When I came across Mariah Continelli’s publication on Substack, The New Unhinged, I knew I had to talk to her on the Gentle Discipline Podcast. She investigates patterns in media, money, and civilization, then publishes what she finds before she has an answer. I came across the publication, saw the name, and figured anyone who titles a Substack that has curiosity to spare. Curiosity is my favorite trait in a person, so I subscribed right away and now I read everything she puts out. It’s even better than I was hoping it would be.
Mariah spent her twenties saying yes to everything and working every hour she could get. At thirty it all came crashing down. She left the job, lost her friends and most of her family, and spent about a year in the dark before she went against everything she was raised to believe and got real help. Three years of trial and error later, her mind opened up. She started retaining information for the first time in her life, which surprised her, because she flunked school and can hardly believe she walked out with a diploma. Now she lives in a van, investigates full time, and told me she does not have a “job job,” which I pushed back on, because what she’s doing is independent journalism and it’s wildly important in modern times.
What stayed with me is how hard she works to avoid becoming another person who pretends to have all the answers. Mariah runs the Pattern Project, where she asks her readers one question a day for fourteen days and stays out of the comments so her own opinion can’t tilt the responses. She fact-checks the podcasters, even the ones she loves, and she says out loud when her opinion changes, which she thinks most people with an audience have stopped doing. That willingness to hold a position loosely while still holding it hard is a really cool way to navigate the complexity of modern living. And it’s a really cool way to have a conversation.
You can get in touch with Mariah in any of the following ways:
Substack: The New Unhinged
Listen and Subscribe on Spotify
What we cover
Growing up scared to ask questions, and getting “I don’t know” or “stop asking” every time she did
The go, go, go years, the yes to every overtime shift, and the something that triggered at thirty
Being raised to believe it was all in her head and that medication was off the table, and what that belief cost her
Losing her friends and her family at the same time because they did not understand what was happening to her
Three years of trial and error to get the protocol right, and her message that bad days after that are allowed
Flunking school, barely getting the diploma, and discovering after treatment that she can retain everything now
Merging Vets and Players, the huddle after the workout, and the first time I saw grown men talk about their problems
Her neighbor who heard fireworks, barricaded himself in, and the bearcat that showed up on a Texas street
Gabor Maté’s line that trauma is your body’s response to the event, and why I now call mine conditioning
Her first article, Agenda 2030, and going down the moon landing before she knew where any of it led
YouTube University, AI as an investigation teacher, and needing no certificate for what she does
Specialized knowledge versus general knowledge, and my case that AI holds all of the first and none of the wisdom
The article I read that called it the great deception, selling us sovereignty as money, and how we forgot to grow, hunt, and prepare our own food
Her friction piece, the quesadilla maker, and the second of thought Amazon deleted from the purchase
Frictionlessness as the new friction, and the frictions she has no intention of giving up, starting with a roof
Van life as a survival education, giving up subscriptions, and finding out the cheap food tastes better
Who is “they,” her answer of world leaders and the Rockefellers and the 1%, and my lizard people
Why I stopped believing in the shadow cabal and started believing the system is the they
Her line that the algorithm is a Labrador who discovered outrage earns bacon
“Watch what a system repeatedly rewards and punishes and you’ll learn more about the behavior it’s encouraging than what the system claims to value”
Her theory that everyone gets made broke first and handed one way out, and what my platoon sergeant called the infantry
Joining after 9/11 and learning years later that what I joined was different from why I joined
How you jailbreak your own mind, why interrupting a pattern only works if you replace it, and her answer of discipline
Quitting Instagram and TikTok on a gut feeling, and replacing them with reading and workouts she never filmed
Her gut as a compass in the rabbit holes: it relaxes when she is digging in the right direction and stops her cold when she is not
Why the stock market does not match her vibes, the 1700s question she is chasing, and the AI data centers whose water and electricity we somehow pay for
The YouTube creator whose channel got wiped, my Hunter S. Thompson repost that ended an Instagram account, and what centralized platforms can do without warning
Taking back our fuck yous, and why she sees The New Unhinged as exactly that
The Pattern Project, one question a day for fourteen days, and why she stays out of her own comment section
Her headlines getting less sarcastic and more direct as her refusal to hand anyone the conclusion got stronger
Why she seeks out the small accounts, fact-checks the huge ones she loves, and feels guilty every time she does it
The ancestral campfire, what everyone brought back to it, and whether that can happen through a screen
