342 - The Conspiracy Theorist Who Changed His Mind

2:24At Walden University, we get the W. That's why we welcome and overcome challenges. It's why our highlight reels are filled with lasting impacts on our communities, on our families, and on ourselves. We turn our passions into purpose, and we put in the work to earn it. Because we're here to create a legacy that elevates us and everyone around us. Get the W. Walden University. Set a course for change. Visit waldenu.edu to learn more. Certified to operate by Shev. You can go to kitted, K-I-T-T-E-D dot shop and use the code SMART50, S-M-A-R-T-5-0 at checkout, and you will get

2:54half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out, middle of the show. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart podcast. Episode 342. I was the guest on the episode that I'm about to play for you. This episode comes from Cautionary Tales, which is a great podcast hosted by Tim Harford. He is a Financial Times columnist, a BBC broadcaster, the author of nine books, including Messy, The Undercover Economist, How to Make the World Add Up, and others. And Tim is just this great storyteller, great interviewer.

3:25And the podcast Cautionary Tales is one of those podcasts that I was already listening to. So I was very excited and honored to get a chance to be on the show. And I think you'll enjoy this particular one. Here's my conversation with Tim Harford. In June 2011, Charlie Veach boarded a British Airways flight at London's Heathrow Airport. He was headed to New York City. In fact, to Ground Zero. There, on September the 11th, 2001, the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, killing thousands after being struck by two passenger aircraft hijacked by Al-Qaeda terrorists. That's the official story anyway.

3:57But Charlie didn't believe it. Charlie Veach was a truther. A man who didn't believe that the World Trade Center collapsed because of a terrorist attack. He thought, instead, that it was a controlled demolition, part of a deadly conspiracy. Charlie didn't just believe this. He was evangelical about it. He was a leader in the truther community, making a good living from his YouTube videos, in which he explained that jet fuel can't burn hot enough to melt steel beams, or that the neat collapse of the skyscrapers into their own foundations could only have been the result of precision explosives.

4:27The 9-11 conspiracy theory was his faith, his social life, and his job. Charlie flew to Ground Zero as part of a BBC TV series, Conspiracy Road Trip. The premise of the show was that in each episode, a different tribe of conspiracy theorists would travel around in a bus, meeting the eyewitnesses and the experts who might challenge their views. And maybe, with the cameras rolling, when presented with the most authoritative facts in the most riveting circumstances, they'd change their minds. Of course, they never did. Except once. Charlie Veach, after listening to all the experts and all the

4:57witnesses, went home to think. And then, after a few days, he posted a short video for his fellow truthers. The evidence had convinced him. He couldn't hold on to the conspiracy theory any longer. 9-11 really had simply been a terrorist attack that caught the US unawares. And that, to his fellow truthers, was utterly unforgivable. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. This is another one of our Cautionary Conversations. As usual, you'll hear a story of something going wrong, a peradventure with a lesson we can all learn. But I'll be joined by an expert to help tell the story and

5:29reflect on it. Today, I'm joined by David McCraney, the host of the hugely influential podcast, You Are Not So Smart, and the author of several books, including his new and brilliant How Minds Change, The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion, which weaves Charlie Veach's story together with many others, along with the latest research, and David's own adventures in persuasion and conversation. David McCraney, welcome to Cautionary Tales. Wow, thank you so much. It is a great honor to be here. I'm a big fan of your work, and this is going to be the best. I'm just looking forward to hanging out with you and having a conversation.

6:03So thanks for having me. It is my pleasure, and I'm a huge fan of You Are Not So Smart and of the book. And you begin quite early on in the book with the story of Charlie Veach. Just tell us a little bit about the things that Charlie believed before he came into contact with this BBC program. And what were the conversations that he had that changed his mind? Yeah, for him, he had been a curious young man. He had moved around a whole lot. He had Brazilian heritage, and his father worked in the oil business.

6:33And so they moved around from country to country to country, several countries in the Middle East, and then back and forth. And eventually, when they settled in the UK, he had sort of a Brazilian lilt to his accent. And he was, as he told me, that he just was made fun of a lot. When he was in the Middle Eastern countries, people there were very prejudiced against him and made fun of him. And then when he came to the UK, people there were prejudiced against him and made fun of him. So then he wanted to do something, and he wanted to question the world.

7:05And so he pursued a philosophy degree. And then he eventually ended up in banking. And he said that was something that he felt like he had gotten into that sort of hamster wheel loop. He just gets up, goes to the cubicle, sits there all day, does something a machine can do, gets back up, comes home. And he just felt very trapped and isolated and not validated. And nothing about this philosophical urge that he had to question the world was being satisfied. And then after 9-11, he watched a video. I want to say it was Loose Change, but I think he

7:37watched all of them. But I know that one of them in particular, he was like, OK, this is clearly a conspiracy. And he had already been playing around in this space. He would take a megaphone and he would run around in London and other areas, and he would just shout at people and tell them they were being controlled, that their lives were part of the military industrial complex. He was very into Anonymous and all these other organizations that felt like there's a sort of a benevolent anarchy that I want to be part of. And he didn't like the idea of being stuck in a loop that

8:10removed his humanity. That was something he reiterated over and over again, that he felt like he wasn't a real human being. And these were things that helped him feel like he was. So when the 9-11 video came along, he felt like, OK, now this is evidence for what I have been talking about and thinking about feeling for so long. This really justifies my beliefs and attitudes. And that is how he found his way into the truth or community, the online community of people who share those anxieties. And together, they talk about it all the time and to the point that they became a real

8:42community to him. So it's really interesting the way that you've set the stage there. So we haven't even yet talked about specifically what he believed, but you've phrased it in emotional terms, his emotional journey, the kind of person he was, the kind of longing he had to believe in his perspectives on the world, which had not always treated him very well. The idea that there was a community out there of like-minded people, this benevolent anarchy. None of this yet is about the specifics of the conspiracy theory. It's all about the emotional resonance of the conspiracy theory, which I think is important in itself.

9:15Yeah, I wanted to lay the foundation of his, of how he arrived in that conspiratorial community, because it's odd to even say it out loud, even after all this research, that the conspiracy actually is irrelevant and the beliefs are irrelevant. But you don't know that when you're in the conspiracy. The anxieties and the values, the emotions that lead a person into a conspiratorial community, that's what's the motivating factor. That's the drive. But in an online ecosystem like we have, an information ecosystem like we have now, you can go online and look for confirmation that your anxiety is reasonable and you will find it.

9:46Yeah. And you'll find it in other people sharing their anxieties. And at a previous era, it would be very difficult for that to go any further. You might have some meetups, maybe. You might be able to correspond in some way. You might subscribe to people's newsletters or buy their books. But now there's this thing that can happen where people form communities very rapidly, very quickly, and then spend a lot of time exchanging ideas with them. So some of the researchers I spoke to about this, they were like, we find our way into these groups for all sorts of reasons.

10:17But once you're in the group, the anxiety is set aside for the desire to be in this community because it satisfies this other drive you really weren't aware of, maybe that you wanted that validation in the community. So that's true for Charlie at the moment that he gets into this. And once you're inside the community, these beliefs that you may never have entertained before start becoming part of the dynamic. And his beliefs, for instance, were that the buildings fell directly into their footprints. He believed that the steel beams of the towers, the jet fuel couldn't have burned hot enough to melt them.

10:48So how could they have fallen? He had other beliefs that were even deeper conspiratorial, were that the airplanes may have been remote controlled, there may have been dummies on the airplanes, and his fellow conspiracy theorists pretty much shared almost all those beliefs. But they all knew that they shared one thing in common, which was it definitely was a conspiracy. And all those people were then brought over by the BBC, and they were given what you always want to give someone who's in a conspiratorial community. The thing we often do online is, let me dump as many facts as I can on this person. Let me just show them.

11:21Look at this link. Look at this link. Look at this link. Well, they went all the way in a way that we all wish we could do. They took them to ground zero. They've had them meet the architects who designed the World Trade Center, who told them about how it couldn't resist a modern plane. It was designed to resist an impact from an older prop driven plane. They even had them get into a flight simulator, the kind that commercial airline pilots use, and had them learn how, yeah, it's tough to land one of these, but it's very easy to just point it at

11:52something big. They had them talk to demolition experts who talked to them about what kind of explosives would be required for this and how difficult it would be to go into the building. And you would have to take these gigantic jackhammer type devices and drill into every one of the columns all the way up. And you'd have to put explosives into those holes that you made all the way up. And then they went even further and said, OK, what if we also took these people and had them meet people who were there, meet people who experienced this? So they talked to people who were at the Pentagon when

12:25it was attacked, who were there and helped with the cleanup before first responders could get there. People who lost people they knew, people who saw the corpses of their own co-workers. Then they went to Pennsylvania to the crash site of one of the planes, and they did everything you could imagine to give people a chance to see, OK, clearly. I mean, like there's facts and then there's this. And the whole premise of the show, because it's like it's a reality show, is that when you do all this, everybody goes, yeah, well, nice job trying to trick me. I still believe it. And that usually is what happens in the show, at least.

12:59But Charlie, he said the thing that really cinched it for him was they met the widows and widowers of people who died in the crash. Charlie, in particular, hugged one of these people when he heard her story. He held her while she sobbed, and when he got back to the hotel room with the other truthers on the trip with him, he was very eager to hear what they thought about all of this. They opened the dialogue by saying, wow, those crocodile tears, huh? What a great actress they hired to trick us. And he told me that he thought privately, you're a group

13:30of disgusting animals to me. And that was overwhelming. He couldn't believe that they had zero empathy for this. And from that point forward, he started seeing himself a little bit separate from the group. It's incredible. But that, I think, is this interesting moment. This really sets off the whole exploration in the book, how minds change, because they all came in with the same belief, pretty much the same belief. They all saw exactly the same thing. So I want to come back to Charlie's story, because I think that this mystery of why he changed his mind and why the others didn't, I think, is fascinating.

14:02But before we come back to him, I wanted to ask David about your own views. You seem to have gone on a bit of a journey. At the beginning of the book, you're pretty much a fatalist, like the BBC TV crew. You're thinking, well, when you show the conspiracy theorists the facts, of course they don't change their mind. Whoever changes their mind about anything. But then you make the point that actually people do change their minds all the time. We managed to do quite a good job of ignoring it when it happens. Yeah, I mean, I had this podcast, You're Not So Smart.

14:34I have the book, You're Not So Smart, and a follow-up. And this has become my beat as a journalist, was talking to people about motivated reasoning, which is just all the psychological mechanisms and neurological mechanisms that influences us. We're very motivated to justify and rationalize and explain ourselves in a way that always seems to suggest we were right all along. And yeah, I was very cynical. I was, I had this pessimism and I was not giving prescriptive advice. I was just describing, here's a thing in the world and, you know, best not to engage in it. And then around the same time period, the norms and attitudes and then the law about same sex marriage in

15:10the United States and LGBTQ issues in general had changed so rapidly. And I had this thought experiment pop in my mind. I was like, what if you took all those people and you put them in a time machine and it's the back 10 years, would they argue with themselves? Would they look at each other and find it impossible to convince each other of something that in the future, that same person will then absolutely accept? I wanted to understand what must have happened in those people's brains. And I felt like to understand it from like the bird's eye view, I could go all the way down

15:42into neurons and work my way up. And I became obsessed. It felt like it was an opportunity to give myself some comeuppance. And I was eager to do so because I didn't want to hold a cynical attitude. So I had motivated reasoning. I was motivated by something that I didn't even quite understand. And that's what sent me off on this super obsessive journey in an all over the world, trying to meet experts and people who change minds, people who've had their minds changed in drastic ways and so on. I mean, not everyone is as knowledgeable about the subject as you are, David, and not everyone is as obsessed

16:15with the problem of changing minds as you are. But a lot of people are kind of, we all like to think of ourselves as people who should be able to change other people's minds. I was quite interested. I published my own book, The Data Detective, last year. And that's a book about how to think clearly about the world and about how numbers might help you think clearly about the world. And I was quite interested by the response because lots of people came to me and said, well, yeah, I enjoyed the book. I've got this friend and he or she believes this dumb thing.

16:47And I, could you tell me how to use numbers to set them straight about this stupid thing that they believe? And my book had never, the way I thought about it is if you can set your own thinking straight, isn't that enough? So do we think too much about trying to help other people see clearly about trying to change other people's views and not enough about seeing clearly ourselves? It's so nuanced. I think that it reminds me of something Tom Stafford told me, the great cognitive psychologist. He, he said, uh, germs were always a problem for human beings.

17:17And then when we built cities, they became this existential crisis because, well, put a lot of people together in a big group, germs become a major problem. You have plagues, outbreaks, and so on. So we developed sanitation at the level of the community. And then we developed best practices for individuals, which would be washing your hands and stuff, boiling your water. He said for misinformation and the inability to develop, where's the good sourcing the information? All these problems with information have always been the problem for human beings. But then you get the internet, which is the informational equivalent of gigantic cities.

17:50And now it's an existential crisis. And so we'll have to develop the generational equivalent of both sanitation at the context level, at the platform level. And we have to develop best practices as individuals. We have to develop the generational equivalent of washing your hands when it comes to misinformation. This is what Tom Stafford told me. So the answer to your question is it's both things have to happen simultaneously because we all do need to become better critical thinkers. That's true. We all do need to become more amenable to changing our own minds, more amenable to being wrong,

18:26more likely to consider things a hypothesis and not a conclusion and all the things that go into that. But the context in which we discuss these issues are going to also have to change because if we're good critical thinkers, we're going to come across things that other people aren't. We're going to have experiences they're not going to have. We're going to have expertise they don't have. We're just going to be in worlds that they don't live in. If we're all great critical thinkers, we're going to discover things that, oh, this might not be true.

19:01We're going to see that certain attitudes might be harmful. We're going to see that maybe certain value structures need to be rearranged. Each person who's doing their due diligence is going to become aware of things that might help everybody else to understand better. And if you don't have a way to actually do that, if you don't have a way to do that, that doesn't create massive resistance and pushback, then it will remain one sided. The current thinking is that natural selection did a great job of creating psychological mechanisms within us that are set

19:36up to have that kind of discussion. You ever go to a movie with someone and you love it and you can't wait to tell them about it. And then when you get out of the movie, they say, boy, I hated that. Yeah. But you don't say, I can never talk to you again. I reject you forever. I don't trust you. Like, no, you, you have, you talk about it and you have a great conversation. I mean, conversations about movies, whether they suck or not are the best kinds of conversations because

20:09they're so interesting, but the stakes are low. It's a friendly chat. So why is it so hard to do? Well, there's real, there are real reasons why this is hard to do. One reason is that we're not very good at it. And another reason is that there is a massive amount of identity defense going on. There's a massive amount of reputation management. And in a case like talking about a movie, that's probably not going to be that way, but let's pretend you're two movie critics to go see a movie that work for two

20:44different organizations. And let's say you're the director of the movie and somebody has just watched it with you as just some random fan. And then they come out and you're like, what do you think? And they're like, I think it's the worst movie I've ever seen. Different conversation, most likely, right? Yeah. There's a reason for all those things. And oddly enough, it can seem like everything is just as neutral as everything else, but clearly not. Clearly, there are other factors that motivate us when we get into these dynamics.

21:17So the celebrated 9-11 conspiracy theorist, Charlie Veach, had indeed changed his mind and no longer thought that the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job. The evidence of witnesses, experts, and most importantly, widows, had convinced him. It had been a personal journey of discovery. But for the 9-11 truther community, it was a betrayal and one that demanded punishment. Cautionary Tales will be back in a moment. Give you stuff you can't get otherware. Otherware? Elsewhere. But otherware is a cool word.

21:47Search for my name, David McGraney, or click the link in the show notes, which is otherware. I like it. Your favorite Starbucks energy refreshers now blended for the ultimate summer cool down. Fruity, smooth, ice cold, and the extra caffeine you need with B vitamins. Sip the flavors you love. Pink drink, mango dragon fruit, or the new mango strawberry. Blended energy refreshers. A whole new way to energize. Only at Starbucks. I chose Walden University because I could explore my career options before I even enrolled.

22:19Then, my Walden classes helped me learn the skills that I needed to succeed. And my personalized career coach was with me through the whole job search. So I could become who I always wanted to be. Your career is our job. Walden University. Set a course for change. Visit waldenu.edu slash undergrad to learn more. Certified to operate by Shev. The School of Thought. I love this place. I've been a fan of the School of Thought for years. It's a nonprofit organization. They provide free creative commons, critical thinking resources to more than 30 million people worldwide.

22:54And their mission is to help popularize critical thinking, reason, media literacy, scientific literacy, and a desire to understand things deeply via intellectual humility. So you can see why I would totally be into something like this. The founders of the School of Thought have just launched something new called Kitted Thinking Tools. K-I-T-T-E-D Thinking Tools. And the way this works is you go to the website, you pick out the kit that you want, and there's tons of them, and the School of Thought will send you a kit of very nice,

23:26beautifully designed, well curated, high quality, each one about double the size of a playing card, matte cello 400 GSM stock prompt cards, and a nice magnetically latching box that you can use to facilitate workshops. Level up brainstorming and creative thinking sessions, optimize user and customer experience and design, elevate strategic planning and decision making, mitigate risks and liabilities, and much, much more. And each kit can, if you want to use it this way, interact with this crazy cool app. Each card has a corresponding digital version with examples and templates and videos and

24:00step-by-step instructions and more. You even get PowerPoint and keynote templates. There's so many ways you could use this. Here's some ideas. If you're a venture capital investor, you could get the Investor's Critical Thinking Kit and use it to stress, test, and evaluate different startups for Series A funding. If you're a user experience designer, you can get the User Design Kit to put together a workshop with internal stockholders for a software product. Or if you're an HR professional, you could mix and match these kits to create a complete professional development learning

24:34program tailored specifically for your team over the course of the next two years. So, if you're the kind of person who is fascinated with critical thinking and motivated reasoning and intellectual humility and biases, fallacies, and heuristics, you know, the sort of person who listens to podcasts like You Are Not So Smart, you're probably the kind of person who would love these decks. If you're curious, you can get a special 50% off offer. That's right. Half off offer right here. You can get half off of one of these kits by heading to

25:08kitted.shop, K-I-T-T-E-D.shop, and using the code SMART50 at checkout. That's SMART50 at checkout. 5% of the profits will go back to the school of thought. So, you're supporting a good cause that distributes free critical thinking tools all over the world, on top of receiving a set of thinking superpowers in a box. Check all of this out at kitted.shop, or just click the link in the show notes. And now we return to our program. Influential YouTuber Charlie Veach had changed his mind about 9-11.

25:38The Twin Towers hadn't been toppled by demolition charges planted by the government after all. Keen to share his new views, Charlie uploaded a video for his fellow conspiracy theorists. If you're presented with new evidence, he told them, take it on. But as my guest, David McCraney, explains, the reaction of the 9-11 truthers was far from measured. As I say in the book, it was swift and it was brutal. At first, there were a lot of these just comments and quickly put together videos wondering what happened, who got

26:08to him. That was the initial response. Like there was this sense that maybe somebody put a gun to his head or that somebody was threatening him. And then that started to transition into... But that he couldn't possibly have just looked at the evidence and changed his mind. Like that is inconceivable. Couldn't have possibly done it. There were comments that were like, that's like exchanging the belief in gravity for something else. There were comments that were like, someone must be coercing him. Someone must be threatening him. Then it went to, oh wait, maybe he was a double agent all this time.

26:40And then you would think, okay, maybe some of this seems like what I would expect. But it goes further and further. They start trying to reach out to his family. They go so far as they find his sister's Facebook page. She had just not made it private. They found pictures of his niece and nephew. They took those pictures of his niece and nephew. They photoshopped their faces onto child pornography. And then they sent that to his mother. And his mother, not being very internet savvy, was devastated. And he had to explain what was going on, which was difficult to do.

27:12They found out who his partner was. They started just sending her all these death threats and messages saying that their children were going to be the demon spawn. She started becoming scared. It was this incredible, awful campaign to destroy his life just for saying out loud in a YouTube video, I've changed my mind. Is this the tribal reasoning that you talk about in the course of the book? Or is this just a particularly extreme version of it? And actually the tribal reasoning is something much broader and much more common. It's hard to say if this is just an extreme version of it because I've seen people react this way

27:47to just about anything. If not in this very coordinated, sort of awful way, at least in the other side of the spectrum where people go to great lengths to demonstrate that they're good members of their groups and will put everything in their lives aside for whatever they're doing. We saw it very clearly with COVID where people would refuse to wear masks, refuse to get vaccinated on their deathbed, say that I'm totally okay with the fact that I'm dying from this. Even though it's pretty clear that they're being motivated by a political ideology that they're trying to signal to their

28:18most trusted peers they're a good member of their group by not getting vaccinated. I think it's extreme in all sorts of different ways. This particular thing seems bonkers and heinous and so weird. But the reason it has that patina to it is that this was just a very coordinated group of people already. They already had this network where they could very quickly coordinate and make new actions. And I think that there are a lot of other situations where people had that ability to coordinate. It would look just as extreme when someone did something that felt like it was absolutely worth their excommunication.

28:50You have to see Charlie as more someone who is an elite within the group. It would be like the head of a political party walking out on stage and saying that my political party is the worst political party. I have been convinced of it and I will never, ever support anything they ever do ever again. And I don't think you should ever vote for people in this particular political party. Like imagine the head of a political party saying that it seems strange in a belief structure like a conspiracy theory. Only if you look at it as a belief structure, it's a community first.

29:23And I argue in the book that that's true for a lot of the things that we think of as just something that we like, we love, we believe in. And we also have met some other people who feel the same way. At a certain point that crosses a line into being a social identity, a group identity. The great sociologist Brooke Harrington told me that the equals MC square of social science is that the fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death. And so if the ship is going down, you'll put your reputation on the lifeboat and you'll go down with

29:56the ship. It seems like that might be some sort of motivating illusory thing. But in the case of Charlie, he demonstrates when he did change his mind, that fear that we think, oh, something bad might happen to us. It happened to him. They almost ruined his entire life. He had to, he left his job. He had to change his name. He had to move. Now, listening to this, I think people will be plunging into the despair and fatalism that you describe yourself as holding before you started writing the book. Of course, no one listens to the facts.

30:27No one ever changes their mind about anything. But you do have stories, really, really striking and persuasive stories of people changing their minds and of conversational methods that help to make that possible. Could you tell us a bit about deep canvassing? There's a little vignette about the Mustang man. And I found it very moving. So just tell me about him and the context in which he was talking to a campaigner. Sure. So around the time that we were discussing same-sex marriage in the United States, I had heard about this group of people in California who were changing people's minds by going door to door and just

31:00talking to them. I was very curious about it. I wanted to see what was going on. And so I read some of the reports about them. And then I emailed, can I come out there? Can I just do this with you? And they said, yeah, of course. So I flew out to Los Angeles and I went to the LGBT Center of Los Angeles. They have several buildings in L.A. And I went to the one where Dave Fleischer works. And Dave Fleischer had developed this thing called deep canvassing after they lost on Prop 8. There was this legal thing that went through it in California where they said, no, same-sex marriage will not be

31:35legal here. And they were stunned that they had been defeated. And so he just wanted to understand how that happened. And he had this radical idea of why don't we just go door to door and ask people? And many of the conversations, people would change their minds and they were recording the conversations. And they did this A-B testing thing, this sort of playback to see what happened there. And over the course of more than 17,000 conversations, almost all of them recorded on video, A-B testing it, throwing away what doesn't work, keeping what does work. And they developed this method for you knock on a person's door,

32:08you talk to them in a particular way, you ask questions in a particular order, you non-judgmentally listen to what they have to say about the issue. And then you help them introspect in a way they've never introspected before by giving them a number scale. And all of the persuasion techniques I talk about in the book have this number scale where you just say, how strongly do you feel about X? Or how much do you believe this is true? You know, how much confidence do you have in X and so on? And then when a person gives you the number from, say, zero to 10 or one to 100,

32:41you then say, why does that number feel right to you? And the conversation leaves immediately the binary debate space and becomes this unspooling of what are my reasons for thinking this way? What motivated all this? And you allow the person to do that on exploration. You're just there to kind of help and move it forward. And over time, this has became so successful as a technique that they were actually getting a lot of people to change their minds to the point that the scientists started studying them. And today it's being used in phone banks for all sorts of different topics.

33:12They had this huge archive. And one of the times I visited, I said, can I just go to the archives? They said, sure. And it really felt like something out of like a FBI thriller or something. They have this room all to itself that has several ways to read and watch and view all their stuff. And they have this amazing archive, very well organized, going all the way back to the beginning. And I watched 80 of these. I spent days in there. It was incredible. And there was one in particular that just stuck out, which was the Mustang man.

33:43They call him the Mustang man. And one of the canvassers approaches this man. He is in the garage with him. And they ask him how he voted on same-sex marriage. He voted against it. And he's in his 70s. He's wearing shorts. He's got a dress shirt. He's smoking a cigarette. He's got the Zippo lighter that he's toying with. And he tells them, you know, I'm not against gay stuff necessarily. I just wish they wouldn't cause such a ruckus. That's the way he put it. He said the country has enough problems as it is. I don't know why they have to keep causing all these problems.

34:16And so the canvasser doesn't respond like, how dare you? Doesn't say you should be ashamed for saying such a thing. They just start asking questions. Oh, that's, huh. I'm wondering why you feel that way. And where are you at on the number scale? And it's just opening up space for this person to explore how they feel about it. And in one of the questions he asks if he had ever been married before. And the Mustang man says, yeah, for 43 years. And she passed away. She passed away about 11 years ago. And I'm never going to get over it.

34:46Because I was supposed to die first. And then he says, let me show you something. And he takes him out and he uncovers, had this tarp over it, his wife's vintage Mustang. And he still maintains it. It's like his central hobby. He works on it all the time. Keeps it in perfect, pristine condition. And he's smoking a cigarette. He says, you know, she never smoked a day. She didn't even drink. She wouldn't let me smoke in the car. And he explains that one day she found a black spot on her gums. It was cancer. Spread to her throat. She couldn't speak.

35:17They had to talk to each other across a notepad. And she died. And just out of nowhere, he wasn't prompted. He said, don't pursue money or other riches. Just find happiness with somebody. Because material things are loaned. Happiness is not loaned. It's yours. I'm getting tearing up thinking about this again. And then the canvasser responded by just listening. By just holding the space and says, you know, it seems like 11 years is a long time to be alone. And he says, it gives you a lot of time to think. And he said this statement where he stopped and let there be silence.

35:48Where he said that sometimes he hears songs that they loved. And he cries. And sometimes he remembers jokes that he laughed about. And he laughs. And he said, he's never gotten over her. And that's okay by him. I don't want to get over her. And so without any prompting, he then says, while looking in the distance, I would want these gay people to be happy too. And he convinces himself that he was wrong. And he says, you know what? I'd vote for it this time. And it was incredible to watch this conversation unfold. Because he clearly was against it.

36:18And until he had this conversation with a deep canvasser, he didn't know that he could feel otherwise. It required someone opening a space and going through what they would consider in psychology, guided metacognition. Something that takes place in a lot of therapeutic models. Where you give a person an opportunity to discover where their current attitude comes from. And an opportunity to discover that perhaps they could see it otherwise. Which was already available to them. And that's why I say in the book that persuasion, the kind that I advocate, and the kind that really works, is more about giving a person an opportunity to understand that they can

36:50change their mind. That it's possible than anything else. Because all mind change takes place on the other side. People change their own minds. And you're encouraging them to engage in some sort of metacognitive process that will get them there. It's incredible to see it when it unfolds and works in that way. You've got to open that space up for people to change their own minds. But I wanted to come back to Charlie Veach because he, apparently, he had the same space, he had the same context as all of these other truthers. And none of them considered changing their minds for a second.

37:21And he wasn't subjected to any clever, deep canvassing or street epistemology. There was something in him that was different. So what was different about Charlie? What was different about his life when he went into that process with the BBC that let him coming out on a different path from the others? And I can say also, to preface this, every person that I met who had left either a conspiratorial community or a cult or a pseudo-cult or something along those lines, there was something else at play and it was this. In Charlie's case, all those things I talked about when we first

37:52started talking about him, all those things that led him into the conspiracy, that led him to even search for something, to be amenable to it, to be open to it, they were being satisfied in the truther community in a way that he enjoyed. Plus, he had some fame there that felt really good as a person who had been considered lesser than. He also was interested in all sorts of anarchy-themed communities and he had found another one called Truth Juice. They're a group that was more open your third eye, let's play around with psychedelics, let's discuss the simulation theory of the universe, stuff like that. And in that community, he was finding that all those same

38:27things that motivated him to go into the truther community were being more nurtured there. And he was slowly moving up there too. He's very charismatic, he's a great public speaker. So he was doing a great job of doing these kind of things that made him move up in the truther world, inside the truth juice world. None of the other truthers had anything like that. They didn't have a foot in two social worlds the way he did. In other words, they didn't have a social safety net. But even though the evidence was persuasive to them, the costs of accepting it were something they could not absorb.

38:58Whereas he could. They had to think of the same things. I'm going to be shamed, I'm going to be ostracized. And none of this is articulated. No, this is salient. This is the things that are motivating their behavior without their knowledge for the most part. But he feels safe to change his mind. He feels safe. So he could change his mind, so he did. Yeah. This thing that everybody said, the other truthers said, like who got to him? The answer is, well, this slightly wacky pyramids and crystals, energy circles, truth juice movement got to him, not in the way that they put a gun to his head or paid him off, but just that they were offering

39:34him an alternative, slightly wacky, but much more benevolent community that he knew he could flourish in. And it's not totally unlike what happens in deep canvassing, because in deep canvassing, one sort of representative of another community comes along and says, I will listen to you in a non-judgmental, empathetic way, and I will hear you out, and I won't push back against it, and I won't shame you for what you're saying. In many cases, it's the first time that person's ever experienced that, but someone who they thought would immediately jump into a debate and argue with them and get angry and possibly go to Fisticuffs.

40:05And with the people I met who left Westboro Baptist Church, particularly Megan Phelps Roper, very similar to what happened with Charlie. We should say Westboro is this church that's famous for just being incredibly inflammatory, showing up at the funerals of veterans who've died in Afghanistan and saying, thank God for dead soldiers, and just deliberately getting in people's faces. And it's kind of this strange cult-like organization. And you talked to several people who had left about that gym. Yeah, they're one of the most prominent hate groups in the United States. They're very anti-Semitic. And when I say very, they're about the most anti-Semitic that a group could be.

40:37Megan Phelps, she was a younger member of the group who was active on social media. They loved this about the fact that she was good at getting on social media, and she pretty much spent all day arguing with people. And somebody who was prominent in the Jewish community, they reached out to her over Twitter, and they extended a hand. They said, I'd like to spend time with you. I want to talk to you about this and hear you out. I want to understand your position. I want to hear more about what you think, feel, and believe. I'm curious in you. And in a compassionate, transparent, non-judgmental way, they opened up a space just to talk.

41:12And then as they started building a bit of rapport with each other, he started making fun of her, making little jokes, the kind of stuff that you would do with your friend when you leave a movie theater. He started just trolling her, and they developed a friendly rapport, even though they both knew they were on two different sides ideologically. And over time, it had an effect to the point that she was at some sort of a public event where people kind of circled her because a lot of people hate Westboro's church. And he was there in person, and he defended her.

41:42And when some things happened in the Westboro that she didn't like, which is similar to what happened with Charlie, that he had that experience where he's like, oh, that was gross. I don't like this. And she started having the foot in both worlds. And when it came time to leave, that was the off-ramp that got her out of that world. What I find compelling about all these stories is that I always thought people changed their beliefs, then they left the groups. But most often what happens is they leave the groups, and then they change their beliefs. And there's something else that is involved for making them feel like, I don't think this community is the right

42:17community for me. And it should offer you some cognitive empathy for the people on the other side of issues, where if you can recognize they may be trapped by those same tribal tendencies, they may actually be imprisoned by this thing, then you can approach them with this sort of nonjudgmental, compassionate listening frame in a way that addresses that part of the motivation that is keeping them away from accepting the evidence that you think should just speak for itself. There's more than one story towards the end of your book in which it seems that you are

42:50setting up to use your clever psychological hacks and conversational strategies to change somebody's mind. And in both cases, actually, you don't. And that's okay. Do you think sometimes we're just too desperate to change other people? I do. In the introduction, I try to make it very clear that you really need to ask yourself why you want to do this. Because I had had several experiences after getting what I felt was like, wow, I have this incredible superpower now. I can just change minds. I spent time with a flat earther, the great Mark Sarge.

43:22And we were having a good time in Sweden. We both got one of those invites that just comes out of nowhere. Come to Sweden, come on stage and talk about this because they had to heard me talk about it. Flat earthers on the podcast and he's a prominent flat earther. But we had such a good time hanging out and he was such a fun person. It was such a, it was interesting. I took the technique up to the point where he said he was totally open and changing his mind, maybe. And then I could tell that if I pushed more than that, that

43:58it would ruin everything, that we'd never be able to talk for the rest of the time. And it felt, it felt, what's the good in that? I would rather let us have a good time in Sweden and then go get some food. It's very easy to assume that the facts are on your side. It's very easy to assume that you're the hero in the story. And I was so excited about deep canvassing when I left the first time that I went there, that I sat down with my friend, Misha Gloverman, who is a conflict resolution, actual professional negotiator.

44:33I told them they're trying, one of the great statements they make is, I'm just trying to solve a mystery together with you. And I was telling him, you know, the mystery is like, why do we disagree? And he's like, the mystery for the deep canvassers is, why are you wrong and I'm right? I was like, no, no, that's not where they're coming from. And he's like, David, they're biased. I mean, I agree with them. You agree with them. We share their values. And we think that what they're doing is good because we feel

45:06that, that we want the LGBTQ people to have more freedoms in this world. We want the laws to change. We want that. But don't kid yourself that it isn't persuasion. But at that point in the journey, I had thought to myself, no, they were just putting people on the correct path. But I had to admit, yeah, it is persuasion. And they were biased. So be honest with yourself at least that you are biased and be sure that you're biased in the direction of what you're trying to do is reduce harm in this world and be aware of

45:40the fact that it's possible you could be misleading yourself into thinking you're reducing harm when you're not. I think that the LGBT Center of Los Angeles is absolutely reducing harm in this world. But I can imagine other people who would try to employ such techniques, who would be convinced of such a thing. And I would not agree with them. David McCraney is the host of the You Are Not So Smart podcast. You should all be subscribing. And he is the author of the wonderful new book, How Minds Change.

46:11David, thank you so much for joining Cautionary Tales. Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. That is it for this episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast. For links to everything we talked about, head to youarenotsosmart.com or check the show notes right there in your podcast player. My name is David McCraney. I have been your host. You can find my book, How Minds Change, wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks.

46:42Details are at davidmccraney.com and I'll have all of that in the show notes. On my homepage, davidmccraney.com, you can find a roundtable video with a group of persuasion experts featured in the book, talking all about it. You can read a sample chapter, download a discussion guide, sign up for the newsletter, read reviews, all sorts of things. For all the past episodes of this podcast, youarenotsosmart.com. You can follow me on threads and Instagram and Blue Sky and everything else that's like that at davidmccraney, at symbol davidmccraney. Follow the show at notsmartblog. We're also on Facebook slash youarenotsosmart.

47:15And if you'd like to support this one person operation, no editors, no staff, just me, go to patreon.com slash youarenotsosmart. Pitching in at any amount gets you the show ad-free, but the higher amounts, that'll get you posters and t-shirts and sign books and other stuff. The opening music, that is Clash by Caravan Palace. And if you really, really, really want to support this show, the best way to do that, just tell people about it. Either rate and comment on it, on all these platforms, or just tell somebody directly, hey, you should check out this show.

Point them to an episode that really meant something, that really connected with you. And check back in, in about two weeks, for a fresh, new episode. At Walden University, we get the W. That's why we welcome and overcome challenges. It's why our highlight reels are filled with lasting impacts on our communities, on our families, and on ourselves. We turn our passions into purpose, and we put in the work to earn it. Because we're here to create a legacy that elevates us and everyone around us. Get the W. Walden University, set a course for change. Visit waldenu.edu to learn more. Certified to operate by Shev.

Thank you. you thought you 've had that down- you thought you and next time.