Conspiracies For Adults

Everything They Didn't Want You to Read... Explained Anyway.

There's a moment at every dinner party, every pub, every 1am kitchen conversation, where somebody leans in and says something that changes the whole room. You know they faked it, right? Nobody asks who "they" are. Nobody ever does.

This book is about that moment. Not whether the moon landing was staged, or whether a Benedictine monk really did build a working time machine out of a cathode tube and two thousand years of institutional patience (he might have). It's about why we can't stop leaning in and why we believe the things we probably shouldn't.

Finally, a book that takes conspiracy theories seriously. Probably.

Across twenty chapters, sentencing a well behaved sceptic to a truly unpleasant evening, this book examines the psychology, history, and occasional genuine, well documented substance behind the conspiracy theories your smarter friends are quietly a little bit into.
It does not debunk. It does not believe. It explains, with the forensic patience of a man who has personally researched considerably stranger things than most of what's in here, and a sense of humour he has never once been able to switch off, even when he probably should.
Over three hundred pages and twenty chapters, each one taken on its own terms, explained rather than debunked, believed rather than dismissed, until the last one asks a question the other nineteen were quietly building toward the whole time. What if none of these were ever separate stories at all? What if they were a clue?

You won't just be reading about conspiracy theories anymore. You'll be inside one, and you won't be entirely sure when that happened.

The Honest Investigation into (Perhaps) Dishonest Ideas:

• Why the Vatican allegedly owns a device capable of viewing the Crucifixion live, and why the Fermi and von Braun names attached to it should never have survived contact with a fact checker.
• Why the reptilian elite theory is older than television, older than Rome, and considerably more dangerous than a man in a lizard suit has any right to be.
• Why a lonely man's belief that his dentist was gang-stalking him turned out to share its architecture with a genuine, documented East German surveillance programme.
• Why MK-Ultra is the one chapter in this book where the wild claim and the official record line up almost perfectly, and what that does to every claim that comes after it.
• Why supermarkets are functionally licensed drug dispensaries with better lighting and possible ties to Satan himself.
• Why roughly half of all internet traffic isn't human, never has been, and why that statistic somehow makes things worse rather than better.
• Why CERN cannot seem to stop accidentally providing its own conspiracy theorists with fresh material.
• What really lies beneath the Arctic ice...

And much more. Including something you're not supposed to read. You'll understand why once you get there.

This is not a book for people who already have all the answers. It's for the ones who noticed, a while ago now, that certainty was never really on offer in the first place, and decided to get curious about that instead of pretending otherwise.

A hilarious investigation about why we believe what we believe, right up until the point it stops being about belief entirely.

Bring your own suspicion. Leave your certainty at the door.