A few days ago I wrote about imposter syndrome, the strange and corrosive tendency good humans have to doubt their abilities, usually associated with vocation.
People throw this term around all the time, good people, smart people, capable people.
The thing is there are plenty of people who should suffer from this malady. Real grifters, true imposters who often dupe people into believing all kinds of mucky muck nonsense.
The Queen Bee of this squad went to jail this week. Photos in every imaginable news outlet showed Stanford drop-out Elizabeth Holmes, who duped investors out of billions, lied publicly for years, even as her laboratory of cards was being revealed, lived an incredibly lavish lifestyle (see if you can find the story of her jetting across the country to adopt a dog she named Balto) being led into prison camp in Texas.
I couldn’t help but think of her kids: a two-year old son and newborn daughter, while I watched the videos of her, smiling and laughing as she went off to serve her 11-year sentence.
What kind of whacko psychopath does this stuff? I mean, when you look at photos of her, she’s kind of creepy, with those gigantic eyes. Her body language in many of her interviews is telling, and that weird, baritone voice … all of it smells off. Everything about her gives me the heebie jeebies. How in the hell did she get Henry Kissinger to sit on the board of her fake company, Theranos?!
Wow.
A while back I had a moment of intrigue around this fraud, too: Guru Yagat. Oof you do not have to scratch the surface too much to see the many ways she was duping everyone into thinking she has some kind of special spiritual interface with a higher power. She not only sold people a bill of goods around her spiritual prowess (though if you have the patience to watch any of her videos you will have trouble understanding just what the hell she’s talking about most of the time), she also sold them very expensive clothing and pricey yoga stuff. She dubed herself the “Founder of RA MA Institute for Applied Yogic Science and Technology,” and people bought it. People bought into her smoke and mirrors, in droves. They paid a lot of money to go to her desert workshops and for the privilege of hearing Yagat share in her deep wisdom, like “David Icke is bigger than ever, that’s the other part of the thing, you know, David Icke, his popularity has grown massively and part of the reason is because a lot of the things he’s been saying for the past 20 years are coming true.”
Yes, she was talking about the David Icke, the notorious Holocaust denier.
That’s the other part of the thing, you know.
Yes, I do know. You’re both nuts!
Yagat supposedly died in 2021 and I say supposedly because I’m more than willing to entertain the possibility that she faked her death so she could pretend to have a second-coming. Stay tuned.
Her supposed master (who died long before she took up yoga 🤔), Yogi Bhanjan, founder of Yogi tea, was an even bigger shyster than Guru Yagat aka Katie Griggs. Gotta love a yoga master accused of sexual misconduct and fraud who also ran a securities enterprise that was awarded over a billion dollars in federal contracts to guard courthouses, embassies, and military bases.
Buy a different brand of tea, folks.
Next in line to the throne we have the wee elfin shaman or whatever the heck she’s supposed to be: Carissa Schumacher. She is so, so cute, romping around the forest where she lives, communing with the critters! Schumacher channels Jesus and charges people over a thousand dollars an hour … to tell them, god only knows what because you can’t look at her website without logging in. No doubt she has a massive backlog of clients, having been guru for Jennifer Anniston and The Brad Pitt. Cutie pie Carissa most definitely does not appear to have imposter syndrome, showing up very late for group gatherings and declaring things like “the vibe at the Flamingo Estate wasn’t conducive to channeling Yeshua.”
I mean, seriously, would Jesus be caught dead hanging out with a bunch of Hollywood celebrities in LA?
How does this work? How is it that good people, hard-working people, smart people, think they don’t have the chops to do the job they’re doing? Chefs, engineers, teachers … people in the trenches doubting their ability while absolute, in-your-face purveyors of utter nonsense flit about completely unapologetic about just how (criminally, in most cases) fraudulent they are? What on earth is it about us humans that we have this inverse reality situation?
I can’t sum this up in any neat way, I have no idea how this happened. What sits in the heart of a human who is willfully, over an extended period of time, duping people into believing something that is absolutely not true? Elizabeth Holmes probably knew all along that her stupid blood tests were a joke. Katie Griggs did nothing but don a white costume and a turban, change her name to sound exotic and start teaching yoga classes. Carissa Schumacher says it feels like she’s being flushed down the toilet when she channels Jesus, which is precisely where the world should tell her to go. People, what the hell? How did our radar get so jammed that we don’t recognize these modern snake oil hucksters whose schemes are usually so audacious even a kid could see the ruse?
MIT-educated, excessively disheveled Sam Bankman-Fried, another creepy-eyed human, still thinks he’s innocent. After defrauding nearly everyone he ever came in contact with to the tune of billions of dollars. He was “earning to give,” he once said, pretending to care about the conditions of the world around him. Hopefully, like Holmes, he’ll be earning about $1 and hour in prison, though at that rate he’ll need a couple of lifetimes to give back what he stole.
I don’t know. It’s really nice outside again today. I guess I’ll put my trust in the trees and the flowers and my kids and the hardworking people I’ve known all my life and the people working every day right here, trying to make it all just a little bit better.
Yea, that. Amen. xomo
What a kick to wake up to this hilarious rant! I thought I was reading my Free Press feed🤣 it is truly amazing that snake oil still sells in the year 2023!
Wow what a story about a story!