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

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00:00:30.860 Conspiracy theories are just theories about what could be a real conspiracy.

00:00:34.900 And some of them are true. A lot of them are true.

00:00:37.260 So we should just stop treating it in a negative way and instead think of, like, the lab leak hypothesis as legitimate, just in case.

00:00:45.720 The moment you start censoring speech, people automatically think, why am I not being allowed to hear this?

00:00:51.200 I want to see this. I want to read it for myself.

00:00:53.600 Epstein died and there were conspiracy theories about that he was killed.

00:00:57.580 I thought, nah, that's probably not the case.

00:00:59.240 And then somebody wrote me, emailed me, from that prison.

00:01:02.760 He said, I used to work at that prison and nothing works there.

00:01:05.740 It's a dump.

00:01:06.580 I thought, okay, so this is the conspiracy principle.

00:01:09.800 Don't attribute to malice what could be explained by incompetence or chance.

00:01:13.260 I'm back to thinking he probably just killed himself.

00:01:16.020 It's rational to believe conspiracy theories because enough of them are true.

00:01:19.780 It pays to err on the side of caution just in case.

00:01:23.360 As they say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you.

00:01:26.120 Sometimes they are after you, right?

00:01:27.460 So if people say, you know what, I don't really trust the U.S. government.

00:01:30.440 I don't trust Fauci.

00:01:31.340 I don't trust the CDC.

00:01:32.420 I don't trust the CIA, the FBI.

00:01:34.400 I say, I understand.

00:01:36.160 There's good reasons why you shouldn't.

00:01:37.600 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:50.820 I'm Francis Foster.

00:01:52.120 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:01:53.160 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:58.600 Our brilliant and returning guest today is a skeptic-in-chief and author of many, many books,

00:02:04.460 including his latest one, which is called Conspiracy, Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.

00:02:08.920 Michael Shermer, welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:02:11.180 Gentlemen, it's nice to be back.

00:02:13.240 Am I your returning champion?

00:02:14.960 You absolutely are.

00:02:16.340 But for those people who didn't catch the first interview, just tell everybody, remind everybody,

00:02:20.080 who are you?

00:02:21.080 What do you do?

00:02:22.440 What's been your journey through life?

00:02:23.700 Sure, thank you.

00:02:24.820 Let me introduce my day job, which is publishing this magazine, Skeptic Magazine.

00:02:29.600 We take on just kind of boring, non-controversial subjects like race, race, trans, and abortion

00:02:37.940 are the last three issues of this year.

00:02:40.940 Sounds like the average trigonometry episode, Michael.

00:02:43.420 Keeping it low-key there, my friend.

00:02:45.080 That's right.

00:02:45.720 No, you guys are my inspiration for doing this.

00:02:48.520 Well, I mean, we've been in business 30 years, publishing starting in 1992.

00:02:52.540 Mostly, we focused on science and pseudoscience and the paranormal, the supernatural, conspiracy

00:02:59.440 theories, aliens, UFOs, Bigfoot, you know, astrology, psychics, talking to the dead, and

00:03:04.960 so on.

00:03:05.300 But you can only debunk those things so many times before it gets redundant.

00:03:09.120 So we're kind of branching out into more controversial subjects like the ones I just introduced.

00:03:13.840 The next issue comes out next week is on nationalism.

00:03:16.920 And then next year, we're doing stuff on money matters, economics, crypto, all that stuff,

00:03:21.460 also mental health.

00:03:23.000 You know, there's recent studies showing that, you know, like, psycho, psychiatric medications

00:03:29.120 appear to do very little for things like depression, maybe nothing, and so on.

00:03:33.960 So what's the, you know, status of that?

00:03:35.740 You know, so those kinds of subjects that I think have more global and, you know, larger

00:03:41.040 cultural implications.

00:03:42.720 So that's my day job.

00:03:43.900 And then I write books, you know, there's conspiracies, my 15th book, and because I enjoy

00:03:49.240 writing and, and then, and then I talked to people like you.

00:03:53.640 Well, Michael, it's good to have you back on the show and quite timely as well, because

00:03:57.480 I think it's fair to say that whatever your view of conspiracy or conspiracy theories or

00:04:02.360 whatever it is, we've never had more of them around.

00:04:06.300 We've never had more of them in our faces.

00:04:08.200 And do you think that's because we've become more conspiratorially minded, or we just have

00:04:12.360 way more access to information now?

00:04:15.320 The latter, there's, there's just as many conspiracy theories 100 years ago as there

00:04:20.280 are now.

00:04:20.780 It's just that they diffuse through culture much more quickly now because of social media.

00:04:25.720 So if you look at, like, there's data collected about letters to the New York Times in the

00:04:30.960 like 1890s to the 1970s.

00:04:33.420 And you can see there's plenty of conspiracy theories, even, you know, a century ago about

00:04:37.740 what the Mormons are doing, or the Catholics are doing, or the Jews, of course, always. 0.97

00:04:43.180 I don't trust any of them.

00:04:45.520 You know, and the influence on American elections or the First World War was just rife with conspiracy

00:04:51.400 theories.

00:04:51.940 You know, why did this start?

00:04:53.520 You know, I have a whole chapter on this in conspiracy on the, the assassination of Franz

00:04:57.340 Ferdinand that, that started the First World War.

00:05:00.020 That was a conspiracy, but then there were layers and layers of conspiracy theories, some

00:05:04.740 true, some not on top of that.

00:05:06.480 So that's not new.

00:05:08.160 You know, you can go all the way back to the burning of Rome, you know, with Nero being

00:05:12.760 accused of letting it happen on purpose or making it happen on purpose, you know, so

00:05:16.980 wherever there's power, where somebody has a lot of power and money and influence and

00:05:21.960 other people don't, then the people that don't are very suspicious of the people that

00:05:26.300 do have power.

00:05:27.560 And for good reason, really, this is what I call constructive conspiracism.

00:05:31.180 A lot of times when people get in power, they get corrupt, believe it or not.

00:05:36.420 Like, like Sam Bankman-Fried, you know, what happens?

00:05:38.940 This guy seemed like the, you know, the nerdiest, nicest guy in the world.

00:05:41.980 You know, we're going to change the world and effective altruism and long-termism.

00:05:45.860 And oh my God, this is going to change humanity.

00:05:47.840 And then all of a sudden he's arrested for fraud.

00:05:49.700 Okay.

00:05:50.380 So something happens, you know, when you get into power.

00:05:52.960 So people see that and reasonably think, you know what?

00:05:56.120 I'm not sure I trust authorities, agencies, corporations, people that are billionaires.

00:06:01.660 I don't know if I trust them.

00:06:02.840 And that's not irrational.

00:06:05.880 Michael, one of the things I was curious to hear your take on is we've obviously lived

00:06:10.660 through a time when there's been a lot of fear.

00:06:13.040 There's been a lot of power being aggregated into the hands of public officials and politicians

00:06:19.640 and so on.

00:06:20.340 And they've been wielding that power.

00:06:21.860 You may agree or disagree with them doing it, but they have been.

00:06:25.400 People's lives were changed in many cases irrevocably by the pandemic and the response to it.

00:06:31.460 Have we seen a rise in constructive conspiracism or unconstructive conspiracism during these last

00:06:39.000 three years?

00:06:39.820 Is there anything you've noticed during this time?

00:06:43.040 Well, of course, so you touched on a couple of things that are triggered, we'll say, of

00:06:49.540 causes of conspiracism, which is anytime there's a major upheaval, social or political or economic

00:06:56.380 or whatever, and we got all of it with the pandemic.

00:06:59.000 I mean, you have political upheavals and economic recessions and so on.

00:07:05.040 And also, you know, government's just printing money and handing it out.

00:07:08.400 I mean, there's a lot going on there.

00:07:10.680 Uncertainty.

00:07:11.120 Nobody knows, you know, to give to give some slack to Anthony Fauci and the CDC and other

00:07:17.380 health agencies around the world.

00:07:19.540 Nobody knew in the spring of 2020 exactly what was going to happen.

00:07:24.020 What would the death rate be of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 disease of it?

00:07:30.560 It could have been like Ebola.

00:07:32.080 It could have been worse.

00:07:32.720 And I'm fond of reminding people, AIDS, HIV was 100% fatal until the drug cocktails in

00:07:40.060 the late 90s.

00:07:41.340 100%, right?

00:07:42.360 So, you know, we don't know.

00:07:43.320 It could be like that.

00:07:44.000 It could be like Ebola.

00:07:44.800 It could be like the common flu.

00:07:46.280 It's nobody new.

00:07:47.480 So under uncertainty, you know, public officials are going to err on the side of caution, the

00:07:52.820 precautionary principle, just in case.

00:07:54.660 So it's a signal detection problem.

00:07:55.940 If I miss it, if I do a false positive, I think the information indicates that nothing

00:08:02.020 to worry about.

00:08:02.640 Let's just continue on business as usual.

00:08:04.460 What if it turns out it's a catastrophic plague?

00:08:08.140 Then that's on you.

00:08:09.380 You know, millions and millions and tens of millions of people die.

00:08:12.200 Wow.

00:08:12.460 Well, as opposed to, well, let's lock down and just in case, it turns out it wasn't

00:08:17.780 that bad.

00:08:18.840 Well, you know, the long-term consequences we're seeing now, you know, education levels

00:08:22.740 have been hit hard on kids and, you know, the economy is, you know, in the toilet for

00:08:28.320 a while anyway with the recession, inflation and so on.

00:08:30.960 That may be the long-term consequences of making that other kind of error.

00:08:34.280 Well, Michael, I'm sorry to interrupt, but there's also excess deaths.

00:08:37.100 We have excess deaths in this country at the moment as well.

00:08:39.920 And I think your argument should be a little bit more sophisticated than that, because I

00:08:44.260 agree with you in spring 2020, we had no idea.

00:08:47.820 And at that time, Francis, myself, everybody I knew, frankly, supported the lockdown.

00:08:52.600 But there were other opportunities later when we knew more about the virus, which is where

00:08:57.200 people, I think, are asking legitimate questions.

00:09:00.440 Yeah, for sure.

00:09:01.460 I mean, I think it was clear maybe, say, mid-2021, summer of 2021, when the lockdowns were

00:09:09.360 probably not necessary, you know, the obsessive masking and social distancing was probably

00:09:15.120 a little over the top.

00:09:16.340 I think that seems clear now, in hindsight, maybe not at 2021, but I know the case could

00:09:21.740 be made.

00:09:21.860 And it seems clear to some of us, I'm not going to lie.

00:09:24.580 Yeah.

00:09:25.100 So, okay, fair enough.

00:09:26.680 So, you know, politicians, again, you're the mayor of the town, you're the governor of

00:09:31.220 the state, you're the president of the country or whatever.

00:09:33.400 And, you know, they stick a microphone in your face and go, all right, what should we

00:09:36.280 do?

00:09:37.040 You know, and again, your job is to, you know, minimize harm in the short run, right?

00:09:43.500 Maybe, you know, 10 years from now, it's going to look like this was a big mistake.

00:09:47.200 But what do you care?

00:09:48.480 Most people in power are only in power for a few years.

00:09:50.840 So they're going to err on the other side.

00:09:52.660 I think that's a problem.

00:09:54.020 I think, you know, long-term thinking and planning is probably better once we know.

00:09:58.820 Anyway.

00:09:59.000 So I'm leaning toward you on that.

00:10:02.160 Also, the lab leak hypothesis to me has always been a viable conspiracy theory.

00:10:07.700 Here in my book, I try to debunk the idea that a conspiracy theory should be a pejorative.

00:10:12.620 It's not.

00:10:13.720 Conspiracy theories are just theories about what could be a real conspiracy.

00:10:17.680 And some of them are true.

00:10:19.220 A lot of them are true.

00:10:20.040 So we should just stop treating it in a negative way and instead think of like the lab leak

00:10:25.540 hypothesis as legitimate, just in case.

00:10:27.900 Because now it looks like at least 50% probability that the SARS-CoV-2 was leaked out of a lab

00:10:35.160 versus the zoonomic hypothesis.

00:10:38.740 Of course, the problem is, Michael, we've just been talking about COVID and the entire

00:10:42.980 situation has been exacerbated by big tech's actions where they censor people.

00:10:48.740 And doesn't this just fuel people's conspiracy theories?

00:10:52.360 Yeah, for sure.

00:10:53.180 The moment you start censoring speech, people automatically think, why am I not being allowed

00:10:58.260 to hear this?

00:10:59.040 I want to see this.

00:10:59.880 I want to read it for myself.

00:11:01.220 And so you get what's called the Streisand effect, a backfire effect where, you know,

00:11:05.000 the attempt to censor it.

00:11:06.400 This comes from Barbara Streisand suing to have a photograph of her house in Malibu taken

00:11:11.480 from a boat, censored, taken off this web page.

00:11:14.980 And I think at the time she filed the suit, maybe 12 people had seen this picture of

00:11:20.160 her house.

00:11:20.820 After she filed the lawsuit, it was like downloaded 400,000 times in a week, right?

00:11:25.500 So be careful about what you call attention to.

00:11:28.400 We don't want you to see this.

00:11:29.620 Oh, OK.

00:11:30.580 In that case, I want to see it.

00:11:32.020 And, you know, so I'm a pretty strong free speech fundamentalist.

00:11:35.580 You know, just let everybody have their say.

00:11:37.240 You know, let Trump back on social media.

00:11:39.160 I want to know what he's thinking.

00:11:40.040 You know, I'm not a Trump fan, to say the least, but if he's influential and he's tweeting

00:11:45.120 it, you know, he's putting stuff out to the public at three in the morning.

00:11:48.720 I want to know what that is, you know, just in case.

00:11:51.440 Right.

00:11:51.660 So I don't want some tech committee, as we've seen in the Twitter threads, telling me what

00:11:58.080 I can and cannot see.

00:11:59.600 You know, I know there's exceptions.

00:12:01.400 You know, should we let ISIS on there to recruit, you know, members to become terrorists?

00:12:05.120 No.

00:12:05.840 All right.

00:12:06.300 Should we allow the nuclear codes to be posted on Twitter?

00:12:09.020 No.

00:12:09.880 Right.

00:12:10.080 There's some obvious ones like that.

00:12:11.940 But, you know, really, how harmful are these kinds of people that are on there? 0.94

00:12:17.060 And the hypocrisy. 0.93

00:12:18.260 Right.

00:12:18.460 So Barry Weiss posted that one of, you know, the decisions to kick Trump off Twitter was

00:12:24.320 pretty questionable.

00:12:25.760 Right.

00:12:25.980 They went back and forth for days and finally decided to kick him off.

00:12:29.240 In the meantime, you have, you know, these people in Iran posting things about Israel. 0.83

00:12:35.040 Oh, well, you know, we should just take Israel right off the map because of the Jews. 1.00

00:12:38.440 And that gets posted and no one says, hey, well, maybe that should be censored. 0.78

00:12:43.200 So I think when people see that hypocrisy, they think, you know, this is not right.

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00:13:16.040 Look, Michael, I agree with you broadly.

00:13:22.380 However, there are more complex cases than the ones that you've just cited.

00:13:25.900 What about Alex Jones, for instance?

00:13:28.000 Doesn't Alex Jones deserve a platform?

00:13:30.360 But he spouts conspiracy theories, as in the case of Sandy Hook, which are very real,

00:13:34.980 very dangerous, and people could have been killed.

00:13:37.360 Yeah, I'm a little conflicted about that.

00:13:39.580 I'm not an Alex Jones fan, to say the least, and I've spent years debunking him.

00:13:44.500 Why is he responsible for what his lunatic wackadoodle followers do? 0.99

00:13:49.560 Why aren't they responsible? 0.70

00:13:51.400 I only know of one case of a woman who actually went into somebody's house or was on their lawn

00:13:55.920 or something who was convicted for harassing somebody at their home.

00:14:00.300 The other family members were harassed by these people.

00:14:04.080 I guess they were out on the public street, so it's harder to, you know, to file charges

00:14:09.380 against them for harassment if you're, you know, on a public ground, something like that.

00:14:13.440 But it brings up the larger subject of to what extent does somebody's words make somebody

00:14:18.700 do something that they would not otherwise have done, like Trump's speech on January 6th

00:14:23.000 that morning.

00:14:24.140 I'm told by First Amendment attorneys that it's a very high bar to meet, to connect words

00:14:31.000 to actions, your words to somebody else's actions.

00:14:34.080 And that, you know, and that probably you cannot convict Trump for causing the January

00:14:39.540 6th insurrection directly because of his words.

00:14:43.380 Or just to go back in time, Manson, Charlie Manson, telling his followers, his cult followers,

00:14:49.180 go to the Tate LaBianca homes and murder those people, Sharon Tate and so forth.

00:14:54.060 And they did.

00:14:55.020 He wasn't even there.

00:14:56.160 And he got convicted for first degree murder by Vincent Bugliosi, who famously also got

00:15:02.840 the women convicted.

00:15:04.700 So it's an interesting case of, you know, free will.

00:15:07.860 To what extent are you unduly influenced by somebody else?

00:15:11.840 It's a hard psychological problem to solve, you know, that you made these people do this.

00:15:17.520 I was just binge watching this Netflix series called Don't Pick Up the Phone.

00:15:22.740 I don't know if you remember these cases, but this was a prank caller to a McDonald's who

00:15:28.820 got the manager to strip search one of the young female employees in the back office. 1.00

00:15:34.060 And the whole thing is recorded on a CCTV video.

00:15:37.300 And this guy is just a just some nobody at a pay phone.

00:15:40.340 This is like in 1999, 2000 time frame, who somehow managed to keep this manager on the

00:15:47.380 phone for three hours, strip searching this woman. 1.00

00:15:51.260 She's completely naked.

00:15:52.320 She's doing jumping jacks and jumping up and down naked so that the money she allegedly 1.00

00:15:56.600 stole would fall out of her body parts or something. 1.00

00:15:59.260 I mean, it's just insane.

00:16:01.020 And how is it that somebody could do that from a pay phone, you know, and just say, I'm a

00:16:06.700 cop and here's what you're going to do.

00:16:08.360 And that the listeners don't go, hey, hang on for a second.

00:16:11.460 You want me to strip this woman down and make her do jumping? 1.00

00:16:14.740 This is not right.

00:16:16.120 And yet somehow this happened like 68 times in the course of a decade.

00:16:21.680 So to what extent are we truly free or other people can make us do things?

00:16:27.500 So that's kind of what you're getting at there.

00:16:29.040 You know, should we hold Alex Jones responsible?

00:16:31.900 Maybe.

00:16:32.880 But again, I first of all, he does have a platform, you know,

00:16:36.000 Kanye West and the other guy, Nick Fuentes, were just on a show.

00:16:42.600 He still has a massive following.

00:16:44.020 So he's not, the government did not go in and shut him down.

00:16:47.280 Private platform said, we're not going to have you on anymore.

00:16:49.920 Would I have done that if I owned Twitter?

00:16:51.480 Probably not. 0.97

00:16:52.440 You know, it's like, I want to know what this lunatic is thinking.

00:16:55.900 And I tend to have more faith in people that they may be unduly confident in people's

00:17:01.440 rationality.

00:17:02.020 Um, I know some people are more influential than others.

00:17:05.600 Jones is apparently one of them.

00:17:06.760 But how is that different from Rush Limbaugh rambling on about, you know, or Sean Hannity

00:17:11.280 or Tucker Carlson or any of those rambling on about, you know, the left, the liberals,

00:17:15.980 the libtards, you know, and they go on and on this every day for hours. 1.00

00:17:20.140 And people are definitely influenced by that to the extent that they just hate liberals.

00:17:25.340 They hate Democrats. 1.00

00:17:26.380 You know, they're, they're, they're satanic evil people. 0.99

00:17:29.140 You know, it's, it's, this is not the politics of old.

00:17:31.780 Why are Hannity and Carlson and Ingram and the Rush Limbaugh radio people of the world?

00:17:36.760 Why are they not being censored or kicked off platforms for their undue influence on people?

00:17:41.980 But Michael, surely isn't, aren't these platforms under a huge amount of pressure?

00:17:46.640 Like if you remember during the very start of the pandemic, David Icke, uh, the, some would

00:17:51.300 say the original and the best, uh, you copied him.

00:17:54.460 Yeah.

00:17:55.220 You know, he was doing these interviews about, you know, 5G causing COVID and it was being,

00:18:01.460 it was, it was being, uh, it was platformed on YouTube.

00:18:04.480 It was watched by millions of people and that creates a very real problem.

00:18:09.760 And it creates a very, very real problem for YouTube, for example, where people are saying

00:18:14.200 to them, how can you being be, how are you allowing this to be broadcast on your platform?

00:18:21.020 Surely they're in an untenable position.

00:18:23.080 They have to get rid of him.

00:18:25.320 Maybe.

00:18:25.920 Yes.

00:18:26.540 Uh, I mean, I know David Icke, uh, I don't know him personally, but I've been following

00:18:30.600 him for 25 years.

00:18:31.740 I mean, he's been, he's been doing this for a long time.

00:18:34.480 I guess he's more influential now, I suppose, because of social media, YouTube and so on.

00:18:39.900 Um, what to do about it?

00:18:42.220 You know, again, this is slightly different than it used to be because, you know, the

00:18:46.920 New York times is not going to interview him every day, uh, or the wall street journal

00:18:51.080 or, uh, NBC, CBS, uh, ABC and so on.

00:18:55.420 Uh, YouTube is a different, you know, social media platforms.

00:18:59.600 Again, you know, you know, this debate, you know, to what extent are they just, uh, uh,

00:19:03.580 like the public square, you know, this is just a public space.

00:19:06.600 Anybody can go there like Hyde Park in London, just go there with your bullhorn and say whatever

00:19:11.140 you want and people can listen to you or not.

00:19:13.920 And is it more like that?

00:19:15.420 So as you know, there's, you know, there's probably going to be some lawsuits and major

00:19:18.640 congressional debates about whether these companies should be broken up or more regulated

00:19:22.820 because of that, uh, they're claiming we're just like the phone company.

00:19:26.900 So if I'm on the phone with you and I, and I libel you, you can't sue AT&T, my phone company,

00:19:32.920 or is it Sprint?

00:19:34.080 Well, I forget what my phone company is, but you know, they're just a platform for us to

00:19:38.500 talk.

00:19:38.860 And, you know, is YouTube and Twitter more like that, or are they more like the New York

00:19:42.980 times that should be held accountable?

00:19:44.740 And the problem is, you know, the New York times gets, let's say maybe a hundred op-ed submissions

00:19:48.840 a day, they publish one or two, they're vetted, fact-checked, the editors stand up for it and

00:19:54.820 so on.

00:19:55.760 Uh, and they can be held accountable for that if somebody libel somebody else and harms

00:20:00.000 them and there's damages because of this New York times article about them.

00:20:03.360 But what if they got submitted and published, I don't know, a hundred thousand op-eds a day?

00:20:09.060 How can they possibly control that fact-check it regulated?

00:20:12.800 They can't.

00:20:13.760 And so that, what do you do about Facebook that, you know, or, or Twitter where you get

00:20:18.780 something like a hundred thousand posts, whatever it is, a minute or an hour, something,

00:20:22.820 just, it's a massive number.

00:20:24.380 I don't know what to do about that.

00:20:26.060 It just seems an intractable problem.

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00:21:59.920 Michael, you mentioned the social media companies and Twitter in particular is an interesting

00:22:05.800 one because of the Twitter files, information drops we've had over the last couple of weeks.

00:22:11.620 And it's interesting to watch the different sides of the political spectrum.

00:22:15.980 You know, Francis and I are somewhere in the center, so we just sit back and watch it

00:22:18.960 unfold.

00:22:19.480 And I look at the right, so to speak, if there is such a thing.

00:22:23.780 And the right is like, this is a massive conspiracy.

00:22:25.880 And on this particular issue, I actually, I lean towards not so much a conspiracy, but

00:22:31.360 these people were doing things they shouldn't have been doing.

00:22:34.480 They were lying about what they were doing.

00:22:36.260 That's my opinion.

00:22:37.620 And while the decisions, as you rightly say, are very difficult, they did not quite live

00:22:44.080 up to the standards that they claimed to be upholding, in my opinion.

00:22:48.340 On the other hand, the left is like, well, we knew this was going on.

00:22:51.280 There's no problem.

00:22:52.420 This is all just, you know, Elon trying to trying to smear people and attack people that

00:22:58.380 he's fired and whatever.

00:23:00.520 Where do you come down?

00:23:02.180 Is the Twitter files a big reveal or is it a damp squib?

00:23:08.620 Yeah, so I have read it.

00:23:10.980 I was not surprised because I think we all knew that Twitter was pretty far left leaning.

00:23:15.960 So on one hand, it would be like saying, you know, maybe, I don't know, Peter Thiel buys,

00:23:22.760 no, let's use another example.

00:23:24.200 George Soros buys Fox News and says, oh, my God, I can't believe it.

00:23:28.300 There's been a right leaning slant in favor of Republicans for all these years.

00:23:33.360 Can you believe it? 0.99

00:23:34.400 Everybody would be like, what are you crazy? 0.96

00:23:36.620 Everybody knows that.

00:23:37.800 You can't watch it for five minutes and not realize it's a total right leaning GOP.

00:23:42.260 But Michael, there's a difference, though.

00:23:44.460 No one's been gaslighting the public for years, claiming Fox News is a left of center publication.

00:23:50.020 Whereas with Twitter, the argument was, oh, no, we're not shadow banning anyone, except

00:23:54.900 they were.

00:23:55.720 Oh, no, the decision to ban Donald Trump wasn't made because of personal animosity.

00:23:59.900 Yet we find out that Yael Roth, one of the major executives, had said that Nazis were in

00:24:05.980 the White House three years earlier.

00:24:07.960 So we were being told one thing and then we find out, actually, yes, I agree with you.

00:24:15.240 I was not surprised to find out that what Twitter had been saying for years was a lie.

00:24:19.960 However, they were saying it wasn't a lie.

00:24:23.200 And now we know and have evidence that it was a lie.

00:24:26.200 I think that's quite significant, don't you?

00:24:28.420 Yeah.

00:24:28.940 Yeah.

00:24:29.380 So to be fair, Fox News did drop its fair and balanced line that it used to use and

00:24:34.360 pretending to be neutral.

00:24:35.880 They've given that up.

00:24:36.700 If Twitter did that, if they just said publicly years ago, you know what, we're a left-leaning

00:24:42.000 liberal platform, have at it.

00:24:44.420 That would be acceptable because then everybody knows.

00:24:47.520 So, yeah, I agree with you that the deception involved, you know, we are politically neutral

00:24:53.120 when the Twitter threads so far show that they're not politically neutral.

00:24:58.540 Although, again, I followed all those threads.

00:25:00.160 I read them all.

00:25:01.360 You know, they're little snippets.

00:25:02.980 It would be nice to see those documents in more context, you know, like a nice 10,000-word

00:25:08.860 investigative piece in the New Yorker or something like that that you get where you

00:25:12.460 see everything.

00:25:13.560 You know, who was this guy again?

00:25:14.780 And how long had he been there?

00:25:16.180 And how many documents were there?

00:25:17.600 You know, we get one document.

00:25:18.880 But how many documents were there?

00:25:20.280 Is this one out of 100?

00:25:21.360 That's an anomaly, and the rest are pretty neutral?

00:25:24.460 Or is this a trend?

00:25:26.200 You know, we just haven't seen the larger context.

00:25:28.760 So, at the moment, I think I agree with you that Twitter as a public square where everybody

00:25:34.540 can have their say and is neutral was not the case.

00:25:38.340 And so that would be a kind of conspiracy.

00:25:40.180 Back to my definition of conspiracy, two or more people plotting secret to do something

00:25:43.780 to a third party or somebody else illegally or immorally.

00:25:47.080 That would be the case.

00:25:49.620 They're lies that, you know, we are a politically neutral platform, but secretly behind the scenes,

00:25:57.000 they're shadow banning people.

00:25:58.120 And so that would be a conspiracy theory that turned out to be true.

00:26:02.180 It is a conspiracy.

00:26:03.640 And I think the significance of it also was, Michael, when you see how people reacted around

00:26:09.420 the world to Donald Trump being banned.

00:26:11.160 I understand in America, by, you know, January the 6th or the 8th of 2021, there was quite

00:26:18.340 a lot of people who were quite happy to see Donald Trump go off every platform, and they

00:26:23.120 didn't particularly care if it was right or balanced or whatever.

00:26:25.860 And I don't agree, but I understand.

00:26:28.700 I understand that's how heated the moment was.

00:26:31.240 But when you see President Macron, Angela Merkel, Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader in Russia,

00:26:37.640 these are not exactly massive Trumpists and Trump fans, all going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,

00:26:44.780 whoa, you've gone too far here.

00:26:47.460 You know, I thought that was a really significant moment.

00:26:50.940 And, you know, seeing some insight, yes, Twitter had their deliberations back and forth.

00:26:56.040 But in the end, they made a decision which I just thought was catastrophic.

00:26:59.040 And what we now know from the Twitter files is that that decision was not made on the basis

00:27:05.080 of he broke the rules.

00:27:07.580 It was made on the basis of, well, we've got to do something about this guy.

00:27:10.780 Let's make it up as we go along.

00:27:13.020 Surely that's got to be a concern.

00:27:15.260 Mm-hmm.

00:27:15.720 Yeah.

00:27:16.420 So, you know, one of the reasons Barry Weiss said she left The New York Times was because

00:27:20.080 she was just tired of, she was working in the opinion editorial department.

00:27:24.700 You know, just, do we need another, you know, the 967th op-ed piece against Donald Trump?

00:27:30.880 You know, but again, I guess he would say, and you'd probably be right, 0.99

00:27:34.400 The New York Times is clearly left-leaning, at least in their opinion section.

00:27:38.040 That's the whole point.

00:27:38.880 Just like The Wall Street Journal, if you want to read a good skeptical,

00:27:42.060 skeptics of climate change, read The Wall Street Journal.

00:27:45.860 They publish Bjorn Lomborg pretty much every month where he, you know,

00:27:50.320 he pushes back against, you know, the number of forest fires and the number of tornadoes or,

00:27:54.700 you know, the greenhouse gases causing this or that.

00:27:57.500 And, but you kind of know that ahead of time, right?

00:28:00.100 You get The New York Times because you like the left-leaning op-ed section

00:28:03.160 or The Wall Street Journal for the opposite.

00:28:05.340 But with Twitter, that's not the case.

00:28:07.800 Again, it's probably a one-off special thing.

00:28:10.200 Why aren't there six Twitters, the equivalent of that,

00:28:13.100 to compete with each other in a free market way?

00:28:15.740 Why can't Peter Thiel, say, start a new Twitter?

00:28:17.980 Or, of course, Elon just bought that.

00:28:20.080 Let's see what happens.

00:28:21.300 But why aren't there, you know, three of them?

00:28:24.100 And it's an interesting problem economically.

00:28:26.600 Well, they're natural monopolies, Michael.

00:28:28.460 That's why.

00:28:28.980 No one wants to use the fourth best Twitter in the world.

00:28:31.660 I mean, look at Parler, look at Mastodon, look at Truth.

00:28:34.080 No one wants to go on there, left or right,

00:28:36.220 because you want to be where everyone else is at.

00:28:38.420 Exactly.

00:28:39.000 Yes.

00:28:39.540 Yeah, exactly.

00:28:40.440 Right.

00:28:41.040 So that's the problem.

00:28:42.540 But that's the case all over the place.

00:28:44.620 I mean, how many search engines are there?

00:28:46.660 Really, just Google.

00:28:47.500 I mean, there's Bing and Yahoo, whatever, but everybody uses Google.

00:28:51.340 And how many diaper companies are there?

00:28:53.360 Two.

00:28:54.620 Right.

00:28:55.100 I mean, it's just how many smartphone companies are there?

00:28:57.880 What, three?

00:28:58.860 I mean, it's just the way it goes.

00:29:01.340 There's, you know, kind of a market head start.

00:29:03.320 You end up with a Pareto distribution, a power law where, you know,

00:29:06.900 10% of the products, you know, generate 90% of the revenue or, you know,

00:29:13.540 even worse or, you know, just take podcast platforms, you know,

00:29:16.520 like two, probably 1% of the podcasters have 99% of the audience.

00:29:20.940 It's just the way it goes, I guess.

00:29:22.820 And I guess Twitter.

00:29:23.100 We are in the top 1% this year, according to our Spotify annual.

00:29:26.080 Oh, really?

00:29:26.660 Oh, nice.

00:29:27.140 We made it.

00:29:27.760 All right.

00:29:29.340 You are the 1%ers. 1.00

00:29:31.460 Yeah, we are.

00:29:32.580 Whoa, whoa, whoa.

00:29:33.140 No, no.

00:29:34.480 Anyway.

00:29:34.680 But, Michael, have people become more conspiratorial?

00:29:40.100 Because it seems that there's a number of conspiracy theories

00:29:43.740 that have been proven correct.

00:29:44.940 For instance, a popular conspiracy, as you know, is, you know,

00:29:48.480 there is this cabal of paedophiles, you know,

00:29:51.320 who operate at the highest echelon of society. 0.93

00:29:54.660 And we all thought that was nonsense.

00:29:56.480 And then you've got, you know, Jimmy Savile in our country,

00:29:59.180 you know, fraternizing with royalty.

00:30:02.640 Prince Charles literally used to go to him and ask him for advice.

00:30:07.940 His crimes were hushed up until he died.

00:30:11.520 Then you had Epstein, and he was obviously killed.

00:30:15.100 And there's a lot of people out there with good reason who think,

00:30:18.520 you know, he was killed, let's put it bluntly.

00:30:21.300 And then the only person who went down for his crimes was Ghislaine Maxwell,

00:30:25.160 or Ghislaine, sorry, Maxwell.

00:30:26.500 And then the Black Book, where everybody else who did the unspeakable deeds 1.00

00:30:31.780 was suppressed.

00:30:32.640 Well, okay, let me give you my take on that.

00:30:36.560 When Epstein died, and there were conspiracy theories about that he was killed,

00:30:41.020 I thought, nah, that's probably not the case.

00:30:43.080 And then they had the CCTV video.

00:30:46.140 Well, the camera went out.

00:30:47.140 I went, okay, that's a little fishy.

00:30:48.640 And then the story came out about the second camera was out.

00:30:51.260 I'm like, okay, that sounds pretty iffy.

00:30:54.140 You know, if you hear a knock on the door, you think, oh, what was that?

00:30:56.560 If you hear, you're like, ah, that sounds like a pattern.

00:30:59.820 And if you heard one, two, three, it'd be somebody's at the door, right?

00:31:02.360 So that seems suspicious to me.

00:31:04.100 I posted on Twitter, you know, yeah, I think there's something to the conspiracy theory.

00:31:06.880 And then somebody wrote me, emailed me from that prison.

00:31:10.260 They said, I used to work at that prison, and nothing works there.

00:31:13.220 It's a dump.

00:31:14.120 I thought, okay.

00:31:15.000 So this is the conspiracy principle, don't attribute to malice what can be explained by

00:31:19.160 incompetence or chance.

00:31:20.420 So I'm back to thinking he probably just killed himself because he had nothing left.

00:31:24.380 You know, he just hit the wall.

00:31:25.780 There was nothing more he could do.

00:31:27.200 He's leading a miserable life, and he's probably not going to ever be freed.

00:31:30.980 So, and so he probably took his own life.

00:31:34.120 The rest of your narrative is rational.

00:31:36.900 I mean, he surely has a black book, or I guess Ghislaine Maxwell has a black book.

00:31:40.620 Why isn't she, although I would ask, why isn't she leveraging the black book to get out or 0.99

00:31:46.340 get a lighter sentence?

00:31:47.440 Because she doesn't want to kill herself, Michael.

00:31:49.140 That's why.

00:31:51.520 I mean, if I was her, you know, because most of these cases like this are plea bargained

00:31:56.220 early on.

00:31:57.100 Like, okay, listen, I know you're about to put me on trial.

00:32:00.320 I'm probably doomed.

00:32:01.300 I got the black book.

00:32:02.740 I'll name names if you, you know, let me go or let me free after five years or whatever,

00:32:07.840 something like that.

00:32:08.520 That she didn't do that is kind of suspicious.

00:32:12.180 It's a little bit like the theory that...

00:32:14.720 Michael, you're working for our side here.

00:32:17.040 Everything you say.

00:32:17.920 No.

00:32:18.220 Maps very nully on what Francis said.

00:32:21.520 Well, okay.

00:32:22.260 But in reality, okay, Jimmy Saville, Epstein, these, you know, these things happen at a

00:32:27.580 time when, you know, way before the Me Too movement and so on, and the awareness of

00:32:33.180 pedophilia, where, you know, I followed the Jimmy Saville.

00:32:36.600 I watched that, there was, I think, a Netflix or HBO.

00:32:39.020 Yeah, it was a Netflix documentary.

00:32:40.360 That Netflix series.

00:32:41.040 Yeah, it was pretty interesting.

00:32:42.400 I think in hindsight, this idea, well, they should have known.

00:32:46.720 Look at all the clues.

00:32:48.140 It's like, yeah, but you have the curse of knowledge.

00:32:50.280 You already know what happened.

00:32:51.480 So it's obvious when he jokes about children or he makes this little line about young girls

00:32:56.540 or whatever.

00:32:57.000 It's like, oh, see, right there, he's admitting it. 0.97

00:33:00.120 But only after the fact, when you already know he's a pedophile.

00:33:03.980 When it's not clear, when you don't know, and you think, oh, that was kind of weird.

00:33:08.060 Well, he's a weird guy.

00:33:09.120 He is.

00:33:09.540 He was a weird guy.

00:33:10.740 And he was kind of quirky and odd.

00:33:13.500 Putting it mildly, Michael.

00:33:13.520 Putting it very mildly.

00:33:14.680 Yeah.

00:33:15.260 So I think a lot of this kind of hand-wringing after the fact, you know.

00:33:19.700 No, but the point is something else, Michael, which I think Francis is correct about, which

00:33:23.560 is if you believe in the conspiracy theory that the world is run by a cabal of pedophiles,

00:33:29.700 and I happen to not believe that, even though the things that Francis said I actually agree

00:33:34.620 with, I think they're true.

00:33:36.180 The thing with Jimmy Savile was he was celebrated, and we have clear evidence that it's not like

00:33:44.180 he committed these crimes on his own and nobody knew.

00:33:46.780 It's that lots and lots of people protected him, and lots and lots of people turned a

00:33:51.420 blind eye, and he was extremely well-connected in the highest echelons of society.

00:33:56.540 So people knew what he was doing, and they allowed him to get away with it because he

00:34:01.480 was powerful.

00:34:02.160 And so from that, I don't think it's much of a leap to conclude that there are probably

00:34:06.140 other pedophiles in the Epstein case shows that there are people who would go and do

00:34:10.360 these things, who work together, who protect each other, who are very wealthy.

00:34:14.840 And to this day, who do not get justice, right?

00:34:19.780 Now, surely, you take all those inputs.

00:34:22.600 I wouldn't blame someone from concluding out of all of that that the world is run by cabal 0.97

00:34:26.840 of pedophiles.

00:34:28.900 Well, that's how the conspiracy theory starts.

00:34:31.680 The Pizzagate one, for example, that there's a secret satanic cult of pedophiles operating

00:34:36.080 out of the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria run by Hillary Clinton.

00:34:39.580 You know, do people really believe that?

00:34:41.900 Do they really believe that?

00:34:42.680 Well, some people do, I don't, but I'm making a different point.

00:34:47.020 I know, I'll get to that.

00:34:48.820 I'll get to, let me address that.

00:34:50.680 Sure, sorry.

00:34:52.180 So one guy did, Edgar Welch, he went there with his gun, which is what you would do if

00:34:56.300 you really thought there was a crime being committed and no one was doing anything about

00:34:59.180 it.

00:34:59.720 So here is what I call proxy conspiracism or tribal conspiracy.

00:35:02.780 I think when significant percentages of Republicans say, yeah, they think there might be something

00:35:08.740 to the Pizzagate, the QAnon, the whole pedophile thing.

00:35:12.080 Do they really believe that?

00:35:13.540 Or are they just kind of ticking off the box to pollsters?

00:35:16.680 Yeah, that's what our tribe believes.

00:35:18.300 Or, yeah, it's a proxy for something else.

00:35:21.040 I don't like the Clintons. 0.99

00:35:22.580 I hate Hillary. 1.00

00:35:23.380 I don't, I want to own the libtards. 1.00

00:35:25.220 I don't like Democrats.

00:35:26.160 You know, and so even if I took you to the comment ping pong pizzeria and go, look, there's

00:35:31.040 no pet, there's no, there's no basement.

00:35:33.300 There's no pedophile ring here.

00:35:34.600 You know, it's not like you're going to go, oh, in that case, I'll vote for Hillary. 0.99

00:35:38.000 You know, you were never going to vote for Hillary, right?

00:35:39.660 So it's a stand, it's a proxy.

00:35:41.280 I don't like this group over here.

00:35:43.400 People are saying they're doing these things.

00:35:45.000 Yeah, maybe there's something to it.

00:35:46.280 Even if there isn't in that case, there's kind of a more general negative valence to your

00:35:51.220 opinions about them.

00:35:52.000 Okay, so to the Epstein case, but let's just take, I think you're correct.

00:35:58.200 I think there's a lot of people that are involved or aided.

00:36:02.400 Say, take someone like, not Epstein, the other movie mogul, Harvey Weinstein.

00:36:09.300 You know, it was clear his M.O. was that he would get these actresses to come up to his

00:36:15.700 hotel room for a late night meeting, right?

00:36:19.280 And so it's one thing to think, well, they're a little naive to go to a hotel room, you know,

00:36:23.620 by themselves with Jeffrey Epstein late at night and not think there was something going

00:36:27.520 to happen sexually.

00:36:29.460 But they didn't go up there by themselves.

00:36:32.280 They were brought up there by women who worked for Weinstein, like his assistant director,

00:36:39.360 whoever their, whatever their job titles were.

00:36:41.900 And they would go, well, Harvey wants to have a meeting with you.

00:36:44.000 And they would actually get in the elevator and go up to the room with these women.

00:36:47.440 And so why have they not been convicted or tried or even charged with something like

00:36:54.240 aiding and abating a crime that, that that's a thing, right?

00:36:57.560 So, and I have no idea why, why that's, but clearly that was part of the kind of psychological

00:37:02.620 kind of prepping for getting somebody to let their guard down.

00:37:08.440 You know, the, the kind of the gift of fear is it's called, you know, women have an instinct 1.00

00:37:12.580 about not trusting men about possible sexual abuse.

00:37:17.160 But if you have a woman in the elevator with you going, oh, I'm going to take you up to 1.00

00:37:20.620 Harvey's room and we're going to have this meeting.

00:37:22.280 You're thinking, well, I guess she's going to be here.

00:37:24.300 If she's indicating it's okay, it must be okay.

00:37:27.500 And then as we know now that these women would then just quietly leave the room, they must 0.84

00:37:33.040 have known these, these women helping him.

00:37:35.100 They must have known he was up to something, you know, late at night in a hotel room with these

00:37:39.720 young women actresses, how could they not to, to your point? 0.99

00:37:43.980 So why is, you know, why is nobody that, that assisted, um, uh, Jimmy Savelle?

00:37:49.000 Why, why are they not being charged with something?

00:37:51.380 And the answer is, I don't know.

00:37:54.560 You're kind of making a point for us, Michael.

00:37:57.360 But Michael, if you take the Epstein point, uh, Ghislaine, she's gone down for her crimes. 0.90

00:38:04.060 Good.

00:38:05.940 Everybody's happy about that.

00:38:07.120 But the fact, but she was the conduit between the young girls, Epstein and all the other men.

00:38:16.900 And we know the other men because there was a flight log, but you are saying that he was

00:38:22.960 the only guy and all these rich and powerful guys, it just doesn't ring true.

00:38:29.320 And to me, it just fuels conspiracy theories around this because we know as a society, as a, as a, as a people, we're not being told the truth.

00:38:39.640 And that to me is what really allows us, allows the conspiracy theories to flourish.

00:38:44.800 This is, uh, I tracked the kind of the origins of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory in my book that it was kind of an overlapping of several threads.

00:38:51.640 Again, you know, just owning the libtards, hating the Democrats and so on. 1.00

00:38:55.120 And then, you know, all this stuff about the Clintons in the nineties and their, uh, you know, that they had people murdered and so on.

00:39:01.820 And then Bill Clinton's, uh, you know, uh, preference for young, uh, women, but adult women. 0.98

00:39:09.760 And then you have the Epstein thing with, you know, all these people on the jets and Epstein's preference appeared to be young women.

00:39:16.940 Well, teenagers, right.

00:39:18.080 Say age 14, 15 to 17.

00:39:20.520 That seemed to be his window of, of sexual preference.

00:39:23.480 And so, but that's an underage, uh, a young teenage woman, girl, and technically that's pedophilia. 0.97

00:39:31.100 So you get this, well, there was a pedophile ring going on, on that jet, on that Island with Democrats like Bill Clinton and whoever else is on that list on that plane.

00:39:43.100 And so it seems like, okay, you kind of put it all together and you just use the word pedophile, which is technically correct for Epstein, but it isn't like he's having sex with five-year-olds. 0.86

00:39:53.480 Right.

00:39:53.660 These are teenage girls, but in people's minds, you kind of throw all that together and you end up with the Pizzagate thing.

00:39:58.800 And that, you know, and then the QAnon drops, you know, cheese, pizza, CP with child pornography.

00:40:03.920 And, you know, you just, and then the, and then the thing just takes off.

00:40:07.060 That's a conspiracy theory.

00:40:08.280 That's not true.

00:40:09.360 Technically there's no pedophile ring at this pizzeria, but it has elements to it.

00:40:13.140 Oh, and the one other thing of the drinking of the blood, you know, that there was the stories about these tech billionaires who wanted to have the blood transfusions from young children to get that adrenal.

00:40:22.920 No hormone that supposedly leads to anti-aging and things like that.

00:40:27.940 So you throw that in the mix, right?

00:40:29.780 And those tech billionaires tend to be liberals, you know, industrial rich people lean right and tech people, rich people lean left.

00:40:37.360 So something there, you kind of throw all that together and you get a conspiracy theory that technically isn't true, but the little elements of it are true.

00:40:44.880 And then that's what happens in people's minds.

00:40:48.280 Yeah, I think the problem is, Michael, with the case like Epstein, it was so shocking.

00:40:54.380 And there was so many like high profile people.

00:40:58.040 And like I said before, there's a complete lack of transparency, which just means that like you've talked about, you know, the pizza game, whatever else.

00:41:08.160 And of course, those ones are complete nonsense.

00:41:10.180 But this feels like something far more sinister and far more real and true to life.

00:41:18.320 Right.

00:41:19.020 OK, so again, back to my constructive conspiracism, people are naturally suspicious and think there's something going on because often there is.

00:41:27.280 So there's back to pedophilia, there are pedophiles.

00:41:30.680 This really does happen.

00:41:31.760 It really is a crime.

00:41:33.160 And, you know, what the numbers are, are debatable, you know, whether it's, you know, 1%, 2%, 6%, 10% of children are abused.

00:41:41.760 It's debatable, but it's not zero.

00:41:44.480 And so like back in the 90s, we tracked a movement called the recovered memory movement, which was these are adult, mostly women in therapy for various reasons.

00:41:53.640 And being told by these therapists, well, you know, perhaps you were, oops, lost you guys.

00:42:00.260 Keep going, Michael.

00:42:01.140 Keep going.

00:42:02.380 So back in the 90s, there was this recovered memory movement, which these mostly adult women in therapy were told by the therapist that maybe your problem stems from being molested as a child.

00:42:13.980 And they were going, well, I don't think I was.

00:42:15.840 I don't have any memory that.

00:42:17.260 Oh, well, it's a repressed memory.

00:42:18.500 You repressed it because it's so traumatic, and now we can help you recover that memory of being molested.

00:42:24.360 And this went on and on for years.

00:42:26.160 And there were men, these are fathers, grandfathers, uncles, family, friends, and so on, who were charged, tried, convicted, and jailed for molesting children based on only one of these recovered memories.

00:42:40.980 They used hypnosis or just guided imagery or whatever in these therapy sessions, and it turned out to be complete bunk.

00:42:46.760 This was totally stopped by lawsuits against these therapists for planting false memories.

00:42:53.040 And the problem at the time, though, was that pedophilia is not zero.

00:42:56.980 It's a real thing, right?

00:42:58.240 So it was hard to tell, how do you know if somebody was molested as a child?

00:43:02.380 Well, it can't just be based on a recovered memory.

00:43:05.000 You have to have some testimony from other family members who witnessed it or participated or saw it happening or whatever.

00:43:12.000 And so, again, this is the kind of problem we face now.

00:43:15.820 You know, to what extent should we be looking for this?

00:43:19.020 So here I would say that, you know, conspiracy theories about pedophilia or sexual assault, you know, should be taken seriously.

00:43:26.660 They might be true, just in case.

00:43:29.040 But you have to look at the evidence for each conspiracy theory in particular and then break it down from there.

00:43:35.560 Michael, one of the things that I think has happened, particularly in recent years, and I do connect it to the pandemic,

00:43:41.900 is I think a lot of people have been persuaded that there is an agenda to take more power away from ordinary people

00:43:54.160 and to accumulate it in the hands of a few, the WF, the Great Reset, and all of that.

00:44:01.380 And as someone who likes the occasional spliff, I've stayed away from it just because during the pandemic, 0.66

00:44:06.480 I was tempted to sort of believe all that stuff.

00:44:08.900 So I'm like, let's not look at it because I might believe it because right now it seems quite credible.

00:44:14.980 But a lot of people are talking about we were actually going to be talking to Michael Schellenberger,

00:44:19.040 who's written about this, and he's a guy I really respect.

00:44:22.160 I think he's a great journalist and he's written about it and he says that there are elements of it which are true.

00:44:27.700 And there's a book and the website and blah, blah, blah.

00:44:30.440 I mean, I looked on the website, it didn't seem uber suspicious to me,

00:44:33.840 but a lot of people are persuaded by all of this stuff.

00:44:36.560 First of all, what do you make of all this stuff about Klaus Schwab?

00:44:41.300 I mean, Klaus Schwab doesn't help himself the way he speaks and looks.

00:44:44.400 He looks like a stereotypical villain.

00:44:48.660 What do you make of the WF, the Great Reset, and all of that?

00:44:52.480 You mean the mask mandates and things like that as a way of controlling people,

00:44:57.500 setting up the population to control them, to get them to conform in other ways as well?

00:45:02.660 I think that's part of what some people roll it into.

00:45:05.780 But I think the central argument, as I understand it, is the World Economic Forum gets together

00:45:11.520 and tries to influence politicians and other decision makers who have authority and power

00:45:17.080 to end the system of capitalism that we have now in order to get a central government in place

00:45:25.200 that controls the entire world.

00:45:26.580 And these people are doing that because they want to stop climate change and change the economic model

00:45:32.660 so that, quote-unquote, you own nothing and you'll be happy.

00:45:36.240 That's the argument.

00:45:37.520 Yeah.

00:45:38.100 Okay.

00:45:39.360 Well, here, first of all, is that a conspiracy theory?

00:45:41.900 A lot of these people, just take a Greta Thunberg type person, 1.00

00:45:44.520 you know, there's no secret about what she believes, right?

00:45:47.980 Or the Bernie Sanders of the world or, you know, the socialists or whoever.

00:45:51.680 They're open about it.

00:45:52.780 You're like, yeah, we should end capitalism.

00:45:54.620 You know, it's all the kind of Antifa people. 0.95

00:45:56.800 You know, we should destroy the entire system, colonialism, capitalism, white, you know, 1.00

00:46:00.820 all the white way of thinking and so on. 0.98

00:46:03.400 That's not a conspiracy because they're pretty open about it.

00:46:05.800 Now, are there people that meet in secret to do things?

00:46:09.160 Yes, but the more specific the target, the more likely that conspiracy theory is to be true, right?

00:46:14.920 So, like, control, you know, world domination, taking over the world, you know,

00:46:19.120 that's a pretty hard thing to do.

00:46:20.520 That's a big ask.

00:46:21.800 People meet in secrecy to influence specific things.

00:46:26.360 My example, Volkswagen cheating the emission standards of the EU in order to make more money.

00:46:31.420 Well, we know corporations do things like that, insider trading and stuff like that.

00:46:35.800 You know, when these Disney executives, you know, play golf with politicians, you know,

00:46:40.940 of course they're chatting up in between the holes, you know, what policy might be passed

00:46:47.040 to influence their corporate standing.

00:46:49.200 You know, the whole Ron DeSantis thing about calling attention to Disney in Florida

00:46:53.340 because of their woke policy that he didn't like.

00:46:57.360 But in fact, it was kind of revealing that they got all these tax breaks.

00:47:00.200 They didn't have to do the things that other corporations have to do.

00:47:03.720 And it's like, oh, yeah, well, that doesn't seem very free market capitalism either.

00:47:08.420 But of course, we know Disney set this up back in the 60s and 70s by giving money to politicians

00:47:12.900 and things like that.

00:47:14.420 So, but again, it's the more specific, the target.

00:47:16.640 Have you looked into the Great Reset, I guess, is what I'm getting at?

00:47:20.740 Not really.

00:47:21.640 Let's talk about that.

00:47:22.860 Give me the, give me the. 0.99

00:47:24.360 Well, I haven't looked into that much.

00:47:27.420 A lot of people keep talking about it.

00:47:29.180 So what I'd love to do is if you get a chance to have a look at it, let me know what you

00:47:33.800 think about it, because I think a lot of people would be curious.

00:47:36.780 Well, again, if by this you mean this, you know, we're going to reset the entire economic

00:47:41.700 political system of the world.

00:47:43.900 First of all, that's not going to happen.

00:47:46.140 And second, the people that are open about it, that's not a conspiracy.

00:47:50.140 You know, there are a lot of Marxists and anti-capitalists around.

00:47:53.500 Not a majority.

00:47:54.320 And they're probably not going to get elected to do anything about it, but they're out there.

00:47:58.460 And certainly they try to influence people like academics, you know, are very far left

00:48:02.960 leaning and are super critical of capitalism.

00:48:06.420 But that's a little bit different than there's a secret group, Cabal, the Illuminati or whoever,

00:48:12.300 you know, the World Economic Forum in Davos and so on.

00:48:15.240 You know, their targets are very specific.

00:48:17.780 This is what we want to do in order to gain some advantage for our group or our tribe, our

00:48:23.080 nation, our corporation, whatever.

00:48:24.780 Yes, that happens.

00:48:25.620 But I would be skeptical of a conspiracy theory that said, you know, they're meeting to take

00:48:30.960 over the world or something like that, because that just doesn't happen.

00:48:33.860 I mean, they may be, but, you know, are they really going to do it?

00:48:38.180 You know, probably not.

00:48:39.280 And is it just a small fringe group of nuts, you know, or just extremists?

00:48:44.080 Because you can find those in any country.

00:48:46.620 You can find somebody to say, you know, you have a population of 340 million Americans.

00:48:49.980 You can find somebody to say almost anything that's completely crazy.

00:48:53.440 Did they represent some large percentage of the population?

00:48:57.040 Probably not.

00:48:58.080 And the thing about Trump was that he's pretty extreme, but his influence was so broad in

00:49:03.700 the GOP that it became a real issue.

00:49:05.600 Is this the new Republican Party?

00:49:07.840 And now it's looking like it's probably not going to go that direction that they were speaking

00:49:12.280 here.

00:49:12.620 But we'll see.

00:49:13.460 Michael, and let's move on to people who believe in conspiracy theories.

00:49:19.180 You always hear, oh, there's this, they're just a weed smoking conspiracy theorist in his

00:49:24.140 basement.

00:49:25.140 Tends to be male, tends to be, like I said, smoking weed.

00:49:28.760 Someone who, you know, doesn't really interact with society, with societies on the internet.

00:49:32.580 Enough about us, mate.

00:49:34.460 16 hours a day.

00:49:36.120 That's funny.

00:49:36.600 That's you guys.

00:49:37.600 Oh, it's you.

00:49:38.260 Yeah.

00:49:38.580 I mean, well, I mean, that summed up pretty much everyone during the pandemic, but is

00:49:44.620 that true or is that a misnomer?

00:49:47.620 No, it's a complete misnomer.

00:49:48.920 I debunked that in the first chapter of the book.

00:49:51.200 There's tons of evidence now.

00:49:52.660 There's a lot of social scientists who researched this, lots of polling data and so forth.

00:49:58.700 Everybody believes at least one conspiracy theory.

00:50:01.360 And again, back to my constructive conspiracism and my argument is that it's rational to believe

00:50:05.580 conspiracy theories because enough of them are true, it pays to err on the side of caution

00:50:10.440 just in case.

00:50:11.880 As they say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you.

00:50:14.620 Sometimes they are after you, right?

00:50:16.480 So we know from lots of surveys that people that believe various conspiracy theories, even

00:50:21.580 a lot of them, are not these wackadoodle, tinfoil hat-wearing people living in their parents'

00:50:26.420 basement.

00:50:26.760 They are regular people.

00:50:27.840 We know that QAnon has been followed by a lot of people that have careers, jobs, marriages,

00:50:32.500 families, children, they keep gas in the tank, money in the bank, they take their kids to

00:50:36.720 school.

00:50:37.340 Every morning they go to work, they have a career, a job, so on.

00:50:40.160 And then they show up on January 6th to take over the U.S. government.

00:50:43.760 Like, what?

00:50:46.060 Why?

00:50:46.560 Because they really believed it.

00:50:47.800 Because the boss told them so.

00:50:50.200 And so they, again, but those people, we now know who all of them were, pretty much everybody

00:50:53.840 who was there.

00:50:54.780 These are normal people.

00:50:56.200 And if you look at any of the major conspiracy theories and who embraces it, most of it is just

00:51:01.720 regular people.

00:51:02.780 So one of the things I'm trying to do in the book is to dispel the myth of that conspiracy

00:51:07.140 theory should be a pejorative.

00:51:08.680 Oh, that's just a crazy conspiracy theory.

00:51:10.900 That's a post-World War II phenomenon.

00:51:14.520 And there's theories about that, that the CIA planted this idea, or the FBI, after the

00:51:18.900 JFK assassination.

00:51:20.100 Let's make conspiracy theories to sound like a crazy thing so we can cover our tracks of the

00:51:25.760 conspiracy theory that JFK was assassinated by the CIA or whoever.

00:51:28.740 So there's some debates about that.

00:51:31.300 But whatever the cause of that, before World War II, the idea of conspiracy theories was

00:51:36.540 completely normal.

00:51:38.160 You know, people like Churchill and Roosevelt, leaders of the free world and so on, all embrace

00:51:42.460 conspiracy theories.

00:51:43.420 Again, the Catholics are doing this. 1.00

00:51:45.240 The Jews are doing that. 1.00

00:51:46.320 The Mormons are influencing our elections and so on. 0.99

00:51:48.480 That was pretty normal part of the regular conversation, not a pejorative at all.

00:51:52.480 So I'm trying to get back to that because, again, if you just go through some of the conspiracies

00:51:57.720 I cover in the book, you know, the CIA MK Ultra program of dosing American citizens without

00:52:03.140 their knowledge or consent with psychoactive drugs.

00:52:05.780 What?

00:52:06.600 You know, or Operation Paperclip where we're hiring these Nazi scientists to build weapons 0.94

00:52:10.440 of mass destruction for us while some of their colleagues are being put on in the docket

00:52:14.180 at Nuremberg and executed for war crimes.

00:52:16.680 Doing the same thing, right?

00:52:18.060 Or the Project COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program by the FBI, to infiltrate civil rights

00:52:25.440 groups like the Black Panthers and the American Indian movement and feminist groups and so 0.96

00:52:29.560 on with plants to make them look bad, to do stupid things, to do illegal things so that 0.97

00:52:35.860 they could be busted by the FBI, all the way up to the point of tape recording Martin Luther 0.99

00:52:40.760 King Jr.'s sexcapades in hotel rooms and then blackmailing him with a letter.

00:52:46.880 We have the letter signed off by J. Edgar Hoover himself, the head of the FBI, you know,

00:52:51.520 that if you don't kill yourself or take yourself out of the civil rights movement, we're going

00:52:54.760 to expose your, your, these tapes to the public.

00:52:58.300 And it's astonishing the things that our government is doing.

00:53:02.460 CIA assassinations of foreign leaders.

00:53:04.640 This was a thing for decades.

00:53:06.820 You know, the attempts to kill Castro are, you know, famous, right?

00:53:09.940 Dozens of attempts to kill Castro.

00:53:11.600 And Che Guevara, the CIA assassinated him in Bolivia in 1968.

00:53:17.220 That was a, that was our government.

00:53:19.580 So, you know, when we rail about Putin having people assassinated, yeah, that's bad that,

00:53:24.360 you know, but our government has done things like that.

00:53:26.360 So when people say, you know what?

00:53:27.400 I don't really trust the U.S.

00:53:28.500 government.

00:53:28.880 I don't trust Fauci.

00:53:29.780 I don't trust the CDC.

00:53:30.760 I don't trust the CIA, the FBI.

00:53:32.860 I say, I understand there's good reasons why you shouldn't.

00:53:36.080 All right, Michael, you've made a conspiracy theorist out of me there.

00:53:40.040 But I was curious, is there any research which indicates who or why people are interested

00:53:48.940 in conspiracy theory?

00:53:49.960 What kind of person, what is it that makes somebody more credulous of them than not?

00:53:56.600 And what is it about believing in them that people like or want or need or whatever?

00:54:03.520 Sure.

00:54:03.900 There's a lot of research I summarize in the book of, you know, like race, for example,

00:54:08.340 is a predictor of what kind of conspiracy theory you embrace.

00:54:11.920 White Americans are more likely to think the U.S.

00:54:14.060 government is conspiring to take away our guns. 0.95

00:54:16.180 Black Americans are more likely to think that the government is conspiring to plant crack 0.99

00:54:20.600 cocaine in inner cities or, or invented AIDS to decimate black populations and so on because 0.98

00:54:26.160 of the Tuskegee experiment.

00:54:27.960 Men and women are, there's no difference in gender or sex.

00:54:32.420 But these kinds of things do direct people's attention to certain conspiracy theories they're

00:54:46.040 more likely to embrace, but not general conspiracism.

00:54:48.940 There's no one group that's more paranoid than the other.

00:54:51.180 There are individual variations in how, say, openness, high and openness to experience means

00:54:55.840 you're open to new ideas.

00:54:57.120 So you're more likely to believe a lot of conspiracy theories, whether or not they're true.

00:55:03.160 Education attenuates conspiracism somewhat.

00:55:05.500 It's about 40 percent of people with a high school diploma embrace conspiracy theories.

00:55:09.980 About 20 percent of people with postgraduate degrees embrace conspiracy theories.

00:55:13.680 So that's, you know, that's a huge improvement in rational thinking from a college education.

00:55:20.020 But that one in five Americans with postgraduate degrees, we're talking PhDs, MDs, law degrees,

00:55:25.200 and so on, believe conspiracy theories.

00:55:27.540 A lot of them tells us, OK, there's something else going on here.

00:55:30.440 It's not just being smart and rational and educated can protect you from conspiracism.

00:55:36.300 And again, the reason I'm arguing is because it is rational to believe conspiracy theories,

00:55:42.400 because enough of them are true, that we should be suspicious of powerful groups, rich people.

00:55:49.020 You know, it's like even Obama, who's, you know, Mr. Transparency, very smart, educated, rational.

00:55:54.040 I really liked him.

00:55:55.100 And then, you know, he gets in there and all of a sudden, you know, the NSA program was ramped up.

00:56:00.280 Homeland Security is ramped up.

00:56:01.840 We're surveilling the American public, not just metadata, but actually surveilling people's

00:56:05.920 calls and so on, even tracking Angela Merkel's cell phone call.

00:56:10.040 Our government, under Obama, not just Bush, but under Obama, you know, he's going to close Gitmo.

00:56:15.560 Didn't happen, right?

00:56:17.280 I mean, just think about that.

00:56:18.660 We have prisoners in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba that are not protected by the Constitution or our legitimate legal system.

00:56:29.200 They've been there 20 plus years without a trial.

00:56:32.120 I mean, what?

00:56:33.040 Our government's doing this.

00:56:34.180 So no wonder, you know, that people are suspicious.

00:56:37.340 There's something happens when people get into power.

00:56:39.860 I don't know what it is.

00:56:40.760 It's like all of a sudden you start thinking differently.

00:56:44.340 And, you know, I think they take you in the back room and they go, okay, here's what's

00:56:47.260 really going on in the world.

00:56:49.880 Oh, I was going to pull the troops out.

00:56:52.160 Yeah, yeah.

00:56:52.740 No, don't worry.

00:56:53.200 You're not doing that.

00:56:53.920 Yeah, no, I can't do that.

00:56:56.000 Michael, sorry.

00:56:57.740 I was going to ask if there's something.

00:56:59.760 I noticed that among people who believe, particularly these conspiracy theories or, you know, whatever you want to call them, these ideas about.

00:57:10.320 I think at the core of them, there's a certain self-victimhood to them.

00:57:17.040 There is, you know, we are the oppressed and the elites, this evil cabal of elites have got together to take away even more of our rights.

00:57:25.600 And they're going to take our money and they're going to take our houses. 0.82

00:57:28.640 And you can't have a hamburger anymore and you can't drive a car.

00:57:31.940 And look, maybe they've got legitimate concerns, but it seems to me when I talk to these people and I listen to the way they talk and I hear the stuff that they say, I get the sense that there's a part of them that actually really enjoys this idea.

00:57:48.480 There's a sort of, there's a kind of emotional reward to being this powerless person against whom the world is conspired.

00:57:57.180 Have you any thoughts on that?

00:57:58.380 Yeah. So this is what's known in conspiracy theory circles.

00:58:02.520 Well, among scholars who study conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories are for losers.

00:58:07.240 That is, whoever loses an election thinks the other side was up to no good, some shenanigans or fraud or whatever.

00:58:13.500 Every political party that's lost an election thinks that for a while.

00:58:17.900 What's different now is that, you know, Trump kept it going.

00:58:20.200 Even after he won in 2016, he still thought there was fraud.

00:58:23.320 It's like, what? Dude, you won. You're supposed to stop talking about conspiracy theories now.

00:58:26.760 It's the Democrats that are supposed to be talking about conspiracy theories.

00:58:29.800 And they did.

00:58:30.240 And they did.

00:58:30.760 They did.

00:58:31.540 Oh, absolutely.

00:58:32.540 You know, Russian collusion and all that, much of which did not pan out like the Democrats thought.

00:58:36.840 Or in previous elections, you know, like in Bush, both 2000 with the Florida hanging chad issue with Al Gore.

00:58:45.740 And then in 2004, there were conspiracy theories from the Democrats that Bush, there were some shenanigans.

00:58:51.040 And I think in Ohio and Iowa, it might have been one of the other Midwest states where there was supposedly election fraud going on that never panned out for the Democrats.

00:59:00.180 Right. So it's not fair to say, well, Republicans are more likely to be conspiratorial.

00:59:04.280 No, Democrats are just as much.

00:59:05.720 Trump's his own special case, I think.

00:59:08.900 But that's that's pretty normal.

00:59:10.400 We know that people who whoever falls out of power, whoever does not have as much money, control, power, thinks there's other like in corporations.

00:59:18.100 People on the bottom are more conspiratorial about the people at the top.

00:59:21.860 People at the top usually don't have as much control and power as the people in the bottom think that they do.

00:59:26.860 And then just extrapolate that out to the Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or George Soros of the world, Elon Musk now, that, you know, somehow there's something going on there.

00:59:37.940 How'd they get that money?

00:59:39.000 It's so much money.

00:59:40.020 It seems unfair.

00:59:41.020 And now they're wielding all that influence.

00:59:43.640 Well, they probably are to a certain extent.

00:59:46.480 Right.

00:59:46.880 And so it's reasonable.

00:59:49.000 It's rational to be a little skeptical of that.

00:59:52.040 It's really interesting what we're talking about, and particularly because the moment you said about, you know, the loser always believes there's a conspiracy theory.

00:59:59.860 I've been watching the football, or as you call it incorrectly, the Soccer World Cup, and every loser, every losing team, at least two or three people have come out, blamed the referee, and said the referee is biased, said the referee is biased.

01:00:13.660 So, you know, so I think it's just human nature, really, that we need to blame someone for our own failings.

01:00:20.220 Yeah, there's studies on this of showing subjects, videos of a football game or whatever, you know, and some of the subjects are in favor of one team, other subjects are in favor of the other team.

01:00:31.140 And they both see like the same foul or the same incident that gets, that the referee calls on.

01:00:36.480 And the one side thinks, oh, it was a totally legitimate call.

01:00:39.380 And the other side thinks, oh, it's the ref is blind or he's biased or whatever.

01:00:42.980 It happens every time.

01:00:44.380 That's totally tribalism.

01:00:45.760 That's just tribal conspiracism.

01:00:47.360 Completely normal.

01:00:47.960 And Michael, is there a correlation between drug taking and conspiracy theories?

01:00:53.540 And believing in them?

01:00:55.680 I have not seen any research on that.

01:00:57.880 I guess it would depend on the kind of drugs.

01:01:00.260 Well, right.

01:01:00.640 If you talk about openness to experience, I imagine drugs which increase your openness to new experiences would increase your credulity for conspiracy theories.

01:01:10.220 That would make sense, wouldn't it?

01:01:11.240 I wonder which ones, though.

01:01:12.280 Would cannabis do that?

01:01:13.440 Certainly, alcohol is a disinhibitory drug, so people are more susceptible to, well, everything, which is why you shouldn't make decisions when you've been drinking.

01:01:23.620 Probably true for a lot of drugs, I would suspect.

01:01:26.540 Yeah.

01:01:27.200 Well, Michael, it's been a fascinating chat.

01:01:29.500 Thank you so much for coming back.

01:01:30.760 As you know, we're going to ask you a couple of questions from our local supporters that only they will get to see.

01:01:36.440 But, as always, we've got one final question for you, which is, what is the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

01:01:43.440 Oh, well, conspiracism, I think, again, is an important topic, more mainstream than anyone, I think, realized.

01:01:52.840 I guess you're going to talk about something else.

01:01:54.640 I really think this whole free speech issue is going to never end because it's a hard problem to solve.

01:02:01.200 It's always open.

01:02:02.320 I know you had our mutual friend Sam Harris on.

01:02:05.220 Your show on that erupted when he talked about censoring the Hunter Biden laptop.

01:02:09.680 I certainly disagree with that.

01:02:11.700 You know, put it all out there and let everybody have their say.

01:02:13.860 But I do understand there's an argument to be made, right?

01:02:16.580 When there's harm that's going to be done and, you know, kind of in a utilitarian way, you do that calculus.

01:02:22.560 I try to see it from the other person's perspective.

01:02:25.220 I see where Sam's coming from.

01:02:26.660 I disagree with it.

01:02:27.400 But I thought the I thought the heap of hate on his shoulders was a little much for that.

01:02:33.260 You know, people have different positions.

01:02:34.520 There are legitimate arguments to be made on both sides.

01:02:37.840 You know, you pick you.

01:02:38.860 I pick one side openness to free speech more than others, maybe.

01:02:43.480 But, you know, there's an argument to be made on the other side.

01:02:46.140 Anyway, I just was going to comment on that.

01:02:47.860 I enjoyed your show with Sam on that issue.

01:02:50.400 But it's an open debate, I think, to what extent we should just open up the barriers and let everybody have their say.

01:02:57.740 Well, we invited Sam back on to talk about why he left Twitter and so on.

01:03:01.360 But he didn't want to do it this time.

01:03:03.220 So but nonetheless, you're right.

01:03:05.040 We certainly weren't happy with the fact that he got so much hate.

01:03:08.780 And it's the last thing we want for someone to come on our show and then end up being attacked in that way, even if, you know, whether we agree or disagree.

01:03:17.320 In this case, I think we're much more aligned with with your way of thinking about it.

01:03:21.180 Anyway, Michael, the book is called Conspiracy.

01:03:24.120 Where can people get it?

01:03:25.020 Where can people find you online?

01:03:27.540 So skeptic.com is my website and we have you can order autographed books there or you just go to Amazon or any bookstore carries it.

01:03:35.740 So, yeah.

01:03:36.460 And michaelshermer.com is my personal website.

01:03:38.780 And my show, Michael Schirmer Show, it's all you can find it all at skeptic.com.

01:03:43.400 And I've been a guest on it, so it must be good.

01:03:45.460 Michael, thanks so much for coming on.

01:03:48.920 And thank you guys for watching and listening.

01:03:51.420 We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or show.

01:03:56.220 All of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time.

01:03:58.640 Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:04:01.940 And is there anything, any crazy conspiracy theory that you did believe that later turned out not to be true?

01:04:08.780 Bye.

01:04:17.400 Bye.

01:04:18.440 Bye.

01:04:19.460 Bye.

01:04:19.620 Bye.

01:04:20.680 Bye.

01:04:21.320 Bye.

01:04:21.340 Bye.

01:04:21.580 Bye.

01:04:22.060 Bye.

01:04:22.580 Bye.

01:04:27.120 Bye.

01:04:27.380 Bye.

01:04:27.680 Bye.

TRIGGERnometry - May 31, 2023

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

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