“Train your mind gently, not to deny what is hard, but to see what is still good” implores the monk sharing spiritual messages to his 2.5 million Instagram followers. Clad in an orange robe—well, sometimes a blue robe, sometimes grey or yellow—the little man of unknown descent speaks knowledge from a temple constructed from just about every Asian country imaginable. As it turns out, the creators of the AI-generated Yang Mun are…Israeli tech bros?
Turns out AI isn’t just for spirituality. There’s an entire industry of health slopfluencers pushing untested supplements, as Derek covers before Matthew breaks down the AI Orientalism of Yang Mun.
First, Julian touches on the 5th anniversary of the Jan 6 riots, and all the propaganda that’s emerged in its wake.
Show Notes
The Promise of Health Chatbots Has Already Failed
Yang Mun on Instagram
LinktreeMcMindfulness: how capitalism hijacked the Buddhist teaching of mindfulness
Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation
GigaChad | Know Your Meme
Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation
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Hey everyone, welcome 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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Conspirituality 291, my Chinese Buddhist Israeli AI guru.
Train your mind gently, not to deny what is hard, but to see what is still good, implores the monk, sharing spiritual messages to his 2.5 million Instagram followers.
Clad in an orange robe, well, sometimes blue robe, sometimes gray or yellow, the little man of unknown descent speaks knowledge from a temple constructed from just about every Asian country imaginable.
As it turns out, the creators of the AI-generated Yang Moon are created by Israeli tech bros.
Turns out, AI isn't just for spirituality.
There's an entire industry of health slopfluencers pushing untested supplements, as Derek covers in segment two, before Matthew breaks down the AI orientalism of Yang Moon.
First, though, I want to touch on the fifth anniversary of the January 6th riots and all the propaganda that's emerged in its wake.
Last week's fifth anniversary of the Capitol riots saw formerly imprisoned insurrectionists proudly return to the scene of their crimes, waving American flags and brandishing their Trump pardons in the crowd with other pro-MAGA demonstrators.
Meanwhile, the official White House website published a new January 6th page that entirely rewrites history.
It begins boldly with putting the real villains front and center.
A full-page black and white graphic shows grim-faced Nancy Pelosi presiding over the original nine members of the January 6th House Committee, which includes Benny Thompson, Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin, Liz Cheney, and Adam Kinzinger.
I think at this point, like we need a whole new threat-level category for Darvo because, I mean, it's just everything's flipped.
Everything's yep.
I also, as I'm watching this unfold with the January 6th Insurrection and Renee Good, it really dawned upon me.
We've discussed for so long how we live in separate media ecosystems, and you know, we're old enough to watch that rift happen.
But I think at this point, there's just no daylight between the two because you can live a life completely believing that Renee Goode is a left-wing antifa terrorist who tried to kill a cop.
And they're not even going to look.
And we're talking in the millions or tens of millions of people at this point.
I mean, the data, you know, the polls don't show good things for ICE, which is somewhat heartening.
But the fact that they can say this about the riots on January 6th and people actually truly believe it really is just, it's kind of hard to wrap my head around sometimes.
Yeah, unbelievable.
So as you scroll down that image of the committee, that black and white image, it shakes intermittently, like you're on a promotional website for a twisted horror movie from like 10 years ago.
While the webpage includes not a single photograph of the actual events of that day, it does go on to memorialize the, quote, nine beautiful souls who lost their lives that day or by their own hand.
Well, that sounds somewhat familiar.
Are we going to talk about the brave and patriotic Capitol police officers who literally defended the democracy of peaceful transfer of power that day?
No.
The beautiful souls in question here were either illegally attacked by those police or driven to suicide by the merciless prosecution that they faced, all for the simple act of, quote, walking through the Capitol to protest a stolen election.
So we're in full authoritarian style state propaganda gaslighting here, complete with referencing the big lie of election fraud as a received truth.
The main focus of the page is on how Trump's re-election allowed him to correct an historic injustice by pardoning or commuting over 1600 patriotic Americans unfairly targeted by the weaponization of the Biden justice system.
You know, I often get prickly about the term gaslighting being used too loosely because it doesn't mean it doesn't mean disagreement.
Yeah.
But I think this truly does make the grade.
And I think everybody's references to Orwell are spot on, especially given how Noam is now looking Jake Tapper dead in the eye and reciting the exact same script that she started with within 15 minutes after the murder.
To your point, Derek, it's hard to wrap your head around.
I think it's because they've already shot you in the head in a way.
It's like they're saying, it does not, it really does not matter what you are seeing or what you're telling me about what you're seeing.
That's not the reality that we are going to abide by.
Did you mean dead in the eye or dead eye?
Both.
Because watching that clip, yeah, it is startling.
It's just gray.
There's nothing happening behind there.
And I, again, as a human being who feels things and has some emotions, I can't imagine standing there and doing what she does.
I don't know what you have to justify in your life to end up doing that.
Yeah.
It also speaks to the fact that Trump dying or leaving at some point is right is like a very small part of the issue here, because all of those people who are able to do that are actually a power block that will that have shown themselves to be absolutely incapable of living in civil society, and and they're at the top of the government.
So I don't know how we get out of any of this without Some sort of promise that they would never have any kind of like access to power again.
Yeah, there's no self-reflection.
It's like he's any question he asks, he's talking to a brick wall and she's just going to stay the course with what her prescripted reply is going to be.
Who hires her after the after her government position is over?
What lobbying firm, what anything comes in and says, yes, we want you.
That also boggles my mind.
Well, if she, if she avoids prison, right?
Right.
Like, if that's even on the table.
So back to this extraordinary webpage, in addition to the really bad horror movie promo aesthetics, the page also reminds me of early internet conspiracy websites, like the one, do you remember this one, guys, that featured the elaborate video breakdowns of how there was just no way a passenger jet could have hit the Pentagon on 9-11?
It's like very similar aesthetics.
The background is black, and the text is white for the first half, along with that ominous black and white composite image of the dour-faced House committee members.
The second half of the page has a white background.
It switches and black text.
And that features a gallery of candid, social media-style, heartwarming images of the supposed real victims in this narrative.
And of course, front and center is Ashley Babbitt.
You know, Ashley Babbitt, who was shot after being warned as she attempted to climb through the recently broken glass of a locked door to give her and the mob she came with, some in tactical gear and carrying zip ties, access to the hallway leading directly to where terrified lawmakers were hiding as all hell was breaking loose around them, with a gallows recently constructed on the lawn.
But all the blame, you see, for this was pinned on President Trump, even though Nancy Pelosi clearly accepted full responsibility for failing to have the National Guard in place.
And so they have video of her candidly saying that.
And ironically here, her willingness to take accountability is framed as more significant than Trump's long game, which began, remember, before the 2016 election, of ceding this baseless claim that he could only lose if the elections were rigged, and then calling on his true believers to show up that day and fight like hell for their country.
But no, no, it was Pelosi's security failures that led to Capitol police alternating between removing barricades to welcome protesters onto the Capitol grounds and then aggressively attacking them.
That's what really caused the chaos, with a kindly and reasonable President Trump urging calm and telling the peaceful protesters to go home.
And there's no mention of the three hours of him watching the carnage on TV before issuing that statement.
And the site goes on to falsely claim that Ashley Babbitt was murdered in cold blood and then lists three other rioters who it says were killed that day.
But let's look at that.
The truth is that one of them, Roseanne Boyland, was under the effects of acute amphetamine intoxication and then was crushed by the crowd.
Kevin Greeson had a heart attack and Benjamin Phillips suffered a stroke.
It then says straight up that zero law enforcement officers lost their lives, which is another lie.
And just to make sure we're clear on this, officer Brian Sicknick died of a stroke after battling rioters all day and being sprayed with what the autopsy called a chemical irritant.
And then four others killed themselves in the PTSD aftermath of being, in some cases, attacked by their own fellow citizens in brutal fashion.
And that's before even mentioning the 140 officers injured in what has been called the most violent day in American law enforcement history.
And then there's Mike Pence's failure to refuse to certify the election being called an act of cowardice and sabotage now on this official webpage.
The rewriting goes on and on.
It includes Trump being silenced by social media platforms and so forth.
So what we have here is an official document of where we are at as a country now with a brazenly whitewashed government-issued account of Trump and his supporters' crimes in attempting to derail democracy, published, not coincidentally, with Jack Smith's renewed efforts at criminally charging the president.
This comes in a year opening week, characterized by a new wave of accelerationism.
The abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Trump threatening military action against Iran in the midst of their huge protests, Stephen Miller's smirking saber rattling at Greenland on TV news, and the absolutely atrocious, tragic, point-blank murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, which, as we've been discussing, is being spun by Christine Ome as self-defense against the weaponization of her vehicle in an act of supposed domestic terrorism.
I wake up every morning with thick mucus I can't fucking clear.
Is something actually wrong with me?
No, dear, there's a reason the Amish community rarely deals with constant mucus, throat clearing, or congestion that never goes away.
Here's the truth.
Most doctors never explain.
Chronic mucus like that is inflammation, not just in the lungs, but in the gut.
In traditional living, we avoid plastics, processed foods, and chemical exposure as much as possible.
So you don't dry up mucus.
You calm the system that's creating it.
Right.
That's why one of the plants we rely on is Moringa.
Guys, you're never going to guess what this 102-year-old Amish influencer sells.
Wait, wait, hold on.
Let me click on this other video.
How old are you?
Baby, I'm old.
I'm 93.
I am 98 years old, and I have lived my whole life without relying on doctors.
Wait, how old are you?
103 years old.
Oh, what the heck?
How is that even possible?
Well, since you asked, anything is possible with AI.
That's right, everyone.
The assault of AI health slot fluencers has arrived.
You just heard from My Health Secrets, whose 67.1,000 followers get treated to a new age nearly every day.
The good news, though, if you never see a doctor, you never know you have dementia.
And then the mismatch between the yelling and the swearing and then the mild-mannered, supposedly Amish health advice is such a bizarre, yet it seems clearly calculated choice, like they're doing some A-B testing there and they found that this thing creates engagement, right?
Yeah, I think it's like perfect go to the heartland with your, you know, Gen Alpha attitude and, you know, yell, right?
And I think there does have to be a new word for the level of irony, you know, where we're generating AI bots to represent America's original anti-tech religionists, right?
Yeah, I don't know, Julian, how calculated it is.
And as I'm going to get into that interviewer cuts across different slot fluencers and different brands.
So it seems, well, we'll think about their marketing techniques.
But to your point, Matthew, AI is not just for the Amish.
There's Health Tips, who is a middle-aged black doctor of some sort.
They never really make clear what kind of doctor he is.
He has 730,000 followers.
He looks our age, so early to mid-50s, but he's also variously 93 or 103.
He rocks graying dreadlocks, but his avatar is a photo of a young woman, the back of her body.
And yes, he also shills Moringa, as does Mama's Wellness, which is a sort of clearinghouse page of all the Moringa influencers.
What's Moringa?
Well, it's a drought-resistant tree native to northern India.
Developing countries use it to improve nutrition as the pods, leaves, fruit, roots, and flowers, and oils pressed from seeds are all edible.
So it's a very nutritious plant in that sense.
It's also used in sustainable land care and even water filtration.
Moringa is used in traditional medicine, but the claims on these slot fluencer pages are way overblown as we often see in modern wellness.
Then we have Texas Wellness Hub, which only reaches 56.2,000 people.
This slot fluencer's menopause tips end in a pitch for saffron, which just happens to be sold by the same company that's pumping out Moringa slop.
These products are manufactured by a company called Rosabella.
Their Moringa supplement has 10,690 reviews and 4.4 stars on Amazon.
But I'm personally wondering how that system is being gamed given that 188 Better Business Bureau complaints have been filed against the parent company, Ambrosia Brands LLC.
The main complaint is recurring subscription charges that people didn't sign up for, as well as extra charges for products they never ordered or received.
Now, what's really interesting to me about this crop of AI slot fluencers is the fact that each page only points to one product.
And as I got deeper into this algorithm, I realized that Rosabella isn't the only company that's using this tactic.
Now, interestingly, regardless of what brand the slot fluencer is shilling, they all follow one another.
And to be clear, I'm going to guess that a lot of their followers are bought.
They also sometimes feature the same person as I mentioned interviewing the slot fluencer.
So it appears that one person or company is pumping out all of this slop to whoever pays them.
I couldn't find who that is, though.
I tried looking through all sorts of various ways of finding out who's creating these pages and I didn't have any luck with that.
Now, to be honest, though, not all the followers are bought.
Sadly, I see some of my friends and connections following these pages.
One page that a few of them follow is Abuela Naria or Abuelo, because her name is spelled differently in different posts.
She's an elderly Amazonian type woman who shares ancient wisdom from her ayahuasca retreat style village about the healing power of, well, I'm going to let her explain.
So again, picture you're on an ayahuasca retreat.
This woman is all these herbs and she's sitting in front of a cauldron that's boiling.
In the intro of the video, I'm about to clip from, she says that there are four foods that she turns to, but then she only shares three.
And it's the third that's the sales pitch.
So I edited this entire video for time's sake.
It's a couple minutes long, but I think you'll get what I'm going for here.
I am 98 years old and I live without doctors because of these four foods.
I am Abuela Naira from a remote village in the Amazon.
Here is what most people miss.
If the gut is weak, these ways lose their power.
That is why this third one is most important, kombucha.
My village, we brew it with living cultures that help maintain the gut balance.
And the gut is connected to how the whole body feels day to day.
But the recipe is sacred.
It remains in the village.
So for you, my viewers, I found something that holds the same fermented character.
It carries what our sacred tea holds, what the stomach relies on to remain balanced.
A small family make these bucha gummies.
They're called butch pod kombucha gummies.
Yeah, because here is the truth: the gut supports everything else.
When it is troubled, the whole body feels it.
Oh, I just love how she somehow drifts in and out of her authentic remote village accent.
And she's also learned how to translate ancient folk wisdom into pseudoscience buzzwords.
It's really impressive.
What happens with the accent there?
Like the AI can't generate consistency there or something like that?
Like it just forgets, or maybe there's several different takes in there.
That was really bad.
It is weird.
And again, just the visual of it.
So you see her over this cauldron and all these herbs around.
And then she actually gives out the package of the kombucha gummies.
So they figure out how to put product placement in these AI videos.
And it's just the whole visual is wild.
Is there no manufacturing process for the packaging?
Like there's they're not taking palm leaves and like pounding them out into the paper and printing it and stuff like that.
No, no, they are using modern packaging.
Actually, the products themselves look pretty cheap.
I'm actually going to get into that in a moment because the companies behind these are pretty interesting.
But poor Abuela, she only has 54,000 followers to spread the wisdom of Booch to.
There's a much larger account.
And sadly, a number of people I know follow her.
And her name, name is Jada Brown.
She's an older black woman pitched as a holistic expert.
And her pitch is quite something.
She's the second voice you're going to hear in this clip.
Day one of taking soursop.
Let's get it.
And this is day 50.
And I'm seriously about to let my husband cheat on me with this holistic healer because she's the one that erased those horrible bags.
Watch this.
A woman who doesn't know this deserves to be cheated on.
Did you know eating soursop helps your immune system get stronger?
This is this is wild.
So let me get this straight.
You deserve to be cheated on if you don't use the product.
But once you do, you'll be so happy you'll allow your husband to cheat on you with the holistic healer.
I guess anything to sort of shake up your scrolling, right?
So the image is two middle-aged black people, a woman and a man, and they're a couple, and they're looking in a mirror, filming themselves.
And in the first one, she says day one and then day 50, they're thinner.
And they're attributing this all to soursop and they're attributing it to this expert for turning her on to them.
Soursop is a Latin American fruit.
It's popular in the Caribbean.
It's sadly been marketed in the alt-med world for decades to treat cancer.
Now, in reality, alkaloids from the fruit have been shown to be neurotoxic and are linked to cases of Parkinson's disease.
And this occurs when extracting and mega-dosing the alkaloids, not from eating the fruit, just to be clear.
Jada's page links to soursop bitters, which is combined with black seed, ginger, and aloe to supposedly give you all sorts of health superpowers, including immune function, liver health.
And of course, this product has never been tested.
I couldn't find any evidence that it's gone through any sort of clinical trials.
I wonder whether AI actually makes testing easier in the sense that you could generate a lot of bots and then have them pretend to take the soursop bitters and then see what the reactions are and then collect the data from how the avatars do.
What do you think?
Would that be scientific guys?
I'm not the science guy here.
Yeah, I mean, I don't hear any problem with that.
I mean, you could get a really big data set, couldn't you?
I mean, you could just like in the trillions.
I mean, this is like Funhouse Mirror stuff.
Every time I'm trying to track down, because there's Jada and you can tell she's AI, but the couple doesn't really look AI.
Like they're shot, it's a different sort of footage that's used, which is completely possible with Sora or any of these apps.
But you start to really question everything when you're doing this.
This is, I mean, it's actually not much different than talking about Renee Good.
Like there's so many aspects and elements of this that are gaslighting you all the time.
It's truly impossible to know, like, oh, this is a real video and this isn't.
And that's, that's going to confuse a lot of people, even me, as I'm trying to do all the research on this.
Derek, just as a point of interest, are you saying with Sora, they might be the AI itself might be grabbing a stock footage clip and plugging it in instead of generating imagery?
No, I meant that you can ask for all sorts of different styles of footage, like if you want it shot in film or 4K or 8K.
Like all of that's possible with it.
I mean, that's been possible with photographer for years.
Now it's possible with video.
So yeah, so that would mean I want this took like a crappy iPhone photo.
Now Jada is going to be super clear and that's what it feels like.
I see.
Okay.
Right.
Yeah.
I looked into all the companies behind these videos that I could find.
And there are a few common threads.
One is they're all recent startups started by younger men.
Well, it's helping them with their loneliness, right?
Oh, boy.
All the men are interested in health, but their social media channels have nothing to do with health.
They're all presenting themselves as business coach entrepreneurs.
And in that light, that's what's really interesting to me.
They all talk about their products in terms of scaling and revenue.
They don't actually talk about health.
So it's really different than a lot of the wellness content that we cover.
So for example, Soursop Bitters, it's owned by Serene Herbs.
And that company is the brainchild of Quaduo24.
Might be saying his name wrong.
He's an influencer.
He has 423,000 followers on Instagram, but very low engagement.
So I'm guessing he buys a lot of them as well, like the AI slop fluencers.
Here's an interview I found with him talking about Serene Herbs with this magazine called Authority.
It's a magazine published through Medium.
And here's how he frames his company.
Rapid growth only works if the foundation is solid.
I've made it a priority to hire people who can own outcomes, not just follow instructions.
We set clear KPIs, give autonomy, and create systems that support performance without burnout.
Internally, I focus on protecting the team's energy the same way I protect mine through clarity, boundaries, and shared wins.
We celebrate progress consistency, not just pressure.
And I don't expect 100-hour weeks at all.
I don't expect anyone to work as hard as me since it's my company, but I expect smart execution, honest communication, and a hunger to grow together.
So this is just business coaching, right?
Is that the side gig or is what's secondary to what Derek?
Are these guys doing business coaching first and then they've gotten into slop fluencing or is it the other way around?
They don't even seem to be.
First of all, none of them talk about AI, really.
They only talk about it tertiary, like in their comments.
They don't say, I'm using AI.
I don't know who's making these videos.
All I know is that these pages are created and then linked to their products.
So somewhere along the line, unless somebody is really into their products and doing an affiliate code, which I highly doubt, they are at least engaging with AI.
I wouldn't even say that they're going, one of them, the guy behind Rosabella, seems to be more of like going for the business coach.
These are guys who are just entrepreneurs.
And they're just talking about their business.
That's it.
They're not pitching themselves.
Their money is being made through the products that they're selling.
And then they're positioning themselves as these business-savvy entrepreneurs.
That's the general vibe I get.
Right.
Now, last June, I wrote an article for Mother Jones, and it was called The Promise of Health Chat Bots Has Already Failed.
And in it, I argued that LLMs were already pulling from pseudoscience sites and hallucinating regularly, a trait that would likely be weaponized by wellness influencers.
Now, a year later, the Maha Report that RFK Jr. published featured what appeared to be a number of hallucinated studies.
I expect that trend is going to get worse as time goes on.
At the time, when I wrote that article, though, you could only do like three second video clips on AI.
If you knew what you were doing and you were paying and you were actually doing a lot of the editing, you could do longer.
But from a consumer level, it wasn't possible to do long videos at the time.
Now, having watched the evolution of AI and being working with tech companies for almost a decade now, I've watched a lot of different technologies evolve.
And even thinking of my own journalism career going back to the 90s, I've watched the internet take over journalism.
And one thing that I've really been thinking about as I'm reviewing all this material is I see a lot of criticism about AI videos and people say they're never going to be that good.
And I just want to remind people that within the span of two years, we've gone through three second clips to like people are about to start making entire movies with AI.
And the stuff that I'm sharing, I call it slot fluencer.
It is that there are much better people creating with AI videos right now.
And that's sort of the bigger fear that I have is we get into this perpetual cycle where we think that where a technology is at now is where it's going to stay.
And that's never how technology works.
And it reminds me of Neil Postman, who I read in the 90s.
His book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, was just a fantastic book about media literacy and media studies.
And as forward-looking and comprehensive as his arguments were, he said, and this was written in 83, 84, he said that the computer will never be more prevalent in people's lives than television.
It'll always be an accompaniment to television.
Because at the time, laptops weren't even really a thing yet.
The prototypes were out.
That was it when he wrote that.
And I think it's this lack of foresight that I think about a lot because there will be AI movies soon that will be on the big screen.
And it will get so good that people are not going to know whether or not it's AI or whether or not it's real.
So when I see these health slot fluencers doing what they're doing now, I think two, three years from now, because if you have the Mark Hyman or Dave Asprey avatar out there and you don't know if it's him or not at this point, that's just going to be pumping out even more content than they already do, which is already tremendous.
Now, given how quick and inexpensive it is to spin up these slot videos at this point, I didn't foresee when I was writing that article that so many influencers were going to get in on this grift.
And more than most of the actual humans we call out for spreading health misinformation and selling untested products, who at the very least might actually believe what they're saying.
This wave of slafluencers is purely about the bottom line.
You don't think Abuela believes in her product?
You don't think she's thinking about it?
You don't think she's really tested it within herself?
You don't think she's being authentic?
She wakes up every day.
She wakes up every day with a mission.
She really wants to help humanity.
She really does.
Well, I think that's a question you're going to answer in a few moments with Yang Moon, actually.
But to me, all of this says quite a lot that a bunch of young entrepreneurs were thinking about how to make a lot of money very quickly, which is a common trait I saw throughout all their social media handles.
And they said, oh, supplements.
And even more tragically, they were right to think that.
Yeah, they're right to think that.
You know, Derek, we had a little moment early on in the segment where I was saying, you know, these things seem to be A-B tested or they're quote unquote designed to generate engagement.
And listening to everything else you've just said, I just have this picture of the sheer number of things that are being inputted into creating these AI videos, right?
Where it's like things are being smashed together.
And to your point, at this stage, we can look at it and laugh and be like, oh, well, this is clearly so ridiculous.
Like this woman's yelling and swearing at the Amish lady who's then in her mild-mannered way going to tell you about her health secrets.
But I think the reason we're seeing this stuff and we're seeing the formula repeated is that it does generate engagement.
And over time, that's just going to get more and more effective and more and more seamless and less ready, less readily obvious something that we can, as something we can mock, right?
I think, Derek, you're right that in the next segment, I think we're going to get into these questions of like what's behind the actual imagery and what is behind the text and whether or not it can actually reach people.
Because as you're speaking about the rapidity of the development, I have no doubt that the AI movie is going to be in theaters and it's going to be convincing.
What I have trouble, and I wish I sort of understood this better with regard to how this material is being put together and how the actual AIs are doing what they're doing and how the designers are thinking about them.
But it's really the problem of uncanniness that I can't imagine being overcome in some way.
This notion that you can, if you sit with a thing for long enough, you can feel that it's not there, that it's that it's automated, it's reading something to you, it's not going to dynamically respond to you.
I have a lot of questions about that.
Like these are my doubts.
Like I think that we can be fooled in short segments about things, but when it comes to things like narrative and conversational rhythm and emotional tells, that just seems, that seems really difficult.
I can't conceive of programming that.
I mean, I can't conceive of any of it.
So I'm speaking out of ignorance here, but like it does seem like that uncanny quality is the primary issue for me coming up.
That is something that is talked about in AI about being able to mimic actual authentic feelings between people.
And all I'll say is that, yeah, we don't know if we'll get there, but I wouldn't doubt that we can at this point.
Train your mind gently, not to deny what is hard, but to see what is still good.
In every situation, there is a seed of good waiting to be noticed.
In every person, there is something that can teach you.
Some people will test your patience.
Some moments will feel heavy.
That is part of the lesson.
When this happens, slow down.
Do not rush to judge.
Look again.
Ask quietly, what is the good hidden here?
At first, it will feel uncomfortable.
Your mind is not used to this way of seeing.
It may resist.
That is normal.
Stay with it.
Each time you choose to look for the good, you are training your inner eye.
And slowly, your world begins to change.
Not because life becomes perfect, but because your awareness becomes abundant.
This practice costs nothing.
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Begin now.
If these words spoke to you, write, I see the good in the comics.
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The practice continues.
So this is the soothing but uncanny voice.
And I'll talk about why I think where I can hear the uncanniness of Yang Moon.
He is, quote, a global teacher known for his unique approach to natural healing, emotional balance, and mind-body restoration.
His teachings combine ancient Eastern wisdom with simple modern practices, helping millions of people reduce stress, find clarity, and reconnect with inner peace.
Or this is what it says on the about page you land on out of the Instagram link tree.
I have to say, with that CV, I mean, I'm in.
It's just perfect.
It's so generic, and it takes the new age aesthetic to the next level of combining appeals to ancient wisdom traditions then with commercialized claims about simple modern practices for stress and clarity.
The flavor comes through as well in the Chinese monk speaking with that upper-class English accent.
And it sounds to me right away like someone colonized and educated to serve the occupying British elites.
You know, about the voice, I'll say a little bit more about it.
But, you know, we use this software.
The listeners should know we've got this program that will create audio clips or capture audio clips.
And of course, you have to edit them a little bit.
And when you open up the editor, you'll see the WAV file.
And when I open up the WAV file for Yang Moon, it looks like I'm looking at something produced by a metronome.
Like the peaks and valleys are perfectly aligned.
And the rise and fall of the sort of rhythm of the script is incredibly regular.
Like when we look at our own WAV files, there's a lot of variation.
Yeah, our voices will start to get a little more metronomic and right.
Well, I wonder if that's the voice or the piano, because the piano is playing like a metronome there.
So I wonder what that's picking up.
That's a good point.
I did play it while I was watching the wave, and it did seem that the spikes and valleys were coordinated with his syllables.
Yeah, and that music, that music is great too.
Yeah, very Chinese, by the way.
We'll link to the reel, but I just want to describe the visual.
So Yang Moon is, what is he, 70-ish?
103.
Right, okay.
Ostensibly Chinese.
He's a monk in a traditional Han Fu robe.
He's serene.
He's composed.
There's a fine fuzz of white hair on his otherwise bald pate.
He sits in half lotus posture behind a wooden scripture table with an open book on it.
Now, the book looks like there's a couple of variations of it, but it looks like a large antique prayer manual with wood block printing.
And then there's a candle flickering on the floor beside him in this particular video.
In others, it's on the table.
Because he's sitting, his stature isn't exactly clear, but he gives the impression of being a smaller guy.
He's elder, but he's obviously sprightly and energetic.
You know, it looks like he gets good sleep at night and he wakes up fresh in the morning.
And he's sitting in what appears to be the great hall of a Ming Dynasty Chinese Buddhist temple with a vaulted ceiling, a clair story, a lot of Tibetan decorative influence because that's when that happened in China back in, what, 14th century or so.
His back is to the ornate triptych altar of enormous Buddha icons, and they have offering tables in front of them, and there's a huge iron singing bowl.
But these are visual themes, because, you know, if you couldn't tell from the voice that it's AI, the giveaway for the page is that if you scroll through the 136 videos, there is a continuity of aesthetics, and you'll also pick up very distinct changes in the temple.
So sometimes you'll get a string of two or three videos where Sora or the suite of tools or whatever they're using replicates the backdrop fairly precisely, but then you'll wonder whether Young Moon has hopped into another temple with very similar architecture, but the icons are not covered in gold leaf, but they're carved in stone.
You might think at first that he's just moving around in the same hall, but then you'll see the surfaces and the fabrics and the sconces are all slightly different.
It kind of reminds me of when my kids play any really graphics-rich AAA game where you start out by choosing like your skins and your costume variations for your loadout, and then you just spawn yourself in like doink, there you are in the lobby.
And it also reminds me of the kind of aesthetics of procedural generation in games, where the code generates a continuous landscape on the horizon of your movement.
So if you're going forward, it's just, it's not actually there.
It's built because you're moving towards it.
Because the overall effect here is that Yang Moon is either in every possible Ming-style temple in parallel universes, or he's not in any temple at all.
He's more like Dr. Strange, like in an infinite complex of temple possibilities.
And maybe between the reels, he goes into deep meditation and rearranges all the surfaces.
Yeah, I mean, it's very much giving like when Neo first goes into the Matrix to learn Kung Fu, right?
Exactly, right.
So this is the recycling, recombinant, faux imagination of generative AI.
And it's been trained on whatever Ming-style temple interiors it can find.
And I mean, that hints at something I want to get to in a bit, which is that for as new as this shit is, it's also a logical endpoint, I think, for this modern process of reconstructing wisdom traditions through colonialism.
It's a process that we've tracked in modern yoga, in mindfulness Buddhism, and everything that came out of the ass of Madame Blavatsky.
There's always some reconstructor out there who is picking up or stealing artifacts of the past, you know, usually facilitated by empire and then pastiching it all together to create something both new and innovative, but also old and authentic, because that's very important.
Well, let me, I want to, I want to ask a question, though, because how would you say this is different than I'm reading a book about the history of Eastern Europe right now, and the author makes the case of how Eastern Europe represents the real place where Christian and Muslims were fighting for centuries, but also one of the first places where they had to build societies together.
And one of the one of the outputs of that is Balkan music.
And Balkan music has a really tremendous history of coming up from India through up to Northern Europe and then back down and all the sort of influences it has.
So how, you know, when you say, I agree with the reconstructing wisdom traditions, we see a lot of shit thrown together, but I also don't want to lose sight of when cultures come together, they naturally recombine things to make new cultures that represent where they are at the time.
So I wouldn't think it's only by colonial history that this happens.
This actually happens in every time societies come together and try to figure out how to create a larger net, as it were.
Yeah, I don't think colonialism is the issue with regard to how cultures come together, but rather who has power and where that imagery winds up and whether it winds up in the British Museum or whether it's the practice of an organic culture that can trace its roots back down through all of its travels and its history.
Because I think the difference between the reconstructors that we have profiled throughout our years and, you know, the legacy of Balkan music is that the reconstructors are sort of picking and choosing things out of the past and then trying to deem them as being authentic.
But I think you're talking about from your world music love, you know, stuff that actually has a legacy, people that learned things from each other and then kept that heritage alive and going, right?
Yeah, like the legitimate cultural exchange.
Right.
Yeah.
And as opposed to sort of the cherry pick and pastiche, where then you then you make it important by saying, oh, this is ancient.
Or I've found I've uncovered the hidden ancient truth of these things that have been lost forever, right?
Like that is, that's the history of modern yoga.
And that's where your pinging of Blavatsky is 100% on point, because Blavatsky is essentially making up a bunch of stuff and claiming a whole set of paranormal experiences and then tying them back to, oh, this is from this ancient exotic tradition that none of you people who I'm selling this to actually know anything about.
Yeah.
And I think in that sense, she's operating as some kind of LLM, right?
Like she's, she's vacuuming up resources and she's putting them together through some kind of, you know, I don't know, like what's going to be most statistically attractive to her readership.
And, you know, that's what she produces.
I agree with all that.
I just wanted to be clear on the sort of the ways that things come together because sometimes it's not super clear.
And even within the cultural exchanges, like if you're a super hardcore Flamenco fan, you'd know that flamenco didn't have the guitar until the middle of the 19th century.
Is that true?
Is that the middle of the 19th century?
Yeah, it was all body slaps and grunting and then the singing and dancing and the foot stomping.
And most people accept flamenco guitar at this point, but the castanets are a little bit more because that was when you started doing show flamenco, where you would do it for the cafes, for the tourists.
Anyway, that's just an aside.
I want to speak a little bit more about the vocal patterning.
Like Julian, you were hearing this upper class English, you know, maybe from Hong Kong.
Each of these videos are about a minute and a half on average.
And the narration is clear, but it's monotonous.
And I think this is one of those things that as the visual imagery gets smoother with AI, the hurdles that will be exposed will be around things like being able to tell a story in a convincing way.
Like the main way I would describe my kind of, I don't know, itches or prickles around this is that this avatar can, and all of the other ones that we heard today as well, these avatars can info dump at you, right?
But they can't tell a story with an arc and a rhythm.
And, you know, I'm paying attention to this a lot right now because I'm trying to start to make real content in this three minute format that, you know, Instagram is now sort of compressing us into.
And to make that work as a story, I think the narration has to embody, you know, the time passage, the three minutes in some sort of recognizable human exchange way.
Like you're going to speed up, you're going to slow down, you're going to emphasize things.
There's going to be a thousand little choices.
Some of them are planned, but more importantly, a lot of them are improvised.
But even those improvised choices are going to be sort of informed by the stress and tension of doing the actual thing, which the bot is not doing.
You know, the avatar is not stressed in presenting this material.
Like it's not worried about like, are people going to buy this?
Or am I really full of shit?
Or all of those things that actually sort of contribute to what we understand as being the anxiety that might be fueling a kind of charisma, right?
Like it feels nothing.
And maybe that's part of the spiritual value on offer, which is that it, in this case, anyway, it's like empty your mind, be very, very calm.
Well, that's easy if somebody who is completely empty is telling you to do that.
Maybe, I don't know.
But, you know, Yang Moon is in competition with the extinction rate of attention.
And my bet is that without narrative tension or the eccentricity of storytelling, the scroll-stopping potential of a bot like this will be limited, at least for now, to about 60 or 90 seconds because of that monotony.
How do you know that AI influencers don't have imposter syndrome, though?
Oh my gosh.
It brings up so many incredible questions too, doesn't it?
I mean, there's part of me that really loves that this has happened because I think it brings up all kinds of, it points to all kinds of issues that we're all scared of, actually, with regard to, am I really feeling this?
Do I really believe this?
Am I really here and present with other people?
Holy mackerel.
It's deep.
Yeah.
And then there's another piece here too, right?
Which is that this kind of more spiritual guru influencer, they're also relying on architecture that's been put in place that does have to do with kind of being a sociopathic actor who's saying a lot of things that they don't really believe because of the reaction that it elicits that they've learned how to, you know, how to tune in on and tap into in the follower.
Right.
So turning to content for a moment, there's really nothing new or interesting going on here.
And I don't think, I don't think we should really spend much time focusing on, except like, you know, tracing the line between what the sort of general messaging is and what the link tree is pointing you to in terms of the product on sale.
But, you know, it seems to be pretty empty.
There is an archive in Young Moon's page where you can see a shift from a focus on the best anti-inflammatory vegetables, like watercress will apparently cure everything.
But soon he gets to a really broad McBuddhism sort of pop psychology about relaxation and self-perception.
The scripts honestly sound like the results from sticking about 50 self-help meditation books into Notebook LM and just prompting, you know, 300 words on the optimization value of patients.
Or, you know, in political terms, it's pretty simple.
This one is simple as well.
I think if we spent a lot more time talking about the politics of other forms of slop fluencers, we would get to the AI Bible stories.
And that draws on Old Testament stories of patriarchal domination.
And so I wouldn't say that Young Moon is harmless because it can definitely depoliticize and numb people out.
But I think Young Moon is not out there telling you to raise your testosterone so that you can keep your trad wife happy or anything like that.
That was a pretty good prompt, Matthew.
I think you have a future here.
I know, man.
Have you seen that people are starting to sue each other over prompts as intellectual property?
I have not.
That's not surprising.
That's coming.
This bitch stole my prompt is what they're saying on the internet.
Amazing.
Okay.
So who's behind Young Moon?
The Instagram link tree bounces to a sales page for a couple of e-books.
They're filled with sayings, but one is a 30-day challenge.
I could be missing something in my reporting by not buying those, but I wanted to spend more time tracking down the creators.
The only trace that I found was a copyright tag at the bottom of the contact page, which says that the site is operated by Mayor Hani and Shalev Hani.
Shalev's name comes up in press releases advertising Young.
And one got posted on the website of Canada's national newspaper, which is a Globe and Mail.
But, you know, I followed the trail and it kind of went dead at LinkedIn.
Mayor and Shalev both have listings there talking about AI marketing businesses based in Israel, but no links to external sites.
I mean, which is weird because it's LinkedIn.
There are images of the two guys, and it's easy to imagine that they're brothers.
They kind of both have a slick Middle Eastern, big money, Iman Godzi style look.
You can kind of smell cologne from the photographs.
But what's hilarious is that Mayor in Hebrew means luminous and Shalev means serene.
And so I'm wondering if Young Moon is at the front of an infinite regression of AI avatars originating with some military tech company in Tel Aviv, like let your mind float like a softly purring drone hovering over the seashore.
When we were discussing this in editorial, we chatted about the social function that the AI guru might be playing, if it goes any deeper than selling shitty self-help books.
And as I thought about that, I think it might be a next piece of a developmental arc that we've been tracing and hopefully a sign that the era of the BS spiritual leader is ending not with a bang, but a whimper.
Because when we started analyzing wellness and pastel QAnon influencers in 2020, we used and adapted the profiles and the analyses that we had from a previous century of toxic yoga and Buddhist gurus.
So men who were assumed to have magical qualities, but then afflicted with what Dan Shaw calls traumatized narcissism to the extent that they recruit servile followers and then abuse them.
Like I wrote a book about one of those guys as part of the Me Too wave that brought many of them down or out into the light.
And then the pandemic shuttered enough of the ashrams in 2020 that the whole brick and mortar cult model took a huge hit and forced aspiring gurus online, where they joined a whole industry of virtual charismatic grifting.
And we also noted that there were threshold figures like Teal Swan, who built her global fame online, but also maintained an in-real life community in Costa Rica.
But most of the post-COVID online gurus are just competing with everyone else.
And Yang Moon now joins the horse race and he's got explosive follower growth.
The account fired up only in October and it's now pulling 2.5 million followers and only 136 posts.
Yeah.
And I think one of the reasons that that might be happening is compared to all the other clips we've heard, there is something there that is very effective that kind of lulls you into a sense of it's almost like you're listening to an Alan Watts discourse.
Like a lot of people have taken Alan Watts and they've cut little pieces of his talks and put music behind them or created videos on YouTube.
And it does have that feeling as opposed to like, you know, the woman just yelling and swearing at the Amish lady.
So there's something here that's, there's a little bit more.
It would be dead easy to do an Alan Watts AI, wouldn't it?
Yeah.
I mean, he talked for years and years and years.
There's all kinds of film.
Yeah.
Oh, I have no doubt they uploaded a nice little archive of Alan Watts to train Young Moon.
Right.
Well, I don't personally see this bot or the others that I've seen.
So there's an Orthodox rabbi that I've seen who dispenses, you know, prosperity Torah wisdom.
There's the Amazonian shaman that Derek profiled.
The guru types don't really have any clear two-way parasocial power at this point.
So they're not grifters who are responding to audience capture with any of the tools of charisma.
You know, they couldn't do cold readings.
You know, like I actually wonder if charisma is like narrative capacity in terms of programming difficulty.
I mean, and one thing that's really clear to me is that the vocal monotony cannot create the aura of disorganized attachment that a lot of, you know, sort of guru types rely on because it can't surprise you.
Like you can't foil your followers' expectations and sort of lead them on in that roll of the dice of, you know, are they going to be mean or are they going to be kind?
Are they going to love me?
Are they going to send me away?
You're not going to get that kind of complexity.
And I think one potential upside is that anything that makes the guru figure, or at least the image of him look silly or vacuous, that's got to be a good thing, right?
Like we've already had a lot of cult busting through documentary coverage on in real life groups.
And I can't help but think that that's going to have a long-term impact with regard to the attractiveness of the actual location ashram where it's presided over by somebody who's a real bully.
There's a lot of buzz these days about the recruitment powers of manosphere influencers.
And that's real.
I think it's crucial to understand.
At the same time, my unscientific survey of our 13-year-old's culture here and his milieu shows me that there's a lot of kids out there who are constantly giggling over social media influencers who present themselves as like unironically spiritual or healthy or masculine.
And there's even a category lampooned there in that last one, masculine, by the term giga chad.
Yeah, which comes from incel taxonomy, right?
Well, and now it's a joke.
Now it's a kind of ironic spoof.
Like things move really fast.
And Andrew Tate's moment is already over.
And for boys and young men, I can't really quite see what's next, but I see a lot of skepticism, a lot of sort of ironic almost inoculation towards the things that come.
And the other thing that I've noticed in the kid culture that I know is that they can really quickly identify a generative AI on YouTube and then point it out usually with contempt.
Like my kids were calling it slop and brain rot before I was.
Yeah, it's really interesting, Matthew.
You just made me think of this.
My seven-year-old, very often, depending on which device, you know, television, iPad, computer, something maybe playing on phone, very often she says to me, Dad, is this real life?
Yeah.
Is this happening right now?
She's very interested in the distinctions between some things being like sports that are being streamed live and then a TV show where people are acting.
Are this real?
Are they being themselves?
And then like stuff that's AI generated where she's like, that, yeah, that's a third category.
Well, and I think that it gives me a certain amount of hope because, you know, I think it's very terrifying for us to realize that our epistemology visually and otherwise is being overturned within, you know, years or something like that.
But for the kid who grows up in that, there are textures, there are signposts, there are, you know, sensual clues to what their world is telling them.
And I don't think they're missing them, right?
And so it relieves some anxiety about the disruptions of AI in their imaginative lives that I have.
I mean, setting aside who the fuck knows what they're going to do for work.
But it also points to something that disturbs me at a deep level.
And it takes me back to, you know, when I first read Baudrillard in Simulation and Simulacra in the 90s.
Yang Moon and every other AI avatar out there will forever, I think, be uncanny because they're not responding as subjective selves with intentions that they can hide or reveal.
And so my kids are growing up in a world of surfaces.
And I think they know this, but I don't think that makes their life easier.
So for them, I think Yang Moon might just be another NPC in this game of online life.
If the old school guru had a source of value, it would be his mystery, his mystique, some sort of secret power or an undefinable internal essence that they could hide from you or disclose in brief moments of seduction, which might be dangerous, but it would be there.
And, you know, I'm not an AI researcher, of course, and I don't know if an avatar could ever achieve that.
But, you know, it is never going to have interiority.
It's never going to have a secret, right?
It might not be able to disclose its logs or it might conceal its intentions from you, but that's different from what we would call a soul or intentionality, I think, anyway.
So the avatar is only whatever you see in the moment you see it.
And I don't see any story.
I don't see any promise.
I don't see anything more to desire or discover.
And that's what Baudrillard said about the postmodern age of superficial surfaces, that, you know, the surface has ceased to conceal depth because depth itself has disappeared.
And so we float through this superfluity of images that no longer refer to any underlying reality or use value or stable meaning.
Yeah, it's not just that it's an artificial copy.
It's a copy of something that never existed in the first place.
And there's also the sense that through the multiplicity of the copies, the original disappeared.
It just left, right?
And he uses the example of the Mona Lisa over and over again, right?
Like, where's the actual original?
How many people have access to it?
And how does it impact you when you actually go there and see it?
So there could be a Buddhist teaching about impermanence in all of this, and Yang Moon could get the last laugh, I guess.
But I also think it's likely that my kids and maybe others in their generation are going to feel the emptiness of the slopfluencer.
And that's going to be just replicated countless times through their lives.
And they're going to, hopefully, they're going to want something more and then they'll go and find it or make it.