Conspirituality - 306: Antifascist Wellness
Aired: 2026-04-30
Duration: 01:08:17


=== Alex Launches Hyperfixed (04:50) ===

[00:00:00]  Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
[00:00:02]  You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
[00:00:06]  I'm doing something else now.
[00:00:08]  I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
[00:00:11]  On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems, and I try to solve them.
[00:00:15]  Some massive and life altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
[00:00:20]  No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
[00:00:23]  That's Hyperfixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
[00:00:26]  Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
[00:00:36]  Learning English is hard.
[00:00:38]  That's why I make Easy Stories in English, where you can have fun while you learn.
[00:00:44]  You can listen to stories full of action, romance, and mystery.
[00:00:51]  Each episode, I tell stories for beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners, and there's a story for every mood.
[00:00:59]  Whether you want something to wake you up or relax before going to bed, Easy Stories in English is the podcast for you.
[00:01:10]  Thank you.
[00:01:20]  Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
[00:01:30]  I'm Derek Barris.
[00:01:31]  I'm Matthew Rimsky.
[00:01:32]  I'm Julian Walker.
[00:01:33]  You can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod, as well as individually over on Blue Sky.
[00:01:40]  You can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon at patreon.comslash conspirituality.
[00:01:49]  You can also grab our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
[00:01:54]  As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
[00:02:03]  Conspirituality 306 Anti Fascist Wellness.
[00:02:09]  Well, listeners, I have the distinct honor today of introducing you to not one, but two new books Anti Fascist Dad, Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times by Matthew Remsky, and Well Enough Finding Health.
[00:02:24]  Despite the wellness industry by Derek Barris.
[00:02:28]  Both books were released last week, which is a fact that spurred me to dig back through our Slack channel in search of the missed message where you guys somehow decided that on top of all the other work we do here, we should each write a book to be published simultaneously during the fourth week of April in 2026.
[00:02:46]  So here we are.
[00:02:47]  I guess I only have myself to blame.
[00:02:48]  Well, I'll say Matthew's publisher decided his date.
[00:02:53]  I decided my own because I published this one and I just randomly chose 420.
[00:02:59]  So that's how it kind of happened.
[00:03:02]  And I don't check Slack enough.
[00:03:03]  So that's how that happened.
[00:03:05]  All kidding aside, I'm very proud of and happy for both of you.
[00:03:09]  Each of your books is, in some ways, both an extension of and a departure from the work we do here together at Conspirituality.
[00:03:17]  Derek, your new book comes in the wake of an Emmy nomination for the New York Times video you did with Alex Stockton about the proliferation of Maha conspiracy theories.
[00:03:27]  Well Enough contextualizes your journalism on wellness pseudoscience in a memoir.
[00:03:33]  That covers your personal struggle with anxiety and eating disorders, as well as your life as a student of religion working in a hospital to pay the bills, who then became a yoga and fitness instructor in your pre conspirituality life.
[00:03:47]  Matthew, your new book is situated in the reality of being a parent to two boys growing up in a world increasingly dominated by fascist politics, misogynist manosphere media, and an accelerating capitalist climate crisis.
[00:04:03]  In response to your eldest son asking, What will happen now when Donald Trump became president again?
[00:04:09]  You've sought to communicate a life affirming vision of possibility based in frank political realism about what Gen Z will be fighting for and what they're up against.
[00:04:19]  You know, that's really a good summary, Julian.
[00:04:22]  All right.
[00:04:22]  I'm going to have to use that.
[00:04:23]  I'm glad.
[00:04:24]  Please do.
[00:04:25]  Today, each of our authors will give a brief synopsis of their books, followed by some questions and discussion.
[00:04:32]  But first, perhaps fittingly, Derek has a segment for us about the pseudoscience grift of a social media influencer who goes by the name Glucose Goddess.
[00:04:49]  Spirituality.

=== The Glucose Goddess Grift (11:21) ===

[00:04:51]  All right, guys, I want to talk about Glucose Goddess.
[00:04:53]  I mean, I don't really want to talk about her, but in 2025, she signed a deal with one of the world's largest manufacturers of continuous glucose monitors.
[00:05:04]  And I think it's pretty important for people to know what they're being sold.
[00:05:08]  I only found out about this partnership with Dexcom, which is one of the top two CGM manufacturers in the world, because my wife, Callan, now uses one of their monitors.
[00:05:20]  I'm going to record a brief on pre diabetes and pseudoscience in May, given what's happened in my home recently.
[00:05:27]  But here's a synopsis, which my wife has signed off on me discussing publicly.
[00:05:31]  And in fact, I'm going to kind of interview her for that brief just to get some of her thoughts about experiencing and going through pre diabetes, which she just found out two months ago.
[00:05:42]  Upon receiving her blood work, she called her oldest friend, who happens to be an endocrinologist.
[00:05:49]  And her friend wasn't overly surprised about Callan's diagnosis, given that she's half Thai.
[00:05:55]  And in fact, she said that being Asian is actually one of the most prominent risk factors for prediabetes and type 2 diabetes now.
[00:06:04]  40% of Asian American adults suffer from it.
[00:06:07]  And half the time, they're not diagnosed because the traditional risk factors like obesity aren't necessarily present.
[00:06:15]  I'll get more into that in the brief.
[00:06:18]  Suffice to say, Callan and I were both surprised by this diagnosis, and we immediately adapted our diet so far to really good effect.
[00:06:26]  But part of the diagnosis involves her regularly checking her CGM and all of the marketing surrounding it.
[00:06:34]  That's why she forwarded me an ad that Glucose Goddess signed a deal with Dexcom for their newest product, Stello.
[00:06:41]  It's the company's first non prescription CGM for non diabetics.
[00:06:47]  That's a trend that's been huge on the biohacking scene for years.
[00:06:50]  And as we've covered often, for example, RFK Jr.'s candidate for Surgeon General, Casey Means, co founded one such company called Levels.
[00:07:01]  And Kennedy himself has said he's interested in all Americans using wearables like CGMs.
[00:07:09]  But there's a problem.
[00:07:10]  CGMs are used to monitor spikes in blood sugar, which is really important for diabetics and pre diabetics, and of course, type 1 diabetics.
[00:07:19]  But for this segment, I'm focusing on type 2.
[00:07:22]  For everyone else, though, not so much.
[00:07:25]  I'll link to an article about the topic written by friend of the pod, Jonathan Jerry.
[00:07:30]  He talked to Miguel University researcher and endocrinologist Michael Soukis about.
[00:07:36]  The topic.
[00:07:37]  Jerry writes The list of people who would best benefit from a CGM, according to Tsoukas, is limited to situations where there is a clear reason to look at blood sugar levels.
[00:07:47]  Those diagnosed with diabetes or prediabetes, those with a family history of diabetes or who have obesity and who want to rule out having prediabetes or diabetes themselves, pregnant people at risk of gestational diabetes, those with multiple episodes of low blood sugar for no clear reason, and those who use certain medications like steroids and psychiatric drugs that can raise blood sugar levels.
[00:08:10]  The twist, though, is that CGMs have been shown to overestimate blood sugar levels in people without diabetes and to report a lot of variability in those levels in those same people, possibly because blood glucose levels are influenced not just by the food we eat, but also by stress, tiredness, and other changes to our body.
[00:08:30]  Moreover, improving health habits long term is notoriously difficult, and obsessing over real time data relating to food can lead some people down the road to an eating disorder.
[00:08:41]  Right.
[00:08:41]  And I'll talk more about that in segment two with my own struggles with an eating disorder, but it wasn't from a CGM, but that is a real concern.
[00:08:49]  But if your business is limited to only diabetics and pre diabetics, you're leaving a lot of money on the table, or so the thinking goes.
[00:08:59]  And so, Dexcom, one of the two industry standards signed up glucose goddess, also known as Jesse Inchopse, you know right away that this is a wellness pitch simply by how far the language is from someone like.
[00:09:13]  Jonathan Jarry, who we just heard, and he's a communicator, science communicator by trade, to this part of the press release from Dexcom.
[00:09:23]  Stello gets crowned by the glucose goddess.
[00:09:26]  With its unmatched accuracy, ease of use, and streamlined design, sounds like they're talking about a car, by the way.
[00:09:31]  Stello caught Jesse Inchappe's eye this past year, becoming the biosensor she came to know and love.
[00:09:38]  It helps her stick to her hacks for more stable glucose, create better daily habits, and stay healthy in the long term.
[00:09:45]  Jesse also loves how she doesn't need a prescription.
[00:09:48]  And that it's affordable.
[00:09:49]  See for yourself why the glucose goddess loves using Stello to reach optimal glucose health and well being.
[00:09:57]  That's amazing.
[00:09:57]  It's awesome.
[00:09:58]  Every time I go to the doctor, they talk about hacks.
[00:10:01]  That's all I hear hack this, hack that.
[00:10:04]  Now, one heuristic I found pretty reliable is that if a public figure chooses a big name, thinking medical medium or glucose goddess, you can be certain there's a sciencey sales funnel somewhere.
[00:10:17]  This goddess regularly sells her 6.1 million Instagram.
[00:10:21]  Followers and 1.8 million YouTube subscribers, plenty of stuff, mostly her books and her anti spike supplement, which Jerry breaks down and he shows going through the supplement list of the ingredients.
[00:10:36]  Take, for example, cinnamon.
[00:10:37]  The claim is that cinnamon lowers blood sugar.
[00:10:40]  Only one 2003 study, which has never been replicated, supports that notion.
[00:10:46]  And in fact, Jerry notes that if the study was accurate, cinnamon would improve blood glucose levels better than Ozempic.
[00:10:53]  Wow.
[00:10:53]  But you'd need to take about five tablespoons with every cup of coffee or something, right?
[00:10:58]  No, just dry, just dry heave it, just throw it down right down the gullet.
[00:11:01]  Nice, nice.
[00:11:02]  Yeah, just I think that was a TikTok challenge years ago.
[00:11:04]  No, I think that's protein powder.
[00:11:06]  That too, that too.
[00:11:07]  Now, there's a patented lemon extract, and it's based only on small and unimpressive trials.
[00:11:14]  That's what Jerry writes.
[00:11:16]  Mulberry leaf extract studies that she cites were low quality, and the supplement did not appear to significantly lower blood glucose levels in healthy people, meaning participants who didn't have diabetes, which is in Chopsea's target audience for this supplement.
[00:11:32]  And of course, the supplement itself has never been tested as a complete supplement.
[00:11:38]  It's just vibing on all the low quality evidence under the useless term synergy.
[00:11:43]  This is amazing because the blurring of the lines between having an actual medical condition and wanting to self optimize in this way allows for this bait and switch where everyone's really confused, right?
[00:11:55]  About like, what do these ingredients do and who do they really help?
[00:11:57]  And it turns out, yeah, it may have some benefit.
[00:11:59]  For actual diabetics, but you're touting its benefits for your people who don't have diabetes to somehow have a hack against blood sugar or what do they call it glucose intolerance or something?
[00:12:10]  Insulin resistance.
[00:12:11]  Insulin resistance, exactly.
[00:12:13]  It's all just a smokescreen and it's probably a very lucrative one for, I would imagine.
[00:12:18]  Yeah.
[00:12:18]  Final note she's not a biochemist.
[00:12:21]  She is a biochemist, sorry.
[00:12:22]  She's not an endocrinologist or dietician, yet we find another influencer using a degree in one field to claim expertise in another.
[00:12:32]  I'm not surprised that she'd hawk supplements this way, as we see it all the time in wellness.
[00:12:36]  But the fact that Dexcom, which is a legitimate medical company widely recommended by doctors, the number one recommended CGM for pre diabetics and diabetics, the fact that they're performing such a blatant cash grab, it just doesn't bode well for medical devices in the medical industry overall.
[00:12:55]  But to be honest, I shouldn't be surprised.
[00:12:58]  They're a publicly traded company with a market cap of $24.7 billion.
[00:13:03]  And they count institutional investors like BlackRock and the Vanguard Group as their two largest shareholders.
[00:13:10]  In 2021, Dexcom launched Dexcom Ventures, which is its own VC arm focusing on emerging CGM tech.
[00:13:19]  And in 2024, they invested $75 million in a data sharing agreement with Aura, the makers of the Aura Ring.
[00:13:26]  Can I just say that I've been working with you guys for six years?
[00:13:31]  I'm not the science person.
[00:13:33]  I've listened to you break down things like this for a very long time.
[00:13:36]  And I will still sort of bypass the fact that this person is a biochemist and kind of like forget that that doesn't mean she knows anything about endocrinology or dietary science.
[00:13:49]  So I think it's so important to like continue to figure out, you know, how we can all learn more about this stuff because I, it just, I mean, to me, it just says, oh, she's a biochemist.
[00:14:00]  She must know something about blood chemistry.
[00:14:02]  Oh, that sounds okay.
[00:14:03]  Well, you know, she's not bullshitting entirely.
[00:14:06]  It's wild because I'm a pretty smart person and.
[00:14:10]  That gets me.
[00:14:11]  Yeah, that's classic argument from authority stuff where you misapply the expertise to something that sounds somewhat related, right?
[00:14:19]  Right, right.
[00:14:19]  She could be studying like seaweed, right?
[00:14:21]  Yeah.
[00:14:22]  It's also why every time I post a video on our social media about Will Cole or Josh Axe, I will call them chiropractors.
[00:14:29]  And the reason I do that, I know they're presenting themselves as functional medicine experts.
[00:14:33]  The reason I do that is because in their handles, they say Dr. Will Cole and Dr. Josh Axe.
[00:14:39]  Their doctorate is in chiropractic.
[00:14:42]  Yeah.
[00:14:42]  So if you're going to use, That honorarium for your marketing, which is what it is, then I'm going to call out what your area of expertise is, which is in every instance here chiropractic.
[00:14:56]  Yeah.
[00:14:56]  And I just want to name here, Derek, that you mentioned it's a cash grab.
[00:14:59]  You mentioned you're leaving a lot of cash on the table if you don't market outside of the group of people who medically actually need these devices.
[00:15:06]  And I can just imagine the board meeting where this gets presented like, okay, we figured out how we're going to increase sales, we're going to break into a whole new market.
[00:15:14]  People who don't actually need this stuff.
[00:15:15]  But look, here's a picture of Casey Means and You know, she's opened the door and here we go.
[00:15:20]  Yeah.
[00:15:20]  And when I say that, it's not an endorsement for it when I say leaving cash on the table because it's more of their thinking.
[00:15:27]  Because in a nation which didn't have a for profit healthcare model, you wouldn't find, I mean, it is a global company, but you wouldn't find this sort of shit happening because then if you were limited to actually only prescribing clinically available evidence based medicine, in this term, devices, you wouldn't be able to do this shit because there is no good data on how this, there's a lot of anecdotes about how CGMs. Have helped people.
[00:15:53]  And I'm not inherently against it.
[00:15:55]  But if your thing is a medical device company and you're just pumping out all this pseudoscience, I think that that breaks the Hippocratic Oath, which they should be beholden to.

=== Psychedelics and Bad Style (15:14) ===

[00:16:12]  I don't know about you guys, but I'm always thinking about the 10 books I'll never write but want to while trying to focus on the next book I'm going to write.
[00:16:21]  After we published our Collective book in 2023, I've been pinging back and forth between two books, a memoir and a novel.
[00:16:29]  Last fall, I realized I had to just focus on one, so I put the novel aside to write the memoir.
[00:16:34]  The good news being that I'm already 30,000 words into the novel, which I may be able to publish later this year.
[00:16:41]  Wow.
[00:16:41]  I've always been allergic to writing a memoir, largely because of my own battles with imposter syndrome and the idea that anyone would give a shit about my life.
[00:16:51]  The irony is that I absolutely love reading memoirs, even of people I know nothing about.
[00:16:56]  For example, I've devoured memoirs by Pablo Neruda and a pair of them by Haruke Murakame.
[00:17:02]  Rebecca Solnit is one of my favorite writers, and her work is often autobiographical.
[00:17:07]  I also know that I spend hours working on this podcast every week, and I'll write thousands of words about some health or political topic.
[00:17:15]  But the one thing people end up commenting on is if I throw in an unscripted aside about the battle of pork roll versus Taylor Ham or how I pronounce water.
[00:17:26]  I get that people relate to the human in all of us, which is why Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers that it's the Christ on the cross that's lovable.
[00:17:35]  Meaning that it's his humanity that we relate to, not his supposed divinity.
[00:17:41]  Two years ago, I read Mary Carr's book, The Art of Memoir, and that changed my thinking on actually writing one.
[00:17:47]  Here's a quote that stuck with me.
[00:17:49]  Julian, can you read this?
[00:17:51]  No matter how much you're gunning for truth, the human ego is also a stealthy, low crawling bastard.
[00:17:56]  And for pretty much everybody, getting used to who you are is a lifelong spiritual struggle.
[00:18:01]  Start trying to bring yourself to the page, and fear how you'll come across besets even the most forthright.
[00:18:08]  The best you can hope for is to rip off each mask as you find it, blotting out your vision.
[00:18:14]  Oh, that's great.
[00:18:15]  It's a fantastic book.
[00:18:16]  Any writer, if you just like reading, you should read the book, but any writer should definitely read Mary's work.
[00:18:22]  And in that light, I started thinking about what led me to wellness in the first place, which was a series of injuries I sustained in youth from playing sports, dealing with anxiety disorder and hundreds of panic attacks, studying Eastern religions in college while also working as a patient monitor, watching suicidal patients in the same hospital I lived in for over a month as a child, just Few examples.
[00:18:44]  I contemplated the steps that led me into wellness, the criticisms I've had, and ones that have changed over time, and the path that led me to the formation of this podcast between the three of us.
[00:18:57]  The book is as much me grappling with, as Carr writes, my own masks, as it is sharing that story with others.
[00:19:05]  Writing has always been a way for me to make sense of my own thinking, to work myself out on the page, which is what this book effectively is.
[00:19:13]  That said, I Didn't want to just write about myself, so I took inspiration from the great Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso.
[00:19:20]  He's one of the founders of the Tropicalia movement, and his book, Tropical Truth A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil, was his opportunity to talk about his own life in the context of one of his nation's most important activist movements.
[00:19:34]  That's the sort of template that I used, divulging personal details while also writing about the larger cultural and political circumstances of wellness's turn into conspirituality.
[00:19:46]  As you mentioned earlier, the book is called Well Enough Finding Health Despite the Wellness Industry.
[00:19:52]  I live two blocks from a great dive bar here in Portland.
[00:19:55]  I mean, most bars in Portland are dive bars, so it's just a great scene.
[00:19:59]  And their old school billboard above the entrance reads, Not just good, good enough.
[00:20:05]  And one day I was walking by it, I had the same thought about wellness.
[00:20:09]  There's so much emphasis on optimization and longevity, the idea that you need to be operating at 100%, 110% all the time.
[00:20:18]  Which of course usually ends in a sales funnel for some bullshit product.
[00:20:23]  In truth, I think most people just want to be well enough, not some biohack cyborg that needs to swallow dozens of pills every day and optimize every second of every minute.
[00:20:34]  So that's where the title came from and what I tried to get across in the book.
[00:20:38]  Well enough for most of us is just a great way to live.
[00:20:41]  You know, I find it funny that the word water is the one that people notice with you because it's the one that people notice with me too.
[00:20:50]  And we have completely different backgrounds and different accents.
[00:20:53]  And for the most part, people will go along just thinking I'm American often when I'm in a class.
[00:20:57]  But if I say the word water, they're like, oh, where's that guy from?
[00:21:00]  And they come and ask me afterwards, how do you say it, Matthew?
[00:21:03]  I think water, which is more of a D, a softer D.
[00:21:06]  Yeah.
[00:21:07]  Yeah.
[00:21:07]  I'm W O O D E R.
[00:21:13]  And I am not surprised that you managed to bring in a world music reference as part of the synopsis that you just gave us, Derek.
[00:21:19]  Of course.
[00:21:21]  Kaitana Veloso is so incredible.
[00:21:22]  Yeah.
[00:21:23]  Such a voice.
[00:21:24]  So, I really enjoyed the excerpt that you just shared this past Saturday on our feed, Derek.
[00:21:29]  You've chosen this very pithy, engaging narrative style, and the book situates your work on the podcast and in your broader journalism critiquing the wellness industry in the context of your personal life.
[00:21:41]  How have your experiences, both as you just referenced as a young patient and then later as a college student age patient monitor, informed your perspective on wellness industry and culture?
[00:21:53]  For that, Jillian, about the style too.
[00:21:55]  I just want to say you texted me as you were listening.
[00:21:57]  You reminded me of Cormac McCarthy, and that's what I was reading as I was writing it, as well as later Philip Roth, because I love short, punchy sentences.
[00:22:05]  Writing is a relationship with the reader, it's not just the writer.
[00:22:09]  And I feel that if you leave the reader a lot of space to have their own experience, that is very effective.
[00:22:17]  And I'm just enamored with that technique.
[00:22:19]  And that's really what I was going for.
[00:22:21]  So that's just a note about style.
[00:22:24]  As for the question, I specifically said this studying Eastern religions and religions overall was my degree, but my focus was on Eastern religions and reading about the transcendence that people are looking for through some sort of spirituality.
[00:22:42]  As I was in the hospital watching extremely physical and physiological processes happening, sometimes when I wasn't monitoring patients, I had to wheel dead bodies to the morgue and all of the other relationships that I had with patients.
[00:22:59]  I just really hit home that on one side, here I am talking about thinking about all these metaphysical concepts and then coming face to face with the reality that I think I write something to the effect of that when consciousness ceases, then, or when the brain function ceases, consciousness ends, something to that effect.
[00:23:18]  And that happened after going to the morgue so many times.
[00:23:22]  That was sort of the tension that had been playing out through my life and continued in the work and wellness, and why I always had.
[00:23:30]  A bit of a bullshit radar up when I heard a lot of wellness's claims.
[00:23:34]  Because when you are around medicine and see the processes happen up close, you start to just question all of the flights of fancy that our imagination can produce.
[00:23:47]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:23:49]  I noticed on our feed that your tagline was something about the impossibility of achieving immortality, right?
[00:23:56]  So you have the title, the subtitle, and then what's your favorite?
[00:23:59]  You can't biohack your way into.
[00:24:01]  You can't optimize into a mortality, I think it was.
[00:24:03]  Yeah.
[00:24:05]  And that's interesting, too, right?
[00:24:06]  Because on the one hand, you're dealing with the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to and the crises of psychological overwhelm in the most intense ways.
[00:24:19]  And at the same time, you're looking at these, seeking to understand these various religious texts and their metaphysics of transcendence and a sort of non corporeal immortality.
[00:24:30]  And then here we are talking about this wellness grift, which is basically about selling you on the idea that you can achieve a kind of immortality through perfection of the body.
[00:24:40]  So it's taking that same transcendent language and applying it to like libertarian health, essentially, right?
[00:24:46]  Right.
[00:24:47]  And I've always found a link between that and going back to.
[00:24:51]  Ponce de Leon and before that.
[00:24:53]  It's always just this grappling with who we are as animals, but there's this yearning.
[00:24:58]  And I think the yearning is beautiful.
[00:25:00]  I don't want to downplay, you know, as much as I'm an atheist, I really appreciate the literature and the quest for transcendence is something I still appreciate to this day.
[00:25:11]  But just over time, it's more rooted in our physiology than anything else to me.
[00:25:19]  You write compellingly about your anxiety disorder.
[00:25:24]  As well.
[00:25:25]  I'm wondering how dealing with that has influenced what you study and write about today.
[00:25:30]  Well, speaking of physiology, I mean, that's a hijacking of your physiology and it's really still unexplained.
[00:25:36]  Like, there's a whole cascade of effects that happen to create a panic disorder.
[00:25:40]  And what I thought about most was how ashamed I was for having them.
[00:25:45]  Like, here I am, like, I can't control my body.
[00:25:49]  And I would have these reactions.
[00:25:51]  And sometimes they would happen in the middle of teaching yoga classes.
[00:25:54]  I'd have 50 people in the room and I'd start having a panic attack.
[00:25:57]  And the way that I Worked around that was I dropped to my knees on my mat and just being down low helped me breathe through it as I was instructing in his higher room.
[00:26:05]  Wow.
[00:26:06]  And over time, I realized like even with that and the eating disorder, men don't talk enough about these problems.
[00:26:15]  I think that, especially when it comes to eating disorders, women, predominantly women, do suffer from them more often.
[00:26:21]  And that there's also some of the case with anxiety as well.
[00:26:25]  But we know that because they're willing to go to therapy more often, they're willing to talk more publicly about it.
[00:26:30]  And at some point, I started by just telling family and then close friends about it.
[00:26:36]  And then I would quickly discover that some of my friends were also having panic attacks, but they never felt comfortable telling anyone.
[00:26:42]  And at some point, as a journalist, I realized that I sort of felt that I had a duty to actually talk publicly about it because I think a lot more men suffer from these conditions than let on.
[00:26:53]  And I think it would be very important for them to be able to publicly discuss them and come to terms with them rather than pretend they don't exist.
[00:27:01]  Derek, do you think that?
[00:27:02]  Beginning to be able to talk with friends and family about something that you found out that they actually shared parts of with you, was that in itself part of a therapeutic process?
[00:27:13]  Absolutely, 100%.
[00:27:15]  When you have people who are like your closest friends telling you they're also dealing with it, it just bonds you even more because it's almost like you've both been going through these things you refuse to talk to anyone about and then you open up to each other and that weaves together the relationship even more.
[00:27:33]  Gives, I think, both parties license to be able to talk more openly about them.
[00:27:38]  Yeah, there's an interesting, perhaps an interesting through line here around medical issues, psychological issues, what's going on neurologically, and then religion and transcendence and neurochemistry, right?
[00:27:56]  Because I know you've, I don't know how much you talk about it in this book, but you've spent a fair amount of time exploring both experientially and intellectually psychedelics and what they're doing.
[00:28:07]  In the brain as well.
[00:28:09]  What do you think about these sort of connections?
[00:28:12]  Psychedelics and religion came together in my life.
[00:28:14]  I was raised agnostic, like performatively Catholic, and not even really.
[00:28:19]  So, by the time I started reading Buddhist texts and Hindu texts, and then started taking psychedelics, they all came together.
[00:28:29]  So, I can't actually distinguish between them.
[00:28:32]  So, there's a whole segment, there's a whole section in the book on psychedelics and my experiences.
[00:28:38]  Great.
[00:28:38]  I mean, I know for myself, certain drug experiences have been my most simultaneously.
[00:28:45]  Sometimes my most profound experiences of transcendence and understanding, oh, this is what people who have religious experiences are touching.
[00:28:54]  But also, they've been the source of my most intense experiences of anxiety and existential dread and feeling, and basically trying to make a deal with God that I'll never do this again if you just let me survive because this is so awful, right?
[00:29:07]  So that experience is about touching what religion has to offer as well.
[00:29:10]  Absolutely.
[00:29:11]  Yeah, fear and trembling.
[00:29:12]  Right, both.
[00:29:13]  And I feel very fortunate that my first experiences on psilocybin and LSD were extremely.
[00:29:17]  Extremely beneficial and just filled with love and friends and a guide that helped us.
[00:29:24]  And the first bad one didn't happen till like the fifth or sixth.
[00:29:28]  And I, meaning I had a framework that when I got through the bad one, I'm like, wait, it's not always like that.
[00:29:34]  Whereas I've talked to people who've had a bad first one.
[00:29:36]  Yes.
[00:29:37]  And they never want to try it again.
[00:29:38]  And I don't blame them.
[00:29:39]  Yeah.
[00:29:40]  But if you had a good one and then the bad one comes.
[00:29:43]  And in fact, the worst one I ever had in my life, I swore off everything the next day.
[00:29:49]  And then five or six days later, I took half the dose by myself and went in a park on my college campus and sat by myself for hours simply to contemplate and to be okay with it because I knew that I had gone overboard the last week and that that wasn't the right path, was to write it off altogether.
[00:30:07]  And did those kinds of experiences have any positive impact on how you dealt with the panic attacks?
[00:30:12]  Well, sometimes the substances would set off a panic attack more marijuana than psychedelics.
[00:30:21]  In the days before, you could find out what strain and dose level you were taking, which we have the convenience of now.
[00:30:29]  So there was a strong interaction because the bad experiences were often because a panic attack was being triggered.
[00:30:37]  And then that just sent me spiraling.
[00:30:41]  All right.
[00:30:41]  So, what about the other difficulty that you've struggled with?
[00:30:45]  I'm wondering about the eating disorder.
[00:30:47]  You've mentioned it on the air before.
[00:30:49]  How did that interact with?
[00:30:51]  Being a yoga student and teacher, and also a fitness instructor.
[00:30:56]  I grew up overweight.
[00:30:57]  I was bullied for it, as kids do, but I was also an athlete my entire life.
[00:31:02]  So even though I was overweight in the class, I could hold my own in any sport.
[00:31:07]  And so I had this weird disparity in my life where the people I would play with on teams who were my friends and colleagues in sports who wanted me to do good there, when we got to school, they would bully me.
[00:31:19]  And it was a weird relationship.
[00:31:21]  Yoga was because I had broken so many bones and it got me out of going to chiropractic every week.
[00:31:26]  Wow.

=== Yoga, Meat, and Eating Disorders (06:37) ===

[00:31:27]  The fitness was an extension of that just because I'm a lifelong athlete and I love movement in any capacity.
[00:31:33]  And same thing.
[00:31:34]  It's just like I was dealing with the eating disorder predominantly when I was really in yoga more than the fitness because I was teaching yoga for years before I started teaching cycling and kettlebells and strength training.
[00:31:47]  And over time, I just, I think with aging, you know, you have to make a conscious decision, but with aging comes some level of wisdom.
[00:31:55]  And at some point, I just became much more comfortable with my body.
[00:31:59]  And then I, I no longer suffer from either anxiety disorder or an eating disorder.
[00:32:05]  I'm very comfortable, but it took me a long time to assess that.
[00:32:09]  And I will say that yoga both helped me feel comfortable in my body in a way that I had never felt before, but the industry itself was part of what was driving the eating disorder because of orthorexia, because of all this idea about the purity of foods.
[00:32:27]  And that's why I'm so hardcore against Maha and the way that they treat food, because everything I see is all the shit I heard for so long that led to my eating disorder.
[00:32:37]  And I know people are going through it now with seed oils and all the bullshit that they're spreading.
[00:32:42]  They're just fomenting eating disorders on a daily basis.
[00:32:45]  So, you're like listening to Maha day in and day out, and it's like 1996 in your yoga studio in New York City, being told to do smoothies and shit.
[00:32:55]  And you know where that goes, but it's so like, it's also cliched too, right?
[00:33:00]  It's cliched to the point of I can't believe it has the traction that it does.
[00:33:05]  And I think because I dealt with it for so long and I came through it and I identified it for what it is, seeing it reach the level that it has from, you know, using your term, Matthew, the brick and mortar yoga studios.
[00:33:16]  To being public health policy is just mind boggling.
[00:33:21]  But it is true that if you're a raw vegan and you do a liver flush every three months, your yoga postures get really, really like electric, right?
[00:33:30]  You're so behind the times.
[00:33:31]  You got to be on an all meat diet.
[00:33:34]  That's the thing now.
[00:33:36]  Yeah.
[00:33:36]  But it strikes me that this is a really key aspect where you have, like, this is the doorway into a certain solidarity that you have with people who are being ripped off by this stuff, but also with people who are vulnerable to it.
[00:33:49]  Like, what the mechanism is of that vulnerability, right?
[00:33:52]  That's why I, when I said earlier, like, where my mind has changed, and I thought about it a lot writing this book, but I've changed my opinion doing this podcast specifically is to really never focus blame on the person who's in the downline.
[00:34:10]  Yeah.
[00:34:11]  Because I was that person.
[00:34:12]  It's really to focus my attention on the influencers pushing that bullshit.
[00:34:17]  And that just has become really clear for me.
[00:34:22]  Like, if you're someone in the downline and you're spreading the bullshit, I might call it out, but I'm not going to put the emphasis on that.
[00:34:30]  I'm going to put the emphasis at the top of the funnel because those are the people to me who are doing the real harm.
[00:34:35]  Yeah.
[00:34:36]  Okay.
[00:34:36]  So you mentioned how, you know, with age and with wisdom and with self acceptance, some of these struggles have lifted from you, which I think is wonderful.
[00:34:46]  I'm curious on the more sort of intellectual tip, like, how much of the pseudoscience did you actually buy into?
[00:34:51]  Because I know I bought into a lot of it when I was younger.
[00:34:54]  And if you did, like, what was the tipping point that allowed you to find your way out of those beliefs or practices or subscribing to that wellness ideology?
[00:35:05]  I talk a lot about the Jiva Mukti Yoga specifically and like, you know, chanting for world veganism and then going to Morocco the same summer into Medina's and seeing like the meat markets there and the disparities of like this very posh Manhattan studio, these people telling the world they need to be vegan.
[00:35:27]  So, my book.
[00:35:28]  My bullshit radar really started to fire that summer.
[00:35:32]  I specifically remember I never really got caught up in the metaphysics around the pseudoscience, but I did get caught up in the bodily stuff, like the diets and the toxins and the cleansing.
[00:35:44]  And I think the final death nail or nail in the coffin, however you want to say it, was starting to eat meat again, because not only did that make me feel better than I had after nearly 20 years of vegetarianism, it also stopped my.
[00:36:00]  Panic attacks.
[00:36:02]  I haven't had a panic attack since I started eating meat again.
[00:36:05]  I make no claims about the physiological function.
[00:36:08]  I know that some vegans thrive on that diet.
[00:36:11]  I don't want to talk shit about any diet, but for me, that's when everything sort of came together.
[00:36:18]  Just simply changing my diet to be carnivorous again.
[00:36:21]  And all of those bodily hijacks that have been happening, both of anxiety and eating disorder, ended after that moment.
[00:36:31]  And that's when my perspective changed on a lot of these things.
[00:36:36]  I don't think I've ever quite connected the dots before, but.
[00:36:38]  I have a very similar experience in terms of shifting from being vegan to being an omnivore and starting to have stable blood sugar levels, improved a lot of stuff.
[00:36:48]  Yeah.
[00:36:49]  Yeah.
[00:36:50]  And it's funny as it is, as much as I go after Dave Asprey, I told him this when we debated in last fall, like his podcast was the one that made me start eating meat again.
[00:37:00]  So, you know, and he laughed at that.
[00:37:02]  He gave me a hug after it.
[00:37:04]  And so, you know, fuck him and what he does.
[00:37:07]  But at the same time, those little moments of humanity, I still, you know, I'm still a fan of.
[00:37:12]  Absolutely.
[00:37:13]  You had a hug.
[00:37:13]  You smelled the keto in one's breath.
[00:37:15]  It was great.
[00:37:17]  So, but, you know, let's just finish the bonding here because I had a similar experience.
[00:37:21]  I was probably vegan for a while, but I was vegetarian for probably 15 years.
[00:37:26]  And I can't explain it either, but becoming an omnivore was very helpful.
[00:37:34]  And I feel like it has something to do with the original conditions of, you know, my home life, right?
[00:37:42]  Like, like, Something that I was used to when I was young, that I was sort of something that built my body around a particular way of eating in the world.
[00:37:53]  And I do, but I do have like, you know, the same ecological, environmental concerns that everybody else has.
[00:37:59]  I try to limit what I do.
[00:38:00]  So I feel quite ambivalent about that.
[00:38:02]  But I share that experience with you both.

=== Religion as a Clash of Systems (15:22) ===

[00:38:05]  Yeah.
[00:38:05]  You know, I said this last week, I believe, or maybe privately, but, you know, Trevor Noah saying, you know, like this, I'm, Butchering it, but the big does not negate that the small is always happening.
[00:38:16]  And that's how I feel about food.
[00:38:19]  Like at some point, I had to be like, I hate industrial farming.
[00:38:22]  I hate all of the suffering that happens, but I am not well eating the way that I was.
[00:38:31]  And so making that sort of adjustment made me much better, feel much better in my body.
[00:38:39]  That to me was where I had to focus my energy.
[00:38:43]  Yeah.
[00:38:43]  And I'll just say for the listeners who are staunchly vegan, I think all three of us probably agree with most of your arguments, be they moral, environmental, or whatever the case may be.
[00:38:57]  And yet, this has been our journey, so to speak.
[00:39:00]  Well, I'll end on this, kind of wraps up some of what you were tugging at.
[00:39:04]  I think one thing coming to grips in the memoir and in life in general is just remembering that we're also animals.
[00:39:11]  And I think the distinguishing between humans and animal life is a misnomer and it's damaging.
[00:39:17]  And I think.
[00:39:17]  Putting yourself in the context of being another animal is helpful in certain ways.
[00:39:34]  So, my book is about developing intergenerational dialogue to support anti fascism.
[00:39:41]  It's about making fascism and the various responses we can have to it feel as normal as any other conversation.
[00:39:48]  And I think it's important because Trumpism or Charlie Kirkism is a mass media event.
[00:39:55]  And like young people are exposed to its meme trash on every channel in every hour, but in ways that seem ironic and unserious a lot of the time.
[00:40:05]  So, in this book, which Can be read by either parents or tweens and up.
[00:40:10]  I try to conversationally define fascism in political terms, but also psychological affect, showing where its roots and feelings are encountered in the schoolyard, in civil institutions, in online culture.
[00:40:24]  And I've tried to make the entire presentation, the ethos of the book, kid positive, because my assumption is that young people today are no less capable of understanding their world than any other generation.
[00:40:37]  And it's actually more possible that they're smarter about it en masse than prior generations.
[00:40:42]  So there's no hand wringing.
[00:40:44]  There isn't any, what about our poor boys, or any other culture war inflected angles.
[00:40:50]  The surface target is the manosphere, but then the deeper target is a more mainstream liberal culture in which someone like Scott Galloway gets boosted as a problem solver for young men when the one thing he will never substantially do in his self help advice is question the basic logic of the economy.
[00:41:10]  Or his own American exceptionalism.
[00:41:14]  And, you know, I believe that the causes of fascism are as straightforward as the answers to it are.
[00:41:23]  And so no one is too young to look clearly at these things, especially if the information is presented in a Socratic and exploratory way and if one skill builds on another.
[00:41:31]  So there's a kind of an order to the book.
[00:41:33]  I open with the value of self regulation being helpful to information hygiene and realizing what's going on when you hear Jordan Peterson blathering on.
[00:41:43]  To investigating the political economy of capitalism, which brings our kids Lego and video games, but also puts other kids into cobalt mines in the Congo.
[00:41:57]  It investigates who gets scapegoated when things get hard.
[00:42:01]  It looks at pornography as a potential attack on solidarity between genders.
[00:42:07]  It discusses risks people can choose or not choose to take when the jackboots march into your neighborhood.
[00:42:13]  And it also talks about the imperatives of friendship, playing games, and then finding something that helps sustain you in some sort of spiritual sense, for lack of a better term.
[00:42:23]  But I also wanted to tell you guys about the general feelings and observations that threw me headlong into writing this book so quickly and so obsessively while trying to balance out the work we do on these episodes as political conditions have changed and I think intensified.
[00:42:41]  And the first thing is that there's nothing in my life that has been so humbling and ego dissolving as parenting.
[00:42:47]  And not in some general sense, but specifically under the conditions of rising fascism, a heating planet, this burning tangle of poly crises that obscure any vision of the future that a parent might reasonably have or traditionally fantasize about for kids.
[00:43:03]  And it's not like I think being a worried parent is some unique condition, but I think certain baselines have changed like, will there be fresh water?
[00:43:12]  What chaos will come from a climate crisis?
[00:43:16]  And what to think of the rise of.
[00:43:18]  Of police statism seemingly everywhere, will there be employment and so on?
[00:43:24]  But I also want to say that I don't assign any superior level of suffering to parenthood than to anyone else.
[00:43:32]  Because I think a lot, Derek, about how you don't have kids and how I do and how different this makes our lives.
[00:43:42]  And we can share those differences more or less easily.
[00:43:46]  And I have other really close friends who don't have kids too.
[00:43:49]  And I just want to say that it's easy for parents to feel resentful of.
[00:43:53]  Or more important than non-parents.
[00:43:55]  And I think that's a big reason of what was behind JD Vance's BS about childless cat ladies.
[00:44:00]  But that's not where I'm coming from.
[00:44:01]  But I have a dog, so it's the same thing.
[00:44:05]  I'm kidding.
[00:44:05]  I know I just pissed off all the parents.
[00:44:07]  Just kidding.
[00:44:09]  But here's my point: I count on my non-parent friends and comrades to do work that I can't.
[00:44:16]  And the thing is that some of the most insightful and penetrating work on deconstructing heteropatriarchy and its effects on women's lives and labor, for example, have come from feminists who didn't become parents.
[00:44:28]  And so they had more time, probably, to work this shit out.
[00:44:31]  So Emma Goldman, Angela Davis, Bell Hooks, Silvia Federici, there's a long list.
[00:44:37]  And then, you know, one of the most brilliant childhood advocates in fascist times was Janusz Korczak, who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto, and he didn't have kids either.
[00:44:47]  So I've written this book with dad in the title, and that is limiting in terms of audience, but it's snappier than caregiver, but that's the real word here.
[00:44:56]  And I'm a big fan of desegregating parenting and non parenting cultures because I think there's a lot of places where they don't meet.
[00:45:03]  However, we do have two kids here in an economic system that atomizes families.
[00:45:11]  Our 13 year old was 12 when Trump won for the second time.
[00:45:15]  And as you referenced Julian, he had this question about what's going to happen now.
[00:45:18]  And that pushed me to start.
[00:45:20]  He's a really driven artist who thinks a lot about AI.
[00:45:24]  And he's always searching for things that it can't do.
[00:45:26]  And these days, he's reading my copy of Blood Meridian very slowly to marvel at the sentences.
[00:45:31]  So, Derek, you brought up Thomas McCarthy.
[00:45:33]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:45:35]  But, like, Blood Meridian isn't short sentences at all.
[00:45:38]  It's like, no, that's his earlier work.
[00:45:39]  That's right.
[00:45:40]  The road is where he evolved to.
[00:45:42]  But yeah, his early work is dense, but also, yeah, Marvel of the Senses, what?
[00:45:47]  I have to say that nothing has been more radicalizing than caregiving with my partner for our nine year old, who is autistic.
[00:45:54]  He has other challenges that make school and a lot of other places inaccessible, despite his incredible skills in a bunch of areas.
[00:46:02]  And what this has meant for my partner, who has had to pause her entire career with no clarity on when it might resume.
[00:46:10]  It's taught me about the invisibility of disabled people and their primary caregivers, usually women.
[00:46:16]  We have state medical care here in Canada.
[00:46:18]  It's eroding bit by bit.
[00:46:20]  But every other system that exists to train and condition and help with children from school to sports to the arts moves really fast and is really dependent on high normative compliance.
[00:46:33]  And so, caring for a kid like this is like caring for the canary in the coal mine of this whole capitalist system, as far as I'm concerned.
[00:46:43]  You know, there's nothing more clarifying about what the culture demands of you than to have to protect a kid from those same demands while also creating out of nothing some other pathway for them to grow into.
[00:46:56]  And I think this becomes a really strong metaphor for how I feel about socialism because I've always been a leftist, but I think that these years with our youngest have always shown me, like in microcosm, how sheltered I have been from the cruelties of the dominant culture, how grotesque the idea of meritocracy is.
[00:47:17]  How hard it's been to see how directly and swiftly these social and economic expectations can overwhelm the person who's different or marginalized.
[00:47:27]  And then what you have to actively do to change that on some systemic level, beginning with protecting that person.
[00:47:33]  So that's one huge thing.
[00:47:36]  But then the other motivating puzzle, I think, came from reading David Graeber's little essay on everyday communism because it kind of showed something about my own life.
[00:47:46]  He describes The typical generosity of our close social relations and how much kindness and forbearance and support we offer and receive without ever tallying it up.
[00:47:56]  There's countless exchanges that make up every caregiving and social reproduction day, which is one of the reasons that being a feminist is so important.
[00:48:04]  We were talking about this a couple of weeks ago because if you don't have equal or near equal participation, women are forced to offer the communist bedrock for society on their own.
[00:48:14]  And that's a huge part of life that shows up in, you know, No GDP measurement, no other mass accounting metric.
[00:48:23]  And so, what I instantly became aware of was this kind of schizotypal threshold with a relationship to the outside world.
[00:48:33]  And it's not defined by the front door of the house, because our political economy at this point enters into every private space.
[00:48:42]  And I see it as a clash between how we relate to each other versus what we're required to do in these vast and impersonal systems.
[00:48:50]  And so the feeling is that in one part of my life, I live on this organic scale, and in another part, I'm navigating Kafka's labyrinth.
[00:48:58]  And I think I always understood the Kafka part before, but Graeber helped me remember that the reason it's alienating is because I know something else that's parallel to it.
[00:49:07]  Like I know love and support.
[00:49:09]  And so a constant subtext in this book is this question of how can the love and support that is standard in the core part of my life be shared and communicated into a growing circle?
[00:49:21]  And I think that's really the basis of my politics.
[00:49:24]  It's a great synopsis, Matthew.
[00:49:27]  I'll depart for a moment and we'll see if we want to leave this in, but it makes me think of a poem by Hafez who says, even after all this time, the sun never says to the moon, you owe me.
[00:49:40]  Yeah.
[00:49:40]  Imagine a love like that.
[00:49:42]  It could light up the sky.
[00:49:43]  Right.
[00:49:43]  Exactly.
[00:49:44]  Well, and it does, right?
[00:49:45]  That's what he's saying.
[00:49:47]  But this everyday communism notion of the ways in which we generously support one another, you know, at our best without keeping a tally of tit for tat, right?
[00:49:58]  Right.
[00:49:59]  Yeah.
[00:50:01]  So I have not had a chance yet to read any of your brand new book, Matthew, but of course I followed how these themes have taken center stage for you over the last few years, as evidenced in your bonus episodes, as well as your Instagram reels, which have really taken off over the last few months.
[00:50:15]  So congratulations on that, as well as the content of your other podcast that bears the same title as the book.
[00:50:23]  I want to step back here for a moment, though, first, and ask the question about how your childhood Catholicism.
[00:50:30]  And young adult experiences in the two high demand new age groups that you've talked about many times here may have influenced how you're approaching this new work?
[00:50:41]  It's a great question because I think the truth is, I had two very different experiences of being Catholic.
[00:50:47]  Like, I was in a liberation theology church as a little kid in the 1970s.
[00:50:53]  And I didn't understand the politics or the ideology at that time, but I was flooded with warmth and feelings of welcome whenever I was there.
[00:51:00]  It was also a university community, so it was really global.
[00:51:04]  Like there were people from everywhere there.
[00:51:07]  And then I also went to an extremely repressive traditional Catholic church and school with corporal punishment, a lot of shaming, authoritarianism, and abuse.
[00:51:17]  And so I saw two sides of the church, which was confusing.
[00:51:20]  But the first part, I think, let me see through the second.
[00:51:23]  And you know, Derek, I just put it together when you were talking about how you were reading Buddhist texts while carting bodies down to the morgue.
[00:51:32]  And there was something about like the juxtaposition of these visions of.
[00:51:38]  Metaphysical life and the raw materials of life.
[00:51:42]  I had something similar in the sense that, like, in that traditional church, I became a church musician and eventually an organist.
[00:51:52]  And by my count, I probably was the organist for about a thousand funerals of people.
[00:51:58]  And if you are an official, like, if you're doing, you know, it's basically religious morgue work, right?
[00:52:05]  Like, you're taking care of the body, you're being respectful, you're honoring it.
[00:52:11]  But you're also aware that it's stuff.
[00:52:15]  It's stuff, right?
[00:52:18]  When you do it every day, there's no room for it to become dreamy or idealized.
[00:52:24]  And I think that was very impactful for me and gave me this kind of ambivalent relationship to religion as well.
[00:52:31]  So, yeah, I mean, then I got into cults.
[00:52:36]  And I think some of this early feeling of a welcoming church kind of probably sucked me into the pseudo welcome of these.
[00:52:46]  Environments, because I think, you know, cults almost pretend to effectively offer, you know, little sanctuaries of socialism.
[00:52:55]  And, you know, that ends up being illusory.
[00:53:00]  But I can also say that I haven't completely discarded the notion that there were good aspects to those social organizations and that I had good experiences within them.
[00:53:14]  And so it makes me think about, like, well, what were those.
[00:53:17]  Actual elements?
[00:53:18]  And are there really black and white lines to draw between groups that we would label cults and groups that we would label parts of religious traditions?

=== Pedagogy and Organized Religion (13:07) ===

[00:53:27]  So I'm always sort of questioning that line as well.
[00:53:29]  Yeah.
[00:53:30]  Yeah.
[00:53:31]  So along similar lines, to what extent is this new book an extension of the last six years of working here on this podcast?
[00:53:39]  Well, the second and third chapters were really easy to write because they look at the intersection between the manosphere, disinformation, and You know, right wing politics capturing most of online political discourse.
[00:53:54]  So I knew all of that like the back of my hand from working with you both.
[00:53:58]  And so my aim was to sort of make that very accessible to young people and especially within their family contexts, including, you know, things that aren't that easy, which include like, you know, the study of affect and charisma in the influencer world.
[00:54:16]  And, you know, what are the general signs of bullshitting?
[00:54:20]  And part of the way into that is to recognize that the techniques of attention capture are everywhere, right?
[00:54:29]  And that your favorite YouTuber as a kid doesn't have far to go between the hype video that they're making about Call of Duty to a hype video on body fascism, workout routines, and then a hype video on peak masculinity.
[00:54:44]  So there's an aesthetic continuum between these forms, and that's how this politics gets smuggled in.
[00:54:51]  Yeah, so that stuff was all sort of very at hand.
[00:54:54]  And then I think the point of departure is that, you know, I'm much more pro spirituality, I think, in specific ways than I have been in most of the work on this podcast.
[00:55:06]  And sometimes I'm actually pro organized religion when it seems to make sense.
[00:55:11]  In most areas, I agree with atheists who feel that, you know, nothing extra is necessary beyond, you know, relationships and general wonderment.
[00:55:23]  And, you know, I agree that nothing extra really is there anyway.
[00:55:27]  But in my life and in my reading of anti fascist literature, revolutionary history, people are very often pulling on something as mystical as their own desired future.
[00:55:40]  And I think it's because changing injustice often feels impossible and endless and proximal to death and losing everything.
[00:55:48]  And so I think that's why people down through the ages have used or innovated their religious heritage.
[00:55:53]  And I think the innovation is really key because, you know, when liberation theologians Look at the passive Jesus fading like a white lily on the cross, and they see something much closer to home.
[00:56:07]  They see like an unhoused carer for the poor executed by the state.
[00:56:12]  That, I think, unleashes a lot of the repressed energy from their more traditional Catholic past.
[00:56:17]  So I'm just really fascinated in those dynamics.
[00:56:19]  I'd just say that Campbell also said that he believed a reformation was necessary every generation so that religion could serve the new times.
[00:56:28]  He was a very big fan of that and thought that a lot of religion had become way too complacent.
[00:56:33]  Yeah, that is so interesting, Matthew.
[00:56:36]  Part of the way I understand what you're saying is that even if, in terms of a real world, evidentiary, rational kind of analysis, you're like, well, there's nothing really there in the literal sense.
[00:56:52]  You have sympathy for the organizational and rhetorical utility that religion can serve in terms of revolutionary politics.
[00:57:00]  Yeah, and I think that what more traditional forms of religion do is that they.
[00:57:06]  Tie up and they bound to institutions themselves a tremendous amount of energy that can be released not necessarily by wiping it all away but by seeing it anew.
[00:57:20]  Right.
[00:57:21]  So, Anti Fascist Dad, you were just referencing some of this earlier and you talked about it in your synopsis.
[00:57:27]  It arrives into this media landscape where there are lots of pundits and authors who are claiming to have the diagnosis for what's wrong with the kids today, especially the boys, and this is how we're going to fix it.
[00:57:38]  How is your book?
[00:57:39]  Different?
[00:57:40]  Well, I don't diagnose anybody, and I don't think anything is wrong with kids, not even boys, beyond the material conditions that we're handing them.
[00:57:49]  And that's uneven around the world.
[00:57:51]  So worrying about screen time or processed food or video games or chat rooms on Discord, you know, I think it has its place, but I think it can only be, it could also be a good way of not talking about inequality and climate collapse.
[00:58:08]  So one way my book is different is that.
[00:58:10]  It imagines conversing with kids of many ages.
[00:58:15]  And sometimes the voice addresses parents as well.
[00:58:18]  But I'm not talking to parents about kids behind their backs, which I always view as a kind of betrayal.
[00:58:22]  You know, we're going to be in the kitchen, we're going to say this stuff, and we're going to figure out how to like organize our kids' lives.
[00:58:27]  I don't think, I don't find that very helpful because usually the kid can be spoken to, right?
[00:58:33]  Can be listened to.
[00:58:34]  And I don't think there's any topic about kids that doesn't include them.
[00:58:40]  It's all a mystery.
[00:58:42]  And if you listen to John Haidt or Richard Reeves or Scott Galloway, leaving aside their content, you don't get any of that ethnographic feeling of sharing a world with kids.
[00:58:53]  You get this sort of like view from above, right?
[00:58:56]  Like, what are these kids doing?
[00:58:58]  Fishbowl, right?
[00:58:59]  But we share a world of rising fascism and climate distress with the people that we care for.
[00:59:05]  And we will not be the authors of their answers.
[00:59:09]  Pablo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a guiding light for me in this because I believe with him that the parent and the educator is a fellow traveler and a co discoverer of the world, not some person who hands down like an idealized vision of how things should be and then gives.
[00:59:25]  People prompts, kids prompts to attain it.
[00:59:28]  But then I think my book is also different, and this is where I'll come back to the Height Reeves Galloway content is that I think there's a strong theme of regressionism within current literature that you're referencing.
[00:59:44]  People who generally seek to restore an older and more disciplinary order with a nostalgic vibe.
[00:59:51]  So, you know, a lot of attention is given to the way in which the most toxic.
[00:59:56]  Forms of the manosphere do that, like everything downstream and to the right of Jordan Peterson.
[01:00:01]  But I think what they're doing is quite obvious.
[01:00:04]  And I think it's more important to be aware of what the more kind of centrist answer to the manosphere is because it's depoliticized usually.
[01:00:13]  And I think that it's easy for people to dispense basic instruction around internet hygiene and knowledge on how to identify misogyny online and at school.
[01:00:23]  But what's harder to illuminate are the answers of People who just sort of apologize for the status quo.
[01:00:31]  And this guy didn't make it into my book, which I'm pissed about.
[01:00:33]  But like our current prime minister, Mark Carney, has suddenly become everyone's nice and protective dad while he hacks away at social programs and increases inequality so that he can triple military spending.
[01:00:47]  I think if you ask most sort of mainstream parents, like, you know, who's the male role model that you would like to see in place of what the manosphere throws up?
[01:00:58]  And, you know, most people, a lot of people in Canada would say, I think Mark Carney's a great.
[01:01:02]  Role model.
[01:01:02]  And I'm like, no, no, no, because you have to look at what he does.
[01:01:07]  You have to look at what he believes.
[01:01:09]  So, yeah, those are some differences.
[01:01:12]  Yeah.
[01:01:12]  So, this is all part, I think, of your analysis of who's complicit, who's playing which kind of roles within rising fascism.
[01:01:21]  And fascism, as a word in and of itself, is loaded down with intensity and dread.
[01:01:26]  I think a lot of people are cautious about feeling they might be using it too quickly or overusing it.
[01:01:32]  Did you find it challenging to find a register or a tone for discussing this topic with young people that avoids catastrophizing or being preachy?
[01:01:42]  You mean without being a podcaster, right?
[01:01:46]  Well, I don't know if that's possible.
[01:01:49]  I think just Socrates is the guide for me.
[01:01:52]  Like you present the idea and you let the questions rise.
[01:01:57]  I don't think I'm alone in feeling split a lot of the time between what I know about the world and the world I'm trying to allow to open up for.
[01:02:05]  My kids.
[01:02:07]  And I'm not alone in feeling that it's probably not right for adults to offload their anxieties onto their kids.
[01:02:14]  But then there's a mental health cost involved with masking that.
[01:02:19]  So I generally have the value of sharing anything that is asked about, but I'm also aware that my world provokes a consistent negativity bias and I have to protect my own kids against that because it's not going to be age appropriate.
[01:02:34]  And speaking of negativity bias, That's what Marxism is politically.
[01:02:41]  It is a negativity bias.
[01:02:44]  Because the basic technique is to ruthlessly criticize power.
[01:02:47]  And this often leads to melancholy and paranoia.
[01:02:50]  Like the root of the right wing's mockery of people on the left is, I think it's this.
[01:02:57]  It's like, you guys are sad.
[01:02:59]  You guys are like really derpy.
[01:03:01]  You're complaining.
[01:03:02]  You're complaining.
[01:03:04]  And they're not wrong about that.
[01:03:07]  And the problem is that if you're parenting while doing that, you're also supposed to be riding bikes and gardening and watching movies and playing with action figures.
[01:03:15]  So there's a real high wire there.
[01:03:17]  It's not easy.
[01:03:18]  Your question was like, you know, how did you find a register or tone?
[01:03:22]  I think the attempt at neutrality and openness, and no question being too difficult or dark to approach in an exploratory and critical thinking manner, I think that was really key for me.
[01:03:36]  So, Matthew, as this podcast has grown and unfolded through time, we've identified some key areas of internal political difference.
[01:03:46]  I would say that Derek and I, and you can interrupt if I'm not quite on point here, Derek, that we're both sort of progressive social democrats who are like spiritual.
[01:03:55]  Atheists, and as you identified before, you're friendlier toward religion, but you're also more overtly leftist, Marxist, anti capitalist.
[01:04:05]  Have you moved more in those directions?
[01:04:09]  Has the radicalization you've described around parenting your son with autism amplified those stances?
[01:04:15]  Or is this just sort of always been bedrock to you and it's emerging more sort of circumstantially?
[01:04:22]  I think something radicalizes me every few months, to be honest.
[01:04:26]  And sometimes it's arguments with you because we work so closely.
[01:04:30]  But there are a bunch of concrete moments.
[01:04:34]  So, two years into this podcast, I picked up Erica Lagalice's Occult Features of Anarchism, which is basically a book length meditation on anti Semitism as the socialism of fools.
[01:04:45]  And I had heard this phrase hundreds of times.
[01:04:48]  But now, having spent two years studying anti Semitism and other related conspiracy theories, it kind of struck me.
[01:04:55]  I was like, oh, okay.
[01:04:58]  Let me look at that further.
[01:04:59]  That really wrung something inside.
[01:05:02]  And after that, it became hard to look at the people we were covering outside of that framework.
[01:05:07]  Another moment is that October the 7th happened and it became clear that the response would be genocidal and that people would be punished for saying that.
[01:05:17]  And then I watched militarized police tear into the encampments on the orders of college chancellors, blue state governors.
[01:05:26]  I watched the undecided movement sit on the ground outside of the Democratic Party convention.
[01:05:32]  I read the congresswoman from, or sorry, the state rep from Georgia, Rua Rahman's speech that she had prepared, but she was denied a slot on the stage.
[01:05:44]  And in that speech, she was actually going to endorse Harris on behalf of the movement, and they still didn't put her up there.
[01:05:50]  And then I watched that whole sort of electoral campaign blame, you know, in part these young people for the consequences of the party's own moral choices.
[01:06:03]  These things all sort of ran together and propelled me in this direction.
[01:06:07]  Lately, it's watching just how fast our social democracy here in Canada can be deregulated by a Davos operative like Kearney and how predictable it is.
[01:06:18]  Because social democracy, and this is probably where we get into tensions because this is how you identify, it's not, in my view, able historically to defend itself against oligarchs who will influence elections and use the state to lock in profit.

=== Whining About Social Democracy (01:43) ===

[01:06:34]  So, I'm living in a place where that's happening right now.
[01:06:36]  Now, the question of what to do about that is this whole other thing.
[01:06:39]  But I think that's maybe the sort of conceptual route of where we can have friction.
[01:06:46]  Well, I'm really looking forward to reading and being influenced by and arguing in my head with your book.
[01:06:54]  Are there any last thoughts that you want to offer before we sign off for today?
[01:06:58]  I don't think so.
[01:07:00]  I think that I really, I've just appreciated working with you both so that these differences.
[01:07:09]  You know, and all of our parts can become more elucidated.
[01:07:13]  We spent a lot of time behind, you know, off of the mic trying to work this stuff out.
[01:07:19]  And, you know, we have real differences that, you know, have real consequences.
[01:07:25]  And somehow we've been able to do it.
[01:07:28]  And so I don't think that I would have, you know, done this kind of like exploration without the, you know, encouragement and friction from both of you.
[01:07:39]  And in the encouragement, funny enough, was like, You know, I started to bring stuff into editorial that was like, I don't, you know, you guys were saying, I don't really know if that's in our stuff.
[01:07:50]  Maybe you could put it onto social media.
[01:07:52]  And I would say, fuck, man, social media is just like throwaway garbage place.
[01:07:55]  And I don't really, and now I'm doing social media.
[01:07:58]  Now you're crushing it on social media.
[01:08:00]  Yeah.
[01:08:01]  Like, so I was complaining about it.
[01:08:03]  I was whining about it before.
[01:08:05]  And then now I'm doing that.
[01:08:07]  And, but then I'm also doing this other project.
[01:08:11]  And so I've really got you to thank for it in this kind of like, Double edged way that I really appreciate.