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 books 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 Shay's the

aluminatus 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 a mosaic of conspiracy that 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 so 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 one I think that is true although sometimes they might do that on their

on merits but just to have fun with them, you know, to explore them like there this big mutant mythology.

Let's find what kind of laughs we can find in there.

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