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Fear Mongering for Clicks Can Fuck Up the Listener · The Occult Rejects

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen. What? What's going to happen?
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Something wonderful. What? I understand how you feel. You see,
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: it's all very clear to me now. Welcome to the
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: Occult Rejects. Spend enough time in conspiracy podcasts, alternative media,
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: religious panic circles, occult communities, political commentary, or basically any
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: corner of the internet where attention can be converted into money,
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: and eventually you begin noticing the same fucking formula. Everything
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: is in an emergency. Every week brings another hidden enemy
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: or secret agenda, and somebody is supposedly coming for your children,
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: your religion, your race, your freedom, your culture, your health,
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: your country, your spiritual purity, or whatever else the audience
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: has already been taught to value and fear losing. The
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: details change depending on which community you wander into, but
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: the emotional architecture remains remarkably familiar. Because somebody is always
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: poisoning something, infiltrating something, corrupting something, stealing something, hiding something,
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: destroying something, or preparing to unleash a catastrophe and that
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: apparently only this particular podcast host, live streamer, preacher, activist, occultist,
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: or independent researcher truly understands. I want to make something
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: clear immediately, because this show is not about pretending that
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: conspiracies never happen, institutions never lie, corporations never cover up wrongdoings,
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: Governments never deceive the public, religious organizations never abuse power,
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: activists never manipulate information, journalists never sensationalize stories, or powerful
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: groups never coordinate behind closed doors. Human beings conspire constantly,
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: institutions sometimes behave horribly, and skepticism toward authority can be
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: completely justified. But that is not the question I am
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: interested in here. What I want to know is what
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: happens to the person listening, When skepticism becomes a permanent
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: state of emergency and their information diet consists of hours
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: upon hours of material telling them that danger is everywhere,
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: catastrophe is imminent, strangers cannot be trusted, institutions cannot be trusted,
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: experts cannot be trusted, and sometimes even friends and family
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: cannot be trusted. because everyone outside the enlightened circle surrounding
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: the microphone has supposedly been fooled, compromised, spiritually blinded, politically captured,
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: or bought off. At some point, being informed can begin
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: turning into being psychologically marinated in threat, especially when the
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: people producing the material discover that fear is not merely
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: emotionally powerful, but economically useful. There is a tendency in
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: these spaces to treat fear as though it were psychologically neutral,
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: as if somebody can spend six hours absorbing stories about
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: impending collapse, satanic infiltration, secret cabals, racial warfare, spiritual warfare,
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: engineered disease, child trafficking, assassination plots, apocalyptic prophecy, institutional corruption,
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: cultural extermination, occult warfare, environmental catastrophe, and whatever fresh nightmare
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: dropped into the algorithm that morning. then simply shut off
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: the podcast and continue through the rest of the day
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: as though none of it touched the way we think, remember, anticipate,
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: or interpret the world around them. Human psychology does not
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: work like a hard drive that passively stores information without
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: being changed by what enters it, because information influences attention, expectation, memory, emotion,
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  Speaker 1: psychological arousal, and our estimation of how dangerous the surrounding
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: environment actually is. What makes the more interesting scientific question
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: not whether every frightening claim is true or false, but
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: what happens when fear itself becomes the product. Fear is
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: not a defect in the human nervous system, because without
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: mechanisms capable of rapidly detecting danger, none of our ancestors
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  Speaker 1: would have lasted very long. A nervous system that occasionally
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: mistook rustling grass for a predator could survive the mistake,
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: whereas a nervous system that consistently ignored actual predators could
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: had a considerably worse evolutionary strategy, which means threat detection
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: serves an extraordinarily important function, even though the same basic
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: machinery now operates inside organisms surrounded by 24-hour information networks
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: capable of delivering every murder, disaster, war, disease, outbreak, conspiracy allegation,
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  Speaker 1: political outrage, religious prophecy, and human atrocity occurring everywhere on
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  Speaker 1: Earth directly into someone's pocket. Even the familiar popular idea
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: that amygdala is simply the brain's fear center is too
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  Speaker 1: crude for modern neuroscience, because researchers such as Joseph Ledoux
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: have emphasized distinctions between systems involved in detecting and responding
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: defensively to threat and the higher-level processes involved in the
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: conscious experience we describe as fear or anxiety. The amygdala
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: participates in detecting biologically significant information and coordinating defensive responses,
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  Speaker 1: But fear involves distributing neural systems rather than one little
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  Speaker 1: alarm button buried inside the brain. And threatening information can
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  Speaker 1: recruit networks involving the amygdala, anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex,
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  Speaker 1: prefrontal regions, sensory systems, and autonomic responses. Researchers continue debating
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: the exact pathways and the extent to which older, low-road
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: models oversimplified how threat processing occurs. But the larger point
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  Speaker 1: remains intact. human attention is extraordinarily sensitive to information that
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: might signal danger. Once something is appraised as threatening, the
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  Speaker 1: body also has several ways of preparing for action through
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  Speaker 1: systems that include the sympathetic adrenal medullary system and the
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: hypothalamic pituitary adrenal or HPA axis, which help mobilize energy,
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: alter cardiovascular activity, release stress-related hormones such as cortisol, and
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: recognize bodily priorities around whatever the organism believes requires attention.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: None of this means that listening to a scary podcast
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: automatically floods somebody with cortisol until their brain melts. But
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: stress physiology varies enormously according to the person, situation, duration
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: of exposure, perceived control, previous experience, and countless other factors.
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  Speaker 1: But it does not mean the human stress response reacts
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: to perceived demands negatively. and threats rather than only to
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  Speaker 1: predators physically standing in front of us. Information can therefore
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  Speaker 1: become part of the environment to which the nervous system responds,
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: and that becomes relevant when the information environment never shuts
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  Speaker 1: the fuck up about danger. Psychologists have spent decades studying
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: what is commonly called negativity bias. Although the idea is
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: more complicated than the internet version, claiming that the brain
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  Speaker 1: is automatically some fixed number of times more sensitive to
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: negative information. There is substantial evidence across many domains that
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  Speaker 1: negative events and information can receive disproportionate attention, processing, and influence,
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  Speaker 1: while scholars have also criticized attempts to turn that tendency
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  Speaker 1: into a universal law operating identically under every circumstance. The
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  Speaker 1: useful takeaway is therefore not that every negative stimulus automatically
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  Speaker 1: overwhelms every positive one. But that threat, loss, danger, and
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  Speaker 1: other negatively balanced information frequently possesses characteristics that make them
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  Speaker 1: unusually salient, which is not difficult to understand from a
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  Speaker 1: survival perspective because missing an interesting flower carries a very
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  Speaker 1: different cost from missing evidence of a predator. Researchers studying
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  Speaker 1: intentional bias toward threat, particularly in anxiety, have repeatedly found
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: that anxious participants tend to orient toward or remain engaged
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: with threatening material more than non-anxious participants, although the size
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: of the effects and the best way to measure them
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: remain matters of methodological debate. A major meta-analysis involving 172
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  Speaker 1: studies found a reliable threat-related attentional bias among anxious participants,
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: while later eye-tracking work has also identified relationships between anxiety
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  Speaker 1: and both initial orientation toward threatening material and continued attention
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  Speaker 1: to it. The important qualification is that none of this
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  Speaker 1: gives us a universal switch whereby frightening information inevitably turns
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: everyone into an anxious wreck. But it does support a
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  Speaker 1: much more reasonable proposition. Anxiety and attention to threat can
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  Speaker 1: become connected, and once attention itself has economic value, that
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: relationship suddenly matters to anyone building a media business. If
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  Speaker 1: threatening information captures attention, While attention produces views, downloads, advertising impressions, subscriptions, donations, membership,
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  Speaker 1: merchandise sales, algorithmic promotion, and social status, then fear acquires
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  Speaker 1: economic value when nobody involved consciously designed the system around
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: human threat circuitry. The nervous system evolved to prioritize potentially
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: important dangers, while the modern attention economy learned to monetize
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: whatever keeps people watching, clicking, refreshing, and coming back. And
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: those two systems fit together almost perfectly, even though they
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: emerge for completely different reasons. Fear appeals have been studied
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: experimentally for decades in health communication, advertising, politics, and public
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: safety messaging. And one major meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: examined 127 pages, covering 248 independent samples and more than 27,000 participants. Overall,
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: Exposure to fear appeals produced measurable changes in attitudes, intentions,
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: and behavior, with an average effect size of approximately D
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: equals 0.29, while the messages tended to work particularly well
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: when they combined serious threat with an effective action that
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: people believed they could actually take. That literature is not
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: primarily about conspiracy podcasts, and much of it involves attempts
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: to encourage disease prevention, safety measures, or other behaviors where
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: communication were intentionally emphasizing risk. But it still establishes something
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: important for this episode. Fear can be persuasive, and threat
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: can influence what people believe they should do. Now consider
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: what happens when the responsible part is stripped away, and
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  Speaker 1: threat is emphasized repeatedly without any proportionate evidence-based method for
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: resolving it. Because the audience can be told that poison
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: is corruption, predators, demonic influence, racism, fascism, communists, secret societies, groomers, extremists,
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  Speaker 1: government agents, ideological enemies, or shadowy elites are everywhere where
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  Speaker 1: the practical response remains suspiciously consistent. The listener is encouraged
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  Speaker 1: to return tomorrow. Listen to the next episode, watch the
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: live stream, join the private community, subscribe to the premium feed,
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: buy the book, attend the conference, keep checking, keep watching,
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: and above all, remain vigilant, which creates an obvious incentive
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: for the threat never to be fully resolved because psychological
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: closure would also end one of the strongest reasons to
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  Speaker 1: keep consuming the product. Research following the 2013 Boston Marathon
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: bombing provides one of the clearest demonstrations that mediated exposure
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  Speaker 1: to frightening events can become psychologically consequential, even among people
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  Speaker 1: who are not physically present. Roxanne Cohen-Silver, E. Allison Holman,
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  Speaker 1: Dana Rose Garfin, and colleagues examined thousands of Americans in Boston,
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  Speaker 1: New York, and elsewhere in the country, while drawing on
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  Speaker 1: information about participants' mental health collected before the bombing, which
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  Speaker 1: strengthened their ability to account for pre-existing vulnerabilities. One result
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  Speaker 1: became especially important in later discussions of media and trauma.
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  Speaker 1: Participants reporting six or more hours per day of bombing-related
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  Speaker 1: media exposure during the week after the attack had higher
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  Speaker 1: acute stress symptom scores than participants reporting direct exposure to
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  Speaker 1: the bombing after statistical adjustment for several relevant factors. And
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  Speaker 1: heavy media consumers were also substantially more likely to report
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  Speaker 1: high acute stress than people with minimal exposure. That finding
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  Speaker 1: does not prove that watching television is somehow objectively more
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  Speaker 1: traumatic than surviving a terrorist bombing. Because the study was observational,
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  Speaker 1: media consumption was self-reported, the participants were not randomly assigned
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  Speaker 1: to exposure levels, and people experiencing greater distress may have
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  Speaker 1: been more motivated to consume additional coverage. The more interesting
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  Speaker 1: possibility is precisely that those processes can interact, because distress
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  Speaker 1: may drive someone toward additional threatening information while that information
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  Speaker 1: helps keep the threat psychologically active, creating a feedback loop
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  Speaker 1: in which the person seeks more coverage in order to
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  Speaker 1: feel informed or regain control, and instead encounters another round
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  Speaker 1: of images, speculations, warnings, and catastrophic possibilities that provide new
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  Speaker 1: material for the anxiety they were trying to reduce. A
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  Speaker 1: smaller laboratory experiment from 2012 revealed offers a more controlled
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  Speaker 1: glimpse of how negative information can affect what happens after
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  Speaker 1: the exposure itself has ended. Murray, France, Marin, and colleagues
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: randomly assigned 60 healthy adults to spend 10 minutes reading
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  Speaker 1: either 24 neutral real-world news excerpts or 24 negative ones,
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  Speaker 1: after which everyone underwent a trier social stress test while
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  Speaker 1: researchers repeatedly measured salivary cortisol, and participants returned the next
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  Speaker 1: day for a memory test, Reading the negative news did
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  Speaker 1: not itself significantly increase cortisol, which is important because it
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  Speaker 1: prevents us from turning the study into another exaggerated claim
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  Speaker 1: about frightening media automatically producing a hormonal stress response. But
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: among women in the study, exposure to negative news was
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  Speaker 1: followed by a significantly larger cortisol response to the later
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  Speaker 1: laboratory stressor, and women also remembered the negative material better.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: 60 people in one experiment cannot establish that every listener
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: who hears frightening stories suffers endocrine damage. But the study
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: does illustrate why the effects of information should not automatically
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: be assumed to end the moment the screen goes dark
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  Speaker 1: or the headphones come off. Somebody immersed in fear-based podcasting
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  Speaker 1: and social media is rarely hearing one frightening story in
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: isolation anyway. Because the typical environment is closer to a
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: continuous rotation in which economic collapse dominates one day, threats
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: to children dominate the next, occult elites supposedly control entertainment
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  Speaker 1: later in the week, civilization is allegedly being destroyed by
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: whichever political tribe the host hates after that, and the
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  Speaker 1: cycle simply renews itself with another prediction, another enemy, another warning,
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: and another promise that the next episode will reveal what
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: is really happening. The scientifically meaningful question is therefore not
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: whether every individual episode produces a measurable cortisol spike while
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: somebody is driving to work, but what kind of mental
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: environment is being constructed when threatening stories become the overwhelming
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: background of daily information consumption? If the world begins to
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: look progressively more dangerous, attention becomes increasingly oriented toward confirming threats.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: Ambiguous events are interpreted more suspiciously, negative stories become easier
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  Speaker 1: to retrieve than information contradicting them, and anxiety encourages still
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: more searching for danger. Then the distinction between being informed
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: and feeling threatened increases. can begin to collapse until psychological
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: activation itself starts resembling evidence of awareness. Once that happens,
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: the person selling fear no longer has to prove that
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: the world is dangerous enough to justify constant vigilance, because
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: the listener has already been taught that anyone who is
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: not frightened simply has not figured out the truth yet.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: And that is where the fear machine really starts working.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: The most important thing to understand about fear-based media is
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: that it does not need to produce some dramatic psychiatric
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: breakdown in order to have an effect. Because the more
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: realistic danger is, it can gradually influence what a person
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: pays attention to, what they expect to happen, what they remember,
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: what they interpret as threatening, and how much additional threatening
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: information they feel compelled to seek out. A listener does
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: not have to wake up one morning convinced that every
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: neighbor is an intelligent operative before the information environment has
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: begun shaping their perception of the world. They can simply
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: become more suspicious, more preoccupied with danger, more interested in
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: catastrophic explanations, and more likely to believe that remaining vigilant
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: is necessary because something terrible might happen if they stop
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: paying attention. This is why the longitudinal research on traumatic
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: media exposure matters so much. Because some of the strongest
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: studies suggest that media consumption and distress can become reciprocal
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: rather than operating in only one direction. A three-year longitudinal
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: study led by Rebecca Thompson and colleagues followed more than 4,000
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: Americans after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and later after
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando. The researchers found
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: that greater bombing-related media exposure predicted more post-traumatic stress symptoms
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: six months later. Those symptoms predicted greater worry about future
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: negative events two years later. And that worry, in turn,
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: predicted increased media consumption and greater acute stress following the
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: later pulse attack. The authors describe the pattern as a
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: cycle in which exposure to collective trauma coverage can help
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: sustain distress while distress itself encourages further consumption of threatening information,
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: which gives us something much more useful than the simplistic
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: claim that frightening content merely makes people frightened. What the
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: research suggests is that the anxious person may actively seek
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: more information because uncertainty feels uncomfortable. Yet the additional information
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: they find may consist disproportionately of material emphasizing danger, catastrophe,
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: and uncertainty, thereby reinforcing the perception that the threat deserves
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: continued attention. That dynamic maps remarkably well onto modern fear-based podcasting,
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: because the listener feels unsettled and therefore searches for answers,
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: but an ecosystem that financially rewards engagement has very little
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: incentive to provide an answer that permanently resolves the uncertainty.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: A creator who says that the situation has been investigated carefully,
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: the evidence remains ambiguous, nothing currently suggests an immediate danger,
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: and everyone should probably stop obsessing over it has produced
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: an emotionally unsatisfying ending to the story. Whereas a creator
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: who says that the investigation has uncovered something even darker
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: has created a reason to return next week. Fear, therefore,
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: becomes more than a reaction to the content. It became
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: one of the mechanisms that keeps the audience consuming the content.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: particularly when each new episode promises to explain the anxiety
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: created by the last one. There is remarkably direct evidence
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: that negative framing can increase online engagement, which means the
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: idea that fear and outrage are useful for generating clicks
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: does not have to remain a cynical assumption. In 2023,
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: researchers published an enormous analysis in Nature Human Behavior using
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: randomized headline experiments originally conducted by the website Upworthy. The
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: complete dataset contained more than 105,000 headline variations, approximately 5.7
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: million clicks, and more than 307 million impressions across 22,743
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: randomized conversations experiments, allowing the researchers to compare different emotional
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: framings of the same underlying stories and ask whether negative
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: language changed the probability that somebody clicked. The answer was yes.
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: For a headline of average length, adding one negative word
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: increased the click-through rate by approximately... 2.3%, while positive language
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: tended to reduce the probability of clicking. That effect sounds
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: modest until it is multiplied across hundreds of thousands or
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: millions of impressions, where a small increase in click-through rate
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: can translate into enormous differences in traffic, advertising revenue, algorithmic visibility,
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: subscriber growth, and cultural reach. The study does not prove
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: that every conspiracy podcaster, political commentator, occult influencer, or preacher
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: consciously calculates how much anxiety is required to maximize engagement.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: Because many creators probably believe what they are saying, and
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: may themselves be trapped inside the same threat-oriented information system
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: as their audience, but the economic incentive exists whether it
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: is consciously exploited or not. This creates an important distinction
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: between informing an audience about genuine risk and creating an
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: environment where virtually every subject must be converted into an emergency.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: Journalism has always dealt with war, corruption, disease, crime, abuse,
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: and disaster because those subjects matter, while alternative media can
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: sometimes draw attention to legitimate issues neglected by larger institutions.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: The problem begins when the emotional intensity of the presentation
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: becomes detached from the quality of the evidence. Once negative
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: emotional language reliably attracts attention, creators are rewarded not necessarily
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: for discovering that something is true, but for discovering something
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: that can be frightening. And the structure naturally encourages escalation
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: because yesterday's alarming claim quickly becomes today's normal background noise.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: A suspicious event becomes evidence of coordination. Coordination becomes evidence
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: of a hidden network. The hidden network becomes global. The
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: global network becomes ancient. And eventually every contradiction becomes evidence
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: that the network has infiltrated whoever is doing the contradicting.
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: The term doomscrolling sounds almost comedic, but researchers have increasingly
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: treated the behavior seriously. because endlessly consuming negative information may
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: be associated with broader perceptions about existence, danger, and human nature.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: A 2024 cross-cultural study involving 620 Iranian participants and 180
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: American participants examined problematic consumption of negative news and found
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: that greater doomscrolling was associated with higher existential anxiety in
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: both samples. While the Iranian sample also showed an association
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: between doomscrolling and more pessimistic views of humanity. The study
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: was correlational and relied on convenient samples, so it cannot
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: establish that doom scrolling directly caused those beliefs or emotional states.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: But that limitation actually reinforces the feedback loop argument because
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: people who already experience anxiety may seek more negative information
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: while repeated exposure to negative information may help sustain the
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: worldview that motivated the consumption in the first place. The
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: broader media research tradition known as cultivation theory adds another
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: useful perspective. Although its findings have been debated, revised, and
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: criticized for decades and should not be reduced to a
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: simplistic claim that consuming a fixed amount of violent or
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: frightening media produces a predictable amount of fear. Its more
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: relevant insight is that repeated exposure to a particular representation
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: of reality can influence assumptions about what the surrounding world
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: is normally like. especially when the same themes appear over
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: and over again. Applied to fear-based podcasting, the problem is
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: not necessarily that each individual's story is false, because the
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: listener may be encountering real crimes, real corruption, real injustice,
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: and real institutional failures. The distortion can arise from selection itself,
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: when the media diet removes almost everything that does not
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: trigger the threat detection system and replaces ordinary reality with
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: a curated stream of the worst things happening everywhere. That
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: distinction matters enormously, because somebody can correctly point out that
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: every story they shared really happened while still presenting a
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: profoundly misleading picture of the whole. If a creator spends
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: every day collecting violent crimes committed by members of one religion, race,
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: political group, profession, or subculture, they can eventually build an
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: enormous archive of genuine incidents and still create a false
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: impression about that population if they ever discuss base rates,
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: comparison groups, ordinary behavior, contradictory evidence, or the countless interactions
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: that never become a headline. Fear-mongering, therefore, does not always
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: require fabricating facts. Sometimes it only requires curating reality so
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: aggressively that the audience loses any meaningful sense of proportion.
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: Research has also moved closer to the exact type of
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: content we are discussing. In 2024, Paulina Molenda and colleagues
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: published three studies examining the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: paranoid thoughts about Polish and British participants. Their first study
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: followed 603 people longitudinally and found that conspiracy beliefs predicted
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: increases in paranoid thoughts over time, while two additional experiments
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: involving 384 and 445 participants found that exposure to conspiracy
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: theories increased paranoid thoughts compared with controlled materials. In the
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: third study, intense negative emotion helped mediate that effect, suggesting
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: that the emotional response generated by the conspiracy material was
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: part of the pathway connecting exposure with suspicious or paranoid thinking.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: That finding needs to be handled responsibly, because paranoid thoughts
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: exist on a continuum and are not equivalent to a
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: diagnosis of schizophrenia, psychosis, or any other psychiatric disorder. The
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: study does not demonstrate that listening to conspiracy podcasts produces
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: clinical paranoia, nor does it demonstrate that everyone interested in
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: conspiracies has a mental health problem. What it does provide
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: is experimental evidence that exposure to narratives involving secret groups
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: intentionally coordinating harmful actions can temporarily heighten forms of suspicious
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: or paranoid thinking. Psychologically, the mechanism is not difficult to understand,
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: because conspiracy narratives frequently organize uncertainty around intentional agents, meaning
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: bad things are no longer allowed to emerge from chance, incompetence,
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: conflicting interests, structural problems, ordinary greed, or the chaotic complexity
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: of large systems, because somebody must be deliberately making them happen,
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: somebody must be hiding the evidence, and somebody must be
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: preventing the truth from getting out. Once that explanatory style
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: becomes habitual, ambiguity becomes easier to interpret through agency and suspicion.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: particularly when the listener has already been taught that coincidences
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: may be signals and that absence of evidence may demonstrate
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: how effectively the conspiracy has been concealed. Healthy skepticism can
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: gradually mutate into a worldview where virtually nothing is allowed
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: to remain uncertain, because every unanswered question requires an agent,
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: every agent requires a motive, every motive requires a network,
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: and every network eventually requires somebody at the top controlling it.
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: The apparent benefit is explanatory certainty, while the psychological cost
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: is that the world becomes populated by increasingly powerful and
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: malicious actors whose presence can be inferred from almost any
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: unexplained event. Another mechanism that matters enormously in fear-based media
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: is the illusionary truth effect, which refers to the tendency
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: for repeated statements to be judged as more truthful than
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: statements encountered for the first time. A 2026 systematic review
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: and meta-analysis published in Nature Communications synthesized 182 studies containing
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: 366 effect sizes and more than 31,000 participants. And even
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: after adjusting for small study effects, the researchers found a
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: reliable illusory truth effect across a wide range of experimental conditions.
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: Repetition does not magically force everyone to believe anything. because
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: prior knowledge, credibility, context, and the nature of the claim
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: all matter. But familiarity itself can influence truth judgments, which
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: creates an obvious problem in interconnected media environments, where one
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: allegation can circulate through dozens of accounts that appear independent
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: while all tracing back to the same original source. A
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: podcast host repeats something heard from another host. A live
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: streamer clips the podcast. A social media account reposts the clip.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: Another show reacts to the post. Somebody writes a thread
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: summarizing the reaction, and a week later the original host
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: announces that the story is now everywhere. From the listener's perspective,
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: the claim can appear to have accumulated corroboration even though
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: what actually accumulated was repetition, because 10 people repeating one
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: unsupported allegation did not transform that allegation into 10 independent
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: pieces of evidence. Once repetition is combined with emotional arousal,
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: group identity, and selective exposure, the effect can become much
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: more persuasive because the listener is not encountering the claim
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: in a neutral laboratory setting. They are hearing it from
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: people they trust inside communities where skepticism may carry social
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: consequences and alongside explanations for why disbelief itself supposedly proves
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: that someone is naive, compromised, brainwashed, privileged, spiritually blind, politically captured,
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: or simply not awake enough to understand what is happening.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: At that point, the system is no longer merely delivering
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: information because attention, expectation, memory, suspicion, social belonging. and repeated
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: exposure are all being pushed in the same direction while
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: both creator and audience are rewarded whenever another threatening story
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: appears to confirm that the world is exactly as dangerous
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: as they have been told. Consuming more information can therefore
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: make the listener feel less secure and while simultaneously convincing
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: them that the solution is to consume still more information.
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: And once that cycle becomes habitual, fear can begin masquerading
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: as vigilance while anxiety begins masquerading as awareness. The next
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: step is where the process becomes socially uglier. Because once
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: people have been taught to expect hidden threats, they still
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: need someone to attach those threats to, which is where religion... Ideology,
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: racial anxiety, occult subcultures, identity politics, moral panic, scientific ignorance, resentment,
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: and outgroup hostility begin interacting with the fear machine in
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: ways that can turn private anxiety into public accusation. Fearmongering
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: becomes considerably more powerful once a community already has an
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: enemy available to receive the fear. Because human beings rarely
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: experience social threat as an abstract idea for very long.
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: before attaching it to a person, group, institution, religion, ideology, race, subculture, politician,
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: or category of outsider. This is where an information problem
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: can become a social problem, because the listener is no
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: longer merely being told that something dangerous exists. They are
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: being told who is responsible, who cannot be trusted, who
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: is corrupting society, who supposedly hates them, and who should
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: be watched more carefully. Once that frame is established, every
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: frightening story involving a member of the disliked group can
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: feel like additional confirmation that the original suspicion was justified.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: While ordinary examples contradicting this stereotype attract far less attention
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: because they do not fit the emotional narrative already in place.
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: Psychologists studying intergroup threat have repeatedly found connections between feeling
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: threatened by another group and holding more negative attitudes toward
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: that group. A major meta-analysis by Blake Rick Eric Mania
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: and Samuel Gartner examined 95 samples and found that several
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: forms of perceived threat, including realistic threat, symbolic threat, intergroup anxiety,
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: and negative stereotypes were associated with more negative attitudes toward outgroups,
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: although the strength of those relationships varied according to the
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: type of threat and the social position of the groups involved.
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: More recent work on intergroup contact adds another important piece
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: to the picture. Because a 2024 meta-analysis synthesizing 238 independent
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: samples containing more than 150,000 participants found that positive contact
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: with members of another group was associated with lower prejudice,
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: while negative contact was associated with greater prejudice, with negative
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: encounters exerting especially strong effects under several conditions. That matters
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: because fear-based media almost never gives audiences anything resembling a
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: representative sample of another group. Instead, it disproportionately delivers the
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: worst member, the most offensive statement, the most frightening crime,
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: the most ridiculous belief, or the most extreme behavior that
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: can be located anywhere inside that population. Which means a
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: listener can consume hundreds of stories about occultists, Muslims, Christians, atheists,
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: racial activists, conservatives, liberals, immigrants, academics, police officers, feminists, conspiracy theorists,
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: or almost any other category and still understand remarkably little
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: about the ordinary people who make up that group. The
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: audience can therefore become more certain about what a group
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: supposedly is, while becoming less familiar with what the average
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: member of that group actually believes, does, or experiences, because
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: their information stream has introduced them primarily to whichever members
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: are most useful for producing fear, disgust, outrage, or engagement.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: One of the easiest raw materials for fear-mongering is ignorance.
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: although that word needs to be used carefully because ignorance
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: does not mean stupidity and should not be treated as
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: a judgment about someone's overall intelligence. Every human being is
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: ignorant about almost everything because nobody understands medicine, physics, neuroscience, theology, statistics, economics, genetics,
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: artificial intelligence, law, history, comparative religion, psychology, and every other
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: complicated field at the same time. The danger begins when
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: a person has very little knowledge about a subject while
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: possessing enormous confidence that they already understand it, particularly when
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: the explanation available to them converts uncertainty into a moral
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: satisfying story about good people and evil people. That combination
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: could become especially obvious in environments where unfamiliar practices or
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: poorly understood scientific phenomena are interpreted through supernatural categories before
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: anyone has bothered learning what they actually are. A symbol
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: somebody has never researched before becomes satanic. A psychological effect
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: becomes demonic possession. A medical procedure becomes a cult ritual.
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: An unfamiliar meditation practice becomes spiritual warfare. An astronomical event
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: becomes prophecy. A piece of biotechnology becomes evidence of an
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: apocalyptic plan. Or a mathematical diagram becomes proof that somebody
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: secretly belongs to a cult. None of this requires religion
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: itself to be anti-scientific. because religious people range from world-class
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: scientists to people who have never seriously opened a science book.
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: The problem is, and it is huge, amongst the conspiracy
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: community is a style of reasoning in which lack of
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: understanding is treated as evidence of malevolent agency rather than
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: a reason to slow down, gather information, and admit that
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: the subject may be more complicated than the first frightening
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: Christian explained. The same machinery can operate outside religion just
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: as easily. Because replacing demons with political, racial, ideological, corporate,
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: or social enemies does not automatically make the reasoning more sophisticated.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: An occultist can misunderstand genetics just as badly as a
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: fundamentalist preacher. An activist can misuse statistics just as confidently
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: as a conspiracy broadcaster. And a secular person can turn
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: unfamiliar ideas into evidence of malicious intent just as quickly
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: as somebody interpreting them through theology. Different communities simply possess
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: different languages for explaining why the unfamiliar thing is dangerous,
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: which means one person's satanic influence can become another person's
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: fascist infiltration, systemic plot, communist agenda, colonial program, globalist operation,
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: white supremacist network, woke takeover, or whatever terminology most effectively
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: activates the fear and moral commitments of the particular audience.
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: The point is not that these categories never describe anything real.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: because extremist movements, discrimination, organized political projects, corruption, repression, and
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: abuse obviously exist and sometimes cause enormous harm. The problem
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: begins when broad explanatory labels become shortcuts that eliminate the
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: obligation to examine evidence carefully, distinguish individuals from groups, understand
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: base rates, consider alternative explanations, or admit uncertainty. Once somebody
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: has been categorized as belonging to the threatening side, almost
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: anything they do can be interpreted through the suspicion already
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: surrounding them. While information that complicates the narrative becomes emotionally
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: inconvenient because it threatens the certainty holding the worldview together.
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: This is why the central problem in fear-based media cannot
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: be explained honestly by pointing at one religion, one political faction,
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: one occult tradition, or one social movement and declaring that
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: those people are uniquely irrational. because the psychological machinery is portable.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: A religious broadcaster can convince listeners that unfamiliar music, sexuality, meditation, symbols,
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: scientific developers, or alternative religions demonstrate satanic infiltration. While an
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: occult influencer can convince an audience that ordinary disagreement proves
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: that somebody is secretly racist, fascist, oppressive, spiritually corrupt, colonizing,
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: or aligned with whatever social enemy currently occupies the center
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: of that community's anxiety. A right-wing conspiracy show can portray
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: every institutional failure as proof of an intentional ideological takeover.
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: While a left-wing media ecosystem can interpret every offensive individual
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: as evidence of an enormous coordinated social threat. And none
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: of these examples require the underlying concern to be completely
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: imaginary for the amplification process to become distorted. What matters
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: psychologically is what happens when every story has to confirm
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: the same enemy model. because a worldview constructed that way
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: becomes increasingly difficult to falsify. If the fair group does
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: something bad, the behavior proves the threat. If the group
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: behaves ordinarily, the ordinary behavior can be interpreted as concealment.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: If somebody from the group condemns the bad behavior, that
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: person can be dismissed as performing respectively. If an expert
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: disputes the allegation, the expert can be accused of ideological capture.
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: And if investigators fail to find evidence... Their failure can
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: be converted into proof that the conspiracy is sophisticated enough
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: to hide itself. Eventually, the theory becomes capable of absorbing
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: almost any possible outcome, allowing the listener to remain permanently
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: convinced without ever having to identify what evidence would actually
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: change their mind. This is also where fear can begin
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: reinforcing hate, because fear tells people that another group is dangerous,
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: while disgust, resentment, and grievance make frightening claims about the
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: group easier to accept. Experimental research on how people generalize
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: experiences with stigmatized groups suggests that negative experience can exert
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: disproportionate effects on judgments of the larger group, which helps
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: explain why one horrific example may carry more psychological weight
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: than hundreds of ordinary counterexamples. For a fear-based content creator,
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: that creates an ideal environment because they do not necessarily
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: need to manifest hostility from nothing. They can locate whatever
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: theological suspicion, racial anxiety, ideological resentment, cultural insecurity, or social
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: grievance is already present and continually feed it new material
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: until the audience experiences each new example as proof that
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: the original fear was justified. The satanic panic of the
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: 1980s and early 1900s give us one of the clearest
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: historical examples of what can happen when pre-existing religious fears,
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: sensational media, community anxiety, law enforcement interest, therapeutic practices, suggestive interviewing,
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: and cultural ignorance begin reinforcing one another. Allegations emerged involving
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: secret satanic networks supposedly operating through daycare centers, schools, families, churches,
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: and communities. and some accounts expanded to include underground tunnels,
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: ceremonial murders, animal sacrifice, bizarre sexual rituals, hidden chambers, elaborate costumes,
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: and fantastic journeys for which investigators frequently struggled to locate
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: corroborating physical evidence. The lesson is not that child abuse
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: was imaginary, because child abuse was and remains horrifyingly real.
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: The lesson is that legitimate concern about abuse became entangled
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: with a much larger cultural narrative that helped shape how
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: ambiguous claims were interpreted Question, remembered, and investigated. The McMartin
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: preschool case became one of the most famous examples, and
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: researchers later examined interviewing techniques derived from that investigation under
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: controlled experimental conditions. In a 1998 study, Stephen Garvin, James Wood,
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: Roy Malpas, and John Shaw exposed preschool children to an
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: ordinary classroom visitor and later interviewed them using either relatively
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: simple suggestive questions or a collection of techniques modeled on
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: the McMartin interviews. Among children receiving the McMartin-style techniques, which
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: included social influence and reinforcement, 58% made false accusations against
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: the visitor, compared with 17% of children who received the
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: simplest suggestive questioning. The researchers concluded that social influence and
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: reinforcement could exert an effect at least as important as
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: suggestion itself, which matters because it demonstrates how an interviewing
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: environment can push ambiguous experiences toward the expectations already held
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: by the adults asking the questions. A follow-up study involving
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: 120 children examined reinforcement and information about what other children
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: had supposedly reported. And the pattern became even more striking.
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: Children exposed to reinforcement produced false allegations against an innocent
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: visitor 35% of the time compared with 12% in the
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: controlled condition. While 52% of reinforced children made claims about
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: fantastic events such as being removed from school in a helicopter,
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: compared with only 5% of controls. Some children later repeated
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: the allegations even after the reinforcement had stopped, showing how
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: a claim initially produced inside a socially pressuring environment could
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: survive beyond the conditions that helped generate it. That research
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: should never be twisted into saying that children generally lie
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: about abuse or that reports of abuse should be dismissed,
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: because such a conclusion would be scientifically irresponsible and potentially dangerous.
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: What the experiments demonstrate is much narrower and much more
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: relevant to this episode. When adults already possess a frightening
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: explanatory narrative and repeatedly pressure ambiguous experience toward that narrative,
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: the interviewing environment can influence what gets reported. Gail Goodman
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: and colleagues also examined children's existing knowledge of Satanism, religion,
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: horror media, symbols, violence, and ritual themes. finding that relatively
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: few children demonstrated direct knowledge of ritual abuse while many
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: possessed general knowledge of Satanism and Satanic worship, with media
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: and cultural exposure providing some of the imagery available to them.
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: The authors did not conclude that children were simply inventing
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: elaborate abuse stories from popular culture, but they did show
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: why the surrounding cultural environment matters when investigators begin asking
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: questions inside an already established panic. This is where moral
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: panic becomes such a useful concept. because a panic does
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: not require every participant to knowingly lie and does not
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: require every underlying concern to be imaginary. People can sincerely
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: believe that they are protecting children, defending society, exposing injustice,
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: confronting racism, stopping fascism, fighting spiritual evil, resisting government abuse,
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: protecting marginalized groups, or warning the public about corruption while
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: simultaneously participating in an information system that exaggerates threats, rewards certainty,
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: suppresses nuance, and increasingly interprets disagreement as evidence of complicity.
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: The social environment can therefore become progressively more frightened, suspicious,
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: and hostile, while the people participating in it remain completely
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: convinced that their fear is evidence of moral seriousness. The
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: most dangerous stage may arrive when remaining afraid becomes proof
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: of being a good member of the community, and that
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: seems to be a trend in the witchcraft community, because
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: once fear acquires moral status, attempts to reduce panic can
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: be interpreted as betrayal. The person saying that evidence is
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: weak may be accused of defending predators, supporting Satanists, including racism,
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: excusing fascists, protecting corrupt institutions, betraying victims, or helping whichever
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: enemy dominates that particular worldview, which makes ordinary skepticism socially
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: expensive and teaches members very quickly which conclusions receive approval
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: and which questions attract suspicions. At that point, the fear
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: machine becomes increasingly self-sustaining because creators supply threats, audiences reward
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: creators for supplying threats, communities reinforce members who accept those threats,
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: algorithms distribute the most emotionally engaging material, and outsiders who
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: question the narrative can be incorporated into the narrative as
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: further evidence that something sinister is happening. That is why
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: the satanic panic matters far beyond satanic allegations, because the
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: historical details are only one version of a reoccurring, psychological
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: pattern in which uncertainty produces fear, fear searches for an enemy,
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: communities reinforce the enemy model, repeated stories make the threat
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: feel increasingly familiar, selective evidence makes the threat appear increasingly common,
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: and social pressure makes questioning the threat progressively more difficult.
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: Once fear, belonging, morality, and certainty become fused together, changing
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: someone's mind no longer requires correcting one factual mistake. It
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: may require challenging friendships, community status, spiritual assumptions, political loyalties,
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: personal identity, and the enormous amount of time already invested
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: in being afraid. Which is exactly why fear-based information systems
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: can become so resistant to evidence even when their most
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: dramatic claims begin falling apart. If there is one place
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: where this entire subject needs restraint, it is here. Because
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: there is currently no legitimate scientific basis for claiming that
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: listening to a conspiracy podcast for a particular number of
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: hours will automatically produce a psychiatric disorder, damage a particular
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: brain region, or raise somebody's cortisol by a predictable amount.
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: Human beings vary enormously in resilience, personality, previous trauma, social support, health, sleep, genetics,
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: economic conditions, and countless other factors that influence response to stress.
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: Which means the argument cannot honestly be that frightened people
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: listen to frightening media and inevitably become mentally ill. What
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: the research does allow us to say is more grounded and,
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: in some ways, more concerning, because repeated exposure to threatening
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: information can interact with ordinary psychological mechanisms involving attention, uncertainty, memory, suspicion, stress,
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: and information seeking until a person's perception of the surrounding
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: world becomes increasingly organized around danger. Chronic stress has been
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: studied extensively outside the context of media. and researchers use
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: the concept of allostatic load to describe the cumulative psychological
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: burden that can emerge when systems responsible for adapting to
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: challenge are activated repeatedly or remain poorly regulated over long periods.
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: Work by Bruce McEwen and others emphasize that stress responses
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: are not inherently pathological, because the same systems that mobilize energy,
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: alter cardiovascular activity, and help an organism respond quickly to
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: danger are adaptive when they activate appropriately and then shut
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: back down. The concern arises when activation becomes prolonged, repeated,
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: or difficult to terminate, which is why chronic stress research
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: examines consequences across neuroendocrine, cardiovascular, immune, and metabolic systems rather
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: than treating stress as a vague emotional complaint. None of
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: that means fear-based podcasts have been shown to cause allostatic load,
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: and making that claim would be exactly the kind of
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: sensationalism this episode is criticizing. The reason chronic stress research
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: belongs in this discussion is is that it demonstrates why
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: spending large amounts of time perceiving the environment as threatening
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: cannot automatically be dismissed as psychologically neutral. If somebody spends
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: several hours every day reinforcing the expectation that society is collapsing,
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: strangers are dangerous, institutions are secretly coordinating against them, their
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: children are constantly under attack, their religion is under attack,
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: their identity is under attack, and some catastrophic revelation is
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: always just around the corner. then the scientifically responsible question
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: is not whether the podcast directly damaged their body, but
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: whether that information environment is helping regulate stress or continually
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: providing new material for the threat system to process. One
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: reason the cycle can become so persistent is that human
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: beings generally dislike uncertainty, and some people tolerate it considerably
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: worse than others. Psychologists describe this tendency as tolerance of uncertainty,
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: and decades of research have connected strongly with worry and
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: anxiety across several different conditions. A major 2026 pre-registered meta-analysis
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: synthesized 738 effect sizes from 138 independent samples involving 28,693
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: people and found a particularly strong association between intolerance of
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: uncertainty and worry. along with meaningful relationships across generalized anxiety,
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: nonspecific anxiety, post-traumatic stress symptoms, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: panic symptoms, although the strength of those relationships differed between conditions.
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: That research gives us another way to understand why fear-based
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: media can become difficult to put down, because conspiracy and
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: panic narratives were often built from unresolved uncertainty. Nobody knows
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: exactly what will happen next, Nobody knows how deep the
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: supposed network goes. Nobody knows which institution can still be trusted.
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: Nobody knows whether the next event is connected. And nobody
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: knows whether some hidden piece of evidence is about to
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: appear and change everything. For somebody who already finds uncertainty
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: deeply uncomfortable, more information promises relief. Yet fear-based content frequently
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: produces the opposite effect by introducing five new mysteries for
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: every mystery it claims to solve, leaving the listener more
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: uncertain than before and therefore more motivated to keep searching
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: and listening. The process becomes even more powerful when ordinary
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: ambiguity is treated as evidence of potential danger, because uncertainty
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: then stops being something a person can tolerate and becomes
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: something they believe they must resolve. An unexplained light in
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: the sky cannot remain unidentified, a strange symbol cannot remain decorative,
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: an institutional mistake cannot remain incompetence, a coincidence cannot remain coincidence,
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: and an unanswered historical question cannot simply remain unanswered because
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: the surrounding culture has taught the listener that ambiguity itself
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: may conceal something threatening. Over time, information seeking can therefore
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: change from curiosity into perpetual scanning, with the person repeatedly
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: searching for an explanation that reduces uncertainty while consuming material
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: that continually creates more of it. Hypervigilance is most appropriately
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: discussed in clinical contexts involving trauma and anxiety, so I
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: do not want to casually diagnose podcast audiences with it.
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: but the concept still helps illustrate what a threat-saturated information
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: environment can do to attention. When people expect danger, they
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: tend to monitor their environment for danger. And once attention
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: becomes oriented toward a particular category of threat, information matching
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: that category becomes easier to notice. Somebody worried about crime
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: notices crime stories. Somebody convinced occult symbols are everywhere begins
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: spotting symbols everywhere. Somebody convinced racial hostility surrounds them becomes
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: unusually attentive to interactions involving race. And somebody convinced government
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: surveillance is omnipresent notices every technological development that might conceivably
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: involve surveillance. The critical problem is that increased detection can
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: be mistaken for increased prevalence. Once a person begins actively
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: looking for something, they naturally encounter more examples of it.
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: And those additional examples can feel like proof that the
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: thing itself has become more common, even when the underlying
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: rate has not changed. The hundreds or thousands of occasions
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: when the feared outcome fails to occur attract almost no
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: attention because nothing happened, whereas the one event that matches
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: the prediction becomes memorable enough to reinforce the whole worldview.
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: This can create an increasingly skewed sample of reality without
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: requiring deliberate dishonesty because attention itself helps determine which pieces
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: of reality are collected and which disappear into the background.
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: Online communities can magnify this effect dramatically, because one person
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: can never personally monitor every news report, criminal case, political speech,
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: scientific paper, religious symbol, social media post, corporate logo, and
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: celebrity photograph produced across the world. Whereas thousands of people
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: working together can continuously harvest examples fitting the group's preferred
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: fear narrative and deliver them into one shared feed. Something
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: statistically rare can therefore appear omnipresent simply because every occurrence
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: from an enormous population is being concentrated in one place.
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: while a countless ordinary non-occurrence remain invisible, which helps explain
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: how a community can feel surrounded by evidence even when
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: what it has actually created is an extraordinarily efficient collection
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: system for confirming material. Many conspiracy narratives do not merely
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: identify one dangerous event. They teach the listener that the
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: normal system used to verify information cannot be trusted. Journalists
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: are compromised, scientists are bought, doctors are lying, universities are captured,
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: religious leaders are corrupted, law enforcement is covering things up,
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: historians are rewriting the past, government agencies are participating, and
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: friends or relatives who disagree simply have not awakened yet.
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: Once enough sources of external correction have been discredited, the
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: listener can become increasingly dependent upon the same information community
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: that taught them that those outside sources were unreliable, which
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: creates another feedback loop in which distrust drives reliance on
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: the in-group, while reliance on the in-group produces still more
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: exposure to information encouraging distrust. Research examining conspiracy beliefs, interpersonal trust, loneliness,
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: and perceived social exclusion suggests that these variables can become interconnected,
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: although the direction of causality remains complicated and should not
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: be simplified. A 2026 longitudinal study of COVID-related conspiracy beliefs
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: specifically examined relationships involving interpersonal trust, loneliness, and social exclusion.
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: building upon earlier work showing that conspiracy beliefs often correlate
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: with lower trust and greater social disconnection. The researchers did
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: not demonstrate a simple one-way pathway in which conspiracy belief
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: automatically caused loneliness. But the broader association matters because a
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: worldview that increasingly divides humanity into people who understand the
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: threat and people who cannot be trusted can gradually recognize
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: someone's social environment around those who reinforce the same interpretations.
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: That process becomes especially powerful in communities where disagreement is
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: treated as moral failure, spiritual blindness, ideological corruption, or evidence
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: of manipulation by propaganda. Because changing one's mind is no
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: longer simply an intellectual act. Friends who challenge the belief
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: can become exhausting, relatives who ask for evidence can be
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: interpreted as naive or compromised, and outside information becomes easier
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: to dismiss because the community has already supplied an explanation
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: system for why outside sources are untrustworthy. The listener may
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: therefore lose access to corrective feedback precisely as the worldview
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: becomes more extreme, not necessarily because anyone consciously ordered them
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: to isolate, but because trust has been redistributed toward the
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: people most committed to the same fear narrative. It would
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: also be a mistake to imagine that every fear-based creator
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: is an evil mastermind cynically manipulating an audience they privately
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: know is being misled. because creators can become trapped inside
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: the same psychological and economic system as the people listening
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: to them. Somebody begins researching a genuine concern, receives enormous
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: engagement for the first frightening episode, notices that darker interpretations
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: generate stronger audience response, spends increasingly amounts of time interacting
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: with listeners who send additional examples, follow more accounts devoted
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: to the same threat, and eventually ends up living inside
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: an information environment even narrower than the one inhabited by
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: the audience. At that point, financial incentives and sincere belief
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: can become difficult to separate because the creator may genuinely
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: feel that every new frightening discovery proves why the work
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: is necessary while simultaneously receiving more downloads, donations, subscriptions, invitations,
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: and social status wherever the threat escalates. Audience feedback tells
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: them that they are saving people, exposing evil, waking everyone up,
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: while criticism from outsiders can be interpreted as proof that
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: the work is threatening powerful interests. The creator therefore becomes emotionally, socially,
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: and financially invested in a worldview where the danger continues
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: to exist, even if nobody ever sat down and consciously
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: decided to manufacture a panic for money. That may be
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: one of the most dangerous forms of the system because
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: deliberate deception at least contains the possibility that the person
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: knows where the lie ends, whereas somebody convinced they are
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: engaged in an existential struggle can reinterpret almost every setback
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: as confirmation that the struggle is real. A failed prediction
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: becomes evidence that plans changed. A correction becomes suppression. Contradictory
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: information becomes disinformation, and no interaction on your social media
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: posts must mean that you're shadowbanned and not that your
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: content actually sucks. And frightened listeners become proof that people
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: are finally understanding how serious this situation is, which allows
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: the entire ecosystem to escalate without requiring a single participant
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: to feel dishonest. After looking at the research on traumatic
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: media exposure, negative news, fear appeals, doom-scrolling, conspiracy exposure, paranoid thoughts, repetition,
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: intergroup threat, suggestive questioning, uncertainty, and chronic stress, the strongest
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: conclusion is not that frightening media secretly destroys everybody's brain.
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: The stronger and more defensible conclusion is that normal psychological
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: systems can be increasingly oriented toward threat when the information
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: environment repeatedly provides threats to process, particularly when that environment
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: also rewards fear with belonging, moral certainty, identity, and the
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: promise of exclusive knowledge. That is what concerns me about
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: the amount of fear being pumped through conspiracy media, religious media,
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: political media, occult spaces, activist spaces, alternative health communities, and
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: every other corner of the internet that has discovered how
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: effective danger captures attention. Because eventually the listener can begin
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: mistaking constant psychological activation for education. They feel informed because
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: they know about hundreds of terrible things, prepared because they
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: are continually scanning for danger, and awake because everybody outside
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: the community appears less frightened than they are, even though
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: that difference may say less about who possesses the truth
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: than about who spent a greater amount of time immersed
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: in threatening information. The satanic panic showed what can happen
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: when religious fear, cultural ignorance, media sensationalism, suggestive interviewing, professional authority,
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: and community reinforcement converge around an enemy people already know
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: how to fear. but the psychological machinery does not disappear
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: when that particular panic faded. The symbols change, the enemies change,
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: and the vocabulary changes. Yet the basic system remains available
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: whenever somebody can convince an audience that danger is everywhere.
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: Uncertainty itself is suspicious, outsiders cannot be trusted, and the
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: responsible thing to do is remain permanently vigilant. There are
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: real conspiracies, real extremists, real corruption, real prejudice, real abuse,
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: real injustice, and real institutional failures, which is precisely why
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: fear-mongering can be so effective without inventing everything from nothing.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: Something real can be stripped of proportion, surrounded by the
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: worst possible examples, repeated until familiarity starts feeling like confirmation,
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: attached to an entire category of people, and then presented
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: to an audience as evidence that anybody asking for perspective
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: simply does not understand how dangerous the situation has become.
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: Once that happens, the question worth asking is no longer
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: only whether the frightening story could be true, because sometimes
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: it absolutely could be. The deeper question is what kind
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: of mental environment is being built when nearly every piece
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: of information entering someone's day has been selected because it
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: keeps them angry, suspicious, disgusted, or afraid. Fear is useful
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: when it points toward a real threat and helps us
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: respond intelligently, but a warning system that never shuts the
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: fuck off eventually stops functioning like a warning system and
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: starts becoming the environment itself. When every stranger becomes suspicious,
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: every disagreement becomes malicious, every unanswered question becomes evidence, every
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: institution becomes compromised, and every day produces another reason to
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: believe the world is closing in. The person generating the
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: content may be getting clicks, downloads, memberships, donations, and attention,
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: while the person on the other side of the headphones
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: carries the psychological weight of living in a reality edited
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: to look like nothing but threats. Before we spend another
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: thousand hours arguing over which side has identified the correct monster,
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: it may be worth asking a simpler question about the
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: people being told, day after day, that monsters are everywhere.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: What is all of that fear actually doing to them?
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: And who are really the black magic magicians you should
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: be worried about? And that's the end of another Occult Rejects.
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: Hope you all enjoyed, and until the next one.