Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 675: Talking Antisemitism with Aaron Rabinowitz

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

Thank you to Aaron Rabinowitz for joining today. Make sure to go check out Aaron's podcast here:    

Today's show is brought to you by AdamandEve.com. Go to AdamandEve.com right now and you'll get 50% off just about any item. All you have to do is enter the code word GLORY, G-L-O-R-Y, at checkout. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode, we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence

to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome mat. And there is no Tom across from me right now. Tom has COVID. And Tom and his couple members of his family have COVID. And he has had a very rough week this week. And so this week, Tom is taking off. Tom decided to take off the week. I will have a guest later on in the program. I'll be talking to Aaron Rabinowitz from Embrace the Void.

We're going to be talking about anti-Semitic conspiracy theories a little later on. But I wanted to talk a little bit about some housekeeping stuff. So with Tom gone this week, we will not be releasing an extra this Thursday. Instead, we'll be releasing that extra next Thursday. We were planning on doing a deep dive where Tom reads the article. We won't be releasing that this upcoming week. Tom is in no shape to read an article, nor is he in any shape to even join me virtually tonight. So we're going to give Tom a week off to rest. And this new schedule that we have actually has built into it is a little bit of leeway. And the leeway happens to be our live stream. So we will be not again doing a live

stream later this month because we have to move things back and we have to be able to shift things around. And the one thing that's going to get cut every time is going to be the live stream. Because it's one of the things that was lowest rated by a lot of people who were watching the show and who were enjoying the show and all the patrons who took our survey. So that's the thing that's going to get cut this month. That leads me to another bit of housekeeping that I want to cover before I get on with the rest of the show. So it turns out that we were banned from YouTube for about a week. Now, I want to talk about this very specifically on this episode because this episode will not air on YouTube.

And the only way to talk about this is to talk about it now because if I talk about it, even just talk about it and there's no video, this may get us completely banned from YouTube. So here's what happened. We think someone mass reported our videos. That then triggered a content moderation bot on their part that literally just took our entire channel away. There was no strikes, no nothing. They just went in and took our channel away. there was no strikes, no nothing. They just went in and took our channel away. After some, we were reached out to by several people who said they knew a guy who knew a guy and they might be able to help out. And then I also had a couple of contacts who knew some people

higher up at YouTube. We sent out a big message on Twitter and that wound up, I think, all those things in conjunction wound up helping us get reinstated. So they reinstated us. And then very quickly afterwards, they gave us a strike. And so first, I'm going to talk about the reinstatement. When I went back to look at them reinstating us, I did notice on one of the videos I had posted two comments. Well, the two comments that I had posted were both to the Manosphere. I had posted these comments

that basically said, I know you guys are here trying to get Nick's attention, but Nick Fuentes isn't going to sleep with you, isn't in cell, I think is what I said. Well, that wound up us getting both those comments. There was two comments.

One where I said, I love that you guys show up and leave a bunch of comments because I just hide you from the page. And I think that's all it said, but both those comments were missing. So my thought is, is that that video was the thing that sprung it

and it was the comments that went back and forth. I left bad comments. I thought, I didn't think they were that bad. I didn't swear. I didn't attack anybody, but evidently it was enough for YouTube to ban our whole account. Later on in the day, we got a content strike.

So we got a content strike a little later on an episode that before we even started doing video. And this was a while ago. We recorded a video or we recorded an episode during the pandemic. This was right as vaccines were starting to change from being like the COVID vaccine, which was the regular vaccine, to before they had specific variant vaccines. they had specific variant vaccines. And Tom and I were having a conversation about at that point, people were starting to relax mask mandates. And so now you have to understand in the context of this situation, Tom and I are both saying it's very sad because the vaccines that they have are not working as well with this current variant that is happening, and they are releasing mask mandates,

and now is not the time to take your foot off the gas. That's essentially the argument that we had. In YouTube's eyes, that is medical misinformation, and they gave us a content strike. So I went back and I appealed it. I tried to appeal it. They rejected the appeal. They said, no, we want to take your content down. So they removed an old episode of ours, an old 500 episode of ours is gone off YouTube. That gave Tom and I the impression that we really can't post anything else to YouTube except for live streams from this point on.

The weekly show we don't feel has a place on YouTube because their content moderation is so weird, algorithmic, strict, yet loose in other ways that it's impossible to predict. So we can't just give them our content because they're going to ban our channel. And we don't want that to happen. We still want to be able to reach people on YouTube through live streams. We want to still be able to do these donation live streams where we raise money for people. And we don't want to lose that channel. And we are afraid that we are going to lose that channel if we keep posting our show week after week to YouTube, because it just gives them

an hour plus of material each week that they can dig through and find something wrong with to ban us. So right now, we have a content strike. We can't even post anything to YouTube for a whole week. Then, I don't know if that ever goes away, but to be honest, Tom and I have talked about it. We are pretty sure our regular show will not go on YouTube anymore. We think that from now on, Twitch is going to be your place to watch the shows both while they're happening, because we run them through a sort of premiere system. Essentially, we run them off a computer

and they stream. And then those videos are available after the fact for a couple weeks. So you can catch those shows and then they eventually just get taken down. So I feel like, we feel like that's probably going to be the place where we post our shows from now on.

Another reason why we're doing this is I have a cooking channel called Season Liberally. First, I want to say to everybody who's listening, anybody who's listening, you don't have to like cooking. I would have really appreciated if you would go to our show notes this week, dissonancepod.com, and click on my YouTube link and just hit subscribe. You don't have to hit the bell, but it would really help me quite a bit

if people subscribed. Even if you don't like cooking, if you've never watched cooking, if you do like cooking and you never checked out my cooking show, I have a totally different vibe, a totally different thing. I do a solo cooking show, I have a totally different vibe, a totally different thing. I do a solo cooking show that I think is a lot of fun. And I really enjoy interacting with the group of people who have become followers of that show. So you can find it on YouTube. It's called Season Liberally.

I will also be a link in this week's show notes. You can click on it. If you're interested in cooking, watch a couple of the videos. If you like it, hit the bell. But no matter what, if you show up, it's going to help me if you subscribe because the more people that they see are subscribed to my channel, the more chance people have of watching a video if it comes across in their YouTube stream. Let me roll back for a second to tell you why I'm telling you this. It just turns out that when I created that YouTube channel, it was connected to my,

specifically connected to cognitive dissonance. If cognitive dissonance gets banned, that channel may go away. When cognitive dissonance was taken off the air, I didn't have access to that channel. I couldn't go to it and upload videos. The channel still existed. They still had all my content on YouTube. So I had all my cooking videos there, but I couldn't get in to add another one. I couldn't get in to talk to anybody. Every time I tried to log in to that particular account, because it's sort of a sub-account to the Cognitive Dissonance account, it wouldn't let me in. I might have fixed that problem, but it's not worth the risk of us losing CogDisc for me to lose a whole other side project on the side. So our decision at this

point is no videos on YouTube. I know it's a long way of saying that. I've talked for 10 minutes at this point about this, but I'm just trying to explain that that's what we're doing now. We are going to put them on Twitch. Those videos will last for a couple of weeks. You can go catch them. There's a community that's going to watch them in the evenings when they play. So every time there's a release, they will play at 9 p.m. in the evening, evening central. Every day there's a release. So you can go watch with a community if you didn't catch the show, or even if you caught the show and you want to hang out with the community while they watch it. It's a fun community. The people who hang out and watch these, they're a great group of people. A lot of people have ported over from YouTube. So go check them out. And they're happening at the same time that the

YouTube live streams were happening most of the time, like on Thursdays. And then they're also happening on Mondays. So you can go hang out and check these out. Twitch is a different type of community, but you can still have that same sort of chat community while you're watching the show. We want to try to foster that, but my goodness, YouTube makes that way too hard for us. We talk about things that they cannot decide are not misinformation. I don't know if I said that correctly, but you know what I mean, right? They don't understand what is regular information and misinformation. Their bots can't figure it out. Their algorithms can't figure it out. And if somehow a person is running their eyes over it, they can't figure it out either.

So we are just going to keep away from YouTube for a little while. At the very least, it's a little while. At the very most, it's going to be forever. But I wanted to let people know that that's where we're going to be from now on. And please go subscribe to my channel. It's also another roundabout way to get you to subscribe to Season Liberally. All right, so let's go to the interview. Oh no, killer brought a mori. Typical Monday sweaty killer. You know, that's right. All right, so let's go to the interview. seem to mind. Cut it out. Also, get on a gin. Who made you the leader? At least half the electorate, not some gerrymandered, archaic, patriarchal, anti-democratic electoral college bullshit. Snowflake says what? Man, shut the fuck up. Shit, I'm slugged.

Anyway, if you go to adamandeve.com and use code GLORY, you get 50% off almost any one item. Whoa, how come I've never heard of that before? What? Yes, you have. I talk about it every other week. No, you haven't. Yes, I have. Someone back me up. Yeah, he's always talking some bullshit about how you get ten free gifts. A gift for you, for your partner, for your mistress or maestress if you swing that way, Jack.

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Right now, Jack. So I am joined by Aaron Rabinowitz of the Embrace the Void pod and Philosophers in Space. Thank you so much for taking the time to join me today, Aaron. Hey, thanks for having me on. I wanted to talk to you, if we can, about these articles that have come out in the Skeptic magazine. I know you have come out in the Skeptic magazine. I know you're a contributor to the Skeptic magazine.

I wanted to talk to you about a couple of articles that you just recently dropped about anti-Semitism. And so I wanted to talk specifically about the article. Let's start with the article about the brand new Ancient Aliens-like show that is on Netflix. So tell me first, what is that show? Yeah. So this came out last year. This is Graham Hancock, which you either have like... There's a small group of people who know that this individual exists.

There are people who've watched Ancient Aliens, or there's some group of people who've read his first book because it got a little bit popular. But basically, he's a diet kind of David Icke, essentially. He identifies as a journalist. Some would describe him as a pseudo-archaeologist or conspiracy theorist. I think those are all accurate, the latter two. He basically follows around behind currently existing conspiracy theories and pseudoscience and rehashes it in these books that are just like really difficultly incomprehensible to try to

follow. Not because they're too complicated, but because they're just badly written. Yeah. In my opinion. Yeah. David Icke was like that. When we read David, when Tom and I read David Icke, it was literally incomprehensible and it's because it's badly written and it doesn't make sense. Not because he's a genius. He's not Heidegger. Right. It's brain numbingly incoherent. and in that article you know i linked to at least one breakdown of one of his books that does a really good job of describing like he just doesn't understand the structure of a non-fictional book like he doesn't

understand the concept of a thesis statement in a series of arguments kind of thing right you know like didn't learn the five paragraph essay kind of vibe. But the show is called Ancient Apocalypse. Okay. It's different. Okay. Right. Yeah. Totally different, except it's not.

Totally different. Yeah. It's really the same. Does he have really big hair? Does he have big hair? He does not. And that's the reason you don't know who he is. Okay.

That's literally the difference between him and the guy on Ancient Aliens. He's not memeable. He's not memeable. Is that it? Yeah. He's very bland white dude. Yeah. So he's very,

he's weirdly popular and the reason he's popular is because of Joe Rogan, of course, who just brings us all of the worst conspiracisms in the world today, apparently.

And the reason they're close is because they're both big into like ayahuasca and psychedelic, you know, kind of stuff. So, you know, kind of stuff. So, you know, Graham shows up.

Hold on, hold on. Use the term I don't know. Is that a psychedelic of some kind, ayahuasca? Oh yeah, ayahuasca is a specific kind of psychedelic. It's a, I think it's a root is the main source of the plant that is used. And you mash it up into like a tea sort of situation and you drink it. And I believe that the name means the perjure because usually you throw up afterwards. Oh, God.

And then you like hallucinate really hard. So that's, you know, a popular one alongside DMT amongst the kind of psychonauts, the explorers of the mind, as it were, as well as the recreational types. It's not as recreational because, again, it's not as much fun if you have to throw up and all that. I think.

I think that's probably why it doesn't. You don't see a lot of weekend ayahuasca as much as weekend mushrooms. I feel like once you're throwing up, it's more a job. Like, it's more a thing that you're just doing now. It's like, yeah, you know what? This is a task I need to complete. Once you start really throwing up.

Anyway. Ayahuasca is really, yeah, it's a ritual. It's like, yeah, you know what? This is a task I need to complete. Once you start really throwing up. Anyway. Ayahuasca is really, yeah, it's a ritual. It's effort. Yeah, so ancient apocalypse. And again, it's so hard not to say the words ancient aliens because we're all just there. We're hardwired. We want to say it, yeah.

And Graham was on ancient aliens from the beginning. I quote him in like episode two in the article. So he is one of these ancient aliens people. Now he will say he doesn't believe in aliens. And that's a hide your power level kind of move, which is to say, you know, pretend you don't believe in something that you really believe in when you're trying to act normal for normies.

Because he believes in aliens. He just believes in interdimensional aliens. So he believes in DMT contacted just believes in interdimensional aliens. So he believes in DMT-contacted, you know, machine elves, to use one of the classic phrases for these kinds of creatures. He, yeah, he's sort of following these high weirdness tradition of thinking that, like, ancient shamans were communicating with interdimensional beings when they were going on these ritualistic kind of trips.

So, you know, he'll poo poo the like, Oh, you wouldn't go across the galaxy, but you would come between dimensions using drugs, obviously. But none of that, none of that comes up in ancient apocalypse because this is very much a like normie facing an entry point. You know, I think you yeah yeah when you think about conspiracism as a project um and like i think it's fair like you can debate grifter versus not i think it's fair to say that he is engaged in a specific project that you see him doing over

and over again in every one of his books and content which is is, again, taking Atlantis or ancient aliens or whatever and just rehashing it with his own slight but not really serious twist. Sure. So, you know, he is primarily in this case known for this ancient apocalypse theory where he believes there were these super advanced ancient human civilizations. And they were all wiped out by like a meteor, you know, in a, in a like pre ice age time.

And like, we've forgotten about them and people are covering up that they existed and all that sort of thing. And that's the like tip of the, the like conspiracism iceberg, the bullshit iceberg. Um, right.

And underneath there's a giant like well of bullshit that of course goes all the way down to those nice anti-Semitic roots. And it's all linked. What's interesting, you know, like, like Tom and I wrote a book specifically talking about how linked and inextricably linked all of these things are together and how a lot of these different entry points do seem innocuous, but they aren't. And they always lead to this other stuff. They always lead to this deeper stuff. So let's talk a little bit about the antisemitism that comes up here. Yeah. And, you know, we joke, like Marsh and I and some of the skeptic folks, we joke about like, we've hit a salient, like a density. I'm a skeptic too, by the way. I just want to say,

you can joke with me about skeptic stuff because I'm as easily as I'm as easily as skeptic of the year as Marge is. Oh, for sure. I like to shout them out because those poor bastards are the ones who have to read all of my anti-Semitic rants where they have to like experience. Yeah. They're contractually obligated to read it. Yeah.

Well, and they're like, you know, your goal here is 1400 words. And I'm like, okay, but how about 4,000 words? You know,

and Alice, like it could be shorter. I'm like, could it though? And like, it could be shorter. I'm like, could it though? Yeah. And like, it is a problem. Like,

we want to do an article almost on like, the problem is to explain any one thing in this area, I have to explain a web of like 10 things to you. Sure, sure.

You know, it's like very, like, parks and rec, like, I don't have time to explain to you how wrong you are.

Oh, no, wait, I do. Here's like 10 things. Yeah. You know, yeah yeah let me lay it all out for you um so like anyone watching ancient apocalypse a might not even realize that it's about ancient aliens they never mentioned the aliens um b won't know probably that ancient alien conspiracism and pseudoscience is directly tied both historically and in the present to anti-Semitic conspiracism and other kinds of racist, horrible bullshit beliefs. You know, and so they'll like start there and then they'll get sort of sucked further and further in. And it's weird, you know, it's not weird. The explanation we've come up with is the kind of like reverse Godwin's law.

So for your non-internet, terminally online folks, Godwin's law is the famous rule that on the internet. Yeah, the Nazi thing, right? Right. On a long enough timeline, any debate on the internet, the odds that like someone's going to be called a Nazi approaches 100%. Yeah. Right. So the reverse Godwin's law is any conspiracism or conspiracy theorist you can sort of fiddle with how you wouldn't want to say it but like on a long enough timeline any conspiracy theory tends towards anti-semitism um because there's a couple of reasons for this i think um i would argue some of the earliest and most persistent conspiracy

theories are about Jews. That's one reason. And they sort of, in that sense, are the early adopters of being scapegoated and so have an early adopter advantage. And so, you know, so the primary examples there are classically blood libel, where, you know, we steal Gentile children and usually use them in some sort of weird cannibalistic ritual where we use parts of them for food because we have weird food

so of course children's blood has to go into it. It's the only way to explain matzo ball soup. Sure, yeah. And then even before that though you have the Christ killer myth which is one of the earliest anti-semitic kind of conspiracy theories where literally the Jews conspired with Rome to kill Jesus which is one of the earliest anti-Semitic kind of conspiracy theories

where literally the Jews conspired with Rome to kill Jesus. And we're blamed for it and we're viewed as sort of evil and conniving. Other reasons behind this no joke are the race realists who believe that Jews are smarter than everybody else. I don't know if you're familiar with this idea. Yeah, I think that there's, but there's also a weird line because there's a lot of people who both think that the Jews are in charge,

very smart, but then also- Evil. Yeah, well, not just evil, but like there was a word that they used to use- Conniving, might be what you're thinking of. No, degenerate. Oh yeah, we're super degenerate, yes. There was a word that they used to use. Conniving? Might be what you're thinking of. No. Degenerate. Oh, yeah.

We're super degenerate. Yes. Yeah. So, they think that not only do they have all of the advantages, but they're also lesser. Yeah. So, if you think about it in eugenics terms, as I often do. The Jews are degenerate in their intelligence in that we are not, we don't have like the pure Aryan intelligence to be, you know, understand goodness and art and ethics. But what we have is cunning, a kind of animal cunning. I see. I see. Okay. We're very clever about lying and doing mischievous kinds of things. So we're smart in that way.

So you're right that like they are still degenerate in that sense. But yeah, so, you know, there's those beliefs. So whenever someone is like Jews are smarter, I'm, you know, you cringe because like on the other end of that is like, that's why Jews control blacks and other minorities and use them. Right. And we use everyone else's weapons against the white people. Right. So there's also the banker thing which is an interesting historic artifact

of Jews being prevented from owning land. And so essentially and also because of usury, weirdly enough, the rules about usury in Christianity for a long time made it such that Jews were the people who would charge interest and so would be willing to do money lending.

And so they ended up in those positions to a disproportionate degree. So all of that, you know, kind of comes together and then you get the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is used to explain things like the French Revolution, but becomes popular. And like there's several periods in which it like reemerges, but becomes popular. And like, there's several periods in which it like reemerges as a very popular text. Ford, for example, are the inventor of the Model T also. Horrible anti-Semite. Horrible anti-Semite. Horrible anti-Semite, that guy. Yeah. Bill Cooper is another one who repopularized it in a book called Behold a Pale Horse. So, you know, you have that text.

And so basically what happens is the way I thought of it in this article I wrote about like sort of, you know, beware conspiratorial thinking. And we can talk about like there's some problems with how people talk about conspiracism. I don't want to overly pathologize it, but I do want to pathologize it in the sense that I think it is harmful. What I basically said there is if you really start to buy into the core idea that there is a evil group of people with a lot of power

who are controlling things to a large degree, A, you open yourself up to a conspiracism spiral. And at the bottom of that spiral, just by sheer dint of early adopter status is Jews. Like it's always just Jews. Even if it's not Jews, it's still Jews. One of my, one of the scariest things I read in the Buffalo shooter. I don't know if you remember, this is like 10 or 20 shooters ago.

But there was somebody who shot up, you know, a place in Buffalo. Yeah, I do remember this guy. You know, he published a very like 4chan copy paste manifesto. It was a supermarket, right? It was like a black-owned supermarket or something like that? Yeah, specifically a black-owned supermarket. Yeah, he posted a very racist manifesto, and everybody pointed to some of the parts

that I think were openly like really scary, but they missed something that I thought was the worst part part which was where he says Jews is not like a race in the sense of the like old way Jews is like a way of being or a way of thinking so like any super rich person who

uses their power to control everybody is a Jew in this sense so like Elon Musk could be a Jew if he's using his powers to like control people in a globalist way or whatever. And that's particularly bad because it just means that now the word Jew is just literally synonymous with evil conspirator on large scale. And, you know, then you're just stuck with that forever. And so in a way, like, help me get there so this show is is saying that there is someone who knows the truth

and they are trying to hide it from other people and that's what this so-called journalist or you call them some kind of archaeologist that's what he's uncovering archaeologist yeah yeah um yeah so and he lays this out from the first moments of the first episode. So anybody who doesn't want to watch it but wants to be, you know, make sure I'm not lying about all of this. Like, his opening monologue is very much, I'm going to reveal secrets to you that have, you know, for some reason that I won't say. I see. Archaeologists refuse to explore and it sure seems like they're covering or not taking it seriously, etc., etc., etc. He never explicitly says why.

It feels like psychedelics democratize that information for everyone though. Like, you know what I mean? Like if it's real and these psychedelics are your keys to the other universe, you know, it's hard for people

to 100% control stuff that you could just grow in like your backyard and shit. Like, I don't, I mean, I... Yeah, you end up with some weird gatekeeping like in religion where you know it's revealed knowledge that's only you know phenomenally internal I see

so like everybody can claim that they've you know met the machine elves but that doesn't mean that you actually have and then you know just start developing you know systems to check who's actually hung out with the machine elves and I did not invent that term. I swear, go Google it.

This is all high weirdness. And there's a great book called High Weirdness that explains how psychedelics and conspiracism arise. Not arise, but in the modern world, in America in particular, are fundamentally intertwined in a way that leads to Joe Rogan, but also July 6th, but also, you know, so many of the strands. I've got an Embrace the Void episode that's going to be coming out a little bit with the author where we talk about all of this stuff and how it all ties together. So, right, so the question is, how do we get down to the Jews, right? And there are a couple of ways you can get there from the ancient blank, fill in your blank perspective. You know, the classic version of ancient aliens is tied to early

1900s eugenics-y stuff. So, people like Atlantis believers, Blavatsky, these sort of theosophist types, these are all just like, you know, mystical groups in like the 18, 1900s kind of stuff. They are in the period where everybody is dealing with, you know, evolution gaining prominence as a concept. They're also dealing with colonialism

being dominant and a lot of interaction with a bunch of different races. And so there's an attempt to explain where did all these people come from in a a way that comports with the bible ideally um and what you end up getting are you getting some of these stories about like atlantis is a real place and we know that because all of these cultures talk about flood myths etc etc all the basic stuff that everyone's probably familiar with at this point. But Atlantis is racially something. And there are a bunch of ways this goes. It could be

Atlantis is the true Aryan race. And there was another race at that period, and they were the Jews. And they caused the apocalypse that destroyed Atlantis because they were jealous of their blah, blah, blah, right? Or, you know, there were multiple races in Atlantis and they fought. And all of this goes along with eugenics and dysgenics stuff because the belief is the Atlantean race was the pure Aryan, whatever, super race.

But because of interbreeding, we are now all fallen. And so we're not Atlanteans in that sense. But if we were to gain the secret knowledge that they possessed, we could reacquire and it becomes a very fascist

naturalism and like I'm not just calling it fascist the Nazis were obsessed with this concept they literally built a place called Atlanta's house

where they studied did they really? oh fuck yeah they did you can go see it it's in it's still there it's got some pretty cool architecture

and they built you know you're probably familiar with it is it like Bioshock? is it like oh yeah it's fucking Bioshock? Is it like? Oh, yeah. It's fucking Bioshock.

Yeah, I'm not kidding. It really is Bioshock in every way. They believe, you know, probably people probably know that like the SS Goebbels, like some of these guys, they believe that there were all of these mystical connections

to Arianism because they were mythicists. They were, you know, they believed in, you know, fantastical prehistory in this kind of sense. And so they took trips to Tibet to look for, you know, the Akashic knowledge and stuff like that. And they took, you know, trips trying to find what they called Ultima Thule,

which was basically Atlantis, a kind of pre-super civilization in this way. So they really believe that there was a life and death struggle over, you know, good versus evil between an ancient, ancient, ancient race of Jews and an ancient, ancient race of Aryans. devolved from one superior race. Or the other views that come up a lot are aliens showed up. There were black people. They did experiments on them and created uplifted white people. Oh.

Yeah. That one comes up a lot. Or if you're a hotep, it's the opposite. White people were the crappy apes and black people were like superior. And the aliens either, you know, screwed over the white, the black people by, you know, like it gets really weird. It comes, it turns into like melanin becomes like Jedi powers. It's, there's a lot of stuff there. But at the end of the day, it's always Jews. Either the Jews are coming from space or the Jews were here and they are the evil race that, and this is where, you know, I think it's

important to understand how this ties to religion. This is all about just world theory, in my opinion. Like, people want to believe we live in a just universe, and we can't explain why we don't, and the answer is

a super powerful conspiracy full of Jews. And like, I'm not just pasting Graham with this. He wrote a book, which I write about in the article, and I cite the end of it, where, you know, it's called like the Master. But, you know, at the end of the day, the book is like, there are some Jews out there doing some Jewy stuff. That's like the reason that it's controlling everything. I should also mention, he believed as far as we can tell that he bought into the like Martian

civilization, but not alien Martians. He believed the advanced humans built monuments on Mars that we can now see even though we don't know how they built them. That's his theory of... Did he steal that from Hoagland? Yes. He stole it very directly from Hoagland. And that's what I mean.

Literally, all of his things are like a slight copy paste or a copy of a copy of a copy. He's Von Daniken without any of the interesting parts it's crazy that you can't like think up your own weird conspiracy theory like they always have to like use the other people as a scaffolding

and you're just like they're all dumb you could easily think up another dumb thing it's not like dumb things are unique but they really do climb on each other yep um yeah and then maybe there's something too like for a lot of these folks like that this unique, but they really do climb on each other. Yep. Yeah, and then maybe there's something, too, like, for a lot of these folks, like, that this is

a kind of creative game for them, but they're not all that creative, potentially, or something like that. Or, like, it's just, it's a very functional business model. You know, it's the version of, like, I mean, it's like, you know, it's the fake movie knockoffs, right? Planet Dune or something like that, right? Where it's like, you know, it's the fake movie knockoffs, right? Planet Dune or something like that, right?

Where it's like, enough people will read this instead of Von Daniken. If you like this podcast, you might like this podcast. And so, yeah, it's easy. I mean, like, it's easy to like work off of that. And so, if they already know they have an audience, a captive audience for Hoagland's garbage, then they might just, you know, create a something very similar to Hoagund's garbage then they might just you know create a something very similar to hoglund's garbage and then feed it to other people that are that are willing to take it yeah and like you know he has his brand which is the ancient apocalypse part of this where it's like the super civilization

which is not a new idea but like tying it to the specific meteor event thing is i think i don't want to say it's totally novel to him i think there are other people who've done it but like that's sort of his um center point the hub of his you know and and like all of his books are essentially take some other person's conspiracy and tie it back to that idea yeah yeah you know which is not unusual like a lot of folks do that kind of brand you know like, amalgamation kind of thing. Aaron, you wrote another article about anti-Semitic, not using anti-Semitic attacks when you're talking about a group that is funding anti-vaccination. Can you talk a little bit about that?

anti-vaccination. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. And this came out of, I, for some reason, well, like many of my articles, they start with a dare, usually from Marsh.

Yeah. And this one involved sending me, I think. This was the anti-vax thing you went to, right? Yeah, this was the Bath anti-vax conference, which I think we talked about previously. Attended virtually. Virtually, right. Clearly not physically

because of the anti-vax part. And you watched it in like two times speed. You didn't just watch it in like regular speed, right. Clearly not physically because of the, you know, anti-vax part. And you watched it in like two times speed. You didn't just watch it in like regular speed, right? True, but I watched it twice in two times speed.

Okay. So it's kind of like watching it once in a while. That is kind of like watching it once in, yeah. But, yeah. So what happened was, yeah, I watched this

and wrote a bunch of these articles. This was one of, this was the last one. And I, you know, felt like I had to talk about the anti-Semitic angle because again, it's my brand and I have to tie everything back to the Jews. That's how, how brand management works. Yeah, I get it.

Everyone's paying attention, I hope. And Jews are better at brand management. So obviously I have to be superior at this. It's because you're cunning. That's why. I'm very, you know, intuitive about tying my conspiracies together. So in the process of learning about

stuff, I was not very, very familiar with anti-vaxxer stuff before doing that conference activity. I knew Wakefield, etc. I didn't know Del Bigtree, for example. Or how he was connected to Wakefield. And I didn't know that Del Bigtree was one of the major financial center points for the anti-vaxxer movement.

And a lot of that money was coming from a family, a couple of Jewish billionaires, literally like a married couple of Jewish billionaires, which is an interesting, presents an interesting conundrum, right? Because it's like, how do you explain that Jewish billionaires are somewhat secretively funding anti-vaxxer conspiracism, you know, without doing an anti-Semitism? Yeah, no, that's true. But I also want to say, though, that there is a brand of anti-vaxxer that runs through the Orthodox community pretty strongly. There's a, you know, there's Orthodox, Orthodox Jews sometimes are very big hotspots for very, very easily preventable diseases because they don't vaccinate. Right. And that is both true and I think brings up the central message of this article, which is it's okay to talk about this as long as you avoid anything that is giving the impression that Jews are special. Right.

You don't want to say that. Because the same thing happens in an Amish community. Exactly. Right. So in the article, I point out, yes, there are higher rates among Hasidic, you know, ultra-Orthodox, actually, very specific sort of subset of Hasidic Jews. There are also higher rates amongst ultra-Orthodox Catholics and things like that as well. And the reason, again, in my opinion, is there is a link between religious worldviews and conspiracism, partly because most religions involve a conspiratorial belief in an evil devil. I would argue is the greatest conspiracy of all.

And it's why Alex Jones is obsessed with the devils because he knows where the big bad really is. And it primes people to think about the world in those kinds of ways and imagine that there could be a force that was supporting the Jews in their, you know, whatever kind of stuff. So, you know, the, so when you talk about those groups, you want to say it's not unique to the Jews. And similarly, when you talk about these billionaires, you want to say, look, it's not, it's not because they're Jews that they're causing this harm.

In fact, most people would have assumed quite the opposite, that like, it's weird in this situation that you don't have to deflect anti-Semitic claims because anti-Semites aren't going to rush forward and claim that the Jews would be preventing people, would want to be preventing the vaccine because most of them believe the vaccine is a hoax or something like that a lot of the time, right? And as you point out, they're largely speaking to their own community at a lot of the time. They're talking to the, you to the ultra-Orthodox

themselves. And so if they're causing harm, they're just causing harm to Jews, it seems like, which doesn't provoke the same fear as the Jews are infecting all of us with their kosher vaccines or something like that. So, yeah. In the article, you talk a little bit about Kanye West. You talk about him being reinstated to Twitter and then immediately, well, not immediately, but relatively quickly afterwards,

being banned again. And he was banned because he posted a Nazi symbol of some sort. And I wasn't sure, but I don't really know exactly what he posted. Technically not, but yes. Yes, I'll clarify that for you. But I'll clarify it in a second.

But in the article, you wind up saying that his banning might actually contribute more to anti-Semitism. How does that work? Can you explain his banning and then how that might actually contribute to anti-Semitism?

Yeah. And so, you know, this was something that I talked about back on a Rebel Wisdom debate a while back related to Monster Island, which I talked with you all about way, way back when. You know, I did a content moderation debate when Elon was first, you know,

making noise about buying Twitter before he pretended not to for a while and then bought it. And like one of the things I really suggested strongly was, if he's going to do this, do not let a bunch of people back on Twitter who got banned, because you will play exactly this game of they will come back and do the exact same behavior that they had to get banned for, and you'll be pressured to ban them again. And all that will do is just further elevate their position, further draw attention to their being canceled you know, canceled in this kind of way.

Allow them to go on a, you know, speaking tour with Nick Fuentes and talk about anti-Semitic stuff. And like, you know, I mentioned the Hotep article to you before, which the Hoteps get their stuff from Bill Cooper. So a lot of this is like poor. And like they say, they say themselves, you know, a lot of Hoteps are kind of from Bill Cooper. So a lot of this is like poor, and like they say themselves, you know, a lot of Hoteps are kind of born in jail cells. And this is kind of a view where Black people reclaim their power

by believing that they are actually the descendants of a superior race out of Egypt kind of stuff. And that's where people like Kanye are getting their philosophy from. So in a sense, it is kind of repackaged conservatism sold to people who feel like they are woke, you know, on the left,

quote unquote. And so he didn't actually post a anti-Semitic image. What he actually posted was, do you know the Raelians? I do know the Raelians, yes. So the Raelians are a weird alien cult. Yeah. And they are not anti-Semitic, but their symbol involves a swastika. And it's a situation where it ties back to the Hindu use of it before, which also ties to the Nazi use

of it because of the weird conspiracies I mentioned earlier about Tibet and Aryans and stuff. So anyway, shared ancestor in that sense, but it's not technically a Nazi meme, but he got reband for it under anti-Semitic rule, which is a problem because it wasn't

anti-Semitic. So now he's been re-banned for something that he didn't actually do, which gives a bunch of people a justification to complain even further. And Elon looks fickle and useless. And it reiterates that content moderation is actually painfully complicated and everyone is going to be miserable

no matter what you do about it, but you have to do it anyway. Is the goal with content moderation to make a group of people less, like, smallest group of people less miserable? Is that what it is? Or to make the smallest, the largest group of people happy with what happened? So I think the goal of content

moderation is harm prevention and harm reduction. I see. Your goal is to contain the spread of these kinds of ideas. I see. And there's evidence that it does contain it. It doesn't prevent it. And to some extent, you do get some, not blowback in the not reproduced psychological sense,

but you get hardening within the core community where they feel in the bunker in that kind of way and they get that bunker mentality. And that's not ideal. And so what you really need to do is preventative measures that don't require that sort of after the fact content moderation.

But what you definitely don't want to do is like be a ridiculous ad hoc, you know, moderator that doesn't, you know, manage its own rules well. What do you think about Vox Populi moderation?

What about that? So if I go to like decide, say Trump were to come back on, if a popular vote lets him back on, I should let him on, right? A popular vote of whom? Like when Elon Musk set up a poll to decide whether or not

Trump was going to be let back on the system. Yep. And then he did. And then Trump hasn't come back yet, but he will soon. Trump's not coming back. Oh, he's coming back. You think? Yeah. And then he did. And then Trump hasn't come back yet, but he will soon. Trump was, Trump's not coming back. Oh,

he's coming back. You think? Yeah. Let's bet. Let's bet. Come on, let's bet. I don't think he's coming back.

And the reason why I don't think he's coming back is because he's got a whole other thing. He's got a whole other, other parlor or whatever it is, or truths or something. If and when he can work out the financials so that he doesn't violate or breach his contract with Truth, he will be back on Twitter, in my opinion. Alright. Anyway. And we can bet that like, you have me back on to talk about Jews for another hour.

I'll bet you an Italian beef combo in Chicago if it happens. And then you could give me like a slice of Newark pizza or whatever it is. I don't know. Oh, not latkes?

I was going to give you access for like 10 minutes to the juice space laser. Oh, man! But if you just want a pizza, that's easy. Is that worse than Italian beef? I don't know.

I don't know. I'm curious. I assume it's a pretty good Italian beef, right? You're not getting like a shitty Italian beef. No, you get a good one. You get a good one.

You get one from downtown. Because I'm Jewish. I will have preference. I want like a good Italian beef. You'll you get a good one. You get a good one. You get one from downtown for sure. Because I'm Jewish. I will have preference. I want like a good Italian beef. You'll know a good one versus a bad one for sure. Okay. So, okay. So, seriously though, let's take a short detour into Twitter now.

I haven't done that yet. Let's take a short detour into Twitter because I am curious. I know you were a, I think, self-professed Twitter addict for a while. You would spend a lot of time on Twitter. Your feed on Twitter for Embrace the Void, I think that's the one that you use the most, right? Sure. Yeah, pretty much exclusively, yeah.

And that one constantly has things happening on it. And I know that you've dunked on a lot of people in the past through that Twitter handle. So what is your experience pre-Musk, post-Musk Twitter? Yeah, it definitely feels like it's gotten worse. And I'll fully acknowledge that I can't prove that it's not just bias or whatever. But my experience has been like, A, basic functionality feels like it's been inconsistent or gone down in various ways but also um my feed feels like it's no longer full of people that i know and want to pay attention to and is increasingly full of anti-trans and anti-vax and that's what i'm getting to and not in the way that i normally have where i choose that in like to a reasonable degree kind of situation.

Like it's the kind of thing where even in my weird bubble of what I do for a living, like I still feel like it's gone up in a weird way. Yeah. And I think, you know, like I think the reason is there was throttling on those accounts. And we know that from the, you know, conspiracism documents that were released, which I think actually just proved that like Twitter was doing its job properly. Yeah. They were just content moderating. Yeah. Right. And like, it's creepy that they have to do that, but like, there's just no other way around it as far as I can tell. Yeah. Also, it proved to me that a lot of people wanted to see Hunter Biden's dick. Those documents, I think, really just proved to me that everybody just wanted to see Hunter Biden's cock. One of the greatest mysteries of my life is the conspiracy by the Republican right wing

to desperately make me want to either be or have sex with Hunter Biden. Or both. I don't know. Or both. Yeah. In the virtual, you know. Admittedly, if you're Hunter Biden, you could have sex with yourself. And that would be a whole thing for them.

I have noticed what you say, because recently I've been going on Twitter. If I go on there to check my mentions and then I'll flip to the feed and it's just trash. It is just awful people saying terrible shit. I saw a video the other day. I didn't even want to see it was a guy gets shot in the head. And I was just like, why is this just on my, why do I have like a thing that I can't hide? It's not a not safe for work. Like even Reddit, which is a cesspit, sometimes has a thing that's like a fuzzy image or whatever. So you can't actually see it.

This is literally just playing right in my feed. There's a guy who's going to get shot in the head. It turned into a suspect. The other problem that I'm running into is before there used to be something to a verified account. I would see a verified account and I would see it and I would say, oh, well, this person got verified. So something happened in the past to make that person notable enough to be verified. Once in a while, you would run across a person with maybe a thousand followers or something, but they would be like a journalist for a large paper or a news agency. And they would

have a personal account that would have very few people, but they would be posting to other accounts with like massive followers, but they would have like only a few. Now I'm clicking on the mentions and they're all up at the top. They're the worst comments ever. And it's because the people have like seven followers, 15 followers, and they bought their blue check mark and they're absolute idiots.

And I literally, I don't even check anymore. Now I'm like, I won't even look at the mentions anymore. Yeah, no, it's a huge problem. Like the concrete, I know it's not bias. It's just terrible is the way he has ruined verification. I'm not saying verification was perfect before. Obviously nothing is perfect, but what he's done is made it useless. And not only useless, he's made it a useless cash grab by like the worst sycophants I've ever seen. And it's terrible. It's really, really like, so yeah, I used to be really big on there.

And I used to honestly defend Twitter as a useful place. Like it was full of terrible things, but it was also a place where I met lots of wonderful people. It's where I got a lot of my Embrace the Void guests. And I'm very happy to have met most of them, most of them. And I, you know, at the same time, I'm like, I don't want to really be there much anymore. Part of it is that like I have a bunch of other things that are more interesting to me

that I would rather be doing at the moment. So it's like I have stuff to pull me away from it. And the pandemic certainly probably exacerbated the problem initially. And it's coming down off of that as you're sort of re-engaging with the world. But it is also that it's just like it's a less useful place to be, you know, other than some DMs with some people. It's not really there for me anymore. Facebook, I only use for groups. And that's pretty much my social media at this point. There's no like wide, you know, wide band social media content to me anymore.

media content to me anymore. When I started talking to you about coming on today, we talked about maybe going over some of your articles for The Skeptic, but while we were talking, you sent me an abstract for a paper I think you're writing now. Is that it? Is that you're writing a paper now on compassionate skepticism? Where is this paper going to be when it's finally done? I don't know necessarily. I submitted it to one conspiracism conference. I haven't, I don't know how that's going to go. So I don't want to like say anything about that yet. And if that doesn't happen,

it could go to a journal, who knows. No, it's totally fine. We can just say, generally speaking, it's sort of part of a larger project that like you as a skeptic would certainly are already a part of, I think. So I won't just say me and Marsh and the other people and Alice and all of them. But like, you know, I think y'all have to some extent moved away from some of the dunking content towards a little bit more of a like somewhat compassionate approach. And we,

you know, at the UK Skeptic, the tagline is reason with compassion. And at the UK Skeptic, the tagline is reason with compassion. And I really believe strongly that people who have conspiratorial beliefs are suffering from bad epistemic luck. Sure. That you or I, if we had been in the wrong situation,

could have been James Lindsay. It's just dumb luck that you didn't end up in that situation or, you know, in a crisis in a moment where somebody took advantage of you by selling you on alien reptiles or something. And so, you know,

I've always sort of been, like, you know, while I've been doing conspiracies, I've been pushing for this compassionate approach. But this particular article, I'm arguing that it needs to be a kind of universal compassion, which is going to, this is where it's going to get a little controversial for folks. So it's not just, it's not just being compassionate to victims, people who've been hurt by this. You're saying be compassionate to people who might be out there

propagating these conspiracies. Right. And there's a couple of terms for folks like this. One popular one is conspiracism entrepreneurs or conspiracy entrepreneurs. I think that overemphasizes the kind of financial benefit of this. A lot of folks, I think, do these things not for money, but for the sense of power or the pleasure of being paid attention to. There's lots of benefits to mongering conspiracism, let's say. So I call those conspiracism profiteers. And what I see a lot, even amongst compassionate conspiracism folks, these debunkers these days,

is no punching down at the rank and file who believe these things. They're poor, unfortunate souls. But you can punch at Alex Jones all you want or Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump or something like that. But like, these are people who know, we would say, that they're doing something wrong and are profiting off of it.

And therefore, they are justified targets of abuse. And I don't think that's true. I think that you can't make a hardline distinction or any real substantial distinction between conspiracism profiteers and conspiracism victims. I think they're all conspiracism victims and they're all conspiracism profiteers. what amount they're selling things, essentially. But what this, I think, means is that we really do have to be compassionate even to the Alex Joneses of the world, not because they're not doing something wrong. And that doesn't mean that we don't take them off the air, right?

All that stuff I said about content creation holds here. We still quarantine people when they're sick. And Alex Jones is deeply, deeply sick. But we don't abuse them. We don't need to abuse them. And it doesn't actually help, I don't think. I don't think there's any real solid evidence that making fun of Alex Jones substantially helps even victims. There's some people who will claim that if you do that, you can deter other people from believing those folks. But if you don't know

whether the person you're talking to is already sympathetic to Alex Jones or not, the risk that you're going to attack him and they're going to identify with him and take it personally is very high, it seems to me. And so you don't want to take that risk. And like, you know, just be realistic, right? How many times has someone made fun of you for a belief and that like substantially improved your chances of changing that belief? I don't think it happens. I don't think that's how our psychology works. Like maybe it's part of it,

but it's not the real thing. It's the compassion, the space to change, you know, and then you can recognize that the jokes helped a little bit or something. But what is, so, but what about somebody who you see is clearly not just profiting, but using those things to specifically harm other people? Like for instance,

when we talk about somebody like Donald Trump, he motivated an entire group of people through conspiracy theory to attack the Capitol. This is, that's a nefarious deed by a person who was so full of himself that he wanted, he would literally upend the apple cart

of the United States, of America in order to stay in power. That seems like a bad person. That doesn't seem like somebody who I think I should treat with compassion. Why should I?

That's the difference. Because I think we should treat bad people with compassion. Okay. Think about it, right? No, I don't disagree. I don't disagree in the broad strokes. And I really do think like I'm for the idea of,

you know, I think there should be forgiveness, a chance for people to be forgiven for things that they've done that are bad. But I also recognize that there has to be some movement on their part in order to get there. They can't just be bad and continue to be bad and then me being like, well, that's fine. Do you know what I mean? There has to be some movement on their part. Yeah, and let me be clear.

Compassion and forgiveness are not the same thing in my mind. Okay, all right. I don't think that anybody has to forgive Donald Trump, nor am I here to tell people who have been harmed by these individuals that they personally have to do the emotional work of expressing compassion. If you want to, you know, say things about Alex Jones because he's hurt you personally, I'm not going to tell you not to. I'm just going to say, you know, I think ultimately healthy, you know, and this is a very restorative justice kind of approach. Sure. No, it's a very different approach than what I'm used to. Yeah. Yeah. And

ultimately I think a healthier one, even for people who are harmed because it allows you to get closure in a way that is, I don't think there's evidence you get closure by seeing the other person suffer. The idea that like victims get closure when they see other people being abused. I, you know, I'm not going to say it never ever happens, but I think it's an overstated reality compared to the alternative, which is what they suggest in restorative justice, which is most victims when they find out what they really want is they want the person, A, like you said, to acknowledge that they've done something wrong and B, to prevent it from happening again, that they just don't want it

to happen to other people. So there's less of a desire to see the person suffer and just more of a desire to make a system where that doesn't happen again. And that's what I'm totally for. You know, we need to, again, keep Donald Trump off Twitter, right? Keep Donald Trump for running from office. If necessary, put Donald Trump in prison, but not in a prison where people punch him every day, in a prison where he just doesn't hurt people. Because like, I think we're all

on the progressive side of things at this point, pretty in favor of a criminal justice reform that takes out all of the weird punitive stuff where people are like, it's great that folks

are suffering in prison. No, I'm with you on that. Right? And it's just that writ large for everybody, even the ones who aren't currently in prison, but are still doing bad things. And we don't stop saying they're doing bad things. We say they're doing bad things because of their bad luck and we have to prevent them from causing

harm, but we don't have to make fun of them and we don't have to cause them to suffer or something like that. Do you think that there's like a moment of realization that somebody can go through where they start to become a grifter, where they stop becoming a victim and they start acting on this to become a grifter? Yeah, there's certainly places where that happens. My guess would be it is rarer than you think, and for sure you can't prove it. So if you're trying to decide whether or not someone has to be deplatformed, you don't want to base it on intent because you're going to have a really hard time proving that Alex Jones doesn't genuinely believe what he believes no matter how many times he lies or is inconsistent. Right. Because those don't prove he doesn't believe it.

He just proves that he's like not consistent. Um, even if you had a text, you know, like a message that says, I don't believe the things I'm saying, you know, we could still reasonably just claim that like he was, you know, pressured to say that or something, whatever. So there's no behavior that you can tell for sure that someone doesn't believe the thing they're now claiming to believe. So don't worry about it. Worry about whether they're causing harm with their beliefs and promoting them and something like that. But the other thing I would say is most of them believe it, I think, you know, it doesn't matter. But if we're going to ask is most of them believe it, I think, you know, it doesn't matter. But if we're going to ask the question, the answer is it's easier to sell something if you believe in it than if you don't. And audience capture is a hell of a drug, you

know, and if you're one of these people, you know, you get into a feedback loop with your audience where you're like, you know, Jews and they're like like, Jews. And you're like, Jews, you know? And you really believe it because 10,000 people are agreeing with you that it really, in fact, is the Jews. Yeah. The thing that makes me push back on this idea is all the people I've seen walk away from religion when someone has sort of made it look silly, right?

So like someone has gone out of their way to say, look at how silly religion is. And now I understand the difference, I think, between making a person look silly and making a thing look silly. But I don't know that they're so different that it should be out of line to make Alex Jones' thoughts and actions look silly. Yeah. And this is complicated, right? I do believe there are individuals who do, you know, like mocking someone directly for their beliefs is likely not a good mechanism. No, yeah, right.

If somebody's already in doubt, for example, you know, mockery could be a scaffolding by which they climb out of the belief. And then, you know, maybe they don't need the mockery after that. I think there's a lot to the idea that a lot of new, not in the sense of new atheists in the big end, but in the like newly, you know, egg-cracked atheists, a lot of them need mockery kind of content because it helps them deal with the abuse they experienced. It helps them feel confident in

their own beliefs again and helps them feel better in those kinds of ways. But in my experience, a lot of folks mellow into a place of no longer feeling like they need that kind of mockery. I think that's good. And the way we want things to kind of work. So, you know, essentially what I'm saying is like, you know, like with the abuse victim where I'm not going to tell them, don't make fun of Alex Jones, you know, the new atheist, I'm not going to tell you don't make fun of Christianity or whatever. But I'm also going to say like, you know, maybe eventually process beyond that anger and into a place of compassion and recognize that like the hard problem is you can't make fun of it without someone near you hearing it and believing you're talking about them.

You know, it's sort of like if you make fun of fat people or, you know, something like that, your friends see it. And if they deal with that kind of issue or something, then they will take that personally and it'll cause harm to them. So yeah, I do think there's a problem in the modern world where you can't just speak to one audience, right? You can't have a private conversation with your in-group without the out-group hearing it. audience, right? You can't have a private conversation with your in-group without the out-group hearing it. And you can't mock someone's leader

without their followers finding out about it. So you are trading off cost-benefit there in terms of helping your own community while also closing the door for some people to join that community because they're turned off by the way that atheists are aggressive assholes who

dunk on religion all the time. Admittedly, it is a good time though. I will say it's kind of a good time. Everybody loves dunking, you know? I don't know that I agree with you, Aaron. I don't know that I agree with you, but I really do respect your opinion. I want to thank you for coming on. Aaron, if people are going to find your podcasts, where would they look? Yeah, you can just Google Jews in Control of the Universe at... No. You know, if we were really in control, my podcast would be a little more popular, I feel like. Right. It'd be at the top

of the charts, but... I'm surrounded by a bunch of Gentiles with gigantic followings. No. Well, that's because y'all are my shock troops. Y'all are out in front and I'm just pulling the strings. We take any of the damage too that comes in so we absorb that for sure

I appreciate that you are my you are my shock absorbers okay you can find me on you know at ETV pod on Twitter

you can find Embrace the Void and Philosophers in Space with the wonderful Callie Wright over on any pod app in the universe and

the Skeptic Mag the UK one, not the one with Michael Shermer. Not the one with Michael Shermer. We believe in reason with compassion and they do not. You got to tell us when this, if this talk of yours is compassionate skepticism,

if it does wind up at a conference, let me know. I'd like to go there and see you give this talk because I think it's very interesting. While I might not agree with you, I definitely want to see it. The conference is in Amsterdam, which is one of the reasons I submitted for it.

100% reason why I want to go. So let me know if it does get accepted. And say hello to Callie, friend of the show for us. We appreciate you coming on today. Thanks very much. All right. So I want to thank Aaron Rabinowitz Thanks very much. great shows. We are patrons, I think, of one of them. I think we're patrons, Cogdiss's patrons of Embrace the Void, because it is an excellent show and he does great interviews. So you should go check it out. I want to thank him for joining me tonight and talking about the conspiracies. If you guys want to send Tom some good wishes, you can always do it in the Facebook group that

we have. You can always say, get well, Tom, start a thread in there, get well thread, or you can send him a tweet. I will let him know next week when he shows up. I'll have him page through the tweets when he shows up next week if he's feeling better. I'm sure that'll make him feel loved. So if you want to send Tom some get well wishes, there's a couple of ways to do it. You, of course, can always send Tom messages through our email, dissonance.podcast.gmail.com. Next time, next week, we will be reading that extra article. We'll be reading that article

and then we'll be covering one full article, long form article next week, but we will not be doing it this week. So don't expect anything extra in your feed this Thursday. Expect it next Thursday. No live stream this month. Thanks to Aaron for joining us. Get well, Tom.

Subscribe to Season Liberally. We're going to leave you like we always do with the Skeptic's Creed. Thursday. No live stream this month. Thanks to Aaron for joining us. Get well, Tom. Subscribe to Season Liberally. We're going to leave you like we always do with the Skeptic's Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babylon bullshit. Couched in scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quasi-alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water, downward spiral, brain dead, pan, sales pitch, late night info docutainment, Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death in towers, tarot cards, psychic healing, crystal balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, doublespeak, stigmata, nonsense.

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