WEBVTT - How the Brain Is Built for Conspiracies (with David Eagleman) 0:00:00.840 --> 0:00:04.760 It's not pathways switched on by propaganda, it's pathways switched off. 0:00:04.960 --> 0:00:09.120 It turns out that what propaganda does is it suppresses 0:00:09.200 --> 0:00:12.080 those networks so that I come to understand some other 0:00:12.160 --> 0:00:16.639 group more like an object rather than another person. Where 0:00:16.680 --> 0:00:21.000 you associate somebody with something bad like pollution or viruses 0:00:21.120 --> 0:00:23.680 or whatever. But the point is you don't see them 0:00:23.720 --> 0:00:28.160 as a human and that's the power of propaganda and dehumanization. 0:00:30.160 --> 0:00:33.159 I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry o'she I served in 0:00:33.200 --> 0:00:36.760 the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover 0:00:37.000 --> 0:00:38.240 all around the world. 0:00:38.040 --> 0:00:40.400 And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I 0:00:40.479 --> 0:00:43.320 served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. 0:00:43.479 --> 0:00:45.720 Although we don't usually look at it this way, we 0:00:45.840 --> 0:00:47.920 created conspiracies. 0:00:47.360 --> 0:00:50.360 In our operations. We got people to believe things that 0:00:50.440 --> 0:00:51.120 weren't true. 0:00:51.240 --> 0:00:54.160 Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the 0:00:54.200 --> 0:00:55.400 news almost every day. 0:00:55.640 --> 0:00:57.880 Will break them down for you to determine whether they 0:00:57.920 --> 0:00:59.960 could be real or whether we're being manipular. 0:01:00.560 --> 0:01:07.560 Welcome to Mission Implausible. Our guest today is David Eagleman. 0:01:07.720 --> 0:01:10.760 He's a neuroscientist and a teacher at Stanford. Best selling 0:01:10.760 --> 0:01:12.840 author of numerous books and articles, and the host of 0:01:12.840 --> 0:01:17.000 the outstanding podcast Intercosmos with David Eagleman. David, Welcome to 0:01:17.040 --> 0:01:17.880 Mission Implausible. 0:01:18.160 --> 0:01:19.360 Great to be here, guys. 0:01:19.560 --> 0:01:21.720 So David, I'll kick it off, maybe with an observation 0:01:22.000 --> 0:01:24.360 and a question to get us going. One of the 0:01:24.400 --> 0:01:29.600 observation is that CIA and neuroscience, at least when it 0:01:29.600 --> 0:01:33.240 comes to conspiracy theories, they're actually much closer than you think, 0:01:33.280 --> 0:01:37.080 because as agency officers, we deal not only with people 0:01:37.200 --> 0:01:42.000 having conspiracy theories about US secret organization, but in our 0:01:42.160 --> 0:01:46.400 work we dealt with people who are conspiracy theorists, and 0:01:46.440 --> 0:01:52.360 we deal with societies that view life through a conspiratorial 0:01:52.440 --> 0:01:56.320 or conspiracy theory lens. So if you sit down John 0:01:56.440 --> 0:02:00.240 or I, if we sit down with a Pakistani scientist he's 0:02:00.280 --> 0:02:03.280 convinced that the Jews run the world. You have to 0:02:03.360 --> 0:02:05.720 deal with this guy, right, he's got information. We have 0:02:05.760 --> 0:02:08.280 to figure out how to work with him and how 0:02:08.280 --> 0:02:10.480 to talk to him. And on the other hand, there 0:02:10.639 --> 0:02:16.680 was a really smart, intelligent person from a major agent country. 0:02:16.960 --> 0:02:19.720 He was in their security service. He and I were 0:02:19.720 --> 0:02:22.320 getting close, and I realized he was trying to recruit 0:02:22.440 --> 0:02:25.000 me and what his government wanted to know, and what 0:02:25.040 --> 0:02:28.960 he wanted to know is what was the role of 0:02:29.000 --> 0:02:32.839 the Masonic lodges in the United States, because clearly they 0:02:32.960 --> 0:02:35.480 run the US. So, just to kick it off, I'd 0:02:35.480 --> 0:02:38.840 love your thoughts on why people are prone to conspiracy 0:02:38.880 --> 0:02:41.480 theories and why societies are as well. 0:02:41.880 --> 0:02:44.600 It's because the job of the brain is to make 0:02:44.720 --> 0:02:47.920 hypotheses about the world. So your brain is locked in 0:02:48.000 --> 0:02:50.920 silence and darkness inside the skull, and it's trying to 0:02:50.960 --> 0:02:53.239 figure out what the heck is going on out there, 0:02:53.240 --> 0:02:55.760 and so the way it does this is by generating 0:02:56.400 --> 0:03:00.560 ideas and testing those because you know, we're totally limited 0:03:01.240 --> 0:03:03.160 in what we can actually know about the world, not 0:03:03.200 --> 0:03:08.040 only because our reach is very small, but also because 0:03:08.080 --> 0:03:11.320 the world is very complicated. There are billions of people 0:03:11.320 --> 0:03:13.560 in the world, and we're always trying to figure things out. Now. Now, 0:03:13.600 --> 0:03:16.239 brains do this naturally. So if I'm trying to figure 0:03:16.240 --> 0:03:20.600 out where I put my phone down, my first hypothesis is, oh, 0:03:20.919 --> 0:03:22.720 I must have left it where I normally do, and 0:03:22.720 --> 0:03:24.960 then it's not there, so I think, oh, maybe I 0:03:25.040 --> 0:03:26.920 carried it with me over to the bedroom and left 0:03:26.960 --> 0:03:29.600 it there, And then I search that and I find 0:03:29.600 --> 0:03:32.880 that's not true. And then as I continue to not 0:03:33.080 --> 0:03:36.839 find my phone, what the brain naturally does and appropriately 0:03:36.920 --> 0:03:40.200 is it turns up the temperature on these ideas and 0:03:40.280 --> 0:03:43.920 it comes up with whackier and whackier hypothesis. And eventually, 0:03:43.960 --> 0:03:46.360 if you can't find your phone, you might say, well, 0:03:46.400 --> 0:03:49.680 I think the electrician who was here maybe took the phone. 0:03:49.800 --> 0:03:52.080 This is what brains do, and this is a natural 0:03:52.560 --> 0:03:56.880 part of what they're supposed to do. Now, interestingly, this 0:03:56.960 --> 0:04:02.600 is what leads to conspiracy theories, because when we're generating 0:04:02.640 --> 0:04:05.840 a hypothesis about what was it that land in ron aswell, 0:04:06.040 --> 0:04:09.920 or how did JFK actually get killed? Or the nine 0:04:09.960 --> 0:04:12.560 to eleven? How did the towers actually fall? When your 0:04:12.560 --> 0:04:16.800 brain comes up with a really crazy hypothesis, usually you 0:04:17.120 --> 0:04:19.920 dismiss that one in favor of things that are more likely. 0:04:19.960 --> 0:04:22.760 And so my interest has been in why people are 0:04:22.800 --> 0:04:25.520 attracted to certain hypotheses, and I actually think there are 0:04:25.560 --> 0:04:28.560 several reasons here. One of them is that puzzle solving 0:04:29.160 --> 0:04:31.480 is very rewarding to the brain. And of course we're 0:04:31.520 --> 0:04:33.520 trained on this since we're kids. You're in school, you 0:04:33.600 --> 0:04:36.479 have all kinds of flavors of puzzles that you do 0:04:36.560 --> 0:04:41.240 all the time, and this actually activates these reward systems 0:04:41.400 --> 0:04:44.880 when you solve them, and when you generate a good 0:04:45.040 --> 0:04:48.680 theory to explain a mysterious event or just to have 0:04:48.760 --> 0:04:52.120 a complete different explanation of event, there's something really rewarding 0:04:52.160 --> 0:04:56.000 about cracking that puzzle. You are the Sherlock Homes in 0:04:56.040 --> 0:04:58.880 that moment. And I do want to make clear that 0:04:58.920 --> 0:05:01.760 when I often you people say things like conspiracy theories 0:05:01.800 --> 0:05:04.200 are not rational, but in fact they're completely in line 0:05:04.240 --> 0:05:08.360 with what brains do to solve problems. And when someone 0:05:08.839 --> 0:05:11.560 buys into a conspiracy theory, it's not necessarily that they're 0:05:11.600 --> 0:05:15.680 being disingenuous. It's that the world is large and complex, 0:05:15.760 --> 0:05:17.440 and the best any of us are trying to do 0:05:17.520 --> 0:05:20.360 is fit together lego pieces to try to figure out 0:05:20.360 --> 0:05:22.400 what the heck is going on out there. I'll just 0:05:22.400 --> 0:05:25.240 say a couple other things, which is that fascinatingly, there 0:05:25.240 --> 0:05:28.280 are many reasons why brains try to solve puzzles all 0:05:28.320 --> 0:05:32.520 the time. One of them is to reduce cognitive dissonance, 0:05:32.600 --> 0:05:34.520 which is to say, you know, when we're faced with 0:05:34.680 --> 0:05:37.960 facts that don't fit or information that conflicts, which happens 0:05:38.000 --> 0:05:42.320 all the time, that's uncomfortable for us. And so when 0:05:42.320 --> 0:05:45.240 you can come up with a good conspiracy theory that fits, 0:05:45.360 --> 0:05:49.680 it can reduce cognitive load and complexity and dissonance. So 0:05:49.880 --> 0:05:51.600 just a couple other things I think are fascinating here, 0:05:51.640 --> 0:05:55.640 which is we're also all yoked with a confirmation bias, 0:05:55.720 --> 0:05:59.120 which just means that we seek out information and we 0:05:59.279 --> 0:06:03.720 like information that confirms our pre existing beliefs. 0:06:04.080 --> 0:06:06.120 I've got a ten dollar word I want to use, 0:06:06.400 --> 0:06:11.039 so I probably mispronounce it, but peridola, right, paridolia. So 0:06:11.320 --> 0:06:14.720 from an evolutionary point of view, as I understand it, 0:06:14.800 --> 0:06:18.760 we're more likely to survive and breed if we see patterns. 0:06:18.880 --> 0:06:21.560 If there's a rustle in the bushes in a shadow, 0:06:22.160 --> 0:06:24.640 it could be a tiger, right, so you run. You 0:06:24.680 --> 0:06:26.640 don't know if it's a tiger. And of course the 0:06:26.640 --> 0:06:28.640 person who goes over and says I'm going to go 0:06:28.760 --> 0:06:31.039 check this out and determine whether it is or isn't, 0:06:31.240 --> 0:06:33.560 of course they're going to get eaten, right, even if 0:06:33.600 --> 0:06:35.839 it's only one out of one hundred times. So that 0:06:35.960 --> 0:06:41.280 we've evolved this innate capacity to see patterns and to 0:06:41.480 --> 0:06:45.440 even if they're false, evolutionarily speaking, it's still an advantage 0:06:45.520 --> 0:06:47.040 or it has been an advantage to us. 0:06:47.200 --> 0:06:49.920 Yeah, exactly. So first, let me define the ten dollar word, 0:06:49.960 --> 0:06:56.320 which is paradolia is seeing patterns in random visual patterns. 0:06:56.440 --> 0:06:59.880 Probably the most common example of paradolia is seeing faces. 0:07:00.120 --> 0:07:02.440 You look at the electrical plug on the wall and 0:07:02.520 --> 0:07:04.480 it looks like two eyes and mouth. You go, there's 0:07:04.480 --> 0:07:07.120 a old face there. That's paradolia. And of course we 0:07:07.160 --> 0:07:09.360 see faces and everything, the man on the moon or 0:07:09.440 --> 0:07:13.120 some burn marks on a piece of toast or whatever. Okay, 0:07:13.360 --> 0:07:16.600 but I'm going to introduce another ten dollars word, which 0:07:16.680 --> 0:07:20.400 is apo fenia, which is the more generalized thing. So 0:07:20.480 --> 0:07:25.000 paradolia is about visual patterns, but apoffenia is about just 0:07:25.200 --> 0:07:29.120 as signing meaning to random patterns. And I think that's 0:07:29.160 --> 0:07:33.080 really at the heart of conspiracy theories, is our brain's 0:07:33.200 --> 0:07:37.480 natural inclination to find meaningful connections in random data. 0:07:37.960 --> 0:07:41.400 The thing that I don't get is how when people 0:07:41.760 --> 0:07:43.960 come out the other end and they believe in lizard 0:07:44.000 --> 0:07:48.440 people and QAnon and the politicians drink blood, those things 0:07:48.480 --> 0:07:54.080 aren't sensible answers or sensible patterns of solving any kind 0:07:54.080 --> 0:07:57.680 of puzzle. How does that work? How could someone go 0:07:57.720 --> 0:08:00.520 down a rabbit hole and believe that politicians drink the 0:08:00.600 --> 0:08:01.400 blood of children. 0:08:01.720 --> 0:08:04.440 The thing to appreciate is that it's all on a spectrum, right, 0:08:04.560 --> 0:08:07.040 So you can believe in a whack your and whack 0:08:07.080 --> 0:08:11.600 your hypothesis about something, and eventually you find yourself pretty 0:08:11.640 --> 0:08:15.280 far out on something. But if it confirms the bias 0:08:15.320 --> 0:08:18.000 you have about this politician, and if it seems to 0:08:18.120 --> 0:08:21.720 answer some sort of if it cracks a puzzle for you, 0:08:21.800 --> 0:08:23.240 I don't know what it is. In this case, all 0:08:23.240 --> 0:08:26.480 these children have disappeared and these politicians seem to be 0:08:26.480 --> 0:08:30.720 getting healthier or whatever the thing is, then to your mind, 0:08:30.840 --> 0:08:33.880 that might make sense. But there's actually another thing that 0:08:34.000 --> 0:08:36.440 I think might shed some light here, which is that 0:08:36.640 --> 0:08:40.679 there is a social component to conspiracy theories. And I've 0:08:40.720 --> 0:08:43.520 been very interested in this issue. So actually I would 0:08:43.520 --> 0:08:47.360 say there's two aspects of social components. One is brains 0:08:47.360 --> 0:08:50.880 are very predisposed to have in groups and outgroups. You've 0:08:50.920 --> 0:08:52.880 got the people that you know and like and trust 0:08:52.920 --> 0:08:55.920 presumably the group that you are in, and then there's 0:08:56.000 --> 0:08:58.800 the others who are in that outgroup, and we trust 0:08:58.800 --> 0:09:02.920 them less, we think they're capable of anything any sort 0:09:02.920 --> 0:09:07.120 of moral turpitude, and that allows for whackier and whack 0:09:07.120 --> 0:09:10.000 your hypotheses to be possible. But I think there's even 0:09:10.040 --> 0:09:13.640 a second social component that's even more important, which is 0:09:13.679 --> 0:09:17.200 that if you are the one that comes up with 0:09:17.520 --> 0:09:20.600 a conspiracy theory, you get a lot of attention for that, 0:09:20.720 --> 0:09:23.200 or at least you think you do. You get to say, hey, 0:09:23.200 --> 0:09:26.440 look I've pieced all these things together, and I know 0:09:26.520 --> 0:09:28.920 something that is the first time anyone has ever known 0:09:28.960 --> 0:09:31.120 this in the history of humankind. I mean, look, this 0:09:31.200 --> 0:09:34.559 kind of thing drives science, right if you are Einstein 0:09:34.760 --> 0:09:37.400 and you explain this little loop de loop that the 0:09:37.440 --> 0:09:40.840 planet Mercury does with the special theory of relativity, and 0:09:41.040 --> 0:09:44.480 suddenly like everything is clear, and no one in the 0:09:44.520 --> 0:09:46.480 history of humankind has ever felt this, you know, has 0:09:46.520 --> 0:09:49.600 ever understood this before. What Einstein said is he felt 0:09:49.600 --> 0:09:52.680 like something snapped inside him. I mean, what a feeling, 0:09:52.679 --> 0:09:54.920 what a moment. And by the way, I think this 0:09:55.040 --> 0:09:59.040 social component matters even if you're just the guy repeating 0:09:59.080 --> 0:10:01.120 the story, the one who came up with it, But 0:10:01.200 --> 0:10:05.240 you get something out of telling it. Why, Because conspiracy 0:10:05.280 --> 0:10:09.560 theories are interesting and you get attention at the party 0:10:09.960 --> 0:10:13.040 for saying this or on social media. And the reason 0:10:13.320 --> 0:10:18.000 they are interesting is because they challenge someone else's internal model. 0:10:18.080 --> 0:10:22.199 They think they understood something. Oh, I know how nine 0:10:22.200 --> 0:10:24.480 to eleven happened, or how JFK got shot orund and 0:10:24.520 --> 0:10:28.360 certainly you tell them something and voila, there's a totally 0:10:28.360 --> 0:10:31.319 different framework for explaining the same thing, and that holds 0:10:31.360 --> 0:10:34.320 their attention. And even if you were at the original 0:10:34.320 --> 0:10:36.160 sherlock who came up with a theory, you get to 0:10:36.200 --> 0:10:38.160 glow in the credit of that because you're the ones 0:10:38.200 --> 0:10:42.439 spreading the word and with a good story, it's like 0:10:42.480 --> 0:10:45.000 a gift certificate that doesn't get used up, that gives 0:10:45.040 --> 0:10:46.920 you really great social feedback. 0:10:48.360 --> 0:10:50.679 Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just. 0:10:50.679 --> 0:11:01.280 For a minute or two, and we're back. 0:11:02.960 --> 0:11:05.880 I know somebody who's who lost a relative at Jonestown 0:11:06.440 --> 0:11:09.559 and Jim Jones and the temple famously nine hundred and 0:11:09.600 --> 0:11:13.360 eighteen people. The word is they committed suicide. They literally 0:11:13.440 --> 0:11:15.680 drank the kool aid Arsenick and the grave kool aid. 0:11:15.960 --> 0:11:18.960 But Jim Jones at the end had come up with 0:11:19.000 --> 0:11:24.000 this intricate conspiracy theory about how the US government was 0:11:24.040 --> 0:11:27.120 going to attack them. They were going to be murdered 0:11:27.200 --> 0:11:30.360 and tortured, their children would be taken away, and this 0:11:30.480 --> 0:11:34.800 was the only way out. And in the end, as 0:11:34.840 --> 0:11:38.800 people have studied this more probably only about I'll just 0:11:38.840 --> 0:11:42.920 say half a significant number actually drank the kool aid voluntarily, 0:11:43.600 --> 0:11:45.640 but a lot of them when push came to shove, 0:11:45.679 --> 0:11:48.920 when somebody almost literally put a gun to their head 0:11:48.960 --> 0:11:52.360 and said, do you believe this conspiracy? More than half 0:11:52.400 --> 0:11:55.480 of them are around half didn't you know? They went 0:11:55.520 --> 0:11:57.720 along with it for the social component to be in 0:11:57.760 --> 0:12:01.200 the end group, but when it's like my life's steak, Yeah, 0:12:01.240 --> 0:12:03.480 they knew it wasn't true. Deep in their hearts. They 0:12:03.520 --> 0:12:05.880 knew it wasn't They still drank it because they put 0:12:06.120 --> 0:12:08.560 literally a gun to their head or a crossbow. And 0:12:08.600 --> 0:12:11.320 so these people did kill themselves because they were forced to. 0:12:11.679 --> 0:12:13.640 But it wasn't a mass suicide. It was a lot 0:12:13.720 --> 0:12:15.559 of them. A lot of them did it because they 0:12:15.720 --> 0:12:17.760 bought into it, and a lot of them did it 0:12:17.840 --> 0:12:20.480 they didn't really believe. In the end. It was like 0:12:20.880 --> 0:12:24.200 it was a sham in their inner hearts. They didn't 0:12:24.200 --> 0:12:25.280 believe in the conspiracy. 0:12:25.679 --> 0:12:27.400 I just want to address one point here that I 0:12:27.400 --> 0:12:31.400 think matters, which is that when it comes to our 0:12:31.520 --> 0:12:36.120 believing in something, it's not that there's a true answer, 0:12:36.240 --> 0:12:38.240 as in, oh, I didn't really believe it, or I did. 0:12:38.559 --> 0:12:41.160 You have lots of different networks in your brain all running. 0:12:41.160 --> 0:12:42.599 The way I've described to some of my books is 0:12:42.640 --> 0:12:45.280 that it's a team of rivals under the hood, and 0:12:45.360 --> 0:12:48.080 so you can both believe something and part of you 0:12:48.160 --> 0:12:49.920 doesn't believe it at all, and part of you thinks, hey, 0:12:49.960 --> 0:12:52.360 this may be really true. So all those things can 0:12:52.400 --> 0:12:53.960 be running in your head at once. So it's hard 0:12:53.960 --> 0:12:56.040 to say that they didn't believe it at all and 0:12:56.080 --> 0:12:58.920 they knew it was a sham. It's possible that they 0:12:59.000 --> 0:13:01.559 were questioning back and forth, wow is this true? Is 0:13:01.559 --> 0:13:05.120 it's not true? A good mid level conspiracy theory, ninety 0:13:05.200 --> 0:13:08.760 nine percent of your cognitive mind says, Okay, that is 0:13:08.800 --> 0:13:10.680 definitely not true. But then you think, hey, what if 0:13:10.720 --> 0:13:12.640 what you can partially entertain it. 0:13:12.920 --> 0:13:15.839 You talked about sort of truth and the relativism of truth, 0:13:15.880 --> 0:13:18.040 and that we each have our own sort of worldview 0:13:18.160 --> 0:13:20.760 or in our own heads that maybe there's not really 0:13:21.040 --> 0:13:25.120 unimpeachable truth. There are things that are clearly not true, 0:13:25.480 --> 0:13:28.440 like back to my original question, the view that there 0:13:28.440 --> 0:13:31.600 are lizard people running the world and running our politics. 0:13:32.240 --> 0:13:34.959 No one has ever seen a lizard person, So how 0:13:35.040 --> 0:13:37.800 is it that people can convince themselves of things that 0:13:38.080 --> 0:13:39.880 there's just no evidence for. 0:13:40.440 --> 0:13:43.400 Yeah, okay, So I think this is a really important 0:13:43.480 --> 0:13:47.080 question because it shows a couple things. One is, first 0:13:47.120 --> 0:13:50.040 of all, this social component. I don't if you hear 0:13:50.120 --> 0:13:52.680 about the lizard people running politics and you go and 0:13:52.720 --> 0:13:55.840 you tell someone else, there is some social component to Hey, 0:13:55.920 --> 0:13:57.480 I get to be the one telling you about this, 0:13:57.679 --> 0:14:00.600 even if this is unlikely to be true, there's still 0:14:00.600 --> 0:14:03.920 some social award to get. But more importantly, our world 0:14:04.240 --> 0:14:07.880 has mental illness. About one percent of the population, for example, 0:14:07.880 --> 0:14:11.160 has schizophrenia, which means that they're divorced from reality and 0:14:11.760 --> 0:14:16.000 they can have a thought like lizard people are running society, 0:14:16.600 --> 0:14:20.280 and to them there's nothing strange about that. They feel like, Okay, 0:14:20.360 --> 0:14:23.320 I know that's true, because I don't know if you 0:14:23.440 --> 0:14:25.640 have ever talked or any of the listeners ever known 0:14:25.680 --> 0:14:27.280 someone or had a loved one or just a friend 0:14:27.360 --> 0:14:30.200 or someone that talked to with schizophrenia. But when somebody 0:14:30.600 --> 0:14:35.440 is delusional, they will believe whatever coinage their brain is 0:14:36.200 --> 0:14:38.320 coughing up. So in the same way that we believe 0:14:38.600 --> 0:14:44.240 our dreams are completely wacky, ridiculous dreams when we're in them, 0:14:44.520 --> 0:14:46.720 that's exactly what it's like for a person with schizophrenia. 0:14:46.920 --> 0:14:49.520 I talked with one gentleman who was telling me that 0:14:49.640 --> 0:14:53.160 he had just had brunch with the president and advised 0:14:53.240 --> 0:14:54.760 him on all these things and so on. He was 0:14:54.840 --> 0:14:59.080 locked in a mental institution, and clearly this was not true, 0:14:59.120 --> 0:15:01.120 but he believed it. I came back and saw him 0:15:01.600 --> 0:15:05.360 about ten days later. He was now not having hallucinations, 0:15:05.360 --> 0:15:07.560 and I asked him about that. I said, Hey, what's 0:15:07.600 --> 0:15:09.360 your view on that now? And he said, oh, I 0:15:09.400 --> 0:15:11.760 guess that wasn't true. Now it feels like a dream 0:15:11.840 --> 0:15:14.400 to me. But when I was there ten days ago, 0:15:14.520 --> 0:15:18.480 I felt like that was true. So there's some interesting 0:15:18.520 --> 0:15:21.400 interaction between the one percent of the population that has 0:15:21.440 --> 0:15:25.920 schizophrenia and then other people who are maybe just adjacent 0:15:25.960 --> 0:15:28.760 to them. And so I have a suspicion this is 0:15:28.800 --> 0:15:31.280 a little bit sometimes how things can spread. 0:15:31.760 --> 0:15:36.080 So if I understand correctly hate speech, of course, dictators 0:15:36.240 --> 0:15:42.000 and hate groups use these dehumanizing metaphors that they switch 0:15:42.160 --> 0:15:47.960 on neural pathways and these neural pathways, they bypass higher 0:15:48.040 --> 0:15:52.440 cognitive reasoning centers, and over time, these mental patterns become 0:15:52.960 --> 0:15:56.240 entrenched and it becomes more and more difficult to get 0:15:56.280 --> 0:15:58.960 out of them. And of course for CIA officers, this 0:15:59.000 --> 0:16:01.360 is something that's very important when we're dealing with people 0:16:01.720 --> 0:16:05.640 or societies that view the world this way. And so 0:16:05.720 --> 0:16:09.160 I know John's a Russia expert, and looking at Russia now, 0:16:09.520 --> 0:16:13.040 I think there's a lot of this neural pathway change 0:16:13.120 --> 0:16:16.960 right now where they simply don't view the world exactly 0:16:17.000 --> 0:16:18.760 in the same way we do. And let me just 0:16:18.800 --> 0:16:21.920 follow it up with one quick sort of personal So 0:16:22.400 --> 0:16:25.600 when I was eighteen, I went to Germany and I 0:16:25.600 --> 0:16:28.960 had a German girlfriend and I met her mother, and 0:16:29.040 --> 0:16:32.320 she was nice, but she was from the Sudate and 0:16:32.400 --> 0:16:34.280 Land and driven out after World War Two as a 0:16:34.320 --> 0:16:37.040 young child. And one night she had a couple of 0:16:37.120 --> 0:16:41.240 drinks too many, and she said to me, look, she said, 0:16:41.480 --> 0:16:44.080 it was wrong what happened to the Jews, but with 0:16:44.200 --> 0:16:47.000 everything they did, they kind of had something coming to them. 0:16:47.240 --> 0:16:49.600 And I thought, she's never going to wash it out 0:16:49.640 --> 0:16:53.760 to her head. She's a well educated sixty year old 0:16:53.800 --> 0:16:59.560 woman and she is never despite all the contradictory evidence 0:16:59.680 --> 0:17:03.520 and everything, and she's very happy living in a democratic 0:17:03.560 --> 0:17:09.360 West Germany. Yet how her views formed in her cognitive years, 0:17:09.840 --> 0:17:12.040 that was depically never going to change. The only way 0:17:12.040 --> 0:17:13.840 it was going to change is like she hasd her 0:17:13.880 --> 0:17:15.119 and her generation had to go. 0:17:15.400 --> 0:17:17.760 Here's what I would say. I've actually studied a lot 0:17:17.880 --> 0:17:23.400 about propaganda and dehumanization, and you're mostly right about what 0:17:23.680 --> 0:17:26.120 happens there, except by the way, it's not pathways switched 0:17:26.200 --> 0:17:29.480 on by propaganda, it's pathways switched off. It turns out 0:17:29.480 --> 0:17:31.560 that you can start by asking the question of what 0:17:31.640 --> 0:17:34.080 is required for pro social behavior, In other words, what 0:17:34.160 --> 0:17:37.600 is required for me to care about you and not 0:17:37.880 --> 0:17:40.960 want to see you get hurt? And what is required 0:17:40.960 --> 0:17:44.919 are very particular networks, mostly in the frontal lobe behind 0:17:44.960 --> 0:17:49.400 your forehead. These are networks that allow me to understand 0:17:49.440 --> 0:17:52.480 you as a fellow human. But it turns out that 0:17:52.680 --> 0:17:57.520 what propaganda does is it suppresses those networks so that 0:17:57.600 --> 0:18:00.480 I come to understand some other group more like an 0:18:00.480 --> 0:18:04.879 object rather than another person. And this is the trick 0:18:04.920 --> 0:18:09.119 that all propaganda across place in time uses. Is you 0:18:09.800 --> 0:18:14.800 dehumanize by comparing them to for example, animals or viruses. 0:18:15.240 --> 0:18:17.919 Because the interesting thing is I've collected up, for example, 0:18:18.000 --> 0:18:20.600 propaganda posters from all over the world. They all do this. 0:18:20.760 --> 0:18:22.840 So I don't know what you were thinking, but whatever 0:18:22.840 --> 0:18:26.440 you were thinking generalizes to everybody. That's the interesting part. 0:18:26.520 --> 0:18:30.120 So look American World War One and World War two 0:18:30.200 --> 0:18:34.480 posters showed the enemy as like a gorilla, or I've 0:18:34.480 --> 0:18:37.920 actually collected quotations from like the Hutu and the Tutsi 0:18:38.080 --> 0:18:43.399 in Rwanda. The Hutu viewed them as rats. That's a 0:18:43.480 --> 0:18:45.879 common one across place in time, viewing them as rats 0:18:45.920 --> 0:18:49.040 or viruses, things like that. Okay, So the point is 0:18:49.080 --> 0:18:51.919 what this does is this turns down these areas, these 0:18:51.960 --> 0:18:55.679 networks in the brain that are required to see another 0:18:55.760 --> 0:18:59.440 person as a person. And so what happened. By the way, 0:18:59.440 --> 0:19:01.760 there are lots of turned this down. Moral pollution is 0:19:01.800 --> 0:19:05.680 one as well, where you associate somebody with something bad 0:19:05.960 --> 0:19:08.879 like pollution or viruses or whatever. There are many ways 0:19:08.880 --> 0:19:10.920 to do this, but the point is you don't see 0:19:10.920 --> 0:19:14.960 them as a human. And that's the power of propaganda 0:19:15.000 --> 0:19:17.119 and dehumanization. And the reason I study this and give 0:19:17.200 --> 0:19:20.879 talks about this is because once you're aware of these tricks. 0:19:20.920 --> 0:19:23.280 Then it's easier to see them, and so the next time, oh, 0:19:23.320 --> 0:19:26.159 this group is like a virus or like rats or whatever, 0:19:26.480 --> 0:19:28.440 you can think, Okay, well I've seen this trick before. 0:19:28.480 --> 0:19:30.960 I'm not going to allow that to happen. So clearly 0:19:31.000 --> 0:19:33.879 the problem is you're pointing out, for example, what this 0:19:33.920 --> 0:19:36.680 German woman is. Once you come to believe this about 0:19:36.720 --> 0:19:39.520 in groups and out groups, it's not so easy to change. Now, 0:19:39.520 --> 0:19:43.720 people do change. There are really interesting examples of a 0:19:43.760 --> 0:19:47.320 guy who was in the KKKA who changed his view, 0:19:47.840 --> 0:19:49.679 Or there's a young woman who was raised in a 0:19:49.840 --> 0:19:54.240 very strict, kind of awful church environment where she was 0:19:54.240 --> 0:19:56.679 taught to hate all kinds of groups of people and 0:19:56.720 --> 0:19:59.960 she's really changed her ways. Yeah, these things do happen, 0:20:00.240 --> 0:20:03.600 But to your point, it's tough. Once you've been taught 0:20:03.640 --> 0:20:06.720 how to categorize the world. Those are not the kind 0:20:06.720 --> 0:20:09.399 of people I hang out with, and they're capable of 0:20:09.440 --> 0:20:12.280 any kind of devious behavior, then that tends to stick. 0:20:12.520 --> 0:20:15.560 Do you think that social media and getting everybody in 0:20:15.640 --> 0:20:18.680 to find these communities of people who believe in these 0:20:18.680 --> 0:20:21.439 things has made this worse for us today or has 0:20:21.480 --> 0:20:22.640 it always been the same. 0:20:23.080 --> 0:20:25.119 I do not think that social media has anything to 0:20:25.160 --> 0:20:28.040 do with this. Actually, for several reasons. One is that 0:20:28.200 --> 0:20:31.040 and you guys must be experts in this part. When 0:20:31.040 --> 0:20:33.680 you look back through history, there is no moment or 0:20:33.680 --> 0:20:36.480 a place where there haven't been conspiracy theories. There was 0:20:36.480 --> 0:20:38.600 a great, big fire that destroyed a lot of Rome 0:20:38.720 --> 0:20:41.520 in sixty four CE, and there are all kinds of 0:20:41.560 --> 0:20:44.399 conspiracy theories about it where people thought, hey, wait, I 0:20:44.440 --> 0:20:49.320 think the Emperor Nero was responsible for the fire because 0:20:49.359 --> 0:20:51.600 he wanted to build this new palace and for that 0:20:51.880 --> 0:20:56.000 clear land, and so consequently all these conspiracy theories blossom. 0:20:56.119 --> 0:20:58.639 Nero blamed the Christians, by the way, yeah. 0:20:58.440 --> 0:21:02.680 Yeah, exactly, everyone exactly, and probably it was some random 0:21:02.760 --> 0:21:05.560 spark from whatever, like who knows is ole is cow? 0:21:05.800 --> 0:21:09.000 Yeah exactly. And the thing is we'll never know. And 0:21:09.040 --> 0:21:11.000 of course there are no good forensic tools back then. 0:21:11.040 --> 0:21:13.760 Some people then couldn't have known, you know, there were 0:21:13.760 --> 0:21:15.800 conspiracy theories. And by the way, this was the same 0:21:15.800 --> 0:21:18.919 thing behind the assassination of Julius Caesar, the death of 0:21:18.960 --> 0:21:24.200 Alexander the Great, who actually wanted to ensure that Socrates 0:21:24.440 --> 0:21:27.640 was tried and executed. So as far back as we 0:21:27.760 --> 0:21:31.200 have written history. We have conspiracy theories, so first of all, 0:21:31.680 --> 0:21:35.680 it's not a new thing. But more generally, the idea 0:21:35.840 --> 0:21:39.640 that social media reduces our need for proof, I think 0:21:40.040 --> 0:21:43.520 might be a retrospective romanticization to think that we ever 0:21:43.680 --> 0:21:46.240