Joel Cardwell, a former skeptic turned conspiracy researcher, traces how lockdown protests in Melbourne (2021) mirrored 1919’s Spanish flu backlash—both fueled by misaligned claims. He debunks pseudo-conspiracies like vaccine depopulation schemes and uniform media narratives, citing market forces (e.g., Murdoch’s agenda-setting) and corporate control theory over collusion. Electronics executives at Samsung and others exposed price-fixing via SEC emails, while Five Families’ organized crime collapsed from betrayal. Political conspiracies, like JFK theories, lack evidence of grand coordination; most infighting serves elite power struggles, not public harm. China’s uninhabited cities and opaque governance echo Soviet inefficiencies, yet misinformation—weaponized in movements—risks societal chaos, demanding critical scrutiny over unfounded claims. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is now live on Twitter.
I'm Spencer, your host, and I have a special guest today, Joel Cardwell.
Go ahead, introduce yourself.
Tell us what we need to know about why you're here today, Joel.
Yeah, well, I'm sort of here on accident, right?
Because, you know, in 2021, we had the lockdowns and in the lockdowns, you know, people kind of went cray cray.
And one of the things that I did to go cray cray was I started watching the protesters on the streets of Melbourne, but they seemed rather incoherent and they had a lot of strange things that they were saying that didn't match up with the facts.
And I was wondering what they were talking about.
And I started asking what they were talking, started trying to find out.
I went into a lot of different internet forums and places where they were and real life, trying to understand what their problem was, right?
Because, you know, from my point of view, it's like, well, lockdowns really suck, but you got to do what you got to do to get through the terrible situation, just like we did with the Spanish.
Well, not I did, but humans did with the Spanish play in 1919, right?
So that's, that was my point of view, but I saw these crazy people acting out.
I went in looking for what they were going on about and I found a whole world of bizarre conspiracies, both naturally forming and artificially inserted by various characters.
Not maybe the Michael Flynn Q connection, which is a whole different conspiracy level, but definitely there were some interesting characters in there.
So since then, I have maintained a small hobby of chasing down some of these events and some of these individuals.
Great.
So ordinarily, this part isn't on the podcast, but we don't have any behind the scenes.
There's no curtain to duck behind to organize anything.
In these episodes where I have an idea, where I have to explain a notion, a fairly complicated set of thoughts, the guest, Joel, you today, it's their responsibility to understand it or to tell me when it's not understandable.
So if I haven't explained something appropriately or properly, or if it doesn't make sense, it's your job to stop me and say, hey, that, you know, that needs, you know, like, I didn't understand that or whatever, because if you don't get it, no one will get it.
That's, that's the kind of bar that we're at today.
We do have other people here and they're listening.
And I'm sure that John Guy would love to tell me that I'm wrong whenever I'm wrong.
He specializes in that.
That's fine.
But right now, that's you're in the hot seat.
So that's just how this is going to roll.
So the topic for this is a thing I'm calling pseudo conspiracies.
All right.
Right.
So the idea here is that there are conspiracies and then there are things that look like conspiracies, but maybe or maybe probably are not actually conspiracies.
Right.
And so that's the idea, the topic that we're going to talk about now.
So we're all increasingly going to be exposed to conspiracy talk in our lives.
People around us will be speculating about what events around us occurred because of the action of conspiracies.
Mostly, we won't know anything that's happening behind like the veil of what the act powerful people are doing who affect the world most greatly.
And we'll be forced to decide which things are and aren't conspiracies based just on what they look like.
In this way, we will either become slowly consumed by conspiratorial thinking that more or less completely prevents us from maintaining rationality, or we will develop more cunning and effective methods of determining what is and is not an actual conspiracy.
Better ways of sifting the wheat from the chaff, as it were.
Having more tools to analyze systems and behaviors will be the determining factor between these two possible futures.
That is, where we're all just conspiracy-brained and know essentially nothing, or we have a much better system of actually figuring it out.
With that in mind, we're going to talk about things that can masquerade as conspiracies, but are usually not.
And like I said, I call these pseudo-conspiracies.
They're not actual conspiracies, but they do look like conspiracies when we examine them perhaps from a certain angle.
So we're going to start with the debt of conspiracy, just so everyone's on track.
Everyone thinks they already know what a conspiracy is, but when you ask regular people what a conspiracy is, they often, you know, kind of hodgepodge some examples together, whatever.
So I define the word conspiracy this way.
It's a conscious, explicit, and secret plan by two or more people for actions that work against someone else's interests.
So that's very simple.
It's succinct.
Just one sentence.
It's not, it didn't need a whole paragraph or chapter of a book to explain.
It is a plan.
It's explicit and it's conscious.
Those things have to be there for it to be an actual conspiracy.
And that's my contention.
And today, we're not going to kind of litigate the exact definition.
We're going to take that for rote.
It's close enough.
Some people in the past have complained that, you know, this definition isn't exactly precise for everything or whatever they want, but we're not going to go through that today.
This one will suffice.
So first of all, Joel, how have I done so far?
Am I making sense?
Oh, yeah.
It makes perfect sense.
Although I would say that if you're going to take that definition for a conspiracy, then most of the things that people think are conspiracies are actually pseudo-conspiracies.
That's the only thing I'm going to say.
Oh, really?
Wow.
Quick learner.
Check out the big brain on Joel.
He's already ahead of the class.
So many of the things that people think are conspiracies aren't really conspiracies.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's okay.
Wow.
But end of episode right here.
Let's just pack it in.
Go straight to questions.
Wow.
Okay.
So I don't really know what your life is like in Melbourne, Joel.
But do you, do you drive?
Do you drive a car?
I'm actually learning how to drive a car, believe it or not, even though I'm probably way too old to be doing that.
Do you own a car?
I have driven a car.
Yeah.
Okay.
Familiar with the idea that cars exist and that now we have some cars that run on electric power.
They're battery powered, but until fairly recently, they've all been internal combustion engines and they run on a thing we call gasoline.
Or at least in North America, we call it that.
I think petroleum, petrol, and some other places, right?
You're heavily, I don't know if you're happy about this, but Australia is heavily affected by the British influence.
Oh, yeah.
Canadians notice.
Yes.
It is probably more thoroughly, oh, probably, probably more thorough in a different way than Canada, although Canada also is.
And also is the U.S. in some ways.
Right.
But we certainly don't call it petrol.
No, no.
We call it gasoline.
There are some linguistic cards.
You probably come across, even as a person who doesn't drive and doesn't regularly fill up a car, you probably come across the idea regularly that gasoline prices in regions tend to be more or less the same.
Yes.
Right.
So some people begin to think that maybe this is, you know, this price thing.
It's, it's being set something and they're all the same because of some kind of a master plan that does a thing to these gas prices.
And all these people selling the gas all make monstrous profits.
And part of that monstrous profit machine is a conspiracy that's being worked upon us to sell, you know, extract more profit from us through setting of these prices, et cetera.
Sure.
Right.
There is at least an apparent collusion going on when we see that all these prices are the same in across regions, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
So while many conditions arise that will cause gasoline prices at the pump to rise.
So things like spikes in demand and problems with the supply chain and this sort of thing.
This will affect how they go up.
But how they go down.
Sorry, what's that?
Did you have a question?
Oh, no.
Okay.
How prices go down, drift back down in price after they've spiked has a very specific set of features in a capitalist market.
All these gas stations are in competition with each other.
And whenever someone is in a market like this and they want to gain more revenue, they need more market share.
So when you have competing people in this market and you have a product that's more or less the same or very, very similar quality across all spots, you're going to have a situation where the only way to gain market share is to lower price.
So we used to have a situation way back in the olden times where whenever you changed your price, you had to have people that came and they had to mess with the machine that actually lower the price of the pump.
And you had to have people who went up and they, you know, there was a big sign on the outside.
You had to have a person that actually went up there and changed the numbers and trade out some numbers with other numbers, change the price.
You had to do that again.
And this all took time.
And sometimes it had to happen like the next day or when the guy was there who could actually do it because it took some skill, et cetera.
And in the meantime, as some people change their price and the first person to change their price gets everyone in their gas station to fill up and they get more of the market share.
But as we notice, this situation has just changed just because of technology.
Now, it doesn't, I'm fairly certain that it doesn't even isn't even a person who works at the gas station actually there manning a booth or whatever that changes a price.
It's someone in an office somewhere who changes a price.
And they are watching usually now by camera everyone else's price in a region.
So they can just change it on the fly.
Anytime any gas station changes in price, all the others in the region are that identical price within moments.
I would be surprised if it took more than 15 minutes now anywhere in the Western world.
And actually, probably most places in the world, even places like Africa probably have this same situation where very, very, very quickly the gas price changes.
So you get this interesting market situation that's just a product of the technology where no one really gains any market share by lowering the price.
And since this is the only way you lower the price is to gain market share and no one gains by doing so, suddenly prices might go up because of a change in supply or whatever, but they don't drift back down again the way they used to do.
And this leads to all of the players in these markets getting very, very large profits, much, much larger than they should get if they were competing in this same way.
And therefore, we don't need this.
This is a market condition along with technology that provides this situation where it's almost like a strange version of the game chicken, where in the game chicken, the one person who deviates first is a loser.
But in this strange game of chicken, you might have five players and anytime one of them deviates, they all lose.
So as long as all of the players in this game are aware of their market condition, they all win.
And this doesn't require any collusion.
It doesn't require a conspiracy.
It doesn't require any, you know, actual thing.
It's just a consequence of technology and capitalism.
Now, that's not saying that we should just be happy with it.
We should probably do something about it.
But looking for a conspiracy is never going to solve that.
Along with this idea, when we're talking about prices and the fact that they can go up, but then they don't drift back down again, we might talk about groceries.
People notice and maybe think about the fact that in almost all grocery stores now, people who sell these products in grocery stores are changing to a system where the price is now on a digital readout that can be changed very, very, very quickly.
And this is done specifically so that people who sell groceries can create this same strange game of chicken where if anyone lowers their grocery prices, a competing store can change their price to match it within hours and no one gets a gain in market share by lowering their price.
And it provides resistance or like friction to the lowering of prices, such that now we have, let's say, a pandemic that greatly increases the price of nearly everything.
And then many of those prices don't move back down again very quickly because everyone who's in that marketplace knows that there's they only lose money by doing so.
No one gains anything by it.
So how am I doing so far, Joel?
Am I making sense?
I mean, that explains, you know, the petrol, well, petrol market and the inflation of grocery prices for sure not being not being conspiracies.
Well, I never thought they were, but I suppose some people would, for sure.
I guess they do.
Yeah.
Someone has some meter of control over or some individuals or really a bit more complicated.
Agreed.
It is fairly complicated.
In engineering and in mathematics, there is a small area of mathematics that sort of ominously called control theory.
It's not like controlling humans.
It's how you come to control machines.
If you're 150 years ago, you're making the first automobile and it's going to have a gas pedal and the gas pedal is going to apply.
shoot some product into a piston that explodes or whatever.
If it doesn't have the right amount of, if it puts a gasoline in too quickly when you hit your foot on the pedal, you won't actually go anywhere.
It will cause the machine to malfunction.
So it has to happen at a certain rate and at usually a slower rate than what we're trying to do in order for it to work correctly.
And in essence, what these people who run these corporations are doing is they're attempting to speed it up to prevent the thing from changing.
It's a way to bypass this sort of what would otherwise be this natural control of prices that slowly pressures them to come down as they compete with each other to get to the right price where everyone still makes money, but they still provide it to the customer at a price that's that's reasonable.
And they're trying to bypass that.
And, you know, in some way, you know, I don't blame them for wanting to make more money, except that everyone loses.
And this sort of facilitates in some small way one additional piece of the mechanism that causes, you know, differences in the wealth gap.
But yeah, any questions about that?
No, that makes pair of me.
Excellent.
You're so good at this, Joel.
Thank you.
That's perfect.
I'm right all the time.
You're doing really well.
Okay.
So what we have here with these kind of these two examples is a look at the fact that intelligent people in like a marketplace can they're not consciously colluding.
They all kind of know that if no one moves, they all kind of win to their certain extent.
And they might try to, you know, have a commercial to kind of show that their product is better somehow or whatever.
There's commercials for gas stations and they, you know, but oftentimes they're not bragging about how good their gas is.
It's usually about how good you'll feel if you go there.
They'll sell you chocolate bars and all this stuff.
That's that's more or less the level they're on.
But this idea of commercials leads straight to media.
So we have a lot of sort of ideas that media people and news media especially is sort of vaguely in colluding and in some kind of conspiracy space.
Very often we look at this situation and we just think, ah, it's all, they're all kind of, they're all kind of just saying the same thing and it's all, it's all the same and there's no new things and the media is so unexciting and, you know, they're all kind of just dribbling out all the same information.
And, you know, people cobble the idea that they're all just kind of in it together and they're all because they all are all kind of, they all look the same and they're all saying much the same things.
So do you, have you ever had thoughts, Joel, that the news media is acting in a conspiratorial fashion, that they might be colluding or working together on any information?
I mean, yes, because we have Murdoch Media in Australia.
So I'm pretty sure that there is a level of agenda setting and a level of manipulation of the public interest in Australia.
I'm fairly certain of that from many years of experiencing that, and a certain amount of gaslighting of the public.
But I've also noticed that, and again, is this really, I mean, this is probably more to the way of what you were saying before in terms of the news media will pick up on certain thematic aspects of certain stories.
And once one story becomes a hit, as it were, in one way, they'll find five other stories that all create an imagined pandemic of issues that are all happening at the same time, whenever, you know, really it's just isolated incidents that they're reporting because they got clicks from the first one.
So there is that element.
And of course, the newspapers will sometimes set an agenda and then the other newspaper will compete with that agenda.
So, you know, there are elements of that.
Whether you could really call it a conspiracy, I'm not totally sure.
I don't really know.
I think there's agendas that people are setting.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a conspiracy, but I definitely have a very dim view of Murdoch Media.
Well, I don't blame you.
I have a dim view of all media, you know, some more than others.
Only high on the list of, you know, media to not trust.
But I don't think they're just like everything they're saying is lying to us.
But people have come to that conclusion that in order to know the truth, remarkably, all you need to do is read what's in the newspaper and then just, you know, form the opposite, which is okay, but I don't, you know.
That's not really it.
There's no, there's no epistemological validity to that at all.
No, no, no.
And it's, but I mean, I hear that sort of idea more from people that are on the right of the political spectrum, right?
And I generally think that, you know, if we're separating society into a left and right thing, the people on the right generally are a lot more muddled and have a much more difficult time finding, you know, seeing what is real because they're engaged in a media atmosphere that's just much more confusing and misleading to them.
Well, I'll put it to you a different way.
I think that, because I think that people are muddled on all sides of the issue.
And I don't even mean right, left, I mean every single side of the issue because human beings tend to be muddled.
And that's just our human nature.
But I would also say that the reason that the right-wing spectrum is so muddled, as it were, is that there's a lot of cash injected into it.
And cash in a certain way produces distortions, I think.
Yeah.
Well, and it's difficult to say how much there is cash in something like CNN, right?
Like they're not doing that for free either.
I totally agree.
Yeah.
But cash does move the needle and change some decisions, but I don't think that it, you know, causes people to, let's say uh, engage in genocide if they weren't going to already.
Um, which has been the you know, an explanation some people have given in the past as to some things that that uh uh, people who are who put forth say, anti-vax notions will say that uh, you know, for example, i've heard that uh um, all of the all of the health organizations are colluding to to depopulate the planet with vaccines.
And then you ask, why would they do that?
And they say well, they were paid to do it.
No, this is uh yeah yeah this, you know, these are doctors who took an oath to protect people and to save lives.
The thing that they would then just say oh oh, but you have money well, i'll definitely just kill all these people that whose lives I was going to save and then we'll carry on our merry way.
That doesn't make a lot of no no, but i'll tell you what that is.
In my opinion, and just based on what I think that is projected, because the wellness industry actually does engage in a lot of cash laundering through influencers and and people who can actually make more money getting struck off the medical register uh, and grifting uh alternative remedies than they can being doctors.
So there is, there is a distortion of caste.
It's just not.
It's the exact opposite place to where they say.
It is not that there's not problems with big Pharma and cast and promoting medicines, because there's definitely big problems there, but that's, that's the whole.
That's.
That's a huge thing that that that's multifaceted, right.
So um, the news media is peopled with well it's, it's people with people.
They're, it's, they're all humans who run this thing right, and humans by their nature, are generally selfish and self-serving and, right out of the box, probably shouldn't be trusted until you get to know them really, really well.
Um I, that's just how I feel.
I'm fairly antisocial myself, so maybe i'm biased that way.
I don't know.
I don't trust politicians generally either.
If it's just it's just a me thing, I don't know.
But uh, generally I just think they're out for themselves.
But that doesn't mean everything they say is not real or not useful.
Yes, but they are engaged in a market.
They are engaged in a, what might be looked at as like a game, like an examined in a sort of a game theory kind of sense, even though it's probably too complicated to be examined as like strict game theory, like mathematical game theory, it can still be sort of looked through that lens to see how the pieces of this machine are working together and why they seem to be acting in a way that's just sort of leading people to think that they're all just the same.
Somehow.
Uh so, first of all, they all look sort of vaguely similar right right, all of them.
They kind of have this Sort of look the same, right?
They dress similarly to each other.
They hire similar looking people to read the news to us when they're an outlet that actually reads news.
And all those people are, they're all attractive, but usually in a sort of a bland and sort of characterless sort of way.
Like, well, I call them as I see them, balls and structures.
You would never imagine a person who looks like Steve Bussemi ever reading the news on a regular basis, right?
You know, he actually looked that interesting would ever be reading the news.
It's just, it just seems bizarre once you kind of try to picture it.
And there is a reason why they are attractive and a reason why they're sort of, you know, not like so attractive as to be distracting.
It's because distract sort of is distracting, and they, but they still need to be attractive because it turns out that just because humans are humans, we pay more attention to people who are attractive when they speak.
That's that's just a social thing.
So, and media companies know this and they exploit it.
It's uh oh now I gotta figure out how to make Joel a speaker again.
Maybe he's got a request request speaker, Joel.
And then I'll figure this out again.
You're gonna make me figure it out again.
This is so unfair.
Make you co-host.
Yeah, there you are.
You can be co-host again, too.
So you can.
Oh, wait.
Can you hear me?
Yep, I can hear you.
Oh, all right.
Oh, it's good to be doing the Elon Elon stuff again.
Yeah.
Oh, ah, that's all right.
So, in this way, they all kind of hire the same sort of people to be the talking heads that sort of represent their product, right?
Yeah.
And this already makes, gives us the impression that they all kind of look alike.
But also, there's a couple other reasons why we sort of smear them all together in our heads.
The established mainstream news outlets all have teams of lawyers who have to review stories and they get some level of veto power over what can and what can't be said, lest the engine that drives the machine be exposed to some kind of risk.
This leads to an overall effect of risk avoidance and highly edited and curated language that softens otherwise like hard-hitting stories and often can sort of help the story to sort of miss the mark and leave all the emotion out of you.
I mean, if that's what you're trying to tell, it sort of becomes more flavorless in that process because that's pretty much what lawyers do is take the flavor away of everything.
Sorry if there's any lawyers in the crowd, but that's and that is kind of their job.
But that process does strip, tend to strip this thing of any, you know, color or flavor, if you will, right?
Um, another fact is that these uh news-producing machines often need access to political circles, and or at least they assume they need it because that's how they've always done this job, right?
They if that's how they did it and this gives the politicians some level of like influence yeah, on the access and and like limiting it or denying it if they sort of step out of bounds in a certain way and this sort of works to uh curtail them and and cause them to make less daring uh moves and stories and this sort of thing about you know the politics that we need to know about.
I would say it also worked the other way, as in um Murdoch certainly distorts the Australian market by withholding favorable stories or access to politicians, so it actually goes the other way around.
Oh, yeah.
So like interviews and appearances can be like channeled to favored news outlets.
Exactly.
If a you know, one powerful owner owns enough of the market or whatever, he can deny certain politicians or even certain political parties from getting enough airtime to make a difference.
Or he can make you jumpstart her so that you do get access, which has definitely been said by both Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, two politicians on the opposite sides who came together and asked for a royal commission into Murdoch Media.
So yeah, that was quite interesting.
Yeah, the way these two machines sort of intertwine and have tangles that move back, you know, are plugged into each other is definitely not that useful.
And, you know, probably something we should do something about.
But it's not enough to say that there's like a conspiracy.
No.
It's that it's a sort of thing that could lead to a conspiracy in some limited cases or in some respects.
And in all these, like I'm not even saying in all these cases that conspiracies can't happen in these situations, but to look at these and point out the similarities of what's going on and saying that's enough isn't enough.
So I think there's a difference as well between a limited, maybe as you sort of alluded to, there's a difference between a limited conspiracy between a few actors to do a particular thing within a system that allows that to happen and the whole system being some big conspiracy with a creepy controller behind it.
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
This idea of like a grand conspiracy that moves past, you know, like a single company to, you know, reach across, you know, continents or the globe or whatever.
That thinking that you're describing is what sort of leads someone to the idea of a grand conspiracy notion, right?
They're all together somehow, right?
It's the particular demographic that you want to vilify this week, which seems to be the same demographic every week, but you know, that's okay.
So a few other factors that cause these individual and competing companies and corporations to sort of look alike in a not useful way is that a lot of them are on a 24-hour news cycle.
So they need to have enough content produced to continually seem like they're not just saying the same thing every 20 minutes.
And that can lead to a fair amount of like garbage on a slow news week.
There hasn't been a lot of slow news weeks in the last couple of years, but in the past, in the, you know, kind of pre-COVID, certainly, there were some.
And certainly before Trump, there were more than that, where you had companies trying to come up with or take a regular story that shouldn't be a story and amplify it to a higher level as if it's a much bigger deal.
I mean, this was the sort of thing like Obama wore a tan suit and FOX NEWS lost their mind for a week because they just had nothing else to talk about, like there was nothing else useful to say, so they just took a thing that should have gone unnoticed and just ran with it, which isn't useful for anyone.
Uh no, but no they, they dress up more garbage as something they pretend is useful and just feed it straight into people's brains.
It's terrible.
And uh, and talk to you's about the only ones.
There was that uh, incident where the uh, the uh, they had freed the people from the serial prison as DNN go in, and uh they, they apparently wrest or they, they see a rescue.
Right, this guy's come out of the prison and oh, he's been tortured.
Oh, it's terrible.
Oh, what a victim.
And blah blah, blah and uh, it turns out that the guy that they'd been rescued was actually one of the torturers themselves.
Yeah, so you know there's reckless reporting as well that that leads to complete wild misinformation, and you see that on FOX and you see that on CNN as well.
Yeah, oh yeah yeah, they're all, they're all.
Uh, there's no innocent people in that space, that's for sure.
I'm fairly certain of that.
Uh, part of this uh, this sort of the gaming of this news media, is to sort of uh limit the number or effectiveness of your competitors.
Exclusive stories so like an exclusive story, just in case there's anyone who doesn't really know what that is is when uh, one outlet has a story that they say is interesting or good or whatever, whatever measure they have for that, and has it.
They're the only one that has a story.
Uh, it's an exclusive or whatever.
Yeah, but it's in everyone else's interest to limit the the like I say, the number and effectiveness of everyone else's exclusive stories.
So whenever any one of these news outlets has like, what they call an exclusive story, all the others try to find a way to tell that same story as quickly as possible, and in that way you get.
It doesn't take a lot of thinking to understand how they all tend to come up with uh, the same stories yeah, the same list of stories if, if FOX wants to talk a lot about a certain Uh murder trial, then inevitably CNN is also going to talk about that same murder trial, and so is Msnbc, and and I don't know OAN, and and whoever else I don't even know the list, but it's a big.
They're all gonna yeah, they're all gonna start coming up with, you know, at least get a mention or a or a thing, because they're gonna imagine that some part of the audience wants to hear that and they don't want them to only be able to go to, you know, FOX NEWS for that.
So they want to have to have some mentions and some people reporting on it, and so in this Way, you will tend to get all of them having the same list of stories.
And this is just a fact of the, you know, situation they're in and require any like collusion or, you know, cooperation on their part to go, oh, yeah, yeah, you know, the fox guy calls us the NN guy.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
We got to definitely talk about this murder trial coming up or whatever it is.
You know what I mean?
Like require that in order for this to occur.
Just requires market forces.
No, yeah, that's absolutely right.
And, you know, it looks like very, if you don't understand the market forces, I guess.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
I mean, and I don't blame people for not, you know, under, you know, it's, there's a lot of things in the world to understand, you know, like, why would you have to, you know, the idea that you have to additionally try to figure out all the inner workings of like how news media works, it's also, by the way, incredibly boring.
So like, who wants to know, you know what I mean?
But I am making the case here, I think, that if you're going to do something like try to form conspiracy about it, propagate those conspiracy notions to other people, then I think you owe something to the people, certainly the people you try to put the idea to to actually do that work and understand what those market forces are, what, how they're, how that gamification of the news media works.
Yeah.
Because and you get, you get a kind of competitive damnness, you know, and I mean, it might be due to the fact that there's less, it could actually be the fact.
There's also the fact that they're all run by large conglomerates, right?
So like CBS, ABC, NBC, you know, massive, massive talk, CNN, massive, massive huge group that that will sort of whittle down the content into being the most digestible.
So that, that automatically leads to a flattening out at a state of content, just like you were saying before with the anchors being, you know, a particular type of person that they want to see, this blad, vaguely attractive, at least not unattractive person who could talk a little bit, you know, like, like, you know, I think, I think that it's almost a competitive bladdness.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, if you're thinking of just like, you know, if you're going to do the insane move, in my mind, insane move of taking like, you know, all the people who are of a certain level of attractiveness and higher, you know, some of them will be perhaps, you know, maybe they're lazy or they're not all that competent or whatever.
And they find some other way to get by in life.
They, I don't know, marry Rich or they, you know, do whatever they're doing, whatever to get by.
And then you get people who are more competent and maybe they think they can make more money by, you know, modeling or, or acting or whatever, which as much as people try to say that this, these jobs don't require any real competence, they actually do, yeah.
They actually do, right?
Which is why extremely attractive people who try to become actors but aren't very good tend to, you know, not make it very far because it does require a fair amount of actual skill at the at the actual task.
So you get this sort of mid-range thing where you get people that are attractive, but they're, and they're competent, but they're not got the skill for acting.
I think this was actually captured in a song, a song by, who was that guy that was the guy from the Eagles?
Oh, yeah.
He had a song about news media and he had a line in there about washing out of acting and then becoming an anchor.
It was so funny.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I really, but I'm not sure if that is a Joe Walsh song like the other guy, Glenn Fry.
No, Glenn Fry was the, was another one of the guitarists, whatever.
I can't remember.
Oh, Don Drama?
Yeah, Don Henley.
Don Henley, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, what an amazing act they were, by the way.
But yeah, I don't know, the best-selling act of all time.
I don't know.
They've got to have something about them.
Yeah, it must have been something there.
I don't know.
Big Lebowski didn't like them, but, you know.
Well, you know, they actually were the backing band for Linda Ronstadt as well.
It's kind of cool.
But yeah.
But off topic, back to the topic.
There is one more thing I noted that when I was looking at this to kind of view why all of these different news outlets would kind of tend to be doing things all the same way, which is that highly competent editors and producers who are looking to sort of climb the ladder and move up to the next level will tend to get hired.
They won't always move up in their own company.
They will sometimes get hired and move to the next level at a competing outlet.
And in this way, these ideas will move from one company to another.
And they will tend to start to, you know, create what, you know, procedures and habits across different companies that all tend to look the same that are actually look probably more like a culture than like a set of individual companies that are all creating individual procedures to compete with each other.
They all tend to have the same procedures as to how to do everything because they all worked at different companies in the past where those sorts of things all happen and they all kind of recognize this way to do it.
And so when you have situations, they just do it that way.
It's not like your spahi beer is going to be produced that much differently from things power.
It's not going to be produced that much differently from Carlton United, et cetera.
So they're all going to go through a similar process.
They've got slightly different flavoring based on whatever, but it's not like there's some radical new way of brewing beer, potentially.
Yeah.
I mean, when you kind of compare this, this looks a lot more like sort of professional sports leagues that trade players, right?
There will be some differences between the teams, but they will take game fairly similarly to every other team with a couple differences.
Whereas the direct contrast is sort of like national military services, which will tend to develop training and everything that favors defense, favors their own terrain and their own set of capabilities that can be drastically different than the next nation over that maybe has a terrain or different amount of capability, different numbers of troops or different armament or whatever they have.
And they will train to their specific thing and it can be drastically different from one nation to another.
And they're never getting hired.
You're never hiring the neighbor's general to come run your army.
No.
At least not anymore.
This actually did sort of happen once upon a time, but certainly not.
They consult with each other and with each other and they have like when they're allies, they can.
When they're allies.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
But NATO countries might, you know, because they understand that if they ever need to coordinate on short notice, they need to have some procedures for how to do this and some understanding of how each other's military functions, right?
So that they can make useful plans without having to have a month of meetings first.
But they're still going to be drastically different.
Like at no point is.
Is uh, you know, the Us going to poach the Canadian general who just happens to be very, very come run a section of the U.s military.
That's not going to happen in any you know conceivable time frame right no uh, they're going to, you know, move their own officers up the chain of command in the Us military and the Canadian military is going to do the same for their guys, and that's just how that's going to go and it's not going to cross these.
These, you know, idea streams aren't going to cross in this same way that they do for other professions.
Yeah yeah yeah, you're not going to.
Yeah so yeah, I see what you're saying.
So in sport, you can, you can poach the uh head coach at the other table yeah right, yeah right, and he might have a similar plan for his new team as he had for the old team.
Because why wouldn't he?
Yeah right yeah, it was working before.
That's the reason why he got poached, right?
No, that makes sense, that makes sense.
So how am I doing so far with uh these, these examples?
I think.
I think it really does highlight the um, the complexity of what it requires to get an actual mass conspiracy, which are very rare.
Actually they're very rare.
I'm trying to think of examples and I can't actually think of any any real, proper examples of math conspiracy.
There's uh, I mean, i'm sure some anthropologist somewhere has done, you know, some kind of work in this.
I would hope someone has, but you know, i've never found one but uh, of actual conspiracies that lasted longer than maybe say, a year, a year.
Yeah, i'm thinking like a Ram contra, that was a real conspiracy.
Um right, it's sort of.
Only, you know, there's sort of like.
It seems like there's like two kinds.
One is is uh, people that form that that have uh different goals, but they they find a way to set those different and competing goals in an uneasy conspiracy.
So this, this actually happened with uh back in the late 90s, I believe, in early 2000s, there was a conspiracy of executives in electronics companies to collude on the price of ram chips.
Ah yeah, I do remember that actually.
Yeah this, this was uh, this was a scandal.
It was, as far as I can remember, was spearheaded by a guy who worked at, I believe Samsung, and that guy was uh slapped on the wrist by Samsung.
He was uh, fired and then, after five years later, was rehired and put in charge of a whole different division which somehow was meant to, you know, wipe the slate clean somehow.
And no one you know he said no one who's higher than me knew anything about this.
Of course they didn't, and you know, I think uh, probably someone did at least, but it was him and several other people at several of the companies who were all agreeing to slowly raise their prices at a fixed rate and not lower them.
And of course, The SEC and a couple other national things got, you know, worked on this situation, saw the situation, investigated.
They did subpoena work.
They grabbed emails, and this was how they were communicating.
They found it out.
So, this is one sort of conspiracy that could work.
You have a handful of executives who work at different companies.
They do have competing interests.
They agree to set those interests aside.
And then they have to trust that they're not going to, because any one of them could gain by, you know, saying, oh, yeah, I'll set my price at the same as yours at the same rate.
Yeah, sure.
And then just be a little slow in doing it and market share in the meantime, right?
I mean, one of them could have done that.
But as long as they don't break the rules that they've set up, no, there is a real conspiracy in here as well, which is, you know, the five families, actual Nafiosa in New York, when they divvied up the markets or divided up the markets, then agreements for territory and this sort of thing.
Yeah.
So on and so forth.
And then if someone breaks.
Of course, they're breaking those all the time too.
Wow.
That's why they keep blowing each other away.
Yeah, right.
So you get this idea that when their interests are competing, it's difficult to get people to keep on that because they always have something to gain by breaking.
And then you get a different kind of conspiracy, which is sort of based on identity or like group involvement.
Right.
So you can get groups of, say, police officers who have in the past sometimes agreed to a certain amount of rule breaking.
I mean, this is the whole idea behind Serpico.
Serpico was a cop who didn't want to go along with all the rule breaking he saw in his precinct and et cetera.
So he agreed to, you know, spy on his fellow police officers and they all hated him for it and all this stuff.
There was a movie.
There was a famous guy in it, all that stuff.
But there have been times where police officers have done this.
It appears that their sort of like team identity, if you will, was a major factor in getting everyone in the conspiracy to stay as part of the conspiracy as long as they were in the conspiracy.
And yet those conspiracies still came out, even though they had that strong team dynamic.
So it takes a lot.
It takes a lot to keep something going for a long period of time.
But in those situations, it was still possible to have larger than like.
So they might have a, I'm not sure how many in a precinct.
It might be 60 or 80 or something, right?
Or maybe, you know, maybe even more.
I'm not even really sure.
But that seems like a fairly large number of people to all be colluding.
But in that course, you can sort of see the way in which it works.
It becomes a team environment.
They're in the same locker room all the time.
They're congratulating each other on their kids' birthdays or, you know, track meets wins or whatever, right?
They're all, you know, they're all slapping each other on the back and they're high all the time.
And they're, it's almost always a boys' environment when this happens.
Yeah.
And they're, they're friendly with each other enough that they go along with this for long enough.
And that's a major factor in how these things can be large enough for long enough to actually work to the extent that they do.
But a lot of conspiracies that try to go for longer almost always have to have not competing interests and a smaller number of people.
Yeah.
I've said before that an affair is actually a conspiracy of two people who are agreeing to have a secret that works against the interests of their other partners.
And they have a mutual interest, though.
They don't have competing interests.
So already in these sort of dynamics of how conspiracies work, we can start to see how it is they succeed and how it is that they fall apart.
Yeah.
And in the case of like the Samsung guy and the memory chips, there was a reason why they thought there was a conspiracy, but it didn't lead the SEC to just file charges right away.
It led them to investigate.
And that's the sort of next step, right?
You have to do the next step.
You have to actually find a way to move past the information bubble to get the conspiracy information from the inside of the conspiracy to the outside by looking inward at it, right?
If you think there is because there's an appearance of cooperation, then that's what you have to do.
You have to look into it.
And the evidence has to be sufficient.
It can't just be guys all really hated politician X. Yep.
So they all hated Politician X. Of course, when Politician X dies, they were in on it together to poisoned it.
That's insufficient, right?
This is the level of thought that goes into most of the what I would call the JFK assassination conspiracy ideas, right?
They are almost always motives in search of a method.
Exactly.
Exactly.
They have, there was plenty of people who had motive to kill JFK Newsflash.
There's plenty of reasons that people can find to kill every president that's ever existed.
Exactly.
That doesn't mean that that was the way in which, you know, the thing went down.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, they're fun, but they're also, they're, they're ridiculous, the JFK conspiracy theories.
Sorry if anyone is a true believer in the Grassy Knoll theory or whatever, but yeah.
I invite you to have those discussions with Mike Reigns.
Yeah, cool.
Cool.
We should clean it.
Everyone who has those ideas, I invite you to have to discuss those with Mike Reigns.
We can set it up.
We can have a space for it.
He loves to do it.
And he has all the goods.
I've listened.
He has, he really does have them all.
Yeah, nice.
I started to come up with a couple of things about conspiracies here because there's a huge number of people who are certain that the government is just cooperating many of the things that are deleterious to our everyday lives.
Right.
But I ran out of time, unfortunately.
Might be a good thing.
And so I don't know if my ideas there are as coherent and concise enough for this.
But perhaps we could just kind of touch on some and discuss them.
What do you think?
Yeah, that sounds good.
Yeah, yeah.
So already the idea that there are conspiracies in political circles should be no surprise to anyone.
I think there definitely are.
I think it's almost impossible for politicians to be in Congress or in parliament or what have you without there being some conspiracies that exist.
No doubt.
But I will put to people that almost all of that conspiracy energy and almost all of those conspiracy ideas are put to conspiracies against each other.
Yes.
In almost every case, politicians do what they do because they're seeking power.
There are a vanishingly few number that do it out of some actual real sense of doing good for the people they represent.
And almost all of them will say that they are.
Oh, I'm doing this for the people in my region of blah, blah, blah.
Right.
Except that they're maybe in some respects or whatever, but they're also all doing it for power.
And once you're in those halls of power, the way to get more power isn't by, isn't usually by, you know, participating in a grand conspiracy against the people.
It's by conspiring against the other politicians who also have some kind of power.
They're on a committee.
You want to get on that committee.
You know, they have donors.
You want those donors instead of them.
There's only so much donation money to go around.
You're almost always competing with other people who are also politicians in that space.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so this is the first idea is that, yes, they conspire, but almost all of them are just each other.
And I don't even want to say just because many of the decisions by politicians are not cultivated to be useful for us.
Unfortunately, even in the places of the world where we're fairly certain that they're not actively trying to kill us.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're really not forming a lot of decisions that are useful for us.
No, I mean, it might be, although it can be things like branch backing, for example, which is really just in the interest of themselves.
It's not really against anyone particularly.
It's just this lazy way of drumming up votes, right?
Or getting increase elections.
So it's really bad.
Does it really hurt anyone?
Probably, probably, well, maybe, but maybe in terms of democracy, but like, does it physically hurt anyone or does it kill anyone?
No, not really.
But, you know, should we encourage it?
Absolutely not.
You know, but does it actually have anything to do with keeping the population down or whatever it is that they're talking about in the conspiracy circles?
No, it's literally a side hustle.
It doesn't really mean anything to anyone.
Yeah.
A major factor in democracies, particularly like representative democracies like most of the English-speaking democracies, we have what might be called like safe seats.
People who are representing an area, a region, riding, whatever they call it in the states.
I can't even remember what the district or whatever it's called.
Or district.
Thank you.
They can become safe.
And in that way, they almost have to pay no attention to the people they represent because they know that those people will vote for that party almost without blindly without ever having to service their needs at all.
And in that way, the situation is created where they are more beholden to the political party that allows them to run in that safe seat, district, riding, whatever, than they are to the people that would vote them in.
Which, which is a problem.
It's a big problem.
It's like, as soon as I describe it, everyone should be like, yeah, yeah.
If anyone here, here's the thing.
There aren't that many people in this space, but if anyone here, that's not a problem, put up your hand.
I'll make you a speaker.
We'll bring you in right now and make your case for why you think safe seats are a beautiful, fantastic idea and should be just embraced by all of the democratic society.
Because I think there should be none.
I think every politician should be in fear of losing their seat if they don't straight up fly right.
We've just had an election in Australia where the leader of the opposition lost his seat.
We've just had an election in Canada where the leader of the opposition has lost his seat.
Ours didn't get parachuted into a safe seat, but yours did.
Get parachuted into a safe seat over in Albany.
And they enthusiastically voted for him.
He had 80% of the votes cast in that writing.
In that riding, it's almost always a smaller number when you have a by-election that's not at the main election time.
So there were a smaller number of people who voted.
But of the people who voted, he did get 80% of the votes that were cast.
Which is incredible for someone with such an historic loss as well in the Canadian election.
Well, I mean, in that particular case, he lost his original riding because it was a suburb of Ottawa.
Ottawa had the trucker convoy and he supported the trucker convoy.
And the citizens of Ottawa did not like that and voted him out.
Which is completely fair enough.
Pretty much the entire story.
In any, almost any other conservative riding, he would have no problem except that his riding happened to be in Ottawa.
And they were still angry about that.
I think a fair proportion of Canadians were angry about that.
Yeah.
A smaller proportion than I'd like.
Yeah, fair enough.
Still a fair proportion.
Yeah.
You still hear a lot of people talking favorably about that.
And I hope to have a deep dive episode about it coming up in the next month or so.
I still got to do some more digging on that.
Oh, that'd be super exciting.
Yeah.
I'd like to do it because there's a lot of details that a lot of people sort of gloss over.
And I, I, uh, um, the Wikipedia entry on it specifically has been scrubbed of a lot of the details that are very relevant.
Have you ever checked out Mayor McFaze?
Which?
Mayor McFaze.
He did a lot of coverage on it back in the day and the court cases afterwards with like, I can't remember what her name is.
Lit?
Tara Lit.
No, what was his name?
Tamara Lich?
Tamara Lich.
That's the one.
So like, if you want to check out somebody who'd be a good resource, Mayor McFaze would be the guy.
Yeah, I'll check him out.
Weirdly, but he has a lot of resources on it.
But another, let's see if I can get this right.
I was working on this idea and I just need to make sure that it's not going to go off the rails or whatever.
In these sort of uh large legislative bodies that we have in our western democracies.
People say that the Us system is so much different than you know the Canadian system and the and the Australian system and the British system and everything else and the only way in which they're really different is the role of the president.
That's really the only way uh, and it's a.
It's a thing that the most people in the Us have a baffling time trying to understand.
you know why there's a thing called a governor general and and why they have as much power as they do and they never whatever but it's just most of the things that should happen should happen at the congressional level in the united states and that used to be the case but that's less the case now and that's the biggest part of the problem of where the rest of us looking at the situation in the united states
looking at it see, is that Congress is like laying over and giving up, more or less, you know, most of its power to the president.
100 fair.
We have had similar issue in Australia, where uh cabinet and what's called the governor general in council with his cabinet um, has been receiving uh, a lot more power and a lot more executive uh, royal prerogatives or privileges, um to to take decisions without having to go by parliament or any reasonable level of oversight.
So I mean key examples would be an immigration law where uh basically, if the minister doesn't like you, you're not getting into the country.
There's no real way of the courts or anyone properly and um, and it's a real, it's a real problem in terms of um, giving too much power to the executive.
So I think i'm not sure if it's the same in Canada uh, but it's certainly certainly getting more and more like that in Australia, where the executive has arguably too much power and too little oversight from either the courts or the, the legislature.
Yeah, I mean the.
What the most, the closest that Canada has to the position of the president is a person that we call the governor general.
Yeah yeah, but the governor general has in Canada has the only real power the governor general has is veto power over any bill that's passed in parliament.
Yeah, which that's the, literally the only power.
They are not the uh, you know, commander in chief of the armed forces or anything like that.
Uh, we have a general that's doing that.
We don't really think a politician should actually be the, you know uh, but they also have to.
You know, the king is, is commander in chief technically, but yeah yeah, if the king ever tried to take control of Canada's army, then that's, that's when the full, you know, removal of the face on the coins would happen.
The king and the crown are all as politically independent, which is why it's the well, that's arguably why it's a better system, right?
So yeah, they never um, they would never do that.
Well it's, it would become the reason to secede fully yeah yeah, that allowing them to keep their face on our money is sort of a like, a like a courtesy we extend to them and they get to.
You know, Charles gets to call himself the king of Canada.
Have Adam show up once every couple years, I guess, you know, make a couple stops, have a parade uh, but uh, if there was ever a British monarch that attempted to wield any executive power no, it would never happen, not after the alarm bells would go off and, and everyone would, you know, in the same way, the alarm bells went off when the president said the words 51st State uh yeah yeah that yeah,
they made the hair rise on everyone, the back of everyone's neck.
I, I noticed he stopped doing that now, which is kind of kind of a good thing.
Yeah, we're.
We're still eyeing him warily.
Oh, I would be.
We're not, we're not convinced that he's put this idea aside.
And uh yeah, what a what a, what a ridiculous thing for him to say.
That was absolutely, absolutely embarrassing.
And uh, if I were American, i'd be, i'd be disgraced, disgraced by my president, that's what i'd be right.
But uh, when you have these sort of large legislative bodies, they do cluster themselves into political parties.
But even across party lines, there's a fair amount of disagreement.
Yeah, for the same reason why uh, you know, you get, I mean, they're still in competition with each other for all manner of thing within a party, within party lines like uh, in parliament, if you're in the party, that's uh, you know, forming the government, as they say, there's cabinet seats.
You're gonna want one right, yeah?
So yeah that's, you need to wield a certain amount of of sort of political sway in order to get one of those yeah, and get a, get a sort of a portfolio and things to do in parliament, right and so.
And if you're not in that, then maybe you have to do something else.
Maybe you have to, you know, and you, in this way, you get these politicians that work against each other's interests in this way and they form sort of like power blocks and they, you know groups of them that that think they can, you know, work against another block of of representatives interests to to, you know, become the ones or the, you know their guy gets in, so they get part of that or whatever, in you know, there's all kinds of infighting in this way.
Oh yeah, that that is uh in the way politicians do uh, a smile on their face while they stab each other in the back 100 yeah, yeah.
If we've ever seen a leadership bill happen, we know we know exactly what that looks like.
Yeah yeah right yeah, I hundred percent support this guy until i'm running against him.
Yeah, Yeah.
Yes.
And in that way, it may the best person win.
And I definitely hope it's me and not them.
And right.
And so you'll, this is what we, we also see this in the U.S. Congress and in the Senate for that matter, right?
You get groups of representatives who have similar interests.
You have a black caucus.
You have a black caucus in both parties even.
And some of those guys interact with each other and are across party lines sometimes when they have particular things that are needed, right?
You have other groups that form for other special interests of all manner of things.
And of course, this is essentially what committees are.
Yeah.
Although committees are groups that are working on specific things and you want to get on one or whatever in order to show that you're doing things.
But I personally think that those committees and cross-party organizations and any kind of cross-party collaboration are a good thing.
I actually wouldn't have any.
Like when you see a committee when they've got labor and liberal and greens and everyone else talking with each other in the smaller groups and getting things done, potentially making regulations or whatever it is that they're doing, that's actually healthy.
I wish people did that more.
Yeah.
Well, it might, I don't know, it might help.
It might hurt.
It's maybe it'll just cause them to stab each other in the back more.
I don't know.
I think when they're robbing from each other, they're less likely to rob from us.
I think every one of them needs to be watched, lest take more than they're already taking, because I think many of them are already, you know, that could be the role of the media, but the media does really graft.
They do a really bad job of it most of the time.
They're usually behind the they do an okay job in most in nearly every case.
Okay, mediocre to mediocre.
Okay, yeah, mediocre is probably better.
Yeah, that's probably in this range of, yeah, because they also, again, they want the access.
They don't want to piss anyone off.
And so there will be sort of these handshake things.
But of course, in media, you're competing with other media that unless you're shaking hands with all of the media that have all the different stripes.
And if they find out, they might say, yeah, but I want to stab my, I want, I'm competing, you're agreeing with.
So, you know, he could have had this story, but he agreed with you to not say it.
So I'll have this story instead.
And then it's an exclusive.
And then, you know, I mean, this is this is, you know, when they compete more, this is, this always works for the interests of everyday people when all of these people compete more with each other.
And the more ways in which we can find for them to compete with each other and for their positions to be less secure, that always works to our interest to improve our interest who need them to be less safe, right?
Well, they need to be active.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
You can't just put, you know, whereas, you know, if you look at, say, the Soviet system, right?
Where if you get a good position in the Soviet system, then you've got basically a good position for life.
And yeah, everyone's hunky dory, right?
They're all in the same party.
And it's great, right?
Except Docker is terrible, right?
Because it just, it's, well, they couldn't compete as a country and they fell behind and they ended up, you know, falling apart.
So, you know, I think you're right.
We'll see.
China is attempting to break that model to have the one party, but still be competitive in every way.
I don't know.
They could do that.
They could do that.
Look, they are doing that at the moment.
Well, okay, but when rubber meets the road, like the Soviet, Russia became a paper tiger because they had they had two sets of books, essentially, where they had commissioned a certain amount of supplies and and here's the five-year plan, and we're going to hit all the quotas for the five-year.
Yeah.
Some of those things got frittered away by middle men, mid-level officers who sold on a black market sort of thing and just claimed that they were sitting in a warehouse somewhere.
And then when it was time to use them, suddenly there's not enough boots to put on soldiers.
Yeah.
You have sections of the army that, you know, their feet are freezing.
And by the way, if you've ever stood in the weather when it's 30 degrees below Celsius, you want good boots.
And if you don't have them, you are not going anywhere that day.
You're definitely not marching.
I will tell you that right now.
You are dying.
Like, yeah.
A lot of their casualties were accounted for by administrative cock up as well.
But I'm allowed to say that.
Is this the BBC?
No, no.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
So like, I totally agree.
But also, like, their market in general being centrally controlled meant that there were surpluses of items that nobody needed.
And, you know, and we're seeing that in China today with cities that are completely uninhabited.
Yeah.
Build cities with some idea in mind.
And by the time you have it built, you have a different idea in mind.
And now you don't have this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, and I think that's true level in bookkeeping as well, where you've got the official bookkeeping.
And the key problem that a friend of mine is a China expert, Andrew Thielen, he actually told me that the biggest problem with China is they don't have the rule of law.
They've got a huge amount of corruption.
So you don't really know what's going on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mass confusion.
Yeah.
But again, is this the conspiracy?
No, not really.
It's just, well, you know, it's a bunch of bad stuff happening.
They do have one party that does hold meetings every, you know, week or month or whatever it is and come to agreements on how they're going to conduct business.
And they don't always tell everyone what that business is.
So technically, then they're consciously coming up with a plan.
That plan is secret because they're not telling anyone.
I mean, how many boxes are we ticking on a conspiracy before?
Maybe we are.
Well, yeah, right.
So in that way, maybe, maybe this is looking like this.
But in the same way, like technically, every board meeting of every corporation is engaged in a conspiracy against all of their competitors, obviously, right?
And sometimes their own workers.
Yeah, obviously, because they get a direct benefit when their workers are paid less.
Yeah.
So finding a way to arrange their business in such a way that works against the pay raises of their workers is a benefit to them.
And so they are coming up with a plan that works against the interest of the people who work for them.
And so, yeah, you've ticked all the boxes at that point.
And then you could argue that conspiracies exist within unions as well, in terms of at least, at least some of the unions to create cartel like activities as well.
Yeah, they can get co-opted to have a different set of goals other than the goals that are explicitly stated within the union.
And in that case, that is a conspiracy, right?
The mafia is technically a conspiracy.
Yep.
Every organized crime effort is some level of conspiracy.
And I've even said every football huddle is a conspiracy.
Well, you gotta, you gotta tell your guys what to do without letting the other thing know that.
Yeah.
That's exactly right.
And it's over with, you know, you, you'll have the football play.
The football play is over in 20 seconds or 30 seconds or whatever.
And then you'll have another huddle with a new conspiracy.
That doesn't make it not a conspiracy.
It also doesn't make it harmful or bad or negative in some cases.
So there is always the question of, is a conspiracy always a bad thing?
No.
Because like, if you're say, if you're, say, a spy, right?
And you're working for, you're working for Canada, right?
You're not going to tell the people that you're spying against that you're spying on them, right?
Because A, you'll get killed, right?
But B, like the whole point of you doing that job is to spy on these people, right?
So it's, it's like, but you don't want Canadian spies to suddenly be given up and conspiracies get get exposed, right?
That would be terrible.
Like Trump sometimes does inadvertently with things he just, you know, puts into the media atmosphere.
And suddenly, you know, spy organizations in the U.S. have to start pulling agents because they let some secret go that.
Yeah.
So transparency in government is actually not necessarily good for all departments.
I would argue.
Otherwise, you don't have things like intelligence services, et cetera.
Yeah.
True.
True.
I mean, there is some level of secrecy that has to be maintained.
The military, you know, if it's going to have itself work against the interests of a competing nation, then at least something that it does has to remain secret to that other nation.
Otherwise, in order to gain the advantage of secrecy.
So you have to have it not be known by every person in the, you know, that's within your nation.
Otherwise, it'll be to avail spies, et cetera.
I mean, that's just the nature of that game.
And top secret stuff is not always super interesting or super like decisive either.
It can be like we tap the phone of Donald Trump or something.
I don't know.
When he was talking about invading Canada.
But it can be something as innocuous as that, but you still don't really want people to know that you tapped Donald Trump's phone.
Yeah, it might be a contingency, right?
You tapped someone else's phone who wasn't really related to the thing, but you tapped it because you thought they might get put into the cabinet.
And so you tapped it just in case they got put in the cabinet and then they didn't.
And so you're like, oh, okay, that's a useless thing, but it's already there now.
So, you know, like we still better keep that top secret.
So there was a conspiracy.
We definitely don't want them to know that we had access to tap that, you know, like, yeah.
Just keeping a secret just keeps your capabilities secret.
And then, you know, I mean, spy agencies do this sort of thing all the time.
Yeah.
And yeah.
So I think, I think, you know, that's the other thing of, you know, a conspiracy is not always, I mean, can be a bad thing, can be a terrible thing, but it depends who you're working against.
If you're working against your own people, that's, that's terrible.
If you're if you're working for your own people, maybe it's necessary sometimes.
Yeah.
So I have a little closing bit and then I don't know, we'll just hang out, see if anyone has any questions or whatever.
We'll just invite people up to speak after that.
We are in an age of conspiracies.
Not because we suddenly have them or because we suddenly have more of them, but because we've become hyper-aware and our ability to communicate with each other about conspiracies, about which conspiracies are like the most obvious or like the most fun or like the most hazardous to our lives or futures or whatever.
This ability has never been greater.
Still, if we're going to engage with conspiracy ideas, we must do so responsibly.
Flooding our lives and our neighbors' lives and our boomer ants' lives with misinformation that we think is so cool just makes it harder for anyone else to discover and visualize reality.
Each person who throws a piece of garbage in the river says to themselves that this one piece of garbage cannot possibly be responsible for contaminating the river.
But when we all do it, rivers can become impassable.
The Cuyahoga River in Ohio has caught fire from the mass amount of oil and garbage that litter its surface at least 14 times.
Oh, wow.
So I say this only to remind you that while no one person can be responsible for that much waste, all of us can.
And so it is with misinformation.
You think that the little bit you forward isn't the entire problem, but it is.
And as these conspiracy ideas are weaponized to create political movements.