TRIGGERnometry - Conspiracy Expert: How to Spot a True Conspiracy Theory - Michael Shermer

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

Michael Shermer is an American science writer, historian of science, executive director of The Skeptics Society, and founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, a publication focussed on investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. He is the author of over a dozen books, the most recent of which is ‘Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.’ You can find Michael's book here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1421444453/  SPONSORED BY: ATHLETIC GREENS. Get a free 1-year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs with your first purchase. Go to https://athleticgreens.com/triggernometry/ Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Intro  01:16 Michael Shermer’s Background 03:21 The Information Era’s Impact on Conspiracies 10:06 Big Tech Speech Censorship 16:40 When Should a Media Platform Censor Someone?  19:27 Sponsor Message: Athletic Greens 20:58 The Twitter Files 28:33 Have We Become More Conspiratorial? 36:51 Epstein’s Island & Flight Logs 42:33 The Great Reset 48:11 The Conspiracy Theorist Demographic 55:52 Conspiracy & Victimhood 1:00:54 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conspiracy theories are just theories about what could be a real conspiracy. And some of them are true. A lot of them are true. So we should just stop treating it in a negative way. And instead think of like the LabLeague hypothesis as legitimate, just in case. The moment you start censoring speech, people automatically think, why am I not being allowed to hear this? I want to see this.

I want to read it for myself. Epstein died. And there were conspiracy theories that he was killed. I thought, nah, that's probably not the case. And then somebody wrote me, emailed me from that prison. He said, I used to work at that prison. And nothing works there. It's a dump.

I thought, okay. So this is the conspiracy principle. Don't attribute to malice what could be explained by incompetence or chance. I'm back to thinking he probably just killed himself. It's rational to believe conspiracy theories because enough of them are true. It pays to err on the side of caution just in case. As they say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. Sometimes they are after you, right?

So if people say, you know what, I don't really trust the US government. I don't trust the CDC. I don't trust the CIA, the FBI. I say, I understand reasons why you shouldn't. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisham. And this is a show for you.

If you want honest conversations, we're fascinating people. Our brilliant and returning guest today is a skeptic in chief and author of many, many books, including his latest one, which is called Conspirators. why the rational believe the irrational. Michael Sherman, welcome back to Trignoltery. Gentlemen, it's nice to be back. Am I your returning champion? You absolutely are. But for those people who didn't catch the first interview, just tell everybody, remind everybody who are you, what do you do, what's been your journey through life? Sure, thank you. Let me introduce my day job, which is publishing this magazine, Skeptic Magazine. We take on just kind of boring, non-controversial subjects like race, trans, trans, and.

and abortion are the last three issues of this year. The fourth point of the year. Sounds like the average trigonometry episode, Michael. Keeping a low key there, my friend. That's right. No, you guys are my inspiration for doing this. Well, I mean, we've been in business 30 years, publishing started in 1992. Mostly we focused on science and pseudoscience and the paranormal to supernatural conspiracy theories, aliens, UFOs, Bigfoot, you know, astrology, psychics, talking to the dead and so on.

But you can only debunk those things. so many times before it gets redundant. So we, you know, kind of branching out into more controversial subjects like the ones I just introduced. The next issue comes out next week is on nationalism. And then next year we're doing stuff on money matters, economics, you know, crypto, all that stuff, also mental health. You know, there's recent studies showing that, you know, like psych psychiatric medications appear to do very little for things like depression, maybe nothing and so on. So what's the, you know, status of that? You know, so those kinds of kinds of subjects that I think have more global and, you know, larger cultural implications.

So that's my day job. Then I write books, you know, there's conspiracies, my 15th book. And because I enjoy writing. And then I talk to people like you. Well, Michael, it's good to have you back on the show and quite timely as well, because I think it's fair to say that whatever your view of conspiracy or conspiracy theories or whatever it is, we've never had more of them around. We've never had more of them in our faces.

And do you think that's because we've become more conspiratorily minded or we just have way more access to information now? The latter. There's just as many conspiracy theories 100 years ago as there are now. It's just that they diffuse through culture much more quickly now because of social media. So if you look at like there's data collected about letters to the New York Times in the 1890s to the 1970s. And you can see there's plenty of conspiracy theory. even a century ago about what the Mormons are doing or the Catholics are doing or the Jews, of course, always. I don't trust any of them.

You know, and the influence on American elections or the First World War was just rife with conspiracy theories. You know, why did this start? I have a whole chapter on this in conspiracy on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand that started the First World War. That was a conspiracy. But then there were layers and layers of conspiracy theories, some true, some not on top of, that. So that's not new. You know, you can go all the way back to the burning of Rome, you know, with Nero being accused of letting it happen on purpose or making it happen on purpose. You know, so wherever there's power, where somebody has a lot of power and money and

influence and other people don't, then the people that don't are very suspicious of the people that do have power. And for good reason, really, this is what I call constructive conspiracism. A lot of times when people get in power, they get corrupt, believe it or not. like Sandbankman-Fried. You know, what happens? This guy seemed like, you know, the nerdiest, nicest guy in the world. You know, we're going to change the world and effective altruism and long-termism. And oh, my God, this is going to change humanity.

And then all of a sudden he's arrested for fraud. Okay. So something happens, you know, when you get into power. So people see that and reasonably think, you know what? I'm not sure I trust authorities, agencies, corporations, people that are billionaires. I don't know if I trust them. And that's not irrational. Michael, one of those things I was curious to hear your take on is we've obviously lived through a time when there's been a lot of fear.

There's been a lot of power being aggregated into the hands of public officials and politicians and so on, and they've been wielding that power. You may agree or disagree with them doing it, but they have been. People's lives were changed in many cases irrevocably by the pandemic and the response to it. have we seen a rise in constructive conspiracism or unconstructive conspiracism during these last three years? Is there anything you've noticed during this time? Well, of course, so you touched on a couple of things that are triggered, we'll say, of causes of conspiracism, which is anytime there's a major upheaval,

social or political or economic or whatever, and we got all of it with the pandemic. I mean, you have political upheavals and economic recessions and so on. And also, you know, government's just printing money and handing it out. I mean, there's just, there's a lot going on there uncertainty. Nobody knows. You know, to give some slack to Anthony Fauci and the CDC and other health agencies around the world, nobody knew in the spring of 2020 exactly what was going to happen. What would the death rate be of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID?

COVID-19 disease of it. It could have been like Ebola. It could have been worse. And I'm fond of reminding people, AIDS, HIV was 100% fatal until the drug cocktails in the late 90s. 100%. Right. So, you know, we don't know. Could be like that. Could be like Ebola. Could be like the common flu. It's nobody knew. So under uncertainty, you know, public officials are going to err on the side of caution, the precautionary principle, just in case. So it's a signal detection problem. If I miss it, If I do a false positive, I think the information indicates that nothing to worry about. Let's just continue on business as usual. What if it turns out it's a catastrophic plague, then that's on you.

You know, millions and millions and tens of millions of people die. Wow. As opposed to, well, let's lock down just in case. And turns out it wasn't that bad. Well, you know, the long-term consequences we're seeing now, you know, education levels have been hit hard on kids. and the economy is in the toilet for a while anyway with a recession, inflation, and so on. That may be the long-term consequences of making that other kind of barriers. Sorry to interrupt, but there's also excess deaths.

We have excess deaths in this country at the moment as well. And I think your argument should be a little bit more sophisticated than that, because I agree with you in spring 2020, we had no idea. And at that time, Francis, myself, everybody, I knew, frankly, supported the lockdown. But there were other opportunities later when we knew more about the virus, which is where people, I think, are asking legitimate questions. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think it was clear maybe, say, mid-2021, summer of 2021, when the lockdowns were probably not necessary. You know, the obsessive masking and social distancing was probably a little over the top.

I think that seems clear now, in hindsight. Maybe not at 2021. but I mean, he seems clear to some of us. I'm not going to lie. Yeah. So, okay, fair enough. So, you know, politicians, again, you're the mayor of the town, you're the governor of the state, you're the president of the country or whatever. And, you know, they stick a microphone in your face and go, all right, what should we do?

You know, and again, your job is to, you know, minimize harm in the short run, right? Maybe, you know, 10 years from now, it's going to look like this was a big mistake. But what do you care? Most people in power are only in power for. a few years. So they're going to err on the other side. I think that's a problem. I think, you know, long-term thinking and planning is probably better once we know. Anyway, so I'm leaning toward you on that. Also, the lab leak hypothesis to me has always been a viable conspiracy theory. Here in my book, I try to debunk the idea that a conspiracy theory should be a pejorative. It's not.

Conspiracy theories are just theories about what could be a real conspiracy. And some of them are true. A lot of them are true. So we should just stop treating it in a negative way and instead think of like the lab leak hypothesis as legitimate just in case because now it looks like at least 50% probability that the SARS-CoB2 was leaked out of a lab versus the zoonomic hypothesis. Of course, the problem is, Michael, we've just been talking about COVID and the entire situation has been exacerbated by big text actions where they censor people. And, Doesn't this just fuel people's conspiracy theories? Yeah, for sure.

The moment you start censoring speech, people automatically think, why am I not being allowed to hear this? I want to see this. I want to read it for myself. And so you get what's called the Streisand effect, a backfire effect, where the attempt to censor it, this comes from Barbara Streisand suing to have a photograph of her house in Malibu taken from a boat,

censored, taken off this web page. And I think at the time she filed the suit, maybe 12 people had seen this picture of her house. After she filed a lawsuit, it was like downloaded 400,000 times in a week, right? So, you know, be careful about what you call attention to. We don't want you to see this. Oh, okay.

In that case, I want to see it. And, you know, so I'm a pretty strong free speech fundamentalist. You know, just let everybody have their say, you know, let Trump back on social media. I want to know what he's thinking. You know, I'm not a Trump fan to say the least. But if he's influential and he's tweeting it, you know, he's putting stuff out to the public at three in the morning.

I want to know what that is, you know, just in case, right? So I don't want some tech committee, as we've seen in the Twitter threads, telling me what I can and cannot see. You know, I know there's exceptions, you know, should we let ISIS on there to recruit, you know, members to become terrorist? No, all right. Should we allow the nuclear codes to be posted on Twitter? No, right?

There's some obvious ones like that. But, you know, really, how harmful are these kinds of, people that are on there. And the hypocrisy, right? So Barry Weiss posted that one of, you know, the decisions to kick Trump off Twitter was pretty questionable, right? They went back and forth for days and finally decided to kick him off. In the meantime, you have, you know, these people in Iran posting things about Israel. Oh, well, you know, we should just take Israel right off the map because of the Jews. And that gets posted and no one says, hey, well, maybe that should be censored. So it, I think when people see that hypocrisy, they think, you know, this is not right.

Look, Michael, I agree with you broadly. However, there are more complex cases than the ones you've just cited. What about Alex Jones, for instance? Doesn't Alex Jones deserve a platform? But he spouts conspiracy theories, as in the case of Sandy Hook, which are very real, very dangerous, and people could have been killed. Yeah, I'm a little conflicted about that. I'm not an Alex Jones fan, to say the least.

And I've spent years debunking him. why is he responsible for what his lunatic whack-a-doodle followers do? Why aren't they responsible? I only know of one case of a woman who actually went into somebody's house or was on their lawn or something who was convicted for harassing somebody at their home. The other family members were harassed by these people. I guess they were out on the public street. So it's harder to, you know, to file charges against them for harassment if you're, you know, on a public ground, something like that. But it brings up the larger subject of, to what extent does somebody's words make somebody do something that they would not otherwise have done?

Like Trump's speech on January 6th that morning. I'm told by First Amendment attorneys that it's a very high bar to meet, to connect words to actions, your words to somebody else's actions. And that probably you cannot convict Trump for causing the January 6th insurrection directly because of his words. Or just to go back in time, Manson, Charlie Manson, telling his followers, his cult followers, go to the Tate La Bianca Holmes and murder those people, Sharon Tate and so forth. And they did. He wasn't even there. And he got convicted for first-degree murder by Vincent Biliosi, who famously also got the women convicted.

So it's an interesting case of, you know, free will. To what extent are you unduly influenced by somebody else? It's a hard psychological problem to solve, you know, that you made these people do this. I was just binge watching this Netflix series called Don't Pick Up the Phone. I don't know if you remember these cases, but this was a prank caller to a McDonald's who got the manager to strip search one of the young female employees in the back office. And the whole thing is recorded on a CCTV video. And this guy is just some nobody at a pay phone.

this is like in 1999-2000 time frame, who somehow managed to keep this manager on the phone for three hours strip searching this woman. She's completely naked. She's doing jumping jacks and jumping up and down naked so that the money she allegedly stole would fall out of her body parts or something. I mean, it's just insane. And how is it that somebody could do that from a pay phone, you know,

and just say, I'm a cop and here's what you're going to do? and that the listeners don't go, hey, hang on for a second. You want me to strip this woman down and make her jump? This is not right. And yet, somehow this happened like 68 times in the course of a decade. So to what extent are we truly free or other people can make us do things? So that's kind of what you're getting at there. You know, should we hold Alex Jones responsible?

Maybe. But again, first of all, he does have a platform, you know, Kanye West and, and, the other guy, the Nick Fuentes, we're just on a show. He still has a massive following. So he's not, the government did not go in and shut him down. Private platform said, we're not going to have you on anymore. Would I have done that if I own Twitter? Probably not. You know, it's like, I want to know what this lunatic is, is thinking. And I tend to have more faith in people that they may be unduly confident in people's rationality. I know some people are more influential than others. Jones is apparently one of them. But how's that different from Rush Limbaugh, rambling on about, you know,

or Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson or any of those, rambling on about, you know, the left, the liberals, the libtards, you know, and they go on and on this every day for hours. And people are definitely influenced by that to the extent that they just hate liberals. They hate Democrats. You know, they're, they're, they're satanic evil people. You know, it's, this is not the politics of old. Why are Hannity and Carlson and Ingram and the Rush Limbaugh radio, people of the world? Why are they not being censored or kicked off platforms for their undue influence on people? But Michael, surely, isn't on these platforms under a huge amount of pressure. Like, if you remember during the very start of the pandemic, David Ike, some would say the original and the best,

you copied him. Yeah. You know, he was doing these interviews about, you know, 5G calls in COVID, and it was being, it was being, it was platformed on YouTube. It was watched by millions of people. And that creates a very real problem. And it creates a very real problem for YouTube, for example, where people are saying to them, how can you be, how are you allowing this to be broadcast on your platform? Surely they're in an untenable position. They have to get rid of him. Maybe. Yes. I mean, I know David, Ike, I don't know him personally, but I've been following him for 25 years. I mean, he's been doing this for a long time. I guess he's more influential. now, I suppose, because of social media, YouTube, and so on.

What to do about it? You know, again, this is slightly different than used to be because, you know, the New York Times is not going to interview him every day or the Wall Street Journal or NBC, CBS, ABC, and so on. YouTube is a different, you know, social media platforms. Again, you know, you know this debate. You know, to what extent are they just like the public square? You know, this is just a public space.

Anybody can go there like Hyde Park in London. Just go there with your bullhorn and say whatever you want. And people can listen to you or not. And is it more like that? So as you know, there's probably going to be some lawsuits and major congressional debates about whether these companies should be broken up or more regulated. Because of that, they're claiming we're just like the phone company. So if I'm on the phone with you and I libel you, you can't sue AT&T, my phone company.

Or is it Sprint? I forget what my phone company is, but, you know, they're just a platform for us to talk. And, you know, is YouTube and Twitter more like that, or are they more like the New York Times, it should be held accountable? And the problem is, you know, the New York Times gets, let's say, maybe 100 op-ed submissions a day. They publish one or two. They're vetted, fact-checked, the editor stand up for it, and so on. And they can be held accountable for that if somebody libel somebody else and harms them

and there's damages because of this New York Times article about them. but what if they got submitted and published, I don't know, 100,000 op-eds a day? How can they possibly control that? Fact check it, regulated? They can't. And so what do you do about Facebook or Twitter where you get something like 100,000 posts, whatever it is, a minute or an hour? Something, just it's a massive number. I don't know what to do about that.

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Check it out and become real men like me. You mentioned the social media companies and Twitter, and particularly is an interesting one because of the Twitter files information drops we've had over the last couple of weeks. And it's interesting to watch the different sides of the political spectrum. You know, Francis and I are somewhere in the center, so we just sit back and watch it unfold. And I look at the right, so to speak, if there is such a thing. And the right is like, this is a massive conspiracy. And on this particular issue, I actually lean towards not so much a conspiracy, but. These people were doing things they shouldn't have been doing.

They were lying about what they were doing. That's my opinion. And while the decisions, as you rightly say, are very difficult, they did not quite live up to the standards that they claimed to be upholding, in my opinion. On the other hand, the left is like, well, we knew this was going on. There's no problem. This is all just, you know, Elon trying to smear people and attack people that he's fired and whatever. where do you come down?

Is the Twitter files a big reveal or is it a damp squid? Yeah, so I have read it. I was not surprised because I think we all knew that Twitter was pretty far left-leaning. So on one hand, it would be like saying, you know, maybe, I don't know, Peter Thiel buys, no, let's use another example, George Soros buys Fox News and says, oh my God, I can't believe it. there's been a right-leaning slant in favor of Republicans for all these years. Can you believe it? Everybody would be like, what are you crazy? Everybody knows that. You can't watch it for five minutes

and not realize it's a total right-leaning GOP platform. But Michael, there's a difference though. No one's been gaslighting the public for years claiming Fox News as a left-of-center publication. Whereas with Twitter, the argument was, oh, no, we're not shadow-binding anyone, except they were. Oh, no, the decision to ban Donald Trump wasn't made because of personal animosity, yet we find out that Yor Roth, one of the major executives, had said that Nazis were in the White House three years earlier. So we were being told one thing, and then we find out, actually, yes, I agree with you. I was not surprised to find out that what Twitter had been saying for years was a lie. However, they were saying it wasn't a lie. And now we know and have evidence that it was a lie. I think that's quite significant, don't you?

Yeah. Yeah. So to be fair, Fox News did drop its fair and balanced line that it used to use and pretending to be neutral. They've given that up. If Twitter did that, if they just said publicly years ago, you know what, we're a left-leaning liberal platform have at it. That would be acceptable because then everybody knows. So yeah, I agree with you that the deception involved, you know, we are politically neutral when the Twitter threads so far show that they're not politically neutral. Although, again, I followed all those threads. I've read them all. You know, it's, there's little snippets. It would be, it would be nice to see those documents in more context. Sure. You know, like, like a nice 10,000 word investigative piece in the New Yorker,

something like that that you get, where you see everything. You know, who was this guy again? And how long have he been there and how many documents were there? You know, we get one document, but how many documents were there? Is this one out of a hundred? That's an anomaly and the rest are pretty neutral? Or is this a trend? You know, we just haven't seen the, the, larger context. So at the moment, I think I agree with you that Twitter as a public square where everybody can have their say and is neutral was not the case. And so that would be a kind of conspiracy. Back to my definition of conspiracy, two or more people plotting secret to do something to a third party or somebody else illegally or immorally. That would be the case. They, their lies that, you know,

we are a politically neutral platform, but secretly behind the scenes, their shadow banning people. So that would be a conspiracy theory that turned out to be true. It is a conspiracy. And I think the significance of it also was Michael, when you see how people reacted around the world to Donald Trump being banned. I understand in America by, you know, January the 6th or 8th of 2021, there was quite a lot of people who were quite happy to see Donald Trump go off every platform and they didn't particularly care if it was right or balanced or whatever. And I don't agree, but I understand. I understand that's how heated the moment was. But when you see President Macron, Angela Merkel, Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader in Russia, these are not exactly

massive Trumpists and Trump fans, all going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you've gone too far here. You know, I thought that was a really significant moment. And, you know, seeing some insight, yes, Twitter had their deliberations back and forth, but in the end, they made it. decision, which I just thought was catastrophic, and what we now know from the Twitter files, is that that decision was not made on the basis of, he broke the rules. He was made on the basis of, well, we've got to do something about this guy. Let's make it up as we go along. Surely that's got to be a concern. Yeah. So, you know, one of the reasons Barry Weiss said she left the New York Times was because

she was just tired of, she was working in the opinion editorial department. You know, just do we need another, you know, the 967th op-ed piece against Donald Trump. You know, but again, I guess he would say, and you'd probably be right, the New York Times is clearly left-leaning, at least in their opinion section. That's the whole point, just like the Wall Street Journal. If you want to read a good skeptics of climate change, read the Wall Street Journal. They published Bjorn Lomborg pretty much every month where he, you know, he pushes back against, you know, the number of forest fires and the number of tornadoes or, you know, the greenhouse gas is

causing this or that. But you kind of know that ahead of time, right? You get the New York Times because you like the left-leaning op-ed section or the Wall Street Journal for the opposite. But with Twitter, that's not the case. Again, it's probably a one-off special thing. Why aren't there six Twitters the equivalent of that to compete with each other in a free market way? Why can't Peter Thiel say start a new Twitter? Of course, Elon just bought that. Let's see what happens. But why aren't there, you know, three of them? And it's an interesting problem economically. And so the natural monopolies, Michael, that's why. Yes.

No one wants to use the fourth best Twitter in the world. I mean, look at parlor, look at Mastodon, look at truth. No one wants to go on there, left or right, because you want to be where everyone else is at. Exactly. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Right. So that's a problem.

But that's the case all over the, I mean, how many search engines are there? Really, just Google. I mean, there's Bing and Yahoo, whatever, but everybody uses Google. And how many diaper companies are there? Two. Right? I mean, it's just how many smartphone companies are there? What, three?

I mean, it's just the way it goes. There's kind of a market head start. You end up with a Pareto distribution, a power law where, you know, 10% of the products, you know, generate 90% of the revenue or, you know, even worse. Or, you know, just take podcast platforms, you know, like probably 1% of the podcasters have 99% of the audience. It's just the way it goes, I guess. We're in the top 1% this year, according to. our Spotify annual. We made it.

All right. You are the one percenters. Yeah, we are. Whoa, whoa, no, no. But Michael, have people become most conspiratorial because it seems that there's a number of conspiracy theories that have been proven correct. For instance, a public conspiracy, as you know, is, you know, there is this cabal of pedophiles, you know, who operate at the highest echelon of society.

and we all thought that was nonsense. And then you've got, you know, Jimmy Saville in our country, you know, fraternising with royalty. Prince Charles literally used to go to him and ask him for advice. His crimes were hushed up until he died. Then you had Epstein and he was obviously killed. And there's a lot of people out there with good reason who think, you know, he was killed, let's put it bluntly.

And then the only person who went down for his crimes, Gislein Maxwell, or Jelene, sorry, Maxwell, and then the Black Book, where everybody else who did the unspeakable deeds was suppressed. Well, okay, let me give you my take on that. When Epstein died and there were conspiracy theories about that he was killed, I thought, nah, that's probably not the case. And then they had the CCTV video. Well, the camera went out.

I went, okay, that's a little fishy. And then the story came out about the second camera was out. I'm like, okay, that sounds pretty ify. You know, if you hear a knock on the door, you think, oh, what was that? If you hear, you're like, ah, that sounds like a pattern. And if you heard one, two, three, it'd be somebody's at the door, right? So that seems suspicious to me. I posted on Twitter, you know, yeah, I think there's something to the conspiracy theory.

And then somebody wrote me, email me from that prison. He said, I used to work at that prison. And nothing works there. It's a dump. I thought, okay. So this is the conspiracy principle. Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence or chance. So I'm back to thinking he probably just killed himself because he had nothing left to, you know,

he just hit the, hit the wall. There was nothing more he could do. He's leading a miserable life and he's probably not going to ever be freed. And so he probably took his own life. The rest of your narrative is rational. I mean, he surely has a black book or I guess Galane Maxwell has a black book. Why isn't she, although I would ask, why isn't she leveraging the black book to get out or get a lighter sentence? Because she doesn't want to kill herself, Michael.

That's why. I mean, if I was hurt, you know, because most of these cases like this are plea bargained early on. Like, okay, listen, I know you're about to put me on trial. I'm probably doomed. I got the black book. I'll name names if you, you know, let me go or let me free after five years or whatever, something like that. That she didn't do that is kind of suspicious. It's a little bit like the theory that.

Michael, you're working for our side here. Everything you say, maps very lovely on what Francis say. Well, okay, but in reality, okay, Jimmy Seville, Epstein, these, you know, these things happened at a time when, you know, way before the Me Too movement and so on and the awareness of pedophilia where, you know, I followed the Jimmy Civil. I watched that. There was, I think, a Netflix or HBO. Yeah, it was a Netflix documentary. That Netflix series. Yeah, it was pretty interesting.

I think in hindsight, this idea, well, they should have known. Look at all the clues. It's like, yeah, but you have the curse of knowledge. you already know what happened. So it's obvious when he jokes about children or he makes this little line about young girls or whatever. It's like, oh, see, right there, he's admitting it. But only after the fact, when you already know he's a pedophile,

when it's not clear, when you don't know, and you think, huh, that was kind of weird. Well, he's a weird guy. He was a weird guy. And he was kind of quirky and odd. Put in the very mildly. Yeah. So I think a lot of this kind of hand-wringing after the fact,

you know, No, but the point is something else, Michael, which I think Francis is correct about, which is if you believe in the conspiracy theory that the world is run by a caball of pedophiles, and I happen to not believe that even though the things that Francis said, I actually agree with, I think they're true. The thing with Jimmy Saville was he was celebrated and we have clear evidence that it's not like he committed these crimes on his own and nobody knew. it's that lots and lots of people protected him and lots and lots of people turned a blind eye and he was extremely well connected in the highest echelons of society.

So people knew what he was doing and they allowed him to get away with it because he was powerful. And so from that, I don't think it's much of a leap to conclude that there are probably other paedophiles in the Epstein case shows that there are people who would go and do these things, who work together, who protect each other, who are very wealthy. and to this day, to do not get justice, right? Now, surely, you take all those inputs, I wouldn't blame someone from concluding out of all of that that the world is run by a caballipatophiles.

Well, that's how the conspiracy theory starts, the Pizza Gate one, for example, that there's a secret satanic cult of pedophiles operating out of the comet ping pong pizzeria run by Hillary Clinton. Do people really believe that? No. No.

No. Well, some people do. I don't, but I'm making a different point. I know. I'll get to that. I'll get to, let me address that. Sure. Sorry.

Direct. So one guy did, Edgar Welch, he went there with his gun, which is what you would do if you really thought there was a crime being committed. No one was doing anything about it. So here is what I call proxy conspiracyism or tribal conspiracy. I think when significant percentages of Republicans say, yeah, they think there might be something to the Pizza Gate, the Q&on, the whole pedophile thing. Do they really believe that?

just kind of ticking off the box to pollsters, yeah, that's what our tribe believes. Yeah, it's a proxy for something else. I don't like the Clintons. I hate Hillary. I don't, I want to own the Lib Tards. I don't like Democrats. And so even if I took you to the comment ping pong pizzeria and go, look, there's no, there's no basement. There's no pedophile ring here.

You know, it's not like you're going to go, oh, in that case, I'll vote for Hillary. You know, you were never going to vote for Hillary, right? So it's a stand. It's a proxy. I don't like this group over here. people are saying they're doing these things, yeah, maybe there's something to it. Even if there isn't in that case, there's kind of a more general negative valence to your opinions about them.

Okay. So to the Epstein case, but let's just take, I think you're correct. I think there's a lot of people that are involved or aided. Take something like, not Epstein, the other movie mogul, Harvey Weinstein. You know, it was clear his MO was that he would get. these actresses to come up to his hotel room for a late-night meeting, right? And so it's one thing to think, well, they're a little naive to go to a hotel room, you know, by themselves with Jeffrey Epstein late at night and not think there was something

going to happen sexually. But they didn't go up there by themselves. They were brought up there by women who worked for Weinstein, like his assistant director, whatever their job titles were. and they would go, well, Harvey wants to have a meeting with you, and they would actually get in the elevator and go up to the room with these women. So why have they not been convicted or tried or even charged with something like aiding and abating a crime? That's a thing, right?

And I have no idea why that's, but clearly that was part of the kind of psychological kind of prepping for getting somebody to let their guard down. You know, the kind of the gift of fear, as it's called, you know, women. have an instinct about not trusting men about possible sexual abuse. But if you have a woman in the elevator with you going, oh, I'm going to take you up to Harvey's room and we're going to have this meeting, you're thinking, well, I guess she's going to be here. If she's indicating it's okay, it must be okay. And then, as we know now, that these women would then just quietly leave the room. They must have known these women helping him. They must have known he was up to something, you know, late at night in a hotel room with these young women actresses. I, I, I, I, have

could they not? It's a two-year point. So why is nobody that assisted Jimmy Sevel? Why are they not being charged with something? The answer is, I don't know. You're kind of making up for us, Michael. But Michael, if you take the Epstein point, Gilein, she's gone down for her crimes, good. Everybody's happy about that. The fact, but she was the conduit between The young girls, Epstein, and all the other men. And we know the other men because there was a flight log. But you are saying that he was the only guy and all these rich and powerful guys, it just doesn't ring true.

And to me, it just fuels conspiracy theories around this. Because we know as a society, as a people, we're not being told the truth. And that to me is what really allows a conspiracy theories to flourish. This is, I tracked the kind of the origins of the Pizza Gate conspiracy theory in my book that it's kind of an overlapping of several threads. Again, you know, just owning the libertards, hating the Democrats and so on. And then, you know, all this stuff about the Clintons in the 90s and they're, you know, that they had people murdered and so on.

And then Bill Clinton's, you know, preference for young women, but adult women. And then you have the Epstein thing with, you know, all these people on the jets. And Epstein's preference appeared to be young women, well, teenagers, right? Say age 14, 15 to 17. That seemed to be his window of sexual preference. And so, but that's an underage, a young teenage woman, girl. And technically that's pedophilia. So you get this, well, there was a pedophile ring going on on that jet, on that island,

with Democrats like Bill Korn. Clinton and whoever else is on that list on that plane. And so it seems like, okay, you kind of put it all together and you just use the word pedophile, which is technically correct for Epstein, but it isn't like he's having sex with five-year-olds, right? These are teenage girls. But in people's minds, you kind of throw all that together and you end up with the Pizza Gate thing. And then the Q&N drops, you know, cheese pizza, CEP with child pornography and, you know, and then the thing just takes off. That's a conspiracy theory that's not true, technically, there's no pedophile ring at this pizzeria. But it has elements to it. Oh, and there one other thing

of the drinking of the blood. There was the stories about these tech billionaires who wanted to have the blood transfusions from young children to get that adrenal hormone that supposedly leads to anti-aging and things like that. So you throw that in the mix, right? And those tech billionaires tend to be liberals. Industrial rich people lean right and tech people, rich people lean left. So something there. You kind of throw all that together and you get a conspiracy theory that technically isn't true, but the little elements of it are true. And then that's what happens in people's minds. Yeah, I think the problem is, Michael, with the case like Epstein, it was so shocking.

And there was so many high-profile people. And like I said before, there's a complete lack of transparency, which just means that, like you've talked about, you know, the pizza. get and whatever else. And of course, those ones are complete nonsense. But this feels like something far more sinister and far more real and true to life. Right. Okay. So again, back to my constructive conspiracyism, people are naturally suspicious and think there's something going on because often there is. So there's, back to pedophilia, there are pedophiles. This really does happen. It really is a crime. And what the numbers are are debated, you know, whether it's, you know, 1%, 2%, 6%, 10% of children are abused.

It's debatable, but it's not zero. And so, like, back in the 90s, we tracked a movement called the recovered memory movement, which was these are adult, mostly women, in therapy for various reasons, and being told by these therapists, well, you know, perhaps you were, oops, lost you guys. Keep gone, Michael. Keep gone. So back in the 90s, there was this recovered memory movement, which these mostly adult women in therapy were told by the therapist that maybe your problem stems from being molested as a child.

And they were going, well, I don't think I was. I don't have any memory that, oh, well, it's a repressed memory. You repressed it because it's so traumatic. And now we can help you recover that memory of being molested. And this went on and on for years. And there were men, these are fathers, grandfathers, uncles, family friends, and so on who were charged, tried, convicted, and jailed for molesting children based on only one of these recovered memories. They used hypnosis or just guided imagery or whatever in these therapy sessions. And it turned out to be complete bunk. This was totally stopped by lawsuits against these therapists for planting false memories. And the problem at the time, though, was that pedophilia is not zero. It's a real thing, right? So it was hard to tell. How do you

know if somebody was molested as a child? Well, it can't just be based on a recovered memory. You have to have some testimony from other family members who witnessed it or participated or saw it happening or whatever. And so again, this is the kind of problem we face now, you know, to what extent should we be looking for this? So here I would say that, you know, conspiracy theories about pedophilia or sexual assault, you know, should be taken seriously. They might be true just in case. But you have to look at the evidence for each conspiracy theory in particular and then break it down from there. Michael, one of the things that I think has happened, particularly in recent years, and I do connect it to the pandemic, is I think a lot of people have been persuaded that

there is an agenda to take more power away from ordinary people and to accumulate it in the hands of a few, the WF, the Great Reset, and all of that. And as someone who likes the occasional spliff. I've stayed away from it just because during the pandemic, I was tempted to sort of believe all that stuff. So I'm like, let's not look at it because I might believe it because right now it seems quite credible. But a lot of people are talking about, we were actually going to be talking to Michael Schellenberger, who's written about this, and he's a guy I really respect. I think he's a great journalist. And he's written about it and he says that there are elements of it which are true. And there's a book and the website and blah, blah. I mean, I looked on the website. It didn't seem

uber suspicious to me, but a lot of people are persuaded by all of this stuff. First of all, what do you make of all this stuff about Klaus Schwab? I mean, Klaus Schwab doesn't help himself the way he speaks and looks. It's not, he looks like a stereotypical villain. What do you make of the WF, the great reset and all of that? You mean the, like, mask mandates and things like that as a way of controlling people, setting up the population to control them, to get them to conform in other ways. as well? I think that's part of what some people roll it into, but I think the central argument,

as I understand it, is the World Economic Forum gets together and tries to influence politicians and other decision makers who have authority and power to end the system of capitalism that we have now in order to get a central government in place that controls the entire world. And these people are doing them because they want to stop climate change and change the economy. economic model so that, quote, unquote, you own nothing and you'll be happy. That's the argument. Yeah. Okay. Well, here, first of all, is that a conspiracy theory? A lot of these people just take a Greta Thurnberg type person, you know, there's no secret about what she believes, right? Or the Bernie Sanders of the world or, you know, socialists or whoever, they're open about it. You're like,

yeah, we should end capitalism. You know, it's all the kind of Antifa people. You know, we should destroy the entire system, colonialism, capitalism, white, you know, all the white, way of thinking and so on. That's not a conspiracy because they're pretty open about it. Now, are there people that meet in secret to do things? Yes, but the more specific, the target, the more likely that conspiracy theory is to be true, right? So like control, you know, world domination, taking over the world, you know, that's a pretty hard thing to do. That's a big ask. People meet in secrecy to influence specific things. My example, Volkswagen cheating the emission standards of the EU in order to make more money.

Well, we know corporations do things like that, insider trading and stuff like that. You know, when these Disney executives play golf with politicians, you know, of course they're chatting up in between the holes, you know, what policy might be passed to influence their corporate standing. You know, the whole Ron DeSantis thing about calling attention to Disney in Florida because of their woke policy that he didn't like. But in fact, it was kind of revealing that they got all these tax breaks. They didn't have to do the things that other corporations have to do. It's like, oh, yeah, well, that doesn't seem very free market capitalism either. But of course, we know Disney set this up back in the 60s and 70s by giving money to politicians and things like that. But again, it's the more specific, the target.

Have you looked into the Grey Reeser, I guess, is what I'm getting at. Not really. Let's talk about that. Give me the, give me the thing. Well, I haven't looked into that much. A lot of people keep talking about it. So what I'd love to do is if you get a chance to have a look at it, let me know what you think about it, because I think a lot of people will be curious. Well, again, if by this you mean this, we're going to reset the entire economic political system of the world.

First of all, that's not going to happen. And second, the people that are open about it, that's not a conspiracy. There are a lot of Marxists and anti-capitalists around, not a majority, and they're probably not going to get elected to do anything about it, but they're out there. And certainly they try to influence people like academics, you know, are very far left-leaning and are super critical of capitalism. But that's a little bit different than there's a secret group, Cabal, the Illuminati, or whoever, you know, the world economic form and Davos and so on. You know, their targets are very specific. This is what we want to do in order to gain some advantage for our group or our tribe, our nation, our corporation, whatever. Yes, that happens.

but I would be skeptical of a conspiracy theory that said, you know, they're meeting to take over the world or something like that because that just doesn't happen. I mean, they may be, but, you know, are they really going to do it? You know, probably not. And is it just a small fringe group of nuts, you know, or just extremists? Because you can find those in any country. You can find somebody to say, you know, you have a population of 340 million Americans. You can find somebody to say almost anything that's completely crazy. Did they represent some large percentage of the population?

Probably not. And the thing about Trump was that he's pretty extreme, but his influence was so broad in the GOP that it became a real issue. Is this the new Republican Party? And now it's looking like it's probably not going to go that direction that they were speaking here, but we'll see. Michael, and let's move on to people who believe in conspiracy theories. You always hear, oh, is there just a weed smoking conspiracy?

theorist in his basement, tends to be male, tends to be, like I said, smoking weed, someone who doesn't really interact with society is on the internet. Enough about us, man. 16 hours a day. That's funny. That's you guys. Oh, it's you. Yeah.

I mean, well, I mean, that summed up pretty much everyone during the pandemic. But is that true or is that a misnomer? No, it's a complete misnomer. I debunk that in the first chapter of the book. There's tons of evidence now. there's a lot of social scientists who research this, lots of polling data, and so forth. Everybody believes at least one conspiracy theory. And again, back to my constructive conspiracism.

And my argument is that it's rational to believe conspiracy theories because enough of them are true. It pays to air on the side of caution just in case. As they say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. Sometimes they are after you, right? So we know from lots of surveys that people that believe various conspiracy theories, even a lot of them. are not these whack-a-doodle tinfoil hat wearing people living in their parents' basement. They are regular people. We know that Q&on has been followed by a lot of people that have careers, jobs, marriages, families, children.

They keep gas of the tank, money in the bank. They take their kids at school. Every morning they go to work. They have a career, a job, so on. And then they show up on January 6th to take over the U.S. government. Like, what? You know, why? Because they really believed it.

And because the boss told them so. And, you know, so they, again, but those people, we now know who all, All of them were pretty much everybody who was there. These are normal people. And if you look at any of the major conspiracy theories and who embraces it, most of it is just regular people. So one of the things I'm trying to do in the book is to dispel the myth of that conspiracy theory should be a pejorative. Oh, that's just a crazy conspiracy theory. That's a post-World War II phenomenon.

And there's theories about that, that the CIA planted this idea or the FBI after the JFK assassination. Let's make conspiracy theories to sound like a crazy thing so we can cover our tracks of the conspiracy theory that JFK was assassinated by the CIA or whoever. So there's some debates about that. But whatever the cause of that, before World War II, the idea of conspiracy theories was completely normal. You know, people like Churchill and Roosevelt, leaders of the free world and so on, all embrace conspiracy theories. Again, the Catholics are doing this, the Jews are doing that. The Mormons are influencing our elections and so on. That was pretty normal part of the regular conversation, not a pejorative at all.

So I'm trying to get back to that because, again, if you just go through some of the conspiracies I cover in the book, you know, the CIA MK Ultra Program of dosing American citizens without their knowledge or consent with psychoactive drugs. What? You know, our Operation Paperclip where we're hiring these Nazi scientists to build weapons of mass destruction for us while some of their colleagues are being put on in the docket at Nuremberg and executed for war crimes doing the same thing, right? or the Project Cointel Pro, the counterintelligence program by the FBI, to infiltrate civil rights groups like the Black Panthers and the American Indian movement and feminist groups and so on, with plants to make them look bad, to do stupid things, to do illegal things so that they could be busted by the FBI, all the way up to the point of tape recording Martin Luther King Jr.'s sex capades in hotel rooms,

and then blackmailing him with a letter. We have the letter. signed off by J. Edgar Hoover himself, the head of the FBI, you know, that if you don't kill yourself or take yourself out of the civil rights movement, we're going to expose these tapes to the public. And it's astonishing the things that our government is doing. CIA assassinations of foreign leaders. This was a thing for decades. You know, the attempts to kill Castro are, you know, famous, right? dozens of attempts to kill Castro. And Che Guevara, the CIA assassinated him in Bolivia, in 1968.

That was our government. So, you know, when we rail about Putin having people assassinated, yeah, that's bad. But our government has done things like that. So when people say, you know what, I don't really trust the U.S. government. I don't trust the CDC. I don't trust the CIA, the FBI. I say, I understand there's good reasons why you shouldn't. All right, Michael, you've made a conspiracy theory out of me there.

But I was curious, is there any research which indicates who or why is in people are interested in conspiracy theory? What kind of person? What is it that makes somebody more credulous of them than not? And what is it about believing in them that people like or want or need or whatever? Sure. There's a lot of research I summarize in the book of like race, for example, is a predictor of what kind of conspiracy theory you embrace. White Americans are more likely to think the U.S. government is conspiring to take away. guns. Black Americans are more likely to think that the government is conspiring to plant crack cocaine in inner cities or or invented AIDS to decimate black populations and so on because of the Tuskegee

experiments. Men and women are, there's no difference on gender or sex of, you know, more likely that's a whole other kind of one. That's a whole other, yes. Let's not go there. But these kinds things do direct people's attention to certain conspiracy theories, they're more likely to embrace, but not general conspiracism. There's no one group that's more paranoid than the other. There are individual variations in how, say, openness, high in openness to experience means you're open to new ideas. So you're more likely to believe a lot of conspiracy theories, whether or not they're true. Education attenuates conspiracism somewhat. It's about 40% of people with a high school diploma, embrace conspiracy theories, about 20% of people with postgraduate degrees, embrace conspiracy

theories. So that's, you know, that's a huge improvement in rational thinking from college education. But that one in five Americans with postgraduate degrees, we're talking PhDs, MDs, law degrees, and so on, believe conspiracy theories, a lot of them tells us, okay, there's something else going on here. It's not just being smart and rational and educated can protect you from conspiracyism. And again, the reason I'm arguing is because it is rational to believe conspiracy theories because enough of them are true that we should be suspicious of powerful groups, rich people. You know, it's like even Obama, you know, Mr. Transparency, very smart, educated, rational. I really liked him. And then, you know, he gets in there and all of a sudden, you know,

the NSA program was ramped up. Homeland Security is ramped up. We're surveilling the American public, not just metadata, but actually surveilling, people's calls and so on, even tracking Angela Merkel's cell phone call. Our government, under Obama, not just Bush, but under Obama. You know, he's going to close Gitmo. Didn't happen. Right? I mean, just think about that. We have prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and Cuba that are not protected by the constitution or our legitimate legal system. They've been there 20 plus years without a trial. I mean, what? Our government's doing this. So no wonder, you know, that people are suspicious.

There's something happens when people get into power. I don't know what it is. It's like all of a sudden you start thinking differently. And I think they take you in the back room and they go, okay, here's what's really going on in the world. Oh, I was going to pull the troops out. Yeah, yeah, no, you're not doing that. Yeah, no, I can't do that.

Yeah. So, sorry, I was going to ask if there's something, I noticed that among people who believe, particularly these conspiracy theories or, you know, whatever you want to call them, these ideas about, I think at the core of them, there's a certain self-victimhood to them. There is, you know, we are the oppressed and the elites, these evil cabal of elites, have got together to take away even more of our rights and they're going to take our money and they're going to take our houses and you can't have a hamburger anymore and you can't

drive a car and and look maybe maybe that they've got legitimate concerns but it seems to me when I talk to these people and I listen to the way they talk and I hear the stuff that they say I get the sense that there's a part of them that actually really enjoys this idea there's a sort of there's a kind of emotional reward to being this powerless person against whom the world is conspired have you any thoughts on that yeah so that's what's known in conspiracy theory circles. Well, among scholars who study conspiracy theories, calls conspiracy theories are for losers. That is, whoever loses an election thinks the other side was up to no good, some shenanigans or fraud or whatever. Every political party that's

lost an election thinks that for a while. What's different now is that, you know, Trump kept it going. Even after he won in 2016, he still thought there was fraud. It's like, what, dude, you won. You're supposed to stop talking about conspiracy theories now. It's the Democrats that are supposed to be talking about conspiracy theories. And they did. And they did. They did. Oh, absolutely. You know, Russian collusion and all that, much of which did not pan out like the Democrats thought. Or in previous elections, you know, like in Bush, both 2000 with the Florida hanging Chad issue with Al Gore. And then in 2004, there were conspiracy theories from the Democrats that Bush. There was some shenanigans. And I think in Ohio and Iowa, or might have been one of the other Midwest states where there was supposedly election fraud going on that never panned out for the Democrats, right? So it's not fair to say, well, Republicans are more likely to be conspirator. No, Democrats are just as much. Trump's his own special case, I think.

But that's pretty normal. We know that people, whoever falls out of power, whoever does not have as much money, control power, thinks there's other, like in corporations, people on the bottom are more conspiratorial about the people at the top. People at the top usually don't have as much control and power as the people in the bottom think that they do. and then just extrapolate that out to the Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or George Soros of the world, Elon Musk now, that somehow there's something going on there. How'd they get that money? It's so much money. It seems unfair.

And now they're wielding all that influence. Well, they probably are to a certain extent, right? And so it's reasonable. It's rational to be a little skeptical of that. It's really interesting what we're talking about, and particularly because a moment you said, about, you know, the loser always believes there's a conspiracy theory. I've been watching the football, or as you call it, incorrectly,

the Soccer World Cup. And every loser, every losing team, at least two or three people have come out, blamed the referee and said the referee is biased, said the referee is Bob. You know, so I think it's just human nature really that we need to blame

someone for our own failings. Yeah, there's studies on this of showing subjects, videos of a football game or whatever. and some of the subjects are favor of one team, other subjects are in favor of the other team. And they both see like the same foul or the same

incident that the referee calls on. And the one side thinks, oh, it was a totally legitimate call. And the other side thinks, oh, the ref is blind or he's biased or whatever. It happens every time. That's totally tribalism. That's just tribal conspiracism. Completely normal. Michael, is there a correlation between drug-taking and conspiracy theories?

And believing in them? I have not seen any research on that. I guess it would depend on the kind of drugs. Well, right. If you talk about openness to experience, I imagine drugs which increase your openness to new experiences, would increase your credulity for conspiracy things. That would make sense, wouldn't that?

I wonder which ones, would cannabis do that? Certainly alcohol is a disinhibitory drug, so people are more susceptible to, well, everything, which is why you shouldn't make decisions when you've been drinking. Probably true for a lot of drugs, I would suspect. Yeah. Well, Michael, it's been a fascinating chat. Thank you so much for coming back.

As you know, we're going to ask you a couple of questions from our local supporters that only they will get to see. But as always, we've got one final question for you, which is what is the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Oh, well, we, conspiracyism, I think, again, is an important topic. more mainstream than anyone, I think, realized. I guess you're going to talk about something else. I really think this whole free speech issue is going to never end because it's a hard problem to solve. It's always open. I know you had our mutual friend Sam Harris on.

Your show on that erupted when he talked about censoring the Hunter Biden laptop. I certainly disagree with that. Put it all out there and let everybody have their say. But I do understand there's an argument to be made, right? when there's harm that's going to be done and you kind of in a utilitarian way, you do that calculus. I try to see it from the other person's perspective. I see where Sam's coming from. I disagree with it. But I thought the heap of hate on his shoulders was a little much for that. You know, people have different positions. There are legitimate arguments to be made on both sides. You know,

I pick one side openness to free speech more than others maybe. But, you know, there's an argument to be made on the other side. Anyway, I just was going to comment on that. I enjoyed your show with Sam on that issue. But it's an open debate, I think, to what extent we should just open up the barriers and let everybody have their say. Well, we invited Sam back on to talk about why he left Twitter and so on, but he didn't want to do it this time. But nonetheless, you're right, we certainly weren't happy with the fact that he got so much hate. And it's the last thing we want for someone to come on our show and then end up being attacked in that way. Even if, whether we agree or disagree.

In this case, I think we're much more aligned with your way of thinking about it. Anyway, Michael, the book is called Conspiracy. Where can people get it? Where can people find you online? So skeptic.com is my website, and you can order autograph books there. Or you just go to Amazon or any bookstore carries it. And Michaelshirmer.com is my personal website and my show, Michael Shermer Show. You can find it all at Skeptic.

And I've been a guest on it, so it must be good. Michael, thank you. Thanks so much for coming on and thank you guys for watching and listening. We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or a show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. Take care and see you soon, guys. And is there anything, any crazy conspiracy theory that you did believe that later turned out not to be true?