Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
In conversation with Joe Uscinski
33 Plays3 years ago
Josh discovers that M has interviewed Joe Uscinski once again...
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding? http://www.podbean.com/patron/crowdfund/profile/id/muv5b-79
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Setup
00:00:09
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:00:18
Speaker
Hello, you're listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand, and Dr. M. Dentethwell. Well, once again, we find ourselves in this position where it's just me recording on my own sim, and yet, I have had another mysterious dispatch from Dr. Denteth, wherever they may be.
Interview with Joe Usinski: QAnon and COVID Discussions
00:00:38
Speaker
This time, it's an interview recorded with a friend of the show and semi-regular contributor, Joe Usinski.
00:00:47
Speaker
who is still at it surveying the beliefs of people around QAnon. Obviously now it's been around a year I think since we last heard from Joe and there's been a whole lot of Covid conspiracy theorising going on so there's probably that to talk about as well.
00:01:05
Speaker
So I won't waste time. It's a good hour and a bit interview. So let's just play it and maybe see what we can divine about Em's current whereabouts, if there is anything. Let's listen and see.
00:01:27
Speaker
It's the 26th of June, and I'm talking with Joe Yusinski, political scientist and associate professor at the University of Miami. We've talked with Joe a lot over the years, but it's been well over a year since we last chatted, and my what a year it has been. Joe, how are you holding up in the COVID-19 pandemic?
00:01:45
Speaker
Very good. Thank you for asking, and it's great to be with you again. I think the last time we talked was at the beginning of the pandemic. Arguably is really only a year and a bit ago, but it seems a lot longer. It seems decades ago, and it's tough to even imagine what things were like in April and May of 2020. But it's been a gradual return to normal here in Miami.
00:02:10
Speaker
I mean, not everyone locked down to begin with, and not everybody was wearing masks to begin with. So, you know, a lot of people did what they were supposed to do, and there were some drastic changes at the beginning, but one summer hit last year, people pretended that, you know, it didn't exist. And then, of course, we got second, third, and fourth waves after that.
00:02:35
Speaker
But my understanding is that vaccination is going pretty well. I've gotten both doses a couple months ago. So you're now fully 5G compatible. Yeah, metal sticks to my neck, so I'm told. Because last time we spoke, you were teaching in the middle of a basketball court. I was. So the things that were going on in fall
00:02:59
Speaker
of 2020 were very drastic on the university campus where they had me teaching in a basketball stadium and they had my head up on these jumbotron screens and once
00:03:16
Speaker
I mean they were keeping very good track of what was going on on campus in terms of public health and they weren't finding any classroom transmission or any faculty catching it from teaching
00:03:32
Speaker
So that was all good news, particularly for me. So they sort of eased back on some of the restrictions. They still had big classrooms for a few students. And everyone kept social distancing. There was masks and everything. But they found the things that drove outbreaks on campus were largely when you had a three-day weekend and all the kids would go out and party.
00:03:59
Speaker
not socially distanced, and then come back and they would catch it and then spread it around. So the real drivers of it weren't the college experience per se, it was more the extracurricular activities off campus that were doing it.
00:04:20
Speaker
Well, it sounds like you should be keeping all of your students in dorms and policing them. Well, they did. So it got to a point in the spring where they did do like a really stringent lockdown because they did have a spike, I think in March or April. And they had to really crank down on what people were doing. But again, it all came less down to the disease itself and more to everybody's behaviors.
00:04:46
Speaker
A lot of people were just sick of the social distancing and they stopped doing it, and then you got exactly what you'd expect. At this point, they're requiring vaccination from everybody but students. And if you're not vaccinated, you got to get tested multiple times a week, which I think is pretty good. Not just public health,
00:05:10
Speaker
good for public health records, but it's pretty good in terms of encouraging people who don't want to get vaccinated to get vaccinated.
00:05:17
Speaker
Yes, it's been actually quite an interesting time back in Aotearoa, New Zealand as well, looking at the way in which the pandemic has basically been spreading overseas, given that New Zealand has done particularly well during the pandemic by locking down our borders and kind of stopping people from coming in, thus limiting the extent of the virus, although we did have a scare in Wellington.
00:05:42
Speaker
last weekend, where it turned out that a person from Australia with the Delta variant had come to visit the Capitol and went to an art exhibition and spent a lot of time socializing with friends. But crucially, was also a very good public citizen by using the the app that tracks where you go business wise, so they're able to do contact tracing. And thus far, Wellington has done particularly well by not getting the Delta variant spread amongst the general pop
00:06:12
Speaker
But it's early days and the Delta variant seems to be particularly pernicious and not the kind of thing you want to see it amongst, say, a country of sheep. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, now it just comes down to who's going to get vaccinated and who's not in my country. And then for other countries, you know, how much can production be ramped up to get the vaccine to everybody?
00:06:41
Speaker
and can the rich countries step in to cover the costs of that? I mean, my guess is you're gonna have between 20 and 30% of Americans who just opt out of getting it, which doesn't shock me. I mean, we've been measuring anti-vax attitudes for a long time. That's probably, you know, could have been predicted before the pandemic that we'd have that many people saying, oh, I don't wanna get it.
00:07:09
Speaker
Who's choosing not to get it? It's sort of been changing over time. And that if you go back to last summer, it was African Americans, minorities. But then black Americans started to trust the vaccine more and we're getting it more. Trump supporting Americans and evangelicals who don't want to get the vaccine. And then there's other reporting that suggests that this is
00:07:40
Speaker
has to do with education and other psychological factors and whatnot. So it's not entirely clear what's driving the people who aren't going to get it, but that's
Understanding Conspiracy Beliefs and Media Influence
00:07:52
Speaker
part of what I'm going to be working on this summer is surveying people to find out who's gotten it, who hasn't, and if they haven't, why not.
00:08:02
Speaker
and try to see what's going on in their heads that's driving them to either get it or not. And that brings us quite nicely to the conspiracy theories that have been around since last we spoke. This is, of course, COVID-19 conspiracy theories, where we kind of ended our discussion over a year ago at the very beginning of the pandemic, where an awful lot of those conspiracy theories were about the origin, purpose, and transmission of COVID-19.
00:08:29
Speaker
And of course, as many of us predicted, once vaccines became available for COVID-19, which became available a lot faster, I think, than many people thought they were going to be, then there was going to be the pivot to the anti-vax conspiracy theories. So yes, how has COVID-19 as a set of conspiracy theories been affecting your work? It's what I study.
00:08:57
Speaker
I mean, I've said this throughout the entire pandemic because people were acting like they were shocked that people believed conspiracy theories about the pandemic. Like how come everybody doesn't agree about everything? And it's like, what planet have you lived on? Nobody agrees about everything. We don't find unanimous agreement ever. So to act as if everyone should have just jumped into lockstep with each other didn't make any sense.
00:09:27
Speaker
So from the very beginning, we were finding large numbers of people who believed that it was, that COVID was either some sort of bio weapon or that it was largely harmless, but being exaggerated to hurt Trump. And each of those propositions were getting about 30% in our polls. And that was seen as shocking, but to me it was more continuation of the same. 30% when you compare it to other things we ask about on our polls, that our conspiracy theories is sort of, eh, it's middling.
00:09:58
Speaker
It's not the highest, it's not the lowest, it's somewhere in the middle of things that register. Over time, those ideas didn't increase. So social media came and went, the pandemic video came and went, all sorts of things happened, and there were no changes. So I started polling in March of 2020, right at the very beginning, followed up in June, October, and then just May of this year, 2021.
00:10:28
Speaker
no changes in those. So people either believe them or they don't. And as shocked as people were that the numbers were so high and that people would even believe conspiracy theories about COVID-19, it's, to me, it was the same theories believed by the same people. The only difference was that the theories had different nouns in them.
00:10:54
Speaker
Instead of saying AIDS is created by the government to kill whoever, now it's COVID. The MMR vaccine is trying to stick you with something. Now it's the COVID vaccine that's trying to do that.
00:11:09
Speaker
I mean, before COVID hit, they were saying, oh, 5G is going to fry your brain or something. And then when COVID hit, oh, 5G is going to give you coronavirus. So it was the same stuff. The same ideas promoted by many of the same people just adapted in different ways to
00:11:27
Speaker
the big thing that we were all talking about. So none of that shocked me. But what I think the important takeaway is, is that the information environments change drastically over time, but beliefs, as far as we can measure them, didn't.
00:11:46
Speaker
And I measured lots of other COVID beliefs too. I mean, in June of 2020, we started asking more specific things as the conspiracy theories got a little more tailored to COVID. So we were asking about Bill Gates conspiracy theories and getting microchipped in the vaccine and whatnot. And again, when we repold those same things months later, no changes. And if anything, more went down than went up.
00:12:15
Speaker
So to me, a lot of these beliefs have to do with is there are things that are internal to the believers. They have a particular worldview. They see things a particular way. They're the ones who are going to see the conspiracy theories most of the time. And because of that, the numbers aren't going to shift radically one way or another over time.
00:12:41
Speaker
I mean, this fits in with some of the work I was doing with the group at the University of Auckland at Punaham-Martatini, where we were looking at the infodemic around COVID-19 over the course of 2020. And as far as we could tell, at least when it came to social media, the people who were promoting COVID-19 conspiracy theories, whether it be about the purpose of the pandemic,
00:13:04
Speaker
or the problems that were going to be associated with the vaccines. We're exactly the same people who a year prior, before the COVID-19 pandemic, were promoting false medical claims about the origins of diseases or promoting false claims about the dangers of vaccination.
00:13:22
Speaker
It didn't seem there were any new people being involved in these conversations. It was the same old people who had the same old problems, which as you point, they just changed the noun. They went, oh, I mean, what used to be the MMR vaccine that we used to go on about in public. Now we're going to go on about COVID-19.
00:13:42
Speaker
It used to be 5G. Now it's COVID-19. It used to be that we were talking about vitamin C cures cancer. Now vitamin C cures COVID-19. It's COVID-19. It's COVID-19. Yeah, and the reason for that is fairly simple. It's just that everyone's paying attention to one thing. So if you have a worldview in which, you know, there's a lot of conspiracies in public health and medicine,
00:14:12
Speaker
then you're gonna be applying it to that rather than the thing you were thinking about in 2019. So it's very much just a continuation. And to me, it didn't really shock me all that much. I guess I would have said, I would have thought the numbers would have been higher than initially polling. I mean, with everybody focusing on one thing and how scary that one thing is, you've got essentially a deadly pandemic that nobody knows much about
00:14:42
Speaker
and you've got government lockdowns in a way that nobody's ever seen, economic catastrophe, death, you know, an illness. And I could, if it had come in at 70%, I wouldn't have been shocked. But that it was that they're already was sort of like, okay, you know, it's sort of middling amongst
00:15:09
Speaker
conspiracy theories, right? I mean, you still get, in my most recent survey, I got like 55% thinking Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy theory. So something that doesn't really matter right now and isn't really getting the most media attention, and a lot of people were born decades after the fact, still gets 25% more buying in than COVID stuff, which everyone is intimately knowledgeable about.
QAnon's Societal Impact and Misconceptions
00:15:38
Speaker
Yes, actually, that is actually interesting, that the JFK stuff still has such a huge amount of resonance, despite the fact that it's very historical now, and I suspect even if you were to finger the actual culprit of the supposed JFK assassination conspiracy theory,
00:15:55
Speaker
it wouldn't really change anything. Whilst thinking about COVID-19, that seems like it should be of pith and moment, and yet the fact that it's only a middling polling conspiracy theory is both heartening and also quite weird. So another thing too that's sort of interesting is that in May of this year we asked about
00:16:21
Speaker
the bioweapon idea again, was COVID-19 either purposely created or purposely deployed to hurt people? And when we asked this question last month, it was after about a month of intense coverage of, you know, was there a lab leak or not?
00:16:40
Speaker
The evidence doesn't really show anything one way or another as far as I can tell. But this was very salient in the news in the US with everyone saying, oh my God, it's the lab leak. And all of us lab leak conspiracy theorists were right all along. It would largely depend on what people were claiming.
00:17:00
Speaker
even if it were true, which I'm not convinced yet that it is, but it's even with that heightened attention, we didn't get an increase in that. So to me, it's very much either people are inclined towards certain ideas or they're not. And the information is going to come and go. But if somebody's not inclined towards something, it doesn't matter what's out there.
00:17:29
Speaker
It's not gonna it's not gonna do much
00:17:31
Speaker
Now we're gonna come back to the polling around COVID-19. So I believe you've got a new paper which you've been working on which has been measuring things all the different ways. Let's talk about some of the other conspiracy theories that have come and gone or at least had their day in the sun in the last year. So QAnon, what was going on with QAnon last year? So QAnon started getting a ton of media coverage in 2020.
00:18:00
Speaker
And I think there are a few reasons for why that is. One, everyone was stuck at home, everyone was stuck online, and it just became easy for believers to access QAnon stuff or for reporters to find QAnon stuff and report about it. And that's an important piece of this puzzle in that unlike five, 10, 15 years ago,
00:18:30
Speaker
Newsrooms now, the big ones anyway, have groups of reporters on dedicated misinformation, social media conspiracy theory beats. So they have reporters that this is all they cover. Whereas in the past, there was no such thing. But now you have reporters, this is what they do. So of course, we're getting a ton of news content covering the latest conspiracy theory online.
00:18:57
Speaker
a lot of it having to do with QAnon because the stuff they come up with is so entertaining, it's click worthy. So if you look over 2020, there were three main claims made in the media about QAnon. I think that it was big and getting bigger and that it was on the far right. And the third being that it was driven entirely by social media.
00:19:27
Speaker
those were taken as gospel. Everyone was saying, it's big, it's mainstream. Now putting aside the fact that the claims themselves don't even make sense together, because how could something be far right and mainstream? It doesn't make sense, but they were able to put those two words together in the same sentence sometimes. So having been polling on it a few different ways since 2018,
00:19:54
Speaker
I mean, one way was with a feeling thermometer, saying rate on a scale of zero to 100, how much you like the QAnon movement. It started out with an average rating of both polls in Florida, my home state, and nationwide ratings about 22, 24 on average, which is not good. And that put QAnon about on par with how well Floridians felt about Fidel Castro. And they don't like Castro here.
00:20:25
Speaker
in case anyone doesn't know. Since that time, I've been following up nationwide, and it's only come down, so the average now is about a 16 out of 100, and that puts QAnon, makes it about as popular as the ratings for white nationalists and Antifa, extreme groups that most people don't really like, right? So it has not gotten more popular.
00:20:54
Speaker
by that method. So another thing we've done is we asked more direct questions. Are you a believer in QAnon? Are you a follower of QAnon? Consistently we've gotten since 2019 between five and 8%, which means no movement over time. And between five and 8%, that makes it one of the least believed things that I poll on. So when we ask about things like Holocaust denial,
00:21:25
Speaker
you know, as the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust been exaggerated for political purposes. That poll's three times as high as QAnon on some of my polls. When we get conspiracy theories, when I ask about, you know, were the shootings at Parkland and Sandy Hook faked, we got four times as much sometimes as QAnon. So it's, it's,
00:21:49
Speaker
It's not the case that QAnon was ever big, comparatively speaking, it's really small compared to everything else. And we found no growth over time. So that's the first claim gone. The second claim that it's far right, well, I should remind people that yeah, they think Hillary Clinton is running a satanic sex trafficking ring and eating babies. So they don't like Democrats, but they don't like Republicans either.
00:22:15
Speaker
I mean, the QAnon people that stormed the Capitol on 1-6, one of the things they were chanting was, kill Mike Pence. And they wanted the Bushes dead. So it isn't like they just dislike Democrats or liberal politics. They dislike politics and politicians. They like outsiders, and they believe that the entire establishment is corrupt to the extreme.
00:22:40
Speaker
So what we find with QAnon supporters, they're not like Republicans. It's not like you get some standard bear Republican like I'm really into Ronald Reagan and I read Milton Friedman and Barry Goldwater is my hero and I have a subscription to the National Review. Oh yeah and uh satanic baby eaters. No, those things don't go together. Right? So um
00:23:08
Speaker
I mean, just to put it mildly, the things that Trump and the things that he tried to activate were not mainstream Republicanism or conservatism, and that goes doubly for QAnon. QAnon was chasing anti-establishment views, people who don't like either party, people who just trust politics and society writ large. So when we model out who likes QAnon and doesn't from our survey data, the things that tend to predict liking QAnon are
00:23:38
Speaker
Do you dislike the establishment? Do you have high levels of conspiracy thinking? Do you have populist sentiment? Are you a Manichaean thinker? Meaning do you see politics as a battle between good and evil? And then do you have dark psychological characteristics? So we measure the dark triad, which is narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism in our survey. And those predict QAnon
00:24:06
Speaker
Also, all the things that predict it are, do you like to share things that you know are false online? And also, do you like to have arguments online? So you put that sort of stuff together. People who have sort of cranky personalities who dislike the establishment and like to share stuff, whether it's true or not, and like getting into arguments online, that sort of explains QAnon. But what doesn't predict it?
00:24:34
Speaker
liberal conservative ideology doesn't, partisanship doesn't, even strength of those two things doesn't. So it's just not the case that it's some extreme form of conservatism.
00:24:49
Speaker
It isn't. It's something else entirely off the regular left-right path of politics. Yes, and I suspect there's going to be an awful lot written on the popularism side of these things. And also, I suspect in the wake of the Trump presidency, probably quite a lot written on the potential fascistic aspect of some of Trump's regime and the way that certain people like Alex Jones became really, really big fans of fascism.
00:25:18
Speaker
Now, of course, anyone who's listening to this who is skeptical of the idea that QAnon is a minoritarian view and that we're underplaying exactly what happened in 2020 will point, of course, to the January 6th invasion and go, well, how can you say that QAnon is something which hardly anyone believes when all of these people stormed the US Capitol? Surely it's much bigger than you rubberneck academics actually think.
00:25:49
Speaker
Well, that's just anecdotal evidence. Of the people who were there, not all were QAnon, but on January 6th, most Americans were either at home or at work. You had some thousands of people there, but we're not talking about a representative sample, and we're not talking about all or even most Americans showing up.
00:26:14
Speaker
So you've got to put it in terms of this is a country of more than 300 million people. And we're talking about the actions of 1,000. I don't know how many arrests have been made now, maybe less than 100. I don't know. But it's not enough to be able to say, well, everyone's a killer, not a believer. So that's the first thing I would say there, where I will extend it in olive branch.
00:26:44
Speaker
is that some of the ideas that make up QAnon exist far outside of QAnon and exist, but importantly, they have existed long before QAnon. My country had satanic panics back in the 80s and 90s where they thought that there was satanic sex trafficking and satanic ritual abuse going on everywhere.
00:27:07
Speaker
and that this had infiltrated police departments and whatnot. The Oliver Stone movie, JFK, has a deep state. And they posit that the assassination of JFK was pulled off by a pedophile character, played by Joe Pesci. So even the most outrageous claim of QAnon, which seems to be, oh, it's pedophiles, sex traffickers, control the government. Even that's old. That's old sauce.
00:27:37
Speaker
When we poll on some of those things, those come out sometimes between 15 and 30%. So you can get a lot of people buying into some of these wacky ideas, but a lot of those people, when asked, do you follow QAnon? Not only is the answer no, but they don't even know what it is. They never heard of it.
00:27:58
Speaker
And what some people are trying to do is try to say, well, everyone who believes any wacky conspiracy theory is now QAnon, or they'll call them QAnon adjacent. Well, that's just dishonest. It's dishonest. Because it's putting a causal locus onto QAnon and what QAnon's been up to and saying that they've had some sort of much bigger influence than they've really had. I mean, the scarier truth is, I mean, the good news is this, the QAnon wasn't able to convince that many people.
00:28:27
Speaker
at a time where you think it would have happened during a pandemic where there's lockdowns and everyone's online. The bad news is that people have believed wacky stuff for a lot longer than QAnon and the numbers of people who believe these sorts of things are particularly scary.
Conspiracy Theories in Context: Beyond QAnon
00:28:43
Speaker
And they leave society open to manipulation by people who would take advantage of that. So we saw in the 2020 election, a lot of the ads that Trump was running
00:28:56
Speaker
were accusing Biden of being a pedophile. And this wound up being in all sorts of ads and in different campaigns, even in the House of Representatives, where people were saying, oh, that one's soft on pedophilia, that one's soft on sex trafficking. I want to save the children. And people can use that as a cudgel to beat their opponents with.
00:29:22
Speaker
because what we find on our surveys is that views about sex trafficking are just off the charts in my country. It's probably the same in the UK and some other countries. We asked a question where we said, do you think the amount of sex trafficking in this country is higher or lower than 300,000 children a year? And the reason why we gave that number as a baseline was because that's a number that a lot of Congress people have trotted out.
00:29:52
Speaker
is that 300,000 American children are trafficked every year, sex trafficked every year. But at the same time, fact checkers have also repeatedly
00:30:03
Speaker
rated that pants on fire for Pinocchio false. And they said, you know, we don't know what the true number is because this is underground stuff, but it's nowhere near 300,000. So we use that in our survey, and we found most Americans rate it at 300,000 or much higher, with 33% of Americans, I think, saying it's far higher than 300,000. So people have this view of sex trafficking that it's massive.
00:30:31
Speaker
And then when we ask questions, do you think elites in government in Hollywood are running sex trafficking? We get like 30%. So these beliefs are out there and they're very widespread, but they tend to incredibly exaggerate.
00:30:49
Speaker
you know, the truth of the matter. And that leaves these believers as prime targets for somebody like a QAnon or somebody like some politician who wants to come in and beat their chest about how they're going to save the children. Yeah, there is something quite interesting about the way in which people want to associate any weird conspiracy theory belief with QAnon at the moment. So I had an argument with someone locally back in Aotearoa, New Zealand earlier this year
00:31:16
Speaker
Where they were describing a whole bunch of satanic panic stuff as being QAnon adjacent and I was going no shouldn't really be talking about that stuff as being QAnon adjacent because that stuff was brought into the QAnon conspiracy theories, but it's got a long and Terrible history aside from it. So it's wrong to label that stuff as QAnon You should be talking about how the stuff influence QAnon not labeling it as a QAnon like things
00:31:43
Speaker
theory. And often I think people want to do this to make the threat of particular conspiracy theories even greater by just extending the fringe of what actually encompasses that theory by going, it's not just QAnon, it's all these other things which resemble it slightly, which we're just going to put under this umbrella to make it seem like an even bigger threat than it is at this time. Yeah, and you've had headlines in my country in the UK where they're like,
00:32:13
Speaker
The Guardian, 25% of Britons believe QAnon conspiracy theories. Well, those theories existed long before QAnon, and most of the people believing it never heard of QAnon. And it makes it sound as if QAnon is having some influence where it isn't. And it's putting the blame on QAnon for convincing people of this stuff, where the blame lies with all sorts of other factors, one of which is government and politicians.
00:32:43
Speaker
who are always talking about how much sex trafficking there is and how much more power they need to fight the sex traffickers. I've recently gotten these comments back where people say, well, is it a distinction without a difference? And I say, yeah, it's a huge difference. If you want to fight these conspiracy theories, you want to convince people that they're not true, or if you want to understand why they came about,
00:33:12
Speaker
You can't just say it's QAnon and then walk away if the person believed it 30 years ago. Yeah, precisely. Because you're totally misunderstanding what they believe and why they believe it and what the consequences of that are. To me, QAnon is important because you have people taking cues from this anonymous person in an anonymous chat room that's engaging in a lot of violent rhetoric.
00:33:36
Speaker
And that's something we should potentially be concerned about. But if grandma believes that there's, you know, satanic sex trafficking going on, because that's what she heard when she was a little girl 80 years ago, that's a completely different thing.
00:33:51
Speaker
Yeah, because I mean, if you end up going, oh, you believe a QAnon theory, and the person goes, well, I've never heard of QAnon, and also I've believed this since 1963, then A, you're not going to change their mind by saying, but you do believe a QAnon theory, and it's wrong because, because they'll go,
00:34:08
Speaker
no, I believe this other thing. But also then, and this is one of the terrible things you get when you're trying to say, fight conspiracy theories, is that conspiracy theorists quite rightly think that there are people out there who are trying to bring them down unjustly or insincerely. They'll go, look, these people, like Youcinski and Denton, who keep on labeling our views as QAnon theories and telling us that we believe the wrong things because these theories we don't believe are false.
00:34:37
Speaker
Well, obviously, that's part of a disinformation campaign being paid by big government, which funds their luxurious lifestyle. So obviously, that shows there's a conspiracy against us. We must be right. I'm looking for the luxurious lifestyle. I mean, you live in Miami. I've watched my Miami Vice. I've been to get on a speedboat every day, snorting, surrounded by lots of naked women.
00:35:03
Speaker
Oh, if only. That's the interesting thing here. I'm not battling conspiracy theorists all that much nowadays. I'm battling the people who have misconceptions about conspiracy theorists, and that's where most of my energy is spent.
00:35:27
Speaker
I'm interviewed a lot. I think I've had 350 or 400 interviews since the pandemic started with the news. And it's always the same thing. QAnon's getting bigger. Why do you think that is? And I say, it's not getting bigger, full stop. People are believing conspiracy theories more now than ever. And I say, well, we don't have any evidence for that, full stop.
00:35:51
Speaker
You know, so we are living in the space now where people have made these big empirical assumptions and are now trying to find the causal devil. Well, first you got to demonstrate that conspiracy theory beliefs have actually increased in the social media era. Show me that. And then we can talk about what's causing it. But until then, you don't even get to talk about a cause as far as I'm concerned.
00:36:23
Speaker
So the way I've seen the conversation playing out recently is that, you know, there's a phantom increase in conspiracy beliefs and the new thing that we all hate must be the cause of it.
00:36:39
Speaker
So it's just a witch hunt, is what this has sort of become, where we're blaming social media for all the ills of society, whether those ills exist or have been made worse or not. Which of course makes it sound a lot like the satanic panic back in the 1980s. Yeah, I mean, if you stood up and said, no, I don't believe that the Satanists are eating babies and whatnot, you were said you were part of them. Or you were soft on Satanism.
00:37:10
Speaker
Right? And the evidence then was just as stupid. So when they said, oh, there's ritual satanic abuse going on, and they said, well, we never find any evidence of it. Well, of course, they're covering their tracks. They eat the children after they sexually molest them. So there's no evidence that the child was ever there because all the Satanists dined on them. Well, it could be true, right? But you get stuck in this place where you can't falsify it.
00:37:40
Speaker
And you can't provide any evidence for it, because of course, there wouldn't be any evidence. It's all being covered up by the Satanists. And to me, we have that same thing going on now in conversations that I have with journalists. And it's, well, don't you think social media is spreading these beliefs, you know, making everyone believe them? And I said, well, there's no evidence that people are believing them more. And they say, well, social media must be doing something then, right?
00:38:09
Speaker
So they completely move the goalpost and say, well, it's doing something. I'm like, sure. I'm sure it's doing something. And then maybe they'll come back with something like, well, it's helping these people find each other in the way they never could before. And I say, well, people could find each other before the internet.
Social Media, Technology, and Conspiracy Theories
00:38:27
Speaker
I mean, major religions formed and got billions of followers long before the internet.
00:38:33
Speaker
People could do things called talk and they did it quite a bit and they were writing and it had other forms of communication before the internet and people could find each other and they could join groups and those groups sometimes got really big. That's not something confined to the last decade and a half.
00:38:57
Speaker
What I've done just over the past few months is spend a lot more time on this particular question. As an academic, it's not something that I would normally do because it's not theoretically driven. It's not a theoretical question. It's an empirical question. One, have these beliefs gone up or not? Purely empirical. But I've decided to invest a lot of time and effort and research money into this.
00:39:22
Speaker
What my team and I have done is we've gone back into the old survey archives, looking at survey questions that have been asked since the 1960s about conspiracy theories. And there isn't that many, because polling was more expensive then than it is now. It was done a lot less. And there was really only maybe a dozen conspiracy theories asked before 2010 in national surveys in the US. But we've gone back and repolled all these things.
00:39:51
Speaker
And I've repolled a lot of what I and other researchers have polled in the last decade, too. Out of about 50 conspiracy theories that we repolled with lengths between time one and time two, ranging between seven months, which would be like the COVID conspiracy theories, and Kennedy, which would be like 56 years between the two polls that we used, out of 50 or so conspiracy theories, I think we had seven that went up
00:40:22
Speaker
and the rest either didn't go up or went down. And on average, out of the 50 conspiracy theories, the average change was about negative four or five points. So in most of the conspiracy theories that people, when they make this claim and say they're going up and they mentioned specific ones, usually they're saying COVID, QAnon, we don't find any evidence that those have gone up.
00:40:47
Speaker
And we don't find evidence that a whole lot of them have gone up. And the ones that have gone up are just sort of random things. Like UFOs went up a little bit. Do you think that Kurt Cobain and Tupac were killed by the government? That was an older one that we pulled on. That went up a couple of points, barely.
00:41:11
Speaker
But for the most part, we're not finding it. And then even when you step away from the trappings of individual conspiracy theories, because someone could come along and say, well, you didn't ask about the right ones or something like that. When we just measure general conspiracy thinking, just the general worldview that correlates very well with specific conspiracy beliefs, I've been polling that nationwide for, I think, 11 years now.
00:41:37
Speaker
No increase, flat, flat lines. So it's, and I've measured this in a few other ways too, which I won't get into now, but the point being that if we're gonna talk about an increase, you have to show the increase. You have to be able to evidence it. And no one's really done that yet. And the reason is simple, because it doesn't seem to exist.
00:42:04
Speaker
I mean, if the data changes, I'll change my mind on that, right? But the data's gotta show it first. And what the data's showing now is that we're just not finding these increases. We're not finding them, because they're probably not there. And this gets me in trouble with a lot of journalists, because it blows up their headline, right? They want it to be the Golden Age. And they want to have a boogeyman for what they see and what they think they're experiencing out there.
00:42:33
Speaker
Oh, social media is driving all this. But I think there's both good news and bad news.
00:42:40
Speaker
And the good news is that social media isn't having such a degrading impact on our beliefs. It's not spreading conspiracy theories the way some people are claiming breathlessly. But on the other hand, people believe a lot of conspiracy theories and they seemingly have for many, many decades. And that's the thing we have to come to grip with. And I think that's a lot more scary for some people. Because if you could just say, oh, it's Twitter that's doing it, you can blame
00:43:08
Speaker
these things that you don't like on some exogenous force that's invading our society. Oh, if we just deal with Twitter and Facebook, then the problem will go away. It's a lot more scary to have to deal with this by saying, this is how people are. This is who people are. This is part of the human experience. This is part of people's identities. That's a lot more difficult to come to grips with.
00:43:37
Speaker
Because when your cousin or your uncle or your spouse adopts some conspiracy theory and then starts driving you nuts with it, you'd like to be able to say, Twitter did that to them. Social media did that to them. That's a lot easier than saying, no, I married a weirdo. And they were always weird. I just wasn't paying attention. So shame on me and shame on them.
00:44:03
Speaker
Yes, this actually reminds me of one of my personal bugbears you find in a lot of academic discussion about these things, which is everyone talking about being in the, and I'm using scare quotes here, the post-truth age, as if for some reason there was some switch that was flicked sometime between the 1960s and the 1970s, where truth stopped being important in public discourse, which has led to this rampant belief in fake news, conspiracy theories, and the like.
00:44:32
Speaker
And I just think it's such an ahistorical view because if you go back to the 1940s, the 1930s, the 1920s, the 1910s, the 1900s, the 1890s, everyone is complaining that they're living in a post-truth age because 50 years ago people believed in truth and now they'll print anything in books and the papers. It's been a constant refrain.
00:44:58
Speaker
in intellectual history to go, look, 50 years ago, things were so much better than they are today. We live in a kind of post-truth age. Well, you're right. These things have always been in the background of human nature. And people, for some reason, don't want to admit that sometimes people believe weird things and they always have. And that's sort of the neat thing is when you bring up something like religion.
00:45:26
Speaker
So when someone's so organic, sex trafficking and this and that going on. But is that weirder than the claims made by most modern religions? No, it's not. Is it really that more fantastic and is it any less or more evidence? So that's one issue. The other issue you bring up is the rosy hindsight and that's with everything. It's like, oh, when I was a kid, the newspapers only said things that were true. Yeah, okay.
00:45:52
Speaker
It's funny, I mean, if we really were in a post-truth world, we wouldn't be talking about it. We'd be thinking we were in a truth world, right? But we have become puritanical about truth lately. Oh, we gotta have fact-checking, we gotta have, you know, we gotta call out those conspiracy theories. But at the same time, we've become puritanical about it as a society. We've also become very uneven in how we want to apply our truth standards.
00:46:21
Speaker
So that's one thing that bothers me quite a bit. Like, oh, we gotta make sure we fact check the other guy's conspiracy theories, but not our own conspiracy theories. And then, you know, if you go back in time, as you say, you can find tech panics just like we're having now. Just like everyone's saying, oh, Twitter and Facebook are destroying the world and making everyone believe nonsense.
Historical Context of Conspiracy Beliefs
00:46:45
Speaker
You go back in time.
00:46:46
Speaker
It was cable TV that was doing it. And we've got to put labels on cable TV. And before that, it was rock music and rap music. You go back 100 years, it was jazz music that's corrupting our youth. Or it was newspapers. You can even find newspaper articles in the past that say, people are reading too many novels. It's destroying the country. So everything gets blamed.
00:47:14
Speaker
you know every communication technology it's it's all going to destroy people's minds but i think all that's really happening is that communication technologies are allowing us to see ourselves and each other more clearly and sometimes what we see doesn't always flatter us and and we want to blame the communication technology for it but that's not what's that it's just
00:47:41
Speaker
we're seeing human nature. Yes, I think Rosie hindsight is a good way to put it there. We seem awfully fixated on a version of the past that never occurred. And we want to blame something that happened back then for why we're in this terrible travail we're in now. And it holds us back, too. I mean, one thing that always comes to my mind is with self-driving cars. People are like, I would never trust a self-driving car
00:48:10
Speaker
And it's just like, well, what's the number one cause of accidents? Humans. Right? So we have some way that they want to do things because it's comfortable to them, but it doesn't make it better than the new way. And there's a lot of biases out there like, oh, the new thing is going to destroy us. The new thing is bad. I don't trust the new thing. You know, Billy Joel had a song with a good lyric of this. He said, the good old days weren't always so good and tomorrow isn't as bad as it seems.
00:48:40
Speaker
And I think that's something that people ought to hold on to. Now, we started this discussion talking about how we're going to come to the recent work you've been doing. We've been measuring things all different ways. Tell us about this most recent work of yours. So in looking at how or if conspiracy theories have increased over time, we put together a paper with four studies. And the first study was, as I just explained a few moments ago,
00:49:10
Speaker
that we went back and repulled all sorts of conspiracy theories exactly as they had been pulled in the past to see are there increases. And if conspiracy theories were increasing, we would have expected to find good evidence of it.
00:49:24
Speaker
We didn't. Then we got a hold of the data from the conspiracy and democracy project at Cambridge in the crash center where they polled a handful of European countries with a handful of conspiracy theories over consecutive years exactly the same way.
00:49:45
Speaker
no increases in these European countries. Then we came back to the US, and I've been asking this question in my surveys, say here's a list of 10 groups, conservatives, liberals, big business, international organizations, labor unions, communists. Here's a list of groups. Pick all the ones that you think are conspiring against us. And I've asked that over the course of the last decade. No increases.
00:50:13
Speaker
in the number of groups people think are out to get us. And then finally we looked at just generalized conspiracy thinking over the course of a decade. No increase. So I just, you know, once you're there, it's just sort of like we're not finding it. We're not finding these increases. And for some people, it's just become a part of their identity.
00:50:42
Speaker
that yes there are massive increases in this and yes it's social media doing it and yes it's you know everyone's dumber than me because they all believed stuff and now it's just not the case and and just like talking to a you know what's
00:51:00
Speaker
Because I always hear this thing about conspiracy theorists. They never change their mind, and they always change their theory, and they wiggle around evidence. Well, when I tell people conspiracy theories haven't gone up, they do the same thing. They're like, well, I don't believe you. You're missing something. Your evidence isn't good. You have the wrong evidence. But here's my anecdote. So I mean, a lot of times what I find some journalists are doing is just as bad as the conspiracy theorists that they are trying to denigrate.
00:51:31
Speaker
I mean, although I'm thinking about this now, I mean, surely, given that some of us are making our academic coin from writing about conspiracy theories, surely you should be in an act of conspiracy to suppress your very own data and actually put out false information that conspiracy theories are going up to ensure that we continue to get funding to do this work. I mean, really, shouldn't you be part of a conspiracy to hide the fact that conspiracies aren't particularly common? Sorry, conspiracy theories aren't particularly common?
00:52:00
Speaker
Well, that's the funny thing is that my incentives go in the exact opposite direction of what I'm saying. So it would be good for me to say this problem is big and getting worse. And, you know, if you don't fund my research, we're all going to die. Right. And there are scholars who are out there saying, oh, you know, a lot of scholars do that. It's like, oh, the problem. My study is really big and important and it's getting worse and we need to do something.
00:52:29
Speaker
That's sort of par for the course. And I understand that because the reason we study something is because we feel it's important, so duh. But I have seen scholars in this space say things, make claims about increases when they don't have data for it. And sometimes they get upset about it. How can you say that?
00:52:55
Speaker
But I can come out and say that these are big and getting worse, and I could attribute all sorts of terrible things to it. I can even make up causes and say, you need to hire me to write the legislation for this or that or some other thing. That's where my incentives are pushing me, but that's not where the data is pushing me. And to me, that's what really matters. But for me, I think two things can be true.
00:53:24
Speaker
conspiracy theories can be widely believed and problematic and at the same time not be getting bigger. I think those two things are completely compatible, right? And
00:53:37
Speaker
I think sort of what's happened now is that there is a little bit of a witch hunt for conspiracy theories, selectively applied. But I remind a lot of journalists, I say, I don't think I'd want to live in a world without conspiracy theories. I don't think I want a world where they're banned. I say, yes, they have problems and we should work to mitigate those problems. I don't have a problem with people entertaining conspiracy theories.
00:53:59
Speaker
I am concerned when people believe anything on really short evidence and then act deleteriously on it. So I would like to curb that. But a lot of the same people who are saying, we've got to get rid of these conspiracy theories now, are the same ones who were proffering their own two years ago.
00:54:23
Speaker
Yes, it does seem that there is a conspiracy theory by the people who are saying that conspiracy theories are bad. Yeah, I mean, and this is the thing, a lot of the Trump presidency was him spewing a bunch of conspiracy nonsense, but also the people on the other side believing a whole bunch of conspiracy theories about Trump, some of which should and was, some of which went way beyond the available evidence at any given time.
00:54:55
Speaker
And this is the funny thing, is that you get people who then go back and say, well, I was right all along, no matter what. So they found Trump did something. Well, I was right all along. No, you were saying that he was a Russian agent for the last 50 years. There's no evidence of that, but they found some other thing.
00:55:17
Speaker
So you don't get to say you were right all along. You were just throwing out all sorts of theories. And the most mildest is the one that seems to have stuck. You see that with the lab leak thing, too, where they're saying, I knew this lab leak thing was going to come true. Well, no one's talking about lab leak.
00:55:38
Speaker
is saying that it's a bioweapon or anything like that. They're saying maybe it just accidentally escaped. But you had people a year ago saying, this was built by Russia and China and it's part of some extreme conspiracy by them to get us.
00:55:52
Speaker
It's like, no, you don't get to take credit now for something that's only half proven and doesn't even match what you were saying. This reminds me of one of the more infuriating things about the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which, as we now know, was kind of predicated on bad, if not entirely fabricated, evidence that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction.
00:56:16
Speaker
And one of the excuses that people in the American intelligence services made after it was revealed that actually there was no evidence was, oh, but Saddam was acting as if he had weapons of mass destruction. So that kind of confirmed the intelligence reports we had, which were fabricated. So that's why we had to go and invade. They just find anything, any little chunk of evidence that then vindicates them
00:56:45
Speaker
post the act to then go, oh, we were right the entire time. I mean, we were wrong, but Saddam was acting as if we were right. So that justified what we did, doesn't it? I mean, it reminds me of Ruby Ridge, which took place about 30 years ago in my country. And this is the danger when you have sort of a government believing in conspiracy theories and then coming down on people who also believe conspiracy theories about the government.
00:57:14
Speaker
So I don't know if your listeners are familiar with Ruby Ridge or this guy named Randy Weaver who believed a whole bunch of like white supremacist stuff, but also some serious religious beliefs about the end of the world. He takes his family and they move out to the Pacific Northwest in this place called Ruby Ridge, builds his own house, raises chickens out in the middle of nowhere. It's just him and his family. Like they were miles away from civilization.
00:57:40
Speaker
And the government starts infiltrating groups around that area, and they try to recruit Weaver. Anyway, people could read about the story, but you wind up at this point where the government thinks that Weaver is, they start believing all the things about Weaver that just aren't true. They send snipers, they kill his wife, they kill his son, they kill the dog, they run over the dog with a tank.
00:58:08
Speaker
it just gets out of control where you had the government believing all sorts of theories about where Randy Weaver was up to that didn't come to be true. And they acted on those theories and part of it was, well, he's living out in the woods. He has a bunch of weird beliefs that justifies our behavior. And that seemed to have repeated with the Branch Davidians
00:58:37
Speaker
shortly after that, where the government believed the Branch Davidians were up to a bunch of things, which there's no evidence for, and that justified how they approached the Branch Davidians, which led to a whole lot of deaths.
00:58:50
Speaker
So, but I do get concerned because the government is just made up of people and they're prone to conspiracy theorizing too. And if they act on it, it can be really, really dangerous because they're acting with authoritative force. Yes, there's quite a lot, I think, to be written on.
00:59:09
Speaker
how some official theories or at least official narratives end up being unwarranted conspiracy theories because they're promoted by political causes, they end up becoming the kind of de facto view within the civil service or the intelligence apparatus.
00:59:25
Speaker
and then these things get acted upon. I mean there's the the recurrent feature we found in the wake of the terrorist shootings two years ago back in Christchurch in New Zealand. As it turned out, the intelligence agencies in New Zealand were attentive to the potential of terrorist activity within the nation state of New Zealand.
00:59:49
Speaker
But they just always assumed it was going to be Islamic terror. So they had bought into that particular notion that that's where the threat was. And like the US kind of completely ignored the white supremacist, white nationalist movements, which were gathering arms under their own watch. Well, that's the thing. I think some people say that about the US, but I mean, the US was
01:00:13
Speaker
investigating the white supremacist stuff going back decades. I mean, they infiltrated the KKK and Nazi groups and all sorts of similar groups in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, you know, even before and after Timothy McVeigh blew up the FBI building. Some people make the argument, and they have presented evidence for this, that the government has paid more attention to left-wing groups than they have to right-wing. I'm not familiar with that evidence, so I can't.
01:00:44
Speaker
evaluate it, but what I can say is that it's not clear that the government's ignored it.
Cross-Political Conspiracies and UFOs
01:00:50
Speaker
I think post-9-11, obviously, and this is where I'll clearly agree with you, the assumption was it's going to come from Muslim terrorists, Middle Easterners, something like that, and that's where the focus was.
01:01:06
Speaker
If they had taken their focus off the white supremacists, they paid a price for it, particularly in both our countries, because we've seen a lot of violence like that. Not just church, but we've had shootings here based on white replacement theories and things like that. So that's still there.
01:01:27
Speaker
I mean, the thing for me, though, is that if we get into this left-right dichotomy, we're sort of missing something. I mean, to me, again, it's about the people. It's not like someone got too conservative and decided to go shoot people, right? It's not like I'm too much of a Republican, so I got to go shoot up a mall. It's a whole bunch of other things going on in this person.
01:01:56
Speaker
that's driving them towards conspiracy theories, towards other sorts of behaviors and whatnot. And there's probably a set of personality and mental dispositions that are driving them to act in really bad ways. They have nothing to do with their particular issues that they're writing or talking about. I mean, I read the manifesto of the Christ Church shooter. I wouldn't say that's a far right person.
01:02:24
Speaker
I mean, he's had issues that were sort of jumbled all over the place, right? He's only far right in the sense that we tend to call white people who are concerned about white people far right, right? That these white nationalists are far right. But sometimes when you look at their issue positions, their issues aren't really that far right. They're like, I want free healthcare. Of course, they just want it for white people and people like them, right? Or I want to save the environment.
01:02:55
Speaker
or things like that. So you can find this mishmash of beliefs. So it's not like the person, some of these people are ideologues in the sense that we might imagine. There's sort of just a hodgepodge of stuff in their heads along with inclinations towards violence and antisocial behavior. So I mean, if it helps us,
01:03:20
Speaker
understand what sort of issue is driving them in a particular way. I guess that helps a little bit, but to me, we really got to put the focus on the people and not sort of the political issue.
01:03:33
Speaker
So here's a nice example which takes us away from the left-right divide, and it's also nicely topical. That UFO slash UAP report released by the Department of Defense, because I think we can all agree that belief in UFOs, and we'll take UFOs here to be alien flying saucers, tends to be found across the entire political spectrum.
01:04:00
Speaker
Yeah, so depending on how you ask the question, but it's not like Republicans are believing UFOs and Democrats are. It seems to be equal across surveys. And same thing with moon landing. It's not like, so there's a whole bunch of conspiracy theories that once you get
01:04:22
Speaker
out of having partisan cues in them. Like if you say Obama faked his birth certificate, Democrats aren't going to believe that, but Republicans will. But if you just say something like, the government's corrupt and up to no good and they fake major events, you'll get people on both sides saying,
01:04:41
Speaker
What do you make of the whole foray that's been around this DOD report on unidentified aerial phenomena? Because it seems to have been a really big thing in the news. Shame on the news. And shame on the government leaders who funded this sort of stuff.
01:05:03
Speaker
Shame on the journalists who have been passing it off for the last few years. There's no evidence that this is flying saucers. I mean, I watch a guy called Mick West and he does a really good job investigating... Oh, he's a liner, Mick. Yeah. He does a really good job investigating each of these videos. And what you find is that they're not what UFO people are claiming that they are.
01:05:33
Speaker
And to me, most of them can be explained. I mean, maybe not perfectly. It's tough to go back and say, well, this is this. But you can recreate those things with normal methods. So it doesn't make more sense that it's light refracting off the lens, that it's just things going at high speeds, and it's sort of an optical illusion. So in that sense, they can be explained with some amount of certainty.
01:06:01
Speaker
But you've had essentially a media sideshow going on where it's they're using UAP and UFO because they know it means alien in most people's minds and that's what's getting clicks. So I think it's just just awful that they that they have tried to pass this stuff off as.
01:06:23
Speaker
real aliens flying around and then you have people taking advantage of it like obama saying oh we've got to investigate we don't know what it is he's egging it on rubio you know senator from my state acting it acting if it's like uh you know we're being attacked by aliens we need to shore up our defenses and if someone's invading we need to know who it's like take a breath um i i i i just think that this is
01:06:53
Speaker
largely a creation of a small number of people and a lot of willing journalists. Yes, I think there's quite a lot of evidence to show that certain journalists have kind of been entrapped by vested interests in the UFO community, who have spent time building up relationships with reporters in the lake.
01:07:14
Speaker
that which then precipitated this particular kind of media coverage when it was revealed there was going to be a report and no one knew it was in the report and yet people had been seeded with the idea this is going to confirm we've had alien contact in the past
01:07:31
Speaker
And then the report comes out, and it's remarkably banal. You should be pulling your hair out of all people, because the epistemology that we hear in this whole discussion is just terrible. I've seen like, well, we don't know what it is. So that means aliens. No, you don't know what it is. It means you don't know what it is. You don't get to then say aliens.
01:07:56
Speaker
There's some people moving the goalposts everywhere. You debunk eight videos, and they say, well, those weren't the videos I was relying on. It's these other videos. And you debunk those and say, no, I wasn't showing those as evidence of aliens. It's these other ones. So people aren't allowing themselves to ever be proved wrong with them.
01:08:16
Speaker
But also there's this other weird thing, which is a very weird appeal to authority that goes on with a lot of these reports of unexplained sightings. These are the world's best pilots. They're trained to do these things. And yes, in theory, a pilot should be someone who's very good at observing what's going on around them.
01:08:40
Speaker
But we also know that the US Air Force has terrible record keeping when it comes to pilots arriving on the ground and writing their post-flight debriefings. So often when it turns out, oh, so there's a contact that was on your radar during your flight two days ago, which we can't explain. Could you sit down and actually just write down what happened? Because you didn't write it when you actually landed, but it's OK, you'll do it now.
01:09:09
Speaker
And two days later, you've already going to have memory conflation, you're going to have confusion of events. And yet we're assuming that somehow these reports are verbatim and crystal clear, when really they're nothing of the sort. Yeah.
01:09:30
Speaker
And it's a mountain of bad evidence, which looks from the outside, if you don't know what's going on, as very suggestive of a particular hypothesis. But a mountain of bad evidence doesn't really suggest anything other than the fact that you need to get better evidence. Yeah. And that's what I think sometimes people can be impressed when you've got lousy evidence plus lousy evidence plus lousy evidence, they think it adds up to something. Yeah.
01:09:57
Speaker
But 0 plus 0 plus 0 plus 0 plus 0 is still 0. And once you start knocking each of these things down, you're not left with anything. So just because there's a lot of it doesn't mean anything's good. And I think some people fall for that.
01:10:10
Speaker
I mean, I'm not opposed to the idea that there's aliens. I'm not even opposed to the idea that they might be showing up. But I'll believe it when there's evidence for this. And these videos don't show up. I mean, every video is a different thing supposedly flying a different way or direction with a different shape and different characteristics.
01:10:32
Speaker
you know, if all these were aliens, then the aliens sent their entire fleet of 600 different spaceships to come and look at us, you know, so. I actually like the hypothesis that was advanced by Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that yes, there are UFOs, they are alien flying sauc-sources, but they're teenage joyriders who just like coming to Earth and teasing rubes by lending and-
01:11:00
Speaker
to them speaking funnily, and then just driving away. Yeah, they like showing up and zanguinating a cow and then leaving. Yeah, it's a kind of hazing ritual that goes on for alien corporations. Go to Earth, drain blood from a cow, and then we'll let you into our special fraternity. I think another problem that I see with a lot of this discussion is that you have people who say, well, the government's lying, and they're covering everything up. But look at this evidence from the government that I have.
01:11:30
Speaker
Yeah. Well, wait a minute. Well, I mean, it's the old Alex Jones thing that the powers that be can't help but leak what they're really up to. This argument that the government is so evil and so malign that they want to rob their evilness in your face, which is how you can say the government is untrustworthy and then use evidence from the government to prove
01:11:57
Speaker
even more untrustworthy action on their part. Yeah, or they like putting out little signals and symbols and whatever to let us know what they're up to, even though they're trying to hide it. Like building Denver Airport. Yeah. Have you ever flown through Denver?
01:12:13
Speaker
Yes, and I have seen the mural. Yeah, I actually need to organize a trip to the US that specifically takes me through Denver with a two or three hour layover so I can actually explore the airport properly. Is that how you would fly now? Wouldn't you come to San Francisco or LA? Yeah, I'd assume LA. Yeah, and then you could bop over to Denver.
01:12:37
Speaker
Yeah, I have to find some kind of easily fundable reason to go that, look, I have to travel through Denver to get to this particular place, which is why. I mean, you kind of owe all of us conspiracy theory theorists a conference.
01:12:53
Speaker
So I think you should hold a conference in Denver. Surely Denver Airport has a conference center. You need to re-host the conference. It didn't occur, but in Denver. Well, I would like to as soon as things calm down, but it wouldn't be Denver. It'd probably be at Disney.
Personal Insights and Future Research Plans
01:13:11
Speaker
And there's plenty of, maybe we could find Disney's frozen head somewhere. Oh yes, and have a great old kick around on the field just outside Epcot. Yeah. Hmm, I like the way you're thinking. Because I believe Disneyland's actually been quite stringent about masking and the like as well. They're coming down now. So it's slow, everything's easing up, but we'll see. I haven't, I mean, I'm a,
01:13:40
Speaker
I go quite a bit, but I haven't gone since the pandemic. I've been since I've lived in Florida without going to Disney. It's about a year and a half. But we probably won't go back until October or November.
01:13:55
Speaker
It's too hot now anyway. Yes, yes. The last thing you want to do is be in a pandemic-ravaged country in small forecourts surrounded by a lot of sweating human beings. Yeah, and a mask. So before we go, I believe you've also received a large chunk of funding recently.
01:14:15
Speaker
Yeah, so it's not finalized yet. These things always take some negotiation and finagling, but we just got a large grant from the National Science Foundation to continue on some of this research for the next three years. So we've got a team of interdisciplinary researchers who will be working with me on that. So like I said, I mean, you don't have to make the incredible claims
01:14:40
Speaker
to research something. You don't have to say it's big and getting bigger and bad and getting worse. You know, I think these beliefs are part of our, they're just part of it being human. And we should understand them more, if only because of that. Yeah, I mean, I've always been of the opinion that it doesn't really matter what the base rate of belief in conspiracy theories are.
01:15:08
Speaker
The probably the more important thing is a discussion about either the potency. So does this lead to people acting in particular ways or how salient they are to any particular bit of public discourse? Because you don't need to be that concerned about whether there are lots of them or not that many of them. What you really want to do is have a conversation about what do they actually mean when we're having these kinds of conversations about what's going on in politics or world history?
01:15:38
Speaker
and the like. Yeah. I mean, that's part of it. And then this leads to a second question, which is, you know, a lot of people believe conspiracy theories. Most people don't act on them. So for the people that do, what's that ingredient? What's that thing? And to me, that might be more important than the conspiracy belief.
01:16:03
Speaker
Whereas the conspiracy theory might help that person focus their action on something, but the choice to act is driven by something completely different. I mean, we went through three decades where 80% of Americans believed JFK was killed by a conspiracy, but there wasn't like chaos and blood in the streets everywhere because of it.
01:16:25
Speaker
Yes, I mean, that's a really interesting point. I mean, not being American, the whole JFK thing often leaves me quite cold, why people continue to talk about this thing since 1963. But as you point out, if you have decades of people really believing quite sincerely,
01:16:45
Speaker
that their duly elected president was assassinated by a conspiracy of people either not involving Lee Harvey Oswald or Lee Harvey Oswald being just part of a larger conspiracy. There was that question as if you believed that surely you'd want to change something about your political system and if it didn't actually lead to any direct effect
01:17:10
Speaker
Was it leading to indirect things? Did it increase people's want to be involved in the political system? Did it lead to a greater number of enrollments in, say, the Democratic Party or the Republican Party? Or do people sometimes simply entertain conspiracy theories as interesting hypotheses? But when push comes to shove, they don't believe it in the sense that they would believe that they've got to do something about it. I agree.
01:17:41
Speaker
Well, I mean, that seems like a perfect place to end the conversation. We've got complete agreement there. And also that seems like the beginning of a really interesting research project in its own respect. Thank you, Joe. This has been once again an entertaining and elucidating conversation. And I would encourage viewers to send all complaints to Emdenteth at his new email, whatever that is.
01:18:04
Speaker
That new email will be with us in about two weeks, two weeks or so. I've still got some time in this quarantine hotel that I've got to live out. But yes, yes. So yes, thank you, Joe. A pleasure as usual. All right, thanks.
01:18:28
Speaker
the habit always good to listen to what Joe's got to say, although it seems to be largely the same stuff most of the time, because I think largely the stuff that he's talking about most of the time, that seems to be his biggest complaint generally, is that this stuff just doesn't change. It's the same bollocks over and over again. It's QAnon,
01:18:51
Speaker
QAnon itself may be new, but it's mostly just repackaging conspiracy theories that have been around for a long time. COVID conspiracy theories knew that there's a new focus of them, a new thing for them to gravitate around, but it's essentially the same sort of anti-vax things or the same sort of anti-government things or whatever that have been going around forever as well.
01:19:19
Speaker
kind of I don't really have much to say in reaction to this interview really I listen myself just kind of listen to it going yep yep yes yes I agree because it all it all makes sense and it's all just kind of familiar really but good to see it's all
01:19:39
Speaker
Good to see Joe's still at it, and good to see that a lot of the doom and gloom and fear-mongering that one sees in the media possibly isn't backed up by empirical research. So that's another episode down, another episode with me in Auckland and Em, who knows where. So I guess there's not much more for me to do than say goodbye, except I suppose I should again go plugging my creative endeavors. I have a new game,
01:20:09
Speaker
I have a new game which you can find on itch.io. It's called Platform Blitz, a nicely generic title. A title that's possibly a little too generic, possibly suspiciously generic. And it's probably not actually, but I want you to think it's suspiciously generic and go and play my game, Platform Blitz, and possibly discover what secrets it may or may not contain.
01:20:35
Speaker
So there we go, I've plugged my latest work. I think my work here is done. So goodbye from me, and we'll see where we get to next week. And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.