Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Wow, Wow, that's what we're starting with. Katie Stole admitting
Speaker 2: to committing a crime. Sophie, can you get the DEA
Speaker 2: on the horn real quick? Just just call them up.
Speaker 2: We gotta we gotta report this now.
Speaker 3: It's legal behavior on your speed dial, not on mine.
Speaker 4: I love Robert reporting me the DEA.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll show him your book on my bookshelf about drugs.
Speaker 2: Hey, hey, hey, hey, whoa. You can't. You can't prove
Speaker 2: ship just because it has my name in it. You
Speaker 2: know that doesn't mean anything. Books are lies all the time.
Speaker 4: Love Robert front page.
Speaker 2: That doesn't prove ship, Katie. What have you heard about Chowtury?
Speaker 5: Uh?
Speaker 1: Not that much, Robert? Just really okay, okay, I actually haven't.
Speaker 6: So they did commented from So there was a billboard
Speaker 6: in Los Angeles on Olympic and like Barrington for Bickram
Speaker 6: yoga my entire life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I feel like more it's it's a I
Speaker 1: definitely have seen Bickram. I do have some sort of
Speaker 1: vague association with negative association with the person. I don't
Speaker 1: think it's because I'm here on behind the bastards and
Speaker 1: I understand the uh what happens here.
Speaker 4: On this show. But yeah, I don't got I haven't
Speaker 4: got any information on him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, uh okay, well that's this is great. That this
Speaker 2: is great. You're coming in cold. He used to be,
Speaker 2: as Sophie mentioned, like there were billboards for this guy,
Speaker 2: like an entire style, like probably one of the most
Speaker 2: like like famous and prominent types of yoga literally bear
Speaker 2: like in you know, the American conception of yoga literally
Speaker 2: bore his name for decades. And he is a fucking monster,
Speaker 2: very bad dude. And uh, I mean obviously I started this.
Speaker 2: I initially been planning to kind of do a two
Speaker 2: parter on Bickram, honestly, like I felt like in order
Speaker 2: to do that, we would have just been repeating very
Speaker 2: similar stories about abuse in a way that was not productive.
Speaker 2: And then I found out about you know, Pierre Bernard
Speaker 2: and was like, oh, I think this is actually a
Speaker 2: really useful way to lead into the story of Bickram,
Speaker 2: because there's a lot of continuity between the two guys,
Speaker 2: and obviously they are not the only kind of yoga
Speaker 2: cult leader abusive types. In fact, there was a one
Speaker 2: of Bickram's students is currently like his yoga you know
Speaker 2: cult that he created in New York City is like
Speaker 2: falling apart under allegations of like horrible abuse. So like
Speaker 2: this is there we are. That's part of why I
Speaker 2: wanted to do it this way. It is like there's
Speaker 2: a chain of these kind of guys taking advantage of
Speaker 2: the sort of trappings of yoga and you know, Hindu
Speaker 2: and Buddhist mysticism in order to abuse people. And that's
Speaker 2: that's bad. You know. We talk about we talk about
Speaker 2: people doing that with Christianity all the time. It's worth
Speaker 2: talking about that when people do it using other you
Speaker 2: know things. So from the very beginning of the physical
Speaker 2: asana component of Hatha yoga, there was an element of
Speaker 2: exhibitionism to it, right. We talked about this a little
Speaker 2: bit in the last episode. This is like the yogi's
Speaker 2: laying on beds of nails. That's a prominent example of this.
Speaker 2: As yoga in India became more centered around physical movements
Speaker 2: and the early prescriptions against halfa faded, exhibitionist elements of
Speaker 2: it became more common. A good example of this would
Speaker 2: be Rebo Rakshet, an Indian bodybuilder and yoga advocate who
Speaker 2: studied under a teacher named Bishnu Ghosh, who we will
Speaker 2: talk about more in a little bit. Riba immigrated to
Speaker 2: Kolkata after the partition of India and with the withdrawal
Speaker 2: of the English menace, and by the early nineteen fifties
Speaker 2: she was winning titles and bodybuilding. She also started to
Speaker 2: perform for circuses, where she would lift the legs of
Speaker 2: elephants onto her chest and let them stand on her
Speaker 2: without crushing her. She also like, let fully loaded. I'm
Speaker 2: sure there's like some probably it's a lot that like
Speaker 2: elephants are smart and don't want to crush people. I
Speaker 2: don't know. I'm not an expert on like how this works.
Speaker 2: She would also let fully loaded cars drive over her body.
Speaker 2: And I bring this up because number one, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: I think this stuff is neat. I'm a big fan
Speaker 2: of like circusy shit, and it's also interesting to I
Speaker 2: also bring it up because like to make the point that,
Speaker 2: like you might say, the kind of circusy vibe of
Speaker 2: public yoga has a pretty proud tradition back in India. Right.
Speaker 2: Bikram Chowdery was born in Calcutta in British India in
Speaker 2: nineteen forty four. I haven't ever seen a credible exact
Speaker 2: date for this guy's birthday. That's not really uncommon given
Speaker 2: the time record keeping wasn't perfect. It's also the case
Speaker 2: that Bickram is an inveterate liar, so I'm not sure
Speaker 2: I would even trust a birth date if he gave it.
Speaker 2: But nineteen forty four is pretty seems like a pretty
Speaker 2: good ballpark estimate for like when this guy was born.
Speaker 2: We know very little about his early life life, save
Speaker 2: that he claims he grew up quite poor. This is
Speaker 2: certainly possible, even likely. In the version of his life
Speaker 2: that he spun for interviewers, Bikram Chowdery describes the foundational
Speaker 2: moments of his existence this way. I remember all the
Speaker 2: Bengali kids used to play a little ball, and somehow
Speaker 2: I crossed the alley and I saw Gosh's College of
Speaker 2: Physical Education. About fifteen or twenty kids there are doing
Speaker 2: the postures. So I said, wait a minute, I can
Speaker 2: do those things a lot better than you are doing it.
Speaker 2: There's a man who was sitting there. He says, hey,
Speaker 2: you come here. What's your name? I said, Bikram. He said, wow,
Speaker 2: come every day here, I will teach you more. And
Speaker 2: that guy is Bishnu Ghosh we mentioned a little bit earlier.
Speaker 2: He's the guy who trains Riba and Bishnu. Gosh is
Speaker 2: the younger brother of a famous guru and an author
Speaker 2: named Paramahansa Yogananda who wrote a book called Autobiography of
Speaker 2: a Yogi that was published in nineteen forty six. This
Speaker 2: is generally seen as the book that helped to widely
Speaker 2: introduce yoga and meditation to Westerners in the sixties and seventies.
Speaker 2: Steve Jobs found Eastern philosophy as a teenager by reading
Speaker 2: Autobiography of a Yoga and he was a vocal about
Speaker 2: rereading it every single year. Mark Benioff, who is the
Speaker 2: current CEO of Salesforce, has set on record that ad
Speaker 2: Jobs's memorial service, you know, during his funeral, everyone who
Speaker 2: attended was given a copy of the book. Like That's
Speaker 2: how central Jobs considered this. In his own life, George
Speaker 2: Harrison read Autobiography of a Yogi for the first time
Speaker 2: in the late nineteen sixties when Ravi Shankar gave him
Speaker 2: a copy. Elvis Presley readit it around the same time. Now, obviously,
Speaker 2: I bet, I bet my grandma read it.
Speaker 1: I've been hitting on this nugget that my grandma, my
Speaker 1: great grandma, a white woman.
Speaker 4: Well taught yoga in the sixties, started.
Speaker 2: To oh sure, oh yeah, Like there's not even a question,
Speaker 2: there's not even a question that she read that book
Speaker 2: like it. It was it was like foundational to the
Speaker 2: to not just like yoga, but just in general to
Speaker 2: like the New Age movement, right is it? It's just
Speaker 2: a massively influential text, and as you might expect among
Speaker 2: religious scholars, as among like historians who study yoga, among
Speaker 2: people who are like experts in in like the actual
Speaker 2: like like uh study of the religious traditions that kind
Speaker 2: of autobiography of a yoga is talking about. There are
Speaker 2: very mixed opinions about this book. There are some criticisms
Speaker 2: that it's basically pure mysticism, filled with stories of miracles
Speaker 2: and other things you know, seen as impossible. But you know,
Speaker 2: critiquing what is essentially a religious belief is not the
Speaker 2: place of this podcast, so I'm not going to get
Speaker 2: into it. Obviously, this is like an incredibly popular and
Speaker 2: influential text about spirituality. Of course, there's there's a myriad
Speaker 2: set of opinions on it, so it's worth giving this
Speaker 2: overview of like Bishnu Gosh and his brother, because you know,
Speaker 2: his brother, who writes autobiography of the Yogi, is a
Speaker 2: little bit more of a high level kind of spiritual guy.
Speaker 2: Whereas Bishnu, while he's he's definitely using some of his
Speaker 2: brother's ideas, he's very grounded in like physical sciences, and
Speaker 2: his application of yoga is like really kind of relentlessly
Speaker 2: focused on both like physical fitness and also physical rehabilitation.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to quote from the Yoga Pedia here.
Speaker 2: Bishnu believed that the root of all disease is stress.
Speaker 2: He thought that the body's energy centers around the spine,
Speaker 2: so spinal health is key to physical, emotional, and mental health.
Speaker 2: He combined weightlifting and bodybuilding with Hatha yoga practice to
Speaker 2: promote physical and mental wellness. Bishnu Ghosh would work one
Speaker 2: on one with a student, diagnosing the problem and developing
Speaker 2: a specific program to promote healing. His program was founded
Speaker 2: on the eighty four yoga postures that his famous brother caudified.
Speaker 2: And like, he seems pretty rad. Actually, everything I've read
Speaker 2: about him is pretty good. He was a very big
Speaker 2: advocate for a specific set of abdominal muscle ass isolation
Speaker 2: exercises traditional to Hatha yoga that his brother taught, and
Speaker 2: Gosh has kind of like he's got this very academic
Speaker 2: and even scientific attitude towards integrating this stuff with modern
Speaker 2: physical education. He trained at the University of Calcutta, and
Speaker 2: he mixed these kind of ancient teachings about diet and
Speaker 2: lifestyle with modern bodybuilding techniques from the West. And in fact,
Speaker 2: as much of an influence as his brother's book was,
Speaker 2: Goosh was also influenced by the book Muscle Control by
Speaker 2: a German bodybuilder named Max Sick. And I don't know,
Speaker 2: like it's one of those things when I read about it,
Speaker 2: it makes sense to me just in terms of like
Speaker 2: what's worked for me. A big, a major focus of
Speaker 2: my own exercise is just like lower backshit, because I
Speaker 2: just kind of noticed as a kid that all of
Speaker 2: my older male relatives like the thing that aged and
Speaker 2: like them the most and cause them the most problems
Speaker 2: and misery in their life was like fucking lower back pain.
Speaker 2: I think that's not an uncommon story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And what most people don't necessarily know is how
Speaker 1: important core strength is to lower back and vice versa,
Speaker 1: and that absolutely if the back those muscles are actually
Speaker 1: part of your core or if they're not there, you know.
Speaker 1: So there are some a lot of like I do
Speaker 1: a lot of different types of activities. I know, I
Speaker 1: kind of shit on my yoga practice in episode one.
Speaker 1: I see it's important, but I have it incorporated in
Speaker 1: everything I do and that deep.
Speaker 4: Yeah anyway, Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, I mean it makes total sense to me. The
Speaker 2: idea that like you would kind of look at what
Speaker 2: makes people get old and be like, oh, well, the
Speaker 2: back is the key to all this makes total sense
Speaker 2: to me because like that's what's going to fuck up
Speaker 2: your mobility more than almost anything else.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so yeah, pretty rebish, new Ghosh, Pretty reasonable dude.
Speaker 2: So this is the guy that little kid Bikram finds
Speaker 2: and learns from. And yeah, it was Ghosh who kind
Speaker 2: of first put together this list of twenty eight asanas
Speaker 2: and two breathing techniques that Bickram would later take to
Speaker 2: the West. But for a time he was Bickram's teacher, and,
Speaker 2: according to Bikram Chowdery, Bickram was an excellent student. He
Speaker 2: credits Ghosh as being the greatest health culturist of the
Speaker 2: twentieth century, a rare compliment for a man who most
Speaker 2: frequently compliments himself. Oh yeah, oh yeah. I think it's
Speaker 2: one of those things where like you got to talk
Speaker 2: up your teacher because like it makes the case that
Speaker 2: you're extra awesome.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it is. That's a self serving compliment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Bickram claims he was such a good
Speaker 2: student that at age eleven, he entered and won his
Speaker 2: first major yoga championship, becoming the All India Yoga Champion
Speaker 2: that year. In competitive yoga is like a thing in India,
Speaker 2: although as we'll talk about, not really in this period.
Speaker 2: So he and Gosh, Bikram claimed later toured around the
Speaker 2: country showing off various feats of yoga prowess as a
Speaker 2: mix of like Carnival act and evangelical revival for the
Speaker 2: religion of yoga. Bickram claims his Guru told him to
Speaker 2: refuse any payment for the work they were doing and
Speaker 2: that he lived without any material possessions at this time.
Speaker 2: If this is true, it's not a habit he's stuck with. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Bikram also claims that he won the All India Yoga
Speaker 2: Championships for the next two years in a row. When
Speaker 2: talking about this three years of purported victories, he said unbeaten.
Speaker 2: The whole country complains if Bicctram competes, nobody else ever wins,
Speaker 2: so they make me retire. Now, this is definitely a lie,
Speaker 2: like the claim that he was just so good that
Speaker 2: he was forced to quit by, you know, the yoga
Speaker 2: powers that be in India. There's an Indian journalist named
Speaker 2: Chandrama Paul who dug into his backstory with rigor. She
Speaker 2: was unable to find evidence that there was any sort
Speaker 2: of All Yoga Champion All India Yoga Championship in the
Speaker 2: country at this time that matches his description. The best
Speaker 2: evidence I found suggests that like it was several years
Speaker 2: later that like the first competition that kind of matches
Speaker 2: this came into existence and he probably just sort of
Speaker 2: retroactively claimed that he'd won it because he knew the
Speaker 2: record keeping was bad. The Internet wasn't a thing, you know,
Speaker 2: when he started doing this, it was an easy lie
Speaker 2: to get away with. In other versions of the story
Speaker 2: he would later tell, he would claim that he was
Speaker 2: asked by the head judge of the competition, yoga luminary
Speaker 2: Bksi Inngar, to retire from competing in order to give
Speaker 2: other contestants a chance. Now, most of the version of
Speaker 2: the Bickram story I'm giving you is from a recorded
Speaker 2: interview he gave that was used by the producers of
Speaker 2: a Netflix documentary about the man. But Bickram's claims about
Speaker 2: himself are not consistent over time, and I'm going to
Speaker 2: quote from a write up by NPR summarizing some of them. Here.
Speaker 2: In some accounts, he started training at three, sometimes at six,
Speaker 2: other times he won the championship at eleven, twelve or thirteen.
Speaker 2: And his famous yoga sequence, the very core of Bickram
Speaker 2: yoga was actually not so much developed or designed by Bickram,
Speaker 2: but largely observed it with only the slightest of changes
Speaker 2: from a longer series of ninety one postures that have
Speaker 2: been firmly in the public domain for the last hundred years.
Speaker 2: So you know, this is like not an uncommon kind
Speaker 2: of grifter backstory that you would like.
Speaker 4: Like a real George Santo's.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's Santo saying pretty already here. The
Speaker 2: most common Bickram story after this point says that he
Speaker 2: became next a professional bodybuilder. Again, you always have to
Speaker 2: double check everything this guy says, because he's an inveterate liar,
Speaker 2: But there is some evidence for this, namely, there's photos
Speaker 2: of him looking super jacked and lifting heavy weights. So
Speaker 2: I can confirm at least that Bikram Chowdery was once
Speaker 2: yoked as absolute fuck like yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely definitely
Speaker 2: was swoll at one point. Yeah, it's like Alex Jones,
Speaker 2: where it's like, well he was. He was in fact
Speaker 2: shredded for a period of time, you know. Uh. So
Speaker 2: he claims that b Ksi Nngar, who's he says is
Speaker 2: the guy that told him to stop doing yoga so
Speaker 2: other people could win, advised him to do this, and
Speaker 2: that he quickly went on to break records in powerlifting. Now,
Speaker 2: this is probably a lie because there's no evidence of it,
Speaker 2: and whenever he says something without evidence, it's definitely a lie.
Speaker 2: NPR continues and these are you know, his claims. He
Speaker 2: ran marathons with no training, he became a competitive weightlifter
Speaker 2: and broke records. He continued public exhibitions, drawing larger and
Speaker 2: larger crowd, stretching out over a bed of nails, dragging
Speaker 2: automobiles up and down Calcutta streets, and slowing his heart
Speaker 2: rate until he could be buried. Alive around this time. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and this is like he's not the only guy doing
Speaker 2: this kind of stuff. These are these are like common
Speaker 2: sort of like I don't know, tricks. Seems like a
Speaker 2: little bit reductive, but you get what I'm saying, Like
Speaker 2: these are common like at performances that that people are
Speaker 2: doing in the country around this time. It's not He's
Speaker 2: not the only guy doing this sort of stuff. I'm
Speaker 2: going to continue that in pr quote. Around this time,
Speaker 2: Bickram learned he didn't need to sleep. From here, things
Speaker 2: get weird. At age seventeen, during a routine training session,
Speaker 2: Bickram slipped and dropped a three hundred and eighty pound
Speaker 2: weight on his knee, crushing his patella like a seashell.
Speaker 2: Doctors who were rushed to the side of the young
Speaker 2: celebrity declared he'd never walk again. Now, like, that's about
Speaker 2: what I deadlift at this present moment. I don't know
Speaker 2: how you would drop a weight because I think in
Speaker 2: other things that I've read, well, I mean, that's not
Speaker 2: really that much. I think in other like it because
Speaker 2: I think it was like he's claimed that he was
Speaker 2: basically like deadlifting at the time. He may have been
Speaker 2: doing like an Olympic lift though, but like I either way,
Speaker 2: I don't know how you actually crush your knee with
Speaker 2: the weight, Like I just difficult. It seems hard to
Speaker 2: drop it on one knee like that, Like it's easy
Speaker 2: to injure yourself doing lifts like that, but like I
Speaker 2: don't know how you shatter a single knee that way.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying it's impossible, but I don't know how
Speaker 2: you do it.
Speaker 4: The mechanics are eluding me. That's for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's a little baffling to try to like
Speaker 2: work out in your head. He claims that, like the doctors,
Speaker 2: because he was, like he's in his version of events,
Speaker 2: he was a super famous weightlifter, and so all these
Speaker 2: doctors run up to the stage when he hurts himself
Speaker 2: and they you know, do a scan, and he says
Speaker 2: his knee is broken into a thousand pieces. And he
Speaker 2: gets told by these doctors always never even going to
Speaker 2: be able to walk again, and he's like, no, I
Speaker 2: won't accept this. I will learn to walk again. And
Speaker 2: so he claims that, like you know, is in kind
Speaker 2: of this journey to prove them wrong. He heals himself
Speaker 2: by discovering this mix of asanas and breathing techniques that
Speaker 2: he's later going that are later going to become what's
Speaker 2: known as bickram yoga or you know in some cases
Speaker 2: hot yoga, right that he invins it in order to
Speaker 2: heal his shattered knee. This in almost this like supernatural fashion,
Speaker 2: and like I'm not going to say, like, if you've
Speaker 2: got bad knees, I think there's there's different things in
Speaker 2: yoga that can be helpful with that. I don't think
Speaker 2: doing hot yoga is gonna heal your knee if it
Speaker 2: shattered into a thousand pieces. I question that.
Speaker 1: No, honestly, Yeah, hot yoga gives you a risk of
Speaker 1: injuring those muscles because you don't you're so lu you're
Speaker 1: so warm that you don't know when you've gone too far.
Speaker 2: Yeah. AnyWho, Yeah, then yeah, there's a bunch of risks
Speaker 2: of overtraining with it. Yeah. But he says that in
Speaker 2: six months of doing this yoga his leg is all better.
Speaker 2: But he's sadly is no longer jacked because he had
Speaker 2: to give up weightlifting. So that's tragic. We hate to
Speaker 2: see it. So Ghosh told him to travel to Mumbai
Speaker 2: next and open a shop and teach this marvelous new
Speaker 2: healing sequence to all comers, using his injury as proof
Speaker 2: of his prowess. His yoga techniques exploded in popularity and
Speaker 2: in short order people were calling him Yoga Raj, the
Speaker 2: Guru of Mumbai. He continued on this path for several
Speaker 2: years until Bishnu Goosh got sick or in some versions
Speaker 2: of the story, Gosh decided to die and induce a
Speaker 2: heart attack and himself at age sixty nine. I don't know,
Speaker 2: Bickram is like, yeah, he decided that that was the
Speaker 2: least painful way to die and he was done being alive, which, honestly, boss,
Speaker 2: move if that's the case, if.
Speaker 4: You control and you're able to do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, man, Hey, I'm gonna go worse ways to
Speaker 2: leave the world. Sure, And also sixty nine pretty funny
Speaker 2: age to make it too, so yeah, yeah nice. Bikram
Speaker 2: claims that before he went, Ghosh made him swear an
Speaker 2: oath quote. My Guru took my hand and told me
Speaker 2: something in English which he never spoke. Promise me you
Speaker 2: will complete my incomplete job, he said. He meant bringing
Speaker 2: yoga to the rest of the world, to the West
Speaker 2: and America, and I replied, yes, I promise I will.
Speaker 2: And again there's no evidence that, I mean, he definitely
Speaker 2: worked with Ghosh. There's no evidence that Gosh was like
Speaker 2: in the you know, at the end of his life.
Speaker 2: You must you must promise me that you'll go to
Speaker 2: America and teach them yoga. You'll go, You'll go, please,
Speaker 2: like your sacred duty is to go to Hollywood and
Speaker 2: teach fucking you know, what's his name? The guy from
Speaker 2: Er George Clooney had a fucking stretch better here.
Speaker 1: It's also like, if this Ghostbella is as enlightened and
Speaker 1: wonderful as he's being made out to be, and I'd like,
Speaker 1: we haven't gotten to the specifics of Bikerm yet, but yeah,
Speaker 1: I've got an idea of where this is going.
Speaker 4: Hi, Yeah, I don't think that he would be this.
Speaker 1: He must know this person's character, like no any him
Speaker 1: as wanting money, all the money, and yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean you have to assume, you know, at
Speaker 2: this point, Bickram's claiming that he's, you know, he has
Speaker 2: no money. He's just kind of living, you know, off
Speaker 2: of donations and refusing to accumulate any any kind of
Speaker 2: wealth or possessions. Again, there's also no evidence that this
Speaker 2: is true, but perhaps it was. People go on go
Speaker 2: through journeys. It is kind of worth noting the yo
Speaker 2: he is doing, the yoga that he like that Ghosh
Speaker 2: is doing that he kind of like takes is not
Speaker 2: really hot yoga. Yet he's doing it. Obviously, he's doing
Speaker 2: it in like Calcutta, which is an extremely fucking hot
Speaker 2: part of the world. He's doing it in Mumbai, also
Speaker 2: very hot part of the world. But it's not they
Speaker 2: are not heating up where they're doing these sessions specifically, right,
Speaker 2: That's not a part of it. Yeah, So it's it's
Speaker 2: worth kind of looking at the story as we kind
Speaker 2: of go into this next phase of Bickram's life of
Speaker 2: Bikram Chowdhurry as not just the story of a guy
Speaker 2: who you know later becomes an abusive cult leader. That
Speaker 2: is an element of this, but the way that he's
Speaker 2: crafted this kind of story about his early background also
Speaker 2: owes a lot to kind of long held storytelling traditions
Speaker 2: in Indian culture. Chandrympaul, who's that journalist I quoted earlier
Speaker 2: when interviewed about her research into Bickram, is always careful
Speaker 2: to point out that The fabulous and often impossible stories
Speaker 2: he weaves for listeners are reminiscent of the many tall
Speaker 2: tales in popular Indian books, movies, and folklore. We grew
Speaker 2: up with characters like this. To actually find someone in
Speaker 2: the flesh and blood who was capable of spinning these
Speaker 2: yarns was quite something, and you know, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 2: it's like if you if you spend a lot of time,
Speaker 2: like in India, talking like just like about different kind
Speaker 2: of historical figures and stuff, you'll encounter some pieces of this.
Speaker 2: Like I under like, it makes sense to me that
Speaker 2: like she's kind of trying to integrate him into this
Speaker 2: this kind of tradition of sort of like local folklore,
Speaker 2: because you can't really understand how he's portraying himself sort
Speaker 2: of without that. It's not it's not quite the same
Speaker 2: as as like the way in which like a George
Speaker 2: Santos lies in.
Speaker 1: The United States and you know, me little bit stand
Speaker 1: there's a cultural suspension of disbelief.
Speaker 2: Yeah maybe maybe a little bit, yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, an acceptance, And it's not it's not the
Speaker 1: way we see a George Santos as just being a liar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's also not going to do most of this
Speaker 2: lying over there, So maybe I think it might it
Speaker 2: might be more. I think what Sandrina is saying is
Speaker 2: more that like, well, he probably gets to some extent,
Speaker 2: he's probably kind of inspired in like how he's framing
Speaker 2: himself by the way these stories of these other kind
Speaker 2: of folkloric figures are told. Yeah, which makes sense. You
Speaker 2: know what else makes sense, Katie?
Speaker 1: Uh, using podcasts to sell stuff.
Speaker 2: Using podcasts to sell Who better to tell you what
Speaker 2: to spend your money on? Then two people whose primary
Speaker 2: job is sitting in front of a microphone and you know,
Speaker 2: talking about shitty people. Where else can you learn what
Speaker 2: products and services are are going to finally make you happy?
Speaker 1: Absolutely, this is probably the only place that you can
Speaker 1: possibly be advertised to, I think these days.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, Yeah, It's it's very hard to find, you know,
Speaker 2: people whose life experience, uh is largely limited to the
Speaker 2: entertainment industry, who can tell you, you know, here's here's
Speaker 2: what you can spend your money on to finally be happy.
Speaker 2: You know, this is this is it folks.
Speaker 4: But you can trust us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can trust us. We we have your best
Speaker 2: interests at heart, that's all, Katie and I talk about,
Speaker 2: you know, in private, is your best interests? What do
Speaker 2: you think? What do you think is good for for
Speaker 2: our fans? Katie? You know that's what we ask ourselves. Anyway,
Speaker 2: spend some fucking money, you you sheep. Ah, we're back.
Speaker 4: I hope spend your money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I hope you sheep are happy.
Speaker 4: Well, code bastards. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Katie, I've got I've heard this new technique that
Speaker 2: I'm using with the fans. It's called negging. You heard
Speaker 2: of this? Have you seen this? Have you heard about this?
Speaker 2: It works great?
Speaker 4: Heard about it? Yes, it does work very well, unfortunately.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm big into it these days. It's a it's
Speaker 2: it's great. Really, it does work so groundbreaking. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's good. I'm trying it everywhere now. The other day,
Speaker 2: I was at the gas station and you know, in Oregon,
Speaker 2: you're not allowed to fill your own gas up because
Speaker 2: that's considered dangerous and sketchy for for reasons that are
Speaker 2: impossible to explain. But I'm at the gas station and
Speaker 2: I just kind of started, you know, negging my gas
Speaker 2: station attendant as he was filling up my car, and uh,
Speaker 2: you know, I gotta I got a dollar off. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I think you just want to rest me. Yeah, there
Speaker 2: you go.
Speaker 1: See everybody get out and Robert, what are you doing.
Speaker 1: Everyone's going to become absolute assholes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's the world. I want to say that
Speaker 2: ship's disrespect Sophie, Sophie, it's the it's the only way
Speaker 2: to destroy the power of the pick up artists. If
Speaker 2: everyone is negging, then their teachings will have no worse
Speaker 2: behind them.
Speaker 3: Be nice, to be nice to the gas station workers.
Speaker 6: Wow, okay, yes, last time I got gas, I got
Speaker 6: a great boomer joke from my They were like, do
Speaker 6: you want to receipt? And I was like, no, thank you.
Speaker 6: They're like, that's cool. Receipts are for boomers. God, that
Speaker 6: was a product and a service, Thank you, sir.
Speaker 2: It is so funny, like this fucking state, like an Oregon,
Speaker 2: like you can open carry, you know, a sword, should
Speaker 2: you wish, completely unregulated. You can buy still basically any
Speaker 2: kind of firearm that's legal in the United States. But
Speaker 2: if you want to pump your own gas, that's a problem. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the state's got issues with that. Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Speaker 4: I love it. I would it would take me a
Speaker 4: minute to adjust. But I think it would be thought
Speaker 4: I would hate it. It's delightful.
Speaker 2: See, I hate it. But I like pumping my own gas.
Speaker 3: Because you're knowing WEIRDO continue.
Speaker 2: I like to get out, you know, the start pumping gas,
Speaker 2: light a couple of cigarettes. You know, sometimes I just
Speaker 2: toss lit cigarettes around the gas station. It's a good time.
Speaker 2: It's a good time. So we're talking about Bickram Chowdery.
Speaker 2: So at any rate, we can say with some certainty
Speaker 2: that Bickram next left India for Japan, and this is
Speaker 2: where he would make what is, by some accounts, the
Speaker 2: only real breakthrough of his career. He found the winters
Speaker 2: in Japan horrible. Again, This is a guy who grows
Speaker 2: up in India in particularly hot parts of India, and
Speaker 2: Japan has real rough winters. Right, large parts of Japan
Speaker 2: get extremely fucking cold. So he is miserable there and
Speaker 2: he has difficulty. He finds he has difficulty performing a
Speaker 2: number of his the postures that he's trying to do
Speaker 2: because he's like shivering so badly. So he decides to
Speaker 2: bring yes fucking shattered, ask me. He decides to bring
Speaker 2: in space heaters to class first, just to keep himself warm,
Speaker 2: and then he notices that, like, the students who are
Speaker 2: kind of nearer to the heater are like having an
Speaker 2: easier time, So he puts more heaters in the room,
Speaker 2: and he notices that the warmer he makes the room
Speaker 2: the easier of a time, his students have locking up
Speaker 2: their knees and touching the floor with their palms and
Speaker 2: doing you know, a number of the movements. Over time,
Speaker 2: he keeps turning the room off hotter and hotter and hotter,
Speaker 2: until the temperature in the room matched the vicious heat
Speaker 2: of Calcutta, where he'd first trained, And he seems to
Speaker 2: have started at around like ninety five degrees, but eventually
Speaker 2: settled on one oh five, although sometimes he'd crank things
Speaker 2: up to like one ten. Now there is an extent
Speaker 2: to which heat, you know, you can like it like
Speaker 2: you put a heating pad on, like if you've got
Speaker 2: like a stiff knee or something, and you'll notice that
Speaker 2: it like makes it easier to move. Heat can benefit
Speaker 2: movement and make it easier for people with conditions like
Speaker 2: arthritis to move. But as you noted earlier, Katie, that
Speaker 2: can there's sometimes that can be helpful. It can allow
Speaker 2: people to do the kind of stretching and exercise that
Speaker 2: can you know, help deal with and entreat and improve
Speaker 2: their condition. But also it makes it easier to overtrain,
Speaker 2: right like if you're because like maybe you'll go a
Speaker 2: little like too hard, harder than you ought to than
Speaker 2: you would if you like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: The yoga that I have perhaps the most well not
Speaker 1: the most I've done some heated yoga, and there are
Speaker 1: absolutely some benefits to it.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you get a hell of a workout.
Speaker 4: Yeah, hell of a workout.
Speaker 1: It make it made me incredibly nauseous though, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: multiple times. Uh, And you're like so far away from
Speaker 1: the door and there's all these people dealing with their
Speaker 1: own issues in the heat, and you're like, how do
Speaker 1: I get out of here?
Speaker 4: Byfore I throw up over everyone?
Speaker 2: No, And that's the that's the part. So there are again,
Speaker 2: like there's benefits to like doing yoga in warmer rooms,
Speaker 2: the actual medfical benefits well, uh, where off will before
Speaker 2: one hundred degrees and like by the time you get
Speaker 2: up that high you are like there. You know, there
Speaker 2: are some benefits to it, but like there's serious risk
Speaker 2: of like heat stroke, of overtraining people die doing this,
Speaker 2: you know, and in part because like it is a
Speaker 2: it can be traumatic for your body to exercise like
Speaker 2: that in that kind of heat, especially if you're not
Speaker 2: drinking enough water, if you're not like you know, taking
Speaker 2: proper precautions. Not that it's bad for everybody, but like
Speaker 2: a number of people are going to have problems in
Speaker 2: that kind of environment. That said, when you're when you
Speaker 2: put people in that kind of situation when it's one
Speaker 2: hundred one hundred and five hundred and ten and they're
Speaker 2: doing these intense stretches in this like boiling heat with
Speaker 2: this group of people and you've got you know, as
Speaker 2: you as you stated, Katie, it can make you feel
Speaker 2: like you're like locked in and trapped. But also if
Speaker 2: you can, if you push through that, there's a kind
Speaker 2: of physical elation even euphoria that a lot of people
Speaker 2: experience when they're doing that. And also because it is
Speaker 2: so difficult, there's like a kind of trauma bonding that
Speaker 2: you can get with other people you're doing And so
Speaker 2: it it's addictive, right, yeah, you know, like there's a yeah,
Speaker 2: there's a degree which it's just deeply addictive. The inciting
Speaker 2: incident for Bickram's rise to power, wealth and influence, and
Speaker 2: his version of events was a long trip that President
Speaker 2: Richard Milhouse Nixon took to Southeast Asia that included a
Speaker 2: visit to Japan in nineteen seventy three. This was to
Speaker 2: shore up the increasingly toxic relations between our two countries
Speaker 2: due to his agreement to visit China. He's like, you know,
Speaker 2: in a number of parts of the region at this time.
Speaker 2: It's kind of unclear where Bickram is supposed to have
Speaker 2: met him, but Bickram claims that during Nixon's time in
Speaker 2: the region, he's you know, he's riddled with phlebitis, which
Speaker 2: is an inflammation of a vein that can It's usually
Speaker 2: not serious, but it can cause serious health issues. And
Speaker 2: you know, Nixon is you wouldn't call him our healthiest president, right.
Speaker 2: I sure Nixon is, like he claims to have like
Speaker 2: that his phlebitis is like reared up to such a
Speaker 2: level that he like might lose his leg at some point.
Speaker 2: You could find like news articles about this, but they
Speaker 2: don't come out until he's like getting pardoned by Gerald Ford.
Speaker 2: So I think there's a degree to which it's like, oh,
Speaker 2: was Nixon just sort of pretending that he was super
Speaker 2: sick in order to get people to like, you know,
Speaker 2: maybe want to lay off him to get like sympathy.
Speaker 1: But really that's a pr move I've ever heard one.
Speaker 2: And Bikram doesn't start making these claims about Nixon until
Speaker 2: kind of like years after this would have happened, So
Speaker 2: it looks like what happened. Nixon is in Southeast Asia
Speaker 2: before his like visit with Mao, and then a couple
Speaker 2: of years later when he gets forced out of office,
Speaker 2: he he like talks about how bad his pholebitis is
Speaker 2: to get sympathy, and Bickram is like, oh, yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: when he was in Southeast Asia, Nixon like his people
Speaker 2: brought me to him, They like flew me out to
Speaker 2: him so that I could like help him with his
Speaker 2: phlebitis and I got him in a swimming pool and
Speaker 2: we did yoga together, right. I think in one version
Speaker 2: of the story, he spends like four days with Nixon
Speaker 2: and that like he like basically teaches him a set
Speaker 2: of asanas that Nixon can do in order to like
Speaker 2: make his flebbitis better, and it works so well that
Speaker 2: the President can't tell any longer yellow, which was his
Speaker 2: good leg and which was his bad leg. Because Bickram's
Speaker 2: just so good at this stuff. And Bickram says that,
Speaker 2: you know, tells Nixon, if you do your yoga regularly,
Speaker 2: the problem won't persist. Which number one, the idea, the
Speaker 2: very idea that Dick Nixon ever did yoga, I find inconceivable,
Speaker 2: Like I simply don't believe it. But it's also like,
Speaker 2: you know, after this point he will continue to complain
Speaker 2: about his phlebitis, which I guess if you're Bickram, you
Speaker 2: could be like, well, you know, Nixon didn't keep his
Speaker 2: yoga up or whatever, Like I don't know if you're
Speaker 2: if you're a kind of liar, you can find ways
Speaker 2: to explain this away. In any case, Bickram claims the
Speaker 2: president was so great that he expedited and signed off
Speaker 2: on a special green card just for Bickram. In some
Speaker 2: versions of the story, he like greets Bickram on the
Speaker 2: runway when the yogi flies into the United States to
Speaker 2: start his first school. I gotta tell you right now,
Speaker 2: we're talking about like all of the different like timing
Speaker 2: shit on this. There's no way this happened, Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: like this absolutely did not occur. There's no evidence the
Speaker 2: two men ever met Researchers have talked to the Nixon
Speaker 2: Library and were like, hey, this like very prominent yoga
Speaker 2: guy is claiming that like Nixon got him a green
Speaker 2: card and he like cured Nixon's phil bidis with yoga.
Speaker 2: Is there any evidence that the two even talk to
Speaker 2: each other? And the Nixon Library folks like went through
Speaker 2: their records looking for any evidence that the two men
Speaker 2: ever met a correspondent and there's just there's absolutely nothing.
Speaker 4: Now you feel like there would be something.
Speaker 2: You feel like because like, look, Nixon covered up a
Speaker 2: lot of shit about his presidency, but I don't feel
Speaker 2: like he would have fought to cover this up like this,
Speaker 2: This couldn't couldn't be a priority for Dick to like
Speaker 2: ide yeah, And it's like it's it's it's fascinating because I.
Speaker 4: Would watch a movie about this relationship though.
Speaker 2: I would, Yeah, I would like a little buddy comedy
Speaker 2: Dick Nixon and is like yoga guru hanging out in whatever,
Speaker 2: Indonesia or something.
Speaker 1: Like yeah, yeah, Nick k I don't know why, Nick Cage, but.
Speaker 2: No, Nick k Oh Nick Cage as Nixon I feel
Speaker 2: like we do deserve that.
Speaker 1: Like I basically I think that's the level because we
Speaker 1: don't want to do any reverence to Nixon.
Speaker 4: No, no, no, let Nick Cage do his thing to Nixon.
Speaker 2: Nick k like Nick Cage just doing drunk Nixon, like
Speaker 2: learning how to do yoga like that's yeah, that's a
Speaker 2: that's that's perfect.
Speaker 5: Maybe that would be casting. Okay, continue again, Hulu hit
Speaker 5: us up. You know we've got this ship. So Bickram,
Speaker 5: he does make it to the United States, he does
Speaker 5: get a green card. I just there's no evidence that
Speaker 5: fucking Nixon signed and Bickram launched his Yoga College of
Speaker 5: India at a small North Beach studio in San Francisco
Speaker 5: in nineteen seventy two, which again doesn't seem to time
Speaker 5: out with when Nixon was in Southeast Asia.
Speaker 4: But whatever that, it does time out with my great grandma.
Speaker 2: It does time out with your great grandma. I've also, again,
Speaker 2: there's always multiple shit. I found some articles that say
Speaker 2: Bickram's first studio was in Beverly Hills. I think it
Speaker 2: was in San Francisco, but it's a little unclear either way.
Speaker 2: You get the idea.
Speaker 4: Pretty sure she was still in San Francisco at that point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there's a good chance she was aware of
Speaker 2: this guy. So his yoga studio, with its heaters and
Speaker 2: boiling temperatures, an intense series of stretches and breeding exercises,
Speaker 2: took the new health conscious California set by storm. He
Speaker 2: hits the California New Age community like a fucking bomb.
Speaker 2: I'm going to quote from The Guardian here. From the
Speaker 2: mid nineteen seventies onwards, he drew in a celebrity clienteleading
Speaker 2: Michael Jackson, Jeff Bridges, Shirley Maclain, Barbara streisand and Raquel Welch.
Speaker 2: His classes, heated to a regulation forty degrees celsius, designed
Speaker 2: to mimic conditions in Kolkatta, offered a combination of constructive hazing,
Speaker 2: cosmic wisdom, and pantomime eccentricity. He would wear speedos and
Speaker 2: issue bizarre commands. In two thousand and seven, a writer
Speaker 2: for GQ magazine went to a class and reported him
Speaker 2: telling a student, you miss teeny winnie bikinis, spread your legs.
Speaker 2: He loaded the color green and banned people from wearing it.
Speaker 2: He had never seen carpet until he arrived in America.
Speaker 2: And believing it represented the height of luxury. Had all
Speaker 2: his studios carpeted, hygiene be damned, which is horrible. You
Speaker 2: do not want a room, Yeah, you do not want
Speaker 2: a room designed to be sweated, to have carpets.
Speaker 4: Oh no, that's so bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's not great, that's not ideal.
Speaker 4: Carpet didn't last a week before.
Speaker 2: No, oh horrible. So it was actually actress Shirley Maclain
Speaker 2: who he credits with convincing him to give up the esthetic,
Speaker 2: possession less life of a yogi that his guru had
Speaker 2: advised him and to start charging for instruction. She had
Speaker 2: met him in Mumbai years ago at his first yoga
Speaker 2: shop and told him that while taking donations might work
Speaker 2: in his home country, Americans couldn't possibly understand the concept, right.
Speaker 2: I think there's some example of like, they won't respect it,
Speaker 2: they won't like take it seriously if they're not spending
Speaker 2: money on it, YadA, YadA, YadA. Speaking of which, Katie,
Speaker 2: do you know what is worth taking seriously because it
Speaker 2: costs money?
Speaker 4: I don't know, Robert. Is it products and services.
Speaker 2: To be average as products and services? It is? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Just you know what? Don't even look, I'm going to
Speaker 2: need something from the audience here, which is a little
Speaker 2: bit of faith in us. You know, don't don't even
Speaker 2: listen to what the ads are for. Just go to
Speaker 2: the first URL I read to you during the ad break,
Speaker 2: figure out their bank routing number and wire them your
Speaker 2: life savings.
Speaker 1: Just do it.
Speaker 2: You know, what's the horm code? Yeah? Yeah, use the
Speaker 2: promo code. You get five percent off of your life savings,
Speaker 2: you know, do ith There we go ads, Oh we're back.
Speaker 2: I yeah. I hope you're all enjoying the possessionless life
Speaker 2: of a yogi now that you've given your life savings
Speaker 2: to I don't know, fucking Blue Apron or whoever who
Speaker 2: sponsors as Sophie is at Blue Apron HelloFresh, Hello Fresh
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, send him the money. They need it.
Speaker 6: So.
Speaker 2: Over the years, you know, Shirley Maclain kind of tells
Speaker 2: Bickram that he has to give up, you know, living
Speaker 2: without possessions and taking you know, funding his his yoga
Speaker 2: based on donations and start charging people. Over the years,
Speaker 2: as his actual contact with celebrities expanded, Bickram starts telling
Speaker 2: lurid lies about other famous people he'd worked with. He
Speaker 2: took credit for opening the Beatles up to Eastern Spirituality,
Speaker 2: claiming that he had worked with them in nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: nine and helped like bring them, you know together. The
Speaker 2: Beatles did not exist in nineteen fifty nine, so like
Speaker 2: this definitely did not happen.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean maybe the early version of the Beatles,
Speaker 1: back when they still had Pete Best do on the
Speaker 1: exact timeline, but they were so far.
Speaker 4: Off in this stage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely drugs. Yeah, no, they hadn't. They weren't doing
Speaker 2: anything cool. Like it's like, actually, the Beatles, like getting
Speaker 2: into Eastern Spirituality is super well documented and none of
Speaker 2: the ah bitram jottery we would know, Yeah, it would
Speaker 2: not be it would not be hard to prove. He
Speaker 2: claimed to have taught his yoga to astronauts at NASA's behest.
Speaker 2: There is again no evidence of this in reality where
Speaker 2: he did have a lot a lot of famous people
Speaker 2: are doing Bickram yoga. You can find like clips of
Speaker 2: you know, like fucking George Clooney and shit talking about
Speaker 2: doing Bickram in various like late night shows and shit.
Speaker 2: But while he you know, winds up a lot of
Speaker 2: famous people do his yoga. His first follower in the
Speaker 2: United States is a reggueler dude named Tony Sanchez. Tony
Speaker 2: started taking Bickram's yoga in nineteen seventy six while he
Speaker 2: was still in high school n PR Rights. After his
Speaker 2: first class, Sanchez approached Choudhury to thank him and asked
Speaker 2: what his philosophy of life was. He said, be good
Speaker 2: to others, so others will be good to you. Chowdhury
Speaker 2: was already heating his studio, but only to eighty five
Speaker 2: or ninety degrees. Sanchez started coming in every day, then
Speaker 2: began working the front desk part time. He felt that
Speaker 2: yoga was sacred, says Sanchez, a discipline that would actually
Speaker 2: help people not only physically but also mentally, spiritually, and morally.
Speaker 2: And this is where you get to kind of a
Speaker 2: thing that's unclear to me, which is like, was Bikram
Speaker 2: a khan man from the beginning or was he someone
Speaker 2: who developed into a con man over time as he
Speaker 2: got influence over people, as he got like exposed to wealth,
Speaker 2: like did he kind of degenerate? And part of why
Speaker 2: it's unclear is that from the time he becomes prominent,
Speaker 2: he's lying about his past. He's lying about all this stuff.
Speaker 2: That happened, and I think that can kind of like
Speaker 2: back words cloud the story of the guy that he
Speaker 2: is when you get like one of the things that's
Speaker 2: interesting about what Tony says is he's like, yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: it's like eighty five or ninety degrees, which is like
Speaker 2: a reasonable temperature for to do a hot yoga thing in,
Speaker 2: but he keeps bringing it up up up up to
Speaker 2: a degree that's like a lot less healthy and a
Speaker 2: lot less reasonable. I think over time he realizes, like
Speaker 2: the intense impact that this has on people, that it
Speaker 2: kind of the unpleasantness makes it more addictive, and I
Speaker 2: feel like there's a degree to which that's something he's
Speaker 2: absolutely conscious of and like purposefully doing. I also think
Speaker 2: it's possible that like he comes in with better motivations
Speaker 2: at the start, and as he gets famous, he becomes
Speaker 2: sort of more Number one, having money changes you, and
Speaker 2: number two having that degree of influence over people, like
Speaker 2: people following you, treating you as a guru. That's not
Speaker 2: like good for you, Like it doesn't make you a
Speaker 2: better personally.
Speaker 4: And we can all blame Shirley McLain for this.
Speaker 1: I guess, yes, greatest monster, you you what was his
Speaker 1: teacher's name, Ghosh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Guru Ghosh.
Speaker 4: He I mean you specifically said that.
Speaker 1: He specifically said, we cannot accept money for these teachings. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I don't know, maybe I've just seen this movie too,
Speaker 1: not this specific movie, but like the story of the
Speaker 1: person that, you know, the younger person that says, but
Speaker 1: it can be this way or whatever, and or you know,
Speaker 1: really I wants to go to America.
Speaker 4: Whatever it is. I don't know, missing pieces showing. I
Speaker 4: don't know. I think that there is. It sounds like
Speaker 4: the origins of his training were legit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's not contaminated.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's certainly. It's like it's unclear like was he
Speaker 2: always this kind of guy or did it happen later?
Speaker 2: You know, that's a little bit of a mystery. I
Speaker 2: think guys like Sanchez seem to suggest that, like he
Speaker 2: was a better person earlier on, which isn't surprising to
Speaker 2: me if that is the case, Like that's not the
Speaker 2: only time that's happened.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we just did a whole episode on money and
Speaker 1: how to fix people over at our other show Some
Speaker 1: More News.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's that's definitely a part of the Bickram
Speaker 2: Chowdery story. So when Sanchez meets this guy, he says
Speaker 2: the yogi was attached to his strict Indian diet, but
Speaker 2: as Chowdery began to make some money, he found a
Speaker 2: fellow Indian immigrant to emulate the controversial Ashrom leader Bogwan
Speaker 2: Shri raj Niche. If you watch that show Wild Wild Country,
Speaker 2: right like that that's the guy and ra you know,
Speaker 2: there's a number of things problematic about him, but a
Speaker 2: big thing that he's doing is he gets super rich.
Speaker 2: He has this very large colt and he's like always
Speaker 2: he dries everywhere he goes. He's in the fucking Rolls Royce. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he's ye Rolexs And Bickram sees this and is like,
Speaker 2: oh shit, that actually looks pretty dope, right. Rajnische is
Speaker 2: also like a sex guru right now. Sanchez claims that
Speaker 2: when he meets him, Chowdhurry is in. He's in. You know,
Speaker 2: he's got a couple relationships over time, but they're always monogamous.
Speaker 2: He's interested in like massages and stuff, but he's not
Speaker 2: really like motivated by sex. Sanchez claims that even told him, like,
Speaker 2: I'm not really sex doesn't mean much to me. This
Speaker 2: is not always going to be the case for Bickram.
Speaker 2: During a trip back to India in nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 2: he met Rajashri, a teenaged girl who became his wife
Speaker 2: via an arranged marriage. She was a yoga champion at
Speaker 2: the same school he'd studied at, and the whole situation
Speaker 2: is kind of problematic. But as far as I've been
Speaker 2: able to tell, she seems to have been an active
Speaker 2: and engaged part of his business. There are a lot
Speaker 2: of allegations that she is a huge part of the
Speaker 2: fucked up shit he does later. She's certainly an enabler
Speaker 2: right of this, that is, that is at least something
Speaker 2: that people will allege. It is, in fact, after marrying
Speaker 2: Rosistere that he got really serious about expanding his business.
Speaker 2: By the end of the nineteen eighties, Bickram was making
Speaker 2: good money and steadily expanding both the size and the
Speaker 2: notoriety of his business. As the money rolled in, Bickram
Speaker 2: equipped himself with the trappings of wealth, a Rolex watch
Speaker 2: and a fleet of Bentley's. He would try to like
Speaker 2: claim that this didn't mean that he was, you know,
Speaker 2: as rich as he was, by telling interviewers like, oh,
Speaker 2: these Bentley's were like Rex, and I restored them all,
Speaker 2: you know, you know, and my my main job is
Speaker 2: helping restore people to health. But my spare time I
Speaker 2: fixed Bentley's. Again, zero evidence of this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really hard to square this spiritual kind of
Speaker 1: a thing with wanting Bentley.
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially multiple Bentley's. Right, Yeah, you get rich and
Speaker 2: you get one Bentley. Like, I don't know, maybe you
Speaker 2: could still be like when you by the point you
Speaker 2: have a fleet of Bentley's, It's like, I don't know,
Speaker 2: man like that. That seems like it seems like there's
Speaker 2: probably some something shady going on here. Yeah. So it
Speaker 2: is around this time that the first signs of what
Speaker 2: we might call clt shit from Bikram become a parent.
Speaker 2: It started the same year as his marriage, when he
Speaker 2: excommunicated his first student, Sanchez, after Bikram demanded that he
Speaker 2: break up with his girlfriend and Sanchez refused. So that's
Speaker 2: we've got some cults. He's trying to isolate his followers from,
Speaker 2: like their loved ones and stuff, you know, you can's
Speaker 2: that's that we're starting to get into that good old
Speaker 2: fashioned cult shit. Right by the early nineteen nineties, Bikram
Speaker 2: had expanded to Tokyo in San Francisco. He started holding
Speaker 2: teacher training classes each three months long, and he would
Speaker 2: accept just twenty five trainees per year, although eventually he
Speaker 2: increases that substantially. People paid somewhere around ten thousand dollars
Speaker 2: for the privilege of learning from Bickram for several weeks.
Speaker 2: Classes were intense, including hours of stretches every day in
Speaker 2: blazing heat, long dia tribes from Bickram that had to
Speaker 2: be listened to in full, and late nights of Bollywood
Speaker 2: movies in Bickram's hotel. He still claimed that he didn't
Speaker 2: really need to sleep, so nobody else should either. Bickram
Speaker 2: was extremely discriminating about who he allowed to open schools
Speaker 2: and who he allowed to use the Bickram name. He
Speaker 2: was also proactive about policing what he saw as his brand.
Speaker 2: In nineteen eighty five, Raquel Welch published a book that
Speaker 2: he claimed was a copy of his different yoga teachings.
Speaker 2: He settled with her for enough money to buy a
Speaker 2: house in Beverly Hills, and look, maybe Raquel Welch was
Speaker 2: stealing somebody's from Bickram. I certainly, like it seems like
Speaker 2: there was enough there that he was able to force
Speaker 2: a settlement on the issue. In two thousand and two,
Speaker 2: he's like, I don't I'm not invested in Raquel Welch's
Speaker 2: intellectual honest. Yeah. So like it's whatever.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but also it's like you're scummy too, like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's what. Yeah. So he settles for her.
Speaker 2: He gets a house in Beverly Hills. He says some
Speaker 2: like wild shit about her like that, like she's in
Speaker 2: terrible shape and like has horrible muscles, and it's like, man,
Speaker 2: she is Raquel Welch in the nineteen case, like we
Speaker 2: like nobody's kind of bond. Yeah, nobody's buying. Yeah. In
Speaker 2: two and two, we have eyes, Yeah we can. We
Speaker 2: can go watch a series of nineteen eighties movies. In
Speaker 2: two thousand and two, he started registering trademarks and applied
Speaker 2: for a copyright for his yoga, which you'll remember was
Speaker 2: based on a series of asanas and breathing patterns that
Speaker 2: were generations old and had first been organized in the
Speaker 2: structure that Bickram used by his matester bishnu Ghosh, who'd
Speaker 2: made no attempt to like copyright them or limit who
Speaker 2: could use.
Speaker 4: Them, right, Yeah, you very much do remember that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's super fucked up. He starts this process of
Speaker 2: trying to be like I own this kind of yoga
Speaker 2: and you can't do it without paying me in two
Speaker 2: thousand and two. Uh. That eventually led to a long
Speaker 2: series of lawsuits, which gets settled in twenty twelve when
Speaker 2: the US Copyright off and a federal judge say like, no,
Speaker 2: you can't do this. You can't copy your ideoga like
Speaker 2: it's which is fine. That's yeah, a good good call.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it seems like the right choice.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It would be like if you developed like a
Speaker 2: mix of like squats and like weightlifting, and we're like,
Speaker 2: I own this. No, man like people, you can't copyright
Speaker 2: how people use their bodies. Yeah, yeah, you can copyright
Speaker 2: I don't know having Richard Simmons do it, but you
Speaker 2: can't copyright the movements themselves. So it is unclear when
Speaker 2: precisely Bram started to sexually harass and abuse students, but
Speaker 2: we do know that this was a fairly regular occurrence
Speaker 2: by the early two thousands. When Sarah Bond took her
Speaker 2: first class, her first Bickram class in Washington State, she
Speaker 2: was a sophomore in college and had suffered from scoliosis
Speaker 2: since high school. So obviously, like, this is the kind
Speaker 2: of thing that Gosh developed, you know this, this mix
Speaker 2: of asanas and breathing technics specifically to treat Here's how
Speaker 2: Vanity Fair describes what happens next. What happened next is
Speaker 2: the archetypal Bickram story. She loved the yoga, and as
Speaker 2: it healed her spine and spirit became consumed by it,
Speaker 2: dropping out of school and taking out loans to attend
Speaker 2: teacher training so that she might devote her life to
Speaker 2: this thing that had changed her life. She was pretty
Speaker 2: and enthusiastic the first week, with Chowdery presiding, every trainee
Speaker 2: introduced herself for himself. When it was Bond's term, she said,
Speaker 2: this yoga saved me. Now I'm happy. I don't get sick,
Speaker 2: I don't get pain. As Bond recalls in an interview,
Speaker 2: I looked up to Bickram and said at Bickram, I
Speaker 2: love you more than chocolate, and everybody laughed, and he laughed.
Speaker 2: The third night, as students were demonstrating postures, she says
Speaker 2: she found Chowdery staring at her, then watched as he
Speaker 2: dispatched a young woman brushing his hair to bring Bond
Speaker 2: his diamond spangled rolex. She returned it after class. She
Speaker 2: was flattered by the guru's attention. I had a very
Speaker 2: deep backbend. I thought he probably just noticed my spine,
Speaker 2: but also found it uncomfortable. After class, he kept her behind,
Speaker 2: she says. He told her they knew each other from
Speaker 2: past life and kissed her on the cheek. On the
Speaker 2: fifth day of training, According to the lawsuit filed this
Speaker 2: past March by Bonn, Chowdery called her into his office
Speaker 2: and said, should we make this a relationship? I have
Speaker 2: never never felt like this about anyone. Shocked, she protested,
Speaker 2: made her way out of the office and broke into tears,
Speaker 2: She says. After telling her boyfriend what had happened, she
Speaker 2: approached Greg Vlani, who ran teacher training and, according to
Speaker 2: Bonn's legal complaint, revealed Chowdery's overture to him as well.
Speaker 2: In an interview, Bond told me that Villani said she
Speaker 2: should separate the man from the teacher and not tell
Speaker 2: Chowdery's wife what had happened. So that's you know, that's gross.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of that too, and part of it
Speaker 2: is that, you know, some of these other teachers all
Speaker 2: had like some of the different kind of physical problems
Speaker 2: that were helped by you know, this yoga they're doing,
Speaker 2: and then like Bonn, they kind of turn it into
Speaker 2: their life because they get you know, they feel both
Speaker 2: the sense of gratitude to it and maybe even kind
Speaker 2: of an addiction, and it also becomes the way that
Speaker 2: they make money, and so so over and over, you
Speaker 2: hear this idea that like a woman will come in
Speaker 2: with a complaint and like everyone will be aware that
Speaker 2: Bickram is a creep, but they'll kind of be like,
Speaker 2: just just don't be alone with him. We'll all stay
Speaker 2: in the room when you guys are together, We'll make
Speaker 2: sure that you're never alone or whatever. And they always
Speaker 2: fall short of that. There's kind of maybe some suspicions
Speaker 2: you get reading it that sometimes they know that they're
Speaker 2: abandoning her, right, Like it's unclear.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is an unfortunately very classic story of a
Speaker 1: man in power using that abusing that position, and people
Speaker 1: enabling it. There's a myth there's a magic to him,
Speaker 1: even though it is more modern. We're not talking about
Speaker 1: the last episode, whereas you know, turn of the century,
Speaker 1: nineteen hundred, but like it.
Speaker 4: And you know that still exists. It's a little bit
Speaker 4: better now, but not much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not much at all. And like you know what, honestly,
Speaker 2: like as much of this is based in like yoga
Speaker 2: and mysticism. The abuser, one of the abusers that most
Speaker 2: reminds me of Bickram is fucking Weinstein.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like this. He's this big industry figure. They
Speaker 2: are all working for him, their careers rely on his approval.
Speaker 2: And that's the center of the abuse that he's able
Speaker 2: to do. And that's in a big part of the
Speaker 2: abuse he's able to do is a lot of people
Speaker 2: around him. They're not all entirely aware, but like they
Speaker 2: know enough and they just kind of like avoid making
Speaker 2: it there, letting it be their problem, you know. Also,
Speaker 2: which means throwing a colleague under the bus, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And as we've established with this copyright thing, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm trying to it's he does. He is
Speaker 1: he has successfully positioned positioned himself at the center of
Speaker 1: a practice that actually is very helpful for people that
Speaker 1: actually he can be life changing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but that's not him, He's not.
Speaker 2: No, he's taking the teachings of you know, his his guru,
Speaker 2: who was a much better, like actual expert on physical health.
Speaker 2: He's tweaked them a little bit, but like he's he's
Speaker 2: pretending that like he is the font of these techniques
Speaker 2: that have benefited people, when in reality he's just kind
Speaker 2: of like enclosing them and capitalizing on them and then
Speaker 2: using his perceived control over them to abuse women who guy.
Speaker 2: So the entire world of teaching this popular brand of
Speaker 2: yoga is basically close to you without Bickram's approval, and
Speaker 2: as someone whose serious spinal problems had been treated to
Speaker 2: a substantial degree by this yoga, someone who also had
Speaker 2: decided to like make this her professional life, Bond more
Speaker 2: or less took the advice of her colleagues at first,
Speaker 2: right where she's just like, I'm just going to try
Speaker 2: not to be alone with them. Yeah, I'll try to separate,
Speaker 2: you know, the teachings from the things about him that
Speaker 2: are imperfect. You know, nobody's perfect, right like she's doing.
Speaker 2: You know, this is not an uncommon way to react
Speaker 2: to this. She continues to attend events while he's present,
Speaker 2: and you know, just tried to avoid being alone with him.
Speaker 2: Bram had picked. Bickram had picked another mistress by this point,
Speaker 2: which helped on the few occasions when he did try
Speaker 2: to make advances on Bond, she was able to get away.
Speaker 2: So for a while things are fine. She's moving up
Speaker 2: in yoga. She's an extremely prominent person in the community.
Speaker 2: She's doing great, and eventually Bickram's wife invites her to
Speaker 2: a Thanksgiving dinner at their home. This was a big
Speaker 2: event within the professional community, so she chose to attend there.
Speaker 2: Bickram waited until other folks had left and his wife
Speaker 2: went to bed, and he assaulted Bonn again, like he
Speaker 2: comes after her. He's, you know, putting it on her
Speaker 2: and stuff. He's like going in with his hands. She
Speaker 2: reacts negatively to his advances. He complains about being lonely
Speaker 2: and calls his wife a bitch. And then when Bond
Speaker 2: still didn't buy it, when she somehow didn't find that endearing,
Speaker 2: he said, you will never be a champion without me.
Speaker 2: Sure enough, at the next year's Yoga Championships, she came
Speaker 2: in second, despite what she claims should have been a
Speaker 2: clear victory. Now I can't judge that statement. I'm not
Speaker 2: a yoga expert. NPR talked to one of the judges.
Speaker 2: There's one judge who like bound claims, was like tells
Speaker 2: her you were robbed, right, Basically, Bickram came to the
Speaker 2: judges and told us not to give you the win.
Speaker 2: NPR talked to that same judge, and the judge kind
Speaker 2: of waffled. They didn't back up Bond's claims, but they
Speaker 2: also like didn't deny them either. So I don't entirely
Speaker 2: know if that's accurate, but there's significant evidence that he
Speaker 2: harmed a number of people's careers directly when they would
Speaker 2: not like yield, and including Bond, when they would not
Speaker 2: like yield to his sexual demands. Later that year, at
Speaker 2: a training camp in Acapulco, Bond was assaulted again by
Speaker 2: Bickram and again managed to get away. From this point on,
Speaker 2: he stopped letting her teach advanced classes and contacted studios
Speaker 2: that had booked her for sessions and advised them to
Speaker 2: drop her. And when I say, as salt, we're generally
Speaker 2: talking about like you know, going in like like not
Speaker 2: you know, we're talking about like sexual harassment, right, like
Speaker 2: sexual harassment on to a degree that's legally actionable. So yeah,
Speaker 2: there are numerous other stories of Bickram's behavior with other women,
Speaker 2: many that unfortunately went even worse than Bond's own. As
Speaker 2: a rule, Bickram seems to have a pattern. He will
Speaker 2: invite promising new instructors into his inner circle. At some event,
Speaker 2: they will all wind up in his hotel room watching
Speaker 2: Bollywood movies. At a certain point, everyone else just kind
Speaker 2: of knows to leave, and then Bikram has his way
Speaker 2: or attempts to have his way with someone else. Vanity
Speaker 2: Fair describes what happened to another instructor, Larissa Anderson quote
Speaker 2: one day after dinner, when Rajastri had gone to bed,
Speaker 2: chowder asked her to give him a message while he
Speaker 2: watched a Bollywood movie. Eventually, Anderson says, she started to
Speaker 2: nod off from fatigue, but Chowdery asked her to stay,
Speaker 2: then tried to kiss her. She said no, she wasn't
Speaker 2: interested in that. You are my family and I want
Speaker 2: to go to bed now, but Chowdery persisted and raped her.
Speaker 2: According to Anderson's suit, Larissa was horrified and went into
Speaker 2: what she now understands was trauma shock. She simply froze.
Speaker 2: Larissa could not find her voice to cry out for help.
Speaker 2: Defendant forcefully spread Larissa's legs apart and ejaculated. It did
Speaker 2: not last long. That's a very you know, clinical police
Speaker 2: way of talking. But you know that's a sexual assault.
Speaker 2: You know that's rape. Like Bonn Anderson was unable to
Speaker 2: leave the environment, right. She has spent a huge amount
Speaker 2: of money making a profession out of teaching yoga. This
Speaker 2: is her job. She can't just like bounce right. It's
Speaker 2: not like, you know, not that it's easy when it's
Speaker 2: like someone that you're socially related to with. But like
Speaker 2: her ability to like survive is reliant upon being involved
Speaker 2: in this community. She believed that her life would be
Speaker 2: effectively over if she lost Bickram's favor entirely, so she
Speaker 2: tried to continue on keeping her distance from the man.
Speaker 2: This was, as covered basically impossible. Bickram's other instructors seemed
Speaker 2: to have been at least passive accomplices, clearing out with
Speaker 2: surprising regularity when he wanted time alone with a new victim. Again,
Speaker 2: it's unclear what they knew what he told them, But yeah,
Speaker 2: it seems a little sketchy when you read a bunch
Speaker 2: of these stories kind of in sequence yeah quote. The
Speaker 2: pattern allegedly repeated with Jane Doe one, who liked Jane
Speaker 2: do two, filed suit early last May. When Jane Doe
Speaker 2: one assisted at the Fall Teacher Training in twenty eleven,
Speaker 2: she says Chattery flattered her by saying he had a
Speaker 2: gift for her, a transmission, because they thought the same.
Speaker 2: According to the suit, on another night soon after, he
Speaker 2: told her, I have never met someone who had a
Speaker 2: mine quite like my Guru. You have the divine in you.
Speaker 2: You have been touched by God. One morning, her legal
Speaker 2: complaint asserts, when she was doing her duty of tidying
Speaker 2: his suite and making sure there was fresh fruit, Chottery
Speaker 2: surprised her and forced her onto the bed, pulling her
Speaker 2: pants off. As she told him she didn't want to
Speaker 2: do this, he called her idiot over and over. She says,
Speaker 2: he forced her to perform oral sex, then raped her.
Speaker 2: According to the suit, defendant Chowdery force fully manipulated her
Speaker 2: legs into a yoga posture and laughed at her, saying
Speaker 2: you are a yoghini. As with the other women, Jane
Speaker 2: Doe Well number one says walking away from the Bickram
Speaker 2: yoga community wasn't a simple choice for her. She was broke.
Speaker 2: She had spent what was for her a lot of
Speaker 2: money to attend teacher training and had invested the last
Speaker 2: five years of her life in teaching Bickram. She stayed
Speaker 2: at the training and kept working, though she broke down
Speaker 2: crying at a staff meeting, then cleaning Chowdery's room. Days later,
Speaker 2: she says she was attacked again. The plaintiff could not
Speaker 2: feel in her body. She felt dissociated. Jane Doe's Number
Speaker 2: ones lawsuit says she could not run erect. Plaintiff remembers
Speaker 2: feeling that his sexual assaults were incestuous, like a family
Speaker 2: member attacking her. Eventually, she borrowed money from her mother
Speaker 2: to enable her to leave the training.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, and it's he's horrifying, really yeah, I mean
Speaker 4: it's terror.
Speaker 2: He's a fucking monster. Like these are. I do want
Speaker 2: to talk a little bit because this is a very
Speaker 2: common thing that you will encounter from like shitty people,
Speaker 2: particularly cops when someone is raped, is like why didn't
Speaker 2: you fight back? Right? Why didn't you? And like these
Speaker 2: these are you know, Bickram is an older guy. These
Speaker 2: women are often like physically taller and even sometimes stronger
Speaker 2: than him, you know, why don't they fight back? I
Speaker 2: And to tell to kind of talk about that one
Speaker 2: of the things that comes up in my mind a lot.
Speaker 2: I interviewed a man years ago who, while he was
Speaker 2: a marine stationed in Iraq going out and combat missions
Speaker 2: every day, was raped by his male sergeant. And he
Speaker 2: was like, he was not bigger than me, Like I
Speaker 2: was a I like fought for a living. I was very,
Speaker 2: very physically strong. He describes it the same way that
Speaker 2: Jane do Won. He just associated right, the fact that
Speaker 2: this person who he had like been in this trusting
Speaker 2: position with the fact that this person he was like relying
Speaker 2: on to keep him safe out in combat like assaulted him.
Speaker 2: He just completely lost the ability to physically act.
Speaker 1: Right, because you also don't know what the ramifications of
Speaker 1: reacting might be a bigger picture.
Speaker 4: Who's going to believe you x y Z my job?
Speaker 4: There's but also just in that moment, yeah, to give uh.
Speaker 1: I mean probably a lot of your listeners already know this.
Speaker 1: But it's not fight or flight. It's fight flight, fawn
Speaker 1: or freeze. Yeah, and especially when someone is attacking you
Speaker 1: in a position of power. Uh, You there's something in
Speaker 1: you your body business, assist you.
Speaker 4: You don't know.
Speaker 1: You might want to like appease the situation. You might
Speaker 1: want to try other tactics than fight. You're not fighting
Speaker 1: somebody you respect necessarily, You're still figuring out what the
Speaker 1: fuck is happening to you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And and again we're kind of bringing
Speaker 2: this up just to note that like everything these these
Speaker 2: women have said is completely consistent with I mean, god
Speaker 2: knows how many millions over our time of sexual assault.
Speaker 2: These are not uncommon store There's nothing about this that
Speaker 2: is that is abnormal in terms of their reactions or
Speaker 2: how they how they handle this. Eight women in total
Speaker 2: would eventually accuse bitrum of rape while or various other
Speaker 2: kinds of sexual assault and while all or harassment, and
Speaker 2: while all this is going on, he would brag loudly
Speaker 2: and often like kind of like weirdly about his sexual
Speaker 2: prowess in interviews, claiming stuff like that he had seventy
Speaker 2: two hours of marathon sex while my partner has forty
Speaker 2: nine orgasms I count. He also claimed this was I
Speaker 2: think this was him kind of trying to protect himself.
Speaker 2: He would tell interviewers that women begged to have sex
Speaker 2: with him. Like from his classes, and that would they
Speaker 2: had threatened to kill themselves if he said no. And
Speaker 2: again I suspect that was him like trying to like
Speaker 2: set up like, oh so if somebody later accuses me,
Speaker 2: I can say, like, oh, no, it was that, you know.
Speaker 2: I that's my guess as to why he was doing that.
Speaker 2: So all of this is fucking nightmarish, but none of
Speaker 2: it's what brought his empire down. It started with simple racism.
Speaker 2: In May of twenty eleven, Pandora Williams and it's spelled
Speaker 2: p A N d h O r A Pandora Williams
Speaker 2: sued him over a training session she had attended the
Speaker 2: previous year. She claimed that during a training he had
Speaker 2: started ranting about how all gay people should be put
Speaker 2: on an island and left to die of ades. After training,
Speaker 2: she was like, what the fuck?
Speaker 6: Man?
Speaker 2: And I think her exact statement was like yoga's isn't
Speaker 2: yoga supposed to be about love? And he responded to her,
Speaker 2: we don't sell love here, bitch, And then he told
Speaker 2: an assistant, get that black bitch out of here. She's
Speaker 2: a cancer, so that's pretty bad. Williams was forced to
Speaker 2: leave and the eleven thousand dollars she had paid for
Speaker 2: training almost was not refunded. So that's awesome.
Speaker 4: Pretty my jaws on the floor.
Speaker 2: He's a real piece of shit, So you'll get in
Speaker 2: this documentary there will be moments where he's like he's
Speaker 2: making jokes about people. He'll like give him little nicknames
Speaker 2: and stuff, and it's a little bit insulting, but like
Speaker 2: in a way that like people do with their friends,
Speaker 2: and you can see in the reactions of other people
Speaker 2: they respond well to it. And then other times, and
Speaker 2: there's again documentation of this, he'll he'll be incredibly abusive.
Speaker 2: And I think part of what makes the abuse both
Speaker 2: more baffling and kind of it takes people maybe sometimes
Speaker 2: longer to figure out what's happening, is that, well, sometimes
Speaker 2: he does this in a way that's not abusive. Sometimes
Speaker 2: it's kind of playful and like fun, and then he'll
Speaker 2: turn and it'll say it's very suddenly not at all playful.
Speaker 2: And that's part of classic abuser shit. Yeah, very very
Speaker 2: classic abuser shit. Right when she sued Bitcram's legal representative
Speaker 2: for the company, right, you know, because he's got a
Speaker 2: corporate entity, was Mickey Jaffa Boden. She had started recently
Speaker 2: and found the company to be a mess. There was
Speaker 2: what she'd called a total commingling of personal and corporate assets.
Speaker 2: Bickram would regularly do rich asshole shit like refuse to
Speaker 2: pay his hotel bills in one case to the tune
Speaker 2: of one point eight, which is like, you know, we
Speaker 2: can talk about like the things that are not financially
Speaker 2: appropriate he did, But I don't really care about that
Speaker 2: when we're talking about like a serial rapist, like the
Speaker 2: fact that his finances weren't in order, It's not my
Speaker 2: primary concern. So Jaffa Boden kind of gets hired to
Speaker 2: do this job. He gets her like a green card
Speaker 2: or whatever. She's because she's an Indian woman. So she
Speaker 2: comes over the United States, and again she's in a
Speaker 2: very vulnerable position because she is reliant upon this this
Speaker 2: state of employment in order to stay in the country.
Speaker 2: So she finds this kind of mess and she's working
Speaker 2: on fixing it, and these allegations that woman Pandora Williams
Speaker 2: sues him, and she's kind of as she's trying to
Speaker 2: work through the financial problems within the company, kind of
Speaker 2: shaken by this. And I'm going to quote again from
Speaker 2: Vanity Fair here and this is them talking to Jaffa Boden.
Speaker 2: I realized that if half of this was true, we
Speaker 2: were facing a very serious situation. Jeffa Boden tells me now.
Speaker 2: She conducted internal investigations and challenged Chowdery on his behavior.
Speaker 2: She found him unremorseful. He would pick on someone in
Speaker 2: the crowd. If someone got up to go to the toilet,
Speaker 2: he would say, where are you going to change your tampon?
Speaker 2: He uses profanities, he's anti Semitic, he's homophobic. He'll say
Speaker 2: things like blacks don't get my yoga. And once he
Speaker 2: starts on his ti rate of profanity, he doesn't stop.
Speaker 2: Once he's picked on you, then you've had it for
Speaker 2: the entire class. Why did no one stand up to him?
Speaker 2: There's very little you can do. He's up there on
Speaker 2: a podium, he's miked up, and it's really hot. Many
Speaker 2: trainees feared losing the thousands of dollars they had already
Speaker 2: spent on their fees. Their livelihood depends on putting up
Speaker 2: with it. The problem was that Bickram had set things
Speaker 2: up in such a way that without his continued patronage,
Speaker 2: you can't teach anywhere else. Some of his victims would
Speaker 2: come back to his training and just try to take precautions. Eventually,
Speaker 2: Bickram started sexually harassing Jaffa Boden. She quit in part
Speaker 2: because he'd also asked her to shut up other witnesses.
Speaker 2: And then she got together with one of the lawyers
Speaker 2: who'd been representing Bickram's other victims. She sued him, and
Speaker 2: the lawsuit ends. To make a very long legal story short,
Speaker 2: the lawsuit ends with her in legal control of Bickram,
Speaker 2: the yoga entity, which is now generally brand Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: she's and he has. He is not It's not like
Speaker 2: he's not like in jail or anything like. He has
Speaker 2: not been charged criminally, but he has lost a number
Speaker 2: of legal cases. He owes a shitload of money to
Speaker 2: a bunch of different people. So he's yeah, he's still alive.
Speaker 2: He just fled the country, like he's been. He's violated
Speaker 2: a number of court orders to be deposed basically in
Speaker 2: order to avoid being like held legally to account for
Speaker 2: the things he's doing. He just like bounced, He like
Speaker 2: left the United States.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 2: He spends a lot of his time in India. He
Speaker 2: does a lot of training still in Mexico. He is
Speaker 2: still doing teaching sessions and young yoga instructors still like
Speaker 2: pay huge amounts of money for him to teach them. Uh,
Speaker 2: he did like a tour of India after he left
Speaker 2: the United States. So like it's one of those things
Speaker 2: where his reputation is fucked for sure.
Speaker 4: That blows my mind.
Speaker 2: And he lost control of Bickram, like the corporate entity.
Speaker 2: But like, you know, he's not over. He's not like
Speaker 2: in jail. He's not all of his money's not gone.
Speaker 2: You know, he has like a divorce with his wife,
Speaker 2: but it's so that she can protect their assets and stuff. Like,
Speaker 2: it's not I don't know, it's not the worst story
Speaker 2: we've had in terms of you know, a bad guy
Speaker 2: like not getting what they deserve, but it's not the best.
Speaker 2: So it's not great. Yeah that's the story that I mean,
Speaker 2: it's yeah, it's not nothing like that.
Speaker 1: He doesn't have control of that company. You know, it's
Speaker 1: not nothing. It's fine, but it does make me think,
Speaker 1: you know, everyone's like just in general the age we live.
Speaker 4: In, and maybe I guess it's just always true.
Speaker 1: But like he can't get canceled you're gonna have other opportunities.
Speaker 1: You'll just go find the people that are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: fuck people that are two PC or whatever.
Speaker 4: Fuck women, I hate those people.
Speaker 1: Whatever it is, like, that's disappointing, but he legally lost
Speaker 1: that thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's I'm not gonna say it's the best case scenario,
Speaker 2: but it is consequences, and that is better than you
Speaker 2: and a lot of it's it's better than a lot
Speaker 2: of these stories.
Speaker 4: And so I don't know, and I was surprised by that.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, there's that's something, Katie. You want to
Speaker 2: plug any pluggables?
Speaker 4: Oh boy, I do, I do.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 1: I've got a show called some More News with Cody Johnston.
Speaker 1: We have a whole YouTube channel with lots of long,
Speaker 1: funny videos. I mean I think they're funny, informative, and
Speaker 1: a podcast called even more News. And we've also take
Speaker 1: the audio from the YouTube channel and it's a podcast.
Speaker 4: Lots of options. But yeah, that's that's me.
Speaker 2: Well, I am also me. I have a book. It's
Speaker 2: called After the Revolution. You can buy it wherever books
Speaker 2: are bought. Uh. You should also check out other Cool
Speaker 2: Zone podcasts like Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, which
Speaker 2: is the opposite of the show, and we'll do a
Speaker 2: nice job of making you feel less shitty after hearing
Speaker 2: stories like this shit.
Speaker 3: Katie's been a guest, she was wonderful.
Speaker 4: I have I love that show.
Speaker 2: It's a great show, very fun, uh not depressing. So
Speaker 2: check that shit out. It's yeah, it's like a c
Speaker 2: just like hot yoga for the soul. Oh yeah, there
Speaker 2: you go.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking i might crank my heat up to one
Speaker 1: ten pop. Okay, yoga class, I'm not going to do that.
Speaker 4: Don't do that.
Speaker 6: And on that note, peace out, motherfuckers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, motherfuckers.
Speaker 3: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3: More from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com,
Speaker 3: or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 3: or wherever you get your podcasts.