 My deepest sorrow is about to your grandmother. We're in the camps together. I'll show you through all that just to be shot in a living room by a burglar. Nazis Jonas. God damn Nazis. That's Al Pacino from the Amazon series Hunters about a group of modern-day Nazi hunters. Spoiler alert! Al Pacino isn't quite what he seems to be in that little clip there, although isn't that a perfect theme set up for this show in general and for this episode? Things aren't always what they seem. Take for example, today's guest, the very excellent and well-spoken Scott Shea, who's written a book called Conspiracy You. Now, you know or you might know from listening to this show that I have a special affinity for successful business people who then venture into these kind of intellectual pursuits like Scott does. This guy is sharp and he's worldly in a lot of ways. And as you'll see in this dialogue, he's able to quickly kind of cut through a lot of the chaff and get down to talking about real stuff. And we talk about plenty of real stuff in this interview. Here are some clips. I do run across people now and then who have the holahokes thing and it pops up in sometimes the strangest way. I'll talk to people and I'll think we're having a good conversation and then I find out this part. I've talked to folks just like that too who are and I talk about folks in the book who are had PhDs in something. They're not dummies and yet when it comes to believing in a conspiracy theory about the Jew Arthur Butts, who's a professor of engineering in Northwestern University as tenure, claims that everything that happened to my father and everybody else was just a myth designed by Zionists with political motivation and that these Jews were so smart that they were able to place thousands of false documents. Sadly, what happens on campus no longer stays on campus. These theories are becoming much more ubiquitous. They're infiltrating in some areas into the investment world, this whole BDS movement, a boycott, this is divest in sanction, is a direct heir to what happened on campus. Let's go to something a little bit harder because the other, I guess, concern I had with the book is that, you know, when I think of anti-Zionist conspiracy theories, I think of this. Ghislaine Maxwell and her pedophile lover, Jeffrey Upstein, were both Israeli spies who took pictures of powerful men having sex with underage girls to blackmail them. Their alleged Mossad handler has sensationally claimed. Now I would just add that that alleged Mossad handler kind of stands up to scrutiny pretty well. He was tried in court and was actually acquitted because he showed that he was an agent of Israel in his arms dealing. Well, look, first of all, I'd like to say this. What the anti-Zionists say is something separate. I mean, there, by the way, I have no idea if that's right, wrong, or indifferent. I've never heard that or seen that before you put it up on the screen. So I don't express any opinion, but I will say this. The United States has done despicable things. A lot of countries do despicable things. So I think this is a really good interview from a really terrific guest who's willing to go there and engage on stuff and talk in a very unscripted way like this. Hats off to Scott Schaefer doing that. So here's the thing. If you like this interview, if you agree with me that this is unique, you're not going to find another interview like this. Well, anywhere, I listened to a ton of podcasts. I don't hear very many interviews like this. Share this interview with other people. Let's let other people know that these kind of dialogues, these kind of challenging dialogues are happening on the internet. That's my mission to make that happen. And to make it happen, I need your help. You know, in the last episode, I asked people to reach out a little bit to share the skeptical thing with other people, and you did. I'm really, really grateful that you did. So I'm going to ask you to do it again, take a moment and do what you can to let people know that we're out there. We're holding down the fort in terms of these next level intelligent dialogues slash debates about real important stuff. Okay. That's my pitch. Remember, there's no strings attached. There's no money changing hands. There's no firewall. There's no advertising. There's no nothing to go by Scott's book. If you want to spend anybody, do that, but you don't have to give me anything. Just share the ideas. Okay, here's the interview. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Akeris. And well today, we have a good one. Super successful business leader, banker, and author Scott Shea is here to talk about his new book, Conspiracy You. Scott is the co-founder and chairman of Signature Bank in New York, a very, very substantial bank. He has an undergraduate and MBA from Northwestern. I mentioned that particularly because it is relevant to this story as we go on. Scott, welcome to Skeptico. Thank you so much for joining me. Alex, thank you for having me on your show. It's great. So Scott, why don't we start just tell people the basic premise of the book? So the basic premise of the book is that conspiracy theories from both the far left and far right are masquerading as scholarship at universities, including my own Northwestern University. And these conspiracy theories are not just about Jews, but there are plenty of them about Jews and Zionism. And I was amazed and stunned to see how things that make no sense are passed off as academic research at fancy universities. Great. I'll tell you what, can you tell us a little bit about your father? I think it's actually there's some important history there that I learned that I didn't know before. And it certainly plays into one of the most important conspiracy theories that we might talk about a little bit. Yep. Well, my father grew up in Specter, Lithuania. And he was when the Nazis came in in 1941, he was it was just before he was going to turn 14. His father was murdered practically before his eyes, his brothers, his aunts, his uncles, and almost all of his cousins were murdered. My closest relative on his side is a second cousin once removed. The bad news was and the really, really bad news is the decades of conspiracy theories and a boycotts of Jews in Spexner led everybody to think that these Jews, no matter how nice these local Jews are, they're part of some evil cabal. And once the Nazis came in, every last Jew was handed over in Spexner. Nobody escaped. So that's the little bit that I guess I've heard about. But your story and I don't know if it was in the book or I read in another interview did kind of added to that, you know, I mean, tragically, this was an enabling kind of thing that was going on in Lithuania that really propelled that. And then, you know, I do run across people now and then who have the whole hoax thing. And it pops up in sometimes the strangest way. I'll talk to people and I'll think we're having a good conversation about something that we both believe in or think we believe in or want to explore. And then I find out this part and I always kind of am surprised. But then the actual history, not of your father, but that same period is what I refer people to because because what what happens to your dad? So here's a thing that I and unfortunately, in this process, I've talked to folks just like that too, who are and I talk about folks in the book who are have PhDs in something, they're not dummies. And yet when it comes to believing in a conspiracy theory about the Jew, Arthur Butts, who's a professor of engineering in Northwestern University as tenure, claims that everything that happened to my father and everybody else was just a myth designed by Zionists with political motivation and that these Jews were so smart that they were able to place thousands of false documents. They were able to, in his words, bamboozle Germans to confess to committing crimes against humanity just because the Jews were so good at gaslighting. They were able to, and another word, it's a word of his bamboozle or hoodwink, the judges at Nuremberg who there were a few Jews on the margins who convinced these otherwise smart jurists that there had been this massive tragedy among the Jews when at most, at most he would say, and this is a tenured professor at Northwestern University, at most it was a typhoid outbreak brought by some Russians who were also prisoners of war. Andy states that the only reason the Jews were put into camps was for their own protection. Hitler wanted to make sure that no one would bother the Jews. When you think about it, you have to dismiss all the evidence in order to believe what he's saying and strangely about 11 percent of millennials think that that's the case. So in the case of your dad, if I have the story right, he's in Dachau, horrible, horrible concentration camp. He's liberated in April of 1945. He weighs 60 pounds. But the facts that we know is like, hey, one of the only reasons Dachau is what it is and it's shown for what it is to the world is because patents kind of charging through with his tanks famously not to rescue necessarily Dachau, but that was the strategy of the Americans at this point. But then, you know, like I tell people who, you know, you can go online and find like a guy who's still alive was 19 at the time was just a US soldier serving with patent. And he says, yeah, I was there. And it was horrible. And patent, just like you hear this story, patent went into town and grabbed the mayor and grabbed the people in town and made a march through the camp. He says, this is a real story. I was there. I saw it. And then Eisenhower, our became our future president, came to the camp and was a guy who was seasoned and war was just so horrified that he was literally throwing up. You know, this guy had seen a lot of stuff and he was throwing up at the site of it. So I think it just, I don't want to hammer that too much because I got some other stuff for you that might not have all your stuff. But hammer away on that. I mean, my father, if he hadn't been liberated in those days or at most a few weeks, he'd have been dead. And the only reason he's alive today. I'm alive today is because American soldiers brought him to a field hospital. Otherwise, he'd be dead. I mean, my father was a great patriot because the Americans saved them and they did it out of the goodness of their heart. It took him a year to be fully recovered. Oh, I can, I can only imagine. Okay. So that's an important history because it's your personal history, but it's also just as it ties into the book, it's just an important history to know because there are people, I wasn't aware of that fear that you threw out, but it's stunning to think that 11 percent of millennials would believe the Holahokes thing because it's just a silly conspiracy theory. And that's what I want to talk about next because this book of yours, Conspiracy You, talks about maybe you want to, before we get there, you know, tell us about the main conspiracy that you're driving at because it's the one that you detail in the book and talk about. I found rather obscure within the realm of conspiracy theory, but obviously it's one that you think is important. Is it the one that you mentioned? There's other ones you mentioned in the book. Which ones do you really want to highlight? Well, you know, it's the anti-Zionism one is a conspiracy theory. Now, you can be for the Jewish state, you can think Israel's good, Israel's not so good, but conspiracy theories, and you really get this, is that it's not just about unwarranted or harsh criticism. That's bad, but academics, publishing books at major presses, Duke University Press, Stanford University Press, that have tenure are writing stuff that's made up about Zionists, Jews, naming Palestinians so that they can they can harvest their organs. That somehow Zionists slash Jews are in cahoots with people all around the earth to teach police to harm people of color. These are so silly in terms of when you start to try to analyze any facts, but when you talk to folks who are propagating these theories, the Jesper Puas are the world. Some of them recognize that they're just politically motivated, but others, they just continue to create a larger and larger false non-falsifiable theory. So not unlike what Butz does with the Holocaust, the folks on the far left think that there's some amazingly effective conspiracy of Jews to cover up all the bad stuff that they're doing in the world from organ harvesting to colluding with the Minneapolis police in the murder of George Floyd. I mean, this stuff is amazing. And then 300 California University organizations created a resolution that they wanted to censure Israel for their involvement with the George Floyd and other murders, harassments of people of color. There's no sense to this. I mean, let's not forget, there's 6.7 million Jews in Israel. We have 8 billion people in the world. And yet somehow the Jews are the massive focus of all of these theories. And by the way, I talked a little bit about the boycott issue. I mean, there is one boycott movement in the world, the one BDS movement in the world. And strangely enough, it's against the one Jewish nation in the world, like every other country is perfect. Okay, let me kind of pull this apart a little bit. I think there's a lot of common ground between us. I think for someone who's investigated conspiracy theories a lot and has some of the same frustrations that you do about the silly conspiracy theories. Flat Earth conspiracy theory. There is no COVID-19. There is no COVID virus. There's no viruses at all. The public is alive and Paul is dead. Well, there's also conspiracy theories that I think justify our examination. And I wanted to bring up, are you aware of the origin of the modern term conspiracy theory and where it came from? Because I looked in your book and you have a chapter, conspiracy theories, what they are and why they are bad. We'll talk about that in a minute. But are you aware of the modern origin of the term conspiracy theory? No, I read Jordan, Joven Breyford and Kwaesam Kassim who wrote about conspiracy theories. Yeah, they don't they don't talk about it. It's directly from a document that was released through a FOIA request. I think the New York Times initiated the FOIA request in 76 or something like that. The title of the document, this is CIA, concerning criticism of the Warren report and was drafted in 67. It was about JFK and it was to all the media outlets. Back then, you remember the day media outlets, you could kind of count the ones that really mattered. All of them were told, do not veer from the story of Lee Harvey Oswald known, low-nut assassin. And then they introduced this term conspiracy theorists as a pejorative term and use that to kind of characterize all these people. Now, the upshot of that, I don't know if you're totally aware of this, but again, I'm not making that up. That's a FOIA released document from the CIA. But the upshot that that I guess a lot of people and in the same way that you're talking about, a lot of people don't realize that in 1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that JFK was probably a conspiracy and they're using that softly. They proved pretty conclusively from the evidence that it was a conspiracy. So the official position of the United States government is that JFK was a conspiracy. The real question is why does Dan rather go on, why does Dan rather go on TV and say, hey, I can't show you the Zabruder film because it's too gory, but you can clearly see that his head falls forward when we all know, now that we've seen it, that that's a lie. Here's my point. Not all conspiracy theories are bad. And I'm a little bit concerned the way you kind of, are you falling for part of the game that is in conspiracy theories by only focusing on the silly ones, whether they're silly ones directed at the group that you care about or the silly ones, you know, in general. So I think that's a great question. So the nomenclature that I use to describe what you're talking about is a little different. I say there are two things. There's conspiracy theories, which I use in a pejorative way. And then there are theories about conspiracies. So if you have a theory that there was a conspiracy, the way I would use the terms like JFK, or that black men were not, were falsely vaccinated and falsely treated in Tuskegee, then you have a theory about a conspiracy. And you should investigate it. You should try to investigate that. You should investigate whether the CIA gave LSD to unwitting victims. Because those are theories about conspiracy. So you've got a fact. Now you're going to investigate it. It may not be that you can get all the evidence you need. It may be that it's being hidden. But it's a theory about a conspiracy. And you have to say, I think based upon this, that this may have happened. Conspiracy theories, such as Arthur Butz, or such as some academics, Jasper Puerh, others claim about Zionists, about Jews, is that there's a cabal that are doing all of these evil things with no proof. I mean, I've read whole books with no actual facts other than maybe some demographic table doesn't foot. I'm with you on that, but you've realized that a lot of people view their quote unquote evidence as factual and important. So it's kind of an eye of the beholder thing. I'm totally with you. It seems completely ridiculous to me as does Flat Earth, but they hold conferences, they have quote unquote scholarly discussions. So it's not so easy, is it to really make that distinction you're talking about? You know, but that's what we're supposed to be thinking people. So one book that I indicate that it was written by Jessica Winnegar and Laura Deeb, both full professors at universities. And it's about they have this conspiracy theory that anthropology departments across the country are subject to compulsory Zionism and that you can't get promoted unless you subscribe to the compulsory Zionism. Okay, that is a allegation. Got it. Now they're going to write a book. Got it. Okay, that so far where everybody should be on the same page. They write this whole book that finds two instances of professors who didn't get tenure, who had anti-Israel views, one of which ultimately got tenure, I believe, and don't compare their scholarship to any other scholar, but assume that it's because of their anti-Zionist views. Not mentioning, as you would in a normal study, any other professor who didn't get tenure in comparing that. I'm sure there were scores of people who didn't get tenure in anthropology departments. And the question is evaluate their scholarship, but no, that wasn't done. It was just assume that that was that their anti-Zionism was the sole reason and be the rest of the book. It's hard to exaggerate. They have they interview person after person who feels that this has happened. They feel that this is happening. They go on and talk about how evil it is that this is happening. And all of these Zionists are moles and they use campus rabbis in quotation marks. But there's no facts. The only fact in the whole book is that a person did one person didn't get tenure and okay. So they still may have and they could still say they have a theory about a conspiracy. I think they haven't presented the slightest evidence, but okay. But to say that they proved it at the end of the book and that anybody who disagrees with them is not a good person doesn't make any sense to me. And it's not scholarship. It's not agreed, but two points on that, Scott. First, aren't you kind of punching a little bit below your weight class? I mean, no one takes the whole postmodern humanitarian academic. I mean, that's like cliche now. It's just so discredited. They have peer review papers that are machine generated that get it. It's like no one. Do we really need to punch down those people anymore? I guess that's question one and I'll wrap question two right into it. Because I think it's related because one of the concerns I have is the cancel culture kind of thing is enabling the censorship of people. Like I don't care how stupid those people are and they're obviously not very bright. I don't want to see them removed from the public dialogue. I don't want to see their YouTube channel taken down, which is happening so frequently now. I don't want to see them out of Facebook, Twitter, let the conversation go on. I haven't say with the Hala hoaxers. I invite them on the show. I'm like, Hey, you know, maybe I missed something. It took me 30 seconds to refute your stuff, but maybe you have some other stuff. Come on on. Isn't that the kind of dialogue we want? So I have two points. I'll answer the questions in order. First, sadly, what happens on campus no longer stays on campus. These theories are becoming much more ubiquitous. They're infiltrating in some areas into the investment world. This whole BDS movement, a boycott, this is divest and sanction is a direct heir to what happened on campus. BDS started in, well, actually, and we can go off in this. I want to answer your question, but BDS actually started on the far right. BDS has been around since they were painting black smears on Jewish shopkeepers in Svexner, Lithuania, to tell people not to shop because this was a Jewish shopkeeper. And that was part of what prepared people for, you know, hand over the Jews to say they're so evil. So the first modern BDS was actually again on the far right, William Luther Pierce, who was a neo-Nazi, a famous American neo- Nazi who set up, I think the National Alliance Party, tried to get McDonald's Douglas not to send the sponsor to share the resolution, not to have them resupply Israel. So BDS started on the right, but it was adopted on campus and it's being used today. And the general dialogue on, in other areas, look at the New York Times. The New York Times published an article in which there was an interview endorsing David Ickes book, which you've probably heard of. I've interviewed. I'll set you free. Well, this says that the Jews both started the Holocaust, that Hitler was a Nazi, that I'm sorry, Hitler was Jewish. They both started the Holocaust and funded the Holocaust. I mean, it's the most garbled thing that the Atalman is the most evilest book in the world. And this is now out there in the New York Times reported on this uncritically because if you go to campus now, this criticism of Jews and only Jews in print is acceptable somehow. So I don't go with your premise that what happens on campus stays on campus. And a lot of these folks also are big tweeters and interviewers and are part of that. Now, the tougher question that you ask, I think, so I don't think I'm punching down. Actually, I think I'm punching up and they probably are ignoring it. The bigger question is cancel culture. And how do we deal with people who have strange ideas about certain things? But in other areas may be brilliant. Kant, for example, I mean, we think of him as the founder of modern reasoned morality. Well, he hated blacks. He was a amazing racist, Confucius, who we again, wise person, we he was a Chinese supremacist. And the list goes on and on there, you know, in Africa, you know, I mean, there were there was there were several amazing poets who also were misogynist. So this goes on and on, you have in the modern day Heidegger. He was a Nazi. We didn't know it for sure at the time, you know, until the model is notebooks, the so called black notebooks were released, but he was a Nazi. Should we stop reading his all of what he wrote? Some of it was absolutely brilliant. I think we have to recognize that within some folks, both on the far right and the far left, that we can't excuse their strange ideas, we can't excuse them, but nor can we excise them. So we have to look at them both, you know, Watson for Watson, who co-discovered DNA also has said racist things. But should we get rid of DNA research? Should we not take what he wrote? Of course not. That means it's harder for us as thinking people to do this, but we shouldn't cancel people. So I just interviewed, I just interviewed a guy from Google, a pretty high level guy, mainly in the AI department. I mean, Google is manipulating and canceling, demonetizing all that stuff. So how do you come down on that? Don't cancel anyone? There's no such thing as hate speech. Everything is kind of okay. Where do you draw the line? We all have a line to draw. I draw it pretty much like free speech is foundational to this whole experiment we're in. So I'm very, very uncomfortable with hidden demonetization. They don't even have any rules or guidelines and they've done it for years and not told anyone and now they're finally exposed. But I think that's just very dangerous. Yeah, I would say the problem is today the line is drawn very close to whatever that person or organization happens to believe. This is our modern press. Why do we accept that they can control, censor, and politicize their narrative? Look, generally, I agree. I think free speech is the foundation of the civil society, of civic society, of the United States. And I'm in favor of free speech, even when I totally disagree with it. I'm not in favor. I would not say to cancel Butz's book. I think rather it has to be carefully read as I did and recognize that it's a pack of lies. But it's out there. And to try to squash it, I think is actually going to make it more attractive. I agree. Let's go to something a little bit harder because the other, I guess, concern I had with the book is that, you know, when I think about anti Zionist or anti Semitic anti Jewish, I'm not even sure that we can that sometimes when you combine all those together, I'm a little bit uncomfortable. But you definitely at the beginning of this interview spelled out kind of my point that, you know, there's all sorts of people of the, this is you, you know, the Jewish tradition who might not agree with you politically might not agree with the politics of Israel or even the Zionist agenda as it is the religious state for the Jewish people, all sorts of different opinions out there of people that have a Jewish tradition, as well as other people like they have a voice in this too. But here are the anti, you know, when I think, Scott, when I think of anti Zionist conspiracy theories, I think of this, I'll pop it up on the screen here and show you. I'll read it so people can hear it. Ghislaine Maxwell and her pedophile lover, Jeffrey Upstein, were both Israeli spies who took pictures of powerful men having sex with underage girls to blackmail them, their alleged Mossad handler has sensationally claimed. Now I would just add that that alleged Mossad handler kind of stands up to scrutiny pretty well. He was tried in court and was actually acquitted because he showed that he was an agent of Israel and his arms dealing. I'm not here to hammer out, you know, to flesh out what, but there's some factual evidence here. You know, Maxwell's father is, is definitely Mossad. He gets a state funeral in, in Israel, where the prime, several prime ministers are there and all the top intelligence guys are there. So there's fact behind this. This is the kind of stuff that when I think of anti Zionist, and I wouldn't go so far as to say that with this, but that to me is what we need to talk about, not some wacky, you know, professor with the whole hoax idea. Well, look, first of all, I'd like to say this, what the anti Zionists say is something separate. I mean, they're, by the way, I have no idea if that's right, wrong, or indifferent. I've never heard that or seen that before you put it up on the screen. So I don't, I don't express any opinion. But I will say this, the United States has done despicable things. A lot of countries do despicable things. Recently, Iran massacred 1500 protesters, you know, not so nice to kill 1500 your own citizens. Nobody says let's abolish Iran. I haven't heard people say, you know, from border to border, let's exterminate or expel all Iranians and end their state. That is what they, that is what the anti Zionists say. Hamas says that openly. BDS says openly, the founder says no Jewish state period. So there's a difference. And this is what I was starting. What I sort of was, I want to say, but it was hinting at a little bit, you can have harsh criticism. You can say you want to vote this government out. You can say a lot of things. But that's very different than saying and what the anti Zionists are doing, which is saying that the Jews don't have a right to self determination. You could say CIA is bad. You can say a lot of spy organizations are bad. Again, I'm not a pining on that. But that's the criticism of Israel is different by an order of magnitude from criticisms of every other country on this earth. I get that. And I think you, your book does an excellent job of bringing that into focus and reminding us that that's still out there. And it's not something we can just kind of blow past. I do wonder, and I'm going to throw one more out there, which is another kind of, I guess, fuel for the extreme anti Zionist conspiracies that you're talking about is the more serious kind of anti Zionist conspiracies that we would need to kind of consider or throw on the table. So I'm going to throw one out, another one. And again, I'm doing nothing other than reading a mainstream newspaper. This one's in Scotland. This has been debunked. Look, I know that, you know, this one actually makes me angry because there are so many Jews who were murdered in that tower. I mean, I find this reprehensible. And there were supposedly photos of people dancing who were Muslims around a mosque. Everybody's got their own frigging conspiracy theory about this. This is actually, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, I anybody can write anything about anything. Well, let me just make sure we're talking about the same thing, because there's a lot of conspiracy theories around 9 11 that tie into Israeli Mossad. This one, again, maybe you have data to the contrary. And that's okay. I just want to make sure that people know what we're talking about. Here is again, from the Harold Scotland, longest standing newspaper in Scotland. There was rune and terror in Manhattan, but over on the Hudson River in New Jersey, a handful of men were dancing. As the World Trainers Center burned and crumbled, five men celebrated and filmed the worst atrocity ever committed on us on American soil, as it played out before their eyes. They were as railies, and at least two of them were Israeli, Israeli intelligence agents working for Mossad. So I've looked at this. Again, I, this, this is made up. This is this concept. And I really find this, frankly, repugnant because there are again, also photos. If you want to go to Jersey City, there are photos are supposedly Muslims dancing and handing out candy and beeping horns. You know, this is not sourced. And it's sourced. There's FBI, there's FBI documents on the arrest that were released in the foyer. And these guys were sent back to Israel two months after without any investigation. They appeared on Israeli TV, but I don't want to get into hashing out those details, but I'm telling you, Scott, I'm not coming at this as some wild, wacky kind of conspiracy nut thing. Anyone who goes investigated, there's plenty of evidence who knows how. Wedging that the 19 hijackers from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere didn't plot this with ISIS to destroy the world trade centers and effectively declare war in the United States. What I'm saying is a Zionist plot. I mean, I definitely not. I'm definitely not saying that it's a Zionist plot. And the way I'm trying to bring it back into focus with your book again, Conspiracy You, is that I think we have to look at the role conspiracy theories are playing in our culture in both a positive and a negative way. So I don't think we're too far apart on this. And I think there's going to be conspiracy theories that are going to gaslight all of us. And I think we have to find a way to, I guess, embrace them in the same way that you're exposing a couple of very important, you've convinced me in the book and in this interview, very important conspiracy theories in academia. I'm just saying, I think we have to have a different attitude about conspiracy theories that I didn't exactly get from your book, even though I think it was very convincing about some of the ones that you met. So that's my point. And then I definitely am open to, you know, your feedback on that. Well, again, I think you have to, you have, you have, you can have theories about conspiracies. I'm not using the Warren or the CIA language, you're going to have theories about conspiracies, and then you have to evaluate them. There was a ton of research done, the 911 Commission and others, both what's been classified and declassified, and even more has been declassified during the Biden administration. And it's pretty clear what happened. But I'm, I'm, again, what the thing that concerns me is that anytime something bad happens in the United States or elsewhere, there is a reflex to somehow blame it on the Jews. Climate change now is being blamed on Jewish oppression of Gaza. It doesn't matter that there are, you know, smokestacks in China or elsewhere with burning coal. That's somehow blamed on the Jews. George Floyd, 300 university organizations said this is somehow designed as Jews fault. I mean, there's a impulse that when something bad happens. Now, knowing people that died in that tower. I have to say, I can't hold back an emotional reaction. Knowing Jews who died in that tower. I just can't hold back an emotional reaction to seeing that what you put up. I'm sorry if I sounded a little loud, but I, you know, it definitely hits a raw nerve because they were involved Jews and they were good people and they were murdered. And so that's tough for me. Totally, I totally get that. I'll tell you what, in the time that's left, tell folks about some of your other books and your work in general, because in the reason I want you to do that, we can't possibly get to that in this interview. I think it starts to get back to the root core of this, which is spirituality, which is atheism. I think atheism is the root cause of what you see in academia. If we're able to advance without criticism, this idea that we're meaningless, biological robots in a meaningless universe, I think it is the first conspiracy that opens up this door. I'm not a religious person, but I think that you're onto something when you're putting your finger on it in those other books. So tell us about that as we wrap this up. Sure. So thank you. First of all, my previous book, this is my third book, Conspiracy U, a case study, but my previous book, In Good Faith, talked about spiritualism, In Good Faith, questioning religion and atheism. And I will give you the punchline since we don't have a lot of time. The one thing that I came that is the common cause that is what I think the most basic moral value is the golden rule expressed negatively the way Hillel did. Don't do unto someone else what would be hateful if it were done to you. In other words, treat, don't treat anybody else the way you wouldn't want to be treated. Don't think about it groups, don't think about identities. Think about that individual person, because we all share, in Hillel's view, a common spark of the divine, or you're an atheist, a common spark of humanity. And my whole book, the whole In Good Faith, is about finding the common ground between religion and between ethical atheism. And what I find is the biggest problem is, and this ties into what we're talking about, the biggest problem is that most people who claim to be atheists aren't atheists. Some are, but some aren't. And what they really are is too many religious quote unquote religious people are really idolaters. And here's the problem. We talk about idolatry like it's some quaint bowing down to idols. But in reality, and if you're listeners, just remember one thing from this interview, I hope they remember the following. Idolatry is actually a set about lies, is a set of lies about power. It's about ascribing super authority or super powers or some mysterious forces to finite beings like ideologies, beings like people like God keeps like fair or ideologies like communism and other isms. And so we may have thought we licked idolatry 33 years ago, but in reality, Hitler, Stalin, the Assad family, the Kim family, and I can go on and on, use the same tropes of ancient Pharaoh, power, pageantry, myth, theater, all backed up with secret army secret informers and and strong police and armies. And it's at both the macro level and the micro level at the micro level. I think idolatry explains how people like Charlie Rose and Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer got away with what they got away with because they were considered idols. They had super authority in their in their arenas. So they were unquestionable until there was enough weight of evidence against them. And that too could be called in a sense conspiracy theories. I mean, we could get that would be a whole nother broadcast how they got away with what they got away with. So I really am passionate about that. And so I'm really passionate. My writing of In Good Faith was a five year project for me. And and I think it's in it, you know, I really do think it's an important book. Fantastic. Our guest again has been Scott Shea. The book you're going to want to check out the latest one, Conspiracy U, a case study. But that other one sounds like a perfect skeptico pairing with that. Scott, it's been terrific having on the show. Thank you so much for joining me. Alex, it's really been a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks again to Scott Shea for joining me today on Skeptico. The one question I tee up from this interview is kind of the big one. What do you make of anti Zionist conspiracy theories? Scott makes a really strong case about a couple of them that weren't on my radar that we might want to pay attention to. On the other hand, there's a couple that don't seem to pop up on his radar. So what are your thoughts about that? Let me know. Join me over on the Skeptico Forum, which I would really invite you to join me on the Skeptico Forum, particularly if you want to have a next level dialogue. It's not a place just for venting. You have to have some thinking behind your opinion, maybe some references, links, that kind of stuff. But that's all in the spirit that I talked about at the beginning of let's grow this community and let's grow it the way we want with people who want to engage in intelligent dialogues, tough dialogues, but intelligent dialogues. So I will leave you with a reminder of that. If you can help me out in that way, I would greatly appreciate it. That's going to do it for this interview. I have several more coming up. I don't know how many more, but I have more until next time. Take care and bye for now.