The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Age of Conspiracy?

Episode Date: December 10, 2022

Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by comedian and author David Baddiel, psychologist Prof Karen Douglas, biologist Prof Matthew Cobb and philosopher Dr Timotheus Vermeulen to discover why conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists seem to be booming. From flat earthers to moon hoaxers and holocaust deniers, is there something about society today that encourages beliefs that seem to go against all evidence and reason? Or are conspiracies just part of the human condition, and each to their own? Why do some of these alarming theories seem to hold more truth for many than overwhelming data and evidence to the contrary, and how far should we go in accommodating views that seem to have no basis in reality?Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Tax is extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.

Hello, I'm Professor Brian Cox, CVEFRS. I'm Robin Ince, PCW, PCW, which means I am a Pointless Celebrities winner twice over. Just so you know, one of my greatest dancers was Alderney, another was Eve Ferrett. Anyway, and this is the infinite monkey cage. Now, human beings have a habit of always living in the worst time possible. The past is a place of rosy nostalgia, where old women would unicycle to communion, balancing a pint of beer on their head. And the future is a place where we've all moved to a luxury centre park on Mars. The only time that's rubbish is the present which tragically is where we always have to live. Now in the 21st century it seems popular to believe that this century is where the human species jumped the shark. After decades of reason and progress we became a world of crackpots and

conspiracy theorists. Even Brian in fact this is you won't believe he is not immune to crazy pseudoscience right the other day he was telling me this is basically he told me that one particle could go through two slits at one time right but typically being a pseudoscientist he then went oh but only if you're not looking. What a crank. You see, here's the problem with creating shows that are balanced. If indeed you should balance drivel. For 13 years

now, I've attempted to present a science show celebrating the most remarkable strides we've made as a species in understanding the deep structure of nature and the majesty of the heavens, while sharing the stage with the man who doesn't understand interference phenomena trying to explain why people believe weird things to brian is like for instance people who believe that the earth is flat is like talking to mr data basically in star trek because he just his brain implodes you just get to go do not understand people make decisions based on emotion,

not facts and equation. What is love? Today, we're looking at how we come to believe ideas about the world that go against all the evidence and how we twist the evidence to fit with what we want to believe. Has conspiratorial thinking changed as our worldview has changed,

shaped as it is by the new scientific discoveries and new philosophical movements that shape our world? Joining us to discuss this are a philosopher, a zoologist, a social psychologist and a writer who reacted to not understanding a lecture by Brian Cox by writing a play all about it, which I felt was a bit extreme. But anyway, they are... I'm Professor Matthew Cobb at the

University of Manchester, and I think the most interesting conspiracy theories are those that are true, like the conspiracies by big business to make us believe that tobacco wasn't harmful to health, or that there was a problem about the overwhelming majority view that there is climate change and it's anthropogenic. My name is Timotheus Vermeulen. I'm a professor of media culture and society at the University of Oslo in Norway. And the oddest conspiracy theory I've heard, I heard it the other day when I was in a German town called Bielefeld, is that Bielefeld does not exist. My name is Karen Douglas and I'm a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent.

And one of the strangest conspiracy theories I've come across, also relatively recently, is that the Disney Corporation released the film Frozen deliberately to change Google's algorithm so that when people searched for Disney Frozen, they no longer came across information about Walt Disney having been cryogenically frozen. I'm Tavi Baddiel, and I once said that conspiracy theory is how idiots get to feel like intellectuals, and I think that was borne out by the Flat Earth Society, who someone from the Flat Earth Society did once say that they were a very respectable society who had members all around the globe. This is our panel.

Matthew, it does feel at the moment as if we're in a world where the facts that underpin our civilisations, so science, is under attack. And it often feels like it's under attack like never before. But is that really the case? Well, I think there's obviously been an amplification through social media and through mass communication of many of the more interesting ideas. But I think this goes way, way back and has always been with us. Francis Crick used to get letters from strange people

and he would write on them, file under madmen, and then they would all be put in the filing cabinet along with all the other crazed ideas about the origin of the universe and so on. Newton, somebody who you would admire, I'm sure, his laws of motion enable us to put satellites around Jupiter, but at the same time, because there were things he didn't understand, that he was groping to try and understand how the universe worked through what we would now call alchemy. He thought that metals were alive

and indeed that in some way the universe was alive too. And he was searching for the philosopher's stone, which would be a way of turning base metals into gold. Was he like Harry Potter? Exactly like Harry Potter. That's where it comes from. It's all about, it's actually a whole conspiracy, all the Harry Potter films, conspiracy to get over Newtonian mechanics.

That's what all the flies are. I find that fascinating with Newton as well. He basically didn't think that his laws of motion, he thought they were very much the kind of, they were okay you know his huge work on the book of Daniel from the bible that was what people would remember him for no one would care about gravity well then they'd care if you could find a way of turning base metals into gold and you'd get very rich

but of course the government was very worried about this this was something that affected chemists throughout the 17th and 18th centuries as they tried to turn base metals into gold that what would then happen to the value of the currency it would collapse if all of a sudden this turned out to be not proper gold that had been mined in peru or wherever but was in fact this kind of weird gold that somebody had made in a in a laboratory somewhere in europe why i find I've only just realised, you telling that now, that must be the reason they made him the head of the Royal Mint, because he was the head of the Royal...

So they saw him as a kind of Rumpelstiltskin character who would just say, brilliant, we'll get Newton on our side, and he'd just be weaving all this gold for us. How's it going? I said, not as well as I'd hoped. So basically, Newton just thought of the physics as a hobby. Is that right? No, I think his physics and what we would call his alchemy were part of the same way of understanding the universe.

It's just that one of them was better and more accurate and more predictive, and we've retained it, than the other stuff, which slowly did transmute, but not into gold, but into chemistry by the end of the 18th century. But some of the ideas, they now look crazy to us. They look like they should be filed under madmen. Metals aren't alive. The universe isn't alive. But that was his way of trying to deal with something

that he couldn't understand. Tim, if we come to the 20th century and through the 21st century, so the way that we think about facts, the way that we think about the world is mirrored and intertwined with philosophy. So could you outline the philosophical movements that we see as we move through the 20th century into the 21st century? Yeah, so and I'm sure some of the audience know this, and this is a very crude explanation of a kind of a categorization that is far more complex and far more broad, so I'll surely miss out on some things.

But generally speaking, there is this thing called modernity, and this is all the industrial processes, but what we associate modernity with these days is this idea of progress at all costs, regardless of whether this was scientific progress or political progress, all kinds of progress, and you're willing to, I guess, sacrifice everything in order to achieve that, right? And so if we think of modernity, which is the late 19th, early 20th century, we think of enthusiasm and absolutism, but we also think, and this is quite important, we think of the tragedies and the terror

and the catastrophes that emerge as a result, right? So the Enlightenment ends in the French Revolution with Saint-Just throwing everyone under the guillotine. Communist Russia pogroms and so on and so forth. So all of these projects for progress end up in disaster. And so what postmodernism then is, which is the kind of the dominant register of experience that follows from that, it's not singular, but the dominant register of experience that follows, roughly after the Second World War, is people saying, oh dear, this went quite terribly. Let's not do this, right? Let's not tell each other these huge stories that explain everything.

Let's instead assume that we need to take them apart, that will be the leftist, the progressive kind of postmodernism, or let's assume that there's only one ideology or one grand narrative left in the boxing ring. And this is Francis Fukuyama who said that it's America, which was convenient because he was American. And so, but the right and the left, whether you say America is where it's at, or whether you say we should not tell these big stories, we should take them apart and show that patriarchy here, capitalism and so on and so forth,

both of them imagine an end of the future, right? This is it, they say. Let's not go there. Let's not do those things anymore. And in Britain, I think it's called Tina. Sorry, in Britain it's called what? Tina. Tina? There's no alternative. Sorry, in Britain, it's called what? Tina. Tina? There's no alternative. Really? I've never heard. Do you know that?

Because I just thought you were talking about someone called Tina. Yes. I was doing both at the same time. But also I was talking about Margaret Thatcher's notion of there's no alternative. Okay. And so this eternal present, postmodernism works really well. It's called the holiday from history also. And then suddenly you have a generation, I guess my generation, the one next after that, that is taught or has always been raised and been taught those principles at school, that there's just your opinion and so on and so forth. And then the world appears to fall apart.

Climate change, political upheaval, enormous economic inequality, socioeconomic inequality. And so they are like, oh dear, what do we do now? And so how do you build a new future and how do you establish new truths to get you out of this moment without having the tools to do that? There's this artwork, a very famous artwork

by the Lebanese-American artist Annabel Daou. And she has this piece, it's called Which Side Are You On? In which she asks people in the gallery which side they are on. And you understand immediately listening to it that they don't know. They have no idea what to say, right? They'll joke or they'll be very serious, but they don't really know where to go with that. And I think the reason is that they understand, like most of us do, that there's no one

side that is definitely better than the other right you can't really make that choice right I don't know it's also an open question so if I say arsenal and someone else says human rights you know you feel like a terrible human being for having just said arsenal maybe maybe generally that's so that's not a fixture I'm aware of, though. Is that the Europa League? It's the only league the Europeans still play. If you're this captain on a ship, that's the model, by the way, for postmodernism in philosophy,

a captain on a ship moving between islands but never going onto one island, but keep moving between them, what do you do when the ship sinks? And so I think this is this question, this is this meta-modern question. And apparently, it's just putting stuff together and hope for the best. You can see, Karin, how this poses a challenge

to a scientific worldview. Just the idea, as you said, that you can alight on many different islands. You can't, right? If you're talking about just very simple scientific ideas, like the Earth is spherical. And we're going to get to that conspiracy theory later. So can it, as you described, Tim, this move from, I suppose,

you're talking about celebrating progress, I suppose, 19th century, simply speaking, so a celebration of science, to a more distrustful society. But yeah, I think it is true. A lot of people in my line of work are saying that we are living in this kind of society where people are trusting science much, much less than they used to. They're trusting the experts a lot less. And instead, they're trusting information experts a lot less. And instead, they're trusting information that their auntie has told them or, you know, that somebody has come across on the internet. And so the science kind of matters less than the information that

you can kind of just find yourself by looking here, there and everywhere. And that's kind of what I'm interested in. I'm interested in why people will opt for these sorts of explanations that they will find that aren't particularly factually based or information that they've just found somewhere or someone's told them about rather than information that is derived from science. So I'm interested in the psychology of conspiracy theories and why people will go for these sorts of explanations as opposed to um scientific or more rational explanations so i think the reason why people believe in conspiracy theories at heart is because it's reassuring and it's reassuring because the world is in fact full of random you know a quantum physicist can tell you this the world is full of very random, accidental stuff, and it's very hard to

process. And so it's simpler just to think that there is a force or a number of forces that you or only you and your mates on undiscovered.com have managed to crack a code that you've cracked that sorts out the world. And even if that that's evil it's more reassuring to think that there are people in control there are shadowy forces i say people they could be lizards in control than the idea that the world is generally random uh i mean speaking personally i once saw an american comedian i don't remember this guy's name which is really bad of me because i've quoted this quite a lot but it's a it's uh it's an important thing from my point of view, which is when he came on stage, he just said, I blame the Jews. It's quicker that way. And the thing is that

the reason that Jews are so often, and almost every conspiracy theory does end up with this idea of the Jews, is that really the Jews are just stand-ins for the idea of a kind of superior force that's somehow evilly controlling the world. And although it leads to genocide, at some level, what the people want to imagine that is that that force is there because it comforts them. It comforts them and makes them think that life is not just completely random and accidental. But that's, David, what I find interesting about that, and I wouldn't disagree at all, is it doesn't seem to bring happiness. I very rarely, if I've ever ended up in an argument with a flat earth or with a moon hoaxer, with someone who doesn't believe, you know, that Joe Biden won

the election, I never see them appearing to be cock-a-hoop. They always seem to be furious as well. So that's what I find fascinating is is this it is both comforting and seems to make people utterly infuriated all the time yeah because comfort what i mean by comforting is it's more about identity and having a stable identity about yourself than is about any idea of happiness and the reason why i think that it's grown a lot over the last 15 years is of course social media is a marketplace of identity social media is not a marketplace of ideas it's a marketplace of identity it Social media is not a marketplace of ideas. It's a marketplace of identity. It's about broadcasting who you are.

And what's the best way of broadcasting who you are? It's I believe this. And often, if you believe something extreme, then you're turning up the volume on your identity. Yeah, with the social media, I mean, I'm also thinking, right, so if we all agree that conspiracy theories, they reoccur throughout history, but they're more common or more prevalent at moments of crisis. It also seems to me that with, I mean, you mentioned social media,

we can also go back to the advent of modernity in cinema, right, where we also see a momentary rise in conspiracy theories. It also seems to me that the medium or the medium specificity is quite important, right? In early film philosophy, there's always this distinction between the theatre and film, right? And in the theatre theater you have a kind of a physical closeness right if i would now fall and break my leg and one of you was a doctor i think hopefully you'd feel responsible to jump on stage and help me out right so there's kind of a physical we're in it this is england

they'd be too embarrassed they want to get up but they go well what if he's just sprained and then he stands up just as I get there and then oh god no no no let him writhe in agony for an hour or two yet also some people in here might be thinking what if it was a false flag what if it wasn't real what if it's all part of the BBC trying to control the world, his broken leg

yeah I don't know I mean I hope at least that we will be in it together right there's a kind of a physical presence there's a kind of an access we have to each other at the same time there's a distance right we're sitting here we have also loads of space and you're all sitting there with less space right quite cramped there's a kind of distance as well whereas with cinema of course if you sit in the theater and someone on stage falls i mean it's insane right you can't help that person with their broken leg, right?

There is that kind of epistemic distance. You're no longer in the same world, in a way. However, because of close-up and repetition and so on, you do get more of a sense of closeness, right, of intimacy. So it's a simultaneous kind of closeness or intimacy and not having to bear that immediate responsibility or kind of an ethics of being together, which also allows you, I suppose,

to go about it in a very different way, right? And so if you go from cinema, where you're still with loads of people, to television, where you're just with your family on the sofa, I guess, to then social media, where you're on your own in your bed with your phone, or on the loo, whatever, you create those very different kind of relationships

of intimacy and distance, in a way. So the ethics change entirely, which seems to me quite beneficial, if that's the word, for the emergence of more, or the popularity of conspiracy theories. The root, I mean, I think I would contest your suggestion that the root of conspiracy theories is to do with changes in modernity or whatever,

and I think the example of, say, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is a fake conspiracy theory cooked up but then consumed by people from the late part of the 19th century onwards, demonstrates that, that this is to do with, as David said, other social factors of uncertainty and fear and holding on to something that you can... that explains something that is otherwise incomprehensible.

And now, you know, clearly we've been going through a very interesting last 20 years with an awful lot of things. It does seem as though history has sped up. I'm not sure that's true, but that's the feeling you've got and so maybe that as well as the social media is helping to explain why there is the explosion of increasingly crackpot ideas i think the modernism thing is interesting because i think the other thing that's very important with conspiracy theory is story is narrative you know we are the only animal that really has narrative and we constantly try

and create stories out of our lives again that's an illusion life isn't really doesn't really have narrative it's just a series of random events but if we create narrative then we create narratives of oh you know here's a thing that's gone wrong but i know how to bring it to justice and that's an arc right and it provides a kind of satisfaction in people's minds and so the protocols of the elders of zion is that it's a story it's a story about villains controlling the world that the conspiracy theorist is then the hero because they've cracked that code now none of that is true but the story allows us to make sense of the world i was just going to chip in on the issue of social media consumption as well and and of course i think that has it has really changed how people can communicate and find um conspiracy theories and other types of um odd beliefs if you want to use

that word um but also it helps people to find like-minded individuals which relates to the issue that you you mentioned about identity finding groups of people who agree with you and with whom you agree um at the same time, it also allows you to filter out information that you don't agree with, you don't want to listen to. So it's a way that people can preserve a niche or unusual belief because they can just ignore other pieces of information. So people become i guess consumed in these in in these particular groups or information bubbles or whatever you want to call

them and it's a way of holding on to the belief by basically ignoring what anybody else has to say you can just tunnel your information consumption in a particular direction and just and just keep it there i wanted to just just on the protocols of the elders of zion just because that was brought up and this seems to me of an interesting thing which is as far as i know that was debunked quite quickly and they even found the root of it actually came from a fiction originally was turned into so even though it's been debunked people somehow seem to have a and i'm interested in the psychology of being able to say i know this isn't true but it doesn't mean it's not true which seems to be what is going on there yeah yeah yeah absolutely and people are very very good at rationalizing their beliefs and they they think

well you know this isn't maybe i've not come across any evidence to say this is true but i also haven't come across any evidence to say that it's not. And people, if they do believe something, which may be kind of wrapped up in various different prejudices, they are very, very good at protecting those beliefs and coming up with strategies to be able to, I guess, shield themselves from other types of information. And one tool that conspiracy theorists use quite a lot is accusing anybody who says otherwise that they're in on the conspiracy they're part of the giant conspiracy themselves. That happened to me actually, so I did a documentary about holocaust denial that was on BBC2 a little while ago and I spoke to holocaust denier and I said to at one point so all these you know like my family larger members of my

large section of my family was murdered by the Nazis. So I said, so where are they? If they weren't murdered by the Nazis, why haven't they come and seen me by now? Where are they? It's really nasty that they just haven't come up and said, no, it was all a lie. Come on, let's have tea. They're not doing that. And I said, so where are they?

And he said, you tell me. Meaning, you're a Jew, so you obviously know. He also said at one point, because it was a BBC documentary, that he didn't trust me anyway because Jews run the BBC. And I said, well, I promise you, if I was running the BBC, I'd be on it a lot more. LAUGHTER But as you say, none of this made any difference to him. Absolutely none of it.

I could have joked, I could have said logical stuff. It was all just grist to the middle of, well, obviously I'm right because you're in on the conspiracy, as you say. I love the fact that what you have to do now is you have to carry a briefcase of all of your rejected TV projects to prove your point. 20 years of rejected plays, everyone a masterpiece.

Tim, it's easy to see this arc of philosophy that you describe, from modernism, postmodernism, then to metamodernism. It's easy to map that onto a rise in conspiracy theory. I mean, I know nothing about philosophy at all. So when you say the word postmodernism, I tend to think that it almost feels to me like an anti-intellectual movement. So you can correct me on that. In the sense that everything becomes possible. There are no real facts that we can hang on to so is is that i'm

sure you're going to say it's a gross oversimplification and my question is is it's a gross oversimplification but also whether um this the the philosophical tides make space for people to say well my i have an opinion that the Earth is not going around the sun, or I don't like these vaccines, or whatever it may be? Yeah, I mean, I would say yes. To the extent that I don't think, and I'm sure that there are many people who associate with or who think of themselves as postmodern thinkers or whatever,

that they would deny the very existence of truth. But the way I've always understood it is more that there is an emphasis on the contextual nature of truth. So something is true here, but not necessarily there. That is not to say that it isn't also true there, but to assume as much would be tricky. And so I think for postmodernism, it's very much about that understanding

of having the contextuality of a truth. However, I do think, and we see that now, that it also allows the liberty for a kind of radical taking apart of the very idea that there is a truth at all. And so I think that postmodernism allows to question every single truth. It is just that now, now that suddenly the world doesn't seem so certain, you're bringing up other truths just sort of from the gods. There is a difference, though, between questioning truths, which you might call skepticism, which lies at the heart of science. But something you said, the idea that what is true over here is not true over there,

that really does go to the heart of science in that it's fundamental that what is true here is true over there. The chemistry that exists on Earth is the chemistry that exists in the distant stars. So that does seem to run counter to the basic foundations... Except it's not, Brian, is it? Sorry, I'm just... Yes, it is.

Well... It is. I'm just thinking. Yes, it is. Well, it is. I'm going to posit something to you, which is that relativity suggests that what is true over here is not true over there. No, no, there's a logical... Oh, I've got him. I've got him. No, you haven't. You've the opposite have got me. Oh, okay. No, no,

relativity is a very well-defined mathematical theory. It is true across the universe. No, I'm not saying that relativity opposite have got me oh okay no no no relativity is a very well-defined mathematical theory it is true across the universe no i'm not saying that relativity isn't true but but the relative speed of something is different or the relative depending on where the person is or the train is or where they are or the light you know all that is different well it's interesting i mean no you're talking nonsense in a very deep sense. However, you do raise an interesting point, because it was... This is like a Radio 3 programme, isn't it?

Not many will listen, but they will be greatly inspired. Because it does raise this idea. I mean, so relativity was taken, as was quantum mechanics, as a part of that movement that led apparently to the undermining of certainty in science. The world is not clockwork anymore. That's a misreading of the science, actually. I mean, I think that this perhaps reveals philosophy's interest in the wilder realms of physics. philosophy's interest in the wilder realms of physics and if you think about what's happened in biology since the second world war rather than us losing our way quite the opposite we have understood life down to the most exquisite molecular level we can manipulate it in all

sorts of ways our understanding of genetics has completely transformed our understanding of evolution of physiology of everything medicine so in a I mean, it seems to me like, you know, philosophy is going over there and biology is steaming ahead, still stuck in the old onward to a glorious future modernist view that you've said is kind of out of fashion. Well, that's what I wondered, Karen, about, you know you know how true is it we started off by talking about this that our conspiracy theory is more rife is it is part of that because the universe has become more certain and we are surrounded by information so as you know as david was saying this this idea of trying to find some certainty becomes more desperate when you have so many possibilities well i i think that some people would argue that conspiracy theorizing this way of

thinking has always been with us so evolutionary psychologists would say that this is just a natural way that we deal with situations where they could be potentially a hostile group who is trying to you know do something bad towards us as a kind of safety or survival mechanism and I guess you can trace conspiracy theorizing back a long long way so I think that they have always been with us but I think one of the reasons why we're seeing so many more of them now apart from perhaps use of social media and just the ease with which we can find this information now is that particularly in the last couple of years we've just all been dealing with a horrendous crisis situation and a situation like like the pandemic has just been absolutely fertile ground for conspiracy theories it has all of the necessary ingredients you have situations of of uncertainty people feel that they're out of control they feel that they don't have any power

over the things that are happening to them. They feel lonely and isolated. And all of those things put together, as a psychologist, this is what I would say, just provide a perfect storm for conspiracy theories to flourish. And I think that's what we've seen in the last couple of years, at least now.

But they have always been with us. I suppose that is the bottom line. They they're nothing new but in times of crisis we do see much more of this sort of way of thinking as people are just trying to make sense of a very very complex situation that they're really struggling with and we also know that if you believe in one of these sorts of narratives you're more likely to go down this rabbit hole and find others and kind of get a little bit lost in information if it's part of our nature which is described it's been around essentially i think is as old as time it's when you have civilization you have conspiracy theories it is part of our nature. There are two questions that arise.

One is, is it possible to eliminate them? And the second question, though, is it necessary or even desirable to eliminate them completely, given that it just seems to be part of the human condition? Yeah, good questions. I think that some people would say, no, we should not eliminate this way of thinking because it's quite similar to just a general cynicism or scepticism that you want to

encourage. But of course, it isn't exactly the same as this. If people are rejecting science and not getting vaccinated and not doing things that they perhaps should be doing, then it can become a problem. But at the same time, it raises issues of censorship and free speech and all of those sorts of things. And I think that a lot of people would say, no, you should never tell people that you shouldn't believe in conspiracy theories or be sceptical in any kind of way. But in terms of getting, like, if you wanted to get somebody not to believe in conspiracy theories, that is possible, but general debunking isn't really successful. Is it the same kind of processes that people use to get them out of cults?

The same kind of... Because it's very cult-like. Yeah, similar, yeah. So, like, de-radicalisation types of techniques. Another technique that's being used a bit now is... They call it inoculation, and it is kind of just like giving someone a vaccine. So you give someone a very weak piece of misinformation or a very weak form of a conspiracy theory and then when they come across a stronger influence attempt they'll be more able to reject

it. And sometimes giving people just factual information before they come across a conspiracy theory can mean that the conspiracy theory is it's more difficult to take root but on the other hand once you present the conspiracy theory first trying to debunk it is more of a more of a challenge so is it like a kind of psychological whack-a-mole so if somebody you know you get them to decide that the virus isn't caused by 5g but then all of a sudden they're going to think, well, actually, maybe the Earth is flat. Do you think that there are kind of conspiracy-minded personality types that are going to search for those kind of explanations? It is absolutely like that.

And I think that some scholars would argue that there is a general kind of mindset that makes people more attracted to conspiracy theories than other types of explanations so on that note is whack-a-mole an actual game or is it just something used in analogies because i think they play it in american fairgrounds do they with real moles yes absolutely moles were hurt in the making of that game wow it's got sorry i've never heard of this so this something to take with you

when you go home, the whack-a-mole game. It doesn't really exist, like that German town. I'm interested, can you enlarge a little bit on the German town that doesn't exist?

What's the basis of that conspiracy theory? I think it was satirical from the beginning. I mean, Angela Merkel made the same joke. Is it just a very boring place? I think they would ask you

the question, do you know anyone from Biele couple of... Is it just a very boring place? I think they would ask you the question, do you know anyone from Bielefeld? Have you ever been to Bielefeld? And the answer to that question will, I mean, almost inevitably be no. And I think if you have been there, some of us have been there. It's a forgettable town. Right.

But the Germans, with their famous sense of humour, have been making this joke for decades, as it turns out. Would it work with Swindon? But I think that's quite interesting because that does seem to connect with some... The idea that there do now seem to be people who will not believe something unless they've actually experienced it. So, well, you say Peterborough exists, but I've never been there.

And you kind of just... That bit i've never been there and you kind of just that bit of just accepting that there will be some things you have not done that the fact you haven't done them or the fact you haven't been there does not mean they don't exist it doesn't require you to actually go there to then bring it into existence well i think that there's clearly an appetite for this kind of things aren't real business because there's that satirist in america who started putting up posters saying pigeons aren't real. And this was a joke. He was just making a joke. But then he was saying, you know, they're all drones and robots.

And then people started believing it. Now, he's a joker, and now he's making a nice bit of money out of T-shirts with pigeons aren't real and all the rest of it. But there are lots of people who are now convinced that pigeons are not quite men in suits, but they're more drones and robots. I still like that idea of just giving people

a homeopathic amount of the JFK assassination, and the next thing you know, they believe lizards rule the universe. That's a good example, though, JFK, right? So David Aronovich has written a book about conspiracy theory called Voodoo History. It's a really good book. And he sort of begins it by saying, you probably think that you're someone,

because no one who is an actual conspiracy theorist would buy a book debunking conspiracy theorists. So it's for people, you might say, like us, who think, no, we don't believe in all this. But he begins by saying, there's probably one you do believe, and it's JFK. He says that probably people in here can do it. Who here thinks JFK has a bit of conspiracy to it, the assassination?

No-one's going to put their hand up, are they? Oh, there's someone over there who's backing to the left. Yeah, there's a few people. Now, I know it's not television, but I'm going to say a few people put their hand up. But I probably thought that, more or less. And then he points out, which is not generally known, it might be generally known, but not known to me,

that six months before he shot JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald tried to shoot a retired general called General Edwin Walker with a sniper rifle and blah, blah, blah. You'd think that sort of would be in the mix of all these people saying, well, what about this? Well, exactly. He tried to and failed. So how would he suddenly be able to hit something when once he hadn't hit something before?

You don't have the conspiracy mindset here, David, do you? Also, General Edwin wasn't in a convertible, as far as I know. No, but my point is that, you know, there are some conspiracy theories that even someone like me, who's very, like, think, oh, I would never believe in a conspiracy theory, probably just ended up by osmosis, vaguely thinking there might be something in that one.

And JFK is probably, as you say, the kind of, you know, what's the word, the entry drug for conspiracy theories. Because one of the other things I think about conspiracy theory is once you start to believe it, it's very difficult to row back on it. It's like everything else has to fall in to line with your conspiracy theory. Otherwise, you have to say, I was wrong, or we were wrong, which everyone finds very difficult to say.

I read this thing the other day that Mark Twain said, it's much easier to fool people than to get people to admit that they were fooled. And you can see this because lots of people still support Brexit. For balance? No, I'm not even gonna bother and also thank you for that it was not at all difficult to get into the country this morning does it i suppose the question is does it does it matter? We've covered that a bit, but in terms of solutions, given that it matters that we all agree on some shared facts in a society such as ours, where it's very necessary,

as you said, during a pandemic, for example, or with the challenge of climate change, for example, we have to all agree on some shared facts. I think it's also really important that, you know, people are challenged on things like Holocaust denial, or that Sandy Hook was some kind of setup, all these things, these are deeply offensive, and also very, very damaging things that people actually believe to be true. Yes. I mean, every time develops its own critical tools, right? I don't think we should think about it in terms of reversal or going back or any of those things.

I mean, I think we need to figure out new and perhaps adaptive models that will provide us the tools by which we can make sense not just of what's happening now, but also of what's happening tomorrow, right? That's why it also never makes sense if you're just debunking

some kind of weird Trumpian conspiracy theory. That's not the problem. The problem is, as you also mentioned, and there's a kind of weird Trumpian conspiracy theory. That's not the problem. The problem is, as you also mentioned, and there's a kind of a type or there's a kind of an attitude behind it of having this hermeneutic overdetermination everywhere. You're seeing that stuff sort of everywhere potentially. So it seems rather that we need to find a new vocabulary,

a new kind of, I don't know, a set of critical tools that will help us not just here or now, but precisely to bridge that. Isn't the thing we really need to teach at school, and we don't do this in England anyway, and that's philosophy. So in France, all the students, whatever kind of baccalaureate they're studying, they all have to sit the philosophy paper they all learn the basics of philosophical thinking of thinking about thinking and therefore you know it's not critical thinking but it's actually a deeper way of trying to think about how we know things and as a university lecturer when we get students who've done the international baccalaureate rather than a levels they've got a much broader way of thinking

a much richer understanding of the world than your average English student. So for any students out there listening, thinking about what they should do, study philosophy. I would love to agree also, but of course we've seen the political situation in France, and although it's like everywhere, incomparable, and I'm saying this with respect and on the BBC, incomparable to the UK situation, which I guess to many of us who aren't living here seems quite funny.

You know, Le Pen is up, you know, I mean, the situation in France is also quite awful, in spite of philosophy. Yeah, so we, thank you so much. We have also asked our audience what conspiracy theory they'd like to start. And obviously Tim started the conspiracy theory that Tina Turner is somehow in charge of everything. We found that out earlier on. What have you got, Brian? Well, pi is 4.1.

But it can be. It just depends on the geometry of the surface. So that's not a conspiracy theory. It's an accurate description of a curved surface. Riemannian geometry. So what is true over here is in fact not true over there. We're talking about the difference between the geometry of surfaces. Leave it, Brian. I've won.

I've never seen you look happier. The door handles exist solely to catch on tall people's trouser pockets to publicly embarrass them. That's from Ben. You'll see him as he walks out with his trousers flapping about. Schrodinger's cat was actually a strawberry. We have a distinguished guest on the panel,

because, Matthew, you were at the original strawberry discussion. I was in there. It was very exciting. How do you know the strawberry's dead? Well, you send two of them through a slit and as long as you don't move... Thank you very much

to our panel. Karen Douglas, Matthew Cobb, Tim Vermoon and David Baddiel. Next week, for the purposes of balance, we're going to make sure that we have an entirely non-animal panel uh we are going to have uh guests including a vase of daffodils an oak tree and a punnet of strawberries which to be honest the last time i saw it did not look well so i hope it's still alive anyway the strawberry and the punnet yeah well now matthew's here as well it's like we finally created that eternal loop where people are now just trapped in 162 episodes going round and round

returning to the dead strawberry alive again. But really, how do we know if it's dead? Well, it's dying. It's not dead. Goodbye. Dying. APPLAUSE In the infinite monkey cage Without your trousers In the infinite monkey cage Turned out nice again. Can you remember the worst day of your life?

How would you feel if someone told you that day never happened? That you were being paid to make it up? For people who've lived through terrible disasters, this is a shockingly common experience. I'm Marianna Spring, the BBC's disinformation and social media correspondent. In the BBC Radio 4 podcast Disaster Trolls, I investigate how people caught up in the Manchester Arena bombing and other UK terror attacks are being targeted with extreme conspiracy theories and abuse. Join me as I uncover evidence of the trolls blighting the lives of people right here in the UK, who now want answers and justice. To hear the podcast now, subscribe to Disaster Trolls on BBC Sounds. ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th.

Terms and conditions apply. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. you