Brent Lee, a former conspiracist with 15 years in the movement (2003–2018), traces his exit from Illuminati/NWO theories to contradictions like Sandy Hook hoax claims and Brexit/Trump’s unpredictability. He rejects "reality-denying" ideologies—flat Earth, anti-vaxx, QAnon—as baseless, noting how algorithms amplify unrelated political obsessions across demographics (e.g., Canadian conspiracists suddenly supporting fringe U.S. figures). Once drawn to David Icke and Alex Jones for focus, he now sees them as manipulative grifters exploiting cognitive dissonance, a tool both sides use to dismiss opposing views. His shift from ritualistic sacrifice narratives to skepticism highlights how even well-meaning belief systems collapse under conflicting evidence, leaving only the comfort of discarded illusions. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
I have a special guest today, and I will allow him to introduce himself.
So go ahead, Brent.
Hi, I am Brent Lee, and I am a former conspiracist of 15 years.
From 2003 till 2018, I was consumed by what I call an ideology of conspiracism.
You know, I believed in a global conspiracy headed by a sort of Illuminati New World Order kind of group, but we didn't really know what they were really called, but we just called them the Illuminati.
And in 2018, I started to completely move away from the whole conspiracy scene.
And now I've got a podcast to explain conspiracies.
And I spend a lot of time sharing my experience of being down that rabbit hole for 15 to 20 years now.
Yeah, it's fascinating.
I've listened to your podcast and I haven't.
I think there might be some other content somewhere else that I haven't caught yet, but I'm slowly tracking it down.
Don't worry, Brent.
Listen to it all eventually.
After I heard your podcast, I really wanted to have you on my podcast because I try to get across a certain thing about this concept that I'm not seeing.
I'm kind of in this middle ground.
I don't think I wouldn't call myself a voice of reason.
I don't think I get to claim that for myself.
History maybe will tell whether anyone is a voice of reason or not, but I'm in the kind of a middle ground.
I know some people who are in that place and I've know a lot of people who are not in that place.
And they just don't seem to be coming together at all.
They don't seem to be, their ideas don't seem to be meeting ever.
And I, so I really like showing people who are not conspiracists that conspiracists themselves are not stupid or defective.
They're not, you know, the people who haven't slipped down that rabbit hole don't shouldn't really work hard at getting to pat themselves on the back and congratulate themselves on how they're better than conspiracists.
Under the right conditions, they would also be conspiracists.
And this goes with my idea that we all have, we're all born with essentially a meat computer.
And that meat computer comes with software that's loaded by default.
We don't get to opt out of it.
We get to use it more or less.
And it's a complicated set of software.
And it's not really created for our modern world.
And, you know, many factors in our modern world will lead someone astray in this.
And that's, you know, I think your story exactly fits what I'm trying to say there.
What are your thoughts?
It also sounds like you're arguing for like nature and nurture.
You know, when you just said about the meat computer, that's your nature.
And then the societal impact is your, the nurture.
Right.
Like both do these things form who you are.
Yeah.
And you can't opt out of either of them.
Yeah.
I usually see it more like We are stuck with the computer we have, but it's not a bad computer.
Some people think they're unable to think about these things or, you know, discuss about these things.
And I think that's terrible.
I think everyone really has something going on upstairs and they should engage that.
Because if they don't, that's when things get worse.
And so that's where we are now.
So before we get too deep into what you're doing, I'm wondering if you want to just do, tell us briefly about how it is that you came to change your mind about this.
Because that's interesting, I think.
Yeah.
To be honest, like this, the first inkling of starting to question what I was, what I believed was actually questioning what everyone else was talking about.
And that goes back to 2012, Sandy Hook.
A narrative started being spun of like these what we were calling at the time false flag attacks, which were attacks that really happened.
People started spinning a new narrative like that these things were hoaxes and that nobody died and it was like crisis actors and stuff.
And a lot of like my friends were pushing this same narrative.
And I really questioned it because like it didn't fit my ideology of like what this conspiracy was, which we'll get into a bit later.
Like I thought it was ritualism and sacrifices.
Like I said, we'll get into that a bit later.
But over the next six years, pretty much, there was more and more things that I disagreed with that were being pushed by the truth movement.
And the truth movement is like the culture of conspiracy to me.
It's just all of the people that are in their little pockets, like the flat earthers or the 9-11 truthers or the people that believe, you know, the World Economic Forum sort of conspiracies.
It's like there's a whole bunch of different ones.
And I just call the whole thing, call all of them truthers.
I call it the truth movement and conspiracy culture.
Right.
I use more syllables, but I think it's from my perspective more accurate.
I call them reality denying ideologies.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, you were talking about this in your previous episode.
And I was listening to it.
And this is to me, what you just called it is like the thing that started to pull me out.
Right.
What I was believing before, I felt like was more rooted in reality.
Yeah.
And these other things that were coming out since 2012, all these other conspiracies, like hoaxes, Mandela effect, flat earth, these sorts of conspiracies, they were doing exactly that.
They were making you question reality.
You know, they were denying what reality actually was.
And that was strange to me, you know.
But these are the things that actually started to pull me out, like my beef, say, with the truth movement.
But then there was other things happening on like the global scale that actually like politics and stuff that started to make me doubt that there was even a new world order, you know, that any of this stuff was controlled.
There was Brexit.
Trump became president.
We there was a late labor leader here in England, Jeremy Corbyn.
Like he was like this rebel, like socialist rebel, and somehow he became a bit in charge of this centrist party that I'd always thought like Tony Blair used to run this party.
And I just was like, how did how did like the protester become the leader?
That this isn't how it works.
It was things like this that were coming out that just made me really question my whole understanding of what the new world order was, what the politics were.
You know, to me, these things wouldn't, they wouldn't have happened, essentially.
The new world order wouldn't have let, say, England leave the, or the United Kingdom leave the European Union.
Yeah, for if the Illuminati is controlling everything, they seem to have a great lack of control over a great many things.
Yeah.
And to be fair, like 2020 really, really, although I was, you know, completely away from it and I didn't believe it anymore, 2020, the pandemic and everything really convinced me that there is no, no one in control.
Yeah.
It's just how it turned out.
Yeah.
The world is the way it is because that's how it turned out.
That's how I see it.
Yeah.
Which is, to me, it's almost worse because if there were a cabal, we could go to a room somewhere and at the right time and find them and drag them in the street and, you know, treat them accordingly.
And then we could be free.
But the fact that this is just how the world turned out means that there is no room that we could go to at the right time to catch them all in the act and carry on.
We have to, we have a much bigger job to do.
It's, it, it would be almost comforting if there were a cabal, right?
Yeah.
I, I, I, I hear this a lot, like people saying like it must have been comforting having that kind of thing.
And I feel like it wasn't comforting.
I think comforting might be the wrong word, but what it gave me was a focus.
Sure.
Yeah, a focus, like who our enemy is, I guess, who is bringing us down, but I still suffered the same like you know, feeling like of being oppressed or something by these, this, I guess, imaginary wizard of ours, you know?
Yeah, the man behind the curtain, right?
Yeah.
So I know that it's going to come up and I'd like to talk about it.
So I want to just briefly mention here the definition of cognitive dissonance.
So this is a phrase that's been thrown around a lot.
Some people consider it a buzzword or a buzz phrase or whatever.
I don't.
It's a scientific term for a thing that a psychological thing that goes on inside people.
And I think it happens more regularly than people, more regularly than people give it credit for.
So this is an attempt to make two contradictory beliefs coexist inside your mind.
It's a psychological stress from having to face something right in front of you that contradicts the things you believe or the things you value.
One would think that we are all rational creatures and that's all fine, but we are far from naturally rational creatures.
We have, our brains, our meat computers, have an entire toolbox of things that are meant to deal with this situation.
And they include all kinds of justifications and ways to ignore sources of information, self-delusion.
This is all part of this.
And that's a thing I'm hoping I get to pry in deep enough to talk to you about is whether or not you have any real experiences, or if you could describe maybe what it's like to have that cognitive dissonance, to have a thing appear in your world that you cannot deny that is directly contradicting all the things you believe.
Go I'm on the spot here.
I can't think.
It's okay.
You got time.
There's no clock.
If you'd like, I can go on with something else and you'll have time to think about it.
So I have another thing that I just wanted to mention because I think it makes the conversation about these concepts easier.
Is that if you take the human population and you divide it into two subsets that are separate.
The first subset we would call conspiracists, and they're the people who are entranced by these conspiracist notions.
And then the next subset is what we might call the consensus view.
The vast majority of people are not conspiracists at this time.
And so that we call them the consensus view.
And then if you take the conspiracists as a subgroup and you divide them further into two separate groups again, one being what might be called the speakers who are conjuring and communicating these conspiracy notions.
And then the other subsection that would be listeners who are just paying attention, sometimes repeating conspiracist claims, but they're not really adding to them.
They're not, you know, making them more convoluted or adding any info.
They're also not researching.
They're just listening and nodding their heads and paying attention and following along.
And of course, as is pointed out many times on your podcast, that some of these speakers, as I'm naming them here, are making a fair amount of money in what they're doing.
And of course, maybe some are making less money or maybe even none.
It's difficult to say, but you, you clearly, I mean, you are much more well-informed in this world than I am.
I learned that in episode one of your podcast.
And it's, you know, there were names being bandied about that were commonplace names for you.
And I, I was, I had to look them up.
I had to stop and dig deeper.
And I, I, I mean, the first episode is about lizard people.
And it's, it's, I'm well aware of the idea of Illuminati.
Lizard people is a whole extra level on top of the Illuminati, right?
It really is.
Pyramid.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's so far up the pyramid, it was in the you know hazy clouds.
I couldn't see it from where I was at the bottom.
And so it's you call them, I think you call many of the people that I would call speakers in this scenario.
You call them some level of grifters, influencers.
Influent, I call, I call these influencers and believers.
Right.
That's my point.
Well, that might be more apt to what's actually happening here.
And you often refer to them as having a grift.
And that's that to me indicates some level of conscious dishonesty, right?
That they know that they're lying and they're doing it for gain.
And, you know, it's a grift.
And that would make the listeners then marks, right?
I mean, essentially.
Yeah.
Yeah.
these i've come to like believe these people are charlatans sure yeah that word too that's the the new word is grifters but to me they are charlatans you know i'm 42 years old or 43 years old for keep forgetting i'm older charlatan that's the word we we know snake oil salesman right that's what these people that's what these people are that's what the influencers mainly are I mean,
there's a couple that are like believers and they believe certain things to certain levels, but half the truth is still a whole lie.
So if they're telling half the truth and half lies, they're still liars.
They're still charlatans.
They still are selling the same amount of lies as they are truth.
And people like David Icke, Alex Jones, Jordan Maxwell, they're too smart to know that they're not peddling lies.
That's all I can say.
The more I look at it, the more I look at different things, it's like the truth is just so obvious.
It's right there.
Do you think from their perspective, they're engaged in some level of modern day freak show circus in that they're not traveling around with actual exhibits on their circus, but they are inviting people to come look at their ideas and their ideas are so strange and that they don't really care if people believe that the bearded woman is really a bearded woman.
It doesn't really matter as long as they show up for the show.
Do you think that fits any of these individuals?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, some of my friends probably don't think that they're quite as bad as I do, but I honestly do think a lot of them are exactly like that.
I don't think they like David Icke himself, like I don't think he believes a lot of the stuff he talks about.
You know, I think he is just selling bullshit.
I'm sorry.
He's good at convincing people that he believes it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I believed him.
I believed him wholeheartedly.
I used to watch nine-hour lectures of him.
I had like six of his books.
I listened to radio shows, interviews, all this different stuff from him.
And it wasn't like I believed everything that he's talked about or most of these other influences.
It wasn't like I believed 100% of what came out of their mouth.
Like it was just that they had references that I could look at.
You know, they'd have the ideas and I can go check them out.
But the thing is, is I feel like they're dishonest with their sources.
So when they tell you to go look something up, they're pointing you to a source that backs them up instead of like, here's all the different references.
You know, and I find that it's really sneaky.
It's a sneaky thing to do to people.
I think in that you're probably hitting the nail directly on the head in that if they believed what they were saying, they would act differently in that scenario, right?
They'd be more transparent about their sources, right?
Yeah, right.
Which I think you're right.
It's difficult for us to see on this side of the fence that that's really happening because we aren't paying as much attention to all of these notions.
Many of the people on my side of the fence are just rejecting all of those ideas and all the people with them.
And that's yeah.
Yeah.
And they're just willing to just wash their hands and say, well, too bad.
Joe didn't make it.
He's a conspiracist now and he's not getting invited for coffee.
Right.
But I think that you're right.
That if they were if they felt that what they were doing was good and righteous, they would be more transparent.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I want to run an idea past you here, if you don't mind.
Is it possible that some people who are in among the conspiracists are true believers, but are still dishonest in that they have what I might call the dishonesty of zealotry.
And this is what I mean is that they believe two things.
First is a belief that they are in a pitched battle with, you know, whatever creature is at the top of their pyramid on their set of ideas and that they need to convince everyone else to be with them in order to have an opportunity to battle this thing.
And the second is that the people, some of the people, or maybe even all of them who are in a consensus view are actively lying about their level of participation in this.
And that because of these two things together, they're in a pitched battle.
And many people on the other side are already lying.
They feel like this, like lying themselves is just essentially like an escalation of weaponry.
That if the other side is willing to use these chemical weapons on us, we should be willing to also use these chemical weapons on them.
We shouldn't feel bad about lying to them about these things as long as we get the goal done, which is, you know, and this is essentially that the end will justify the means, that they believe that there's really lizard people.
And that as long as the lizard people are defeated at the end, it doesn't matter how many lies I had to tell in order to get there.
Do you think there's anyone in this camp that fits that description?
Yeah, I think I see quite a few believers that do this.
I've seen it like for over 10 plus years.
Like a lot of in like the this age of memes, it seems like they are happy to, you know, pass a lie on just to get your attention to to bring you over to the side.
Yeah.
I've witnessed it so many times, like just even like posting fake quotes, you know, like right and they don't care.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just because it proves their point, like some JFK like quote that doesn't really exist or right.
You know, and I've just, like I said, I've witnessed it over the years for many, many years, people just doing it.
Yeah.
I kind of, as a truther, at the time, I just thought, why didn't you double check that?
You're supposed to fact check.
You're supposed to like do your research.
Yeah.
And I just thought it was a mistake.
I didn't think like people were doing this just to get you on their side, trying to get your attention, trying to provoke you into seeing their truth.
And that's what I did start to eventually think.
Yeah, that is interesting that it's because this is a thing that I've noticed is more or less consistent with conspiracist behavior is that they tend to not care how consistent they are from one month to the next, for example.
The flat earthers are the most blatantly obvious example of this in that they don't care what shape the earth actually is, it turns out, as long as it's not spherical.
Yeah.
It doesn't matter if the if they originally got the idea from the description in the Bible, which turns out it's not listed in every version of the Bible, but in some of them it lists it as a flat surface that's square with a pillar on each corner to hold it up.
And of course, the current model, every time I check, the model changes every couple months, but it's not square.
It's sometimes it's not flat even.
It's only slightly curved, but not a sphere.
And it's so they change this regularly.
And the only thing that's consistent is that they want the other side to be wrong.
They don't even really care if what they're doing is right, as long as the other side is wrong.
And that's an interesting thing that I noticed is that that's the only thing I can find that really explains the totality of all their behavior.
They never double check against anything they previously said.
So going to a conspiracist and reminding them of what they said two months ago and how it's wrong now never seems to do any good at all because they've already moved past that to a new thing and a new angle from which to try to say that thing X is so.
And they don't care about the thing they said last month because that's already old news.
I think that's a new thing.
I think that's a new phenomenon.
I don't think it's a it's not a stand it wasn't like standard practice when like I was a conspiracist.
I feel like the internet like, or social media changed, or something in the past five six, seven years or whatever something.
Something's changed and I feel like yeah, the truthers are not the same as they used to be.
When I, when I fell down the rabbit hole and when I started becoming parts of different communities and meeting different people, I swear it was a different breed.
Well, I think all of us were different in 2002 than we are in 2022.
Yeah I guess that's right.
It must just be society moving on.
And like I said, social media accelerating it.
Yeah, it's it's harder for a lot of people to just read books because we've become more used to having our our intake of media and conversations with people even split up into very small chunks.
And that that makes it more difficult to just read 200 pages at a time.
Most people don't read 200 pages in a month anymore.
Some people don't read 200 pages in a year.
And that's part of a thing that technology has had an effect on in our society.
And of course, as you point out, it's affected the truther community as well as the consensus view.
Yeah.
Everyone.
No, that's a good point as well.
Like the notice earlier, I said I had like six David Icke books.
Yeah.
You know, so that's what we used to do.
We used to actually go and find the book and have to try and read it.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
And of course it's just watch a YouTube video 10 minutes.
Looking for any of the obscure documents then was much more difficult.
And now it's a lot easier.
One would imagine that having those obscure documents be a lot more readily available would make it easier to show that the people relying on those documents to prove a thing are wrong.
But as I've heard specifically in your podcast, when you actually read some of those books, they say something completely different than what the charlatan who's relying on it is actually trying to tell people.
And that's, I mean, I haven't read those books either.
I haven't, I haven't bothered.
I haven't had time or the inclination.
But you're right is that that's where we are is that having the information more readily available isn't helping because we're also not reading as much.
To download the 9-11 report and read it, something like 400 pages.
No one's going to do that.
So few people have really done that.
It's readily available.
I'm sure you can go get it now.
I got it way back in the day.
And but it's not, it's not something people would do.
And therefore, making it that long, you know, I would want the Cliffs Notes version of that, really.
Yeah.
Something 40 pages tops.
They'll listen to a podcast that talks about it.
Yeah, but no one does a podcast about what really happened.
They do podcasts about what might have happened, the conspiracy hypothesis that's never proven.
So I have another idea that I've mentioned on this podcast a couple times is that people who are conspiracists, they want to believe in these conspiracies.
And that's the thing that's really driving them is that they want to believe it.
I don't get any credit for that idea, by the way.
I saw it on a poster in Fox Mulder's office on the TV show X-Files.
Can you see my camera?
Oh, there's something I should be watching.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
Sorry.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah, that's right.
I want to believe.
Yes.
I've got the poster behind me.
Yeah.
He wanted to believe in the things that he was coming up with.
And that's an idea that I came back to when I started to look at these conspiracists.
And it occurred to me that that's a thing that they, that threads them all together.
They want to believe these things, which is it doesn't seem to be like they stumbled across some incredible evidence and then the evidence convinced them.
And it's also true that new evidence that contradicts that stuff doesn't convince them to come back.
The thing that really explains their behavior is that they want to believe these things.
Do you think that that affects what, you know, is wanting to believe these things a thing that you noticed yourself doing at any point?
I think today, even now, there's certain things I want to believe.
Like what?
Bigfoot?
Sure.
It would be fun to find Bigfoot.
Yeah.
The fun stuff, the fun things, like the mysterious, you know, that sort of stuff.
Like that would be be great.
Those would, that would be amazing discoveries to to witness, you know?
Right.
Um, I don't want to believe that these top people are murderous paedophiles.
Like, that's not something that we ever wanted to believe.
Right.
I didn't, I'm, I'm a Christian, you know, and to me, it was always tied into Luciferian worship or something.
And like, I didn't want to believe that Lucifer ruled this planet or wanted to rule it by the Antichrist coming onto the earth.
And, you know, I didn't want that stuff to be true.
But it was true to me.
So I had to believe it.
You know, I think that I want to believe and I have to believe is maybe there's, that's a line.
Once you cross into something, it just can get a bit out of whack.
But if you just want to believe in Bigfoot, that's, that's cool.
That's, that's, that's fine.
But when it starts to affect like other humans, like saying Sandy Hook is a hoax or saying that the royal family killed Princess Diana in some secret ritual or anything like that.
It's like, I'm actually crossing a line here and hurting people.
Right.
Like no one is trying to say that we have to elect a different president than this one because this one doesn't believe that Bigfoot is out there and the other guy believes in Bigfoot.
And so therefore we need to change everything about our world because we need to go after Bigfoot.
If we don't get him, he's going to get up.
Exactly.
If it is that, it wouldn't be so bad, would it?
Only that kind of did happen, but yeah.
I have a list that I keep of what I call reality denying ideologies, as I said.
And I'd like to just go through and just see which ones you believed in at the time, just to kind of get a good baseline for this.
And the top of my list is flat Earth.
Did you believe in a flat Earth?
No.
Okay.
Never.
I did look into it.
Right.
At first, I was like, no, no, this is ridiculous.
And then someone told me, nah, dude, NASA, NASA's lying to you about everything.
You have to look into it.
And I was like, oh, yeah, shit.
Hold on.
NASA secret space program.
Yes, they are a cult.
Let's go look into it.
I spent about a week looking into everything and me and my partner both looked at each other basically at the end of it and went, well, that's a load of rubbish.
Right.
On to the next.
At any point in that, did you get out something that would be like a sundial and take some measurements of the actual path of the sun across the sky or anything like that?
No.
I didn't bother with that.
No, I not long before I did that, like me and my partner were like binging cosmos.
So almost everything that they were talking about, we're like, no, well, that's not, that's not true.
That's not exactly how it happens, is it?
That's not what Uncle Sagan said.
Yeah, yeah.
Carl Sagan, yeah.
Savior of humankind.
So next on my list, anti-vax.
Were you an anti-vaxxer at any point in this?
Yeah.
Yeah, totally.
So I thought it was part of a depopulation plan.
And if I was a truther today, I would have definitely 100% thought that the vaccine rollout across the globe was in some form of fashion going to probably kill people.
Like most people, like I thought I definitely can see 100% why people fell for it now.
But yeah.
That must be an interesting view.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So next on my list, this is my personal list in order of sort of order of importance for me to delve into on my podcast.
But next on my list is QAnon.
Did you ever?
Yeah.
No, not strictly QAnon.
To me, like everyone's got a different definition of what QAnon is actually.
And to me, QAnon, because I was a truther at the time that QAnon came about, like QAnon is just about the Q drops and believing that Trump has a, is waging a secret war.
Right.
You know, he, like the storm is coming.
And that's like the crux of it.
Everything else, the satanic paedophiles and the ritualism and all of that type of stuff, I 100% believed all that because that all kind of stems from earlier conspiracism.
Right.
That fit in with other things you already believed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The guy who started Q, the actual original poster of Q, I've read like his old posts and I, I swear down, whoever it was was like a big time William Cooper fan.
They were as a real truther and they really believed in like the William Cooper style of conspiracism.
You can just, it's like a blueprint when you look at it.
But yeah, the Trump stuff, you know, that really threw me when I was coming out of the rabbit hole.
Like it was really like, there's something wrong with all of this.
Why is Trump going on the InfoWars on the Alex Jones show?
What's going on?
There are some people who are cynical enough, I believe is the right phrase, to suggest that QAnon is or was an effort to attract the conspiracy-minded toward the Trump beacon.
That's difficult to say for sure is or isn't happening, given the secret nature of the person who is creating and, you know, putting out the Q drops, as they were called.
Yeah, I'd say that like, I don't know about the actual poster because there's so much, like you said, mystery around it.
And there's all these different theories of who it could be.
But Q, in one sense, is sort of irrelevant.
It's all the influencers around Q, all the influencers that started communities after Q.
Yeah.
Like those are the dangerous ones.
Yeah, I agree.
But they, one might even go so far as to call it the one ring of conspiracy notions because it does sort of rope everyone in who's in that world.
I don't know anyone who was in that world that wasn't somehow, I mean, you maybe had a different view.
I mean, it seems to me from the standpoint you have in the UK, you might have a different view of this than we do here in North America.
I mean, Canada, we have, we're overwhelmed by all the media from the US.
So we're different nations and we behave differently as people.
But online, we might as well be in the United States online.
We are, you know, we're a tiny flickering candle and they're a bright lighthouse right next to us.
No one sees us and all we see is that lighthouse.
So we get everything from there.
We, you know, even things like Facebook, some things on Facebook that are meant to target people of a specific demographic that don't have data or don't target based on region will target,
will be meant to target blue-collar workers in the States and will definitely also be directed at blue-collar workers in Canada, regardless of anything else, because they just, there's, oh, all the blue-collar workers, tick boxes, X, Y, Z, these ads go to these people and they get them.
And so you get many of the same trends here as you do there as far as demographics and who's exposed to which ad about which politician.
And I can see, I can see those trends without ever going to Facebook.
I can see those trends just going to work.
Right.
Which is really interesting.
And I think that's not something that's noticed as much in other places like the UK and certainly places that have other languages.
I think that extra language barrier certainly creates an extra buffer from this, unless they have their own shenanigans.
I know that I was in France for a month when they were having an election and there was a lot of things going on there about Maureen Le Pen and the man they eventually elected.
Forgive me, I can't remember the name of the French president at the time.
Right now, the same man right now, I think, but it doesn't really matter.
He's in France and neither of us live there.
So, but it's we these technologies, as we mentioned, are allowing people to zoom in on these demographics in this way.
And I'm noticing it, like just as a person, I see enough of it here that it's, I can see the trends here.
Some people are getting it far more than others.
And the similarities between those people and, you know, steel workers in Pennsylvania are, you know, when the election comes and they want the steel workers in Pennsylvania to vote for a certain politician, suddenly I see an uptick in my world, in my everyday world outside the internet, for people who meet that same demographic being cheery and happy and hoping that this certain politician wins.
And I think to myself, that's really strange considering we're in Canada and that politician doesn't mean anything to us.
You know, that's weird, but it's a thing that's true, I think.
And it's another thing, it's one more thing on the list that we have to deal with.
So the next thing on my list is, and I think I already know the answer to this, but it's the Illuminati.
And because I'm talking to you, I also put slash lizard people because essentially they're the same.
It's only the DNA of the people at the top of the pyramid on it that would be in any way different between these two.
Unless I'm getting something wrong about this.
No, that's the theory.
That there is a cabal that's running everything.
And that if it's a lizard people cabal, it's it's people from an alien world who uh perhaps have a different set of dietary habits.
And uh, but if it's just Illuminati, it's still very dark and dangerous.
It probably includes, you know, Bill Gates and every former president and and uh um almost every, almost every celebrity and politician and right business mogul, and for some somehow, it's everybody.
Like, maybe that's the answer definitely there, I don't know why.
The answer to your cognitive dissonance question earlier like how is it everybody, but only a select few at the same time right, you know, but it needs more and more people to make the entire thing work well, that's the thing I mentioned to Lydia is that is that uh, Lydia Green, who I had on the podcast, is that in order to believe in each of these individually aside from the Illuminati,
by default includes this, but most of these reality denying ideologies, in order to believe in them, you pretty much have to include a global conspiracy as part of it, because it doesn't make sense for the earth to be really actually flat unless all of NASA and most of the pilots and a large number of other people who are really good at mathematics and geometry.
and all these things that are readily available knowledge in colleges and even actually on Wikipedia as we go, that all of them have to be in on the thing.
You, you pretty much have to believe that a large part of society is willing to lie to you about the shape of the planet in order to keep believing that it's flat.
So in a, in something like flat earth or Anti-vax, you know, the Illuminati, or Q ANON, as it tried to, you know, be gets wedged in on the side.
It's the, it's the ugly cousin that comes with the, the beautiful shape of the earth theory that they have it.
It has to be true along with this, otherwise nothing in our world makes sense.
Do you think that was a thing that went through your mind at any point where you you felt that other things had to be true in order for this thing you believe to be true?
What's your, what's your thought on that?
Um, I mean, I think you seem to believe in a global conspiracy from the get-go.
So in that specific instance, it didn't seem weird to have to include it along with your other beliefs, because it seemed to be at the core of it.
Yeah, but do you think there was anything else that was like?
In order for my world to make sense, this has to be true.
I yeah, I think, I.
I think that the the thing is that is your rabbit hole journey is a constant goalpost shifting, redefining of the shape of your world in order to make it make sense.
Yeah, the more information comes in, the more you've got to try and make it fit.
And like, like you were just uh, mentioning like Illuminati and lizard people like yeah, I believed in in an Illuminati like that, that that was just the name for the group, that's what we just kind of told them.
You know yeah, and if you say that, then everyone knows what you mean.
Uh, today it's the cabal a useful function of a word, by the way.
Yeah yeah um, And I had to make Reptilian theory fit somehow, because a lot of people were talking about it.
And I didn't want to discount certain people's eyewitness testimony or whatever.
And I thought, well, they must be seeing something.
They must be experiencing something.
But what is it?
So I just had to keep moving goalposts until eventually I got to a point of like, okay, this is what I believe.
The Anunnaki and the reptilian gods or whatever, these ancient gods are actually the fallen angels that were spoken of in the book of Enoch.
And they came to the earth and mated with humanity.
That is this reptilian bloodline.
It's actually a demonic bloodline.
You know, and the kings and queens of this planet are descended from this royal snake bloodline.
And that gives them the right to rule here.
And like, I had to just make all this stuff fit.
But that's how that was my final kind of like resting place of trying to make everything fit.
And this is also how I made the whole conspiracy work.
Lucifer.
Lucifer, demons.
Basically, they're the ones that are running everything that's going on.
They're the ones that influence people to do this stuff, essentially.
You know, that was my out for everything.
Like that catch-all.
Exactly.
That's how it all works.
Right.
Nothing I could prove to anybody, but that was just, that was for me, right?
That's the final answer.
It's in that case, having an image of a potentially magically empowered head of the organization that's the opposition really makes it,
I think, do you think it makes it easier to justify the belief in these things because the explanation for them is some level of magic versus something like creationism, which is, by the way, the next one on my list is sort of, do you believe in creationism, by the way?
Or is it no?
No.
A young earth doesn't appeal to you?
It's not very factual.
I think it's, yeah, I think it's a lie.
My reading of Genesis is a poem, basically.
It's not supposed to be.
Yeah, it's not like a scientific document, Kent Hovind.
More like a montage that leads to the beginning of the story.
Yeah.
Yeah, basically.
It's just that beginning bit.
It's just a poetic telling.
I look at like a lot of the Bible is 66 books written by 40 different authors, and it's those 40 different authors sharing their experience of what God means to them at whatever time it was that they were writing those specific books.
Now, throughout history, hundreds of thousands of people have done this.
So, these 40 authors aren't necessarily that special because lots of people did it.
It's just that those ones are special because they fit neatly into one book that expressed it for a certain amount of people, you know.
Um, and I think like those hundreds of thousands of authors are just as relevant to me.
I just want to hear everyone's like view of what that divine is to them.
Like, to me, like, my religion is just my uh, my personal uh relationship with the divine.
It's not about proselytizing to anybody or trying to bring them over or convince them that God is real or anything like that.
It's my own personal experience.
It's like I don't go to church, don't I don't feel like I need a church.
You know, I've got my belief, I got my faith, I don't really need any authority.
I think that's a useful way to look at it.
Absolutely.
For me, religion should be focused on dealing with the spiritual.
I mean, I did a podcast about an episode about science and politics.
And my friend Jeff that I do these with immediately asked me, Why didn't you make it about science and religion?
And it was a simple answer for me.
Religion only falls into conflict with science when it's attempting to achieve a political goal.
Fair point.
Very fair point.
And so to me, the concept, the two concepts that oppose each other are science and politics.
And religion is a completely separate thing that occasionally engages in either or both.
So it's not the enemy.
You know, some people consider science to be the enemy of religion, but religion is not the enemy of science.
Science is just a process by which we come to know new things.
And it doesn't say anything at all about religion.
Some people have tried to, you know, wrangle it into a position where they say, oh, because we know this much, we're sure that these religious beliefs are untrue, but we don't know enough to know that.
We can't possibly prove that God doesn't exist, nor should we worry about it because that's not the point.
Yeah.
You know, that the meddling in spiritual affairs by scientists should be equally decried as it is the meddling into politics by religious people and the mixing of politics and religion.
Both should be poo-pooed with the same effort, really.
I don't see how we got to this place where if you want to be a logical and rational person, you have to be atheist because plenty of religious people are rational and just fine.
They're not deranged.
They're not.
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong.
Maybe you have a different view on this.
But do you think it was religion that contributed to your trip through the rabbit hole?
No, because I wasn't religious when I started.
Right.
So it didn't bring you to that place.
Yeah, I found my, yeah, I found religion like when I was down there.
I see.
Which also was a bit of a rabbit hole because I just I like I said I call myself Christian, but like I'm gonna tell you like 99.9% of Christians will completely disown me for calling myself a Christian because I do not believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God, you know, point blank.
Well, it is exactly what I said it was earlier.
It's this, yeah, it's a bunch of different books.
So I loved just going and searching through different religions, going to different churches and going to the mosque and like speaking to many people about this character, Jesus.
That was something that like really just really struck me about this person.
And I wanted to get to who he was.
So whatever religion was talking about him, I went and looked.
You know, so I definitely was on a bit of a rabbit hole journey looking for that.
But I had to, I was already a conspiracist by that time.
See, interesting.
Your brain's taken a strange journey.
Yeah.
It really has.
Like, there's something I didn't get to speak about earlier because I just always forget, like, because of such a long journey, this being like my complete worldview, my complete ideology of how I saw the world, how I saw everything work.
Like, I was talking about how I came out, but I only really explained the political side of it.
Yeah.
How I thought the New World Order and the Illuminati and stuff weren't actually in control of anything.
So does that mean they even exist?
I also, at that time, started coming out of certain conspiratorial beliefs that were rooted basically in right-wing evangelism, which I didn't realize is that's what it was.
Like this whole idea of the Antichrist or, you know, the burning in hell and all this stuff basically that I kind of thought that they were sacrificing these things and people to Satan and Lucifer and everything.
During that time, I started like when I was pulling away from the community, this is between 2015 and 2018.
When I was pulling away, I started like, instead of looking into a lot of my conspiracy stuff, I started like burying my head into like religious studies and looking more at that.
And I came across a lot of stuff that was explaining like hell and the devil and like what the most commonly held beliefs were basically for the past 2000 up to three, 4,000 years ago, like with like including Judaism.
And like this whole idea of hell and the Antichrist and the devil, like it's only a very new like iteration of what this stuff is.
And I found out like kind of, I like to go to the historical context of what was being said by a person, when, why did it matter?
And so looking at Jesus's words to me, like he would mention Gehenna and Gehenna gets translated to the word hell.
And the image that he talks about is like burning fire, gnashing of teeth of wild animals.
But the word gehenna is the rubbish tip, the dump, the city dump, like where you take all your rubbish and there, like they would burn it, and the like animals would fight each other over it.
So he was trying to explain that.
And he was saying, like, if you don't do good things in this world, what's the point of you?
You might as well be thrown into Gehenna.
So he was basically saying, like, don't be, don't be pointless.
You know, go do good stuff.
Otherwise, you might as well just be a heap of rubbish.
He wasn't saying you should go to hell and burn forever.
You know, that kind of stuff.
So.
Technical difficulties.
I'm back.
You're back.
I'm back.
Looks like I had a blip there on my end.
Yeah.
But yeah, that's.
I just finished this bit about the antichrist.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
And so what John was trying to say was about an antichrist at that time.
Someone coming and pretending to be a Christ, like anti-Christ, anti-men in place of, not what we think of today as someone who is against something.
The diametric opposite of, yeah.
Yeah.
And that's not what it actually meant.
It meant in place of.
And it's these sorts of things that started making me come away from the idea that like there was a satanic new world order that they were sacrificing and ritualistically killing people because I started to realize like in a in a way like the devil's a lie.
Wow.
Just like God, we can't be sure.
Yeah.
Oddly.
Before we go, one thing I wanted to mention was that it was something Lydia mentioned when I talked to her was that she said that everyone who believes in these things, when they're confronted with the consensus view, they feel that cognitive dissonance.
But I think that people who hold the consensus view feel the same cognitive dissonance when they are exposed to conspiracist notions, and that they do a similar thing where they work to ignore the things that are being told to them by conspiracists whenever they're in conversations with them,
and that they get that same psychological stress of being unsure about the shape of their world.
their world and having to rethink things and double down on what shape they think the world has.
I pick on flat earthers a lot, but to me, it's the most obvious case.
Most people, if pressed, couldn't prove that the earth is spherical.
They don't have the mathematical and geometric skills to go about working this thing out.
And they just feel like it's true because everyone around them and all their social connections and all the people around them believe it's true.
As soon as they're confronted with a person who doesn't believe it's true, they have this new thing they have to deal with and they get uncomfortable with having to deal with that person.
And they hope they don't mention this flat earth thing again because it makes them really uncomfortable.
So I think this cognitive dissonance is not simply something that happens with conspiracists.
I think it happens because we have ideas that oppose our view.
And that is the definition.
Doesn't matter whether your view is right or wrong.
You will feel it if you have to try to fit a new fact that conflicts with everything in with all those other facts.
That's just the psychological stress.
If you're forced to, if you're forced to say that, I mean, the classic reference for me is 1984, all the doublethink in 1984.
And at the end, he's forced to admit that there's five lights in the ceiling when there's, he knew there was four.
And he had to admit that there was five because he was under so much stress.
At that point, he was broken.
He was willing to listen to everything and go along with all the things that spoiler alert for 1984.
For anyone who hasn't read it, he had 60 years or whatever it was, 70 years almost.
Sorry.
Go read it.
It's a good book.
I didn't ruin anything, I promise.
And I think everyone feels that when they are confronted with someone from the other side.
And for people who are in a consensus view, they don't relentlessly research all the things that they believe.
They simply just believe them.
They believe that the Earth is a sphere, even though they've never been to space and they can't do the math to show it.
They just believe it.
And when someone appears to show some clever experiment that shows them something that looks different, they feel they get that stress inside themselves and they feel something that's not right.
And they, the only thing they can do in that point, usually is just reject it, just declare harder that it's not true and walk away because it's easier when you're not confronted with it.
And so I think that's a thing that everyone feels in this climate where we have conspiracists and non-conspiracists, right?
But do you have any thoughts on this that this is a thing that other people?
I mean, we usually this is said that conspiracists have cognitive dissonance, but I think everyone has it.
I think it's an everyday occurrence now.
What do you think of this?
Well, if you define it the way that you just did, like coming across a new belief that contradicts what you believe, so you have to think about it for a minute.
I guess like, yeah, everyone does have it.
I think it's really interesting because being a truther, like that is one of the things that we are kind of told, like in, say, lectures by David Icke or in Alex Jones' documentaries, they like say, yeah, the reason why it's hard to wake your friends and family up is because of cognitive dissonance.
You know, they have their view and then you come and try and tell them the truth and they just can't handle it.
Right.
And that's why like you kind of are on your own, you know, basically.
So yeah, it's interesting that you pick up that it's the other people because a lot of what I see coming out of the rabbit hole and now being like, I guess, on this side or whatever that means.
Like there's a real line.
Yeah.
No, I'm just on the outside.
I'm just glad I'm on the outside.
I'm not inside there anymore.
That's all.
That's the only side I'm on.
But I see like non-conspiracists charge conspiracists with cognitive dissonance all the time.
Yeah.
And it's good that you just said like, you know, both sides are doing it.
And it comes back to something I was thinking when you were talking about that.
Like the Sandy Hook and spate of hoax, like conspiracy or hoax-based conspiracies between 2012 and say 2014, Boston marathon bombing uh, the Pulse nightclub shooting and Sandy Hook, like that new narrative, it being a hoax was like completely against my belief of them being rituals.
You know, to me the people had to die, like them, being like actors doesn't work.
So I think you're saying it would have made more sense to you in that space if they weren't actors, if they were killed and sacrificed for some yeah, ritualistic thing.
That would have fit more with the set of things you had.
Yeah, and then this new narrative like completely shook me because I was like well, what are you guys talking about?
They have to die for the ritual to happen.
I believed all of these things 9-11, the 7-7, London bomb attacks um, the Aurora, Aurora shooting so many of these things I believed were.
I believed Columbine was a Satanic ritual and, like I, I believed at the time, like I didn't believe that the two, the two boys, did it.
I believed that they were killed by uh intelligence basically, and it was like a black ops sort of thing.
But they killed uh, 12 students and one teacher, you know, to symbolize Christ and his followers, 12 and the teacher, you know, like I felt like that's all of these things, they had to have the death to work and then the hoax narrative completely flipped on, a hit on its head and I was like your conspiracy doesn't work anymore, you know.
So I think maybe that at that point, what 2012 2013, 14 is, I guess, where i'm having that cognitive dissonance with the prevailing narrative in conspiracy world right yeah, because to you it still would be a thing that conflicted with what you felt you knew absolutely.
I felt i've proved it, like with i've done multiple blogs and videos and songs and all types of stuff with like proclaiming this is how it works right yeah, it's interesting looking way back at all this stuff okay well um, I think i'm gonna cut for time there and uh, hope for another conversation at some point in the future, because this has been very interesting.
Yeah, any time, Spencer.
I really enjoyed talking to you.
I enjoy listening to you.
You know, I think you think about stuff and you think words matter.
And yeah, I really, really enjoy just listening to you and Jeff chat.
Oh, he'll be glad to hear that.
He doesn't listen.
We should get him on next time.
I'll pitch it to him.
See if we can get a time that works for all three of us.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
Thanks for doing this and we'll talk to you again.