you can imagine.
And, you know, once we kind of, both of us are very dramatic, so we went like full out.
I have a little thing on my ring, but I like tried to like pull off my ring and I couldn't pull it off.
And then that just, Yeah, I mean, it was full, full drama.
I almost threw myself in the Nile.
It was dramatic.
Full drama.
That's the thing that jumped out at me.
I want to make an observation here.
I don't know these people personally, and so I don't want to extrapolate from that, but I will make an observation about having consumed their content for years is that I've known people in my life who are always working on themselves.
And I don't mean like, I think everyone's always working on things, which is fantastic.
When I hear words, when I hear things like on my journey and the constant suffering and everything is this like just dramatic instance.
And then I think about like, And then I think about the work that I mostly do on this podcast, which is advocating for socialized medicine and then reading all of the research on people who go medically bankrupt and can't afford to buy their prescription drugs so they can stay alive.
Those disparities are not lost on me.
Because so many people are just trying to get by.
I listen to podcasts like this and I'm just like, what world are these people occupying that they can't actually self-reflect and understand what they have and everything they've been given and yet everything is still this sense of drama.
And again, I don't want to take away from anyone's personal traumas or healing they need to do, which I think is...
But looking at these things in the broader scope, especially under the framework as Aubrey presenting it as a form of spirituality, is just really fucking tough for me to stomach.
Yeah, so you have the time, you have the money and the time on your hands to be able to be really preoccupied with like, how do I become this, you know, really unique, amazing, self-actualized human being in all these different ways?
And then there's this exhibitionist component to it, right?
Which is that essentially the way that a lot of this money keeps flowing is through this really being your job.
And so your job is to share your spiritual journey, which more and more is about like very intimate and sensationalist kind of controversial details on the big stage in a highly produced and curated way.
And yeah.
And I also found just a little bit of this, like, there's the transition from Violana's real emotional vulnerability into a kind of almost like making fun of the drama of it.
Oh, I hate it when you can't get the ring off in a dramatic moment.
Like, he's almost acknowledging, like, yeah, you're on camera and you're trying to have your big moment.
And then it's like, wait, she's actually, like, struggling.
Yeah, well, it's got to be cut short somehow, right?
It has to be reframed and contained and put back in the box.
And, you know, to the privilege point, Derek, I would say that, like, to the extent that they develop a fandom that is aspiring to their wealth and to their leisure time, their sort of continual commodification of their own leisure is...
And I think you're right, Julian, that leisure is their job.
And the question is, who really profits?
You know, who owns the assets?
And one of the things that I thought from this clip was that Vailana is really stuck in, you know, whatever is going on in the relationship.
But at least in the performative side that we're seeing, on one hand, she's supposed to be honest about how the open relationship rules really hurt and are not natural for her.
Like her confession and the tears are painful.
And that's what Marcus's intention is.
But it backfires, as we'll see.
And so it's also the thing to work on and transform, to your point earlier, Derek, about always having to work on something.
So this is commodified emotional labor that she has to do.
And, you know, I think the editor put the tears into the opening montage because it's actually a selling point.
They are counting on viewers clicking through to see.
See this person in vulnerability, in a form of surrender.
But then on the other hand, the metaphysics of the moment, as set up by Gaffney, have already decided that all of the upset is actually kind of childish.
It's really just a tantrum that will pass.
It's something that you have to realize is funny and meaningless.
So in labor terms, it's disposable.
Like it's there to draw views and allow the men on the panel to care-give, apparently.
But it's also a foregone conclusion that the tears will not change the ordained outcome that absolutely, contrary to Violana's expectations, now she's going to be a co-parent with Alana, with somebody who's 10 years old.
Yeah, and she has a few different moments like this of emotional overwhelm.
And at one point, this is in this general period of the podcast, she actually asks Mark Gaffney to speak on sacrifice.
Yeah.
Because there's something that she is being called in a very holy way to sacrifice in order to maintain her relationship with Mark.
And then you see all of the, sorry to use the term, but the spiritual gaslighting of her struggle.
Yeah, so how do people respond to this as we head into the homestretch?
You know, it was incredible to see actually the vast majority of maybe more than 10,000 comments excoriate Marcus for this particular display.
They were long.
There were quite earnest, overly polite call-ins from disillusioned followers, mostly women, who think that Violana is trapped, that they hope she finds a way out.
There were disillusioned comments from women who were invested in the fantasy of their divine monogamy.
There were responses from wellness bros on YouTube who thought that actually Marcus was just doing it all wrong and that any kind of non-monogamy will cause disease, and especially if it involves allowing your female partner Because that was another part of the story was that a rationalization for this new arrangement was that Marcus had actually given or granted Violana some sexual freedom previously.
But these guys on YouTube, they were German new medicine guys, and they were saying that basically if you allow your female partner to have sex with other men, there's nothing more humiliating because what they want to do is criticize Marcus for not doing gender essentialism in the right way.
There's also this really large YouTuber.
That seems to be discovering corruption in the awakened community for the first time.
And I was really surprised by how much content was produced and how short a period of time.
I guess I'm not on YouTube that much, but there was a real wave with a whole bunch of people weighing in with what they thought were unique kind of observations about, wow, there's corruption in the spiritual community.
Who knew?
Or there's charismatic leaders or something like that.
There were also some Cut closer to the argument of nobody cares what you do with consenting partners, but don't pretend that you've studied how to do consensual non-monogamy or polyamory or its agreements or its discourse or anything around that or its rules because look who's actually in control as per usual.
And when we don't follow rules, then we have power, you know, mess ups like this.
So, yeah, that's a.
survey of the comments.
What did you guys think about the comments?
I thought it was really refreshing to see, you know, here's for the first time, Orby Marcus really sticking his neck out on something like this.
And the backlash is almost unanimous.
And it's a lot of very powerful, eloquent, Ultimately, I was cheering them on.
Just calling out his bullshit, straight up.
One thing I found refreshing about the comments is it was just straight to the bone.
Some people did entertain Aubrey a bit, but most of them did not entertain any of the utter bullshit that he spouted.
They were just like, we see you.
We know what this is.
It happens over and over again.
And I actually went on to Alana's page because she closed the comments on her Aubrey post about the podcast, but she didn't close the comments, so people were commenting on her previous posts.
And there were actually some women who were just like, hey, look, you're at a place in your life, you're young.
Be careful.
I've been through this.
I know this guy.
This does not lead to anything good here.
And I found that really refreshing, seeing slightly older women step up to be like, I was that younger woman.
And it's so clear to us, and we just don't want to see that happen to you.
And that actually, that gave me some good feelings there of people looking out for other people in this way, especially against fucking assholes like Aubrey Marcus.
Who we have to say, actually, after maybe four days of backlash, closed and deleted all comments from the main posts and closed the comments under YouTube, which I've heard from reliable sources, he's actually never done before.
Actually, he's been very clear that he doesn't want to ever delete comments, and this just became too much.
He's got a couple of explanations up online that we can link to.
But, you know, when this broke and I saw the overwhelming and unique backlash, I wondered why this was the moment, like, and whether any of it would impact him.
Because, you know, in the background of this is a kind of crisis over accountability, especially in...
in the sort of larger backlash against the Me Too movement.
But as of yesterday, Aubrey Marcus's most recent post on Instagram is this kind of And it consists of a montage.
Did you guys see this?
Yeah, thanks, dude.
I had to fucking watch it.
That was horrible.
Yeah, well, it's this montage of really family-friendly clips where he's presenting himself as the fun-loving daddy who's playing pickleball and doing puzzles and riding horsies with these younger women and also making yummy pancakes.
So I think that the divine dad branding has already commenced.
But also that moment.
It was so fucking cringe staged.
Yeah, and I just want to underline this again.
Aubrey, if you're listening.
Oh, he's definitely listening.
this whole thing about wanting two babies, you know, you have a real something coming, right?
Like, because once...
You're not going to get all the attention anymore, even if you have an army of house help.
And also, God forbid, you have an autistic or otherwise disabled child.
And also, fair warning, the vast majority of people doing the hard work of parenting are not posting about parenting.
So you're not going to get that out of it.
Aubrey is listening.
We know this because he made an entire fucking documentary where he stole Matthew's voice to respond to one of our episodes.
So, dude.
Give us credit, at least.
I know you love to fucking be voyeuristic and peer in.
So at least put us on the fucking byline there.
We have to end with somebody who knows more about this than everybody, perhaps than the three principals involved.
And that would be Whitney Miller, who went on IG Live.
And I reached out to her, but she says publicly that she's not speaking to journalists.
So she did this IG Live that I happened to.
She was super diplomatic throughout this Q&A that she did.
She isn't grinding an axe.
She's choosing to speak because she's getting a lot of questions and she wants to shed light on patterns that she can shed light on.
She says that Marcus's relationship transitions are lightning fast.
She said that she moved in with him very shortly after he broke up with his previous partner, Caitlin Howe, in 2012.
She calls herself an idiot for doing it.
But in 2019, Whitney hears about Violanna on a Sunday, and Aubrey has moved in with her by Wednesday, and within two weeks, they're married.
And contrary to the narrative put out at the time, she wanted to make clear that there was little clarity about all of this and that they were definitely not all friends at the time.
Now, she's 22 to 30 years old while they're together, and she does describe love and some growth, but she also says that she was continually pushed to expand her boundaries and that every expression of discomfort and resistance was described as a shortcoming and the need for her to do more shadow work.
Now, through therapy, she has come to understand what she describes as narcissistic patterns.
And she says that listening to this podcast episode with the thruple was like listening to an older version of herself, trying to make sense of something she didn't understand.
And then I think this is the most important thing.
A listener DMs a comment to her during the IG Live saying that her partner, the listener's partner, basically forced her into an open relationship.
And she tried to make it work And it didn't.
And, you know, together they were inspired to do this by Aubrey Marcus and Whitney Miller.
