Nov. 13, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| So the subtitle of the book, Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, my point is that people that believe conspiracy theories are not tinfoil hat idiots. | ||
| They're me and you. | ||
| Everybody, surveys show everybody believes at least one conspiracy theory. | ||
| And one reason for that is my constructive conspiracism. | ||
| A lot of them are true. | ||
| So it pays to be a little constructively paranoid, just in case. | ||
|
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I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the publisher of Skeptic Magazine, a presidential fellow | |
| at Chapman University, the host of the Michael Shermer Show and author of the new book, I've got it right here | ||
| in my hand, Conspiracy, Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, My Concerns. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and I'm joined by my friend, Dr. David Ruben. | ||
| And we're gonna talk about the book, The Conspiracy, Why the Rational Believe | ||
| the Irrational, My Concerns. | ||
| And we're gonna talk about the book, Michael Shermer, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| All right, nice to see you, Dave. | ||
| Nice to be back. | ||
| It's good to see you, my friend. | ||
| Now, before I do anything else here, you have one of the largest stacks of books I've ever seen behind you. | ||
| Is this some kind of ploy, like if there's an earthquake or something, books crash on you, clip goes viral? | ||
| It's very clever, very clever. | ||
| I'm killed by a conspiracy. | ||
| By a plethora of conspiracies, yes. | ||
| Crushed by your own conspiracy book, that would be odd. | ||
| It is good to see you, my friend. | ||
| We did about 30 seconds before we started recording here, but you have been on this show probably a dozen times in one incarnation or another. | ||
| And you also have written 400 billion books. | ||
| I did the math on that. | ||
| Now, what is this? | ||
| This is like 16, 18 for you? | ||
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What is it? | |
| 15th book. | ||
| Yeah, first one was First World Book, as Mr. Skeptic was why people believe weird things, 1997. | ||
| So I average, you know, like two a year, something like that. | ||
| This, although this conspiracy, this is last real book was 2018, heaven's honors. | ||
| So it takes me, you know, three to four years really on average. | ||
| Was this, was this a little different? | ||
| I mean, a lot, your books, obviously they're, they're dense and thoughtful and interesting. | ||
| And one of the things that I always credit you for is you, you don't pretend you made up every idea. | ||
| You credit people accordingly and you call back to people and all sorts of things, but there's a lot of research. | ||
| In this book, you had to dive into a lot of stuff. | ||
| Does that make it more fun or less fun to write a book where you're unpacking and going across all sorts of mediums to figure out who believes what and why they believe it? | ||
| I do like to cite authors that actually do the work. | ||
| Unlike some authors, whom I won't name, not you, there's some academics that are not especially generous about recognizing where they got that research. | ||
| There's actually a huge body of Literature on conspiracies and conspiracy theories, why people believe them, sociology of it, social psych, cognitive psych, you know, anthropology of beliefs, and so on. | ||
| There's a lot in there. | ||
| So I summarize all that, but then try to push the frontiers a little bit with some of my own ideas. | ||
| I constructed a three-part tripartite, you might call it, or three-legged stool of conspiracism, proxy conspiracism, tribal conspiracism, and constructive conspiracism. | ||
| So there's kind of an overarching theoretical model that holds together all the different parts up. | ||
| While most of the details of course are other people's research. | ||
| I kind of put it all together in an integrative whole under that rubric. | ||
| Yeah, and I really liked how you did that. | ||
| So as you said, there's sort of three sections to the book, a prologue that leads into it, but then each one sort of leads into the next one. | ||
| So I want to get into some of that, but broadly speaking, one of the questions I get the most these days, if I do a public event or if I'm doing a Q&A online or whatever, is people say to me, where do you get your news? | ||
| How do you know what to believe? | ||
| And I find it's getting increasingly more difficult to answer that. | ||
| You know, we're all going into our little ideological echo chambers. | ||
| I do my best to not be in there all the time, but it's getting tough for everybody. | ||
| And as I often say, if you're watching MSNBC, you basically live in a different world as the Fox News person. | ||
| And I think everyone right now in a modern sense is struggling with this. | ||
| So the book, for that reason, feels very relevant because I think everyone's going through some version of a conspiracy theory to some extent. | ||
| Yeah, well, so here's one solution. | ||
| I actually get print newspapers every day. | ||
| I get the New York Times or say, oh, where's my Wall Street Journal? | ||
| Here's my Wall Street. | ||
| I got my Wall Street Journal. | ||
| Oh, here it is. | ||
| And the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| So I add them up and divide by two to get the truth. | ||
| So in my estimation, the Wall Street Journal would be far more factual than the New York Times, which I think has gone really off the deep end. | ||
| As you know, Barry Weiss, they were so out of control that Barry Weiss as a liberal felt she couldn't even stay there anymore. | ||
| So when you pick up the New York Times, are you basically going, all right, they screwed this one up, ah, that's a deflection, this is a confusion, et cetera, et cetera? | ||
| Well, the Wall Street Journal, you know, separating the opinion section from the news section, | ||
| you know, they're both biased in each direction that we all know about. | ||
| And that's true for any of the news sources you might wanna name, you have to separate the, | ||
| like just even Fox News, if you just take the daytime news reporters, | ||
| they're very different from the evening, more like entertainers. | ||
| So I think if you know what you're looking at, but my point is you can't rely on any one source. | ||
| You have to go to multiple sources, including online sources and just evaluate them. | ||
| And there are sites that evaluate the bias, liberal or conservative bias of different media sources. | ||
| You just have to do that, you know, I don't trust so much anymore AP Associated Press I feel is fairly objective about how they present things. | ||
| No one's completely unbiased of course, but some multiple sources I mean in that now there's so many online and Really, you just have to kind of do a little bit of your own fact-checking. | ||
| Well, isn't that almost one of the biggest problems we have in this technological adolescence that we're in? | ||
| That the average person, that even if they want to stay informed on current events, what's going on in the world, the economy, whatever it might be, they don't have the time. | ||
| To go, OK, I'm going to read the Times and the Wall Street Journal and I'll see what they're saying on Fox and MSNBC. | ||
| And then they just kind of put their hands up and they and they check out. | ||
| I think I think we're getting a lot of that, actually. | ||
| So the subtitle of the book, Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. | ||
| My point is that people that believe conspiracy theories are not tinfoil hat idiots. | ||
| They're me and you. | ||
| Everybody, surveys show everybody believes at least one conspiracy theory. | ||
| And one reason for that is my constructive conspiracism. | ||
| A lot of them are true. | ||
| So, it pays to be a little constructively paranoid, just in case. | ||
| So, for the most part, most people are rational about their daily lives. | ||
| You know, they get the kids off to school, they hold jobs, you know, they keep gas in the tank and food in the fridge and they have a social life and they're just normal. | ||
| About things that they could do something about now if you take some of the big conspiracy theories like the rigged election say of 2020 I How would I check that to know what's going on? | ||
| I you have to rely on Sources that have the resources and access to check back check things like that I wouldn't even know to call in Ohio or Georgia or Arizona to ask, you know What about that truck that pulled up at 3 in the morning because that grainy video was kind of suspicious, you know So here we rely on people that we should trust and we have traditionally, maybe not so much anymore. | ||
| But for me, whatever questions I had were put to rest when Attorney General Bill Barr said, well, you know, we had the entire resources, the Department of Justice, and we looked into it. | ||
| And we looked here, and we checked that, and so on and so forth, didn't find anything. | ||
| It's like, okay, well, end of story, as far as I was concerned. | ||
| Now, Senator- What do you say to the people that will go, well, Bill Barr is just part of the machine that would produce that sort of lie? | ||
| Because that, of course, as you know, you're the expert in this. | ||
| I mean, conspiracies, they jump from one sort of seeming dead end to a new place, and then a new place, and a new place, and a new place. | ||
| So what do you say? | ||
| Well, what I say is, well, then who do you trust? | ||
| What is your source? | ||
| You know, if you don't trust the entire Department of Justice, if you don't trust the Trump-appointed Attorney General, or all the Trump-appointed judges in the cases that he brought before the courts, and so on, who would you trust? | ||
| And why would you trust somebody else if not them? | ||
| I like quoting Christopher Hitchens when he says, Which he got from somebody else, which was that if you hear the Pope say he believes in God today, you think, well, the Pope's doing his job again today. | ||
| It's what he's supposed to do. | ||
| But if you hear the Pope say, you know, I'm beginning to have some doubts about God's existence, you think, huh, he might be onto something, right? | ||
| So when somebody on your team or somebody you trust says something that you can pretty much count on, if Bill Barr said, hey, I found some suspicion, well, of course he's a Trump-appointed Republican. | ||
| Maybe we need another source. | ||
| But if he says, If he would be motivated to find fraud, and he didn't, then to me that ups the probability that there was no fraud in the election. | ||
| That's just kind of how to think about that kind of conspiracy theory. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So since we're talking about the election, and I do think so much of what we now talk about related to fake news and this confusion has to do with the election. | ||
| What would you say about the four years that Trump was president when basically half of the media or all of the mainstream media, in essence, was saying either he was a Russian plant or that that election was illegitimate or stolen? | ||
| And then the second those people were on the other side, now we have Biden as president. | ||
| They say you can't question anything. | ||
| And you're going to be booted off Twitter and YouTube and everywhere else if you do. | ||
| That's pretty predictable. | ||
| Everybody does that. | ||
| If you go back in time decades, pretty much every losing side in a presidential election or even congressional races and senatorial races, the losing side thinks the other side did something. | ||
| There was some shenanigans or some, and then they usually drop it after a few months and focus on the next election or whatever. | ||
| So what's unusual this time is that, you know, Trump continues with the conspiracy theory. | ||
| But let's not blame Republicans, because Democrats do this also. | ||
| It's pretty common because, again, it's so complex. | ||
| There's so many moving parts in a national election. | ||
| No one has access to all the information. | ||
| So there's always going to be some anomalies. | ||
| And then people go anomaly hunting, as we call it. | ||
| And then you can always find them, no matter what. | ||
| Again, that blurry video of the truck that pulled up at 3. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| OK, he had a box. | ||
| There's always something like that. | ||
| Part of the problem is the lack of trust. | ||
| We've always had trust in our systems that, for the most part, they work pretty well. | ||
| But again, with Trump, I've been pretty critical of Trump, particularly in that last year. | ||
| But pretty much everything else he did was pretty standard Republican stuff. | ||
| He's lowering taxes, he's helping rich people get richer, he's tightening up the borders, foreign policy, and so on. | ||
| That's his job, like the Pope. | ||
| That's his job. | ||
| That's what he's supposed to do. | ||
| You know, so it's only when like when George H.W. | ||
| Bush said, read my lips, no new taxes. | ||
| Then he raised taxes like what? | ||
| You're a Republican. | ||
| You're not supposed to do that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So we have expectations. | ||
| And Trump, you know, deregulation of the economy. | ||
| That was pretty standard Republican stuff. | ||
| And Biden's doing what Democrats do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, so. | ||
| It's not fair to criticize either one as being extremist when most of the policies they're doing is pretty standard. | ||
| What do you think, since you mentioned trust, what do you think we can do, or not we, I suppose, whatever mainstream institutions that still exist at this point, and it's hard to tell to what degree they exist anymore, who's watching these things, how much influence do they have, how could they gain back trust? | ||
| I think in most cases, if you were to take, say, the New York Times or CNN, I don't think there's a way back now. | ||
| I think they've gone so all in on so much confusion and been so exposed as partisan players that I don't know that they can come back from that. | ||
| And maybe they shouldn't. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, OK, so but I'd say Fox News is has the same problem. | ||
| You know, they've kind of dialed into a business model of, you know, ramping up the extremism on their side. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, the Russian you mentioned, you know, Russiangate and all that stuff, all those accusations against Trump. | ||
| You know, most of which did not pan out. | ||
| Those were conspiracy theories. | ||
| You know, we think this happened and it turned out the Mueller report and so on. | ||
| Well, OK, that was kind of a nothing burger. | ||
| That doesn't help, right? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So that if you actually get something, it's like, yeah, well, you cried wolf so many times. | ||
| So that's not a problem. | ||
| So the larger problem, I see it as an erosion of trust across the board. | ||
| Scientists used to be trusted. | ||
| The CDC used to be trusted. | ||
| Teachers, professors, the academy used to be, you know, high in In trust, not anymore. | ||
| My last chapter had to rebuild trust. | ||
| That's a hard problem. | ||
| But I sign on with Jonathan Rauch's The Constitution of Knowledge. | ||
| I think you had Jonathan on your show. | ||
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We talked briefly once. | |
| But this kind of commitment to, like in journalism, fact-checking. | ||
| In science, peer review. | ||
| In the judicial system, a fair confrontational trial between two attorneys to get to the truth. | ||
| Uh, jury of your peers and so on. | ||
| So there's, you know, here's kind of the conservative argument for maintaining institutions that have been around for decades or centuries. | ||
| Uh, and the reason we keep them is because they work. | ||
| We've been tweaking them for centuries, the legal system, the criminal justice system, journalism really, um, maybe a century now they've had, you know, standards, actual standards, fact checking and editors and things like that. | ||
| You know, we rely on that, and we just have to keep pushing back. | ||
| It's just not cool to make assertions without any evidence at all. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's interesting, I'm guessing. | ||
| I think you either read, well, you certainly read it or maybe wrote a review of it even in Jordan Peterson's last book, In Twelve More Rules. | ||
| I think the first of the new set of rules, you know, is in essence, you got to be careful when you're burning down institutions because you don't know what will come on the other side. | ||
| And I think that's kind of where we're at right now. | ||
| We don't trust the old institutions, but we don't know exactly what the new institutions are. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Well, that's, that's classic Burkean conservatism. | ||
| Edmund Burke defended the US Revolution, sorry, the Revolutionary War, but not the French Revolution. | ||
| And he was right, you know, because they tore down everything. | ||
| Let's just start over. | ||
| All the way down to a new calendar system, you know, and new titles and new days of the week. | ||
| Everything's going to be different. | ||
| And that didn't pan out so well. | ||
| So, and again, you know, certain institutions have been around, that have been around for a long time, and they've been tweaked here and there to be more efficient. | ||
| And fair and just and so on. | ||
| We should keep that we should not throw them overthrow them too easily. | ||
| And you mentioned you mentioned science before. | ||
| And as a man of science and a man who likes facts, having been through two years of covid and you are in California, which I fled because of covid and and lockdowns and masks and injections, you know, mandated injections, all of these things that I felt had nothing to do With science, and I think in, or virtually nothing to do with science, or an abuse of science, let's say. | ||
| How shaky do you think the scientific world is right now? | ||
| I mean, Fauci, just in the last couple days, saying, oh, I was never for lockdowns. | ||
| And then it's like, we're playing videos on the show where he's calling for lockdowns a year ago. | ||
| I remember when he said, when you criticize me, I am the science. | ||
| You're criticizing science. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's, it's been a problem for the reputation of science, I guess, because the CDC says one thing and then changes his mind, or Fauci says, you know, no mask, then mask, then no mask. | ||
| But in a way, okay, let's just step aside from particular individuals like Fauci and just say, in general, if you don't know what's going on, and we didn't, you know, you know, it was January 2020 to March is when we were kind of realizing, okay, there's something big happening here. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| And it took a long time to figure out what's the right thing to do. | ||
| There's so much uncertainty and so much unpredictability in complex systems like the human body of, you know, why do some people who get the virus who double vax, boosted, they lead clean, healthy lives, you know, they're isolated, masked, and they get it anyway. | ||
| And I know people that didn't do anything. | ||
| They didn't change their life at all. | ||
| Never wore a mask, never got, and they get it. | ||
| Nothing happens, right? | ||
| It's like, okay. | ||
| Cause there's variation, you know, the body's a complex system and people respond differently. | ||
| And so it's, these are on average recommendations. | ||
| And I try to be sympathetic by putting myself in somebody, if I was a public policy person, if I was the head of a health Institute or I was the mayor of the city of LA say, or governor of California, and they stick a microphone in your face and go, okay, what do we do? | ||
| So here you have kind of a type 1, type 2 error problem, signal detection problem. | ||
| If I say business as usual and it turns out it's like Ebola or AIDS. | ||
| Remember AIDS was a hundred percent fatal at first. | ||
| What if it turns out like that, you know, and I really screwed up and it's on me. | ||
| So they're more likely to err on the other side. | ||
| Like let's err on the side of making a type 1 error. | ||
| Assume it's going to be terrible. | ||
| And if it isn't, well, we got lucky. | ||
| Of course, they're not calculating into the equation the effects of lockdown, isolation, masks, school closes, economic effects and so on, which I think we're years away from knowing what the full effects will be. | ||
| So far, it looks like it has damaged our economy and other things. | ||
| School kids are behind and social attitudes about youngsters and how they interact with each other. | ||
| You know, there's some studies coming out now showing, you know, these kids just coming into college now. | ||
| I have freshmen myself. | ||
| You know, they're very different than they were a few years ago. | ||
| It's hard to say what the cause is, but social isolation during COVID might be one. | ||
| Anyway, those are the kinds. | ||
| Wait, I'm curious, though. | ||
| How are you seeing that manifested in your students now from, say, five years ago? | ||
| Super quiet. | ||
| Very, very reticent to say anything. | ||
| There may be some cancel culture effects there. | ||
| You know, people, because I bring up abortion, like we just did an issue on abortion. | ||
| So, you know, pro-life, pro-choice. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Kids, let's talk about it, and they're afraid to say anything. | ||
| It's like, how can you not have an opinion? | ||
| And you're a Chapman, which is a great defender of free speech, one of the few universities that is. | ||
| Yeah, so here this is reflecting more of a bottom-up kind of cultural shift, I think. | ||
| Maybe they're just shy, I don't know. | ||
| Yesterday, one of my student TED Talks was on attractiveness, lookism. | ||
| Why is it that good-looking people get more benefits than others? | ||
| All right, you've got to have an opinion on this, right? | ||
| Here's Brad Pitt. | ||
| That's so unfair! | ||
| What are you going to do about Brad Pitt? | ||
| And they're looking around like, I don't want to say anything. | ||
| I'm like, oh, come on, man. | ||
| So it could be some of that. | ||
| We do know there's an uptick in depression and cutting, suicidal ideation. | ||
| Particularly amongst girls. | ||
| Is it social media? | ||
| Is it Facebook? | ||
| Is it social isolation during COVID? | ||
| There's different factors we don't know yet, but there are some effects to that. | ||
| I'm curious, how much of this, say, related to COVID was people that maybe weren't qualified, or in some ways were overqualified to give information, giving information? | ||
| So an example I would use is right when the pandemic happened, I had a bunch of experts on, people that are fairly well-known, And they were talking about how to wash your bags when you leave the grocery store and perfectly, you know, put your mask on this way and talking about social distancing, a phrase that no one had really uttered before. | ||
| And all of these, you know, all of these strange things and lockdowns, which really had never been done before at scale and were based on basically some wonky paper that never meant anything. | ||
| But everyone just started saying the same thing. | ||
| Then when we find out it doesn't work, everyone just looks at the expert class and goes, and I'm not talking about the Fauci's or even the CDC's, I'm just talking about the general people who are the tastemakers. | ||
| Everyone just looks at them and is like, you guys just screwed us all terribly. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Right, so whenever there's uncertainty about the cause of something, say autism. | ||
| You know, one reason vaccines got associated with autism is because we don't know the cause of autism. | ||
| We still don't. | ||
| Uh, there's probably multiple causes, some genetic predispositions, who knows, you know, in the womb chemistry, I don't know, you know, we don't know. | ||
| But so that anything that's even loosely associated then gets affiliated as a causal vector. | ||
| And I think we see a lot of that in pandemics like this where you just don't know. | ||
| Remember when AIDS first came online, I mean, there was like panic. | ||
| Oh, you shouldn't go in the swimming pool. | ||
| I remember when Greg Louganis cut his head on the diving board and Barbara Walters was doing this private one-on-one interview with him. | ||
| And he said, talked about this. | ||
| He's, oh, my God, Greg, you went in the pool? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Because at the time, it's like, oh, it could spread through water, the air. | ||
| Don't get on a bus with an AIDS patient. | ||
| You know, it's a gay disease, all this crazy stuff. | ||
| There was conspiracy theories about it. | ||
| The black community that the CIA was up to something with AIDS. | ||
| And, you know, but these are not completely crazy. | ||
| This is under my rubric of constructive conspiracism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| You know, because the Tuskegee experiments where they, you know, withheld treatments to African-Americans with syphilis and other shenanigans that the CIA and the FBI have done to infiltrate black activist groups to to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. | ||
| and threatened if he doesn't kill himself, they're going to expose They made sex tapes of him in hotel rooms with women and said, we're going to play these publicly if you don't kill him. | ||
| This is our government did this. | ||
| So it's not completely crazy for people who, you know, I don't trust the government. | ||
| It's like, yeah, OK, I understand. | ||
| So in essence, by the end of reading this, most people will be a little more libertarian, perhaps. | ||
| Because you do go into several other examples of that, about how governments have been doing this. | ||
| Oh yes, yes, right. | ||
| MKUltra, CIA dosing US citizens with LSD, just to see what would happen. | ||
| They actually set up in brothels. | ||
| You know, they had these Johns coming and they would dose him with LSD and then watch film them having sex with prostitutes. | ||
| Let's see what happens here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It was all under this kind of larger plan that, you know, you remember the missile gap. | ||
| Well, this is the the mind control gap. | ||
| You know, the Chinese and the Russians and the North Koreans are ahead of us on mind control drugs. | ||
| So we got to do experiments on this. | ||
| So, again, no congressional approval. | ||
| People didn't know about it. | ||
| President didn't even know about it. | ||
| You know, this is just like rogue. | ||
| Factions in the in the security state doing this. | ||
| So when people talk about the deep state, there's people behind the scenes doing things. | ||
| Well, historically, that has happened, right? | ||
| That's just MKUltra. | ||
| That's just one. | ||
| this counterintelligence program, this COINTELPRO, was another, let's plant some people | ||
| in these social justice groups, like the Black Panthers, AIM, | ||
| the American Indian Movement, feminist groups, and so on, and just to make them look bad, | ||
| or essentially create a false flag operation. | ||
| Let's send in one of our guys, they'll do something really stupid. | ||
| And then this will get covered in the media, and then they'll look bad. | ||
| I mean, this is like, what, our government does this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think it's odd that these things are not discussed more? | ||
| I mean, you go into all of these things in the book, but, you know, fringe internet people talk about these things. | ||
| Guys that run Skeptic Magazine talk about these things. | ||
| But, you know, in a time where we've watched the institutions fail, people would be wise to be a bit more skeptical about the information they're being fed. | ||
| Yeah, you should be. | ||
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Right. | |
| So I think of it as a signal detection problem. | ||
| That is the signals you're getting in versus the noise. | ||
| You know, is it a real pattern or is it not? | ||
| That is the pattern you think is a conspiracy theory that represents a real conspiracy. | ||
| Is that true or not? | ||
| And so my argument is that, well, we it's probably better to err on the side of being trigger happy, like assume it's real when it's not. | ||
| Because that's a less costly mistake to make than miss the real conspiracy. | ||
| Somebody in your company is conspiring to hold you down, or some other company is conspiring against your company, or whatever. | ||
| Just governments do these things all the time. | ||
| Just look at what the CIA did in rigged elections. | ||
| Well, the CIA used to try to rig elections in South American countries to favor fascist dictators over communist dictators, because they were friendlier to American business interests in those countries. | ||
| And, you know, and again, this was all under the radar. | ||
| No one knew about it until decades later when it was exposed. | ||
| And so that's that constructive conspiracism. | ||
| You should be- It's almost as if things might be going on now that we don't know exactly what's happening. | ||
| I have no doubt this is the case, right? | ||
| And we won't know for another 20 years, somebody does a Freedom of Information Act, you know, FOIA request and finds out, oh my God, in 2022, you know what the CDC or whoever was up to? | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| No, I didn't know that. | ||
| Where do you think social media, or how do you think social media plays a part in all of this? | ||
| You know, one of the things, just in terms of the way the internet's structured that I always think about is, I remember the internet when it started, or, you know, started on basic AOL or Prodigy or something. | ||
| You go to a website, you get to the bottom of the page, and that was it. | ||
| Meaning you could scroll for a certain period of time, then it would stop. | ||
| Then we got infinite scroll. | ||
| So more and more and more kept coming. | ||
| If you're on Twitter, you can go more and more and more. | ||
| That rabbit hole is endless now. | ||
| And I think a lot of that probably also feeds a certain part of the brain that would lead people to some of these ideas. | ||
| Yeah, it does. | ||
| I mean, the history of conspiracism, there's always been conspiracy theories, nothing new there. | ||
| But the spread of them in real time and the depth that people could go, I talk about in the book of the JFK conspiracy theorists. | ||
| Back in the 60s and 70s, they're just meeting in little hotel conference rooms with two dozen people, and they have their little mimeographed newsletters that they mail out. | ||
| And so not very many people knew about this or were into it. | ||
| Now you can reach millions of people instantly in real time. | ||
| And so the spread is more rapid, the kind of going down the rabbit hole, the siloing off of people into these Communities that it's hard to penetrate. | ||
| That's the harder part. | ||
| Is it, do you think, also easier to debunk some of these things because of the speed of information? | ||
| Just as fast as it can spread, it can also be debunked that much more quickly? | ||
| Yeah, to me, that's the only solution is that because I'm not in favor of censorship or kicking people off of social media because they said the wrong thing. | ||
| This doesn't help for two reasons. | ||
| One, you might be wrong and that guy that you just kicked off, he might be right. | ||
| No one's omniscient. | ||
| How do you know? | ||
| Uh, John Stuart Mill, you know, it's like if he knows only his own position, doesn't even know that. | ||
| So it's good to listen to these other people. | ||
| Uh, but, and then second, if you kick somebody off, you cancel culture and so on. | ||
| Then outsiders observing this will go, I wonder if that guy has something to say. | ||
| And because they're making such a big deal about it, right? | ||
| Banned in Boston. | ||
| Ooh, I want to read those banned books. | ||
| And so, you know, when someone like Joe Rogan has on Robert Malone to talk about vaccines and cardio issues, you know, everybody made a big stink about that. | ||
| It's like, well, first of all, Joe's not 60 minutes where he has to have guests on each side or whatever. | ||
| It's not what he does. | ||
| You know that going in. | ||
| But if you make a big deal about it, now everyone wants to know, well, who is this Robert Malone guy? | ||
| And what is his argument? | ||
| Because no one seems to debunk it. | ||
| They just say, oh, it was bad he had him on. | ||
| Well, OK, what is the problem? | ||
| Somebody should say, here's the argument and here's the response. | ||
| And what's so interesting about that is, if you remember, so he has Dr. Malone on, who had, I think, if I'm not mistaken, more patents on mRNA technology than anybody. | ||
| I mean, it's not like this guy's a kook, right? | ||
| So he has him on. | ||
| The media goes crazy about it because he's talking about ivermectin and all of these things. | ||
| And then you remember what happened about four days later, where suddenly we had a week Of Joe Rogan saying the N-word and should Joe Rogan be deplatformed off Spotify and everywhere else? | ||
| And that, I think, led people to believe, you know, I don't even know that this is a conspiracy theory, but that there was some sort of coordinated attack by the corporate press on Rogan, like he was becoming too influential. | ||
| So it behooved CNN to push these, oh, Joe Rogan's a racist stories because he's moving in on their territory. | ||
| I don't know if that's a conspiracy. | ||
| I mean, I don't have all, I don't have the documents from Zucker at CNN, but it feels like something that's kind of there. | ||
| I suspect that's not a top-down conspiracy. | ||
| Like we think of a conspiracy theory of, you know, the Illuminati or somebody power cigarette smoking people behind closed doors or calling the shots. | ||
| And the reason I'm skeptical of most of those theories is because the world is too complex, there's too much randomness, there's too much chaos from the bottom up, and no one can control it. | ||
| No one's in control. | ||
| This is part of my theory, is that it's one thing to be a little afraid or anxious about. | ||
| There's some cabal going on of 12 people called the Illuminati running the world and doing a crappy job of it. | ||
| But it's quite another to think, actually, nobody's in control. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No one can explain the economy, why wars break. | ||
| I mean, I don't think Putin even knows if he's going to use tactical nukes or not, let alone Biden or Defense Department. | ||
| I don't think anybody knows. | ||
| It's just impossible to know. | ||
| Do you view that as, is that scary or more comforting if nobody's in control? | ||
| I like it because I'm kind of libertarian in my personal attitudes and it's OK with me. | ||
| People that prefer a structured hierarchical worldview that's predictable, they're not. | ||
| And they tend to be more conspiratorial in their thinking, a little more paranoid, a little more suspicious that there's things going on. | ||
| And again, things do go on. | ||
| So how do you know? | ||
| Well, my little test is, you know, the more people that have to be involved in the conspiracy, the less likely the theory is true. | ||
| The more components that have to come together just at the right time in the right place. | ||
| Again, it's probably not likely if a lot of things have to happen because, again, chance, chaos, contingency, accidents, you know, people just don't do what they're supposed to do. | ||
| You know, I remember that when my first book came out, I went on G. Gordon Liddy's radio show in Washington, D.C., Why People Believe Weird Things. | ||
| And I discussed conspiracies a little bit in there, and he asked me about it. | ||
| And I said, well, you're the expert. | ||
| You're Mr. Watergate. | ||
| He says, well, actually, most conspiracies are a bunch of baloney. | ||
| Conspiracy theories are because people can't keep their mouth shut and most people are incompetent. | ||
| And, you know, so this is like 9-11 truth. | ||
| You know, the Bush administration was in on 9-11, let it happen on purpose, lie up or made it happen on purpose, lie up. | ||
| Well, in fact, negative evidence, WikiLeaks, you know, millions of classified documents, not one, not one document about 9-11 or we know they're coming or we're gonna let it happen or you know planting explosive nothing, right? | ||
| So that tells me if if it was an inside job and these were classified documents We would predict that there should be some leakage there. | ||
| There isn't because most conspiracies we do find out about him, right? | ||
| Lincoln was assassinated by conspiracy. | ||
| We knew within hours who did it same thing with Kennedy I mean Oswald was discovered within an hour. | ||
| We they had him at that theater And so we find out about these things, but not one person wants to go on record about the fake moon landing, or 9-11 is an inside job, not one. | ||
| So that's very probably not true. | ||
| What would you say about something like the Hunter Biden laptop story, where New York Post, which is generally thought of as a reputable news organization, they say this is true. | ||
| They have their sources, et cetera. | ||
| Big tech, Twitter particularly, comes in. | ||
| You can't share these stories. | ||
| You can't even share them through your own private messaging, your own direct messaging on our platform. | ||
| Then other platforms start doing it as well. | ||
| Of course, it all turns out to be legit, and there's a lot of pretty bad stuff on there, some nasty stuff on there. | ||
| I think a lot of people see that as a coordinated conspiracy. | ||
| That in essence, that thing was going to be damaging to Joe Biden. | ||
| They wanted Joe Biden to be president. | ||
| They wanted to be rid of Trump. | ||
| We accept that big tech can just get in on this. | ||
| Like, is that a conspiracy or is that? | ||
| Yeah, that's an interesting example, because here it would be a conspiracy in the traditional sense. | ||
| Say the news networks called each other and said, you know, I'm not going to run the story. | ||
| Are you going to run the story? | ||
| I won't run it if you won't run it. | ||
| If that was shown, that would be a more traditional definition of a conspiracy. | ||
| More likely is more of kind of a cultural shift or trend. | ||
| We're all liberals. | ||
| We want to protect our guy. | ||
| And so we're just going to bury the story. | ||
| You know, I'm going to do it. | ||
| You're going to do it. | ||
| It's kind of common knowledge. | ||
| I don't have to call you up. | ||
| You just know that, you know, we're gonna kind of work together to support our guy or criticize the other guy. | ||
| That's more normal. | ||
| That happens, I think, a lot. | ||
| Without the concerted, top-down, you know, private phone calls kind of messaging to coordinate the effort. | ||
| That would be my suspicion for that one. | ||
| You know, when Alex Jones was banned after... Was he banned after Sandy Hook or was he banned after...? | ||
| Yeah, no, it was... | ||
| Yeah, it was after Sandy Hook, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, well, I know it was after Sandy Hook. | ||
| I don't remember if that was like the full impetus for it, but whenever he got banned by everybody | ||
| within a day or so, I actually had Teal, Peter Teal on my show the next day, | ||
| and I asked him privately, he has since said it publicly, I said, well, what do you think happened here? | ||
| You know, did they all coordinate? | ||
| And he said, I think you'll appreciate this. | ||
| He said, actually, what he thought was, well, you know, once one of them did it, | ||
| once Twitter, I think Twitter did it first, then it was just the signal to everybody else, | ||
| just go ahead and do it. | ||
| Like now we took the hit, we did it. | ||
| So it's not a coordinated phone call conspiracy that you're talking about, | ||
| but it's some other level related to fear and manipulation and how we all operate, I suppose. | ||
| Here's an analogy. | ||
| An athlete gets busted for doping or some, you know, horrible thing they did, and Nike drops him, and then within an hour, everybody else drops him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, I don't think Nike called any of the other companies and said, you gotta drop the guy. | ||
| They all look around and go, well, we better go, you know, what everybody, the big guys doing and show our support for, or a criticism of this athlete or whatever it is. | ||
| So part two of the way you lay out the book is how to determine which conspiracies are real. | ||
| So we're sort of bouncing around a lot of that in the political sense. | ||
| What about in just, and let's get away from politics for a second, just every other sense. | ||
| There's aliens and Area 51 and all the other stuff that we're all, how do you figure out what's real? | ||
| You know, somebody visited you at night and they poked, they're always pronging people and all that stuff. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| So some of the criteria I mentioned already, you know, how many people have to be involved How many elements have to come together? | ||
| Just the right moment. | ||
| How typical conspiracies really unfold. | ||
| I went into detail in that chapter on what triggered the First World War, which was a group of Serbian nationalists called the Black Hand, who conspired to assassinate Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who was leaning on Serbia to control them and so on. | ||
| So this was a cabal for sure. | ||
| They met in secret. | ||
| They plotted for months. | ||
| You know, each of the seven guys had to go to a certain house | ||
| and give the code word, and then they get the weapon, a pistol or a hand grenade, and so on. | ||
| And, you know, one guy didn't, he went to the wrong house. | ||
| Another guy chickened out. | ||
| Somebody else, you know, got the weapon but went to the wrong place on the parade route | ||
| where he was supposed to stand. | ||
| And then finally, some guy actually was able to pull the pin on the grenade and throw it, | ||
| but it bounced up the Archduke's back of his car, rolled under the car behind him and blew up there. | ||
| And so these people got hurt. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| And then the car zooms off and he goes off to his little meeting, gives a speech, says, thanks a lot. | ||
| I come here to Sarajevo and you guys throw bombs at me. | ||
| And then and then he leaves and then said, hey, we better go back to the hospital and check on our comrades. | ||
| So the driver goes back down the same road that they were at. | ||
| And he turns right on the Alpecua, the main drag there, where the the last conspirator, this Gabrielle Pritchett was sitting there despondent eating a sandwich for this deli | ||
| and he's got his pistol in his pocket. He's like, well, that was a big fuck up. | ||
| Nothing happened. And then all of a sudden, here comes the car and the car makes a wrong turn. | ||
| And there was no reverse in it. So the driver puts it neutral and just backs up | ||
| at like one mile an hour right in front of this Gabriel Pritchett. | ||
| He's like, oh, my God, bam, dead. That's how these things normally go. Right. You | ||
| know, I mean, Nixon with the with the the G-men and the FBI couldn't break into the Democratic | ||
| Hotel at Watergate. Right. | ||
| I mean, again, if those guys can't do it, and by my example, that's how things usually go, the more complex it has to be, the less likely the theory is true. | ||
| 9-11, true, impossible. | ||
| I mean, first of all, you'd have to have hundreds of people involved to break through the drywall of the World Trade Center building, You know, they abandoned buildings that they demolished. | ||
| They had to break them apart and put the explosive devices in there. | ||
| Nobody saw that. | ||
| How did you know they operated under the pretense of being elevator repair? | ||
| It's like, I mean, now you're just hand waving. | ||
| You know, it's just crazy. | ||
| And not one person wants to go on 60 minutes and say, I knew somebody. | ||
| I was dating this guy and he told me all about the 9-11. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| I'm going to go on 60 minutes. | ||
| God, I got to have a book. I have a book out about. | ||
| Nobody has come forth. | ||
| Very, very unlikely. | ||
| As opposed to 19 members of Al-Qaeda with box cutters. | ||
| So there's kind of a disparate effect between cause and effect. | ||
| The bigger the effect, the bigger the cause to match it or else it just doesn't feel right. | ||
| So you get, you know, JFK killed by who? | ||
| This Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone nut, that doesn't feel right. | ||
| So you had KGB and the FBI and the Russians and the Cubans and the mafia, and now it feels better. | ||
| Princess Diana, cause of death, drunk driving, speeding, no seatbelt. | ||
| Tens of thousands of people die like that every year, but princesses are not supposed to die like that, right? | ||
| So it's got to be the MI6 and the royal family and Prince Charles and whoever, you know, is supposed to be in on this. | ||
| And I think that there's an effect like that. | ||
| Like, there's no way Al Qaeda could have done that. | ||
| That's actually the only way that could happen. | ||
| Just somebody in the nooks and crannies of a free society that no one notices, that's how you get away with stuff. | ||
| You know, it's funny, because you can also see how through pop culture some of this stuff leaks in. | ||
| I mean, obviously the movie JFK was absolutely massive, and I'm sure you, well, I have no doubt that you don't agree with the conclusions. | ||
| That Oliver Stone was putting forth in the movie. | ||
| But even I was watching The Crown on Netflix a year or so ago, and in the last season where there's a lot about Princess Di, you know, in essence, you're watching the thing and you're kind of like, yeah, it seems like they wanted to kill her. | ||
| And, you know, then she ends up dead. | ||
| So it just sort of just sits there and you can ruminate about all of these things. | ||
| Of course, that's a hindsight bias. | ||
| You know, tons of people hated Obama, but he was assassinated. | ||
| End of story. | ||
| No one's talking about what happened to those people. | ||
| Why didn't they kill him? | ||
| Well, it's hard to kill a president, right? | ||
| Plenty of people would have been glad to take out Donald Trump, you know, Michael I'm reminded of a couple years ago We've told the story once or twice publicly, but we were at Arizona. | ||
| I think we're at Arizona State University if I'm not mistaken We're doing a talk on free speech and I at the top of the show I say to the audience I don't know a couple hundred kids there I say, you know how many Democrats how many Republicans how many libertarians and then I said how many Nazis just to get a laugh and a one person stood up in the back and And said that they were a Nazi. | ||
| And I think you said, hey, you know, if you just wait to the end, we'll take your question first and that'll be interesting and let's see what happens. | ||
| So that we end our talk and then we take the question from the Nazi and the Nazi had all these conspiracy theories about the Holocaust and the gas chambers and all of this stuff. | ||
| I should also mention, it turned out that the Holocaust denier was also trans, which is just sort of... | ||
| Right. | ||
| And to me, that's the way to handle these kinds of things. | ||
| But what you did, I thought was really beautiful because you just flat out explained | ||
| why the conspiracy theory was not a conspiracy at all. | ||
| Right, and to me, that's the way to handle these kinds of things. | ||
| I mean, if you tell them to shut up or sit down or silence them or kick them out, | ||
| then onlookers are gonna go, well, what's the story with that? | ||
| What's the problem with that argument? | ||
| So you got to, at some point, address the argument, which I did in my book on that. | ||
| And you'd been to the concentration camps, right? | ||
| You've been to Poland. | ||
| Can you explain a little bit about that? | ||
| Oh, well, so yeah, Holocaust denial or revisionism, whatever you want to call it, they're not claiming that no Jews were killed or died. | ||
| They're just downgrading from six million to about a million. | ||
| Maybe 500,000. | ||
| So it's a clever strategy, because no matter what photos you show, like here's a body stacked like cordwood at this concentration camp, how do you explain that? | ||
| Oh, that's part of the half million I'm willing to admit died of disease and starvation and overwork and so on. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| And, you know, what about these gas chambers? | ||
| Oh, those were used for delousing clothing. | ||
| Okay, well, what's the difference between a delousing chamber and a homicidal gas chamber? | ||
| There is a difference, but you have to know something about that, right? | ||
| So it does require some knowledge. | ||
| Like, could you Explain how why the flat earthers are wrong. | ||
| Could you explain why creationists are wrong Holocaust deniers are wrong, whatever so you have to so that's kind of what we specialize in it skeptic You know what? | ||
| What are the best arguments the 9-11 truth is actually have and what what's your response? | ||
| How do? | ||
| Controlled demolition buildings fall. | ||
| Do they fall from the top down or the bottom up? | ||
| It's the bottom up the opposite of what we saw in the videos Okay, so but you have to know that kind of art a little bit of detailed arcane knowledge and so I did that with the Holocaust and and you know It's harder to prove intention, but there's enough memos from Hitler, Himmler, Goethe, Goebbels, and so on, that indicate they, after 1941, they intended to exterminate European Jewry. | ||
| It was not just an accidental byproduct of the war. | ||
| And then finally, that the gas chambers were used. | ||
| Well, there's six death camps. | ||
| Here's another trick that the revisionists used. | ||
| Right after the war, they said there were 21 death camps. | ||
| Now they say there's only six. | ||
| The ever-diminishing death camps, pretty soon it'll be zero. | ||
| No. | ||
| This is how history normally works, right? | ||
| You have the kind of real-time reporting by journalists, and then the first round of books after an event or a war, | ||
| then the second round, and so on. | ||
| That's when you get more information. | ||
| You change your mind, right? | ||
| So, okay, it's six. | ||
| And you can go there, and you can measure the Zyklon blue staining | ||
| on the bricks at Majdanek, for example, and see, well, that was the chamber where they killed people. | ||
| It's very different from the ones where they dilauched clothing. | ||
| And you just kind of go through all that. | ||
| Now, when somebody at this point says, I still think the Jews are up to no good. | ||
| All right, so now you want to talk about the Jews and not the Holocaust, right? | ||
| So you have to kind of bore down to see what the deeper motive is, you know, like like with QAnon or pizza gates You know, there's no possible way somebody could really believe that, except that one guy, Edgar Welch, who went there with a gun to that comet ping-pong. | ||
| So when most people say they believe it, they mean something else, like, I don't like Democrats, I don't trust that Hillary, you know, the Clintons are evil, you know, such that if I took you to the pizza place and showed you there's no pedophile ring, there's not even a basement, it's not like you're gonna go, in that case I'll vote for Hillary. | ||
| Right, and I remember after that incident at Arizona State, when we were all breaking up, I think you started, you continued to talk to the woman, and in essence I asked you after, well, do you think you convinced her of anything? | ||
| And you basically were like, no, that's not really how it works, because the deprogramming, no matter how much you offer, In some ways it's almost impossible to get to, which I think is sort of what part three of the book is about. | ||
| That's right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All you can do is plant a seed of doubt. | ||
| Like, how did you get that idea? | ||
| Where did it come from? | ||
| What was the source? | ||
| What's the quality of the evidence? | ||
| How do you know that's true versus some other hypothesis? | ||
| What it would take to change your mind and so on. | ||
| It's like cult deprogramming. | ||
| Back in the nineties, they were, you know, doing this, you know, kidnapping the person from the cult and locking them up in a hotel room and showing them videos or whatever. | ||
| It didn't work. | ||
| Because that's not how it works. | ||
| No one joins a cult, they join a group that they think is a good thing. | ||
| And then months or years later, they're down the rabbit hole and they didn't even realize | ||
| how extreme they got. | ||
| So it's not going to happen overnight. | ||
| You just have to plant a little seed like, huh, interesting. | ||
| Yeah, I heard that. | ||
| I did wonder though, I call it the Columbo thing. | ||
| I have just one more question. | ||
| You know, the Detective Columbo. | ||
| I'm about to leave, but I just thought of one more thing I was going to ask you. | ||
| You have to wear a brown trench coat when you're doing that, or a tan trench coat. | ||
| Turn around and say it. | ||
| I'm curious, do you have a certain degree of sympathy, as you're writing a book like this, a certain degree of sympathy for the people that fall into these traps? | ||
| Because, you know, if you look again, if we bring it back to the news, if you look at the way the mainstream media for a year said that Brett Kavanaugh is a serial rapist, turned out not to be true. | ||
| Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist, turned out not to be true. | ||
| Jussie Smollett was going to be lynched or got attacked by those two guys, turned out he hired them. | ||
| Donald Trump, very fine people on both sides. | ||
| Yes, the sentence after was, you know, I completely condemn white supremacists. | ||
| All of these things that lead, I think, a certain set of good people to perhaps come to wrong conclusions. | ||
| But actually, I'm not even going to say that always. | ||
| I think in some ways they then come to the right conclusion. | ||
| But I always say I have sympathy for the people that are just like, yeah, these people are lying to us about so much. | ||
| What else do you expect from us? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So that's why, you know, journalism has to stick to this strict Ethic of fact-checking and double fact-checking and multiple sources and so on. | ||
| And they don't do that if it fits a particular narrative. | ||
| Of course, we're highlighting the big stories that got wrong. | ||
| Most of the stories they get right that are not that big or important. | ||
| We kind of fly under the radar. | ||
| We don't notice those. | ||
| Most journalists, most of the time, are just doing their job. | ||
| It's the big ones that stand out. | ||
| And in particular, if it fits a narrative of your department, then you probably should ask for another source. | ||
| Or maybe let's wait a day. | ||
| But you know, the economic model is you can't wait a day, right? | ||
| We gotta get this out before the other blogger gets it out or the other network, right? | ||
| So, yeah, and again, you know, you toggle between the three major networks on the news every night, which I do. | ||
| It seems like there's a script. | ||
| They all, the same stories, it's like the same order. | ||
| And I'm pretty sure they don't call each other and go, well, okay, I'm gonna cover this one first, which, you know, which order are you gonna put it? | ||
| It's just how the system works. | ||
| And I just, you know, I wish it was different or, you know, there was just more subtlety or more, I don't know, caution, skepticism. | ||
| Michael, can you stick around for one more thing for my Locals community? | ||
| I want to specifically ask you about my favorite conspiracy theory. | ||
| We'll do that on Locals. | ||
| But the book is Conspiracy, Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. | ||
| And we'll link to it right down below. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about academia instead of nonstop yelling, check out our academia playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're all right over here. |
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