Spencer and Patrick dissect "decision paranoia," a coined term describing the fear that external entities control personal choices, driving conspiracy theories from Julian Huxley's 1927 tinfoil hat story to Magneto's X-Men helmet. They analyze how this anxiety fuels beliefs in COVID-19 mask mandates as autonomy-stripping overreach and Alex Jones' Sandy Hook event denial, arguing that the perceived safety of imagined threats outweighs the risk of losing freedom. Ultimately, the discussion reveals how figures like David Icke exploit these fears for profit, suggesting that defeating misinformation requires addressing the deep-seated dread of losing agency rather than just correcting factual errors. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is creating and interpreting the language of the disinformation age.
I'm Spencer, your host, and I'm back again today with Patrick.
How are you doing, Patrick?
I'm doing good, Spencer.
How are you?
Good.
Yeah.
I have theme music now and I've had them for a couple episodes, but I had this awkward thing where like I had almost four years of no theme music because reasons.
And I just, I always felt like I should fill every moment with talking of some kind.
Like silence is a thing that I don't want.
So now I don't know what to do while the theme music is on.
I feel awkward.
Like I feel like there's this awkward thing where something else is happening and I'm not a part of it or I'm not doing anything with it.
I should be doing something.
So I like nod my head or I, you know, but then I'm like, that's going to get old.
That's not a thing.
That's like, what is that?
That's, I don't know.
So I, so it makes me feel incredibly self-conscious if I do something and also if I do nothing.
So, okay, maybe as an idea, because I've seen both and I've seen podcasters roll through different theme musics where, you know, because of the length of it, you know, they want to honor and respect that somebody made this for them.
But then, you know, in order to ensure it is played, they put it at the end.
So if a person just wants to get, get into it, but I don't know.
I kind of see an opportunity for you to use that.
Cause like, what is it about 10 seconds?
It could even just be like while the theme music's playing like a brief snippet about what the matter or like what the subject material will be.
Because for me, I mean, I know as your guest, I just, I go for a drink of water.
I get ready, right?
Theme music is really making it real.
So I'm just an opportunity to go get a drink.
Yeah.
Like a commercial from the old days.
Yeah.
Before we had DVRs and whatever that we could just fast forward.
And yeah.
Yeah.
Why do they even have commercials in TV shows anymore?
I don't know.
I'm not sure.
I'm really not sure.
Until they force us to watch them, I don't know, like YouTube sometimes does.
I don't know.
Any amount of advertising works.
I guess.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Before I forget, I forgot to last episode, slap my wrist, bad me.
That theme song was written for me specifically by my good friend, Jeff Powell.
I told him I would honor him by mentioning him on the podcast every time, every episode, and I didn't do that.
And I'm a bad friend.
But I'm catching up.
I'm catching up.
It's a new thing.
Sometimes I don't even do my tagline right.
Give me a break.
You're good.
Today, I'm going to do the email at the top too.
If anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about anything they hear on this podcast, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
I get what I believe are automated messages on behalf of people to be guests on the podcast.
And I don't respond to any of those.
I'm getting those at an accelerated rate, which worries me.
I don't know what it means.
To me, I think they're all written by the same machine.
Maybe I'll do an episode where I go over them.
I don't know, embarrass all the people in them that I'm not invited to the podcast, but because I'm sure they're all nice people.
Yeah, invite them all to the same episode.
That'd be awesome.
That'd be too amongst yourselves.
The theme is explaining to silence.
Too good.
Yeah.
But they're all, they all, you know, these are kind of like, you know, someone who wrote a book, but it's kind of self-published and they have their thing and they, you know, spend some money probably on someone to help them to push the book.
And that agency is doing this, is has a list of podcasts and sending it to podcasts, whatever, and try to get them on their podcast to get their thing heard.
So, you know, I'm sure they're good people.
Although I know I looked up a couple of them.
Some of them are people who are engaged actively in reality denial for whatever that's worth.
They've mistaken what this podcast is about because either the agency that they went through or the machine that looks into these things doesn't understand what's happening.
But that's, you know, okay, whatever.
I get that it's confusing.
It has a name that makes it sound like I'm really into, you know, enthusiastic about conspiracy stuff when actually I'm the opposite of that.
Yeah.
And that name is kind of on purpose for that reason.
Whatever.
Okay.
That's kind of ticklish to think about the program name being having the element of deception.
Well, you know, the underline is about, you know, defeating misinformation.
Yeah, I'm skirting the line.
I mean, I am, I am, uh, I am ambiguously titling the episodes in a way that would confuse someone who was into conspiracies into maybe accidentally listening to some.
Yeah, I am, I'm deceitful.
I'm a human being.
I'm, yeah.
For example, I, one of my episodes that I've linked many, many times was about the Butler assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania in July of 2024.
And I could have called it not staged.
That could have been the title of the episode.
But you know what?
I called it instead?
Staged.
Oh my God.
Clickbait.
Yeah.
Well, you know, and whenever someone brings up that they think it was staged, I on Twitter or something, I just link the episode and just leave it.
Nice.
Because if they stumble in and then they're wondering halfway through why I'm telling them why it's not staged, well, whatever.
Like I just, you know, they should know better.
Wait for them to cite you while they're telling someone else it's I've had some people get angry about it.
I've had, yeah, I have.
It's a thing.
Whatever.
I don't know.
I'm not lying, really.
I'm just, I'm just being shady.
I don't know if you're being shady even.
Well, it's in the world.
They have to be allowed to misinterpret.
It's in a lukewarm shade area, not like full shade, you know, but like diffuse light like under a tree in this summertime.
It's all grow there.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
Grass is growing under there.
Yeah.
Maybe only water it once a day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
So with all that, that I think that section there, that qualifies for the closest thing this podcast has ever come to housekeeping.
Talking about the emails, but what I do want to mention, I brought it up for a reason.
I want to say that if anyone wants to send me an email in which they give me feedback on something they heard on the podcast, I will send that person a picture of one of my pets.
A picture that I take specifically for them of my pet doing one of my pets doing something cute and not like a picture that I would throw online or whatever.
Just do your own picture of one of my pets.
We have four cats and a dog.
Let me know if you'd prefer a dog picture or a cat picture.
They're all cute, but some people prefer one or the other.
You get your own picture of one of my pets.
Go ahead.
This will, if, if anyone takes me up on it, that'd be awesome because I've been bugging people to send me feedback in my email inbox for a long, long time.
And I don't, I shouldn't say no one has.
One person has.
But yeah, very, very rarely.
Is that me from a while back?
Two people have.
Two people have.
You didn't send it in the email, though.
You sent it via DMs.
Okay.
Pretty sure.
I thought I sent an email for, I don't know.
Maybe two.
Two anyway.
But yeah, so this is a sort of an incentive.
And if I get so many that it annoys me, I'll just stop.
Right.
I'll just say, yeah, that giveaway is over or something.
Let that pendulum swing.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, it's, there's worse things to be annoyed by.
So yeah, if anyone does that, just let me know what you'd like and I'll send that.
So today we have a topic.
We haven't, I said I was creating and interpreting the language of the disinformation age, and I am doing that today.
It's a new term I came up with to describe an aspect of this.
It's already been used on this podcast, but it needs its own episode.
So this episode will be called decision paranoia.
So pretend like we haven't talked about this at all, Patrick, in any other episodes until I bring up the conversations that we had about that.
Okay.
Okay.
Do you know, do you know what a tinfoil hat is?
I know how the term is used.
And yes, I believe like a literal tinfoil hat.
Sure.
Well, tell me, tell me, give us some of your voice.
Tell us.
As far as I know, tinfoil hats were seen by some very paranoid people to be able to block out some entity's ability to control their thoughts or their actions by, I guess, beaming shit into their brain.
Or to read their minds.
Not necessarily to control them, but to read their thoughts.
Okay.
In out.
Yeah.
Do you know, and it's also conversely been used to refer to people who believe in conspiracies.
Right.
Right.
Derogatory term.
Derogatory term.
Right.
So this started out as an idea and then became a way to mock the people who had those ideas.
So now, nowadays, there aren't many people, I think, unless there are some and I haven't seen them.
But I don't believe there are any people who are actually trying to wear a tinfoil hat or do anything like that to block something like that physically.
But there is a history of this tinfoil hat thing.
Magneto and Tinfoil Hats00:14:37
I hesitate to say that what I did was research because I just did a little bit of Google searching.
Not the same thing as research.
You looked into it.
I did.
I spent a couple of minutes looking into this a little bit.
And there is a history.
So there is a story.
It's kind of neat.
It's a short story.
I'll put a, it's, uh, it's, it appears to be free, available free online now.
I'll put some links to it.
One is a, will be a link to a YouTube video that is, as an, I didn't listen to it, but as I understand it, is the spoken or the audiobook version of it.
It's only nine pages.
I think it only takes 15 minutes or something to listen to.
I read it because I'm like that.
It was a story written by, you ever hear of an author called Aldous Huxley?
Yes.
He wrote a very, very famous novel called Brave New World?
Brave New World.
Yes.
Okay.
Right.
He had an older brother named Julian Huxley, who was, they were both involved in the field of science and evolution and that sort of thing, biology and that sort of thing.
I say that sort of thing because he was involved in several different areas of science, including, unfortunately, eugenics.
His older brother was named Julian Huxley.
And Julian Huxley wrote this short story.
Okay.
I don't know if he did it because he was jealous that his brother wrote things and he wanted to do that.
I don't know.
Brothers sometimes do that kind of thing.
I don't know.
Maybe they were just talking and he decided to write a short story.
He doesn't seem to have been much of an author other than this and maybe a couple other things.
But he wrote the short story.
It's now reading it now.
Has this odd sense.
It was written and published in 1927.
So almost a full hundred years ago, 99 years ago.
And the story is essentially an allegory for how scientists sort of get caught up by capitalist and corporate bureaucracy structures and that sort of thing, how they sort of get captured by it, where they're making money doing a thing that's, but it's not really like science.
And so in a way, it's a sort of a thumbing your nose at like technology, which was becoming a much bigger thing in the 20s and much bigger thing much after that too.
Which I think scientists sort of poo-pooed the idea of technologists or engineers, at least for a time they did.
But that was kind of what the story was about.
But it featured a the story was about a scientist who gets captured.
He's in Africa and it never explains why he's in Africa, but he's in Africa doing something that's related to something like a war type of thing.
And he gets captured by people in Africa who have a city of their own.
And it goes into great length.
Like the first half of the story is all about he gets captured by these African people who are also also have levels of racism involved in their descriptions, but whatever.
It was 1927.
And he meets another European man who's who was captured five years before.
And he's in this culture now.
And so it spends like the first half of the story is all about how he avoided getting killed by the people there and how he convinced them that he was useful by a thing he was doing.
And then now he has to do that thing all the time for them.
And it's become like a religion for them, even though he feels it's not that useful.
So that was interesting.
And that's kind of how he gets captured.
But then he realized that while he was there, he could get resources from them to work on other things.
And one of the other things he's working on is a thing involving hypnosis.
So the second half of the story is all about this sort of hypnosis technology that the narrator now helps him with and they use to try to escape.
So this also is wrapped up in how hypnosis in yet again, a way that hypnosis does not work.
We've talked about this on here when we referred to some of the movies that we've looked at, right?
Most particularly was the Manchurian candidate involved hypnosis.
And we were like, well, hypnosis doesn't really work this way.
Yeah, I mean, people get afraid of it working this way, but that's just, it just doesn't work this way.
And this is a different depiction than like what's in the Manchurian candidate, but it is yet another way in which hypnosis does not in fact work.
So, but it, the way that he does it isn't that it doesn't appear that he was confused about the way hypnosis works.
He was more or less describing how society works and that he their hypnosis technology was like some kind of ESP where you could get a person, you could invade a person's thoughts with it.
And then with them, once you got their thoughts involved, your sort of hypnosis machine got stronger.
And then you could have more people that were nearby your machine get affected by it.
once you're affecting them it got stronger and then um so and they they use this to escape Now, of course, the key is that they discover that they can make this hypnosis ESP machine kind of do this, but they have to have it not affect them.
So they discover that they can put these metal hats on.
They fashion these metal hats that protect them from the way the machine works.
And then they sort of hypnotize everyone into, I don't know, going to sleep or whatever it was.
And then they escape.
And that's, that's how the basically how this, this was, as I read the situation, as I, in the few minutes that I went into Google searching on this, this appears to be the earliest fictional reference to a what would amount to like a tinfoil or metal hat, you know, blocking someone's ability to control your mind or to block their ability to read your mind.
Yeah.
Right.
We're almost at the 100-year anniversary of tinfoil.
Almost.
Yeah.
But I didn't want to wait a whole year to do this episode.
We're doing it now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Teasing it for a year.
There's going to be a big event.
But it occurred to me while I was thinking about this and the whole idea of this tinfoil hat thing having a history that there is another literary reference.
And some people would complain about my calling this a literary reference, but I'm going to call it a literary reference because I'm a big fan.
There is a series of comic books and now a series of movies based on the X-Men characters in the Marvel cinematic universe.
And one of those characters is a powerful telepath named Professor Xavier.
And he has a nemesis named Magneto who wears a metal hat to block Professor Xavier's ability to read his thoughts or control his mind.
And this is, to me, this is another significant sort of reference to communicate this idea that a tinfoil hat or a metal hat or something like that can stop and block this sort of thing to, you know, and in the in the canon of events, I don't know if there was ever an actual comic where they built it, but they describe that they say in the history of the two characters, they were once friends.
And Magneto said that he wasn't sure he could ever really trust Xavier until they, so Xavier helped him to build a helmet that would shield Magneto from the effects of Xavier's powers.
And in this way, they could fully trust each other, which is also an interesting lesson about the nature of trust among people who are potentially more powerful than you.
But we're not going to get into that today.
That's a whole other situation.
But yeah, Magneto wanted to know that his thoughts were his own.
So he asked his friend to help him be sure of this.
And he did.
He could really block this out.
So this is sort of some of the history of the literary reference and how some of these ideas get translated and brought forward into our current age.
I think the original short story wasn't ever going to last this long.
We're only looking it up because I'm looking up tinfoil hats and their history.
But, you know, the success, you know, Stanley never really knew that X-Men were going to be as successful as they were when he first made them in the 60s, but they turned out to be that successful decades and decades later.
And in some small way, helping to translate the idea that you need to be careful and watchful for some menacing ability to read your mind and have a way to block that.
How am I doing so far?
Am I making sense, Patrick?
What are you thinking about this?
Yeah, I think we have a pretty complete picture of the kind of tinfoil hat idea.
How does it relate to the idea of decision paranoia?
Well, it's really simple.
I mean, you see, Magneto was worried that he couldn't rely on his own decisions until he found a way to, you know, that a method by which he thought he could stop it.
And this, so.
And that method doesn't necessarily even stop it.
It just only gave him the sense of assurance because, you know, in all of the lore of X-Men, Professor X is always very noble in his pursuits.
And he did that for his friend to give him that assurance.
Though we would never have said that Professor X was likely to abuse his powers, right?
No.
He recognized it as an equalizing.
Right.
But I mean, it also, I mean, if you're really diving into the two characters in X-Men, it also says something about Magneto's powers that he didn't help Charles Xavier build a suit of some kind that would block Charles Xavier from the effects of Magneto's powers.
He could just pick up that chair that he's in and just toss it at any moment, right?
Like, you know, so it does say something about their two characters that Xavier trusted Magneto, but Magneto didn't really trust Xavier.
Well, I think Magneto was always greater power.
Well, yeah.
But Magneto always thought to himself, if I had that power, I would use it against people.
So I need a way to block this power that he has from affecting me this way, because, yeah.
So, but the idea here is that the idea of a tinfoil hat began as an errant way.
I mean, this was a plot device that was used in an old short story just to give the character some plausible way in which, you know, because they maybe this guy couldn't, you know, it's 1927.
He could have done anything he wanted.
He could have said, this machine only works on black people and then just, you know, the two Europeans just stroll out of town.
But instead, he did this because in his sort of canon or whatever story he's writing, this would have affected them just as much as it affected the Africans in which he was in the city in which he was living.
So, I mean, he wasn't that racist, I guess, right?
Well, he kind of wants the reader, maybe wants the reader to be able to imagine this is something that could be happening to them for like the plausibility of the story, regardless of who they are, right?
I guess, yeah.
Yeah.
So the idea is that, in my opinion, one of the central and key drives, it's not the only one and it's not the all-encompassing one.
Driving on the Side Road00:11:08
There are other factors involved.
But one consistent factor that I see when I look at people who are engaging in conspiratorial beliefs is a consistent belief that there's always a they, the they has some unknown set of powers.
And also the they is looking to influence all the decisions.
They're looking to control the world.
They're looking to gain all the money.
They're looking to own the banks.
They're looking to, but even owning the banks wouldn't mean anything if owning the banks didn't allow them to run the economy, to buy the presidency, to, you know, fix the elections, to do all the things, right?
All of that.
Decision paranoia isn't only the idea that someone's going to, you know, physically read your thoughts or control your mind, right?
It's also the idea that your decisions will be taken away from you.
So in my mind, decision paranoia as a fear that you have is much more prevalent among people who have strong decisions.
It's like freedom.
Freedom is a thing where if you want to see people motivated, tell them that they're losing their freedom.
And it motivates the people who have freedom.
Like if you don't have freedom, you're telling people that they're losing it, they're not motivated at all to do anything.
They're like, what's going to change?
Right.
But it's only in an age when we have so much freedom that the fear that it goes away is a much stronger motivating factor for all manner of thing.
And the same is true, like freedom, really, the real measure of freedom is your ability to make decisions that matter for your own life.
According to your, yeah, for your existence in the world, maybe decisions to affect the world.
In democracies, we feel like we have the ability to maybe affect the outcome of a thing.
If we lived in an autocratic world in which there was no real choice, we might not feel that way.
Looking at you, Russia, Russians tend to not worry as much about whether their freedoms are being taken away because they probably don't feel like they have many to begin with.
That's just my opinion, man.
They're trained not to care by the culture they live in, right?
Well, that's exactly what I'm saying, right?
They don't have that many decisions that matter, and therefore they're not worried about it that much.
But we here have more decisions and higher quality of decisions, or at least we feel we do, which is the same thing.
The perception of it is just as good as actually having it in this case, because it's fully subjective.
So having those decisions leave, have the things we thought we had decision power over be taken from us is what is a real fear for people.
So this is what becomes a central part of a lot of conspiracy beliefs is the idea that the end goal is to remove all of your choices.
Yeah.
And that's, I think, I think that's, I see it in many of the really all of the decision or conspiracy areas that I look at.
The most confusing one, of course, is flat earth.
So it's a bad example of this because no one can discern what the motive would be to pretend that the earth is flat when it's not.
Or to pretend the earth is spherical when it's not, rather.
I said that the opposite way.
Someone's going to clip that.
Yeah.
But because it's just a weird eating game of the flat earthers.
Well, it's almost always religion.
To almost everyone who's really sincerely believing in a flat earth, it's all about a reason to believe that science is lying to them about the Bible.
It seems incredibly simple and it is.
It is at the end of the day, really incredibly simple.
The people who sincerely believe it, there are some people who sincerely believe it who don't profess to believe in the Bible.
But I think those are the grifters.
Those are people who are using this just as a way to get a platform for money.
Because yeah.
Yeah.
So what is what is a good example then where we see decision paranoia affecting somebody?
This is a mask that I wore during COVID.
I still have it.
I don't wear it much anymore.
But during COVID, people thought, and people still do think sometimes when I talk to them, that the drive to get people to wear masks during COVID was a way to convince people to do what the government tells you to do.
That wearing it made you sheeple.
In fact, the entire word sheeple implies that your decisions have been taken away and that you're just following the leader now.
So that lumps right in with decision paranoia.
And that this was this whole idea that if you wear a mask, you're going to somehow learn to just listen to what the, you know, they tell you is a little obscene because we already have things that we listen to that we let the government organize for us.
They're not like orders that they tell us to do.
They're organizing principles.
So for example, here in Canada, we've decided to drive on the right side of the road rather than the left side of the road.
It's the government enforces this with fines, with police officers that will come out there.
Generally, people just do it because they also understand this is in their interest to not drive in the opposing lane.
You'll get hit head on and it's very, very bad.
But there's also a fine if you do that in the wrong spot.
You're not passing someone.
It's dangerous.
Right.
But what's to stop you?
Why aren't there obscene people in the world who say that it's government overreach to demand that we tell us which side of the road we're on?
Or to say that because they told us and we listened, that somehow we're now enthralled to the, oh, well, I guess we listen to that.
We're going to have to listen to all this other stuff.
Like, geez, I don't know.
They make us get licensed, Patrick.
They put our names on a list.
Think of it.
They have our name on a list in a government office somewhere.
Like there, they own us now because my license has a number on it.
Like, you know, like this is, this is this, you know, as soon as I apply this to driver's licenses, it seems ridiculous, except that this is very similar or almost the same as what was happening with like COVID vaccine records, right?
To try to, you know, track to say, okay, well, you don't have to get a vaccine, but we need to keep unvaccinated people away from congregating.
So restaurants, if you want to stay open, you have to check that people got vaccinated.
And this was also seen as government overreach.
But we also check that people have licenses when they drive.
Yeah.
Is that government overreach to say that you need a license in order to drive?
Like this is a very similar thing.
Not exactly the same, but very, very similar.
They say, yeah, you don't have to get a license, but you also don't get to drive.
You don't have to get a vaccine, but for a time you weren't allowed to go to a restaurant.
Like that's a luxury that the government, you know, you don't have a right to go to a restaurant.
It's not, there's no, you know, we, I read the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
It's not in there.
It's like, so yeah, like it was inconvenient for a bunch of people.
Yeah.
But wearing a mask or even getting a vaccine wasn't giving anyone control over you.
But that was the narrative that was driven was that this was going to give some they, some government entity that of unspoken shape to know all the, you know, to control you somehow.
And of course, also other vaccine lies that, you know, the vaccine has a chip in it that's going to, you know, microchip in it or whatever.
It's going to track you, which was hilarious because all those same people carry the phone around with them and Google's tracking everywhere they go.
Only if you have the Google Maps installed, but it's so much better than Apple Maps.
I can't not have it.
Like, well, everybody's paying all of their cell phone bills with credit cards or bank accounts that are like nobody's, nobody's doing, these are the same people who say cash is king.
It's like, is it?
It's useful to maybe have some, but is it really king?
Are you really conducting most of your life using physical money when most of the money in the world is just digital records?
You know, going back to like, you know, the mandates, you know, like you said, we all kind of have this very good intuitive sense why it's good to make sure that people pass some sort of skill testing question before they get their license,
you know, and that's a driving test and all of that stuff because we don't want people to just find a machine to then propel themselves and have every right to do that until someone dies, right?
Or the convention of the convention of driving on the side of the road.
Deadly Pandemic Paranoia00:03:12
So unfortunately, you know, the pandemic just had a lot of people, you know, using whatever doubt that they had because they weren't seeing something happen firsthand in front of them.
They were saying, oh, well, maybe the science isn't right, or maybe this virus isn't as deadly as people think, or maybe it's only deadly to such and such people.
So it was people disbelieving the science that caused them to disagree with the mandate that was designed to protect us all from overwhelming our medical systems because we had very explicit examples of like the first cities to get hit by this being way overrun when it was allowed to run.
So, you know, and it's interesting too, just to look back that for the first couple months, if you wore a mask, you were anti-government because the government was saying, well, don't worry about masks, just social distance and do this other stuff.
And then it became okay to wear masks to prevent outward spread, you know, in the fear of either people becoming ill and passing it or asymptomatic and passing it.
But whatever, most people didn't understand what the principal reason for the masks were in the first place.
The messaging was very, very poor.
The CDC screwed up a lot of stuff.
Well, you know, trying to protect their stockpiles of a certain type of mask, you know, we had other cultures to look at.
Was it Japan had like nothing because they just wearing a mask in Japan is second nature, right?
Like just in flu season.
Yeah.
They just and that's because of the tight proximity of the majority of the space there.
Yeah, the Japanese are living so close together that by just the numbers and the and the geometry, they should have gotten it way worse, except that it was way better because they're incredibly clean as well.
They're cleaning everything regularly, all the surfaces, and they just were like, oh, it's time to wear masks.
They all just already had in their pocket.
Like, okay, well, you know, pull that out now and go on about my day.
And I personally think the pandemic would have looked much, much different if every country had that culture, right?
Because what would the proliferation of spread have been if it didn't have these deep roots in places where people were like, oh, no, I'm not, I'm not wearing a mask, you sheeple.
Yeah, yeah.
Or people who would wear the mask and the mask would have something that the wearer thought was clever on there about how useless the mask was or whatever.
So, you know, wear it to comply, but then attempt to advertise how useless it is in their opinion.
It's like, okay, all right, man, whatever.
But the decision paranoia is, you know, it's a driving factor, right?
And it's easy to stoke fear.
Crisis Actor Motivations00:06:21
This is this is a major thing about conspiracies and conspiracy beliefs is that racking up the fear and increasing the fear is always hand in hand with this that that drives this thing forward.
I'm trying to think of other very specific examples that are as good as the mask thing.
The masking is very front of mind.
It's very recent.
We all had really common things with it.
But well, I mean, almost all the conspiracy vaccine hesitancy in the first place, right, is one of those things where a person is, if they are vaccine hesitant, they've, they're probably relying on some sort of fear that I don't know what this is, even though you know what the fuck it is that you're trying to protect against.
And it's fucking horrible, you know, for a small sliver of fear about a thing that is unknown and unproven to fuel people, you know, to not protect themselves or their own children.
Yeah.
So there's a lot of other areas of conspiracy belief.
There's a big area that branches off into many other areas is called violent event denial.
Yeah.
And almost all of the violent event denial motivations that are imagined are about control of some kind.
So people imagine that 9-11 was an inside job.
And when you ask about this, the motivation for staging 9-11 is incredibly obvious.
The government gets the power to do all kinds of things because the government did at the time get power to do all kinds of things.
They were opportunistic.
They saw an opportunity and took advantage of it.
But that doesn't make them people who did it on purpose.
But almost all the other violent event denial also has an imagined motivation just like this.
Things like Alex Jones got sued several times for saying that Sandy Hook was not real.
Crisis actors or something.
He claimed that all of the parents were crisis actors.
Yes.
That all of them didn't lose children or that their children still live, or whatever, like there was all kinds of claims yeah um, and the motivation that he claimed for why someone would do this is that uh, they would stage this so that they could take the guns away.
So that's explicitly what he said.
So you know, I mean that this is a much bigger deal.
In the states they have the second amendment that uh uh says the government shall not uh, make no law that restricts uh gun ownership, that kind of thing.
Or it doesn't even say guns, it says arms.
But whatever, I don't want to get into a second debate thing right now, but this is this was the motivation that he claimed at the time, that the reason why they would do this is a false flag to justify taking away the guns.
And this is again part of this decision paranoia, the the reason to take away the guns would be to make the uh population vulnerable to a coup of some kind.
That the idea usually behind the second amendment is that you'd have the guns because, in case you ever need to rise up against your government you, you have some means with which to do it.
Um okay, that's.
I don't know how useful that's ever going to be.
But um yeah, if the if the Us military ever uh gets any further astray than it is, maybe we'll find out.
Um, it's wild that somehow he thought that crisis actors were going to move that needle on that right, like the authorities would report how many children and individuals had been injured or killed.
Right, and it's not going to be what the parents said after that.
You know the fact that it happened.
At least it should be right on the night.
The night that was uh, you know, within you know, eight hours or 12 hours or whatever it was.
After the event, some news agency somewhere convinced one of the parents to speak on camera.
And so it was something like a, you know, something like a press conference, although not really a press conference.
I mean, this isn't like a thing, but this parent spoke.
It was a father and this was used as part of Alex Jones's.
uh sort of uh uh worked into his uh uh story.
Every nervous twitch that the father had was pointed out as a sign that they were only acting.
Wow yes, and that's that's exactly what it was like.
If there's, this is available online.
You can watch his show where he's showing it and pointing out, he's like oh, you see them doing this.
This is a sign they're acting.
This is a sign they're acting, but they're just a nervous parent who's uh um processing, processing and and uh, I can't remember the, the justification under which they got the guy to talk.
I mean, obviously the media will try to get him to talk because it'll get eyes on the screen and that's yeah, that's their whole game um but uh, you know, maybe they were like, I don't know, tell him to talk because uh, you know, they're worried about uh, I don't know, worried about copycats or whatever, I don't know who knows um, any reason to get him to talk and get him.
Get that camera in his face and, and you know, if it bleeds, it leads, man.
I mean, the media is terrible sorry, all the media in the world.
Pascal's Wager on Decisions00:07:08
Do better, Do better.
Yeah.
If you don't want me to say that about you, do better.
And that means that if you're doing better and the guy next to you isn't, tell that person to do better because he'll listen to you before he listens to me.
Like, sorry, not sorry.
Fucking do better.
Totally.
But yeah, I mean, this, and almost every one of the mass shooting events in the States has been also reduxed by Alex Jones and others since he did that about Sandy Hook.
So the Las Vegas shooting and the Pulse Nightclub and all of these have been spun.
You know, the Parkland High School shooting, all of these have been spun as a way to put people who are victims or, you know, parents of victims on camera to generate support for taking the guns away.
It's, yeah, it's like we don't deserve to know the feelings of impacted families.
Right.
Well, in Alex Jones's mind, it's they he deserves to own guns.
And in fact, he wasn't the only person.
Charlie Kirk, who was murdered last year by a person with a gun climbing on a rooftop.
Charlie Kirk said at one point that it's sad that sometimes children die in a school shooting, but that's the price we pay for having these guns be in society.
And that's just the price we pay.
That's just, you know, those children sacrificed themselves somehow so that we could have these guns.
Like that was like what do you, what, what is this your spin really?
But it's the decision paranoia.
It's the idea that losing that will take all the decisions away from them, take the power away from them.
Take the they're coming for your guns.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't, I don't think, I think that those are enough examples.
I don't think I need to get into Holocaust denial stuff.
Well, I think decision paranoia is, you know, listening to it here and talking about it.
It's, you know, I would want to see it like useful in being able to, you know, interpret how people rely on uncertainty to shield themselves from rationally assessing what is, you know, what is the best decision or what's the best interpretation, but also, you know, as a to become a tool in people's toolbox to assess because we're going to see it again.
It's going to happen again where especially anywhere, I think, where people are invited or compelled to participate in something as a society or a community, like, you know, the use of masks in order to share that protection.
How will we make sure that the next time something comes along, you know, it could be a new frontier.
It could be something about how we use our devices, right?
Like there could be something that comes out.
Like right now, one of the one of the debates is about the use of AI.
Using AI, for some people, they feel like it is making people complicit in the ills that go along with the resource management issues.
So like, you know, depleting natural resources to fuel these giant machines where some people feel like, well, it's just stealing human creativity or whatnot.
Eventually, we hit a point where the decision will matter more than it does now.
And maybe some people are going to be like, No, I don't want to stop doing the bad thing because it's my right.
Whereas other people will be like, Yeah, but so many of us now doing this bad thing are leading to what is ultimately something that jeopardizes all of us, right?
I mean, it's that way too with the decision about what we do and partake in with anything regarding the climate or environment.
So, I think that I mean, I would like to hear the perspective from someone who, maybe someone who used to believe in some conspiracy ideation or maybe still does.
But I suspect that it manifests, and they probably don't think about it this way, really.
But I would suggest, and they can compare and see if this lines up with their thinking, is that Pascal's wager comes into play in that when they think about the idea that their decisions might be affected or reduced or taken away or whatever, and then they think about the idea that that might not be happening.
They first think about how easy it would be to tell the difference.
And then they think about, can I take the chance?
Yeah.
Can I take the chance that it's that I'm going to be able to make a full set of decisions if I don't act on this or if I don't take caution, take precautions against this thing I've just imagined might be happening?
This is kind of like one of the premises of game theory, isn't it?
Well, it comes up in game theory.
Yeah, incomplete information.
I mean, I did an episode about Pascal's wager, so I don't want to get too deep into it.
Pascal's wager gets flipped on its head all the time with environmental science, with climate science.
Because if you're not going to try to understand all of climate science, then the most compelling argument is you should try to reduce carbon because you can't take the chance that it will end everything.
The cost is far too high.
And it is going to incur some costs to reduce the carbon, but it's not going to be life-changing to just reduce carbon.
But it will be, you know, potentially humanity-ending if this gets really out of control, right?
But that is the same logic that's used by people who will say, can you take the chance that the government isn't going to come and take all your stuff if you don't come believe that that party is all made of demons and baby eaters, right?
David Icke and Humanity00:03:34
Like, I'd be flattered.
You guys want my stuff?
How can you be sure if you're David Icke?
You're saying, how can you be sure that the royal family isn't actually lizard people who are just shape-shifting into human form?
You'd better not take that chance.
You'd better come and buy all my CDs and buy all my books and read them.
And I don't really care if you read them, just buy them all and just own them and listen to me when I talk so you can know which ones to buy next time.
And make sure you're up on all the stuff because being informed is the way you're going to prepare for this thing I just imagined and told you about.
Because it will make someone feel like they're getting their decisions back if they're getting informed.
But they're getting informed with garbage at that point.
David Icke is just feeding garbage straight into your brain.
If you believe him, if you take on board the fears that he will put into your mind.
Yeah.
And by the way, for a significant amount of time, he thought he was actually Jesus.
So, I mean, you're listening to a person who actually thought they were Jesus for a while.
Not great.
Not a great track record.
Yeah.
So with that.
Still water.
Still water.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's not walking on it either.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So with that, I think we can sign off.
That's, I think we beat that to death.
Yeah.
So yeah, I think I'll leave that uncomfortable silence in there.
Just to prove that I could do it.
Just to prove that I could.
I could, I could just let it hang and be silent for like a full four or five seconds.
I thought the stream froze for a second.
I was just like, okay, I better not move just in case.
I'm over here now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was good.
Okay.
Well, if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns, I can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And if you give me feedback about the podcast, I will send you a unique picture just for you of one of my pets.
And yeah, yeah, you can't get pictures of these pets anywhere else but here.
And a unique picture, just taken just for you.
Just for you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You want me to prove it?
I'll get the newspaper.
I'm getting in on this.
Like, I'm not disqualified just because I was on here, right?
I'll make that determination at the moment.
I'll hold up the newspaper that's got like the date on it.
Does you know that it's in the picture?
You can see the date.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dear Truth Unrestricted.
I kind of like the guy in orange becomes strong bad even.