This is the full transcription of podcast 'Hidden Forces'.
Conspiracy Theories Why the Rational Believe the Irrational Michael Shermer #Podcast #Transcription #ReadAlong #KnowledgeUnlocked
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This is the full transcription of podcast 'Hidden Forces'.
Conspiracy Theories Why the Rational Believe the Irrational Michael Shermer #Podcast #Transcription #ReadAlong #KnowledgeUnlocked
What's up everybody? My name is Demetrius Grafinis and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs and everyday citizens. The challenge consensus narratives and to learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in today's episode is Michael Shermer. Michael is the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine. He hosts his own podcast, the Michael Shermer Show, and he is the prolific author behind many best-selling books that you will recognize by name like The Believing Brain, Giving the Devil His Do, The Moral Ark, The Mind of the Market, and many more. His latest book, Conspiracy, presents an overarching review of conspiracy theories who believes them, why, which ones are real, and what we should do about them. You're going to come away from today's conversation with a framework for thinking about conspiracies, what we mean when we talk about a quote conspiracy theory, the different types of conspiracies that (1/57)
exist, how to distinguish between a conspiracy that's real and one that's imagined, and how to tilt the information landscape towards producing more accurate models of the world around us so that we're elevating theories that more closely converge on the truth without resorting to censorship or policing of thought and information. For anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener-supported. I don't rely on advertisers or commercial sponsors, so if you want access to the second hour of today's conversation, as well as the transcripts and intelligence reports, which include my takeaways from every episode, as well as my thoughts on what comes next, head over to hiddenforces.io, select the episode that you're interested in, and click on the premium extras, where you can then sign up to one of our premium content tiers. If you want access to our Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events and (2/57)
dinners, feel free to send an email to infoathiddenforces.io, and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this incredibly informative and timely conversation with my guest Michael Shermer. Dr. Michael Shermer, welcome to Hidden Forces. Nice to see you. Great to see you too. So you really crushed it with this book. This is very timely. It's kind of a subject that you've written about in different ways than some of your previous books. What makes this one different? Is it just you kind of wanted to start off by building a framework for thinking about conspiracies? Yes, well, conspiracy theories and conspiracies has always been in our wheelhouse of skeptic. We've been around for 30, this is our 30th year, started in 92. And we've covered it over the years, JFK several times, 9-11 Truth, the Obama birther, you name it. We looked into it, the whole militia movement in the 90s was largely based on conspiracy theories about the government building (3/57)
FEMA camps to imprison Americans who own guns. And during the Obama administration, same kind of conspiracy theories about false flag operations as an excuse to take away Americans guns. I mean, that's been in the news recently because that was the Alex Jones, Sandy Hook, false flag conspiracy theory. I'm a writer and a social scientist, so I'm always looking for new projects. I don't want to be one of those authors that writes the same book over and over. I try to move on and my books have dealt with lots of different topics, but I've never focused on conspiracy theories as a problem to solve. That is, namely, why do people believe them? What's the theoretical model there that you can then test empirically? And thankfully, there is a sizable body of literature in the social sciences on conspiracy theories now. That didn't used to be the case in the 90s and early 2000s. It was still kind of on the fringe. Journalists would write colorful articles about the nut jobs that believe this or (4/57)
that. Academics largely steered clear of it. It wasn't really an academic field like it has become in the last 15 years or so where social scientists actually collect data. Who are these people? What are their educational levels? What's the gender ratio? Where do they work? What kind of jobs do they have? What are their ages? Where do they live? Basic demographic data that social scientists collect had never really been done to the extent that it has been recently so that we now have a handle on it. Summarize all that research. The last chapter of the book is my own a massive research survey project on that subject. I love this so much to discuss. I love the demographic part. I love all the data that went into this and the attempt to try and describe likelihoods to different cohorts based on those parameters and whether or not they would be more amenable to conspiracies. I found a lot of that very fascinating and I actually want to look into it. You mentioned the 1990s, the FEMA camps, (5/57)
the black helicopters, the UN takeover of America, German troops spotted in Texas, and Alex Jones. We did an episode with Alex Limoyer, who's a documentarian, who did a documentary recently on Alex Jones. I had gone down on Alex Jones' rabbit hole when I had become disillusioned with, I guess, the world after the 2008 financial crisis. I'm very familiar with him. Were you familiar with Alex Jones back in the 90s or when did he first come across your radar? I think early 2000s after 9-11 is when he came onto my radar. I vaguely remember him, or maybe this is a false memory of him ranting about the Oklahoma City bombing and has the fingerprints of the CIA all over it, or maybe it was the FBI, or the government, or something like that. Although I may be remembering that from that documentary film, but definitely after 9-11. The 9-11 truth thing, it did surprise me because it was so obvious why the buildings collapsed, the planes hit them, and they collapsed right at the point of impact. (6/57)
How could that be spun? Well, it was. It was amusing to watch it unfold in real time, and we documented that, published many articles and skeptic about it, that you really have to reach to make that a conspiracy theory of the US government. Of course, it was a conspiracy by 19 members of Al Qaeda plotting to fly planes into buildings without telling us ahead of time, is orchestrated by Osama Bin Laden. That's a conspiracy by definition, right? But which conspiracy theory is the correct one, that one or the inside job one? That's, I think, when Alex came onto my radar. It was interesting to watch his audience grow as the internet evolved. I think he started what, in cable radio? There was no satellite radio then, right? He's in public access television in Texas. Yeah, that's right, right, in Austin. Yeah. Of course, with the internet, you can reach hundreds of millions of people instantly. I'm often asked, is all this new? No, nothing's new in conspiracism. There's always been (7/57)
conspiracy theories all the way back to ancient Rome when Rome burned down and Nero was the emperor. He was accused of being, he made it happen on purpose, my hop, or he let it happen on purpose, Lyhop, and all these conspiracies. That's not new. It's the speed with which the transmission of conspiracy theories can spread and how many the reach is just astonishing. After 9-11, that homemade movie, Loose Change, that was astonishing. This guy got views that Hollywood producers would die for. Of course, he didn't make any money on it. He didn't charge, but tens of millions, I don't know what it's up to now. There's probably 100 million people have seen this thing. It's astonishing. Then it starts to more fringe to more mainstream audiences where people get used to hearing about these, right? By the time Trump comes along and starts spouting his own conspiracy theories, Obama wasn't born in the United States. I remember when that happened and he's on CNN, astonishing. He could get that (8/57)
kind of coverage. Anderson Cooper is asking him, well, where's the evidence for this? Oh, it's huge. I got people on the ground in Hawaii. You are not going to believe what they found. Well, tell us. Oh, no. I'm saving it. Can you give us a hint of what they found? Nope. Just a lot of people are saying. That's when he started this. A lot of people are saying. And the whole controversy around the long form versus the short form birth certificate. Oh, I had a friend send me that PDF with the whole breakdown. You could tell that this was photoshopped. And here's how you could tell. Then somebody finally that understood how photoshop works did a complete analysis showing why that was just nonsense. I'm concerned that we're already losing people. And this is actually something that we're going to talk about today, which I'm excited to talk about because at no point in the book do you say that conspiracies are by default not true. In point of fact, you go out of your way to say that (9/57)
conspiracies, there are conspiracies that are true. And in point of fact, the reason why we tend to believe conspiracies or one of the theories behind why we think that people tend to believe conspiracies is because that sometimes they are true and you're better off believing in a false conspiracy a lot of times than not believing in a conspiracy that's real and you end up dying because you hate your blind spot. I know Luke Rudowski also and I'm familiar with loose change. I'm also familiar with the documentary film Zeitgeist that came out in that period of time. And as a millennial who was coming of a particular sort of age in that period of time, really Zeitgeist for me was a bigger deal. Loose change was I think, in fact, it wasn't something that I really converged on. A lot of that stuff got roped into things like Zeitgeist or Alex Jones. And this whole community fed each other. Something else that comes up for me when you're recounting this period of time is a sense of reclaiming (10/57)
history, reclaiming power over our education of the world. There was a sense during that time and I think it was amplified by the fact that this information was spreading through the internet and there was this kind of do-it-yourself culture around it, which gave it a sense of authenticity, something that I talked about with Alex Lee Moyer that I think gives Alex Jones credibility as a voice is that he's a hot mess. There's this authenticity to Alex Jones that then sort of bleeds into a lot of the stuff he puts forward, so much of which is, you could call it basis conspiracy, theories without any evidentiary basis, but it's not because they are by fault, quote, conspiracies. And I do want to make that distinction because we're going to talk about a lot of stuff here today. Before we do any of that, because I could start going all over the place, let's start with maybe what a conspiracy theory is. How do we define that? What's a conspiracy theory and how do we spot one in the wild? (11/57)
Right, it's your binoculars. Well, first let me comment, Zeitgeist, because I remember when that film came out, I was researching and writing a lot about science and religion and the origins of religion, the anthropology religion. And then if I recall, the film started off about the secret origins of Christianity and how it really began and what all these things meant. And so I thought, yeah, that could be interesting. But then the guy goes off on, and then this was part of it and that was part of it and through the middle ages, all tied together. It's like, this is too grand a scope. This is not how conspiracies work. But yeah, that was another one of those that in the early days of the internet that really got legs, I think, again, tens of millions of people seemed like people used to send it to me all the time. Okay, so a conspiracy is two or more people plotting a secret to gain an unfair, illegal or immoral advantage over somebody else. It's not complicated. It's by that (12/57)
definition, these things happen all the time. Coalitional plots against people in your group or between groups is quite common in our evolutionary history. So my evolutionary argument is that we evolved a constructive conspiracism that is a kind of paranoia in which in signal detection theory language, it's better to make a type one error in which you assume a conspiracy theory is true when it's not, just in case, versus a type two error where you miss a real conspiracy that could harm you. So there's a kind of a logic, a rationality to it as it were, because the subtitle of my book is why the rational believe the irrational. In many ways, there's a kind of rationality behind most conspiracy theories. There's a tiny little element of truth, even in Alex Jones's crazy rantings about false flag operations at Sandy Hook, there have been false flag operations in the past. I mean, the CAA is notorious for their false flag operations in the 50s and 60s, particularly rigged elections in South (13/57)
American countries in which we favor fascist dictators over communist dictators because they're going to be friendlier to US business interests in those countries, less likely to nationalize the company like a communist dictator would and so on. And so before you know it, we're funding a lot of these programs that Congress didn't approve, oftentimes didn't even know about it, much less the public, right? Or the famous Northwoods document that was given to President Kennedy by his own administration, top people in his administration saying about all the different kinds of false flag operations we could perform as an excuse to invade Cuba again after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but really ramp it up. I mean, a total invasion and assassinate Castro, decapitate the entire regime. That would have involved terrorist attacks on Miami. Yes, right. Shooting down like an American airline. I mean, what? To his credit, Kennedy said, we're not doing anything. This is crazy, right? But that that CAA and (14/57)
in his top of administration people were proposing this tells us that this kind of thing is not totally out of left field. This does happen. I mean, I talk about MKUltra, the CAA dosing American citizens with psychoactive drugs like LSD is a form of research on mind control, out of fear that in addition to the missile gap, there was the mind control brainwashing gap with the Russians and the Chinese and the North Koreans. We got to get on this. CIA did that or the Cointel pro of the counterintelligence program by the CIA of planting spies in social justice movements in America, like the American Indian movement aim, many feminist movements, the Black Panthers and so on. And these are pretty much probably illegal, certainly immoral. And certainly Congress never approved these actions. And again, this was in the 60s and 70s, all the way up to the 90s before Congress kind of cracked down on the sorts of espionage things that the CIA could do. But even there, homeland security has been (15/57)
conducting warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of U.S. citizens, email, phones, and so on under Obama, Mr. President transparency. So it's like when someone like Alex is ranting to a lot of people that know some of this stuff, they think, yeah, that seems plod, that's not completely crazy, could be. Absolutely. So again, like I said, there's so much to discuss. You mentioned constructive conspiracism. There's actually a section in your book where you you actually come at this subject from a lot of different angles. In the case of constructive conspiracism, you actually break down three different types of conspiracies in this category, proxy conspiracism, tribal conspiracism, and constructive conspiracism, which I would like to discuss. You also layer on top of that certain psychological or sociological forces that can exacerbate this. And so I want to get to that conversation as well. Before we do, maybe just to set the context here, how widespread is this phenomenon? I've always (16/57)
kind of wondered just how many people believe in things for which there's no real evidence to support it. That's how I tend to think of this. And because these also these conspiracies break down, you know, like along a spectrum. So you've got sort of paranoid conspiracies that you talk about versus quote conspiracies or things that are much more plausible. Help me understand that. Lay the landscape out for me and our listeners, and then let's start to break into the different types of conspiracies and why people believe in them. Right. Well, first of all, it's not fringe. A survey show that everybody believes at least one conspiracy theory. I mean, if you do a survey and you have 30 different conspiracy theories, none of them are zero. Everybody takes at least one of the boxes. So that shows it's not a fringe thing. It's not tin foil hat wearing overweight guys in their parents' basement age 40. That's kind of the stereotypical conspiracy theorists in people's minds. No, it's all of (17/57)
us. And again, for good reason, you know, there are reasons we should be suspicious of government activities, corporate insider trading and shenanigans to gain an unfair profit over other companies. So on this, this sort of thing happens all the time. So then from there, you can kind of try to break it down. So you mentioned some of those causes here. I'm making a distinction between proximate causes and ultimate causes. Proximate causes are like which races or genders or ages or political orientation are more or less likely to believe conspiracy theories. And the answer is it depends which ones. So race, for example, is not a predictor of overall conspiracism, but it is of specific conspiracies. African Americans more likely to believe that the CIA planted crack cocaine in inner cities or invented AIDS to decimate black populations. Whites are less likely to believe that, but whites are more likely to believe that the government or some nefarious organizations are plotting to take (18/57)
away our Second Amendment rights or build FEMA camps to imprison Americans with guns. You know, usually something constitutional like that. Liberals are more likely to believe that Republicans, that conservatives are up to no good, you know, unfairly gain a profit and make more money. And conservatives are more likely to think those libtards are trying to turn America into a communist nation, communist state and, you know, those kinds of things. It depends on the specific conspiracy theory of what predicts it. Education attenuates conspiracism a little bit, but not massively so. I mean, if you only have a high school education versus an undergraduate versus graduate, the more education you have, the fewer conspiracy boxes you take on a survey, but not that many. You know, it's not like the percentage drops dramatically, again, because it's not unreasonable. It's not irrational to believe at least some conspiracy theories. And if anything, smart people, educated smart people, are even (19/57)
better at rationalizing beliefs that they hold for really non-smart reasons. That is to say, most of us don't have the means to check if a conspiracy theory is true or not. You know, so you hear somebody like an Alex Jones ranting, you know, I got people on the ground there, reporters are discovering amazing things, much like Trump did. And, you know, how would I know? I don't know anybody in Sandy Hook or at this voting district in Georgia. And, you know, I only have this to go on. And, you know, well, the New York Times, well, the New York Times, you know, they're run by a bunch of liberals. And I don't trust them. And, you know, you kind of get these rationalizations that people have in their head for why they would believe this. And in their mind, it is rational. You know, I'm fond of saying no one in the history of the world has ever joined a cult. They join a group that they think is going to be good. No one in the history of the world has ever self-identified as a pseudo (20/57)
scientist going down to their pseudo lab to collect pseudo data to support their pseudo theory. They think they're onto something true and big. And so same with conspiracy theories. No one thinks this is a crazy conspiracy theory. They think I have detected a true conspiracy and I am going to expose it and take Watergate. You know, I was just watching this new Netflix doc called the Martha, what's her name? Sorry, I just tweeted about this this morning because it was so good in terms of how the Watergate thing was exposed first by journalists, but also Martha Mitchell, yeah, the wife of the attorney general of Nixon's cabinet. You know, she was instrumental in exposing that what was really going on. And at first she was being gaslighted by people in her circle, including Nixon. But then it turns out later when the Nixon tapes, you know, Nixon was taping his White House conversations, it came out that her own husband was in on the gaslighting of her. Right? So if you hear enough of (21/57)
this, it's like, all right, all right, what's really going on? I mean, you want to talk about conspiracy? I've heard a lot of those Nixon tapes. There's actually a great reservoir of them on C-SPAN and I'm sure elsewhere too, obviously at all the individual libraries. So I've heard a lot of them from the Nixon administration, Kennedy, LBJ, and I believe Ford as well. Nixon was like, you want to talk about conspiracies. I mean, Nixon was constantly imagining conspiracies. Very paranoid. You know, just this thing about education is interesting to me. Is it not significant enough to comment on or is it significant enough? And then one has to wonder, is the reason that education makes you less prone towards believing conspiracies? Or maybe you have a higher threshold because you have some appreciation for the empirical method? Or is it a kind of groupthink and maybe a sort of a greater degree of submissiveness or belief in authority? I have you thought about that at all? Is it relevant or (22/57)
is it just not significant enough to comment on? Let's clarify it, that it's an on average effect, more education, less conspiracism, but not related to any particular conspiracy theories. Not like, you know, the 9-11 truthers are all idiots or the flat earthers are dumb and educated. You can't make those generalizations about any conspiracy theory because you can always find very educated people. I mean, a number of the 9-11 truth or conspiracy theories were promoted by college professors. I mean, David Ray Griffin at the Claremont College. Book up two of his books here, the WT7 book and another book on both on the claims as to why the towers were imploding. Yeah. Or most of the JFK books are written by lawyers and professors and whatnot. I mean, really smart. Or Robert Kennedy Jr. Right. Yes, right. Exactly, right. So if anything, those people are even better at rationalizing beliefs that they hold usually for non-rational reasons, right? You know, they employ the confirmation bias (23/57)
and the hindsight bias and the myside bias and all these things that I talk about in the book, even better than less educated people do. So anything, the effect could go the other way. Are more educated people more likely to believe in, let's say, a conspiracy that the founding fathers set up the country to privilege white people? That's interesting because we asked that question, right, in our survey. And yes, well, so they're probably your political orientation. Liberals are more likely to think that, right? And conservatives are less likely to think that. So how important is political affiliation in predicting either general willingness to believe? Because for example, I want to mention this, we did a great episode a year and a half ago or so with David Shore, who was, he was kind of nicknamed as like the Nate Silver of the Obama team back in the 2012 election, kind of a statistics whiz. And one of the things that I learned in the process of preparing for that conversation and (24/57)
having it subsequently is the degree to which people who tend to vote right today are distrusting of others and may be also increasingly fearful. So it's difficult to also draw out how much of it is actually political, i.e. ideology, and how much of it is these other things like fearfulness, distrusting of others, feeling marginalized. I thought about that as well when I was reading through, because again, it sounds like it wasn't very significant, but in your data set, it did seem that people that were Hispanic or Black tended to believe in general more so than others. Maybe I misread it. And I wondered, is that maybe because marginalization, if you're an immigrant, for example, you're more likely to feel somehow alienated and therefore you're less trusting, more paranoid. I wondered about that. I'm curious, can you draw out some meaningful inferences for us? Yeah, like any other human behavior or thought, it's a rat's nest of interacting causal variables. Nothing humans do has one (25/57)
cause. And that's certainly the case with conspiracism. I mean, you mentioned several there. Yes, political orientation directs you to believe certain conspiracy theories more than others. The obvious two big ones are 9-11 truthers was believed by more liberals than conservatives. The Obama-Birther movement was more conservatives than liberals. And pretty much the flip side was like 70, 30, 30, 70 on each of those by political orientation. Again, it's not just your political orientation, but that's nudging you to which stories fit the narrative. Again, we can't check these things. Most of us can't check these things ourselves. We're going to take the reason one this week with the story about the public schools having kitty litter boxes for children who identify as cats. So this fit the conservative narrative of what the libtards are doing with their confused gender sex. It's all a spectrum and we're going to teach these children how to be the opposite sex and how to perform sex acts (26/57)
young. And you can identify as anything you want, including the cat. This is one of these classic urban legends. No one found any schools anywhere with litter boxes for kids, but it fit the narrative. It's like, yeah, that's the kind of thing those liberals would do. So I call this proxy conspiracism. Even if the specific conspiracy theory is not true, it's the kind of thing they would do because look what else they did that we know that they did. So I use this for the pizza gate as my type specimen there, that Hillary and other dams are running a secret satanic cult out of a pedophile cult out of a pizzeria in Washington, DC, Comet, Ping Pong, pizzeria. And does anyone really believe that? Well, one guy did, Edgar Welch. He went there with his gun to break up the crime, which is what you would do if you really believed it. There was a crime being committed against these children and no one was doing anything about it. I mean, this guy, Edgar Welch, he made a video. He drove three and (27/57)
a half hours and made a little home video for his daughter saying, I'm going in. I would do this for you if I thought somebody was doing something harmful like this to you. I'm going to help these children. But most people I think are just like, yeah, I don't know, but I don't like those Democrats. It's the kind of thing that Clintons would do, such that even if I took you there and said, look, there's no basement, there's nothing going on here, it's not like you're going to go on that case, I'll vote for Hillary. You were never going to vote for Hillary, right? So it's just kind of a stand-in if it fits the narrative arc of your tribe. So this is the my side bias. It kind of fits the way your side thinks. I think it's so true and to bring up Alex Jones again, I've seen Alex Jones do this all the time where he rationalizes why he gets things wrong because, well, whatever, they've done all this other stuff. So who cares if I'm wrong about this one specific thing? I'm on a mission to (28/57)
educate people about the danger of this group. So who cares if I miss this thing or if I miss that thing, right? Exactly. Another thing that came up when you were giving your answer there was a study that was in the book. I don't know if you want to call it a study or a depiction of something that happened, which was that particular cult that believed that the world was ending and that the aliens were going to come and they were hanging out. And then what I found so instructive about that and so useful was the way in which they rationalized their prophecy not coming true. And this was a very specific prophecy. This was the world will come to an end at a particular time and place. And then it didn't come to an end and some people kept on believing. Can you tell me how, first of all, let's talk about that phenomenon and tell me a little bit about how powerful and important that is in explaining why we believe things with absolutely no evidence or no meaningful amounts of evidence. Right. (29/57)
Well, that particular example was from Leon Fessinger's book, When Prophecy Fails. He is a young psych professor, was curious about these end-of-the-world cults. And this one in particular was this woman in suburbs of Chicago that was channeling some alien that told her that the world would come to an end on December 21st, of course, the Winter Solstice of 1954. So he thought, okay, well, this is very specific. I'm going to go there. He got permission to join the group and then go up there with his clipboard to take notes or whatever he used and wait for the mothership to come after which there'd be massive floods and earthquakes in the Midwest and that'd be the end of it. And of course, it didn't happen. And so he was curious to see what these people would do when they go, wow, that was a dumb idea. I'm going to go back and get my job and get my car back and stuff. They gave away their belongings and whatnot. But no, in fact, they went back and doubled down on their beliefs. So he (30/57)
called this cognitive dissonance. So you have a belief that's very strong and then you're confronted with contradictory evidence. Something has to give. You either say, I was wrong or I was right, but this apparent contradictory evidence can actually be rationalized away. Often this is done with these end of the world cults of miscalculate. Oh, we miscalculate. I forget to carry the one. It's next year. We'll be back here next year. Or it was a test of our faith and God granted us that we can continue because we went all the way to the edge right there. And then he pulled back and so on. So there's half a dozen of these rationalizations. And the doubling down is a way of reminding yourself, you're not wrong, you're not wrong. And Carol Tavers' book on this, Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me is the best source on this whole subject of cognitive dissonance, which is one of the most well-researched areas in psychology. It has survived the replication crisis quite nicely. It's a real (31/57)
effect. And it happens all the time. I mean, if you think about it, I also- Politics is, it's one giant cognitive dissonance. Politician coming out. I mean, George Carlin had this great bit about that where he talked about mistakes were made, mistakes were made. Let's move past it now. Let's go. Let's move past. It's time to move past it now. Let's put it behind us. Let's put it all behind us. Yeah, both sides do it for sure. And so here's what we call a proportionality bias or this sort of cognitive dissonance of cause and effect not being in properly alignment. So we want big effects to have big causes. So if you take like the Holocaust, one of the worst crimes committed in history caused by what? The Nazis, one of the worst criminal political organizations in history. So there's kind of a harmony there that makes sense. But if you take 9-11, people tell me, you're telling me 19 guys with box cutters pulled this off? No way. It's got to be huge. This is a huge thing. It must have (32/57)
been the Bush administration and all these people or JFK gunned down by a lone nut, Lee Harvey Oswald just doesn't resonate. It's like that just doesn't feel right. It's a big effect, tiny little cause. So this is the proportionality bias, Princess Diana, cause of death, drunk driving, speeding, no seatbelt. Well, come on, that's how normal people die. 40,000 plus a year on American highways alone. But it has to be the MI6 and the Royal Family and this and that kind of. David Eich's given a whole thesis as to how there were a lot of satanic symbols and patterns involved in the crash. By the way, David Eich, who has put forward the reptilian theories as to the nature of the ruling class, what percentage of people believe in those kinds of conspiracies? That like the elites are interdimensional child molesters? Yes, thankfully, those are very low in percentage. And also you have to remember the limitations of survey data. This is self-report data. People that again tick the box famously, (33/57)
that Princess Diana was murdered are also more likely to tick the box that she faked her death and she's still alive somewhere with Doty Fiest. Just like Tupac. They're alive in Southern Argentina with Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. Elvis. Elvis. So actually, let's talk a second here about a very specific conspiracy, which was 9-11. You say it was a conspiracy, but it wasn't a conspiracy of the sort that people believe. I had one of the 9-11 commissioners, one of the members of the 9-11 commission on, Senator Bob Kerry. And we talked about 9-11. And what he said was, and this was also at the time that Bob Graham, I believe, was coming out and making some similar statements that actually we didn't know the whole truth, that we were effectively lied to or that things were kind of covered up. But the specific thing that Bob focused on was that, and this straight from the quote from our conversation, which was public, that 9-11 was a conspiracy that went all the way to the top of the Saudi (34/57)
government. And what I had asked him on that show was, if that was the case, and I'd asked him, why did the Bush administration fly the Bin Laden family, as many Bin Lads they could out of the country as their number one priority? He goes, I don't know. He goes, why didn't they answer questions? I don't know. You'd have to ask them. And the thing with the 9-11 is, there were a lot of things that give people pause. And I'm not talking necessarily about WT7, which I think stuff like that, it's very easy to go down these rabbit holes. I told Alex Lemoyer this in our conversation about Alex Jones, that when you're on the outside, you look at the stuff that he says, and you say, this is insane. How is anyone believing this? I cannot empathize with the person. But when you start listening to him and you start listening to things that he says, he feels increasingly plausible, there's a sense that you feel like it's true. It's less about, like, I can rationalize it. You do kind of find a way (35/57)
to rationalize it, but it feels true. Those things aside, I think the conditions around 9-11, the proximity of the Bush family to the Saudis, statements like this that have come out after the fact with Bob Kerry, and the fact that we know that there was a conspiracy by the administration to invade Iraq and concert effort to lie to the public, I think it's understandable for people to really not know for sure. And if you put a gun to my head, I would not say that I believe that the Bush administration, so to speak, the executive branch was responsible for the 9-11 attacks. But I would wonder if some, quote, deep state network of people in the intelligence community interfacing with the Saudi royals in some weird nexus of interests collaborated to either let it happen on purpose or made it happen on purpose, as you say. So I guess the concrete question that comes out of that entire rant, Dr. Schermer, is is it not just is it reasonable for people to feel that way, let's say, about this (36/57)
particular case, but also like, is it possible for us to know if there wasn't a nefarious involvement by elements of the, quote, deep state in something like 9-11? Certainly it's possible to know. Look, I mean, we have found out about a lot of things the US government has done. Watergate is an example I gave. And, you know, we know what happened now, thanks to whistleblowers and the persistent work of journalists like Woodward and the other guy. Yeah, Bernstein. Bernstein, Bernstein Woodward. Dustin Hoffman. It's right, Dustin Hoffman, right, and Robert Redford, right. Yeah, so I mean, a lot of these things, like I mentioned, Cointel Pro, you know, of planting agents in these social groups. See, I did that, that came out. A lot of it does come out thanks to whistleblowers, which is why we need whistleblower laws. Could there be others? Yes, of course, there could be others. I wouldn't call the invasion of Iraq by the way a conspiracy. I mean, it was right out in the open. I mean, he (37/57)
sent, you know, he got the approval of the UN, you know, under the UN resolution. But what I mean is the sending out the Secretary of State to talk about mushroom cloud being yellow cake. Yeah, the yellow cake, the sending Powell out to the UN to testify about uranium and the nuclear weapons program or the weapons of mass destruction. I can't even remember. I mean, I know subsequently having studied the period that there were considered efforts on the part of the administration to push a very specific agenda that ran overtly counter to the public narrative that they were putting forward and their attempts to conflate the threat of al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein. Maybe that's not a conspiracy, but it. Yeah, yeah, it's something for sure. Did Powell know that this was a lie about the yellow cake and the evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or was there just a lot of intel and they selected the intel that supported the narrative that we want to invade Iraq? We need an (38/57)
excuse. We're going to use these pieces of intel here instead of those over there that show he doesn't. I think it's probably more likely something like that, right? And, you know, foreign affairs, you know, public foreign affairs is a messy business. You know, so like you mentioned the Saudis, you know, I'm sure there's a lot going on there that we don't know about even now. You know, there are things that we do for national interest, either safety or oil. You know, so all this, you know, behind the 9-11 inside job is the, you know, the need for oil profiteering from war. That's a world conspiracy. That's a world conspiracy, right? Yeah, so, but it's not completely crazy. You know, we do know like Halliburton, for example, with Dick Cheney, you know, he ran that company. Then all of a sudden, you know, we invade Iraq and all of a sudden, you know, Halliburton has the exclusive rights to, you know, rebuild the country after we bombed it. And so that looks pretty bad. You know, whatever (39/57)
their intentions are, we can't get in the heads of other people to know what they're really thinking. I mean, Bush in his memoir said that was the biggest mistake of his presidency, believing the weapons of mass destruction story, you know, and then the UN goes in there, and they don't have any. Oh, oops. Again, it's probably more likely with intelligence, memos, you get, you know, thousands of them. It's more likely, you know, confirmation bias. I'm selecting the ones that I think tell what I want to hear because this is what I want to do. I want to invade Iraq, damn it. So I call that capitalized on what happened on purpose, cow hop. Instead of lie hop or my hop, it's cow hop. Capitalized on what happened on purpose. Like Roosevelt wanted to support Great Britain against the Nazis, but he couldn't. He needed a pretext. And so the attack on Pearl Harbor, he didn't let it happen on purpose. He didn't make it happen on purpose, but he was so glad that he could then do something about (40/57)
that. And same thing with Bush, with Iraq and all presidents do that, all of them, not just Democrats, Republicans, they all do it. Yeah, this is so fascinating. I want to ask you about Jeffrey Epstein, by the way. I don't want to forget. So we're talking about conspiracies. That's one I have a question about specific. I wonder, well, let's do that because we were just talking about Pizzagate. You know, this whole that Democrats are running a secret satanic pedophile ring with children. Okay, so we do know that Clinton, Bill and other prominent Democrats did fly on Jeffrey Epstein's plane to that island where he had what not children, but he did have underage women, right? Apparently his preferred age was like age 14, 15, maybe 17, right? So they're not little five-year-old children. So you can see how the story kind of like, okay, Clinton on the airplane, Epstein has children, then that transmogrifies to the pizza place with the little children instead of teenage girls and so on. I (41/57)
thought that was fascinating. You talk about that in the book. I actually thought that was insightful. I hadn't thought of that, that there's this kind of bleed factor, very interesting. Also, the drinking the blood, well, that's an old blood libel about that Jews are killing Christian babies to drink their blood and so on. And then there was a few years ago that kind of movement in tech billionaires to achieve immortality by taking certain hormones or the blood of young children. Yeah, transhumanism and it's still, but it's, right, that's an extreme, but that's still going on. They're obsessed with living for it. Right, right. So there you just throw that in. Oh, well, why are these people doing this? Oh, because they want to live forever or something like that, right? So you kind of mix in all these different, you know, the satanic panic of the 1980s. Sex craze. Yeah, the satanic panic of the 1980s. You know, that's again, one of these kind of urban legends that, you know, turned (42/57)
into a mass hysteria in which the FBI finally said, all right, we better go expose, check, look into this, say to every city in America as a satanic cult. Well, none of them did. They couldn't find any, right? So it's a little bit like that as well. Right. I remember, what book was it where I read about the gorgeous family, the popes and the kind of insane satanic behavior that went on in the very center of the Vatican, you know, like, I mean, you know, so again, constructive conspiracies, some conspiracies are real. I mean, even if you want to go full Dan Brown, you know, that Jesus didn't really die, this was an actual conspiracy theory before Dan Brown, he got it from these other two authors of that book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, that, you know, he was kind of put into a coma through some special chemicals. And then he woke up three days later and they whisked him off out of the tomb after France, where he marries Mary Magdalene as sweetheart, and they have kids and so on. You know, (43/57)
that's actually a kind of a conspiracy theory, right? But it's in this case, it's just entertaining. Yeah, I should say that too. A lot of these stories are entertaining. I mean, Alex Jones is before he went really dark, you know, he was pretty fun to watch. I mean, it was really just amusing to watch him rant. And 100%. So I want to add something there and then we can either go down the entertainment route or we can just button something up on Jeffrey Epstein, because my Jeffrey Epstein comments weren't about the pedophile island, they were about the death of the very suspicious circumstances around his death. With respect to entertainment, I couldn't agree more. And in fact, there have been periods of time where we have found conspiracies to be far more entertaining or the entertainment value of conspiracies to be much higher. And that's something that Alex Limoy and I discussed, which is that, and her documentary made me feel it transported me back to the living room of my childhood (44/57)
watching unsolved mysteries and X-Files, you know? And so I couldn't agree more and I'd love to talk about that. But to just button this up on Jeffrey Epstein, just for me, like just looking at this, like everybody else, that looked really suspicious. The fact that there were two attempts on his life, the first failed. It was by an ex-cop who was jacked up on steroids and bunked with him. The second one succeeded. The kind of stuff I looked at, and I have to be fair here to this point, it's very easy to look at some explanations, select coronary reports, et cetera, and be like, this looks like a suspicious hanging that wouldn't work. But no camera footage. I mean, like the guy that was on staff was gone. I mean, the level of incompetence that had been required for such a high profile case seems hard to understand. Now, perhaps when you investigate the bureaucracy at Rikers and you get into the details, you say, actually, this turns out to be much more plausible, for example, like the (45/57)
Oswald conspiracy, which we can talk about as well. What is your reading of this? Did you spend time? Because I tried. I reached out to his lawyers. God help me, I tried to get as much information on this story as I could, but it was just, I think people didn't want to touch it. Interesting. Yeah. Well, so when I read the story about the second camera going out, I posted something on Twitter, like, yeah, that's pretty suspicious. One camera, cameras go out. Two of them, that sounds like a pattern. So I say, well, this one could be true. This conspiracy theory could be true. He was murdered. But then somebody wrote me who had worked at Rikers Island. He goes, oh, this place is a dump. I mean, nothing works there. Cameras go out all the time. The people that work there are like totally incompetent. They're sleeping on the job. They leave. They, you know, whatever. I'm like, oh, okay, never mind. So that's the conspiracy principle, never attribute to malice, what can be explained by (46/57)
incompetence and chance, right? A lot of the world operates on randomness and chance. It's almost impossible for us to detect randomness. We're not good at that. We didn't evolve that. We evolved to be pattern finders, not randomness, understanding, right? The stories I tell, like the famous iPod shuffle feature that Jobs introduced, and then Apple got complaints from customers. It's not random because certain songs come up more than others. That's randomness, right? There's a pattern. And so they reprogrammed it to make it come out where each song is played the same number of times in your playset. You actually have to program that in to be non-random, right? The stars in the sky are random, but we see patterns of big and small dippers and scorpions and horses and whatnot. So, or even cancer clusters. It doesn't seem possible that in this town where there was this big industrial plant with a lot of leakage of their toxic chemicals, there's a cluster of certain kinds of cancers there. (47/57)
Actually, that is usually random. You know, if you throw a handful of pennies in the air and you let them land on the ground, they're not going to be evenly distributed. There's going to be clusters of pennies, right? So, which is why the cover, this is the cover, right? It's just kind of these random dots that, you know, we piece them together into some sort of pattern. But in fact, setting aside the fact that conspiracies do happen, the theories we have are probably not true. It's just random dot connecting, patternicity. So then it becomes a signal detection problem. Well, then how do you know which ones, which signals are real and which are just noise? And so it's hard to tell. You know, there's a great chapter in James Glake's book, The Information, where he talks about random numbers. And there's a whole philosophical exploration of what constitutes a random number. And there's, you know, to your point, there's a huge difference between that. There's all difference between what (48/57)
looks random versus what actually is random. Something can look extremely non-random and actually be completely random. But it's really about a set of probabilities and order. And that, again, speaks to pattern, patternicity, and our desire to find patterns in the noise. And we're so good at it. Actually, that's a great question. Before we moved to the entertainment thing, because I guess we kind of closed off on Epstein, has anyone looked into understanding whether or not people who by their nature tend to see patterns more than others, if those people tend to be more conspiratorially minded than other people? Right. Yeah. So people that see patterns that are not there, called illusory patterns, are more likely to believe conspiracies. Or, because which way does the causal arrow point, could be that people that believe conspiracies are more likely to find illusory patterns in random dots. I mean, that is what the research shows. You put subjects into a condition of feeling anxious. (49/57)