Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we take a look at the disturbing parallels between the witch hunting conspiracies that we saw in Europe in the 15, 1600s and modern conspiracies like QAnon. And consider what's going on with that.
Hello, welcome. Call like I see a podcast.
I'm James Keats, and joining me today is a man who is such a strong and wise head of his family, you could call him Mr. Fantastic. Tunde. Ogonlana Tunde. Are you ready to put your suit on and show us your superpowers?
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Clearly you haven't talked to my wife and kids recently, so let's just keep going. I don't even know what to say.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: Now. Before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you subscribe and like the show on YouTube or your podcast app. Doing so really helps the show out. Recording on July 29, 2025. And Tunde, we were recently talking about the book Nexus, which we both read maybe a year ago and did a show on. But we were talking specifically about how our post Internet communication environment really seems to mirror in a lot of ways the post printing press information environment that, you know, really in Europe after that time. And, you know, and this is like the 14, 15, 1600s and so forth. And really what stands out about it is just how truth became less, you know, became less prevalent, more elusive. And conspiracy theories just went rampant during that time. Conspiracy theories that were maybe small time before that became huge and exploded all over. One being the kind of the witch conspiracy, the witch hunts and so forth.
And it's been very eye opening for us, you know, that that book was, I should say was very eye opening for us because it introduced or it corrected us. You know, both of us had what the book calls the naive view of information, that, that more information, that information is ultimately about truth and discovering truth, and that more information will ultimately lead to a clearer understanding of truth and bring you closer to truth and inevitably which, you know, understanding now, you know, reading the book, we got to see how that wasn't true and, you know, definitely upended some of the things that we thought. But if you look at kind of how the witch hunting exploded and after the printing press and with the huge increase of information that the printing press allowed for and anybody to present that information and compare it to how, in a similar way, but in a much larger scale, the Internet did that, you know, much more information out there. Anybody can get the information out there. We see the printing press stuff.
Shortly after that, we had witch hunts and then thousands of People being killed and people getting accused of all types of crazy stuff. So with this unlimited stream of information now that we have with the Internet and all that, should we be more concerned about what may be coming over the coming decades as far as this kind of just explosion of information? If information is not going to take us to the truth, then where is it going to take us?
[00:03:11] Speaker B: To Haitians eating pets and more witch hunts?
So, yes, we should be concerned.
Can we do anything about it? No, this is going to happen. It's already happening.
And it's just like the printing press. It's going to cause changes that we cannot predict.
Writing before the printing press really was done by monks in the Catholic Church. So the church and the religious institution curated and held a lot of power because really, information was disseminated through them. When the printing press came, all of a sudden millions of copies of things over a shorter period of time, like maybe just 100 years versus a thousand years, could be printed by people anonymously. Information starts flowing around, and that disrupts the old order, the hierarchy of the church and the monarchy in Europe. And so I think we're living through the beginning stages.
You know, let's say we're in the first generation of that. And today with the Internet, where all this new information and the ability for it to get all over the walls of the gate of the old gatekeepers means that we're probably going to go in the same direction. And to your point, if people burned witches back then and looked at other human beings in a way to say that they were sinister, that they were drinking children's blood, that they were putting spells on other people, they were controlling the weather. There's a lot of things we're hearing.
[00:04:40] Speaker A: Now from the group you mentioned go into that yet? Because I wanted to get into that a little bit. I kind of wanted to. I think that you raise an interesting point in terms of how the, The. The uncon. The lack. The loss of control, the previous gatekeeper, so to speak. I mean, I think that's the analogy. And, and you're the idea that we. We've looked and, you know, historically, if you don't look at the witch stories and how many thousands of people were killed in that and how it was so arbitrary and you can. You could. People were settling scores like, oh, this person, you know, cut in front of me in line, I'm going to call him a witch, or I'm going to call his family witches, and then they're going to get. When somebody calls you a witch, you know, like it's a rat. Because the way that you find witches, if they admit it, you kill them. If they don't admit it, you torture them until you kill them. So it's like, well, you know, this creates this kind of just crazy sound in society. But the key piece in there is that it was, there was an iron grip on the spread of information by an institution, the church at that time.
And they kept like the idea of witches existed before that, but they kept that out of the public kind of the mainstream mind.
Once that grip was broken, then it was very unpredictable, as you point out. And so I think that's the part that we're living through now, how it's going to actually play out. We don't know. We know people are capable of doing some pretty crazy things. And so any of that stuff's on the table. And that's the question of whether we should be more worried about this loss of control.
The reason why I think that is a yes is because of another factor that's brought up in the book. This again is nexus is the book.
And the other factor being that again, a lot of people assume that information reflects reality or says stuff about reality and so forth, but information, most information is not truthful. Most information isn't reflecting reality. And in fact information can, can be used to create other realities. You create the reality where people think there's witches running around and having orgies with Satan, you know, and so the idea that if most information is not going to be reality based and information explodes exponentially, then we're going to have more and more of alternate realities, conspiracies and so forth, that are going to take more hold more and more in our own society. And so that piece, unless and until there's some way that's probably invented, I mean, and you know, like we'll see. Usually the problem has to happen before people come up with a solution. So we're kind of waiting on the problem to come to a head. But until there's a way to figure out a way to decipher what's real from all of the, out of the sea of information that we have, at least to some reliable extent, it seems like anything is on the table. From the standpoint of cruelty, human cruelty, or, or human kind of being cruel or being kind of just thinking the world is flat again or anything like that.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think, and that's the key, right, is because we're back at that. That's why this reminds me so much of that printing press time, because think about where we're at. We've got more information at our fingertips than ever before as humans. I mean, all of us have. Generally in this today's age, most people have a smartphone, you can get online from anywhere and you can go to Google and that could give you the universe. And now in recent years, we have ChatGPT. And that that ability for information, especially in the era of AI, is only going to continue to proliferate. So you're right. I was naive too. I used to think that, okay, if you just give everybody all this information, they're just going to naturally find things that I agree with.
[00:08:16] Speaker A: Right.
[00:08:16] Speaker B: I mean, realistically, it's a projection or.
[00:08:18] Speaker A: Even find things that reflect reality, you know, like that they'll be automatically gravitate.
What, like the I. What can refute this? Absolutely. Is the idea that, hey, if we put enough information out there about how the solar system works and forget the universe, you know, the universe has so much unknown, but just the solar system, then we won't have people walking around with all that information available. We won't have people walking around thinking the world is flat. But lo and behold, we got all that information out there and we still have people walking around thinking the world is flat. And so more information doesn't automatically bring everyone to the same understanding of what's real and what's not.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: No, exactly. And I want to also play on this theme about the use of the way this new information is disseminated to go after others in society who one may not like. Because, and here's what I'll say also for the audience, you know, prior to reading this book Nexus, I was only really exposed to the idea of the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in the United States in the late 1600s. I was ignorant to the fact this was going on in Europe, you know, for 100 years prior to that and.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: The extension, particularly the context on which it unfolded. You know, I think that like, even if you knew that it would happen to some degree, maybe not the scale, but the context of how it happened. You know, like you had this guy that wrote a book that this book outsells Copernicus, you know, a thousand times over. Copernicus discovers that the Earth goes around the sun. This guy writes a book about witches and orgies with Satan and penis eating oats, penises eating oats. And he's like the best, the original bestseller, you know.
[00:09:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: So.
[00:09:54] Speaker B: Well, hold on, but let's get into that because I think that's what it's eye opening. Like this guy Wrote a book. And people believed that witches, primarily women, were stealing men's penises.
Like literally that, that. And I don't know, it sounds stupid to us today. Right? But, and, but this is what people believed and they were willing to believe it. And that's when I started equating to things like today, like post birth abortions. I'm yet to still see a doctor get arrested for killing a baby three, four minutes after it was delivered.
And a lot of the things we saw going into last year's election about, you know, kids having cat litter boxes in schools or whatever, you know, just these things that. And people just believe them. You know, Haitians eating pets. And so. And even after they're proven to be false, people still want to believe them. So you can think, okay, so back in the day, it doesn't sound that stupid anymore. If someone believed that a witch could fly around at night on a broomstick. Because we got people today in the US Congress saying that their political opponents can control the weather.
That's pretty stupid too.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Which people, by the way, witches could do as well, according to. Yeah, right.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: That was one of the accusations. And so. But what did we find out?
A couple things. One is with the fringes of society able to kind of gain a little bit more power, notoriety through the printing press by getting people to read more of their stuff so that they had an audience, so on and so forth. Just like today with the Internet and YouTube channels and, and social media and all that. What were they able to do? Number one, just like we're seeing today, that gentleman that, that wrote the book, the Hammer of the Witches, the way he was described to me, I said this to you in a private conversation is like he was an incel. He seems to have had this issue with women.
[00:11:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: That he had to get back at women. Everything was women's fault. So that's one thing is that, that's why the witches were women, because they were the ones lusting and all this stuff. And the other thing that made me think of then is things like Nazi Germany or America after the Civil War, during Reconstruction, which is the incentives of those who were in the position to go get the witches. Because one of the things that was mentioned in the book, I wrote it here, was the estate of the person who was accused of being a witch, meaning their wealth and whatever they had accumulated during their lifetime was split up between three entities. One was the accuser, one was the inquisitor, and the other was the Catholic Church.
[00:12:22] Speaker A: Yeah, the inquisitor slash executioner.
[00:12:24] Speaker B: Yeah, correct. So I thought about, this is like the Nazis when they just looked at a Jewish business or a house and was like, hey, you know what, let's go kill that family. And the art on the wall, I'm taking it. But you could have the jewelry and over here, this guy's going to come in and get this. And the business they ran, we're just going to give it to the state.
Or like we talked about lynchings in the south back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, which is when black people had land or amassed some kind of wealth or somebody liked a black man's wife, all of a sudden there was a reason why that guy had to be lynched and he was killed and his spoils, including potentially his woman, were split up by the people who, who went and got him. So it, it again, I bring all that up to say this is just how humans behave is very interesting. And again, I was naive thinking, you give people all this information, they'll do something very positive with it. But now I'm living through the Internet age and now reading about the age after the printing press and I'm thinking this might be universal, that if once the, the, the gatekeepers of the way that information has been disseminated, whether we think it's good or bad.
[00:13:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's not to say that's not good keepers were flawless or that they were, you know, like. But it does create a period of, of disorder.
[00:13:39] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So that's, that's where, that's where I see it. Man, it's interesting.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean, and I think, because when you learn about these things in history, a lot of times you attribute it to the idea that it's because they lacked.
That's kind of extrapolating that naive view. As, you know, Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Nexus that he talks about is like, oh, okay, well, they did the witch burnings in Europe or in America because they lacked the information that we have, or they did the stuff in post reconstruction United States or the stuff in Nazi Germany because they lacked all the information that we have now. And if they had the information, if people had the information we have now, they wouldn't behave like that. Whereas conversely, if you follow, you know, the, the premise that's, that's laid out and the, the case that's made very well in Nexus, it wasn't because of their lack of information. It was because of the information that they chose to follow. There was a lot of information and they chose this line of information to, to follow down its conclusion. And that's the part we can see illustrated because. Well, on the Internet, because the Internet actually will silo you intentionally as part of keeping your attention. So people do like to kind of take a particular slice of information, regardless of whether it's true or not a lot of times and follow down that path, and that's the information they're going to buy into. One of the things though, about this, that, and actually this kind of what brought us to this topic in the first place was just the similarities and the author and Harari does in Nexus point out that a lot of the things that were alleged of the.
It's an international, global cabal of witches, you know, is, is what. And you know, the hammer of the witches is, is, is what's being alleged. And this global cabal of witches and they, they can control the weather, you know, they, they, they, like I said, they have orgies with Satan. They can take men's, you know, penises and, and you know, hide them in, in birds nests or, you know, do different things with them. And a lot of this stuff, not that one in particular, but the, the controlling the weather, the, the international cabal. Oh, they would kidnap children. A lot of these allegations mirror allegations that we see in modern conspiracies, including like QAnon. What do you think's happening there? Like what, Like, I'm sure the people, you know, when coming up with QAnon, these people didn't go real. Okay, well, what conspiracies, you know, worked well in the past? Let's, let's re. Let's, let's leverage, you know, these kind of stories that people believed before and retell those like. Well, or maybe you do think that's the case, but how do, how do they end up in so many of the same places? As far as the kinds of things that the people. This global, that there's a global conspiracy, that it involves the devil or Satan or whatever, and these are the kinds of things that they do. Like how do we end up. How does that rhyme or repeat itself?
[00:16:27] Speaker B: Because humans haven't changed. I think that's why. And you know, because, I mean, I'm being serious, right? We think we're so much smarter and I think better than people from 500, 1,000, 10,000 years ago. But based on the book Sapiens, right, the cognitive revolution happened 70,000 years ago. Generally, we're the same humans from the 1415, 1600s. So the same things will get us to feel certain feelings to turn us into behaving a certain way against a portion of our population, let's put it that way. So, and those are things like we learned also in Sabians, things like disgust. Right.
Disease. So that's why, why do you think in a different example, the same terminology to talk about some of our federal fellow people in our country in the last election were the same as they were used in the 1930s. Right. Calling people vermin and soiling the blood and all this kind of stuff. So it's all the same, you know, And I think this is where, because that to me would be maybe the more, the more modern way in big societies at the industrial age to talk about people.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: But what, even with those, even in those examples, though, like you said, with the things that may have mirrored Germany in the 1930s, there is enough cultural awareness that that stuff worked then. Well, that's what I'm thinking that somebody might have said. Oh, okay, that worked. I'm going to use the same thing.
[00:17:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: The witches thing to me seems even crazier because you can, you can assume. Now maybe this again, maybe it's a faulty assumption that, that they didn't come up with these ideas of what the, the current QAnon global conspiracy. They didn't get the ideas of what those people do from what was alleged about witches in the witch hunts.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: No, you're right. And that's why I say, I think this is more of just what, like a human thing. If people want to, if you want to turn a group of people against another group of people, what's the most heinous things you can say? And generally it would be about them hurting the children of the other group, them, them doing things. Think about what we talked about, right? Flying around on broomsticks, controlling the weather, basically assigning supernatural powers to your, to your, to your enemy, to your people that you don't like. So that, because think about it. If you have the goal of exterminating or getting rid of these people, whatever you want to say about it or how you want to get these people out of your land or whatever, you have to assign something more robust about them, that they're not just normal everyday humans. They're, they're beasts, they're savage. They got these powers they have.
[00:19:03] Speaker A: Let me jump in real quick because I, I, there's something that I want to say that you're, you're, you're getting to, but I want to say it a little in a little different way. I think that as you point out, it's like in order to turn someone Against a group of people, there's certain things you say. So that is the worst things you can think of. You know, the worst things you can think of. You know, you're doing stuff with the devil. You're part, you're. You're in conspiracy with the devil to do certain things to the rest of society or you do stuff to kids. You know, those are kind of the. As far as the human imagination goes, that's about as. That's the furthest extent that we have. So if we want to. Or if I, if, If someone wants to explain to other people that the people that I'm talking about are the worst possible people, those seem to be just that. That doesn't seem like you can go any further. So I think that the reason they overlap is because the point for both people or the both groups is to figure out the worst stuff they can say. And they both came like that. That is as far. We don't have anything less. We are. Excuse me, we don't have anything that goes any further. If there were other worse things, I'm sure they would say that too. So I think that that's as far as turning that. But I think what's happening with the supernatural powers of controlling the weather and all this other stuff is a little different or even the. For the witches in the witch's case, being able to take your penis. I think that what's happening there is to justify the heinous, crazy things you're going to do to the people. Because if someone is okay, hey, they're in a global conspiracy, you know, they're, they're. They're going to kidnap kids. You can address all that stuff just by locking them up. Like, look, Abrah, lock you up, throw away the key, you know, and that's it. Like, you're not going to kill any kids in there or do anything. Any kids in there, and you're not going to be running off to talk to Satan in there, you know? You know, so I think the other stuff is about justifying the supernatural powers. Or like, you can't just lock somebody up. They got supernatural powers and they can create all this havoc from the jail cell. They change the weather, do all this other stuff. And so I think that is. So I think it's separate. You know, it may come together and. But that's where I think the real concern comes is that once you start assigning supernatural powers to people that you disagree with, then the only logical answer that people will have as far as how to deal with that is Execution, you know, like, you can't leave it the chance of, oh, if we lock this person up. So I, I think that's where to go back to the first question.
That's where you really got to start watching out. You know, like if, if, if the thing, if, if we're just saying, hey, these are really bad people, that's not great. You know, that's deceptive, that, but that's, you know, you'll have that in humanity. You know, it's always been there, it's always will be there. Right now we're in a time just like after the printing press, we're in a time where that stuff gets disseminated more broadly and frankly it's, that stuff is more engaging a lot of times than reality. So people be drawn to it. But once, once you see people assigning more and more supernatural powers, or to your point, the activating the disgust like the vermin and stuff like that, that's when you start seeing people start trying to justify ultimate killing and extermination, which is a whole nother level.
[00:22:06] Speaker B: No, and that's why I think going through this sausage making of our society is inevitable now. Just like what happened in the Europe at that time after 1440, when, when Gutenberg's press was, was invented.
But, and there's a lot of good and bad around that, right? Like what I'm saying is I could think of, well, at some point within a 200 year period, you know, you have the Enlightenment, you have all the scientific discovery, all that. Also the, the printing press allowed people. That was another thing he said in the book that I found very interesting, Copernicus to John Locke, you know, all of these figures that basically we revere today in modern society as foundational thinkers of their time. Whether it be science or with Locke's example kind of how to run society or government, or the ideas of conservatism. With Locke, for example, they weren't actually scholars.
Copernicus was not a scientist. So through the printing press, the idea of more people being literate, information being spread to more people, that was a good thing.
So it was like these good and bad things happen at the same time. And I feel like the Internet's gonna continue to create the same thing. There'll be people doing great things based on the Internet that may not have been able to do them through the old hierarchies and the way that, you know, you went up the ladder in life from a young person to an adult, but then we're also gonna have to be prepared as we've seen already, there's gonna be a lot more unfortunately I think alligator Alcatraz type of ideas where people who at one point may have been on the fringe of our society in certain conversations. Just like the witches, people that accused people of being witches, I'm sure on the fringe. Maybe in the 1300s, they were early 1400s.
[00:23:56] Speaker A: Well, yeah, they were on the fringe, you know.
[00:23:58] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And so, and I think it's the same thing that we've now seen the fringe come in through the dissemination of this new information mass communication network called the Internet. And society is going to have this sausage making process now for some time, probably the rest of you and I's life that until a new kind of order forms out of this, just like an order eventually formed in Europe after the kind of crumbling of the power of the Catholic Church, the monarchies and that became the merchant class and the governments.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: Yeah, but there's things that like the printing press and I mean I think the book made the case really well that the printing press didn't lead to the Enlightenment. You know, the printing press was something that helped bring about the Enlightenment. But what they disconnect the thing that connected the two was more so and this is, you know, what we, what it ultimately hopefully will happen in this case was the ability to, to, to give to more biased information towards truth. And so in that case you had these societies form that their goal was to, to, to read things like what Copernicus is saying or anything like that and then challenge it and see if you can disprove, you know, scientific method type stuff like keep spread the information. But then let's, let's try to figure out what's closest to reality and then try to bias what's being distributed towards that. That's you know, kind of the curation idea is, you know, biasing what's distributed towards what, what represents reality more. And so that I agree with you that we're gonna have to go through a sausage making period now mainly because I think the impetus to figure out ways to bias our information environments more towards reality and less towards fantasy.
I don't think that things are bad enough right now for society to really kind of sober up and say hey, we gotta do this or else we're not gonna be able to get anything accomplished anymore. You know, so I think that that's kind of what we're, that's the sausage making so to speak. And once, you know, once the downside of the, the, the during the printing press of the unfettered distribution of all information. Once the downsides became so dire, people were able to get a better handle on how to deal with that. I think that's kind of the natural process of you open things up, then you figure out how to leverage the things that have been opened up to. To help, you know, to help more than it hurt. You know, help help more than it hurts. So I think that's kind of the, the process. So any last things before he closes up?
[00:26:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, because I was going to say it's, it's interesting because I, I agree with you. The printing press itself did not lead to the Enlightenment directly.
[00:26:35] Speaker A: Well, that's, that's Harari, you know, that's his point.
[00:26:37] Speaker B: No, I know. Well, that's why I want to say this. But indirectly, it, it was responsible for it in the sense that it created the witch burners. Right. And I think the Enlightenment was the population's response to that period of the sausage making, saying, hey, we got to have different things. We got to have laws here. We got to have. We got to. We got to treat this differently, how we do this thing in society, because we can't keep burning people and accusing people of this and that. And the kind of scientific revolution was on the heels of all that, which, which also helped. And I think that's why it's interesting that the pain, like you said, pain is going to have to get words.
[00:27:15] Speaker A: It created the need to create this new organizational structure.
[00:27:18] Speaker B: That's what I'm saying. So, so that's why I think you're right. We need to be prepared that this is going to get a lot more painful for society because in order to get out of this, people are going to have to kind of the proverbial touch the stove like a child. We're going to have to live through this pain. And that's what I mean. It's probably going to be longer than the rest of our lifespan, me and you personally, because this might take another 100 years for society to figure out, go through enough pain. Just like World War II was very painful, there was a calm period after that. Just like the civil rights era as a more microcosm was painful, there was a calm period after that. So we're now getting out of the calm periods of kind of post World War II world events generally. I know there's been skirmishes and wars in between. And we're going to get to a painful period again where, you know, the societies around the world are going to deal with these changes in information landscapes and what is everyone's truth. Because that's another thing from the naive thing that I had. I used to think that you could find truth through more information.
And then I, as I've gotten older, I realized that truth doesn't necessarily mean right or wrong. Truth is just what enough people agree on.
So that's what the battle is now. Information being the first casualty of warfare. The truth is what people are battling for. Well, yeah, because this is not going to end.
[00:28:35] Speaker A: It's not something that you can use interchangeably with reality a lot of times. Because like you said. Exactly. Their truth can be. There are different parts of truth which we're not going to get into. Different things, different kinds of truth that we're not going to get into right now, but also are covered in the book. And I mean, as you know, when we discussed the book before, it's a highly recommended book. Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari. So. But I think we can wrap this topic up from there. You know, we appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call Like I see it, subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, tell us what you think, send it to a friend. Until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:29:06] Speaker B: I'm Tunde.
[00:29:07] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk soon.
