All Episodes
May 24, 2021 - Conspirituality
09:23
Bonus Sample: Loaded Language & Productive Discussion

Julian and Matthew discuss words, world views, and how productive disagreement can lead to mutual understanding. In today’s overheated discourse, social media posturing can make the culture wars feel like pro wrestling and political conversation like tip-toeing through a hair-trigger minefield. While these two co-hosts share a healthy skepticism for conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and New Age grift, some of their underlying philosophical and political beliefs hold interesting tensions. On the table this time: postmodernism, science, cultural sensitivity, Enlightenment values, social constructionism, and grand narratives about the arc of moral history. -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
You can support our work and have full access to bonus episodes and other premium content by subscribing for as little as $5 a month at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
Thanks for listening and your support, which keeps us ad-free and editorially independent.
Alright, so I started recording and we can just see how this goes.
I think I have a little more trepidation than you do.
Well, I hope not.
I mean, it is a different kind of episode.
I'm sure our audience can already hear that.
Yeah.
One thing I didn't ask you was, like, how long do you have for this?
We can go an hour or less.
OK.
All right.
Because that's good because it's like 7.30 Eastern time here.
I'm like, I'm lights out by 9.15.
Well, I didn't know that, but I know that your light's on by 4 a.m.
Right.
And, and also, and also I think, I think that's, we might also like, there might be a limiting factor in getting charged up about, about the stuff that we'll talk about.
So anyway, what are we doing?
We've been discussing doing something like this on Slack for, I guess, the past week, but I think it's been bubbling up over a couple of, I don't know, months maybe?
I don't know.
But my thought is that you know, we do this really kind of deep work in the conspirituality field.
And, you know, I like, we jive so well with so many aspects of our analysis.
And, you know, we have really fruitful discussions.
And then every once in a while, it becomes apparent that we have like political differences.
And that's not a problem for me.
I actually enjoy that.
But I guess what I wanted to do was to have a conversation with you kind of off script and explore what those differences are, because I don't think I really understand them.
And And I also am starting to get the strong sense that the conspirituality world and the culture war worlds are starting to intersect and collide even more.
I mean, Culture Wars stuff touches everything and, you know, we have to be aware of all kinds of issues as we go through this material.
But, you know, things like, I don't know if we mentioned another podcast yet, but, you know, Michaela Peterson interviewing Kelly Brogan and Joe Mercola, you know, it means that, you know, You know, Uncle Jordan is going to be holding court in Austin, you know, next year with Joe Rogan sitting at his feet or something like that.
And these things are going to get blended.
And so, I don't know.
Yeah, like J.P.
Sears on the Jordan Peterson Show.
Yeah, you're right.
You're right.
And I think that there's a There's a, an overlap there that you have been tracking and have been aware of in ways that I don't think I was, was seeing yet.
And really I've, I've started to see it first, most glaringly with, uh, with Brett Weinstein and Heather Haying.
Right.
You know, venturing more and more into the territory of kind of anti-vax, uh, conspiracy stuff and, Yeah.
And bringing their legacy of culture warriorship with them and their audience as well.
Yeah.
And part of that too is I see them, just for whatever it may be worth, I see them responding to the fact as two
Former academics who've lost their tenured position, they're responding to the fact that there's this pull towards a more white-wing sort of set of topics that get them an audience and probably allow them to monetize their content in a way that is, yeah, it's disturbing.
Right, where and it brings up this problem of which you've mentioned many times which is like there's a number of figures in this category who usually identify as left of center or liberal or perhaps even progressive and yet as they follow the carrot of the audience it seems that the content can begin to change.
So anyway the other thing is that like I I have this feeling, too, that we do something extraordinary because we are how many thousands of miles away from each other?
Like 3,000 miles away, I think.
And I met you in person once.
A long time ago.
A long time ago, but I've known you for at least 10 years.
Yeah.
We were published together in an anthology of yoga writing.
And, you know, I've always admired your work, and we've had these shared interests.
And when I met you in LA, I think Hala was there, and we had lunch together.
I had this I was like I was like oh this you know this this person could be my in real life friend and I feel like he is and I I had this warm feeling towards you and and that that hasn't really that kind of I guess Just sort of faded in the years before we started this podcast and now it's like I'm seeing you, I'm seeing you right now and you've got the pillow behind you that you have behind you every week and so I feel like I know what it feels like to sit on your couch.
But I feel, I guess, I have this image where I know two Julians.
And one of them is kind of in real life but somewhat unstable because we're not in the same neighborhood and we have more professional obligations than personal contact.
And then there's the other Julian that I know who is online and who has a political and a critic's persona and perspective.
I'm feeling those two people come together more, and I feel like the internet, Julian, is somebody that I'm still trying to learn about, because you'll use terms, you'll gesture towards thinkers that are just kind of not in my ballpark, and with a person that I'm not friends with, those
Those references might throw up, you know, red flags of, oh, this is not a person I would be friends with.
And yet I know you better than that.
And so it's, it's, it's, there's two, there's two Julians.
And, and, um, and I also feel that I can speak in a politicized language that I have learned not through my neighborhood, not through hanging out with friends, but I've learned it online.
And I am very interested in The depolarization of discourse, because I think that some of the differences in understandings that develop online are more about performance and jargon than they are about, and about the media itself, than they are about, you know, allyship and shared values.
But this is all sounding very abstract, so...
Yeah, well let me just say in response that I feel like we're in this time where it's sort of a cliche to acknowledge that things are very polarized and it's really hard to have productive conversation about a lot of different topics.
And so I think part of For me, part of being open to having a conversation like this is to say, well, let's see what that might be like.
I think one of the things that's going on with the podcast is that we spend a lot of time identifying problems and mistakes that we see going on.
In the world that we cover, and then proposing solutions or better ways of making sense of that world.
And so I think we overlap really strongly around aversion to authoritarian control or cultish disempowerment, how pseudoscience plays into the New Age grift and how all of this has sort of become part of the conspiritualist landscape that has been going on for the last 18 months or so.
Export Selection