#608: Jordan Takes The Wheel 7
Today, Jordan takes over hosting duty to tell Dan about a conspiratorial TikTok creator that he's found, and discuss the implications of how old bad information is being spread in new ways.
Oct. 22, 2021 - Knowledge Fight
01:01:43
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dan and Jordan. | |
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Fight Knowledge. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| This is a nice little podcast where we talk about anything. | ||
| It is a nice little podcast. | ||
| But, Alex Jones, we do still worship at the altar of Selina. | ||
| Hey, Jordan. | ||
| Yes, Dan? | ||
| What's your bright spot? | ||
| We're great at this. | ||
| I jumped the gun. | ||
| I don't know how you have that restraint, generally. | ||
| I'm telling you. | ||
| That's the thing that most people are like, Jordan, where do you get all your restraint from? | ||
| You lay back in the cut, and you come in right at the right time to ask about the bright spot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Immediate. | |
| I was over-eager to hear about your bright spot. | ||
| Just wait until I say 2021. | ||
| We're going to be in series. | ||
| Ah, damn it! | ||
| Hit my bright spot today, Dan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know if you know this, but tomorrow, we're recording this on the 21st, tomorrow is October 22nd, and that is the day that Dune is released, my friend! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that right? | |
| Dune! | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| The new Dune! | ||
| Do you want to go see it? | ||
| Dune! | ||
| Should we go, like, I mean, we could probably go tonight, like a midnight show. | ||
| I don't know if we could go tonight. | ||
| We could go tomorrow afternoon. | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| But we could go, like, dressed up. | ||
| I'll dress up as Duncan Idaho. | ||
| I'm not dressed up. | ||
| You don't even know what Duncan Idaho looks like. | ||
| But it's a great name. | ||
| It is a great name. | ||
| Patrick Stewart! | ||
| It's a book. | ||
| It's open to interpretation. | ||
| No, Patrick Stewart was Gurney Halleck in David Lynch's version. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I knew you were going to be mad if I didn't correct myself on that one. | ||
| Someone would have been. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It would have been awful. | ||
| How about you, Dan? | ||
| I bet there is a midnight show we could go to. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Let's think about it. | ||
| Okay, we'll think about it. | ||
| Let's go tomorrow. | ||
| I'm kind of going to go to bed now. | ||
| My bright spot, Jordan, is not a health ranger. | ||
| Our friend was in town. | ||
| We had a very nice lunch. | ||
| Always nice to see some peeps. | ||
| Oh, fantastic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely fantastic. | |
| And now that I've learned that Dune is coming out. | ||
| This is a bright spot upon a bright spot day for you, Dan. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Can I dress up as Paul Atreides? | ||
| Yes, you can. | ||
| You got it right. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You also could have said Muad'Dib. | ||
| Can I dress up as spice? | ||
| You could have said Usul. | ||
| Usul would have worked. | ||
| Can I dress up as the sandworm? | ||
| No, actually, that is sacrilegious. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| Shaitan. | ||
| Shaitan. | ||
| Can't mess with Shai Halud, my friend. | ||
| Man, I always blow it. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's just terrible. | ||
| I'm excited. | ||
| I am going to see this movie. | ||
| I haven't felt this way, this sort of excited about a movie since Mortal Kombat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you didn't watch it. | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| Oh, no, we watched it together. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But it's not real excitement. | ||
| It's fake excitement. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| I am pumped. | ||
| Artificially. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| I was, for Mortal Kombat, I was disappointed. | ||
| I'm gonna be disappointed by Dune, but I'm fucking pumped. | ||
| I doubt it. | ||
| Everything I've heard is that this is the Dune movie that you, Dan, specifically, have been waiting for. | ||
| I've been waiting a while. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But we're not going to talk about Dune today. | ||
| I bet people wish we were. | ||
| If only. | ||
| Alright, so as everybody has probably figured out by now, this is a Jordan episode. | ||
| Number five or six? | ||
| Well, I think it's number six total and five that will be released. | ||
| So today it's going to be a little bit of a shorter episode, but that is because we are talking about... | ||
| TikTok. | ||
| And I know that this has been something that we have probably needed to talk about for a long time. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard some rumbling. | ||
| Yeah, and probably the world needs to talk about for a long time. | ||
| But while researching this, I realized very quickly why nobody does this. | ||
| And that is because it is awful. | ||
| TikTok is the worst place in the world. | ||
| I hate it. | ||
| But I totally get why it's very, very popular. | ||
| And we are going to explore all of that stuff. | ||
| I've never been on it. | ||
| I think I'm too old. | ||
| I've had the same sort of feeling about it that I had with Snapchat. | ||
| That is like, nah, it's not for me. | ||
| Not for me. | ||
| Not for me. | ||
| I'm too old for this shit. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| I was looking through the person we're talking about today. | ||
| Has well over three and a half million followers, right? | ||
| And I'm going through this with my old ass, just like looking at these videos, just going like, you know, this isn't how you're supposed to do it. | ||
| You're supposed to have a 20-minute episode of a show or something, man. | ||
| Write a screenplay. | ||
| Years ago, you would have been the guy who saw the early YouTube videos. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| Come on, man! | ||
| What is that, a minute and a half? | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Or you're the blogger who's mad at Twitter. | ||
| Micro-blogger. | ||
| 140 characters? | ||
| Get out of here! | ||
| Nonsense. | ||
| You need at least a thousand words to explain anything. | ||
| My only exposure to TikTok really is my friend Angela Lampsbury. | ||
| She sends me from time to time fun animal things on TikTok. | ||
| I think it's probably one of the more insular... | ||
| Weird spaces I've ever seen. | ||
| Like a lot of sort of isolated bubbles. | ||
| Yeah, but huge isolated bubbles. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| It's bananas. | ||
| It would be like if, you know, at the height of Carson, you know, with a hundred million people viewing a night or whatever, you know, some ridiculous number. | ||
| If you just met a, you know, people who were... | ||
| Just now started to watch David Letterman and never heard of Carson. | ||
| Just like, never heard of him. | ||
| Like, who are you talking about? | ||
| There's only... | ||
| What are you talking about, you know? | ||
| This is just animal videos. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| It's not cancerous nonsense. | ||
| No, there's no way that there would be bullshit on here. | ||
| It's too short. | ||
| Well, I mean, I guess this is probably what Vine would have become if it had stayed around. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Anyways, before we talk about TikTok... | ||
| I think it's time for us to say hello to some new wonks. | ||
| That's a great idea. | ||
| Nicely done. | ||
| See, you came in at the right time there. | ||
| I was holding back. | ||
| First, an action lion with a commercial driver's license. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Lee. | ||
| Just Lee. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Lee. | ||
| Next, we have Joe Fotch. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| And then there is Turd Anderson. | ||
| That's probably a real name. | ||
| I would hope so. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Can't be an alien. | ||
| Turd Anderson. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| And then finally we have a technocrat who I assume is... | ||
| It is Poopington Vaughn Poopington. | ||
| You're now a technocrat. | ||
| You're now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Crikey, mate, that's fantastic. | ||
| Have yourself a brew. | ||
| How's your 401k doing, bro? | ||
| We gotta go full tilt boogie on this, Watson, alright? | ||
| Let's just get down to business. | ||
| We ain't making that money off that heroin. | ||
| Why are you pimps so good? | ||
| My neck is freakishly large. | ||
| I declare... | ||
| Infowar on you. | ||
| A little bit more scatological wonk names today than normal. | ||
| I'm not thrilled with that. | ||
| Did you choose them specifically? | ||
| Just like, today's the poop day. | ||
| We're going to get it out of the way. | ||
| We're going to get the poop day out. | ||
| I wish that I had. | ||
| Like, if I just sold you a bill of goods. | ||
| Well, it's a Jordan episode, so let's just put all the poop wonks on there. | ||
| I don't want to have to say them. | ||
| I have dignity. | ||
| Yeah, that's fair. | ||
| That is fair. | ||
| I did come off a little bit like Norm MacDonald saying turd Ferguson there. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| There was that. | ||
| Today, Dan, we are going to talk about a little TikToker named at TyTheCrazyGuy. | ||
| Blackjack. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| But it's not all in 2021. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Nice. | ||
| TyTheCrazyGuy? | ||
| TyTheCrazyGuy. | ||
| Wow, I mean, he just puts it right out there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now... | ||
| There's a huge caveat here, which is that I do feel like this is important to talk about. | ||
| But, like most people on TikTok, we are going to be talking about a child. | ||
| So, it's a very thin needle to thread there without just being like, all kids are stupid. | ||
| How old a person are we talking here? | ||
| 18. Okay, well, that's the age of majority, as they say. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, in his first video... | ||
| He can join the army. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He can be a subject of an episode of Knowledge Fight. | |
| And he can destroy democracy. | ||
| So, the first video this dude put out on TikTok, I think he was like 16 years old, and it's essentially all what most TikTok videos are. | ||
| It's a very short thing, and it's got him kind of like dancing and mugging to the camera. | ||
| There's music over it, and then he just points. | ||
| And words appear on the picture. | ||
| I've seen that on Twitter. | ||
| I've seen people repost those. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're like, little dance and then the captions. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Simple, direct, that's what everybody gets, you know? | ||
| And in his, it's basically like him saying, like, I want to be TikTok famous. | ||
| Can we make that happen? | ||
| And then over time, it appears without changing anything. | ||
| Or doing anything different or having any discernible thing that would make him stand out. | ||
| You know, he just started getting more and more popular. | ||
| People just kind of went, uh, okay. | ||
| This is what we call the secret. | ||
| Yeah, he manifested TikTok fame. | ||
| No, he was like, hey, I want to be TikTok famous, and apparently everybody on TikTok was like, I guess, fine. | ||
| Sure, why not? | ||
| Yeah, let's just make this guy famous or whatever. | ||
| That's what he wants. | ||
| Yeah, so he goes on for a year or so, putting out these very, very simple, similar videos. | ||
| He's doing pretty well. | ||
| Every now and again, he'll go real viral, and he'll get like... | ||
| 200,000 views on one of these. | ||
| You know, something crazy. | ||
| And it's, again, these are all just him, like, dancing and then pointing to words as they appear. | ||
| And it's your basic internet meme joke, you know? | ||
| Very simple. | ||
| Him being like, when I'm in class, I feel like... | ||
| And then he makes a face, and then, you know, and you get it. | ||
| Yeah, but what's fascinating, though, is that, like... | ||
| I have no idea who this person is. | ||
| Never. | ||
| And you're saying there's millions of followers, and it's so bizarre that those things can happen now. | ||
| We don't have that centralized attention economy. | ||
| Bananas, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And again, because we're talking about a kid, I'm not shitting on his creative output or whatever. | ||
| It's not like I'm expecting him to have already instantly distanced himself from his fucking peers or whatever. | ||
| I'm not trying to be an asshole. | ||
| He hasn't changed the form. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But he really doesn't have any talent. | ||
| He's just very there and watchable. | ||
| And I get it. | ||
| I get what's going on. | ||
| Now... | ||
| All of this is going along normally, and then he puts out his first conspiracy video. | ||
| So instead of conspiracy, it's tea, with T-E-A. | ||
| So he's drinking tea? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Spilling some of it, probably. | ||
| You got it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh boy. | |
| You got it. | ||
| First conspiracy, I refuse to finish it. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Comes out instantly. | ||
| Instantly. | ||
| Right up over like 200,000 views. | ||
| Now it's up over like a million or two million or whatever it is. | ||
| And here is what vaults this kid into popularity. | ||
| The Kardashians are cursed by witches? | ||
| We need to talk about this. | ||
| In 1809, the Kardashians' great-great-great-great-grandmother, Kekko Kardashian, had just given birth at 19. She wanted the best for her baby girl, so she went to the local town witches and asked for not only her baby, but for all future female generations of the Kardashians to have fame, power, and wealth. | ||
| Now, the witches granted this wish, but at a cost. | ||
| In order for the Kardashians to keep the fame they had been given, they needed to lure men into their life so the spirits of past witches could steal their energy and happiness. | ||
| So now let's flash forward to these Kardashians, who, by the way, got famous In order for the Kardashians to keep their fame, they had to lure many men into their lives. | ||
| Which explains the many, many, many exes of the Kardashians. | ||
| Let's look at Scott Jisic. | ||
| Before he met Kourtney, he was a happy, successful businessman. | ||
| Pretty soon after they broke up, both his parents died, he went to rehab, and he's been seen in countless fist fights. | ||
| Some even say that the Kardashians sacrificed their own brother to the witches in 2014. | ||
| This is him in the beginning of 2014, and this is him at the end. | ||
| And that's the conspiracy. | ||
| That's quite a bit of tea. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So he's got the Paul, he's got the PJ, Pete Watson. | ||
| The editing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The jumping around. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The fast pace. | ||
| I guess that's kind of necessary on TikTok, I would assume. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| All really, really cut nice and quiet, nice and tight. | ||
| You know what I hear when I listen to that is like a melding of celebrity obsession and like fairy tales. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That is exactly what it is, Dan. | ||
| I will tell you where this conspiracy comes from. | ||
| A fairy tale? | ||
| Well, in 2012, I believe February of 2012, someone named... | ||
| Studio writer wrote this for Studio No, and it's why are the Kardashians famous? | ||
| So his whole conspiracy thing... | ||
| Well, their dad was OJ's lawyer. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You would think that, but you're an idiot. | ||
| You'd think that, but that's because you're stupid. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| The biggest case? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The thing that changed, like, televised... | ||
| Who saw that shit? | ||
| Do you think a TikToker, an 18-year-old TikToker, is like, well, they became famous because of OJ. | ||
| They don't even know who that guy is! | ||
| Wait, that guy who just joined Twitter recently? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, this whole story is called Why Are the Kardashians Famous? | ||
| A dark history exposed. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Now, I'm going to read you some of this, and you tell me if you think it's based in reality or not. | ||
| Just, this is how it starts. | ||
| So the Kardashians, their great-grandmother went to a gingerbread house. | ||
| Wait. | ||
| In 1809, a dark-haired woman strode through the deep forests of Armenia. | ||
| The rain lashed down through the trees, the water making her robes heavy and thick, but she was determined. | ||
| This is ostensibly the very real accounting of something that happened in 1809. | ||
| To be fair, it sounds legit. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I feel like the sourcing on this is probably above board. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Go on. | ||
| It goes on for quite some time. | ||
| After some very breathless description of her traveling habits. | ||
| And also, like, what she's experiencing. | ||
| Like, it has to be a first-hand... | ||
| It's a first-hand account, yes. | ||
| This is her diary, obviously. | ||
| So, Cakel came upon a clearing. | ||
| Gnarled trees rose up from the earth like tortured hands. | ||
| Beyond the rough clearing, beyond the dark earth, the mouth of a cave gaped like the throat of a beast. | ||
| Within faint traces of flame cast shadows in the depths. | ||
| Ghostly tremors of light. | ||
| Alright, so this is again... | ||
| 100% based in real. | ||
| I got caught up in the visuals of it. | ||
| It's very evocative. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Like a fairy tale. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Almost exactly like a fairy tale. | ||
| And here's how it ends, which may convince you that you might be right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, the twist on this is that Cakel goes to the four witches. | ||
| And one of them is named Rumpelstiltskin. | ||
| Close. | ||
| Very close. | ||
| She asks for... | ||
| And this is what she asked for. | ||
| I want nothing more than fame, fortune, and beauty, right? | ||
| So they give her fame, fortune, and beauty, but nothing more than that. | ||
| So they don't have talent or brains. | ||
| The whole thing is one giant dig. | ||
| It's just an asshole thing to say about why the Kardashians are famous, because they're not good. | ||
| Because they made a deal with witches in the 1800s. | ||
| That's the whole thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a little sexist, too, let's be honest. | |
| No, it's awful. | ||
| It's really awful. | ||
| And this kid has no idea. | ||
| Because that would include Robert Kardashian, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| I don't know if... | ||
| That's ludicrous. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| He wasn't that hot. | ||
| Well, I mean, I don't know if that was the real takeaway here, but... | ||
| That's debatable, too. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| Beauty's in the eye of the beholder. | ||
| Yeah, that's wild. | ||
| So someone just wrote this bizarre fan fiction that was basically just a slam back in 2012, and now this person on TikTok is bringing it out as a spill in the tea about a conspiracy about these famous people. | ||
| You got it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Man. | |
| Isn't that nuts? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| Yeah, it's sad. | ||
| It's really sad. | ||
| Because a million people have watched it, and you've got to assume a couple of them at least were like, wow, that's interesting. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And here's the other thing. | ||
| When we talk about... | ||
| Talking about some of these people who you don't know if they're trying to be funny or not. | ||
| That kind of thing where it's like, I can see them conceivably being hidden behind that wall of, well, I'm joking. | ||
| That kind of thing. | ||
| This kid exists where there is no... | ||
| There's no distance between them. | ||
| There's never any distance between a joke and reality. | ||
| There's no distance between fantasy and reality. | ||
| It's all the same thing. | ||
| So he doesn't believe this. | ||
| But at the same time, he does believe it. | ||
| But at the same time, he doesn't believe this. | ||
| This is insane. | ||
| But I kind of believe it, you know, because it does explain some things. | ||
| Now, I don't believe it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nah. | |
| You know, that's the whole thing. | ||
| But what if? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It is not a problem. | ||
| For me, whenever I go through these things, the problem isn't so much what information or what conspiracy theories he's disseminating. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It is that he has removed the line between fantasy and reality. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's almost like the content is what it is, but the presentation of it is really damaging. | ||
| Because if you accept that kind of... | ||
| A way to take in information. | ||
| What else are you going to be susceptible to? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And because it's so short, you watch it and it disappears. | ||
| And you don't even think about it again, but it's up there somewhere. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know? | ||
| The whole time I was thinking of, if you recall, we had an interaction one time where I told you that I didn't want to drink the beer because the temperature had changed. | ||
| And that was a thing that I'd always been told. | ||
| That was real. | ||
| And you very correctly pointed out that that is an incredibly insane thing to think. | ||
| That's stupid and it's ridiculous, right? | ||
| Yeah, like beers are stored at room temperature. | ||
| What was I thinking? | ||
| But it's one of those unexamined little things that was popped into my head at some point and I never thought about until it just pops out. | ||
| We all have those things and you're never really able to... | ||
| Confront them until you're aware of them. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So these things just pop in and out. | ||
| And then here's his next conspiracy tea. | ||
| Another glass of tea? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| The Titanic never actually sank. | ||
| We need to talk about this. | ||
| So the company that owned the Titanic also had a lot of other boats. | ||
| One of which was the Olympic. | ||
| Now the Olympic had just come back from a huge journey and had a lot of damage on it. | ||
| So much that it really wasn't ever safe for it to go out again. | ||
| So the theory goes that the company switched the Olympic with the Titanic so the Olympic could go out and purposely crash. | ||
| And once it crashed, they would make that bank from the insurance money. | ||
| It sounds crazy, but look at the proof. | ||
| First off, the Olympic had 16 portholes and the Titanic had 14. However, when you look at this picture of the alleged Titanic, it has 16 portholes. | ||
| Now, a few years ago, photos of the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean surfaced. | ||
| One of them caught the logo of the Titanic, but it said MP, which is literally a part of Olympic. | ||
| If that didn't convince you, just wait. | ||
| This is James Fenton, who worked in the Titanic, and he was one of the few survivors. | ||
| On his deathbed, he confessed that he knew that they swapped the Titanic with the Olympic, but the government bribed him not to say anything. | ||
| And that's the conspiracy. | ||
| I don't like the, we need to talk about this. | ||
| He says it every single time. | ||
| I got that. | ||
| I got that it was a catchphrase. | ||
| I find that annoying. | ||
| I hated it. | ||
| This is why I told you this is the worst thing. | ||
| I watched how many of those and I heard him say that again and again and again. | ||
| Yeah, and this one is less like a fairy tale. | ||
| This is something that you do here in conspiracy circles. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| This is something that... | ||
| I know that we've even talked about, by virtue of, I think it was a Bill Cooper episode. | ||
| And I know that Alex believes that the Titanic was a conspiracy. | ||
| He has brought that up. | ||
| Yeah, this is where that connective tissue comes in. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing. | ||
| You start to see him, because the first conspiracy video gets so many fucking likes. | ||
| He is incentivized to keep going. | ||
| So all of a sudden, in very short time, he goes from like, oh, isn't it funny the Kardashians are witches? | ||
| To like, now I'm getting into those fringe conspiracy theories and not the I read on a message board kind of stuff, you know? | ||
| And he didn't even have the class to pronounce it witches. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| I was a little disappointed by that. | ||
| But, I mean, obviously this one's very easy to debunk. | ||
| It's very easy. | ||
| All right? | ||
| The insurance wouldn't have covered the cost of the Titanic. | ||
| So, the end. | ||
| Jay Kent Layton wrote a book on all the Titanic conspiracy theories, and his quote, which I enjoy, the whole switch conspiracy founders, quite literally, on its financial merits alone. | ||
| Which is a nice little, eh, it's a good little pun. | ||
| He's got a nice little, yeah, it's good stuff. | ||
| I mean, like... | ||
| The issue is... | ||
| What is even the conspiracy based on what he's saying? | ||
| They sunk it intentionally? | ||
| Yeah, for the insurance money. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So all the people still died on it and everything. | ||
| Well, they switched the boats because the Titanic... | ||
| Couldn't have actually sunk. | ||
| Well, the Titanic couldn't have actually sailed. | ||
| It's unsinkable. | ||
| No, it couldn't sail because it was already busted. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So they didn't want the Titanic, because it's the most unsinkable ship ever, to go out and sink. | ||
| So they switched it with another boat in order to recoup the insurance losses on the Titanic. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And none of it makes any sense. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| And it wouldn't cover it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, just from a business standpoint. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Insurance folks are very, um, not interested in paying out when they don't have to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Very much so. | ||
| That's their whole business. | ||
| Yeah, especially, and not just that, but again, the money wouldn't, they would have lost money switching these things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is it, what, that's like somebody who's like, hey, I bet, I bet. | ||
| For about a hundred grand, I could make a Titanic disappear. | ||
| There's no other explanation for that. | ||
| Nuts. | ||
| But the thing about that is that with this TikTok video, it's 30 seconds, and you can go look into it in 30 seconds, and it'll all be gone. | ||
| It'll be equaled out. | ||
| But... | ||
| That's not how TikTok works. | ||
| No. | ||
| TikTok doesn't work where you watch a video and then you open a new tab and look into it. | ||
| Let me see about this. | ||
| It just keeps playing. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| They just keep playing. | ||
| And more and more goes and more and more builds up. | ||
| So this was nothing. | ||
| I heard it. | ||
| I Googled, did they switch the Titanic? | ||
| And it was immediately like, no, idiot. | ||
| That was what Google said. | ||
| And then, here we go. | ||
| Another one. | ||
| The birds in the sky are actually surveillance cameras from the CIA. | ||
| We need to talk about this. | ||
| So in 1953, Alan Dules took over the CIA. | ||
| His main goal was that he wanted to vamp up with the surveillance by a lot. | ||
| In 1956, his plan was to wipe out all of the birds and replace them with fake birds. | ||
| Birds that would be watching our every damn move. | ||
| Between 1951 and 1979, the CIA killed over 12 billion birds. | ||
| And here's how. | ||
| So for two years, the CIA designed these very interesting airplanes. | ||
| The bottoms of each of these planes gave out 450 gallons of bird poison. | ||
| Now this poison was very unique because it gave each bird an asymptomatic disease and after 24 hours they would die. | ||
| Meaning there was enough time for each bird to spread the disease multiple times. | ||
| Which is why in two years almost all of the birds were dead. | ||
| Now President JFK tapped into one adult's phone and this is actually what he heard. | ||
| "We've killed about 220 million so far and the best thing is, the robot birds we've released have done such a good job that no one suspects a thing." And that is the conspiracy! | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Shocking if true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, this is just basically like a t-shirt sales scam. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| This was just like a viral marketing thing. | ||
| This is not even like... | ||
| Yeah, it's real bad. | ||
| And somehow also, he like... | ||
| He's getting the details of the conspiracy theory wrong. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he said, quote. | ||
| Yeah, exactly! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly! | |
| We've got robot birds. | ||
| Now, the story actually goes in the most common one in our birds' real conspiracy world. | ||
| Which, again, was rooted in just like a bumper sticker poster t-shirt scam. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Theory is, Alan Dulles, you know, a guy who needs fake conspiracy theories about him. | ||
| He's somebody who's good to attach things to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Makes things believable. | ||
| Boy, his evil, real ones, kind of, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, he's like, ah, we gotta watch everybody. | ||
| And the story is because he's replaced these B-bombers, B-52 bombers, and taken them from having all these bombs to having 450 gallon tanks in there. | ||
| They were like, I don't know why that happened. | ||
| And then some fake scientists from fake Area 51 were like, oh, we know why that happened. | ||
| Birds. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And then the theoretical quote. | ||
| Theoretical quote was from... | ||
| Wait, wait, that's Jefferson, actually, right? | ||
| Yeah, it was not Kennedy. | ||
| No, it was Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| Thomas Jefferson, yeah. | ||
| Talking about robot birds. | ||
| The first head of the CIA reanimated Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| It was, theoretically, Alvin B. Cleaver, the internal communications director. | ||
| His phone was tapped, and this article was far more measured. | ||
| Cleaver is believed to have said, quote, we've killed about 1.1 billion so far, and the best thing is, the robot birds we've released in their place have done such a good job that nobody even suspects a thing. | ||
| Doesn't that just seem so real? | ||
| Very, very real. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I think there's some technological hurdles. | ||
| That don't make sense, especially considering that this would have been in the 60s. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The sort of robot technology that we would have had access to at that point, probably not that great. | ||
| One of the things that people don't take into consideration a lot of the time with robotics is... | ||
| Not so good outside. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I mean, when it rains. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| And the birds are real high in the sky. | ||
| They're way up there. | ||
| There's lightning. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| They could fall out at any moment in time. | ||
| Here's the other thing. | ||
| You know, they live outside. | ||
| It'd be a bad place for a robot to live. | ||
| Now, here's the thing about this kid that I do find... | ||
| Truly dangerous. | ||
| Like, this is something that is... | ||
| And it's really indicative on this clip specifically. | ||
| All right? | ||
| In the actual conspiracy theory, you know, all the birds died, right? | ||
| And he said... | ||
| He wiped out birds, gave them a disease, and then they would die in 24 hours. | ||
| In the real conspiracy theory, their bones melted within 24 hours. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Their bones dissolved. | ||
| Now, when you have that as part of the story, you're like, so you're telling me that in 1953, Alan Dulles had bone-melting technology, and all he did was use it on the birds? | ||
| To be fair, it only worked on birds because they have brittle bones. | ||
| Hollow bones, yeah, there we go. | ||
| They have weak bones. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if you leave that part out and you just have, oh, they all died, then you can make up any number of reasons. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| They've got a disease. | ||
| They've got a thing. | ||
| They've got a thing. | ||
| In the actual story as it's told, their bones melt. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And I think that the other thing that's a disservice or that's kind of dangerous about this sort of information dissemination... | ||
| Oh, he's truly one of the most evil dudes you could look into. | ||
| But those things that are real are not as fun as he killed the birds to watch you. | ||
| You know, it's not as fun as that. | ||
| You know, hijacking the attention in that direction does a disservice to, like, real-world issues. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| And it only gets people to look more at this kid. | ||
| Well, he wants to be TikTok famous. | ||
| Yeah, and he's done it, you know? | ||
| It's such a weird thing for him to have completely succeeded at. | ||
| And then, here we go. | ||
| This is what I want to... | ||
| This is almost like a rapid-fire kind of situation here. | ||
| So, this next one is so... | ||
| Incredibly stupid. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm pumped. | ||
| This is how you can tell if the FBI has tapped into your phone and is watching you. | ||
| We need to talk about this. | ||
| So basically, you're going to want to dial this number into your phone app. | ||
| If you dial it and get this message, like me, that means that you have not been tapped in your phone. | ||
| It's normal. | ||
| However, if it actually dials or it goes to voicemail, that means that the FBI might be tapping into your phone and watching your every damn move. | ||
| Stay safe, y 'all. | ||
| And that is the Conspiracy T. That actually sounds dangerous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, that could have been a fishing kind of thing. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| No, and there's no explanation. | ||
| It's just him just being like, hey, text this into your phone right now to see if the FBI's tapping you. | ||
| To confirm whether or not you're in danger. | ||
| Totally! | ||
| That might as well have been him being like, there's hot singles in your area. | ||
| It's the same fucking thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just an instant, like, oh, yeah. | ||
| And if you watch him, why not do it? | ||
| Yeah, it couldn't hurt. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You think? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I'd like to know if the FBI's watching you. | ||
| I would like to know if the FBI's watching you. | ||
| They're not going to open up a tech magazine how-to geek and be like, oh, okay, that's just the interrogation code that says if your call forwarding is on or off. | ||
| That's what the number is? | ||
| That's the whole thing. | ||
| Well, at least it's benign. | ||
| Yeah, it's super benign. | ||
| At least it's not something where you could have somebody collecting your phone number. | ||
| Luckily, it's benign, but this is out of control. | ||
| I don't know what would be stopping somebody from not having that number just be something that's not benign. | ||
| Yeah, why not? | ||
| Something that's malicious. | ||
| And it doesn't matter. | ||
| If it's obvious or not, or if you're somebody who's smart enough not to, if there's a million and a half views on his TikTok with him saying, put this into your phone right now, a lot of people are gonna do it. | ||
| Or even, like, it could be someone's phone number. | ||
| It could be a tool of targeted harassment. | ||
| Yeah, totally! | ||
| There's so many ways that this type of shit can be abused, and it's in the hands of an 18-year-old fucking kid, you know? | ||
| Who has a lot of teeth to spill. | ||
| And we need to talk about that. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| So, then we go into... | ||
| This is like... | ||
| I kind of want to play these really, really close to each other, so we'll kind of talk a little bit in between each one. | ||
| The next two? | ||
| Yeah, the next three. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The government is controlling us through our water? | ||
| We need to talk about this. | ||
| Okay, so today's theory starts in the 1940s when the government started randomly adding fluoride to tap water throughout the country, saying that it was making people's teeth whiter. | ||
| Now, people started protesting, saying that they wanted more information, that this was infringing on their rights, that they wanted to drink just normal tap water, but the government never responded. | ||
| And to this day, around 75% of tap water throughout the nation has fluoride in it. | ||
| Here's where the theory starts. | ||
| So if you look up fluoride in IQ on Google, there are There are thousands of research studies basically proving that fluoride has a negative impact on your IQ. | ||
| Basically, it's pretty much scientifically proven that drinking fluoride makes you dumber. | ||
| So the theory goes that the government started getting very scared of the rapid intelligence gain in humans that they ended up dumbing everyone down through the tap water. | ||
| That way they wouldn't get overthrown and they would always be above their people. | ||
| I mean, think about it. | ||
| We depend on tap water, so if the government puts something in it like fluoride, we can't just stop drinking it. | ||
| Let me know what y 'all think, and as always, that is today's Conspiracy! | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| That's just literally an Alex Jones conspiracy. | ||
| Yep, straight up. | ||
| We've talked about that a ton. | ||
| A ton. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nuts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| And it's just there in 30 seconds from the guy who you were like, oh, I'll just put the number into my fucking phone in an instant. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No big deal. | ||
| I'll just do what this guy fucking says. | ||
| We need net neutrality for TikTok. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| We need the opposing voice to be heard. | ||
| This is insane! | ||
| 30 seconds must be given to the alternate viewpoint. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there are tons of his videos that have the COVID misinformation. | ||
| I bet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's not malicious. | ||
| This kid isn't a mean kid, and he's not like a far-right kid. | ||
| He's a young... | ||
| He's got tons of Biden-supporting shit. | ||
| This dude is just oblivious. | ||
| He doesn't know what he's doing. | ||
| It's pretty easy to see how a lot of the ideas, if accepted by the audience, would lead someone closer and closer. | ||
| To right-wing territory. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And now play the next clip. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You got it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| This is the dark truth of how Halloween started. | ||
| We need to talk about this. | ||
| Okay, so the origins of Halloween can be dated back to over 2,000 years ago in the Celtic Samhain Festival. | ||
| The Kardashians. | ||
| Now originally this festival was at the end of the summer, but Pope Gregory IV switched it to October 31st for unknown reasons. | ||
| Now let's just say this festival day was scary. | ||
| Now according to Celtic mythology, the day of the festival, aka Halloween, is the one day a year that the passage between the overworld and our world disappears. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Basically spirits and souls come back to earth on Halloween. | |
| Now on this day the dead could swap their soul for years so that they could return to earth and you would be sent to the overworld. | ||
| It was said that in order to keep your soul you had to give away food to the poor so peasants would come to people's houses and get free food. | ||
| And over the years that's evolved into trick-or-treating now with kids. | ||
| Now peasants weren't able to give food so they did something else to keep themselves safe. | ||
| What they would do is they would dress up as dead people or people from the overworld so they wouldn't be targeted by the actual people looking for souls. | ||
| And that's where the idea of dressing up in costumes for Halloween came from. | ||
| And that's today's conspiracy! | ||
| What's the overworld? | ||
| Life, I guess. | ||
| Are we back to Mortal Kombat? | ||
| Something along those lines. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The outer world. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| The outworld. | ||
| Outworld. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| No, and this one, not a conspiracy. | ||
| No. | ||
| Not a dark history. | ||
| Sort of back to fairy tale territory. | ||
| But, I mean, even then, it's just kind of like, it's more of like a mainstream theory of where our modern Halloween culture comes from. | ||
| Celtic Samhain festival. | ||
| And the Pope kind of co-opted it to... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All of this kind of tracks. | ||
| Kind of. | ||
| Kind of. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you look into it, then you would look into it and you'd be like... | ||
| He got more or less kind of what people would say is the... | ||
| In that case, I better fucking call that number. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, like, he's checked out. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I fact-checked this one. | ||
| He's right about this. | ||
| The Conspiracy episode is not a conspiracy. | ||
| It is not dark. | ||
| It's not a... | ||
| It's just a thing, you know? | ||
| He's just telling you a fact, basically. | ||
| Or at least, like, a factual hypothesis. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, yeah, exactly. | ||
| Which is fine. | ||
| And he just mixes that in there with the rest of the bullshit. | ||
| And it doesn't matter. | ||
| There's no difference between them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| And it keeps fucking going. | ||
| And this is the thing about it. | ||
| It is not done. | ||
| It is accelerating. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And it's going through... | ||
| Well, listen to the clip. | ||
| This crazy Illuminati game from the 90s might have predicted the future? | ||
| We need to talk about this! | ||
| Okay, so in 1995, the supposed Illuminati came out with a card game called New World Order. | ||
| It was basically just a chain of cards that was said to predict the future. | ||
| Now, of course, at the time, no one believed it because it was from the Illuminati, but looking at it now, it's crazy. | ||
| The card game had hundreds of cards that were meant for a specific order, but this specific chain of nine cards is so accurate, it's crazy. | ||
| The first one is rewriting history. | ||
| The second is terrorist nuke and the third is Pentagon. | ||
| In the second row, which is basically now we have population reduction center for disease control and epidemic and literally the words quarantine in it. | ||
| And if we're following this very accurate timeline, that means that the last three is what's going to happen in the near future. | ||
| And it says there's going to be combined disasters, kill for peace and tape runs out. | ||
| Like, is this a war? | ||
| It seems like there's going to be rebellion against the police system, which is already starting. | ||
| And I don't even know what this last one means. | ||
| And that, y 'all, is today's Conspiracy Tea. | ||
| Fun fact, right behind you is a bunch of the Illuminati card game on my wall. | ||
| There is no way I couldn't. | ||
| I listened to that one and I was like, well, we're putting this in there because every day Illuminati cards are behind me. | ||
| Yeah, and I mean, like, if you just look behind your head, there's the frog god. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| There's also Bigfoot and vampires. | ||
| You know, they talked about the Center for Disease Control, but they don't talk about the Center for Weird Studies. | ||
| Sure, or the Hammer of Thor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of stuff that's conveniently ignored when people talk about the... | ||
| I mean, he did bring up the fiendish floridators already. | ||
| That's definitely there. | ||
| The clone arrangers. | ||
| The Fred Birch Society. | ||
| Dinosaur Park, of course. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Very nice way to get around copyright. | ||
| Right! | ||
| Yeah, it's real nice! | ||
| And then, of course, Godzilla. | ||
| I can't read Atomic Monster. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah, right next to Dinosaur Park. | ||
| You got it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, fun. | ||
| Yep, so that's the thing about this one. | ||
| The thing that I kept thinking about whenever we're going through this clip is, like, he is kind of almost systematically scouring the internet for... | ||
| conspiracy theories, but they're all the same old ones. | ||
| So it's almost like he's creating this crunched up version of the past. | ||
| Yeah, and you kind of have to assume that if the workflow is basically... | ||
| He's incentivized to find new things to spill the tea about, as it were. | ||
| Eventually, you're going to end up in Holocaust denial. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| Eventually, you're going to run out of things that are interesting, in quotes, to your audience, and you're going to find way more fucked up conspiracy stuff. | ||
| You're going to go from innocuous, look at the Illuminati card game, to the Illuminati drink children's blood. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And I do love, though, that there's something really hilarious about the Illuminati put out this card game. | ||
| And no one believed it because it was the Illuminati. | ||
| Because it was the Illuminati that put it out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| Because whenever the Illuminati is like, they have a press release, I'm like, shut up, Illuminati. | ||
| Again with the Illuminati! | ||
| They won't stop releasing card games! | ||
| Yeah, they're notoriously unreliable as a source. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's bananas. | ||
| And then... | ||
| You know, he's also kind of... | ||
| I'm going to skip the... | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| Let's play the next clip. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'll play that one real quick. | ||
| The news doesn't want us to know that they might have found aliens on Earth. | ||
| We need to talk about this. | ||
| Okay, so just three days ago, they found this huge metal rectangular monolith in the middle of Utah. | ||
| And when I say huge, I mean this thing is gigantic, and no one saw it. | ||
| It just randomly appeared one day. | ||
| Now, a lot of people think that this might be some extraterrestrial life telling us that they're on Earth, and here's why. | ||
| So in the 2001 Space Odyssey movie, when the characters find a metal monolith like this, just like the one in Utah, they find out that it was built by- So many think that there might be a species from another planet on Earth playing a little mind game with us by installing that big metal monolith in Utah. | ||
| And let's not forget that a few months ago, the Pentagon released footage of what they thought were possible UFO sightings and no one really talked about it. | ||
| Things like this and this. | ||
| And they didn't want to release these. | ||
| The only reason they released this footage is because information was getting leaked from the inside and they didn't want people getting concerned. | ||
| And the media is trying to hide it. | ||
| And that is today's conspiracy! | ||
| I can't wait for him to find out that they used real dinosaurs in the dinosaur park. | ||
| I know. | ||
| That's the whole thing. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I was looking into this one, and this one was interesting to me because I do remember the monolith. | ||
| They did discover a monolith in Utah, and it was the talk of the internet for the day. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It was one of those things. | ||
| Reddit user Tim Slane pinpointed the coordinates so the park people didn't tell anybody where it was, rightly thinking crazy people would just show up nonstop. | ||
| And then fuck over native indigenous populations. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Or protected land. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what they, of course, forgot was that the internet is going to find it. | ||
| It's just going to happen. | ||
| Well, because they've got the robot birds. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They can just happen to anything. | ||
| And you know, the thing that he used, he didn't use robot birds, which was interesting. | ||
| He used Google Earth. | ||
| It turns out you don't need robot birds. | ||
| But you know how we developed Google Earth. | ||
| Robot birds? | ||
| You bet. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| He uses historical imaging from Google Earth. | ||
| He triangulates where it is, and then they figure out when it was placed in there, somewhere between August 2015 and October 2016. | ||
| Not entirely sure when it happens. | ||
| Probably part of the Trump campaign. | ||
| Well, roughly around that time, the epic sci-fi drama Westworld was filming in a nearby location. | ||
| So the best bet at the moment is that someone on the crew either didn't pack up properly, Or maybe even use the metal slab to play a long-term Kubrick-inspired prank on the world. | ||
| That's from CNET. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Yeah, so it's been used, the location that they're specifically talking about has been used as a filming location for the longest time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For a sci-fi show. | |
| Yeah, the longest time. | ||
| For tons of sci-fi shows. | ||
| Classic westerns going all the way back. | ||
| So yeah, it is not a super huge terrifying conspiracy theory. | ||
| Certainly not. | ||
| No. | ||
| And those government videos of the UFOs are pretty much bullshit. | ||
| So everybody kind of figured that one out quick. | ||
| But again, too, I think you have the same thing that we see in Alex so often of the melding of fantasy and reality, like movies. | ||
| Movies. | ||
| Movies being treated as if they were real. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And that's so fascinating that that's just such a ubiquitous thing. | ||
| Yeah, the blending, the inability to tell the difference is really kind of... | ||
| Fucked up. | ||
| But the ability to mix them together is terrifying. | ||
| You know? | ||
| The ability to remove... | ||
| From others, how to differentiate. | ||
| Essentially the unwillingness to treat things as they are. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| To draw the line. | ||
| Now, the other thing that he does is almost, you know, he's done a ton of videos on the Mandela effect. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That whole thing. | ||
| That one's fun. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's very annoying, but this one I did find interesting. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Go ahead and play this one. | ||
| Did we switch to a different dimension in 2021? | ||
| We need to talk about this! | ||
| Okay, so everyone's been talking about how last year 2020 felt really off to a lot of people, not just because of COVID, but just because of time and everything. | ||
| So the theory goes that in 2020, we were all put into an alternate dimension, which is why things felt off. | ||
| And once it became 2021, we were all transported back to our original dimension. | ||
| It sounds crazy, I know, but please just listen to this evidence. | ||
| Okay, number one, let's talk about the New Year's Eve ball drop. | ||
| So if you're watching the ball drop this year, you might have noticed that the ball dropped at exactly 12... | ||
| This is the first time ever that the ball drop has been off. | ||
| People think it's because we're transporting from one dimension to the other and it messed up the time. | ||
| Speaking of time, technology still thinks that we're in 2020 for some reason. | ||
| And people are finding that old Mandela effects are going back to normal. | ||
| For example, there used to be a huge Mandela effect that everyone thought Fruit Loops spelled fruit with two O's but it was actually spelled as fruit. | ||
| But now all of a sudden it's back how we remembered it with two O's. | ||
| But y 'all, I literally used to be obsessed with Mandela effects and I wrote them down in 2017 and it says Fruit Loops was actually Fruit Loops! | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Here's why this is interesting to me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That... | |
| I'm sorry. | ||
| No, no, no, please. | ||
| That was one of the ones that felt more clear that he's fucking around. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, it's... | ||
| That to me is like, okay, you're taking this seriously. | ||
| He's not even taking this seriously. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That to me is a bummer. | ||
| Here's the other thing about that, though, is that he is taking it... | ||
| In a very weird, half-serious way. | ||
| He's mocking the idea that we are in an alternate dimension or whatever. | ||
| He's making fun of that. | ||
| What he is... | ||
| What I'm actually serious about, though, is Mandela Effect shit. | ||
| He believes that shit. | ||
| Well, he said he was obsessed with it. | ||
| Yeah, so the Froot Loop stuff is something that he believes, but the alternate dimension stuff is something that he's obviously joking about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So somehow they're both in the same 30 fucking seconds. | ||
| You have a limited amount of time, and you have to deal with stuff. | ||
| Exactly the same that you care about and that is a joke. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's disorienting. | ||
| It really fucked my head up watching all these videos. | ||
| And the thing that made me interested in this is I was like, there's definitely an explanation for this Froot Loops shit. | ||
| Why are people losing their minds over this? | ||
| There generally is for Mandela Effect stuff. | ||
| Always. | ||
| Always. | ||
| And, I mean, I looked into it and Froot Loops was originally called Froot Loops, spelled like fruit, right? | ||
| In 1959. | ||
| Now, before they could continue with that, there was a lawsuit from Paxton who was like, hey, there's no fucking fruit in this. | ||
| You can't call it Fruit Loops. | ||
| You'll make people think there's fruit in it, right? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So they had to change to the two O's. | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| It's always been that way since 1959. | ||
| Or... | ||
| Or? | ||
| We live in an alternate dimension. | ||
| Yeah, well, we lived in an alternate dimension for a year. | ||
| And now we're back to the normal one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I mean, well, you know, you thought COVID was what, but it was in a different dimension. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That was the whole thing. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I was interested. | ||
| I was interested to find out where Froot Loops came from. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| I think that if you take the time, almost every one of those, like, weird Mandela effect things is very explainable. | ||
| Although it does... | ||
| Sort of exploit something that is really universal. | ||
| It's like, wait a second. | ||
| I thought this happened. | ||
| That can be a powerful feeling that you can manipulate people with. | ||
| Especially if you put it in the same videos as other stuff that's complete bullshit. | ||
| You are giving people this feeling of like... | ||
| You're right. | ||
| That's not what I thought it was. | ||
| Wait, I thought it was Berenstain Bears. | ||
| So now I'm in this state of like, now I don't know what things used to be. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And you end up entering a space where you distrust your own perceptions. | ||
| And that's dangerous. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I would... | ||
| Well, the last clip is... | ||
| We don't need to do that one again. | ||
| Essentially, the clip is just him saying like... | ||
| Is Mars getting less red? | ||
| And then conspiracy theories for why we don't see it. | ||
| It's not as red as it is. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And the obvious answer to that is it's not red. | ||
| It never was. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| It's never red. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| And then he goes on to say, did you know, right, that humans used to live on Mars? | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| And then they took all the resources and moved to Earth. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then, all right, what they're going to do is they're going to take all of the resources from Earth. | ||
| And move back to Mars. | ||
| Totally makes sense. | ||
| They're just going back and forth. | ||
| You see what I'm saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That is essentially the plot of Mission to Mars starring Gary Sinise. | ||
| It is again movies confused with real life over and over and over again. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Now the thing that gets me about this kid, and again, it's a child. | ||
| I'm not going to be like, or anything along those lines. | ||
| But with these videos, so often the caption is like, this is just a theory. | ||
| Please no one come after me. | ||
| I am in no way claiming this is real. | ||
| Just a theory. | ||
| I don't want anyone coming after me. | ||
| This level of like, I'm going to say my bullshit, and I'm going to give myself this distance of like, I don't have to... | ||
| I don't have to account for any of this shit. | ||
| Don't come after me. | ||
| I'm just taking other people's ideas, repackaging them for you, and you're somehow calling me a member of this problem? | ||
| I'm taking these ideas that are patently ludicrous and doing no due diligence in terms of disseminating them with the caveat that, like, okay, here's why this isn't true. | ||
| Some people believe this, and it's fascinating that some people believe this. | ||
| But, here is the reality. | ||
| Instead? | ||
| Instead, I'm just going to funnel it to you with a wink, and like, maybe it's real. | ||
| I shouldn't be held responsible for that. | ||
| And at the same time, I'm going to put stuff that is just regular old mainstream information out there. | ||
| You know, just regular stuff. | ||
| And I'm just going to mix those all together, and I'm not going to take responsibility for a single thing about it. | ||
| This is the thing. | ||
| Andrea Marks wrote a Rolling Stone article about TikTok and how it's, you know, going insane. | ||
| So they talked to, she talked to Ty, and he's I've always, from a young age, been really obsessed with the what-ifs and things that don't seem like reality. | ||
| For example, the wholly unsubstantiated theory that Wayfair traffics children, one that was circulated wildly in QAnon, is something that Ty read about. | ||
| This is Andrea saying this. | ||
| Ty read about that, and it genuinely troubled him. | ||
| Quote from Ty. | ||
| I came across an article about it that made me concerned, and so I thought posting it would spread that. | ||
| Adding that he had not realized the theory is popular among QAnon, who believe a satanic pedophile cult is... | ||
| And then he just says, I didn't even know it's like a very right-wing theory, if I'm being honest. | ||
| And that is such the most chilling shit to hear from a person with... | ||
| 10 million views on a conspiracy video. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, because it seems like a point that I think should be made is it's less about him, and it's more about this information dissemination technique and strategy that is being used quite effectively on TikTok. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| You do end up like, oh, whoops, I accidentally did a blood libel. | ||
| Yep, yeah, exactly! | ||
| Yes, 100%. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wasn't even, I wasn't trying to. | ||
| And I believe that he probably wasn't trying to. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| But the effect that it can have is equivalent if he did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| People should be more careful. | ||
| Yeah, I was trying to come up with a conclusion, like a summary of what does this mean and what should we take away from it? | ||
| And, I mean, he's an 18-year-old kid. | ||
| He started this when he was 16. All he wants to do is be famous on TikTok, and he did it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Good for him. | ||
| He found the way that destroys the world to become famous on TikTok, to spread bullshit conspiracy theories and get famous for it. | ||
| And... | ||
| Again, it's not like his fault. | ||
| He's not maliciously doing anything. | ||
| He's not writing or faking or making up bullshit. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| He's just repackaging it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's not like a negative thing he's doing. | ||
| It's the absence of the positive element that he needs to do. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's a crime of omission, essentially. | ||
| And the more I kept going, the more it was like, maybe there's something about the internet, you know, like, maybe we should have a license. | ||
| Like we do for cars. | ||
| You know, like something along those lines. | ||
| And the more I thought about it, the more I've just come to the kind of conclusion that I don't think humanity can engage with the internet responsibly as a whole. | ||
| And I don't think it's possible. | ||
| I wonder about that myself. | ||
| I think early on when we were doing this podcast, my prescription for everything was just like education. | ||
| And I think that that is still definitely something that's very important. | ||
| Hugely important. | ||
| But I don't know if that's necessarily the full deficiency. | ||
| Our brains, you know, we've had thousands of years of development and the introduction of the internet and the way that information can be spread is so new. | ||
| And so fast. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we may not have caught up to it. | ||
| We're not maybe... | ||
| Able to... | ||
| And maybe we will be better eventually, but yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| See, that's why I felt like it was really important to go to TikTok and see what the kids are... | ||
| Because to a certain extent, Alex... | ||
| What are the kids doing? | ||
| What are the kids doing? | ||
| No, I know, but Alex started when he was 19 or 20. He didn't start when he was 25. Right, right. | ||
| Like, it starts somewhere. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| And he started in what would be the accessible medium of the time, which was local access TV. | ||
| You know, there's the... | ||
| You do what you can. | ||
| And back then, where could you get a platform? | ||
| The internet didn't exist. | ||
| The gatekeepers of broadcast television wouldn't allow you on. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So? | ||
| You gotta go to local access. | ||
| Now you have TikTok. | ||
| You have so many... | ||
| Internet platforms where you can build your own thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and I just feel like what I'm watching when I see this kid is the ultimate reality that the internet and the real world cannot coexist. | ||
| Because he's trying to make them coexist. | ||
| He's trying to exist both in fantasy and reality simultaneously and have it not be harmful to anyone. | ||
| And you just can't. | ||
| You just can't. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| I think he shouldn't do this. | ||
| I don't think he shouldn't be stopped. | ||
| I don't know if somebody shouldn't allow him to do this. | ||
| But I think if he was a thoughtful person, he could really get through it. | ||
| Because he's not an insane, far-right... | ||
| Nut job kind of guy. | ||
| It doesn't seem like it. | ||
| No, if he, like, really just educated himself, I think he would himself come to the conclusion, what I'm doing is bad. | ||
| Yeah, I think that, yeah, it's, I don't understand, like, I can't even conceive of how you would set up a system where people are not allowed to. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That seems like it would get off track pretty quickly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, I think we need to do a better job of helping people recognize Actually what they're doing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You are making a choice to do something, and you think the choice you're making is to do this. | ||
| You might think that this is neutral. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And it's actually bad. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You don't realize... | ||
| And it's not your fault! | ||
| You're 18 years old! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| What do you know about fucking theory? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| How would you be like, oh, well, H.L. Mencken said, you know, like, what are you talking about? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Maybe some of that does dovetail back to education. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's really weird. | ||
| So yes, we have gone to the land of TikTok, and it is terrifying. | ||
| Except for the parts where there are cute animals. | ||
| There are cute animals everywhere. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| That part is just fine. | ||
| Yeah, you keep that up. | ||
| Keep it up, TikTok. | ||
| I'm not making an episode about somebody posting the cute little horse and the cat that get along. | ||
| Come on! | ||
| It's so fun. | ||
| It's the best. | ||
| Yeah, I appreciate you bringing this to our attention. | ||
| It's definitely a space that I ignore, but it's not irrelevant to everybody. | ||
| No, I mean, I think it's hugely relevant and I think it's very impenetrable for the rest of society, honestly. | ||
| You don't see people writing too much about TikTok. | ||
| Just because you don't... | ||
| I don't even know how. | ||
| Like, I didn't even know how to put this episode together because it's like, oh, well, what are we going to talk about? | ||
| 30 seconds? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| It's very difficult to kind of get a handle on it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So here we are. | ||
| Well, thank you, Jordan. | ||
| Thank you, Dan, for letting me do this. | ||
| I appreciate you stepping in and taking a swing. | ||
| But, yeah, we'll be back on Monday. | ||
| Indeed we will, Dan. | ||
| Until then, I'm pretty sure we have a website. | ||
| That's... | ||
| I've heard tale of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| It's at knowledgefight.com. | ||
| In 1809! | ||
| Right. | ||
| Kakel Kardashian! | ||
| Right. | ||
| Made a deal with a witch in order to get us a website, and it's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Squarespace. | ||
| We are also on Twitter! | ||
| Right. | ||
| We are at birds, our robots, and at knowledge underscore fight, and I go to bedroom. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| Until then, I am neither Leo, Neo, DZXClark. | ||
| I'm just none of those people. | ||
| And now here comes the sex robot. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |
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