Rowan Mangan:
Hi Cahoot and welcome to a brand-new Bewildered.

Martha Beck:
In this episode, we are talking conspiracy theories and why they’re so delicious.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, we’ll give you the basics, but it’s up to you to put the pieces together.

Martha Beck:
You do the math.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, you do the math. Have fun, folks.

Martha Beck:
Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of your favorite podcast, I hope, Bewildered.

Martha Beck:
Bewildered!

Rowan Mangan:
That’s us. It’s called Bewildered. It’s us. I’m Rowan Mangan. She’s Martha Beck. We’re Bewildered. It’s quite clear. Do you have any questions?

Martha Beck:
Okay, the end. I think we’ve covered it. Well, we are bewildered. We are trying to figure things out.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah, I forgot to say that we’re trying to figure things out.

Martha Beck:
What are you trying to figure out these days, Roey?

Rowan Mangan:
I am trying to figure out at this moment, at what point do all our high-tech tools become more and more and more helpful in their helpful little ways that we don’t necessarily ask for. So the technology, they get helpful. They’re like, “Now I do this.” And you’re like, oh, okay, cool. Yeah, I can see how that would be useful. But I feel like it’s on the verge of going too far. And I’m not talking in some deep AI, dystopian way. I just, it’s Bluetooth that I’m talking about.

Martha Beck:
Say more.

Rowan Mangan:
So case in point, something very embarrassing happened to me.

Martha Beck:
Oh, please tell.

Rowan Mangan:
This past week, and it began with a snow day. A snow day. A snow day with cold. And as I think many parents of small children know, that’s terrifying.

Martha Beck:
Horrible.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s just quite frankly a terrifying thing. And even though we are a three-parent family, which should give us some backup—

Martha Beck:
Three to one, you know, like three parents, one child.

Rowan Mangan:
Should be fine. We should be able to handle it. But the privilege is out of control. No, it was not possible for all our things to get done on the snow day. Karen had to be elsewhere. That was fine. We had a plan. The main thing was that there was a very big zoom call happening that day that you and I were supposed to be on, both of us, but I couldn’t make it because of the other things to do with our child. Now where it got really problematic, Marty, was I had to set, you’d never done all the tech stuff, sorry to out you this way.

Martha Beck:
I’m aware.

Rowan Mangan:
But you were supposed to set up the zoom meeting. I wasn’t going to be there. I was concerned.

Martha Beck:
It’s like leaving a ferret in charge of the high-security codes or something, me doing it. But you set it up. You did.

Rowan Mangan:
So what I did is I gave you my computer. Key factor. So you were logged into the right account. I wrote out instructions. I had a person on the phone on standby to show you how to do it. Everything worked smoothly, I’d like to say.

Martha Beck:
A group gathered. There were maybe, I don’t know how many people were there, like a hundred people there.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, there were a great number of people there.

Martha Beck:
A vast horde.

Rowan Mangan:
Marty made my apologies. I got home from picking up our child. Zoom call is continuing, and I could sort of hear Marty upstairs, but I’m like, “I could just jump on” while, as a mere spectator, while I parent our child, since I’m home lurking. It’s about halfway through the hour-long call. So I think some people are going to know where this is going. Pop in the little wireless headphones. And I did it at a very specific moment and it was a moment where I had a child, obnoxiously, I think it’s fair to say, begging me for a Popsicle in mid-winter.

Martha Beck:
On a snow day.

Rowan Mangan:
On a snow day, yeah. Not relevant, but crikey. So I was being bullied, effectively and badly. Sometimes when you’re being bullied by your child and you believe yourself to be alone…

Martha Beck:
And in the right.

Rowan Mangan:
And in the right. We don’t always show up as our best selves. And so I didn’t realize that I was being broadcast via the headphones that had sneakily connected upstairs with my computer that you were on running a zoom call in which you were unmuted. Suddenly I’m that person. I’m that you.

Martha Beck:
I couldn’t hear a thing. It went silent for me.

Rowan Mangan:
It went silent for you. It didn’t make any noise to me because whatever noise was happening was drowned out by me saying, I don’t know exactly what I said, I haven’t listened back. But I imagine that what suddenly broke into this sharing zoom meeting where someone else was talking, not you, someone was sharing something probably quite deeply emotional.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
And I broke into share something quite deeply emotional, which was I think along the lines of, “Please, Lila, please, just for once, can you give me a break? I’m very stressed out.” Or something like that. Not what I would choose to broadcast as like, here’s Ro parenting.

Martha Beck:
Now I just have to say, I’ve never heard you actually lose your shit at Lila.

Rowan Mangan:
But you have heard me beg her for mercy. That’s what happened.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I have heard you say, “Lila, for the love of God, could you please…” It’s like that. It’s not abusive in my view. That’s what, I needed to say that.

Rowan Mangan:
I was down on my knees on the verge of tears saying, “I’ve given you two popsicles. It’s the middle of winter. I have got to put a nutrient into you sometime today. Please, please, God, please.”

Martha Beck:
And we don’t know what the people heard, but we do know that someone put in the chat, “Oh, a random Australian.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, no, someone said that out loud. That was my first clue.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah, that’s not good.

Rowan Mangan:
So that’s how I knew that I had been heard and not just heard, but probably identified. Like Goddamnit, having an accent’s like you’re always extra, like there’s no camouflage. There’s no camouflage.

Martha Beck:
Your fans could never mistake your voice for anyone.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
No matter what the accent.

Rowan Mangan:
And so I just went into a puddle of humiliation.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I came down and I didn’t know what had happened. And you were literally in a fetal position on the couch.

Rowan Mangan:
I was. Look, I mean, and it might’ve been worse. I haven’t had a chance to listen back yet. It might be worse. And everyone knows except for you, you were deaf to it.

Martha Beck:
It would be amazing to me if it was something really bad because it would be literally the only time you’ve ever said anything really bad if that went out to a large group of people.

Rowan Mangan:
To me, the humiliation of being on my knees begging for mercy from a 4-year-old is like, that’s humiliating. That’s bad.

Martha Beck:
Any parent has felt that, I do believe.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, anyway, thanks a lot, Bluetooth, for making our lives so convenient.

Martha Beck:
So convenient. Okay, well mine is sort of related to that, to things people say and to children and whatnot. So as you know, I swear like a wounded pirate all the time.

Rowan Mangan:
It was one of the loveliest things when I first met you in real life to discover that unlike in more professional settings, you have a real potty mouth. And I love that about you.

Martha Beck:
And the thing is that people always mistake me for someone who would be prim and proper. Like when I used to go do these things on the local news in Phoenix, if somebody said like “hell” in front of me, they’d look at me like, “Oh, sorry, Mom.” I don’t know why I gave us off this vibe, but I am guessing that it came from being raised by church ladies. I remember in my teens having a conversation with my sister and I said, “I try never to think a swear word, but sometimes I do.” And she said, “Oh, I use one word. I use the S word.” And I was like [inhales sharply]. And I said, “Isn’t that, doesn’t it bother you to say it?” And she said, “Listen, I want a word that is so bad that it burns my mouth.” Because she was ahead of me. I was very like, oh, keep on the wheels. But then I left my religion and doing a few things like drinking coffee. Yes! Not wearing long underwear in the middle of summer in Singapore. What else? Like swearing. These things, they all still feel a little wicked to me. I mean, forget alcohol. I can barely drink any alcohol anyway, but I had a glass of champagne for the first time when I was 30 and thought the world—I was on a plane, I thought it would crash.

So I literally had tried to control my thoughts. I’m so embarrassed to admit this. And when I let go, I just thought, “I’m going to swear a blue streak for a couple of years and then I’ll get it out of my system.” Well, it turns out it’s very, very fun.

Rowan Mangan:
It is.

Martha Beck:
Especially when it feels a bit like a sin. Same as coffee. Whoo-hoo-hoo, a little sinful makes it better. They say when ice cream was invented, some English lady got a taste of ice cream for the first time, and she said, “Ah, that’s quite delicious. What a pity it isn’t a sin.” Well, in our culture, of course, it now is a sin. Anyway, all of this, I have children, I think I’ve got to stop swearing in front of these kids. Doesn’t happen. Can’t rein it in. For some reason the kids never swore around me. I didn’t even— They actually, I think, are kind of offended. I sort of get the feeling that they are more high-minded than I am.

Rowan Mangan:
They’re just rebelling.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, they’re rebelling by being really articulate and not using course language. Well then we have Lila, and when you were pregnant, I’m like, “I’ve got to practice not swearing. I’ve got to do this one right, man. I’m getting another shot at this. I got to do it.” And so I tried to stop, but I thought, “The baby’s not even here yet.” So then the baby was here, but not verbal. So I was like, w”When’s the cutoff line, really? When do you have to stop swearing?” She starts to talk, but not much. She didn’t really know much. Now she’s four. And let me tell you something, I have not done my mental workouts. When I step on a Lego and go down hard, the word that comes to my mind is not, “Oh my.” But the interesting thing is, even though I continue to swear like a wounded pirate, once again, the child doesn’t swear, or at least not in front of us.

Rowan Mangan:
She’s had a couple of swearing, but we’ve tried very hard not to react and so.

Martha Beck:
But it was more like she was trying it on. She didn’t know what it meant. But then, I don’t know if she’s done this in front of you, I’m sure she has, she started doing baby swear. So she literally, the other day, she gets very upset and one day she was trying to load everything in the world onto her scooter and then take it around the neighborhood and sell it or something. I don’t know what the plan was. But the whole scooter fell down and everything. And she said, “Bam it! Crumbs and crackers!” And I’m like, “Where in the motherfucking goddamn universe did this fucking child get these shitty words? Bam,? Crumbs and crackers? What the fuck is this?”

Rowan Mangan:
I know. We didn’t teach her to do lame cussing. That is not, if you’re going to have an exclamation of disdain, it better sound like a wounded pirate in our household.

Martha Beck:
It should burn your mouth. It should burn your mouth. And now I just did that. And by the way, I am now in this fear state where I think we may have to just beep, beep, beep and let them imagine me swearing because I still have this investment in my image as a person who does not use coarse language.

Rowan Mangan:
You are so funny because you completely forget that we swear on this podcast constantly and it has an expletive-ridden warning on it that says, “Don’t play it in your car when kids are around.”

Martha Beck:
Wait, you said, “an expletive-ridden warning,” which doesn’t mean a warning against explicit language. It means the warning itself is: “Don’t fucking listen to this in your car, asshole.” Yeah, not with your kids, your rugrats. Anyway, it’s just a miracle to me that somehow children’s brains do this astonishing thing of knowing what not to say when your parents are listening, even though your parents say it all the time, no matter who’s listening, including on a recorded podcast.

Rowan Mangan:
“Mom, there’s a fucking goat in the yard.”

Martha Beck:
No honey, it’s just a goat.

Rowan Mangan:
No, it’s a fucking goat.

Martha Beck:
If you haven’t seen that online, you need to look it up. It’s a fine Australian passion. I have to say Australians swear even more than I do. There are words, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah. How do we feel about me using the C-word right now?

Martha Beck:
Oh, I don’t feel comfortable at all.

Rowan Mangan:
No worries. I’m going to do it.

Martha Beck:
Oh God.

Rowan Mangan:
So Australian media, Australian media was trying to sum up, I mean, admittedly a satirical newspaper was trying to sum up a joint press conference between two political leaders, one of which was our president at the time of recording, and the other one was another, not someone I admire greatly on the world stage. And this is how the Australian media decided to headline it: “Cunt Outcunts Cunt.”

Martha Beck:
That’s an Australian news report.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Thank you very much. Oh my goodness.

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry, Americans.

Martha Beck:
Well, I guess it’s just, if anybody—

Rowan Mangan:
I’ll receive my hate mail.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I’ve had a lot of hate mail saying, “I did not think you were a person of low mind and now you’ve shattered me. Never meet your heroes.” Sorry, guys.

Rowan Mangan:
Hi there. I’m Ro and I’ll be your podcaster for today. Do you know how to tip your podcaster? It’s actually pretty easy. You can rate our pod with lots of stars, all your stars. You can review it with your best superlatives. You can even subscribe or follow Bewildered, so you’ll never miss an episode. Then, of course, if you’re ready to go all in, our paid online community is called Wilder: A Sanctuary for the Bewildered. And I can honestly say it’s one of the few true sanctuaries online. You can go to wildercommunity.com to check it out. Rate, review, subscribe, join, and you all have a great day now.

Martha Beck:
Why don’t you kick off the topic of the day for us, Ro?

Rowan Mangan:
The topic of the day today, Marty and Cahoot, is—we’re calling it The War of the Worldviews.

Martha Beck:
Ooh. In that voice.

Rowan Mangan:
In that voice, whoa, whoa, whoa. What’s the thing with Orson Wells and they put it on the radio? War of the Worlds, right?

Martha Beck:
Orson Wells put on a sort of short story he’d created called The War of the Worlds, where he made it like an ordinary broadcast.

Rowan Mangan:
A news broadcast, right?

Martha Beck:
A news broadcast. And he did it really well, and people actually believed that there had been a Martian invasion and there was mass panic and it was a big thing.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, so imagine that is this, except that this is real. It’s not a radio play. This is real. It’s called War of the Worldviews.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
And I think most of our listeners are pretty aware that we are at this moment in our culture, in a strange period where the very idea of a kind of mainstream culture is becoming fractured and a lot of this is at least originating online. So we’re talking about those things where the more online you are, the more aware you’re going to be of this until Thanksgiving, as we said earlier.

Martha Beck:
When you’re sitting down across from your cousins and uncles.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s right. I think a lot of these phenomena that we’re going to talk about today really started going properly into the guts of the culture during the pandemic. But yeah, we’re beginning to separate as a society into groups who see the world fundamentally differently, and both or both or many believing that theirs is the objective reality and that someone else is being in some way tricked.

Martha Beck:
Or unbelievably foolish.

Rowan Mangan:
Or just manipulated.

Martha Beck:
“How could you fall for this?”

Rowan Mangan:
“Wake up, sheeple!”

Martha Beck:
Yeah, wake up sheeple. What was it you said? Big poetry?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah. The moon was invented by poets to keep them in work. And someone put, “Big poetry is inventing moons and you’re just sitting there. Wake up, sheeple.” Big poetry.

Martha Beck:
So yeah, I never saw that because I’m almost never online and when I am, it’s just otters wall to wall. That’s my algo. So from the sidelines, it’s astonishing. While we were talking about this, you said, “Do you really think it’s gone up?” Oh, it’s gone up because I kind of dip into the world from my solitary haze once every two weeks or so.

Rowan Mangan:
But she will read a book. She will read the living shit out of a book.

Martha Beck:
I will. But lately, the last two, three years, yes, it did intensify most during the pandemic, but it’s been going on for I’d say six, seven years that I started to notice it was an exponential growth curve at how angry people were at each other for things that I didn’t understand the anger at all. It reminds me of Jonathan Swift’s thing where there’s a group of people who go to war over which end you should crack when you’re cracking an egg. It would be some random topic, “How do you really make a quilt?” And people would be like at each other’s throats. I’d go to research something and people would be so angry at each other.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So there’s that phenomenon, which is kind of, there’s trolling and flame wars and stuff, but we are really digging more into not how do you really make a quilt, but are people drinking the blood of babies? So I think it’s a different—

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and fortunately someone finally wrote a book about it.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s how Marty knew it existed.

Martha Beck:
t’s been literally in my hands for years, but until it’s a book. The book to which I refer is called The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher. Really well researched, really well written. And it’s about how social media and the way it works where it just gives people more of what engages their attention the most. It turns out that the brain is most engaged when it’s appalled and horrified. And so the algorithm goes, “Oh, you want things that appall and horrify you? Okay, here’s more of that. Here’s more of that. Here’s more of that. Oh, you believe that people are evil that way and it gets your attention? Oh, they’re eviler than you even think. Look, here’s a crazy person who says that they’re Satan.” And this book talks about how this particular facet in the brain, this ability to see people as sort of painted with one brush as horrifying, how that has fed into the algorithms which then feed back so much information that the brain starts to believe it for no other reason than sheer repetition. So it’s this cycle. The brain feeds its flaws into the algorithm which feeds the flaws back exaggerated, which makes the brain. So he’s saying, we really are being rewired, and the culture has been neurologically rewired by this interaction with social media. It’s pretty scary.

Rowan Mangan:
It is. And so then the outgrowth of the weird exaggeration and amplification that happens through the algorithm, which could be an episode in and of itself, we have these conspiracy theories that arise and that’s where we’re sort of getting to with the world, I can’t say it, the “war of the worldviews” is these conspiracy theories that become an entire paradigm and an entire way of seeing reality. So just to give our peeps an idea of what we’re talking about, a lot of them are political. A lot of them suggest that there’s a lot going on that the government are doing that is very not good, people. It’s not good.

Martha Beck:
And you do the math.

Rowan Mangan:
You do the research. Just type in “deep state.”

Martha Beck:
And they found that the human attention funnel goes crazy when it sees moral emotional language. So the more fervent and fraught with hints the language gets, the more the brain goes, yum, yum, yum.

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
And it starts to believe it.

Rowan Mangan:
And then you’ve got the feedback loop of the algorithm again. And then there’s like, “My group is under threat. My group is being, my tribe is being attacked.” So one of the popular ones is called The Great Replacement Theory, which is about the way that political elites are basically trying to eliminate white people by immigration and I don’t know what with minorities, so that white people end up disappearing or replaced. I think a lot of people know about Q-Anon. There’s a sort of left-wing version that’s popped up lately that people call Blue Anon. And then one of the interesting ones actually for us because we sort of swim in this pool a bit is it’s called the Conspirituality Pipeline.

Martha Beck:
I love it. I mean I don’t love it, but I love the word.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it’s cool. And so that’s a lot of kind of crunchy granola yoga people end up going down this rabbit hole that you can sort of chart it through: Big Pharma is bad, which it is. Yoga is good, which it is. But then my body is a temple, therefore vaccines, you see how it kind of, and then before you know it, you’re putting dead bear cubs in Central Park and becoming, getting very—

Martha Beck:
When there’s a worm in your brain, you know.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s just hard to know if vaccines are bad or good when there’s a worm in your brain. So that’s conspirituality. So there’s plenty of more fringe ones and niche ones.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. There are tons of them.

Rowan Mangan:
This is what we’re talking about generally.

Martha Beck:
And a lot of them are floating around all the time, and the algorithm is testing them. And every now and then, one of ’em really hits a vein and goes viral. And then it creates viewpoints that dominate some people’s inner lives so that their public interaction online becomes really focused on that thing with true believer energy. And then even in private discourse, we had one person we knew quite well who got deeply into conspiracy theories and it was just—

Rowan Mangan:
Via the conspirituality pipeline.

Martha Beck:
Yes, yes. Someone who was very crunchy granola and ended up—

Rowan Mangan:
Bunker—

Martha Beck:
With ammo and a lot of guns and designating the demons and the angels that are existing in society and being absolutely sure who is who and begging other people to believe that it is true. Because don’t you see, they’re coming to get us.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m just trying to save you. I just need you to see the truth.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Tearfully, “Don’t you get it? That there is going to be this, the spaceship is coming out of the mountain at 3:30 on Thursday and we have to be there and we need to drink this grape Kool-Aid because otherwise we’ll be in real trouble.”

Rowan Mangan:
I mean, it sort of goes without saying, but the majority of these sort of narratives or discourses, they exist despite being completely debunked in any objective way beyond any doubt. But what we’re sort of edging towards that is really juicy and fun for us is that there’s a psychological phenomenon that is very interesting when we talk about conspiracy theories. And Marty has been excited about this concept for years and years, haven’t you?

Martha Beck:
Yes. Because it’s summarized by a word no one knows.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s been written in a book.

Martha Beck:
Yes, and I was going to write a book, this is not true, but I made up a mock cover of a book with a joyous anteater on the cover, and it was called Pronoid Apophenia. Apophenia is a sensation. Yes, I am a loser. That’s fine. I don’t curse at babies in front of other people except I just did.

Rowan Mangan:
Beg for mercy, not curse.

Martha Beck:
Anyway apophenia is the tendency to see meaningful patterns or perceive a meaningful pattern in just random noise, to look at a cloud and see a face. We have this incredible ability as humans to pick out things that we’re familiar with even in random noise. So we see faces in clouds, but it never goes the other way. We never see clouds in faces. It’s not—

Rowan Mangan:
You don’t see clouds in faces?

Martha Beck:
Well, I wasn’t going to tell them about you, but no, it doesn’t go both ways. We create pattern so quickly, whether or not it’s there. And when we do, when we link two things together and we say, “These two things are causally related, okay, there’s a reason.” Okay, that politician wore a yellow tie and that’s a dog whistle that means that this is going to happen later. And then two days later, there was a news report on penguins. Do you see? Do the math. And the conspiracy theorists never actually link the stuff because to say, “Here’s one thing, here’s another thing, you do the math” creates this sensation called apophenia, creates the phenomenon called apophenia, which has a feeling that goes along with it, a feeling of deep pleasure and reinforcement. It’s a burst of dopamine, which makes us feel good. And it’s a burst of oxytocin, which makes us feel lovable.

Rowan Mangan:
And connected.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, connected. It’s super reinforcing inside our brains. It feels delightful. It’s like bowling a perfect strike or something. It’s hooray! I have experienced apophenia, and it makes us want to do it more.

Rowan Mangan:
And so because that exists and it is so pleasurable, there’s a tendency to notice patterns even when patterns aren’t there. That’s kind of what we’re talking about. But I was curious about, there is this thing, it produces these chemicals. There must be an evolutionary purpose to this pattern seeking. Do you know what that is, Martha Beck?

Martha Beck:
I don’t know for sure, but here’s what I strongly suspect. I think that finding meaningful patterns quickly is a huge evolutionary advantage. I have never experienced the joy of apophenia so much as when I first started tracking animals or learning to track animals at Londolozi in South Africa, and my friend Boyd is showing me, “Here is a snake track, which direction is the snake going?” And I’m looking at the track and trying to figure out exactly what was happening. Here’s a lion track, what was the lion doing? And there’s another lion track, and now the track is gone. But now I found another one. And these bursts of dopamine, it was like hardcore gambling addict suddenly. A group of people learned to do this when we were on a seminar there. And then we went out to see a big animal of some kind, and nobody cared about the animal. They just wanted to look at the ground because it was so fun. So in evolutionary terms, being able to track like that and see between the causal relationships between these bits of evidence and what happened that will help you find food, avoid predators, and there’s also the pattern tracking of negative things. Like say you notice a person in the village who does three odd things that are typical of psychopaths, and something in you goes, no, no, no, no, no.

Rowan Mangan:
Murders your next door neighbor.

Martha Beck:
Murders people.

Rowan Mangan:
Murders the lady across the street.

Martha Beck:
Again, murders them.

Rowan Mangan:
Murders your dog.

Martha Beck:
Murders the dog.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m starting to put it together.

Martha Beck:
Yep. Add two and two, you do the math.

Rowan Mangan:
You do the math.

Martha Beck:
But honestly, three, that was the math. Three, so far as we know. So yeah, there are obvious advantages to our incredible ability to find pattern. And then it just kind of slops over the side sometimes.

Rowan Mangan:
So another one would be patterns in the weather. Before we had meteorologists in our phone, we can be like, “Oh, this sign in the sky means that it’s likely that there’s going to be a storm overnight. So I’ll tie up my boat.” Right?

Martha Beck:
Yes. And people who don’t have meteorologists are incredibly sensitive to weather signals, like literal feelings in their bodies. The old joke, “Oh, my knees are telling me rain is coming,” it’s true. There are all these ways that our bodies can sense weather coming. And it gives us that sense of, “Okay, I’ve figured it out. I know what’s happening. I’m feeling a burst of oxytocin, so I’m going to keep my people safe. Okay. Okay.” And the brain keeps rewarding things that help the people who follow them survive. If you’re tracking well and you know how to find an animal on the tiniest of evidence and you know how to avoid a flood on the tiniest of evidence, you’re going to be left alive to spread your genes to more people and you will end up with a group of people who are very sensitive to patterns.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, our daughter comes from a long line of pattern recognizers, I can only assume, since she exists, so we must all have done okay from an evolutionary point of view. I told her yesterday, no, day before yesterday, that a babysitter was coming yesterday. I said, “There’s a babysitter coming tomorrow.” Sorry, time is not my strong point. I said, “There’s a babysitter coming tomorrow.” And Karen was away and Lila said, “Yeah, Emma always appears when someone is gone.” And I have to say, I’m a little bit worried from the tone of her voice and the kind of narrowing of her eyes that she was trying to build a bit of a conspiracy theory around it. Well, I mean, I guess it is a conspiracy. Karen went to New York, we couldn’t get work done, so Emma appeared.

Martha Beck:
I love how it’s a total conspiracy. We conjured Emma from the basement.

Rowan Mangan:
Someone’s gone. Emma appears. Kaboom!

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So there’s obvious— she’s growing up to be a great apophenia sensor because there’s a massive advantage to each individual to be able to track patterns. And there’s also this incredible, I can’t overemphasize the feeling of a burst of oxytocin. I mean, people talk about the dopamine receptors, but there’s something called the dopamine-oxytocin reward cycle where you’ll get something like a burst of—and apophenia really does this—if you’re together with a couple of people and you’re like, “But here’s this clue. What do we do, Scooby Doo?” And then somebody else goes rawr-roh and they get the next clue—I never saw Scooby-Doo, I’m making this up. Anyway, I read a bunch of books when I was a kid about Encyclopedia Brown and his friends fix everything, and they all contribute little bits of information that add up to the picture and the social bonding of doing this is unbelievable.

So the social bonding of “I suspect something’s wrong” or “Something good is coming”— advertising, when they started advertising on TV, they massively capitalized on the fact that if we’re together when we learn that something is good or bad, we will massively, we will do anything. We will buy, we will wear, we will use. Anything associated with that feeling of social bonding that they trigger. I mean, I remember seeing ads—well, bottled water is considered one of the biggest money-from-nothing solutions to have arisen in my lifetime. And I remember that very person who went off to do the guns and ammo, saw me drinking tap water from our ultra-purified water system, and she was like, “Oh my God, let me help you exist a little longer on this planet.” And went and got a plastic bottle of water for me. Well, now we know it’s full of microplastics. But she was so eager to care for me by never letting me drink the tap water that we’d had triple, quadruple tested. And advertisers and now algorithms have been playing this like a drum ever since, well, the moment they arise. And right now—so we talk about the nature-culture divide—so it may be the culture that you’ve fallen into online, it may be your friendship group, it may be your family, it may be the whole national story about something. If you get a sense of belonging in a group that is going toward an irrational acceptance of something completely wrong, even, like in opposition to reality—

Rowan Mangan:
The group think is stronger than the rationality in that context, is that what you’re saying? That’s so interesting.

Martha Beck:
And that’s how horrible things like racism and genocide end up being seen as acceptable by masses of people who are otherwise completely normal.

Rowan Mangan:
Because it’s not so much about the othering of the other group. It’s about the way that if they are other, we are—our bond is tight.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s an upholding of the self.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and the worldview.

Rowan Mangan:
By extension. Sure. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s so much easier to simply assume that all the clues in reality support the viewpoint you already have than it is to go, “Well, I’m not sure.”

Rowan Mangan:
Right. Well, and I think, I mean, I guess it’s sort of something that we’ll probably talk about later, but you’ve got a worldview. You want to uphold that and defend that. And apophenia can be a chemical, mental, it can be a whole scaffolding by which you uphold a worldview that under scrutiny may not hold up that well.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Or at all.

Rowan Mangan:
Or at all.

Martha Beck:
It might be completely not at all held up. And you have to be willing, so this happens to all of us, and as we were talking this through, we hadn’t talked it all the way through, but I was thinking, “Okay, where have I done this in my life?” And I’ve definitely done it many times, but I’ve tried to get more and more scrupulous about examining the evidence the older I get and the more training I got. But even as recently as five or 10 years ago, I was doing business with some people and I found out they were lying and doing some sketchy things, and that was bad. But because I had people telling me, oh, this is very negative, it started to get very apopehnia-like where if they did that, maybe they did other bad things as well.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, right.

Martha Beck:
Oh, and did you see that hint? That indicates that they may have done another bad thing and another bad thing, and it would get me spinning, and I could tell I was off center, but it was something I called bonding by bashing. Choose someone and then get together and bash their evilness, and it creates cohesion. I did that and I did another thing where people would tell me that an authority figure was absolutely right. We went to a doctor who got an award for compassion. Do you remember him?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
The compassion doctor.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I remember him well.

Martha Beck:
He had the plaque on his office wall.

Rowan Mangan:
The same office where he started talking about man-hating lesbians while my legs were in the stirrups.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Yeah. He was doing a pelvic while he told Ro she was a man-hating lesbian. It was—

Rowan Mangan:
Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Martha Beck:
And we talked about it. We were like, “But he won the compassion award. We must be wrong.” So yeah, it didn’t hold up. And in both cases, it felt like I was trying to shore up this viewpoint because on one case, I wanted to be with the people who had a conspiracy theory. On the other one, I wanted to acknowledge this person who’d been publicly recognized as compassionate, and I fought my own sense of truth. It felt like I had vertigo and it felt like eating nothing but junk food. Like I’d been eating sugar for days on end, and my body hadn’t had a nutrient, and yet I kept going for quite some time before I put the brakes on it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I can remember just with the first example of the people being sketchy, I can remember us looking at social media posts by their friends and trying to figure out did that mean that those people, were they making a point to you in how that post was done? And even though it was quite a paranoid activity, as many of these apophenia journeys end up, even within the paranoia and the fear that it kind of generated for us, there was also that “Look. Look.”

Martha Beck:
Ooh. Proof!

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, look, I think this is, I think, yeah, yeah. And I can remember, and I think of it almost like with the dopamine part of, in the casinos where you just press the button, what’s that called? The fruit machine or whatever?

Martha Beck:
Slot machines. The fruit machine. I wish.

Rowan Mangan:
No, no. You know the ones they have to—

Martha Beck:
Slot machines.

Rowan Mangan:
But the fruit, they go fruit.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, the cherries. Bing, bing.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. But you just press the button now. Yeah. It’s not the point is it? It’s not the point at all. All right, let’s—

Martha Beck:
The pressing-the-button thing, that intermittent reinforcement, man, it is—we get drunk on it and we get drunk on it when we’re just talking about the news.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah. It’s pernicious, man. Yeah. And I have to say that there’s culture and there’s this person that I know is being sketchy, whatever. But when culture is represented within a context that’s charged by algorithms, there’s something really distorting about it immediately through all that exaggeration and amplification that we were talking about.

So for instance, I was convinced that the 2024 US presidential election would go a different way than it did because all I saw in my algorithm was 500 people a day, one after the other, just tweeting, “I understand the assignment.” And so I thought we understood the assignment, but these islands, these islands do not meet. And so I never saw the other side. The silos and the walls of those silos are so tall. And that’s what I mean by, like—hm?

Martha Beck:
One of my friends who’s a brilliant political analyst on TV and everything, he said, “I bet my mortgage that Kamala’s going to win.” That’s how intense it was.

Rowan Mangan:
And I think because of that, there’s this kind of effect that happens, talking about culture and the forces of culture where our own point of view is replicated back to us like that in that sort of echo-chamber way, but we feel that it’s the town square.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
So we feel that it’s a range of people coming together, and it’s not. It’s not the town square. It’s like a bunch of incels in their mum’s basement trying to create pain because no one will fuck them. But we think we’re just having coffee. We’re not having coffee. So anyway, this is how I see it. The cycle is: If something strikes you as interesting, the algorithm will instantly create the impression that everyone knows about that thing that you’ve just discovered. Everyone’s talking about it, and everyone has the same concerns as me. And then what happens with that impression is that just by the force of the number of people, it makes it seem more credible. It makes it seem more true. So even if I’ve only seen 30 people saying that, my impression is that that’s probably about 75% of the people.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
And if 75% of the people believe it, there’s a very good chance. Right? And that’s just “Do the math.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And it’s factually right, and it’s morally right. One of the things that Max Fisher writes about in The Chaos Machine is that social media found a way to break something called the Dunbar Number, which we evolved—this guy named Dunbar estimated that we evolved to live in groups of like 50 to 150. And 150 people is as much as we can handle in our heads. And those people were all interacting richly in an everyday environment, checking their experiences of reality with each other and conveying truths about things and maybe lies, but everybody was watching everybody in real time. And social media hit a ceiling. When people got to the Dunbar number, they didn’t want more than 150 friends on Facebook, and it’s too complicated to explain, but they found a way deliberately to break through the Dunbar number and to have people feel like they’re in the town square with a hundred friends, and the hundred friends are telling the moral and factual truth. And when they did that, things really exploded. When they went past that.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And it just strikes me that we’ve always talked about culture is coming to consensus, and what these processes do is create the illusion of consensus, which is in some ways even more damaging than the normal consensus that we already think is bad. So that sucks. I want to add into the whole discussion another kind of factor that I think is at play, which is this general sense of chaos. Like there’s a general, there’s a lot of fear, there’s a lot of breaking down of discourses that have been fairly stable for at least a couple of generations.

Martha Beck:
Oh five or six, maybe.

Rowan Mangan:
This new multipolar, a million different pieces to try and comprehend, it’s like the temptation to get your gigantic pinboard and put your newspaper cuttings up and then get your red yarn and connect all the bits, there’s great comfort to that because it says it’s not chaos. There’s something that makes sense here. And so we can comfort ourselves with apophenia in a scary time as well.

Martha Beck:
Especially because our culture is so dominated by the types of thinking that occupy mainly the left hemisphere of the brain. We’ve talked about this before endlessly, but we live in this way of thinking and way of being that doesn’t tolerate much uncertainty because the left hemisphere doesn’t like uncertainty. And when it feels uncertain, it grasps for control. And it grasps for control more than for actual reality. The emotional sense of control that comes from moral outrage—”They’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs.”—the left hemisphere fear will grab that and say, “That is simple. That is direct. I can believe it. It’s visual. I feel that in my gut.” And I do think that this blizzard of information with all of us working on our Dunbar number and being in touch with a million, trillion people. I had a friend who died of cancer in the 1990s, and after her diagnosis, when I went to see her, I said, “Maybe you can beat this.” And she’s like, “No.” She said, “The world is just too complicated for me. I can’t think my way through it anymore. I just want to leave.” And I’ve met other people who were, this was a very, I think she dropped out of high school. She didn’t have any education. But then I’ve known people with graduate degrees who grab onto something or someone usually—”I’m just going to believe this one person who’s very opinionated and says things in a confident voice” because there’s so much I don’t now, and it’s just too scary.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m going to choose this person. I’m going to, I use the example of always, I’m just going to scroll down past the terms of reference or whatever, terms and conditions and just click agree, and then I’m done. This is my new thing that I’m going to follow. Yeah. No, it’s absolutely true that and poor us, it’s a really weird time to be alive. Your headphones can connect to a computer in another end of the house and broadcast you begging for mercy, and you didn’t even mean to do that. But I digress. So if there’s something secret going on that explains how strange and alien and fractured everything feels, like if people are telling us about it, then someone is still in charge. And if someone is still in charge, then there’s still meaning and hope and some sort of moral framework that we’re working within. And I think just longing for mom and dad to tell us it’s going to be okay, to say there’s a reason for all of these things, and it’s not random and it’s not chaos, I can see how we long for that.

Martha Beck:
And we actually, I think the desperate longing for certainty actually sends people out looking for these patterns for evidence that will bring on the feeling of apophenia, that burst of dopamine and oxytocin. “Oh, thank God, a moment of relief in my brain.” But as you always say about addiction, you can never get enough of something that almost works. And when I have been deep in apophenia territory where I’ve gone off the trail of evidence, evidence that I’ve seen with my own eyes and ears and evidence that feels true in my entire nervous system, we as animals are far more able to detect something that’s not true than we are as thinkers.

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
As computers, we’ll go with anything, any apophenia source. We’re like, “Okay.” But whenever I’ve done that, there’s been a feeling in my gut that I was off track. And this is coming back to nature. And the terror of that was, “What I have to acknowledge is the worldview that is so tasty to me right now feels wrong and bad, and I don’t have a substitute except uncertainty.”

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
And it was when I meditated myself into it, there’s a psychologist named Andrew Newberg who talks about his own experience of desperately seeking truth. And then one day realizing that he was in a sea. He said a sea of infinite doubt where anything could be true, but he wasn’t really sure. And instead of being terrifying, it was warm and it was resonant, and it actually made him a scientist. He went out to look for things that felt that way. Even from the doubt, he could then test with his own experience, the feeling of truth and the feeling of falsehood. You could say, this is six of one and a half dozen of another. Right? You feel good about one, you feel good about the other. There’s a different feeling. And I was kind of trying to get to it. It’s not apophenia, it just feels normal. It feels normal when I’m not imagining conspiracy theories when I’m just going, “Well, I don’t know.” But boy, then when I’m scared, I look for the authority figure and I look for the oxytocin hit of being bonded. I want to not be alone, I want to not be uncertain, and I don’t want to be lonely.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And I think, again, to put it out of the actual interpersonal context and into the online context, the combination of lonely people looking for hope and community, even if it’s an illusion, when you add that in and then you add the kind of parasocial vibes that social media creates, there’s this sense of, “I have a peer group who accepts me.”

Martha Beck:
Although Fisher says in this book, and again, I have to go look at his research and see if the studies are true, but what he says is that these lonely people who really lock into extremist echo chambers, they feel like they’re getting friends, but they actually grow more lonely over time. The more deeply they dig down into their strange, angry, protesting little group, they get more lonely.

Rowan Mangan:
And then we think about critical thinking as some sort of defense against this going overboard into these conspiracy theories and stuff. But you can find so many “critical thinkers” who fall into the cultural biases, the whole science thing of, even though my whole process is supposed to be about testing hypotheses, there’s just—

Martha Beck:
And acknowledging uncertainty.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s just so many, such a strong cultural bent in science so often to just shut down anything that sounds—

Martha Beck:
A little iffy, not part of the dogma. There’s a brilliant researcher named Lisa Miller, I think she’s at Columbia now, but she just ran some statistics on huge national surveys and showed that this one variable, which was participation in some kind of religious activity, had a huge positive effect on all these other factors in people’s lives. And she presented this with great joy and pride because it was a massive effect. It was not small. And her fellow scientists looked at it in dour silence. And then they would say to her, “Wow, it’ll be really good when you find the hidden variable that accounts for this finding.” They wouldn’t just go, “Huh.” But on the other hand, easily, easily convince people that a very sketchy study that confirms their bias is true, whether they’re scientists or not, we’re all vulnerable.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. Okay. So given that all of these tendencies that we’re describing are kind of reflections of the human psyche, externalized or exaggerated, how do we come to our senses in this crazy, crazy world?

Martha Beck:
I will tell you in just a second.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. So we’re talking about how do we come to our senses within the war of the worldviews and the algorithms and the conspiracy theories, and I just have a few little thoughts and then I’ll hand you over to the master.

Martha Beck:
Oh, please.

Rowan Mangan:
I think we have to be wary of apophenia because a lot of dopamine-producing activities, it gives you the sense of a quick win. And so to recognize that and go, “I think that might be a little bit of that. That might not be me in my right senses.” The conspiracy theory thing’s interesting. I think there’s people, this is the problem with ideas of these vast conspiracies is people are not that good at stuff. They’re not very organized, and they cannot keep things secret.

Martha Beck:
That’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
If they were drinking baby blood, they would tell their friends.

Martha Beck:
They would. They literally would.

Rowan Mangan:
And someone would call the papers, someone would put it on Reddit. So that’s that. So I think when we have that, “Holy shit, I’m all alone. I don’t understand anything. There is no voice of authority,” we have to come back to we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Find it in ourselves, be the helpers, be the calm spot. And in trying to embody it, I think we find it. What do you think?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I think that the way to do this, to find our way through all this morass of misinformation and apophenia, we have to become trackers of our own tracking devices. So when you’re tracking a rhino, I remember, well, for example, once in South Africa, I said to Boyd, “I found a lion footprint for sure.” And he’s like, “You’re sure?” And I was like, “Yeah, it was huge.” He was like, “I think it was a hyena.” I was like, “No, it’s immense.” Now I know that it’s about half the size of a lion track. I had to go, “Oh, nevermind.” And it was so embarrassing, but I knew how.

Rowan Mangan:
Hey, Marty, we’ve all been there. Who hasn’t mistaken a lion track for a hyena track?

Martha Beck:
Vice versa. But the point is, I learned that it was okay to be wrong, even though it stings and that I learn when I acknowledge that I was wrong. And I did that in the cases that I mentioned. When we finally left the “compassionate doctor” and went to a doctor who was really, truly compassionate, there was a totally different feeling, right? And it was coming from all our sense cues and all our experiences of the office and the nurse and everything. There were all these little, a variety of sources of information that all resonated with: This is an actually compassionate doctor. And for example, when I realized, okay, some people had lied about certain things in business, but as you said, they’re not evil geniuses and they can’t do things that well, and they can’t keep secrets. So I don’t have to assume that there’s a deep, dark conspiracy, right?

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And I think that where we need to check in is not in our head, which is going to be where the dopamine, where we’re feeling the dopamine, the oxytocin is a little bit harder to track because it is more in the body. But if you are feeling it down here instead of an exciting, like the fizzy casino dopamine vibe versus just the piece of simple truth.

Martha Beck:
I like to say, it’s like there’s a different feeling between a mind that is clenched onto a worldview and a mind that is free and balanced. And if you can find that feeling, you can learn to trust life and nature and yourself. And the way I demonstrate it is if I hold my palm up and I put a pen in it like this, it’s easy to hold because—

Rowan Mangan:
For those who are listening, which is most of our people, Marty Beck, she’s holding a—

Martha Beck:
I have a pen in my hand.

Rowan Mangan:
She is holding her palm upright and resting a pen on it.

Martha Beck:
A pen is on my hand. Now, if I have to grip the pen, I turn my hand upside down. I have to grip the pen because gravity will make it fall if I don’t hold onto it. So if you’re holding on to a viewpoint and you’re always reiterating it and going over, that’s the clenching. If there’s something that’s simply true in the world and you let go of it, it will go on being true. You don’t have to put any effort into that. You don’t have to create the fizzy casino dopamine vibe that keeps you going back and going back to press that button. It’s peaceful and the world keeps playing out in a way that feels consistent.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, and I have one more, which is if you feel like in order to show people the truth, you need an oversized pin board and a lot of red yarn, that’s a clue that it might not be right.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. If you feel violent toward anyone who simply varies from you in the tiniest bit, you may want to open your mind on that. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I think so. So let’s just all collectively continue to consider more than one point of view.

Martha Beck:
And allow other points of view to come in, even when the other person seems to be objectively insane.

Rowan Mangan:
So yeah, we’re going to cultivate our feeling of truth, and we’re going to our, yeah, stay…

Martha Beck:
Wild.

Rowan Mangan: 
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