Emily Guerin  00:04

[music in] It's 9am in Venice, California, and a white woman in a white turban and flowy white clothes is sitting cross-legged on a stage, the way she did almost every day for more than eight years. She is surrounded by crystals and candles, a bronze gong and golden poles strung with fairy lights. On the ground, people sit shoulder to shoulder on yoga mats folded in half to make more room. They sip tea from tiny cups. They stretch, and eventually, the woman onstage leans towards the microphone. The chatter stops. This is what everyone is here for. This is their guru. And now, she begins to speak.

Guru Jagat  00:47

[audio clip from YouTube video: Transform Your Whole System with This Yoga Set] [takes a breath] [very slowly] Ong Namo... [duck under]

Emily Guerin  01:00

She chants, eyes closed, palms pressed in front of her heart. And then, she begins aggressively punching the air [sounds of rhythmic breathing] above her head, like an angry backstroke.

Guru Jagat  01:10

[audio clip continues] Consciously get frustrated, get angry, everybody's [drumming in background] all upset about this year, just another thing to get upset about, now go. [rhythmic breathing]

Emily Guerin  01:25

The breathing gets heavier, the drums get louder. And then- [music out] [pause]

Guru Jagat  01:29

[audio clip] Yeah, hashtag fuck 2016. [audience laughs]

Emily Guerin  01:36

This woman's name is Guru Jagat. In this YouTube video from 2016, her voice is deep and gravelly, confident and relatable, kind of like your big sister or your camp counselor. She talked like this a lot on her podcast too.

Guru Jagat  01:50

[audio clip from YouTube video: Reality Riff- Venus Demystified] And that's ultimately what all spiritual practice is for. Can I be cleaning up the dog shit and having like uh, an ecstatic experience because I get to do this? Like that's the extreme right? Um, can I be dealing with you know, whatever, my screaming baby? Can I be doing the dishes? And when that happens, you have the sacred outlook, which is part of this whole kind of teaching.

Emily Guerin  02:12

[music in] This is what people loved about Guru Jagat. She dressed and acted like a deeply spiritual yogi, but she also talked about sex, swore, and ordered smoothies on Uber Eats.

Taylor  02:25

[audio clip] She's so funny. She could light up an entire room without even saying anything.

Shayma  02:30

[audio clip] She was just like really being herself, and she's kind of like no bullshit.

Jaclyn Gelb  02:35

[audio clip] She kind of felt like everyone's girlfriend.

Nicole Norton  02:39

[audio clip] She's actually kind of like Kundalini royalty.

Emily Guerin  02:43

Her ability to relate to people, to modernize the esoteric practice of Kundalini yoga- That's what got her a book deal, a fashion line, celebrity clients like Alicia Keys and Kate Hudson, and tens of thousands of Instagram followers. Until 2020. [music out]

Jaclyn Gelb  03:03

She was talking about like an alien agenda. And, this is engineered by the government. There's a reason they need to keep us at home. You need to be looking at that. And she said, "This is what you get for spending the weekend on YouTube, watching alien videos."

Emily Guerin  03:17

[music in] Within a matter of months, the girl boss darling of LA's yoga and wellness scene had started questioning vaccines, holding in- person classes in defiance of lockdown orders, and wondering out loud whether the virus had something to do with alien invasions and secret space programs. This is from her podcast, Reality Riffing, in mid-2021.

Guru Jagat  03:38

[audio clip from YouTube video: New Realities of Disclosure and Making Contact] What is your opinion in terms of the rips in time and space that have opened unnatural portals from the Nazi agreements with extraterrestrials? I mean, I think this is very important for what's happening right now even with COVID...

Emily Guerin  03:55

She wasn't the only yoga teacher plummeting down the wormhole during the pandemic. And I'm not the only journalist to notice this phenomenon. There's been a lot of reporting about radicalization in the wellness industry. So much so that there's even a term for it: the "Wellness to QAnon pipeline." But why? [music out] I mean, what is it about wellness culture that seems to slide so naturally into the deep dark world of conspiracy theories? [music in background] I decided to trace Guru Jagat's journey of radicalization to see if I could find out.

Sundeep Morrison  04:26

[audio clip] When we see a white woman with a turban, we think, Oh, what is this mystical person?

Nicole Norton  04:31

[audio clip] She would literally bend over backwards to do anything for him.

Guru Jagat  04:34

[audio clip from YouTube video: Reality Riff: Programming the Machine] Five years ago, if you believed in aliens, or you were talking about aliens, you were a conspiracy theorist. Now that's just in your Apple News feed.

Rabbit  04:43

[audio clip] I said that that sounds like some QAnon bullshit. And she hung up on me.

Emily Guerin  04:50

From LAist Studios, this is Imperfect Paradise, Yoga's "Queen of Conspiracy Theories."

Harijiwan  04:56

[audio clip] What's truth? It's your truth. You decide what you want to believe in the story.

Emily Guerin  05:02

I'm Emily Guerin. [music out] [break]

Emily Guerin  05:10

The first thing you should know is that Guru Jagat is dead. She died suddenly in August 2021 of the kind of thing that can kill anyone, a pulmonary embolism, a sort of unglamorous death for someone who has been called Kundalini royalty. So because I can't talk to Guru Jagat herself, what I do know has been pieced together through what she left behind- friends, enemies and lots of YouTube videos. And just a note on sourcing- unless I tell you otherwise, all of the audio of Guru Jagat speaking that you will hear or have already heard in this series is publicly available from three YouTube channels: Guru Jagat, RA MA TV, and Harijiwan Kundalini. [pause] [music in] Jaclyn Gelb took her first class with Guru Jagat in 2013. At the time, she was living in Malibu with her husband and her preteen daughter. She told me she grew up Catholic.

Jaclyn Gelb  06:05

At quite a young age, I'm gonna say probably younger than 10, I realized, I don't know what God is, but God's not in this place. So as soon as I moved and went to college, I stopped going to Catholic mass. So I think that there was always a, a need to fill. And, you know, there's a, a concept among seekers that when the student is ready, the teacher appears, and I've found that to be true.

Emily Guerin  06:33

Tell me about your first class with Guru Jagat.

Jaclyn Gelb  06:36

She came out, and she looked like a queen. And just everything about it- the stage, there were flowers. It felt more sacred, more holy, more- with more depth than the yoga that I had been doing. [EG: Mmm.] And she began her morning spiel. And um, I was absolutely riveted, every word, and when she used the word fuck, I hope I can say that. [EG: laughs and says: You can say it.] I was like, all in. A yoga teacher that talked like that. That was real. That was grounded. That was so brilliantly intelligent. I knew instantly. This is my teacher.

Emily Guerin  07:27

What does that mean to see someone lead a class and then sort of know that they're your teacher?

Jaclyn Gelb  07:32

I have thought about this a lot since 2020. It feels like the answer to all your prayers in a moment. It feels like this is the person I have been searching, I have been seeking, I have been trying to find. Here one day, I open my browser and this woman is embodying everything that I believe that I've been seeking for. And she's speaking with 100% authority. She believes fully, so fully in what she's saying that I believe her. And it, so it feels like coming home. It feels like a safe place. It feels like Oh, the cosmos conspired to put me here to learn from this woman. [music out]

Emily Guerin  08:18

The yoga that Jaclyn got hooked on, Kundalini yoga- it's really different from a yoga class that you would take at your local gym. In a more typical yoga flow class students move through a series of poses designed to improve flexibility and strength. But Kundalini is all about manipulating energy. Students hold simple poses for an agonizingly long period of time, or they make vigorous, rhythmic movements while chanting or breathing rapidly. These exercises are demanding, and they can produce for some students, a kind of spiritual high. That was definitely the case for Jaclyn. Pretty soon, she was practicing Kundalini yoga every day, sometimes for four or six hours. She'd wake up, take a cold shower, which is a Kundalini thing, and then she'd log on to RA MA TV, which is Guru Jagat's online streaming platform to catch her 9am class that was always live streamed.

Jaclyn Gelb  09:13

I had elevated myself into this, I had found this teacher, I had found this dharma. And so let me elevate you and bring you in. I introduced a lot of people to the yoga. A lot.

Emily Guerin  09:27

Practicing with Guru Jagat made Jaclyn feel like her years of searching were over. She had earned it. She was now one of the "spiritual elite." [music in] It's March 20th, 2020. It's the first full day of California's statewide shelter-in-place order. Streets are empty. Kids are at home. Bread and bleach are impossible to find. But right now, Guru Jagat is sitting in front of the gong onstage at the RA MA Institute in a video that was later posted on her YouTube channel. She's wearing a tightly wrapped white turban and dreamcatcher earrings. She's sitting across from this doctor named Siri Shakti and she's asking her for advice on how to stay safe [music out] from the Coronavirus. Siri Shakti is her spiritual name- more on those later. She has a medical license in California under the name Pamela Davis. She did not want to talk for this story.

Siri Shakti  10:24

[audio clip from YouTube video: Immunity Technologies -Guru Jagat x Siri Shakti, MD] So in terms of contagion, in your own household, if you live with other people, self-isolation actually really does work.

Emily Guerin  10:31

Some of this is sound medical advice. Some of it isn't.

Siri Shakti  10:35

[audio clip continues] Intermittent fasting or water fasting or dry fasting. Um, you know, when you fast you really activate your um, immune system.

Emily Guerin  10:45

Dr. Siri Shakti also recommends oregano oil, elderberry syrup, and IV infusions of ozone, which sounds pretty extreme. But remember, at this point early in the pandemic, there really wasn't much good advice going around at all. The CDC was advising us not to wear masks. Many of us were wiping down our groceries.

Siri Shakti  11:06

[audio clip] Just kind of restricting the hours of the day that you eat, actually will activate your uh, immune system to be more effective.

Guru Jagat  11:14

[audio clip] It'll also extend the, the, the amount of, you know um, rations [laughing] [Siri: Armageddon [laughing] rations you--] It won't help you with the toilet paper, but maybe...

Emily Guerin  11:25

What strikes me here early on in the pandemic is how absurdly funny it all seems to Guru Jagat. And how skeptical she was, already.

Guru Jagat  11:36

[audio clip] My opinion is maybe it's best that people don't get the test? [laughs]

Siri Shakti  11:39

[audio clip] There's- Yes- there's two sides to every situation. [laughter]

Guru Jagat  11:42

[audio clip] Yeah.

Emily Guerin  11:44

"It's best that people don't get the test," Guru Jagat says, laughing. Guru Jagat had a lot of her own theories about how to stay healthy. And she shared them with her students during her increasingly empty in-person classes. She talked a lot about "seeking out the truth" about what was really going on.

Guru Jagat  12:02

[audio clip] It's important. I, I think it's really important to see things from multiple perspectives. [music in] [music out]

Emily Guerin  12:14

Cassidy George is a reporter who wrote a story for Vice about Guru Jagat in 2021. And she told me that at this point, Guru Jagat mostly kept her personal beliefs out of the yoga studio.

Cassidy George  12:26

Around May of 2020, staff who were working with her at the time, reported to me that she constantly complained about having to wear masks, constantly complained about how, you know, the pandemic was harming her business, and would speak about you know, Bill Gates's agenda and all of this. And she started platforming, major conspiracy theorists on her podcast Reality Riffing, which I think for her was a safe space to exercise her true political agenda. Um-

Emily Guerin  13:07

Hmm. Like more so than in class, or in person?

Cassidy George  13:11

Yes. She hinted at these things in class. I think the podcast gave her the space to platform the people and the thinkers who she truly believes in and who she follows without having to actually take accountability for saying those things herself.

Guru Jagat  13:31

[audio clip from YouTube video: The 5G Report- Guru Jagat x Arthur Firstenberg] Hey Reality Riffing, a much awaited interview that I did on the landline with Arthur Firstenberg. We have a very interesting conversation about what's currently going on with this current virus and 5G. I don't always agree with him. I think he is a really interesting guy, and we had a very dynamic conversation. I hope you enjoy it.

Emily Guerin  13:55

This is Guru Jagat during an interview she did for her podcast in mid- April 2020. She's talking to Arthur Firstenberg who believes 5G wireless internet caused the Coronavirus pandemic. And what's most revealing about this conversation for me are little anecdotes like these.

Guru Jagat  14:11

[audio clip continues] You know, I, I've been kind of staying, not going outside that, this, that much just because I, I do believe that it's possible that they're spraying uh, some sort of aspect of chemical warfare or Coronavirus in the chemtrails. I mean, I'm not super paranoid, but these days I, who knows, I mean, I actually, I am super paranoid.

Emily Guerin  14:31

Guru Jagat wasn't the only yoga teacher to speculate like this.

Matthew Remski  14:36

The first six months of the pandemic saw my social feeds turn into just a bloodbath of attention seeking and panicked pivots with regard to content.

Emily Guerin  14:51

Matthew Remski hosts a podcast called Conspirituality. He discusses wellness, spirituality, conspiracies, and cults. He's a yoga teacher himself, and he's written extensively about sexual assault and cult-like behaviors among yoga teachers. And his show actually, is how I found out about Guru Jagat. Matthew told me that when yoga studios around the country closed for social distancing, it really changed the marketplace for yoga. Suddenly, a teacher like Guru Jagat in Venice- she wasn't just competing with a teacher in Santa Monica. She was competing against teachers in New York or Berlin.

Matthew Remski  15:27

It occurred to some yoga teachers that if they had something important, or spicy, or perhaps even inflammatory to say about the pandemic, that could actually increase their engagement. And unfortunately, for many of those people, that meant teasing the edges of QAnon.

Emily Guerin  15:53

I feel like QAnon is one of those things that everybody thinks they understand, but they don't. So I asked Ben Lorber to define it. He's a senior researcher at Political Research Associates, a think tank that monitors right wing movements.

Ben Lorber  16:07

QAnon is a conspiracy theory. It kind of promises that there's a secret alternative truth out there that only a select few can really access.

Emily Guerin  16:17

The secret truth that QAnon followers believe is that the world is controlled by "the Deep State," aka an evil cabal of elites who worship Satan and sexually assault children.

Ben Lorber  16:29

And you see that in also a lot of yoga and wellness communities, right, where you know, you stumble upon a kind of hidden knowledge that only you and a select few others have access to.

Emily Guerin  16:39

QAnon first emerged on a website called 4chan in 2017. That's when an anonymous poster who went by Q began posting these kind of cryptic messages about how then President Trump was trying to fight the Deep State. But Ben Lorber told me that QAnon is broader than that. It also encompasses doubt of the medical establishment, the Democratic Party, and the pharmaceutical industry. And even though it just started recently, it builds on centuries of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Ben Lorber  16:39

So I think that you see a lot of the same kind of rhetoric in alternative spirituality communities or wellness communities that, that say you know, what the medical establishment is telling you is a lie. Uh, and we have the truth.

Emily Guerin  17:25

[music in] As spring of 2020 stretched into summer, Guru Jagat's initial interest in how to use alternative medicine to stay safe from the Coronavirus give way to stronger and more radical opinions. This is student Jaclyn Gelb again.

Jaclyn Gelb  17:43

She was talking about like an alien agenda. And this is engineered by the government. There's a reason they need to keep us at home; you need to be looking at that. And she said, "This is what you get for spending the weekend on YouTube watching alien videos." I mean, that caught my attention because it was like, Oh, she's, she's falling into rabbit holes.

Emily Guerin  18:03

I can't actually play you some of the more extreme things she said because she said them during subscribers-only classes, which although her mom gave me permission to use, her company's lawyer did not. On her public YouTube channel, she was more cryptic and toned down. Here she is in late May 2020, teaching maskless and in person.

Guru Jagat  18:24

[audio clip from YouTube: Here's How to Link Up to a Higher Frequency] But people are waking up now. Whether it's a, an agenda of some sort of control and power and and brainwashing, or an agenda that has more to do with the awakening of consciousness and the awakening of kindness and the awakening of goodness, whatever it is, the master plan, the master frequency always is love. And as we uplink to that, it dissolves the fear.

Jaclyn Gelb  18:52

But I kept thinking someone around her, someone who's still holding the thread will, you know, figure out a way to wake her up, figure out a way to snap her out of it.

Emily Guerin  19:05

Why did you keep doing that?

Jaclyn Gelb  19:07

Because I loved her. I loved her and I still had friends in the community at that point. I no longer [EG: Mmm.] do. Now I'm an outcast because I spoke out. You know, it, it almost felt to me at that time like if you see your friends drowning, you know, do you just like- and you try helping them and helping them and they're not helping themselves. At some point do you like fuck it and walk away. I never said fuck it and walked away.

Emily Guerin  19:39

But then Jaclyn's loyalty to her teacher really got put to the test.

Jaclyn Gelb  19:44

When she brought in David Icke, I mean, that just was not something that the, the woman I knew before would do. That was so deeply offensive.

Emily Guerin  19:53

That's after a break. [music out] [break]

Emily Guerin  19:59

By mid-December 2020, over a hundred people were dying every day in LA County. Hospital ICUs were out of beds, and outdoor dining was once again prohibited. But over at the RA MA Institute, Guru Jagat was excitedly announcing her Winter Solstice Festival to be held in person at the studio in Venice. "Join me [music in] in uncensored, mind-blowing, pineal decalcifying, heart blasting conversation with the great thought leaders, artists, brave hearts, prophets and poets of our time," she wrote on Instagram. Guru Jagat was particularly stoked about one speaker, who she later featured on her podcast. And interestingly, this episode wasn't on her YouTube channel. I had to dig around on the streaming site called Odysee to find it. Odysee markets itself as a less-censored version of YouTube. [music out]

Guru Jagat  20:57

[audio clip from Odysee: Perspective Perception- Guru Jagat x David Icke] I am so excited to drop this new episode where I get to sit down with the controversial thought leader David Icke.

Emily Guerin  21:08

David Icke is one of the most well-known conspiracy theorists around. Peer-reviewed research papers have been written about him and his influence. His book, The Biggest Secret, claims that the world is "under the control of reptilian humanoid extraterrestrials, who use religious, governmental and other organizations to conceal the truth from humanity by mind control." By the time Guru Jagat invited him to the RA MA Festival, the Associated Press reported that he had been denied a visa to Australia for his anti-Semitic views. And according to the BBC, he was banned from Facebook and Twitter for spreading misinformation about Coronavirus.

Guru Jagat  21:48

[audio clip continues] We're in this global lockdown. We know there's other reasons for it besides um, what they're telling us. And uh, I would love to just kind of go into where you think the layers of other agendas and in terms of extraterrestrial um, invasions, uh, secret space, you know, if, if there's some sort of um, connection between China and, and some extraterrestrials, or where are you going with kind of deconstructing the uh, the bigger narrative of what's happening?

David Icke  22:18

[audio clip] Well, I've been uh, researching and writing and talking about this now for uh, 30 years, and over that period, I've gone very, very deep in the rabbit hole.

Emily Guerin  22:29

Their conversation ranges well beyond COVID.

Guru Jagat  22:32

[audio clip] This is why this spiritual or wellness scene as it stands has has basically been, has been hijacked. And we've seen a lot of this in 2020 in the wellness industry. It's been hijacked by all of this kind of woke agenda.

David Icke  22:48

[audio clip] One hundred percent! Round of [clapping] applause. Yeah, absolutely. [music in]

Guru Jagat  22:50

[audio clip] Yeah.

Emily Guerin  22:52

The end of 2020 is when I really began to feel like Guru Jagat was self-aware about her belief in conspiracies. I wish I could play this tape for you, but it's from her subscribers-only website. In this classroom December 23rd, Guru Jagat complains that no one is asking questions about the percentage of ICU beds that are occupied, saying hospitals just want to make money. And she jokes that she's going to win "the Oscar for the Queen of Conspiracy Theories." But she was also critical of people who labeled her like that. She tweeted this in October 2020: "Your own personal discomfort or lack of depth in relationship to the mystery, the unseen, the transparent or alternative narratives than that of "corporate news headlines" does not give you the all-seeing power to pronounce others as "conspiracy theorists." Maybe part of why she began speaking her views more publicly was that by late 2020, they really weren't so fringe. [music out]

NPR Reporter  23:55

[audio clip from NPR] There's evidence that conspiracy theories are becoming more and more mainstream in American society. That's according to a new NPR/Ipsos Poll out today. The poll gave people a sort of test to see if they could spot misinformation like... [duck under]

Emily Guerin  24:08

According to this NPR poll, 40% of respondents believe that Coronavirus was made in a lab, and half either believed or weren't sure that a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media. In other words, they believe in QAnon. Here's Guru Jagat speaking on her podcast in February 2021.

Guru Jagat  24:32

[audio clip from YouTube-Reality Riff: Programming the Machine] Five years ago, if you believed in aliens, or you were talking about aliens, you were a conspiracy theorist. Now that's just in your Apple News feeds.

Emily Guerin  24:41

By this point, Jaclyn Gelb had stopped taking classes with Guru Jagat, but she couldn't look away.

Jaclyn Gelb  24:47

I kept talking to her, you know, having conversations with her in my head and I used- and I would say, Where does this end? Like, what is the end game? It was a very hard confusing time, but mostly I was really angry.

Emily Guerin  25:03

Like, angry because she let you down?

Jaclyn Gelb  25:05

No, angry because she was so intelligent. She had so much power. She could have done so much good with her life, and she did do a lot of good. She helped a lot of people. Kundalini Yoga helped a lot of people, and she was all of it. She, she was that queen who helped people, and she was that shadow who hurt people. I mean, she was all of it. And I was just pissed that she was sort of all in on expressing the shadow side of it. And I was, I missed the light and I missed the intelligence. And I was pissed at all the people around her who enabled her and the ones who didn't speak up and maybe pissed at myself that I didn't. But yeah, it was confusing and I was pissed.

Emily Guerin  25:55

[music in] In mid-July 2021, Guru Jagat was traveling in Berlin when she fell and broke her ankle. She posted a picture of herself in a wheelchair, laughing at her reflection in a hospital elevator. She promised she would take it slow and get some rest. But she also promised to teach on stage at two multi-day retreats coming up in the next few weeks. On July 30th, she posted again. "I had a sudden cardiac event, pulmonary embolism, related to complications with my ankle surgery," she wrote. The next day, she died. She was 41. [music out] The machine that Guru Jagat built at the RA MA Institute kept going full speed after her death. [music in] There were subscribers-only classes called "Meditation to Heal a Broken Heart" and "Grateful for all She Left Us." There were two weeks of continuous live-streamed chanting. There was a gong ceremony, a DJ'ed dance party, and a thirteen-day-long Mayan ceremony for clarity and direction. I saw a picture of the studio's lobby during this time, and something caught my eye. It was this map that I'd never seen before. It had a lot of thin black lines, little arrows, and lots of pleasingly spaced words in Sans Serif font. It looked like it could have been hanging on the wall of a third wave coffee shop. I realized through some googling that this was actually a well-known image called the Great Awakening Map. It was kind of an explosion of QAnon catchphrases and concepts. And this particular version was printed on a soft beige or maybe millennial pink cardstock. There were a lot of words I expected to see: "arrest pedophiles," "drain the swamp," "Trump." But then there were a whole bunch of words I didn't expect: "divine downloads," "pineal gland," "Age of Aquarius," and "the highest vibration in the universe is gratitude." I thought these were yoga words. I mean, I'd heard Guru Jagat say them before. But it turns out, they were also QAnon dog whistles. Looking at that poster, it was obvious there's a lot more overlap between yoga and conspiracy theories than I thought. I wanted to find out why. [music out]

Emily Guerin  28:24

On the next episode of Imperfect Paradise... [music in]

Guru Jagat  28:26

[audio clip] He represented to me like a true rebel spirit and a true spiritual master. And so I said, I want to be like that guy.

Matthew Remski  28:34

It's really a totalizing environment that I think fits very well in with the totalizing and attention absorbing practices that emerge in groups that begin following something like QAnon.

Emily Guerin  28:50

Do you think the yoga influenced her in becoming more extreme?

Rabbit  28:55

I think it did.

Emily Guerin  28:55

That's next time on Imperfect Paradise: Yoga's "Queen of Conspiracy Theories." [music out]

Emily Guerin  29:04

[credits music in] Imperfect Paradise: Yoga's "Queen of Conspiracy Theories" is written, reported, and hosted by me, Emily Guerin. The show is a production of LAist Studios. Shana Naomi Krochmal is our Vice President of Podcasts, and Antonia Cereijido is the Executive Producer for LAist Studios. Production research and sound design by Emma Alabaster. Research and additional reporting by Francisco Aviles Pino. Editing by Kelly Prime and Antonia Cereijido. Fact checking by Tess Kessler, Emma Alabaster, and me. Mixing by Donald Paz. Original Music by E. Scott Kelly with instrumentation by Will Marsh, Nicholas Young, and Kamini Natarajan. Our theme song was written by Raaginder. Our website LAist.com is designed by Andy Cheatwood and the digital and marketing teams at LAist Studios. The marketing team of LAist Studios created our branding. Thanks to the team at LAist Studios, including Taylor Coffman, Sabir Brara, Kristen Hayford, Kristen Muller, Andy Orozco, Michael Cosentino, and Leo G. Special thanks to Megan Garvey and Karlene Goller. Imperfect Paradise is a production of LAist Studios. Support for this podcast is made possible by Gordon and Dona Crawford, who believe that quality journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live. This program is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people. [music out]