CRS001 What Is Real?

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the cozy robot show [Music] well hi everybody welcome to the cozy robot show this is the first ever episode and i'm mike mccarg and this is a show about how we understand the world and how we relate to our feelings which is so important in the world right now and we have already run into our first technical problem with the cozy robot show which is that the event we had scheduled disappeared so uh in order to air on time i just went live on restream which means i don't know what the title is or where this might be showing up so if you're on uh the existing event there might be no video but we've got folks out there tanner who helps us organize all of our media and work in the science mic world uh is getting the right link out to everybody as fast as possible so i'm so glad you're here and i see folks uh saying hello on facebook so it is good to see everyone and uh the cozy robot show is not a youtube show or a facebook show or just a podcast uh this is a space that we want to be available wherever you have the room in your life so we're on youtube we're on facebook we'll be on instagram tv we'll be on all that stuff and the goal here is just to create a space where we can talk about the world and we can talk about our feelings and uh you know the cozy robots is a community there's over 700 of us already and the cozy robots are the people who pick the topics for the show they interact with me and we'll all get together on discourse as soon as this show is over to uh kind of talk about the experience so if you'd like to join us you can learn how to do that by going to cozyrobots.com okay it's so good to see everyone here and tonight we want to talk about our media and conspiracy these conspiracy theories because it is getting really hard to tell what is real in the world anymore and there's a lot of really i don't know understandable problems a lot of really um valid concerns with media in our world today i mean i can think of three that are especially important first institutional skepticism is pretty justifiable historically uh the institutions that we rely on are made of people and people have agendas and biases and often a desire for power and influence over other people but the failures of our institutions are even more profound than that our institutions have really racist histories and sexist histories and have a history of exploiting people who don't have the power to oppose them i mean think about science i love science but weird science is a very real problem and i don't mean the delightful 1980 80s film featuring kelly lebrock when i say weird i mean an acronym which is western educated industrialized rich and democratic and what that means is when scientists conduct research often what they're doing is studying people who live in the west who have a college education who are from an industrialized society are personally wealthy and live in a democratic state but the biases in science actually get worse than that i think of the tuskegee syphilis study that started in 1932 and 600 black men were told by the u.s public health service that they were going to get free health care can you believe that in 1932 we were talking about free health care in the united states but instead of getting free health care they were offered a false diagnosis of bad blood which was a colloquial term for kind of generalized poor health and they were treated with aspirin and placebo now some of them who were in the control group they didn't have any health problem at all but others the larger group had syphilis a very serious infection and the u.s public health service encouraged local physicians not to treat these patients these study participants so in this case these men were allowed to have untreated syphilis without their knowledge or their consent so that the government could learn more about this disease the problem when we try to have an intelligent conversation about media and what we can trust is that cover-ups are real corruption in institutions is real and because of this our trust in the institutions that we rely on erodes and meanwhile we face more information than ever and we're left alone to try to parse what we can and can't trust without support and without resources and fair enough brandon uh it was curable in the course of the study they learned that penicillin could treat uh syphilis so thanks for that comment i do see all your comments by the way as you are watching so is any wonder that people turn to conspiracy theories to make sense of the world the second problem i think about when i think about how we trust and rely on media is the digital democratization of media and what i mean is we had an old world of media think newspapers and radio and television where gatekeepers were in tight control of what perspectives were available to the public and this had its own very real challenges by the way i don't pine to return to a world in which wealthy and white men have total control over what we see and hear in the media that kind of sounds like the world we live in right now almost but things have gotten better because of new media and the shift from old media to new media was one in which companies realized there was profit to be made in allowing people to create and consume their own media and i lived through both the first wave of the web and the second web called web 2.0 or the social web and it seemed like a media utopia it seemed like we were moving into a more just and perfect human society but honestly i was surprised how quickly that utopia turned dystopian because for-profit enterprises realizes that they could program machines to look at the content people were creating and curate it in a way that increased engagement and engagement is a huge problem with our trust in media today now when i talk about engagement what i'm talking about is when we stay on a given site or service and scroll i mean you know if you go on instagram or facebook or tick tock you can scroll all day it'll never stop and when we engage companies make money by selling ads so of course reading the news really is engagement connecting with old friends online is engagement and both of those things are wonderful and productive activities so what do i mean when i say engagement is a problem well when engagement is your only success metric guess what moral outrage is engagement in fact it's one of the most potent ways to get people and get to engage with an online platform hate speech is engagement as the american president so definitely demonstrates spreading misinformation and lies still creates this wonderful engagement that companies want with donald trump and twitter someone has a tiger by the tail but it's not clear who the tiger is in that analogy and even more pressingly i think about the kenosha guard gang associated so terribly with violence in middle america there was a facebook group associated with that and after the event facebook claimed that they had taken that group down but further reporting by buzzfeed news revealed what facebook never took the page down at all moderators from within the group took the page down themselves because when engagement creates money it gives you a strange set of incentives that warp human behaviors in way that make media hard to trust and the third and final problem i want to share with you is the way that media conglomeration meets algorithms the rise of digital media really hurt traditional news organizations they weren't able to rely on the ads and subscriptions that kept them in business and so they rushed into a new era of history and as they failed large companies bought up their brands and the trust that went along with them and this created a real problem with incentives one of my favorite books is a book called the honest truth about dishonesty by a man named as dan ariely he's a a behavioral economic economist of world renown and in his book he realized the experiment that if you give people a game to play and they can cheat just a little bit they'll do so often because if you cheat a little bit you can maintain a sense of positive self-image and when he looked at that at a larger context dan ariely realized that things like corporate fraud enron major scandals that cost people their retirements could be explained by so-called good people doing small bad things over and over for example if you steal a pencil from the office you don't feel like a bad person that's a small minor moral transgression but one pencil is no big deal billions of pencils is world-changing and so when we look at even good and traditionally trustworthy media platforms we're learning that they are starting to use exploitive tactics to increase their viewership or their readership in order to sell more advertising impressions if i think about the headlines i often read in media even from publications i trust the kind of click bait or sensationalistic headlines that get you to click because they seem outrageous have become all too common and create a cycle of arousal when we're trying to simply become informed and when newsroom success becomes measured in quarterly growth of profits and not in accuracy in reporting and people's jobs are on the line is it any wonder that media institutions look at the success of social media companies and try to borrow that success through engagement by flirting with or even outright endorsing radical and dangerous conspiracy theories like q anon friends we are living in a golden age of conspiracy theories and the stakes are both global and existential if i think about the coronavirus the pandemic that we're all living through right now here are four very popular widely held conspiracy theories one coveted 19 was created by bill gates to depopulate the earth that is a real thing people discuss online and in person i've had friends raise the idea to me cautiously second the idea that covet 19 is a chinese bio weapon that was released either accidentally or on purpose third american democrats are grossly exaggerating the dangers of sar cov2 in order to remove donald trump from office and fourth that 5g cell networks cause covid19 millions of people subscribe to at least one of those ideas about the pandemic and these all show us that conspiracy theories start with a grain of truth because it is true wealthy interests do behave in ways that exploit people bio weapons exist and they really are dangerous politicians work hard to control narratives and spin information there's a grain of truth that we face in our daily lives and these conspiracies they also show us surreptitiously the way that a crisis impacts our critical thinking skills all of these conspiracy theories were able to propagate so readily because of a global pandemic research tells us that when we are under stress and friends we are all under enormous and continuous stress today when we're in that situation the instinctive parts of our brain gain more control over our actions and our feelings and therefore our beliefs when we're anxious we're more likely to think in conspiratorial ways and believe conspiracy theories and when we think about the conspiracy theories i just mentioned about bill gates or the chinese government or 5g networks they all take this incredibly complex nuance difficult to understand and relate to global pandemic that is caused by an utterly indifferent virus into a conspiracy that has an identifiable relatable and understandable enemy you see if these conspiracy theories were true then there's both an identifiable reason for our suffering which gives it meaning and a hope to defeat it if bill gates created covet 19 then perhaps bill gates could be persuaded to give out the secret antidote and believe it or not conspiracy theories have even bigger stakes today than how we relate to the biggest public health challenge in a century buzzfeed news recently renamed q anon from a conspiracy theory to a collective delusion something unprecedented in media and here's why q anon is no longer a single conspiracy theory sure it started with the idea that a pedophile ring of democrats run the world but it's expanded and is expanding every day things like black lives matter and antifa antifa are terrorist organizations our ideas you often see put forward by q anon supporters they put forward the notion that donald trump is in a clandestine war with a global cabal of child sex traffickers and they're working to expand into other areas to weave in anti-vaxxers and flat earthers kind of a meta conspiracy an ultimate conspiracy to show us that nothing in the world can be trusted ironically other than the people who advocate q and on beliefs and q anon has both incited violence recently and gotten their first representative elected to the u.s congress in a heavily conservative district in georgia this is by no means a fringe movement and that means the stakes here are very serious and that's just talking about covet 19 and the right-wing political movements in the united states but the one-two punch of erosion in media trust and the proliferation of conspiracy theories is also impairing our ability to vaccinate against preventable diseases to create functional political coalitions to manage the challenges our societies face on local national and global scales and also and i would argue most importantly to mitigate the impacts of climate change because many conspiracy theorists are obsessed with the notion that climate change is not actually happening which is news to us in 121 degree los angeles i can tell you so how can we meaningfully respond to conspiracy theories both in our own lives and with our friends and family well the first thing is if people are more likely to believe conspiracy theories when they're anxious that means we need to name anxiety when we feel it when we name our own anxiety we feel it less when we notice other people are anxious and de-escalate it's easier to have productive conversations about the challenges in our world we can create inclusive spaces with our friends and family because research has shown that feelings of isolation and alienation make people much more likely to believe conspiracy theories if you believe a conspiracy theory you think you've found a hidden truth that no one else knows like oh my gosh the moon landing was faked everybody believes the wrong thing and that creates a powerful sense of identity and belonging so in my life and work i regularly name and confront conspiracy theories but i'm always careful to be inclusive towards the people who believe those theories so while i believe that the anti-vaxx conspiracy theory is a significant threat to public health i also know and name that people who believe anti-vaxx conspiracy theories are actually trying to be good parents in a world with overwhelming amounts of conflicting information and when i validate their good parenthood and their attempts to be good parents it's easier to call people back into reasonable conversation and keep them out of seeking refuge as a persecuted minority for having fringe conspiracy beliefs another thing we can do is repeat facts but we have to be careful to avoid the backfire effect when we confront people with information about ideas that are close to their sense of identity or their worldview people can generate incredible cognitive resistance to any idea so if we learn to challenge conspiracy theory ideas without challenging someone's identity you'll find you can have much more productive conversations i've seen this happen in my own life and it's also true with me sometimes i notice i'll read something that seems very seductive seems very interesting and i stop and pay attention often what's happening is i've confronted something that makes me feel validated in the way that i see the world and those are the things we need to question the most deeply finally and this is really important we can ask questions that are both empathetic and analytical here's what i mean with genuine curiosity ask who do you trust and why what would it take for you to accept that a given source was reliable what makes the people behind this theory more credible than other sources you will find that when you give people the space to answer these questions they will expose the contradictions and shoddy evidence behind their own beliefs and if you remain supportive and listening throughout that process they'll often admit that you can have an important conversation especially when you do these things over time naming the cycle of anxiety and de-escalating creating inclusion repeating facts and asking empathetic and analytical questions but there is good news here it's not all doom and gloom there are real positives to digital media so even though we see all these conspiracy theories proliferating i want us to remember that disabled people find community online they were not able to find in the world before and trends like black lives matter and me too have shown us the real transformational power that can happen when social media are activated in ways that impact the entire world and so i believe by learning to analyze media critically support others to do the same and do all that without jumping headlong into conspiracy theories we can keep the good and reduce the bad of our modern media and i just want you to know it is so fun to be here with you live right now i just can't believe it it feels so neat and thank you for being here um so you know maybe let's get practical let's talk about some of the techniques we can use to de-escalate the rising sense of anxiety we so often feel when discussing difficult topics when we are confronted with the difficulties of the world so often our bodies respond we're not always aware of that by the way there are many times i feel like i'm focused or hard-working when i'm actually entering a cycle of overwhelming stress and anxiety we get used to feelings and our bodies create a new baseline but it's not until we confront feelings of anxiety and create a moment of peace that we realize just how much tension we're carrying i'm going to ask you right now to check on your shoulders or your neck or your back or your belly do things feel tight there maybe sometimes you feel like you have a burning feeling in your stomach maybe sometimes your cheeks or your hands feel hot maybe some of those things are true right now because we've often been talking about such difficult things in our world and so i have found a very helpful grounding exercise that i learned from therapists that help me in those moments i realize i'm entering an acute state of anxiety and that's called a five four three two one grounding exercise what does it mean it means we look for five things that i can see four things i can touch three things i can hear two things that i can smell and one thing that i can taste around me in the world right now because neuroanatomically when we're anxious our brain is focused on the future not the here and now so to get back to the here and now we just ask our bodies what's going on so i'd encourage you to try this right now what are five things that you can see around you i can see a quarter and a little metal egg i can see my mug i can see all of you chatting in the chat below which is a lot of fun i see things all around me as i name those things you'll find your attention gets more and more here in this moment what about four things you can touch physically in your environment they might be some of the same things you just name that you can see and that's okay i often like to as i think about that i could touch them actually touch them and see how they feel uh quarters are really fun in coins because they have so many little textures one side is pretty smooth another is pretty rough but when i pay attention there's little divots all in this seemingly smooth face three things that you can hear what can you hear right now you probably hear my voice i hear it too i hear the hissing of my air conditioning system i feel the hum of the preamplifier that's bringing my voice to you right now now this intentionally gets more difficult when you smell this one can be really hard we get used to smells around so we've gone in this order on purpose in increasing levels of challenge i can smell the uh detergent in my shirt i put it on just to be here with you right now trying to look fancy for the camera i can smell the oil that i use to keep my beard nice and silky smooth and then one thing you can taste there is just the most subtle scent of an almond right now from a snack that i had earlier today and as you move through this five four three two one cycle see touch hear smell taste it's almost impossible to remain in a state of extreme anxiety activation it's so grounding now what can happen though is you can go oh my gosh i can't remember what are the five things what's the order and that can make you more anxious so here's an abbreviated version that's helped me this is just my opinion i've never heard a therapist validate this i still do five things i can see i can always remember that if you have a visual disability just do five things you can hear instead and then three things i can touch and i can remember five c three touch all the time and when i'm anxious and if i get anxious i can't remember five four three two one then i just go five three and move on and when we do that we can create the space we need in order to feel more grounded and less anxious even in the most difficult of times and we've thought a lot on the cozy robot show about how we want to go through things that are practical and helpful and useful and so if we're going to talk about media literacy we thought it'd be really fun to go through a couple of real articles and show you different techniques you can use to ascertain what's real and reliable in the world of media so this is a segment we call news and noise [Music] all right this week we are going to look at articles from two bellwether uh platforms uh that used to be kind of print media and have moved more into the digital space newsweek.com and forbes.com and i'd probably start there uh there is in almost every print media institution you recommend recognize different operations for online and print even for something like the new york times which is very well resourced compared to most reporting places these days there are still separate editorial desks for the print desk and the online desk that's certainly going to be true for newsweek and forbes as well as there's a different publication cycle for print than there is for the more real-time ongoing digital space and as we kind of look at this together i thought it'd be fun to start with newsweek we have a piece here i'm going to put it up on the screen so you can see it and i'm going to scoot over so that my face isn't covered and in this piece it's called seniors went to trump by 53 in 2016. mccarthy warren's party could lose them without mail-in voting and i'm leaving it here for a moment so you can look at the masthead for a reason you know when i think about the reliability of a given piece of media i always start with the masthead or the brand if you think about the history of newsweek it was a titan of print publishing with an impressive multi-decade print run but they really struggled in the digital age they end up being bought by the washington post and then sold again they were a digital only publication for several years but the print magazine did return in 2014 and because of that very long heritage newsweek's name and logo often create a sense of legitimacy and trust you know the name newsweek could it sound any more official i don't think so but guess what this is public information that is is verifiable and reported newsweek doesn't use fact checkers and has not since the late 60s can you believe that newsweek doesn't use fact checkers which is a very common practice in news media and not only that newsweek is currently owned by a company called ibt and is reported by the new york times and mother jones to have ties with a fundamentalist christian sect in korea so you know these are these are two pieces of information that if we're thinking if what we want from news is a limited amount of bias uh editorial coverage and someone doing the homework of making sure things are factual a company that has questionable ownership ties and does not employ fact checkers well we have a couple of knocks against it right out of the gate i say that so you'll know i always carefully evaluate anything i see in newsweek for that reason but on the other hand newsweek does have editors the articles are date stamped and writer credits are listed and these are all important signs for a piece of media if you come across a piece of media that does not have a date on it and there is no writer listed those are huge red flags for credibility now the post we're looking at here uh is not listed as an opinion piece so they are they are positioning this as factual reporting which immediately puts me at a higher level of skepticism that if i'm reading someone's opinion everyone has a right to their opinion not no one has a right to their own facts and uh when i look at this piece and kind of scrolled through it what i noticed immediately was a lot of meta reporting or reporting on reporting this piece by newsweek was citing axios which is kind of a political website and cnn which everybody knows cnn and so you know there's not a lot of original reporting in speech although there appears to be some as i look down in towards the bottom of the piece i found that there was this uh quote from two political scientists michael barber and john holben and that appears to not i looked at all the links that were referenced in this piece and those appear to be uh original reporting to this reporter but i noticed that there were paraphrases and not direct quotes that's always something i could kind of look at why not get a direct quote now sometimes people ramble or whatever but whenever you have just paraphrasing you're getting a reporter's take on what the source said so that's something i always kind of pay attention to and then the other thing i look at and i do this every article i read believe it or not is i come up and i see who it's by and then i i just tap on that name so this is a piece by jenny fink and when we look at her title she's the chief reporter of breaking news wow so it's a staff position a little bio here and then when you look through the content on that page you'll see that there's really not a lot of sensational headlines there's a lot of factual reporting and so when i look my lack of confidence in newsweek here is getting kind of balanced by what seems to be a hard working and responsible journalist if you really want to understand how hard-working journalists are click on their bios and see how many articles they often post a day wow it's grueling so newsweek starts at a c minus at the best case for me when i look at it but this article by jenny fink is at least a b plus i'd probably give it an a if she were more open about the scoop that axios has that starts as the premise for the whole piece scoop style journalism it doesn't lack credibility but uh is just a step past gossip reporting uh in the political beats so uh although the axios piece is certainly uh sourced uh and says so it is positioned in the axios world as a scoop article to inform the reader and that level of nuance got lost here in translation so again overall a b plus possible a so that's our piece in newsweek and um the next piece we're gonna look at is in forbes now forbes is another famous i mean super famous name in media and they were an old media business bellwether that targeted uh you know businesses people uh who own businesses people who are executives or or people with at the salary level in a company is the kind of people who write for people who own stocks or aspire to own stocks and again i like to know the media of a given publication so forbes as the digital world came in they made a lot of radical changes really early they were one of the first to embrace what's known as the contributor model which basically means just about anybody can post anybody can share in this given media it was a very simple process to become a contributor reportedly at one point forbes had over 2500 active contributors now that's not bad in and of itself but it is difficult to provide editorial oversight for 2500 people who are effectively freelancers uh than it is to provide uh editorial oversight for reporters that are sitting you know at a desk with you or have regular editorial meetings and i will i do want to say the last couple years probably since about 2018 that forbes has been moving away from that contributor model and back more towards a more traditional structure but i just wanted to say uh that was there for context and then as we look at this piece specifically uh it's a very different style of article it's light on prose it is effectively the way this is structured it's daniel cassidy writing who's listed as forbes staff there's a top line and the top line is basically executive summary it's a paragraph about what this piece is saying and why then it's broken into key facts which is a literal bulleted list where they cite where they got this information and then finally a list of information in this case how much time before election day different states will be counting ballots then it includes some tweets from donald trump now that what's interesting is uh i did not see this earlier so either my ad blocker was stopping twitter from being embedded which is possible or there has been an edit to this piece since i looked at it and then a key background where there's some background information so this doesn't read like a traditional news piece which i don't enjoy personally i don't like this style of writing but it's very effective for the targeted audience of business people and executives i can see how this structure is helpful and how daniel cassidy would be delivering pieces like this and when i looked at daniel's catalog of articles what i saw was a lot of well-sourced reporting very little you know sensationalism a partisan spin and most of his pieces are in this same format this kind of executive summary and i'm going to give this piece an a uh it is well reported if anything gets a little light on context daniel doesn't tell you why you should care about this very much other than a lot of people are going to vote by mail but there's literally no analysis really about what the different timelines mean the viewer is left to make their own choices there uh if i had to choose i would choose more facts with less analysis uh over you know facts with analysis that isn't disclosed as such so daniel in an age of understaffed news desks you are really giving factual reporting a good name here and i think that's a theme i really wanted to cover here now what news and noise is something you'll see a lot on the cozy robot show but in this particular case in a week when we're talking about whether we can trust or not trust institutional media both jenny fink and daniel cassidy show us that they're still hardworking reporters who are trying to create trustworthy media and content even in corporate mastuds that have a heavy emphasis on traffic and the cozy robot show could not happen without the support of sponsors so i'd like to tell you about one of my favorite sponsors right now and that's betterhelp.com betterhelp is an online counseling service that i personally use they've helped me work through some really challenging issues with codependency and trauma and betterhelp is set up in a way that they can assess your needs and match you with your own licensed and professional therapist and what i really like about betterhelp is whether there's a pandemic or not i don't like driving i don't like parking i don't like waiting rooms and i love that i can talk to my therapist in the safety and privacy of my whole home your therapist is available through text messages through chat through video calls and voice calls it's convenient it's professional and it's affordable there's so many people now signing up for better help that they're working hard to recruit additional counselors in all 50 states it's available for clients worldwide and even available on a sliding scale if you face income limitations so if you'd like to get started on your own mental health journey today with a licensed professional therapist you can get 10 percent off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com sciencemike again that's betterhelp.com sciencemic join the 1 million people already using those services today finally here's the good stuff y'all the cozy robot show uh was born out of another program called ask science mike and i gosh i love that show we did it for years and the the foundation that that show was built on was people sending questions and i responded to them and we are keeping that tradition alive right here on the cozy robot show with a segment that we call ask mike [Music] about hi mike my question for you about conspiracy theories is whether or not you think that there's a correlation between people who believe them and people who are raised in conservative christian environments the people that i grew up with in the south tend to strongly hold these conspiracy theories and but locally i live in massachusetts now it's very progressive here and yet my conservative christian friends here who are well educated um who are otherwise reasonable people believe these conspiracy theories and it makes me wonder if what they were taught about the bible being incongruent with science i don't know maybe it helps them to suspend reality in some way it's just it's frustrating because you can't really reason with them um so any light you can shed on that would be very helpful thank you gosh what a wonderful question um and there's a surprising answer here you know the question is are evangelicals more likely to believe conspiracy theories probably not what can you believe i'm saying that yeah i'm saying it you know when we look at research guess who's likely to believe conspiracy theories almost everyone statistically um a given person almost certainly believes at least one conspiracy theory there's a lot of belief on the political left in the united states for example that people on the political right are more likely to have conspiracy theory style thinking it's just not true we all have a predilection to fall into conspiracy theories and that's because conspiracy theories spread based on social trust if you trust other people then your beliefs are formed by social relationships and conspiracy theories move that way the first time we hear something we kind of ignore it the second time we recognize it and the third time we start to believe it and if we hear it from someone we trust one two or all three of those times we are much much more likely to believe it now that's all true and the scope of conspiracy theories that evangelicals believe tends to be more dramatic i grew up evangelical and i still have a lot of affection and appreciation for what i learned in the evangelical church but it's also true that i was taught to deny verifiable well-sourced information in service of theological beliefs i was taught that the bible was the ultimate authority for all information in the world and so when the bible spoke about science it had to be right and therefore for years of my life i believed that the earth was less than twenty thousand years old i believed that evolution via natural selection could not exist as it violated the creation poetry of genesis i believe that all of humanity was wiped out in a global flood that god sent because of people's wickedness and all those all of those pieces of scripture are there and do in fact tell us important lessons about the world they are not factual at the time that human beings have been on the earth it's never fully flooded that's just not true at all the diversity of life we have on this planet is the result of a natural process known as evolution via natural selection and the earth is not thousands of years old it's billions of years old and the the skills you learn to accept those ideas actually help train you to have more information literacy and to think more critically and so i believe you can draw a straight line from biblical literalism to creation mythologies to the anti-vaxx movement to the opposition of climate change and the rejection of the simple fact that there is a virus called sars cov2 that is behind a global pandemic that has cost the lives of likely over two hundred thousand americans so far life is hard life is so hard and the world is so complicated and so overwhelming and often so difficult and i absolutely understand that we need ways to find meaning and purpose and to navigate the challenges of the world and evangelical christianity would not be so successful not only in america but across the globe if it didn't excel at providing a sense of meaning purpose and identity if it wasn't almost ideally suited to rapidly form community but the trouble with being human is our evolved path has taught us that the most important thing that can happen in life is that we belong with other people our brains are shaped not to learn what is true or factual about the world but instead what will keep us in community with other people what will make us belong and when we create systems of belief that so aggressively create social pressure if you don't conform with a belief system and literally train people against critical thinking for the sake of social coercion and i would argue probably at this point manipulation we're seeing an increasing number of evangelical leaders who are obviously corrupt and exploiting their genuinely well meaning audiences so the correlation between conspiracy theories and evangelicalism is not whether or not we believe conspiracy theories we are all prone to that it is the degree to which that world view is uniquely and powerfully structured to move people into an anti-fact perspective where we believe those things that are comfortable to our community at the expense of ourselves and our health and our communities thank you so much for that question hey mike my mother has been listening to televangelists and they have convinced her that black lives matter is tearing this country apart how do i talk to her since i support black lives matter and i think they're doing very good and necessary work any suggestions would be greatly appreciated john thank you so much for a timely and important question and it means so much to me that you care about engaging with your mother you know that's getting hard we are facing real divides along ideologies in america and around the world there's rising movements of white nationalism and right-wing conspiracies all across the world i read a piece today about the rising popularity of donald trump with the right-wing movement in germany the far-right movement in germany and because so many of us were changing the way we see the world we're seeing the ways in which the stories we learned about the world as children weren't accurate we're realizing that racism is real and it has a significant impact on people we care about people we know personally and there's just a sense of fairness in each person you know it seems unfair to me the way my life is different than the life of a black american and that makes it hard when someone gosh pushes back against things we've only started to realize recently ideas that are new to us and go against our innate sense of what is right and what is wrong and when that happens in the context of family it's all the more difficult because these are the people who loved us and raised us it in many ways shaped our moral code so it's confusing and disorienting when younger people and families are sympathetic empathetic and getting activated into the black lives matter movement and the generation before them stands in active opposition so i might recommend that we start with a simple ascertation of fact because when people oppose black lives media it's often not because they're terrible people it's because their opinions are being shaped by some form of media which we've talked a lot about together black lives matter is very complicated and so it's easy to remove the nuance and create a straw man a facsimile of the movement that you can take down if you're a correspondent an opinion uh talking head on fox news or if you're on a q a anon conspiracy uh message board online the fact is there is no such thing as black lives matter as this big chunk there's no black lives matter company there's no single black lives matter organization black lives matter is several things first of all i think most of all it's a grassroots movement started by black women to push back against the notion that racism is over so commonly held in america it's a grassroots movement it's a powerful slogan as well it's evocative it gets people talking and the slogan is in many ways distinct from the grassroots movement and when black lives matter does become more structured it does so in a frankly very different way than is typically done in the west black lives matter when it is structured is structured in local generally unaffiliated chapters that are made of justice advocates and consuming community organizers there's a black lives matter los angeles black lives matter new york black lives matter and then different neighborhoods of brooklyn right so as you go through all these different places minneapolis wherever that group using the black lives matter name is unique to that community and really doesn't have anything to do structurally with other movements of the same name across the country so when we're you're against the black lives matter movement what are you actually against are you against the idea that black lives matter well i hope not because if you are we have a very serious conversation to have are you against people who believe something making grassroots movements to make it real if so i hope you don't live in the united states which began as a grassroots movement itself against the british are you against local organizers and justice advocates taking a stand in their community so we can start by saying if this is what black lives matter is what in black lives matter are you against and you'll often find either false statements or rare things taken out of context or things that weren't even black lives matter to begin with there's a gentrifying happening right now in the black lives matter movement as more and more white people get involved which is good white people need to be involved in the work of the destruction of white supremacy but white people are bringing white tactics and doing things that black lives matter organizers would never endorse black lives matter ultimately is an acknowledgement of what the inevitable response when someone says black lives matter is all lives matter as if the person saying black lives matter doesn't believe that too of course we all believe that all lives matter i don't want to spend time with people who don't believe that human lives matter but if my house is on fire and i run outside and i yell my house is on fire i want you to pick up a bucket or call 9-1-1 i don't want you to tell me that all houses matter because if my house is not on fire maybe now is not the moment to assert the value of my home black lives matter is accused of tearing the country apart for a reason our country relies on systemic racism and the exploitation of by of people of color but especially black people and especially indigenous and native americans american history accurately stated must acknowledge that we took and we i mean the nation i didn't do this but i benefited from it our nation took land that other people were living on native americans and then cultivated that land using the labor of enslaved people and so often in america we say that you should never give people a handout but things like the gi bill after world war ii land grants as the country expanded towards the west gosh there have been a lot of handouts in american history and inevitably those handouts have gone to whom white families the wealth generated by that land and that labor gets passed along family lines which again are white and that creates a lasting and massive gap in family wealth between white families and black families so white lives matter and black lives matter but only one set of those lives is getting given a head start with family wealth and that's to say nothing of the horrific gaps we see in educational access in housing in health care or criminal justice the statistics in all of those cases are irrefutable and undeniable the wealth imparted to white families produces different outcomes and different standards of living to me john it's a red herring to talk about whether or not black lives matter is tearing the country apart the question is can we acknowledge that there are different standards of living along racial and ethnic lines in this country and around the world and are we willing to do something about that or not so as for me i support the slogan the grassroots movement and the local chapters of black lives matter and every effort they make to ultimately prove all lives really do matter including black lives well as you can see the show is going to involve you every week so if you'd like to send in a video question for me to respond to you can go to cozyrobots.com ask mike you can see the list of topics that are coming so you don't have to be like gosh what do i want to ask a question about we'll let you know where we're going to be going in the future you can check that url anytime you'd like cozyrobots.com ask mike next week we're going to talk about the power of play and my good friends rhett and link will be here to join us for that one so stay tuned i'd love for you to be here for that thanks so much for watching our show today now for all of you folks out there who are cozy robots if you'd like to join us you can join our patreon which is uh you can find it at cozyrobots.com and you'll get access to additional videos and content plus an invitation to our discord where i'm going to be hanging out in just a few minutes also wherever you're watching right now make sure you like and subscribe so you know when these happen in the future and then follow and like on other social media channels as well and the cozy robot show is made by the most talented and supportive team of people in the entire world and i'd like to thank them all first of all each and every one of the cozy robots who make this show possible to do every week i'd like to thank the producers tanner hearn victory palmisano and greg nordin the cozy robot music is by my wonderful daughters madison mccarg and macy mccarg production support was offered by andrew golucky production support and my assistant is caitlin hermstad designed by sydney smith motion graphic design by landon satterfield set design by jesse lane interiors and my wardrobe stylist and craft services [Laughter] and ruler of my whole life is jenny mccarrick thank you so much for being here for this first episode of the cozy robot show and i can't wait to see you again next week take care friends it was so good to see you the cozy robot show