An unlock of a bonus episode from earlier this year. ⁠Access all of our bonus episodes here⁠.

Happy holidays, everyone!

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Earlier this year, a spate of news stories told of chatbot users travelling through the looking-glass right into Conspirituality. Paranoid conspiracies, spiritual awakenings, even falling head-over-heels in love with the simulated personalities of large language models like ChatGPT.

Could AI have finally crossed the threshold into autonomous sentient consciousness? Could it be that chatbots were anointing new prophets—or, conversely, that very special users were awakening their very special friends via the power of love and illuminating dialogue?

Step aside, QAnon, the code behind the screen is illuminated by God!

Sadly, some of these stories trended very dark. Suicides, attempted murder, paranoid delusions, spouses terrified of losing their partners and co-parents to what looked like spiritual and romantic delusions.

For this standalone installment of his Roots of Conspirituality series, Julian examines this strange new phenomenon, then takes a detour into Ancient Greece and the oracle at Delphi to show that everything old is actually new again—just dressed up in digital technology.

Show Notes

⁠I Married My Chatbot⁠

⁠FTC Complaints Against OpenAI for Chatbot Psychosis⁠

⁠AI Spiritual Delusions Destroying Human Relationships⁠

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RFK Jr trademarked MAHA in a giant swath of categories, including many he now advocates for in his position as Secretary of HHS. After making $100,000 in licensing fees, he transferred the trademark to his anti-vax compatriot, Del Bigtree, before it was transferred again to former Kennedy security lead, Gavin de Becker. Currently being used by a variety of MAHA-based organizations, the opportunity to monetize MAHA, the brand, could be directly affected by Kennedy’s policies. Given how much MAHA leadership loathes social services, more health-based privatization could be on the horizon—just as Projected 2025 prescribed.

Derek winds down the rabbit hole into the MAHA trademark.

Show Notes

MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN - Trademark Details

The MAHA Enterprise Explained

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Dr Mike has become one of the most effective debunkers of science misinformation. His second appearance on the uber-popular show, Jubilee's Surrounded, pitted him against 20 fans of RFK Jr. Derek and Julian discuss the debate, as well as the value of Jubilee in an oversaturated media environment.

Show Notes

1 Doctor vs 20 RFK Jr. Supporters (ft Doctor Mike) Surrounded

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Derek sits down with Dr Jessica Knurick at the Eudemonia Summit for this special live recording. They discuss combating health misinformation online, what MAHA gets right and wrong, whether or not "nutritionist" should be a protected term, and Jessica's possible political ambitions.

Show Notes

Dr Jessica Knurick on Substack | Instagram

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Matthew explores Marx’s “opium of the people” passage by placing it back into the philosophical and political project it came from. Marx was not attacking religion in some essential way, but criticizing the conditions that make religion necessary as a consolation. The problem is not faith itself, but the suffering — inequality, exploitation, alienation — that gives rise to the instinct for spiritual escape. 

Marx’s atheism was not a New Atheist-type negation but a theological critique — a way of revealing how capitalism itself can displace Christianity as a religion of profit, rent, and wages. According to liberation theologian Enrique Dussel, Marx frames money as a jealous god, capital as the Antichrist, and private property as original sin. No wonder he is eternally hated. 

Full show notes at https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/brief-demonic-karl-marx

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Matthew examines how Karl Marx has long been framed as a demonic threat to religion and private property — a tactic that sidesteps Marx’s actual critique of capitalism. J. Edgar Hoover, Ronald Reagan, and a raft of Evangelical blowhards cast communism as satanic and civilization-ending, a narrative now accelerating through Trump-era rhetoric, and Project 2025. 

Capital is difficult to rebut directly, so detractors often attack Marx himself, calling him godless or deranged. Jordan Peterson and Paul Kengor treat Marx’s horny gothic teenage poems as literal evidence of demonic influence—which is much more interesting to them than taking surplus value, alienation, or commodity fetishism seriously.

But the OG distorter of Marxist economics is the Catholic Church, beginning with Pius IX, who Red-Scared the 19th C faithful with a now-famous trick: conflating personal property with bourgeois private property. Marx targeted only the latter — profit-generating property — which the Church depended on then and still does today.

Full show notes at https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/brief-demonic-karl-marx

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How does an elite Millennial politics reporter wind up having phone sex with and giving campaign advice to the 70-year-old emerging fascist she’s reporting on?

Most of that should stay between Olivia Nuzzi and her therapist. What we do know is that American Canto, Nuzzi’s new book, is a memoir (or maybe novel) made for the conspirituality age, in which raging toxic roided-up hypocritical male charisma is always the center of attention.

The domineering ghoul is the pole star of interest and fascination, always moving too fast and chaotically to understand—unless you know how fascism accelerates. We scavenge these pages for clues about Kennedy and how the hell this journalism disaster happened.

Show Notes

Zyn pouches and American Masculinity

The Olivia Nuzzi Comeback Is Everything Wrong With Modern Media

A Serious Journalism Scandal Hiding Inside a Frivolous Sexual One

The Scandalous Rollout Was the Best Part of Olivia Nuzzi’s Memoir

119: We Are Slenderman (w/Kathleen Hale)

The first-person industrial complex: How the harrowing personal essay took over the Internet.

A Q&A with Olivia Nuzzi of New York magazine on her career, covering Trump and access journalism 

Guests urged to be vaccinated at anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr’s party

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Hasan Piker just spent two weeks in The People’s Republic of China. The famous streamer is often invoked as being a potential “Joe Rogan of The Left,” who might bring young voters, especially working class men, back into the Democratic Party. 

But Piker’s livestreams from China raise controversial questions. Is he whitewashing Chinese human rights abuses? Was he paid by their government to propagandize his combined 5 million viewers? How else to explain first-class plane tickets, ultra-luxury hotel rooms, privileged access to forbidden Western social media, and carefully avoiding criticisms of the authoritarian state while waxing poetic about their country and Mao Zedong?

Julian digs into Piker’s politics in the context of China’s tumultuous history. First stop: Tiananmen Square.

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"Immortality influencer" Bryan Johnson recently livestreamed his second-ever psilocybin trip "for science." But was it, really? Derek and Julian break down the performative nature of this stunt and discuss the growing right-wing influence on psychedelics culture.

Show Notes

Bryan Johnson Has Discovered Shrooms, and He Really Wants You to Know It

Silicon Valley’s Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends

How the Right Coopted Psychedelics

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RFK Jr is one of the greatest perpetrators of a firehose of falsehoods that we’ve ever covered. The stakes were raised when he was installed as head of America’s public health system. A new longform article in The Atlantic offers an inside look at the history and current thinking of this man, as insightful for what it offers as telling for what it omits. We discuss the role of journalism in an age defined by propaganda.

Show Notes

Scoop: The new #2 at CDC is a top ivermectin prescriber who ended Louisiana’s vaccine-promotion media campaigns

Doctor Critical of Vaccines Quietly Appointed as C.D.C.’s Second in Command

CDC Quietly Turned Off Its Vaccine Search Tool. It’s Not Clear When It’s Coming Back.

The Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr. Affair Is Messier Than We Ever Could Have Imagined

RFK Jr. and the Inexplicable Appeal of Repulsive Men

RFK Jr. is overhauling the program that helps preserve Americans' access to vaccines

Why Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So Convinced He’s Right?

Nature: Pertussis, A Tale of Two Vaccines

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With the CDC recently updating its website with anti-vax propaganda under the direction of RFK Jr, disgraced and disbarred physician, Andrew Wakefield, is back in the news. In fact, Senator Ron Johnson even tweeted out that he deserves an apology. He must be relying on short attention spans, given all the ways Wakefield manipulated the “study” that showed a link between vaccines and autism—even though the study itself found no such proof.

Derek revisits the retracted 1998 study, as well as shows just how much proof exists to the contrary of the CDC’s new page.

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