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June 3, 2024 - Conspirituality
05:20
Bonus Sample: Nicole Shanahan Talks DEI with Scott Adams

Nicole Shanahan, RFK Jr's VP pick, has recently started her own podcast. Dilbert creator Scott Adams joined. The conversation quickly turned into a conspiracy free-for-all, starting with DEI, then swerving into fertility, vaccines, transgender people, EMFs, and much more. Derek responds. Show Notes Inside the fringe worldview of RFK Jr.’s VP pick A Running Mate’s History: $1 Billion, Cocaine, a Fling With Elon Musk Back to the People: Reframing Our Brains on Food, Debt, and DEI (full episode) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
I'm Nicole Shanahan, Bobby Kennedy's Running Mate.
Welcome to Back to the People podcast, which highlights the growth of a movement uniting America, where our government is free from corporate capture and where we give voice back to the American public.
What is that fucking music?
Oh hey, this is Derek with a Conspiratuality Bonus episode about Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.' 's vice presidential pick for the 2024 campaign.
And I just listened to a 62-minute conversation that Shanahan had with Scott Adams.
The cartoonist behind Dilbert turned far-right Twitter troll in recent years.
Well, maybe decades, as you'll see.
Now Adams will claim that he doesn't belong to a political party, but as we're going to hear, his ideas sure align with a particular side right now.
Now this podcast between Shanahan and Adams is a sort of masterclass in conspiracy thinking and the way that people start from a place of honest questioning about life experiences and then get sucked into a rather dangerous pipeline that's rife with Misinformation and bigotry.
In fact, as we'll hear throughout this episode, Shanahan is spreading the same misinformation she has for years, but now with a much bigger platform.
Okay, so a little bit of context.
Two weeks ago I was interviewed by NBC News and the Washington Post about Shanahan, specifically the sort of conspiratorial, conspiritualist ideologies that she's been peddling.
The NBC News piece has run already, and I'll link to that in the show notes.
There was also a New York Times feature on her that was pretty good and I'll include that as well because it gives a good framework for how she evolved to become the public figure that she is and how she ended up being a major candidate's VP pick.
And I know that Kennedy isn't in the Democratic or Republican Party officially, but given the current climate, I would put him up there as being a contender in the sense that he can really spoil the race.
So let's start with a little bit of background.
Nicole Shanahan has an origin myth that she likes to tell, and a lot of it appears to be true, but some of it is questionable.
Or at least it's slanted in this sort of rags-to-riches, self-made direction that's pretty standard in Silicon Valley lore.
Now Nicole was born in Placer County, California and grew up in Oakland.
She apparently had a pretty tough childhood.
Her father was diagnosed with bipolar schizophrenia and he died in 2014.
Apparently her family had a lot of financial troubles when Nicole was growing up.
Her mother is from China and she worked as a maid before becoming an accountant.
Now, Nicole appears to have been a pretty hard worker in school.
She went to the University of Puget Sound, where she got a bachelor's degree in 2007.
Then she went to law school at Santa Clara University School of Law.
She graduated from that institution with a JD in 2014.
She was also an exchange student at the National University of Singapore during this time.
And somewhere in there, she became interested in tech.
So while still in law school, she founded a company called Clear Access IP, which is a now defunct patent tech company.
And her dream was to become a patent attorney, and she was aspiring to be something in Silicon Valley as well.
Now, both the New York Times and NBC articles include conversations with a number of former friends and colleagues of hers, and she seems to be very aspirational, which is, of course, fine, but there's also accusations of her being a social climber, and that bears out in some of her biography.
Now, I'm not into gotcha journalism or gossip journalism, but her history of relationships matter in this context.
Nicole dated tech investor Jeremy Kranz in 2011 when she was living in San Francisco, and she converted to Judaism for that relationship.
They were married in August of 2014.
But there was a hitch.
The month before her wedding, she met Google co-founder Sergey Brin at Wanderlust Yoga Festival in Lake Tahoe, and apparently she had an affair with him.
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