Decoding the Gurus - Special Episode: Interview with Matthew Remski on Conspirituality

Episode Date: February 20, 2021

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

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try our best to understand what they're talking about. the world has to offer and we try our best to understand what they're talking about. I'm Professor Matt Brown and with me is Dr. Chris Kavanagh. And sometimes we have a great mind to help us understand the other great minds. And that's the case today, isn't it, Chris? It is, yes. So we've invited on Matthew Ramske, 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 a yoga teacher or yoga practitioner I would say practitioner I don't I haven't I haven't taught in a classroom except for training groups where I will give like history and culture content for yoga teacher training programs but I haven't taught like 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 Conspiratuality, 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 respect. But you're speaking about it from the position of people who have a lot of experience. 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, you know, 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 Brit 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 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's 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 at stuff that is related to unhelpful and unhealthy things whereas the holistic health beliefs there's nothing wrong like you can read those and those capture another aspect of it and they're not wrong they're not anti-science, so you'd probably be glad to know that even psychologists, when we study those beliefs, we do make that distinction as well. Right. So 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 conspiracy reality sphere. And part of the motivation that I wanted to get your feedback on was after Matt and me did the JP Sears episode, where I'd actually came across JP 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 afterwards and he's continued down that road. And I wanted to get your opinion first on those overlaps that we observed

and that you see in JPCS. 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 Trump era and with COVID related to that? So that would be my opening question to ask for your enlightenment. 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. You know, 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 you know european fascisms of the early 20th century uh in which in which the body becomes kind of fetishized as the the microcosm of the of the pure nation which usually means you know the purely xenophobic nation and so there are deep threads of conservatism i would say even even right-wing is them and fascism within uh within the history of wellness culture and in when we get into the digital age however i would say that there's a pipeline between right-wing conspiracism to or between spirituality and right-wing conspiracism to, or between spirituality

and right-wing conspiracism that's defined by the basic libertarianism of the industries involved. So there's this basic principle of hyper-individualism at play where 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 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 under his influence, of course, is some sort of core reality principle. 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. 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 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 confronted by the needlepoint of the state. 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, with obviously very positive sides to it. But there's actually also a darker side to that as well. 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 commuterian type things. 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 sort of 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, you know, 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 like you kind of hinted that and you've mentioned on conspirituality many times, there's a long term association with alternative health movements and counterculture, left wing counterculture movements and the 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 candidate in the last cycle, 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, do you feel that that sphere, that element, it hasn't really had a strong purchase in the communities? 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. 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 his good-natured picking on vegans begins to have a more hardened political edge to it, 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, yoga cultures and communities and texts, there's often a lot of idealization that has to be sort of taken on in order to pretend as though medieval yoga cultures were inclusive or something like that. And so, the history and the authenticity and the traditionality of things like yoga and Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine are hotly contested. 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 talk to people who research the Sanskrit, 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, usually they have some sort of immediate claim or observation that they want

to make, and then they want to 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 garometer parameters, right? It's just this willingness to just basically say anything. Yeah, they definitely do exercise no restraint in terms of running a mark across any discipline but history and 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 Gad Saad

because he's been on my mind recently, but not Gad Saad. Taleb. Taleb. Nassim 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 an 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 that because Matt 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 gurusphere where people are very, very comfortable to suggest a totalizing narrative

across entire cultures, millennia. And we've all been 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, 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 and oh man yeah and i know you have very strong opinions with him i want to hear these i don't agree because the thing i really appreciated

about it was that you know him because he's toronto academic and so you are aware of the political aspects which which often get overlooked in the way he presents himself. But that way of talking with complete confidence, and even where you're adding caveats and disclaimers that they're just kind of throwaway points, I think he is a really prototypical example of that kind of person. You can do that well. typical example of that kind of person you can do that well yeah and and the the caveat itself is a way of tamping down the effect of one's the possible effect of one's charisma and and the influencer culture is going to work exactly the opposite uh way is that is that the caveat actually is going to put some sort of like distance or veil over the radiance of the person's confidence.

And that's just, it just won't do. Like your caveat is, JP Sears would tell you directly, you're outsourcing your truth. Because the only way that, 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 so you don't want to like commit over commit to to you know going into somebody else's territory or making a fool of yourself but like in influencer culture that's just not a thing it's like that 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 eternal source of truth and a real trust and belief in the ineffable as opposed to the external and the objective. And that feels just really central to what's going on. Yeah. And I think it's a misprision of some very beautiful old literature. 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 what is this self? And the father will say,

and the father will say, well, 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 philosophical lesson, the ancient philosophical lesson, which is about, as far as I can tell, thepressibility of existence and and the failures of language and the the inability that that people seem to share of being able to really find anything to hold on to uh so they so they decide out of an act of faith to sort of 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,

JP 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, and as we've, 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 to 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 and, or polishing the mirror and all of the various analogies and metaphors that you get in that literature this might be the stroking ego 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 are often point out that that actually what underlies that in many

of the cases in the gurus that we're looking at is very mundane insights, right? 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 attention. You know, as you're speaking,'m i'm thinking about how uh maybe it's the the haiku and the whole genre of of then poetry that would be antidotal to this because because the the the uh the observations are so naturalistic but also banal you know uh that that basho is talking about the frog in the forest pond and I don't think

Eric Weinstein would quote that right like he might if he pointed out that it was a Zen koan oh I see okay all right oh and if he did maybe if he did a hipster interpretation of it but if there was an exegesis that said that that oh the you know the frog symbolizes this or that, or 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 there's a tradition in anthropology looking at this literature that talks about invented traditions have you ever come across that before matt what's no no so hobsbawm and ranger i think are the two who and 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. And 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 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 a traditional, he wanted it to be an Olympic sport, which he succeeded in and so on.

But so this image of like ancient traditions where it's layered on top but it can but it can actually be very recent and i know matthew from some of the things i've heard you talk about in conspirituality and i think you've done some investigations as well into that that very thing in yoga communities uh 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. And 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 know, 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 we 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.

They don't, you know, the notion that yoga teachers are touching the bodies of students doesn't emerge until the 1930s. And that happens in the classroom of another main kind of mythological figure. 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, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, was Patabhi 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 Brahmachari 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. 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? That it's, I mean, that it's primarily been 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, you know, the communities when these kinds 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 is worth $40 billion or something and is riding on these claims of ancientness. Because he did the research and the legwork 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 this wasn't, 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 uh 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. Ma, 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 ashism as a practice right but what going to university and studying the history of buddhism and buddhism in other cultures that the kind of actual culture from a anthropological perspective it revealed that my personal image was founded on you know 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 was 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 uh cyril henry hoskin who was the son of a plumber and had you know no no connections to tibet or any of that and it was like it was all you know basically just his. 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 you start looking into the history, even of frauds or invented traditions, it's often very fascinating what actually happened, like how people people why they were presenting traditions in certain ways or or way why for example we've inherited the view that buddhism is a philosophy another religion right there's a there's a reason for that right right um but but yeah so this is music to my ears but i'm i'm wondering my for 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 is 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 have persisted for hundreds of thousands of years are good. And when you think about it, that really is, 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 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? 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 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.

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 like it's in their it's in their bodies yeah and look and i think that's an i mean it's a natural thing dare i say i mean like my you know my kids uh my family all does karate and it's nice you know the fact that there is a history to it yeah that it's not just like i like irish dancing yeah you're like irish dancing like the fact that there is a history to it. Yeah. That it's not just like. I like Irish dancing. Yeah, you like Irish dancing. Like the fact that it wasn't made up by Bruce down the road. Right, right.

Is, you know, there's nothing wrong, I think, with like, you know, 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 some people seem to go into periods or phases of sort of like reconstituting the authentic or the traditional. And i'm thinking about uh there was an early um you know uh early anti-colonialist uh activist who ended up i think becoming prominent in the rss in um in in india in the late 19th century his name what's the rss uh the 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 all of this stuff. 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, you know, eviscerates this body that, you know, 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. And so it's not like this is a new story either. Like people are getting disillusioned all the time

and then they recongregate 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 with philosophers having philosophical battles about the details of the dharma and and sometimes sometimes yes but a lot of times it's polemical like you see the conference and they're disparaging the characters of the monks who practice the other thing and you know saying those idiots and right or 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 was that you know this appealing back to the image these ancient traditions right like talib but uh 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 One that I've heard him reference multiple, multiple times is Braveheart. But he mentions it as if it was a historical, yes, it was a Willie Wallace, but he was not the way that he was portrayed in that movie. But it wasn't Mel. But for J.P. Sears, it really feels the way he talks about it. Like that movie is what actually happened you know and so he he talks about he wants to be like william wallace and yell out freedom as he's being disemboweled

and and i'm listening for going but you know that was the movie right like that so it just 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. size. 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 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. 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 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 um one of the questions came from the discussion we had with teen neuron the philosopher who has looked at conspiracy theories and echo chambers and what's the other one Matt? Yeah, incentives, online incentives. Yeah, yeah, filter bubbles. Filter bubbles and gamification. He has many things.

He's got his fingers in many pies. Echo bubbles, echo bubbles. But one question he had for us, and it was quite productive area that we discussed was whether 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 and the negatively veeranced side of things. harsh criticism and the negatively vealanced 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, you know,

welcome into my world. There are a lot of leaders who are doing love letters to their potential recruits all the time. So yeah, 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 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 video elements, as I suggested, to amplify things like intrusive eye contact. There's somebody that you can look up about 30 seconds at what she does in terms of the aesthetics to see that there's this like completely oversaturated, absolutely like scintillating, uh, HD quality to the, to everything that she does and to the, to the, I mean, the focus and the texture and her makeup and the,, 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 are beginning intentionally or not to create cultic dynamics are starting to utilize, you know, 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. Like he's just all over that microphone. I don't know. I don't know how you guys like 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. couple of years ago ran like a super well attended or subscribed operation out of um boulder i think or crestone california uh right um he he got he got busted by um uh b scofield who's a colleague of mine and kind of like a guerrilla journalist gonzo uh 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, people don't have to buy in at very high levels 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 and get it from somebody else means that they're very transitive, right? It's like you could pick and choose, you know, you just have to open another tab and some other guy is there staring into your eyes. And so I think what really super confounds cultic theory is QAnon because obviously the behaviors that people exhibit are of full indoctrination and then co-recruitment. And the indoctrination happens really fast. Like 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, 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 I mean, prior to QAnon, I mean, I was just thinking earlier today of QAnon as, 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 right the chemtrail wiring facebook group so there are probably other examples too and um you know correct me if i'm wrong but i i get the feeling that they're similar in a way and that they're they're crowdsourcing their doctrine which is you know it's it's 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 that I'm aware of that changes the focus a little bit away from,

okay, well, is this really a pyramid with leadership and, you know, lieutenants and inner circle? 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 you know 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 and even 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 yeah that makes sense to me there's so so many things matthew you mentioned that completely gelled with my impression that yeah i 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 i'm doing that idw thing of praising the the person i can't resist it's still true yeah 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 join the dark side, you've got the right timber and the right elegance for phrases. We're screwed, Matt. We got no chance. But apart from that fawning praise. Can I just say something about that? Is 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 uh and so yeah like i do have some some like my some theater and voice training in my in my background and so i just can't help but to use that but then yeah you're right you pointed out and i'm like oh boy no it's busted yeah 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? Yeah.

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 gurus Twitter account only follows the people that we've covered. Right. So it's a nightmare feed to log into. But, but one of the things that you notice is that there's a lot of overlaps with people that you wouldn't like, for example, James Lindsay was retweeting JP Sears recently, or Scott Adams was being retweeted by Eric Einstein or Eric Einstein. He'd like that. Eric Weinstein. You 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 the hardest take and like i think there is an element of they have to constantly be providing the next big thing or you know the next big take well i 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 jp sears and somebody else that are and 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 the economic spread and and uh clout of unregulated industries is that they co-promote as they are in competition with each other as well the idea is that they're they're they're always creating new markets we had a guest on uh rebecca baruchi 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 then that has set the stage right for like for sort of mind over matter, you know, heal yourself through good intentions stuff. So Rebecca Barucki 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 the 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. of like 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 mean, we've talked a bit about the, what you've, I think what you've talked about for

years, like unregulated markets that we've noted in an informal sense about the tendency to promote supplements across figures that you wouldn't necessarily associate that that's related to their brand. Absolutely right. Like Eric Weinstein, right? A kind of science-y 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 grammar there 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 group,

essentially what they would do on Twitter is that they would 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 right and like yeah that i didn't make that connection so clearly but right that 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 and those build relationships and marketing relationships through affiliation deals. And yeah, 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, 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 as a like 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 yes and it is true that you know you can you can appear with someone without endorsing them you could 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 and there's a very distinct political flavor or a very distinct ideological pattern, it is informative. And the elements that you're talking about here with cross promotions and actual profit, 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 just, yeah. 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... Brian Rose. That's it, Rose. And just the nature of their discussion, I mean, they spent 40, the vast majority of their time talking about like business. Right. Like it was that 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 sort of spiritual or kind of new age principles, but they very quickly went. And brave hearts. Yeah, brave hearts. But it very quickly came back to how that would be used to in order to you know bill i forget the the buzz phrases they were using but it was always stuff like yeah i think they were using the word empire he was actually using the word i'm going to build my own line empire and that stuck out to me going is that that's just yeah yeah you because when you were talking to me about that you

were strongly emphasizing but these guys are just like they're just capitalists like like they were saying it felt like they were saying the quiet bit very loud um anyway i don't know yeah i yeah i don't think it is a 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?

Like, what is that? And this is why I wanted to say that if you want an addition to the gurometer, 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 the mh you become yes there there there we go but uh 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 they're allowing their audience into a kind of locker room that is hyper intelligent it might not be so smelly it might be like it might smell like tea right it

might it might it's like a an enlightened locker room and so and so yeah i just wanted that was the main thing that i wanted to throw onto the garometer list is uh grandiose i don't want to necessarily i mean toxic masculinity comes with a lot of pre-definitions but and it and some of 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. pages 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 but the um that we listened to four hours of eric and douglas murray uh oh yes i saw i i, I listened, 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 and you

know touch a little bit on political topics and uh contemporary issues but it 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 being allowed to see this world of intellectuals and academics and the

kind of, you know, 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 that's their framing i i want to say something that feels a little bit sad, which is that I think the bro influencer vibe that is so attractive is really a 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.

But the last thing that I clipped was a quote-unquote interview, really kind of overheard conversation between JP Sears and his buddy Tim Kennedy uh who's an ex-MMA fighter and uh and and an ex um army ranger I think who also revealed that he was one of the um I think unmarked or unbadged federal agents who was roaming through Portland this summer, throwing people into tactical minivans. So, you know, like there's a real intersection between between JP's tip and hard, 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 jp sears is like groveling in front of in front of his muscle master uh tim kennedy but also there's this like this kind of um facade of intimacy and i don't know it's like when you see when you see guys like not in the

locker room who are not really able to make eye contact but they kind of like greet each other with a chest bump while looking away it's kind of that feeling where uh there's there's this there's this sense that there's this there's this sense that that there 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, 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 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 i might do on this

i have something to say but i don't know i just i just really like what matthew says like i i i mean it's it's so much in along the same lines that we've been talking about which is that the form is really important and 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 groveling somewhat in that 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 criticise, 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. Yeah. But obviously many of them are not super happy with our criticisms. So it's been interesting to pay attention to their responses. Right. And, I mean, I don't think i'll be too unfair when i say that i think 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 i just i get the sense that they they just they just like the feeling it's it's it's the feeling in the form yeah they love them like i i don't know i don't know if you heard i 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 he i mean i i like all of all of my red flags went off uh went up and started waving around because literally the feeling in the room with probably five or six hundred people attending, it was packed. It was a lecture hall. We all paid thirty five dollars to be there for a two and a half hour lecture where he didn't get to the bloody content until the last 15 minutes.

And that was terrible. So he just did his buzzwords and his feminists are ruining everything stuff. But the feeling of him walking out onto the stage, the only thing that came close to it was when I went to a concert like 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? Like there was this buildup,

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 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, you know, 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. And so, 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 gurus 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 i'd be interested to hear your opinion on but 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 skeptics 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, had no interaction with them,

but it hit me like hard when I heard the announcement. And the thing that surprised me at that time was that I hadn't realized I had developed a feeling of a one one completely one-sided uh like feeling of intimacy or friendship with this with this host and I'm sure you know who would have been a lovely guy if you'd met him in person or just a normal person but it definitely made clear to me and this was uh like in the early era of podcasting that that intimacy was possible yeah and so i 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 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 like i wouldn't expect that if i met you in person that things would be very different so the the 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 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 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 that it it just it ends up bringing back to me this distinction that the philosopher T kept making that 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're, they're, they are brothers. They obviously grew up in a very complex,

uh, you know, sort of network. Uh, and so they have legitimate intimacy and they are also like absolutely performing their, their social roles and their, and their, and their, and their professionalism. And so and so yeah and that's another thing about influencer culture in general though is that is that it it it really breaks down these categories between uh between personal and professional uh and between and between private and public in very very disarming and uh and and disturbing and disturbing ways um But to speak to your question about like, okay, well, so many of our subjects are men. And I think as 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, we are talking about a practice and a consumer population that's probably 70% or 80% women. And I do want to say that leadership and charismatic leadership amongst women influencers is just as big. can tell many of the same sort of dominance principles that we see in in the in the bro sphere um but i don't spend i mean i've done i've done journalism on on somebody on people like kelly brogan uh but i don't spend a lot of time uh critiquing that because i really believe that you know legitimate feminist scholars should be doing that uh and, and, and I, it's very, I think it's

very difficult to do that without, without, uh, you know, appearing to be insensitive or misogynistic or sort of like ignorant about, about, uh, you know, structural misogyny. Uh, but I, I will say that a lot of the women influencers that we look at on the podcast, so, um, you know, Brogan, Christiane Northrup, Bauhaus' wife, Yolande 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 goddess-type idealization of women's power that is centered in reproduction, 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 crib

with every facet. But it's all good. All right. It's good, yeah. very fast but it's all right yes good yeah so maybe do you have time just for one more uh set of questions and then i'll let you escape yes but it's been a pleasure matthew and like for sure for sure i 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 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 overlap but in any case the last thing I wanted to ask you about you because we we've kind of touched on things that we are missing with the grommeter 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 like 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. And I wonder though, this balance between when you're studying a phenomenon and you're critical of it, and you think it does real harm, that how you can retain a kind of objective researcher

bias where it doesn't become that you're just, I'm not sure if I always do this, but like, you know, that 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, I think 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, what really struck home for me was the sort of 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, I don't have to maintain one. And I don't like, 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 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... Yeah, you see? I mean, that's the thing is that we have, you know, it's a question of

how well supported i think we are by institutions and by and by the media platforms that we use uh i'm you know my 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 people ever like I just don't want that to happen it's like having a an instinct against bullies and and so I'm never going to get rid of that, but what I do want to have more of is the kind of 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's going to go through everything and they're going to hedge. And they're going to say, okay, do we really want, do we really need to go that far? Or can't we just let this speak for itself?

And that process has been really, I think it's been really good for my work, but I think also it's been really good for just my personal life in the also it's been really good for my my just 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 you know just kind of feeding my own needs or which is is very easy to do in this, in this environment of, of, you know, self-employed content production. Right. So, so yeah, I, I don't think, I don't think I can be objective, but I think I can test myself against, you know, principles of neutrality or fairness uh and and invite that and and and then and then just go from there that's great yeah like you know 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 you're probably uh you know you're doing okay um right but i i i also realized that you know good interviewer technique probably doesn't end on a negative question right right so right so on that um learning as we go along. So of course, you have the Conspiratuality 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 but so are there any other upcoming projects or areas where people can find your work that you'd want to highlight or mention uh yeah um i am going to i think i just uh 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 field book or something like that. So I'm kind of looking forward to that opportunity.

We're very, yeah. Thank you for your, your kind words. Your, your, your own podcast has been really helpful for me personally. And yeah,

the podcast is really fulfilling to work on. We have to, you know, continue to broaden our horizons, I think, and, 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, not quite sure what the future holds. Yeah, it sounds like good things. But this has been really fascinating. I could continue talking endlessly, as Matt 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, Matthew, about dealing with people that you're well qualified

so we're going to cover abram x candy who's oh my gosh oh that'll be fascinating yeah that's so this is possibly our last episode before we are ceremoniously uh kicked off but yeah that that will be a change of ps as the kind of proper left-wing people tend to be um so yeah but but yeah look out for me too matthew um thanks so much for um talking with this um to our listeners absolutely the um conspirituality podcast is is required reading it is prescribed texts because you know know, really that original generation, you know, guru-like behaviour was really the inspiration for us to look at these newfangled gurus who are a weird new thing. But, you know, I don't think you can really understand what's going

on with these people without understanding the gurus of 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 other 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 I'm going to finish

up every episode by saying that you need to grovel at the feet of your muscle master. So thank you for that. That'll be better than bye-bye, right? Yeah, yeah. That's not creepy at all. All right.

Thank you, Matthew. Thank you. Thanks, man. Bye. Bye-bye. Thank you.