105: TikTok, Cults, & Conspiracies (w/Abbie Richards)

Conspiritualists hide their grifts in mantras. MLMs market themselves as communities, while cults preach freedom. When a research firm spotlights Sayer Ji as a disinformation super-spreader, he calls ...

1 Apr 20211h 36min

Social psychologists and evolutionary psychologists have been studying the origins, neural networks, and role of intuition for decades. Wellness influencers cling to the belief that intuition is a mys...

29 Mars 20213min

It was inevitable: QAnon has stormed HBO. Less inevitably, Conspirituality Podcast has been invited to an academic conference Down Under. In this episode, we’ll review how the first two episodes of Cu...

26 Mars 20211h 23min

Julian recounts the wild and touching journey of four close friends in a self-directed spiritual group therapy session—super high on Ecstasy.Content Warning: this story includes accounts of traumatic ...

22 Mars 20217min

Back in December, a certified anesthesiologist named Dr. Madhava Setty posted a long critique of our podcast to the New Age website Collective Evolution. While cordial and apparently well-meaning, Set...

19 Mars 20211h 35min

This episode follows up on earlier discussions on the podcast about how we manage privilege. Our exploration of cancel culture — specifically that part of it that is really a form of horizontal violen...

15 Mars 20218min

Imagine that you’re 25 years old. You grew up Irish, gay, and online. When the Orlando Pulse massacre explodes, you go to YouTube for the news. You watch Milo Yiannopolous and Gavin McInnes fake-kiss ...

11 Mars 20212h 19min

Humans will never be cats. In his new book, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life, the philosopher John Gray argues that we can learn a lot about how to live from them—namely, how to calm ou...

8 Mars 20218min