Factually! with Adam Conover - The Psychology Behind Conspiracy Theories with Rob Brotherton

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

Adam brings on author and academic psychologist Rob Brotherton to discuss why our brains are wired for conspiracy. They how classism and elitism shape our opinions about conspiracy theorists, how the word “fact,” and how humility is the key to meaningful conversations about truth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. And, you know, as a kid, I was fascinated with conspiracy theories. Not that I believed them. I just enjoyed thinking about them as a kind of speculative fiction. You know, I liked sci-fi novels about the Illuminati. I love thinking about, oh, what if there really was a men in black who'd come take you away in the black helicopters. And most importantly, I was always fascinated by the idea that there were people out there who really believed in these things. I've always been attracted to strange belief systems, to understanding why people go down those weird roads in their mind, whether it's understanding Anne Rand's

cult of personality that she built up around her philosophy of objectivism or Scientology, for instance. These things have always been Velcro to my mind. I love learning about them. And, you know, every so often I'd meet a meet a new friend who was also into conspiracy theories, and it was really fun getting into it and chatting about them. But sometimes after a little while, the conversation would take a turn, a turn from, wow, isn't this so bizarre and cool to think about how weird it is that people believe this to, wow, isn't this bizarre and cool and maybe true? And that moment was always a little uncomfortable to me because, see, one of my goals in life then and now has always been to get the outside of the world to match the inside of my

head. Does that make sense? I want my own understanding of the world around me to match the objective truth to whatever degree I can. I know you can't do it perfectly. I've read Kant, okay? But I want the inside of my brain to match up the outside of the world. But I want my beliefs to be true and I don't want to believe in false things. And part of the reason I've always been so fascinated with conspiracy theories is that these are people who seem to me to have made a grievous error along the way to understanding. But, you know, the older I get and the more I think about this, the more I realize that that is a simplistic view, because the truth about conspiracy theories is we're realizing more and more that they don't just drag in dumb people,

right? People who don't know how to think right. People who are making mental errors. They're just as capable of sucking up anybody, the smarties or just people like you and me. They're not just for the wingnuts. We're all susceptible to them. And that is even more fascinating because the truth is the belief in conspiracy theories doesn't just reveal a way in which our minds are broken. They explain the ways in which our minds are built. See, our cognitive machinery is majestic and complex. And in some ways, that complexity tends it towards conspiratorial thinking. Here's one example.

Researchers in the 40s conducted an experiment. They made a little animation using cardboard cutouts, two triangles, a circle, and some random lines. And for a minute or two, all the shapes in this animation, they just move around the screen randomly bumping into each other. And after showing this animation to the study's participants, the participants were asked to write what they saw. And nearly every person in this study described what they saw as a story. They gave these random-ass shapes, intent, personalities, and narratives. The point being, our brains look for motives in random events. Human motives and intent.

We, in fact, have a bias towards assuming that events are intentional, even when they're not. Now, you can see how this bias could result in you believing in a conspiracy theory, right? Random things happen, and you think there must be some shadowy actors behind it. But this faculty is also just as important for trying to make sense of the world, right? Why do things happen in human society? Well, it's usually because a human wanted them to happen. So this very human faculty that we use to understand the world can also draw us towards conspiracy theories. Here's another bias that works the same way. Think of the assassination of JFK and then think about the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, who was

shot at by an assassin, but who was not killed. Now, the truth is that either of those events could have just gone the other way. It was almost random chance that JFK's assassins' hands were steady and Reagan's were not. But only one of those events, the JFK assassination, has attracted a massive corpus of conspiracy theorizing around it over half a century later. No one's talking about how the failed attempt to kill Reagan was a plot by the mafiosos and the Cubans or whatever. We only say that about JFK. And the bias that shows is that the larger an event that occurs, the larger of an explanation we need to explain it. You know, with Reagan, we're perfectly happy saying that was just

one weirdo acting alone. But in JFK's case, we demand a larger explanation. There must be more to it. We are hardwired this way, a way that gives rise to what we often think of as conspiratorial thinking. The point is, we as human minds are built to seek out patterns and to make patterns where they don't really exist. And that means that the bright lines we want to draw between ourselves, normal, rational, brilliant us, and those other people,

those deluded, irrational, stupid conspiracy theorists, is not, in fact, that bright. Now, let's be very clear about this. False beliefs about the world are, in fact, bad to have, especially when they're as dangerous as many conspiracies truly are. And we should endeavor to make sure that we don't have them and to try to make sure that other people don't have them either to the best of our ability. But this divide between conspiratorial thinking and normal thinking is a lot more complex than we like to think. And let me tell you something. My interview today with Rob Brotherton really challenged me on this point. He really broke down this division in a way that I found challenging and thought-provoking. He gave me a lot to think about, and I know that it will for you, too.

So let's get to it. Rob Brotherton is a professor of psychology at Barnard College, and he's written the books Bad News, Why We Fall for Fake News, and Suspicious Minds, Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. Please welcome Rob Brotherton. Rob, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. So look, you know, a lot of times when I do interviews about my work,

the press says to me, oh my God, we're in an era of false information, fake news, conspiracy theories, alternative facts. It's so hard to get good information. And this is a new period that we're in. That's what everybody seems to feel. I don't know how I feel about that. Do you feel that something is new about our information ecosystem and what it's doing to our brains, the way we're processing information? So the honest answer is that I don't know. And I don't know that anybody knows. I think the evidence is not compelling that we are. So if you look at the history of conspiracy theories, there have always been conspiracy theories. If you look into the history of fake news, there's pretty much always been complaints about fake news. And a lot of the complaints and a lot of the conspiracy theories, they are eerily similar to what we're living

through now. So at least in a lot of ways, this does not seem to be a new phenomenon. That's so that's really interesting. Are there any examples of ways in which conspiracy theories, fake news reared their head. And by fake news, by the way, we're talking about the original meaning of the word. It's become so distorted by now. It's a term I don't even like to use because it's become so corrupted. But, you know, in terms of information dissemination on a wide scale of information that's not true, is I believe what we're working with. What are some other historical examples of that that you'd point to that may be put today into perspective? So from the very beginning of news as an industry, from the very first newspapers that were published on a regular schedule, there were critics of those

papers who said that there's as much in here that's false as that's true. And that same criticism has been prominent throughout the history of news. So in that kind of mundane sense, there has always been allegations of fake news, and for good reason, because a lot of the information in the newspapers wasn't always that well verified. I start my newest book, Bad News, with an example of fake news in the sense that most people don't mean these days, but literally a fake news story. Orson Welles' radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds, the story of an alien invasion on the East Coast of America. And he framed the news show as if it was a breaking news broadcast. For a lot of the show, it was framed as, you know, we're interrupting this music broadcast with news of something strange happening on the East Coast. We'll get back to you with more. this music broadcast with news of something strange happening on the East Coast. We'll get back to you with more. And things unfolded that way. And so it's a phenomenal show to listen to.

Still, it's very compelling. But what anybody knows about this show, if they know anything about it, is that there was mass panic afterwards, that the nation panicked because so many people fell for this fake news that aliens were invading. And in fact, that's a myth. The idea of mass panic, it didn't happen. People have looked into the archives and there's no evidence for that at all. And so that's what I find so interesting about this story is it's fake news about this fake news broadcast. Literally, the headlines of almost all the national newspapers the day after said, nation panics. And it didn't. I'm so glad you brought that up because I wasn't sure you were going to go there. And I've done in my own work on my show, Adam Ruins, everything we did that exact segment where this famous,

this famous case you've heard of where the nation panicked itself was a myth. And the reason the myth occurred was that at least in the version that we read, the story that we understood from historians, that newspapers perceive themselves as being in competition with radio. And so they inflated this story of, oh, the radio, there's such bad information on radio. The radio is fooling the public. And here's an example of that. And we can, you know, frighten everybody about how bad radio is because they were sort of losing their information monopoly. And I wonder if there's a, not to get too far off track here, but is there a connection between that where it's a, you know, the fear of that story of War of the Worlds was inflated

by old media stakeholders who were frightened of the new guard and somewhat invented. Is there a connection between that and today's fear of fake news that, you know, because the place that the people who coined the phrase fake news were newspapers, newspaper columnists about social media, right? Saying, oh, social media is so bad, people are getting fake news there. Is it possible that those newspaper writers are seeing a phantasm in the same way that they were back in Orson Welles' day and creating an enemy where it doesn't really exist? seem like there's an element of all the aspersions that are cast against social media in the mainstream, the traditional media seem like an element of gatekeeping or, you know, passing the buck, saying that there's this other medium which is full of bad information. So you better come to us.

To me, that sounds compelling and plausible, but not to burst your bubble about the war of the worlds. But from what I've read, that idea that it was a newspaper is kind of lumping blame on the radio. That seems to be a little bit of a myth as well, or at least it's contested. It's not that well established. Myth on myth on myth. That's,

that's what some, that's some historians account or some, some writers account, but that's not yet widely accepted. Yeah. Yeah. And so what I find so interesting about that story, the war of the worlds is,

is less that the story emerged. I mean, from what I've read, from what I think is the kind of agreed upon historical understanding, the headlines the next day, they ran because of an Associated Press bulletin that was put out. This was late at night, so not that many people were working in the newsrooms, and they had to get the next day's edition out. This seemed like a big story. And so they ran with it kind of uncritically without checking a lot of the information, which, you know, is extremely problematic in its own way, but it's understandable. What I find more interesting is that so many people bought the story, that they were so ready to believe that everyone else was an idiot,

that everyone else was ready to fall for this fake news. And there are so many think pieces from the days after that show of people saying, well, it's no wonder that the American public fell for this because it's so full of morons. And they did cast dispersions on the radio. They said, well, radio listeners, you know what they're like. They're all stupid or the radio makes people stupid. And there were all these theories that people came up with for why everyone else was so stupid. And in fact, they probably weren't. They were just theorizing about a myth, which I think is fascinating. Well, the story of everyone was

fooled by a fake radio broadcast is itself a good story, especially if you're working in newspapers and you feel threatened by the radio or even if you're just of the opinion that most Americans are stupid. Right. Those are very powerful narratives. And so reading, you know, hearing that story is as good as the hearing that story is itself very compelling. And it's something that you want to believe. And so that brings me to sort of my main question here, because it seems that there's a degree to which good stories like this are built into our minds, that a desire to believe these things is just part of what is being human. And a story that is shaped right, that appeals to your preconceptions and your biases and your priors, and furthermore has a lot of drama to it, can really hook you and make you believe that it's true, regardless of its actual truth value. That is really why people believe things or Um, at least in my experience, uh, and, and my whole challenge

as a, uh, storyteller, as someone who uses comedy and storytelling to try to spread the truth is to not let storytelling overrule the truth, truth value of what I'm saying, right. Um, to, to make sure that we're only using storytelling to tell things that actually happened. But I wonder how this connects to conspiracy theories generally, that, you know, it seems like we have a built-in affinity towards them.

And it does seem to me that that's exploded in recent years, that we've seen them go a little bit more mainstream. I wonder if you could speak about that. Yeah, again, this is a question where I would agree that it kind of seems like people are talking about this more than they used to. But it's difficult to establish whether that's true. And as far as the data that we have goes, it seems to suggest otherwise. So really, the best data that we have, there's not much data, to be honest, because it's hard to know what people were thinking or talking about a hundred years ago before, you know, mass public opinions, surveying and things. But there's one really ingenious study

that used letters to the editors published in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune from the 1890s through to the 2010s. They just looked through all these letters looking for any mention of conspiracy theories. And then they added them up over the years to see if there was a trend, if there was an increase in recent years. And there wasn't at all. There were a couple of interesting spikes in the data, so like the Red Scare in the 1950s. But there wasn't the kind of steady or sudden increase that you might have expected after the JFK assassination or after Watergate and things like that. There was no real spike, no increase in conspiracy talk.

So as far as that goes, that seems to suggest that people aren't talking about these things more than they used to. And that is consistent with the psychological perspective that to some extent, these things are built into our minds the way that our minds work. But, and obviously we can talk much more about the psychology. That's what I have specialized in as a psychologist, but I think it's worth saying before that, first of all, that a large part of the reason why people believe in conspiracy theories is because people conspire all the time because conspiracy is routine. It's been an ever-present feature of human society. People conspiring against other people out of self-interest or to actively harm other people.

This is not an unprecedented phenomenon. So that's the starting point, I think, for any discussion of why people are receptive to conspiracy theories is because conspiracy sometimes happens. So that's very true. And again, a lot of my work is about conspiracies. You know, I made my career on telling the story of, hey, the reason we have a diamond engagement ring tradition in the United States is because a bunch of ad executives and diamond

executives got together in a little room and hatched a plan to spread it throughout the culture by inserting it into ads and magazine articles and things like that. It worked. And now we all buy diamonds for each other when we're getting engaged. And it's a cultural tradition. It was a true conspiracy and it in fact worked. But there seems to be some kind of distinction. I can't quite put my finger on it between that story. And when we talk about a conspiracy theorist, you know, the people using red, red yarn to, uh, connect photos in their basements, uh, like there's now those are two wide extremes, but in your research on this as a psychologist, is there a way that you distinguish them from learning true information about a real conspiracy and the sort of behavior that we call conspiracy theorists or that, that we sort of maybe don't want? Is there a, is there a distinction there that you draw? I don't think there's a black and white distinction. In my first book about conspiracy theories, I spent a whole chapter on the definition of a conspiracy theory. And, you know, the short story is there's no succinct

definition that everybody's going to agree upon. I think there are characteristics that we can look for, characteristics that to the extent that a claim exhibits these characteristics, we can, it's more likely to be called a conspiracy theory by people. But, you know, there is a wide spectrum and claims will meet these great, will demonstrate these characteristics more or less. And one of the problems when people talk about conspiracy theories, I think, is that we naturally tend to go for the most extreme examples, the interdimensional lizards or the most fanciful, frankly, ridiculous conspiracy theories. But there is this very broad spectrum of

conspiratorial allegations. And yeah, there's no neat distinction between what seems quite plausible and what seems absolutely absurd. Yeah. You know, I often have an argument with people. I have arguments with like my mom about this, you know, and it's the kind of thing where it's like, they designed the iPhone to get slow right when the new iPhone comes out, you know? They do that on purpose. And I have to explain, you know,

as a follower of tech culture, that's actually not true. There's no kill switch in the iPhone, you know, like that's not that's not accurate. However, they have created an upgrade cadence that causes there to be new products that come out every year that causes you to want them. And they are constantly upgrading the software in such a way that it requires slightly, you know, harder, bigger hardware all the time. And so they have it's not planned obsolescence. It's regular obsolescence, but it still has the same effect on you, you know. And those two stories are kind of subtle. You know, the difference between them is because I think they're real. One is not true. Tim Cook's

not sitting there steepling his fingers saying, yes, yes, put a, you know, make them explode two years in. But there's still something happening. It's just not it's just a more nuanced process than people are describing. And so I understand what you're saying about like drawing the line is drawing the line is difficult. But I still wonder, is there like I don't know, the my feeling has always been that, you know, we're pattern-seeking creatures. You know, it's the classic thing of humans are hardwired to see faces places. You know what I mean? Like we look at combinations of shapes and we see faces, but sometimes we're looking at a face and sometimes we're just looking at our sink. You know, our sink has a couple knobs in a hole that look like a face, you know? And when you look at the sink and you say, that's a person, well, that's disordered thinking,

right? We need to be able to draw a distinction there. And so is there not a distinction where between someone who says, oh, I think there might be a conspiracy happening. I'm seeing a pattern in the actions of humans. And there is some, there is maybe something going on behind the scenes here. And someone who every single place they look, they see a conspiracy that's out to get them specifically. Is there not some distinction we can draw there or? Yeah. Well, this kind of gets towards the idea of conspiracy theories, even fundamentally as a subject of psychological inquiry. Why should they be? You know, presumably their claims of fact that should be investigated by people best placed to know.

So what are psychologists doing? Yeah, good question. Giving attention to this. And part of the answer to that, I think, is that there does seem to be what's been called a conspiracy mentality. The idea that some people have a higher or lower threshold towards entertaining these kinds of ideas. Some people are more conspiracy prone. Like you say, some people are more likely to see conspiracy everywhere they look

and some people less so. And, you know, there are various biases and habits of thought, I think, that sustain that and feed into that. And it's worth pointing out again that, you know, this is a spectrum and conspiracies are real in the world. And so you could be too low

on your conspiracy inclination. You could be naive and gullible. You could miss plots that really are out there. So you want to be somewhere in the middle, entertaining ideas that seem reasonable, but not entertaining every absurd idea. And I think the phone example is a good one, because to know what's reasonable, what's plausible there and what's not, you kind of have to be in the club like you.

You have to have quite a deep knowledge of how these things work. You have to be an insider to some extent. And if you're not, it's much harder to judge what's plausible and what's not. And as a simplification, I think it's understandable why people would be receptive to the idea that, well, they're just planned to break down after a year. So we have to buy a new one, you know, as a simplification of what seems to be the more reasonable explanation, that's not a million miles off. Yeah. And that's why it's a tough argument for me. Cause I'm like, well, that's not true, but also the effect of it is the same on you. And I can't really, you know what? This is not an argument worth having mom

is where I end up on that. But at the same time, it's like for me, my ethos as a person is I wanna know what's actually true. I wanna know what's actually happening as best as I can. I am trying to match up the inside of my brain to the outside of the world as much as I possibly can. And I know it's I'm a human. It's impossible. I've read Kant and every other philosopher has described why you can't do this perfectly.

But that's still my goal in life. And that is, you know, there's a degree to which I think if you're calibrated wrong, as you put it, or if you if you go down the wrong rabbit holes, you end up in places where you're drastically off from reality. And that's the thing that I think upsets me about it. And that, you know, for me, my fascination with conspiracy theories, I've been fascinated with them since I was a kid, but not in the way of, you know, some people become fascinated with conspiracy theories and they're into them for fun. And then they start going down the rabbit hole, right? And they start, oh, maybe that could be true. For. It's always been how could people believe that? You know, where does this what is this attraction for people like these are such strange beliefs. So there is interesting to me

as, you know, religious cult beliefs or or any anything else like that. I've always been, you know, interested in for the same reason, interested in Scientology, for instance. But yeah, it's I don't know't know, it's an endlessly fascinating topic. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there are too many people who would say they're not doing what you're doing, that they're not interested in truth or reality, and that they're not doing their best to try and get to the bottom of it, right? Everybody thinks that they're doing that. And for the most part, you know, I want to say that everybody genuinely is to the best of their ability and means. But I think there's an element of classism behind a lot of conspiracy theories in that, like I said, you have to be in the club to an extent. You have to

know the rules of, you know, intellectual discourse, so to speak, to be able to have a conversation about what's plausible and what's true and what's not. And if you're not in that club, so if you haven't gone to college or if you don't spend a lot of time looking into these things, if you don't know about the academic journals or the respectable, so to speak, places to get information, then you're doing the best with what you have, probably. You're taking the information that you have available to you and making sense of it as best you can. And, you know, again, this was one of the ideas after the War of the Worlds, after everybody, or after a lot of people thought that there was this mass panic and they were trying to explain it, which hadn't happened. But they were coming up with these ideas that like, you know, people are just uncritical. The American public, the average American is this uncritical, gullible, you know, bad consumer of information.

They're off listening to the radio, this shoddy source of information. They don't know how to tell good information from bad. You know, this was the kind of elite discourse that was going on about the typical American. And from that point of view, I think there still is a large element of that in how people talk about conspiracy theories today. It's, you know, there are people who aren't in the club, people who don't know or who don't necessarily agree with the information or the style of thought that is fashionable in intellectual circles. And I think that's a part of a problem with how people talk about conspiracy theories,

is that it assumes that people aren't trying their best to understand reality. I think everybody is, but they're coming at it from different perspectives. That's a really good point. And it's revolving how I think about this a little bit because that's absolutely true of the discourse about conspiracy theories that you see today. And I think about it, you know, when even the way people talk about YouTube, the way I talk about YouTube,

I think I'm as guilty of what you're describing as anybody, to be very clear. I feel called out and I thank you for it. You're welcome. The way people talk about YouTube as spreading misinformation while YouTube is at this point, like the most populist media platform, it's free for anybody. Anybody can put their own stuff up. Um, and you know, it's, it's watched by, uh, folks who, you know, you can watch endless content without, without having to pay for it, you know? so it's most accessible by people of lesser means.

And it's I think there is a little bit of classism in the way that people that people talk about it and talk about the ideas that are being spread there. And you're right that folks who are looking for. That information are still seeking out the truth and maybe have a reason to feel alienated from the rest of people who are trying to give them information. Yeah, I don't know. Just talk more. I want you to talk more and me to think about it more. Along the same lines, I think when people talk about conspiracy theorists and when they cast aspersions against conspiracy theorists, you know, it's worth remembering that demographically, some of the people who are most receptive to conspiracy theories are the people you

just mentioned who have good reason to be. Like in America, African-Americans tend to be more receptive to conspiracy theories and opinion polls about these things than other people. And that's especially true when it comes to things like health and autonomy. So, you know, lately there's been some polling about the potential coronavirus vaccine. Would you take it, you know, if it was available today? And, you know, a lot of talk about how people who say no to that are a problem, how that's so problematic. And, you know, disproportionately people who are skeptical of that, who say no, or, you know, maybe not to that are in America, African-Americans. And again,

this is for good reason. I think that certain communities have more reason to feel like they may be the victims of conspiracy than others. So in America, you know, I don't need to mention the long history of institutionalized racism here, which might lead people to think that, you know, the government or industry or institutions don't have their best interests at heart. Yeah, I think that's understandable. And again, there's been a lot of coverage of this, you know, the conspiracy theories about the outbreak of AIDS have been quite well studied. And in the late 80s, early 90s, there were a lot of media coverage of those conspiracy theories saying that the conspiracy theory said that AIDS was engineered by the government or it was deliberately released in certain communities. And understandably, these conspiracy theories

resonated more among African-Americans. And so a lot of the elite mainstream news coverage of that at the time was, had the tone of, you know, you'll never believe what these people think about AIDS. Like how could they be more wrong? And again, there's this kind of classist, somewhat racist in some instances element to, to dismissing the way people are thinking about things. Well, and let's be specific about, you know,

beyond just the general issue of institutionalized racism, like black on them over the course of decades in the most inhumane. I mean, this is like, you know, close to the some of the worst, you know, medical crimes of the 20th century. And that was real. It was a conspiracy, as you point out. If the the horror that must have affected that community once it was realized by the people in that community and then the people who, you know, as it radiated outwards, like it's not unreasonable then when AIDS comes through to say if you're in that position, if you're a member of that community to say, well, I know what they did to us fucking 10 years ago, right? Maybe it's happening again. And it's like a very, a very specific history of victimization. And so I do, I do understand that.

And that is something that, yeah, we really need to bear in mind when we're talking about this. Yeah, I agree. Okay. Look, I've got so many more questions, but we got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Rob Brotherton. Okay. We're back with Rob Brotherton. So you have a very nuanced view of conspiracy theories, which I really love. And but I want to I just want to poke at this a little bit more with the idea. And I know this is the cliche idea that we now live in a conspiracy theory age where something is different about conspiracy theories and false news reports than it used to be. And I'm I'm very much open to the same as it ever was argument that you've presented that,

you know, we've always had them. They've always been with us. And maybe things are not fundamentally different. But I do want to just ask the media environment has truly changed profoundly over the course of my lifetime. You know, one of the things I've noticed just to draw a comparison with, say, avowed racists, you know, like the Ku Klux Klan Nazis, people like that, right? When I was a kid, you only ever saw those people. They weren't allowed on television, right? You know, they were not given a platform.

Instead, you would only see them on Jerry Springer. They were let on once a week and the whole audience would boo with them and like throw tomatoes and shit, you know? And that was, they were marginalized specifically. And the same was true of conspiracy theorists. I used to read, you know, science fiction about conspiracy theorists and stuff like that. It was always presented as like a false view that only really out there people would have. Tiny, tiny minority, these guys who are mimeographing zines in their basements and hanging them out on street corners, right? Now, for both of these groups,

with, you know, the media barriers have fallen, right? The, you know, with the internet and everything else, everyone can be their own broadcaster. People are finding affinity groups, you know? So, you know, anyone who's interested in war games can get together on a Reddit. Anyone who, you know, people who all experience ASMR can get together and put a name to what they're experiencing. Right. And racists can get together and say, now we've got our clubs and our subreddits and our political movement. And that's been a big story of how American society has sort of changed. And I feel like the same thing has happened with with conspiracy theorists that, you know, they're no longer stuck in their basements. They're no longer barred from the media they're able to signal boost themselves as much as they

want um you know alex jones being the huge example until he was finally one of the only people to be fully censored on the modern internet uh by you know acclamation of of all these different groups but everyone else is still out there that does seem like a shift that would boost the prominence of conspiracy theories and that sort of thinking to me. What do you think about that? Does that track for you? Are you like, actually, it's still, you know, still kind of same as it ever was? Yeah, I mean, it seems like it seems like there's an element of that. Right. But I think it may be romanticizing the past somewhat. I mean, you know, if you go back a little bit farther. I think the past sucked, but okay. No, well, I mean, you know,

going back a little bit farther than your childhood, I assume, you know, you had The Birth of the Nation, which was a mainstream film about the Ku Klux Klan glamorizing them, you know? And then you had Henry Ford passing out half a million copies of The Protocols of Zion, you know, publishing his own newspaper to get out his anti-Semitic conspiratorial views. There have been times in history where this has not been at all marginalized.

In fact, I think that's been more often the case than not. I think in recent American history, this idea that conspiracy theorists are these fringe basement dwelling losers, that idea is itself the new idea, the unusual idea. More often in history, conspiracy theory has been the default. You haven't been shunned the way that you are today because of how the term conspiracy theorist has taken on this pejorative label and it's not fashionable within academic circles to talk the way that conspiracy theorists talk. That's a really good counter argument, Rob.

That's very good. I mean, yeah, it's a fair point. And, and, you know know, talking about racism as well, I think I grew up in this brief period of media unanimity where those views were not considered acceptable by everyone who ran, by newspapers and by television networks, partially maybe in order to, you know, protect and preserve their monopoly over those airwaves, right? We won't broadcast views like that. We've all decided those were unacceptable, but that in itself is relatively recent. Like even that status quo would have only existed from like the 80s through the 90s.

There was far more avowedly racist content on the airwaves, you know, in earlier years. And maybe I'm even forgetting about content that existed during my childhood that I'm not, you know, someone could easily come up and be like, I forgot about this fucking shit. Right. I completely forgot about it. Something else that I've been thinking about lately is, again, on this division between what's intellectually respectable or intellectually respectable ways to talk and not. And the boundary between them being not as clear as it might seem.

One of the earliest scholars of conspiracy theories was a historian called Richard Hofstadter. He called, he talked about the paranoid style of explanation. One of the things he mentioned was the sort of pseudo intellectual or pseudo scholarly style of citation that conspiracy theorists used. And as much as they would like refer to one another, they would cite other sources to try and back up the conspiracy arguments that they were making. And it's interesting to me that that's not at all unique to conspiracy theorists. That's what science is fundamentally premised on, is citation, citing other people to back up your sources, that you're not working in a vacuum. vacuum and yeah it's become clear within the last decade or so it was clear before that i think but there's been a lot of talk within the last decade or so sort of soul searching within science and within my discipline of psychology specifically of shoddy research practices and one of those being you know citing other papers without having read them citing them even though the findings are

pretty dubious and they probably don't hold up. There have been other cases in science, more broadly in medical science, particularly where researchers have cited papers which don't make the claims that they were citing them to make. And so even within science, you know, there is this not entirely legitimate style of intellectual endeavor, of intellectual research intellectual research you know we think that we're doing something very different and in some ways we are right it is more rigorous it's premised on more reasonable assumptions but it's not entirely flawless and so i think it's again it's not entirely fair i think think, to give conspiracy theorists, so-called conspiracy theorists, a hard time for this pseudo-scholarly activity when there are elements of exactly the same thing happening within what we see as legitimate scholarship. Yeah, man. I mean, yeah, it's absolutely another great point. You're saying that there's a snobbishness in academic circles about, oh, well, conspiracy theorists do things like this.

We have the much more rigorous style. And in many cases, maybe we do not. Maybe we're maybe we shouldn't be so quick to judge. But still, these are these are all fantastic points. Still, these are all fantastic points and, you know, good to take myself out of the bubble and say, you know, not turn my nose up so much and not be so immediately dismissive. But it is still not the case that the world is run by interdimensional reptiles. Right? Do you agree? As far as we can talk. God damn it.

I'm unwilling to be pinned on on this. Academically, I take no stance on the truth or otherwise of any particular conspiracy theory. Really? But I will say this. I will say there is a spectrum. You know, like I said before, some of these theories are more implausible on the face of it. Some are absurd. And I'll give you the interdimensional lizards.

I'm pretty comfortable calling that absurd. But again, I think that's not the best starting point for a conversation about conspiracy theories is to go to the most extreme, most absurd examples. I think in doing that, we're exonerating ourselves from this phenomena that we're talking about because we don't believe in the interdimensional. But we probably have some ideas. We probably have some habits of thought that, you know, we have in common with the people we're calling the conspiracy theory. So you'd say, for instance, we watch the documentary about the flat earthers, right? And we see the scene. I haven't seen this documentary and I forget the name of it, but there's a pretty well-known documentary about flat earthers where at the end the flat earthers actually come up with a proof

that the earth is round or the of whether the earth is round or flat they carry out their experiment it proves that the earth is round and they still don't believe it like they're like these flat earth conspiracy theorists were smart enough to actually figure out how to do the proof and And then, you know, we're still resistant to having their thoughts changed at the end. And we look at that and we laugh at that. And your argument is, well, actually, there there's something about the way that their minds are working. Our minds work the same way. And we shouldn't be so quick to judge. Is that some some bit of the argument? Yeah, I mean, to pull back the curtain on science a little bit, you know, it's not that uncommon for scientists, for scholars to have to come up with theories and to publish a lot on it and then to have the evidence kind of fall apart upon replication and to to double down or to not be assholes about it, to be stubborn theories were flawed. Yeah, that's one way to put it wow that's really interesting um

so how do you phrase then your description of what a flat earth believer is doing like how do we characterize that belief that they have because it is it is untrue right a mistake is being made what is it well i think part of the reason why this is so interesting to me and so difficult to discuss clearly is because there's no simple answer to that. I think with any conspiracy theory, flat earth or otherwise, these beliefs, like possessing these beliefs and communicating these beliefs, which are not necessarily the same thing, can serve many different purposes for many different people. And part of what research has to grapple with, I think, going forward and hasn't really begun to is what does it mean when somebody says they believe this claim? You know, for some people, presumably they're saying, I literally genuinely believe this to be a true statement about the state of reality.

But that's only one function that that belief or the communicating that belief could serve. You know, it could serve many other functions. Maybe it's more like entertainment to people. Maybe they're playing a role. They're going along with it. Maybe it's like an alternative reality game to some people. It adds a bit of extra interest or entertainment to thinking about the world. Maybe for some people, it's like more of a social thing. They're communicating something

about themselves to other people to say, you know, I'm part of this group that, you know, we all agree that we shouldn't trust scientists or politicians or, you know, whatever intellectual authority and it's bonding people together rather than necessarily or exclusively communicating. it's bonding people together rather than necessarily or exclusively communicating. I literally believe this to be true. I remember reading in the Obama years, early in the Obama years, there was a poll that said that some large number of Americans thought, oh, President Obama was a Muslim. Like 40% of Americans thought he was a Muslim or something like that. How can they believe that?

So obviously not true. And I remember thinking that's that many people don't literally believe he's a Muslim, like secretly studying the Koran and going to a mosque. They just fucking hate him. And that was the only option on the poll that gave them the chance to express. Fuck this guy. He's not like me, you know, and that I really felt they're expressing something different there. They don't literally believe that. And so you're, are you talking about that, that sort of, there's all these reasons that are buried in that question, that that question doesn't separate out for us. Maybe some number do think

that he's secretly going to a mosque, but there's a whole lot of other beliefs and emotional reactions and just people being weird that are buried in that question that doesn't literally mean they think he's a Muslim. Yeah, exactly. And it's hard, if not impossible, to know what that number is, the number of people who genuinely believe it or what people are communicating by saying that. You know, another example that made me think of this a few years ago was just before the Brexit vote in the UK, there was quite a bit of study of Euro myths, misconceptions that people held about the European Union and reasons that some people might want to vote to leave the EU. And one of the myths that stuck with me was the idea that there was going

to be some EU regulation to rename sausages within the UK and to call them instead high-fat emulsified awful tubes. Which is funny, right? It's not like a joke about technocratic liberals. Yeah, exactly. And if I remember right, which I probably don't, but it was something like 17% of people said that they thought that was true, that there really was going to be such a regulation coming from the EU. And I thought about that, like 17% or whatever it actually was, it seemed high. And I thought, and not only might people be communicating something about their attitude towards the EU in general, rather than saying they literally think that is true. But they probably didn't know. They haven't read all the regulations. Who has, apart from the

bureaucrats who work there, right? So there's no way you would know the truth of that question. But for sure, you might have good reason to suspect that it's not true. But so whatever you say, whether you agree with that or disagree with it, it can't literally be a claim of truth that you're claiming to know for sure. It has to be something a bit more subtle, either something that I feel like I have good reason to suspect is true or false, or I'm just going to tell this pollster I think is true because that gets across my attitude towards the EU in general. Yeah, that is the poll option that lets me say fuck you to the EU, but in not so many words. Exactly. Yeah, that's really interesting. But I have to try to pin you down. I've got 15 minutes left or so in this interview to try to pin you

down a little bit because, OK, so talking about the person who believes in the flat earth. the person who, you know, believes in the flat earth and who is resistant to that, you know, to that proof otherwise. When I look at that, one of the reasons I'm obsessed with that idea is I don't want to be making a mistake like that. It's vitally important to me in my life that I not be making such an error. You know, you're saying that there are maybe things in my life where I am too wedded to some idea. I am making a similar error and that this is something that we're all susceptible to, that this sort of false conclusion or conspiratorial thinking, et cetera, that leads us away from the truth is part of us. To me, then, it's vital that I figure out what it is so I can make sure I don't do it and so I can help other people not doing that.

That is, in fact, the focus of my career is to try to help other people not do it, to try to get my mind and other people's minds more in line with the outside world so that we can have a society that is based on facts and not fictions to whatever extent we can. and not fictions to whatever extent we can. And I say that knowing about the power of stories, you know, that stories are more powerful than facts. And then I'm as susceptible to that as anybody. But so how do I do that? You know, because like I can be, I wanna make sure I'm not being classist about conspiracy theorists, right?

I wanna make sure I'm not being racist. I wanna make sure I'm being as self-critical as myself and I'm not being a snob. And I want to hold all that in mind as I try to make sure that I don't believe in conspiracy theories that are not true. How do I do that? If only I knew. I'd love to tell you. I mean, this is the hard question. I mean, again, I think a lot of people would agree that that's what they're trying to do, that their lately is to do with labeling claims as fact or opinion. And it seems to be that to an extent, we're more likely to call something a fact when we agree with it, when we think it's true. And, you know, technically speaking, that's not the definition of a fact. A fact is a claim that can be proven or disproven using some kind of objective evidence one way or another.

But people don't necessarily understand or use the term that way. We're more likely to, if we think something is true, we'll say, well, that's a fact. And if we think something's not true, we'll say, well, that's your opinion. And this is true, obviously, in the domain of politics. There's been some research, public opinion research, finding that, you know, for example, opinion research finding that, you know, for example, Democrats in the U.S. are more likely to say the minimum wage should be $15. That's a fact. And Republicans are more likely to say a smaller government is better.

That's a fact. You know, and these things, they're not fact, according to that definition of something that could be proved. Those are value judgments. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And so, again, it's hard to see from the inside, from inside our head with all our beliefs and our biases and our own idiosyncratic worldview. It's hard to even see fundamentally what is a factual claim. What's up for debate?

What can be proved or disproved versus, you know, just what do we kind of think is true? And that warps our very understanding of what's factual. What's a factual question? Well, then, is this entire project of trying to, you know, build a society based on factual information, right? Is that a fool's errand? I mean, are we just arguing about value judgments at the end of the day or what? I don't know that they're separable. I'm an academic, I'm a scientific psychologist, and like you, I'd say that my allegiance is to the truth, to wanting to know what is true. But I don't know that that is enough if we want to genuinely understand how other people think. And if we want to get along, you know, if we want to understand one another and to come to some kind of consensus view of reality, I think just debating over the facts isn't necessarily going to get us there. For one thing, because of this difficulty of even defining what's a fact versus what's your opinion.

And for another thing, like we've discussed, the different perspectives that people might be coming to these questions with means that if we're just debating over the facts of what's true and what's not, we might be having different conversations. And I don't think that's going to get us where we want to be. Yeah. I think I follow you. I'm sorry. It's just like huge. As I'm talking to you, it's just like giant icebergs are like breaking up in my mind and I'm having to like shift stuff around very slowly. You know what I mean? Some gears are grinding in here. This is a very provocative conversation to me because I have always, you know, been very interested in and amenable to the idea that, you know, at the end of the day, we're a bundle of biases, right? We're a bundle of psychological heuristics and shortcuts and that it's impossible to escape our own perspectives. And at the same time, I've held that, no, like I said, I want the inside of my brain to match the outside of the world as much as I can. But maybe those things are a little mutually

incompatible. Like you might be describing a way of talking about other people that acknowledges in a more concrete way that perspective is to be a human thinking about the world. And that, you know, these biases and these, you know, ways of thinking are, you can't remove them and you can't expect other people to remove them because they're in you as well. And you like, what, just need to approach other people in a way that acknowledges that like everybody believes a lot of not true shit all the time and there's no way not to basically or non-factual shit i suppose yeah yeah i think that would be a good way a good way to put it you know everybody including you including me you know because i think what gets lost in this view of, you know, we're all biased and we're all irrational to some extent is that when we talk that way, and I think I'm guilty of this as well.

When we talk about those biases, that we're all biased, what we're really saying is that they're biased, that they're more biased than me, that I know about these biases and therefore I'm less susceptible to them. And so again, it's this kind of dismissive, this way of like in a veiled way, dismissing other people's point of view by saying we're all biased when what you really mean is they're being biased.

Guilty, man. I'm fucking guilty of this. You are calling me out more than any guest I've ever had because I do say those things and that is what I mean. I don't, I say that it's true about me, but I don't point it at me as much as I think I do. So what, so sorry, finish your thoughts, please. No, I'm a, I'm extremely flattered. I'm glad that I'm shaking you off. This is, this is nice. Well, I think, you know, on a similar point, the subtitles in my books, you know, I wrote this book called Suspicious Minds, Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories.

And then I wrote another book called Bad News, Why We Fall for Fake News. And so I use we in there both times. And, you know, the first time I think I was kind of committing that same that same thing of saying we believe conspiracy theories but actually i don't i'm explaining somebody else's behavior and at least that was my view when i went into writing it and then the more i learned about conspiracy theories about this way of seeing the world through writing that book and since, the more I've come to see that it really is we. I mean, it's completely unsapparable. We all see the world in these idiosyncratic biased ways and it's hard to see in ourselves. You know, as another example, I think there's been so much

coverage of QAnon, this particular conspiracy theory in the States for the last couple of years, and more so internationally as well. It's become a pretty big media phenomenon, I think. And, you know, since the media coverage first started a couple of years ago, there were sensational headlines about this, saying things like, this is a conspiracy cult, a dangerous conspiracy cult. And there were a lot of arguments about like, here's why experts are worried about this. And, you know, I wasn't worried about it. I got contacted by a lot of journalists at the time. And I kind of said, like, hold up, we don't know much, if anything, about this. We don't know who believes it or how many people. And, you know, I think it's premature to say this is a dangerous conspiracy cult.

And mostly what happened is the journalists didn't quote me on that. They left me out of the article and they quoted somebody else who said they were terrified about it. And, you know, I feel like I've been vindicated because the best data that we have since a couple of years ago and more recently is that most people haven't heard of QAnon and those who have, they're not favorable towards it. It really is, as far as any conspiracy theory is a fringe niche belief, QAnon is it. But you wouldn't know that from the media coverage. A lot of the media coverage has taken this tone of there's this scary secret little group of people who are getting together and they're

going to undermine or overthrow democracy. And, you know, that kind of claim has a lot in common with the conspiracy theories that we're dismissing here. You know, the idea that some little secret group of unusually powerful people, they're going to have this influence over society. That's basically a conspiracy theory. So I think, again, this is another nice instance, I think, of the surprising symmetry between the conspiracy theories that, you know, the acceptable intellectual authorities are dismissing and the very patterns of thought among that intellectual elite.

I hear you. I hear you on this, but I have to push back a little bit. And this is completely anecdotal, but at least one difference between QAnon and what you're describing is for the people who do believe in it, what happens to them? You know, a good friend of mine reached out to me because his mom started to fall into QAnon. And he said, this is really frightening. She's spending all day doing this. She doesn't talk to me anymore because she sees me as the enemy. And, you know, her, her, she's seeming to become more erratic. She's obsessed with this thing. It's not good for her health and it's really harmful to our relationship. And I can't talk to her anymore. And what do I do? And, you know, my friend came to me because I've done a television show about conspiracy like, because that that's the hardest thing. I don't know how to what you should do with your mom in this case. But it certainly identified for me that this is this is traumatic, you know, for for him and that whatever has happened to his mom is not a normal thing. And it's different than, you know, the newspaper saying the war of the world's caused

a mass panic, right? Or it's different from inflating the danger of QAnon because, hey, even if I'm a journalist who's inflating the nature of QAnon, I'm still able to have conversations with other people. You know what I mean? I'm not, I'm not, there's definitely, there's a difference of degree here at the very least, even if not of kind. And I think maybe it's still a difference of kind. So I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. First of all, if you know of a,

for folks at home who like know a conspiracy theorist in their lives, who they want to, you know, not have to cut out of their lives or want to be able to have a conversation about, but also, I mean, do you really not feel that there's a difference there?

No, I think that's, it's a conversation about. But also, I mean, do you really not feel that there's a difference there? No, I think that's a fair point. You know, there have been these anecdotal reports of people who seem to have gone off the deep end, so to speak. And, you know, their loved ones who don't agree with that are worried about them. And certainly, you know, I'm not trying to minimize that. I'm not saying that can't happen. That clearly does. What I'm minimizing, if anything, is the idea that QAnon is this very widespread phenomenon that's going to have these very important consequences. I don't think that's well established. I'm not saying it's not necessarily,

or it won't become that, but at this moment in time, the media coverage doesn't match up with what we know about this. That being said, I think it is an important issue to think about the people who really do go for that, the people at the extreme end of the spectrum and the people who are worried about that or who seem to be having trouble getting through to them. Again, I think I would come back to the things that we've talked about here, the idea that just facts, hitting somebody with what you see as the facts, maybe isn't going to be the most productive conversation. Maybe there's some other more fundamental difference of view. And maybe for the people who do go in for the QAnon ideas, again, maybe it's not like a literal belief of truth. It might be, but maybe it's a more general way of grappling with reality using the tools that you have available to you. Again,

the idea that, you know, to have the kind of what we would probably see as a nuanced understanding of the political process and reality and how things work, it takes work. It takes a lot of knowledge. It takes, you know, certain foundations, say, from having gone to college and having read the right books and things like that, that aren't available to everyone. And, you know, so I think a more productive place to begin the conversation would be to find what you have in common, rather than starting from the point of view of this is a conspiracy person and they're wrong about all this stuff. And I'm going to tell them why they're wrong. Try and find what you can agree about, you know, try and find where they're right.

And, you know, if you talk about it the right way, I think we would all agree that there are reasons to distrust the government, to distrust politicians, to distrust institutions and industries, you know, because a lot of the time people are lying to us about stuff. Like when you put it kind of frankly like that, it can cause a bit of pushback because it sounds like conspiracy stuff. But if you read academic books about how people were colluding and how all these inside deals were done in politics, how things get achieved through people colluding and not always with everybody else's self-interest in mind, then we can probably agree that fundamentally, suspecting that you're being lied to and that the government doesn't

have your best interests in mind, it's not that implausible. It's not that absurd. Yeah. But is it really your view that, you know, the, the, that there's no way to, you know, get again, to keep using this phrase, our, our insides to line up more with the outside, right. That, that in terms of, because, because my final question to you would be something like, how do we get a news media that is able to, you know, spread more true information, less fake news and have people believe it? What things could the news media do that would achieve that? Right. Or how can we reduce the spread of harmful conspiracy theories or, you know, how can we rescue that loved one or something like that? Right.

agree with that as a goal or a possible outcome, that we're always going to be sort of locked in this cloudy haze of conspiratorial thoughts, some of which are going to be true and some of which aren't. And we don't really have a way to reconcile our differing viewpoints. We simply need to accept them in some way in order to move forward. Or maybe I'm offering too pessimistic a version of your view. Yeah. How do you, how do you respond? Yeah, I don't, I hope I'm not that pessimistic. I'm actually quite optimistic as a person. I think we can all get along, you know, hopefully. Yeah. get along, you know, hopefully. You know, I wrote a whole book about fake news.

I mean, fake news was kind of the premise to begin with, but it became much more broadly about news in general, the mainstream media and how it can not always promote the most accurate understanding of reality. And, you know, I stopped short in my book of offering any solutions or recommendations because, you know, I, I stopped short in my book of offering any solutions or recommendations because, you know, partly I don't feel like I have the expertise to do that. I feel like analyzing and describing a phenomenon is, is quite a different endeavor than proposing how it could be changed. And so, you know, I didn't want to overstep that. The closest I come to suggesting anything that could be done is I quote the

journalist David Broder, who gave a speech in the late 70s or early 80s about the news industry in general. And he used as a hook the New York Times motto, all the news that's fit to print. And he wasn't picking on the New York Times. Specifically, he was a Washington Post journalist, but he wasn't picking on the New York Times. He was talking about the news industry in general. He said that if we were being collectively more honest, more accurate, if we were respecting our readers more, we wouldn't say all the news that's fit to print. We would say it's like some of what we've learned over the last 24 hours. It's our biased selection of what we think is the most important. That's what we could fit in this newspaper.

You know, this was when people read newspapers on paper still. It's what we could fit in there so it would land on your doorstep. You could lift it up and you could read it in like half an hour or an hour. And some of it's going to be wrong and we'll try and get, we'll try and do better tomorrow. You know, that was his, what I think is just a beautiful, nuanced conception of a portrayal of how the news industry works. You know, I went into writing this book by news somewhat naively, I guess, thinking that, well, the news, it's about the truth, right?

It's like the true stuff that you need to know. And, you know, obviously, in hindsight, there's much more to producing the news than that. You know, it's what's going to sell to an extent, what people are going to find interesting, the stories that people want to hear, or, you know, stories told in a way that people are going to want to hear them. There are all these other incentives, these different motives in producing the news, other than just here's the most important true stuff that you need to know. other than just here's the most important true stuff that you need to know. And so, like I said, the closest I come to any kind of recommendation is that,

is encouraging the news as an industry to be more open about the process and about the limitations. But in doing so, I think that would improve the reputation of the news industry. It would build credibility, which has always been low since the beginning of the news as an industry. Its credibility, trust in it has been quite low. Even though people keep reading it, as consumers, we keep going back to it for good reasons, presumably. But getting back to the question of how can we talk to each other? How can we have a productive conversation? I think trust and credibility is fundamental to that. I think part of the reason why it's hard to talk to someone you see as a conspiracy theorist is you fundamentally often you don't trust them.

You don't trust that they've done the work into understanding reality, that they've looked up the facts that you have and that you know and you understand. You've already judged them with that phrase with by labeling them a conspiracy theorist. You've already put them beneath yourself. Exactly. Yeah. And so I think starting from a position of more trust in each other would be a good place to begin. I really like that.

You're calling for a lot more humility from everybody. And I appreciate you showing it yourself by saying that you don't try to offer a solution. Diagnosing a problem is different from offering a solution. Most authors don't realize that. And in fact, in my own work, I've often felt compelled to offer a solution just because that's what television wants you to do at the end of the 22 minute episode. When really, you know what I try to do when I'm being a little bit better is to say, hey, I'm just a fucking comedian trying to learn things, you know, and I'm wrong a lot. And I'm just talking to smart people like you and I'm on the quest with all of you. And that's when what I'm doing works best, uh, when I, when I'm acknowledging those mistakes. Um, and it would be wonderful to see that from the news.

I love that. I love that expression. Some of the news we figured out in the last 24 hours would be great because that is, you know, I, uh, you know, I, I read my local LA times, uh, and the more I understand that these are just some people in their 30s who are going out with a notepad and they have to write a story at the end of the day and they're really just doing their best, the more I appreciate the reporting because I just have that in mind. I'm picturing the person versus when I'm most frustrated with the newspaper is when it is putting on the cloak

of infallibility of we are the high priests of information, especially because I know from past work that I believe I've talked about on this show that even that aura of infallibility is a pose that newspapers put on in order to protect their media monopolies in the earlier part of the 20th century from government regulation. They said, no, no, no, no, no.

We'll stop doing yellow journalism. We'll stop doing slanted. If it bleeds, it leads stuff quite as much. And we'll do a important, important journalism, you know, and the network news department, same way, you know, the FCC was going to crack down on them for, for having too much tawdry shit. And they're like, how about half an hour a day? We'll have the high priests of the news give you the perfect version of it. And that's how, and then we'll be OK. Right. And the government said, yes, all right, now you can continue.

You can keep your media monopolies. But in reality, that was opposed. It wasn't, you know, yes, they increased their rigor. They certainly did as a result of that pressure. But it was also opposed in order to avoid future harassment from the government. And we'd be better off without it. We'd be better off with just saying, hey, we're just fallible people doing our best here.

And you're saying, if you have that conspiracy theorist in your life you want to talk to, put yourself down on that level too and say, I'm susceptible to the same things that has caused this person to have this frame of mind. And let's go meet together as equals and try to have a conversation as fallible people who are just trying to understand the world. Am I representing that correctly? Yeah, absolutely. You know,

start from what can we try and agree about, you know, what to, in what ways do we fundamentally see the world the same? And it might not be obvious because, you know, different people have different ways of talking about things, but we can probably all agree that you shouldn't always trust everyone, that sometimes people do plot and conspire and don't have your interests in mind. So start from what we can agree about and then try and understand, genuinely understand where these differences of opinion, these divergences happen, you know, in a very deep way, not just on the level of the facts, not the facts aren't important, obviously, but

in a deeper sense of, you know, what's the history of the ideas here and the history of the people who hold them and express them, you know, that kind of deep, deeper understanding, I think, is an element. It's not the only element, just like the facts aren't the only element of understanding this, but I think it is an important element. I know that I just, I'm picturing that conversation that you're talking to the conspiracy theorist. Okay. We agree not to trust everybody. Now, what else do you believe? And they're like, well, I hate Jews. I think they run everything. And you might have a little bit trouble continuing the conversation at that point. I think that's, you know, like that can get in the way.

But I understand the principle that you're talking about. And I agree with the principle of that humility. Yeah, I mean, I just I read this this wonderful short book. It's called Occult Features of Anarchism. And yeah, it's by a scholar called erica lagalise and she mentions a story of how she was involved in this group this uh anarchist group and one of her uh one of the fellow group members one day mentioned this conspiracy theory about the protocols of zion and how the jews are in control of everything and she was kind of taken aback. And, you know, admirably, she said

what she did is she did a ton of research into the protocols of Zion, into the Illuminati, all these conspiracy theories that were just emerging on YouTube. Then this was in 2006 or 2008. And she says she managed to persuade the guy that it's probably not all Jews, that if there is a conspiracy among bankers and elites and, you know, people like that, you know, we can probably agree that it's not all Jews, you know, they're, whatever they're doing is probably motivated more by their worldview and by capitalism than by their religion. They probably don't share that. So, you know, that's, it's not an entirely satisfying story, right? But it's like, hold on a second. But it's something, you know, we can agree that it's probably not the Jews, you know, with somebody like that.

I mean, that, to be more serious, I think, is what you would think of as the prototypical example of an extremist conspiracy theorist, right? Somebody who thinks the Jews are in control of everything. How could you be more extreme? And that kind of person, you'd never be able to change their mind. Right. But at least in this one case, she tells this story that she did. So it is possible, you know. You've given me so much to think about, Rob. I could keep talking to you forever, but I do think I need to go take some time and process this and maybe talk again another time. I can't thank you enough for this. Yeah. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me. Hey, thanks so much for being here. Well, that is it for my interview with Rob Brotherton. I hope you enjoyed that conversation

as much as I did. Hey, if you did, please leave us a rating or a comment wherever you subscribe. It really does help us out quite a lot. I want to thank our producers, Kimmy Lucas and Sam Roudman, our editor, Andrew Carson, Andrew WK for our theme song. I got to thank Falcon Northwest for building the incredible gaming PC that I am recording this very interview on and that I stream on at twitch.tv slash Adam Conover. If you want to check that out, you can find me on the internet at adamconover.net or at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media, including now on TikTok. And hey, if you want to suggest a topic for the show, shoot me an email at factually at adamconover.net. And if you have a question for

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