# Cautionary Conversation: The Conspiracy Theorist Who Changed His Mind

An episode of [Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1484511465), 21 Oct 2022, 41 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdrl.fm/18db03/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/c0ae8c6e-22f0-4e9b-ac1c-ae390037ac53/0bf03e56-8692-49e1-bed2-af32012b1b91/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=7f5a4714-6b10-4ccf-a424-ae390037ac70

Charlie Veitch was certain that 9/11 was an inside job. The attack on the World Trade Center wasn't the work of Al-Qaeda, but an elaborate conspiracy. He became a darling of so-called "9/11 truthers" - until he actually visited Ground Zero to meet architects, engineers and the relatives of the dead. The trip changed his mind... there was no conspiracy. His fellow "truthers" did not take Charlie's conversion well. David McRaney (host of You Are Not So Smart and author of How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion and Persuasion) joins Tim Harford to discuss what happened to Charlie Veitch; what it tells us about those who hold strong beliefs even in the face of damning contrary evidence; and why persuasion isn't always the right answer. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:15] Speaker 1: Pushkin. I have been preparing a special Halloween episode of
[0:23] Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales, but this week isn't Halloween, so that's not right.
[0:29] Speaker 1: We don't want to annoy the spirits, so we'll release
[0:32] Speaker 1: the Cautionary Tales Halloween episode next week. Well, what should
[0:38] Speaker 1: we do this week? This week I will be dropping
[0:40] Speaker 1: another of our occasional Cautionary Conversations, an interview with someone
[0:46] Speaker 1: with a story to tell that I think you might enjoy.
[0:51] Speaker 1: In June two thousand and eleven, Charlie Veach boarded a
[0:55] Speaker 1: British Airways flight at London's Heathrow Airport. He was headed
[0:59] Speaker 1: to New York City, in fact, to Ground Zero. There.
[1:04] Speaker 1: On September eleventh, two thousand and one, the twin towers
[1:08] Speaker 1: of the World Trade Center collapsed, killing thousands after being
[1:13] Speaker 1: struck by two passenger aircraft hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists.
[1:19] Speaker 1: That's the official story, anyway, but Charlie didn't believe it.
[1:24] Speaker 1: Charlie Veach was a truther, a man who didn't believe
[1:28] Speaker 1: that the World Trade Center collapsed because of a terrorist attack,
[1:31] Speaker 1: who thought instead that it was a controlled demolition, part
[1:35] Speaker 1: of a deadly conspiracy. Charlie didn't just believe this, he
[1:39] Speaker 1: was evangelical about it. He was a leader in the
[1:43] Speaker 1: truther community, making a good living from his YouTube videos
[1:47] Speaker 1: in which he explained that jet fuel can't burn hot
[1:50] Speaker 1: enough to melt steel beams, or that the neat collapse
[1:53] Speaker 1: of the skyscrapers into their own foundations could only have
[1:57] Speaker 1: been the result of precision explosives. The nine to eleven
[2:00] Speaker 1: conspiracy theory was his faith, his social life, and his job.
[2:05] Speaker 1: Charlie flew to Ground Zero as part of a BBC
[2:08] Speaker 1: TV series Conspiracy Road Trip. The premise of the show
[2:13] Speaker 1: was that in each episode, a different tribe of conspiracy
[2:16] Speaker 1: theorists would travel around in a bus, meeting the eyewitnesses
[2:20] Speaker 1: and the experts who might challenge their views, and maybe
[2:24] Speaker 1: with the cameras rolling. When presented with the most authoritative
[2:28] Speaker 1: facts in the most riveting circumstances, they'd changed their minds.
[2:33] Speaker 1: Of course, they never did, except once Charlie Vach. After
[2:41] Speaker 1: listening to all the experts and all the witnesses, went
[2:45] Speaker 1: home to think, and then after a few days, he
[2:49] Speaker 1: posted a short video for his fellow truthers. The evidence
[2:53] Speaker 1: had convinced him he couldn't hold on to the conspiracy
[2:57] Speaker 1: theory any longer nine to eleven really had simply been
[3:01] Speaker 1: a terrorist attack that caught the US unawares. Yes, he said,
[3:08] Speaker 1: I have changed my mind, and that, to his fellow truthers,
[3:14] Speaker 1: was utterly unforgivable. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to
[3:20] Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales. This is another one of our Cautionary Conversations.
[3:46] Speaker 1: As usual, you'll hear a story of something going wrong,
[3:50] Speaker 1: a peradventure with a lesson we can all learn. But
[3:52] Speaker 1: I'll be joined by an expert to help tell the
[3:55] Speaker 1: story and reflect on it. Today I'm joined by David McCraney,
[4:00] Speaker 1: the host of the hugely influential podcast You Are Not
[4:03] Speaker 1: So Smart, and the author of several books, including his
[4:06] Speaker 1: new and brilliant How My Interchange, The Surprising Science of Belief,
[4:12] Speaker 1: Opinion and Persuasion, which weaves Charlie vach his story together
[4:16] Speaker 1: with many others, along with the latest research and David's
[4:20] Speaker 1: own adventures in persuasion and conversation. David McCraney, Welcome to
[4:26] Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales. Wow, thank you so much. This is a
[4:29] Speaker 1: great honor to be here. A big fan of your work,
[4:31] Speaker 1: and this is going to be the best. I'm just
[4:33] Speaker 1: looking forward to hanging out with you and having a conversation.
[4:36] Speaker 1: So thanks for having me. It is my pleasure. And
[4:38] Speaker 1: I'm a huge fan of You're Not So Smart and
[4:40] Speaker 1: of the book. And you begin quite early on in
[4:43] Speaker 1: the book with the story of Charlie Vach. Just tell
[4:46] Speaker 1: us a little bit about the things that Charlie believed
[4:49] Speaker 1: before he came into contact with this BBC program and
[4:53] Speaker 1: what were the conversations that he had that changed his mind. Yeah,
[4:56] Speaker 1: for him, he had been a curious young man. He
[4:59] Speaker 1: had moved around a whole life. He had Brazilian heritage
[5:03] Speaker 1: and his father worked in the oil business, and so
[5:06] Speaker 1: they moved around from country to country to countries, several
[5:08] Speaker 1: countries in the at the least, and then back and forth,
[5:10] Speaker 1: and eventually when they settled in the UK. He had
[5:14] Speaker 1: sort of a Brazilian lilt to his accent, and he was,
[5:19] Speaker 1: as he told me, that he just was made fun
[5:21] Speaker 1: of a lot. When he was in the Middle Eastern countries,
[5:24] Speaker 1: people there were very prejudice against him and made fun
[5:27] Speaker 1: of him. And then when he came to the UK,
[5:28] Speaker 1: people there were prejudiced agast him and made fun of him.
[5:30] Speaker 1: So then he wanted to do something and he wanted
[5:33] Speaker 1: to question the world, and so he pursued a philosophy degree,
[5:36] Speaker 1: and then he eventually ended up in banking. And he
[5:39] Speaker 1: said that was something that he felt like he had
[5:41] Speaker 1: gotten into that sort of hamster wheel loop. He just
[5:43] Speaker 1: gets up, goes to the cubicle, sits there all day,
[5:46] Speaker 1: does something a machine can do, gets back up, comes home,
[5:49] Speaker 1: and he just felt very trapped and isolated and not validated,
[5:53] Speaker 1: and nothing about this philosophical urge that he had to
[5:56] Speaker 1: question the world was being satisfied. And then after nine
[6:01] Speaker 1: to eleven he watched a video. I want to say
[6:03] Speaker 1: it was Loose Change, but I think he watched all
[6:05] Speaker 1: of them, but I know that one of them in particular,
[6:07] Speaker 1: he was like, Okay, this is clear conspiracy. And he
[6:10] Speaker 1: had already been playing around in this space. He would
[6:14] Speaker 1: take a megaphone and he would run around in London
[6:17] Speaker 1: in other areas and he would just shout at people
[6:19] Speaker 1: and tell them they were being controlled, that their lives
[6:22] Speaker 1: were part of the military industrial complex. He was very
[6:26] Speaker 1: into Anonymous and all these other organizations that felt like
[6:30] Speaker 1: there's a there's sort of a benevolent anarchy that I
[6:32] Speaker 1: want to be part of and he didn't like the
[6:35] Speaker 1: idea of being stuck in a loop that removed his humanity.
[6:38] Speaker 1: That was something he reiterated it over and over again,
[6:40] Speaker 1: that he felt like he wasn't a real human being
[6:43] Speaker 1: and these were things that helped him feel like he was.
[6:46] Speaker 1: So when the nine eleven video came along, he felt like, Okay,
[6:50] Speaker 1: that this is evidence for what I am been talking about,
[6:53] Speaker 1: I'm thinking about feeling for so long. This really justifies
[6:56] Speaker 1: my beliefs and attitudes. And that is how he found
[7:00] Speaker 1: his way into the truth or community, the online community
[7:02] Speaker 1: of people who share those anxieties and together they talk
[7:05] Speaker 1: about it all the time and to the point that
[7:07] Speaker 1: they became a real community to him. So it's really
[7:09] Speaker 1: interesting the way that you've set the stage there. So
[7:12] Speaker 1: we haven't even yet talked about specifically what he believed,
[7:16] Speaker 1: but you've you've phrased it in emotional terms, his emotional journey,
[7:19] Speaker 1: the kind of person he was, the kind of longing
[7:22] Speaker 1: he had to believe in his perspectives on the world
[7:25] Speaker 1: which had not always treated him very well, The idea
[7:28] Speaker 1: that there was a community out there of like minded people,
[7:31] Speaker 1: this benevolent anarchy None of this yet is about the
[7:35] Speaker 1: specifics of the conspiracy theory. It's all about the emotional
[7:37] Speaker 1: residence of the conspiracy theory, which I think is important
[7:40] Speaker 1: in itself. Yeah, I wanted to lay the foundation of
[7:44] Speaker 1: his of how he arrived in the conspiratory community, because
[7:47] Speaker 1: it's hard to even say it out loudly, even after
[7:50] Speaker 1: all this research that the conspiracy actually is irrelevant and
[7:53] Speaker 1: the beliefs are irrelevant, But you don't know that when
[7:56] Speaker 1: you're in the conspiracy. The anxieties, in the values and
[7:59] Speaker 1: the emotions that lead a person into a conspiratory community,
[8:03] Speaker 1: that's what's the motivating factor, that's the drive. But in
[8:06] Speaker 1: an online ecosystem like we have in the information ecosystem
[8:08] Speaker 1: like now, you can go online and look for confirmation
[8:13] Speaker 1: that your anxiety is reasonable and you will find it. Yeah,
[8:15] Speaker 1: and you'll find it in other people sharing their anxieties.
[8:19] Speaker 1: And at a previous here it would be very difficult
[8:21] Speaker 1: for that degty. Further, you might have some meetups, maybe
[8:24] Speaker 1: you might be able to correspond in some way. You
[8:27] Speaker 1: might subscribe to people's newsletters or by their books. But
[8:30] Speaker 1: now there's this thing that can happen where people form
[8:33] Speaker 1: communities very rapidly, very quickly, and then spend a lot
[8:35] Speaker 1: of time exchanging ideas with them. So some of the
[8:38] Speaker 1: researches I spoke to about this, they were like, we
[8:40] Speaker 1: find our way into these groups for all sorts of reasons,
[8:43] Speaker 1: but once you're in the group, the anxiety is set
[8:46] Speaker 1: aside for the desire to be in this community because
[8:49] Speaker 1: it satisfies this other drive you really weren't aware of,
[8:52] Speaker 1: maybe that you wanted that validation in community. So that's
[8:55] Speaker 1: that's true for Charlie at the moment that he gets
[8:57] Speaker 1: into this, and once you're inside the community, these beliefs
[9:00] Speaker 1: that you may never have entertained before start becoming part
[9:02] Speaker 1: of the dynamic. And his beliefs, for instance, were that
[9:06] Speaker 1: the buildings filled directly into their footprints. He believed that
[9:10] Speaker 1: the steel beams of the towers the jet fuel couldn't
[9:13] Speaker 1: have burned hot enough to melt them, so how could
[9:16] Speaker 1: they have fallen. He had other beliefs that were deeper conspiratorial,
[9:19] Speaker 1: where that the airplanes may have been remote controlled, there
[9:22] Speaker 1: may have been dummies on the airplanes, and his fellow
[9:24] Speaker 1: conspiracy theorists pretty much shared almost all those beliefs, but
[9:28] Speaker 1: they all knew that they shared one thing in common,
[9:30] Speaker 1: which was it definitely was a conspiracy. And all those
[9:34] Speaker 1: people were then brought over by the BBC and they
[9:38] Speaker 1: were given what you always want to give someone who's
[9:40] Speaker 1: in a conspiratorial community. The thing we often do online
[9:43] Speaker 1: is let me dump as many facts as I can
[9:45] Speaker 1: on this person. Let me just show them. Look at
[9:47] Speaker 1: this link, Look at this link, look at this link. Well,
[9:48] Speaker 1: they went all the way in a way that we
[9:50] Speaker 1: all wish we could do. They took them to ground zero.
[9:53] Speaker 1: They've had them meet the architects who designed the World
[9:56] Speaker 1: Trade Center, who told them about how it couldn't resist
[9:59] Speaker 1: a modern plane. It was designed to resist an impact
[10:02] Speaker 1: from an over prop driven plane. They even had them
[10:05] Speaker 1: get into a flight simulator, the kind that commercial airline
[10:09] Speaker 1: pilots used and had them learn how, yeah, it's tough
[10:13] Speaker 1: to land one of these, but it's very easy to
[10:15] Speaker 1: just point it at something big. They had them talked
[10:18] Speaker 1: to demolition experts who talked to them about what kind
[10:22] Speaker 1: of explosives would be required for this, and how difficult
[10:25] Speaker 1: it would be to go into the building, and you
[10:27] Speaker 1: would have to take these gigantic jackhammera type devices and
[10:30] Speaker 1: drill into every one of the columns all the way up,
[10:33] Speaker 1: and you would have to put explosives into those holes
[10:36] Speaker 1: that you made all the way up. And then they
[10:38] Speaker 1: went even further and said, okay, what if we also
[10:41] Speaker 1: took these people and had them meet people who were there,
[10:43] Speaker 1: meet people who experienced this. So they talked to people
[10:45] Speaker 1: who are at the Pentagon when it was attacked, who
[10:48] Speaker 1: were there and helped with the cleanup before first responders
[10:51] Speaker 1: could get there, people who lost people they knew, people
[10:54] Speaker 1: who saw that, the corpses of their own coworkers. Then
[10:58] Speaker 1: they went to Pennsylvania to the crash side of one
[11:01] Speaker 1: of the planes, and they did everything you could imagine
[11:03] Speaker 1: to give people a chance to see. Okay, clearly, I
[11:07] Speaker 1: mean like there's facts and then there's this. And the
[11:11] Speaker 1: whole premise of this show, because it's like it's a
[11:13] Speaker 1: reality show, is that when you do all this, everybody goes, yeah, well,
[11:17] Speaker 1: nice job trying to trick me. I still believe it,
[11:19] Speaker 1: and that usually is what happens in the show at least.
[11:22] Speaker 1: But Charlie, he said, the thing that really sensed it
[11:24] Speaker 1: for him was they met the widows and widowers of
[11:28] Speaker 1: people who died in the crash. Charlie in particular, hugged
[11:32] Speaker 1: one of these people when he heard her story. He
[11:34] Speaker 1: held her while she sobbed, and when he got back
[11:36] Speaker 1: to the hotel room with the other truthers on the
[11:39] Speaker 1: trip with him, he was very eager to hear what
[11:41] Speaker 1: they thought about all of this. They opened the dialogue
[11:44] Speaker 1: by saying, Wow, those crocodile tears. Huh, what a great
[11:48] Speaker 1: actress that they hired to trick us. And he told
[11:52] Speaker 1: me that he thought, privately, you're a group of disgusting
[11:55] Speaker 1: animals to me, and that was overwhelming. He couldn't believe
[12:00] Speaker 1: that they had zero empathy for this, and from that
[12:03] Speaker 1: point forward he started seeing himself a little bit separate
[12:06] Speaker 1: from the group. It's incredible, but that I think interesting moment.
[12:10] Speaker 1: This really sets off the whole exploration in the book
[12:14] Speaker 1: how minds change, because they all came in with the
[12:17] Speaker 1: same belief, pretty much the same belief. They all saw
[12:20] Speaker 1: exactly the same thing. So I want to I want
[12:22] Speaker 1: to come back to Charlie's story because I think that
[12:24] Speaker 1: this mystery of why he changed his mind and why
[12:27] Speaker 1: the others didn't, I think is fascinating. But before we
[12:30] Speaker 1: come back to him. I wanted to ask David about
[12:32] Speaker 1: your own views. You seem to have gone on a
[12:34] Speaker 1: bit of a journey. At the beginning of the book.
[12:37] Speaker 1: You're pretty much a fatalist like the BBC TV crew.
[12:41] Speaker 1: You're thinking, well, when you show the conspiracy theorists the facts,
[12:45] Speaker 1: of course they don't change their mind. Whoever changes their
[12:47] Speaker 1: mind about anything. But then you make the point that actually,
[12:51] Speaker 1: people do change their minds all the time. We managed
[12:52] Speaker 1: to do quite a good job of ignoring it when
[12:55] Speaker 1: it happens. Yeah, I mean, I had this podcast, You're
[12:58] Speaker 1: Not So Smart, I have the book You're Not So
[13:00] Speaker 1: Smart and a follow up, and I just become my
[13:03] Speaker 1: beat as a journalist. Was talking to people about motivated reasoning,
[13:07] Speaker 1: which is just all the psychological and neurological mechanisms that
[13:11] Speaker 1: influences us. We're very motivated to justify and rationalize and
[13:16] Speaker 1: explain ourselves in a way that always seems to suggest
[13:19] Speaker 1: we were right all along. And yeah, I was very cynical.
[13:22] Speaker 1: I had this pessimism, and I was not giving prescriptive advice.
[13:27] Speaker 1: I was just describing, here's the thing in the world,
[13:29] Speaker 1: and you know, lest not to engage in it. And
[13:31] Speaker 1: then around the same time period, the norms and attitudes
[13:35] Speaker 1: and then the law about same sex marriage in the
[13:38] Speaker 1: United States and LGBTQ issues in general had changed so rapidly,
[13:43] Speaker 1: and I had this thought experiment pop in my mind.
[13:45] Speaker 1: I was like, what if you took all those people
[13:47] Speaker 1: and you put them in a time machine and it's
[13:49] Speaker 1: the back ten years. Would they argue with themselves? Would
[13:52] Speaker 1: they look at each other and find it impossible to
[13:55] Speaker 1: convince each other of something that in the future that
[13:58] Speaker 1: same person will then absolutely accept. I wanted to understand
[14:02] Speaker 1: what must have happened in those people's brains, and I
[14:04] Speaker 1: felt like to understand it from like the bird's eye view.
[14:06] Speaker 1: I could go all the way down into neurons and
[14:08] Speaker 1: work my way up, and I became obsessed. It felt
[14:11] Speaker 1: like it was an opportunity to give myself some come uppance,
[14:14] Speaker 1: and I was eager to do so because I didn't
[14:16] Speaker 1: want to hold this cynical attitude. So I had motivated reasoning.
[14:19] Speaker 1: I was motivated by something that I didn't even quite understand,
[14:22] Speaker 1: and that's what sent me off on this super obsessive
[14:25] Speaker 1: journey and all over the world trying to meet experts
[14:27] Speaker 1: and people who change minds, people who have had their
[14:29] Speaker 1: minds changed and drafted ways and so on. I mean,
[14:31] Speaker 1: not everyone is as knowledgeable about the subject as you are, David,
[14:33] Speaker 1: and not everyone is as obsessed with the problem of
[14:37] Speaker 1: changing minds as you are, but a lot of people
[14:40] Speaker 1: are kind of We all like to think of ourselves
[14:43] Speaker 1: as people who should be able to change other people's minds.
[14:46] Speaker 1: I was quite interested. I published my own book, The
[14:48] Speaker 1: Data Detective, last year, and that's a book about how
[14:51] Speaker 1: to think clearly about the world, and about how numbers
[14:54] Speaker 1: might help you think clearly about the world. And I
[14:56] Speaker 1: was quite interested by the response because lots of people
[14:59] Speaker 1: came to me and said, well, yeah, I enjoyed the book.
[15:01] Speaker 1: I've got this friend and he or she, well, he's
[15:04] Speaker 1: this dumb thing, and I could you tell me how
[15:07] Speaker 1: to use numbers to set them straight about this stupid
[15:11] Speaker 1: thing that they believe? And my book could never The
[15:13] Speaker 1: way I thought about it is, if you can set
[15:15] Speaker 1: your own thinking straight, isn't that enough? So do we
[15:19] Speaker 1: think too much about trying to help other people see clearly,
[15:23] Speaker 1: about trying to change other people's views, and not enough
[15:26] Speaker 1: about seeing clearly ourselves. It's so nuanced. I think that.
[15:30] Speaker 1: It reminds me of something Tom Stafford told me the
[15:32] Speaker 1: great cognitive psychologists. He said, germs were always a problem
[15:38] Speaker 1: for human beings, and then when we built cities, they
[15:41] Speaker 1: became this existential crisis because well, put a lot of
[15:45] Speaker 1: people together in a big group, germs become a major problem.
[15:47] Speaker 1: You of plagues, outbreaks, and so on. So we developed
[15:50] Speaker 1: sanitation at the level of the community, and then we
[15:54] Speaker 1: developed best practices for individuals, which would be washing your
[15:57] Speaker 1: hands and stuff, boiling your water, he said, for misinformation
[16:03] Speaker 1: and the inability to develop where's the good source of
[16:07] Speaker 1: the information? All these problems with information have always been
[16:10] Speaker 1: the problem for human beings. But then you get the Internet,
[16:13] Speaker 1: which is the informational equivalent of gigantic cities, and now
[16:17] Speaker 1: it's an exidential crisis. And so we'll have to develop
[16:20] Speaker 1: the generational equivalent of both sanitation at the context level,
[16:24] Speaker 1: at the platform level, and we have to develop best
[16:27] Speaker 1: practices as individuals. We have to develop the generational equivalent
[16:31] Speaker 1: of washing your hands when it comes to misinformation. This
[16:33] Speaker 1: is what Tom Stafford told me. So they answer to
[16:35] Speaker 1: your question is it's both things have to happen simultaneously
[16:39] Speaker 1: because we all do need to become better critical thinkers.
[16:42] Speaker 1: That's true. We all do need to become more amenable
[16:45] Speaker 1: to changing our own minds, more amenable to being wrong,
[16:48] Speaker 1: more likely to consider things a hypothesis and not a conclusion,
[16:51] Speaker 1: and all the things that go into that. But the
[16:54] Speaker 1: context in which we discuss these issues are going to
[16:56] Speaker 1: also have to change, because if we're good critical thinkers,
[17:00] Speaker 1: we're going to come across things that other people aren't.
[17:02] Speaker 1: We're going to have experiences they're not going to have.
[17:04] Speaker 1: We're going to have expertise they don't have. We're just
[17:06] Speaker 1: going to be in worlds that they don't live in.
[17:08] Speaker 1: If we're all great critical thinkers, we're going to discover
[17:11] Speaker 1: things that, oh, this might not be true. We're going
[17:13] Speaker 1: to see that certain attitudes might be harmful. We're going
[17:16] Speaker 1: to see that maybe certain value structures need to be rearranged.
[17:19] Speaker 1: Each person who's doing their due diligence is going to
[17:21] Speaker 1: become aware of things that might help everybody else to
[17:24] Speaker 1: understand better. And if you don't have a way to
[17:26] Speaker 1: actually do that, if you don't have a way to
[17:29] Speaker 1: do that doesn't create massive resistance and pushback, then it
[17:33] Speaker 1: will remain one sided. The current thinking is the natural
[17:36] Speaker 1: selection did a great job of creating psychological mechanisms within
[17:40] Speaker 1: us that are set up to have that kind of discussion.
[17:44] Speaker 1: You ever go to a movie with someone and you
[17:46] Speaker 1: love it and you can't wait to tell them about it,
[17:49] Speaker 1: and then when you get out of the movie, they say, boy,
[17:51] Speaker 1: I hated that. Yeah, but you don't say I can
[17:54] Speaker 1: never talk to you again. I reject you forever. I
[17:56] Speaker 1: don't trust you like no. You You you talk about
[17:58] Speaker 1: it and you have a great conversation. I mean, conversations
[18:01] Speaker 1: about movies, whether they suck or not. The best kinds
[18:04] Speaker 1: of conversations because they're so interesting. But the stakes are low.
[18:07] Speaker 1: It's a friendly chat. So why is it so hard
[18:09] Speaker 1: to do? Well, there's there are real reasons why this
[18:11] Speaker 1: is hard to do. One reason is that we're not
[18:13] Speaker 1: very good at it. And another reason is that there
[18:16] Speaker 1: is a massive amount of identity defense going on. There's
[18:21] Speaker 1: a massive amount of reputation management, and in a case
[18:23] Speaker 1: like talking about a movie, that's probably not going to
[18:26] Speaker 1: be that way. But let's pretend you're two movie critics
[18:28] Speaker 1: to go see a movie to work for two different organizations,
[18:31] Speaker 1: and well, let's say the director of the movie, and
[18:33] Speaker 1: somebody is just watched it with you, was just some
[18:37] Speaker 1: random fan, and then they come out and you're like,
[18:41] Speaker 1: what do you think? And they're like, I think is
[18:42] Speaker 1: the worst movie I've ever seen. Different conversation. Most likely, right, Yeah,
[18:45] Speaker 1: there's a reason for all those things. And oddly enough,
[18:48] Speaker 1: it can seem like everything is as just as neutral
[18:51] Speaker 1: as everything else. But clearly not clearly, there are other
[18:53] Speaker 1: factors that motivate us when we get into these dynamics.
[18:56] Speaker 1: So the celebrated nine to eleven conspiracy theorists Charlie Veach
[19:00] Speaker 1: had indeed changed his mind and no longer thought that
[19:03] Speaker 1: the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job.
[19:07] Speaker 1: The evidence of witnesses x Berts, the most importantly widows,
[19:11] Speaker 1: had convinced him. It had been a personal journey of discovery,
[19:15] Speaker 1: but for the nine eleven truther community, it was a
[19:19] Speaker 1: betrayal and one that demanded punishment. Cautionary tales will be
[19:25] Speaker 1: back in a moment. Influential YouTuber Charlie Veach had changed
[19:40] Speaker 1: his mind about nine to eleven. The Twin Towers hadn't
[19:43] Speaker 1: been toppled by demolition charges planted by the government, after all,
[19:47] Speaker 1: keen to share his new views, Charlie uploaded a video
[19:51] Speaker 1: for his fellow conspiracy theorists, if you're presented with new evidence,
[19:56] Speaker 1: he told them, take it on. But as my guest
[19:59] Speaker 1: David McCraney explains, the reaction of the nine eleven truthers
[20:04] Speaker 1: was far from measured as I see in the book.
[20:07] Speaker 1: He was swift and it was brutal. At first. There
[20:11] Speaker 1: were a lot of these just comments and quickly put
[20:14] Speaker 1: together videos wondering what happened, Who got to him? That
[20:18] Speaker 1: was the initial response, like there was this sense that
[20:21] Speaker 1: maybe has somebody put a gun to his head, or
[20:22] Speaker 1: that somebody was threatening him, And then that started to transition. Indeed,
[20:26] Speaker 1: but that he couldn't possibly have just looked at the
[20:29] Speaker 1: evidence and changed his mind, Like that is inconceivable, couldn't
[20:31] Speaker 1: possibly done it. There were comments that were like, that's
[20:33] Speaker 1: like exchanging the belief in gravity for something, you know.
[20:36] Speaker 1: Else that there were there are comments that were like
[20:38] Speaker 1: someone must be coercing him, someone must be threatening him.
[20:42] Speaker 1: Then it went to oh, wait, maybe he was a
[20:45] Speaker 1: double agent all this time, And then you would think, okay,
[20:49] Speaker 1: maybe some of this seems like what I would expect,
[20:51] Speaker 1: But it goes further and further. They start trying to
[20:54] Speaker 1: reach out to his family. They started, they go so
[20:57] Speaker 1: far as they find his sister's Facebook page. She didn't
[21:02] Speaker 1: have a she had just not made it private. They
[21:05] Speaker 1: found pictures of his niece and nephew. They took those
[21:07] Speaker 1: pictures of his niece and nephew, they photoshopped their faces
[21:11] Speaker 1: onto child pornography, and then they sent that to his mother,
[21:15] Speaker 1: and his mother, not being very Internet savvy, was devastated
[21:18] Speaker 1: and he had to explain what was going on, which
[21:20] Speaker 1: was difficult to do. They found out who his partner was.
[21:23] Speaker 1: They sort of just sending her all these death threats
[21:27] Speaker 1: and messages saying that their children were going to be
[21:29] Speaker 1: the spawn of demon spawn. She started becoming scared. It
[21:32] Speaker 1: was this incredible, awful campaign to destroy his life just
[21:37] Speaker 1: for saying out loud in a YouTube video. I've changed
[21:41] Speaker 1: my mind. Is this the tribal reasoning that you talk
[21:46] Speaker 1: about in the course of the book? Oh? Is this?
[21:49] Speaker 1: This is a particularly extreme version of it, And actually
[21:52] Speaker 1: the tribal reasoning is something much broader and much more common.
[21:54] Speaker 1: It's hard to say if this is just an extreme
[21:56] Speaker 1: version of it, because I've seen people react this way
[21:58] Speaker 1: to just about anything, if not in this very coordinated,
[22:02] Speaker 1: sort of awful way, at least on the other side
[22:05] Speaker 1: of the spectrum, where people go to great links to
[22:08] Speaker 1: demonstrate that are good members of their groups and we'll
[22:11] Speaker 1: put everything on their lives aside for whatever they're doing.
[22:14] Speaker 1: I think we saw it very clearly with COVID, where
[22:16] Speaker 1: people would refuse to wear a mask, refuse to get
[22:18] Speaker 1: vaccinated on their deathbeds say that I'm totally okay with
[22:22] Speaker 1: the fact that I'm dying from this, even though it's
[22:24] Speaker 1: pretty clear that they're being motivated by a political ideology.
[22:28] Speaker 1: They're trying to signal to their most trusted peers they
[22:30] Speaker 1: were a good member of their group by not getting vaccinated.
[22:33] Speaker 1: I think it's extreme in all sorts of different ways.
[22:35] Speaker 1: This particular thing seems bonkers and heinous and so weird.
[22:39] Speaker 1: But the reason it has that atina to it is
[22:42] Speaker 1: that this was just a very coordinated group of people already.
[22:45] Speaker 1: They already had this network where they could very quickly
[22:48] Speaker 1: coordinate and make new actions. And I think that there
[22:51] Speaker 1: are a lot of other situations where people had that
[22:52] Speaker 1: ability to coordinate. It would look just as extreme when
[22:55] Speaker 1: someone did something that felt like it was absolutely worth
[22:58] Speaker 1: their excommunication. You have to see Charlie is more someone
[23:02] Speaker 1: who is an elite within the group. It would be
[23:04] Speaker 1: like the head of a political party walking out on
[23:06] Speaker 1: stage and saying, my political party is the worst political party.
[23:10] Speaker 1: I've been convinced of it, and I will never ever
[23:12] Speaker 1: support anything they ever do ever again, And I don't
[23:15] Speaker 1: think you should ever vote for people in this particular
[23:17] Speaker 1: political party. Like imagine at the head of a political
[23:20] Speaker 1: party saying that it seems strange in a belief structure,
[23:22] Speaker 1: like a conspiracy theory, only if you look at it
[23:25] Speaker 1: as a belief structure. It's a community first. And I
[23:29] Speaker 1: argue in the book that that's true for a lot
[23:31] Speaker 1: of the things that we think of as just something
[23:33] Speaker 1: that we like, we love, we believe in, and we
[23:36] Speaker 1: also have met some other people who feel the same way.
[23:39] Speaker 1: At a certain point, that crosses a line into being
[23:42] Speaker 1: a social identity a group identity. The great sociologist Brooke
[23:45] Speaker 1: Harrington told me that the equal ZYMC square of social
[23:49] Speaker 1: science is that the fear of social death is greater
[23:52] Speaker 1: than the fear of physical death. And so if the
[23:56] Speaker 1: ship is going down, you'll put your reputation on the
[23:59] Speaker 1: lifeboat and you'll go down with the ship. It seems
[24:01] Speaker 1: like that might be some sort of motivating, illusory thing.
[24:05] Speaker 1: But in the case of Charlie, he demonstrates when he
[24:08] Speaker 1: did change his mind that fear that we think, oh,
[24:12] Speaker 1: something bad might happen to us, it happened to him.
[24:14] Speaker 1: They almost ruined his entire life. Had he left his job,
[24:17] Speaker 1: he had to change his name, he had to move. Now,
[24:20] Speaker 1: listening to this, I think people will be plunging into
[24:23] Speaker 1: the despair and fatalism that you describe yourself as holding
[24:28] Speaker 1: before you started writing the book. Of of course, no
[24:31] Speaker 1: one listens to the facts. No one ever changed their
[24:33] Speaker 1: mind about anything. But you do have stories, really really
[24:37] Speaker 1: striking and persuasive stories of people changing their minds and
[24:41] Speaker 1: of conversational methods that helped to make that possible. You
[24:46] Speaker 1: could you tell us a bit about deep canvassing. There's
[24:49] Speaker 1: a little vignette about the Mustang man and I found
[24:52] Speaker 1: it very moving. So just tell me about him and
[24:55] Speaker 1: the context in which he was. He was talking to
[24:58] Speaker 1: a campaigner. Sure so, around the time that we were
[25:04] Speaker 1: discussing same sex marriage the United States, I had heard
[25:07] Speaker 1: about this group of people California who were changing people's
[25:10] Speaker 1: minds by going door to door and just talking to them.
[25:13] Speaker 1: I was very curious about it. I I wanted to see
[25:15] Speaker 1: what was going on, and so I read some of
[25:18] Speaker 1: the reports about them, and then I've emailed can I
[25:21] Speaker 1: come out there and can I just do this with you?
[25:23] Speaker 1: And they said, yeah, of course. So I flew out
[25:25] Speaker 1: to Los Angeles and I went to the LGBT Center
[25:28] Speaker 1: of Los Angeles. They have several buildings in LA and
[25:31] Speaker 1: I went to the one where Dave Flysher works and
[25:35] Speaker 1: Dave Flyscher had developed this thing called deep canvassing. After
[25:39] Speaker 1: they lost on Prop eight, there was this legal thing
[25:43] Speaker 1: that went through in California where they said, no, same
[25:45] Speaker 1: sex marriage will not be legal here. And they were
[25:48] Speaker 1: stunned that they had been defeated, and so he just
[25:51] Speaker 1: wanted to understand how that happened. And he had this
[25:53] Speaker 1: radical idea of why don't we just go door to
[25:56] Speaker 1: door and ask people and many of the conversations people
[25:59] Speaker 1: would change their minds, and they were recording the conversations
[26:02] Speaker 1: and they did this ab testing thing, this sort of
[26:05] Speaker 1: playback to see what happened there. And over the course
[26:09] Speaker 1: of more than seventeen thousand conversations, almost all of them
[26:12] Speaker 1: recorded on video, ab testing it, throwing away with it
[26:15] Speaker 1: doesn't work, keeping what does work? They developed this method
[26:18] Speaker 1: for you knock on a person's door, You talk to
[26:20] Speaker 1: them in a particular way, You ask questions in a
[26:23] Speaker 1: particular order, You non judgmentally listen to what they have
[26:26] Speaker 1: to say about the issue, and then you help them
[26:30] Speaker 1: introspect in a way they've never introspected before by giving
[26:33] Speaker 1: them a number scale and all of the persuasion techniques
[26:36] Speaker 1: I talked about it in the book. Have this number scale,
[26:38] Speaker 1: or you just say how strongly do you feel about X?
[26:41] Speaker 1: Or how much do you believe this is true? You know,
[26:43] Speaker 1: how much confidence do you have an X? And so on,
[26:45] Speaker 1: And then when a person gives you the number from
[26:47] Speaker 1: say zero to ten or one to one hundred, you
[26:50] Speaker 1: didn't say, why does that number feel right to you?
[26:52] Speaker 1: And the conversation leaves immediately The binary debate space becomes
[26:57] Speaker 1: this unspooling of what are my reasons for thinking this way?
[27:01] Speaker 1: What motivated about is? And you allow the person to
[27:04] Speaker 1: do that on exploration. You're just there to kind of
[27:06] Speaker 1: help and move it forward, and over time This became
[27:10] Speaker 1: so successful as a technique that they were actually getting
[27:12] Speaker 1: a lot of people to change their minds, to the
[27:14] Speaker 1: point that the scientists sort of studying them. And today
[27:16] Speaker 1: it's being used in phone banks for all sorts of
[27:19] Speaker 1: different topics. They had this huge archive, and one of
[27:22] Speaker 1: the times I visited, I said, can I just go
[27:24] Speaker 1: to the archives? And they said sure, And it really
[27:26] Speaker 1: felt like something out of like an FBI thriller or something.
[27:29] Speaker 1: They had this room all to itself that has several
[27:32] Speaker 1: ways to read and watch and view all their stuff,
[27:35] Speaker 1: and they have this amazing archive, very well organized, going
[27:38] Speaker 1: all the way back to the beginning. And I watched
[27:41] Speaker 1: eighty of these. I spent days in there. It was incredible.
[27:45] Speaker 1: And there was one in particular that just stuck out,
[27:48] Speaker 1: which was the Mustang Man. They call him the Mustang Man.
[27:52] Speaker 1: And one of the canvassers approaches this man. He is
[27:56] Speaker 1: in the garage with him, and you know, they asked
[27:59] Speaker 1: him how he voted on same sex marriage. He voted
[28:01] Speaker 1: against it. And he's in his seventies, he's wearing shorts,
[28:04] Speaker 1: he's got a dress shirt, he's smoking a cigarette, he's
[28:06] Speaker 1: got the Zippo lodder that he's toying with, and he
[28:09] Speaker 1: tells them, you know, I'm not against gay stuff necessarily.
[28:13] Speaker 1: I just wish they wouldn't call such a ruckust as
[28:15] Speaker 1: the way he put it, he said, the country has
[28:17] Speaker 1: enough problems as it is. I don't know why they
[28:18] Speaker 1: have to keep causing all these problems. And so the
[28:22] Speaker 1: canvasser doesn't respond like how dare you, doesn't say you
[28:24] Speaker 1: should be ashamed for saying such a thing. They just
[28:28] Speaker 1: start asking questions, Oh, that's I'm wondering why you feel
[28:31] Speaker 1: that way, and were you at on the number scale?
[28:33] Speaker 1: And it's just opening up space for this person to
[28:36] Speaker 1: explore how they feel about it. And in one of
[28:38] Speaker 1: the questions, he asks if he had ever been married before,
[28:42] Speaker 1: and the Mustang man says, yeah, for forty three years,
[28:45] Speaker 1: and she passed away. She passed away about eleven years ago.
[28:48] Speaker 1: And I'm never going to get over it because I
[28:50] Speaker 1: was supposed to die first. And then he says, let
[28:54] Speaker 1: me show you something, and he takes him out and
[28:55] Speaker 1: he uncovers this tarp over it his wife's vintage Mustang
[28:59] Speaker 1: and he still maintains it. It's like his central hobby.
[29:02] Speaker 1: He works on it all the time. Keeps it in
[29:04] Speaker 1: perfect pristine condition, and he's smoking a cigaret. He says,
[29:06] Speaker 1: you know, she never smoked the day been drink. She
[29:09] Speaker 1: wouldn't let me smoke in the car. And he explains
[29:12] Speaker 1: that one day she found a black spot on her gums.
[29:15] Speaker 1: It was cancer spread to her throat. She couldn't speak.
[29:17] Speaker 1: They had to talk to each other across a notepad
[29:20] Speaker 1: and she died and it just out of nowhere. He
[29:23] Speaker 1: wasn't prompted. He said, don't pursue money or other riches.
[29:26] Speaker 1: You just find happiness with somebody. Because material things are loaned.
[29:30] Speaker 1: Happiness has not loaned. It's yours. I feel, tear you up,
[29:34] Speaker 1: think about this I get and then the canvass are
[29:38] Speaker 1: responded by just listening, by just hoping this hold in
[29:41] Speaker 1: the space and says, you know, it seems like eleven
[29:42] Speaker 1: years is a long time to be alone. And he
[29:45] Speaker 1: says it gives you a lot of time to think.
[29:46] Speaker 1: And he said this statement where he stopped and let
[29:49] Speaker 1: there be silence, where he said that sometimes he hears
[29:52] Speaker 1: songs that they loved and he cries, and sometimes he
[29:54] Speaker 1: remembers jokes that they laughed about. He laughs, and he
[29:57] Speaker 1: said he's never gotten over her, and that's okay by him.
[30:01] Speaker 1: I don't want to get over her, And so, without
[30:04] Speaker 1: any prompting, he then says, while looking in the distance,
[30:08] Speaker 1: I would want these gay people to be happy too,
[30:11] Speaker 1: and he convinces himself that he was wrong, and he says,
[30:14] Speaker 1: you know what, I'd vote for it this time. And
[30:16] Speaker 1: it was incredible to watch this conversation unfold because he
[30:19] Speaker 1: clearly was against it, and until he had this conversation
[30:21] Speaker 1: with a deep canvas or, he didn't know that he
[30:23] Speaker 1: could feel otherwise. It required someone opening a space and
[30:27] Speaker 1: going through what they would consider in psychology guided metacognition,
[30:30] Speaker 1: something that takes place in a lot of therapeutic models,
[30:32] Speaker 1: where you give a person an opportunity to discover where
[30:34] Speaker 1: their current attitude comes from, and an opportunity to discover
[30:38] Speaker 1: that perhaps they could see it otherwise, which was already
[30:41] Speaker 1: available to them. And that's why I say in the
[30:43] Speaker 1: book that persuasion, the kind that I advocate and the
[30:46] Speaker 1: kind that really works, is more about giving a person
[30:49] Speaker 1: an opportunity to understand that they can change their mind,
[30:51] Speaker 1: that it's possible, than anything else, because all mind change
[30:54] Speaker 1: takes place on the other side. People change their own minds,
[30:57] Speaker 1: and you're encouraging them to engage in some sort of
[30:59] Speaker 1: metacognitive process that will get them there. It's incredible to
[31:03] Speaker 1: see it when it unfolds and works in that way.
[31:05] Speaker 1: You've got to open that space up for people to
[31:07] Speaker 1: change their own minds. But what I want to come
[31:09] Speaker 1: back to Charlie Vach because he apparently he had the
[31:13] Speaker 1: same space, he had the same context as all of
[31:15] Speaker 1: these other truthers, and none of them considered changing their
[31:20] Speaker 1: minds for a second. And he wasn't subjected to any
[31:23] Speaker 1: clever deep canvassing or street epistemology. There was something in him, yes,
[31:28] Speaker 1: that was different. So what was different about Charlie? What
[31:31] Speaker 1: was different about his life when he went into that
[31:34] Speaker 1: process with a BBC that led him coming out on
[31:37] Speaker 1: a different path from the others. Sure, And I can
[31:40] Speaker 1: say also to preface this, every person that I met
[31:44] Speaker 1: who had left either a conspiratorial community or a cult
[31:47] Speaker 1: or a pseudo cult or something along those lines, there
[31:50] Speaker 1: was something else at play, and it was this in
[31:53] Speaker 1: Charlie's case. All those things I talked about when we
[31:57] Speaker 1: were first started talking about him, all those things that
[31:59] Speaker 1: led him into the conspiracy that led him to even
[32:01] Speaker 1: search for something to be amenable to it, to be
[32:03] Speaker 1: open to it. They were being satisfied in the truth
[32:06] Speaker 1: or community in a way that he enjoyed. Plus he
[32:09] Speaker 1: had some fame there that felt really good as a
[32:11] Speaker 1: person who had been considered lesser than He also was
[32:15] Speaker 1: interested in all sorts of anarchy themed communities, and he
[32:19] Speaker 1: had found another one called truth Jews. There were a
[32:21] Speaker 1: group that was more open your third eye, let's play
[32:25] Speaker 1: around psychedelics, let's discuss the simulation theory of the universe,
[32:30] Speaker 1: stuff like that. And in that community he was finding
[32:33] Speaker 1: that all those same things that motivated him to go
[32:35] Speaker 1: into the truth community were being more nurtured there, and
[32:39] Speaker 1: he was slowly moving up there too. He's very charismatic,
[32:42] Speaker 1: he's a great public speaker, so he was doing a
[32:45] Speaker 1: great job of do these kind of things that made
[32:47] Speaker 1: him move up in the truth the world inside the
[32:48] Speaker 1: truth Jews world. None of the other truthers had anything
[32:51] Speaker 1: like that. They didn't have a foot in two social
[32:53] Speaker 1: worlds the way he did. In other words, they didn't
[32:55] Speaker 1: have a social safety net. Even though the evidence was
[32:58] Speaker 1: persuasive to them. The costs of accepting it were something
[33:02] Speaker 1: they could not absorb whereas he could. They had to
[33:05] Speaker 1: think of the same things. I'm going to be shamed,
[33:07] Speaker 1: I'm going to be ostracized. And none of this is articulated. Now,
[33:10] Speaker 1: this is salient. This is the other things that are
[33:12] Speaker 1: motivating their behavior without their knowledge for the most part.
[33:15] Speaker 1: But he feels safe to change his mind. He feels safe,
[33:18] Speaker 1: so he could change his mind. So he did. Yeah,
[33:21] Speaker 1: this thing that everybody said, the other truth has said,
[33:23] Speaker 1: like who got to him? The answer is, well, this
[33:26] Speaker 1: slightly wacky pyramids and crystals, energy circles, Truth Juice movement
[33:32] Speaker 1: got to him. Not in the way that they put
[33:34] Speaker 1: it unto his head or paid him off, but just
[33:37] Speaker 1: that they were offering him an alternative, slightly wacky, but
[33:41] Speaker 1: much more benevolent community that he knew he could flourish in.
[33:46] Speaker 1: And it's not totally unlike what happens in deep camvusing,
[33:49] Speaker 1: because in deep camusing, one sort of representative of another
[33:53] Speaker 1: community comes along and says, I will listen to you
[33:56] Speaker 1: in a non judgmental, empathetic way, and I will hear
[34:00] Speaker 1: you out, and I won't pushback against it, and I
[34:03] Speaker 1: won't shame you for what you're saying in many cases,
[34:06] Speaker 1: so the first time that person's ever experienced that, but
[34:07] Speaker 1: someone who they thought would immediately jump into a debate
[34:11] Speaker 1: and argue with them and get angry and possibly a
[34:13] Speaker 1: good aphisticas. And with the people I met who left Westboro,
[34:17] Speaker 1: Babin's Church, particularly Meghan Phelps roper very similar to what
[34:20] Speaker 1: happened with Charlie. And we should say Westboro's this church
[34:24] Speaker 1: that's famous for just being incredibly in flourishes, showing up
[34:27] Speaker 1: at the funerals of veterans who died in Afghanistan and
[34:32] Speaker 1: saying thank God for dead soldiers and just deliberately getting
[34:35] Speaker 1: in people's faces. And it's kind of this strange cult
[34:37] Speaker 1: like organization. And you talk to several people who had
[34:41] Speaker 1: left about that jah they're one of the most prominent
[34:44] Speaker 1: hate groups in the United States. They're very anti Semitic,
[34:47] Speaker 1: and when I say very, that's they're about the most
[34:49] Speaker 1: anti semitic that a group could be. Meghan Phelps, who
[34:52] Speaker 1: she was a younger member of the group who was
[34:54] Speaker 1: active on social media. They loved this about the fact
[34:56] Speaker 1: that she was good at getting on social media and
[34:58] Speaker 1: she pretty much spent all day arguing of the people
[35:00] Speaker 1: and somebody who was prominent in the Jewish community. They
[35:04] Speaker 1: reached out to her over a Twitter and they extended
[35:07] Speaker 1: a hand. They said, I'd like to spend time you
[35:09] Speaker 1: want to talk to you about this and hear you out.
[35:11] Speaker 1: I want to understand your position, I want to hear
[35:13] Speaker 1: more about what you think, feeling believe. I'm curious in
[35:15] Speaker 1: you and in a compassionate, transparent, non judgmental way. They
[35:20] Speaker 1: opened up a space just to talk. And then as
[35:22] Speaker 1: they started building a bit of rapport with each other,
[35:25] Speaker 1: he started making fun of her, making little jokes, the
[35:28] Speaker 1: kind of stuff that you would do with your friend
[35:30] Speaker 1: when you leave a movie theater. He started just trolling her,
[35:33] Speaker 1: and they developed a friendly rapport even though they both
[35:37] Speaker 1: knew they were on two different sides ideologically. And over
[35:41] Speaker 1: time it had an effect to the point that she
[35:44] Speaker 1: was at some sort of public event where people kind
[35:47] Speaker 1: of circled her because a lot of people hate West
[35:49] Speaker 1: Brother's church, and he was there in person, and he
[35:51] Speaker 1: defended her. And when some things happened in the West
[35:55] Speaker 1: Brow that she didn't like, which is similar to what
[35:57] Speaker 1: happened with Charlie, that he had that experience, He's like, oh,
[35:59] Speaker 1: that was gross, I don't like this, and she started
[36:02] Speaker 1: having the foot in both worlds, and when it came
[36:05] Speaker 1: time to leave, that was the off ramp that got
[36:08] Speaker 1: her out of that world. What I find compelling about
[36:10] Speaker 1: all these stories is that I always thought people change
[36:13] Speaker 1: their beliefs then they left the groups. But most often
[36:15] Speaker 1: what happens is they leave the groups and then they
[36:18] Speaker 1: change their beliefs, and there's something else that is involved
[36:20] Speaker 1: for making them feel like, I don't think this community
[36:22] Speaker 1: is the right community for me, and it should offer
[36:25] Speaker 1: you some cognitive empathy for the people on the other
[36:27] Speaker 1: side of issues, where if you can recognize they may
[36:31] Speaker 1: be trapped by those same tribal tendencies, they may actually
[36:34] Speaker 1: be imprisoned by this thing, then you can approach them
[36:39] Speaker 1: with this sort of non judgmental compassion to listening frame
[36:42] Speaker 1: in a way that addresses that part of the motivation
[36:46] Speaker 1: that is keeping them away from accepting the evidence that
[36:48] Speaker 1: you think should just speak for itself. There's more than
[36:51] Speaker 1: one story towards the end of your book in which
[36:54] Speaker 1: it seems that you are setting up to use your
[37:00] Speaker 1: clever psychological hacks and conversational strategies to change somebody's mind
[37:06] Speaker 1: and in both cases, actually you don't, and that's okay.
[37:10] Speaker 1: Do you think sometimes we're just too desperate to change
[37:14] Speaker 1: other people? I do. In the introduction, I try to
[37:17] Speaker 1: make it very clear that you really need to ask
[37:19] Speaker 1: yourself why you want to do this, because I had
[37:22] Speaker 1: had several experiences after getting what I felt was like, Wow,
[37:25] Speaker 1: I have this incredible superpower. Now I can just change minds.
[37:29] Speaker 1: I spent time with a flat earther, the Great Mark Sergeant,
[37:33] Speaker 1: and we had we were having a good time in Sweden.
[37:35] Speaker 1: We both got one of those invites that it just
[37:38] Speaker 1: comes out of nowhere, come to Sweden, come on stage
[37:40] Speaker 1: and talk about this because they had heard me talk
[37:41] Speaker 1: about it flat earthers on the podcast, and he's a
[37:44] Speaker 1: prominent flat earth But we had such a good time
[37:46] Speaker 1: hanging out and he was such a fun person. It's
[37:48] Speaker 1: such a It was interesting. I took the technique up
[37:51] Speaker 1: to the point where he said he was totally openly
[37:53] Speaker 1: changing his mind maybe, and then I could tell that
[37:56] Speaker 1: if I pushed more than that, that that it would ruin everything,
[37:58] Speaker 1: that we'd never be able to talk for the rest
[38:00] Speaker 1: of the time. And it felt felt what's the good
[38:02] Speaker 1: and that I would rather let's have a good time
[38:04] Speaker 1: in Sweden and then go get some food. It's very
[38:07] Speaker 1: easy to assume that the facts are on your side.
[38:10] Speaker 1: It's very easy to assume that you're the hero in
[38:12] Speaker 1: the story. And I was so excited about Deep Campus
[38:15] Speaker 1: Ring when when I left the first time that I
[38:17] Speaker 1: went there, that I sat down with my friend Misha Globerman,
[38:21] Speaker 1: who is a conflict resolution actual professional negotiator. I told them,
[38:26] Speaker 1: they're trying. There's one of the great statements they make
[38:29] Speaker 1: is I'm just trying to solve a mystery together with you.
[38:32] Speaker 1: And I was telling, you know, the mystery is like
[38:33] Speaker 1: why do we disagree? And he's like, the mystery for
[38:36] Speaker 1: the Deep campuss is why are you wrong? And I'm right.
[38:39] Speaker 1: I was like, no, no, that's that's not where they're
[38:42] Speaker 1: coming from. And he's like, David, they're biased. I mean
[38:45] Speaker 1: I agree with them. You agree with them. We share
[38:47] Speaker 1: their values and we think that what they're doing is
[38:51] Speaker 1: good because we feel that that we want the LGBTPQ
[38:54] Speaker 1: people to have more freedoms in this world. We want
[38:57] Speaker 1: the laws to change. We want that. But don't kid
[39:01] Speaker 1: yourself that it isn't persuasion. But at that point the journey,
[39:04] Speaker 1: I had thought to myself, no, they were just putting
[39:06] Speaker 1: people on the correct path, but I had to admit, yeah,
[39:10] Speaker 1: it is a persuasion and they were biased. So be
[39:14] Speaker 1: honest with yourself at least that you are biased, and
[39:17] Speaker 1: be sure that you're biased in the direction of what
[39:20] Speaker 1: you're trying to do is reduce harm in this world,
[39:23] Speaker 1: and be aware of the fact that it's possible you
[39:26] Speaker 1: could be misleading yourself into thinking you're reducing harm in
[39:28] Speaker 1: your narme. I think that the LGBT Center of Los
[39:31] Speaker 1: Angeles is absolutely reducing harm in this world. But I
[39:33] Speaker 1: can imagine other people who would try to employ such techniques,
[39:36] Speaker 1: who would be convinced of such a thing, and I
[39:38] Speaker 1: would not agree with them. David McCraney is the host
[39:41] Speaker 1: of the You Are Not So Smart podcast you should
[39:44] Speaker 1: all be subscribing, and he is the author of the
[39:46] Speaker 1: wonderful new book How Minds Change. David, thank you so
[39:50] Speaker 1: much for joining cous Metals. Thank you so much for
[39:53] Speaker 1: having me. It's been such a pleasure. Cautionary Tales is
[40:11] Speaker 1: written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced
[40:15] Speaker 1: by Ryan Dilley with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughan.
[40:19] Speaker 1: The sound design and original music is the work of
[40:22] Speaker 1: Pascal Wise. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow,
[40:26] Speaker 1: Melanie Gutridge, Stella Harford, and rufus Wright. The show also
[40:31] Speaker 1: wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle,
[40:34] Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnars, Julia Barton, Carlie mcgliori,
[40:39] Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Royston Berserv, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Mrano, Danian Lakhan,
[40:45] Speaker 1: and Mayakine. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
[40:50] Speaker 1: If you like the show, please remember to share, rate
[40:53] Speaker 1: and review, tell a friend, tell two friends, and if
[40:56] Speaker 1: you want to hear the show, adds free and listen
[40:59] Speaker 1: to four exclusive Cautionary Tales shorts. Then sign up for
[41:03] Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or
[41:06] Speaker 1: at pushkin dot fm, slash plus

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