Conspirituality
byDerek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker
ScienceSocialSocietyCulturePhilosophy
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...
Episodes(40 episodes)
Bonus Sample: An Ode to Curiosity
When videos surfaced of Alex Pretti kicking an ICE vehicle's taillight 11 days before his murder, claims that the video was AI dominated social media. Some commenters even posted articles that stated the opposite of what they thought they said.
Derek explores the necessity of curiosity when coming across information that contradicts what you want to hear. First, he explores it through his love of books before applying the skill to situations like the Pretti video. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Published: Feb 2, 2026Duration: 5:51
Brief: Did MAHA Put MAGA In Power?
The silence of MAHA influencers around the murder of Renee Good (and ICE generally) has been excessively loud. Yet that’s expected from the coalition that voted for Donald Trump in order to install RFK Jr at this point. Many believe “health isn’t political” while refusing to accept or acknowledge what their vote has empowered.
Dr Jonathan Howard, a neurologist and psychiatrist at NYU Langone’s Multiple Sclerosis Comprehensive Care Center, returns to the podcast to talk about MAGA’s enablers in the MAHA movement with Derek and Julian.
Show Notes
MAHA Gave Us MAGA...
Published: Jan 31, 2026Duration: 37:09
293: Trump and Fascist Dementia
As Trump surges his Gestapo and threatens to annex new territory, his brain is collapsing. He’s sundowning on Truth Social, nodding off in meetings, slurring words, slurping at the saliva pooling in his mouth. His insults and aggressions are as constant and predictable as his arms are, reaching out for handholds.
Up until this point, discourse on the mental health of this decrepit fascist leader has used the kid gloves of psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry, in which even the most informed analyses were constrained by the fact that experts were interpreting his inner states. For our pa...
Published: Jan 29, 2026Duration: 58:06
Bonus Sample: Simone Weil: We Have Obligations Before We Have Rights
Listen to the full episode
Simone Weil was skeptical about the project of “rights.” They argued that obligations come before rights, and that rights only become real when obligations are recognized and lived.
Weil believed the French Revolution made a foundational error by grounding society in rights rather than eternal obligations, creating a contradiction that still haunts liberal democracies today. Rights, Weil argues, carry a bargaining spirit and ultimately depend on force for enforcement, while obligations arise unconditionally from the mere fact of another person’s vulnerability. You owe something to others not because they’ve assert...
Published: Jan 26, 2026Duration: 5:34
Brief: Prospirituality Predictions for 2026
If conspirituality names the ways religion and spirituality are weaponized to justify power, prospirituality points to religious traditions doing the opposite: grounding resistance, ethical clarity, and solidarity in moments of crisis.
So: is there a growing prospirituality response to fascism, genocide, climate collapse, and AI-driven labor precarity? Matthew argues that yeah, there’s some good news.
In Israel, scripture has been mobilized by political and religious leaders to sacralize violence in Gaza. But there’s also a surge of Jewish religious resistance among U.S. rabbis and Peter Beinart’s On Being Jewish After Gaza sets a n...
Published: Jan 24, 2026Duration: 28:31
292: Women of Jan 6 (w/ Noelle Cook)
Noelle Cook’s The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging is the first ethnography of conspirituality, and it comes via someone who was able to really embed themselves in a volatile culture and find its emotional logic. She’s our guest today.
Cook focuses on the travails of two middle-aged women following the January 6 Capitol riot. By spending years befriending and talking with Tammy Butry and Yvonne St. Cyr, Cook is able to document the impacts of childhood trauma and systemic neglect—as well as diverse personality quirks—that can drive folks toward QAnon.
They ar...
Published: Jan 22, 2026Duration: 1:08:11
Bonus Sample: Oil, Power, and Theocracy
In 1953 the CIA and MI6 participated in a coup d’etat in Iran. That true sentence (and what usually follows) can create an oversimplified distortion of history—and present. But Iran is in the news again with the biggest protests since the 1979 Islamic Revolution bringing millions to the streets. The regime unsurprisingly cracked down hard: at least 2,700 protesters have been killed and 18,000 arrested.
Though the initial impetus was economic, these are the latest in a wave of growing uprisings in Iran against the far-right theocratic authoritarian government—especially its treatment of women. How did we get here? What h...
Published: Jan 19, 2026Duration: 7:08
MAHA’s Selective Skepticism
Whole milk is back! The war on protein is over! Mainline meat!
Derek investigates the new inverted pyramid and everything lacking in the new dietary guidelines.
Show Notes
The New Dietary Guidelines and the “Flipped Pyramid”
Several of Kennedy’s Dietary Advisers Have Ties to Meat and Dairy Interests
Carotenoid bioavailability is higher from salads ingested with full-fat than with fat-reduced salad dressings as measured with electrochemical detection
Human health effects of conjugated linoleic acid from milk and supplements
Enhancing the fatty acid profile of milk t...
Published: Jan 17, 2026Duration: 23:55
291: My Chinese Buddhist Israeli AI Guru
“Train your mind gently, not to deny what is hard, but to see what is still good” implores the monk sharing spiritual messages to his 2.5 million Instagram followers. Clad in an orange robe—well, sometimes a blue robe, sometimes grey or yellow—the little man of unknown descent speaks knowledge from a temple constructed from just about every Asian country imaginable. As it turns out, the creators of the AI-generated Yang Mun are…Israeli tech bros?
Turns out AI isn’t just for spirituality. There’s an entire industry of health slopfluencers pushing untested supplements, as Derek covers before...
Published: Jan 15, 2026Duration: 1:06:06
Bonus Sample: Overwelled
From Andrew Huberman's Goop collab and Mel Robbins' protein shots to MAHA flipping the long-defunct food pyramid and making meningitis great again, the first full week of 2026 was off to quite a start. Derek covers the week that made heads spin.
Show Notes
Andrew Huberman is Optimizing Turkey Chili
Mel Robbins is Selling Protein Shots
What to Know About the New Childhood Vaccine Schedule
Health officials slash the number of vaccines recommended for all kids
Johns Hopkins doctor concerned over CDC's new child vaccine recommendations
...
Published: Jan 12, 2026Duration: 4:20
Brief: Censorship Industrial Complex
Marco Rubio’s office published an official press release last month titled “Announcement of Actions to Combat the Global Censorship Industrial Complex.” The memo discusses the decision to impose visa restrictions on five individuals due to their “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.”
One of those individuals is Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate and repeat Conspirituality podcast guest. Derek and Julian break down what's going on with this case.
Show Notes
Rubio Announcement
CBC: Individuals Named and EU Reactio...
Published: Jan 10, 2026Duration: 22:16
290: Trump Derangement Science
What do fascists need to do to convince their rank and file that they’re the smartest in the room? They invent new science to trash the old science they didn’t like. First, we look into how RFK Jr is “making the proof” for all his scientific endeavors, then unpacking a new proposal from the AZ state sena Janae Shamp about how she’s going to get to the bottom of the clinical diagnosis of Trump Derangement Syndrome. First, we read a lovely bio-romance poem from our favorite ex-Mormon vampire millionaire, Bryan Johnson.
Show Notes
CDC awar...
Published: Jan 8, 2026Duration: 1:06:32
Bonus Sample: What My Late Mom Would Have Thought About Jordan Peterson
Matthew reflects on the fifth anniversary of his mother’s death and revisits how her life, trauma, and values helped him understand the appeal—and fatal flaw—of Jordan Peterson’s worldview. Toughness can be an expression of love without becoming a politics of cruelty.
Show Notes
33: Manipulating the Hero’s Journey
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Published: Jan 5, 2026Duration: 5:33
Brief: Class Wars on Christmas
Have you seen the “Grinch prank” video trend? Bad parenting, yes. But also a nod to the conflicts, ancient and modern, embedded in Christmas.
Contrary to what Bill O’Reilly would tell you, there has never been a “war on Christmas.” Rather, Christmas itself has always been a battleground over love, dignity, and resources. What we’re really fighting over is who gets care in systems built on scarcity and extraction.
Vignette 1: The Original Creche
Vignette 2: Krampus
Vignette 3: Dickens, Chekhov, and Andersen
Vignette 4: The Christmas Truce, 1914
Vignette 5: Dr. Seuss and the Grinch
Show Notes
Andersen, H...
Published: Jan 3, 2026Duration: 35:30
289: Big Wellness’s Nicotine Gambit [feat Mallory DeMille]
In 1965, the US passed the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, the reason every pack of cigarettes has a warning label informing you about the potentially harmful effects. Since then, numerous regulations, educational drives, and taxation initiatives have made smoking less appealing and harder to do.
In the contrarian wellness space, nicotine has become the alkaloid du jour. Forget cigs, this special chemical helps your energy, mood, and, at the far end of the influencer spectrum, treat cancer and autism—without that being medical advice, of course. And while nicotine has been shown to be potentially beneficial fo...
Published: Jan 1, 2026Duration: 50:19
Bonus Sample: Alien Abduction Mack Daddy
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In 1994, Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatry professor John E. Mack became one of the most pedigreed proponents of UFOs, alien abductions, and the alien-hybrid breeding scheme. He was introduced to celebrated painter, amateur hypnotherapist, and UFO researcher Budd Hopkins by transpersonal psychologist Stan Grof. Hopkins had helped author Whitley Strieber recover the abduction “memories” that became the book (and then movie) Communion.
Mack and Hopkins quickly produced their own movie, Intruders. Mack published Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, going on the TV talk-show circuit with star patients that believed they were being...
Published: Dec 29, 2025Duration: 5:59
Brief: Nicki Minaj Goes MAGA
Turning Point USA's AmFest 2025 saw a record number of attendees pour into Phoenix last weekend to watch a host of MAGA and MAHA luminaries proclaim they're raging against the Deep State—even though their coalition is now the Deep State. Derek and Julian look at the conference through the lens of the white, Christian Nationalist identity politics on display.
Show Notes
Inside AmericaFest: Infighting, lies and the desperate search for Charlie Kirk’s heir
Vance Refuses to Take Sides in G.O.P. Fight Over Bigotry
Turning Point exposed a brewing MAGA...
Published: Dec 27, 2025Duration: 36:28
UNLOCKED: Chatbot Awakening to Love and Enlightenment!
An unlock of a bonus episode from earlier this year. Access all of our bonus episodes here.
Happy holidays, everyone!
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Earlier this year, a spate of news stories told of chatbot users travelling through the looking-glass right into Conspirituality. Paranoid conspiracies, spiritual awakenings, even falling head-over-heels in love with the simulated personalities of large language models like ChatGPT.
Could AI have finally crossed the threshold into autonomous sentient consciousness? Could it be that chatbots were anointing new prophets—or, conversely, that very special users were awakening their very special friend...
Published: Dec 25, 2025Duration: 51:25
Bonus Sample: The Monetization of MAHA
Listen to the full episode
RFK Jr trademarked MAHA in a giant swath of categories, including many he now advocates for in his position as Secretary of HHS. After making $100,000 in licensing fees, he transferred the trademark to his anti-vax compatriot, Del Bigtree, before it was transferred again to former Kennedy security lead, Gavin de Becker. Currently being used by a variety of MAHA-based organizations, the opportunity to monetize MAHA, the brand, could be directly affected by Kennedy’s policies. Given how much MAHA leadership loathes social services, more health-based privatization could be on the horizon—just as P...
Published: Dec 22, 2025Duration: 8:16
Brief: Dr Mike vs MAHA
Dr Mike has become one of the most effective debunkers of science misinformation. His second appearance on the uber-popular show, Jubilee's Surrounded, pitted him against 20 fans of RFK Jr. Derek and Julian discuss the debate, as well as the value of Jubilee in an oversaturated media environment.
Show Notes
1 Doctor vs 20 RFK Jr. Supporters (ft Doctor Mike) Surrounded Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Published: Dec 20, 2025Duration: 34:25