Hello everyone. Welcome to Conspiratoriality where we investigate the

intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to

uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.

I'm Matthew Remsky.

We're on Instagram and threads at Gins Spirituality Pod

and you can access all of our episodes ad-free,

plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.

Okay, today's bonus is called Faith Unearned and earned and it's an attempt at getting at the problem of

authenticity which I think plagues every investigation that we do on the spiritual influencer beat.

It's really about this basic queasiness that I think we're always contending with

when we're listening to somebody like

Charles Eisenstein or Kelly Brogan or Zach Bush or RFK Jr and I think that

queasiness can be summed up in a question.

Has this person really earned the spirituality they are presenting?

Or is spirituality instrumental to them?

Do they have experience to share or programs to sell?

And I think it's hard, if not impossible, to find the line between these two things, especially

in the society of the spectacle, especially when we're talking about influencers we don't

personally know, but I think it's an important

consideration because assumptions made in one direction or another just

sort of taint the entire discourse. But recently I believe I've stumbled across a

uuristic for what we're guessing at here. I think we're often talking about the difference between

...