The Jordan Harbinger Show - 814: Matt Frederick & Ben Bowlin | Stuff They Don't Want You to Know

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

Matt Frederick & Ben Bowlin (@ConspiracyStuff) are the conspiratorial masterminds behind the Stuff They Don't Want You to Know podcast and co-authors of a book that, to avoid any confusion, goes by the same name. What We Discuss with Matt Frederick & Ben Bowlin: Why people believe conspiracy theories. Popular conspiracy theories and why they persist. Conspiracy theories that turned out to be real. Telling the difference between true believers and opportunistic grifters. How we can avoid going down rabbit holes that foment conspiracy theories. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/814 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. There's something that happens with conspiratorial thoughts there. You get the added, not just a status bump of belonging to a community and being approved of, but those you would consider your peers, but you also get the feeling of being one who is influential in that group, one who is moving that group in some certain direction by the power of your mind, right? This happened a lot with QAnon, right? especially when COVID had a lot of people inside,

we saw people who were kind of building their own social pyramids, and they were at the top. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional arms dealer, investigative journalist, cold case homicide investigator or astronaut,

and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs as a place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topics that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on this show. Topics like persuasion and influence, disinformation and cyber warfare, conspiracies, crime, cults, and more.

just visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Don't forget, you can search for anything we've ever done here on the show or any promo code for any sponsor by using our AI chatbot at Jordan Harbinger.com slash AI. Today on the show, why people believe conspiracy theories. You know, I'm fascinated with this stuff. I don't really or didn't really understand what the attraction was to a lot of this kookery. We'll also explore some popular conspiracy theories, how they originated, and why they still persist. We'll discuss some conspiracy theories that are actually true because go figure, a bunch of them turned out to be true, and conspiracy thinking how we can do better or help those around us do better.

And who better to explore this topic with Matt and Ben from the Stuff They Don't Want You to Know podcast. All right, here we go. I'm actually pretty excited for today's conversation because you guys are a lot of fun. And also, conspiracy theories and why people believe them are actually, this is one of my favorite things to explore just because it seems so ridiculous. but there are kind of concrete scientific reasons why our brains do stuff that is kooky. First, though, I found it interesting. You guys kick off the book by noting that the United States was founded by a conspiracy that, of course, turned out to be true.

And I'm wondering if you think that this history plays any role in Americans' willingness to believe in, frankly, ridiculous conspiracies as well, because it's like, this is in our DNA as Americans. Yeah. I mean, I would say 100%, Jordan. that's a huge part of it. There's another part, the opening foray of the book, we had to cut this, but we talk about the number one conspiracy that many children learn in the United States. It's the first conspiracy theory that you ever get introduced to. It's the idea of Santa Claus.

Yeah. Obey these social mores so that this large man can break into your house and leave you stuff. And every adult is in on it. It's a huge violation of taboo and normalcy to be that adult who tells a kid, you know, exposes the whole thing to the kid. So everybody plays along, not because there's some overarching sinister plan or cabal, but because you don't want to ruin Christmas for children. And so I think when you see the origin story of the United States and all the things that are taught about it, all the things that later come out as ugly truths, it makes sense that people would have an inherent distrust of authority and official

narratives, especially in this country. The idea that kids believe in, believing in Santa's a conspiracy is kind of funny. We tried Elf on the Shelf this year, and my son's like, do you know about this? You know about Elf on the Shelf? I didn't know about this. I guess it's a white people thing, and I just somehow, that just, that went way over, that skipped my house. It's the difference between omniscient surveillance, like with Santa Claus. He just somehow knows, what you're doing, even when you're sleeping and all that, to a physical representation of a surveillance device that's in your house that knows all the shit you're doing.

Right, so it's like TikTok, but it's a figurine that sits on your mantle. We tried it, and my son, who's three, he was like, so he's alive and he talks to Santa Claus, but he's sitting on the shelf. I'm like, oh yeah, at night, he flies back to the North Pole. And then the next day he's in a different position or whatever. And he comes out and he goes, why isn't he moving? And I'm like, oh, well, he's magic. And he goes, okay, but why isn't he moving?

And I thought, that's a valid question. I'm trying to avoid that because there's no good answer. And then I go, well, he's sleeping. And he goes, but his eyes are open. And I'm like, I can't, I don't have the mental capacity to argue with you about this because you are right on all counts. So I eventually told my three-year-old son, this is just a game that we're playing. He's just a plastic doll and it's fun so we can pretend that it's real,

but we know that he's really not real. And he's like, oh, And it was still fun. It was fine. Of course. Maybe it lost a little bit of the magic, but he didn't really care in his baby sister who at the time wasn't even one year's older. It was about one year old. He's like, this is real.

He flies to the north. So he was in on it, and it was just as fun for him to tell his little sister who doesn't even understand what's going on. Well, because stories are fun to tell, right? Maybe I'm the adult who screws up Christmas for everybody, because when the kid's like, how does this possible? He goes to every house. And how come some kids get bad toys, even though they're good kids? And I'm like, Santa's fake, and it's all us buying your stuff. and some parents have more money than others.

That's the truth. Yeah. Don't tell your friends. Because, you know, why did the kid next door who lives with his grandparents who are retired not get a bunch of crap? And he did. That kid is not a bad boy. His parents have, they live on social security, right?

And we don't. It's almost a harmful narrative to tell kids that Santa brings good children more stuff than others because when one kid gets a thousand dollar whatever thing for Christmas and the other kid gets a handmade craft from grandma. It's like, well, what did I do? We're basing it on moral stuff that the kid did. Like morality checks and balances basically and choices that they make. Yes.

So then you're tying whether they're good or not to whether their parents are wealthy or not. And also tying the idea of success to the accumulation of material goods. It's like, listen, kid, I'm just going to break down with you. That neighbor may seem cool, but he's into some really dark shit. And that's the reason why all his action figures are off brand. Right. He got megablocks instead of Legos because when you're not there, he lights other people's houses on fire.

That's a monster. I'm sorry. Can we get back just an original question, Jordan? That's probably a good idea. The American conspiracy, right? Or the conspiracy that became America. I think it has a lot to do with young minds, because if you think about it,

at least in my experience, and I think for a lot of American kids, you experience the founding fathers for the first time. You learn about them for the first time, really young. And it is almost, I don't know, some kind of fable that you get, caught, a version of the story that is a fable. If you think about the cherry tree and all, I mean, all those things that you learn that

stick you're out. Yeah. It's like, well, you probably told some lies. And probably owned some slaves, too, but let's not, there's a lot of things you've done wrong. Some of your fake teeth were from enslaved people. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Wait, is that true? That is true. I thought he had wooden dentures. Oh, God, that's gross. They pulled other people's teeth out and they gave them to, oh, God, do I want to go, do I want to know? Jordan. Okay, so look, look, don't think about it too much.

So, but if you encounter at that early age in that version, it's what Ben was saying, we become disillusioned as we grow older and we start to fill in those full stories. And I think that happens to us over and over again, especially if you grow up in a very religious family, no matter what religion that is, it's a simpler version. It's a fable version for you for a long time until you start to learn more and more details. And as that complexity increases, the reality starts to change a lot. interesting because of course the idea of the founding, any sort of thing that gets mythologized, fabalized is always going to look black and white and of course nothing ever is.

Is the dentures thing true? I remember learning like, oh, we had wooden dentures. And I'm like, that's a weird detail. And it turns out that it's just way more horrifying than that. Is that true? It is true that George Washington was at least in one purchase of teeth from enslaved human beings. Also, it was way more common to have false teeth that were made from. like hippopotamus bones. Okay, well, that's less... It's less weird. It's less bad.

Way less horrifying. Horrifying, yes. But these stories, these examples are true. And of course, if one looks back at, if we're trying to understand how someone could slowly fall into, off a cognitive chasm into something crazy like Pizza Gate, right?

Or something easily disprovable, like the claims of Q, of QAnon fame, I think you're very correct in that we have to start with an understanding of the things that led us from history to the present date. And the sad fact of the matter is that whether you're talking about Smetley Butler or whether you're talking about some of the things the founding fathers did, what you're going to find is that some things that would have been dismissed as conspiracy theories even before that word existed were absolutely true. They were real conspiracies. And it takes, it takes a dollop of critical thinking to avoid saying,

look, if one thing was proven to be true, then shouldn't everything else be proven true? Like that's, I mean, conspiracy theory as a concept, it's been weaponized into a thought terminating cliche. That's why you'll see a lot of places, like, if you want to dismiss something, right now, conspiracy theory is a pejorative term. It's used to make it sound like the idea that Queen Elizabeth is a half human, half alien creature with all these weird hobbies to make that sound as though it is on the same level of saying, you know, certain banks ran money for drug cartels. It's tremendously reductive and dismissive because one of those things is absolutely true. That's kind of a line that we try to explore here. And we went back and forth

in the book in any project that we do where we say, what is our intellectual responsibility to our audience, you know? And that's something that maybe sounds a little highfaluting, but it's a question you have to ask yourself. And honestly, it's a question some textbook writers of the past should have asked themselves. I'd like to talk about why a conspiracy theory isn't the same as a theory that is based in science. I think that's the difference that, one, a lot of people online certainly don't seem to understand. And two, the word theory is so broad that you can say, oh, that's just a conspiracy theory. But if you say theory of relativity, no one's like, theory of relativity. I mean, let's be, that's just a theory. Well, okay, let's talk about some of the similarities,

because there are some. A conspiracy theory is often formed by creating an hypothesis. You're putting together a couple of different puzzle pieces that you as the person creating the theory have identified as being connected in some way. you are making those connections. That's really what that theory is. And when you're creating a hypothesis for some kind of scientific research, you are coming up with the potential answer, right? This is potentially the answer to the bigger question of why does gravity function the way that it does. Something simple. Simple like that, right? So simple gravity. It's not. But like you create that thing. And then with the scientific method, you test it. And that's the whole point. And you test it until it fails.

right? And when it fails, you change one of the variables and you test it again and you keep testing. With a theory, a conspiracy theory, there is really no concrete way to test it because you're often trying to in some way prove a negative, which is either impossible or you just, you aren't ever going to get the information that you would need to confirm that theory. It's almost impossible, I would say. Can you give an example of that? Because the Pizagate guy who you mentioned earlier, for those who don't know, that was where they thought this pizzeria in Washington, D.C., had a secret basement, and there were children trapped in there, and that I think it was Hillary Clinton slash Democrats were drinking the kid's blood to stay young, which is a ridiculously

dumb thing to believe. And it turned out this place didn't have a basement at all. And the way this guy tested the hypothesis was he ran in there with what a, like a rifle to try to rescue the kids. You know, he wanted to be a hero, and he thought he was doing this noble thing. and he tested the hypothesis and now he's in prison. So maybe we start there, one of the more, and I don't want to oversimplify,

but one of the ways to think of it, when you're asking about the difference between a scientific theory and conspiracy theory, we're kind of talking about inductive v. deductive reasoning. Like Matt was saying, scientific theory, you're testing existing things, right? And with this person, if we trace out,

if we kind of game out what happened cognitively to them, they started including a bunch of other stuff based on their previously existing beliefs, their confirmation bias, right? So one person already doesn't like Hillary Clinton. And, you know, unfortunately, there are any number of valid reasons to dislike any number of politicians. So building on that, this guy's already primed to find negative information. I'm not using a scientific way.

like, you know, critical information about the person, find it more believable, right? So if you already don't like someone, then when you hear something bad about them, your brain just kind of wants to toss that on the pile of reasons you were right. And then this gets rewarded in sort of the dopamine cycle, the addiction cycle of social media, right? I said this, 50-something people liked it. So I must be on to something, right? And then this sort of snowballs, right?

It escalates into a series of if-thens that are increasingly less examined. Because now what happens is something that you thought could make sense because you don't like a person, an entity, an institution, or whatever. Along the way as you accept more and more out there claims, the stuff that you started with just starts to slide into the realm of fact in your perspective. The other thing is, Jordan, most people. Given a safe space to digest information and given the opportunity to learn, most people are incredibly intelligent when they have that opportunity, that space to process. And that space to process

is just increasingly elusive in these days, you know. Ben, I agree with everything you're saying there. I just want to give some more context to that, the Pizza Gate example, right? You've got one guy who reads about this theory online. You can read a ton about it because there was so much speculation on the internet at the time, surrounding the email situation, the Podesta situation, all those things. There were leaked emails from WikiLeaks that showed them talking about bringing pizzas, and people were like, that means child pornography. And so they're getting the pizzas from, I think it was called Comet Pizza or something like that.

A Comet Pingpong. The connection was made from John Podesta to the owner of that Comet Pingpong and Pizza Place. There was some connection there. I remember reading about that. and then it kind of went down the rabbit hole from there. Like stuff was glommed on to the theory, right? Well, maybe this is where they keep the kids.

Well, maybe there's this hidden subway tunnel system that takes them over to the other parts of Washington. Well, maybe there's all this. And that's all part of the conspiracy storytelling that goes on as one of these things is forming, and it really just continues on. The reason why that guy was testing the theory, and it's true, that's what he's doing.

Well, I'm going to go there and do that. The reason why it doesn't stop the theory from proliferating or growing is because you can add new parts to the story. Well, maybe they boarded up the part where it used to have access to the tunnel that was down there. Well, you know, they knew the heat was on so they shut down the operation there and moved it somewhere else.

You can just add stuff to it if you're on a message board, if you're talking about something like that. It's collaborative storytelling. And the absence of proof can function as proof all its own, if portrayed in the right spin. So, I mean, there are some weird Orwellian aspects to this

but I think to the point about mixing and matching, conspiracy theories in the modern day, proliferating in modern communication channels, it's kind of like going to Chipotle. You're getting a burrito, but you can add your own lettuce. You could get the, you know, I don't know if they do guacquot on request.

It's not important for this comparison, but I am curious. You don't know if Chipotle does guac on request. Bro. Just what? I do not know that. I've never gone into the breach there. I'm always in such a hurry. Good Lord.

Guy doesn't know Chipotle has quack for $2? I know. I've destroyed all my credibility. The fuck out of here. To be fair, Ben's always ordering the cassidia. Yeah, which is off-menu. That is ridiculous. Yeah, it is indeed.

I thought we were friends. Anyway, continue. But the point is, yeah, the point is what we're really looking at. Another way to conceive of this is what I would call, this is like high-speed collaborative folklore is what's happening. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, it's crowdsourced, right? It has all the juicy bits of scary stories to tell in the dark, you know, and it has all of the

confirmation, the scratch behind the ears of feeling one belongs or has an identity within a community or tribal system. So it's reinforced in several powerful ways. And this happened way before conspiracy theory became a modernized term. This happens with doomsday cults as well. You know, whenever the leader gets the date wrong. the leader or someone else can always come in and say, oh, also this is why. Yeah.

Everybody stay in the cult, but this is why. Right. Everyone stay in the cult. The reason the spaceship didn't pick us up was because we had metal in our underwire in our bras and in our pants, and they said no metal, and we took off all the metal, but we forgot that there's metal in the underwire in the bra. That was a real example, by the way, from, was that in your book or was that in a different book, that particular comet death cult?

Are you talking about Heaven's Gate? they would be the most famous when I don't know if it was them. I don't know if that's Heaven's Gate. I think that's the one, or I'm starting to even get them confused, that one of the leaders was Doe, right? Do you remember this? Oh, yeah, okay. Yes, yeah, I do remember this.

And also how strange is it that now we're saying, yeah, which doomsday cult was that? Which death cult with the comet was that? Because there were multiple death cults with multiple comets that had spaces involved. Yeah, exactly. That's where we're at. I mean, it takes us to interesting, challenging places, you know, especially when you have to go back and take a hard look like you interrogate history, right? And sometimes quite recent history. And you have to say, well, this thing that was dismissed,

right, or called, you know, a crackpot narrative, it turned out to be true. And, you know, again, to your point about the lack of nuance, often this stuff is not 100% true. And on the flip side, a lot of times, at least in history, it's not 100% false either. There's often, Matt, you and I always like to talk about this, and Noel as well, there's often some germ, some grain, some origin point that was true and that informed the growth of the folklore, the embellishment around it, you know? So a lot of conspiracy theories do have a basis in fact, but then people continue to connect dots that just aren't there.

Yeah, I think you kind of mentioned this before people follow, they make connections in their brain, and I'm trying to think of an example, but chemtrails is probably a good example. episode of Skeptical Sunday about this episode 660. And people would say, those are chem trails, not just airline condensation. And the reason is this, this, this and this. And since they're looking for a conclusion, they'll say, like, look, people who are over this area, they get sick more. And it's like, well, did you look at any other area to compare? No, we just looked at the area where we wanted to find sick people. And look, we found all these sick people. And it's like, okay, but then you went to this other area where there's no people at all and you found less sick

people, why would that be? Well, one's a city and one is a rural area that has no people in it, and one's near an airport that has a million planes. So, of course, you say, look, there's more sick people where there's more planes. Okay, but you didn't control for any of the other variables, so it's not really useful. And that's a generous interpretation to people connecting dots that aren't there. A lot of people just make up the friggin dots in the first place, like Pizagate. Yeah, but if you look at our book, and we talk about some of the experimentation and spraying in the air, aerosol sprays that the U.S. government has tested out, both on the populace of the United States, when we've been engaged in hot war in places like Vietnam, like just doing tons of testing,

spraying stuff in the air, just like the way chemtrails are described by, you know, someone who would believe that conspiracy theory. And that's, I think, the germ of truth at the center of that. Sure. A lot of it is stuff that we didn't know for years. But was it the St. Louis spring in a couple low-income areas? Operation Large Area Coverage, I believe. That was one of the names. What's that? This is one of a series of tests that the U.S. government conducted, specifically over economically

disadvantaged populations. And their idea was that this would be kind of a war game. This is practice. This is experimentation. What we're trying to learn here is how a foreign powers biological weapons attacks could spread. over the continent. And they checked a bunch of safeguards, or at least to their, you know, to their standard of safe. And they said, look, we don't think this is actually going to hurt people.

So it'll help us learn how this stuff spreads. Of course, it went everywhere because they didn't really factor in like the wind patterns. Oh, yeah. I can understand not knowing that wind exists when you're a scientist. Right, right. Exactly. For the military. Well, it was a test, right? They were, they were trying to see what would happen, and they wanted to understand how wind would affect it, how temperature would affect it. Yeah, and if it's so safe, then, this is one of the questions we have.

If it's so safe, then, then why are they only testing in poor areas where people are... Sprayed over Beverly Hills, California. Right. Put it over Beverly Hills, you know? And why are they also not telling the public? Yeah, super secret. Yeah.

So that kind of stuff, you could see how maybe somebody grows up in St. Louis. And maybe they hear these stories, right? And maybe like many people, they correctly or incorrectly attribute later health issues to something like this. Then, of course, that becomes part of this hidden lore, right? And they keep their eye out for maybe congressional investigations that do or do not arrive. And then at some point, they hear about chemtrails. And they go, that's not too far off, actually, from what I know to be true. I think that's a really solid example of how these things spread, because on some level, the very bare bones of the concept, there is a factual basis. But the problem is, the problem is that makes it really easy for someone else to come along,

whether they're acting sincerely, whether they're just trolling, or whether they're even just trying to, like, spread propaganda for some other conspiracy, makes it very easy for them to say look at example A, now reassess example B. And even if example B is absolute hogwash, it can be very difficult to apply critical thinking to it in that case. Right. So the argument that some conspiracy theories turn out to be true, no matter how ridiculous, MK Ultra, right, with the CIA using like psychedelics for mind control or whatever it was, and chem trails where people were actually sprayed with something in a poor area. And then the government, of course, lying about that. So a lot of these theories, although it's ridiculous, there's a reason for believing them that's not just

completely insane. Oh, yeah. But that doesn't mean you can't go a little too far down your own rabbit hole because ultimately it's a choose your own adventure in this thing, right? And when you're thinking about the information we encounter on a regular basis, you have to acknowledge. I think we all have to acknowledge. It has changed fundamentally in the course of 10 years, maybe, maybe 15 years, let's give it. The stuff that we encounter every day that so many people will just kind of take in and use either as a talking point with somebody that they're hanging out with or as something they even take in as maybe a true fact that they just know that they can spout off when they're, you know, I do this. I'm assuming we all do this to some extent. It's often unattributed information.

It's often like this bite-sized cherry-picked piece of information from a much larger story. it's often aimed at a specific bubble that you're probably in, and it's often conveyed to you by somebody who is not a subject matter expert, right? Yeah, it's called podcasting. Or TikTok. But that's just the world we live in now. That's how we get our information to a large part, not all of us and not all information, but it's just the information we swim in.

It's creepy to me. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guests, Matthew and Ben, from the stuff they don't want you to know podcast. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, creators, every single week, it's always because of my network. And I want to teach you how to build your network in a non-gross, non-smoosy way. It's a free course, Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. It's about improving relationship skills, but also inspiring other people to want, and I don't even like the word inspiring, but, you know, in the actual sense here,

inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you. The course is, again, non-cringe, not awkward, very easy, practical exercises that you can do in a few minutes a day that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer, and many of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us, you'll be in smart company. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now, back to the show. Another classic example of something that sounds fake, but turns out to be true is like

these false flag attacks, right? Golf of Tonkin where the United States was like, let's larp that Vietnam attacked us. us and then go invade. And it's like, oh, that turned out to be true. But then that evolves somehow into 9-11 was an inside job. Look at this detonation. And it's like, well, okay, you're crazy. Oh, wait, Gulf of Tonkin. Okay, so this has happened before where the United States pretends we get attacked by somebody. But this is different, right? And it's like, okay, but where's the nuance? If you look at something like the project for the new American century, a think tank that in the year 2000 puts out a statement within their, you know, members and to other people,

that we need a new Pearl Harbor. We need a new Pearl Harbor. That is what they said verbatim. It was because they needed more money to build more weapons, to make sure weapons manufacturing, like the Northrop Germans of the world and the Lockheed Martins of the world

are still going to be functional and their stocks are going to be okay. Wow. I would have put in something important here because I appreciate the point about nuance. It is crucial. We are talking about something to be devilishly difficult,

but we also have to realize that people are great explainers, right? The brain categorizes. That's kind of the extreme end of that trait that has evolved to get people to where they are today. The extreme end of that creates patterns where none may exist. Yeah, patternicity, I think, is what this is called,

where we connect dots, even if they're not there. It's the age-old example of this is, Russell and Bush's is a predator, even when it's a bird or something. And so we're evolved to connect the dots and go, there's a Russell in the bushes. Everybody run and get your weapons ready or both. And so we've evolved that as a survival instinct,

but we still do it where we say confirmation bias pattern that happened to many people that I know is, and I'm sure you've seen this or heard about this, you know when you drive under a street light and it turns off? Has that happened? Oh, yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, yeah.

And so a lot of my friends growing up had noticed this and they'd be like, I have a power over lights that I don't know how to control. And it's like, no, you've observed solenoids or whatever, overheating in street lamps, and they turn off when you're near them, but you didn't notice the other 30,000 lights that did absolutely nothing when you drove underneath them because of patternicity and because of confirmation bias. So you have nothing but the ability to observe that sometimes lights turn off,

and you see that, which is literally everything with eyes in the whole universe. Which is still great. That's a great power. It's just not the one you think you have. But, yeah, this is something that I think because human brains are hardwired to practice and engage in this phenomenon, in this activity, then what we have to understand is there's realistically not a way to stop it. The best we can hope for is to channel it appropriately. And, you know, there's a great point that our buddy, I think was Dan Harmon, Matt, who made this a while ago. he said, he said, I love conspiracies because, you know, the alternative is that there's no one in charge. Yeah. And the world is just a bunch of people sort of kind of faking it until they make it.

And I mean, I think that's something that's quite alluring. That's a deeper point. Yeah. I've noticed this, and I was going to bring this up, that a lot of people that believe in this stuff, the more ridiculous theories, I should say, I can't help but notice that a lot of them, their lives are spinning out of control. like maybe they lost their job recently or they've got issues, health issues. And instead of going, holy crap, there's nobody that can control things. We're just one text message looking at my phone while crossing the street away from death at any given moment. The economy, anything could happen. I might lose my home. My kids, something might happen to that. It's better to be like,

there's a cabal of people that are really steering everything and they're evil and they're the enemy. Let's focus on that. Rather than anything could happen to me at any time and there's nothing I could do about it. Yeah, rather than it's my fault. Yeah, or that it's your own fault, right? But it's better to believe that somebody is steering the ship rather than fate happens, you know, and stuff happens to perfectly good people for any reason, and there's nothing you can do about it. That's actually more scary than there's an evil cabal out to get you, I think.

True, yeah. You could join the cabal. Right. You have a shot at making your way to the cabal, right, at some point, or avoiding it, right? Oh, I'm avoiding it by keeping a low profile. You're not going to fight nature. But conspiracy belief systems themselves have been around forever. Was it old Russia where they said Jews eat babies?

And then it's like, dot, dot, dot today we have QAnon saying Democrats eat babies and it keeps them young. It's just a shalacking on this multi-century old conspiracy theory. So not only are they undermining democracy, they're not even being original about it, classic internet somehow. Are conspiracy theory is becoming more prevalent or does it just seem that way because of the internet? That's a really good question, Jordan.

We used to talk a lot about zines. You know, the things you'd find, like, in the basement of your bookstore or of a library or something like that? Photocopied underground music punk band brochure. Underground publishing scene. That was really the way that I'm aware conspiracies proliferated for a while until you got message boards, like the early message boards where it could happen on there. And that's just where you can find a group of people who kind of at least in some way agree with what you're talking. talking about and your ideas, right? And then it becomes a very, a very tribal small thing early on with the zines, grows a little bit with the message boards. And now when you've got

full-blown social media, everybody is just, there are a lot of people who are willing to at least explore the ideas further. And that's where you get the palimcess thing, where you get the glomming on thing, where folklore really takes off, is when you have enough people contributing enough stuff and ideas onto that, you know, core. Yeah. Like, okay, so the earlier point, are humans, given the opportunity, are humans quite intelligent? Yeah. Are humans quite original?

Nah. Like, there's a reason why UFO abduction stories are beat for beat the same as fairy tales about changelings. Van Winkle is an alien abduction story. They just mad-lib the terms in. So it is sadly not surprising to see some of those old tropes come back and be weaponized again, as they were against Jewish communities for, as you said, hundreds of years. And now what I would say is also different here is that these ideas can be weaponized.

To your point, Matt, about the ubiquitous nature of communication. They can be weaponized by bad faith actors quite effectively. Like there's proof that the so-called troll armies in Russia and the government of China doesn't employ them, right? They're just patriotic dudes. They had some pretty successful campaigns spreading misinformation, disinformation. And if you asked some of the people there who were paid to spread these ideas in the U.S. in particular, they probably didn't really care. They were at least agnostic about whether or not, you know, insert person here was eating babies. they just knew it was their job to spread it around. And it's like, we talk sometimes about meta-conspiracies.

And maybe that's the difference today. Maybe that's one of the big differences. You got to this beautiful point, Jordan, where so many conspiracies that we find to be proven are some faction of a government or powerful entity, like a corporation, messing up, and then trying to cover it up. Yeah. Conspiring to cover up their original mistake. So these are not grand, genius, Illuminati types. They're, oh, shit, I don't want to get in trouble types. So when you see that, that's a meta conspiracy. Another meta conspiracy example would be disinformation campaigns that are meant to spread and divide populations to one degree or another.

So those things, unfortunately, do have some sand to them. It's hilarious to me and quite, you know, sad because I felt for this in my younger days as well to be able to go on to readily available sources of unverified information and say, well, I don't know. I was pretty busy today, and I put a solid two hours into some YouTube videos. And I read the Wikipedia sources. So, guys, I think I don't have a biology degree, but I form some pretty solid opinions on Kim Trails.

You touched on something that was quite interesting. Conspiracy theories fed by nation states like Russia and China, their whole concept of asymmetric warfare because they can't now, especially we see with Russia, could never beat any Western country on the battlefield, really, or any large power, I should say, on the battlefield. China also certainly can't. You've got Russia with their internet research agency plugging all this nonsense. We did an episode about that with Renee DeResta, especially regarding vaccines and other health issues. You mentioned the example from China. We call them Umal, which is like 50 Cent Army, is the translation. They actually use the same task.

on their own population to explain why their COVID policies failed, among other things. You know, you can't have a normal discussion on the Chinese internet or we chat because they'll either delete your account, your message, or they will just sort of mob you with people that are like, you're bad for thinking this. The real reason is this. And it's just people who are paid to post these things. Also did an episode about that with Lauai 86 on paid Chinese and Russian propaganda on YouTube. But it's especially dangerous because people think they've come to conclusions, like you said, based on their own research. But really, what they're doing is talking to people that have, in many cases, talking with people who say, I was there. I saw it with my own eyes.

And it's like, no, you didn't. You're a part of a group of 200 people that are posting this everywhere, along with a doctored photo or 10, to make it look like this is a real thing with a real set of people that swear they saw it. But this is, it's a psychological operation. Speaking of conspiracy theories, the real conspiracy theory is the friends we made along the way, right? Because we've got 200 people who are pretending that this thing happened. A friend of mine got offered to post a, he got offered money to post a video that said COVID-19 came from the American white-tailed deer. And it was a Chinese agency that sent this to him and a lot of other YouTubers.

And in fact, I got the same offer to do it on my channel. Hey, we'll give you, you know, whatever, a couple thousand bucks if you post this video about how COVID-19 actually came from the United States. And the reason is because China didn't want to say, yeah, we know this came from us and we have black standards at our bio labs or we eat bats or whatever it is. They wanted to whitewash this. And so they offered to pay YouTubers to post this video. It's crazy. And that's the real conspiracy is that that is, that's really happening, that kind of thing, right? What do you do with that kind of thing when you, Ben and I and Noel, we talked pretty recently about this, I think it's called the Smith-Munt Modernization Act?

which is it states that the United States can deploy propaganda against its own public now. Wow. And it's totally fine. It was repealing an older law that was in place that just said the United States can propagandize with Voice of America and other services, you know, exterior to the United States, much in the same way the CIA is only really allowed to operate outside of the U.S. territories. In this case, it's saying the U.S. can propagandize its own people. when you're trying to imagine and identify

like what kinds of propaganda are headed my way like that potential message that you may that if you were a different person Jordan maybe you needed that $1,000, maybe you would take it and make that video. Now yeah. You know, and how many other versions of that are out there occurring right now

with other messages that are either coming from like a state power like China or maybe even coming internally from the United States government because there's some kind of message that they need to get out that somebody somewhere in some office believes would be helpful, either for a campaign or for, you know, a fight against whatever unnamed, unknown thing like terrorism or drugs.

The conspiracy is coming from inside the house. Yes, exactly. Speaking of propaganda, have you guys seen the new top gun? Right. Man, it's going to get so much worse when we have widespread, deep fake audio and video, because you're going to be able to show a video of Obama drinking blood with McCauley Culkin, and you're going to think, I saw it with my own eyes in a video. What are you talking about?

Nina Schick and I did an episode about that. I can't remember the episode number, but she was talking about deep fake audios on the way, deep fake videos on the way. She had a deep fake made of her, and it was basically her face over a porn actress, which is like the most obvious use of deep fake stuff, and that's only going to get worse.

I've noticed a lot of the people who seem to believe in the more ridiculous theories. They seem to be undereducated, right? Lots of all caps run on sentences with no punctuation about chemtrails or whatever. it is in my inbox, but what other factors are involved? Because it's not just education level, is it? I do see otherwise sane people also starting to indulge in this sort of thing. It's no longer just the Pakistani taxi driver in New York telling me no Jews died on 9-11, which really happened

to me. And I was like, dude, why do you believe that? And he's like, oh, infowars.com He was talking about Alex Jones stuff. And I was like, whoever's telling you this has an agenda, they want you to believe. It's not true. Like, I know people who are Jewish who died on 9-11. And he's like, really? That guy was a moron, right? But there are other people that are otherwise normal.

And they're like, yeah, the government might be putting things in the food of the water. I mean, we just don't know. Yeah, there are a couple. I mean, I want to be careful with some of this because we don't want to paint with a broad brush, right? And we don't want to make the mistake that some conspiracy theories make. where they get a little too absolutist with stuff. So, yes, there does seem to be a trend toward, it's the same way that higher education tends to make people

a little bit more to the left at times in like a general way, than you could correlate a bit of educational aptitude, or educational achievement, but to your point, which is beautifully made, there are also plenty of people who are doing very well in life, you know, very well. And then they've got the one thing. They've got that one thing you talked. And now it's usually not going to be like flat earth, right?

Right. When you get to the doctorates and so on, but they may have one thing. And they may have very strident opinions on that. I'm trying to recall some of the studies I read, but there was one thing that said people who are more likely to believe in what would be described as conspiracy theories also are more likely to believe in a higher sort of spiritual or supernatural power. so like a matter of faith. Now, the degree of that correlation, again, is tricky because if you're not carefully nuanced

about that, that gets to be a lot like saying, if you believe in God, you are a conspiracy theorist. That's going to go over well. Yeah, that's third rail for a lot of people, you know? Yeah, yeah. Well, can I just say, Jordan, the things that people believe are, I mean, think about something that would just hit the news as we're recording today. It's actually been talked about for months and months and months for years in other

countries for decades. Something called potassium bromate, which is a food additive. That's funny. I saw that just the other day that we're putting something in bread that is illegal in your, we did an episode on banned foods on this show too, a skeptical Sunday. And all these dyes we use, it's like, well, we don't use that in Europe. It's bad. Yeah. It's our government institution, right? The FDA that goes through and tests these food additives and make sure they're good to go for us humans at certain levels. And that's our stance. Like, the government stance is you can put pretty much anything in there as long as you test it and make sure it's okay, you know, at the level you put it in there. Now, let's be reasonable. Yeah. You can only have so many rat turds in the cereal.

Sure. What's that called the LD50 where like this amount of this can kill you? And for some things, it's really small, like ricin. And for other things, you're like, shouldn't that number be higher? It's like, this is how many Twizzlers you need to eat before you die on the spot. Yeah, well, I mean, but that stuff's all real. Yeah. And, you know, it doesn't matter what your educational background is. We all eat a lot of the same foods. A lot of them are prepackaged, you know, a lot of them are just out there and existing.

Like, if you ever hit back a mountain dew, you've had quite a bit of brominated vegetable oil in your body, which is a flame retardant, which is a known food additive that a lot of other countries say no to. Right. That's just some of the food additives. You think about the environmental factors that, you know, industry produces. a big spill like just what happened in Ohio. You think about these really scary things like forever chemicals and these chains of carbon that are just going into us. This is all reality.

But this is all actually happening. It's real. It's actually going to be causing cancer and is causing cancer right now. It's terrifying. So I feel like even if you're super intelligent and some of this other stuff comes your way and just enters your bubble, right, you, I think, are probably more likely to believe something like that because the world feels an awful lot like chaos more and more and more, at least in my experience.

I think it's just because we know more, right? I think back in the day when you didn't know anything about anything because you worked on a farm and you knew a lot about your own farm and you had a third grade education, you weren't like, hey, does this have brominated vegetable oil? Why is it so cloudy? Yeah, all right. Maybe I shouldn't burn things in my house to heat it up and inhale all the smoke. It was more like the milk is bad on my farm.

I don't like my neighbor. Gotta be a witch. The end. Yeah. You know, we should burn her alive. Just to check. Just to be safe. You know, just national.

Dunk her in water. If she floats, you know. I did notice that the little girl across the street walked across these three fields and now two years later those three fields are dead. So we should probably drown her with stones. Again, for like the greater good. just to be safe. But this is something that I always love pointing out and I love where we're going to this space. It's not that there are more skeletons in the closet, right? It's just that now people

have flashlights. There's a light in the closet and that can be very terrifying. Oh, I love that. Yeah, it's the world in which we've all lived, you know, everybody listening to this show. And this is regardless of socioeconomic circumstances. This is simply reality as it exists. but I have a question that I wanted to ask, oh gosh, okay, it's been on my mind since we started this conversation. Is it easier now to cover something up than it was in the past? I doubt it. You think it's more difficult? I think back in the day you probably could just say, hey, don't tell anyone and the government would go.

Yeah, especially women, right? And then all the guys would light up a cigar and have a drink at the office like madmen. And then it's like, oh, yeah, okay, whatever. Who cares of a bunch of people die? Now you've got Freedom of Information Act, and you've got these huge offices and bureaucracies where somebody's like, wait a minute, that certainly sounds illegal. I don't think you could do the Tuskegee experiments again and be like, let's give this minority group a bunch of syphilis or another deadly disease.

Like maybe, hey, let's try a eugenics program. Don't say anything about this. No, I don't think so. We've seen this movie before. And marginalized communities, especially, are on high alert for this. And not to go down too far down this road, but we know that African Americans have lower vaccination rates. And it's not because they're undereducated or they don't know any, but it's because in the past, the government has given them diseases deliberately. And so yeah, Nikki Minaj

tweets it out. And people are like, well, I'm not touching that shit. Right. And it's not because of Nikki Minaj. It's because of the Tuskegee experiments or the St. Louis thing. And the government saying, oh, it's for the greater good if we just poison all these poor people. They probably won't get poison. But if they do, thank God, it's just a bunch of black people living in housing in St. Louis. That's what they're really thinking. Well, yeah, it's also because there was this really scary existential thing that was happening, right? This pandemic that was occurring. And then the government working way faster than they ever have in conjunction with private corporations developed all these vaccines real quick and somehow convinced the majority of the population to be like,

yeah, I want that. Give me that. No, I don't care that you're making it. Just give it to me. Give it to me now. I need two. And it was because we were so scared. And it's that heightened level. of fear that's often abused and used by people who stand in those upper echelons of power. I mean, really, really think, like, for my money, that's when big changes occur, when there's a ton of existential fear in some part of the world, and I've only experienced it really in the United States, but then a huge shift in policy is able to occur because of that fear. Okay, so maybe a better way to phrase the question then is, is it easier to conspire without consequence. Like I'm thinking, okay, so there's this thing called, let's start a coup,

this show about Smetley Butler and the business plot. And in the 1930s, this guy came to Congress. It was like, hey, I can prove it. There's a bunch of rich people who are trying to overthrow the government and that this was kind of squash. It's my belief that it was kind of squash. And people learned about it only later in retrospect. And then you have other stuff where now, you know, in an increasingly divided United States, there's a camp of people who are saying, hey, someone tried to overthrow the government quite recently. There's another group of people who are saying, no, you've got the narrative wrong. This was a protest.

And protesting is an inherent right. So like, I guess my question is maybe better phrase not as cover-ups, but in a world where every competing narrative can be treated with the same level of credibility, even if that credibility is not earned, is it not easier to get away without consequence in some of these things like what's going to happen in Norfolk Southern in Ohio? Because right now I think the answer is pretty much nothing. Well, all you'd have to do to put that out of a lot of people's minds is shoot down, oh, I don't know, four, five UFOs and make a big deal out of it publicly, right?

And now people are like, the U.S. is shooting down UFOs now? Like, what happened in Ohio? Yeah. I love that during COVID. When the United States government came out was like, oh, and, you know, crazy week, everybody. Am I right? By the way, aliens, maybe. All right. Yeah, I remember that. But anyway, pandemic, though. And people are like, this is them warming us up to accept that aliens are real. They don't want to dump it all on us at once. There's conspiracy theories about how they're

delivering the conspiracy theory. I'd love to talk about how we can tell a conspiracy theory from factual evidence, because many people seem to have a lot of trouble with this. And fake factual evidence online makes this a hundred times harder. Are there rules of thumb where it's like, okay, I heard this thing. How do I know if it's really a new thing or if it's just a bunch of BS from Crazy Uncle Frank? Matt, you and I may have to double-dragging this because there are a couple of things.

The first one is pretty boring, which is you have to figure out Uncle Frank's source. Okay. Yeah, and Uncle Frank's source is, you know, it may be legitimate, right? Like, what is the credibility of that bonus points if you find another source that disagrees and compare the two

an attempt to sort of triangulate the truth. But I think that's one of the biggest things is the source. If the primary source appears to have a horse in the race, then, you know, they clearly have an agenda. That doesn't mean that they're not telling the truth, but that means there's a reason for their statement other than transparency, perhaps. That's one way to look at it. But I would say also, if they're linked with other things that are kind of proven conspiracies, to take food examples, right? If you say, hey, the U.S. has a big problem with dangerous additives to food, that's true. But then if it's comma as proven by, you know, the blood rights of insert politician here, then that's kind of a flag.

I would say that's a red flag. I don't know, Matt. What about you? I think sources and seeing if it's related to other disprovable things, those are two big tools. I feel like it's changed in my calculus has even altered. a bit. But for me, when we started the show 2009, 2010, we were making videos. It used to be how many different outlets are reporting on this? Are those outlets all within the U.S.? Are there some international outlets that also are talking about this? And what are the reputations of those

outlets? You kind of do a little math there, figure out, okay, where are they getting their original source from? Is it an AP article that went out? Is it an official press release that some company put out, where's that initial piece of information coming from? And comparing the, what is it we used to do, Ben? It was comparing the phrasings from those different outlets, especially if you've got far left and far right outlets. You compare the phrasings and how it's being talked about and how it's being portrayed, what angle are they looking at it from? And then try and find yourself somewhere in the middle of those things. If it's just a soundbite or a headline or a TikTok video, good luck because you've got,

you either have to disregard it completely or hunt it down to prove that it's real. And that's just the way it is right now. You can't just accept it. Even if you've got, I guess you just trust your sources. You trust your Jordan Harbingers, your stuff they don't want you to know. You have to make that choice by evaluating their past or the work that you've seen in the past. It just stinks. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guests, Matthew and Ben, from the stuff they don't

want you to know podcast. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate and skeptical listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All of the deals, all the discount codes, ways to support the show are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. You can also use the AI chatbot on the website over at Jordan Harbinger.com if you want to dive into the future. Thank you for supporting those who support us. It keeps things going and lets us create these episodes week after week. Now for the rest of my conversation with Matthew and Ben from the stuff they don't want you to know podcast. It does stink. I wonder if there's sort of self-defense for not falling down the rabbit hole because I think, you know, we talk about

the YouTube algorithm where somebody is searching for science videos on SpaceX rockets. And then the next one is, how do they launch SpaceX rockets if the Earth is flat? Is the Earth really flat? And then it's like, flat earth. The Earth is flat. Everything is a lie. And you're like, whoa, I went to lunch, left YouTube playing, and I come back and three videos later, 10 videos later, I'm watching some neck beard tell me that gravity's not real. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So this is something that becomes increasingly challenging.

And a big part of it is that the primary sources for news are doing the things that primary sources of information have always done. They want to keep you looking at them. You know what I mean? Very much they love attention, right? Who doesn't? The issue is now, the calculus is not, are we telling the most true thing? It's are we telling the thing that will keep the people, you know, their mental butts in the seats.

We have to be aware of that. It's a tall milkshake, man, because I've been in the exact situation you're describing where I thought, oh, I'll just leave autoplay on. I started on a pretty good TED talk about, you know, Corvids or something. I went to get the mail. I came back. And now there's this guy who's telling you that he's part bird and will prove it in his next video. smash that subscribe button, like that kind of stuff, I think is it is incentivized, right?

It is incentivized over nuance. There's the emphasis on short video, right? Instead of, let's say, the 23 or two-hour conversation or lecture by somebody who might, you know, she or he or they might be very stodgy in their presentation, but they're literally the person who knows what they're talking about. It requires a heavier investment of time, at least the way people see it. and it doesn't automatically give you that dopamine rush. Another thing you could do if you're trying to kind of separate the wheat from the chaff,

right, of a wild conspiracy claim or something that has a little bit more heft to it, is to kind of self-evaluate. If it seems designed to incite an emotion, what emotion is it and why? And we see this all the time in political reporting. Somebody says, oh, I think blah, blah, blah is not a good plan. And the headline is like so-and-so excoriates or slams or, you know, like just whatever angriest word you can have, right? And that's because that headline is meant to make somebody react. So I think headlines are a big key of that.

I'm trying to think of little simple things you can do because I know it stinks to give all of us the homework of saying, if you hear something in a two, you know, one-minute video, go find the two-hour lecture on it. Right. Yeah. What is that called that concept where the original sort of phrase is that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on. There's a name for the fallacy, right? It's called like the fire hose or something where like if you say a piece of disinformation or misinformation, it might take me 20 minutes to debunk it, but it took you a minute to utter this ridiculous falsehood. And you can utter falsehoods infinitely more and faster than I can debunk those falsehoods.

And so that's the path of least resistance and why people fall down these rabbit holes. Good conspiracies like jazz, right? You know, you can make a painstaking symphony of the truth. But then somebody could just come around and, you know, have a nice little run. That's some other stuff. This has been weaponized against the American voting public before. We've seen it. We know that bots have been utilized on social media to do exactly what you're talking about, George.

Muddy the waters. Just muddy the waters enough to where there are questions. and the takeaway from a voter is, I don't know how I feel about that, Hillary Clinton. I don't know. See, I heard a lot of things, you know? Like, that's all it takes to alter in some small way an election. What does believing conspiracies do for the believer?

You touched on this earlier. There is a status bump. There's a tribalism bump. Can you get into this a little bit? Because I think a lot of people go, why bother believing in this? I get it if you feel marginalized or whatever. What else is going on here?

There are reasons people glom onto this stuff. Like at the top of the show, I think we talked about lack of control in your life being a reason these are attractive, but there's also a reason that they're addicting. Yeah. Oh, it's, Ben, I'm going to say you up for this. For me and my understanding of it, I believe that it's a, it's having information that makes you feel like you know more than other people who around you. and that at all times you can be, Ben, how did you put it, the light bringer to those people? Like very Luciferian in a way.

Yeah. That's it, Promethean. I've seen that in action where someone who truly believes, has a lot of information that they believe is true about very specific conspiracy theories and just wants to tell everybody else about that specific thing, as in I've got this special stuff that you need to know too, but I'm the one who knows it. I'm going to tell it to you.

Yeah, people like to teach. I think Matt and Noel and I all agree that there's something that happens with conspiratorial thoughts there. You get the added, not just a status bump of belonging to a community and being approved of by those you would consider your peers, but you also get the feeling of being one who is influential in that group, one who is moving that group in some certain direction by the power of your mind, right? This happened a lot with QAnon, right? And especially when COVID had a lot of people inside, we saw people who were kind of building their own social pyramids and they were at the top.

There's some cost comes along, right? Where you say, oh, I'm at the top of this thing now. So it must be true, right? Even if it sounds a little crazy. It was a great example. Our buddy Noel brought of the, we're all reading about this. I think we really spoke to him. In Canada, there was and is a lady who was called the QAnon Queen or the Queen.

Oh, yes. I've heard of this person. Yeah. Isn't she currently, like, on the run with arrest warrants out or something for, I don't know, giving medical advice from weird crap like this? You know, not every path runs smooth.

So she, yeah, this person was being venerated by their followers. And so if you have that veneration, you have a shot at that or you get closer to that inner circle there, then everything about that experience is telling you that you were on the right path. path, right? This is a very appealing thing. And then also the point we don't talk about all the time

is that just the way that people in power would weaponize anti-Semitism or any kind of conspiratorial stuff toward an oppressed group, they weaponized that for profit, for resources, for land, right, for further power. And in this world, in this era, rather, we see the same thing happening. You know, Alex Jones wants to tell you stuff before and after he tries to sell you on a thing. So part of the reason he's telling you the thing is not like unrelated ads, right? He's telling you that there is an economic collapse imminent because he wants you to buy gold bars. And he gets a cut of that. So I think weaponizing profit has occurred as well. And so for some people, it's very easy to be just cynically pursuing a profit. But there's a flip side to that too, and we've already

kind of touched on it. Sometimes believing in conspiracies is about protecting yourself and your family from dangers and looming harm out there, whether it's from a government or corporations and environment, whatever these things are. If you believe in the fluoridation of water conspiracy, usually the people who believe in that is because they're worried about feeding their child tap water, or they're worried about ingesting tap water because they're having. have in the past been a lot of contaminants. There have been major lawsuits against chemical companies because of stuff that leaches into the groundwater and then people drink, they get super sick. There's something about self-preservation and protection and defense when people believe

in conspiracy theories because nobody likes being made a fool and nobody likes being in potential harm when they could be protecting themselves potentially. The element of status, that makes sense, the element of self-esteem, the grifter element, And also, and pardon me if you touched on this, but the tribalism and community element where I think a lot of the flat earth guys kind of fall into this where you can tell that, yes, they're making some money from their books. Yes, they're selling some flat earth t-shirts. But really, the status is part of it.

Yeah, they're getting their neck beard stroked. But also, a lot of them are probably kooky in other areas. And maybe they don't have a girlfriend or a boyfriend. And maybe they don't have family that talks to them anymore. And they don't have kids. They don't, they're not married. So a lot of this is kind of all they have is this thing, and they go to all the conventions, because that's where their homies are.

And we can't really overlook that. If we're in a dot, dot, dot cliches about the social media in internet age, making us less social with one another, maybe this just happens to be the thing. Like, if that guy got into radio-controlled airplanes, maybe he wouldn't give a shit about flat earth anymore because he would have fun doing something else and just not care. Find a more suitable community that gives him a little bit more excitement. I think that's a great point. Up until the guy who's the big wheel, or whomever is the big deal in this radio-controlled hobbyist

community says also Kim Trails, you guys. I like radio-controlled planes because they don't drop chem trails, which I made another video about that. You can look at it. Here's my channel. But anyway, here's my review. Right. I love that point, though, because, like, you see that people want to hang out with folks

with whom they have things in common, but then also you see that, people want to have things in common with folks that they like. And that's where I think, because the two, and this is just me spitballing, I think the two are very true for just my opinion. And maybe I'm maladjusted. You know what I mean? Your mileage may vary. Oh, well, that's a given. But I don't think that's why you think that or why you've come to that conclusion. I think that one might be accurate. Those two things can both be correct at the same time. There are different types of people here as well, like true believers versus grifters, right. Alex Jones, maybe he's a true believer, but he's also a grifter, right? He's selling you the, like,

man hormones and the gold bars and the colloidal silver to cure COVID in one shot. Marjorie Taylor Green, probably a true believer. It just believes a lot of stupid crap, always kind of believed a lot of stupid crap, according to people that know her. And then later goes, oh, I was misinformed on the Jewish space lasers, my bad. And then just goes on to the next dumb thing. Right. In many ways. Who do we see? Who else do we see? Like, we see some real pure grifters who, clearly don't believe, I can't name any, unfortunately, I don't know if you can, who just literally don't care at all if whether the thing they're saying is true, they're only trying to sell you the T-shirt or the cure. Matt, I'm going to set you up for this because I always like to think

that there are a lot of people who maybe started drifting, right, or started as true believers, and along the way their path diverged. And some people seem to have started just maybe with cynical aspirations of some sort, but they were so continually reinforced that they decided, based on the approval they were getting, their ideas must be true. It reminds me of, since we quoted Mark Twain earlier, with a lie getting halfway around the world, let's go with a Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's court. When the Yankee goes back in time and sees Arthur and Gwynnevere Merlin and the whole thing, he realizes, he's like, oh, Merlin is a freaking con. artist. But Merlin now believes he has magic powers because everybody's just been agreeing that he does.

So I think sometimes people fall into that true believer aspect. As far as folks who are out and out grifters, you know, you will have an Alex Jones-like character who does say, we're not misquoting him, does say that I consider myself a performer when he finds himself in a court of law that will say this is a performance, right? I don't know, Matt. Like, I'm trying to think of just solid grifters without dunking too hard on cult leaders who I don't believe by their own stories.

Well, I'll dunk for you. I don't know how hard it's going to be, but look, man, televangelists. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. Prosperity theology. Yeah, we've seen so much of that. Is it Kenneth Copeland who's like, I can't fly commercial

because there's demons on the plane? I think that one. There's also Creflo Dollar. Oh, Lord. What? That's Creflow dollar. That's an Atlanta thing, I believe. Yeah. That sounds like a rapper. Yeah. He's got some good planes. He's got some really cool planes.

I like how we're both like, yeah. But like Jim and Tammy Fay Baker, I mean, there's all kinds of people like that that are pushing, it's not necessarily conspiracy theories or anything like that, but there's salespeople, right? And in the end, that just creeps me out a whole lot because the people in the audience, people who are watching who are really believing, who are following along, and like wanting, wanting to give their money because they think it's the good, the right thing to do,

it's going to help them and benefit them. They're just being taken advantage of. And it does feel like there's quite a bit of that with the conspiracy theory world. I think that's why we so, so badly want people to use the kind of critical thinking approach to these things. Like really, I mean, you've got to acknowledge some things, right?

Maybe I don't know everything. Maybe some of the stuff I think I know is wrong, but it doesn't mean I have to believe everything that's posted on this message board, you know? What causes some theories to catch on versus other theories that die on the vine? Why is the Democrats drinking the blood of children for adrenal crumb? Why does that catch on but other stuff you'd never hear about it unless you're on 4chan? This is where I think conspiracy theories and Western philosophy about psychotherapy really collides

because it's about what is real, like what is real for sure versus what feels real, right? So how do I feel about something and how is something? And I think the conspiracy theories that we get into really are about what feels right, to me personally, right? What does this story say about this story I tell myself, right, about my identity, right? Everybody's the main character. So how does this information relate to my vision? of me. Yeah, and if you've got a group of people who have been demonized enough by any other

side or whatever, if you're talking about the political right and using their media outlets versus the political left and their media outlets and they're fighting each other, basically, it's only kind of a stage play for everyone really involved. It's all the same government. Everybody's shaking hands once they get, you know, into Congress. But on the outside, from the observer's perspective, the audience, it seems like there's. bitter enemies, and they will be. And if you're on one side, then you've got to hate the other side. And if you hate that other side enough and they're the enemy, well, then they probably do the worst thing you can think of. And if someone tells you that they do the worst thing that you can

imagine, like eating a baby, drinking blood, doing all of that kind of horrible stuff, you're way more likely to believe it. If you are more likely to believe it as an individual, I guarantee you that kind of thing is going to catch on. And then once it runs wild, what do you do to put that fire out. How could you put that fire out? Because it's already true for them now. Yeah, the story needs a villain. There needs to be a villain. That villain needs to be different from you and your end group. Most people are billionaires, right? That's a very easy group to pick. It's a powerful group, very small population, you know, and given the desire, a billionaire could actually do some pretty significant things on the planet, and some have done. So you have the villain who is

you. This informs the story of yourself. It also gives you a call to action. That's another huge thing about a good conspiracy theory. Like Matt was saying, you know, I've learned of this danger. It's present. It's clear. I also walk away with ideas of what I should be doing. And sometimes that's stuff that's innocuous and harmless. Sometimes it's saying, hey, I'll change part of my diet, right? That's not hurting anybody. That's totally fine. That may in fact be. Well, I don't want to go that far. because sometimes they're like, add this crazy stuff to your food. But, you know, that's relatively innocuous. But then that's also, that call to action is the same thing that has people in pizza parlors

with firearms, threatening a guy who probably already doesn't like his job. There's so much more we could talk about UFOs and TikTok and secret societies and you mentioned thought terminating cliches and coups and takeovers. I mean, there's so much in the book as well. But I know we're sort of out of time. Guys, thank you so much. I usually don't do this, but tell people where to find you because they're going to, if they're into conspiracies, they're going to want to know where to find the straight dope on all that.

Oh, shucks. Well, you can find Matt, Noel and myself at our show, stuff they don't want you to know. Some variation of conspiracy stuff or conspiracy stuff show on TikTok. Right, TikTok. After all, we dug on it. Instagram and so on. We've got a YouTube page, of course. Yeah, Matt.

I just want to say, thanks for having us on, George. and we had a really great conversation with you on our show. Gosh, that was a while back. I think September of last year. But just appreciate you having us on. It's really great talking to you again. Likewise. Check out Jordan's episode on our show.

It's absolute privilege, man. It's titled, Who's Hiding the Broccoli? Yes. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. Hiding that broccoli. Guys, thank you very much. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show

about why people believe and want to believe conspiracy theories. Pretty much anybody can fall for these theories. Pretty much anybody can start watching a YouTube video. And because a lot of these YouTube videos are very, very compelling, then they get sucked into it and they start believing one thing and then they start believing another thing. It becomes very understandable that they would believe these things. It's just regular people who have just kind of got sucked down a rabbit hole. It may seem ridiculous to everybody else, but from their perspective, it makes perfect sense. They're doing it because they think they're on the side of good.

So that's one of the reasons why I debunk. I want people to focus on real issues and not on the fake issues. When people start to make significant life decisions based on their conspiracy theories where it becomes a problem, getting out of the rabbit hole isn't just like casting away all these false beliefs.

It's kind of climbing up into a world that's composed of all these new real beliefs into the light, the actual real things that are going on. And you can see more clearly what's going on. in these other areas because you've got the light of reality helping you there. There's harm done to the world, I think.

If a significant number of people are making decisions based on things that are entirely false, things that are anti-science, my whole reason for doing this is based around increasing the amount of truth in the world, increasing the amount of facts and science in the world. But if things are left unchecked and if conspiracy theories continue to rise, there is this growing division within the country. So that could be a dangerous thing. To learn how to help our friends and family escape the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, check out episode 363 with Mick West on the Jordan Harbinger Show.

I could talk to these guys all day. I really feel like we really click well and we have similar thinking. They touched on thought-terminating cliches. We talk about this in our cult episodes. You can find all of our cult episodes in the starter pack, by the way, Jordan Harbinger.com slash start if you're not there yet. these thought terminating cliches are a part of all bad thinking, especially cult-like thinking and conspiracy thinking and cult thinking really have a lot of overlap. It's essentially when you don't

want to let logic creep in, and you don't necessarily know you're doing this. So you might say something like, ah, well, I see you watch a lot of CNN, or I see you, you're only listening to lame's dream media, or whatever sort of thought terminating cliche you would see with any given conspiracy. There are a zillion of them. A lot of them are, you know, call. calling people's sheep or saying, ah, you're one of the sheeple, that kind of thing. There's a zillion of these for every cult. There's a zillion of these for conspiracies. Sometimes you need to the conspiracy, sometimes not.

We didn't even get a chance to touch on UFOs. Historically, there were lots of UFOs, all kinds, not aliens, spycraft. And of course, government wanted them to stay unidentified because Soviets might learn about the experimental aircraft. So why not follow the same logic today? UFOs could be supersonic drones. we keep them unidentified because we don't want China to know we are testing these, or we don't want our population to know that China's testing these over our country,

spy balloon. But I'm going to get emails about this because people really, really want the alien thing to be true. They want the shadowy cabal. They want the reptile people. I don't know why people are so obsessed with this. I think that's another psychology show entirely on its own. I forget who said this, but it's pretty apt. I'm paraphrasing here.

I think it's a scientist or a science writer, and he says, something along the lines of, I always figured an alien race would use technology hundreds of thousands of years more advanced than ours to travel across the galaxy or farther at a speed multiple times faster than light, only to be caught on an iPhone 4 while exploring bum-fuck Idaho. And I can't help but agree with him. I think Neil deGrasse Tyson said, I'm not sure if it was on this show or somewhere else, he said, it's literally never aliens. And I kind of think that he's right. But that doesn't explain why we are so obsessed with this. I really do think we have an urge for cosmic connection. And again, another show, possibly a philosophy or psychology show that is just out of the

scope here. Last but not least, we didn't get time to go over secret societies. These are so interesting, especially for conspiracy theorists, and they always have been, the deep state is kind of the new secret society for the modern age, the elites them, right? Before, it was the Freemasons, who, by the way, are usually just old dudes shopping next to you at Walmart. In fact, whenever I see those masons plates, I always notice the guy in the car is 75 years old, and I'm like, these are the Freemasons. This is not the Illuminati. Everybody calm down.

Skull and Bones over at Yale was one of these. And remember, it was a bunch of kids. Yes, they had some notable members. The rest of them, where are those guys? Not all of them are notable. The ones you know about are, hence the definition of notable. We had one at the University of Michigan called Mishagamwa. And honestly, it was people who led like volunteer societies, some sports teams.

I mean, these are hardly secret cabals controlling the entire world. Or maybe I'm one of them, and I'm just trying to throw you off the scent. Big thank you to Matthew and Ben. Their show is called Stuff They Don't Want You to Know. Go check that out if you're into the conspiracy stuff. Links to all things Matt and Ben slash stuff they don't want you to know will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. But if you don't want to search the show notes, use our AI chatbot to find anything we've ever talked about on the show, Jordan Harbinger.com slash AI. Transcripts in the show notes, videos.

on YouTube, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. I said it once, but I'll say it again. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, and I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same software systems and tiny habits that I use every single day.

That's our six-minute networking course, and the course is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Many of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company. And hey, dig that well before you get thirsty. Build those relationships before you need them. Speaking of relationships, this show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

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