Conspirituality
by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker
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,
Episodes
-
332: The Protest Kids in France (w/Anthony Mansuy)
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...
-
Bonus Sample: Mikki Willis Injects More Bad Medicine
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...
-
Book Club: American Caesar (w/Brad Onishi)
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...
-
331: Charles Eisenstein Reflects
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...
-
Bonus Sample: The New Age Nuclear Doomsday Prophet
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...
-
Book Club: The Last Temptation of Beck (w/Josephine Riesman)
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...
-
330: The Hypocrisies of Paul Saladino [feat Mallory DeMille]
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...
-
Bonus Sample: Max Haiven’s The Player and the Played
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…
more -
Book Club: Protocols (w/Scott Carney)
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…
more -
DROP: It’s Not a Horseshoe. It’s a Business Model.
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...
-
329: Does Claude Have Charisma?
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…
more -
When Men Lie: Listening to the MAHA Summit
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...
-
Brief: Mark Carney, Davos Catholic
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…
more -
328: Canadaland Platforms Antivax Grifter
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...
-
Bonus Sample: The Pope, the Playwright, & the Electrician
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...
-
Book Club: Man In The Mirror
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,...
-
327: AOC Meets MAHA
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.…
more -
DROP: When Spiritual Teachers Abuse Their Power
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...
-
Bonus Sample: Swoletarians and the Left Manosphere Attack a Disability Activist
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"...
-
Book Club: Fed Up
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...
-
326: The War on Empathy
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...
-
Bonus Sample: What Happened to Yoga?
A recent article in The Atlantic ponders the current state of yoga. Derek weighs in based on his decades-long experiences. Show Notes What Happened to Yoga?
-
Brief: The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy Theory (w/AJA Woods)
AJA Woods (The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy) joins Matthew to trace how "cultural Marxism" mutated from Nazi "cultural Bolshevism" and the British Union of Fascists' attacks on modernist art, through Lyndon LaRouche's CIA-brainwashing lore, into Paul Weyrich and William Lind's 1990s "political...
-
325: Long COVID Profiteers
Conspiracy theorists have decided Novak Djokovic has long COVID — despite no evidence — because he's become an anti-vax icon courted by RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz. So we thought it was high time for a long COVID update. Derek looks at a new Boston Children's Hospital research on viral reactivation, as…
more -
DROP: Kennedy Chooses Erectile Dysfunction Over Postpartum Research
Heading into the holiday weekend, RFK Jr terminated almost all grants dedicated to the Office of Minority Health. Now, $38 million over four years will be redirected from postpartum screenings and assistance for Black and Native American families to "research" on erectile dysfunction…
more -
Bonus Sample: How Oprah and Art Bell Red-Pilled 1990’s Normie America
Listen to the full episode The 1990s were a special time in American media. Female-coded, liberal-leaning, daytime TV talk shows like the Oprah Winfrey Show normalized past-life regression, alien abduction, and Satanic Ritual Abuse for housewives. At the same time, male-coded…
more -
Book Club: The Nerd Reich
Support the podcast and listen ad-free Gil Duran's exceptional new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, explains how technofascists like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Curtis Yarvin, JD Vance, and Marc Andreessen are not-so-quietly dismantling America as we know it.…
more -
324: Then They Came for Dolly
Listen ad-free The irreplaceable Dolly Parton died on August 25 after a brief battle with cancer. Social media was filled with loving tributes to an incredible artist and devoted philanthropist. A minority also felt the need to use her death to platform their own issues, including a cohort common...
-
Bonus Sample: Piker, the Zhongshan Suit, and Left Melancholy
Listen to the full episode There’s a lot going on when Hasan Piker wears a Zhongshan suit and praises Maoism. Matthew uses Wendy Brown's 1999 essay "Resisting Left Melancholy", which cites Walter Benjamin, Freud, and Stuart Hall to argue that campist rhetoric on the left, whether earnest or…
more -
Book Club: Plastic Shaman
During James Arthur Ray’s 2009 Spiritual Warrior retreat in Sedona, the self-proclaimed spiritual teacher exhorted participants to “play full-on” in order to overcome their limiting beliefs and fear of death. After having their heads shaved and enduring a gruelling 36-hour “vision quest,” Ray...
-
323: Joe Rogan Defects?
Support the podcast and listen ad-free Someday in the future, Joe Rogan may ask Jamie to be his mirror, and facilitate the next and most important psychedelic experience of his life: a walkthrough of his craven MAGA and MAHA boosterism, and what it said about his soul. On his ayahuasca trip,...
-
Bonus Sample: Has RFK Jr Kept His Promises?
Listen to the full episode Presidential hopeful Robert F Kennedy Jr held a “health policy roundtable” on Rumble on June 27, 2023, just as he was shoring up support from a band of contrarian doctors, anti-vax activists, and wellness influencers. During the conversation, he made 15 promises if he…
more -
Brief: Wetiko: Original, New Age & Marxist Views
Matthew traces the concept of wetiko — a Cree figure for a cannibal spirit whose hunger grows with what it consumes — from its original anticolonial and anti-imperialist meaning in Jack Forbes's 1992 book Columbus and Other Cannibals, through Derrick Jensen's anti-civilization lense, Ladha and...
-
322: The Cult of Spiralism
Support the podcast Spiralism is a quasi-spiritual online movement that emerged from long, intense conversations between humans and AI chatbots. Across users, platforms, and models, chatbots have engaged deeply with users about identity and consciousness, leading to discussions of “awakening.”…
more -
Bonus Sample: 1970’s Violent Revolutionary Chic
Listen to the full episode The “Summer of Love” ushered in a decade of revolutionary terrorism in the West. “Bring the war home” went the slogan of the Weather Underground, a small and highly-educated Marxist-Leninist group who’d decided violent revolution was the only answer to American...
-
Book Club: How the Internet Disrupted Science
How the Internet Disrupted Science is an enlightening gaze into the shady world of for-profit and open access scientific publishing. Authors Kent Anderson and Joy Moore join Derek to discuss their exceptional new work. Show Notes How the Internet Disrupted Science
-
321: Inflammation Pseudoscience
Inflammation is an important and necessary part of the body’s healing process. It’s also long been a wellness buzzword used to sell products that do very little to treat it. This week, we look at inflammation through the lens of a new Mother Jones article, “The Great Inflammation Panic,”…
more -
Bonus Sample: Conspirituality in the Age of Hyperpolitics
Listen to the full episode Matthew applies Anton Jäger's Hyperpolitics—a theory of extreme politicization without institutional consequence—to conspirituality and to his own political biography. Continuing a mini-series begun with "Conspirituality Viewed Through Neofeudalism and Vectoralism,"...
-
Brief: The Ceuta Crisis Great Replacement Conspiracy
Last week, around 72,000 migrants flooded from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. What really happened? Was a local girl abducted, never to be seen again? Did the Moroccan border guards step aside (or even collaborate) in an organized operation? Right-wing politicians and pundits were…
more -
DROP: Who Killed Charlie Kirk? (w/Brandy Zadrozny)
Support the podcast MS NOW senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny spent 10 months tracking the conspiracy theories that evolved online in the wake of the death of Charlie Kirk. She joins Derek to discuss what her investigation found. Show Notes Deep End: Who Killed Charlie Kirk? Charlie Kirk’s murder…
more -
320: The Fauci Files
During an extraordinary career, Dr. Anthony Fauci led the federal response to HIV-AIDS, SARS, H1N1, Ebola, and Zika. He always advocated funding for pandemic preparedness, vaccine development, immunology and pathogen research. Then came COVID-19, which, unlike outbreaks past, was trapped in a...
-
Bonus Sample: The Fauci Show Trial
In the lead-up to our full episode on Anthony Fauci this Thursday, Derek looks at a recent MAHA Action webinar that focused on Rand Paul's publicly releasing over 1,100 pages of diary entries and other related material. As with all things MAHA, the event largely turned into a marketing pitch for...
-
Brief: Red Scare Rising
Back in the fall, Trump's NSPM-7 redirected the FBI, DOJ, and IRS toward "left-wing political violence," opening the door to labeling domestic groups terrorist organizations — despite three independent datasets (New America, CSIS, even the ADL!) showing right-wing violence outpacing left-wing...
-
319: Climate Conspirituality
Support the podcast and keep independent media alive Climate reality keeps colliding with denial, erasure, and rebranding — across media, politics, and religion. Temu conspiritualists weave melted stories about the origins of wildfires, while the high-class guys run...
-
Bonus Sample: Reality, Monsters & Brain Glitches
Listen to the full episode What do films like Dracula, The Truman Show, The Matrix, Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, Being John Malkovich, and Night of the Living Dead all have in common? Science fiction and horror bend our everyday experiences and beliefs around mind and body, sensory perception,...
-
Brief: The Chiropractors Are Coming
Support the podcast The MAHA Chiropractic Hub had a big launch in Washington DC this week, with RFK Jr extolling the benefits of the practice—and promising to redirect research funds their way as his movement attempts to spread chiropractic throughout the American healthcare system. But can back...
-
318: Wellness is the New Big Pharma [feat Mallory DeMille]
Support the pod on Patreon The pharmaceutical industry is filled with greedy businessmen getting innocent consumers hooked on their toxic products in order to barely keep them alive. But if you want to actually thrive, an entire array of natural supplements are just a click away. So goes most…
more -
Bonus Sample: Today at Death’s Door
Listen to the full episode Matthew considers two registers of painful eulogy: spectacles thrown for elite terrible people, and the music offered for ordinary terrible people, when we can manage it. Lindsey Graham's death triggered a wave of bullshit from Trump, Harris, Booker, Netanyahu, and...
-
Brief: Graham Platner’s QAnon Moment
Access ad-free listening and support the podcast Graham Platner’s recent 11-minute video, where he announced he was dropping out of his bid for the US Senate, is filled with some of the hallmarks we heard during peak QAnon: there's a deep state conspiracy between powerful politicians and the…
more -
317: Jordan Peterson vs the Nuns
Jordan Peterson is back. After a hiatus due to a, well, a whole lot of problems, he’s up for regular posting on his social media channels. We’re going to take a look at what’s happened over the last year or so of his absence, followed by his influence in the so-called manosphere podcast world.…
more
About this show
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,
Hosted by
Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker
Categories