The Burning Food Factory Myth

of um this is it could happen here. The podcast about serious problems where we talk about them seriously, and sometimes about the Supreme Court having a threesome like that, like that, like that cruise ship where there was a threesome and then a giant six fight. How's everybody doing today? I think the opening will work better if we just believe and yeah, yes, always bleep outcome uma of a

right there. So I I feel like today we should chat about one of the many things that's that's a problem, which is a specific piece of disinformation that is spreading and not quite like wildfire. It's more spreading like in the background, like monkey pops on the internet. This is not like the number one piece of of of of like conspiratorial nonsense that's getting around, but it's getting around deeply, and I'm seeing it on the left and the right.

You have if you spend any time at all on social media, which statistically you do, you've probably seen a bunch of stories and like freaked out posts about fires and arson at agricultural facilities and factories of food factories

is often how it's phrased. I think the post I saw about it that was sort of most emblematic with someone being like, hey, you know, uh, you're probably not aware that some huge number of chickens died in fire recently and a bunch of cows died in this field, but if you were, it's the only thing you'd be

talking about. And the idea kind of that people are pushing when they when they uh catastrophize this is that there's this massive rash of attacks on American food infrastructure, UM at a year when we're already due for a food crisis because of the Ukraine, and um it's going to be this this big like looming disaster and some like shady group is trying to starve everybody. UM and we've brought in a friend to talk about this because it's it is not at all what what people who

are kind of catastrophizing or saying. Um, and I wanted to introduce Carl to the show. Carl, how are you doing, buddy? You know, living living life in a one party state? Yeah? Yay? Um, I don't know, man. There's a lot of parties these days, like the one on that cruise ship, uh so, or the Forward Party, our our favorite, this is a big Yang Gang podcast. Um. Now, Carl, you and I had buddies on the old Twitter for a while. You were the origin of one of the terms that that that

we use a lot on this show. Um. And uh yeah, I wanted to I wanted to talk to you because this is this is a pretty potent piece of weaponized on reality. Um. You have been tracking this for a while on kind of your own. Yeah. Well, this is one of those ones that's it sits in between a lot of the other conspiracies, right so, like you said,

it's it's kind of the background operating thing right now. Um. And you know, so when we think of the big conspiracies right now, they kind of revolve around what they always did, right depopulation, weird n W. Well, like secret society stuff, the Q the que brand of that. How we want to look at this is a little bit different because this is more overtly political, right, So this is this is looking to not just dig the hole

of well, everyone's out to get us. Bill Gates is buying all the farmland, you know, the crazy stuff we normally I mean, you know that's right in this, but it's not the center part um. And yeah, I've been looking at this for a few months now since I first saw it, and I first saw kind of traces of this right after the invasion of Ukraine started, so

early March. Things started to kind of shift and nothing you know, post here and there that are now missing, stuff like that, the kind of classic well, let's test the waters. Let's see how people accept the idea that maybe something else you know, in the in the conspiratorial

way is going on just as exact exact. It's the just asking questions, it's just well maybe think about it kind of thing, and those those pique my interest because those tend to be test balloons, and for this kind of thing, I had a weird you know, they're weird feelings.

You kind of get when you watch some of this as much as we do, yes, yeah, yeah, and you can kind of sense when the thing has enough ingredients to catch on exactly, and especially when they're super kind of inflammatory ingredients, right, you know, the Bill Gates um buying all the farmland is a good example, not quite as inflammatory, but catches on because people, you know, it's

it's the social paradelia thing. There's always like, there's always this, I mean, and this is something again that's a broader through with conspiracies. There's always a germ of truth. The germ of truth with that is that Bill Gates has bought a lot of farmland. Now, if you compare it to the total quantity of farmland he has bought, very it's like, yeah, it's a friend point oh three percent

or something. I mean, it's an absolutely tiny amount of the total, right yeah, Because this this country is I don't know, if you've looked at him appsently pretty sizeable country, the United States of America kind of a big place when you actually look. Yeah, and so the kernel of truth is there. There there are fires right there, industrial accidents, there are weird stuff happens in big industrial situations. We have a large industrial farming situation in this country. So

you see it. And I think part of what makes the kind of the idea that oh, this is suddenly happening and it's suddenly like a massive problem easier to sell to people is that most Americans know next to nothing about the food supply and how it works. Like if you have because I grew up in and around farms, I've been a lot of my life in agricultural areas. Farms and things related to farms catch on fire fucking constantly.

It may not be yeah, they're they're like I think they said there are five thousand annual, five thousand annually, about fifteen a day. I mean, it's it's giant fields of dried grain. It's stands of dried grain, and it's ship like silos full of like flour and stuff, which is like there's nothing like, yeah, silos explode like like the like a a silo full of grain is slightly less explosive than like a military like missile or some ship. Like they're like they detonate if you catch them at

the right way exactly. And like I know here in Minnesota a few years ago and there's video of a floating around. You know, there was a you know, a corn a corn silo split and the dust goes out and something you know, a car or engine because it's hot, sparks it off and it's a fireball. You know. So these things happen, and I can remember. There was one of the last things I saw and I went and covered in Texas before I moved, was there's this little town called West which is not in West Texas. It's

in North Texas. It's in between um Alice and Waco, which is in between Dallas and Austin, because no, Waco is not a destination. And they had this big god it was some sort of what was the I'm gonna google what the facility was, uh, but it was it was this like, um, yeah, it was a fertilizer factory and it caught on fire. There's a terrifying video of this guy with his daughter watching it and it goes off like like a fucking fuel air bomb. The massive exploit.

It killed the entire town's fire department, like all of them dead in a second. I mean, it was basically fucking anfo And because it happens this is like I think, um, it never it's just this big tragedy. If it had happened a couple of years later, there would have been like a conspiracy attached to it. It was just, yeah, it was just slightly too early. But like this ship happened.

I mean, the point of making is that, and that we're making here is that like this ship happens all the time time And to the numbers we were quoting earlier, there's no evidence whatsoever that there are a higher number of of these events this year than there ever are.

Basically one of the things that we've seen is as of like the spring of this year, a list has been compiled um mainly in places like Gateway, Pundit and zero Hedge, where they've got like a hundred different events too, and and it it looks very compelling when you just see this list of and there's this fire, and this many chickens died here, and this many cows died, and

there was this explosion. But again, if you actually look at the number of events that are expected in a year, there's nothing abnormal about this, and in fact, it's pretty middle of the road for any year. And like the bird, the bird calls right, like that's a great example of this being just absolutely out of the park conspiracy land. I mean, there's a massive avian flu epidemic going on right now that's killed more birds, you know, than the

last ten years. And so when you start talking about you know, three hundred you know, three hundred million birds worldwide being called whatever the massive numbers. That funny how avian flu does that, And that's a response. But when you get into the zero hedge, who is really pushing this right now world that's one of the top ones on the list. And it also makes you know they have their little maps up right now with all the drop tabs that show right they love doing and there's

a you see this in other conspiracies. I think one of the big ones that that kind of was a little, i don't know, on the edge of of of getting mainstream recently was like the conspiracy about people disappearing at national parks, where it's like mapped, yeah exactly, like yeah, yeah, and it's like yeah, man, um, people, there's three fifty million people in the United States, like and also people go missing while hiking, and one of the like a bunch of stuff isn't on that list, like them of

those people who were found again, and what Exactly a lot of people just like slip and fall and never a seat again because they falled out a cliff. National parks are kind of dangerous, funny enough once you're off, that's why they're fun. Yeah, exactly, there was There was a whole four wh one documentary made a few years ago about this person who went missing, you like were they were They dropped into a secret underground government bunker where they abducted and they like a year later they

found his body at the bottom of a cliff. Yeah, and like it it doesn't you know, that doesn't talk about the horrible stuff done with like especially in Canada with all of the missing Indigenous women. Is actually it is actually a big problem. But I mean to back to back to the fact, back to like the farming thing. I think what all of these you know stories show is just the innate holder of industrial farming. It's actually the scary Yeah, yeah, it is absolutely scary, um, but

it's also like normal scary. Like the thing it's scary is that the system of industrial farming is incredibly dangerous and like, if you actually want to be properly horrified about something relating to food, production. Look at how many people die because they get sucked into bogs of pigshit or drowning grain stile or drowning grain sile. I mean people legit, whole families because one person will fall in the grain silo and they'll try to get him out,

the whole families. I know, I know people who have who have died that way because I grew up in the very agricultural area. Yeah, a lot of this is just like people don't know the country, but sharine, yes, um so industrial. I mean like yeah for me, for me, someone that hasn't growed up in any agricultural area at all, and this is yeah, grain is like so it's like quicksand it sucks you in. It takes you to that bottom. If you don't spread out immediately, you're going down and

there's really no way to save somebody. It's stay stay the funk away the grain silos. Do not play around grain silos. With the grain silo. It is it is. It is killed entire families because people will try to save each other and then they get stucked down and it's it's pretty Yeah, it's bad when you have livestock livestock poop and sometimes that poop is super usful. Chicken ships one of the best fertilizers ever. You can make chicken ship very very useful. Pig shit is like nasty,

it's toxic. It is very hard to do anything. It's once it's in the ground long enough, it's a bio Well theoretically, if you were to like really care about it, you could you could make a use of it given enough time. But there's so many pigs because our hunger for bacon is insatiable that you wind up with this this massive tox of massive toxic sludge. So there's the chunk of the country in which most of the pigs

come from. There are these huge pig shit bogs that are like there are countries smaller than bogs of pigship that we have in the United States. And people die in them all the time. They get sucked down into the big ship or you suffocate because you get one of them bursts. I mean, there's so many weird things because it's a meth their methane and hydrogen sulfide since so it's just like bad things around farms all the time.

And that's just that's just farming and what we're ultimately what we are seeing here if you want to like actually analyze the thing that is happening, um with all of these conspiracies, it's it's what's called the frequency illusion, which is the idea that like if you've ever I don't know, if somebody when somebody like teaches, like you learn a new word, right, or you like you hear about a historic event, and then you keep seeing everywhere.

This is something that's an author that Garrison and I quite like Robert Anton Wilson played with a lot um. It's why, like twenty three is one thing you'll notice in like Hollywood movies and TV shows if you look out for they're fucking everywhere because a whole bunch of people who got into hollywo our fans of the same guy, and there's this conspiracy with the number of twenty three

people sticking. It's all over the fucking wire. It's in a bunch of ship um, and it's it's yeah, at the base of things like right, humans are paradelium, right, so we're looking for patterns and static that's what we do. It's part like in my mind, it's part of our like ancestral uh, you know, deep in the past protection, right, yeah, exactly, it's that, and it's how you look for monsters in the woods. You know, it's like when we're looking for

eyes in the dark. That's part of it. And so you know, we tend to find meaning in points and then try and connect them because that's how we work. And so this is a great example of this because it hasn't gone full Q level yet where it's just absurd to be absurd. The shield itself, like you can see where people are trying to pick together points that

normally are just industrial accidents. And know some of the stuff I saw early on before, like the cow death posts and the stuff related to climate change, what you really were seeing was people trying to make order out of what is just chaotic accidents and now and now yeah, yeah, no, it's it's it's something you rarely actually see in the cascade of you know, conspiracy theory like this so overtly, and it's been really interesting for me watching that because

you know, as someone who's far too into watching people melt their brains. Um. This this kind of lays out some of the ways that this works for all of us, UM and I think it also offers a roadmap in certain ways to like see past it and be able to correct it for yourself so you don't get into the same Oh, there are a thousand points a light here, let's fall all of them. Yeah, it's um one of

the things that's interesting. So we just called it the the recency bias or the frequency illusions, also the recency illusion, which is like the belief that things that you have like noticed only recently are a recent phenomena rather than things that go back a long time. There these are kind of inter related. But this, this sort of phenomena that we're seeing is often called the bottom mine off phenomena.

And that's so so the bottom I'm pretty yeah bottom the bottom mine Off group was a it's also called the German Red Army. Um, it was a Yeah, it was a West German terrorist organization from like seventy years ago. Like this is not a recent thing, but there was an article about them in like a Minnesota St. Paul newspaper in nineteen nine four that happened to be one of the first newspapers with an online comment page. Oh no, well yeah, so this is like you'll always here referred

to as the bottom minor phenomena. It has nothing to do with this terrorist group than the fact that one commenter on there saw an article about them um within a couple of hours of someone else in their life telling them about the group, and so they named it in the common section the bottom mine off phenomena because yeah, like it's it's which is an example of the phenomena UM.

But like that's it is. It is. It's a thing that people do for again good reason, Like like you said, like if you're a fucking hunter gatherer and you notice that like, oh, after a rainstorm is when the big cats come out and hunt. And like if somebody, if one of your friends gets eaten by like a tiger, it's probably after a rainstorm. You associate after the rainstorm with danger, which is like good, right, Like I live inside urban environments, the usually usually less. This becomes useful

as relating to more of our like instinctual practices. Yes, learning to recognize this like first step of delusion is really important UM decisions future, right, But I think it's much more similar than we realized to like how people think of religion, because even religions people are Yeah, like what you're saying is like there's so much chaos. People can't make sense of the world. And just like religion, you're trying to make order out of disorder, and you

look for signs, to look for patterns. It's like an element of magical thinking, where yes, you look for reasons that this has meaning, so I understand where they're coming from. And so the problem, again, the problem is not with your brain, because this is not like a bad thing your brain is doing. It's just a thing your brain is doing. The problem is that this is one of the easiest ways that bad faith actors can take advantage of you and other people. And so in terms of

protecting yourself and others from it. And again, one of the problems with this and one of the things that makes it so so much more difficult twenty years ago the batter mind how obviously the bottom mine how phenomenon is much of a thing is that dude in the fucking comments page that Minnesota paper proves. But there was less ship coming at you, so you kind of had even if you might get caught for a little bit and they're like, oh, is there something weird going on

with this this German terrorist group? Um, you kind of had the space in your head and the space in your media diet to like actually parse that out and calm down. But today it all comes with you with a flood. There's like three new fucked Supreme Court decisions. Oh and now all of the food factories are on fire and all of the chickens are dead, and this war in Ukraine is actually elevating the food prices, and

it all compounds on itself. If you when you start seeing something new like this come into your media diet that seems scary, one of the first things you should do is just try to get a handle on the raw numbers this Well, this is a complexity Yeah, you know, you know, this is a complexity issue. That's how I like to look at it. And that's exactly one of the great ways to to kind of get disrupt the complex nature of this and the amount of it you're

taking in is just to start breaking it down. Numbers are great, right, Like, if you can look and see their eighteen thou instances of industrial accidents leading to X, Y or z and five thousand fires, you start to really get yourself into a better position to understand what's

being thrown at you. Yeah, but I don't think most people can actually understand what those numbers mean, Like they're just like they're large numbers, But I don't think people understand like that means a lot of that stuff is happening versus just like one or two things you hear about and you don't realize probability wise that it's like insignificant because I don't think those numbers make sense. I

mean even to me sometimes I can't. I can't picture so many things, So I think it's I don't know, maybe it's just like a deficit and how our brains would you be able to understand why the numbers exist. But you can try to compare them two previous years, right, you can't exactly you can't expand what you relating to.

Right if you're if you're looking from here's everything from March to June two, you're like, whoa, this is a lot of stuff just in these few months that if you compare that to every preceding year for the past five years, like, oh, this actually isn't a regular this is this is this is still fucked up, but it's actually kind of normalized. Um, and it's not it's not an abnormal phenomenon right now. And so even if you can't like understand what the numbers are, you can still

compare them to previous things. But but yeah, I mean that does require more work than just like looking at a meme, right. And the reason why this stuff works is because people know how to exploit this part of our brains really well. Not not not not not in this part of this brain is useless, right, it has uses, um, you can play with it, but it's also is exploitable.

And and that's the thing that you wanna be aware of is trying to be cognizant of if the information you're taking in is exploiting this pathway and then choosing how how you want to be circumvent some of those mental effects exactly well. And we have such I mean, as humans, we have a real issue with this kind of brain hacking. And it's something we're just all kind of getting up to right now and understanding. And we

still don't fully understand some of this. But you know, I UM, a lot of the stuff I I kind of initially worked off of for the concept of weaponized unreality kind of talks about social engineering in the way that like freaking was done, and hacking back in the day was done, and this is so similar to that in certain ways that it's kind of shocking, right, Like it's a conspiracy, but it's also a management tool, and it's a it's a memory management and and you know,

ultimately a reality management tool and giving it numbers looking at context like that does take time, but some of these are like gonna gonna be hard and fast rules probably going forward to like interact with the digital world, because this is gonna be how it is for a

long while. There's a book that is kind of considered to be like the foundational text or at least strategic document Islamic State, called The Management of Savagery Um, and the title gives away what what you're doing, right, you're carrying out You're you're engaging in acts of savagery, terrorist attacks that that that kill innocent people, that are that exists to disrupt um the state that you're in in order to and you're attempting to like you're attempting to

build kind of a melieu of savagery, which then provides you the opportunity to take an exert power. And what we're seeing here is like the Management of cognitive biases, right, exactly, the management of like these weird little evolutionary holdovers in your brain. Um that that don't quite work in the modern world. But if you understand what what's happening, you can take advantage of them, and you can you can trick people into thinking things are happening that aren't. It's

the same, you know, you can see this. The right does this very effectively and a lot of the anti trans stuff they've been doing absolutely obviously with gay you know, if you look at the population trans and of gay people, some number of people in that community are going to do things that are bad, right, because it's a population of human beings, um, and because the country is large enough. If you get people hyper focused on here's a story,

here's another story, here's two, here's three stories. Now is that does that mean that there's any kind of actual systemic problem. No. Um, that community is no more likely to do things that are bad than any other community. But if you get people focused on each of those stories in their head, they feel like there's they feel like there's an epidemic, and like, well, we have to

get a handle. It's the same thing that that gets done with like Islamic terrorism right where it's like, yes, since nine eleven, actually not that many acts of Islamic terrorism in the United States, extremely fucking uncommon, much less common than right wing terrorism like homegrown terrorism. But the media doesn't really cover one of those kinds of terrorism and loves to cover the other. So you get people periodically tricked into thinking that they're under direct threat from

the Islamic state or whatever. The fun right, well, and I think it's you know, I think going to that point right like, it's almost U I mean, it's a reality filter, right, so, like it's a way to selectively filter out things that would counter the narrative that you're trying to overall push. And I think that that's something that's what's interesting me about this in a lot of ways is that we're seeing a filter being set up that only allows people into one lane of this thought.

And we've seen what the end result of that is with radicalization and things that come along with these kind of conspiracies. But it's really it's been very wild to watch since the you know, the nineteen April till now where we're seeing it. You know, Serovich is doing it every any one of the guys you can think was doing it. Yeah, exactly. Tucker ran a couple of things on this and kind of interspersed it with his you know,

white male virility ship. It's we're we're we're in a weird place where these are starting to be able to be played with and on each other, and that kind of filtering, you know, starts to get people onboarded from a conspiracy into you know, what we're seeing now is

kind of the white nationalist Christian nationalist movement. That's that's become that that thing, and you know, for me, that's where my interest stems from because of this idea of weaponizing on reality, seeing what happened in Russia when that happened, and seeing this kind of thing which is so similar to that filtering and that narrative shift and building that goes on in that world. It's it's been you know,

staring into a void feels bad. Sometimes this is just one where it's like, oh, this is terrible, and it's just the beginning of it. Every once in a while, the void stares back and you're like, oh boy, oh yeah no, And that's exactly I mean, that's uh, that's the problem is sometimes it just stars you right in the eyes and tells you, yeah, I'm here, and that's a bad feeling. Yeah, well, I think that's more or

less what we needed to talk. That would be like, you know, like one of the one of the ways to combat this, if you can, is honestly, creating your own memetic graphs is really useful because these things spread so fast when they're in images of dates and instances spread like wildfire. Um So if you can make your own which compares it to previous years, say hey, this actually isn't a new pattern, this is something that's this

is this is just what happens in industrial farming. I think spreading it via memetic images is one of the if there is a way to combat it, that's probably one of the core ways to go about it, just

to get how fast those things spread. Again, you can see I've seen some useful people have been trying to push back against, you know, this idea that there's been this like massive crime surge in San Francisco and stuff, and they it's uses the same tactics, Right, You have like a couple of videos of people shoplifting or something, and then you make a and and is there is that kind of crime actually up well no it really isn't, but like it doesn't matter because um or is it

any higher there than it is in some place like Duluth where no videos are coming out, like no it's not, but um it's uh. If you have to be aware, the first thing you have to be aware of is the phenomena is like the way in which they're taking advantage of you, and then you have to you have to kind of deter and you have to use the tactics they're using against them. And one of the things that is effective is these these graphs with kind of like numbers and dates and ship on them. People love

to feel like they're looking at research. But yeah, at the same time though not to not to be like, I don't know negative about this at all, but in my mind, this is like a modern day version of someone starting your religion and make people like making the sheep of a sl following and then having them turn into like whatever it is, whether it's Christian nationalism or whatever. But just like in religion, if people are presented with science, they don't care you know what I mean, you will

present them with like, I don't know. There's some people that I think are be it's it's it's it's not science. It's about everyone wants to have access to special, secret and secret knowledge. Everyone wants to have esoteric knowledge that no one else has. So these graphs are still compelling in the first place because you're like, oh, no one else knows all of these things. No one else has

laid it out in this manner. So if you can present your information in that same style, say, hey, no one knows that this is actually part of this overall thing that's been going on for years and it's about industrial farming, then you hope that that will spread. That then that spreads because because it infects the same point in someone's brain. Right want to we want to feel smart, we want to feel unique, we want to have like

esoteric knowledge. So if you can, if you can frame it to to fit that same mold, then it's not science. It's just playing with the same tactics that God them convinced of this in the first place, exactly. People, that's different. Yeah, I think I think Sharine, like it's true that like if somebody is a committed believer in in whatever, like like Mike Cernovitch or something, you're not convincing them the danger the thing that they're doing that's dangerous is there.

They're quote unquote pilling a lot of like random people into problems that scares those people. And when those people get scared, they're willing to accept ship they wouldn't otherwise scare. And I think those people you can push get to step down from the ledge because one thing we do

want this is also a problem. But like you think about like climate change, right, and how much of the denial of climate change is not based around getting people to reject the idea entirely, but getting like when people bring up a specific problem being like, well but look at this weird new piece of technology that some kid developed, and like this is going to fix it, and then

you get to not worry about it. Right, So if somebody suddenly starts speaking out about agricultural fires for the first time and you're like, actually, they're lower than they are in normal years, this isn't a problem, then maybe their brain, maybe you can get their brain to go like, Okay, that I won't worry about that because I don't want more things to worry about. I just have been given them. Um, that's targeting the ledge people we're talking. Yeah, you're not

getting to true believers. You're not getting to true believers at this point of any of this stuff for the most part. You know, that takes a wholly different level of work. I mean, that's that's in the ballpark in my mind of the radicalization, right, Like you're you're in a wholly different ballpark. And if you can target the people who are thinking about jumping into the pool too, they tend to if you do change their mind, they become some of the biggest proponents of trying to get

other people off the ledge that they might know. And that's something something well, it's something, yeah, it's it's it's it's very similar. And it's something I've seen even in my friends circles, you know, talk to people who five years ago, we're fully you know, in the all let's do Donald Trump for the lulls thing. You know. Now those are the same people who are telling their friends, oh shit, we have a Christian nationalist movement that's trying

to overthrow democracy. And that's a huge you know, like that's a huge help um to everyone. Right, you want more people saying the truth to people who might not hear it from someone like us um and can internalize it. And there's you know, the truth takes a lot more work than fiction, unfortunately, but once it starts to work, it's a compounding thing. And the truth tends to really

set people free. As corny as that is. If people find out they've been lied to, they get they want to know why it worked, and that works in our favor and the truth's favor, and reality is the thing we you know, we gotta protect this at all costs because we're getting title weight by unreality and that's a problem for all of us for different reasons. Let's the more uplifting note I think than a couple of minutes ago. Yeah, all right, well there there we go. Um go, I

don't know, fix it. Yeah, go fix things. Yeah, go fix things. Don't go swimming in grain silos, and uh, avoid grain silos. Always avoid grain silos. It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media, but more podcast from cool Zone Media. Visit our website cool zone Media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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