Stephanie Kemmerer compares conspiracy theory engagement to drug addiction, highlighting dopamine’s role in reinforcing pleasurable experiences like consuming conspiracy theories or fentanyl laced with xylazine. Both addicts and conspiracy theorists often justify harmful behaviors—drug dealers claim "it’s their choice," while Alex Jones spreads extremist ideologies under the guise of truth. Cognitive dissonance drives avoidance of conflicting facts, even among Nobel laureates, as overconfidence fuels resistance to correction. Kemmerer suggests neurological or behavioral interventions could help rewire susceptibility, framing conspiracy addiction as a coping mechanism for underlying trauma. [Automatically generated summary]
This episode of the Truth Unrestricted podcast contains graphic descriptions of drug addiction and some of the ways that people suffer from drug addiction.
Listener discretion is advised.
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that most definitely, 100% will eventually have theme music in place of this silly tagline.
Eventually, someday, maybe soon.
So back again today with Stephanie Kimmerer.
How you doing, Stephanie?
I'm doing good.
How about you?
Oh, really good.
Before we get into all the content, just a reminder that if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns, any of the other C words that are relevant, send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And with that, we're going to get into it today.
So Stephanie emailed me with an idea for an episode.
And usually these are like my ideas and I'm running them past other people.
So this is a kind of a turnaround.
But I got what she was, what she sent and I liked it.
So usually it's kind of me explaining what's happening and then another person questioning, but this is going to be the other way around today.
So this will be fun for me and new thing.
So take it away, Stephanie.
All right.
Well, we had discussed before about how conspiracy theories can be viewed as an addiction.
And we were discussing dopamine.
And so before we go into, you know, more of that again, I just wanted to kind of do like a little rundown.
From an article on healthline.com, there, you know, I'm just going to read a few little snippets here.
Sure.
Experts are still studying exactly how dopamine, a neurotransmitter, works in the context of addiction.
Many believe it trains your brain to avoid unpleasant experiences and seek out pleasurable ones.
It's this role in reinforcing your brain's quest for pleasure that's led many to associate dopamine with addiction, but it's not that simple.
While dopamine does play a role in addiction, this role is complex and not yet fully understood.
So basically, it's, and we did kind of go over this before.
It's not necessarily the dopamine that's addicting you.
It's what you connect that dopamine with.
And that's what they're saying here.
Like psychologically connection to a certain thing.
Yeah, right.
Right.
And they say experiences that make you feel good, including using drugs, activate your brain's reward center, which responds by releasing dopamine.
The release causes your brain to focus more of its attention on the experience.
As a result, you're left with a strong memory of the pleasure you felt.
And then, you know, they're saying that memory can lead you to want to connect with that experience again.
So if you get a rush from eating, like, for example, my favorite thing is the keto-friendly tortilla chips.
They're like grain-free and they're super tasty.
And I just load them with cheese and I'll dip them in a little bit of salsa and it's so good.
I, when I think of those chips, like I get a rush, you know.
And, you know, when I take my gummies, I get a rush because I know I'm going to feel good.
And same thing that I got with the conspiracy theory.
So it's, it's not the dopamine.
Dopamine is like kind of the messenger in the whole thing.
It's not the adopt, the dopamine you're addicted to, it's the thing that gives you the dopamine.
And I went down a bit of a rabbit hole last week.
Um, I came across some video of like a, a woman who looked like a zombie in Seattle, and it turned out it was like some viral stunt.
And then I decided to look into, you know, real life zombies which brought up unknowing you know, I had no idea this is where we're going brought up Kensington, which is part of Philadelphia and they call it zombie Land because of the fentanyl.
And then I was watching this.
And then I watched a bunch of documentaries about fentanyl and xylosine, which is an animal tranquilizer which is often mixed with the fentanyl.
And so as i'm watching these documentaries, i'm noticing the connections with, you know, not just the, the dopamine addiction factor, but i'm also noticing that there some of the excuses are so similar to people who believe or push conspiracy theories.
So, like you know, in all these documentaries, the reporters they always end up talking to some of the dealers, you know.
And the dealers, you know, they have the, the voice changing stuff, the voice modulators to hide their voices and they're all dressed in black and their faces are completely covered.
You know all that and in every single video, reporters saying, do you feel bad for selling addiction to people?
And the dealers every and this is in several different documentaries.
If it, if they don't get it from me, they'll get it from someone else.
I might as well make some money off of this, and then they always follow up with, aren't you worried you might be killing or harming people?
And the?
And you know the response is always, they're the ones who want it.
I'm just filling a need it's, it's like that, that typical capitalist response.
Yeah, it's like a justification mechanism right yeah yeah, and honestly I I I, you know you get this like cold feeling from these dealers and hard to picture them having experiences of love or joy.
But who knows?
Well, you know, when they're not dealing they might be nice people.
Who knows?
But the thing is, is that this is I?
I drew a parallel, you know, because I still have the dot connecting abilities that I had when I was a conspiracy theorist.
It's just trained in a different way now, and These excuses from the dealers are, you know, if you could actually get Alex Jones to be honest for a minute, I don't think he would be as honest to reply if they, you know, if not me, they'll get it from someone else.
I don't think he would reply that honestly, but you see that sense with a lot of conspiracy peddlers where, you know, oh, I'm just a truth teller.
You know, people need to know the truth.
And it's similar to what you hear from the dealers.
And, you know, the users keep coming back to the dealers and to the Alex Joneses of the world.
They come back again and again because they need their next hit.
They have an addiction.
And, you know, one of the biggest things, one of the reasons why Kensington and it's all over YouTube.
If you type in like zombie, it'll bring up a whole bunch of things about trank and fentanyl.
And trank is an animal drug that's usually injected.
It's called xylosine.
And it's fine for animals, but you know, it's kind of like ivermectin works for animals, not for people.
Yeah, the fact that we're generally the animals that are getting these xylosine and tranquilizers are also mammals does not mean that these chemicals will react in a similar or even same way, same or even similar way as they do in humans, right?
Like that's in some cases they will, in some cases, they won't.
In some cases, they will, but with additional side effects.
And yeah.
Yeah.
We can't know that.
And the scary thing, and it's interesting that you said we can't know that because there are some people who straight up seek out xylosine, but most of the time it's used as an adulterant.
It's extremely cheap.
And I think they're putting like a certain specific status on it in Pennsylvania because like Pennsylvania is like the xylosine heroin fentanyl capital or something.
But some areas have stricter precautions on it, but it's not an actual like tranquilizer opioid.
It's used often in conjunction with like ketamine for animal surgeries and stuff.
So yeah, I was going to ask that.
Ketamine was also originally used for animals too, wasn't it?
Yeah.
And the problem with Trank is because it's not often federally, you know, controlled and it's not considered controlled substance.
It's cheap and easy to get a hold of.
So it's, it's often mixed with the fentanyl to boost the effect.
And also, you know, like you can get, I think they said like 300 trank pills or like a pretty big bottle of the liquid form, really cheap.
Fentanyl is a little more expensive.
So you're cutting your fentanyl with this stuff.
And, you know, the baggie weighs the same, but it costs you less and you're making the same amount of money on it.
And what happens is, and this is, and this also ties in with the conspiracy theory stuff, you're getting this extra dose of this drug and it's hidden and you don't know about it until the rotting limbs begin to show.
You're getting your dose of your conspiracy theories.
But you don't realize that.
It's a filler, right?
It's a bunch of filler material you can add in with your other conspiracies.
Sure.
I get the extent of metaphor.
Yeah.
And you're not realizing that you're getting high off of this drug you didn't ask for.
And sooner or later, before you realize it, you're yelling the K-word and you're, you know, posting images of the happy merchant.
And, you know, so, so anti-Semitism is the xylosine.
And sometimes it's very overt, you know, I mean, some, but, you know, with like Alex Jones, the globalists.
As a metaphor, it's not always perfect.
Yeah, right.
So, and just like with the xylosine, by the time you're aware that it's in your supply, your limbs are rotting.
And that's, that's what conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism do to you.
And the people who are addicted to the fentanyl that's that has the xylosine in it, the xylosine causes like a cardiovascular effect.
It's often at the injection site.
There's a reason why they call them zombies because they stop in mid-sentence and they just bend over at the waist and just hang there, like on the streets.
And they have rotting necrotic fasciitis, which is like the flesh-eating bacteria.
Yeah.
They have open wounds.
I saw a picture of a guy, his collarbones.
You could see all the way down almost to his rib cage.
It was like a two-inch deep cavern eaten through his chest.
And then they showed that they had to do like, they had to take skin from another part of his body and stitch it up.
It looked like he had just had an autopsy.
That's how, and people lose limbs.
So that, you know, there is a metaphor here with you're buying this drug, which is the conspiracy theories.
And they're putting this other shit in it.
And by the time you realize that this other shit's in there, you're already too rotted away to care.
You're not getting what you paid for.
You never get what you paid for with the conspiracy theories because there's always a hidden agenda.
Imagine that.
Imagine a hidden agenda.
I liked your metaphor you have of like the conspiracism being like sold as like a product.
It's that's ostensibly at face value.
That's what the influencers are claiming to do, that they are they're on a noble mission to spread the truth, to to save humanity from the lies that are distorting reality.
When in fact, they are distorting reality.
They're just straight up are the ones who are doing this.
But they need, they need to have more and more of the product.
They need to keep the, you know, the, in quotes, the truth, that coming, right?
They need to keep saying new and new things, which is why, I mean, I mentioned last week that they, the, the, when I was talking about the conspiracy as storytelling, just a crowd all participating in telling a huge story.
And the story is confused because it doesn't have a single author.
And it's the, the tendency is to get more and more extreme.
And I think this ties in with this metaphor too, because a lot of addicts tend to go to a greater and greater extreme with their addiction to get to get more high the next time, to have it last longer or to find some way to last longer or whatever.
And the need to keep providing all that quote unquote truth.
I don't even like calling it that, but that's what they're claiming they're giving.
They do have to find more and more things to say it.
And in doing that, they're going to find, they're going to look for and actively find more and more of these other things.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Blame it on the globalists.
Yeah.
Work that globalist angle in.
Yeah, yeah.
Work this thing.
Oh, add in World War II.
Yeah.
And as soon as you start adding in World War II, we all know where this goes.
The most dazzling thing that happened in World War II was the genocide.
So work that in.
What were they lying about in World War II?
Well, shrug.
And sometimes they don't even say.
They just sort of leave it hanging and let the audience fill in the blanks.
And that's the part where everyone in the audience gets to tell their own part of that little bit of story and fill that in.
Yeah.
And I, yeah, it's dangerous, but I, I like like what I'm trying to do is, is to try to point out how it's happening rather than like, obviously you've been involved and a lot of other people that we know collectively have been involved in active debunking of the actual things that are wrong.
And I, I do do that once in a while.
But more than that, I, I'm trying to point out the way in which the machine is producing the untruths, right?
Like, like if it's a wave pool and you want the waves to stop, like you can try to, you know, smooth out each individual wave and that's a lot of work.
But eventually we're going to have to stop the thing that's causing the waves.
So if we can, you know, exactly define and put our finger on that, that's, that's where I'd like to be.
That's where I'd like to get to, right?
That would be good because once these lies go down the train, there'll be other ones after them if it's still profitable.
Yeah.
And it, and it's, and, you know, like I put in the notes, there is no Narcan for conspiracy theories.
The metaphor doesn't extend that far.
No.
Right.
And just to clarify for people, that's the drug that prevents overdose.
And oftentimes, and we've seen the pictures, you know, of the penny next to the little tiny, like almost microscopic flecks of fentanyl.
And they're like, this is enough for an overdose.
This shit is strong.
Now, the, now, the thing with Narcan, just to kind of like, so people understand, it's a drug that you can get.
I, and I believe like some outreach programs have them for free, you know?
And I've seen it administered as a nasal spray.
I think there's also like an injection version.
All it does, and it has no effect on the trank because trank is not an opioid and it doesn't detox the person.
It only prevents the overdose.
And the biggest side effect is people, is the person that's overdosing screaming at the person who administered it.
Why did you wreck my high?
Yeah.
And so, but there is no Narcan.
There is no official detox.
There is no panacea for healing the conspiracy theories.
But I think, you know, there are so many different ways that we can look at them.
And I think as an addiction, and especially with the fentanyl and the trank, like there, it does turn you into a zombie.
And I hate that they use the word zombie for the addicts because it's very dehumanizing.
But I understand it from a metaphorical sense.
And it's also something that, and conspiracy theories do produce a zombie effect where, you know, instead of brains, brains, I mean, if you're going with return of living dead where the zombies could talk, yeah, you're not going with that.
You're going with, you know, follow the water, you know, or think mirror.
You're, nothing can stop what is coming.
You're going to be a lot of people.
Those nonspecific things that come from QAnon were and still are effective because they're nonspecific, because they can be interpreted so many ways, right?
Yeah.
And you can take the same ones over again and you can reinterpret them with new contexts involved to try to spin new yarns for yourself.
That's part of the part of the storytelling, right?
And what one of the things that, and I think they said it was in Vancouver, there's a place where addicts can go and, you know, they have to sign up and do all this stuff.
They go in, they sit down, they're given a clean needle with a pre-measured dose of medicinal heroin in it.
And they shoot up in this building and they noticed like, I don't know, like, I forget the number, this huge decrease in overdoses.
And they also discovered that people that were using this legal medicinal heroin service were able to hold jobs.
They were able to, you know, find places to live.
They were able to become productive members of society.
And, you know, unfortunately, there's no metaphor for that with the conspiracy theories.
You know, the conspiracy theories just need to kind of be cured.
There's no like real control.
But I just, I just wanted to let people know, you know, just as an aside that there is a possibility of getting the opioid crisis under control in our country, but I really doubt we're going to do what needs to be done, which is medicinal heroin.
And, you know, another thing that has really like spoken to me about this is the like the addicts.
And obviously I know when you're filming a documentary, you're not going to keep put in the footage of the crazy person that's screaming.
You're going to keep the footage and use the footage of the most logical, sane, and reasonable addicts that you're going to be talking to, obviously.
But the thing that I noticed was the people that they used in these documentaries were more open about being an addict than a conspiracy theorist would be about being a conspiracy theorist.
They were like, yes, I'm hooked.
You know, sometimes they'll avoid words just so they don't actually have to say it, but they will admit it.
And there was a moving part in this one documentary where a guy's just crying and he's like, I didn't want this to be my life.
And I think if you dug into a conspiracy theorist, I think they would say the same thing because just like a drug addict, nobody wakes up one day and says, you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to ruin my life.
Nobody says that.
No, that's often, I mean, I'm sure there are a few people out there, but nobody plans to ruin their life with drugs or conspiracy theories.
No, and in there, no one works to join a cult either.
Like that same exact same.
And no one goes into an abusive relationship saying, you know what?
I really want to be degraded and dehumanized.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, it doesn't, that it's not a life goal, hashtag life goal.
You know, it's not that.
And also, similarities, you know, and this kind of ties in with the Vancouver, the medicinal heroin is that if you can somehow fix an underlying cause of the addiction, all of the other issues can go away.
These people are getting the pure medicinal, safe heroin.
They're doing it in a safe place with doctors and nurses on staff, and they're able to function.
So someone is attacking the root cause.
And once their addiction goes, you know, once it goes from addiction to dependency, they're able to function.
Underneath the conspiracy theories, just like underneath the drug addiction, there is a reason.
And you see, and I saw it in all these documentaries, you know, someone saying, oh, I was abused as a kid.
There were even men who were saying, I was sexually abused as a kid.
There were all of these issues of neglect.
And, you know, oh, my dad was a drinker and he hit me.
And so there are these underlying issues that cause people to develop trauma that leads them to drugs, just like there are underlying issues that cause trauma that attract people to conspiracy theories.
And, you know, like I've been saying, yeah, we do need to do debunks.
We do need to do pushback.
We do need to do a little bit of mockery.
But underneath all those conspiracy theories is a hurt, screaming child.
Set aside the conspiracy theories.
What's up with you, man?
How are you doing?
What's going on?
Oh, you got fired?
A lot of times you'll see a shift in a conspiracy theorist and a drug addict's life.
I just lost my job.
I need to escape this pain.
Let's try this drug.
I just lost my job.
I need to escape this pain.
Ah, 9-11 was an inside job.
There's a similarity there.
And in order to solve both issues, you really need to set aside the drug.
You need to set aside the conspiracy theory.
You need to tackle what's underneath it.
And that's kind of what they're doing at this Vancouver thing.
Yeah, the drugs are being administered, but they're being administered safe and clean.
And I think they're also trying to get their attention, like to get them some kind of counseling too, right?
Like that's part of the.
I believe that's one of the prerequisites.
Like there are all these things like in order to be a part of this program, you have to do this, you have to do that, you have to do this, you know, and I'm sure they probably have to submit to drug tests too, because they, I'm sure weed isn't an issue, but the only thing they want them testing positive for is going to be heroin, you know?
And so I think that it does really play into the conspiracy theorist as while the drugs and the conspiracy theories turn you into a zombie, we, you know, we should not use that dehumanizing.
And like I said, I understand why they use that.
And it is fitting, but it's also dehumanizing.
But you see this similarity.
And a lot of times the two overlap, you know, when you, it's kind of like the houseless population where there's always like the screamer on the street corner.
And there's always the question of, are they houseless because they're crazy or are they crazy because they're houseless?
You know, which, and, and again, I'm sorry for using the word crazy.
I'm just trying to simplify it.
Yeah.
And you do see some of these addicts that are talking about like there was one guy going off, I think, about the new world order or something.
And there's a double issue for you to try and figure out.
But the drugs, just like the conspiracy theories, are covering up a pain, a deep pain.
And we need to get through to the underlying cause of that pain.
And we need to correct those behaviors.
But that's also very time consuming and can also be dangerous for you as an individual to engage with someone that's far gone.
Yeah.
There's a reason why we put more effort into prevention than into the project of trying to rehabilitate once a person's past certain point, right?
Because we get more sort of bang for the buck, more usefulness for the amount of energy we put in by preventing than we do from trying to pull back from that edge.
But I think that I think that we should put some effort into that, trying to find a person who's that far gone, multiple people who are that far gone and try to see what it might take to pull them back and get them, you know, set back on their feet again, you know, both in both contexts here, homelessness and a person who's just fully consumed with drugs, whether they're homeless or not,
and people who are so far gone with conspiracies that they are saying everything.
All the bad things are happening to these people, right?
Like Liz Churchill looked at her feet.
It keeps coming up.
And it's just, it's, wow, all the things are coming up for her now.
It's unbelievable.
Well, she, she also, I noticed that she likes to steal shit from other people.
Like, I actually caught her flat out, like stealing one of Alex Jones's things, like almost word for word.
And I was like, this bitch ain't even original.
No, and they're not.
They're not.
They might try like.
Some of the better ones, like Alex Jones, will try to take something that's not original and twist it one more time to put his own little spin on it.
It's like, it's like a guitar riff that you steal, that you add an extra strum on the end of, right?
And then you say it's yours instead of someone else's.
And this is what he does all the time.
Yeah.
He likes to get it.
He gets a lot of extra thing.
Yeah.
Well, vanilla ice with one extra note or whatever.
Yeah.
You can barely hear.
Yeah.
So close to the original note in space, you know, in time that you can't even tell just by listening that they're not there.
But yeah.
But it does, it does, you know, and I think, I think if we can kind of look at the, what's going on in the brain chemistry of a conspiracy theorist, I think we can find some answers there.
And who knows?
You know, I'm not a neuroscientist.
Okay.
I'm not even a scientist.
All right.
But what could, and this, I'm just asking questions here.
Okay.
And I'm not like asking conspiracy theory questions, but I think this is something for scientists to think about.
Is there a medication that could help a conspiracy theorist?
Is, you know, like some of the stuff with like well butrin is used for depression, but it also causes people to, it reduces nicotine cravings.
You know, is there something out there that can help a conspiracy theorist rewire their brain possibly?
That's, you know, that's something for a scientist, but I think that would be something like, can you imagine if there was a medication that could fix conspiracy theories?
They definitely wouldn't take it.
Yeah.
Well, one, one step at a time.
Right.
So if you, if you don't mind, I'd like to circle back to one thing that I thought about.
And I didn't want to interrupt you because you were on a roll.
But and we'll probably finish off of this or whatever.
But you mentioned at the very top an article that you were reading an excerpt from.
I haven't read it, but you were mentioning in there that they had things, I believe it was something about dopamine and there were experiences that were bringing the dopamine and the experiences were the thing that they craved that because they associated the feel-good feeling with those experiences, right?
I mean, we touched on this when we first had this conspiracy addiction discussion about just simple how habits can form and conform strongly because you might get a good feeling once you engage in a habit and then you want to engage in it again.
And that we only really call this addiction when it's dangerous for you, when it's hazardous for your health and your well-being and yourself.
So, but does it say anything in that article about in that article about anything that causes anxiety?
Like if there's a, if there's an experience that someone has that makes them feel good, was there in the article anywhere An opposite experience that made them feel anxious or repelled them in some way.
Like, is that anything that they talked about in there?
Do you know?
It's mostly, it's mostly just kind of like working on like the connections.
Uh, this is what made me feel good.
So, I'm gonna keep doing it.
And I'm experiencing that with doing this exercising every day now.
I gotta tell you, and anyone will tell you this, like the first two or three days of exercising is like, Why am I doing this?
And it's so hard to get through.
And you look for any excuse to stop.
You're like, oh, I feel gassy.
I better, I better just stop.
Like, my brain is seeking any excuse to get out of it.
A justification.
Yeah.
Now I'm like, I want to do this.
You know, so, so there, there's a rewiring process.
And I've experienced this off and on, you know, like I'll get into like an exercise routine and I'll find it sucks and then it's pleasurable.
But it, it really, it seems like it's more about like a reward thing.
And it's just, it's like, I don't know, like the metaphorical thing, there, there could be a way to attack this by using the metaphors, metaphors can be very helpful, I think, in a lot of regards.
Yeah.
So I want to bring in an example.
It's not a counterexample.
It's just a further example of something that I've seen in my life, seen people go through.
And I don't know exactly how well it fits, but I'm just going to leave it here.
And people who listen to this episode can mull it through and they can decide if I'm way off base or if it works or whatever on their own.
But this is what I call a Canadian experience.
It's not really just a Canadian experience, but compared to the U.S., it's more of a Canadian experience, which is working outside in the cold weather.
So this is what I've seen people do.
And I've done it too.
I work outside in the cold weather every winter, where you will have an area that's indoors, like a vehicle, a shack of some kind, and it'll have a heater in there.
And the heater is good.
It is very good.
It is pumping out lots of heat because it has to to overcome the very cold weather outside.
So you will see people that they go outside and they feel miserable in the cold weather.
And then they come in and they warm up.
And most people don't think about how this is affecting them, but it's sort of like a pair of feedback mechanisms, right?
Where you go outside and you feel awful.
And then you go inside and you feel good.
Because when you come in from minus 40, and for anyone who's not familiar with the way the two scales work, minus 40 is the same in Celsius as it is in Fahrenheit.
When you come in from that cold and you come in and it's like really warm, you want that.
You want that warmth.
And all the time you're outside, there's a little voice inside your head, much like you said when you were exercising and it didn't feel good.
There was a little voice that was saying, you know what?
You don't have to do this.
You can go somewhere else.
You can stop this.
You can, you know, and there's a little voice inside you that says, you know what?
There's a warm place.
It's a warm place right over there.
You can just go warm up.
And what I've seen is people who come to Canada from much warmer places, they tend to have a much worse experience with this than people who have grown up in Canada.
I mean, when you're a school, when you're going to school as a child and you have to walk to school in the cold weather, you have to go outside and play in the cold weather.
you kind of get this and it's just been there your whole life and so you just kind of deal with it.
But then you get a person who comes from Nigeria.
And I literally had working for me one time, a helper who was from Nigeria.
And this was his first job where he had to work outside in the cold and winter.
And he developed like a fear of going out the door to go do things.
And you don't have to go out there for about five minutes at a time, go out there for five minutes and do stuff.
But he was, I could see it in him.
He was like visibly anxious about doing it because he hadn't figured out, he hadn't like consciously thought about what this feedback seesaw was doing to him.
He was liking the warmth so much that he, it was completely distracting for him.
It was hard for him to focus on doing anything when he was that cold.
And he just would do whatever it took to just do it really quickly, come back inside.
And then once he was inside, he was growing to get like an anxiousness.
And eventually it would have been a fear of going outside in that cold weather, just hope that it's somehow warmer since the last time he went outside.
I mean, and I sat him down and I talked to him about it and I described to him what was happening.
And it must have been strange for him for me to have to describe to him that I know what he's sort of feeling.
But once I was able to describe it for him, you know, he kind of understood and he was able to consciously think his way past it and go outside and not be anxious.
And, or maybe better, a better descriptor is he was probably able to feel the anxiousness and just go outside anyway.
And I, at the time, in the way I'm comparing something to something that I compared it to, at the time for him, I compared it to a fireman who had to go into a burning house.
And that so many parts of what a person would would do is to not want to go into that burning house.
There's no oxygen, there's smoke, there's fire.
But the fireman has gear and he has an oxygen mask and he has all the things he needs to get him in and out of the house safely.
And that's what a fireman trains to do is to understand that, yeah, you're going to go into a dangerous scenario that you're going to want to, you know, some part of you, some mammalian instinct is going to make you want to just flee from.
But you have to think past that and, you know, in your training, think past that and go in anyway.
And that's what he had to do.
He had to go outside anyway and do the things he had to do outside, regardless of whether this feedback mechanism was making him feel bad about doing this certain thing.
And I wonder if working after all that explanation, working back to this, I wonder if part of what's happening here is that there is a mechanism, as you describe, that's making them feel good.
There's an experience that they, that they get the dopamine and that's working and the thing.
And it's psychologically, they have a thing that's making them feel good.
But I wonder if there's also a part of their life, social life or whatever, that's making them feel bad and that they're then avoiding.
And in case anyone, you know, I don't want to hit the nail too much on the head here, but really what I'm talking about now is cognitive dissonance here, right?
When you have to, inside your own brain, you have a shape for the world.
And as soon as you are confronted with an idea that radically conflicts with the shape you have in your brain, you don't feel good about that idea.
And you have to make a choice.
What I often see people doing when they talk about cognitive dissonance is they talk about the choice you make as cognitive dissonance in that you're choosing to ignore some part of some information that you're getting.
You're rejecting it out then.
And they call that cognitive dissonance.
But really, that's a consequence of cognitive dissonance.
The dissonance is just the bad feeling.
You know, when you get two prongs and they're offbeat and they ring at the same time and you get that sense where they clash with each other, it's that that's why they relate it to dissonance, two sounds that aren't cohesive.
And you have two ideas that don't work.
You have a flat earth and a round earth and they don't work together and you have to reject one.
And I've seen people who know that the earth is spherical not want to engage with any flat earth material, even as a joking thing or whatever, because they feel bad when they listen to it.
It's information that conflicts with their view of the world being spherical.
And they just don't want to even engage with it.
And I think the similar thing is happening with people who are deep in these conspiracies.
They feel bad when they are confronted with the thing that conflicts with their view.
And so there's a good feeling like you're describing where they get more of the thing that they get to just fly free with.
And then there's a thing that's grounding them.
And I think they work to avoid that because they get an anxious, you know, bad feeling about it.
So after all that, what do you think?
Yeah, no, I mean, for me personally, I don't like to engage with the flat earth stuff because I've been in an airplane.
You know, it's like, and also for me, I'm not good with geography.
I'm not good with like geology and geometry.
I'm not, I'm not good with that stuff.
So it's like there that because I'm so dumb with that stuff, their arguments could affect me, you know, which is why I do pre-bunking.
Like, you know, I, because I'm working on that article about like the crisis actors and stuff, you know, I'm looking into all sorts of denialism.
And what I do is the way to get rid of that cognitive dissonance is to pre-bunk, which, you know, I was reading that idiot, Jim Fetzer's book, and he has a chapter about how the Holocaust didn't happen.
So what I did was I went to the NISE Corps project and I read through all of the debunks against Holocaust denial.
And then I read Fetzer's book.
And it's also helpful to do that because you are able to catch, you know, you're reading stuff and people are denying the Holocaust and you're like, this is just bullshit.
But if you do the pre-bunk first, you're able to catch the propaganda techniques that they use.
So, you know, that, but for me, some of the stuff that I avoid is just because it's like, yeah, it is cognitive dissonance, but it's like my brain is like, how could you be so stupid to believe the earth is flat?
Or how could you be so stupid to think the Holocaust didn't happen?
Like that's just they're the two most extreme conspiracy theories.
And I haven't heard of many people coming back from either one.
No.
And but I'd like to say, I don't think that the people who fall for these are falling for them because they lack intellect.
No.
I don't have, yeah, I don't have all the, like I'm working on something, but I don't have all the all the pieces in place yet to really describe it.
But I think that being in a certain intelligence kind of area and the higher the better, actually we usually think of it protecting a person against the idea that these what are really are ridiculous ideas from taking hold.
But that's, I think, not how it works at all.
I think that it's something like that they trust themselves and their own ability to process more than they trust anyone else's.
And I mean, this is, I think, related to why we see so many Nobel Prize winners who go down conspiracy rabbit holes, right?
Because they've been the smartest person in the room more often than anyone else.
And they have trusted their own knowledge and their own ability to interpret much more than anyone else.
And so when they get only part of a story that's usually laid out specifically as only the parts that are meant to lead you to the poor conclusion, and they follow along with that, and then someone tries to tell them they're wrong, well, they've been right almost every time for their whole lives.
They're not about to let someone just tell them they're wrong now.
And this is, it's sort of like a trap for intelligent people where I think the only thing that really saves them is humility, the ability to understand that it's possible for you to be wrong.
It's possible for you to look at these things and come to the wrong conclusion, especially when someone's leading you to it with breadcrumbs.
But they like to think that they're independent thinkers.
They like to think that they understood all the things on their own.
They weren't led there.
They interpreted it the right way in quotes, right?
And that's part of the problem is that being intelligent is no fail-safe against this.
In fact, it might be easier to get yourself confused.
Oddly enough, in this weird paradoxical way, it might just be, right?
Yeah, like Beautiful Mine.
Well, that guy was bloody brilliant.
And yeah.
He's doing the world's best math.
And then also thinks that he's talking to people all the time.
Yeah.
And I also wanted to include, and this works for conspiracy theorists, mental health crisis and drug abuse.
Substance abuse and mental health services administration national helpline is 1-800-662-4357, 1-800-662-4357.
I think it's important to include that if you're having a mental health crisis, if you are addicted to drugs, if you are a conspiracy theorist and you're ready to come out.
I'm not, you know, I offer help and support to people, but I'm not a psychologist or a therapist.
But I want people to hear that hotline because some of the people listening to this might be drug addicted.
They might be having a mental health crisis.
They might be looking to leave conspiracy theories.
And that one phone number seems to cover it all.
So.
Well, yeah, great.
So wrapping this up, where can people find you if they need to find you, Stephanie?
I'm on Twitter at Steph in Doubt.
That's the name of my support group discussing our unusual beliefs together, doubt.
Yep.
And doing some good work there.
Trying.
Well, all you can do is try.
It's all any of us.
And I also wanted to add when, because my friend Robin posted a lovely thread on Twitter last night.
He was talking to a homeless man and he had this really beautiful experience with him.
And the homeless man was, I'm sorry, houseless, was trying to explain to these teenagers, this is what you shouldn't do because this is what I didn't look where I ended up.
And when someone offers you their experience as a former drug addict, as a former houseless person, or even if they're still houseless, when you're offering your experience up as a former cult member, as a person who suffered through an abusive relationship, as a person who once believed in conspiracy theorists,
when you hear someone who's been through that talk about their experience, believe them when they tell you, these are the mistakes I made.
Do not do this.
Yeah, good advice.
And I'm found on Twitter, Spencer G. Watson.
And I mentioned the email at the top of the podcast.