I've been curious about conspiracy theories my whole life. As soon as I popped out of my mom’s grassy knoll, I wanted access to the secret knowledge that conspiracy theories promised.

I wanted to believe because conspiracy theories promised to deliver powerful insight, they promised to transform how you see for the better.

But I was always disappointed in what I found. I remember watching the movie JFK in the theater, which was a place where people used to gather to exchange air borne particles. And I just remember coming out of it and thinking, so did everybody kill JFK? Is this like Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, because that definitely wasn't real.

I didn't know enough at the time to know why I didn't buy the JFK conspiracy theory or the moon landing or Roswell or chemtrails -- I just couldn't do it. I think I just sensed that they were too good. Too orderly, too dramatic, too simple, too emotionally satisfying. They were too much like movies. Nothing I’d experienced about the real world showed me it was this… interesting. Did I mention I grew up in Canada?

To me, society didn't seem like a top down hierarchy, like a company or a dictatorship. It seemed more like something else that was transforming the world around then: the internet. The world seemed like this massive, decentralized hive of activity where sure there was power and control but there wasn't some great and powerful Oz behind the curtain pulling the levers.

The machine just seemed too immense, too complicated. Too many other people had their own levers they could pull.

Anyway, skip ahead from my youth to my middle age and I wanted to know if this hunch I had as a kid was right. I launched a project about conspiracy theories, and I learned everything I could about them and I now know more than is necessary, really. I've done things I don't recommend.

I've spent precious hours of my one and only life listening to Alex Jones' speak and thinking about what he said.

I follow a bunch of QAnon people and read their claims about celebrities murdering children and drinking their adrenochrome, and I wonder if some essential truth is accidentally being expressed.

I have willingly given my attention to David Icke, who once claimed to be the son of God then later pivoted to talking about a master race of shape-shifting reptilians and people are still listening to him because he figured out COVID and you'll never guess -- he’s got a conspiracy theory.

I've looked at these other perspectives with tolerance and in good faith, willing to believe. I mean maybe not these particular examples, but other ones. And I don't think conspiracy theorists are wrong all the time. Just like a stopped clock is right twice a day, Alex Jones has probably been right twice in his life. I've not seen this personally but I'm assuming…

Folks, I've dared to know.

I've read the super secret hidden knowledge and it's got a concerning number of typos. Some claims within conspiracy theories are true, sometimes I even see the metaphorical point of some theories, but the ultimate, inescapable conclusion is that conspiracy theories are constantly wrong.

Despite conspiracy theories always being constantly wrong, there is something admirable about them, or at least their aspiration. They try to offer profound answers and they faceplant at this.

But the controversy they create is profound. Conspiracy theories themselves might not be that interesting but the issue of conspiracy theories is very interesting. Conspiracy theories are actually important. They are central to this strange metastasizing disease within our collective imagination right now.

I'm going to be exploring this realm for a while. If you'd like to join me on this journey, come back me on Patreon and help me make more videos like this. And subscribe to this channel and click the bell button too. No one knows what it does. It's one of life's eternal mysteries. And check out my feature length documentary, This is Not a Conspiracy Theory, if you'd like to know more about how we got into this mess and how we can go someplace better. You can get it for five bucks and you can get the super special deluxe edition for fifteen bucks. This concludes the flogging section of the video.

This conspiracy theory thing has been a long time coming. They've been around right from the formation of the United States, but I think what's happening now has been building since the nineteen fifties and we clearly need to have this out.

Conspiracy theories often frame everything as an epic conflict between good and evil, and I think this is an epic conflict, but not between good and evil. It's a battle of ideas. This is a cultural fight and conspiracy theories are currently winning. They are pulling ahead in this race and we need to catch up.

Conspiracy theories must lose this battle because they are a collective fantasy. The very premise of conspiracy theories is impossible. I mean, mostly. You can never say 100% cuz monkeys might fly out my butt someday.

In this video I will present a series of exhibits, each one more mindbreaking than the last, that will prove my case beyond all reasonable doubt. This will begin with Exhibit A and culminate in Exhibit F, F as in FFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUCK! I’ll cover how conspiracy theories are not like real conspiracies, I’ll reveal the profound truth within Bandersnatch, I will treat the 1998 Gwenyth Paltrow vehicle Sliding Doors with the deep reverence it deserves, and in the end, I will fix everything and tonight you can sleep the sleep of the just knowing that you fought for the cause because you watched a video.

This video is aimed at two groups of people: the conspiracy curious, which is what I was back in the nineties, and the non-believers, the people who don't believe any of this crap and just wanna smear their rightness all over themselves like baked beans.

The overall point I'm going to make here is irrefutable. Now I can definitely be wrong on some claims and I will listen to criticism with an open mind but sometimes you just know you're right.

Evolution is real, climate change is happening, conspiracy theories are impossible. If there are victories to be had over me they will be in the outer perimeter. You might take out some of my tie fighters, but there is no thermal exhaust port in this Death Star.

So kick back and relax while I zap the entire planet conspiracy theory with brain power.

First off, what are conspiracy theories?

A conspiracy theory is a claim of secret crimes by a hidden group, and this claim is driven by a community of amateurs. This is not the same thing as a conspiracy, which is just a criminal plot by a group of people. A conspiracy is a very common criminal charge, these happen all the time.

There are some who claim the term conspiracy theory was created by the CIA in the sixties to undermine people who disagreed with the government's account of the JFK assassination. There are reasonable and well intentioned people who repeat this claim.

Folks, you will be shocked, shocked! to learn that the conspiracy theory about the origin of the term conspiracy theory is the opposite of true. The term conspiracy theory is at least a century old and the CIA document that always gets cited doesn’t even say what they claim it does. To get that meaning, you have to decode it, remember that one? That's the trick where you can make anything mean whatever you want it to mean. See my last video for more on that.

A conspiracy theory is not just a theory about a conspiracy. You don't just add words together to get their meaning. Like science fiction isn't just science plus fiction. If that were the case, Breaking Bad would be science fiction. It has a scientist lead character and it's fiction. But science fiction is about the future or advanced technologies or different worlds or whatever I don't wanna get into it, nerds.

Anyway, back to my definition. Again, a conspiracy theory is a claim of secret crimes by a hidden group, and this claim is driven by a community of amateurs.

So there’s an assertion that a nefarious act has been perpetrated by some shadowy lot, like the deep state or celebrities or the all time number one solid gold classic, the jews, with their bagels and their lox and their challah and their latkes. They're coming to get you and they brought snacks!

An important thing here is these are alternative accounts. These narratives are driven by outsiders, by amateurs. If the story is driven by police and journalists and the government, that's the establishment, that's institutions, and that will be a very different type of story.

Some of you out there are thinking wait wait wait, the Russia investigation was a conspiracy theory and it was driven by mainstream institutions. The Russia investigation was clearly not a conspiracy theory. I wrote a whole bit about this and you can find a link in the description.

For now, I'll just highlight one immense difference. Once Robert Mueller's results came in and there was a conclusion of no criminal conspiracy, that was mostly it. And it went away.

Conspiracy theories do not work this way. A poor confused guy took the Pizzagate garbage he was reading on Infowars seriously and went looking for the victims and found a pizza restaurant. And yet Pizzagate shuffles on, like a stinking zombie, hunting for tasty new brains to consume.

If Q revealed himself and said all this Q stuff was a joke, you think QAnon would go away? No way, that’d be fake. Conspiracy theorists never give up, even after they clearly should.

One last time: a conspiracy theory is a claim of secret crimes by a hidden group, and this claim is driven by a community of amateurs. After all these years looking at these things, this is my best understanding of what a conspiracy theory is.

Let me add some nuance here because we love nuance nowadays. This is the age of nuance.

There can be multiple, valid definitions of conspiracy theories. These are complicated, evolving cultural entities. There also are multiple conspiracy theory subcultures which are quite different. Like there's the UFO subculture, which I don't buy but I don't mess with them because they seem pretty groovy man.

And like everything else, there are levels of quality here. Not all conspiracy theories are stupid trash.

If you believe the JFK assasination was a conspiracy or you think Jeffrey Epstein was murdered, I disagree with both these arguments but I don't think they're crazy. Whereas if you think the earth is flat, it's time for some self reflection.

Alright, definition asserted, nuance applied, now let's DESTROY!!!

EXHIBIT A

NO CONSPIRACY THEORY HAS EVER BEEN PROVEN TRUE

But what about the lists on the internet? Have I not seen the listicles?

Could Listverse be wrong? Are their ten quirky facts about Tom Cruise wrong too?

The people who makes these stupid lists only care about getting some clicks. Whereas I am purely altruistic and selfless and make videos for the betterment of all humanity and animals too, especially the baby elephants, I mean look--

What's wrong with all these lists is that they do not differentiate between conspiracies and conspiracy theories.

These two terms often get used interchangeably, but they’re actually two different things.

A conspiracy is simply a criminal plot by a group of people. Obviously this happens all the time. Anytime two knuckleheads team up to rob a liquor store, that's a conspiracy.

There have been lots of real conspiracies. A group of Roman senators conspired to murder Julius Caesar. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln was a conspiracy. More recently, Elizabeth Holmes was indicted on conspiracy charges. And the NXIVM sex trafficking cult was a conspiracy.

Here’s twenty real conspiracies. These all happened. All the biggies that get cited in conspiracy theory lore are here.

1. 911 hijackings
2. Watergate
3. Gulf of Tonkin
4. NSA mass surveillance
5. Enron
6. Theranos
7. NXIVM
8. Iran Contra
9. Trump Ukraine
10. Bay of Pigs
11. Epstein Pedophilia
12. MKULTRA
13. Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
14. Cigarettes cause cancer cover-up
15. Soviet espionage
16. Operation Northwoods memo
17. Operation Mockingbird
18. Operation Paperclip
19. Scientology, Operation Snow White
20. Rajneeshpuram
21. McDonald's Monopoly
22. Talcum Powder Asbestos
23. Project Sunshine
24. Bohemian Grove
25. Volkswagen emissions

And here's twenty of the most popular conspiracy theories. This is only only a fraction of them, but all the major ones are here.

1. JFK
2. 911
3. COVID
4. Birtherism
5. Qanon
6. Pizzagate
7. Vaccines cause autism
8. Epstein murdered
9. Flat earth
10. Global warming
11. Illuminati
12. Moon landing
13. Holy Blood, Holy Grail
14. Chemtrails
15. Roswell
16. AIDS bioweapon
17. Crack
18. Holocaust denial
19. Area 51
20. New World Order
21. Seth Rich Murder
22. Sandy Hook denial
23. Clinton body count
24. Spygate
25. Fluoridation

Titles

If a conspiracy theory proves true there should be a conspiracy theory first, then the conspiracy is proven.

Let’s connect the dots, shall we? Take a look at these two lists. There should be conspiracy theories that show up on the real conspiracies list. See any? Yeah, nuthin.

These lists don't connect. Because… reality… fiction.

The existence of conspiracies doesn't prove your conspiracy theory any more than the existence of murders proves some random murder accusation.

Where are the conspiracy theories that turned out to be real conspiracies? They're in a parallel, superior universe, that's where. In this universe we're stuck with dogshit like QAnon.

EXHIBIT B

REAL CONSPIRACIES ARE NOT LIKE CONSPIRACY THEORIES

A big conspiracy is just a large-scale crime that involves a bunch of people. They have a lot in common with ordinary small crimes and they're part of the spectrum of criminal activity. Conspiracy theories should resemble actual conspiracies and other crimes. They should be on this spectrum, over here at the far right, they're the biggest and most complicated ones.

But they're not on this spectrum. They're a different species. They’re an alien life form.

There's plenty of documentaries about real conspiracies and how they happen.

1971 is a documentary about COINTELPRO, an FBI program that surveilled, infiltrated, discredited, and disrupted political organizations.

There's a new HBO documentary about the NXIVM sex cult called The Vow. NXIVM produced self-improvement seminars, but at the same time it was a recruiting platform for an actual secret society where women were branded and forced into sexual slavery.

From a distance, this might look like QAnon, but it’s actually just a very weird cult crime. There are victims, witnesses, evidence, and criminal charges.

One of the most fascinating and extensive conspiracy docs is Wild Wild Country, which is an instant classic. If you haven't seen it, I really recommend it. And if you've already seen it, watch it again. All the elements of filmmaking really came together in this beautiful series.

Wild Wild Country is about a commune in rural Oregon called Rajneeshpuram. As conflicts with the existing town of Antelope slowly escalate, the group becomes increasingly conspiratorial.

They bus in homeless people to vote in a county election, who they then drug to keep them from potentially getting violent. They plant salmonella all over the nearby town restaurants as a test to see if they could make enough people sick to prevent them from voting. There's a bunch of different poisonings, there's immigration fraud, and ultimately, there's several planned or attempted assassinations.

But all these schemes produce good, hard evidence, they produce leaks, they produce witnesses. And ultimately, conspirators turn on each other, because of internal conflicts or as a means to evade prosecution. And that's when things really go sideways and the whole thing crashes and explodes and sends evidence hurtling everywhere. So much of it that you can make an excellent six part docuseries about it.

Large scale conspiracies are like a massive game of chess, and as time passes more squares are added to the board and more chess pieces are added to the game. Oh, and these chess pieces, they think for themselves. If at some point they feel like they're on the losing side, they'll switch and start playing for the other side.

Conspiracy theories are not part of this reality. They live in the upside down. Everything stays perfectly sealed up. Nobody leaks. Nobody flips. No good evidence surfaces. No victims tell their stories. Nobody decides one day, hey I'd like to be a hero, which they can do by just dashing off an email to The Washington Post.

At best, conspiracy theories create a large pile of weak evidence. This was the approach of the popular 911 documentary, Loose Change, which piled up loads of misinformation and little oddities.

It might be crap, but it's a lot of crap.

Yep, that right there is an empty hole, folks. It’s not visibly full of plane.

If a conspiracy theory is real, why wouldn't the much maligned MSM report on it? Because they protect their tribemates? Like they protected Hillary Clinton? Like they protected Harvey Weinstein? Like they protected Jeffrey Epstein? Like they protected Bill Cosby? Like they protected Ellen?

Journalists love scandal and crime and whether you're a Democrat or a Republican they'll rip you in half and feast on your guts just the same.

We should all be skeptical of huge, dramatic assertions. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

When somebody makes big, dramatic claims you get to kick back and say okay, bring on the big, dramatic evidence. You don't have to disprove them.

I don't have to disprove Pizzagate, you have to prove it. Maybe start with a victim.

Galileo Galilei was imprisoned for life for saying the sun is the center of our solar system. But ultimately he won because the truth keeps being true forever. If something is objectively true, it will eventually win out because people die and it doesn't.

Sometimes the bold claim is true, like Galileo’s was, but this is the exception to the rule. Not many of us are Galileo. Fantastical claims are generally fantasies.

Conspiracies are just crimes. And the actions and covers-ups from conspiracy theories should just be crimes too. But they're not like crimes, they're like movies. The brilliant, unerring villains of conspiracy theories are like movie villains.

And the dramatic, orderly structure of these stories isn’t like Watergate, it’s like The Da Vinci Code.

We're fascinated by difficult-to-solve cases but most crimes aren't mysterious. Josiah Thompson is a private investigator who wrote a book called Six Seconds in Dallas and in its day it was very good. It's one of the best pro-conspiracy theory books. This guy is no slouch, and he said this about crimes.

But my spidey sense tells me that maybe the guy who worked at the book depository, which is where all three of the bullets came from, it's even been simulated in 3D, the guy who witnesses say brought what looked like a rifle to work that day, the guy who disappeared after the shooting, where did he go? Oh he's halfway across town shooting and killing a cop and then punching another cop in a theater and pulling a gun and trying to shoot him and oh by way this is the same guy who tried to assassinate someone else months earlier, and that gun they found in the sniper's nest, this guy bought it and it has his fingerprints are on it and here's a photo of him with that gun. In case you think that's fake, like was shown in the film JFK, here's another photo of him with that gun. Also fake? Here's one more. Think they're all fake? Again, simulated in 3D, the pose is stable, all the shadows are exactly correct.

I mean I dunno, maybe it was him?

Thompson thinks this case is somehow different from all the rest but what's really different is him, is his beliefs. He wants to believe something grand happened, something ineffable. He wants to believe this is some Moby Dick of Western rationality. He doesn't wanna catch this whale, cuz then it's just a fuckin' dead whale. And what kind of ending is that?

If JFK was an ordinary person and we were all just looking at the evidence, this guy's guilty and forgotten. It's like Chris Rock once said about OJ.

I know there's nothing bold or edgy about saying these boring old men were right, but maybe people like this were more decent than you think and maybe American institutions aren't as rotten as you think. That's the red, white and blue pill.

EXHIBIT C

JENGA DEATH MATCH

Big conspiracies are complicated crimes, they involve a lot of people, they require a lot of actions, they produce a lot of evidence, and therefore they have a lot of vulnerabilities. Just like a big, complicated machine with lots of moving parts is prone to failure, so is a big conspiracy.

A conspiracy is kinda like a game I'll call Jenga Death Match.

In this game, every action the conspiracy requires adds a block. So you add a bunch of blocks with all the tasks required to kill the president or shoot that fake moon landing or do all that pedophilia with your celeb pals.

During all this, people are seeing you, cameras are recording you, banking systems are logging you, you're scattering bits of data behind you like a cloud of dust, and you're even leaving behind your DNA, a unique identifier that’s equivalent to just dropping your license.

And every conspirator you involve, they start adding blocks too. And I bet they’re not as careful as you think they are.

And the cover-up is a bunch more blocks. You gotta forge documents, plant evidence, destroy evidence, create cover stories, coerce, bribe, intimidate, blackmail, and if it comes down to it and you gotta murder somebody, that’s a whole bunch more blocks you just added.

The end result is a huge tower but it's already got flaws, it's already missing blocks because not everything can be perfect. And it might seem stable, but it’s actually fragile and if somebody pulls the wrong block, the whole thing collapses and hopefully it makes for a good docuseries.

And you can never be sure which block might trigger a collapse. I'll use a fictional example here because I think it demonstrates how this really does work. Capricorn One is about a fake Mars landing and it was inspired by the 'we never went to the moon' conspiracy theories. In this scene, this technician doesn't know anything about a conspiracy. He only knows that a signal is arriving too quickly.

So he has this odd little piece of the puzzle that doesn’t ft. That’s all he’s got. And people are endlessly curious about odd little things that don't fit. That's why we like puzzles. So he blabs to his friend, who just happens to be a journalist. This block gets pulled and then the journalist starts pulling blocks too and then all of a sudden, it’s game’s over and you lose.

And yes, that is OJ.

Speaking of murder, it's really difficult to get away with crimes even when you're alone and you’re careful about leaving behind evidence. You don’t even know what ultimately will _be_ evidence.

The Golden State Murderer was recently convicted after a forty year search. He had no collaborator. He commited his crimes at night in private homes in an era with no security cameras. He was a cop and he knew how to not leave evidence. And even he didn't get away with it because they had his DNA and they tracked him down through basically 23 and Me. Good luck factoring the technology from four decades in the future into your plans.

Even when you commit crimes on your own, out of sight, in the dead of night, it's still really hard to get away with it. This guy added very few blocks to his tower and it proved stable for over four decades. But that DNA block was bearing a lot of weight and when you pull it, it’s all over and thankfully the docuseries is pretty good.

EXHIBIT D

SLIDING DOORS

Alright folks, prepare your normie minds for shattering cuz we're about to go through the looking glass. If you've got a bong, hit it. If you've got an adult diaper, strap it on cuz your bladder might slacken in dumbfounded awe.

This trip’s gonna take a while so get comfy and it's sometimes gonna seem like this doesn't relate but stick with me. Trust my plan!

We all understand that big changes create a very different future. Something big and great can happen. Biff Tannen can get fifty years of future sports scores, make a fortune gambling and build an empire.

And something big and awful can happen. At the start of The Road there's probably a nuclear war and after that everything is much worse than Cats.

And we also understand that big changes are not predictable. You can do something that seems big and great but it might turn out to be big and really, really, really bad.

In Stephen King’s 11.22.63 a guy finds a time travel portal in a closet in a diner, which isn't totally realistic. I’ve generally found they’re in the bathroom at Arby's. Anyway, he stops the assassination of John F Kennedy, every conspiracy theorist's dream, but after this a hard right segregationist gets elected and we have nuclear war and then everything is much worse than Cats.

And in Alan Moore's Watchmen superheroes are introduced into American history in 1938 and this event eventually means the US wins the Vietnam War and the Watergate break-in is never exposed. By the time of Damon Lindelof's excellent sequel series we have an entirely different America that in 2019 seemed far worse than the present, now I'm kinda like… I dunno. Seems more like a draw.

We all get that when you drop a big boulder into the pond of human history, you get a big splash and the future is transformed, maybe for the better, maybe for the worse.

Less of us, although still plenty, understand that small events can do the exact same thing. You can drop a pebble in the pond of human history and get a huge splash. Let me illustrate with Gwenyth Paltrow.

Before she was selling you jade eggs for your vagina, Gwenyth Paltrow was an actress in movies for the theater. And her bestestest movie is called Sliding Doors.

In Sliding Doors the narrative splits into two timelines: one where my girlfriend catches a train and one where she doesn’t. In the one where she catches the train, she has mousy brown hair and is the Gwenyth Paltrow version of plain, and it's just a relentless clusterfuck with her boyfriend who is obviously cheating on her and she’s super gullible and dumb about it and it’s fuckin’ tedious.

In the other timeline she catches her cheating boyfriend and moves on and gets phenomenal nineties hair and wears belly shirts and has montages and gets it on PG13 style with a funny Scottish divorcee who's caring for his ailing mum. I feel like I’m really selling this movie!

So this moment, the Sliding Doors of our title, is a tiny moment, seemingly irrelevant. And yet, whether she catches the train or doesn't sets her off on entirely different plots.

Yes, you're still watching a video about conspiracy theories. Trust my plan!

We've all had countless Sliding Doors moments. If you skipped that party that night because watching every season of Ozark in one go seemed necessary, you'd never have met your boyfriend, who became your husband, who fathered your children. Change this moment and your children wouldn't exist. You would have different children... maybe better children.

COVID demonstrates this on a global scale. Our best understanding right now is that COVID originated in bats then transferred to a pangolin, which is a scaly anteater, then to a human. It's pretty similar to the movie Contagion.

The wrong bat met the wrong pangolin met the wrong person and now everything is much worse than Cats.

It's not just big events that transform the future, it's small events too.

This seems to be a deeply true part of nature. There's a mathematical idea like this in the field of chaos theory called The Butterfly Effect, where in theory the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas. So tiny events can snowball and go exponential and become immense.

This inspired a movie called The Butterfly Effect where Ashton Kutcher can time travel by reading his old journals, which I guess could happen but again, Arby's bathroom, people. He then changes various traumatic events and completely alters the present in ways that are much worse than Cats.

But the film's comprehension of the work of Edward Lorenz is not as excellent as one would expect and the actions Kelso takes in his time travels are actually big, so of course they have big effects. They should have called this movie The Blue Whale Effect, amirite? Cuz the blue whale is the largest animal. Forget it, I guess chaos theory humor's not your thing!

For real chaos mathematics, better to stick with Sliding Doors, the greatest movie of all the time!

People who are attracted to conspiracy theories seem disturbed by this idea that small events can change the course of history. That a below average misfit like Lee Harvey Oslwald can kill a president doesn't seem to balance. Long before this, many people couldn't believe that John Wilkes Booth could assassinate Abraham Lincoln. What's up with these assassins and three names?

Small events can irreversibly change the course of history just like large ones can. So even if you somehow prevent big disasters from striking, you never know what tiny event might go exponential and start a revolution. This happened in the Middle East when a street vendor set himself on fire to protest local corruption which triggered the Arab Spring which engulfed the entire region and produced an unpredictable cascade of events that transformed the region.

All this is to say that predicting and controlling the future, as you need to for any large scale conspiracy, is at best difficult or more likely, impossible. You never know what tiny event might become a gigantic problem and explode your nefarious plans. You never know what tiny domino might do this.

But we're just getting started here. It gets so so so so so so much worse.

EXHIBIT E

There is no exhibit E.

EXHIBIT F

As in fuuuuuuuuuuck!

AN INFINITY OF BIG BANGS

I know what you want now. Mathematical concepts weren't enough. You want me to really bring this home some actual math, right? Hey how who wants math? Let's do some math!

Fine, I’ll sugar the pill and talk about _Black Mirro_r, okay?

Bandersnatch is an excellent Black Mirror episode, maybe on the level of Sliding Doors, which I guess wasn't a Black Mirror episode but I'm too lazy to restructure this sentence. Bandersnatch was inspired by the _Choose Your Own Adventur_e books of the eighties. At certain points in the story you make decisions and this chooses the next branch of the narrative.

The result doesn't really feel like a game though, because, well, firstly, your Roku's not an Xbox and secondly, the interactions are infrequent and very limited. That's because the producers can't create that many possibilities because each split in the narrative requires a whole nother script and yet more production time.

Now, what's not obvious to us humans, is that once you start multiplying and splitting branches, these numbers very quickly become mind boggling.

Let’s walk through this. Here’s that math, folks.

Split the storyline once and you've got two story branches. You with me? Split these storylines and you've got four. Split again and you've got eight.

This is just simple doubling, there’s nothing fancy happening here, and yet if you keep doing this things go entirely coconuts.

If you split the storylines twelve times you get 4096 plotlines. And if you split them 60 times, that’s just one choice per day for two months, that’s over 1 quintillion. That’s a 1 with 18 zeros after it. That's an insane, mumbo jumbo number. Jeff Bezos has less than 0.0000002 of this amount in dollars.

This is exponential growth, it starts out slow then it gets faster and faster until the numbers are basically infinite. Exponential growth is something we don’t intuitively understand, we need to learn about it.

Let’s connect the dots now people!

This is the way possibilities multiply in the real world. So if you're Lee Harvey Oswald and you murder the president, this act produces this endless branching of possibilities, that’s start out slow and then goes entirely coconuts. Way out there on those branches there's going to be completely unimaginable things, like forty years later a guy is going to graphically recreate the path of those bullets on a computer, whatever that is, and prove that they definitely came from the sixth floor window of the book depository.

But it's even worse than this. Bandersnatch only gives you two choices. In reality you can do anything you want. Like right here instead of visiting Dr. Haynes or following Colin, you could just go home, you could keep talking with your dad, you could roll around on the sidewalk, you could dance like noone’s watching, you could -- I don't know I'm not that imaginative!

Each action you take creates this multiplying of possibilities from this moment onward. And the farther out you look, the more possibilities there are. 10 seconds from now probably won’t be too different from now. Nope, pretty much the same.

But 10 months could be very different. If you go back in time 10 months, there was no COVID, no masks, no shutdowns, and everything was perfect and wonderful, right?

And 10 years from now, obviously that’s gonna be a very different place. Bring a gun and floaties.

The future is unpredictable and the farther out you go the more unpredictabler it is.

What does this have to do with conspiracy theories?

A grand conspiracy has to predict the future, it needs to control this. It needs to initiate effective actions, it needs to anticipate where all this is going, and it needs to anticipate problems. You have to be ready for all these possibilities and you can't be. At some point, and it probably won't take long, you're going to get caught flat-footed. Like this guy said in the HBO docuseries McMillions:

Somewhere way out on these branches there are gonna be catastrophic problems nobody can imagine. Human minds can't compute this number of possibilities.

Nor do we have the technology to compute this sort of thing. Artificial intelligence is just in the most primitive stages of doing this.

The game of Go famously has more potential games than atoms in the universe. It has even more possibilities than chess, which AI already beat us at a while ago.

AlphaGo was the first AI system to beat the best human Go player. How did it do this? One of the things it does is called a tree search. It plays out entire sets of branches, these billions upon billions of games, then it chooses the path that has the highest probability of leading to a victory.

This guy managed to win one game out of five against AlphaGo and that single victory is probably one of the last times a human will beat an AI.

Maybe AI will someday be able to help us plan and predict our future? Maybe someday, that's kinda the premise of season 3 of Westworld. There's a corporate owned mega AI called Rehoboam that manages society and sets everybody on the appropriate life path. This circle shows where everything is going according to plan and the spikes are disorder. You can probably imagine that some company's AI managing society on its own doesn't work out great.

Anyway, maybe someday AI really can help us with this, but right now, we just beat a guy at a fuckin’ boardgame, okay? So get comfy, bring an audiobook, it's gonna be a bit.

A game of Go compared to the possibilities of human society is like a grain of sand on the beach compared to, I dunno, everything that's ever happened everywhere.

This is at the core of why immense conspiracies can't work. Our potential futures are infinite, but the future turns out one way. Good luck finding it. It’s not a needle in a haystack. It’s a quark in the universe.

And each future scenario you prepare for costs you time and money. You can only place so many bets until you go broke. These odds are so infinitesimal it’s like betting on a roulette wheel the size of the planet. If George Soros actually did everything he's accused of, he'd be broke in three seconds.

This globalized, networked world that we inhabit is just so so so so so so much bigger than we think it is and so entirely beyond any conceivable intelligence.

Our animal minds want things to be small, we want a small cast of characters, we want clear opponents to defeat for finite resources, we want simple causality. But that is the world of our past, not our present and not our future.

Each choice we make creates a big bang of possibilities. Most of the time what happens next is predictable, but once in a while, it’s not.

You take a wrong turn and you meet your wife. You get a text message and you crash your car. Someone decides that the president's motorcade goes past the book depository and the president gets murdered.

These big bangs of possibilities that surround us are invisible. We don't see all the paths not taken, we don't see the possibilities branching out before us. We only see the path we're on. We think we're in an ordinary movie, but we're actually in the infinite version of Bandersnatch.

This is a vital thing to remember when you hear people making predictions about our future: nobody nobody nobody knows what's coming. Not when it comes to society. We can make immense scale predictions about our world and the universe. We have excellent reasons to think earth will continue warming, but we can't know what our lives will be like in this hotter future.

Whoever your favorite thought leader is, they do not know what's coming. Not Elon Musk, not Elizabeth Warren, not Eric Weinstein, not Thomas Piketty, not Naomi Klein, not Jordan Peterson, not Barack Obama, not Yuval Noah Hararri. And certainly not Q or Donald Trump, these are the flat earthers of politics.

I believe this is a certainty: nobody is in charge. Not George Soros. Not the Rothschilds. Not Bill Gates. Not Trump. Not Biden. Not Putin. And certainly not the fuckin Jews. I feel sorry for people who are confused and desperate and hurt enough to believe something like this.

Conspiracy theories are always premised on some group having the plan. Nobody has the plan. There is no plan. And we shouldn’t be frightened by this. We should be empowered by it because it is the truth. And if we understand this we’ll be better able to shape the future we want, by taking smaller steps and adapting along the journey.

To the people who are into conspiracy theories, my respect to you on getting this far in the video. And I get where you're coming from. I share your interest. I wish conspiracy theories did what they promise. I wish they revealed deep truths about our world. I wish we could just beat the bad guys and everything would be better. But in our heart of hearts, did we ever really believe it would be this easy?

And I especially get the appeal right now. We seem to be in some sort of profound civilizational transition. It's a scary time, and our mediasphere is the wild west. We can all choose to believe whatever feels best to us.

My advice for anybody who's not quite ready to leave the conspiracy theory world behind is to try zooming in. Conspiracy theories tend to be sweeping and abstract and they often don't get into how their theories would actually work.

Get into true crime. Watch some of the documentaries I've featured. They show how actual conspiracies spiral out of control, splinter, spring leaks, and ultimately implode. You can find links below. And if anyone has recommendations, leave them in the comments.

WHAT DO WE DO

Okay, so what do we do? You might find this a bit odd, after all the trashing and ridicule, but I am now going to strike a conciliatory tone. I lure you in with the Gwenyth Paltrow vajayjay jokes, then I clobber you with the empathy.

Like I said, this video is aimed at the conspiracy curious primarily and also nonbelievers. I don’t expect to reach the true believers. They probably think I’m a lizard person.

Why am I not trying to reach the true believers? Because I have no credibility with them. But you know who might? You. If your friends or family or even acquaintances have gotten into conspiracy theories, you can have an influence, especially if these people haven't completely drunk the Kool Aid yet. So my plan to reach the true believers goes through you.

Here’s how I think we should deal with people who believe in conspiracy theories.

HOW DEEP ARE THEY IN

The first thing to do is gauge how deep someone is in. If someone is pilled, if they're a true believer and they're really into this stuff, the best we can do is nudge them here and there and not expect much at all. I think we should consider this like an addiction. It's not gonna be gone tomorrow. These beliefs are deep rooted and you can't just yank 'em out.

If the person is moderately interested in conspiracy theories, this is where we can have the most positive influence. You can push a bit, you can joke a bit, but you should still use a light touch.

PRESSURE DOESN'T WORK

Nobody likes getting lectures. Don't call people out, don't ridicule them. You're trying to help people, not defeat them. When someone senses you're trying to beat them, they'll think whatever they need to to prevent you from winning. They might even burrow deeper into the hole.

Direct contact is best. DM or text or talk or whatever. I've seen people instantly drop false ideas by just messaging them with a bit of information. This can be a Sliding Doors moment for them. You could have prevented a friend from getting pilled. If you can nudge someone off the path to believing in Q, you have helped them. You've prevented someone from getting lost perhaps for years or perhaps for life.

Treat these moments as important but don't lean on them, don't lecture, don't mansplain.

JUST ASK QUESTIONS

When a claim someone makes seems far fetched, just ask questions about how it works. You don't have to know if the theory is real or not. Maybe it's a real conspiracy, who knows? Just ask questions. This can help people think something through out loud and maybe arrive at a conclusion on their own.

DON'T REPEAT CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Be careful about repeating conspiracy theories because we know that people use familiarity as a shortcut for truth. When we hear something a lot, we tend to believe it's true or somewhat true. So very simple, if you mention conspiracy theories in the wild, frame them as being untrue and avoid simply repeating their claims.

WE ALL HAVE CRINGEY BELIEFS

I once watched The Secret and recommended it to friends. Maybe you don't believe in QAnon but you believe in other goofy stuff. We all hold some weak ass theories about politics or health or relationships or whatever, and this awareness can help us approach conspiracy theorists with a spirit of sympathy.

And there is something right, not about these folks facts, but about their lived experience. Q is definitely fake but something is wrong for people who believe stuff like this and we should care and we should help. These people are family and friends and colleagues and fellow citizens. I'm not giving up on them. And if the reality is that we mostly can't help these people and they're just gone, I am okay with being wrong on this one.

WE NEED TO ENDURE

All predictions about the future of society should be taken with much more than a grain of salt. But my guess is this conspiracy theory thing isn't going away anytime soon and it might get worse. Trump losing won't solve this, it'll just stem the rapid deterioration. This is gonna be a while.

It's better to be prepared to endure for the long run, than expecting to vanquish this foe shortly and then getting cynical and pessimistic when things get worse.

Ultimately, this stuff will destroy itself because it just doesn't work. It fails because it’s indifferent or adversarial to reality and at some point, reality gets its way.

But this can take a very long time, and right now we need to slow conspiracy theories' spread as best we can.

Just like a big conspiracy is a janky jenga tower that inevitably will collapse, so is conspiracy theory culture. At some point, enough blocks will get pulled and it's all over but the docuseries.