The Jordan Harbinger Show - 871: Julian Walker | How Conspiracy Theories Make Society Sick

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

Conspirituality co-author Julian Walker joins us to discuss how influencers have curdled New Age spirituality and wellness with the politics of paranoia. What We Discuss with Julian Walker: Why have so many wellness influencers gone off the conspiracy deep end since COVID began? What do these conspiracies have in common, and who benefits from their proliferation? How do otherwise reasonable people get sucked down conspiracy rabbit holes? How "The female-dominated New Age (with its positive focus on self) and the male-dominated realm of conspiracy theory (with its negative focus on global politics)" has synthesized into a hybrid system of belief dubbed "Conspirituality" by sociologists Charlotte Ward and David Voas. Why a privately owned platform's refusal to host and perpetuate the views of disinformation peddlers isn't censorship or a violation of free speech. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/871 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

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During the pandemic and now afterwards, I noticed a lot of wellness influencers, woo-woo or more spiritual friends of mine. They just started falling into the path of weird conspiracy theories. Some of them went into QAnon, pseudoscience, quackery, and cures. I thought this was just something I noticed in my own circle. Maybe it was just the internet kind of weirdos. Until I met today's guest, Julian Walker. He studied this whole phenomenon that he calls conspirituality,

and today we'll discuss how a lot of spiritual practices. such as yoga, wellness circles, etc., can really become a pipeline to conspiracy thinking and even cults. So if you're into the cult stuff, disinformation episodes we've talked about here on the show, or skeptical Sunday type of episodes, I think you're going to enjoy this conversation. So here we go with Julian Walker. Thank you for coming on, man. I actually got interested in your work because I noticed, in part, because I noticed that during the pandemic, and even slightly before, a lot of my friends, and I use that term sort of loose, because we're talking about people I know from being in podcasting or being in an online business space for a decade and a half. A lot of my friends who were, especially in the wellness space, yoga, even the jujitsu kind of guys, a lot of these guys and gals who were in the spiritual

movement type stuff, they started getting weird. And some of them went so far off the deep end that I can't even talk to them anymore because they're not living in a shared reality, if that makes sense. And I'm wondering what sparked your interest. in all this. Surely you've noticed similar phenomenon. Oh yeah. A similar phenomenon. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, that's interesting to know that you saw it too. So yeah, I mean, basically we are three guys on this podcast called spirituality.

And the reason the thing exists is that all of us were involved in the yoga and wellness kind of space professionally, both as consumers and as teachers and, you know, having just been in that world for a long time. And when the pandemic started, we noticed on all of our social feeds that it was getting weird. like you said. And it was very quickly sort of moving through these different cycles of memes. You know, COVID is not real. It's closed by 5G. It's part of an elaborate plan to, you know, take over the world. Or population reduction was the other one that kicked off later. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so you can't, you can't trust anything. So there's this sort of skepticism

towards anything that is quote unquote mainstream or claims to be about following the science or something like that. These became catchphrases. But there's this. is at the same time a really sort of increased credulity towards some pretty outlandish claims that just kept escalating as the pandemic continued. I noticed that even the people who were seemingly trying to moderate this, they would say things like, just remember, this is a space of love and inclusivity.

And it's like, well, okay, but you're saying that, but then you're also promoting this other thing where you're clearly tribalizing people into believing stuff that you have no evidence for. You know, you came back from Burning Man or whatever, not there's anything wrong with Burning Man. Sure. And suddenly you realize that you don't need medicine for anything.

And it's like, well, that's bullshit, man. And you're hurting people by telling them that. It's not a belief that you don't need medical care. That's just not a thing you're going to credibly believe in that. And then suddenly that applies to everyone who's following you on Instagram. Yeah. I mean, this was one of the early iterations that we observed and that made us start saying, guys, we got to talk about

this. One of us already had a podcast, Derek Barris, one of my colleagues had had a podcast and said, hey, let's just jump on and talk about this. We'll talk about it, maybe a couple episodes, and then, you know, we'll have addressed what we're seeing. And now here we are, like, we've created, you know, hundreds of hours of content. And we have a book that just came out. And it has been this inquiry that just kept going and going because we live in such strange times. One of the first ideas, as you just correctly pointed out, is that that sort of came to the fore was that, you know, viruses don't really cause illness, and we don't really need conventional, so-called Western medicine to help protect us from diseases. Really, it's all in the mind, or really,

it's coming from technology. So there was this guy named Tom Cowan, who early on in the pandemic, who's a homeopath kind of guy, one of these guys who used to have a medical license and then lost it because he did a lot of unethical things, and then he becomes kind of a contrarian influencer. And he's saying every pandemic that's ever happened happened because of new electromagnetic technology. And so this is really not about a virus. That's all actually just a ruse. Wait, how did he explain to Black Death?

Is he like, they invented? What was electromagnetic during that pandemic? I have to know what his theory is for that. Yeah, I'll have to look back and find out exactly how he made sense of that. In 1684, they discovered magnetism. It didn't exist before then. What are you talking about? Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. but this went viral. This got shared by a bunch of celebrities. This woman, Kathy Hilsen, who's a singer, I think Seal was enamored of it. Several people were just, like, boosting the stuff, which then leads, as things continue in our story, to Mickey Willis,

who's someone that we knew kind of tangentially or sort of one degree of separation from the L.A. spiritual scene. He produced Plandemic, right? Yeah. non-documentary where it's just like a bunch of, well, made-up stuff. Yeah, so Mickey Willis is an interesting character, right? Because he's been very involved in the spirituality scene in L.A.

He is a fixture at this church called Agape. That's kind of like a science of mind, new age, quasi-Christian, but like very hip church that a lot of people are into on the west side of L.A. Agape, otherwise known as agape by people who don't know what the little thing in the end of the E is. Got it. You're familiar. Really unfortunate. Now, I'm not, but I just assume it's spelled like a gape and that's funnier than caving into

their BS making me pronounce things like that. I don't do, I don't do what are those called? Accents, A. I'd say, glap. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the French name for that. I refuse.

Yeah, and so Agape is like one of the Greek words for love. It means brotherly love or, you know, fraternal love or something like that. Actually, no, not fraternal love. I think it's the divine love of God pouring down on all of us, something like that. So Mickey Willis poured down his divine bullshit in the form of pandemic, which is, which is, he calls a documentary expose, but really it's a 26-minute interview with this disgraced former researcher named Judy Mikovits. And essentially, the through line is that once again, there's an alternative secret

explanation for what's really happening. And it's that the whole pandemic was really planned and it's a totalitarian plot. And again, it gets widely shared. It goes viral. It gets millions of views in just a few days. and we're off to the races. Yeah, I mean, a few of those views from me because I will immediately watch stuff like that

when kooky people share it with me. Of course. Like, I can't wait. Yeah, I can't wait. I watch all of it. And I've seen stuff where my wife walks in and she's like, do you want to talk about something? Because I was watching, like,

and I shouldn't even admit this, I was watching something about like Nazi Holocaust stuff. And my wife is Taiwanese-American. And she's like, what are you doing? Are you okay? And I'm like, it's for recent. starts purposes, you know, but I'm just strangely interested in watching this because I like to find the holes in things like this and they're very obvious to me. Often show fans will say, can you watch

this and I'll watch it? And then I'm like, oh, what did you think? And they're like, I don't know. All my friends are sharing this with me and it doesn't seem right, but I can't put my finger on it. And that freaks me out, right? Because that's how you radicalize people. They watch something and they go, it doesn't seem right, but all my friends believe it may be, I'm wrong. I thought I would share it with you. And I'm like, holy crap, stranger on the internet, I'm the last line of defense between you starting to believe that the Holocaust didn't happen or something along those lines. That scares me and shows me that this is really pervasive and pernicious stuff. Yeah, it's a fascinating and scary phenomenon. I mean, basically, I think that human beings always have a kind

of vulnerability to outlandish stories, to mysterious kind of explanations for the unknown, for the idea of the person who's behind the scenes kind of pulling the strings, for explanations of the world that perhaps rely on things like aliens or, you know, lizard people or that the Jews are all kind of conspiring against us. This is not something we've ever been free of. And, you know, you can even, you can even like see where it overlaps to some extent with our tendency to buy into various fairly outlandish religious beliefs that have been normalized. And I were like, oh, yeah, sure. But there's a way that Scientology is no more weird, say, than Christianity. But we've

somehow culturally come to normalize these things. But I think that even though it's been with us all along, there is something about the advent of the internet that allows for rapid distribution, that allows for the tools, you know, the immersive experience that you're going to have watching a documentary movie that tells you the Holocaust never happened. That immersion in imagery and music and voiceovers and editing techniques, I think it's very compelling. And I think you're right to say that for a lot of people, they watch and they're like, I don't know, this just challenges a lot of my assumptions. Like, maybe I've been wrong all along, which is always what this kind of media tells you. Like, oh, you've had the, you've had the woolpool.

over your eyes, but now I'm going to enlighten you so that you can be one of the special ones who knows the truth and can be more empowered. I find it starts, and it starts early, right? I want to get back to the spirituality stuff in a minute, but a lot of the mail that I've gotten over the last probably even like 20 years has been from young people. I remember what my first sort of experience with this was with America Online back in the 90s. Somebody sent me an instant message and was like, I heard you're a Jew. And I was like, who are you? And they were like, yeah, I'm in the Hammerskins,

which is a skinhead group. And instead of getting mad or starting to cuss him out, which is kind of what he wanted, I just started talking with him. And it turns out he wasn't actually in the hammer skins. His brother was, supposedly. And he was like, yeah, my brother got his tattoos. They're awesome.

I'm going to join as soon as I'm old enough, but I'm like 14. And I just talked with him like a regular human being for a few weeks. And he just was abused, lonely, neglected, bored as hell, didn't give it crap about any other beliefs. And I was like, this is how people get sucked into this crap. This is how people get sucked into skinhead gangs. This is how people get sucked into ridiculous conspiracy theories or neo-Nazi sympathies, stuff like this. And I know I'm going to get a message like, Why are you conflating bad spirituality or nonsense spirituality with Nazi Holocaust denial?

And I don't think that they're that far apart. I don't think they are. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, we looked at cults a lot in terms of these intersections, right? Cults, conspiracy theories, they rely on alternate explanations for reality. There's a sociologist Michael Barclun who refers to it as stigmatized knowledge, right? So if you think about any of your sort of outsider ways of that, you know, being, ways of thinking about the world. It's always like, we know something that the mainstream

normies who are asleep don't know. We can't really prove it to you. We know it either because our cult leader is God or has aliens talking to them, or we know it because we've uncovered through this, through doing our own research, some secret set of facts that somehow hang together in this worldview that really is filled with logical fallacies and very weak evidence and like motivated reasoning, confirmation bias. Nonetheless, it has revealed. to us this knowledge that it makes us special, so it will feel certain needs, right? It makes us special. It gives us a mission in the world. It connects us to a group of people so that we have a sense of belonging. And just like you were, I think, very insightfully observing a moment ago,

like it is medicine for feeling abandoned, for feeling a sense of nihilism and purposelessness, for feeling unworthy. And into that kind of vacuum around, you know, poor reasoning, uh, losing touch with standards of scientific evidence, having all of these sort of psychological and social motivations, I think pretty much any content can then fit as long as it's sort of shaped the right way to engage with that hole, right? Yeah, that's an interesting way to look at it. Like, you're, they're crafting the key that fits into the proverbial hole in your heart, right, in your soul, whether it's a skinhead gang because you're lonely and you're getting picked on and like that won't happen anymore

when you got a brother, a band of brothers who are skinhead tough guys. Yep. Or whether it's, hey, you're, and I hate to use this example, but it's very apt. Your yoga studios got shut down

because of COVID. You're wondering how you're going to pay the bills and a lot of your friends who you respect who are wealthy yoga influencers or fitness influencers or whatever are saying, hey, this is all a plan. Your business wasn't shut down

because of stuff that nobody can control. It's not that. that we just don't know what the hell we're doing is a population right now because we haven't had a pandemic in a century like this, it's that there's this big plan and whoever's behind the plan are probably the people that you already don't like.

And I notice, this is, tell me what you think of this. I noticed the wellness people were like, it's big pharma, it's the health officials, you know, Fauci, whatever. But other people had different sort of demons for this because the demons just took the shape of what they already didn't like. So if you were a wellness person, you had a distrust of the pharmaceutical industry, it was big pharma. If you were a conspiracy theorist and you had a distrust

of the government, it was mostly the government. If you were like a technophobic, sort of nostalgic prepper type, it was, there were vaccines suddenly in the microchips. Sorry, the other way around, but who cares? Why, it's as wrong as having microchips in the vaccines, that thing I just said. So there are suddenly microchips in there. It's because they want to track you. and the technology is going to be used to control and kill you. I kind of noticed this among, look, sample size of whatever I'm following on Instagram, but I noticed those demons just took shape. It basically was like the bad guy in the latest season is stranger things.

The demon just took the shape of the thing you were already afraid of, and that's what showed up as a result of this pandemic. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And where you started there with the yoga studios, right? We have a chapter in our book, which comes out of some of the work that we've done on the podcast, in terms of really trying to understand, like, what's going on here? Why are people vulnerable to this?

How can we understand that without being, you know, totally condescending bastards, you know, and just sort of demonizing people or blaming them saying that they're dumb or something like that? So the chapter in the book is called, conspiratualists are not wrong. And when you look at the demographic that we started off studying, which was people in the yoga and wellness spaces, these are people who are entrepreneurial, they're self-employed, they have no safety net. they typically have no health insurance, like most of them. I'm not talking about the wealthy influencers who are like, you know, gathering all of those followers on Instagram. Just your average run-of-the-mill person who's trying to make a living as a coach, as a yoga teacher,

as a massage therapist, as someone who's offering whatever services that they have, Reiki, you know, runs the whole gamage. Typically, they're living without a safety match. And so for that kind of person, if they're unable, and I fell into this category too, if you're unable to do your week in and week out kind of hours, there's no money coming in. There's no way for you to sustain what you're doing. And then there's the anxiety of like, oh, there's this thing that I could get really sick. And I don't know how I would pay for that, let alone pay my bills and all the rest of it. So one of the things that we found early on was this academic paper from 2011. It's called Conspiruality, it's just where we got our name from. And it's by Charlotte Ward and David Vowas.

and not to go too deep into this here, but there's a really interesting overlap that they identified that we went, yes, that's exactly what we're seeing, and it relates to what you were just saying, Jordan. There's this way that they noticed online the combination of the dark paranoia of conspiracism, which tends to be more kind of a male interest, right,

in being involved in that inquiry into what are these hidden conspiracies. There's an intersection between that and the often more female coded kind of interest in love and light, in this idea that we're heading towards some kind of magical, wonderful awakening. And what they labeled this conspirituality was the coming together of these two things, almost in a way that balanced each other out, where now I can be simultaneously investigating the way the world is controlled politically and socially by some

secret group, but also feeling an optimistic sense that if we can overcome that group, I can wake up into my true self and into being conscious and filled with light and the world will be transformed in a way that ultimately is going to be something to celebrate. It's not only that, right? There's this sort of spiritual prosperity side to it. And the whole thing is monetized, which will surprise absolutely no one. There's conferences that then talk about this. There's online courses or product. And I'm not just talking about like colloidal silver that kills COVID in one shot, you know, from Alex Jones. I'm talking about anything from exercises to different types of supplements. And it's real unfortunate timing, right? Because as these yoga studios closed down or

other gyms, whatever it was, businesses all over closed down, a lot of those people had to find ways to make money online. And if you were not wrapped into this, you might have said, oh, I'm going to teach online yoga for people at home. That's fun. It'll make me money. But then as the competition for that revved up and other people decided that they couldn't or wouldn't do that, they started to sell other things that would pay the bills and a lot of that was just straight grifting. Yeah, so you have the supplements, you have the claims that the breathwork or the meditation technique or the hot yoga or the, you know, defying of public health measures, you know, whatever you thought about that and however that sort of was a bit of a shit show in terms of the public communication, nonetheless,

we're going to defy these things because of our spiritual beliefs. We're going to gather together for a fee in a small space and chant away, you know, our fears and become kind of little mini super spreader events of our own, all because the provider is needing to find some way to still make money. But then beyond that, what you start to see is that people who had social media accounts that were, you know, decent, but not that big, suddenly were able to grow their followings, suddenly were able to increase the revenue that they could generate through that algorithmic kind of escalation. By recognizing, wow, when I say a bunch of stuff about how the aliens are talking to me or they're talking to this other person I know, the Galactic Federation,

I shit you not, is telling us what all of this really means in terms of the timeline of the Great Awakening, which, you know, you had Great Awakening kind of memes coming through from QAnon, which had more of a right-wing bent in terms of photo. focusing on Trump getting reelected and that sort of thing. But now within the New Age communities, the Great Awakening became about fifth dimensional reality and how we're going to, you know, basically the divine aliens are going to come and save us

and we're going to transcend into this realm of light and love, like I was saying before. So that starts to also become a way of monetizing, right? Is that the recognition that as I am telling these stories and as I am claiming the special access to hidden stigmatizing, knowledge, I'm becoming more famous and people are loving me. And I'm now identifying as having a mission as this renegade, enlightened outsider. And I think that's for some people, that is a

very intoxicating brew. I will put myself in that same, well, at least adjacent to that same bucket, because it is, it's very appealing for somebody who's in my position to get more followers, more listeners, which translates to more advertising dollars. I mean, I think about this all the time well before the Joe Rogan appearance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He wanted to come on my show. And I just can't do it. Because it's not good faith stuff.

It's harmful. I'm all for varied opinions and yada yada, I just can't. There's a line I got to draw where there's just, there's a line I got to draw. And it is really annoying to me in a way to see other people sell out and go, well, I'm going to, I'm going to have this person, and I'm going to talk about the aliens and the Jews and the this and that and the plan.

And they build this huge following. And I'm like, man, I would just be so rich if I had absolutely no principles whatsoever. But I can't do it. I can't do it because I have to look my kids in the eye. Yeah. And because I truly, truly think it's one of the most harmful things you can do, which is corrupt somebody's belief system, especially for money. I was going to ask you later in the show

if these influencers believe their own bullshit because if you do, I have at least a little bit more understanding if not respect for what you're doing, but if you don't, you are one of the worst kinds of people that exist, in my opinion. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly where we end up

with that question. That's a question everyone asks us. That's a question that we've debated back and forth a whole bunch behind the scenes. I mean, ultimately we come down in the place of like you don't have x-ray vision into someone's psyche or heart You don't really know what they think or believe.

I think, however, we are constantly making those kind of evaluations as we listen to people, as we watch people, as we see the kind of content they put out. In the book, we sort of talk about a sort of broad distinction between believers and boosters. And we have certain people who we think, like, these people really, really seem to believe what they're saying. And so, like you just said, there is a sense of maintaining a sort of empathic understanding of that. Like, if you really believed that, then it makes sense that you would do and say all these things.

But if you don't believe it, if you know that you're just kind of cynically exploiting whatever is getting you more clicks, if you know that it's not true. I mean, RFK Jr. is a fascinating example. There's a sense that I have that he is passionately committed to what he's doing and saying. I agree. Yeah. I agree. That's why I was on the sense because I'm like, man, he does not come across as a guy is just trying to get. speaking fees. He really believes all this, but I'm, I still can't get there. Yeah, yeah. And, you know,

he's, as you probably know, he's coming from a background of 20 years as being an environmental lawyer, where he's essentially been trying to protect people from the harmful effects of pollution, which largely comes from like government lobbyists and, and they're being in bed with corporations in ways that are really disgusting. He's been fighting the good fight, but somehow he took a wrong turn, in our opinion. And that wrong turn has led him into this place. where he's putting out the most florid kind of example of conspirituality. I'm sure you saw the talk he gave at the defeat the mandates rally, where he was kind of like the headline speaker.

You've got the American flag behind him. You've got the statue of Lincoln behind that. And he's basically comparing people who are refusing the COVID vaccines to being like Anne Frank trying to escape the Nazis. He's talking about all of Bill Gates' little drones spying on everyone, and this being turnkey, totalitarianism, and it just,

it goes off into territory where you're like, that is a science fiction movie that you're describing that you're now infusing with Holocaust references. Like, dude, I get that you're sincere, but you need a reality check.

Yeah, that's, of course, where I ended up falling, as you can see, he is not, he is not in the list of show guests, which is a shame, because he has other, there's a lot of beliefs there and in thinking there

that I think is very admirable, but I just, I have to be careful with the influence that we have on this show. whether or not people agree with me, I think even people who say, Jordan, you're a moron, you should believe in all this. He's right. I think even those people would agree that you have to be careful with the type of influence that you have when you have a platform like this. And so I have to be selective with what I'm infusing my audience with because there's a level of trust that I've

earned over years that I can't misuse. I really respect that. I feel like you're also describing Jordan without saying it directly. You're kind of describing like an equation that, you sold for yourself or that you consider for yourself between your own sense of moral integrity, being able to look your kids in the eyes versus like, well, you know, this is trending. And so maybe if I jump on it, I could make a lot of money. And I think included in that equation is there's some sense of like how immune you are to the kind of adulation that can come from taking the easy way, right? Maybe. I mean, don't get me wrong. I would love it if millions of people were like,

you're right and you're fighting the good fight and everyone else is wrong and here's millions of dollars. That sounds pretty good. Sure. But I also have to go to sleep with my own thoughts at the end of the day. That's my point. It's not good enough.

Like, look, listen, all of us like being on camera and hearing the sound of our own voice. That's why we're in this game. We have a little bit of narcissism. Yeah. But the narcissism is maybe not pronounced enough to overcome that moral discomfort. TBD, watch this space, I guess, right?

Yeah, exactly. Let's see what happens. But you know what? I want to say too that this situates us within one of the topics of the day that's really difficult. And I know you're going to get emails about this, right? Because in a way, some people would say, well, you're a refusal to have RFK Jr. on your show. You're censoring him. You're opposed to free speech. You're part of the problem right now. Right. And to me, I think if when we examine like the history of this stuff a little more closely, even if just in the more recent past, you go and you look at 4chan. Pizagate and QAnon conspiracy theories, which, you know, basically ate the world for a while, originate on 4chan. What was 4chan? 4chan was a completely unmoderated free-for-all, where, you know, just like all of the worst content you could possibly imagine was up all the time. People got ironic about it. People got completely immune to it.

It's a very cruel space. It was a very, like, harsh and bigoted and sadistic kind of space where everything was just fodder for humor in a way, for like dark humor. And Frederick Brennan, who I don't know if he started 4chan or whatever his relationship, he was a very prominent figure with regard to 4chan. He's come to the place, you know, over like the last 10 years where he's just like, it should be shut down. That's the guy who he's disabled, correct?

And he's like, speaks out about how just how awful this message board that he created has become and how it's done horrible things for society. Yeah, he lives with a heavy burden, I think. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, for people who don't know, this is. the message board that were, you know, when there were mass shooters who had connections on those boards, they'd be live streaming their mass shooting on the board, so that people could watch it and people would be cheering along. So it's like, I don't know about your orientation toward this issue

over time, but I, for a long time, I've been a free speech absolutist. I believe in the marketplace of ideas. I believe in if your ideas are strong enough, if you have enough conviction in them, you should be able to debate and you should be able to defeat the other ideas if they're really false if they're really stupid. And I think that there's a lot of truth in that, but we're at a point in time right now with the reality of the internet and social media and how fast misinformation spreads and how people can get really frothed up in this kind of cultish conspiracy dynamic. We're in uncharted territory. And I think the kinds of questions that you are modeling in terms of wondering, like, should I really post RFK junior? I think not. I think maybe there's a line there

for me. I think we're all trying to figure out where those lines are. And I don't think the answer is to say, there's no lines. Just let, you know, everyone fight it out. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Julian Walker. We'll be right back. Have you ever had a moment where you think, man, someone should really do something about this? Then you realize, maybe that someone is you. Well, with the help of GoFundMe, you can change someone's life. You could start a GoFund me to help a friend pay for school, fund that new community space or help a local kid finally get to that national competition. I've seen this myself. Last year, a friend of mine launched a go fund me to help with medical bills after an unexpected surgery. It was incredible how fast the support rolled in. People want to help.

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better at home. A few minutes a day is all it takes. And many of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company. You can find the course for free at jordanharbinger.com slash course. Now, back to the show. It's a life and death for a lot of folks when it comes to this. And that brings me to this concept of karmic responsibility that you talk about in the book, this is one of the reasons why I can't humor a lot of the nonsense that people come to me with. Tell me about karmic responsibility. This is what, this is what's killing people, essentially, in part. Yeah. I mean, when you say carmic responsibility, are you referring to the idea that basically it's your own fault,

like any bad things that are happening in your life? I should have more specific. But yeah, that's what I mean is there's a lot of, well, if you are having a problem, if you have a health problem, it's because you have done something in this life or a past life or it's because of your belief system. I'd love to hear more about this because I hear this. And I'd love to just say, what about starving kids in Africa? What are they done? Why are kids who can't get enough food and they're in a civil war and they're born in Eritrea or whatever and they're escaping over a militarized border?

What are the North Korean kids done wrong? Yeah. to deserve this. And it's just there's no answer to this that isn't complete BS in a past life they were Hitler type of shit. There's just not. Exactly. You know, if you drill down into some of this stuff, I think, I think whether we're talking about certain types of new age beliefs, certain types of cultish indoctrination, certain kinds of conspiracy theories, I would even argue certain forms of religion. Underneath all of this, in my opinion, you have, you basically have existential anxiety. We have to confront the fact that we're going to die one day.

We have to deal with the reality that a lot of things that happen in our lives are random, that bad things do in fact happen to good people, that complete and utter awful human beings often prosper and do well in the world. Now, that's not to say that there's not something to the idea of the kind of social capital that you can generate in the world by being a good person, by having good interactions with others, by caring about them, by doing favors, by showing up in positive ways. There is a kind of energy that I think you generate that has real impacts on the world,

but within a limited kind of framework. Because these things can provoke so much anxiety, the uncertainty of the world we live in, the vulnerability of what it is to be human and that terrible things can happen to us and our loved ones at any time, I think that part of the appeal of certain types of beliefs like the ones we're talking about is that they claim to be able to solve that problem, that sort of existential angst, if you will. The idea of everything happens for a reason, you're never a victim, you're always choosing everything that happens. Somehow, if things seem not to make sense, if your dad gets hit by a bus, or if your child gets leukemia, or, you know, you lose your job,

ultimately it's all for some higher purpose. And so you can hear that idea coming through lots of different belief systems. You're right. It's not just yoga and karma stuff. I remember going to a lecture with a Hasidic rabbi, and it was why do bad things happen to good people? And the short version is, well, you don't know that they're good people. They might beat their wife and you have no idea. I'm like, dude, what are you talking about? Are you kidding me? That's the answer to this? I thought there was going to be way more to this. And the answer is, ah, you just don't know, they might be really terrible people. Yeah, that's a great spin. That's a great spin. You know, in the realm of like, you know, for a while there in the 80s and 90s, there were a group of psychologists who were very

involved, actually starting more in the 70s, who were involved in trying to integrate like Eastern and Western insights about the nature of the psyche. And there's a guy named John Wellwood, who was a theorist in transpersonal psychology, which is that kind of discipline. And he came up with this observation that was really from working with a lot of people who were very spiritual. In this case, they were really into Buddhist meditation. But he observed this thing that he coined a name for, which is spiritual bypass. Ah, yeah. Yeah. Essentially, spiritual bypass means that whatever is really difficult about being human, whether it's the fact that you have childhood trauma or the fact that the world is politically, you know, complicated and often really

harsh, or that there are economic injustices, you know, that you see all around you that may feel guilty about or you may be impacted by, one of the responses to that is to try to just do an end run around all of that difficult stuff and just go directly to some place of divine perfection as a way of avoiding facing it. Now, it works for a short period of time, and it can work intermittently, right, where you can just sort of talk yourself out of any of those difficult emotions

or, like, mental problems, but it doesn't really go anywhere. You're still dealing with that stuff. And what tends to happen, then, is that the lack of sort of coherence around really being authentically aware of those difficult emotions and issues plays out in relationships.

It plays out in your life choices. Young has a famous quote that what remains unconscious appears in our lives as fate in a way. So it's kind of a slightly different angle on this idea of how we're showing up in the world. So one of the things that we see a lot with cults is that cults will exploit that vulnerability to spiritual bypass. That's part of the bait on the hook is like, hmm, here's a yummy, yummy way of feeling like you can just move beyond all of the struggles of being an ordinary human being. Right, it's all for some divine purpose or the spiritual bypassing thing I noticed happens a lot

with a lot of these online influencers that I know. Can we give examples of this actually? I think that's helpful because this is this is so pervasive now that it's almost the default for a lot of people in this space. Yeah, so the idea is basically that, you know, anything that happens to you, the spiritually correct way to see it is that you're not a victim of it. Anything bad that happens to you, you're not a victim of. And conversely, then, anything, think good that happens. It happens because you really deserve it. It happens because you had the right mindset. So the really famous example of this, we see this like in prosperity gospel. We see it in Joel Osteen. Like it's everywhere, but the really famous counterculture kind of spiritual new age version of it

was the film The Secret. Yeah. That came out in 2006. And so what is the secret? The whole thing. And here's the fascinating thing about the secret. If you go and look at that movie again, I know you like to look at this stuff. The first like 20, 15, 20 minutes of the secret, it's this thing that's been hidden throughout time in smoky boardrooms. The elites have known about it. Plato and Aristotle talked

about it. All of the great philosophers across time and spiritual masters have known the secret. And you get really revved up like, this is going to be good. Kind of like you were saying when you ask people and you're like, wait, you ask the rabbi and it's sort of like, what? I'm like, that's here joking, all right? There's more

to it. You're just too lazy to tell me? No. That's it. Yeah, like, you're being prepared for, like, this profound thing that both the physicist and the, and the, and the guy in the boardroom with the cigar who's making billions of dollars, they all know the secret. And what does the secret turn out to be? Your thoughts create reality. And then they go, they keep going deeper and deeper into unpacking this premise in terms of,

like, all of these different examples. If you just visualize that a million dollars is going to come to you, the check will magically appear in your mailbox. And when you give real examples, like I've created. criticized this film for a long time because it was so impactful. It was the biggest selling DVD of all time. You know, not that DVDs were around for that long, but nonetheless. Still, they hit right in the pocket. Yeah. It was hugely popular. Yeah. So when you give real examples, people say, oh, well, that's, you know, surely you're exaggerating. It's like, no, it's an actual

example in the film. Focus on a million dollar check. It will come in the mail. But conversely, then they'll say, if you, at the time the Iraq war was going on, a lot of people didn't like the Iraq war, whatever your political position on that may have been. But they would say focusing on the Iraq war by protesting it makes the Iraq war continue. Interesting. So you should ignore it. If you ignore it, it's just going to go away. Now, here's where this becomes relevant in terms of conspirituality and the pandemic, which is where things really came to ahead, is that you had a lot of these wellness and spirituality type influencers, either denying that it existed, saying that COVID was closed by 5G, saying that viruses don't really close

diseases. That's part of an old paradigm. We're waking up to something new, saying that fear is the real virus and that if you buy into the mainstream narrative that makes you afraid, then you're going to get sick. So here you are creating your own reality and the way to protect yourself from COVID, because especially in those early months, like I think a lot of people were really anxious about it, whatever their guiding kind of worldview may have been, to protect yourself from it, here's the meditation technique, here's the breathwork technique, here's the essential oil you need to buy, here's the supplement that, by the way, you can get through an affiliate link that I have in the description right now, you know. So that's how it started playing out in this specific situation.

I do see that ironically, a lot of the people who are saying, like, you're giving into the fear. I'm like, you're all you talk about on your show feed, YouTube, whatever, is conspiracies about people are out to get you. There's a higher power that is trying to control you. This is going to kill you if you take it. Their radiation from the cell phone towers is going to kill you. And I'm thinking, why am I the one that looks like, I'm afraid, if this is all you think about and talk about? It's very ironic. It's all projection. Yeah, that's a perfect observation. Absolutely. Fear is the mind killer. Do not believe the fear. And now let me tell you everything that you should be terrified of in an absolutely paranoid and irrational way. It's wild. I mean, one of the things we

talk about in the book as well is like, I'm sure you're familiar with it because I know you're a fan of psychology. There's this theory within psychology that's very, very well scientifically supported called attachment theory, right? Attachment theory is essentially about like how we form bonds, how we form relationships, especially in our early childhood and how the experiences we have in terms of forming bonds, learning how to trust people, learning how to be able to bounce back from disappointments or, you know, what's called empathic lapses where we don't feel like we're fully being taken care of, like how those things then shape the way we show up in our adult relationships. than attachment style. And then also, there's a lot of research, because this has been done

intergenerational over decades, it shows how we end up sort of relating to our own kids and some of the issues that transfer across those different vectors. So with regard to cults and sort of conspiracy theories that are organized around a kind of buying into a group identity, one of the things that we've explored is this idea of disorganized attachment. And disorganized attachment is one of the attachment styles within which the defining characteristic is that you are driven to seek comfort from the person who is terrorizing you. Right. So it's the experience that when you're a kid, the parent scares the hell out of you, but they're the only one that you can get comfort from. So you're simultaneously stuck in this dynamic where you're basically in a bit of a

trance because you're terrified of the person you want to get away from them, but they're the one who should protect you from the world. And so we've looked at how, just like you were saying a moment ago, the influencer who's simultaneously saying, be unafraid, I have the answers. By this supplement, buy into this belief system, I can explain to you how this is all part of the Great Awakening that we're heading towards. And then here are all these things that you need to be absolutely terrified of that you never thought of before, because they're fantastical and utterly paranoid. And that that's part of the dynamic, consciously or not, there's this sort of enmeshment in a very, uh, conflicted and intense relational dynamic.

I don't know if that made sense. It does. Yeah, it also sort of goes hand in hand with, I think, trauma bonding, right? Where the elites and the Illuminati, they want to make you afraid. And then also, if you take this medicine that we require for kids to have to go to school, that's going to secretly sterilize you because Bill Gates wants to reduce the population. And it's like, wait, it's very confusing. And I think you phrase it well in the book, you say they create a storm that only,

only they can shelter their followers from. So they create the storm, but then they're also simultaneously the shelter from that exact storm. And it's a great recipe until people start to wake up and figure out what's actually happening, right? Because it's like, well, wait a minute. I wasn't afraid until I started watching all your videos. And then the answer to what you're telling me to be scared of

that I'd never heard about is to buy your vitamins. That's a little on the nose. Yeah, yeah. So we have a phrase on the podcast, watch what they say and then watch what they sell. Right. And, you know, I also want to say here that, that like all of this can sound incredibly cynical and manipulative. And some of the time it is, but I also think some of it is a product of all of these surrounding realities, you know, where the influencer needs to make a living. They're involved in this online kind of dynamic where there may be some sense of audience capture and some sense of like, oh, if I keep escalating my sensationalist rhetoric, it helps me make a living, right? And then getting networked into these groups of influencers who are all showing up together. at conferences and summits. Like the fascinating thing that we tracked as well

is within the yoga and wellness space, the most successful charismatic individuals already had locked and loaded, and I know you can relate to this, they already had a system in place, right? Where you have the website, you have the email capture widget, you have the newsletter that you're going to send out to,

you have the sales pages for the different things that you're doing, You have the affiliate marketing stuff going on. You have the groups of other people who are at a similar level, who you're sharing email lists with by doing these summits. Like this is a model of online entrepreneurial influence that was already in place. And then they could slot right into that conveyor belt, oh, here's the new content. We've got the new content for this season.

It's about COVID denial. It's about the cabal. It's about how public health is really trying to enact authoritarian. on you. So that was wild to see as well. And I think that's also part of why this phenomenon really had legs and really, you know, took off in the way that it did was because there were already these networks in place for spreading things incredibly, effectively and quickly. For money. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. And you've coined the term disaster spirituality, which I think is really apt, because a lot of grifters use whatever, terrorism, health crises, et cetera, to recruit and make money.

I remember after 9-11, if people can think that far back, there were guys selling like parachute backpacks that you could wear. And it'd be funny if it weren't so disgusting, right? Because the idea was if a plane crashes into a building or something, you have this parachute backpack that you can keep under your desk and you can just jump out the window. And it's like, it's really gross. It's really gross because there's no actual use for this.

It wouldn't work anyways if you needed it to. But yet that's what we're seeing is like never miss the chance to use something like COVID to increase your footprint. And now we see that everywhere with every little thing. Even with the Ukraine conflict, we see people like, oh, you know what? You're going to run out of food because Ukraine's a breadbasket and these experts are saying that the grain levels are going to go down,

which dot, dot, dot, you're going to run out of food, even though you live in Texas. And it's like, no, you might have trouble with food if you live in Ethiopia because you're at the bottom of, the bottom of the breadbasket food chains, so to speak, you're not going to run out of food if you live in Tampa. You're going to be fine, right? But there's people selling meals and buckets

for the time when there's no bread left because there's no grain because it's nuclear holocaust. Yeah, it's so shamelessly opportunistic. We've identified now the hole in the market and let's jump on it as soon as possible. You know, the thing that's interesting about that in terms of this disaster spirituality, which we borrowed from Naomi Klein,

who has a book called Disaster Capitalism, people that we follow. So there's a few examples. T.L. Swan is a very famous one. Kelly Bogan is very well known. Charles Eisenstein, who is now the advisor to RFK Jr.'s campaign. These are people we've covered in depth. When the pandemic hit, they were ready to go.

Like literally in the first week of the pandemic becoming something that we all realized we had to deal with and we thought we're going to stay home for two weeks, right? In that initial moment, within that week, they each had really well-written essays, really well-scripted videos, like ideas about everything that was going on before any of us really knew, like even the facts of what was going on. They had a spiritual conspiracy kind of narrative that they were ready to just plug right in and get out there to their hundreds of thousands of followers. It was really a wild thing to see. I saw this, and I know Teal Swan, I've talked about her a little bit before.

For people who don't know, she's kind of a, what would you say, a cult? YouTube cult leader where she kind of, well, she told me she can read something called the Akashik record, which is what, like a list, a spiritual record that details everything everyone has ever done. Basically, dot, dot, dot, I'm psychic and talking to aliens with a little twinge of, what is this, like, ancient Indian lore thrown in there. It's just the flavor of that. And she says things like suicide and killing yourself as a reset button. So it would have just sort of reset all the problems in your life.

and it's she's bat-shit crazy, I think, is the technical term we're looking for. She's a real harmful person. I'm not going to argue with your technical terminology there. Yeah. I think Teal Swan is a really, really interesting person and an interesting character in terms of the stuff that we've looked at. Teal Swan, I think of as kind of being like the living, anthropological missing link between the satanic panic period of the late 80s and the early 90s

and what started to happen circa roughly like 2017 online that then leads to everything that happens in the pandemic. And the reason I say that is that Teal Swan is a great example of a charismatic, kind of spiritual leader figure who gets a lot of traction, gets a lot of followers. She's beautiful. She's eloquent. She's very smart. She reads a lot of stuff and is able to synthesize it and talk at length in ways that

people find very compelling. She talks a lot about trauma. So she's unique in terms of that spiritual bypass thing that we were talking about before because she actually goes the other way where she's like, no. Everyone has these terrible traumas. They've often forgotten those traumas. I have a technology for helping you to heal and to become fully empowered and then to wake up to all of your psychic abilities and sort of enlightened spiritual realizations. What's fascinating about Teal Swan is that I think she kind of created the template right around 2010, 2011, for that kind of leader whose qualification, the thing that makes them special, the things that makes them an authority.

is they have a terrible backstory. They have an origin story that is just the most horrific trauma you can imagine. And the reason I say she's a missing link back to the satanic panic is that there is a psychotherapist named Barbara Snow, who was one of the main therapists during this period of time in American history where everyone was talking about satanic ritual abuse. There were all of these big high-profile court cases around daycare centers, especially, and schools where people were being accused of like the most outlandish, wild satanic ritual, blood drinking, sexual abuse, like being able to fly through the air, like killing animals and feeding them to the kids. I mean, all the most horrible things you can imagine.

And later on, as time by, there's some good documentaries on this. We started to realize that there was like an interviewing technique that the therapists use and that the police often used where the kids would basically end up going down the garden path and giving the answers that made the interviewers. happy, you know, that convinced them of their own confirmation bias. And later on, you know, the fascinating thing about the satanic panic, in 12,000 court cases that were brought around these types of allegations and this big sort of hysteria that, you know, it was on Heroldo and it was on Oprah and everyone was talking about. It was huge. Of course it was. In 12,000 cases,

there was never one piece of corroborating evidence. Like, none of it ever added up to anything. That's not to say there aren't horrible abuses that happen in the world and that there weren't groups that were probably torturing children. Yes, there were. But this idea that there was this big phenomenon going on turned out to be completely baseless. People went to jail for, in some cases, a decade or two. And then were later released because it was just shown to be a completely baseless fabrication. Teal Swan's therapist was one of the central therapists within that whole world who was eliciting these kinds of allegations from these kids of satanic ritual abuse. Teal Swan goes to see her when she's a young woman, and what do you know it?

Turns out she was involved in not one, but two different satanic cults, one of which was Mormon, and one of which was kind of anti-mormon, if I'm remembering correctly. And now she has this elaborate backstory. She's been sewn into a corpse at some point as part of these rituals. She's watched babies be killed. She's been, of course, hardly sexually abused. Terrible stuff. If this really happened to her, my heart absolutely goes out to her.

but the orientation within this lineage of repressed memory stuff that we now know to not be scientifically or psychologically sound is pretty striking. And so Teal Swan then comes onto the scene as like, I'm this wounded healer with this horrific backstory. And that is why I develop these incredible psychic powers. And that is why I'm this truth teller who can look you in the eye and tell you exactly what you need to know in order for your life to get better. And then wouldn't you know all of the satanic panic stuff gets rebooted, and that's what Q&ON is essentially, right? QAnon is this idea that there's this horrible cabal that is secretly trafficking kids and drinking their blood and, you know, involved in this, this pedophiliac kind of weird power dance with the devil.

So satanic panic stuff among many schools and daycare centers, there was one anecdote where it was like a school in Santa Monica underneath there's a system of underground tunnels and they're feeding serpents to the kids. And parents were like digging in the freaking playground and well, they didn't find any tunnels. And it really reminded me of Pizza Gate where there's a secret basement and the comet, ping pong or whatever the place is called. And they're trafficking children there. And there's no basement. That place doesn't have a basement, right? And it's just like, this is the same shit. That's exactly right. That's a very good connection. You know, I think his name's Edgar Welch drives for like hours to go to comet pizza.

call it ping pong pizza or whatever it's called armed, right? And storms in to this place where basically they, you know, have kids have pizza parties and, you know, convinced that in the basement Hillary Clinton has all of these kids that she's trafficking, shoots his way through the only door that's available once he's inside, thinking this must be where the stairs go down to the basement. And what's in there, but like the server for the computers of the business and on top of a concrete slab. There's no, like the whole thing is just made up. But the problem with Pizza Gate and then with QAnon, especially with Q&ONN,

is that people get so convinced of these far out beliefs about what's really happening in the world that they then act in the real world based on those beliefs. And they end up killing people. They end up kidnapping and, you know, having standoffs with the police. And, you know, there's a couple cases of men who killed their own children because they were convinced that their mothers were involved somehow in the cabal. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Julian Walker. We'll be right back.

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I felt bad for the comic pizza guy. Thank God. He didn't kill anyone, hurt anyone. And imagine if he'd been right, he would have been a national hero for going in and rescuing those kids. But the problem is, I remember the cops arrested him and they're like, what are you doing? And one of the cops like, it's the Pizza Gate thing. And other cops like, what are he talking about? And he goes, the Pizza Gate thing.

He thinks there's a basement with kids in it. And the other cops, like, what? I mean, it was just, it's a very surreal video of this guy with his face down on the pavement with a cop's hand on the back of his head. And they're like handcuffing him. And they're just, one of the dudes is just flabbergasted that anybody would believe this. And the other cop's like, yo, don't you have Twitter? It was just so freaking strange. Let me pull up 4chan for you on my phone.

I know all about it. Right. Like, dude, don't you even, do you even Xbox? This is all over the place. Like, talk about it all the time. It's just that nobody actually. believes it, except for this guy who's going to prison for 20 years, for bringing a, you know, rifle into a pizza place. But QAnon also distracted people from real sex trafficking. And I got kind of

duped by this, too. I had some of these supposed, you know, door kicker guys on my show, only to find out that a few months later, they're like, did you know Wayfair, which is a furniture company, is supposedly selling children online? Look at this cabinet. It's $20,000. And the name of it matches a kid who went missing in Mississippi three years ago. And it's like, this is the most unhinged dumb crap. And I don't think a lot of those folks believe it. They use it to raise money for their organization, which is a fake human trafficking organization. And they live in five-star hotels and travel all over the world, raising money for something that is not a real, not that there's no child trafficking, but they're not doing anything with it or they're doing very little.

And unfortunately, a lot of the real trafficking organizations are like, oh, gosh, our hashtags are being taken over. We can't raise money because our donors are shifting to give to these other places that aren't doing anything. They don't have shelters. They're not doing anything. They're telling people they're flying to other countries and rescuing kids that are locked up in satanic cults. And it's just not real. This is not a thing. Yeah. So you're describing the architecture of these kinds of moral panics, right? And the thing is, the horrible thing, the horrible truth is, sex trafficking goes on. It's always gone on. It was going on under Obama. It went on under Trump. Like, it's just, it's part of the world we live in. And there are organizations and there are government agencies that are doing as much as they're able to address it and to try to put a stop to it and to rescue those kids. We've had people on our show who are involved in those kinds of organizations. And yeah, they all said the same thing. They're like, the amount of interference that was caused for us in our attempts to really combat child sex trafficking by all of this wacky conspiracy stuff and people thinking they were going to be vigilantes and kind of.

of get clout online through claiming to be these kinds of heroes. It was just awful for people really trying to do that work. And this is an interesting aspect of what happened in 2020, which is that as QAnon's started to gain more and more sort of mainstream visibility, there were Q&N on people showing up at Trump rallies who were wearing the shirts and waving the banners, et cetera, and it was something that started to get talked about more. There's a moment in which a lot of the big influencers in that particular movement started spreading the message, drop a lot of the familiar hashtags, drop the where we go one where we go all hashtag, drop the Great Awakening hashtag, just focus in on these different issues.

And so there's a researcher named Mark Andre Argentino who's covered this, and he coined this term pastel Q&ONON. And pastel Q&N is this phenomenon that happened in the summer of 2020, where a lot of kind of mommy blogger, Instagram influencer, you know, spiritual, maybe they're in an MLM trying to sell you essential oils,

like whatever the schick is, they had the very curated, you know, kind of pastel colors is why he chose that term. There's a very particular aesthetic and it was very appealing to young women of a certain kind of spiritual disposition.

A lot of those influencers started circulating QAnon themed material, but without any of the Q&on hashtags, right, without any of the distinguishing language. And that's when the new hashtag saved the children started to become something that developed its own traction. And there were a ton of people that we noticed in yoga circles, because yoga in the West is predominantly female, who got hooked into this and started sharing this kind of content on their Instagram, started showing up, you know, there was a march on Hollywood Boulevard here in L.A. sort of showing up at these different things. And then for some of them getting there and being like, oh, wait, this is that QAnon thing. Yeah. This is something else, you know. And yeah, as you were

saying, Save the Children is a hijacked hashtag that refers to something very real. But now it's woven into this lurid kind of fantasy notion of what's going on in the world. It's really a shame because the blood libel, which is like this whole thing, that the Jews are killing Christian babies to bake matzah for Passover, that's been going, is it thousands of years old or merely hundreds of years old? I don't know. I think it's thousands of years old, but we have sort of like the really major incident of it, I think, in the 12th century. Sure. But there's incidents of it much prior to that as well. So I think it's William of Norwich, who is the English boy, who is found stabbed to death. And immediately, this thing crops up that, oh, it's the Jews. And the Jews do it because they need the

blood to make matzah for the high holy holidays, but also they do it because if they kill Christian children, then they will one day get to return to their homeland. And so, yeah, this, this is a pernicious idea that rears its head in different forms again and again. Obviously, there are predators out there. We don't want to look like we're saying there's no such thing as trafficking, but it goes so much further to provide a scapegoat for the vulnerability of our kids. And I hadn't thought about this until I read your book, but really what this sort of says, this in part, is, hey, our Our kids aren't vulnerable because we have terrible health care. We've decimated the education system.

We have weak public safety laws, terrible diets. They're vulnerable because Hillary Clinton is running a satanic blood-drinking pedophile ring in the basement of a pizza parlor slash ping pong place or whatever. And that, I think, is that's sort of the larger meta message here that I think is, well, it distracts us from what we could actually control and do something about because it's actually a real problem. Yeah, I mean, this is a thing, not to get too much into like the political landscape, but it's something that we've wondered about. You know, like if you think about the social safety net, right?

Like the majority of other Western democracies have what is called a strong social safety net. They have good social services. They have universal health care. I went and visited some friends in Sweden about 12 years ago, and I was blown away. I was really blown away with how well taken care of people are. Now, people are going to say they have really high taxes, yet they do have really high taxes. And we can argue back and forth, like the relative merits of these different types of systems. But there's something about the anxiety that we feel.

There's something about the kind of dog-eat-dog world that I think we live in in the U.S. And I'm all for, like, competition and, you know, excellence and certain aspects of meritocracy, I think, are really do generate excellence across a variety of different industries. But at the same time, there's something of. about how we don't really take care of kids, how we don't really take care of families, how so many Americans are one medical emergency away from bankruptcy. That's just a reality,

or couldn't afford if they were unable to work just because they were injured for some reason, or they had to deal with something in their family for a month or two. They'd be homeless. Those anxieties, I think, are part of why the United States is probably more susceptible to some of these deflecting, scapegoating fantasies

about what the real problem is. Like, really, you think Hillary Clinton, sex trafficking kids is really why you're feeling so insecure? That is an interesting point. I hadn't really thought about that, but you're right. And you mentioned this in the book. I hadn't thought about this until, of course,

I read this bit about a lot of yoga studios or just wellness stuff in general, right? They paper over terrible paid, no benefits, over time where you don't get paid because you're not really teaching a class. as so it doesn't count. You could do whatever you want in your phone. They paper over that with good vibes only signs in the locker room and $8 an hour with nothing, no frills. And a lot of these places that preach unity and good vibes are just about consumerism and selling yoga pants like

every other store in the strip mall where they're located. And so those people, you're right, they don't kind of have any sense of agency or control when they hit a run of bad luck. So it's easier to dive into, well, your body reflect your spirit. So if you can't stretch in this inhuman way like the teacher can, it's because your heart's not open or your chi is blocked or some other such nonsense. And that results in dangerous over-training and injury when we don't have a pandemic, when there aren't greater non-conspiratorial issues happening to the entire world. So they layer the spiritual veneer over what essentially is exercise. That's dangerous. I mean, look, you'd never, if you start thinking of stretching is literally just exercise, you'd never say, hey, if you can't

deadlift 400 pounds, it's because. the carmic burden you're carrying. It's too heavy. It's weighing you down. Right. So you have that combined with here's your pittance for working here and you're lucky that you get to sell these Lulu lemons while doing what you love and stretching. That's just a very fertile ground for nonsense beliefs as soon as there's a rock in the road. Absolutely right. So under the best of conditions, you have these kind of issues with like the hierarchy that says the better able you are to do these particularly, you know, deeply flexible yoga poses, for example, the more enlightened you must be, when really the reality is probably just that being a yoga teacher, to some extent, self-selects

for people who are genetically able to do certain things with their bodies, whether or not those things are good for them over time, because having been involved in the yoga world for a good 30 years, I can tell you a lot of the most impressive, acrobatic, flexible-looking teachers are the ones who end up getting the hip replacements or having the spinal fusions. because you're putting a lot of repetitive stress on your body going into extreme range of motion that you know you really shouldn't spend that much time in if you want to have a functional body. So all of that is really, really weird. And then when things, you know, there's a way in which the mainstreaming of something like yoga

normalizes and in a way kind of sanitizes a lot of things, right? So most yoga studios, they're not breeding grounds for cults. And I don't want to in any way like make generalization. that would be unfair towards the community I come from and love and think there's a lot of, like, wonderful things that can happen in those spaces. They're not breeding grounds necessarily for the old type of cult that you might think of. But some of those dynamics are still there. And coming up through that world as a young person, I started to notice, oh, my boss is also my guru. Yeah, what could go wrong? The person who pays my salary, yeah, is also the person who has

the most influence on me in terms of being like an authority figure for me. me spiritually. If I disagree with them about some aspect of how the business is run, that can easily then get turned around to like, oh, this is because I'm too judgmental. This is because my heart isn't open. This is because I'm getting greedy and I really need to look at that and do some more meditation. Those dynamics can be present. Also, because it was a new industry for most of the time I've been involved in it, there were no guardrails. So yeah, you're simultaneously an independent contractor who gets no benefits, but the studio can also make all sorts of non-compete rules that you can't teach at the studio down the street. And, you know, there's all sorts of ways that you have to show up

and maybe do extra work. You maybe have to be there early to turn on the heater and you have to lay out the mats. Maybe there's like all these different ways in which it can become quite exploitive. But then all of that exploitive dynamic is coded in the language of what it means to be on a spiritual path together, to be of service. Right. Yeah. To be of service. Hey, look, you don't need money. You can transcend all that. Well, then why do you need money? Exactly.

Don't ask too many questions. You don't need the money. I need the money. But to your earlier point, right, loss of faith in the health care system, for example, has led to a loss of faith in the entire system and therefore to more conspiracy thinking, in my opinion. And I think especially related to health care, right? So the pandemic was a really, I mean, this was a swirling pot already.

And then you have a tornado of the pandemic coming through and swirling even more. And you see, of course, people are going to lose, who've already lost faith in the health care system and the safety net that we don't really have, losing faith in the entire system. And thus, then when the pandemic hits and they find out firsthand that they really, there, no one is coming to rescue you. We have no plan. It's like, oh, crap. So when someone says, I'm reaching out my helping hand of Gaia to help you with this, you're like, okay, fine, I've got nothing else, nothing else going from me right now. I'm going to starve to death. I don't figure this out. Yeah, and not only that, now you can buy into this alternate belief system about what's really going on, and then you can be mobilized to become an activist. Now you're not just the helpless person sitting at home and no one's coming to rescue you and you don't know how you're going to pay your bills. Now you're an activist, you're a renegade, you're on the side of freedom. You're going out on the cyborg and you're saying all of this is bullshit and we're going to rise up against it. And you can't limit our religious freedom and stop us from getting together and breathing really deeply in a confined space without masks on. You know, whatever the science on

masks sort of evolved to show over time. Nonetheless, you see this particular, like, psychological dynamic where I'm going to, I'm going to rise up against this injustice. And then you have a whole group of renegade scientists and doctors who are speaking out against the kind of mainstream consensus of what's really going on. And they have the credentials. And one of the things that I've said to people a lot over the years is, you know, there's nothing remarkable about someone with a PhD who, is just wrong. On any weekend in the United States, pre-pandemic, you could probably go to most major cities and look at most of the big hotels and in a ballroom somewhere, there would be someone with a PhD explaining to you the reality of Bigfoot or UFOs or how the aliens are already

walking among us or how there's no way that 9-11 could have happened the way they said it did. Like, when you think of the sheer number of people there are out in the world who have some kind of academic credential, certain percentage of them are going to be crackpots, and that's just the truth. But if you've lost faith, that medical science can really help you, and you're longing in an understandable way, right? This is part of the spiritual temperament. You're longing for a return to the magic, for a return to the natural ways of being in touch with the earth, for a return to some kinds of ritual and an empowerment that feels like it transcends what science can tell you. then a doctor like Christian Northrop is going to come along and say, like, I'm an OBGYN.

I went to Dartmouth. I wrote this bestselling book, Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom, and I'm here to tell you that there's, you know, nanotechnology in the vaccines, and they put an ink in there that's called Lucifer Race that's going to give you the mark of the beast. But I'm an MD so you can trust me. Yeah, oh, my God. And there's a lot of fetishizing of Native Americans or First Nations people because of that connection to like they have the ancient wisdom. And what's funny is I thought I asked a couple of

of show fans of mine who are Native American. I was like, what do you think about this? And they're like that is, they had opinions. None of them were very positive because yeah, first of all, what nobody likes to be fetishized. And two, it's like, oh, so now you're going to take this stuff and bastardize it and use it to sell an online course or something. How dare you? Our first episode of something called Skeptical Sunday where we debunk things was about ear candling. And one of the proponents, including many who are angry and in my Instagram inbox later on, were telling me that the Sioux Indians have been using this for hundreds of years. So we called them.

They have a phone number and an office. And they were like, yeah, we get calls about ear candling. No, we don't use this. We do not use it. Most of us, I had to ask the first time I got a phone call because I'd never even heard of it. This is like a Sue spokesperson is like, and I asked all the healers of the chiefs and all the people that we have around.

And it's just, no, we don't do that. Amazon is lying to you. These are not from our tribe, and we don't do this. It's not a thing. It's not a thing. Yeah, so, like, in the same way that I referenced, you know, some influences getting into, like, the origin story, right? The dark, horrific set of things that now qualify me.

So either you have the PhD, but you're an outsider who has stigmatized knowledge, or you're the influencer with no credentials, but the horrific experience. you've gone through are the thing that makes you an authority. Or this comes from an ancient source. Right. I think that any time you see this comes from an ancient source, in your mind, you should think, oh, that's because there's no evidence to support it. And it's actually that it's basically bullshit. If you're having to go to that vague kind of, it's an ancient source. It comes from the Sioux people. You know, for thousands of years, this was used. And like now we've lost touch with that ancient wisdom. you know, maybe, but for the most part, I call bullshit on that. Yeah, definitely. There's now that there's, of course, medical influencer. There's one guy in particular calls himself the medical medium, you know, about this guy, of course you do.

It amazes me that otherwise intelligent people will listen to somebody who essentially claims to be a psychic that can diagnose medical conditions and recommends, among other things, drinking celery juice every morning as a health cure. Celery juice in the morning as a health care is absolutely bananas. Sorry, that pun was terrible. It was low-hanging fruit, if you will. I'm here all week, folks. No, but thank you for the awkward laughter.

Someone's got to do it. But it's really shocking, because you look at this and you're like, it's fiber and water, and there's guys driving 30 miles out of a resort that we're in at this conference because they've got to get fresh celery and they don't have any there. And I'm thinking, you're the smartest moron I've ever met in my life. Or the dumbest genius I've ever, and these are people with, like, multi-million dollar businesses that are not usually idiots. Yeah.

And I'm like, so you got a guy who's a psychic that told you that you're lacking whatever celery juice has. You know what's in here? Fiber and water. Come on, man. I don't know. I get a little worked up.

It's upsetting because you should freaking know better and he's grifting you. And you just stand up and take it. Ah, it just drives me insane. Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? Right. Exactly what you said. Otherwise, intelligent, educated people

can become invested in the ritual of some kind of repetitive activity or consumption of something that it becomes talismanic, it becomes the thing that if I don't do this, it's a kind of superstition, you know? And it's related to like, you know, the baseball player always has to wear

the blue underpants or whatever before they go out, because it now becomes this thing that I believe my success and my well-being is tied to this thing. And with wellness, if you can juice that up a little, if you'll excuse the pun,

with some kind of pseudon, scientific claim about why this is the special thing that's going to give you the edge. I mean, that's what the whole wellness industry is organized around. Here's the thing that other people don't know about that you're going to, if you jump on this, you're going to have the edge. It's going to make you, you know, whatever. It's going to make you smarter. It's going to make you more virile.

It's going to improve your immune system. It's going to improve your lean muscle mass. It's going to do all these different things. And those are all understandable desires that I think we all have. Usually the claims are, if they're based on science at all, it's a very, very small positive benefits, if any. Yeah, you mentioned earlier that some of these people with the horrible, tragic backgrounds and things like that, they use that as a cudgel in many ways.

And I noticed that, and you phrased this pretty well in the book, that refusing, now refusing to endorse a conspiracy theory in some of these culty worlds, it's not just a rejection of bad thinking. And I get these letters in my inbox from angry people, right? You know, I'm not just rejecting their bad thinking and conspiracy theory thinking. I am somehow now lacking empathy, right? I'm not a critical thinker. I'm callous and hateful of the people that supposedly went through, whether it's ritual

abuse that may or may not have happened, and let's be honest, 99.9% of the time didn't happen. Or someone said, you just don't, you're an ablest. You don't like autistic children because my son got autism because of vaccine. or whatever it is that's afflicted this person. So they twist it instead of me, instead of, hey, Jordan, you don't believe this because you're over-reliant on science or whatever.

It's because you're a terrible person. And it becomes almost like this manipulative. It's because of my lack of empathy that I don't believe it, not because I'm actually using logic and reason and evidence-based medicine and things like that, science. It's very uniquely aggressive and dark because of that. Yeah, it's definitely a manipulative technique where you switch categories without, you know, a forewarning.

It's suddenly we're going from, wait, is there evidence to this, to how dare you? How dare you? Insult someone who's been through such a horrible experience. My run-ins with these people often blindside me. I mean, whether it's that or, geez, a couple months ago, maybe even a year or two ago now, I went on a fitness podcast. And then it was like, we're talking about fitness, which I'm no expert on. And then the guy starts talking about how aliens built the pyramids and how we can't

replicate the technology because it comes from Atlantis. And I'm just thinking, like, where, what, how did I get here? I looked at Jen and I go, never book this guy again. Like, how, what am I going to do right now? I've got like another hour. I've got to put up with this thing. I can't believe it. But thank you so much for coming in today, man. It's an interesting look, interesting look at the weirdly dark side of the wellness industry. And we didn't even get into yoga Nazis or how yoga was largely founded by Nazi sympathizers, I mean, in a way? It's complicated. It's complicated.

Yoga definitely existed for a really long time within the Indian sort of tradition and religion. But yeah, right around the turn of the 20th century, there's a whole set of influences that come together. And the chapter in the book is called Did Nazis Love Yoga? And the short answer is, yeah. Yeah, who knew? Thank you very much.

Thanks for having me. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with a black man that to friends members of the Klu Klux Klan. I don't support the KKK at all. I don't support that ideology. But I support people having the right to believe as they want to believe, as long as they don't cross the line and hurt people. And to show, to prove that I will stick up for somebody else's rights,

has also led to people just like that sticking up for mine. I didn't convert anybody. I am the impetus for over 200 to make up their own minds to convert themselves, because I've given them reason to think about other things that make more sense than what they're currently doing. It bothers me a great deal that we call ourselves the greatest nation on the face of this earth. We have to admit that there are some flaws here.

I don't adhere to that statement that we are the greatest. Maybe I would bend and say that perhaps technologically, we are the greatest. So how is it that we as Americans can talk to people as far away as the moon? or anywhere on the face of this earth, but yet there's so many of us who have difficulty talking to the person who lives right next door.

This is the 21st century. This racist nonsense does not be long in any century, let alone the 21st. We are living in space-age times, but there's still too many of us thinking with Stone Age minds. For more on how Daryl Davis convinced 200 KKK members to give up their robes, check out episode 540 on the Jordan Harbinger Show. A lot of this stuff seems like lonely disaffected people

whose lives aren't working out for them, seeking certainty, seeking a tribe, willing to completely dispose of any logic or critical thinking as kind of the price of admission here. I do think, however, that doctors can help step into the gap here if people don't understand science and medicine from doctors and science communicators that they trust, charlatans will step into the gap because there's a lot of money to be made there. So I know that this is tough. It's kind of a losing battle, right? Because somebody who sells a fake cure could

become a millionaire, but a doctor who can convince somebody that that stuff is fake, they earn zero additional dollars from doing that, right? They earn no money from telling people what is real science and what is real medicine. Those incentives are just kind of unfortunate. A lot of the rules of the culty groups, they reminded me of North Korea, the self-criticism, self-surveillance, seeding agency to the group, basically throwing out your individual thought for that of the cult. North Korea, the more you look at it, the more it is just one big national cult. And when you think of cults as national and patriotic, sometimes you see it in other countries

as well. No matter what country you're in, you're going to have people like that. Nationalists is, I think, the term we're looking for. If you're looking for more about how and why people believe and are attracted to conspiracy theories, episode number 814 with the stuff they don't want you to know, guys, was really interesting. Episode 814 and Michael Shermer, episode 492. Of course, you can search for conspiracy theories or cults on the website. Using the AI bots, a good way to do that at Jordan Harbinger.com slash AI.

So go have a look, plenty more where this came from. All things, Julian Walker will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Ask the AI chat bot if you're missing something. Transcripts included in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support this show. All at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Our newsletter, with highlights and takeaways from the most popular episodes of the show

going all the way back is at Jordan Harbinger.com slash news. And I reply to you when you reply to me there. So you can send me snarky comments, passive aggressive feedback, or anything you'd like me to know, Jordan Harbinger.com slash news is where you can sign up. And once again, don't forget, give directly.com slash Jordan is our fundraiser for the village in Kenya. Give directly.com slash Jordan. We need your support, folks. Bring it. Give directly.com slash Jordan. Once again, a reminder that the Stitcher app will no longer work for any podcasts as of August 29th, 2023. So if you're using the Stitcher app, time to switch. If you're on Android, podcast addict is a good one, cast box.

And if you're on iOS, I suggest Overcast or Apple Podcasts. The Stitcher app is a going away, folks. Six-minute networking also at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter or X or whatever the hell they call it these days and Instagram or connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created an association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Emilio Campo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The feed for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting and the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

So if you know somebody who might be a little bit into the conspirituality cult or knows somebody who is and doesn't know what to do about it, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you can apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast.

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