This is longtime Cato Daily podcast host, Caleb Brown. After thousands of episodes over nearly 18 years,

I've moved on from the Cato Daily podcast, but in the interim, I, along with some of you, have selected some favorites.

I hope they resonate with our current moment and continue to spark the desire to defend liberty.

Thank you for listening.

This is the Cato Daily podcast for Thursday, September 5th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

Conspiracy theories have a long history, but the Internet age is a veritable golden age of conspiratorial thinking.

Jesse Walker is book's editor at Reason Magazine and author of the new book, The United States of Paranoia, a conspiracy theory.

We spoke recently about the book and what gives conspiracy theories currency in popular culture.

I guess my introduction to conspiracy theories was Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's The Illuminatus Trilogy,

which for those who haven't read it, sort of wraps up all of the

great conspiracy theories effectively into one, one grand conspiracy that is... Or a mosaic of conspiracy.

That's somehow been going for thousands of years. Yeah, I mean, the great thing about that book,

which is in my book, is that it's a, people sometimes say it treats

every conspiracy as true. It might be more accurate to say that it treats every way of looking

at the world as equally true and equally absurd and then sort of sees what they can tease out

from that. But those two, as particularly Wilson, represent what I

call in the book, the ironic style of political paranoia, which is not actually, or the ironic

style of conspiracism, I should say. And that's people who, they're not interested so much in

talking about conspiracy theories to debunk them or to say,

hey, this is when I think that is true, although sometimes they might do that on their own

merits, but just to have fun with them, you know, to explore them like they're this big mutant

mythology.

...