This is a headgum podcast. I don't know what to think I don't know what to say

and that's all right that's okay

I don't know anything.

Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover.

Thank you so much for joining me on the show again.

This week, I want to talk about an experience that is both weird and weirdly common in

2023 in the past couple years. You've probably seen it happen to someone around you.

Maybe it was a roommate, a parent, a family friend or for me some comedians I started out with whoever it was the story is the same

someone who seemed sane with it and living in the same reality as you did, suddenly lost their mind and went down some rabbit hole

to emerge as a fully blown conspiracy theorist.

Now, people have been losing their shit like this from time immemorial as I've covered before on this show and on

Adam ruins everything conspiratorial thinking follows from the normal patterns of

human thought that we use to understand the world around us.

But it seems that there's something particular and special about the way that people fall

into the trap of conspiratorial thinking now, Whether it starts on 4chan or Fox News,

anti-Vax or Q-Anon,

there's a mirror world of socially poisonous conspiracy

that people keep falling into. It is incredibly painful when it happens to someone

who you know and love and it's often hard to know how to even understand what

happened. What is it about our world, our media, and our politics today that makes this

happen over and over again, the reasonable people who we love and care about?

Well, today I have a truly brilliant guest to help dig into this issue

...