The Burning Food Factory Myth

We sit down with a researcher to discuss the disinformation campaign around burning food factories.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Oh yeah, Sophie, that's how we opened the episode. I
didn't think anything could be more appalling than that other
thing that you said that I won't know what I
was talking about. Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas wrapped together
so tightly that they can't tell who's where one person's
skin begins in the other. I balked you right into it,

(00:28):
just like Neil Gorsch walked right into that and then decided,
you know what, in for appendy, in for a pound
of um this is it could happen here. The podcast
about serious problems where we talk about them seriously, and
sometimes about the Supreme Court having a threesome like that,
like that, like that cruise ship where there was a

(00:50):
threesome and then a giant six fight. How's everybody doing today?
I think the opening will work better if we just
believe and yeah, yes, always bleep outcome uma of a
right there. So I I feel like today we should
chat about one of the many things that's that's a problem,
which is a specific piece of disinformation that is spreading

(01:13):
and not quite like wildfire. It's more spreading like in
the background, like monkey pops on the internet. This is
not like the number one piece of of of of
like conspiratorial nonsense that's getting around, but it's getting around deeply,
and I'm seeing it on the left and the right.
You have if you spend any time at all on
social media, which statistically you do, you've probably seen a

(01:36):
bunch of stories and like freaked out posts about fires
and arson at agricultural facilities and factories of food factories
is often how it's phrased. I think the post I
saw about it that was sort of most emblematic with
someone being like, hey, you know, uh, you're probably not
aware that some huge number of chickens died in fire

(02:00):
recently and a bunch of cows died in this field,
but if you were, it's the only thing you'd be
talking about. And the idea kind of that people are
pushing when they when they uh catastrophize this is that
there's this massive rash of attacks on American food infrastructure,

(02:21):
UM at a year when we're already due for a
food crisis because of the Ukraine, and um it's going
to be this this big like looming disaster and some
like shady group is trying to starve everybody. UM and
we've brought in a friend to talk about this because
it's it is not at all what what people who

(02:42):
are kind of catastrophizing or saying. Um, and I wanted
to introduce Carl to the show. Carl, how are you doing, buddy?
You know, living living life in a one party state? Yeah? Yay? Um,
I don't know, man. There's a lot of parties these days,
like the one on that cruise ship, uh so, or
the Forward Party, our our favorite, this is a big

(03:04):
Yang Gang podcast. Um. Now, Carl, you and I had
buddies on the old Twitter for a while. You were
the origin of one of the terms that that that
we use a lot on this show. Um. And uh yeah,
I wanted to I wanted to talk to you because
this is this is a pretty potent piece of weaponized

(03:25):
on reality. Um. You have been tracking this for a
while on kind of your own. Yeah. Well, this is
one of those ones that's it sits in between a
lot of the other conspiracies, right so, like you said,
it's it's kind of the background operating thing right now. Um.

(03:46):
And you know, so when we think of the big
conspiracies right now, they kind of revolve around what they
always did, right depopulation, weird n W. Well, like secret
society stuff, the Q the que brand of that. How
we want to look at this is a little bit
different because this is more overtly political, right, So this

(04:07):
is this is looking to not just dig the hole
of well, everyone's out to get us. Bill Gates is
buying all the farmland, you know, the crazy stuff we
normally I mean, you know that's right in this, but
it's not the center part um. And yeah, I've been
looking at this for a few months now since I

(04:30):
first saw it, and I first saw kind of traces
of this right after the invasion of Ukraine started, so
early March. Things started to kind of shift and nothing
you know, post here and there that are now missing,
stuff like that, the kind of classic well, let's test
the waters. Let's see how people accept the idea that

(04:51):
maybe something else you know, in the in the conspiratorial
way is going on just as exact exact. It's the
just asking questions, it's just well maybe think about it
kind of thing, and those those pique my interest because
those tend to be test balloons, and for this kind
of thing, I had a weird you know, they're weird feelings.

(05:15):
You kind of get when you watch some of this
as much as we do, yes, yeah, yeah, and you
can kind of sense when the thing has enough ingredients
to catch on exactly, and especially when they're super kind
of inflammatory ingredients, right, you know, the Bill Gates um

(05:36):
buying all the farmland is a good example, not quite
as inflammatory, but catches on because people, you know, it's
it's the social paradelia thing. There's always like, there's always this,
I mean, and this is something again that's a broader
through with conspiracies. There's always a germ of truth. The
germ of truth with that is that Bill Gates has
bought a lot of farmland. Now, if you compare it
to the total quantity of farmland he has bought, very

(05:58):
it's like, yeah, it's a friend point oh three percent
or something. I mean, it's an absolutely tiny amount of
the total, right yeah, Because this this country is I
don't know, if you've looked at him appsently pretty sizeable country,
the United States of America kind of a big place
when you actually look. Yeah, and so the kernel of
truth is there. There there are fires right there, industrial accidents,

(06:21):
there are weird stuff happens in big industrial situations. We
have a large industrial farming situation in this country. So
you see it. And I think part of what makes
the kind of the idea that oh, this is suddenly
happening and it's suddenly like a massive problem easier to
sell to people is that most Americans know next to
nothing about the food supply and how it works. Like

(06:43):
if you have because I grew up in and around farms,
I've been a lot of my life in agricultural areas.
Farms and things related to farms catch on fire fucking constantly.
It may not be yeah, they're they're like I think
they said there are five thousand annual, five thousand annually,
about fifteen a day. I mean, it's it's giant fields

(07:06):
of dried grain. It's stands of dried grain, and it's
ship like silos full of like flour and stuff, which
is like there's nothing like, yeah, silos explode like like
the like a a silo full of grain is slightly
less explosive than like a military like missile or some ship.

(07:26):
Like they're like they detonate if you catch them at
the right way exactly. And like I know here in
Minnesota a few years ago and there's video of a
floating around. You know, there was a you know, a
corn a corn silo split and the dust goes out
and something you know, a car or engine because it's hot,
sparks it off and it's a fireball. You know. So
these things happen, and I can remember. There was one

(07:49):
of the last things I saw and I went and
covered in Texas before I moved, was there's this little
town called West which is not in West Texas. It's
in North Texas. It's in between um Alice and Waco,
which is in between Dallas and Austin, because no, Waco
is not a destination. And they had this big god
it was some sort of what was the I'm gonna

(08:12):
google what the facility was, uh, but it was it
was this like, um, yeah, it was a fertilizer factory
and it caught on fire. There's a terrifying video of
this guy with his daughter watching it and it goes
off like like a fucking fuel air bomb. The massive exploit.
It killed the entire town's fire department, like all of

(08:33):
them dead in a second. I mean, it was basically
fucking anfo And because it happens this is like I think, um,
it never it's just this big tragedy. If it had
happened a couple of years later, there would have been
like a conspiracy attached to it. It was just, yeah,
it was just slightly too early. But like this ship happened.

(08:55):
I mean, the point of making is that, and that
we're making here is that like this ship happens all
the time time And to the numbers we were quoting earlier,
there's no evidence whatsoever that there are a higher number
of of these events this year than there ever are.
Basically one of the things that we've seen is as
of like the spring of this year, a list has

(09:17):
been compiled um mainly in places like Gateway, Pundit and
zero Hedge, where they've got like a hundred different events too,
and and it it looks very compelling when you just
see this list of and there's this fire, and this
many chickens died here, and this many cows died, and
there was this explosion. But again, if you actually look
at the number of events that are expected in a year,

(09:37):
there's nothing abnormal about this, and in fact, it's pretty
middle of the road for any year. And like the bird,
the bird calls right, like that's a great example of
this being just absolutely out of the park conspiracy land.
I mean, there's a massive avian flu epidemic going on
right now that's killed more birds, you know, than the

(09:58):
last ten years. And so when you start talking about
you know, three hundred you know, three hundred million birds
worldwide being called whatever the massive numbers. That funny how
avian flu does that, And that's a response. But when
you get into the zero hedge, who is really pushing
this right now world that's one of the top ones

(10:20):
on the list. And it also makes you know they
have their little maps up right now with all the
drop tabs that show right they love doing and there's
a you see this in other conspiracies. I think one
of the big ones that that kind of was a little,
i don't know, on the edge of of of getting
mainstream recently was like the conspiracy about people disappearing at
national parks, where it's like mapped, yeah exactly, like yeah, yeah,

(10:48):
and it's like yeah, man, um, people, there's three fifty
million people in the United States, like and also people
go missing while hiking, and one of the like a
bunch of stuff isn't on that list, like them of
those people who were found again, and what Exactly a
lot of people just like slip and fall and never
a seat again because they falled out a cliff. National
parks are kind of dangerous, funny enough once you're off,

(11:11):
that's why they're fun. Yeah, exactly, there was There was
a whole four wh one documentary made a few years
ago about this person who went missing, you like were
they were They dropped into a secret underground government bunker
where they abducted and they like a year later they
found his body at the bottom of a cliff. Yeah,
and like it it doesn't you know, that doesn't talk
about the horrible stuff done with like especially in Canada

(11:34):
with all of the missing Indigenous women. Is actually it
is actually a big problem. But I mean to back
to back to the fact, back to like the farming thing.
I think what all of these you know stories show
is just the innate holder of industrial farming. It's actually
the scary Yeah, yeah, it is absolutely scary, um, but

(11:56):
it's also like normal scary. Like the thing it's scary
is that the system of industrial farming is incredibly dangerous
and like, if you actually want to be properly horrified
about something relating to food, production. Look at how many
people die because they get sucked into bogs of pigshit
or drowning grain stile or drowning grain sile. I mean

(12:17):
people legit, whole families because one person will fall in
the grain silo and they'll try to get him out,
the whole families. I know, I know people who have
who have died that way because I grew up in
the very agricultural area. Yeah, a lot of this is
just like people don't know the country, but sharine, yes,

(12:38):
um so industrial. I mean like yeah for me, for me,
someone that hasn't growed up in any agricultural area at all,
and this is yeah, grain is like so it's like
quicksand it sucks you in. It takes you to that bottom.
If you don't spread out immediately, you're going down and
there's really no way to save somebody. It's stay stay

(12:59):
the funk away the grain silos. Do not play around
grain silos. With the grain silo. It is it is.
It is killed entire families because people will try to
save each other and then they get stucked down and
it's it's pretty Yeah, it's bad when you have livestock

(13:24):
livestock poop and sometimes that poop is super usful. Chicken
ships one of the best fertilizers ever. You can make
chicken ship very very useful. Pig shit is like nasty,
it's toxic. It is very hard to do anything. It's
once it's in the ground long enough, it's a bio
Well theoretically, if you were to like really care about it,
you could you could make a use of it given

(13:44):
enough time. But there's so many pigs because our hunger
for bacon is insatiable that you wind up with this
this massive tox of massive toxic sludge. So there's the
chunk of the country in which most of the pigs
come from. There are these huge pig shit bogs that
are like there are countries smaller than bogs of pigship
that we have in the United States. And people die
in them all the time. They get sucked down into

(14:05):
the big ship or you suffocate because you get one
of them bursts. I mean, there's so many weird things
because it's a meth their methane and hydrogen sulfide since
so it's just like bad things around farms all the time.
And that's just that's just farming and what we're ultimately
what we are seeing here if you want to like
actually analyze the thing that is happening, um with all

(14:29):
of these conspiracies, it's it's what's called the frequency illusion,
which is the idea that like if you've ever I
don't know, if somebody when somebody like teaches, like you
learn a new word, right, or you like you hear
about a historic event, and then you keep seeing everywhere.
This is something that's an author that Garrison and I
quite like Robert Anton Wilson played with a lot um.

(14:50):
It's why, like twenty three is one thing you'll notice
in like Hollywood movies and TV shows if you look
out for they're fucking everywhere because a whole bunch of
people who got into hollywo our fans of the same guy,
and there's this conspiracy with the number of twenty three
people sticking. It's all over the fucking wire. It's in
a bunch of ship um, and it's it's yeah, at
the base of things like right, humans are paradelium, right,

(15:13):
so we're looking for patterns and static that's what we do.
It's part like in my mind, it's part of our
like ancestral uh, you know, deep in the past protection, right, yeah, exactly,
it's that, and it's how you look for monsters in
the woods. You know, it's like when we're looking for
eyes in the dark. That's part of it. And so

(15:34):
you know, we tend to find meaning in points and
then try and connect them because that's how we work.
And so this is a great example of this because
it hasn't gone full Q level yet where it's just
absurd to be absurd. The shield itself, like you can
see where people are trying to pick together points that

(15:56):
normally are just industrial accidents. And know some of the
stuff I saw early on before, like the cow death
posts and the stuff related to climate change, what you
really were seeing was people trying to make order out
of what is just chaotic accidents and now and now yeah, yeah, no,

(16:18):
it's it's it's something you rarely actually see in the
cascade of you know, conspiracy theory like this so overtly,
and it's been really interesting for me watching that because
you know, as someone who's far too into watching people
melt their brains. Um. This this kind of lays out

(16:40):
some of the ways that this works for all of us,
UM and I think it also offers a roadmap in
certain ways to like see past it and be able
to correct it for yourself so you don't get into
the same Oh, there are a thousand points a light here,
let's fall all of them. Yeah, it's um one of
the things that's interesting. So we just called it the

(17:02):
the recency bias or the frequency illusions, also the recency illusion,
which is like the belief that things that you have
like noticed only recently are a recent phenomena rather than
things that go back a long time. There these are
kind of inter related. But this, this sort of phenomena
that we're seeing is often called the bottom mine off phenomena.

(17:23):
And that's so so the bottom I'm pretty yeah bottom
the bottom mine Off group was a it's also called
the German Red Army. Um, it was a Yeah, it
was a West German terrorist organization from like seventy years ago.
Like this is not a recent thing, but there was
an article about them in like a Minnesota St. Paul

(17:45):
newspaper in nineteen nine four that happened to be one
of the first newspapers with an online comment page. Oh no,
well yeah, so this is like you'll always here referred
to as the bottom minor phenomena. It has nothing to
do with this terrorist group than the fact that one
commenter on there saw an article about them um within
a couple of hours of someone else in their life

(18:07):
telling them about the group, and so they named it
in the common section the bottom mine off phenomena because yeah,
like it's it's which is an example of the phenomena UM.
But like that's it is. It is. It's a thing
that people do for again good reason, Like like you said,
like if you're a fucking hunter gatherer and you notice

(18:28):
that like, oh, after a rainstorm is when the big
cats come out and hunt. And like if somebody, if
one of your friends gets eaten by like a tiger,
it's probably after a rainstorm. You associate after the rainstorm
with danger, which is like good, right, Like I live
inside urban environments, the usually usually less. This becomes useful

(18:48):
as relating to more of our like instinctual practices. Yes,
learning to recognize this like first step of delusion is
really important UM decisions future, right, But I think it's
much more similar than we realized to like how people
think of religion, because even religions people are Yeah, like

(19:11):
what you're saying is like there's so much chaos. People
can't make sense of the world. And just like religion,
you're trying to make order out of disorder, and you
look for signs, to look for patterns. It's like an
element of magical thinking, where yes, you look for reasons
that this has meaning, so I understand where they're coming from.
And so the problem, again, the problem is not with

(19:33):
your brain, because this is not like a bad thing
your brain is doing. It's just a thing your brain
is doing. The problem is that this is one of
the easiest ways that bad faith actors can take advantage
of you and other people. And so in terms of
protecting yourself and others from it. And again, one of
the problems with this and one of the things that
makes it so so much more difficult twenty years ago

(19:56):
the batter mind how obviously the bottom mine how phenomenon
is much of a thing is that dude in the
fucking comments page that Minnesota paper proves. But there was
less ship coming at you, so you kind of had
even if you might get caught for a little bit
and they're like, oh, is there something weird going on
with this this German terrorist group? Um, you kind of
had the space in your head and the space in

(20:19):
your media diet to like actually parse that out and
calm down. But today it all comes with you with
a flood. There's like three new fucked Supreme Court decisions.
Oh and now all of the food factories are on
fire and all of the chickens are dead, and this
war in Ukraine is actually elevating the food prices, and
it all compounds on itself. If you when you start

(20:39):
seeing something new like this come into your media diet
that seems scary, one of the first things you should
do is just try to get a handle on the
raw numbers this Well, this is a complexity Yeah, you know,
you know, this is a complexity issue. That's how I
like to look at it. And that's exactly one of
the great ways to to kind of get disrupt the

(21:02):
complex nature of this and the amount of it you're
taking in is just to start breaking it down. Numbers
are great, right, Like, if you can look and see
their eighteen thou instances of industrial accidents leading to X,
Y or z and five thousand fires, you start to
really get yourself into a better position to understand what's
being thrown at you. Yeah, but I don't think most

(21:23):
people can actually understand what those numbers mean, Like they're
just like they're large numbers, But I don't think people
understand like that means a lot of that stuff is
happening versus just like one or two things you hear
about and you don't realize probability wise that it's like
insignificant because I don't think those numbers make sense. I
mean even to me sometimes I can't. I can't picture

(21:44):
so many things, So I think it's I don't know,
maybe it's just like a deficit and how our brains
would you be able to understand why the numbers exist.
But you can try to compare them two previous years, right,
you can't exactly you can't expand what you relating to.
Right if you're if you're looking from here's everything from
March to June two, you're like, whoa, this is a

(22:06):
lot of stuff just in these few months that if
you compare that to every preceding year for the past
five years, like, oh, this actually isn't a regular this
is this is this is still fucked up, but it's
actually kind of normalized. Um, and it's not it's not
an abnormal phenomenon right now. And so even if you
can't like understand what the numbers are, you can still
compare them to previous things. But but yeah, I mean

(22:29):
that does require more work than just like looking at
a meme, right. And the reason why this stuff works
is because people know how to exploit this part of
our brains really well. Not not not not not in
this part of this brain is useless, right, it has uses, um,
you can play with it, but it's also is exploitable.
And and that's the thing that you wanna be aware

(22:49):
of is trying to be cognizant of if the information
you're taking in is exploiting this pathway and then choosing
how how you want to be circumvent some of those
mental effects exactly well. And we have such I mean,
as humans, we have a real issue with this kind
of brain hacking. And it's something we're just all kind
of getting up to right now and understanding. And we

(23:11):
still don't fully understand some of this. But you know,
I UM, a lot of the stuff I I kind
of initially worked off of for the concept of weaponized
unreality kind of talks about social engineering in the way
that like freaking was done, and hacking back in the
day was done, and this is so similar to that
in certain ways that it's kind of shocking, right, Like

(23:32):
it's a conspiracy, but it's also a management tool, and
it's a it's a memory management and and you know,
ultimately a reality management tool and giving it numbers looking
at context like that does take time, but some of
these are like gonna gonna be hard and fast rules
probably going forward to like interact with the digital world,

(23:54):
because this is gonna be how it is for a
long while. There's a book that is kind of considered
to be like the foundational text or at least strategic
document Islamic State, called The Management of Savagery Um, and

(24:16):
the title gives away what what you're doing, right, you're
carrying out You're you're engaging in acts of savagery, terrorist
attacks that that that kill innocent people, that are that
exists to disrupt um the state that you're in in
order to and you're attempting to like you're attempting to
build kind of a melieu of savagery, which then provides

(24:36):
you the opportunity to take an exert power. And what
we're seeing here is like the Management of cognitive biases, right, exactly,
the management of like these weird little evolutionary holdovers in
your brain. Um that that don't quite work in the
modern world. But if you understand what what's happening, you

(24:57):
can take advantage of them, and you can you can
trick people into thinking things are happening that aren't. It's
the same, you know, you can see this. The right
does this very effectively and a lot of the anti
trans stuff they've been doing absolutely obviously with gay you know,
if you look at the population trans and of gay people,
some number of people in that community are going to

(25:18):
do things that are bad, right, because it's a population
of human beings, um, and because the country is large enough.
If you get people hyper focused on here's a story,
here's another story, here's two, here's three stories. Now is
that does that mean that there's any kind of actual
systemic problem. No. Um, that community is no more likely
to do things that are bad than any other community.
But if you get people focused on each of those

(25:40):
stories in their head, they feel like there's they feel
like there's an epidemic, and like, well, we have to
get a handle. It's the same thing that that gets
done with like Islamic terrorism right where it's like, yes,
since nine eleven, actually not that many acts of Islamic
terrorism in the United States, extremely fucking uncommon, much less
common than right wing terrorism like homegrown terrorism. But the

(26:00):
media doesn't really cover one of those kinds of terrorism
and loves to cover the other. So you get people
periodically tricked into thinking that they're under direct threat from
the Islamic state or whatever. The fun right, well, and
I think it's you know, I think going to that
point right like, it's almost U I mean, it's a
reality filter, right, so, like it's a way to selectively
filter out things that would counter the narrative that you're

(26:22):
trying to overall push. And I think that that's something
that's what's interesting me about this in a lot of
ways is that we're seeing a filter being set up
that only allows people into one lane of this thought.
And we've seen what the end result of that is
with radicalization and things that come along with these kind
of conspiracies. But it's really it's been very wild to

(26:46):
watch since the you know, the nineteen April till now
where we're seeing it. You know, Serovich is doing it
every any one of the guys you can think was
doing it. Yeah, exactly. Tucker ran a couple of things
on this and kind of interspersed it with his you know,
white male virility ship. It's we're we're we're in a
weird place where these are starting to be able to

(27:08):
be played with and on each other, and that kind
of filtering, you know, starts to get people onboarded from
a conspiracy into you know, what we're seeing now is
kind of the white nationalist Christian nationalist movement. That's that's
become that that thing, and you know, for me, that's

(27:28):
where my interest stems from because of this idea of
weaponizing on reality, seeing what happened in Russia when that happened,
and seeing this kind of thing which is so similar
to that filtering and that narrative shift and building that
goes on in that world. It's it's been you know,
staring into a void feels bad. Sometimes this is just

(27:49):
one where it's like, oh, this is terrible, and it's
just the beginning of it. Every once in a while,
the void stares back and you're like, oh boy, oh
yeah no, And that's exactly I mean, that's uh, that's
the problem is sometimes it just stars you right in
the eyes and tells you, yeah, I'm here, and that's
a bad feeling. Yeah, well, I think that's more or

(28:10):
less what we needed to talk. That would be like,
you know, like one of the one of the ways
to combat this, if you can, is honestly, creating your
own memetic graphs is really useful because these things spread
so fast when they're in images of dates and instances
spread like wildfire. Um So if you can make your

(28:30):
own which compares it to previous years, say hey, this
actually isn't a new pattern, this is something that's this
is this is just what happens in industrial farming. I
think spreading it via memetic images is one of the
if there is a way to combat it, that's probably
one of the core ways to go about it, just
to get how fast those things spread. Again, you can

(28:51):
see I've seen some useful people have been trying to
push back against, you know, this idea that there's been
this like massive crime surge in San Francisco and stuff,
and they it's uses the same tactics, Right, You have
like a couple of videos of people shoplifting or something,
and then you make a and and is there is
that kind of crime actually up well no it really isn't,
but like it doesn't matter because um or is it

(29:14):
any higher there than it is in some place like
Duluth where no videos are coming out, like no it's not,
but um it's uh. If you have to be aware,
the first thing you have to be aware of is
the phenomena is like the way in which they're taking
advantage of you, and then you have to you have
to kind of deter and you have to use the
tactics they're using against them. And one of the things

(29:35):
that is effective is these these graphs with kind of
like numbers and dates and ship on them. People love
to feel like they're looking at research. But yeah, at
the same time though not to not to be like,
I don't know negative about this at all, but in
my mind, this is like a modern day version of

(29:56):
someone starting your religion and make people like making the
sheep of a sl following and then having them turn
into like whatever it is, whether it's Christian nationalism or whatever.
But just like in religion, if people are presented with science,
they don't care you know what I mean, you will
present them with like, I don't know. There's some people
that I think are be it's it's it's it's not science.
It's about everyone wants to have access to special, secret

(30:19):
and secret knowledge. Everyone wants to have esoteric knowledge that
no one else has. So these graphs are still compelling
in the first place because you're like, oh, no one
else knows all of these things. No one else has
laid it out in this manner. So if you can
present your information in that same style, say, hey, no
one knows that this is actually part of this overall
thing that's been going on for years and it's about

(30:39):
industrial farming, then you hope that that will spread. That
then that spreads because because it infects the same point
in someone's brain. Right want to we want to feel smart,
we want to feel unique, we want to have like
esoteric knowledge. So if you can, if you can frame
it to to fit that same mold, then it's not science.
It's just playing with the same tactics that God them

(31:00):
convinced of this in the first place, exactly. People, that's different. Yeah,
I think I think Sharine, like it's true that like
if somebody is a committed believer in in whatever, like
like Mike Cernovitch or something, you're not convincing them the
danger the thing that they're doing that's dangerous is there.
They're quote unquote pilling a lot of like random people

(31:21):
into problems that scares those people. And when those people
get scared, they're willing to accept ship they wouldn't otherwise scare.
And I think those people you can push get to
step down from the ledge because one thing we do
want this is also a problem. But like you think
about like climate change, right, and how much of the
denial of climate change is not based around getting people

(31:44):
to reject the idea entirely, but getting like when people
bring up a specific problem being like, well but look
at this weird new piece of technology that some kid developed,
and like this is going to fix it, and then
you get to not worry about it. Right, So if
somebody suddenly starts speaking out about agricultural fires for the
first time and you're like, actually, they're lower than they
are in normal years, this isn't a problem, then maybe

(32:07):
their brain, maybe you can get their brain to go like, Okay,
that I won't worry about that because I don't want
more things to worry about. I just have been given them. Um,
that's targeting the ledge people we're talking. Yeah, you're not
getting to true believers. You're not getting to true believers
at this point of any of this stuff for the
most part. You know, that takes a wholly different level
of work. I mean, that's that's in the ballpark in

(32:29):
my mind of the radicalization, right, Like you're you're in
a wholly different ballpark. And if you can target the
people who are thinking about jumping into the pool too,
they tend to if you do change their mind, they
become some of the biggest proponents of trying to get
other people off the ledge that they might know. And
that's something something well, it's something, yeah, it's it's it's

(32:56):
it's very similar. And it's something I've seen even in
my friends circles, you know, talk to people who five
years ago, we're fully you know, in the all let's
do Donald Trump for the lulls thing. You know. Now
those are the same people who are telling their friends,
oh shit, we have a Christian nationalist movement that's trying
to overthrow democracy. And that's a huge you know, like
that's a huge help um to everyone. Right, you want

(33:19):
more people saying the truth to people who might not
hear it from someone like us um and can internalize it.
And there's you know, the truth takes a lot more
work than fiction, unfortunately, but once it starts to work,
it's a compounding thing. And the truth tends to really

(33:41):
set people free. As corny as that is. If people
find out they've been lied to, they get they want
to know why it worked, and that works in our
favor and the truth's favor, and reality is the thing
we you know, we gotta protect this at all costs
because we're getting title weight by unreality and that's a

(34:02):
problem for all of us for different reasons. Let's the
more uplifting note I think than a couple of minutes ago. Yeah,
all right, well there there we go. Um go, I
don't know, fix it. Yeah, go fix things. Yeah, go

(34:23):
fix things. Don't go swimming in grain silos, and uh,
avoid grain silos. Always avoid grain silos. It could happen
here as a production of cool Zone Media, but more
podcast from cool Zone Media. Visit our website cool zone
Media dot com, or check us out on the I
Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

(34:47):
You can find sources for It could Happen here, updated
monthly at cool Zone, Media, dot com, slash sources, thanks
for listening.