Conspiracy redefines the term as hidden plans benefiting a small group at others’ expense, debunking grand narratives like the Illuminati—born from 1970s Playboy satire by Robert Anton Wilson—while acknowledging real corporate collusion, such as Samsung’s role in the late 1990s RAM price-fixing scheme. The host argues that systemic conspiracies (e.g., wealth inequality) outlast individual targets like Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, and critiques how limited evidence (like 9/11’s Pentagon attack claims) fuels unfounded theories over broader patterns. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
So before we start today, I'd like to announce that we now have an email address for people to contact the podcast with comments, send any feedback, hate mail, nitpicking grammar concerns, and woke us trigger warnings to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
Hit us with your grammar hammer.
We're going to talk about conspiracy today with my good friend Jeff.
Hello, hello.
Looking forward to it.
Getting right to it.
Defining what a conspiracy really is.
It's again, one of these things that people talk about so much that they never really think about what it really is.
But conspiracy is really about information.
It's information being kept among a small group of people as if it's inside a bubble.
It's different than a secret, though, because unlike a secret, the information about a conspiracy must be something that runs counter to the interests of people that are outside the bubble, that don't know that information.
That's the essence of a conspiracy is that only a few people know what's really happening or have a plan of some kind that works against the interests of people that are outside of that plan.
And really, that's conspiracy.
That's the whole deal.
Do you see any problems with that?
Is there any obvious flaws in my?
I see it more clearly as like what you just described could also be the definition of propaganda, I would think.
Well, a conspiracy could push propaganda as part of what it tries to do.
And generally does.
Sure.
I have some interesting examples of conspiracies that most people don't see as conspiracies.
So most people, when they think of conspiracy now, they think of what they call conspiracy theory, but I refuse to call it that.
I call it conspiracy hypothesis.
Thank you.
I'm going to trademark that because that's what it really is.
It's not really an explanation.
It's a guess.
So there's a lot of things that are functioning like conspiracies that aren't conspiracies.
And I want to start including them in this.
So here's a, here's one of my favorite examples of a conspiracy is a football huddle.
It's a perfect definition.
You have one team that is all huddled together.
Everyone is paying attention.
They all have a plan.
They're all going over the plan of what they're about to do on the field.
And then the other team also has a huddle.
The defense has a huddle.
They're discussing what they think the other side's going to do.
And it doesn't seem like a conspiracy because we think of conspiracies as a thing that's attempting to be unknown.
It's convenient for a conspiracy to be unknown.
It makes it easier to pull it off, but it's not necessary that that's the case.
So a football huddle is a conspiracy.
What do you think of that?
I'm honestly hanging on by my philosophical fingernails to this viewing of the concept of conspiracy from the other side like that.
Because like when I think conspiracy, I think the lizard people conspiracy, really wingnutty stuff about the Illuminati, stuff like that, where the conspiracy is there is this great and dastardly evil group that is in power, QAnon, all that crap.
Yeah.
There is this great and dastardly evil power that is in power and they're doing horrible things to us, like sacrificing babies and satanic rituals or whatever.
Right.
Or underground kitty porn ring or whatever we need to brand them with to label them as the big evil conspiracy.
But like it's always about what those people over there are doing.
I mean, I totally have my head wrapped around it as a tool of division, us from them.
But I don't feel that every conspiracy naturally implies, and we are going to do something about it, at least not anymore.
Well, first of all, the one you described fits exactly in the definition that I gave.
Information, their plans, whatever they are, whatever evil plans they are are to their own selves and they're working against us.
That is exactly within a definition I had.
So I have no disagreement there.
Well, sorry, I read that definition as in the first person, because like the football huddle, it isn't like they are running against the majority.
It's we are running against it, our conspiracy internally, right?
Well, in the football huddle, you have two teams and they're the only players, right?
So, just before the play, you'll have one team that's engaged in a conspiracy.
The conspiracy isn't going to last very long.
It's only going to be one play.
It'll be 30 seconds or something, right?
And then they'll come up with a new conspiracy.
And everyone knows that they're conspiring.
Everyone can see them.
They're right there.
They're in the open, but you don't know what they're really saying and what their real plan is.
You might guess and you might even guess correctly, but that doesn't mean they were not attempting to keep the information from you so as to use it against the other team.
And they're only against the other team until they go on to a new game and they're against a different team.
But it's still a conspiracy.
For example, another conspiracy is two people who are engaged in a sexual affair when they're cheating on one or both their spouses.
That's also a perfect example of a conspiracy.
Yep.
And it doesn't need to be involving the government.
It doesn't need to be all-encompassing.
It doesn't even need to be against you personally for them to be conspiring.
They're conspiring against someone's interest and they're keeping the information to themselves or at least trying to.
And that's another perfect example of a conspiracy.
When I look at people who are attempting to identify conspiracies and also people who are attempting to debunk those notions, I see something that they're assuming about conspiracies that I don't always find true.
So I divide conspiracies into two types: perfect conspiracies and imperfect conspiracies.
And here's how I see them.
Perfect conspiracies are like a football huddle.
Everyone involved in the conspiracy knows all the information about the conspiracy.
Everyone in the football huddle knows the play.
They're in there, they're listening, they know the plays, they know what they're going to do.
Their part, each person's part, is a different part on the team, but they all know more or less what the rest of the team is going to be doing.
And that's a perfect conspiracy.
Everyone has full knowledge of everything.
That's more or less how people who are debunking conspiracies tend to assume things.
And to me, that's a straw man.
They'll say that, oh, well, you know, obviously the moon landing wasn't a conspiracy because there was 30,000 people employed in the larger organizational structure to do this.
And it would be impossible to keep the level of organization required to keep them all quiet.
Yeah.
But, and I don't really think that the moon landing was faked, but I also think that that argument against it being a fake is fallacious.
It's a bad argument because you wouldn't need nearly all 30,000 people who are involved in the space program to know that it's a fake for it to be fake.
Yeah.
Hopefully this podcast lasts long enough that I get to do each individual big conspiracy as an individual episode.
That would be fantastic.
So I don't want to get too deep into things like just the moon landing or whatever.
But imperfect ones are the opposite.
Not all the people in the conspiracy know all the details of the conspiracy and some of them might not even know that they're even really that much of a part of it.
Things like the mafia.
The mafia is engaged as a conspiracy.
People say the mafia doesn't even exist.
Organized crime definitely exists.
So all the organized crime organizations individually are functioning as imperfect conspiracies.
The guy at the top knows quite a bit, probably not even everything because the guys at the bottom all got their own scams going on and that's affecting it.
And all the guys at the bottom definitely don't know everything.
They have to kick up their money from whatever scams they have and whatever their organization of their crime is.
It's an imperfect conspiracy.
Not everyone inside knows everything.
And that's a thing that the mafia uses to protect itself.
Whenever one of the mafia guys go to jail, they can only rat on some of the others.
Which brings me straight to one of the main points here, which is we have a question of how do conspiracies succeed or fail in the wild?
You have these conspiracies and people say conspiracies don't happen.
And that's obviously not true.
They obviously happen.
But then they say, they quickly say, well, they happen, but we always learn about them.
So there's sort of two forces when you're looking at this that would allow a conspiracy to succeed.
The first is a force that's on the inside of the bubble.
The people on the inside must have some reason to not include other people outside the bubble in the information.
Maybe they all benefit or maybe there's some well-known consequence that they would suffer.
You know, one imagines that the mafia who rats on other mafia members would suffer dire consequences.
I mean, this has kind of been told in our popular fiction.
And if it's a conspiracy of, I have to check some details on this, but I was pretty sure I read about a group of executives at some electronics companies back in the late 90s and early 2000s who engaged in a conspiracy to artificially inflate the price of RA chips.
Oh, yeah, I remember hearing about that.
It was a while ago.
And I remember Samsung was one of the big companies that was investigated in that.
And this is an example where they're all benefiting from their participation in the conspiracy.
And this is a force that's allowing it to move, if not forever unnoticed, but further down the field.
And any conspiracy that wishes to continue has to have all the people involved having some kind of a benefit or well-known consequence for stepping outside of it.
And often the thing that will happen with conspiracies when you're looking at them is you cannot ever escape the deathbed confession because no one suffers any further consequence once they're dead.
And if they confess to their involvement in conspiracy on their deathbed, you can't ever punish them after that.
Yeah.
So that's the first force.
The second force is that there must be an unwillingness or inability to see inside the bubble of information.
So this is why conspiracies are always better off when no one knows they exist.
If you don't know to look there, you're not going to look there for anything.
You know, in popular fiction, there's all kinds of these.
Vampires are famously conspiratorial.
No one thinks they exist, so no one looks for them.
Almost all vampire fiction includes some version of this.
And I'm sure the executives at the electronics companies would have loved to stay invisible in their price fixing scheme, make many extra billions of dollars on all the RAM chips that were increasing in price.
Eventually they were found out.
If you are known, you have to make it impossible for them to know what it is you're conspiring about or what your plan is.
So that's why a football huddle keeps themselves well away from the line of scrimmage.
And of course, if you're in a noisy stadium at the time, that helps with some noise cover or whatever.
They can't hear what you're saying to make your plan of what you're what play you're going to run.
But like the level of conspiracy that exists there is palpable too, because I'm not a huge sports guy, but I've watched enough football games.
Every single guy on the sideline with a headset on, not one of those guys talks, but what doesn't cover his mouth with a piece of paper or his hand, because both teams employ people who read lips.
And how many times have we seen the hilarious third base coach with all their symbols and signs?
Almost all of it is nonsense.
Of course, it's just meant to confuse, but they need to do that confusion because the other team is attempting to decipher their secret messages, you know, their signals.
Exactly.
So again, another sports conspiracy.
I mean, you have this perfect situation.
We have two teams of any sport that are attempting to outthink the other one.
So the more thought and strategy in the game, the more often you're going to have this level of conspiratorial behavior and it fits naturally.
So that's it, right?
We don't have anything else to talk about with conspiracies.
We're done.
The episode's over.
I don't think so.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
All right.
There's more stuff.
I disagree completely.
Do you have any thoughts on what we've gone over so far?
No, but like there's other stuff we haven't touched on yet.
So how about some other common examples of conspiracies that people don't normally see as conspiracies, like government cabinet meetings, for example, perfect example.
Corporations, all political parties, in fact, are operating in a conspiratorial manner.
They make plans behind closed doors.
Their plans need to be quiet because there's another team essentially that's working against their plans.
Well, the boardroom of pretty much every corporation in the free world.
Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
And, you know, they claim that that's some level of what you might call work product or proprietary information concerning their business.
This leads me to a thing that I'm thinking about lately: I think that the level and proliferation of conspiracy hypothesis is greatly increased by the internet, the greatest communication system ever created, and it's not close.
Obviously, these things are swishing back and forth inside the mouth of the internet all over the place.
But I think that another factor that increases our paranoia about this is the relative change in power between individuals and the powerful.
That seems to be a running theme in many of the popular conspiracy hypotheses out there: the powerful are coming to get the ordinary people.
And as we get things like a greater difference between the relative money available to the very powerful and to the regular people, that money gap is widening yearly.
And I think that's a major factor in people turning to this as an explanation for, I mean, we're losing.
Why are we losing?
It's because they're colluding against us.
I think for a lot of people, that narrative just fits.
What do you think of that?
I don't consider it to be a narrative.
I consider it to be a fact.
Well, okay.
It's a fact that there is an increasing gap between the very richest people and what's known as the average and below average.
That's a fact.
But do you think it's a fact that that would only be happening because like they wouldn't have the power to get that powerful unless they were working together against us?
That's more or less the gist of a lot of these conspiracist notions is that we wouldn't be losing if they weren't working together against us.
Yes, that is also true.
Yeah, but do you think they're really working against us or well, yeah, without derailing this thing into a hit piece on capitalism?
We'll get we'll do a separate episode on capitalism.
But like, look at the existence historically of antitrust laws.
Yeah.
Any free commerce society has always set up first thing rules for tariffs and trade and taxing stuff extra hard that comes from producers other than ours.
And also rules that say you're only allowed to hold so much of the market share.
And every year those laws get more and more eroded.
And every year there's the next big boom.
Everybody gets richer.
Everybody gets leveraged.
And then the next crash.
The ones that were over-leveraged falter and get gobbled up by the bigger fish.
I mean, you work in the oil industry, buddy.
You see this happening.
And oil isn't the only industry that it happens in.
The grocery industry, it happens in, for God's sake.
How many groceries have died in the last decade?
And it facilitates your perfect conspiracy.
Because when the players at the table, when all you need to accomplish the price-fixing conspiracy that you talked about with Ramchips, when there's only like three manufacturers that produce 90% of the market, yeah, it takes one conference call between three dudes to pull that conspiracy off.
That's a really easy conspiracy to get away with.
Human nature being what it is.
If you have the opportunity to cut a corner and make more money, most people will do it.
So it might be worth noting at this point that they didn't get away with it.
It seems easy to get away with.
They only got away with it for like, I don't know, a couple of years, I think.
So there's that.
I also think there's a great big difference between what's projected in people's minds about the Illuminati, the idea that Jeff Bezos and Barack Obama and Donald Trump and all the richest people are all gathering in a room once a year to decide how this thing's really going to play out, absent any actions we make as people, and they're just sort of toying with us all.
That's a whole different thing than what I think you're describing, which is that, yes, we have a situation where the very rich have a level of access to the machinations of government that far supersedes that of regular people.
And that's contrary to the spirit of democracy.
The people are supposed to be in charge of that, the final say on that.
And they're obviously not in a lot of cases.
And they have a great influence on which rules are put in place, which ones are wiped off the board.
Being rich alone gives a person a much greater leverage to get richer.
And I think that's where we are in this.
But I think that the fact that there are fewer people getting that rich every year tells me that if they were working together, some of those should never have trusted the other ones because they didn't reach that level.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
And I suppose I see your point based on the premise of it is pretty kooky to consider that Bill Gates and Donald Trump are going to get in a room together and breathe the same air and be on the same team.
Yeah, let's try to leave Trump out of it.
But yeah, yeah, even Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, yeah, and the guys from Google.
No, no, for sure.
But like what I was speaking to was a more kitchen sink corporate conspiracy, not an Illuminati thing where we're dealing with five billionaires in a room, but more like across an industry where you're down to, you know, a handful of major players, it becomes really easy to collude within that industry.
If you collude within that industry, generally the richest shareholders are the ones who get richer and everybody else gets boned.
And because we see that happening in the kitchen sink bread and butter variety so frequently and so frustratingly, I think it's really easy for people to believe that it's happening on a grand, far more orchestrated scale.
Perhaps because it feeds into one's sense of hope that if it's just 10 guys in a room, if we could find where that room is and blow it up, then maybe we'll all be better.
Yeah.
Dealing with these scores, hundreds of smaller, more mundane conspiracies that accomplish the same end by a thousand cuts as seven nefarious men meeting in a room over cigars.
Right.
But infinitely harder to fight.
Part of this is the psychology of having an enemy you could fight.
There's a reason why in many of our latest our in the Western world, our latest ventures globally, we tend to pick a single person as the person behind it all and needing to go.
For a while, it was Saddam Hussein, and his picture was shown in many places with the idea that we were meant to hate him for a long time.
It was Osama bin Laden and his picture shown in many places with the idea they were meant to hate him.
And this goes against the idea that this is just one guy and the ideas that were presented by these people and placed in the world are probably going to continue after they're gone.
So just getting rid of the one guy is probably not.
The war on terror and terrorism itself didn't end with Osama bin Laden being gone.
It certainly continued and perhaps even got worse afterward.
It's easier to sell this thing as this one person is the face of your enemy.
And that's a powerful thing.
It's hard to resist that.
And I think it's easy to create a narrative about the powerful and the rich to say that, oh, it's these people that are really your enemy.
And when we see these massive gaps in the availability of wealth and resources, oh, you know, it's these people that are against us and we can fight them.
And it feels like something we can fight.
But of course, if you try to fight it that way, you're fighting the wrong battle.
You're fighting it the entirely wrong way and you're going to lose because you're going to use the wrong strategy.
You could never fight against those people because some other billionaire would take their place after they were toppled and get all those resources.
It would never come to us.
It's part of, it seems like sometimes with conspiracies, it's like it's a psychological soother.
Yeah, I think you're right.
It gives you an easy person to hate.
Yeah.
What was the name of the designated bad guy in 1984?
Big Brother was the all-knowing, all-seeing father.
And what was the name of the...
I don't remember his name, but I do remember the man you're talking about.
And I think that's the same idea.
They were giving a face where like every citizen had to spend five minutes a day looking at that face and hating him.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
And they would, they would parade prisoners of war through town for the people to vent their spleen upon because people needed someone to hate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
These, this is the face of your enemy.
Yeah.
That's a very salient point, the soother.
We have a problem with single event observation.
When I look at conspiracy hypotheses online, things that only happen once are a problem for science.
Really, history is about a scientific study of one-time events, if you think about it.
There's a big problem with first-hand accounts and eyewitness testimony.
This is also a problem in courtrooms that we haven't ever, what we most hear about is that eyewitness testimony is the best testimony.
And oftentimes it is not even nearly the best testimony.
Forensic evidence should be the best testimony.
And it's very, very true.
It's very, very salient when it comes to single event observations, 9-11 being one of the biggest ones.
A lot of people witnessed a lot of different things on that day.
Everyone has a memory of events from that day, most especially people who were in New York, but a lot of other people too, people who were in Washington, D.C., people who were in all kinds of other places have all kinds of recollections of many, many things.
And cell phone cameras were not common then, not even nearly common then.
They were barely thinking about putting cameras into phones at the time.
So really, there wasn't a lot of individual footage of this stuff for 9-11.
And we had a couple of people who filmed it, and that has led to no end of chaos with all the armchair forensic investigators who have gone through it and try to show this and show that.
And this is, these are squibs and this is, these are definitely explosives and they're 100%.
This is, you know.
Aircraft fuel burns at X degree, Y degree is what is required to melt structural steel.
Yeah.
And this is all of this is problematic.
And 9-11 particularly was, as far as the, all the conspiracist notions that came from it was further complicated by the things that the many government agencies involved did.
So one thing that they did in Washington, D.C. was they collected all the video footage that they could find of the event and they've never released it.
It's just a thing that happened.
This was for the attack on the Pentagon.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There wasn't that many.
Cameras weren't nearly as ubiquitous then as they are now.
So it wasn't like they went around and every business had to give up.
There was probably like half a dozen or something like that.
There was a couple of gas stations, right, that had cameras, security cameras for watching things and they caught little things.
And there's almost no footage of what happened at the Pentagon.
And that's incredibly problematic.
Almost all of the regular investigatory functions we would do with airplanes didn't happen, almost none of it.
The NTSB would normally investigate every plane crash of any kind, was not involved in any of it.
They were hands off.
They were kept away.
And that's only kept the thing in a further shroud.
And if you wanted to encourage people to make conspiracy hypotheses, you couldn't have created a better garden for it.
Yeah, there were a lot of things that sort of beg questions.
Like one of the most common conspiracies that I've heard regarding the Pentagon attack was that the reason why everything was cleaned up and hushed up was because it wasn't a plane.
It was a cruise missile fired from a U.S. source and entirely staged to hit a wing of the Pentagon that not that many people were in for the explicit purpose of justifying war.
That's the ongoing conspiracy hypothesis regarding 9-11, right?
Was that we needed a reason to attack brown people.
Yeah.
So being the great Illuminati U.S. government, depending on what version you hear, either directly trained or just let access happen.
When they learned that it was going to happen, they allowed it to happen and let it get through.
But yeah, a lot of that is based off like secondary, well, you know, they covered it up.
So there must be a reason why and it must be nefarious.
There's a meme that I saw and I wish I could find it again.
I've searched it, but I saw someone post this as this idea that there were alternate explanations to pretty much everything.
They had a series of dots in the sort of children's game of connect the dots.
And they had the dots, some lines drawn between the dots as if to form a picture.
And then right next to it, they had the same dots, but a completely different picture drawn by a different set of lines between the dots.
And this is meant to create as an illusion in the minds of the people viewing the meme that were perfectly valid to have a completely different explanation for this set of dots.
But what's important and almost always true about conspiracy hypothesis is that, first of all, there's usually more dots on the one page that's not the conspiracy hypothesis.
So they're usually ignoring some dots.
And what's also generally true is that they're not just coloring lines between dots.
They're usually drawing an entire other picture off to the side and maybe an extra page or an extra thing off to one side just to explain where these dots would be.
And that other whole page of an extra, they're drawing an animal to attach to where they think, oh, these dots, they describe a beak on the next page over is the entire animal that would be connected with this beak because I have to explain where the beak came from.
That's more or less where I see a lot of conspiracy hypothesis.
They have to construct a large number of other things that have no attachment to anything that they've really witnessed or anything that anyone else has even written.
Like there's not even other people who have eyewitness testimony to this thing that they can point to and say, well, you know, those people, you know, they're usually having to make it up, which really puts it in the fan fiction category.
Yeah.
And that brings me to kind of my wrapping up point here is that speaking of fan fiction, this is an interesting thing I just learned the other day.
It's crazy that I just learned this.
But the Illuminati was an idea created by an author named Robert Anton Wilson.
This guy worked for Playboy magazine back in the 60s and 70s.
And one of his jobs at Playboy was to answer reader letters.
And there was a lot of letters that would have all kinds of crazy ideas in them.
And this gave him the idea that there was in the world, in the zeitgeist around the world around him, there was people who had these conspiracist notions, that there was people in rooms gathering.
All they needed was some content to talk about.
So he wrote three books in a trilogy describing these ideas, like taking some of the ideas from letters that were sent in and then elaborating on them greatly to describe the Illuminati that were secretly controlling the world.
And that's where this idea came from.
It came from a guy that was attempting to poke some mild fun at the idea that this could be possible.
And most people don't know who Robert Anton Wilson is.
They don't know about these books.
I didn't know about him until a few days ago.
Blew my mind.
That's funny.
It never occurred to me that someone might have actually wrote fiction about it, knowing that it wasn't real.
It always occurred to me that the idea of the Illuminati was based just on people who saw rich people and saw that they were getting more rich and decided they must be colluding in order to get such a great advantage over us.
They don't need that advantage.
And if they were all in the same room together, you're talking about people who got to where they are by being incredibly selfish.
Selfish in a way you probably don't even understand.
Incredibly selfish.
To think that they would work happily together without trying to also take from each other and therefore have their whole cooperation break down is really, it's ludicrous.
It doesn't fit with their characters as we know them.
We would have to imagine them as being much different characters than we know them to be, which would make them, what, like well-trained spies?
The idea that they would act incredibly selfish to us in all other arenas and then not be incredibly selfish when they're together, that doesn't match.
You're taking fictional people that have the same names and then putting them in that room.
That's what you're doing in your mind when you're doing that.
And that's the thing you have to think about is that it doesn't match their character.
I think we can, just based on the new information of our source of the title of the group, we can consider the Illuminati conspiracy hypothesis to be pretty resoundingly debunked.