Part 1: Lovers, Leaders, and The Ways of Superior Men

What the Epstein Files, the Doctrine of Polarity, Divine Femininity, and the Online Marketing Industry Have in Common — and It's Not Just Deepak Chopra

In May of 2021, Deepak Chopra and Alicia Keys launched a twenty-one-day meditation experience called “Activating the Divine Feminine: The Path to Wholeness.” It was free. It was beautiful. Millions of people downloaded it. The premise was simple and appealing: there are feminine energies — love, compassion, receptivity, nurturing — that have been suppressed by a world run on masculine aggression, and if we could only reconnect with these qualities, we would restore wholeness to our lives and to the planet. Chopra described the divine feminine as “cooling, lunar, and receptive,” balanced by the “solar, warming, and active energies of the masculine.” Keys called it “an extremely powerful force within all of us.” The press release said they hoped to reach one billion people.¹

A billion women, learning that their deepest spiritual power lies in cultivating divine femininity and receptivity. Let’s hold on to those ideas and that number while we review what Chopra was doing during those same years.

According to CNN’s review of documents released as part of the Epstein files, Deepak Chopra exchanged hundreds of messages with Jeffrey Epstein between 2016 and 2019 — years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring a minor for prostitution. CNN reported that Chopra visited Epstein at his New York townhouse, his South Florida estate, and his Paris apartment. He signed his messages “Love” and “XO.” In one email, according to CNN, he wrote to Epstein: “Come to Israel with us. Relax and have fun with interesting people. If you want use a fake name. Bring your girls.” In another: “God is a construct. Cute girls are real.” In a text exchange reported by CNN, Epstein wrote to Chopra: “I liked watching you zero in on your prey. Made me smile.” Chopra responded five minutes later: “I not a predator Just a lover.” A convicted sex trafficker named what he was watching Chopra do as predation, and the man being watched did not deny the behavior — he denied the category. He was not “zeroing in on prey”. He was loving. His worldview — the one that teaches masculine energy initiates and feminine energy receives — had already made the distinction disappear.²

Here is something you already know, even if you have never thought about it in these terms. Someone hands you a gift — at a party, at the door, on the street — and even if you didn’t want it, even if you didn’t ask for it, you feel something shift in your body. A small tightness. A sense of owing. If you try to refuse the gift, it feels worse — rude, ungrateful, like you’ve broken something. It is easier to accept the gift than to refuse it, and once you’ve accepted it, you are in a different relationship with the giver than you were thirty seconds ago. You owe them something now. You don’t know what, and they haven’t asked, but you feel it.

This is reciprocity. It is one of the deepest pieces of social programming human beings carry, and every institution that has ever wanted something from you knows how to use it. The Hare Krishnas understood it in the 1970s, when they began pressing flowers into the hands of travelers at airports — gifts nobody asked for, impossible to refuse without feeling like an asshole, and remarkably effective at generating donations.³ Men understand it at bars, when they buy a woman a drink she didn’t order — because once she has accepted it, refusing the next thing he asks for feels ungrateful. Religions understand it. Marketers understand it. And the man who taught a billion women to activate their divine feminine understood it, too — because the second of Deepak Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws of Success is called “The Law of Giving and Receiving,” and it teaches that the universe itself operates through this exchange, and that to receive gratefully and openly is a spiritual practice.⁴

I am going to connect Chopra’s meditation app and his messages with Jeffrey Epstein, and I am going to do it through the reciprocity tactic — through the mechanism of giving and receiving and the obligations that flow from it — because I believe these things are structurally related. Not as a hypocrisy, but as a system. The ideology that teaches women their power is in receptivity and the social world in which women and girls are treated as consumable objects are not separate phenomena. They are two expressions of the same logic — and I have spent the better part of a decade mapping that logic, tracing it through marketing playbooks and spiritual teachings and pickup artist manuals and men’s rights manifestos, watching it replicate itself across every domain it touches.

I didn’t start with a theory. I started with a feeling in my body — the same feeling you get when someone hands you a gift you didn’t ask for.

Robert Cialdini, the social psychologist who mapped the principle in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, identified reciprocity as one of six core principles of persuasion⁵. But here is the detail that gets lost almost every time an online marketing enthusiast cites his work: Cialdini wrote his book in order to help people resist exploitative persuasion. He wanted readers to recognize when someone was triggering these automatic sequences in them — and to push back. Argue. Boycott. Unsubscribe. He was, in his own framing, arming the public against “compliance professionals” who abuse our deep programming toward justice in order to construct asymmetrical and unjust transactions.

The online marketing world read his book and drew the opposite conclusion. Jeff Walker, whose Product Launch Formula became the blueprint for virtually every online course launch in the industry, took Cialdini’s six principles and embedded them into his sales sequence as “mental triggers“⁶ — psychological levers to pull in order to compel people to buy. The formula is elegant: offer a cascade of free content, instruction, and gifts. Trigger the feeling of indebtedness. Convert that indebtedness into a sale. Walker’s model became the foundation of most online marketing, including the business models of most of the significant women’s empowerment brands I have spent a decade studying.

But what I recognized, when I first encountered this playbook, was not innovative business strategy. It was something I knew in my body long before I had language for it in my mind.

I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and the thing about surviving abuse is that it gives you a particular kind of vision. You learn to read the architecture of a room before you read the conversation happening inside it, because your safety once depended on that skill. And the architecture of the reciprocity-based sales funnel was immediately, viscerally familiar to me. Because the mechanism Cialdini described — force someone to receive, then leverage the obligation that receiving creates — is not merely a sales tactic. It is the architecture of grooming.

Sexual predators love-bomb. They offer time, attention, affection, gifts. They are generous and warm and seemingly selfless. And then, having forced their target into the position of recipient, they collect on the debt. The target, who never asked to receive and never consented to the transaction, is now caught in a web of manufactured obligation. To refuse feels ungrateful. To comply feels like a choice. The phrase I used in that essay⁷, and which I want to be precise about, is this: exploitative compliance professionals try to force you to receive. Sexual predators and romantic con men try to force girls and women to receive. It is the same mechanism. Force you to receive. Collect on the debt.

Zero in on your prey.

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Walker built an entire trigger architecture around this core mechanism — manufactured authority, artificial scarcity, social proof, community — each one reinforcing the system. Authority triggers deference: manufacture the appearance of expertise so people comply with your instructions. Scarcity triggers panic: limit the time, the seats, the availability, so people act from fear rather than judgment. Community triggers conformity: show them that everyone else is buying so they feel they should too. Each trigger bypasses a different layer of rational decision-making. But it is reciprocity that initiates the sequence, reciprocity that generates the obligation, and reciprocity that connects the marketing playbook most directly to what I would later trace in the spiritual and ideological world — because, as I will show, the Doctrine of Polarity does exactly the same thing, to the same end, using the same mechanism. It just does it at the level of identity rather than the level of a sales funnel.

Walker himself seems to understand the power of what he has built, even if he frames it as innovation rather than predation. He calls these triggers the “final piece of the puzzle” and writes that they are “always working just below our consciousness” and “exert enormous influence over how we act.” He is describing a system for producing compliance by operating below the level of conscious choice. That is not persuasion. Persuasion respects the other person’s capacity to evaluate and decide. This is the override of consent, systematized and sold as a business model.

The authority trigger was particularly instructive as an illustration of who this system serves. Walker illustrated it with a story from his teenage years: stuck in a traffic jam after a football game, his friend grabbed a flashlight from the car floor, jumped out, and started waving it like a traffic director. Other drivers, seeing the beam, assumed he had authority and made way. Walker and his friends drove right out of the parking lot. The moral, as Walker told it, was this: “It doesn’t take very much to create authority.”⁸

What struck me about this story was not the cleverness of the trick but the distribution of its benefits. Walker’s friend did not create a solution that served all the drivers stuck in the lot. He manufactured the appearance of authority in order to advance his own car at the expense of the people who followed his instructions. The drivers who cooperated gained nothing. The person who signaled authority gained everything. There was no mutual benefit. There was exploitation dressed as direction. And Walker offered this story not as a cautionary tale but as an aspiration.

This is the diagnostic question I kept returning to, the one that cuts through everything: where does the benefit flow? When someone triggers your reciprocity programming, who profits from your compliance? When someone manufactures the appearance of authority, whose car advances? When someone creates artificial scarcity to make you act before you’ve had time to think, whose interests does your urgency serve? If the answer is that the benefit flows overwhelmingly to the person engineering the transaction, you are not in a relationship. You are in a trap. And that assessment applies whether you are evaluating a sales funnel, a romantic relationship, or a spiritual teaching.

Walker’s formula teaches entrepreneurs how to manufacture the appearance of authority, not how to earn it through deep expertise, extensive training, or years of devoted practice. The primary vehicle for this manufactured authority is the makeover story — the first installment of any launch sequence is the “I was just like you” narrative: I was broke, struggling, lost, unfulfilled, and then I discovered this method and everything changed. The story seems empowering. It waves at lived experience. But underneath it is a fundamental contempt for the audience, because the message from authority to follower is: you are broken. You are unacceptable as you are. You need to be fixed. I was horrifying, just like you, and look at me now. That contempt is what gives entrepreneurs permission to build psychologically manipulative sales funnels that disproportionately advantage sellers over buyers. If the people you are selling to are broken, then the asymmetry of the transaction feels justified. You are not exploiting them. You are rescuing them. From themselves.

What I came to understand, and what I argued, is that this system — the reciprocity-driven trigger architecture, the manufactured authority, the engineered compliance — is the same thing as monetizing privilege. It takes the social dynamics that already advantage some people over others — the automatic deference to authority, the compulsion to reciprocate, the fear of missing out — and converts them into revenue. It is, in the language I had been developing, empowermyth: the performance of empowerment deployed in service of the same hierarchical dynamics that empowerment was supposed to dismantle.

I traced this formula through Marie Forleo, who endorsed Walker’s book. Through Lisa Sasevich, who called Walker her “bestie” and had him present at her mastermind. Through Kris Carr, through Gabrielle Bernstein, through Mastin Kipp, who in the acknowledgements of his book thanked Walker by name for having “inspired a generation to LAUNCH, including me.” These were not fringe operators. These were the most visible, most trusted, most beloved brands in the women’s empowerment world. And they had adopted, wholesale and apparently without critical examination, a sales infrastructure built on subconsciously triggering obedience in the people they claimed to be empowering. They had adopted it because it was packaged as marketing, and marketing was understood as a neutral set of tools rather than a set of practices with a specific history and a specific function.

That was the landscape in 2016. The marketing playbook replicated the grooming playbook. Women’s empowerment brands deployed it on female audiences and celebrated it as innovation. And I kept asking a question that nobody seemed interested in answering: where did the ideology come from? Not the marketing tactics — I could trace those to Walker and Cialdini and the compliance professionals. But the content of what was being sold. The divine feminine. The masculine-feminine polarity. The receptivity-as-power framework. Where did the coaches learn to talk like that?

It took me two more years to trace it upstream. And when I did, I found something that made the whole system legible, because the ideology and the marketing turned out to be doing the same thing. Not parallel things. The same thing. Walker’s formula positions the target as receiver — forces you to receive — and then collects on the debt. Now consider what the Doctrine of Polarity teaches women: that their deepest nature is receptive. That femininity itself means being a receiver. That spiritual maturity, for a woman, means surrendering into the open, allowing, receptive posture.

These are not two different systems that happen to share a vocabulary. They are the same system. Both position the target as receiver. Both generate obligation from the act of receiving. Both override consent — because in both cases, the target did not choose to be placed in the receiver position; it was done to them, either through a marketing sequence they didn’t design or through a theology that told them it was their nature. And in both cases, the person or system that initiated the sequence extracts value from the compliance that follows.

And here I want to return to Deepak Chopra, because he makes the identity between the marketing mechanism and the spiritual teaching almost unbearably explicit. The second of Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws of Success is called “The Law of Giving and Receiving.” His instruction: “Wherever you go, and whomever you encounter, I will bring them a gift.” Give a compliment, a flower, a prayer — give constantly, to everyone. And then: “Gratefully receive all the gifts that life has to offer me.” Be open. Let it soak in. “The universe operates through dynamic exchange,” Chopra writes, “…in our willingness to give that which we seek, we keep the abundance of the universe circulating in our lives.”⁹

This is Cialdini’s reciprocity principle dressed in sacred language. Give first. Receive gratefully. Trust the exchange. The mechanism Walker and the compliance professionals deploy as a sales trigger — give in order to generate obligation — Chopra teaches as a law of the universe itself. And the instruction to receive gratefully, openly, without resistance? That is the instruction to place yourself in exactly the position that every reciprocity sequence depends on: the position of the receiver, where obligation is generated and compliance is extracted. Chopra is not adjacent to the reciprocity trap. He is teaching it to millions. And the man teaching it is the same man Epstein watched zero in on his prey. The man teaching the Law of Giving and Receiving is a man who zeros in. Prey is the word underneath all the sacred language about receptivity. Prey is what the receiver position actually means when the initiator is extracting.

The only difference between Walker’s version and Chopra’s version is scale. Walker’s reciprocity trigger operates transaction by transaction — each launch, each funnel, each sale. The Doctrine of Polarity operates at the level of identity. It does not need to force a woman to receive gift by gift, trigger by trigger, because it has accomplished something far more efficient: it has convinced her that being a receiver is who she is. It has turned the first move of the grooming sequence into an identity. A woman who believes that her power lies in receptivity will position herself at the receiving end of every reciprocity sequence she encounters — in marketing, in relationships, in spiritual communities — and she will do it voluntarily, believing she is honoring her feminine essence, unaware that she has been placed exactly where every compliance professional in the world wants her: in the position where obligation is generated, where debt accrues, where the yes has been engineered before the question was even asked.

That is not spiritual practice. That is conditioning. And another word for conditioning is grooming. We are grooming all women — through marketing, through theology, through the language of empowerment itself — to occupy the position that makes extraction possible. The Epstein files did not reveal an aberration. They revealed the destination the conditioning has always been pointed at.

None of these men invented this conditioning. It is older than any of them. But I wanted to know how it was being transmitted — how an idea that originated in men’s rights ideology was arriving in the mouths of women’s empowerment coaches who had never heard of Warren Farrell and would be appalled to learn they were teaching his framework.

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In July of 2018, I published a piece called “Dear Women’s Empowerment Coaches: Is Your Teacher’s Teacher a Men’s Rights Activist?“ It traced the ideological supply chain upstream to its source.¹⁰

The premise was a question that had been nagging at me: why did so many women’s empowerment coaches use the same peculiar language? Why did they all talk about “divine masculine” and “divine feminine”? Why did they frame women’s power as residing in receptivity, softness, surrender? Why did the phrase “the pendulum has swung too far” — meaning feminism had gone too far, meaning women had become too masculine, meaning the corrective was to return to feminine essence — keep appearing in the mouths of women who considered themselves progressive, feminist, empowering?

I followed the language upstream. The phrase “the pendulum has swung too far” turned out to have a very specific origin. It came from Warren Farrell, who is widely considered the intellectual godfather of the modern Men’s Rights movement. Farrell’s book The Myth of Male Power argued, among other things, that feminism had overcorrected, that men were the truly disadvantaged sex, and that women’s dating power constituted a form of dominance over men. He was, before his pivot to men’s rights, a board member of the National Organization for Women — a fact that gave his subsequent anti-feminist work an aura of having been arrived at reluctantly, through disillusionment, rather than through ideology.¹¹

From Farrell, the ideology traveled to Tony Robbins, who is arguably the single most important figure in this entire chain — not because he is the most extreme, but because he operates at the greatest scale. His website claims his tools have reached over one hundred million people. More than four million have attended his live seminars across eighty countries. He has sold tens of millions of copies of his books and audio programs. His companies generate billions in annual revenue (according to SUCCESS magazine, “their combined annual revenue exceeds $6 billion”).¹² He runs the Robbins-Madanes Training Center, which has certified over fifteen thousand life coaches — coaches who then go out and coach their own clients using his methods. He runs Business Mastery, a program that explicitly teaches marketing, sales strategy, and customer acquisition — with featured speakers who include Ryan Deiss, a founding member of The Syndicate alongside Eben Pagan and Jeff Walker. His programs include Unleash the Power Within, Date with Destiny, and the Platinum Partnership, which costs upwards of $85,000 per year. He is, by any measure, the largest distribution channel in the personal development industry.

And at the core of his teaching is sexual polarity. Robbins endorsed Farrell’s work and built “sexual polarity” into his flagship program, Date With Destiny — the event documented in his Netflix film I Am Not Your Guru.¹³ He teaches that masculine and feminine are essential energies, that polarity between them is what generates passion, and that the collapse of this polarity — through feminism, through androgyny, through women becoming “too masculine” — is responsible for the death of desire in modern relationships. This is Farrell’s thesis, repackaged as relationship advice and delivered in arenas to crowds of thousands who walk across hot coals and then go home and restructure their marriages around the principle that women’s power lies in feminine surrender. His fifteen thousand certified coaches then carry this framework into their own practices. His Business Mastery graduates carry his marketing and sales training into their own businesses. The ideology doesn’t just reach the people in Robbins’s arena. It replicates through every person he has trained.

Robbins’s co-author and business partner Peter Diamandis — with whom he wrote the #1 New York Times bestseller Life Force and co-founded the health company Fountain Life — appears in over 270 documents in the Epstein files. According to reporting by Aging with Strength, which conducted an extensive review of the files, Diamandis was emailing Epstein as early as May 2008, just weeks before Epstein’s guilty plea, trying to arrange a visit to Epstein’s New Mexico ranch. In April 2009, while Epstein was still incarcerated, Diamandis emailed him seeking to “catch up.” Diamandis has said he was introduced to Epstein in 2013; the emails show contact five years earlier.¹⁴

In May 2019, BuzzFeed News published an investigation detailing accusations from multiple women of sexual misconduct at Robbins’s seminars, including groping fans at events and exposing himself to staff. According to VICE News, nine women ultimately came forward. One former attendee, Carolina Galvez, told BuzzFeed News the experience was “almost predatory.” Robbins denied all allegations and sued BuzzFeed News in the United Kingdom. A year earlier, in April 2018, video recorded at a seminar in San Jose captured Robbins telling a female audience member, Nanine McCool, that women were using the #MeToo movement for “significance” — and then physically advancing toward her with his fist extended. The Washington Post published the video. McCool, a survivor of sexual abuse, told Refinery29: “Being sexually abused, harassed, raped, you’re entitled to your rage.” Robbins later apologized.¹⁵

A man whose organization has reached a hundred million people. Who has certified fifteen thousand coaches. Who teaches polarity — that women’s power lies in surrender, in receptivity, in softness — at a scale no one else in this chain can match. Whose own behavior at his own seminars was described, by a woman who was there, as “almost predatory.”

Zero in on your prey.

From Robbins, the ideology traveled to Ken Wilber, the philosopher who created Integral Theory, a framework for synthesizing all of human knowledge that happened to include, at its core, a theory of masculine and feminine essences. David Deida, who had already been publishing on sexual polarity since the mid-1990s — Intimate Communion in 1995, The Way of the Superior Man in 1997 — became a founding member of Wilber’s Integral Institute when it launched in 1998. Deida didn’t emerge from Wilber’s world; he was already there, already writing about masculine essence and feminine radiance, and Wilber absorbed him into the institutional framework that gave polarity theory its intellectual credibility. Wilber blurbed The Way of the Superior Man, calling it “a guide for the noncastrated male” and praising it for discussing “strong sexuality within strong spirituality.” Robbins blurbed it too. Marianne Williamson predicted Deida’s ideas would “spread like wildfire.”¹⁶ The ideology also traveled to John Gray, of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus fame, who had co-authored work with Farrell.¹⁷

These men — Farrell, Robbins, Wilber, Deida, Gray — did not operate in isolation. They endorsed each other’s books. They appeared at each other’s events. They shared institutional affiliations. And their collective body of work produced a coherent ideology: that masculinity and femininity are essential, complementary energies; that feminism disrupted the natural balance between them; and that women’s path to empowerment runs through embracing their feminine essence, which is defined as receptive, nurturing, surrendered, and soft. I called this the Doctrine of Polarity.

The Doctrine of Polarity sounds liberating. It feels like permission. After a lifetime of being told to lean in, toughen up, compete in masculine structures, being invited to soften and receive can feel like relief. But the doctrine’s function is to return women to a position of structural receptivity — the same position that makes grooming possible, the same position that the reciprocity trap depends on, the same position that every compliance professional in the world knows is the most exploitable one a person can occupy. Receptivity is not power. Receptivity is a posture that powerful people encourage in the people they wish to influence, and it has been dressed in sacred language so effectively that millions of women now pursue it as spiritual practice.

That was 2018. The women’s empowerment coaches I was writing about were, for the most part, entirely unaware that the language they were using could be traced back to a men’s rights activist. The supply chain was invisible to them. They had learned it from their coaches, who had learned it from their coaches, who had learned it from Robbins or Deida or a weekend retreat run by someone trained in Integral Theory. The ideology had been laundered through so many layers of spiritual and self-help packaging that by the time it reached the Instagram accounts of female entrepreneurs, it no longer looked like ideology at all. It looked like wisdom¹⁸.

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Across all three worlds — pickup artistry, marketing, spiritual teaching — the architects use the same word. They call them triggers. Walker names his “mental triggers” and says they work “below our consciousness.” Pagan, as David DeAngelo, promises to teach men how to “trigger the attraction mechanism” in women. As Eben Pagan, he teaches marketers to “trigger action by giving the subconscious what it’s looking for so the decision is made.” Chopra calls his version a “law” — the Law of Giving and Receiving — which operates through “dynamic exchange” whether you are conscious of it or not. In every case, the claim is the same: the target’s response is not a conscious choice. It is a mechanism that can be activated by someone who knows how.

There is a man named Eben Pagan who makes this convergence visible — not because he invented it, but because his career sits at the junction of all three worlds in a way that is almost comically legible.

In 2001, Pagan published an ebook called Double Your Dating under the pseudonym David DeAngelo. It became one of the foundational texts of the pickup artist community — a world in which men are taught to engineer women’s sexual compliance through psychological triggers. The book’s core premise, and his signature phrase as DeAngelo, was “attraction is not a choice.” The marketing copy promised to reveal “the secrets to triggering this ‘attraction mechanism’ in a woman so that she feels it for YOU.” Note the language. Triggering. Mechanism. The claim is not that you can become more attractive. The claim is that women’s responses can be engineered — that attraction operates below conscious choice and can be activated by someone who knows the right levers to pull. In the ecosystem DeAngelo built, the language is explicit: a woman who shows interest is described as “easy prey.” A man who can’t approach is told he lacks the “killer instinct.” The metaphor is not hidden. It is the architecture.¹⁹

By the mid-2000s, Pagan had dropped the pseudonym and was operating under his real name as an online marketing big man and core member of The Syndicate — a group of internet marketers including Frank Kern, Jeff Walker, Mike Filsaime, and Ryan Deiss who coordinated their product launches, cross-promoted to each other’s lists, and built the distribution infrastructure of the online course industry.²⁰ Pagan’s signature marketing concept was something he called “Move the Free Line” — give away massive free value to prospects before asking for the sale. His own materials describe the method as making prospects “extremely receptive to your marketing aim in the feel of giving back the favor” and identify the mechanism explicitly: “This is technically known as reciprocity, a psychological trigger.” His course notes go further: “Trigger action by giving the subconscious what it’s looking for so the decision is made and action is taken.” And, in a rare moment of candor: “Every marketing decision is an ethical dilemma because by being skilled at these areas, you can manipulate people in dark ways if you choose to.”

The same man. The same word — trigger. The same claim — that the target’s response operates below conscious choice. As David DeAngelo, you trigger the attraction mechanism in a woman so she feels it for you. As Eben Pagan, you trigger reciprocity in a prospect so they feel obligated to buy. The transition from pickup artistry to marketing required no intellectual retooling. The mechanism was already the same.

And then, on his personal blog, Pagan spiritualized the whole thing. He wrote about “New Wealth” — knowledge, experience, love — and how giving it away generates more: “Not only do you not LOSE these new forms of wealth when you give them away, you actually get more of them by giving them away.” Give freely. Receive abundantly. The universe rewards generosity. It could have come straight from Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws of Success — and that is not a coincidence, because Pagan’s wife was sitting on the same board as Chopra.

And then there is Pagan’s third world, the one that completes the picture. His wife, Annie Lalla, a relationship coach and self-described “intimacy expert,” sat on the Wisdom Council of the Center for World Spirituality alongside Deepak Chopra, Warren Farrell, Marc Gafni, and John Gray. She co-facilitated sexuality workshops with Gafni, co-created an eight-part audio series with him on sexuality and intimacy, and co-led retreats at Kripalu retreat center called “Loving Your Way to Enlightenment: The Path of Outrageous Love.”²¹

Marc Gafni is a man who admitted to a sexual relationship with a thirteen-year-old girl when he was nineteen. He has been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women across decades. He was asked to leave the Integral Institute after allegations of sexual involvement with a student. His publisher cancelled his book. Integral Life deleted his contributions from its website.²² And his central teaching — the one Lalla co-facilitated workshops on, the one that gave the Kripalu retreat its name — was something he called “Outrageous Love.” Gafni taught that “ordinary love is a strategy of the ego” and that the path to spiritual awakening runs through “outrageous erotic sex” and surrender to Eros. His book A Return to Eros lists “surrender” and “allurement” among the core qualities of the sacred. He wrote: “Enter into the inside of sex and you will find God, the sacred lover and gorgeous divine slut of the Cosmos.”

His colleague Sally Kempton, in a biographical essay, described Gafni as a man who says “I love you” constantly, whose relationships are “often erotically tinged,” and framed his “boundless lovingness” as “one of the clues as to his particular uniqueness of spirit.” What she was describing — and celebrating — is love-bombing. The reciprocity trap in its most intimate form. Force you to receive love. Collect on the debt. And when the women he has harmed come forward, his defenders frame the harm as a misunderstanding of his gift. He loved too much. He loved too freely. He loved outrageously.

And yet: Ken Wilber co-founded the Center for Integral Wisdom with him. Tony Robbins sat on its Wisdom Council. Warren Farrell sat on its Wisdom Council. Deepak Chopra sat on its Wisdom Council, gave a keynote at Gafni’s Integral Spiritual Experience event, participated in a public dialogue with him called “The Future of Love,” and — when a petition circulated urging public figures to disavow Gafni — responded simply: “Take my name off all petitions re Marc. This is an official notice.”²³

He did not condemn Gafni. He simply declined to be associated with criticizing him.

Zero in on your prey.

Pagan did not create the convergence between pickup artistry, marketing, and spiritualized patriarchy. But his career — three identities, three audiences, one mechanism — demonstrates that these are not separate industries that happen to share personnel. They are the same practice of psychological manipulation, applied to different targets, in different registers. The pickup artist overrides a woman’s decision-making to extract sex. The marketer overrides a consumer’s decision-making to extract money. The spiritual teacher overrides a seeker’s decision-making to extract compliance with an ideology that positions women as naturally, divinely receptive — and therefore permanently available for extraction. The reason the same men show up in all three rooms is that the rooms are the same room.

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On January 30, 2026, the Department of Justice released approximately 3.5 million pages of documents from the Epstein investigation. The release included over 2,000 videos and 180,000 images.²⁴ In the weeks since, Prince Andrew has been arrested. European politicians have resigned or been charged. UN human rights experts have called the files evidence of “a possible global criminal enterprise involving systematic sexual abuse, trafficking and exploitation of women and girls, committed against a backdrop of extreme misogyny and the commodification and dehumanisation of women.”²⁵

The world is treating the Epstein files as a revelation. And in one sense, they are — the scale of the operation, the specificity of the documentation, the sheer number of powerful men implicated. But the structure the files reveal is not new. The architecture of it — the manufactured trust, the gift-giving that creates obligation, the institutional access that enables predation, the way charm and generosity function as delivery systems for exploitation — that architecture has been visible for a long time, if you knew what you were looking at.

It was visible in the way Jeff Walker’s launch formula teaches entrepreneurs to manufacture authority and trigger obedience. It was visible in the way the pickup artist community teaches men to engineer compliance. It was visible in the way the Doctrine of Polarity teaches women that their highest spiritual expression is to receive.

And it was visible, most of all, in the network — in the fact that the men teaching these things were not strangers to each other but collaborators, co-authors, co-board members, dinner companions. The fact that the man teaching a billion women to “activate the divine feminine” was writing to a convicted sex trafficker about cute girls. The fact that the man who co-founded the Center for Integral Wisdom admitted to sex with a child. The fact that the intellectual godfather of the men’s rights movement sat on the same advisory council as the world’s most famous meditation teacher.

This is not a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy requires secrecy. These men put their names on the same letterhead. They appeared at each other’s events. They blurbed each other’s books. The Wisdom Council of the Center for World Spirituality — which listed Chopra, Farrell, Gafni, Gray, Lalla, and dozens of others — was published on the organization’s website for anyone to read. It was never hidden. It just wasn’t legible to people who hadn’t been trained, by their own experience, to see the structure underneath the surface.

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I want to return to the meditation app. A billion women, learning to activate their divine feminine. Learning that their power is in receptivity, compassion, nurturing, allowing. Learning this from a man who makes another man smile as he “zeros in on his prey”.

I do not think every person who downloaded that app was harmed by it. I do not think the desire to cultivate compassion and receptivity is inherently dangerous. And I do not think Deepak Chopra is the architect of a vast conspiracy to oppress women through meditation.

What I think is simpler and, in some ways, worse.

I think these men all share the same understanding of what women are. Not an understanding they invented, but one they absorbed — from the culture, from each other, from the water they swim in — and then built careers amplifying. In that understanding, women are receivers. Women are responders. Women’s power is in their openness, their softness, their willingness to be moved. And men are initiators. Men are engineers. Men design the sequences, pull the triggers, make the first move, set the terms. In that understanding, consent is not something women give from a position of full awareness and autonomy. Consent is something that can be produced — through the right triggers, the right gifts, the right theology, the right combination of authority and reciprocity and scarcity and surrender. Attraction is not a choice. Reciprocity is a psychological trigger. The universe operates through dynamic exchange. Outrageous love transcends the human form. In every version of the story, the woman’s yes is engineered before the question is asked.

This goes beyond Chopra and Pagan and Gafni and the rest of the network and becomes something much larger: these men did not invent this understanding. They did not manufacture it in a back room, on their own, and inject it into the culture. This understanding IS the culture. It is the source code. The belief that women are receivers and men are initiators, that women’s compliance can be engineered, that consent is a product of the right technique rather than a free expression of autonomous will — that belief is in our marketing, in our relationships, in our spiritual traditions, in our dating advice, in the way we raise boys and girls, in the way we structure workplaces and families and governments. It is in the Epstein files because it is in everything. The Epstein files are not an aberration. They are what the logic produces when the men at the top of the chain stop bothering to dress it up.

That is why the same mechanism shows up everywhere I looked. Not because Jeff Walker corrupted marketing. Not because Warren Farrell corrupted the men’s movement. Not because Chopra corrupted meditation. But because the mechanism — position women as receivers, engineer their compliance, extract value from the obligation that receiving creates — is the foundational logic of a culture that has always understood women as objects of extraction. Marketing adopted it because it works. Pickup artistry adopted it because it works. Spiritual teaching adopted it because it works. And it works because the culture has spent millennia training women to believe that their power lies in being received upon, and training men to believe that their power lies in engineering the reception.

The supply chain I have been mapping is not a chain of corruption from one bad actor to the next. It is the culture’s own supply chain — the infrastructure through which its deepest assumptions about gender, power, consent, and value are manufactured, packaged, distributed, and consumed. Men’s rights ideology produces the theory that feminism has gone too far and women’s power is in their feminine essence. That theory is adopted by self-help and spiritual teachers who package it as sacred wisdom. Those teachers build institutional networks — boards, retreats, conferences, courses — that give the ideology credibility and reach. Marketing professionals, some of whom began their careers teaching men how to manipulate women into sex, build the distribution infrastructure that carries the ideology to millions. And at the end of the chain, women absorb the message that their empowerment lies in being receptive, surrendered, soft — unaware that the men who built the pipeline were, in some cases, literally dining with a sex trafficker, or having sex with children, or cross-promoting each other’s products to manipulate consumers out of their money.

But the reason the pipeline functions — the reason it doesn’t collapse under the weight of its own absurdity, the reason millions of intelligent women can absorb this message without recognizing its origins — is that it sounds true. It sounds true because it matches everything the culture has already taught them about what women are. Receptivity as feminine essence doesn’t feel like ideology. It feels like remembering. It feels like coming home. And that is the most sophisticated achievement of the supply chain: it has made the source code feel like nature.

I have been writing about this since 2016. I saw it early because I am a survivor, and survivors develop a particular kind of pattern recognition — not as a gift, not as a silver lining, but as a survival adaptation that happens to have analytical applications. I knew what grooming looked like before I knew what a sales funnel was, and when I encountered the sales funnel, I recognized the grooming. That recognition is the foundation of everything I’ve written and taught for the past decade.

The Epstein files did not tell me anything I didn’t already know about the architecture. What they gave me was receipts. Documentation, at industrial scale, for what I have been arguing for years: that the tools we use to sell are not neutral. That the marketing playbook and the grooming playbook share a common ancestor — and that ancestor is the culture itself, its oldest and most foundational story about what women are for.

And this is where I have to say something uncomfortable, because the point of mapping this supply chain is not to stand outside it and point. The point is that we are inside it. All of us.

Our culture offers two positions: predator or prey. That binary maps exactly onto the masculine-feminine binary the Doctrine of Polarity teaches — the initiator and the receiver, the one who triggers and the one who gets triggered, the one who engineers the sequence and the one whose compliance is engineered. Masculine is the position that acts. Feminine is the position that is acted upon. The texts I’ve been studying call this sacred polarity. Chopra calls the feminine “receptive.” DeAngelo calls attraction “not a choice.” And a convicted sex trafficker, watching Chopra pursue a woman, called it what it is: zeroing in on prey.

Prey. There it is. The word underneath all the sacred language. The word that reveals what the receiver position actually is in a system where the initiator extracts and the receiver complies. The divine feminine is the theological name for prey.

And it is not only women. The predator-prey binary organizes everything these men teach. In the business trainings and the PUA playbooks, the fundamental preoccupation is status — how to elevate yours. Because the status hierarchy turns most men into prey, too. Business prey. Social prey. The men lower on the pyramid are pursued, triggered, funnelled, and extracted from by the men above them — through the same compliance architecture, the same manufactured authority, the same reciprocity traps. The Syndicate cross-promoting to each other’s lists is a food chain. The seminars charging $85,000 are a food chain. The whole system runs on the same binary: someone engineers the sequence, someone else’s compliance is engineered. The only question is which position you occupy, and every one of these trainings — PUA, marketing, spiritual, self-help — is selling the same promise: move up. Stop being prey. Learn to be the one who zeros in. The women’s version just has a different name. It is called empowerment.

This is why I spent years writing about what I called the Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand(FLEB). The FLEB was my name for what happens when women recognize — consciously or not — that the culture offers them only the prey position, and try to switch. A woman looks at the system and sees: I am either predator or prey. I don’t want to be prey. The only other option the system offers is predator. So she adopts the predator’s tools. She learns the launch formula. She masters the triggers — reciprocity, authority, scarcity, social proof. She packages her personal transformation into a product, markets it using the playbook she learned from Walker or someone trained by Walker, wraps it in the language of divine feminine empowerment she absorbed from someone trained by Robbins or Deida or someone trained by someone trained by them, and sells it to other women, who then do the same thing.

She has switched positions in the hierarchy. But she has not changed the hierarchy. The system — predator and prey, initiator and receiver, the one who triggers and the one who is triggered — remains perfectly intact. She is now running the source code on other women instead of having it run on her. And because she is doing it in the name of empowerment, using the language of the divine feminine, deploying the trigger architecture as generosity, neither she nor the women she sells to can see what is happening. The supply chain has recruited her as a distributor. Not through coercion. Through position-switching. She chose the only other position the culture offered.

That was the part that kept me up at night. Not the men at the top of the chain — I could see them clearly, and I could name what they were doing. It was the women in the middle, the ones who had genuinely been helped by a coaching program or a course or a retreat, who had experienced real transformation, and who then adopted the entire infrastructure — the triggers, the ideology, the reciprocity trap, the divine feminine framework — and built businesses that replicated it for the next woman down the line. Not out of malice. Out of love. Out of genuine desire to help other women. And that is the most effective distribution system any supply chain has ever built: one in which the distributors believe, correctly, that they are doing good work, and cannot see that the tools they are using carry the source code inside them like a virus in a gift.

Every woman who has launched a course using Walker’s formula. Every coach who has talked about divine feminine energy without knowing where the language came from. Every marketer who has used reciprocity as a trigger and called it generosity. Every person who has absorbed, without examination, the idea that masculinity means initiating and femininity means receiving — that the only two options are predator and prey. We are running the source code too. Not because we are predators, but because the source code is the culture, and we learned it the way fish learn water — by never being outside it.

I want to return to Chopra’s response. A convicted sex trafficker watched him pursue a woman and called it predation, and Chopra’s reply — five minutes later, no hesitation — was: “I not a predator Just a lover.”

He was not being contradictory. He was being perfectly consistent. The worldview that teaches women their power is in receptivity, that the feminine surrenders and the masculine initiates, that polarity is the natural law governing desire — that worldview does not produce men who think they are predators. It produces men who think they are lovers. That is the point. The behavior Epstein named as predation, Chopra experienced as romance. Not because he was deluded, but because the Doctrine of Polarity has already decided that the masculine zeros in and the feminine receives, and if you believe that — if you teach that, if you build a meditation empire on it — then pursuing a woman is not predation. It is nature. It is how the energies work. The prey language is not a confession. It is a job description the culture wrote for everyone.

In business and marketing, we are taught to zero in on our prey — to trigger, to engineer compliance, to manufacture the yes. In romantic relationships, we are taught that there are two positions: the one who pursues and the one who is pursued. In spiritual communities, we are taught that this binary is sacred — that it is the divine masculine and the divine feminine, and that to resist it is to resist our own nature. Some of us are taught to be better prey. To be softer, more receptive, more open, more surrendered. We are told this is our power. It makes things a little easier for the predators, who also do not think they are predators, because the culture has already told them they are lovers. Leaders. Superior men.

We are all in this water. We are all wet. The supply chain is not a conspiracy of bad men at the top (although yes, there are clearly very bad men at the top). The supply chain is the culture — the online marketing playbooks, the relationship advice, the spiritual teachings, the meditation apps, the launch formulas, the coaching certifications, the polarity workshops. We are all running the source code. The Epstein files just showed us what the source code produces at scale, and it should not have surprised us, and it did.

I will be writing more about this in the coming weeks — about what it means to build a business that refuses to replicate these structures, and about why the people best positioned to see the architecture are the ones who survived it. For now, I want to leave you with this: Chopra said I not a predator Just a lover, and he meant it. That is not what makes him dangerous to the women and men who believed in him. What makes him and the rest of the men in the Epstein Files dangerous is that our culture agrees with them.

Zero in on your prey.

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This is Part 1 of a series. Part 2 is "No Human Is Prey: How the Marketing Formulas You Were Taught Replicate the Grooming Playbook — and the Six Commitments That Break It."

1. Deepak Chopra and Alicia Keys, “Activating the Divine Feminine: The Path to Wholeness,” 21-Day Meditation Experience, Chopra Global, 2021. Chopra’s description of the divine feminine as “cooling, lunar, and receptive” and the goal of reaching one billion people are from the program’s promotional materials and press release.

2. MJ Lee, “Chopra had close relationship with Epstein, told him to bring ‘your girls’ on trips, messages show,” CNN, February 23, 2026. CNN reviewed hundreds of messages between the two men released by the U.S. Department of Justice. All Chopra-Epstein quotes in this essay are attributed to CNN’s reporting. The text exchange in which Epstein wrote “I liked watching you zero in on your prey” and Chopra responded “I not a predator Just a lover” was first reported by Voice of San Diego (Andrew Keatts, “Deepak Chopra: New Age Guru, UCSD Prof — and Epstein Confidant,” February 5, 2026), which reviewed the original DOJ documents. Following the release of the files, Chopra posted a statement on X stating he was “never involved in any criminal or exploitative conduct” and later acknowledged the communications reflected “poor judgment in tone.” Artist and entrepreneur Sevda Rubens separately alleged on X that Chopra gave her his phone number at a meditation event in Europe when she was sixteen; reported by American Bazaar.

3. Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (New York: William Morrow, 1984; revised edition 2006). The Hare Krishna flower example is from Cialdini’s work.

4. Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams (San Rafael, CA: Amber-Allen Publishing, 1994). The Law of Giving and Receiving is the second of the seven laws.

5. Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (New York: William Morrow, 1984; revised edition 2006). The Hare Krishna flower example is from Cialdini's work

6. Jeff Walker, Launch: An Internet Millionaire’s Secret Formula to Sell Almost Anything Online, Build a Business You Love, and Live the Life of Your Dreams (New York: Morgan James Publishing, 2014). Walker’s description of reciprocity as a “mental trigger,” his statement that triggers are “always working just below our consciousness” and “exert enormous influence over how we act,” and the flashlight/authority anecdote are from his published work.

7. Kelly Diels, prior work: “On the Abuse of Reciprocity and Women,” kellydiels.com/abuse-reciprocity-women/, originally published May 2016. “On the ‘Mental Triggers’ of Online Marketing, The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand, Assessing Who Deserves Your Money, and Why We Should Be Skeptical of Makeover Stories,” kellydiels.com/mental-triggers-online-marketing-female-lifestyle-empowerment-brand-about-page/. The term “Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand” (FLEB) was coined by the author and has been in use since 2015. For the introductory essay, see “The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand. An introduction,” kellydiels.com/female-lifestyle-empowerment-brand-introduction/. For the definition and full essay archive, see kellydiels.com/female-lifestyle-empowerment-brand-definition/ and kellydiels.com/female-lifestyle-empowerment-brand-we-can-do-better/.

8. Jeff Walker, Launch: An Internet Millionaire’s Secret Formula to Sell Almost Anything Online, Build a Business You Love, and Live the Life of Your Dreams (New York: Morgan James Publishing, 2014). Walker’s description of reciprocity as a “mental trigger,” his statement that triggers are “always working just below our consciousness” and “exert enormous influence over how we act,” and the flashlight/authority anecdote are from his published work.

9. Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams (San Rafael, CA: Amber-Allen Publishing, 1994). The Law of Giving and Receiving is the second of the seven laws.

10. “Dear Women’s Empowerment Coaches: Is Your Teacher’s Teacher a Men’s Rights Activist?” kellydiels.com/women-empowerment-teachers-mens-rights-activist-warren-farrell-tony-robbins-john-gray-david-deida/, July 2018.

11. Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). Farrell served on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women’s New York chapter in the 1970s before his pivot to men’s rights advocacy.

12. Robbins’s website (tonyrobbins.com) claims his tools have reached over 100 million people and that more than 4 million have attended his live seminars across 80+ countries. The $6 billion combined annual revenue figure is from SUCCESS magazine’s profile of Robbins. The Robbins-Madanes Training Center has certified over 15,000 life coaches. Business Mastery features Ryan Deiss as a speaker. The Platinum Partnership costs upwards of $85,000 per year.

13. Robbins teaches sexual polarity at his Date with Destiny program, documented in the Netflix film Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru (2016, directed by Joe Berlinger). Robbins endorsed Warren Farrell’s work and blurbed David Deida’s The Way of the Superior Man.

14. “Exclusive: The other ‘Peter’ in the Epstein files, and what that says about the longevity industry,” Aging with Strength (Substack), February 2026. Diamandis appears in over 270 documents in the Epstein files, with email contact beginning in May 2008. The April 2009 email was sent while Epstein was still incarcerated. Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis co-authored Life Force (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022), a #1 New York Times bestseller. They co-founded Fountain Life.

15. Jane Bradley and Katie Baker, “Tony Robbins Has Been Accused Of Groping Fans At Events And Exposing Himself To Staff,” BuzzFeed News, May 2019. According to VICE News reporting, nine women ultimately came forward. Carolina Galvez’s quote (”almost predatory”) is from BuzzFeed News. Robbins denied all allegations and sued BuzzFeed News in the United Kingdom. The #MeToo confrontation with Nanine McCool was recorded at a seminar in San Jose in April 2018. The Washington Post published the video. McCool’s quote was reported by Refinery29. Robbins later apologized.

16. David Deida, Intimate Communion (Health Communications, 1995); The Way of the Superior Man (Plexus, 1997). Ken Wilber blurbed the latter, calling it “a guide for the noncastrated male.” Robbins also blurbed it. The Integral Institute was founded in 1998 by Ken Wilber; Deida became a founding member.

17. John Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (HarperCollins, 1992). Gray and Farrell co-authored The Boy Crisis (BenBella Books, 2018). In Beyond Mars and Venus (2017), Gray thanks Farrell in the acknowledgments as “a close friend and a brilliant authority.”

18. “Dear Women’s Empowerment Coaches: Is Your Teacher’s Teacher a Men’s Rights Activist?” kellydiels.com/women-empowerment-teachers-mens-rights-activist-warren-farrell-tony-robbins-john-gray-david-deida/, July 2018.

19. Eben Pagan published Double Your Dating in 2001 under the pseudonym David DeAngelo. His phrase “attraction is not a choice” and his acknowledgment that “every marketing decision is an ethical dilemma because by being skilled at these areas, you can manipulate people in dark ways if you choose to” are from published course materials.

20. The Syndicate was a group of internet marketers — including Eben Pagan, Frank Kern, Jeff Walker, Mike Filsaime, and Ryan Deiss — who popularized the tactics in Jeff Walker’s Launch book (the ones I critique) and coordinated product launches and cross-promoted to each other’s email lists.

21. Annie Lalla sat on the Wisdom Council of the Center for World Spirituality alongside Chopra, Farrell, Gafni, and Gray. She co-facilitated sexuality workshops with Gafni and co-led retreats at Kripalu. Marc Gafni admitted to a sexual relationship with a thirteen-year-old girl. He has been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women across decades. He was asked to leave the Integral Institute. Ken Wilber co-founded the Center for Integral Wisdom with Gafni. Tony Robbins, Warren Farrell, and Deepak Chopra sat on its advisory bodies. Chopra gave a keynote at Gafni’s event and participated in a public dialogue called “The Future of Love.” Chopra’s response to the petition urging disavowal: “Take my name off all petitions re Marc. This is an official notice.” Sally Kempton’s biographical essay characterized Gafni’s “boundless lovingness” as “one of the clues as to his particular uniqueness of spirit.”

22. Ibid.

23. Marc Gafni admitted to a sexual relationship with a thirteen-year-old girl. He has been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women across decades. He was asked to leave the Integral Institute. Ken Wilber co-founded the Center for Integral Wisdom with Gafni. Tony Robbins, Warren Farrell, and Deepak Chopra sat on its advisory bodies. Chopra gave a keynote at Gafni’s event and participated in a public dialogue called “The Future of Love.” Chopra’s response to the petition urging disavowal: “Take my name off all petitions re Marc. This is an official notice.” https://www.whoismarcgafni.com/2024/09/in-february-2017-deepak-chopra-asked-to-be-taken-off-stephen-dinans-petition-against-marc-gafni/

24. The U.S. Department of Justice released approximately 3.5 million pages of documents from the Epstein investigation on January 30, 2026, including over 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly Prince Andrew) was arrested on February 19, 2026. Peter Mandelson was arrested on February 23, 2026. Multiple European politicians have resigned or faced charges.

25. UN human rights experts called the files evidence of “a possible global criminal enterprise involving systematic sexual abuse, trafficking and exploitation of women and girls, committed against a backdrop of extreme misogyny and the commodification and dehumanisation of women.” UN OHCHR press release, February 2026. See also Scott Mills, “The Silence: Inside the Chopra-Epstein Files,” The Pulse / drscottwmills.substack.com, February 2026, documenting the silence of major personal development industry figures — including Tony Robbins (15 million followers) — following the Chopra-Epstein revelations.