David Bloomberg examines zealotry—how single-issue obsession, like QAnon’s adrenochrome fixation or a consultant’s baseless Blagojevich claims, drowns out reason, evidence, and social norms. From pedophilia panic overriding due process to environmental extremism shutting down sterilizers despite medical risks, zealots discard facts for ideological purity, even justifying violence (e.g., January 6th or LA synagogue harassment). Bloomberg and Spencer G. Watson contrast this with necessary compromises in elections, like voting for flawed candidates to block worse ones, warning that unchecked zealotry fractures reality and relationships, leaving only blind devotion to collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
The podcast would have more taglines if I had thought of this in advance.
So you should really dedicate your entire life to the development of taglines, to the exclusion of all else.
Yeah.
Well, I should become zealous about it, very zealous about it.
Exactly.
Yes.
So that's the voice of David Bloomberg, frequent guest.
I don't, we didn't really go over any titles.
Everyone's a guest except for me.
So I guess that's what you're always going to be.
You're never going to be a co-host, David.
I think you're always.
Frequent guest.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So here today with David Bloomberg.
And as we alluded to in our unrehearsed but cleverly placed little lead in, we want to talk a little bit about zealotry today.
Zealotry is a psychological condition in which one thing, one issue, one topic, one thing becomes very, very important to a person to the exclusion of nearly all or perhaps all other things.
I think of it like one signal that drowns out all the others.
The others aren't getting more quiet.
It's just that the one is so loud that that's the only one you hear.
Volumes turned up on it to the max, right?
And that's a very simple look at zealotry.
We're not psychologists or anything.
So that's fine.
But once you achieve like a level of zealotry about something, it can overwhelm everything else in your life.
And I like that description of zealotry because it shows how anyone can become a zealot about something.
You can become a zealot about wearing the newest trends and fashions every season.
You can become a zealot about making sure you're eating all the natural and good green vegetables all the time.
You can become a zealot about anything, literally, because it's just part of human behavior.
It's in our programming and we're never going to escape it.
We're never going to weed it out.
We're never going to eventually have children that don't have this.
Otherwise, they'll probably also lose interest in everything else.
Yeah.
So starting with zealotry.
Yeah.
It's just something that people need to watch themselves for.
And of course, you know, this topic came up because of something that happened directly with someone I know, also someone who has interacted with you online, where this person was, you know, is an acquaintance and got into certain arguments with me because they were buying the conspiracy beliefs,
which was something I knew about them.
And then you joined in.
And by the end of it, this person, who, like I said, was an acquaintance and had managed to mute or block both of us because they just didn't want to hear it anymore after leveling a number of personal attacks at us.
And then and then out of the blue, I had forgotten this person was also a Facebook friend.
And they commented with some kind of jokey, you know, kind of response on something that I posted.
And it's like, and it was just a family related post.
And I mean, I didn't respond to it or anything, but, you know, you can disagree with me.
You can debate with me, but you can't personally attack me and block me and insult me and then expect me to just act as if nothing happened.
And to me, this just showed he does not comprehend that his words have impact on people.
It's like he's such an idealist in his views that he doesn't consider the real world.
And so, you know, I, that's one way that we ended up getting to this topic, you know, because of that person.
And then it just, it kind of just blossomed because there are so many examples of this, both, you know, from our own lives, in politics, in everything.
Literally, even after writing up my notes, as you were sitting here talking about, I thought of another example that perfectly matched what you were talking about.
And it was someone who I had met, I don't know, 20, 30 years ago online.
It must, it was, it was over 30 years ago now that I think about it.
Online was a fellow scientific skeptic.
And we, you know, argued with people together and, you know, stuff like that, and then had lost touch.
And then with Facebook, we had re-found each other and we were Facebook friends.
And in the meantime, as regular listeners to this podcast know, I got involved in coverage of reality TV shows.
Well, on Facebook, I started, not started, I post when I have articles that go up or nowadays podcasts that go up.
And I posted about one and he launched into an attack on me in the comments that basically said this topic, and I don't even remember what topic it was.
It was some scientific or leftist or skeptical topic that was near and dear to his heart.
And he literally said, it is so important that it is the only thing that we should focus our time on.
And that I, you know, there's no way that I should be spending any time on, you know, any other pursuits like reality television.
And then he unfriended me and blocked me.
Right.
Yeah.
So zealots, I think, to be fair, on some level, I think they understand that the other things in their life are being left behind.
But they justify this behavior of the lowering of relative importance of all the other things by focusing on the one thing that they feel is important, right?
And we see this in, we actually see this in a lot of unreality grifting work is that part of the grift is to give the audience a reason to become zealous about this thing.
And in a lot of situations now, it's save the children, right?
It's whatever your participation in this will assist in reducing the number of pedophiles and the instances of that in the world.
And then therefore, this should subsume every other thing in your life because what could ever be more important than this?
Right.
Which is true that we should stop pedophilia if that's what's really happening.
And most people skip past the part where they feel they have to prove that the pedophilia is happening.
The insinuation alone should is meant to carry the day in a lot of these situations that you're just assuming, yeah, yeah, we know that these people are pedophiles, and then therefore, you know, you're on our side.
We're against that, and it's good to be against that.
And of course, uh, you should, why are you doing, why are you spending any time on this other stuff?
Reality TV doesn't matter.
Uh, um, why are you going to watch that latest movie?
That movie isn't going to help you with this.
That's money that you could spend on this.
That's time you could spend on this.
People are suffering, not just people, children are suffering.
Yes.
And, you know, why isn't the entire world not helping with this?
So, what we see in a lot of behavior with this is an almost inability to leave behind to not mention this stuff in every other social situation.
Yes.
They'll go to baby showers and bring it up, right?
They'll go to weddings and bring it up.
They'll go to funerals and bring it up.
They'll, every other thing, they'll go to get coffee at the store and people talk to them and they'll bring it up because they feel it's the most important thing.
It's like avoiding the apocalypse.
And I had an episode about apocalyptic rhetoric and what it's meant to do.
It's meant to change people's decisions to sort of put a time limit on it.
And this is sort of what is done in a lot of these situations.
It's the more time you spend doing something else, the worse the danger becomes.
Yeah, the problem is that I think a lot of the zealots, and I know certainly a lot of the examples that I have seen, are, I don't want to say less concerned with real world issues, but I would say more concerned with or more focused on their idealism.
And so we see this.
This was another, like I said, I noticed this all kind of popping up at the same time.
And, you know, I, at the roughly the same time, I saw a tweet that said, voting third party is a good way to let marginalized groups know that your abstract principles are more important than their very real lives.
Yeah.
And it reminded me of people like that who I've encountered over the years.
And, you know, you do have a situation where for marginalized groups and even non-marginalized groups, but especially marginalized groups, letting Trump win could seriously harm them.
Yeah.
He's literally talking about rounding up groups of people and shipping them off.
You know, he so he's taking metaphorically talking about it.
He's not figurative to talk about it.
There's no symbolism here.
Right.
That's the real actual words that are leaving his mouth and the mouths of the other people that he is relying on to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so it's great that some people say we shouldn't have just two parties.
Okay.
I understand.
You and I have had discussions about this offline many times.
But this is where we are.
We have two parties.
Like it or not, we have two parties.
And saying, I cannot vote for either of those two parties.
So I'm going to cast my meaningless vote for Jill Stein.
That's one way we got here to begin with.
Yeah.
And So it's, and again, this, this leads to another tweet that I saw, which this came from filmmaker and writer Jeff Locker, who said, I will never understand not voting for the person with whom you're mostly, but not 100% aligned, yet somehow you demand to be perfect.
When that act will ultimately lead to electing a corrupt, trash Hitler wannabe who wants to destroy you, your family, people you care about, and your country.
Politics is messy.
Politicians are imperfect.
The world is complicated.
But the consequences of not helping elect the best choice we have and letting the bad people win can be devastating and permanent.
And yeah, all of that's true.
And so, but yet you've got these people who are such zealots that they will say, no, we need to still vote third party.
We need to show that this is our, this is, this is what we believe.
And it just, you're cutting off your nose to spite your face.
You're, you're ignoring the real world consequences just as much as the person I was talking about who, who attacked me and then wanted to pretend it hadn't happened.
And it's, it just, they don't learn.
They are such zealots.
They don't learn.
Yeah, I agree.
They don't learn.
I think that they think, like, I try to create a space in my mind where I'm thinking like them.
I think to them, they, and when I talk to people who appear to be zealous like this, they appear to be frustrated that no one else is listening.
Right.
Because to them, this is the only important thing.
This is, if you're ever in that spot where you think there's only one thing wrong or only one solution, you probably need some perspective.
Yes.
For anyone who listens to this, if you're not just now, but anytime in the future, you're in a spot where you think there's only one thing left to do, you need to think harder about this.
And I think, you know, I, the apocalypse isn't the answer.
You know, the end isn't the answer.
The consciously moving toward the end is a thing that's known as accelerationism.
And some people almost veer toward this, like even in conversation with people that I have in conversation in Canada that we don't even have any nukes, but some people sometimes veer toward this almost out of like a fatigue for the whole thing.
Like, why do we have to live under this sort of Damocles of potential nuclear threat?
Why don't we just get it over with already and just, because we feel it's inevitable, just do it already and then we'll start fresh.
Well, no.
How about no?
How about there's a lot of other ways this could turn out other than destruction in this way?
And I think we see the same thing with political things.
And I think this leads to a lot of zealotry too, is the idea, like a fatigue of worried, being worried about the thing that will bring the end.
And it's almost easier to throw the switch yourself and help to bring the end than it is to just endlessly wait for it, right?
Well, and it's not just that.
I mean, like the people, there are literally people out there who, you know, they did this in the Hillary versus Trump election and they've been advocating it again as if they have zero memory.
They're saying that, yeah, we know taking votes away from Hillary and voting for Jill Stein could cause her to lose.
It helped.
But they figured that Trump winning would be so bad that people would want to swing the other direction afterwards and lived in their ultra-leftist paradise after that.
Yeah.
And yeah, that didn't happen.
It didn't happen last time.
It's not going to happen this time.
So, I mean, you know, there's some question as to whether there'll be another election if Trump wins this one, considering some of the things he said.
And, but they just, it's similar to what you're talking about in terms of, well, you know, if we can't gradually move the party to the left quick enough, which let me be clear, the Democratic Party has moved to the left.
The country has moved to the left.
We got, as an example, you know, rights for gay marriage much faster than even most of the people who were fighting for those rights expected.
As the Canadian on the panel, I need to remind you it was not before Canada did it.
Well, yes.
I'm talking about America, though.
So any Canadian listeners, Canada did it first.
Yes.
Okay, okay.
As long as our little chip is on the table, we're good.
Yes.
Now, I mean, under Trump, that could be taken away again.
But my point is, there are certain things that have changed just in my lifetime that I look back on.
I look back.
I watch TV shows that are 20 years old, 30 years old.
I can't believe they're saying some of the things they're saying and doing some of the things they're doing because that's just not acceptable now.
Yeah.
And it shouldn't have been acceptable then, but, you know, it was whether, you know, because the country has gotten better.
It just hasn't gotten better fast enough for certain people.
And I understand that.
I'm sure it is frustrating to them.
You want everything to be perfect.
You want it to be better for everyone.
But it's not going to happen that quickly.
And it's certainly not going to happen as some sort of pendulum swing.
If you make it really bad, then it'll get good after that.
Yeah, making it really bad got three Supreme Court justices put onto there.
Yeah, really bad.
With lifetime appointments.
Yeah.
And no ethical obligations.
Yep.
And so it just, it doesn't work that way.
And you've, they, you've got to put aside your, your, your zealotry.
You've got to realize, yes, we all want to fight to make things better, but in a democratic society, it has to be done by convincing people.
Yeah.
And unfortunately, some of the older people who had those positions dying out.
It's the, you know, it's similar to science in science.
Sometimes that's the way things move forward is the older people who are holding on so desperately to outdated positions died out.
Yeah.
But, you know, another, another very recent example as we're recording this was the vandalism of Stonehenge.
Yeah.
And there's been a lot of recent vandalisms like this by protesters.
And, you know, the question is, how does damaging a cultural icon help advance their narrative?
It doesn't.
In fact, many who share the same opinions with them about climate change have come out strongly against them because these kinds of actions can turn the general public against them.
Yeah.
It doesn't put things in a favorable like, yeah, maybe you're thinking all press is good press, but it's not.
You know, as a writer in The Atlantic said, it's yet another example of environmental activism that produces more rancor over its means than focus on its message.
Yeah, I was thinking about your what you were saying about the people.
And I remember this rhetoric happening at the time in 2016 with the Jill Stein and the Hillary and about being okay with a Trump presidency because it was meant to, you know, they were meant to slingshot sort of a backlash against it that was going to, you know, bump the thing.
Okay.
I guess.
But the thing isn't exactly working on the principles of physics, right?
So yeah, it's not necessarily that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
This, this isn't that exact thing.
But I think that that's an example of a situation where someone decides that because their argument is not having an effect, that they need some other measure.
And I think that principle is one that needs to go away.
You know, it was said once upon a time by a philosopher of war that war is politics by other means.
And I think that really generalizes to violence is politics by other means.
Almost all instances of violence are times where someone wants to convince someone of something, can't do it with words.
So that's when it happens.
Some people say, well, violence happened because they reacted to the violence.
Well, of course, then what was the thing?
You know, what were they reacting to?
Was that guy, you know, the bridge that first started the violence is almost always you're not getting what you want without it.
So you think you'll get it with the violence.
Right.
And this is, I think, what you're describing is this situation.
It wasn't like a riot to get what they wanted, but they were thinking of Trump like a scourge that was going to be unleashed that would galvanize the people to the left against more scourges.
I think is kind of generally what they were thinking.
And they were vocally saying these things.
This isn't things that we were, that we're sort of making up.
They were really saying these things.
But I think this whole principle, we need to somehow put this whole principle to bed, this whole idea that anyone should resort to violence to get what they want when their argument isn't enough.
Because, I mean, that's what happened on January 6th.
Right.
They weren't getting what they wanted from the vote.
And they weren't even getting what they wanted from declaring that the vote was faulty.
They felt that they needed to go into the building to prevent something or force something.
You know, even now, it's not totally clear what they thought.
But, you know, they clearly wanted something.
They brought hangman nooses with them.
They brought zip ties.
They did bring weapons.
There were a couple of guns, though not many.
And they did take things from the building and from the police to use against the police.
This is, you know, very dangerous situation.
And just being outnumbered by that many people is a weapon unto itself.
And so this idea needs to go away before we can ever get to a place where we're in a, well, to a better place.
You can't just say, well, if we're not going to get what we want, we're going to we're going to violently insurrect.
And this is the exact rhetoric that Trump is beginning to line up again.
If I don't win, we're going to march.
Yeah.
What's the end result of that march going to be?
What's that going to look like?
How much zealotry does it take to inspire a mob to do that?
I said this.
I said another version of this recently.
I don't remember the exact words, but I'll try to replicate it here.
Is that we can think about January 6th as maybe a one-off.
And maybe some people can say that'll never happen again.
It won't happen exactly the way it was, but the idea that it won't happen again, I think, is just wishful thinking.
Yes.
So we need to think about, and individuals, mind you, not like people in committees or someone up a chain in a hierarchy that's, you know, some government official needs to think about this.
Individuals need to think about this, is that when that happens, when some demagogue makes the call, Trump or some other demagogue makes the call to say, you know, we should march on this to do this thing to get the thing that I want.
People should think about who they know that might answer that call, what level of zealotry they're going to have.
Are they going to be zealous enough to go themselves or just zealous enough to cheer when it happens?
And in the days, months and years before that, you know, how much pushback was given to those people when they started saying completely unreal things, did anyone stand up and say, no, look, that isn't real.
That just, that just didn't happen that way.
And you don't have to get in a shouting match with them.
But I think it's important for not only them, but also the other bystanders around you to see that someone is saying to them, that's not real.
That's not, that didn't happen that way.
You know, we can show this.
And of course, the media needs to do that as well, because right now what sells better is all the all the fantastical stuff.
Right.
But what is leading to a better future is the reality of the situation.
And so news people need to think about this.
And we need to think about that when we choose which news sources we have that we use.
Yeah.
And it's not looking great.
It's not the end yet.
But if you can reduce the amount of zealotry in the other people that you see becoming zealous around you in just everyday conversation, then, you know, you haven't saved the world.
But if you prevent one person from going, you know, what's the size of that crowd going to be on the next January 6th like event?
Right.
And if you could reduce it by 10%, 20%, if you and the work of a bunch of people can make it smaller, right?
Those are all things.
You know what I mean?
And it doesn't even have to be January 6th.
I mean, there was recently anti-Semitic violence in Los Angeles surrounding a synagogue.
And the excuse that was given was that supposedly they were selling plots of land in that there are varying accounts as we, you know, as we're still sitting here, but, you know, that were supposedly had belonged to Palestinians or they were in Gaza or the West Bank or something like that.
And it wasn't true.
It was spread that way, or at least to my knowledge, it wasn't true, I'll say.
And they just attacked random worshipers, Jewish people who happened to be there because of a story that they heard that had nothing to do with those people.
Right.
You know, and we're certainly, you know, we're not going to get into the much larger issue of what's going on in Israel and Gaza and everything.
That's a million different podcasts.
But the point is, it just took a story to turn these people violent.
Yeah.
And when I say these people, I don't mean any particular people.
I mean a group of people.
Any group of people can be, well, not any group, but, you know, I mean, there's been studies, you know, the studies of the way large groups act as compared to individuals.
And, you know, once you get them revved up in a cause, in a zealous cause, whatever that cause may be, it can turn to violence.
Another example, not, it didn't get to violence, but this is another recent one where there were people targeting CNN's Jake Tapper by standing outside his house and shouting at his kids through megaphones.
Yeah, great.
If you're attacking someone through their kids at their house, you need to reevaluate your life choices.
Yeah.
First of all, realize you don't have an argument.
Otherwise, you wouldn't have had to go to their house with a with a bullhorn.
I don't, I don't advocate for anyone to go to anyone's house.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I don't think anyone should go to, you know, Trump's house and, you know, do that.
I don't advocate that anyone should go to Matt Gates' house and do that.
You know, and he's, Matt Gates is a pretty despicable person, but don't interrupt his personal life for that.
Make the argument in the space it needs to be made, in the proper place, and discourage other people from supporting him by showing them the real things that he's done and reminding them of those things.
Yeah.
Because the real power for these people is in their ability to convince a large number of people to follow them.
And it's a lot more work.
I get it.
But it's, you know, it's more difficult to be honorable, but it's also got its perks that have a, you know, long-term, is a long-term goals, which is why it's easier to not be honorable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, and I mean, you know, besides obviously avoiding violence that can harm other people, you know, think about it for yourself and the people who agree with you too.
Because, you know, I know that we've, you know, leaned a little bit to one side in this particular discussion, but just, you know, look at the way the right handled COVID.
You know, they were anti-vaccine.
They were anti-mask.
I say were, still are.
Claimed it wasn't really dangerous.
It literally killed off not only millions of people they didn't care about, but a lot of themselves as well.
There were whole websites dedicated to listing the anti-vaxxers, anti-masker COVID deniers who died.
Some of them had deathbed conversions and they were, they published videos and they were like, I was wrong.
You know, this is a real problem here.
Others went, literally went to their death, still claiming it's just a cold for everyone.
Yeah.
And, you know, there were politicians who went to Trump events and had to show fealty to Trump by not wearing a mask and ended up dead because of it.
Yeah.
I think that not wearing masks could only be justified by the belief that COVID wasn't dangerous.
But I think that masks were a good example of a lot of this weird, the weirdness around zealotry with COVID because, first of all, they're not infecting you in any way.
It's not actually a thing that goes inside you as a, you know, the mask become part of your blood or whatever.
Right.
So it's weird that people were also who were against vaccines were also against masks.
One would think logically that people who were against vaccines would prefer masks and, you know, lean heavily on that and say, look, we can solve this with masks.
We don't need those stupid vaccines.
But it didn't go that way.
It went to this thing where they had to not just minimize, not just maximize the dangers of the vaccine, they had to also minimize the dangers from COVID and then therefore had to pretend like masks were a sign that you had given into the fear, which is actually a thing that Jordan Peterson said at one point, that wearing masks was a sign that you had given in to the fear.
And the fear was the thing that the, you know, imaginary monster in charge wanted you to have, which is incoherent and coming from a, you know, supposedly world-renowned psychologist is pretty remarkable.
Yeah.
And the same was true.
And I remember arguing it at the time.
The people who were against lockdowns were also against mask mandates.
It's like you said you're against lockdowns because you want the economy to start going again.
Yeah.
Well, the way to get the economy going again was to get people back into stores, get people working, whatever, in masks.
So by having mask mandates, you get rid of lockdowns.
Yeah.
You know, and it just, but there was no logical coherence to their arguments.
Yeah.
Because again, zealotry.
Now, taking a step back to less dangerous zealotry, I realized as we were, you know, as I was preparing for the podcast, just how many examples of zealotry I saw in my old job where I worked for a state government environmental agency.
And I often saw examples of zealotry in that, in that job.
Now, for most of my time, because of the state that I'm in, I worked for a Democratic administration and we passed regulations that were undoubtedly beneficial.
Even the Republicans didn't have us do anything that was, you know, bad because there were so many federal requirements.
But there were times when they were like, well, we don't want to go quite that far.
But it was rare.
And like I said, I was mostly in Democratic administrations.
No matter what we did, it was seemingly never enough for some of the people who would come out and yell at us.
They would attack us, even as we proposed rules to reduce air emissions because they felt it didn't go far enough, ignoring the facts that we presented that going further would have been technically or economically infeasible.
Like, yes, you can always reduce the emissions to zero by shutting everything down.
Yeah.
Right.
And they would have done that.
If it were up to them, they would have shut down companies.
They would have put people out of work.
And yes, sometimes that is necessary.
But as an example, we need to move from fossil fuels to renewables in the energy sector.
There's no doubt.
Yeah.
But you can't just pass a law that says all coal and natural gas are shut down.
Deal with it.
And, you know, there's not going to magically be some sort of solution.
Solar power and wind power and nukes aren't just going to spring up out of the ground like flowers.
Yeah.
And so we would, you know, these people, they would come, they would testify, they would argue, and we would present facts.
And it just would not matter because they were so zealous in their viewpoints that literally their own opinions would ignore the facts.
Right.
And so there was another example.
And this is more recent.
This was near the end of my time working.
It was determined that ethylene oxide was much more toxic than people had realized.
And ethylene oxide or ETO is used in a number of different sterilizing operations, most notably for medical devices, surgical kits, just about everything else you'll find related to a hospital.
And many hospitals used to have their own ETO sterilizers, as well as the companies that provide the stuff.
So hospitals used to just take their surgical equipment, send it to their own ETO sterilizer.
And the people who operated it, you know, they weren't experts necessarily in ensuring that the ETO didn't get into the atmosphere.
But once its toxicity was updated, there was a huge outcry.
And people wanted all the facilities not controlling it to the amount they wanted shut down.
And that started to happen.
Some of them did get shut down by environmental agencies.
And then what happened next?
There was a shortage of certain types of medical equipment.
It was eventually resolved without probably most people noticing because they saw it coming and went to the federal government and were like, if you don't allow us to operate, you are not going to have, you know, surgical equipment.
You're not going to have these particular things that you get in a hospital.
But if those who had wanted it shut down all the way had their way, there could have been a serious medical crisis.
It goes back to focusing so much on only one aspect of the situation and ignoring everything else around it, much like the person who we started this conversation talking about.
They were focused on one thing and ignoring everything else.
And you can't do that.
I mean, like I said, I worked.
I worked for over 30 years in the environmental field.
It's complicated.
You can't just wave your magic wand and make things go away.
Yeah um, I just had a thought that uh, one thing you said there triggered a little.
Another little thing in my brain is that it occurs to me that zealotry, as I've described it, where one topic overtakes in importance everything else in a person's life, I think, greatly contributes to conspiracism and unreality as it's created inside a mind, because a person,
a person will start to interpret all the new things that they get, all the new pieces of information, all the news, all the happenings in the world.
They'll start to interpret them around the one central issue that's overtaken in importance all the other things in their life, right?
So a person in QAnon who's obsessed with the elites draining adrenochrome from children or something will learn some new thing about a celebrity and then immediately in a process that's called cooking will attempt to reinterpret this new piece of information around this central idea.
Oh, so-and-so got, you know, Justin Timberlake pulled over for drunk driving.
And so to the people in QAnon, this becomes immediately a bakable thing, a thing that they could cook into their process.
He's very popular.
He's obviously a quote unquote elite.
And then therefore he's part of this conspiracy.
Or to some other people, he's not in the, you know, the big elite.
And so therefore this was done to keep him out of the club, to discredit him somehow.
I mean, all these stories are available and they're all nonsense.
And you were describing with the people who were looking at all the things you were doing in the environmental protection.
And they were interpreting all the things you were doing around their one central thing.
Well, how does that make this happen?
How does this absolute thing happen?
And all the things in my life should be interpreted around this.
And so therefore, yeah, we will shut down the factories.
And it's sad for those workers.
It's sad that we no longer have an economy anymore, but that's the level we have to get to.
I guess that's the case, right?
And one can almost see how this occurs in a mind, right?
Yeah.
And I may have told this story before I'm here.
I can't remember now.
But there was one woman who repeatedly through the years came to these, the different hearings for her area.
And she would talk about her daughter having terrible asthma.
Oh, yeah.
I think I have heard the story.
Yeah.
Yes.
And she insisted that it was caused by the pollution.
Right.
And then as the years went on, because like I said, I worked there for over 30 years.
So I got to know some of these people.
And she talked about the air pollution is so bad in this small town where she lived that her daughter went to college in Chicago and her asthma cleared up.
And that proves that the pollution is terrible in this small town.
I was like, no, no, no, it doesn't because I know what the data are.
I know what the air pollution rates are.
And Chicago was, I mean, like it or not, just by its very nature, was the worst air pollution in the state.
And so, and here I was earlier being coy about what state I worked for.
Now I'm giving it away.
You said you live in before on this.
I know, I know.
But I said it was Michigan and you said it was Illinois.
I was wrong.
And David, you're right.
It's okay.
Yes.
And so I knew I could not talk to this woman because she would not listen to me because I was part of the conspiracy that she had seen in her mind for all these years.
So I talked to someone else I knew who was on their side.
Not reasonable, but more reasonable, I'll say.
And I said, look, what you're describing to me sounds like what some of my family members have, which is allergy-induced asthma.
She lives in a small town surrounded by farms.
There's a lot of pollen.
There's a lot of everything else going on.
She went to Chicago and it got better.
Yeah, guess what?
There's a lot less of in Chicago.
Farms.
Yeah.
So you need to, you know, not you need to, but I would recommend you talk to her and have her see a doctor and find out the real reason.
Because despite what she thinks, her daughter's entire childhood health problem was not due to air pollution, or rather, I should say, man-made air pollution.
And I don't know if that message ever got passed along or not.
I would like to hope that it did, but it was a perfect example of what you were talking about.
She got it in her mind that this was what was causing her daughter's problems.
And because of it, her daughter suffered through asthma attacks her whole childhood when it perhaps could have been alleviated somehow.
Yeah.
She wearing a mask might have helped her.
Well, yes, yes.
Too soon?
Yeah, well.
Awkward.
Yeah.
And, you know, this does also relate to something else that I was going to mention, because I started off by talking about the acquaintance who, you know, blew past all social norms in attacking me and then, you know, blocking me and everything else and then acted like it was fine.
And I said it, you know, at the beginning, I said, it can be fine to disagree and, you know, separate the two.
I mean, in my job, I had to take positions that were in direct opposition to those of people I had gotten to know over the years.
And I remember in one case, a coworker of mine was a witness in a case, and the lawyer in the case was questioning him pretty strongly.
And when they were done for the day, she came up and shook his hand and talked to him a bit.
And he came back to me the next day and he was just shell-shocked.
He was confused.
How could she be so mean to me when I was on the stand and then so nice to me afterwards?
And it's like, well, she wasn't mean to you.
She was asking you questions about the case.
That was her job.
And so I understand that separation.
I formed friendships with some people who are on opposite sides of me sometimes because working together was almost always the best way to get something done.
If you could avoid fighting it out and leaving it up to a third party to decide, you were better off, you know.
But there were also those who I couldn't form those relationships with because they used dishonest tactics, personal attacks, quoting things out of context, suggesting I was outright lying.
I mean, you want to argue different opinions, fine.
I totally understand, but don't get so caught up in your zealotry that you're going to impugn someone's character for it.
One time, a zealot working for the state's attorney general's office actually suggested in a proceeding that I made up an email and even a whole person working for the federal government who sent it to me.
They actually suggested this.
Right.
Like, like, why would I do that?
Yeah.
You know, I'm just a government worker trying to show that the federal US EPA says that what we're doing is okay.
And you're going to literally suggest that I'm making this up.
So again, zealotry, you know, it just comes in all different forms.
And for people to act that way and then expect to just have a normal interaction or relationship with you afterwards, none of it makes any sense.
Yeah.
And I think I've seen a similar thing to what you're describing here, where it's almost like some people feel it's like context switching, where I've seen this in the difference in interaction between online versus personal.
People thought that being doing personal attacks online wouldn't affect the personal relationship offline.
And at times where I had to tell them, no, man, this is, yeah, yeah, no, that wasn't cool.
And I'm not cool with it.
And this is, is definitely going to affect this.
Yeah.
I mean, this, this sometimes happened a lot more in sort of the early days of the internet, where people thought of the internet as a whole different reality space.
The interwebs was kind of a term.
Oh, that's just the interwebs.
It's just a, that's different.
Everything that happens there is different somehow in a, we're, in a way.
And I never thought that.
To me, everything that happened on the internet was also just a thing that happened in my life, my real life.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, I had to tell some people, yeah, that's not, I don't have a different personality online.
I'm not, you know, this isn't Kfabe.
We're not wrestlers.
You know, we're not putting on masks when we go online to do this.
Yeah, that's not how this is working.
You know, and yeah, I'm not, that's not cool.
So yeah, sorry, but, you know, you've, you've made a mistake here.
You know, whatever, whatever you're going to do with that information now, I don't know.
But I mean, I mean, it's not even there.
It's just in different thing.
There was a consultant who once wrote a book.
He was a very right-wing consultant.
He worked for companies.
And he wrote a book.
I was part of a subject of one of the chapters.
Now, he only self-published it, but I got a hold of it.
And in that chapter, he basically suggested, well, he basically said that the company he was working for got fined a lot of money because Governor Blagojevich was on the phone with me telling me to raise the fine so that there could be more money going to the state coffers because the state was in debt.
Now, there were so many different things wrong with this.
It's hard to know where to begin.
First, the idea that Governor Blagojevich would be talking to a mid-level manager at the EPA, the state.
Do you even know who you are?
Right.
Yeah.
Second of all, the attorney general's office determines the fine, not the governor's office.
Right.
Third of all, the money goes to a designated fund that is split up into four different parts.
It doesn't go to the general state coffers.
Yeah.
And fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the reason the company got such a big fine was because, like I just said a little while ago, it's a lot easier to work together than it is to work in opposition.
Yeah.
And this, this consultant always worked in opposition.
He and the attorney fought for so long on ridiculous bases that the fine, which is based in part on the amount of time that you're out of compliance, just kept racking up.
And so it was just, you know, again, but then I would see him after that and he would act.
Now, he probably didn't know I had seen that chapter in his book.
Right.
But he would act like, oh, yeah, you know, we're old buds.
You know, we worked on these cases together.
No, you're an ass.
Together.
No, no, you didn't work on them together.
Yeah.
And so what, I mean, it is a, it is a context switching thing.
And like I said, yes, I do have people who I could take opposing positions with, whether they were environmentalists, whether they were consultants or attorneys for business, whether they were federal officials, whether they were other states.
Not our interests did not always align.
I understand that.
I understand the roles that they had to play, but there's a line.
And sometimes certain types of people cross that line, just like the guy that we were talking about at the beginning of the podcast.
And that wasn't even anything done under official things.
That was just a discussion we were having online where he went so overboard that he attacked both of us and just thought that then he could go back to being himself again.
And it's like, no.
And, you know, the same thing is true of, like I said, certain people, there was a guy, he's an environmentalist, and he actually used to work at the agency with me.
And then he, in order to try to get his point across, he quoted something massively out of context and put it forth to support his case.
And we had to rip him apart in comments.
I mean, we just, we just went at it.
We tore him to shreds because he deserved it.
And then afterwards, he was like, oh, hey, how's it going?
It's like, no, you're lying about things that we've said.
Yeah.
And we're not, you know, that does, I'm sorry, but that does transcend to me.
Yeah.
We should probably wrap it up here because it's obvious we could talk about this for another hour.
Yes, hour, hour, six hours, eight hours.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're going to cut it off at one though.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And again, it goes, you know, I mean, I know that I've told a lot of stories here more than I usually do, but it, I, again, it was just something where once the topic came up, just more and more things kept coming to me about all these.
I mean, I have other notes that don't even relate to me that relate to other people and that we haven't even gotten to.
But it's, it, it really does, you know, it at the time when we first started talking about, when I first brought it up to you, I didn't have a term for it.
And you were the one who kind of said, this sounds like Zealotry.
I was like, yes, that is exactly it.
And all these things lead to that same, you know, that same anchor point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And a blind spot that's created because of it, where they, a person, you know, ignores all social niceties and in fact discards sometimes the entire social contract and breaks all the other rules because of the imagined importance of this one thing in their life, right?
Yeah.
So, David, aside from, you know, sharing old stories about environmental agencies, what else do you do online?
Where can people find you?
Well, as I mentioned, I still do reality television stuff despite my old friend slash acquaintance getting so mad at me all those years ago.
I'm still doing it.
You know, sorry.
Stubbornly moving along with it.
Yeah.
Stubbornly doing it.
You know, actually, you know, trying to have a little fun with life instead of being angry at everyone all the time.
And for that, people can find, well, for that and everything else, people can find me on my link tree, which is linktree slash David Bloomberg.
There's a dot before the EE in the URL for Linktree.
And there you'll find a variety of different things that I do.
Among them, you know, most pertinent to these discussions, I am on Twitter and Blue Sky is at David Bloomberg.
I'm on Threads as at David Bloomberg TV.
And that's because Instagram is still directly connected to threads.
And I'm at David Bloomberg TV on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.
And that's all reality TV stuff on the video sites.
The Twitter type sites is a strange combination of people who follow me.
They may follow me for reality TV and get a heavy dose of science and politics.
The people who follow me for politics get a heavy dose of reality TV.
And so everybody gets this mix.
And so it's a select group who enjoys all of it.
But hopefully, people can figure out what they like among it.
Yeah.
So anyone who has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about this podcast episode or any other can send an email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
Or if you're really adventurous, you can follow me on Twitter, Spencer G. Watson.
Yeah, I've accumulated a couple of trolls recently.
I'm rather proud of myself.
So come check that out.
Been crossing a lot of bridges there to find those trolls.
Yeah.
I guess I crossed a couple of bridges into some new lands recently.
So, yeah.
And some people complain that it didn't pay the toll properly.