Pod Insights Modern Wisdom Conspiracy Theories In New Age Cults - Derek Beres About this episode Derek Beres is an author & media expert, the Senior Editor at Eco & co-host of the Conspirituality podcast.
Far left yoga mums and far right trolls aren't the most obvious pairing that you would put together, however these unlikely ideological allies have more in common than you might think. Much of the thinking within these groups has converged in recent years and Derek is here to explain how this happens.
Expect to learn how the term conspiracy has been diluted down to mean all manner of things now, the typical characteristics of a cult leader, why conspiracy theories are so seductive to the people tempted by them, how spirituality adds a different flavour to conspiratorial tropes, whether I need to stop saying hello cult members and much more...
Sponsors:
Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/
Learn how to skip college and get Praxis’ free book on the success mindset at https://discoverpraxis.com/modernwisdom/ (discount automatically applied)
Get 20% discount on everything from Lucy at https://uk.lucy.co/ (UK) or https://lucy.co/ (US) (use code: MW20)
Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied)
Extra Stuff:
Check out Derek's website - http://derekberes.com/
Check out Conspirituality - https://conspirituality.net/
Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/
To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom
#conspirituality #cults #spirituality
-
00:00 Intro
00:28 Origins of Conspirituality
05:35 Who is More Vulnerable to Conspiracy Theories?
09:54 How QAnon Infiltrated the Yoga Community
25:15 Omniscience & Lack of Humility
37:32 Why Conspirituality Cults are Seductive
47:27 Common Traits of Cult Leaders
1:00:22 Effectiveness of Deplatforming
1:04:43 Is an Ethical Cult Possible?
1:08:43 Far Left vs Far Right
1:13:11 Where to Find Derek
-
Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/
Listen to all episodes on audio:
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn
-
Get in touch in the comments below or head to...
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx
Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/
Transcript 12,557 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 In this world that we cover, feelings will trump facts or science or research at any moment. If this thing makes me feel good, then I'm going to trust that. And that's how cult leaders have gotten people to leave their families and come into their groups because they feel something that they weren't getting elsewhere.
0:22 Chris Williamson? Derek Barris, welcome to the show.
0:24 Speaker 00 Thanks, Chris. Appreciate you reaching out and having me on.
0:28 Chris Williamson? So I got all happy and proud of myself over the last couple of years or so because I'd noticed a mechanism occurring where spiritual yoga moms, far-left spiritual yoga moms, and sort of right-wing trolls appeared to be horseshoeing some of their worldviews to coalesce online. And I was all sort of pleased with myself that I'd unearthed this kind of interesting dynamic that I thought was going on. And then it turns out that this is quite a well-known dynamic that has been going on, a mechanism that's been occurring for quite a while, which has a term, "conspirituality," which describes the overlap of conspiracy
1:10 Chris Williamson? theories with spirituality typically of new age varieties. Contemporary conspirituality became common in the 1990s, apparently.
1:20 Speaker 00 Yes, I actually wouldn't say it was that well-known. Even today, I track the term on Twitter, and there are constantly people who are just discovering the term. So I wouldn't feel bad about having stepped into this world in such a manner. It was academically coined in 2011 by Charlotte Ward and David Voas, but it really didn't get a lot of traction as a paper until the very, just before the pandemic began, actually, a philosopher from the UK named Jules Evans wrote a Medium article where he unearthed that term, and that's how I found out about it. And then I wrote a subsequent article for a publication I used to work for called Big Think.
2:01 Speaker 00 And that eventually led to the podcast of that name. So it's really, it, it, and it, we can look back in reflection and trace it back to the sixties. We can trace it back, honestly, to the beginning of the 19th century with Emerson and Thoreau's work. But it really still is a new concept that I think a lot of people are trying to wrap their heads around, although I think the precursors, you know, in hindsight, everything makes sense and you can trace them back from there.
2:32 Chris Williamson? Yeah. Well, I think one of the interesting things in 2022 especially is that calling something a conspiracy theory seems to be quite problematic now. So after a few decades of using it to refer to sort of all manner of crimes, whether it's rumors or misinformation or disinformation or general fuckery by the government or corporate media that ends up being proven as true or not being proven as true, it's kind of memed and legitimated the term into a particularly weird place. And it's, it's almost a little bit useless now, as far as I can see.
3:05 Speaker 00 I remember I interviewed for my older podcast before conspirituality, which is called Earthrise, I got to talk to Dan Carlin of Hardcore History. And I remember asking him specifically, when historians 100 years from now look back at this time, how are they going to be able to make sense of what was going on with so much information? And his idea was that the cream always rises to the top. And I think his work has, you know, shown that in a lot of ways, given how diligent he is with what he does. But we're in a completely new environment now. And I agree with you that the term conspiracy
3:46 Speaker 00 theory is overused in a lot of ways. It still has validity and there are still real world examples we can point to about it. But everything gets so jumbled when everyone has a voice and there's so much misinformation and disinformation that floats around that you can never really identify where the source material comes from. That it's completely disorienting when you're looking at your feed and seeing all that information come through to identify what are the actual conspiracies, what are, what have levels of truth in them that we should explore further, and what is purely just trolling to see if it can get traction?
4:26 Chris Williamson? Yeah, the interesting thing, I suppose, about Dan is that being a historian, he is going to be looking retrospectively. And it's easy to say, oh, the cream rises to the top with the benefit of hindsight, because the stuff that wasn't true tends to kind of decay and fall off. But when you're in the midst of it, every different proposal of a description about how reality exists, kind of seems like it might be equally possibly true.
4:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, and for the most part, there is a common understanding in history that the winners write the history.
4:58 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
4:58 Speaker 00 So, so even then, you're dealing with source material that is coming from aside. For the most part, I think if you actually go back to the precursors of written language with hieroglyphs or different forms of, you know, currencies or things that we can speculate on, we can actually piece together a better understanding because historians have more to work with. But as soon as you start getting to memoirs and government-sponsored written logs, then you're going to be skewed in one direction or the other. So it's extremely exciting to look back at history, but it's also quite challenging.
5:35 Chris Williamson? What types of people would you say are the most vulnerable to conspiracy theories or conspiratorial thinking and/or the intersection with the spirituality elements as well?
5:48 Speaker 00 Well, I'll answer that in two ways. I'll go broad and then a little more towards conspirituality. The broad one is, and this isn't, you know, 100% bulletproof, but in general, it's often people without strong social support networks. If you're spending a lot of your time online and you're disconnected from your tribe or your groups or the people that you're around that can check you, then, you know, it's very easy to get indoctrinated into any sort of ideologies. One reason where, you know, I've worked in fitness and the wellness industry for decades. And one reason I feel like that I never fell into any sort of rabbit hole was because I have a large network of friends from a wide group, from many different groups.
6:33 Speaker 00 And anytime I would float something that seemed a little ridiculous, I would get called out. And that's really important. Like those checks and balances are necessary. And even though everything feels so close because of these, you know, I've never met you in person, we're just meeting now, but you know, we can have rapport and build a relationship from this. And that gives a false sense of security that doesn't actually necessarily exist. So those real world connections, the lack of them make people very vulnerable to conspiracies. Now specifically to conspirituality and the wellness influencers and people who are indoctrinated into these ideas, the language that has been going on in yoga studios since
7:16 Speaker 00 I began my practice and study in the mid 90s, has always veered toward what we now recognize as this merging. Meaning, the idea that, for example, you know your body best, you're your own doctor, your brain is your own pharmacy, all these ideas have, this rhetoric has been perpetuated throughout this industry for a long time. So when you get to something like a pandemic, you have a community that is generally not engaged in their local civics, they don't necessarily vote, they don't know who their representatives are, they don't really have to pay attention to politics. And then you have a slightly privileged class
7:59 Speaker 00 that can afford the supplements and the nootropics and they can afford to eat organic. Well, they be, they get caught up in this closed system where they feel as though their reality is reality. And so they become very vulnerable to conspiracy theories as well because, well, if it's not affecting my life, then why should I, you know, it must not be real. And that's just not, you know, if you look at it from a globalized perspective, that's just not how the world operates.
8:28 Chris Williamson? Yeah, so there's kind of two, two rules, or at least two on averages here. One of them being people that are incredibly isolated, and another being people who are also kind of isolated, but isolated within a very tight sphere community.
8:44 Speaker 00 Correct, yes. And, and it definitely changed. I always look at Instagram as the point where it changed. When I began my practice in yoga, a lot of the conversations, they were local, right? It started in college in New Jersey, but then living in New York City. You know, so the studios, you'd get into these conversations with people. And the conversations really trended around what's the correct shoulder alignment in downward dog? Or what does this yama or niyama represent? Like, let's talk about the philosophy of it. In 2011, when you had this real uptick in people showing off the poses, and then branding them, and then selling their supplements, and whatever, whatever
9:29 Speaker 00 courses online, whatever they're doing on their Instagram feed, that created a real different dynamic. And it did introduce more people to yoga and different practices, but at the same time, it made it very about the image and the lifestyle instead of the practice. And that's where eventually, things like QAnon slipped into the hashtags and was able to infiltrate that community.
9:54 Chris Williamson? Hang on, QAnon infiltrated the yoga community?
9:57 Speaker 00 Oh, absolutely. That's really the roots of the podcast in many ways.
10:00 Chris Williamson? Okay, talk to me about that.
10:02 Speaker 00 Well, so as I said, I began my career in journalism as a local news reporter in 1997. And I would cover zoning board meetings and school board meetings and go to the politicians' houses and knock on their doors. And it's, that is where politics really happens. We, we get caught up in the, you know, the, the whatever's happening on Twitter, but it still happens regionally. And what I noticed as I entered the wellness community and space, again, is this lack of political dis- engagement. And so when the pandemic happened, you have a community that is highly disengaged from politics, especially local politics,
10:43 Speaker 00 highly disengaged from public health, because we haven't had any serious pandemics or anything of nature in our lifetime. And all they had was their news sources, which were usually social media feeds, which depended upon the people that you followed.
11:03 Speaker 00 The term "pastel QAnon" was introduced around the time at the beginning of the pandemic to show how far-right conspiracy theories started infiltrating into wellness community through hashtags. And that specifically happened through what was happening in the Chans on QAnon. And the first point of infiltration was actually with 5G, this idea that 5G was causing COVID.
11:29 Chris Williamson? That was David Icke's sort of big contribution, right? He did whatever, three or four episodes with Brian Rose that broke YouTube for a little bit.
11:37 Speaker 00 Right. And he's still on it. He just recently did a series on Gaia where he's still promoting that narrative of 5G. And the thing about 5G is, people will only follow any sort of conspiracy as far as they will until it inconveniences them. So if they pick up their phone and it works a second faster than it used to, ultimately, they're going to forget about 5G. And the same thing's going to happen with 6G, 7G. It's going to keep happening, and people are going to forget it because they have short attention spans and because the technology, they want it to work as quickly as possible. So that entered the community and then quickly kind of faded. Now, as I said, this was the first time in all of our lives that we were locked
12:19 Speaker 00 in. We were forced to stay inside. And if you don't know where to look for news, and you have a distrust of certain news sources, and you're following your influencers and they say, "Don't look at that. Look at what's happening on these Chan boards. That's the real truth." Well, that's very seductive, this idea that you have some inside knowledge that other people don't have. That's also been embedded in the yoga community for a long time. It's like, "Well, I can meditate and I have this breathwork practice and I'm connecting to spirit, so I have the inside track to true spirituality." And so from there, the real point of infiltration and what has perpetuated was the anti-vaccine rhetoric, which has continued and will continue for a long time.
13:03 Speaker 00 That ideology is not new. It began when Louis Pasteur's experiments started with vaccines. So there's always been anti-vax sentiment, but at that time, that started becoming part of the worldview. Oh, there's, there's this virus. Eventually, there's going to be vaccines and that's where the microchips will come in. And that was coming from the QAnon chat boards in the feeds and then that was fed directly into the wellness community who have this idea of bodily sovereignty. And so that is what created this juggernaut that we track and cover on the podcast.
13:37 Chris Williamson? It seems like gate-kept knowledge, we have a unique insight or we are a special group or a particularly unique type of person is one of the tropes that seems to be being used here. Do conspiracies tend to have some common themes or agendas with them that you can kind of pick up on?
14:00 Speaker 00 The inside group knowledge is one of them. This idea that the, there are these forces external that are trying to oppress society in some manner. And to be clear, there are. Our banking system is a good example of that. And, and healthcare has many problems. One of the funny criticisms that we've gotten is that we're shills for Big Pharma because we promote vaccines. And my last book on psychedelic therapy, half of the book was talking about all of the problems with the pharmaceutical industry because of mental health treatments. But everything gets scrambled when you have the binaries that are presented on social media.
14:42 Speaker 00 And so specifically with these groups, this idea that wink, wink, this is really what's going on and now you know it so that we can share in this? That's very seductive to people, especially if their only connection is through the technology at that time.
14:58 Chris Williamson? Well, that's a binding mechanism, right? It makes you feel like you're a part of something. It makes you feel like you're special and that creates an immediate in-group, out-group dynamic.
15:10 Speaker 00 Absolutely, and we've even noticed that with our podcast. I mean, admittedly, we're all left of center on the podcast, but even the three of us don't agree on certain topics and will express that. And even within our listenership, if we stray too far off of something that a certain base doesn't agree with, then they come after us. It's, this in-group mentality persists across the political spectrum right now.
15:38 Chris Williamson? Yeah, it's, I thought about this the other day, I might do a newsletter on it, that one of the most painful, insulting, irritating things that you can do on the internet is to disprove the avatar that somebody had of you in their head. Somebody thinks that you're a particular person, and maybe it turns out that you weren't quite that. And that is because it's inconvenienced them, they've had to face the potential that they're untrue. And there's another part of this, which is something I think Jordan Peterson does get right, where he says that when people live in archetypes, what we're able
16:22 Chris Williamson? to do, if we can, if we know one view that a person holds, and we can accurately predict everything else that that person holds, it makes them quite predictable. They're actually quite a safe person to be around, because you don't, there's no nuance, there's no danger of them deviating from one thing. So when you've got this projection around the direction that you think that Derek or Chris are going to go in, and then they deviate from that, you actually think, oh, hang on a second, maybe this person isn't as trustworthy as I thought that they were. Now, it's not about trust, it's about the fact that you easily want to be able to predict their behavior in future. But my bro-science idea is that that plays a role in it as well.
17:01 Speaker 00 I was listening recently to Sam Harris had a roundtable, and David Frum and Applebaum, George Packer were involved. But David Frum said he has a rule, which is, if he's on Twitter and he sees someone whose name he doesn't know, he doesn't then go start talking about that person.
17:19 Speaker 00 But that doesn't really exist in a lot of Twitter culture or social media culture in general.
17:23 Chris Williamson? Do you mean that he wouldn't take a single instance of what that person says as a representative? Right, okay.
17:29 Speaker 00 Correct, yes, exactly. Well put.
17:31 Chris Williamson? What a terrifyingly reasonable way to exist.
17:34 Speaker 00 I don't know, you know, I've read Peterson, I've covered him for Big Think. I haven't been happy with certain directions, so I don't know that particular quote from him. So I can't comment on that, but the idea behind it of, of, of, yes, there's, it's basically, you imprint onto these figures and influences that you have. And then when you realize that they're not thinking exactly everything that's in your head. Well, I mean, in general, humans would then be able to discuss, debate and dialogue. I've been involved in some serious attacks or debates online. And I'm like, if we were all together in the same room, this would never go down this way.
18:16 Speaker 00 I have never once been in a situation of discussion among people that left in the same manner that happens on social media. And I understand that there are different dynamics and technology does that. But I really think about every time I post or say something, I think, if I was in the room with them right now, would I say it this way? And also, what else do you lose? This happened recently because I made some comments on Joe Rogan that weren't appreciated by all of our listeners. And the way that I wrote it, then it was in my voice and the way it was read were different. And I get that because you don't get inflections, you don't get pantomimes.
18:59 Speaker 00 You can't see the expression, you can't, forget sarc, I'm a very sarcastic person. I'm always fielding stuff about sarcasm because just on Twitter alone, if you don't know me, you'll read it in a completely different way. And that's, that's a real challenge when operating in these structures and trying to, trying to. You know, provide valuable information to spark conversation with people, but not to be taken in a complete 180 of what you actually were intending to say. It's challenging.
19:30 Chris Williamson? Well, this feeds into the in-group, out-group tribalism mentality, right? That you can, what everybody is always looking to do, and I don't want to call, I learned about the purity spiral and I'm always hesitant about learning a new heuristic and then trying to apply it to everything because it's kind of like the, whatever the new toy that you've gotten and you want to kind of make it like that. But I do think that there's, I do think there's an element of this where everybody, many people online are bound together by mutual distaste of an out-group more than they are mutual love of an in-group. And I think that there was some stats around this to do with, if you looked at voting
20:10 Chris Williamson? patterns in 2012, people were more passionate about their hatred of the other than they were about the love of the one that they voted for. So Democrats were more distasteful of conservatives than they were liking of Democrats and the same was true vice versa. But that makes the group very fragile, right? It's a very, very fragile way to hold any sort of community together because you're constantly vigilant, you're always on the lookout for who might be the next heretic or who might be the next person. And another part of this that Jonathan Haidt talks about in The Happiness Hypothesis
20:50 Chris Williamson? is he says that the reason that we love scandal and outrage is that it allows us to feel the moral emotion of outrage and superiority whilst having done nothing moral to earn it. So we get to see somebody else do something that is wrong and we get to stand, our morality stands on the shoulders of a person that's fucked up while no one looks at us. So I think that there's two dynamics there that are maybe playing a bit of a role.
21:18 Speaker 00 Absolutely, and hate, people tried to cancel hate. And he was contributed greatly to our understanding of evolutionary psychology and biology. That, I love technology. My father was a computer programmer, starting in the 60s. I grew up around it. I work full time in cryptocurrency. I've worked in that field for about five years. I think the applications of technology are wonderful, but they, we have to know the limitations and the failures when it comes to communication. And the, this, this group mentality, and not to say I haven't gotten caught up in it too, I mean, I've had to check myself in the past as well.
22:01 Speaker 00 I hope at least that what I bring to the podcast and my work is informed by the work that I've done in the real world, having spent decades in journalism, having worked specifically in world music and haven't gotten to travel around and working with a lot of artists across the world and understanding that not every, one sees America the way that they, Americans see America, for example, was very illuminating to me when you get outside and trying to bring that perspective. And you were so right with the avatar thing, especially when they don't even have their photo or name on them. It's like you're screaming at a void right now. And all that's going to do is increase your cortisol and your frustration and make you
22:44 Speaker 00 not sleep at night, instead of actually pushing any conversations forward. And it takes your eye off of what's really important with, if you want to actually impact society in positive ways, it's not going to happen by screaming at someone on Twitter.
23:00 Chris Williamson? Speaking of America and how it's seen by the rest of the world, do you think that America as a nation is more conspiratorial on average? Is it the most conspiratorial in the world?
23:11 Speaker 00 I don't know about most. I can speak through the lens of conspirituality and our listenership and some data that we've found. So we tend, from people who reach out to us, our listenership is predominantly America, Canada, the UK, and Australia, for example. And a lot of the, what we call conspirituality, happens in those countries, as well as in, sort of, let's say, colonized refuges like Costa Rica or Bali, where white or Europeans or Americans have gone and basically started yoga communes. So a lot of the thinking happens in those
23:48 Speaker 00 areas. I would say that privilege is often an indicator of conspiracy, not overall, by the way, but specific to the wellness industry. Because, as I referenced earlier, people who have a certain usual middle to upper middle and above-class lifestyle, just basically defaults to believing, "Well, why can't everyone have this?" And that happens on the left and the right. That's, you know, that cuts across the board. And to be clear, I'm speaking in broad strokes right now. There are people within all sorts of demographics that don't fit that bill. But from what we've noticed, conspiracy will often happen in these countries.
24:30 Speaker 00 And I will also point to something that is very apparent right now, and it flares up at times, like what we've just happened, the convoy, and the freedom in America being around masks and vaccines, and then something like Ukraine happens. It really is a sound gut check to remind Americans what democracy is, and while it's in no way perfect and needs a lot of help, that, look at what happens in countries where you don't have some of those freedoms, and don't be so quick to judge and then just stand on a soapbox. Like, listen to what other people from other places are saying, and they usually tend to be not as white and not as privileged.
25:15 Chris Williamson? One of the things that we've seen over the last two years has been a kind of a veil lifting, at least with regards to me, of my faith in media and the powers that be and stuff. Because I think, you know, they fucked up a bunch of times. And a lot of the time, people have commented on this as, look, you totally shouldn't trust them. However, look at how many creators online that have got platforms have just jumped from one grift to the next without a second thought. And I can't remember who it was, someone put this really, I think it was Tim Kennedy, who put this really famous meme up about, last week I was a vaccine expert and this
25:57 Chris Williamson? week I'm an expert in international relations and public policy for Ukraine. But the reason that that's so funny is that it is such a trope. And I think that that, you know, just if you're going to use a heuristic to try and think about the sort of people that you're taking, media organizations, right, that you're taking your information from online, no one is a specialist in everything. And people need to have humility around not knowing the thing. I'm going to guess that another hallmark of conspirituality leaders is a sense of like omnipresent, omnipotent, understanding and insight into kind of pretty much everything that they need to.
26:41 Speaker 00 Right, exactly. And that was, again, apparent in what's happening in Ukraine. We just, our last week's episode was conspirituality goes to war, which was covering all of the influencers. And so let's look at that through two layers. First of all, they've had a lot of the spotlight on them for their rhetoric for the past two years, and now all of a sudden the news is focused elsewhere. They're monetizing their streams. They're like, hey, this is the attention economy. We need to stay relevant. So we're just gonna start waxing poetic about Ukraine, which is the second thing, about just saying things that don't make any sense. So one thing that we identified often were people saying things like, war only happens when you're divided
27:26 Speaker 00 internally, right? And that it's such nonsense. What's that mean? Basically, the I, okay, so stepping back in the yoga sphere, you've had events happen for decades, things like meditations for world peace. The idea that if enough people got together and meditated, the rest of the world would feel the energy and then they would relax all of the problems that they have. This is some Rhonda Byrne shit. Oh, yeah, yeah. So well, very influential in this community. And so, so the idea that you're split internally is that either you have some psychic rift, meaning that your thoughts are not strong enough to create the reality that you want it to create, or
28:08 Speaker 00 that looking at world leaders, that they're not spiritual enough and they're only doing this because they don't have the empathy and the compassion for the society. Oh, that happens to be developed through the practices that I have accomplished. And so they'll just put out these messages on social media with bullshit like that and then put that forward as truth. And I want to pull on something else you said there, which relates. I think that the term mainstream media is just nonsense in many ways. Having worked in, again, local reporting for a number of years, media entities are competing organizations.
28:50 Speaker 00 They're not all together in cahoots trying to like, put forward an agenda. That said, the necessity of breaking news as quickly as possible before anyone else has created very bad incentives for the industry. That's so I'm not giving them a free pass. But if you are, and I'm just making up a number here, if you're the New York Times and you have a million daily readers, I think it's above that, but you know, their Twitter following, whatever, you know, something of that nature. And then you're someone with a podcast and I'm just pulling Rogan out because I know the number of 12 million monthly listeners. You're a media figure at that time. And if you have, I mean, we have
29:36 Speaker 00 370,000 downloads a month for our podcast, for example. We're putting forward media and I take that seriously from my training in terms of trying to provide the correct information. So the idea that all of the media is in cahoots and just putting forward bad messaging, it doesn't actually happen. It depends on where your attention is focused because all of this is media at this point. You have established organizations, you have organizations with specific incentives, and then you have people who are just kind of making shit up and then putting it forward and trying to discern what actually floats to the top there is its own challenge. But to just label it as all the one thing, it's usually presented as the organizations
30:21 Speaker 00 that I don't agree with are all in cahoots. Oh, but I'll share an article from here because that's the real thing and that's its own problem with our media environment.
30:30 Chris Williamson? I think you're right. What I, I think what I probably meant there was that there is a particular standard that you expect corporate press to be held to because they're the ones that have been doing it for the most amount of time, they're the ones that are supposed to be adhering to journalistic standards, they're the ones that have got the most number of researchers and so on and so forth. So in the back of my mind, I have an increased degree of skepticism when I read some fellow's Substack versus when I read something on a big media outlet and therefore I hold that media outlet to a higher standard, which means that it's more easy for them to fail at meeting that standard, you know, and as well, I think it's a trickle down effect
31:13 Chris Williamson? of seeing certain government officials, you know, maybe Anthony Fauci would like the mask thing, it's like one example. I've not got into COVID really at all on the show. I'm not bothered about trying to politicize that, but the flip flopping around masks is like a fairly obvious example where you have somebody that's in a position of authority that has kind of very publicly fallen flat on their face and kind of changed their messaging a little bit. And one of the causes of that for me has been an increase in or a lack of faith, right, in the powers that be knowing what they're actually supposed to be doing. And then you think, okay, well, if, maybe if they don't know and they make mistakes.
31:54 Chris Williamson? I had this, I think this is quite a British thing, they're quite, quite an orderly nation. I had a lot of faith sort of two and a half years ago that the people in power knew what they were doing. And maybe during times of non-crisis, they broadly, they're better. Presumably in chaos, you're going to be more difficult. However, the last couple of years really has kind of exposed some of the ineptitude, I think. I mean, in the UK, we've had the guy that's in charge of public health snogging his secretary on CCTV. And, you know, the dude that was the communications like guy or like the right hand of Boris Johnson,
32:36 Chris Williamson? going up to Barnard Castle to do whatever, like just the very humanizing of a lot of the errors that people in positions of power were making, remind you that they're just as fallible and idiotic as you probably are, which kind of breaks that them and us thing. And I held them in high esteem and now maybe a little bit less. And that then trickles down to press too. And you think, well, hang on, I had this really, really high standard that I was holding everybody to. And then maybe not so much. So perhaps the waterline of what I expect an independent producer, I have a degree of skepticism around them, which is tuned up. And I wouldn't have done previously with regards to the corporate press. And then now with that as well, I'm thinking, oh, well, God, does anyone know what they're talking about?
33:16 Speaker 00 Well, that's good that you have that level of discernment. I would argue that a lot of people don't in terms of differentiating between the standards of a New York Times or a Substack. And even looking where the Substack comes from, because some of them are funded by media organizations, which is fine. It's just a different platform. But looking at the bona fides of the people writing them is also important. And you also bring up a good point about public health, the public health communication, there were blunders. And some of them were expectable because science is always changing, or our understanding of things are always changing, especially when you have a novel virus, we're trying to figure it out. And part of my issue is that there have been mistakes. And then
34:02 Speaker 00 Sometimes we'll see the influencers continue to hold up these old mistakes that were already admitted to and moved on from, at least there were apologies for and being like, okay, we know better now, but still holding them up as indicative of, no, this is, oh, this has been part of the plan all along and see how they were manipulating us. And no, again, the level of humility that exists in the yoga and wellness world is, there's not much humility there. And from the very least, the, at some of the figures, not all the figures, but those experts do come clean when they, they mess up. Even recently, Matt Taibbi, you know,
34:42 Speaker 00 was just like, okay, I messed up. I did not expect Russia to invade and I wrote all these things and I messed up with that. And I'm like, okay, I don't agree with you on some things, but that's good that you can see that. And if there was more of that, that would be very helpful from all of the different vectors that you were pointing out.
35:00 Chris Williamson? The problem with that, and this was something that I learned from Douglas Murray, he said that anytime that you concede that you've done something wrong, or that you don't adhere to the ideological projection that your side has, it's seen by the other side as a chink in your armor and as your own side as a lack of conviction towards the, whatever the purpose is or the, the, the party line. And I think that it very much causes people to know in the back of their mind that if I admit that I'm wrong, this is going to be a vector of attack for the people that are against me. And it's
35:39 Chris Williamson? going to be a signal of non-loyalty or non-compliance or whatever to the people that are supposed to be on my side too, because it's this very kind of rough-hewn.
35:52 Chris Williamson? Discourse that we have online and it's very sort of, you said it earlier on, very binary thinking. You're either with us or you're against us.
35:59 Speaker 00 And again, not how you would act in person. Forgiveness is such a powerful human connection. Saying I'm sorry when you're in the room with someone and actually meaning it, that brings healing with it. And that can let people move forward. But one incident, so what I mentioned earlier about the Rogan tweet that I had. It was, it basically had to do with like all of the different arrows that were coming at him from all different directions at once. And I was sort of fixated on the COVID misinformation. And my point was being like, let's focus because part of the problem with the left is that they don't focus long enough on issues.
36:41 Speaker 00 Whereas the right tends to sustain issues for generations and has the discipline to be able to do that. And not that they're perfect at it either with social media and such, but that does, that is more indicative of that particular political leaning. And one thing that I noticed when I released it was a number of people saying, if you just apologize, we'll forgive you. And I'm like, but I don't not believe what I said. So you're asking me to apologize for something that is, I'm actually not sorry for. And you can't, so you can't create actual progress emotionally or intellectually in these mediums
37:24 Speaker 00 if you can't have actual conversations.
37:27 Chris Williamson? What they're after there is fealty, right?
37:29 Speaker 00 Yes.
37:30 Chris Williamson? That's what they want. They want fealty. Give me, so explain to me what conspiracy theories or conspirituality cults, what do they offer the people that follow them?
37:42 Speaker 00 I would say a sense of in-group mentality as we've identified. And I think that virtual reality will offer new forms of indoctrination. I don't want to get too far from your question, but as we look at how these technologies are working. One thing that has existed for a long time in cults is the eye gaze, right? The cult leader who will stare in your eyes for long periods of time to invoke some sort of emotional response. This is well-founded in the cult literature. And that doesn't translate as well on social media, but you can identify it with some of the yogis who are just like, the light is right here. They have a halo and they're locked into you the whole time. And I think that will further as we get to augmented reality and virtual reality.
38:26 Speaker 00 So that's the method, that's one of the methods that they'll use. They offer that feeling of, "I'm with you," right? "I'm with you right now and you alone." We're working on an episode on Russell Brand, who uses this technique. And we've identified that, he's actually used it for a long time. But there is that feeling of camaraderie that exists there. And in general, it also has to do with verifying pre-existing beliefs. There are serious problems with our agricultural system and our food system, our supply chain. There are serious problems with our public health and medicine in general, especially in a capitalist system.
39:08 Speaker 00 Taken to the extreme, though, you have this fanceified notion of, "I'm only eating food that I grow, the supplements that I know that come from this culture that respect their indigenous people, that I am taking and putting it into..." You mentioned the purity spiral before. Purity is probably one of the biggest ideas that pervades these influencers that we're talking about. "My sovereign body, I know what's best." And the purification of that body, the purification of thoughts, as well as bodily representation, is very seductive to people who get caught up by these influencers
39:49 Speaker 00 and then eventually get roped into their downline on their sales, on their courses, their workshops, whatever it happens to be.
39:57 Chris Williamson? What, why is it that a conspiracy on its own isn't enough? Now, obviously, you get, everything comes in different flavors. But why is it, or what extra does the spiritual element add on to the conspiracy part that, that sort of gives it what more stickiness perhaps, or more effectiveness? What, how does it deliver it?
40:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's the, it's the feeling. I just finished next week's episode, which has to do with this idea that terrain theory is right and germ theory is wrong. And I won't get into all the specifics of that, but Beauchamp's work on terrain theory has been disproven, Pastore went out. That's what modern medicine is based on. And again, leaving aside the problems with the industries of medicine, but that's what it's based on. But if you think about terrain theory, which basically posits that you, the germs only make you sick if your environment or your thought patterns are off. If you're not living a specific lifestyle, or there are environmental conditions that are off, not that you and I are hanging out in a room and you sneeze and I end up taking that into my body, right?
41:04 Speaker 00 It has to do with something metaphysical, right? Well, that invokes a feeling. And in this world that we cover, feelings will trump facts or science or research at any moment. If this thing makes me feel good, then I'm going to trust that. And that's coming from the brick and mortar cults. That's how cult leaders have gotten people to leave their families and come into their groups because they feel something that they weren't getting elsewhere. Uh, and that is also what's happening now in, in these online tribes where you never know what the other end of that avatar is going through. You don't know their isolation, you don't know their family dynamic.
41:46 Speaker 00 Um, we've received hundreds of people who've lost family members and they are no longer in contact, divorces, child separation. Like, there's a lot of people who've lost people over this time. And it usually has to do with that feeling of the, what the other person was providing for them.
42:08 Chris Williamson? You talk a good bit about yoga and Buddhist groups as well. I would have thought my experience with Buddhism and yoga practice, dissolving of the ego, letting go of the self, all that sort of stuff. It seems like. It seems quite anti to what I would have presumed would have occurred in these groups. So how is it that that's coming about?
42:32 Speaker 00 Well, you're talking about being already, if you're entering the dissolution of ego, for example, you're already halfway up of Maslow's pyramid, right? So you've already have the basics taken care of. You know, to think about it from the triune brain model, you're not in the spinal cord stem anymore. You're up in the prefrontal cortex at this time. So you're, you're living in a way that you can start to, you have the comforts of survival already taken care of. Now, the problem is, again, looking specifically at the pandemic and then all of a sudden, you know, I go to yoga at 10 o'clock, then I go to brunch with my friends and then I do this and that. Wait, I have to be locked in this room? Well, you've now trapped me.
43:17 Speaker 00 You've taken away my comfort and my, what I know as my survival mechanisms. And so you can only reach certain states of being in terms of transcending if your basics are taken care of. When someone says, hey, those basics no longer exist anymore. You can't buy your toilet paper, you can't, whatever it happens to be, we will very quickly revert to that scared animal, ready to lash out. And so religion in general is always aspirational. It provides comfort. It does provide survival mechanisms as well.
43:59 Speaker 00 But when you talk about the manifestation of yoga and Buddhist in a predominantly secular culture in America, that is predominantly privileged in a lot of ways, then you're, you're, you know, you are already talking about being partway up that pyramid and then you take it away from them. And so you're going to see very bad behavior happen. And I think we've seen that.
44:21 Chris Williamson? I'm getting a bit confused here because it seems like on one hand, conspiracies are a bourgeois indulgence, and yet on the other hand, it's this primal response.
44:36 Speaker 00 No, I would say that in terms of the bourgeois indulgence, I'm speaking specifically to spirituality and the people we cover. You know, Bigfoot, aliens, all of that, that has existed across the board and you can look at them how you want. So that's that I'm speaking very specifically of the beat that we cover.
44:56 Chris Williamson? Okay, and the part of the response is in often a some sort of physical threat that people go through. I'm going to guess, does this occur when people have got maybe terminal illness diagnoses and stuff like that as well? Or if people have recently gone through grievances?
45:14 Speaker 00 Um, sorry, I lost the thread a little bit there.
45:19 Chris Williamson? Are people more vulnerable if that's one of the situations that's occurred? You've mentioned about people losing elements of themselves and feeling some sort of mortal threat. I was trying to roll that forward into some other situations.
45:31 Speaker 00 Okay, so let's look at both of those. So first off, yes, grievance is always a pathway to indoctrination if you're not careful. If you are, I just lost my 22 year old cat last week and he was, but you know, I've lived with him in seven apartments in three states. Like he was very meaningful to me and for a few days after I was kind of walking around just like keep expecting to see him. And he's not there and that puts you in a particular state where you're more open for information and potential indoctrination. If someone slips in and be like, oh, you're not feeling good. Well, I have this thing, try it out, maybe it'll make you feel better. Oh, it's a breathing technique. Wow, I felt really bad for three days. Now I'm doing this breath work and I feel amazing. This person is amazing.
46:16 Speaker 00 So yes, absolutely on that level. Back to the pyramid idea, and this might be where some confusion have confusion happen.
46:25 Speaker 00 Privilege often means that you get so accustomed to your lifestyle. Like the fact that I can set my thermometer to whatever I want and be at live at that, you know, that very thin range of homeostasis in terms of what I can tolerate. That's not reality. That's a comfort that certain people have. But when we think of survival, we're thinking of, oh, I just need something to sleep under and some food. But that's not how we actually think of survival. We think of it as whatever level we are at. And then on top of that, we're aspire, we're constantly aspiring to higher levels, which in America specifically usually has to do with. Income or things that we own or can acquire quickly. And so that's specifically what I meant when I was going through that pyramid idea is that
47:10 Speaker 00 people had what they thought was their survival threshold. And then that was taken away from them. And some people, we talked about humility. Some people was like, oh, wow. I can live with less. I actually feel better with less. But that wasn't the case for everyone.
47:28 Chris Williamson? What types of people become conspiracy leaders? If you were to create a on average avatar, what would be? What would the traits be?
47:39 Speaker 00 They usually, I mean, they have, most of the time they have some presence. They're able to communicate within the mediums of whatever they're working in. And so a number of our figures were brick and mortar, that meaning that they ran workshops. They were public figures in real life that they were able to translate through their technology. And then some people are just fantastic on TikTok. They know how to edit and light and they know the keywords, they know the hashtags.
48:08 Chris Williamson? Are TikToks a feeder mechanism for cults?
48:11 Speaker 00 Oh, absolutely.
48:12 Chris Williamson? Oh, God. TikTok's what, dude, I'm so glad of all of the vices that technology's given me and the whatever the synapses that have been laid down, the fact that TikTok isn't one of them is something that I'm going to be eternally grateful for just having never downloaded.
48:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, I occasionally will post, but I never scroll the feed. It's even for my Gen X brain, it's too much.
48:35 Chris Williamson? Laying down that Mylan's dangerous, man. You do not want to get into that rhythm.
48:39 Speaker 00 Right, right. And I have, I have friends who I'm 46 and I have friends my age or older who that is their, that is their addiction. They got into that, that quick niche and I'm like, no, I can't do that. Oftentimes with the, and I'll use the term grifters because a lot of these people are grifters and one question we often ask, and it's very hard to ever indicate intentionality with someone. It's just, it's impossible unless you specifically know them and you know why they're doing it. But.
49:10 Speaker 00 I always wonder with some of the figures, do they really believe this? Or do they just see an avenue to monetization? And that is very difficult to assess at times. But I will say that what usually cuts across the board with the influencers is that they're selling something. And whether that is direct with, again, supplement, nootropic, like course, whatever that happens to be, or whether that's just your attention for a future project or book sale, they are dealing in the attention economy and they want as much of it as possible turned onto them and what they're saying. And I'm pretty confident in saying that cuts across the board.
49:53 Chris Williamson? Would that not be the same with, say, you guys, though? You know, you have a podcast, you need people to, you think that it's interesting and of value, therefore, more people watching it is good. What's the distinction with the conspirituality guru? Why do they take it to one step further there?
50:10 Speaker 00 Sure. Well, in terms of the monetization, the three of us work separately. I work full-time. We have a Patreon and my feeling has always been, you will allow us, if you really find value in our work, you'll allow us to do more of it if you support us. But less than 1% of our listenership supports us on that mechanism. So, we don't sell anything. I mean, we do have a book coming out now as well.
50:36 Chris Williamson? I saw the announcement. Congratulations.
50:38 Speaker 00 Thank you. And the three of us are all writers, we're all trained writers. So that was always a goal, was we've been writing articles and such along that. And of course, yes, I want to be successful, I want to sell books. I completely understand them, understand that fact and agree with it. I think that, and again, this is where it comes into intentionality and it's so hard to really understand.
51:05 Speaker 00 I am going to put forward the work that I've investigated and feel is true. If I'm wrong on something, we've made corrections on the podcast. The top of every podcast leaves us room to be like, hey, we said this thing and we were wrong. We own up to when we are wrong. We also own up to when it is speculation. Because some things we know for sure. And sometimes when we're riffing on something, we will always say, we don't know this, but we're going to speculate on this right now. And it fits into a dynamic, but we're not sure on that. That is something that you don't find with a lot of the influ- or all the influencers, I think.
51:43 Chris Williamson? They would always posit themselves as an authority.
51:46 Speaker 00 As the authority. And the humility that goes along with it is usually some sort of just fake humility. It's just like, I don't know this, but I know this. And, and that I think is an important distinction. Um, I think you are completely correct in calling that out and it's tough to assess. Uh, so it's really up to every individual to put forward what they think is the best information. And that's the standard that we try to hold ourselves to.
52:11 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I think one of the challenges that you have is that feedback as well to the creators is always going to be difficult, especially as you start to scale up. Because you, when you first start out, maybe you could read all of the comments. But after a little while, you go, if I tried to take on board all of this information, I wouldn't do anything else outside of it. And also, I don't know how many of the people that are feeding this backup actually have my best interests at heart, how many of them actually genuinely understand and are bought into what we're trying to do? How many have just stumbled here randomly because of the internet? One thing that I notice is, um, rare, but I find to be a very charming element that people that I listen to have.
52:52 Chris Williamson? If they are receiving criticism, or if they're going through a difficult time or whatever, a degree of vulnerability and openness around that. I, I see that a lot of the time, very rarely would I see some of the sort of conspirituality influencers ever genuinely seem to emotionally connect with the uns-
53:14 Chris Williamson? Uncertainty that they have, the uncertainty would always seem to be quite performative. It would be there as a smokescreen for them to sit behind. That, you know, like the just asking questions type.
53:28 Speaker 00 Yeah.
53:28 Chris Williamson? Scenario, whereas some of the guys that I, so Lex Friedman is a good example of this. Like he's someone and not conspirituality like at all. He's like nerd spirituality. But he is somebody who is, he genuinely connects emotionally with the fact that he is more ignorant than he would like to be. And I have faith therefore that when he messes up, it's in, you know, he was doing his best to try and do things. And I hope that I try and do the same on the show too. However, you know, there's an endless litany of people who are more unscrupulous with the way that they go about.
54:11 Chris Williamson? Performative ignorance or uncertainty and sort of this lack of emotional connection.
54:18 Speaker 00 I spent my life in media interviewing people. It's my favorite, one of my favorite things to do. I've done thousand or thousands of interviews and my feeling is always that if I don't know something, I'm going to find someone who knows it. And identify them and talk to them about it to get their information. So as I mentioned, we had just done an episode on germ theory. I listened to this conversation between two pseudoscience grifters about terrain theory. I could tell it's bullshit, but I couldn't tell why it was bullshit. So we have a friend who has a PhD in molecular biology named Dan Wilson. He runs a channel called debunk the funk.
54:58 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I've seen, uh, he's been doing loads of stuff, right? During COVID.
55:02 Speaker 00 Yes, yes. So I pinged him. I said, he's been on before. I said, hey, you've covered these guys. I'm trying to make sense out of this. Can you come on and explain why this is bullshit? And he did, and that comes out next week. And also, you know, I keep referencing this, this incident, but it is pretty fresh with the Rogan thing. I mentioned all of the, the, you have to apologize.
55:28 Speaker 00 Grief that I got, but I also had a number of people reach out to me and be like, hey, we love you. We think this is wrong. Here's why. And I was able to invite two of them onto the next podcast to talk about why they thought I was wrong and have conversations. And at that time, I just switched to journalist mode. I just asked questions. I didn't push back. I wanted to hear their perspectives and release it out there. And so if you listen to that episode, you're going to hear myself and Julian, who have our perspective. Matthew has a slightly different perspective on it. And then you're going to hear an infectious disease epidemiologist, and then you're going to hear a civics activist all chime in on this one topic, taking it from different angles and finding where we disagree and
56:13 Speaker 00 agree. And that also is something that I just don't see happening in the conspiratorality realm. People will only talk to the people that already agree. And you're not going to see any sort of debate happening on their feeds. And that's unfortunate as well. We've invited a number of the people we cover on the podcast, and so far, only Charles Eisenstein has ever accepted and came on for two episodes. And still don't agree with what he's saying, but I appreciate that he was willing to take the time and engage in that level. And that is really, really important.
56:48 Chris Williamson? I think the binary that you have with regards to debate, one of it being the like Ethan Klein, Steven Crowder, and Sam Seder situation, which is kind of this super performative, you know, even the, I think one of them, their wife was ill or whatever before the thing started, and they were recording prior to like the broadcast beginning. And even that was, oh, I'm very sorry about that. And you think that's, that's what a person that would care would say. I didn't really trust the like, non performative part of
57:24 Chris Williamson? that. However, you do get to see really only total sort of myopia and an insular containing of just speaking to people that agree with the views. Or on the other side of that, if it is going to be a debate, it's bare knuckle, guns out, everything going. And, you know, the version that you've had there, which is kind of a reasonable, can we get somewhere closer to the truth? That's, I mean, one of the reasons that it's not done as much is that it doesn't get as many clicks. You know, if you decide to dunk on someone or use the sarcasm muscle to try and make them seem stupid with, you know, like side eye jokes and little giggles and
58:08 Chris Williamson? stuff like that, that's going to get your audience more riled up, or at least the less gracious elements of people's like natures within your audience, which maybe they would even fact check themselves on and go, this is activating a part inside of me that I really wish it wasn't. But that's why certain people gravitate towards certain creators, because they continue to press that button. They continue to trigger that reaction in them.
58:38 Speaker 00 Right. And, you know, it is challenging for me operating in this medium. One Twitter feed I follow is the governor of New Jersey, but it's not him running it. It's, I'm from New Jersey. So it's, it's, it's just a sarcasm Twitter feed. And in fact, the other day, there was something about like, what is the native language of New Jersey? And they responded sarcasm because it's just, it's so in me. And so sometimes it's hard to, you know, stop that impulse. And yet the medium doesn't allow for it. But in terms of the debate and the ability to have discourse with people, my academic training is in religion. And I
59:20 Speaker 00 didn't grow up with one. I feel fortunate that I got to college having no religious training whatsoever. I found psychedelics. I found a few eastern texts and off I went. And that began my exploration. And one thing about studying comparative religion without having been brought up in one, is that you can read all of them. You can find through lines, you can find points of disagreement, and then you can kind of assess, oh, what's good from this that I can take? What should really be left behind? And look at them from that sort of perspective. And that was very important to me as I continued working and as I mentioned, traveling in my work and meeting a lot of different people is that ability to relate to something that they understand without having this, but that's wrong, immediately
1:00:03 Speaker 00 put on them. And that's just so hard to do in these mediums. They're easier to do in long form podcasts, and that's one reason why I think they've proliferated over the last few years. But in the general, like, low attention span mediums that we use, it's quite impossible.
1:00:22 Chris Williamson? How effective is deplatforming when it comes to curtailing the growth of certain creators? Because I've kind of heard two sides of the story here. One being that you get this Streisand effect where it brings more eyes to people and they're going to grow in any case in different ways and blah, blah. But then, my sense is, at least in my opinion, that doesn't seem to be true. Like, when you, you essentially unperson somebody when you take them off of social media and they're out of sight and out of mind?
1:00:52 Speaker 00 That is a question that lies at the heart of our book in many ways. And we had Imran Ahmed, who was the founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate in the UK, on one of our very first episodes to discuss that topic. And now, we want to talk to him again almost two years later, because there are varying opinions on that. What I will say is that with conspirituality influencers in particular, they will announce they're leaving Facebook or Instagram for Telegram for a year, every day or week, because they actually realize that those other channels don't have the same power
1:01:34 Speaker 00 for them. And so they'll keep announcing they're leaving, but they don't actually leave until they get deplatformed.
1:01:39 Chris Williamson? They're kind of predicting the writing being on the wall. It's going to happen at some point. It's going to happen at some point, and I need to prepare.
1:01:46 Speaker 00 But they also, and they also, some of them, it would seem that they do it intentionally to put content that would make them get kicked off after months of hinting at they might get kicked off.
1:01:59 Speaker 00 And you go to their Telegram channels and they've grown since some of them have followings, but not to the degree that they do. Their influence, their influence in their in-groups isn't necessarily going to lag. Because if they've gotten them into their Telegram, if they communicate through Signal, Parler, whatever they happen to use, it's going to be strong. You will also often find that on the Instagrams and Youtubes, they post much more milquetoast material, but always tell you go to Telegram where you're going to see the real material about what they think. So it's kind of layered here. Some of them will use, Christiane Northrop is an example of one, who uses her main Twitter, Facebook for the very vanilla sort of material.
1:02:45 Speaker 00 And then Telegram is just all out Nazi material, like straight up.
1:02:49 Chris Williamson? Here's a question for you. If somebody is using a platform which has stricter terms of service, like a Twitter or a YouTube, as the front end of the funnel to get people into another platform which doesn't, and that other platform has nefarious nasty stuff on it?
1:03:12 Speaker 00 I think that it's still too new to tell that for sure. Meaning that a lot of these people have been building up their followings for years. And so it's more reactive now. They use those main channels to get them over, but they didn't set out with the intention of that.
1:03:28 Chris Williamson? I understand. My question is, if they're saying reprehensible shit in a Telegram, do you think that people should be removed from YouTube or Facebook or something else? If they're driving, do you think that perhaps there should be some kind of cross pollination between different platforms for you to be? Do you understand the problem that I'm talking about?
1:03:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's too dicey. That's too dicey. I mean, one of the things you'll often hear them say, freedom of speech, freedom of speech. These are private companies. And if you start having private companies working together on that level, that gets really dicey there. I would not, I would not be for that idea.
1:04:06 Chris Williamson? But you do have a bit of an information hazard here, right? That you can have the well wrapped version of somebody on the platforms that are discoverability, and then you can have the nastier version of someone on the platforms that are more protected.
1:04:21 Speaker 00 It is, it is a challenge, but I just, I've worked in technology too long and I feel I do, like, freedom of speech is an important aspect. I, I think that identifying misinformation that's harming people should be removed, but if you're talking about ideas and then cross-platforms, that gets too far afield for me.
1:04:41 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I understand. Is it possible, I had this question asked of me the other day, do you think it's possible to have an ethical cult?
1:04:50 Speaker 00 Were you talking to Jamie Weal?
1:04:52 Chris Williamson? No, no, I wasn't actually, no.
1:04:54 Speaker 00 I had him on the podcast about a year ago, talking about that.
1:04:57 Chris Williamson? Okay, is it, what did you come to? Is it possible to have one?
1:05:01 Speaker 00 I don't think so. I think that, I, I think that as soon as you label it a group or a cult, that history shows that power dynamics always come into play at some point. As soon as you start to scale, it, it becomes too dicey for that. I think that if you're talking about a small gathering of people who have a certain mindset, let's take an ayahuasca circle. And so, say you always do it with these 10 people, you have your corondaro, and you have your ritual. You don't need to label it something. You're not trying to put it out into the world. It helps you. It has some meaning. We don't need to call it a cult. We, you know, it could be a gathering of friends. As soon as you start to scale and you're getting to hundreds or thousands of people, but
1:05:44 Speaker 00 you want to say it's ethical, I, human nature just shows that it's very difficult to actually pull that off. There's too many competing interests at that point. That's why in conspirituality, we'll see that these people come together for online conferences, but you're not going to see them working together on their own platforms too often. There's too many cults of personality to be able to pull that off. So, what, what, part of what you're asking is, is a leaderless cult possible? Right? Because that cult is usually defined by the leader. And as soon as you have one figure to point to, then there's going to be power differentials that happen. Even with the best yoga instructors who are not cult-like that I've followed.
1:06:26 Speaker 00 Their assistants and the people closest around them would start to form these tribes around them, where they practice in the room, how they talk to it. Like, so I I'm not confident it could ever be pulled off.
1:06:39 Chris Williamson? But you end up with cliques in CrossFit classes, right? You know, you have, you always have the same guys that'll do the same class at the same time, and they're the the stronger dudes and, oh, you know, the better looking girls that wear the smaller hot pants or whatever. Yeah, it's it's an interesting one. I I've jokingly been referring to like the the pinned, the pinned comment on the top of the timestamps is, hello, cult members, like, here's the timestamps. And now I'm second questioning whether or not you can even use cult in a like ironic, satirical sort of non true way. I don't even know if I wonder whether it's such a dangerous term that you can't even really use it.
1:07:20 Speaker 00 It's challenging. You know, people have pointed out that cults is the root of culture, and I get that. I was a group fitness instructor at Equinox for 17 years leading into the pandemic. I I completely experienced that, the same 40, 50 people in the room every week. That was their part of their practice, and they were there. The question to me then becomes, are we having this experience in the room together that's very powerful? But then I, as the person leading it, am I trying to take it out of the room? And that's that's something I was always extremely careful. I got into fitness predominantly for physical and not spiritual reasons, and I try not to cross that line the entire time. So if
1:08:04 Speaker 00 people asked me what to do to protect their knee, I'd give them an answer. If they started asking me something metaphysical, I'd say, I'm not your guy. So I think that line is extremely important to find. And that and that's why that's what I mean by scaling. You're in the room with the people, you have an experience, awesome. We don't even need to label that. But, once you take it out of there and start trying to attract people in, then it becomes problematic.
1:08:27 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I understand. Okay, so as long as I don't get a god complex, then I'll at least be okay for now. So I saw this, um, I don't follow Paul Graham, although I probably should do, because I keep on using his stuff. So this tweet from him, uh, yesterday, "While the far-left and far-right have a lot in common, the far-left is more ideological than the far-right, while the far-right is more into conspiracy theories than the far-left. Interestingly, this means far-right nonsense is more likely to get banned than far-left nonsense. Far-right nonsense gets censored on social media, far-left nonsense becomes HR policy." What are your thoughts on that? I don't really know how to take it.
1:09:05 Speaker 00 Okay, I'm just hearing it for the first time, so I want to make that clear. Uh, I just did an episode on horseshoe theory recently, which a lot of people push back against.
1:09:15 Chris Williamson? What's horseshoe theory for the people that don't know?
1:09:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, sure. Horseshoe theory is this idea that was, um, developed by this researcher called Faye. It had to do with Nazi Germany and this group that broke off of Nazi Germany, Nazi Germany, who are anti-capitalist. And so they disbanded from Hitler and they started their own group. And the idea was, they were very left of what he was promoting. And so the idea is that once you get to, like, that politics is not a straight line, that it's a horseshoe, that the closer you get to the middle, the more that people will get along, and then as you go up, that the far-left and the far-right will start to meet someplace. Now, I think this is true in terms of sentiment and not necessarily policy, because the policy
1:09:59 Speaker 00 is what he says about HR rooms. Um, the policies of the left and right will manifest very differently. What I focused on, and I admitted that it does not have to necessarily do with Faye's original idea on this, but, is that the more dug in that people get on the left and right, the more they're unwilling to engage with ideas that don't conform specifically to what they're saying. I would not say-
1:10:30 Speaker 00 That the far right at this moment is necessarily more conspiratorial. That's the entire field of coverage that we're doing. Now that said, baked into the term conspiracy theory is the far right conspiracies and the ideology that pulls them over. But at this moment in history, the left is coming up with plenty on their own at the at the fringes. So, but when you, that's in terms of sentiment. When you step back and look at policy, then you're you're you're at your completely different worlds. You have one world that is, in good ways, I think, trying to make a more equitable world across genders and across races.
1:11:10 Speaker 00 At the worst extreme, they're focused more on renaming schools than actually trying to instill a better economic system and actually work on the policies that would do that. In the far right, you have stuff that I generally disagree with a lot more, which has to do with, you know, transgender rights, gay rights, abortion rights, things of that nature. So it's very split apart there. So my top line thought from that is it's just, it's a little too stereotypical to really make an impact there. There's, there's so much going on between sentiment and policy that it's hard to discern what he was actually driving at.
1:11:46 Chris Williamson? What are some of the far left cults that have been? What are like the most popular ones that have been going on?
1:11:54 Speaker 00 Uh, I mean, in terms of what we cover, I, I, there, we can debate whether or not you can call them cults. Because again, a cult is usually defined by having a charismatic leader.
1:12:05 Chris Williamson? Okay.
1:12:05 Speaker 00 And right now, you have a lot of different people who are just putting forward their viewpoints and they tend to be boosted up, but there is no single leader of any of these ideas at this moment. It's just a conglomeration of a lot of people. But it really, it has to do with the anti-vaccination. It really rooted there and then spread out from there. So from anti-vax, it got into anti-mask and the efficacy of masks.
1:12:31 Speaker 00 And from there, it just got, and this is where the crossover happened, that some of these influencers then turned to tactical training and armed training, which I'm not anti-gun, but watching people who are yogis then start to say, we need to protect the land, and then start to create actual physical communes, which is happening right now. We've identified at least two. That's where the crossover start to happen. And you see a lot of people who were on the left in terms of sentiment crossing over into that space right now.
1:13:07 Chris Williamson? Wild, man. The internet's a crazy place.
1:13:08 Speaker 00 It's the craziest.
1:13:11 Chris Williamson? Derek Barris, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with what you do, where should they go?
1:13:16 Speaker 00 Everything filters off of derekberes.com and conspirituality.net is where we host our podcast.
1:13:23 Chris Williamson? Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you for coming on.
1:13:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, thank you, Chris. Appreciate it.
Previous 350k Q&A - Dating Advice, Jordan Peterson & Internal Fears Next The Art Of High Performance Psychology - Dr Michael Gervais Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
