Transcript Now Available: The Lure of Conspiratorial Thinking

Why do otherwise rational, intelligent people fall for conspiracy theories—and how can we tell the real ones from the truly irrational? 

In Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, Michael Shermer presents an overarching review of conspiracy theories―who believes them and why, which ones are real, and what we should do about them. Returning to Objectively Speaking, Shermer is no stranger to The Atlas Society, having joined us previously to discuss his book Giving the Devil His Due, a tour de force in defense of free speech from a scientific humanist perspective. Watch the interview HERE or read the transcript below.

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JAG: Jennifer Anju Grossman

MS: Michael Shermer

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JAG: Hi everyone, and welcome to the 295th episode of Objectively Speaking. I'm JAG, CEO of The Atlas Society. I'm so excited to have returning guest Michael Shermer join us today to talk about his book, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. Michael, thank you so much for joining us.

 MS: Nice to see you, Jennifer.

JAG: Yes, and I am very excited to announce that as of two minutes ago, Michael's going to be speaking at Galt's Gulch in San Diego and talking about his next book. His most recent book. Here we are approaching our 300th episode of Objectively Speaking. I remember when we had you on five years ago for our 31st episode to discuss your book, Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist. I hope we'll have you back on to discuss your very latest, Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters. So, yes, a good friend of The Atlas Society for a very long time. 

As Objectivists, of course, productivity is a virtue we prize and you certainly embody it more than most with well over a dozen best selling books, your podcast, your quarterly Skeptic magazine, your weekly Substack column, and teaching university courses for over 30 years. Two questions. How do you manage to do it all and still, as you said, find time to goof off, and which of your many, many pursuits gives you the most fulfillment?

But academia also, as you've heard, has gotten pretty crazy with the whole woke, far left, progressive, DEI, trans, all that stuff. I fought the good battle as best I could.

MS: Interesting. Well, first of all, I'm not in academia anymore. I retired from Chapman University two years ago. Basically my contract was up and I was tired of driving 140 miles each way from Santa Barbara, so. . . . But academia also, as you've heard, has gotten pretty crazy with the whole woke, far left, progressive, DEI, trans, all that stuff. I fought the good battle as best I could as a Presidential Fellow there, but there's only so much you could do. I find I could do more if I'm writing and doing podcasts and things like that. I don't miss that, that's for sure.

The magazine. Well, here's the latest issue, Skeptic, we still publish that. We started in 1992. Here's volume one, number one, check it out. Isaac Asimov on the cover. There he is right behind me here. That's the original artwork, the way it used to be done in the old days. I have a good staff of people that help with that. Most of the articles are written by outsiders looking to find a voice which we provide for them, and then the podcast grew out of the fact that I was reading. I enjoy reading books: mostly nonfiction, new science and engineering,history, philosophy, economics, and so on. 

I thought since podcasts came online and I'd done Rogan a bunch of times, I thought, well, I could do this. I could talk to these people. These are people whose books I would read anyway. I thought this would be sort of like having this guy over for dinner or this woman over for lunch, and I get to ask her questions about her new book, right? But I could do it with a microphone. I'm here in my studio and the technology is so good now and it's virtually free. Anybody could buy these mics for a couple hundred bucks on Amazon. It's not hard putting all that all together.

Do you know the lottery test? If you won the lottery, how would your life change? Mine pretty much wouldn't change at all.

In my case as a writer and editor, I've been doing it for so long that if I don't do it, I feel a little anxious, sort of like working out. I work out every day. If I don't work out, I feel a little anxious that I should get out there and move. If I don't write every day or edit something I feel a little off like, hey, come on, I should do my thing here. I enjoy it. So for me, it was fortunate to find something that I like doing. It's not really work. Do you know the lottery test? If you won the lottery, how would your life change? Mine pretty much wouldn't change at all. Well, I shouldn't say that I would fly private, let's put it that way, that I would indulge in it. But I don't own a yacht or a plane or any of that stuff. Flying private would be nice, but just riding my bike and hanging out with my friends and family and doing my writing stuff, I would just do that anyway.

JAG: Well, your journey from door-to-door evangelizing to founding Skeptic magazine is fascinating. Did that early phase of strong belief in the supernatural help you understand why rational people sometimes believe in irrational things?

MS: Oh, absolutely. Yes, because I became a Born-Again Christian in high school, 1971, when I was in 11th grade, at the behest of my friends who were all doing it. When you're that age, you don't really know much about anything. I just did it for fun. But then over the years, I took it pretty seriously. I went to Pepperdine University in Malibu. I was a member of the first graduating class, 1976, of Seaver College there in Malibu. There I was in the circle of everybody there is a Christian. It's a Christian college, Church of Christ. That's what they do. I took the whole thing in. 

By the way, everybody was reading this cinder block of a novel that I was pretty intimidated by. It's there on your shelf. I finally got around to reading it after graduation. I thought, oh, this is pretty good. I should have read this in school anyway. But then I went to a secular science program, experimental psychology graduate program, and no one was religious, or if they were, it didn't matter. So I realized you don't really need religion to take an interest in all these different topics and exposure to other ways of thinking about the big issues. Free will and determinism, and God's existence, and consciousness, and why there's something rather than nothing, and good and evil, all that. Everybody was talking about these issues without being Christian, and I thought, oh, okay. So there's a different worldview. Lots of different worldviews. I tried a bunch of them on, and eventually I just gave up on the Christianity part and just dropped it. I wasn't an evangelizing atheist or anything like that. That wasn't even a thing back in the ’80s. 

Now when I debate a theist or talk to a paranormalist or whatever, I totally understand what they're thinking because I was there. I believed what they're telling me.

Then, I was a bike racer at the time. I started Race Across America and did that for a decade. Then when we started Skeptic in 1992, the whole science and religion thing came online. First with creationism. The teaching of creationism in public schools was a big culture issue, and science and religion became an issue. So I took the side of science more or less against religion, although I've softened up a bit in my older age. But that gave me perspective. Now when I debate a theist or talk to a paranormalist or whatever, I totally understand what they're thinking because I was there. I believed what they're telling me. This is what I used to say. So it makes me more empathetic, I think, to know where this guy's coming from. When he says X, I understand it. That helps a lot.

JAG: Well, speaking of the paranormal, I can't not ask you about the haunted transistor radio.

MS: Oh, good wedding day right here. Yes, that's right. Here it is.

JAG: Well, tell us what happened and whether that at least—

MS: Hey, let's see if we can get it. Let's see if we can get it to come on. Nah, it's not coming on. All right, all right. Well, yes, this is an ofttold story I wrote about in Scientific American and got a lot of interesting emails. These are under the category of weird things that happen, anomalous events that don't have natural explanations. Probably something with the radio coming on randomly had to do with some speck of dust or something inside. But it was dead for decades. It was my wife's grandfather's radio. She did not have a father. She was raised by a single mom. So, the grandfather hung out with her and they used to listen to this radio. Then he died. 

It's okay to enjoy these weird, quirky, anomalous events that happen without creating a whole worldview of grandpa's there in the bedroom with us now.

Anyway, then she met me and decided to come to America and shipped me the radio along with all her stuff. I tried to get it to work. Wouldn't work. Then, on our wedding day, it came on. It was just in the back of the house. We just did a wedding at our house and it was playing this perfectly tuned, beautiful romantic music. And it was just a special moment for us. I wrote about this and said it's okay to enjoy these weird, quirky, anomalous events that happen without creating a whole worldview of grandpa's there in the bedroom with us now. No, no, no. Yes, that would be weird. Okay, that would be weird.

JAG: That was pretty remarkable. And to have your skepticism kept intact is also impressive. Obviously, The Atlas Society, we are a philosophy organization. We embrace Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. I'm curious, which philosophical tradition do you consider yourself most aligned with?

MS: I mostly call myself an Enlightenment Humanist. Now, I like the term which I got from Steven Pinker in his book Enlightenment Now, but really it's just secular humanism or scientific humanism, whatever, it's humanism. That is, the central tenets are: there is a reality out there to be discovered; this is not all relative; there is a real right and wrong for most things and we can know something about these issues empirically and rationally and so on; and we can derive from that right and wrong, rights, and so forth, as well as what political and economic systems work best using empirical and logical reasoning, and so on. So that's pretty much what I embrace. I am an atheist technically, but it's not important to me. It's not like there's an atheist worldview that I adhere to. I object to that because being an atheist just means I don't believe in God, full stop. But that doesn't tell you what I do believe. 

Von Mises gave a talk. He wrote something in the 1950s about the anti-communists and he scolded them saying it's not enough to be anti-communists, you have to be for something. What are you for?

Why do you believe in rights or why do you believe in democracy or free market capitalism? That has nothing to do with atheism. The fact that the Soviet Union was atheist or whatever is irrelevant. We're not talking about any of that. We're talking about positive things. I took this early on when I read von Mises gave a talk. He wrote something in the 1950s about the anti-communists and he scolded them saying it's not enough to be anti-communists, you have to be for something. What are you for? People can't get behind an anti-program. Right? I always took that to heart like, okay, we are not anti-religion, we're pro-science. If you want to be religious, fine, but we're pro- science and reason and rationality, and the fallibilism: we all could be wrong, and realism: there is an objective reality out there.

JAG: That sort of thing sounds like a close cousin to Objectivism.

Why don't liberals like Ayn Rand? I find this astonishing because—they call it identity politics, right?—she ticks all the boxes: she's a female, she's an immigrant, she's pro-choice, she's part of a minority: she's Jewish. On and on and on, she ticks these.

MS: It is very close. I was influenced, again, I read all of Rand's works. I thought Atlas was the best by far, but her nonfiction books were fairly clear and influential on me. It's always been. I'll ask you this because I ask everybody that has any connection to Ayn Rand this question. Why don't liberals like Ayn Rand? I find this astonishing because—they call it identity politics, right?—she ticks all the boxes: she's a female, she's an immigrant, she's pro-choice, she's part of a minority: she's Jewish. On and on and on, she ticks these. Some heroes of her novels are women running major corporations. Liberals should love this, but they don't. That makes me wonder. It's not identity, it's politics. More important. But what do you think?

JAG: Well, yes, not only that, she's pro-choice on the abortion issue.

MS: Yes.

MS: Some get her anti-racism.

JAG: I had written about this, actually, in my Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Can You Love God and Ayn Rand?”, in which I was just remarking upon how many religious people in my network were huge Ayn Rand fans. I said that I think one of the reasons that she makes people on the left, their heads explode (at least primarily here in the United States, she doesn't have that same stigma overseas), is number one, because she's so effective. Ed Crane, a cofounder of the Cato Institute, called her “the greatest all time recruiter for the liberty movement.: Making that portal, that intake center, radioactive has strategic value. 

But I think the other thing is that she refused to say that the impulse to collectivize, to move in a socialist direction came from lofty ideals. She severely criticized Hayek when he said that they have good motives. She had a very different perspective. I'm sure it was somewhat informed by her experience seeing the Bolshevik revolution and her father's shop “get liberated for the greater good.” She said that she believed that it was more likely to be motivated by envy, entitlement, resentment, victimhood, and just sometimes pure nihilism. I think that by refusing to allow the left the moral high ground, that really earned her a forever bad mark in their book. That's my working theory, in any case.

The characters in her novels, the good ones, are highly personally responsible for their own actions, and the evil ones are not. That's a central tenet that goes against a lot of modern liberalism, or at least progressivism, in which they claim that no one's really responsible, society made you do it.

MS: I would add one thing to that, that is personal responsibility. The characters in her novels, the good ones, are highly personally responsible for their own actions, and the evil ones are not. That's a central tenet that goes against a lot of modern liberalism, or at least progressivism, in which they claim that no one's really responsible, society made you do it. That people who hurt people are hurting. You hear these lines, a blank slate-ism. Criminals are victims of their society or their race or their gender. It's the patriarchy, it's the capitalists doing this to you, it's the colonialists. It's this horrible background of slavery and colonialism that made you do these things. They really shun personal responsibility. That's why they're mostly determinists. They don't believe in free will. They go strict determinism. You didn't choose to do anything. I think her strong take on personal responsibility irks a lot of people.

JAG: Yes, and then there's just the whole postmodernist framework rejecting that there is an objective reality, that there is truth and that we can empirically pursue it, and that instead there's only lived experience. Yes, there's a lot of places where I think a leftist would find her pretty challenging. But I think she would have really enjoyed your book, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. In your prologue, you write, “The problem of today's conspiracism is urgent, arguably more pressing than at any time in our history.” That's quite the statement. What has led you to that alarming conclusion? Is it polling data, violence born of conspiracy? What's going on?

MS: Well, all of the above there. My general work is that people act on their beliefs, so what they believe really matters, which is why the truth matters. Because if you hold a false belief, then you may be acting on what you think is rational, when in fact it's not. There's an underlying rationale, but you're simply wrong. I think a lot of moral acts that people do suicide terrorists or murderers or whatever, we know that 90% of homicides are moralistic in nature. The people, the murderers, think the other person deserved to die. They're mistaken, but for the most part, a lot of these conspiracy theories that people hold are not true, but they think they're true. 

Most conspiracy theories that people hold, they really believe. So therefore, whether the conspiracy theory is true or not really matters.

That's the subtitle, Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. There actually is an underlying rationality. If you really believe, like January 6, if you really believe that the election was being stolen and the boss says we're going to all march over there to the Capitol, he did say peacefully, and so on, but come on, people get riled up, they get upset, they're mad, they think something bad is going on there.  Or Pizzagate: if you really think there's a pedophile ring being run, you’re going to go in there and break it up, because that's a terrible thing. Most conspiracy theories that people hold, they really believe. So therefore, whether the conspiracy theory is true or not really matters.

That's why getting to the book, I made a distinction between conspiracy theories and conspiracies. Conspiracies are real. It's not irrational to think some of them might be true. Right? Some of the theories might be true. Watergate and Iran Contra, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, a lot of the CIA shenanigans in the 1950s and ’60s of rigging elections in South American countries because the fascist dictators can do business with our companies better than the socialist dictators can. A lot of that stuff. MK-Ultra, the spying on of US citizens, civil rights activists, all the way up to Martin Luther King Jr. being spied on. His sex-capades were recorded by the FBI so they could blackmail him. There's hundreds of examples of what the US government did to its own people. When somebody says I think Sandy Hook was a false-flag operation or whatever, it sounds completely crazy: Alex Jones kind of stuff. But if you start to look at real conspiracies in US history alone, it's like, oh well, that's  pretty crazy stuff.

JAG: In your prologue you also quoted Hannah Arendt, who in her 1951 book the Origins of Totalitarianism observed that quote, the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi nor the convinced communists, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exists. Again referencing what I talked about, has the spread of postmodernism, the rejection of the concept of an objective reality in academia and elsewhere, contributed to this epistemological crisis?

The idea that anyone that thinks any conspiracy theories are real has to be crazy, that's not true. They're not crazy because a lot of them are true.

MS: It's made it worse. We know from polling, early, early polling data and also some other interesting studies before that, that conspiracism has always been around. You just talk to historians; all the way back to ancient Rome, there were conspiracy theories about what people were doing. That was certainly the case in the early Republic: what the British were really up to in the colonies and so forth. It got worse after the Second World War in the 1950s, the creation of the CIA. Then a lot of this idea that conspiracy theories are just crazy and anyone that holds one is a crazy person. I debunked that showing, in fact, a lot of conspiracy theories are true. It's not irrational to believe some of them are true. Floating the idea that anyone that thinks any conspiracy theories are real has to be crazy, that's not true. They're not crazy because a lot of them are true. Right? 

Then, after the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, the acceleration and spread of conspiracy theories that were always there but the speed at which they travel now is so much faster and wider, really begins with the self-made-film Loose Change. That 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration, right? This was just made by a college kid with his Apple laptop in his dorm room. It was nothing. It was seen by tens of millions of people. This was unheard of. That launched everything. As I like to say, JFK-assassination conspiracists used to mimeograph off these little newsletters and hold their meetings in a hotel room with 12 people. Now they have websites with tens of millions of people following them. That didn't used to happen. It's the delivery mechanism has changed.

JAG: Well, I can't believe we've already gone more than 20 minutes. I want to take a few of these audience questions before we go too much further into the book. MyModernGalt has a question that I'm curious about as well. He's asking, is there a study behind what kind of people or personality type is especially prone to conspiratorial thinking?

People that are highly open to experience but low in conscientiousness tend to be more open not just to conspiracy theories, but to everything, the supernatural, the paranormal, all kinds of weird ideas.

MS: There are some studies showing some people are more gullible than others. You could tag it to the big five. Openness to experience and conscientiousness. People that are highly open to experience but low in conscientiousness tend to be more open not just to conspiracy theories, but to everything, the supernatural, the paranormal, all kinds of weird ideas. Being highly conscious, being open-minded is good. But also being conscientious about evidence for your beliefs could keep some of that in check. 

Another component is power. Who has it, who doesn't. So, as they say, conspiracy theories are for losers. Pretty much every losing political party in an election thinks the other side cheated. This is very common. So, what Trump did in 2020 about the rigged election, there was nothing new in that. Hillary did the same thing. He just has a much bigger platform, so it was much more prominent and lasted longer than it usually does because in 2016, after he won the election, he was still saying it was rigged. It's like, you won. Conspiracy theories are for losers, not winners anyway, so there's some of that. 

Most people also tag outsiders. So whoever the outsiders are in history, that's usually the Jews. One reason for why always the Jews, there's many multiple reasons for this, but one is the Diaspora. They've been the outsider everywhere for thousands of years, and so they're always suspected of causing a disease or an accident or an economic collapse or anything. They get blamed for everything. That's pretty common. Insiders think the outsiders are doing it. 

Then, the element of fear. If you're a highly anxious, fearful person, you're more likely to buy a gun. But you're also more likely to think you need a gun because people are up to no good, even if they aren't.

Then there's an up-and-down component. The people down here think the people up there, the people with money, the people with political power, they're up to no good. Studies show that most super rich people and most politicians have less power than the average person thinks they have. They have more than you and I do, but not as much as we think they do. Bill Gates simply cannot run the world like people think he is. No one can. Right? So there's all of that. Then, the element of fear. If you're a highly anxious, fearful person, you're more likely to buy a gun. But you're also more likely to think you need a gun because people are up to no good, even if they aren't.

JAG: All right, Lock Stock and Barrel asks, how do we deal with the issue of two people looking at data and interpreting different results? It does seem as if, even if there is an objective reality, it can be hard to agree on what it is.

MS: Yes, well, that's a super good question because that's what science is all about. It's a signal detection problem. Is it a hit or a miss? How do you know what's true? What should I believe, what should I not believe? What happens when we're all looking at the same thing, and you say this and I say this, right? Just think of the videos of—what's her name? Good—Renee Good’s death in Minneapolis. Within days you had people looking at the exact same video clip saying, you can clearly see here, she ran him over; you can clearly see here, she never touched him. It's like, we're all looking at the same thing; what are you talking about? But, eventually when there was other camera footage and other eyewitnesses and you get a convergence of evidence, most people think this is what happened, not that over there. That's a good window into how science works. 

There's always data. People are always arguing about data. It's not just the data. Is there a consensus amongst the experts that this is the likeliest explanation and that one over there is less likely in a Bayesian way? Not true with a capital “T.” But just 90% confident or 40% confident, whatever it is. How many people are in that direction or this other direction. When there's no consensus, then we probably don't really know the answer to it. Now, this has gotten worse with social media. This is why we have to consume more than one source of media. Independent journalists are great, but they don't have a lot of fact checkers or none. I don't trust the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, so I read them both plus half-a-dozen independent journalists and The Free Press and all these. You should. You have to. You have to consume a lot to see what most people think. That doesn't make them right, but at least it gives you some confidence in a claim. That's a hard problem.

JAG: All right, well, in the book, you describe a study conducted by your colleagues at Chapman University on what Americans fear the most. What were some of the most surprising findings?

MS: Yes, let me pull that up here. This was by my colleagues correlating fearfulness and conspiratorialism. Let me just pull this up here. Chapman. I don't have it here. Okay. Darn. Let's see. I think I have the data here. Well, for example, people that think there's more conspiracies going on are more likely to buy guns. Or people that buy guns are more likely to think there's really conspiracies going on. Let me just read a few of these here for you. You gave me this, too. I should have looked this up for you. Also, people that are more fearful, think something bad could happen to them, just in general, are more likely to believe conspiracy theories.

JAG: Also there was an interesting correlation if people thought that their spouse was potentially cheating on them.

MS: That's right. Yes.

JAG: That also correlated with a higher tendency to see that.

MS: Right.

JAG: Forces beyond one's control.

If you tick the box for “you think the moon landing was faked and the aliens are hiding in Area 51”, you're also more likely to think JFK was assassinated by a conspiracy, that 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. On and on and on.

MS: Right. Thinking that your spouse is cheating on you as a proxy for just general paranoia. Paranoia that other things might be at work there that you're not completely aware of, that what those studies are showing is that there are proxies or predictors of conspiracism. Now, we're not sure which is the causal arrow. People that buy guns are more conspiratorial or people that are more conspiratorial are more likely to buy guns. We don't know which causes which, but they're associated with each other. My favorite study in this area was Dead and Alive, it was called. People that ticked the box that Princess Diana was murdered are also more likely to think she faked her death and is living somewhere in South America with Elvis or something. Well, they can't both be true. She can't be dead and alive. But what it is, is a proxy for I don't really trust authorities. So, whatever anybody thinks happened who’s an authority, I'm going to be doubtful of it. That also tends to be another one of these cases where these components of conspiracies go along with a bunch of other things. If you tick the box for “you think the moon landing was faked and the aliens are hiding in Area 51”, you're also more likely to think JFK was assassinated by a conspiracy, that 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. On and on and on. That's general conspiracies.

JAG: Yes. I'm wondering, are Americans particularly prone to believing in conspiracies compared to, let's say, other cultures? If that's the case, then why might that be?

MS: Yes. Interesting. There are studies from European psychologists on this and Europeans are very conspiratorial also. My suspicion is that this is the case in other countries. It's a human trait to be suspicious of other people and other groups, especially, up to no good. In the case of America, it's more prominent because of our freedom of press and just the widespread openness to society where more things can be going on because you have the freedom to do so. It'd be hard in China for people to pull anything off because they have so much top-down control: all those cameras. In America we're pretty free. The roads are public and open and wide and you can just move around. People don't even know what's going on. And so the idea of conspiracism is easier to pull off in an open society where no one's checking you and therefore you should be.

MS: In other words, back to my rational part. You should be. It's rational to be a little paranoid about stuff going on. There really are school shootings. There really are crazy people and we don't control them, we don't lock them up, all the stuff we've seen since Trump took office about the illegal aliens committing crimes, we're going to get rid of the worst first, and so on. Well, that's because we have an open society that that's going on. We have all these people coming in, so more bad things are likely to happen. Therefore America is going to be a little more paranoid than say, Europeans, where there's a lot more control, or in China, where it's totally controlled. Plus the free press and all that stuff on the Internet, we're just allowed to talk about it. It's everywhere.

JAG: All right. Iliacin asks, you mentioned how it's no longer a few people in a hotel, but hundreds online. Do you think the ease of finding any particular conspiracy makes people more susceptible?

Let's say you have a dozen people in the room. If you have one or two people that are objecting to the consensus, then the entire group becomes less polarized, less extreme.

MS: Yes, it does. It certainly puts them in more polarized positions where most people do not read multiple sources that contradict each other. They become in these boxes, in these little cylinders and they don't go out of it. We know from cognitive studies that people in a room where everyone agrees with each other become much more polarized on a position than if they have one or two. Let's say you have a dozen people in the room. If you have one or two people that are objecting to the consensus, then the entire group becomes less polarized, less extreme. Again, back to our free speech issue, it's good to have somebody that speaks, stands up and says, no, I disagree. That immediately changes the entire tenor of the group. That's a good thing, right?

JAG: Yes, well, we certainly have that at The Atlas Society, and that'll be on display at Galt's Gulch, some feisty disagreements between our faculty and scholars. I wanted to get a little bit more into the theory of conspiracies. You argue that conspiracy thinking is driven more by pattern seeking and apophenia, seeing connections where none exist, than actual evidence. Can you walk us through one of the experiments or real world examples from the book that show how even highly rational people fall into that trap?

MS: Yes. I call that patternicity, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise, and also agency, the tendency to infuse those patterns with intentional agents. Those are both elements of conspiracies where we look around the world and find these meaningful patterns. Now what's the element about that that's interesting? My thought experiment is, imagine you're a hominid on the plains of Africa 3 1/2 million years ago and you hear a rustle in the grass. Is it a dangerous predator? Is it just the wind? It's a signal detection problem. If you think that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and turns out it's just the wind, that's a false positive. But that's a low-cost error to make as opposed to the reverse. If you think the rustle in the grass is just the wind and it turns out it's a dangerous predator, you’re lunch. You get a Darwin Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool early. We are the descendants of those more likely to be a little paranoid. Assume the worst, just in case. There's an evolutionary element to conspiracism that's totally rational because there are dangerous things out in the world. 

There's a thousand ways to die on any given day, right? It's good to be a little paranoid. Then, in the experiment you're referencing, if you put people in a condition of uncertainty, then show them ambiguous figures, they are more likely to see a meaningful pattern in the ambiguous figure than if they're not feeling a little paranoid or a little anxious. All that is the psychology of this. Again, it's not irrational to think that because these things do happen, or even the social-proof experiments like the smoke in the room where everybody's an actor except the one guy filling out the form or whatever. If no one moves with smoke in the room, that's social proof that there's nothing to worry about. It's not completely irrational. The guy sits there and doesn't jump up and run out the room. Right? There's a lot of that, that happens. The fact that we're a social-primate species, we get our cues from other people and if you're siloed in these groups that only read about the conspiracy, say vaccines or whatever, you're taking your social cues from just that one group. So, that's going to direct you into a particular extremism. That's not good.

JAG: Another concept that really stuck with me from your book was this idea of the cognitive dissonance created when something truly horrific and historically impactful is perpetrated by a relatively insignificant individual or group of individuals. How that dissonance creates susceptivity to believing that a larger conspiracy had to have been at play. Maybe some examples of that. But it put me in mind immediately of the conspiracy theories that began circulating almost immediately in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination.

This cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance and also a bias toward large events need large causes, small events need small causes and so on.

MS: Yes, that. This cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance and also a bias toward large events need large causes, small events need small causes and so on. The type specimen that the Holocaust, one of the most horrific crimes in the history of humanity, commanded by the Nazis, one of the worst political regimes in world history. There's a balance there, a resonance. It makes sense. But the idea that 19 guys with box-cutters committed 9/11 and took down the World Trade Center buildings; and you mean just lone nut, Lee Harvey Oswald, assassinated the leader of the free world; Princess Diana, she's beautiful, she's a princess, for God's sake -- she died by drunk driving, speeding and no seatbelt like the rest of us—there's a dissonance there. So, you have to add elements. Oh, no, it wasn't just Lee Harvey Oswald. It was the FBI and the CIA, KGB and the Mafia and the Cubans and the Russians, on and on and on. It balances there, right? Princess Diana was murdered by the Royal Family or whatever, and so on. There's an attempt to find some harmony there. 

The fact is, though, in a free and open society like the United States, it’s not likely Lee Harvey Oswald can get away with it. In the case of Charlie Kirk, he's famous, right? Famous people never just die like the rest of us. Kurt Cobain and Elvis and you name it. It's that they can't have just died there either. They're still alive or something. There was some cabal behind it. Charlie Kirk was famous, right? And it's just this -- again, a lone nut, Tyler Robinson said, okay, maybe he had some influence of the weird, furry trans culture, whatever that is. But that's not enough for the conspiracists. They want Israel to be behind it now. Okay, I'm channeling Candace Owens here, who's a bit of a nut in my opinion but it's alright to ask these questions. Maybe Israel is behind it, but I doubt it. Again, the Jews are always behind everything because they're the outsiders and they're pulling the strings. They made Trump invade Iran. It's everywhere, right?

JAG: Yes, I sometimes say if only this were true, that Jews had so much power. Everybody would be reading Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged and The Atlas Society would have $15 million.

MS: My Jewish friends are always telling me, man, I wish I had this power. They think I have special power.

JAG: So, yes, I actually have always been confused by QAnon. Like, what exactly is it? I thought that your deep dive into that whole subculture was really one of the most chilling parts of the book. Maybe first, just for those who were similarly confused, what is it? Then what surprised you the most while researching it, especially the way it turned ordinary high-functioning professionals into true believers.

QAnon is a proxy conspiracy theory. That is to say, it stands in for something deeper in my opinion.

MS: Well, okay, so in general, QAnon is a proxy conspiracy theory. That is to say, it stands in for something deeper in my opinion. I think, if you look at the specifics of it there's this whole Pizzagate part of QAnon, there's a deep state, there's these secret elements at work having to do with child molestation and drinking their blood, which is the old Jewish blood libel conspiracy theory. That it's happening at this pizzeria and Hillary and Tom Hanks and Beyonce are all part of it and so on. But did anybody really believe specifically that's what was going on? 

Well, one guy did. Edgar Welch. He drove to the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria in Washington D.C. with his rifle and shot the roof up when he got in there and he got upset. There was no basement and people were just eating pizza. There was no pedophile ring and he went to prison and apologized for it all later. But the average person here, I would say, would say something like, nah, I don't know if Hillary actually did that, but she's the kind of person that would do that. Or those Democrats, they're the kind of people that would do that. Then it was also linked to this whole billionaire tech brood, people that want to live forever. There's some truth to that. There are people doing that that are getting their blood cleansed. There are people that do that. That Brian Johnson guy, he's had blood injections from his son, you know. It's not the same as what they're talking about with the QAnon Deep State Pizzeria thing, drinking children's blood and pedophilia. But there's a little element to it like, oh yes, I bet that's what the Democrats are doing, something like that. 

The deep state idea is not, again, completely irrational. Again, back to the 1950s and ’60s and what the CIA was doing with MK-Ultra dosing, mind-dosing with LSD.

Then Trump gets in there and okay, we're going to expose the deep state now. There is a deep state. Not officially. There's no Department of Deep State. Right? But there are things that go on inside the government that most people don't know about, most senators don't know about. The whole UAP, UFO thing, it's probably just DARPA stuff, but there's a lot of DARPA-type projects that go on that most of us don't know about, most of the government doesn't know about. Who's funding those? Where does that money come from? So, the deep state idea is not, again, completely irrational. Again, back to the 1950s and ’60s and what the CIA was doing with MK-Ultra dosing, mind-dosing with LSD. US citizens rigging elections in foreign countries, assassinating foreign leaders. Our government did all that. This was not approved by Congress. In most cases, they didn't even know that this was going on. In many cases, the President didn't even know what was going on. Plausible deniability. Don't tell me too much, just make something good happen. Okay? There's enough of that that when someone like Trump says, I'm going to expose the deep state, people think that's not completely crazy. But that doesn't mean everything that happens is a conspiracy.

JAG: I think one of the reasons people sometimes get their hackles up when they even hear the term “conspiracy theory” is that it wasn't too long ago when if you would say, “Hey, you want to know something? I think there's something to this natural immunity or gee, look at these two counties that have very different policies on school closures and there are virtually no differences in their infection rates.” You just said, can we talk about it? Can we look at the different evidence? At the time it was, well, you are spreading a conspiracy theory. Therefore I'm the government, I'm going to jawbone the social media folks and tell them to do something to your accounts. Maybe just talk a little bit about the role of free speech and free inquiry and why that is important as a context as opposed to, let's say, a Ministry of Truth or a Ministry of Disinformation.

MS: Yes, it's a great point. I wrote much of Conspiracy under Covid conditions. Chapman closed and I'm giving these idiotic zoom lectures from home. And I'm up here in Santa Barbara and the beaches are closed. Are you kidding me? The hiking trails are closed. It was so insane. Then all these conspiracy theories about is it a lab leak or the zoonomic -- it was the bats in the wet market. Why was that a crazy conspiracy, that this is entirely possible? Viral labs doing research do have human errors. No one was saying the Chinese intentionally did this as a bioweapon. They're just saying they screwed up. This is still a viable conspiracy theory that could be true. As far as I'm concerned, it's more likely to be true than the wet market origins. Matt Ridley's really made a good case for this. 

Part of the point of my book, calling it a crazy conspiracy theory or a racist conspiracy theory is a way of shutting down discussion. That's one reason I wrote this book: No, it's not.

But again, part of the point of my book, calling it a crazy conspiracy theory or a racist conspiracy theory is a way of shutting down discussion. That's one reason I wrote this book: No, it's not. Don't do that. Stop doing that. Just let people have their say. As you know, because I was one before this, I’m a big free speech advocate. Let the Holocaust deniers have their say. They're wrong and they may very well be crazy anti-Semites, but why are they wrong? This bothered me back in the ’90s when I was researching the Holocaust deniers and I'd go to Holocaust historians and say, they're making this argument here about how many millions were killed at Auschwitz. They're like, oh, that's just a bunch of anti-Semitic claptrap. Yes, maybe. But why is it wrong? I just want to write about this, explain. This is why that really bothered me. Just let people have their say. Then once everything is said and everybody knows what everybody thinks, then we can decide what's true. Usually that just makes them go away. It's the case of creationists, and so on. 

So, I think that's why, again during COVID, what I would have liked to see is our public policymakers and politicians be more Bayesian. That is to say, put a probability on it and just be honest. Just say, “Look, this is a rapidly moving target. We don't know a lot yet. We think the masks might work, but we're not sure. For the next week, we're all going to wear masks and let's see how it goes. Then maybe next week we'll, well, whatever it is, open the schools back up or whatever.” It looks like, as near as I could tell, that they should have opened the schools up in the fall of 2020, after they closed them in the spring of 2020, that we knew enough that the children were not going to be affected, anything like that. Adults and people with comorbidities like diabetes and obesity would be affected. Old people's homes, fine, close those down. Protect those schools, open them back up. Businesses, open them back up. As far as I could tell, they knew they could have done that and didn't do it. That is a conspiracy that is not right in a free society. I have to say I think that it's fair criticism there.

JAG: Right. Well, it's also interesting context that this was happening while you were writing this book and a lot of things that should have been the subject of a legitimate debate were being marginalized as crazy conspiracy theories. I've returned to the subject of the many, many mistakes that were made during that time in terms of the policy interventions and precisely what you just said, which was that if our leaders hadn't panicked and had been perhaps just a little bit more humble in saying we think this might work, we're going to give it a try, we're going to look at the evidence, and we're going to move forward from there. Okay. Taking a question from Iliacin who wants to know: Michael, what do you think most people get wrong about skepticism? What role does and should empathy play in skeptical inquiry?

Skepticism is just a way of trying to determine what the truth is. What should I believe is true? It's a signal detection problem. Is this a hit or a miss? Am I right or wrong?

MS: Okay, well, that word, empathy, and also ‘cynic’ is often lumped with skepticism. Skepticism is just a way of trying to determine what the truth is. What should I believe is true? It's a signal detection problem. Is this a hit or a miss? Am I right or wrong? What do we know? Oftentimes we don't know. Right? It's not cynicism or lack of empathy or any of that. It's just let's be humble before the facts: fallibilism. We could all be wrong. Again, I'm an atheist, but you know, if there is a God, I know one thing for sure: I'm not God and neither are you. No one knows for sure about anything, not 100%. We have to have degrees of confidence and therefore we have to have an open society with open dialogue amongst experts and everybody; let's just see the facts for ourselves and decide and really that's just science. My books really are pro-science, pro-reason and rationality and logic, and so on. There are tools to determine these things. Not 100%, no capital “T” truth, but with a degree of probability. It's reasonable to offer your provisional assent that this is true for now. I might change my mind later. We'll see. But this is what I think is true.

JAG: I think that sounds very healthy and I think more of us should incorporate that and adopt it in various areas of our lives. Another aspect of the book that I thought was interesting, surprising, was how the entertainment value of some of these conspiracy theories contribute to their appeal. Can you unpack that for us?

MS: Yes, well, it is entertaining. Most interesting movies have to do with plots and people up to no good behind closed doors and the whole X Files series was about that. A lot of great movies are about people doing secret things and plotting against others. Most of great literature has to do with people with power and people that don't have power and people that are deceiving, self-deception and deception, and so on. These are all very human elements. So, it's entertaining because it's true. It's telling us something about the human condition that's real. 

What really scares people, I think, is that no one is in charge. This is even worse than how does the economy work?

What really scares people, I think, is that no one is in charge. This is even worse than how does the economy work? Well, the idea of there's 12 guys in London called the Illuminati, running the world's economies is like, oh, that's bad. But now we found out about them. How about this? No one's running the economy, right? We all are. It's like, wait, you mean no one's in charge? Yes, no one's in charge. This whole bottom-up, emergent phenomenon of the economy, this bothers people. I think they'd rather think that there's a cabal, somebody behind closed doors, smoking cigars, making these decisions. I think that drives a lot of people into these irrational conspiracy theories.

JAG: What about the role of AI and how do you see it playing into America's particular penchant for conspiracism? On one hand, do you think that after enough tries of going to various chatbots and seeing that the evidence for the conspiracy that you are so cognitively committed to simply isn't there, or on the other hand, that you think conspiracists will use things like deep fakes and just manufacture evidence to spread their particular narrative.

MS: It could make it worse, yes, because you can't really trust the videos and photos anymore is quite clear. It looks very real even though you know it's fake. That's a problem. It's, maybe it's amusing in entertainment, but in terms of politics, what if you showed a video of Putin launching the missiles against the United States? Is Trump going to watch that and think, oh, we better counter-launch? No, I don't think so. I think there's enough checks and balances there, but that's a concern. I'm not an AI doomsayer. I think it's just going to be another tool to help us to do more great things. It could be used for evil, I guess. 

Like the lawsuits against Meta that came out yesterday about hooking these teenagers and making them addicted, like on cigarettes. I don't think I really go that far, but for the most part, I think there's a lot more positive things to artificial intelligence becoming AGI and the LLMs; and Gemini, Grok, I use all those. They're fun. It's very useful. Yes, maybe there's a downside, but that's always been the case in the history of science and technology, in engineering and so forth. It's always the case that this next big thing is going to destroy society. It doesn't. Not only does it not destroy us, things get better. I think for the most part, AI is going to just make life better for everybody and we'll deal with the new problems that come up as they come up. Right? I think it'll help us create more wealth for more people in more places and we'll see the end of poverty. Well, they've been saying that about 2030, 2035 will be the end of poverty in the world. I think AI is going to maybe speed that up.

JAG: What an exciting time to be alive. Given that you once said that writing about conspiracy actually made you more optimistic about human reason in the long run, after four years of watching these ideas play out in real time, do you still feel that way?

I'm by nature, I guess, an optimistic person but I do think, studying human rationality, we get it right most of the time.

MS: I do, yes. I do feel pretty optimistic. I'm by nature, I guess, an optimistic person but I do think, studying human rationality, we get it right most of the time. What stands out is the weird. The weird things, the crazy conspiracy theories, the cults or whatever. Most people do not believe the really crazy conspiracy theories. Most people do not join cults. This is called base-rate neglect and Bayesian reasoning. We noticed the people that drank the Kool Aid or whatever it actually was in Jonestown. But how many people went to Jim Jones's church in the Bay Area? You know, probably hundreds of thousands that would never join a cult. How many people have taken the crazy Scientology personality test down on Sunset Boulevard or whatever, Hollywood Boulevard, but never joined? They didn't take out a second mortgage on their house and give it over to the church. 

Or that Tinder swindler video on Netflix about the four women they highlighted that got suckered in by this guy that they thought they were going to marry, and they wired him tens of thousands of dollars, but what we don't know is how many women did he try this out on and they told him to suck off. They weren't going to give him money. Or the Nexium cult. How many women take this marketing empowerment program or whatever, but they never had this guy's initials branded in their crotch or anything like that? Most people are fairly rational. They don't fall for bullshit. They just go along. We know this because they're able to hold down jobs, have families, keep gas in the car and food in the fridge, and they lead relatively normal lives. I think, for the most part, we're a good, rational, logical species.

JAG: All right, Michael, we're about to come to the end of the hour. I want to give you the opportunity, if there's a question I should have asked you but didn't, or if there's anything else that we didn't get to talk about from this book, or perhaps you want to tease your most recent one.

MS: Oh, well, where's Galt's Gulch? I want to go.

JAG: Okay.

MS: Well, yes, I've been looking all over Colorado, but apparently it's in San Diego this year.

JAG: It's in San Diego and it's going to be great. We have 150 young people coming from across the country and around the world. Some other speakers that you already know, Gregg Hurwitz and Heather Mac Donald, Kaizen Asiedu, who people who follow Elon know he's a big fan. And now Michael Shermer, so very much grateful.

MS: I'll come and talk about reason and truth and science and for you, I am optimistic in that sense. I do think there's enough groups like yours and mine, the people that care about the truth, that think there is a reality and we can know something about it, that do believe humans are pretty rational. We get it right enough of the time that if, through education and open conversation and the Internet and so on, we all just convey those ideas, here's how to think about difficult things, and we'll get better.

JAG: Well, I can promise you once you meet these kids that are getting scholarships to attend, it'll be impossible for you not to walk away without significantly boosted optimism. Thank you, Michael, and hope to see you before long.

MS: All right. Thank you. Thank you.

JAG: All right. Thanks also to everyone else who joined to ask great questions. Be sure to join us next week when bestselling author and ghost writer Joshua Lisic joins us to talk about his coauthored book on humans, A Secret History of Communist Revolutions and How to Crush Them. We'll see you then. 

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