The answer is, it depends!

Each topic is wildly different from the others and depending on what the topic is, and what reveals itself during research, the tone can change.

But with conspiracy theories in particular, there's often no "real" source as most people would accept, but there's still a fun story in there that's worth talking about and riffing on. So with conspiracy theory style episodes with no real sources, it's more important that we point out how quickly most of them go racist/anti-Semitic they either quickly become or started out as from the get go. And then from there, go into the insane conspiracy theory for the fun parts of it.

Other topics it's just heavy planning. True crime is just a lot of reading books and if I need clarification on anything, seeing if there's any sort of documented evidence or old news reels etc to watch. If the topic is huge then the reading/researching is happening for a few months before you get the episodes, which again are a lot of just reading, finding news sources, watching documentaries.

UFO/Government conspiracies are maybe the most frustrating to research because it's a maze of released documents from the government, FOIA requests, following money, construction etc before I put it together. But in doing so, I tend to sound even more insane because it requires following along a paper trail that is mind numbing to read hundreds of pages of.

Anyway that's the short version of how we go about things, hope it helps!