Conspirituality

5 am. Day 4 of executive plant medicine retreat. The venture capital tech bro sits on a metaverse mountaintop, immersed in deep meditation. He hears a hum—a vibration from the great beyond. A mantra rises up like kundalini gas bubbles just in front of his spine: techno-capital machine. Today we dissect Marc Andreessen’s anarcho-capitalist attempt at a Silicon Valley religious doctrine, The Techno-...

Matthew’s essay about the transient, disorganized, purificatory pleasure of RFK Jr's campaign for his wellness/yoga/biohacker demographic.  A workshop breakthrough is not a strategy. The pleasure of deconstruction is not a theory of change. With reference to Vincent Bevins’s brilliant new book: If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. If you’ve never donated through GiveWell...

Bari Weiss recently held a "debate" about the failure of the sexual revolution. Expensive tickets to the Theater at the Ace Hotel in downtown LA allowed you to see Grimes and Sarah Haider talk about motherhood, porn, and woke culture with Anna Khachiyan and Louise Perry. And the results were...rather boring, says journalist Michelle Lhooq. Derek gets the lowdown from Lhooq, who wonders how the New...

Get full access to all of our episodes and listen ad-free on Patreon. Today’s profile by Julian is of a man who connects the dots between the gun-nut fifth column in American law enforcement, local school board and city council anti-woke mania, and grassroots Christian Nationalist/QAnon crossover. Like our other swamp creatures, his involvement in the chicanery around the last two elections make h...

Arizona’s recent increase in “sovereign citizen filings” connects to a New Age spiritual center called the Ultimate Light Mission. Julian talks to investigative reporter Isaac Stone Simonelli. Show Notes Sedona's wellness to radicalization pipeline Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Women journalists spend years meticulously investigating, corroborating and fact-checking allegations that Russell Brand is a serial sex offender. The result? A 6600-word masterpiece of survivor-centered concision, battle-tested by a legion of editors and lawyers. But the manosphere responds! With logorrheic defenses, conspiracy theories, and rationalizations. Peak posting through it. We look at c...

Four members of the Florida-based Grenon family were recently sentenced to between 5 and 12 years of prison for selling bleach. The problem? They claimed that bleach, known as Miracle Mineral Solution, cured Covid-19—as well as cancer, autism, AIDS, erectile dysfunction, and over 90% of the world's ailments. The elder Grenon, Mark, had founded the Genesis II Church of Health & Healing alongside of...

On October 9, RFK Jr. brought his three-podcast-bros-in-a-trench-coat campaign to Philadelphia. On a dias across from Independence Hall, he announced his anticipated departure from the Democratic party and his new status as an independent candidate. Matthew and Julian profile his conspirituality credentials, his diagonalist politics, and his incoherent positions: He attacks public health officials...

Quinn Slobodian teaches Modern German History at Wellesley and William Callison teaches Political Theory and Human Geography at Uppsala. We first came across their work via Naomi Klein’s examination of the clusterf&cked politics that dominate the movements we cover. We dug out their paper, and they had us at this: "At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspir...

Our main character this week is the six-degrees of authoritarians—more like one or two degrees, in fact. He’s made millions playing footsie with most of the blood-thirsty kleptocrats of the last half-century. He embodies the corrupt and anti-democratic deep state history of Donald Trump’s inner circle, reaching back through the decades and across the globe. Julian’s colorful storytelling series se...

On October 14, Australians will vote in a referendum on a simple question: should Indigenous peoples be invited to form an advisory council—a Voice—to Parliament?  It seemed like a shoe-in “Yes”—before the issue was FUBARed by a coalition of antivax, anti lockdown, Q-adjacent white sovereign citizens who believe that they are the true victims of colonization.  Professor Tyson Yunkaporta of Apalech...

Butcherbox Deal! Sign up today at butcherbox.com/conspirituality and use code CONSPIRITUALITY to receive ground beef for life plus $20 off your first order. We love our scicomm episodes, because they really dig into the material heart of the conflicts this project tries to understand. What is this information chaos tearing apart public health? How do you push back against it? What does “follow the...

On September 19, Matt Christman was hospitalized with, in the words of his colleagues on the podcast Chapo Trap House: “a sudden, severe medical emergency that will require a significant period of recovery.” His wife was scheduled to deliver their first child a few days later. Baby arrived in good health. Christman is as of this moment still hospitalized, but making some progress. Matthew reflects...

Deep Cut pulls from our bonus episode archive to unearth previous ideas that remain relevant today. What the hell happened between the Dalai Lama and that Indian boy? The internet served up a raft of painfully inflammatory takes, so I took a month to talk with Tibetologists and review the literature on sexual abuse in Tibetan Buddhist contexts. This is a deep, tangled dive. Content warnings apply....

The market for psychedelics is projected to grow from $2 billion in 2020 to $10.75 billion by 2027—a growth rate that could outpace the legal US cannabis market. Many high-profile investors and celebrities are entering the space, often under the pretense of funding breakthrough mental health interventions. But…is that the real concern? Microdosing to help depression, anxiety, addiction, or suicida...

We’ve spent the last three-and-a-half years criticizing a range of wellness ideas, charismatic charlatans, abusive self-styled gurus, and conspiracy theories. We’ve also discussed our own beliefs and highlighted many people and ideas that we believe are getting it right. Derek has never really explored what motivates him on a physical and mental level despite having spent many years doing so insid...

In light of the recent allegations, Matthew offers a backgrounder on what we’ve learned about Brand through conspirituality and cultic studies and from his opportunistic relationships to wellness, self-help, and Kundalini Yoga. Ending with a focus on how his yoga world LARPing became a launch pad for his success as a spirituality-coded conspiracy theorist in the age of COVID. Go to HelloFresh.com/...

Who could be a better guide through the fever dream of modern anti-semitism—the socialism of fools—than a scrappy young scion of the House of Rothschild? How has Mike, this mysterious insider—visible on CNN but a seeming ghost in real life—used his inheritance and connections to score book deals with the Fake News Media? Will he redeem his family name? Just joking! Author and friend of the pod Mik...

When we deconstruct harmful ideas and beliefs—from antivax positions to reactionary social views—we will inevitably be seen or felt as attacking the relationships that people form through those views. That’s a big problem in a lonely world, and there will be blowback. What to do? Matthew steps off the debunkery hamster wheel, and remembers an old piece of yoga advice.  Show Notes The Religious Cas...

Burning Man 2023 will forever be burned in memory with two images: a group of climate activists blocking the single road into Black Rock City and the sea of mud that a climate change-induced hurricane turned the playa into. The jigsaw puzzle is pretty complete. Will Burners see it? Tommy Diacono is a five-time Burner. He also helped organize the protest. He joins two-time Burner Derek for a discus...

Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World is a polymathic work that serves up new political heuristics with the firepower we’ve come to expect from the coiner of “disaster capitalism.” A Dante-spiral through our circles of cultural hell, it’s also a memoir of demoralization, self-evaluation, and persistent hope. If this sounds overly ambitious or grandiose—that’s a fair suspicion in...

The Forrest Gump dandy of right-wing dirty tricks is in the news again. Strategizing from the Willard Hotel as January 6 unfolded; protected by a coterie of now convicted Oathkeepers; captured on video dictating Trump’s fake electors scheme for an email. These are just a few of the things Roger Stone has done.  Stone may be the swampiest of Deep State operatives our politics has seen. Julian gives...

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World is an exuberant, polymathic effort, in which Klein develops several new political heuristics that pack the punch we’ve come to expect from the originator of “disaster capitalism.” Reading it is like getting walloped by a novel political theory virus— or a potent vaccine for the times. It’s also a Dante-esque spiral down through our endless circles of hist...

Do you ever feel like American society is caught in limbo? The bardo-realm between two election cycles. The dial-up static between invasive social media and quarantine isolation. Stacking sandbags against the deluge of conspiracies and disinformation as we await the slow-motion countermeasures of science and the justice system. The disruptions of Trump, COVID, QAnon, conspirituality, and January 6...

Claiming your First Amendment rights are being violated is a sure way to have the spotlight shone on you. It's also an effective way to shut down criticism of whatever you're selling. From the 1940s-60s, supplements manufacturers used the free speech gambit to keep regulators away from their products, resulting in a 1969 Supreme Court case. Derek looks at the 20th century evolution of medical regu...