Conspirituality

Listen ad-free Julian interviews journalist Anand Giridharadas about his new book, Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City. The book centers on the tragic death of Jordan Neely, a deeply traumatized, mentally ill, and unhoused former Michael Jackson impersonator who was put in a five-minute choke hold on a New York subway car by Marine veteran Daniel Penny, who was acq...

Listen to the full episode Matthew tracks the concept of "islamo-gauchisme," the French accusation that leftists are useful idiots for jihad. Pierre-André Taguieff's 2002 book on "new Judeophobia" is ground zero, and a forensic Twitter analysis has shown that far-right accounts pushed the term for years, until it was taken up by Macroniste ministers in 2020. The academic consensus is that it is a...

Election denialism didn’t go away after the Capitol Insurrection. If anything, the revolving door between the Trump administration, the far-right conspiracy-mongering media ecosystem, and those directly involved in (and even convicted and imprisoned for) undermining democracy has only gotten more elaborate and determined. As the elections loom, Julian talks to the VP of Media Matters for America,...

Listen ad-free In 2021, the first secular embryo adoption organization received federal funding after decades of pro-life Christian organizations had hogged the kitty with their particular views on who is fit enough to raise a family. Then in 2026, a change in language and some apparently shady bookkeeping on the part of an agency under RFK Jr's HHS resulted in two ultra-religious organizations re...

Listen ad-free The protests in France were initially sparked in mid-September by high school kids as young as 14 in the poorer metro districts, articulating concrete grievances about their neglected schools, underpaid and absent teachers, an AI-driven vocational assignment algorithm that forces them to choose career paths at 15, and a pervasive culture of smug condescension from the adult world. A...

Mikki Willis is back with another installment of Plandemic—er, with a new book that further explains Plandemic, or something like that. Given how badly his sequels have gone, it appears that he’s looking for a new angle to mine (and monetize). Derek opens the pages of Bad Medicine: How COVID Protocols Turned Hospitals into Death Traps only to find Willis’s continual inability to grapple with reali...

Listen ad-free Matthew welcomes friend of the pod, Brad Onishi, back to Conspirituality. Brad is the co-host of Straight White American Jesus, and he’s got a new book out called American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy.  Onishi’s scholarship charts the Frankenstein alliance of reactionary Catholic integralists, Protestant Reconstructionists, and Silico...

Listen ad-free Charles Eisenstein’s very long essay, “The Coronation,” was the focus of EP1 of Conspirituality. The sacred economist turned philosopher king joined us on EPs 30 and 32 for a two-part interview about that very essay. We’ve had no contact since, even though the man turns up in the most unusual places. Including, recently, another podcast to take stock about his time serving as adviso...

Listen to the full episode The Church Universal and Triumphant became an international mainstream news story in 1990. Their leader, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, was poised, eloquent, and beautiful. She also claimed to have received messages directly from God about an impending nuclear holocaust. But it's more complicated than that: the theology of her new religious movement has significant overlap wit...

Listen ad-free and support the podcast Although Beck David Hansen was born into Scientology, he’s never really practiced it. Except for that period where he did, heavily, when he even contemplated becoming an auditor. But then he left the church he was never really involved with—though pressure from the church appears to have completely ended his long-term relationship and close friendships. Does...

Listen ad-free and support the podcast Paul Saladino doesn’t like peanut butter. Or whey protein. Or processed foods at all. Except when they’re his peanut butter whey protein bars that are, you guessed it, processed. But his bars are different: they're really good and totally natural processed foods. Those other guys make shitty non-food foodstuff products. Paul produces the real deal. Just don’t...

Listen to the full episode Max Haiven's The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to Twenty-First Century Fascism (MIT Press, 2026) argues that financialized capitalism has turned us all into speculative "players" in rigged games. It produces a "cheated player" whose resentment the far right redirects onto scapegoats rather than the ruling class. This is what contemporary fascism is. ...

Andrew Huberman’s new book takes many hours of podcast transcripts and distills them to what he believes are ideal protocols for a healthy life. Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body became an instant bestseller upon its publication last month. Does the science behind the hype hold up? Journalist Scott Carney joins Derek to look at the slipperiness of many claims. They also discuss the...

This is episode 1 of a new side project Julian is doing with Azi Ghaffari, Dr. Inna Kanevsky, and Aaron McCall. Find upcoming episodes via Grifty Podcast and at grifty.org  The wellness people think your toothpaste is poisoning you. Finance bros think empathy is bad economics. Somebody on the far right thinks Taylor Swift is a Democrat psy-op, while someone on the far left thinks your aunt bu...

Listen ad-free and support the podcast When we started this show, the charismatic influencers we covered had identifiable tactics of hard-selling, finding pain points, using disorganized attachment strategies like cult leaders do, to scare followers with sometimes real, sometimes fictitious stories that only they could understand and help solve. Beyond the patterns shared by supplement hawkers, al...

Listen to the full episode Last week, MAHA Action once again blurred the lines between activist organization and government entity, with RFK Jr, JD Vance, Dr Oz and other officials sharing the stage with dozens of corporate sponsors and private healthcare executives—and Russell Brand. Derek tunes in to this nine-hour fiasco. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew examines how Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has paired an 18-month austerity rampage with approval ratings near 60%. Centralized power, new surveillance and protest laws, refugee restrictions, public-service cuts, a tripling of the military budget, climate rollbacks, a seeming refusal to protect the basics of Medicare. Why do so many people love him? Carney's appeal and ability to abs...

In 2013, businessman turned independent journalist Jesse Brown launched Canadaland as a podcast focused on media criticism. He grew the business to include many other podcasts, creating his own small media empire. Then October 7 happened and things took a turn. Recently, he hosted anti-vax contrarian doctor, Peter McCullough, in what he claims was a focus on media, but which really turned into a s...

Who was behind the gunman that shot Pope John Paul II in 1981? We know the man who pulled the trigger was a Turkish member of the Grey Wolves. We know he planned to flee via the Bulgarian Embassy. We know an Italian nun ensured he didn’t get away.  But had someone ordered the assassination? One possible clue is held in the answer to this next question: how did the Soviet Union collapse? We al...

When the Black, 30-year-old Michael Jackson impersonator stepped onto the F train in Manhattan on May 1, 2023, he was ranting angrily about being hungry and thirsty, willing to kill, die, or go to jail for life. His name was Jordan Neely. He was clearly in distress. Daniel Penny, a white, 24-year-old former Marine put him in a chokehold and pulled him to the ground. Neely struggled for almost 6 mi...

Listen ad free Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been meeting with MAHA activists in an attempt to bring the coalition to the Democratic party. Recent reporting reveals that she’s been meeting (or trying to meet) with some close to RFK Jr, as well as those who have been critical of the HHS Secretary. It might be a sound political strategy, but what happens when you start courting conspiracy theorists?...

Today's Drop is a crosspost of an interview Matthew Remski did with Brianna Patten of the Surviving Satchidananda Podcast.  Patten asked him a bunch of really good questions about high control groups, both as a former member and as someone who went on to research their sociology. Matthew finds Satchidananda's Integral Yoga fascinating, because Satchidananda's ascendancy through his Woodstock...

Matthew tracks the attack on disability justice activist Beatrice Adler-Bolton after a clip from her Socialism 2026 panel — "Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State" — was stripped of context by a right wing rage-farmer, and made to go viral. Adler-Bolton used the word "dysgenic" ironically, as a reclamation, arguing the left shouldn't try to out-fitness fascists. The clip drew 12...

Harvard paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman returns with Fed Up: What Evolution Teaches About Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well. In the book, he tries a variety of major diets, breaking down the latest science around each. His work, Derek argues, is a necessary corrective to the wellness influencers who promote and monetize single-diet solutions, when history and biology tell a much different s...

Humans are social animals. We’re not the strongest, fastest, or even best adapted to our environment. But what we excel at is our ability to work together, which means we’ve been able to adapt to every environment, a true outlier in the animal kingdom. And a big reason for that is our ability to empathize with others. Basically, empathy is the ability to step into someone else's shoes, understand...