JOSH: Hello and welcome to Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, the podcast about ideas that matter. I'm Josh Castle, the producer of the podcast, and I'm so glad you've joined us today. In this episode, Spencer speaks with Brian Dunning about combating misinformation, conspiracy theories, and shaping perceptions through skepticism.

SPENCER: Brian, welcome.

BRIAN: Hey. Thank you for having me.

SPENCER: I feel like you're on the front lines fighting a war against misinformation that never seems to end. I wonder, why do you think that misinformation is a perpetual problem?

BRIAN: Not only does it never seem to end, it seems to escalate. Misinformation is everywhere. A lot of it is just people being wrong and passing on wrong information innocently; they don't even mean to. If you're having a beer with your friend, I might say something wrong about the price of corn right now or something, and you might repeat that. But then there are people who have vested interests in passing along misinformation. There are TV shows, there are podcasts like mine, and every podcast has a perspective, and they can't all be right, so some of them are wrong. You've got politicians. You've got professionals who spread misinformation, like people who work at think tanks. They get hired to write reports that support particular points of view, and then you've got the marketing people who spread and publish those reports. It's just everywhere. You have to be crazy vigilant, and you have to assume everything is wrong until you can verify it.

SPENCER: How much of it do you think comes from manipulation versus innocently reporting on something that you think is true, but it's not true?

BRIAN: A lot of it does, really a lot of it does. One example off the top of my head would be the whole organic food industry, the wellness industry. These are industries that consist almost entirely of misinformation. And yet, if you ask anyone on the street, "Is organic food healthier?" they'll say, "Yes," because they've heard that, because people make lots of money by promoting that. Same with the wellness industry, "You know, you need to take this supplement. You need to do this kind of yoga. You need to talk to this spiritual advisor," whatever it is. All of those are money-making industries.

SPENCER: It's funny, though, because the way the human mind works, I think very few people in those industries are just cynically manipulating people. If you talk to people in the wellness industry, I don't think they think, "Oh, yeah, my product doesn't work. I'm just trying to squeeze a buck out of someone." I think that they do believe their products work, even if they don't.

BRIAN: Absolutely, yeah. People who are deliberately deceptive are very much in the minority, but everyone has some bad information. There are things that I believe that are wrong. I don't know what they are. I'd love to so I can fix them, but so many people have bad information and they just pass it on. And that's not being deceptive or anything. It's just telling people what you think you know, and you're absolutely right that those industries probably have very few people who know that their products are fraudulent, basically.

SPENCER: This idea of manipulation is a tricky one, because if the way human minds work is that usually when we're manipulating someone else, we convince ourselves that we're right and we're not really manipulating them. It's actually for their own good. Then, a lot of the bad action ends up feeling very innocent from the inside, if you were to actually somehow read their mind.

BRIAN: There's an example I knew of a friend of mine who was driving the car I was riding with him, and we paused in this neighborhood to look at some house that was for sale or something. But I knew we just kept driving, and we were just turning around a corner after being stopped, so we weren't going 10 miles an hour, and a little kid ran out and got hit by my friend's car. It turned into a whole big thing, and he was in court and everything. He got off, and I had to testify. The thing that struck me was that the family, there were a couple of people outside, and then a whole bunch of neighbors all came forward and said these kids came tearing around the corner. They were going 60 miles an hour. It was completely false. I've been fascinated by that ever since because I wonder, did they actually change their memories of what happened to think that we were going 60? We weren't, we were going 10, and the kid sprang out of nowhere from behind a car. There was nothing that my friend could have done to prevent hitting him, and yet all of these people were absolutely convinced that we were driving dangerously and the kid was being totally safe. That is just a striking example of misinformation that is very harmful. My friend got off, but he could have easily gone to jail.

SPENCER: Wow, it reminds me. So we have a tool called Is Memory Like a Photograph? In that tool, with your permission, we'll actually manipulate your memory, where we give you a scenario and we ask you leading questions in a way to try to change your memories right in the moment. It's based on research from different memory researchers, like, I believe Loftus is one of the researchers, but it really is fascinating how memory can get warped very easily.

BRIAN: That is so true. You remember the thing when 9/11 happened, all the memory researchers ran out to say, "Hey, we got to start seeing how people's memories of this incredibly impactful event — no pun intended — change." It's staggering how much people's memories change: where you were, when you saw the news, who you were with, how you first heard it. These things all changed dramatically over the years. It's really wild. Yeah, memory sucks.

SPENCER: Well, I think the particularly bizarre thing is not just that we don't remember, but we often think we remember. If you just said, "Yeah, I don't really know how fast the car was going," that would be one thing. But it's like, "No, I remember the car was tearing around the corner, going 65 miles an hour on a 20 lane."

BRIAN: Yeah, that was the thing with the 9/11 research, is that people would write down all the key facts and then, do you remember the main study that got published about that?

SPENCER: I thought it was the space shuttle Challenger. When it blew up, they asked people the next day in class to write down where they were, what their thoughts were, and then, many years later, the professor followed up with them and had them do it again, and then had them compare. Basically had them say, "How similar do you think it's going to be to the memories you wrote down many years ago?" And people were quite confident it would be very similar. And then they had them read their original little essays about what had happened, and people were just shocked. I think some people even denied it was their own writing. They said, "I know this is my handwriting, but I didn't write this."

BRIAN: Almost everyone believed that their memory now is more accurate than what they had written down right after the event. They said, "Nope, nope. I must have got that wrong, because I know I wasn't with that." That's another important part of why misinformation is so persistent is because people can't be persuaded that they're wrong.

SPENCER: It really makes you think about what it's like to be in a human mind. In the human mind, you feel like you're just perceiving reality directly. You're remembering things as they happened, etc., and we have these incredibly strong intuitions about this that just don't map onto what's actually going on.

BRIAN: Yeah, brains are terrible things. Brains are magical and powerful and incredible and wonderful, and also so horrible at certain things. Its job is to give you enough information that you can get by. It's not a digital recorder. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to give you enough information to get by.

SPENCER: Another thing this reminds me of is, if we go back to the manipulation question: does misinformation come from people purposely manipulating us, or maybe they're deceiving themselves, and they're spreading misinformation because it's in their own interest? There's another thing that comes up, which is that some people just don't care. So they're not trying to manipulate you, but they're, as philosophers I think, call this bullshitting rather than lying. They literally don't know whether what they're saying is true or not, but they literally don't care. And yet others, when they're evaluating them, are saying, "Oh, so they're lying." And it's like, "No, they're not lying. They're just indifferent."

BRIAN: You see those things where they ask trivia questions of people on the street, and it seems super funny that people don't know the most basic stuff. Like, "How many planets are there in the solar system? 100? I don't know, one." And you'd think that that's not important to most people's daily lives. But how do you not know that? It's just that people don't care. When I was making my UFO movie, I talked to a bunch of people. I was going to include a segment on this when I decided not to, but I talked to a bunch of people and said, "Do you think aliens visit the Earth?" Almost everyone said, "Yeah," because they'd heard that on the news. They see the UFO CON Committee things in Congress.

SPENCER: These are random people you're asking?

BRIAN: Just random people, yeah, not experts or anything. Almost everyone said, "Yeah." And they couldn't have cared less. I could have told them, "No, it's not true." They go, "Oh, really, okay." They don't care about that.

SPENCER: That blows my mind. That doesn't make people care.

BRIAN: People just care about the same things, but they know a lot about things they care about that I don't care about. It goes both ways.

SPENCER: It's funny. I was actually wondering, do I actually know how many planets there are? I was like, "Are there nine planets?" Then I just checked, "Nope. They're eight. I'm a little behind the times." Although, nine is not the worst answer you could give.

BRIAN: It's not a good question anymore, because now we all know that it's, what do you consider a planet?

SPENCER: Right. But I think that's a really interesting point, that people don't necessarily care about the same things. And so there could be some things that would radically alter your worldview if you believed them, if you really took them seriously, but people don't seem to process them in that way. I've always wondered this about people who believe in the Illuminati or whatever. They seem to do it so casually, rather than being like, "Wait, there's really a secret cabal that's controlling everything in society." But people, it's almost like people believe it but don't think through all the implications of what that actually would imply if it were true.

BRIAN: Exactly. That's the case with so many topics. And, with me being a science writer, I care about all these scientific things. I really care about them, and I stay on top of them, and I know stuff about them, and almost nothing that I am interested in concerns the average person at all. Sometimes I'll be writing an episode on something...

SPENCER: For Skeptoid, right?

BRIAN: Skeptoid, yes, my podcast. I'll be writing an episode about, oh, I'm doing one on leaded gasoline and the impact that it had on generations of Americans' mental health. And I came across this one fact, and I was super excited about it. And my friend was over here, I'm telling him, and his eyes are just glazing over. "How can you not care about that? That's really cool." They just, "I just don't care about that." So, yeah, it's really easy to get people's misinformation. It's really easy to get people to buy stuff by telling them what they want to hear, by telling them you've got a magically easy solution to a complicated problem. So people take advantage of it.

SPENCER: I think there are different sorts of beliefs that we hold, and we engage with those different sorts of beliefs very differently. For example, your belief that you own a dog is a very concrete belief. You need to feed the dog, and you expect to see the dog when you walk in your house. So we have all these extremely concrete predictions about what to expect, and it really matters in our day-to-day life. But our belief is, is climate change happening? Or our belief about, is the earth flat or round? They don't really intersect with our daily life. And so I think that people are able to hold them in a different way that doesn't actually affect their day-to-day existence.

BRIAN: That's a huge problem, and people don't care about stuff that's going to happen in 50 years. So the water crisis, the climate change crisis, and there are so many long-term things like this that are coming and are going to hit hard, but it's out of sight. It's out of mind. That's the next generation's problem. Why care about something that has no impact on you?

SPENCER: I think that people tend to see the other side politically as being the ones that are full of misinformation. A lot of dumb beliefs. But my perception is that both sides politically are definitely prone to misinformation, but they may not be the same types of misinformation. So I'm wondering, what have you observed with regard to the left versus the right and misinformation?

BRIAN: There's a really interesting study that I use in a lot of my presentations on conspiracy theories. Imagine, if you will, a chart. The left side of the chart is politically left, the right side is politically right, and down one side, the vertical axis, is a list of 100 conspiracy theories. Some you've heard of, some you may not have heard of. Some are fake that don't even exist. And then you look at where the plot is, and there's an error bar. So what you've got on this chart is a diagonal line going down from the bottom left up to the top right. The people on the far, far right believe these conspiracy theories. The people on the far, far left believe this other set of conspiracy theories. When you tell people which political party believes in conspiracy theories, without exception, they're going to tell you the opposite one of what they are. And then you show them this chart, they say, "Well, that's not a conspiracy. That's true. That's not true."

SPENCER: Have you observed any patterns, or what sort of conspiracy theories tend to be believed by the left versus the right?

BRIAN: Yeah. You can take the sentence, "the Koch brothers are responsible for all the evil in the world," backspace over the Koch brothers and type in George Soros, and you just converted a left-wing conspiracy theory to a right-wing conspiracy theory. My favorite example of this is that people on the right tend to believe conspiracy theories about the government being evil, but what we're seeing right now. "Too much government. Let's get rid of all of it." The moon landing was a hoax. That famous conspiracy theory was faked by NASA and Stanley Kubrick and all that stuff. That was a victory of the United States over the Soviet Union. Patriotic people tend to not accept that one because they like having the win of the US over the Soviet Union. Here is a conspiracy theory that is, in its most basic form, likely to be believed by people on the right, but they drop out of it because they like its patriotic aspect. So it is a rare standout of an anti-government conspiracy theory that is believed mostly by people on the left.

SPENCER: Oh, interesting. Yeah. So it suggests that conspiracy theories might support our pre-existing views about the way things operate. If you dislike the government, your conspiracy theories are going to be about the government being bad or evil. If you don't trust businesses, maybe your conspiracy theories will be about businesses being bad and evil.

BRIAN: Yeah, exactly. Are billionaires causing the problems, or are immigrants causing the problems? Well, neither, really, but those are two super popular ones right now.

SPENCER: I think something that trips people up is that there obviously are real conspiracies. You have terrible, real experiments that have been conducted on people. For instance, one of the really shocking ones, almost nobody knows about, is they once flew helicopters over the San Francisco Bay Area and dropped some kind of bacteria as an experiment to see how they could use bacterial weapons. Of course, the bacteria was designed to be harmless; they didn't want to hurt anyone. But then a bunch of people got sick and ended up in the hospital. It's not totally clear whether that was due to the experiment or just a weird fluke, but that's crazy.

BRIAN: I've never heard about that.

SPENCER: Yeah. Okay, give me one second. I'm going to Google this. Make sure I'm not making this up.

BRIAN: [laughs]

SPENCER: Yes, I'm not making this up. It's called Operation Sea Spray. It was in 1950. According to Wikipedia, the US Navy had a secret biological warfare experiment in which they sprayed bacteria over the San Francisco Bay Area.

BRIAN: Wow. I wonder why they used a bacteria that wasn't going to produce any effects. Because you'd think if they're just testing for, "Oh, how is it going to disperse in the atmosphere? How is it going to get into back alleys or out on the street?" If they were trying to answer questions like that, then you'd want to use something like a radioactive marker or something that you could detect. A bacteria is going to be pretty hard to detect where it ended up falling. So, yeah, I wonder what they were doing?

SPENCER: Well, I think they were studying bacterial weapons.

BRIAN: Well, yeah, but if you said the bacteria was inert, it wasn't going to hurt anyone

SPENCER: Yeah, I think I did misstate something about it, actually, now that I look at it. So it turns out it was from ships that they sent the bacteria from ships. So anyway, we've got scenarios like that, shocking, seemingly real. And you can find a whole bunch of very weird things that different governments have done, that businesses have done, that were super shady. You have, for example, the PFAs stuff. It seems like a bunch of people were actually poisoned by PFAs in the area where the factories were making it. Isn't that true?

BRIAN: I have not done that one.

SPENCER: Okay, all right, you gotta do it a few times.

BRIAN: I am very good about saying I don't know when I don't know something yet.

SPENCER: But in any event, these things really do happen. So how do you think about the difference between, "Well, conspiracies really happen. We should believe in some of them," and yet most conspiracy theories are false. I think that's a tough thing to keep in mind to actually hold that ambiguity.

BRIAN: Yeah, when you're talking about conspiracy theories, I think one of the things that, by definition, you're talking about false conspiracy theories. So I have always maintained, and I'm happy to be challenged on this, that no conspiracy theory has ever been proven true. And when people come to me with examples of, "Oh, here. MK Ultra, the government actually did these horrible things," I said, "Yes, but it was discovered by investigators, or there was a whistleblower, actually, and that brought it all out into the light." It never existed as a conspiracy theory because a conspiracy theory is a prediction that something is going to be discovered. I think this is going on, but it hasn't been discovered by law enforcement or investigators or reporters yet or whatever. There's no proof of it, and users think it's going on; you're making a prediction that it will be discovered someday.

SPENCER: So, was there never a case where something was a conspiracy theory? In other words, it was generally denied, and the accepted view was that it wasn't true, but there was a conspiracy theory that it was true, and then eventually was proven true?

BRIAN: That's the thing that I have not been able to find a case of.

SPENCER: That's actually really wild to think about. If that's really that hard to find a case.

BRIAN: This is one of the things we talked about when I was on Joe Rogan. I made that point on Rogan, and he, of course, challenged me on that because he thinks there are conspiracy theories everywhere, and they are all true. So I told his listeners, "Hey, here's my email address. Email me any conspiracy theory you think is true." I got, God knows how many thousands of emails, but it was all the Gulf of Tonkin, Tuskegee syphilis thing, all of these things, and not one of them ever existed as a conspiracy theory. They were all conspiracies that were discovered or they were known to be false from the very get-go.

SPENCER: Wow. That's really fascinating. Then you can do kind of a reference class thing and say, "Okay, if that's really true, and we don't have examples of things that were conspiracy theories that eventually proved to be true," then that actually gives you a reference class of saying, 'Hey, it's very, very, very unlikely that any new one will be true." Of course, it's not impossible. But it does put it in a reference class of extremely unlikely.

BRIAN: All predictions are extremely unlikely, predictions of that nature. So I think that's one reason, because conspiracy theories are, if you look at the ones that are in pop culture today, they're ridiculous and they're made up. They are not coming from evidence of anything; they're not consistent with the way we know the world works. So the fact that so many conspiracy theories are so goofy, the QAnon one, which I think is probably the most ludicrous of them all, that's part of why they never get proven true, because they're not plausible.

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SPENCER: I don't know if you've looked into this, but when you think of a case like Jeffrey Epstein, where it's clear that he engaged in incredibly shady stuff with a lot of powerful people, and there is a lot of ambiguity there, and that's unknown. Some people believe that he might have been murdered. Have you thought about that case?

BRIAN: Is prison a thing?

SPENCER: Yeah.

BRIAN: No, I don't do shows on deaths. I try not to on my show, and that's one that there's just not a lot to say. That guy by killing himself in prison. I don't remember how he did it. Did he hang himself? That's totally common, especially when you're going down for child molestation, which is basically what he was doing with the underage women. Child molesters get the living shit beat out of them in prison. You do not want to be in prison for the rest of your life as a child molester. So I probably would have done the same thing. I would have checked out too, if I could, if I was facing that. So it's entirely plausible that he would have killed himself. There's more reason to think that he would than that he wouldn't, and it's what all the evidence shows, and it's consistent with how prisons work. So what's the mystery here?

SPENCER: It's kind of ironic how conspiracy theorists missed an opportunity. Because there actually was an island where a billionaire was taking underage girls and having sex with them, and somehow they thought it was instead a pizza parlor that had sex trafficking in the basement, right?

BRIAN: Wouldn't they love to have known about that? That's one that you really couldn't call a conspiracy or anything, because it was openly known by many, many people. They may not have talked about it a lot, but look at all the people that went to Epstein's Island and everything, and all the famous people and people who weren't famous, all the people who worked there. There's a big infrastructure on that island. A lot of service people worked. There just wasn't anything secret about it.

SPENCER: I think a lot of people have an intuition that if something is known about it would get dealt with. Surely, if a bunch of people knew that Jeffrey Epstein had sex with underage women, he would have been brought down. But I think they underestimate how hard it is to bring down powerful people, and how few people are willing to take the risks to do so. The case of Weinstein is a similar example, actually, where, if I'm not mistaken, there was a famous actress who actually went on television, being asked, "Do you have any advice for young actresses in Hollywood?" She said, "Don't go into Weinstein's bedroom."

BRIAN: Oh, my God.

SPENCER: Or something to this effect on television. And then, fast forward many years until he finally gets taken down.

BRIAN: Did you ever hear the recording? Some actress was recording with her phone as he was trying to get her into his hotel room; she recorded their whole conversation. It was just absolutely disgusting. And how long did that recording exist before it got taken down? I don't know, but she must have played it for a lot of people. People probably advised her, "Hey, just bury that. Don't bring that out. That's not going to do you any good."

SPENCER: But if you think that people knowing will cause the thing to disappear, then you have to say, "Oh, there must be some super secret conspiracy." It's like, "No, actually, something can be known and be horrible and just keep existing." Which is tragic, but that does seem to be the way the world often works.

BRIAN: Or Bohemian Grove. Alex Jones thought that he was blowing the lid on this big secret society up in the redwoods. 10,000 people attended that every year, and there was never anything secret about it. So what did he think he was revealing? I've got a cousin who's gone every year for 30 years. It's not a secret, but it just gets misrepresented, and now he presents it as if he has uncovered this big conspiracy of wealthy people getting together in the woods to discuss global destruction, or whatever he thinks wealthy people do.

SPENCER: I heard this story about a billionaire that's a friend of a friend, and the billionaire was like, "I wonder if the Illuminati were true." And so he set out to join the groups that he thought might be the secret group ruling society. And he joined it, and then he's like, "Oh no, it's just a bunch of old men who are self-important, talking about things." That's it. It's pretty boring stuff.

BRIAN: When I was about 20 when I first heard of the Freemasons. What you hear is that they secretly control everything. So I tried to find some way to join the Freemasons so that I could be one of the few elitists controlling the world.

SPENCER: Did you do it? Did you succeed?

BRIAN: No, I don't remember how it works. You either have to be invited or you can't be invited, and you have to ask to join. I didn't know anyone, so I was trying to locate Mason lodges in the phone book. Remember phone books?

SPENCER: I have a friend who's a Freemason. They're still kicking around. They still have lodges, although I don't know how much they're really doing these days.

BRIAN: As far as I know, they have a scholarship and send a local student to college each year, and that's about the extent of what they do in my experience.

SPENCER: One thing that really baffles me is Alex Jones, and why so many people watch him. If you just watch his show, it's almost straight misinformation. It's unbelievable the rate at which he spreads false things. How do you make sense of that? Why do people want to watch that?

BRIAN: He appeals to bro culture. It's the same reason that Rogan has this huge audience, because Rogan has an appeal to bros, the alphas of the world. That's his demographic. He appears to have all these incredible, amazing guests who are the world's experts on everything. In many cases, he does. But what that causes is the perception that anyone who's on his show is therefore an expert. Some of the people who are his favorites, like Graham Hancock, everything the guy says is false. All of a sudden, he has a reputation for being this great, heroic archeologist. When you're watching Alex Jones, he has the exact same kind of appeal. He appeals very much to people who feel that they are tough and badass, but everyone is against them. They're dissatisfied with their lot in life, so they want to be told that here's how you can take power back from those who are making your life awful. I think that's a large part of Alex Jones's appeal. He empowers the audience.

SPENCER: Do you think some of these folks are on kind of a schizophrenic spectrum, and they're just not perceiving reality, and yet they're persuasive and charismatic and interesting to listen to, and some people just get swept up into their delusions?

BRIAN: Yes, absolutely. I don't like to give names, but there are some that I have worked on on my show that clearly have some sort of delusional disorder. Some are legitimately schizophrenic, and some, like Alex Jones, know exactly what they're doing. Alex Jones does know what he's doing. He is weird, don't get me wrong, and he probably does believe a lot of that, but he knows exactly what his show is and who he appeals to and why, and he plays up that angle very well. If there's someone I feel is legitimately mentally ill, I'm not going to do a show on that.

SPENCER: Unfortunately, some legitimately mentally ill people have huge audiences, which is quite disturbing.

BRIAN: It really is.

SPENCER: Mentally ill in the sense that they're having trouble distinguishing reality from non-reality, is what I mean.

BRIAN: That's certainly a mental illness, and there are many different types of that. There's a guy here in Bend who is a podcaster and who is well known to the mental health community. He has schizoaffective disorder. My ex-wife was a licensed marriage and family therapist here in town. She worked at an office where this guy came in all the time, and he was very well known to the whole community as being definitely a dangerous kind of wacko. His podcast has an audience. It's got a decent-sized audience.

SPENCER: You have a very successful podcast, and I definitely recommend the listeners check out Skeptoid. Do you ever feel frustrated when you see essentially pure misinformation? I guess they're more popular than yours.

BRIAN: All the time, all the time. It's so easy to make a really cool show when you're not limited in what you can say.

SPENCER: You can literally say anything.

BRIAN: Yeah, yeah. All the paranormal Podcasts are more popular than Skeptoid, and they don't require any work to put them together. Skeptoid, it's a short show. It's like 15 minutes, and it takes a full week of research and writing for every single episode. There's probably more actual work and research put into Skeptoid than any other podcast. On the one hand, it's nice, but on the other hand, it's an awful lot of work, and sometimes I wish I'd picked a model that was a little bit easier to manage, easier to produce.

SPENCER: Well, you're trying to say what is true, and that is really complicated, especially across many domains. One day you're going to cover UFOs, another day you're going to cover climate change, and another day you're going to cover ghosts. Essentially, you have to investigate every single topic.

BRIAN: Yeah, you have to be very much a generalist, and it's hard to do that well. I sometimes feel that, since I'm not a working scientist in any particular field, that gives me a bit of an advantage in being able to more quickly grasp fields that I know nothing about, because I don't want to say I don't bring biases to it, because it sounds like I'm suggesting scientists are biased, but they do see everything through the lens of what they know best, as most people do. I feel I get away with a little bit of an advantage in that.

SPENCER: I really appreciate how you do correction episodes where your listeners write in when you make mistakes, and you do these episodes to correct those mistakes. I think it's fantastic, and I think more people should do that.

BRIAN: Very popular. Everyone has that feedback for me. My advice to all podcasters is to do corrections more often because your listeners will really appreciate you for it.

SPENCER: One thing I wonder about: have you ever had an episode where you feel like you fundamentally got it wrong? I don't mean it was just that the facts were slightly off, but that the whole gist of the episode was in the wrong direction.

BRIAN: Not once the episode comes out, but when I'm doing the research, that happens a lot. What I figured I was going to find turns out to be completely not what I was going to find. That's one thing I love about doing my job because I surprise myself all the time, and I find out that my preconceived notions were way off, and that's an exciting thing for me. In fact, people ask me this so often that I did a show just about the examples of times that I went in with the wrong idea. It ended up being a hard episode. When I did the Flight 19 in the Bermuda Triangle, the famous five airplanes on a training mission that just disappeared. The story is that they were reporting that their instruments were going crazy and everything. It's been dramatized a million times. Well, I did an episode on what actually happened with that, and I expected it was going to be some weather thing or something like that. I was more surprised on that one than just about any other episode. The whole thing was caused by the flight leader, the trainer, who was with the five planes. He was in one of the five planes. He was a terrible navigator. He was so wrong about where they were. They were off the east coast of Florida, out over some of the islands out there, and he thought they were over the Keys southwest of Florida. He was the one that flew them out there, and he was that wrong about where they were. He said, "Okay, we got to keep going east to get back to land." All the pilots were saying, "No, sir, you're wrong. We got to go west." But they didn't have the choice to not follow his directions. So they all flew east until they ran out of fuel and all ditched in the ocean, way out to sea. I was astonished to find that the cause of that was that simple and that comically tragic. This guy was such a bad navigator that twice during World War II, he had gotten lost in his fighter plane and had to ditch. But he was rescued both times, and they put him in charge of training guys.

SPENCER: Wow, who knew the explanation was just such a level of incompetence? It's hard to fathom.

BRIAN: Here's another fun one. There was this thing called the Bell Island Boom. You ever heard of that?

SPENCER: No.

BRIAN: So, Bell Island is this island off of Newfoundland, and in the late 70s, I don't remember exactly when, there was this incredibly loud boom that everyone on the island heard. Nobody had any idea what this could have been. They used to have mining going on under the island, so they said, "Oh, maybe some explosives went off down in the mine," or whatever it was. Some people said, "No, it was this crazy, weird kind of lightning that's super rare." I thought, "Okay, well, it's obviously not going to be that; we're going to find that it was some kind of, you know, a boiler explosion or something." It turned out to be that lightning is a lightning superbolt, they call it. That's a case where I went in having heard what I thought was a fringe explanation that I was sure I was going to be able to dismiss easily, and it turned out to be the true one.

SPENCER: Wait, so there's such a thing?

BRIAN: Yeah.

SPENCER: Wow. I never heard of that.

BRIAN: One of the things that kind of made this a conspiracy theory was that people were talking about, "Oh, it was the government doing a test of a secret weapon." That was one of the leading fringe theories, that it was something that Nikola Tesla had invented. It was some giant explosion out over the ocean. Some government scientists were snooping around and asking people questions and stuff. People were going, "Oh, these men in black were here. That proves that it was some government test." These government scientists were guys who monitored the Vela satellites. I think there were two of these satellites looking for Soviet nuclear tests, and they had learned about lightning superbolts because these satellites were the first to detect it. Scientists were going, "Oh, wow, what's that?" Then they started learning about it. When they heard that one of these had just happened on this island, they said, "Oh, shoot. We got to go out there and see what happened." They found one barn that the lightning had hit, and they were able to firsthand examine the damage and the type of damage that it did, which was pretty substantial. It was really cool. One fringe explanation was true, and it disproved another fringe explanation.

SPENCER: Hmm, that's fascinating. It seems like Nikola Tesla is just a magnet, so to speak, for these conspiracy theories.

BRIAN: Yep, poor guy [laughs]. No one's name has been abused as much as his.

SPENCER: I think I called him Nikolas. It's Nikola, isn't it?

BRIAN: Nikola, yeah, probably a different pronunciation than that, Nikola, I don't know. A lot of times when people challenge me, people will come across my website, or they'll hear an episode and they'll send me this big, long, rambling email about how wrong I am about everything. They will almost always say in these emails, you should research Nikola Tesla.

SPENCER: I bet you spend a lot of time reading about Nikola Tesla.

BRIAN: I did a whole episode on the things that have been falsely attributed to him that he never actually did. The current feeling now is that he never actually invented a single thing.

SPENCER: Really. Is that actually true?

BRIAN: Apparently, so. The last thing that anyone thought he invented was the radio-controlled boat, the little toy boat that he went radio controlling around in a pond. Then it turned out that someone had done that the year before. So that took that last thing away from him. Everything that he's associated with, the alternating current and all that stuff was already happening in Europe, and it just had not been patented in the United States yet. That's why, when he came to the US to work in Edison's factory, he brought a whole bunch of stuff with him that he was ready to develop and patent. Unfortunately, he handed a lot of that to Edison, just because of the way patent law works. If you're developing this as an employee, it belongs to your employer. That's when he left and continued patenting things in the United States that had actually been developed and already patented in Europe.

SPENCER: Would you say he was a brilliant guy or more of a grifter?

BRIAN: He was. Here's what I say, he was 10 years ahead of his time, 75 years ago. Nothing that he did that long ago is magical or mysterious or we can't recreate today. Nothing. He was also definitely a little bit of a loony bin. I don't remember if anyone has ever tried to diagnose what his mental condition was, but he was definitely delusional. His apartment in the hotel where he lived in New York was, the government sent people to go through that, to see if they could find anything that actually was useful. It was just full of the craziest, nonsensical stuff. He definitely went loopy at the end.

SPENCER: Now, I'm quite sold on your mission. I think it's actually really important to try to fight misinformation, but I think a lot of people have a view, "Well, why does it really matter? So who cares if people are incorrect about the Bermuda Triangle or what Tesla's inventions were?"

BRIAN: They'll say grandma believes her dog is psychic. Okay. What's the harm in that? No one's being hurt by her having that belief. Why are you shooting her down? Why are you taking away her psychic dog? Who's paying you to do this? I just say misinformation can be harmless, or it can be very, very harmful, but we adopt misinformation of any kind with the same faulty thought processes. So it's important to point it out wherever it is, even if it is something as silly as grandma believes her poodle is psychic. Because if you believe that, or if grandma believes that, she's going to believe the next weird thing, and it might be that she shouldn't go to the doctor for her cancer. Misinformation all leads in a harmful direction.

SPENCER: I guess you could also say that encouraging thought processes of critical thinking help prevent grandma from believing her dog is psychic, but they also help you make incredibly important decisions for your life. Who to trust, who to vote for, what medicine to get, and so on.

BRIAN: Yeah, exactly. I always say that the reason it's important to understand what's real and what's not is because that lets you base the decisions you make in life on sound data, on sound information. Therefore, your decisions, all of them, are going to be better.

SPENCER: I don't know if you're aware of this, but the Telepathy Tapes became, I think, the most popular podcast in the world, temporarily. Do you know about this?

BRIAN: Telepathy Tapes?

SPENCER: Have you heard about this? Yeah, it's basically a podcast about how some autistic children are telepathic.

BRIAN: Okay, no, I've never heard of this.

SPENCER: Yeah. My understanding is it beat out Joe Rogan, as it was part of my podcast temporarily. Yeah. So it seems like this stuff kind of rises and falls. Telepathy, I feel, was really popular many decades ago, and then you didn't hear about it for a while, but then it comes back. And then we need people like you to be like, "Wait, hold on, we've already gone through this. Telepathy is not real."

BRIAN: Everything's cyclical. UFOs were big in the 70s with Chariots of the Gods and everything, and then nobody cared about them for a long time, and then all of a sudden they came roaring back. So who knows what's going to come back around next? And everyone's going to start believing the next weird thing.

SPENCER: Let's talk about UFOs, because obviously it's been in the news. You've had Congress talking about UFOs. There's been all these sightings in New Jersey. And it's interesting, I think, partly because it's not in principle ridiculous. The universe is really huge; it's not so crazy to think that there might be aliens out there somewhere.

BRIAN: Well, that's a different question.

SPENCER: Right. So what's your thinking on UFOs as a phenomenon?

BRIAN: Yeah. So First of all, I am much more optimistic. I tend toward the optimistic end of the spectrum. I'll phrase it that way for people in the science community regarding their estimation of how likely it is that there's life in the universe. I have one astronomer friend who is absolutely convinced there is no life anywhere in the universe except Earth. I think there's life everywhere. By far, the majority of people I've spoken to are in agreement that there is life everywhere, of all kinds, throughout the galaxy. Then the question is, can it get here? Can any of these civilizations, which probably exist, ever visit each other? That is universally answered with a "No." There are people who will look toward these very fringy speculative science fiction ideas, like wormholes and stuff like that. "So, let's talk to an expert on that. Here's why that's not possible." The astronomer friend I mentioned who thinks that there's no life anywhere, let me tell you about the theory he embraces, because I find it really interesting. Have you ever heard of the grabby robots theory?

SPENCER: Oh yeah. But why don't you repeat it for our audience?

BRIAN: It came out in the 1970s, I think some guy or a team of people may have published something on this. The idea is that since the universe is so huge, there are so many billions of stars, billions of exoplanets, billions of galaxies, that anything that is remotely possible is therefore inevitable. Does that make sense mathematically to you?

SPENCER: It depends. If it was infinite and there were no configurations that were prohibited. So, every configuration is eventually going to happen over and over again, then yeah, that does make sense.

BRIAN: It's the monkeys on the typewriters. Anything that might possibly be written, if they have infinite time to do it, will inevitably be written, which has actually been disproven, but that's another subject. Anyway, this idea is that one of the things that some civilization might do is build self-replicating robots to go out and explore the nearby planets. Once they get there, they would use the resources on that planet to replicate themselves and send new copies of themselves out, and so on. I remember that the model predicted that a civilization like this would eventually be expanding at the speed of light. If anything that is remotely possible is inevitable, that means this must have happened, but since we can look around and see that it hasn't happened, we have not been consumed by these self-replicating robots. That means there is no life anywhere. It's kind of a logic thought experiment. I am not persuaded by it, but I do think it's really interesting.

SPENCER: Yeah, I see the logic. I also am not quite persuaded. There are a few too many assumptions in there, but it's definitely interesting to think about. It's not so crazy to think that if you had sufficiently advanced alien life that was taking over planets, it might be able to send out scout robots in all directions to find the next planets.

BRIAN: That is the point where I think it breaks down, because that's the big assumption of interstellar travel. The energy requirement for interstellar travel is simply too big. He was talking about Oumuamua, the long cigar-shaped asteroid that flew through our solar system a few years back, and the absolute crackpot of the physics community, Avi Loeb from Harvard, has made a career off of saying that was an alien probe. Taking that as a concept, if a dumb rock — because it's probably just a dumb rock, an asteroid that came from another star system — can travel between systems, then a smart rock can — that was his point — a smart rock is something that can wake itself up when it arrives and start doing its thing, whatever it needs to do to self-replicate. I disagree with that because I've done enough work to know that you can't expend zero energy; you have to always be expending some energy in order to have a mechanism that can wake you up. The timer has to be running, and something has to be powering that timer. The energy requirement for even doing that, I think, is always going to be impractical.

SPENCER: I know there are hypothetical systems like, "Okay, what if you could capture particles in space? Even though particles are not very dense, if you're going very fast, you do catch particles, and then you could use fusion to turn them into energy." It's obviously getting incredibly speculative.

BRIAN: Yeah, there are lots of great science fiction ideas, but I don't think any of them hold up in the practical sense. Energy requirements are just huge for that kind of thing. To take something from one civilization to another star system when there is a much easier and cheaper option, and that's simple radio communication, sending electromagnetic energy from one star system to another happens all the time. That's why we see stars, because we are seeing electromagnetic signals. You can transmit messages back and forth. Yeah, they're going to take a century to get there, but that's a way to have meaningful communication with another alien civilization. We haven't had it yet, but that's because we only invented the radio about a century, 150 years ago. I'm not exactly sure, but it's just a blink of an eye in an astronomical time scale. Give us 1,000 years; I think it's more likely we might start hearing things.

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SPENCER: It's weird to think about the fact that once we started broadcasting radio communication for the first time, it's expanding in a sphere around our planet, and there could, in theory, be aliens that eventually could catch those signals. But it might take a really, really long time to get there. Now, of course, it loses energy because it's spreading across the sphere, so maybe by the time it gets there, it's too low energy to be detectable. But it is fascinating to think that eventually it could hit an alien civilization that could pick up on it.

BRIAN: Even lasers, you think, well, if we aimed a laser just right, it could make it all the way there without diffusing. But we can't make lasers that don't diffuse; they still diffuse, and it would probably be undetectable also. But power radio with a nuclear explosion, I don't know. I'm sure we'll figure out stronger transmissions. Nature certainly has.

SPENCER: I think people underestimate just how big the universe is, how far apart it is. Even if you knew there were aliens a few solar systems away, it would be really hard to get there.

BRIAN: The distance is a huge problem. But there is another problem that very few people think about, and that's being synchronized in time, being temporally synchronized with another civilization. I talked about this in my last movie, The UFO movie, and I call it the Christmas tree problem. If you imagine a Christmas tree with blinking lights scattered throughout the tree, think of each one of those as the lifespan of a technological civilization. Each time a light is on, that's a technological civilization going through its life and then blinking out when they eventually come to an end. If you imagine that Christmas tree, you can see that having two lights be on at exactly the same time that are right next to each other is much less likely. Even though you might have two lights blink on near each other, they're probably going to be out of sync. That's another problem; even if we could overcome the distance problem, that civilization might have disappeared a billion years ago or might not appear for another billion years. That temporal synchronization is also another reason it's vanishingly unlikely that any technological civilizations will physically be able to ever visit one another.

SPENCER: That's really interesting to think about. Do you think that the ideas from relativity help with any of this? Because in theory, if you accelerate and get closer to the speed of light, time will move slower in your reference frame relative to other reference frames, and therefore you could take, in theory, a really long journey without the perception of so much time passing.

BRIAN: Yeah, that is super interesting. I was talking about this with a physicist, and I got out of my depth quickly, so I almost immediately lost the thread. I had no idea what they were talking about, but I said, "Can't you get in a rocket ship, or some spaceship with some kind of power and accelerate at 1g? Can't you do that for as long as you want to?" I said, "Well, sure, if you have enough fuel, you can accelerate at 1g." Well, sit down and do the math. If you're just talking about classical physics, you can get there in a couple of days. If you can accelerate at 1g constantly, it's not going to take you long. You're going to be passing the speed of light very quickly, and you're going to be going 50, 100, 1000 times the speed of light in a classical physics model. But of course, the universe does not work on classical physics. It works on special relativity, which would come into play and would complicate things, and you would still never be able to get there because it takes an infinite amount of energy to accelerate anything with mass to the speed of light. Even though, from my reference point, I'm going faster than that because I can calculate I've been accelerating at 1g for a week now, in fact, it's not possible, and so my perception is completely off. I have no idea what someone watching me would see. This is where I lost the thread when he was trying to explain.

SPENCER: It's funny, because real physics actually sounds completely crazy. If you were to explain an idea about quantum mechanics or time dilation or length contraction in relativity to someone 50 years before those theories were invented, they'd think you were completely off your rocker, like you've lost the plot. It's actually fairly hard for someone who knows nothing about this to differentiate those theories from nonsensical theories.

BRIAN: Yes, in fact, it's a huge problem doing this kind of science communication, especially when you're talking about aliens. What does every person say? They say, "Whoa, the aliens are smarter than us. They've figured out solutions to all of these problems." Yes, they can engineer things better than we can, but they can't change the laws of physics. We have direct observational proof that the laws of physics have always been the same throughout the entire universe. That's proven, that's observationally proven, it's predicted, and the predictions are confirmed by observations. It's really hard to talk people out of that. To say, "No, the aliens can't go faster than light. No, the aliens don't have wormholes. They don't have warp drives. They haven't figured out those things." They can probably engineer great things, but that's it. They can't change the laws of physics, but it's super difficult for people to understand.

SPENCER: Yeah, and I agree that they obviously can't change the laws of physics. Though, I will say we know we don't have the final theory of physics yet, because we still have contradictions in our current theory. So it is possible aliens figured out some bigger, broader theory that's sort of the true physics that might allow for things that we currently don't see as possible.

BRIAN: I don't agree, because we have the fundamentals down pretty darn well.

SPENCER: Some of the things we can rule out pretty well, but we know there are certain gaps that we don't and we don't quite know what is in those gaps.

BRIAN: Well, yeah, but they say sciences are like an onion. I hate that analogy. An onion has all the layers. The middle of it is really thick and solid. That's the core knowledge, the basics, the fundamentals of a science. Think of that as the middle part of the onion that's very solid. As you go further out, it gets more flaky. You've got the fringe theories, speculative theories, and leaves that are just flying off the onion. That's where the changes have always been made in sciences, kind of out in those fringe areas, never in the fundamentals. We've never been fundamentally wrong about basic stuff since the invention of modern science. We've never been fundamentally wrong about that. You can't go back in history and look for examples of, "Oh no, gravity actually goes up, not down." Those are the kinds of things when you talk about the holes in the standard model and things like that. It's that fringy stuff. I think it's really unlikely to think that we're going to find a core fundamental of the way the universe works is fundamentally wrong.

SPENCER: I think I agree in some domains, but not others. If we think about Newtonian mechanics, which worked really well for a long time, it still works in many domains. From that lens, you would say, "There's no way to alter time, like time just ticks along, one second per second." Then we introduce relativity, and we're like, "Oh, wow, time is not actually something that's fundamentally always the same and can actually be warped. It can be warped with mass, for example." Prior to that, we would have thought there's no way to change time. Suddenly, "Oh, wait, time is not the sixth thing that we thought." I think there are certain things that could be fundamentally altered with new theories, whereas I agree that there are other things that are extremely unlikely to change.

BRIAN: This is an abstract conversation, but when Einstein came out with relativity, this was a theory to explain an observation. The most basic way that science works is you have an observation, and you come up with theories to test it. Before that time, we didn't have those observations. We didn't know anything about radioactivity and stuff like that. We did not have observations of it. So the science didn't yet exist. You can't really say we found it to be wrong.

SPENCER: The other thing to say is that some of our observations almost certainly are never going to change, what any theory is going to have to explain those observations. But sometimes there can be weird stuff we didn't know was possible. For example, before the invention of quantum computing, there were things that quantum computers could do that scientists would have said are actually impossible until they realized the potential of exploiting the wave functions of subatomic particles. It just hadn't occurred to anyone that that is a thing that the universe was capable of.

BRIAN: I remember someone explaining it once, a really elegant little example. He just took his hand and hit it on the table. He said, "Okay, you know what just happened? Your hand is a bunch of atoms held together by electromagnetic magnetism. That's why it feels like a solid object. The desk is a solid object for the same reason. Those two things just struck each other. You heard the sound. Sound waves did this." But if you go deeper and deeper into all of the nuances of what just happened, there is going to be stuff in there that we don't know about. How did the quarks interact with one another when that contact happened? But again, a hand hit the table. It didn't go through the table. It didn't do something that's fundamentally against our knowledge. Just because we don't know everything yet doesn't mean that we don't have the basics of just about everything.

SPENCER: There are a number of things that are sort of locked down now. We already understand so well that it's pretty hard to concede that they could change at this point.

BRIAN: People will always talk about spooky action at a distance entanglement. That was new; that overturned things. No, it didn't. We didn't have the observations of that yet to explain this. It's another case where science simply didn't yet exist. But entanglement is super limited in what it can do. You can't communicate over long distances with it. You can't use it for any kind of passing of information. That's a fundamental law of the universe, and there is no way that you can make that happen. I did an episode just about that, and my god, the feedback I got, "No, you're wrong. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, here is how entanglement works, and it does not work the way that you've heard it works from Joe Rogan."

SPENCER: I feel people tell me I'm wrong fairly often, but you must just get a thousand times more people telling you you're wrong because you're touching on these topics that people are really confident about and telling them, "Nope, you're mistaken."

BRIAN: It's also a fundamentally negative mission to tell people that they're wrong. The basic description of a Skeptoid is, I find things in popular culture that a lot of people believe that aren't true, and whether this is an urban legend, a conspiracy theory, or a paranormal claim, or whatever it is, I know going in that just saying, "This is wrong, blah, blah, blah," is not a good show. No one wants to watch that. But if you can say, "It didn't happen this way, it actually happened this way," that was even cooler than you thought. So that's the way I always try to go about any topic, and you can find something that is much cooler than what anyone thought about just about everything. So yes, I do get people telling me that I'm wrong a lot, even though I'm really trying hard not to make the show about that. But here's something that I've learned about human nature from doing this show: people don't hear what you say. They hear what they want to disagree with.

SPENCER: You think they're looking for things to disagree with?

BRIAN: In so many cases, yeah, especially when they come into something with the expectation that this is not, you know, "Oh, he's just a debunker. He's gonna tell us that grandma's poodle isn't psychic." So as soon as you start talking, when they have that attitude, when they're listening, yeah, they just hear things that I didn't say, that I don't agree with, but they misheard it because they wanted to hear it. They wanted to disagree with it.

SPENCER: I feel, to some extent, that the skepticism movement has shrunk and that you're one of the last vanguards of that movement. Is that true? Is there less skepticism out there now?

BRIAN: It certainly had its peak. When James Randi was in the latter stage of his life, he was really the one who made it a popular thing, and it was not an uncool thing then. With the passing of Randi and the closing of his foundation, and the Amazing Meeting no longer being around, it's really lost its rallying point. The community of people who were into scientific skepticism has lost a rallying point. CSICon largely picked up that baton with their annual CSICon conference, but we just had the last one. I guess the next one is going to be in two years in New York or somewhere, and then they say that's going to be the last one. So it's effectively over. Yeah, we actually do talk about at Skeptoid, we actually do talk about whether we should pick that up and start having an annual conference. There are very few people that could do it. The Center for Inquiry is one. They've just stopped, and we're probably about the only other one.

SPENCER: Yeah, well, you're doing that. You're doing the world a service. I never really counted myself among the skeptics, and I think it's mainly because I've always been much more interested in how to figure out the truth about new things, rather than trying to investigate things that people already believe. Does that make sense?

BRIAN: Yeah, but I'd say you're exactly describing the skeptical process. If someone says there's a ghost in their house, that would be a new thing.

SPENCER: Well, that's true, yeah. But I really appreciate the work of discoveries. I think it's really important. Occasionally, I'll dabble. We did run a study in astrology, and that might be the time that the most people were angry at me simultaneously in my entire life when we put out our study in astrology.

BRIAN: I did my episode on astrology a long time ago. Twitter was in its early days, and I don't remember how I did this, but I made some kind of poll or something that you had to retweet or quote. This is how I was collecting data from a large number of people, and it went viral in a very bad way. It clogged up every follower of mine. Their whole feed was completely clogged with all of these votes, and a lot of people unfollowed me because of that. It made Twitter completely unusable. Just because of the way Twitter worked, you saw everything. There was no algorithm filtering out what you saw or didn't see, but that was kind of funny.

SPENCER: Yeah, I think there's this unfortunate truth, which is that negative things tend to get more attention than positive things. If you tweet about how something is great, it's just not that likely to get a lot of attention. But if you say, this thing sucks, this thing's trash, this thing's wrong, it tends to get amplified a lot more.

BRIAN: Yeah, and that's another cause for the question we started with: why is misinformation so prevalent? If you're any kind of content creator, coming out with something sensational and attention-grabbing is what's going to make you a successful content creator. Whether you're making movies, TV shows, or series on the streaming networks, you want something that's sensational, and the easiest way to do that is just to make stuff up. Thus, we have aliens.

SPENCER: It's the asymmetry. It's just easier if you're telling lies. It's just easier to go viral, it's easier to get attention, it's easier to be interesting than if you're trying to tell the truth.

BRIAN: That's why I'll never go out of business. I'll always have a job.

SPENCER: Before we wrap up, one thing that I appreciate about your work is that you don't do it in a kind of mocking or condescending way. At least you seem to try to avoid that. I imagine that was a conscious decision. Do you want to talk about that?

BRIAN: In the very, very early days, I kind of did, especially in my listener feedback episodes. I'd read emails people sent in, and I just basically made fun of the stupidest emails. This was in, we're talking 2006, 2007. Enough people got back to me with the message. Loyal listeners would email me and say, "Hey, you know, that really wasn't what you're about. That's making fun of people." Because in this episode, you talk about the importance of empathy and the importance of not making fun of people, and how humans are the best part of any story. If you celebrate what was interesting about those humans, even if they were a weirdo or whatever, that's what makes a show good. Eventually, I finally took that advice, and I came out with a feedback episode. I just started it with a little preface. I explained it's not going to be like any of the feedback shows I've ever done before, turning a whole new page on that. I went back, and I didn't take those episodes out of the feed, but I did cut out the worst parts, so I cleaned up the website a lot. I definitely hold myself to standards. Our company values are on the homepage of the nonprofit's website, skeptoid.org. It's a different site than the podcast. We all try to follow those values. They truly do guide our decisions. In fact, just yesterday, we were talking about something in one of the ways our software works, and we decided, "You know, that's not how we do things. We don't cheat or take the easy path just because something's going to be easier to do it that way." To put out that kind of content, you really have to live the model.

SPENCER: One thing I think about with regard to that is, don't you want to reach the people that are most wrong? If you're mocking, if you're sending your turn, those people away, sure your core audience might enjoy it, but it really does prevent you from changing minds, I think.

BRIAN: Absolutely, it does. I always want to have a big tent. I always feel great when I get an email from someone who says, "Hey, I'm a super conservative Christian, and I really appreciated the way you handled that show on the myth of Nazareth, or whatever it is." Conspiracy theorists, former conspiracy theorists, email me all the time and say, hey, it was your show that changed my mind. They wouldn't have listened to the show if it was going to turn them off right away. So, yeah, it's important to the way that I've found success without being sensational and making stuff up. That core value has been very important to the way I've found success.

SPENCER: If we think about critical thinking education, it's something that I try to engage in by teaching people about the methods of critical thinking, and you engage in it by showing the sort of applications of critical thinking. You're applying it in specific cases, but there is a significant contingent of critical thinking content that feels to me like dunking on other groups. I really doubt the effectiveness of this. You can find lots of YouTube channels like this that are all about just how dumb Flat Earthers are, or something like this. They're entertaining and they're supposedly teaching critical thinking, but I actually think it misses something really fundamental, which is that critical thinking only works if you apply it to yourself. If you're just saying how dumb other people are, that's not critical thinking.

BRIAN: I've always said that those shows are important too, because there are lots of different kinds of people, and they all respond to different types of styles of communication. Remember, Adam Ruins Everything was a comedian who did this really fast-paced show that was full of fun little jokes and stuff that reached some people. Penn and Teller: Bullshit was another different style and that reached some people. My show reaches some people. The shows that are snarky and make fun, those reach some people too. So the more approaches there are to doing good work, I think the better.

SPENCER: And I agree different approaches are helpful. I just worry that when there's such a high level of treating the other side as an idiot, it rubs off and...

BRIAN: It makes us all look bad.

SPENCER: Yeah. Also, it makes the listener feel elevated, like, "Oh, this is just something that idiots believe," rather than thinking, "No, I could have false beliefs," Because, to me, the key aspect of critical thinking is that you need to apply it to your own beliefs. If you just imagine you're incredibly good at pointing out rhetorical fallacies and cognitive biases, but only in other people. No, you have to then direct it at yourself and say, "No, this applies to me too. I need to ferret out my own false beliefs."

BRIAN: I catch myself not doing that a lot, and I'm talking about on the show, but just in my daily life, I catch myself not doing that. I think that's a pretty good accomplishment in itself, that I catch myself and I'm able to stop it and change it. That's just a result, I think, of thinking about this all day, every day, for how many, 18, 19 years?

SPENCER: Absolutely. I think often that's what good critical thinking looks like. It's like you notice that you are about to engage in bad thinking, and then you're like, "Oh, wait, whoops, okay. I got myself." It usually doesn't look like you just never have cognitive biases or fallacies, etc.

BRIAN: Yeah, I'm always fascinated by the question, "What am I wrong about?"

SPENCER: It's such a great question.

BRIAN: It's something, but you don't know what. It's not for everyone in the world to be right about everything they know.

SPENCER: Even though we know we're wrong about a bunch of things, it still feels like each of our beliefs is correct when we think about them individually.

BRIAN: One of the talks I would give, I'd have people come up on stage a lot, and one of the questions I'd ask them was, "what's something you're wrong about?"

SPENCER: That's a much easier one. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really love chatting with you.

BRIAN: This has been a lot of fun for me too. Yeah, thanks a lot. It's a good time.

[outro]

JOSH: A listener asks: "What is your opinion of social media and of X or Twitter in particular?"

SPENCER: I think social media is very heterogeneous. I think the effect on a person of using TikTok three hours a day is very different from the effect of using X or Twitter three hours a day, which is very different from using Instagram three hours a day. Additionally, I think the dose matters; using it 30 minutes versus three hours is a big difference, and using six hours is an even bigger difference. I guess what I would say is that certainly there are ways in which social media can make us more polarized. On X, you can see people promoting the worst ideas of the other side or promoting things in the most inflammatory way possible, and so that can be a problem. On the other hand, it can be a great way to learn what's happening in the world, hear about ideas you've never heard before, or just get entertainment. So even within a single platform, you can have heterogeneous experiences, where some people are into this corner of Twitter that's all just getting angry all the time, and they're seeing things that fill them with rage, while other people are discussing philosophy. Not to say that that's the norm on Twitter; it's certainly not, but you can find that there. So I think basically we can't say social media is good or bad. We have to say, "Which social media, how is it being used, and how much are you using it?"