Conspirituality

MAHA isn’t a health movement. It’s a marketing engine driving activist propaganda. Derek looks at Tony Lyons, one of MAHA’s key architects, and his recent strategic memo sent to Republican leadership about how to use MAHA talking points to retain power in the midterm elections.  Show Notes Tony Lyons’s strategic memo to GOP leadership Examining Who Benefits From Kennedy’s Anti-Science MAHA Push MA...

In the wake of the DOJ’s dump of 3 million documents from the FBI’s Epstein investigation, journalists, content creators, and everyday people are forming narratives and schema for what it all means. Social media is flooded with survivor stories, overwhelming disgust, rage and grief, and reports of anxiety, sleep disturbance, and difficulty functioning in the world (mostly from women). Pizzagate an...

Deepak Chopra is all over the Epstein files. Are we surprised? Nope. But we are interested in the various layers of his entanglement and what they say about the ethics and politics at play in the shadow of Big Wellness. Show Notes Self-Help Guru Sorry He Got Busted for Vile Epstein Emails Deepak Chopra: New Age Guru, UCSD Prof – and Epstein Confidant God Is A Construct, Cute Girls Are Real': Bests...

Mark Carney is a devout Catholic, and his economic vision came from a challenge posed by Pope Francis. Matthew walks through the contradictions of Carney’s economic spirituality.  Show Notes Values by Mark Carney | Penguin Random House Canada  Pope Francis says he wasn't offended by 'communist crucifix' gift  The Catholic Case for Communism - America Magazine  Pope Francis: “If I See the Gospel in...

Matthew pokes at the contradictions behind Prime Minister Mark Carney’s polished Davos attempt to distance Canada from U.S. chaos, while Canadian companies continue profiting from the U.S. domestic terror regime.  Drawing on reporting by Rachel Gilmore, Matthew looks at how Canada’s “middle power” liberalism masks deep complicity with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement through arms, surveill...

Over 1,000 children and women were potentially victims of Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking and sexual abuse. It is not clear how deeply Peter Attia was enmeshed in Epstein's core activities, but we do know he belonged to an important tier of his operation: the influencer-celebrity-intelligentsia set that legitimized him as a sophisticate across a wide range of disciplines.  We revisit Attia in light...

In the wake of ICE murders, some are calling for more protestors with guns, or at least to prepare to meet fire with fire. Julian examines the history of armed struggle in South Africa and Northern Ireland, as well as the arguments for nonviolent vs militant political movements.  Is there a way back from the turning point at which people recruit their friends and families into neighborhood militia...

Two new MAHA-approved bills would force insurance companies to cover supplements and shield homeopathic manufacturers from any liability while allowing them to make more health claims. As Derek argues, this is what Kennedy has always been aiming for: shuffle as many alt-med products into circulation as possible while ensuring they don't need any of those pesky regulations pharmaceuticals must endu...

Prior to last month’s killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, many white American citizens felt obligated to use their privilege to actively disrupt unjust ICE activities in their cities. But the stakes just got higher for everyone. In the wake of these tragic deaths, we look at how the MAGA propaganda machine dehumanizes opposition and demands loyalists not trust the evidence of their own eyes an...

When videos surfaced of Alex Pretti kicking an ICE vehicle's taillight 11 days before his murder, claims that the video was AI dominated social media. Some commenters even posted articles that stated the opposite of what they thought they said. Derek explores the necessity of curiosity when coming across information that contradicts what you want to hear. First, he explores it through his love of...

The silence of MAHA influencers around the murder of Renee Good (and ICE generally) has been excessively loud. Yet that’s expected from the coalition that voted for Donald Trump in order to install RFK Jr at this point. Many believe “health isn’t political” while refusing to accept or acknowledge what their vote has empowered. Dr Jonathan Howard, a neurologist and psychiatrist at NYU Langone’s Mul...

As Trump surges his Gestapo and threatens to annex new territory, his brain is collapsing. He’s sundowning on Truth Social, nodding off in meetings, slurring words, slurping at the saliva pooling in his mouth. His insults and aggressions are as constant and predictable as his arms are, reaching out for handholds. Up until this point, discourse on the mental health of this decrepit fascist leader h...

Listen to the full episode Simone Weil was skeptical about the project of “rights.” They argued that obligations come before rights, and that rights only become real when obligations are recognized and lived.  Weil believed the French Revolution made a foundational error by grounding society in rights rather than eternal obligations, creating a contradiction that still haunts liberal democracies t...

If conspirituality names the ways religion and spirituality are weaponized to justify power, prospirituality points to religious traditions doing the opposite: grounding resistance, ethical clarity, and solidarity in moments of crisis.  So: is there a growing prospirituality response to fascism, genocide, climate collapse, and AI-driven labor precarity? Matthew argues that yeah, there’s some good...

Noelle Cook’s The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging is the first ethnography of conspirituality, and it comes via someone who was able to really embed themselves in a volatile culture and find its emotional logic. She’s our guest today. Cook focuses on the travails of two middle-aged women following the January 6 Capitol riot. By spending years befriending and talking with...

In 1953 the CIA and MI6 participated in a coup d’etat in Iran. That true sentence (and what usually follows) can create an oversimplified distortion of history—and present. But Iran is in the news again with the biggest protests since the 1979 Islamic Revolution bringing millions to the streets. The regime unsurprisingly cracked down hard: at least 2,700 protesters have been killed and 18,000 arre...

Whole milk is back! The war on protein is over! Mainline meat! Derek investigates the new inverted pyramid and everything lacking in the new dietary guidelines. Show Notes The New Dietary Guidelines and the “Flipped Pyramid” Several of Kennedy’s Dietary Advisers Have Ties to Meat and Dairy Interests Carotenoid bioavailability is higher from salads ingested with full-fat than with fat-reduced salad...

“Train your mind gently, not to deny what is hard, but to see what is still good” implores the monk sharing spiritual messages to his 2.5 million Instagram followers. Clad in an orange robe—well, sometimes a blue robe, sometimes grey or yellow—the little man of unknown descent speaks knowledge from a temple constructed from just about every Asian country imaginable. As it turns out, the creators o...

From Andrew Huberman's Goop collab and Mel Robbins' protein shots to MAHA flipping the long-defunct food pyramid and making meningitis great again, the first full week of 2026 was off to quite a start. Derek covers the week that made heads spin. Show Notes Andrew Huberman is Optimizing Turkey Chili Mel Robbins is Selling Protein Shots What to Know About the New Childhood Vaccine Schedule Health of...

Marco Rubio’s office published an official press release last month titled “Announcement of Actions to Combat the Global Censorship Industrial Complex.” The memo discusses the decision to impose visa restrictions on five individuals due to their “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.” One of those individuals is Imran Ah...

What do fascists need to do to convince their rank and file that they’re the smartest in the room? They invent new science to trash the old science they didn’t like. First, we look into how RFK Jr is “making the proof” for all his scientific endeavors, then unpacking a new proposal from the AZ state sena Janae Shamp about how she’s going to get to the bottom of the clinical diagnosis of Trump Dera...

Matthew reflects on the fifth anniversary of his mother’s death and revisits how her life, trauma, and values helped him understand the appeal—and fatal flaw—of Jordan Peterson’s worldview. Toughness can be an expression of love without becoming a politics of cruelty. Show Notes 33: Manipulating the Hero’s Journey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you seen the “Grinch prank” video trend? Bad parenting, yes. But also a nod to the conflicts, ancient and modern, embedded in Christmas.  Contrary to what Bill O’Reilly would tell you, there has never been a “war on Christmas.” Rather, Christmas itself has always been a battleground over love, dignity, and resources. What we’re really fighting over is who gets care in systems built on scarcit...

In 1965, the US passed the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, the reason every pack of cigarettes has a warning label informing you about the potentially harmful effects. Since then, numerous regulations, educational drives, and taxation initiatives have made smoking less appealing and harder to do. In the contrarian wellness space, nicotine has become the alkaloid du jour. Forget cig...

Listen to the full episode In 1994, Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatry professor John E. Mack became one of the most pedigreed proponents of UFOs, alien abductions, and the alien-hybrid breeding scheme. He was introduced to celebrated painter, amateur hypnotherapist,  and UFO researcher Budd Hopkins by transpersonal psychologist Stan Grof. Hopkins had helped author Whitley Strieber recover...