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)
288: Conspirituality Live with Dr Jessica Knurick
Derek sits down with Dr Jessica Knurick at the Eudemonia Summit for this special live recording. They discuss combating health misinformation online, what MAHA gets right and wrong, whether or not "nutritionist" should be a protected term, and Jessica's possible political ambitions.
Show Notes
Dr Jessica Knurick on Substack | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Published: Dec 18, 2025Duration: 1:06:22
Bonus Sample: Marx’s “Atheism” vs. the Capitalist Religion of Everyday Life
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Matthew explores Marx’s “opium of the people” passage by placing it back into the philosophical and political project it came from. Marx was not attacking religion in some essential way, but criticizing the conditions that make religion necessary as a consolation. The problem is not faith itself, but the suffering — inequality, exploitation, alienation — that gives rise to the instinct for spiritual escape.
Marx’s atheism was not a New Atheist-type negation but a theological critique — a way of revealing how capitalism itself can displace Christianity as a religion of profit, rent, a...
Published: Dec 15, 2025Duration: 5:31
Brief: Demonic Karl Marx ATTACKS Private Property and DESTROYS Religion
Matthew examines how Karl Marx has long been framed as a demonic threat to religion and private property — a tactic that sidesteps Marx’s actual critique of capitalism. J. Edgar Hoover, Ronald Reagan, and a raft of Evangelical blowhards cast communism as satanic and civilization-ending, a narrative now accelerating through Trump-era rhetoric, and Project 2025.
Capital is difficult to rebut directly, so detractors often attack Marx himself, calling him godless or deranged. Jordan Peterson and Paul Kengor treat Marx’s horny gothic teenage poems as literal evidence of demonic influence—which is much more interesting to them than taking su...
Published: Dec 13, 2025Duration: 40:49
287: She Did Nuzzi RFK Jr Coming
How does an elite Millennial politics reporter wind up having phone sex with and giving campaign advice to the 70-year-old emerging fascist she’s reporting on?
Most of that should stay between Olivia Nuzzi and her therapist. What we do know is that American Canto, Nuzzi’s new book, is a memoir (or maybe novel) made for the conspirituality age, in which raging toxic roided-up hypocritical male charisma is always the center of attention.
The domineering ghoul is the pole star of interest and fascination, always moving too fast and chaotically to understand—unless you know h...
Published: Dec 11, 2025Duration: 58:54
Bonus Sample: “Joe Rogan of The Left” Glazes China
Listen to the full episode here
Hasan Piker just spent two weeks in The People’s Republic of China. The famous streamer is often invoked as being a potential “Joe Rogan of The Left,” who might bring young voters, especially working class men, back into the Democratic Party.
But Piker’s livestreams from China raise controversial questions. Is he whitewashing Chinese human rights abuses? Was he paid by their government to propagandize his combined 5 million viewers? How else to explain first-class plane tickets, ultra-luxury hotel rooms, privileged access to forbidden Western social media, and carefully avoiding...
Published: Dec 8, 2025Duration: 5:58
Brief: Have Tech Bros Killed Psychedelics?
"Immortality influencer" Bryan Johnson recently livestreamed his second-ever psilocybin trip "for science." But was it, really? Derek and Julian break down the performative nature of this stunt and discuss the growing right-wing influence on psychedelics culture.
Show Notes
Bryan Johnson Has Discovered Shrooms, and He Really Wants You to Know It
Silicon Valley’s Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends
How the Right Coopted Psychedelics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Published: Dec 6, 2025Duration: 28:41
286: RFK Jr’s Great Crusade
RFK Jr is one of the greatest perpetrators of a firehose of falsehoods that we’ve ever covered. The stakes were raised when he was installed as head of America’s public health system. A new longform article in The Atlantic offers an inside look at the history and current thinking of this man, as insightful for what it offers as telling for what it omits. We discuss the role of journalism in an age defined by propaganda.
Show Notes
Scoop: The new #2 at CDC is a top ivermectin prescriber who ended Louisiana’s vaccine-promotion media...
Published: Dec 4, 2025Duration: 1:08:18
Bonus Sample: How Does Andrew Wakefield Keep Getting Resurrected?
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With the CDC recently updating its website with anti-vax propaganda under the direction of RFK Jr, disgraced and disbarred physician, Andrew Wakefield, is back in the news. In fact, Senator Ron Johnson even tweeted out that he deserves an apology. He must be relying on short attention spans, given all the ways Wakefield manipulated the “study” that showed a link between vaccines and autism—even though the study itself found no such proof.
Derek revisits the retracted 1998 study, as well as shows just how much proof exists to the contrary of the...
Published: Dec 1, 2025Duration: 5:53
Brief: Black Friday’s Wellness Extravaganza
Derek and Julian survey all of the incredible, life-changing deals going down this weekend in Wellnesslandia.
Show Notes
Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Published: Nov 29, 2025Duration: 34:24
285: Can Peter Attia Live Forever?
In the wildly popular biohacking and longevity space, Peter Attia is often cited as one of the leading luminaries. His straightforward, science-backed approach seems to cut through the noise in a space dominated by fit bros and wellness grifters who always seem to have a product to sell. But the man who dropped out of residency at Johns Hopkins to found a private clinic focused on longevity has his share of critics, who are a bit suspicious about his self-experimentations—and the millions he makes counseling Silicon Valley insiders about experimental medicine.
This week we take a lo...
Published: Nov 27, 2025Duration: 1:11:18
Bonus Sample: Graeber vs Bannon, Anarchism vs Leninism (Part 2)
This bonus episode is Part 2 of Graeber vs Bannon, Anarchism vs Leninism.
I start in the 1870s with Marx and Bakunin fighting over the joys and traumas of the Paris Commune. Marx sees it as an imperfect but historic prototype of a workers’ transitional state, cut down before it could consolidate power. Bakunin reads it as a betrayal of anarchist principles — too willing to replicate the machinery it meant to overthrow. Out of that conflict comes a rift that still haunts us: should revolution be disciplined, organized, and strategic, or spontaneous, horizontal, and permanently suspicious of institutions?
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Published: Nov 24, 2025Duration: 4:49
Brief: Graeber vs Bannon, Anarchism vs Leninism (Part 1)
In this first of a two-part series, I dig into a century-long debate within revolutionary politics—one that now shapes the fault lines between MAGA authoritarianism and the fragmented resistance against it.
How did the American far right end up using Leninist strategy more effectively than the American left? And what does that say about our own movements—our blind spots, our strengths, and inherited illusions?
In 2013, Steve Bannon called himself a Leninist. In 2016, he openly called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” In Trump 2.0, he’s been an ideological whip for the vanguardism of Project 2...
Published: Nov 22, 2025Duration: 43:28
284: When Prophecy-Science Fails (w/Thomas Kelly)
In 1954 a doomsday alien cult headed up by Chicagoland housewife Dorothy Martin was waiting for the cataclysmic flood that would herald the arrival of spaceships to transport her and her followers to safety. When the hour came and went and nothing happened, she and her followers made up a Bible’s worth of excuses, saying that the group's penitence and piety had saved them, and so the failure of the prophecy was actually a validation of their new religion. And even though its central claim had been refuted, they accelerated their efforts to proselytize and convert new followers.
T...
Published: Nov 20, 2025Duration: 1:12:12
Bonus Sample: Temple of Blood & Fire
They offered initiation into ancient Christian mysticism, ritual communion with the spirits, an understanding of reincarnation, and the destined transition to inhabiting a "solar-body" in the Sirius star-system. But it all ended in murderous blood sacrifice and fire—and 74 dead believers.
What is this dark preoccupation with sacrifice and ritual killing in the name of metaphysical belief? Grotesque to modern ears, yet quite commonplace historically.
Julian covers the late 20th-century French cult, The Order of the Solar Temple, for his Roots of Conspirituality series. They identified with the Knights Templar, weaving Rosicrucianism and Theosophy into a...
Published: Nov 17, 2025Duration: 7:02
Brief: Does Calley Means Get Anything Right?
RFK Jr's senior advisor and supplements salesman, Calley Means, has repeatedly fabricated the story of Abraham Flexner and the birth of the modern medical system. Derek looks into his historical revisionism and what it could mean for the MAHA movement.
Show Notes
Medical Education in America: Abraham Flexner
The Great Influenza: John Barry
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: Roy Porter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Published: Nov 15, 2025Duration: 28:13
283: Guys
Back in June, we published an episode about the "Speaking with American Men" (SAM) project, a $20 million initiative designed by political consultants to understand and win back young men (18-29) who increasingly voted for Donald Trump. We talked about this cringey, inauthentic approach to compete over the influence of manosphere figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Huberman, who exploit a perceived "meaning crisis" with pseudo-intellectual and often reactionary messages.
Instead of what? We said that the better route would be to focus on material concerns so that the rage of young men isn’t ceded to right-wing mov...
Published: Nov 13, 2025Duration: 1:06:40
Bonus Sample: MAHA Inaction
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The nonprofit organization (and its adjoined Super PAC), MAHA Action, is leading semi-regular Zoom calls featuring a host of wellness influencers and RFK Jr appointees, including Jillian Michaels, Dr Oz, and Russell Brand. Derek listens into a recent call to see just what they're saying. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Published: Nov 10, 2025Duration: 5:57
Brief: Taylor Swift Goes MAGA?
Taylor Swift: Nazi sympathizer, freshly-minted racist, MAGA trad wife. Or so proponents of a recent conspiracy theory would have it. For years, the most successful female recording and performing artist of her generation (and therefore of all time) has used “easter eggs” as part of her marketing. Hidden messages in music videos and lyric sheets, oblique references in social media posts, and puzzles as merchandise marketing gimmicks have all contributed to a parasocial sense of intimacy and insider knowledge for her millions of ardent fans.
With the release of The Life of a Showgirl, these treats seem to h...
Published: Nov 8, 2025Duration: 43:05
282: Mutual Aid Against ICE
When restaurants and cafes in Portland and elsewhere link into networks of food pantries and soup kitchens, will mutual aid feel real in the US? When regular folks come out of their houses to shame and chase ICE thugs out of the neighborhood, will that feeling of power from below catch on? Will it create some craving for a different way of doing things and understanding authority and order?
Derek looks at Portland, Julian looks at street resistance, and Matthew unpacks the old anarchist idea of mutual aid, and whether and how it intersects with our time...
Published: Nov 6, 2025Duration: 1:04:26
Bonus Sample: US v. Liberation Theology (Part 2)
Listen to the full episode on Patreon
Part 2 follows the money flowing from US agencies and interests to anti-Liberation Theology figures in Latin America. We meet Jesuit operator Roger Vekemans, who in the 1960s drew funding from the CIA, USAID, West German bishops, and U.S. conservative foundations to undermine Liberation and Christian socialism in Chile and beyond.
Nelson Rockefeller used Protestant missions as a model for soft power in the region, including the Summer Institute of Linguistics and their aviation-radio infrastructure (JAARS) that doubled as state and military logistics in Amazon frontiers. That infrastructure w...
Published: Nov 3, 2025Duration: 5:28