Paul and Rich talk conspiracies: Where they come from and why people keep going in for them. Paul pretends to be a guy named Jeff who is falling into QAnon. They talk about where conspiracy thinking comes from, what to do, and how to handle Christmas Dinner.

Rich.

Hey Paul.

Let's imagine my name is Jeff, okay.

Uh hey.

Hey, Jeff.

Hey, how you doing?

I'm a young guy.

I'm, I'm in my twenties

I, oh, I might have a college degree, I might have an associate's degree,

and I have a job and I have friends and I go to work, et cetera, et cetera.

And

I've been reading stuff on the internet.

I've been watching YouTube videos, and I'm coming to you as my advisor,

as the Audi and Ford advisors.

Okay.

And I gotta tell you, like I grew up, went to church.

My dad used to read the paper.

He watches a lot of Fox News.

Gotta tell you that.

Man, my friend's been sending me these YouTube links and it's about how there's

all this stuff going on in the world where, where these, these people kind

of run the world and they, they go, I can't remember what it's called, like

Bohemia and Grove and, and the Illumini and which I know is like a joke.

Jeff, how are you doing?

I'm alright, man.

I, I don't know, my girlfriend broke up with me, so there's like

a lot going on in my life, but,

Mm-hmm.

I have, I, I just like get online and like, you know, I play Call of

Duty for a while and then, know, ding and somebody's like, check this video out.

And

Mm

head is like all scrambled man.

mm.

don't really know what, what to do.

Jeff, let me think about this for a bit and call you back tomorrow.

Okay.

Okay.

Paul,

Hey Rich, what's going on?

I just spoke to your cousin, Jeff.

He's not doing too great.

There's a lot of weirdness going on in the family.

I, I don't know what to say to him, so I was kind of hoping you could help him out.

Yeah, I mean, I, I think he's heading down, uh, a

path and it's actually leading to.

A subject that I've done a ton of thinking about because it, it, it really

confused me when it first kicked in.

I would say 20 15, 20 16, where it really started to ramp up.

And that is just how conspiracy theories take hold.

Um, did a lot of reading, did a lot of kind of thinking, and I wanna share a

framework on how to spin up a wickedly strong adhesive viral conspiracy.

Wait a minute.

That's exactly the opposite of why I wanted you to talk to my cousin.

Yeah, but let's, let's see if we can get to your cousin

before he falls too far into the hole.

All right, so you're gonna make me an evil conspiracy.

I'm gonna tell you the, the ingredients necessary, the recipe, Paul,

for a good solid conspiracy theory.

First thing, you need the subject, the target.

Let me call them a target for a moment.

Jeff.

Uh, it isn't in a great place either.

Didn't come from a great place, meaning difficult family background, just a

rough environment such that, you know, there's also the person's individual

psychology, but such that things aren't great and they're seeking.

A clarity or a bit of an explanation on why their situation

isn't great, why they're stuck.

Um, lemme put it that way.

Um, can you be well off?

and comfortable and fall into a conspiracy theory.

Absolutely.

it's a context that can come out of anywhere, but a lot of

the time it's vulnerable people.

And when I say vulnerable, I don't mean fragile and delicate, I mean

susceptible to conspiracy theories.

So it sounds like Jeff's not doing super.

He told me that his girlfriend just broke up with him.

Um, I think he's been at the same job for a while.

Jeff's doing okay though He is.

Xbox.

He's got a car, he's got a nice apartment.

Okay.

a

wait, wait.

Xbox Series X or the old one?

old one?

All right.

All right.

We're starting to see things here.

All right, now . Okay.

Look, does that lead to you falling into a conspiracy theory?

Theory hole?

No.

Does it?

Is it a component?

Yes.

You have to be open and vulnerable to it to take it in.

Now, Jeff gets on the.

and the internet is ready to feed you whatever you're willing to

kind of meander towards, right?

Like there, it's not mainstream.

In fact, the fringes are fascinating places on the internet and there

are a lot of bad places and there's a lot of things that get shared

that, um, there's an explan.

For why he's in the situation he's in and why the world is the way it is.

By the way, it doesn't have to be personal.

The world's scary man.

We can see it warts and all these days, every bit of it.

And so you want explanation and the internet will give you the why and it'll

speak in authoritative terms, right?

It'll speak in absolute terms.

let me, let me say two things to respond to that.

So one is, I like to listen to old radio programs, especially old news programs.

Something about it really appeals to me and when you listen to a news

program, regular c b s evening news

It's just,

War ii.

it's like wreckage everywhere.

It, it's just, well, 10, we, we don't expect more

than 10% of our pilots to die.

Yeah, yeah,

news.

yeah.

The bad news is that Poland has been destroyed, right?

Yeah.

human, there are precedents.

We just happen to live in an era of unprecedented, calm and prosperity in

the West, while that stability is not equally distributed around the globe.

And I think what's happening is just more and more and more is surfacing and

you're starting to see the tensions.

People blame social media, and I think this is my second point.

There is a reality which is that you used to have to, if you wanted to be into a

conspiracy back in the day, you'd, uh, send away for things from the back of, of

Yeah,

get them mailed to you.

it, it was hard to get the raw material like

you

Yeah.

you wanted to share your thoughts, you had to make pamphlets,

photocopy them and hand them out outside of Tower Tower records to

people who would make fun of you.

Right, right.

what?

to broadcast back out to the world.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the fundamental mechanism.

Sure.

The internet makes publishing and sharing stuff a lot easier,

or making your own YouTube

fundamental mechanism is seo because

Yeah.

in the words.

Runs the world, right?

And

yes.

engine will say, well, you know, most people think it's

the un, but, and then, you know,

Yeah.

that, that one wrong link.

That the, the search engine

Or, or it got shared with you, like Jeff's been

getting links from his friends.

It just takes that one buddy at work or that one guy who you love.

You both love Call of Duty, right?

Yep.

Yep.

boom, here

Alright.

So the, the, the, the tools are out there, right?

There's mechanisms to share information.

There's always somebody ready to write up a, you know, a crazy theory about

how, why the world is the way it is.

But then it's back to Jeff and there's two key ingredients, key

components to Jeff buying in, right?

The first.

It's psychological and it's a phenomena called aia,

Okay.

Afinia, that's my fear of dropping my iPhone.

incorrect.

But you shouldn't try to drop your iPhone.

You shouldn't drop your iPhone.

Yes, that is incorrect.

Paul.

Um, there's a great article by a guy named Reid Berkowitz.

It's on medium, it's called A Game Designer's Analysis of QAN on, right.

And I thought he was gonna like take down QAN on bit by bit and instead he.

Shares a lesson or actually a, a pitfall that he's learned as a game designer.

I'm actually gonna read you a paragraph In one of the very first experience fictions.

experience.

Fictions are a type of game where it's kind of open world and you, you

sort of nudge the user along the gamer along, but it's kind of open, right?

One in one of the very first experience fictions I ever designed,

the players had to explore a creepy basement looking for clues.

The object they were looking for was barely hidden and the clue was easy,

like it was scuba do Scooby Doo easy.

I definitely expected no trouble in this part of the game, but there was trouble.

I didn't know it then, but its name was Afinia.

Afinia is the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningless

pa, meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things.

as the participants started searching for the searching for the

hidden object on the dirt floor, were little random scraps of wood.

How could that be a problem?

And what he found when he was testing the game is the gamers kept looking

at patterns in the scraps of wood and saying, ah, look, that's an arrow

pointing to the wall on the left.

And they would get stuck.

And meanwhile, this guy's designed the whole world just outside the door.

But everyone felt a connection.

It felt a, a, I'm gonna say dopamine hit that they had found

something and connected dots.

Look, humans are pattern finders.

As you're saying this, I'm suddenly reminded, I had a friend 15 years ago

and I, I believe this story, okay.

He was hanging out with somebody at a bar his a coworker, and

then he went home and he is.

He lived in a tiny one room apartment and he threw his coat on the bed.

At which point the coworkers single blonded hair fell into his pillow.

Eh, that's life

But then his girlfriend came over.

She was a brunette a long blonde hair on your pillow,

And he had a very good explanation.

It happened to be true, but she was looking for that pattern at

that phase in their relationship.

was not gonna let that go.

Well, it's interesting.

It's one of the, the hallmarks of a good, a good conspiracy theory is you put the

burden on the other person to disprove it.

He was founding himself that the burden of proof was now him trying

to explain that it's not true

me a blonde hair magically appeared on your.

I mean, it probably took some work.

It probably took some work.

So,

It, it did.

Yeah.

And so that, that sort of satisfaction of finding those

patterns, it's, we seek it out.

It feels really good to connect the dots where no one saw, everyone just

saw a bunch of dots, but like, watch this, I'm gonna connect these dots and

it's gonna make the shape of a unicorn.

That's satisfying.

But there's another component to it, and that's also fueled by the

internet, which is there's a social.

Dynamic, which is when you share that pattern that you matched back out into a

a group of people and they validate it.

An incredibly strong bond is created because they share

this common understanding.

If it is the most rapid fire way to create a belief system, religions need

hundreds of years to create belief systems and you can do it in the most

efficient, rapid way possible, so, okay.

I solved something.

Scooby-Doo style, and I've found a group of people who are

validating and building on it.

By the way, one of the hallmarks of QAN on is it, it's like it's fractal.

People just add stuff to it and they say, of course, add it to the diagram.

Right?

Why?

Because that is you effectively validating and contributing back

into that little community, right?

And it's, it's very,

Here's what's tricky and here's where it's hard to advise Jeff.

a continuum.

I, I'll give you an example.

You're a religious person.

I am not.

We both

Mildly, and I don't go to church, but yes,

I, I, I believe in something.

Okay.

I don't.

And so like you would think.

I don't know.

You have a set of beliefs that are really different from

mine and in that one regard.

Right?

And like,

Right.

don't know.

I I'm never gonna try to convince you otherwise or vice versa, like, so that,

It's not, it's not tearing us apart.

It's not tearing us apart, and it seems to be that

Yeah.

relationships with just about anybody, including

people who don't share your

Mm-hmm.

we can all be in the same club now.

I don't go to church with you when you do go to church,

regardless, I grew in church.

All good.

Now

Hmm.

a little further.

I grew up at one point.

My family went evangelical and that church was way more insular.

People, outsiders were not as

Hmm, hmm

that church and

hmm.

minister was really the center of everybody's life.

Okay.

But even there, you're still going to the store, you're still seeing friends.

You might be talking about weird stuff at

People are different.

We accept our differences.

You're part of the community, but now we go a little bit further, right?

And I'm gonna like, I'll fast forward all the way to the end,

which is I spend all my day trying to prove that Sandy Hook was a hoax.

Like there was a profile of a woman who does that, and it, you read it and you go.

that's the worst person in the world.

She is.

She is cruel and she believes something that is reprehensible

she is brutal to suffering people

Yes.

is no good reason for it.

Right?

Right.

so like, where do we, how do we talk about this stuff then?

Because there's all kinds of conspiracies.

Democrats believe things, Republicans believe things

Hmm

each other that actually point to conspiracies.

Yes.

Republican, you think Democrats are sitting around

a table planning to, to, to

Sipping blood.

and they're, they're going to add gender

Yeah.

water supply,

Yeah.

just like you get into

So we're all, we all have our own conspiratorial biases.

Situate me in there, like, where, where does this begin and end for you?

Where, where does this become a problem?

Why do you and I get along and accept our differences

where if you try to even approach the, the rational, irrational

discussion with a, like a, a conspiracy theorist, it's pretty ugly, right?

And here's the thing, the more bizarre and crazy it.

, right?

The more powerful, the defensiveness and the backlash that comes out the other way.

Why?

Because it's actually.

When it's crazy, it's fragile.

It's actually quite delicate.

Right?

And, and it feels like if you just take that one peg out of

the big giant structure, the whole thing will crumble, right?

And so there's this intense defensiveness, this, this in, in, in intense, uh,

need to protect and actually go on the offensive to protect the, these theories.

I, I mean, I, I don't wanna judge yet another religion, Scientology, but it's,

it's known for like, Hiring private investigators and like chasing you down in

real life if you try to go astray, right?

Because they're defending, frankly, a set of constructs that are i'll,

I'll go ahead and say it a little.

Banana cakes, right?

Like, and so how do you keep that together?

You keep it together by being insular and being very, very

protective and defensive about it.

people believe all kinds of wacky things.

When I walk down the street, I look at people and I go, there's a 70%

chance You think wizards are That is just walking down the street.

Yeah.

are real Scientology.

I'm like, all right.

It's no wackier than anything else.

As a stone cold, atheist, everybody believes, I, I think everybody believes

in weird stuff, but Scientology wants to get you on that boat.

They wanna put you on that that

put you in.

International waters

And that, that is where

jurisdiction.

I don't like religions that are like, Hey, if you really

want to get into this thing, we're gonna need your bank account.

We're gonna need your wiring

gotta get on this

get on the boat.

So,

don't put me on a boat.

There's another key component to what I'm saying here.

Why is what's different and what's different is if you are centered and

you, your identity is strong and is pretty together, you don't need this

externality, a conspiracy theory or some organization to define you

really good conspiracy theories.

You internalize them, you take from the group and it becomes part of who you are.

Like I am.

Lebanese by birth, an American citizen, Eileen left.

Um, I, uh, I'm Catholic by, you know, by birth, et cetera, et cetera.

So I have these things that I identify as part of my identity.

Good conspiracy theories, really effective ones.

You don't just buy into it, it becomes part of who you are.

And so when you're telling someone that's bananas, you're essentially saying you

are bananas and you are incomplete.

You are not an entire human being, and that is terrifying

Hey Rich it's Jeff

Hey.

Hey Jeff.

How are you doing?

You said you'd call me back man Um look I don't know I went

I you didn't call me back So I went and showed my family some of the stuff

I'm watching on YouTube and my dad like turned off Fox News and he's like

now yelling at me and he says I don't know I think he's out of it and like

he thinks I'm losing it And he's like you can't watch that stuff anymore cuz

Hmm.

was telling him about banking and he's like you don't

know anything about banking and

Well, mean, wait

gonna be messed up

Wait, what's wrong with banking?

Jeff?

What about banking?

Well it turns out that there are certain groups of

people who control all the banks And I I was just trying to like

You mean bankers?

No not bankers Uh uh Anyway can we move on

Jeff, there's this, there's this YouTube channel that I like that

I, I know you've been on YouTube a lot.

It's called Channel five.

It's, it's this guy named Andrew Callahan.

What's great about this channel, Jeff, is he is not yelling at anybody.

He's actually let, he's just hearing these people out.

And what you're gonna find if you watch a few of these is, um, a certain

pattern around people who are actually in a lot of pain in a, in a really

tough place cuz they're feeling really alone cuz they've bought into a lot of

theories and they're feeling like the whole world's kind of bailing on him.

Families are getting torn apart.

Um, and it's pretty rough.

Um, and, and I think what's great about it is that he doesn't explain to them

why they're, He doesn't ever do that.

He just sort of lets him talk and I think you could, you can kind of gain some

perspective here if you check these out.

Um,

right I'm gonna go watch him I I like YouTube and that makes

alright, I'll talk to you later.

Paul, I have a question for you.

Y go for it

We just explained how these things come to.

How people get fall into the hole.

How do you get 'em out?

This stuff is tearing families apart.

I I like your idea of Hey go watch Channel five Here's why I I explain

things sometimes for a living and I don't think in 20 plus years I've ever actually

convinced anyone of anything I've merely

given people

ever.

for real Like I I've given people information

that they can use

So you can't talk him out of it.

You can't say, man, what are you doing with Get off the internet?

This is crazy talk.

Does that not work?

No no one's been convinced of anything And I think in fact if you

say You're outta my life and I hate you for what you believe you actually

reinforce that They go well that there you go That's what it's like out there

People people are so scared of the truth that my own family won't talk to

me anymore because they're so scared

Right.

It just gets worse and worse.

So Christmas dinner, what do you do?

They're coming over.

I've watched a family that's close to me go through this through

qan on and through Trump and through all the stuff and people were at

each other's throats for a long time

Hmm.

I'm seeing it calm down People are starting to get together for Christmas

That's okay.

can you have a drink together Can you just let them

and then go for that's it

Yeah.

can do

Yeah.

and if you look on like the reddick groups for for people who

are trying to get their families outta QAN on or you look at historically

culty programming it doesn't work

Yeah, it takes a long time.

Yeah, it

it's built in It's like asking someone to stop being a

University of Michigan Wolverines

I think.

To build on what you're saying here, I think this is less about them

believing in a bunch of stuff and more about how much they invested in it and

becoming a big part of who they are.

And I think one of the things they fear, one of the, it's just terrifying, is

that, oh my God, I'm gonna be an empty shell of myself if you take this out.

If you actually unplug this part, I have to start over.

And that is scary and terrifying.

I don't think people actually they don't think that way let me let me do

it this way Paul You can no longer use a web browser right You you love technology

No more technology for you You get to write with pencil and And use a landline

phone and I'm gonna go that is so boring I would really not enjoy that That seems

Okay.

Fair, fair.

what you're saying You're saying all the things that stimulate

excite and connect you to your peer group and let you feel that you are in control

of the world For me that's technology Like that's what technology is for All

those things are gonna get taken away from you uh because I think they're

not good for you And you know what that person's gonna do They're gonna say

they're gonna put their middle finger up

Yep.

to

Yep.

Um,

So it it

give them a Paul.

Just give 'em a hug at Christmas dinner.

I mean

it's good to see you.

the the contemporary ideology is that you should only

scream But no I'm still of the opinion that kindness and respect as well as

saying I'm really sorry you believe

Mm-hmm.

I find it really sad

can say tough things You can say tough things and they won't care And that's

Yep.

can represent yourself as a moral person you can also just go Hey

I love you and I hope this works out.

I have one piece of advice and it's not for young people or people

who are bought into conspiracy theories or who are on terrible websites.

You know who it's for.

Paul,

Tell me

the people that are influential, that are

influencers, journalists.

Publishers, uh, people who are savvy with social media.

Um, I, I think over the last seven, eight years, people, um, understood

these mechanisms really well.

They kind of come out of marketing, like really good, savvy viral

marketing, and they leverage them for political gains, for, um, for

other, for monetary, uh, gains.

And I, I think, We do have a choice and we do have, um, uh, I think

we can do better in terms of how manipulative we can be with these tools.

Right?

And, and it doesn't need to be that way.

We ha we had a president that won based on that exact playbook.

Um, I'm not even getting into whether it's a good or bad person or whatnot,

that is a marketer who learned how to manipulate lots and lots of people.

We can do better.

but but let me throw this back at you I actually think we

are I think you know you know what you don't hear a lot about anymore

Hmm, hmm.

You hear seems to have gone you know what we're gonna turn the

dial down We're gonna just no more of these bad ads We're gonna get rid of

Yeah,

And so the

it does seem calmer, right?

It does seem calmer.

are calmer Let's see what happens with the next presidential

election You do hear a lot about Twitter where everything you

just described it seems like Elon Musk is doing the opposite and

I mean, he, he, yeah, he picked up the playbook, right.

And he un knows exactly what he is doing.

And, and, uh, here we are.

Um, I, I don't, I'm not gonna get into whether it's bad, good, what the

rationale or reasoning is behind it, but that's clearly the same playbook.

It's hard to deny.

It's not the same playbook.

It is, maybe we should just give up and start a conspiracy.

How about a conspiracy that says that if you eat blueberries,

you're gonna be a happier person.

Why can't we have that kind of conspiracy?

You know, there's no reason why not.

I'm gonna go downstairs and see if I have any blueberries.

Go eat some.

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Have a lovely week.

Take care of each other.

Bye-Bye.