S3E15 - The Conspiritualists (interview w Matt Remski of Conspirituality pod)

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Matt Remski: The overwhelming concentration of that realm of physical yoga is upon perfecting the self. But not only perfecting the self so that it can become symbolic of and representative of a perfected nation or a perfected people. So, you know, obviously, nazis become really fond of yoga.

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Kayla: You're wasting your time. Now it's on.

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Chris: And wasting my breath, wasting my energy, wasting the entropy of the universe.

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Kayla: You do realize you've made wasting away huge mistake here.

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Chris: What?

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Kayla: That thing's not set up.

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Chris: Okay. Opening banter.

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Kayla: Hey, Chris.

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Chris: Hey, Kayla. Oh, actually, so what we. What were gonna do, our new format, is that our audience would have already heard some snippet from the interview, which we're about to talk about. We'll get to that, but right now, that means it'll be after the intro music. We just say our credentials. Bada bing, bada boom. I'm Chris, data scientist. Excuse me.

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Kayla: Sorry.

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Chris: Excuse me.

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Kayla: You don't have any credentials.

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Chris: I'm Chris. I am an unemployed piece of shit, but I have experience with data science and game design.

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Kayla: You do?

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Chris: Thank you.

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Kayla: Who am I?

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Chris: Just say your name.

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Kayla: I'm Kayla, and I am a tv writer.

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Chris: Welcome to Cult.

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Kayla: Or just weird, the podcast that we.

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Chris: Are hosting that has nothing to do with anything that we just said. Our credentials are.

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Kayla: No, but the only thing to do with cults. The only thing I bring to a television writers room is my obsessive knowledge of niche communities.

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Chris: And inevitably, mlms.

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Kayla: Any job that I have, I inevitably try to bring it back to, like, ooh, and then they could be in an MLM. Ooh, and then this guy could be a cult. Like, yeah, inevitably, that's what I will bring it back to.

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Chris: Yeah. When were actually at a premiere last night for a tv show you worked on, and I got to bring up culture. Actually, it was, like, grudgingly. Cause I don't like to.

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Kayla: You don't like to say, I have a podcast.

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Matt Remski: I know.

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Chris: Yeah, I know.

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Kayla: I don't want to be one of those horrible l. A. People that has a podcast, but I am. I am one of those people.

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Chris: I know. We should just embrace it. Just embrace that. We're fucking lame.

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Kayla: Anyway, everybody go watch Hightown on Stars.

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Chris: Yeah, go watch Hightown on Stars eight.

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Kayla: And it premieres tonight, so episode eight will be on in several weeks. But the first episode's really good, too.

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Chris: Yeah. And also, it wasn't my fault. This guy I was talking to just asked if I worked. If I had a project that I worked on with my wife. Cause we're both creative.

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Kayla: Yeah.

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Chris: And I was like, well, technically, yes, we have this podcast that we do. But then he got, like, super interested when I told him what it was about, he was like, oh, cool. Did you watch that Lularoe documentary? And I was like, oh, yes, we did. Yeah, we did.

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Kayla: Go watch the Lularoe doc if you haven't watched it. Lularich.

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Chris: Lularich, any business that you need to talk about before we get going here? No, tyt, man.

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Kayla: We can edit it out.

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Chris: It's funny if we don't.

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Kayla: No, I don't think so.

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Chris: I have one business.

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Kayla: Give us your business. Give us the business.

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Chris: So I will give you the business. We have a new patron that we need to shout out. His name is Matthew Walden. Thank you so much, Matthew, for joining our community on Patreon. Hope you're getting some good out of the content. We have a lot of bonus content now.

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Kayla: Yeah, we're getting into this bonus.

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Chris: We have hours and hours of bonus content now on Patreon.

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Kayla: They're basically bonus episodes.

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Chris: Yeah. Yeah.

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Kayla: We should stop calling it bonus content. It's bonus episodes.

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Chris: Well. Cause some of them are videos.

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Kayla: Some of them are videos. Some of them are cute little animations I've done. Some of them are meditation audio.

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Chris: I like the meditation audio.

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Kayla: The meditation.

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Chris: I used it.

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Kayla: The meditation one was one of my favorite ones to do. I mean, it's definitely a different kind of bonus content, but if you need a meditation that is not steeped in mysticism and woo. Go check out our Patreon.

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Chris: Yeah. Kayla just liked larping as a hypnotist there for a minute.

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Kayla: It was fun. I got to use my calming voice.

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Chris: Can you use that for the rest of the episode?

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Kayla: No, I try sometimes, and then I eventually go back into my nasally vocal fry. Lots of peaks and valleys. Yeah, it's bad. So at culture, just weird. We've got another episode for you today that's a little bit different from our normal episodes.

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Chris: Well, not lately, though, right?

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Kayla: No. We've been digging into a new style here in the back half of season two. We've been doing more.

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Chris: This is season three.

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Kayla: Season three.

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Chris: I'm gonna keep that. I'm gonna keep that.

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Kayla: Season three. We've been doing more interview style episodes, and this one is also another interview style. We really like doing them. It's really amazing and awesome to be talking to people who are actual experts on subjects that we're interested in, that we've talked about on the show before. We've had Molly Maeve Egan talking to us about the Amish to Travis Vue, giving us an update on QAnon. And we hope that you guys really like these episodes, too.

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Chris: As always, though, please give us feedback. If you have any, hit us up on twitter, email us@cultorjustweirdmail.com, or ping us on instagram, where we are ultorjustweirdos.

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Kayla: And technically, we have a TikTok now.

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Chris: Oh, yeah.

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Kayla: Though we have not put anything on it.

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Chris: We haven't done anything on it.

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Kayla: But it exists.

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Chris: We've talked about it.

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Kayla: You guys can find it. Send us a message on there.

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Chris: Actually, the best place to give us feedback is in our your world of text page.

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Kayla: Definitely. Send us your world of text. Little right in our world of your world of text.

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Chris: We haven't pinged that in a while. Well, we haven't pinged it on the show in a while, so there might be a bunch of people who don't know about it. Yourworldoftext.com culturejustweird.

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Kayla: Don't give any more context.

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Chris: You don't mean to tell them about the episode we did.

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Kayla: At least you can tell me the episode, but I want them to go and explain.

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Chris: Go find the episode from season two called the line.

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Kayla: But go to the. Go to. Go to your world of text cultures. Weird.

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Chris: First.

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Kayla: All right. Okay. So this might surprise our listeners, but there are actually podcasts out there that are almost as good as culture. Just weird. No, I know. I know. It's hard to believe, but it's true. I mean, like, clearly, we've had people from other podcasts on the show, and they're better than us. But another one of those amazing shows that deals with subject matters and themes similar to this one is called conspiratuality, and it's hosted by Derek Barris, Julian Walker, and Matthew Remsky. Here's a quote from their Apple podcast preview, a weekly study of converging right wing conspiracy theories and faux progressive wellness utopianism. At best, the conspirator movement attacks public health efforts in times of crisis. At worst, it fronts and recruits for the fever dream of QAnon. End quote.

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Chris: Ugh. Qanon.

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Kayla: Again, it all ties back to QAnon because QAnon is that goddamn umbrella, right?

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Chris: And it's total. Like, if crank magnetism is a thing, then QAnon is like the black hole at the center of the galaxy. So we've mentioned the idea of conspiratoriality on the show before, and actually, I think that was back during our QAnon episodes. But these guys on this podcast really get into the nuts and bolts, and were lucky enough to snag one of them to chat with and lend his considerable insight in this space to the show. Matthew Remsky in particular, caught my attention with an article he wrote for medium entitled, what can spiritualists and anti vaxxers get right? Subtitled, when grifters are not entirely wrong. We have work to do.

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Chris: I've linked this article a couple times on our Twitter, and if you haven't read it yet, I very highly recommend, but when I was reading this piece, I just caught myself nodding so vigorously all the time and just like, having epiphany after epiphany.

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Kayla: I think you threw your neck out.

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Chris: Yeah, I did.

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Kayla: You were nodding.

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Chris: Yeah, yeah. I'm actually. I'm gonna sue Matt because it's. My neck hurts now. But I was like, I mean, we gotta have this guy on the show because it's just so. The DNA is so, I think, similar to some of the things we've talked about before. And I. And again, I found myself so enthralled with what he had to say.

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Kayla: And to our enormous benefit, we did get that guy on our show. So without further ado, here's Chris and me having a conversation with the Conspiratoriality podcast co host, Matthew Remsky.

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Chris: Can you introduce yourself to our listeners?

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Matt Remski: Hello. So, I'm Matthew Remsky, and currently I'm a co host of a podcast called conspiratuality podcast. I've been a cult researcher and investigative journalist for a number of years with bylines at Jinn by medium, but also the Walrus magazine here in Canada. I'm in Toronto, by the way, and my last book was a pretty comprehensive study of cultic abuse in a very famous yoga method or business program called Ashtanga Yoga that was founded by a guy named Patabi Joyce in the seventies. He died in 2009, and he unfortunately, sexually assaulted probably every day of his working career. And this was known about, but suppressed through various cultic mechanisms. And so I did the research to uncover that and to help boost the testimonies of his survivors. That's. Is that short enough? Is that enough to get started? Yeah.

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Kayla: Yeah.

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Matt Remski: Okay.

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Kayla: That must have been some really brutal research, and we do want to talk a lot about that research that you've done. But since you are someone who, yourself, is very involved in yoga, can you talk a little bit about the journey that kind of brought you there, your spiritual journey to yoga? You know, how you got to it, what it's meant for you. Those kinds of things.

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Matt Remski: I would like to. Sometimes I hear people talk about their sort of yoga origin story in a very sort of clean way. And as in, they bumped into something, or they came across, you know, a book by Swami Vivekananda in a used bookstore, or, you know, their uncle, they found practicing strange postures on the patio deck one day. But for me, you know, it's hard to say that I really became attracted to yoga so much as it was one of the kind of spiritual practices and communities that was kind of just around and available to me when I was in a very vulnerable position, which is after having come out of six years of being in two different cults.

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Matt Remski: So the first yoga class that I went to actually was in New York City a couple of days after the first buddhist teacher that I had. His name is Michael Roach. He's still out there doing his thing. And I would define him as a cult leader. He was going into retreat for three years, and along with all of the kind of social control contracts that I had been living under, the practice that I was given in that group and that kind of ran my life, was really based on meditating, sitting still and meditating. And over the years that I was in the group, I really had become more anxious, more agitated in my body. I developed severe back pain. I mean, there's many reasons for this, but, I mean, just sitting still is a big one, right?

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Matt Remski: And I think that I had a final meeting with him before he went off into a three year retreat, which was supposed to be sort of solitary, but actually he went off with six of his female disciples. And. And there's a whole story behind that, which came out later, but kind of in this empty pause or segue in my life, in which I had just sort of given all of my attention and my resources over to this group. And then suddenly the leader was gone. I was in a real depression. And my partner at the time said, we have to get you moving. Let's go to a yoga class.

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Matt Remski: And I remember, and I remember there being something so simple about the premise that if you breathed into the sensations of very simple postures that felt kind of devotional or communicated a kind of a mood of equanimity, that you would just feel better. And I certainly did. But I also. There was this key moment where I felt, or I associated yoga practice with the ability to enjoy my own experience of being human in a way that the cult that I just come out of really didn't want me to have access to. And so the key moment, I've described it a couple of times, was that I rolled over onto my side after conking out in Savasana, and I looked at my hand, and for some, for whatever reason, it seemed that I had never looked at my own hand before.

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Matt Remski: I had never really sort of taken in the fact that my hand was me and that this was my body, and that I could choose to do things with it for exploration and contemplation and perhaps even pleasure, but mainly that it was me and mine. And I remember looking at my hand and saying, oh, hello. And I mean, that could have happened in any context, it could have happened in crossfit, it could have happened in a cooking class, it could have happened anywhere. But the dynamics of new age spirituality are such that sort of false attribution is a key marketing kind of premise, which is this experience happened in this space, and therefore you should come back to this space because it unlocked the secret of your existence.

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Matt Remski: And so I immediately and very innocently just associated yoga practice with kind of bodily autonomy and agency and freedom. And it seemed to me at first that, well, this is not a landscape in which cults could emerge, which is like a really naive thought thinking about it now, but that's where I was. That's where I was. And I also appreciated that there were many forms of yoga philosophy that were very clear about their non denominationalism. The root text that everybody was given in yoga teacher training to look at the yoga Sutras, this Iron Age text, it doesnt say anything about spiritual mentors or hierarchies or educational programs or initiations into any kind of, I don't know, tantric league or whatever. And so it seemed to be a kind of open source inquiry method, at least at the time.

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Matt Remski: And that's what really attracted me to it. And if, to the extent that I still meditate from time to time, or think about moving my body in ways that look like yoga postures or movements, I still appreciate those aspects.

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Chris: It's interesting, we just did an episode on the self realization Fellowship, and you were just talking about the initial commitment to non denominationalism and. Yeah, and they had the exact same thing where like, you know, the on ramp into that on ramp may be severe because maybe they're not problematic as much as some of the stuff you've experienced, but they had that same sort of, like, you know, all religions welcome type thing going on.

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Matt Remski: What a lot of people don't realize is that has been a standard political gambit amongst modern yoga enthusiasts and evangelists for the last hundred years. Oh, really? That was Vivekananda's entire pitch as he presented it back in the late 19th century at the Chicago world Parliament of religions. Yoga is India's gift to the world. It promotes universal values. Everybody can practice it as a kind of complement to their own religion, but the subtext there is that it will help you transcend your religious beliefs eventually, because it's actually better than everything else. So the universalism is actually a really sectarian statement, and the modern political kind of evolution of that is very apparent in contemporary India with the rise of hindu nationalist inflected yoga, which makes the same argument.

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Matt Remski: Yoga is both universal, but it's also particularly hindu, and it will allow everybody to understand the truth of, you know, hindu philosophy and theology. So there's a long history of yoga evangelists speaking out of both sides of their mouths. You know, this is for everybody. But once everybody practices it, everybody's going to be like me.

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Chris: Do you think there's something to do there with the universality of the hindu religion itself? Like, do you think that there's some overlap there?

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Matt Remski: Well, I'm not a scholar of Hinduism, but I would say that, first of all, it's a plural set of religious traditions that I think it's a modern gloss to say that collectively they express some sort of universality. Many of the traditions are hyper localized and very tied up with the ground and the soil where they've emerged and the local divine forces as they're conceived of. I think what you're actually citing is a neo hindu argument that Hinduism in general is universalist. So I think that's what the Modi government would actually want you to believe, is that Hinduism has universal value. And I wouldn't deny that it has great human literature and advice for everybody, but there's a big threshold to crosse to get from there to evangelizing, for sure.

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Kayla: It seems like in your journey and your experience, and like Chris said, we just talked about the self realization fellowship and just knowing other people's journey and spirituality and yoga in particular, it seems like you had a lot of very beautiful experiences, like you talked about with the hand and realizing that relationship to your body, and you've also talked about a lot of really dark aspects that yourself have experienced and that other people have experienced and that you've. You've done research on. Can you walk us through a little bit what. What that tightrope is kind of like. Like, how. How do you hold both of those things, actually?

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Chris: Can I interject here, too, real quick. This is not. I'll edit this part out. But I just wanted to say that the hand story was really. It's a really compelling story, because I just. The intense presence and mindfulness you had in that moment is just really. That's a really. It was a really cool story.

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Matt Remski: Oh, well, thank you. I mean, yeah, I don't feel like. I don't know. I don't. And this is where the attribution comes in, because I didn't really. It never occurred to me that, oh, I've learned something, or I've learned how to do something. It was more that a very intense physical experience that I wasn't directing, but I was being put through by this yoga teacher who was very athletic. It gave me a kind of endorphin shock that I think resolves to a sense of emotional happiness, but also kind of like an immediate granular awareness of what your physical reality is. And I think if you have spaced out in meditation for a long time or if you have spent ten years on four chan, you can have a really strong re embodiment, re enchantment experience of that.

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Matt Remski: That actually is also very young, because thats the other thing that I felt about it was that kind of moment that I associate with kind of early childhood, where I would be by my house in west Toronto where I grew up. There was a creek that I would go to in the summer when I was 5678 years old, and I would spend afternoon hours there, and the sunlight would be ordinary, and I would be able to pick up small stones and just get really close to the world. I have two sons now. They're five and eight, and they're doing that all the time. They're getting down close to the world and looking at things. And so it was also a very young, almost pre verbal moment as well.

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Matt Remski: So I think that's a huge hook for these embodiment practices, is that they can really dislodge where we are sort of entrapped in virtuality and bring us back to some very early stuff, very early sensorial stuff. But I feel like. I feel like I interrupted your interruption, though, because, Kayla, you had asked. You had, oh, you had asked about, like, dark experiences.

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Kayla: What is it like to have this relationship to yoga, wherever you've had those experiences where, like, with the hand, but you also have had darker experiences, like the cult aspect and learning about the sexual assault that runs so rampant. What is it like to hold both of those things at the same time?

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Matt Remski: Well, I really didn't want to, because I'd been in cultic environments for six years, and I really wanted the yoga world to be different from that. But the kind of 101 feedback for cultic research is that the content doesn't matter, right? Like, the dynamics of social control emerge in any and every circumstance, especially when there's a strong kind of charged commitment to a group project. And so it was very naive to think that somehow the yoga space, because it was more ideologically open ended or because there was no yoga poke or something like that it would be a less cultic experience. But I think the lesson there is that the cult doesnt care about your content. So what was it like to start to realize that I just really didnt like it? I really didnt want it to be true?

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Matt Remski: And I so much didnt want it to be true, that when it came down to me starting to become as a writer, a cultural critic of yoga ideology, especially as expressed through people hyperextending themselves in postures to represent states of spiritual openness through their bodies, for example, and then getting injured, that was the thing that I became very interested in at a certain point, which was, why are so many people going into this supposedly spiritual practice and coming out physically injured? So I started to look into that, but not as a trained anatomist or physiotherapist or anything like that. But beneath that concern, I feel like I had identified a physical problem with yoga practice, that it comes from this kind of pre scientific era in the late 19th century.

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Matt Remski: I'm not even talking about its medieval ideas, but it comes from an era in which nobody really knows anything about biomechanics, nobody really knows anything about range of motion. People are making up a lot of stuff around the medical benefits of yoga because they want it to be a legitimized thing instead of a hobby. And they also are driven to professionalize it in the new gig economy that emerges in the 1990s. So I was very much concentrated on all of this, and I started this research project that was kind of unskilled, and I didn't really know what I was doing. And it was called, what are we actually doing in Asana? Asana being the word for postures.

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Matt Remski: I started interviewing people about their injuries and then just sort of presenting these sort of qualitative findings in talks and articles that I would put on my website and stuff like that. And the idea was for that to emerge into a book. And then I hosted an event with a friend of mine named Diane Bruni, who just died last year, actually, or this past year of cancer. And she had this story to tell, not only about injury, but about how Patabi Joyce, the founder of Ashtanga Yoga, was sexually assaulting his students. And we recorded. We filmed and recorded this event. And it was advertised as, you know, the subject is going to be injuries in yoga. But she took this opportunity with about 60 or 70 people gathered in the room to spill this story that she had never told before.

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Matt Remski: And to say, well, actually, the thing that has bothered me most about the yoga industry is the sexual predation. And I so much didn't want that to be the focus of what I was thinking about or what the event that when it came around to releasing the video of that event, I actually talked her into editing that out, because I was like, you know, these are allegations. They can't. They aren't proven. I did all of the basic rape culture stuff instead of saying, wow, okay, well, what is the real. What's the more important story here?

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Kayla: Right?

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Matt Remski: And the more important story is that beneath the bodily fascism of the modern yoga movement, which I think leads to a lot of injury, because it's because of its focus upon perfection and purity, there's a story of intergenerational abuse. And so that's what I started to turn my attention to. I mean, to my credit, it only took me a month or so after I talked her into editing this thing out to realize that I had made a mistake. And I went to her with my tail between my legs, and I said, I'm really sorry. Let's talk about what you want to talk about, and I will start working on that. She was a primary informant for what I went on to do. Yeah.

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Chris: Do you still practice yoga?

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Matt Remski: Occasionally. I mean, occasionally, if I feel like there's no possibility of anybody knowing that I'm doing it, or there's no possibility that even the five year old is going to look in the door and see me of the study and see me doing it. I will roll out a mat and I will. I will do some postures more often if I am particularly charged or agitated, or I developed a sleeping disorder writing this book about Pitabi Joyce, if that is acting up, then ill sit and do a simple meditation once in a while. But I think that when it comes down to it, if you know too much about how the postures and how the entire scene was invented and constructed and marketed, it's difficult to forget all of that and take pleasure in the movements themselves.

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Matt Remski: If my spiritual practice had been attached to modern dance, for example, it might be different because there wouldnt be this premise that if you downward dog with this particular kind of excellence that you will open up higher levels of consciousness. It wouldnt be about that. It would be what does it feel like to swivel? What does it feel like to curl? What does it feel like to recreate fetal movements developmentally? These are all things that actually Diane Bruni got to later in her life after a hardcore career of ashtanga yoga practice. Wow. So she very much inspired me that way. The other thing that I just can't sort of stomach anymore is that because I taught yoga for about twelve years, it's very hard for me to do a sequence of postures without hearing myself tell myself what to do in my own head.

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Matt Remski: And that's weird. But it also reminds me that this whole thing evolved in the context of group practice and classroom kind of dynamics that is still kind of haunting me. It's still with me. It's like, that's why I think maybe that's why I want to feel like I'm really alone, is that I learned how to do this thing because other people told me how to do it and I was around other people doing it. That is just weird. It doesn't feel right anymore. So for the most part I just do a lot of hiking now.

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Chris: I was going to ask if anything filled in that sort of physical, spiritual space for you.

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Matt Remski: Yeah, I think hiking does it. I just got a weighted vest.

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Kayla: Oh, nice.

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Matt Remski: Delivered. And I'm going to see how that works and whether or not what kind of impact that adds. Yeah, pretty much hiking. Oh, and swimming. When I can, I will swim as much as I can.

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Chris: Yeah, swimming's very full body.

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Kayla: It's just so interesting to hear you use the term bodily fascism. Oh yeah, that's not something that I've heard before. But it makes sense that it just makes sense to have to kind of recognize that and then have it lead to recognizing the other kind of not so great parts of yoga and just going off of the term bodily fascism. Like I'm somebody who casually practices yoga. I mean, I'll throw on yoga. Yoga with Adrienne on YouTube. We started doing yoga in high school. Kind of like, oh, this is a California, like this is the PE class. We're going to do yoga.

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Kayla: So I very much don't like, I don't have that really hardcore spiritual aspect to it, but it is, it has always been very clear to me that even when the teachers are saying things like you know, yoga is for everyone and modifications and blah, blah. It's really nothing. And I'm not somebody. I'm not somebody that is flexible. I'm not somebody that has a yoga with Adrian body that can just do all of these very yoga works poses. And I'm still a able bodied, cis white woman. So I'm not as left out by the yoga community, the modern yoga community. But it's just so interesting to even just be doing it so casually and realize, oh, this is not accessible. This is not for fat bodies, this is not for so many different kinds of people.

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Kayla: And it just made me that the bodily fascism terminal spoke to me.

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Matt Remski: Well, and all of those disclaimers, this is for everybody. Here are modifications, kind of like, prove the point. Right? Right. It's like you're protesting a little too much, yoga teacher. You have learned something that is a form of spiritualized gymnastics, and you know that's a problem. And you want to make sure that it is universally marketable and you're doing what you can to make things more accessible. And it's actually hard just to define body fascism a little bit more closely.

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Matt Remski: And this is also really at the root of what our podcast goes on to study in terms of conspirituality, is that we now have more than 100 year tradition of physical culture in various nationalistic contexts being the basis for constructing the image of the upright, productive, and virtuous citizen that is self sufficient and therefore does not need the help of their community, or they don't need social welfare. They can actually come to embody and perform the heroic state. Right? Like, that's when you look at. When you look at the photographs of BKs Iyengar, who's the most. Up until the Instagram age, he was the most photographed yoga person in history.

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Matt Remski: His postures, in light on yoga, express, in their own terms, a kind of courage and moral rectitude and uprightness, but through the lens of physical culture and its history that explodes in the 1930s in Europe and beyond. Those postures are also postures of conformity. They are postures of discipline, their postures of making the body fit for military action, but also virtuous and noble at the same time. And the overwhelming concentration of that realm of physical yoga is upon perfecting the self. But not only perfecting the self so that it can become symbolic of and representative of a perfected nation or a perfected people.

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Matt Remski: So, you know, obviously Nazis become really fond of yoga at a certain point because it gives them a kind of materialistic way of working out and expressing their fetish for not only bodily control, but also the relationship between bodily control and nationalistic triumph.

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Chris: That is fascinating.

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Kayla: I have no idea.

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Chris: You're sitting here just blowing my mind over and over. But the funny thing I was going to say is it was the first time I had heard the words bodily fascism as well. And as you were answering that question just now I can't unsee it anymore. Now I'm just like, oh yeah, there. Oh yeah, there. Oh yeah, also there. Really fascinating stuff.

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Matt Remski: Yeah. And the roots are, and the keywords are purification, alignment, especially geometrical proportionality, self sufficiency, continence, containing things, containing especially one's emotions, whilst also radiating out a kind of self isolating confidence. Think about. And, you know, you can see these things writ large in the films and the pictures of Lainey Riefenstahl from like 1939 or 1936, the Olympics especially. But there's not a lot of difference between the photographs that she is taking or stills from Olympia or whatever the film was called. Every single cover of Yoga Journal, where the body is perfected, homogenized, geometrically organized and well managed, but also softened.

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Matt Remski: So this is the thing that becomes difficult to understand, and it also ties into themes of conspirituality as well, is that over time, the largely male run evangelical yoga movement, which contains all of these sort of body fascism subtexts, it goes transnational, and it gets adopted by a female consumer class in the 1960s, seventies and eighties who launder those ideas, but keep many of the same kind of somatic values at the same time. And this is part of why it becomes very confusing for people to say, well, how can yoga. Why are yoga people aggressive these days? Or why were there a bunch of yoga instructors at the January 6 insurrection? And it's like, well, because it's not like yoga culture contained anything that would actively resist nationalistic and even belligerent impulses.

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Matt Remski: In fact, for a lot of people, yoga postures just make them even more asshole ish.

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Chris: So fascinating.

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Kayla: Yeah. So you mentioned, I think this maybe the first or second time of this entire conversation so far. You said the word conspirator.

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Matt Remski: Yeah.

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Kayla: And obviously that's the name of your podcast, and that's where we learned about you. But can you define for our audience what conspirituality means?

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Matt Remski: Yeah. So I have. I always like to quote the abstract from a paper from 2011 called the emergence of conspirituality by Charlotte Ward and David Voas. I've got it here, so I'll just read it. Because they coined the terminal, they write, 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, may seem antithetical. There is a synthesis of the two, however, that we call conspirituality. We define, describe, and analyze this hybrid system of belief. It has been noticed before without receiving much scholarly attention. It is a rapidly growing web movement expressing an ideology fueled by political disillusionment and the popularity of alternative worldviews. It has international celebrities, bestsellers, radio and tv stations. It offers a broad political spiritual philosophy based on two core convictions.

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Matt Remski: The first, traditional conspiracy theory, and the second, rooted in the new age. So, firstly, they say these are the two premises a secret group covertly controls or is trying to control the political and social order. And number two, humanity is undergoing a paradigm shift in consciousness. Therefore, proponents believe that the best strategy for dealing with the threat of a totalitarian new world order is to act in accordance with an awakened new paradigm worldview. So that's ward and voas, and I think it's an amazing piece of work, and it's extraordinarily prescient. And they also, I don't think, could have predicted how much this movement would accelerate, not only with social media technology, but also under the stress of a pandemic. So we have taken our inspiration from that, and we've gone on to work really kind of in granular form on its aspects.

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Matt Remski: We divide up the content between us roughly in three sections. So Derek, who's been a journalist in the kind of old health world and music worlds for many years, he really digs into investigating the pseudoscientific claims that are made by conspiratoriality influencers. Julian's really good at skeptical arguments that unpack things like spiritual bypassing or cognitive fallacies that are used to attract people to these movements. And then, as a cult researcher, I look at the cultic dynamics that really sort of sew them together and make them gain speed. And so, you know, we look at the fact that this is a movement that really kind of mixes doomsday prophecy and the charisma that influencers are able to promote through social media, the pyramid schemes that are rife in alt health and its economy, and also people's earnest yearning for spiritual revelation.

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Matt Remski: Yeah, those are my co hosts. So Derek Barras and Julian Walker. I mean, I guess in short form, we say that it's where new age yearnings meet. Far right cynicism and perhaps even nihilism. And neither of those kind of factions are sort of fully aware of the mix. They kind of infect each other and also produce a product, a kind of discourse that is. I mean, it has a long history to it. It. But it's also more generalized and monetizable than something more inflammatory but distinctly related, such as QAnon. So QAnon has all of the conspirituality themes writ large, but also almost freakishly or cartoonishly large. And so one way of thinking about conspirituality is that it's kind of the landscape out of which something like QAnon can emerge as a very distinct structure and social movement.

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Chris: How did you guys meet? How did the conspiratoriality podcast start?

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Matt Remski: We had known each other as sort of fellow yoga writers and critics for about a decade, and I've never met Derek in person. Actually, they're both in LA. I'm in Toronto. I met Julian once on a trip to LA, but this was years and years ago. But, yeah, this is a relationship and a coalition of our times, I suppose, because it's really been through this screen for the most part.

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Kayla: I love that. I love that you were able to make that work. It's just, it's nice to see, and it's. It's nice to be reminded that it's not just reserved for the pandemic where we're all looking at each other through a screen that has had some benefits and really good things come out of it. Before, were all stuck on Zoom all the time, I just. I wanted to. And we'll move on to our next question. But when you're. When you were defining conspiratoriality and talking about how these groups overlap, it just really made me think about as somebody who was very much, you know, five, eight years ago on a lot of facebook groups for new age spirituality, 5d ascension and those kinds of things.

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Kayla: And also somebody who was on a lot of four Chan and Reddit groups, I was very interested in researching incel culture and very alt right men's activists kind of thing. And I remember when those groups started overlapping and I did not understand what was happening. It was very strange to be in this Facebook group where, you know, people believed that there was an ascension of mankind happening and were evolving. And, you know, going from carbon based to crystalline based and then seeing white supremacist and anti vax stuff bleed into that and alt right, you know, the conspiracy theory stuff, to start seeing those overlap was really strange. And why do you think spirituality has become that radicalization on ramp? And do you think that it's possible to go, so we know it's possible to go from spirituality to radicalization?

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Kayla: Do you think it's possible to go from being radicalized to spiritual? Like, is it a two way street?

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Matt Remski: Yeah. So there's a lot of parts there. And the first thing that I want to say is that if you or your listeners have not read Dale Baran's book, it came from something awful. I would recommend that book as kind of like a definitive landscape, various political and ideological influences through four Chan culture. So he's done a fantastic job there. And I think specifically with regard to the overlap between the subcultures that you're talking about, I think we really have to look to not only specific influencers like Jordan Peterson, for example, who I'll say a bit about in a moment, but also to the way in which people like Jordan Peterson organize their content delivery according to charismatic rules.

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Matt Remski: So one of the things, when you say, I'm looking at incel culture, and I'm seeing it brush up against conspiracy theories about the ascension of humankind, I mean, first of all, structurally, both of these position themselves as anti authoritarian, outsider movements that want to exert some sort of transformative action upon the world. I mean, then there's also nihilism within incel culture that it just wants to disappear or to be the best at being nihilistic. So the structure of those sentiments are similar. Anti authoritarian. We have access to secret knowledge. Weve been red pilled by something. We know the truth about a certain aspect of reality. And in that sense, researchers will tell us that if you believe in one conspiracy theory, youre likely to believe in others. Its a mode of thinking. Its not so much about the content.

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Matt Remski: In the same way that cultic dynamics emerge, regardless of the content, conspiratorial thinking will float amongst content patches and will sort of pick the thing that it is convenient to plug into at the time. But when we have influencers who actively blend religious, conspiratorial and body fascism content, like Jordan Peterson does through his emphasis on sort of personal responsibility and cleaning a room, even though he can't clean his own room, bodily virtue and self control as a kind of ideal manhood, that will push back against the critiques of feminism, for example. But then there's also this sort of muscular christianity that is driving his psychology content. It's easy to see how those worlds start to merge, because the people who are hanging out in the incel groups and the alien disclosure groups. They're probably both reading Jordan Peterson. Right? Right.

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Matt Remski: And so they'll find common cause, they'll find keywords, they'll find shared themes. And just another note on the gender dynamics of some of the groups that you're talking about. Conspiratuality culture has already been defined, as Ive said, by Ward and VOas, as being this melding of masculine and feminine elements, the feminine new age and the masculine political cynicism. But at the root of the body fascism that comes out of the early 20th centuries is also this absolute fascination or obsession with reproductive sanctity and heteronormative glory and men and women finding each other as Adam and Eve again and producing perfect white babies to fill up the homeland. So that intersects with white nationalist concerns.

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Matt Remski: But it also means that it's not surprising at all that a keynote within conspirituality is to become so called gender critical or turfy, or to begin to worry about the trans agenda, or to worry about how children are being sex trafficked because the medical industry is essentially pedophiliac and that vaccines are like child rape and so on. So all of these concerns kind of meld together. And the keynotes under all of them are strict gender binaries that must be preserved so that the holy family can produce holy children, and a kind of obsession with bodily purity that is so strong that it has to assert that the body is always already perfect as it is. It's already immune. It doesn't have to be meddled with. So fuck off with your vaccine.

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Matt Remski: So, yeah, there's a lot of overlapping themes there, but your specific question is, how does it just. Spirituality does make people vulnerable to radicalization, very clearly, because the premises of conspiracy theories sound very much like the basic premises of spirituality. So the three famous ones are in conspiracy theories, people believe nothing is as it seems, nothing happens by accident, and everything is connected. And those three claims or premises are also deeply enmeshed in most forms of spiritual discourse. And so if you've been practicing a kind of spirituality that respects or believes in those premises for many years, you've almost rolled out a red carpet for a conspiratorial mindset or a way in which those views can be soured and become paranoia. But then you asked, like, does it go in the other direction? And can people who are invested in spiritual culture become radicalized?

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Matt Remski: Or is that how they're vulnerable? Or am I getting that right? Are you asking. Are you asking the other way around? If people are in sort of have they? If they've been radicalized into incel culture, can that lead them towards spiritual ideas? That's what you're asking?

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Kayla: I feel like we see less discourse about maybe that route.

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Matt Remski: I mean, I think the activities are different, right. It's like my understanding of Chan culture is that if you move out of the black pilled status of nihilism, everything is awful. And I'm just biding my time here shitposting because it's better than committing suicide, then turning towards spiritual aspirations would be a betrayal of that affect. Right? So I don't, I dont necessarily see how there would be a connection between those two things.

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Matt Remski: But I can imagine that when people in conspiracy cultures begin to get, or conspiracy theory cultures rather begin to really get tired of the lack of resolution, the impossibility of proving that 911 was an inside job to anybody's real satisfaction, or when they realize that they're never going to convince their families that vaccines cause autism, they're just not going to get anywhere like that, then I think it would be very natural for some people to reach towards a spiritual explanation for that failure. Right. And to say, well, my family isnt ready to hear the truth. People have to wake up personally and individually and spiritually in order to understand what really happened with World Trade center building seven. And until they do, they just wont see the truth.

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Matt Remski: And I think that pivot to spiritual explanations probably becomes very relieving for a lot of people. So I do see it flowing that way as well. But I'm kind of speculating there. I can't really point to solid anecdotes or certainly any data, but it does make sense that could happen.

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Kayla: Thank you for answering that multi part question.

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Matt Remski: Yeah, yeah.

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Chris: I'd like to pivot a little bit to talking about just the specific article that you wrote for medium, I think, a couple months ago now. But that was finally the thing. We like your podcast. But that was finally the thing where I was like, we have got to talk to Matt Remsky. Because I don't know that article, it was just full of insights. It was really fascinating. And the title, it was what conspiratorialists and anti vaxxers get right when grifters are not entirely wrong. We have work to do. The question that I want to ask is, can you sort of give us the most succinct summation of what you stated in that article about what conspiratorialists get right?

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Matt Remski: Well, they knows that something is wrong and they know that what is wrong is systemic. They have been enculturated into the old aphorism of as above, so below. So if they understand that as individuals, they are vulnerable to various forms of disease or oppression, that signifies something systematically as wrong. Now, what is actually wrong is up for grabs. But I think underneath the sentiments, most conspiratorialists understand that late stage capitalism is destructive. I think they understand now, they might actually specifically deny climate collapse, but I think there might be an awareness that the climate is in trouble in some catastrophic way. And the reasons that they have for understanding things that way might be non scientific. But I think they grasp the general peril existentially of the issue.

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Matt Remski: If they are american, they know they live in an incredibly predatory and unequal and disorganized society in which libertarianism and a kind of, like, cruel libertarianism is the only real law of the land. I think that they know and cherish the stories about spiritual heroism and transcendence. They know that people rise to wonderful capacities under stress, or that they can do. And I think they know from their personal stories, but also from the resources and the literature that they love, that the dark night of the soul is a thing that people can pass through really deep depressions and anxieties in a way that is purposeful, in a way that is meaningful. And so, in general, I think, can spiritualists have it nailed?

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Matt Remski: And what makes it so frustrating and tragic to work on this material is that the answers that they are provided by influencers or that they create for themselves are just way too simple and self serving and privilege blind and anti egalitarian and uneducated. And I think anti vaxxers, as a kind of subset of conspiratorists, simply take all of those anxieties and they concentrate them down and narrow them down into the point of the needle that is meeting the flesh of their child, and that's at the center of their lives. So it's like the anti vax ideology is like a highly concentrated form of conspirituality that is focused upon, like, a unique and very disturbing threshold event.

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Matt Remski: You know how when public health agencies try to kind of show or depict vaccination as this really innocuous and kind of fun thing to do, it's like, here's the friendly nurse, and she's got a mask on, and there are the blue gloves, and here's the little alcohol swab.

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Kayla: And.

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Matt Remski: And if the child is crying a little bit, that we've got stuffy toys here, and they'll get a lollipop afterwards and boink, your jab is done, and so on. I think in the heart of the anti vaxxer, the moment of that penetration of the skin is like this terrible threshold that all of the public health messaging around, hey, this is a harmless and positive thing to do. Feels like gaslighting to them. And I wouldn't discount the sensations at the heart of that, because there are just too many people in our culture here in North America, but then also around the world who have had terrible threshold experiences as they navigate institutional authority, especially in medicine. And so they're right about that, too.

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Kayla: Right? Right. It's terrifying.

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Chris: So one of my favorite parts about your article was where you talked about expertise and trust. One of the phrases we talk about a lot on our show is the concept of, like, the trust network. And then it's like, right there in your article. In fact, I have a quote here, the absence of slam dunk answers. We rely on networks of trust. And I think there's like, a lot of misconception, even among rational minded folks. When we say things like follow the science or trust the experts, there's like this unspoken layer underneath that of, like, who or what to trust. Right. That just, there's like that decision that we don't talk about.

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Chris: So I guess my question is sort of like, if you could talk a little bit about that, and then why do some segments of society trust, you know, some folks, but not others, why do some segments of society trust the Joe Rogans andrew Wakefield while others trust the Anthony Faucis?

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Matt Remski: I think for this question, telling a little story about somebody that I referenced earlier might be helpful, and ill just tell a little bit of his story. But thats the story of BKS Iyengar, who was probably more responsible for the explosion of global yoga than anybody else. This is somebody who lost his father when hes nine. He grows up in abject poverty. He is kind of recruited by a distant family member named Tiramalai Krishna Macharya, who ends up teaching a bunch of the yoga greats of the early 20th century to come to Pune and basically be a house servant. Krishna Macharya marries Iyengars 13 year old sister. Hes 36 at the time or something like that. Not uncommon, by the way, for this culture and time.

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Matt Remski: And Iyengar is sickly as a child, and he was very hopeful that Krishnamatarya would teach him yoga postures to help him with his childhood illnesses. And Krishna Macharya didnt. He withheld, according to Ayengar biography, autobiography for many years. But then finally, when he was about 16, he got a big chance, and he proved himself to be adaptable and adept and super flexible and a hard worker. And he became basically a gymnastic yoga superstar, somebody who could demonstrate. But one of the first jobs that he got at the age of 18 was with a wrestling club, a physical culture club in the town of Puna, city of Pune that was associated with the hindu nationalist physical culture movement.

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Matt Remski: And he was asked to teach yoga there to a bunch of bros, really, who also wanted to do weightlifting and gymnastics and wrestling and stuff like that. That. But to make the yoga program more sort of appealing, there was a doctor there named Doctor Gokhele who said to Iyengar, he's at the age of 18, he says, you know, you're really good at these postures. I would like you to demonstrate them in various presentations as I talk about their medical benefits. Now, Gokula didn't know anything about yoga postures, and Iyengar didn't know anything about medicine.

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Matt Remski: So they kind of made this shtick up together where they would go to YMCA halls and they would go to various conventions, and they would go to meetings of dignitaries and people who were forming the new kind of cultural elements and assets of the emerging indian nation, because their argument was physical yoga is a form of indigenous exercise that's going to be very good for the nation. And so in an interview that he does in the 1980s, Iyengar recounts that the doctor would just recite the medical benefits of these postures that he had never seen before, right? He's not offering evidence. He's not offering any kind of citations or anything like that. And Iyengar says, I learned medicine from him. And, okay, so that's an interview that he does in the eighties.

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Matt Remski: He's doing the interview in the eighties because at that point, he's traveling the world giving what he calls and what his hosts call medical yoga classes. This is a dude who didn't finish high school. He's never cracked anatomy textbook. He knows shit all about medicine. And he's giving medical yoga classes. Now, of course, he's got teams of acolytes who describe him healing their infirmities and so on. There's one class that I saw this totally blew my mind. It was on video, and it's in Australia or something like that. And he's got a whole group of people who he says he's giving them postures to heal their heart, cardiac ailments, and then he's got people with kidney problems, who he's got in particular postures, and he's just making. He's obviously making shit up now. Is he a charlatan? I don't know. I don't know.

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Matt Remski: He earnestly believed in what he was doing, and very importantly, he believes he cured himself of his childhood ailments through the vigorous practice of this lonely thing that he basically made up with a little bit of instruction from Krishna Macharya. And so the force of his survivalist enthusiasm for this art form became a way in which he was able to make increasingly grandiose claims about what the medical benefits would be. And it was his charisma, really, that allowed him to come to North America and to Australia and to Europe and to basically say, I know enough medicine to be able to cure people of heart disease. And nobody offered any resistance. Nobody walked in and said, hey, wait a minute. What are you actually talking about? What's the mechanism here of action? Like, how does this.

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Matt Remski: How are we going to track these patients afterwards? What are the real. No research is done on this. And then he ends up publishing in 1966 the most popular yoga manual ever, 3 million copies now in print, of light on yoga. There is a medical claim for each posture made on every page and in. And there have been dozens of repent pre printings of this book. I've got one that's not too long ago where there is no medical disclaimer in the front. There's not even. It doesn't even say, do these exercises under the advice of your doctor. It doesn't even say that. There are concrete medical claims made basically on every page. This posture will cure your liver of. Dot, dot, dot. Right? This will help with your rheumatoid arthritis. Dot, dot. Right? And. And there's not even a disclaimer. He was able.

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Matt Remski: The force of his own belief, his charisma, his ardent desire also to communicate the gospel of what had saved his life as he believed it. His desire to do that made him so such an attractive figure that all rules of evidence and process and scope of practice just sort of went out the window to the extent where the publisher themselves doesn't even feel the need to offer a fucking disclaimer. And so this, I'm telling the story. It's a little bit long winded, but it sets the stage for a media environment where if you have an origin story of personal triumph over illness, I've recovered from my triumph, from my trauma, and I did it in a way that the doctors at the time couldn't understand, but then they came to see that it was worthwhile.

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Matt Remski: But of course, you'd never really say who those doctors are. And if you make claims about your own recovery, and then you present your material and your health ideas in this kind of like hero's journey format, which has nothing to do with the way in which medical knowledge actually evolves and is produced, you will have a winning set of products. You will just have that. And so why do people believe Joe Rogan? Because he invites a shit ton of guests on who do exactly that. Why do people believe Brett Weinstein? Because he wears the clothes of a professor and of a scientist, even though most of the time he is talking from very subjective and personal experience. And he has the sort of origin story narrative of, I've always been a rebel. Look at what they did to me at Evergreen College.

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Matt Remski: That's a long answer to your question. But Andrew Wakefield, the same thing. It's like I had to personally overcome all of this acrimony and judgment and disdain within the medical community that I had given my life to, in order to communicate this truth. Now hes going the opposite direction from Iyengar. Iyengar is basically a gymnastics teacher who becomes a spiritual guru, but then he also becomes a doctor. Now, in the conspirator era, we have doctors who for some reason, are not satisfied with the boring work of medicine. And its not for some reason. I mean, medicine is boring and it never ends, right? And it's like an endless series of problems that nobody can ever really solve.

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Matt Remski: And so obviously, it's going to be very attractive for impatient or narcissistic doctors to say, well, what you really need is this spiritual view of the world, right?

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Chris: This root cause thing. This is a follow up to that. I don't know how to put this. I'm trying to think the right way to formulate this. One of the things that was interesting is how you talked about how you would have to use the. And not just you, but all of us, even the most scientifically literate of us, unless it's our field of choice, unless it's our field of study, have to do some similar type process to, you know, to prove a claim or to follow the science, as even a conspirator might. Can you talk a little bit about, like, is there any way for rational minded folk to have additional trust in our processes versus the processes that a conspiratorialist might do to do the same thing?

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Matt Remski: It's a great question, and I want to thank Doctor Annie Kelly for a remark that she made one of our episodes, which is that when it comes down to it, also, Chris Kavanaugh, on decoding the guru, says this regularly. When it comes down to it, so many of us are in the same position of operating out of a kind of epistemological filter bubble where Im not a virologist, Im not an epidemiologist, why do I end up believing what I believe? In alt right circles, I would be told that I believe in my public health officials because Im a simp, and that would be very harsh. But theres a grain of truth to that, which is that.

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Matt Remski: But I cant really explain why I dont have a fundamental antipathy towards my public health officials here in Toronto that kind of inspires me to go off book or off kilter and seek out hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin as a prophylactic against Covid. I dont exactly know why I trust the way I do. Is it about my class? Is it about my educational status? Is it because I don't want to be caught next, dead next to a person wearing a MAGA hat? Is it because I really want to believe that the institutions of late capitalism can be functional? If I put it that way, all of those reasons, given that I'm not an expert myself, give me a lot of reason to pause. Like, who am I actually deferring to?

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Matt Remski: And Christopher, you brought up the notion of how can the rational person find more validation in their way of doing things? And I don't think it's a matter of rationale. I think it's a matter of more of emotional intelligence. With regard to who do you trust and why? Its been abundantly proven by researchers of disinformation and cult researchers that you cant argue somebody cognitively out of their belief in their cult leader or their belief in QAnon or their belief that thimerosal is causing autism in vaccinated babies. That doesn't work. You really have to try to understand, who did they come to trust along the way? And more importantly, who did they come to distrust along the way and why?

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Matt Remski: And if those people that they distrust are in white coats, or if they are silver tongued politicians who obviously are not as interested in public health as they are in being reelected. Reelected, then we have to work on that. Right? Like we have to. We have to look at how our trust bonds are formed.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: It's a hard problem.

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Kayla: It's a hard problem.

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Matt Remski: It's a really, it's a really hard. It's a really hard problem, even in.

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Chris: A really reflective way. Right.

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Matt Remski: It's like. And it's made. Yeah, and it's made. And it's made a lot more difficult by the impulse to say, those fucking people are stupid. Right? They're not stupid. They're not stupid. They have feelings, they have big feelings, right. And they have reasons for their positions, and those reasons can run the spectrum of hard won all the way to. They've been manipulated by a charlatan, but the feelings remain the same. Right. Which is I trust who I trust and that's how I'm going to make my decisions.

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Chris: Yeah. I mean, I constantly hear, even just an everyday discussion, right. You hear like why do the anti vaxxers want to hurt people so much? And they don't. Right. Like the thing is, unfortunately they believe that it's the other way. They believe that vaccines are causing the damage. So that's why it's such a tough nut to crack, because it's not that simple. Yeah.

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Matt Remski: And that's why actually doing the best that you can with the vaccine science doesnt really make a dent because the vaccine is often symbolic for institutional distrust. That, as I said before, is kind of distilled down into the tip of a needle. And its something that you can really closely focus on, especially the moment in which it happens. Its like the jab is going to change your life. Where were you when you got jabbed?

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: Yeah. Such a. Before and after. That's so interesting.

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Matt Remski: Right?

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Kayla: Wow. So one thing that Chris and I have been finding very challenging with our podcast and the world right now is the psychological toll from some of the topics that we talk about. Do you also find this challenging and how do you deal with it? How do you, how do you stay healthy? Insane?

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Matt Remski: I totally find it a challenge and I am trying to recognize that. I spent three years writing the book on Joyce, and during that time I also did other journalistic investigations into cults and so on. And now on a weekly basis, my email box is filled with 50 more tips about various groups. And. And I spent the first year after the book was published trying to field those questions and think about where am I going to take this next? And I gradually felt more sour and more alienated and more distant and more, I don't know, like what's the word for being? I felt more self protective of my time as these leads came in. And then I realized it was because I had really worn myself out with this terribly dark material.

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Matt Remski: And also that I had done the best that I could do and I couldn't really see any positive impact from it. Right. Like, it was nice to have the book praised by people that I respected and so on, but every writer wants the book to change something and I couldn't really see how that was going to happen with conspirituality podcast. I've recently gotten to the same point personally. This might be news to my co hosts, but breaking, yeah, breaking news. I'm not quitting. I'm not quitting Derek and Julian, I can say that. But I am saying that I have to say that when I saw the news report that Joe Rogan had contracted Covid and thought he was curing himself with ivermectin, I was like, oh, I can see how this is going to keep going.

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Kayla: Yep.

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Matt Remski: I can plausibly write out the timelines of the 20 top influencers in conspirituality going forward for the next six months. This one's going to pivot to cryptocurrency. This one's going to keep going nuts on critical race theory. This one is going to incorporate more and more anti trans bullshit into their QAnon stuff. Christiane Northrup is going to run for political office in Maine. I realized that. I know how those stories are going to go. And all of those stories are garbage, right? There's no end to the absurdity of what this culture will produce. It's like there's no real answer to climate collapse either. These are hyper objects.

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Matt Remski: The notion that as a journalist you can bring somebody who's not doing something obviously illegal to account, that you can bring shame to them, that you can be so thorough with your deconstruction of Mickey Willis and the pseudo documentary that he'll never make another one that's just completely. It's so naive. It's like almost pathologically naive. It's wishing for a world that just does not exist. And you want it to. And you want the world to exist because somehow you're caught on this like guinea pig wheel of thinking that youre doing something positive, that youre in a ground war that youre winning. And I dont think thats realistic. And so I dont think that im going to have much more time going forward for taking apart Zack bushs next stupid post.

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Matt Remski: I don't think that I'm going to spend any more of my brain cells on Yoland Norris Clark talking about how fat trans people are ending civilization. It's not just that it gives these people oxygen, it's that it poisons the soul, really. And for me, anyway. And so my commitment to my own psyche is not only to keep doing a lot of hiking, but I'm really just going to start finding the people who are providing, or at least trying to answer the questions that the people who are reaching out to Kelly Brogan for answers are asking. It's an economy of supply and demand. The demand is for meaning. And the conspirituality, supply is just garbage. And so I want to start spending the majority of my time looking for people who are listening clearly to the questions, like, what do the conspiratorialists get right?

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Matt Remski: What do the anti vaxxers get right to listening to those questions and figuring out what the real what the real useful, forward moving, hopeful answers are.

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Kayla: That that question helped, or that answer helped me a lot because I think that we're dealing with this very much in the same way where it's like, oh, cool, Joe Rogan has Covid and now he doesn't have Covid, and now he took ivermectin. And we can see how this is going to go. And it's just, it's crazy making and.

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Chris: It'S, it's a fire hose. It's a fire hose.

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Matt Remski: And it's never going to stop. Stop. It is never, ever going to stop. Thinking that it's going to stop is kind of like thinking that late capitalism is going to reduce carbon in some meaningful way. It's not. It's just not going to. I don't think it's going to happen. We can make it less bad by focusing on the people who have the best ideas.

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Kayla: Right. Finding those quality conversations, not having it be about, yeah. The takedowns and the dismantlings and the, and just looking for the actual quality. That's, that's really helpful. So thank you for answering that question.

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Chris: Yeah, I think it also puts us at risk of, you know, the more take downy, the more dunky, you know, things are, the more it puts us at risk for just being part of the problem, just being part of the, like, you know, the clickbait, you know, algorithm problem right back and forth. Yeah.

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Kayla: Don't poison your soul. That's what, that's the takeaway.

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Chris: Well, this interview has been good for my soul, as was your article, as is the conspiratoriality podcast. So we just really want to thank you again for your time.

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Matt Remski: You're welcome.

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Kayla: What do you, what did you, what do you think about all that.

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Chris: All of the things. Okay. I was not ready to start, so. Baby, that was a very good interview.

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Kayla: I don't even know why we're talking right now. Like it speaks for itself.

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Chris: It does. The end.

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Kayla: The end.

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Chris: It's been cultured. Just weird. I do want to react to a couple things, but you do have a good point that I don't know we're gonna say anything better than Mister Rimsky said it. That's part of. I don't know. I guess it's part of what I noticed in the article is that he does have a way with words. He has a way of crystallizing things.

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Kayla: I want to start with body fascism.

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Chris: Oh, you want to start with body fascism?

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Kayla: I don't even have anything to say about it. I just want to say. Yeah. Glad we talked about it.

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Chris: Yeah. No, that's, like, in my lexicon now.

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Kayla: It's fantastic.

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Chris: It's a good.

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Kayla: And, man, do we see it immediately. It's not just a part, obviously. Now, I am educated on how it is hugely an issue in yoga. Again, Matthew Ramsky was able to distill something that I've noticed in the community to a very high degree. But now I'm just, like, seeing it everywhere. And, God, if it isn't around in.

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Chris: The time of COVID how much it connects to. Yeah. Oh, God. The whole, like, the bodily purity that is required of people who are like, well, they died with complicating factors, which is, like, literally fascism of the bodily type. And then that saying that Nazis were into yoga, which I didn't know they were into yoga. I did know that they were into physical fitness, bodily purity. That was a big part of the aryan movement. But, yeah, I didn't know specifically yoga, but it makes sense. It goes with everything that were just saying about. It's actually not that many steps from a physical practice that only really is for a certain type of body to bodily purity to racial purity. Right. You can kind of see the steps.

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Kayla: Right. And I think, yeah. Then it's also not that far, that many steps to get to the whole, like, reproductive sanctity, heteronormative glory. Men and women reproducing their babies.

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Chris: Right. There's a purity aspect to all. Yeah, I think we might talk. We react to that a little bit more. But I wanted to say just because the first thing you talked about was like, oh, there was, like, some sort of culty yoga leaders that were sexually assaulting people. And my note here is, why is there always sexual assaults with this shit? Like, why is it all. I know it's not literally always, but it's. What do you mean?

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Kayla: This shit.

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Chris: Nxivm and voodoo field.

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Matt Remski: Yeah.

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Chris: With, you know. And now with this just. I don't know, it just seems like that's, like, frequently a pillar of, like, a cultic system is, like, sexual assault. I guess it's power.

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Kayla: Yeah, I think. I think that it's probably. I think it's something where there are common reasons every single time and also unique reasons every single time.

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Matt Remski: Right.

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Kayla: I think that some of the common reasons are. Yeah. That in these groups, power dynamic is part of it. I think that when we're talking about groups that have a charismatic leader, I think that person's pathological, like, narcissism has something to do with it. And that ties back to the desire for the pursuit of power. I think it's a tactic that is. That is wielded to maintain power.

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Chris: So, see, this is where I was.

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Kayla: Power.

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Chris: Okay, so that thing, literally the exact thing you just said was what's confusing me, I think, the most, which is like, is it chicken or egg? Is it.

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Kayla: I think it's both.

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Chris: Like, sexual assault as a way to maintain. To gain and maintain power. Or is it. I have gained and maintained power and I'm going to spend that power capital on sexual assault?

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Kayla: I think both. It's probably both and. Yeah, then it goes back to what I was saying where probably depends on the situation. I don't think there's gonna be one size fits all for this kind of thing.

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Matt Remski: Yeah.

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Kayla: Like, I think that's all.

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Chris: So many of them.

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Kayla: I think that the reason why. The reasons why sex abuse runs rampant in the catholic church are different reasons than why sex abuse ran rampant in nXivm. But there's probably some parallels to be drawn. You know, I think that there's some parallels why sex abuse runs rampant in the amish communities that connect back to the sex abuse in the catholic church. And why does this happen in yoga? Well, there's probably some parallels to be drunk. There's also probably some unique reasonings. I think it's all. There's something to be learned. There are global lessons to be learned. And also, once you start measuring that coastline, it's going to be unique each time.

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Chris: Fucking coastline.

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Kayla: I know.

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Chris: I also really liked his hand story. It was just something very, like, very.

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Kayla: Into the hand story.

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Chris: It was something very. It was just viscerally meditative. Like, I could. I could, like, see him meditating and that sort of like. Yeah, like, present I think I said this in the interview with presence and mindfulness sort of aspect that just was like a really. I don't know, it was a powerful story. We also talked about, like, the universality of Hinduism potentially having something to do with, like, why yogic practices seem to have this sort of, like, all religions welcome. I just want to make sure that this is not really a correction, but we talked more about whether Hinduism has universal value and what the sense of that value is. And he brought up the Modi government. I was actually trying to get more at Hinduism's syncretism as a religion.

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Chris: And so syncretism basically just means when a religion takes on aspects, it's basically like, it amoebas other ass other religions into itself.

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Kayla: So kind of like how Christianity consumed pagan traditions.

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Chris: Exactly. Like, that was the exact example I was going to give. Christianity is a highly syncretive religion because it's like, oh, yeah, cool, like, the winter solstice. Yeah, it's Christmas now. That's when Jesus was born. Oh, this other, like, festival of spring. Yeah, that's christian thing now. So, like, Christianity is heavily syncretive or.

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Kayla: Like, how the romans, other religions are not. Oh, the greek stuff is ours now, too.

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Chris: Yeah, yeah, I actually. Maybe. Yeah, maybe that carbon copy named them. That's, like, almost needs a different word. But there's then the contrast to that would be something like, Judaism is less syncretive because they're more about, like, these are the jewish traditions. These are the jewish things, and it's been like this for thousands of years. We don't care that you have a holiday on your winter solstice, you pagans, because we're not trying to convert you. We don't care. So my understanding. And if there's listeners out there that know more about this, and I am not a religious scholar, so please, please correct me, my understanding is that Hinduism is also a very secretive religion. Like, it tends to say, like, oh, yeah, like, Jesus. Yeah, he's actually part of our pantheon, and so is this, and so is that.

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Chris: And I think, you know, like, it's very welcoming in that way, in terms of, like, you can kind of, like, worship other stuff, but also consider yourself hindu because it's all part of the same thing. Again, this is just, like, my very rudimentary understanding of how Hinduism works.

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Kayla: My understanding from Hinduism, and this again, goes back to, like, that one time in high school when the hindu students older sister, who was studying religious studies, came to talk to our history and said these things. But from what I remember, from that talk, which was very illuminating for young Kayla, was that just kind of depending on who you are and where your family was from and your family's traditions, you would have a relationship with certain gods in the religion and not necessarily all of them, like, you pray to. Like, oh, these are the gods that we pray to, and there are hundreds or thousands of others that we acknowledge as being a part of the umbrella religion, but, like, these are the ones that we focus on kind of thing.

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Chris: Right?

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Kayla: Again, correct me if I'm wrong.

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Chris: That is my understanding, but, yeah, please correct and or sharpen our understanding of this if you are a listener and you know better. But to be clear, like, you know, when we're talking about something, like, when were at the self realization fellowship, Hinduism was one of the religions that it was like saying, come one, come all to. So I don't want to, like, muddy this by saying, like, yoga equals Hinduism. That's absolutely not the case. But just because we talked about, like, you know, sort of culturally, them sort of, like, springing from the same region, right. There just might be some, like, common thread of syncretism there. I also wanted to comment on. I liked his quote, like, the cult doesn't care about the content because we've seen that so much, right?

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Chris: Like, especially with this show, because we talk about so many different things content wise. You know, like MLM, business, wellness, conspiracy, political, religious, anti cultism sometimes. I mean, we talk about such a wide variety of things, it's, I think, maybe easier to see some of those, like, structural elements of, like, disinformation and culty conspiracy ness that apply to all of those things. And that I like the cult doesn't care about your content thing, like, all of those cultic, whatever you want to call it, structures. Yeah, that can be QAnon. It can be political, like, far right, it can be anti vax, it can be amway. I mean, there's just so many forms that it can take, and it kind of doesn't care about what the content is.

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Kayla: Right, right.

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Chris: He talked about this a couple times, so I wasn't really sure where to. Where to put this react, but he brought it up like two, three times. I just thought it was really interesting, him talking about the ultra binary nature of before and after getting a vaccine and how much psychological weight that puts onto that tiny little tip of metal for people. And I say for people, not for some people, because I just want to bring up that, even though that sounds maybe crazy, think back when we got our first vaccine for Covid. Like, I had an emotional reaction to that.

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Kayla: You were like, I'm just gonna sit here and be emotional.

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Chris: Yeah, okay, well, fine. Some of us actually are in touch with our emotions, Kayla. Whatever.

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Kayla: Not me.

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Chris: The point is, for me, it was helpful to think of that situation that I was in, where I similarly felt, like, very before and after. Obviously, I don't feel that way about a lot of other, like, you know, the flu shot is like, whatever, right?

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Kayla: Yeah. I don't have any emotional connection to the flu shot. It's like, oh, I go to the doctor, and they're like, here. And I go, okay.

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Chris: Yeah. But with the COVID vaccine, it definitely felt like there was, like, a before the COVID vaccine and an after the COVID vaccine. And that, like, point in time and that point in space are both, like, so tiny. And it's. Yeah, I don't know. It's just a really interesting singularity of emotion. And then the. But the big part at the end is, we talked about his article that you absolutely should go read.

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Kayla: It's really good.

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Chris: What do conspiratorialists get right? And if I just had to summarize it, I would just say they know that there are systemic problems. That's sort of the fundamental thesis, is that they know in some form or fashion, they may not do sociological research on it, but they are in touch with the fact that there are these problems that are systemic. And then from that flows everything else. They're the ones with the solutions. They have to seek it.

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Kayla: It's not just like they know. It's that they acknowledge, because.

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Chris: Right.

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Kayla: That's the huge thing is, like, once you feel like somebody is. Is agreeing with you, that there's some massive gaslighting going on with the, like, personal responsibility, like, dictating your lot in life, once it feels like somebody goes like, yeah, you're not crazy. This is bullshit.

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Chris: Right?

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Kayla: It's almost like that's the point of entry. And we just have to be hopeful that the first person that says that to you is acting in good faith. Because I think that all of us are very. Are very moved by that moment when it's acknowledged that there are systemic issues at play here. And some of us are lucky enough for that moment to come from people who are the Matthew Remskys of the world, people who are acting to, like, find solutions, people who are on the side of science, who are on the side of reality. And some people, their first or the most powerful way into that is the Joe Rogans, is the Jordan Petersons are the grifters, are the cult leaders, are the people who are not acting in good faith. But it's that moment.

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Kayla: It's like what you said, that singularity, that moment where you realize or where you're. Where you finally have somebody in whatever position of authority going, no, you're not crazy. Yeah, there are problems here.

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Chris: Yeah. It's like a switch flips.

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Kayla: Yeah.

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Chris: You know, that was to me, I had. I had this thought when I was reading his article that, like, I almost felt more on the side of conspiratorists in a weird sort of way. Like, in a. Like, a weird sort of, like, the enemy is the same. Like, this is, you know, the systemic issues are the same. And if there's a way back to, like, you know, from being so, you know, oh, this country is so divided. And, like, I feel like if there's a way back, it's like acknowledging that and just saying we. We disagree pretty heavily on. On, like, what the. Maybe what the causes are and how to fix it.

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Chris: But, like, we can at least say, like, you know, we're being driven by the same unease that there is some really systemic issues that we are, that we absolutely have to solve.

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Kayla: Right?

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Chris: I mean, we talked about that with the. Like, our analogy with Q was, yes, it's a cancer, and we should probably excise the cancer, but we also need to figure out what's causing the cancer. Right. That's where they're like, well, Q's not entirely wrong. Like, that's where that kind of comes from.

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Kayla: I think it is made more complicated by the fact that, like, we want to all be united on the same side against the oppressed. And also, you cannot fight alongside fascists. You cannot fight with fascists, right. Because then you're fighting for the fascists, and they will turn around and oppress you and shoot you in the head. Like, you cannot join forces with fascists to enact change. Even if you both want change. You cannot align yourself no self with fascists.

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Chris: Here is the thing that makes that hard, though, and I think that is illustrated by conspirituality as a concept, is that, like, that's. It's not like suddenly you become a fascist, right? That's the thing that makes it really hard, is that there's this sliding scale. Like, you know, the person that's, like, saying, like, hey, I really like Atlantis, right? You know, it's like, okay, they're probably not a fascist yet, but then that turns into, like, oh, there's this cool theory about Atlantis where it, you know, like, the thing we talked about a few episodes. Episodes ago, or I think was last episode, and, you know, so, anyway, it's. It's that. It's that, man. It's that, like, fascism spectrum that slide into radicalization that makes that so difficult, because you're, like, the guy, like, clearly the guy that is, like, I like Atlantis.

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Chris: I can talk to, and I can be like, hey, cool.

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Matt Remski: Yeah.

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Chris: Like, there's some neat mythology there, and just make sure you don't wade into the anti semitic parts.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: And also, like, let's, you know, let's. Let's solve some problems together. Cool.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: And then, like, the other end of that spectrum, there's, like, you know, like, the ghost dazzlers of the world. There's, like, the just complete neo Nazi, like, you know, dyed in the wool stuff. And that's easy to say, like, yeah, I'm not gonna associate with them. But then, like, everything in between is, like. It's just. I don't know. It's, like, hard to know, right? I don't know. Complex problems for a complex world, Kayla.

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Kayla: It's hard.

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Chris: This is tough. The other thing that he talked about, that we talked about a bunch, and he talked about in his article was the trust network. And it's not just the trust network, but it's like, the, you know, you see so often, like, trust the experts, trust the science. Especially from, quote, unquote, our side. Right. Especially from the, like, you know, latte liberal side of things, for, like, a lack of a better word.

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Kayla: That's me.

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Chris: I like lattes. But you see a lot of, like, you know, people not trusting experts is the problem. You should trust the experts. And it's. I get that sentiment, and I feel it sometimes, too. But that's not the question. That's not the. That's not the problem that we're having here. The problem that we're having is which experts? So, for anti. Anti vaxxers, for example. Right. It's not that they're just saying, like, oh, I don't trust any experts. It's I don't trust the experts you trust. I don't trust Anthony Fauci. I trust Joe Rogan, or I trust Andrew Wakefield.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: So it's not enough to say trust the experts. That's not enough, because that's not the problem. So. And that's what I was sort of trying to get at with the, like, how do I know that the experts I have chosen to trust supersede in, like, a reality sense, the experts that these other folks have chosen to trust. Now, the only way that I have thought of to frame that is this idea of the trust network that we've talked about before, where, unfortunately, it has to come from. This very long buildup of, well, I learned this in school, and then that made me trust this article, and I know this about science, and that made me trust this person. But then they started saying nazi things, so then I started not trusting them and trusting this other person who debunked that. So it's just.

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Chris: It just seems like it's a really. I don't know. There's no glib answer for, like, how do you know who to trust? I think it's just like, how have you lived your life so far? I don't know.

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Kayla: Well, I think it's. You never really know. It's your best guess. And I think the best way to go at it is to know that's always a question. It's a question that's never answered. It's always going to be a question. It's always going to be updated and have new information added, and it's going to change because, I mean, you and I have talked about this so many times on the podcast. There are experts that you and I considered experts ten years ago that now we consider quacks, right?

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Chris: And it's disillusioning, and it's disillusioning, and it's hard.

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Kayla: And then the only answer really is to, you know, take that information and update your framework and find new experts. And it's always about figuring out who you can trust, not knowing who you can trust.

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Chris: Right.

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Kayla: And it's gonna change. And I think that. I think that one of the big theses of this entire show is. Sounds like feces. Feces is how do you identify an expert? Like, I really think that's kind of what it comes down to, is, what's the checklist? Like, how do you go this person, if I am a. If I'm somebody who considers myself a rational skeptic, a pro science rational skeptic who wants to understand the truth of reality, how do I identify somebody as an expert that will keep me on that path? And it's. It's. I don't have answer for, like, what, those check marks. You know what that checklist is? Well, he said, but I think we're, you know, we're working on that kind of thing.

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Chris: One of the things I like that he did say is that it's like, you know, we think that it's about like what you know, but it's actually more about, like, who do you know? Sorry, it's not what you know, it's who you know. This week on Tips, boomer tips from culture.

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Kayla: Just weird. You got to get out there. If you want a job, you gotta pound the pavement.

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Chris: No, it's about how you know it. Right? And he's. The words that he uses are, like, emotional. It's actually more about emotional intelligence rather than just, like, knowledge.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: And I think that is definitely a thing, like, part of when we say, wait a minute, this is. This doesn't smell right, you know, it's like. It's that little, like, intuitive red flag. Which is weird to say that, like, you sometimes have to use your intuition to, like, know what the science is. But it's. It does come down to that when you're talking about, like, who to trust, because. Yeah, you do. And I think we've also. Because we've honed these instincts working on the show, it's easier for us. Right. But, yeah, some of it, I think, does come down to just like, that, like, emotional intelligence of, you knowing when somebody is quacking at you or not. Right. And the other element I wanted to bring up was just, like, living in a state of constant self doubt is something that is.

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Chris: It's like the price you pay for having more confidence in your own trust network is because. Yeah, I do. I'm constantly like, wait, am I right about this? Am I not seeing it from the right angle? And I don't know. I'm constantly worried about that. And I think that's maybe a bit of a price that you pay. I was actually thinking about that when were talking to Jatar for the show. Is that, like, he has these, like, big epiphanies, right? Like, he'd had, like, oh, man, I can't trust the media because of all the things that happened with Bernie and Hillary in 2016 and the podesta emails and then, like, felt nice and safe and, you know, wasn't, like, in QAnon. And then again, he had this, like, big epiphany, right, of like, oh, my God, all this shit was false.

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Chris: And I was just kind of, like, part of me was sitting there kind of going like, that's interesting. It's like you're saving it up and I'm doing it all the time, you know, like, I'm like. I'm. Every single day I'm like, am I right about this? Is this right? I don't know.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: So it's almost kind of like you pick. Pick a or b, you know? But I don't know. Yeah. I think that sort of, like, constant questioning keeps it sharpen, too. It keeps your trust network sharp. Because otherwise you might find yourself in a situation where there's, like, a crusty old belief that you haven't questioned a long time and may not be true or may not be true in context anymore. I think that's actually a pretty good stopping point. Now. I think that I sound like a genius.

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Kayla: Obviously, you sound like a genius. I think it's more about Matthew Remsky.

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Chris: Sounds like a genius, right?

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Kayla: Yeah, I'm just putting hats on, hats on, hats. Like what he had to say. Pretty good there, you know?

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Chris: Yeah. It stands on its own.

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Kayla: So, yeah, I think we'll, you know, if you want to. If you want to keep hearing us pontificate, obviously we'll put more of this conversation on our Patreon. I think we'll probably talk a little bit more about, like, the mental health stuff.

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Chris: Yeah.

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Kayla: On there.

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Chris: The thing is, we just can't stop talking, so we can't keep recording it.

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Kayla: We'll put it on Patreon. Just as a reminder, no criteria this time. No flapping papers. We didn't talk about a specific group. I'm not going to wave a paper around, even though Chris asked me to.

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Chris: Kayla, that's part of the gimmick. Here, I'll do it here.

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Kayla: That's not a paper.

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Chris: That's a multiple. That's close enough. That didn't sound very good.

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Kayla: That was horrible.

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Chris: Forget it. And again, as we always say, don't bother liking subscribing. Just listen to and enjoy the show.

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Kayla: But I won't be mad if you like and subscribe. This is Kayla, and I'm a total asshole.

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Chris: She's reading verbatim from the script.

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Kayla: This is Kayla, this is Chris.

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Chris: I tried to get her to say that she was an asshole on air. This is Kayla, and this is Chris.

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Kayla: And this has been cult or just weird?