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Conspirituality — Philosophy
Conspirituality

Dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis. At best, the conspirituality movement attacks public health efforts in times of crisis. At worst, it fronts and recruits for the fever-dream of QAnon. As the alt-right and New Age horseshoe toward each other in a blur of disinformation, clear discourse, and good intentions get smothered. Charismatic influencers exploit their followers by co-opting conspiracy theories on a spectrum of intensity ranging from vaccines to child trafficking. In the process, spiritual beliefs that have nurtured creativity and meaning are transforming into memes of a quickly-globalizing paranoia. Conspirituality Podcast attempts to bring understanding to this landscape. A journalist, a cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic discuss the stories, cognitive dissonances, and cultic dynamics tearing through the yoga, wellness, and new spirituality worlds. Mainstream outlets have noticed the problem. We crowd-source, research, analyze, and dream answers to it.

Copyright: © 2023 Conspirituality

Latest Episodes:

Brief: Unmasking Jay Shetty (w/John McDermott) Mar 23, 2024

Show notes

Former monk turned spiritual influencer to the stars, Jay Shetty, has amassed 15 million followers on Instagram. He’s interviewed Michelle Obama, Kim Kardashian, and Kobe Bryant on his popular podcast. Shetty has received accolades from Gwenyth Paltrow and Ellen Degeneres. He even officiated J Lo and Ben Affleck’s wedding.

Yet when LA-based writer John McDermott was assigned to cover Shetty for Esquire, something seemed…off. When he started pulling at some threads, Esquire pulled out of the feature. Fortunately, The Guardian agreed to publish McDermott’s investigative reporting, in which he found little of Shetty’s origin story holds up to scrutiny.

John joins Derek and Matthew to discuss.

Show Notes

Uncovering the higher truth of Jay Shetty

‘Very few have balls’: How American news lost its nerve

Jay Shetty Is Full Of SH*T!

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198: Holy Food (w/Christina Ward) Mar 21, 2024

Show notes

Does God have a recipe? That’s the first line of the blurb of Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat: An American History by independent food historian, Christina Ward. Ward’s survey of American religious groups and cults through the foods they grow, source, and prepare leads into an in-depth discussion about cults and high-demand groups that use food, and food restrictions, as a method for control.

That’s not all she tells Derek—they also discuss the ritual of sharing a meal. Matthew and Julian offer their own reflections on food in high-demand settings before Christina joins to discuss her excellent book.

Show Notes

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Bonus Sample: Ketamine Soul Mates Mar 18, 2024

Show notes

Dolphins, drugs, new age music. Isolation tanks as a portal into other dimensions. True love and fake aliens. Julian shares a personal love story from the nineties that intersects with the work of prolific scientist, inventor, and psychonaut, John C. Lilly.

The belief that we can contact extraterrestrial civilizations, which are waiting to usher humanity into a golden age of light and love, is now a hugely profitable and popular commodity. Apparently these extraterrestrials also want to help us vanquish the forces of Deep State darkness. This is evidenced by the QAnon-and-alien-disclosure-style of programming on Gaia’s spiritual subscription platform (which brings in roughly $80 million annually).

Yet: Gaia is currently embroiled in a legal battle with a former host who claims that his stories about secret space programs and eight-foot tall “blue avian” aliens are actually part of his trademarked creative IP. When it comes down to dollars, he admits it’s all make-believe. Has he really ever dropped acid in a flotation tank though?!

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Brief: RFK Jr Hijacks the “Crisis in Masculinity” (w/Natalia Petrzela) Mar 16, 2024

Show notes

Masculinity, in all its wounded and preening anxiety, is the perennial currency of American populism.

America’s foremost public historian on fitness and education, Natalia Petrzela, returns to the pod to discuss her recent study, with Ilyse Hogue, of the appeal RFK Jr. has with young men, and what progressives can learn from it.

Show Notes

Bio – Natalia Petrzela

RFK Jr. has a distinct appeal when it comes to young male voters — Petrzela and Hogue

Robert F. Kennedy Jr | "My Plan To Heal Addiction" | News Nation

Prior coverage of RFK Jr.

Brief: RFK Jr Flirts with Body Fascism (w/Natalia Petrzela) — Conspirituality

164: The Two Faces of Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. — Conspirituality

Brief: The New Age Origin Story of RFK Jr’s Campaign — Conspirituality

Brief: RFK Jr’s New Director of Propaganda — Conspirituality

Special Report: RFK Jr.’s Independence Day — Conspirituality

Brief: RFK's Health Propaganda Roundtable — Conspirituality

Brief: RFK Jr., The Anti-Vax Candidate — Conspirituality

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197: Psychic Surgery (feat Brad Abrahams) Mar 14, 2024

Show notes

The “healer” mutters prayers, flutters his hands over the patient’s belly, then rubs his fingers close to her navel. A stream of what looks like blood shoots out from between his fingers. After a few more finger wiggles, he appears to pull several bloody cocktail shrimp out of an invisible incision. The patient is healed. Of something.

Welcome to “psychic surgery.”

Documentarian of the uncanny, Brad Abrahams, takes our correspondent seat this week to explain how Shirley MacLaine, Burt Lancaster, Andy Kaufman, Charlie Mingus, and tens of thousands of Americans got drawn into the morbid healing craze that kicked off in the 1970s, and which may have seen its last hurrah with the imprisonment of Brazil’s John of God.

Centuries of colonization in Brazil and the Philippines, Brad explains, made conventional medical care basically unavailable for anyone poor or outside of major cities. This left a void for traditional and alternative healing to fill as the only real options, as well as provide a connection to a cultural identity that had been systematically repressed. And of course, charlatans rode the wave.

Brad brings his characteristic curiosity, empathy, and cultural competence, holding the door open for us to imagine why this abject form of medical and spiritual fraud speaks so deeply to so many.

Show Notes

Love And Saucers — Brad Abrahams

Do you see what I see? | Short Doc about Controversial Conspiracy Theorist Artist David Dees — Brad Abrahams

72: John of Fraud (w/Lisa Braun Dubbels & Mirna Wabi-Sabi) — Conspirituality

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Bonus Sample: How to Stamp Out Racists (and more) Mar 11, 2024

Show notes

At what point do you tune someone out and no longer consider them worth considering? Is their entire catalog of thought defined by one encounter you don’t like? Multiple encounters? If you disagree with someone on one point, do you write them off entirely, or can you consider other points of agreement? What if your initial encounter with a thinker is disagreeable? What if you really like someone and then find them increasingly disagreeable over time? Have they really changed that much? Or have you? And would you know it if you did?

Derek meditates on these questions while working through his own process of consideration. Most importantly, he lands on one certainty: racists, bigots, transphobes, and misogynists need to be stamped out.

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Brief: The God Pivot: Rogan, Brand, & Huberman Mar 09, 2024

Show notes

Being a chaos agent is exhausting. The internet never ends. It’s so abstract, groundless. At some point, all of your content seems stale and redundant. All the conspiracy theories, outrage farming, and dietary supplements seem boring; your manic salesmanship starts to feel hollow. Maybe you’re also wondering about whether you’ve sold your soul, or who you may have hurt along the way.

What will you turn to? Who will help you? What will your ultimate piece of content be? From time out of mind, there’s only ever been one answer: GOD. Russell Brand, Joe Rogan, and Andrew Huberman have all recently made such confessions of faith. Derek and Matthew discuss.

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196: Julian Goes to the New Age Expo! Mar 07, 2024

Show notes

For 22 years, astrologers, channelers, and UFO enthusiasts have run booths next to crystal healers, purveyors of esoteric books and pseudoscience products, and paranormal enthusiasts at Los Angeles’s Airport Hilton. More recently, this event—the Conscious Life Expo—has increasingly featured speakers spouting red-pilled conspiracy theories about COVID, vaccines, and the Satanic alien reptilian cabal coming for your children.

To get an insider’s view, Julian donned his gray baseball camp and grabbed his recorder to do his own research on the latest iteration of conference room conspirituality.

Show Notes

Introduction to CymaTones cymatic sound therapy

Activate your Pineal Gland: An introduction to your third eye and exercises to awaken the higher mind: Ruehlig, Bianca

Shawn Buckley, Trucker Lawyer

Ottawa's use of Emergencies Act against convoy protests was unreasonable, violated Charter, court rules

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Bonus Sample: “There Are Worse Things Than Dying” Mar 04, 2024

Show notes

This is a newly favorite mantra that RFK Jr is using on the presidential stump.

The subtext, uttered in the shadow of a pandemic that this guy did what he could to minimize and bypass, carries a lot of American spiritual—or maybe pseudospiritual—baggage.

Digging into what he means and what his demographic hears when he says “There are worse things than dying,” can tell us a lot about the status of Death, Grief and Belief in the American psyche—and even global capitalism—in this volatile time.

This episode is a recording of a talk Matthew gave at the 2024 Symposium on Death and Bereavement Studies in January, organized online by Terri Daniel of Portland, OR.

Show Notes

2024 Symposium - Death, Grief, and Belief

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Brief: The CPAC Pope and the Icicle Babies (w/ Brad Onishi) Mar 02, 2024

Show notes

Brad Onishi of Straight White American Jesus sits down with Matthew to analyze the debut of “America’s Bishop,” Joseph Strickland, on the CPAC stage, where he blessed MAGA Christian Nationalism with his purple finery and endless torrent of anti-choice bafflegab.

Strickland—removed as Archbishop of Tyler, Texas in November by the ultra-woke Pope Francis—has hit the influencer circuit to firm up the sometimes-precarious Evangelical-Catholic alliance on the backs of women. His aw-shucks “humility” and East Texas drawl offers this reactionary movement genteel cover for its aggressive fever dreams. He is, as Onishi puts it, the Catholic Ned Flanders who conspires with Mr. Burns at night.

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Show Notes

Conspirituality 183: Woke Pope Cancels America's Bishop w/Mike Lewis

Weekly Roundup: Embryos are People Now? — Straight White American Jesus

Nazis mingle openly at CPAC, spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories and finding allies

Bishop Strickland at CPAC — LIfesite News (redpill site warning!)

The making of Bishop Strickland - Where Peter Is

Strickland's Adventurous Online Legacy - Mike Lewis Extra

Bishop Strickland's "Letter from a Friend"

Twitter photo: Strickland with Fournier and Pavone

Catholic Priest Uses Aborted Fetus On Altar In Appeal For Donald Trump (Trigger warning. Image blurred, but still, JFC.)

Fr. Frank Pavone uses aborted fetus in message for Election Day | National Catholic Reporter

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