So conspiracy theories are theories about actual conspiracies, whether they're true or not, whether the theory is true or not.

And there are real conspiracies. I mean, Watergate was a conspiracy. I ran Contra, all the M.K. Ultra and all the CIA shenanigans in third world countries in the 50s and 60s and 70s. These are all true.

And they were covered up.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

I have to admit something to all of you.

I find conspiracy theories to just be absolutely fascinating.

It is fascinating to me how much time a lot of people

are spending to try and prove these ideas, some of which are of obvious relevance to big

social and political issues, others just seem arcane and strange to me, but getting into the

mindset of how and why people are drawn

to spending the hours and the days on arguing of people about the internet, on, you know,

chemtrails or on Hugh assassinated John F. Kennedy or on all of those other issues,

it's just really interesting. But it raises a deeper question, which is how do we actually know what is a conspiracy theory

and what is a true theory?

Conspiracies do happen in the world sometimes.

So can we dismiss all of these ideas out of hand?

How do we investigate them?

How do we determine which of them we should be looking into in a serious

way, in which of them we should just not even give the time of day? And it raises an even

deeper question on that, which is what is actually the truth? This is a question that philosophers

have discussed for decades and centuries. And millennia, it is not one that is fully solved. We need some concept

of truth in our own lives and in our societies for our society to work. We don't want it to be

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