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When shows like Pod Save America run pseudoscience ads, they undermine their credibility

Michael Marshall
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When shows like Pod Save America run pseudoscience ads, they undermine their credibility

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Whenever I’m working, or doing household chores, or popping to the shop or out for a run, it’s rare to see me without earphones in, listening to people talking about things.

It’s a medium I love, and one I’ve quite a lot of experience in: idly totting up shows the other day, I realised I’ve recorded nearly 500 shows, over a span of 12 years. In that time, podcasting has changed a lot. In 2009, it was something niche enough that you had to explain to people what a podcast was; now having a podcast has passed into being a cliché, especially for white guys like me.

That explosion in popularity over the last decade has seen something of a gold rush, as people who would otherwise have sought an audience through more mainstream publications set up their own show – hello Alec Baldwin, Megan Markle and Prince Harry – while mainstream publishers themselves arrived into podcast-land and declared it theirs faster than a 19th century British general stepping off a boat in India. Where once the iTunes podcasting charts were filled with independent shows by makers you’ve never heard of, recording in bedrooms on cheap headsets, the charts now are filled with podcasts from the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times and NPR.

With any gold rush, what you really need is some gold. For a long time, that gold when it came to podcasts was simply ears – the number of people you could reach, and how many iTunes stars you could persuade them to give you as a rating. When you accumulated enough stars… well, nothing happened. Monetisation was a long way off – at best, you could sell them a T Shirt or a mug. But then, in 2013, Patreon came along and allowed listeners to make small micropayments to finance the shows they love (and, indeed, the publications they love – check out patreon.com/theskeptic if you’re enjoying our work!).

Patreon isn’t the only source of income for podcasts – as avid listeners will be aware, running ads on podcasts has become commonplace. These come in several different formats: the pre- and post- ad, where a clip of audio is inserted at the beginning or end of the podcast; the mid-show ad, where your podcast stops for a moment and plays an audio clip; and the copy-read ad, where your favourite podcast hosts stop talking about the thing you like them talking about, and start talking about products and services instead.

A necessary evil

A vintage style newspaper with adverts for things like rose seeds and breakfast cocoa.

To be clear, this isn’t an anti-advertising article: I’m someone who spends a lot of time reading about and talking about how the traditional media works, and how it is (just about) financed, so I understand that ads are often a necessary evil, and equally keeping the lights on is a very reasonable thing for podcasts to do. Some people make their living doing podcasts, and advertising I’m sure is a decent chunk of that. I get it. I personally find ads in podcasts annoying, but I also find ads annoying when I watch TV, and when I read newspapers, but in all cases I’m willing to accept it as a necessary trade off to get access to the content I’m interested in.

Where things get more ethically dubious, as I’ve covered elsewhere, is when the article you spent time reading was actually provided by a commercial company rather than written and edited by journalists – that’s native advertising. Native advertising undermines the trust you place in your newspaper, because you can no longer be sure whether something was published because it is a genuine story, or because a company paid the paper to pretend it is a real story.

In my opinion, copy-read ads are the native advertising of the podcast world, and they get way too little scrutiny.

I was recently listening to an episode of Pod Save America, from Crooked Media. It’s a political show in which several former staffers in the Obama administration talk through the latest political news from the US. Under Trump, there was always a lot to talk about, and I’ve been a regular listener for a few years. I’ve therefore lost count of the number of times their political analysis would pause for a moment for them to talk about the underwear brand they’re wearing, or where they got their mattress from. It’s incredibly jarring, because these people who were just talking authoritatively and informedly about how the American political system works and where it is breaking down are now slipping straight into infomercial mode, reading ad copy about how wonderful a company paid them to say it is.

It’s possible they really believe what they’re saying. It’s entirely possible that they really do eat Hello Fresh every night, and sleep soundly on a Casper mattress, and maybe they really do hate going to the post office and so find Stamps.com a godsend with its free digital scale. I’ve honestly no idea what their opinions on those services are, because it is a fact they’re paid to say they’re great. That transition from trusted expert to door-to-door salesperson is jarring, and it’s bad enough when they’re promoting things that are uncontroversial, like mattresses… but it doesn’t stop there.

Magic spoons and bee supplements

“Magic Spoon cereal is high-protein, low-sugar, keto-friendly, gluten-free and GMO-free” Pod Save America told me recently, before talking at length about how great this cereal is and how it comes in so many flavours. In doing so, they joined the ranks of influencers who rave about Magic Spoon for money, including testimonials on the Magic Spoon website from Kelly Leveque, the holistic nutritionist and wellness expert; John Durant, author of the Paleo Manifesto; and Katie Wells, founder of WellnessMama.com. As they promote the cereal, there’s no question from Pod Save America’s hosts about whether it’s actually a good thing that the cereal is GMO-free, or whether it’s so important for people to eat gluten-free. In the place of such scrutiny, we hear personal experiences about the product – because that’s what the advertisers have paid to for the hosts to share. I imagine a personal experience like “anti-GMO is an anti-science position, and you don’t need to be gluten-free unless you have coeliac disease” is not what the advertiser is looking for, and sharing it would mean the end of that advertising partnership.

The show regularly reads ads for the Noom dietary program, which claims to use psychology-based evaluation to determine the right diet for you. It’s a weight-tracking app that costs $25 per month. The hosts say they love it. They also tell us they love their Four Sigmatic mushroom coffee, the organic drink that supports your immune system.

And boy do they love to tell you about Athletic Greens, your “Daily Dose of Nutritional Insurance”, which are “paleo and keto friendly” supplements designed to “support immunity, energy, digestion and recovery”. They are apparently “filled with superfood complex including adaptogens and antioxidants”, plus “more than 75 vitamins and minerals”. Are these products actually good for you and worth buying? Your favourite podcast hosts are willing to say yes to those questions, for money, so that should put your mind at rest enough to spend £90 on a 30 day supply… or you could use the discount code for 10% off your first purchase that’s the discount code for 10% of your first purchase.

On a recent show, I heard an ad for Beekeepers Naturals, during which the hosts told us, “Beekeepers Naturals is on a mission to reinvent your medicine cabinet with clean remedies that actually work. It naturally supports immune health and contains powerful antioxidants making it your daily dose of defence when it comes to naturally supporting your immune system”. It got worse, the hosts went on to explain that Beekeepers Naturals also sell “B LXR Brain Fuel”, which is “a productivity shot that supports clear thinking, with science-backed adaptogens”.

A green smoothie and lots of green fruit and vegetables

Clean remedies? Naturally supporting your immune system? Brain Fuel? This is the language of Goop and Infowars, and it’s coming to you directly from the voices you trust and have affinity for.

Beekeepers are a supplement company who sell products like the $75 “Beegan Pharmacy Kit” (note, that’s Beegan, not ‘vegan’ – their products are not vegan, merely associating with the goodwill their target market has towards veganism), which includes some superfood honey, a throat spray, and their brain force plus – sorry B LXR Brain Fuel. They market that with the claim “Fight jetlag, defend your immune system, and get energised”.

They sell an Immune Rescue Kit for $80, and a Family Immune Support Essentials pack for $83 which includes four throat sprays (which the founder of Beekeepers Naturals, Carly Stein, told Business Insider can be used to “prevent any sort of illness or recover when you have a sore throat, cold, or the flu”) and a bottle of cough syrup. The sprays contain bee propolis – a kind of waxy resin created by bees. There’s no good evidence it has the health benefits claimed by the company, as best as I can see – certainly not for being able to “fight jetlag”, or “support clear thinking”, whatever that means.

This is wellness nonsense – mountains of it, entire Goops of it – promoted to you by the very people you listen to regularly and trust.

Undermining credibility

This is an issue, I believe, that all podcasts who run copy-read ads need to think long and hard about, and it isn’t just reserved for the claims which are obviously pseudoscientific. Some of the most popular skeptical podcasts out there today aim to train their listeners to think critically, and by extension those hosts become people their listeners trust and respect, people whose word listeners are inclined to believe. Those shows will transition directly from sharing their expert opinion on an issue of science or skepticism, to, in the very next breath, telling their audience how amazing their investment-tracking app is or how life-changing their new mattress has been. The ethical concerns here should be pretty clear, and the only thing clouding them is that seductive income stream.

Full disclosure here, because I don’t want to be a hypocrite: I regularly appear on God Awful Movies, a podcast that runs copy-read ads, and I take part in those ad reads. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about, as it’s a show I dearly love doing, and I came to the conclusion that I feel comfortable with their ads, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the show vets their ads for pseudoscience, and doesn’t take ads that are questionable – they even run potential advertisers past Dr Alice Howarth, Deputy Editor of The Skeptic, for her opinion on the science. When in doubt, they refuse the ad.

Secondly, and perhaps more pertinently, their copy-read ads are always, 100% of the time, presented in sketches and skits. Partly that’s because it’s more interesting to listen to a comedy bit than it is to sit through someone giving you an opinion they’ve been paid to pretend to have, but it also enforces the barrier between editorial and commercial. Ads are read by characters the people on the show play, and not the real people. It’s clear to all that the opinions expressed in the ads are part of a script, because we all recognise and inherently understand that sketches are scripted; that’s not necessarily the case for those ad reads on Pod Save America. When I’m on God Awful Movies, they go out of their way to make the line clear between the times I’m giving my opinion and the bits where I’m playing a character in a sketch they wrote.

A microphone laid on a sound desk

I’m not saying it’s a perfect solution, or that there even is a perfect solution here, but I do think it’s something podcasters need to give some serious thought to – especially if their aim is to educate their audience and to encourage critical thinking. It’s hard to do that while segueing into an untrue story about how wonderful your new toothbrush is. At the very least, all podcasters need to have a strict vetting process on who they advertise, and what they’re being paid to say they believe.

Right now, podcast advertising is an area that’s less than a decade old, and the advertising offers often end up being pitched to people who started a show in their bedrooms because they were passionate about something, and an audience found them. Even the most worldly of podcaster in that situation might not be fully equipped to understand when and how to push back against the demands of their advertisers.

But if podcasters who care about their integrity set clearer lines, they have the opportunity to shape the rules and norms of podcast advertising. Without those clear lines, the advertisers will take as much as they can, because that’s what advertising does – the value, for them, is in the hosts’ reputation, and voice, and the trust they’ve built with their listeners.

If those hosts don’t work hard to protect and preserve the trust of their audiences, nobody else will. When it’s gone, it’s gone… and even the advertisers won’t want them any more.

When it comes to our health, doing nothing is often better than doing something wrong

Natália Pasternak
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When it comes to our health, doing nothing is often better than doing something wrong

In his now-classic 2016 book on the use of science denial as a political weapon, ‘Lies, Incorporated’, American journalist Ari Rabin-Havt stresses the role of denialism as a cue for inaction: as long as there is uncertainty, and as long as “the science is not really settled”, there is “no reason” to act against, say, climate change, second-hand smoking or – bringing the issue closer to our present day – COVID-19. After all, what do we really know about those dastardly lockdowns anyway? Wouldn’t it be wiser to let people carry on as usual until we have more information, so we don’t cripple the economy for nothing?

The answer, of course, is no – as soon as it became clear that the virus is transmitted via saliva and mucus droplets, things like masks and social distancing become no-brainers. However, as Rabin-Havt aptly shows, the main goal of the denial-monger is not to be right: what they actually want is to stop us from acting, or, more to the point, to stop the government from taking action to regulate anything. Keeping the controversy alive preserves the status-quo. Nobody wants to be unduly harsh under uncertainty. Let’s just stop and wait.

About the role of scientific denialism and even outright lying about science in the United States during the last decade, Rabin-Havt wrote in his book that “our democracy has been hacked, manipulated by political practitioners who recognise that as long as there is no truth, there can be no progress”. This equation between denial and public policy paralysis seems to hold quite well in several fields (here in Brazil, for instance, denial of rampant deforestation in the Amazon keeps the destruction going unpunished), but the current pandemic has highlighted at least one field in which denial seems to equate with calls for action: health. More precisely, the use of unproven or useless treatments for a variety of health conditions.

In Brazil, the same Federal Government that says that the data on deforestation is iffy and therefore fighting illegal logging ought not to be a priority also peddles unproven treatments like hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin against COVID-19. Further, they do so with the support of doctors who argue that these treatments are not yet completely “disproven” by research, so using them is reasonable and desirable.

In this instance, then, the denial of scientific results – the dissemination of doubt about the present scientific consensus that these drugs are not recommended for COVID-19 – is used not to paralyze the creation of public policy, but to justify the implementation of a foolhardy one.

The Brazilian government’s love affair with hydroxychloroquine has been noted all over the world, but the association between denial of evidence and action in healthcare goes beyond the present crisis. The “what’s the harm” argument so often used by proponents of alternative therapies can be construed as a form of proactive denialism.

Doctors expect – and are expected – to treat people. That means caring for them, giving advice, and of course, prescribing treatments. With time, prescribing took on more and more prominence, and so some patients came to feel cheated if they left the doctor´s office without a prescription for a pill or treatment. This over medicalisation is not exclusive to mainstream medicine, of course: it is a main component of alternative medicine, in the form of sugar pills or healing energy. But the important take-home for the patient is that the doctor / healthcare provider / psychic healer is actually ‘doing’ something.

If the doctor just sends us home, and tells us to get some rest and drink plenty of fluids, we feel frustrated… and so does the doctor. They also want to ‘do’ something. They feel powerless if they don’t. Unfortunately, this can lead us to widespread use of all sorts of useless health interventions and pills. This became clear throughout the pandemic with the hydroxychloroquine hype – doctors felt better prescribing it, just in case. They didn’t want to be held responsible for omission in case the treatment proved to work.

Surprisingly, the notion that it could harm the patient didn’t seem to cross their minds. The same happens with alternative medicine. And even when skeptics try to explain that these practices do not work, there are plenty of people to point out that even if it’s just a placebo, what’s the harm? The worst that could happen is nothing.

Sadly, that´s not true. The worst that could happen is death, and it happens more often than most people think. Several studies show that use of alternative medicines increase risks of complication and death. Edzard Ernst, in his book ‘More Harm Than Good’, states some examples: alternative medicine has the potential to actually kill diabetic patients, advice given to asthma patients by chiropractors has the potential to do serious harm, and anthroposophic doctors often advise patients not to get vaccinated, and can cause serious public health crises, such as measles outbreaks. As we are seeing right now especially, anti-vaccine advice can have serious consequences.

An assortment of blister packets containing different shaped and coloured tablets.

Studies published in JAMA Oncology also show increased risk of death for cancer patients who use alternative medicine, usually because they abandon, totally or even partially, regular treatment.

Unproven and disproven medical treatments for COVID-19 such as hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, nitazoxanide have been widely prescribed in Brazil during the pandemic, because doctors want to prescribe something, and end up prescribing anything. And they probably truly believe that if it does not help, at least it will do no harm.

Just as in the general case of alternative medicine, it’s not true. These drugs have the potential to harm the patient directly, because of side effects, and indirectly, for creating an illusion of safety. The person is medicated, and feels safe to meet with family, forgets about masking and other preventive measures.

All in all, being proactive can be a good thing. But doing nothing is better than doing something stupid. It’s even an old trope in medical wisdom: first of all, do no harm. That’s the real “traditional knowledge” we need right now.

The carefully-woven conspiracy theories behind the attempted coup of January 6th

Thiago Vahia Malliagros
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The carefully-woven conspiracy theories behind the attempted coup of January 6th

To understand what happened at the Capitol in Washington on the 6th of January, I need to tell a story that starts even before the November 3rd election. As the election results came in, and it started to become clear that Biden would be the 46th President of the USA, the narrative of the conservative sphere had already been primed with a simple belief: that Donald Trump won the election and that any results that disagreed were proof that the election was stolen. What’s more, this fraud would be so evident and undeniable that the courts would immediately grant Trump his rightful win, and the Democrats would be shown to be the corrupt party Trump’s supporters knew for sure that they were.

The seeds of this conspiracy narrative were visible to all who knew where to look – they were present in the talking points of the Trump campaign, in repeatedly emphasising how untrustworthy the mail-in ballots were, and in rushing to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat with conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett, a mere month after Bader Ginsburg’s death.

That was the narrative in many conservative spaces, including from conservative twitter personalities such as Candace Ownes and Charlie Kirk, senators like Ted Cruz and Ron Paul, and news networks such as OAN and NewsMax: that the election was stolen, the proof is just about to come out, and the courts would confirm Trump’s win. This belief was characterised by crowds changing “Stop the Steal”, which soon became a popular hashtag.

Notably, not all conservative media was in lockstep with this narrative: Fox News, equal parts cheerleaders and bulldogs for the Trump regime, officially recognised Biden’s victory… but even then, many of their hosts such as Lous Dobb, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo pushed #Stopthesteal narratives to spread false accusations of voter fraud.

It’s important to remember that the Republican party essentially fracturated itself on this question: some were focused on pushing Trump’s narrative of election stealing, while others backed Biden’s legitime win. For the most part, the party decided to stay silent – a silence that can perhaps be attributed to the imminent Georgia Senatorial run-off elections, which would crucially decide which party would have a majority in the Senate. The Republicans wagered those vital races were much more likely winnable with Trump’s support.

From November 3rd to December 14th, the conservative sphere, driven and guided by Trump’s constant tweeting, buzzed with baseless stories of voter fraud, with alleged witnesses coming forward, and photos or videos claiming to show the “steal”. Project Veritas, a “journalist organization” with a history of deceptively edited videos of its undercover operations, shared claims from postman Richard Hopkins that some ballots had dates altered in order to be falsely counted in the election – claims Hopkins retracted when asked by federal investigators. Others claimed that in Georgia, observers were asked to leave the room while videos showed suitcases of votes being taken behind a desk and counted – in reality, observers had never been asked to leave, and the footage actually showed the normal tabulation process.

To the believers, it didn’t matter that each of these were investigated before being found to reveal no irregularity; nor did it matter that the dozens of legal challenges brought before the courts were dismissed for having no real proof. For Trump supporters, these failures only went to show just how much corruption was going on, and how deep the “steal” really went. There were even attempts by the Texas state to sue states over the election results – an astonishing effort by one state to overturn the Presidential election of different states.

This perhaps should not have been a surprise: conspiracy theories and their believers often attempt to deal with reality by changing it. In this way, real events are transformed and misrepresented to suit what the conspiracy theorists want, but sometimes events are too stubborn to be changed, and they pop the conspiracists’ bubble. In this case, the believers’ narrative depended on Trump’s victory being confirmed; when, on December 14th, Biden was confirmed by the electoral college as the President of the United States, that narrative was broken.

Biden’s confirmation left an entire group of people adrift; failed by the media they trust, the personalities they follow, and the politicians they adore. Despite the big build up, #Stopthesteal didn’t happen. Instead of shifting back to reality, and being faced with the need to process and understand why they lost, the coalition of conspiracy theorists found a new date to look forward to, guided once again by Trump: the electoral vote count, on January 6th. This obviously overlooked the fact that the count is just the confirmation of the results, a mere formality; the election was already over.

From December 14th to January 6th, the biggest names in the conservative sphere, including the then-President themself, were echoing and amplifying a single narrative: the 6th was the day when the steal would be over and Trump would be reelected. All people had to do was to appear in Washington DC to show that they were there, to support their President. Some promised that on January 6th the Republican senators would have time to show the evidence of fraud, prompting a recount which would give the victory to Trump.

During this period, the Democrats won the Georgia run-off elections, taking a slim Senate majority. At this point, the narrative of the 6th shifted a little, refocusing on forcing the election to be decided not by the election results, by a system of electors, where each state would get one vote as a result of the irregularities… which believers were confident would lead to Trump winning. This plan found little support in the majority of the Republican party, who were already preparing for the transition of power, but who mostly stayed silent to avoid angering Trump or the passionate conspiracy theorists in his base.

Donald Trump By Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52081539

When the day of reckoning arrived on January 6th, Trump addressed the huge crowd, alongside other guest speakers. Repeatedly, speakers reinforced that the decision to be taken by Congress that day was key for the future of the US (even though there was no decision to be taken – the count was a formality), if only the Vice President, Mike Pence, and the other senators play their part. The speakers at the event, including Trump, knew that wasn’t going to happen – they’d been told as much by Mike Pence.

For weeks, the people who came to gather in Washington had been repeatedly told that the election was stolen, that the wrong would be corrected, and that Trump would become president. They had been told that the 6th was their last chance to save America from Biden, who they had been told was an evil “globalist communist” that was determined to destroy their country. Then Trump told them he would be with them for their march on the Capitol, and that Mike Pence had refused to contest the election results.

So, what exactly was supposed to happen? An entire mass of people persuaded of the false belief that the election was stolen, and that it would lead to the end of their nation, along with – in their eyes – the best president they ever had. Agitated for weeks with stories and narratives reinforcing this belief, what were they supposed to do? Go back to their homes and allow the ‘evil’ to win? Let the steal be completed?

For many in the crowd, they did the most logical thing for the position they had been led into: they marched to the big symbol of DC, the Capitol, and stormed the building. While the events of the invasion have been amply covered elsewhere, it is worth looking at what these people did once they got into the Capitol. Some stormed the offices of political figures they didn’t like, to smear or even steal items of supposed important information. Some tried to locate specific politicians to arrest. These are actions doubtlessly driven by conservative media and conspiracy theorist media, which had repeatedly built the narrative that dozens of Democrats were criminals.

The rioters who stormed the Capitol had no stable plan or clear objective, and took the centre of democracy in America – just like they had been told to do, by the figures they trust and the media they followed. “We the people” had shown up in force to Congress… yet the stealing didn’t stop, and Trump didn’t get to be President. Once again, the bubble in which they lived came crashing against reality.

That was January 6th. Looking back, it was inevitable something would happen. The narratives driven by the misinformation which had been pushed for months all came to a head the only way it ever could have. But though the 6th has come and gone, the beliefs that led to that day are still out there. Biden, to them, is still an unlawful president who took power by a coup and stole the election from them. The conservative media has never really de-escalated this narrative; instead, they’ve re-written history to pretend they were never part of building it, and effect an outrage whenever they are accused of any responsibility.

The forces that made January 6th inevitable are still around, and all it will take is another point of focus for it to explode again.

Monkey Business: humans aren’t alone in recognising a good bargain

Deborah Hyde
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Monkey Business: humans aren’t alone in recognising a good bargain

Back when it wasn’t politically-incorrect to have a ‘village idiot’, there was a village idiot.

People would gather to watch their local twerp being offered either an old penny (which was quite large) or an old thrupenny (which was smaller). The halfwit would take the larger coin every time. What a fool!

A penny along side a thrupenny - the penny, though much larger, is worth three times less than the thrupenny.

One day, a passer-by asked: “Why don’t you take the thrupenny? It’s worth more!” To which the simpleton replied: “How often do you think they’d offer me free money if I did that?”

The meaning of the apocryphal story is clear – the ‘fool’ was cleverer than the delighted dullards he regularly entertained. He had intelligently calculated the value of his trick.

Calculating value is a beneficial ability and, according to all the –ologists, it’s probably something we do naturally. We have an idea what things are worth and we regularly exchange them. We reciprocate.

Like-for-like is easy – you give me one kilo of flour and I’ll give you one kilo back next week when you have none & I’ve made extra. But we can do it with other stuff too. Things can be more valuable because they’re more potent or concentrated, when they’re more difficult to collect, when there has been risk associated with their acquisition, when there has been a manufacturing effort invested in them …

The evolutionary benefit of social animals being able to calculate value is clear. We live in social networks where we support others in their hard times and they support us in ours. Freeloaders could vampirise the whole system if we didn’t have a mental note of who owes what and how much. So you’ll probably invest a nominal stake while opening a relationship with an untested human. But you won’t continue to give if your investment isn’t repaid. In the words of the Bard*: “We won’t get fooled again”.

People are also able to use ‘tokens’, objects that are symbols used to request specific rewards.

And so can apes and primates.

Studies that demonstrate this have been in the lab, so their validity could be challenged. But what if there were a population of primates who had learned the use of tokens and also had a concept of a scale of value, this time in the wild?

A fascinating study by Leca, Gunst, Gardiner and Wandia, published by the Royal Society comes close. A group of long-tailed macaques at Uluwatu Temple in Bali, Indonesia are free-ranging animals accustomed to humans. For a long time, it has been observed that they steal items and barter them back again for food.

This study goes beyond the already-known anecdotes to quantify the behaviours and the demographics of the individuals exhibiting them. This can “provide insights into the cognitive underpinnings of economic behaviour”.

I was very interested in the fact that the stolen tokens which had a higher value for humans eg. a mobile phone as opposed to a flip-flop, were traded for food that carried a higher value to the macaques (bear in mind that you don’t get your iPhone back until you accept their terms.)

A monkey holding an iphone with the caption "Hold on a sec. - I haven't finished looking at my emails ..."

The study importantly also revealed that success came with age. Older individuals were both better than younger ones at acquiring human belongings to, er, ‘borrow’ in the first place, and also at preferentially selecting those higher value items. So this is a learned skill.

The macaques understood the advantage of conducting the process near an experimenter or one of the Temple staff – somebody who knew the rules, in other words. They also returned items in good condition having, one supposes, learned the lesson that a dead iPhone is no better than a paperweight.

Back to people: we don’t just attempt to exchanges with people, but with god/s too. What other sense does a sacrifice make? Gods own everything, so you can’t give them anything other than your own deprivation; whether that deprivation is a tax to the temple, your own self-restraint from pleasure, or the forfeiture of an item that you would otherwise find useful.

This is your opening move in what you hope will be a transactional relationship. Maintaining faith necessarily involves some conceptual gymnastics when the reward from your God(s) of choice doesn’t appear.

At least when you trade with monkeys, they seem to know the rules.

* Pete Townsend, of course. Although other bards include David Bowie, Roger Waters and David Gilmour.

Toxoplasmosis: how worried should we be about the ‘mind-control parasite’ spread by cats?

Lydia Hemus
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Toxoplasmosis: how worried should we be about the ‘mind-control parasite’ spread by cats?

I never used to care for cats – until recently when my flatmates brought home a kitten, Finn. He was sweet and playful with piercing green eyes, he could knock over a prized mug and still look adorable in the process. I was instantly hooked. I would take tens of pictures of him in cute poses and adopted that jarring squeaky voice whenever he did something mildly cute. I had become a crazy cat lady!

Though this newfound love is annoying to those who don’t share my new affection for cats, it can be put down by most as relatively tame and disconcerting behaviour. However the reason behind this new affinity – of mine and many others – may be due to more than just a cat’s cute looks. A recent more sinister explanation of this behaviour has been brought into mainstream attention via a TED talk with the title, Is there a disease that makes us love cats? (De Roode, 2011).

While the title of the presentation sounds automatically sceptical, the talk itself speaks at great lengths of the impact of toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that lives in the human brain and is allegedly capable of manipulating our behaviours to make us love cats. Toxoplasmosis is a disease caused by the parasite toxoplasma gondii. T gondii is unusual in that most mammals and birds can be infected with the parasite, however it can only reproduce sexually in the intestines of cats.

For T gondii to complete its lifecycle, a sinister side of the bacterium presents itself. It is known to manipulate the behaviour of its host, normally rats and mice, by overriding their innate fear of cats to bring the poor rodents closer to their impending doom (Dubey, 2016).

Humans come into contact with the infection when changing the cat litter tray; it can be caught via the shedding in the cat’s faeces.

Once a person has been infected with T gondii, they remain infected for life, as the parasite often remains dormant, but ‘hidden’ from the immune response. While humans are not the intended host for T gondii they can allegedly be subject to the parasite’s mind-bending influences. Not only does toxoplasmosis apparently make us love cats, the TED talk also mentions studies that suggest infected humans have higher occurrences of slowed reactions, less concentration, obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (Torrey et al., 2015).

A ginger cat with fold eyes laying on its side looking quizzical

The thought is terrifying – but how does this relate to me and Finn? Are we both infected? How could such nasty debilitating mental health disorders be caused by the humble and once innocent-looking cat? Following from the TED talk, many others have surfaced and added fuel to the fire. While a minority were well referenced and subject to rigorous scientific testing (Webster, 2001), most were sensationalist fear-mongering articles with titles such as, ‘‘Cat lady’ parasite linked to brain damage, How your cat is making you crazy’ and a Daily Mail article referencing, “a mind controlling feline parasite”. Articles on the topic have collectively massed over a thousand shares and hundreds of comments. The search for toxoplasmosis spiked on Google after the TED talk’s release due to the paranoia invoked by simply owning and being near cats.

So what is to be done? While nothing stated in the TED article is technically wrong, it heavily suggests severe mental health concerns related to toxoplasmosis infection in humans. This encourages the reader to believe their cat could be responsible for more than just the accumulation of cat hairs everywhere, but also for a worrying range of mental health issues. The study cited in the Daily Mail article states that half of the people who had a cat as a child were then diagnosed with mental illnesses later in life – a slightly larger percentage than those who didn’t grow up with a cat.

The study cannot prove that the parasite can cause mental illness; it simply hypothesises that it might cause mental illness based on a loose, seemingly random link between having a cat in childhood, and later developing mental illness. The study here doesn’t even mention toxoplasmosis. The article wrongly presented a small scale and mostly irrelevant piece of research as robust scientific evidence for mind controlling parasites! Definitive conclusions on the effect of cat ownership surely await human trials, peer review and replication of research. To prove that a link between altogether random and unrelated variables can be found, fivethirtyeight.com collected large amounts of data on many seemingly meaningless variables, and proved that through p-hacking*, they were able to find statistically significant correlations for random statements such as “having an inny belly button” and “liking red cabbage”. This proves rather elegantly, that just because something may be statistically significant it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is true! It illustrates that just because you have a cat and act a little crazy sometimes, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the cat is causing it.

While we come to expect shoddy journalism from sources like the tabloid press, wouldn’t we hope that TED might be better? The TED talk illustrates part of the argument with an example of rats’ erratic behaviour following toxoplasmosis infection. While correct in asserting that laboratory evidence has shown infected rodents are more reckless around cats (Stibbs, 1985), this assertion is not proven in humans. This lone study’s applicability to humans is limited, and the talk is in error to imply so. The behavioural effects of toxoplasmosis in humans, if any, are subtle and hard to distinguish from the array of many other irrational human behaviours.

The results of the experiments listed in the TED talk as well as other sensationalist articles do not measure up to the claims and effect boasted. Nuance and tentative findings often get blown out of proportion by news outlets to get clicks and sell papers, all at the expense of our four-legged friends. This demonstrates how we can be easily deceived, especially when it is a scientist who is making the claim.

An infectious stage of T gondii viewed down a microscope
One of the life cycle stages of T gondii

Not only has behavioural manipulation by the parasite been debunked, it’s also very rare to catch toxoplasmosis from cats either – they have wrongly been named the sole culprit of spreading T gondii and toxoplasmosis infections. Although it must be noted that cats are important in the life cycle of T gondii infections, human infections are often more likely the result of ingestion of undercooked meat containing the parasite, or contaminated water. It is estimated that worldwide more than 500 million people are infected with T gondii (Bowie, 1997). Those that do carry the infection often carry no symptoms, the infection only has negative implications for the small percentage with weaker immune systems (Frenkel et al., 1972).

Stronger evidence exists for the effect of suggestibility; much like horoscopes, as many of the symptoms explained in the TED talk and other articles such as slowed reactions and lowered concentration apply to many, leading people to believe that they are infected when this is not actually the case. By using these generalised sweeping Barnum statements, these outlets were able to provide subjective validation in which the reader is able to find personal meaning in the statements of loved-up cat behaviours that, in reality, apply to many people, giving the articles false plausibility. This raises the issue with TED talks in general, as several talks and presentations have since been found to be incorrect in places and have needed to be updated.

Despite a scientific background, some speakers subscribe to sensationalism and hyperbole, and get away with it largely due to their credible scientific brand or credentials. Quality scientific research can be oversimplified to the degree that the audience gets misinformed. Sloppy journalism can cause fear-mongering, and encourage other media outlets to follow suit in producing articles that challenged the safety of the company of our feline friends.

Research conducted by Kahneman in 2002 suggests that we have two brain systems, one that functions via intuition that responds more quickly to emotional stimuli, compared to the second reasoning system. The first pathway is seemingly being exploited here: media outlets are successfully able to harness fear and emotionally charged wording to gain attention to bring readers to their content – though arguably the fault is somewhat with the lay public too, who choose to consume these stories. We need healthy scepticism to distinguish the good from the bad.

So where does the answer lie? Do we trust these articles wholeheartedly and stick to fawning over dogs and banish cats from our homes and affections? Thankfully, the future for cat lovers is not this hopeless. While it is true cats are capable of contributing to the spread of toxoplasmosis, the likelihood of this happening is blown vastly out of proportion. Uncooked meat and tainted water supply are the main culprits.

Even if a cat were to infect someone, the effects of the infection are slight and no research points strongly towards mind-controlling, cat-fawning behaviours. While we can’t yet rule it out completely, more clinical research is necessary before we start barricading the cat flap.

The responsibility lies with TED as well as other media outlets who should make more effort to be clearer about the validity of their sources, and steer away from emotional sensationalism and lazy journalism just to get clicks. After all, the impact of misleading and false statements is wide-reaching. 

Though it must be stated that some responsibility is with the lay audience themselves; we must strive for better journalistic integrity and fight the urge to give into clickbait. If it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably bullsh*t.

Lastly, cat owners surely share some of the blame. They ought to be more sympathetic to those that don’t admire cats, and maybe if their behaviour didn’t seem so crazy, people wouldn’t believe that a mind controlling parasite could plausibly be the cause of their loved-up cat behaviours!

References

  • Bowie, W. R., King, A. S., Werker, D. H., Isaac-Renton, J. L., Bell, A., Eng, S. B., & Marion, S. A. (1997). Outbreak of toxoplasmosis associated with municipal drinking water. The Lancet, 350(9072), 173-177.
  • Dubey, J. P. (2016). Toxoplasmosis of animals and humans. CRC press.
  • Frenkel, J. K., & Dubey, J. P. (1972). Toxoplasmosis and its prevention in cats and man. Journal of Infectious Diseases, 126(6), 664-673.
  • Gray R. (June 2015) “Is your CAT making your child stupid? Mind-controlling feline parasite is linked to poor memory and reading skills”. Retrieved from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3105707/Is-CAT-making-child-stupid-Mind-controlling-feline-parasite-linked-poor-memory-reading-skills.html#ixzz4Qy3qVImQ
  • Kahneman, D., & Frederick, S. (2002). Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment. Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment, 49.
  • De Roode J. (2011). Retrieved from http://ed.ted.com/lessons/is-there-a-disease-that-makes-us-love-cats-jaap-de-roode
  • Torrey, E. Fuller, Wendy Simmons, and Robert H. Yolken. “Is childhood cat ownership a risk factor for schizophrenia later in life?.” Schizophrenia research 165.1 (2015): 1-2.
  • Webster, J. P. (2001). Rats, cats, people and parasites: the impact of latent toxoplasmosis on behaviour. Microbes and infection, 3(12), 1037-1045.

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 26, Number 3

Fecomagnetism: how Spanish alternative therapists promoted our hoax faeces-based cure-all

Fernando Cervera
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Fecomagnetism: how Spanish alternative therapists promoted our hoax faeces-based cure-all

If I told you that you could get rich selling your shit, you probably wouldn’t believe me. Faeces is ugly, it smells, and obviously nobody would want to buy it. There might be exceptions to the rule: for example, if you are a famous movie actor, there might be a legion of fans lining up to buy anything that has touched your body, from a used handkerchief to your excrement. For the rest of us mere mortals, doing something similar seems impossible.

But buying human waste is exactly what I convinced people to do, a number of years ago.

In December 2009, my friend Mariano Collantes and I started a joke that ended with literally thousands of people wanting to buy our shit. It all started when a group of friends and I created a website aimed at popularising science. Among the many sections that we had, there was a forum where we could share opinions, doubts and experiences with other students. One day, an anonymous person left an article on the forum asking for more information about a novel therapy called medical biomagnetism, which supposedly could cure cancer and AIDS using magnetic fields. At that time I was studying biology at University of Valencia and I knew that what biomagnetism was promising was false. But it does not end there.

When we explained that medical biomagnetism was all a lie, a new user entered to the forum and began to defend biomagnetism. The newcomer accompanied his entire argument with many links to web pages of dubious origin. When we tried to verify the information, we realised that all of it was false. At this point, I got really quite pissed off: I’d seen plenty of scams and misleading claims sold to ill people, taking their money in exchange for their health, and in many cases their lives. So, in a moment of outrage, I posted a somewhat eschatological comparison on the forum: I said that promising to cure AIDS with magnets was as stupid as bottling human shit and selling it as a miracle cure. That was the end of that conversation.

Some days later, my friend Mariano confessed to me that he thought that it was very funny to compare biomagnetism with selling bottled shit. In fact, he came up with a very clever idea, why not use exactly that idea as the basis of a parody of alternative medicine? Mariano wanted us to invent an alternative therapy that would give supposedly scientific arguments to justify the idea that our shit could cure diseases. You might wonder why spend so much time on such a stupid idea – well, we were in our twenties, with a lot of free time and a strange sense of humor.

We created a website where we claimed that shit could cure diseases. But, importantly, it wasn’t just any old shit that would work: only our shit would do the trick! We called this novel therapy ‘phecomagnetism’. We tried to give some not-so-subtle clues that our therapy was bogus. For example, we claimed that two doctors, ‘Hugh Nielsen’ and ‘Leslie Laurie’, had discovered that shit mixed with magnets, diluted homeopathically, was miraculous. But ‘Hugh Nielsen’ and ‘Leslie Laurie’ were actually the rearranged names of two of the most famous doctors on television: Doctor Gregory House, played by Hugh Laurie, and Doctor Rumack from the Airplane!, played by Leslie Nielsen. In some of the photos, Leslie Laurie was white, while in other photos, he was black. Also, the photos advertising the products did not correspond to what was described: for example, there was an apple cream instead of our powerful phecomagnetic cream.

It was all a joke, but many people took it seriously. We started to hear from a large number of people, who wrote to us asking us, please, to send them our shit. They wanted cures for every disease you can think of. And that’s when we realised that it doesn’t really matter how silly you think a supposed ‘cure’ is, when people are ill they become desperate, and they can believe anything.

But what do you do when desperate people want to buy your shit? We wrote to them, explaining that it was just a joke. But then another type of person began to write to us: many alternative therapists wanted to ask us if they could sell our shit in their stores! This, we thought, presented us with a good opportunity to do an interesting experiment. How far could we go with our obvious lie? Could we get to present our shit therapy at conferences? And in magazines? Could we even reach the parliament of our country?

We began to write to magazines that specialised in alternative therapies, who completely accepted our story and even began to write about our novel therapy. Before long, they began to ask us for collaborations: for example, a famous former presidential science adviser in Mexico asked ‘Hugh Nielsen’ to write a preface his next book of therapies. They even started talking about our therapy in prestigious forums that promoted alternative therapies. Finally, Mariano Collantes and I got to participate in the largest national fair for the promotion of alternative therapies in Spain, the Esoteric and Alternative Fair of Atocha.

A screenshot of the website for the Esoteric and Alternative Fair of Atocha with a talk held by Mariano and Fernando advertised.

For years we moved in alternative medicine circles with our fake therapy. We even attended, as equals, meetings with prominent promoters of alternative therapies. We wrote to the Spanish government and to the health commission, and a political representative of a Spanish party told us that she thought phecomagnetism should be included in the Spanish Health Public Service.

Eventually, we explained our joke to the world and published the entire story in a book, El arte de vender mierda (Editorial Laetoli, 2014). After the revelation, we appeared on many Spanish television programs.

"Fecomagnetismo" discussed on a TV show

What we learned from our story is that anyone can come up with a fake therapy. In fact, new false therapies appear every year, and nobody does anything to stop it. We also learned that many of these therapies are already in our institutions, including homeopathy, acupuncture and reiki.

So, when someone tells you that if a therapy exists and people buy it means it must work, you can always remind them of the time in Spain that two bored young guys managed to make thousands of people, including politicians, believe that their shit could cure diseases.

Beware the ‘They’: once we believe in hidden, evil cabals, we can be convinced of anything

Aaron Rabinowitz
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Beware the ‘They’: once we believe in hidden, evil cabals, we can be convinced of anything

Beware the “they”. No, I don’t mean the shadowy cabal that some say runs the world, I mean beware of anyone who starts to talk about “they” or “them” when explaining why things aren’t quite as they seem. At the heart of every conspiracy theory is the key premise that “they” – the mysterious conspirators – are controlling the flow of information such that the evidence needed to out them is suppressed and replaced with mass media misinformation. The fact that all conspiracy theories posit a “they” may seem trivial, but it’s worth focusing in on the nature of this premise, because it ultimately allows one to believe anything. That complete dissolution of an individual’s capacity for genuine skepticism is what makes even trivial conspiracy theories into potentially dangerous on-ramps to a very dark spiral.

For folks not familiar with how conspiracy theories work, consider Qanon. Qanon could rightly be described as an all-encompassing conspiracy. It is massive in scope and tends to absorb all other conspiracy theories into its framework. Very briefly, Qanon is an updated version of the antisemitic blood libel myth that claims there is a secrete elite cabal of paedophiles who traffic in children for both sex and to siphon off a chemical called “adrenochrome” that “they” then inject to stay young. At this point, Qanon contains so many absurd and even contradictory moving parts, you’d expect it to collapse under its own weight. On the contrary, at least until recently Qanon’s membership has been growing. It now includes between two and twelve representatives in Congress and was heavily implicated in the Capitol hill riot. All despite zero manifestation of the promised crackdown on elite paedophiles, as well as investigative journalism exposing the fraudster likely to be running Q. How could such an absurd narrative gain so much traction in the general population? Revelations about Jeffery Epstein and his subsequent death certainly help fuel the fire, but I think the main cause is more systemic than circumstantial: once you start down the path of “they”, it’s hard to stop.

A Qanon flag at a rally in Virginia with the tag line "Where We Go One We Go All". Image by Anthony Crider (CC-by-2.0)

For folks who are familiar with conspiracy theories, Qanon’s resilience will come as no surprise. Conspiracy theory communities tend to be even more resistant to conflicting information than regular human communities, which are already pretty bad on this front. There are a variety of mechanisms that contribute to that epistemic resilience, but I think the among the strongest , the one that conspiracy communities always fall back on, is the appeal to “they”. “They” don’t want you to know the truth, and “they” are sufficiently powerful that it’s reasonable to infer you don’t have the full truth. Once you have that argumentative move in place, it serves as an unbeatable counter to any conflicting information. Documents that disprove the conspiracy? Obviously forged by “they”. A public statement made by Trump himself disavowing Q and calling the whole conspiracy nonsense? Simple, either “they” got to him and forced him to make that statement, or he’s bluffing to draw them out. Once it’s formed, every piece of information can fit neatly into the epistemic permission structure.

It would be bad enough if the “they” premise merely made conspiracy communities immune to conflicting information, but there’s an inverse problem that’s just as dangerous. The same “they” premise that can undercut any conflicting information also allows for the unfettered incorporation of any new information. If “they” are really the all-powerful manipulators of information that conspiracies like Qanon demand, then “they” could be suppressing the truth about anything, and are probably suppressing the truth about a great many things. In that mindset, all conspiracies become equally plausible, and the result is a tendency towards Qanon type Ur conspiracies that create a space where conspiracy theorists from all walks of life can come together and join in the Massively Multiplayer Online narrative game. There’s good reason to think that the experience of shared narrative formation combined with the endorphins produced by feeling like one of the epistemic elect drives a lot of engagement in these communities, and the open door nature of the “they” premise means there are always new narrative adventures to join.

In an easier world, you could simply see someone citing a “they” and move on with your life. The unfortunate reality is that we cannot simply dismiss any theory that posits a conspiracy, because documented examples of conspiracies exist in the world. There have been and likely still are “they” out there, having some amount of influence. Some of them are likely to actually be pedophiles. Statistically, some of them will involve people of Jewish decent. How do we address the spread of conspiratorial thinking in a world of competing power systems?

What we need is a meaningful way to distinguish between Conspiracy Theories in the problematic sense and theories that involve exposing genuine conspiracies. As with other kinds of flawed but persuasive arguments, there is no simple formula for separating the wheat from the chaff here, but there has been some interesting progress with this on the AI front. The culture analytics group at the University of California are working on a program that can detect the “signs” of conspiracy theories in online conversations. In the process, they’ve exposed some interesting commonalities amongst Conspiracy Theories that might distinguish them from genuine investigations into conspiracies. For example, Conspiracy Theories tend to form rapidly, due to the addictive nature of collective narrative formation games. Conversely genuine investigations take years to get a complete picture. Conspiracy Theories also tend to be overly complex and aim to explain way too many things. Actual conspiracies, on the other hand, tend to explain discrete events, as in the case of the Bridgegate conspiracy.

There are still a variety of problems with these criteria. Conspiracy theorists will argue that their theories are aimed at discrete events, such as 9/11, or the assassination of JFK, or the death of Jeffry Epstein. I personally struggle to square these criteria with the Christian conspiracy exposed in Jeff Sharlet’s The Family. Sharlet claims that a substantial cabal of evangelicals have significantly influenced American foreign policy and provided material support for harsh conservative laws like Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act. Similar reporting has argued that Evangelical Christians are influencing foreign policy with the explicit aim of bringing about the end of days by creating the right environment for the events of Revelations to unfold. These religious zealots have infiltrated our government at the highest levels and have substantially influenced foreign policy around places like Israel for the sake of achieving their ends. This has even produced a great deal of coordination between these fundamentalist Christians and many Pro-Israel Jews, because a key part of Evangelical Christian eschatology involves Jews regaining control over Jerusalem and reconstructing Herod’s temple where the Dome of the Rock currently stands. Prophecy or not, that would likely precipitate something that would look a lot like the end times.

If I’m comfortable saying that The Family and other religious cabals are influencing global politics, how can I confidently say they’re the only religious cabal that exists and has that level of influence? I don’t think a perfect formula exists to draw the distinction. I hope the reason I believe what I believe is because I’ve examined evidence presented by experts on these two subjects and found the evidence for The Family much more robust than the evidence for Jewish conspiracies to wipe out the white race or keep everyone enslaved. Sharlet’s theory avoids the criteria of having formed rapidly through online narrative formation. It’s debatable whether it fails on scope, since you could argue it’s primarily used to explain discrete choices by evangelical conservatives in America, but it’s hard to see how it doesn’t end up explaining a lot more.

A shadowy figure holding their palm out

One major difference for me is that Sharlet never claims The Family has the kind of absolute grip on information that makes claims of “they” so dangerous. While it’s likely that The Family, along with other conservative groups, have heavily influenced the conservative media environment, in the end their power appears patchy and narrowly focused, rather than absolute and ubiquitous. I think these are sufficient distinctions, but as always it’s not nearly as strong a case as I would prefer.

Let me wrap up with a related question that commonly arises when discussing the “they”: Why does “they” so often turn out to be “the Jews”. If you’ve spent much time around conspiracy theorists, you’ll understand this isn’t just a punchline, there really is a reliable principle that, over time, the odds that any Conspiracy Theory will come to include the Jews approaches 100%. Ironically, this forms a kind of inverse of Godwin’s Law, the internet rule that, as the length of an online argument increases, the odds that someone will be accused of being a nazi also approach 100%. With the reverse Godwin, though, the mechanism is not as simple as people inevitably reaching for a universally reviled baddie, though it does retain some of that flavour.

My theory for why all “they” inevitably come to include “the Jews” is that Jews have dominated as the go-to group for scapegoating through much of history, and so when modern conspiracy theorists go to “investigate” who “they” really are, their inability to resist absorbing conspiratorial thinking, combined with the ubiquity of conspiracies about the Jews, makes it vanishingly unlikely that the Jews will play zero part in their explanation.

You may still wonder why Jews have historically been the most common scapegoats in the Abrahamic world. My sense is that it really does go back to their being scapegoated for the death of Jesus as a marketing gimmick for Christianity. A gimmick so effective that, 1950 years later, my dad was still getting called ‘Christ killer’ while growing up in the Bronx. There are plenty of other socio-economic factors that likely also contribute, but the result is that Qanon, ‘the Great Replacement’, and ‘the Great Reset’ are all just reboots of blood libel and other antisemitic conspiracy theories. Even conspiracy theorists that seem entirely apolitical, like flat or hollow earthers will, when pressed, frequently reveal that they believe it’s Jews at the center of the hollow disk or whatever. In the case of flat earthers, one confounding variable is the surprisingly high influence of Christianity within the flat earth community, which creates an opening for implicating the Jews in hiding the truth. Still, it continues to be the case that all internet conspiracy roads lead to the Jews.

Once again, I’ve left you with more problems than solutions. I can’t say with confidence that The Family is the only shadowy cabal with esoteric goals out there fiddling with things, or that they all are likely to have little to no influence. We’re stuck, for the foreseeable future, having to pick through these conspiracies by hand, which means we’ll always be far behind those spinning the theories, as they face no such research constraints. I realise that’s an unsettling epistemic reality to live in, but I’d have to invent a conspiracy theory to make it easier, and that’s how “they” get you.

Why we should have listened to Flat Earth believers (even though they were completely wrong)

Michael Marshall
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Why we should have listened to Flat Earth believers (even though they were completely wrong)

This article was first published in May 2018, for Gizmodo UK. Since then, the Flat Earth movement has largely dissipated, but many of its proponents have shifted to become COVID-deniers and QAnon conspiracy theorists. I believe this is no coincidence, and that the technological drivers and social isolation that fuelled the rise of the Flat Earth movement are the same pressures growing the QAnon and anti-mask conspiracy movements. As Gizmodo UK has shut down, The Skeptic has chosen to republish this piece.

It’s easy to attribute the recent resurgence in belief that the world is flat to stupidity or gullibility – indeed, physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson writes Flat Earthers off as proof that the educational system has failed. But while it might be rightly labelled ridiculous, belief in the Flat Earth does not exist in a vacuum. People who believe that the is Earth flat almost universally accept other conspiracy theories too, and while Flat Earth belief can be harmless, its bedfellows may not be quite so benign. 

To understand what brings people to reject what has, for centuries, been one of the most uncontroversial facts about the world we live in, I attended the Flat Earth UK Convention, the first meeting in the UK to bring together disbelievers in the globe Earth model. 

Iru Landucci, one of the conference’s headline speakers, has researched the Flat Earth since 2014 and found no problems marrying his rejection of the spherical Earth with his other areas of interest: researching the New World Order, 9/11 truth, exposing the supposed perils of GMOs and vaccines, and promoting the wonders of Germanic New Medicine. 

“99% of all disease is psychological”, he explains to the audience. “Even cancer is caused by emotional factors”. 

As it turns out, Landucci flew in from his native Argentina for the conference, arriving a day earlier than anyone expected – arguably exposing just one of the pitfalls of a world view which struggles to explain the International Date Line. 

Time was clearly a struggle for Landucci: he had prepared a two-hour presentation for his 90-minute speaking slot. After some negotiation with the organiser (who spent the weekend fighting an uphill battle – albeit on a strictly-flat plane – to keep things on schedule), he agreed to give his presentation in two halves. The first half lasted for 90 minutes, with another 45 minutes after lunch. The third half, the following day, lasted just over an hour. 

Satanism, NASA and the One World Order

Landucci’s talk was a perfect illustration of the role Flat Earth belief has in attracting and unifying dozens of disparate conspiracy theories: we are told climate change and evolution are fake; the moon landing was a hoax because Satanism is at the heart of NASA’s agenda (as proven by how many astronauts do the “devil horns” finger gesture in photos); dinosaurs were invented by an artist who simply drew a rhino crossed with a giraffe and then painted it green; atheists actually worship the Greek mountain giant “Athos”; and the Freemasons and the Jesuits control everything, as explained in the (well-known anti-Semitic hoax) book “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. 

All of this is supported by with Landucci’s “evidence”, largely consisting of clips of scientists making seemingly damning admissions (sharply cut to avoid anything that might give their words context) and bafflingly intricate attempts to ‘decode’ signs of the grand plan hidden in plain sight. For instance, Landucci points out that if we take the Spanish initials for the United Nations, ‘ONU’, and read it backwards, we get ‘Uno’ – which is Spanish for ‘One’. This, he explains, is proof that the UN is a tool of the One World Order. I found myself wishing Landucci spoke French, so at the very least his paranoia might get to the point in a marginally less convoluted way. 

Noah’s Medieval Flood

Satanic symbolism was a concern for other speakers, too. Welsh YouTuber Martin Liedtke believes the globe model is the work of Satan, “put in place to lead people into oblivion and away from The Creator”. He explains that Noah’s flood took place just 1,000 years ago, as is proven by the presence of Middle Age architecture in some Middle Age drawings of Biblical events. He also believes the ageing process is optional: you can choose not to age. Liedtke is in his fifties, at least.

Despite his on-stage confidence, Liedtke’s journey to Flat Earth belief in 2015 was not an easy one. 

“I’ve experienced the people who run the Matrix, they’re not nice”, he tells the audience. “What you are living in is not what you think. I could give you proof but I won’t, because it’s traumatic as hell… I’ve been put to the test like you would not believe. The Creator has put me to the test to put me here in front of you, for a reason.” 

Having seen Liedtke’s YouTube channel, to which he’s posted more than 230 videos in the last six months, I don’t doubt him when he alludes having faced serious personal struggles. 

Another of the speakers, Dave “Allegedly Dave” Murphy, also rejected the spherical Earth model following traumatic events. Murphy served as a volunteer firefighter in New Jersey and witnessed 9/11 at close range, leading him in 2005 to become a believer in Truther conspiracy theories. According to Murphy’s website, that same year he had a mid-life crisis which convinced him to start living off-grid. Alongside his Flat Earth beliefs, Dave advises on how and why to drink and wash with your own urine, highlighting that urine “reverses aging” and “is helpful” with AIDS, cancer, smallpox and more. 

The Cosmic Egg

When it comes to constructing a grand narrative around Flat Earth belief, nobody at the conference came close to Martin Kenny, who presented his “Cosmic Egg” model on Saturday evening. Summarising his theory hardly does justice to its spiralling complexity, but his starting point is the (mistaken) assertion that in the foundational myths of almost every culture in history, the universe was hatched out of a giant egg. With that in mind, reasons Kenny, the universe itself must be egg-shaped, with the Earth at the centre. This is the smallest leap in logic Kenny will make all evening. 

Once we know where the Earth is, we can start to look at its shape. The Earth, Kenny explains, is a circle, with the North Pole at the centre. So far, so standard Flat Earth. However, beyond the ring of ice that most of us know as Antarctica, there is actually another realm, and another beyond that, forming concentric rings, separated by ice. Each realm was once adjacent to the North Pole, but were pushed out when a new realm was formed. Every realm is densely populated, and the people who live there are what we have mistaken throughout history to be angels or aliens. 

What exactly are those realms, you may wonder? Kenny explains that the outer realm is Hyperborea, of Greek legend. The next realm, surrounding our own, is Lemuria. That leaves our own realm, which Kenny has decided must be Atlantis, for reasons he does not go into. Living at the North Pole is the race of Polarians, who live on Mount Maru (which is apparently situated under a dense cloud, which is why nobody has ever seen it). 

Kenny's model of the Cosmic Egg as described in the text

It was at this point in the evening that Kenny unveiled an actual model of his Cosmic Egg – a four-foot tall mass of papier-mâché and plastic that puts Anthea Turner’s Tracy Island to shame. Each of his four realms were carefully drawn, with white walls representing the ice that keeps them apart. Transparent strips of plastic represented the concentric domes Kenny believes cover each realm, with the planets held in place (or at least they would have been, but the heat of the lights had caused Mercury to fall off land in North America). 

A close up of the model of Mercury sitting atop the water just North of South America in Kenny's model.

Each of the four realms, Kenny explains, has their own race of people living there, and they would seem familiar to us if we were to meet them: 

“I’m willing to bet if we went to one of the realms and saw the Hyperboreans”, Kenny said, “we’d say ‘Oh, I see where the Chinese get their looks from, they look awfully Chinese-ish’. And if we met the Lemurians, we’d see them and say, ‘I see, I think that’s where black people get their looks from or their traits from’”.

If that weren’t problematic enough, the Polarians – who oversee the four realms – have created the next race of people to populate the new realm they’re making: 

“There is a fifth race that was seeded about 6,000 years ago, when the last deluge happened. They are the Aryan race,” Kenny explained, to an audience that seemed to take this worryingly in their stride. “I’m sure you all know about the Aryan topic. The Aryans are the white race, and I’m willing to bet if we went to the centre right now and we saw the Aryans, we’d go: ‘Oh, I see where white people get their traits from’”.

The Cosmic Calendar

If the unexpected introduction of Aryan ideology somehow wasn’t surprising enough, Kenny still had a little more left in the tank. 

“I’m going to ask you to put your seatbelts on for this one”, he warned, two hours into this extraordinary three-hour talk, “because the things I’m about to say are pretty outlandish to say the least.”

Kenny's Cosmic Calendar as described in the text.

Kenny then unveiled his final prop – the Cosmic Calendar, a series of concentric circles on a large blackboard, each separated into multiple parts and labelled with the names of seasons, constellations, months and gold stars. It began to feel like Kenny was explaining the rules of an immensely complicated board game: “Now, you play the Atlantians, and your aim is to overtake the Lemurians before the Polonians send the Aryans down from Mount Maru…”

The Calendar, he explained, was his attempt to use astrology and numerology (plus more than a heavy dash of wild speculation) to figure out when each realm was created, when each 24,000-year epoch ended, and when the next realm would be pushed into the world, pushing our realm away from the North Pole. When this happens, Kenny speculated, the domes above would open and we would be free to move into another realm. 

According to Kenny, because the Doomsday clock was set to two minutes to midnight at the start of 2018, we must logically be two years away from this alignment. At that point, NASA will finally be able fly to Mars (which the dome prevented them from doing, as Mars is actually the Sun of the Hyperborean realm), and Flat Earth believers will be able to travel to the North Pole and into the heavens. 

“Some who are ahead of their time will time travel into the future, to the central realm, 3000 years into the future” Kenny told the audience. “Those who have done their time and are ready to move on, will physically be able to walk into the centre. They won’t have to die, there’s no death” 

Kenny explained that when the alignment comes, people should set aside their fear and anxiety, and embrace the experience. Kenny doesn’t fear death, he explained: “Death doesn’t exist, because we are all energy, and that can never die”. 

Kenny left the audience with his hope for the future:

“I really, really, really want to go to the centre,” he explained. “I had a journey planned with a few friends a few months ago, we were setting about doing it, but the universe said it’s not the right time to go North yet. There’s a time, a season and a place for everything. Wait for the right time. So that’s what I’m doing.”

It didn’t occur to me at the time, but in retrospect his final sentiments – his comfort with death and his thwarted plans to move on – feel ominous. Perhaps a weekend with conspiracy theorists led me to see significance where there is none, but it’s hard not to view it in the context of his personal situation when he first came to Flat Earth belief:

“A time came when things were a bit rough in my life,” he explained, “I got to a stage where I was asking questions, and I was sure that something was definitely not right. Then one day I came across a video of Dave Murphy talking about the Flat Earth, alarm bells rang inside me, and something told me to pay attention, so I did”. 

Looking back at my weekend with Flat Earthers, it is striking how many people who doubt the global model of the Earth also subscribe to all manner of other beliefs, from Biblical literalism to occultist paranoia, from anti-vaccination to quack cancer cues, from antisemitism to Aryanism. But it was also just as striking how many people whose journey into believing the Earth is flat included traumatic events or personal crises. 

This, perhaps, is why it is so important for us to listen to and talk to Flat Earthers, and to approach them as much with understanding as ridicule: if they can see no light in mainstream society, their rabbit hole may only get deeper and darker. 

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Expert skeptical analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal.

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