Michael Shermer: Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories

great hi everyone thank you for coming this is I think this is my favorite town that I never that I have no reason to ever move to um which is saying a lot for me because I love to move so I'm so happy to be in Chicago and it's great to see you Michael nice to meet you in person I know you were on my podcast a couple of weeks ago so that's what gave me the Big Boost exciting exactly that'll put anyone over the top um so it's great to continue the conversation uh so

we should say we're going to talk for about 35 minutes and then we wanted to make sure there was enough time for audience questions so we'll stop at that time and then open it up to you guys and um yeah it's too bad we only have 35 minutes I know you were just on Joe Rogan for three hours yes that was a short one so yeah yeah so this is gonna be this can be easy um well I guess I thought we would just open this conversation by talking about a story that's right in front

of us so Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul Pelosi was just um brutally attacked really horrifying story um by somebody who is now being talked about as both a q Anon far-right conspiracy theorist and a uh far left um other kind of conspiracy right right um so uh you know and obviously this has become totally polarized so we had the people on the left saying this is what happens when um the far right furthers ridiculous dangerous uh theories and we have people on the right saying well um this not only is a person following leftist conspiracy theories

but a mentally ill homeless person living in San Francisco and therefore what did you expect so what are we to make of this yeah I don't know well it's too soon to tell on that one probably but uh the moment I saw that his quote you know where's Nancy oh well that's what the guys are asking on the insurrectionist uh January 6th day so that sounds like he's one of those guys it's possible it could be both he could be mentally ill and a q Anon those are not mutually exclusive in fact there may be

some relationship there um so to what extent do people believe uh Q Anon or pizzagate just take the most crazy uh conspiracy theory I've ever heard you know that Hillary Clinton and Beyonce and Tom Hanks and others are running a secret satanic pedophile ring out of a pizzeria I mean who could possibly believe that right but one guy did Edgar Welch he went there with his gun to break it up uh which is kind of what you would do if there was an actual crime being committed and no one was doing anything about it and

this is what he said on his video he made a video in the three and a half hour drive from his house to to the pizza place uh you know I'm going in there to to his daughters leave this message to his daughters I'm going in there to break up this crime if this was happening to you I would want somebody to do something about it so he believed it does anyone in the top GOP really believe those kinds of things I don't think so did anyone in the top of the GOP really believe the

election 2020 election was rigged I don't think so I think they kind of went along with it so in my book I kind of outlined different kinds of conspiracy conspiracism this kind of proxy conspiracism where the specific conspiracy is a proxy or a stand-in for something else such that even if I took you to the pizza place and said look there's no basement here much less a pedophile ring it's not like you're gonna go oh I don't think I'll vote for Hillary in that case it's like you're never going to vote for Hillary so this

is kind of like the kind of thing Democrats would do even if they didn't do this one there was something about the Clinton Body Count in the 90s and was it bill on that plane with Epstein to that island where they had a trafficking pedophile ring going yeah so they kind of conflate things such that the specifics are not as important as the deeper concern which drives much of conspiracism somewhere somebody behind closed doors that has a lot of power that I don't have is up to no good yeah so just so we get a

sense of um how many people believe conspiracy theories although maybe it won't come as a surprise to people in this audience I'd be curious how many people in this audience are like conspiracy junkies or if you just happen to wander in here but I want to um read off a couple of I want to read off a little dated so this came um this comes from political scientist Joseph uchinski and Joseph parent and so they connected conducted a Content analysis of over 100 000 letters sent to the New York Times over the course of 121

years all right and they compiled uh this into an edited volume called conspiracy theories and the people who believe them so we're just gonna run down this uh some some statistics here about of a about a third of Americans believe the birther conspiracy theory that Obama is a foreigner yeah okay about as many believe that 9 11 was an inside job by the Bush Administration so a third okay this one about 10 I bet you haven't thought of this one lately so about 10 percent of Americans think that the chemtrail conspiracy theory is quote completely

true and another 30 percent think it is somewhat true that means that over 100 million Americans think that the government and airlines are conspiring to poison or drug U.S citizens by spraying chemicals from airliners I'm aren't you glad to be reminded of that now this is something more new to think about four four percent of people believe that shape-shifting reptiles are secretly running the world I think that sounds plausible actually it would explain a lot in politics yeah all right nine percent believe that the government adds fluoride to water not to fight tooth decay which

it does but in order to control the lives of citizens all right 21 believe that an alien spaceship crashed in Roswell New Mexico in 1947 and that the government is hiding the ship and aliens in a secret Warehouse um and that we back engineered computer technology from them and then of course since 1963 more than half of all Americans believe that more than one person was responsible for the assassination of John F Kennedy with a high of 81 percent in the 1970s and a low of 61 percent in the 2010s Okay so that's insane this

is interesting because these this is self-report data always a limitation of social science research and that people are just ticking a box you know what are they really thinking of course we don't know uh there is a consistency where people that tick the box for one conspiracy theory tend to tick the box for a bunch of them same thing with paranormal beliefs Supernatural believes if you believe in UFOs you also probably believe in the Paranormal Supernatural so on so it's not clear what the data really means I mean shape-shifting aliens you know I think sometimes

people are just ticking the Box and and it may be tapping a deeper uh concern that I don't trust authorities of any kind I don't trust government agencies I don't trust corporations and therefore any of these things could be true right whether or not they really believe that that particular one is true you know is not clear so the most famous study on this that I write about in the book by Karen Wood is a title of this paper is called dead and alive people that tick the box to agree that Princess Diana was murdered

are also more likely to tick the box that she faked her death you know and she's still alive with you know Dodie Fayed in in Argentina with Elvis in Maryland or something right well she can't be both dead and alive so the the interpretation is that it's just kind of a a more Global distrust of whatever the authorities the media the mainstream media the lame stream media they're always lying to us right and you can always find a few examples you know the Kyle Rittenhouse case was you know misinterpreted and so on and those left-wing

media they always get it wrong well they got it wrong you know once on that particular time okay but so people run with that and and so that's why you get those numbers like that so you have to kind of look at the consistency underline there's something else that they're trying to tell us people in power are up to no good and so my theory of constructive conspiracism is that enough of those stories are true that it's kind of rational to be constructively paranoid a little bit just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after

you because sometimes they are right so I go through a bunch of those so what is the criteria for a conspiracy theory versus a cover-up say yeah right okay so a conspiracy conspiracy is uh where two or more people are plotting in secret to gain a unfair illegal or immoral advantage over a third person or a different group a conspiracy theory is a theory about that happening whether it's true or not is a separate question and then a conspiracist is somebody who believes that the conspiracy theory is a is actually a true theory so in

a way it's kind of a signal detection problem so you have say our two by two grid you have up here conspiracy theories that are true and you say yes I think they're true so you got to hit right conspiracy theories that are true that are not true conspiracy theories that are true that you say are not true so that's a miss you missed out that's a type uh two error uh down here you have conspiracy theories that are not true and you signal I think they are true okay that's a type one error a

false positive and then the the last one so what I'm arguing is that it's a costlier error to miss the real conspiracies because that could harm you versus identify a conspiracy that isn't actually true it's not not all that harmful to believe these things when they're not true right so I'm arguing in our evolutionary history we evolve this cognition to assume more true than actually are just in case okay so the conventional wisdom about people who believe conspiracy theories is that it's so uncertainty is so cognitively unmanageable that the brain does something as almost like

a an organ organizational principle or soothing mechanism by creating a conspiracy theory or lending one to believe in those things so is that yes too reductive or no I don't think it's too reductive I think that's true because it's true for everything like we just assume we can understand causality in the world we're not omniscient so I'm going to be flawed in my ability to determine whether the pattern is real or not so better to err on the side of just assuming most patterns are real the Russell in the grass is probably a dangerous predator

even if it's just the wind it's not a particularly costly error to make again that's one of our false positives errors right so in our in in small groups there are coalitions of people that are talking about you behind your back they're plotting to get the raise before or you do or groups are plotting against each other this is very normal anthropologists have a lot of research on this and so it pays to be a little cautious about other people especially if you don't really know them especially if they have more power than you or

at least you think they have more power right so have conspiracy theories gotten more elaborate over time yeah so this is a hard one to answer because the social science survey data is pretty new just in the last few decades conspiracy theories was always treated since the since about the 1950s is a real Fringe tinfoil hat wackadoodle weirdo kind of belief doesn't belong in mainstream Academia journalists weren't covering it in any depth and so on and until recently it became apparent you know oh this is kind of serious you know the guy in the White

House thinks this stuff is true all right so maybe this is not a fringe thing and it didn't used to be that way before the 1950s conspiracism was pretty mainstream you know you you cited uh yusenski and parents they did that massive study of letters to the editor to the New York Times over a century and you go back to the 1890s there were just tons of letters about what the Mormons were doing what the Jews were doing what the Catholics were doing The Outsiders versus the Insiders and this was pretty common normal knowledge for

citizens to have about things that were going on was not considered Fringe but were people acting on those conspiracy theories like have they become more more dangerous what were the net effects of people believing the stuff I mean I think yes it was dangerous well and most anti-Semitism throughout history is based on a conspiracy theory those Jews are up to no good they're they're seeding the wells with with plague disease and and they're manipulating the economy and Banking and they're running the media and they're doing this they're doing that the stab in the back conspiracy

theory in the 1920s that explained why Germany lost the first world war was picked up by Hitler and the Nazis to perpetrate anti-Semitism that way that goes back to an earlier blood libel conspiracy theory about the Jews uh you know sacrifice sacrificing Christian children to drink their blood and you know the what I call the witch theory of causality you know that that a witch is an explanation for why bad things happen you know plagues and diseases and accidents and storms and starvation and so on the cause of that is women converting with demons in

the middle of the night that's a conspiracy theory and and so and people acted on that that's what a witch craze is how much does YouTube and social media have to do with the way conspiracy theories are sort of metabolized now like if it weren't for the rise of all that stuff do you think people would have sort of become smart enough to avoid them or is this just part of Being Human yes the internet is going to liberate us all everybody could be their own trying to figure out how much to blame the internet

and well I would say it carries some of the blame for the speed of transmission of conspiracy theories and the size of the audience you can Garner overnight I mean you've tracked the history of JFK assassination conspiracy theorists I mean the 60s and 70s they were mostly meeting in these tiny little hotel conference rooms with their little mimeograph newsletters you reach a few hundred people a couple self-published books not a big thing right now you know like loose change was the first digital uh viral video it was seen by like 10 million people in the

first couple months you know the numbers Hollywood producers would kill for this was the 911 truther film and that that's that's different yeah so I remember when Loose Change came out what what was was it like 2000 okay yeah it was a few years it wasn't right away so I mean I'm thinking back right after 9 11. I remember I mean I remember seeing viral images going around like there was that one where it was like Nosferatu was in the clouds was in the big smoke cloud that kind of thing but like how long did

it take the current conspiracy theories around 9 11 to sort of take hold did Loose Change actually start it no it didn't start to accelerated the first book was uh in French the big lie and that was 2002 I think so we're talking September 2001 it was like March of 2002 when the first book started coming out that it was an inside job um and you know then it really accelerated pretty fast after that the birther uh that Obama wasn't born on U.S soil apparently forgetting that Hawaii's part of the United States anyway that that

took off pretty fast and of course you know who was was trumpeting that if you will on CNN uh remember that when he was on there with Anderson Cooper Earl Anderson we have people in Hawaii you're not going to believe what they found and that so you get instant overnight coverage right so there after loose change then there was a documentary released where that actually went went through Loose Change sort of almost almost frame by frame explaining what was wrong so do you can you break that down at all like oh like yeah I guess

whatever okay let's put it this way how do you talk somebody out of that particular 911 conspiracy that's a hard one because uh here they go they do what we call anomaly chasing so you just go look searching for something that anomalous that doesn't appear to be explained by the mainstream Theory and then that becomes the new Theory and and so you knock that one down these are like Unsinkable rubber ducks you push this one another one pops up and they have and people that are steeped down the rabbit hole of these conspiracy theories they

have hundreds of these like you know the JFK assassination thing you know I read Vincent boliosis 1400 page book in which he addresses all not probably not even all but you know like 400 different conspiracy theories about JFK alone and then you got to keep that in your head like with Rogan on Tuesday you know he he's got he's got this one little thing Shermer if you can't explain this one little thing about the bullet and it turned right and left and then it should have been you know if I don't know that then he's

like gotcha and and there could be hundreds like that so this is part of the problem so yeah so what I try to do is go for some what is it that really bothers this person you know it's like talking to climate deniers right before you know it five minutes in you're talking about free market capitalism it's like wait what has that got to do with climate so this is what they're really after right or you talk to somebody a a Christian creationist about a a Christian conservative about Evolution and all of a sudden you're

talking about morals and the the values of American it's like what has that got to do with the biology nothing but it's this deeper thing that they're concerned about so usually with conspiracy theories there's something underlying it so in case of 911 you know there's concerns about the foreign American foreign policy or oil policy what are we doing in the Middle East and this is what bothers me about these like the truth or they're missing the bigger story what was the relationship of the US government with the Saudi government where did the money come from

to fund those guys why aren't we tracking that how did those Saudi lead at the family get out of America on a 9 12. how did that happen why did that happen so to me this these other conspiracies are distracting us from if you want to call it a conspiracy but something else but why is that because it's just not as sexy a narrative so I think it's not as entertaining it's not as sexy it's I don't know because it's more like boring regular politics because we know politicians lie and dissemble and they do Shady

things behind closed doors that we don't know about until we find out through Freedom of Information Act things and government committees so let me just rattle off a few of those you know the CI MK Ultra the CIA had a program of Mind Control brainwashing because there was a fear that there was a gap with the Russians and the Chinese and North Koreans that were falling behind the the brainwashing Gap right so the CIA was dosing U.S citizens with LSD and other mine altering drugs without their knowledge without their consent Congress didn't even know about

it what yeah okay and then operation cointel Pro the FBI was seating agents inside these social movements uh the Black Panthers the American Indian movement feminist groups a bunch of others with agents that would pretend to be members of these groups apparently there were some of these gatherings where there were more FBI agents there were actual members of the group right and all the way up to blackmailing Martin Luther King they taped his sex in hotel rooms to blackmail him and send them that letter that I remember that that letter and then it turns out

that was written by the FBI sent to him by the blackmailing our government is doing this you know I mean that's good stuff it's not enough that's real exactly is that not enough it should be enough I mean it's got sex I mean so one of the things that I hear often when I have conversations with people about this this idea that it's it's a test the government or whatever this uh you know what whoever they are are testing the American people to see how compliant we will be so something like the pandemic that this

whole thing so somebody will say this whole thing was engineered um to see how if we will follow orders if we will behave because I mean I guess did this Bill Gates has something to do with this I don't have all the details of this but this is somehow um they're they're gonna see how far we'll go going along with it and then something even bigger will happen and that will enable them to completely control us yeah that's one of them yeah there's a whole bunch related to the panda so here's the Gen the underlying

principle is the principal proportionality that is we have a big cause a big effect you know pandemic or a famous person dies and we want the cause of that effect to be equal in size right so if I take so interesting so if I take a little Pebble and toss it it doesn't take much effort right if I have a fist-sized stone I got to kind of heave it with more effort if I have a boulder I gotta really throw everything into it to get it out there right so the cause and effect are kind

of in a Newtonian way a match so like and then the psychologically our physics graphs onto our folk psychology if you ask subjects actual experiments to take to die and try try to roll a low number and you'll see them kind of like gently like it just sort of like that if you could try to roll 11 or 12 they'll take it and really heave it against the wall as if somehow that's going to make a difference it doesn't so then you apply to conspiracy theories right so take the like the Holocaust one of the

worst things that ever happened in human history the cause of that one of the worst political regimes in human history the Nazis okay so JFK assassinated by who Lee Harvey Oswald some lone nut that just doesn't feel right cause and effector so you got to add in the FBI and the CIA and the KGB and the mafia and the Cubans and the Russians and you know kind of make it match Princess Diana cause of death drunk driving speeding no seatbelt but princesses are not supposed to die that is boring that's boring yes come on it's

got to be MI6 and the Royal yeah so there we look for a minute 911 you know you tell me 19 guys with box cutters brought down the World Trade Center bills come on charmer you can't be serious okay but with the pandemic I'm curious just how you think about this like as putting aside like what you talk about with respect to conspiracies how they manifest in our brains all of that it's admittedly it's really confusing everything with the vaccines everything with the way the information was disseminated it was extremely confusing whether or not it

was confusing on purpose is debatable I personally I think it was just like a whole bunch of things but even I who I'm a very skeptical person I think we're pretty much aligned there um I have a hard time not thinking that there's some fishy business going on well so we were just talking on the drive over about the lab leak hypothesis yes that's one of my favorite subjects I mean yeah when it when it first came out it was like that was a real hypothesis and then all of a sudden it was silence that's

a crazy conspiracy theory yeah I think there was about three weeks when you were allowed to talk about the lab Lake right then it wasn't until of all things John was it Jon Stewart that kind of triggered it off on one of those nights well I think it was but I think it was starting to come back uh where are we this is the end of October I feel like we've been allowed this is in the summer I feel like it was people started creeping back into it yeah and the way you said allowed to

talk about it I mean it's just so weird that we have this media landscape where you're allowed or not allowed to talk about things like that so I think uh so the general problem here is when there's great uncertainty we just have no idea what it's going to be right so you're talking January February March of 2020 no one knew if this the death rate from SARS Kobe 2 was going to be like the flu or if it was going to be like Ebola or just remember remember people forget this AIDS the death rate from

AIDS was 100 percent until the drug cocktail a hundred percent so imagine you're the head of the CDC or you're Anthony foucher you're some politician mayor governor of a state whatever and there you are press conference microphone in your face what do we do we close down the economy should we shut the schools down no more restaurants do we mask everybody so it's a signal detection problem right so you're back to type one type two errors you know if you make the wrong error you assume business as usual it's not going to be that bad

and turns out it's you know fifty percent for fatalities like the plague then that's on you right so better to err on this side it's probably going to be terrible and if it's not lucky us I think that's what was happening isn't that awesome but they're really underestimating the intelligence of the people or the ability for people to walk and chew gum at the same time to say that Matt that you don't need masks that masks will not prevent transmission when they just when they knew that they needed to save the masks for the First

Responders yeah yeah like I mean I think that kind of if that's your opening Gambit yeah there's no way to retain the trust of the the people and that fuels conspiracism it was doomed from the beginning yeah yeah yeah it's a problem yeah better to be transparent honest just come right out and say well you know no one actually knows and you know you just couch it in a signal detective look I'm just going to do the best I can here's what we think now we might be wrong be a good Bayesian like here's our

probabilities I'll update I'll up you know update my priors if the new information comes in and then the next conference hey we found out something new rather than the way it's presented is like well now this is the truth and then well but you said something different last time yeah so it looks like you're lying right I I mean and also with the lab League we were talking about this before I don't think any reasonable person thinks that it was done on purpose that that this was some kind of Bio weapons attack but it seems

to me that the chances of an accident um it's now being well Vanity Fair and propublica just dropped um a really big story with new you know newly emerged you know pretty pretty compelling evidence that I think they were calling it a research related accident okay that's funny yeah right well so that's that's what fuels conspiracism right where there's great uncertainty there's lack of transparency and you could say the Chinese government's not the most transparent uh political regime right well it just makes it worse what okay so you Michael Schumer when the pandemic was starting

and you were following the news and watching fouchy on TV what were you thinking personally I I was thinking pretty much what I was just saying like these guys really don't know we not nobody knows and that was the problem and you know I I tend to try to err on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt of their motives you know I never got the impression Anthony fauci wants to control the American public and take away our freedoms right I don't think Bill Gates wants to chip everybody uh you know so

they can track US in any case it's already happening because if you have a cell phone they're tracking you so it's too late yeah right yeah you missed that one that's right that is a kind of a conspiracy although it's sort of open conspiracy I guess yeah although it's not clear apparently I'm trying to find the answer to this question if you turn your phone off and you drive somewhere do they know where you are and I some people have told me they do that it's still pinging well if you say something in conversation a

word or you mention a product or a place or a name it will pop up in your suggested in your feed I mean I'm not kidding I mean how many people have experienced this you think your phone is off you're having a conversation with somebody and suddenly you get a marketing email about this thing interesting not crazy interesting I did not know that okay there's a new a new conspiracy theory yeah okay so I was just um I was just at a I was doing a retreat with um uh about about 15 people who consider

themselves politically homeless uh this is this is something that I've started recently and uh these were very these were all women they were um mostly not all but mostly um liberals who had just uh grown a little are starting to grow weary with the extreme ends of the political left um and these were people who had have started listening to a lot of podcasts like yours and like mine um and very reasonable not hysterical intelligent sober minded and one of the things that came up again and again was this idea that were being played I

mean I don't think the term Global Elites entered into the discussion per se but this idea that there are people pulling the strings out of very very high level it may not be Anthony fauci that wants to control the American people but as somebody in his ear who's then who's being manipulated by somebody even higher up and you know this notion that the head of the World Bank and others are meeting in on Islands to talk about things yeah how far off is that okay probably not that far up let's let's carry this through and

think about it for a minute so in 9 11 truthism there's the two phrases lihop and my hop lihop is let it happen on purpose Bush knew that Katie was going to do this and he let it happen on purpose as a pretext to invading Iraq or Worse made it happen on purpose he's actually in on it and Bush operative somehow got into the World Trade Center buildings and knocked through all that drywall and plan of those explosive devices without anyone noticing okay I mean it just goes on on it's just completely crazy in fact

I introduced in the book cowhop capitalized on what happened on purpose right this is what politicians do oh this bad thing happened okay we gotta raise the budget we gotta invade this country we got to do these things after Pearl Harbor there were Li hop in my hop uh they didn't call him that but that Roosevelt knew the Japanese were gonna attack in Hawaii and he let it happen on purpose as a pretext to getting America into the war because he wanted to support Great Britain uh Churchill was begging him to come into the war

he couldn't do it Congress didn't want to vote on it the American firsters led by Charles Lindbergh were against this stay out of those crazy entanglements in Europe and so on and he needed some pretext Pearl Harbor happens boom okay now here's our capitalize on what happened on purpose right that's what politicians really do and that should be our Focus right because that is a kind of kind of a conspiracy in a way that really happens but something we're going to go to q a in one second but like just I mean something like Jeffrey

Epstein okay so if we're talking about people meeting in secret and you know a kind of almost like multi-level marketing scheme of control and then we have somebody like Jeffrey Epstein totally mysterious um Source you know it's totally mysterious where his wealth came from that he then he's in prison then he dies like what do you I guess did he kill himself or not Michael yeah so I when when that uh if it would have first broke I would now he just committed suicide and then then it's like well one camera was out it's like

that's a little suspicious two cameras were out okay it's like you know if you hear a knock on the door here like what was that or then well is that somebody at the door that's somebody at the door right so it was two signals and so I posted on Twitter okay I think there's this could be an actual conspiracy theory where somebody you know killed him and then somebody wrote me emailed me that used to work at that prison Riker's prison there they said oh that place is a dump nothing works the cameras don't work

electricity goes out it's a dump it's really in the most like rickety I believe yeah it's hard to believe that that's the case well I mean why do people commit suicide well when they hit the end and he did uh I mean that's one not just depression but also when you you know if you're a con man and you've been found out ultimately that may be the no one knows for sure of course I mean so here's what happens we spin a narrative that makes sense well he's got a list of all those famous rich

people that were on that island and we know Clinton and whoever else was there and so on and so forth and somebody would have had the motive to kill him but same thing with Kennedy who wanted to kill Kennedy well the military industrial complex said the CIA and Johnson and the Cubans and Castro hated him and on and on yeah but you could say that about every American president think of many people hated Nixon or or Trump or Obama I mean and they did they didn't assassinate that Nixon got us out of Vietnam why wasn't

he assassinated by the military-industrial complex right so the counterfactual makes us think rethink those all right all right okay well we're gonna go to um audience questions I purposely didn't Grill you about specific um too many specific conspiracy theories oh more one more um oh okay sorry yeah conspiracy one more okay well oh yeah you ready yes oh no we're still gonna go sorry um okay well actually let me ask you what conspiracy theory do you believe uh well the ones that actually have evidence uh for them you know that there's actually a paper trail

so the Pentagon papers or the Wikileaks you know revealed here's millions of documents showing exactly what these politicians were saying uh behind our backs without Congress knowing and so on the Pentagon papers they were lying about the Vietnam War here are here are public comments by McNamara about how it's going and then here's what he said like an hour later to Nixon and he said you know it's we're losing it's terrible it's you know we got to get out you know it's like they're just lying now so is you know but that's not a surprise

we know politicians lie right so my other examples of Volkswagen cheating the emission standards in Europe why would they do that oh I don't know to make more money you know I mean this come on it's not a shocker right so we know people do this okay okay well okay so but here's a here's a 911 conspiracy theory that I believe I don't believe the narrative around flight 93. okay the whole let's roll thing I think that was engineered the so Flight 93 is the one that was um in Pennsylvania the one that crashed in

Pennsylvania so that the conspiracy theory is that that was shot down um by our planes because it was headed into some other it was gonna crash into something else okay whether or not that's true I think I feel like that could be true whether or not that's true the whole idea that everybody you know overthrew the hijackers and crashed into the ground um in order to be Patriots and and keep the plane from going somewhere else and they said let's throw the guy said let's roll and they all convened that seems yeah not I think

I would agree with you and it is a story it's it's kind of a salvaging a horrible thing that happened with a feel-good story and that does kind of fit a certain narrative these are our brave the equivalent of our brave soldiers fighting back against these terrorists I mean there's no recording of this let's roll right there's just this was ear witness no and and I mean George W bush made it um a mantra it was a it was a meme practically yeah that could be that that's right that could be there was a story

about that like in Columbine where they asked one of the female students you know something about to see a Christian and you know she said I would die for my Lord or something and then he shot her and it was like when I was like come on I mean it was just sort of one of these we got to salvage something out of this horror horrible tragedy okay all right are we are we it was a time yes you want to go okay we're going to open it up to your questions now I cannot wait

okay she's gonna come around with the they're getting they're these first questions over to you all right yes I wonder if you would talk a little bit about the psychology behind uh people who believe in things that obviously aren't true there's a psychological concept called cognitive dissonance that as we try to make sense of our world we build ideas uh based around our own values and our experiences but then cognitive dissonance takes over and we believe things that obviously aren't true could you talk more about the psychological background yeah Behind these people that believe these

things that just clearly aren't true yeah so I have a discussion of this in the book uh this was discovered by Leon fessinger in December of 1954 in which he joined a end of the world UFO cult at the top of a mountain not far from here actually but side of Chicago where uh this woman was getting uh through chant channeling from the aliens that the world was going to come to an end so he thought Leon Fester was a young psychology Professor well this will be interesting I'll join the group and see what happens

when the world doesn't come to an end you know hopefully and of course it didn't and and you know midnight comes around and they're like looking up at the sky and they're checking their watches which time have you got it oh it's 1205 oh no well maybe it was the Eastern Standard maybe it was Western Standard time or you know and then you know and then they you know kind of spin doctored it oh well maybe we miscalculated tomorrow night you know it actually was December 21st the winter solstice which is always a good time

for the end of the world and um uh and but then wondered what would they do like tomorrow and the next day next week or whatever you know would they go back and go well that was a dumb idea you know can I have my car back and my job back you know because they gave up everything right and no they went back and doubled down on their beliefs so he called that cognitive dissonance so the dissonance created but you have a strong belief and the facts are countering it so what do you do you

either change your beliefs or you spin doctor the facts to make them fit the belief and that's usually what happens it takes a lot to change a fundamental belief very hard to do and so most conspiracy theories are like this if you're really committed to it if it's really important to you for it to be true because it's some part of your identity your moral or political or religious identity is built into the conspiracy theory there are almost no facts that are going to change your mind it's very difficult to do that question over here

that's a perfect lead into my question to follow up on this question of comparison between Cults and conspiracy theorists what do we do how do we pull people back or out of of this path that they're in well first of all as I like to say no one in the history of the world has ever joined a cult you know they join a group that they think is going to be good and helpful and save the world and if you look at the gym history of Jim Jones you know and the guy entered the Jonestown

disaster you know he was a real what we would call a social justice Warrior today he's a progressive living in the Bay Area working with Jerry Brown his first time he was governor Manning the soup kitchens helping poor people he had one of the earliest integrated racially integrated churches in California I mean it's you know people join that group because like this is a good thing and it was a good thing right and you know 15 years later you're drinking the Kool-Aid and so nobody thinks they're going to do that no one thinks that what

they believe is a crazy conspiracy theory they think it's an actual conspiracy that I have discovered and this is important and I am in on this secret knowledge and it's incredible that I get to know this and I'm going to do something about it and so you can't just counter it with okay this is all a bunch of baloney and here's why because that's not going to do it you have to kind of do do an end run around it and to try to bore down well what is it you is really concerning you here

and you know how did you then you just ask a lot of questions you know how do you know that's true where did you hear that you know what's the source of those facts did anybody uh fact check that you know is it confirmed by other sources basic journalists of stuff right you know you kind of try to follow up on that and uh they may not change their mind at that moment almost never you just kind of plant that seed and maybe they go away and think about it a little bit and then they'll

likely never talk if they change their mind they'll likely just not bring it up again they probably won't say thanks to you I changed my mind right that almost never happens any next question is up in the front here uh yes does level of Education indicate a likelihood of someone believing in conspiracy theories it attenuates a little bit uh if you don't have a high school diploma like 40 40 percent believe in most conspiracy theories if you have a postgraduate degree it's about 22 percent uh but that one in five Americans with a postgraduate degree

believe in a lot of these conspiracy theories it's not that big of a fact and in a way it makes sense because um smart educated people are better at rationalizing beliefs that they hold for non-smart reasons that is for other reasons you know emotional political religious these this is my religious truth this is my political truth and the smarter you are the better you're going to be able it's called motivated reasoning confirmation bias and so on you can just employ that even better yeah I actually was going to ask you is it kind of like

the Horseshoe theory is that the least the very the least educated people and the highest educated people are the most disacceptable to this and I wonder too if the highest educated people are just so used to believing their own hype sort of trusting themselves thinking whatever they think must be correct because they're educated well I know that again back to the tinfoil hat wackadoodles you know the people that storm the capital on January 6th these were not those people these are people that married family jobs careers military lawyers doctors to regular people I mean just

they keep gas in the tank they pay off their bills I mean they're they're leading normal lives and they have this one thing that because they believe it's true I have a yeah next question next questions in here in the center what's your thought on social media Banning publication of conspiracy theories you know like Twitter and Facebook will take posts down that are it seems to be those would make that's like it's conspiracy theory supporter if you can't say your theory yeah you tend to be against that a pretty Hardcore Free Speech fundamentalist almost I

mean libel slander you know posting the nuclear codes you know you can't do these sorts of things but attend to err on the side of let people have their say and then let people like me debunk them and just I I have more faith in the media that American public people can actually reason their way to things and you show them the fact uh and and I tend to disinclined to put it in the hands of a committee to decide what I can and can't read right you know so like my friend Joe Rogan was

hammered for having Robert Malone on his show talk about myocarditis and vaccines okay he appears to be wrong but why should some guy at Twitter tell me what I can read and not read about myocarditis in vaccines you know I know what Joe Rogan's show is like it's not 60 Minutes I know he's just bullshitting with people for a couple hours and I know what to expect and I could look up on on Wikipedia or whoever you know Robert Malone what is the counter to that and you find it within seconds oh there's the argument

against the vaccine myocarditis connection okay so I said just let people have their say so I'm glad Elon but Twitter oh okay maybe that's not going to go over well here next question in the center uh uh yes just to piggyback on the education I was wondering if it plays into who believes conspiracies more yeah okay let's go through these so uh like a political orientation uh uh race and so on these are proxies for predictors of specific conspiracy theories not overall conspiracism so blacks are more likely to believe that the CIA planted crack cocaine

in inner cities or invented aids to decimate black populations white Americans more likely to think the government is building FEMA camps to imprison Americans that own guns or the government's trying to cancel the Second Amendment and so on uh and uh you know age um education political orientation so these these are just kind of direct people toward different specific ones that match The Narrative of their position but overall everybody polls show that everybody ticks the box for at least one conspiracy theory and for good reason because some of them are true right they're not all

completely crazy even The Crazy Ones have some element of Truth to them you know Sandy hick was a false flag operation okay completely crazy but the U.S government has conducted false flag operations in our history a lot of them if you look at the history of the CIA the CIA was very much involved in false flag operations in South American countries to manipulate elections to favor the fascist dictators over the Communist dictators because they'd be friendlier to American business interests our government was doing that okay and operation Northwoods was a document we have the document

from Top aides in Kennedy's Administration presented to him and Robert McNamara that we are going to shoot down an american commercial airliner filled with Americans and blame it on the Russians so we can invade Cuba and there was a bunch like this we're going to do this in Miami we're going to do that we're going to blow up a but you know and so on and so on to their credit Kennedy and McNamara said we're not doing that we can't do that but but the top government officials are going we need a reason to invade

Cuba after the Bay of Pigs disaster I mean a real Invasion where we just go in there with everything and we assassinate there was dozens of attempts to assassinate Castro by the CIA including In Cahoots with the mafia so enough of that is true that people go huh yeah maybe that Alex Jones isn't completely crazy next questions way in the corner is there anything at all that we could possibly do in the course of the educational system in the United States to try and teach children High School even college for that matter how to ask

the kind of questions when something like that comes up how how do you prevent yourself from falling into this trap but then still allow for the fact well all right there were some of these things that were being done just to get at the accuracy of what you hear or read yeah I think this is this is the core of the problem I think it's not really taught in lower grades I would propose we teach like the course I teach at Chapman University in Southern California is skepticism 101 how to think like a scientist this

isn't rocket science it's not you don't need college kid I could teach this to middle school kids you know and so they take algae and I remember I took geometry algebra pre-algebra algebra pre-calculus and so on why do I need all that you know unless you're going into a stem field how about a course in how to think period and you know not couched in that heavy duty philosophical logic you know if P then Q if not P then not q and all of a sudden the i's are kind of glazing over but you know

couch it in real world examples like you know how do you know if you a UF if uaps are real or not these UFOs all right let's just use it use it fun examples like that how to reason about those sorts of things and it's supposedly taught under critical thinking rubrics but I don't really see it they do people graduate they have no idea how to think about these things I get them at 18 at my students are 18 that right out of high school they have no idea their brains are mush and they're just

like eye opener like oh my God I never thought about it yeah so that would be a good start educational reform yeah I was going to say like the we talk about critical thinking all the time but that can go both ways you can say people who believe in Crazy conspiracy theories say they are critically thinking they're just asking questions yeah that's right yeah we call it yeah it's called jacking off j-aq just asking questions okay but it's really hard because you do have to ask questions yes it's maddening because that these very Notions have

been weaponized one must ask questions in order to prevent exactly what you're talking about you tell me something because you're a journalist I have found in my is my experience journalists are really good at critical thinking in fact they are hardcore Skeptics I find them more is it because you've heard so much that from people in interviews that you know I'm going to start off being skeptical well oh God I mean this is a top a whole other topic I think um I think journalists are less and less that way I'm mean we have this

whole phenomenon of activist journalism where there's an adherence there's looking for you know there's a sort of confirmation bias approach to reporting but um yeah I mean of course you're supposed to be skeptical you know in order to you always say like a good editor will say we decide to do a story if we have looked at all the reasons that we shouldn't do the story ask yourself you know every single question you know is there any reason I shouldn't do the story try to talk yourself out of doing the story and if you can't

talk yourself out of it then you should do it yeah yeah that's good right and for one more question it's going to be right up in the front here what about the tendency to act on conspiracy theories do danger sacs you touched on this a little bit when you talked about pizzagate and certainly when you talked about uh the the big lie I'll call it and uh the and so uh is there are there any studies around the notion of people actually acting on conspiracy theories they believe in and causing harm to others most people

don't act on it again I mentioned Edgar Welch because we know who the guy is he's the only guy that did anything about the pizzagate thing everybody other other people just went on Yelp and left a bad review for the doe is too doughy in the pizza it was like it's not exactly what you do if you thought there was a pedophile ring going on right this is why I think they didn't really believe it in the same way they believe other things all right it's again it's a proxy belief it's a stand-in for something

else that you don't trust the Democrats you don't trust government agents something like that um yeah so uh but the fact that some people do and of course we're concerned about 2024 uh you know our what's going to happen if no one accepts the outcome of the election on either side regardless of what happens then what I mean so people are talking about Civil War I can't imagine what that would look like it's not like armies are going to line up like they did you know in 1861 but something political violence you know people with

hammers and whatever there could be more of that uh acting on it I mean we have an evolved moral sense of justice and right and wrong and people get very agitated and act on that we know for sure I mean if you look at the study of of homicides um it's like 90 of them are moralistic in nature we're told by people who study this that is it's not instrumental I killed him because I wanted his Rolex Watcher took his car it's that you know he dissed me in in in front of my friends he

he slept with my girlfriend he insulted me he did this he deserved it right there's studies on killers in prison and to a man and they're almost all men uh you know the the other guy had it coming and here's why and they have a list of grievances against the person they killed right that's moralistic uh sense of justice so but it's skewed but it's not it's not like you know so they do act on it that can be a problem all right is that it and no more oh sorry that was the end no

more okay all right well are you let me ask you one more last question or do you have something are you hopeful for people's critical thinking abilities to reason are we getting worse at this or or better on the long time scale I'm very hopeful if you look back at let's say the last 500 years you know 500 years ago everybody believed in witches and demons and all these kind of the Jews were doing this and the Catholics were doing that I mean this was common knowledge and no one knew how to tell if it

was true or not because there was no such thing as a like rationality Community a scientific Community empirical ways of testing hypotheses that's all fairly recent right even like statistical analysis of big data sets that's just in the last few decades that we've figured out how to do that properly so that's pretty new that's true so it's not as hopeless and chaotic yeah no I think that's a good I think of Hope for social media although yeah well watch out for those Chemtrails in the meantime something new to think about well Mike some this morning

yes all right well Michael thanks congratulations on the board thank you thank you for coming thank you thank you all appreciate that thank you