This season will be further exploring each topic, hanging out with experts and enthusiasts of all kinds for more strange stories, social commentary, and the myths that make America tick.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith.

Ellen Cushing caught my attention with her piece in the Atlantic called I was a teenage conspiracy theorist that tells the story of her own conspiracism during the post 9-11 years.

And you know what? It was extremely similar to my own.

Not only is Ellen a writer, she's also the special projects editor at The Atlantic and the editorial

director of their ongoing series on conspiracy called Shadowland. Today, we share our experiences as teenage conspiracy

theorists to try to explain what these stories were like back in our day and how they

intersect with the stories we hear now that have profoundly altered our current political and social relationships.

We'll also ask the biggest question of all,

how do we combat this alternate reality?

As the subtitle on Ellen's article reads,

Want to know why wild conspiracism can be so irresistible, ask a 14-year-old girl.

Ellen, thank you so much for being here. It is so great to be here. I am thrilled about the

opportunity to talk to another former teenage conspiracy theorist. Would you mind just let's start by what was your in-rout?

Because we're going to kind of talk about how conspiracy theories have really changed form a lot.

And they came out of thinking that that someone as a teenager would be really, really attracted to.

And so what was what was your in route into sort of the

world of the Illuminati, essentially? Great place to start. My in route was that I had a teacher

in high school, freshman year, in a journalism teacher who just was

really into conspiracy theories and taught my class about conspiracy theories, specifically

about the Illuminati one day.

I don't remember what the pedagogical purpose of this lesson was,

...