Stephanie Kemmerer, a former 9/11 conspiracy theorist and Express Times archivist, traces her addiction to unprocessed trauma and dopamine-driven fringe theories like Zeitgeist (2013–2014) and David Icke’s works. She warns AI could weaponize misinformation subtly—eroding shared reality via viral lies rather than physical destruction—while comparing conspiracy recovery to addiction treatment, where personal struggles (grief, job dissatisfaction) fuel belief. Examples like Ginny Thomas’ QAnon shift or Steve Hassan’s hypnotic claims show how trauma distorts narratives, with skepticism now the best antidote. Recovery demands patience, not confrontation, and she offers resources: @McPasteFace on Twitter, doubtisthewayout@ProtonMail, and truthunrestricted@gmail.com for support. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
And I'm proud to say I have a special guest today.
And I will allow her to introduce herself.
Go ahead, Stephanie.
I'm Stephanie Kemmer.
I'm a freelance writer and a former conspiracy theorist.
And all of my writing, all of my work is incredibly focused on conspiracy theory culture.
Yeah, and that obviously that fits right in with a lot of things that I talk about, which are sort of looking at the mechanism of conspiracy and conspiracism, conspiracy belief, I guess would be a better way to say it.
So first of all, I'm just kind of getting over a cold, so I might sound a little different than normal.
I'll try to keep that to a minimum.
That's the reason why my voice is a little more ratchet today.
But I have time to do a podcast and I'm not coughing to death.
So here we go.
All right.
Let's just start maybe with sort of your story because I find it interesting and I think it'll be relevant to a lot of things we get into here.
I mean, you, you, I know from other interviews you've done and having followed you on Twitter for a while now that the primary thing you focus on regarding conspiracy is 9-11.
So everyone has a 9-11 story of the day and everyone who got wrapped up in the conspiracy beliefs of 9-11 have a story for how they got into that.
So let's get into that.
What happened there?
Start from the beginning.
Well, I was working at a small local newspaper in Easton, Pennsylvania called the Express Times.
And I normally worked from like noon to eight.
But that day on September 11th, I was filling in for the archivist.
And she would get there early in the morning.
So if it weren't for her being on vacation, I would have slept through all the action.
And I'm really grateful that she went on vacation because I got to experience 9-11 from a newsroom.
And, but I think also that journalists didn't get to process 9-11 the way the general populace did because, and also that goes for, you know, elected officials, even small town elected officials, anyone whose job in some way had to scramble to procure information and disseminate information on 9-11.
I don't think we got to process it because we're watching this terror unfold, but we don't get to just sit there and cry.
We're working, you know, and we're doing stuff.
The rest of the world almost shut down, but that you, you know, the people that you're describing would have had the opposite.
They would have been time to get to work, right?
The opposite of shutdown.
So that's interesting to me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I remember my first reaction, someone walked into the lib the newspaper library and they're like, oh, plane just hit the World Trade Center.
And I just shrugged because that's that was, I mean, shrugging wasn't, that was kind of a cold reaction, but I think it was also indicative of the general, you know, when the first plane hit, everyone was like, oh, what a bad error.
What a bad mistake.
Nobody, nobody thought, you know, and of course they had a plan so that all eyes would be on the towers when the second plane hit that that was their goal.
And I remember after the buildings collapsed, I was outside smoking a cigarette and I had said to someone, I'm like, this feels like an inside job.
Like I actually had that feeling on the day.
But it just came and went.
And, you know, I never really formed a complete consensus with myself about what had happened.
So it was an easy space for conspiracy theories to fill because number one, you're looking at like unprocessed trauma because obviously it was a traumatic event.
And because of having to do the work, I didn't get to process or think.
So that, you know, looking back on it now, it was definitely the fact that the nature of the job and the confusion, you know, I was, I was very dumb and very young and very entitled.
So I just had a stupid mindset.
And that I think that, you know, and I'd gotten a David Icke book, Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center disaster back in like 2004, 2005.
But I never got really hardcore into the 9-11 stuff until like 2013, 2014.
That's when I went like after seeing Zeitgeist.
And I recall at the time when they talked about the 9-11 stuff, I was like, oh, I remember this stuff.
And then I got a rush and I remember thinking, oh, this feels good.
I like this rush.
I want more.
And that's the dopamine.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, that circles nicely into kind of the crux of what I was hoping to talk about, which is, I mean, what you're talking about is psychological addiction, right?
I mean, this is the idea that a person has a conscious experience and that that experience makes a person feel good and that this then has a feedback where it biases the person, sometimes subconsciously, to want to get that experience again and have that same good feeling another time, right?
So when I look at this, I mean, everyone looks at this as psychological addiction, and addiction is usually seen as as a negative thing, as a as a destructive aspect of a person's life, and that's usually how it's defined.
But I think it's useful to look at this in a more general way, because separating these experiences into things that are just the destructive ones and then the ones that are good tends to make people who are only experiencing the quote unquote good ones not identify as well with the people who are experiencing the destructive ones.
So if I just take a minute here, I want to focus on the fact that this psychological feedback loop happens to people when they read an exceptionally good book.
It happens to people when they get the thrill of skydiving.
It happens to people when they make love.
These are experiences we have every day.
They're part of what helped to form habit forming behaviors.
And so, yeah, some of them lead to destructive, addictive behaviors, but other ones are not.
They're perfectly fine and normal.
And so we have to understand that when we look at people who are having these, what we call addictive aspects, because we've all experienced the things that lead to that, and we need to recognize that.
And I think that's important to remember.
I also think that most of the things that are studied for this, as far as, you know, especially the psychological addictive effects of things like gambling, those aspects are studied because they're able to be replicated experimentally.
But there's a huge number of experiences that just can't be replicated ever.
They're one-time experiences.
Like show of hands, if anyone who's listening to this ever wants to relive their first kiss with someone they're romantically involved with.
I mean, in my memory, those were incredible great moments.
And there's nervousness and stress and the possibility that it won't work.
And I was terrified.
But I'll never forget them.
And there's no way to do them ever again.
Right.
And, but if I could put that into like a virtual reality video game and sell it, I would be the richest person in history without a doubt, because everyone would want those experiences again if you could really give them again a second time.
And they'll never be.
So, yeah, we've studied this, but we've only studied from a very limited perspective because that's the part that they could study.
And there's a huge number of experiences that can't be studied in that exact same way in a lab with repeatable results.
So when you look at events like 9-11, it'll never be repeated.
There will be horrendous events in the future, but it won't be that event.
It won't be that personal.
It won't be this personal in the same way.
And we can't repeat the things that anyone experienced or felt there on that day or the time that came after.
So at first, it seems unscientific to attempt to study this because of a way that it can't be replicated.
But I think that tends to disregard a lot of what people experience in this, because as you say, there are aspects of this that made people feel a certain way and made them want to feel that way again.
And so that's what I want to talk about with you today is what might be called conspiracy addiction, when a person looks into these conspiracy beliefs and it makes them feel good and then it makes them look into them again, makes them want to feel that excitement or charge or whatever that feeling is another time.
And that's the most interesting thing about your tale that I would like.
So let's pick up there.
What do you think of what I said?
Or what speaks to you there?
I would love to see.
I don't know if a study like this has been done or not, but I would love to see an fMRI study with conspiracy theorists.
I'd like to see what parts of the brain are lighting up.
And of course, I'm not a neuroscientist.
So I would have to do a lot of Googling and a few years of research to catch up on, right?
Yeah.
But it would be it because I know Chris Hitchens spoke about like an fMRI study with like religious people and non-religious people and how like the religious people's brains lit up in certain areas.
And then, of course, you've you've heard about the studies with like serial killers where parts of their brain that should be lighting up aren't and other parts that shouldn't be lighting up are.
So it's obvious that there's some mechanism that's going on in our brain.
You know, our little neurons are firing and some, you know, some of it's misfire and some of it, you know, everyone's brain chemistry is slightly different.
Some parts of it are probably confusion, right?
Yeah.
Some crossover things getting confused one way or the other.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a complex system.
And I do recall that feeling of, and I didn't have the words for it at the time, but chasing the dragon.
Like I really was chasing the dragon because I got to the point where I kind of reached the end of the 9-11 stuff and I need it more.
I need something else, you know, that that wasn't enough.
And I actually remember searching for other conspiracy things to like listen to.
And I came across, you know, like Antarctic Nazis.
And I was like, nah, I don't believe that.
But the fact that, and I wasn't aware of it, I guess I was kind of aware of it, but not consciously.
But when you're seeking truth and that truth is based on your own opinions, that's not a good place to be.
You know, like reading the David Icke books, when I'd get to the Holocaust denial stuff, I'd be like, well, I don't believe that.
Well, then you would have to disavow the rest of the book logically.
You know, you can't say, okay, reptilians, but you know, Holocaust denial is off the table.
Pick and choose the parts you like.
Yeah, right.
But I think all conspiracists do that, right?
Yeah.
And Mick West says that every conspiracy theorist has a line in the sand.
Every, you know, like even some Holocaust deniers, I'm sure they're like, oh, well, I'm not touching that one.
But to me, that to me, the Holocaust denial, that Holocaust denial and flat earth are a bridge too far for anyone, as far as I'm concerned.
Well, I pick on Flat Earth a lot on this podcast because they're such a useful example of many things.
It's so obviously against regularly available observation.
And that's the point almost.
But things like Holocaust denial are more difficult to access.
The evidence of it isn't right in front of us all the time, especially us on a whole other continent.
It's a lot harder for us to go to Poland to see a concentration camp.
And so also you're U.S., I'm Canadian.
Our countries did participate in World War II, but we didn't get invaded.
We didn't get bombed.
Well, Pearl Harbor got bombed, but most of the U.S. didn't get bombed.
Most of Canada was unscarred by any actual events.
You know, people from our nations got shot, but they got shot in other places.
They didn't get shot in our home territory, which was, it takes away that personal edge.
So we look at World War II and the Holocaust, I think, a little bit differently because of that.
And it's getting that extra separation, I think, in some ways helps some people to form obscene beliefs about the reality there, right?
It's easier for a person here to say, oh, well, that probably didn't even happen.
I mean, is there even a place called Poland really?
I mean, it's just as unreal as a place called Japan, right?
It's so far away.
I might as, you know, in somewhere in your brain, you can almost form that.
That happened so long ago and so far away that it's in a distant corner.
And if someone says it didn't happen, then it almost makes more sense then.
Like, what do you think of that?
Well, yeah.
And there was, I read that there was a survivor of one of the concentration camps who went on to become a Holocaust denier.
And on the surface, that may sound pleatly absurd, but it actually makes more sense if you really pick it apart because this person's trauma, they're able to ignore it if they ignore the events under which it took place.
Yeah, like repressed memories, right?
It's in their box and put them away.
And there was also a thing called the Mengla effect where people who survived the concentration camps would later claim to have met Dr. Mengla, but they didn't, but he becomes so iconic that they talked about him so much.
Yeah, that there people were confabulating memories.
And, you know, so it's it, but for me, that, that, someone tried pushing flat earth on me when I was into this stuff.
And I was like, no, thanks, man.
I'm not, I'm not one of them.
Yeah.
And I, I think once someone, I mean, I went some really dark places.
False flag stuff is a very dark place, but I haven't really seen many, I haven't heard of any stories of people coming back from flat earth or holocaust denial.
Like those, those are the bridge too far things.
People don't once, I mean, that would be like being a gravity truther or something, you know, once you are that deep, I don't, I think that's, you know, like, I mean, people come back from heroin addiction easier than they come back from Holocaust denial or flat earth.
Well, in the case of Holocaust denial, there's an additional sort of level of agenda, social expectation that you cross, whereby once you're there,
it's difficult to, because very likely you've insulted a bunch of people, rightly so, in declaring this openly, that to go back incurs some additional social cost that might be unpalatable.
It's, it sort of, uh, you know, burns the bridge, if you will, a social bridge.
And that's where, I mean, I personally think that we, as a, you know, as a group of people who would like people to come back from those spaces, we need to try to find a way to make sure those bridges stay intact, that there's a path for them to come back.
Like that if they come back from there, it's not just permanent disdain and uncomfortability forever, that they're never going to hear the end of the fact that they once believed these things.
Because if we, if all it is is insults down a long dark tunnel, they're never going to walk down it, right?
They're much less likely to walk down it.
They're much less likely to walk away from their terrible things that they've come to believe, right?
Flat Earth is not quite the same.
It doesn't have the same level of social stigma as Holocaust denial.
It's still, I don't know, I would think that it would be fairly embarrassing to have declared yourself a flat earther and then have to later declare that you were just confused.
There's reasons why it becomes confusing.
And that's a thing we have to recognize.
That's a, I mean, I'm going to give a shout out here to another podcast.
That's a thing that I really like about some dare call it conspiracy.
Brent Lee, Neil Sanders, they go through these things and they sort of step you through why a person might believe it first.
And then after that, they explain why it's not really true.
And I think going through both of those in sequence really helps not just the people who are in that space to maybe think about moving away from it, but it also helps the people who might reach a hand out to them actually reach a hand out to them and say, look, I kind of understand a little bit about why this confused you or whatever, right?
I mean, and I think that the ability to reach out with those friendly hands is the first step, one of the first steps, anyway.
Because the people who have these beliefs, if all they're ever going to get is, you know, scorn, what's going to motivate them to ever stop?
Right.
And all they're going to want to do is dig deeper, right?
And as you point out, they might also be getting another reason to stay, which is a different psychological charge from these ideas that these truths are being unveiled for them.
Yeah.
And it also creates a cult-like atmosphere where what generally happens is, you know, you're a quote-unquote normal person and you have quote-unquote normal friends.
And then as you start to get into conspiracy theories, those normal friends will, and you can't place blame on them.
They're doing what is right for themselves.
When you see something crazy, you step away from it.
You know, you don't jump in a pool with a great white shark.
And so, rightly so, those friends start to abandon the pool.
And then you have a new set of friends who are conspiracy theorists.
And then maybe you're starting to doubt your beliefs and you want to get out, but you're faced just like a person in a cult.
You're faced with this prospect of being friendless.
And then you're also faced with the prospect of you have a lot of work to do.
And you do, because even if you're not going to speak out about your experiences, you still owe a lot of apologies for your behavior.
So that, those are, you know, two kind of intertwining elements that I think keep people in.
And that's why, you know, I kind of came up with the whole idea for doubt, the support group.
Yeah.
Maybe this is a good time to tell us about that.
What is doubt?
It stands for discussing our unusual beliefs together.
And I came up with the acronym and the name, and I like that because I noticed that it's kind of like you have a friend and you know something's wrong and you're trying to get them to talk about it and they don't.
They're kind of hesitant.
But if you tap into the right element, the floodgates will open.
And I've noticed that there are a lot of former conspiracy theorists out there.
And when you start talking to them, the floodgates open and they all have this really amazing story.
And it's usually very, very dark, but you see this amazing emergence, you know, from the from out of hell, the path that leadeth up to light.
You know, it's very Dante.
And there, there, it really is like a Dante's Inferno scenario.
You're descending through hell and you're coming back out.
And these people want to tell their stories.
And I had this thought that I can still get that warm, squishy feeling that I used to get about conspiracy theories, but now I'm getting it from a different perspective.
Interesting.
I like what you say about this idea of it being like a pool that no one wants to jump into because it strikes a note with me because of a couple of moments in my life.
And I won't go into gory detail about them, but you know, I've often thought about why I didn't go deeper down into these beliefs.
But when I think about it, when you describe that, it occurred to me that there were a couple moments in my life where a good friend, essentially, brought me aside and just said, hey, these things you've been talking about, they're not real.
Like they're not reality.
And, you know, they didn't use those words, but, you know, sometimes they even use the word crazy, which I don't think is a very useful word in a lot of these contexts, but a lot of people use it.
And, you know, because I was good friends with them and because I understood that they had my best interest at heart, I paid attention.
And not everyone has that.
I think I've been lucky in that.
And I think that maybe we need a little more of that.
Maybe we need a little more of the caring person that will take someone aside and say, look, what are you doing?
This isn't, this isn't real.
And continuing with it is not going to be useful for you or anyone you're with.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I was honestly, I wasn't even interested in examining myself at the time when I got out because I got out before COVID.
But the thing, like you, you, you listen to Amanda Moore's story about how she started going undercover.
And it was COVID that kind of spurred her to do that.
And I think COVID was a turning point for a lot of people because, you know, when COVID was going on, that's when I started seeing people I knew in real life posting insane stuff on Facebook.
And I had this excruciating, painful moment.
Why does everyone sound like I used to?
And I also had like an empathy where I realized, oh, this is going to be the narrative.
Like I can still put myself in their mindset.
And I also sometimes I'm critical of conspiracy theorists because I don't think they're taking their stuff, you know, far enough in some ways.
Like with the buffalo shooting, one of the victims' last names was Uvalde.
I'm like, someone should be jumping on this as a conspiracy theorist.
Somebody's going to be able to do it.
Everything should be connected, right?
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
And there are no coincidences in the conspiracy world.
Right.
And they, I, you know, I'm critical of them because it's right there.
You should be latching on to that.
You know, what's wrong with you?
And, but I was out by the time the Las Vegas shooting happened.
But when I heard it, I knew instantly, oh, they're going to say this was fake.
Right.
it that it never happened you know without even seeing what conspiracy theorists were talking about i i knew you know so it's kind of like being a conspiracy whisperer where you know where these threads are going to lead just from having been in that mindset right you know and also if you are a conspiracy theorist And I think this is kind of important.
It might be slightly off topic, but yeah, we all make jokes.
We all laugh.
We all giggle, like, look at this idiot and stuff.
Everybody makes a joke once in a while.
And mockery is an important part of dealing with the hellscape that our reality is.
But I want people to understand that conspiracy theorists, you know, I can't make a general statement about a group of people, you know, without being horrific.
But in general, a general view of conspiracy theorists is that they're stupid and they're not.
They're actually that, I mean, Jim Fetzer, the guy who wrote the book, No One Died at Sandy Hook, he's a college professor.
Jim Tracy, another Sandy Hook truther, he's a college professor.
And you see a lot of conspiracy theory culture would actually, you know, like in the 80s and 90s, you would find it in the college classrooms and wasn't even necessarily right-wing professors like Fetzer and Tracy.
A lot of times it was left-wing professors and conspiracy theorists are imaginative, creative people.
And they're also, they're storytellers.
And they're not necessarily dumb yet.
There are some that are dumb, but you can't say that every conspiracy theorist is dumb.
No, not even close.
And I'm glad you brought that up.
It's a thing that I've mentioned a couple of times on this podcast, but I haven't done a lot of in-depth stuff about it.
What might be called the view from mainstream society is that these people are on the fringe and that they're defective in some way.
I don't know whether people who believe in conspiracies are defective, but they're unlikely to be defective in intellect.
I'm sure of that after seeing many people who have been in that space.
I think personally that a brain that is constantly seeking patterns is unlikely to be completely unfit.
It's unlikely to be slow.
It's unlikely to be not useful, regardless of whether the patterns that that brain finds are not real.
It's unlikely to be a person that's not thinking.
And that's a thing I like, I would like people to take away, if I can, is that, you know, it's not really that people who fall into conspiracy beliefs are just like everyone else.
They're not just like everyone else, but they're not like, you know, a measurable amount of IQ different than everyone else.
If anything, they might be a measurable amount of IQ above everyone else because the ability to try to see all these things all at once is not done from someone who's unfit.
And the unwillingness to listen to anyone else's opinion on it is probably more based on a bias toward their own intellect, right?
If you're smart enough and you've always figured things out for yourself, then you're more likely to try to figure everything else out for yourself again in the future.
And that's a factor leading to believing in conspiracies like this is that, oh, it makes sense to you all of a sudden that the establishment got it wrong or planned it this way, maybe, and that only a select few figure it out and that you're among those select few because you're also intelligent.
Like it does speak to the ego in that way, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
And then you are, you know, then you become in like the serial killer mindset, you're the smartest person in the room.
Yeah, right.
You're the one who's in on it, getting away with it and not getting fooled.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And why can't all these other idiots see that there are millions of children in deep underground military bases and cages?
Why can't you see that?
Yeah.
Why can't you see that Hillary Clinton is a, you know, child-eating monster?
Of course.
And face wearing.
Oh, yeah, right, right.
And also, yeah, also has the technology to look like anyone else.
So why would we even bother to look at a picture of Hillary Clinton?
Because it might not even be our.
Oh, no, no, I meant Frazzle Drip.
I meant the supposed Frazzle Drip video.
Additional.
Yeah, there's so many.
I've seen some charts and I've been intimidated immediately by them by their complexity because I thought about making one at one point.
And then I saw some of the others and went, oh, there's so many more that I hadn't even encountered yet.
Oh, my.
Yeah.
And one of the things I think that like for me with the zeitgeist and with the conspiracy charts that you see is that there's always a little bit of truth in it.
Like Zeitgeist was presenting like the myths of Christianity and stuff like that.
And I was like, oh, well, Bill Maher talked about this in Religilis.
So the rest of the movie must be true.
But that is that is one of the techniques they use is, and that's why one of the main formats is the just asking questions, or as Rational Wiki calls it, jacking off.
And that becomes your whole worldview where it's, you're just asking questions.
You're the smartest person.
Why can't these, you know, normies see this stuff?
And you become this really that.
And I think that's where a lot of the Karen mentality comes from with you see, you know, those, and I think some of them are actually staged, but you see the TikToks of, you know, Karen's having meltdowns.
And I think it's because people get this, you know, like this, don't you know who I am mentality, you know, like, and you begin to think you're better than everyone else.
But in reality, you deep down, I mean, I, I would challenge you to find me a conspiracy theorist, like a genuine one, not just like an influencer.
But I would challenge you to show me a conspiracy theorist who genuinely likes themself and is happy with life and the way that their life is going because you're not going to see it.
Like my ex-husband's former best friend never did anything with his life.
Now he's almost 50, still lives at home with his parents, never had anything above a minimum wage job.
This is someone who has no locus of control.
All of their locus of control is external because their life is unhappy.
So they turn to conspiracy theories and now they're important.
I think that's one of the most damaging things about these beliefs is that they encourage a reduced amount of investment in the future and in society.
And I mean, if you think that the whole thing is fake and that the world is going to end at some point very soon and the whole thing is going, you know, the whole thing will be somehow magically revealed in the next, you know, three or four years, why would you save up money to buy a house?
Why wouldn't you indulge more in the things that are making you happy now?
And this is a story that I do hear repeatedly among people who leave those places is that they do regret a lot of the time they spent in that space because it was so damaging for their futures.
They didn't think there was a future, so they didn't plan for it.
And that's, you know, among all the many things that are, you know, sort of wrong with the world right now, the inability to think about the future is a big one, right?
And another thing you said that struck me as interesting was this idea that there are all these stories, the conspiracists, the influencers will have all of these disparate stories and that some of them are not believed.
There's a bridge too far and this, and I believe that.
But I think that to influencers like David Icke, it doesn't matter to David Icke if you don't believe everything that he says.
The point isn't for you to believe everything that he says.
The overall arching point for people like David Icke is for you to not believe the official story.
It doesn't matter if his story is exactly right.
He can always claim that he was only researching from a small room in whatever town he lives in in England and that he doesn't have a team of whatever people to help him, whereas the mainstream media does, which is always an excuse.
But the point is to make, to poison the well, to poison the well of reality.
And the more that a person who listens to him loses faith in the idea that there is a reality to be understood, to be shared with everyone else around them, the more likely the next story will land.
And that's why people like, you know, I'm going to try to pull some names out of my hat because I didn't prepare any of this stuff, but that's why influencers like Alex Jones will be able to capitalize on that because it's a softer ground.
It's a reality that's in a field that's already been, the soil's already been turned once or twice, right?
And it's already been fertilized well.
And so Alex Jones can move in and grow in that spot.
And then the ground that Alex Jones made, you know, useful for that sort of thing is also occupied by other people in that same space now.
They all try to, they all try to grow the field and then also compete with each other for the available space on that field, the market, if you will.
That market is getting bigger slowly, but and it's it's boosted by events like 9-11 and like, you know, shootings.
COVID.
COVID was a big one.
And this idea that this is a fringe phenomenon needs to go away because the internet, first of all, first of all, showed that this is no longer a fringe thing.
The ability to remove trust in reality is now gaining strength.
And once we have people who really harness the ability for AI to do this, and someone will, without a doubt, every technology will be turned against us eventually.
And this is a thing we always have to think about when we make technology is it's not always going to be used for the good.
Someone will try to use it for their own ends against everyone else's good eventually.
And AI will eventually be used to try to mechanize this in a way that individuals like you and I won't be able to, you know, push back hard enough against anymore.
Right.
We will need everyone else.
We will need actually more AI to also help, right?
We need AI that's working against those AI that's looking to just make everything fake because it's easier to make things not real than it is to make them real.
Yeah.
It's easier to show, it's easier to try to make it look like things are fake than it is to try to show what is real.
This is the idea that bullshit makes it around the world before the truth ever gets its boots on, right?
Yeah.
And that's, that's the bigger story.
That's the bigger picture.
And that's where we need to be.
Yeah.
And my prediction, you know, and I'm, you know, not like a psychic prediction or just, you know, I'm just shouting out through the darkness here.
But, you know, I think James Cameron had it right with Terminator, except AI isn't going to be skynet and destroy us with a nuclear weapon.
AI is going to destroy the basis of reality.
That it will be a far more subtle and existential threat than just a nuclear war.
You know, AI isn't going to become self-aware, nuke Russia, and then Russia nukes us in retaliation.
That's not how AI kills us.
The Terminators that are coming after us aren't made of steel.
They're made of TikTok videos.
They're made of Instagram posts.
I fear what AI will do to the nature of reality.
Yeah.
When James Cameron first conceived of the Terminator, what year was that?
87, 88, 89, somewhere in there.
The internet and its possibilities hadn't really brought, you know, been brought to him.
So he couldn't really factor that in.
But now that you mentioned that, I'm kind of interested to know what a guy like James Cameron, who obviously does a lot of thinking, thought when he first watched the Matrix movies.
Because what you're describing is the Matrix, right?
That it removes all reality.
It replaces all of reality with a different reality that's only useful for it and not for the humans.
And did James Cameron do a head smack, a forehead slap and say, oh, of course, this is a much more realistic version now that I've seen the way computers are going?
Or did he say, well, that's a nice idea, but it's still going to be military hardware.
That's the thing, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You know, did he double down on his vision of this apocalyptic future where we lose, at least at first, to the computers?
Because as far as prophetic dark futures go, we do have these sort of two looming visions, the skynet and the matrix.
And it's not necessarily that either will come true, but we do always seem to compare against these when we look at computers and this technology and what it's going to do to us if we just let it go on its current course.
Yeah.
And it's sad how the matrix has gotten, you know, I remember when I first saw the matrix back in 99, I was like, oh, this is going to destroy people's minds.
And I was right.
Yeah.
And never mind that.
Most of the people who like to talk about the Matrix as if it's a real thing, like Andrew Tate and other idiots, never mind the fact that the Wachowski sisters made the Matrix to express their transgenderism because the red pill actually represents a hormone.
Yeah, I had, I haven't done a lot of reading on that particularly, but I know that that's been mentioned and I think that is an interesting take on it.
I actually didn't know that the second Wachowski was also transgender.
I knew the one, but I didn't know that both were.
But I think we're probably going to have to try to steer this back to wrapping up somewhere.
Right.
Right.
I'm sorry.
No, don't be sorry.
I love going off course when it's interesting.
And this has been totally interesting, but it's almost to the point where it's like a whole extra episode worth of interesting.
And because we're doing, we're chewing on a whale over here when we just had a fish for lunch over here.
And I'm like, oh, we need to like put that aside for another day.
Yeah.
This is, but this has been fascinating.
This has been great.
And I think, but what I, you know, in kind of closing and stuff, I think I've kind of identified two different portions of recovered conspiracy theorists.
There are the quiet and the loud.
And the quiet usually just kind of, I'm done with those things.
I don't want to talk about it.
And they just want to go on with their life.
And that's fine.
But I also do feel that there is a moral imperative.
In today's, like I said, I was content to just let it go and not talk about it.
But then COVID happened.
And that was kind of, you know, my calling in a way.
And I think in the current, I mean, when mainstream Republican viewpoints come directly from QAnon, that's not good.
QAnon is mainstream and that is not good.
So I think there is a moral imperative for all of us to be loud.
And I understand some people can't do it, you know, and I like to do the Lestat thing and tell people, come out, come out, wherever you are, because I think it's important.
And the more of us that speak up, the more we can work on ourselves and help other people.
And I also tell people that if, you know, one of the biggest questions I get all the time is, oh, everyone has a story.
Oh, my friend is getting into blah, blah, blah.
How do I help them out?
And I tell them, you have to do a calculus.
How well do you know them?
How often do you see them?
How close are you?
You know, how much time are you willing to invest?
Because you are not going to, if you want to pull someone out of conspiracy theories, it's not going to be with debunking.
It's going to be what's going on in your life.
Because something's going on.
You don't attack the conspiracy theory.
You find what the underlying issue is.
Oh, you're unhappy with your job.
Or, oh, You're, you know, you just lost a loved one.
You know, either they died or there was a relationship breakup.
Let's talk about that.
Let's not talk about false flags because that isn't going to pull you out.
The conspiracy theories are just a band-aid covering a broken bone.
That's that's an interesting take because that's I mean, I don't, I don't know if you reference this or take this from there, but as soon as you say that, that reminds me of things I've read about addiction recovery, which is very often about looking for things like triggers, things like causal factors, looking at trying to look at the psychological factors that made a person want to, you know,
drown in alcohol or whatever it is that they were using and look to try to treat that because the substance abuse is often just a symptom of some other problem.
And you might stop them from using alcohol, but you, they might switch to something else that tries to make them feel up when they're down, right?
Makes them, you know, they might switch to gambling or heroin or any other thing if you don't find the psychological factor that led them to want to do it in the first place.
And I think that's really useful advice.
That's, that's, you know, that they're, that there is something that they are looking for that isn't really the conspiracy belief, but the conspiracy belief is helping them to alleviate, right?
And you see it, the, the addiction thing is very similar to cult hopping, where like you see, Ginny Thomas was a moonie, yeah, and she got out and now she's QAnon.
And Steve Hassan was a, was moony, and he started becoming this like cult expert.
And now he's saying that there's hypnotic suggestions in trans porn.
So you, you see, and I, I had a cult hopping phase too, where I was connecting dots that didn't connect with true crime cases.
So you, you, there will be a cult hopping, and you do see it sometimes.
Like I read a story like decades ago about a woman who kicked heroin by getting herself addicted to alcohol and then she was able to get herself off the alcohol and stuff.
But you, and we do it with methadone, you know, we do it with methadone.
But meanwhile, there's ibogaine, which could potentially cure people from addiction.
And, but I mean, they're, there, what we need to find is we need to find an ibogaine for conspiracy theories.
And unfortunately, a mental or emotional or psychological addiction is kind of harder to cure than a physical one.
Right.
The evidence of, first of all, the evidence of its existence is not easy to see.
You have to see the manifestations of it rather than the actual thing.
You don't get to watch someone pouring the beer into their throat.
You maybe just watch them looking at their phone and you don't even know what they're reading, right?
And also, it's the idea that how many grains of sand are in a heap, right?
How far does a person go before they're quote unquote addicted to conspiracy, right?
With each successive grain of sand you add, it's only this much sand.
It's only one more grain.
It's only this much.
At some point, you know, and that I don't intend to ever answer that question.
That's a question philosophers have asked for ages: is how many grains of sand make a heap exactly?
That's not answerable for a reason.
Because you can't tell at what point when people take so many small steps toward a point, at what point do they cross a line that we haven't defined, right?
And so some people will be told that they're overreacting and they'll believe it.
And in some cases, they're right that they are overreacting.
But in other cases, they're not.
And it's hard for people to see where that is, when they should step in, when they should speak up.
And I don't, I don't have any good answers for that.
There probably aren't any.
It probably has everything to do with how well you know the person, what you know about them, what changes in behavior they have, what are troublesome.
I mean, every situation is different in that way.
There's no way to define it exactly.
And that's a thing everyone is going to have to work on themselves.
But increasingly, I think it's a question everyone's going to have to ask about someone they know because it's getting to the point where everyone knows someone who is lost in one of these and believing in a completely unreal thing.
It's fun.
It used to be fun and now it's not, which is why I've been addicted to listening to old Art Bell because that's when it was genuinely fun.
And that's when it was obscure.
And if you wanted these things, you had to seek them out.
But now with the internet, even if you don't want these things, they're going to find you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's, it's, it, the fun has been removed from it because they like to say, do your own research.
Well, everybody's doing their own research, so nobody has to do their own research.
And the do your own research that you're doing is just based on someone else's.
And it's just when something, it's kind of like when something becomes super popular, it's not fun anymore because all of the, you know, you know, small batch brewery suddenly goes mainstream.
It's not going to taste as good.
Even if it's the same, it's not going to taste as good to you because that exclusivity thing is that you found it.
And yeah, I've seen the same thing happen with music where people found a band and they introduce everyone else to it and they're happy that they found the popular band.
But then once everyone else likes it, they don't like it as much anymore and they have to find another band.
And the joy wasn't so much in listening to the music as it was in knowing that you had the lead on the new band.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it conspiracy theories have infested and infected our mainstream life.
And that to me is a very sad state because, you know, conspiracy theorists always played a sort of iconic, heroic role in our lives.
Like, you know, and there are some people now who are too young to remember this.
But when I think of conspiracy theorists, I think of the lone gunman from the X-Files.
I remember that.
I think of, you know, and they were just iconic as to what you thought a conspiracy theorist should be.
And that's really, they were drawn off of like real things because that's what they used to be like.
They used to be cool like that.
Yeah.
The X-Files was filmed in Vancouver for a very long time.
And a lot of people in BC were very, very personally proud of the whole thing.
They were, it's a really big time show that they were, yeah.
It was a great show.
It was a, it was a, and it went off the rails towards the end.
And yeah.
But, but that's where every conspiracy.
And I think I wonder if part of that was planned because that's where conspiracy theories ultimately end to this ridiculous point where you just throw up your hands and go, I give up.
This is ridiculous.
Yeah, I've compared it to very recently to the conspiracy itself is not the real belief.
The belief is something else.
And the conspiracy is the collection of explanations that you use to get your belief to fit with the rest of the world.
So, for example, if you believe that 9-11 was not caused by the 19 hijackers, you now need a conspiracy in order to explain the new thing you believe, which was that it was someone else.
If you believe the earth is flat, it's fine to just believe the earth is flat, but you also now need a conspiracy to explain why most of the world thinks it's not flat and why it appears to look not flat to many aspects and everything else.
You need a conspiracy to go along with that.
And the conspiracy then is just a catch-all explanation.
And that when your belief is very, very wrong, if it's not just a slight belief, like if you if you just believe that everyone in the Pfizer office is only interested in money and none of them are interested in the health of people, you know, you can easily make that work without it being too bad.
It's still a kind of a conspiracy because it's a conspiracy of people in the main office at Pfizer, but it's not an all-encompassing across the world conspiracy.
It doesn't require the commitment of world governments and everything else.
But once you believe that not only that the people in the room at Pfizer were all not interested in your health, but they are also creating a vaccine that's trying to depopulate the planet, you now need to include all of the health agencies across the world.
And some of them definitely just took the recommendation of other health authorities, but a large number of them did not.
Canada did not.
UK did not.
China obviously did not.
They even did their own vaccine.
So whatever that means.
And it's almost like your world is like a house and the conspiracy beliefs are just the part that don't fit with the rest of reality of the house.
But once you're really deep in conspiracy belief, you know, what was once just a bunch of spare parts shoved in a closet now soon move to having to fill the garage too and then eventually fill the attic and then the upstairs bedrooms.
And soon you're just left in your living room and the rest of the house is filled with conspiracism because that's the only thing that makes the house fit together for you.
And you can't go anywhere because that's the only real place in the world.
That's the only real place in the world is this one room.
The rest of the whole world in your mind is fake.
And that's where you want to go.
Yeah.
And I tell people, look, you know, once you, some people think that getting out of conspiracies is the end of the journey.
But it, you know, and, you know, let's do some Joseph Campbell talk here.
It's the beginning.
That's the start of the hero's journey.
It's not done yet because you have a lot of work to do.
Yeah.
You still have, and I tell people, you know, this doesn't work for everyone.
And it takes a while for you to get to the point where you can expose yourself to conspiracy theories without believing in them again.
But I can still have that same warm, fuzzy feeling I got from the conspiracy theories.
Now I get it from reading books about conspiracy culture, from consuming conspiracy culture content.
And I get it, but I don't believe it.
And I'm able to, so I still, I tell people conspiracy theories were part of my life since I was a young kid, but I can still have that joy.
I still get that warm, squishy feeling, but it's from it, but it's from debunking.
It's from critical thinking.
It's from skeptical inquiry.
You know, that's.
It might be from, for you, it might be from the ability to recognize the grift that's happening, right?
The techniques involved.
And that's interesting to me too.
But I think we're going to probably have to wrap it up here.
Yes, I could talk about conspiracies all day, and I often do.
Well, is there anything you'd like to plug?
Anything you want to, anywhere you want to point anyone to?
Any Twitter handle, anything like that?
I'm at McPaste Face, and that's M as in Michael, C is in cat, and then Paste as in glue, and then Face.
And I can send you my, if anyone wants to reach out to me, it's doubt is the way out at ProtonMail, and that's all one word.
And my Twitter account is locked, so you have to send me a follow request.
And, you know, I'll look you over and make sure you're not stewing on.
And then I will accept that.
But I'll send my links if you want to put them in the show notes.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
But, you know, if you, my last thing is if you have a friend or family member who's into this stuff, you have to look after your own mental health first.
And then you can approach from a different perspective.
And you're not going to pull someone out.
It's not a matter of you convincing someone.
It's a matter of leading them to just ask questions about their beliefs.
Yeah.
That's that's a good point.
Yeah.
It's not like a firefighter because everyone who's in the burning building knows they have to get out.
It's not like that at all.
That's a poor metaphor.
And it's a lot like escaping the towers on 9-11.
It's not necessarily going to be a firefighter that pulls you out.
You're going to pull yourself out, but the firefighters are there to help.
Right.
But some people don't want to leave.
And that's the reason why it being a burning building isn't a good metaphor for this, because some people just want to stay.
It's more like someone did.
Well, yeah.
Someone in the South Tower died on the 35th floor because they refused to stop working.
Yeah.
Well, that's also a tragedy.
Yeah.
It is.
And I'm sorry that I chuckled a little bit when I said that, but it just, that's the most ridiculous 9-11 death, honestly.
Yeah.
So, but, you know, when things look weird or strange, then kind of follow those instincts and realize if you have a loved one that's in this stuff, you know, it's just talk to them.
Yeah.
Talk and don't talk about conspiracy theories.
What's going on with your life?
What's up with you, man?
What's going on?
Let's talk.
So, yeah, there is a way out, but it takes time and effort and it's a lot of work.
Yeah, good point.
For this podcast, any comments or feedback can go to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
I can be found on Twitter arguing mostly with reality deniers at Spencer G. Watson.