Humans are social animals. We’re not the strongest, fastest, or even best adapted to our environment. But what we excel at is our ability to work together, which means we’ve been able to adapt to every environment, a true outlier in the animal kingdom. And a big reason for that is our ability to empathize with others.

Basically, empathy is the ability to step into someone else's shoes, understand what they are thinking or feeling, and share in that emotional experience. The main types of empathy are cognitive, affective (or emotional), and somatic.

Derek looks at the first two in segment two through the lens of Paul Bloom’s work, but given a recent book by Lebanese-born Canadian marketing professor, Gad Saad (which Matthew covers in segment three), we thought we’d look at how empathy is being used, and potentially distorted, in modern society. Or, as Julian starts with, how it’s being weaponized on social media by Christian nationalists.

Show Notes

This Lebanese-Canadian Behavioral Scientist Is Gaining World Fame

Gad Saad: Google Scholar profile

Jews safer in Mississippi than Canada, says Jewish prof who left Montreal for Ole Miss

He's Canada's number one author, and he's leaving Canada for safety reasons 

David Saad: Olympedia (official Olympic biographical record)

Gad Saad thread on his brother's Olympic/antisemitism story

Trump Says There Are 25 Million Illegal Immigrants

Fact Check: Did 20 Million Illegal Immigrants Enter US Under Biden?

Record 14 Million Unauthorized Immigrants Lived in the US in 2023

Vance magnifies false claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets

ADL's Global 100 Survey: What Does It Actually Say About Muslim Attitudes Toward Jews?

Examining the ADL's Antisemitism Audit

Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences (CASE)

Flawed by Design: Jewish Faculty Network Response to CASE Report

First Anti-Islam March by Pegida Movement Fizzles in Denmark

Why Moslems Cannot, Will Not, Need Not Integrate

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A recent article in The Atlantic ponders the current state of yoga. Derek weighs in based on his decades-long experiences.

Show Notes

What Happened to Yoga?

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AJA Woods (The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy) joins Matthew to trace how "cultural Marxism" mutated from Nazi "cultural Bolshevism" and the British Union of Fascists' attacks on modernist art, through Lyndon LaRouche's CIA-brainwashing lore, into Paul Weyrich and William Lind's 1990s "political correctness" rebrand, Pat Buchanan and the Tea Party's free-floating panic, Andrew Breitbart's arugula jokes, before finally landing as Christopher Rufo's anti-CRT crusade and James Lindsay's "Race Marxism." 

Woods argues the throughline isn't honest scholarship on the Frankfurt School but a recurring move: relabel any liberation struggle—civil rights, feminism, trans rights, climate action—as an elite conspiracy, so its gains can be revoked as "foreign" corruption. Should sane people keep participating in these "debates" or refuse the frame and point to material stakes instead? 

Show Notes

A.J.A. Woods, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West 

Jack Z. Bratich, Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture 

Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism 

James Lindsay, Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis

Christopher Rufo, New Yorker

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Conspiracy theorists have decided Novak Djokovic has long COVID — despite no evidence — because he's become an anti-vax icon courted by RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz. So we thought it was high time for a long COVID update. 

Derek looks at a new Boston Children's Hospital research on viral reactivation, as well as the findings of a 2026 meta-analysis pooling 200,000+ participants.

Matthew surveys the Canadian LC landscape, where insurance-industry money is quietly funding McGill's Institute for Transforming Healthcare and McMaster's FALCON trial, testing the pseudoscientific "Lightning Process" on Long COVID patients, led by researcher Dr. Jason Busse, who has deep insurance-disability ties.

Finally, Julian unpacks Phil Parker's Lightning Process — Ericksonian NLP dressed as neuroscience, with roots in hypnotherapy, cult techniques, and pure "neuro-bollocks."

Show Notes

Kennedy Hires Covid Vaccine Skeptic to Look at Dubious Claims of Military Deaths

A New Brunswick woman's account of being left to find her own way with long COVID

Canadians frustrated by long COVID as they grapple with its effects

December 2023 release on Canadians' experiences with long-term COVID symptoms

Fourth Report on longer-term symptoms among Canadian adults

"Dealing with the Fallout": post-COVID condition's continued impact

Survey record confirming the CCAHS was a one-time collection

RFK Jr.'s workforce cuts wiped out federal tracking of key health data

Trudeau kept Harper's health care funding formula

2025 National Health Expenditure Trends snapshot

Canada Health Transfer deductions for non-compliance are declining

Carney refuses to commit to enforcing the Canada Health Act

Canada's affordability crisis and health care

Ontario should join Alberta in challenging the Canada Health Act

Alberta's new health system structure under Premier Smith

Alberta's "Bill 11" and Ford's hospital privatization

Union concern over Saskatchewan's move toward privatization

McGill launches initiative to strengthen Canada's healthcare system

Sectoral Asset Management's healthcare-investing focus

Manulife launches Global Longevity Institute committing $350M by 2030

Manulife advances longevity leadership in Canada with support for the National Institute on Ageing's landmark survey

National Institute on Ageing releases 2025 Ageing in Canada Survey

FALCON study

Petition calling to pause McMaster's FALCON trial

Original 2011 PACE trial publication

Peter White's ties to Swiss Re

The PACE team's insurance-company consulting work

The yawning gap in ME/CFS research funding 

Trial By Error: BBC Takes On The Lightning Method

Can Lightning Method Help Kids with CFS?

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Heading into the holiday weekend, RFK Jr terminated almost all grants dedicated to the Office of Minority Health. Now, $38 million over four years will be redirected from postpartum screenings and assistance for Black and Native American families to "research" on erectile dysfunction, testosterone, and sperm counts.

Derek reports on this disturbing news, as well as how the kratom industry appears to be influencing Kennedy's decisions.

Show Notes

HHS Cancels Infant Mortality, Postpartum Grants to Focus on Sperm Counts, ED

RFK Jr. Bails on MAHA Event After Being Cornered on ‘Gas Station Heroin’

Kratom drink Feel Free gains popularity despite growing concerns about addiction, health impact and death

How an Addictive Gas Station Drug Found Allies in Trump’s Cabinet

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The 1990s were a special time in American media. Female-coded, liberal-leaning, daytime TV talk shows like the Oprah Winfrey Show normalized past-life regression, alien abduction, and Satanic Ritual Abuse for housewives. At the same time, male-coded, conservative-leaning, night-time AM-radio shows like Art Bell’s Coast to Coast did the same for their husbands and brothers on the graveyard shift at budget hotels or driving enormous trucks on long stretches of open highway.

For the latest installment in his Roots of Conspirituality series, Julian digs into how these two media figures brought conspiracism, pseudoscience, and the paranormal into America’s mainstream, setting the stage for how the internet and social media would melt everybody’s minds.

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Gil Duran's exceptional new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, explains how technofascists like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Curtis Yarvin, JD Vance, and Marc Andreessen are not-so-quietly dismantling America as we know it.

Derek discusses this science fiction nightmare we’re now all living through.

Show Notes

The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

Gil Durán and Wajahat Ali: The Rise of "The Nerd Reich”

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The irreplaceable Dolly Parton died on August 25 after a brief battle with cancer. Social media was filled with loving tributes to an incredible artist and devoted philanthropist. A minority also felt the need to use her death to platform their own issues, including a cohort common on our beat: the anti-vaxxers.

We’re going to cover that. But we’re also going to reflect on Parton’s incredible life, because she spent so much of it uplifting others.

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There’s a lot going on when Hasan Piker wears a Zhongshan suit and praises Maoism. Matthew uses Wendy Brown's 1999 essay "Resisting Left Melancholy", which cites Walter Benjamin, Freud, and Stuart Hall to argue that campist rhetoric on the left, whether earnest or ironic, can signal unmourned loss more than conviction, and that nostalgic attachments to revolutionary pasts can choke off engagement with present possibility. 

Brown argues that left melancholy displaces its grief over capital’s triumphs onto scapegoats (identity politics, postmodernism). Matthew adds that it functions as an affective membership fee within online left communities. This might account for why liberals sense that they're sometimes being asked to join in choreographies of sadness rather than build coalitions in the present. 

Drawing on Hall's account of Thatcher's mastery of political language, and closing with reflections from Matthew's years as a church organist playing nearly 1000 funerals, the episode asks what it would actually mean for the left to mourn its losses instead of reenacting them — and how mourning might be a necessary revolutionary act.

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During James Arthur Ray’s 2009 Spiritual Warrior retreat in Sedona, the self-proclaimed spiritual teacher exhorted participants to “play full-on” in order to overcome their limiting beliefs and fear of death. After having their heads shaved and enduring a gruelling 36-hour “vision quest,” Ray packed the spiritual warriors into a makeshift “sweat lodge,” where temperatures reached 120 degrees. 

Three people died. Eighteen were hospitalized. Ray fled the scene, taking cover at a nearby luxury resort to promote his next event. After spending just two years in jail, he went right back to presenting himself as a spiritual guide and transformational seminar leader. 

Journalist and professor emeritus at Northern Arizona University, Annette McGivney joins Julian to discuss her new book, Plastic Shaman: The True Story of a Deadly Self-Help Retreat and America’s Misguided Quest for Wellness.

Show Notes

Annette McGivney Bio

Plastic Shaman is available September 15th through Torrey House Press

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Someday in the future, Joe Rogan may ask Jamie to be his mirror, and facilitate the next and most important psychedelic experience of his life: a walkthrough of his craven MAGA and MAHA boosterism, and what it said about his soul. On his ayahuasca trip, Anthony Fauci will come to him in the gown of the Angel Gabriel and offer him penance but also forgiveness— and take his microphone away. 

Not today, folks. We only get to reflect on Rogan making the next-most intimate discovery: that Trump is a grifter, so adept at grifting he fooled all the grifters. Is he defecting? What would that really mean?

Show Notes

Inside Ben Shapiro’s MAGA Meltdown

The MAGA Media-Machine is Fracturing

RFK Jr. Ripped by MAHA Base After Backing Trump's Betrayal

MAHA feels betrayed by RFK Jr. reversal on glyphosate

Meatheads Are Hijacking America: Vegans feel betrayed by RFK Jr.'s beef boosting

RFK Jr. Is Breaking His Two Big Promises to MAHA Diehards

New CDC director pledges to ‘speak truth’ about science

Health secretary RFK Jr. endorses the MMR vaccine — stoking fury among his supporters

Nicole Shanahan Warns Someone Is "Controlling" RFK Jr.

'Crunchy moms' come to blows over Trump's surgeon general picks

Backlash from MAHA influencers and podcasters over glyphosate

'I've never felt so betrayed': MAHA disillusionment hits high gear

RFK Jr. tells Joe Rogan he was not 'particularly happy' with Trump's glyphosate order

RFK Jr. Calls Fake MAHA Report Citations a 'Mistake'

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