Alternate Realities from Embedded

March 25, 2025·28 min·2 clips

Zach Mack's dad left a frantic voicemail warning of an EMP shutdown and urged him to stockpile two months of food and water.

Audrey Marnovich opens the handoff. The Radiotopia producer sends listeners to NPR's Embedded, where Zach Mack is already recording a family story while it is still happening. The subject is his dad, who has been pulled deeper into political conspiracy theories, especially the kind pushed by online prophets and fed by long hours with a screen. Kelly McEvers resets the frame. Conspiracy theories are old, but this story brings the national mess down to one hard relationship between a son and his father. Zach looks back at earlier tensions. His father's politics used to be easier to live around because they stayed mostly quiet, even with vaccine skepticism and hostility toward the Clintons already in the room. Then an iPad arrives. Around 2019, his dad gets the device, and Zach starts hearing stranger claims about Facebook, government control, and Mark Zuckerberg as a pawn. The pandemic locks things in. His dad resists masks, refuses vaccination, and later accepts the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. Zach tries to reach him. He even warns his father about QAnon ahead of time, hoping the warning might give him a little armor against the next turn. It backfires, softly. His dad says he knows the warning came from love, but he respects the concern without accepting Zach's belief. Another rift opens when Zach explains that his sister Kira came out to their father two years earlier, after years of fear about telling him. The question becomes intimacy. Father and son can still say they love each other. The harder part is figuring out what can be said out loud, and what gets swallowed.

As heard by us

A close, uneasy family story about conspiracy belief, love, and the limits of talking someone back to reality.

Alternate Realities follows Zach Mack as he tries to understand how his father slipped from long-held suspicions into a deeper conspiracy worldview, and why a family conversation can start to feel like a dispute over reality itself.

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Why you'd press play

If someone you love has fallen into conspiracy theories, Zach Mack went looking for answers first.

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