Special Episode: Interview with Matthew Remski on Conspirituality
Today we talk to Matthew Remski, co-host of the Conspirituality podcast, writer, yoga practitioner, and independent journalist. Matthew is a font of information on the alternative spirituality and health and wellness spheres and he gives Matt and Chris a crash course on the dynamics of those spheres. We discuss a range of topics including the growing overlap between spirituality and right wing politics, the enlightened locker room dynamics of male influencers, the role of invented traditions and the spirituality sphere and why Matt should grovel at the feet of his muscle master.Matthew provides a wealth of insight into the gurus we've examined as well as an entire host of new characters. As ever, we greatly enjoyed the chat and hope you do too!--------------------------------More from Matthew Remski: Matthew's Personal WebsiteThe Conspirituality PodcastMatthew's work on MediumHis investigative book on Pattabhi Jois’s Ashtanga communityAnother great interview with Matthew by Stephen Kesting
So we've invited on Matthew Ramsky, who maybe some of you know from the Conspiratuality podcast.
He's done quite a lot of other things as well, but I came across Matthew relatively recently and I've started working my way through the back catalogue and Conspiratuality is looking at the overlap between The spirituality and health and wellness communities and the growth in conspiratorial thinking and cult dynamics.
And Matthew is also a journalist and researcher, investigative journalist.
Would it be fair to say, Matthew?
I'd say that's fair, yes.
Independent.
Independent and not degreed.
Well, sometimes that's better.
But when I was looking at your website to get information about your background, I saw that you'd published a lot on a broad range of topics.
So I feel like I'm doing a disservice by just picking out on one thing.
But I will also say that it's relevant that you are...
Yoga teacher or yoga practitioner?
I would say practitioner.
I haven't taught in a classroom except for training groups where I will give history and culture content for yoga teacher training programs.
But I haven't taught a lead yoga class in close to 10 years now.
So that's pretty firmly in my past.
I still practice at home.
But I do a lot of, you know, sort of independent study and research into recent yoga history and the sort of cultural scene.
So, so yeah.
Yeah, that's interesting because in listening to Conspirationality, the impression that I got was all of the hosts are within the communities that you are talking about and that, you know, criticizing or highlighting issues
with. But I wouldn't say that you are all typical of those communities in any way.
But you're speaking about it from the position of people who have a lot of experience.
And I think it's fair to say a lot of empathy for the people that are even in the cult dynamics or the negative guru space that you discuss.
I hope so.
I mean, I think we all feel very empathetic for this subculture that we've spent a lot of time in and that we have friends and family in.
Derek and Julian, my co-hosts, I think are still actively teaching yoga classes in online format because of the pandemic.
I don't know if either of them will wind up going back to studios.
I don't know if there's going to be yoga studios when everybody's vaccinated.
It seems like the brick and mortar economy of the yoga industry is crumbling as we speak.
But yeah.
Sometimes I feel like I'm in the position of Britt Hermes or something like that, who was trained as a naturopathic doctor and then became a whistleblower, although she doesn't have much redemptive to say about naturopathic medicine at all.
Whereas I maintain a very strong sympathy, actually, for people who I've become engaged for very good reasons often with yoga and Buddhism and the adjacent spiritualities.
And I got a lot out of it, too.
I got a lot out of it.
That might reflect my current position in regards to anthropology.
Not that they are full of cult dynamics and conspiracies, usually.
But I would say I have quite a lot of criticisms about...
Social anthropology, but I also see a lot of value in it and a lot of good, if you can cut through some of the things that I might critique.
My perspective, of course, but I think my anthropological background is useful and I hope I bring it into my work, but I also hope that I can...
Put aside some of the worst habits that anthropologists tend to have.
But, yeah.
And Matt, you must feel the same way.
You know, psychologists, the replication crisis, you're even worse than...
No, no, we're fine.
Nothing to see here.
It's all good.
But actually, the empirical psychological literature on complementary and alternative health is kind of interesting.
When they look at the beliefs and they attempt to measure the beliefs, one of the scales that I quite like makes a distinction between two types.
I think one of them is called holistic health beliefs and the other one is called alternative health beliefs.
And it's the second which is the one that...
And you can actually read the items and see that they do include forms of magical thinking and stuff that is related to unhelpful and unhealthy things, whereas the Holistic
health beliefs, there's nothing wrong.
You can read those and those capture another aspect of it and they're not wrong.
They're not anti-science.
You'd probably be glad to know that even psychologists, when we study those beliefs, we do make that distinction as well.
As this random jumping around introduction may illustrate, we are not professional interviewers, but there are a bunch of topics that I wanted to ask your opinion on and have a discussion about some of the insights that we might have and your impression coming with a greater familiarity with the conspiratoriality sphere.
And part of the motivation that I wanted to get your feedback on was after Matt and me did the J.P. Sears episode, where I'd actually came across J.P. Sears a long time before,
back when the videos that he was originally well known for, poking fun at alternative spirituality and in a friendly manner, I would say, like a knowing way.
But we tried to take a break from the more serious content by covering him because I was aware that he had previously been a life coach and was active in those communities while critiquing them.
But we didn't fully anticipate just how far he not only was into COVID denialism, but that he had also picked up...
A whole host of talking points and political perspectives, which were really familiar with us because we'd been covering IDW folk and Trump apologist people.
And he slotted just right in there with all the same talking points.
And I've continued listening to him afterwards and he's continued down that road.
And I wanted to get your opinion first on those overlaps that we...
To what extent are they a new thing which is emerging in the alternative spirituality spheres?
Or is that something that has a longer history, has been there, and maybe people just weren't paying attention?
Basically, just to ask your impression of, have there been dramatic changes or significant changes in the...
Well, I think my best answer would suggest that there's a historical stream that a lot of these influencers are drawing upon,
but then there's particular contemporary conditions.
Historically, I think We see the braiding of conspiracism in every spiritual paranoia that makes use of something like the blood libel, which is then reinvigorated by QAnon, for example, in which the Jews are out to destroy babies and also the nobility of honest work through banking and so on.
It's very, very old.
But in terms of more recent history, when I'm with yoga teacher training groups and I'm doing history segments, I always emphasize that the yoga and wellness and the spiritual ideas connected with them that they're training under are directly connected to European fascisms of the early 20th century,
in which the body becomes kind of fetishized as the microcosm of the pure nation, which usually means the purely xenophobic nation.
There are deep threads of conservatism, I would say, even right-wingism and fascism within the history of wellness culture.
And when we get into the digital age, however, I would say that there's a pipeline between spirituality and right-wing conspiracism that's defined by the basic libertarianism.
of the industries involved.
So there's this basic, you know, principle of hyper-individualism at play where when, you know, J.P. Sears seems to be joking when he says, you've got to stop outsourcing your truth.
It's a nonsensical statement, but he's really encapsulating something important to his whole demographic, which is that he's telling people that their intuition, their subjectivity, their gut feeling And that premise of sort of the triumph of the individual will drives the entire unregulated economy of wellness influencers.
They can't evidence their claims, so they have to appeal to personal truths.
You will never hear them talk about the social determinants of health.
Their entire ideology can't.
Accommodate the notion of medicine that is not simply a consumer choice.
And that's why the vaccine, by the way, is such a flashpoint.
I think one of the reasons anyway.
So even if they view themselves as socially progressive, they're sex positive, they want to decriminalize drugs, they go to Burning Man or whatever.
At the root, there's this libertarian bias that's baked into their economy.
And so their politics are going to track towards the right.
And what really that means is that...
They want less governmental interference and that's going to sort of dictate their COVID views.
And just to return to the vaccine for a moment, it's a flashpoint because the vaccine is a very concrete, at least as far as I can tell, it's a very concrete presentation of social medicine.
You have to, as an individual, you have to be...
But you do it essentially for other people.
But JP comes from a world of supplements, right?
Where you have the choice to improve your immunity by taking this BS supplement.
So that's the model of sort of privatized healthcare that is essential to them.
So there are a number of streams.
I haven't actually seen enough stability in...
So-called progressive aspects of yoga and wellness culture to overcome what we're talking about either.
That accords with what you had before, Matt, about the connections between libertarian and focus on...
Personal autonomy, right?
Yeah, the way you expressed it there, Matthew, is really great and clearer than we've ever managed to express it, even though we've had a lot of, we're talking about a lot of the same ideas where you have those two aspects that you explained,
which is that on one hand, you have that valuing naturalness and purity, which is that basis of a certain kind of spirituality.
There's obviously very positive sides to it, but there's actually also a darker side to that as well.
And that second aspect, which is that strong preference for individual determinism, especially around your existential things like your health and a strong bias against communitarian type thing.
So as you said, vaccination is a flashpoint.
Because it violates both of those two principles.
At the same time, right.
Yeah.
There's also something about it is so immediately representative of outside authority entering the body.
And of course, that gets conflated with...
In the anti-lockdown rhetoric, it gets conflated with rape culture discourse and Me Too discourse and stuff like that, like, don't enter my body without my consent.
But because it enters the body and it kind of reprograms in a way, which is another bit of rhetoric that they'll use, I think it replaces the idea of internal transformation very precisely, right?
It's like, I'm going to go through a personal epiphany.
In order to become more enlightened, and that's going to come from within me.
But the vaccine is kind of like, in their view, the toxic mimic of that.
It's going to enter your body to transform your reality.
And that's why they're fixated on DNA and shit like that, because what they're saying is the vaccine is going to change my soul.
And I think what they're talking about is...
That it's going to change the ability of my soul to have autonomy.
So the thing that surprised me, and I think the JP series episode was part of an entry into this for myself, because afterwards I've found many more examples.
But I was initially surprised, because you kind of hinted that, and you've mentioned on...
There's a long-term association with alternative health movements and counterculture, left-wing counterculture movements, and a kind of progressive attitude towards things like sex or drug use or psychedelics, right?
And so you mentioned that those factors haven't been stable enough to overcome this other trend.
But I'm wondering, you know, there does seem to be a...
Pretty strong movement on the left on the social justice and progressive side of things.
Whatever stance that you take on those issues, it feels like with the Me Too movement and with everything that has progressed since then in the past couple of years, that there is a clear strain of progressivism.
And maybe I don't know her well, so you can correct me on this, but Marianne Williamson, the presidential...
It seems to me to embody that image maybe a bit more.
And maybe Goop, I know that Goop also has the kind of hyper-capitalist aspect to it, but it also feels like it's leaning a bit more towards the at least progressive identity.
So I'm basically just wondering, you feel that that sphere, that element, it hasn't really had a strong purchase?
It has, but it's been polarizing more than anything else.
And I think what we have in yoga and wellness is a very strong demographic that we might associate with social justice activism that centers around the Me Too discourse, but then also Black Lives Matter and an awareness of the...
Structural inequalities that are embedded within boutique wellness services and the fact that very few people can actually access them.
The whiteness of urban yoga studios in the global north.
There's a strong contingent of POC and especially WOC practitioners and teachers who are actively challenging The way in which yoga and wellness are configured in general.
Now, their ability to impact the mainstream, I think, has started to happen in the sense that some folks like Susanna Barkataki will come forward and they'll be featured on the cover.
I don't think she was on the cover, but she'll be featured prominently in Yoga Journal along with other teachers within the NRI Indian diaspora.
And they provide really cogent political critiques of the inherent libertarianism of yoga and wellness.
But as that has happened, a kind of hardening of yoga libertarianism, I think, has also been evident.
And in fact, I would say that a test point for that is looking at J.P. Sears' career and seeing the point at which I think that's probably a good measurement for how he's responding to the reality of social justice language gaining more prominence within yoga and wellness spheres,
actually.
He's kind of like a barometer in that way.
So the thing that I find problematic about social justice efforts within yoga and wellness is that if they appeal to traditional yoga cultures and communities
and texts, there's often a lot of idealization that has to be sort of taken on in order to, you know, pretend as though medieval yoga cultures were inclusive or something
like that.
And so there's there's.
And from the right, they are used to create this impression that, you know, somehow nothing should ever change and men are men and women are women and God is God and, you know, we're going to do our practice.
And then from the left, there's this vision of a more matrilineal set of practices that have always been about social liberation and equality.
And it's like if you actually talked to people who researched the San...
They don't really find any of that stuff on either side.
And so the politicization of the content itself is quite a sport, actually.
I don't mean to use the word sport.
It's deadly serious, but it's very active.
It reminds me of Rutger Bregman referring to Hunter Gallery Societies as proto-feminist, like really proto.
If you look at the levels of...
Domestic violence and, you know, kind of forced marriages and so on.
Yeah.
Not across all hunter galaxy societies, of course, but it would be a severe overstatement, I think, to present them as strongly feminist cultures as a whole.
And isn't this where, like, galaxy brain comes in?
because when we have people who are willing to make claims like that, it's usually they have some sort of immediate claim or observation that they want to make and then they want to like infer outwards and backwards into history.
about how something must have been.
And that seems to be one of the characteristics that you're describing in the gurometer parameters, right?
Is just this willingness to just basically say anything.
Yeah, yeah.
No, they definitely do exercise no restraint in terms of running a mark across any discipline.
But, you know, history, including prehistory, anthropology, is certainly one of the ones that they'll be rife with it.
So we just covered...
I was going to say Gadsad because he's been on my mind recently, but not Gadsad.
Taleb.
That's him, Taleb.
Although they are friends.
Are they?
I'm not surprised.
They are good friends.
I'm not surprised.
And he certainly does look back to traditional...
Social organisations as inspiration.
Ancient China, Greek and...
Ancient wisdom, yeah.
Which just so happens tends to support and agree exactly what he's arguing for.
Surprising that, yes.
It struck me as a difference because my...
And I are academics.
And when I was talking about the hunter galleries though, right, my urge is the caveat, the statement, not all hunter galleries, right?
There's exceptions of that.
But I see the exact opposite instinct in the guru sphere where people are very, very comfortable to suggest a totalizing narrative across entire cultures, millennia.
Without being experts in the area, and even in the areas where I feel pretty solid about my knowledge, I often feel the need to, you know, caveat the claim to say, well, yes, of course, there's exceptions that you could raise to that point.
But I think Matt and I have both noticed that that makes you sound maybe less authoritative in some sense.
Oh, absolutely.
It doesn't in an academic setting, but in a, you know.
In giving a lecture, when you show those kind of doubts and stuff, I think for some people that's presented as, well, he didn't, you know, that you're kind of, you don't have the confidence to just like go out.
And that's why I listened to you discuss Jordan Peterson.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
And I know you have very strong opinions with him.
I want to hear these.
I do agree.
Because the thing I really appreciated about it was that you know him because he's a Toronto academic.
And so you are aware of the political aspects, which often get overlooked in the way he presents himself.
But that way of talking with like complete confidence and even where you're adding caveats and disclaimers that they're just, you know, kind of throwaway points.
I think he...
Is a really prototypical example of that kind of person.
You can do that well.
Yeah, and the caveat itself is a way of tamping down the effect of one's, the possible effect of one's charisma.
And the influencer culture is going to work exactly the opposite way, is that the caveat actually is going to...
Put some sort of distance or veil over the radiance of the person's confidence, and it just won't do.
Your caveat is, J.P. Sears would tell you directly, you're outsourcing your truth, because the only reason that you'd put the caveat on is to satisfy...
The external critic who might know more than you in that particular area or who might have a valid opposing opinion.
So you don't want to commit, overcommit to going into somebody else's territory or making a fool of yourself.
But in influencer culture, that's just not a thing.
You have to make a virtue of making a fool of yourself because there's nobody around you in the room who's going to tell you otherwise, right?
I mean, this is the really interesting thing, Matthew.
Maybe you can say a bit more on this because I've heard you talk about this kind of idea where there's a real...
It gets into epistemology.
This internal...
Yeah, and I think it's a misprision of some very beautiful old literature.
You know, I think of how this refrain in the Upanishads, in these conversations between usually fathers and sons or...
Older men and younger men about what the nature of the universe is.
And the answer is always mystical and aphoristic and kind of ineffable, right?
Where the son will say, so, you know, what is this self?
And the father will say...
Well, you know, the self is like the ghee in milk, or it's like the salt in the ocean water.
And then the ending of the statement will be, that very self is you.
And so, it's like the philosophic lesson, the ancient philosophical lesson, which is about, as far as I can tell, the inexpressibility of existence and the failures of language.
The inability that people seem to share of being able to really find anything to hold on to, so they decide out of an act of faith to focus in on an experience and say,
well, that's my ground of being.
I think what happens in popular culture is that...
They take that second person, you know, that very self is you, and they think it's me.
They think it's like J.P. Sears read that and they said, oh, it's me, okay.
No, that's exactly opposite of what the old book said, I think, unless I'm idealizing too, but I just refuse to believe that this literature...
Stayed around for so long so that it could validate grandiose people.
I don't think that's what it was for.
The interesting thing that struck me with the description there is we've talked about a lot of gurus who have a way with metaphors.
Dan Gilbert, the member of Eric Weinstein's community, was...
Was saying that Eric has a remarkable gift to remember metaphors and he's always putting out kind of new ones.
And it never struck me until you just said there, Matthew, that the classical religious texts or spiritual texts, which are rife with these quite beautiful, quite striking metaphorical descriptions, you know, the...
Enlightenment is like the sun piercing or coming out from behind the clouds or polishing the mirror and all of the various analogies and metaphors that you get in that literature.
This might be the stroking ego of the gurus that we look at, but it strikes me that maybe that's a modern version and it might be a hollow version of it, but I think there is a similar aspect to it in The poetic use of language and metaphor,
that in itself is a way that adds profundity.
You know, Matt and I often point out that actually what underlies that in many of the cases in the gurus that we're looking at is very mundane insights, that it didn't require a 20-minute metaphor to disentangle.
But yeah, I think there's a continuum there between that facility for metaphor in gurus who have something valuable to say and people who maybe don't, but can command the same
You know, as you're speaking, I'm thinking about how maybe it's the haiku and the whole genre of Zen poetry that...
Would be antidotal to this because the observations are so naturalistic but also banal, you know, that Basho is talking about the frog in the forest pond and I don't think Eric Weinstein would quote that,
right?
He might if he pointed out that it was a Zen quote.
Oh, I see.
Okay, all right.
Oh, and if he did...
Maybe if he did a hipster interpretation of it, that if there was an exegesis that said that, oh, the frog symbolizes this or that, yeah, maybe.
Yeah, this coin is not what you think it is.
That's the important thing.
They've all been getting it wrong.
And another point before I forget, and I know you mentioned it quite a while ago, but it's actually another point that I wanted to get to with you was, I don't know if we've talked about this on the podcast or not, but there's a tradition in anthropology looking at this literature that talks about invented traditions.
Have you ever come across that before, Matt?
No.
So, Hobsbawm and Ranger, I think, are the two who were initially associated with it.
And it was basically looking at elements of culture and showing how these cultures, which are often presented as timeless or with deep historic and ancient roots, are often recent inventions or at least have substantial elements of them that...
are manufactured within a much more contemporary period.
And the examples include Highland kilt wearing
I'm familiar with some of the ones that are looking at Japanese culture.
So that would include the dogi, the white training uniform, which is associated with martial arts, but which was co-opted by Kano, the founder of...
Judo.
And he tried to introduce to Japanese martial arts a modern scientific mindset, not traditional.
He wanted it to be an Olympic sport, which he succeeded in and so on.
So this image of ancient traditions where it's layered on top, but it can actually be very recent.
And I know, Matthew, from some of the...
Things I've heard you talk about in Conspirationality, and I think you've done some investigations as well into that very thing in yoga communities or maybe other areas as well.
So I was interested to hear your thoughts on that.
I know that's a whole bunch of questions, but you can pick and choose what you'd like to answer.
Yeah, they're great questions.
I would say that the whole field that I study when I'm sticking with yoga is just littered with invention that poses as traditionality.
And usually what this allows is for...
Charismatic leaders to both claim market share through this is the real thing that I have.
It also allows them to clothe their excesses in the mystique of the past.
You can't understand what I'm doing because it comes from another time and place.
It also is used to cover over or rationalize abuses.
And on the positive side, it also gives people a sense, especially if they're disconnected in their postmodern alienation, it gives them a sense of depth and historical grounding.
But I think it's a negative thing when that's deceptive.
So I got some examples.
I wrote a book about Patabi Joyce, the founder of Ashtanga Yoga, and I showed that he sexually assaulted his students for decades from about the 80s till he died.
And people rationalized it because he gave them the impression that the physical adjustments that he was giving to them were traditional.
There's no such thing.
The notion that yoga teachers are touching the bodies of students doesn't...
I mean, he's a real figure, but there's a mythos around him.
So, the person who is widely acknowledged to be the founder of modern yoga, Thiromalai Krishnamacharya, was Bhattavi Joyce's teacher.
And he claimed that he learned his discipline from some mystical yogi that nobody else had heard of, named Ramamohan Brahmachari.
Who either lived in South India or in Nepal, depending on who Krishnamacharya was telling the story to.
But he said that Brahmacharya was 200 years old.
And that's just sort of accepted amongst the majority of people who are devoted to modern yoga as a spirituality.
But it's also used to cover over the fact that a lot of modern yoga is...
Profoundly influenced, if not directly mimicking, European physical culture of the early 20th century.
In another segment, if listeners have heard of Yogi Bhajan and Kundalini Yoga or 3HO, this guy hung his entire credibility on something he called the golden chain of teachers that he claimed would go back to the Stone Age,
but in actuality he contrived virtually all of his content in the 1970s.
You know, one of the cults I was in was led by a guy named Michael Roach, who ostensibly taught Tibetan Buddhism.
And he had some competence in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, but only really enough to convince people that the prosperity gospel stuff that he really wanted to sell was traditional.
So say you can document that a tradition isn't old, right?
It's primarily being invented by, say, a Westerner 60 or 70 years ago, and they were not relying on these ancient traditions from the Far East, or if they were, they were drawing a lot of inspiration from themselves.
In those cases, how is that received?
And do you think it actually...
That it has an impact on the communities when these kind of things are found out.
This last part of your question, like, what happens when people find out when the veil is torn away?
In 2010, a yoga scholar named Mark Singleton published a book called Yoga Body.
It was kind of a watershed moment for this global industry that, you know, is...
You know, he did the research and the legwork to show that, you know, you really can't separate modern global yoga that takes place in a classroom from European calisthenics and gymnastics training and public education in colonial India.
I tore at least my little part of the yoga world apart because on one hand, this campaign was raised against Mark to...
Really erroneously try to debunk all of his painstaking evidence and to suggest that he was doing it because he hated Hindus.
So there was a Hindu nationalist sort of faction that came in and tried to erase this scholarship and to cancel Mark.
And then there were other people who were like, wow, we knew something was funny.
We knew something was up with this.
We knew that what we were told for the last 30 or 40 years didn't quite add up.
And, you know, maybe the relationship between European physical culture and colonial public schooling...
And girl punishment and all of this physical abuse in yoga classes, maybe that's a thing to tie together.
And it gave some people the freedom to say, oh, whatever yoga is, it's like an ongoing participatory art form and culture.
And let's just be honest about the fact that we're changing it as we do it, whatever it is.
Matt, I'm interested to hear what you think about this, because a lot of this is, you know, the specifics that you're talking about, Matthew, are new to me, but a lot of it is very familiar.
And like we were talking about before we started recording, I started out my academic career studying Tibetan and focusing on the study of religions.
And that was partly because of a personal interest in Buddhism as a practice.
But going to university and studying the history of Buddhism and Buddhism in other cultures, the kind of actual culture from an anthropological perspective, it revealed that my personal image was founded on exoticism and an inaccurate image that had kind of been...
Deliberately sold, sold and marketed to a Western audience.
And I'm not even blaming the people who did that, because in a large respect, they were responding to colonialism.
Absolutely.
So there's legitimate elements to it.
But one of the stories that I always remember was, there's a book, you might have heard of it, Mark, called The Third Eye, an autobiography of a Tibetan Lama.
It's popular in the 50s and 60s, but it's part of where the concept of the third eye enters the popular culture in the West.
And it was supposed to be written by a Tibetan lama, Lobsang Rampa, but there was an investigation into it, and it turned out to be Cyril Henry Hoskin, who was the son of a...
Plumber.
And had, you know, no connections to Tibet or any of that.
And it was like, it was all, you know, basically just his imagination.
And he turned out to be this eccentric guy that would like walk a cat on the lead and all these strange things.
But when...
When you start looking into the history, even of frauds or invented traditions, it's often very fascinating what actually happened, like how people, why they were presenting traditions in certain ways or why,
for example, we've inherited the view that Buddhism is a philosophy and not a religion, right?
There's a reason for that.
But yeah, so this is music to my ears.
But I'm wondering, Matt, for you, coming at it from the more psychological background, does any of this seem surprising or is this all of the foibles that you expect when dealing with imperfect people?
Yeah, so I guess what you're talking about is mainly sociological and historical and so on.
So it's kind of outside of psychology a little bit.
But what I was thinking of...
How that relates to the naturalness fallacy.
So we talked about that with respect to Nassim Taleb because he was leaning on that pretty heavily in the same sort of vein, which is that practices that are old and traditional and, you know,
have persisted for hundreds of thousands of years are good.
And when you think about it, that really is, I mean, it was you who described that as just a particular...
And a type of naturalness fallacy.
And it struck me, I was just thinking to myself, well, okay, yes, clearly various gurus of all kinds do like to get the credibility that's associated with venerable age.
And I guess I see it as an instantiation of the naturalness fallacy.
Does that sound plausible to you guys?
It does, in the sense that there's, I mean, it feels as though traditional as a term, as a category, is almost like synonymous with the pure, or the natural, or the untrammeled, or it's not been infected by modernity,
or by the scientific method, or by, you know, materialism, or whatever.
Yeah, there seems to be a very close overlap between those two things, and they're like felt, they're felt things.
So when people say the word tradition...
In the yoga world, you can almost see them stand up straighter or something like that.
It's in their bodies.
I think it's a natural thing, dare I say.
My family all does karate, and it's nice.
The fact that there is a history to it.
That it's not just like...
I like Irish dancing.
Yeah, you like Irish dancing.
The fact that it wasn't made up by Bruce down the road is...
There's nothing wrong, I think, with light.
But we should acknowledge that humans do have...
We like that.
We like traditional stuff intuitively.
And I also would just like to...
I have a little story from yoga history that I think points out that disillusionment is cyclical and then...
And then some people seem to go into periods or phases of sort of like reconstituting the authentic or the traditional.
And I'm thinking about there was an early, you know, early anti-colonialist activist who ended up, I think, becoming prominent in the RSS in India in the late 19th century.
What's the RSS?
I forget the acronym, but it ends up being the sort of pedagogical and moral wing of the BJP in modern India.
It provides the sort of historical backdrop for Hindutva politics, for Hindu nationalist politics.
It's like a very old think tank and sort of cultural activist movement for Hindutva politics.
And so this guy, Dayananda, this is the late 19th century.
There's a story about him, about how he goes on one of these journeys throughout the country to figure out what is actually India and what does it all have in common as part of this project of trying to re-envision a post-colonial state.
And he travels on this pilgrimage with a number of medieval yoga texts.
So goes the story.
And they teach about internal anatomy and the chakras and the channels.
And he describes how they never really made sense to him.
And so one day he happens upon a corpse in a river and he decides he's going to just wade into the river, take out the corpse and dissect it to see whether or not these old books are telling the truth.
And then he finds out that they're not, that when he eviscerates this body that...
He doesn't find the channels and the chakras and the organs are in different places from how they're drawn in these medieval texts.
And at this moment, there's this heartbreaking description of him throwing all of those books into the river and saying that, okay, well, the only thing, therefore, that will be true for...
The spirituality of yoga that I want to make as a part of my politics, really, or to support my politics, is going to be Patanjali's Yoga Sutras and the Veda, or I would say probably the late Vedic literature.
I'm not quite sure what he was referring to.
But he basically threw out all of the pre-modern medical and folk medicine stuff at that moment in this spasm of disillusionment.
And recollected what he felt would be rational and supportable for his vision of yoga and specifically Hindu yoga.
And it's just really, it's kind of amazing because he's...
Finding out something about his traditional texts at that moment, he's going through a process of throwing things away that don't seem to work, but then he's also bestowing a blessing and relevance upon what he thinks is going to work going forward.
It's not like this is a new story either.
People are getting disillusioned all the time and then they re-congregate around things that they want to be true or they think will be useful for them going forward.
Yeah, when I was looking at the history of, I focused on Buddhism and East Asia in particular, and that dynamic where, you know, it's common in all religious and various cultural movements that there's periods of
Kind of fundamentalism or alternatively intersect battles for who is the authentic group.
And it often involves that people have the image of these ancient times where philosophers having philosophical battles about the details of the Dharma.
And sometimes, yes, but a lot of times it's polemical.
Like you see the content and they're disparaging the characters of the monks who practice the other thing and, you know, saying those idiots.
Or they're seeking patronage from some prince in order to instantiate their communities and kick out the other ones.
And the romanticized version of history is much less interesting than the actual version of history.
But just as a side on a point that you mentioned was that, you know, this appealing back to the image, these ancient traditions, right?
Like Taleb.
I don't know if you've noticed, Matthew, but JPCers, like lots of these guru figures, they have go-to pop culture or movies that they reference.
And the one that I've heard him reference multiple, multiple times is Braveheart.
But he mentions it as if...
It was a historical...
Yes, it wasn't Willie Wallace, but it was not the way that he was portrayed in that movie.
It wasn't Mel.
Yeah, but for J.P. Sears, it really feels the way he talks about it.
Like, that movie is what actually...
And so he talks about he wants to be like William Wallace and yell out freedom as he's being disemboweled.
And I'm listening, but you know, that was the movie, right?
So it's interesting that there's this overlap with the fictionalized and romanticized past, but it's still used as powerful illustrations.
And in some sense, it almost doesn't matter as long as it has the motifs that they want to emphasize.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there are so many stories from the history of modern yoga where the male evangelists end up going through these archetypal journeys.
There's a bunch of them that lose their fathers when they're nine years old.
There's a bunch of them that have mystical visions when they're 16. And, you know, these are all self-reported, but then they're self-reported uncritically to the point where they become repeated as though somehow there had been historical research into these people,
rather than the anecdote that the person told about themselves has kind of become this movie that everybody now can reference and that has extraordinary power.
Yeah, it's amazing, actually, how it happens.
And quite beautiful in some ways.
You know, it's just so irritating when folks are not able to take the extra step and say, oh, look at all of the ways in which we're able to sort of, like, convince ourselves of something.
That's kind of awesome, isn't it?
Yeah.
Well, I'm looking at my list of questions.
There's a bunch of things.
And I know I don't want to take up all your time.
So I'll try to hit some of the points.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Let's go.
One of the questions came from the discussion we had with Tim Nguyen, the philosopher who has looked at conspiracy theories and echo chambers and what's the other one, Matt?
Yeah, incentives.
Online incentives.
Yeah, filter bubbles.
Filter bubbles.
And gamification.
He has many things.
He's got his fingers in many pies.
Echo bubbles.
Echo bubbles, I think.
Echo bubbles.
But one question he had for us.
And it was quite a productive area that we discussed, was the dynamics of modern social media were creating changes to the kind of classical guru structure.
And he suggested that maybe he had observed that there was more flattery and less harsh criticism, the negatively violenced side of things.
But when me and Matt were discussing that, we had observed...
Within guru communities, like in the discords or in the Facebook groups, that those more negative aspects and policing of followers were still common, but maybe not evident so obvious on Twitter or that kind of thing.
But I'm wondering from your work, and since you're active in both these spheres, like the traditional cults and their modern versions and the online instantiations, how do you feel?
Have things changed dramatically in the digital age or is it old wine and new bottles?
I think that that observation that there's more and less overt authoritarianism up front is very key.
And I haven't actually thought about that, but I think it's very true.
And that, I think, is reflective of the sort of charismatic romance of influencer culture where the basic aesthetic is...
The selfie video with intrusive eye contact and really beautiful framing and welcome into my world.
There are a lot of leaders who are doing love letters to their potential recruits all the time.
So I'll think more about that, but I think that's really observant.
I think the first thing to say is that most of the cult theory that we have is pre-digital.
And I feel like most researchers are swimming pretty frantically upstream as the cult landscape has changed very, very quickly away from in-person dynamics and into the weird space that is online dynamics.
In the digital world, all of the cultic theory around bodily control kind of goes out the window because...
You're not in a place in which leaders can dictate when you're getting up or what you're eating exactly when or who you're having sex with or not having sex with or whether you're masturbating or not.
There's all kinds of avenues of bodily control that I think it's possible that leaders are learning how to outsource those controls to the tech platforms themselves.
And then if they can, using...
You know, video elements, as I suggested, to amplify things like intrusive eye contact.
There's somebody that you can look up.
I don't think this is in your sort of guru remit.
She's more of a New Age influencer and priest, but her name is Elizabeth April.
And if you look up her YouTube videos, you just have to look for about 30 seconds at what she does in terms of the aesthetics to see that there's this like...
Completely oversaturated, absolutely scintillating HD quality to everything that she does and to the focus and the texture and her makeup.
It's just overwhelming.
She looks like a supermodel leading you into a trance state.
And so I think that is one way in which, just through aesthetics, that people who...
Who are beginning, intentionally or not, to create cultic dynamics are starting to utilize.
And then in terms of sound, I think that this might apply to Eric Weinstein.
If he were running a cult, I don't know if he is or not, but listening to him, holy shit, it's like an ASMR experience.
He's just all over that microphone.
I don't know how you guys don't get pilled by him listening to him for four hours at a time.
At times two speed, it loses some of that richness.
But yeah, it's really, really hypnotic for a lot of people.
I think also the economics of online cultism is totally changing everything and turning it upside down on one hand.
Monetization of the cultic dynamic is easier, but it's also less stable.
So, for instance, with somebody like Bentino Massaro, who up until a couple of years ago ran like a super well attended or subscribed operation out of Boulder, I think, or Crestone,
California.
Right.
He got busted by...
B. Schofield, who's a colleague of mine and kind of like a guerrilla journalist, gonzo, anti-cult, independent reporter.
And she published an article on her site called Tech Bro Guru and ran down his profile a little bit.
And we don't actually know what that did to his subscription model, but I had the sense at the time that, oh, like...
People don't have to buy in To support him financially.
They might be subscribed for $20 a month or $40 a month or something like that.
These are not leaders who are making bank by getting people to hand over all of their life savings, right?
So the threshold for entry is lower.
I would say that the sunken costs are also going to be lower.
And also the fact that you're getting your guru fix through the same screen that you could click out of.
I think what really super confounds cultic theory is QAnon,
obviously the behaviors that people exhibit are of full indoctrination and then co-recruitment.
And the indoctrination happens really fast.
People who specialize in radicalization are amazed that folks can become full QAnon boosters and recruiters within a matter of days.
But there's no leader.
There's an absent, there's a vacuum at the center of QAnon.
We know, we kind of, nobody's seen who they are.
The drops themselves are very poetic and compelling to the people who buy off on them.
But it's like we have a global cultic organization with no central organization and no discernible leadership.
And then the leader hasn't even posted since December 8th now.
And the people who are probably in control of it, you know, Jim and Ron Watkins, have kind of slowly distanced themselves from it.
And so it's like, if you run that through the cultic models that came out of studying Jonestown or Heaven's Gate or Scientology, they just don't compute, right?
There's just so many different elements going on.
I think my answer for the leaderless cult, my theory anyway, is that...
Without a leader, what the cultic environment has to do is it has to deputize everybody else as leaders or proto-leaders, right?
It's like so everybody becomes a digital soldier.
And the gamification of QAnon then becomes the fill-in for the juice, the charismatic juice that the leader would have given if they were there, if they even existed.
Well, can I ask you about that, Matthew?
Because prior to QAnon, I was just thinking earlier today of QAnon as an example of crowdsource propaganda, which is a similar kind of idea.
But just as you were speaking, I was thinking of the...
Flat Earth Facebook groups and the Chemtrail wiring Facebook groups.
There are probably other examples too.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that they're similar in a way.
They're crowdsourcing their doctrine, which is, you know, it's a rich tapestry.
It's not like a rigid doctrine.
It evolves depending on what stuff sticks and what stuff doesn't.
Yeah, do you see connections?
I do.
I'm just not so familiar with those spaces, but I imagine that that's very true.
And it makes me actually realize that I would be remiss to neglect that there is one piece of new cult analysis.
Okay, well, is this really a pyramid with leadership and, you know, lieutenants?
And does it follow the Hannah Arendt model of, you know, sort of like widening circles of influence and, you know, propaganda that faces the outside and lies that face the inside and stuff like that.
And it's the work of Alexandra Stein, who's in the UK.
And what she did was she said, she doesn't say this specifically, but her research implies that it's not the structure and the leadership that defines the cult.
It's the quality of the relationships.
In relation to the interpersonal attachment stuff.
And she basically defines the cult as a cluster of disorganized attachments where people are bound together through the oscillation of terror and love.
So you don't necessarily need a leader for that.
You need a sort of relational culture in which...
People in a Facebook group are constantly terrorizing each other with the terrible thing that's going to happen, and then on the other hand, they're constantly pretending to love and care for each other.
And that can create this kind of trauma-bonded group experience that's very difficult to leave, and therefore it creates kind of a skin around it that we might identify as cultic.
It's like you're in that and it's hard to go.
And it's hard to go even if you know it's harmful to you, right?
Because it's become absorbing and you've lost other relationships.
Yeah, that makes sense to me.
There's so many things, Matthew, you mentioned that completely gelled with my impression.
I really encourage anyone that's listening to...
To listen to your podcast break down these topics because you have a lot of excellent insights.
And I'm doing that IDW thing of praising the person.
I can't resist.
It's still true.
It's still true.
And I have to say as well that focusing on voice, I'm not sure Matt and I have voices made for podcasting, but you certainly do.
So if you want to go in the dark side.
You've got the right timber and the right elegance with phrases.
We're screwed, Matt.
We have no chance.
But apart from that fawning Prius...
Can I just say something about that?
The modern yoga world also is dominated.
The top-tier earners are dominated by people with theater and film training.
This is a little-known secret.
And so it really fits into the performativity of the whole culture and this strange non-distinction that's made between are you appearing to be spiritual or are you spiritual?
And so yeah, I do have some theater and voice training in my background and so I just can't help but to use that.
But then yeah, you're right.
You point it out and I'm like, oh boy.
Busted.
It's a power that can be used for good or evil.
But the points that you were raising reminded me, I heard, I think it's your most recent episode where you're talking about pandemic, but focusing on it from the point of view about this intimate, high production value,
confessional style, which I think...
Skeptical groups or maybe traditional skepticism might approach it more from the point of view of the content, right?
Like, what are the actual facts about the vaccines and so on?
But I think that misses the points that you're raising, that a lot of it is in the presentation style and the emotions that that brings up in people.
Totally.
And the other thing that struck me was when you were talking about...
This ecosystem of gurus, which now exists and always did, but maybe online, there's more of it bumping together and there's a bigger marketplace, right?
Whereas before you might not have came across gurus that weren't in your local sphere.
Now they're global and they're all available at the click of a button.
And it made me think, you know, when we are looking at this content and we...
We keep constantly seeing, especially in the feed now, because the Coding the Guru's Twitter account only follows the people that we've covered.
So it's a nightmare feed to log into.
But one of the things that you notice is that there's a lot of overlaps.
For example, James Lindsay was retweeting JP Sears recently or Scott Adams was being retweeted by Eric Weinstein.
Actually, you've made this point, Matt, that there's this dynamic where the big swinging brains in the room are all Bumping along beside each other.
But rubbing up against each other as well.
That was the analogy.
Not a very nice analogy.
They need to flatter each other, but they're also in competition for the hardest take.
I think there is an element of they have to constantly be providing the next big thing or the next big take.
I bet that's true of spiritual people, too.
Am I right, Matthew?
Yes.
Well, what I'd like to say is that what might not be apparent from an academic perspective is the economies of influence in unregulated industries at play.
That, yeah, if your guys are quoting each other, it's not just that they are merging their email lists.
It's also possible, very possible, that they share affiliate deals.
That the New Age platforms that they use will demand, in some cases, that if they're published by, if Sounds True is publishing J.P. Sears, they've cut him loose, actually.
But if they're publishing J.P. Sears and somebody else that are, and they're in that zone, they are actually required contractually, and then they're rewarded economically for promoting each other's material.
And so this is a huge problem, actually, in terms of the economic spread and clout of unregulated industries.
The idea is that they're always creating new markets.
We had a guest on, Rebecca Barucchi, who talked about how, as an author at Hay House, which is like a top New Age publisher.
In the United States, founded by Louise Hay, who used to tell gay people that they wouldn't get AIDS if they had a better attitude about themselves.
And that has set the stage for mind over matter, heal yourself through good intentions stuff.
So, Rebecca Baruchi started to say, okay, well, why, Hay House, are you publishing the work of Christiane Northrup, who is denying COVID and this is impacting communities of color?
And once we talked to her a little bit, we realized that, and she told us this story about how when she was brought in as a Hay House author, the huge emphasis in her onboarding was, Here are the other authors that you need to connect with,
get testimonials from, get book cover blurbs from.
I mean, I know that there's some of this kind of backscratching and incestuous stuff in academia, but I mean, I don't think the stakes are as high as they are in the New Age world because these people literally have nothing else.
They don't have anything except each other to provide mutual validation.
They can't actually submit their stuff for peer review.
So there's networking there.
I would bet that the people who you've got in your health feed are actually economically benefiting from proximity.
I think what you've talked about for you is unregulated markets that we've noted in an informal sense about the tendency to promote supplements across figures that you wouldn't necessarily Absolutely,
right.
Like Eric Weinstein, right?
A kind of sciencey person, you know, if you take him at face value, but is promoting lion's mane, mushroom, herbal tea.
And the connection, it doesn't seem apparent, but we actually included it as a kind of bonus point on the...
Right.
Because we were noticing it so much.
So I think some of the other connections, it might be simply the effect of not yet being a mature market in some space in the people that we are looking at.
It calls to mind to me that the IDW, the intellectual dark web, it's morphed over time and it's changed its contours in a whole lot of way.
But initially, people were focusing on that that group.
Essentially, what they would do on Twitter is that they would, you know, promote something and then they would hashtag in or at all the other people in it.
And they were kind of cross promoting and attending events together.
And that was seen as a like sort of a new thing emerging.
But it makes me think now that it's just basically piggybacking on.
These tried and true practices that exist in the New Age and spirituality sphere.
I didn't make that connection so clearly, but that's existed forever there.
It has.
We have economic pathways that have been forged by MLMs, by New Age publishing houses and their lists, and by alternative health companies.
Those build relationships and marketing relationships through affiliation deals.
I mean, because I follow the influencers that we cover, I'll get emails from Kelly Brogan or Sayer G, and probably a half or at least a third of the content in any given newsletter is going to be affiliate linked to a fellow networked promoter of something similar in the alt-health sphere.
And sometimes those affiliate deals are worth a lot of money.
As in, you know, if somebody's selling a workshop for $700 that is promoting vaginal kung fu or something like that, if they sign up to that thing through Kelly Brogan's email list, Kelly Brogan might get 50% of that fee,
right?
And so we're talking about a lot of business dollars floating around in an industry that seems to be...
Hyper-individualistic, but it's actually quite synergistic in terms of its capitalism.
It's just making me think about how vapid the defense of guilt by association is as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card, right?
Because people use it to say, well, you're not dealing with the arguments, you're just noticing that they're talking to these people.
And it is true that, you know, you can appear with someone without endorsing them.
You could have a critical interview, so on.
Like, appearances do not entail that people endorse all of the agenda of the people they appear with.
However, people who appear together regularly talk about the same things frequently.
And when you look at their networks and their, you know, there's a very distinct political flavour or a very distinct ideological pattern.
It is informative.
And the elements that you're talking about here with cross-promotions and actual profit, right, that selling goods and services and workshops, it's incredibly telling to follow networks and to look at those kind of connections.
And to not do so is actually kind of missing the bigger picture in some respects.
So, yeah, it's just...
Well, I mean, the thing that really made Matthew's point super clear to me was in doing a bit of background research on the J.P. Sears episode led me to the London Real.
He had an extended interview with the fellow who runs that, his name is Ryan Rose.
That's it, Rose.
And just the nature of their discussion.
I mean, they spent the vast majority of their time Talking about business.
Right.
They were talking about an alliance of their business interests and how great it was to be an entrepreneur and to take those...
There was a bit of reference to spiritual or new age principles, but they very quickly went...
And Braveheart.
Yeah, Braveheart.
But it very quickly came back to how that would be used.
In order to, you know, build...
I forget the buzz phrases they were using, but it was always stuff like...
I think they were using the word empire.
He was actually using the word, I'm going to build my online empire.
And that stuck out to me, going, is that...
That's just...
Yeah, because when you were talking to me about that, you were strongly emphasizing, but these guys are just like, they're just capitalists.
It felt like they were saying the quiet bit very loud.
Anyway, I don't know.
Yeah, I don't think it is the quiet bit, but there's also something so deceptive about this collapse of categories.
So, J.P. Sears...
Is interviewing Brian Rose or they're talking and we're eavesdropping about their business prowess?
And who's the audience?
Is it bros who want to up their own game in the tech sphere?
So there's this mixture of anti-authoritarianism while we're building a dominant empire, while we're giving life coaching about how successful we can be when we commit to our principles.
It's like, what the fuck is that?
What is that?
And this is why I want to...
It seems like there is a lot now, you know, present company aside, there is a lot of this stuff that's built on men talking to each other.
And you've sort of referenced it, Matt, a little bit with the big egos both massaging but also creating friction between each other.
This is going to be DMHU.
Yes, there we go.
But so often it seems that we're talking about men who have gathered social power who are being eavesdropped upon, right?
And who are being, they're allowing their audience into a kind of...
Locker room that is hyper-intelligent.
It might not be so smelly.
It might smell like tea, right?
It's like an enlightened locker room.
And so, yeah, that was the main thing that I wanted to throw onto the Garometer list is grandiose.
I don't want to necessarily...
I mean, toxic masculinity comes with a lot of pre-definitions, and some of it is toxic, but it's also grandiose masculinity.
No, look, Matthew, I'll let Chris answer because we are very much on the same page.
We talked about this a lot.
Right, right.
Yeah, Chris.
Yeah, what you're describing sounds so familiar because we recently, I don't know how long it is, they're all seared into my mind and like, you know, time is a flat circle with the gurus.
We listened to four hours of Eric and Douglas Murray.
Oh, yes.
I listened to about half of your review of them.
Yeah.
And that took us like weeks to get through because of how long it was.
But that feature that you're talking about, like, who's this for?
And what is this?
Because this sounds like two guys sitting, talking, in large part talking about how insightful...
They are and how their friends are important and the things that they do which are interesting and, you know, touch a little bit on political topics and contemporary issues.
But it felt like an interminable, like being trapped in their dinner conversation and being unable to exit it.
But I got the feeling, and you pointed this out, Matt, at the time, that...
The way it's framed and the way that I see people online in forums responding to that is as if...
So some people notice the indulgent nature of it.
It is true.
It's not like there's no critical consumers.
But there's another group of people who respond as if they've been let into an exclusive club and that they're...
They're being allowed to see this world of intellectuals and academics and the thinkers in society, the people who can really think.
And Eric and Douglas completely lean into that.
And so do many of the gurus that we are looking at that that's what they want to do.
They want to bring in their followers, let them into these spaces, which they don't normally the academics and elites will keep them out of.
I want to say something that feels a little bit sad, which is that I think the bro influencer vibe that is so attractive.
It's really serving a need for friendship and for dialogue and for transparency, especially between men, that it won't, that it can't actually do.
There was one bonus episode that I produced for the podcast called something like Solstice Light in the Man Cave or something like that, and I was talking about the vocal affect of the people, the men especially, that we study.
The last thing that I clipped was a quote-unquote interview, really kind of overheard conversation between J.P. Sears and his buddy Tim Kennedy, who's an ex-MMA fighter and an ex-Army Ranger,
I think, who also revealed that he was one of the, I think, unmarked or unbadged federal agents who was roaming through Portland this summer, throwing people into tactical minivans.
There's a real intersection between JP's tip and hard right and authoritarian governance politics in the States.
But this dialogue that they have is like...
Totally, there's an alpha-beta thing going on where J.P. Sears is groveling in front of his muscle master, Tim Kennedy, but also there's this kind of facade of intimacy and,
I don't know.
It's like when you see guys in the locker room who are not really able to make eye contact, but they kind of greet each other with a chest bump while looking away, it's kind of that feeling
where...
There's this sense that there's a possible closeness and a sense of shared values, but...
Really, what is shared between them is their social power, right?
Because if one of them was not earning as much, if one of them was a loser or a nerd or was homosexual or something like that, they wouldn't be doing that chest bump.
And so there's all of this social coding that's going on in these conversations that I think, along with the performance aspect, how the influencers actually give their stuff.
I think it confounds this basic approach that a lot of us have, which is, let's make them get their facts right.
Because, you know, it's not like, I don't think it's about the facts and the data and the bad arguments.
It's about how are the bros relating to the bro-influencer vibe, and how good does that feel, and what is it replacing?
Matt, do you want to, I have something to say about idols?
No, I just really like what Matthew said.
I mean, it's so much along the same lines that we've been talking about, which is that the form is really important.
Totally.
And you can't just focus on the content.
And we were talking about that parasocial stuff where we could see how there was that sort of intimate feeling that you were a part of this conversation.
And you talked about that kind of relationship.
I mean, Eric was grovelling somewhat to Douglas.
But they absolutely would not be doing that or saying those things unless they recognised some...
Mutually advantageous power thing going on.
And I just think it's so true.
And by the way, Matthew, the people who are fans of the figures we criticize, we often know them on Twitter and in other places, and they engage with us.
And they've been very cool about it, actually.
Like, we haven't copped a great deal of flack.
But obviously, many of them are not super happy with our criticisms.
It's been interesting to pay attention to their responses.
And I mean, I don't think I'm being too unfair when I say that.
I think a lot of them just, they say we're being unfair to their arguments or aren't dealing properly with their arguments, but I get the sense that they just like the feeling.
It's the feeling and the form, yeah.
They love them.
Like, I don't know if you heard, I've probably told this story on the podcast maybe twice, but I went to see Jordan Peterson in person.
Oh, yeah.
That was really interesting.
Right.
Well, he, I mean, like...
All of my red flags went up and started waving around because literally the feeling in the room with probably 500 or 600 people attending, it was packed.
It was a lecture hall.
We all paid $35 to be there for a two and a half hour lecture where he didn't get to the...
But the feeling of him...
Walking out onto the stick, the only thing that came close to it was when I went to a concert in the early 90s in a stadium with U2 and Bono coming onto the stage in the midst of his light show.
That was like that, right?
There was this build-up, people were stamping their feet on the floor for him to come into the room, and then he sort of bounces in in his three-piece suit and his watch chain and stuff like that, kind of steampunky.
And people stand up and roar.
And that is not...
You're not going to have an argument about...
About whether cultural Marxism is a thing with people like that.
Because cultural Marxism, it's just the word that goes into their mouth or their ear like some sort of drug and sets off this physiological response, which is, I belong to something and I'm going to defend something and I'm going to stand up for something and I'm going to feel noble about something.
It's never quite defined.
Yeah, I think the feeling of the thing is so incredibly important.
So you mentioned as well, Matthew, that there's an element of a kind of men's club, right, within the guru sphere, which is evident in the people that we've covered.
And I think we've discussed, Matt, that we thought maybe the...
Health and wellness and alternative spirituality spheres might have more space for women, which I'd be interested to hear your opinion on.
But before that, one thing that definitely struck me was, so a lot of people have commented about long-form audio or podcast format has the ability...
To create an intimacy between listener and host.
And I felt that a long, long time ago when I was listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, you know, had been passively consuming it as content.
And then one of the hosts died.
And the reaction for me felt like somebody, you know, like somebody I had known had died.
And of course, I'd never met them.
I had no interaction with them.
But it...
It hit me hard when I heard the announcement.
The thing that surprised me at that time was that I hadn't realized I had developed a feeling of a completely one-sided feeling of intimacy or friendship with this host.
And I'm sure you know who would have been a lovely guy.
If you met him in person or just a normal person, but it definitely made clear to me, and this was like in the early era of podcasting, that that intimacy was possible.
And so I think the critique, you were kindly, you know, you kindly said, you know, present company excluded, but I also think...
And I don't think you would have any issue admitting this, that we don't get out of that dynamic.
Not at all, not at all.
Even, I would say, Matt, like, you and I have never met in person, right?
We met in a very digital 2020 kind of way through Twitter, and then over Skype and Zoom, and then created a podcast together.
But I would still say that, you know...
I would consider you a friend and I wouldn't expect that if I met you in person that things would be very different.
So there feels to me that there's an element where these podcast spaces and the ability for people to focus on niche topics and form communities like Patreons or that kind of thing around areas of interest.
In some sense, it's like a neutral space, right?
Or it could be used for creating communities that allow people to meet people that they wouldn't meet, to form like interest groups where they wouldn't be able to form it in their own communities and potentially to reach more diverse people.
But it also carries with it because of the intimacy aspect and because of the ability for these...
All these kind of dynamics that you have been touching on with the presentation and with the ASMR and with the kind of one-way nature of the relationships.
It ends up bringing back to me this distinction that the philosopher T kept making.
There's the thing which is real, that you get a genuine feeling of connection or you get a genuine feeling of insight from actually having insight and actually having friendship.
And then there's another thing which is parasitic on that, which is...
Looks very similar to it, invites the same feelings, but is ultimately empty.
And distinguishing between those two things is very hard because the feeling in both cases is real.
And isn't that why listening to Brett and Eric Weinstein talk on the same podcast is so excruciating?
Because those two things are actually blended.
They are brothers.
They obviously grew up in a very complex sort of network.
And so they have legitimate intimacy, and they are also absolutely performing their social roles and their professionalism.
And that's another thing about influencer culture in general, though, is that it really breaks down these categories between...
Between personal and professional and between private and public in very, very disarming and disturbing ways.
But to speak to your question about like, okay, well, so many of our subjects are men and I think as, you know, in our group we understand those dynamics probably from early childhood and we have some sense of what that all feels like.
But in yoga and wellness, you know, we are talking about a practice and a consumer population that's probably 70 or 80% women.
And I do want to say that, like, leadership and charismatic leadership amongst women influencers is just as big.
But it follows, as far as I can tell, many of the same sort of dominance principles that we see in the brosphere.
But I don't spend...
I mean, I've done journalism on people like Kelly Brogan, but I don't spend a lot of time critiquing that because I really believe that legitimate feminist scholars should be doing that.
And I think it's very difficult to do that without appearing to be...
Insensitive or misogynistic or sort of ignorant about structural misogyny.
But I will say that a lot of the women influencers that we look at on the podcast, so Brogan, Christiane Northrup, Bauhaus' wife, Yolan Norris Clark of the Free Birth Society, a lot of them present this kind of faux feminism that's either pushing a really super conservative Or they are often deferring to male
charismatics in their field.
So, you know, Christiane Northrup will be constantly talking about how handsome and wise Zach Bush is, or, you know, she'll have Andrew Wakefield on to talk about how he's some sort of ultimate protector of women because...
He found out that vaccines were causing autism, and he was the first one to start listening to women.
So there's this weird kind of patriarchal deference that we see play out in, I would say, in women's wellness spaces as well.
But I think I've said enough.
There's a whole bunch more that I would be really...
I want to ask you, but I'm also aware that I've eaten up a whole bunch of your time and I'm probably dragging Matt closer to the grip with every facet.
But it's all good, yeah.
So maybe, do you have time just for one more?
of questions and then I'll let you escape.
Yes. But it's been a pleasure, Matthew.
And like, for sure, for sure.
I hope we can continue having these kind of discussions, because I think there's a lot of overlap.
And there's, it's very interesting to look at the points where the, you know, when you look at our podcast art, for example, there's, there's already a quite a great deal of overlap there.
But I think in the dynamics and the figures, even the figures are starting to
In any case, the last thing I wanted to ask you about, because we've kind of touched on things that we are missing with the grometer from our analysis and so on.
I think it's fair to say that you and also us are walking the line between documenting a phenomenon and offering commentary and in some sense coming close to...
Activism.
Maybe me and Matt less so because we're not serious enough to be doing it genuinely.
But I also feel that we do both have the view that we are providing a kind of inoculation for people and a set of tools with which, yes, we're poking fun and having fun with the content that we look at.
But we do try to highlight the techniques and the tactics that are in use.
I wonder, though, this balance between, you know, when you're studying a phenomenon and you're critical of it and that you think it does real harm, that how you can retain a kind of objective researcher base where it doesn't become that you're just...
I'm not sure me and Matt always do this, but you're not just tearing the people down or that you're not unfairly representing them because you disagree with them.
So that balance, I'm just wondering if you have any reflections from your own work
Yeah, totally.
I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is that I didn't finish college because my life went sideways and then I was in cults for six years.
But when I was in college, You know, what really struck home for me was the sort of, you know, more almost spiritual teachings of postmodern literary criticism and how it investigated language and meaning and how it really sort of cast a lifelong doubt upon the process of or the premise of objectivity.
That, you know, you can try, but you have to be really clear about your positionality, and you have to know what you don't know, and you have to, you know, be clear about what your boundaries are.
And so, you know, I don't have a pretense to objectivity, and because I'm not an academic, I don't really have to maintain one.
And I think that you both in your publication careers, I imagine you would...
You know, you would start to close off some avenues if you pushed farther into the activism line.
But maybe that depends upon, like, you know, how you're hired right now and whether you're looking for work or whatever.
Matt's much safer than I am.
That's the thing.
It's a question of how well supported I think we are by institutions and by the media platforms that we use.
You know, my experience for six years in two different cults is like a defining feature of my life and I can't really undo that or unsee that or like not come from the perspective of I don't want people to be unduly influenced by charismatic.
I just don't want that to happen.
It's like having an instinct against bullies.
And so I'm never going to get rid of that.
But what I do want to have more of is the kind of like...
editorial and fact-checking oversight that I get when I move more into journalism with publications like The Walrus or Jen at Medium, where somebody is going to vet every sentence that I write and say, give me two sources for this.
And then a lawyer is going to go through everything and they're going to hedge.
And they're going to say, okay, do we really need to go that far?
Or can't we just let this speak for itself?
And that process...
I think it's been really good for my work, but I think also it's been really good for my personal life in the sense that it's made me a lot clearer about the difference between why I'm personally motivated to do something and whether or not I'm being of service or whether or not I'm...
Just kind of feeding my own needs, which is very easy to do in this environment of self-employed content production.
I don't think I can be objective, but I think I can test myself against principles of neutrality or fairness.
And invite that and then just go from there.
That's great.
One thing that strikes me is that the people who are concerned and have self-awareness and degrees of doubt about their motivations and how pure they are and so on, they're not the gurus.
So if you have those, you're probably doing okay.
I also realized that, you know, good interviewer technique probably doesn't end on a negative question.
Right, right.
So on that, learning as we go along.
So, of course, you have the Conspirituality podcast, which I heartily recommend.
And we haven't really spent time getting into your personal experiences.
With cults, which is somewhat amazing.
But again, illustrating our brilliance as interviewers.
So I'm sure we'll have conversations in the future.
So are there any other upcoming projects?
Are there areas where people can find your work that you'd want to highlight or mention?
Yeah, I think I just finished the contract with one section of the Medium platform where I've been given space for 12 columns,
four per month, starting on March 1st.
And I'm going to try to put together a kind of summary series called the Conspirituality Fieldbook or something like that.
So I'm kind of looking forward to that opportunity.
Thank you for your kind words.
Your own podcast has been really helpful for me personally.
The podcast is really fulfilling to work on.
We have to continue to broaden our horizons, I think, and figure out how to not bite off more than we can chew and stuff like that.
I would like to put together the last year and a half or so of Reflections on Conspirituality into some sort of larger book.
So I'll see if I can pull that off amidst homeschooling and related chaos here.
But yeah.
Yeah, it sounds like good things.
But this has been really fascinating.
I could continue talking endlessly, as Mark could attest.
But I really appreciate all the time you've spent and the insights you've offered.
And the next episode that will come out after this...
Following on your advice, Mafia, about, you know...
Dealing with people that you're well-qualified.
So we're going to cover Abram X. Candy.
Oh my gosh.
Oh, that'll be fascinating.
Yeah.
So this is possibly our last episode before we're ceremoniously kicked off.
But yeah, that will be a change of peace as the kind of proper left-wing people tend to be.
But yeah, look, from me too, Matthew, thanks so much for talking with us.
To our listeners, absolutely, the Consumptuality Podcast is required reading.
It is prescribed text because, you know, really that original generation, you know, guru-like behavior was really the inspiration for us to look at this, these newfangled gurus who are a weird new thing.
You know, I don't think you can really understand what's going on with these people without understanding the gurus in the spirituality, health and wellness space.
So it's not only a great podcast, but it also covers essential material.
So we'll post links to all kinds of ways in which you can link up with Matthew and another related materials.
And yeah, just thanks again.
Thank you so much, both of you.
Thanks.
You've also added a new sign-off for me.
I think, Matt, I'm going to finish up every episode by saying that you need to grovel at the feet of your muscle master.
