Heheh. When I was a kid in the 80s standing in the checkout aisle I convinced my Mom to buy me a little booklet about "Ancient Aliens". (She usually would let me get a crossword booklet or something, so she didn't really notice what it was). I believed this stuff. Blew my mind. Only aliens could have built those pyramids. Some years later, I found myself listening to a guy named Alex Jones. Believed that the government was going to put us all in concentration camps. Went out and looked at some of the expected FEMA concentration camp sites, took pictures of the barbed wire, stuff like that. Um. I'm not proud of this, I'm just saying I bought into a lot of hooey in my life before I realized that the people selling it were completely full of shit. In fact, every time I did, I felt smarter than everyone else, because I thought I knew something they didn't know.

What woke me up to the scam? It wasn't some Dostoevsky mock-execution come-to-Jesus moment. It was a gradual realization that none of these claims made as much sense as other explanations. And a slow but building sense of anger at the assholes who had made all this bullshit up to line their own pockets.