September 13, 2023 • 61 mins
For thousands of years groups of humans have each told their own religious and social narratives, building a past that attempts to explain the present and the future. And, unfortunately, since the dawn of recorded time these groups have also sought to make sure their version of history is the 'real' one. In tonight's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel dive into the strange practice of controlling the past -- and why this conspiracy continues, unabated, in the modern day.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Noah.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
They called me Bed. We're joined as always with our
superproducer Paul Mission Control Decat most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know. Tonight's episode is going to
be a little bit different. It's a meditation, an extended
conversation about themes we had explored in earlier evenings. You know,
(00:50):
the future of censorship. We did that a few years ago,
and then the idea of whether any book should be banned.
And I believe in that conversation all three of us
walked way saying, well, we're against censorship, but yeah, maybe
some books shouldn't be out there.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
Yeah, like you know, a list of procedures in assassinating
somebody and disposing of a body, you know, things like that,
probably not great, or just recipes for bombs.
Speaker 5 (01:21):
Maybe not the best.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
But also you can argue that it's just like it's
just it's sort of like we have the old rules
of the head shops back in the day. This is
only for tobacco use, right, It's all on how you
use it well.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
And today we're talking about the dangers of books, words, concepts,
and ideas that are written that are potentially very dangerous
for the future. But they're mostly written about the past.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
That's correct. We are exploring something related. It's a consequence
of what you can call narrative control. Companning books help
people empower control the past. Is it possible that powerful
forces in the modern day can literally erase history, rewriting
it to suit their own ends. As George Orwell famously said,
(02:14):
who controls the past controls the future in nineteen eighty four,
and you know, maybe nineteen eighty four isn't so long ago,
and maybe nineteen eighty four is or Well saw it
is on the way as we record. Here are the facts. Look,
there's another great book that's kind of about this or
(02:34):
involves this, by the legendary author Neil Stephenson. It's called Anathem.
In both of those books, these very shadowy, very potent
forces conspire to control everything the public knows about the past.
We've always been at war with East Asia. We've also
always been at war with Eurasia. And you know, you'll
(02:54):
just have the double think your way around it in
anathem without spoiling it too much. A renegade or secretive
cabal of monks. They're a little less sinister, they're greater
good type dudes, but they're no less powerful. And it's
strange because these are both works of fiction for now,
(03:15):
but they point toward a very real thing, this ongoing
debate about history and who owns it.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Well.
Speaker 5 (03:22):
I think it's interesting too.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
We've been doing a lot of these kind of book
and media recommendations on the Instagram and youtubes and stuff,
and I think one thing that I think we all
probably think about when we're recommending a book, whether it's
fiction or nonfiction, is whether or not it gives you
It empowers you as a reader to kind of reset
your thinking around these types of questions. You know, who
(03:46):
controls the narrative? You know, nineteen eighty four is a
work of fiction, but more prescient now than ever. You
could argue that in some ways works of fiction can
be just as dangerous, if not more so, as works
of nonfiction. For those in power, because they do have
the ability to kind of change minds, even if it's
just a little bit over time.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Sure, same reason music gets banned pretty often. It's weird. Okay.
So our word for the day or word for the
evening is such a very English language word. Historiography history, graphy, history,
history of history. It's the study of history and the
methodology of history as a discipline. So it's like it's
(04:29):
like studying the tech. It's like not studying the symbolism
of tarot cards, but studying the margins of printing that
were used on tarot cards throughout history.
Speaker 5 (04:39):
It's very tough.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Oh, very nice. Hey you guys. I just learned the
collective noun for historians. Ooh, and I'm just going to
shout out before I even say what it is. I
want to shout out James M. Banner Junior, who wrote
a book titled The Ever Changing Past why all history
is revisionist history? But he states the collective down for
(05:01):
historians is an argumentation.
Speaker 6 (05:04):
Ooh, well, see it's my perspective, right.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
I mean, you know, we all see things and experience
things and process things differently. Something that isn't happening right
now that we're not looking at as it occurs. There
is inherently within the retelling a bias, and I guess
you could argue that the best historian sort of throw
that are better at, you know, contending with that bias.
But I love that. I think that actually is the
(05:28):
best way I've heard it described. That it is sort
of like, well, here's this school of thought, here's this
school of thought, here's the way we think.
Speaker 5 (05:35):
It went down.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
But it's not even about an argument over event, it's
about what they mean.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Yeah, it also reminds me. I try not to quote
it too often, but it also reminds me of that
William Faulkner quote the past is never dead, it's not
even the past. Something like that. It's true. And we
have to love the English language other you know, it
feels like peak English to have a word heard about
(06:02):
historian studying history. And as meta and weirdly extra as
that sounds, it's extremely important now more than ever to
steal the line from Fox News. Understanding the objective truth
of the past. It's a pretty tricky thing and it
always has been, I mean for thousands of years, right,
(06:24):
basically since people started peopling. They've disagreed on various narratives,
various aspects of origin, stories, explanations of the natural world,
what happens when object A meets object B, all kinds
of stuff, and increasingly some members of humanity started to
(06:46):
lie about some facts, to bend some truths for agendas
of their own. And it didn't start out, it didn't
start out as a purposeful conspiracy. There was no malevolence.
I mean, we talk about this some ridiculous history. We've
talked about it here. Back in the day, people disagreed
(07:06):
about what we consider objective facts at this point. And
they weren't stupid, they weren't evil. They just didn't have
access to the same kind of information we have access
to today.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
You mean, like in terms of religious explanations for history
and religious explanations for the way the world works.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Yeah, man like, And that might be a hot take
for some folks, but let's explore it together. Imagine way
way back, thousands of years ago, just hypothetical tribes. There's
a tribe in one part of the world, say they're
way up in the mountains. They have a completely different
understanding of the past than another tribe hundreds of miles
(07:48):
away in the plains in the valleys. To your point,
they have very different religious beliefs, different socioeconomic practices. And
imagine now they meet for the first time. This is
for them, this is like meeting aliens, and they're trying
to communicate, right, they have their best intentions. They're telling
each other the fundamental, inarguable truth of the world as
(08:10):
they see it. And each person in that conversation, each
side they think the other one is crazy. Yeah, of course,
there are lots of gods. The sun is the main god.
People always came from mud mixed with water, and the
other guys like you, ding bat. Yeah, sure, the sun
is a god, it is not the main, dude, by
any stretch. And if you don't know that you come
from corn, then you must not be human. As a
(08:33):
matter of fact, this lake belongs to us, now wow.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Well yeah, well, And then imagine that escalates into those
two tribes fighting and essentially obliterating each other. Right, so
there's not much left of either one. Then imagine, you know,
an historian or an anthropologist or somebody stumbles upon this scene,
let's say a thousand years later, maybe just one hundred
(08:59):
years later, and sees what's left on that battlefield, what's
left of the houses, the writing that's in the houses,
and you know, then has to interpret what happened because
nobody's there to say, oh, this group and this group
they disagreed over some stuff and they all died. The
historian or the anthropologist has to make stuff up basically
(09:21):
or interpret the signs, read the tea leaves that are there,
and also is applying their own understanding of the world
to that situation.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Right, absolutely well put, because then and where these are
all hypotheticals. But then imagine in that case, the historian
looking into this or the archaeologists looking into this, they say, well,
I study arrowheads, and so my paper is going to
(09:51):
be about the tremendous role that arrowheads played in both
of these civilizations. Now that's not wrong, but that might
be making the wrong thing the main character. If that
makes sense. Sure, so it happens, and it happens again
with good intentions. Histories not set in stone as we record.
(10:14):
It's true, governments have suppressed archaeological digs in the past.
Humanity has lost entire cities. Concepts like phantom time still
get a lot of attention, which I absolutely love.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
You're living in the seventeen hundreds right now. I saw
that on Instagram's reels like yesterday.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
Wasn't that in the plot of an m Night Shaymalan
movie too? Or maybe that was a little different.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
It's village similar. Yeah, I like the village.
Speaker 5 (10:41):
Yeah, it's fine. And I also liked his new one,
The What the Cabin at the End of the World.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
I preferred the book much more like the I think
the film missed some things.
Speaker 4 (10:54):
It sort of romanticized some things and did a little
bit of an easier to digest ending but by Paul Tremblay,
who apparently listens to the show and reposted a video
that we we posted about one of his books, which
was very sweet. I wanted to mention too, Ben, how
do you feel that this figures into like and I
know we'll probably get into this in terms of the
history of it, like you know, the South, the perspective
(11:15):
of you know, who won the war and all that.
I mean, we know who won the war, but in
certain parts of the country there are things in history
books that might be soft pedaled a little bit. But
what about that whole debate over like should evolution be
included in science books? You know, in places that are
maybe governed a little bit more by more religious kind
of thinking.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
Yeah, yeah, we're going to get to that in depth.
I think, like the crazy thing here is, for thousands
of thousands of years, people didn't really know what the
heck was going on scientifically, so you had to have
a cultural framework, usually religious. And now after millennia, human
beings today do have a little bit better idea of
(11:59):
what happened in the past, a little bit better and
a big part of that success, yeah, it came from
advances in technology. But I would pause it to your
question that perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle
was the removal of religion and ideology from the realm
of science. Now, all of a sudden, you don't have
(12:19):
to bend objective discoveries to suit the narratives of people
or institutions and power. Now you can just tell the truth.
You can be like, hey, Earth orbits the sun, and
people won't execute you, which is a big win.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
People won't execute you just for like expressing that, right right, Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 5 (12:39):
But isn't that interesting, though, Ben?
Speaker 4 (12:40):
I mean, I think it goes without saying that We've
talked about it a lot, that that kind of perspective.
Just speaking it into the world is such a threat
to the powers that be, you know, in a time
where we were living, you know, in a heliocentric view
of the world or whatever, or like flat Earth or whatever.
I like, when someone breaks those norms and speaks out
(13:03):
and has credibility behind them, that is dangerous.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah, it's weird. It makes me guys. I just recently
watched the twenty sixteen movie Arrival.
Speaker 5 (13:14):
Academy very very good, yea beautiful.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Super good. And I'm gonna throw a spoiler in right here,
So if you have not seen the movie Arrival, do
yourself a favor and skip forward fifteen seconds. That movie
is amazing because in the end, the weapon that the
extraterrestrials are attempting to give to humanity is a language,
a language that allows the mind whoever can wield that
(13:40):
language to see time differently, right, And so it's literally
I'm just thinking. The reason I'm thinking about this is
just language as a weapon when wielded. When when you
use history as your like medium, or I don't know
your battle your battlefield, I.
Speaker 5 (13:58):
Guess this, Felu. No, No, you're right, you're right.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
It just feels like that. I don't know, I don't
know why I got one of those visions. Amy Adams
gets visions right.
Speaker 6 (14:10):
You hit it right in the head.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
I mean, that is exactly what that movie is trying
to express. I think, is that the biggest, the greatest
weapon of all can be language. There's even like a
dumb money Python sketch about like this weaponized joke that's
so funny that at any time it's used, it kills
anyone that hears it, and they have to like keep
it in parts, and one time accidentally someone got both
(14:33):
parts and it killed a whole room of generals or whatever.
I just think that's great satire, and you know, and
the Villanov movie is just taking that to the next
level and making it about like time and space and
our place in the universe.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
And without sounding like a broken record. The short story
it's based on is also really good, and the Arrival
is really faithful adaptation of it.
Speaker 5 (14:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
I think in a previous episode we may mention that
language is technology. Language is one of the oldest technologies,
quite possibly predating fire right, which is still pretty popular.
So our idea is that you don't ideally you no
longer have to bend the truth. You no longer have
to dilute the objective veracity of a thing to please
(15:23):
a power structure, or do you The question tonight is
could powerful people or institutions in the present day, could
they control narratives such that they alter the public's understanding
of history? And if they are doing that, if that
is the case, then why at this point maybe we
(15:44):
pause for a word from our sponsors and get into
some deep water that will be edited years later. Here's
where it gets crazy. Okay, so what do you think?
And people still rewrite the past.
Speaker 6 (16:05):
It's happening all the time before our very eyes.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
People rewrite last week, people rewrite yesterday. It's it's it's rhetoric.
It's absolutely happening now more than ever, and it's easier
to do because of the Internet. And people just kind
of believe the take that they see when they see it.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Yeah. I In writing for The New York Times, Max
Fisher back in January of this year, he talked about
right now, there are a bunch of leaders, both autocratic
and democratic alike, who are attempting to shift narratives in
the public sphere of actual historical events right to and
(16:44):
they're doing this to benefit themselves, whether it's in an
election or whether it's in you know, keeping their own
power in a country. And it's happening more and more
and more, and it seems to be more and more effective,
you know, at a way to sway a populace.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
Oh yeah, yeah. And then go to this this real
banger of a scholarly paper called Power, Freedom and the
Censorship of History, which aligns with the New York Times
article you side of Matt. It's by a guy named
Professor Antune Debates from the Netherlands. And this guy also says,
(17:24):
you know, you can't be too precious about your current
ideological identifications because quote censorship of history has been practiced
in all modes, genres, fields, categories, and periods of history,
and in all countries. To begin with, it ranges over
all modes of the historiographical operation. All right, Well, lost
(17:47):
the translation at the end, but there's the end.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Well, it's true that that guy I mentioned earlier who
wrote a book, James M. Banner Junior. One of the
first points he makes in his book and he wrote
a really great piece you can find right now for
the National Endowment for the Humanities he talks about the
first historical revisionism literally occurred the first time a couple
(18:11):
of guys in ancient Greece got around to figure out
what history is and like basically define it and change
just the past, you know, things that happened, to the
stories of the things that happened.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
It was wild man. Oh, that must have been such
a time being in historian back then, because you could
just say I heard about it, and you know, none
of you reading this are going to leave thirty miles
from where you were born. So this is what a
hippo looks like, you know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Well, yeah, and this is my interpretation of what is
actually in the Iliad and the historical events surrounding the
myth that is that thing, Right.
Speaker 4 (18:53):
Ben, you brought a really incredible book that I'd heard
talked about for years but it never actually seen it
to one of these video shoots we did the other day,
the Codex Sarafineous. I believe it's called right, yeah, you're.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
A weird pronunciation, Sarah.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
Point is it's this completely legit looking tomb of presumably history, science, drawings.
Speaker 6 (19:19):
All of this, but it's but it's all Bolt.
Speaker 5 (19:22):
Beautiful Bolt it's all art man, it's.
Speaker 4 (19:25):
But my point is, like I think there was a
time even where some people were like the thought it
was some kind of artifact or whatever.
Speaker 5 (19:31):
You know.
Speaker 4 (19:32):
I don't know if that was the intent, like Blair
witch marketing style or whatever, but I think the point
is with any kind of retelling, if you say it
with enough authority, and you say it enough times and
you make it feel legitimate enough enough people are gonna
believe it. They're gonna repeat it, sure, and then then
it's just gonna keep carrying on. And then you have
(19:52):
these conflicting narratives. But now, because it's so easy to
proliferate false narratives, there's so many one of them floating
out around there, and you really have to do your
due diligence to figure out which one's at least somewhat
close to the truth.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
And that is quickly becoming a full time profession. This
paper from eight, just like the Banner junior book that
you're citing there, met this paper is pretty fascinating because
it's like an insult comic. It's no holds barred, it's
not married to any particular political ideology. This guy looks
(20:32):
at different regimes power structures to determine what people are
allowed to know about their past. And of course we
all know dictators, autocrats, demagogues, they're going to be big,
big fans of censorship and control. But we cannot make
the mistake in assuming that democracies are necessarily better. He
(20:55):
breaks down the process of how this stuff happens. And
these are two rough categories. There's pre censorship, which is
one of the Well, that's the one. I think that's
the sleeper hit. Maybe we describe what we mean by
pre censorship.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Oh, I'll tell you what the in my head, what
I see the movie Good Morning Vietnam, And there are
twins that work in the censorship room where any and
all intel that's coming into the radio station or the
base where the radio station is. They decide what can
or cannot be told right as news. And for me,
(21:36):
that's true, that's all real. I mean, it's based on
real events. Yeah, I mean it's a it's a telling.
It's historical revisionism about the actual people like Adrian Cronauer.
But still what I'm what I mean is I see
those two guys in my head, like deciding what can
go out there. But I guess that's just censorship. What
(21:57):
is pre censorship?
Speaker 4 (21:59):
That's more like having your work pre tweaked before it
even is released. It's not banning books. It's augmenting things
like manuscripts or like a press releases or public statements.
Speaker 5 (22:14):
And this really happens. We know, this happens, you know,
I mean less so with books.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
But you might have a situation where you're writing a
tell all and you've got some source and it's a
real risk to include that source in a certain way.
So your public might be pre censoring.
Speaker 5 (22:29):
Some of that.
Speaker 4 (22:30):
But that's not quite the same, But that is an
example that could happen in real life.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
No, I think it's very much the same, you know,
because pre censorship, when successful, is invisible to the public.
Speaker 5 (22:41):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
It's also not just cutting off at the past a
paper written before it publishes, also cutting off at the
past a direction of research. These are very interesting ideas,
but I am under the impression you would like to
continue your career at the university.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
So we're really that your research, but we are going
to take that research pop it over here to our
Darbale I mean our secret government.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Vintion Secrecy Act. Yeah, cough cough. So this and like
you said, it gets tweaked. Things are kept secret, maybe
they're destroyed, maybe the authors are threatened. That makes total
sense for dictatorships. But also to that point you made
before anybody in the US gets on our high horse
about this, we have to remember that if you're a
(23:29):
former intelligence agent in the United States, you have to
jump through a lot of hoops before you make a
public statement, before you publish a book, like Jake Hanrahan said,
or Pal Jake, I don't know if those people really retire,
you know what I mean. So then there's the other one. Obviously,
this is the more famous of the two. Post censorship.
(23:52):
Something comes out, it gets banned because it's either it's
dangerous for some reason, whether that's threatening the status quo,
whether that is putting a group of people in a
community at risk, you know, or it might just be changed.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yeah, I think about just restricting access to certain websites
or search key terms or you know, things that you
could do to control the Internet nowadays as a way
to take part in post censorship.
Speaker 4 (24:23):
Or like what happened with that Goofy seth Rogen movie
where they had the you know, Kim jong Il's face
being melted off. Remember, there was some presensorship involved in
that because they didn't want it to cause an international incident.
But then the movie ended up being just so much
less remarkable and offensive than anyone might have thought. And
(24:44):
and then it got more boost probably from all the
talk of censorship than about anything that was actually in
the movie.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
But there was post censorship too, right, Like.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
There was, but maybe I'm misremembering, but I do feel
like there was some demand to like, you know, censor
what was in there before it came out. And also,
by the way, I mean, we know this happens all
the time in other countries with American films, like I believe,
like in the Barbie movie, there's a map that was
showing some ben you're nodding, I think, you know, you know,
(25:14):
this is the geopolitical thing, but it was like a
territory that was in dispute Vietnam. Perhaps it was showing
this thing, this body of land as part of a
country that that was in dispute or something like that.
And to that point, they were like, you know, enraged,
and they insisted they wouldn't release it unless that was
taken out.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
Yeah, the map controversies there. There's also a standing policy,
going back to our episode on the Chinese film industry,
there's a standing policy not to depict other countries' landmarks
or there are a lot of rules around it. So
if the statue of liberty is in a film, then
(25:56):
that gets worked around.
Speaker 5 (25:57):
Don't they have a policy against ghosts? Yes? Two? Is
that a thing that I means? Okay, that's wild? Any
more specific?
Speaker 3 (26:06):
Uh, that's in the in the episode. What we talk
about there is sort of their reasoning behind these things. Right,
we'd have to get back into it, but if you're
interested in learning more, please do check out our episode
on the Chinese film industry. It's a eye opening and
here's hoping we can still clear customs.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
By the way, if you're interested in that Barbie map thing,
look up nine dash line. That is a very specific thing.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
And it was Vietnam who bannit.
Speaker 4 (26:40):
Yeah, apparently the movie Crimson Peak didn't get released in
China because it had too many spooky ghosts in it,
and like Ghostbusters, never got released in China. It's a
long standing party line, the communist party line not to depict.
I think it must have to do with ancestor worship
kind of stuff that they.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
Say it's disrespectful, Yeah, ancestor warship. And then tamping down
religion in favor of atheism, because what was it? Was
it old old Mao. Uncle Mao said that religion is
opiate for the masses, or his administration did. So if
if something is supernatural that see, that might be a
(27:18):
little too close to the line of religion. But anyway,
this this kind of stuff post censorship, pre censorship, it
makes sense for dictators.
Speaker 4 (27:28):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
And I do want to point out poor Ghostbusters too.
It's an amazing film, but it has two strikes against it.
First it's got ghost and then spoilers. The statue of
liberty plays a huge role. Oh no, how is the
policy on ooze okay? With I think they're I think
they're fine with Oo's. I think they're Ooh's neutral. So
(27:51):
here's the way to put it. And I was up
late when I was thinking of this, so it might
wax a little poetic. But if you were a dick
natorial regime, then propaganda is kind of your loud gun
and censorship is your knife. It's silent, but they are
both dangerous and they're both used to keep people in line.
(28:12):
And while you might not see academics popping Kalishnikov's or
aks in the trenches, make no mistake, they are always
going to be some of the first people targeted in
a coup, in a military coup, especially for good reason,
along with journalists, along with authors. I mean, shout out
to the numerous If you don't think nerds can throw down,
(28:35):
shout out to the numerous Central and Latin American academics
who became revolutionaries to fight fascism and to fight honestly,
a lot of US supported forces. You don't hear their
stories often because those are, to quote Al Gore inconvenient truths.
He help, I'm being suppressed exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
We did a lot of study on Fidel Castro up
a while ago, but honestly, I didn't learn a ton
about his personal history, and that's just making me think
I want to learn more about that and learn more
about FARK and some of these other groups. It's like
the history of the individual leaders because I do not
know that stuff.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
Yeah, yeah, well, I wish luck on your journey, Matt.
They're not perfect people, oh.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Who is right? But again, like there's not a single
human being on this planet. It's perfect. Sorry, that's how
we're that's how we're born.
Speaker 6 (29:30):
It was a perfect phone call.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
It was.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Me.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Yeah, you know, mister Rogers probably like haunted somewhat in traffic.
So I guess because we all got to aim for something.
We'll see if the Rico lass stands up now that
itself is being eroded.
Speaker 4 (29:51):
So of your theory there, but maybe not the time,
but immediately interesting what better time.
Speaker 5 (29:56):
I mean, just a quick sidebar. There's a Rico case
being against a lot.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
Of the opposition to this whole cop city movement here
in Atlanta, and it's I don't even understand how they're
using it, but.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
There it's a clearly egregious use of Rico law. To
be absolutely transparent about this, I think we can speak
as a unified show here we support the stop cop
City movement. Militarization of police has led to many, many
things in the past, and none of those things have
(30:27):
been good.
Speaker 4 (30:28):
That's what's kind off we're talking about here too, that
that militarizerization of the police is what allows nineteen eighty
four totalitarian type situations to flourish. And what's happening is
these people are being targeted literally for spreading information, for
trying to protest a thing, for you know, activating people
resigning a petition. So Ben's theory is, though that they're
(30:51):
using this, that it may well be such an egregious
misuse that another very prominent use of RICO law might
be called into.
Speaker 3 (30:59):
Ques right erode the credibility of RICO and we'll see
how that works out. Look forward to your thoughts on that.
Just objectively would that work anyway? There are tons of
examples of people controlling history as we record. To your point, Matt,
(31:21):
ask Cuba what they think led to those US embargoes,
you know, get their side of the story. Read the
North Korean version of what the US calls the Korean War.
In DPRK they call it the Fatherland Liberation War. So
you can already see there's some dividing narratives. You'll hear
a very different version of that than the one you
(31:42):
hear in South Korea. Are okay or the or the
rest of the world. And to that question all about
the Civil War, this trend applies to pretty much any
war in history then and tonight. That's why we did
that episode on textbooks.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Well, yeah, that's why in Britain the Revolutionary War is
titled the Peasant Uprising the pesky Peasants seventeen hundreds.
Speaker 4 (32:13):
So inconvenient those peasants with their needs for bread and water,
ab sustenance and shelter.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
Ough, And it goes so small too. Just to light
in the mood a little bit, you can go to
almost any historical article about the Middle East ernie, oh
god forbid, any geopolitical article about the Middle East. You
can go to the Wikipedia entry and click on the
(32:44):
talk tab and just bring some popcorn because people are
still fighting over that. And then even it goes even
unto food, because food is a huge part of culture.
Ask people who invented what particular dish? Who can claim hummus?
Who is the first to knock that lemon in those
chickpeas together?
Speaker 4 (33:03):
Oh man, I can't remember who it was, but it
was somebody like a food historian, or maybe it was
literally just like a chef on the Splendid Table or
Milk Street or one of those NPR shows, and they
were talking about that exact thing, about how like there
it's impossible because these things are part of the oral tradition.
They're carried around you know, and they're they're made, they're
improved and changed and by the time it gets to
(33:25):
the final form, like whatever that even is. You know,
no one knows who actually really truly invented the thing.
Speaker 5 (33:33):
Not to mention like that.
Speaker 4 (33:34):
You know, chicken tika masala is the national dish of
the UK.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
That's just that's freaking imperialism.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
It's so good to me. Well, that makes me think.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
Of like who won colonialism. I was talking with a
I was talking with an Indian American friend of mine
about this. She was in town recently, and uh, and
you know, we had to point it out. She spent
some time in the UK as well. We had to
point out, what does it say about regional British cuisine
(34:04):
that your national dish is from India? You know what
I mean. It's it's a statement, no offense. One of
my favorite restaurants does kind of reimagine British cuisine, Saint
John's out in London.
Speaker 5 (34:17):
Someone imagining it kind of terrible on itself.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
Shout out to Fergus Henderson. Also, he's an awesome writer.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
You can either have chicken tacon masala or spotted dick
you chuse, Yeah, I think.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
They shot themselves in the foot a little bit with
the names you know what I mean, barley water, what
did I do wrong? Bangers and or mash So another
example would be palm free, don't call them French fries
in Belgium. And these things might seem innocuous, but it
goes much much further into much more dangerous waters of
(34:54):
cultural erasure. Humans have only ever been the sum of
the stories they tell themselves, and as a result, those
stories are extremely important. They're mission critical to any government
from the ancient past to the modern day. A government
is just made up of humans so far, and so
also in a large part, it is a story it
(35:16):
tells its collective self. Shout out to the American dream, right,
That's one of the most popular narratives around here. And
this makes us think about the historical trends. We've only
name checked a few examples, but there are many, many, many,
many other examples, virtually countless because this is so common,
(35:39):
and why should we care? Why should we care? In
twenty twenty three, we'll take a pause for a word
from our sponsor and we'll tell you. And we have
returned these examples, Like we said, they're part of a larger,
sadly recurrent trend through all cultures, all civilizations, all time periods.
(36:04):
No single country has gotten away clean. Everyone, every force
at some point has told you a story that they
prefer you to believe. And it used to be much simpler.
You know, if you wanted to retroactively edit history, you
just had to kill the people who were there when
it happened, right.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
Yes, pretty simple, Just eradicate a bunch of people, or
it's not maybe it's not that many people, maybe it's
just one.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
And when the written word arrived, things got a little
more complicated. You had to create a class system and
restrict access to literacy, right, A priestly class, a noble class,
a monastic class, or something like that. And the problem
is that never works, because literacy is a cognitive virus.
(36:55):
People will inevitably learn to read, and if they are
prevented from learning the language of the in class, they'll
find a workaround. They'll make something that they can.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Understand, yeah, and use it as a weapon to fight back.
Speaker 5 (37:08):
Right.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
Yeah, Well, you know you could talk about the Vulgate Bible,
why that was controversial, right, or there are modern examples
that we don't have to get into.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
But okay, well, maintaining how about maintaining a language in
a like a smaller community or in an uprising, you
know group, you maintain a specific language that you can
communicate in that you know your oppressors or the person
you're fighting against cannot speak or read.
Speaker 5 (37:39):
Mm hmmm.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
Yeah, that's a huge part of it, a barrier to access.
And then let's say, you know, because literacy will inevitably
arise in some form, that means books or something like
books will begin to exist. So now it's complicated. You
can't just kill the people. You have to somehow destroy
the note in the books, so burn them, prevent them
(38:02):
from being written, ban them, et cetera. And then at
the same time you propagate the version of the truth
that you want out there, like building an urban legend.
Speaker 5 (38:13):
It's exactly like that, Ben, I think that's spot on.
Speaker 4 (38:15):
It also makes me think of how another important technology
I guess of warfare is cracking codes. You know, what
was it the operation that actually won US World War One?
Speaker 3 (38:28):
I think it was touring cracking the Enigma codes, right.
Speaker 4 (38:31):
Yeah, because again there was they were you know, using language,
using information, siloing information, and then transmitting it over publicly
available channels, disguising it right, and then once you have
that cipher, then you have the upper hand, you know,
I mean, language in so many ways.
Speaker 5 (38:51):
Is such a weapon in and of itself.
Speaker 4 (38:52):
I mean, I think it's you know, not to belabor
the point, but I just I find it fascinating.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
I think we all do agreed, agreed. So you've got
you've got your state approved version of the truth. You're
getting rid of any alternative or revisionist viewpoints, and you
can reward the people who fall in line by not
murdering them mainly. And so back when the average person
(39:18):
lived and died within what around thirty miles of where
they were born, they had very little chance of seeing
the wider world unless they were a merchant, unless they
were sent to war, or they went on a religious pilgrimage. Right,
otherwise they're going to be pretty local. And this was
a very this was a nearly full proof proposition. It
(39:41):
was easier to change the past. There were fewer people
and they had fewer avenues of access to knowledge. So
now it wouldn't be crazy to assume that the dawn
of the information age would end this grift. Right like now,
everybody with a phone can read any.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Yay, it's so weird. It's so weird. Okay, guys, I'm thinking,
I don't want to politicize this, but just I want
to use this as an example because I think it's
pretty prescient. That same article that I meant I mentioned
Max Fisher before writing for The New York Times. It's
titled in a Race to shape the future, history is
under new pressure, and he cites the January sixth thing
(40:22):
and the election of current President Joe Biden as like
one of these flashpoints where historical revisionism is like occurring
in real time. Yes, where there are fact there are
As an individual, you have to decide who to believe
about what actually occurred, Like you have to make the
(40:44):
decision to believe in something, and whichever one you believe
is the objective truth for you, right, and everybody else
is lying or has a motivation to tell you that lies.
Speaker 4 (40:58):
But doesn't it also depend on like your belief in
the people's intent. I mean, we know that people broke
into the Capitol, We know that people did some bad things.
The question then becomes were they justified in doing that?
Or were they acting as terrorists?
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Domestic terrorists because it goes back to was the election false, right,
and it was it stolen? Or was there freed someone
messing with it?
Speaker 5 (41:25):
Right? Terrorists?
Speaker 2 (41:26):
So I mean, but but we as individuals now face
this in so many avenues, so many moments in history
as we go along, Ben, you're talking about just like
when you get to the age of the internet and
you can read literally anything. We are now we're having
to make a choice to believe everything. There is no
(41:47):
ministry of truth. There is no like somebody who's telling
the you know, humanity or an uber historian who's like, ah, yes,
this is what this is the consensus we've all come
to about what has happened and what has not happened, things.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
That are past, have passed or yet to come.
Speaker 4 (42:05):
And there's no like way to you know, we're talking
about use of deep fake video for example, like what
to even believe with your eyes and how can we
get around that? There would have to be some sort
of watermark or way to authenticate, you know, to to
prove positive that what you're seeing is real footage. Such
things do not exist for text and facts, you know.
Speaker 3 (42:28):
Yeah, the only way that I will not assume something
is a deep fake is if I see the person
in the video choosing fire hydrants from a selection of
nine pictures, right, because robots can't do that.
Speaker 4 (42:43):
But there's no way to attach any kind of authentication
methods to truth because it's so much more complex than that.
Like you can even say it, no, that's not a
lie and believe it. And if you believe it enough
and say it with enough authority, as far as you're concerned,
it's not a lie. I think there are even arguments
being made, you know, in terms of the charges against
(43:05):
former President Trump, that if he really believed the election
was stolen from him, then he didn't do anything wrong.
It's about the nature of belief and objective truth, and
it's becoming harder and harder to decide what is objectively.
Speaker 3 (43:19):
True right the so called post truth world. Here's the
thing about the information age. Everybody got so excited, very
few people read the fine print. The reality is that
not all information is good, by which we mean not
all information is created equal. People have not really changed
in terms of motivation. I think that's what we're all
(43:40):
three talking about here. You can see concerted efforts to
rewrite history all around the world. Not just on the
macro level. It's not just Russian propaganda. It's not just
Ira and the KSA beefing over the history of Islam.
And it's not just America's selling movies every summer about
World War II. The micro level happens. You've seen it
(44:00):
with your loved ones. They're telling themselves a narrative of
the past. It's not even necessarily related to divisive political ideology.
They just maybe they have a different memory of who
broke the cookie jar in nineteen seventy two, Right, And
they are ten toes down on that opinion because to
them it is a fact and Uncle Roy is a flyer. Right,
(44:25):
couldn't be right?
Speaker 5 (44:26):
This was Uncle Roy.
Speaker 3 (44:28):
Uncle Roy is the guy who broke the cookie to
I don't know, poor family. I hope they work it
out so that leads us to the future. Right, And
we are on the cusp of witnessing I would pause
it unprecedented events in the attempt to rewrite history. More
and more people get their news from this global font
(44:49):
the Internet. It's the oasis in the desert, right, and
that means that there are tons of new tools that
can be leveraged and are being leveraged to control any
even narrative. I mean, think about the show over vaccines.
It immediately became a thematic football from the big dogs
of world powers. Right did Russia, China and the US
(45:14):
when they made statements about other countries vaccination or COVID efforts?
How much of their motivation was purely well intentioned and
how much of their motivation was ulterior? Right, was propagandistic
or some sort of hearts and minds attack? Fortunately, we
have to ask those questions. And again we've got to think.
Local Florida just cracked down on how black history is
(45:36):
taught in public colleges and universities. And remember the academics
were always the first ones targeted, just like the priests
thousands of years back.
Speaker 4 (45:45):
So yeah, let's take a minute to talk about this law.
I think it's a great example of what we're talking
about here. SB two sixty six forbids teachers to teach
that systematic racism is quote inherent in.
Speaker 5 (45:57):
The institutions of the United States.
Speaker 4 (46:00):
They also can't teach that it was designed to quote
maintain social, political, and economic inequities. Now this is interesting
to me because that is again an example of how
do you interpret like some people might argue that we've
gotten past that, that it is no longer that. Sure
(46:23):
it was established when this was a thing, and these
laws were written with these things in mind, but that
as a country we've moved past that we're living in
a post racial society. So you could argue from a
law making level that to teach that systematic racism is
inherent in the institutions of the United States is false
because that's making a judgment saying that we have failed
(46:43):
in trying to.
Speaker 5 (46:44):
Shed these mistakes of the past.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
Yeah, it's well put. And again, of course people are
going to be sensitive about this because there is a
primal identification for some people that can feel like an
attack to tell ugly truth about history and less this
sound like partisan winging. Got to shout out these two
great historians who aree this article for the Conversation, professors
(47:10):
Rochelle and Davis and Eileen Kin. They said, look, we're professors.
We teach modern history of the Middle East and Eastern Europe,
so not even Florida. They're not even teaching Florida Floridian history.
They said, we know even democratically elected governments will suppress
histories of their own nations that don't fit their ideology totally. Yeah,
(47:33):
and they go on. It is very much worth reading,
you know, even if you don't live in Florida, because
the point they're making is control of the past has
never been the sole domain of dictatorships. It's not about
right or left ideologies. It never has been controlling the past.
(47:54):
Basically gas lighting the public to make them more docile.
It's an age old practice because it works just like
assassination or excuse me, targeted killing. Whatever the thing is now.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Guys, I'm jumping back to Max Fisher one more time.
He is saying the same thing talking about this is
what he's saying. I'm going to give you a quote
from him. The goals are sweeping to re engineer society,
starting at its most basic understanding of its collective heritage.
It's collective heritage, right, So it's exactly what you're talking about, Ben,
(48:28):
the idea of needing to have your history reflect in
the identity that you feel, reflect feeling of identity rather
than actual identity.
Speaker 3 (48:41):
Right to include people. The American experiment has done something
quite impressive, and not a lot of other countries have
been successful throughout history. In this maybe the Roman Empire,
maybe the Ottomans, but not really the United States. The
proposal on paper was you were unified not by your biology,
(49:07):
not by your geography necessarily, not by your religion, your creed, whatever.
You are instead unified by the concept of being part
of this story, this story called the United States. And
that's a tall order. It's pretty impressive. I don't know
(49:29):
if you could pull it off today, if i'm If
I'm being honest, it's.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
More than a modest proposal, you know what I mean,
You're going to start talking about eating babies there.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
I don't know if we're at that point. I hope not.
So there's another way to think about this. If you
are editing the past to control a populace, and if
governments and people are to arch degree just the stories
they tell themselves. And when you do this, you're not
killing a single person, you're killing an entire version of
(50:09):
the past, and you're replacing it with a doppelganger, right,
with a change link that is just so, And it's
usually going to be a story where in your group
for some reason looks like the hero. Why would you
do this? You do this to justify the current power structure,
or you do it to rationalize something you're about to
do or something.
Speaker 5 (50:29):
You just did.
Speaker 3 (50:32):
We blew up, yeah, we blew up. You know this
clearly civilian gathering and insert country here, but we did
it because of insert reasons.
Speaker 4 (50:43):
Do you guys might if I read a quick quote
from a song that's just been basing my brain, please,
it's I think it's a Elvis Costello song is the
first track off of his nineteen eighty two album Imperial Bedroom.
Speaker 5 (50:55):
It's called Beyond Belief.
Speaker 4 (50:57):
And I just think this is some incredible wordplay, and
it is kind of sums up some of the stuff
to me, at least a little bit. History repeats, the
old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats, keep your
finger on important issues with crocodile tears and a pocket
full of tissues. I'm just the oily slick on the
wind up world of the nervous tick in a very
(51:19):
fashionable hovel. It kind of makes me weep. It's so
good like the wordplay. Man, I was gonna tell you.
Speaker 3 (51:26):
I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna be honest with you.
He's my second favorite Elvis, my first favorite el No
My first favorite Elvis is a guy in a remote
town in East Tennessee.
Speaker 5 (51:37):
Cool.
Speaker 3 (51:38):
They got weird names. But yeah, that's I think that's
quite apropos nol. I think that's a really good thing
for us to take with us because the results are in.
It is true, the democratization of information and technology, it
could have led to a better, more universally honest interpretation
of the past, but it didn't. There's a paradox. Feels
(52:00):
like there are more voices out there, but not maybe
not as many as we'd like to think. It's the
grocery store paradox. That's what I would call it. We
talked about it before. Right, you go to a grocery store.
You're in the cereal aisle. It looks like there are
thirty different kinds of cereal.
Speaker 4 (52:15):
All the choices. We have, the choice information. We must
be smarter, right, Yeah, this is.
Speaker 3 (52:21):
The reason why Matt says, I insist on pretending to
like Raisin Brand.
Speaker 5 (52:27):
I love Raising Brand. Dude, are you serious? Out of town?
I love it?
Speaker 4 (52:31):
Mean, guy, you chase it with some grape nuts?
Speaker 5 (52:37):
Really?
Speaker 2 (52:37):
Do you have a box of just the original r
B downstairs scoops? Yeah?
Speaker 5 (52:43):
Is it two?
Speaker 2 (52:43):
Scoops always scoops to scoop.
Speaker 6 (52:49):
First of all, I want to I want a number.
I want to number you.
Speaker 2 (52:53):
They show you on the box, there's a here's a scoop,
here's another.
Speaker 3 (52:58):
B free. But the idea here, even though it seems
as small as your grocery store, those serial brands are
ultimately owned by a much smaller handful of holding companies.
And that's kind of what happens with the Internet. And
they keep those brands alive from the grocery store to
(53:19):
the Internet because they know you dig the illusion of choice.
People are sensitive to the stories told about themselves. To
your point, Matt, people want to feel that they are
choosing the correct narrative, that they are doing so for
objective reasons. History is not just riddled with conspiracy. It's
(53:40):
chock full of some profoundly disgusting truths, way more than
two scoops. And the question is similar to that old
story from Plato and the allegory of the Cave. It's
the choice in the matrix. Do you want to know
what really happened? Or do you prefer the tales told
to you by the authorities.
Speaker 4 (53:58):
Guys, do you think there's a meme opportunity and like photoshopping,
like a little plastic container of playto but having it
have plato on it. I'm trying to think of that. That
has to be an additional twist. Enough.
Speaker 3 (54:11):
Yeah, that's a good starting point at point.
Speaker 4 (54:13):
Yeah, let us know what you think if there's a
good way to push that into the over the top
and the mimisphere.
Speaker 3 (54:19):
And while you're thinking about that, let's end tonight's journey
with this. We talked a little bit about modern politics.
Modern politics are ephemeral, to be quite honest with you,
regardless of religion, regardless of creed, personal ideological leanings, and
so on, we have to ask ourselves, doesn't everyone at
(54:40):
least deserve a choice matrix style between the truth and
convenient lies. Shouldn't every human being, by the virtue of
their humanity, be able to choose for themselves between an
ugly truth and you know, a smoothed up deception.
Speaker 5 (54:59):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (55:01):
It sounds nice, right, It sounds nice that we should
be able to have that. I just don't think I
don't think every and I don't think anybody's ever going
to get that.
Speaker 6 (55:11):
I think we're no one you're going to agree on
what it is.
Speaker 2 (55:15):
Well yeah, yeah, yeah, Oh my god, you got to
get on the same page to figure that out.
Speaker 4 (55:19):
First, totally, God, to weigh the things. I mean again,
that's just you started it off so beautifully.
Speaker 5 (55:26):
Ben.
Speaker 4 (55:26):
It's just the nature of discourse. It's the nature of
history as a storytelling mechanism. It is a storytelling enterprise.
Speaker 3 (55:36):
You know.
Speaker 4 (55:36):
It's not the same as science. You're not gathering data
per se. You're not gathering vials of things and analyzing them.
It's all about context. It's all about the eye of
the beholder.
Speaker 3 (55:47):
It's I thought that was a Dungeons and Dragons reference
for just the second, nol and I want to thank
you for that.
Speaker 5 (55:55):
I don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (55:57):
That is definitely a reference to a beholder.
Speaker 6 (55:59):
Come come on, dude, the eye of the beholder. Yeah,
the single eyes is super cool.
Speaker 2 (56:04):
Of the beholder.
Speaker 5 (56:05):
We did a super cool reference.
Speaker 2 (56:06):
Good. It's got really powerful magic. Be careful of it.
Can I give a quote from a UC Berkeley's associate
professor named Andrew Little quote, We want to believe. We
want to believe that we are capable and decent, and
that our friends and our favorite relatives share the same
(56:26):
traits and that the groups we belong to are on
the right side of conflicts. And that's just that's the
quote here. So if there is a narrative being sold
to us, whether it's about the future, about what's happening
right now, or something that happened in the past, that
makes us feel all of those things, that we are decent,
(56:47):
good people, that our friends, our groups are decent, good people,
and we didn't do anything bad in the past, we
are going to buy that story more often than not.
Speaker 3 (56:58):
Sure, we want to build consensus. It's very difficult to
be the tenth person in the conversation who contradicts a
lie that everyone has chosen to believe. And that's that's
a question. You know that everyone is going to quarrel with.
We would love to hear your thoughts. We would love
to We'd love to get your take on this.
Speaker 5 (57:20):
Folks.
Speaker 3 (57:22):
Are we being overly alarmist about this idea of rewriting history?
Is it less possible now or is it more possible now?
What do you think? Let us know. We try to
be easy to find on the internets.
Speaker 5 (57:37):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (57:37):
You can find us at the handle conspiracy stuff on YouTube, Facebook,
and Twitter, nay X. I don't know if I'm using
nay right there, but I'm gonna keep it up. I
sed toll call Twitter. You know what. I actually saw
a post form Elon must the other day where he
referred to it as x fka Twitter, So.
Speaker 3 (57:56):
I think, yeah, I think I think it would be
x nay.
Speaker 4 (58:00):
N twitterh yeah, yeah that I hate putting X first,
but it is what it is again, conspiracy stuff on
those platforms, Conspiracy stuff show on Instagram and TikTok, where
we've got a ton of fun stuff popping pretty much
a couple times a week, I think, right.
Speaker 2 (58:16):
Oh yeah, oh yeah. Did you guys see the rumor
that Elon Musk prevented nuclear war? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (58:23):
He uh, that explained some of those texts he was
sending me.
Speaker 2 (58:28):
No, but for real, the he allegedly turned off the
Starlink system.
Speaker 4 (58:33):
Yes, oh but that but just as a petty like
penny pinching maneuver, right, because he was supposed to give
them like free internet, and then they were not paying
him or something, and then he basically just said, you
know what, we're cutting this off. And yes, it did
lead to some issues on the battlefield, but he wasn't
doing it benevolently.
Speaker 3 (58:53):
He also had again recently spoken with Vlad.
Speaker 2 (58:59):
Well, yeah, so this is the week again. This is
like the revisionist history thing that's occurring in real time
at all times nowadays. Like the one story is that
he got some intel from from Russia basically and prevented
an attack on some military naval vessels.
Speaker 3 (59:18):
Russian naval vessels.
Speaker 2 (59:20):
Yes, and that preventing that attack prevented tactical nukes from
being deployed.
Speaker 7 (59:28):
That's a lot, it's crazy, but it also goes to
show just how somebody doing something completely self serving and
petty could ultimately lead to you know, if you're operating
at such a high level, ultimately lead to something like that.
Speaker 5 (59:45):
And then it just becomes about the narrative twist.
Speaker 3 (59:48):
It's the butterfly effect, you know, because I used because
I used Cheddar in my casadia. The red panda is
no longer endangered. Whatever. It's a you could if then
your way on all sa sorts of interesting limbs, not
saying it's not true, but to your point, it's definitely
an interpretation. What about your interpretation, folks? Why didn't give
(01:00:09):
us a phone call?
Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Our number is one eight three three, STDWYT and K.
That's our number.
Speaker 5 (01:00:18):
Call it.
Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
It's a voicemail system. You've got three minutes. Say whatever
you'd like, Give yourself a cool nickname, and let us
know if we can use your name and message on
the air. If you've got more to say than can
fit in those three minutes, why not instead send us
a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 3 (01:00:32):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:00:54):
Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Noah.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
They called me Bed. We're joined as always with our
superproducer Paul Mission Control Decat most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know. Tonight's episode is going to
be a little bit different. It's a meditation, an extended
conversation about themes we had explored in earlier evenings. You know,
(00:50):
the future of censorship. We did that a few years ago,
and then the idea of whether any book should be banned.
And I believe in that conversation all three of us
walked way saying, well, we're against censorship, but yeah, maybe
some books shouldn't be out there.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
Yeah, like you know, a list of procedures in assassinating
somebody and disposing of a body, you know, things like that,
probably not great, or just recipes for bombs.
Speaker 5 (01:21):
Maybe not the best.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
But also you can argue that it's just like it's
just it's sort of like we have the old rules
of the head shops back in the day. This is
only for tobacco use, right, It's all on how you
use it well.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
And today we're talking about the dangers of books, words, concepts,
and ideas that are written that are potentially very dangerous
for the future. But they're mostly written about the past.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
That's correct. We are exploring something related. It's a consequence
of what you can call narrative control. Companning books help
people empower control the past. Is it possible that powerful
forces in the modern day can literally erase history, rewriting
it to suit their own ends. As George Orwell famously said,
(02:14):
who controls the past controls the future in nineteen eighty four,
and you know, maybe nineteen eighty four isn't so long ago,
and maybe nineteen eighty four is or Well saw it
is on the way as we record. Here are the facts. Look,
there's another great book that's kind of about this or
(02:34):
involves this, by the legendary author Neil Stephenson. It's called Anathem.
In both of those books, these very shadowy, very potent
forces conspire to control everything the public knows about the past.
We've always been at war with East Asia. We've also
always been at war with Eurasia. And you know, you'll
(02:54):
just have the double think your way around it in
anathem without spoiling it too much. A renegade or secretive
cabal of monks. They're a little less sinister, they're greater
good type dudes, but they're no less powerful. And it's
strange because these are both works of fiction for now,
(03:15):
but they point toward a very real thing, this ongoing
debate about history and who owns it.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Well.
Speaker 5 (03:22):
I think it's interesting too.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
We've been doing a lot of these kind of book
and media recommendations on the Instagram and youtubes and stuff,
and I think one thing that I think we all
probably think about when we're recommending a book, whether it's
fiction or nonfiction, is whether or not it gives you
It empowers you as a reader to kind of reset
your thinking around these types of questions. You know, who
(03:46):
controls the narrative? You know, nineteen eighty four is a
work of fiction, but more prescient now than ever. You
could argue that in some ways works of fiction can
be just as dangerous, if not more so, as works
of nonfiction. For those in power, because they do have
the ability to kind of change minds, even if it's
just a little bit over time.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Sure, same reason music gets banned pretty often. It's weird. Okay.
So our word for the day or word for the
evening is such a very English language word. Historiography history, graphy, history,
history of history. It's the study of history and the
methodology of history as a discipline. So it's like it's
(04:29):
like studying the tech. It's like not studying the symbolism
of tarot cards, but studying the margins of printing that
were used on tarot cards throughout history.
Speaker 5 (04:39):
It's very tough.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Oh, very nice. Hey you guys. I just learned the
collective noun for historians. Ooh, and I'm just going to
shout out before I even say what it is. I
want to shout out James M. Banner Junior, who wrote
a book titled The Ever Changing Past why all history
is revisionist history? But he states the collective down for
(05:01):
historians is an argumentation.
Speaker 6 (05:04):
Ooh, well, see it's my perspective, right.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
I mean, you know, we all see things and experience
things and process things differently. Something that isn't happening right
now that we're not looking at as it occurs. There
is inherently within the retelling a bias, and I guess
you could argue that the best historian sort of throw
that are better at, you know, contending with that bias.
But I love that. I think that actually is the
(05:28):
best way I've heard it described. That it is sort
of like, well, here's this school of thought, here's this
school of thought, here's the way we think.
Speaker 5 (05:35):
It went down.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
But it's not even about an argument over event, it's
about what they mean.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Yeah, it also reminds me. I try not to quote
it too often, but it also reminds me of that
William Faulkner quote the past is never dead, it's not
even the past. Something like that. It's true. And we
have to love the English language other you know, it
feels like peak English to have a word heard about
(06:02):
historian studying history. And as meta and weirdly extra as
that sounds, it's extremely important now more than ever to
steal the line from Fox News. Understanding the objective truth
of the past. It's a pretty tricky thing and it
always has been, I mean for thousands of years, right,
(06:24):
basically since people started peopling. They've disagreed on various narratives,
various aspects of origin, stories, explanations of the natural world,
what happens when object A meets object B, all kinds
of stuff, and increasingly some members of humanity started to
(06:46):
lie about some facts, to bend some truths for agendas
of their own. And it didn't start out, it didn't
start out as a purposeful conspiracy. There was no malevolence.
I mean, we talk about this some ridiculous history. We've
talked about it here. Back in the day, people disagreed
(07:06):
about what we consider objective facts at this point. And
they weren't stupid, they weren't evil. They just didn't have
access to the same kind of information we have access
to today.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
You mean, like in terms of religious explanations for history
and religious explanations for the way the world works.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Yeah, man like, And that might be a hot take
for some folks, but let's explore it together. Imagine way
way back, thousands of years ago, just hypothetical tribes. There's
a tribe in one part of the world, say they're
way up in the mountains. They have a completely different
understanding of the past than another tribe hundreds of miles
(07:48):
away in the plains in the valleys. To your point,
they have very different religious beliefs, different socioeconomic practices. And
imagine now they meet for the first time. This is
for them, this is like meeting aliens, and they're trying
to communicate, right, they have their best intentions. They're telling
each other the fundamental, inarguable truth of the world as
(08:10):
they see it. And each person in that conversation, each
side they think the other one is crazy. Yeah, of course,
there are lots of gods. The sun is the main god.
People always came from mud mixed with water, and the
other guys like you, ding bat. Yeah, sure, the sun
is a god, it is not the main, dude, by
any stretch. And if you don't know that you come
from corn, then you must not be human. As a
(08:33):
matter of fact, this lake belongs to us, now wow.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Well yeah, well, And then imagine that escalates into those
two tribes fighting and essentially obliterating each other. Right, so
there's not much left of either one. Then imagine, you know,
an historian or an anthropologist or somebody stumbles upon this scene,
let's say a thousand years later, maybe just one hundred
(08:59):
years later, and sees what's left on that battlefield, what's
left of the houses, the writing that's in the houses,
and you know, then has to interpret what happened because
nobody's there to say, oh, this group and this group
they disagreed over some stuff and they all died. The
historian or the anthropologist has to make stuff up basically
(09:21):
or interpret the signs, read the tea leaves that are there,
and also is applying their own understanding of the world
to that situation.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Right, absolutely well put, because then and where these are
all hypotheticals. But then imagine in that case, the historian
looking into this or the archaeologists looking into this, they say, well,
I study arrowheads, and so my paper is going to
(09:51):
be about the tremendous role that arrowheads played in both
of these civilizations. Now that's not wrong, but that might
be making the wrong thing the main character. If that
makes sense. Sure, so it happens, and it happens again
with good intentions. Histories not set in stone as we record.
(10:14):
It's true, governments have suppressed archaeological digs in the past.
Humanity has lost entire cities. Concepts like phantom time still
get a lot of attention, which I absolutely love.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
You're living in the seventeen hundreds right now. I saw
that on Instagram's reels like yesterday.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
Wasn't that in the plot of an m Night Shaymalan
movie too? Or maybe that was a little different.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
It's village similar. Yeah, I like the village.
Speaker 5 (10:41):
Yeah, it's fine. And I also liked his new one,
The What the Cabin at the End of the World.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
I preferred the book much more like the I think
the film missed some things.
Speaker 4 (10:54):
It sort of romanticized some things and did a little
bit of an easier to digest ending but by Paul Tremblay,
who apparently listens to the show and reposted a video
that we we posted about one of his books, which
was very sweet. I wanted to mention too, Ben, how
do you feel that this figures into like and I
know we'll probably get into this in terms of the
history of it, like you know, the South, the perspective
(11:15):
of you know, who won the war and all that.
I mean, we know who won the war, but in
certain parts of the country there are things in history
books that might be soft pedaled a little bit. But
what about that whole debate over like should evolution be
included in science books? You know, in places that are
maybe governed a little bit more by more religious kind
of thinking.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
Yeah, yeah, we're going to get to that in depth.
I think, like the crazy thing here is, for thousands
of thousands of years, people didn't really know what the
heck was going on scientifically, so you had to have
a cultural framework, usually religious. And now after millennia, human
beings today do have a little bit better idea of
(11:59):
what happened in the past, a little bit better and
a big part of that success, yeah, it came from
advances in technology. But I would pause it to your
question that perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle
was the removal of religion and ideology from the realm
of science. Now, all of a sudden, you don't have
(12:19):
to bend objective discoveries to suit the narratives of people
or institutions and power. Now you can just tell the truth.
You can be like, hey, Earth orbits the sun, and
people won't execute you, which is a big win.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
People won't execute you just for like expressing that, right right, Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 5 (12:39):
But isn't that interesting, though, Ben?
Speaker 4 (12:40):
I mean, I think it goes without saying that We've
talked about it a lot, that that kind of perspective.
Just speaking it into the world is such a threat
to the powers that be, you know, in a time
where we were living, you know, in a heliocentric view
of the world or whatever, or like flat Earth or whatever.
I like, when someone breaks those norms and speaks out
(13:03):
and has credibility behind them, that is dangerous.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah, it's weird. It makes me guys. I just recently
watched the twenty sixteen movie Arrival.
Speaker 5 (13:14):
Academy very very good, yea beautiful.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Super good. And I'm gonna throw a spoiler in right here,
So if you have not seen the movie Arrival, do
yourself a favor and skip forward fifteen seconds. That movie
is amazing because in the end, the weapon that the
extraterrestrials are attempting to give to humanity is a language,
a language that allows the mind whoever can wield that
(13:40):
language to see time differently, right, And so it's literally
I'm just thinking. The reason I'm thinking about this is
just language as a weapon when wielded. When when you
use history as your like medium, or I don't know
your battle your battlefield, I.
Speaker 5 (13:58):
Guess this, Felu. No, No, you're right, you're right.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
It just feels like that. I don't know, I don't
know why I got one of those visions. Amy Adams
gets visions right.
Speaker 6 (14:10):
You hit it right in the head.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
I mean, that is exactly what that movie is trying
to express. I think, is that the biggest, the greatest
weapon of all can be language. There's even like a
dumb money Python sketch about like this weaponized joke that's
so funny that at any time it's used, it kills
anyone that hears it, and they have to like keep
it in parts, and one time accidentally someone got both
(14:33):
parts and it killed a whole room of generals or whatever.
I just think that's great satire, and you know, and
the Villanov movie is just taking that to the next
level and making it about like time and space and
our place in the universe.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
And without sounding like a broken record. The short story
it's based on is also really good, and the Arrival
is really faithful adaptation of it.
Speaker 5 (14:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
I think in a previous episode we may mention that
language is technology. Language is one of the oldest technologies,
quite possibly predating fire right, which is still pretty popular.
So our idea is that you don't ideally you no
longer have to bend the truth. You no longer have
to dilute the objective veracity of a thing to please
(15:23):
a power structure, or do you The question tonight is
could powerful people or institutions in the present day, could
they control narratives such that they alter the public's understanding
of history? And if they are doing that, if that
is the case, then why at this point maybe we
(15:44):
pause for a word from our sponsors and get into
some deep water that will be edited years later. Here's
where it gets crazy. Okay, so what do you think?
And people still rewrite the past.
Speaker 6 (16:05):
It's happening all the time before our very eyes.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
People rewrite last week, people rewrite yesterday. It's it's it's rhetoric.
It's absolutely happening now more than ever, and it's easier
to do because of the Internet. And people just kind
of believe the take that they see when they see it.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Yeah. I In writing for The New York Times, Max
Fisher back in January of this year, he talked about
right now, there are a bunch of leaders, both autocratic
and democratic alike, who are attempting to shift narratives in
the public sphere of actual historical events right to and
(16:44):
they're doing this to benefit themselves, whether it's in an
election or whether it's in you know, keeping their own
power in a country. And it's happening more and more
and more, and it seems to be more and more effective,
you know, at a way to sway a populace.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
Oh yeah, yeah. And then go to this this real
banger of a scholarly paper called Power, Freedom and the
Censorship of History, which aligns with the New York Times
article you side of Matt. It's by a guy named
Professor Antune Debates from the Netherlands. And this guy also says,
(17:24):
you know, you can't be too precious about your current
ideological identifications because quote censorship of history has been practiced
in all modes, genres, fields, categories, and periods of history,
and in all countries. To begin with, it ranges over
all modes of the historiographical operation. All right, Well, lost
(17:47):
the translation at the end, but there's the end.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Well, it's true that that guy I mentioned earlier who
wrote a book, James M. Banner Junior. One of the
first points he makes in his book and he wrote
a really great piece you can find right now for
the National Endowment for the Humanities he talks about the
first historical revisionism literally occurred the first time a couple
(18:11):
of guys in ancient Greece got around to figure out
what history is and like basically define it and change
just the past, you know, things that happened, to the
stories of the things that happened.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
It was wild man. Oh, that must have been such
a time being in historian back then, because you could
just say I heard about it, and you know, none
of you reading this are going to leave thirty miles
from where you were born. So this is what a
hippo looks like, you know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Well, yeah, and this is my interpretation of what is
actually in the Iliad and the historical events surrounding the
myth that is that thing, Right.
Speaker 4 (18:53):
Ben, you brought a really incredible book that I'd heard
talked about for years but it never actually seen it
to one of these video shoots we did the other day,
the Codex Sarafineous. I believe it's called right, yeah, you're.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
A weird pronunciation, Sarah.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
Point is it's this completely legit looking tomb of presumably history, science, drawings.
Speaker 6 (19:19):
All of this, but it's but it's all Bolt.
Speaker 5 (19:22):
Beautiful Bolt it's all art man, it's.
Speaker 4 (19:25):
But my point is, like I think there was a
time even where some people were like the thought it
was some kind of artifact or whatever.
Speaker 5 (19:31):
You know.
Speaker 4 (19:32):
I don't know if that was the intent, like Blair
witch marketing style or whatever, but I think the point
is with any kind of retelling, if you say it
with enough authority, and you say it enough times and
you make it feel legitimate enough enough people are gonna
believe it. They're gonna repeat it, sure, and then then
it's just gonna keep carrying on. And then you have
(19:52):
these conflicting narratives. But now, because it's so easy to
proliferate false narratives, there's so many one of them floating
out around there, and you really have to do your
due diligence to figure out which one's at least somewhat
close to the truth.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
And that is quickly becoming a full time profession. This
paper from eight, just like the Banner junior book that
you're citing there, met this paper is pretty fascinating because
it's like an insult comic. It's no holds barred, it's
not married to any particular political ideology. This guy looks
(20:32):
at different regimes power structures to determine what people are
allowed to know about their past. And of course we
all know dictators, autocrats, demagogues, they're going to be big,
big fans of censorship and control. But we cannot make
the mistake in assuming that democracies are necessarily better. He
(20:55):
breaks down the process of how this stuff happens. And
these are two rough categories. There's pre censorship, which is
one of the Well, that's the one. I think that's
the sleeper hit. Maybe we describe what we mean by
pre censorship.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Oh, I'll tell you what the in my head, what
I see the movie Good Morning Vietnam, And there are
twins that work in the censorship room where any and
all intel that's coming into the radio station or the
base where the radio station is. They decide what can
or cannot be told right as news. And for me,
(21:36):
that's true, that's all real. I mean, it's based on
real events. Yeah, I mean it's a it's a telling.
It's historical revisionism about the actual people like Adrian Cronauer.
But still what I'm what I mean is I see
those two guys in my head, like deciding what can
go out there. But I guess that's just censorship. What
(21:57):
is pre censorship?
Speaker 4 (21:59):
That's more like having your work pre tweaked before it
even is released. It's not banning books. It's augmenting things
like manuscripts or like a press releases or public statements.
Speaker 5 (22:14):
And this really happens. We know, this happens, you know,
I mean less so with books.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
But you might have a situation where you're writing a
tell all and you've got some source and it's a
real risk to include that source in a certain way.
So your public might be pre censoring.
Speaker 5 (22:29):
Some of that.
Speaker 4 (22:30):
But that's not quite the same, But that is an
example that could happen in real life.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
No, I think it's very much the same, you know,
because pre censorship, when successful, is invisible to the public.
Speaker 5 (22:41):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
It's also not just cutting off at the past a
paper written before it publishes, also cutting off at the
past a direction of research. These are very interesting ideas,
but I am under the impression you would like to
continue your career at the university.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
So we're really that your research, but we are going
to take that research pop it over here to our
Darbale I mean our secret government.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Vintion Secrecy Act. Yeah, cough cough. So this and like
you said, it gets tweaked. Things are kept secret, maybe
they're destroyed, maybe the authors are threatened. That makes total
sense for dictatorships. But also to that point you made
before anybody in the US gets on our high horse
about this, we have to remember that if you're a
(23:29):
former intelligence agent in the United States, you have to
jump through a lot of hoops before you make a
public statement, before you publish a book, like Jake Hanrahan said,
or Pal Jake, I don't know if those people really retire,
you know what I mean. So then there's the other one. Obviously,
this is the more famous of the two. Post censorship.
(23:52):
Something comes out, it gets banned because it's either it's
dangerous for some reason, whether that's threatening the status quo,
whether that is putting a group of people in a
community at risk, you know, or it might just be changed.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yeah, I think about just restricting access to certain websites
or search key terms or you know, things that you
could do to control the Internet nowadays as a way
to take part in post censorship.
Speaker 4 (24:23):
Or like what happened with that Goofy seth Rogen movie
where they had the you know, Kim jong Il's face
being melted off. Remember, there was some presensorship involved in
that because they didn't want it to cause an international incident.
But then the movie ended up being just so much
less remarkable and offensive than anyone might have thought. And
(24:44):
and then it got more boost probably from all the
talk of censorship than about anything that was actually in
the movie.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
But there was post censorship too, right, Like.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
There was, but maybe I'm misremembering, but I do feel
like there was some demand to like, you know, censor
what was in there before it came out. And also,
by the way, I mean, we know this happens all
the time in other countries with American films, like I believe,
like in the Barbie movie, there's a map that was
showing some ben you're nodding, I think, you know, you know,
(25:14):
this is the geopolitical thing, but it was like a
territory that was in dispute Vietnam. Perhaps it was showing
this thing, this body of land as part of a
country that that was in dispute or something like that.
And to that point, they were like, you know, enraged,
and they insisted they wouldn't release it unless that was
taken out.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
Yeah, the map controversies there. There's also a standing policy,
going back to our episode on the Chinese film industry,
there's a standing policy not to depict other countries' landmarks
or there are a lot of rules around it. So
if the statue of liberty is in a film, then
(25:56):
that gets worked around.
Speaker 5 (25:57):
Don't they have a policy against ghosts? Yes? Two? Is
that a thing that I means? Okay, that's wild? Any
more specific?
Speaker 3 (26:06):
Uh, that's in the in the episode. What we talk
about there is sort of their reasoning behind these things. Right,
we'd have to get back into it, but if you're
interested in learning more, please do check out our episode
on the Chinese film industry. It's a eye opening and
here's hoping we can still clear customs.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
By the way, if you're interested in that Barbie map thing,
look up nine dash line. That is a very specific thing.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
And it was Vietnam who bannit.
Speaker 4 (26:40):
Yeah, apparently the movie Crimson Peak didn't get released in
China because it had too many spooky ghosts in it,
and like Ghostbusters, never got released in China. It's a
long standing party line, the communist party line not to depict.
I think it must have to do with ancestor worship
kind of stuff that they.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
Say it's disrespectful, Yeah, ancestor warship. And then tamping down
religion in favor of atheism, because what was it? Was
it old old Mao. Uncle Mao said that religion is
opiate for the masses, or his administration did. So if
if something is supernatural that see, that might be a
(27:18):
little too close to the line of religion. But anyway,
this this kind of stuff post censorship, pre censorship, it
makes sense for dictators.
Speaker 4 (27:28):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
And I do want to point out poor Ghostbusters too.
It's an amazing film, but it has two strikes against it.
First it's got ghost and then spoilers. The statue of
liberty plays a huge role. Oh no, how is the
policy on ooze okay? With I think they're I think
they're fine with Oo's. I think they're Ooh's neutral. So
(27:51):
here's the way to put it. And I was up
late when I was thinking of this, so it might
wax a little poetic. But if you were a dick
natorial regime, then propaganda is kind of your loud gun
and censorship is your knife. It's silent, but they are
both dangerous and they're both used to keep people in line.
(28:12):
And while you might not see academics popping Kalishnikov's or
aks in the trenches, make no mistake, they are always
going to be some of the first people targeted in
a coup, in a military coup, especially for good reason,
along with journalists, along with authors. I mean, shout out
to the numerous If you don't think nerds can throw down,
(28:35):
shout out to the numerous Central and Latin American academics
who became revolutionaries to fight fascism and to fight honestly,
a lot of US supported forces. You don't hear their
stories often because those are, to quote Al Gore inconvenient truths.
He help, I'm being suppressed exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
We did a lot of study on Fidel Castro up
a while ago, but honestly, I didn't learn a ton
about his personal history, and that's just making me think
I want to learn more about that and learn more
about FARK and some of these other groups. It's like
the history of the individual leaders because I do not
know that stuff.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
Yeah, yeah, well, I wish luck on your journey, Matt.
They're not perfect people, oh.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Who is right? But again, like there's not a single
human being on this planet. It's perfect. Sorry, that's how
we're that's how we're born.
Speaker 6 (29:30):
It was a perfect phone call.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
It was.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Me.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Yeah, you know, mister Rogers probably like haunted somewhat in traffic.
So I guess because we all got to aim for something.
We'll see if the Rico lass stands up now that
itself is being eroded.
Speaker 4 (29:51):
So of your theory there, but maybe not the time,
but immediately interesting what better time.
Speaker 5 (29:56):
I mean, just a quick sidebar. There's a Rico case
being against a lot.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
Of the opposition to this whole cop city movement here
in Atlanta, and it's I don't even understand how they're
using it, but.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
There it's a clearly egregious use of Rico law. To
be absolutely transparent about this, I think we can speak
as a unified show here we support the stop cop
City movement. Militarization of police has led to many, many
things in the past, and none of those things have
(30:27):
been good.
Speaker 4 (30:28):
That's what's kind off we're talking about here too, that
that militarizerization of the police is what allows nineteen eighty
four totalitarian type situations to flourish. And what's happening is
these people are being targeted literally for spreading information, for
trying to protest a thing, for you know, activating people
resigning a petition. So Ben's theory is, though that they're
(30:51):
using this, that it may well be such an egregious
misuse that another very prominent use of RICO law might
be called into.
Speaker 3 (30:59):
Ques right erode the credibility of RICO and we'll see
how that works out. Look forward to your thoughts on that.
Just objectively would that work anyway? There are tons of
examples of people controlling history as we record. To your point, Matt,
(31:21):
ask Cuba what they think led to those US embargoes,
you know, get their side of the story. Read the
North Korean version of what the US calls the Korean War.
In DPRK they call it the Fatherland Liberation War. So
you can already see there's some dividing narratives. You'll hear
a very different version of that than the one you
(31:42):
hear in South Korea. Are okay or the or the
rest of the world. And to that question all about
the Civil War, this trend applies to pretty much any
war in history then and tonight. That's why we did
that episode on textbooks.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Well, yeah, that's why in Britain the Revolutionary War is
titled the Peasant Uprising the pesky Peasants seventeen hundreds.
Speaker 4 (32:13):
So inconvenient those peasants with their needs for bread and water,
ab sustenance and shelter.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
Ough, And it goes so small too. Just to light
in the mood a little bit, you can go to
almost any historical article about the Middle East ernie, oh
god forbid, any geopolitical article about the Middle East. You
can go to the Wikipedia entry and click on the
(32:44):
talk tab and just bring some popcorn because people are
still fighting over that. And then even it goes even
unto food, because food is a huge part of culture.
Ask people who invented what particular dish? Who can claim hummus?
Who is the first to knock that lemon in those
chickpeas together?
Speaker 4 (33:03):
Oh man, I can't remember who it was, but it
was somebody like a food historian, or maybe it was
literally just like a chef on the Splendid Table or
Milk Street or one of those NPR shows, and they
were talking about that exact thing, about how like there
it's impossible because these things are part of the oral tradition.
They're carried around you know, and they're they're made, they're
improved and changed and by the time it gets to
(33:25):
the final form, like whatever that even is. You know,
no one knows who actually really truly invented the thing.
Speaker 5 (33:33):
Not to mention like that.
Speaker 4 (33:34):
You know, chicken tika masala is the national dish of
the UK.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
That's just that's freaking imperialism.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
It's so good to me. Well, that makes me think.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
Of like who won colonialism. I was talking with a
I was talking with an Indian American friend of mine
about this. She was in town recently, and uh, and
you know, we had to point it out. She spent
some time in the UK as well. We had to
point out, what does it say about regional British cuisine
(34:04):
that your national dish is from India? You know what
I mean. It's it's a statement, no offense. One of
my favorite restaurants does kind of reimagine British cuisine, Saint
John's out in London.
Speaker 5 (34:17):
Someone imagining it kind of terrible on itself.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
Shout out to Fergus Henderson. Also, he's an awesome writer.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
You can either have chicken tacon masala or spotted dick
you chuse, Yeah, I think.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
They shot themselves in the foot a little bit with
the names you know what I mean, barley water, what
did I do wrong? Bangers and or mash So another
example would be palm free, don't call them French fries
in Belgium. And these things might seem innocuous, but it
goes much much further into much more dangerous waters of
(34:54):
cultural erasure. Humans have only ever been the sum of
the stories they tell themselves, and as a result, those
stories are extremely important. They're mission critical to any government
from the ancient past to the modern day. A government
is just made up of humans so far, and so
also in a large part, it is a story it
(35:16):
tells its collective self. Shout out to the American dream, right,
That's one of the most popular narratives around here. And
this makes us think about the historical trends. We've only
name checked a few examples, but there are many, many, many,
many other examples, virtually countless because this is so common,
(35:39):
and why should we care? Why should we care? In
twenty twenty three, we'll take a pause for a word
from our sponsor and we'll tell you. And we have
returned these examples, Like we said, they're part of a larger,
sadly recurrent trend through all cultures, all civilizations, all time periods.
(36:04):
No single country has gotten away clean. Everyone, every force
at some point has told you a story that they
prefer you to believe. And it used to be much simpler.
You know, if you wanted to retroactively edit history, you
just had to kill the people who were there when
it happened, right.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
Yes, pretty simple, Just eradicate a bunch of people, or
it's not maybe it's not that many people, maybe it's
just one.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
And when the written word arrived, things got a little
more complicated. You had to create a class system and
restrict access to literacy, right, A priestly class, a noble class,
a monastic class, or something like that. And the problem
is that never works, because literacy is a cognitive virus.
(36:55):
People will inevitably learn to read, and if they are
prevented from learning the language of the in class, they'll
find a workaround. They'll make something that they can.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Understand, yeah, and use it as a weapon to fight back.
Speaker 5 (37:08):
Right.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
Yeah, Well, you know you could talk about the Vulgate Bible,
why that was controversial, right, or there are modern examples
that we don't have to get into.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
But okay, well, maintaining how about maintaining a language in
a like a smaller community or in an uprising, you
know group, you maintain a specific language that you can
communicate in that you know your oppressors or the person
you're fighting against cannot speak or read.
Speaker 5 (37:39):
Mm hmmm.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
Yeah, that's a huge part of it, a barrier to access.
And then let's say, you know, because literacy will inevitably
arise in some form, that means books or something like
books will begin to exist. So now it's complicated. You
can't just kill the people. You have to somehow destroy
the note in the books, so burn them, prevent them
(38:02):
from being written, ban them, et cetera. And then at
the same time you propagate the version of the truth
that you want out there, like building an urban legend.
Speaker 5 (38:13):
It's exactly like that, Ben, I think that's spot on.
Speaker 4 (38:15):
It also makes me think of how another important technology
I guess of warfare is cracking codes. You know, what
was it the operation that actually won US World War One?
Speaker 3 (38:28):
I think it was touring cracking the Enigma codes, right.
Speaker 4 (38:31):
Yeah, because again there was they were you know, using language,
using information, siloing information, and then transmitting it over publicly
available channels, disguising it right, and then once you have
that cipher, then you have the upper hand, you know,
I mean, language in so many ways.
Speaker 5 (38:51):
Is such a weapon in and of itself.
Speaker 4 (38:52):
I mean, I think it's you know, not to belabor
the point, but I just I find it fascinating.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
I think we all do agreed, agreed. So you've got
you've got your state approved version of the truth. You're
getting rid of any alternative or revisionist viewpoints, and you
can reward the people who fall in line by not
murdering them mainly. And so back when the average person
(39:18):
lived and died within what around thirty miles of where
they were born, they had very little chance of seeing
the wider world unless they were a merchant, unless they
were sent to war, or they went on a religious pilgrimage. Right,
otherwise they're going to be pretty local. And this was
a very this was a nearly full proof proposition. It
(39:41):
was easier to change the past. There were fewer people
and they had fewer avenues of access to knowledge. So
now it wouldn't be crazy to assume that the dawn
of the information age would end this grift. Right like now,
everybody with a phone can read any.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Yay, it's so weird. It's so weird. Okay, guys, I'm thinking,
I don't want to politicize this, but just I want
to use this as an example because I think it's
pretty prescient. That same article that I meant I mentioned
Max Fisher before writing for The New York Times. It's
titled in a Race to shape the future, history is
under new pressure, and he cites the January sixth thing
(40:22):
and the election of current President Joe Biden as like
one of these flashpoints where historical revisionism is like occurring
in real time. Yes, where there are fact there are
As an individual, you have to decide who to believe
about what actually occurred, Like you have to make the
(40:44):
decision to believe in something, and whichever one you believe
is the objective truth for you, right, and everybody else
is lying or has a motivation to tell you that lies.
Speaker 4 (40:58):
But doesn't it also depend on like your belief in
the people's intent. I mean, we know that people broke
into the Capitol, We know that people did some bad things.
The question then becomes were they justified in doing that?
Or were they acting as terrorists?
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Domestic terrorists because it goes back to was the election false, right,
and it was it stolen? Or was there freed someone
messing with it?
Speaker 5 (41:25):
Right? Terrorists?
Speaker 2 (41:26):
So I mean, but but we as individuals now face
this in so many avenues, so many moments in history
as we go along, Ben, you're talking about just like
when you get to the age of the internet and
you can read literally anything. We are now we're having
to make a choice to believe everything. There is no
(41:47):
ministry of truth. There is no like somebody who's telling
the you know, humanity or an uber historian who's like, ah, yes,
this is what this is the consensus we've all come
to about what has happened and what has not happened, things.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
That are past, have passed or yet to come.
Speaker 4 (42:05):
And there's no like way to you know, we're talking
about use of deep fake video for example, like what
to even believe with your eyes and how can we
get around that? There would have to be some sort
of watermark or way to authenticate, you know, to to
prove positive that what you're seeing is real footage. Such
things do not exist for text and facts, you know.
Speaker 3 (42:28):
Yeah, the only way that I will not assume something
is a deep fake is if I see the person
in the video choosing fire hydrants from a selection of
nine pictures, right, because robots can't do that.
Speaker 4 (42:43):
But there's no way to attach any kind of authentication
methods to truth because it's so much more complex than that.
Like you can even say it, no, that's not a
lie and believe it. And if you believe it enough
and say it with enough authority, as far as you're concerned,
it's not a lie. I think there are even arguments
being made, you know, in terms of the charges against
(43:05):
former President Trump, that if he really believed the election
was stolen from him, then he didn't do anything wrong.
It's about the nature of belief and objective truth, and
it's becoming harder and harder to decide what is objectively.
Speaker 3 (43:19):
True right the so called post truth world. Here's the
thing about the information age. Everybody got so excited, very
few people read the fine print. The reality is that
not all information is good, by which we mean not
all information is created equal. People have not really changed
in terms of motivation. I think that's what we're all
(43:40):
three talking about here. You can see concerted efforts to
rewrite history all around the world. Not just on the
macro level. It's not just Russian propaganda. It's not just
Ira and the KSA beefing over the history of Islam.
And it's not just America's selling movies every summer about
World War II. The micro level happens. You've seen it
(44:00):
with your loved ones. They're telling themselves a narrative of
the past. It's not even necessarily related to divisive political ideology.
They just maybe they have a different memory of who
broke the cookie jar in nineteen seventy two, Right, And
they are ten toes down on that opinion because to
them it is a fact and Uncle Roy is a flyer. Right,
(44:25):
couldn't be right?
Speaker 5 (44:26):
This was Uncle Roy.
Speaker 3 (44:28):
Uncle Roy is the guy who broke the cookie to
I don't know, poor family. I hope they work it
out so that leads us to the future. Right, And
we are on the cusp of witnessing I would pause
it unprecedented events in the attempt to rewrite history. More
and more people get their news from this global font
(44:49):
the Internet. It's the oasis in the desert, right, and
that means that there are tons of new tools that
can be leveraged and are being leveraged to control any
even narrative. I mean, think about the show over vaccines.
It immediately became a thematic football from the big dogs
of world powers. Right did Russia, China and the US
(45:14):
when they made statements about other countries vaccination or COVID efforts?
How much of their motivation was purely well intentioned and
how much of their motivation was ulterior? Right, was propagandistic
or some sort of hearts and minds attack? Fortunately, we
have to ask those questions. And again we've got to think.
Local Florida just cracked down on how black history is
(45:36):
taught in public colleges and universities. And remember the academics
were always the first ones targeted, just like the priests
thousands of years back.
Speaker 4 (45:45):
So yeah, let's take a minute to talk about this law.
I think it's a great example of what we're talking
about here. SB two sixty six forbids teachers to teach
that systematic racism is quote inherent in.
Speaker 5 (45:57):
The institutions of the United States.
Speaker 4 (46:00):
They also can't teach that it was designed to quote
maintain social, political, and economic inequities. Now this is interesting
to me because that is again an example of how
do you interpret like some people might argue that we've
gotten past that, that it is no longer that. Sure
(46:23):
it was established when this was a thing, and these
laws were written with these things in mind, but that
as a country we've moved past that we're living in
a post racial society. So you could argue from a
law making level that to teach that systematic racism is
inherent in the institutions of the United States is false
because that's making a judgment saying that we have failed
(46:43):
in trying to.
Speaker 5 (46:44):
Shed these mistakes of the past.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
Yeah, it's well put. And again, of course people are
going to be sensitive about this because there is a
primal identification for some people that can feel like an
attack to tell ugly truth about history and less this
sound like partisan winging. Got to shout out these two
great historians who aree this article for the Conversation, professors
(47:10):
Rochelle and Davis and Eileen Kin. They said, look, we're professors.
We teach modern history of the Middle East and Eastern Europe,
so not even Florida. They're not even teaching Florida Floridian history.
They said, we know even democratically elected governments will suppress
histories of their own nations that don't fit their ideology totally. Yeah,
(47:33):
and they go on. It is very much worth reading,
you know, even if you don't live in Florida, because
the point they're making is control of the past has
never been the sole domain of dictatorships. It's not about
right or left ideologies. It never has been controlling the past.
(47:54):
Basically gas lighting the public to make them more docile.
It's an age old practice because it works just like
assassination or excuse me, targeted killing. Whatever the thing is now.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Guys, I'm jumping back to Max Fisher one more time.
He is saying the same thing talking about this is
what he's saying. I'm going to give you a quote
from him. The goals are sweeping to re engineer society,
starting at its most basic understanding of its collective heritage.
It's collective heritage, right, So it's exactly what you're talking about, Ben,
(48:28):
the idea of needing to have your history reflect in
the identity that you feel, reflect feeling of identity rather
than actual identity.
Speaker 3 (48:41):
Right to include people. The American experiment has done something
quite impressive, and not a lot of other countries have
been successful throughout history. In this maybe the Roman Empire,
maybe the Ottomans, but not really the United States. The
proposal on paper was you were unified not by your biology,
(49:07):
not by your geography necessarily, not by your religion, your creed, whatever.
You are instead unified by the concept of being part
of this story, this story called the United States. And
that's a tall order. It's pretty impressive. I don't know
(49:29):
if you could pull it off today, if i'm If
I'm being honest, it's.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
More than a modest proposal, you know what I mean,
You're going to start talking about eating babies there.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
I don't know if we're at that point. I hope not.
So there's another way to think about this. If you
are editing the past to control a populace, and if
governments and people are to arch degree just the stories
they tell themselves. And when you do this, you're not
killing a single person, you're killing an entire version of
(50:09):
the past, and you're replacing it with a doppelganger, right,
with a change link that is just so, And it's
usually going to be a story where in your group
for some reason looks like the hero. Why would you
do this? You do this to justify the current power structure,
or you do it to rationalize something you're about to
do or something.
Speaker 5 (50:29):
You just did.
Speaker 3 (50:32):
We blew up, yeah, we blew up. You know this
clearly civilian gathering and insert country here, but we did
it because of insert reasons.
Speaker 4 (50:43):
Do you guys might if I read a quick quote
from a song that's just been basing my brain, please,
it's I think it's a Elvis Costello song is the
first track off of his nineteen eighty two album Imperial Bedroom.
Speaker 5 (50:55):
It's called Beyond Belief.
Speaker 4 (50:57):
And I just think this is some incredible wordplay, and
it is kind of sums up some of the stuff
to me, at least a little bit. History repeats, the
old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats, keep your
finger on important issues with crocodile tears and a pocket
full of tissues. I'm just the oily slick on the
wind up world of the nervous tick in a very
(51:19):
fashionable hovel. It kind of makes me weep. It's so
good like the wordplay. Man, I was gonna tell you.
Speaker 3 (51:26):
I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna be honest with you.
He's my second favorite Elvis, my first favorite el No
My first favorite Elvis is a guy in a remote
town in East Tennessee.
Speaker 5 (51:37):
Cool.
Speaker 3 (51:38):
They got weird names. But yeah, that's I think that's
quite apropos nol. I think that's a really good thing
for us to take with us because the results are in.
It is true, the democratization of information and technology, it
could have led to a better, more universally honest interpretation
of the past, but it didn't. There's a paradox. Feels
(52:00):
like there are more voices out there, but not maybe
not as many as we'd like to think. It's the
grocery store paradox. That's what I would call it. We
talked about it before. Right, you go to a grocery store.
You're in the cereal aisle. It looks like there are
thirty different kinds of cereal.
Speaker 4 (52:15):
All the choices. We have, the choice information. We must
be smarter, right, Yeah, this is.
Speaker 3 (52:21):
The reason why Matt says, I insist on pretending to
like Raisin Brand.
Speaker 5 (52:27):
I love Raising Brand. Dude, are you serious? Out of town?
I love it?
Speaker 4 (52:31):
Mean, guy, you chase it with some grape nuts?
Speaker 5 (52:37):
Really?
Speaker 2 (52:37):
Do you have a box of just the original r
B downstairs scoops? Yeah?
Speaker 5 (52:43):
Is it two?
Speaker 2 (52:43):
Scoops always scoops to scoop.
Speaker 6 (52:49):
First of all, I want to I want a number.
I want to number you.
Speaker 2 (52:53):
They show you on the box, there's a here's a scoop,
here's another.
Speaker 3 (52:58):
B free. But the idea here, even though it seems
as small as your grocery store, those serial brands are
ultimately owned by a much smaller handful of holding companies.
And that's kind of what happens with the Internet. And
they keep those brands alive from the grocery store to
(53:19):
the Internet because they know you dig the illusion of choice.
People are sensitive to the stories told about themselves. To
your point, Matt, people want to feel that they are
choosing the correct narrative, that they are doing so for
objective reasons. History is not just riddled with conspiracy. It's
(53:40):
chock full of some profoundly disgusting truths, way more than
two scoops. And the question is similar to that old
story from Plato and the allegory of the Cave. It's
the choice in the matrix. Do you want to know
what really happened? Or do you prefer the tales told
to you by the authorities.
Speaker 4 (53:58):
Guys, do you think there's a meme opportunity and like photoshopping,
like a little plastic container of playto but having it
have plato on it. I'm trying to think of that. That
has to be an additional twist. Enough.
Speaker 3 (54:11):
Yeah, that's a good starting point at point.
Speaker 4 (54:13):
Yeah, let us know what you think if there's a
good way to push that into the over the top
and the mimisphere.
Speaker 3 (54:19):
And while you're thinking about that, let's end tonight's journey
with this. We talked a little bit about modern politics.
Modern politics are ephemeral, to be quite honest with you,
regardless of religion, regardless of creed, personal ideological leanings, and
so on, we have to ask ourselves, doesn't everyone at
(54:40):
least deserve a choice matrix style between the truth and
convenient lies. Shouldn't every human being, by the virtue of
their humanity, be able to choose for themselves between an
ugly truth and you know, a smoothed up deception.
Speaker 5 (54:59):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (55:01):
It sounds nice, right, It sounds nice that we should
be able to have that. I just don't think I
don't think every and I don't think anybody's ever going
to get that.
Speaker 6 (55:11):
I think we're no one you're going to agree on
what it is.
Speaker 2 (55:15):
Well yeah, yeah, yeah, Oh my god, you got to
get on the same page to figure that out.
Speaker 4 (55:19):
First, totally, God, to weigh the things. I mean again,
that's just you started it off so beautifully.
Speaker 5 (55:26):
Ben.
Speaker 4 (55:26):
It's just the nature of discourse. It's the nature of
history as a storytelling mechanism. It is a storytelling enterprise.
Speaker 3 (55:36):
You know.
Speaker 4 (55:36):
It's not the same as science. You're not gathering data
per se. You're not gathering vials of things and analyzing them.
It's all about context. It's all about the eye of
the beholder.
Speaker 3 (55:47):
It's I thought that was a Dungeons and Dragons reference
for just the second, nol and I want to thank
you for that.
Speaker 5 (55:55):
I don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (55:57):
That is definitely a reference to a beholder.
Speaker 6 (55:59):
Come come on, dude, the eye of the beholder. Yeah,
the single eyes is super cool.
Speaker 2 (56:04):
Of the beholder.
Speaker 5 (56:05):
We did a super cool reference.
Speaker 2 (56:06):
Good. It's got really powerful magic. Be careful of it.
Can I give a quote from a UC Berkeley's associate
professor named Andrew Little quote, We want to believe. We
want to believe that we are capable and decent, and
that our friends and our favorite relatives share the same
(56:26):
traits and that the groups we belong to are on
the right side of conflicts. And that's just that's the
quote here. So if there is a narrative being sold
to us, whether it's about the future, about what's happening
right now, or something that happened in the past, that
makes us feel all of those things, that we are decent,
(56:47):
good people, that our friends, our groups are decent, good people,
and we didn't do anything bad in the past, we
are going to buy that story more often than not.
Speaker 3 (56:58):
Sure, we want to build consensus. It's very difficult to
be the tenth person in the conversation who contradicts a
lie that everyone has chosen to believe. And that's that's
a question. You know that everyone is going to quarrel with.
We would love to hear your thoughts. We would love
to We'd love to get your take on this.
Speaker 5 (57:20):
Folks.
Speaker 3 (57:22):
Are we being overly alarmist about this idea of rewriting history?
Is it less possible now or is it more possible now?
What do you think? Let us know. We try to
be easy to find on the internets.
Speaker 5 (57:37):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (57:37):
You can find us at the handle conspiracy stuff on YouTube, Facebook,
and Twitter, nay X. I don't know if I'm using
nay right there, but I'm gonna keep it up. I
sed toll call Twitter. You know what. I actually saw
a post form Elon must the other day where he
referred to it as x fka Twitter, So.
Speaker 3 (57:56):
I think, yeah, I think I think it would be
x nay.
Speaker 4 (58:00):
N twitterh yeah, yeah that I hate putting X first,
but it is what it is again, conspiracy stuff on
those platforms, Conspiracy stuff show on Instagram and TikTok, where
we've got a ton of fun stuff popping pretty much
a couple times a week, I think, right.
Speaker 2 (58:16):
Oh yeah, oh yeah. Did you guys see the rumor
that Elon Musk prevented nuclear war? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (58:23):
He uh, that explained some of those texts he was
sending me.
Speaker 2 (58:28):
No, but for real, the he allegedly turned off the
Starlink system.
Speaker 4 (58:33):
Yes, oh but that but just as a petty like
penny pinching maneuver, right, because he was supposed to give
them like free internet, and then they were not paying
him or something, and then he basically just said, you
know what, we're cutting this off. And yes, it did
lead to some issues on the battlefield, but he wasn't
doing it benevolently.
Speaker 3 (58:53):
He also had again recently spoken with Vlad.
Speaker 2 (58:59):
Well, yeah, so this is the week again. This is
like the revisionist history thing that's occurring in real time
at all times nowadays. Like the one story is that
he got some intel from from Russia basically and prevented
an attack on some military naval vessels.
Speaker 3 (59:18):
Russian naval vessels.
Speaker 2 (59:20):
Yes, and that preventing that attack prevented tactical nukes from
being deployed.
Speaker 7 (59:28):
That's a lot, it's crazy, but it also goes to
show just how somebody doing something completely self serving and
petty could ultimately lead to you know, if you're operating
at such a high level, ultimately lead to something like that.
Speaker 5 (59:45):
And then it just becomes about the narrative twist.
Speaker 3 (59:48):
It's the butterfly effect, you know, because I used because
I used Cheddar in my casadia. The red panda is
no longer endangered. Whatever. It's a you could if then
your way on all sa sorts of interesting limbs, not
saying it's not true, but to your point, it's definitely
an interpretation. What about your interpretation, folks? Why didn't give
(01:00:09):
us a phone call?
Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Our number is one eight three three, STDWYT and K.
That's our number.
Speaker 5 (01:00:18):
Call it.
Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
It's a voicemail system. You've got three minutes. Say whatever
you'd like, Give yourself a cool nickname, and let us
know if we can use your name and message on
the air. If you've got more to say than can
fit in those three minutes, why not instead send us
a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 3 (01:00:32):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:00:54):
Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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