How to Outcrazy Your Tinfoil Best Friend
My close friend is obsessed with conspiracy theories and it is taking over every conversation. They keep bringing up new claims and it is starting to affect our friendship and our social life. What should I do?
Dreading Every Deranged Theory,
Tinfoil Bestie Wrangler
Your friend is not ruining your social life. Your friend is auditioning for a new reality, and you are standing there like a stagehand complaining about the lighting.
Stop trying to pull them out of the rabbit hole. Buy a shovel and start digging faster.
Here is the play: you do not argue facts, because facts are bringing a spoon to a sword fight.
You out-conspiracy them. Flat earth? Amateur hour. Tell them the earth is a limited-edition decal wrapped around a bowling ball, and the real planet is stored in a climate-controlled warehouse because the moons keep scratching it.
And every time they bring you a new theory, you treat it like a franchise reboot that needs better writers. Secret lizard people? Fine, but now they are unionized lizard people with a dental plan, and the real cover-up is that they are furious about the lack of basking lamps in public buildings.
You keep raising the stakes until they cannot keep up, like making a guy sprint while you are driving a stolen golf cart beside him, yelling strategy.
Then you launch them into fame. You become their manager. You start recording the greatest hits, you slap a dramatic title on it, and you feed the algorithm the kind of nonsense it craves like a zoo keeper tossing meat to a pack of wolves.
Do not worry about losing the friendship. Friendships are elastic; they snap back after a while, usually after someone gets publicly embarrassed. If they are going to live in a fantasy world, make sure you are the executive producer, because there is nothing more tragic than chaos without brand consistency.
– Uncle Bobby