Whatever one’s conception of “God” is, “John of God” should now be a nauseating name. For decades, João Teixeira de Faria pretended to heal an endless stream of pilgrims to his center in rural central Brazil through the Spiritist practice of “psychic surgery.” In reality, the miracle healing claims worked to cover up an obvious truth. João was sexually assaulting and raping women, in public and in private, likely every day of his “working” life. As he did so, he amassed a vast fortune in affilia...
Oct 08, 2021•2 hr 18 min
During Thursday’s episode, Derek briefly described Flow States in the context of a universal form of spirituality. He explores that concept in a little more depth, pulling audio from Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s 2004 TED Talk about the social ramifications of Flow States. -- -- -- Support us on Patreon Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat : America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian Origina...
Oct 04, 2021•4 min
We’re grounding down. We’re letting go. We are going deep. We are finding the metta in our meta and tuning in to Source. This week we’ll either answer or transcend the core questions our listeners post in moments of parasocial vulnerability: Do you guys believe in anything at all? Are there any wholesome spiritual communities out there? Are all spiritual teachers toxic? This four-hour immersive encounter between three white guys is not to be missed! (Seriously tho: we’ve got some huge interviews...
Sep 30, 2021•1 hr 20 min
Julian traces the roots of today’s pandemic-era conspirituality back to What The Bleep’s quantum woo, The Secret’s privileged denial and grandiosity, and the dark lessons of why beliefs really matter, as revealed by James Arthur Ray’s deadly Spiritual Warrior Retreat. Show Notes Laura Tucker’s response to Nine Perfect Strangers Guru: The Dark Side of Enlightenment -- -- -- Support us on Patreon Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat : America | Canada F...
Sep 27, 2021•10 min
Daniel Sherrell is the author of an extraordinary memoir and prayer book, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World , in which he recounts how, as a climate activist born in 1990, he has fought to manage, digest, and even celebrate the desperate tasks of the only age he’s known: the Anthropocene. The book is his homage to the resources that help him meditate on weaning ourselves from the dissociations of Twitter and doing the hard work of transforming climate grief into climate integrity. In...
Sep 23, 2021•2 hr 16 min
On his family’s yearly trip to Manitoulin Island, Matthew detoxes from conspirituality influencer garbage, and returns with parts of a new plan. Show Notes Warmth by Daniel Sherrell: 9780143136538 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books Living at the End of Our World (w/ Daniel Sherrell & Dorothy Fortenberry) | Know Your Enemy Lives Reclaimed — Mark Roseman What Conspiritualists and Anti-Vaxxers Get Right | by Matthew Remski | Aug, 2021 | Medium -- -- -- Support us on Patreon Pre-order Conspirituali...
Sep 20, 2021•10 min
This week, California Governor Gavin Newsom rode sane pandemic messaging to victory against the Republican-led recall election by a huge margin. Unsurprisingly, voting patterns perfectly matched the state COVID heat map, with fans of the recall suffering the worst outbreaks. Meanwhile, a strict lockdown in Australia, which is experiencing a Delta outbreak, led to American libertarians and right-wing commentators screaming fascism! We talk to Decoding the Gurus co-host (and real-life Australian) ...
Sep 16, 2021•2 hr 16 min
In June, Planedemic creator Mikki Willis appeared on Living 4D with Paul Chek to discuss what “really happened” at the Capitol on Jan 6. During the long-ranging talk, Willis took some time to attack a VICE News article that we were featured in. Unfortunately for Willis, we have the audio from the Election Night party in Austin being referenced. Derek updates Willis’s memory. Show Notes Living 4D With Paul Check, EP 141 – Mikki Willis 2: What’s Really Going On? The Election Night audio Leading Ne...
Sep 13, 2021•10 min
Paul Chek will tell you how much he’s influenced the fitness industry. He’ll tell you that he popularized Swiss Balls, and about his time working with the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls and then the championship Lakers. The kinesiologist and founder of the Chek Institute, which offers numerous training programs under the slogan, “We teach the science of living well,” claims that he’s always taken a holistic approach to weightlifting and the gym. In fact, the man does not mind telling you how vast his ...
Sep 10, 2021•1 hr 14 min
A QAnon-themed Stop The Steal, anti-vax, Covid-denial roadshow came to an untimely end in mid-August with their fearless leader succumbing to COVID pneumonia on a ventilator in Florida. He denied the virus was real until his last breath. This week, Julian chronicles the 84-stop Arise USA Resurrection Tour led by the recently deceased former CIA agent, Robert David Steele. Characters on this Ill-fated tour include the aging wanna-be rock star slam-poet conspiracist Sacha Stone, anti-vax Urban Hea...
Sep 06, 2021•6 min
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 ...
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 ca...
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 Notes Neuroscientist Anil Seth: ‘We risk not understanding the central mystery of life ’ VS Ramachandran: 3 Clues to Underst...
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 illu...
Aug 16, 2021•8 min
With guests: Philip Deslippe, Jules Hartley, Janja Lalich, and Stacie Stukin We’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 11...
Aug 12, 2021•1 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 Patreon Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat : America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian Original 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 ma...
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 ...
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 collect...
Jul 23, 2021•1 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 disp...
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 ...
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 Notes How Should We Do Drugs Now ? Is This Peter Thiel–B...
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 Patreon Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat : America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choi...
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•1 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 Anthropocene Conversations with Cornel West | Glenn Loury, Cornel West & Teodros Kiros | The Glenn Show -- -- -- Support us on Patreon Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat : America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek ...
Jun 28, 2021•7 min
