Friends and neighbors, fellow conspiracy realist. Back in twenty twenty, towards the very end of the year, guys, as we were gearing up for as we were gearing up for what they call Thanksgiving in the United States, we had a really deep conversation about natural disasters and revolution.
Yeah, when empires deal with something like a major flood and it destroys infrastructure, right, But then we've got historians, anthropologists, all these folks coming through trying to understand what happened to an ancient civilization, And often it's thought that it was a rival civilization, somebody that tried to just take over and raise a city.
Let's say, but what if it was just the weather slash, the climate slash, some disaster.
I was just saying to a really interesting interview with a famous production designer named Jack Fisk, who worked on on the recent Marty Supreme and a lot of Terrence
Malick movies. And he's just a really fascinating dude and a great historian because a big part of what he does as a production designer is look into historical references and photos and just understanding how to create the world of very specific times and history and he pointed out that at the end of the day, what makes the most perfect storm no pun intended circumstances for a revolution is when people can no longer feed their children, is when people can no longer have the things they need
to survive. Not ideology that's almost like a luxury. We are talking about situations, circumstances that lead people to revolt because they are not able to live.
And as we find in tonight's classic episode, multiple investigations with the benefit of retrospect have found a troubling correlation that not all revelations are falls or rises of empires are necessarily the fault of the humans involved. That's so nuts. Like the natural world, you might be one hurricane away from living in a different country. That's what we're talking about.
Whoa's roll it.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeart Radio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nolan.
They call me Ben. We're joyed as always with our super producer Paul Mission Control. Decades most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. We've got a real optimistic one today, my friends. We're talking about the hazard of natural disaster.
And this was inspired in part by some earlier conversations we had on and off air, but most recently it was inspired by a moment in our episode on the Bronze Age collapse where we found that several different scientists propose a volcanic eruption in Iceland, of all places, may have played a direct role in that that collapse that went across multiple large civilizations. And one of the questions we asked is how could this have such a tremendous impact on these civilizations?
Yeah, it's a real Who done it? It turns out it was people?
Yeah, well, well people were the ones in the end who you know well to who would hold a weapon
and attack right someone? But where we're looking at the root causes of what what made those people decide that it was the correct time to attack a city, to revolt to a good point, and it has all you know, it kind of harkens back to a couple other episodes ben that we did in the past, so specifically thinking about the solar activity and mass excitability and humans how we react to solar changes, as well as the episode Can Weather Make You Crazy, where we looked at how
weather itself can affect our minds and our moods and our decision making. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on.
Here and that's one of that's still one of my favorite titles of a show we've done. I think it was we called the Solar Excitability one Slaves to the Sun, which sounds like a nineteen seventies band or maybe.
Like a.
Oh what's what's that Australia.
Group Anti Donna?
Yeah, oh no, Silver Empire of the Sun. Yes, their album would be Slaves to the Sun. But you guys are right, and there are other examples of this. But first we need to examine what we mean when we say natural disaster. So here are the facts.
Really quickly, just as a caveat. This isn't a leaf blower today, folks. But there is a small screaming child in my house. So if you hear that, just know knowing it's okay, everything's fine. My daughter is babysitting for her little sister in the other room, and I don't have the heart to go down there and tell them to keep it to pipe down. I'm gonna text them shush, see what happens. But just wanted to put that out there.
Speaking of natural disasters, I'm just kidding. Your child is just natural disaster.
She is an unnatural abomination. That is what she is.
Okay, So back to natural disasters. We all use this phrase all the time, and we have a pretty good sense of what it means. It's a catastrophic event that comes from the natural processes of planet Earth. Earth was doing this stuff all the time. We only call it a disaster because it's bad for humanity. It's still you know,
we're a very small piece of this. This includes all the stuff you've heard before, all the biblical fire and brimstone things, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and so on.
Yeah, even wildfires can be put in there, especially if they are caused by lightning and drought conditions. And in previous episodes, we've explored humanity's ongoing conflict with these things that we consider natural disasters, including the question of whether or not in the past, at some point we have found a way to harness these things to send them out against a country with which we are having conflict, right, or whether or not we can to harness the weather
in some other way for a good purpose. And you know, you may remember cloud seeding as something we explored, even how something that doesn't seem connected to this topic, like fracking can actually cause things like earthquakes, and you know that's some creepy stuff.
Well, and I was being a smart alec at the top of the show and I said, it's a who done It turns out it was people. I was just, you know, winking and nodding at climate change. I mean, you can call it a natural disaster all day long, but the activities of humans, to a varying degree depending on which scientist you ask, probably has something to do with the frequency of these natural disasters.
That's all frequency and severity, right, Yes, so it goes.
I would be careful with the word harness, however, because harness could mean a couple of things. It could mean opportunism after a disaster strikes, and it could mean to the extreme degree, which I think we've proven fairly conclusively, manufacturing of disaster. I would point to cloud seeding operations on the US side in the Vietnam War as a weaponized weather. That's an example of creating natural disasters in that case, specifically flooding. And to the point about fracking
that you make mat which I greatly appreciate. We don't have evidence that someone purposefully created earthquakes with fracking, but we do have evidence that fracking has an unforeseen side effect, which is increasing the likelihood of earthquakes by a measurable amount.
Yeah, I think. I think by using hardness, I was going back to some of the allegations about Tesla and building a machine that could actually create an earthquake that we looked at a long time ago.
Yeah, Wordcliff Tower is related to that, I believe. And you know, the thing about Tesla that still bugs me is what happened to his notes after he passed away. You know, that's the big, big piece of that conspiracy. So here's something that a lot of people throughout history have had a big problem with in the world of natural disasters. It's this, natural disasters are non discriminatory. A hurricane doesn't just hit the poor zip codes, you know
what I mean. An earthquake doesn't not shake a church or a mansion. It shakes everything that it hits, so we as humans just simply try to survive when these things strike, get ourselves back together and sol draw on. It reminds me of something. I can't remember which show I talked about this honor or whether it was just us hanging out off air, but it reminds me of how humbling birds are for humanity. Think about it. We have so much technology. We can take people to the Moon.
For Pete's sake, we are gone to as a spe ses accomplish our first round trip to an asteroid, which started in twenty sixteen. Just landed took a sample of an asteroid. It'll be back in twenty twenty three. But there's one thing we can't do. We can't stop birds from crapping on things. We haven't figured it out. The closest technology we have for that is either eradicating birds, which I know you're on board with NOL, or building roofs. So the natural.
Umbrellas you know, the umbrella is a second, A strong second.
I feel like an umbrella is a portable roof.
Absolutely. Do you know what when you put it like that, you got me well, and there are there are specific things you can put on let's say, railings in other places that will prevent birds from landing there, or will discourage birds from landing in certain areas.
Yeah, you see them in like subway stations or signage for storefronts and strip malls and things like that. They're like little.
Spikes, but that can't stop from the poop from coming out.
Oh streets our example too, because when we think about that building, those deterrents on benches or statues, or the eaves of roofs and buildings, it's a lot like the way we would try to build levees, right, we try to shore up a coastline. We can't stop a hurricane anymore than we can stop birds from pooping everywhere. We can only try to mitigate the disaster and the potential aftermath.
So that's why the bulk of scientific research into natural disaster it doesn't really it doesn't really hinge on how we can stop these historically, It hinges on how we can predict when these unavoidable events will occur. You know what I mean?
Yeah, no, absolutely, Yeah, there's no way to stop that volcano from erupting currently, unless you know, you toss a nuke down there and just classify the whole situation, which you know is an option I guess at some point. And every time it happens, we're seeing especially this year, my goodness, we are seeing it in the United States happen time and time again. A terrible natural disaster occurs.
We have somewhat of an outlook on it. We know it's coming for at least a week, few days, maybe, especially with the hurricanes that have been just pummeling the Gulf Coast in other areas, and it rolls through, power goes out for a lot of people, People lose their
homes to terrible tragedies on a personal human level. And then as a whole, society picks itself up as much as it can, allocates disaster funds as much as it can, and as much as the governments of various states and other places localities will allow, and then we just keep going until another one.
Hits yep, and we hope that we can use our previous experience to better handle these once again unavoidable could catastrophees. It's it sounds pretty fatalistic, right. It's an existential crisis of some sort. We're always as humans dealing with natural disaster. We have a lot in common with the story of Sisyphus.
We just keep rolling that great stone we call civilization to the top of a hill to watch it fall back down again and start from square one, pick ourselves up, stumble along, and we still, you know, try to build things that will last. There's something beautiful about that when we consider that all of civilization is a lot more like one of those meditative Buddhist sand paintings than we would like to suppose. It gets wiped away so easily, you know.
I recently rewatched the anime film Akira, which is all about the destruction of Tokyo and rebuilding of Neo Tokyo, and it's really fair. Thing is I watched a little mini documentary about how Japanese culture and their attitude toward technology and their pop culture and in anime and their film world is very much driven by the fact that they were in large places blown up, you know, by the United States with the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
And what an interesting cultural benchmark to affect the way you think about technology, especially having to completely kind of rebuild society and rely very heavily on technology, but also kind of fear it in a weird way. I thought that was a really interesting point in the documentary.
Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard that line of reasoning before. I think it's I think it's a really compelling theory that has a lot of sand to it. We see in there a microcosm of a larger historical trend, you know, and it's one that continues today. It's one that is not going to stop. Every single year, natural disasters wreak billions upon billions of dollars worth of damage across this planet.
The wealthy, the poor alike, any religion, any any set of values doesn't matter when the hurricane or the tsunami comes calling. In fact, they have brought so much damage that it's difficult to estimate the exact cost. There's one stat that's interesting and still just a ballpark. From nineteen eighty five to nineteen ninety four, studies show that natural
disasters cost about thirty six billion dollars a year. Now, from two thousand and five to twenty fourteen, the damage inflicted is around one hundred and forty two billion dollars. So that means a couple of things. If we want to unpack it. First, it means that we have more stuff to wreck, right. We also have more inflation in general, that's a trend, So we just have more potential or more I guess liability or risk people might call it.
But secondly, it means that things are increasing. Inflation alone cannot explain this cost, and studies indicate the damage wrought by natural disasters may go much much further than a financial bottom line.
But what if revolutions are caused not just by human factors, but somehow guided by the planet itself. Well, we're going to talk about that very thing after a quick word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. So are we accusing Earth itself of conspiring defoement revolution? Yes, it sounds I mean, yeah, we are. It might sound preposterous, But the scary thing is this does seem to be the case. There's a fascinating paper about this very thing. It's called Natural Disasters and the Risk of Violent Civil Conflict by researchers Philip Nell and Margaline Righarts.
Yes, and in this study they argue that the occurrences of natural disasters such as an earthquake maybe or a volcanic eruption, maybe a flood, let's say a hurricane, anything really anything at all, a heat wave, an epidemic, massive forest fires, a plague, all of this stuff. Whenever there's something like that occurring, it is going to increase the possibility of some kind of violent conflict within society, or at least the the risk of something like that occurring.
And at first you think, no, there's no way those things could be connected, but then you start going down just go, just go down the pathways of your mind a little bit and imagine how much tension something like that causes within a society and everything from any kind of government, religious, whatever, whatever the controlling powers are, and the people as well as the people with each other,
the inner conflicts. It's it makes so much sense when you if you allow yourself to really to think about it. I don't know what I'm saying.
Bah wait, but wait, guys, aren't we in the middle of a disaster and uh uprising or fine?
Everything's fine, everything's fine.
It feels like you just describe what's going on in our world literally right now. I'm just okay, all right, I'm gonna let it go.
Arguably, humans are the disaster, uh if you look at the planet overall, which I know sounds sanctimonious. So let's say the disasters that are humans. I like where you're going though, Matt, Could you trace this out because are you saying there's some sort of pattern?
Perhaps I'm saying there's definitely a pattern, you guys, if you take a look at the study, or at least what they did for this study. They took data from one hundred and eighty seven political units from the year nineteen fifty to two thousand, and they were just going through and systematically exploring the relationship between natural disasters, occurrences of any natural disaster, and violent uprisings or civil civil conflict within a society. Right, how do these things work together?
And they found something pretty terrifying. We've actually got a quote from it right here.
Yes, it says natural disasters significantly increase the risk of violent civil conflict both in the short and medium term, specifically in low and middle end countries that have intermediate to high levels of inequality jeez. Okay, mixed political regimes jeez, and sluggish economic growth. Rapid onset disasters related to geology and climate seem to pose the highest overall risk, but different dynamics apply it to what they call minor and major conflicts.
So let me let me walk us back here for a second. There are some important things political units. That's an umbrella term, or I guess for this show, it's a portable roof term. It describes everything from a local tribe or a community to something like the British Empire, you know what I mean. And that is where we see the different dynamics they're sketching out to what they would call minor and major conflicts, so like a regional, short lived conflict between two tribes or a major multi
party conflict like World War two or something. And of course, yes, their study only goes back to nineteen fifty, so this is post World War two. But we know from previous episodes and from a wealth of other research that this is at best a cover version of a very old original song of terror and heartbreak. We looked at earlier civilizations,
ancient civilizations that mysteriously disappeared for centuries. People thought, well, maybe this group of highly advanced people just left this metropolis they worked so hard on because they got tired of it. Maybe they just said, you know what, it's time for a new chapter. But later studies have shown that disaster plays a huge role in this. Like what's the example of Khmer Empire in modern day Cambodia. There's this beautiful former metropolis called Angkor Watts, which you can
visit today. For a very long time, people didn't know exactly why ankor Watt went into decline, but now we're pretty sure that it collapsed due to prolonged drought. The weather changed, and when the weather changed, the people had to change their routine and their lives and the rules of the governing system at that time, those rules no longer applied because they were not able to address the problems people were having, and so the empire collapsed.
Yes, yeah, no, that's that's a really great point. Well, and you know, we talked about this. We keep mentioning of the Bronze Age collapse something like that, where we we thought, or the belief was that somehow this volcanic eruption way over in Iceland had something to do with it. And as we explored it, we realized that it's not just because a volcano exploded, Like the volcano exploding it in itself is not what caused the revolutions and the
uprisings to occur. It was almost like dominoes were set up for collapse to occur. They're all just sitting there waiting for something to knock them all down. And that volcano just went up boot And we're gonna get into
more details about that here in just a moment. But the the you know, one of the first things we need to talk about is the limited lifespan over you know, the past several millennia of a civilization, of a large civilis, especially of an empire, something large and unwieldy, and we've seen some things in the past, We've looked at it, but it's, uh, there's this tendency for empires, for big ones, the collapse a bit of a bit of a schedule. There, a bit of a cycle that happens.
Some people would argue that's the case. Yeah, you can. You can read studies that attempt to treat empires like natural disasters in the following ways. They assume that empires are unavoidable and that the collapse of empires is also likewise unavoidable. And so if these two assumptions hold true, then researchers find themselves attempting to do the same thing that scientists concerned with disaster do. They ask themselves, how can we predict this, how can we model it? How
can we mitigate the collapse of a civilization. That's where we come into the varying theories that civilizations may have some sort of expiration date. You know, one of the numbers that we hear thrown around pretty often is something like two hundred, two hundred and fifty years. That should really bother every US resident in the audience today, because the US celebrated its bicentennial in nineteen seventy six.
Hey, but we're not an empire, right, It's not like we've got troops stationed all over the planet and control a bunch of other territories. Wait a second, I want.
To really quickly the idea of empires being inevitable.
Is that sort of just a.
Product of like human nature and never having enough and just the idea that someone's eventually gonna slide into an empire building role just out of here, you know, megalomania? Or is it a matter of like organization of society and making sure everyone has everything they need. Because I feel like civilization and empires aren't the same thing true.
There have been a lot of very uncivilized empires. Kidding with that one. Yeah, it's an excellent question, Noel. So you will find the argument that empires do not exist in the modern day, that instead we are a somewhat conflicted global group of one hundred and ninety something countries, right, and that those countries maybe nations, They may be civilizations, they are not empires. We were talking about this off air. However, I would argue that empires haven't gone away, they have evolved.
A corporation can function the way that an empire does, right. A financial institution of a large enough size also functions as an empire, so we.
Could almost call them like shadow empire is in some way interesting.
And this goes into what we would define as an empire. And I know that there are a lot of pr departments in various corporations, maybe not in iHeart that would object to being defined as an empire. An empire is technically a large group of states or countries under a single authority. So the UN is not an empire because it doesn't have the powers of action and oversight that
a single a single ruling force would have. But the British empire was an empire because technically speaking, if the monarch said I want to destroy this nation in the Commonwealth, or i've you know, I've never been to India, but they should do what I say, then that's an empire. And banks can do that.
And there is a great article you can read on this specific subject. It's on foreign policy. It's called Empires with Expiration Dates. Fantastic, creepy article from two thousand and nine. We'd recommend it. But there's a quote from that article that I want to read right now, which I think
applies to all of this quote. An empire sick will come into existence and endure so long as the benefits of exerting power over foreign peoples exceed the cost of doing so in the eyes of the imperialists, and so long as the benefits of accepting dominance by a foreign people exceed the costs of resistance in the eyes of the subjects. So it no mystery there. But just think
about it, and again it makes so much sense. But maybe when we're in the midst of struggling for the every day, we forget this concept that if the system that's set in place of control and power, it doesn't work for everybody at least to an extent, you're going to have problems with the subjugated.
Essentially true, and that applies, I mean, that's a macro level view. I would argue it applies to the micro level of individual human psychology. We are programmed, arguably hardwired to avoid change until the pain of change becomes less than the pain of the status quo.
Right.
That's honestly, that's where rock bottom is described as sometimes And now the question is do empires hit a rock bottom? And I love that you bring up this quote, Matt, because it clearly, it clearly points to that cost benefit analysis that happens for every individual on any given date, and ultimately for every nation, every civilization, every what do we call it? Political unit? Here we go, that's the umbrella.
So now that we have this, we know that historically there is a correlation, a dark butterfly effect, right of an eruption and a country people have never visited leading to the collapse of their day to day lives of civilization. We have to ask ourselves where are we in media arrests here because we're part of this story, and that means that it's on us to figure out what happens as disasters accelerate? What are we talking about. We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor. So back to
natural disaster's fall of civilization. There's a huge elephant, an enormous badger in the global bag or the room, and it's simply this. If we have compelling evidence that natural disasters can lead to violent revolution, then what can we extrapolate from this information in a world where the frequency of some natural disasters is provably inarguably accelerating.
So just to kind of break it down a little bit, if floods and famine lead to violence and instability, and floods and famine both seem set to happen, then we can assume violence and instability in turn will accompany it. That is the hypothesis here, and it would seem it is a correct hypothesis at least based on these patterns that we've been looking at. So a topical paper from the Independent Evaluation of Asian Development Bank. Then I believe you gave this one high marks for its awkward name,
but high levels of rigor and its research. This paper showed that climate related disasters are indeed on the rise, specifically as such and here's a quote from the paper Intense climate related disasters. Floods, storms, droughts, and heat waves have been on the rise worldwide. At the same time and coupled with an increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, temperature on average has been rising, have been Temperatures have been rising and are becoming this yes, enmeshed,
and are becoming more variable and more extreme. I think even just observationally, we've all seen that here in Georgia, summers are hotter, winters feel colder from year to year. I don't think there's any question about that. Just from like going outside, Temperatures on average have been rising and are becoming more variable and more extreme. Rainfall has also been more variable and more extreme. And it goes on to consider some main risk factors behind these these observable features.
Yeah, one of the biggest problems is so many people live near a coast, and when you've got natural disasters, many of them being generated you know, out in the ocean and then making their way in, that's a problem when there's so many people concentrated along the shores of that ocean. That is a especially in the especially in the case of hurricanes. You've got a hurricane generator. It's just out there a little bit and you're right next to it.
Oh yeah, and then and then consider So there's important point in this examination this paper the phrase more variable and more extreme. Right, having too much water can be as dangerous as not having enough. We we're seeing ongoing
transformation of ecosystems, right, desertification of some areas. But then we're also seeing areas transform in terms of monsoon frequency and cadence, which is enormously dangerous because these are, to your point, Matt, heavily populated areas historically in the span of human civilization in the first few seasons. Of course, you want your characters to live by a coast. There are immense resources there, and now that's coming back to
bite us. So there is rising population exposure. There's also greater population vulnerability with If you are listening to this the year that we recorded in twenty twenty, then the odds are that you are going to be alive when regions of Earth become uninhabitable without technology, and we're going to see a rise of a new kind of inequality.
Climate change will not really be an argument. It will be something that people all acknowledge, and people who deny it will be seeing the way that folks look at flat earthers today. People will be talking more about climate in equality because think about this, all right, So the Middle East big, like the empty quarter of Saudi Arabia, inhospitable, already very very hot, very arid. It's tough to live there without technology. Right, It's tough to live in a
lot of places in the Middle East without technology. Now, consider that the temperature increases that we're reaching, like the what's called the wet bulb temperature increases. That means that the temperature is so hot that your insides are essentially cooking and will and you will be dead within hours if you are outside. What does this mean for the people who can afford air conditioning versus the people who cannot.
It is literally a matter of life and death. And it will happen within your lifetime, hopefully not to you, hopefully not to any of your loved ones. But the math is there, and the math is frightening. The next question, what does this mean for everybody? Because you might think, just like the people back during the Late Bronze Age, even if they were aware of iceland, which I don't think they were. But you may think, well, I live
in I live in Chicago or something. I live in the interior of Canada, so I don't have to really worry about rising coastlines, and if the temperature rises, it'll still be livable because the area where I live is seasonally very cold. The problem still exists because if these predictions are correct, then the next several decades may well be defined by periods of widespread, violent conflict. You know
what I mean. You don't have to be in an uninhabitable part of Florida for your for your day to day life to be affected by the collapse of the United States. I'm being very dystopian. I'm not saying that'll happen.
Well, you you are being dystopian, but it's also almost it's almost the cold hard facts of what will happen if we can we continue to see a rise in the variability and extreme nature of the natural disasters that are headed our way. Because we're not just talking about flooding, We're not just talking about drought. We're talking about not being able to grow crops and not being able to
feed everyone. And it doesn't matter if there's a Kroger or a what uh piggly wiggly down the street from you, if there are no suppliers of food getting food to that pigley wiggly.
But why the the aversion to accepting climate science, Like if this literally means the downfall of civilization as we know it. Even people in power and giant corporations that seem to be the ones that are pushing for these kinds of deregulations to sell more you know, oil or whatever, even that seems short sighted because if there's no people that are alive to drive cars, you know, who's going
to buy their product? Like the whole focusing on today rather than tomorrow just seems obviously it's unsustainable, but just seems shortsighted, even in a greed way, like don't you want to make more money off people? Shouldn't we figure out how to sustain this crazy thing we call the human race so that we can keep selling them.
It's a cost benefit analysis for sure, because there are several conspiracies here. First, many multinational conglomerations knew about this, They knew it was coming right, They even funded some of the studies that proved it to be the case. And then they just didn't talk about it. Instead, they quietly began working on new revenue streams.
Right.
We it's tough because we're asking about self interest, and whenever we ask about self interest, we have to remember that every human being is capable of very dangerous things. And one of the biggest, most dangerous things that every human being is capable of is phenomenal rationalization. It's a mental Parker, Right. No one thinks they're the bad guy.
I'm the you know, like I'm one of those Captain Planet Villain CEOs and I'm saying, well, really, what I'm doing is helping everybody, if you think about it, right, And that's exactly That's exactly what happens. And it only works as long as those institutions are considered effective. Right, So, in terms of a corporation or company, the institution is
considered effective if it remains profitable. So once it becomes less profitable for these kind of like mad cap adventures to continue, then of course they're going to turn their sales and head to a different direction. What's happening now To answer your question directly, in my opinion, this is
just my opinion. It's happening now as far as denial of climate science is a conspiracy because the people who funded the studies that revealed a lot of these problems went on to fund Burnet's level PR campaigns to denigrate anybody who was pointing out the facts or to shift the blame at the very least, when we talked about plastics and the idea ever cycling, this all PR to shift the blame and the responsibility to consumers.
Yeah, and shout out to our episode with Amy Westervelt where we went into depth on on this very subject. Check that oen out if you want to learn more about that. What Ben was speaking about the companies knowing and willingly uh forgetting that those studies exist, their own studies that they were funding.
Wait, what's that?
It reminds you there's a quote I saw online recently. It was pretty great. It was just a fake headline where it said, h you can leave the door open a little bit according to new study by mosquitoes. We didn't write that, but that's like, you know, cats can have a little slammy according to new study.
Bys just for a treat, just for a tree.
Yes, yeah, that's where we're at, you know, and these conspiracies are there are conspiracies that we can then logically assume are occurring because the powers that be or the forces that we're aware of this before the average Jane or John or Joe or whatever. Those forces are planning
in self interest. There are plans to make sure that these folks or their institutions, or their loved ones or what have you, are able to find a livable place that they do always have clean water and ac And I don't think we should have a problem with that. I just think it should apply to everybody. And maybe that's Pollyanna or whatever. But the truth of the matter is, we are going to see, we are already seen. We
are going to see a massive rise in migration. People like the ones you mentioned, Matt, the populations living in the equator, living on coastlines, are going to desperately search for an escape from increasingly uninhabitable regions of the world. And the governments in place, and you know what, let's throw in, throw in the the corporations, let's throw in whatever kind of governing structure you want. The ones that are in place, many will be rendered either powerless, corrupt,
or ineffective in combating this. And when those institutions erode, We're going to lose faith in authority. Why why should I? Why should I pay taxes? The world's burning down.
I already got to feel that way. I don't feel like I get much benefit from the tax that I pay, you know, in terms of direct impact in my day to day life. You know, I still have garbage healthcare, you know. I mean, I don't want to sound like some kind of bleeding heart liberal comedy or something like that, but I honestly don't know where my tax money goes, and it certainly doesn't seem to go anywhere that actually helps me or my family.
That's interesting that you say that and old because what we we have seen historically through some really interesting studies and an article that was published in Ours Technica about some studies that we're looking at that correlation that we've been talking about this whole episode natural disasters and how violence erupts because of or as a partial effect of
that natural disaster. We've seen that the way a government or a governing institution responds to a natural disaster and the effects of it can have a may It can play a major role in the outcome. Even if there is a violent conflict that begins that response can temper it, stop it, or full nent it.
Can we just address the elephant in the room real quick. I mean, is a virus a natural disaster? So sure we're in this and and and the way the government is or is not handling this, and the people's positions on how it was or was not handled is going to have an impact.
Well, yeah, Matt, Matt brought this up at the top with that definition of what is a natural disaster, It's always been an epidemic or a pandemic. And again, the only option that human beings have is generally going to be to respond an attempt to mitigate. Matt, your note brings up two examples. I think we talked a little bit about this off air. There's an example in ancient Egypt. There's an example in a relatively recent US history. Well, you know, all US history is relatively recent so far.
FDR attempting to mitigate the Great Depression unquestionably did some dictator stuff. It's just true. It doesn't matter if you love him or hate him. He did a lot of good things, and he did a lot of things that were governmentally speaking illegal. If we look at older examples. Then we see a really compelling one in Egypt during
the forties and the thirties BCE. We see a government response to mass starvation, to plague, to run away inflation which people have always hated apparently, and Cleopatra queen like, yes, that Cleopatra was instrumental in quelling a revolt. She quelled this revolt that was, you know, inarguably caused in part by natural disaster. She quelled it not by killing all the protesters or something like that. She quelled it by going I guess, I guess we would say she went protectionist.
I guess we could say, by our modern framework, which doesn't really apply, we could say that she took actions that would be described as socialists. So she was both with authoritarian and socialists at the same You see what I'm saying, Like it's it's weird to put those boxes in. But she offered grain relief, like gave people free food. And then she banned all exports of food, which is cute.
Like imagine someone saying that. Imagine someone saying, like the US or China or any country, guatemalaut baton, whatever, people wouldn't ban food exports.
Well, yeah, absolutely, not, because again you're talking about money coming in, and what's the difference between money and grain, right, you can eat grain, you got to trade that money for something. And if everybody that you have direct connection to is dealing with drought conditions or in their in their case, it was natural disasters that caused the Nile River to not flood as much, so so that those floodwaters generally would be used to make the ground fertile
for growing things. And when those floodwaters weren't coming in, it's very difficult to grow things, almost impossible in a lot of places. And if you've got a stack of cash and no grain and nobody's got grain, then you're out of luck. So it was actually a really smart thing to do. And I love what you're talking about there, Ben, just how interesting it is to consider it a socialist move, but how smart it was and how it was really the only thing you could do. We've got grains here,
it's just we the state essentially controls them. And do we hold those for future need or power or do we begin doling them out and helping everyone.
Well, full dystopian scenario like the coasts of the country, like fall into the sea, or become uninhabitable, and those people start going inland, but we can't sustain them. We don't have enough supplies to sustain them or enough infrastructure sustain them. Do we like wall them out?
Like?
What, what's the worst case scenario in that situation?
Well, how how far down the barrel do you want to go?
Man, it's it's a medium dystopia. But this is a thing like, we can't there isn't another California to put California in, you know, And if you can't live there, where do you go?
Well, it would in the case of the US, it would require a dramatic fundamental change in the policy of the country, and maybe not maybe not a good one because I want to be clear with that Egyptian example from thousands of years ago. I'm not coming out and saying like socialism would be the answer, because God knows, there were a lot of a lot of countries that did go full socialist and it did not work out. We still haven't found the best solution for managing large
groups of people. The medium dystopian would be something like, Okay, let's say parts of the southwest, parts of the southeast become uninhabitable without the constant implementation of technology. You always have to have the ac or you will die something like that. So those people have to move somewhere. Let's make it medium high dystopia and say that also the San Andreas fault goes, and so we have one of the most populous states in the country turned into a
chaotic disaster zone. All of those people from those three areas we just name, they have to go somewhere. The good news for the US is that it has a huge, relatively sparsely populated interior. So if we're just thinking like rules and red tape aside, where those people go. They go inland and they begin to populate places like South Dakota or North Dakota, you know, which only have a population in the hundreds of thousands.
Right now, that's a really good point, Ben, I was thinking of that in the back of my mind. But okay, well that's I like that that. I mean, obviously we don't want the fault to erupt or whatever, but I like the at least people aren't gonna just drown or be walled out in no man's lands.
But the migration is only half the battle. I mean, I hate going back to this all the time. But then food and water are your priorities. And you know, if you're talking about problems with water. We've discussed before the water wars that are inevitable that are headed our way. If you look at something as recent as the past I think month in a couple parts of Mexico where
there are disputes between water trade. Essentially that's happening between the United States and Mexico where certain areas of Texas and water to Mexico, certain areas of Mexico send water
to Texas. And very recently we're gonna hopefully talk about this in an upcoming episode, but a group a group of farmers went to a dam in Mexico and took over the dam and they prevented water in the river from flowing to Texas so that they could keep it because they were experiencing drought they needed water.
Wellack, we have that with in Georgia, with the tri state water wars with Alabama and Florida. We've been seeing those conflicts for years. Well yeah, only one river.
Yeah, but in this case, we're talking about farmers who armed themselves to go take over a dam, right, yeah, Well, that's what we're talking about here though, violent conflict, where where on the individual level the decision is made if I do not act, myself or my family is in jeopardy.
That's really what we're getting to here. That's when if the individual is deciding that, and there are enough individuals, it becomes an uprising of a sort, or a revolt or a revolution, or you know, fighting back against something that is seen as deciding to wield control over a group. Right, it's just it's scary.
We also we also, in this medium spicy dystopian scenario, would inevitably see regardless of which country this occurred in, we would inevitably see a rise in militarism. Maybe not for the reasons you think. First yes, obviously to protect against adjacent countries invading for increasingly sparse resources. But secondly, because it's a solid job for people to get. It provides shelter, it provides food, it provides a degree of safety from whatever crazy social programs will be instituted.
Right.
And then the next thing we'll see, of course, which we're already seeing, is dehumanization of people based on their location. Right, So like it has happened, It's not some nuts theory and it's not left wing or right wing. Like. Think about I'm sure I'm sure many of us listening you had to read the Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck based on real events, right think about how dehumanized the
people from Oklahoma were. The whole reason they were treated is less than human was because they were from Oklahoma at a time when being from Oklahoma sucked. They were called okie's not people.
It's hard to wrap my head around that.
It is.
Indeed, hey, shut out to all you okies out there.
Oh gosh, well, Oklahoma is a is a beautiful state. Honestly, I would I don't know, guys, I'm mistraveling. Should we try to get back on the road before the collapse of civilization? This is such an optimistic episode. We're past the tipping point. Disasters are on the rise. The only question now is the same questions as the talking heads would say, same as it ever was, how will humanity respond?
What should we do?
We've seen a bunch of different We seen a bunch of different good faith attempts to preserve empires, civilizations, community units during times of natural disaster, which we are in. We have not seen anything that's one hundred percent successfully reproducible. And that counts the far left stuff, the far right stuff, the crazy absolute power monarch just doing weird things. We don't have an answer, and we are standing on the train tracks, arguing often semantic in public discourse, while the
train is coming for us and not slowing down. Okay, we need a positive note to end this.
On Oh, Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping the.
Place, bens and the way, and then when the rain.
No droughts not.
That's okay, y'all went fine, Oklahoma, Oklahoma.
Okay, that's a perfect actually perfect thank you guys made my day. First, if you're listening, if you enjoyed that half as much as I did, then I think I think this may be a high point of your day.
We want to know what you think. By the way, are you someone who has figured out a response to these things? Again, people too often get mired down in misleading labels and discourse. Natural disasters do not care really about any your personal information and your beliefs. They do not matter.
Really.
The only thing it matters immediately is your location. But then as we see past a certain threshold, your location doesn't super matter either. You'll still be affected. So what are the answers? We're asking for help?
Yeah, help us save you know, humanity. Okay, you can find us and write to us and give us your thoughts in many a place across the internet. Firstly, we are on Facebook and Twitter at Conspiracy Stuff. On Instagram, we are at Conspiracy Stuff show.
Yes, and you also could find us on our favorite place on the internet, the Here's where it gets Crazy Facebook group, where all you have to do is answer a simple question, which is the naming one or two or three or anybody associated with the show. Ben always says, you can also just make us laugh, and I say, you can make a reference to something, let us know you're not a Russian bot. Whenever we approve people coming into the group, these go away, and occasionally we'll all
screenshot the ones that we think are noteworthy. This one here, Matt Ben nole, security should be fixed. I was using Spanish knowing that Matt's wife is Cuban and that it might be indecipherable to a hacker or bot.
Wow. Nice, How did you know that? Have I talked about that?
This is actually?
How much do people know about my life?
Too much?
Oh?
Are you not on the blog. Do you not read the blog anymore?
I see it sometimes. I try to stay off of Facebook, as I hope you do. But if you don't and you do like Facebook, then go there. That's the right place to go.
The blog is watchmatt Sleeping dot org. It is a nonprofit.
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I mean, I knew there were cameras all over the house. Uh my phone was bugged.
But geez, you didn't know about this one, did you?
Baby? Thanks You guys really means a lot.
Yeah, man, Yeah, we just want to keep an eye on you. The NSA intern Steve gave us that idea. Uh, so shout out to him. Uh And if you don't want to uh interact on social media, as Matt said, we one percent get it. You can give us a call toll free. I remember when people used to say toll free, back when there were tools like that. Anyway, we're in totll free. We're one eight three three st d wytk uh speak your piece, speak your mind, give us suggestions for topics. React to this topic. Uh, you
know the time is yours, conspiracy realist. The only thing we ask is that you let us know whether or not you are comfortable with us using your name or your voice on the air.
That's right, hey, And guess what I have the best news for you all. The YouTube channel is going strong right now. You will see new videos posted there all the time. And by the way, this weekend, as we're recording this, we realized that our documentary short, one called etchten Secret the Georgia Guidestones, was just hanging out on the old YouTube channel, and guess what, we published it. And if you want to watch that, you can head over to YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff right now.
You can watch Nol's face talk about the Georgia guidestones and you can hear Ben's sweet voiceover that you've been missing. You can hear it right now. Just go to YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff.
Dare we say, bearded face and dulcet tones.
And while you're there, I tell you what's been making my day on that in particular, is the all the crow comments, all the corvid not COVID stories from ore a weird news piece which was really just an excuse for me to talk about crows. But cherry crow stories.
You guys, I speaking of crow stories I dropped my son off at school this morning. Yeah, and as I'm leaving, I'm going through a little neighborhood to get out of the school area, a massive group of crows corvids. They were hanging out in the middle of the street a ton I'm gonna estimate three dozen, four dozen, and they were all I looked to be gathering food of some
sort on the street. Because you know, we talked about this before, but there's an awareness that when a car's tires drive over nuts or certain things, they can get that meat out of there, so they'll drop it onto a street so that the cars can do their thing and they can get their food. They were doing that this morning.
Amazing, amazing, you found a crow convention. You went to cro con accidentally?
You know you sent them, Ben, don't be boy well.
Speaking of speaking of sending things, if you don't care for phones, if you don't care for social media, and your wija board is broken or whatever, never fear. There is one way that you can always contact us twenty four to seven. Send us a good old fashioned email.
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