Speaker 1: Why are conspiracy theories a natural output of the brain?
Speaker 1: And what does this have to do with Roswell New
Speaker 1: Mexico or John F. Kennedy or the Great Fire of Rome.
Speaker 1: What do conspiracy theories have to do with brains and
Speaker 1: puzzle solving and cognitive dissonance and in groups and outgroups
Speaker 1: and storytelling? If you hear an unlikely explanation for something,
Speaker 1: what are good and bad ways to assess it? Welcome
Speaker 1: to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist
Speaker 1: and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we
Speaker 1: sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why
Speaker 1: and how our lives look the way they do. Today's
Speaker 1: episode is about conspiracy theories. Now, the point of today's
Speaker 1: podcast is not to assess the truth value of any
Speaker 1: particular theory, but instead, my interest is in why they
Speaker 1: happen in the brain and why they are so sticky
Speaker 1: in society. Okay, So, for definition, the idea of a
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory is this, although all the available facts seem
Speaker 1: to indicate X, there is an alternative story that reveals
Speaker 1: a different truth. There are a million examples of this,
Speaker 1: but let's just take a couple of examples to get
Speaker 1: the ball rolling. So in nineteen forty seven, in Roswell,
Speaker 1: New Mexico, an object falls from the sky. The examiners
Speaker 1: conclude that it is a weather balloon, but that confirmation
Speaker 1: did nothing to stem the tide of a conspiracy theory
Speaker 1: that space aliens had crashed in Roswell. The alternative explanation
Speaker 1: suggested it was a spaceship and no one wanted to
Speaker 1: admit it. Now, this is an example of a conspiracy
Speaker 1: theory because it requires that some people know the truth,
Speaker 1: in this case, that there's evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization
Speaker 1: and in fact one that has vehicle troubles like we do.
Speaker 1: But the conspiracy is to conceal that from the rest
Speaker 1: of the population. Or take the nineteen sixty nine Moon landing,
Speaker 1: a moment of great pride for the scientists and engineers
Speaker 1: who made it happen, but many thousands of people at
Speaker 1: that time and I think even some now, asserted that
Speaker 1: the landing was a fake filmed professionally in a movie studio.
Speaker 1: Or take the assassination of the President of the United States,
Speaker 1: John F. Kennedy in nineteen sixty three. Although one man
Speaker 1: Oswald was captured for the crime. The conspiracy theory is
Speaker 1: that many powerful shadowy figures and perhaps even another shooter
Speaker 1: was involved with all of these examples. Decades after the event,
Speaker 1: there are still assertions that there are alternative and better
Speaker 1: explanations to the mainstream stories that the general public has
Speaker 1: taken on. Now, most people that I talk with imagine
Speaker 1: that conspiracy theories are something new. They are not. As
Speaker 1: best I can tell, there is no country in the
Speaker 1: world and no time in history that was not rife
Speaker 1: with conspiracy theories. And this, as we shall see, is
Speaker 1: because conspiracy theories don't require any particular technology or country
Speaker 1: or politics. All they require are human brains. For example,
Speaker 1: in sixty four CE, there was a huge fire that
Speaker 1: destroyed much of the city of Rome. Now, historical accounts
Speaker 1: suggest that the Emperor Nero had no responsibility for the fire,
Speaker 1: and in fact he helped people in the fires aftermath.
Speaker 1: But he had previously announced plans to build his new
Speaker 1: palace the Domis area, and for that land needed to
Speaker 1: be cleared. So conspiracy theories bloss and Roman said, maybe
Speaker 1: Nero lit the fire or allowed it to happen, because
Speaker 1: he clearly has something to gain here. Conspiracy theories pervade history.
Speaker 1: There's so many examples, like who was really behind the
Speaker 1: assassination of Julius Caesar twenty years earlier than that, or
Speaker 1: who was actually responsible for the death of Alexander the Great,
Speaker 1: which was three hundred and seventy years before that, or
Speaker 1: who actually wanted to make sure that Socrates was tried
Speaker 1: and executed before that. So conspiracy theories go back for
Speaker 1: as long as we have written history, and that's the
Speaker 1: signature that tells us we're not just looking at a
Speaker 1: cultural phenomenon but a neural one. Now, it's often easy
Speaker 1: to take the position of laughing at all conspiracy theories,
Speaker 1: in large part because they end up being different than
Speaker 1: whatever we have in our internal models. But I'm going
Speaker 1: to assert that there are good and bad approaches to
Speaker 1: analyzing any new explanatory idea, because, first of all, there
Speaker 1: probably are some conspiracy theories that have some truth value.
Speaker 1: A tame example would be price fixing, where you have
Speaker 1: a small handful of companies who control a market, so
Speaker 1: they all get together and decide that all of them
Speaker 1: should keep their prices high. Or another example is that
Speaker 1: of planned obsolescence, where a company will make a product
Speaker 1: that's pretty good, but it's not going to last you
Speaker 1: eight years. Instead, it's going to break down in a
Speaker 1: much shorter time so that you'll have to buy the
Speaker 1: next model of it, and they'll get to enjoy you
Speaker 1: as a repeat customer. So our conspiracy theory is true,
Speaker 1: not true sometimes all the time. I only mention this
Speaker 1: to remind us that the world is driven by incentives
Speaker 1: of individuals, and sometimes weird stuff can happen. And then,
Speaker 1: of course remember that sometimes there are unsolved mysteries, like
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy one, when a mild mannered man hijacked
Speaker 1: the Northwest Airlines between Portland and Seattle and exchanged the
Speaker 1: passengers for two hundred thousand dollars and then kept the
Speaker 1: crew and ordered them to fly to Mexico City. And
Speaker 1: then on the flight he did something totally unexpected. He
Speaker 1: leapt out of the back of the plane with a
Speaker 1: parachute and the money. This remains one of the great
Speaker 1: unsolved mysteries in FBI history. Are there conspiracy theories around
Speaker 1: the shore, but of course it's hard to separate whether
Speaker 1: something was a conspiracy or whether the investigators were just
Speaker 1: not talented enough or whether the perpetrator was just too talented. Anyway,
Speaker 1: it's a big, complicated world, and we can't always rule
Speaker 1: out conspiracy theories right away because something could be possible.
Speaker 1: But what we are going to see today is how
Speaker 1: to think about this through a scientific lens to distinguish
Speaker 1: which ones have some modicum of possibility and which ones
Speaker 1: most likely do not. So to begin, I'm going to
Speaker 1: argue that conspiracy theories are inevitable. There's no way to
Speaker 1: say if we just get better education and better media,
Speaker 1: then we'll get rid of conspiracy theories, because in fact,
Speaker 1: they emerge as I'll argue from a brain locked in
Speaker 1: silence and darkness trying to understand the outside world. The
Speaker 1: way brains figure out the world is by making hypotheses.
Speaker 1: They make their best guesses about how everything in the
Speaker 1: world fits together. Now, almost everything in the world is
Speaker 1: beyond the reach of your short little limbs and even
Speaker 1: your line of sight. So to understand what's happening with
Speaker 1: groups of people, or politics or societies, we work to
Speaker 1: put these little puzzle pieces together. Now, we essentially never
Speaker 1: have all the puzzle pieces, so we always just work
Speaker 1: with what we can. This is how we function in
Speaker 1: the world, and brains work to balance their conclusions against
Speaker 1: an assessment of how likely that hypothesis is. So let
Speaker 1: me give you an example. Brains cough up hypotheses on everything,
Speaker 1: usually entirely unconsciously, and then they evaluate those hypotheses, and
Speaker 1: almost all of them are wrong. So an example is
Speaker 1: you say, I thought that I had put my keys
Speaker 1: on the counter right here, But where are they? So
Speaker 1: your brain runs through simulations. Maybe they're in your pocket
Speaker 1: from last night's pants. Maybe you accidentally carried them into
Speaker 1: the other room and left them over there. Maybe you
Speaker 1: left them in the door. But if none of those
Speaker 1: hypotheses pan out, eventually your brain starts turning up the
Speaker 1: temperature to cook up more and more exotic possibilities. Maybe
Speaker 1: my wife took them accidentally thinking they were her keys.
Speaker 1: Maybe the electrician who fixed our panel accidentally pocketed them.
Speaker 1: And eventually, because you've ruled out many of the other explanations,
Speaker 1: you might come up with something in a more far
Speaker 1: away range, like the electrician who was here was casing
Speaker 1: the joint and has plans to come back and rob me,
Speaker 1: So he took the keys in order to make a copy.
Speaker 1: Now what interests me is not just that brains come
Speaker 1: up with increasingly more esoteric hypotheses, that's what brains do,
Speaker 1: but our evaluation of those hypotheses, because we're always trying
Speaker 1: to land on a story that makes sense. We're always
Speaker 1: looking for a through line that takes the complexity of
Speaker 1: the external world and turns it into something we can understand.
Speaker 1: So when do we say, yeah, I think that is
Speaker 1: the optimal explanation. Now, fundamentally, finding the best explanation is
Speaker 1: a matter of connecting different dots together in ways that
Speaker 1: best match the world. Here's a visual description of this picture.
Speaker 1: A bunch of dots, and the dots are data points. Okay,
Speaker 1: Now imagine some lines in between connecting the dots, something
Speaker 1: like a subway map. And now this represents knowledge. And
Speaker 1: when you can trace a path all the way from
Speaker 1: one dot to another, we call that inside. And the
Speaker 1: question is when does something go from insight to being
Speaker 1: lots and lots of dots all connected to each other
Speaker 1: in a pattern that no one else sees. And that's
Speaker 1: what puts us into the realm of conspiracy theories, which
Speaker 1: is what we'll talk about today. So why do people
Speaker 1: find themselves there from a neural point of view. I
Speaker 1: think there are several reasons. First, the brain is all
Speaker 1: about pattern recognition. Our brains are wired to detect patterns
Speaker 1: and make connections even when none exists. And this tendency
Speaker 1: to see patterns even in random data is what's known
Speaker 1: as apophenia. And by the way, if you listen to
Speaker 1: episode sixty three about the way that we sometimes see
Speaker 1: faces and patterns even where there is not a face,
Speaker 1: that's called paridolia. And note that this is a visual
Speaker 1: type of apofenia. But apofenia relates not just to what
Speaker 1: we see, but to any sense like hearing, as well
Speaker 1: as to con We make patterns out of random data,
Speaker 1: and this is really at the heart of conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: Now there's another thing as well, which is that puzzle
Speaker 1: solving activates our reward systems. That's why we do Sudoku
Speaker 1: or wordle or brain teasers or whatever, because we love
Speaker 1: finding solutions. Presumably this involves the reward systems in the brain,
Speaker 1: like the neurotransmitter dopamine associated with the reward system. When
Speaker 1: you engage with a bunch of facts and suddenly see
Speaker 1: a pattern, we all know the sense of excitement that
Speaker 1: triggers and the positive reinforcement there. Now, it's for these
Speaker 1: reasons that we solve puzzles, and of course when we're
Speaker 1: kids in school, we get rewarded all the time for
Speaker 1: solving problems by connecting the dots. And by the way,
Speaker 1: I suspect this is why we love mystery novels. Something
Speaker 1: seems so impossible and complex and confusing, and the satisfaction
Speaker 1: is delivered in the final pages when Sherlock Holmes or
Speaker 1: Hercule Poirot gives the explanation and now that you see it,
Speaker 1: you thrill in the transition from something seeming impenetrable moments
Speaker 1: ago now being rotated to a different angle so that
Speaker 1: you can connect all these dots with ease. It's the
Speaker 1: same series of events, but now there's a clear path
Speaker 1: connecting them. So when someone generates a good conspiracy theory
Speaker 1: to suddenly explain a mysterious event, there is this satisfying
Speaker 1: feeling of having cracked the puzzle. Plus, I imagine that
Speaker 1: one of the appeals of conspiracy theories is the overwhelming
Speaker 1: sense of awe that you are the first person in
Speaker 1: the world who sees the truth, whereas everyone else is fooled.
Speaker 1: You're the Sherlock. Now, I want to make clear that
Speaker 1: even though people often say that conspiracy theories are not rational,
Speaker 1: it's perfectly in line with what brains do to try
Speaker 1: to solve problems. It's not necessarily the case that anyone
Speaker 1: is trying to be disingenuous. It's that the world is
Speaker 1: large and complex, and the best anyone can do is
Speaker 1: to try to fit together the lego pieces that we
Speaker 1: have to try to make a model of what is
Speaker 1: going on out there. So the desire to crack mysteries
Speaker 1: to resolve questions, this is presumably one of the things
Speaker 1: at the heart of our success as a species. It's
Speaker 1: what drives us to constantly cook up the next solution
Speaker 1: and find the shorter paths and solve things that would
Speaker 1: have otherwise been opaque. So why do we like having
Speaker 1: answers so much? While psychologists point to a number of
Speaker 1: drives that push us towards finding answers, the first is
Speaker 1: the desire to reduce cognitive dissonance. When we're faced with
Speaker 1: facts that don't fit our model or information that conflicts,
Speaker 1: we experience a state of mental discomfort. I know that
Speaker 1: I feel this way when something doesn't make sense. It
Speaker 1: almost hurts physically until I can solve it. So we're
Speaker 1: always trying to resolve this discomfort, and sometimes conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: can offer explanations that seem to provide a fit to
Speaker 1: one's own existing beliefs or biases. A closely related issue
Speaker 1: is that we always seek things that reduce cognitive load,
Speaker 1: and this is why we so often look for simple
Speaker 1: explanations for very complex events. When we're faced with overwhelming
Speaker 1: our ambiguous information, our brains often prefer a more straightforward narrative,
Speaker 1: even if it's incorrect, to reduce cognitive load. And I'll
Speaker 1: come back to this in a little bit, but I
Speaker 1: also want to mention one more thing. We typically have
Speaker 1: what's called a confirmation bias, which means we seek out
Speaker 1: information and we favor information that confirms our pre existing
Speaker 1: beliefs and we disregard contradictory evidence. This shows up really
Speaker 1: importantly in conspiracy theories when people selectively gather and interpret
Speaker 1: information that supports their views. So these are reasons why
Speaker 1: we seek answers in gener But there are even more
Speaker 1: specific drives that shape a good conspiracy theory, and that
Speaker 1: has to do with in group and outgroup dynamics. So
Speaker 1: we grew up in small tribes for millions of years,
Speaker 1: and you knew the people in your tribe, but you
Speaker 1: didn't know those other people on the other side of
Speaker 1: the hill. So as a matter of our deep history,
Speaker 1: we have developed suspicions about our outgroups. In other episodes,
Speaker 1: you've heard me talk a lot about the dynamics of
Speaker 1: in groups and outgroups. But the key here today is
Speaker 1: that many details of conspiracy theories are influenced by social identity. Specifically,
Speaker 1: you are more likely to believe in theories that align
Speaker 1: with your group's view and portray your outgroups those outside
Speaker 1: your social or political group negatively to your mind. Your
Speaker 1: outgroups are predisposed to act poorly and without the kind
Speaker 1: of excellent conscience possessed by your in group, and that
Speaker 1: fact gives a great deal of latitude for your theories.
Speaker 1: After all, if you were trying to explain some terrible
Speaker 1: event that happens and you only had your in group,
Speaker 1: you would be limited in your explanation. But without groups,
Speaker 1: all the normal constraints of human behavior are unlocked, which
Speaker 1: opens a broader set of possible narratives to use. Suddenly,
Speaker 1: you're not talking about your friends and neighbors. Now you're
Speaker 1: talking about them, that other group that lacks morality and
Speaker 1: ethics and always wants to trip up the good intentions
Speaker 1: of your group, And so the impossible now seems possible.
Speaker 1: This was all a ruse. It was a setup to
Speaker 1: fool everyone, and only they would be sneaky enough and
Speaker 1: cynical enough and devious enough to do something like this. Now,
Speaker 1: one of the social benefits that people derive from outgroup
Speaker 1: accusations is that it can strengthen in group cohesion and identity.
Speaker 1: So your group, with all of its flaws, can nonetheless
Speaker 1: feel pretty good about itself. So conspiracy theories typically reflect
Speaker 1: who our friends are and who our enemies are. In
Speaker 1: other words, the particular conspiracy that a theorist chooses is
Speaker 1: consistent with what they already have in their internal model.
Speaker 1: So if they hate Russians for whatever reason, then that
Speaker 1: is the target of their conspiracy. If they hate Ukrainians,
Speaker 1: then that is the target of the conspiracy. And there's
Speaker 1: one more thing I just want to mention here about
Speaker 1: in groups and outgroups. Your outgroup doesn't have to be
Speaker 1: someone with whom you have enmity, just someone you don't trust.
Speaker 1: Maybe you think they're secretive, and this is why shadowy
Speaker 1: government organizations so often feature. They are a default outgroup
Speaker 1: that you don't trust because they reveal their cards so little.
Speaker 1: We'll come back to that, okay, So returning to the
Speaker 1: bigger picture of why people generate conspiracy theories, there's another
Speaker 1: drive that deserves mention, and that is the jern audience.
Speaker 1: It shouldn't be overlooked that there is a social component
Speaker 1: to conspiracy theories. So for the puzzle solver, there's often
Speaker 1: a sense that they will get famous for nailing this
Speaker 1: thing that everyone else overlooked. The theorist's mind races to
Speaker 1: visions of the future in which they are on the
Speaker 1: front page of Time magazine for having figured out what
Speaker 1: no one else did. All of these are feelings that
Speaker 1: are natural and important drives of our brains. Not only
Speaker 1: the desire to simplify a complex model to something that
Speaker 1: suddenly clarifies our understanding, but also the desire to demonstrate
Speaker 1: your value to your community. And this social component, I
Speaker 1: suspect is an important piece of what powers the creation
Speaker 1: of conspiracy theories. But there's even a slightly more tame
Speaker 1: way that the social drive expresses itself and that's even
Speaker 1: just repeating the story. You get something out of telling it.
Speaker 1: After all. The piracy theory is interesting, so you get
Speaker 1: the attention at the party or on the couch or
Speaker 1: on social media. The reason it's interesting is because it
Speaker 1: challenges someone else's internal model. They think they understand something,
Speaker 1: and suddenly you tell them, voila, you have a totally
Speaker 1: different framework for explaining the same thing. That's why it
Speaker 1: holds their attention. Maybe you weren't the original sherlock who
Speaker 1: came up with the theory, but you can glow in
Speaker 1: much of the credit because you're the one spreading the word.
Speaker 1: So conspiracy theory is propagate because you get to be
Speaker 1: the one who tells the story. It's like having this
Speaker 1: precious little gem that you get to show over and over.
Speaker 1: It's like a gift certificate that you can use, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't get used up. And that's why if you
Speaker 1: have a good conspiracy theory, you'll tell everybody you know,
Speaker 1: because it's not only about truth, it's about social dynamics. Now,
Speaker 1: this is not to say that you as the teller,
Speaker 1: might not believe it totally, just that you don't have
Speaker 1: to believe it totally to get all this delicious social feedback. Okay,
Speaker 1: so these are some of the drivers of why people
Speaker 1: create and repeat conspiracy theories. We are all driven to
Speaker 1: solve puzzles and that helps us to simplify narratives and
Speaker 1: reduce cognitive dissonance. And there are many social components here.
Speaker 1: Our in groups and out groups typically play big roles
Speaker 1: in shaping the story. And finally, conspiracy theories tend to
Speaker 1: be sticky because people could have the impression that they
Speaker 1: are doing something valuable for their community or at minimum
Speaker 1: getting social attention for being the one to offer the
Speaker 1: surprise twist. And in thinking about conspiracy theories from the
Speaker 1: neuroscience point of view, I realized there we're two more
Speaker 1: things that are important here. The first has to do
Speaker 1: with threat detection. One of the most important jobs of
Speaker 1: the brain is to see trouble coming. What we find
Speaker 1: in neuroimaging is that the amigdala is like an emergency
Speaker 1: control center that kicks into gear when anything menacing is brewing,
Speaker 1: whether that's a real threat or even just a perceived threat.
Speaker 1: And once you're amigdala is revd up, you operate with
Speaker 1: heightened suspicion and vigilance. Now like almost everything in neuroscience,
Speaker 1: we find a spectrum of threat detection across the population.
Speaker 1: Some people never see threats, possibly at their detriment, while
Speaker 1: other people have more fear and anxiety and see threats everywhere.
Speaker 1: I just want to note that Mother Nature always seems
Speaker 1: to do this. She generates a spectrum, and in some
Speaker 1: situations or in some eras, one end of the spectrum
Speaker 1: might do better than another. But it's not to say
Speaker 1: that there is a single best answer for all situations.
Speaker 1: Along with threat detection, there's one more thing that brains
Speaker 1: try to do all the time, which is agency detection.
Speaker 1: Did this event happen because of the actions of agents
Speaker 1: behind it, like other people or groups of people, Like
Speaker 1: are my keys missing because I with them somewhere stupid
Speaker 1: or because someone else came in and took them? Not surprisingly,
Speaker 1: we find the same kind of spectrum here, such that
Speaker 1: at one end people think that everything just ends up
Speaker 1: the way it is by natural forces, not by any
Speaker 1: planning by humans. At the other end, people have hyperactive
Speaker 1: agency detection, and they are more likely to believe that
Speaker 1: powerful forces are behind complex events. Now I've been talking
Speaker 1: about this so far, as though anywhere on that spectrum
Speaker 1: is equally useful, but in fact, at the extremes we
Speaker 1: find things like paranoid schizophrenia. People who suffer from this
Speaker 1: are much more likely to be predisposed to conspiracy thinking.
Speaker 1: In paranoid schizophrenia, we generally find patterns of suspicious thinking
Speaker 1: and a heightened tendency to see threats and hidden motives.
Speaker 1: These detectors are all cranked way up, and the reason
Speaker 1: that we categorize this as a mental illness is because
Speaker 1: it tends to in ped the social progress of a
Speaker 1: person because they're out on a part of the spectrum
Speaker 1: which is unlikely to be correct very often. Again, I'm
Speaker 1: not saying that there's no possibility of conspiracies in the world.
Speaker 1: It's just that if you connect the dots everywhere all
Speaker 1: the time, it's very unlikely within your lifetime that you
Speaker 1: are going to be right often if ever. Now, what
Speaker 1: has always fascinated me about people who suffer from paranoid
Speaker 1: schizophrenia as I've traveled around the world is an obsession
Speaker 1: that they have with shadowy organizations, but specifically whatever your
Speaker 1: local shadowy organization is. So, if you have schizophrenia in
Speaker 1: the United States, you obsess about the FBI or the NSA.
Speaker 1: But if you're in Russia, you obsess about the Federal
Speaker 1: Security Service, the FSB or its predecessor of the KGB.
Speaker 1: In the United Kingdom, it's the MI six that you
Speaker 1: worry about. In China, it's the Ministry of State Security,
Speaker 1: known for its secretive operations. In North Korea, you're sure
Speaker 1: it's the Reconnaissance General Bureau that's behind whatever conspiracy theory
Speaker 1: you're working on. So the stories themselves are plug and play.
Speaker 1: You find the same stories translated everywhere. The thing that
Speaker 1: changes is the local group that you are paranoid about. Okay, Now,
Speaker 1: with that foundation about why brains cook up more and
Speaker 1: more esoteric explanations for things, I now want to pose
Speaker 1: the question, what are the chances of any particular theory
Speaker 1: being true? I mean, we all have limited information, and
Speaker 1: there's a possibility that some things are done in a
Speaker 1: shady way. But I assert that with any proposed theory,
Speaker 1: the important thing is to look at it through the
Speaker 1: lens of probability. And there are a couple of ways
Speaker 1: that I want us to think about this. First, let's
Speaker 1: consider the optimal number of people involved to keep a
Speaker 1: conspiracy going. My guess is that this number would have
Speaker 1: to be very small, like two or three, because that
Speaker 1: would give just enough power to do something maybe interesting,
Speaker 1: but it wouldn't involve so many people that you're guaranteed
Speaker 1: that somebody is going to defect. Now, the fact is,
Speaker 1: any of these conspiracy theories that float around, like the
Speaker 1: moon landing was faked, or JFK was murdered by a
Speaker 1: larger organization, or nine to eleven was an inside job
Speaker 1: by the American government, all of these would require an
Speaker 1: enormous number of people to keep a secret. And the
Speaker 1: question is, how do you keep a really big secret
Speaker 1: in the face of someone involved getting drunk in a bar,
Speaker 1: or talking in his sleep or having a deathbed confession.
Speaker 1: Now you can model this mathematically by his assuming that
Speaker 1: each day there's some very tiny probability of defection or
Speaker 1: of accidentally spilling the secret, and then you look at
Speaker 1: time ticking along, and if each day you have a
Speaker 1: tiny probability of the secret coming out, the chance that
Speaker 1: that secret survives drops with time. This is done mathematically
Speaker 1: with what's called a survival analysis. So, for example, say
Speaker 1: on a given night, you have a super small chance
Speaker 1: of getting drunk and spilling the secret. Let's say it's
Speaker 1: a point zho one chance. Then after a year of
Speaker 1: having to keep this secret every day, there's a larger
Speaker 1: chance that you have spilled the secret, And after two
Speaker 1: years the chance is even bigger, and so on. But
Speaker 1: now here's where I think it's really interesting. There's a
Speaker 1: branch of math called game theory, which studies the interaction
Speaker 1: between people and the strategies they use and the outcomes
Speaker 1: that happen, especially when the outcome for each person depends
Speaker 1: on the choices of everyone who's involved. In other words,
Speaker 1: what happens when people are making independent decisions, but those
Speaker 1: decisions are actually all related to one another, but the
Speaker 1: outcome depends on all of the decisions. One of the
Speaker 1: most famous versions of this is a puzzle called the
Speaker 1: prisoner's dilemma. Now there can be many versions of this,
Speaker 1: but here's the basic idea. Two criminals get arrested, but
Speaker 1: instead of getting thrown in the same cell, they're separated
Speaker 1: into different cells and interrogated independently. The police investigator says
Speaker 1: to each one, look, we don't have the evidence yet
Speaker 1: that you guys robbed the bank, but we can charge
Speaker 1: you right now on a lesser offense, and you're both
Speaker 1: gonna get one year in jail. But if you confess. Now,
Speaker 1: if you rat out your partner, he'll get ten years
Speaker 1: and you get to go home. And by the way,
Speaker 1: if they both rat each other out, they'll both do
Speaker 1: seven years. So each prisoner can either stay silent and
Speaker 1: not admit that they were up to anything, and they'll
Speaker 1: both just spend a year in prison, or each prisoner
Speaker 1: can make the decision to defect to rat out his partner,
Speaker 1: because that way, as a defector, you can go free,
Speaker 1: while the prisoner who stayed silent would receive a long sentence. Now,
Speaker 1: the key is that if both prisoners remain silent, if
Speaker 1: they don't admit anything, then they can only be charged
Speaker 1: on the lesser offense. They will both have a much
Speaker 1: shorter sentence, so that it turns out as the optimal
Speaker 1: solution for both of them mutual cooperation and a short sentence.
Speaker 1: But it never happens because individually it's actually better to
Speaker 1: defect to betray your partner, which leads to a worse
Speaker 1: outcome for both of them. The expected outcome essentially every
Speaker 1: time is that both don't want to take the chance
Speaker 1: that the other is going to rat them out, so
Speaker 1: they take the option to betray. Now there's a parallel
Speaker 1: here with anything that requires a lot of people to
Speaker 1: cover it up. So let's say there were some conspiracy.
Speaker 1: For the guy who decides to break from the group,
Speaker 1: he frees himself from getting in trouble, and he's incentivized
Speaker 1: to do so before someone else in the group does
Speaker 1: it to him. He doesn't want to be the one
Speaker 1: who's been ratted out. He wants to do the ratting.
Speaker 1: And presumably if you're the first guy who comes clean,
Speaker 1: you'd be world famous. If you're the guy who says, look,
Speaker 1: I was there, here's how we set up a studio
Speaker 1: and filmed a fake moon landing, and here's all my
Speaker 1: proof and documentation, or here's how he orchestrated this incredibly
Speaker 1: sly assassination of a president and kept it secret for decades.
Speaker 1: But now I am coming clean, or my conscience has
Speaker 1: gotten to me, and two and a half decades after
Speaker 1: nine to eleven, I'm going to explain how this was
Speaker 1: done as an inside job, and I'm going to write
Speaker 1: an internationally best selling book on this and beyond every
Speaker 1: news and morning show and presumably make a ton of
Speaker 1: money because I'm the one who chose to blow the
Speaker 1: whistle for reasons of guilt or over some internal argument,
Speaker 1: or because I can win the prisoner's dilemma this way,
Speaker 1: because I suspect that some other guy on the team
Speaker 1: is on the verge of spilling the means, whatever the reasons,
Speaker 1: game theory would suggest that the rational thing to do
Speaker 1: would be too defect before someone else does. And this
Speaker 1: is why I look skeptically at UFO conspiracies. It's not
Speaker 1: that I don't think the cosmos is enormous and there
Speaker 1: could be other life forms out there. In fact, I
Speaker 1: think it's inevitable. But all the conspiracy theories about UFOs
Speaker 1: I find difficult to believe because it's very hard to
Speaker 1: get a large group of people to keep a secret.
Speaker 1: The incentives are just too high to defect. The defector
Speaker 1: could say, you know what I want protection, I want
Speaker 1: a seven figure deal with Penguin Random House to publish
Speaker 1: the best selling book of the decade. I want to
Speaker 1: be played by Tom Cruise in the movie of My
Speaker 1: Life and so on. Okay, so maybe you'll say, well,
Speaker 1: you have a bunch of military discipline involved, a bunch
Speaker 1: of hard men who would never crack. But what about
Speaker 1: their law young haired rebellious kid or their gen z grandkid.
Speaker 1: They'd be thrilled to be on CNN revealing what they
Speaker 1: discovered in the attic, like a little piece of spaceship
Speaker 1: or a secret correspondence, and then everyone on their social
Speaker 1: media would give them thumbs up. And at the heart
Speaker 1: of this discussion about getting a big group of individuals
Speaker 1: to keep a secret is a critical question what would
Speaker 1: be the point of keeping a secret? For example, what's
Speaker 1: the point of keeping a secret about aliens having landed
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty seven. The conspiracy theorist always insists that
Speaker 1: the government keeps it a secret because if it's revealed,
Speaker 1: the public will freak out and some sort of unspecified
Speaker 1: chaos will rain. But that argument seems specious to me,
Speaker 1: given that every person is talking about aliens in Roswell. Anyway.
Speaker 1: It just so happens that my brother went to military
Speaker 1: school in Roswell, New Mexico, so I've been there plenty
Speaker 1: of times, and they sell t shirts there with UFOs
Speaker 1: on them, and hats and toys with UFOs and so on,
Speaker 1: and outside Roswell and even outside New Mexico. Almost everyone
Speaker 1: in the nation who I run into recognizes the name
Speaker 1: Roswell precisely because they've heard about this supposed alien crash landing.
Speaker 1: But the conspiracy theory requires, for its upkeep that every
Speaker 1: single person who knows anything has to stay quiet because
Speaker 1: the nation would freak out if they knew. And yet
Speaker 1: that is all that almost anyone associates with the town
Speaker 1: of Roswell. It seems like a leak at this point
Speaker 1: would be anti climactics. Someone would come out with the
Speaker 1: big reveal and everyone would say, yeah, tell me something
Speaker 1: I don't know. So I'm not making the claim that
Speaker 1: we are the only life form in the cosmos. Statistics
Speaker 1: would suggest there should be lots and lots of life
Speaker 1: pervading the galaxies. But I am suggesting that it's probably
Speaker 1: going to be easy to know when we actually get visited,
Speaker 1: because it won't depend on dozens or hundreds of people
Speaker 1: keeping a secret with no particular clarity on why the
Speaker 1: secret is being kept. Or take the Moon landing, some
Speaker 1: small fraction of the population still says this was actually
Speaker 1: a hoax. Now, this one is easy to address because
Speaker 1: with some equipment you can actually prove to yourself that
Speaker 1: it's not a hoax. I was lucky enough to meet
Speaker 1: Neil Armstrong, and he would always say that he was
Speaker 1: just a lowly worker whose job was to put a
Speaker 1: mirror on the Moon. Now he was obviously much more
Speaker 1: than that, but it's true about him placing the mirror.
Speaker 1: The mirror is there to bounce a laser light off of,
Speaker 1: so you can measure the distance to the Moon with
Speaker 1: millimeter precision by using the speed of light. This is
Speaker 1: called lunar laser ranging. And by the way, there are
Speaker 1: now six mirrors on the Moon, three placed by the USA,
Speaker 1: two by the Soviets, and one by India. So you
Speaker 1: can prove this to yourself by bouncing a laser off
Speaker 1: the Moon. But let's say you didn't know about the
Speaker 1: retroflectors and you thought there was a possibility that the
Speaker 1: moon landing had been faked. Again, there are presumably an
Speaker 1: enormous number of people who would have to have been
Speaker 1: involved here, certainly more than two or three I would guess.
Speaker 1: To pull off a moon landing hoax where the entire
Speaker 1: world is watching and you want to fool the whole population,
Speaker 1: you would need the participation from the entirety of NASA,
Speaker 1: from the production crew, from the newscasters, you certainly need
Speaker 1: the whole astronaut core to be on board, and probably
Speaker 1: the president and presumably hundreds of engineers who went home
Speaker 1: to their families each night. And every one of these
Speaker 1: people was at risk of getting drunk or talking in
Speaker 1: their sleep, or having spasms of guilt or religious conversions
Speaker 1: or deathbed regrets or whatever. So the key whenever you
Speaker 1: are confronted with a conspiracy theory is to ask what
Speaker 1: are the probabilities. You shouldn't dismiss a new hypothesis on
Speaker 1: the grounds that anything outside your internal model simply can't
Speaker 1: be true. Instead, you should consider the numbers, how many
Speaker 1: people would have to be involved, what incentive structure would
Speaker 1: keep them not talking, how much time has passed where
Speaker 1: they could have had a chance to slip up or
Speaker 1: make a purposeful confession. Okay, now, I just want to
Speaker 1: take a minute to address something that I often hear
Speaker 1: people lament about conspiracy theories, and that is the idea
Speaker 1: that the Internet is a key problem here. This is
Speaker 1: what allows for the easy flooding of conspiracy theories. I
Speaker 1: think the Internet is not particularly powerful here. Why because
Speaker 1: Whenever someone asserts this to me, I say, okay, let's
Speaker 1: say you wanted to make a new conspiracy theory, say
Speaker 1: that Joe Biden actually has an alien baby. So what
Speaker 1: do you mean that the Internet gives you the technology
Speaker 1: to flood the world with your crazy idea? Really? Picture this.
Speaker 1: You post this statement on your x account, and you
Speaker 1: do a selfie video, and you post it to Insta
Speaker 1: and TikTok. Now, the question is is the Internet meaningfully
Speaker 1: allowing you to flood society with your conspiracy theory or
Speaker 1: does nobody care that you've posted this? Do you get
Speaker 1: hundreds of reposts or do you get none? When people
Speaker 1: talk about how easy it is to flood a conspiracy theory,
Speaker 1: what they overlook is a subtle but critical point, what
Speaker 1: makes a really good conspiracy theory? Because it has to
Speaker 1: live in a very narrow range to get love online,
Speaker 1: you can't flood the Internet with anything. Just like Darwinian evolution,
Speaker 1: only a very tiny number of ideas make it and
Speaker 1: have successful reproduction. So this leads us to the really
Speaker 1: important question what kind of conspiracy theories stick? And the
Speaker 1: answer is it has to make a really good story.
Speaker 1: As I said earlier, the story has to connect the
Speaker 1: dots in a way that it's interesting and surprising and
Speaker 1: has explanatory power and reduces cognitive load. A good conspiracy
Speaker 1: theory is one that has an appealing narrative structure. Many times,
Speaker 1: when something happens, like the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, it's because
Speaker 1: of a mistake or incompetence or an oversight, and those
Speaker 1: don't make an interesting story. And this is what opens
Speaker 1: the opportunity for conspiracy theories to blossom, if they can
Speaker 1: put together a bigger and more exciting story. My guess
Speaker 1: would be in fact, that if some random chance event occurred,
Speaker 1: you're always going to get a conspiracy theory blossoming. And
Speaker 1: if you re ran the exact history a thousand times,
Speaker 1: every time, the randomness of the event would not be believed,
Speaker 1: and instead alternative explanations would shoot up around it. Why,
Speaker 1: Because we want story, We want a clear explanation. Story
Speaker 1: gives meaning to events. And by the way, I think
Speaker 1: we can flip this description and look at it from
Speaker 1: the brain's point of view. Sequences of events that have meaning,
Speaker 1: in other words, things that resonate in the internal model,
Speaker 1: as in this cause this, which caused this, this is
Speaker 1: what we call a story, as in, I have a
Speaker 1: narrative that explains this, and the narrative is easy to
Speaker 1: remember because each thought follows from the last, and there's
Speaker 1: a minimum that I have to memorize because the pieces
Speaker 1: fall into place. So what makes a good conspiracy theory, Well,
Speaker 1: it can't be too complex. It has to be a
Speaker 1: digestible story, and it has to be plausible, even if unlikely. Plausible.
Speaker 1: It often involves a shadowy group or simply any out group,
Speaker 1: and it has to be surprising and compelling. So, coming
Speaker 1: back to the Great Fire of Rome in the year
Speaker 1: sixty four, who the heck knows how the fire started.
Speaker 1: It might have been someone cooking a chicken and a
Speaker 1: spark flu or some candle in a house somewhere melted
Speaker 1: most of the way and then fell over, or there
Speaker 1: was an accidental spark from a blacksmith, or maybe someone
Speaker 1: doing a religious ritual, or a seven year old kicking
Speaker 1: embers around or whatever. They didn't have forensic tools for
Speaker 1: the investigation at that time, and even if they did,
Speaker 1: it's not clear that they would have found the answer.
Speaker 1: But the story that Emperor Nero would directly benefit from
Speaker 1: having this land cleared. That's straightforward, and it's spicy and
Speaker 1: compelling and repeat worthy because of the simplicity and deviousness
Speaker 1: of the whole thing. Or a weather balloon randomly landing
Speaker 1: in Roswell is obviously not the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: people are going to get all excited about write books
Speaker 1: and start clubs over. But alien life covered up by
Speaker 1: the government that is a very compelling plot. Or Oswald
Speaker 1: acting alone in JFK's assassination is one kind of narrative,
Speaker 1: but it's not nearly as compelling as a larger story
Speaker 1: where lots of secretive people decided that they wanted the
Speaker 1: president dead. So to work, a conspiracy theory needs to
Speaker 1: have a good narrative. Now, I've watched news events happen
Speaker 1: for years and conspiracy theories come out about them, and
Speaker 1: the thing that has struck me as so interesting is
Speaker 1: how the whole thing unfolds. Like physics, as in, if
Speaker 1: X happens, then you're guaranteed some group will come out
Speaker 1: and say, wait, what if why happened? So, for example,
Speaker 1: Nero's rome gets incinerated, but someone realized says, hey, he
Speaker 1: could benefit from this because the land is now clear.
Speaker 1: Therefore he might have been the one to have caused this.
Speaker 1: With thousands or millions of brains thinking about the situation,
Speaker 1: it is absolutely inevitable that that version of things will
Speaker 1: come down the pike next or after JFK's assassination. The
Speaker 1: FBI ran twenty five thousand interviews and that's how they
Speaker 1: concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. But that's just
Speaker 1: fuel for the fire. We're guaranteed that another version of
Speaker 1: the story is inevitable. I really can't think of a
Speaker 1: single big event in history where one story came out
Speaker 1: and everyone said, Wow, what a world we're in, and
Speaker 1: everyone shook hands on the narrative. So nowadays I'm putting
Speaker 1: together a model of this because my assertion is that
Speaker 1: what unfolds every time is inevitable. When X happens, there
Speaker 1: are many people in the world who could have had
Speaker 1: a vested interest in it. As one random example, when
Speaker 1: Hamas invaded Israel, someone I knew suggested, Hey, this seems
Speaker 1: like the kind of thing that Russia could have been behind,
Speaker 1: because Russia wants to get the attention off of themselves
Speaker 1: for their attack on the Ukraine. And of course that's
Speaker 1: true that Russia would theoretically like to have a distraction,
Speaker 1: But does that mean that Russia was behind it? Well,
Speaker 1: I can't know. But just because an entity has an interest,
Speaker 1: does that tell you something meaningful? Maybe? Maybe not. So
Speaker 1: the model goes like this, an event happens. Then let's
Speaker 1: say there are ten entities in the world, like governments
Speaker 1: or people or organizations who could, in theory, have something
Speaker 1: to gain from that. What will inevitably happen then is
Speaker 1: that all ten will become the targets of different conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories because they could in some way benefit, perhaps directly,
Speaker 1: perhaps very circuitously, but they could benefit from the event
Speaker 1: that just happened. So all ten of them will be
Speaker 1: the target of a round of YouTube videos and AM
Speaker 1: radio programs and so on saying hey, look, I think
Speaker 1: they were behind this event. And then there's the second level.
Speaker 1: There's the people who could benefit from having someone else
Speaker 1: accused of benefiting. So in a cartoon example, we might say, well,
Speaker 1: Ukraine would benefit if people thought that Russia was behind
Speaker 1: the attack. So then it becomes a second level conspiracy
Speaker 1: because the idea is that they would benefit from igniting
Speaker 1: a conspiracy theory about Russia, and I suspect that good
Speaker 1: conspiracy theorists can do third level and fourth level theories,
Speaker 1: where they can point to anywhere on the map and
Speaker 1: connect enough dots to make a story. The story might
Speaker 1: not be compelling to everyone, but if it involves the
Speaker 1: right out groups, it can get traction, at least among
Speaker 1: a particular in group. In other words, the cascade of
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories following any event seems to me totally predictable,
Speaker 1: because in any random situation, there will always be other
Speaker 1: parties that could be seen to benefit from it, other
Speaker 1: countries or governments, or individuals or shadowy organizations. And because
Speaker 1: of the inherent complexity of the world, there will always
Speaker 1: be a large canvas upon which to draw connections between dots.
Speaker 1: And I just want to address one final point. Someone
Speaker 1: asked me recently if I thought that conspiracy theories were
Speaker 1: more common right now than they are at other times
Speaker 1: in history. I don't know, and I think it's hard
Speaker 1: to study that with high resolution, But two things seem
Speaker 1: clear to me. The first is that we always retrospectively romanticize.
Speaker 1: We imagine that previous eras were more rational, whereas any
Speaker 1: close reading of history tells us that's absolutely not the case.
Speaker 1: The second is, like I mentioned before, there have been
Speaker 1: lots and lots of conspiracy theories all throughout history. I
Speaker 1: mentioned the plot against Socrates, or the death of Alexander
Speaker 1: the Great, or the assassination of Julius Caesar. But I
Speaker 1: have to allow that only tells us that conspiracies exist
Speaker 1: across the centuries of millennia, but it can't tell us
Speaker 1: much about whether there's some slight up and down that
Speaker 1: happens on the scale of decades. So this is very
Speaker 1: speculative and maybe erroneous, But I've been wondering if conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories grew more popular around twenty twenty than they were
Speaker 1: in the years just preceding that. Now, again this is
Speaker 1: just a speculation, but if it's true, I feel like
Speaker 1: I have an explanation for that, and that is covid.
Speaker 1: I'm making this conjecture because of something you've heard me
Speaker 1: say a million times that brains build internal models of
Speaker 1: the outside world to try to predict things as best
Speaker 1: they can. Fundamentally, the brain is a prediction machine, and
Speaker 1: that is why we have brains, and that is why
Speaker 1: we have been so successful as a species. But what
Speaker 1: happens when our internal models suddenly are not predicting. Well.
Speaker 1: Example I've ever seen at a societal level was when
Speaker 1: COVID hit. It all seems clear enough in retrospect, as in,
Speaker 1: that's what happened, and the world did this and that,
Speaker 1: But if you can really put yourself back and let's
Speaker 1: say March of twenty twenty, what you might remember is
Speaker 1: that the whole thing seemed not possible. We all heard
Speaker 1: there was some virus in China that people were worried about,
Speaker 1: and it started hitting our ears, some discussion about it,
Speaker 1: and then at some point you heard the term SARS
Speaker 1: COVID two virus for the first time, and eventually you
Speaker 1: hear COVID nineteen and you realize you've heard that word
Speaker 1: a couple of times now, and then it starts being
Speaker 1: part of more conversations, and pretty soon it's all anybody
Speaker 1: is talking about. But the feeling that essentially everyone had
Speaker 1: was that this is somehow going to get taken care of,
Speaker 1: because that's why we have governments, and they have all
Speaker 1: kinds of special departments and units and people in white coats,
Speaker 1: and surely this is the kind of thing that somebody
Speaker 1: will take care of and it'll just blow over, just
Speaker 1: like everything else is blown over. After all, we haven't
Speaker 1: had a meaningful pandemic since the nineteen eighteen influenza epidemic,
Speaker 1: and now, for goodness sakes, it's twenty twenty. We're living
Speaker 1: in the future. There's not going to be anything to
Speaker 1: worry about here. And at some point in the middle
Speaker 1: of March twenty twenty, it became clear that we all
Speaker 1: needed to shut down our businesses and offices temporarily and
Speaker 1: work from home, something most of us had never done.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if you remember the details, but
Speaker 1: it seemed like we were going to have to shut
Speaker 1: things down for a few days, and pretty soon we
Speaker 1: were all dismayed to realize this was going to last
Speaker 1: at least a couple of weeks, and suddenly the world
Speaker 1: became highly unpredictable. By your brain. It used to be
Speaker 1: that the biggest surprise you'd had was maybe your local
Speaker 1: store rearranged things so the toilet paper moved from Aisle
Speaker 1: six to Aisle eight. But you never in your life
Speaker 1: saw a situation where they simply said, we don't have
Speaker 1: any toilet paper. The supply chain broke, and you probably
Speaker 1: never even thought about the supply chain before, and now
Speaker 1: you didn't know if the Starbucks down the road was
Speaker 1: going to be open, would your haircut place be open,
Speaker 1: would the bank be open? Suddenly all of your prediction
Speaker 1: abilities were afraid. Our internal models in March twenty twenty
Speaker 1: suddenly revealed themselves to be woefully inadequate. So what happens
Speaker 1: when our internal models suddenly are not doing a good job.
Speaker 1: I hypothesize that they grasp for foundation, They grab for
Speaker 1: things that would seem to return them to a firm footing.
Speaker 1: So I watched this and myself and in all my colleagues.
Speaker 1: You would read an article that said this is all
Speaker 1: going to be over by next week, and you think, okay, cool,
Speaker 1: I got it. I believe the argument. I can repeat
Speaker 1: this to my friends. And then ten minutes later you
Speaker 1: read an article that says two hundred thousand Americans are
Speaker 1: going to die and you think, wow, well that was
Speaker 1: well argued. I get it. I can repeat this to
Speaker 1: my friends. Now. It's not easy to remember now, but
Speaker 1: we were all going back and forth on completely different
Speaker 1: predictions about the world and everything happening around us. We
Speaker 1: had a breakdown of the internal model. And this, I suggest,
Speaker 1: is when conspiracy theories really thrive. Why Because we're seeking
Speaker 1: harder than ever to find foundation, to place our understanding
Speaker 1: of the world on firm ground, and whackier and wackier
Speaker 1: theories can scratch the itch of reducing cognitive dissonance and
Speaker 1: giving good explanations for things. And the fact is, the
Speaker 1: main thing we learned from the pandemic is that the
Speaker 1: world is very complicated and fragile, and when it's suddenly
Speaker 1: tossed into a blender by a global pandemic, the results
Speaker 1: can be unpredictable. But our brains aren't in that business.
Speaker 1: They're in the business of finding hypotheses that allow the
Speaker 1: mind to impose a narrative that makes sense. Okay, so
Speaker 1: let's wrap up. What we saw in this episode is
Speaker 1: that conspiracy theories have been with us for as long
Speaker 1: as we have recorded history, so it's not something brand new.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, I did make the argument that
Speaker 1: there may be small periods of time, like during COVID,
Speaker 1: when the brain's internal model is having a harder time
Speaker 1: landing predictions and therefore is more susceptible to compelling stories.
Speaker 1: We also saw that brains love to solve puzzles, and
Speaker 1: this is something like a compulsion for brains which always
Speaker 1: want to lighten cognitive load and reduce cognitive dissonance. But
Speaker 1: the fact is that events in the world tend to
Speaker 1: be quite complex, so there are many ways to solve
Speaker 1: the puzzle, some more straightforward and some more arcane. And
Speaker 1: the reason the arcane explanations are sometimes appealing to some
Speaker 1: people is because they give an opportunity to confirm biases
Speaker 1: about our outgroups. And I also emphasized the social aspect
Speaker 1: of that is gained from having the conspiracy theory. Finally,
Speaker 1: I suggested that we can't always know what is true
Speaker 1: and not true because the world is complex, But the
Speaker 1: most sensible thing to do is to approach any particular
Speaker 1: suggestion with a scientific lens and ask yourself questions about it,
Speaker 1: like how many people would have to be involved, do
Speaker 1: they have realistic incentives that would allow them to spend
Speaker 1: the rest of their life in prison if they get caught,
Speaker 1: And with the increasing passage of time, how likely is
Speaker 1: it that none of the people involved would defect in
Speaker 1: order to save themselves from punishment and make themselves famous
Speaker 1: as the whistleblower. Most conspiracy theories that float around are
Speaker 1: not particularly robust When viewed against the background of these questions,
Speaker 1: and very often it's because the conspiracy theories are not
Speaker 1: built on a good model of human behavior. In a
Speaker 1: future episode, I'm going to dive into this issue of
Speaker 1: why conspiracy theories are generally unlikely because of the difficulty
Speaker 1: of keeping anything confidential. That upcoming episode is called why
Speaker 1: is it so hard for the brain to keep a secret?
Speaker 1: I don't mean to imply that these considerations would rule
Speaker 1: out any conspiracy theory, but certainly many or most conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories are ruled out by a good understanding of our
Speaker 1: neural drives and the resultant insight into human social dynamics.
Speaker 1: Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
Speaker 1: and to find further reading. Send me an email at
Speaker 1: podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and
Speaker 1: check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for
Speaker 1: videos of each episode and to leave comments Until next time.
Speaker 1: I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.