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Dec. 21, 2023 - Conspirituality

01:28:24

185: Light in the Growing Darkness

In this annual meditation and reflection, the trio consider the past year's significant happenings in conspirituality, discuss their biggest influences, identify 2024's most pressing challenges, and offer what gives them each hope as we transition into 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	The nights draw long.
	The chaos seems endless.
	But it's solstice, Derek.
	The birth of light.
	Surely that's all about to change.
	Sometimes we're tempted to gaze into the crystal ball, draw the tarot cards, consult our astrological charts, and seek out a prophecy for a brighter future.
	Oh, I don't know.
	The temptation to revert to magical thinking is kind of brief and fleeting.
	Yet, we keep digging for reason and kindness and faith in humanity.
	Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
	theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
	I'm Derek Barris.
	I'm Matthew Remsky.
	I'm Julian Walker.
	You can find us on Instagram and now on threads at conspiritualitypod.
	And you can also access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes over at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
	You can also access our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions, if that is your platform of choice.
	And as independent media creators, we all really appreciate your support.
	We also have a book out.
	It's called Conspirituality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.
	It's in print, ebook, and audiobook format.
	it would make an incredible holiday gift.
	Okay guys, we're starting this episode with discussing significant happenings in conspiracy land this year.
	And, you know, the first two years of our work culminated in a book which told the story, as we saw it, of what happened in the yoga and wellness world as the pandemic and QAnon turned it upside down.
	It was also where we outlined our own emerging theory of what conspirituality is, how it functions in the world.
	But as 2023 unfolded, the world kept turning.
	The disinformation, propaganda, conspiracism, and pseudoscience grift kept on grifting.
	And as we kept talking to expert guests, hopefully our analysis kept evolving.
	Yeah, and it happened so fast.
	I think we rode the new cycle roller coaster, and we went from proposal to print in about 18 months.
	So I, this is going to be a theme today, but I think the god of speed is gaining strength over everyone, including us.
	And, you know, then as it was heading to print in June, we discover that three standout subjects, RFK Jr., Marianne Williamson, and Charles Eisenstein, are set to impact the electoral chaos of the coming year.
	Yeah.
	As I reflect on the pod, standout moments for me included having Jordan Klepper visit as a guest host.
	And then having Naomi Klein shout us out in the intro to her own new book, Doppelganger, and then sit down with an interview for us, I believe, the week that the book came out.
	Yeah.
	So two very mainstreaming guests for this material, cutting in different directions.
	And I think mainstreaming is your theme today, Julian.
	Yeah.
	I mean, here we have both a high-profile TV political comedian and a celebrated public intellectual with a lot of political influence overlapping with our beat, which is telling.
	And then for me, interviewing disinformation researcher Renee DiResta was central to our coverage of the Twitter files, which I would argue was the biggest driver of conspiracy crossover.
	The Twitter Files thing is really kind of what I've been thinking about a lot, meaning it was handled by independent journalists.
	And realistically, that's what we are as well.
	media, YouTube, and podcast channels a smoking gun to rally around.
	The Twitter files thing is really kind of what I've been thinking about a lot, meaning
	it was handled by independent journalists.
	And realistically, that's what we are as well.
	And having been involved in various facets of media for 30 years this year is when I
	began college and started working at the school newspaper at Rutgers.
	I've thought about how media has evolved and changed.
	And so for me, the theme this year One of them, at least, has been seeing so many influencers decry the mainstream media.
	And now we're really seeing, even more than any time in the past, what the erosion of trust in the media can lead to.
	And that's institutions overall as well.
	Now, this isn't only in our beat, of course, and this isn't to say that the media isn't partly responsible for the lack of trust.
	Right.
	But a lot of what I'm going to say in this episode relates to the fact that Americans in general have really bad media literacy skills and, as part of my beat, science literacy skills.
	And you don't get the proliferation of the many conspiracy theories and misinformation that we've been covering without it turning away from trustworthy sources.
	So just for some data, a November Pew Research poll found a 16% drop in the belief that science has benefited society since the beginning of the pandemic.
	And I don't mean scientists or public health officials, they also experience declines, but the actual impact of science itself.
	Now at the same month, Pew found more of what we've known for years.
	Consumption of traditional news media continues to decline, while more people, and especially younger people, get at least some of their news from social media.
	Which is really alarming.
	Derek, I wanted to ask you about that Pew research poll because I'm curious about the way the question is really framed.
	Is it belief that science has benefited society since the beginning of the pandemic, or is it belief that science has benefited society and that that has declined since the beginning of the pandemic?
	The latter, correct.
	The poll was measuring from the beginning of the pandemic to three years later, but the overall question was, has science benefited society?
	So, Derek, so you're saying, Pew seems to be saying that these declines in common sense are signs of media and science literacy problems, but how do we distinguish that potential cause from disinformation or increasingly throttled access to good sources?
	Well, I'm saying they're decreasing signs.
	I mean, you can read between the lines in the research polls, you know, but I'm extrapolating from that to be clear.
	So, especially because media literacy, science literacy is something I focus on so much.
	And how do you distinguish that?
	I mean, the problem is there is no one cause.
	And that's what we're going to have to grapple with forever.
	Just like there's no one solution to most problems, there's no one cause why people go astray.
	I mean, as we've seen in our beat, Sometimes people get pulled into wellness grifting because they have real chronic issues that their doctors have not found answers for, and they found some solace in people listening who might come from, you know, the pseudoscientific worlds.
	It's really challenging to understand that, but one thing I'm pretty sure of, or I'm very sure of, is that a lot of the people on our beat specifically exploit the fact that institutional distrust is so high right now to slip in and to sell their products and services.
	Yeah, and what we do know, we read disinformation, Matthew, is that the disinformation crisis on social media combined with the digital incentives for contrarian influencers and channels means that there's a way that there's there's way more noise that seems to validate the idea that science itself has been corrupted and politicized and it should make you skeptical therefore of its worth that hashtag trust the science is sort of an empty, you know, almost like superstitious slogan.
	Right.
	And that's a central theme of what we've been covering in real time, but I was curious what you meant about sources being throttled in some consequential way that might impact the data.
	Well, here in Canada, Facebook is blocking news links because our government initiated something called the Online News Act, and that is some, like, very modest attempt to protect Canadian news agencies by asking for a tiny percentage of online revenue from social media and search engines.
	We have excellent journalists being hounded off of Twitter.
	We have Musk hiding the headlines of articles.
	And then we have, like, the labor carnage of reputable news orgs slashing staffs by the hundreds.
	Like, here, Canada, the CBC just lost 700 positions.
	Every day, Derek is in slack with another story of some news platform getting gutted.
	So, I just, I want to maintain the connection between literacy and access, because when we focus on literacy, I think we might tend to, like, focus on how do individuals have How educated are they with regard to what they're taking in versus, well, what are they being bombarded with that's actually beyond their control?
	Yeah, so there's always the danger of a kind of libertarian victim blaming, right?
	That it's their fault for not being more media literate.
	I wonder, though, if everything that you just described is kind of downstream of the stuff that we've already been covering, right?
	That the increasing mistrust of mainstream institutions, of the media, of
	government agencies, of science as a way of finding out what's true has this trickle-down
	effect in which, you know, there's all of this.
	It's just becoming less and less viable, for example, for mainstream news organizations
	to keep the size of staff and the advertising budget they used to have, right?
	One thing that I found in my research, because I've read like three or four books in these
	last few months about the history of media, and I will say that news specifically has
	gone through many incarnations and relied on many different monetization models over
	the last few centuries.
	So in one sense, we're not really seeing anything new.
	I just think in our lifetimes, it's going through one of those seismic shifts that happened like say 300 years ago here in America.
	And so we have to be prepared for what comes next.
	And given the fact that more people have access to information now than ever before, it's going to be really challenging to try to understand how credible news makes it through this.
	But we are going to end today's episode with some hope.
	So let me throw that in that bucket right now.
	All right.
	And also, I'll get into the bigger picture consequences of this sort of misinformation trend as we progress, especially around topics like something on my mind a lot, which is Project 2025.
	But on a basic conspirituality-level wellness grift, fomenting distrust in media and medical experts lets influencers monetize their followers through products and services.
	And as I'll get to in our discussion on our evolving perspectives, With more people turning to spirituality to find answers, and especially those said influencers who are promoting a form of spirituality, this combination of distrust coupled with influencers, and let me throw in right wing pundits because we're going to talk about them today too,
	Selling their solutions is a problem that's getting worse.
	And I believe, and where my focus is right now, is how this is going to impact the election cycle next year.
	Here's my sort of top line perspective as I look back over the year.
	I think we did a lot of good work to understand the social psychology of twisted spiritual paranoias and hopes, how they distort reality and scramble politics.
	I think we've also been clear about basic journalistic fairness.
	There's 700 end notes in the book that we published.
	So we don't make arguments lightly, but it also doesn't mean we always can have the broadest or most generative view.
	And that's because we, like everybody else, have to cope with the spaces in which our arguments emerge.
	So the podcast space, the social media space, We know that these can have their own closed system gamified logic that drives a kind of commodification of the hot take over the sharing of understanding.
	And I think that's something that, like, we always have to be on guard against.
	But also, I don't think it's all bad space.
	And Derek, like you told me a few weeks back, on air that you were feeling better about social media because you were on threads and I like rolled my eyes at you and then you told me later in a meeting that that felt kind of deflating and you know it's a world of bad spaces but you were actually expressing some hope so I wanted to apologize about that because hope is a precious resource and even like real hard asses like you deserve to not have it shot down.
	Even people from Jersey need hope.
	I'll consider accepting the apology, Matthew, but thank you.
	All right.
	OK.
	Well, I would add to that, too, that even when hard asses from Jersey express hope.
	Yeah, that's a rare- I know.
	It's crossed a real threshold there, right?
	You've gotta be really careful with it, and I wasn't.
	I wasn't, I'm sorry.
	So, on the whole, though, something has been wearing me down all year, and I think it finally broke in relation to this space that we work in in the weeks following October 7th, because, you know, the on-the-ground attack and then retaliation were abominable and incomprehensible enough You know, just the absolute worst of the history of oppression and vengeance.
	But then to watch social media become just this storm of seething propaganda and vicious attacks was, it was really too much for me.
	Seeing lifelong friendships and alliances, especially between folks considering themselves to be progressive on the left, like ruined overnight filled me with a lot of despair.
	It's so impossibly difficult, I think, because in the current online ecosystem, not only is every pundit incentivized to have and express a bold position as quickly as possible on essentially the most intractable and complicated conflict of our times, But the trend that also has emerged over the last few years is that activists from across the political spectrum put pressure on public figures to take a stance as mouthpieces for their message.
	And that pressure is very strong.
	And I'm not sure that it's very useful.
	I even think it may be a kind of magical thinking, you know?
	Yeah, that you want like a larger mouthpiece that you could will your particular influencer to say what you want them to say, yeah.
	Yeah, yeah, and that would then have some kind of, you know, talismanic effect on the political process or what's going on in the world.
	I guess it's just clear that there's no part of the virtual world that operates as a space apart from the world in which wars happen.
	It's not a space of slowing down or circumspection or connecting with the feelings that are so obvious and palpable and yet so dissociated from the chattering.
	I think it's old news that the weaponization of our internal lives has accelerated to this state level, but now it's blatant.
	There's no escape.
	And of course, at the center of it is this super venal loser in Elon Musk who's like an animatronic.
	embodiment of capitalism refusing to go to therapy or rehab.
	So in light of all of this, when I look back at my contributions and what shines out to
	me in a way that really lights a forward path, there are these moments where the reactivity
	and polarization yielded to a kind of understanding, and usually that came from exemplary guests
	that I'll talk about under the next heading.
	Like, these are stories where I heard some glimmer of a third space
	or a language that would understand rather than stigmatize, an analysis that would step back from this commodification
	of polarizing takes.
	♪ We have five questions that we gave ourselves for this
	episode today.
	And now we're moving on to the second, as we do this sort of reflection,
	and this year-end moving into the next phase of our project and our society.
	And so now we're talking about who has influenced us the most over the last year.
	And for me, a few people jump out.
	First of all, Kat Bohannon, who wrote a book called Eve, How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, and she really taught me a ton about one of my favorite subjects, which is evolutionary biology.
	A lot of what wellness influencers and right-wing male pundits especially advertise as sound science is based on biology and physiology conducted on male bodies Dr. Jen Gunter, my wife, is reading her book right now.
	this has been the case for many centuries.
	And as Kat points out, men avoided female bodies because their menstrual cycles made
	studying them unreliable.
	Dr. Jen Gunter, my wife, is reading her book right now.
	She's also made that point.
	And you'll see a lot of complaints about how men are falling behind in society.
	There's a whole other part of my work for next year and beyond about masculinity and the concept of it.
	And this is especially being talked about in the STEM fields.
	I believe, and Kat points this out, that we should treat the fact that more women and BIPOC people are working in STEM as a boon because it's making us understand human biology and evolution better from a holistic perspective and not just white male bodies, which gives us a skewed understanding.
	I want to read this book and I'm also hearing a wonderful antidote to the other right-wing kind of red-pilled tendency of using evolutionary biology or more correctly evolutionary psychology as a justification for reactionary ideas about maleness and relationships and the woman's role and what's gone wrong with our society.
	Yeah, it's all this reflexive behavior where we're just—or reactionary behavior, really, where we're just going back to what we know or we think we know.
	And I'm glad people like Kat have, you know, stepped up to actually put forward better information.
	I did reach out to her for an interview.
	I haven't heard back yet.
	I will try again because I think she's wonderful.
	And, you know, I also just have to give a shout-out to people who've really inspired me, and that's the incredible science and medical educators on social media and beyond who are doing a service by speaking out against pseudoscience while also presenting credible information for people to consume.
	A number of them have been on our podcast, like Danielle Bilardo, Michelle Wong, Andrea Love, and Jessica Steer of Unbiased Science Podcast.
	Jonathan Howard, Jonathan Stea, he hasn't been on the pod yet, but he has promised to come on one day.
	I think he's waiting for his book to come out, and that's totally fine.
	You know, and one thing I think about is there's a lot of debate about how to combat conspiracy theories and misinformation, and will this work, does this work, etc.
	But an important aspect will always be presenting credible information, especially in your field of expertise.
	And the people I just mentioned and many more who I missed, and I apologize, they're doing that on a regular basis.
	It's such an art form, right?
	Like presenting credible information, totally crucial.
	How that information comes across, also crucial.
	It's really hard to be trained in both your discipline, but then also in communication.
	So it's amazing when people can do that.
	Yeah, I got a lot of thoughts on that.
	Yeah, I think it also, it taps into a sort of evergreen tension between interpersonal dynamics and like statement of the facts, right?
	Right.
	Yeah.
	And personally, I lean a little bit more towards fostering a culture that is more scientifically literate and well-versed in substantive critical thinking as being, you know, in a viable and sort of coherent way.
	I see that as having more possibility in it than perhaps ending up catering to fragility or making ill-fated diplomatic compromises on the facts so as to try not to lose people.
	It's so tricky.
	It is tricky.
	Let me just give an example from a recent episode.
	You did this great interview with Scott Kennedy about the documentary.
	Shot in the arm.
	Okay, right.
	Yeah, so Paul Offit, fantastic researcher, developer.
	Amazing contribution to public health and to vaccine uptake.
	He's quoted as saying, science is not political, and that is so rich that you re-quote that, Julian, because it just really scratches an itch for you, right?
	And it's a really clear statement that is both true from sort of a platonic lab bench You know, I'm trying to eliminate my biases and I'm trying to, you know, follow the data exactly where it leads.
	And yet it will sound to some people who have inherently political experiences of interacting with especially medical science as perhaps not being true.
	And that's really, that's a real conundrum.
	Like, absolutely, from an idealized perspective, science is not political.
	But if you talk to somebody who, you know, who knows that or feels that they're Their physical pain or their mental health hasn't been taken seriously because they're in a marginalized group and there's a politics behind that.
	They might well say, actually, there's nothing that isn't political, including the practice of science.
	So it's, you know, it's the whole landscape is filled with difficulties like that.
	Yeah, I mean, I think that contradiction is worth exploring.
	At the same time, the scientist is not in a platonic ideal sitting at his bench trying to overcome his biases.
	He's engaging in a scientific method which includes having others who are qualified check to see what his biases are.
	And I think what Paul Offit is getting at is that, you know, Making, for example, making public health recommendations based on what the current data shows is actually not a political act.
	It's a communication of the facts and a communication of what our best sort of recommendations are for, you know, saving lives.
	And it got turned into something political because people were duped into thinking that, oh, Fauci's just a mouthpiece for the libs.
	And, you know, you could certainly, like, chase that down and try and find, like, was Fauci actually wrong?
	Was he fudging the science?
	Was he corrupted by, you know, big money interests, et cetera, et cetera.
	And you won't find really anything there.
	You'll find that he made some mistakes.
	You'll find that he was dishonest in one thing that he's been really frank about in terms of the availability of masks and him trying to make sure that first responders had them.
	But ultimately, if you look at that, You know, honestly and in good faith, you can sort of go, okay, well, that was a mistake, but it's not that he was, you know, engaging in some political or financially corrupted obfuscation, right?
	I also think that differentiating between sciences is important in this respect, because when you're talking about vaccines, everyone's physiology, biology is different.
	And so we know that Any vaccine has some side effects or potentially life-threatening consequences for a certain small number of people.
	Like, we know that.
	And we haven't found a way to work around that.
	And I'm saying we, it's not me, obviously, but it's actually scientists.
	It's all you, Derek.
	It's your work in the Paris lab.
	So, allow me to jump from there to the engineering sciences, where you have an example where 2 million Tesla cars are recalled this past week.
	And it is specifically because there were promises made by the CEO that turned out not to be true.
	Something like 47 people died in accidents before the recall because of the self-driving feature, which is never real.
	To me, that's where it rings really true.
	Science is not political because the The problem in that case is that Tesla never had their research fact-checked.
	I mean, it did, and most people were like, this isn't going to work.
	And it turns out that that is true.
	So yeah, I agree that it's just so hard to take that statement, which is just a heuristic, I think, a guiding light for people to understand.
	But then when you go science by science, it gets so much more challenging and nuanced.
	And maybe the problem with Offit, actually, is that once somebody like that is a politicized figure, you can't actually say science is not political without having a kind of counter-reading immediately pop up in his opponent's heads, you know?
	I think that's what I'm pointing to.
	Yeah, yeah, I hear that.
	I mean, to go back to the original sort of jumping off point here, I think if there was more scientific literacy within the broader American population, and what I mean by that specifically is if people understood how the trial process works, what it means for something to have passed the third phase of trial research, how many people have
	gone through it, how the FDA actually provides oversight, what the elaborate process is that has
	been put in place as a result of all of the missteps that happened over like 50, 100
	years ago, that would make a big difference towards people understanding, look, this is
	actually not political, this is just the data.
	And here's why we can trust the data, and here's why we can also say it's to the best of our knowledge, this is what we have.
	And then if more of the population had greater media literacy, they would be able to Have more of a sense of like, oh, this is being spun in a way that actually is political, but is distorting the scientific process as a way of fear mongering for, you know, clickbait and, you know, culture war point scoring.
	I just finished yesterday a six week course from Johns Hopkins on clinical experiments and trials and really deep dive into what goes And I did it because I talk about them all the time and I read studies, but I didn't know everything about the construction of an actual trial.
	And after doing that, I'm even more just blown away by the level of detail and the number of checks that are at least supposed to go into a clinical trial to actually get it verified.
	And I don't expect The casual person.
	I mean, this is my field and I'm really enjoying it, so I have an interest in it.
	I don't expect everyone to do that.
	But when I see these people saying these things about people like Offit, who's done a lot of amazing work, without having any clue of what they're talking about, to me, it's like they're the ones who are really politicizing this, not the researchers themselves.
	And beyond Offit, then we have Peter Hotez, who's Nobel Prize winning, one of the developers of the COVID vaccines, who is just, you know, he's probably going to spend the rest of his life hiding from harassment and death threats and people accusing him, you know, much in the way that the Sandy Hook parents were just falsely accused of all kinds of wrongdoing.
	Alright, so in terms of what influenced me, which is what this segment is about, reading Ruth Ben-Ghiat's book, Strong Men, and David Nyward's Age of Insurrection, as well as Bradley Onishi's Preparing for War this year, and interviewing each of those authors, had a hugely sobering impact on me.
	I don't know how hopeful it is.
	In terms of the very ominous historical trifecta of emergent global
	authoritarianism, rising Christian nationalism, and the ever more active armed militia movement. And all of
	those, of course, are fertile breeding grounds for conspiracism and bigotry
	and apocalyptic prophecy.
	From Ben-Ghiat, I got the understanding that today's fascism is not like that of the earlier
	And I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of like public, you know, tension around this because it's like, well, Trump is not like Hitler.
	It's like, hold on, hold on.
	Here's how authoritarianism has been evolving.
	Today's authoritarianism or fascism sweeps into power via populist electoral campaigns and then it sets about dismantling democracy.
	Javier Millet in Argentina appears to be just the most recent example and we're going to
	be watching him closely as we head towards 2024 because he might provide exactly the
	cautionary tale we need.
	But you know, this is a worrying trend that has affected countries from Hungary to Italy
	to Brazil, the Philippines, the Netherlands, and it's gaining ground in Germany and Sweden
	and France, Belgium, even Canada.
	And spoiler alert, the good old US of A. So that's something that we're looking at very
	From Bradley Onishi, I came to see Trump as one chess piece in what is actually the patient and focused long game of Christian nationalism.
	And this makes Democrats look like, you know, drunken dilettantes who can't find their shoes, you know.
	Neiwert helped me to understand the true significance of Trump announcing his 2024 campaign in Waco, Texas.
	On the 30th anniversary of its tragic Branch Davidian siege.
	But I was also very influenced by Anand Giridharadas' book, The Persuaders, which I'll come back to in a little bit.
	And of course, Naomi Klein's doppelganger and the work of Quinn Slobodian and Will Callison about diagonalism was, I think, really huge for all three of us in terms of adding another layer of analysis to our work.
	And not to go too deep into this, but, you know, I think we'd always found the go-to notion of horseshoe theory Which posits that the extremes of the left and the right eventually bend around to touch each other in a transcendent authoritarianism.
	We always found it a bit lacking.
	Not least of all because the conspiritualists we cover, while ostensibly or culturally liberal, were never actually extreme lefties of any description, right?
	Yeah, exactly.
	And so what diagonalism presents, and Naomi Klein referenced it in her book, which then led us to checking out Slobodin and Callison, is an alternative analysis.
	And it has to do with how freelancers, the self-employed, the perhaps default libertarians, end up forming unconventional diagonal alliances with anyone who's also cynical about parliamentary politics or government oversight.
	And this then, between them, they share the mood of framing institutional power as inevitably being a conspiracy.
	And what was fascinating about that is that Quinn and Silbodium also flag holism and spirituality as being ingredients in that diagonalist soup.
	Yes, because they're not actually, diagonalists aren't actually standing in a position.
	They have to believe primarily in themselves and their own magic, right?
	Of course they're going to reach for the stars and for their supplements and for the eternal repair of their own pure bodies.
	So for me, interviewing Klein on Doppelganger was a highlight.
	Because she really nailed the emotional and sometimes moral legitimacy of the conspiratorial mindset.
	This feeling that the man is picking your pocket or keeping you sick and isolated.
	It's not wrong.
	And we had a good chapter on that, but she did a whole book on it.
	Related to what I was saying before about speed and the news cycle, I can't help but think that she was able to go deep and long on that view because she wasn't spending 60 hours a week processing surface-level news and posting about it.
	She made, you know, time and space.
	And I think that's what it takes to get really quiet with this stuff.
	And, you know, it makes me reflect that the conspiratorial mode can actually be a kind of folk wisdom that creates alliances of solidarity that everyone could actually benefit from.
	Now, this idea comes from a Canadian sociologist named Erika Lagalise.
	She's at the London School of Economics, and she looks at how working class suspicion can form bonds between people who begin to fight together for a better world.
	Now, it's not all a good thing, obviously.
	It can go sideways.
	She opens her book, which is called Occult Features of Anarchism, by wondering why her leftist friends in the early 2000s are suddenly starting to make anti-Semitic comments.
	Like, don't they know this is a keynote of fascism?
	Obviously, this is very topical right now.
	So, between Naomi Klein and Erika Lagellis, I'm also reminded, going back about four years now, to the Yoga and Me Too movement, where after like 20 years, 30 years, you know, women begin saying things, describing what they have experienced, and describing what they knew in their bones about the organizations they were embedded in, but they couldn't corroborate.
	There was no journalism to help them out.
	You know, and they would say things like, I think that man assaulted thousands of women.
	All of his senior students knew.
	Everybody covered it up for years so that they could build the reputations, make a lot of money.
	And you know, when the receipts are tallied, when the journalism actually comes in, that's exactly what is found out to be going on.
	So before there's institutional support for like a whisper network, people within that world regard the whistleblowers,
	people who are trying to tell the truth as kind of hysterical cranks,
	conspiracy theorists who are hell-bent on taking down a legitimate institution.
	So, before there's good research in journalism, the only people who listen to those with survivor stories,
	um, are other survivors who have similar experiences, and who are also, therefore, labeled as hysterical cranks.
	But then circumstances can emerge in which they support each other and that connects them with journalistic resources, with legal resources.
	And it reminds me that Julian, like, you've done this great work this year on Brett Weinstein, and he says this thing, uh, we are not conspiracy theorists.
	He's responding to, like, legitimate criticisms of his bullshit.
	He says, we are conspiracy hypothesizers.
	It's so classic.
	Yeah, we are conspiracy hypothesizers.
	There may be a way.
	Yeah, it's so hilarious and craven that Matt and Chris over at Decoding the Gurus, they've turned it into this punchline that they play every episode when they thank their Patreons.
	But what's so pernicious about it is that Weinstein knows enough To effectively use something real to sell something unreal.
	He doesn't prove, he doesn't test the hypothesis, he just monetizes it.
	So, like I'm thinking about how conspiracism can be a stage of discovery and revelation.
	There can be a wisdom to it.
	But without facts, institutional support, you know, access to good tools, that wisdom can begin to eat its own tail.
	It can only start to look out for itself in its isolation.
	And I think that's partly where the politics of diagonalism is born.
	Of course, I have to chime in here and say my usual thing, which is that there's a wisdom, as you're saying, to the attitude of skepticism that checks the facts and examines the evidence and cedes to sidestep fallacious arguments and gives people a fair hearing.
	Healthy skepticism can uncover actual conspiracies and cover it up abuse.
	The freshman or faux skepticism of the conspiracy hypothesizers gets really lost because it ends up becoming inverted, and you talked about it eating its own tail.
	The very types of faulty beliefs that skepticism should be debunking become articles of faith, while valid evidence-based consensus is deemed propaganda.
	And this is based only on a worldview that weaves falsehoods together with paranoid vibes.
	Yeah.
	The other crucial part of Klein's argument, and this is where, you know, it feels like she's, I don't know, like a kind of a den mother or an aunt to a certain, you know, political demographic, is the appeal for people who consider themselves to be progressive to be more generous, less cruel.
	And to point out that When you're impatient with people who might be in a discovery phase, like, you know, if we laugh about the red-pilled folks who are fretting over Epstein's plane or surveillance capitalism on our phones, like, how cynical and jaded is that?
	Oh, those are valid things to be fretting over, right?
	Yeah, well that was her point.
	She said, wait until they hear about cell phones when Naomi Wolf was worried about tracking in the vaccines.
	And I'm like, we turned a joke, we turned something that is a real concern into a joke to dunk on somebody, to dunk on somebody who is bringing up something false.
	But hold on.
	The joke makes sense, because they're fretting about the vaccines having tracking devices, and the joke is, well, wait until you hear about your phone.
	We're not joking about them worrying about surveillance capitalism on the phone.
	That's the real conspiracy.
	That's the real thing that we should be concerned about, right?
	I think what she's pointing out is that, like, oh, we all know.
	We all know that the phones are fucking with our lives and our privacy.
	And they're naive, actually.
	They don't realize that.
	They don't realize that.
	They're children, actually.
	They have to grow up and join the real world.
	But that's not accompanied with a concurrent, oh yeah, we should really push back against surveillance capitalism.
	Because the other part of our argument is, as soon as the mirror world grabs hold of a particular topic, it becomes toxic for liberals and progressives to touch.
	Well, that's really important.
	But I think that the pointing out that the skepticism Is the skepticism is misdirected, right?
	The skepticism that says, oh, vaccines might contain tracking devices, saying, hey, look, let's talk about, you know, how we actually are being tracked.
	To me, that that that seems like a legitimate thing.
	And the joke is there's a wry thing to it of like, oh, you don't know how bad it actually is because you're focused on something that's pure fantasy when there's real stuff going on.
	Right.
	And but then with regard to the the other comments about, you know, once something gets seized upon by the red pilled or by the right,
	it becomes sort of taboo for people on the left to acknowledge it or to talk about it
	or to look at the data or to say, you know what, they actually have a point here
	even though I hate everything that they're wrapping it up in.
	Yeah, I think that's really important.
	That's really important.
	In light of all of this, mostly, I'm just thrilled when I can hear from people who are like less reactive
	and more thoughtful than I am.
	So I'm just going to refer to a few other people in this zone.
	I love that we gave space to Bo Brink to talk about what it feels like as a trans person to be a blank slate.
	for the morbid projections of QAnon and other related moral panics.
	We did something similar with Esme Providence Brown, who, as a veteran and now retired sex worker, was able to break down the twisted conflations of neo-tantra and sex work and really peer into the hypocrisy of New Age purity culture.
	I love talking with Julian Brave Noisecat about how the QAnon story harmonizes with indigenous histories of genocide.
	And then there was talking with Mike Lewis, who as a conservative Catholic, had a lot to say about what it's like to resist radicalization from within a religious tradition.
	Not by leaving it, along with family and relationships and all that history, but by staying.
	And with Lewis, I also felt this window open up into another zone of Like sanity and good relations or, you know, and that our views and positions on important issues might be different, but I could trust that he recognizes the same culture war chaos that I do, that he shares the same vision of civil respect and problem solving, and most importantly, that he can speak to people that just wouldn't listen to me, which means, you know, his co-religionists.
	And none of these guests were polemicists.
	They had life experience and views and politics, but they all are kind of calm in the culture war breach, and they explained how we might think about things in a more holistic way, in a way that I really appreciated.
	And they're also really engaged in some kind of slow work offline, like Julia Noisecat is a powwow dancer, Mike Lewis has his church life.
	Bo Brink is doing a writing project about things that cannot exist on the internet, or that you cannot do on the internet.
	Like some of the titles of the articles are, you know, you can't crochet on the internet, nothing lasts forever on the internet, you can't develop ethics on the internet.
	So, I'm going to have a good time this year, despite all of the chaos keeping up with voices like these.
	And perhaps you can have some influence on Mike Lewis with regard to things like a woman's right to choose.
	This next segment is on how we've seen the topic of our study evolving as well as our own
	perspectives changing.
	For me, the big theme is summed up in one word that you flagged already, Matthew, thank you, mainstreaming.
	I just feel like from the start, 2023 was the year that the conspiracists decided to go ahead and take a victory lap.
	With no new evidence, armed only with mutually reinforcing enthusiasm, usual suspects like Russell Brand, Brett Weinstein, Konstantin Kissin, maybe not as much of a usual subject, but he's in the mix these days, and Jordan Peterson, to varying extents, recited a liturgy that all the prophecies the normie world smeared as conspiracy theories had actually Yeah, liturgy is a good word because I think it gives the sense that their online space is actually a ritual or conjuring space that doesn't really have anything to do with reality.
	It's a space set apart, really.
	True.
	So they repeat the magic words.
	COVID was clearly a lab leak.
	Quarantine measures were really creeping communism.
	The vaccines were ineffective and super dangerous.
	The 2020 election was fishy.
	Inevitably, they end up there too, right?
	And of course, wokeness is the biggest threat to Western democracy.
	Now still posturing as a spiritual rebel, Russell Brand continued his breakneck rightward slide, appearing on Tucker Carlson, and framing his awful sex abuse allegations as part of a conspiracy to shut down his brave truth-telling.
	And for his part, Jordan Peterson doubled down on trans panic and Christian nationalism.
	Have you ever heard the Gregorian chant litany of the saints?
	There's a long version of it.
	It goes on for like an hour or more, so some Catholics sing it and they bliss out.
	Like whenever we go through a list of assholes like this, I feel like there's some weird inversion of that litany.
	I feel myself filling up with Black Sludge.
	I dissociate so many names, so many types of cruelty.
	I've probably heard the one you're referring to without knowing specifically which one it was, because I've listened to my fair share of Gregorian chants as a 20-something new ager.
	It was always on in the background.
	And also as a musician, learning about modal theory, because each of those chants is sort of exploring a different mode of, you know, Yeah.
	Nerdy music theory.
	That's really funny, though.
	This mainstreaming was reflected in the heterodox alt-media sphere.
	channels like The Rising and Breaking Points and Kim Iverson all picked up the Twitter
	files story as evidence of a left-wing, big tech, mainstream media and intelligence agency
	conspiracy. Former Rolling Stone darling Matt Taibbi, who also was part of the Useful Idiots
	podcast that has continued running with this theme, and his climate denying colleague Michael
	Schellenberger, took the shtick all the way to the floor of Congress, giving us the term
	censorship industrial complex from their testimony.
	And in that process, I think they set back the earnest work of those seeking to understand and set policy around the very real disinformation crisis and the influence of maligned foreign actors on our political process.
	These more alt-media news channels would also take clickbait and both sides' angles on Russell Brand and his scandal, on RFK Jr., on what really happened, of course, now at the Capitol insurrection, and, of course, on Putin's ongoing war against Ukraine.
	But this stuff isn't even ideologically driven, necessarily, right?
	Like, it's a property of independent media seeking out new edginess.
	Yeah, it's actually so Tragic and disappointing and someone on Instagram sort of had a go at me because I used the term heterodox in describing some of this stuff because of course, heterodox, you know, if you go back a few years, it's Jonathan Haidt's term for the importance of having, you know, open and good faith.
	Disagreements and debates.
	But what the heterodox sphere turns into in terms of these YouTube channels and podcasts is much more of like the, well we don't really know for sure so we have to have RFK Jr.
	on to make his case about vaccines because we're being open-minded and we're champions of free speech.
	And you know Steve Bannon has this often quoted line that politics is downstream of culture.
	In this case, to your point, Matthew, I would say ideology becomes downstream of algorithmic incentives, because this stuff really is what gets clicks, and clicks are what get ad revenue, and here we go, everyone's got to cover whatever the latest sort of sensationalist angle is.
	But by the time we approach the end of the year, Bret Weinstein speculated that amongst other world events, the October 7 Hamas attacks might well be part of what he called a coalition slicer-dicer.
	And Heather went, ah, when he coined this new phrase, he loves coining these phrases, a coalition slicer-dicer enacted by the shadowy force that he refers to as Goliath.
	To fracture unity.
	It did this to fracture unity between the 10 heroic podcasters who dared to question the COVID narrative.
	And part of his rationale is that, you know, and this is where you see what I talked about earlier.
	I said something like, you know, a worldview based on falsehoods and paranoid vibes.
	If Israel was willing to sacrifice so many citizens with their extremely high vaccination rate, because we know the vaccines were deadly, right?
	Then surely they wouldn't flinch at deliberately weakening their border and allowing the Hamas attacks to happen.
	His wife and Dark Horse Pod co-host Heather Hain chimed in that this might also relate to the increase of transgenders weakening the military.
	They just jumped right in there and made it all about them, didn't they?
	Yep.
	I mean, a very small part of me feels sorry for Heather Hain because she's on such a tightrope between needing to continually feed Brett's incredible narcissism while retaining some kind of ASMR glowing dignity for herself.
	Yeah, every time I watch, I wonder about that too.
	I'm just sort of like trying to understand the dynamic and read into it.
	She listens attentively.
	She makes all the right oohs and ahhs at his novel insights.
	But then she speaks and she adds her own addled yet incredibly self-assured PhD dressing to Brett's word salad.
	I just imagined myself doing a podcast with my wife and it would just be eye rolls constantly at me.
	There would be no oohs and ahhs.
	That's good.
	That's really good.
	It would have to be on YouTube then, right?
	In HD.
	Well, in terms of the evolution of the space from my perspective, I remember reading early in the pandemic about this phenomenon where cultures that come out of times of trauma often revert to religious or spiritual thinking.
	And usually, Yeah, I agree with that.
	And I also think this means that it's going to be worth engaging more deeply with people who are in that mode or in those traditions because they might be less available to secular discourse as time goes on.
	Yeah, I agree with that. And I also think this means that it's going to be worth engaging more
	deeply with people who are in that mode or in those traditions because they might be less
	available to secular discourse as time goes on. But I'll say more about that in a bit.
	I think in our field and in our age demographic, that's true.
	I mean, one thing that does give me hope is that research polls have consistently shown that Gen Z is way less religious.
	And even though you see some movements in some of the churches, I hope they are taking a more secular view, especially when you notice around things like climate change and how activated they are politically.
	That does give me hope.
	You know, one aspect of this is the fervent desire to monetize their offerings and we're going to be discussing this next week in our episode on the unregulated world of coaches.
	Mallory DeMille will be returning to co-pilot and she'll be offering a ton of details.
	You know, so to think about like the wide world of coaches and coming from all these different aspects, but they're all sort of Congealing and using this spiritual language that we're accustomed to in order to sell their variety of questionable services.
	For example, Mallory identified one woman who is coaching parents of children with autism and she has no training whatsoever.
	It's a lot to take in.
	I would like to invent a vaccine that strikes down autism coaches with crippling shame, but shame that only lasts for long enough for the person to like commit to getting another job, like no permanent effects.
	On the other hand, I have to say that anyone with an autistic kid in their lives knows that there's a market for trash like this because the dominant paradigm is neurotypical and ableist.
	Yeah, there's someone in my family who is five who was recently diagnosed on the spectrum and, you know, they kind of had a feeling given how he's, you know, acted and acted in school and around things like the clothing he allows himself to wear.
	And I'm just really trying to steer my family away from any of that nonsense and work with their therapist and, you know, so far it's been good.
	Yeah.
	Broader picture, this turn to spirituality comes along with something we identified over a decade ago when the three of us worked together on Yoga Brains, which was a project about yogis checking out of politics because they think they've transcended the real-world impact of things like legislation.
	And I'm seeing that same trend happen again now.
	And given what we face next year, and I'll flag again, Project 2025 will be covering in our first main feed episode of 2024, and Julian and I will be doing some bonus episodes on that, that is indicative of why it's the worst time in our lives to check out a politics.
	And it just, again, points to the extreme privilege that many Americans have when they shirk their civic duties.
	So this convergence of forces that we've been tracking for nearly four years now is ready to form a Voltron right now, and the people that are tuning out to focus on themselves, it's just not a good look.
	Yeah, Project 2025 obviously is it for me too.
	This past year has set the phenomenon we started off tracking into a much broader context for me of what's happening in American politics, but also globally.
	Disinformation, conspiracism, contrarian spirituality and wellness, and prophetic Christian nationalism seems to be part of a bigger picture of this trend toward authoritarianism that rides a wave of anti-elite, low-information, jingoistic, shamelessly anti-reality, anti-science populism.
	The yoga world just had its own variant of this pandemic of lies and a politics that surfaces our most ugly emotions and intuitive convictions.
	I think this is a refrain for me today, but I do want to point out that some of the most coherent and effective resistance to things like That sounds great.
	I mean, maybe it's because I don't sort of steep myself in that.
	You know, Julian recently introduced me to a YouTube channel, Rationality Rules.
	from within evangelicalism.
	That's good.
	That sounds great.
	I mean, maybe it's because I don't sort of steep myself in that.
	You know, Julian recently introduced me to a YouTube channel, Rationality Rules.
	Like from my perspective, being a secularist, like that's really nice resistance,
	but obviously it takes the, you know, it's going to speak to the choir.
	He's speaking to the choir in that sense.
	Well, I don't know, but what I do know is this, and I find it really interesting.
	away from their red pill churches to go to more open-minded churches, for example?
	Well, I don't know, but what I do know is this, and I find it really interesting.
	So, on the tail end of my interview with Mike Lewis, one of our Patreons pointed me towards
	a podcast called Holy Post.
	It's run by a group of progressive evangelicals.
	I didn't even know that was a thing.
	And I'm putting progressive in quotes because it's comparative.
	Their views on abortion and sexuality are what they are.
	They're not going to change.
	Oh, so they're not progressive in that sense.
	No, they're not.
	So what's the sense?
	Well, with regard to reproductive issues, they have a metaphysical understanding of when life begins and they earnestly... No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	I wasn't gonna, I wasn't asking what their positions are.
	If they're not progressive in that sense, how is it that you are, how is it that they identify as being progressive?
	First of all, with regard to reproductive rights, they are not the evangelicals who are ignoring everything that happens after conception.
	They are actually saying, it doesn't make sense for us to have this position unless children actually have a fighting chance and they have good, you know, sort of social support and so on.
	This is like the social gospel against, you know, poverty, right?
	I was shocked listening to them by their non-combativeness because my entire exposure to evangelical culture is framed by Jerry Falwell and all of the more extreme grifters who followed him.
	And I'm starting to wonder, like, what percentage of evangelical culture do those people represent?
	And how much influence do they have?
	And is it outsized?
	And is it unfair?
	So, for instance, The folks on this podcast are speaking about evangelicals exerting political power as a moral and spiritual failure to evangelize, which in their understanding means to persuade with what they believe is the good news, which is like what the translation of gospel is.
	If it really is the good news, they say, you don't have to force it on anyone.
	It should just make sense.
	And if it doesn't, is it really good news?
	In other words, it is wrong, they say, for Christians to pursue political power over others.
	What impressed me most about them was they are clearly able to turn to their fellow Christians and to say, Christian nationalism is a heresy, and here is why.
	This is not something, this is not an argument that we have in our toolbox, right?
	Because that argument tells the red-pilled evangelical that there is a saner, more civically-oriented religious world to come back to, rather than telling them that they're off base and it would be best to give it all up.
	And I just think that's fascinating.
	I understand the appeal of that.
	I can't help but think that they might just be the Liz Cheney and the, whatever his name is, Flake of the, Jeff Flake of the Republican Party.
	They may be those kinds of figures within evangelicalism because it's a juggernaut of Christian nationalism.
	I mean, it's great that there are some voices that are trying to push back.
	I would wonder how influential they really are.
	Let me ask, Julian, just, okay, so I have that opinion too, but I don't know the answer to this question.
	How many, let's say out of a thousand evangelical preachers who had to deal with QAnon sweeping through their churches from 2020, what is the percentage that tried to fight back against that, that got fired, that reached out to other pastors to try to figure out, like, what the hell do I do with this?
	People are turning against basic vaccination policy.
	They want me to open my church again.
	Like, we actually don't have any data on that, I don't think.
	And so I want to find that out because That's kind of extraordinary.
	But those would be people then that have been fired and kicked out of the movement though, right?
	Maybe, or they've moved on, or they've been demoted, or they've had to find new communities.
	I just think it's just a wide open field for us to look at.
	Yes, I think that research would be good to dig into.
	When you say exert political power, I will say that when I see the group of preachers praying with their hands on Trump, I'm pretty sure they were all evangelicals.
	So I think at least the bigger figures have a good amount of political power.
	And I also read Francis Fitzgerald's 700-page book on the history of evangelicals this year, and I would say they have an outsized political power.
	So in terms of the actual numbers, yeah, that would be interesting to look at, but in terms of their actual Persuasion within government, it's pretty outsized compared to all the other brands of Christianity.
	Sure.
	So my advice for the three of us actually, though, would be to hold terms like evangelical and Catholic a little bit more gently or with some, with a willingness to hedge and to make sure that we don't, we don't sort of erase or sort of like And turn an entire denomination, which is incredibly diverse actually, into some sort of monolith that is unmovable, filled with people who can't be spoken to, or people who obviously don't share any of our values.
	I think that's what I'm getting at, is when I see that within a group of people that I formerly thought were fairly lumpen, that it's actually more complicated, I'm like, Oh, okay, who do I want to talk to in that group?
	Yeah, I wonder how much work, you know, Incredibly Diverse is doing in that conception, you know, like, like, I just wonder how much of a difference there is between Incredibly Diverse and there being, you know, a minority group who run counter to the dominant view.
	Yeah, I guess we don't know, right?
	That's what I'm saying!
	That's what I'm saying!
	I think I've made the point over and over, so I apologize if it's repetitive, but I've always distinguished the difference between any religious group and their metaphysics, which I will debate till the end of time, and their charity.
	Yeah.
	Which is apparent in a lot of churches.
	I would give at least some respect to the listener to be able to distinguish between talking about those different aspects of religion.
	I know it tends to get bound up by believers because their worldview is informed by metaphysics, but when you step back and you tease those things apart, You can definitely tell the difference between people who are doing real-world impact work and are living out their gospel as compared to people who are manipulating their gospel in order to achieve a certain particular ends.
	Yeah, agreed.
	Yeah, and I mean, I'm sorry to interrupt again.
	I feel like with the progressive evangelicals that you were referring to, the reason why I was asking you those follow-up questions is You know, I can imagine gay or trans activists or choice, women's right to choose kind of activists hearing that we might be saying, hey, you know, these folks are really focused on, you know, charity and good social programs and taking care of babies after they're born.
	Yet, you know, they're still on the wrong side of history in terms of, you know, what What is so heartfelt about these, these real progressive issues.
	So it gets, yeah, I wouldn't want to be seen to be saying, well, they're not so bad after all, even though they're, they're pro-life and anti-gay.
	Yeah.
	I didn't say that.
	That's not what I said, but.
	No, I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want any of us to appear to be saying that.
	Let's maintain appearances.
	Okay.
	Well, on the last note in terms of growth and evolution on this year, I feel like since we've begun this podcast, I've actually become a little more sympathetic, not towards the same groups, but towards certain ostracized groups that I didn't personally pay as much attention to in the past.
	Along with that, however, I've grown less sympathetic Towards people who are promoting this growing authoritarian impulse in our politics and the ways that they're doing it.
	So, I'm really becoming more and more sick of this both-sides bullshit.
	This idea that if the overturning of Roe v. Wade isn't enough of a wake-up call for these Americans to understand what's at stake, I'm not sure what is, because it can get a lot worse.
	Yeah, so your empathy has had an accelerationist and dialectical boost.
	The grifters are so venal and shameless because the stakes are so high and the marks are so vulnerable.
	Okay, what are we expecting next year?
	What are we most concerned about in 2024?
	And I've said it a few times now in Project 2025, we've teased it a bit, but basically this is the Heritage Foundation's presidential plan for the next Republican president entering office in 2025, should the winds blow that way.
	And since Trump is crushing it in the polls, they're all in on Trump right now.
	But honestly, if Nikki Haley somehow surges and wins, They'll get behind her.
	They're kind of Switzerland in that terms.
	So it's not about the person, but the agenda.
	And their 920-page master document is one of the most authoritarian PDFs I've ever read.
	You can download it if you want to and put yourself through that, but you might want to given what's at stake.
	And as I mentioned earlier, we'll cover it in January and moving forward, but you have to pay attention to this if you care at all about any of our civil liberties, not just abortion rights, which we were just talking about.
	We just saw Greg Abbott sign into law yesterday the idea that they can just start arresting migrants coming over from Mexico the weekend.
	And this comes a few days after Trump was basically like, we're going to get them all out of the country.
	I mean, this is bad.
	While the Heritage Foundation is leading the charge, over 80 conservative and religious organizations have signed on, and members of some of those other organizations are writing chapters for this.
	So just to tease it out, just to give you a big picture view on this, here's a paragraph from the introduction by Kevin Roberts, who is the current president of Heritage, and When he joined Heritage in 2021, he is the person
	responsible for Project 2025.
	The next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard
	targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and
	gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is DEI, gender, gender equality, gender
	equity, gender awareness, gender sensitive abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights,
	and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule.
	Agency regulation, contract, grant regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
	Control F. Totally upside down.
	So these deletions will protect First Amendment rights?
	That is his argument, yes.
	Unbelievable.
	Okay, so this is not a conspiracy theory.
	It's not a hypothesis.
	It's just a conspiracy.
	It's out in the open.
	It's in PDF form.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	This is definitely the big one.
	You know, as an aside, I tweeted a couple days ago, With, you know, no small amount of snarkiness, how's it going for all of my heterodox and centrist friends who decided to move out of California because they thought it was too authoritarian and went to Austin?
	And now that Ken Paxton is enacting his, you know, incredible decrees that are, you know, basically criminalizing women
	who need to have abortions for medical reasons, right?
	I have to say, we're getting to the hope part next, but I was just, I just was texting a
	friend of mine from Los Angeles.
	He's a men's coach.
	He's wonderful.
	He moved to Austin with his wife because he just wanted to kind of check it out and get out of LA, and I texted him the other day to see how he's doing, and he was like, Austin reminds me of Santa Monica in 2010.
	It's too nuts for me.
	We're moving to Maryland.
	I'm actually on the road right now.
	So I was like, okay, good, good.
	There is some hope with some people getting the fuck out of that state.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I just feel like it's a, it's a, an early warning of what we could potentially see with Project 2025.
	I have this incredible sense that the problem right now is so much worse than we imagined in the last election year during 2020.
	I feel like we've all been having to play catch up with a virulent digital ecosystem and economy that exploits and hijacks the worst aspects of human nature.
	So greed, bigotry, cruelty, paranoia, confirmation bias, tribalism, scapegoating, and a glut of incredibly superficial and fact-free free, tasty analysis, peddled by people more than happy to
	abuse any sense of truth or evidence into torturous parody.
	And meanwhile, as we're playing catch up and trying to combat the existing nonsense, the
	perpetual motion machine it fuels with outrage and lies just keeps spinning out algorithmic
	mind viruses like an AI generator.
	As I've said so far, I'm seeing conspirituality nowadays as existing within this nested context
	of our truly disorienting and alarming historical moment.
	The stakes are very high.
	The deliberate and ruthless juggernaut on course to derail democracy and the percentage of the U.S.
	electorate apparently either low information enough not to know or fascist friendly enough to be all in is the most alarming thing.
	I mean, the New York Times poll this morning had Trump up two points over Biden amongst registered voters.
	So he's still their guy.
	Looking forward to 2025, like the global convergence from my point of view of conspiratualities is really finding its center point in Israel, Gaza.
	So we have jihadis, we have religious Zionists, we have conservative evangelicals who want there to be all out war that calls Jesus back to earth.
	And all of these folks have urgent, acute, and paranoid claims that are turning cities and homes into rubble.
	And so I, you know, going on this previous theme, I want to find moderate believers from all sides to talk about how And contrary to some of my argument today, I want to say, Matthew, I think interfaith dialogue is definitely a good thing.
	some kind of relief. And contrary to some of my some of my argument today I want to say Matthew I
	think interfaith dialogue is definitely a good thing I support it. Yeah okay now turning the
	corner into what gives us hope and optimism in the you know interfaith thing when it happens
	it's kind of amazing.
	And it's happened kind of with us, which is like over the past year, we've been interviewed or tagged or written in for, you know, CNN or the New York Times or the LA Times, you know, WAPO, Mother Jones Wired.
	But recently we were mentioned from the pulpit of St.
	Hildreth, St.
	Patrick Episcopal Church in Edmonds, Washington, where Reverend Joseph Peter Matthews talked about spiritual bypassing.
	And in his sermon for the second Sunday of Advent, basically, he quotes our podcast from a pulpit.
	Yeah, really cool.
	Basically, he's saying, don't let the ritual theater of Advent fool you into thinking you don't have to do the work because God's going to take care of things.
	That's kind of amazing.
	I want to know how many yoga classes we've been mentioned in as don't listen to these guys.
	Yeah, where's the real audience?
	Yes.
	And despite everything I've said so far today, I remain hopeful.
	I think it is very important for our individual and collective mental health.
	Of course, a sign of depression is that you do not have hope, and I think it's important to always maintain.
	So on a socio-political level, two things give me hope.
	First is the fervent response of voters who have been coming out in states and off-year elections to save abortion rights.
	I hate to say, and I'm not implying that the overturning of Roe v. Wade is a gift because of the tragic consequences we've already seen, Kate Cox in Texas just being the largest so far.
	Yeah, incredible.
	And we will continue to see this, but if that's what it takes to mobilize and activate voters in the next year's election cycle, I am all for it.
	Yeah, I mean, it does feel like they've overreached in terms of trying to normalize that reactionary extremism and the real-world impact, hopefully, is backfiring on them.
	Yes, we can hope on that because, again, move the metaphysics aside and get down to the real-world impact of how people operate in society.
	And I mean, Kay Cox is a perfect example because I don't know if she's religious, but she has children.
	She wants to raise a large family.
	She would never have gotten an abortion just to get one or because she didn't
	want to have a child that was against her worldview.
	And she was put in that situation that we've been warning about for so long and we're seeing
	it.
	And so the second thing that gives me hope right now is this surge we've seen in union
	protests.
	I mentioned earlier the hard swing against public health by conspiritualists, but I cannot
	ignore the fact that 2023 was one of the strongest years for unions in like a century.
	And they're winning their battles, which is huge.
	So let's keep that up into the new year and forever after that.
	Yeah, hear, hear.
	So, I said earlier I would come back around to Anand Giridharadas' book, The Persuaders.
	His defiant and well-researched call to save democracy is something that I really recommend.
	It's framed through examples of the people working on the ground, activists, To do exactly that, and it's a good tonic.
	Listeners can still download his free PDF from his website.
	It's called How to Become a Better Persuader.
	And here, I feel like rather than the activist or the political, you know, platform communication sphere, he's talking more about personal relationships.
	And he gives advice like this.
	Do distinguish disinformation perpetrators from its victims.
	Don't make the duped feel manipulated and stupid.
	So Matthew, perhaps you resonate with this.
	Do play the long game of trust building.
	Don't try to change your mind in a single day.
	Do amplify what you're for and help people to see it.
	don't live in perpetual reaction mode to the other side's outrages.
	Yeah, when you brought that book in, Julian, I was so happy.
	I read it in like three days.
	It's so well written. It's fluid.
	Anand's work is great.
	But one thing that I will also add to my list is him talking to and citing Loretta Ross,
	a long-time black activist from the 60s.
	She just has had such a prolific career, but she has a concept called Circles of Influence, which I've referenced numerous times.
	And it's about how the fact that the three of us can disagree on certain things, but we agree on enough to continue this project and continue to focus on hopefully just having good conversations, but also bringing in experts to talk about important issues that are affecting all of us.
	And I highly recommend the book for many, many reasons, but especially to check out Loretta's work.
	Yeah, that part is really good.
	You know, Matthew, I also found our conversation with Bradley Onishi very hopeful because he's lived through what I would frame as the intense cult indoctrination of a particular kind of evangelical white Christian nationalism.
	And he's come out the other side through education.
	and inquiry and empathy.
	He's now actively working to reach others as you've sort of called for today or called for us to be to acknowledge his
	humility and kindness during that conversation.
	Really touched me.
	It made me want to be a better person.
	Yeah, me too.
	And I'm looking forward to talking to him later this week.
	We're going to talk a little bit more about his framing of the secular person of faith.
	I kind of feel like we need a word for the solid, honest academic who, through the strength of their work, perhaps informed by their life experience, but not because they're grandiose.
	They cross over into some kind of inspirational territory.
	I think we're very familiar with the Weinsteins and Petersons who leverage academic capital to, you know, become these dime store messiahs.
	But what do we call the academic who does the opposite?
	Like, they serve their disciplines so well that you're inspired beyond their actual sort of content to be more kind.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, I've talked about this a lot before on the podcast.
	Bradley, in that conversation, really struck me as someone who is embodying and living that kind of, maintaining that kind of connection to what we can only describe as sort of spiritual values whilst having stepped away from, you know, it appears, any of the supernatural belief.
	Yeah, I think it'll bake your noodle, Julian, to know that we're going to talk about something called Christian atheism on Friday, actually.
	Awesome!
	Awesome!
	I can't wait to argue with you about that.
	Yeah, sure.
	But I look forward to hearing what Bradley has to say.
	I'm sure it's quite powerful.
	I am also moved and made optimistic by the many people who reach out to us to share stories of how our work has spoken to them at just the right time.
	How they've shared it with loved ones who were able to change course after having fallen down some of the rabbit holes that we describe.
	I actually had this experience last week.
	I just started doing my dance events again and over the last few months and two people came who had never come before and both sort of independently over the course of our time together realized that, oh, I'm that guy from conspirituality and they were just incredibly appreciative.
	It was, it was very humbling.
	You know, I've done a lot of listener stories for our Patreon feed.
	They're fascinating.
	And I am noticing one thing I'm going to pay some attention to, which is that not every angle or platform can always do all things at once.
	I mean, this seems obvious, but I have seen that there's a kind of developmental spectrum that people are on with different angles.
	And here's what I'm thinking about, that amongst our possible listeners, we have people who might be deeply embedded in a conspiracy theory community or a cultic organization and you just can't reach them with critique or deconstruction.
	If you mock them, they're gonna dig in deeper to escape the judgment and the cruelty of the world.
	If you're a friend or you have social capital, you can offer the constancy of friendship, but that isn't podcast territory.
	I think where our wheelhouse is is that a person is on the edge of leaving a conspiracy theory community or a cultic organization, and some forms of deconstruction or critique spiced up with even irony or rage might be helpful or connective.
	In reinvigorating independent thinking and courage.
	I mean, we've got a lot of listeners who want us to reassure them that they're sane.
	But then the listeners that I'm talking about on the edge of recovering can really benefit from the baseline of what we do.
	Although for some, you know, we'll be going too hard for others will be going too soft.
	But then the third point on the spectrum is after like somebody has recovered and integrated from the various social You know, situations we're talking about and this is the listener who they've pried themselves free of the LDS, they're not in the MLM anymore, they aren't in the anti-vax group or Kelly Brogan's vital mind group, they've stopped going to Charles Eisenstein, Darshans and Joe Dispenza faith healing events, but now they're lonely and they're looking around for goodness in the world
	And, you know, I think for them, it can be that the continuation of listening to critique and deconstruction, you know, ceases to be educational.
	It's not nourishing in the same way.
	And I think there are two ways of looking at this demographic.
	Like, you know, first of all, well, we did our job.
	They're going to move on.
	Secondly, well, maybe we did part of the job.
	But in that Naomi Klein sense of, you know, the mirror world only really emerges in the vacuum of real world care, maybe we also play a reparative role.
	Maybe we speak to disillusionment and disenchantment a little bit more by finding enchanting people in projects.
	I think that it's a paradox, because I think we can reach forward a little bit beyond our, you know, original purview.
	But in so doing, we're also reaching back into the origin of the crisis of trust, which, like in my view, increasingly is really about the pervasive impact of capitalism that accelerates competition, zero-sum games, and depressive cynicism.
	So, I guess my question now is, what if conspirituality begins with a positive impulse?
	Like, how do we get back to that and nurture it so that it doesn't go sour and skid sideways?
	I think we've identified a little bit about conspirituality beginning with the impulse in our book and we'll continue to look for that.
	I would also just add family members of people who you identified in our listenership because we see that a lot as well.
	Totally.
	Which is really important because people are trying to understand what happened to their partner or their mother and we're trying to figure it out as well.
	On a personal level, this entire episode kind of evolved out of a comment that a fellow cyclist and conspirituality listener Jed Lowenthal left on one of my Strava rides.
	It was the fact that Strava is a social network that is predominantly positive.
	In my years on the app, I've never seen one instance of negativity.
	I'm sure they exist.
	There are probably trolls everywhere, but he was right on that point.
	It sounds like that's it.
	I've been wondering why that is and I don't have an answer to that.
	But I do know it's a place that I love opening up to see what my friends are up to, what
	kind of workouts they're doing and to track my own workouts.
	It sounds like that's it.
	Like it's simple that it's a purpose built app for encouraging each other, maybe finding
	out where the most beautiful rides are, right?
	Yes, it is.
	But also like anything fitness or health related can very quickly spiral into a lot of shaming.
	Yeah.
	And that doesn't happen there?
	I haven't seen it.
	You know what I'm saying?
	Like it might exist, but so far so good.
	And I'm going to continue to hope that it continues that way.
	So, along with Strava, a few things that keep me going on a personal level.
	My Discover Weekly on Spotify, which continues to introduce me to amazing music every week.
	You know, Spotify did a poll years ago where they found out that most listeners stop searching for new music when they are 33 years old.
	They see a drop off at that age.
	And yes, I am a former music journalist and DJ, so music is important, but I think it's very important because at 48, I have too many friends who have taken that attitude of, there's no good music out anymore.
	And I'm like, no, no, no, no.
	There's so much, just so much more than we were growing up.
	It stopped.
	It stopped with Radiohead.
	After Radiohead, there's nothing.
	I will also plug something that I think is one of the most fantastic things of 2023.
	It's the British electronica band and live band, Jungle.
	For about 10 or 12 weeks, they released a new dance video for one of their songs from their album, Volcano.
	They've recently packaged it into one full movie called Volcano Emotion If you have 52 minutes to just sit back and have a good time, look for that because it's amazing.
	And then banging back to Strava, getting on my bike multiple days a week to explore Portland.
	It gets me off of these screens that I'm on all day and out into the wonderful fresh air.
	And finally, just staying close with my family and friends, checking in, focusing on what matters most.
	Which is beyond all this bullshit we wade through is your connections with the people that you love.
	That extends to both of you because this work, as challenging as it can be, you know, is really a gift.
	And the cultivation and maintenance of relationships remains one of the most important and rewarding aspects of being a human in my estimation.
	And that keeps me mentally sane and emotionally sane even during insane times like this.
	You know, I've spoken a lot of shit about the internet for this episode, but I have to say it's brought us here, and it's so incredibly strange that we live so far apart and work so closely, and I've never met you in person, Derek.
	That is bizarre.
	And I think that whenever we do meet, and it's weird, too, because the three of us really should have had a book launch together.
	But, you know, pandemic and stuff.
	But I think when we do meet, I think it'll be very emotional.
	Maybe because this has been such an intense project.
	And I've also been very angry at you at times, like both of you, over politics or creative styles or just the tone of your voice at staff meetings, for fuck's sake.
	And that's just like family.
	And maybe this is an overshare, or maybe it's just me being a dad, but I did have this, like, half dream one night.
	Where I got terrified that you'd fallen off your bike and you were really injured, you were in the hospital, and my first thought was, I gotta get on a plane to Portland and go see this guy and tell him how much he means to me.
	And then, like, it got neurotic because I started wondering if I should pick up a gift at the airport to bring to your wife who I've never met.
	And then, oh, and while I'm out there, I should like, can I afford to buy a ticket to go down to Los Angeles and finally meet Julian's daughter and listen to you play guitar in your kitchen?
	So anyway, yeah, it's, it's, it's deep inside me.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Well, I will look forward to all of those things happening except Derek falling off his bike.
	Yeah.
	That, that cannot be the reason that we have our book launch.
	I am, as active as I am, I am a klutz and I have fallen off a number of times and landed on my shoulder and thankfully nothing in the hospital yet.
	Yeah, I mean on a personal note, I'll just say I've already mentioned it, but gathering in community again.
	To be with people and to dance and, you know, just have that experience over the last five months has been amazing.
	It's for the first time since the pandemic started, really meaningful, really fun outlet.
	And of course, it gives me that creative opportunity to DJ.
	I'll also say I've been playing guitar more than I probably had in the last 20 years since the beginning of the pandemic.
	So that was one sort of unexpected positive that came out of it.
	And then, you know, I'm the only one of us who still teaches yoga.
	Welcoming in-person participants back into the yoga room has evoked a lot of gratitude and humility for me.
	I think really like 30 years into this career, the word community is much less hollow and transactional now.
	Like I'm really feeling it.
	I'm able to let it in and I'm much less sort of caught up in What does it mean to be the teacher?
	I'm just like, I'm just here with these people, you know?
	And we're doing this thing together and I'm grateful.
	This year I finally ditched trying to be a runner.
	At 53, I'm like, you know what, this right hip is just never going to be okay with running.
	So I started walking daily and was very skeptical that that would do anything, but I'm averaging about 8,000 steps a day and it feels really great.
	But, you know, the best thing for me, sort of predictably, you might guess, is spending time with my five-year-old daughter, seeing the world through her eyes, being in the simplicity of love and play and wonder with her every day.
	Wear your helmet, Derek.
	Thank you, everyone, for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
	We hope you have a wonderful holiday season.

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