Real Talk with Marissa Streit | PragerU - Why Conspiracy Theories Are So Addictive

0:00Hey friends, before we dive in, make sure to subscribe so you never miss any of my interviews with leaders and disruptors across education, business, health, and world affairs. And if you enjoy the podcast, leave a rating, a comment, or share it with a friend. Your support really helps us grow. Now let's get into the conversation. On social media and the internet, you can just launch your own conspiracy page within days you have millions of followers and the videos they produce are quite good. Miss Skeptic Michael Sherman, why are we so drawn to conspiracy theories? Conspiracy theories is always there. The JFK conspiracy theory. The Roswell incident, the Moonland he was fake, dead or missing scientists associated with UFOs or propulsion or NASA, like the 9-11 bombers, is the Bush administration pulled it off, the Illuminati, these 12 guys in London are running the world, or the Jews are behind it. The dedication that people have to conspiracy theories seems to be religious-like. The presence of conspiracy entrepreneurs out there who are making lots of money.

1:00That's a great phrase. What's different now is the speed at which conspiracy theories can spread. Dumping blame conspiracies on other people can be incredibly dangerous. How did you develop the idea of how to discern what is true and what is false? Famous Skeptic Michael Sherman, I'm so glad you're here. Well, thanks for having me. There's a lot going on right now when it comes to conspiracy theories. I think you were born for a time as this. It would seem like the book is timely, yes. There's a lot of conspiracy theories. Yeah. Well, it seems like there have always been a lot of conspiracy theories. I don't know if it's a new thing, maybe a human nature type of thing. But I think with social media, the world has become even more confusing. Well, it's not new. Conspiracy theories go back to the burning of Rome and so on. What's different now is the speed at which conspiracy theories can spread. First of all, I make it a six between conspiracies and conspiracy theories. Conspiracies are two or more people plotting and secret to gain an unfair

2:01illegal or immoral advantage over somebody else. That happens all the time. Lots of people do it. Lots of groups do it. The question is, is the theory about the conspiracy true or not? So then it becomes just a test. What are the evidence and so on? What's different now is that like the analogy I make with the JFK conspiracies in the 60s and 70s and 80s, they had these small little groups in a memograph newsletter. They'd meet in a hotel room with 20 people or whatever. Now on social media and the internet, you can just launch around conspiracy page and within days you have millions of followers and the speed with which they do this and the videos they produce are quite good. I mean, the very first one ever was the 9-11 truth or is loose change. It was called, this is made by a college kid in his dorm in the little apple laptop, right? Cost nothing and like tens of millions of people saw this. So a lot of people went, oh, that's where conspiracies got to go on the internet. So the speed and the penetration in culture that they make overnight is what's changed.

3:02Yeah, well, AI is not going to help it either. It may even worse. Yeah, you don't even know what to believe because once upon a time you would say, well, you could see with your own eyes and then you would know whether it's conspiracy or not. Oh, you can just type in, dear Grock, please make me a conspiracy theory about X and you'll get it. Yeah, it's amazing. So I'd like to get a sense of how did you develop your expertise as a skeptic, as one who studies conspiracy theories and how did you develop the idea of how to discern what is true and what is false? So a skeptic magazine that we founded in 1992, conspiracy theories was always one of our places that we published a lot about, you know, UFOs and psychics and whatever, but conspiracy theories is always there, right? The JFK conspiracy theory I mentioned that was the mother of all conspiracy theories until 9-11 happened. And then, you know, the other is the moon landing was fake, that kind of stuff. But so the question for us in skeptic is, is it true? You know, so there's two, two different areas. Why do people believe it? But what should people believe?

4:03So our readers are, yeah, that part is interesting, the psychology of belief about anything. But what actually is I as a reader reading about this conspiracy? Should I believe it's true or not? So we try to do both. We try to explain the psychology behind belief. But also, what should I believe about it? I mean, is it true or not? Or is it indeterminable, right? So like UFOs, I'm on this White House committee for UAPs through Harvard, Avilob and so on. But what we want to know is not why people believe in UFOs or aliens or whatever, but is it actually true? Are they here? Does the government have something? And if they do, show us, right? That's what we want to know. What is the evidence? Okay, well, now I'm going to have to ask you this question. So you're on this commission with the White House to study UFOs. So are there actual UFOs? What have you discovered so far? Well, there are UFOs, but by definition, unidentified flying objects are unidentified, anomalous phenomena on UAPs. Those are real. Most of the vast majority we know, 95% are the planet Venus or Starlink satellites or

5:05it's a cloud or it's a flock of geese or it's a plane or a balloon. Those, even the hardcore believers go, yeah, yeah, of course, 95% are explainable. The other 5%. And that we don't know. I mean, we've gone through five tranches of government releases now from the Department of War. And there's a lot of weird things on their orbs. Mostly these orbs, what are they? Are they energy, like ball lightning? Is it some kind of drone? And the videos are blurry and we're asking the government, give us more information. They have these redacted blackout boxes on the video screens. It's like, what's in the box? Why is it redacted? Because it's the information about what the cameras were and what the jet was and what the military was doing. This is our theory. They don't want the our adversaries to know what our technology is. So it's not that they're hiding the sightings of some UFO. They're hiding their own military actions. They can't release that. That's what they're saying.

6:05In my opinion, that's probably the explanation. Okay, it's not impossible aliens have come here from some far distant planets. That's possible. But it's very less likely than that the government hides things from citizens. We know they do this. There's tons of conspiracy theories that turn out to be true about what the US government has done. A Watergate is an example or the MK Ultra, the CIA's program to dose US citizens with mind control drugs. We did that. The Tuskegee experiments and the Co-Intel Pro was the FBI spying on US citizens who were civil rights activists all the way up to Martin Luther King, Jr. Signed off by Bobby Kennedy, by the way, who said, yes, it's okay to go ahead and spy on him. Right? And so we know the government did this, right? All the the shenanigans of the CIA in the 50, 60s and 70s of like supporting fascist dictators over communist dictators in third world countries, because at least the fascist you can bribe

7:07and do business with the communist. So just just nationalize your company so we can't do business with them. So the president can't declare war all the time. So you send the CIA guy in there with a suitcase of money and you just bribe people. All this came out in 1977 with the church committee hearings about the JFK assassination. And then it came out like the CIA was doing what? They even had people assassinated in foreign countries. They tried to kill Castro? Yeah. So when people say I'm suspicious of the US government, that's not irrational. Yes. Of course. There's a lot of truth to that. Well then how do you reconcile when to believe in a conspiracy theory, knowing that the government will conspire? And sometimes the government will conspire for the benefit of its citizens, right? When I think you would, the example that you brought up with World War II with the fascists and the communists. What I'm conspiring was because they had to align first with the communists so that they can fight the fascists with the idea that ultimately they would fight both, right?

8:08It is very possible that oftentimes American intelligence will do what's best for America through these conspiracies, right? With multiple people coming together to, you know, high things from the rest of the world, but ultimately to produce a result, hopefully, that is in the benefit of American citizens and hopefully in the benefit of the world. That doesn't end up being the case, but obviously that happens. So how do you reconcile that versus conspiracy theories that are completely not true? Well, so first of all, the government does have secrets and for good reasons, right? You know, like during the Cold War, the Roswell incident became the Roswell incident in 1980, not in 1947. What they found there was a balloon and it was like, well, it's just a weather balloon. Okay, they lied. It was a high altitude project mogul balloon with acoustic equipment listening for upper atmosphere nuclear tests by the Soviet Union because we know they spied on us at the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. They had a guy, a physicist named Klaus Fuke, who turned out to be a Russian spy.

9:10So they stole all our plans and they had the bomb by 49. And so we set up these balloons just in case like, woo, what if they stole them and sure enough, they did. And so that's what crashed in Roswell. But of course the government was not a UFO. It was not a UFO and it was not a weather balloon. The government lied because they're not going to tell everybody, hey, by the way, we're spying on the Russians, right? Because they don't want everybody to know that. Then in the 90s, it came out like, this is what we were doing. It was almost like the conspiracy is that the government wanted Americans to think it was a UFO. So they don't know that it's an actual military operation against the Russians in the Cold War. So there's a conspiracy theory about this that like what's going on now with UAPs is with these five tranches that the US government that Department of War has released. Maybe they're just feeding us nonsense to keep us distracted because they're doing this thing over here in Iran or whatever. And there's stories in the 60s and 70s of commercial airline pilots at 35,000 feet looking

10:12up and seeing something streaking across the sky at another 30, 40,000 feet up at five times their speed. Turns out they were seeing the U2 spy plane or the SR-71 Blackbird that they didn't know about at the time. But my other theory about UAPs is that what if DARPA and the CIA are, they're just like that. Now, you know, 30 years ahead of what we know about. And then we'll find out like, oh, that's what that was. That's why we believed in those things that they told us. Okay. So speaking about UFOs, what is going on in area 51, also the moon landing and is the earth flat? I feel like all three of those are probably questions that the same group of people is asking. There's a lot of overlap there. Yes, the space related ones. Yeah. There's a lot out there in Nevada, actually all the test range where they were testing all the nuclear bombs and so that's all out there. It's in the middle of nowhere, which is why the government put it there. So that part is true. But the fact that they're doing the various things out there with technology doesn't mean they're also hiding aliens, right?

11:13Maybe they want us to believe that these are UFOs so that we don't know what they're actually doing. Well, that's called the disinformation campaign, right? They're letting float the idea that these are aliens and UFOs because they're really up to something that's a little more nefarious. That makes sense to me. Particularly during the Cold War, why not let that story unfold and watch the public go crazy about the aliens when we know we're really doing these things because we're spying on the Russians. That's not completely crazy to think they might have done that. There's a theory about that. I don't know if that's true, how directed it was. So the flat earth, okay, so we know the flat earth theory is not true to people. Believe it, some people do. I think if you asked somebody, I don't know, a thousand years ago, what does it look like? It looks like the earth is flat because by your senses, that's what it looks like, right? But now we know we have pictures from space. You can see that it's around. We have pictures of all the other planets. They're all round. The earth can't be the only flat planet and the whole thing and so on. And so to make that true, you'd have to believe that NASA has faked all these photos,

12:14every astronomer that ever took a picture of Mars or whatever, faked the photos and so on all planets are flat and so on. In terms of going to the moon, we went to the moon. An interesting question is, why can't we have them in back? And the answer is because it's really expensive and hard to do. We did it in the 60s, but we spent a huge amount of money, a sizeable proportion of the US GDP income was based on the moon project. You know, Kennedy said, we're going to do this. We're going to do it. We'll give you whatever you need. It's harder for Elon to do that by himself, right? So can we get through the radiation belt? Yes, absolutely. What happened to all those instruments that are on the moon? I mean, how do they get there? We know that the Apollo spacecraft took those instruments and planted them there. And they're still there. There's these lasers that we can send a beam to the laser beam from here to there and come back and see exactly how far the moon is away. It's elliptical orbit. You can see exactly a far away down to millimeters or inches. And so that refutes that argument.

13:17Is there an incentive behind propagating the idea that the earth is flat or that American ever made it to the moon? I mean, I could see how let's say the communists would want to propagate the idea that America lied about making it to the moon. I could see how it would come from foreign adversaries. But why would Americans want to say that America never made it to the moon? It's a great point. I mean, right after Apollo 11 successfully landed on the moon and returned, the first people at college were the Russians going, congratulations, you did it. They would have said, hey, hey, hey, we know you fake that on a, you know, this is a Spielberg film that or whoever was supposed to do that on an area 51 films that like this. Now, also all the whistleblowers that would have to be in on it, right? They all signed an NDA, you know, tens of thousands of, maybe it was several hundred thousand, I think, in total worked on them Apollo and Mercury, Gemini Apollo missions, NASA, all the different locations and so on. It's a lot of people, all the independent contractors who made the parts, most of them

14:21would have to have been in on it, right? There's even jokes about this. I mean, that British comedians did a, a send up of that. Well, aren't people going to ask how we got to the moon? Yeah, we got to build a huge rocket. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just build the rocket that actually go to the moon that actually fake the whole filming? You have to pay all the crew and all this stuff. Anyway, that Michelin web show, yeah, they, you know, they did a funny one about Princess Diana. We're going to have her murder, right? So we're going to do this. We're going to get her chauffeur's drunk, slightly drunk. And then we're going to have some, hire some people to chase her into this tunnel and make sure she's not wearing her seatbelt, all this stuff. And then the phone rings after the end of all this, they go, oh, that all just happened by chance. Yeah, when you have to make more leaps of faith to believe in the conspiracy theory than the actual conspiracy. I think the flat earthers, I think the motive there is the attention they get. I think you see the films on these guys and they're like, they're a little nerdy and all of a sudden now they're big stars. I, oh, camera crews are filming me talking about the earth is flat. Lots of conspiracy entrepreneurs out there who are making lots of money.

15:22That's a great, that's a great phrase. It's true. It sells books. You get talk invitations like you think, what happened? Yeah, we want to hear this. Yeah. Yeah, it's entertaining too. So I want to get into how we think through conspiracy theories, psychology behind it. We'll get into some more examples because I'm sure the audience wants to hear what you think about 9-11, what you think about Bridget McRown and what you think about COVID and what you think about all these other, do the Jews run the world? Is it the Illuminati? Is it the Rothschilds? Is it the big, you know, the big, big, big, globalist, right? We'll get into the details. But before we go there, one of the things that you mentioned is that in order to understand conspiracy theories, you have to understand human psychology. Why are we so drawn to conspiracy theories? There is something almost intoxicating about hearing about them and starting to dive into them. It's almost drug-like. It's almost addicting. And, you know, I'll admit many of my girlfriends who will find out about conspiracy theories,

16:24will oftentimes start believing in them and they'll believe in a second one and a third one. But before you know it, it's almost kind of like the new drama for some people, especially on social media. So I'd love to understand the psychology behind conspiracy theories. Yes. Well, that's a big one. There's several factors that work there that you referred to there. My favorite study that I wrote about there was called Dead and Alive. People that ticked the box and told posters that Princess Diana was murdered were also more likely to say she faked her death and she's still alive. She can't be both dead and alive, right? She's living in South America with Elvis or whatever. So people that think the moon landing was fake or also more likely to think 9-11 was an inside job and Kennedy was killed by the CIA, whatever. They just believe all of them. So there's kind of a consistency underlying that is a distrust of authorities of any kind. Like I don't trust the government. I don't trust big corporations. I don't trust academics. I don't trust doctors. Whatever it is. So when authority tells me this is what happened, I'm going to doubt it.

17:25So when they go, well, Princess Diana died in a car crash. Oh, no, can't be that she must have been murdered and that she faked her death. Okay, that's all true, right? So there's some of that. I go deeper in the book about sort of an evolutionary argument for why we're a little paranoid. And the bottom line is just in case. So there's two kind of errors you can make. A type one type two error. So let's say you're a hominid on the plains of Africa. And you hear a rustle in the grass. Is it a dangerous predator or just a wind? All right. If you think the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator, it turns out just the wind, that's a low cost error to make you just kind of become cautious. If you make the other kind of error, you assume the rustle in the grass is just the wind, it turns out it's a dangerous predator. You're lunch, right? So it pays to be more paranoid just in case, just slightly on the suspicious side. It's I call that constructive conspiracism. It doesn't hurt. I know a lot of these things are true. You know, watergate and Iran Contra and Coentail Pro and MK Ultra, the government's doing what? About some of these others, like, okay, they might be true.

18:26They might be false. I'm not sure. I'm going to be skeptical or just a little paranoid, just in case. You know that line just because your paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. Sometimes they are after you, right? So that's my argument about the deeper cause. Then there's things like political orientation or gender, whatever. Everybody is more or less the same in terms of level of conspiracism. Now women are a little more risk averse for good reasons because you're smaller and you're more likely to be physically violated by men and so on and so forth. You carry more of the responsibility of childbirth, all that stuff, right? So women are a little more, but men are more suspicious of other kinds of conspiracy theories. They have to do with power and that kind of thing. Religious people are not more conspiratorially minded than non-religious people, but they're the target of conspiracy. So in like a century ago, Catholics were the big target of conspiracism, not the Jews. Then the Jews replaced the Catholics after like the 1930s or so and now we see this all

19:29the time, right? And you know, it just kind of comes and goes like that. For politics, whoever loses an election tends to be more conspiratorially minded, the winners cheated. Almost everybody does this. Hillary did this initially after she lost a Trump. Weirdly said, yeah, the election was rigged. It's like, no, dude, you won. You're just supposed to just accept it, right? Which was kind of funny. But everybody does it. All losing candidates and their parties think the other winners cheated, right? Then they move on to the next one and so on. So it's an interesting profile. If you're anxious, you know, people that are subject to losing their job or they're subject to like a natural disaster tend to think there's more conspiracies going on. Like the government made this disaster happen. Like after the Katrina disaster, right? There was things about, oh, the government was actually doing these things to make this happen, to do this to the black people or whatever. There's a lot of that. Or the crack cocaine epidemic or AIDS.

20:31This was all invented by the US government to suppress black people. You know, so that becomes a conspiracy or the Jews are behind it, right? That's another popular one in the 90s and now making a resurgence. African-American people thinking the Jews are doing these things to us behind the scenes, right? Very common. And that I'll just, the last point. Any group that's a minor group in a country that's successful is not just in the United States, Jews are successful or in the Middle East, Jews are, Israel is successful. Any minority group in any country in history is always thought by the majority. How did they get to be so successful? That's only 2% of our population and they had the most Nobel prizes or they made, they're the most doctors and lawyers. This is what happened to Jews. In part because historically Jews were excluded from all these other professions. So they went into banking or into law or whatever. It's like that's the only thing we could do. And then it was like, look what those Jews are doing. You know, they're all congregating to banking. It's like, yeah, because that's the only thing you're allowed them to do, right?

21:31And then because they have a culture of education and work and ethic and so on, they're successful. And then it's like, how could they be so successful? Because look at the majority over here, not doing as well as this minority over here. They must be doing something behind the scenes, right? I think that's the explanation for the current crop of anti-Semitism. You know, it's interesting how you describe how certain types of minds are more susceptible to conspiracy theory, thinking, fear, anxiety, blame, right? That kind of like allows you to dump your trauma on somebody else or dump your fear on a different group, whether it's the Jews or maybe the government or whoever it is that you believe is conspiring. Rich people. Do you think that people who grow up without trust may be broken homes or without a strong community around them? Is it possible that if you grow up feeling incredibly lonely and you can't trust anybody,

22:32you're not married, you don't have children. You don't have a community, you have a broken home. Would that make somebody more susceptible to conspiracy theories? Yeah, low trust is a predictor of conspiracyism. If you are an environment that's unpredictable, low, just sort of low GDP and the schools are crappy and so on and so forth, broken homes and so on. You're less likely to be trusting of what's going to happen tomorrow or the next day or next year, right? So you're a little more suspicious about what the people in power are doing. So one of my favorite psych experiments is the famous marshmallow test. This was at Stanford University where you give a kid an opportunity. You can have this one marshmallow now, but if you wait for 15 minutes, you get two marshmallows. Now I'm going to leave the room. If you want to eat it, but if you don't, I'll be back in 15 minutes and give you a second marshmallow. So the videos of this are just hilarious for these kids are like, I'm not going to look at it. They're trying to make it. And so the long term follow up on that was that the kids that waited for the second marshmallow

23:34had higher GPAs in terms of like their whole life. This has been going on for decades. Better marriages, they make more money, a lowered body weight index and all that stuff. They have a better life. So the theory is that by delaying gratification, by having a longer term horizon where you trust the environment, you live a healthier, happier life. The problem with that was these were the children of Stanford University professors who are not normal. So if you grow up in a broken home and you have a bunch of siblings and no dad and there's gangs and you can't trust it. It's not smart to wait for the second marshmallow because somebody's going to steal the first one and you're going to get nothing. So the more rational thing to do in low trust environments is eat the marshmallow now. Don't delay gratification because you're going to get screwed. So in a lot of environments, unfortunately, this is the case in some of these Muslim communities where you don't trust the environment you're in. So we're going to form a little gang or we're going to commit these crimes or whatever

24:36because you can't trust any of it at all. And you're kind of a sucker if you don't join in, right? It's a little bit like a white athlete's dope or cheater, whatever. If too many of them do it, then you're kind of a sucker if you don't. Even if so, you become suspicious. Like I think these other guys are doping in sports, right? You don't know for sure, but if enough of them do it and you think I better do it just in case because I'm a sucker if I don't. In that case, being a little paranoid suspicious is actually a rational choice in that environment. Well, I could see how conspiracy theories can create this group thing, cult like mentality, right? You don't want to be left out either, right? That seems to be a very natural human desire to belong to the tribe. And so if your tribe is all believing in something, even if somewhere in your mind, you know, this makes no sense. It takes quite a bit of courage to run against the herd. Yes, so this is tribal conspiracism as I call it. It's just I'm going along with this because everybody in my group says it's true. Now, part of this is this default to truth.

25:37Now, none of us have the time to fact check everything anybody ever tells us, right? So, you know, maybe you told me this and I don't really know. I don't have time to look it up. I'll just believe you. Most of the time, that's fine because most people don't make up stuff, right? You know, so we kind of offload onto our group members or the elites of our tribe or whatever, the information for us. And then now I don't have to do it because I'm busy. I got kids and I got a job or whatever. I don't have time to do this. And that's why a lot of people go along with conspiracy theories by political organization or by the church or by whatever our group is. You know, and part of that is that it's just it's kind of a practical thing. Conspiracy theories are a way of reducing the world to simplicity. Like, okay, I don't have to think about that now. Now, I know it's these guys are doing this over here, right? So like the scariest thing about economics, you know, there's the Illuminati, you know, these 12 guys in London are running the world and making decisions about wars and economies and so on. That's bad enough. I thought it was the Rothschilds.

26:38Or the Rockefellers of the Rothschilds or the lizard aliens or, you know, there's a bunch of people that are secretly running the world for a lot of people. Marissa, even scarriers that nobody is running the world. Nobody's in charge. You have to make it on your own. And it's a chaotic world. A lot of bad things can happen. You got to dig in and be responsible because those people up there, they're not going to take care of this for you. They're not making this stuff happen. I know, but personal responsibility is so hard and collective grievances. So addicting. It is addicting. Yes, it's well, it explains things and makes you feel good. And also conspiracy theories are kind of entertaining. Like, ooh, we never went to the moon. Oh my God, how do they do this? Right. Well, this is another one of those things because so many of the conspiracy theories can be quite salacious, right? So is Brigitte Macron a man or a woman? Right? I could totally see young people becoming incredibly addicted to these ideas. Right? Oh, did Erica Kirk murder her husband? Right? This is classic mean girls.

27:39Now, I know you didn't go through high school as a female, but I did. I know that there is something about blaming this other person for something so salacious. It's addicting. You just want to get to the end of the story and be part of the in crowd. You don't want to be outside of the cult. You want to be part of the ones who are invited into that wine party that the girls are putting on. So girls are putting girls is about, okay, that's what the mean girls is about. And honestly, I know you know this Michael, but girls can be quite mean. It can be quite mean. And so when you see these conspiracy theories and when I talk about mean, I mean, these things can be very, very dangerous, right? I think you talk about Erica Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk, her being blamed for the murder of her own husband. And now she's in court during these proceedings. And you have people in the culture propagating these ideas. And you mentioned the dangers of dumping blame on the Jews and what that has led to in World War II, but dumping blame conspiracies on other people can be incredibly dangerous.

28:42But for some reason, these salacious conspiracy theories are so addicting to people. And they think it's no big deal. And they think, oh, it's just entertaining. But is it just entertaining? I don't think it is, but I don't know what's in the heart of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens when they talk about these things. Did they really believe it? Is it also a product of our attention economy where the more clicks you get, the more money you make to get those clicks, you got to come out with more and more outrageous stuff. You know, there's a woman's not a woman. She has a penis and who cares? Well, apparently a lot of people, they click on it and that feeds more. So I got to hear, in other words, why are you following Candace Owens? Because other people are following Candace Owens. But wait, why in the first place? Because it's outrageous stuff. So part of it, there's another effect called the proportionality bias. So the analogy I make is like the Holocaust is one of the worst crimes in history committed by the Nazi regime, one of the worst political regimes in history. So there's kind of a balance there that's proportional between cause and effect. You know, assassination of JFK, the leader of the free world, handsome, articulate, and

29:45smart. Taken out by who? Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone nut, just a nobody, right? Doesn't feel right. And this is the 9-11 truth, I'll say. Are you telling me that 19 guys with box cutters pulled this thing off? Come on. I don't believe it, right? So there, you know, you have this one of the worst terrorist attacks in US history committed by these 19 guys, there are nobody's, there what? Right? Princess Diana, cause of death, drunk driving, speeding, no seatbelt. Tens of thousands of Americans every year die by these causes. But princesses are not supposed to die. She's famous, she's beautiful, she's powerful. She must have been taken out by a cabal of M.I.5, M.I.6, the royal family. Well, these people were involved, right? And then you kind of get it feels like, oh, there's more of a balance there. So I think, you know, Charlie Kirk, if it was not Charlie Kirk, it was just some known a preacher or whatever, nobody would care. Right? But it's Charlie Kirk. I mean, he's powerful and, and he's the most popular of the university debaters on that side. So, you know, that, he was a target.

30:47And we know he was a target. And so now the, it can't just be this weirdo trans guy with the furry lover. That means it's like, what? Is that our brain needs to make sense? Yes. So we want something big happening. Somebody must have been, you know, the organization, you know, turning point America and his widow, you know, that Erica was behind it or the Jews or Masad, right? Masad is targeted for everything because Masad is, it really is an agency that does nefarious things because that's their job. You know, back to the founding of Israel, that the line was never again. We're never letting this happen again to Holocaust, right? They almost got exterminated. And they said, we're never going to form this organization. We're going to have a military. We're going to defend ourselves. That's it, right? And I respect that. Of course, yes. So, but now, of course, because they've done this or that or the other, then anything bad that happens, like, I wonder if that was the Masad because, you know, they did these

31:48other things we didn't know about or the CIA or whoever, the KGB is another one. Well, there are so many examples throughout history. You talk about World War I, which I think is a very helpful way to think about how a conspiracy can actually lead to a bunch of other conspiracy theories that can lead to major occurrences around the world that don't have something to do directly with the original conspiracy. Can you explain how World War I is a perfect example of a conspiracy that has led to something so much bigger than the original conspiracy itself? Yes, a great story. So the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, who was the heir apparent of the Austria-Hungary Empire, which was under pressure from other states and so on. And there was all these treaties between the different countries, things were kind of on the balance in 1914 anyway. And so he goes to Serbia to visit, this is one of their territories and we're going to make an appearance there and so on.

32:48He was warned. You know, there's people that don't like you. They published the parade route in the newspaper. So there was a cabal of the Serbian nationalists who were against the Austria-Hungarian Empire ruling over them. So we're going to kill this guy. So there were seven of them and they each went to different houses. I'm going to get the hangar date and I'll give them the secret code and I'll get the pistol and they did all that and then they were plotted along the parade route waiting. So as the car is driving along and there's like four cars in the little parade, several things happen. Like one guy chickened out another guy, he went to the wrong house and so on. So they have just three or whatever it was there. And then the guy that had the hangar, he pulls the pin, throws the hangar, it lands on the back of the Franz Ferdinand's car and rolls underneath the car behind him and explodes. So those people are harmed and they're rushed off to the hospital. And Franz Ferdinand's team is like, oh, okay, we got to get out of here so they get out of there and then they go to the place where they were going to give his speech and then

33:49they give his little speech and say, thanks a lot for trying to kill me. And then they like, let's go to the hospital and see how our friends are doing. So they're on their way back to the hospital and they go back on the parade route and the car makes a right, a wrong turn and it doesn't have a reverse. Remember, this is in 1914. These are not sophisticated cars. So the driver puts it neutral kind of backs down. Now he's going like three miles an hour and by chance one of the assassins is just sitting there on the curb. There's no idea even what's going on. Like, well, that was a mess up. And then there he is. And he's like, oh, wow, bam, kills him right there. And that was a complete chance. Randomness, you know, there's nothing. It wasn't like this massive conspiracy, which a hundred parts had to be together just the right time. And the lesson there is that the first part of the lesson is that that's how most conspiracies go. They don't go according to plan. The more peace, how do you know if it's true or not? The more people that have to be involved, the more elements that have to come together, the better the timing has to be the less likely that the theory is true.

34:50Because mostly these things happen like that to sort of ran. And then things start snowballing and you end up the launch of the First World War. It was just a little nothing of an event that happened by randomness, right? So it wasn't that the Serbs conspired to go more or more one. That's right. Now they just were like, we just want to. Of course not. These are nobody's. They're not educated. The principle was the guy shot him. He was on trial. He's just an educated nobody. They had no big plans other than we're just going to pull this off, right? I do think a lot of the participants in conspiracies like this are not higher up. They're just like they're in it for the money or just for the entertainment or the fun or just to get involved or their ideologues like, you know, like during the BLM riots. Like I always wondered how many of the rioters out there really believe all this stuff? Do they even know what they're doing? Like from the river to the sea. What's the river? I forget. Right. They're just out there because like, I don't know. Because they want to belong to some. They want to belong. They want meaning. Yeah. And so, you know, maybe you're in your dorm room at Columbia and you're just reading a

35:53boring book and they're like, Hey, guess what? There's some riots going on down there. We're going to go protest. Yeah. Change the world. Yeah. We're going to change the world. What are we protesting again? Oh, the Jews. Oh, the Jews. Yes. Yes. Oh, the Jews. You know, if you ask them, they don't know anything about it. I think a lot of them are like that. So the real conspiracy, in that case, to me is the who is orchestrating this, right? Who bought all those people, those tents? The tents were all like the same tents, right? Is this soros? You know, those one, that's one of those ones like, it's hard to get to. Well, that's an interesting thing to hear from you because I know you're a skeptic about conspiracy theories. Yes, I know, but people, yeah, I know. But you seem to know to ask certain questions. Are you just asking questions? Or are you? No, it is. It's okay to be asking questions. Not for the motive of because I secretly think it's the Jews or whatever, because I just want to know, because those things do happen, right? There are people that pull the strings behind the, the sort of the soldiers in the field. There's somebody telling them where to go, right? Like the 9-11 bombers, I mean, they're just like largely nobody's that were orchestrated

36:57by Osama bin Laden. Like, we're going to pay, we're going to pull this off and so on. Now they believe it. They're ideologues. Like, oh, yeah, I'm going to get to go to have and get my virgins or whatever they believe. So that's why I'm doing it. I hate America and they're the great Satan and Israel's the little Satan. But they're not the ones orchestrating it. Like there's somebody higher up. That's why we went after bin Laden. Now is there somebody even beyond that? Well, I think we got to the bottom of that one. But who knows what else is going on? So you do think that there is a conspiracy behind 9-11, except the conspiracy theory behind 9-11 is not what most people think it is. Well, no, I think it's Al-Qaeda. For sure. It's the terrorists, it's Muslim terrorists against us. What about the conspiracy theory that it was the Jews or the CIA or Bush who wanted to get into war? Yes. Or, you know, people have mentioned that the plane that flew into the Pentagon could not have left such a small hole in the Pentagon or the way the twin towers fell down doesn't

38:02seem to make sense. I don't know anything about real estate or buildings and bloating. But you've heard these theories that it's not possible that 9-11 happened in the way that you described 9-11 happened. Yes. So I have all chapter in this. So, you know, the inside job is the Bush administration pulled it off. Okay, why would they do this? So I'll cause a boil in the Middle East. You want to finish the job that his father didn't do in Iraq and first in Afghanistan, then Iraq. Okay, that's all after the fact reasoning. How would they do this in the first place? Okay. So how do you bring down a building? Well, one way you can fly a plane into it. No one's ever done that. Okay, that was new. And you know, after the fact we know that these hijackers trained to fly a plane but not land it. Okay, that should have been a clue. But no one had ever done that before in terms of hijacking a plane. No one had ever said, okay, we're just going to fly it into a building. They said, we're going to go land and get a ransom or get our comrades at a jail or what they used to do. Okay, so if that's not what happened, then how did the Bush administration get their

39:07building demolition people into the World Trade Center buildings? Because the structure of the building is inside the drywall. So you'd have to like over there knock down these walls, put the built, you know, the explosive devices around the structural buildings, beams inside the wall, all over the place. You know, this would take weeks or months of hundreds of people in there knocking down drywall. Now building destruction people operate, they told us how they do it. We've seen videos how they do it. Nobody's doing that. And everybody would have seen them do this. And then that would be evidence. These are two of the most secure buildings in the world, right? Because in 93, okay, the Muslim terrorists tried to bomb, they did bomb it. Remember, the truck bomb and the basement of the World Trade Center building killed some people and so on. It was bad. So ever since then, there's security all over those buildings, right? So they had to go in under elevator repair, right? Okay, that was the excuse. So what about all the, you know, the people on the planes, you know, and so on? Well, they were taken out of the planes and the planes are flown remotely.

40:08There's even a branch of the 9-11 truth is to say there were no planes. These were CGI fake videos on TV that we saw. They were not actual planes. Okay, most of the night I don't have a truth is say, oh, that's nonsense. So it's kind of funny to see everybody close a little further down the conspiracy theory lane. And then the original conspiracy theory skit annoyed with the ones who've taken it too far. So why didn't the buildings just fall over because that's not what buildings do when they collapse. They just go down on the footprint. Okay, why did they go down at this speed of, you know, of a gravity? And also what about those puffs of smoke? You can see the little puffs of smoke. It looks like explosive devices. Well, it's not. It's the pancake floors and the fires are burning. And as the floor pancakes down, it pushes the smoke out the windows. Now it looks like an explosion, right? Seven is another popular one. That one burned all day. And so when you hear the fire guy go pull it, he means pull the fire team out of there because it looks like it's going to go any moment. And then it does.

41:09And on the videos, you only see the backside where it looks intact. You don't see the front side. It was damaged from the fall of the World Trade Center buildings. And that's where all the burning happened. Anyway, so we have answers to all those. But just the idea that how would you pull off something that big with so many people and not one person wants to go on 60 minutes ago. I know what happened. I was dating this guy and he told me the whole story about 9.11. And he was one of the guy, nothing like that. No one wants to write a tell-all book. No one wants to come clean. There's no paper trail. Look, I made $100,000 to plant this bomb. Nothing like that. That one single piece of evidence for that. Michael, as you talk about conspiracy theories, the first thing that comes to my mind is that people seem to be very dedicated to the conspiracies which they start believing in. It's almost like a religion. And I have asked people the question that you tell us to ask, what would it take to change your mind? There is a joke that my producer told me about where there was a person who believed

42:10in the conspiracy theory, whatever conspiracy theory it is. And he kept trying to go down that rabbit hole of getting answers for his conspiracy theory. And every time he was given answers that were contradicting of this conspiracy theory, he would say, oh, you're part of it too. You're in there. You're part of the club. You're part of the cabal, et cetera. And eventually the person dies. He makes it to heaven. And he asks God, you know, God, I need to know I've lived my entire life trying to figure out whether this conspiracy theory is true. Tell me whether this conspiracy theory is true or false. And God says actually the conspiracy theory is false. And the person's reaction was it made it all the way up to the top. Even God is in the conspiracy theory. So the dedication that people have to conspiracy theories seems to be religious like. There's something psychological going on there when you're dedicating yourself to these theories. Why is that the case? I love that, Joe. I tell that joke in there about the JFK conspiracy. This goes even higher than I thought.

43:10God's in on it. You're right. Yeah. So it depends on what you mean by belief and how important the belief is to the person who holds it, right? So for most of us, you know, I hear about this or that. I don't really care. I'm not committed to it. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not whatever. But if it's something important to me, like I'm a conservative or I'm a liberal and this is what I believe and define myself as I'm a Catholic or I'm a Jew or whatever. And this is my very being. And you tell me something that contradicts it. It's much, much harder for me to change my mind and go, well, okay, I guess I was wrong. I just spent the last 30 years believing this and I was wrong. That's hard for any of us to do, right? So the key is to have a open mind enough that the truth about something is your North star. This is what I just want to know. Now, I know I've believed all this over here. And so the way you do that is you couch it in. This is called Bayesian reasoning. You couch it in probabilities of being true or false. Instead of it's absolutely true or it's absolutely false. Just I don't know.

44:10Maybe it's a 1% chance of being true or 80% chance of being true or somewhere in between 99% 60% whatever like aliens, you know, the UAPs aliens from another planet. I'd put you know, like 1% pretty pretty low. But if it turns out that tomorrow Marco Rubio goes on 60 minutes and goes, I was there. I saw it. And it's an alien spaceship. It's not one of our CIA. I'm okay. I'll change my mind. Now let's see a picture. You know, I'll keep up it to 50% and 80%. Oh, there it is. Now we've all seen like the Chinese spy balloon. We all saw it. You know, it was covered. Everybody knows it's real. Okay, 99.9% right? And so that be willing to change your mind if the evidence changes. That's it. Whatever it is. Now that said, there are some beliefs I think it's hard to know if they're really true or not. Is it an empirical truth that is we can get at it and I can point it to you. The evidence you go, oh yeah, Schumer's right or no, no, I got contradictory. But if it's something else, so one analogy is literary truth.

45:12So my analogy is, is there really a middle earth and J.R.O. Tokians, Lord of the Rings? No, he just made this up. I mean, this is made up story. Although some people tell me it's in New Zealand because that's where they filmed it. Or you know, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter stories with the train station 9 and 3 quarters. Now I turned out to check that and somebody did make a fake train deep in London, but it's fake, right? You're missing the point if you're asking about this. It's not literary, it's not literally true, it's a literary truth, right? Now for some people, like if you're Catholic, I think, you know, the resurrection, that had to literally happen. That's an important belief for me. As opposed to like, Joan and the whale, you know, in the Old Testament story, Jonah gets this message from God. He lives here and he's supposed to take this message over to these other people in Ninevehne and he doesn't want to do it. So he gets on a ship and he goes in the other direction and then God's angry about this. So he hurls some storms at him and then the crew members are like, we don't like this. So they throw him overboard and Jonah swallowed by a great fish or whale or something who

46:16then takes them over to Ninevehne and spits them up on the land and then he goes and delivers the message for God. Okay, so if you're an obnoxious atheist or whatever, you're like, how could that be true? I mean, how could anybody live in the belly of a fish? It's like, you're missing the point of the story, dude. The fish is not part of it. It's just the message. It's like asking, how does the transporter work when Captain Kirk goes from the ship to the planet? Don't worry about that. It's just going to the planet. That's the story. Right? We want to know the plot. Right. I love, I love, I love that you bring up Jonah and the whale because I so relate to that biblical story of Jonah. Oftentimes I say to myself, I just can't do this anymore. Right? I can't do that run run a company, fight evil, take on conspiracy theories, take on some of the biggest issues in the world. I'm just done. I just want to move to the mountains and raise my kids and just not worry about all this stuff. And I just have this burning desire that I'm going to wake up the following morning in a figurative belly of a whale. Right? I just feel like there's a pool to do the right thing.

47:18There's a pool to fight against evil, a god-sized pool that makes me feel like I need to keep engaging. And so to me, the biblical story of Jonah and the whale is exactly that. It's important lesson about human nature that we don't want to deal with life's hardest things. But we will wake up the following morning feeling like we're kind of missing something when we're unengaged. But I think that's different from conspiracy theory. That's different from the addiction to being part of a conspiracy theory that if one asked me this question, what would it take to change your mind? The answer is nothing. Yes. And it's different when it comes to something so earthy or earthly as the 9-11 conspiracy theory or any of the other ones we've talked about. So there, I think we can get to an actual answer and say the probability is higher or whatever, based on the evidence. My point here is that maybe there's some things in life we can't ever know for sure and you just make the leap of faith or you don't for this, you're this religion or you're that

48:19religion. I mean, the resurrection has happened in real, but if you're Jewish, it's not real. Okay, maybe there's not a correct answer there. Maybe there's some beliefs that we scientists can't answer because it's in a different realm. It's a mythical truth. I'm channeling my inner Jordan Peterson or something. It's mythically true. There's no dragons, but the dragon story, but maybe that's what you were channeling a little bit of dragon type story. It's true for you and it's true for human nature or whatever. I mean, what makes great literature great is that the novels touch on truths about us, about human relationships and society and governments and all that stuff. That's what makes it great. Whether they're literally true or not, you're missing the point. That's kind of what I'm saying. Most of the time I want to know what's actually true, but I do recognize there are some things we may never know for sure. That's okay too. Well, it feels like we're living through a conspiracy theory right now with the issue of the COVID lockdowns. So for you're probably aware of this, but Prager, you was demonetized, de-platformed.

49:23How rast attacked from every single direction because we spoke against the early vaccines for children, the masking, locking kids out of classrooms, etc. And we were penalized and it did feel like there were people who were conspiring to punish anybody who dared to question the science, as they said, whether you questioned the narrative of the wet market and the bat. The Wuhan lab leak, whether you questioned whether women would have fertility issues or miscarriages when we saw so many of my friends had fertility issues after taking the COVID vaccinations. And if you dared to speak about it or question it, you were penalized by the government. Right. And so now you see Dr. Fauci testifying, now you see sections out of Dr. Fauci's journals and files where you're hearing more and more that it's very possible that this conspiracy theory in fact may have been true.

50:25So for people I think who have lived through the COVID lockdowns, starting to believe in conspiracy theories is becoming very, very real and very realistic. It's unfortunate because now public trust in medical institutions like the CDC, people like Fauci is at an all time low for good reason. Right. This is not good that you cannot get up in front of the public and say, we know for sure X, when privately you know that's not, you don't know that, right. We know the mass work or you don't need a mask or whatever to social distancing, they just made up this number. Six feet. Well, where'd that come from? I don't know. Right. And you know, it affects kids just as much as older people. No. No. By the late spring early summer of 2020, we knew that children were not as effective as elderly people and people with pre medical conditions and so forth. And we know that the teachers unions were thinking about opening the schools up in the fall of 2020 until Trump said, I think we should open the schools and then the teachers unions

51:25are like, oh, no, in that case, come on. This is not good. And for the longest time, I was more sympathetic to people like Fauci, like, you know, they're airing on the side of caution, the precautionary principle. Just in case of a turns out it's like Ebola, I'd hate to air on the side of letting things go on as business as usual. Millions of Americans die. I don't want that on my shoulders. I was like, okay, I kind of get that. Now in the last few months, I'm thinking, you know what? I don't think it's that. They seem to have known that this is what's the truth, likely the truth is and we're going to tell people something different. Yeah, but not for the right reasons, right? So that was pretty bad. You know, why not just get up and say in a Bayesian way? This is what we know about mass at the moment. We're not quite sure. We may change our mind next week, but we're recommending this. You do what you think is right. Just leave it at that, but they don't do that. So now I think the trust that at all time low and, you know, the recent stuff with Fauci, you know, it's very political, but I do think he lied to us and not just like, I'm airing

52:30on the side of caution, but you know, like, I know this is not true, but I'm going to say it anyway. That is not good. That's not science. There's no such thing as settled science, by the way, Mercer. This is, I don't know where this term came from, maybe from the climate change wars or whatever, but science has never settled, right? It's that the whole point is, you know, this is what we think is true today and I might change my mind tomorrow if I see new evidence. Show me. Okay. And so this whole thing, there's a consensus. There may be, but a lot of times the consensus is wrong. Yeah. Well, especially when it comes to, you know, you mentioned climate change issues and the COVID lockdown issues, I used to, I used to think that America had an immune system against this kind of conspiracy theory because of freedom of speech and journalism. But once you take away freedom of speech and you start labeling things as hate speech or inappropriate speech or misinformation, what news guard has essentially done and many other fact checkers out there, they have removed the immune system against the conspiracy

53:33theories. And so, I think that's the problem. Well, I remember the Twitter files where they were consciously at the behest of the government censoring people like Jay Bada Charya, you guys, others that were speaking out and they weren't saying we know this is wrong and that we're right. They were just saying, are you sure that this is the right thing? We should really close all the schools because this is what looks like, you know, the great barrington declaration that Jay Bada Charya and two others published in October 2020, they were right. And they were right at the time, but even at the time you could have at least said, yeah, you know, that's a good point, right? Even the Lab League hypothesis, it was never a conspiracy theory. It was never like the Chinese made a bio terror weapon to kill people, but that wasn't the theory. Theory was they just screwed up. Lab League's happened. And now it looks like that one's probably true, right? More than the zoonomic wet market thing. Yeah. And so like, okay. So, we have to be open minded to say, okay, for now, I'm going with this. Tomorrow I might change my mind and that's okay.

54:34Yeah. So, I mean, the Jay Pada, I know him. It's like, come on, really? Friend, jeopardy, de meologist, you know, Fauci and Collins and these guys. Well, luckily he made a comeback. And now he's made a comeback as the head of the NIH. But I met him before the comeback. And it's like, I mean, the poor guy, I mean, friend, jeopardy, de meologist, he has a PhD and an MD. And at Harvard, at Stanford University, it's like, that's a friend, jeopardy, come on. Yeah. Right? I feel like I'm still haught wearing weirdo in a basement telling me something. We have to be open to other experts. That's okay. Michael, one of the things that I learned from your book is that the bigger the government, the higher the chances that there'll be conspiracy theories that are hidden, right? Because there's more control. There's less openness. There's, if you have a free or market, there is, there is freedom of speech. There's freedom of information. And when you have a government that is more controlling, like a socialist government or a communist government, I'm sure they can get away with way more conspiracies. Why is it the young people who actually want to have more information and want to be

55:37able to have a free or life? Why are young people drawn now to socialism and communism? We're in fact all these conspiracies that are drawing them into this populist movement. It seems like it would be counterproductive for what it is that they're actually advocating for. They're young and foolish. I don't know. They don't own anything. You get a job and you see the money ticket out of your paycheck. You go, wait a minute. What? What am I supporting here? I mean, there's some of that indoctrination in the academy, which we know is very far left leaning. I mean, when I was a college student, it was maybe 60, 40, 70, 30 at most, liberal conservative. By the 90s, it was like 80, 20, 90, 10. Now it's like 99.1 of liberals versus conservatives. In some departments, there's not a single conservative professor. I've worked in the academy for decades. I know. Almost everybody I would meet with in meetings or whatever. They're all liberals. They just joked about a butcher, whoever.

56:40As if we all know, this is funny because we all think alike. They say, hang on, I'm not a liberal. This isn't funny. Why would you just assume that? It's a bit of a backlash there. That fire is replaced the ACLU as defending academic rights and freedom of speech and all that stuff. But the collectiveist government, that's what the first thing that any autocracy does is to silence the press and silence the centers. In the case of Nazi, just lock them up. It's over the union. I think independent journalism is a good counter to the effects that we saw with the Twitter files that even Twitter was captured. We just need multiple voices so that even if some of these are captured, some others will speak out. Thanks to the internet, they're out there. Part of the problem is that it's a lot of work. People like you and I got to go, I better check several of these sources. At the New York Times, I got the Wall Street Journal. I better check multiple, the free press and so on.

57:43It's like, those are all markets. It's like the free press is a good example. You guys, there's a market response to, obviously, there's a problem here. And the fact that you're so successful is because there's a lot of people going, yeah, I'm tired of just reading the New York Times article, turns out I wasn't right. Where else can I go? And now it's like, okay, now I got 20 sources or whatever. This is good. You mentioned the Russians, communists, and how, when I think of them, I think of how they use populist movements in order to build a political movement. And one of the ways to create a populist movement is actually to create conspiracy theories, right? There's some big, bad guy, whether it was the corporation or the white man or the Jew or whoever it is, go blame them. They failed you. Let us come in and fix your life, right? That is essentially what socialism preaches. It's what ultimately communism preaches. A conspiracy theory in order to galvanize a populist movement. I mean, you're seeing this on the left.

58:45Now you're seeing it with the alt-right, right? The disaffected young boys who want to blame everybody and create a third party, let's say. So if you really think about how these conspiracy theories work, they do congregate power, maybe away from the old regime, but they congregate power towards a new regime. How is it that these populists don't get it? Well, it's hard to see it when you're in the middle of it, maybe. You need a big figure. There's some of that, there's some of the perspective taking on that. I mean, part of the problem is that, you know, in big, huge societies and governments like ours, it's possible that the bureaucrats and the bureaucracies and departments are so siloed. They don't actually know what the other groups are doing. And it's less a top-down conspiracy than that each department wants to keep its budget. And each person in the department wants to keep their job. And so, you know, the anti-terrorism thing, you know, the moment you say, hey, we've solved this problem, you know, it's down to a level green instead of orange or red, then somebody's

59:49going to get some congressman or senators going to, then why do we need this budget? I mean, we solve this problem, right? And so they're like, oh, no, no, no, it's always got to be bad, you know, the terrorists are about to take us down at any moment. So that's why you need it. That's just, each department is kind of just fighting for their own survival. So in a big society like this, it's possible Trump or the president doesn't know what everybody's doing. So maybe the CIA or the Pentagon has the aliens. Let's just joke about that in area 51. And President Trump or Clinton or Obama or Bush or who, they've all said, I'm going to get to the bottom of this and they come out and go, well, I looked and I didn't see anything. It is possible that they're not, they don't have a need to know that there's some department that knows stuff, that the other is stuff. I mean, even some of the CIA activities I mentioned in these third world countries in the 70s and the president not only did not know about a lot of these, they don't, they don't want to know. So then they have a probable explanation like, I didn't know that they were doing that, right?

1:00:50You know, Reagan famously said, I didn't know we were swapping guns for hostages. We were doing what? Now, maybe he had a bad memory or whatever. But there is a lot of that stuff that goes on because between a war that a president declares and Congress has to approve and, you know, in a foreign nation, you can, you can have a step in there where I'm going to send my CIA guys in there. Just go fix the problem and I don't want to know what's happening. That gives you a probable deniability like I didn't know. Yeah, that sounds pretty bad. Okay, let's look into that a week, week, right? So I think there's a lot that's not top down conspiratorial so much as just bureaucratic mess. And I don't know about this problem, but the moment a government is formed and starts growing, it may be impossible to stop. I mean, Elon famously went on Rogan and said, I went in there as a doge guy. I'm going to, I'm going to get to the bottom of this and he goes, I went in there and went, oh my God, nobody knows what's going on. Nobody knows who's signing those checks, whatever. I mean, in the UAP hearings, one of the things that came out that people didn't even notice

1:01:53was the Pentagon has not passed an economic or a, you know, financial review in like 20 years, like what? Who's mining the Ford over there? And that's where the stories came out about the, you know, the $50,000 hammer or the toilet seat that cost $20,000. Like, what? I mean, who's running the show? Yeah, this is why the government is always the problem. It's most of the time. Yes, it's not, it's not irrational to think that's the case. Now, I mean, we need government, right? We need a Leviathan because it's chaos otherwise. Yeah, okay. So the problem is how do you set it up? And then you start it running and then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and then people don't know what's going on and all of a sudden budgets are out of control and we got trillions of dollars of debt. I don't know. Yeah, as limited as possible. What is your advice for those of us who need a toolkit on how to discern whether a conspiracy theory is worth buying into versus not? Okay. So the more people that have to be involved, the less likely it is to be true. The more elements that have to come together, just the right time, the less likely it is

1:02:54to be true because people make mistakes. She cordoned Liddy famously told me I was on his radio show for my first book because he's the watergate guy, right? He said, I said, well, I ask you. And he said, well, because most people are incompetent and they can't keep their mouth shut. And he said, that's what happened to the watergate, right? I mean, Clinton couldn't even have some fun with Monica and the White House and everybody knows, right? That's how it usually goes. You know, the people can keep their mouth shut, they're incompetent. The critics are made. It's hard to time everything to come together, just the right place and time. And then you're going to do this and you're going to do that. You go left and then that's not how the world works, right? So then the bigger it is, you know, like real conspiracies are like, you know, we're going to just rig this one little election for the mayor or whatever. Or the corporation is going to cheat the regulatory state. We know Volkswagen did this with the missions in Europe. We know that Big Pharma did some of this with the drugs, with the painkillers, the opioid crisis. We know they bought off regular regulators so they can make more money.

1:03:56Okay, those are real conspiracies. They're narrow targeted. Because they're narrow. They have a smaller number of people and they don't continue over many, many years. Yes. There is less chance for a leak. Right. But the leaks do come out, right? I mean, whistleblowers do speak up. That's where we have whistleblower laws or some of the sales people that work for Purdue pharmaceuticals. Yeah, this is what we were doing. They came to us and said, go these doctors and offer them this and that. Yeah. So we eventually find out about it. That doesn't mean secrets can never be kept, but almost always the big conspiracies that we find out about it's usually by somebody on the inside. You know, like the Pentagon papers, you know, they saw the, there's documents. I'm going to photocopied them or even the Wikipedia stuff. You know, like we found out about that. Not Wikipedia. The WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks. Yes, the WikiLeaks. Right. I mean, we found out about because they were doing this. Here's the insiders. Right. Is there stuff going on now? This would be the hard problem. What's next? I don't know. If I knew, I wouldn't believe it.

1:04:57Right. Oh, there it is. So, but that's why we have whistleblowers come forward and tell us. So, you know, last week or two weeks ago, Trump lifted the NDA restrictions on people that said they saw the UAP, the alien spaceships. The people that said, well, they didn't say I saw it. They said, I know somebody that went inside the spaceship that interacted with the aliens. Okay. Who is it? Oh, we can't tell you because it's classified. I signed an NDA. All right. So, Trump said, all right, no more of that. No more NDAs, no more restrictions. Go ahead and tell us. There will be no consequences for you. All right. Not one person has come forward yet. It's like, come on. Now's the time. Show us no consequences. Yeah. This is how we find out about stuff. Is that the whistleblowers are protected? Show us. Nothing. Nothing yet. Wow. We're waiting. We're hoping. Like, it would be cool. Yeah. That we won't find aliens by January of a December 31, 2030. He says we will. Okay. Whoever wins should give a tax deductible donation to Prager. Okay.

1:05:58I'll do that. Sounds good. All jokes aside, something very important that you've written about recently and that is truth. This is your new book truth. I want to dedicate some time to talk about that because I think as we're living through this chaotic era, I think truth needs to be on the forefront of everything we think about. Tell us a little bit about this book and why you've decided to write it. Well, it's an extension of the conspiracy book and that thing with the conspiracy book, which conspiracy theory should I believe with the truth book is what, what should I believe about anything? Right? So how does, how do scientists determine what is true? Okay. This whole business of consensus, I say, does not true. But there are methods we have to get at it, like, you know, running randomized controlled trials to know if, if it's really the drogger, if it's some other effect that we didn't measure, we didn't know about. Correlation and causation, you know, correlations are strong. They're important. They're interesting. But they don't necessarily imply causation. But sometimes they do. When can you tell, right? Or signal detection theory.

1:06:59Like so, fun example I give on that is I did a talking head documentary about cursed horror films, cursed horror films. So these are horror films that have, or something bad happens to the actors on the set, or something bad like the exorcist or, you know, or all these scary movies. And they had a bunch of examples. I said, okay, that's interesting. So what about the non-curse horror films like it or the shining, where nothing happened? They're like, oh, yeah, I go. And what about the non-horror films where bad things happen like apocalypse now, you know, martenshin has a heart attack and all these things happen that raise the price of apocalypse now. And it was a terrible, you know, hard movie to film and all this non-curse. Like, oh, yeah. And then what about the non-curse non-horror films are like, oh. So in other words, you have a two by two, basically one, two, three, four cells. You're picking the one cell like, oh, that's a super interesting one. Okay. So another example that I use recently is the dead are missing scientists associated with UFOs or propulsion or NASA or whatever.

1:08:00Okay. So there are people that die and go missing. But you're just focused on that one cell, right? Okay. What about the people that die or go missing that are not associated with UFOs? They don't work for NASA. They don't work. They're not physicists or scientists. There's lots of those like what's the base rate comparison, right? So it turns out, I just looked it up, you know, like how many people go missing every year and national force in the United States? It's like 20,000 people. I mean, it happens all the time. People go missing. Sometimes they're found. They go hiking without water. The coyotes eat them. And then after they die, you know, this stuff happens a lot, right? So you're focused on the one. And then, but then the other one is all the people that work in UFOs or NASA or propulsion systems where nothing happens. They don't kill themselves. They don't go missing. They're making them disappear. No one murders them. Nothing happens. So in other words, there's nothing to explain when you see all the different possibilities. It's so hard to live with bizarre coincidences, especially when there are negative ones. You just want the answers. We just feel like we deserve an answer to these big puzzles.

1:09:02I was going to end with a question of what piece of advice could you give me so that I could be more discerning? But actually, one end with a different question because I think many of us know that most people are able to blame the other for believing in a conspiracy theory, right? With so much easier to point fingers at the other person, the people who on the other side of the political aisle who are believing in these bogus claims, how could they even believe in it when our own group think believes in some things that should be questionable as well, right? And so I think as we walk away from this conversation, I'd like to know how to better engage with somebody who is believing in a conspiracy theory that I think they should be challenged with. What advice would you give me as I walk off this conversation out of this conversation, how can I speak to somebody who I who I would like to disarm and I'd like to open their mind to think about something differently? Well, of course you could be wrong. Maybe they're right, right? That's very possible too. You could start right there. As I was the last chapter of my book is like, okay, so I'm going to Thanksgiving dinner

1:10:04with the family and there's crazy Uncle Bob. He's got the stereo. We never went to the moon. Okay. Well, you could just keep your mouth shut and just let peace be. But if you want to say something, you can, you don't challenge them so much as ask questions. Here's the just asking question. That's okay. Like, oh, that's super interesting. Where did you hear that? Or, you know, is what's the evidence for that? I didn't hear that or I thought that would be interesting to believe, but I don't know if I should believe it or not. How do you know? And just kind of ask questions, just kind of in a secratic method, like a Colombo, you know, detective Colombo. I just have one more question. So just keep probing and see. And then I'll always ask them or yourself, what would it take to change your mind? Right? I mean, you might be right. Maybe you're right. You're probably right. Okay. But what if you're not right? What would it take to change your mind? And most people have never thought about this. They go, oh, I don't know. Right? And if the answer is nothing would change my mind, then it's like, why don't they would say nothing? They would say, well, I'd need real evidence. Yes. But that goes back to the original joke.

1:11:05Well, the real evidence got himself is going to tell you that it's a conspiracy theory. And you're still not going to even believe God. Right. Yeah. So then the ultimate question is, what is your North Star? What's the most important thing to you? Is it, you know, tribal loyalty or I'm loyal to this person or whatever, or this idea? Or is I just want to know what's true about the world as best as I can figure it out? Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Well, pursue truth. For suit truth. That's it. Right. Michael Shermer. Thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me.