How to Master the Skill of Quitting & Deconstructing Conspiracy Theories - SYSK Choice
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Today on Something You Should Know, what drinking water can do for you, and it's a lot more than you may realize. Then, quitting. Quitters never win. Winners never quit. Well, not exactly. It's not really like should we persevere more and quit less. We have to figure out when is the right time to persevere and when is the right time to quit because they're really the exact same decision.

Also, whether you have good teeth or bad teeth, I'll tell you who's partly responsible. And the fascinating world of conspiracy theories, aliens, moon landings, chemtrails, 9-11. When people said the collapse of the Twin Towers looked like a controlled demolition, it actually looked nothing like a controlled demolition. And there's actually no such thing as something looking like a controlled demolition by how it falls. What makes it look like a controlled demolition is where it lands.

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Hello, and we're going to start this episode of Something You Should Know with a bit of a medical quiz here. Do you have any of these symptoms? Tiredness, no energy, dizziness, depression, stomach issues, headaches, dry skin, or joint problems? Well, believe it or not, all of these things can be caused by dehydration.

There's a lot of research about this, and in fact, Dr. Mike Marino, a family doctor, says about 50% of his patients come to him with these symptoms. And when he gets them to increase the amount of water they drink, those symptoms often just disappear, or at least become less serious. Dr. Marino explains that simple hydration, drinking more water, nourishes every organ, cell, and tissue in your body, and makes them function properly.

His prescription is to drink at least six glasses of water a day. Thirst is not a good indicator. If you feel thirsty, you've been dehydrated for a while already. Sipping water throughout the day is your best bet. And that is something you should know. When you hear the word quitter or quitting...

Doesn't have a nice ring to it. After all, we've all heard that quitting, well, that's the chicken way out. Quitters never win and winners never quit. Quitting is for losers. Well, hold on a second.

Sometimes, quitting may be the very best thing you can do, according to Annie Duke. Annie was a professional poker player for two decades and won the $2 million winner-take-all invitation-only World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions. In 2010, she won the prestigious NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship.

Prior to becoming a professional poker player, Annie was awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship to study cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She's the author of a best-selling book called Quit! The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. Hi, Annie. Welcome.

So, all of my life, I think this is true for a lot of us, is I was told, you don't quit. Success comes through perseverance. You got to stick with it. And here you come along and say, well, now, wait a minute, maybe quitting has gotten a bad rap.

Yeah. So Mike, I think you actually get right to the heart of the matter. You know, we think about grit and quit as opposing forces where in that opposition, grit is, is the clear winner, right? Like grit is a virtue. It's character building, right? We love the people who persevere. They're the heroes of our stories. Whereas quitting, you know, it's a vice like quitters are losers. They're failures, right?

And so we just really favor the idea of grit when we think about these two together. But as you point out, in terms of you looking back on your life, there are not just times when you feel like you quit too early and maybe you should have persevered longer, but there are also times when you feel like you quit too late. And I think that that's true of most of us, that when we think back on our life, we realize like, no, it's not true that persevering is always the right choice, but

Because I can think of times when I should have quit earlier. And that's because it's not really like, should we persevere more and quit less? It's we have to figure out when is the right time to persevere and when is the right time to quit? Because they're really the exact same decision. If you choose to stick, you're choosing not to quit. If you choose to quit, you're

You're choosing not to stick. And that gets to the real heart of the matter is to stop thinking about it as one versus the other, but as the same decision.

Well, and it seems that in every situation you can look back and it isn't always crystal clear whether or not you made the right decision. Maybe you should have stuck it out a little longer and things would have turned out different. Maybe you should have quit a little sooner, but gee, you'd never really know. It isn't like, oh, that was right. Oh, that was wrong. Yeah, so I think that this is really, Mike, one of the problems that we have as decision makers, whether it's this decision to start something

or the decision to stop it, it's made under uncertainty. So what that means is like, if you think about the decision to start something, we know very little at the time that we start it in comparison to all there is to be known. And then there's also just the influence of luck. So I can make a decision to start something that's gonna work out 80% of the time. And by definition, that means it's not gonna work out 20% of the time. And I don't have any control over when that 20% is gonna happen.

So that is also true. That uncertainty is also true of the decision about whether to stick or quit once you've started something is that when you are facing that decision, you're also not going to have all the facts. And you also, I assume, still don't have a time machine where you can look into the future and see how something is going to turn out. And so that makes these decisions really hard in terms of their timing. So I'm sure, Mike, that you've had that feeling before, right?

of, you know, oh, I wish I knew then what I know now, right? And that's that feeling of the influence of hidden information, of the fact that when we decide things, we don't have all the facts at the time of the decision and new information is going to reveal itself to us after the fact.

But this is where we get into the problem, which is exactly what you, you know, we're asking about in the question, which is, but don't we, you know, we kind of never know for sure. Right. And the answer is, yeah, we don't ever know for sure. And so what that makes us do is stick to things in general, usually, not always, but usually we stick to things too long because we want to know that there's no other choice but to walk away.

And when we know for certain, in reality, that means there is no choice because it means that we've already butted up against the failure. It means that we're in a job that's so intolerable by that point that we can't even get out of bed because we're so miserable and we're using up all of our sick days and vacation days trying to avoid going into work.

And that is long after the time that quitting would have been correct to do, except if we quit when it's actually right, we're quitting in this sort of cloud of uncertainty that we're just really uncomfortable with. Well, the job thing is a good example of this next question. And that is, you know, I was always told by my father and just in general advice growing up that when you have a job that you want to quit, it's better to have a job

you want to get another job. So you hang in there till you get another job. You don't quit the first job until you get another job. And that may mean you're hanging in there longer than you want to, but there is a payoff to that. So yeah, it depends on the situation, right? So there's a couple of issues with it. The first is that sometimes, I mean, if you have severance and

or if you have the wherewithal, and this is a matter of what your circumstances are, you can actually quit the other job to go look for another one because you may have some cushion built in. And, you know, clearly that depends on the job market. It depends on the opportunities that are available to you. That's for sure. But if you can do that, that's actually kind of ideal because you can turn more of your attention to actually looking, which is a good thing to do.

The bigger issue really with that advice is this, that when you're in the other job, you tend not to be exploring other opportunities. So that would be fine if while you were holding the other job, you were actually exploring other opportunities. You were talking to recruiters. You were trying to make sure that you were securing interviews. So if while you were in your current position, there was real exploration,

of what the other opportunities were, then I would say, sure, yeah, stay in your job and do it in parallel. I think that that's incredibly sage advice. The problem is that when we are in our current position, we tend not to do those things. And so since everybody has had the experience of, you know, should I or shouldn't I quit this?

What's the advice? I mean, every decision, every situation seems so different that it would be hard to give any kind of blanket advice. But there must be some formula, some way of thinking that would help anybody make a decision to take this road or to take that road. Yeah, so I mean, I just want to say what you just said about it seems like every situation is so different that blanket advice doesn't make sense.

gets right to the heart of it. Because the issue is that we do have blanket advice, which is that quitters never win and winners never quit. Grit is good. It builds character. And exactly what you're saying that that loses the context, right? What is the situation that you're in? Is the situation that you're in one that's worthwhile pursuing or not? And that's really what it comes down to is we have to find a way to distinguish the paths that we're on that are worthwhile to continue.

versus the ones that are no longer worthwhile. That's what we have to start to figure out. And how you do that is the million-dollar question. I want to ask you that in a moment. But first, I am speaking with Annie Duke. The name of her book is Quit, The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away.

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Okay, so Annie, you got to figure out when do you stay, when do you go? How do you make that decision? What's the process?

So that's the rub, right, Mike? Because it's hard. It's really hard when we're, what I would say, in it. So this is something that Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel laureate, talks about being in it in terms of the decision. The best way that I could kind of describe to you what it means to be in it is, let's say that you've decided that you want to eat healthier, but now you're sitting in front of a box of chocolates. That's the rub.

That's being in it because you're facing it down right then. And we have that problem with quitting because that moment that we quit is when we can't recover the cause. So let's say that you're doing something that isn't going well. As long as you keep doing it, there's some chance you might turn it around. But when you quit, that's the moment that you admit defeat. It's the moment you're saying, nope, it's not going to work out.

So what we want to do is avoid actually making the decision in that moment when we're in it. And how do you do that? There's two things you can do. One is to make the decision in advance. In other words, to say, I'm starting this thing, whether it's a project or a job or a relationship or running a marathon or going up a mountain or buying a stock, I'm going to start it. And let me imagine what the signals are that I might see in the future that would tell me,

that this is not going well, that things are not worth pursuing anymore. Let me write those things down and let me commit that when I see those signals that I'm going to react to them. So that's the first thing you can do is this kind of advanced thinking. And the second thing you can do is to get somebody to help you with it. Because let me ask you this, Mike, have you ever been in a situation where you see a friend of yours or a colleague who

And they're pursuing something, whether it's like they're in a job or they're in a relationship or they're pursuing a project or they're developing a product or whatever it might be. And you're just looking at them going, how can they not see that they should be stopping? Sure. Yeah. Well, I've often looked back at some of my own decisions in retrospect and thought the same thing. But yes, I've certainly seen other people and wondered, why are you doing this?

Right. So what's true of you for seeing other people is also true of other people seeing you. So just as you can look at other people and say, why are you still doing this? They are looking at you saying, why is Mike still doing this? So that is actually, interestingly enough, like a tool that we can use to help us be better quitters, which is to go get a quitting coach. Go find somebody who has your long-term best interest at heart and say to them, look,

I want you to help me. You know, I'm having trouble with this decision about whether I should stay in what I'm doing or whether I should walk away. Please help me. I'm starting something. And I figured out all of these signals that I might see in the future that are going to tell me that this isn't going to be worth pursuing anymore. I want to share those with you and have you when that future occurs, right?

Help me to see those signals and to react to those in a way that's more rational by actually walking away when it's appropriate. Now, I think one thing that I don't know you can tell me might be going through your mind is, well, wouldn't people do that automatically for you?

But the fact is that they're not going to because they're going to be afraid of like hurting your feelings. I mean, I don't know. Are you really eager to tell someone who's in a bad relationship that they should break up with the person they're with? Yeah, not likely. None of my business. None of your business. And also, ooh, if they stay with them, that's going to be really bad for you. Right. Or if someone's pursuing a project that's failing, telling them to walk away is telling them that they're failing. Right.

You know, and we think that as friends, we ought to be cheerleading people. Like, I know you can turn it around, Mike. Like, I know you can do it. Like when you come to me and you say like, things aren't going well, but I know I can turn it around. It's going to be my instinct to say, well, I want to, you know, Mike is my friend. So I want to be nice to him. So I'm going to tell him like, yes, I know you can turn it around. Like I'm going to cheerlead you. So it's actually a little bit on us.

as people who are seeking somebody to help coach us, to let them know, like, I'm giving you permission to tell me the truth because I don't want you to tell me what you think I want to hear right now. I want you to tell me what you think is best for me in the long run. It would also seem, though, that

Another reason I wouldn't volunteer that somebody quit, and maybe even if they asked me, I'm not, because I don't know enough about that, whatever that is, to know. I don't know this other person. I don't know your industry. I don't know your employer. I don't feel equipped to tell you whether you should stay or go.

Yeah. So that, that's why I mean, so when I say this, like you want to have someone who has your best interest at heart and is the right person to ask about it. You know, I do think that if, if you're my friend and you see that I'm super miserable in a job, you are the right person for me to ask about it. When it comes to is a product worth pursuing, is a project worth continuing to pursue, you need to find someone who's got enough experience to

in, in what you're thinking about that their opinion is going to be worthwhile to you. So that is something about like identifying the right quitting coach. It, the person that you get to help you with a problem, you know, with problem A is not necessarily going to be the person that you want to help you with all problems. So you have to find the person who's in the right category, who's the right subject matter expert, who's seen it enough and has enough experience that their opinion is going to be a good one.

It does seem that one of the reasons people hesitate to quit is it's that old, you know, road not taken problem. You know, if I quit, I'll always wonder what if I didn't? What would have happened if I hung in there? And that's a thing that's hard to let go of. You know, here's the issue is that we need, you know, in poker, when I used to play professional poker, we had a saying that poker was one long game.

And what that meant was that what happened on a single hand mattered very little. What mattered is that over the long run, you were getting yourself in the best situation so that you would be making money. Because if you got really caught up in, say, a single hand of poker that you were playing, continuing to play beyond the point at which it mathematically made sense for you to be in the pot,

Because the moment that you folded was the moment that you knew on that hand you couldn't recover those chips. That that was a way for you to go broke. Because what that would mean is that you would be continuing to bet more money that wasn't actually being bet in a winning situation. And that's true of these types of decisions. And I know it's really hard.

But this idea of I don't want to quit because maybe I could get what I've got put into this back if I continue. Maybe I could turn this around and make it successful. When that thing that you're doing isn't really worth your time is actually what makes us not succeed in the long run. Because what happens is in the service of not wanting to have wasted time,

what we've already put into something. We now continue to put time and effort and attention and money into things going forward that are no longer worth it. Real quick, because I want to ask this question and get your response. Do you think that when, because you alluded to the idea that when you're starting to think about quitting, it's probably past the time, but it seems to me that there's a difference between

I want to quit and I ought to quit. That the path may be difficult, but success may still come. But the path may be driving you to quit because it's really hard to get there. But it doesn't mean you won't get there. But you want to quit, but maybe you really shouldn't quit.

I think that that's really insightful. It's also why I think that everybody should go read Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth, which is a really wonderful book on exactly that problem. She's brilliant. I mean, I think everybody should read that book for exactly the reason that you're talking about. What Grit does is it helps you to stick to things that are worthwhile but that are hard because there's all sorts of things that we do that are absolutely worthwhile for us to pursue that are also really hard.

You know, like running a marathon, for example, might be worthwhile for you to pursue, but it's going to be really hard. And if you want to accomplish that goal, you should stick to it. The problem and the reason why I wanted to write this book is to have a conversation with grit to let people know that, yeah, but if you're in the middle of the marathon and you break your leg, then grit is no longer good, right? That then you shouldn't continue through that because that is too hard.

Now you've crossed the Rubicon, right? And into, into, oh, please don't keep running because you're going to create a huge injury for yourself. And by the way, if you just Google like people finishing marathons with broken legs, you're going to be amazed at the number of stories that you're going to find. You know, there's one of Siobhan O'Keefe in the 2019 marathon who was a broker leg, I think on mile eight, literally snapped her fibula bone.

And she finished the race, right? So exactly what you're talking about is true. Like we need to be able to tell the difference between, oh, this is just hard. Like I feel like quitting because it's hard versus as you put it, I ought to quit because this is not worthwhile because I don't want people to quit things that are just hard.

That's not a good reason to quit something just because it's hard. I only want people to quit things that aren't worthwhile anymore, regardless of whether they're hard or not. So I think that quitty people are also gritty people because they can tell the difference between the two.

And they're willing to stick to the worthwhile things. Well, this is a very different way of looking at quitting. And the process you outlined could ultimately save people a lot of trouble and heartache if they follow it. Because we're so trained not to quit. And we hang in there too long on so many things, I suspect. And maybe it's not necessary.

Annie Duke has been my guest. She was a professional poker player for many years, a very successful one at that. And the name of her book is Quit, The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. And you'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you for being here, Annie. Well, thank you so much, Mike, for having me. This has been a super fun conversation. I really appreciate the time.

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A lot of people believe in conspiracy theories, or at least a lot of people believe that the official version of a story isn't true, that there's something they're not telling us.

whether it's the Kennedy assassination or 9-11 or whether men landed on the moon, that the official story is really a smokescreen for the truth. Personally, I've never been a big fan of conspiracy theories, but why is it that so many people often think that there's something else, something sinister, something weird that we're not being told?

Well, that's why Casey Lytle is here. Casey is a psychology and sociology professor, and he's author of a book called Debunked. Separate the rational from the irrational in influential conspiracy theories. Hi, Casey. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. So people often ask the question, why are we fascinated with conspiracy theories? And I sometimes think, well, not all of us are. I mean, I'm not that fascinated by them. And the reason I'm not so fascinated by them is because I don't believe them. And the reason I don't believe them is most of them would require too many people to keep their mouth shut, and people don't keep their mouth shut. So they don't really...

tickle my fancy. So who are the people that really find them fascinating? Maybe that's a better question. You actually hit the key point right there in that you think of what it would take to actually carry it out and keep it a secret.

A lot of people, it just fits their base belief about how things are. It's basically how we take in information a lot anyway. We hear something that fits our beliefs. We don't think it very deeply. We just accept it and go on from there. And the more of an emotional need you have for the thing to be true, the more you're going to hang on to it and like it and not want to question it very much.

A great example here are the supposed false flag shooting events, things like this that involve crisis actors. It's frightening to think that any stranger could just walk into my grocery store and start shooting the place up. That's frightening. That's a threat to me. But if I believe these are all staged events and no one's really getting hurt, now that's not a threat to me anymore. It feels safer to believe in that.

But the theory that we didn't really land on the moon, that that was fake, that doesn't make anybody feel safer. So why would anyone want to cling to that? What's the point of that? That one holds on to the general suspicion of government, that government's always lying to you and there are secret operations they don't want you to know about, which is true. You know, there are secret things going on that they keep covered up. And every once in a while we hear about one of them.

But it kind of fits that belief that they're lying to us and we're smart enough to see through it and not fall for it. And the moon landing is another great one where just a lack of understanding of physics can lead you to believe it without questioning it very much. Do the people who believe in conspiracy theories believe

Tend to tend to believe in lots of them or do people who believe in them tend to cling to one or two, but they don't really care about the rest or who are these people who who are the people that yeah, who are these people?

Yeah. Once you get on board with that, you're more likely to bring in more and accept more because you've just opened yourself to that cognition. Again, a general suspiciousness, a suspicious nature is a key. When we look at the big five personality traits in psychology, suspicion is a consistent factor. We think of conspiracy theorists as tinfoil hat hiding in the basement, people who are just obsessed about it.

Most of the people who believe are actually very casual believers, just like anyone else. They've heard the information. It makes sense to them. They don't think the official story makes sense. So they just kind of adopt it without thinking it through very much. So you're a good person to ask this to of of all the kind of classic conspiracy theories or maybe some of the less classic conspiracy theories.

Have the conspiracy theorists ever been proven right? Like, oh my God, you were absolutely right. This conspiracy theory was true. Not in the modern age. You know, there were people in the 50s and 60s that believed in the government doing like secret drug experiments, LSD experiments. They turned out to be true when that got declassified in the 70s.

But as far as, you know, since the 70s onward, and especially with the internet bringing these groups together to basically feed on each other, they've just gotten a little wilder and wackier. And it is much easier when you think about them to realize how ridiculous a lot of them are.

I guess you would call people who believe the earth is flat, is that a conspiracy theory? That there's a conspiracy theory that the earth is round and we all should know that it really isn't? Would you classify that as one? That one is a wild one that I don't include when I bring up conspiracy theories in class because I have never been able to fully convince myself.

that that is not just itself kind of a parody hoax that people do because of most of these, the Flat Earth one is one that I really have trouble wrapping my head around as far as how can you ignore the evidence, you know, otherwise that we're a sphere. Why would that be something people would hide?

you know, and why would the world agree? If the world was flat, the edge of the world would be the most valuable real estate in the world, the biggest tourist attraction of all time. And why can't we find it? It seems to, well, I'd say it's missing from satellites, but they don't believe the satellite information, so. Are conspiracy theories particularly American, or are they everywhere?

They do exist everywhere, but the US is ground zero for conspiracy theories. I mentioned earlier how the internet caused an explosion of that. Conspiracy theorists used to be very isolated groups. They didn't meet very often or have great communication with each other. Internet has brought them together as a global community and that caused a reverberation

where it's spread more to other places, you know, wherever the Internet can reach, which is almost everywhere. Probably one of the biggest conspiracy theories, and it isn't really specific necessarily to any one event, but that the government is, you know, hiding UFOs and that UFOs really exist, but there's this big conspiracy to hide it from us. Right. So talk about that one.

That one is interesting because there is a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories that fits into that one. And that is that the government itself, the military itself, is the one that created and pushes the idea of alien UFOs in order to provide a convenient cover-up for any sightings of experimental aircraft.

And the more extreme of a conspiracy I can get people to believe in, the less credit they have with the general public. So if they do happen upon something true, people are going to disregard them.

Because of some of the wackier stuff they believe. And the whole Roswell thing, as far as a craft crashing there, that wasn't even really news when it happened. That wasn't something that really took off until the 1970s. Again, when we saw the modern age of conspiracy theory start rising up.

And that got fueled because President Ford started releasing a lot of previously classified documents of classified operations. And that's where we got the MK-ULTRA, you know, the drug experiments.

And he did that because of the escalation of suspicion after Watergate. The public was really mistrusting of the government. So Ford was trying to say, OK, we're going to be more transparent. We're going to let you know the things that were going on. But there are plenty of people who believe that there are aliens and that it is being kept secret or even that the aliens are keeping it secret, that they they hide really well and it's hard to spot them. But occasionally you spot them.

And that's where we get into the problems of time and physics and everything else. You know, when you look at, are they out there? Do they have faster than light or space warping drives that these little spaceships are capable of? If they came here, why would they stay hidden and stay secret?

And if they are going out of their way to stay hidden and stay secret, why do we sometimes see them in daytime? You know, in populated areas, wouldn't they just zip around at night when we couldn't see them? Kind of what supports this is the reports of the shapes of a lot of the UFOs. They started with the whole flying saucer idea, which no one reported a flying saucer shape until the first UFO sighting around Mount Rainier happened.

in the early 20th century. And even that pilot did not actually describe them as saucers, but the media reported it that way. And then suddenly people started seeing saucer shapes, which later became cigar-shaped UFOs. Now that was interesting because that was the 60s when we changed to cigar shape. And that is actually what you would think of the SR-71 Blackbird if you happen to see it on a test run

in the Southwest in the early 60s. It looked nothing like any plane anyone had ever seen. It went faster than anything anyone had ever seen. And if it's zipping by you, that's the image you're going to get of it is this cigar-shaped blur that went by. I've always thought that one of the things that fuels almost all conspiracy theories is that

Lack of knowledge. There's something people don't know or don't think they know, and so they rush to fill in the blank. They need an explanation, and so they make one up, what seems to be plausible, and then that becomes the new reality for them.

That is exactly right. I mean, if you are awakened in the middle of the night by a loud boom outside, your brain wants to know what that is and what caused it. You may turn on the radio, you may talk to neighbors. It's essentially an old primitive survival mechanism that wants to know why did this thing happen and could it be relevant to me.

And that's what drives a lot of these. And we also have stored memories of media in our heads that our brain will pull those out and use those for explanations. When people said the collapse of the Twin Towers looked like a controlled demolition, it actually looked nothing like a controlled demolition. They're simply talking about the way the towers started, at least initially, to fall. The top seemed to fall straight down.

But what are they comparing that to? How many collapses of skyscrapers have they ever seen in their lives that are actual events? That was the first one. What your brain is pulling up is memories from movies and TV, you know, fictionalized collapses, special effects that are altered for dramatic effect. And that becomes our expectation. That is such a great point that

To say that the Twin Towers collapsed like a controlled demolition when there's never been a controlled demolition of buildings like that. Right. So how in the world would you, can you make that statement? Right. And there's actually no such thing as something looking like controlled demolition by how it falls. What makes it look like a controlled demolition is where it lands. Right.

Because different demolitions will bring buildings down in different ways, in different directions, depending on where they want the footprint to be.

Is there any sense how many people believe in at least one conspiracy theory? You know, psychology does study that, but a lot of people won't really admit because of the stereotype of it that they believe them. But it's estimated that at least 50% of the population will at least have a mild casual belief in conspiracy theories, at least ones that would fall on what I would put the more rational end of the scale.

Is there any sense of how they begin or it's just too weird and it's too organic and each one is so different that there's no way to trace it back? Yeah, especially now again with social media, you get a bunch of little pieces from individuals and then those start to kind of coalesce and it does really organically grow. September 11th, you can definitely see over time

how they just kept adding layers to these conspiracy theories. You ended up with weird things, you know, let's blow up World Trade Center 7 to cover up secret documents or something as if that would be a rational way to get rid of information like that. You know, if you have the means and the resource to secretly detonate a skyscraper, you definitely have the means to sneak in and take whatever information you want that's in there.

without going to that extreme. But yeah, you definitely see them gradually grow. And part of it comes from the misreporting that happens initially when an event is new. There's all sorts of reports that turn out to be wrong.

but conspiracy theories will be rooted in the idea that those initial reports were actually correct and the corrections later were themselves a cover-up in some way. So they'll grab those early misreports. Well, it does seem that when people come up with a conspiracy theory, they're very selective in the facts they use to support their case. One that comes to mind is, remember when Paul McCartney was supposedly dead, right?

And when you looked at the clues that that guy came up with to prove that he was dead and that these were clues that the Beatles had left to prove that Paul McCartney was dead, they were pretty convincing. But there was also a lot of evidence that it isn't true. But those facts isolated like that.

were seemingly convincing. Right. In the modern age, the new "McCartney is dead" is the Avril Lavigne died around 2003 and has been replaced. That's the big one that she keeps having to let people know she's still alive. And I was doing a video clip on that recently looking at some of the supposed evidence. People show two pictures of her that are like 10 years apart, and they'll say, "Look how her nose is different."

But then they also show a picture, a more of a close-up saying, look, the shape of her eyes is different in these two pictures when it's actually just the makeup that makes the eyes look different. But in the picture where they're saying the eyes are different, the nose is exactly the same in both. So they just basically threw away one of their theories in trying to focus your attention on this other thing. And that's how those get fueled.

A great example I've used in class is the old moon landing hoax documentary that was on years ago now. I think it was on Fox, this hour-long special. The method they use is how all of these are used. They throw a piece of information out there. They tell you it's weird and unexplainable when it's really not. But before you have a chance to think about it, they've gone on to the next thing.

and they just keep hitting you with these things over the course of an hour. Even a rational person listening to that and not really thinking it through will come out the other end of that thinking, well, yeah, that is a lot of weird unexplained stuff. Maybe something is up there. But I would show that to class, and I would stop after every point the documentary makes and explain what actually is the explanation for it.

And there's actually nothing unexplained in it at all. And they can see how manipulative it is by just hitting you with information one after another and not giving you a chance to think about it. So my idea that I said at the very beginning here, the reason I just, these don't interest me much because I just know that too many people have to keep their mouth shut for these things to actually be true. And no one ever comes forward saying,

So I'm just not interested. I mean, the simplest explanation is usually probably correct and...

And I'm done. Is that kind of most people's thinking? Yeah, yeah, it is. And that's the center of when I take a project management approach to it. Think about what it would actually take step by step to carry it out. How many people would it take? How many materials? How much time? And the more you think about it, the more you realize, wow, that is like way too complex.

And one of the things I will challenge my classes with when we bring up one of these, whatever the goal of the conspiracy is supposed to be, are there easier ways you could think of to carry it out that would not be as complex, easier to keep secret, and probably even be better at carrying it out? And they can come up with all sorts of easier solutions. Chemtrails is another kind of ridiculous one for a very simple reason. If you're trying to keep it secret,

You wouldn't be spraying it on sunny days during the day. You'd be spraying at night or on cloudy days when everyone on the ground couldn't see it. You'd do something that had better control over where it goes. You'd put your chemical in drinking water and food additives, sneak it to people that way. So what's the big message here? When the dust settles on all this, what is it you want people to understand?

Well, contrary to the title of my book, I don't debunk everything in it. What I'm trying to do is deliver a cognitive tool for assessing whether or not something actually sounds realistic and is possible, or if something is just kind of off the rails. I mean, you mentioned early covering up the moon landing. You're literally involving hundreds of thousands of people over time.

The motivation wouldn't be there to keep doing it. And there's just no reason to do it. No one would even propose something like that in the first place because on paper, it would be impossible to keep something like that covered up.

And the risk if it gets uncovered is tremendous. Moon landing, there's one reason I've never believed that that was faked, and that's the Soviet Union. They had the technology to be able to see whether we went or not. They would be the first ones to have blown the lid on that because it would have been a global humiliation of the US. But they didn't. They realized we really went.

as we really did. So there's always some fly in the ointment there that the theorists don't want to consider. Well, then there's always the possibility too that maybe it's just like a fun mental exercise. That's kind of like how I think the Paul McCartney is dead idea came about was just something to do. But, you know, you can blast holes in all of these things, but they're kind of interesting to entertain and

Casey Lytle has been my guest. He is a professor of psychology and sociology, and he's author of the book Debunked, Separate the Rational from the Irrational in Influential Conspiracy Theories. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Casey. All right. Thank you for having me. Thank you.

Why is it that some people can take really good care of their teeth? They brush and floss and they have the best dental hygiene and they still wind up with more problems than someone who eats candy and never flosses. Well, you can blame their parents. Most of us have a smile just like one of our parents, teeth included. Genes determine things like height and hair color and health and teeth are no exception.

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I always appreciate the word-of-mouth advertising that listeners to this podcast do. I mean, that's how we grow our audience. You tell somebody and they tell somebody. So please get the ball rolling and tell somebody you know about this podcast and have them give a listen. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love Top Ten Lists?

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