Daniel Loxton debunks the myth that conspiracy theorists are skeptics, calling their approach "feral critical thinking" instead—relying on bias over evidence. He contrasts this with real skepticism, like Dr. Peter Hotez’s patent-free vaccine work, dismissed despite transparency, and explains how reality inversion (e.g., flat Earth claims) exploits cognitive dissonance tied to identity. The fight against misinformation is under-resourced, with activists facing burnout and trolls, needing 10,000 more allies. Loxton’s fragmented strategy—using David Bloomberg for video debates on YouTube/TikTok while shifting focus to Blue Sky—highlights the systemic struggle to scale trust-based solutions in a polarized digital landscape. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that finally has a guest that has their own Wikipedia page.
God damn it, I made it.
And it's not me.
It's well, it's not David Bloomberg.
Yeah, so we have David Bloomberg here today and another guest.
Very excited about it.
So I don't see any reason to go too long here, but we're going to talk about skepticism.
And we have two people who have been working at the art of skepticism, even though it's not really an art for a very long time.
So David Bloomberg, give it to you.
Yeah, I mean, obviously I've been on, you know, quite a bit, but one thing we haven't really talked about is that I was actively involved in organized skepticism for many years.
I co-founded a local skeptics group in my area.
I wrote a number of articles and columns for the group's newsletters.
And I wrote for national publications as well, like Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic Magazine.
Now, I haven't done as much of that recently.
I spend more of my time arguing with them on social media instead.
But your other guest here has a background in skeptical writing that definitely dwarfs mine.
So, you know, let's bring on Daniel Loxton.
Hi.
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, I have been kicking around skeptical circles for quite a while since the early 90s when I first discovered the Skeptical Inquirer, the original pioneering North American skeptics magazine.
And yeah, I had been a huge believer in the paranormal.
I believed every darn thing.
And when I discovered the skeptics literature, it was not challenging for me, or it was challenging, but it was also eye-opening and exciting because I discovered this richer, more robust literature on all my favorite weird topics.
And so I became an avid reader of that literature and eventually started writing, doing pro bono art and whatnot for Skeptical Inquirer, for Skeptic Magazine,
for Free Inquiry, a related humanist magazine, and eventually became the editor of Junior Skeptic, which was then a sizable magazine within a magazine published for younger readers on critical thinking and paranormal and science topics within the pages of Skeptic Magazine.
And I was there for like 19 years and published various books that were spin-offs from that junior skeptic material.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I have, I mean, my kids are now much older, but I'm pretty sure that I have one or two of your books kicking around here somewhere.
Oh, I should hope so.
The only reason I wouldn't is if I gave them to someone else who had younger kids.
My first and most commercially successful book, Evolution, How We and All Living Things Came to Be, has just gone out of print this summer, I'm sad to say.
But it had a long, long run, about 15 years.
And I'm hoping to see it back in another revised form at some point.
And my academic book for adult readers, Abominable Science, co-written with paleontologist Don Prothereau, is still available from Columbia University Press and then dinosaur books and whatnot.
Great.
So we're going to get right into this here.
When we examine conspiracy beliefs, we often encounter people who claim that they are coming to their unreal conclusions because they are engaging in skepticism.
But in fact, they aren't being skeptical at all.
And they're greatly confused about what it means to be skeptical and how a person properly engages with the concepts contained within skepticism.
So we're going to go over a couple of those here today.
And the first one, primarily, this is kind of the most important thing really for everyone who has to exist in an objectively real world, is that beliefs should be based on evidence.
So yeah, the primary quality of a skeptic is the ability to change your beliefs based on new evidence.
Some people actually see this quality now in our world today as something like a negative.
I think people see it as though they look at it as though you're giving someone else the power to change your mind when you're allowing your mind to be changed when evidence is presented.
And then they think that being able to resist having your mind be changed is some kind of important property or something.
It's a very strange thing for people in the skeptical community to look at.
So kind of first question based on this topic, how do we combat this terrible trend in our social environment where we have people that are digging trenches into unreal beliefs?
Well, you know what's really funny when you approach some of these fringe or reality denying subcultures, you know, whether you're talking about the anti-vaccine industry or flat earthers or all kinds of conspiracy theorists, they do not only think of themselves as being skeptical, but they think of themselves as critical thinkers.
And what's interesting to me is that in some ways they are.
They use the same language as skeptics and mainstream scholars.
They may reference the same list of biases and logical fallacies.
But the difference is, as you suggest, that critical thinking divorced from grounding in fact can easily lead you down the garden path.
Like it's, I think of it as feral critical thinking when it's when it's untethered from the necessity of verification, falsification of evidence.
And yeah, you can reason yourself anywhere, but if you have to check if you're right, that's a different thing.
And so in my skeptical career, I've actually been a little impatient with how much emphasis is sometimes placed on like lists of cognitive biases and especially lists of logical fallacies.
Because although those are interesting and useful building blocks and you should have that in your quiver in your toolkit, by itself, it's not enough.
And so that second part of actually checking whether or not this thing is true is really critical.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, I don't know how we combat it.
You know, I know we're the ones who are supposed to be answering your questions here.
But I mean, we've seen it for so long, not just in the conspiracists or the so-called critical thinkers who aren't, but in politics too.
You know, the worst thing you can call someone in politics is a flip-flopper.
And well, okay, maybe not the worst thing, but it seems that way sometimes that that's a charge leveled at them.
Oh, they used to say this, and now they say that they're a flip-flopper.
It's like, or their mind was changed by evidence.
And, you know, that is something we should be valuing, not attacking.
And, you know, some of those are not necessarily scientific.
It's more social in terms of, well, should we allow this thing or not allow it?
But yeah, when it comes to the science, you have to look at the evidence.
The evidence continues to move forward.
And, you know, I think, Daniel, you of all people would know this when it comes to like the dinosaur books that you wrote.
You know, I mean, we, we, when I grew up, which was you know, a couple of years ago, um, you know, dinosaurs were seen as leathery-skinned uh lizards and tail dragging.
And yeah, yeah.
Now a lot of them, uh, maybe not all of them, but a lot of them are seen with feathers and or or at least feather precursors.
Yeah, it depends on the on the group, but yeah, a lot of them were feathered, right?
And so that was just science moving forward as we understood it better.
And it's something more visual that we can see.
Now, there wasn't a really big group out there saying, no, dinosaurs.
Yeah, I mean, there was, you know, there were, of course, the older scientists who tend to get stuck in their ways sometimes, who were a little hesitant to allow this to move forward.
But as time has progressed, it has.
And you don't have like the anti-feather element who are out protesting or anything like you do with the anti-vaxxers or the full-on creationists or the others who engage in conspiracies to explain all their beliefs.
There were at a certain point scientists who were very, very unhappy with the linkage between what we now think of as the avian and the non-avian dinosaurs.
But yeah, they all had to change their mind because that was where the evidence went.
We found new fossils and we had to update.
For someone who hasn't paid a lot of attention to the how, I mean, I'm kind of aware loosely of how this happened, but along how much of a kind of a time frame do you think, I mean, estimating, do you think it was between when Paleontologists first started to think of some of the dinosaurs being avian.
And when they, the, what's kind of seen as the older group of dinosaur scientists who finally just kind of admitted, like, like stopped giving, you know, any pushback about it and said, okay, fine, we'll have avian and non-avian dinosaurs.
Like, was that over a decade?
Was it over a couple of years?
Like, what kind of timeframe we're looking at there?
I'm not a paleontologist, so I'd have to review that actually.
But roughly speaking, some animals like Archaeopteryx were discovered quite early, and that thing had feathers.
It was clear.
So this linkage was kind of much discussed and argued about for a long time.
And then I think it all came to a head pretty suddenly, like in a decade or so, maybe around the 80s.
The overall discussion probably goes back 100 years or more.
Well, I think that was 100 years ago there first kind of being sure that there were dinosaurs, right?
Yeah.
It's not even that long that we've really had this idea of dinosaurs.
Yeah, I think you can see just in watching, and this is a totally unscientific way to look at it, but the first Jurassic Park movie versus the most recent Jurassic Park movie and how they portrayed the different dinosaurs.
Obviously, in the first one, they ended the movie, the first Jurassic Park movie, with a reference to birds, but they didn't show them as being feathered.
And I think there was a lot more of that in the most recent one.
I don't want to get totally lost on the dinosaur topic because like every nerd, I could talk about dinosaurs all day.
But yeah, if you can compare like King Kong from 33 and the look of dinosaurs we have there to the first Jurassic Park to really current reconstructions like Prehistoric World on Apple TV Plus, you can see kind of the full arc of our understanding changing over time.
Going back to your question about changing minds, yeah, absolutely.
We do have to find ways to destigmatize and also go further and valorize reconsidering evidence.
It is a virtue to be fair-minded enough to look at new evidence, take it seriously, and consider whether you might have to change.
That's not weakness.
That's mental discipline.
But even I'd go even a step further than that.
I'd like to see society do a better job of encouraging just not reaching an opinion prematurely.
That's, you know, in the skeptical space and in science, there are kind of two complementary ideas of how to approach belief claims.
One is that we should withhold assent until a certain amount of evidence has accumulated.
We should just not believe things.
We should, in fact, disbelieve things and, you know, we should prioritize the null hypothesis until we have a certain amount of evidence.
Another position, and this is where atheists and agnostics got into fights in science all the time, is that we should just not reach a conclusion before there's evidence either way.
We should not guess before testing, before looking or observing.
Although both of them work and are appropriate in their own way, we don't want to be in a position where we're actively disbelieving all things that are not yet known.
I don't think that's useful.
That's not terribly useful.
It's kind of nihilistic.
And there are lots of things in the world that you and I do not personally know.
We haven't looked into it.
We haven't studied it.
It may involve ideas that are not even accessible to us culturally.
It may involve things that are not easy to resolve because they involve these kind of messy human things, simultaneities and contradictions and emotions.
And it's not necessary for everybody to have an opinion on everything.
And certainly not in advance of really thinking about it.
A lot of the time we can just go, I don't know about that yet.
I haven't looked into that.
Yeah, I think that's really important because that will happen.
You know, someone, I'll be online and someone will say, oh, yeah, well, what do you think about this?
And I'll be like, I don't know.
I don't know what it is.
I don't know the topic.
I am not familiar with it.
I am therefore not going to render an opinion.
And they get all pissed off.
You know, like, what are you talking about?
How can you not?
And it's like, because that isn't something that I have paid attention to.
And therefore, I do not have an opinion on it.
And it's seen as shocking.
As a matter of fact, Spencer and I had a recent interaction with someone on social media.
Now, I think this person is absolutely loony and has lost his mind, but where they started throwing things at Spencer and then me about, oh yeah, well, what about this person and that person and the other?
And it wasn't even that coherent, but it was like, what are you talking about?
We don't know who these people are.
Why do you want our opinions on them?
What are you talking about?
And they just rambled on and on and on and attacked us for not knowing about these things or these people.
And it's like, yeah, I try to tell people the same thing.
You don't have to have an opinion on everything.
You should, if you don't have an opinion, you should trust the people who are most likely to be experts, actual experts.
You know, when a member of my family had cancer, I did not say, oh, yeah, well, I think I know best, and therefore this is how my family members should be treated.
No, I let the oncologist talk to me about it.
Now, did we evaluate possible options?
Yeah.
But it was still with the knowledge base that comes from their expertise.
Yeah.
And things can be unknown and experts can be wrong individually or collectively.
And yet, what's the alternative?
It's guessing, essentially.
And that's not a great way forward on anything.
Or, you know, replacing somebody who knows something about it with somebody who has different skills, different knowledge, different expertise, different investments.
And that's how you get, you know, that's how you get Boeing.
You know, you fire the engineers and replace them with money guys.
And you're going to, you know, it's just the wrong sphere of expertise for a central task.
And that's, that's true for anything.
You know, if you're trying to figure out what's going on with the climate, you're going to have to talk to climate scientists first and foremost because they know more than other people do.
The replacement of engineers with money guys is essentially identical to what Richard Feynman charged NASA with after the in the Challenger investigation, right?
Yeah, and I yeah, I wouldn't argue with it.
Yeah, I saw it in my own job.
You know, the upper echelons used to be technical people, and then slowly but surely they were replaced by lawyers.
And to the point that, like, I, in my bureau, I was the highest level technical person as an engineer.
And my boss was a lawyer, and her boss was a lawyer or someone who had been in politics or both.
And, you know, we get to situations where some politician says, we need to do this.
And the lawyer says, make this happen.
And I'm sitting here going, that is not possible.
That is not absolutely impossible to do that from a technical standpoint.
And I don't want to get sidetracked on this either, but even though I keep starting these, but yeah, you see that all over the place.
You know, you see the internet excoriating VFX artists who were simply trapped in untenable conditions, you know, working 100 hours a week for studios who don't understand how VFX work and what's necessary to accomplish a satisfactory outcome.
Yeah, it happens a lot.
And if you're, you know, you need some dentistry done or you want to fly safely on an airplane or you want to see a really good film, you want to know how to treat a dangerous illness, you're going to be better off talking to somebody who knows a lot about it.
Right.
And ideally, someone who's embedded in a community of other people who know a lot about it who can check if they're going off the rails.
Right.
It reminds me of a one-panel comic that I have seen.
It circulates quite a bit and it has a passenger in a plane and he's out there rabble-rousing and says, We've lost confidence in this pilot.
Let's, you know, who's with me?
Let's fly it ourselves.
These pilots have lost touch with the common people.
Yeah.
Yes.
I just want to circle back real quick to a thing you said.
You said that we should take more time before attempting to form full opinions.
And it made me think that when we're in a political environment that appears to be charged with a high sense of urgency, I think that's a sort of an environmental force that pushes people to try to come to conclusions faster.
Because in general, I think a lot of people feel like they have to, like they don't have time to wait for more information in a lot of cases.
And I think that's a factor of why we're seeing a lot of these, a lot more conspiratorial nonsense that just comes out of the ether.
I think you're right.
And one, one partial remedy for that is good old-fashioned scientific reductionism.
You know, it's possible to break things into parts.
And, You know, say, say, you're considering some complex social question that's kind of near the cutting edge of where our society is evolving.
It involves complex human things.
And also, we can see that there is a conspiratorial backlash against that thing.
And also, we can see that it serves certain interests or groups.
Like, we can form micro opinions on those individual things without resolving the entire thing.
You know, I don't actually have to know the most updated climate models to know that there's a long-standing climate disinformation industry.
I don't, you know, again, we can defer to experts who do have to stay up to date.
I don't.
I can just leave that to them and look at the one thing that is relevant to me or that does seem so urgent that it needs to be answered today, you know, or the thing that I can access information about.
Yeah, and I think another area where you see that is in lawsuits, you know, where that's a big problem is, well, I, you know, someone says, I got cancer, I used Roundup, therefore, Roundup must have caused my cancer, and I'm going to sue.
And then they win a big judgment because juries and judges are not scientists.
And then people come out and say, see, that proves that Roundup causes cancer.
It's like, well, no, if you actually look at the evidence in that case, no, that is not true.
And it did not support that.
But a courtroom needs to come to an immediate answer one way or another, yes or no, you know, liable or not liable.
And they just aren't very good at it.
And then people go from there and use that as if it were valid information.
The Roundup example is funny because in a previous career as a young person, I herded sheep for a living.
I was a shepherd on these sheep vegetation management contracts in silviculture in Canada.
So we were herding sheep as a weeding tool on tree plantations in the wilderness.
And the reason that that industry existed at that time was as an alternative to Roundup.
That in some areas it was, you know, it was either opposed by local First Nations groups or it was thought to be unsafe in certain like riparian zones and whatnot.
And so we were a more expensive alternative.
But I've actually never reached a really firm conclusion personally about how safe or unsafe Roundup is.
I don't feel expert enough about it.
I was happy to have a job as a Roundup alternative, but I, you know, it's, it's not, I, I don't have an activist level understanding of this on either side.
I just understand a lot of concerns have been raised about it.
And I there, I just wait to see how things fall out.
Yeah.
Another example, something that I have seen personally in my job was when a chemical was reclassified.
Like they did studies on it and they reclassified it and said, oh my gosh, this is way more, you know, causes cancer at a way higher rate than we ever thought.
And as soon as that came out and it was found out that these companies that had been using it were not controlling it as well as they perhaps should have been because nobody knew, you know, how bad these were, everybody who had any illness ascribed it to that chemical.
And you literally, there were interviews in the paper, like, ever since I have moved here near this company, I have had a sore throat.
And it's because of that company.
Well, no, it said it causes cancer.
It didn't say it caused a sore throat.
You know, or I have had, you know, or this person has had, you know, had stomach cancer, and therefore it must have been this.
Well, no, you can't say that it must have been.
Lots of different things cause cancer.
And so there's these people always searching for a cause, which kind of loops us back, Spencer, as sometimes happens, loops us back to the actual topic here of, you know, conspiracies, because people are always searching for a root cause.
And if I have something wrong with me, well, then it must have been caused by XYZ.
And in this case, look what's in the news.
It's right there in the news that this chemical is terrible.
It must have caused this.
And this is not to deny in any way the existence of environmental hazards.
Right.
Lots of our pollutants are dangerous.
But it's not easy to establish that in many cases.
It takes time.
It takes science.
People do.
They want some kind of comprehensible explanation in the meantime.
And that shortcut can lead to a lot of mischief.
So, yeah, let's go on to the next topic on our merry journey through skepticism here.
When people are forming conspiracy beliefs, they very reliably form them on along lines of existing biases.
They claim that they're attempting to be skeptical in order to not be fooled into believing an untrue thing.
But usually they're only being cynical about whether they should trust an event that may not work to their benefit.
The cynicism very predictably falls along their existing biases.
So how do we articulate and amplify the differences between cynicism and skepticism?
Cynicism, predispositions of all kinds, and whatever information or beliefs you already have in your head are all going to influence how you look at new information.
Let me think about this for a second, David.
A cynic or a cynical person, depending on what they're cynical about, like a conspiracist could be cynical about the government.
Well, the government says that this is safe, but that must mean they're hiding something.
That's not skepticism.
That's just automatically assuming the opposite.
And so many times skeptics are accused of just being cynics.
You know, when we say, well, astrology isn't real.
Ghosts are not real.
UFOs are not aliens.
We get lumped in with the same people who say, you know, the government wants you to believe X, so therefore it must not be true.
And the difference, of course, is what we were talking about, evidence.
You know, skeptics require evidence for whatever the claim is.
And of course, the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the evidence should be.
And whereas a cynic will just dismiss things out of hand without even worrying about the evidence, because in their minds, especially once you get to the conspiracy level, that evidence could be faked anyway.
So what's the difference?
You know, oh, you say the mRNA vaccine is safe.
Oh, who's saying that?
Oh, the drug manufacturers, of course.
And, you know, the government is saying that.
So do you know how much money Pfizer made last year?
Yeah.
Right.
So, you know, whereas a skeptic would look at it and say, well, okay, let's look at the evidence.
Yes, this is a new form of vaccine, but let's see what the evidence has to say.
And I will tell you, when my kids were very little, the chickenpox vaccine had just come out.
And as much, I mean, you will not find probably a more pro-vaccine person than me, even back then, because I was even more involved in organized skepticism then.
But it came out and I was like, should I get it?
What is the, you know, this is brand new.
And in those days, at least to my knowledge, there weren't very many brand new vaccines coming out.
And so, you know, and then there were questions because I had a six-month-old and a three-year-old at the time.
And so the three-year-old could get the vaccine, but there were questions like, could the three-year-old then give chickenpox to the six-month-old?
Which, you know, I didn't know the answers to that.
Now, as it happened, while in the very short time that I was discussing this with my pediatrician, the three-year-old got chickenpox and gave it to the six-month-old.
So it became a moot point.
But, you know, it shows that, yes, you know, that process was ongoing.
And yeah, I wanted to see evidence.
And if they hadn't gotten it, they certainly would have, well, the three-year-old would have gotten the shot.
I don't think the six-month-old was old enough at the time.
And it's just based on the evidence as opposed to saying, oh, this is new, therefore I don't trust it.
Yeah, I was pretty excited as a parent to have access to the chickenpox vaccine because I had gotten chickenpox as a young adult.
Oh, and it was brutal.
It was one of the sickest times I've ever been.
So that is not to be taken lightly in my personal opinion.
But yeah, let me circle back to the question.
So I had a little stumble there because the idea of being a skeptic and a cynic, I don't think of them necessarily as opposites.
One can be cynical and also skeptical.
Yeah.
They're not opposites.
They're right next to each other, right?
They're right next to each other.
And so, like, I'll bet there were hundreds of millions of people, for example, on the actual day of 9-11 who were watching television and understood immediately that this would have global and political ramifications and had some kind of conspiratorial speculation go through their mind.
I was one of those people.
Could see that this, this gave a certain license to a certain political project, and and uh uh, and so, in that sense I, I was certainly cynical.
Uh, even even in the midst of watching this terrible tragedy unfold uh, I I wondered like, who's gonna benefit, who's gonna who's gonna be further harmed by this?
Where does this unfold from here?
And um, and I, I did not know so uh, so in that sense, I was also skeptical.
I had to admit that uh I, I have no reason to think that this is not what it appears.
I'm just gonna have to wait for investigators to to uncover whatever there is to uncover, and uh uh, and go with that um yeah, and so, like it's it's, on the one hand, it's it's cynical to, in a sense, to be distrustful of big pharma, for example um, but it's also uh practical and reasonable to have some uh concern about those guys,
because they are big money generating factories, they have uh value to generate for shareholders and uh, and their, their history is not spotless, and that's why we have regulators, it's why we have to keep an eye on those, those dirty dogs, you know um, but at the same time, a lot of their products work as advertised and uh, and so, in that sense, you can be uh again, skeptical and cynical uh,
without being incredulous of every conspiracy theory that comes down the pike.
When I think about cynicism as compared to skepticism especially, I think it's it becomes a lot easier.
So I think I think it's easy to become cynical and I think that's a big thing that we're seeing in the world.
Um, it's a there's a reason why certain institutions are mistrusted far more than others uh, but it's also, I think, telling that it tends to be large uh somewhat, you know, I don't want to say mysterious to pronounced here, but somewhat mysterious institutions, in that it's mysterious as to how they exactly work and how they do what they do.
That tend to get that people tend to be cynical about the products of so big pharma right, how exactly do they come up with drugs?
You know, I don't know.
I don't think you guys know right um it's, it's behind a curtain, it's sort of it's got the Wizard Of Oz effect right, no one really knows how the Wizard Of Oz does what he does.
He's the wizard uh, but for that reason, I mean, NASA suffers the same thing.
No one really knows what's.
You know how they do the magical things that they do at NASA.
It's just this sort of dream factory and then they put people on the moon or they put space stations in orbit or whatever they do.
I'm not even sure what NASA does anymore but um, maybe they don't do anything important anymore.
I don't know, maybe they're just all money men, but a lot of cool robots.
It looks like yeah yeah, maybe maybe it's just things that they yeah, robotic things.
Sorry not to interrupt.
Yeah there's, I think there's a reason why people are cynical of these large institutions that are doing very remarkable things in a lot of respects, because no one, none of the laymen, know what it is that they do and how they do it.
It's it's, uh, I mean, NASA isn't proprietary.
It's sort of a semi-public sort of institution, but they still don't advertise how they come up with the conclusions they come up to.
You can get a documentary every now and then that'll tell people, but it's well after the fact.
So because it's behind sort of a veil, that's where people can come in and say, oh, you don't really know what they're doing there.
You don't really know what their intentions are.
You don't really know any of these things.
And it's easier to cynically look at it and think that, yeah, maybe they, you know, you don't think they're doing that out of the goodness of their heart, do you?
I mean, they're not creating the vaccine out of the goodness of their heart.
Not really.
Probably someone is happy that they did it to save human lives, but that person doesn't have their salary directly tied to the stock price.
So I think part of it is sort of a, you know, human society is large enough that we need these institutions just to function as a group that's this size.
But the idea that we're going to trust a small group of people that have a lot of this power and the rest of us have to trust them, I think that that's a growing concern.
What do you guys think?
Well, it's uncomfortable.
And it's also, I want to say it's both getting worse and almost as old as civilization.
Like, you know, there were guilds that closely guarded their, you know, their dye recipes and their technologies and whatnot.
How they make glass, exactly.
Yeah, right.
Sure.
And there, and there were conspiracy theories about those groups.
Yeah.
What kind of alchemy they're doing behind that closed door?
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
But as technology and science have moved further and further, it's just, you know, I could learn about the dye technique if I joined the guild.
I literally could not learn about some of the things going on in science.
I don't have the math for it.
You know, I'm getting older.
I might not have the plasticity to learn those things.
So, yeah, we're more than ever, we're at the mercy of experts.
We don't understand what they're doing a lot of the time.
And then we have to trust these proxies, reputable media, science communicators, peer review, these various things that allow us to have greater trust.
Add into there, you have a large number of people that are mimicking peer review, but not really doing it.
That's the thing is all of these things are being corroded at this period as well.
So not only is it hard.
At the same time that other people are trying to buttress trust in them.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And so it's a mess out there.
I can't blame anyone for being off balance or cynical.
It's, you know, we're living in a time when our information ecosystem is more complex than ever and also more polluted than ever.
And people are very unclear what the full range of solutions might be at this point.
It's just there are lots of people working on it.
I don't know how many solutions there are.
Well, and you see that in like the attacks that are leveled against someone like Dr. Peter Hotez.
Yeah.
You know, he is that person, Spencer, that you were talking about, who is selflessly out there creating vaccines.
Very goodly, yeah.
Yeah, the good of humanity.
He is, he and his work group, you know, are making these vaccines available patent-free.
Like, here, take them, use them to save lives.
Right.
And people attack him and say, oh, you're in the pocket of big pharma.
And he, he is the one person who probably has more patients online than you do.
And he will sit there and say to them, like, well, no, actually, I don't take any money from big pharma.
I, you know, and he will go through and explain and explain.
And of course, that never, I mean, I won't say never.
I guess maybe once or twice someone has gone, oh, wow.
Okay.
I'm sorry I said that.
But it sure isn't frequent.
I would say 99% plus of the people who attack him already have their minds made up and nothing that he says is going to change that, even though he is not part of some big corporation, some big oligarchy that's out there making money, you know.
And once you get to that level of thinking, it doesn't matter how open someone is or how open the process is.
People already have it set in their mind.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, if you guys are good, we'll go to the third topic.
So this is my favorite because it's one of my pet ideas in it.
Some people become so set in their beliefs of a thing that they continually reinterpret every piece of evidence to support their preferred version rather than accept a version that new evidence better supports.
I call this reality inversion, in which evidence should support one conclusion, but is wrangled in the mind to instead support the opposite conclusion.
We see this with people engaging in conspiracy beliefs in the moment when they come to see a much larger view of the evidence, but still attempt to reject it.
They will sometimes say things like, it all fits together too perfectly.
It's like it's too neat and tidy to be real.
So the question, do you have any thoughts on how we can push past this cognitive dissonance and reach the person that might be confused by it?
Well, this is the million dollar question.
This is a doozy.
We could talk about this.
Once we solve this, we're going to go on to world peace.
If we solve this, we might have already solved world peace.
Maybe.
So cognitive dissonance is a phrase that has become part of the popular culture at this point.
And a lot of people use it to mean just a contradiction.
Somebody's holding two views that don't seem to go together.
But it's a specific area of research within psychology.
It's been very well founded since the 50s, well understood, well supported in the lab.
That it refers to mostly unconscious psychological mechanisms we have in our brains to maintain consistency, just as your body wants to maintain an adequate level of fuel and water.
It also wants to sink up the beliefs that you carry around in your brain.
So by the time you are really committed to a belief, Especially if you've paid some kind of price for it, you've been ostracized for it, you have beat somebody up on behalf of this belief, you have alienated a loved one, you've been swindled in some way by it.
The more swindled you've been by a belief, the less you are able to change that belief.
You have paid too much for it, and your brain will automatically, without you even noticing it, reject new information or undertake a number of different options that have the same effect.
Like you can just rather than replacing one belief with the other, you can just forget you heard the new thing.
You can dismiss the person who is.
You can tell, you can identify the person who's saying that fact as a bad agent of some sort, a bad actor, and just reject anything they have to say because they're, you know, a big pharma shill or whatever.
Like a justification for rejection, yeah.
That's right.
You can explain away the contradiction.
Maybe these two things fit together much better than at first appeared.
Maybe you can preserve both.
And our brains will just automatically choose one of these things without most of the time us ever becoming aware that there's a tension between these two ideas that we've had.
And so, yeah, when you're way down the rabbit hole, it's next to impossible to reason somebody out of it.
And if you are able to, it's not going to happen in a hurry.
It's going to take a really long time.
And it's going to have to happen in an environment of non-judgment and trust and personal trust and just little drops of nuance that will not trigger not trigger those self-defense mechanisms.
And one of the reasons these self-defect defense mechanisms are so aggressive when we're talking about really cherished beliefs is that they automatically go to our sense of self.
If you have picked on someone for recommending vaccines, like Dr. Hotez, you have staked your morality on being justified in doing that.
And your intelligence is staked on that too.
So part of your identity is wrapped up in it, right?
That's right.
So if you are to allow the possibility that you're wrong about Dr. Hotez to come up to the surface of your mind and really have to wrestle with it, you also have to allow the possibility that you have been an asshole and a fool.
And people find that almost impossible to at scale to confront.
Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, is it occurs in almost every different area of our existence?
It does.
People do it all the time.
People think they're good at something.
You know, regular listeners and Spencer will know that I sometimes bring these things back to things on reality TV.
And right now, there's a big brother player who is certain that he is an expert body language reader.
And the very first time he talked about it, he got it completely wrong.
And the second time that he talked about it, he got it completely wrong.
The most recent time he talked about it, he was coincidentally right.
It wasn't because of his body language reading.
It was for other things.
But he still now firmly believes, you could tell by what he says, see, this proves that I'm an expert at body language reading, conveniently forgetting about the times that we all saw on our TVs when he was wrong.
And I think that that really speaks to a lot of these situations where people will just, like you said, put it out of their minds completely.
that, oh, I saw evidence that contradicted, well, no, there was something wrong with that evidence or just forget it.
We usually think of that as confirmation bias.
And I would view that bias as just one subcomponent of the larger cognitive dissonance resolution process.
Yeah, counting the hits and forgetting the misses.
Yes, exactly.
The old psychic trick works.
Yes.
But, you know, there's the committed hardcore believer who's paid a price for their belief is not the only person out there when we're trying to think about how to tackle misinformation, particularly around public health and things where we, you know, there's a need to intervene in some way.
We don't always want to just say, well, it's your business what you think about, you know, the shape of the earth or Bigfoot or whatever.
If you're trying to make it other people's business by banning a medical treatment or promoting some kind of medical malpractice or trying to change the law in some way, determine what can be taught in school, then skeptics and others may want to intervene in some way.
And that requires crafting messages and sharing information that is not only accurate, that we might just hope is picked up, but is actually designed to be in some way persuasive or to reach people.
And a lot of those people will not be hardcore believers, but they will be only friendly to your message in a soft way or a little skeptical of your skeptical point of view, or they've heard a few things that are not resolved for them yet, or they just have no opinion.
And reaching these kinds of groups, we still have to think about cognitive dissonance, particularly when we're talking about something like vaccine hesitance, where it's a different thing than reaching a hardcore, committed anti-vaccine professional, say.
They're just not going to change their minds.
Their livelihood depends on it.
But just your average mom or dad is trying to figure out if they should get the chickenpox vaccine, they have questions.
And one of the more effective ways that doctors have discovered to deal with that is just to make some time and talk to them about their concerns.
And just in a non-judgmental way, just listen and provide the best information you can.
And above all other things, avoid dismissing or scoffing or making them feel dumb because that will ratchet them further into that commitment.
It will not, it will backfire for the intended result.
Every time you make somebody feel stupid, they like you less and they believe you less.
And whatever belief they were starting to grow, it hardens.
And that's hard to scale too, partly because skeptics and communicators are bad at it.
We want to call out foolish stuff and say that's really dumb.
No, you're wrong about that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think it is, you know, like you said, it's the difference between dealing with the hardcore anti-vaxxer, the hardcore creationist, and someone who has questions and how you have to alter that message.
Because, yeah, I mean, almost every parent today has heard the too much too soon claims, like, oh my gosh, you want to stick my baby how many times?
Yeah, and those have been proliferating for decades.
Right.
We have now coming into generations of people who've heard that.
Right.
And so, yeah, it's something that, you know, as my own kids, you know, get towards the age and life situation where they may be having kids of their own at some point soon.
You know, I wonder, okay, am I going to have to have these discussions with them?
Because I know that other members of the extended family have been like, oh, no, we're going to take a slow route to vaccines.
We're going to do this.
We're going to do that.
And, you know, nobody in the family, I mean, I wasn't close enough to have a conversation with them because it would have been strange, but nobody else in the family really knew what to do because, you know, the person who was saying it was known to be rather stubborn and only valued their own beliefs.
And so it was like, okay, well, we don't want the, you know, the child to be in danger, but how do you deal with that?
You know, there used to be a, Daniel, you may remember this, and I don't remember the name of the person who did, but there used to be a whole podcast about how to be a skeptic and still have friends.
Yeah, I think that was Mike Moraz's.
Yes, it was.
It was.
And so he, you know, he had episode after episode about, you know, that topic and how to handle it.
And so it's noteworthy that that was a project that seemed worth doing.
Yes.
Because especially at that time, this kind of rhetorical style inherited from the new atheism was kind of on the ascendant, prioritizing firebrand rhetoric, which may be entertaining for the person speaking and their fans, but is really off-putting for anybody who might actually need this information, for whom this information might be novel or important or life-saving.
Right.
So yeah.
You should believe what I believe.
And if you don't, then you're totally stupid and you're worthless.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But this brings us back to the flip-flopping thing.
You know, smarty pants, rationalist types have all our own dumb stuff that we fall into or all our own traps.
And one of them is disdain for framing or communication, disdain for actually thinking about how our messages will be received or internalized by an outside audience.
It could actually, it was argued, you know, 15 years ago, quite commonly, that it was unethical to refrain from insulting people.
And for anyone who actually had an interest in something like public health, this position was pure madness.
Like, of course, you want people to be able to receive your message without you going out of your way to erect unnecessary barriers to understanding.
That's, that's just, you're scoring own goals there.
You're the one screwing that up, not the person hearing you.
Right.
Yeah.
That was, I think, the most recent, as we're recording this, the most recent episode of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe had a discussion of framing.
And, you know, it won't be the most recent by the time this is out, but I don't remember what episode was like 997 or 998 because they're approaching their 1000th episode.
I think they just crossed it.
Well, yeah, I putting it out.
They did it in Chicago this past weekend.
Okay.
Yeah.
But, but yeah, it's interesting because so back in the days when I was heavily involved in, like I said, the local skeptics group, we had a meeting one time and someone said to me, why are we not more like Rush Limbaugh out there just in their faces, telling them they're wrong, et cetera, et cetera.
And then shortly after that, I got a call to go on a TV show because we were the only, even though I'm, you know, down three and a half hours south of Chicago, we were the only organized Illinois skeptics group.
And so there was a TV show.
I don't know if either of you remember Morton Downey Jr.
Yep.
This was his attempt at a comeback after he lost his original TV show for faking a Nazi attack on himself.
And he got caught because he used a mirror to make the swastika on his own head.
And then people were like, that's backwards.
The only way that would be backwards is if someone used a mirror to draw that.
And so he lost his TV show.
He was now coming back on a much smaller station.
And they wanted skeptics.
And a friend of mine was a well-known skeptic and magician in the Chicago area.
And he had me come up.
And the funny thing was, I expected him to do most of the talking.
He had a bad cold and laryngitis.
So I had to do most of the skeptical talking.
And as it happened, they brought the psychics on first, and we were back in the green room.
And we saw them and were like, oh my gosh, that's Dorothy Allison.
I happened to have a book with me about a skeptical book about psychics and had a whole chapter on Dorothy Allison.
So I'm sitting there doing quick research and I bring it out.
And, you know, when we get out there, it comes to us and I immediately just, yeah, go on the attack.
Now, you could say it's a talk show.
It's meant for this sort of thing.
And so I started reading through like all her failures.
And she got so pissed.
She got out of her chair and she came over to me.
And I got out of my chair.
And I was, I mean, I am not a tall person, but I was a good eight inches taller than her.
And she's sitting there pointing her finger at my face to the point that like their security guard jumped up.
You know, they always have one on these talk shows.
He thought we were going to have a fist fight right there.
And, you know, I, yeah, we were getting in each other's faces.
And it was just funny that the person at the local skeptics group had said, we need to do more of this.
And I'm sure Morton Downey Jr. loved it.
You know, this is the sort of thing he wanted.
Exactly what he wanted.
Yeah.
Did it convince anyone who was watching that day?
Well, doubtful.
I mean, because I didn't really get to, I mean, I listed some of the important things that she had failed at, but then it turned into just a yelling match.
I don't know how you do both in that situation.
Yeah.
So, Rush, Rush Limbaugh, Morton Downey Jr., that kind of presentation, it can gather in a certain type of disaffected person.
It certainly can be entertaining.
But mostly, it is just what's happening with Trump rallies right now is just red meat for the base all the time.
It's not designed to persuade.
It's not going to persuade.
And, you know, I doubt you'll find many progressives in the world who were made more conservative by Rush Limbaugh.
It's just, you know, because, you know, that's when the messenger clearly hates your guts, you're not going to listen to the message.
Right.
You know, even if they're telling the truth, you don't want to hear it from them.
Yeah.
And it's kind of, it's funny, long before cognitive dissonance was spelled out theoretically, studied, people who do this kind of debunking work, there's always been a few oddballs out there who were like, hold on, are you sure this witch hunting stuff is really all it's cracked up to be?
You know, maybe there's some problems in how we're thinking about it.
And all of those people, they always, you know, all through literature going back centuries, they all have some kind of, they reach some kind of folk understanding of the problem of cognitive dissonance and how to overcome it.
Because it just, it's, it's always been there.
It's just baked into how humans think.
That if you're really committed to this idea, if it pays your bills or it justifies your actions or, you know, it is just really important to you in your soul, it's really hard for you to change your mind.
And the more you're mocked for it, it just adds up to a bigger investment.
It's only going to make you more evangelical for that belief.
You're saying we're not going to solve this problem today.
That's really no.
And for people who don't know, Leon Fessinger, however you say his last name, I've never quite resolved it.
The psychologist who spelled out his theory of cognitive dissonance, this grew out of a direct field study where he and his team wanted to know what would happen when committed believers, like really committed believers, hardcore believers, were forced into a situation where they were simply unambiguously shown to be wrong.
How would they react?
And so he chose a end of the world UFO cult, a little one.
And they were embedded with those guys for weeks as they approached the end of the world deadline, which is a specific date.
And that date came and went.
And they shuffled the date and they hedged around and made excuses.
But eventually it was clear the world was not going to end.
And most of the members of that cult, particularly in the real inner, inner parts of it, the real hardcore believers who were reinforced by other believers around them, they did not change their minds.
They became twice as convinced.
And they became, as well, more evangelical.
Yeah, dig a deeper trench, right?
Yeah, deeper and deeper.
Yeah.
I mean, I think, you know, we could all come up with examples.
There are examples of people who get out of that situation.
Yeah.
Spencer, you have had some guests on the podcast.
Yeah.
The Democratic National Convention, as again, as we record just yesterday, had a number of speakers who were repeat Trump supporters and voters.
And, you know, one got up there and said, I voted for him once.
I voted for him twice, you know, and I, and, and now I realize.
And it's like, well, what exactly did it take for you to get out of that?
And, you know, some of them explain certain things.
And, um, and, you know, that is more, you know, less of a science situation, but, you know, is a UFO cult really a science situation?
It's all about, you know, your belief at that point and, you know, doing what it takes to overcome that belief.
And so, yeah, sometimes it just seems impossible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Probably it is impossible for some people.
It's, it's pretty rare for people to make a complete reversal like that.
Sometimes people do it on their own.
And in every case, you have to do most of that work yourself of coming to acknowledge and face uncomfortable insights, like my whole generation is doing in therapy right now.
But yeah, no, some people will just like, maybe it's a personality thing that, or, or you have some even deeper value that you just, this doesn't sit right with you somehow.
And that unease just kind of grows and grows and grows.
It is possible to help somebody through that process, just as it is, you know, recovering from a cult type situation or an addiction.
But yeah, it takes a lot a lot of investment in interpersonal trust and it takes a really long investment in time.
And it won't work for everybody.
Well, yeah.
The one notion that has of the people that I've had on the podcast who talked about coming away from unreal ideas and kind of joining the rest of us in reality, I think that I'm going to loop in another one of my ideas in here shamelessly.
I guess it is my podcast, so I should be fine.
Is the idea that many of the conspiracy notions are more or less drifting free?
They could be described as like telling a story by having the crowd kind of each chime in, right?
Everyone tells their own little bit of the story and it drifts in meaning and in definition as it goes.
Each person who wants to be a storyteller in the conspiracy sphere has to kind of start from where it leaves off.
And some people have tried to have an entirely new conspiracy, but it doesn't catch on because it doesn't mean anything to anyone.
So it's almost like they know that they have to start from where the story is so far and add their own little bit, their own little conclusion, their own little what-if scenario.
And what I've seen happen, again, anecdotally among the few people I've had on the podcast is that for a person, for one individual, they can have a part of it that's that's like what you said earlier, Daniel, about that there's a part that becomes part of their identity.
In a case of one person I had on the podcast, name was Brent Lee, a man from the UK.
And for him, he believed in a global conspiracy.
And he described that there was a particular part that was sort of dear to him, this one particular part of the belief that was in his mind unshakable, which was, I mean, he was involved in all kinds of things that we consider to be not great.
And he talks about it openly now.
It's really interesting.
But he believed that almost all the mass shootings and all the mass casualty events like 9-11 and whatnot were fake.
But the core belief that he had that was sort of unshakable was that there was like demonic sacrifice things going on and that it had to be this the elite, the Illuminati were somehow doing blood rituals and this sort of thing.
And this is, it's a very strange belief to me anyway.
But it is a thing that is sort of circulated in a lot of places.
And to him specifically, this one thing was unshakable.
So when the crowdsourced story began to drift with the introduction of QAnon and all the Donald Trump stuff, it moved away from this specific set of beliefs enough that he was kind of left behind.
And he was left looking at it, going, oh, none of this works for me because I have this core bit that's to him like a touchstone, like it's unmovable.
And the story left that part behind.
And it's the story, you know, it's this mass of people that are all kind of moving in a group sort of thing.
They don't really care about what one person has as a core bit.
They just go with the flow, right?
The crowd moves.
But he found that he couldn't leave this one bit behind.
And then when he was kind of clinging to it and the crowd moved further from it, like the story of the conspiracy moved further from that, that was kind of the moment where he kind of, you know, shook his head and kind of, well, okay, maybe none of it's true.
And then it kind of popped him out, right?
And I think this is part of a thing that I think I've seen other people have is that they sort of have one central touchstone belief or they come to form one based on the things that they're being told.
And that for them and their part of the story that they try to tell, they always circle back to that.
They always come back to that one thing.
It's, it's, for some people, it's that the earth is flat, or some people that like Brent, it was the demonic blood sacrifice thing or whatever.
And they always circle back to that thing.
And if you can find that, what that unmovable thing is for them.
And like I, for him, it wasn't like that anyone debunked that notion.
It was just that what everyone was talking about, the stream of ideas that he was attempting to follow just wasn't including that anymore.
And he was sort of left out.
And it was kind of strange because it was kind of a group formed by people who were left out of other things anyway.
I think that if you can find a way to find out what that is, I think that's a start at the very least to because then if you can pick a part and you could, you know, I personally think if I was to find in a person who was having these beliefs what that thing was, I wouldn't attack that one thing because that's the thing they will cling to more than anything.
Like what you say, they'll double down on that one thing.
But if you can then think to yourself, okay, well, this is a mass of things, and it's almost like the scientific, was it scientific deconstructionism, reductionism, right?
Right.
Where you could say, okay, well, all the rest of them are sort of expendable to this one idea.
Well, then start pulling apart all the other ones, right?
And separating all those.
And like, because once it's a smaller amount, once it's a smaller thing, once you get all the little buddies over to the side separated, then maybe I think you have a chance, right?
Like you, you can pull apart all the ideas that they won't cling to and debunk those.
It's a long process, like you say.
But I think that we have to find that and discover the process at the very least, because I don't think this problem is going to go away on its own.
So I think you're getting at something really important that it's similar to advice that Mick West gives in his book, Escaping the Rabbit Hole.
Right.
Okay.
Which is fleshing out, like when I say it's, you know, you can do this empathy and listening and non-judgment, one-on-one relationship with somebody over a long time.
Well, what does that entail?
And Mick goes into that in his book.
And again, this is hard to scale, but if you have somebody, you know, a wife or child or father, you know, a loved one, a friend who's really going down the rabbit hole, you may want to help in some way, intervene in some way.
And yeah, that's one of the things Mick Rep recommends is, yeah, find that one touchstone thing where you can agree and then start to use that position.
I mean, maybe you can agree, but if you have a little joint platform somewhere that you can both stand, that's really helpful.
But if you can identify that thing that is really core for that person and start to just very gently nudge them in the direction of seeing the disparities between that core belief and other things that they may have encrusted around it, it helps to plant seeds, as the metaphor has been.
And yeah, you need to find a little bit of fertile soil to plant those seeds.
So, you know, we look at public figures like, say, Liz Cheney breaking with the Trumpian mainstream.
You know, whatever motivated her to do that, whether it's this, you know, perceiving the Constitution of the United States as sacred or, you know, something along those lines, something can act as a lever and a ratchet.
And yeah.
And in that process, like I don't want to sound too kind of Machiavellian or whatever here either.
If in a sincere way, you can help somebody come more back to themselves, you know, find, you know, find ways to talk to them about the things that are really important to them.
That's not an unkind or manipulative thing to do.
It's helping.
And when we look at many conspiracy theories, he mentioned the flat earth.
Well, one of the things that's attractive to people about the flat earth is that in most formulations, that cannot be a natural, naturally occurring object.
It's a created place.
And if there's a created place, there is a creator.
And so there's great solace in there for some people.
And same with creationism.
If we can defend literal creation in six days and overturn evolution, then we can confirm our own faith.
And same with some of the spiritual warfare stuff, the demons and the dungeons and dragons seducing our children.
Further proof of justification.
That's right.
If there's a devil, then there's a God and an afterlife and a ground for goodness.
And if you want those people to shift out of those ideas, it's telling them there's no God is not going to get you anywhere.
That's the very thing they're trying to avoid, thinking about.
But showing them that other people of faith have found other ways to resolve this question of what is the ground of goodness or what do I rest my faith on, that may be much more fruitful and healing for them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, all right.
I think we'll end on that note.
That is at least a little bit positive.
We didn't solve the problem of disinformation and unreality, but maybe we got a little closer.
Well, there's just the three of us here today, and that is going to have to be an all-of-society project.
It's bigger than the Manhattan Project dealing with disinformation, misinformation.
Maybe we should do world peace first then.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, this has been really fun.
Do you have any projects on the go?
Do you have anything that you want to plug or you want to talk about that you're working on?
Not specifically.
I'm trying to keep my toe in.
Most of my energy right now, a lot of it is spent over on Blue Sky, the Twitter alternative.
And a lot of my thinking is about that larger saving the world question.
And we can maybe talk about in another day that tackling the larger disinformation project, anti-disinformation project, it would maybe help to have a really functional skeptics movement, which we don't right now.
It would maybe help to be able to build coalitions with the newer people, the newer disinformation experts and anti-misinformation reporters and activists, many of whom are reinventing the wheel and already burned out and often under attack from legions of trolls and sometimes congressional committees.
And yeah, it's a mess out there.
We're badly outgunned.
So saving the world thing is going to take some doing.
General Patton only looked so good because someone else had already built the army, right?
He just kind of showed up and led it to the few battles he did.
And yeah, right.
There's a lot of work to do.
We need about 10,000 more people working on it.
We haven't even started building a force.
That's right.
So Daniel, what's your what on Blue Sky?
What is your handle there?
I think it's just Daniel Larkston.
If you just want to search my name, I should pop up right away.
I'm on Instagram.
I'm still on Twitter, but I don't spend much time there.
It feels unethical.
It's a little unavoidable because there's still so many smart people lingering there.
But it's not a nice experience.
And I feel like I'm contributing to the problem and propping up what's become a major misinformation organ.
Yeah.
And with that, yeah, you can find me mostly on Twitter.
You've been lots of people.
It's still the biggest.
Yeah, it's and I fully understand what you're saying.
It is a debate.
You know, is it?
And I know many people who have said exactly that.
Anyone who is still on Twitter, you should not be.
But I still ascribe to the idea that you can't, all the thinking people can't just completely abandon Twitter because then all you have left are the, you know, the Nazis, the conspiracists, and yeah, and the people who they're trying to convince.
You know, and so, um, I mean, I have alternative reasons too, because I, as I mentioned earlier, you know, I spend a lot of time in the reality TV community.
And though there have been efforts to bring them to Blue Sky and to Threads, those efforts have generally failed because you kind of need a community to bring the rest of the community there.
And catch 22, classic.
Right.
And the problem was both Blue Sky and Threads opened up their doors before they were ready for prime time.
I would argue that they're still not fully ready for prime time in many ways.
Yeah, I mean, threads, I'm sorry, Blue Sky, you still can't post videos.
Yeah.
And the heart of the reality TV community wants to see videos.
So you're not going to get them over there until that's a thing.
And so, yeah, so I, you know, I have my hands in multiple pots.
Yeah, I get it.
It's, I'm in much the same boat.
And there are no really satisfactory options right now.
So I can hardly be too prescriptive about it.
Yeah.
So anyone who wants to find me, they could find me at David Bloomberg on Blue Sky and Twitter at David Bloomberg TV on threads and Instagram and YouTube and TikTok.
And the TV is there because on all the video things, you know, on any of the tech space, I will argue all these different topics.
But because the video platforms, their algorithms, they screw you over if you try to do multiple topics.
So all reality TV all the time on those.
And, you know, unfortunately, I don't have as much time on Blue Sky as I would like and threads, but I'm trying to make that time.
Well, guys, this has been a lot of fun.
I just want to say thanks for inviting me on and having this chat.
Yeah, I feel like we've known each other for a really long time on social media.
Yeah, and I'm familiar.
Yeah.
I'm familiar with your early skeptical work, too.
I've cited it a number of times.
Good.
Yeah.
Great.
For anyone who has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about this podcast, anything you hear on that we've said here, you can send an email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And I am still on the front line of the misinformation war at Twitter primarily at Spencer G. Watson.
And I'm also available on Blue Sky and Threads, but just less so there, just because I focus on one.