Brief: Ground Zero Grifting

Are you ready to biohack your brain with buttered coffee? How about going “within” at the Drybar of acupuncture? What if we told you that cannabis will catapult your chakras into higher consciousness—all it costs is a $5,000 retreat entry fee, not including airfare and hotel? In the $4.4 trillion wellness industry, is any cost really too expensive to achieve true self-care—even if it never really seems like you arrive anywhere at all?Rina Raphael was getting burnt out as a millennial digital news producer at NBC News. And so she did what anyone would do: she moved to Los Angeles in search of that self-care. Yet she could never shake her journalistic chops, and so she ended up writing about the wellness industry for the NY Times, the LA Times, Fast Company, and other publications. Her skeptical eye and earnest curiosity lead her to write her brand new book, The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care. And she’s here this week to talk to us this week about her adventures in modern spirituality—its teachings as well as its traps. Show NotesThe Gospel of WellnessWell To Do — Rina Raphael -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

22 Sep 20221h 3min

Christina Flinders returns for the second of a two-part tour through her experience with cultic dynamics, conspirituality, and the long road towards finding her place in the world. Picking up where she left off, Flinders discusses breaking free of the sexually abusive cult of Eknath Easwaren, finding ambivalent agency as a stripper, and then graduating to yoga teaching—where she then had to dodge being redpilled.Thanks again to Christina for her generosity and lucidity, and her family for their support.If you'd like to share your story with us and our Patreon community of listeners, please get in touch. -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

19 Sep 20224min

Did you know that Joe Biden is a Satanic alien Nazi pedophile intent on bringing about the New World Order? Or that Donald Trump is the only thing that will save us from complete tyranny? How about the fact that COVID vaccines are bioweapons destroying the global population? But that’s okay, because colloidal silver is the magic bullet that will boost your immune system to help you fend off this scamdemic. Add that to your herbal stack alongside Lung Health Organic Herbal Spray which is definitively proven to boost your immunity even though it’s never been clinically tested.Oh, and have we mentioned that chocolate is an octave of the sun?Strap in, folks, because this week we’re finally looking at David “Avocado” Wolfe, whose paranoid Telegram channel boasts all of the above claims and much, much more. And we’re not just clipping recent podcast talks and driver’s seat rants. We’re joined by longtime journalist, health food marketing guru, and co-founder of the website, Ethos, Jill Ettinger, who worked side-by-side with David for many years. She’ll tell her side of it—and honestly, it’s not all bad, except for recent years. In effect, we’re looking at a conspiracy-prone health food guru turn full conspiritualist over the last two decades. Bonus: Jill brought Derek along to many events across the country in the aughts, and David was often there, so we’ll hear about this descent from people who watched it happen. -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

15 Sep 20221h 13min

Christina Flinders is our honoured guest today for the first of a two-part tour through her  experience with cultic dynamics and conspirituality. Matthew and Julian learn about her family's enmeshment in the cult of Eknath Easwaren, and her subsequent journey through rebellion, self discovery, and political awakening.We'd like to thank Christina for her generosity and lucidity, and her family for supporting her in this. We hope that this will be the first in a series. If you'd like to share your story with us and the Patreon community of listeners here, please get in touch.Show NotesComment from Pratik Joshi on Easwaren's abuse history in IndiaPEOPLE v. RUPPENTHALEknath Easwaran on the Training of Attention -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

12 Sep 20227min

On May 31st, 2014, Morgan Geyser stabbed her onetime best friend Bella Leutner nineteen times, while her new best friend, Anissa Weier, looked on. All three girls were twelve years old.  Geyser was living with schizophrenia, and Weier had introduced her to the crowd-sourced internet phantasm known as Slenderman, who first appeared on Something Awful, the message board at the root of chan culture. Together, Geyser and Weier came to believe that Slenderman was demanding a sacrifice in exchange for his protection. Their crime,  at once naïve and brutal,  sparked a moral panic. Author Kathleen Hale joins Matthew to discuss her reporting on this story in her riveting and compassionate new book, Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls.Slenderman is brimming with tenderness for these girls, who are all creative, confused, scared, and ultimately bound to each other through social contagion and mental illness. Hale's writing is accessible but elliptical as it uncovers jagged details, but never easy answers, about a world that predicts our own.  On this podcast we spend a lot of time on the virtual demons that animate conspirituality and QAnon, driving some devotees to violence. Hale's work is good medicine for those who know that internet chaos and mental precarity will remain locked in feedback loops for the foreseeable future. Her meticulous investigation—enriched by hours spent interviewing Morgan Geyser—shows that the road to understanding is always paved with empathy. Show Notes Slenderman — Kathleen HaleAm I being catfished? An author confronts her number one online critic | Books | The Guardian Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet MythologyThe Slender Man Wiki | Fandom -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

8 Sep 20221h 34min

As we're all with family over the holiday weekend, here's a 2018 interview that Derek conducted with neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga after the publication of his last book, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind. Michael revolutionized the field of neuroscience in the 1960s with his work on split-brain patients and remains a towering figure in his field.  -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

5 Sep 20226min

Do you ever stop to think about whether or not you can afford organic food—and then consider that many people don’t have such an option? Is Goop’s $295 incense holder a sign of feminine empowerment or merely another Gwneth Paltrow grift? Will that $32 spin class that features an endless litany of positive affirmations make you more likely to slip $5 to the homeless person camped outside of the studio—or does it increase your happiness or contentment levels at all, once the endorphins wear off?These are just some of the questions posed by CTZNWELL founder, Kerri Kelly, in her new book, American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal. Beginning with her own transformational moment after 9/11, Kerri has long asked difficult questions of both herself and the industry she’s spent decades immersed in. In fact, while Derek and Julian were co-founding the Conspirituality pre-cursor, YogaBrains, over a decade ago, Kerri was an integral member of yoga-activist organization, Off the Mat, Into the World. She joins us this week as co-host to discuss her own origin myth and to tell us exactly how she’s detoxing from America these days.Show NotesAmerican Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1 Sep 202252min

The homestretch of our study of Michelle Remembers zeroes in on the literal symbols—and symbols gone literal—of the Satanic Panic. Archetypes, gore, anxieties about sex and babies and filth: Lawrence Pazder mined it all, using modes of abstraction and dehumanization as old as religion itself to weave a story he claimed was all about Michelle—but was really an exercise of his own fetishes.Michelle Smith could have received proper care for her understandable stresses. She could have offered up her feelings and sensations and images from dreams for discussion and contemplation, and an actual therapist would have held that material safely for her to explore. But in Pazder, Smith found someone who wasn’t interested in common human complexity. He was interested in cosmic warfare, and the role he could LARP within it.But Pazder was so blind to his craven narcissism that he couldn’t help but tell on himself. In the final passage we analyze, Pazder records Smith demanding to end therapy. “If I could tear out my tongue,” she says, “I would never have to speak again.” But in the very next paragraph, the man who is forcing her to “remember” symbolically tears out her tongue, rejecting her plea to end the sessions, interpreting her demand as though it were coming from Satan himself.She imagines herself getting in a car and driving and driving, anywhere. Away from this psychiatrist who wanted to be an exorcist, away from his story, perhaps to find her own. Show NotesHIGHEST GAME IN TOWN ‘I See His Blood Upon the Rose’ | Franciscan Media How to Lose Weight (Weight Loss and Obesity) - Teal SwanThe Cause of Obesity - Teal Swan Articles  -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

29 Aug 202210min