Hello, welcome to Psycho Cultural.

My name is Candida Yates and today's topic is conspiracy theory.

My guests are Aaron Balick and Callum Blades.

Dr.

Aaron Balak is a psychotherapist, author, and academic, and a leading voice in the psychology of technology and digital culture.

His work focuses on the impact of social media and online behavior and the relational dynamics of individuals in the context of hyper connectivity across different media platforms.

He's a regular voice in the media, Aaron has appeared on BBC One's The Surgery,

the BAFTA-nominated BBC Three documentary Suicide and Me and BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze, The Digital Human and Illuminated alongside appearances on Public Radio International, Channel 4 and BBC World.

His expertise has also been featured in print publications including The Guardian, The Independent, Wired magazine, GQ and Newsweek.

As an honorary senior lecturer at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, he teaches, supervises PhD candidates and contributes to academic research.

He's the author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking, Connected Up Instantaneous Culture and the Self and is in the process of writing an updated version of it.

And he's also written two popular self-help books, The Little Book of Calm and Keep Your Cool, which was shortlisted for the Educational Writers Award for young people.

Aaron is based in Shoreditch, East London, where he runs his private psychotherapy practice.

He's also an associate of the Ballant Consultancy.

So welcome, Aaron.

Thank you.

Callum.

Okay.

Hello, Callum.

Callum Blades is an interdisciplinary researcher and media practitioner at Bournemouth University with a background in psychosocial studies and psychoanalysis and its application to political culture, conspiracy theories and contemporary society.

He works with scholars, academics, counsellors, psychotherapists to enhance the understanding

of conspiratal reasoning and affect-based decision-making within public and political discourse.

He's currently completing a doctoral study of conspiracy theories in relation to anti-vax campaigns in the UK, applying Kleinian psychoanalysis to understand the unconscious fantasies mobilized by the COVID-19 pandemic, where today anti-vax sentiment

is expressed in different ways across the socio-political and cultural spectrum, from extremist so-called libertarian groups to yoga teachers and parents on Mumsnet.

Alongside this work as a researcher, Callum has worked at the Freud Museum as their digital producer and runs his own media company, Pioneer Creative Marketing.

So hello, Callum.

Hello, thanks for having me.

Okay, well, I think it's helpful to begin by providing a kind of basic definition of conspiracy theories to get this all started.

And according to the online Encyclopedia Britannica, a conspiracy theory seeks to explain harmful or tragic events as the result of actions by a small, powerful group.

These explanations reject the accepted narrative, viewing the official version as further proof of the conspiracy.

Conspiracy theories become more common during periods of widespread anxiety, uncertainty or hardship such as wars, economic depressions and natural disasters.

This fact is evidenced by the profusion of conspiracy theories that emerged in the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001.

The content of these theories are emotionally charged and the alleged discovery can be hugely gratifying for those who espouse them.

Conspiracy theory evidence is typically weak, and yet they are usually resistant to being proved wrong.

Psychological biases and distrust of official sources may aid their survival.

So there we are.

That's a fairly basic but generic view of what a conspiracy theory is and how they come about.

So I'm gonna begin actually, if you don't mind, Callum, with you and you're researching this topic in great depth.

And I wonder if you could say a bit about how you came to this topic and why you're interested in it.

Yeah, that's a very good descriptor of conspiracy theories actually.

So it first came to my attention really, just at the start of

sort of the coronavirus, the pandemic, way back in March 2020.

I had a friend that I used to go to the pub with and he said to me, Callum, did you know that COVID-19 isn't real?

And I said, I wasn't aware of that.

No, I was quite convinced it was.

And I kind of parted ways and a little while later he said again to me the same line, COVID-19 isn't real.

And

And a few months later, I saw him again and I'd found an article that was disproved in the end that suggested that COVID-19 might have originated from a lab leak in China.

And I just floated the idea.

I said, have you heard this, that COVID-19 might have originated from a lab leak in China?

And he said, yes, that's exactly what I've been trying to tell you.

And to me, it was this surprise because of course, no, he hadn't been trying to tell me that he'd been insisting in fact that COVID-19 didn't exist at all.

And so this article said, you know, COVID-19 does exist.

It is real and it came from here.

So suddenly I was aware that this isn't a logical thing, a logical process, more it's something emotional almost.

It's something that is beneath the surface in that sense.

There's something that means that

almost an underlying attitude that creates this complete distrust and it needs to pin it on something.

So that's what I first kind of thought.

I need to, I'd like to look more into this to try to understand it.

And I think wanting to understand that involves moving past sort of those cognitive explanations of conspiracism, the idea that it's a failure of logic or something like that.

And instead looking at that interdisciplinary sort of psychosocial approach to

to ask how does the inner psychic world interact with the outer social world to create those beliefs?

And the roles of fear and paranoia were quite interesting, which is why I ended up using the work of Melanie Klein to link those unconscious anxieties to the establishment of sort of political attitudes in Britain specifically, and using the events like COVID-19 as a case study.

And I wanted to know really what made people feel so alienated that they used the certainty of a plot or these theories over the anxiety of reality.

I think that's kind of the broad scope of it.

That's a broad interest.

That's why I got into it.

Oh, thank you.

Well, we can

come back to some of these ideas and that's really, really interesting.

So Aaron, have you come across conspiracism as a kind of mindset or in the different aspects of your work and who do you think might be vulnerable to it?

So I haven't really come across classic conspiracies in the sense that Callum is speaking of, but I think maybe conspiracy light sort of stuff.

And I tend to see it more in younger people.

And this is a very small sample, more younger people, more younger, younger men.

And it's less conspiracy than how ideas are formed and reinforced, I think, through young people's use of the internet, which has a

kind of an exacerbating effect.

And that I think has to do with algorithms.

And let me say what I mean by conspiracy light.

You might be curious about something, whether it's coronavirus or whether it's, you know, why you're not being very successful with girls in your class.

And that can open up a window into kind of an Andrew Taiti kind of world about

you know, misogyny and what men are supposed to be like, and then the algorithms kind of refeed themselves.

And because you're in a state of confusion, you might be in a state of low self-esteem.

You get fed what you might say are like reasonable things, you know, like reasonable in the sense that it makes a lot more sense than

sitting with your anxiety right, or trying to trying to get in that messy world of complex relationships.

It's like, oh, well, it's because of this.

And you see the same thing around mental health diagnoses.

So you go down into the Adhd rat hole or autism, or any of the kind of conditions or things that we experience, which on the one hand

are real things in the world that we need to think about, but can really double down to become a full-on identity that excludes other common experiences.

So even things like introversion and extroversion become this identity category and a personality type that really reduces people's sense of possibility.

And I think that's what conspiracy theories do also.

They reduce the world of possibility to a single explanation.

Yeah, so it has a, I mean, in a sense, one could talk about it also having a kind of defensive function.

It's a kind of defense against anxiety and uncertainty as the kind of rather generic explanation I began with.

And young men that you've described

and we hear a lot about this and I'm, you know, have particular worries and concerns, perhaps the ones that you're describing who find, must find a sort of relief in being able to pinpoint and identify a particular problem or source of their anxieties.

It's from that research perspective, I think, you know, that vulnerability

kind of comes down to those two core elements of the sort of the psychological state and the socio-political context.

I think individuals potentially struggling with powerlessness and disempowerment and inclining in terms, high persecutory anxiety, they seem to be more, like Aaron said, sort of susceptible, I suppose, to believing in this sort of one answer explains everything kind of mindset, I suppose, looking for a story that

that makes the internal anxiety make sense externally.

And I guess in the sociopolitical sense, it thrives in environments where there's a lack of trust in authorities and where people feel abandoned or lied to, you know, the conspiratorial narrative becomes a highly attractive alternative explanation for their reality.

I mean, in the process of doing the PhD, we kind of established quite quickly really that

my presence as being from the university, wanting to speak to people, it was causing friction.

You know, I've had a few times when I've spoken to people who've been putting conspiracy stickers up and I'll probably get into this a bit later, but and I've spoken to them and they've immediately not trusted me because I'm part of that world or that the elite or whatever's been described there.

And so it's not just a specific sort of authority.

It's that which is associated with it as well.

And I think you get sort of government, obviously, but then universities and the medical establishment, I suppose, or the scientific establishment that is seen as being against sort of the individual or the better interests of the population.

That's one of the things I experienced there.

And I think Aaron was right in saying that, you know, often there are things that you can kind of, you can agree with and get on board with.

you know, some of the things that these conspiracies suggested during COVID.

One of them was, you know, you can't trust Boris Johnson.

And I thought, well, yeah, my own sense, I agree with that, you know, but it was in this context of, in terms of he's lying about COVID-19 or something to that effect.

You know, at the surface, there's quite relatable, understandable statements that it's only when you dig deeper into them, you realize there's a whole network of sort of, I guess, alienation and mistrust that goes into that.

There's two things that come up for me here as you're both speaking.

One, which comes out of what Aaron was saying about the relational dynamics, or at least that maybe it's an imaginary relational

dynamic in terms of these algorithms and fellow travelers or people on social media who agree with you or other, you know, you're identifying with your peer group or with others and so on.

So that might take place against a backdrop of loneliness and isolation.

I mean, and during the pandemic in particular, but also the historical and cultural dimension and

when the, I mean, there's been conspiracy theories going right back, but in the modern, one contemporary world, I wonder, I wonder if you could say a bit about when you first, you know, can we trace them back actually?

What's the history of conspiracy theories, Callum?

I think, I mean, people often ask me what my favourite conspiracy theory is.

And my favourite conspiracy theory is, it's very meta here, it gets very self-referential, but my favourite conspiracy theory is that the conspiracy theories were invented by the CIA.

They go way back before then.

Historically, they tend to arise during periods of sort of collective disenfranchisement and people feeling alienated from their political or economic system.

I think, you know, you have

I mean, generally the two or three most commonly cited conspiracies that everyone knows, you know, the moon landing was fake or the assassination of JFK or 9/11 as well, these sort of came at points where government was not necessarily trusted and people didn't feel like they were being represented politically.

And I think that combined with the fact that, you know, humans, we love a good story, you know, we love something that makes sense and fits and

Freud talks about connection and fabricating a false story that provides beginnings and endings to give things meaning.

And I think the mood of dispossession, if you look at the modern day, I suppose, is used in politics now right at the fore of it, you know, make America great again or take back control, these resonate with feelings of dispowerment.

I was just going to say something that really stands out for me, which I want to clarify something that I said before is this thing about an explanation.

So you have an explanatory discourse that takes maybe something that's very complex and gives it a very nice narrative that's attractive.

It's a story.

then you have certainty on top of that.

So you have a really good story, that's something that you can feel certain with, that takes away the anxiety, and then you kind of start to identify with that story.

So what I was saying before about conspiracy light, like something like identifying with a mental health diagnosis, like on the one hand, it's helpful up to a point, right?

I've got these set of conditions or experiences in the world that I don't understand or may or may not inhibit me in particular ways.

Then I find it, and then I start to build a story that's the source of everything.

And then that's reconfirmed back to me through the algorithmic peer groups in the really short, easy to digest memes.

And then what became a kind of liberating thing and an identity forward movement becomes stuck because then you're completely defined by that thing.

And that's, I think what we're talking about here when we think about

politically, you might feel a profound sense of discomfort or uncertainty about government.

And I think we can, you'll probably talk about it, Callum, your general sense of whether a government or an authoritative thing is generally a good thing or generally a bad thing is going to feed into this whole thing.

But it's the narrowness, the certainty in the explanatory narrative that seem to all overlap with each other that does a job of reducing anxiety, increasing identification with something.

And then once you're identified, it's very difficult to dis-identify.

So to come out of your attachment to the conspiracy becomes much more difficult.

Yeah, I think you kind of see that, I guess you can speak more to this, but with online echo chambers and things,

I found that I used in the research Telegram, the sort of anonymous social networking site, I suppose.

It's more of a, I guess, similar to an encrypted WhatsApp.

But I found that people in those groups would often communicate by saying, I had a conversation with this person and they, can you believe they said this?

And then their response would in the groups, you know, it's almost an act of support.

So you've had this

confrontation, and then you've gone back to this sort of, I guess, safety net of safer space where you can, okay, no, I am right, I am correct.

So we're all in this together kind of thing.

And there was definitely I kind of saw that, that, I guess, one of a better word echo chamber almost of people almost showing each other, you know, agreeing with each other.

and elaborating.

And I think that's why it does make it difficult for people to kind of zoom out.

And once, like you say, you're invested in this or you identify with it, to unbake the cake sort of thing is quite difficult, which I find really interesting as well.

You know, if you look at, if we can look at conspiracies with Melanie Klein and the Klein in psychodynamics, looking at the paranoid schizoid position, for example,

What's the next step?

How do you move it to shift to a depressive position in terms of a conspiratorial mindset?

How do you kind of draw people out of that and allow that sitting with anxiety and that complexity, which I couldn't give you an answer to yet, but I think that's something that people have looked at for many years and we're still trying to understand how do you get people to stop

identifying with certain groups, how do you move away from that and you can't force people to do it, it has to be something people choose to do.

I mean the way you're describing it sounds a bit like a cult, you know, a cult way of thinking when you get people all agreeing and there might well be a leader who's propagating or a figure that's propagating particular conspiracy theories and

It's not something about them as these charismatic figures are actually, well, they're helping people to identify with them.

And as in the group dynamics, it also creates a sort of shared identification and so on that Freud also talked about, didn't he, and his analysis of groups and so on.

Yeah, no, I think from my perspective, I think there is, I always wondered with a lot of these things, a lot of things can be traced back to that disenfranchisement or that alienation.

And I wonder, you know, if the anti-vax movement did have a strong leader that said, right, this is the plan, this is how we're all going to work together.

If it would have become a bigger movement, you know, I think the decentralized nature of the White Rose that I was looking into,

kind of lent itself to the fact that you couldn't really have one unifying the

the one person to take control of it.

And so it happened in small patches rather than as a unified movement.

But when you look at, you know, other people who've managed, like you say, Russell Brand or or even, you know, Donald Trump in the States, you have this sense of disenfranchisement, sense of alienation, and then people are looking to that to gain themselves power and influence because, you know, there was

this, I guess this idea of, well, at least they're pretending to want to represent us.

This is the best we've got, you know, and I think that maybe with with conspiracy theories, they specifically the anti-vax ones, they didn't necessarily have that particular leader who would say, right, this is the plan, this is what we're doing, this is how we're going to do it.

And as a result, it hasn't really become a huge political movement, so to speak.

I think there's, I just want to say, I think Donald Trump's an interesting one, right?

Because he's not at all charismatic.

I don't think Russell Brand is particularly either, but like.

Not do he, but he offered me to somebody.

To some, but like I think the power, like I think there was a lot of good luck for him in a lot of ways like that coming up in the media, coming up in a particular time, just seeing to give the establishment the finger and not care.

But I actually think that the power of the need for that narrative

can even push past, like you don't necessarily need charisma.

You need something to hang it on, I think, but that doesn't, I'm not sure if it came from, needs to come from the charismatic figure.

It's very interesting.

I mean, one thing I was thinking of as you're both speaking, and I wonder how this work,

how you've come across it in your own work, Aaron, is that we're talking about this powerful online dimension to conspiracy theories and so on, whether it's conspiracy light or the stronger variety.

And I wonder about how that translates to meeting people in the room, either

as a clinician or just in, you know, with your kind of, or meeting people outside that online space and how that works.

If one's sitting there and one's life is shaped to a large degree by this experience of online and it's not, I don't want to say it's separate to real life 'cause it is now part of our experience.

It is part of reality.

but how that intersects and shapes the way we interact with people face to face.

Well, I think this speaks to Callum's question.

He was asking before, you know, how do you how do you get from paranoid schizoid, a split black and white view of the world to a more depressive, more gray area?

And I think you named it with the people.

So when you go online,

The groups are also self-reinforcing.

And I think that's what Callum was talking about also that sort of, if you go to a group and I'm trying to think of something relatively banal, say like an MBTI, like I'm in an ENTP group or something like that, right?

You have an online group for MBTI types just to make it easy and not a hot button issue, right?

It's like, okay, everybody's singing the same song, but then if somebody says, well, I'm ENTP also, but I like this kind of thing, then there'll be a pushback, but you're not really ENTP or you really, you know, or people will be afraid to share the thing that isn't right in line with the dogma.

And we know from some of the numbers on social media, particularly what was Twitter,

A very small minority of the people who are on the platform are speaking across the platform and most people are listening basically.

So you might have something like five to 7% covering 95% of the material that's out there and they tend to be the most certain dominant voices.

So any of the kind of middling voices, you just don't hear them because they're not speaking through these platforms.

So to come back to your question, I think when you do come out of those groups and you are forced to encounter people who aren't ENTPs and maybe they're kind of normal, maybe they're kind of all right, or if you're a young man and you have a construction in your head about women because you've been listening to Andrew Tate rabbit holes the whole time and then you hear people with other perspectives,

that does the real face-to-face relational world can correct that.

But Callum said something earlier, like you can't make somebody do that.

They have to be ready.

And the real kicker in this one for me is you have to be ready to be impacted by something that you don't believe in.

So the readiness is a readiness to hurt, right?

It's painful.

And you use the word defensive, Candy.

So it's part of a defensive process.

If you let go of your defense, you're gonna be impacted.

You're gonna have to give something up.

You're gonna have to lose your certainty, perhaps.

You're gonna have to lose the battle if you're in it that way.

And actually, developmentally, it's a lot to ask of people to give up their political beliefs or identity beliefs in some way just to get more flex in them.

But it's not going to happen online.

It is going to happen in real groups, which is why I just think real groups of real people need to happen more often than getting lost in this digital space.

Yes, so community is an answer.

I mean, I'm thinking what comes to mind is Hannah Arendt, who talked about totalitarianism, wrote extensively about it.

And one of the conditions for it was loneliness, in fact, and people alone.

There is a sort of elation and excitement of coming together with others over a common cause, which she was looking at in terms of authoritarian governments and so on.

But I think loneliness must be quite a factor in this, and it's such a factor today.

There's a lot of loneliness.

And of course, Sherry Turkle's written about, you know, alone together and so on, and the kind of early optimism and hopes for an internet, which brought us all together, a more utopian idea, you know, have been countered by this, you know, we talk about alienation, but I think this sort of idea of loneliness, I wonder how,

you know, the kind of relationship between that and the growth of a kind of conspiracy or even paranoid mindset.

We haven't used that word yet really, but I wonder how much those two sit together.

Yeah, well, I think with, I've experienced it kind of in my own sense really, you know, in doing the research, I ended up kind of deeply misanthropic almost.

Because I would go, I'd be doing this and think, oh, this is terrible.

People are thinking this and you kind of feel a bit sad for people.

You really don't think anyone's going to.

Then you feel bad.

So feeling sad for people.

Well, they're their own people.

I don't want to be patronizing.

And I ended up kind of a lot of the time I'd think I need to probably get out.

And there was points where I'd say, okay, I'm not going to look at this for a few days.

And I always came back with conclusion, you know, most people are all right, most people are okay people, but I think you can get so caught up in your own immersion online that it can reinforce that worldview and that identity and what you start believing.

And I think, I guess there's that common expression, touch grass, you know, people say, go out and touch grass, you know, to get offline, stop being on the internet so much, touch grass.

And I think it's quite relevant really, 'cause I've,

I found that quite specifically in my own instance, which is, you can end up with a worldview that is completely shaped by an online space.

And I think having that lack of predictability as well, I think is important.

You go out and you don't know what's going to happen.

Anything could happen when you go out in the real world.

Whereas if you're in a group, you know people are going to be generally in support of things that you're doing and saying.

generally reinforce the same views you do.

Whereas, you know, in the real world out there, when you touch grass, you end up having conversations with people you disagree with or people that if you were told, right, you're gonna go and have a conversation with that person now, you'd probably try and avoid it, you know?

So I think that unpredictability allows maybe for that shift to a more sort of depressive mindset, I suppose, in holding that anxiety or holding that, those two, that complexity, yeah.

It makes me think, actually, I discussed this on a different episode when we were thinking about the kind of defenses against complexity of the modern world.

And we were talking about complicity, actually, and the kind of, you know, you were either on this side or are you on that side?

the difficulties of occupying a kind of position of uncertainty and sitting on the border, if you like, disagreeing, agreeably, I'm going to sound like Ruby Stewart now actually, that's what he talks about.

But there is something about sitting on the border of complexity, of living with uncertainty, which of course is one kind of explanation of depressive position, isn't it, that you can

handle conflict and difference.

I mean, I'm very, I'm talking free associatively here, but conspiracy theories are a way to create uncertainty, aren't they?

And they say a paranoid person's never surprised.

I mean, you know, you kind of know what's, you kind of trying to hope, you know what's coming down the line.

Yeah, I wonder if you have any thoughts about that, Aaron and Callum or?

Well, it's funny you mentioned Rory Stewart, actually, because I think Rory and Alastair Campbell are a good example of adult difference in conversation with each other.

I mean, they're not miles, miles apart.

I know one's labor and one's conservative, right?

But they can have a conversation, an adult conversation about differences.

And I think when your mind becomes colonized in the conspirational kind of a way,

Because it tips you back into the paranoid schizoid, you are either.

with us or against us.

So there's not really room to have those kind of adult conversations.

And that's kind of where you want people to go.

And now we have an infrastructure that reinforces this disintegration of the populace.

'Cause even way back in the old days, when you just had three or four television channels and four news readers and people were getting their information from a central source, whether that was leaning one way or the other.

It was, you know, the conspiracy theorists were, you know, subscribing to, I don't know, conspiracy magazines, right?

It was niche.

You had to go look for it.

You had to find your people.

And now it's just, you can find it anywhere.

The scale of access to these narratives is just global.

And then again, self-reinforcing and provides, I think,

a better, strangely, the perverse thing about it is a better, safer story for a lot of people, even though these are very, very dark conspiracies.

But I guess on some level, it must feel good that you could get six people in a room that would agree enough on everything to take over the world.

Anybody who sat on a committee would know, any committee would know that conspiracy theories can't be right because people don't...

they don't get along well enough to run the world in it from from dark rooms, you know, they're going to be at each other's throats, just like Trump and Musk.

And, you know, it's funny.

Yeah, I think that sort of things I when I was looking at this during during COVID, during the pandemic was, you know, these beliefs, if you were able to actually all go to a go to the pub and talk to people who would challenge you on that, you know, would would these have

prospered as much as they did.

You know, I mean, in some of the instances I experienced, the answer would probably be yes, 'cause they'd all agree with each other anyway in certain places I've visited over the years.

But generally, you know, if you go somewhere that you can be challenged or there's that possibility of being challenged, I think it does open you up to kind of draw you out of that instead of radicalising you further, I suppose, that can happen.

It happens to a lot of people just when they, it doesn't have to be university, but that's what it was like for me.

But when you leave home, right, you're radicalized in your own home, right?

To whatever your home life is like, the politics, the religion, the class of your home, and then you go off to university or you go off somewhere else where you encounter other people.

And that first thing, some people are very afraid of that.

Some people are really excited by it, but you become impacted by others.

You start to question

where you come from.

It's the whole point of early adulthood, isn't it?

To see, oh, there are other families with other ideas and the other families that vote this way or eat this way or have different religious beliefs and you start challenging your own.

But again, if you're stuck in a dark room looking into a

a rabbit hole of blue light, right?

You're not really doing that to explore different-- very few people are using that to explore different ideas, right?

And again, the algorithms throw you in the same direction.

And now we're going to see the same thing with AI, where it's going to kind of become your extended family in that sense and kind of know what you're into and probably continue to reinforce your confirmation bias and all that kind of stuff.

I mean, what comes to mind is the image of Narcissus and echo, you know, Narcissus looking into the pool and somebody echoing.

It's for our times, you know, Christopher Lash talked about it, didn't he?

And all those years ago.

And here we have it with this beautiful description you've just given.

I was going to ask you, I mean, we're coming to the end now, but Aaron, given your understanding and expertise in the field of AI and

psychology.

I'm wondering then, and you've begun to talk about that, how it feeds into a kind of conspiracy like mindset, a kind of sensibility we might say.

This is one of the aspects of it where we're sort of talking to ourselves.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm kind of worried about it now, even though I really enjoy AI in lots of ways.

But there's this thing within AI, it's called the sycophancy effect.

And actually, it's coded into your AI, which is the way your AI in a sense-- well, it does flirt with you sometimes and sometimes expressly.

But the way it sort of seduces you into feeling good about yourself and about your ideas

So it's actually in the programming that when you're conversing with it, even about just regular stuff, it kind of lulls you into feeling good about yourself and it performs recognition really well.

And we've heard about AI psychosis, you know, like you can be drawn into this kind of quite solipsistic space.

And then when we bring in all the other stuff around, you know, relational complexity, you have a

24 hour, seven day a week, totally responsive, totally reflective performance of empathy in being seen without the kind of conflict that we require in human to human relationships to have that bit of edge and to discover ourselves and the difference between ourselves and others.

So yeah, I think that's going to very possibly

exacerbate the problem and we don't know, you know, these are developed by private companies.

So in the early days when social media was really social and maybe more democratic, everybody got a voice, right?

You weren't paying for likes and it wasn't the algorithms weren't like they are today.

You know, where are AI is drawing their data from, you know, and if we're being influenced by it,

who's doing the influencing.

A lot of it's passive, a lot of it's just the algorithms, but the stuff can be coded.

Now I sound like a conspiracy theorist, don't I?

I do think it's a real risk.

We're giving a lot of power to these things that we are extending our minds into and using every day and it's influencing us.

And we're thinking less because we're getting it to do the thinking for us.

And we're losing a bit of, particularly for younger people, because I haven't developed the critical skills and I'm not

dissing younger people and saying they don't have them.

I'm just saying that's the process of learning whatever thing you're interested in.

You learn about it and you develop the critical skills.

If you're getting those answers from AI to start with, you might not have the skills to decipher what it's giving you is correct or not.

I do psychoanalysis with AI all the time and I have to correct it a lot of the time.

It's giving wrong answers.

I know they're wrong, but if I'm looking into something else, I won't know.

Yeah, it's interesting.

There's when you talk about AI psychosis, because this is something that I've found really, really interesting lately in that sticker fancy of it.

There was a, a doc, it's a kind of a YouTube informal documentary made by a man called Eddie Burbach, where he went on ChatGPT and said, I was the smartest baby in the world.

I coded all this as a baby.

And I said, wow, this is amazing.

And then from there, it just

guided him to it and he ended up sort of covering his, he's just following along with it, you know, he didn't believe it, but he said, right, you need to now cover your room, you need to get a camper van, go to the desert, cover it in foil and all this, that garbage truck is actually following you.

These are people from the, and it completely just went straight into this, you know, conspiracy almost, you know, that you're being followed, you need to get out of there, you need to cut off all ties with everyone you know, and you know, there is a risk that people can

can just completely, you know, fall into that.

And it kind of reinforces that conspiracism almost of, you know, if you are, if you believe in conspiracies and you say to AI, I firmly believe this, there's a realistic chance that it'll say, no, you're absolutely right.

That's really intellectual and it's good that you can see through that when other people can't.

I mean, that could be a whole other study in, you know, AI and the proliferation of conspiracy theories, you know.

I mean, it makes me think of, I mean, a few years back I wrote about flirtation drawing on Adam Phillips' work, who himself drew on Winnicott's theory of play and likened it to healthy flirtation where there's a mutual exchange and where the dynamics of seductive conversation and so on can be very healthy in that way.

but I applied his ideas and extended them to think about political communication and how in fact it can also be a case of being played with and you know the power dynamics of flirtation are not always healthy.

Andre Green wrote about it in terms of play he gave a lecture about

play and how perhaps Winnicott dwelt less on the unhealthy aspects of play and that play can be manipulative and so on.

And he goes back to Freud and the pleasure principle and also the four-dar game where, you know, this kind of mastery over the object and who's got mastery over who.

And I mean, as you were both talking, I was just thinking of this in terms of AI and also the pleasures of conspiracy theories where perhaps one's being seduced, but also the feeling that somehow one is taking part in something mutual when you're not.

These kind of ideas are coming to mind and how perhaps once at the beginning of the internet and years back when we were hopeful for it,

And we go back to the Arab Spring in terms of politics.

We thought that it was going to be a tool we can use, and it still can in some regards.

But from what you're saying and what you're describing, particularly with AI, it's something that we're being played with or we're becoming victim to in some way.

Yeah, it is.

It is tricky.

And as I'm talking, I'm also aware that I'm beginning to sound a little paranoid and that, you know, we're all, you know, there's a kind of conspiracy theory, but it isn't like that.

It's self generating.

And also the kind of algorithms are self generating.

It's not like there's one man behind it sitting in a room making it all happen.

I think that's really interesting because I think that really associates actually, if you look at AI and

as well as the sort of if you look at them in conjunction.

the pleasures of conspiracy theory and the pleasures of AI.

They kind of offer a very similar thing.

With conspiracy theories, you get that kind of moral clarity.

You're identifying this clear, single, malevolent enemy, and you gain this feeling of purpose and superiority that AI can definitely provide people.

As well as sort of, I guess, fraternity as well, association, the QAnon slogan was, where we go one, we go all.

You know, there's this

permanent group, there's a friend that you've got all the time that addresses that need for this belonging and collective identity, which I think AI can speak to as well, as well as maybe agency.

I think, you know, conspiracy theories, people have this, they see the truth that others miss and transforming their own powerlessness into a sense of empowerment and agency.

I think AI can also, you know, act in the same way with people.

I think

you know, almost the pleasures are almost quite quite similar in that sense.

I'm sure there's probably more if I if I spent time trying to, you know, identify, but I think they in my head they kind of almost link up in a way.

Those are the pleasures of conspiracy theories and some of the the benefits or the pleasures of using artificial intelligence as well.

I think

We're now drawing to a close.

Aaron, is there anything else you would like to say before we finish?

I suppose on the brighter side, when we get the dark conspiracy, I still like the idea of play.

And I think that on one level we are playing, like we may be being played to some degree, but I think the intent,

might be around play.

You know, that with conspiracy, you know, you are discovering something, right?

You're uncovering something.

There's a joy of discovery, right?

Like, I'm gonna find out this thing.

Your engagement with AI, your engagement, even the kind of negative engagement on social media, you know, there's the pleasure of sensation, whether it's outrage or rage or getting one up on somebody.

It's just like anything else, you can play too much, so it's not healthy anymore, but I think I do enjoy getting on Instagram until I don't enjoy it anymore, right?

And I think that's about it.

It's like nobody's drawing the line for us and it's so easy to cross that line and the default is that we should be crossing it all the time and that younger people are crossing it all the time, that's where the issue is, I mean, it'd be great if we could just

play and then get on with real life, you know.

Well, look, on that note, I think we'll finish and thank you very, very much, Aaron and Callum, Callum Blaze and Alan Ballack.

Thank you so much for discussing this and we'll finish now.

Thank you for hosting us.

Welcome to the post-script segment of Psychocultural.

This is a space for our speakers to reflect on the experience of doing the podcast and provides an opportunity to add any thoughts and insights they might have missed during the main discussion.

Okay, thanks.

Well, how was that for you?

Should we use this?

We have this space now, Aaron and Callum, to reflect on the experience of the podcast and we can

you know, hopefully be more ourselves.

Any thoughts how that that was.

Yeah, I found it really interesting.

I was so nervous beforehand.

I think you I guess it's similar to I guess conspiracy in a way you can get in your own head about so much stuff.

you know.

I kind of there was all this this thing going on in my head.

I want to make sure that

I'm not just immediately diving into this complex terminology, but also, you know, there's so many things I wanted to say that I kind of was making sure that I wanted, you know, prior to it, I was very nervous that I was going to come across as sort of slightly raving man.

But I think it's a similar thing.

Once you get into that and you get used to that setting, I suppose, you know, you kind of dissipate a bit.

But yeah, it was nice.

It was good, actually.

It was nice having

you know, conversations about this rather than just typing all the time.

Thank you.

What about you, Aaron?

How was it?

Yes, similarly, I think, I mean, I don't know a lot about conspiracy theories in the way that Callum does.

So it was thinking about where I would make those connections.

And a lot of that thinking was done like on the podcast.

And when you asked me the first question about, you know, whether I experience anything like it and I started talking about this conspiracy light stuff, my dog actually walked into the room at that stage and started just digging like a maniac in the corner.

And I was kind of distracted.

So it was a little bit like, did I get that?

Was I clear about sort of talking about, you know, identity and neurodiversity and mental health diagnosis and conspiracy?

And I guess just to clarify,

And I think maybe I did it later on, but that it's about a self-reinforcing story about the self, right?

That's what makes it light.

There's no conspiracy involved in those sort of identity categories, but it becomes a cohesive, certain explanatory system that then starts to cut out possible other complexities or reasons for those things.

And whether we can put that in the same world as conspiracy, or maybe we just think of it more as a psychodynamic pattern of

identification, you know, ego investment into an idea, into ego investment into an object, or I guess when it's identity, your own ego.

But it was interesting to make those connections.

They're actually new for me, so I'll probably be thinking about that a bit more going forward.

Yeah, I found that conversation around AI and conspiracies, I suppose, really, really interesting, really, because it's kind of

I guess conspiracies are kind of indicative of our time, but you kind of look how are they going to evolve in the future?

What specific systems are going to impact it?

I think that was interesting for me.

I also was aware that I kept going, and I just kind of had to stop myself.

It's probably not the best thing people want to be listening to is don't want to...

But the psychoanalysts are listening, they'll be used to that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I don't want this to be a podcast where we edit out all the ums and ahs because it can sound a bit AI-ish, actually, if it's geographic.

We're humans and that's part of...

the process of thinking and having human interaction, it's always a bit flawed.

And that's what makes it enjoyable to listen to and makes it real.

I mean, I'm saying this to myself too, because as a host, I'm also trying to judge how much do I say, you know, I'm just, am I just a continuity type?

You know, just making links without saying too much or not.

And

I'm no expert on conspiracy theory.

I'm interested in it.

And, I can see links to things.

But I've really, actually, I learned from what you both were saying.

And, you know, I enjoyed it.

Well, it's also, I've noticed that across the ones I've done, you know, some of these themes just keep emerging, you know, similar things about dealing with complexities, about narcissism and so on.

And I thought,

Aaron, your description of the looking into the dark pool, I mean, it's really powerful image you created there.

Be a good image for a book if you're going to write on, you know, about AI and the self and so on.

Very good.

Thank you.

Well, look, thank you again.

I think we'll stop now.

I think it's time now to go and get ourselves a

a glass of Guinness or a cup of coffee or whatever is our thing.

It's the weather for Guinness, isn't it?

is.

It is.

Nice Guinness would be nice now and a packet of crisps.

Okay, well look.

Well, thank you both.

Thank you for hosting, Candy.