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, and dietary supplements seem boring; your manic salesmanship starts to feel hollow. Maybe you’re also wondering about whether you’ve sold your soul, or who you may have hurt along the way.
What will you turn to? Who will help you? What will your ultimate piece of content be? From time out of mind, there’s only ever been one answer: GOD. Russell Brand, Joe Rogan, and Andrew Huberman have all recently made such confessions of faith. Derek and Matthew discuss.
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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.
You can catch us on Instagram or on threads at ConspiratualityPod.
You can also access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes over on Patreon.
You can also just access our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
Today, Matthew and I are producing a brief called The God Pivot, Rogan, Brand, and Huberman.
Let's say you're a charismatic guy, burning with passion and hunger, looking for your slice of eternal glory.
And starting out, you made a name for yourself as a cultural critic, or a comedian, or as a maverick scientist.
Your fans saw you as brilliant, charming, inspiring.
But how many fans?
Was it enough?
You rode home from your gigs in a humming limo, thinking about that theater, the comedy club, that undergrad class you were teaching.
Such small, shabby spaces.
Keeping your light, as Jesus says, under a barrel.
But then one day, as if in a dream, you feel the door of the internet crack open.
And in the cold blue light, you see the streams of infinite code that can turn the fans you can see into followers you can monetize.
The algorithm shows you the emotional wounds of the whole world and how to both soothe and pick at them.
Following your intuition, you seek out the norms of journalistic, political, and medical consensus so you can test those norms and break them.
You enter a flow state as a perpetual disruptor and you can't even count the money that pours in.
But being a chaos agent is exhausting.
And the internet never ends.
It's abstract, groundless.
You're rising or falling in empty space.
And at some point, all of your content seems stale and redundant.
All the conspiracy theories, outrage farming, and dietary supplements are boring.
And your manic salesmanship starts to feel hollow.
Maybe you're also wondering about whether you've sold your soul or who you may have hurt along the way.
What will you turn to?
Who will help you?
What will your ultimate piece of content be?
From time out of mind, there's only ever been one answer, and that's God.
I'll put the God filter on your voice for that part.
So, today we're looking at the growing trend of these top Often contrarian podcasters who are expressing their newfound faith in a god.
In this case, it happens to be the Christian God.
Now we're going to play their confessional moments and discuss why at this point in their trajectory they've decided to open up about their faith.
And to be clear, this is not about denouncing anyone's faith, because that's a personal decision and we don't want to take that away from anyone.
But it is interesting that in the last few months, all three men that we're covering today have come forward as shepherds in ways that, to us in our field of conspirituality research, raises more questions than it answers.
And so we're going to start with the most questionable of them all, Mr. Russell Brand.
The reason I wear a cross is because Christianity and in particular the figure of Christ are, it seems to me, inevitably becoming more important as I become more familiar with suffering, purpose, self and not-self.
I'm reading the Bible a lot more and as I've told you before, I'm reading Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life.
When I grew up, Christianity seemed like it was either really irrelevant and old-fashioned and sort of dusty and sort of incense and sort of... or they tried to modernize it and it seems just like...
Right okay we're going to talk about Jesus and like both of those routes seem like well I don't know if there's anything for me and I suppose it takes a certain amount of adulthood and it might be different for all of us for me it seems that it's taken quite a lot to recognize that you need, I need, a personal relationship with God.
It occurred to me that if instead of always talking to myself inwardly I could replace one of those voices with an indwelling God. He says in Galatians, it is our job
to die so that as Christ died on the cross he might be reborn in us. I'm very interested to hear what
you think because for me my heart is open. Oh well what I think is the following, um he
He alludes to suffering and repentance, but vaguely, and I wonder why.
I'll get to those more general questions a little bit later, but the standout here is name-dropping Rick Warren.
Warren's 2002 Purpose Driven Life has sold 50 million copies worldwide in various languages.
And I think it's the perfect evangelical text for brand because it's mostly boilerplate Christian self-help, although Warren hates the term self-help.
And that disguises some extremely reactionary views.
But it sounds like this, quote, your value is not determined by your valuables.
And God says the most valuable things in life are not things, exclamation point.
Or without God, life has no purpose.
And without purpose, life has no meaning.
Without meaning, life has no significance or hope, unquote.
So, this is advice and encouragement that's so bland.
Warren has had some real cross-cultural success, such as getting tapped by Obama to speak at the 2009 inauguration.
But beneath the kind of Ned Flanders hokum, he's out there fighting the gays and against reproductive rights.
He's blaming atheists for all the world's troubles.
And he's insisting that, like, Terry Schiavo be kept alive in a vegetative state
when that was happening.
So, I think it's totally on brand for Russell to select the most laundering Christian texts
and thinkers at this point.
I also wonder, does Russell understand that...
replacing a voice in his head with what he thinks is God doesn't mean that it's necessarily God?
-...like... -...yeah.
That's just giving his voice inside of his head another character.
An elevated character.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's the danger.
That's where the danger begins with a lot of religious thinking, right?
Oh, that voice in my head was really a God telling me to do these things for so long.
Okay.
Rick Warren.
Okay, so out of curiosity, I visited his main campus when I lived in LA.
This is back in 2015.
I wanted to experience a sermon from a man who could sell that many books.
If you're up there, what are you saying?
And this campus is huge and beautiful.
It is really on prime real estate.
His sermon was, as you insinuated there, it was very bland.
There were some pretty malicious items inside of it as well.
And there's something that's always stayed with me from that night.
So, the theme of the evening was the shape that God crafts humans in.
And Warren started by talking about how bad assisted suicide is.
Because God chooses when we're born and when we die.
He shapes us throughout life.
But it was also very jokey.
He is charismatic.
He is sort of the guy in the corner that you could just hang out with.
I get that vibe from him, at least his public persona.
And You want this personality, is what he's saying, but you're really this for God.
And that was throughout the entire thing, and it went all over the place.
So there was a total of 43 minutes that I captured on audio, and he had a bunch of rotating guests.
It was very professional people coming on and off, and they were all throwing jabs, some joking, some not, about the shape that God gave us.
But then there was this moment.
And the more we move away from the Bible, the more people have an identity crisis.
The more we move away from the truth of God, the more people have an identity crisis.
And what we've got today is people denying what God made them to be.
We've got light-skinned people wanting to be tan.
And we've got dark-skinned people wanting to be lighter.
We got men wanting to be women and women wanting to be men, and people with fur or curly hair wanting to be straight hair, and people with straight hair wanting to be curly hair, and those of us with receding hair wishing we had more hair, and And everybody's in an identity crisis.
Why?
Because we've gone away from the Word of God.
Okay, so he must be against the free market giving people choices about how they would like to be in the world, right?
Well, he's worth $25 million, so I'm guessing he spends that money somewhere.
I also find it humorous that he starts this part of the litany with the idea that people wanting to be tan.
It is Orange County, California.
This is the epicenter of plastic surgeries and bodily manipulations.
It's throughout the crowd.
So there's just this almost grab bag of ideas that exist throughout these 43 minutes.
But notice, and why I picked this clip, again, this was November 2015.
So this was well before transgender people becoming a right-wing culture war issue.
And he's comparing gender identity With people who want curly hair, and he's pontificating about refusing tanning beds.
I can speak more about the carelessness this represents, but we might as well move on to Joe Rogan's recent confession of faith, and we'll also touch on his recent interview with Chris Rufo.
Yeah, before we do that, I just want to say one last thing about how strategic Bran's choice of Warren might be.
I mean, to his credit, Warren has taken an outspoken position against sexual abuse in the Evangelical Church by doing things like calling for accountability in the Southern Baptist Convention.
He even personalizes it by talking about his wife as a survivor of church abuse.
So, I think Brand is aligning himself with not only a man of God, but with a whistleblower in that culture.
So, I don't think he could choose a better reference given his particular situation.
Yeah, and in fairness, they started the sermon that night with all talking about the sort of aid that they were sending to Africa.
They actually have all these classrooms on the campus where those things are happening.
And you can debate whether or not missionary work is good and what kind of contingencies happen when they're sending aid.
But at the same time, one of the aspects of the church that I always appreciate is when they are charitable And he does seem to put some efforts around that.
But again, there are, of course, contingencies.
A man without any contingencies, though.
Let's move on to Joe Rogan.
As time rolls on, people are going to understand the need to have some sort of divine structure to things, some sort of belief in the sanctity of love and of truth.
A lot of that comes from religion.
A lot of people's moral compass and the guidelines that they've used to follow to live a just and righteous life has come from religion.
And unfortunately a lot of very intelligent people They dismiss all the positive aspects of religion because they think that the stories are mere superstitious fairy tales that, you know, they have no place in this modern world, and, you know, we're inherently good, and your ethics are based on your own moral compass, and we all have one, and that's not necessarily true.
We need Jesus.
I think for real.
Like, if he came back now, it'd be great.
Like, Jesus, if you're thinking about coming back?
Right now?
Now's a good time.
Pretty soon.
Yeah.
Now's a good time.
I think this is the Jordan Peterson light argument, which is we need Jesus or Christianity because otherwise it's all chaos.
But then look at who's speaking, like who fosters chaos?
I mean, I love how you can spend years rising to the top of global media by platforming conspiracy theories, and then you get high, and then you look out on all the wreckage and say, We're all going to need some kind of sensible structure for ourselves sometime soon.
I mean, Joe, we have moral and ethical guidelines in media, and they're based on intellectual curiosity and humility and respect for evidence and a rejection of emotional manipulation.
But Joe's not a media guy.
He's just a guy talking into a microphone.
You know, he doesn't have the legacy media outlet responsibilities, of course.
Right, okay.
I'm so tired of this argument that humans can't possibly have a moral compass without a belief in a higher power.
When he says that it's not necessarily true that humans can follow moral guidelines without religion, he's first of all overlooking the fact that many religious people can't follow their own damn moral guidelines.
And he's also overlooking the centuries-long exploration and implementation of secular philosophy and secular humanism in America.
We're not the only culture to attempt that, but Rogan can't even manage the basics of American history, so I'm going to guess he's not well-versed in global ideologies.
You know, I want to say as a lapsed Catholic that the real juice of religious guidelines is in the perpetual temptation to break them.
That's like an absorbing and pleasurable tension.
If you can obsess about whether you should masturbate or whether other people should be allowed to have anal sex, You're pretty much absorbed in the project of what orderly is versus chaotic, and you're projecting it outwards.
And in that sense, I think Rogan might just be joining Peterson in looking for some kind of more elevated orthodoxy within which he can continue to play a contrarian role.
Because they don't want to sign on to all of it, I can tell you that.
Yeah, and contrarianism has existed for a long time.
Again, their historical understanding is terrible.
I mean, since Aristotle and probably since before that time, slavery was associated with religious hierarchy, a divine order that kept certain people in their place.
And American history has shown us over and over again that the most regressive laws that we have are implemented from a religious perspective, from this idea that there is a natural order that we have to abide by.
And we're living through it right now when it comes to bodily autonomy.
That's a big thing in the Rogan space with their anti-COVID views.
We've been living through that for centuries.
But the notion that we need religion to be good people is usually stated by people who don't trust themselves to not have metaphysical guardrails in place.
Don't let your training wheels dictate the reality of those who no longer need them, though.
I think we have to say that we're recording this only a day after Rogan's two and a half hour session with Chris Rufo dropped.
And we've both had time to listen to it.
We might do a review of that separately if we can stand it.
But I just need to say, I knew that the Rogan podcast was bad.
I just didn't know how bad it was.
At this point at least, it's like pure free association of bigotry, stereotypes, unsighted claims, category errors, and just this like casual stoner cruelty.
And you know, I said earlier that I think it makes sense for him to point to Jesus in the midst of his own chaos, but listening to more of him just over the last couple of days, I don't think he's going to stick with that line because It's pretty clear that his true religion is like bullshitting.
Like, that's where he finds God.
There's this empty space between his lips and the mic, that improv space, and I think that's where the divine is for him.
Well, and also, his profession of faith seems to be the sort of, you can just say it and it'll happen without understanding that all religions have those guidelines in place because you have to have the discipline to follow them.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm going to talk about that in a bit later.
But as I've admitted before, I was a regular Rogan listener a decade ago.
Even before the pandemic, though, I dropped off.
There was always stuff that I tuned out.
It's important to recognize where you agree, where you disagree, and then decide whether or not you're going to stay on board.
Rogan just kept getting worse in the conspiracy space, and I haven't listened to an entire episode in years.
So this Rufo episode might be the first in a while since, as you said, we might have to cover it because it is that bad.
But like you, I was floored at just how bigoted and dangerous his and Rufo's free association were.
Rogan likens choosing genders to choosing a phone.
He makes absolutely ridiculous claims about drug addiction and houselessness because he hates the word houseless or unhoused.
He's like, homelessness, we have a word for it.
It can't change.
That is the word.
He goes on to compare Marxism to rabies.
I mean, and that's all in the first 10 minutes.
I'm only 18 minutes in and it hasn't gotten any better now.
Yeah, I want to pick up on that example.
I mean, there's so many, every sentence would have to be fact-checked, like nothing could be published anywhere from this podcast on any other platform.
But when he rants about the terminology change from homeless to unhoused, He's talking about it being some useless woke gesture, but he doesn't have any curiosity about what that's about.
He's not curious about, you know, the fact that, I mean, his lack of curiosity actually is part of the problem.
Unhoused comes from unhoused and anti-poverty advocates saying that people living in tents are making homes like all humans do.
Where they create whatever dignity they can.
They have communities.
The problem is, they don't have housing.
And if we spotlight housing instead of implying that they are from nowhere, they're just wandering hobos and not part of our society, then we can focus on the communal or state responsibility for providing housing.
Well, I'm going to guess that there is not a lot of unhoused people on Lake Travis in Austin outside of his fucking compound, so he probably doesn't have to interact with them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's so many more things in my head right now about this episode, but let's hold off.
We'll see if we follow up on that.
I feel like we're going to have to.
So let's listen to one more confessional, which is more buttoned up because that's his MO.
But we also have some red flags here, and that's Andrew Huberman.
That's an interesting one because I think God, yeah.
So I absolutely do.
I've actually started reading the Bible recently, start to finish.
I feel like it's my duty to like learn and in some sense compare Old and New Testament.
I'm really interested in the stories, but I'm also fascinated by the story of us, right?
And the story of everything.
But yeah, I pray out loud in the morning, sometimes again in the middle of the night if I wake up.
And it's only recently that I've been doing this more often.
It's given you peace?
Oh my goodness, it's given me so much.
It's given me peace.
And you know, this is gonna sound weird and probably people are gonna be like, what are you talking about?
It works.
It works.
There's a way in which certain things I was grappling with, you know, I just couldn't resolve.
I couldn't do it.
And it was all internal, and I just couldn't do it.
How were you trying to resolve these things?
Like, have an answer?
Yeah, discipline myself.
I mean, it wasn't like I was super, you know, undisciplined.
I mean, obviously, I have a lot of self-discipline, but, you know, like, I always pray, you know, I want to remove my defects of character.
I want to, you know, I certainly pray for other people.
I mostly, you know, these days I pray for the ability to really harness as much care and love for other people and for myself, something I haven't been that good at in my lifetime, in order to be able to put the best possible work into the world, to really serve.
Like I really see myself as serving higher power.
Like I'm a conduit.
So I think this is a higher-end confession.
So, like, Rogan is Chick-fil-A and, you know, this is more like Whole Foods.
I listened to the whole 13-minute homily that we clipped this from, and in it he also has some Buddhist contemplation going on in the renunciation vein.
He's been going through a period in which a number of people close to him died, one by suicide, and this lends a carpe diem quality to the sermon.
And he alone, within this trio we're looking at today, Derek, connects this surrender to empathy.
And I think that that might reflect where he started with his confession at the beginning of the clip with a hymn of praise to the mysterious complexity of the brain, the body electric.
And just to note, this comes from a recent episode with Cameron Haynes, but I always wonder why a scientist would study the Bible if they're interested in the story of us.
I mean, you will gain an understanding of the story of Western culture, for sure.
That's totally fine.
But Huberman seems to be hinting at something grander and older than that.
And if you want to know that story, you study evolutionary biology, you study anthropology, you study physics.
He's a neuroscientist.
You can study the very mechanism that invents stories in the first place, which will give you amazing insights into who we actually are.
Well, remove of us.
You can literally study stories that way.
Yeah, so I'm assuming he's done all of that and it's not satisfying, like he's reached the end of His fascination with scientific language in some ways.
Maybe he wants to diversify his audience.
Maybe he is impressed by the way in which mystical poetry works.
I don't know.
I mean, maybe he's run up against some kind of boredom.
And it makes me wonder about personality differences here because, you know, you're an atheist, Derek.
You engage in art and music.
I don't get the impression that that ever reaches a dead end for you, that you ever feel the need to, you know, locate the one true source of meaning in one particular thing.
Is that right?
Like, I mean, some people evidently do, but that's not right for you.
No, I absolutely don't.
And I'm definitely not alone.
You can look at scientists like V.S.
Ramachandran, Carlo Rovelli.
They do amazing jobs at expressing awe and wonder in the sciences, which I'd argue are important ingredients in religion.
But you just don't need to be theistic.
It's interesting that you point out that some sort of boredom.
I mean, how can you be bored as a neuroscientist?
There is so much that's going on in that field right now and so much more to explore.
Now, the thing about these confessions is you have to have a working knowledge of science To see the awe and wonder in the natural world.
So Rogan brand, they don't have that.
So it kind of makes sense that they would kind of run up at the end and be like, Oh, what else?
Well, I guess Jesus is there.
But I figured that Huberman would, but apparently I'm wrong, which makes me question this particular confession.
Not the searching.
Everyone searches in their own way.
Again, I'm not criticizing.
Or the prayer.
If you pray, awesome.
But I kind of look at it my own sort of journey through these, having studied religion academically, having gone through a long experience with psychedelics where I was searching in my own way.
And right now, I'm currently reading a 700-page section on Buddhism from a larger work on the history of the world's six major religions because I just continually re-explore Buddhism, the history and the culture, not just the philosophy, because if you don't place these ideas in the time that they're in, you won't really get a good grasp on them.
And I feel like Huberman is confusing the story of Judaism and Christianity with the story of all of humanity.
And as a field of study, like if you're focused on Judaism and Christianity, that's totally fine.
And again, no issue with any of the practices there per se.
But Huberman's framing seems like it's very specific for a specific Christian audience.
And his method doesn't really align with his stated goals, or it's just short-sighted.
I'm really confused by people who think that a very specific notion of God is the only one that matters, and that's sort of where I land with his entire 13-minute section there.
Just one more note about boredom.
Like you say, how can you be bored with the expanding horizon of neuroscience?
And on one level, I agree with you, but I wonder if there's also something going on there with familiarity versus novelty, that if you're just using or immersed in the same discourse for a certain period of time, it's just going to become It's definitely possible.
I mean, you said novelty and that is true.
you know, epiphany that you might have first had when you started studying.
I mean, I think I get used to things all the time and I move on and I wonder if that happens
with some of these influencers.
It's definitely possible.
I mean, you said novelty and that is true.
So whereas you have someone with the temperament of a Ramachandran who can continually explore
the literature and find new connections to explore and is fascinated by it.
He is an expert in that sense.
I mean, look, I'm not an expert in anything.
I like a lot of things and I explore them all the time and then I have certain points where I spend a little bit more time with Buddhism because I find it fascinating.
One of the things that Ramachandran might be doing, I don't know the guy personally, but what if he's getting his novelty in terms of discourse in other places and he's not making that part of his public persona and so he can come back to his actual disciplined work and like all of the juices right there.
Maybe that's something.
That would make a lot of sense because as far as I'm aware, he's not a podcaster who has continually put out content.
Like, he writes a book every few years, and you get that one.
Like, here's my last decade of study.
Here it is.
And so that could definitely make sense.
And that sort of impatience could be part of what's happening with these figures, because they have to constantly stay on top of news stories, their version of news stories, if you're talking about Rogan and Brand.
And then they need to seek that dopamine rush and maybe it's just not giving it to them.
I don't know.
Definitely possible.
So, I had some general thoughts just as we close out here about the notion of the confessional.
And I wanted to say that to the extent that these guys have been disclosing their daily fitness regimes and their supplement stacks and their
exercise rituals and like the quality of their stools and the number of reps and all of that
stuff.
They've been doing that forever on social media and in their podcasts.
And so they've been in a kind of professional performative confessional zone for a long
time.
In fact, in some sense, they're just the mega producers in a broader social confessional economy where everybody's secrets, their foibles and formulas are content, where you become visible by emptying everything out, by showing everything.
But I think it turns a corner when the contents of the confession pivots to something that is painted as vulnerable and taboo, which is whether or not you're ultimately reliant upon God.
Whether at the end of all of your podcasting BS, there's some point of silent communion.
And so, as naive or disingenuous as these statements from Brand, Rogan, and Huberman are, something is new here.
I think they're calling on something older than the confessional mode of social media.
And it goes right back to the first literary work in the Western canon by a single author, which is the Confessions of St.
Augustine.
But the thing about the Confession of Faith is that it's not just meant to signal a transformation.
It also embodies a yearning for absolution.
There's a desire for a clean slate, a kind of purification.
Augustine is mortified by the sins of his youth and how they kept him from the ecstasy he now experiences as a new man.
Now, there are a lot of confessions of faith out there currently, and some of them have that quality of seeking absolution and mystic communion, and I think that's where RFK Jr.
provides a kind of gold standard model at this point.
He gave a homily on Lex Friedman's show by putting his crisis in the rearview mirror and talking about his 12-step practice.
And his confession was really that he is always an addict who always needs to surrender himself to God.
And then I remember that there was also this very plausible but also reactionary confession of faith that came from the former environmentalist and now eco-fascist Paul Kingsnorth.
He became Orthodox recently.
Now he sends out substacks about visiting all the holy wells in Ireland.
And his description of newfound surrender to God came out of a kind of despair that his years of work in the climate change movement seemed to have accomplished nothing, that it was all vanity.
It didn't work.
And I kind of resonated with that.
I respected that a little bit more.
But with Rogan, Brand, and Huberman, we don't get these lows and highs.
We don't actually hear anything about regret.
We don't hear anything about the need for forgiveness.
We don't hear anything about making amends.
And I think if they're expressing vulnerability, it's really just in the thinnest sense.
Like, you know, creating a resting point for their own minds.
Like a way of ending the endless chatter.
Maybe for someone like Brandt, it's obvious what he has to clean up behind him.
Maybe for Rogan and Huberman, the atonement is for things yet to come or to be revealed, or maybe on some level, this becomes a way of preempting the consequences of their very real public sins over the past years.
So, with Rogan, the spreading of conspiracy theories and anti-vax, you know, disinformation, and in Huberman's case, walking right up to the edge of pseudoscience wellness grifting.
That was really a perfect turn of phrase, I have to point out.
Atonement for things to come.
Because on a meta level, that could mean getting good with God before you die.
Yeah.
But on a much more human level, these are men with growing right-wing, Christian nationalist audiences, and it always makes sense to align with them as much as possible.
Just in case you need them on your side for anything.
I mean, we saw this with Russell Brand when his stans rushed to his defense without even considering the charges against him from those women a few months ago.
I'm sure others have studied that playbook.
I mean, Brand didn't invent that playbook.
A profession of divine faith often appeals to a certain population more than any carnal endeavors they might have been involved with.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I mean, bottom line, I don't actually hear any real suffering or gravitas in these statements or the kind of suffering that necessitates a psycho-spiritual surrender.
And, you know, we don't know what their darkest nights are like, but I'm not hearing men who have grown up enough to really be able to describe the ways in which they suffer, the ways in which they need help.
It makes me wonder what the real purpose is.
You know, I mean, Jesus specifically tells guys like this to not pray in public, right?
Like the Pharisees do.
So, I think the real point is that they're continuing to build their product.
But here's what I worry about, because once you confess your theism, like, where do you go from there?
What do you do?
If everything in your platform is oriented around commodification, what do you do when you wind up commodifying a confession of faith?
I mean, at a certain point, these guys won't have anything left to expose.
They won't have anything left to sell.
I mean, if your ultimate content is God, you can't really hock supplements in the same way with a straight face.
