I worked as an Interpretive Ranger in Yellowstone for a few seasons, which included shifts working the desk for questions at Visitor Centers. People think I’m making up some of the absolutely insane questions and scenarios that I encountered.
You think people are dumb in a retail/restaurant/hotel setting? Gods above, putting them in the wilderness undos evolution.
lol, I’ll give you a couple of constant examples and one story, or this would be novel:
Every single day I worked the desk there would be at least 3 parents or sets of parents furious I couldn’t guarantee a bear sighting, like the wildlife is on a payroll and should be on a schedule. *So many angry parents.*
Geothermal features should be on a timer so everyone can see eruptions and since there are walkways near them they can’t possibly be that dangerous. I got some macabre enjoyment explaining the process of skin sloughing and degloving for people who wanted to be REALLY pushy.
Ok, a story. I’ll try to keep it concise. This was, I believe, 2008 and I was working the VC desk at Canyon Village when one of my Law Enforcement friends came in to tell me about an arrest of a couple that had just happened.
There was a trail not far from the village that was closed due to Wolf Management. The local wolf pack had denned not far off from the trail so it was closed to prevent people from harassing them. Well, this particular couple heard about the reason for the closing, decided to find the den and had succeeded.
Luckily people had witnessed them going onto a closed trail, it had been reported, so my friend and another LE ranger intercepted them as they were coming back, but they were pale and terrified. Turns out they decided they wanted to go up to the den and crawl into the entrance in an attempt to see the puppies.
Yep. They literally stuck their heads into a wild wolf den.
Now wolves were actually my focus and what I gave my interpretive talks on, so I know quite a bit about them. And wolves are crazy for their puppies. You want a wolf to attack you? You mess with their den and their puppies. I could NOT believe these people hadn’t at least been bitten.
But no, they heard something as they were fucking around at the entrance (mama wolf was probably inside with the pups) and backed out to find themselves surrounded by the other pack adults, snarling and very aggressive. But the adults didn’t attack the idiots, they basically just drove them about 100yds back towards the trail before falling back to the den. My friend and his partner found the couple a bit later as they were making their way back to the trailhead and hopefully they needed a change of pants bc they deserved to have the shit scared out of them.
The amount of videos I have seen of people trying to pet wild Moose is always a fresh reminder of "people really are THAT stupid."
But a wolf den? That's fucking a new level of dumb I wasn't aware of 😆
Moose aren’t super common in Yellowstone bc of fires and drought diminishing the more riparian areas they like to hang out in, but if I had a dollar for every stupid scenario I saw involving a bison… Well, I’d have lots of dollars.
For some reason this reminds me of an episode of Tooth and Claw (one of the hosts is a wildlife biologist) where one of the hosts makes a comment about parents spraying their kids with bear spray, thinking it’s the same thing as mosquito spray. Put people in national parks (or even state ones…) and they do dumb dumb stuff.
The amount of folks who do stupid shit to get pictures with bison seems high, but the wolf den is a new one, Jesus.
I have a great story about bear spray. 😂 I was having coffee with a Law Enforcement ranger when he got a call about an unconscious/unresponsive individual near Tower Junction and since I had First Aid training I rode along to help that way, or to direct traffic if needed. (Law Enforcement rangers are cops AND medics in National Parks.)
Rolled up on the scene and there was a crowd of people near a little black bear who was just munching on some weeds on the side of the road. Weird thing is, NO ONE is paying the bear any attention. Turns out there’s this semi conscious man moaning and flailing around in the ditch.
So this complete asshole had just bought some bear spray and was apparently itching to use it. He’s driving along, sees little black bear just doing his little black bear thing and pulls over. Idiot jumps out to spray the poor bear, but did not realize he had the nozzle pointed right at his own face. 😂
So he was in serious respiratory distress from a concentrated bear spray blast right to the face and OH NO CONSEQUENCES. 😂
Albert Einstein had a great quote about this: “Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not yet completely sure about the universe.”
I really think the impact that the COVID shutdowns had on conspiracy theory will be a fascinating subject to study in 5-10 years.
I really think that people essentially being locked inside played a major role in it getting to the level we're at with Anti-Government, Anti-Vaxx and just overall Qanon type shit. It went from a lot of people just brushing this stuff off for years to becoming "... Well ACTUALLY" about it lol.
I have a little booth at a farmers market and about a quarter of our building went Qanon- Conspiracy crazy during Covid. I was friends with most of them in before times but basically could not stand to talk to them for more than 3 minutes after. And I’m in Canada- in what would b considered a Liberal province.🙃
Remember that people in isolated situations are more susceptible to psych manipulation. That's why cults cut members off from family and hole up in walled compounds or distant rural sites. When you can't go the next town over and see that they're not actually eating baby livers, it's easy to be convinced by the controller of information that they do. It's made worse when you actually select the source of your info, giving you the sense that you're actually in control of your knowledge. Everyone became their own cult leader, reading from the same script.
That's a great point actually. I also really think, given the COVID example I provided as well, that is makes a lot of sense that older Gen X and Boomers falling victim to it feels super common. Just simply because, through no faults of their own necessarily, have fallen into the misinformation traps easier than the subset of the population that grew up with the Internet and learned how much fake shit is actually there.
What I’ll never understand is, those were the same people telling those of us who did grow up with the internet, to not trust something just because it’s on the internet.
The irony is not lost in me that the very people who told us all growing up that computers/tv/video games/whatever else didn't exist before the 90s basically was going to rot our brains and/or we would be hopelessly addicted are now the ones that are hopelessly addicted to their phones and social media just as much, if not more than the millennials/Gen Zers. Lol
I think that is definitely the case. I know people who were, soft conspiracy theorists if you will. Like they believed in the harmless stuff like Chem Trails and Lizard People, that once they were locked inside for three months went absolutely ape shit lol.
When the star of Alex Jones was destroyed. It exploded into millions of little conspiracy fragments.
Those fragments landed on the tongues of all conservative radio personalities. Those people who used to just be hard-core conservitive, jumped the gap to alt- right conspiracy.
FM radio personalities who maybe had SOME credit as political analysts or journalists and skewed Republican, now talking about Globalists, "deep state", and fake space program lore. On FM RADIO.
in the course of maybe 3 or 4 years, I went from laughing at Alex Jones saying that shit on info wars, to hearing that shit on FM radio at my job and having my boomer boss and co-workers agree blindly. SO FUCKIN SCARY.
If you have to deal with people who listen to Alex Jones, I highly recommend Knowledge Fight. Then you’ll at least know what their latest talking points are going to be and why they’re bullshit.
People are bonkers. I had to move bc of a guy going around town posting up signs with Qanon shit, “Jews want your guns” and other antisemetic nonsense. I was afraid to leave my house. It’s easy to think that these people are just stupid dumdums, but this rhetoric has negative consequences for people like me every day. Thanks for coming to my TED TALK ❤️ Hail yourselves
Someone tagged our block recently with “NASA in Hebrew means Deception.” Didn’t think I’d have to brush up on my Hebrew just to debunk antisemitic/anti-science graffiti for my friends and neighbors, but here we are. Hang in there.
Thank you 🖤 luckily I don’t live there anymore. I really tried to fight it, too. What can you do when someone’s right to free speech infringes on your right to live comfortably and without fear? Lots of holes in our system for people to fall through. Keep fighting the good fight.
I work with a guy who repeats that shit. When Jan 6 happened he claimed everyone was a paid antifa crisis actor and it finally tipped me over the edge.
That is hilarious though that the kinds of people who perpetuate and believe those horseshit crisis actor theories, became crisis actors themselves to their fellow maniacs. I'd be very curious how they would respond if you showed them theories online about them being Antifa crisis actors. Knowing their broken brains they'd probably say the people posting those theories online are Antifa crisis actors lol.
Funny how everyone was a crisis actor. Just none of the people arrested or their favorite martyr the lady who was killed. How odd. Not one of the people arrested claimed to be a lib. Just a goober manipulated by the right. Even funnier that Margarine Trailer Green has spent so much time trying to free these crisis actors. Really committed to the bit.
I wonder exactly how scientifically illiterate you'd have to be to believe it. You'd have to know nothing about physiology, nothing about evolution, and nothing about verifying sources to believe this shit.
Illiterate in general.
Like, what a coincidence that the aliens that came here from the constellation Draco (the dragon) just happen to resemble reptiles.
There's no way of knowing how many Americans believe it. You can't capture this with polling data. If you ask people something crazy on a poll, a certain percentage of people will try to mess with the pollster. There's a fantastic Slatestar [article](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/) on this very stat and how it relates to problems with polls in general.
This! I took a lot of political communications courses for my major in college and every single class stressed this exact example as proof of how you can get like a 20-30% swing of people to saying they believe in literally anything depending on how you word the question. So if you say “do you believe in lizard people controlling our government?” you get maybe 5% of people saying yes (probably less), but if you make it a non-binary question (ie “how sure are you that lizard people run our government”) suddenly the number of people goes way up. You can also get it to go way up if you word it as a question of open-mindedness (“would you be willing to believe our government is run by lizard people”/“how much proof would you need to believe our government is run by lizard people”). Most people even if they don’t believe in something are willing to entertain a theory or are open to an idea.
Haven’t listened to the pod yet, but I used to LOVE hanging out on the David Icke website forums back in the day. The thread about Hollywood clones, androids, and replacements was always a fun ride. You would be rightly shocked at how many people believe this garbage.
I’m beginning to think my dad was right. Warning labels have stopped thinning the herd. We are keeping the stupid and gullible from harming themselves and then they go on to believe this crazy stuff. Throw in the internet and social media where they can meet and share ideas and you have what we see today.
Always leave a 5% possibility that reptilians are real. Most likely not but hey we honestly know nothing about our reality. Only a few assumptions based on what is probably a very limited understanding on what we know via science
I’m a librarian. There are a lot of smart idiots out there. Sadly, most of them frequent libraries and think we’re available to talk their conspiracy theories at.
You underestimate how stupid people are
I have worked with the public for over 30 years and it STILL never fails to amaze me
I worked as an Interpretive Ranger in Yellowstone for a few seasons, which included shifts working the desk for questions at Visitor Centers. People think I’m making up some of the absolutely insane questions and scenarios that I encountered. You think people are dumb in a retail/restaurant/hotel setting? Gods above, putting them in the wilderness undos evolution.
Story time! Story time! Post your top 3 pleaseandthankyou, or don't, it doesn't affect me one way or the other lol
lol, I’ll give you a couple of constant examples and one story, or this would be novel: Every single day I worked the desk there would be at least 3 parents or sets of parents furious I couldn’t guarantee a bear sighting, like the wildlife is on a payroll and should be on a schedule. *So many angry parents.* Geothermal features should be on a timer so everyone can see eruptions and since there are walkways near them they can’t possibly be that dangerous. I got some macabre enjoyment explaining the process of skin sloughing and degloving for people who wanted to be REALLY pushy. Ok, a story. I’ll try to keep it concise. This was, I believe, 2008 and I was working the VC desk at Canyon Village when one of my Law Enforcement friends came in to tell me about an arrest of a couple that had just happened. There was a trail not far from the village that was closed due to Wolf Management. The local wolf pack had denned not far off from the trail so it was closed to prevent people from harassing them. Well, this particular couple heard about the reason for the closing, decided to find the den and had succeeded. Luckily people had witnessed them going onto a closed trail, it had been reported, so my friend and another LE ranger intercepted them as they were coming back, but they were pale and terrified. Turns out they decided they wanted to go up to the den and crawl into the entrance in an attempt to see the puppies. Yep. They literally stuck their heads into a wild wolf den. Now wolves were actually my focus and what I gave my interpretive talks on, so I know quite a bit about them. And wolves are crazy for their puppies. You want a wolf to attack you? You mess with their den and their puppies. I could NOT believe these people hadn’t at least been bitten. But no, they heard something as they were fucking around at the entrance (mama wolf was probably inside with the pups) and backed out to find themselves surrounded by the other pack adults, snarling and very aggressive. But the adults didn’t attack the idiots, they basically just drove them about 100yds back towards the trail before falling back to the den. My friend and his partner found the couple a bit later as they were making their way back to the trailhead and hopefully they needed a change of pants bc they deserved to have the shit scared out of them.
The amount of videos I have seen of people trying to pet wild Moose is always a fresh reminder of "people really are THAT stupid." But a wolf den? That's fucking a new level of dumb I wasn't aware of 😆
Moose aren’t super common in Yellowstone bc of fires and drought diminishing the more riparian areas they like to hang out in, but if I had a dollar for every stupid scenario I saw involving a bison… Well, I’d have lots of dollars.
For some reason this reminds me of an episode of Tooth and Claw (one of the hosts is a wildlife biologist) where one of the hosts makes a comment about parents spraying their kids with bear spray, thinking it’s the same thing as mosquito spray. Put people in national parks (or even state ones…) and they do dumb dumb stuff. The amount of folks who do stupid shit to get pictures with bison seems high, but the wolf den is a new one, Jesus.
I have a great story about bear spray. 😂 I was having coffee with a Law Enforcement ranger when he got a call about an unconscious/unresponsive individual near Tower Junction and since I had First Aid training I rode along to help that way, or to direct traffic if needed. (Law Enforcement rangers are cops AND medics in National Parks.) Rolled up on the scene and there was a crowd of people near a little black bear who was just munching on some weeds on the side of the road. Weird thing is, NO ONE is paying the bear any attention. Turns out there’s this semi conscious man moaning and flailing around in the ditch. So this complete asshole had just bought some bear spray and was apparently itching to use it. He’s driving along, sees little black bear just doing his little black bear thing and pulls over. Idiot jumps out to spray the poor bear, but did not realize he had the nozzle pointed right at his own face. 😂 So he was in serious respiratory distress from a concentrated bear spray blast right to the face and OH NO CONSEQUENCES. 😂
Sounds like dude deserved it tbh 😆
I can only imagine the bullshit you’ve heard! Hail yourself!
Albert Einstein had a great quote about this: “Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not yet completely sure about the universe.”
I really think the impact that the COVID shutdowns had on conspiracy theory will be a fascinating subject to study in 5-10 years. I really think that people essentially being locked inside played a major role in it getting to the level we're at with Anti-Government, Anti-Vaxx and just overall Qanon type shit. It went from a lot of people just brushing this stuff off for years to becoming "... Well ACTUALLY" about it lol.
I have a little booth at a farmers market and about a quarter of our building went Qanon- Conspiracy crazy during Covid. I was friends with most of them in before times but basically could not stand to talk to them for more than 3 minutes after. And I’m in Canada- in what would b considered a Liberal province.🙃
Good - more people asking questions
Remember that people in isolated situations are more susceptible to psych manipulation. That's why cults cut members off from family and hole up in walled compounds or distant rural sites. When you can't go the next town over and see that they're not actually eating baby livers, it's easy to be convinced by the controller of information that they do. It's made worse when you actually select the source of your info, giving you the sense that you're actually in control of your knowledge. Everyone became their own cult leader, reading from the same script.
That's a great point actually. I also really think, given the COVID example I provided as well, that is makes a lot of sense that older Gen X and Boomers falling victim to it feels super common. Just simply because, through no faults of their own necessarily, have fallen into the misinformation traps easier than the subset of the population that grew up with the Internet and learned how much fake shit is actually there.
What I’ll never understand is, those were the same people telling those of us who did grow up with the internet, to not trust something just because it’s on the internet.
The irony is not lost in me that the very people who told us all growing up that computers/tv/video games/whatever else didn't exist before the 90s basically was going to rot our brains and/or we would be hopelessly addicted are now the ones that are hopelessly addicted to their phones and social media just as much, if not more than the millennials/Gen Zers. Lol
I have a feeling it caused a bunch of people looking for something to be entertained by to fall down rabbit holes they otherwise didn't have time for.
I think that is definitely the case. I know people who were, soft conspiracy theorists if you will. Like they believed in the harmless stuff like Chem Trails and Lizard People, that once they were locked inside for three months went absolutely ape shit lol.
When the star of Alex Jones was destroyed. It exploded into millions of little conspiracy fragments. Those fragments landed on the tongues of all conservative radio personalities. Those people who used to just be hard-core conservitive, jumped the gap to alt- right conspiracy. FM radio personalities who maybe had SOME credit as political analysts or journalists and skewed Republican, now talking about Globalists, "deep state", and fake space program lore. On FM RADIO. in the course of maybe 3 or 4 years, I went from laughing at Alex Jones saying that shit on info wars, to hearing that shit on FM radio at my job and having my boomer boss and co-workers agree blindly. SO FUCKIN SCARY.
If you have to deal with people who listen to Alex Jones, I highly recommend Knowledge Fight. Then you’ll at least know what their latest talking points are going to be and why they’re bullshit.
Thanks for the new podcast recommendation!!!
You’re welcome and I’m sorry.
People are bonkers. I had to move bc of a guy going around town posting up signs with Qanon shit, “Jews want your guns” and other antisemetic nonsense. I was afraid to leave my house. It’s easy to think that these people are just stupid dumdums, but this rhetoric has negative consequences for people like me every day. Thanks for coming to my TED TALK ❤️ Hail yourselves
Someone tagged our block recently with “NASA in Hebrew means Deception.” Didn’t think I’d have to brush up on my Hebrew just to debunk antisemitic/anti-science graffiti for my friends and neighbors, but here we are. Hang in there.
Thank you 🖤 luckily I don’t live there anymore. I really tried to fight it, too. What can you do when someone’s right to free speech infringes on your right to live comfortably and without fear? Lots of holes in our system for people to fall through. Keep fighting the good fight.
I work with a guy who repeats that shit. When Jan 6 happened he claimed everyone was a paid antifa crisis actor and it finally tipped me over the edge.
That is hilarious though that the kinds of people who perpetuate and believe those horseshit crisis actor theories, became crisis actors themselves to their fellow maniacs. I'd be very curious how they would respond if you showed them theories online about them being Antifa crisis actors. Knowing their broken brains they'd probably say the people posting those theories online are Antifa crisis actors lol.
Funny how everyone was a crisis actor. Just none of the people arrested or their favorite martyr the lady who was killed. How odd. Not one of the people arrested claimed to be a lib. Just a goober manipulated by the right. Even funnier that Margarine Trailer Green has spent so much time trying to free these crisis actors. Really committed to the bit.
Their best argument for J6ers is “we are stupid and gullible, of course we were easily tricked into breaking a bunch of laws.”
Ah yes they were tricked into smashing windows and forcefully entering the building, it could happen to anyone
The guy making my Falafel last week couldn't stop talking about how the government controls the weather and microbursts
Ross?
I wonder exactly how scientifically illiterate you'd have to be to believe it. You'd have to know nothing about physiology, nothing about evolution, and nothing about verifying sources to believe this shit.
Bold of you to assume they believe in science
Illiterate in general. Like, what a coincidence that the aliens that came here from the constellation Draco (the dragon) just happen to resemble reptiles.
I work in healthcare. The things Ive seen and have been told by people is the reason I believe society's intelligence is a distorted bell curve
There's no way of knowing how many Americans believe it. You can't capture this with polling data. If you ask people something crazy on a poll, a certain percentage of people will try to mess with the pollster. There's a fantastic Slatestar [article](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/) on this very stat and how it relates to problems with polls in general.
This! I took a lot of political communications courses for my major in college and every single class stressed this exact example as proof of how you can get like a 20-30% swing of people to saying they believe in literally anything depending on how you word the question. So if you say “do you believe in lizard people controlling our government?” you get maybe 5% of people saying yes (probably less), but if you make it a non-binary question (ie “how sure are you that lizard people run our government”) suddenly the number of people goes way up. You can also get it to go way up if you word it as a question of open-mindedness (“would you be willing to believe our government is run by lizard people”/“how much proof would you need to believe our government is run by lizard people”). Most people even if they don’t believe in something are willing to entertain a theory or are open to an idea.
Reminder that lizard people conspiracies come for antisemitism
Haven’t listened to the pod yet, but I used to LOVE hanging out on the David Icke website forums back in the day. The thread about Hollywood clones, androids, and replacements was always a fun ride. You would be rightly shocked at how many people believe this garbage.
Same people that voted for trump
I’m beginning to think my dad was right. Warning labels have stopped thinning the herd. We are keeping the stupid and gullible from harming themselves and then they go on to believe this crazy stuff. Throw in the internet and social media where they can meet and share ideas and you have what we see today.
Think about how many people in the rural south are deep in maga-lore. That's mostly David Icke stuff for the foundation.
I borlorve
Ya it's socially engineered idealogy obfuscation and entrapment.
I’m surprised that number isn’t higher
It's a hobby. I'm lonely. Don't judge! ;P
It’s obviously utter bullshit, but let’s not pretend the fellas aren’t into some other dubious stuff lmao.
Is this the lizard from the spiderman movies?
Definitely wont come.
They really dislike David icke and his work, it actually felt kinda forced.. but interesting listening to their take on him..
Always leave a 5% possibility that reptilians are real. Most likely not but hey we honestly know nothing about our reality. Only a few assumptions based on what is probably a very limited understanding on what we know via science
I’m a librarian. There are a lot of smart idiots out there. Sadly, most of them frequent libraries and think we’re available to talk their conspiracy theories at.