I left a corporate job to go work with one of wellness culture’s most recognizable figures. But behind the smoothies and supplements was a playbook of manipulation, pseudoscience, and performance.
I didn’t set out to join a cult. I took a job.
In 2004, I packed up my car, left New York, and drove to San Diego to work for one of the most recognizable names in wellness — a man known as much for his superfood smoothies as for his conspiratorial takes on gravity (gravity!), sunscreen, and the government. My new employee training involved weeknight DMT sessions and a viewing of a documentary on how the moon landing was faked. He had millions of followers before Instagram existed. Back then, we sold dried fruits and raw chocolate out of a warehouse east of the city and sometimes out of the veggie-oil-powered school bus we criss-crossed the country in as we went from city to city speaking to packed rooms about longevity, superfoods, and the healing power of never cooking your food.
He wasn’t a scientist or a doctor, but he performed like one. And there’s no denying he had a gift — not just for sales or product development, but for tapping into the exact thing people didn’t know they were searching for. I didn’t believe everything he said, but I did believe enough to leave a stable job. Enough to put my name on the pitch. Enough to ignore the urine-drinking. (That part came later.)
We called it a superfood company, but it was more like a movement. The exotic products — take your pick — were just the entry point. What we were really selling was transformation. Every event, every smoothie, every sample table was another opportunity to convert someone to the idea that they could be healthy, radiant, alive in a way they hadn’t felt before.
The work itself was dynamic, fast-moving. I handled national sales — building a network of reps, landing meetings with retailers, getting our products onto the floor of Whole Foods before most people could pronounce “açaí.” (It’s ah-sigh-ee if you’re still not sure!) I negotiated 100-case deals of our signature products for the opening of Whole Foods Markets in cities from Manhattan to Los Angeles. That felt big at the time — and it was. We weren’t just building a brand; we were building a new language for how people talked about food. Raw. Living. “Vibrational.”
More than two decades later, I mostly still agree with that ethos. We are what we eat, after all. And there’s more data now than ever before about the benefits of eating plant-forward, unprocessed whole foods.
Behind the scenes, though, things were more chaotic. No real guardrails. It was a constant mix of idealism and improvisation. Sure, we had pitch decks and purchase orders, but the real secret sauce was his passion. Charisma. FOMO.
“I can see why many people are skeptical of the [wellness] industry,” Hayley Krischer wrote in People. Krischer says these days “everything” feels like wellness. And, she cautions, “you should be skeptical about buying supplements from conspiracy theorists. You probably shouldn’t put ozone in your rectum. You likely should be wary of orgasmic meditation cults. You should know that there’s no real way to measure ambiguous wellness marketing terms like ‘support,’ ‘stimulates’, and ‘optimizes.'”
Just like today’s wellness hype, ours wasn’t only the message that drew people in — it was the performance. He was the archetype of the modern wellness guru before the wellness guru had a blueprint. A blend of rockstar, mystic, and motivational speaker, wrapped in hemp clothing — if he wore clothes at all — and bearing superfoods from faraway lands. He was always on. Always talking. Always the loudest voice in the room. He had this way of making everything feel urgent and profound — whether it was about water memory or “sun octaves” or the supposed nutritional benefits of drinking your own urine. There were moments when the pseudoscience made my skin crawl. But there were others — usually in Hawaii over a fresh coconut or a raw cacao drink — when I could almost believe it.
The people who followed him — worked for him, slept with him, worshipped him — usually fell into one of a few categories. There were the young and idealistic. Some had only just left home, others had never really landed anywhere at all. They arrived wide-eyed, often from small towns, convinced they’d finally found someone who could explain the world to them. He had a type, too, or rather, a rotation. And if you didn’t make the cut, he might push you toward one of the other men in his orbit. A sort of trickle-down intimacy.
Then there were the older women — wealthier, often in the thick of a midlife reinvention. They weren’t naïve, exactly, but they wanted something back: youth, health, some spark they’d misplaced. They became patrons. They hosted potlucks and healing circles. They flew him in for “spiritual consultations,” poured money into his products, sometimes even invested in the business. Few would admit they were also hoping he’d fall for them.
The men came for their own reasons. Some were true believers — in the food, the philosophy, the “frequency” of spring water. But many were pulled in by proximity. The women. The psychedelics. The promise of some otherworldly bromance. Clothing-optional retreats. Ceremonial cacao under the stars. It wasn’t always about discipline or transformation. It was a lifestyle that he’d carefully curated, and one they wanted in on.
Internally, the power structure was just as calculated. He kept salaries low and turnover high. There was always someone younger, hungrier, more impressed by him waiting in the wings. He made sure we knew that. It was part of the control. The same charm that filled lecture halls also made it clear to his team: you are missing out if you leave me, and you are replaceable.
The brilliance of it all, if you want to call it that, was how normal it all felt from the inside. We weren’t in a cult. We were working in the wellness space. Working to heal the world. Educating people about nutrition and longevity and ancient wisdom. There wasn’t an official uniform. No one shaved their heads. But the emotional hierarchy, the devotion, the blurred boundaries — it was all there.
For a while, I brushed off the contradictions. The fringe science, the ego, the extremism — it was all part of the theater. And when you’re in the middle of something dynamic and fast-moving, you don’t always notice when it turns. It happens slowly, then all at once.
What eventually broke it for me wasn’t a single moment, but a steady accumulation of discomfort. The logic started to fray. The “science” behind drinking your own urine, the extended liver cleanses, the insistence that certain foods vibrated at higher frequencies — it started to feel less like health education and more like theater. You can only rationalize so many juice fasts and sunwater rituals before the spell starts to lift.
The psychedelics were a big part of it, too. In his inner circle, it wasn’t just encouraged — it was expected. The late-night mushroom trips, the ayahuasca retreats, the “downloads.” I participated more than I wanted to. It wasn’t that I was opposed to psychedelics, but in this context, they felt less like exploration and more like an obligation. A way to prove you were open, that you were “doing the work,” that you belonged.
And then there was the self-help ideology, the constant reframing of doubt as resistance, of hesitation as fear, of any critique as “lower frequency thinking.” He was obsessed with people like Tony Robbins and Dale Carnegie. The same buzzwords echoed in our meetings and casual conversations: breakthrough, resistance, leadership, alignment, abundance. It created a feedback loop where questioning anything — especially him — became proof that you just hadn’t evolved enough yet.
That’s when I realized the control wasn’t about rules or schedules. It was about belief. The deeper you bought in, the more credible you became. The more credible you became, the closer you got to him. And once you were close, it became harder to walk away without unraveling your entire sense of purpose.
In the end, I didn’t really leave. I was edged out.
After months of tension, we had a contract dispute. He wanted to sever ties. I brought in a lawyer, and got what I was owed, but the emotional rupture was harder to resolve. We didn’t speak for years. I heard he later sued the investors who bought the company out from under him. That felt like a kind of justice, but not the kind I had wanted. I think I was still waiting for him to approve of how I’d handled it — for some kind of closure, recognition.
That’s the part about cultish environments people don’t always understand. You don’t just leave. You lose a belief system. You lose an emotional center of gravity. There’s a loyalty that lingers, even after the spell is mostly broken. It took me a long time to see it for what it was: not just a career chapter or an ideological divergence, but the ending of a relationship that had functioned, in a very real way, like a form of spiritual parenting.
It’s embarrassing to admit that now. But it’s also important. That longing for healing, for approval — it’s what keeps people in systems that don’t serve them. It’s what makes charismatic leaders so powerful. They don’t just offer information. They offer identity.
For years after, I found myself wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t left. Would I still be defending fringe theories I never really believed in? Would I have refused to vaccinate my child? Would I still be looking to someone else to tell me what it means to be healthy?
I’m grateful I don’t have to answer those questions.
Wellness culture has always had a magnetism for the vulnerable, the curious, the burned-out — and it often functions on the same mechanics that underlie cult psychology. Not necessarily with dogma, but with language, hierarchy, and emotional control. There’s usually a charismatic leader at the center — someone who claims access to truths hidden from the mainstream. There’s often a strong disdain for institutional authority (especially medicine and government), and a fervent loyalty that builds through repetition, isolation, and identity reinforcement.
The wellness industry is especially fertile ground for this because it sells something unprovable: feeling better. And that promise can’t be fact-checked in real time. If a juice cleanse leaves you weak or a mushroom trip leaves you anxious, you’re told you’re “detoxing” or “releasing blocks.” It becomes difficult to distinguish between what’s healing and what’s harming.
This isn’t just anecdotal. Experts who study high-control groups — including cult deprogrammers and psychologists — have long pointed to how wellness rhetoric mirrors indoctrination techniques: extreme diet rules, ambiguous spiritual claims, demands for loyalty, and reward systems based on “progress.” It’s what social psychologist Alexandra Stein calls dependency through emotional isolation — where your sense of truth becomes linked to your connection to the group (or leader), not the evidence itself.
And when pseudoscience enters the mix, it muddies the waters further. Take “urine therapy,” for example — the idea that drinking your own urine gives the body feedback to rebalance its systems. There is no scientific evidence to support this. In fact, the practice can be harmful. Urine is a waste product, and while it’s sterile when it leaves the body, reintroducing it serves no medical benefit.
The same is true of prolonged cleanses. According to experts at institutions like Harvard Health, what people often pass during liver cleanses that involve drinking olive oil are not gallstones at all, but soap-like fatty deposits formed in the digestive tract from the oil itself. There’s no clinical evidence that these regimens improve liver function — and some may even cause gastrointestinal distress or nutritional imbalance.
Yet in environments like this, these practices weren’t fringe — they were sacred. You couldn’t challenge them without seeming “blocked” or “closed off.” Science was something to be cherry-picked if it confirmed the purveying ideology. Everything else was “low vibration.”
That’s the trap. Cultish wellness doesn’t need to make scientific sense. It just needs to feel true to the people inside it. And the more extreme the practice, the more devotion it seems to signal. If you’re willing to drink your own urine, fast for 21 days, or microdose until you see the divine, you’re not just participating — you’re ascending.
Even now, with years of distance, it’s hard to say exactly where the line was. When did we go from simply selling healthy foods to dictating belief systems? When did the smoothies go from being nutrient delivery systems to sacraments?
Wellness is a multi-trillion-dollar global market. According to the Global Wellness Institute, the industry was valued at $5.6 trillion in 2022, with projections reaching $8.5 trillion by 2027. Most of that growth isn’t coming from hospitals or medical treatments. It’s coming from supplements, “functional” foods, retreats, influencers, and lifestyle brands.
We’re not just buying the purported health benefits. We’re buying identity. And increasingly, that identity overlaps with a new kind of right-wing spirituality, courtesy of the MAGA / MAHA subset, where wellness conspiracy and anti-science rhetoric are the new Republican currency. What used to be a patchouli-scented rebellion against Big Pharma has merged with authoritarian narratives and internet echo chambers. Natural health, vaccine denial, anti-government ideology — it’s all wrapped in the same package now, often delivered through podcasts, supplement sales, and viral “health freedom” memes.
He moved in that direction, too. The same man who once preached cacao as cosmic medicine now aligns himself with reactionary figures and far-right platforms, draping fringe science in nationalist language. It tracks; if your brand is built on rejecting institutional truth, it’s not hard to pivot from chlorophyll to a culture war. What once felt like eccentric defiance now reads as a dog whistle. The cacao’s still there. So is the charisma. But the message has changed. Or maybe it hasn’t. Maybe this was always part of the playbook.
There are still things I believe from that time. I still value whole foods, clean water, herbs, and walking barefoot. I believe that food is powerful and that most of us are nutrient-deficient, stressed, and underslept. But I also believe that modern medicine saves lives, even if it sometimes ignores the root causes of disease. I still like mushrooms. But I also like Tylenol. I see an acupuncturist and a physician. I don’t need to choose between kale and evidence-based care. As science catches up to phenomena like the Blue Zones and the impact diet has on our health, that line, too, has begun to blur.
But back then, I wouldn’t have had that clarity. Everything was binary. Everything was either high vibration or toxic. “Clean” or “poison.” You were either doing the work or you were deep in shameful denial. It left no room for nuance. No room for curiosity. It made intelligence feel like a liability.
So no, I don’t miss it. I don’t want to go back. But I don’t regret it, either. That time taught me how easily good intentions can curdle into something else. How manipulation can disguise itself as empowerment. How charisma isn’t the same thing as wisdom. And now, as a mother, those lessons feel more vital than ever — not just to guide how I parent, but to help my daughter recognize and resist those same traps. If I’m loyal to anything now, it’s the uncertainty. The freedom to accept that I don’t know and that I don’t need to. I still eat lots of salad, but there’s no doctrine with it these days. Just lots of vegetables.
Related on Ethos:
