Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 879: It's never been easier to be a conspiracy theorist

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

It's never been easier to be a conspiracy theorist How a son spent a year trying to save his father from conspiracy theories

This episode of Cognitive Dissinance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. 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. From Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissanance. Every episode would be blasted 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 at today that you're listening to this is November the 13th Thursday. And Cecil, I don't know what's going to happen between now and then. We've got a little long-form action to go through today. Yeah. Obviously, we can't always stay out like super on top of the news.

But I think that this, the stories that we're going to cover today, are something that is really important for America to understand nowadays. And it's something that's happening every single day. And they're both about conspiracy theories. Yeah, the first article is, you know, it's a little bit of a fluff piece from MIT. So, you know, if you're... It's from MIT Technology Review. And really, this is a terrific article.

It really is. If you're not a patron, please consider being a patron. Remember that patrons at the $2 and above level get an audio recording of this article read by yours truly. And this is like really worth your time. It's really worth the listen. It's really worth gathering through. It's a long article. It's an in-depth article.

And I think it brings some information and some insight into really like where do conspiracies come from? And why are they so sort of everlasting and why are they amplifying in this day and age? The title of it is it's never been easier to be a conspiracy theorist. A mix of technology and politics has given an unprecedented boost to once fringe ideas, but they're pretty much the same fantasies that have been spreading for hundreds of years. So this article really does a great job of bringing that historical context to bear and to say, okay, here's where this and how this appeals to us throughout the centuries. and here's how this moment is a little different than others.

It's a fucking great article. It really is good. And what it reminded, while I was reading it the whole time, I was thinking about the book we wrote. Yes, yes. Really genuinely, it's about when we wrote the book, Grand Unified Theory of Bullshit, the conclusion that you and I came to was that, look, all bullshit is connected. And the more bullshit you believe, the easier it is for you to be infected with other bullshit. and a lot of bullshit stems from really personal beliefs,

really tight things that are close to us and specifically religion. And when you pay attention to read this article, you will see that there's many different points that they point to very specifically pointing to religion and saying like, this is a religious way of thinking and it is spurred on created and fostered by religious thinking and believing in gods and also very, very, specifically believing in the book of revelations.

And the book of revelations itself is the thing that a lot of these conspiracies, especially modern day conspiracies, are based off of a lot of things that come up in the book of revelation. Because it's that sort of thing. Even the people who fucking wrote these books back then knew that shit. Yeah. You know, I had, when I was having my sort of shower thoughts when I was done reading this article, I had actually the same idea, the same thought occurred to me as like, yeah, what conspiracy

theorism seems to want to do is to find a single narrative thread that can be used to explain all of the bad things that we don't like about the world, but then also to find all of the villains responsible for those things. and to tie all of those things together with one narrative thread that defines our enemies for us and tells us that all of the events of the world are interconnected. And like going back to the book, the Grand Unified Theory of Bullshit, I thought the same thing. And I thought like, you know, what conspiracy theorists or theories seem to do is they seem to create kind of like a bullshit immune deficiency.

where you all of a sudden become more susceptible to these other viruses, right? You get this bullshit immune deficiency and all of a sudden, like, the next fucking thing that comes through, well, it squeaks past the goalie easier. And the other one squeaks, because you don't have that immune system built up. Because you've got a desire to paint the world

in a way that says, like, hey, I need to define for myself who the enemies are. who are the people that we need to attack and to vilify? And once we can attack and vilify this right category of people, then we'll know that the world works in the ways that we need it to work

in order to satisfy our sort of narrative conclusions. And it's really interesting. The article also goes through, and it does something that I thought I'd never considered before, which is it says, look, there's a sort of evolution

of conspiracy theories, that move sort of from like siloed theories. So a siloed theory, it uses a different term I can't remember, but a siloed theory would be like, hey, there's a single event, like the assassination of JFK, and there is a conspiracy around that. So it was the mob that did it, right? Or, you know, it was the CIA that did it.

It was Castro that did it. Or Cuba. Or Q, yeah, right. And so, and that would be a sort of like single event conspiracy theory. But that gives rise to this sort of over. overarching narrative conspiracy theory, where that's just one piece of this grander puzzle, this larger conspiracy theory worldview. And that's different, right?

And that's way different. If I just have one conspiracy theory, I'm sort of siloed into that. Like, okay, like I think of one weird thing, you know? But like, that's the evolution of that is, okay, well, if that's true, then maybe this other thing. then maybe this other thing. And now all of a sudden, what I have is an entire worldview that pulls and pulls all these pieces together. And really, something like QAnon is important because it is not its own conspiracy theory in a silo,

but because as a theory, it says, bring me all of your shit. Like, bring it all here. Like, bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of nonsense. and I will create a melting pot melange of bullshit and it all fits. And that is a kind of, and that's not new. Like there's a historical context to this.

Well, and when you bring up QAnon, what I think is so interesting about Q&N and about these larger conspiracies is that people can bring their own, their own personal hatreds to it. And then those people are then the enemies. And often these are tied to anti-Semitic tropes, You know, we see this all the time when we're talking about who controls our media.

It's going to be the Jews. Who controls the banks? It's going to be the Jews. Who controls, who's controlling our politics through funding? It's George Soros, right? Right. I mean, like, these are all really easy to see. And then just start throwing in other things, right?

Like, you have Hillary Clinton, who was genuinely maligned through all of these fake bullshit stories that came out about her. and there's a million of them that came out about her and they all fit in QAnon even if they somehow completely would negate each other if one of them was true the other one couldn't be it doesn't matter they all found the same place together

they all found the same home together because it's all attacking the right person and I think that that's something that's really and that to me says again let's look to religion let's look to the fight of good and evil let's look to this secret war that is happening around everybody, this secret war between the devil and between God that we are all part of,

that all plays into it too. And it's all just this major feedback loop. And it's a lot harder to pull this stuff apart than you think it is. It's a lot harder because it's based on other beliefs that aren't related to these conspiracies. Yeah. And one thing I thought, I never thought of this until I read this article is so good. is it really points out, you know, that a lot of these conspiracy theories in the Western world are anti-Semitic. And they're anti-Semitic specifically because of the historicity tied to the rise of Christian hegemony.

So if Christianity was not attempting to become a major defining political force across the world, then it probably wouldn't be anti-Semitism. It would be something else. Yeah. But it is anti-Semitism across most of the, you know, as a through line, specifically because Christianity needed a villain. And in order for them to have a villain, the villain that made the most sense was the Jewish people.

Yeah. And so there is a longstanding, like, history behind that. And that history is really tied to, hey, in order for us to rise to power, we have to get people to get fucking mad about somebody and to get mad about something that we can say, hey, the cause of your woes, be it famine or disease or poverty or whatever, we can pin that on someone that's not us. And once we've done that, then your woes are not ours to have responsibility for. We can say it's that guy.

It's that group. It's that. And the same is true of like the witches. They point out like, yeah. Oh, yeah. What do people blame witches for? Well, everything. It was just like you create this kind of scapegoat.

And now the powers that be, the powers that are in charge, the powers that are really supposed to do the work of protecting you are off the hook. So if there's a famine, it's not the government's fault for not helping people to rotate crops and to stockpile food and to do all the things that a government is supposed to do to protect its people during a time of famine. if there's a famine, it's the fault of the witches. So let's go burn a bunch of witches, or it's the fault of the Jews. Or if you create that kind of villain, what that does is it also takes the responsibility away

from the people who really should be responsible for fixing it. And everyone's distracted by, you know, let's kill that guy and let's burn that lady and let's do this thing. They're distracted by that stuff. And they've not actually placed blame and responsibility on the political forces that are responsible for taking care of their people. And that's why currently the Republican Party, and they

very rightly call it out as far right in here, they very rightly say, this is right-wing conspiracy stuff. And these people leaned deeply into these conspiracies because they recognized exactly what you suggest, Tom, is that they can get off the hook and they can get people spun up

and tuned up about these conspiracy theories and never questioned them. Because if they say to these people, yes, you should believe QAnon or once in a while make a nod to QAnon, QAnon essentially has in it a ultra-powerful deep state that cannot be overthrown by the current administration. So they are constantly on their back foot fighting against this evil cabal of deep state workers who control everything. So every time this administration fails to do something, it's never their fault. they can easily just pass that off as something like, well, it's not my fault. Like, of course, I can't.

How can I possibly compete with the deep state? I'm only the one in power. I'm only the one where the shit rolls uphill to. But I can easily blame it. And literally, look at Doge, right? Look at what Doge did. It is an extension of QAnon the things that they went out to do. When you look at the way in which Doge was pitched to the American people, it was pitched

based on the idea that there is a deep state. It was pitched on the idea that this money is going out and there is this cabal of evil politicians who is scooping up this money that you give out that is not going anywhere. It's still being broadcast even today this last week Elon Musk said it on Rogan Show that this money, the reason why,

and he even said it's 90% Democrats who are involved in this. There are a few Republicans who are involved in this, but it's mostly Democrats are stealing money from the American people, shipping it off to all these like USAID type things and then just taking the money. He has no proof whatsoever that any of this is happening. That's literally fraud. You would be prosecuted for that.

That's literally fraud, right? But there's no proof. He's just saying it's happening. And the people, that's the other thing. The people who believe these things, they don't require proof. And if things are proven to them that they're not true, they will just move the goalposts every single time.

It is almost impossible to get them to stand still so you can point out that something is even wrong. Yeah, I thought, you know, one thing that occurred to me, like along those lines when I was reading the article, is when you look at the way that Donald Trump uses social media, one of the things that he's done since the beginning, which I always thought was juvenile, but this article really made me reframe it. He does a lot of, like, not just name calling, right? So when I think of name calling, you know, like if I was,

like, ah, you're an asshole. In my brain, that's name-calling, right? But what he does instead, and I think he does a really, again, I always thought this was so juvenile, and it is, but it's also, I feel how strategic it is now. What he does is he comes up with a name for people. He creates a name. He creates a nickname, you know, like sleepy Joe Biden, right? Yeah. So that's, he does that for all of his- Why and Chuck Schumer? Yes. He does that for all of anybody he's trying to create a villain narrative for. He literally comes up with a new name for that person. And that feels so important in this moment because that language of demonization is best done when you can dehumanize first, right? If somebody is not a healer in your community or a wise person, but instead they're a witch, they're a different kind of person.

Instead, if we cast somebody as a less than version of human and using different names does that, right? it's not Joe Biden, the guy who, you know, is a Catholic and who buried one of his children and, you know, did all of this important work during the civil rights here. It's not that guy as a human being. Instead, it's a sort of type of person, right? We can remove somebody's humanity and make them a type, make them a caricature. And if we do that, then it's easier to do the work of demonizing and vilifying. And I, it's soon as I was reading this article, I was like, well, that's why he does this specific kind of name calling. He's not sort of just disparaging in that name calling. He's rebranding. And I think that's so fucking, like, part of me wants to say, like, that's really fucking smart, but I don't, I don't know that he's, like, explicitly understanding that so much as that he's just crafty. Well, or that it has worked in the past, and so why won't it work in the future, right? I mean, I think a lot of times when we see things that are

successful people like to think that they thought of it ahead of time, but it really is just sort of spaghetti against the wall, and he saw what stuck. And what stuck was these things, that he, these juvenile things that, you know, like everybody else looks at and says, God, why would you debase yourself to do those types of things and make those kind of attacks? And if they didn't work, he would just move on. He doesn't care about the criticism of those attacks as much as he cares about the effectiveness of those attacks. And those attacks are super effective because it's easy for those people who are following to now have that same sort of like, it's really easy for them to find the reason why they don't like that person.

Yeah. Yeah. And like what I think that's exactly the right point. Like I think he just does this because it's always worked for him. Yeah. And so why not just repeat it? Yeah. But it is still, it's like it's an interesting analysis to say like, all right, whether he,

I think that's right. I think he implicitly understands that this works. But the effect of it is, again, it's that demonization. When he's talking about Democrats, he's talking about the radical left. Right. Like there's, there is a real intentionality to that sort of like recasting, rebranding, and reframing of your enemies in these really specific ways. And those ways then allow this conspiratorial mindset not just to continue, but to flourish and to grow. And there's a there's a sort of like seeding of the source.

that's done with this work. There's a great part of this article where they talk about how how modern people on the right have started to accept these things. And that's the real change, right? There is change, obviously, in how we communicate, which is a big factor in this. I'm sure we'll talk about it. There's change there. There's, but the real substantive change that I pulled out of this is that people used to

look at things like this when they were. would come up and they would say, that's fucking stupid, that's fucking nonsense, don't believe that dumb shit, and then they would move on. And the dumb people would say, oh yeah, okay, maybe it is, or maybe they'd still believe it, but they wouldn't grab anybody else. There wouldn't be anybody else that would be pulled into this. And I think really genuinely, this administration and the people who are in power now on the right recognize that this is a great tool for them to continue to use, and this won't stop. I don't feel like, these conspiracy theories are on their way out.

I think the only thing that these people are ever going to get thwarted by is their own bad policies. I don't think these conspiracy theories are. Them not telling the truth and them manipulating the truth is never going to be the thing that brings them down. Yeah, that's exactly right. Like the problem with these conspiracy theories is, according to the article, they've more from theories into conspiratorial beliefs.

And they are belief systems. And they are belief systems that can. cast the world in good and evil religious terms. They borrow from that religious sort of vernacular. And then once you've done that, you've moved out of the realm of evidence. And when we move away from the realm of evidence being a prerequisite for knowing things, then now you start with the belief and then you fit everything that happens into the system of belief.

And it's malleable. And that perfect malleability creates an environment that flourishes despite. And it's the despite, like people like you and I that don't start with a belief system that says believe first fit the truth in second, right? Which is what religious belief says, right? It says you have to have faith first. Once you have faith, then the rest becomes more clear. Well, I obviously think that's a nonsensical way to understand the world. But that's the way many, many and most probably people understand the world.

And they would look at that as a virtue. you, if you take that and say, okay, if that's acceptable over here, then that's always an acceptable way to think. And if I can say, okay, the belief is first and the facts come second, then the facts actually don't matter. They're not, they're not actually functional facts. They're just sort of like, they're window dressing. What I think, too, and, you know, we should talk about, obviously, the way in which you can communicate helps put this out there too is, you know, they bring up a, Alex Jones in this.

They bring up people who have profited deeply off of spreading more and more conspiracy theories. And I think one thing that we have to pay attention to is that this is not just a belief. When you talk about religion as a belief structure, what is implicit in the belief structure is a sense of community. What is explicit in that belief structure is that you are not alone in believing this thing. you are in a group of people who all believe the same thing, and they all feel like this is a righteous thing to believe in. So it borrows that righteousness from religion,

and it also borrows that community from religion, and it allows it to propagate nowadays very specifically because it's so easy for these people to communicate. There's no church of conspiracy theory out there where you can just go on the weekend and drive down, you know, a big road near you, and there's three or four conspiracy churches. right, but there are plenty of places where you can get your conspiracy church on online and you can get

it through your sermon every week or every day from Alex Jones, right? You can get a conspiracy sermon every single day, not just from Jones either. You can get it from a myriad group of people. And the people who are religious are going to feed back into this too. They're going to be pulling these conspiracies and we've seen that. We've seen them try to dip prophecy into this, which again reaches into revelations. We've seen, you know, all of these Christian pastors who dip their toe into politics, look at how often Jim Baker

and the guy with the Trump Cyrus coin, I don't even remember his fucking name now. Like all these people, they all have the same ideas, which is this is a cash cow. There are people who are willing to spend the money and people who believe this just as much as the Bible that I was preaching, why shouldn't I jump on this train to? Yeah, and like I think that's a really important.

piece I had not considered. And I, you know, we've talked on this show a lot about how when you are, when you are outside of the rule of like explicitly religious circles, finding and having community is very difficult. It's very, very difficult. And, you know, all of the data and the research that I've seen shows that less people are going to church, more people are lonely, and less people have community. And there is also a growing up body of research that says that in many ways, the internet is part of what makes us more lonely, that more lonely people spend more time online and do not feel less lonely as a result.

But we feel like that's part of the solution. It's kind of fascinating the auriboris that this all is, right? So as community, as like the sort of traditional ways that humans have gathered together for community have become less and less a part of civic life, it drives more and more people to find replacements for that community online, which actually makes us feel in many ways less connected, which makes us more susceptible for this need for community, which then can bring us into these conspiratorial spaces. And there's a, there's a problem there. There's a vicious cycle rather than a virtuous cycle that takes place.

The internet is really something that capitalizes on it. The article says, here, I want to quote from it, the algorithms of YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and X, which operate on the principle that rage is engaging, have turned into radicalization machines. One could hardly design a more fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories than social media. And I think that's a really true and important thing to recognize is that while these conspiracy theories and conspiratorial beliefs have existed for centuries, we've not had the amplification power that we have now. And I think there's a wrongheaded tendency.

And I understand where it comes from. There's a wrongheaded tendency to say there's nothing new under the sun. And if you read the first part of this article, you might be tempted to say, hey, we've always done this. Right. We've done this since the dawn of time since recorded history. It appears that we've always done this. And that's true. But like, that's also true.

It's also true that, like, man has always formed weapons to kill one another. the extension would not be to say, therefore the nuclear bomb is no more threat than a stone. That's stupid. Scale matters. Scale matters here, too. So misinformation, disinformation, conspiratorial beliefs and conspiratorial systems,

systems that demonize and vilify the other in order to consolidate political power. None of that's new, but the scale is new. The reach is new. The power and speed is new. That has to matter. I believe strongly, as listeners will know, like, that matters. That makes a big difference.

I think there is a difference between a musket and a machine gun. I believe that. I think it's insane to believe otherwise. People who want to minimize how dangerous a machine gun is will compare it to the musket, though. They do that all the time. And I always am like, yeah, who's telling you that this is okay? Well, the people who stand to benefit financially from it. Sure. And the reason why it won't change and why a lot of this stuff won't change, because the money is, we've attached these communication devices to money. And the money will then protect those communication devices.

So there's never any, it's not like, it's not like the early internet, which was basically just like a sort of very free flowing, very like sort of libertarian, you know, information's free sort of thing. It's not like that at all. It's very focused on data. It's very focused on,

harvesting things from you, your attention and your data in order for them to make more and more money. And it's in their best interest to get as much data out of you. Yes. But then also put you in places where you're then going to spend all your time so they can feed you ads and then get more data from you that they can then sell. It makes sense when you look at it from the developer standpoint that those types of things. So if they put you in a QAnon group and then you start talking QAnon, This is fucking, you're just basically, you're like that scene in, in fucking, it's a wonderful life where they just keep ringing the fucking cash register making angels. You're making angels for them, man. They're ching, ching, ching, ching, ching.

They're constantly fucking ringing you up because you're spending eight, ten hours a day on these very specific platforms paying attention to what's happening in these platforms. So they want you to go on Reddit into those subreddits. They want you to stay on Facebook into those groups. They want you to get into the internet fights on Twitter because those are the best places to keep you. They want you to fall in those internet rabbit holes. They want that for you. I want to read a couple of one more thing from the articles.

I thought one of those sentences here is really great or one of the phrases. Meaning the moment, it's easy to feel helpless in the face of this epistemic chaos because one other foundational feature of religious prophecy is that it can be disproved without being discredited. That's a great line. How fucking true is that? That is such a fundamental truth about conspiratorial belief systems, right? Is that, and really, to dovetail that back into our current political moment, I mean, think about one of the things that, I mean, how much is that alternative facts?

Yeah. It's just alternative facts. There is a guy, we are in a post-truth environment, and in a post-truth environment, what we're saying is that if you disprove something that does not discredit it. that's the same thing. So the other article that we read, what's the name of the other article, Tom? The other article is from NPR. It's how a son spent a year

trying to save his father from conspiracy theories. And I think this dovetails exactly into what you're talking about because in the other article that we read, now this is an article that is detailing essentially what is three half-hour podcasts that this person put together. The long and short of it is that this father

in this family, is pretty far right, pretty Christian, and he's married a woman who is not the same religion and doesn't hold the same political beliefs that he has. He has a son and a daughter, and his son works for NPR, and his daughter is gay, and he doesn't accept his daughter,

and he's a conspiracy theorist. He thinks, like, genuinely crazy things are going to happen. Yeah. And his father is basically the only one in the family who feels like this, but he gets his reinforcement in other places. So he gets it mostly from online preachers, right? So he finds this online preacher, and this online preacher keeps on making all these revelatory prophecies that are going to happen to the American people. And this person believes it without any kind of critical thought whatsoever. And when you hear this person, if you are to listen to this particular podcast, there's

three full podcast. This article's shorter than that. So it's a much shorter version and sort of a synopsis of it. You can hear the father sounds relatively reasonable when you hear him speak. When you hear him talk, he doesn't sound like somebody who is fully into QAnon, but

when you hear what he has to say, he is fully into QAnon. He's fully into these things. And the podcast series essentially is his son and him have this bet. And the bet is, the dad says, I will give you 10 prophecies, and I will pay you $1,000 for each one that doesn't come true before the end of the year.

So I'm going to start in 2024. We're going to make, I'm going to write all these prophecies up, and he reads them off, and they're all crazy. They're like a Barack Obama's going to get arrested. You know, Hillary Clinton's going to be arrested. There's going to be martial law. It's like all these like really, really extreme things that might happen. And he says, I'll give you $1,000 for each one.

And really what this is is a play for this child of this adult. to try to get him to walk away from conspiracy theories. Prove he's wrong. Tell him, show him at the end of the year. These things didn't come true. Because guess what? I just told you a bunch of crazy shit. You already know 2024 through all of 20204 to 2025.

None of those things happened that I said. The father is wrong. The father eventually has to pay $10,000 to his child. But at the end of it, it's heartbreaking because the father and the mother split up. It's the last draw between them. They've been married for 40 years. He still doesn't accept his business. daughter and his daughter goes no contact because she's gay. It's a mess. Like if you listen to this

podcast, you read the story, it's a genuine mess that this person has created for themselves. But just what you said before, Tom, they're not going to, what they're not going to do is they're always going to continue to move the goalpost. Even if they're factually wrong, they still believe they're right. Yeah. In the in the article and in the podcast, one thing I thought was really interesting is when they're, after they set the terms of the of the bet, The father says something like, you know, look, I hope that when these things happen, that you're able to see that, like, you have a little more respect for me, that you see that I wasn't crazy, you know, that these things came true.

And the son says, well, if these things don't happen, what do you think you should, you know, how should you respond or change? And that dad says, I don't know, because I'm so sure these things are going to happen. Like, he's unable to even process the idea of how, if these things don't happen, and that should influence his worldview. Yeah. And so when these things don't happen, then he just puts the word yet at the end of them.

Yep. And then that fixes the whole problem for him, right? It just didn't happen yet. I got the date wrong. I Harold camped it. You know, like it's just a thing that didn't happen yet. He also says, like when the son says, like, hey, like, why do you think you believe this stuff

and you believe it so powerfully? but like all these other people that you love and respect don't believe this. And the dad who has like essentially such poor technology skills that he doesn't even know how to use his laptop to check his email. He says, why have access to more information than everybody else? He believes that he has a God-given power of discernment. And a power of discernment, you hear that word used a lot in the Christian prophecy community. What they mean by that is they are, they have some exclusion.

God-given power to tell what's true from false, to understand with a deeper level of profound clarity what is true. And they're able to do that in a way that supersedes the need to have evidence. So if that's your starting point, you can't ever be proven wrong. That's your start. You started at a point where you have been given a divine ability. Like you're fucking, you can shoot fucking webs out of your hands. You got a spiky sense, you know, like you're a fucking God. given profit-driven superhero. This is a guy who barely can use this fucking iPad. He's watching YouTube videos.

Yeah. He's not better informed than anybody else. He's worse informed than everybody else. But that's antithetical to what he believes about himself functionally. I think that's the key. What you said at the end there is the key. And I've been kicking this around in my head because I'm reading a book. It was a guy we had on the show, Mike Rothschild, his name is.

he was on the show a while back and he wrote a book about Q and on and I'm reading it now. So the title of is it The Storm is Upon Us. It's by Mike Rothschild's about Q&N he was on the show a while back and we asked him a bunch of questions about it

but I hadn't had an opportunity because it had just come out when we had him on the show. Literally just released so I had an opportunity to read it and I put it on my reading list and it just sort of got pushed down and now I'm reading it, right?

And one of the things he says in it which makes me think about a lot of this stuff is he says that a lot of the people who get caught up in Q&on they're boomers. These are people who are boomers. They're low-tech people who get caught up

into the technology of this and they don't, what they don't know is that the technology is trying to rev them up. They don't realize that and they fall into this head first. But I also wonder

if there's something else there too. And I want to kick this around with you. I don't know if there's anything here, but I just want to kick it around with you for a second. I wonder if their platonic ideal of what it means

to be a guiding light for their children is blown away and they need something to fill that hole. And what I mean is that I think like throughout my life, you know, there was always the idea that you could go to your dad and your dad would have a lot of answers and your dad would know things, and your mom would know things.

They would understand the world better than you, et cetera, et cetera. I wonder if we're not relying on those people as much, right? Like if I, like back in the day, if I would have had credit card fraud, like let's say like before the internet, if I'd had credit card fraud, I wouldn't know what to do, right? I would be like, well, what do I do? How do I handle it? The person who I would probably ask is my father, right?

I would be like, dad, I'm 25. I just had about a credit card fraud. What do I, how do I even handle this? And there's a possibility, a good possibility, that your father would know, well, what you got to do is you got to first call the bank and you got to cancel your credit card. Like, he's going to walk you through all the things that you have to do. But you don't have to do that now. Like if I have credit card fraud, the first.

thing I do is probably go to the internet. I don't go to my dad. I go to the internet. Yeah. And I go to the internet more. And I wonder if they're just trying to fill the hole of I am a teacher. I am someone who knows things. I am someone who is important. And they're trying to fill that. And I don't know if this is anything, Tom. This is just me stickballing. Right. But I feel like I wonder if there's a fucking hole that the internet made inadvertently in all those people because we don't need them as much as we did. Does that make sense? Dude, that makes perfect sense. So, like, to say it back to you maybe a little differently. Like, there is now, like, an expertise gap that exists that our parents used to fill for us.

And if I don't fill that expertise role for my kids, then does that create a kind of identity and values crisis for those people? And I think that is absolutely possible, man. Because, like, as a parent, I feel that, right? Like, I feel that need to be the expert for my kids, right? It's part of the value that I derive from being a parent. It is important for me to say, like, yes, of course, this thing that I'm doing with my time and my energy, my money and my emotional labor and all of this, this is important because it's valuable. If all of a sudden that kind of is like, all right, well, I can just look it up, man. I don't really need you for it.

And it's like, well, fuck. Like, what good am I that? And like, how do you derive value? Yeah, like, okay, so then if I'm not providing value to my kids by being the guy who showed you how to change a tire or helped you learn how to like, you know, invest. Like, so this is interesting right now in this moment. So Donovan is starting to become interested in money and he doesn't have hardly any, but he wants to think about like, how do I learn about the stock market? How do I invest money? Like, where should I park my money for short term and for long term?

And he and I have spoken about this. stuff. And I've given him the advice that I have. But then what he does is he goes online and he figures it out himself and he opens an account and he does. And I'm just sort of like, now I'm out of the picture. Right. Like now, now he's sort of like he began that conversation and then he handed it to the internet. And so I guess like for, I can understand maybe for those boomers who all of a sudden two things I think have happened really simultaneously. And I think the other thing to consider is the second is that exactly what you're describing. happened where all of a sudden there's this expertise and values and identity crisis that

occurs at the same time that those people are moved out and now they're empty nested and now they're just like okay well fuck like what do i know where does my knowledge and value come from and one of the things that that helps fill that hole is these conspiracy theories that now they know and their kids don't yeah i'm smarter than you i know a thing right right you don't know and I can lead you to that thing and I can be the expert in this thing that you don't know about. And it really struck me with this story, the second story, is because this person constantly talks about how much more they know than the other people and they recognize and I think that they see that they find value in that. Yeah. They find real, real validation in

knowing more than someone else. Yeah, look, and if I think of this, this is such, that's so interesting because that makes me more sympathetic, right? Because we want to have value. We want to have expertise. That's natural. I think that's a good thing, right?

Because if you take it charitably, and you really have to, I think, too, as a parent, because they're, you know, like kids are tiny and they rely on you for everything. Everything. They don't exist. They don't survive. if you don't make them survive, right?

But then there's this sort of like moment where all of a sudden you become kind of functional useless. And that's not a cash money transition. And I don't think that's... Right? Yeah, it's not something that's super great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't think it's a natural transition

that did exist for most of time. Yeah. Like for most of time, we lived in these intergenerational communities. And we had different experiences, intergenerational where our experience was valued, our connection to people within our community was differently valued. But now all of a sudden, what are you?

Well, you're fucking old. And what do you know? You know nothing. And like, how do you know it? Badly. And like, well, how are you, like, I'm sympathetic to that loss of identity. Sure. I really am.

I'm sympathetic to that loss of identity. It doesn't make untrue things true. No. You know, and that's also important to say. Being sympathetic to something doesn't necessarily like excuse. the results of it. But I think like you really found something there. That resonates with me. I get that. Yeah. I think that there's too, very specifically, they're swimming upstream against a lot of different forces. So you're swimming upstream against disinformation that is weaponized,

not just because it's profitable. And that is true. Right. We know that's true. We know disinformation is profitable for people. Just ask Dave Rubin. All you have to do is spread disinformation and you can get, you can make great profits from this. Ask Alex Jones. Those people make a lot of money off of lying you. But there's also weaponized disinformation. So people go out of their way. They might not make money off of it directly, but they may be weaponizing it to try to, to try to overthrow parts of our government and change how our government is treating us and how we're treating. our government so that we know that's also true.

So there's swimming upstream against all these different forces. They're swimming upstream against very specifically against forces that are prophetizing their eyeballs and their, you know, their intent. And they're swimming upstream against all these grifters who are very church-like, right? That have these sermons every day that go out of their way. And I want to touch on that for a second, too, because something occurred to me when I was thinking about the sermons. You ever heard of the Nicene Creed?

Have you ever heard that before? Do you know what that is? I've heard of it, yeah. Yeah, so the Nicene Creed, when they get together in church, some churches will just be like, and now we recite the Nicene Creed, and the Nicene Creed, is like, we believe in God, and we believe in Mary, and we believe that they came down, and they gave each other bread, and they gave each other massages, and then they all went back up to heaven, and everybody lives forever, and we believe in bad people going to bad places,

and good people go into good places, and they say all the shit, they literally say all the shit they believe, right in this creed and it's short. So they say all the things. They repeat it to themselves. They go out of their way to repeat it to themselves. And what else can one of these conspiracy podcasts be but a daily Nicene creed about the things that you believe? We're going to repeat back to you the Hillary Clinton thing. We're going to repeat back to you the fucking whatever other conspiracy du jour is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, man. Like, yeah. We're reinforce it every day. I can reinforce it constantly. Yeah, that reinforcement, and it is very churchlike. And in that respect, it's very, very churchlike. I think something else that occurred to me when you were talking is that disinformation online is a lot like pornography online.

It's freely available and always looks exactly the way you want it to. And it doesn't have any of the friction and tension of real people and real sex. And so it's something that people will be drawn to, not because it's reality-based, but specifically because it's not. Because it always is available in exactly the form and the format that you want. You never have to contend with any human beings that have different feelings and interests and, you know, et cetera.

It feels like, I don't know, they dovetail with each other, man. Like they 100% dovetail with each other. They really do. Like these things tap into a part of our brain that says, what's easy is good and what's good is easy. I wonder if a way to get out of this whole thing, is to just let the people know

who believe this stuff that they do matter. You know, I wonder if it starts with going to those people and being like, you really matter. You're an important part of my life. Yeah. Or you're an important person. And maybe they rely less on the crazy

to get their validation if they get some from you. Dude, maybe, right? Like, almost like, hey, you don't have to do that. Yeah. Like, I'll love you anyway. Like, I find you valuable because we can just be together. You know, and I think that's something that, like, people naturally, I think do struggle with.

Like I said before, like I do think that as we've moved away from the intergenerational, you know, households and communities, and we move into this space where, you know, maybe our value is less concretely defined. maybe what needs to be defined is like, hey, you're valuable in my life because you're in my life. Yeah, yeah. And that's it. And then I can say, good, because I got nothing, you know? Like in your pocket, you've got every encyclopedia, ever written, what the fuck? And like a tutorial on how to do everything. How am I supposed to compete with that as like a father?

And also, I think it helps us understand that, like, love can. be unconditional and that like there doesn't need to be a transaction for you to get my love. Right. That's not a, I don't need that. We don't need to have a transaction. We could just be people who love each other. Right. And that's okay.

And that's the full stop of the relationship. Yeah. That's okay. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, I would be very curious to know if that would work. I mean, it would take time, right? That wouldn't be like, nothing happens overnight.

I'll tell you what. There's definitely a lot of love in this podcast. So listen to these three if you get a chance. Like I would genuinely encourage you not only to listen to. the time read this article, but then very specifically go out and seek out these three podcasts. Because you could tell this family loves each other. Yeah. It's just like, but this, what's crazy is, is that we've created these systems that are actively

breaking them apart and there's nothing that they can do about it. Okay, all right, that's going to wrap it up for this long form show. We will be back on Monday with a full show. We're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cooking. cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babalon, bullshit. Couched in Scientician, double bubble, toil, and trouble,

pseudo-quazi 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 and towers, tarot cars, psychic healing, crystal balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, wizards, vaccine nuts. Shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your signs.

Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive. doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash dissonance pod. Help us spread the word by sharing our content. Find us on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and threads, all under the handle at DissinancePod.

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