From WXXI news.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made in April, when President Trump announced that his administration would resurface the concrete bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

The president wanted the pool to have a color that he called American flag blue.

He promised to make the reflecting pool beautiful again and remove all that algae.

He did not consult with federal agencies or Congress.

The work was completed on June 5th.

Just days later, with the pool refilled.

Algae started to bloom again.

Cruise port hydrogen peroxide into the pool and tried to mainly vacuum the algae away.

They were not successful.

Then the pool liner began to peel.

Scientific American published a breakdown of why the liner was already coming apart.

All of the answers coming back to shoddy workmanship.

But President Trump went with a different explanation.

Someone, he claimed without evidence, must have taken a razor blade and cut the liner on purpose.

There was a conspiracy to bring back the algae and make the Trump administration embarrassed.

Visitors who touched the water were now being accosted by police.

Now, you might think that conspiratorial thinking like this would be laughed off.

But these days, conspiracy theories with no evidence are treated as respectable ideas, and it goes way beyond the reflecting pool.

Senator Lindsey Graham died of an aortic dissection, a catastrophic health event that affects 13,000 Americans every year the next day.

I want to listen to what podcaster Tim Dillon was musing about with the idea that it was maybe Russia had poisoned and assassinated Senator Graham.

A bunch of people are going, hey, we don't want to hand Russia a propaganda win if, If you if it comes out today, poisoned Lindsey Graham or that they killed him or that he died in the explosion of the Ukrainian drone factory, which by the way, I guess I'm sure you know, obviously I'm not an idiot.

I know that on some level it would be, a propaganda win, but also a lot like there would be a lot of people in our country who didn't care.

Isn't that interesting?

That's one of the more popular podcasts.

And the podcasters in the country musing that this conspiracy was very possibly playing up before our eyes, and he was already upset that more people didn't care.

Not that they were not asking for evidence that people just don't care that these conspiracies are happening.

And true to form, Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, came out and said they're going to investigate possible link to Russia.

There's no evidence for that.

This past spring, when a gunman got into the hotel where the white House Correspondents Dinner was being held, the online swamps lit up with claims that that was a staged event.

And you can still find plenty of people who say that the July 2024 attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, was a staged event.

Are we all victims of the internet age?

We are supposed to be getting better information than ever before.

Instead, we are more likely to believe nonsense.

And I've invited one of my favorite guests to discuss why that might be here.

Doctor Kyle Green is associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Suny Brockport.

He's the host of the Give Theory a Chance podcast.

It is great to have you back here.

It's nice to have you in studio.

Nice to have you here.

Thank you.

It's a compliment that you keep bringing me back.

Well, we always enjoyed Kyle, and I'm going to.

I guess I'm going to start broadly.

I've already got some emails from listeners who have their own ideas about this very challenging technological time that we're in.

But I want to start more broadly.

Wasn't this supposed to be the golden age of information?

At the dawn of the internet age?

It was like, hey, you're going to be able to get information instantly or almost instantly on almost any topic you want.

You're going to be better educated than you've ever would have dreamed.

You can learn more.

You can go deeper.

What is going on here?

I'm going to do two annoying things.

Not just one, but two of them.

One of them is citing a sociologist.

So way back in the system.

Night.

It can be annoying because I'm going back to the 50s.

There's a sociologist, C Wright Mills, and he looked at the age of information and said, we're having this explosion of information.

And the problem is we don't have the tools to decipher what's good information and what a fact is and start to make those connections.

He's right.

There's a 1950s.

Writing this in the 50s.

And so he's prescribing.

This is a part that's annoying.

He's saying, well, everyone needs to develop a sociological imagination, which is where you start to be able to see what's an individual event, what's what link to things bigger.

Start to think about structures and systems and saying, that's the only way we'll be able to handle the fact that we have more information than we ever had before.

Now you're pointing to the 2000 that's really supposed to be the golden age.

You can pick up your phone and within seconds find out something.

Right.

So we're all supposed to be learning from each other.

We're supposed to be understanding more, but more and more we're just inundated with ideas.

And I don't think we have the ability to decipher what's good and what's bad, or at least many of us don't.

And that's a scary thing.

So there's a lot of different ways to attack this.

And I want to try to be kind of solution oriented this hour and talk about ways that we can, because, I mean, honestly, I'm pretty pessimistic.

I have a feeling that my guest is kind of pessimistic about where we're going here, but I don't think it's inevitable.

I don't think it's impossible that the culture would improve or learn some hard lessons on how we educate ourselves and what we do about this.

I also think there's some very powerful forces at play here that lead people to believe certain things here.

So, listeners, if you've got thoughts to share on conspiracy thinking, you know, I mean, if you want to talk about yourself, you want to talk about friends or family, or even strategies that you have for making sure information that you acquire is good information.

It's eight, 44295 talk.

You can call the program toll free.

84429582552636.

If you're in Rochester 2639994, email the program connections@auction.org.

You can join the chat if you're watching on YouTube.

So at the heart of a lot of conspiracy thinking is a plausible idea.

Not not a true thing, but a plausible idea.

So take the Trump assassination attempt.

Is it plausible that a politician somewhere would try to burnish their reputation by looking like a heroic figure who the quote unquote, other side wants to kill?

That's plausible.

And has it happened throughout history somewhere?

Of course.

Probably.

Is there any evidence that Butler, Pennsylvania was that?

No.

Is there any evidence that the white House Correspondents Dinner was that in fact?

No.

All the evidence is the other thing.

But the notion that little germ is plot, is it plausible that Russia would assassinate somebody?

Of course they've done it.

That's not idiotic.

That's not stupid.

That's real.

Is there any evidence that Lindsey Graham was targeted?

There's no evidence.

And doctors have talked about aortic dissection and his own diagnosis.

So at the start of this has to be I think it has to be something believable or plausible is, is that the seed typically would be.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And in some cases there's enough cases where the conspiracy theory turns out to actually be true.

You know, 20 years, 30 years.

Yes.

Summit.

Some turn out to be correct, but I think this is, I promise, two annoying things.

The second annoying thing is just stepping back and giving a definition of so how we think about what a conspiracy theory is.

And there's really three key qualities.

And I think this gets at what you're what you're asking.

Yeah.

The first is the starting point is nothing is as it seems.

So that's the beginning point of conspiracy theory.

The second is everything happens for a reason.

And the third is everything is connected.

So you can start out with the element of truth.

But if you're going in and already saying, well, there must be something else going on here because the starting point is too simple.

There's a distrust.

So you look for something greater and you know, something can't be random.

A lot of the times where conspiracy starts is something like Covid.

There is this virus that's spreading, but there must be.

It's so awful that there must be something underneath it.

The fact that someone almost killed Trump.

The fact that Trump lived.

There must be something underneath it.

And then the third point is where you get to that famous meme of Charlie from It's Always Sunny drawing all those, you know, having the threads going everywhere on the paper, going everywhere.

So you're starting to connect everything.

If those are your three starting points, that's this rumor about secret, powerful groups with bad intentions that can never be proven to be false.

Right.

So that's what's so powerful about it.

And there's enough cases where it's real that we look to other cases and say, well, remember that strange thing that happened?

And it turned out there was some sort of underlying network, some sort of secret group that was behind it.

Well, this seems so strange or I'm so skeptical of it.

This must be another example of that.

One of the really discouraging things that I've listened to recently, we talked to the host of the podcast series, a three part podcast series last year.

A really awesome young journalist who, he convinced his dad to do a podcast series with him.

His dad, who he loves very much, had gone down a very conspiratorial direction in his life.

It actually affected his marriage, actually ended his marriage.

But his dad bet him ten individual bets $1,000 a piece, a $10,000 overall bet, and he bet on that.

By the end of 2024, Barack Obama would be arrested for treason.

Hillary Clinton would be arrested for treason.

Donald Trump would be reinstalled as president before the 2024 election because he would be deemed the proper president.

Ten different things.

And his dad told him at the dawn of 2024, I'm so confident these things will happen.

And in this 12 months ban, I will bet you $1,000 a piece on these.

But I might expect you to pay me when I win.

And I want you to stop calling me a conspiracy theorist.

And he convinced his dad to actually do a series of interviews with him throughout the year.

When it became clear that these things were not happening, and he actually became closer to his dad personally, but became sort of tragically, you know, sad to see what was happening to his father, his parents marriage, which ended up dissolving, and a lot of other friendships which dissolved.

And nothing about his father changed.

None of the ten predictions came true, and his father only said at the end of the year, I wasn't wrong about what I said.

I was just wrong on the timeline.

And that's the thing that's so powerful about it.

And why I wanted to start with the definition.

Is that one of the.

And we'll get to all the ideas we have about what can we actually do as a society.

Yeah.

But one of the common solutions that puts forth is we'll just present people with good information, right?

If you just show them that they're wrong or you show them some stats or you point to a study, well, then they'll change their mind and then that house of cards will fall because it's built on that starting point.

But that's not how conspiracy works.

That's what makes it so powerful, because it actually not only do you double down, but that that someone showing you that you might be wrong is proof of how powerful those forces must be.

It must be deeper than we even realized, right?

So now we have to form new connections.

Or maybe the timing was off.

But that's conspiracy is powerful and it it can be fun to be in the world of conspiracies.

So we can think of examples where the outcomes are not as dangerous.

We just saw Argentina make a run in the World Cup, right?

Right.

And one of the things was, well, it seems like the refs are giving them good calls.

Maybe there's a conspiracy behind the scenes and that's again pointing to a secret, powerful group that has an intention.

They have an outcome in mind and then they do things.

Bad call against Egypt, right?

There must be something behind it other than this is how the technology now works.

The not as dangerous as something like Pizzagate, where you actually have someone going into a pizza shop with a gun looking for the children that are hidden there, or something as dangerous as people refusing to take the vaccines.

But there is some sort of joy, and you're the person making these discoveries.

You're the person putting together the connections that other people title of your show.

You're the one making the connections other people are not seeing.

Right.

You're in a sense, and psychologists have pointed this out.

People lean towards conspiratorial thinking.

There's an element of narcissism or delusions of grandeur, or just pride and joy in it, because everyone else's eyes are closed.

You're the only one who can see it, right?

So there's something powerful there.

And as people try to dissuade you, well, they're just confused and they're not getting it.

And everyone's trying to stop you, which means it must be more important, because otherwise, why would people try to stop you from figuring it out?

No, I don't want to go down this rabbit hole.

But I do think FIFA's corrupt.

FIFA's corrupt.

I mean, that's the element of truth, right?

FIFA's FIFA is very corrupt.

FIFA is corrupt.

We know that, right?

But then the conspiratorial thinking you start to make connections that you might not have, oftentimes the answer is much more simple and depressing.

And I think that's the other reason we turn towards conspiracy.

There is, I think she's a political scientist or a cultural theorist who made the point that conspiracy poses as a critique of power, but it never actually gets to the point of critique.

It actually ends up being more of a celebration of power because the answer is often right in front of us.

There is a structure.

There's groups in power.

They want to maintain their power, they want to maintain their wealth.

But instead we start to think of it as being this like evil hidden network that's operating behind the scenes.

When in response, we can point to the problems.

We know that FIFA's corrupt because there's a lot of people exchanging money and exchanging favors with each other.

But then we start to think about playing out these other secrets type of ways.

How much do you think that this is tied to identity, the way that, this is where I don't have any expertise or ability to kind of look beyond the internet generation.

I mean, I'm 47.

I came of age at a time when the internet was becoming a thing just as I hit adulthood.

Yeah, but it seems like the internet has accelerated our desire to identify ourselves with certain groups.

So it might be politics, it might be social causes, it might be conspiracy thinking.

But I it seems like without the identity piece, maybe you could break somebody from.

So if you have an opinion about something but your identity isn't based on it, I can probably dissuade you with some some facts that would counter that.

Yeah, but if your identity is tied to it, it's going to be a lot harder, isn't it?

Yeah.

And I don't know if it's.

There's always been.

There's always been conspiracy.

There's always been interest in being part of groups.

There's always been a connection to different types of identities.

But there's something different about in the online experience.

In the online world, you can have more fragmented and isolated identity groups, and you can have more fragmented.

People often talk about the internet serving as echo chambers.

I know I don't love the term echo chamber because it kind of implies a degree of being contained.

Rather, you're getting part of these different networks of thinking and they can validate the views you have.

So it could be tied into your identity.

The fact that you're the one who knows that Covid was created in this spot and is doing this thing, and it's tied to this specific goal, and where you're the one who knows that Bill gates is trying to implant chips in you through the vaccine, you can tie into people through that network, which will then introduce you to other conspiracies, and it will build upon itself.

And you're pushing out, like you're saying, the people who are going to reject those ideas and maybe like the person that you're talking about, where their marriage dissolves, the person who would call them out, you don't have to listen to them because you're that other person online supporting you.

So there's a danger there.

So in a moment, we're going to talk.

We're gonna start talking about maybe what we can do, as a sort of solutions oriented angle.

Here, let me read a couple of emails Charles emailed this morning to say, well, let's examine a conspiracy theory that turned out to be true.

For two plus years, everyone could see that President Joe Biden was not.

Well, it was not hard to realize that something was very, very wrong with him.

It's also not unprecedented in American history to have a president who is not carrying out his duties due to illness or injury, C Woodrow and Edith Wilson.

But despite these facts, what did the Biden administration and the mainstream media tell us?

Deep fakes, cheap fakes, he sharp as a tack.

Everyone knew these relies.

It's natural and I would argue important to ask what's the real story here?

But everyone who did ask that question was then labeled a conspiracy theorist.

If only there were an industry dedicated to asking the hard questions, even when they didn't like where the answers lead.

That's from Charles.

Yeah, I mean, that didn't help there.

So there's there's there's no way around it, right?

Yeah.

Because the more you can point to something that actually did turn out to be a real thing or a real problem, the more you start to convince yourself that all of these other things are probably.

Yeah, the real.

And and again, so conspiracy theory has always been here.

And we can point to times in the past where conspiracy theory flourished.

We can look to the 70s, and a lot of counter counter culture believed in things that were conspiracy theories.

I was when we saw the rise of a lot of belief about all the hidden aliens and UFOs or fluoride in the water.

There's lots of conspiracies that have always been around, but there's certain things that have accelerated it.

And we know right now we have an all time low distrust of institutions and a distrust in media.

And I'm sure that you're aware of this.

But right now, current surveys have shown that I think 8% of Republicans trust mainstream media.

Yeah.

And I think it's something like 50 or 51% of Democrats and independents are right in the middle, which isn't surprising.

And we saw that drop during Covid.

That was it.

Also in response to Black Lives Matter protests and how the media covered it, but especially during Covid, we saw this huge drop.

Democrats as well, Democrats and people on the left who started to recover.

Some trust people on the right have not.

Right.

So we're at this point, and it can be things where we point to instances like Joe Biden and say, hey, I see this thing in front of me.

I see him on on the stage.

I see him giving a speech, and I can tell that things are not right.

And I'm being told in this news article where they're supposed to be that objective coverage, that he's fine and we don't have to worry about it.

But there's still a face in the media among certain groups, but in other groups, 8% is incredibly that's low.

That's that's that's that's pretty scary.

And then on top of that, we have a news organization, Fox News, which has done a good job of saying we're the ones you can trust and you should not trust other media sources.

And I think that's different than the past before.

So you could have a group, you could have a media source saying, we're going to provide you the best coverage on this topic.

But I didn't see in the past and correct me if I'm wrong, but specifically saying, and they're lying to you, that's new.

Yeah, but but take the Fox News thing, which is interesting to me on the recent LG, G8 or the reflecting pool.

They covered the white House claims that someone took a razor blade like it was, you know, Watergate.

Like it was this obviously like there's real smoke here.

And I'm watching this coverage thinking if I'm a viewer of Fox News, even if I love President Trump and, you know, whatever, am I going to pause and say, how many cameras are on the reflecting pool?

Yeah.

How many cameras are in society?

How much evidence do I think we probably could have by now if somebody actually were engaged in some sort of a clandestine plot to carve that thing up and make the president look bad, how would we get algae back in the pool?

Yeah.

Does the lay person who carries a backpack in overnight, you know, just like, can you just inject algae?

And, I mean, does anybody stop to ask?

Or is it again part of the game, the identity.

I do I mean, if we look at polls, there is there is a breaking away from Trump on some level.

So I think that we're reaching this point where there are people saying, all right, you promised all these things and some of them directly related to conspiracy Trump ran.

I mean, Trump's origin story in politics is in part they as part of the birther moment movement with Obama.

Right.

So he's always been attached to conspiracy theories in a way that we've never seen a previous president.

It's not that other presidents use conspiracy theories, and we can think of examples of that.

But Trump was attached to it really as part of his origin story.

And the second time he ran, he made a lot of promises directly calling out too often young men who are interested in conspiracy saying, hey, we're going to give you the answers related to JFK.

We're going to give you the answers related to Martin Luther King Jr being shot.

We're going to give you answers related to aliens.

We're going to tell you the truth, especially about Epstein and more and.

More and all the files.

Yeah, more and more.

Those people said, well, he made those promises are starting to have doubts.

And I think now when they're seeing him point to things like the reflecting pool, I believe that it's not with everyone who's a supporter of a Trump people.

Some people just accept it.

But more and more people are seeing that as a joke and they're liking him in spite of it.

Or they're saying this is another example of how he's operating.

Okay.

You know, I think of podcaster and comedian Andrew Schultz as an example of someone who's broken away from Trump primarily because of Epstein.

Yeah.

A number of issues, if you listen to Schultz.

But, he said he was aghast at how quickly the Trump administration flipped from, we're campaigning, you're being lied to.

We're going to show you the truth to we're in office.

Stop asking.

This is a a done a dead issue.

And but I still don't I mean, the polls don't say it's anywhere close to a major.

I mean, it's not even a a small it's it's a very small number so far.

No.

And the other thing, if we look at someone like Andrew Schultz, he's saying I no longer trust Trump in the same way that I did, but we don't see him taking the step of saying, here's institutions we should trust.

He's not saying, hey, it turns out that media source, that reporter actually had it, right?

He's still in the space of conspiracy where he's saying, trust no one and I need to find the real answers.

Yeah.

And I think that's the real danger that we see.

So if we look at what causes conspiracy, it's about those social divisions.

It's about that lack of trust.

It's a lack of, belief in expertise or institutions.

Andrew Andrew Schultz breaking from Trump does not lead people towards a better news source.

It leads them away from the place that he did put his faith in.

But it would be different.

You're saying if he said, look, I've thought about this kind of like the scales are falling from my eyes here, and you know, institutions are not perfect, but maybe Z is not as bad as we thought or that's not the argument he's making.

Yeah.

And now now, would it solve it?

No, it would help some.

But the problem is, if we go back to that definition of everything's connected, everything happens for a reason.

Nothing is as it seems.

People would say there must be some underlying reason.

Now, why Andrew Schultz is breaking.

They got to him.

So some people would still double down and say, look how powerful they are.

Here's an extension of the conspiracy.

Yeah, look how powerful.

They even got.

Andrew.

She even got the person I could trust.

Or maybe he was placed there to try to lure us away from the truth.

Because that happens too, right?

That's the conspiratorial thought.

But I do think it would help if you had a bunch of people who have led people down this path saying, turns out I was wrong.

And not only am I wrong, but they were right about certain things and we can point to it.

And maybe there is a better way of gathering evidence and understanding the world.

I have to believe they could drag a few people along.

Well, let me read, this other email that I think will turn us in the direction of what we might be able to do.

Jen says, hi, Evan, the age of AI is going to make all of this way worse.

You guys think it's bad now?

Wait until no one knows what's real on their feeds.

It's already happening.

No one will trust anything.

Isn't that what they want?

The Capitol TV.

Let's set aside the last line of Jen's email for a second here, Jenna saying it's already happening, where if you get on your social feeds, you see a slop.

You see, yeah, it it takes about five seconds to create a video that has a plausible look.

Again, a believable look.

You can probably figure it out pretty quickly, but it's getting better and better.

And Jensen, what happens in the future when everything is questioned?

Nothing you feel like you can believe.

Are we going there?

I mean, it's scary.

The audio is better than the video too.

So if you want to have hey, we found these leaked tapes of Obama saying what he really thinks.

You could create that pretty easily.

It's scary.

We live in a very cynical.

We live in a very cynical world.

Younger people are coming up as a very cynical generation now.

I think we do see signs of hope.

And we can, we should talk about those.

But I was as I was on my way here, I was thinking about, if you're a 30 year old now, what you've actually gone through in terms of these big moments that had conspiracy around them, and then you have the rise of all these technologies which muddy the waters of what to believe.

If you're 30 years old, you start out with nine, 11.

You live through the birther movement, you lived through Pizzagate, you lived through Epstein, you lived through Covid, you lived through all the sports, gambling, gambling, and seeing all the corruption of catching players who were trying to make money by throwing games.

And you see inequality growing more and more billionaires, more and more struggle, and you're trying to figure out this confusing world and how how could this actually be when it seems all messed up, like it shouldn't be this messed up?

And then you get this fractured online space, which is how you learn about the world.

Plus you have AI, which means anything that happens.

The easiest excuses.

Well, that's fake, right?

Yeah.

I mean, think about what's going to happen with sex scandals in the future, right?

The easiest thing a politician or celebrity gets a sex scandal.

Well, that wasn't real, right?

All those that video that you saw, that audio, they heard, that email or text messages, those weren't real.

Why would you believe them?

And we already have politicians who have been willing to say fake news.

And that's actually discounting the news source.

When you might have the data in front of you to go against it.

But now that you can actually point to AI, I mean, it's pretty scary.

That's based rendering.

So after we take this break, I've got a pile of your emails, some responding to some of what we've been talking about already, others with ideas on what can be done here.

And I'm going to get to those with my guest, doctor Kyle Greene, who's associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Suny Brockport, host of the Give Theory a Chance podcast.

So we'll take those emails, and we are going to talk with Kyle about what he thinks.

You know, culturally, individually, we can think about in different ways to maybe inoculate ourselves a little bit, I hope.

But I hope this is not coming off as like I've laughed a little bit.

Some of the conspiracy theories are sort of fun or silly.

I'm not trying to laugh at anybody who I'm sure I've believed all kinds of wild things at some point in my life, and I'm sure maybe right now.

So I'm not trying to laugh at anybody, but I am trying to be real about the fact that I think there's a risk and very, very kind of, clumsy or dangerous thinking.

And so we're going to talk about what we do about that.

We'll take more of your feedback coming up.

Coming up in our second, Our Connection Summer sessions focuses this week on love, friendship and belonging.

And today, a conversation about the love and friendships that we might soon find or are finding right now in I. Our kids are forming friendships with I, but adults are having romantic relationships with I. It's happening already.

Where should the boundaries be?

We'll talk about it next.

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This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson, right.

Let me read a few of your emails here.

Again, it's connections at sidewalk.

You can jump in the chat if you're watching on YouTube.

Hello there.

And you can call 844295 talk if you want to call the program.

(844) 295-8255.

Here's Dalia.

She says, the Joe Biden thing is hardly a conspiracy theory.

That's a very, very weak example.

And probably an example provided by somebody who does believe in conspiracies or thinks about them a lot.

Because classifying the Joe Biden thing as a conspiracy theory is weird.

Okay.

So just briefly, I, I agree with Dalia that the Joe Biden health thing is not a conspiracy in the way that, someone is claiming that there is a basement in this pizza shop and they're holding children there, as slaves or that Joe Biden had died and was was the government was being run by the people that that's conspiracy.

I think, though, what Charles was emailing about, Dalia, was simply the idea that when powerful institutions are powerful people lie to your face or try to convince you that the sky is green, even if it's something like Joe Biden's health, it makes people not want to believe anything that they hear.

I think that's what Charles was saying.

Yeah, I think did you hear I think so it's about the erosion of trust.

And why why are we in a place right now where we have so little faith in whether it's the media, whether it's our political parties?

Because that's the other thing that we've seen, even as people lose faith in Republicans, it hasn't.

That meant that faith in the Democrats have gone up.

Right.

So why do we have why are there so few places we don't trust our doctors, we don't trust our professors.

We don't trust our people having noontime shows where they talk to experts about different topics.

Right.

So why have we had such an erosion?

I think that's what it points to, where you have someone, as public figure as possible, the president, and you're wondering what's going on, and you're being told something that doesn't match your eyes, and then you find out your eyes are actually right.

Why would you trust that party anymore?

So it's an erosion of trust rather than conspiracy.

Diya, thank you for the email.

This is Erin who says, good afternoon, very entertaining hour.

I was on a vacation with all the mail in laws in my family last month.

Out of the blue, one of my brothers in law started showing videos about how they faked the the moon landing and everyone was laughing and incredulous.

But two nights later, my 87 year old father in law was heading down the YouTube rabbit hole, watching what seemed like very intellectual videos about all the holes and the official moon landing story and how it could have been faked in 1969.

Great thing to mention today on the anniversary.

That's from Erin and Bright.

Brighton.

Yeah.

So you talk to us a little bit about what Erin is witnessing, which is, hey, I think we're kidding, but there's so much material in the online space, especially on YouTube, that you can go down a rabbit hole pretty quickly and find yourself pulled.

And this is the danger of the network.

This is the danger of the algorithm not believing the moon landing.

Probably not the most dangerous conspiracy, right?

Where?

What action is going that going to lead to?

However, it does start to sow distrust in expertise.

It starts to sow distrust in the scientist.

It starts to sow.

Just trust with the government.

And I'm sure when you finish that YouTube video that you're watching, when it has recommended videos, maybe then you end up watching the Plandemic video or something else, right?

So it's easy to jump from one to the other.

And again, going back to a point that you made earlier, which I think is important and that I agreed with, is sometimes conspiracy theories.

Most conspiracy theories have an element of truth that's really key, but it's the connections that you make when you're to build upon that truth.

And if you have that ability to falsify your views.

And that's one of the differences between something like a rumor or something like conspiracy.

And what we do, a scientist is saying, well, here's a hypothesis if we think of how this thing actually works.

But if you give me data that goes against what I expected, then I have to admit I'm wrong or I have to improve how I'm understanding it.

Can somebody I don't know if it's you.

If you can't, then maybe somebody's listening.

Can somebody explain to me what is the the explanation of why the the moon landing was?

I mean, obviously we're in a space race.

Yeah, but, like, why are we still talking it?

Why do we.

What's the germ of truth there?

What were we going for by building the soundstage and faking a moon landing?

I should know this.

And this.

This is a this is sidestepping answering your question.

But one of the reasons that conspiracy is so popular, especially with young men, is Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan's podcast.

And in, in part started as a peddler of conspiracy theory.

But they were more of that variety, questioning the moon landing.

So we had a lot of people come on to question the moon landing, and we learned about how I think Stanley Kubrick was actually the person, and he had a set that he was one of them.

I don't know, but I don't know that I don't know that reasons that we still talk about it.

But he also talked about things like Bigfoot and things like Sasquatch.

And so those are the ones that seem less dangerous.

And it's interesting following Joe Rogan to say, well, now is a place where conspiracy runs.

That's beyond just talking about the moon landing.

It's beyond just talking about Bigfoot.

So when we looked at popular figures and their their origin stories, it's funny when you bring up the moon landing.

Well and to your point about there's some low stakes and high stakes conspiracy.

Yeah.

I suppose Bigfoot would be like a low stakes ride.

That's kind of fun for some people.

Doesn't really seem to have much impact.

Ken Trails is a different thing where, somehow people believe Tucker Carlson did a whole, like, two hours on this.

Totally.

Not ironically, like chem trails that we have international networks literally international networks.

Some of them are with the commercial airlines somewhere with military airlines.

Some are in Costa Rica, some are in Mexico, some are in the United States.

And these pilots are seeding the atmosphere.

They're poisoning us.

Sometimes they're controlling the weather.

But the amount of people who would have to be involved at this, the amount of human beings involved in the conspiracy, how does that not immediately tell people?

Because isn't that like a basic equation?

The more people involved in an actual conspiracy, the less likely that conspiracy will be able to be covered up.

And that's pretty basic, right?

Yeah.

So how how are we doing this internationally with thousands of people?

Well, and I think that's one of the things you're pointing to is conspiracy is exciting and fun because you're building this idea that there's this evil network that's doing things that seems astounding, even think about flat earth, right?

Think about the amount of work that it takes to demonstrate to someone that the Earth is actually flat.

Yeah.

That round it's it's a lot of work to build these conspiracy theories.

There can be a joy and an excitement in the person doing that.

And one of the things about paranoia, which we can associate conspiracy theory with paranoia, paranoia doesn't really have abound.

When you're paranoid about something, it can extend to and extend and extend, and so you can get these intricate stories to explain it.

The other key difference when your point is someone like Tucker Carlson is we often thought about conspiracy in the past, and I think, I think we still do think about conspiracy happening around the margins.

Right?

Oh, that's that group of people online that's thinking about it.

Oh, that's that person who sits in the back of the classroom who's making all these connections.

That's Alex Jones, who now we can understand the power that Alex Jones has had on society.

But that wasn't taken seriously for so many years.

He's that weirdo that's peddling all those things that we know are not actually true, as those people either actually enter the government or enter.

Tucker Carlson has a very large fan base, a very large audience.

Yeah, but you can see some of those ideas.

RFK talks about camp trails as well.

Right.

So what happens when the people who are on the margins pointing towards supposedly questioning the corruption in power suddenly that the people in those positions of power.

That's one of the things I found so astounding when Trump was giving his talk about election.

Yes.

One of the things I think is so fascinating to me, pointing to just using reason, is the time the election was stolen was when he was president, and yet when he wasn't like you.

Were in charge.

Yeah.

When he wasn't president, the election wasn't stolen.

So it's only when he was president.

And that's one of those moments where I say, this is it should be when the conspiracy theory breaks down, when you when you are the person in the position of power, it shows the resiliency of these theories that they can operate against.

Basic sense.

Yes.

I'm so glad you brought this up because that's like the ultimate the calls coming from inside the house, dude.

Yeah.

Like you're the guy.

You're you're not the outsiders anymore.

You've your party has gotten elected and is winning at every level.

If you want to put the information out there, you can.

So that makes me think of two things.

So you brought up Alex Jones, Alex Jones in depositions has had to admit, yes, I'm just an entertainer.

No, I don't believe this stuff that's on the record.

And I would have thought the second he says that, his people are going to say, you are a fraud, I'm out of here.

But the conspiracy theory says he had to say it.

That's that's what I've learned.

It's a they will spin within the conspiracy.

Some explanation for that.

Just as yeah, there's people who are upset at JD Vance and Donald Trump and Kash Patel and Dan Bongino for time for not releasing what they claimed, all this information, but now they're like, oh, something is preventing them or they know something else.

There's always another layer here.

Yeah.

Even when you get the power.

That prevents us from getting the full picture.

Yeah.

So and there's this constant thinking about Alex Jones.

There's this constant self-fulfilling prophecy of conspiracy theory.

And I'll try to tell this story very quickly.

But there's this famous example Jon Ronson British journalist.

Yeah.

He wrote this book on conspiracy and he tells a story with Alex Jones, which I think is so enlightening, where it shows both an element of truth, but then how we can build it towards a more darker analysis or more darker vision of it.

Jon Ronson and Alex Jones are going to Bohemian Grove.

Bohemian Grove is one of these long lasting conspiracy theories about where the elites meet and engage in all these like ritualistic sacrifices and a true secret society.

So John Roberts and Alex Jones go there together as they're going in Jon Ronson's Walking in the entrance, Alex Jones jumps in the bushes because he says, they're watching us.

There's cameras everywhere.

So he jumps in the bushes, rolls down a hill, goes through the woods.

Jon Ronson simply walks in.

He ends up at the actual ceremony that's happening, and Alex Jones appears after going through the woods, going through poison ivy, having this extreme experience for Alex Jones, his story is now I went through the woods.

I had to do this.

They were chasing me.

Jon Ronson ended up at the exact same point.

He still saw something that was disturbing, which is a group of elite people gathering together and engaging in these strange, old fashioned ceremonies that you would see it like an elite fraternity.

And so he sees this and says, this is strange.

There's this gathering of people who have power, and they're burning this like giant statue that looks like a human.

And there's a musical performance, and they're not.

Sacrificing actual human beings.

Alex Jones story is, I went through the woods and there might have been an actual human, and Jon Ronson says, no, I walk down a path and I saw something strange, and it tells us something about how the elites in society gather together and form a exclusionary community.

They both see the exact same thing.

But for Alex Jones, it's a story about this was a group of rich people who would have killed me if they found me.

They chased me through the woods, and then I saw potentially a human being burned, each seeing the exact same thing.

Right.

And that's the story of conspiracy thinking, There is something disturbing about what Jon Ronson saw.

There is something disturbing about what Alex Jones saw, but Alex Jones telling of the event because of that self-fulfilling prophecy is much more disturbing.

Horrifying.

All right, so I got to get through a few more emails, and then I want to talk about what you think maybe we can do better.

Tim just writes, fun show.

Did you know that birds aren't real?

What is?

The birds aren't real thing.

Is that a real conspiracy?

No, this was a this was someone creating a parody.

Okay, so this is not a real.

But it was brilliant the way the person did it.

That's very funny, Tim.

Thank you.

This is a different Tim.

Timothy says on Bigfoot.

I do want to blame Linus.

And the Great Pumpkin is the beginning of my belief in Bigfoot.

Just saying.

I never ate.

It.

I I'm not even familiar with the reference there.

Gary, says, on the subject of fact versus fiction and the rise of totalitarianism, he says Hannah Arendt studied the rise and origins of totalitarianism in the 1930s.

She found that the inability of the population to differentiate the difference between fact and fiction was the foundation of totalitarianism.

So what does the future bring?

Totalitarianism becomes the only manner to ensure any social stability.

That's what the future has in store for us.

It's not a conspiracy as no one is orchestrating it.

It is the natural selection evolution at work.

It's the scariest conclusion.

But not impossible.

Not impossible.

Not impossible at all.

Dallas said that, is Mitch McConnell experiencing a conspiracy?

I saw a picture of him rollerblading on a trampoline.

Yes.

This is the AI slop that we're talking about.

There are all kinds of Mitch McConnell getting up and dancing memes because they post this picture of him in the hospital saying, oh, look, he's reading a Washington Post.

It's time.

David.

He's fine.

It's not Weekend at Bernie's with Mitch McConnell.

But now everybody's taking it to the AI machine.

And this is where it's very difficult to know what what to believe.

And when you have enough reasons not to believe what you're seeing, you start to question everything.

And I will say, you can call me the conspiracy theorist, the Mitch McConnell photo is strange.

Oh, why is it?

Oh, I think that's strange.

Yeah.

Why?

We haven't seen him for a month.

We haven't seen for a month.

Why is he sitting in bed with the Y in shirt or whatever, casual shirt wearing and still in the hospital.

He's sitting in a chair.

The photo seems very.

I at least modified, so there's reasons to doubt it that being questioning power is not necessarily the conspiracy theory.

Right?

It's the starting point.

And I think it's where do you go with that?

Because we don't want to simply say, simply trust every expert.

Don't question when someone tells you if you're in a position of power, simply obey what they say.

Right?

There's reason to have doubts.

We have lots of reasons to have doubts.

Our government has done awful things right throughout all the years, throughout all the groups that were in power.

Medical institutions have done some very shady things and recommended some very bad practices.

Right.

So we have reasons to have doubt what we don't want to do.

I think at least as we start to move towards solutions, is to just become so cynical and doubt everything we don't want.

Do your own research to mean, I'm going to dismiss what the mainstream media says or what the expert says, because that's being a critical thinker.

But now I'm going to just trust whatever the YouTube video says, because that's often what we see happen as well.

And we see that a lot with, we often talk about young men being sucked into these worlds.

Young women are as well.

And this is one of the great successes of the Maha movement.

This is part of what built built the coalition of young women supporting Trump is in part people saying, I'm looking for answers about health.

I don't fully trust that thing.

So now I'm caught up by all the social media influencers are promising something else.

And so if you're wondering why do people why are people doing some really odd stuff with health?

Products and things like that, the beef tallow on your face, things like that?

Yeah.

It's part of this movement that seeks to reject the mainstream institutions in a way.

Yeah.

And to find something more natural.

And a lot of this is a response we can't ignore the impact that Covid had.

Right?

This was this big tipping point in society where we saw increased distrust about media and the medical institution and hard to recover.

It's a lot easier, again, when we start to move towards thinking about solutions.

It's a lot easier to erode institutions and to erode trust than to rebuild it.

I'm really glad, though.

You bring up, I mean, even the Mitch McConnell thing I think is valuable because I think it's odd that we haven't seen him.

Yeah, that there's been no real, transparent statement.

The health of a sitting senator is very important.

Do I think that the one of the conspiracies, he's already dead, that everybody knows it, and they're, you know, they're plotting x, y, z?

No, I don't have any evidence of that.

But am I at least curious?

Of course, he had public events where he looked to be having, you know, quasi stroke like events in public.

And I'm not a doctor, but yeah, of course I'm concerned, I do.

I just buy whatever they want me to buy.

I am a skeptic.

Yeah, but help me.

Help all of us be skeptics without being conspiracy theorists.

Especially in the age of AI and this weird technology soup that we're in, what can we do better?

That's the challenge.

That's that's a really difficult challenge.

I mean, I'd say one is remind yourself of the definition of conspiracy.

And if you find yourself ending up in a place where you're saying, my views do really look like I'm attaching myself to an idea that nothing is as it seems, everything happens for a reason.

Everything is connected.

Maybe it's time to step back and say, now I'm not only being critical, but I'm starting to enter that space of conspiracy.

The other thing that I think can help, and this may seem like a bit of a jump, is we should be reading more, and we should be trying to engage in a slower form of thinking.

There was an article that came out in The Atlantic we talked about before we recorded that you're aware of as well, the end of reading and it.

Everyone should read this.

Yeah.

We should and you should read it right.

Actually read the article.

Yeah, we've engaged it.

We've engaged in we consume very fragmented, immediate thoughts and there's no depth to it.

And it actually shapes the way that we see the world.

And it lends itself really well to conspiracy thinking.

This goes back to the point I was making with Seawright Mills at the very beginning.

We need to slow down and build our understanding of how institutions work and how society works.

And then in a sense, it will give us this is pitching sociology, but it will give us a sociological common sense right, of saying, all right, that seems like a critique of power that makes sense.

That seems like something that an elite group would do.

Epstein files would serve as an example groups of powerful people gathering together and doing awful things, sadly believable and horrifying.

But then when you take the step of also seeing people say, well, there's all these accounts of them eating babies and things like that, and like that kind of goes against what we see as common sense and often gets in the way of the actual critique of how these networks work.

So I think a big part of is slowing down and trying to consume information around it without just jumping from A, B, C, and just rapidly because you're not going to you're just going to get sucked into that network if you do that.

And again, the three pillars of recognizing conspiratorial thinking, what are the three pillars?

Nothing is as it seems.

Everything happens for a reason and everything is connected.

And then the other point that I would make, which I think is really important and again, very, very difficult, and this is more of a call for politicians to focus on this, but also local communities building institutions that do things for people starting to demonstrate again why we should trust you.

That's the way we recover.

If we see public, if if we advertise and we see public health bringing good things to the people in the community, well, then you start to trust them.

If you can say, hey, those are the people that made sure that we avoided that virus that was going around.

And I saw at work or when I talk to my doctor, I don't seem like I'm dismissed.

They actually communicate both their confidence, but also some of the unknowns as well.

Right.

Or if we see a government that's saying, hey, we're actually doing this for you, you should trust us.

Because, look, this is what we provide as an institution.

I think that helps.

I want to just mention the piece on the end of reading that Kyle mentioned that we should talk about on a whole separate day here.

The piece the author is not arguing that we're not going to read anymore.

What the author is arguing is that the kind of reading we are doing is rapidly changing in a way that's going to make us more vulnerable to bad information, to authoritarianism, to conspiracy thinking.

And the idea is basically this throughout human history, we were sort of, you know, kind of one thing as a species.

The printing press actually fundamentally changed us because we started to learn how to develop complex thoughts, and we could develop those thoughts because we could write them down, we could think about them, we could develop more sustained and complex ideas, and then we could respond to them and rebut them in ways that we never could before.

And it literally changed our IQ, our brains, our capacity for thought.

And we are choosing now to go away from that.

We are reading a lot, most of what we're reading, our text messages and short messages and, and social media messages, and we are not reading books and we are not reading long treatises, and we are not reading articles and we're not reading depth.

And that will have a profound impact.

It will fundamentally change us as a species.

Yeah.

You agree with that?

I do agree with that.

And I think again, return to conspiracy.

If we look when conspiracy flourishes, it's exactly the type of thinking that reading pushes against.

Now, of course, reading there could be an in-depth, long form book that pushes some sort of conspiracy theory.

But if we think about just making these rapid connections and not stopping to think about whether it makes sense or not, looking at how much data there actually is to support the idea, it flourishes in an age where we're rapidly consuming.

I read more words now than I probably did ten years ago, but I read them in a very different way, which is the point of that article.

See why says the human brain is adapted to the environment by recognizing patterns to predict what will happen.

Therefore, everything must have a reason to our environment can be predicted and our lives can have meaning, however absurd our brain will find something.

I mean, in some ways, Steve lives right?

We're trained to find those things, right?

Yeah.

And we're also we're also social creatures that tell stories to make sense of the world.

And we like there to be a narrative arc.

So we're looking for patterns or trying to create a narrative arc.

So again, it makes sense.

We've seen conspiracy theories in all societies across time.

The question is why it's so incredibly accelerated right now.

30s or so here.

You know, you work with students, I'm very, very curious to know what young adults are making of all of this because they are coming up in the information age in a way that I did not.

And so I would think they're more savvy about, like AI recognition and or more discerning about whether they want AI, art, things like that.

But I'm worried that we're all at every level at their generation, too, just accepting it more quickly than I thought.

What do you say?

There's a rejection, but it's there's a polarized rejection.

So there's some students who would say, I absolutely hate this thing.

And there's a nostalgic for that kind of 80s and 90s style esthetic.

And then they're students who say, you're making too big of a deal of this.

Who cares?

And then there's perhaps the saddest group is saying, I don't like it, but I'm cynical and I simply accept it.

And it's easy.

So almost like a nihilism.

Yeah.

And that's I think that's the other part where I get really scared, so.

Oh, boy.

But I do think a final point.

Yeah.

Quickly.

A lot of research shows conspiracy flourishes in times of uncertainty, at times of inequality, when people are less educated, when there's poverty.

So when we think about things that can provide resilience, it's also things that help society.

Egalitarianism is better for our thinking and better for everyone.

Seems like it, I hope.

Thank you for coming in.

Doctor Kyle Greene, associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Suny Brockport.

Where do you want people to find you for fun?

You can check out my podcast, Give Theory a Chance.

You can check out my website at Suny Brockport.

Or you could even.

I don't take classes in Brockport.

Why not come back sometime soon?

Anytime.

Great.

Having more connections coming up?

I'm.

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