Offline with Jon Favreau - ScarJo v. AI, the Digital Guillotine, and Why We Play Make Believe with Misinformation

Episode Date: May 26, 2024

Do we treat political affiliation like a religion? Which parts of our identity are based off factual belief vs. imaginary belief? This week, Max talks to Professor Neil Van Leeuwen about the difference between thinking and believing, the power of groupish thought, and the similarities between religious creeds and political ideologies. But first! Jon and Max break down the drama between Scarlet Johansson and OpenAI, pick apart the TikTok blockout, and suspend their disbelief that a close friend of the pod is…on Survivor?! Will he love it or leave it? For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

People who subscribed to this idea that the Democrats were running a pedophile ring out of a pizzeria didn't most of the time, except for one guy who showed up with a gun. But of all the people who subscribe to this conspiracy theory, most of them didn't take action like you would if you were in, say, a resistance movement. They posted about it on Yelp, gave the thing bad reviews on Yelp. One guy posted a review on Yelp, apparently, where he said, yeah, I went in there with my 10-year-old to get some pizza, and I noticed they were looking at him funny. Now, think about that for a minute. If you had anything even close to a factual belief, or even a suspicion that there was a pedophile ring in this damn pizzeria, you would not show up with your 10-year-old.

I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Max Fisher. And you just heard from today's guest, professor of neuroscience and philosophy and author of the new book, Religion as Make-Believe, Neil Van Leeuwen. All right, Max, I'm intrigued by the title. What did you guys talk about? What's this book about? The title of the book is a little bit more provocative than the actual underlying book. He's saying religion as make-believe, not to make fun of religion, but as a kind of play on the phrase make-believe.

It's like, why do we believe the things that we believe? And we had a really great conversation about why we are attracted to certain beliefs, why those seem like they are increasingly unmoored from factual belief and the idea that we actually have different modes in our head of thinking about factual beliefs and symbolic beliefs like things like religion or political ideology. I have to say it clarified a ton for me about why misinformation is so rampant now. Very interesting. And I'm guessing the Internet has probably played a role. The Internet did come up in our discussion. We were surprised to hear that.

Why we're all godless heathens now? Internet is my god, personally. That is true. And Sam Altman, specifically. I pray to the algorithms every night. That's right. And I always deliver.

All right. Very excited to listen to that. But first, many people are asking, did offline manifest the open AI Scarlett Johansson scandal? It kind of feels like we did, yes. For people who don't know what I'm talking about, our latest offline movie club episode with Ezra Klein was about the movie Her. On our last regular offline episode, we talked about how OpenAI's new voice assistant model of ChatGPT sounded suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson, of course,

the actress that voiced the AI in the movie Her. Turns out we weren't the only ones that had that thought. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a tweet that just said Her when the new ChatGPT voice model came out. A tweet that he probably regrets

because earlier this week the old the old trump school of exactly but earlier this week scarlett johansson released a statement saying she was quote shocked angered and in disbelief that this new model of chat gpt copied her likeness in the statement she alleges that last September, Altman offered to hire her to voice the new model of chat GPT, saying her voice would, quote, bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives. Cool. Which clearly needs bridging. That wasn't in the quote. I'll continue the quote.

And help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI. Mission accomplished. Johansson turned down Altman's offer, but according to her lawyers and everyone's ears, OpenAI moved forward with a model that sounded quite similar to Johansson. After releasing the statement, OpenAI has agreed to take down the voice in question. So much for Sam Altman's hope that The Voice would help consumers feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI, huh? Yeah, if you wanted to invent or imagine the perfect thing that you could do to make everybody

distrust your company in the AIs you were building, it's hard to imagine something better than getting in a giant public fight with a celebrity where you force that celebrity to publicly reveal that you lied to them and use their voice and likeness without their permission, especially when they're like they're in the middle of all these legal sure sounds like Scarlett Johansson and it sounds like you're trying to do a her with your new Opening Eye. She was like, oh, I didn't – I never made that connection. That never even occurred to me. Oh, God. Yeah. So clearly it seems like the entire company was in on this, which does not build trust that they are going to be, you know, proper stewards with their users who don't have the power of Scarlett Johansson to publicly shame them.

And I will say, you know, the Washington Post reported, while many hear an eerie resemblance between Skye, that's the name of the voice. Right. R.I.P. Skye already. Yeah, they also chose a name that sounds like ScarJo. I know, I know. So while many hear an eerie resemblance between Skye and Johansson's her character, an actress was hired to create the Skye voice months before Altman contacted Johansson, according to documents, recordings,

casting directors, and the actress's agent. So if that's true, you can still, you can see what happened, right? Sure. Which is like, they hired this actress. To sound like her. We want someone to sound like Scarlett Johansson. Then Sam Altman probably was like, I could probably get Scarlett Johansson.

Just do it herself. Calls her up. She says no. And they're like, well, I mean, it's not her. It's close enough. Let's just do it anyway. Right. And now they're fucked.

And I will say, like, I do get the appeal. Like, when Crooked first hired me, you said, could you speak in the voice of Scarlett Johansson? And unfortunately, Scarlett did say no. She asked me not to. She's a friend. And I wanted to be respectful. I thought we were getting Ezra Klein. Some days you are.

So Scarlett concluded her, Scarlett Johansson concluded her statement calling for, quote, the passage of appropriate legislation to help ensure that individual rights are protected. Do we think that's going to move the needle? And what do we think of the legal implications? Because it doesn't – she lawyered up. Sure. I mean, that's – she wrote the letter, but they did take the voice down. I don't know where that goes from here.

So my understanding is that she's reasonably litigious, which is good for her, I guess. The scale of the lawsuits that these companies like OpenAI are facing over what they can use their AIs on and will not help with public trust at a pretty critical moment when we're still like the technology is new. We're all kind of awed by it. How much can we trust these companies? It's just it's not helpful. Yeah, I don't think this is the most egregious move that the AI companies have made, nor do I think it will be the most smooth thing. But I do think this has served to call attention to some of the potential problems because, you know, a lot of journalists and media companies are worried that, you know,

AI is going to scrape all of their work off the internet without compensating them for it. And in fact, it might be doing that already. We've talked about, you know, during the writer's strike, the actors are worried about this, writers are worried about this, right? So there's a whole bunch of people are, I'm sure that has not gotten as much public attention as it should. You throw a celebrity in there and a movie and a new voice robot that sounds like the celebrity and a controversy, more people are going to hear about it.

Do you think that when Truth Social social as they are collapsing inevitably launches their shitty open ai copy do you think they're gonna have trump voice it yeah a trump voiced ai it'd be kind of fun i mean i think we're moving we're moving towards a world where trump is the forever president and we will be hearing his voice and the voice and his likeness everywhere so you like get in a cab you won't need the the AI. And you hear Emperor Trump talking. And you don't know if it's the real Trump or the Emperor Trump. Get out and vote, people. What are you doing?

Should we get AI Joe Biden to start campaigning in some of the swing states? I mean, it's not a bad idea. Train him on 1990s Joe Biden. People like 1990s Joe Biden. I watch his speeches on one and a half speed. One and a half speed. I do. I watch Trump's, too, on one and a half speed, just to be fair. But who's got that time? Who's got that time? All right. In other atypical celebrity news, the hottest new trend on TikTok is blocking celebs and influencers. In the weeks after the Met Gala, online activists have been

calling for TikTok users to block celebrities they feel are not using their platforms to speak out in exactly the right way and volume about the war in Gaza. The criticism began when a popular influencer posted a TikTok of herself at the Met Gala wearing a lavish 18th century style gown with audio from Sofia Coppola's 2006 film Marie Antoinette, in which Kirsten Dunst proclaims, let them eat cake. You know what? Deserved. No, come on.

Supporters of, quote, Blockout 2024 and, quote, the Digiteen. I guess that's like the guillotine, but for your digital head, Max. I did actually. I guess anyone did get that. These supporters argue

that blocking celebrities will decrease their engagement oh no which will then make it is it will then make brands less likely to work with them to promote products yeah hurting their bottom line max you are going to need to speak first on this before i fucking lose it so full disclosure kirsten dunst and i of course are very close and personal friends in the sense that i saw her at whole foods once so oh yeah full full yeah she actually would not get out of the way like kept like blocking me in the aisles like excuse me kiki um so i'm gonna try to not make this about like our usual like max and john scold the youths, Klaxon, and try to make this about, like... Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to do this. That's why I'm here, John. I do think that ultimately, for me, this is another example

of the way that our media and information environments encourage us to approach politics this way of, how can I make it about me? How can I make it all, everything that matters is engagement, right? The whole idea that the worst thing you could do to someone is limit their engagement on a social platform is like very being online. But it's also, it's like, it's kind of like, you know, the Starbucks boycott. It's the platforms are telling you, because this is what goes viral on them, that the most important thing for you to do is something that takes very little effort and that makes you the kind of hero of the story. And, you know, I don't think it's kids' fault that they're saturated in that and that they're surrounded in this media environment that tells them that that's what they're supposed to do.

But I do think, you know, it's bad. It's terrible. It's terrible. I'm trying to think of how I'll say this in the most constructive way. So the person with the most power to stop the war in Gaza is Bibi Netanyahu and Hamas and Bibi's government. They have been protested by their own people. He has been threatened by people in his own governing coalition, right, to leave over this. There is the UN also trying to get involved. And the ICC.

And the ICC. And then the next circle out, Joe Biden, for sure. Right. Right. Someone who can put more pressure on that, right? Yeah. Members of Congress, for sure. So if you are upset about the war in Gaza and you want to do something about it. But there's two things you could do. If you want to pressure people politically to stop this war, you can pressure

Joe Biden. You can pressure Congress. If you're overseas, perhaps you can pressure the Israeli government. If you block... Kirsten Dunst is also in that second circle, right? That's where you're going with this. If you block Zendaya and then she loses a couple thousand followers, first of all, not going to matter. Second of all, let's say it does matter. Let's say Zendaya is like, I have fucked up this whole thing and I am going to speak out. And she goes on a speaking tour around the world demanding that this war ends. Not going to make a fucking difference.

Everyone has the right to block all the celebrities they want, to never go to Starbucks, to yell at everyone who has pictures of their Starbucks. Go, if you want, do it. Just know that you are having zero effect and that you are completely wasting your time and your energy and everything and you could be the other way i was going to say to get involved is if you want

to help people like you can you can contribute to world central kitchen and some of the aid organizations yes i realize they're not getting it as much as they should but some aid is getting in and if you want to contribute to that world central kitchen especially and i've been donating to them for years they're fantastic so that's one way to do it. Blocking the celebrities, yelling about Starbucks. The Starbucks thing is, I still see it. I still see people like, how dare you have Starbucks coffee?

It actually came up in the conversation with Neil Van Leeuwen. It's just like, it made me finally like, like look into the Starbucks thing. I know. Did you see where it started? Have you seen, do you know the roots of all this? I looked into it at one point as well, but remind me so on october 7th some an account called the

starbucks workers union which wasn't even clear if that was actually associated that wasn't we don't even know if that was the real union they quote tweeted a picture of hamas bulldozing the fence to attack on october 7th and was like solidarity with Palestine. And so Starbucks, the company, said to the Starbucks union, like, you can't use our likeness and our logo if you're going to be saying shit like that. Yeah. Right?

So that was it. Starbucks does not contribute to the IDF, the Israeli government, anything like that. And now, best guess what? The Starbucks boycott has had an effect. And they've said on earnings calls, yeah, like it's hurt the business. And they've had to lay off a bunch of people. A bunch of people lost their jobs.

Wow. And do you think Starbucks has changed their stance? No. What Starbucks has decided to do is to say nothing. Yeah, right. And they are, by the way, donating, though, to World Central Kitchen to help. That's good. But so it's like, fine. Wear yourself are, by the way, donating, though, to World Central Kitchen to help. That's good. So it's like, fine, wear yourself out, post yourself up, do anything you want to do.

You're just not making a difference. You should know that. To try, I agree with all that, to try to be sympathetic about this. I completely agree with everything you said about thinking about what are the things that you can do and be constructive and like kind of taking that like inner rings, outer rings approach. If you imagine posting that on TikTok or Instagram reels, it's not going to do very well with the algorithm because it's a message that says put down your phone, walk away from and go do something. It's going to be really hard. That's going to demand in-person engagement. A video that says the key to solving this conflict is to be on your phone more.

The phone's going to reward that. The phone is going to push that video to more people. It's going to encourage you to spend more time on it. That's what people are surrounded by. I think it of what is hard about this is that it's really frustrating to watch this, watch what's happening in the world, to feel powerless about it, right? I mean, you and I have fucking podcasts that have a significant audience. You and I are trying to pressure a lot of those people that you mentioned. How's that going? Yeah, but this is the challenge. This is another challenge with social media and the internet having everything in our faces is every day we are shown all the world's problems graphically in our faces, along with images of the Met Gala. And of course, that is going to break our brains because we're going to. It's going to feel like a collapse, like it's all the same story. It feels like you are. Wait, who wrote that book that I love? It was The Chaos Machine, I believe.

Alain de Beton wrote this book called The News. How social media changed art. But it was actually before social media. But the idea was he's like the news often is like you are watching someone drown behind a plate glass window and there is nothing you can do. And every day you wake up and you see this. It's terrifying. And it's terrifying, right? And I get that. So I totally understand why that makes people angry.

I totally understand why that makes people angry. I totally get that. And if you don't have an organizing training or activist training or you're not getting other information, of course. I'm just saying you should know you're not doing anything if that happens. I agree with that. It's just to say I think to exactly your point, I think a lot of what's driving this is the fact that we don't feel like we can do nothing. And the things that could do something are really hard and have a very, you know, they're really hard to make work. We don't know how successful they're going to be. Telling yourself that blocking a celebrity is going to do something,

you know, it does serve a real psychological need that we have to feel like we have some sense of agency in this horrible, fucked up world. But I agree with you that it's not actually doing it, but it's also not hurting Zendaya. So I'm not too offended if you want to block her. That's what I'm saying. Like I said, block away if that's what gets you happy. I'm not going to scold you for that. I'm just telling you, don't think it's doing anything.

Zendaya, I would never block you personally. Finally, speaking of disappearing celebs. John Lovett. Let's do it. John Lovett. Let's do it. John Lovett, my co-host on the offline spinoff podcast Pod Save America. Thank you. Will be. I've heard.

How's that show doing? You know, we're trying. Okay, okay. I don't have a lot of help these days. Will be on this upcoming season of Survivor. This week, Survivor released a trailer for its 47th season, which prominently featured the crooked host who is now the undisputed biggest winner of the offline challenge in the office. Austin, can we play the clip for the audience?

Every Survivor story begins with an empty page. It's up to the players to leave their mark. People look at me as an underdog. That's Miss Delaware, whatever. She has nothing more to her. And I'm like, I'm a big dog. I have no outdoor skills. What am I doing here?

I went camping as a Cub Scout. I threw up and went home. There's our boy. Great question, love it. Great question. He's always potting. In the middle of wherever he is, in the middle of the wilderness, he's still potting. I love that.

What do you think of this, Max? He's taken the offline challenge. Did he take some extreme steps to get there? He did. He could have just gotten the clown case. He could have put his phone in the little box. But you know what? I respect his commitment to the challenge.

It is incomprehensible to me that I would be able to first of all i'm not cut out for survivor i agree with love it yeah sure um there's no starbucks delivery there is no starbucks delivery right yeah no i can't uh anyway uh so i know where you're about to go i would be bad at survivor for a whole bunch bunch, a host of reasons. I also just, in the middle of this election, tearing myself away from the news for that long. And now you're selling me on it. They have, keep in mind, they have, the way that Survivor works, they have no contact. No phones. It's not like at the end of the day and the cameras are done, they get to nothing.

Nothing for however long. That sounds great. Are you kidding? That's fantastic. Yeah. It's a great, like, 2025 play for me. Yeah. Maybe I could see this year there's some stuff going on.

Yeah. Like after Trump wins, you know, I might want to go to Fiji. But wow. So can I tell you my take on this? Man, normalize midlife crises. Normalize and celebrate midlife crises. Sincerely. They're good.

Could have bought a car. This is so much better. Honestly, he's challenging himself. He's mixing it up. Like, he's... Certainly is. We have this attitude. I actually believe this take.

I have been workshopping this for a little bit and waiting, frankly, for the opportunity to drop it. We have this attitude in our society like, oh, midlife crisis. It's like, oh, sorry, you panicked that you're not young anymore. So you bought a car. That's stupid. Like, no, it's about taking stock. It's about wanting to like challenge yourself in your life and wanting to like make sure that you have experiences. That's great. Could have gone for a hike. He could have gone for, sure that you have experiences that's great could have gone for a hike he could have gone for that's what i would

have done he is going for a hike actually could have taken some uh you know some scuba lessons or something i don't know i mean people the joke is like oh it's better than ozempic it's like yes exactly he's really i think why choose i don't know what the rules are out there. So there's two things I'm very interested in from an offline perspective. Sure. One is we got to figure out a way whenever he comes back, if he comes back, to like... Well, I want to do this on Pod Save America. I want to give him like a...

Sure. I want to give him a news quiz. Oh, like what does he remember? I feel like we need to come up with, and I'd love for everyone to send in suggestions, like some kind of an offline challenge recap with him. Oh, so it's like what was different? I kind of think he needs to do like a,

when he comes back, just like a round robin where he does like a PSA thing, an offline thing, and a keep it thing. All before he actually turns on his phone and finds out what has happened while he's been gone. Oh, like he's one of the astronauts landing from the Apollo mission going through a series of debriefings before he can be released into the outside world.

Yes, 100%. I like that. So I need to figure out when, you know, whenever he gets back, I want to know. I'm going to be watching for, when we have our Survivor watch parties, I'm going to be watching for when we have our survivor watch parties. I'm rewatching for is he going to do what I did when I gave up my phone for a week, which is reaching into his pocket every 10 minutes to try to pull the phone out. I just can't wait to see when he, you know, yells at some Midwestern nurse whenever he gets hungry.

Being being hangry is a real condition. I know, especially for him. I've seen it. The other thing I'm interested in, the whole thing reminds me of Gina Tolentino, who was our first guest on Offline and wrote Trick Mirror.

Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, that's cool. One of her chapters was about when she was on a reality TV show, and it was about how the internet makes you performative, and social media makes you more performative. And it is fascinating to me because some – I think the easy and probably not true take on reality shows is, like, oh, they're all rigged or the producers set it up and everything's made up and it's not funny. That's only true if he loses, to be clear.

Right. But, like, from the people – i know some people who were reality tv show contestants that's not quite true like the producers are there and they sort of push you one way or the other right but i do think especially for a game like this you construct a persona we heard it he's going underdog yeah i'm just i'm just simple podcaster boy. I don't know anything about trees. Yeah, I'm just going to trip over this log right here. Oh, no. But it's like fascinating to me the persona you construct to win this game and how different that is than what his persona was before the game and after the game. Will the two merge?

I'm wondering, you were making me wonder, is the tougher break going to be for him being off of his phone and social media or being away from podcasting? I mean, I don't, I mean, the microphone won't be there. At least the microphone this size won't be there. He'll have a smaller one, I guess. And I'm sure he'll continue to be podcasting. There's apparently, I was looking through the cast list. There's like four different podcasters. I saw that they're doing the podcaster season.

I love that. What? Well, I think they said maybe there are too many podcasters and we need to call the herd a little bit, which frankly, fair enough. I get it. Anyway, I'm fascinated. I can't wait. It's a great offline experiment. It is. That's why we had to mention it here. All right. Before the break, some quick housekeeping. Do you know some undecided voters but don't know how to convince them to show up this election year? Or maybe you've joined Team West as part of Vote Save America's Organize or Else Challenge

and are worried about what you'll say to the undecided voters you'll be talking to. Or if you're a fucking loser, you've joined Team East. Team East. Either way, we got you covered because this year I am back

with season four of The Wilderness. We're going to try to give you the insights you need to persuade the persuadables in your life. With the help of some of the smartest strategists, pollsters, and organizers in politics, I'm exploring the thought processes of voters who are slipping away and diving into what we can do between now and November to secure our democracy. New episodes of The Wilderness drop every other Sunday in the Pod Save America and Wilderness feeds.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Also, Pod Save America's going on tour. Get ready in New York, Boston, Phoenix, Ann Arbor, and Philadelphia. All the same great political analysis now with fun games, interactive audience segments, and way more whiskey and the Diet Cokes we bring on stage. What do you think? We're sober up there? It's summer, baby.

So come to a show, meet your fellow political nerds, and let's hang. Head to cricket.com slash events to buy tickets now. After the break, Max talks to Neil Van Leeuwen about the process of how we form our beliefs. Hey, everyone. Thank you. Half of Americans also think unemployment is at a 50-year high. Again, couldn't be less true. Unemployment hasn't been this low for this long since the 1960s. We've gotten used to this kind of thing. People believing things that are just not true. And not just casually believing them as a passing misapprehension, but stubbornly.

Maybe you've encountered this. Show someone who holds this sort of belief contradictory evidence, like maybe a news article stating the economy is growing, and they're often likelier to argue with you than they are to change their minds. On some level, people aren't misinformed by accident. They're misinformed because they want to be. Today, I'm talking to Neil Van Leeuwen. Neil studies the philosophy of the mind, which means he thinks a lot about how the rest of us think. I came across his book in a magazine article about the science of misinformation. And that might sound incongruous with his book's title, which is Religion as Make Believe, a Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity. But his insights about how our minds work and why we hold the beliefs that we do could not be more relevant for us in this show. Neil, welcome to Offline. Thanks for having me. It's great to

be here. So you open your book with a discussion of the way that children play, which is a really lovely way to start a book. And this sets up a few points about how our minds work. But one that I wanted to ask you about is this concept that our minds can simultaneously work on the level of factual understanding, but also symbolic beliefs that we hold for reasons other than because they accurately describe our world. And you call this the two-map cognitive structure. It's a really important idea. Can you explain what that is, both in context for how children play and for how grown-up minds work? Well, the basic idea is actually really familiar. We're all familiar with the fact that our brains model the world, like I've got a

whiteboard behind me, my address is on Dechner Avenue. And so that's this one map layer of just tracking how things are. And sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get it wrong. Mostly we get it right just because otherwise we would fail. We know that our bank is with this bank. We know that our bank account is, you know, about this full, you know, not exactly. But we keep track of the world really well. And we process ideas in a certain way in so doing, right? And I call that factual belief. And we can break down what I mean by that in a little bit, perhaps. But we also do things like imagine, right?

We imagine that the cloud in the sky is a face, right? Or we imagine that this little plastic toy doll, this Zartan G.I. Joe figure is this powerful agent who can do all sorts of deceptive things. And developmental psychologists have shown that even from a very young age, we don't get the two maps confused, right? So, children don't expect you to take a bite out of the Play-Doh cookie that you made, right? They're not confused between the Play-Doh and the real cookie. And this has been studied by you have an adult actually take a bite and kids are surprised, like, what are you doing? That's not... So, this two-map cognitive structure

is that there are two layers of processing ideas, right? And in make-believe play, you see this in children already. They build a sandcastle, they call it a castle or a fort or a palace or whatever, and they're not confused. They know it's sand. They know where to dig for the wet sand and so on. Well, here's the suggestion and kind of drives my book. The way children play make-believe, they form groups around certain ideas. We play this game. We play G.I. Joe. They play He-Man. They play Barbie. The idea is that, well, what if religions are large-scale versions of that? Or more generally, what if ideologies are large-scale versions of that, where we form a coalition around which things we're dedicated to playing and which things we're dedicated

to imagining, right? So, a lot of religious ritual on this picture comes out as sacred play, but you don't lose that two-map cognitive structure. You know the wafer is just a wafer. You know the thing in the cup is wine. It's going to get you know, you assert that the election was stolen or what have you, for a lot of people, it's not confused with their underlying bedrock of factual belief. It's sort of what political scientists might call cheerleading beliefs. And it's, again, a two-map cognitive structure where the second layer is expressed in symbolic action, and the primary layer is what guides you in your everyday life. Well, you hit on something that I think is really important, which is that in the abstract, it's very easy for us to understand this difference

between things that we think are factually true and things that we symbolically believe. Like, it's very easy for us to accept like, you know, okay, you go to church, but you don't literally believe, for probably most people, that the cracker is the body of Christ. But at the same time, the kind of closer that we as individuals get to these symbolic beliefs, and the more closely we hold them, and you kind of alluded to this in your reference to politics, the more we lose that sense of distinction. And the more that we start to kind of blur, maybe in our own minds, maybe just in our behavior, the distinction between the factual and the symbolic. Can you talk about why that would be, why it would be that we kind of lose the distinction between those as we hold them more closely? Yeah. So there's two things that

lose the distinction could mean. One is that the symbolic religious credence layer just pollutes your factual beliefs and confuses you about what the world is like. Okay. Another one is that you're kind of muddled in your own mind, which is which. All right. And I think that's kind of what does happen. So, so when people play make-believe, say you're, you're, you're playing, I don't know, what's a good character you'd like to play on the stage? On make-believe? Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're an actor, right? Oh, I don't know. Let's say Luke Skywalker. I could see you cast as Luke Skywalker.

I think you could. So if you're in front of the camera, you know, Mark Hamill's, you know, he's retired now, so they've hired Max Fisher. Sure. You are very involved in your imagination, but you still know to face the camera. You still know to stop doing the lightsaber thing. So you're having all these imaginings, and you're more or less metacognitively aware. These imaginings aren't my bedrock factual beliefs. Okay. And I think because identity signaling beliefs or what I call groupish beliefs or religious credences, they kind of have the job

of you signaling your identity generally. You're kind of forced to not admit to yourself that they don't really work like your everyday factual beliefs. The other thing is, a lot of times your everyday factual beliefs are invisible to you, right? You don't think about the fact that you factually believe there's a microphone in front of your face, right? For you, it's just that's how things are. It just seems like knowledge to you. You don't consciously think, oh, I've got a factual belief that I own a pair of glasses. Right. You just you just you know, it seems like knowledge to you. That's factual belief. So even though people might, you know, and often under a lot of social pressure, kind of try to convince themselves that they factually believe their ideological ideas, they don't act like it, right? People

really don't act like they would act if they factually believe what they said, what they say they believe. Let me give you an example of that. Okay. So, this is one I'm borrowing from the French cognitive scientist, Hugo Mercier. He wrote a great book called Not Born Yesterday. And he points out that people who subscribed to this idea that the Democrats were running a pedophile ring out of a pizzeria didn't most of the time, except for one guy who showed up with a gun. But of all the people who subscribed to this conspiracy theory, most of them didn't take action like you would if you were in, say, a resistance movement. They posted about it on Yelp, gave the thing bad reviews on Yelp. One guy posted a review on Yelp, apparently, where he said, yeah, I went in there with my 10-year-old to get some pizza,

and I noticed they were looking at him funny. Now, think about that for a minute. If you had anything even close to a factual belief or even a suspicion that there was a pedophile ring in this damn pizzeria, he would not show up with your 10-year-old. So what is he doing there? Well, the point of groupish beliefs, I mean, one of the many points is to signal to your co-group members that you're one of them, right? And so, this kind of charade, right, it really is identity constituting make-believe, even if he didn't realize that's what he's doing, it shows that the second map layer, in this case, religious credence, is not guiding his behavior in the same way that a factual belief

would. And this is why hypocrisy is so common in both religious contexts and in ideological contexts, because the map layers don't work the same. You can't let your kind of fantasy ideas, even if they're connected to group identity and sacred value. Guide your actions across the board. Well, I want to push you on this a little bit, this idea of the symbolic beliefs that we hold and how much do they really govern our behavior? Because you're absolutely right that the people who kind of talk about believing in QAnon or, you know, Pizzagate don't act as if they really think that that is literally true. But at the same time, if you talk to those people, as I have, the emotion in their voice and the amount of outrage that they feel does not come across as someone who is putting on a performance or someone who is just saying a thing because they think it will please the members of their, you know,

demographic cohort. Like another example I think about a lot is anti-vaxxers. I live in Southern California, so you meet a lot of anti-vaxxers. And it's kind of muddied the degree to which they act as if they really think that all these vaccine conspiracies are true. Because on the one hand, kind of like you're saying, push comes to shove if there's a medical emergency, they're going to the hospital. They're not acting as if they truly believe that all doctors are involved in a vast conspiracy to steal our blood or whatever. But at the same time, vaccine uptake rates really are down. So it seems like these symbolic beliefs do in some specific ways, is it that they exert pressure on our behavior? Like, how is it interacting with how we actually behave in the world? Because it seems like a really

important question for understanding so much of our politics today, when these symbolic beliefs that we hold to signal our, you know, membership and good standing in our political tribe are so prevalent. Yeah. So I think in the political case, more than the religious case, this is why I kind of focus on the religious case a little bit more, is because it's actually kind of a cleaner example of the two-map cognitive structure, where religious credences are a little bit more neatly compartmentalized, psychologically speaking, in most people than the political ones. So, I think with the kind of anti-vaxxer thing, it's a little bit weird because I was listening to a podcast on this recently. I forget who the

journalist was, but he pointed out that among people 80 and over, the rate of uptake, regardless of political leaning, was fairly high for the vaccine, right? And so it kind of tells you, yeah, people are still tracking what's going on. And so... Oh, I see, because the stakes are higher for these people because they're older. So they're likelier to maybe they say they don't believe in vaccines, but they still actually go and get it. Yeah.

And so I think with anti-vaxxers, I think you're going to see just a lot of variation among individuals. Like some people really just don't like putting things into their body. And they have a revulsion at the very idea of that. And so, what might be going on is they have this tenacious preference, and people lock on to rationalizations, okay? And so, it's the rationalization's job, right? Maybe it's a groupish belief, maybe it's not. But the rationalization's job is to help make sense of the way they're behaving, all right. And it's not, you know, when you tell the anti-vaxxer that, oh, the vaccine is safe, kind of what they hear is

you behave differently from how you're behaving. And they really don't want to. So, they're not going to update in light of evidence. light of evidence. So I think that's, that's kind of a lot of what's going on in those cases, but there's, there is that, that groupish element where you're signaling to other people, your, your political commitments, and you might have a sort of kind of anti-government stance. And I think that's, that is really a lot of what was going on. And to kind of dig in here a little bit, this is what I call in my book and other places, lack of evidential vulnerability. So, just let me clarify that for your audience. Evidential vulnerability is the disposition of factual beliefs to go away or update when

the evidence is contrary, right? You know, I got to pick up some wine for a dinner later. I think the wine shop has this one that I really like. I go there. The person tells me they don't have it anymore. Poof, my belief updates. That's responding to evidence. And with the factual beliefs, humans are pretty good at that. Why aren't we good at that with our groupish beliefs? Here I want to say the bug is a feature. If you're signaling your loyalty to your in-group through the expression of a certain groupish belief or religious credence, if that could be revised by contrary information from the world, how loyal of a group member are you? Not very, right? So, the lack of evidential vulnerability of groupish beliefs

is a feature. It's not a bug. And if you really, like, take that in, it makes you see that, wow, no amount of shoving evidence in someone's face, if it's a groupish belief, is going to get them to change it. Because that's just an opportunity to signal how loyal they are. Yeah. I'm going to thumb my nose at the evidence and stick with it. And that's their way of saying, you know, or anyone's way of saying, I'm not totally immune from this. I try to be, but I'm going to stick with you guys, right? Oh, I see. So the point of believing in say, Pizzagate isn't to help you avoid child pedophile ring pizza parlors. The point of believing in Pizzagate is it's a social signal to other members of your in-group. I'm with you. I'm part of the team. I'm part of the tribe. But it sounds like that process isn't something that happens consciously. I mean, it sounds like it happens unconsciously, which is maybe why if you talk to people who believe in something like QAnon, Pizzagate, or Stop the Steal, they will simultaneously act like they don't believe in it in their day-to-day choices, but also have engaged in conversation on it, will behave very emotionally as if they very much believe it.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's get to the emotion. Let's really come back to this emotions piece in just a minute. I'll say on that front, I think people are varying degrees of conscious of the extent to which their groupish beliefs don't really work like religious, like factual beliefs, I should say. And people are often tortured about this.

So, I read a lot of anthropology of religion. And, you know, Christians know that they're supposed to believe. So, they're often troubled by the fact that they doubt. And they wrestle with the fact that this thing they're supposed to have faith in, the resurrection, say, is not as convincing to them as the fact that Max Fisher wears glasses, right? Or even that George Washington was the first president of the United States, right? That feels like knowledge. This doesn't feel like I'm, so I'm embracing it in the same way. So I think there's often – and I get into this in the epilogue in my book – there's often a bit of self-deception there in terms of people trying to amp up their level of conviction or their metacognition, so to speak, or of what kind of belief it is that they actually have.

Can you talk about why it is that we do this, though? Because it seems like something, this practice of holding these two different visions of the world in our head simultaneously, one of which is factual, the other of which is symbolic, holding and acting on all these beliefs that on some level, maybe we know are not true. It seems like that would be really counterproductive for our survival as a species. So why did we develop this very strange habit? Yeah. So I think, let's go back to the playground. I think imagination is fantastically useful, not just for one thing, but for many things. And that's kind of where this project came out of. I was really interested in the difference between believing in the straightforward factual sense and imagining. Either way, you're representing the world as being somehow. What's the difference? This question goes mainly back to David Hume, at least as contemporary philosophers deal with it.

And so I was trying to develop a theory, and that's when it hit me one day, because I grew up in the Christian Reformed Church and, you know, had a lot of experience of religion growing up. And it hit me one day that a lot of the, quote-unquote, beliefs of people around me, and this is, you know, already when I'm a researcher and in a postdoc position, they seem to operate and guide behavior like imaginings. So I'm going to give a kind of complicated story. Like if I had to give an evolutionary story, it would be something like this. Sometime in prehistory, maybe even further back, depending upon your view of animals, the brain discovered a neat trick, which is imagining, which is useful for planning, useful for practicing things, useful for rehearsing what you might do. All kinds of things are usefully done with imagining that you just can't do without it.

Right. And it probably really helped us as a species. OK, so take that. Just take that as granted. We're also a coal a species. Okay. So, take that, just take that as granted. We're also a coalitional species. We also form groups, packs, tribes, dot, dot, dot, religions. All right. So, you see where I'm going with this. If we're a communicative species with a capacity for imagining, it's a very, very neat cultural attractor position to use our imaginings to create symbols that we can identify with our group, right? It's almost, so I'm not saying, I definitely don't want to say religions or, you know, the propensity for ideologies. It was selected for in our ancestral environment. This kind of capacity that we're talking about, ideological credence, religious credence, is a very easy thing to have as a byproduct, especially when you have certain kinds of social and informational environments.

So if I'm understanding you right, the symbolic beliefs that on some level maybe we know are not true, they're a social glue. They're the thing that binds us together because we as a species need that in a way that other animals don't. And then the byproduct of that is things like religion or partially a byproduct of things like religion or political tribalism. Yeah, basically, what I'm saying is that the capacity for the tribalistic kind of belief, which is, if my theory is right, and I know this sounds provocative, is a kind of imagining, right? It's a kind of imagining. It operates distinctly from factual belief. The capacity to use that for groupish ends is something that is a byproduct

of other really useful stuff, like the tendency to form groups, the tendency said, we'll update it. You know, if we learn that the hours of the wine store are different, we'll just think, oh, I'll go to the wine store at a different time. But if we're presented with some challenge to our symbolic beliefs, I think you write in your book that our response is often to feel outrage. Did that sound true to me? Where does that track with my experience? Can you talk about why that would be, why we would have this emotional response to encountering information that's contradictory to those beliefs? Yeah. If anything, the emotional response is a telltale sign that not factual belief is going on here, right? So, if you're confident that something is true, like, you know, Toyota has, apparently, Toyota has factories in South Africa, right? I'm, you know, I factually believe that. Smart people told me.

Right. If I learned it were otherwise, I wouldn't be like, no, you know, I would it would make me all angry. So strong belief in terms of epistemic confidence. We don't get outraged when it's religious credences are challenged, it's taken as an affront to their identity, right? It's taken as a willingness to trample on that which is sacred, right? So, religious, one thing religious credences do is they, as cognitive states, they sync up with sacred values, right? And it's like they constitute a map layer on the layer of factual belief that marks certain actions, events, times, and places,

especially, as the ones to which your sacred kind of valuing should attach, okay? And that's, you know, the outrage response, again, it's a signal to other group members, right? It's sort of a way of showing I'm going to stand up for this. Yeah, I'm someone who's going to be, I'm going to be someone who's loyal, right? And so it's not merely an individual thing. Let me say something. This is kind of anecdotal observation, right? So, I don't usually identify as an atheist, but I don't think God exists, right? I mean,

I'm not trying to like join the atheist club, right? But notice how I put that. I said, I don't think God exists. It sounds kind of a little bit harmless, right? I just don't think God exists. Now, listen to this. If someone says, well, I'm a Christian, I say, I don't believe God exists. Notice how that feels more heated. It does. Yeah, you're right. It feels more heated when I say, I don't believe God exists. And that's because the word believe, it does have this sort of connotation of what you hold dear, right? And if I say, I don't believe God exists, it sort of sounds like it's near and dear to my heart that you're wrong. And if I say, well, I don't think there are any deities out there.

I think it's just a world. It sounds kind of like, okay, well, maybe you're not one of us, but you're not giving us the middle finger either. So, I think this is something to figure out for the future is how to talk to people who are in the grips of a certain ideology that's maybe perverse. And I think not getting emotionally amped up is actually the way to go, contrary to what a lot of people's intuitions are, right? Global warming deniers, if you say to them, well, I believe science, that feels like, yeah, we're about to like tear our shirts off and my tribe is going to fight your tribe. Whereas you say, well, I think the data show it is getting hotter. Then you're moving it out of the realm of tribe and symbolic belief.

Yeah. I mean, again, this is me kind of in everyday experimenting with my own ideas, but how can you take it? how can you get them into the everyday frame? So, that's someone I've collaborated with. You might know her books, Tanya Lerman, great anthropologist. She wrote a bunch of books, but famously, When God Talks Back and How God Becomes Real. Yeah, she studied the vineyard, which I go into in chapter three of my book. And she has this nice way of putting it. There's the everyday frame and the faith frame. And it's kind of a generalization of, you know, we think in very similar ways of factual belief versus religious credence, right? And the everyday frame is you're trying to balance your checkbook, you know, you're trying to see what's causing the leak in your basement. And

people are good at solving problems, right? Learning to use computers, learning to drive a car, getting their kids to school on time with a complicated schedule. And that's because the everyday frame is smart and rational, right? But the faith frame, it's not like it's bad at being rational. It's like it's its job to not be rational, right? It does what it does better in terms of inculcating certain emotions in you, in terms of signaling group identity, in terms of signaling loyalty. The faith frame, and this is, you know, we can see religious stories about this, it's supposed to be irrational, or what I've started calling P-rational, P-irrational, purposefully irrational, right? And so, it's kind of like, like okay here's a tough task how do you talk how do you toggle an interlocutors uh um uh you know current frame of mind from the faith frame to the everyday frame

i think that's fantastically difficult it's probably easier in one-on-one conversations uh but i mean if you have any suggestions for how to do that, Max, I think, you know, I'll listen. I'll happily learn from you on that one. Well, I want to follow up on this. I think this is a really important point that I know you make a lot in your book that to the extent that the purpose of these symbolic beliefs is to kind of demonstrate your loyalty to the in-group, you're a member of the group in good standing, they're a lot more effective and therefore more attracted to them, the more factually outlandish they get. Like a religious belief or a political belief that is extremely banal is not very effective at signaling that

you were like really committed to the group, but something that is, you know, like the Holy Trinity is a taller order. So it's a more valuable signifier. And I feel like this, for me, helps me make sense of some of the false beliefs in our society that seem like really weirdly sticky. Like to use an example, it's kind of easy for us to talk about, you know, conservative MAGA beliefs. But to use one that is maybe a little closer to home, I've covered the Israel-Palestine conflict for a long time. So you're going to drag me into that? You didn't tell me this in advance, Max. Don't worry.

Don't worry. I'm just using an example. But one belief that I encounter a lot that I'm very attuned to is the belief that Starbucks and McDonald's are somehow involved in funding the Israeli military and therefore should be boycotted. And that makes a lot of sense as a symbolic belief because it is very resistant to factual appeals. It is something that you believe in it. That's a way that you show that you really care about what's happening in Gaza, which is a good and valuable thing to show, even if it is premised on demonstrating a false belief. But I guess what I'm asking is, how do you differentiate between a belief that a lot of people hold dearly out of in-group symbolic belief and this kind of like

desire for in-group signaling versus something that they've just been straight up factually misinformed about by, you know, political actors or social media algorithms? Yeah. So, I think it's often not easy to tell, but there are a few ways to go at it. One is how much do people update their beliefs in light of evidence, right? And if, you know, you do some good reporting and you show it to one person and they thought that, uh, notice I'm saying, think again, they thought that McDonald's was helping to fund the IDF and then they see the evidence and like, huh, I guess I was wrong. Well, then, then it was, they had a factual belief attitude because factual belief attitudes

update in light of evidence. Right. factual belief attitude because factual belief attitudes update in light of evidence right um uh but if they if they get mad at you um then probably it's even you know it's a religious credence or you know more generally speaking an ideological credence so it's that second map layer right um and if you uh you know and if you see them stopping by Starbucks or McDonald's on the way to their protest and polishing it off and then wiping their mouth and then, you know, then it might be, okay, this is a compartmentalized belief. And that's also characteristic of religious credences. So, one of the things that I think is another interesting differentiator is people will do things that are counterproductive to what their ideology says the goal is

if it doesn't have the right kind of signaling function. So, I talk about this in chapter seven of my book on sacred values. I focus on the pro-life movement. And they're focused on restrictive laws, right? That's the main route. Well, there's tons and tons of other things that one could do to reduce the numbers of abortions, right? Like having universal daycare, for sure, like would really make a huge difference in reducing the number of abortions.

And I don't want to put my foot in my mouth because I'm sure some pro-lifers really do go out of their way to help provide daycare and so on and so forth. Generally, they don't, we can say. Generally not. Yeah. Generally not they don't, we can say. Generally not. Yeah.

Generally not in terms of, if you look at their voting patterns, right, you know, pro-lifers generally are Republicans, and Republicans don't support things like universal daycare. And it's like, well, why not? Okay, if that would save, according to your narrative, millions of lives, right? Why not? And the answer is, well, that's not the sort of signal that works in this group context. So there's a certain conventionality to how groupish beliefs are expressed. Right. I feel like that clarifies so much about our political era now, if political partisan ideology has become so powerful as an identity that we all hold and

feel compelled to express, that that desire to express these symbolic beliefs, not just in word, but in action could lead us to do things that are counterproductive to what we say are the actual goals of our politics. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we could spend a lot of time coming up with examples. But this is, I think, this is something that politicians know about. I mean, the way problems can be solved behind closed doors is much different from when the cameras are on. So, I think, you know, this is something you know a lot about, more about than I do, but the fact that there's kind of always potentially millions of people watching what you do through social media,

it makes more frequent, or how shall I put it, it expands the compartment of identity signaling, right? How so? So, because identity signaling is something you do for other people, right? Oh, I see. like, well, if every Sunday the other church members are watching me, then I'll do my rituals and my symbolic actions, right? This is not so clearly thought out, but that's kind of how it works. I'll do it on Sundays and kind of get back to my humdrum life, my empirical life seven days a week. But if you're, if I'll put it in a little bit different way. One of the things that a group identity does is it makes you not just disposed to signaling,

but it also makes you disposed to social litmus testing, right? Testing if someone else is also on board with whatever values or groupish beliefs are partly constitutive of the psychological component of your group identity. Are you on board with what my team says are the right things to say and believe? Yeah. And then there's, you know, in-groups are more punitive toward in-group members who defect than they are to out-group members. Okay. Right. And so when there's, I mean, just look at Mitt Romney's price of security detail, right? I mean, that's, you know, many, many politicians are more anti-Trump than Mitt Romney ever was, but he's the one most under threat.

Because if you're a member of the in-group who's not playing ball, then you're punished more. And I'm, you know, this is not all my research. I'm drawing on research on sacred values from people like Scott Atran and Philip Tetlock. But if you keep in mind that group identities cause litmus testing or cause people to do litmus testing, and then kind of the camera's always on with Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, or now X, I guess it's called. So, since there's just many more opportunities, both to signal and to be litmus tested as a member of the in-group. So, it takes up just a much larger portion of this sort of ideological signaling, takes up a much larger portion of

the canvas. Anyway, that's, again, you're the expert on, but I don't know, does it sync with what you've been finding in your research? Oh, I think that this, exactly what you're saying, clarifies so much for me about social media's role in our politics, and especially in misinformation. Like, I think that we kind of think sometimes like, oh, there's misinformation on social media because they weren't moderating it or someone posted a falsehood and it went viral. And I feel like what this is clarifying for me is that actually probably what is driving the fact

that there is so much misinformation and partisan polarization on social media is this draw that we have towards expressing symbolic beliefs that have more of a draw to us if we know on some level subconsciously that they're wrong and like point you made is that the purpose of these symbolic beliefs isn't to hold them internally it's to express them that's how they work as a signal that's how they like you relay it with the rest of your group and i feel like social media would really dial up the incentives of that where, you know, if you're in church and you're sending a signal that you hold the group's beliefs, it's with, you know, maybe a couple dozen other people. And social media might be thousands of people who you're in front of. So the pressures to conform and to express these beliefs are so much higher, but the rewards of expressing it are so much higher, too. And every time we go online, we're surrounded by So, I kind of claimed earlier that imagining,

the capacity to imagine is useful in many, many different ways. And so, I don't think what religious credences do, it's not part of my theory that they're only for group identity signaling. So, I think they're sort of multifunctional. So, the group identity kind of thing, that's the Durkheim. Emile Durkheim, you know, said, well, look, groupish beliefs, not, this is not his vocabulary, but, you know, religious beliefs appear to be about God, but they're really about society or the clan to which you belong, elementary forms of religious life. William James, on the other hand, was more about personal religion and what which you belong, elementary forms of religious life. William James, on the other hand, was more about personal religion and what religious beliefs do for you kind of internally

and individually. And so, I think, I mean, one of the, when we focus on the religion case, but maybe also the political case, there may be some sort of internal emotional satisfaction that people gain from engaging with these certain stories, a certain sort of catharsis, right? And that's partly why it's not sort of mere hypocrisy, right? Or mere signaling, right is there is some kind of not just group identity that that people have in embracing the stories they embrace. But, you know, it feels like it even if it's not on a surface level, very plausible. It feels like it's expressive of something that's deeply right with them. I see. I see. And I feel like that aligns with the kind of political interpretations of this theory, too, that they are for expressing something that feels true in a kind of deeper sense. I have to ask, are you on social media? Have you used it differently or looked at it differently since you started working on this book?

Yeah, I've been, I mean, I was one of the early adopters of Facebook. So I was doing my PhD at Stanford in 2004. Oh, yes, you guys got it early. We got it early. So for us, it was this like nifty toy where you had a lot of friends if you had 100 friends. Because it was kind of encapsulated in your college campus. And it was kind of weird and fun. You would just be browsing around and there's someone you recognize from the library and you could learn what their political leaning was.

Right. Like it's just like, you know, tons of candy just came our way. But I used to post more political stuff. I'm kind of reserved about it now. I mean, now it's kind of, you know, I've got this, as you pointed out, I've got this book out for the people watching on YouTube or whatever. All right, here it is. Religion is making the leap. So I'm kind of using it to kind of spread awareness of my work.

That's its main function right now. Instagram, I post travel photos. And I used to kind of try to cultivate a bit of a forum of political discussion of like healthy political discussion on my Facebook wall. I've basically given up doing that. People told me I was much better at it than most people. But there's a breaking point, you know, it's getting harder to do, right? Yeah, yeah. I think maybe it was at its hardest in 2016, actually. Yeah, I agree with that. But now it's just like I can get more mileage out of using my social media for other things. Yeah, yeah. I've had the same experience for sure. Well, Neil van Leeuwen, thank you so much for coming on Offline. It was really great to chat. Yeah, thanks for having me, Max. And if I could ask your audience,

if you don't want to buy the book, please recommend it to your local library, local public library. I'm a big believer in public libraries. And that way more people can share in it. And it's a different way of getting information, old school, and I think it's healthy. It's a factual belief,

not a symbolic belief to read a book. And that's always fun. Yeah, all right, great. All right book. And that's always fun. Yeah. All right. Great. All right. Thanks for having me, Max. Yeah.

Thank you. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Mixed and edited by Jordan Cantor. Audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer,

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