Psychedelics are all the rage in the investment world, with hundreds of millions of dollars pouring into research-based startups in the hope of finding interventions for addiction, depression, PTSD, end-of-life anxieties, and much more. But is it too much? Are we, as has happened with numerous substances in the past, placing too much faith in plant medicine? Will investors expecting a return on investment skew the research? And, more to the point of this podcast, is the burgeoning crop of yoga i...
Sep 03, 2021•1 hr 27 min
After watching the Almost 30 podcast hosts bond over Zach Bush’s Jesus-like qualities, Matthew explores the barren friendship landscape of wellness gigworkers.From the transcript: We engage with friendship pornography by consuming attractive images and vicarious sensations of friendship for the sake of pleasure, without having to engage with the complexity of social conditions, class differences, boredom, sickness, or death, and without having to be responsible for the other in any sustainable w...
Aug 30, 2021•8 min
Spirituality, ill-defined a term that it is, often implies both an emptying out and an addition. What leaves is the vacuous clinging to achievements that are supposedly preventing us from seeing our true nature. What’s granted is a new mindset, a novel way of being, one in which you are at peace with both yourself and the world.Where does the drive for status play into this quest? As journalist Will Storr points out in his new book, The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It, you can’...
Aug 26, 2021•1 hr 13 min
One of the most debated topics in spirituality (and beyond) involves the origins of consciousness. Most neuroscientists agree that it’s emergent—the physiological systems of the body create what we call “consciousness.”Derek revisits his 2018 conversation with Michael Gazzaniga, whose 1961 studies on split-brain patients revolutionized the discipline of neuroscience.Show NotesNeuroscientist Anil Seth: ‘We risk not understanding the central mystery of life’VS Ramachandran: 3 Clues to Understandin...
Aug 23, 2021•9 min
Santa Barbara surf coach Matthew Coleman murdered his two young children in Mexico nearly two weeks ago. He told the FBI that he was “enlightened by QAnon and Illuminati conspiracy theories and was receiving visions and signs revealing that his wife possessed serpent DNA and had passed it on to his children.”Beneath the peak chaos of this story lies a social fabric torn to shreds by QAnon and related conspiracy theories. Marriages are ending, custody battles are raging, and parents and children ...
Aug 20, 2021•1 hr 25 min
Conspiritualists amp up their victimhood-fetish by comparing anti-vaxxers to Jim Crow-era African Americans and Jews under the Holocaust. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson questions vaccines, bangs the CRT red-scare propaganda drum, and swoons over Hungarian fascist Viktor Orban.ulian compares Fox News’s idealizing coverage of Orban to how they treat another famous Hungarian, boogeyman of the far-right, George Soros. He also tells the tragic tale of Trofim Lysenko—Stalin’s “barefoot scientist,” to illus...
Aug 16, 2021•8 min
With guests: Philip Deslippe, Jules Hartley, Janja Lalich, and Stacie StukinWe’ve convened an expert panel this week to remember and discuss Katie Griggs, aka GJ. She died in an LA hospital on the evening of August 1st. LA Magazine was the first outlet to confirm the death with the RA MA Institute, which Griggs co-founded in Venice, CA.The cause of death has not been confirmed, but according to a eulogy film put out by the RA MA Institute, Griggs reportedly broke her ankle in Berlin on July 11th...
Aug 12, 2021•2 hr 36 min
This past week, Matthew defined “Wellness Pornography”, working from the ideas of C. Thi Nguyen and Bekka Williams in their essay “Moral Outrage Porn.” In this bonus episode, he asks: How do we measure the violence of wellness pornography when it becomes clear that it fuels vaccine hesitancy? When wellness pornographers directly indoctrinate people against public health, are they, like the sexual pornographers eviscerated by Andrea Dworkin, violating civil rights to security and safety? If we st...
Aug 09, 2021•8 min
The YogaVaxGate Instagram post turns out to have been a bellwether for the $88B industry packed with science skeptics and spiritual bypassers. When Wolf Terry got trolled for daring to argue in Yoga Journal that getting vaccinated was an act of non-harming, the stormfront was clear. As thousands of yoga studios ponder opening amidst the stop-and-start waves of Delta and beyond, one question dominates staff meetings: “Will we ask our returning clients for proof of vaccination?” Matthew interviews...
Aug 06, 2021•2 hr 9 min
A recent uptick in Holocaust-related memes around the COVID vaccine is fueling further anti-Semitic thought and behavior. Derek investigates a crop of wellness influencers guilty of this charge. -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Aug 02, 2021•5 min
The genius parade continues this week with co-host Dale Beran, author of It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office. All three of us writers are legit blown away by Beran’s layered and penetrating coverage of the chan-verse-to-Capitol Riot pipeline. After last week’s journey led by Dr. Annie Kelly through the anti-feminism of the high-testosterone sites that prepped cyberspace for QAnon, Beran takes us deep into the cosplayed souls of the man...
Jul 30, 2021•1 hr 24 min
QAnon emerged out of a perfect storm of evolving technology, social psychology, and global crisis. But it exploited pre-existing neural architecture already easily hijacked by addictive drugs, junk food, porn, persuasive marketing, and cultish religions. It also relied on how mobile social media, running on cellular and wifi technology, amplifies and speeds up the algorithmic impact of hyper-contagious cultural memes on the material world. Maybe 5G was the real threat all along?Julian explores o...
Jul 26, 2021•9 min
It takes patience, empathy, and a steady hand to paint a detailed landscape of the politics and culture that connect anti-feminism to ethnonationalism to the broader obsessions of conspirituality.Dr. Annie Kelly’s scholarship in these spaces reveals a network of “subversion anxieties”: that patriarchy will be replaced by social justice autocrats, that the privileged will be brought low, that feminism will destroy hetero freedoms and pleasures, that human bodies will become cyborgs, that collecti...
Jul 23, 2021•2 hr 32 min
A closer look at the content and constellations of Josh Rainer Goldstein, who livestreams himself eating raw meat.Presented in three parts: An analysis of how the content is self-centered, ableist, misogynistic, and contribute to structural racism and epistemological confusion. An exploration of the deeply Freudian aspects of Goldstein’s account: its frenzied death wish expressed in an oral/anal fetish of raw meat and body perfectionism. The larger psychoanalytic question is: why are these displ...
Jul 19, 2021•10 min
Are you crypto-curious? This past year has shown that an increasing number of people are dreaming of becoming crypto millionaires. But what is blockchain and this strange new digital currency and, more pertinent to this podcast, how are conspiritualists trying to exploit it, even when they don’t understand what “it” is?Matthew drills Derek, who worked in blockchain for over two years with two different companies, on the basics, before Derek interviews David Morris, the Chief Insights Columnist a...
Jul 15, 2021•2 hr 9 min
Derek investigates a recent NY Times essay by Michael Pollan as an entry point to discuss big questions in psychedelics and conspirituality: How do we honor indigenous traditions as psychedelics are legalized (and monetized)? What dangers lie ahead as pharmaceutical companies and charismatic influencers exploit psychedelics for profit and power? How can we create psychedelic rituals that suit our current time and societal temperament?Show NotesHow Should We Do Drugs Now?Is This Peter Thiel–Backe...
Jul 12, 2021•12 min
What should a global network of popular and private schools do when faced with evidence that the foundation of their pedagogy was laid by a racist, proto-fascist pseudoscientist? What should they do when it becomes clear that they are evangelizing while pretending to teach secular humanism? These are the sticky questions raised by Dr. Jennifer Sapio in today’s interview with Matthew. Sapio taught for three years at the Austin Waldorf School. She was hired from her secular training, but gradually...
Jul 08, 2021•2 hr 23 min
Julian reflects on unchosen racial complicity and how moments of moral courage in the face of oppressive power can reveal one’s true colors. He traces the history of Apartheid as it intersects with the stories of his youth in South Africa. -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices....
Jul 05, 2021•9 min
How do we avoid being the subject of—and feeding the market for—trauma porn? If anyone knows, it’s India Oxenberg, who in less than two years (while under the unforgiving glare of a media firestorm) went from cult victim to survivor to anti-cult activist. Matthew sits down with her to discuss her recovery journey: learning to box, learning to love food, learning about “the strong yes” from her therapist. They also discuss the behind-the-scenes expertise that went into the documentary series Indi...
Jul 01, 2021•2 hr 53 min
Matthew debriefs after the Mike Rothschild interview, looking at QAnon’s “Conspiracy Theory of Everything” as a hyperobject and spiritual dilemma.Show Notes‘A reckoning for our species’: the philosopher prophet of the AnthropoceneConversations with Cornel West | Glenn Loury, Cornel West & Teodros Kiros | The Glenn Show -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew ...
Jun 28, 2021•7 min
It’s only been eight months since Q stopped posting, but Mike Rothschild has been able to corral the firehose of data into the first major journalistic study of the fever dream that has tortured millions since 2018. He joins us as co-host this week just as his new book, The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Cult, Movement and a Conspiracy Theory of Everything, drops. We’ll ask him about researching a “conspiracy of everything, what a leaderless cult means, how an online religion worships, and...
Jun 24, 2021•1 hr 16 min
The race to capitalize on the world’s wellness needs in a post-pandemic society—well, at “post” as we can pretend to be—was unavoidable. Derek reflects on the continually unrealistic marketing promises being offered by wellness influencers, discussing how we’d benefit from more honest ad copy than the hyperbole attempting to be passed off as destiny. -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Insta...
Jun 21, 2021•6 min
In June 2020, equity consultant and journalist Dax-Devlon Ross—who you might remember from Conspirituality 4 that very same month—published an essay called “A Letter to My White Male Friends of a Certain Age.” In it, he applied his decades of experience as a nonprofit executive and program facilitator to have an honest discussion with, as the title suggests, his white male friends. A year later and the book version of that essay, called “Letters to My White Male Friends,” has been published by S...
Jun 17, 2021•1 hr 28 min
Humanity has an apocalypse fetish. But wrapped up In the doomsday death wish is a utopian fantasy of the ascension that comes after a fallen and sinful world is purified by cataclysmic fire. Whether the longed-for intervention is supernatural or extraterrestrial, spirituality porn hijacks our neurobiological wet-ware to bond cults together in a shared and singular climactic focus.For this week’s Bonus, Julian traces the recurring themes between the 19th-century Great Awakening, the Heaven’s Gate...
Jun 14, 2021•12 min
This episode is co-hosted by Dr. C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher who teaches at the University of Utah. His breakthrough book is about agency in games, in which he shines a light on disquieting aspects of our gamified lives and the question of whether we’re still able to act on our own values. We’ll talk about Dr. Nguyen’s key ideas, all of which are super useful for navigating conspirituality: the gamification of Twitter and other systems of “value capture,” the feeling of knowing something really...
Jun 11, 2021•2 hr 43 min
News from Alabama: after a 23-year ban on yoga in schools, generated by a Republican moral panic, Governor Kay Ivey signs a bill that lets kids do yoga again, but with some restrictions:“All instruction in yoga shall be limited exclusively to poses, exercises, and stretching techniques. All poses shall be limited exclusively to sitting, standing, reclining, twisting, and balancing. All poses, exercises, and stretching techniques shall have exclusively English descriptive names. Chanting, mantras...
Jun 07, 2021•10 min
Matthew sits down, across 9,000 miles of mostly ocean, with journalist Anke Richter and reporter and Māori rights activist Joe Trinder to discuss the mind-bending rise of Māori MAGA in the COVID-free sanctuary of Aoteoroa, aka New Zealand. Led by former blues musician Billy Te Kahika, conspirituality has seeped from music and cultural festivals and straight into national politics, where white supremacists manipulate Māori post-colonial distrust of settler governments to boost vaccine hesitancy a...
Jun 03, 2021•2 hr
Derek looks back at three important historical figures with unsavory pasts to ask the question: who gets to decide who gets canceled, and why?Show NotesGreat Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India How would Gandhi’s celibacy tests with naked women be seen today?John Muir Is Canceled. Who’s Next?Don’t Cancel John MuirI’m an MLK scholar – and I’ll never be able to view King in the same lightA judge gave a drug dealer a second chance. Sixteen years later, he swore him in as a lawyer.Spons...
May 31, 2021•9 min
We’re extremely pleased that someone who isn’t a Boomer — and is younger than us — is making a serious but accessible contribution to this golden age of cult literature. Linguist Amanda Montell joins Julian for an engaging interview about her new book, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, which examines the power of language in high-demand groups, from The People’s Temple to the local Young Living dinner party. In a debrief, we discuss not only Montell’s study, but also our own run-ins with spir...
May 27, 2021•2 hr 50 min
Julian and Matthew discuss words, world views, and how productive disagreement can lead to mutual understanding. In today’s overheated discourse, social media posturing can make the culture wars feel like pro wrestling and political conversation like tip-toeing through a hair-trigger minefield. While these two co-hosts share a healthy skepticism for conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and New Age grift, some of their underlying philosophical and political beliefs hold interesting tensions. On th...
May 24, 2021•10 min
