Conspiracy and Pattern Recognition
Andrew Bustamante is a former CIA agent who now is a fairly well known content creator on the internet. I find this short podcast to be interesting so I have decided to share it for informative purposes in this blog post.
The Summary of the podcast can be seen in the chart below.
Three Columns and Two RowsFactual Event
Emotional Distrust
A Gap in Understanding
Something in history happens that spurs questions being asked.
Some historical events involve investigations which are confidential. Facts concerning the investigation are kept from the public.
There usually is a period of time in which the stress people feel from the event that happened to the unveiling of the facts and story of why, sometimes this can take years to fully unravel.
This gap in time creates an unresolved emotional issue in some people. It also creates distrust and a feeling as if information and a story is being kept from them.
A logical hypothesis of what happened forms to help fill in the gap in understanding.
The human brain tends to dislike emotional tension and stress from not knowing something.
The brain also enjoys taking the easy way out and instead of accepting the objective empirical facts of what happened in the "official" story.
Instead sometimes the most compelling hypothesis and story forms which exists mostly in our heads. This story releases the stress, by filling in the gaps in understanding and waiting for objective facts to be revealed.
The most compelling story prevails, and this story can eventually turn into a belief.
And beliefs can be stubborn and difficult to change.
Which is party why conspiracy stories persist long after the objective facts and "official" story has disproven many of the conspiracy stories.
But What does all this have to do with Me?
I have studied enough history over the years to understand that history is the study of time and the formation of a narrative or story. There is a conspiratorial way in which I have studied history. I have found that assuming that history has all the answers, implies the fact that there are stories (sometimes conspiracy stories) that have questions that have remained unanswered. So studying and learning history uncovers those answers in an objective and verifiable way.
I have studied history in a way of a Timeline because it appeared to me be the most logical way to study history. Historians can specialize in a small part of history and know a lot about a historical period or event. I decided to learn as much history as I can and learn a lot of history in a little book I wrote called "History Happens Everyday"
Essentially from my study of history I have become convinced to a degree that history is a series of unrelated coincidences in which sometimes the illogical part of my brain likes to put into a conspiracy story of sorts.
For example, Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln are two historical figures in which libraries of books can be written about their contribution to humanity. On its surface they did not have that much in common, one was a depressed lawyer turned into President and founding father and came from poverty, the other was born in to a fairly wealthy family that allowed him the luxury of traveling the world and being a naturalist who spent years of his life developing a theory in part because he didn't really ever have to work to pay bills.
But my conspiracy brain cannot help but think something was in the stars because both were born on the same day, February 12, 1809. I understand it's a coincidence but I still feel like they should have been born on different days because they were part of two completely different stories in history that has shaped our lives.
So what you are about to read is a conspiracy of sorts about me and my traveling adventures.
The Conspiracy
Something horrible usually happens in the world when I travel.
Now I am not delusional enough to believe that my travel habits cause horrendous things to happen in the world. They are disconnected events.
But history being coincidental has not stopped a bizarre pattern to form that sometimes makes me question the disconnected historical coincidences of these events.
It started on my first trip abroad, here is a timeline.
1. In August of 2001 I went on a road trip with my family to National Parks in Utah and visiting family in Southern California. While visiting family in San Diego at the end of August I went to Mexico for the first time on a visit to another country. The security was almost non existent and I recall the border guard just taking one look at our car with CA plates full of white people and waving us through no problem.
About a week later September 11th happened.
2. In 2009 I was entering my last semester in college and my college girlfriend and I went on a vacation to Florida and the Bahamas in the beginning of January of 2009 just before my semester began. While on vacation Israel and Palestine began a war that lasted for 3 weeks.
3. On Halloween 2015 I purchased a ticket to travel abroad to visit Paris for the first time that December. A few days later a terrorist attack occurred in Paris and I was in Paris during the "Paris Accords" which I didn't know was going to happen when I booked my ticket. My flight was delayed in Montreal because of bomb threat.
4. At the end of October of 2021 I decided to purchase a plane ticket for March to visit a family friend in Pennsylvania because I had never been to Philadelphia, NYC, or Washington DC. I purchased the plane ticket around Halloween, then a few days later there began being news stories about Russia building up their military along the Ukraine border. By the time I flew Russia had invaded Ukraine within a day or two of my flight in March of 2022. While waiting for the plane in Sacramento I chit chatted with a random traveler while waiting to board the plane who happened to be a roadie for heavy metal bands, he happened to have met the niece of the person I was staying with in PA who is in a famous heavy metal band, he also happened to have lost a friend at the Bataclan.
5. For 2023 I felt the pull of Europe again and decided to pick Rome as my next adventure. Towards the end of September 2023 I was surprised when my Dad purchased a flight and hotel for me to visit Rome at the end of February and beginning of March of 2024. The added bonus was that I was going to go to San Francisco which I had not been to for several years to see the Blue Angels during Fleet Week on Columbus Day weekend. I picked the Friday October 6th to go because I wanted to see the parade of ships go under the Golden Gate Bridge. The next day (Same day? with the time change) Hamas attacked Israel and killed 1,400 people.
6. Unrelated to traveling... But on July 11th 2024 I had a LASIK procedure on my eyes to give me better vision. And almost 48 hours later on the dot, there was an assassination attempt on Donal Trump.
7. Which reminds me, that when I was in Rome earlier in 2024, the Vatican just happened to have a symposium on transgenderism and the Pope wrote a letter that more or less mirrored what has been my position on this issue for the last decade. Obviously the Vatican having the symposium and me going to Rome are unrelated events. This is perhaps the one time that I do something awesome and nothing horrible happens soon afterward.
You can see how a conspiracy theory of sorts can be formed by historical events and something as simple as going on vacation. If you travel enough I'm sure you can find a similar pattern. But these are some of the only times I've traveled, It's a somewhat odd pattern that has developed.
(The Date on the photo in in European form, I took this photo when I was a teenager on one of those disposable Kodak film cameras. I was in Utah 8/12/01 and I think we returned on the 30th)
Other Examples maybe it's a Conspiracy?
There is also an odd pattern in my art that has emerged over the years, it is both oddly specific and coincidental in nature at the same time.
Example 1: In 2019 I wrote a book on my smartphone titled "Make 2020 Sane Again" it was published in the middle of January of 2020, I wrote it because I was tired of listening to the news cover Trump's tweets, and instead of writing nonsense on twitter I decided to write a book on my smartphone using a word processing app and a bluetooth keyboard. But then the world began to end about a week later when Covid 19 began.
Example 2: In August of 2022 I decided to combine some of my smaller books and writings into a single volume. As I was picking a photo (that I took) from my library for the cover I decided to pick Independence Hall. I picked this photo because the book also includes a re-wording of the Constitution. The book became live on Amazon on August 12 2022. About a week later Joe Biden gave a primetime speech in front of Independence Hall about Democracy.
Example 3: This past May in 2023 for Mental Health Month I decided to write a book on mental health and self help with the help of Artificial Intelligence. I also used Italian examples and history in the book because I had been wanting to go to Italy for a long time and thought the book would help me get there. I decided to title the book "10 life lessons to live by" but use the Roman numeral X instead of "10". And a couple weeks later Elon Musk decided to rebrand Twitter X and the sign changed in July, even though technically Elon Musk formed the company prior to my book being released in April of 2023, but that kind of doesn't matter, his usage of the letter X for twitter became public and common after the release of my book.
I share these examples to paint a picture with words (to steal a phrase from Safire's political dictionary) of an oddity that is me and history. I consider these examples to be coincidental in nature, I make decisions with some reasoning behind it, and then history happens. But also the connections that could be made within these examples could also be something as to how a conspiracy begins to take hold.