I did have friends in the truth or community that were all musicians, and we had supported each other and supported each other's art in this like fringe element of society, and I built relationships with some of these people for a good ten years, and to have some of them really turn their back on me, it did hurt. They don't want to talk to me because I loved them like they were my brothers. But it's gone.
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry o'she.
I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover all around the.
World, and in my thirty three years with the CIA, I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Although we don't usually look at it this way, we created conspiracies.
In our operations. We got people to believe things that weren't true.
Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the news almost every day.
Will break them down for you to determine whether they could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Welcome to Mission implausible.
We talk about conspiracy theorists as if it's just a fixed thing, but there's something that brings them in and then every once in a while there's something that brings them out.
How eventually you climb out and what's the psychological process neurological process that goes along with that.
Falling down a rabbit hole is easy. Getting out as hard. And so I give credit to people like our guest today who battle with this issue. Yeah, so today's guest is Brent Lee. Brent is a form of conspiracy theory addict, I think you would say, who now works to help others who've gotten lost in conspiracy rabbit holes. He writes and speaks on the issues of conspiracy and hosts a regular podcast called Some Dare Call It Conspiracy.
So welcome Brett, Thank you, thanks for having me so.
Brent, First, I would like to praise you for what you're doing. It cannot have been easy to examine your beliefs and change your life, and more importantly, your willingness to share and help others is really laudable. So I guess my first question is the simplest one. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey and how you ended up here.
Sure, in two thousand and three we were on the verge of war with Iraq. The press and the government in the UK was spinning like the workmans of mass destruction eventually turned out to be a lie, and the UN voted against going to Iraq, and all this kind of stuff was going on, and I somehow came across nine to eleven Truther documentaries, which basically we're pointing out that nine to eleven was an inside job by the government and it was all to go to war in
the Middle East and take over resources. And I'm telling you, because of the lies that I was seeing in the media spread by our government and your government at the time, the Bush administration, I fell, hook line and sinker for it because the arguments were so put together. And with that I started going down a rabbit hole and to trying to figure out, well, who are these people who did this? Oh, George Bush is a member of Skull
and Bones. Oh so was Senator Kerry at the time. Okay, that's interesting, Maybe I should look into these create society links. And then I start coming across freemasonry and all that sort of grand conspiracy myth and it just made sense, It really just made sense. And from there I just descended further and further into the rabbit hole.
Fascinating by the way, and I had a sort of similar journey with the Iraq War as well, that even though I was inside CIA and I knew some people who were involved in the analysis, I believe that it was true, and I'll have to say that a lot of them did too. Now, how much is a lie in a conspiracy to tell that lie, and how much
of it is quite frankly, just human error. Give us your thoughts on the difference between lying with mailis a forethought to achieve something, to create a conspiracy, and then just like simple fuck ups and randomness in the world.
So disinformation is deliberately like misinforming people, So disinforming people, and anyone who picks that disinformation up and spreads it without knowing that it's a lie is spreading misinformation. And I think that's definitely what happened with the Weapons of mass destruction lie.
Can you explain a little bit why you think the Truther view of the world is so powerful?
I think because it does give us an answer. It's really good to bring it back to nine to eleven because that was such a chaotic moment, such a traumatic moment for everyone, Like pretty much everyone around the world watched three thousand people die within an hour of the
two towers falling. We all needed to work out how this happened, and these conspiracies that conspiracy pushers were pushing, essentially, like everyone knows Alex Jones, and at the time it was William Cooper was one of the big ones, Like he was on air at the time saying this was a conspiracy. But yeah, it gives us that order out
of chaos. To use another conspiracy term, like how could America with all of its power, with all of its intelligence, with everything that they have, Like, how did they let this slip? How did they let nineteen high jackers take four planes in one day? That just that shouldn't happen.
What is it about you you think made you susceptible to going down this path? Why you? What is it about your background, or your personality, or your feelings or what have you that got you there?
Yeah, you seem like a really thoughtful, reasonable guy. You generally do.
I think creativity does play a role. Creativity and intelligence does play a role. It helps you imagine a situation and then logic yourself into believing it. I think that plays a big part in say, my personality. However, I think the thing that brought me into the conspiracism in the way that it did for nine to eleven, through the anti war sentiment I had for going to Iraq. I think that definitely ties into my background, and it ties into being brought up in the military. My first stepfather,
he was in Vietnam. He was a Marine, he was drafted and he went to Vietnam, and I didn't really know very much about what happened until like later on, but I can just say my childhood was not a happy childhood with him. While he was in our life, he had PTSD from a terrible experience in Vietnam. He drank, he was abusive, He half beat my mother to death one night, and then they discharged him from the military.
And that left quite a big scar on me. And none of that really bubbled to the surface until the First Gulf War happens in the nineties. At that time, my mother is remarried to a man in the US Air Force, and my friend's dads were starting to get called to go to Iraq, and I remember being terrified of my stepfather going there because of what had happened before. Because this guy was sorry, not was is like the loveliest,
kindest person. He was such an amazing role model growing up that I was terrified if he went to war in Iraq, He's either going to die or is going to come back and be like my first step father. And I feel like that idea of war and what it does to people I really shaped my sentiment, especially when it came to again Iraq war, the second one,
Like I was so dead against that. I did not want our citizens going to war over there and coming back basically like my first step father with all these troubles PTSD, alcoholism.
What were the benefits to being inside a conspiray theorist mindset.
I think at the beginning it was more to do with having an answer, just oh, I know what happened, then I know what's going on. I didn't really feel empowered by it. I know that's a common thing that has said, like people feel empowered by having this secret knowledge, but I never genuinely had that. It's just that I had a weird sort of comfort in knowing what was going on, even though it was absolutely terrible.
Did you feel a missionary zeal to spread that word as well? I'm going to like bring this to everyone.
Else I considered myself an activist. I was a truth activist. I was a musician, I was a spoken word artist. I was a rapper, and I've always been like putting politics and my activism in music. So having that, I had this other whole topic of stuff to talk about.
But can you help me understand or explain why the issue, for example, a pedophilia crops up so often in these conspiracies. It returns, it seems, again and again nowadays.
Well, so the most evil thing to do is the most evil thing on this planet, basically being a pedophile or a murderer or just like sacrificing children and stuff like that. Yeah, it really paints people like as the worst, so it drives your hate towards them.
A bit of a historian and the Roman Empire in the Two Punic Wars, what was their charge against the Phoenicians the Carthaginians? Was it they sacrificed their children? And this is like a two five hundred year old conspiracy theory, and modern archaeology has shown that when babies died early, which a lot of in those days, a lot of babies did, twenty to thirty percent never made it to
their first year. The babies were then cremated rather than buried, and the Romans then turned that into their baby killers. And this allows us to wage war and not to just defeat them, but to exterminate Carthage. So yeah, exactly that thing, even two thousand years ago.
Go even further back in the Old Testament, the Hebrews are talking about the Canaanites serving their babies to molic That's right, and that's probably propaganda as well, for at the time.
The Canaanites were Phoenicians. So yeah, it's the same civilization.
It's incredibly emotive, and that's what you want to do. If you want to manipulate people, that's what you do.
Brend I'd like to talk to you more about the destructive impact of conspiracy theories on both the society and on people and on families.
I got to be honest, like, when I was in it, I didn't understand how dangerous it was because I didn't really see it as a tool being used to manipulate me by people that wanted to manipulate me or have me on their side. I just thought it was people trying to expose the truth, expose what was really going on.
But I have now being out of it, especially since say twenty fifteen, watching political figures embrace conspiracism and push it, and watching people who I'd never thought would They didn't listen to a word I had to say when I was a conspiracy theorist. Now like listening to them and pushing the conspiracies that I used to believe in. That was a real wake up call.
How did you come out of it? Was it a slow process of coming out or was it one or two key things that pushed you along there?
Yeah, it was a very slow process which kind of gained momentum. It took six years. Sandy Hook happens December twenty twelve, and throughout all of twenty thirteen, the crisis actor and hoax narrative becomes very prevalent in the truth movement, and that went against everything that I was believing at the time. At the time, I was believing that all of these mass shootings, terrorist attacks, etc. Were essentially ritual sacrifices,
and so real people die in these things. And when Alex Jones and many other people in the truth community were pushing that these events were hoaxes and that the people involved were crisis actors, so nobody dies. I had a real problem with that because no, I really believed these people were being murdered by them, the Illuminati, the New World Order, the cult, whatever you want to call them. And just to clarify, I wasn't the Jews. I was never like a Jew World Order guy. I was always like,
it's them, all of them. The Queen was involved, and Barack Obama was involved. But through twenty thirteen, this hoax crisis actor narrative just became applied cut and paste every time something happened. We had the Pulse nightclub shooting, the Boston Marathon bombing, all leading up through twenty fourteen fifteen up into the Charlie Hebdo shooting and the Paris Batic clan and Nie attacks. Every single time something happened, my
Facebook would just light up with the whole community. He's talking about, Oh, this is hoax, it's not real.
Look at this.
Crisis sector, that chrisis sector, and they'd show these pictures and all throughout that time it was pulling me away from the community and like making me isolate myself further into my belief but not vibing with what they were saying. And then between twenty fifteen and twenty eighteen, so much stuff happened on the world stage that just made me question, like, is the New World Order actually in charge here? Because there was three massive things. To me. First, it was
the election of Trump. It wasn't just because it was Trump, but the idea was like Hillary Clinton had been primed for this job for years, so she was supposed to be the person who took over because she was a New World Order. But Trump won and I could see him Alex Jones on Info Wars and all these other things, and I was like, what, how is this guy getting into the highest office in America? That doesn't make sense, especially when he's popular amongst the conspiracy theorists. So this
is really strange. So we had that, and then here in England we had the Brexit vote, and the Brexit vote pulled us away from the European Union, and that was just it just did not make sense in the grand scheme of things of the New World Order's goal is a one world government, a police state around the
entire world. But we had a guy called Jeremy Corbyn take over the Labor Party and Corbyn was like a left wing populist so him being able to take over the Labor Party, which is basically if Bernie Sanders took over the Democrats. It wasn't going to be allowed, was he. And I had always thought every single vote, every single election was a see election, it was nothing to do
with us. Leaders were selected, not elected. However, those three votes and watching it all happen on social media, watching people move, it just made almost everything fall apart for me at that time. So I had to log off and that's when I did. I just lugged off of Facebook. And yeah, just over that twenty eighteen to twenty twenty one, even more things started to happen, and I was just like, I think I've been wrong the whole time, and I need to go figure out why.
QAnon famously said trust the plan. So you didn't trust the plan, there's your mistake.
Let's take a break.
We'll be right back.
And Rebecca, it's funny you cite two things that I think it's plausible and I'm open to actual there being a conspiracy. One being that Russian disinformation attempted to or did have some impact on the Brexit vote, or at least they tried to. And it's clear that the US intelligence community did say that Russia did conspire and did attempt to impact the US election to get Trump elected. So it's funny that the two things that you that broke your sense of conspiracy theories may have had elements
of a genuine conspiracy attached. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely, this is what I've learned after. Oh so they were conspiracies, just not the conspiracy I thought, because that's my problem is it was a big, grand conspiracy.
What was the impact on your family and your relationships when you went down the rabbit hole? Were you ostracized or nobody wanted your round anymore? Did they still put up with you, did they try to reason with you? And what was the impact? Did you lose friends? Family?
So the first few years while I was descending down that hole with my family, they were like quite understanding because I was always into very fringe topics and my mum just said, it's a phase, like just let him go through this, whatever he's going through. But I came to realize they didn't want to talk about it, so no one really pushed me away. But I did isolate myself because they didn't want to talk about it, especially
when it came to my friends. I was in a band, and I would stop going to the after parties at the gig. So I turn up to the gig, do our set, and then I go home. I pulled myself away from my social circle.
Nowadays, obviously to your credit, you're trying to help people. And as part of what your podcast is about and what you speak about, what is the hardest thing about trying to do that, What kind of success do you have, and what is the biggest challenges You try to talk about your experience and to help others so that they don't go down the same rabbit hole.
The things I face now are that I'm part of the conspiracy. This is now my favorite conspiracy theory that I'm a part of it.
Welcome to the club man, good audience.
People who are listening, who are conspiracy curious, who maybe dabbling ways that they could extradite themselves or explore things in a way that doesn't bring them deeper in like what happened to you Initially.
All I would say is if you are inquisitive, if you are really questioning everything due, please question everything. Question all sides of the argument, because there's not two sides. That's a bit of a false dichotomy. There's many sides to these. Just because something disagrees with you doesn't mean it's government propaganda or it's them or something. Just look at everything. Honestly, I encourage people to actually go down and look at this stuff. But you have to look
at everything because sometimes a conspiracy can be true. But try not to get wrapped up in too many of them. We're taught that to be fair by the big conspiracists like Alex Jones, like David Ake, and they would always say, in those first hours of chaos, the truth comes out and then the official story comes out later. So we were looking for that, and this is what they do. They pick out all these little inconsistencies where people have
just got things wrong. Essentially, then jump the gun. That's what we dig into, and we use that to paint the rest of it as lies.
I find that fascinating because in our world, I know where you're going. When we were overseas or be a crisis, our instinct and what we're taught is the first things that come out are going to probably be wrong.
Oh absolutely, especially in a crisis. I was in a rock when ISIS was taking over part of the country, and whenever something would happen, there'd be a battle. It would take us a day or two to figure out statistically what's going on, because, especially when you're in a crisis situation, people reporting things very quickly, and very often you get them wrong. So, Brent, was there a Damna
scene moment? Was there a specific moment in your background where you really started to question where it clicked?
So in twenty eighteen, I was scrolling through Facebook and I kept seeing people posting about crisis actors or Qan on Israel, flat Earth clones, all these different things. I just I didn't agree with it, and it was just my community just pushing it, and I remember thinking, I don't want to hear this anymore. I don't want to see this on my feed anymore. And that was the day I logged out of it. It wasn't until later
that year I was writing lyrics. I was trying to make a new album and I was going through the writing process and it just clicked all of a sudden. I don't think I believe this. I feel like I'm just repeating tropes, falling back on ideas that I've had. But I'm writing this and it doesn't actually feel genuine anymore. And those were like the moments where I was just thought, I need to really reevaluate everything here because what's just been going on for the last three years and the
political scene doesn't make sense. So I need to take some time off and try and figure this out. And the best thing about it is me and my partner. We got together in twenty ten and we're still together today, and we went through this process together because we were watching things, we were seeing it all happen, and we were able to bounce these ideas off each other, like when one of us had a doubt, we were able
to question it with the other person. And to be fair, like, it wasn't super shattering until I realized that I was out, and then it just fell apart, like leaving a religion or leaving a cult or something like that. It's the only thing I can compare it to.
As you came out of this and started to change, did you maintain the same friend network? How did your relationships change from before to after?
When I went down, I isolated myself. When I came out, I isolated myself from the new group of friends. And when I came back to tell people that I was out. Yeah, I got a bit of backlash for that. Like at that point, I wasn't isolating myself. I was being kicked out of the community. They just blocked me, unfriended me, just everyone just completely left, and again I just had
to rebuild. It does suck, though, to be fair, I did have friends in the truth Or community that were all musicians, and we had supported each other and supported each other's art in this like fringe element of society, and I built relationships with some of these people for a good ten years. And to have some of them really turn their back on me like it did hurt.
There's about four people that I'm really gutted that they don't want to be my friend, they don't want to talk to me because I loved them like they were my brothers. But it's gone.
There's a few.
Others though, that kept me kept along and they're like, hey, whatever do you believe I don't understand how you've done it. I can't understand how you don't see it still, but hey, I know you're not a shill. I know you're not bought off or an ething and we're all on our own paths and they still respect me for walking my path. So yeah, sometimes it's hard, other times it's whatever.
And when you came out, were people ready to accept you back again? If you were defriended you illicially left when you came back six years later.
Now, when I came back as not a conspiracist anymore in the previous few years, those same people have sent me messages and been like, Wow, I'm so surprised that you turned yourself around after all of this. They were my really good friends, and they completely welcomed me with open arms. There's glad that I'm back, and glad that I'm thinking critically now not so wrapped up in and all this stuff that I was wrapped up in. And they're proud. They're really proud of what I'm doing today.
They're proud that I'm able to talk about this thing that basically happened, and they're proud that I'm trying to help bring more people out and also letting everyone understand what it's like to be a conspiracist, what it's like being isolated in all of this. That's what they're very proud of that I've been able to explain that all right, Well, Brat.
It's been fantastic to get to know you.
You know, are very excited about your podcast and what you're trying to do when we give you a hell of a lot of credit for doing that, and thank you so much for spending some time with us.
Thank you, guys both for inviting me, thanks for speaking to me. It's been absolutely pleasure.
That was great. We have a second guest. We're really pleased today to have Sandra Fenderlin. He's a professor of social psychology Cambridge University and a research affiliate at Yale. He's a leading academic expert in the field of social influencing, risk, human judgment, and decision making. He's also the author of a really great book, Foolproof, Why Misinformation infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity. The Financial Times voted this
the best nonfiction book of twenty twenty three. So, Sandra, welcome today. It's really good, heaven y On, thanks so much for having me on. So said, let's begin with kool aid. Okay, So the expression drinking the kool aid comes from when a cult Jim Jones people temple and acting on a conspiracy theory that they were about to be attacked by the US military, CINAID blased great kool aid.
What can you tell us about the overlap between cults and conspiracy theories and why is it that people choose to drink the kool aid?
Yeah, that's a great question. I think to some extent, we like to differentiate belief in everyday conspiracy theories from the cult psychology. I think cults take it to the next level in terms that they're often what we refer to as high control groups. Let's say you believe in one conspiracy theory and that's the end of it, and you live your life and you're free to do whatever.
But when you're in a cult, you're really under a high amount of social pressure to conform to the norms of the cult and not just buy into their theory, but also perform in a way follow the actions of the leaders, and you get punished mentally, physically sometimes for not following those rules. And so one of the things we monitor often is the transition from when somebody believes in the conspiracy to believing in multiple conspiracies that are
potentially joining a cult. QAnon has, as you guys know, evolved from a single conspiracy to almost cult status that is I think a good example where a conspiracy actually transforms into a cult. It has a following, and members become more extreme within that following, really endorse the rules as if it's a godlike written script, and it's very
difficult to pull people away from that. You can argue with people about conspiracy theory, but getting people out of a cult is a whole different story because as cults have a playbook and we can get into that, but conspiracy theories often use parts of that playbook but are not as extreme.
So Andra explaining why why is this so hard to debunk conspiracies and pull people out of the rabbit hole. It seems like it's easier to sow, dealt and resolved out.
Yeah.
Absolutely, So I have this bad dad joke that kind of explains the psychology of it. Are you ready it's a perfect place for life? Yeah, okay, it's the perfect place.
Okay.
So there's this guy, right, conspiracy theorist, and unfortunately he dies and goes to heaven, and then God him or herself is waiting at the pearly gates, and this conspiracy theorist says, look, God, I gotta tell you this whole earth thing. You have to admit, right, the Earth is flat. You know you can't see the horizon. I have all these facts right the earth. The earth is flat. I mean,
you supposedly created it, so you tell me. And so God kind of frowns and looks the conspiracist in the eye and says, I hate to break it to you, but I can tell you for sure the Earth is round. It is not flat like a pancake. It is round. And so the conspiracy theorist goes, damn, this thing goes higher up than I thought. And that's the psychology of
trying to debunk conspiracy theorists. On a more serious note, there's this thing we call the conspiratorial worldview, which is what we call monological belief system, which is a fancy word for saying that belief in one conspiracy serves as evidence for the existence of other conspiracy theories. And so when you try to debunk conspiracy theories, debunking one is often unsuccessful because they'll just jump to a higher order
conspiracy that sort of explains it all. And so typically what you get is that if you try to create this what we call local incoherence, so you point out about oh, oh, maybe Obama's birth certificate was fake. Then they come up with a higher order conspiracy. If you try to debunk, that sort of explains the inconsistency. And there's been interesting studies on that. For example, Osama bin Laden. So one of the studies asked people, oh, do you
think he was already dead when the troops arrived? And then people say yes, And then how about this other theory that suggests that he's still alive somewhere, and people
say yes. And so the idea is that you know that somehow when you point out this contradiction, it's not strange for people because local contradictions are allowed because there's this higher order conspiracy that connects both accounts into this higher order conspiracy that it's the government's behind things, that's the overarching concern for this particular example, and that can
explain away any consistencies. Yeah, So coming back to the cult's ideology, it's a system of beliefs that's shaped very much like what you experience in cults. Sometimes that people just jumped to the next level on the next level, and that's why I often don't try to debunk conspiracy. It's a good example is Neil the Grass Pyson trying to debunk the wrapper Bob's belief in a flat Earth conspiracy.
So basically he tries to repeatedly point out why to the celebrity, why the Earth using physics, why the Earth really isn't flat, and it just falls on deaf ears and Bob still joined the Flat Earth Society. Neil the Grass even made a track called flat the Fact to try to convince him, but unsuccessfully.
You say the Earth is flattened, and you try to disrespect him. I'll bringing facts to the badest silly theory because Bob has got to know the planet is a spait.
G Wolves, let's sec break co right back.
You say that Nils vesus what he needs to loosen numb the Brothers getting stayed when the ignorance you're spinning helps to keep people enslaved.
I mean, and we're back, you go me. Once people are in and they're down the rabbit hole, it's really hard to deprogram and pull them out. But you're doing a lot of research I understand on what to do to vet people from falling in in the first place. Right, some really groundbreaking stuff. Could you maybe take us to real briefly, what inoculation theory is.
We start to use that we'd pre bunking because it's easier for people to understand, and as you said, it's very difficult to try to give people the radicalized. It takes a long time, it's very hard to do. Even debunking can be difficult to do. I've switched my attention to the idea of prevention, and it follows the medical analogy. So the idea is that your body produces antibodies to help for resistance against future infection. But it turns out
you can do the same with the mind. And in fact, this whole idea emerged because the US government at that time was thinking, hey, we need to double down on instilling American values in American soldiers because they don't seem prepared to answer questions like whi's capitalism good? Or why are you fighting this war? And so on, and they didn't have what we call mental defenses against the types of counter arguments that were being raised by foreign troops.
But the government's response was, we need to give people more facts about why the US is great, whereas the psychologists at the time said, maybe we shouldn't give people more facts. We should expose them in simulation form to what it's like to being attacked on your belief system, and then help them resist and refute these attempts so that that become more immune when it actually happens. And that's really the core idea of inoculation. Of course, you
always get into the discussion. If it's your country, we call it education. If it's another country, it's called propaganda. Irrespective of the content of what we're talking about, the technique is just the neutral device, and we're using it to help people identify misinformation.
I think it's true.
You will see the fact checking after the fact and debunking doesn't seem to be enough.
Part of the spread of misinformation online is leading people to quote unquote alternative facts, alternative knowledge, and alternative claims, which creates the sense of distrust around official narratives and around experts. And I think that has to do with
the more fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. And we know that from experiments that when you tell people something and then the science changes, and then you tell people that it's now different, the conclusion is often that, hence scientists are in competent, and of course the consensus amongst government agencies is different from what scientists are saying, and that's confusing to people.
Well, the best way to fix science is more and better science, right, Although I could say the best way to fix a conspiracy theory is just more and better conspiracy theories.
I love that idea.
There is actually an interesting historical parallel to this. So the Thirty Years War in Europe, arguably one of the reasons that it happened was because of the printing press. Suddenly, for the first time, there wasn't one entity that had a monopoly on truth. People were printing whatever they wanted about religion, and all of a sudden, you had different theories about all sorts of bits about religion and Christianity, and people went to war for thirty years and tore
Europe apart trying to figure out what is truth? Who decides what are facts? And people lived in those days in their own micro information bubbles by deciding what you read, and so I think this is a problem that we're going to have for a long time. I did want to ask you about the Pineapple Pizza game, which you're famous for, right.
We did this game with homeland security, specifically SISA Cyber Infrastructure Security Agency, and Chris Krebs, who at the time was heading CASA, came up with this pineapple pizza idea and the goal was, can we inoculate Americans against foreign influence techniques that are used by bad actors during elections? And of course, the first part of this process is always breaking down if we follow the public health analogy with the structure of the viruses in a way, so
what are the key building blocks? So what's the playbook that they use? Can we then break that down for people in a way that's fun and digestible so that we can then inoculate and create this resistance in a simulated environment. And that's really what Harmony Square was. And so Harmony Square is a ridiculous game, but it's a fake news game. And so you start out in your role as chief disinformation officer, and your goal is to try to create chaos in this fictional town called Harmony Square.
And they have an annual swan and also a Pineapple Pizza festival, and it kind of starts in this way that one of your options is to try to steal the swan and then the game narrator says are you crazy, that's illegal. You know, you have to come up with something that isn't going to get you arrested. This information actors, they don't go and steal statues. And so you learn that there's an election going on for the local bear patroller, even though there's no bears in Harmony Square. But they
just love elections. They love the idea of democracy, and they just love having elections. And your goals is disrupted. And the pineapple pizza metaphor comes in is that the techniques that are used and we break down for people are the following. So you take an innocuous issue, should you put pineapple on pizza? Maligne actors, that's the first step, right, And then then you start controversy and say the Italians they're going to be offended by pineapple and pizza. Right,
it's a cultural that's just culturally inappropriate. And then other people say, nobody's going to tell me what topic to put on my pizza. Right, you can't restraint pizza topping freedom, pizza amendment rights. And then the next step, after you stir up debates on both sides, is a false amplification. So now you're going to have to buy bots there's a whole market for this bots through fake SMS, phones and lots of accounts, and then you blow it up
on both sides. So it's meant to be a bit sarcastic, right, But you go through these techniques and then we test people though with real social media content that use these techniques from past events and as well stuff people might come across, and yeah, we find people are now better able to recognize and resist these techniques. You know, one of the more general theories is that conspiracy theories are
for losers. And so what we mean by that is when you're out of power, the party or the group that's out of power that was more likely to think that the group who is currently in power is conspiring against them, and that switches depending on who's in power. And that's why we like to say conspiracies are for losers, because the people in power are never coming up with the conspiracy that those out of power are plotting against them.
And the funny thing is that we create this new game called cat Park and it's about educating people conspiracy theories and the idea is that you arrive in your new apartment, do your noodles, and it's messy, and so the bad news is that you have a new apartment, new city, and the bad news is you don't have any friends. And so you get this ping from a shady actor down at the local bar who has a story to tell you. You want friends, and you feel marginalized. So you go to the bar and they say, look,
all these elitists are trying to erect this new cat park. However, there are no cats in the city, and so it turns into a big conspiracy and it's called cat Park. Is it's supposed to be fun. But then this whole conspiracy website now says that he's going to try to convince you that this is a game about cats. However, really it's an attempt to brainwash you and so on and the cats and their symbols about the cats, and it's a classic symbol that was used in so and
so history. And there's all these hidden messages in the game that haven't linked it yet to satanic pedofiles. But I'm sure give it time. It just.
And I think it's important to say that really smart people can fall into this. So I would just like to throw in that, Sir Isaac Newton, arguably one of the most brilliant people ever on this planet, invented physics, invented optics. The other thing is he spent years reading the Bible to find hidden messages in it, and at the end he determined that the world was going to end in the year two thousand and sixty. Right, he came up with this figure. So even one of the
most brilliant people in the world might be true. We still got a few years. But yeah, it's not people who are dumb.
So Sendra, is there anything you're learning of the best practices of trying to get people to slowly pull themselves out of the rabbit hole?
Yeah?
I think there's a few lessons. And in the book, I interviewed people who were former conspiracy theorists and extremists and people are part of cults and so on, and often the story that I would get is that there were some inflection, you know, there was some point at which there was a counter narrative that was convincing enough for them to take a small step outside of their
regular circle and start digging. And I think Brent Lee's story is not altogether this similar, but it was that the theories started getting more and more implausible to the point where they started questioning you, is this real? You know how plausible is This is starting to sound a little too kooky, which led them to spend less time online.
And I think these things are key. So we're doing big experiments at the moment trying to get people to unfollow polarizing accounts, deactivate social media for a while, and we find that has a huge impact on people in terms of their information consumption, the information environment that surrounds them. People spread less misinformation, they feel less polarized. And so the challenge with getting people out is that you have
to provide a new network for people. Right, they're used to having the crowd that they affiliate with, but you got to have other people that you can turn to. Right, You've got to have other narratives, and you need to have a new support system. And so the first step is to get people engaged with counter content and then give them a new support system. Brent was courageous because he just logged off and lost all of his friends. And that's why most conspiracy theorists don't turn out like Brent,
because nobody wants to lose their friends. And it's difficult, and you have to find your way out on your own. So I think it was really brave of him to do that and persist. So you can't persuade people coming in saying you're wrong, these are the facts. This is what most people do, and it just doesn't work. You
have to have a more indirect approach. I always start with what we called worldview validation, which is a technique that says, look, some conspiracies have really happened in the past, and now they feel like you're validating part of what they're saying. And then you pivot and say, look, but the specific one that we're talking about, let's agree to disagree.
But you have to get people inched them away a little bit from the story, right, Oh, okay, Okay, I still think on this particular issue, Okay, but would you read this other article, not saying you have to believe it, just read it, right, and then we'll go, okay, let's read it, and then we meet somewhere in the middle, and then you leave it at that. And I think for most people that stuff, they would have convinced someone right they're cranky uncle or family member, and I leave
it at that. The next interaction we move a little bit and you invite people come over to my party where there's a different narrative happening, meeting different people, and you have to do that over and over. It's a huge investment, it takes a lot of time, but I think that's where the evidence is in terms of the
de radicalization strategy. And then Cas Sunstein as a technique calls cognitive infiltration, which I don't think I could get through our ethics committee at the university, but basically, KI maybe a method you guys are familiar with, but cognitive infiltration is basically you pose as a fellow conspiracy theorist, you join their group, and you do subversion from within that. You start to try to sort of unravel the narrative
and start asking questions and getting people skeptical. And you can do that at online chat rooms for example, quite easily. Conspiracy theories hate being manipulated. They don't want to be part of the sheeple. So giving them the idea that maybe they're part of a pyramid scheme, all of the sudden is I don't want to be part of that, and so that's what I try to do. I try to uncover the manipulation techniques and not discuss specific facts and then leave it at that, and then next time
maybe we can discuss and so on. And then the suggestion that making money off of it Alex Jones sells stuff on the show, right, You're contributing money to somebody, and I really don't like that, and so that's one way to introduce it. We call some friction, Santor.
That was actually wonderful. Really, thank you very much.
We're really happy to get a chance to talk to you today, and I hope we are able to do so again.
Yeah, my pleasure. And I'm sure people know this was all planned and predetermined.
All stick to the plan.
I'm too lazy to be planned.
Now, let's speak with our producer Adam Davidson and try to sort this all out together.
I actually read something the other day that the single best intervention found so far is AI slowly methodically convincing people to stop having a conspiracy theory. We should get the researchers of that on, but this is a reminder that joining a conspiracy it's not just accepting some facts. It's an entire way of life. It's a community. I don't know, do you emerge hopeful podcasts like ours or other things could break the hold or is it just too few, too little.
People teetering on the edge. I think shows like this can actually help get him to think about it. But once you're down there, no, we've all stayed around on Thanksgiving with the crazy uncle or cousin who's in a conspiracy theory. And even when he sits with people who love him at an intervention talking about how this just doesn't make sense, still doesn't work. It's about faith, not fax.
Faith and friends. That was what someone was pointing out to me, that you go to a MAGA rally if you're lonely and you suddenly have one hundred thousand best friends.
And I think that's huge, big deal.
Yeah, yeah, thank you for today's discussion and we will see you next time on Mission Implausible.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher, and Jonathan Sterner.
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures for iHeartMedia.