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.
- Update frequency
- every 2 days
- Average duration
- 48 minutes
- Episodes
- 686
- Years Active
- 2020 - 2025
Brief: Unmasking Jay Shetty (w/John McDermott)
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 podcas…
00:29:33 |
Sat 23 Mar 2024
198: Holy Food (w/Christina Ward)
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, Christ…
01:06:30 |
Thu 21 Mar 2024
Bonus Sample: Ketamine Soul Mates
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 pr…
00:05:21 |
Mon 18 Mar 2024
Brief: RFK Jr Hijacks the “Crisis in Masculinity” (w/Natalia Petrzela)
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 po…
00:31:14 |
Sat 16 Mar 2024
197: Psychic Surgery (feat Brad Abrahams)
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…
01:07:01 |
Thu 14 Mar 2024
Bonus Sample: How to Stamp Out Racists (and more)
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 w…
00:06:36 |
Mon 11 Mar 2024
Brief: The God Pivot: Rogan, Brand, & Huberman
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, a…
00:35:08 |
Sat 09 Mar 2024
196: Julian Goes to the New Age Expo!
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…
01:15:13 |
Thu 07 Mar 2024
Bonus Sample: “There Are Worse Things Than Dying”
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…
00:05:56 |
Mon 04 Mar 2024
Brief: The CPAC Pope and the Icicle Babies (w/ Brad Onishi)
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 …
00:43:37 |
Sat 02 Mar 2024
195: Long COVID (w/Tara Haelle)
In the early days of the pandemic, most of the cultural focus was on the necessity of quarantine measures and the distinction between mild and severe COVID infections. Yet by May 2020, some were expe…
01:14:12 |
Thu 29 Feb 2024
Bonus Sample: Through the Looking-Glass
After going undercover at the Conscious Life Expo, Julian examines the weird synchronicities between himself and his mirror-world doppelganger, the eccentric Rhodesian conspiritualist, Sacha Stone. C…
00:06:06 |
Mon 26 Feb 2024
Brief: The “Super Reasonable” Dr. Vinay Prasad
A contrarian doctor “just asking questions.” Super reasonable. Certainly not anti-vax, just a regular guy who grievance-mongers about quarantine measures and mocks people afraid of long Covid. Vinay …
00:38:27 |
Sat 24 Feb 2024
194: The Power Worshippers (w/Katherine Stewart)
January 6, 2021. MAGA hats, tactical gear, American flags, poles turned into clubs. Another flag appears: white, with a blue corner square containing a red Latin cross. Another that proclaims “Jesus …
01:10:41 |
Thu 22 Feb 2024
Bonus Sample: Your Gut Isn't Leaking
The Cleveland Clinic's website states that leaky gut is a "hypothetical condition." Yet Cleveland Clinic physician, Mark Hyman, claims that leaky gut is at the foundation of autism, depression, cance…
00:06:31 |
Mon 19 Feb 2024
Brief: Plandemic Takes the Promenade
An anti-vax, COVID-grievance, climate-science denying, communism panic-generating film by Mikki Willis just won “Best Documentary Feature” at the Santa Monica International Film Festival.
Julian att…
00:29:38 |
Sat 17 Feb 2024
193: Speaking Truth to GOOP (w/Dr Jen Gunter)
When she’s not talking to her angel guides, Christiane Northrup says that taking Vitamin D is better than the HPV vaccine for preventing cervical cancer. When Kelly Brogan isn’t denying germ theory, …
00:50:39 |
Thu 15 Feb 2024
Bonus Sample: Living in the Enema Times
Selling enemas to replace psych meds, or treat cancer, or cure autism is some dangerous shit.
But Matthew has a tingling sense that the wellness enema craze promises more than false health benefits. …
00:05:40 |
Mon 12 Feb 2024
Brief: The Culture Warrior to Wellness Pipeline (w/Dax-Devlon Ross)
Wellness influencers are quite capable of inventing and spreading health misinformation. When it comes to culture war issues, however, they're incapable of generating original thoughts. So it shouldn…
00:40:50 |
Sat 10 Feb 2024
192: Coffee is Your Friend, Not Your Enema (feat Mallory DeMille)
This episode has been brewing for some time. This week we ask: which hole is coffee really supposed to go in? Because, in the contrarian and conspiratorial wellness world, a growing number of influen…
01:01:39 |
Thu 08 Feb 2024
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