This week on People Stuff, Dan and Michael follow the red yarn across humanity’s favorite pastime: connecting dots.

Inspired by Susan Lepselter’s The Resonance of Unseen Things, the hosts explore apophenia — the human tendency to impose meaning on scattered events — and why conspiracy thinking may be less irrational than we like to believe.

Topics include:

UFO stories and narrative inheritance
Why jokes sometimes become political movements
Costco diplomacy and the petty geopolitics of the UN
QAnon, Epstein, and the genealogy of conspiracy theories
How elites maintain legitimacy (until they don’t)
Ghost sightings, grief, and cross-cultural personhood
Why conspiracies provide meaning even when factually wrong

Along the way, listeners ask about spirit-protecting neighbors, uncomfortable family revelations, and whether sharing ghost encounters is ever a good idea.

As always, the anthropologists attempt to fix society — this week by solving childcare entirely.

Remember: we’re anthropologists, and we know stuff about people.

That’s it for this week’s People Stuff — the show where two anthropologists try (and sometimes fail) to make sense of people.

If you’ve got a question, a dilemma, or just something deeply weird about humanity you’d like us to unpack, send it our way at people-stuff.com

Credits

Produced by Gabe Bullard
Music by The Endless Bummer
Art by Siobhan Henegan
Marketing by Bryan Haut
Legal support by The Law Office of Matthew Shayefar, the one true business uncle.

You can also sign up for our newsletter, drop us a voice memo, or become a Friend of People Stuff — which is our fancy way of saying you get to support the show and we get to keep talking about dust, dads, and late capitalism.

So go to people-stuff.com

Dan and Michael Are Connecting the Dots | Conspiracies, Ghosts, QAnon & Why Humans See Patterns Everywhere