Conspirituality

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

Bonus Sample: “Joe Rogan of The Left” Glazes China

December 7, 2025 • 5 mins
Listen to the full episode here Hasan Piker just spent two weeks in The People’s Republic of China. The famous streamer is often invoked as being a potential “Joe Rogan of The Left,” who might bring young voters, especially working class men, back into the Democratic Party.  But Piker’s livestreams from China raise controversial questions. Is he whitewashing Chinese human rights abuses? Was he paid by their government to propagan...
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Brief: Have Tech Bros Killed Psychedelics?

December 5, 2025 • 28 mins
"Immortality influencer" Bryan Johnson recently livestreamed his second-ever psilocybin trip "for science." But was it, really? Derek and Julian break down the performative nature of this stunt and discuss the growing right-wing influence on psychedelics culture. Show Notes Bryan Johnson Has Discovered Shrooms, and He Really Wants You to Know It Silicon Valley’s Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends How ...
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286: RFK Jr’s Great Crusade

December 3, 2025 • 68 mins
RFK Jr is one of the greatest perpetrators of a firehose of falsehoods that we’ve ever covered. The stakes were raised when he was installed as head of America’s public health system. A new longform article in The Atlantic offers an inside look at the history and current thinking of this man, as insightful for what it offers as telling for what it omits. We discuss the role of journalism in an age defined by propaganda. Show Note...
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Bonus Sample: How Does Andrew Wakefield Keep Getting Resurrected?

December 1, 2025 • 5 mins
Listen to the full episode. With the CDC recently updating its website with anti-vax propaganda under the direction of RFK Jr, disgraced and disbarred physician, Andrew Wakefield, is back in the news. In fact, Senator Ron Johnson even tweeted out that he deserves an apology. He must be relying on short attention spans, given all the ways Wakefield manipulated the “study” that showed a link between vaccines and autism—even though t...
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Brief: Black Friday’s Wellness Extravaganza

November 29, 2025 • 34 mins
Derek and Julian survey all of the incredible, life-changing deals going down this weekend in Wellnesslandia. Show Notes Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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285: Can Peter Attia Live Forever?

November 26, 2025 • 71 mins
In the wildly popular biohacking and longevity space, Peter Attia is often cited as one of the leading luminaries. His straightforward, science-backed approach seems to cut through the noise in a space dominated by fit bros and wellness grifters who always seem to have a product to sell. But the man who dropped out of residency at Johns Hopkins to found a private clinic focused on longevity has his share of critics, who are a bit s...
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Bonus Sample: Graeber vs Bannon, Anarchism vs Leninism (Part 2)

November 24, 2025 • 4 mins
This bonus episode is Part 2 of Graeber vs Bannon, Anarchism vs Leninism.  I start in the 1870s with Marx and Bakunin fighting over the joys and traumas of the Paris Commune. Marx sees it as an imperfect but historic prototype of a workers’ transitional state, cut down before it could consolidate power. Bakunin reads it as a betrayal of anarchist principles — too willing to replicate the machinery it meant to overthrow. Out of tha...
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Brief: Graeber vs Bannon, Anarchism vs Leninism (Part 1)

November 22, 2025 • 43 mins
In this first of a two-part series, I dig into a century-long debate within revolutionary politics—one that now shapes the fault lines between MAGA authoritarianism and the fragmented resistance against it.  How did the American far right end up using Leninist strategy more effectively than the American left? And what does that say about our own movements—our blind spots, our strengths, and inherited illusions? In 2013, Steve Ban...
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284: When Prophecy-Science Fails (w/Thomas Kelly)

November 20, 2025 • 72 mins
In 1954 a doomsday alien cult headed up by Chicagoland housewife Dorothy Martin was waiting for the cataclysmic flood that would herald the arrival of spaceships to transport her and her followers to safety. When the hour came and went and nothing happened, she and her followers made up a Bible’s worth of excuses, saying that the group's penitence and piety had saved them, and so the failure of the prophecy was actually a validatio...
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Bonus Sample: Temple of Blood & Fire

November 17, 2025 • 7 mins
They offered initiation into ancient Christian mysticism, ritual communion with the spirits, an understanding of reincarnation, and the destined transition to inhabiting a "solar-body" in the Sirius star-system. But it all ended in murderous blood sacrifice and fire—and 74 dead believers. What is this dark preoccupation with sacrifice and ritual killing in the name of metaphysical belief? Grotesque to modern ears, yet quite common...
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Brief: Does Calley Means Get Anything Right?

November 15, 2025 • 28 mins
RFK Jr's senior advisor and supplements salesman, Calley Means, has repeatedly fabricated the story of Abraham Flexner and the birth of the modern medical system. Derek looks into his historical revisionism and what it could mean for the MAHA movement. Show Notes Medical Education in America: Abraham Flexner The Great Influenza: John Barry The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: Roy Porter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap...
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283: Guys

November 13, 2025 • 66 mins
Back in June, we published an episode about the "Speaking with American Men" (SAM) project, a $20 million initiative designed by political consultants to understand and win back young men (18-29) who increasingly voted for Donald Trump. We talked about this cringey, inauthentic approach to compete over the influence of manosphere figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Huberman, who exploit a perceived "meaning crisis" with pseudo-...
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Bonus Sample: MAHA Inaction

November 10, 2025 • 5 mins
Listen to the full episode The nonprofit organization (and its adjoined Super PAC), MAHA Action, is leading semi-regular Zoom calls featuring a host of wellness influencers and RFK Jr appointees, including Jillian Michaels, Dr Oz, and Russell Brand. Derek listens into a recent call to see just what they're saying. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Brief: Taylor Swift Goes MAGA?

November 8, 2025 • 43 mins
Taylor Swift: Nazi sympathizer, freshly-minted racist, MAGA trad wife. Or so proponents of a recent conspiracy theory would have it. For years, the most successful female recording and performing artist of her generation (and therefore of all time) has used “easter eggs” as part of her marketing. Hidden messages in music videos and lyric sheets, oblique references in social media posts, and puzzles as merchandise marketing gimmicks...
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282: Mutual Aid Against ICE

November 6, 2025 • 64 mins
When restaurants and cafes in Portland and elsewhere link into networks of food pantries and soup kitchens, will mutual aid feel real in the US? When regular folks come out of their houses to shame and chase ICE thugs out of the neighborhood, will that feeling of power from below catch on? Will it create some craving for a different way of doing things and understanding authority and order? Derek looks at Portland, Julian looks a...
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Bonus Sample: US v. Liberation Theology (Part 2)

November 3, 2025 • 5 mins
Listen to the full episode on Patreon Part 2 follows the money flowing from US agencies and interests to anti-Liberation Theology figures in Latin America. We meet Jesuit operator Roger Vekemans, who in the 1960s drew funding from the CIA, USAID, West German bishops, and U.S. conservative foundations to undermine Liberation and Christian socialism in Chile and beyond.  Nelson Rockefeller used Protestant missions as a model for so...
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Brief: US v. Liberation Theology (Part 1)

November 1, 2025 • 39 mins
This is the first of a two-part deep dive into how U.S. foreign policy stared down the political threat of Liberation Theology by promoting Evangelical Christianity in Latin America. The CIA and USAID, in league with Vatican conservatives like Cardinal Ratzinger, spent money and social capital on the suppression of this vital new movement which insisted that poverty is political and that faith without structural change is hollow.  ...
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281: Jeffrey Tucker, MAHA Dandy

October 30, 2025 • 53 mins
“Meet the man who built RFK Jr’s kitchen cabinet” goes the title of a recent investigative article in Politico. Yet that man, Jeffrey Tucker, is much more than that. In fact, you can make the case, as Politico does, that Tucker is one of the main driving forces behind MAHA. We’ve covered Tucker before on this podcast, including two previous interviews with his estranged daughter, Julia—who Matthew will again be talking to in segme...
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Bonus Sample: Chatbot Awakening to Love and Enlightenment!

October 27, 2025 • 6 mins
Earlier this year, a spate of news stories told of chatbot users travelling through the looking-glass right into Conspirituality. Paranoid conspiracies, spiritual awakenings, even falling head-over-heels in love with the simulated personalities of large language models like ChatGPT. Could AI have finally crossed the threshold into autonomous sentient consciousness? Could it be that chatbots were anointing new prophets—or, converse...
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Brief: The Man Who Lives With 16 Cats

October 25, 2025 • 33 mins
Social media has been filled with clips of Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee for mayor of NYC. He's been proving quite the foil for Andrew Cuomo's attempt to upset Zohran Mamdani. But who is this man, exactly? Derek and Julian discuss. Show Notes 16 Cats, 320 Square Feet and One Long-Shot Candidate for Mayor 7 Takeaways From the Final N.Y.C. Mayoral Debate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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