Bonus Sample: Watch What They Say, Watch What They Sell
Since early on in this conspirituality experiment, Derek has been using the catchphrase that is the title of this week's bonus episode. Julian joins in to discuss exactly what the phrase means in the landscape of conspiritualists, who the most egregious offenders are, and the origin story of the term. If you think your coffee is moldy or those glasses are really blocking blue light, think again.
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Thank you.
You know, the thing that I started to notice as I was seeing how this aspect of these worlds was overlapping is that the email funnel, right?
The sense that you can have someone join your email list and then you have a series of emails that go out to them over a period of time, right?
At specific intervals that is calibrated to keep getting them buying in.
Um, whether that's upselling them on whatever the product or service or experience might be, the online course, or whether it is just continuing as people like Sayer G do to, to radicalize them further.
Right.
And as RFK, I actually joined RFK's email list to see what he's doing, RFK Jr.
And yeah, it's amazing.
It's amazing.
The steady stream of emails I get that would be radicalizing me into a hardcore anti-vaxxer if I was open to it.
Yeah, and if they're good, they take advantage of dark patterns.
That's something I've been researching a lot for my full-time job because part of what I do is I'm building an educational platform for financial consumer psychology.
Cognitive biases play into decisions around finances on a number of levels, but we also are working on part of that platform geared toward design bias and recognizing design bias.
So dark patterns are, for example, try to cancel your Amazon Prime account and see how many steps that are hidden that you have to go through.
Try to cancel your New York Times.
You can sign up for the New York Times in 30 seconds.
Another example is if you get your credit card statement, the minimum payment due is in the largest font on the sheet.
And that psychologically primes your brain to associate your payment with that low number because they don't want you to pay off your bill.
And this happens in all sorts of apps and it happens in marketing affiliates, too.
Again, if they're crafty marketers that they can lead you, they're called drip campaigns, they can lead you step-by-step into indoctrinations into their mindset, as well as sell you products along the way.
I'm on the event 2021, 2022, their list, and they're actually pretty sloppy in terms of that.
They're all over the place, but I am noticing the threads that they're using in terms of On every email that they send and it's a it's a constant just deepening of indoctrination that they're trying to bring you into while they're selling you the next course or online series and you know some of them are free and then you get to the paywall and that's that's all this is a tried and true model and we're gonna you know they're they are going to keep using it until it doesn't work anymore.
Yeah, the metaphor I found myself using when I was writing about this the other day is that this incredible digital architecture and arsenal that the conspiritualists have had at their disposal, some of whom were really practiced in it, like someone like Sayerji, for example.
It's like the dry and awkward public health messaging.
of government institutions and global health institutions, it's been absolutely no match for that incredible sales and propaganda fusion.
Because sales and propaganda both, in a way, rely on a kind of psychological persuasiveness that has decades of really good research.
There's a study that was conducted two or three years ago where this group of researchers was trying to get more adherence to a company's 401 program.
And so they had to split off the cohorts into who was already enrolled and who was resisting enrollment.
And in general, if you're thinking about retirement, 401k is, because we don't have pensions anymore in America, it is one of the strongest ways of acquiring some wealth for when you're older.
And they split the companies.
They studied four different companies and they split them into two.
And in one group, they did the traditional way of doing it, which is they have everyone in the room and they say, okay, here are the charts and the graphs that show you compound interest and how much money you'll make when you're 65 and why that matters, blah, blah.
The second group, and this was the new part, They didn't do any sort of graphs, nothing logical.
They did a visualization exercise where they had people visualize what they wanted in retirement and then write that down and then soft-pitched the fact that they had to save in order to get there and that's it.
And the adherence levels on that group Shut up.
Wow.
Not only did a lot of the people who weren't signed up sign up, but the people who had already signed up started putting more.
And that really drove home to me.
I read that study recently because Regardless of how logical we are, we are emotional animals first.
So when you said the public health bureaucracies are doing what they're supposed to do, but it's bureaucratic, and it's dry, and it's like here's the information, and then you have someone yelling into a microphone about the deep state trying to inject you with Mike, like which one is going to get you more emotionally charged?
The people that we cover, a lot of them, I wouldn't say they're all charismatics, but the charismatics, they figured that out and they're exploiting that fully.
And again, commerce is just tied up into that because people, if they're scared or if they're charged, Yeah, isn't that ironic, right?
adrenaline, they're going to spend in that direction.
And they're not going to pay attention to the more bureaucratic messaging.
Yeah, isn't that ironic, right?
Because so much of the contrarian message has been, don't be ruled by your fear.
And yet they are like revving you up in terms of those primal emotional responses, fear and anger and paranoia and the need for sort of in-group bonding and rebelliousness as an identification or what have you.
Yeah, so I'm wondering who else we have in mind here because, you know, the three of us have gone back and forth in a lot of conversation about who qualifies for the main pantheon, right?
For the rogues gallery of conspiritualists.
Who else comes to mind for you?
I mean, I'm realizing that Luke's story is not necessarily someone that we flagged as belonging in this sort of main pantheon.
What do you think about that right now?
He's so just shifty to me.
It's almost uninteresting, because if you have, at this point, it's got to be over 200 products.
That's all you are.
You're just selling all the time, if that's your downline.
And to me, that's almost like, why even bother to give that oxygen more than we have in this bonus episode?
