Filmmaker Betsy Chasse, who co-created the 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know!?, talks with Pinchbeck about how the movement her film helped popularize hardened into a self-help industry. Chasse says she still agrees with much of what the film said, but not with how others turned it into a self-serving business model, and describes being drawn into and then pushed out of Ramtha's School of Enlightenment, the group her two collaborators belonged to, for refusing to defer to JZ Knight. She treats The Secret as the turning point, recalling Joe Vitale telling her he was a marketer rather than a guru and that the film cut the part about doing the work. Pinchbeck frames the conversation around New Age support for Trump and MAHA. They close on AI driven by profit rather than benefit.
Guest: Betsy Chasse
In brief
- Chasse says she was hired to salvage a failing project and wrote, directed and produced What the Bleep Do We Know!?, and still stands behind much of its content while rejecting how it was commercialized.
- Chasse describes Ramtha's School of Enlightenment, to which the film's other two creators belonged, as a cult with MLM dynamics and says she was expelled for refusing to submit to JZ Knight.
- Chasse argues that good intentions in the New Age and New Thought world are routinely displaced by brand revenue once greed and power become addictive.
- Chasse identifies The Secret as the origin of a blame-and-shame logic in which poverty or illness is treated as something the sufferer created.
- Chasse maintains that New Age spirituality and Christianity share the same structure, substituting the universe or source for God as a provider that rewards correct behavior.
- Chasse argues that AI development is currently driven by corporate profit rather than human benefit, and says she is producing a series on the question.
Full text
These people are really stuck in the semantics of oh you're not talking about new thought or spirituality or new age but it's all the same Christianity it's all the same thing Christians have god spiritual people have the universe or source both of them magic vending machines existing upstairs and who provide all sorts of gift for us if we do the right things for them. So, it's the exact same beast, just has a different name. Hey everybody, thanks for joining us. I'm here with Betsy Chass. Chass or Chase? Chass. Yeah, Chassie. Chassis. Uh, who among her many accomplishments produced the celebrated new age classic What the Bleep Do We Know?
I actually wrote, directed and produced. I wrote, directed, and produced. Okay, cool. Right. And uh yeah, that was like a huge success. That was like a a sort of, you know, zeitgeist defining film, I would say. Yeah, it I mean it was interesting as I've been doing a lot of um reflection over the last 20some years, people always ask me like of the things that we talked about in the movie, what do I do I don't agree with anything anymore? And I I look back and I go, "No, I still agree with a lot of what was said in the movie. I don't agree with how people manipulated it into a self-serving model for themselves." But that's a whole story.
Yeah. Who's been who's been the most successful at that? Uh who? Well, that's a big question. I mean there's a I think the entire new age new thought industry has turned into I said this I wrote a book in 2014 that was sort of a very nice way of sort of looking at and examining a lot of the new age new thought tropes. You know like the law of attraction and what does enlightenment mean and forgiveness and all these like things that people talk about and really wanted to examine what they really meant and where they came from. And I would say that, you know, there's a line in that book where I say, "Leave it to the west to make our quest for enlightenment," which literally just means to know thy selves, like a romance novel about ourselves, you know?
So I would say that who it's hard to pick one person but you know I'd say that everybody the way I look at it is just like with the bleep you know things start out with really good intentions but you know eventually what happens and I've seen it over and over and over again is that greed and power become really addicting and all of a sudden People that had really good intentions fall more in love with the idea of how much their brand is making and less interested in what they really started out with. If anybody ever read, there's a really old I'm going to reference a lot of really old books in this conversation. Um, some of them are really hard to get, but there's a a book called Joy Writing the Universe where they talk about channeling. Mhm. And uh, what the bleep, interestingly enough, how I ended up on What the Bleep is the two other guys, Will Will and Mark who made the movie were members of this what I call a cult, the Ram School of Enlightenment.
Um, you know, when I went up there and it was great for the first like I mean everything was great for like the first couple of years and then you get really into the MLMs and the whole hierarchy and it it I I mean I was grossed out eight months in. You know, I got eventually kicked out because I wouldn't bow down to Rompa or Jay-Z night and it was interesting. So there's this line in the joy writing of the universe that talks about this very thing how you know I don't disbelieve in the possibility of channeling. Yeah. But what happens is human nature eventually takes over and human nature is selfish and narcissistic and greedy at you know that's part of we're survivalists right so that's kind of what I think happened and you know not that I want to blame the bleep I do think the bleep was the this zeitgeist for it but then the movie the secret came out and if you talk to the people I've talked talked to many of the people that were in the secret.
Funny enough, they all wrote the coattales of it, but a lot of them were kind of dismayed. I remember I did an interview with I think it's Joseph Vitali or whatever his name is. It was funny when I was setting up the interview with him. We were talking and he said, "Look, I'm not a guru. I'm a marketer." And I was like, "Well, that's honest." And he was even shocked because you know there's this scene in the the secret where he talks about wanting a bunch of money and he he tells I meditated on it and then he said I told the rest of the story which is that I did the work to get it but they took all that part out and just made it sound like he sat on a cushion and a magically a check arrived and sort of that's what sells now in the new age new thought movement is like I'm going to manifest for myself you know and I don't have to do anything for it because I just have to be love and light and it'll all come to me because I'm deserving.
And if you don't have it, you're not successful, you get ill, then it must be something that you created. And that's the blame and shame game that really started, I think, with the secret. Yeah. Let's um let's go through that a little bit more. uh sort of like it'd be fun to kind of tease out a little bit of a systemic critique of um this sort of um you know kind of new age spiritual world particularly as it's um unfortunately became a prop for um Trump and uh Maha which you know that's actually one reason I thought to contact you as I I read some of your posts on Facebook and I was like aha there's somebody who knows what she's talking about and is sharing a lot of the same feelings that I have about about what happened in that respect.
Yeah, let's So for people who don't know, why don't you give us a quick like, you know, little bio, why I'm talking about this. Well, I I you know, I was a girl a filmmaker who got hired by Will and Mark to they came to me and said trying to make this movie and the movie they wanted to make was called Sacred Science and it was complete disaster. And I'm a filmmaker and a storyteller at heart. So I came in and and basically crafted what the Bleep Do we know for them, you know, the narrative, the whole thing. And uh from that became accidentally I I've said this I've been saying this for years like all of a sudden I was opening for Deepo as so as though I was some sort of you know expert on quantum physics and consciousness but when I had literally just made a movie about it and what included I remember like Joe Despensza who were some of all the like Joe Despensza um uh Candace Kerr who I still really love and who passed when he would would love um Ahmed Gwami, Fred Olen Wolf, Ramza, a whole bunch of people.
You know, it's funny when I when I went to go make the bleep, you know, originally they were going to do some other thing. And I said, "We have to interview people." And I remember calling around to like Deepo Chopra and uh gosh, who was that physicist that had done the elegant universe? I can't remember his name now. Um David uh Green or something. Yeah, Green. Um anyway, all these people and they didn't want to have anything to do with it. So, so like all the people that were in the bleep were like kind of nobodyies. Yeah. Or semi cool and we got them and then they all became famous, you know.
Yeah. I still like Amit Gwami quite a lot. Uh Amit's the best. I, you know, there was a funny story with Amit that I have, you know, because the so the big takeaway from the bleep was we create our reality, right? And that's true, but I mean I think you know there's only so much you can say in a movie. It's 90 minutes, right? 88 90 minutes, maybe 100 minutes. You know, no one's going to explain the entire workings of quantum physics and the nature of reality in 90 minutes, you know, in a movie necessarily. But you know, we did try to portray that we are cocreating reality.
And I think what happened is this we create a reality because inherently the west especially, you know, we're narcissists. We we want it to be all about us. That's really the core of human humans. And so Amit once said to me, you know, the thing that's important for people to understand is what you're really creating is your perspective of reality. You know, that's really what you're creating. People are not manifesting Mercedes out of their asses. And anybody that tells you that is probably lying to sell you something. And I really appreciated that honesty. I mean, that's kind of what happened with like the Joe Vitalis and a lot of the people from The Secret.
I mean, they're still selling this notion that if you meditate right and hard enough and you prot, you know, keep your keep everything positive and love and light, magic will come to you. And maybe it does for some people. I'm not saying that that's not necessarily how the law of attraction works, but What happens is when you pick everything about yourself, you lose sight of the reality around you. And that's how we ended up where we are now. You know, if you look at what happened with, you know, all the granola mamas. I mean, I raised my kids partially in the granola. I made baby food from a garden that I my own garden.
You know, I I was in it. But I struggled a lot with this notion that we never tell all our children no. like that was a big thing and you know they can't have this and they have to have this. You know I look at a lot of those kids that are you know the same age as my kids now and you know they're totally un unself-aware. They care only about themselves and they they don't care about humanity in general. The empathy is lost. It's ironic that the group that wants to talk about empathy and com compassion and consciousness has the greatest lack of empathy I've ever seen.
And part of it comes from this arrogance that they know better. Yeah. Right. They've been taught. And so, you know, you combine this hate for big It's a It's complicated, Daniel, but I'm going to try to break it down to you. combined for in the new age new thought world we have a lot of people that mistrust the establishment rightfully so you know big pharma is not our friend I am here to tell you that however big pharma is not science and they've they've sort of lumped big pharma in with science so therefore all science is bad then you get people like Mickey Willis and a bunch of other people who want to profit off of that fear literally profit off of that fear because it makes them money.
And so they run around perpetuating all the conspiracies and fear-based stuff under the guise of we care about people and we we know we understand that people have the right to choose what goes into their body and we really care. But what they're really doing is the same thing that big pharma is doing. And it's funny, there's an interview in the LA Times with Mickey Willis from way back when he when CO was coming out where he literally says, "We over something like we overens sensationalized that movie because we knew it would sell." Which movie was that? That was what was it called again? It was Oh, it was the anti oh conspiracy.
No, but anyway. And that's how that's why everybody wants to murder Fouchy. And you know, people can't step back and have real conversations because I mean, I I knew Mickey years ago and he didn't seem like such a terrible person. He seemed kind of nice. I mean, I I guess he was partially um a believer, you know, to begin with, right, in what he was doing, what he was selling. I think so. But I think also you have to look at the underlying pandemic. Pandemic, that's what it was. Pandemic the underlying trajectory of the last 75 years, right? So, we have World War II. Now, we're sort of in this cycle of enlightenment, right?
And it's all about the pursuit of happiness and bettering ourselves and being good people and and then what comes in is you got people like I keep mentioning things. I wrote this the other day. You know, the daughter of one of the people that was a big big seller in sales sales and marketing and and teaching people in leadership, right? You know, you have Warner Airhard, you have all these people that are coming in like the 70s and 80s and and it starts out great, but then what happens just like it happens in any industry is money starts to get real big. And then all of a sudden decisions stop being made based on what's right and good and better for the people and more about what's better for the brand.
I mean it's the same exact thing that happened with big and medicine and big pharma. You know what started as hey we want to you know polio vaccines and all these really good things turned into how do we make money off of this? when anything becomes forprofit without a sense of sort of even you know I'm a little for conscious capitalism although I don't even know if that's possible at this point when it starts to really focus on you've got shareholders investors and profit alternative health is as bad as big pharma but they and they've pitted and one of the things that they love to do is they pit one against the other so if If you are for alternative health, you have to be against big pharma, right? So now all the alternative maha people have an enemy. It's all big pharma's fault.
Instead of saying, "Wait a minute, it's all money's fault. It's all greed's fault. We have to look at this." But the alternative health industry is just as evil in many ways of their practices as um as big pharma. Yeah. But nobody wants to talk about that because you can't there can't be gray in these conversations. You know, you're either one like I'm one of those people. I'm not a big fan of vaccines necessarily, but I'm not against them. Mhm. For me, I did not vaccinate my kids until they were three, four, five, and six years old. But I'm a white woman of privilege. I had the opportunity to have that conversation with my doctor.
A lot of people don't, right? But that doesn't mean I'm against vaccinations. It just means I'm not a big fan of the way the big pharma now sells them because I do think it's a little bit of an overload on babies. But I can be rational about that. That doesn't mean I want to take away vaccines. And it also doesn't mean that I have the right to have any sort of conversation around legislation about what you do with your children. Mhm. The problem is the arrogance with the new age spiritual woowoo crowd is they've decided that they know better for everyone. Another group did that Christianity.
As far as I'm concerned, the minute somebody announces to me, oh, I'm spiritual, I go, oh, that's just as bad as saying you're Christian right now. You know, sorry, I have a I have lots of rants about this. It's hard to Yeah. No, for sure. That's why I wanted to chat with you, but let's go back a little bit chronologically. She did What to believe? It was a huge hit. You did you did a sequel, then you also wrote some books and and and you recently did some other stuff in the fields. You want to Yeah. I mean, I we didn't do a sequel. Basically, everybody thinks Down the Rabbit Hole is a sequel.
It's not. It was just the director's cut. Um, again, this is funny because this is marketing. It was just a director's cut, but Fox, who was in charge of distribution at that point, wanted to release it as a sequel because they thought they'd make more money, right? Okay. And ironically, people came back and they're like, "This is basically the same movie with added footage." I'm like, "Yeah, that's called a director's cut. That's really all it was." But so did that and then I've done a bunch of books and you know, I wrote the coattales of Bleep for about five years. Yeah. And then I did some distribution and what happened is after traveling around and being around so many of these people for about five or six years I I just started to be like this is ridiculous.
these people are like what's happening is the weaponization of a lot of these concepts you know now this was around like 2005 2006 kind of yeah people started to say you know well they created their reality as if somehow somebody gets in a car wreck and it's now their fault I mean it might be their fault maybe they burning man everybody always talk about manifestation yes manifesto of attraction and money and it's all the underlying thing of all this is You're not enough unless you're successful. You're and buy this book, buy this crystal, do these things. And the thing about it is like there's some truth to all of it, but just like you know these things, what happens is now the big right around 20 I think it was 2005 the salesfunnel became a big thing, right? And email marketing became a thing and people you know 2008 we had a big crash. People were really desperate and they were really looking for ways to recreate themselves and reinvent their lives.
And it's great when you get 15 emails in a row telling you how this is going to fix everything for you. And it's just $499 and you can become a life coach. And now we've got like everybody in there. I mean, I could go outside and throw a rock and probably hit 20 life coaches. Yeah, there's a lot of life coaches out there, you know, and and Raiki My other rant is Raiki masters. Like you can take a weekend course now and be called a Raiki master. Yeah. Who? Like I ended up I ended a relationship probably because of this. I dated a guy and he wanted to be a Raiki master and he went to his weekend courses.
He called himself a Raiki master and he didn't do any other work. Like no other research, no other study, no other like rigorous examination. He just decided because he could raise his hands and they got warm, he was a healer. In fact, if people watch to the end of this uh conversation, they'll be Raiki investors. That's exactly right. And we should each make $599 per each of them. You know, I it's insane to me. I did a series. You can watch it. It's on Amazon Prime. It's called Bliss Up Energy, the Ultimate Healer. And the reason that I did that series was because again there is absolute scientific fact that certain forms of energy healing that are legitimate have benefits health benefits.
For instance, there's a study that says that people that do any sort of meditation, relaxation, or have some sort of raiki, they actually have raiki true raiki practitioners. I don't call them masters, raiki practitioners and hos in about 10,000 hospitals around the world. If you have a pra a session with one of them before you have surgery, you will have a better outcome in the end. Like you'll have less anesthesia, your recovery time will be less. That is scientifically proven, right? But there's nothing and even like ions and some really amazing people doing research, you know, nothing proves that energy healing is going to cure cancer, right?
You know, but by the way, we have we got a nice uh comment in the chat uh from Marjorie Shalita. She said uh new age and new thought because there's something called the new thought movement um are not to be conflated. They're not the same in my opinion. New thought goes back to the hermetic philosophy of ancient Egypt. It has its roots in the transcendentalist movement in New England in the late 1800s via Emerson Thoro and so on. Right. That was um yeah I mean uh still I mean a lot of the American version of new thought which my friend Mitch Haritz is like the big um kind of like historian of is u a little bit low grade you know it's kind of like you know you know the power of positive thinking think and grow rich and so on very very American very pragmatic although I I have to admit I do get quite fascinated by something that a number of people have pointed out uh including my friend Gary Latchman in some of his books that Trump himself grew up in the new thought movement because his preacher was Norman Vincent Peele who wrote the power of positive thinking and apparently Trump had total you know as we can imagine ADHD and couldn't listen to anybody but he would actually listen to Norman Vincent Peele speak for hours and clearly applied a lot of those techniques to his life and and his work in that basically Peele was like look if you want to accomplish something deprogram any negative thought that you're not going to get it or that you didn't get it and just completely so you know Trump used to sort of go into like a little meditative trance before he did his reality TV show and even the way he did the whole thing around the the not losing the last election it was like no I I could not have lost that election and so he's kind of he has kind of shown in a weird way the power of these occult practices you know if you're a certain type of personality and able to sort of like keep things very simple you know he he has it seems like he's man manifested a lot of reality using this these new thought techniques in a strange Well, and also, you know, he's a great cult leader.
Great cult leaders are charismatic. You know, they're bigger than life. And because of his 100% belief in everything that comes out of his mouth, people tend to believe that because most people are in such self-doubt all the time and you you get into a space with somebody who's so confident, you begin to question yourself. This is why, you know, I was married to a narcissist for 10 years and went through a significant amount of emotional abuse. Took me years to step back and go, "Wow, how did I end up there?" Like people often ask like look at what happened at Nexium, right? Really charismatic leader, really smart man.
I don't find that guy charismatic at all. I can He's so unpleasant to listen to. It's just like I agree with you. But then you have people, you know, Mark Vicente was his second You know, funny. Mark Vicente made a whole series basically trying to cover his ass from what happened at Nexium and blame it on everybody else but himself. But Mark Vicente was the second to Keith. He knew everything that was going on. He is charismatic. He's handsome. So you you use those tools along with the think and grow rich and this is how I am and I'm this and how that confidence and a lot of people want that confidence and they're going to buy in and that's the the sad truth is that because underlying all this is we've been told to pursue happiness you have to be successful you have to be rich you have to be perfect and healthy you have to have this body and on layer on top of that the patriarchy where you know, listen, the new spiritual movement is reeks of patriarchy.
You know, women are supposed to be loving and kind and sing and heal and all these wonderful things. We're not allowed to be strong and powerful. Mean like the goddesses, you're supposed to be all goddesses. That's been sold for years. You're a goddess. You're you know, you're find your feminine. Well, what you know who's and what the definition of feminism keeps morphing into what now is trad. Yeah. If you look at it 10 years ago was be a goddess and be feminine and now it's trad go ahead. Yeah. No, I guess I was going to say that um you know I mean you know somebody pointed out in the chat also there's diff differentiations between you know when we're talking about new age and spiritual and Christian but also there's a lot of overlap and there's a lot of merging happening.
I I see a lot of people who I knew from you know Burning Man transformational cultures who were kind of like I would say hippie left new age spiritual who've now become like hippie right Christian um spiritual thing is we can argue semantics. These people are really stuck in the semantics of oh you're not talking about new thought or spirituality or new age but it's all the same Christianity. It's all the same thing. It's all the same game. So yeah Christians have God spiritual people have the universe or source both of them magic vending machines existing upstairs and who provide all sorts of gift for us if we do the right things for them.
Yeah. Right. So, it's the exact same beast, just has a different name. The new age movement is all about control. Control your thoughts. Anger is bad. You have to forgive everybody. If you don't forgive, you're unhealed and there's something wrong with you. Look at what happened with the landmark. I did the landmark, right? Actually, what was it called? Well, I forget the landmark. The landmark forum. I did it right after Warner disappeared. I was working for a company as a PA and the CEO of that company made us do a management pro because they had a big management program and I did the first course and they the the CEO saw wow you're really good I'm sponsoring you so I did a bunch of their courses the the entire crux of their course is don't be mad don't cry it all happened to you got it and now guess what now that you get it you don't have to take personal respon you don't have to take personal responsibility for anybody So people were coming out of the landmark forum for the last 10 years.
You know, I know that I'm an but I accept and love myself and then they continue being an It's like permission to be abusive. Well, or then the the the word sort of in the new age movement is I'm speaking my truth as if somehow my truth is the only truth. That's the way that's been preached. Speak your truth. No, my this is my truth. I don't give a if anybody listening today believes a word I have to say. I don't need I don't need it to be fact or truth. This is just what I think. And we've lost the definition between opinion and fact because everybody now has a truth that is the most valid thing and that and that kind of predated um the current internet social media cluster I mean that was already kind of like forming in parallel you think or I think so.
And the internet there's a great documentary everybody should watch. It's it's called the great hack. And what's fascinating about it is the way that they explain how very young a young woman specifically, but how people understood the sort of world, the container that Facebook specifically was and how it was a big echo chamber because of the way the algorithm worked and they manipulated that so much that it's the same thing that happens when people watch news. When you don't take in other information and all you see is this, then that's all you're going to start to believe. That's I mean, people overestimate how intelligent humans really are.
We're literally programmable computers. Does seem like that point. No, if you understand the way the brain works, if I sit and watch the same news show every day, I develop a trust with the person on the TV because he smiles and and he's wearing a nice suit and he's calming. All of that stuff plays a plays a role. And then all of a sudden, I only believe that person. That's sort of how our brains operate. And so when you can start to realize, wait a second, I'm a programmable machine. And if I only listen to this guru, that teacher, and they pretend that I'm getting all this cool information that they're giving me, or like then all of a sudden I don't have I'm in an echo chamber.
And that's what happened with the internet is we built little echo chambers where we're all existing and people that were sort of antivax were only they watched some thing called pandemic and Mickey Willis was a good guy and why would he lie to me and he's speaking the truth because one of the things they you know the especially in some of the more fringe new age circles is you know the conspiracies and everybody's out to get you and all big pharma is bad and and and there's a giant mistrust for the which I don't disagree with. But so they all decided, oh, Trump's going to fix everything and they're still waiting for that. The other big narrative that everybody's waiting for is the age of Aquarius, right? So all these people are out there going, well, we kind of have to have this bad thing happen because it's part of what's going to bring in the magic of the age of Aquarius. Like people think the Age of Aquarius literally means they're all going to be ascending up to the sky.
Like how is that any different than the rapture is my curious question. But um but well the rap the rapture is less democratic and it's only if you're Christian faith. Yeah. But but it's like so they're thinking they so they put their heads in the hand and they stand back and they hide and they like I'm really just trusting the universe has it all. And so that gives them that's the spiritual bypass. That's the spiritual bypass. First of all, Jesus, Buddha, most of the true gurus and teachers wouldn't be tolerating any of the that's going on. They'd be out on the front lines with it. It's like, but but what happens is that so much of what the old ancient grace, which by the way are also books just like the Bible stories.
If you look at all those books, they've all been manipulated into a safe, easy way for me to sit back, stay quiet, and just pretend that I'm spiritual as opposed to standing up and going, "Hey, what's happening right now is not okay." Yeah. So, how do we get uh you know, the spiritual people who I really think had an important role to play in throwing this last election to Trump? Um, how can we get them uh to go sane again? Is that is that possible or do they just have to go through their individual cat catastrophic, you know, kind of confrontations with uh realities that get increasingly dark? You know, you know, I mean, there's lots of ways I think that people individually can reach out.
You know, my way is, as you've probably read, I'm very sassy. I'm very confrontive. you know, I have access to a lot. Part of what you responded to is that I've started calling out on social media some of the bigger name people openly saying, "Hey, you know, somebody like I just did it the other day. Somebody posted a thing that literally says something to the effect of, you know, the universe accepts for both and or we should be doing the same, right?" And I was like, "Wow, that is gaslighting at its finest." you just literally said what Trump said the other day whenever he said about the Nazis in Charlotte.
There's some good people over there, right? You know, so that's how I do it. And when I confronted her on her page about it, you know, a lot I think she was overwhelmingly surprised at how many people agreed with me. And so what I think one of the things that's happening it's it's interesting when you watch the rebrands starting to happen like Bnee Brown is doing a rebrand now. She's now going to be doing leadership courses, right? Because there's more money in that. She's done with trauma. Now she's moving over to leadership. Look what happened to Elizabeth Gilbert. You know, Elizabeth Gilbert was the white woman's frigin queen of everything because, you know, she wrote Eat, Pray, Love.
She's this spiritual wonderful woman sharing and bearing her soul and it she came out with a book that is a disaster because it's who she was from the beginning and and a lot of people feel angry and what I think has to happen is enough people have to stand up and enough people are you know I've been doing it for 101 15 years but a lot of people have to start up and saying hey you know what I'm not going to follow you anymore because I think you are not standing up for what's really going on in this reality. You know, a lot of people like to pretend that they don't exist in this reality. There are meat packets. They're star seeds. They there's lots of terminology that has been used for a very long time to get people to disassociate from what's happening here because they're not a part of this because they're they're you know they can ascend whatever their story is.
So they personal responsibility. What that? No, what you're saying is really resonates with me because yeah, I have a lot of friends who are very sophisticated and privileged. They go to Burning Man. They're into like sound healing and psychedelics, all that stuff, and they're they, you know, they just are so disengaged from what's happening with the rise of fascism, the destruction because they've been told engagement is not spiritual engagement. If you're engaging with the negativity, then you must have something wrong with you. You must be angry. You must You're like bringing in that frequency or something or you're like that's the programming that has been happening for a very long time.
Yeah. So all of us over here that engage with it, that's just angry. That's You're right. I'm angry. My kids are young and they deserve the world I promised them. I'm going to stand up and do something about that, you know. But the programming especially as it as the you know if you look at the gurus and the new age and even the new thought and Christianity it's mostly white wealthy people who are privileged who say things like you know you talk about the maha crowd well I don't think people on snap should be able to eat candy bars and buy soda you know they are totally unaware of what a food desert is.
Yeah. Right. They are totally unaware that most of the population can't afford the granola that they buy every week, but they just live in this alternate reality all the time because that's the only reality they see because that's the only reality they want to see. Because if they look at anything negative or scary or bad, then that's going to happen to them, right? It's like we are literally computers that can be programmed and they are programmed and underlying it. Yeah. Underlying it is capitalism, right? So it's like because we're we're very we have to compete with each other. So with Tony Robbins or somebody like that, the whole focus is on, you know, how do you become Yeah.
or you said Benet Brown is now doing leadership. It's all about how do you become this big leader? How do you make your company successful and so on. So, it's like a kind of a corporate or entrepreneurial spirituality. Well, the new buzz word, well, it's not new, it's been around for a while, is conscious entrepreneur. Yeah. We don't need any more conscious unless your unless your entrepreneurship is finding ways to use money to solve problems that are real. Like, we don't need another line of supplements, you know? We don't need, you know, another cool product that's going to be only used for the rich. Like in my series in the an energy healing series, one of the things that, you know, this is this is how capitalism everything up.
There's like I I um when I was filming that series, I was having a thyroid issue. So, I went to a doctor and the doctor was like, "We have to put you on this medication. You're going to have to go on it for the rest of your life." And I was like, whoa, I'm not sure I want to do that. Right? So then I went to my Chinese medicine doctor. Luckily, I have the wherewithal and the ability to go to a Chinese medicine doctor. Right? That is expensive. So I went to him. He gave me some stuff. It tasted like dirt. I was taking it for 30 days.
During that time, I went to film with this woman, Dr. Anne Baldwin, who is uh teaches Raiki and and is a Raiki, like legitimately is a Raiki master. um down in Arizona and she had this machine. It's a diagnostic machine, right? Now, you think about when you go to the doctor, you got to do blood tests, you got to piss test, you got to do like all this right? All of which is billable, right? All of these billable tests. So, I sit down, she goes, "Give me your hand." And she puts my top one of each of my tops of my fingers because we have little I'm not going to probably explain this 100% right because I don't remember all the terminology, but like electromagnetic field that we absolutely all exist.
Woos like to call it aura. Um I believe it's called electromagnetic field in the science world. Same thing. She puts my fingers into this machine, prints out a report, and she looks at me and she goes, "You have a thyroid issue." And I went, "Yes, I do." And so I asked her, I said, "Well, why isn't this machine available in the US?" and she said because it would eradicate 80% of the the the billable tests that in people bill for. So that that's capitalism, right? Imagine if that test that machine was available everywhere. How much easier would it be to for people to understand what was wrong with them?
One of the uh one of the main people who is featured in what the bloopers I remember was Joe Despensza who's gone on to be you know a very big deal and like a lot of my friends really enjoy you know have enjoyed his retreats. I'm I I read one of his books and I immediately got kind of turned off by um the way he was using evidence you know he sort of claims uh science but it feels more like scientism or something. And um the thing about Joe is, you know, he need he he's in it for the money just like they all are. And if it's true that everything he's saying is curing cancer and growing back teeth, why aren't millions of people getting healed for free then? Right?
If it's true, right? But instead, in order to get that miraculous healing, you have to go to a five or a $10,000 retreat, right? But what I want to know is if that's true, why is why are they not out at the cancer, you know, the the where people are getting um radiation, etc. and saying, "Hey, we want to give this to you for free, right?" If it's true. Yeah. And also, I noticed in his books, he, you know, talks about, oh, so and so, you know, had stage three cancer and they did my course and it was gone. But I'm sure there are many I'm sure that did happen to a number of people and I'm sure there's also a number of people who came with stage three or stage four cancer and died after you know or that.
So that's like this thing of like programming the mind into this false positivity in a way. Well, let me there's a there's a really you might enjoy there's an episode in my series where a woman needed a liver transplant and she had to wait six months before she could get the liver transplant. And there was really nothing besides she was having also this issue with her lungs filling with liquid. There was but there was nothing really that that western medicine could do until she got the liver transplant. Right. So she legitimately and it's trackable. She she because she wanted to be able to track it medically.
She was going to the doctor and she was doing energy healing at the same time. Right. Within about 3 weeks prior to her getting to to do her transplant. Um she went to the doctor and they said, "Wow, you've you've really healed yourself a lot. You don't need a liver transplant." Now, she also changed her diet radically, right? She did a lot of holistic things and she wasn't 100% healed and perfect, but it did work for her. And she said something really interesting cuz in the interview that I appreciated, she said, "Look, I got lucky. somehow this worked for me. But if it doesn't work for you, there's a lot of guilt and shame being perpetuated by people that say, "Well, you must not have meditated right or oh, you you must deserve it because you have bad karma." There's a lot of stories and negativity that go with people that it doesn't work for.
So, I appreciated that she was like, "Look, I can't sit here and say 100% it was the energy healing. I can't say that it was my green juice, but it what I did worked for me. Yeah. And and that's and people need to understand that that that we have a lot in in the in the in this new age new thought. I call it new way because all Christianity there there's a lot of guilt and shame perpetrated on people who aren't you know are suffering you know people that are angry are bad people that are suffering must not have done something right or they created or there's some you know my big pet peeve is well in the void they chose this life so that they could suffer to learn a lesson well guess what all of that is as far as I'm concerned we're this is Logan's run I call this the plane of experience We're all dropped here.
Every single one of us has a lesson to learn. And the lesson isn't just love just because. It's I think the lesson is how can we be a good person? How can we care about each other? How can we take care of each other? How can we be compassionate, empathetic, thoughtful humans? Not can I sit in my studio surrounded by my all my crystals that I spent, you know, $400,000 on on my special cushion and meditate and call myself enlightened and donate every once in a while. Yeah. You know. Yeah. So, if you were going to remake What to Bleep, how would it be different this time?
What would you how how would you how would you approach the topic differently? You know, I think that I would really add that one piece. I think I hit the concept of we are co-creators a little stronger. I think the narrative we I create my reality um leaves out the participation and the responsibility that you have in the reality that you're in. But you think that would have made the film much less successful because it was if it fed into that I don't think I understood it then. Yeah. You know, when I brought on to the bleep, I didn't know any of this. Yeah. You know, I was really reading and participating in the I interviewed everybody along with Will and Mark.
We we did all of that together and I was trying to make a story about one woman and use her as an example, right? So, in her caricature, she learns she creates a reality. I think I would have probably made that more clear to people that it's a co-c collaboration. We are co-c collaborating. What's your perspective on RFK Jr.? Have you had um personal connections with him or spent time with him? I've never spent time with him personally, but I have done a lot of research um and talked to a lot of people. My perspective is that he is as bad. He's not a nice man.
I mean, the thing he's an opportunist. This is a man who saw autism as an opportunity for litigation, right? And so he started this nonprofit, which by the way, I believe pays him personally half a million dollars a year, right, to be the their spokesperson. Families contact that nonprofit to try to get referrals to lawyers to try to get payouts. And those lawyers paid RFK Jr. for those referrals. So it's a money racket. Yeah, it is. I mean, if I always say to people, always follow the money, especially if it looks too altruistic and wonderful to be true. I guarantee you there's always a profit for somebody.
And for RFK Jr., antiax was a very lucrative world for him and now as you know our human our health secretary it's incredibly lucrative. Go look and figure out I bet you somebody and I don't have time to do this because I don't need to. I know it's happening. Go look at the giant alternative health and wellness brand and figure out who's lining his pockets. Yeah. But I remember they had a whole thing when he was on his hearings about whether he would be able to get money from uh legal claims and so on. Um so um let's see. Um I had another question for you.
Um oh yeah. So what do we do now? We're in this kind of um um you know a lot of people I'd say are becoming scared even if they have you know I mean yeah we they're the Trump administration regime is going to the most extreme what anybody would have imagined. And I I thought it was going to be very extreme and I was warning the hell out of people not to, you know, to to fight back against it. But um yeah, I mean it seems like they really want one party rule and you know, yeah, they're demonizing even Democrats. They're calling them, you know, Steven Miller, who's basically Trump's brain right now, says that the Democratic Party is a domestic terrorism organization and they're going to cut off funding from it and so on.
So we're we're we're we're we're moving very quickly into a kind of shock scenario of uh yeah kind of a totalitarian Christian theocratic takeover and um yeah what I mean you know what do you think about that for yourself your kids how do you think people should deal with that you know should we still try to push back against it give up you know don't give up I mean don't give up part of me is pretty convinced it's going to be a pretty it's potentially going to be there's potential for a radical re a violent revolution and I think you know I get hope in sadly it has to come to this but the policies of this regime are hurting everyone and even the people that voted for it and if you look at the numbers the number of people that really want this violent regime is very significantly It was small and getting more reduced as it starts to harm more people. So, we're in it now. Like, there's really no going back. Okay, we had a chance to go back. He We're, you know, everyone's thinking the midterms are going to change everything.
I'm not even sure we're going to have midterms. So, what do you do? You know, build community close to home. Um, become supportive of your neighbors and your and the people really close to you. take care of each other, become engaged. And you know what the truth is? If for me, my weapon, like you know, I'm not going to go out and beat anybody up. I'm a 5'2, 55year-old woman. I mean, I can do a punch if I had to, but you know, where am I going to what's my sort of revolutionary act is that I'm going to speak up and I'm not going to be quiet even in small rooms.
You know, I was I had to be at the hospital the other day and somebody we were in a group waiting for the something and one person said, "What do you think of Trump?" And there was a Trump supporter right there bashing his mouth. And you know, I didn't want to start a big fight in the middle of a lobby of the hospital. But I just looked at him and I said, "I'm really sorry because this is going to come for you, too." And I got up and I walked away. And interestingly enough, my silent act of getting up and walking away, I turned around and almost everybody that was sitting around that man got up and walked away. And he was trying to be Mr.
Friendly Guy with everybody. And suddenly everybody turned their back on him. And sometimes that's what you got to do. Sometimes you have to say in this situation to me there's like if we want to talk about how do we spend the money to build that bridge, I'm happy to have that conversation with you. But if you're telling me that you're absolutely for what this regime is doing, then this isn't a this isn't a political issue, it's a moral one and we have to be willing to stand up for our morals and our ethics. Yeah. Um why do you think that um I mean I guess Trump already got elected precoid you know 2016 and then the co thing happened in a way actually it was the blame on for Trump on his mishandling of the co thing which got him out of office in 2020 which now we can see was kind of a mistake.
It would actually probably been better if he won again because uh he didn't have the heritage foundation strategizing for four years on how to build uh theocratic fascism. Uh but um then this whole thing on bodily sovereignty uh became like a like a like a massive focus of people in the sort of you know post new age like spiritual culture. Um and that I think really led to people tipping over into Maha and so on like um you know why do you think that particular issue around what happened with COVID um became such a defining issue for for for a whole uh period for a whole generation? Well, because you know, Democrats are just as inept at things as Republicans are. You know, neither one of those groups should be I'm a big Zoran Mandami fan for one thing.
I'm I am a I love that guy and I'm looking for people like him all over the the country, right? Um but you know, when the Democrats started forcing vaccines on people, that was the breaking point. The irony is now these same people want to force other people to not get vaccines. So I don't know how they're crying the the moral high ground there or like the righteous high ground, you know, that to me was a breaking point when they started forcing people to be vaccinated, you know. Um, which and I don't think it was the mask thing. I think that the Republicans and the antivaxers had better messaging on the mask thing.
Um but I really think it was the forcing the the mandatory vaccines, right? Well, I think you know the problem is that um some subjects are actually very complicated and ambiguous and there's not always like a right answer. So, you know, when I look at what happened with the vaccines, I think on the whole they were probably very good for older people and maybe not as good for healthy younger people. and that should have been more quickly understood and to put into policy. But I think also when you have a unpredictable pandemic that's that's changing shape. I can understand from a public health perspective, you're just like any any method that we can to uh to try to slow this thing down or stop it before it becomes like a super killer, you know, which in fact it still could.
I mean, it's still out there mutating and so on. Let me a really good friend of mine is an epidemiologist in uh Washington DC, not actually in the the federal government, but over in that area, you know, and I asked George, he said, you know, the problem is that when that happened, I don't think I think we were aware that it might happen at some point, but nobody was really prepared that it was going to happen when it did. And you're right in the sense that it was throw everything that we got at it. Yeah. Right. But there was a moment when I think it was manageable, right?
Maybe later in in 2020, right? Early 2021 where I think they didn't need to push the vaccine so hard. And so here again, this is where money comes into play. This is where big pharma gets evil because there was massive profits made on everybody getting vaccines. Right. Right. And even my friend says that probably you're right. Not everybody needed to get that vaccine right then and there. I don't get a flu vaccine. I never have. You know, and I'm 55. If I what for me, if I become immune compromised or have health issues that require that, I'll get it. I was sick with my daughter just a couple of weeks ago.
Both of us really had CO really bad. I've had CO three or four times and never been that sick. And there was a point when I think everybody knew that and they were still perpetuating because the fight what happens is a fight gets brought up the fight is us and them and us and them. So the rational conversations can't be had because there was a lot of people coming out and trying to have rational conversations. But it's just like autism. autism is caused by vaccines, therefore vaccines are bad. We can't have a middle conversation. And that's part of what's going on in the world in general is there's no like let's have a rational conversation about this.
And that's sort of what a couple of my friends who were in the health and medical field. It's like yeah, we you can't be rational. You have to be hardline one way or another because the sides have been chosen. And so until we as people step back and go, whoa, we need to slow the roll. The same thing is going to happen with AI. By the way, people are totally unaware about what's really going to what a lot of this the underlying problem is going to be. You know, people don't realize that in the next three to five years, I might I might be exaggerating, but at least 40% of mid-level to entry- level jobs are going to be eradicated, right?
That also could be one reason why they're, you know, militarizing American cities because they're aware that there's going to be a lot of economic uh disruption unrest. Exactly. Why? So, but we can't have a rational conversation about that about well, how do we use AI? I do I'm in the production on a series right now where we talk about AI. How do we use AI to our humanity's benefit, not corporations profit? Right now AI is being driven on profit not on benefit. Yeah, totally. I mean and even there I mean there's a lot of stuff right now about the circularity of the AI economy and how um you know and they're kind of like in a way I mean out of ideas for the types of huge profit margins that would justify trillion dollar investments.
So now like Open AI is looking at porn bots and advertising because it's just they don't they don't know what else to do with it really. Right. Uh well, we're almost at the end of our uh hour here. Um maybe uh if you want to tell people about what you know, how they can follow you. I saw you have a Substack. It doesn't really look like you you've engaged much yet. Uh where do people follow your work? What would you like them to check out? Yeah, you can follow me on Substack. I write like a couple times a week. I do what's called Betsy Rants. So, you know, I'm funny and um a little uh sarcastic.
That's my little weapon. Um you can I have a website. You know, I work in documentaries. I consult with documentaries. I also coach writers and um because I think that you know the pen is a powerful tool and people should be sharing their stories and I think what's going to really turn this around is the good people speaking up and saying no in any way they can. So that's kind of what my message is about and uh you Substack's easy. I don't I don't love other social media platforms. I kind of like Substack. I don't cool Betsy. Listen, thank you very much. It was great to reconnect and let's stay in touch and we'll do this again sometime.
Yeah. All right, hun. Bye. Bye.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.