Making Better Episode 18
(music) Welcome to the Making Better Podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future. Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.
Chris: Hi, I’m Chris Hofstader
Francis: Hi, I’m Francis DiDonato
Chris: And this is Episode 18 of Making Better Podcast, featuring noted skeptic Brian Dunning!
Francis: Yeah, and I have to admit, I was a little bit skeptical, at first…nyuck nyuck nyuck
Chris: Brian was a fascinating guest, and we talked about all sorts of topics from the world of scientific skepticism and critical thinking. We cover some COVID-19 conspiracies, we even talk about UFOs and Bigfoot. Let’s get on to the interview.
Chris: Brian Dunning, welcome to Making Better!
Brian: Thank you for having me, lot of fun to be here.
Francis: Yes, and from upstate New York, I’d to welcome you as well.
Chris: So you’re host of the Skeptoid podcast, which is one of the most popular in the Skeptics movement, and right now we’re going through a major pandemic and there are a lot of conspiracy theories swirling all over the place about it. Would you like to speak to some of those?
Brian: Oh my gosh. It’s been one of the busiest weeks in my whole history. I’m getting emails and calls all day long from radio stations or video news shows, wanting to talk about the conspiracy theories, so I know a lot of people are having a slow few weeks, not at all for me. I did three of them yesterday, it was just brutal. In fact, because of all of these conspiracy theories popping up, everyone was saying, “hey, you should do a podcast episode about these conspiracy theories.” But with Skeptoid I don’t do current events, and I don’t do new, fringe-y ideas or things that haven’t yet proven to have long legs. One of the charters of Skeptoid is that all the episodes are evergreen—you can pick one up in five years and it’s going to be just as relevant today. So, I’m not really going to do an episode on this week’s COVID-19 conspiracy theory. Of course I can talk about that on the radio shows all they want, because I had to do something talking about it, there was just so much demand. I did an episode talking about the phenomenon of why we are having conspiracy theories and how we always have, every time there’s been a pandemic in the history of mankind. There’s been conspiracy theories and there’s been people using the pandemic as a political weapon, and so comparing and contrasting what’s happening now to a couple of prominent ones in the past. It’s both relevant today, and it’ll still be good in five years from now. Trying to keep up with the conspiracy theories as they’ve been appearing has been nearly impossible.
Chris: I heard yesterday that a bunch of people in Liverpool burned down [a 5G] tower.
Brian: Yeah, I heard they’ve been doing that in the UK and I think I heard they were doing it in Canada, and I also heard that so far there’s been no reports of that in the US. What’s silly is that the term “5G tower” doesn’t really mean anything. Yes, some 5G antennas are going to be mounted on existing towers, but they’re not going to be building any new towers for 5G. The range of a 5G antenna is so much shorter that, really, these are just going to be put on buildings and places like that.
Francis: Do they weigh the 5G technology against a duck before they did that, or…?
Brian: One of the points that I make every time I’m doing one of these is talking about how, if you’re worried that radio signals are going cause diseases or cancer or whatever it is you think, then 5G is the one that you should be least worried about, because as it’s the highest frequency of all the different cell phone technologies, it penetrates the least into tissue or anything else. If you’re worried about penetration into human tissue of these radio signals, 5G is the one that’s by far the safest.
Chris: What are some of the 5G conspiracies you’ve heard—and we know it’s non-ionizing radiation so it’s not going to penetrate the skin, so–I guess if you’re afraid of 5G, you should be wearing sunscreen at night.
Brian: Yeah, that’s a good point. The 5G one is really the newest of them, because first of all, when the coronavirus came out—I always expect people are going to go for billionaires first, and that was exactly what happened. People said, oh, Bill Gates was behind the coronavirus, Bill Gates is one of the illuminati and for some reason they want to commit global genocide and reduce the world’s population. So somebody looked into, you know, the Gates Foundation is one of the biggest donors to medical research in the world, if not the biggest. And someone looked into all of their past grants and they found that one of their grants went to a company—I don’t remember where it was—but this same company, on another grant that had nothing to do with the Gates Foundation, had done some research on developing a vaccine for an avian coronavirus, five, six years ago, something like that. And so based on those two tenuous connections, that this was a disease that had nothing to do with COVID-19 and this was a grant that had nothing to do with Bill Gates, they figured that Bill Gates is funding the COVID-19 pandemic. That was the first one that I saw; I guess the second one that I saw was, which for a long time was the biggest, was that this was a bioweapon that was either deliberately or accidentally released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the province of Wuhan, which was of course where the first cases were reported. So that’s an actual disease research institute, and they’re very similar to the US’s Plum Island Research Institute, which is no longer located on Plum Island—they’re basically just worried about protecting their agriculture, and so they are always doing research to protect against things like mad cow disease, things that can affect their crops. So it’s a very innocent institute, but someone decided, well, just because it exists, therefore if a disease from that same area came out then it’s putting two and two together and therefore, the Wuhan Institute of Virology must have created COVID-19. No evidence or rationale behind it at all, it’s just connecting two things that seemed to be vaguely related. Anytime anyone can find two things that are vaguely connected, even if that connection is not a real one, you know, just two things that happen at the same time, in the same place, in the same genre—well, suddenly there’s a global conspiracy. That’s just one of the failings of the way our brains work; we’re always looking for patterns, we’re always looking for meaning behind meaningless currents of events.
Francis: My PhD is in microbiology, so I get a lot of questions about whether COVID is a disease that is originally sort of a, some biowarfare kind of a thing, and you know, obviously there’s no evidence of that based on anything. If you wanted to weaponize a virus, this is definitely not what you’d come up with.
Brian: You take something like anthrax, that actually has been used as a bioweapon, that’s got a kill ratio of, I think, 60% or better, and COVID-19 is, what, 2%, something like that. It would be the world’s worst bioweapon ever.
Francis: Have you heard any, like, really outlandish COVID conspiracies?
Brian: Well, you can’t really get more outlandish than the 5G. You know, everything is so goofy and incredibly scientifically illiterate about every part of that. We know what causes COVID-19, it’s a virus. We have genome of that virus. We have its descent from other coronaviruses that it evolved from–there’s so much that we know about COVID-19, and 5G cell phones don’t play any role in that, not even remotely! And we also know everything about 5G and about radio and how it can’t possibly have any remote connection to any kind of a disease or harm to living tissue. So why and how people put these things together? I mean, really the only thing you can look at is, well, they both kind of happen generally around the same year or so, so therefore one caused the other…I mean, I can think of a lot of things that happened in the same year that don’t have anything to do with each other. You can’t get much closer to that than this.
Chris: Why is it that you think people subscribe to conspiracy theories? More so now than 20 years ago?
Brian: Well, first of all I believe the data does not support that people believe them now more than they did either 20 years ago or at any time in the past. I think if you look at the survey data of conspiracy ideation over all the time that it’s been researched, one thing we find that it does not have any preferences for any particular demographics—we don’t even find a correlation between education and conspiracy ideation. It really is truly something that affects all people equally, or at least all demographics equally, and everyone is somewhere along that spectrum. I think they always have been, I think they always will be. Certainly some particular conspiracy theories appeal to some demographics more than others, but there’s no demographic that’s immune from them. And over time, we’re to see different conspiracy theories come and go from popularity. Flat Earth—nobody had thought of that more than five years ago. But why people believe, why they always have, why they always will—there’s a number of different reasons for this that are the most often cited. One of them is just they’re attractive because they are really oversimplified and easy to grasp explanation for a complicated issue. People don’t understand geopolitics, but it’s easy to understand, oh, there’s a global new world order cabal that controls everything. Boom, got it, understand everything now. Makes it easy to wrap your arms around a complicated question, so it’s attractive from that perspective. Of course I’m sure you guys have talked in the past about how it’s, one of the leading theories is that it’s an evolved defense mechanism. Having a certain amount of native paranoia is a protective measure, especially, you go back to the days when proto-humans were—classic example is you hear a rustle in the grass, the guys who are a little bit more paranoid and suspect there might be some malignant agent in the grass, like a saber-tooth cat, he runs and jumps up in a tree, and he doesn’t get eaten. The other guys who are less paranoid, they say oh, I’m not going to worry about that too much, and occasionally one of them gets eaten. So over time it’s the people who are a little bit more paranoid are the ones who survive better in the gene pool. That may not be the case today, where we don’t necessarily need those skills to survive in the same literal sense, but that’s really a leading theory of why it’s baked into our brains at such a basic level.
Chris: Other than doing things like Skeptoid, how can we educate the populace to be better critical thinkers?
Brian: One of the most common questions I get is, people say oh my mom, my friend, my co-worker, whatever, is a 9-11 conspiracy theorist, or they have whatever strange belief it is that they have. They’ll ask me, do you have an episode that I can play for that person that will cure them of that? And I always say, well, yeah I do, but don’t play them that episode. Play them a different episode, something that you’re both already in agreement on, something that your friend is going to appreciate, not something that he’s going to see as an attack and shut you down and not listen to anything else you have to say. You never want to open by directly challenging someone’s sacred cow. You don’t want to go after their most cherished beliefs, that’s a bad way to open any conversation. But finding common ground is always a great way to open any conversation. I can suggest a hundred Skeptoid episodes that you and your friend are both going to enjoy listening to, and your friend is going to go, ha, that was really cool, I want to learn more. Do you have any other episodes like that? And when you can get people to appreciate the value of skeptical analysis and critical thinking, and get them to really begin to realize the benefits of it in their daily life, i.e. ability to make better decisions, not getting sucked into multi-level marketing schemes, etc. etc., you’ll find that those people will eventually want more and they’ll come around on their own to questioning this strange belief that you originally opened the conversation with. So, find common ground and don’t go for the jugular right off, that’s my summary.
Chris: We’ve had Michael Marshall on the show, and he does the podcast “Be Reasonable,” where he goes out of his way to interview people with really bizarre beliefs. He does it in such a gentle way that you can actually get a feeling for understanding what the people have to way.
Brian: Yeah, I love Marsh. He’s a great guy.
Francis: I have a couple classic conspiracy theories I’d like to throw at you—for example, the Rothschilds family. Did you research that whole thing and come up with your own analysis of it, or was it one of those things where you didn’t even feel like you really needed to..?
Brian: Yeah, I did an episode on the Rothschilds conspiracy theories obviously. There has never been an episode where I don’t feel I need to do any research. You know, it’s a weekly show, and it’s only about a twelve, thirteen minute show, and that twelve/thirteen minutes takes me legitimately the entire week to research. Skeptoid is exhaustively researched, and you’ll find complete references and bibliographic references and further reading suggestions at the bottom of every page on the website. So I never just talk about an episode just with my personal thoughts or off the cuff or anything like that. There was a lot to unpack when it’s something like the Rothschilds. Well, first of all, what is the specific claim? It’s difficult, in that case, because there are so many. The Rothschilds are one of those people—it’s like the Koch Brothers or Rupert Murdoch—conspiracy theorists are simply going to throw that name out there and connect it to anything and everything. Oh, something evil happened in the world that I don’t like? Therefore, George Soros was behind it, or the Rothschilds were behind it, or the Koch Brothers, whatever it is. So it was difficult to find specific claims that you could address in that. I just kind of had to take them all on board and say, OK, basically this is a wealthy Jewish family that was involved in a lot of major world events over this period of about a hundred years or so. And even though they no longer exist in any meaningful way as an entity, people still believe that they are controlling world events. You know, the Rothschilds family is so diluted now and their assets are so diluted, any one who owns a bank account, you or I, we own about as much Rothschild entity as anyone in the Rothschilds family does. Anyone who has an interest-bearing checking account has shares, and those banks have shares in companies, everything is just sort of owned communally now. You can no longer say that any one entity controls anything. If you do say that, then you really need to go back to school at a 101 level and learn something about world economies. That was really kind of the thrust of the Rothschilds episode, is just kind of making those points rather than trying to pick and choose particular claims against them—there’s just too many.
Chris: How much do you think that anti-semitism contributes to conspiracy theories today?
Brian: Anti-Semitism is probably the ugliest part of my job, ‘cause it comes up every frickin’ day. Every frickin’ day I come into something that’s motivated by really ugly anti-semitism. I wouldn’t say that it causes conspiracy theories, it’s just that Jews tend to be the targets of so many, because they’re easy. In fact, the episode that I mentioned that came out this week on pandemics, one of the pandemics that I looked at was the Black Death in the 1300s. Well, who was the conspiracy theory about that? Who was causing the Black Death?—it was Jews, Jews are always the easiest target, they always have been. They’re a marginalized community, they have not had their own country throughout most of recorded history, they’re just kind of the ultimate outcast class. And so, they’re an easy place for people to point blame. In the case of the Black Death, it was claimed that Jews were seen poisoning the wells, therefore the Black plague is caused by whatever the Jews were poisoning the wells with. Now the interesting thing about that is, when you look at this and you try and analyze it from the perspective of, ok, why did people come to that conclusion, you learn some interesting stuff. And in that case—and I had never heard this before, so this was fascinating for me to learn—because of centuries of anti-Semitism and because the Jews did not have their own state, they lived in isolated communities. They were often, especially following the Crusades, a lot of them had been driven out of Europe, so the ones that remained in Europe lived in these isolated communities, often physically a little bit separate from the main cities. Sometimes they were even literally walled. And because of Jewish cultural practices, they tended to wash their hands and wash their bodies more often than other people. And because of this, to some degree, there was probably better sanitation inside many of these Jewish communities than there was outside of them, and so Jewish people tended to not get the plague as soon as other people did—and again, this is a generalization, but it would be likely to have happened enough times that people finally came to the conclusion, oh look, the Jews are immune from this! And here’s a story of someone who says he saw a Jew throwing something into a well, therefore, there’s your conspiracy theory right there. So that whole aspect of the culture happening to equal better sanitation and happening to confer some protection against the plague was a fascinating aspect of the story.
Francis: You think though that the Bible stories kind of contribute to it a little?
Brian: This is my person interpretation on that, and I know some of my colleagues don’t agree with me, and others do: I think all of anti-Semitism ultimately comes down to the Bible story, where Jews betrayed Jesus to the Romans. And I think that’s kind of the ultimate root, if you have to pick one ultimate root of anti-Semitism, I’d say that’s it.
Francis: Is there any time that you’ve come across these things and—were convinced that actually there must be something going on here, in terms of some sort of like, covert power grab or some sort of covert attempt to maintain control over a society or an industry or something.
Brian: That’s the basic idea behind the “illuminati” or whatever you want to call it, that there’s a secret cabal operating behind the scenes to whom all the world’s nations have voluntarily turned over their sovereignty. Why would anyone do that? If you’re Vladimir Putin and you’re sitting on top of the world owning Russia, and some guy comes in and says, “hi, I’m from the local freemason chapter, I’m going to hand you your orders for everything that you’re going to do this year,” why would you do any of that? It just simply doesn’t make any sense, that any entity would want to hand over its sovereignty to some shadow cabal. Nobody knows who these people are, not even the people who they’re directly manipulating, what is the evidence of their existence.
Chris: Why don’t we do a lightning round—I’ll just toss out a topic, and you can talk for a couple of minutes on it. Why don’t we start with Homeopathy?
Brian: Alright! Homeopathy, yeah, probably one of the least plausible of all alternative medical modalities. You know, so many people, if you asked them “what is homeopathy”—I was on a backpacking trip with some friends a few years ago, for example, and they start handing out homeopathy pills. “Here, you need this, this will help you with your altitude sickness, this will help you with your headache,” whatever it is. And I asked them, so what are they? “Oh, it’s just an herbal supplement, no side effects, it’s just a very mild herbal dose”—and of course it’s not. People simply don’t understand, the number of people who know what it actually is a very small part of the market of people who actually buy into it. Because when you look at the box, it’s going to say “extract of milkweed” or whatever it’s supposed to be a homeopathic dilution of, and of course it’s not. If it’s homeopathic milkweed, that means by definition there is no milkweed molecules in there at all—that’s the big disconnect. My favorite way to illustrate that is that if you take a single atom or a single molecule of milkweed and dilute it in a swimming pool that is the size of a sphere the size of the earth’s orbit, that is a typical homeopathic dilution. It’s not a molecule in a swimming pool or in the ocean, it’s in a sphere of water the size of the earth’s orbit. That’s a staggering, staggering number that is mathematically accurate and I think begins to bring it into perspective for some people.
Chris: What about some of the other skeptical topics that may not be alt-med, like Bigfoot or borthman?
Brian: There really is no skeptical topic that should be too silly to talk about, and Bigfoot, of course, is the classic example. I mean, there are people who derisively refer to some subset of skeptics as “Bigfoot skeptics,” because you’re talking about things that are silly, that are not relevant, that don’t have any place in the life of intelligent adults—and yes, that’s true. However, they are absolutely relevant, because it’s the exact same thought processes that lead someone to believe in Bigfoot that leads someone to believe in the flat earth, or in a multi-level marketing scheme, or whatever it is that actually does affect our lives. And when you say that it’s a terrible, terrible thing that Dr. Oz is selling these worthless supplements, but it’s a harmless thing that grandma thinks her dog is psychic, it’s actually the exact same broken thought processes that lead someone to believe in both of those two things. So it is very useful to talk about the silly subjects like Bigfoot, because 1) they’re fun, 2) it’s the same subject, it’s gonna help you correct your thinking, and it’s a fun way to do it. I really love the silly subjects like, any cryptozoology, any famous ghost stories, any famous UFO stories. And there are so many, and the concepts that come up in all of these episodes are the same ones. You really can’t hammer them home enough times and as far to really begin to appreciate the value of skeptical criticism.
Chris: Often my favorite Skeptoid episodes are those that cover topics I’ve never heard of, like some ghost story from someplace or something like that. Which are your favorites of those?
Brian: I tend to have the most fun researching the historical mysteries. The episode that comes out next week is on the holy grail, and again, 700 episodes and it finally takes me this long to get around to the holy grail, which you’d think would be one of the basics. I still haven’t done the, what’s it called, the cloth that covered Jesus’ face?
Chris: The Shroud of Turin.
Brian: The Shroud of Turin! Thank you. I still haven’t done an episode on that. But I really enjoy the historical research. I buy a ton of books, I buy books almost every week or I check them out of libraries, and I just get on my knees and thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for openlibrary.org that lets me check out books online that I wouldn’t be able to drive three hours to a library to get in time. I thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly enjoy learning so much about these odd little corners of history. If I can indulge with my favorite, absolute favorite example of this, was one of my early episodes on Borley Rectory. It’s one of these many houses, claims to be the most haunted house in the world, and as is the case with most of these houses claiming that title, it was conferred upon them by someone who was hoping to make money off of it. And in this case, Borley Rectory was sort of the brainchild of this Barnum & Bailey type character named Harry Price, who went and he lived with the people who lived in the house with the family for a period of time. He hired psychics to come in and do investigations that he could then write chapters about. The whole thing was planning to write this book, from the beginning. The one story that I had read about from Borley Rectory as a child, and that always fascinated me my whole life, was the idea of automatic writing, which was described as writing that appeared on the walls while people were watching. And there are even photographs of this writing, it was kind of this spidery handwriting that said “Maryanne get help,” and Maryanne was the name of one of the daughters in the house. The fact that all accounts said that this writing appeared on the walls while people were watching, that freaked me out. I’m going, well, there’s no explanation for that. I mean, there’s got to be one, but it’s got to be a ghost or something weird happening there. And it wasn’t until I finally did the Skeptoid episode on it, 45, however many years later, that I learned what happened. And it was a couple of people who do seances, who Harry Price hired to come to the house, sit down, and do a seance and to do their seance they used a, basically a Ouiji Board, it’s the thing you put your hands on called a planchette, and it would just move around; but instead of having a board with letters on it, they had a pencil that stuck through the middle of the planchette and would write on paper as it’s moving around on the table top. So to do this, they needed a big roll of paper that they could unroll on the tabletop, and what roll of paper was handy but wallpaper—these big rolls of wallpaper. They turned them upside down so that the blank side was facing up, and they put the planchette on and the seance people did their thing, moving the planchette around with their hands, and guess what, it happened to write out the words “Maryanne, get help” and there were plenty of people in the room watching. Now, when you hear it told like that, it doesn’t sound very mysterious at all; you know, it’s well-established that people can easily move those around deliberately, or they happen automatically with the ideomotor effect—in this case I’m sure it was done deliberately because these people were writing out some handwriting—and over the course of Harry Price writing about this and it appearing in a newspaper article and then later appearing in these books, at some point somebody heard that it was being written on the wallpaper, and they assumed that that meant wallpaper that was on the wall. It’s an assumption that we’d all make if you hear “writing appeared on the wallpaper.” So it goes from this very easily explainable case of the seance people simply writing it out with their hands to “automatic writing” appearing on the wall while people were watching, and it’s just simply a loss of translation in the telling and re-tellings of this. And as far as I was able to determine—I was the first person to kind of make that connection, and explain the automatic writing, which was a very exciting moment in the early days of Skeptoid—I think that best exemplifies why I so much enjoy doing these historical mysteries. It’s ‘cause occasionally you do find these wonderful little tidbits like that.
Chris: Why don’t we move on to UFO’s?
Brian: Alright. So, another question I get all the time, and this is a question that people usually ask early, derisively or aggressively, OK Mr. Skeptic, that kind of a thing; “do you believe in aliens?” And I said, yeah, in fact I side with almost all astronomers and exobiologists and cosmologists, almost all of us are in universal agreement that it’s an absolute certainty that somewhere out there is life, and probably a huge amount of life, throughout the universe. I think most people think of that. However, that is a very, very, very different question than “are flying saucers visiting the earth.” Because one is an absolute certainty, and the other one, as far as we understand physics, a virtual impossibility. The distances involved are simply not possible, and the energy levels required to go back and forth to transport people back and forth in some sort of a spaceship—especially when you consider the time element. I like to think of a Christmas tree, and if you imagine a Christmas tree with all of its little lights turning on, the blinking lights, and a light blinks on here, and it blinks on here, and it blinks on there—very, very rarely do you have two lights impossibly close to each other that blink on at exactly the same time. That’s a good analogy for two civilizations happening to exist at the same time so close together that it might conceivably be possible for one to travel to the other. Interstellar travel happening at exactly the same moment on a universal timescale would be incredibly rare. And we know just from our own observations that we probably don’t have any civilizations close enough to us that we would be able to travel there and back within any reasonable timeframe of how long we expect human civilization might last, whether that’s ten thousand years, a hundred thousand years, a million years, you simply wouldn’t be able to do it. So that’s the basic answer to the question of why earth does not appear to have been visited by any aliens, because there is no evidence that we have, not even any slightly compelling evidence that we have, and I think that’s the reason. So it is possible to both believe in aliens and to dismiss the idea of alien flying saucers visiting the earth.
Chris: Aside from the fact that i believe that everything that Terry Pratchett wrote is true, I don’t actually believe in a flat earth. The flat earth story seemed to have just popped up out of nowhere, and became real popular really fast. I actually know a friend whose brother is a flat earther. Can you speak of the flat earth stories and where you think they came from?
Brian: Yeah. So that’s a really, really, really fascinating story, a lot more interesting than people realize, because flat earth has had two completely different iterations. The original Flat Earth Society that, you know, we all heard about when we were kids—hey, there’s people who actually think there’s a flat earth, and we laughed about it, and they had like a newsletter or something—so that was a real thing, and that happened in the, I believe in the late 1800s, is the first time anywhere in the history of earth, so far as we know, that some group of people believed the earth was flat. There’s no instances in ancient civilizations where there’s any evidence that people thought the earth was flat, at least educated people. And it arose from the culture of Biblical literalists, people who interpreted certain Bible passages as meaning the earth was flat, therefore the earth was flat, therefore it was up to them to prove that the earth was flat in order to prove the literal truth of the Bible. And so that’s where the original Flat Earth Society came from, and by the 1970s, this was down to really just two people, an elderly couple living in a trailer out in the California desert, sending out this mimeographed newsletter—I think it was down to 20 or 30 subscribers at its low point, and literally their house burned down and they both died soon thereafter, and that was the end of it. That closed the chapter of the original Flat Earth Society. And then in 2015—that really, really recently—is when, we can track this down to case zero, is when some guy wrote a self-published book on lulu.com entitled The Flat Earth Conspiracy, and at the same time he made a Youtube video called “The Flat Earth Conspiracy.” This was actually in November 2014, is when this was, and based on that alone, all of the other Youtube videos promoting a flat earth cited him as the original work, he was actually case zero, the germination of modern flat earth belief. And unlike the old flat earthers, this had nothing to do with the Bible or Christianity or anything like that, it was all about conspiracy mongering and alternative science, very much in line with other conspiracy theories today. It’s those ivory-tower elite scientists are corrupt, therefore they’re lying, therefore anything you heard in your science class is wrong, therefore any alternative theory is right, therefore the earth is flat. I mean, that’s literally the logic behind it. So we’ve got these two totally different cultures of flat earth belief, and I think it’s just a wonderful story of how different they are, and how they both have totally unrelated stories.
Francis: I don’t understand anti-science bias. I could easily understand bad science bias, like if you think that there’s something about a scientist who’s just not being rigorous enough or something, but how could people have a problem with science? You know, this is like a really, really big deal right now, because when you think about global warming, when you think about a President who is out there talking about hydroxychloraquine being a drug to cure COVID, it’s just almost like there’s this chaos right now, where there’s no authority that says this is the fact, and this is not a fact, and this is scientifically proven and this is a conspiracy or, you know what I mean?
Brian: Yeah.
Francis: I just don’t know how we got to this place.
Brian: Again, I don’t think this is something that’s new. I mean, science literacy is not something that most people are interested in. I mean if you stop the average person on the street and ask them any kind of a basic science question, it’s not that they don’t know—they probably heard it in school—but they simply don’t care. It’s not of interest to them, it’s not part of their daily life. So science literacy is not something that a lot of people are big on, it’s not one of their interests. And nevertheless, so many people, all of us to some degree, we’ve got this baked-in conspiracy ideation, our tendency to embrace conspiracy theories, to embrace oversimplified explanations for complicated subjects. So when you roll those two things together, you can see that coming up with an alternate science, accepting some alternate explanation for things—it’s not so much that you don’t understand the science, because you don’t care about the science. The reason you embrace it is because it sort of strokes your ideological desire to have a superior insight, to know more than the other people, to know more than those elite, ivory-tower scientists. This is basically what characterizes []. When you hear them talk about it, you’re not going to hear them use science terminology, you’re going to hear them use terminology that criticizes the status quo. They’re gonna talk about oh, the science cabal, and they talk about science as a religion and only they are brave enough to reject the “dogma” that scientists embrace. They talk about it in these terms, they don’t talk about it in science terms. So, that characterizes Flat Earth, it characterizes alternative medicine, it characterizes Nicola Tesla—everyone, so many people on Youtube idolize Nicola Tesla, they say, oh, he invented free energy! You could do anything, he had magic Jesus powers, Tesla could do everything and anything and everything and he’s been suppressed by the government; that’s an easy explanation to understand for why we don’t have free energy, why these problems are actually difficult. It’s so much easier to embrace a conspiracy theory that says the evil government suppresses it, and yes it is as easy as you think it should be. It’s just our tendency toward conspiratorial thinking and anecdotal thinking. It’s an easy way to check all of those boxes.
Francis: Sometimes I wonder how much religion has to do with it, too, because you know when you have so much credibility given to religions, people who interpret religion as fact, as opposed to maybe like a really awesome spiritual metaphor or something that can guide people in their lives; that automatically creates such a anti-science foundation to the way we think.
Brian: It’s another iteration of that some idea. It’s a very simple explanation that explains all of these complicated things, and it’s something that so many people have been raised to believe. It’s the culture and the society of what they’ve been immersed in since they were born, it’s really hard to question those things. You know, that’s something that characterizes all of us. The greater predictor of whether you’re a liberal or a conservative is what were your parents, and where did you grow up? It’s not like you came to these conclusions yourself based on rational analysis of things, it’s simply that’s what was drilled into you.
Chris: We’re running up against our time limit, so Brian, is there anything you would like to promote or plug or pimp or…other than Skeptoid itself?
Brian: Yeah, I mean, obviously Skeptoid. Come to Skeptoid.com or find Skeptoid wherever you listen to your podcasts, and check out my latest book, Conspiracies Declassified. It’s available on Amazon or any bookstore, wherever you get your books. Conspiracies Declassified, it’s fifty of our greatest conspiracy theories, deconstructed and explained, check it out.
Chris: Well thanks so much for coming on Making Better.
Brian: Thank you, we had a lot of fun!
Francis: And I think it’s kind of refreshing we didn’t touch on 9-11. [laughter]. Thank you very much.
Brian: OK gents, thank you!
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