[000:00:00;00] ah ah well we're going to so he called visionary me sophie schubert. not that what uncertainty becomes our daily routine when there are no answers to mounting questions which tend to search in the most unusual places. why do people believe in conspiracy theories? well, i asked dr. michael shermer, psychologist, historian of science and founding publisher of skeptic magazine. doctor micro shermer psychologist, historian of science and founding publisher of skeptic magazine. great. have you

with us, michael? high to see you. alright, so conspiracy theories, they've always been there, but the last half a year, i mean the really started to multiply numbers. first we have, they call it, which is a scam aim to impose more states raylon's though we have the g 5 towers. they are causing the virus, then we have the vaccines that contain satan's microchip. when, when you name it, is how do you explain this trend? like the latest trend in general, people out of power tend to say that people in power have more power than they actually have. and that gives rise to kind of fuels these conspiracy theories that anybody can concoct. and what, let's the construct caseras' series. what is the believe in conspiracy here is like it is some kind of mental virus that targets are rain. is it just in modern form or superstition? i mean from mentally the same as some kind of medieval believe and it will spirits, what is it exactly? yeah,

there are several factors going on versus an explanation for causality. that is why do things happen? so you mentioned the middle ages, you know, so a, which was a theory of causality. why do storms and disasters, and plagues and, and so forth happen. and it's because wishes were cavorting with demons in the middle of the night. so you torched these women as demonic forces. well, that went away once we had a scientific explanation for things like the weather and plagues and diseases and so forth. modern conspiracy theories, again, are more related to like political and economic power differentials. so, and the fact is a conspiracy theory, i mean, some conspiracy theories are real, you know, a watergate in the united states. that was a conspiracy theory that turned out to be real. you know, president lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy. the assassination of france ferdinand in san diego in 914 that

launched the 1st world war. that was a true conspiracy. they were conspiring to these serbian nationalists were conspiring to assassinate a foreign leader. so there's enough of these things that happen in the real world. wall street traders that cheat the system and in your country, you know, oligarchs that, you know, hacked the heck the economic system after the fall of the soviet union. these are real. so people can see that some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. so what's to say that they are all are true and therefore we need some kind of conspiracy theory detection device which i've, i've outlined, but also is it, could it be lack of agency that drives people into believing where things, you know, if an average person has no power control over the virus vaccination, pensions. no power to influence government decisions. is this feeling of being powerless? a factor in developing a set of conspiracy believes?

yes. so uncertainty fuels. conspiracy, conspiracy ism so case in a virus. and she mentioned that, yes, i mean, we didn't really understand it for many months, its origin and, and it spread and deadly was going to be so naturally that you'll be idea that, well, maybe it's, you know concocted by someone like bill gates or the chinese or the russians or, you know, and again, the fact is, the chinese, the russians, and the americans all have bio weapon, laboratories, in which they cough, biological weapons, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, we know this happened, this exists and there happened accidents where viruses have escaped by a lab so again, it's not impossible. so you know, these, these conspiracy theories are usually have some little grain of truth in them that it could be true. and then from there, you fuel like, well, maybe it's 5 g because here again, the uncertainty, you know, a new form. busy of internet technology,

this far vastly powerful than for g and so on. maybe that's helping to fuel or just anything that's kind of on the, in the information eco landscape that can fuel it will, will be gone down to by conspiracy. but i mean, in this age of scientific success, right? with eradicating polio on smallpox and building adamic energy stations, find you to space forgotten, say people where it seemed more likely to believe in science per facts. like you said, you know, once you know that, that, that there are mystified by witches and conspiracy theories and then you had science that explained things to us. what is it about modern times that is undermining this belief? yes, we do live in an age of science, and most people embrace most of science, the outside, so called science deniers. people who deny scientific facts are usually denying them in a specific domain. so for example, conservatives are, are in the united states or are leery of climate science because they feel it

challenges their belief in free markets and free enterprise and capitalism and so on. or they deny the theory of evolution if they're religious. they feel that that the theory of evolution challenges their religious beliefs. but otherwise they accept all the other forms of science. on the left, you know, the most genetically modified organisms are a big fear. even though there's no evidence, because harm nuclear power is considered a big threat, there's a lot of science denial on the left as well. but again, most liberals except most of science. so it's targeted skepticism about science, where there's a perceived threat to your particular worldview, that you feel, you know, define who you are and you don't want to give that up. is it fair to also put some of the blame for the lack of public trust like on scientists and journalists who perhaps don't communicate effectively these days? maybe even politicians. yeah,

for sure shit of scientists are not trained in communicating clearly the results of the research. that's a problem. science journalists tend to guam on to press release like statements about findings and, you know, they have limited space and newspapers, magazines, so it's hard to be subtle. and everybody's looking for, you know, a simple causal connection. a causes b back teens cause autism or, you know, whatever, something simple like that. and in the fact is most research is pretty complicated . so we have something called the replication crisis in science we've been going through for about the last decade. that is probably a half of all published research and peer review journals can't be replicated. so it was probably never should have been published in the 1st place. and so that, that causes the public to be distrustful, will have half of the studies that i read about are not to be trusted. and why should i trust the other half, you know, copy as bad, no copies. good,

no coffee is best. eggs are good or a bad and a good again. alright, you guys can't make up your mind. so why should i believe you about that seeds or climate change? that's why scientists have to be forthright and honest about their research and say where, where they really don't know, which is, you know, a lot of the time, you know, the old saying, those simplicity is genius and ockham's. razor principles as the simplest explanation to things is usually the right one. and i'm a strong believer in that actually. i mean, i come from a family of politicians and you know, we've been surrounded with theories of conspiracy all my life. but the truth is things just happen, you know, and then it sort of out why that instead of like simplifying things, we tend to complex supply them with elaborate transfer. it is why would you say it's part of human nature? maybe? oh, for sure. yes, i mean, you've captured it there and your phrase, things just happen. you know,

a lot of randomness explains what happens in the world. there's nobody pulling the strings, there's nobody in control. maybe just take something like economics. you know, it's a complex adaptive system that just kind of moves along at its own accord with, you know, billions of people just trading and, and shopping and just taking care of their lives. and it's hard to grab onto that kind of chaos, some sort of theoretical model that simplifies at all. most economic models are not simple, they're complex. and. and so, but people want to know, well, you know, so, so something like, conspiracy theory about the illuminati, there's the swell guys living in europe somewhere that run the world's economies and wars, things like that. that's in a way more comforting to think, well, i can understand that. what i can understand is you open a economics textbook and you know, no one can understand why the price of gasoline is what it is or the, the price of a barrel of oil. you know, it's just,

it's almost impossible to predict. how can that be? you know, it's much easier to think somebody's behind the curtain pulling the string. you know, i also noticed that one, someone starts believing in one conspiracy theory, for instance, to hear about the harm look seen. let's say, because that's like a huge one right now. it's likely that they will end up believing in other and then another. and then like, i don't know, a flat earth or something like that. why does it happen? there's some like chain reactions, bird in the bree. well, so you're right. research shows that people that take the box for one conspiracy theory are more likely to take the box for other conspiracy theories. and once you go down that rabbit hole. busy they're also more likely to believe in astrology and psychics and big foot in you know, you oppose an alien figure or the whole package. so it appears to be some people are, are more gullible, say to fringe ideas more open. let's just say open minded to french ideas. it's good to be open minded because

a lot of times we're wrong and maybe they'll be some new idea that we should accept as true. the problem is you don't want to be so open minded the, your brains fall out, you believe every crazy thing that comes along. so in science studies is called the demarcation problem. how do you demarcate between science and suicide? where do you draw the line? how do you know which claim is real and which is not when should i be skeptical? when should i be open minded? and that's hard to say. you know, it really depends on the particular claim. but in general, you know, a scientist reach a consensus about what's likely to be true through years and years of debate and disputation and research and arguing over what data sets mean and so on. and there emerges something like a consensus, like in climate science, there's a consensus that c o 2 gases and greenhouse gases caused global warming. but that was hard. 5, i think like 25 years of research to get to that consensus. but the public sees is,

this is this sort of authoritarian group of experts telling us what's true, but that's not how it really works. my whole without taking sure break right now when we're back we'll continue talking to dr. michael shermer, a psychologist, historian of science, founding publisher of skeptic magazine, talking about why do people believe in conspiracy theories, especially lately? stay with us the

ah, we're here in a st. petersburg at the international economic form. and the topic of our program is the global economy. how is it changed since coven, for the winter, for the loses? what are the challenges and what are the opportunities? as a korea professional sport is much tougher on some than others. she was a year old. she, mired by everybody. so why would somebody believe me, i was just a little girl. the price paid to, to, to achieve really was, was how to read in the paper this morning. usa swimming coach, arrested, allegedly had sex with a 12 year old girl. this happens almost every week. we get calls of the office. i get informed about. one of my greatest fears is someone is going to start linking

all this together. there's going to be a 60 minute documentary about youth coaches in sports like gymnastics swimming. is that documentary? see it on our team. and we're back with dr. michael shermer, psychologist, historian of science and founding publisher of skeptic magazine. talking about conspiracy theories. michael, for someone like you who's studying this and who, you know, who made a science out of it. do you have maybe like, i don't know like a simple 3 step or a 5 step role that would apply to any theory to crack it down and say this is a real one and this is not. are this some curious why to any?

yes. yeah. so several things. it is a claim, been tested by somebody who is the person making the claim. did they have some credibility to them or are they just some nobody is not that outsiders and nobody's can't make contributions to science, they can and have, but it's just very unlikely. there's a community of scientists, experts in a particular field that argue amongst themselves. and that the, the reason that's important is because most of us get it wrong. most of the time that is we have cognitive biases, confirmation bias, and the hindsight bias in my side bias and all these things that distort how we see the world. but if i have somebody else that i can talk to, or a community of people that are interested in what i'm interested in, experts in this particular area, and i can bounce ideas off them and they can say shermer, you've gone off the rails. that's a crazy idea. and then before i publish, you know, i have a sounding board there, people that work in isolation, you know,

are less likely to get approved and, and then, you know, use it in a peer review journal or is it in some non peer review journal or just a magazine or, or are now a web page, or anybody can create a web page that looks impressive. that doesn't mean it's been checked. you know, is there a back checking? the reason, major newspapers like a wall street journal, the new york times. so i have back checkers because most of the journalists, the right get backs wrong, you know, even when they're trying to be careful, they still get backs wrong. so it's good to have back, jackie. you know, so just little things like that, you know, keep the tires, ask a few questions. you know, where did this land come from? you know, who checked it? did somebody challenge it did? is they did a peer review journalist. you know, there might be aliens, there might be been for, you know, there might be this or that, but anything is possible. whereas the evidence, you know, i gotta see the evidence for myself to consider believes also have gateway theories mean something easy to get into. and act who got hooked on i don't know what

they're like, new age, holocaust, denial, kennedy, assassination. yeah, so of course they all have gateways on the internet. this is part of the problem is the internet is, is, is a liberating forest for the spread of knowledge. you know, all the, almost all human knowledge now is available for free instantaneously. but the downside of that, like the printing press, the same, the same device that can print shakespeare can print my income by hitler, the internet, they can give us the wikipedia pages and all human knowledge for free. also gives us q and a crazy conspiracy theories and, and a are anti bachelors and, and you know, that seems cause autism. so all that stuff is also freely available. so the key here is, is, is fact checking. and unfortunately, in the last 5 years or so, there's emerged these websites like snopes and pull it back to my own website,

skeptic dot com that checks the claims made by mike a scientists and other cases like put all the speeches by trump. and maybe they're not getting it right, but there's half a dozen of these political fact checking sites available now. and so consumers need to be aware that you know, if you're going to consume content online, be sure and check the places like snopes that, that, that check these times of blades. so in the case of canon, those are into it's supposedly fantasize about saving children and bringing criminals to justice can feeling good. this sensation of possessing some secret knowledge about something and, and having some sort of enlighten the penny and about how things are be the sexiest thing about conspiracy theories. yeah. yeah. there is a kind of titillation psychologically of somebody who thinks they have inside knowledge about what's really going on. now let's take q and on it started in 2015

when trump was running for office the 1st time. and there was this theory that there was a pedophile ring being run by hillary and other celebrities out of a pizzeria in pennsylvania. and now the people really believe this, you know, i mean, millions of people said, yeah, i think that's possible. but if you really believed that there was a pedophile ring and children were being sexually molested, when you call the police or you know, do something about it. well, one guy did, he went to the pizzeria with a, with a rifle. you had, you had an assault life with him and he burst in there and, and shot up the ceiling and demanded to go to the basement where the pedophile ring was. well, there was no basement at this pizza area. so he's just standing there going, oh my god, i'm, i'm wrong. but at least he had the courage of his convictions, right? he said i will if there's a pet of our a, i'm going to do something about. so i suspect the millions of people that take the box on the surveys and said, yes,

i think you and i could be true the pedophile ring and so on. i don't think they really believed, because if you really believe that you'd call a police or something, right? so they're kind of 2 forms of belief. there's reality. and then there's kind of mythical truth. truth that, you know, i just kind of wink wayne think might be real. for example, there's some percentage of, of, icelanders who say that they believe in fairies. okay. do they really believe in fairies? probably not, but it's just kind of part of their culture. i think they do i think they do. oh so you know, since you mentioned you have a history of politics in your family, part of it i think is a political signaling to your tribe. i'm willing to believe this crazy idea. that's how loyal i am to my party. right. you know, so republicans have been put on the spot. you know, i got a book, i got

a publicly signal that i agree with trans crazy ideas about the conspiracy to pack the election. i don't think most of them believe it, but they got to say that they believe it because their political future is on the line of trump denounces that right. but so here is that we're believe, you know, when they say i believe that that trump is correct, that the election was stolen from him. i don't think they really believe it's actually. i think they believe it sort of tribally or politically or mystically like yeah, that's our story. and we're sticking to it all the way to the end is that's, that's, i got to stand by my, my try my, my party, my, my team, there's low self sacrifice and sort of like political conspiracy theorist isms. right? oh yes, well, so it remains to be seen where the fate of a lot of these politicians will be in the coming years after stating these crazy ideas. you know, i mean, let's just put up, let's just put a dart on that one just just to be clear, you know,

had the democrat. so this theory that the democrats told the election itself refuting for this reason, that they somehow were so diabolically clever, that they managed to hack into all these electronic devices that were counting boats and so on and so forth and stole the election. millions of boat stolen from truck and yet they somehow forgot to steal the election of the senate and the house where they will lose control. they're probably gonna lose control of the senate and buying will get nothing done because the senate will simply block him. why didn't they steal a couple of those house seats so they could at least control the senate, right? but you know, so, i mean, it's just ridiculous, right? so before, right, people who didn't believe in the moon landing, etc, where we're rent, somewhat marginal right now with numerous you to channels facebook groups. there is more and more of them everywhere in the world. can moderating social media be an

effective tool against the tide of believe of misinformation. yeah. so, you know, as you know, there's debates about whether the us government should break up the big social media companies like facebook. and i don't think they should. i think that's the wrong move and that's too strong an arm by the government. i do think that that they should be held accountable publicly. that is to say people should demand that they do some back checking or, or they should just shut enough. right? i mean, the rise of the back checking sites i mentioned before is a good counter to facebook. and of course, as you know, sucker berg has said that they're going to start filtering content. but the problem with that is, is it's not like the new york times it gets, let's say, a 100 submissions for op eds every day and they publish to. and they fact check them carefully. facebook, it's, you know, the equivalent of, you know, i don't know a 100000000 posts an hour. i don't know what it is, but you know, how could they possibly fact check the pose? so the moment they start screening saying, okay,

we're not going to let anybody post something to do with q and i ok, but what about this conspiracy theory or that one? because you know, some of them might be real. what if it's, you know, just a shade above normal conspiracies, some would, that can be true. are you going to scream that out? so the moment they start filtering, you know, that's going to be a problem. i think. so, you know, there's not a good solution because it's orders of magnitude more power of the mainstream media . oh, well i was a conspiracy theories have so many adherents now that there are starting to actually influence whole societies. we spoke about trump. trump's presidency, the prime example, you know, while officials have at the following one theory or another, regular people, they show up with guns and they try to kill nonexistent. human traffickers intimidate those who are counting votes, or take those who believe call it is made up story and therefore a refuse to wear masks. is the believe in conspiracy is becoming more of

a danger now than before. i think it's potentially more dangerous. so again, most people don't act on those beliefs. so maybe you don't think that there's going to be like, it's going to reach some sort of a critical mass when the society won't be able to afford to ignore it anymore. the conspiracy theories years. you don't think that's going to be good. i don't think it'll, it'll happen if it does. i think it will backfire. it is the reason why most terrorist organizations fail to get most of their political goals achieved. because when you impose violence, you lose your large support of your base you. most people don't want to get involved in violence. so just take like the rise of the militia in the united states, in the early 1990 s. they were huge. all these guys out there in their camouflage uniforms and guns, you know, just pretending to be soldiers and so on. and it was, it was considered to be a threat to american political stability. and then oklahoma city happened the

bombing in oklahoma city by timothy mcveigh and the militia movement class overnight after that because most people that were involved, oh my god, that is and say we can't do that. and so they lost a lot of their support financial support as well as membership. all right, well mike was such a pressure pleasure talking to you really. it will be interesting to, to, to recap in one years time, what happens me and you, what do you say? let's see, we will test some of my predict the empirical anyways, thanks a lot. stay safe. take care of yourself and i hope you talk soon. okay, thank you right. bye bye bye.

the ah ah ah ah ah ah ah, ah, one of the persian gulf wealthiest country is, has spend billions of dollars on state of the art stadiums. well look at this, this data was really taking shape. you can see the bowl and most of the stands now, when we were here a little bit over a year ago, at the same construction site, it was just the foundation in

a few metal structures. so it seems that time why this idea to use shipping containers as building blocks has definitely paid off. i mean, they're easy to assemble and easy to dismantle, just like playing with lego the, for the 1st time in a world history, the stadium will be billed from shipping containers and what's more, it will be completely dismantled after the turn in the me, one of the worst in a mass shootings in america was in las vegas in 2017. the tragedy a close a little of the real last vegas. where many say elected officials are controlled by casino loaners. the dangerous shooting revealed what? the l v m p. d really is, and as part of the stand machine to the american public barely remembers that it

happens. that just shows you the power of money in las vegas. the powerful showed that true colors, when the pandemic had the most contagious contagion that we've seen in decades. and then you have a mayor who doesn't care. so here's caroline goodman, offering the lives of the biggest residents to be the control group, to the shiny facade, conceal of deep indifference to the people vice gonna be saved if they were to take an action. absolutely, keep the registering and keep the slot machines doing. they use as a money machine is a huge cash register that is ran by people who don't care about people's lives being lost. these are the 4 people who pulled the trigger. survive something on survival was the hardest thing that i had to face was not having a face adult by patient life accepted. i accept the fact that i made that

appointment. we had no fears. del change pretty fast for shots. different stories behind the bullets. the china and russia once again high on the agenda, his g 7 lead is assembled for the 1st time. since the outbreak of the pandemic do feel a sense of deep sense of the trial. we have your office issued by age alone will not industrial. how come up the want? you can police chiefs, raise the alarm about the lack of vaccination so the force is the $5000.00 and job offices at the g. 7 summit could become cobra. the super spread the new york parents declare war on woke indoctrination at schools putting up billboards demand that children be towards said to think for themselves about diversity.