Conspirituality
Dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis. At best, the conspirituality movement attacks public health efforts in times of crisis. At worst, it fronts and recruits for the fever-dream of QAnon.As the alt-right and New Age horseshoe toward each other in a blur of disinformation, clear discourse, and good intentions get smothered. Charismatic influencers exploit their followers by co-opting conspiracy theories on a spectrum of intensity ranging from vaccines to child trafficking. In the process, spiritual beliefs that have nurtured creativity and meaning are transforming into memes of a quickly-globalizing paranoia.Conspirituality Podcast attempts to bring understanding to this landscape. A journalist, a cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic discuss the stories, cognitive dissonances, and cultic dynamics tearing through the yoga, wellness, and new spirituality worlds. Mainstream outlets have noticed the problem. We crowd-source, research, analyze, and dream answers to it.
Episodes
June 1, 2024 • 25 mins
When young TikTok dance stars joined 7M Films, they got access to big production budgets, luxurious locations, and exciting career opportunities. There was a problem, however. Their boss, Robert Shinn, was a self-styled Christian pastor who placed increasing pressure on their time and finances, demanded unquestioning devotion, and isolated them from the outside world. (Julian covered the story of a family trying to regain contact w...
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May 30, 2024 • 65 mins
Every year, the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, DC-based lobbying group, publishes its “Dirty Dozen” report, which supposedly informs consumers about the 12 “dirtiest” fruits and vegetables. The report is repeated verbatim by major media outlets, which routinely demonize strawberries, blueberries, and other conventionally-grown produce. But does their science hold up?
Not according to the majority of scientists and resea...
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May 27, 2024 • 6 mins
In this Listener Stories episode, Matthew sits down with Jude Mills, an old friend from the yoga world, to hear her story about growing up in an anti-theist home in hyper-sectarian Scotland, but feeling the inexorable call of religion. So started a long journey toward her vocation as a hospice chaplain at the height of COVID.
They discuss the needs of the dying, regardless of beliefs, and how losing dignity to institutional abuse ...
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May 25, 2024 • 47 mins
There’s been a growing acceptance of religious belief from the previously religious-averse, especially in the Covid contrarian space. This comes in the wake of a number of recent high-profile conversions, most notably Russell Brand getting baptized. Why are the skeptical suddenly finding faith?
Derek and Julian discuss their atheism in the context of these recent changes of heart—including Brand’s recent appearance on Bret Weinste...
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May 23, 2024 • 68 mins
Philosopher Thi Nguyen first visited us 150 episodes ago (!!) to discuss how social media gamification exploded online conspiracy theories and audience capture drags content producers toward the seductions of premature clarity—and the ecstasy of fascism.
Nguyen returns to discuss “value capture”: how simplified and portable metrics in institutions, technology, and media landscapes erode our moral capacities as we pursue goals we n...
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May 20, 2024 • 7 mins
Russell Brand has accepted Jesus into his heart and been baptized in the spirit. But does his conversion to Christianity make sense along the New Age rebel to right-wing, conspiracy-theorist radicalization pipeline? Is Brand seeking absolution for his sins, or recognizing that most of his audience are Christians “oppressed” by authoritarian libs?
Julian explores how the “enlightened outsider” uses pseudoscience to justify spiritua...
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May 18, 2024 • 37 mins
Two weeks ago, several university administrators asked militarized police units to smash pro-Palestinian encampment protests on quads and in occupied buildings. It happened at places like Columbia and CUNY, and the University of Texas in Austin where our guest today, Dr. Peniel Joseph, teaches on the history of the Black Power movement.
In the midst of the news cycle frenzy, an old phrase began popping up in discussions of who the...
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May 16, 2024 • 62 mins
Matthew is in the guest seat today! Why? Because in 2019—just months before the pandemic and this podcast kicked off—he published a book titled Practice and All is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics and Healing in Yoga and Beyond. It focused on survivor stories of assault and abuse within the cultic mechanisms of Pattabhi Jois' Ashtanga Yoga community. The book also proposed a path into co-creating safer yoga communities via enhanced cri...
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May 13, 2024 • 6 mins
In 2020, former NY Times journalist Isabel Wilkerson published Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The book tells a compelling story: that the root of our social divisions is the invented hierarchical structure of castes, not, as we often assume in America, race. Race, she writes, is only another manifestation of caste.
While it’s certainly an important topic here in America, Wilkerson shows, by investigating the longstanding ca...
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May 11, 2024 • 44 mins
Dr Sarah Ballantyne forged a career in science communication and health education advocating for autoimmune solutions in food and the paleo diet. In 2014, she began questioning her approach. Shortly after, she realized she was spreading nutrition misinformation and has dedicated her career to correcting those errors.
Derek talks to Sarah about the dangers of diet and nutrition misinformation, dealing with obesity and eating disord...
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May 9, 2024 • 76 mins
We have a real treat today for listeners who love all forms of movement, especially yoga and strength training.
Derek and Julian talk to Movement Logic hosts, Laurel Beversdorf and Sarah Court, who navigate the curvilinear path of creating irreverent yet high quality science-based movement content that sets teachers and students free from dogma and fear-mongering. Our two podcasts intersect by looking into fallen gurus, pseudoscien...
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May 6, 2024 • 5 mins
In the first full episode of this ongoing series, Matthew looks at the anti-abortion arcs of two men: Rob Schenck and Frank Pavone.
Both leaders invested the images and remains of the unborn with passionate but imaginary desires that obscured from them how much harm they were causing.
One of them exited that highway, but the other is still burning it up.
Includes the story of Kermit Gosnell, and how his Philadelphia abortion abatt...
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May 4, 2024 • 47 mins
The late historian of religion James Carse (1932-2020) made a radical proposal in his 2012 book, The Religious Case Against Belief. He argued that beliefs, far from being central to or definitive of religion, are actually antithetical to religious community.
A religion’s historical longevity, he argued, depends on its ability to absorb and neutralize beliefs—epistemological dead ends built on willful ignorance.
“The challenge to ...
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May 2, 2024 • 70 mins
Robert F Kennedy, Jr isn’t backing down. You can’t get away from his voice or his endless content stream. He’s banked on tech world oligarch anti-vax mom, Nicole Shanahan, to nail down the VP slot. His Children’s Health Defense charity is casting doubt on whether polio was even a virus. And he keeps claiming he’s not against vaccines himself, but his messaging around it tells a different story.
It’s been a few months since we’ve ch...
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April 29, 2024 • 5 mins
"Human Biologist" and life coach Gary Brecka's star rose after biohacking UFC President Dana White's health. Yet Derek has a few questions this week: Is someone with a degree from a chiropractic college qualified to talk about seed oils, GMOs, depression, tinnitus, fluoride, detoxifying through water fasts, and diet plans? Is it concerning that his 10X Health System cofounder is a fervent Scientologist? And what happens when you ac...
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April 27, 2024 • 55 mins
A Deep Cut from our Patreon archive (July 2023)
What do we mean when we say that we believe something? When the QAnon Shaman got dressed on the morning of January 6, he put on his red, white, and blue face paint, his postmodern quasi-Native American horned fur hat, and grabbed the spear to which he had attached an American flag. In performance mode, this cosplay persona had already garnered him a taste of the attention that would s...
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April 25, 2024 • 65 mins
Neal Brennan has upped the artistic ante in stand-up comedy. In Netflix specials like "3 Mics and Blocks" he’s explored loneliness, isolation, and the mental health fallout of growing up the youngest of 10 in a Catholic family with an extremely unwell father. In the process he’s made some of the great mysteries of family pain and inner turmoil more tolerable.
And—he’s a fan of our podcast, because in his search for relief, he’s tri...
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April 22, 2024 • 6 mins
Tensions between Israel and Iran escalated as supernaturally-charged conspiracy theories about the solar eclipse flooded the internet. And so Julian searched for answers about the mysterious “red heifer.” What is so special about a red cow? Might its discovery and ensuing journey from Texas to Jerusalem have played a role in the October 7 attacks? Why are zealots from all three Abrahamic religions so focused on one piece of holy re...
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April 20, 2024 • 42 mins
Matthew is joined by Theo Wildcroft and Harriet McAtee, co-editors of The Yoga Teacher's Survival Guide: Social Justice, Science, Politics, and Power (Singing Dragon Publications), a volume of essays from 16 yoga world contributors.
Three yoga culture critic nerds get into the weeds of how wellness workers and yoga teachers survive and navigate a post-pandemic world that exists at the crossroads of:
capitalism and spirituality
me...
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April 18, 2024 • 82 mins
“Cult expert” Steve Hassan has been publicly concerned with the complex sociology of trans youth since 2020. We track that interest back to his communications with gender critical activists in 2017, who reached out to him because they believed that his cult theory could shed light on what they believed were nefarious aspects of the trans awareness movement. In the spirit of helpfulness, but without any chops in the subject, he step...
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