Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Sophie, that's how we opened the episode. I
Speaker 1: didn't think anything could be more appalling than that other
Speaker 1: thing that you said that I won't know what I
Speaker 1: was talking about. Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas wrapped together
Speaker 1: so tightly that they can't tell who's where one person's
Speaker 1: skin begins in the other. I balked you right into it,
Speaker 1: just like Neil Gorsch walked right into that and then decided,
Speaker 1: you know what, in for appendy, in for a pound
Speaker 1: of um this is it could happen here. The podcast
Speaker 1: about serious problems where we talk about them seriously, and
Speaker 1: sometimes about the Supreme Court having a threesome like that,
Speaker 1: like that, like that cruise ship where there was a
Speaker 1: threesome and then a giant six fight. How's everybody doing today?
Speaker 1: I think the opening will work better if we just
Speaker 1: believe and yeah, yes, always bleep outcome uma of a
Speaker 1: right there. So I I feel like today we should
Speaker 1: chat about one of the many things that's that's a problem,
Speaker 1: which is a specific piece of disinformation that is spreading
Speaker 1: and not quite like wildfire. It's more spreading like in
Speaker 1: the background, like monkey pops on the internet. This is
Speaker 1: not like the number one piece of of of of
Speaker 1: like conspiratorial nonsense that's getting around, but it's getting around deeply,
Speaker 1: and I'm seeing it on the left and the right.
Speaker 1: You have if you spend any time at all on
Speaker 1: social media, which statistically you do, you've probably seen a
Speaker 1: bunch of stories and like freaked out posts about fires
Speaker 1: and arson at agricultural facilities and factories of food factories
Speaker 1: is often how it's phrased. I think the post I
Speaker 1: saw about it that was sort of most emblematic with
Speaker 1: someone being like, hey, you know, uh, you're probably not
Speaker 1: aware that some huge number of chickens died in fire
Speaker 1: recently and a bunch of cows died in this field,
Speaker 1: but if you were, it's the only thing you'd be
Speaker 1: talking about. And the idea kind of that people are
Speaker 1: pushing when they when they uh catastrophize this is that
Speaker 1: there's this massive rash of attacks on American food infrastructure,
Speaker 1: UM at a year when we're already due for a
Speaker 1: food crisis because of the Ukraine, and um it's going
Speaker 1: to be this this big like looming disaster and some
Speaker 1: like shady group is trying to starve everybody. UM and
Speaker 1: we've brought in a friend to talk about this because
Speaker 1: it's it is not at all what what people who
Speaker 1: are kind of catastrophizing or saying. Um, and I wanted
Speaker 1: to introduce Carl to the show. Carl, how are you doing, buddy?
Speaker 1: You know, living living life in a one party state? Yeah? Yay? Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know, man. There's a lot of parties these days,
Speaker 1: like the one on that cruise ship, uh so, or
Speaker 1: the Forward Party, our our favorite, this is a big
Speaker 1: Yang Gang podcast. Um. Now, Carl, you and I had
Speaker 1: buddies on the old Twitter for a while. You were
Speaker 1: the origin of one of the terms that that that
Speaker 1: we use a lot on this show. Um. And uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I wanted to I wanted to talk to you because
Speaker 1: this is this is a pretty potent piece of weaponized
Speaker 1: on reality. Um. You have been tracking this for a
Speaker 1: while on kind of your own. Yeah. Well, this is
Speaker 1: one of those ones that's it sits in between a
Speaker 1: lot of the other conspiracies, right so, like you said,
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of the background operating thing right now. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know, so when we think of the big
Speaker 1: conspiracies right now, they kind of revolve around what they
Speaker 1: always did, right depopulation, weird n W. Well, like secret
Speaker 1: society stuff, the Q the que brand of that. How
Speaker 1: we want to look at this is a little bit
Speaker 1: different because this is more overtly political, right, So this
Speaker 1: is this is looking to not just dig the hole
Speaker 1: of well, everyone's out to get us. Bill Gates is
Speaker 1: buying all the farmland, you know, the crazy stuff we
Speaker 1: normally I mean, you know that's right in this, but
Speaker 1: it's not the center part um. And yeah, I've been
Speaker 1: looking at this for a few months now since I
Speaker 1: first saw it, and I first saw kind of traces
Speaker 1: of this right after the invasion of Ukraine started, so
Speaker 1: early March. Things started to kind of shift and nothing
Speaker 1: you know, post here and there that are now missing,
Speaker 1: stuff like that, the kind of classic well, let's test
Speaker 1: the waters. Let's see how people accept the idea that
Speaker 1: maybe something else you know, in the in the conspiratorial
Speaker 1: way is going on just as exact exact. It's the
Speaker 1: just asking questions, it's just well maybe think about it
Speaker 1: kind of thing, and those those pique my interest because
Speaker 1: those tend to be test balloons, and for this kind
Speaker 1: of thing, I had a weird you know, they're weird feelings.
Speaker 1: You kind of get when you watch some of this
Speaker 1: as much as we do, yes, yeah, yeah, and you
Speaker 1: can kind of sense when the thing has enough ingredients
Speaker 1: to catch on exactly, and especially when they're super kind
Speaker 1: of inflammatory ingredients, right, you know, the Bill Gates um
Speaker 1: buying all the farmland is a good example, not quite
Speaker 1: as inflammatory, but catches on because people, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's the social paradelia thing. There's always like, there's always this,
Speaker 1: I mean, and this is something again that's a broader
Speaker 1: through with conspiracies. There's always a germ of truth. The
Speaker 1: germ of truth with that is that Bill Gates has
Speaker 1: bought a lot of farmland. Now, if you compare it
Speaker 1: to the total quantity of farmland he has bought, very
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, it's a friend point oh three percent
Speaker 1: or something. I mean, it's an absolutely tiny amount of
Speaker 1: the total, right yeah, Because this this country is I
Speaker 1: don't know, if you've looked at him appsently pretty sizeable country,
Speaker 1: the United States of America kind of a big place
Speaker 1: when you actually look. Yeah, and so the kernel of
Speaker 1: truth is there. There there are fires right there, industrial accidents,
Speaker 1: there are weird stuff happens in big industrial situations. We
Speaker 1: have a large industrial farming situation in this country. So
Speaker 1: you see it. And I think part of what makes
Speaker 1: the kind of the idea that oh, this is suddenly
Speaker 1: happening and it's suddenly like a massive problem easier to
Speaker 1: sell to people is that most Americans know next to
Speaker 1: nothing about the food supply and how it works. Like
Speaker 1: if you have because I grew up in and around farms,
Speaker 1: I've been a lot of my life in agricultural areas.
Speaker 1: Farms and things related to farms catch on fire fucking constantly.
Speaker 1: It may not be yeah, they're they're like I think
Speaker 1: they said there are five thousand annual, five thousand annually,
Speaker 1: about fifteen a day. I mean, it's it's giant fields
Speaker 1: of dried grain. It's stands of dried grain, and it's
Speaker 1: ship like silos full of like flour and stuff, which
Speaker 1: is like there's nothing like, yeah, silos explode like like
Speaker 1: the like a a silo full of grain is slightly
Speaker 1: less explosive than like a military like missile or some ship.
Speaker 1: Like they're like they detonate if you catch them at
Speaker 1: the right way exactly. And like I know here in
Speaker 1: Minnesota a few years ago and there's video of a
Speaker 1: floating around. You know, there was a you know, a
Speaker 1: corn a corn silo split and the dust goes out
Speaker 1: and something you know, a car or engine because it's hot,
Speaker 1: sparks it off and it's a fireball. You know. So
Speaker 1: these things happen, and I can remember. There was one
Speaker 1: of the last things I saw and I went and
Speaker 1: covered in Texas before I moved, was there's this little
Speaker 1: town called West which is not in West Texas. It's
Speaker 1: in North Texas. It's in between um Alice and Waco,
Speaker 1: which is in between Dallas and Austin, because no, Waco
Speaker 1: is not a destination. And they had this big god
Speaker 1: it was some sort of what was the I'm gonna
Speaker 1: google what the facility was, uh, but it was it
Speaker 1: was this like, um, yeah, it was a fertilizer factory
Speaker 1: and it caught on fire. There's a terrifying video of
Speaker 1: this guy with his daughter watching it and it goes
Speaker 1: off like like a fucking fuel air bomb. The massive exploit.
Speaker 1: It killed the entire town's fire department, like all of
Speaker 1: them dead in a second. I mean, it was basically
Speaker 1: fucking anfo And because it happens this is like I think, um,
Speaker 1: it never it's just this big tragedy. If it had
Speaker 1: happened a couple of years later, there would have been
Speaker 1: like a conspiracy attached to it. It was just, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was just slightly too early. But like this ship happened.
Speaker 1: I mean, the point of making is that, and that
Speaker 1: we're making here is that like this ship happens all
Speaker 1: the time time And to the numbers we were quoting earlier,
Speaker 1: there's no evidence whatsoever that there are a higher number
Speaker 1: of of these events this year than there ever are.
Speaker 1: Basically one of the things that we've seen is as
Speaker 1: of like the spring of this year, a list has
Speaker 1: been compiled um mainly in places like Gateway, Pundit and
Speaker 1: zero Hedge, where they've got like a hundred different events too,
Speaker 1: and and it it looks very compelling when you just
Speaker 1: see this list of and there's this fire, and this
Speaker 1: many chickens died here, and this many cows died, and
Speaker 1: there was this explosion. But again, if you actually look
Speaker 1: at the number of events that are expected in a year,
Speaker 1: there's nothing abnormal about this, and in fact, it's pretty
Speaker 1: middle of the road for any year. And like the bird,
Speaker 1: the bird calls right, like that's a great example of
Speaker 1: this being just absolutely out of the park conspiracy land.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a massive avian flu epidemic going on
Speaker 1: right now that's killed more birds, you know, than the
Speaker 1: last ten years. And so when you start talking about
Speaker 1: you know, three hundred you know, three hundred million birds
Speaker 1: worldwide being called whatever the massive numbers. That funny how
Speaker 1: avian flu does that, And that's a response. But when
Speaker 1: you get into the zero hedge, who is really pushing
Speaker 1: this right now world that's one of the top ones
Speaker 1: on the list. And it also makes you know they
Speaker 1: have their little maps up right now with all the
Speaker 1: drop tabs that show right they love doing and there's
Speaker 1: a you see this in other conspiracies. I think one
Speaker 1: of the big ones that that kind of was a little,
Speaker 1: i don't know, on the edge of of of getting
Speaker 1: mainstream recently was like the conspiracy about people disappearing at
Speaker 1: national parks, where it's like mapped, yeah exactly, like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's like yeah, man, um, people, there's three fifty
Speaker 1: million people in the United States, like and also people
Speaker 1: go missing while hiking, and one of the like a
Speaker 1: bunch of stuff isn't on that list, like them of
Speaker 1: those people who were found again, and what Exactly a
Speaker 1: lot of people just like slip and fall and never
Speaker 1: a seat again because they falled out a cliff. National
Speaker 1: parks are kind of dangerous, funny enough once you're off,
Speaker 1: that's why they're fun. Yeah, exactly, there was There was
Speaker 1: a whole four wh one documentary made a few years
Speaker 1: ago about this person who went missing, you like were
Speaker 1: they were They dropped into a secret underground government bunker
Speaker 1: where they abducted and they like a year later they
Speaker 1: found his body at the bottom of a cliff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and like it it doesn't you know, that doesn't talk
Speaker 1: about the horrible stuff done with like especially in Canada
Speaker 1: with all of the missing Indigenous women. Is actually it
Speaker 1: is actually a big problem. But I mean to back
Speaker 1: to back to the fact, back to like the farming thing.
Speaker 1: I think what all of these you know stories show
Speaker 1: is just the innate holder of industrial farming. It's actually
Speaker 1: the scary Yeah, yeah, it is absolutely scary, um, but
Speaker 1: it's also like normal scary. Like the thing it's scary
Speaker 1: is that the system of industrial farming is incredibly dangerous
Speaker 1: and like, if you actually want to be properly horrified
Speaker 1: about something relating to food, production. Look at how many
Speaker 1: people die because they get sucked into bogs of pigshit
Speaker 1: or drowning grain stile or drowning grain sile. I mean
Speaker 1: people legit, whole families because one person will fall in
Speaker 1: the grain silo and they'll try to get him out,
Speaker 1: the whole families. I know, I know people who have
Speaker 1: who have died that way because I grew up in
Speaker 1: the very agricultural area. Yeah, a lot of this is
Speaker 1: just like people don't know the country, but sharine, yes,
Speaker 1: um so industrial. I mean like yeah for me, for me,
Speaker 1: someone that hasn't growed up in any agricultural area at all,
Speaker 1: and this is yeah, grain is like so it's like
Speaker 1: quicksand it sucks you in. It takes you to that bottom.
Speaker 1: If you don't spread out immediately, you're going down and
Speaker 1: there's really no way to save somebody. It's stay stay
Speaker 1: the funk away the grain silos. Do not play around
Speaker 1: grain silos. With the grain silo. It is it is.
Speaker 1: It is killed entire families because people will try to
Speaker 1: save each other and then they get stucked down and
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty Yeah, it's bad when you have livestock
Speaker 1: livestock poop and sometimes that poop is super usful. Chicken
Speaker 1: ships one of the best fertilizers ever. You can make
Speaker 1: chicken ship very very useful. Pig shit is like nasty,
Speaker 1: it's toxic. It is very hard to do anything. It's
Speaker 1: once it's in the ground long enough, it's a bio
Speaker 1: Well theoretically, if you were to like really care about it,
Speaker 1: you could you could make a use of it given
Speaker 1: enough time. But there's so many pigs because our hunger
Speaker 1: for bacon is insatiable that you wind up with this
Speaker 1: this massive tox of massive toxic sludge. So there's the
Speaker 1: chunk of the country in which most of the pigs
Speaker 1: come from. There are these huge pig shit bogs that
Speaker 1: are like there are countries smaller than bogs of pigship
Speaker 1: that we have in the United States. And people die
Speaker 1: in them all the time. They get sucked down into
Speaker 1: the big ship or you suffocate because you get one
Speaker 1: of them bursts. I mean, there's so many weird things
Speaker 1: because it's a meth their methane and hydrogen sulfide since
Speaker 1: so it's just like bad things around farms all the time.
Speaker 1: And that's just that's just farming and what we're ultimately
Speaker 1: what we are seeing here if you want to like
Speaker 1: actually analyze the thing that is happening, um with all
Speaker 1: of these conspiracies, it's it's what's called the frequency illusion,
Speaker 1: which is the idea that like if you've ever I
Speaker 1: don't know, if somebody when somebody like teaches, like you
Speaker 1: learn a new word, right, or you like you hear
Speaker 1: about a historic event, and then you keep seeing everywhere.
Speaker 1: This is something that's an author that Garrison and I
Speaker 1: quite like Robert Anton Wilson played with a lot um.
Speaker 1: It's why, like twenty three is one thing you'll notice
Speaker 1: in like Hollywood movies and TV shows if you look
Speaker 1: out for they're fucking everywhere because a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: people who got into hollywo our fans of the same guy,
Speaker 1: and there's this conspiracy with the number of twenty three
Speaker 1: people sticking. It's all over the fucking wire. It's in
Speaker 1: a bunch of ship um, and it's it's yeah, at
Speaker 1: the base of things like right, humans are paradelium, right,
Speaker 1: so we're looking for patterns and static that's what we do.
Speaker 1: It's part like in my mind, it's part of our
Speaker 1: like ancestral uh, you know, deep in the past protection, right, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: it's that, and it's how you look for monsters in
Speaker 1: the woods. You know, it's like when we're looking for
Speaker 1: eyes in the dark. That's part of it. And so
Speaker 1: you know, we tend to find meaning in points and
Speaker 1: then try and connect them because that's how we work.
Speaker 1: And so this is a great example of this because
Speaker 1: it hasn't gone full Q level yet where it's just
Speaker 1: absurd to be absurd. The shield itself, like you can
Speaker 1: see where people are trying to pick together points that
Speaker 1: normally are just industrial accidents. And know some of the
Speaker 1: stuff I saw early on before, like the cow death
Speaker 1: posts and the stuff related to climate change, what you
Speaker 1: really were seeing was people trying to make order out
Speaker 1: of what is just chaotic accidents and now and now yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's something you rarely actually see in the
Speaker 1: cascade of you know, conspiracy theory like this so overtly,
Speaker 1: and it's been really interesting for me watching that because
Speaker 1: you know, as someone who's far too into watching people
Speaker 1: melt their brains. Um. This this kind of lays out
Speaker 1: some of the ways that this works for all of us,
Speaker 1: UM and I think it also offers a roadmap in
Speaker 1: certain ways to like see past it and be able
Speaker 1: to correct it for yourself so you don't get into
Speaker 1: the same Oh, there are a thousand points a light here,
Speaker 1: let's fall all of them. Yeah, it's um one of
Speaker 1: the things that's interesting. So we just called it the
Speaker 1: the recency bias or the frequency illusions, also the recency illusion,
Speaker 1: which is like the belief that things that you have
Speaker 1: like noticed only recently are a recent phenomena rather than
Speaker 1: things that go back a long time. There these are
Speaker 1: kind of inter related. But this, this sort of phenomena
Speaker 1: that we're seeing is often called the bottom mine off phenomena.
Speaker 1: And that's so so the bottom I'm pretty yeah bottom
Speaker 1: the bottom mine Off group was a it's also called
Speaker 1: the German Red Army. Um, it was a Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was a West German terrorist organization from like seventy years ago.
Speaker 1: Like this is not a recent thing, but there was
Speaker 1: an article about them in like a Minnesota St. Paul
Speaker 1: newspaper in nineteen nine four that happened to be one
Speaker 1: of the first newspapers with an online comment page. Oh no,
Speaker 1: well yeah, so this is like you'll always here referred
Speaker 1: to as the bottom minor phenomena. It has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with this terrorist group than the fact that one
Speaker 1: commenter on there saw an article about them um within
Speaker 1: a couple of hours of someone else in their life
Speaker 1: telling them about the group, and so they named it
Speaker 1: in the common section the bottom mine off phenomena because yeah,
Speaker 1: like it's it's which is an example of the phenomena UM.
Speaker 1: But like that's it is. It is. It's a thing
Speaker 1: that people do for again good reason, Like like you said,
Speaker 1: like if you're a fucking hunter gatherer and you notice
Speaker 1: that like, oh, after a rainstorm is when the big
Speaker 1: cats come out and hunt. And like if somebody, if
Speaker 1: one of your friends gets eaten by like a tiger,
Speaker 1: it's probably after a rainstorm. You associate after the rainstorm
Speaker 1: with danger, which is like good, right, Like I live
Speaker 1: inside urban environments, the usually usually less. This becomes useful
Speaker 1: as relating to more of our like instinctual practices. Yes,
Speaker 1: learning to recognize this like first step of delusion is
Speaker 1: really important UM decisions future, right, But I think it's
Speaker 1: much more similar than we realized to like how people
Speaker 1: think of religion, because even religions people are Yeah, like
Speaker 1: what you're saying is like there's so much chaos. People
Speaker 1: can't make sense of the world. And just like religion,
Speaker 1: you're trying to make order out of disorder, and you
Speaker 1: look for signs, to look for patterns. It's like an
Speaker 1: element of magical thinking, where yes, you look for reasons
Speaker 1: that this has meaning, so I understand where they're coming from.
Speaker 1: And so the problem, again, the problem is not with
Speaker 1: your brain, because this is not like a bad thing
Speaker 1: your brain is doing. It's just a thing your brain
Speaker 1: is doing. The problem is that this is one of
Speaker 1: the easiest ways that bad faith actors can take advantage
Speaker 1: of you and other people. And so in terms of
Speaker 1: protecting yourself and others from it. And again, one of
Speaker 1: the problems with this and one of the things that
Speaker 1: makes it so so much more difficult twenty years ago
Speaker 1: the batter mind how obviously the bottom mine how phenomenon
Speaker 1: is much of a thing is that dude in the
Speaker 1: fucking comments page that Minnesota paper proves. But there was
Speaker 1: less ship coming at you, so you kind of had
Speaker 1: even if you might get caught for a little bit
Speaker 1: and they're like, oh, is there something weird going on
Speaker 1: with this this German terrorist group? Um, you kind of
Speaker 1: had the space in your head and the space in
Speaker 1: your media diet to like actually parse that out and
Speaker 1: calm down. But today it all comes with you with
Speaker 1: a flood. There's like three new fucked Supreme Court decisions.
Speaker 1: Oh and now all of the food factories are on
Speaker 1: fire and all of the chickens are dead, and this
Speaker 1: war in Ukraine is actually elevating the food prices, and
Speaker 1: it all compounds on itself. If you when you start
Speaker 1: seeing something new like this come into your media diet
Speaker 1: that seems scary, one of the first things you should
Speaker 1: do is just try to get a handle on the
Speaker 1: raw numbers this Well, this is a complexity Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, this is a complexity issue. That's how I
Speaker 1: like to look at it. And that's exactly one of
Speaker 1: the great ways to to kind of get disrupt the
Speaker 1: complex nature of this and the amount of it you're
Speaker 1: taking in is just to start breaking it down. Numbers
Speaker 1: are great, right, Like, if you can look and see
Speaker 1: their eighteen thou instances of industrial accidents leading to X,
Speaker 1: Y or z and five thousand fires, you start to
Speaker 1: really get yourself into a better position to understand what's
Speaker 1: being thrown at you. Yeah, but I don't think most
Speaker 1: people can actually understand what those numbers mean, Like they're
Speaker 1: just like they're large numbers, But I don't think people
Speaker 1: understand like that means a lot of that stuff is
Speaker 1: happening versus just like one or two things you hear
Speaker 1: about and you don't realize probability wise that it's like
Speaker 1: insignificant because I don't think those numbers make sense. I
Speaker 1: mean even to me sometimes I can't. I can't picture
Speaker 1: so many things, So I think it's I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe it's just like a deficit and how our brains
Speaker 1: would you be able to understand why the numbers exist.
Speaker 1: But you can try to compare them two previous years, right,
Speaker 1: you can't exactly you can't expand what you relating to.
Speaker 1: Right if you're if you're looking from here's everything from
Speaker 1: March to June two, you're like, whoa, this is a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff just in these few months that if
Speaker 1: you compare that to every preceding year for the past
Speaker 1: five years, like, oh, this actually isn't a regular this
Speaker 1: is this is this is still fucked up, but it's
Speaker 1: actually kind of normalized. Um, and it's not it's not
Speaker 1: an abnormal phenomenon right now. And so even if you
Speaker 1: can't like understand what the numbers are, you can still
Speaker 1: compare them to previous things. But but yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: that does require more work than just like looking at
Speaker 1: a meme, right. And the reason why this stuff works
Speaker 1: is because people know how to exploit this part of
Speaker 1: our brains really well. Not not not not not in
Speaker 1: this part of this brain is useless, right, it has uses, um,
Speaker 1: you can play with it, but it's also is exploitable.
Speaker 1: And and that's the thing that you wanna be aware
Speaker 1: of is trying to be cognizant of if the information
Speaker 1: you're taking in is exploiting this pathway and then choosing
Speaker 1: how how you want to be circumvent some of those
Speaker 1: mental effects exactly well. And we have such I mean,
Speaker 1: as humans, we have a real issue with this kind
Speaker 1: of brain hacking. And it's something we're just all kind
Speaker 1: of getting up to right now and understanding. And we
Speaker 1: still don't fully understand some of this. But you know,
Speaker 1: I UM, a lot of the stuff I I kind
Speaker 1: of initially worked off of for the concept of weaponized
Speaker 1: unreality kind of talks about social engineering in the way
Speaker 1: that like freaking was done, and hacking back in the
Speaker 1: day was done, and this is so similar to that
Speaker 1: in certain ways that it's kind of shocking, right, Like
Speaker 1: it's a conspiracy, but it's also a management tool, and
Speaker 1: it's a it's a memory management and and you know,
Speaker 1: ultimately a reality management tool and giving it numbers looking
Speaker 1: at context like that does take time, but some of
Speaker 1: these are like gonna gonna be hard and fast rules
Speaker 1: probably going forward to like interact with the digital world,
Speaker 1: because this is gonna be how it is for a
Speaker 1: long while. There's a book that is kind of considered
Speaker 1: to be like the foundational text or at least strategic
Speaker 1: document Islamic State, called The Management of Savagery Um, and
Speaker 1: the title gives away what what you're doing, right, you're
Speaker 1: carrying out You're you're engaging in acts of savagery, terrorist
Speaker 1: attacks that that that kill innocent people, that are that
Speaker 1: exists to disrupt um the state that you're in in
Speaker 1: order to and you're attempting to like you're attempting to
Speaker 1: build kind of a melieu of savagery, which then provides
Speaker 1: you the opportunity to take an exert power. And what
Speaker 1: we're seeing here is like the Management of cognitive biases, right, exactly,
Speaker 1: the management of like these weird little evolutionary holdovers in
Speaker 1: your brain. Um that that don't quite work in the
Speaker 1: modern world. But if you understand what what's happening, you
Speaker 1: can take advantage of them, and you can you can
Speaker 1: trick people into thinking things are happening that aren't. It's
Speaker 1: the same, you know, you can see this. The right
Speaker 1: does this very effectively and a lot of the anti
Speaker 1: trans stuff they've been doing absolutely obviously with gay you know,
Speaker 1: if you look at the population trans and of gay people,
Speaker 1: some number of people in that community are going to
Speaker 1: do things that are bad, right, because it's a population
Speaker 1: of human beings, um, and because the country is large enough.
Speaker 1: If you get people hyper focused on here's a story,
Speaker 1: here's another story, here's two, here's three stories. Now is
Speaker 1: that does that mean that there's any kind of actual
Speaker 1: systemic problem. No. Um, that community is no more likely
Speaker 1: to do things that are bad than any other community.
Speaker 1: But if you get people focused on each of those
Speaker 1: stories in their head, they feel like there's they feel
Speaker 1: like there's an epidemic, and like, well, we have to
Speaker 1: get a handle. It's the same thing that that gets
Speaker 1: done with like Islamic terrorism right where it's like, yes,
Speaker 1: since nine eleven, actually not that many acts of Islamic
Speaker 1: terrorism in the United States, extremely fucking uncommon, much less
Speaker 1: common than right wing terrorism like homegrown terrorism. But the
Speaker 1: media doesn't really cover one of those kinds of terrorism
Speaker 1: and loves to cover the other. So you get people
Speaker 1: periodically tricked into thinking that they're under direct threat from
Speaker 1: the Islamic state or whatever. The fun right, well, and
Speaker 1: I think it's you know, I think going to that
Speaker 1: point right like, it's almost U I mean, it's a
Speaker 1: reality filter, right, so, like it's a way to selectively
Speaker 1: filter out things that would counter the narrative that you're
Speaker 1: trying to overall push. And I think that that's something
Speaker 1: that's what's interesting me about this in a lot of
Speaker 1: ways is that we're seeing a filter being set up
Speaker 1: that only allows people into one lane of this thought.
Speaker 1: And we've seen what the end result of that is
Speaker 1: with radicalization and things that come along with these kind
Speaker 1: of conspiracies. But it's really it's been very wild to
Speaker 1: watch since the you know, the nineteen April till now
Speaker 1: where we're seeing it. You know, Serovich is doing it
Speaker 1: every any one of the guys you can think was
Speaker 1: doing it. Yeah, exactly. Tucker ran a couple of things
Speaker 1: on this and kind of interspersed it with his you know,
Speaker 1: white male virility ship. It's we're we're we're in a
Speaker 1: weird place where these are starting to be able to
Speaker 1: be played with and on each other, and that kind
Speaker 1: of filtering, you know, starts to get people onboarded from
Speaker 1: a conspiracy into you know, what we're seeing now is
Speaker 1: kind of the white nationalist Christian nationalist movement. That's that's
Speaker 1: become that that thing, and you know, for me, that's
Speaker 1: where my interest stems from because of this idea of
Speaker 1: weaponizing on reality, seeing what happened in Russia when that happened,
Speaker 1: and seeing this kind of thing which is so similar
Speaker 1: to that filtering and that narrative shift and building that
Speaker 1: goes on in that world. It's it's been you know,
Speaker 1: staring into a void feels bad. Sometimes this is just
Speaker 1: one where it's like, oh, this is terrible, and it's
Speaker 1: just the beginning of it. Every once in a while,
Speaker 1: the void stares back and you're like, oh boy, oh
Speaker 1: yeah no, And that's exactly I mean, that's uh, that's
Speaker 1: the problem is sometimes it just stars you right in
Speaker 1: the eyes and tells you, yeah, I'm here, and that's
Speaker 1: a bad feeling. Yeah, well, I think that's more or
Speaker 1: less what we needed to talk. That would be like,
Speaker 1: you know, like one of the one of the ways
Speaker 1: to combat this, if you can, is honestly, creating your
Speaker 1: own memetic graphs is really useful because these things spread
Speaker 1: so fast when they're in images of dates and instances
Speaker 1: spread like wildfire. Um So if you can make your
Speaker 1: own which compares it to previous years, say hey, this
Speaker 1: actually isn't a new pattern, this is something that's this
Speaker 1: is this is just what happens in industrial farming. I
Speaker 1: think spreading it via memetic images is one of the
Speaker 1: if there is a way to combat it, that's probably
Speaker 1: one of the core ways to go about it, just
Speaker 1: to get how fast those things spread. Again, you can
Speaker 1: see I've seen some useful people have been trying to
Speaker 1: push back against, you know, this idea that there's been
Speaker 1: this like massive crime surge in San Francisco and stuff,
Speaker 1: and they it's uses the same tactics, Right, You have
Speaker 1: like a couple of videos of people shoplifting or something,
Speaker 1: and then you make a and and is there is
Speaker 1: that kind of crime actually up well no it really isn't,
Speaker 1: but like it doesn't matter because um or is it
Speaker 1: any higher there than it is in some place like
Speaker 1: Duluth where no videos are coming out, like no it's not,
Speaker 1: but um it's uh. If you have to be aware,
Speaker 1: the first thing you have to be aware of is
Speaker 1: the phenomena is like the way in which they're taking
Speaker 1: advantage of you, and then you have to you have
Speaker 1: to kind of deter and you have to use the
Speaker 1: tactics they're using against them. And one of the things
Speaker 1: that is effective is these these graphs with kind of
Speaker 1: like numbers and dates and ship on them. People love
Speaker 1: to feel like they're looking at research. But yeah, at
Speaker 1: the same time though not to not to be like,
Speaker 1: I don't know negative about this at all, but in
Speaker 1: my mind, this is like a modern day version of
Speaker 1: someone starting your religion and make people like making the
Speaker 1: sheep of a sl following and then having them turn
Speaker 1: into like whatever it is, whether it's Christian nationalism or whatever.
Speaker 1: But just like in religion, if people are presented with science,
Speaker 1: they don't care you know what I mean, you will
Speaker 1: present them with like, I don't know. There's some people
Speaker 1: that I think are be it's it's it's it's not science.
Speaker 1: It's about everyone wants to have access to special, secret
Speaker 1: and secret knowledge. Everyone wants to have esoteric knowledge that
Speaker 1: no one else has. So these graphs are still compelling
Speaker 1: in the first place because you're like, oh, no one
Speaker 1: else knows all of these things. No one else has
Speaker 1: laid it out in this manner. So if you can
Speaker 1: present your information in that same style, say, hey, no
Speaker 1: one knows that this is actually part of this overall
Speaker 1: thing that's been going on for years and it's about
Speaker 1: industrial farming, then you hope that that will spread. That
Speaker 1: then that spreads because because it infects the same point
Speaker 1: in someone's brain. Right want to we want to feel smart,
Speaker 1: we want to feel unique, we want to have like
Speaker 1: esoteric knowledge. So if you can, if you can frame
Speaker 1: it to to fit that same mold, then it's not science.
Speaker 1: It's just playing with the same tactics that God them
Speaker 1: convinced of this in the first place, exactly. People, that's different. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I think Sharine, like it's true that like
Speaker 1: if somebody is a committed believer in in whatever, like
Speaker 1: like Mike Cernovitch or something, you're not convincing them the
Speaker 1: danger the thing that they're doing that's dangerous is there.
Speaker 1: They're quote unquote pilling a lot of like random people
Speaker 1: into problems that scares those people. And when those people
Speaker 1: get scared, they're willing to accept ship they wouldn't otherwise scare.
Speaker 1: And I think those people you can push get to
Speaker 1: step down from the ledge because one thing we do
Speaker 1: want this is also a problem. But like you think
Speaker 1: about like climate change, right, and how much of the
Speaker 1: denial of climate change is not based around getting people
Speaker 1: to reject the idea entirely, but getting like when people
Speaker 1: bring up a specific problem being like, well but look
Speaker 1: at this weird new piece of technology that some kid developed,
Speaker 1: and like this is going to fix it, and then
Speaker 1: you get to not worry about it. Right, So if
Speaker 1: somebody suddenly starts speaking out about agricultural fires for the
Speaker 1: first time and you're like, actually, they're lower than they
Speaker 1: are in normal years, this isn't a problem, then maybe
Speaker 1: their brain, maybe you can get their brain to go like, Okay,
Speaker 1: that I won't worry about that because I don't want
Speaker 1: more things to worry about. I just have been given them. Um,
Speaker 1: that's targeting the ledge people we're talking. Yeah, you're not
Speaker 1: getting to true believers. You're not getting to true believers
Speaker 1: at this point of any of this stuff for the
Speaker 1: most part. You know, that takes a wholly different level
Speaker 1: of work. I mean, that's that's in the ballpark in
Speaker 1: my mind of the radicalization, right, Like you're you're in
Speaker 1: a wholly different ballpark. And if you can target the
Speaker 1: people who are thinking about jumping into the pool too,
Speaker 1: they tend to if you do change their mind, they
Speaker 1: become some of the biggest proponents of trying to get
Speaker 1: other people off the ledge that they might know. And
Speaker 1: that's something something well, it's something, yeah, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's very similar. And it's something I've seen even in
Speaker 1: my friends circles, you know, talk to people who five
Speaker 1: years ago, we're fully you know, in the all let's
Speaker 1: do Donald Trump for the lulls thing. You know. Now
Speaker 1: those are the same people who are telling their friends,
Speaker 1: oh shit, we have a Christian nationalist movement that's trying
Speaker 1: to overthrow democracy. And that's a huge you know, like
Speaker 1: that's a huge help um to everyone. Right, you want
Speaker 1: more people saying the truth to people who might not
Speaker 1: hear it from someone like us um and can internalize it.
Speaker 1: And there's you know, the truth takes a lot more
Speaker 1: work than fiction, unfortunately, but once it starts to work,
Speaker 1: it's a compounding thing. And the truth tends to really
Speaker 1: set people free. As corny as that is. If people
Speaker 1: find out they've been lied to, they get they want
Speaker 1: to know why it worked, and that works in our
Speaker 1: favor and the truth's favor, and reality is the thing
Speaker 1: we you know, we gotta protect this at all costs
Speaker 1: because we're getting title weight by unreality and that's a
Speaker 1: problem for all of us for different reasons. Let's the
Speaker 1: more uplifting note I think than a couple of minutes ago. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, well there there we go. Um go, I
Speaker 1: don't know, fix it. Yeah, go fix things. Yeah, go
Speaker 1: fix things. Don't go swimming in grain silos, and uh,
Speaker 1: avoid grain silos. Always avoid grain silos. It could happen
Speaker 1: here as a production of cool Zone Media, but more
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Speaker 1: You can find sources for It could Happen here, updated
Speaker 1: monthly at cool Zone, Media, dot com, slash sources, thanks
Speaker 1: for listening.