Conspirituality

Noelle Cook’s The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging is the first ethnography of conspirituality, and it comes via someone who was able to really embed themselves in a volatile culture and find its emotional logic. She’s our guest today.

Cook focuses on the travails of two middle-aged women following the January 6 Capitol riot. By spending years befriending and talking with Tammy Butry and Yvonne St. Cyr, Cook is able to document the impacts of childhood trauma and systemic neglect—as well as diverse personality quirks—that can drive folks toward QAnon. 

They are starseeds. They are mama bears. They are on a divine mission to destroy the matrix and usher in the Great Awakening. For them, the algorithms were oracles, reinforcing isolation and radicalization by providing a sense of purpose to the purposeless, and visibility to the invisible. Cook has not written a book for answers, but a book filled with the next questions worth grappling with as we realize how deeply wounded some recruits to fascism are.

Show Notes

The Hottest Spot for Sunday Church Is a MAGA Dive Bar

The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging
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In 1953 the CIA and MI6 participated in a coup d’etat in Iran. That true sentence (and what usually follows) can create an oversimplified distortion of history—and present. But Iran is in the news again with the biggest protests since the 1979 Islamic Revolution bringing millions to the streets. The regime unsurprisingly cracked down hard: at least 2,700 protesters have been killed and 18,000 arrested.

Though the initial impetus was economic, these are the latest in a wave of growing uprisings in Iran against the far-right theocratic authoritarian government—especially its treatment of women. How did we get here? What happened in 1953? Isn’t this all just about oil anyway? Was the 1979 revolution really about religion? Weren’t there Communists involved? Does all the turmoil in this region trace back to Western colonial imperialism?

Julian explores the tangled threads of oil, empire, and religion.

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Whole milk is back! The war on protein is over! Mainline meat!

Derek investigates the new inverted pyramid and everything lacking in the new dietary guidelines.

Show Notes

The New Dietary Guidelines and the “Flipped Pyramid”

Several of Kennedy’s Dietary Advisers Have Ties to Meat and Dairy Interests

Carotenoid bioavailability is higher from salads ingested with full-fat than with fat-reduced salad dressings as measured with electrochemical detection

Human health effects of conjugated linoleic acid from milk and supplements

Enhancing the fatty acid profile of milk through forage-based rations, with nutrition modeling of diet outcomes

Dietary Fats and Cardiovascular Disease: A Presidential Advisory From the American Heart Association

Reduction in saturated fat intake for cardiovascular disease

Effect of Interventions Aimed at Reducing or Modifying Saturated Fat Intake on Cholesterol, Mortality, and Major Cardiovascular Events : A Risk Stratified Systematic Review of Randomized Trials

Omega-6 fats for the primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease

Butter and Plant-Based Oils Intake and Mortality
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“Train your mind gently, not to deny what is hard, but to see what is still good” implores the monk sharing spiritual messages to his 2.5 million Instagram followers. Clad in an orange robe—well, sometimes a blue robe, sometimes grey or yellow—the little man of unknown descent speaks knowledge from a temple constructed from just about every Asian country imaginable. As it turns out, the creators of the AI-generated Yang Mun are…Israeli tech bros?

Turns out AI isn’t just for spirituality. There’s an entire industry of health slopfluencers pushing untested supplements, as Derek covers before Matthew breaks down the AI Orientalism of Yang Mun.

First, Julian touches on the 5th anniversary of the Jan 6 riots, and all the propaganda that’s emerged in its wake.

Show Notes

The Promise of Health Chatbots Has Already Failed

Yang Mun on Instagram

LinktreeMcMindfulness: how capitalism hijacked the Buddhist teaching of mindfulness

Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation

GigaChad | Know Your Meme

Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation
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From Andrew Huberman's Goop collab and Mel Robbins' protein shots to MAHA flipping the long-defunct food pyramid and making meningitis great again, the first full week of 2026 was off to quite a start. Derek covers the week that made heads spin.

Show Notes

Andrew Huberman is Optimizing Turkey Chili

Mel Robbins is Selling Protein Shots

What to Know About the New Childhood Vaccine Schedule

Health officials slash the number of vaccines recommended for all kids

Johns Hopkins doctor concerned over CDC's new child vaccine recommendations

Flu season already rivals last winter's harsh epidemic

FDA announces sweeping changes to oversight of wearables, AI-enabled devices

Ōura’s Ricky Bloomfield proposes new regulatory pathway for wearable health features
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