Speaker 1: It's not pathways switched on by propaganda, it's pathways switched off.
Speaker 1: It turns out that what propaganda does is it suppresses
Speaker 1: those networks so that I come to understand some other
Speaker 1: group more like an object rather than another person. Where
Speaker 1: you associate somebody with something bad like pollution or viruses
Speaker 1: or whatever. But the point is you don't see them
Speaker 1: as a human and that's the power of propaganda and dehumanization.
Speaker 2: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry o'she I served in
Speaker 2: the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover
Speaker 2: all around the world.
Speaker 3: And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I
Speaker 3: served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 2: Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
Speaker 2: created conspiracies.
Speaker 3: In our operations. We got people to believe things that
Speaker 3: weren't true.
Speaker 2: Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
Speaker 2: news almost every day.
Speaker 3: Will break them down for you to determine whether they
Speaker 3: could be real or whether we're being manipular.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Mission Implausible. Our guest today is David Eagleman.
Speaker 2: He's a neuroscientist and a teacher at Stanford. Best selling
Speaker 2: author of numerous books and articles, and the host of
Speaker 2: the outstanding podcast Intercosmos with David Eagleman. David, Welcome to
Speaker 2: Mission Implausible.
Speaker 1: Great to be here, guys.
Speaker 4: So David, I'll kick it off, maybe with an observation
Speaker 4: and a question to get us going. One of the
Speaker 4: observation is that CIA and neuroscience, at least when it
Speaker 4: comes to conspiracy theories, they're actually much closer than you think,
Speaker 4: because as agency officers, we deal not only with people
Speaker 4: having conspiracy theories about US secret organization, but in our
Speaker 4: work we dealt with people who are conspiracy theorists, and
Speaker 4: we deal with societies that view life through a conspiratorial
Speaker 4: or conspiracy theory lens. So if you sit down John
Speaker 4: or I, if we sit down with a Pakistani scientist he's
Speaker 4: convinced that the Jews run the world. You have to
Speaker 4: deal with this guy, right, he's got information. We have
Speaker 4: to figure out how to work with him and how
Speaker 4: to talk to him. And on the other hand, there
Speaker 4: was a really smart, intelligent person from a major agent country.
Speaker 4: He was in their security service. He and I were
Speaker 4: getting close, and I realized he was trying to recruit
Speaker 4: me and what his government wanted to know, and what
Speaker 4: he wanted to know is what was the role of
Speaker 4: the Masonic lodges in the United States, because clearly they
Speaker 4: run the US. So, just to kick it off, I'd
Speaker 4: love your thoughts on why people are prone to conspiracy
Speaker 4: theories and why societies are as well.
Speaker 1: It's because the job of the brain is to make
Speaker 1: hypotheses about the world. So your brain is locked in
Speaker 1: silence and darkness inside the skull, and it's trying to
Speaker 1: figure out what the heck is going on out there,
Speaker 1: and so the way it does this is by generating
Speaker 1: ideas and testing those because you know, we're totally limited
Speaker 1: in what we can actually know about the world, not
Speaker 1: only because our reach is very small, but also because
Speaker 1: the world is very complicated. There are billions of people
Speaker 1: in the world, and we're always trying to figure things out. Now. Now,
Speaker 1: brains do this naturally. So if I'm trying to figure
Speaker 1: out where I put my phone down, my first hypothesis is, oh,
Speaker 1: I must have left it where I normally do, and
Speaker 1: then it's not there, so I think, oh, maybe I
Speaker 1: carried it with me over to the bedroom and left
Speaker 1: it there, And then I search that and I find
Speaker 1: that's not true. And then as I continue to not
Speaker 1: find my phone, what the brain naturally does and appropriately
Speaker 1: is it turns up the temperature on these ideas and
Speaker 1: it comes up with whackier and whackier hypothesis. And eventually,
Speaker 1: if you can't find your phone, you might say, well,
Speaker 1: I think the electrician who was here maybe took the phone.
Speaker 1: This is what brains do, and this is a natural
Speaker 1: part of what they're supposed to do. Now, interestingly, this
Speaker 1: is what leads to conspiracy theories, because when we're generating
Speaker 1: a hypothesis about what was it that land in ron aswell,
Speaker 1: or how did JFK actually get killed? Or the nine
Speaker 1: to eleven? How did the towers actually fall? When your
Speaker 1: brain comes up with a really crazy hypothesis, usually you
Speaker 1: dismiss that one in favor of things that are more likely.
Speaker 1: And so my interest has been in why people are
Speaker 1: attracted to certain hypotheses, and I actually think there are
Speaker 1: several reasons here. One of them is that puzzle solving
Speaker 1: is very rewarding to the brain. And of course we're
Speaker 1: trained on this since we're kids. You're in school, you
Speaker 1: have all kinds of flavors of puzzles that you do
Speaker 1: all the time, and this actually activates these reward systems
Speaker 1: when you solve them, and when you generate a good
Speaker 1: theory to explain a mysterious event or just to have
Speaker 1: a complete different explanation of event, there's something really rewarding
Speaker 1: about cracking that puzzle. You are the Sherlock Homes in
Speaker 1: that moment. And I do want to make clear that
Speaker 1: when I often you people say things like conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: are not rational, but in fact they're completely in line
Speaker 1: with what brains do to solve problems. And when someone
Speaker 1: buys into a conspiracy theory, it's not necessarily that they're
Speaker 1: being disingenuous. It's that the world is large and complex,
Speaker 1: and the best any of us are trying to do
Speaker 1: is fit together lego pieces to try to figure out
Speaker 1: what the heck is going on out there. I'll just
Speaker 1: say a couple other things, which is that fascinatingly, there
Speaker 1: are many reasons why brains try to solve puzzles all
Speaker 1: the time. One of them is to reduce cognitive dissonance,
Speaker 1: which is to say, you know, when we're faced with
Speaker 1: facts that don't fit or information that conflicts, which happens
Speaker 1: all the time, that's uncomfortable for us. And so when
Speaker 1: you can come up with a good conspiracy theory that fits,
Speaker 1: it can reduce cognitive load and complexity and dissonance. So
Speaker 1: just a couple other things I think are fascinating here,
Speaker 1: which is we're also all yoked with a confirmation bias,
Speaker 1: which just means that we seek out information and we
Speaker 1: like information that confirms our pre existing beliefs.
Speaker 4: I've got a ten dollar word I want to use,
Speaker 4: so I probably mispronounce it, but peridola, right, paridolia. So
Speaker 4: from an evolutionary point of view, as I understand it,
Speaker 4: we're more likely to survive and breed if we see patterns.
Speaker 4: If there's a rustle in the bushes in a shadow,
Speaker 4: it could be a tiger, right, so you run. You
Speaker 4: don't know if it's a tiger. And of course the
Speaker 4: person who goes over and says I'm going to go
Speaker 4: check this out and determine whether it is or isn't,
Speaker 4: of course they're going to get eaten, right, even if
Speaker 4: it's only one out of one hundred times. So that
Speaker 4: we've evolved this innate capacity to see patterns and to
Speaker 4: even if they're false, evolutionarily speaking, it's still an advantage
Speaker 4: or it has been an advantage to us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So first, let me define the ten dollar word,
Speaker 1: which is paradolia is seeing patterns in random visual patterns.
Speaker 1: Probably the most common example of paradolia is seeing faces.
Speaker 1: You look at the electrical plug on the wall and
Speaker 1: it looks like two eyes and mouth. You go, there's
Speaker 1: a old face there. That's paradolia. And of course we
Speaker 1: see faces and everything, the man on the moon or
Speaker 1: some burn marks on a piece of toast or whatever. Okay,
Speaker 1: but I'm going to introduce another ten dollars word, which
Speaker 1: is apo fenia, which is the more generalized thing. So
Speaker 1: paradolia is about visual patterns, but apoffenia is about just
Speaker 1: as signing meaning to random patterns. And I think that's
Speaker 1: really at the heart of conspiracy theories, is our brain's
Speaker 1: natural inclination to find meaningful connections in random data.
Speaker 2: The thing that I don't get is how when people
Speaker 2: come out the other end and they believe in lizard
Speaker 2: people and QAnon and the politicians drink blood, those things
Speaker 2: aren't sensible answers or sensible patterns of solving any kind
Speaker 2: of puzzle. How does that work? How could someone go
Speaker 2: down a rabbit hole and believe that politicians drink the
Speaker 2: blood of children.
Speaker 1: The thing to appreciate is that it's all on a spectrum, right,
Speaker 1: So you can believe in a whack your and whack
Speaker 1: your hypothesis about something, and eventually you find yourself pretty
Speaker 1: far out on something. But if it confirms the bias
Speaker 1: you have about this politician, and if it seems to
Speaker 1: answer some sort of if it cracks a puzzle for you,
Speaker 1: I don't know what it is. In this case, all
Speaker 1: these children have disappeared and these politicians seem to be
Speaker 1: getting healthier or whatever the thing is, then to your mind,
Speaker 1: that might make sense. But there's actually another thing that
Speaker 1: I think might shed some light here, which is that
Speaker 1: there is a social component to conspiracy theories. And I've
Speaker 1: been very interested in this issue. So actually I would
Speaker 1: say there's two aspects of social components. One is brains
Speaker 1: are very predisposed to have in groups and outgroups. You've
Speaker 1: got the people that you know and like and trust
Speaker 1: presumably the group that you are in, and then there's
Speaker 1: the others who are in that outgroup, and we trust
Speaker 1: them less, we think they're capable of anything any sort
Speaker 1: of moral turpitude, and that allows for whackier and whack
Speaker 1: your hypotheses to be possible. But I think there's even
Speaker 1: a second social component that's even more important, which is
Speaker 1: that if you are the one that comes up with
Speaker 1: a conspiracy theory, you get a lot of attention for that,
Speaker 1: or at least you think you do. You get to say, hey,
Speaker 1: look I've pieced all these things together, and I know
Speaker 1: something that is the first time anyone has ever known
Speaker 1: this in the history of humankind. I mean, look, this
Speaker 1: kind of thing drives science, right if you are Einstein
Speaker 1: and you explain this little loop de loop that the
Speaker 1: planet Mercury does with the special theory of relativity, and
Speaker 1: suddenly like everything is clear, and no one in the
Speaker 1: history of humankind has ever felt this, you know, has
Speaker 1: ever understood this before. What Einstein said is he felt
Speaker 1: like something snapped inside him. I mean, what a feeling,
Speaker 1: what a moment. And by the way, I think this
Speaker 1: social component matters even if you're just the guy repeating
Speaker 1: the story, the one who came up with it, But
Speaker 1: you get something out of telling it. Why, Because conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories are interesting and you get attention at the party
Speaker 1: for saying this or on social media. And the reason
Speaker 1: they are interesting is because they challenge someone else's internal model.
Speaker 1: They think they understood something. Oh, I know how nine
Speaker 1: to eleven happened, or how JFK got shot orund and
Speaker 1: certainly you tell them something and voila, there's a totally
Speaker 1: different framework for explaining the same thing, and that holds
Speaker 1: their attention. And even if you were at the original
Speaker 1: sherlock who came up with a theory, you get to
Speaker 1: glow in the credit of that because you're the ones
Speaker 1: spreading the word and with a good story, it's like
Speaker 1: a gift certificate that doesn't get used up, that gives
Speaker 1: you really great social feedback.
Speaker 4: Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just.
Speaker 5: For a minute or two, and we're back.
Speaker 4: I know somebody who's who lost a relative at Jonestown
Speaker 4: and Jim Jones and the temple famously nine hundred and
Speaker 4: eighteen people. The word is they committed suicide. They literally
Speaker 4: drank the kool aid Arsenick and the grave kool aid.
Speaker 4: But Jim Jones at the end had come up with
Speaker 4: this intricate conspiracy theory about how the US government was
Speaker 4: going to attack them. They were going to be murdered
Speaker 4: and tortured, their children would be taken away, and this
Speaker 4: was the only way out. And in the end, as
Speaker 4: people have studied this more probably only about I'll just
Speaker 4: say half a significant number actually drank the kool aid voluntarily,
Speaker 4: but a lot of them when push came to shove,
Speaker 4: when somebody almost literally put a gun to their head
Speaker 4: and said, do you believe this conspiracy? More than half
Speaker 4: of them are around half didn't you know? They went
Speaker 4: along with it for the social component to be in
Speaker 4: the end group, but when it's like my life's steak, Yeah,
Speaker 4: they knew it wasn't true. Deep in their hearts. They
Speaker 4: knew it wasn't They still drank it because they put
Speaker 4: literally a gun to their head or a crossbow. And
Speaker 4: so these people did kill themselves because they were forced to.
Speaker 4: But it wasn't a mass suicide. It was a lot
Speaker 4: of them. A lot of them did it because they
Speaker 4: bought into it, and a lot of them did it
Speaker 4: they didn't really believe. In the end. It was like
Speaker 4: it was a sham in their inner hearts. They didn't
Speaker 4: believe in the conspiracy.
Speaker 1: I just want to address one point here that I
Speaker 1: think matters, which is that when it comes to our
Speaker 1: believing in something, it's not that there's a true answer,
Speaker 1: as in, oh, I didn't really believe it, or I did.
Speaker 1: You have lots of different networks in your brain all running.
Speaker 1: The way I've described to some of my books is
Speaker 1: that it's a team of rivals under the hood, and
Speaker 1: so you can both believe something and part of you
Speaker 1: doesn't believe it at all, and part of you thinks, hey,
Speaker 1: this may be really true. So all those things can
Speaker 1: be running in your head at once. So it's hard
Speaker 1: to say that they didn't believe it at all and
Speaker 1: they knew it was a sham. It's possible that they
Speaker 1: were questioning back and forth, wow is this true? Is
Speaker 1: it's not true? A good mid level conspiracy theory, ninety
Speaker 1: nine percent of your cognitive mind says, Okay, that is
Speaker 1: definitely not true. But then you think, hey, what if
Speaker 1: what you can partially entertain it.
Speaker 2: You talked about sort of truth and the relativism of truth,
Speaker 2: and that we each have our own sort of worldview
Speaker 2: or in our own heads that maybe there's not really
Speaker 2: unimpeachable truth. There are things that are clearly not true,
Speaker 2: like back to my original question, the view that there
Speaker 2: are lizard people running the world and running our politics.
Speaker 2: No one has ever seen a lizard person, So how
Speaker 2: is it that people can convince themselves of things that
Speaker 2: there's just no evidence for.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, So I think this is a really important
Speaker 1: question because it shows a couple things. One is, first
Speaker 1: of all, this social component. I don't if you hear
Speaker 1: about the lizard people running politics and you go and
Speaker 1: you tell someone else, there is some social component to Hey,
Speaker 1: I get to be the one telling you about this,
Speaker 1: even if this is unlikely to be true, there's still
Speaker 1: some social award to get. But more importantly, our world
Speaker 1: has mental illness. About one percent of the population, for example,
Speaker 1: has schizophrenia, which means that they're divorced from reality and
Speaker 1: they can have a thought like lizard people are running society,
Speaker 1: and to them there's nothing strange about that. They feel like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I know that's true, because I don't know if you
Speaker 1: have ever talked or any of the listeners ever known
Speaker 1: someone or had a loved one or just a friend
Speaker 1: or someone that talked to with schizophrenia. But when somebody
Speaker 1: is delusional, they will believe whatever coinage their brain is
Speaker 1: coughing up. So in the same way that we believe
Speaker 1: our dreams are completely wacky, ridiculous dreams when we're in them,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what it's like for a person with schizophrenia.
Speaker 1: I talked with one gentleman who was telling me that
Speaker 1: he had just had brunch with the president and advised
Speaker 1: him on all these things and so on. He was
Speaker 1: locked in a mental institution, and clearly this was not true,
Speaker 1: but he believed it. I came back and saw him
Speaker 1: about ten days later. He was now not having hallucinations,
Speaker 1: and I asked him about that. I said, Hey, what's
Speaker 1: your view on that now? And he said, oh, I
Speaker 1: guess that wasn't true. Now it feels like a dream
Speaker 1: to me. But when I was there ten days ago,
Speaker 1: I felt like that was true. So there's some interesting
Speaker 1: interaction between the one percent of the population that has
Speaker 1: schizophrenia and then other people who are maybe just adjacent
Speaker 1: to them. And so I have a suspicion this is
Speaker 1: a little bit sometimes how things can spread.
Speaker 4: So if I understand correctly hate speech, of course, dictators
Speaker 4: and hate groups use these dehumanizing metaphors that they switch
Speaker 4: on neural pathways and these neural pathways, they bypass higher
Speaker 4: cognitive reasoning centers, and over time, these mental patterns become
Speaker 4: entrenched and it becomes more and more difficult to get
Speaker 4: out of them. And of course for CIA officers, this
Speaker 4: is something that's very important when we're dealing with people
Speaker 4: or societies that view the world this way. And so
Speaker 4: I know John's a Russia expert, and looking at Russia now,
Speaker 4: I think there's a lot of this neural pathway change
Speaker 4: right now where they simply don't view the world exactly
Speaker 4: in the same way we do. And let me just
Speaker 4: follow it up with one quick sort of personal So
Speaker 4: when I was eighteen, I went to Germany and I
Speaker 4: had a German girlfriend and I met her mother, and
Speaker 4: she was nice, but she was from the Sudate and
Speaker 4: Land and driven out after World War Two as a
Speaker 4: young child. And one night she had a couple of
Speaker 4: drinks too many, and she said to me, look, she said,
Speaker 4: it was wrong what happened to the Jews, but with
Speaker 4: everything they did, they kind of had something coming to them.
Speaker 4: And I thought, she's never going to wash it out
Speaker 4: to her head. She's a well educated sixty year old
Speaker 4: woman and she is never despite all the contradictory evidence
Speaker 4: and everything, and she's very happy living in a democratic
Speaker 4: West Germany. Yet how her views formed in her cognitive years,
Speaker 4: that was depically never going to change. The only way
Speaker 4: it was going to change is like she hasd her
Speaker 4: and her generation had to go.
Speaker 1: Here's what I would say. I've actually studied a lot
Speaker 1: about propaganda and dehumanization, and you're mostly right about what
Speaker 1: happens there, except by the way, it's not pathways switched
Speaker 1: on by propaganda, it's pathways switched off. It turns out
Speaker 1: that you can start by asking the question of what
Speaker 1: is required for pro social behavior, In other words, what
Speaker 1: is required for me to care about you and not
Speaker 1: want to see you get hurt? And what is required
Speaker 1: are very particular networks, mostly in the frontal lobe behind
Speaker 1: your forehead. These are networks that allow me to understand
Speaker 1: you as a fellow human. But it turns out that
Speaker 1: what propaganda does is it suppresses those networks so that
Speaker 1: I come to understand some other group more like an
Speaker 1: object rather than another person. And this is the trick
Speaker 1: that all propaganda across place in time uses. Is you
Speaker 1: dehumanize by comparing them to for example, animals or viruses.
Speaker 1: Because the interesting thing is I've collected up, for example,
Speaker 1: propaganda posters from all over the world. They all do this.
Speaker 1: So I don't know what you were thinking, but whatever
Speaker 1: you were thinking generalizes to everybody. That's the interesting part.
Speaker 1: So look American World War One and World War two
Speaker 1: posters showed the enemy as like a gorilla, or I've
Speaker 1: actually collected quotations from like the Hutu and the Tutsi
Speaker 1: in Rwanda. The Hutu viewed them as rats. That's a
Speaker 1: common one across place in time, viewing them as rats
Speaker 1: or viruses, things like that. Okay, So the point is
Speaker 1: what this does is this turns down these areas, these
Speaker 1: networks in the brain that are required to see another
Speaker 1: person as a person. And so what happened. By the way,
Speaker 1: there are lots of turned this down. Moral pollution is
Speaker 1: one as well, where you associate somebody with something bad
Speaker 1: like pollution or viruses or whatever. There are many ways
Speaker 1: to do this, but the point is you don't see
Speaker 1: them as a human. And that's the power of propaganda
Speaker 1: and dehumanization. And the reason I study this and give
Speaker 1: talks about this is because once you're aware of these tricks.
Speaker 1: Then it's easier to see them, and so the next time, oh,
Speaker 1: this group is like a virus or like rats or whatever,
Speaker 1: you can think, Okay, well I've seen this trick before.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to allow that to happen. So clearly
Speaker 1: the problem is you're pointing out, for example, what this
Speaker 1: German woman is. Once you come to believe this about
Speaker 1: in groups and out groups, it's not so easy to change. Now,
Speaker 1: people do change. There are really interesting examples of a
Speaker 1: guy who was in the KKKA who changed his view,
Speaker 1: Or there's a young woman who was raised in a
Speaker 1: very strict, kind of awful church environment where she was
Speaker 1: taught to hate all kinds of groups of people and
Speaker 1: she's really changed her ways. Yeah, these things do happen,
Speaker 1: But to your point, it's tough. Once you've been taught
Speaker 1: how to categorize the world. Those are not the kind
Speaker 1: of people I hang out with, and they're capable of
Speaker 1: any kind of devious behavior, then that tends to stick.
Speaker 2: Do you think that social media and getting everybody in
Speaker 2: to find these communities of people who believe in these
Speaker 2: things has made this worse for us today or has
Speaker 2: it always been the same.
Speaker 1: I do not think that social media has anything to
Speaker 1: do with this. Actually, for several reasons. One is that
Speaker 1: and you guys must be experts in this part. When
Speaker 1: you look back through history, there is no moment or
Speaker 1: a place where there haven't been conspiracy theories. There was
Speaker 1: a great, big fire that destroyed a lot of Rome
Speaker 1: in sixty four CE, and there are all kinds of
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories about it where people thought, hey, wait, I
Speaker 1: think the Emperor Nero was responsible for the fire because
Speaker 1: he wanted to build this new palace and for that
Speaker 1: clear land, and so consequently all these conspiracy theories blossom.
Speaker 4: Nero blamed the Christians, by the way, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, everyone exactly, and probably it was some random
Speaker 1: spark from whatever, like who knows is ole is cow?
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. And the thing is we'll never know. And
Speaker 1: of course there are no good forensic tools back then.
Speaker 1: Some people then couldn't have known, you know, there were
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories. And by the way, this was the same
Speaker 1: thing behind the assassination of Julius Caesar, the death of
Speaker 1: Alexander the Great, who actually wanted to ensure that Socrates
Speaker 1: was tried and executed. So as far back as we
Speaker 1: have written history. We have conspiracy theories, so first of all,
Speaker 1: it's not a new thing. But more generally, the idea
Speaker 1: that social media reduces our need for proof, I think
Speaker 1: might be a retrospective romanticization to think that we ever
Speaker 1: used to care about proof. For example, we're all old
Speaker 1: enough to remember the pre internet world pretty clearly, and
Speaker 1: you know, one of the things that everybody did at
Speaker 1: the time was mailed pamphlets. You know, you subscribed and
Speaker 1: you got pamphlets to our inbox, but it was your
Speaker 1: physical mail in and they were the craziest, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can get American Nazi Party pamphlets whatever,
Speaker 1: and I've read those, and the idea of proof or
Speaker 1: whatever is the last thing on anybody's mind there. It's
Speaker 1: just the same kind of stuff that you might find now.
Speaker 2: It may make it easier to weaponize for partisan or
Speaker 2: malign purposes. I mean, the fact that the Russians, for example,
Speaker 2: can pump stuff into our system. They did do that
Speaker 2: for decades and decades, the exact same thing.
Speaker 1: It just is.
Speaker 5: Easier to do it.
Speaker 1: That might be right. I do wonder about this though.
Speaker 1: So I was just talking to someone the other day
Speaker 1: who said, who was actually making this argument that the
Speaker 1: Internet is responsible for the proliferation of conspiracy theories because
Speaker 1: it makes it so easy. And I said, okay, look,
Speaker 1: why don't you start a conspiracy theory like that Joe
Speaker 1: Biden actually has an alien baby and posted on your
Speaker 1: Twitter account which has one hundred followers. Do you really
Speaker 1: think this is going to cause the conflagration of a
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 2: But the Russians can do is they used to create
Speaker 2: them and try to push them, and usually they didn't catch.
Speaker 2: Sometimes they would. They made up the AIDS crisis that
Speaker 2: was created by the Pentagon, for example, and that one
Speaker 2: caught and had an effect. Usually they don't. But one
Speaker 2: of the things they can do now is they can
Speaker 2: just monitor bad actors on Twitter and what have you
Speaker 2: on social media and then use bots and things to
Speaker 2: pump that stuff. In other words, it takes this person
Speaker 2: has one hundred followers and pump it fifty million times
Speaker 2: into the system and hope it catches. And they can
Speaker 2: do that over and over and only a few of
Speaker 2: them have to catch to create a problem.
Speaker 5: But you're right, the.
Speaker 2: Fact that our brains take it is the same as
Speaker 2: it's always been.
Speaker 1: So that's really interesting. Glad brought that up because what
Speaker 1: that suggests is for a conspiracy theory to catch fire,
Speaker 1: it has to be a good one in a sense.
Speaker 1: So if you post that Joe Biden has an alien
Speaker 1: baby from an alien distress or something, the Russians could
Speaker 1: pump that all they want on their bot farms and
Speaker 1: it wouldn't catch presumaly.
Speaker 2: But that fits with our old world, right. So one
Speaker 2: of the things that intelligence services do is deception, right.
Speaker 2: So deception is an effort to try to fool people
Speaker 2: to believe something that's not true, and of course that
Speaker 2: works best when you know what the other side wants
Speaker 2: to believe. The better you understand the other side's biases,
Speaker 2: the easier is to fool them by giving them a
Speaker 2: piece of what they want to believe, wrapped in something
Speaker 2: that's not true.
Speaker 1: But even still, you have to make sure that it's
Speaker 1: a good conspiracy that's just on the edge of possibility.
Speaker 2: Let's take a break, we'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 4: I have a question about cognitive dissonance in a ways
Speaker 4: touches on my own family and how we process information.
Speaker 4: So Alex Jones on his show, he goes on and
Speaker 4: he sells things like super male vitality drops and lung
Speaker 4: cleansing plus spray with no FDA approval. Nobody knows what's
Speaker 4: in this, and people buy millions of dollars of this
Speaker 4: stuff the same time, and often these very same people
Speaker 4: are mistrustful of the entire medical community, tens or even
Speaker 4: hundreds of thousands of medical professionals who have dedicating their
Speaker 4: lives to saving people, and who they many of them know,
Speaker 4: like they know their doctor or surgeon and things like that,
Speaker 4: and yet on COVID vaccines they don't buy it. You know,
Speaker 4: It's like, no, the entire medical establishment is unethical. Although
Speaker 4: the super male vitality drops, they're fine, right, I'll put
Speaker 4: those in my body. And yet at the same time,
Speaker 4: their kid gets sick with cancer, and those same doctors
Speaker 4: who they think are unethical and they don't trust, come
Speaker 4: to them and say, I'm going to have to put
Speaker 4: poison in your kid's body chemotherarap just enough poison to
Speaker 4: kill the cancer, but it's going to make your kid
Speaker 4: really sick, but it could save them. And none of
Speaker 4: those people, I'll bet you zero, say WHOA. I want
Speaker 4: to know exactly what's in that stuff, right, they're going
Speaker 4: to say, if you can save them, do it. So
Speaker 4: they're conflicting and completely, I think, irreconcilable. So how does
Speaker 4: the brain work that it functions as a unified hole
Speaker 4: despite this and with real consequences.
Speaker 1: The general story is that the brain is perfectly happy
Speaker 1: to hold contradictions and behavior all the time. I mentioned
Speaker 1: earlier that the brain is made up of a team
Speaker 1: of rivals, by which I mean you've got all these
Speaker 1: different networks that want different things at different times. And
Speaker 1: think of it like a neural parliament. In a parliament
Speaker 1: in a country, You've got all these different political parties
Speaker 1: with different drives. They want different things to happen. They
Speaker 1: all love their country, they just have different opinions on
Speaker 1: what the right moves are. And this is exactly what's
Speaker 1: going on with the brain. So for example, if I
Speaker 1: put some warm chocolate chip cookies in front of you,
Speaker 1: party brain wants to eat that. It's a rich energy source.
Speaker 1: Party of brain says, don't eat it, you'll get fat.
Speaker 1: Party brain says, Okay, I'll eat it, but I'll go
Speaker 1: to the gym tonight. You can argue with yourself, you
Speaker 1: can cuss it yourself, you can cajole who is talking
Speaker 1: to whom? Here? Right? It's all you, but it's different
Speaker 1: parts of you. And that's why we constantly hold contradictory
Speaker 1: information or ways of being in our heads. But it's
Speaker 1: easy to say you don't trust the medical system when
Speaker 1: you've got a cold or something, but when something has
Speaker 1: really gotten serious, then you might change your view on that.
Speaker 4: Is it often a response to anxiety fear. So if
Speaker 4: a society is unsettled, anxious, or made that way, does
Speaker 4: that cause more conspiracy?
Speaker 1: John?
Speaker 4: I mean, you know the Serbs really well. You spend
Speaker 4: a lot of time in Yugoslavia. I think Melosovich created
Speaker 4: anxiety amongst the Serve population that made them more likely
Speaker 4: to believe conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2: And again you can it's very easy to use the other.
Speaker 2: And so the thing in the former Yugoslavia is Serbia
Speaker 2: with they weren't the majority of the ethnic population, but
Speaker 2: they were the largest of the minority. So right, so
Speaker 2: they would say forty percent of former Yugoslavia was serving.
Speaker 2: So the Slovenes and the Croats and the Montenegrins and
Speaker 2: Kosovars and others were smaller groups. And so when the
Speaker 2: biggest group the Serbs claimed that they were the victims
Speaker 2: of those smaller groups coming after them. It scared the
Speaker 2: other groups, right, So the most powerful and biggest group
Speaker 2: was claiming to be the victim and that therefore they
Speaker 2: could act with impunity. So Meloswitch was very good at
Speaker 2: He knew communism was falling apart. He knew that he
Speaker 2: had to grasp onto nationalism, and therefore he used that
Speaker 2: victimhood for him, but probably without realizing that it was
Speaker 2: going to create fear in the other ethnic group and
Speaker 2: created what became a nasty, horrible civil war.
Speaker 4: And so the question is, can you create the preconditions
Speaker 4: for people to believe conspiracy theories by making people afraid
Speaker 4: and making them anxious.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's fascinating that. On the individual level.
Speaker 1: One of the things that brains do all the time
Speaker 1: is threat detection. This is the most important jobs of
Speaker 1: the brain. And when you are sensing that there's trouble
Speaker 1: or something's happening, you've got the sort of special network
Speaker 1: in your brain center at the amygdala, which is an
Speaker 1: emergency control center that says, Okay, look, there's some threat
Speaker 1: going on. I really need to rev everything up and
Speaker 1: operate with heightened suspicion and vigilance. And there's one related thing,
Speaker 1: which is another thing that brains do is agency detection,
Speaker 1: which is, hey, something just happened. Was there somebody behind this?
Speaker 1: Was there some group, some person behind this? Is my
Speaker 1: phone missing because I put it somewhere stupid? Or is
Speaker 1: there somebody behind my phone being missing here? And so
Speaker 1: these are natural things that the brains are always doing.
Speaker 1: And to your point, these things can be cranked up
Speaker 1: if the message from the government is look, there are
Speaker 1: threats all around you. There are people doing shadowy things
Speaker 1: around you. I have a hypothesis that I don't think
Speaker 1: there's any way for me to prove at the moment,
Speaker 1: but I know I noticed, starting in about twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: right after COVID hit, conspiracy theories seemed to become more popular. Now,
Speaker 1: I'd be really curious before I go on, what do
Speaker 1: you guys think? Do you think they actually became slight
Speaker 1: more popular in twenty twenty?
Speaker 2: That's a good question, I think. So was it a
Speaker 2: form of entertainment while we were staying at home? I
Speaker 2: don't know what the answer to that.
Speaker 1: Okay, So I have a hypothesis. What I in my
Speaker 1: lab call an idiothesis, which is an idiotic hypothesis. But
Speaker 1: here's what I think it is. So I mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: that your brain's job is to make an internal model
Speaker 1: of the world, and typically we're pretty good at that.
Speaker 1: We say, look, I know how politics were on, how
Speaker 1: people act, that sort of thing. But what happened in
Speaker 1: March of twenty twenty is that suddenly all bets were off,
Speaker 1: Suddenly the society shut down, and we didn't know what
Speaker 1: was going on. And what appears to me to happen
Speaker 1: is that the brain makes farther and farther reaches for
Speaker 1: explanatory framework. And just as an example, I don't know
Speaker 1: if you can really put yourself back in March or
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, let's say late March or early April, but
Speaker 1: what I noticed is that people would read one article
Speaker 1: that said this is all going to be over within
Speaker 1: a week, and they said, okay, got it, I can
Speaker 1: repeat the arguments. I got this. And then the very
Speaker 1: next article you read says, wow, this is going to
Speaker 1: go on for years and hundreds of thousands or millions
Speaker 1: will die, and you read it and you think, okay,
Speaker 1: that's convincing, and okay, I got it and you can
Speaker 1: repeat that. And so I just noticed that for all
Speaker 1: of us, we were going back and forth on our
Speaker 1: frameworks for everything. And that's my idiothesis on why I
Speaker 1: think conspiracy theory has got more popular when our prediction
Speaker 1: abilities were frayed by the pandemic and we just weren't
Speaker 1: able to make good predictions anymore. Then it certainly seems
Speaker 1: to me that if you are in a country and
Speaker 1: you're trying to make the population more anxious, nervous and
Speaker 1: crank up their threat detection, possibly their agency detection, another
Speaker 1: piece would be just making it so that their brains
Speaker 1: aren't good prediction machines and they feel like, Wow, I
Speaker 1: need a better framework to hang on to, and this
Speaker 1: guy is offering me a framework that gives me a
Speaker 1: really good stable foundation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're describing North Korea.
Speaker 2: Yeah, quick questions. We have talked a lot about how
Speaker 2: the brain and societies get us into thinking about conspiracies.
Speaker 2: How do we get into conspiracies, how do people get
Speaker 2: caught up in them? How do we get out?
Speaker 1: I'll tell you, I think the most important part is
Speaker 1: making just a scientific assessment of the likelihoods of things,
Speaker 1: so all of us might get fooled someday where somebody
Speaker 1: is doing conspiracy theory and we think, oh, we know
Speaker 1: what the right answer is. Maybe there are conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: that happen tame ones, maybe that happen in the world.
Speaker 1: Who knows, but it probably makes sense to always make
Speaker 1: sure that we're asking what are the chances. So I'll
Speaker 1: give an example. Take the moon landing. Apparently there's still
Speaker 1: some people who say it was done in a production
Speaker 1: studio and we didn't actually land on the Moon. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously that's not true, because I actually knew Neil arms Strong,
Speaker 1: and one of the things he had done was put
Speaker 1: a mirror on the Moon so you could bounce the
Speaker 1: laser off its so you could do ranging and find
Speaker 1: the exact distance of the Moon anyway, so you can
Speaker 1: prove to yourself it's not. But anyway, let's imagine that
Speaker 1: you thought, I wonder if the moon landing is a conspiracy.
Speaker 1: The key is how many people would have had to
Speaker 1: be involved, presumably everybody at NASA, the president, the thousands
Speaker 1: of news broadcast whatever like. Lots of people would have
Speaker 1: to be involved in that. And the question is how
Speaker 1: long can a secret be kept? And the fact is
Speaker 1: that if a bunch of people are holding onto a
Speaker 1: secret every day, there's some chance that's going to spill out,
Speaker 1: either because someone gets drunk or they have a religious
Speaker 1: conversion or you know, spasm of guilt or whatever and
Speaker 1: they decide I'm going to do this. But also it
Speaker 1: should be noted from a game theory perspective, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of reward if you're the defector. If you think, okay, look,
Speaker 1: somebody on this team of one hundred people is going
Speaker 1: to defect at some point, and I'm going to end
Speaker 1: up in jail for the rest of my life. But
Speaker 1: if I'm the defector, then I get the New York
Speaker 1: Times bestselling book, and I get to be on CNN
Speaker 1: every day talking about this thing. And so there's all
Speaker 1: kinds of rewards from me and the guy who I was.
Speaker 2: In CIA for thirty years. If I knew that we
Speaker 2: did the JFK assassination, like some people claim, I would
Speaker 2: be out on the rooftop screaming.
Speaker 1: Exactly, you'd write a book, You'd be super famous for it. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Let's imagine you say, okay, well, if these are a
Speaker 1: bunch of really tough people who who aren't going to defect,
Speaker 1: you know, just somebody getting drunk, like the woman from
Speaker 1: Germany or whatever. What are the chances each day? And
Speaker 1: if you multiply that over a year, over twenty years,
Speaker 1: at some point you have to allow that mathematically, this
Speaker 1: isn't really making sense anymore. Also, I think that even
Speaker 1: if you imagine some really tough guys who pulled off
Speaker 1: a moon conspiracy theory, their sun or their gen Z
Speaker 1: grand child is going to say, oh my god, look
Speaker 1: what I found in the attic and some so anyway,
Speaker 1: I think that it's probably useful to just take a
Speaker 1: scientific lens on any conspiracy theory and ask what are
Speaker 1: the chances.
Speaker 2: So it seems you're saying like data and logic can
Speaker 2: help somebody pull out of that, But data and logic
Speaker 2: didn't get them into that viewpoint. I could come to
Speaker 2: them with logic, but I don't know that logic works
Speaker 2: on them unless they all of a sudden now they
Speaker 2: are ready to get out of it. And I don't
Speaker 2: know how people get to that phase.
Speaker 1: So I agree with that. Okay, for all these points
Speaker 1: that we touched on during this episode, I think it's
Speaker 1: unlikely that you'll be able to talk to someone out
Speaker 1: of it. Why, there's the social component, which is they're
Speaker 1: getting something out of it. And if you engage with
Speaker 1: them and say, hey, let's argue this out whatever, it's
Speaker 1: joyful to them. They're having a great time argue with you,
Speaker 1: and they leave feeling smarter and they say, oh, I
Speaker 1: talk to these guys. We got this podcast, and I
Speaker 1: told them, you know, I was able to hold my
Speaker 1: position on this.
Speaker 4: It was really fun talking to you man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, David, thank you so much for spending time as
Speaker 2: it was really enlightening and we can't thank you enough.
Speaker 1: It was blast talking with you guys. Thanks very much.
Speaker 2: We will see you next time on a Mission implausible.
Speaker 6: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Seipher,
Speaker 6: and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Speaker 6: Implausible is a production of honorable Mention and abominable pictures
Speaker 6: for iHeart Podcasts.