The genius parade continues this week with co-host Dale Beran, author of It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office. All three of us writers are legit blown away by Beran’s layered and penetrating coverage of the chan-verse-to-Capitol Riot pipeline.

Dr. Annie Kelly’s scholarship in these spaces reveals a network of “subversion anxieties”: that patriarchy will be replaced by social justice autocrats, that the privileged will be brought low, that feminism will destroy hetero freedoms and pleasures, that human bodies will become cyborgs, that collectivism will replace capitalism.

Derek interviews David Morris, the Chief Insights Columnist at Coindesk, who also just happens to have a longtime interest in MLMs and cults. Matthew also reviews the 1996 essay, “The Californian Ideology,” the famous 1995 study of the bizarre Silicon Valley-fueled fusion of cultural bohemianism and free-market utopia rhetoric.

Dr. Jennifer Sapio taught for three years at the Austin Waldorf School. She was hired from her secular training, but gradually found herself drawn into what she calls an “inherently racist cult.” Her mentors pushed her towards accepting the 19th-century babblings of Rudolf Steiner, who, among other exploits, read the “Akashic Records” to learn why the spirit world disapproved of vaccines.

Matthew sits down with India Oxenberg to discuss her recovery journey: learning to box, learning to love food, learning about “the strong yes” from her therapist. They also discuss the behind-the-scenes expertise that went into the documentary series India starred in and co-produced: Seduced.

Mike Rothschild joins as co-host just as his new book, The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Cult, Movement and a Conspiracy Theory of Everything, drops. We’ll ask him about researching a “conspiracy of everything, what a leaderless cult means, how an online religion worships, and how, amidst catastrophic disconfirmation and deplatforming, we’re seeing new delta QAnon variants emerge.

Dax-Devlon Ross joins this week as a co-host to discuss the topics in his book, “Letters to My White Male Friends,” including the many years of lived experiences that cut through the academic rhetoric and political posturing concerning race in America today.

This episode is co-hosted by Dr. C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher who teaches at the University of Utah. His breakthrough book is about agency in games, in which he shines a light on disquieting aspects of our gamified lives and the question of whether we’re still able to act on our own values.

Matthew sits down, across 9,000 miles of mostly ocean, with journalist Anke Richter and reporter and Māori rights activist Joe Trinder to discuss the mind-bending rise of Māori MAGA in the COVID-free sanctuary of Aoteoroa, aka New Zealand.

Linguist Amanda Montell joins Julian for an engaging interview about her new book, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, which examines the power of language in high-demand groups, from The People’s Temple to the local Young Living dinner party. In a debrief, we discuss not only Montell’s study, but also our own run-ins with spiritual mumbo-jumbo.

Alex Ebert—frontman for Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros—joins Derek to map out the late 20th-century slide into infinitely co-opted creativity and revolution. They discuss the reasons America could use death rituals, the rise of Trump as the ultimate New Ager, and wellness influencers as “the clerical class of the right.”

In this week’s interview, Derek talks with Venezuelan-American singer/songwriter Devendra Banhart about global music, anti-vaxxers, conspiritualist ideology, and paying $24 for a smoothie in Malibu.

Matthew speaks with sociologist Sheena Sood about the hubris of Hindu nationalism as its yoga-boosting ministers show their pious ineptitude, telling their gasping citizens to stop being crybabies and consider drinking holy cow urine against COVID.

TikTok anti-disinformation activist Abbie Richards, whose “Conspiracy Pyramid” and tea-time QAnon explainers have gone viral on the next-gen platform, joins to talk about her process, challenges, why she hates golf, and what GenXers (and older cohorts) should keep in mind when they wonder if the kids are alright.

We discuss the trend of trauma exploitation, Satanic Panics throughout the decades, and social media entertainment finding cover through the pretense of therapy. Then we’ll hear from the pros: licensed psychologists Hala Khouri and Kyra Haglund join Julian to discuss the importance of trauma-informed yoga and cases of abuse in wellness spaces.

Founder of the Flow Genome Project, Jamie Wheal joins Derek for a wide-ranging interview about his new book, Recapture the Rapture. Following up on his Pulitzer-nominated bestseller, Stealing Fire, Wheal makes an ambitious argument for a dazzling renewal of meaning and mystery through sacralized biohacking.

Matthew interviews Heather Simpson and Lydia Greene from Back to the Vax, an anti-disinformation think-tank they founded after fleeing the online cult of anti-vax propaganda. In their first interview together, Simpson and Greene recount how mother-centered anti-vax social media spaces drew them in and exposed them to all manner of anxious conspiracism—and what it cost them to leave.

Both conspirituality and social media influence are driven by the hot take, the keyword, the avatar, and the speed of emotional reactivity. And cults are glued together by intense, non-negotiable emotional demands on participants. Our hope is that we contribute to a slower and open-ended exploration of how to balance the rhetoric of social change with the nuance of interpersonal empathy.

We review how the first two episodes of Cullen Hoback’s “Into the Storm” lands, and wonder about what happens when conspiracy movements come under big-screen and academic scrutiny.

Back in December, a certified anesthesiologist named Dr. Madhava Setty posted a long critique of our podcast to the New Age website Collective Evolution. Then he guested on J. Brown’s Yoga Talks podcast and provided a master class on how to lead an anxious and altruistic yoga devotee into conspirituality.