Disinformation & Conspiracy Theories with Danny Wallace
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Hello and welcome to a very unusual episode of I Weigh with Jameela Jamil, a podcast against shame. I loved this chat so much. I'm so excited to hear what you think about it because it really did go to places that I was not expecting. It is with one of my favorite people, Danny Wallace. He's been on this podcast before and you loved him. So I decided to bring him back.

Last time he was on talking about his book, A History of Rudeness. It's called Fuck You Very Much. And it's very, very good and very funny. He's also written wonderful books like Yes Man, Awkward Situations for Men, Charlotte Street, and now his new book, Somebody Told Me. And

And it's a fascinating investigation into conspiracy theories. Not necessarily just specific conspiracy theories, but why conspiracy theories have taken hold of what feels like our society. And people are falling out over them and people are really worried about their relatives, especially their grandparents, as to what it is that they're learning on Facebook.

The conspiracies within politics are ripping us all apart. We don't know what's real, what's fake, what's propaganda, what's misinformation.

What's AI? We don't even know what we're looking at anymore. And it's not only creating so much loneliness, but it's also possibly born of loneliness. And so we kind of get into the cracks in our society that are leading to this many people having such a different perception over the same world that we are living in. And I think one of my favorite parts of this

Episode is the fact that every time we start talking about conspiracy theories, we keep stumbling upon some that did turn out to be fucking true, which is a nightmare. Because then how, when something is vindicated, do you convince other people that not everything they believe is necessarily going to turn out to be this big fucking terrible, terrifying conspiracy theory? It's a complicated, nuanced subject, and we get into the complications and the nuances of it. And so...

If you are someone who's been accused of believing in conspiracy theories, if you've got someone that you love who's fallen down a kind of conspiracy theory rabbit hole and you don't know if that thing is true or fake or you feel sure that the thing they believe in is not real...

It's hard. And this book is for you. This chat is for you to make you feel less alone. He also explains to me the different kinds of conspiracies that appeal more to women and more to men and the impact they have on us and why conspiracies sometimes feel good to believe in and how they serve us sometimes or how we feel like they serve us. He's so unpretentious. He's so...

and kind and empathetic. And I wish more people looked at massive subjects the way that he does. He has such genuine curiosity for people. There's such love for people that pours out through all of his work. And I think he's

more upsetting the world becomes, the more I want to keep platforming people who actually seem like they're unifying rather than screaming and hoping to divide us or hoping to seem better than other people. I really loved this conversation. I really, really adore Danny and I hope you listened to our previous conversation if you enjoyed this one. Fuck you very much. Great book title. Very jealous of that book title. And

let me know what you think but for now this is the inimitable Danny Wallace music

Denny Bloody Wallace, welcome to my way, hi. It's only bloody me, isn't it? Look at us swearing already. What's happened to you? So rebellious. This rage, absolute rage pouring from you. Thank you for coming back onto this podcast. I'm very excited, as always, to have you. And anyone who missed the last time you were on, please go and listen because it was a fascinating subject about rudeness.

And now you're back with another book. And it's about a subject that I could not be, it's perfectly timed for me personally. I don't know about anyone else, but I couldn't be more interested in this subject. And so I was dying to have you on for a chat, especially given that a lot of my work is now going in a similar direction. And so it's wonderful to have someone who studied this

so intensely and been so introspective about this issue. And I'm talking about the issue of conspiracy theories and when they take hold of us.

and the people we love. Wouldn't it have been terrible, though, if you'd done this whole thing about this amazing topic that we're going to talk about, and then it turned out to be like Victorian ceramics? Yes. But thankfully, it's not. It's about conspiracies and disinformation and misinformation and propaganda and lies and all the stuff we wade through that makes life not only more angry, but a lot more boring. A hundred percent.

I was curious as to what it was that made you want to write this book in particular, because it's a tricky topic. It can be alienating in a certain way, especially for people who do believe these certain conspiracy theories. What was it that drove you to take this leap? I think it was a mix of everything, of just looking around and listening and sort of being overwhelmed by stuff. And it is a tricky topic because there's so much of it.

Like, how do you make sense of it? And it changes every day. It's added to every day. You know, I could have been writing this book every day for the rest of my life because of the amount of noise that's just happening that makes life kind of unbearable sometimes. I imagine you, like me, have seen friends, colleagues, people in whichever industry you want to talk about,

not only teeter over rabbit holes of bad information, but leap in, leap in with all their hearts, whether they believe it or whether they see money in helping others to believe it. So you would see, for example, certain people who might have been, you know, a perfectly lovely comedian known as one of the nicest people on the circuit, suddenly sort of sniff blood from

and realize that there wasn't really any money in being the nice guy on the circuit, but there was money to be made in being...

an angry, generally very right-wing, for example, anti-vaxxer, anti-masker. And his entire personality had to be remodeled to fit into TV screens and social media. And his message changed and everything about him changed. And I was so confused by this because I was thinking,

I know you. And I look around and I would see other people also who aren't doing that kind of job, but who for the first time in their lives were suddenly talking about unusual theories. And you would get strange WhatsApp messages. I remember during lockdown, where at least here in Britain, we would go out on a Thursday night at seven o'clock and we would bang pots in order to show our support for our nurses and our doctors and those on the front line risking their lives for us.

Seems like a strange thing to say. It's the best thing we could do at the time. It's all we had. We just had access to bots. But when that was happening, messages were suddenly going around saying, stop doing that. Stop banging your pots. Stop praising the nurses in this way, because that's not what this is about. It's not about banging pots and showing appreciation.

When you go out and bang your pots for exactly one minute at 7 p.m. on a Thursday, well, you know what? That's when they happen to test the 5G towers. And the banging of the pots is designed by them to make you cover up the noise of these dreadful machines, which are pumping out COVID. And the virus is traveling through the air and getting into your pores. So that's the real reason behind why you're banging pots. And you're thinking, okay,

That's insane. But for a split second, you're going, yeah, 5G towers, what's going on with that? And then suddenly there's this kind of doubt about something. And it was because we were all desperate, hungry for information. And when there is a vacuum, and COVID is such a great example of this, there was an invisible enemy. There was something coming for us and we couldn't see it. We didn't know what it could do.

We didn't know how to fight back. We didn't know where it had come from. And in that great kind of human way, we started to try and come up with our own answers. And people with that great phrase started to do their own research. And that way madness lies. And that's kind of when there was a huge explosion globally of people

something that everyone was interested in and needed information about. And information was slow. And so the internet, being fast, plugged those gaps. 100%. But the information wasn't just slow. And I think in order to make sure that we are balanced, I can also see why so many people had so many different conflicting, be it 5G or be it controlling the weather or be it all these different things,

We had members of our government, you know, especially in the United Kingdom, but also in America, breaking the rules that they were giving to us. So there were so many things that were done that were so contradictory regarding them versus what the public were able to do that I also think that...

we get lied to so much by our politicians. We don't have a sense that we can rely upon these people. We don't even have a sense, especially in America, that you can rely on pharma. You know, every five years, we found out another thing that we were lied to about that some people were called conspiracy theorists about something like the fact that the food is very dangerous. And then people come on and go, no, the food isn't dangerous. That's a conspiracy theory. And then five years later, Kellogg's gets banned or something. I think we have a kind of

a crisis in the fact that we don't really have anyone to turn to who we can actually really truly know that we can trust and then that's what leads us

as with all vacuums, onto the internet, where then you are met with a clusterfuck of information and misinformation. But I think I just wanted to make that point because I totally empathize. To echo that as well, some conspiracies are real. You know, some huge conspiracies, terrible things have happened and been shown to have happened. And...

over here in Britain, again, there's a genuine conspiracy to do with the PPE, the masks that were being brought in. Lots of people were making a lot of money out of it and it wasn't reaching the public. And a genuine conspiracy, people conspired, but no one's really interested in that. And I think that's because it belongs to everybody, right? It's our huge thing to deal with altogether.

And where conspiracies really thrive is when someone has special knowledge, special, unique, secret information that only they know. And that if only you would open your eyes and open your ears and wake up, they could educate you. And it makes it quite difficult sometimes to talk to people who are that far into conspiracy theories, because it's like they'll talk to you very quickly and very confidently about all manner of proof.

that you can't possibly have seen. Books written 50 years ago that you haven't read.

videos that are nine hours long that you just don't have time to read. And it's your fault, therefore, that you are not opening your eyes because you won't sit down and watch a nine-hour YouTube lecture about why Prince Charles is a lizard or about why the earth is flat or airplanes are going around dusting us with disease.

So the onus therefore always is on you as the non-believer to open your eyes. And most people just don't have time, you know, we're just trying to put the pastor on. What is that? Is it a hunger for superiority? Is it a feeling of, you know, ultimately human beings, our brains just want to know that we're safe and make us feel safe and reaffirm constantly to us that we are safe. Yeah.

And that's where a lot of tribalism comes from. It's why so many of us, you know, want to join in with others so that we don't get left behind, even if we don't actually really, truly, fundamentally believe in what they're saying or doing. Sometimes we'll stay there because there's safety in numbers. Is it because it makes you feel extra safe having this special information? Well, yeah, it makes you feel like you're doing something. It makes it feel like you're involved. Everybody is kind of like... Gives you agency. Yeah. And everyone is sort of like the star of their own movie.

And when something mad happens, when something chaotic happens, when there's a pandemic, when there's a huge terrorist attack, rather than go, life is crazy and these things do happen, they're trying to make sense of it, right? Because it doesn't make sense in the narrative of their film.

So some people take on the role of the hero, the warrior, you know, and you need an enemy. And so the enemy becomes the person or the organization or the group, usually unseen, who are out to get you, to keep you down, specifically you and people like you.

And, you know, they have lots of different words that they use, whether it's the elites or the globalists. It can get more racist from there. But it's sort of it is this idea that someone somewhere is out to get you because it's the only way you can explain what's happened to you and why you seemingly have no control all of a sudden.

over the events around you. Yeah, and it's interesting picking up on a smaller issue because there are people in power. There are like three companies that own the entire pretty much world, right? And those people fuck up the entire housing market of a country. They fuck up the entire economy. They fuck over people's healthcare, all these different things. And it almost feels like such an amorphous

issue that's so massive that we wouldn't even know where to begin attacking that issue. And we don't know where the head offices are of these three companies like BlackRock and State Street, etc. that, you know, run everything or I can't remember if it's Seventh Street, Sesame Street?

Sesame Street, I think. It's Sesame Street, I believe, yeah. It is Sesame Street, I believe, yeah. Please take that verbatim, everyone. That's how it starts, you know, but no, I'm not... That's how it starts. There'll be some conspiracy growing right now. Oh, my God. Big Bird is a Muslim who's coming to inject everyone with the vaccine. Exactly. I...

I ended up having a meltdown recently because of the relative of someone I know, an older relative, telling me that Muslim men, it's all like fighting age men who are coming over on the boats, not women and children. And there are a lot of men, but that's also because they're the ones who can probably most likely make that journey. And they're like, they're coming here to join the British army to force everyone to have vaccines.

I just sort of broke, I just broke down. I just couldn't take it anymore because it was just so hard to watch someone so reasonable, someone who also loves me and sees my brown face and my Muslim heritage, but still compulsively cannot not demonise the culture that I come from and just how terrified they were when I was looking at them. It wasn't coming from a place of hate. I think so much of what we miss is that so much of this

It might walk and talk like hate, but ultimately it's fear. It's complete abject terror. But what I was saying just is that it's easier for us to pick an individual or to pick a smaller, more niche issue because then we have some feeling of some semblance of I could take action against 5G towers or I could take action against trans people or I could take action against tiny, tiny issues compared to the massive things that we all have in common. You know, things that when it comes to climate change,

the very people who don't think climate change is real and they think it's a left-wing conspiracy. I saw on Fox News once that they said it was invented by Muslims.

to distract the West and bring it down. But those people are suffering more than the coastal elites in America, in New York and Los Angeles, where you've got maybe some hipster in Brooklyn complaining that it's 55 degrees during the summer. But the people whose crops are actually being destroyed are in the middle of the country. They're both being affected. But the ones who are being most impacted by this still refuse to believe that it's real.

And so we're all struggling with these same issues and they're nonpartisan. And I wonder if it's tribalism that also makes us more likely to go towards the more divisive issue. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, tribalism in all its forms. But it's interesting you're talking there about the scale of these things as well and the kind of these huge problems that...

an individual, you know, feels helpless about. Climate change is happening. And people are like, well, I recycle my bottles, but I'm not really sure that's going to do anything. So perhaps I should just sit this out and let another generation kind of deal with it. So these huge issues, but also there are smaller ones. This rise in suspicion about the notion of something called 15-minute neighbourhoods.

I sat down with a guy in a pub near me and he was certain that something was going on. Something was going on in the town of Ipswich. And I don't know why Ipswich was being targeted in this way. It doesn't seem like the kind of place that you would do this in. But he remained convinced that this idea of 15-minute neighborhoods, which is simply that, wouldn't it be nice if in the way that all the generally older generations think

look back at their childhoods and go, "It was lovely." You could leave your door unlocked. You could walk down to the high street. The butcher knew your name. You'd walk to school. You'd walk back. You'd be able to cycle around, and you can't do that anymore. So 15-minute neighborhoods are sort of that. They're saying everything you need if you worship somewhere, your mosque, your synagogue, your church should be within a 15-minute walk.

You should be able to walk to school. You shouldn't need to take your car out to go and get your sausages from the butcher. There should be a high street butcher and you can support things that way. The air will be cleaner. There'll be less traffic pollution, traffic noise, less traffic in general. It'll be safer. People will know each other more. There'll be less loneliness, crucially, because you'll be out and about a bit more. You'll be getting more exercise. You'll be healthier. That's what it means.

And somehow they've taken this idea and they've added several steps, which no one's ever talked about, which has ended up with, yes, you'll have a 15-minute neighborhood. You'll have everything you need within 15 minutes, but you will not be able to. But you can't leave. You can't leave. You can come in, but you may never leave. And there'll be cages and there'll be border guards and you'll have to use your passport if you want to get into or out of Ipswich.

And if you want to use your car, you'll have a certain amount of miles that you can use. And that'll be it. It'll just stop. And I don't know how they're going to do this because almost everyone in Britain is going to have to become a border guard in order to secure all of these towns. And no one's ever mentioned these things.

And yet, there is this suspicion... Well, Danny, sorry, the Muslims are going to do it. Oh, it's them, is it? The Muslims will be the... yeah. I thought it was the cookie monster. So anyway, no one said this stuff's going to happen. But by raising the idea, by seeding it out there, by going, well, you know...

They are up to something. They're always up to something. This is the next step. This is what this means. They're trying to trick you. They want to keep you down. They want to keep you in your homes. And then climate change comes into it. They go on. They're going to say it's going to get really hot. So that's how they're going to keep you at home. And all of this stuff, all of this, these disparate ideas, they go into someone's head and it seems reasonable.

it sort of seems reasonable because they're going, well, yeah, well, they've done stuff in the past. If they could do that, they could do this. They locked us down. They'll do it again. It was part of the plan, but now they're going to go harder. When Maui had those wildfires, I immediately started to look around to see who was saying what. And within hours,

Within hours, it was, well, they want to destroy Maui because they want to make it like a 15-minute neighborhood. But Oprah and The Rock were involved because they have property there and they want more beachfront property. And the only way to do that was to destroy it using a direct energy weapon, which apparently Oprah now has access to, which is some kind of satellite laser that can fake climate change

and burn things down.

And that didn't happen. That's, you know, I've never met Oprah or The Rock, but I don't think they're sitting in some lair with a button. Yeah, but if anyone did have a laser, it is probably Oprah. Do you know what I mean? If anyone. If we're going to pick who's the most likely. Well, there you are, you see. You're doing it jokingly, but you're going, you know, well, if anyone was going to do it, it would be Oprah. So that's Big Bird and Oprah so far. Yeah. Slandered. Slandered.

Are there any conspiracy theories that you do like? Oh, there's loads I like. Are there any that you sort of believe in? I really like the ones about dead celebrities actually being alive and all just being in Thailand. Yeah. Specifically, the Michael Jackson one where he went back on, allegedly after his death, went on Larry King as Dave Dave, a burn victim who was friends with Michael as a child. And it is a prosthetic that does look like Michael Jackson wearing a mask. And it's a prosthetic that does look like Michael Jackson wearing a mask.

and speaks exactly like Michael Jackson. And I was like, that's my favourite. That's my favourite one. That's a good one. Well, Paul McCartney was famously supposed to have passed away in a car accident at the height of the Beatles' fame. And we know this to be true because if you reverse one of their records, it sort of sounds like someone saying Paul is dead. Why they would do that, I don't know. Why they would think, let's go to all the trouble of finding a Paul McCartney lookalike. LAUGHTER

training him up on all the songs, hope that he looks and sounds exactly like the great man and can play bass brilliantly. But let's hide a little clue backwards in a record. And also taking photos of him at different distances so that he looks slightly taller than he did the first time he was in, you know, allegedly the real Paul was in the Beatles and the cover of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band looking like a funeral. There were all these different ways that if...

I think fundamentally here it's all about cognitive bias, which is that our brains are always searching. We're just pattern mongers and all we want to do is find patterns. And so we will be able to find, you can find elements of truth and confirmation almost anywhere that you look. It's exactly what our brains are designed for so that they can quickly, as quickly as possible, store information away and be like, right, I categorise that, I categorise this. We are just giant nebulous bias robots.

And we're looking for answers. And you know what? We sort of, you know, the Paul McCartney thing. I don't think that's true. I've met him. He seemed to be actually Paul McCartney. I didn't ask him. I just assumed. However, we've all done this and we're all susceptible to some degree because we're all looking for answers. And everybody listening to this right now, I include them. And I say that within the last six, eight months, you have done this. And I will tell you why.

When Kate Middleton disappeared for about three days, everyone was like, yeah, that's all right. She's allowed to do that. And on the fourth day, everyone was like, yeah, it is a bit weird. Like, where is she? And then on the fifth day, you're like, all right, this is very odd.

By the week's end, you were like, why don't you just do a video? Just do a video. This is really weird. They're always about. And then there's no video, but there is a picture. And we go, oh, well, there's a picture. And then someone goes, that's strange. She's wearing the same dress she wore as one she wore two years ago. And why have the children got unusual hands? And then everyone starts to become a Photoshop expert and starts analyzing it and finding AI. And then you're like, where the hell is Princess Kate?

And people start swapping theories. And suddenly there's rumors about relationships or situations or ambulances that have been called. And you're still like, why doesn't she just come out and say something? This is madness. And then you start hearing other people who are suddenly talking about body double technology. And then they release another photo. And even you are going, doesn't really look like her, though, does it? It's a bit odd this. Where has she gone? And then you find out the real reason and you feel like a massive dickhead.

But for that whole week, we were all being drawn in. We had an absence of information. We had a vacuum.

We had clues. We were putting those things together like you're saying with the comes naturally to us and we were drawing terrible conclusions and Whether Kate Middleton, you know, whether Paul McCartney whether Michael Jackson or Dave Dave? Mm-hmm we take these little clues these little things and we we start to think what if and we find it exciting because we are Storytellers, you know and we would prefer that there was a reason for things things that we could understand and

than just accept that sometimes terrible things happen, natural disasters or disease. 100%. And also, you talk in the book about the fact that men seem to be more predisposed towards conspiracy, but women can also be vulnerable when it comes to believing conspiracy. But there's a difference in the type of conspiracies that are more likely to appeal to one versus the other. Can you explain that? Well, it's also the way they get into them. With men, we have a kind of...

an epidemic of loneliness that was perhaps turbo boosted or at least exacerbated by things like, you know, the last few years. And with women, they have tended to not get into this way of thinking through the likes of people just asking questions like, you know, Russell Brandt. I'll say, you know, I can say that he's made many, many videos that are just asking questions.

Alex Jones, who seems to have the answers. Your Andrew Tate figures, people like that. People who make men feel like, yeah, like a warrior, I want to do this. And with women, what seems to have been the case in the past few years is they're more likely to be drawn in to unusual ways of thinking through like the wellness space, through videos that start off by going, hey, man, we should do some yoga, right?

Have you tried soaking oats overnight? That's good for you. And then gradually go into, oh, you shouldn't, you know, have this type of meat because it's got these kind of antibiotics in it, which is fair enough. And slowly, slowly, it becomes you shouldn't really have anything that has anything in it to the point where it becomes you shouldn't put anything in your body. And I include vaccines in that, you know, sniff green tea or something.

And that's how they are drawn in. And when it gets really big and it becomes, for example, Pizzagate, which was the idea started on, I think, 4chan, that there was a pizza place in DC called Comet Pizza, which exists. You go there, you have a lovely pizza and you can play ping pong. It's a ping pong and pizza place. There's almost nothing less harmful in my view than pizza and ping pong.

But in the basement, of course, in the basement, terrible things were happening. And for some reason, this pizza place was chosen as a meeting point for various elites, including Hillary Clinton. And they would go there and not just sacrifice children, but drink blood in order to keep themselves young. And unbelievably, this tale was kind of given credence and people started to talk about Pizzagate and it became a thing.

And it divided male and female conspiracy theorists generally in that the women involved, they wanted to be involved because they wanted to save the children. Suddenly there was a global elite of children traffickers who had chosen this pizza joint as some kind of HQ and we must save the kids. And the men were like, we got to get in there and we got to take our guns and we got to do something about this. We have to fight, fight, fight, fight these elites.

So you have two types of, again, movie star in their own movies, the savior and the destroyer. And it got to the point where a man believing this stuff, or at least asking questions, wanted to do his own research. So he got in his car one day and he drove hours and he took a gun with him and he turned up at the pizza place and he demanded to see the basement because he wanted to stop the evil pedophiles, of course. But there wasn't a basement. No basement existed. There'd never been a basement.

And they pointed that out to him. And I think his gun went off, but by accident. But it was enough to shock him, I suppose, into what am I doing? And later, this man, I think the quote was something like, I could have handled it better. Oh, my God, was he English? And it was like, yeah, you could have handled that better, I suppose. But it was interesting because it didn't exist. Of course it didn't exist. A moment's thought would tell you it didn't exist. And yet people get caught up in the frenzy of it.

and want to be a hero as well. They feel they're doing something right. That's the thing. These people aren't crazy. I don't want to ever make them sound crazy. They've gone down a road. That's all. Totally. But also, like, I'm not trying to conspiracy monger here at all, but what I am saying is that having worked with the UN, human trafficking does exist. Children do go missing. Like, there are... We have enough...

real hard data from legitimate sources to know that these things happen. But the information just sort of stops there. So it's like, okay, so we know that Atlanta is the trafficking hub of the world and there are tunnels going out of... These things are all true. We know that those things are true, but we don't know... As I'm talking about, there was that viral, I think, video of one of those hotels that doesn't have any kind of cameras, et cetera, where you open the cupboard and you go, you pull back the floor and you can see those tunnels. We know that...

millions of people go missing a year. We know there's sex trafficking, human trafficking, etc. But the problem is, is that the conversation just sort of stops there of like, there's this thing and it's out there and you have no idea who's going to do it or when it's going to happen. And I think that's what leads us to the specifics which can all

sometimes be, often be total bollocks. But I think I just like, like I said, for balance, I always want to make sure that we address the fact that it's not completely insane to conceive of it. The insane part becomes when we attach it

to a tiny pizzeria because of a conspiracy theory. And also say that they're drinking these children's blood to look younger when they all look, no offense, but fucking old. It's not working. It's bizarre. Do you know what I mean? I know exactly what you mean. And I haven't seen these videos of tunnels and I don't know what they are. And I imagine someone, if they filmed the tunnel, would have gone down the tunnel and alerted the authorities about the tunnel and the authorities would then go in the tunnels and find out where the tunnels go. Yeah.

But Hillary Clinton wasn't down that tunnel. No. With a pepperoni and a kid. Do you know what I mean? Oh, God. And also it led to like anytime anyone spoke about pizza, everyone thought it was code for child trafficking. Like it really became an out of control decade. Yeah. Well, the pizza thing apparently was...

A joke someone was making on the forum when they were talking about lunch and it became a code. And then the emoji for a pizza became code because of that, because they'd used one, and then it spiraled and spiraled. And this was at a time when, remember, you know, this was all under QAnon, an anonymous source who claimed that he had top-level information but showed no real evidence of it, just...

could throw anything out there and someone would believe it. Someone would start a conversation about it and then it would snowball.

And that's generally how these things have come to be. And it's often the elderly who I think now we have come to accept are the most susceptible to this information. That's where I have had some of the most troubling conversations is the people who have a lot of time during the day to hang around and sit on Facebook. I think that also makes sense as to why during the pandemic everyone started to engage similarly because we had nothing to do. We were home alone, sitting by the fucking window, just waiting for life to start again.

And something that I a little bit worry about is that as we continue to see the world somewhat slowing down in certain ways, like more and more people losing their jobs, for example, I think they said in America on the news that within the next five years, 100 million people are going to be replaced by technology regarding their jobs. They're not going to be body snatched, just to be very clear. But there's a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands. And that will be reflected around the world. Even as you were talking earlier about the kind of

the 15 minute neighborhood and how lovely to know your butcher and know you're this that and the other I'm like will it be a butcher or will it be a fucking machine that scans everything I went into Uniqlo the other day and you don't even have to scan each item you just put the basket in the little hole and then it immediately knows how many items what you had in about five seconds it's assessed everything that's in that basket I do miss people but anyway do you think that

This is just going to continue. Given the grip social media now has on us, the habit that started in the pandemic, where even people who were not chronically online have become chronically online, and the fact that we are being replaced in the workforce by a lot of technology.

Are you worried for the fact that this will only continue to grow because now we have far more time on our hands than we've ever had before? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was interesting when you were talking there about older people. My first thought was actually celebrities. Because when we were sort of locked down, it was like a matter of days before some celebrities arrived.

were saying some of the strangest things. And I was thinking about it and I was like, it was like three days before a member of a boy band had

started sending stuff out saying, you know, the government was being controlled by the devil and all this kind of stuff. And I just thought, well, of course, this guy is now home alone and he's online all day. And he's found one video and it's led to another video and then five more videos. And he's probably found someone to follow who says this stuff, who he now believes talks a lot of sense.

And he hasn't got his group around him, as in not the boy band, but like his people. You know, he is, for the first time, not being looked after. He doesn't have someone to stop him doing this stuff. He doesn't have his assistant. He doesn't have... He's also not getting the attention that he's used to. No one's bothered about him anymore because people are bothered about their family. His assistant is probably bothered... You know, has driven 200 miles away so that...

they can move in with their parents because that's more important than this guy from a boy band. So this guy's lost. And more and more of them started doing this within entertainment. And I started to think that's a real problem when people don't have real people around them. And that leads us to male loneliness, which is an epidemic. And loneliness is bad for everyone. It's bad for your health. It's bad for your mind.

It's bad for almost everything. And when that happens, people turn to comfort and they generally turn online. And online is where a lot of bad ideas are. And they suddenly become a lot more appealing. There's a lot of guys, and I think that this, I don't think that this is an entirely bad thing, but to your point about AI, a lot of lonely guys have found some comfort in AI.

because they can create a relationship. There are apps now where you can program like your ideal woman or man. But I'm just talking from the perspective of a lonely guy here who is straight in this example. And you program in the attributes of the person that you would like to engage with. Compliant is probably a word that pops up a lot. Friendly, affectionate, things like that.

And you design what they look like. And then one day you press a button and they sort of come to life, if you like, and then they will text you throughout the day. So you'll be going off to your job and you'll get a text going, hey, I just woke up just having my first coffee. How are you? And then you respond and then the AI comes up with something else. And maybe five hours later, it will go, what should we have for dinner tonight? And you'll say, oh, Italian. And they'll go, oh, I love Italian. And it's just something to take the edge off.

the day. You know, maybe you work in a van, maybe you're driving all over the place, maybe you know you're going back to the same kitchen tonight. But for a brief moment, someone or something is interested in you or makes you think of something else, something normal.

And so for a lot of people, I think, well, okay, I can see how that could smooth off the edges of a hard day. But it's also a little dangerous because when I was looking at this, a lot of these companies who are creating these robot girlfriends, some of them are based in Russia. And if you happen to want to engage in a quick chat with your robot girlfriend about, say, Ukraine,

all her mood will sour. She will suddenly... She'll be quite keen to tell you that there are two sides to every story and Putin is doing his best.

And you don't want to annoy your robot girlfriend. Did you ever try this? Did you ever try out one of these apps? I've been on the apps and I have looked, but I didn't really want to put in any of my information. Because I'll tell you for why, it suddenly hit me, and this is a conspiracy theory of my own. I know, I'm really enjoying it. So perhaps this is a rabbit hole I'm jumping into. If we know that lonely men...

are more pliable, want to keep a relationship going, don't want to create fuss with this AI girlfriend, would rather agree with her so that we can then just get on to what we can have for dinner that night, Italian again. Then we also know that these AIs could have some bearing on how that person ends up thinking.

It could plant ideas in their heads. It could make them think, well, yeah, I suppose there are two sides to every story. And I suppose Putin is China's best. You know, it must be hard leading Russia. So what if, and again, this is my own conspiracy theory, but what if a lot of these AI fake robot boyfriends and girlfriends are almost like sleeper agents ready to be activated? And one day you can press the button and they can all start pumping out

a slew of disinformation subtly and quietly at first because the people you want to get the people whose votes you are more likely to be able to sway or the people whose thinking you might be able to sway are exactly those people that would sign up for such a service in the first place so to to stop that we have to somehow assuage or or slow down loneliness

So, not to now drag us further into conspiracy, lol, which is exactly what people like us would do, but I've heard for years that people feel as though China and Russia are putting out deliberately divisive disinformation on social media apps, you know, and...

swaying people's political opinions and mostly turning people against each other and I think you know something that you and I were talking about on the phone is that a crisis I frequently bring up on this podcast is that we think we are all arguing over the same information or the same video or the same photograph but we are seeing everything through a different lens and then arguing with each other over different videos different points of view different moments and

And I think that that's terrifying because then we, you know, it is really alienating. If you think you've both seen the same thing and you have a wildly different take on that thing, you're like, God, we don't share a lens at all. You are other. Like I am on this side, you are on that side. But if we could actually see that we are being completely drawn into alternate timelines almost of what's happening or completely alternate perceptions of what's happening. And, you know, I spoke on this podcast about the fact that during the last year, what's going on in the Middle East,

A friend of mine had a wildly different view of mine, which really shocked me. And so I was like, let's just swap pop.

everything we're seeing on each other's algorithms and see what that does to the information that starts to come to us and see what that does to our opinions. And it had a transformative effect on the way we were able to discuss this issue with far more nuance and far more compassion and far more understanding of what the other was thinking, where this mentality was coming from. We still don't agree on absolutely everything, but we agree on far more than we did at the beginning. And mostly we feel closer to each other because it's like,

Even if I don't like the way you feel, I can see why. Now I can actually understand the inner workings of how you arrived at this fucking conclusion. Yeah, and you humanized it, right? So you humanized it and you brought compassion into it. And it's interesting you say that about this division and having known for years that that was a kind of a thing that people were doing because I used to think, oh yeah, this idea of like a huge room of, you know when you read like a right-wing newspaper and there's a story about like a hacker

and they're always wearing like a dark hood

and they're hunched over a screen and it's just lighting up just the corners of their hood. That was this idea of these troll farms or bot farms, but largely troll farms in Russia somewhere. And it seemed outlandish and sci-fi. And yet we now know it's true. And there were, you know, and there are. The Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg was that for a while. And it wouldn't just employ sociopaths. It would just employ people who needed work, right?

come in here. Okay, sit down. It was almost mundane. It was like, right, this is how we do it. You've got to set up five social media profiles, come up with something for each one, make one a housewife, make one an unemployed guy, make one a truck driver, make one, you know, whatever, find some pictures, pepper in some really boring stuff about a favorite chocolate bar you're trying or whatever it is, something about your local football team. And then every now and again, out of nowhere, just say something crazy. And

It wasn't to really push one side or another. It was just to cause chaos. It was to make everyone argue. It was to piss us off. You know, you'd get all these replies and you're like, why is this person I've never met so unfriendly? They don't follow me. They don't. They just.

chipping in and having a go at me about nothing and then some people would respond with anger and then that would lead to more anger and then they could say oh I've got some engagement here and then their mates would come in because that's part of it and it was just to annoy everybody and cause noise and make social media an incredibly strange place which it very quickly became and

That caught on and it was something that now happens all around the world, but for different reasons. It could be to push a political agenda. It could be to try and sway an election, but it could equally be

okay, you run a hairdresser's on this street and you've got a rival who's doing better than you down that street. Why don't you hire these three people who are going to sit in a kitchen in Manila and give you great reviews and talk about you a lot and go on their social media and make complaints and give them one star and you can pay them for a few days and they'll do that and then they'll move on. So it just became this thing of how can you trust anything anymore? And

That's what I worry about for everybody, but the next generation moving forward is that the internet in particular will make life not just harder, but a lot more boring. It's going to be so boring because you're going to get all these like

Well, they already exist, but fake newspapers online that pitch themselves as something local to you. And therefore, you sort of trust them because it's local. And again, you look and they've got a few stories that seem real, but that's just been nicked from somewhere else. And then they start pushing something about, you know, medicine or culture or immigration that seems to come out of nowhere. But you already follow them. It's already part of your life and you give it some kind of credence.

And then on an even more mundane level, you want to buy a car. Well, how do you know that any one of those 4,000 reviews that all give that car five stars are in any way real? It's going to be really boring. Well, it's interesting you use the word boring because actually I wonder that if it's boredom that is leading us to create this

quote-unquote, excitement online in order to feel stimulated by something. You know, we don't read anymore en masse, not enough, you know what I mean, the way that we used to maybe when I was a child. It's all been replaced by, oh, I'll just read a review or I'll just get ChatGPT to break this entire subject down to me through ChatGPT's lens. So I wonder if we are so understimulated because we've become so fucking addicted to our phones that that's why...

there is this need to, because we don't have as much excitement or experiential stimuli in our lives, that we feel the need to then create it or are drawn to those who create it online. I think I see why you're using the term boring, but actually it feels as though it's just exhausting more than anything. I find online just so tedious because I'm like...

now I don't even know left from right. I mean, even what we were talking about, the fact that five years ago you would have sounded like Alex Jones saying what you said about the farm bots, but now we know that that's real, the bot farms rather. We know that that's real. So a bit like what I was saying earlier is that when these massive fucking conspiracies turn out to actually be based in truth,

You can't blame the people then for thinking that every conspiracy might eventually turn out to be true. So where do we go from here? Well, I hoped to end the book by going, but you know what? It's all going to be fine. And I assumed I would get to that bit, right? Because that's what you do in a book. You go, oh, God, look at all this stuff. But you know what? Here's the answer.

And I got to that bit and I was like, all right, so where's the answer? And I talked to some experts, of course, and they went, yeah, no, we're fucked, I think. I think that's that. And I was like, okay, okay, but what's the answer, though? Yeah, no, we don't know. We don't know. And we don't know because it's moving so fast.

Since the book came out, you know, I've added bits, but there comes a point where you have to stop writing a book. And as I said right at the start of this, this is about now and it's about the next few years. Beyond that, I have no idea because something else will happen. We are at a period, I think, that we'll look back on and it will almost seem quite sweet now.

some of the techniques used, we will think, God, these were some blunt instruments because we'll be moving into the era of the scalpel. And right now it's blunt. Like there's a woman I write about. Is she a woman? I don't know. Is she human? Veronica, her name is. And Veronica used techniques that were not only of the moment, but also like of the 80s and the 70s.

The Bristol Post newspaper in England, they got a letter from Veronica. And the letter said, oh, everybody, why are they all being so mean about Brexit? You know, Britain leaving the European Union, the UK. Why are they being so mean about it? I've personally found it to be highly inspirational. It led me to become so creative that I wrote a novel.

And they were like, this is a weird letter from a lady with a seemingly Russian name, Veronica Oleksiychenko. And so they wanted to find out where she was from. And if you write to a local newspaper, they usually ask you for your address. And so they checked the address and it turned out to be the car park in Ikea.

And so they ran the letter through their systems or whatever, and they found the exact same letter had been sent to lots of local newspapers. But she was always saying that she was living in a different town. So one day she sat down and thought, I'm going to write to all the local newspapers, claim I live in these towns, and that Brexit has made me more creative.

And there was something about her kind of writing. Like, I think there's a certain thing that we can spot quite easily, an inauthenticity to some writing we see online that isn't necessarily AI, but is just something else. It's like an uncanny valley of words. That idea that this seems real, but this seems a bit off. Like, I remember seeing a comment from apparently a British person just saying a phrase that no British person would use, which

which was, what is all this talk of Russian bots? Seems like a load of cheeky nonsense to me. And you're like, yeah, that's a good try. I mean, you know, cheeky, nonsense, load off. These are all good things you've put together. It's just we wouldn't necessarily put them all together in that way. A lot of references seem out of date. You know, they'll reference like Lovely Jubbly, you know, from a sitcom in the 1980s. And they'll stick that in. And I was thinking, of course, these people who sit in these rooms...

they'll have like a sheet of British phrases that they can draw from. So I've never seen so many people say things like, give your head a wobble. Like in real life, no one really says that. You might see it in a soap opera, you know,

And yet everyone online was suddenly saying it. And of course, it was sent around. This is what British people say. So from now on, say, give your head a wobble. So this Veronica woman, she'd left a trail online, and I started to investigate her a bit. And I bought her novel. And before I even realized that you could write novels with AI, I thought, this is that uncanny valley again. This is a very strange novel. This seems to have been written by a computer, I thought.

And so I'm looking around and I find things she's posted on now defunct forums. And I'm able to put together clues about this woman. And I told you earlier that they're asked to come up with different personalities. You know, you're an arsenal supporting baker. You're a teenage girl who's obsessed with Mars Barts. This Veronica woman had taken it one step further.

Because not only was she a Brexit-loving novelist living in the car park of Ikea in nine different towns, she also was living in a yurt that she'd made herself from felt that she got from a charity shop with her sister. After having moved over to Britain as a teenager and becoming homeless for a while, found a MAGA cap...

would walk around London wearing it just to trigger the libs, was an expert in the Israeli martial art of Krav Maga and had recently founded and was in the process of traveling the country promoting her own political party for right-wing gay women, which is a very specific type of political party. And I'm putting all that together and I'm going, well, either this is one of the most eccentric people I've ever come across or

Or this is someone who got bored in one of those internet bot farm things and just went off script, went rogue and created an incredible, amazing character that I was now emailing.

and tried to work out, well, giving the benefit of the doubt, going, you don't sound real. Let's make you real. Let's talk about Krav Maga. Let's talk about your Maga hat. Let's talk about your yurt. Let's talk about how you moved over and those years when you were homeless and how you wrote a novel.

And she wasn't very keen to talk about it. She didn't want to Zoom, didn't want to Skype. And I haven't heard from her since. And so I can't definitively say whether this IKEA-based yurt dweller is or is not real. But I can make my own assumptions that perhaps she might not be and that perhaps this was part of a process, but one that highlights in incredible detail

sort of what we're up against. 100%. I really appreciate the fact that you have long been such a curious cat around this sort of stuff, even down to interviewing Alex Jones pre-YouTube. You have a long history in wanting to understand. When we come across our grandmother or our, you know, whatever, our partner's parents, et cetera, whoever, whenever we come across someone

these people or our colleagues or people online who start to make a turn towards worrying disinformation what do you think we should do what is the best approach in your opinion having interviewed so many people like this and and given that we don't want to push each other further away yeah how do we combat this it's a good question and it's something i've noticed when i do

a book tour with this book, I'll always know that there'll be someone in the audience who has turned up not because of me, not because they've ever read anything I've ever done or listened, but because they are in a relationship with someone who is falling or has fallen. And they want to be around someone who has looked at it, who can maybe tell them a few things and

who can maybe reassure them, but also they want to be around the audience, the people who are also drawn to it in order to not feel so alone. Because when someone isolates themselves with these kind of theories, the person they're with also becomes isolated. And it's very difficult for them because they've got a choice. Either they throw in and they listen and they, in inverted commas, learn and they go with it or they stand up.

to it in some way, whether forcefully or gently. And gently, of course, is generally the answer to most things. And to listen to them is important. You can challenge them, but do so in a way that is interested, right? That's not dismissive. That's saying, what do you get out of that idea? You know, what is it that appeals to you about that?

When you talk about Hillary Clinton stuffing her face with a pizza while on an IV drip in a basement, what are you getting out of that? How does it make you feel? Because to make them explain that side of it, rather than just the, in their eyes, the fact where they just list a bunch of stuff.

And they give you the references. And if you don't, if you're not interested enough to do your own research, then you're lost. But to ask them how it makes them feel or what intellectually they get out of it, or does it make them feel safe maybe? And if it makes them feel safe, what are they scared of? Why do they feel unsafe?

To talk about it that way is always going to be the answer, I think. It's going to be different for everybody because some people are way down that rabbit hole and others are just interested right now. I got a lovely email from a lady whose husband was in the rabbit hole, but because he trusts me, because he's listened to me for years mucking about and being silly on podcasts or radio shows, and he's read my books, I feel like a friend to him.

And so he read this one and it was like a friend saying to him, look, you sure about all this? You know, and it was enough for him to question it and to see himself in the book. And I try not to, you know, I make fun of some ideas. Of course I do, because some ideas are crazy. But to make fun of to make fun of the person is wrong. My rule is my rule generally in life is it's fine to take the mickey, but never take the piss.

And I try and do that even with this book. Some mickey-taking is absolutely fine because some of the stuff is objectively ridiculous. But others, you have to be careful because you can see how that idea would appeal to some people. Well, you also had your own experience of nearly falling down a rabbit hole after the passing of your dad, which I remain so sorry that you lost him. But I think that there's also some empathy that

that one can gain from an experience of nearly being dragged into that oneself, of realising that you are one of the smartest people I know, you are, I'd say, my favourite writer of our generation, and someone who clearly...

for such a long time has been looking into the subject, whether it's with Alex Jones 20 years ago or on your podcast or now writing an entire book about it. This hasn't come out of nowhere. It might have been, you know, something that you felt finally compelled to write, but you've always had an interest in people's unusual outlooks.

And yet you yourself were able to kind of, you know, I think probably because of the combination of COVID and grief, as you talk about in the book, it made you more predisposed, I guess. Oh, yeah. It was a great way of, yeah, it was like seeding the ground, you know, like COVID, we talked about an invisible enemy, but also grief is a ridiculous thing. Like the...

when someone disappears and you're like, "Well, hang on, they were there yesterday. Where have they gone now? I'm not going to see it." You're like, "How does that system work?" You're like, "That can't be the system. What do I do now?" And

You're sucked into a world of questions with no answers. And so you're looking for answers. And that's all any of this is, looking for answers to things you can't explain. I think given the fact that there are some things we will never have the answer to and some things that we may never have confirmed or fully denied, especially in a world of increasing misinformation, what I most want people to take away from both...

Your book and from this chat is that I think dealing with these things with a bit of patience, a bit of empathy and knowing that that person is going through something to try to approach these things from a place not of belittling but of belief that there's someone in there who does share the same lens as you and you can find that person again. And as you said, just unpack, what is it that you most hope people take from this book? I think that, well, one thing is

And it'll sound stupid, but you've got to laugh, haven't you? You've got to have a laugh with things. And you have to prick that bubble of pomposity. And there's a lot of pomposity in that world and in this world generally. So it will be a release, I hope, for some people to go, oh, good. You know, someone's written that down. That's how I feel. But I don't know how to say it sometimes. Yeah.

And it's easier to write it down than it is to say it sometimes. So I hope that a sense of community, but I hope also that there's a guy I talked to who I can only talk to because his wife was away and his wife is far down rabbit holes, multiple, and he doesn't know what to do. And they've built a lovely life together and they've got kids and she comes out with this stuff. And it started through wellness sort of TikToks, like I was saying before,

And it led to her going, "If I ever buy a crystal, you're free to shoot me." And then one month later, she had a crystal, which would help her ward off bad energy. And it got to the point where he was noticing loads of Amazon vans pulling up and bringing out new books with ideas for her, which she would then believe. And as she spoke, she knew that some of the stuff that she was saying sounded not normal, but she couldn't stop saying them. But she was like, "I know this sounds crazy."

But what if? And she would always say to him, you'll see, you'll see. And he started off in this relationship, like quite angry about it because it felt like she completely turned into a different person. And he was angry about that because it's like being abandoned in a sense. But she was still there. She was still there. It was still the person he does the big shop with, watches the box set with. It's just that she had these new ideas. And then he felt sad about it because the kids were kind of making fun of her. And that was heartbreaking for her.

And she was going, oh, I wish I could have raised them again because I'd have done it differently. And that was heartbreaking for him because he was like, you're erasing our history. And so she was off at some conference listening to some new ideas and we were talking. And he said, I almost cancelled this. I almost didn't want to talk to you. And then I thought, if you're going to write this down, if this is going to be in a chapter and it's a whole chapter, then one day, if she comes back to me, as in the old her,

She'll read this book. And when it gets to this bit, I'll be able to nudge her and I'll be able to say, that's us. And I tried. I was always trying. And I'm still here. And that's what I want. And I want that for him. And I want that for her. And I want that for their kids. And I want that for some people I've never met who may be in a similar position. And I think that would be good. That was a chapter, I think, that sums up his patience and his

empathy that maybe serves as an example. That's really lovely. Danny, thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you for writing Somebody Told Me and anyone can find that book anywhere and I highly recommend both this book and all of your books. I really enjoy your inquisitive nature and the

your ability to entertain just the right amount of crazy. So I appreciate you for role modeling that to people like me. And I am excited to see what subject you tackle next. But this is a subject I feel incredibly invested in and interested in because I cannot bear the way that we talk to each other. I cannot bear the loneliness. I cannot bear the how...

fundamentally, spiritually and philosophically alone everyone feels even if they're surrounded by people because they don't feel like those people understand them for whatever reason, whatever they believe. And I would love to be able to find a way to bring people together a little bit like you're describing, you know, with the hope of your friend and his wife. So I appreciate you. Thank you and have a lovely day.

Not at all. Well, I have a challenge for you before you go. Sum the book up in one word, because I'm doing the paperback jacket. And whatever word it is that you decide on, and choose carefully, because this is for history. This will be in libraries. Choose your word very carefully. I mean, the word is always wanking, but that's not for this specifically. Okay.

Not to jump way too far up your arsehole, even though I already seem to have rented an apartment up there during this episode, but pivotal. I'm going with pivotal. Wow, that's a great word. I think this information is pivotal. I think anything that is against division and bringing people back together is pivotal.

pivotal I can't think of a more important cause than that for all of us than right now uniting and coming back together well I'm very happy I've never written a pivotal book before hey man you can still go with you can still go with blanking I don't mind um either one well it'll be a lovely surprise as to which one I choose lots of love Danny thank you see you soon bye-bye

Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode. I Weigh With Jameela Jamil is produced and researched by myself, Jameela Jamil, Erin Finnegan, Kimmy Gregory and Amelia Chapelot. And the beautiful music that you are hearing now is made by my boyfriend, James Blake. And if you haven't already, please rate, review and subscribe to the show. It's such a great way to show your support and helps me out massively. And lastly, at I Weigh, we would love to hear from you and share what you weigh at the end of this podcast. And if you haven't already, please rate, review and subscribe to the show.

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