0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

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Celestia Ward: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. Here we are for episode 182. Gosh, that’s a lot of episodes, guys.

0:00:32
BR: Yes, I am pleased and slightly surprised that we’re still doing this, but thanks to our listeners and supporters, we are.

CW: Yes. So for one, I should say, I’m here. My name is Celestia Ward. I’m here with Ben Radford and Pascual Romero. Say hi, guys.

0:01:03
BR: Hi.

0:01:04
Pascual Romero: Hi.

0:01:05
CW: And this week we’re talking about, actually, we’re going to kind of take some themes out of Ben’s new book. You have published a book fairly recently called America the Fearful and I’ll let you take the subtitle there…

0:01:18
BR: Yeah, I think the title is media and marketing of national panics I honestly always forget what that subtitle is to look it up constantly. So I think that’s right.

0:01:26
CW: So see that’s why the publisher picked something shorter and more with more verve than Then the subtitle to be the title America the Fearful. I thought it worked.

0:01:38
BR: Yeah, no, it worked fine. But yes, that’s the topic. And I’ll save the intro for the show. But yeah, basically sort of a return to the media literacy angle, which, of course, I’ve been trying to bring to skepticism for a couple decades now.

0:01:54
CW: Yes. One of the many components of skepticism. Now, before we get to that or anything else, you’ve got some housekeeping. Any new appearances to talk about with any of us.

0:02:04
BR: Oh, you mean me?

0:02:06
CW: Well, I don’t have anything.

0:02:10
BR: Nothing coming up this this week or any time real soon, but I do have a couple things to point out I was recently on August 17th on Bigfoot show called from behind tall trees and it appears on YouTube. So if people are interested, you can check it out. And it was kind of a fun little hour and a half. I don’t, I don’t often get to talk to about Bigfoot as you guys know, I talk about lots of different things, but it was kind of a Bigfoot is sort of a, you know, a long time interest of mine. And, and I don’t really get into discussions, particularly not with believers, which in this case I did. So if people are interested, check that out.

0:02:47
CW: What was that like? Was it contentious at all or was it friendly?

0:02:52
BR: No, it was actually fairly friendly. I had been on… So there was one main guy, I think his name was Brendan Brown, and then the co-host that he had, I had been on his show. I think his name is Pat. And I’d been on Pat’s show, I don’t know, maybe six or nine months or so ago. And they were looking for sort of knowledgeable Bigfoot skeptics because, you know, it tends to be a bit of an echo chamber, as you might imagine. And Pat found me to be reasonably conversant in the topic and, you know, amenable to discussions. And I thought it went great. And so it was recorded, as I mentioned, it is on YouTube. So if people are interested, they can check it out. Also wanted to point out that I am mentioned in a new book for kids.

CW: For kids?

0:03:34
BR: For kids.

0:03:35
CW: Like my pet, the chupacabra.

0:03:39
BR: Close, close. It’s actually a new book titled Curious Cases, True Crime for Kids, Hijinks, Heists, Mysteries and More by Rebecca Valley.

CW: And how did they bring your work into a kid’s book? Which aspect of your bizarre little niches did they pull out there?

0:03:56
BR: You know what? I’m going to I’m going to leave that to be a bit of a mystery in and of itself, but it is a, it’s sort of a cute little Sherlock Holmes-y and, you know, look at different mysteries and how an investigator might go about them. So I mentioned briefly in there, and I’ll also just throw another plug, my book Lake Monster Mysteries, which I co-authored with Joe Nickell, was recently listed on a website called The Lineup, an article called, 11 Monstrously Compelling Books About Creatures and Cryptid Legends. So nice that my old lake monster book is getting some love even years later.

0:04:37
CW: Yeah, yeah, the classics don’t die. Everybody’s always gonna be interested in lake monsters as long as we have lakes. And speaking of having lakes, that kind of rolls into some stuff I’m skeptical about this week.

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0:04:49
CW: Well, as you guys know, Lake Mead is receding, it’s making national news all the time and they keep finding bodies and right now as of this recording, which is which is a little early. So I mean, the the head count or body count could change by the time this gets up and is uploaded for everybody. But right now we’re at possibly five, possibly four bodies dredged out of Lake Mead with the receding waters here due to climate change and the Colorado River not getting nearly as much water as it used to. Now, the reason I’m saying five, maybe four is because, you know, according to the various things I’m reading, there’s some disagreement as to whether or not two of the partial skeletons are actually part of the same person. So they might have found one guy twice. So let that be a lesson to any of you thinking about crossing the mob in the 1970s. That’s just a gross thing that’s happening. And you could say it’s kind of strange, but it’s just mostly just gross. We’re finding bodies in our lake. But as the water recedes from a lot of other places in the world, other strange things are popping up. Have you guys heard of the Hunger Stones? And no, it has nothing to do with the Hunger Games.

0:06:09
BR: Oh, no, that was that was my assumption. No, I have not.

CW: It even made the late night, the late night talk shows. Hunger Stones were apparently they used to be called Milestones or Marks. But according to Snopes, which dug into various sources, including a research paper on them that was published in 2020, said that the Hunger Stones got their name in 1842 from a newspaper article. And that’s pretty fitting. We’ve talked about journalism in the in the mid-1800s. It was always it did not skimp on the sensationalist nicknames. No. For those of you who haven’t seen the news stories, these so-called hunger stones have been showing up as waters recede in Europe from various long-standing rivers.

PR: Yeah, they also have popped up in the Danube, the Rhine, the Veser, I believe it’s pronounced Veser, and the Moselle, among a few others.

CW: And basically people in the past, when they have endured a terrible drought, which results in a famine, they have carved out stones saying, hey, you know, it’s bad if you can see this stone. This means the water level is very low. So, you know, prepare to die, essentially. One of them that was quoted frequently was one that said, if you see this cry.

BR: Wow.

CW: Yeah.

0:07:37
PR: Oh, wow.

0:07:38
CW: Now, the skepticism here is that you might see stories that make this out to be like, oh my God, this has never happened. These stones have never been visible since the 1500s, blah, blah, blah. One of these stones, according to Snopes, you can actually see it 126 days out of the year because they constructed a dam on a tributary of the Elbe in 1926. So, these stones are not, you know, something completely new. You know, they’ve been showing up in previous dry seasons as well. Just it kind of goes with the whole climate change narrative, which I don’t want to call climate change a narrative because it is not like it’s false. It’s absolutely happening. But you might also feel like you’re having a lot of hysteria pitched at you. And, you know, it’s always good to sort of just double check, hey, is that hunger stone actually something that, you know, people have known about for a long time and you can see half of the year anyway? Maybe.

0:08:37
BR: Well, speaking of global warming, I came across a curious story on Sharon Hill’s Substack Weekly World News. For those who remember Sharon, she’s been a guest on the show.

0:08:51
CW: Of course, yes, yes.

0:08:53
BR: And she has a newsletter. So people should subscribe it. It’s a great weekly roundup. And I’ll just quickly go over the case because it was sort of a curious one. But basically it involved a tragedy that almost resulted in the second tragedy. So there was a family of three and their dog that had died on a remote trail, Northern California. And this was Jonathan Garish, his wife Ellen, and their one-year-old daughter Aurelia and their dog Oskie. And they had disappeared on a remote trail in August 2021 and their bodies were later found and there was some question as to how exactly they had died. Was it lightning or foul play or poisoning, whatever else? The most obvious reason was they had simply run out of water and died of exposure. And it was a trail called the Savage Lundy Trail. And the father had sent out a text in a 911 trying to get help, and unfortunately, it was never found. And then about a year later, a Michigan guy thought this was suspicious. So when the bodies of this family were found, online there were sort of conspiracy theories that swirled around and a guy from Michigan went to Northern California because he was gonna do his own research and he was gonna get to the bottom of this. So he he set out on this trail to try and solve the probably non mystery of these three. He himself then got lost and had to be rescued by the sheriff’s office. So, the sheriff said that the man was in his mid-60s, about 5’6″, 200 pounds, and was wearing sweatpants, quote, on some of the hottest days we have seen this year.

0:10:38
CW: Now, that description leads me to believe they found a body. Did they find him alive?

0:10:42
BR: They found him alive.

CW: Okay, okay.

BR: Yeah, he had walked past a blocked gate that said closed on it. So he’d intentionally gone off the trail, trying to figure out how this family could have possibly died, getting lost on this trail because no one would do that. Well, he then got lost on the trail and had to spend overnight and he was later rescued. And after he was found, he started complaining that he wasn’t able to find the trail back. And he tried to call 911, but the call wouldn’t go through.

0:11:17
CW: Man discovers that wilderness can still kill people.

0:11:21
BR: Yes, that is the upshot. So the newspaper articles don’t say whether he was a classical conspiracy theorist, but it sounds exactly like what it was. How could this have happened? Well, one of the hottest days, they ran out of water, no cell phone service, not a mystery.

0:11:39
CW: Yeah, yeah, that’s unfortunate that people sometimes a person’s degree of skepticism can get them killed. And I hesitate to call that skepticism. That’s just denialism.

BR: That’s stupidity.

CW: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, and the last thing I wanted to bring up that kind of caught my eye this past couple of weeks was the the surprise Spanish Stonehenge. I’m, I can’t believe you didn’t hear about that Ben. It’s got alliteration and it’s got Stonehenge in it.

0:12:08
BR: I’ve been busy recently. What’s the story?

0:12:12
CW: Well, itís not officially called the Spanish Stonehenge. Thatís just a moniker that people have given it but itís officially known as the Dolmen of Guadaluparral.

0:12:22
PR: Guadaluparral.

0:12:25
CW: Thank you. I can’t speak Spanish to save my life. But there is a circle of megalithic stones that date back, people believe, to 5000 BC.

0:12:38
BR: So this is about 5000 years ago when the Earth was first created.

0:12:42
CW: Yeah, right after the Earth was created by the Almighty. Yes. And it’s now visible to people. Actually, it’s not just visible like the hunger stones we mentioned. It’s like full on. You can walk around it and touch the stones. It’s not underwater anymore. And this is in one corner of the Valdecanas Reservoir. Did I say that right, Pascual?

0:13:03
PR: Valdecanas Reservoir.

0:13:06
CW: Valdecanas Reservoir.

0:13:07
CW: It’s in the central province of Caceres, where authorities say the water level has dropped to 28% capacity. So you know, people are surprised and saying it’s a rare opportunity to go see this amazing thing. There’s some stories that kind of from the headline at least would lead you to believe that nobody knew about this thing. It’s just popped up like Atlantis and that’s of course not the case.

PR: Yeah, the fact that it’s in a reservoir is the first thing that makes me a little skeptical. I mean, it was land at one point, was it not?

0:13:47
CW: Yeah, yeah. Apparently, if you read further into larger articles, you will hear that the dolmen emerges often. And, as soon as it emerges, a whole different tourism season begins. You know, people, locals in the area start earning money by ferrying tourists there and back. So there’s a little economic silver lining there. But again, tying it with the larger story of climate change does give the story a longer legs and archaeologists for ages now have argued that the stones should be moved to a museum or someplace on dry land where they won’t be submerged most of the time. So, who knows, that might happen in the future maybe, but it’s not a brand new thing. It’s not like news of Atlantis rising suddenly. It’s a cool little thing that people have known about for a while and it’s getting a new life breathed into it thanks to appearing about the same time as the Hunger Stones, you know?

0:14:41
PR: Yeah.

0:14:41
CW: And the bodies in Lake Mead.

0:14:43
PR: It’s all a sign of something. What could that thing be? Could it be global warming? Yeah, I was just reading that the dam was completed in 1963. So until 1963, from the time it was discovered in the 20s, it was actually easily visible on dry land.

CW: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Very good point, Pascual. Yeah. Discovered in the 20s. So we’ve known about this thing and we’ve seen it off and on as the reservoir gets lower.

0:15:20
BR: Well it reminds me of other things that are occasionally rediscovered such as Noah’s Ark. Seriously, on Mount Ararat in Turkey it’s been discovered as far as I know at least five or six times and they keep finding it there and it never seems to be there and then every about you know 10 or 15, 20 years, some some new Christian organization is sure they finally located Noah’s Ark. And yet somehow, even decades later, no one seems to have been able to go up there and actually find the evidence of it. But they keep losing it and finding it. So, you know.

0:15:57
CW: Did you guys hear about the water damageto the Noah’s Ark that they built in Kentucky?

PR: I did hear about that. It was very funny. Yeah, I don’t have details.

CW: I just have a memory of catching the headlines and snickering to myself.

PR: I have a vague recollection of like them being in an insurance battle over it, which is extra hilarious.

0:16:13
CW: They shouldn’t have to take out insurance. You could just trust in the Lord, right?

0:16:18
PR: Yeah, it’s a boat, right?

0:16:19
CW: Yeah, it’s a boat. Yeah. Well, before we get too far afield here, we’re going to talk to Ben about his book. Let’s tune in.

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0:16:32
CW: Well, this is a treat and something we’ve been kind of meaning to do ever since your book launched, Ben. We’re going to kind of take a look at America the Fearful, which is Ben’s latest book, which you can buy from McFarland Press. America the Fearful, Media and the Marketing of National Panics. Now listeners will know that we have covered panics on this show quite a bit, as well as media literacy. But we’re going to do a deeper dive with the author, who happens to be Ben Radford, our co-host here. How are you doing, Ben?

0:17:22
BR: Doing well, doing well.

PR: So your book, America the Fearful, where does it fit in with your other ones on clowns and chupacabras?

0:17:31
BR: Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, you know, for people who have been following me for years and know my background, there’s, like for example, in my book, Bad Clowns came out. And people are like, well, you do ghosts and urban legends and clowns. Where do the clowns come in? But of course, you know, I had done a media literacy book titled Media Myth Makers back in, I think, 2001. And so, you know, I’ve always had, you know, one of my streaks or ruts or I’m not sure how to put it, one of my purviews is media literacy and sort of that I’ll fold it in there. And more broadly, I was realizing not too long ago that I believe that one of the main functions of skepticism ideally is helping calm people’s fears. It’s not an obvious role or function, but I think it really is important. And, you know, you can sort of look at some of the obvious ones like Kenny Biddle and I, you know, trying to calm someone’s fear about ghosts. Calm down. That, you know, that knock or that sound or light probably isn’t a ghost. It’s not something demonic or scary.

CW: Well, you’ve brought it up in a number of things over the show. From people fearing the fact that they might be cursed by an evil fortune teller or fearing that their child’s autism might be linked to a vaccine that they gave the child at the age of two.

0:18:59
BR: Yeah, absolutely.

0:19:00
CW: So, I mean, so you expanded that and tell us more about how you formulated the idea for this whole book about fear in general.

0:19:08
BR: Yeah, I did sort of expand it. I mean, I realized that a lot of people, they don’t care about ghosts. They don’t care about chupacabras, which I find bizarre. I think, honestly, I think any living human being should be fascinated by chupacabras. This is not the case, sadly. So, you know, there are certain things that I, particularly in my groove, and I get that not everyone is into them, and that’s sort of where it bleeds into the media literacy, right, is recognizing that some of these are niche topics, right? Some people, they don’t believe in the evil eye, they don’t believe in curses, they don’t believe in body parts being used in magic, but at the same time, they may believe, as you mentioned, they may believe in other fears, in TikTok warnings. Or a few episodes ago, we did a piece on the needle spiking panic in the UK, for example. And the TikTok abductions and the zip tie. And it occurred to me that there are so many fears that circulate, particularly in news and social media, that are much more common than fears about ghosts or evil eyes or things like that. And so I want to sort of bring in that same critical thinking lens and apply that to fears that we may be seeing on the nightly news.

CW: Okay, so it’s like looking at America as more recently, how it’s kind of nurtured this culture of being afraid of stuff.

BR: Yeah. And of course, there’s nothing new about that specifically. I mean, you know, people have been trading on fears. Since Machiavelli. I mean, there’s there’s nothing new about that. But but particularly over the past, I’d say, you know, five or 10 years and particularly during the Trump administration, there was this routine drum beating emphasis on fears. And I don’t mean to focus on him, although he used it very effectively in his administration. It’s actually, it’s pretty widespread.

0:21:03
CW: You mean Trump is a fear monger? I had no idea.

0:21:07
BR: What? I know, you heard it here first, folks. Somebody make a note. But, and so that was actually one of the things I wanted to do was to have people who know me as a person who makes some half-assed attempt to analyze things critically and put things in perspective and context. And they can look at my long documented history of doing this as applied to topics that they agree with. And then say, okay, by the way, here’s that same critical thinking lens. Here’s that same prism applied to something that you might’ve shared on social media last week.

0:21:43
CW: Oh no, this book is gonna make people feel bad about themselves. Well, I mean, we’ll go into a rundown here of who exactly uses fear. We already mentioned Trump and he’s a politician, but there’s plenty of other people who fear as part of their stock and trade.

0:22:00
BR: Their repertoire. So again, Trump is an obvious one. One example I give in my book, and it’s one of his best known ones, was during the 2018 midterm elections. You all remember the migrant caravan making its inexorable way up to our borders?

CW: Oh yeah.

PR: Oh yeah. Did that ever get here?

0:22:22
BR: Well, here’s the thing about that.

CW: And how many terrorists were in it? And how many buildings were blown up?

0:22:29
BR: How many machine gun toting AIDS riddled terrorists were among this crowd? Well, we don’t know because it all kind of vanished. At the time, there was a claim that Trump put out there that there were various Middle Easterners in this caravan. And I happened to follow it because part of the caravan was, you know, of course, New Mexico’s border state, and they were coming here among other places. And I was doing a fair research on it, and most of the migrants were, in fact, from places like Honduras and El Salvador and Guatemala, and they were coming up to the U.S. not to engage in, you know, months-long raping and pillaging and burning efforts, but because they wanted a better life and they were escaping gang violence in many cases in Central America. So that’s why they were coming up here. They weren’t being infiltrated by all these hordes of Middle Easterners. And of course, Middle Easterners is of course, code for Muslims. That’s who he means.

PR: Yeah

0:23:36
BR: And so, and Mike Pence threw that in as well. And they were talking about these huge crowds, like seven, 10,000 people. And they were making their way very, very slowly to the border. It was almost like those zombies, you know, where you’re being chased by zombies and you have time to like take a nap and get a Coke. They’re coming, they’re coming, run, okay. I’ll see what I can do.

0:23:59
CW: Well, don’t get me started on the comparison between zombies and societal breakdown. I could go into a whole tirade about that.

0:24:08
BR: Yes.

0:24:09
PR: Maybe we’ll do an episode on it.

0:24:10
BR: We’ll save that one, yes.

0:24:12
CW: You could even say that his stirring up of the crowd for the January 6th insurrection that we’re still seeing fallout from and people are still being convicted and people are still being investigated, a lot of that was based on fear. You know, you got to fight like hell or you’re going to lose everything. Your country, you’re going to lose your country. It’s a fear of your whole country is going to break down.

0:24:35
BR: Yeah, and that’s one reason that his stop the steal hoax was so successful. It strikes it as a fundamental fear of not being heard, not being represented and being cheated out of your vote. And of course, that’s very powerful to his constituents and to voters in general. And so that’s one reason they bought into it, hook, line, and sinker                                                        And he made no secret of this. I mean, long before the election, he was setting the stage and he was sowing the seeds and he was telling people, well, it might be stolen. So this is so transparent. But of course, when the election came and went and there was all these conspiracy theories put out by Giuliani and his lawyers and Sidney Powell, all of which were laughed out of court, in many cases by Trump-appointed judges, I should add. So yeah, that’s another example of where they’re using fear.

0:25:29
CW: But you’ve got other examples in the book besides Trump, although Trump is a great touchstone for this particular thing. He’s not the only politician in the world to have used fear as a tactic.

0:25:37
BR: No, they all do it. They just sort of do it to different to different extents. And of course, who we are told to fear that is who the boogeyman are changes depending on your party in many cases. But yeah, there’s other ones as well. So one one obvious one is advertisers. advertisers plan our fears all the time. Our fears about our personal safety, our fears about do we look as good as we can? Are we keeping up with the Joneses?

0:26:08
CW: I just realized why Trump was such a good example because he’s a politician and an advertiser. Constantly advertising for Trump Steaks and Trump University and the taco bowls up at Trump Tower.

0:26:20
BR: There you go.

0:26:21
CE: Sorry, I brought it back. I didn’t mean to. Forget I said it.

0:26:24
BR: You brought it back to there. Okay. But no, I mean, and that’s one of the, you know, that’s one of the common tenets of advertising. And it’s not an inherently sinister, I mean, I don’t want to frame it as some conspiracy, you know, but if you’re trying to get the public to buy a product or to vote a certain way or to do something, you have to give them incentive. You have to give them a carrot or a stick. You have to give them a reason to do something or reason not to do the opposite. And this is, you know, this is sort of communication one-on-one, advertising and persuasion, things like that. But this plays a lot into it. And many people use fear, but the other main group that I talk about in the book are activists. And this is where people sometimes get a little, they get a little hesitant to jump in because they can say, oh, well, all politicians suck and yeah, Trump sucks and Biden sucks this and that, and you know, those advertisers, you know, they’re, they’re just trying to scare me into buying, you know, a new car or safety guns or whatever else. But then when you say, okay, well, keep in mind that activists do this as well. Well, I’m not sure about that.

0:27:27
CW: Activists are the good guys in any news story, generally.

0:27:31
BR: Exactly, exactly. So, and this is why in many ways that the fear used by activists is especially sinister because it’s brought to you under the guise of trying to do good and, hey, everybody, this is an important thing and we all need to get on board with this. Keep in mind that many advertising campaigns bleed over into activism. One example is the fear of vaccines. You had a lot of the anti-vaccination sentiment driven by activists. So it wasn’t necessarily advertisers. It wasn’t people who were, in some cases it was, but for the most part it wasn’t someone who was trying to convince you to buy a product in place of vaccinations. It was people like Jenny McCarthy, right? She apparently sincerely believed that her, I think it was her son, got autism from his MMR vaccine.

0:28:37
CW: And then was later cured and turned into an indigo child who has alien DNA.

0:28:42
BR: See, now you made it weird. Now, you went sideways on me here.

0:28:47
CW: See, I think my internal little definition system needs to be revised because I’ve always just thought of activists as pro, you know, progress people who are, you know, trying to do right by the human race and make things better. But the things is that Alex Jones and Jenny McCarthy are activists. Really, I should I should revise my my definition because they are activists just for a very different cause than I would ever follow.

BR: Yeah, I mean, you know, in Jones, I mean, I don’t mean to so blibbly lump Alex Jones and McCarthy together. I think there’s important differences among them. Jones is a known pathological liar. Yes. Among many other things. And McCarthy, to her credit, I guess, wasn’t making claims about false flag operations in Sandy Hook. But the point here is that is that they either frame themselves as activists and put themselves out there. That’s his shtick, right? That’s Alex Jones’s shtick. I’m just telling you, you decide, right? I’m just asking questions. He obviously he’s selling advertising. He’s making a lot of money, this and that. He wants you to subscribe and like and share. But at the end of the day,

0:30:02
CW: Yeah, activists, he wants to call people to action.

0:30:05
BR: Right. Yeah.

0:30:06
CW: Even if that action is harassing parents of murdered children or trying to keep chemtrails from keeping from turning frogs gay, you know, he wants to call people to action. I’ll accept that.

0:30:18
BR: And then the final, the final of the four that uses fear regularly is, of course, news and social media. They’re a bit of a trickier one because, you know, a lot of it bleeds into sensationalism and clickbait. And so in many cases, the journalists themselves, they sometimes they dip into activism. And there’s a lot of activism journalism out there, much of it very good. I mean, you know, you can you can be an activist journalist and get your facts right and do important work. But on the other hand, oftentimes, they’re just trying to raise awareness of something they genuinely consider to be a problem. Some listeners may remember we did a show on misleading statistics and I did a piece on, I think it was Newsweek, and their headline that something like one third of Americans deny the Holocaust.

0:31:11
CW: Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, and

0:31:14
BR: No, that is entirely untrue. That is as counterfactual You know, I don’t believe that the Newsweek writer was trying to… I don’t think there was some ulterior motive I think they either misread the study and or they knew that it was going to generate clicks and outrage and Get attention and sure enough it did. So again, there’s some bleed over into that where where they’re using fear because that’s that’s of course a fear-monitoring tactic, right? If you write a story, particularly in Newsweek, suggesting that a significant number of Americans are essentially Holocaust deniers slash neo-Nazis, that’s alarmist. That frightens people. It frightens people across the board, except for a tiny minority who think this is great. Everyone else is concerned about this, and so they’re also using fear as well.

0:32:05
CW: Well, I’m wondering too, what kind of like, if there’s some sort of form of the file drawer effect going on where it’s kind of organic that, you know, the cream rises to the top and with people who are self choosing to click on something and share it or not click on something and not share it, the stuff with fear just kind of rises in the statistics there and gets more noticed. And granted, an experienced editor or journalist will know this ahead of time and craft things on purpose that way. But sure, another it just sort of happens. If you have 150 news stories and 10 of them are a little bit scary and rattle your cage a bit, those 10 are going to be the ones that go viral the next day.

0:32:51
BR: Absolutely. And it could be it could be race baiting. I see a lot of of sexism baiting headlines that are they’re intentionally pitting men against women and trying to talk about how horrible one of the other one is. It’s unfortunate because, I mean, there’s enough genuine sexism and misogyny and problems among the genders without framing otherwise innocuous or ambiguous news stories as well. Here’s another way that women are horrible. Here’s another way that men are shitty. Well, okay. Is it true? Is it genuinely an example of that? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but I see this all the time.

PR: So I guess the next question is why is there such an emphasis on fear in culture?

BR: Well, there’s a couple of reasons. I think in my book, I come up with three main sources. One of them, we were just sort of talking about, which is the news bias. And I talk about the news bias in my book, Media Myth Makers. And basically by that, I mean, it’s a bias that is inherent in the news gathering process. So typically the biases that are talked about and that get people outraged are political biases. So people accuse Fox of being too right wing, people accuse NPR of being too left wing, liberals, and blah, blah, blah. And then there’s the whole mainstream media, MSM. I’ve never quite figured out. First of all, mainstream is one word. Whatever, anyway. But one of the important things to recognize here is that there is a natural opponent, right? There’s a natural enemy. So if you have a news gathering organization that is right or left-leaning, you can bet, you can guarantee that there will be people on the opposite political side who will be pointing that out every chance they get. Right? Oh, here’s another time Fox News did this. Here’s another time when the liberals did this. And so there’s a natural sort of argumentative opponent to that. But there’s an underlying, what I call, underlying news bias that cuts across all media. It doesn’t matter whether it’s CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, take your pick. It’s not political, it’s inherent in the process. That is the way in which the news media, journalists and editors select what to report. And this isn’t rocket science. I’m certainly not the first person to point this out, but it’s the old, if a man bites a dog, that’s a news story, right? If it bleeds, it leads. And so one thing I try to get across to people is that what you see in the news feeds and news TV shows and things like that, and newspapers, is a carefully curated selection of the news events of the day or the past week or whatever the time frame is. And I mean, if you think about it, I mean, there are innumerable things that could be brought to your attention, brought to you on your phone, in the newspaper, on the front page of CNN, whatever it is. And somebody, in fact, many people, selectively choose, okay, this is the news story that we’re gonna put on the front page. This is what we’re gonna put out there. And in the process of doing that, in the process of picking out of all the things that happened locally, regionally, statewide, countrywide, globally, whatever else, people and news editors tend to, of course, pick out the ones that are most fraught, the wars, things that scare people, all sorts of things, right? Increases in diseases, COVID, monkeypox, wars, shark bites. There becomes this sort of continual drumbeat of a self-selected set of news stories that not all the time, but by and large, tend to highlight and promote stories that are frightening, that make people afraid, that people will click on and share.

0:36:46
CW: Well so, if the news bias is just one of the three things, the three sources you mentioned, what are the other two?

0:36:55
BR: Well, the other one is related to the news bias, and that is social media bias. So typically-

0:37:01
CW: Because we’re the news now, we make the news.

0:37:04
BR: We are the news. I’m flexing my power right now. So here’s the thing. So there’s a news bias that selectively picks stories, not entirely, but largely by how scary they are, how likely they are to get eyeballs and frighten people. And those are then put out onto the news. And then the other part of this, the other component is social media. So when I talk about the media, I don’t have time to get into it, there really isn’t any such thing as The Media. There is no The Media. It’s a plural noun encompassing all sorts of things ranging from your local high school newspaper to CNN to random blogs you’ve never heard of. So when I talk about the media I’m basically talking about news media and then social media and the relationship here is that much of what we see on social media is derived from news media. So this is where we see memes, we see people sharing the latest news about some deaths, some war, something to be afraid of, something complaining about Joe Biden and gas prices, and then claim of this and that. And so at each level, you have the news media, which selects for frightening stories and clickbait stories, you have social media, which itself draws largely from that news media and once again filters out and emphasizes and promotes scary, fear-mongering clickbait stories.

0:38:45
CW: And sometimes just wholesale makes them up, like, I was almost abducted in the parking lot of Target.

0:38:51
PR: Right, right.

0:38:52
BR: No, that’s a great example. Yeah, I mean, there was the TikTok scares that we talked about. I’ll never forget the bit we did on the zip tie and the guy, he went after this guy with a, what was it, a shark tooth war club.

0:39:09
CW: A war club encrusted with shark teeth, yes, because remarkably that was not in Florida.

0:39:15
BR: That was not Florida.

0:39:17
CW: It was Hawaii I think.

0:39:18
BR: Hawaii man, although I’d say there’s probably some overlap there. But yeah, so we have the news media, then we have social media bias, and then the third kind is sort of more fundamental and more individual. So this would be psychological biases. And these three components all sort of work in conjunction with each other. So when we’re talking about psychological biases, I mean, you know, there’s psychological priming and cognitive biases and things like that, confirmation bias, which we’ve flogged many, many times on the show. But basically, one of the premises is that we tend to remember hurtful things. We remember things that are scary. It’s easy to remember last time someone insulted us. It’s more difficult to remember the last time someone complimented us. I mean, it’s not that it can’t be done, but just in general, cutting remarks or hurtful remarks are remembered long after we hear them. Whereas, you know, if we get a pat on the back, well, we sort of, you know, we feel good for a few minutes, we let it go.

0:40:15
CW: Yeah, grudges are just a lot stickier than warm fuzzies.

0:40:18
BR: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so in my book, America the Fearful, I talk, I quote from a book called The Distracted Mind by two neuroscientists, Adam Ghazali and Larry Rosen. And in there, they talk about attention. And I don’t want to go too far afield, but it is important here because what we pay attention to helps to filter what goes into our heads and what we react to and how we react to things. Here’s a quick quote from mthat. They talk about, to unravel a depth and breadth of what attention is, the first step to appreciate is its most fundamental feature, selectivity. So again, we’re talking about what do people notice? What do people pay attention to? There’s all these things going on in the world. There’s this huge menu of things we could be looking at on CNN and ABC News and Fox News. And then there’s another set of sometimes overlapping and memes and outrage clicks, clickbait material on social media. And out of all these things, what do we pay attention to? And it comes back to, for the most part, we pay attention to things that frighten us, things that we should be concerned about. And not always, I mean, you know, there are exceptions. We don’t spend every waking moment of our lives in constant fear, but the things that we do hear and the things that we are afraid of have a much greater impact on our world views.

0:41:40
CW: Yeah, it reminds me of an old, not really a joke, but a little tale about why boxing is the best sport in the world. I’m not saying I agree with that, I’m just saying I had it explained once where if you’re standing on a street corner and on the northwest corner there’s two guys playing the best game of basketball you’ve ever seen. And in the other corner there’s like a couple guys playing the best game of tennis you’ve ever seen. And then on another corner, they’re doing some other game. And then on the fourth corner, there’s two guys beating the crap out of each other. Where do you look?

PR: Right.

BR: Where do you pull out your phone and hope that it goes vile, right?

CW: Yeah. Which street corner has your full attention? And it’s the guys clobbering the crap out of each other.

0:42:22
BR: But no, but I don’t want to go too far afield, but the important thing here is to recognize that this relentless focus on the negative and negative news stories and things that we’re going to be afraid of, gun violence, diseases, take your pick, it’s a type of psychological priming. And one of the things it does is it hones our attention. It gets us to focus on the worst aspects of the world around us and the worst aspects of the people around us.

0:42:52
CW: Well, that doesn’t sound healthy.

0:42:54
BR: It’s not healthy. It’s frankly toxic. Yeah. It gets to the point where we oftentimes judge a situation on how much of a threat they are. Right? We see this all this news coverage of mass shooters. And there’s a story about, well, mass shooters are white males, you know, 18 to 21, blah, blah, blah. And we see, okay, well, is this person dangerous? Or there’ll be stories, you know, sorry, about immigrants, you know, young black male carrying something, oh, well, should we be afraid of them or immigrants? And it has this way of focusing us on the negative things about each other. And we tend to focus on the differences, right? Because we don’t focus on what we have in common. We don’t, if we see a stranger, particularly in our media saturated world, we don’t think, wow, we have a lot in common, that guy. It’s like, oh, what don’t I have in common? What does he want to do to me? Is he going to try and stab me? Is this a mass shooting? There’s ones all the time. So it sort of primes us to look for the worst in each other. And that’s a real problem.

0:43:55
CW: Well, over the course of this podcast, we’ve certainly heard you talk about media literacy and folklore. You kind of have a foot in both those pathways and when you’re talking about xenophobia, fear of the other and fear in general, folklore has got to come up. Tell us how you talk about fairy tales and boogeymen and how you connect this with modern media in the book.

0:44:19
BR: Yeah, I’m actually, I don’t want to pat myself on the back, hold on. Like I just did. But I’m actually pleased with the way that I sort of connected this together between bringing the folklore, the media literacy, and critical thinking, things like that, because these tend to be sort of disparate purviews. And as you guys know, one of the things I’ve tried to do is bring them together. So, okay, well, ghost hunting is, in many cases, folklore. And there’s lots of these, these two can inform each other, and so on.

0:44:49
CW: Yeah, at the beginning of this, you said it’s a different book than your chupacabras and clown panics, but here we go. We’re going right back there.

0:44:58
BR: Here we go, right. Again, it’s all about the prisms through which you look at these things, right? And so when you’re looking at, for example, media stories, so primarily news media and to a lesser degree, social media stories, one of the things you recognize is that these are often packaged in folkloric packages. That didn’t make sense because it said package twice, but you know what I mean. Part of the power of story and folklore and anecdote is that it comes pre-packaged with assumptions and stereotypes. We intuitively recognize the wicked stepmother archetype. Now, we know the hero’s journey. We can recognize Frodo and Luke and and and Darth and all the all the characters we you know, we can go back to Joseph Campbell’s Archetypes and plug those in so…

CW: Harold and Kumar.

BR: Yeah. Oh my god. How could I have forgotten Kumar? It’s all there, right? And so oftentimes we we I’m not suggesting that we mistake our fairy tales for real life but we we do tend to sort of view the world in pre-packaged stories. And we sort of, in some ways, we come to expect that there will be a tidy ending. I think people see films and TV shows with some sort of a conclusion, even if it’s a continuing series, that whatever the plot problem is, it’ll be resolved in 58 minutes or something. And because of that, when we apply that to the real world, it’s oftentimes unsatisfying because in the real world, loose ends are still there. In the real world, people die without closure. In the real world, answers aren’t always easy to get if they ever do come. And so, you know, when we’re understanding, when we’re sort of looking at the world and trying to understand the characters and where they fit in, we have these social scripts and they’re passed along as sort of self-contained, prepackaged constellations of assumptions and assertions and beliefs. So news stories and particularly ones on social media are framed like, here’s the good guys, here’s the bad guys, which side do you want, right? You’re for this, you’re against this, or you’re for or against Roe v. Wade, whatever the topic is, there’s this prepackaged set of assumptions that you’re supposed to like and share, or to a lesser extent, I guess, criticize, which is why I’m not particularly popular on Facebook these days. I’m used to it. That’s fine. But, you know, but they’re framed as narratives. And again, they’re populated with binary heroes and villains. And so the heroes are, well, it depends on the story, right? In, if you subscribe to the QAnon fairy tale, Trump is the hero. He is the hero who is valiantly trying to stamp out these pedophile rings and lizard people and Hillary Clinton and so on. So, you know, if you subscribe to the comet ping pong story where a guy, you know, went in, he went in with a gun and he went in there because he believed the fairy tales, almost literally, or the conspiracy theories that there were trafficked children in the basement of this pizza place that didn’t actually have a basement in DC. And so he is the hero of his own story. When you have a hero, of course, you have to have a villain. So who are the boogeymen? Who are the villains? Well, take your pick, right? It depends on who’s telling the story. The boogeyman might be gays, might be transgender people, might be immigrants, disenfranchised people. It could even sometimes be white people. It’s it depends on the story you’re being told.

0:48:38
CW: You know, it is remarkable that we’re living in times where Hillary Clinton and the Democrats have literally been cast as people who drink blood from children in some of these narratives. And it blows my mind how utterly mythic that is.

0:48:58
BR: Yeah, I mean, it’s straight out of the blood libel myth. Some of my folklorist friends, I mean, they study this. They study this all the time, and it’s strange talking to them because, of course, from a folkloric perspective, we recognize the themes. We recognize the motifs, we’ve done this, we can pull it apart and look at the inner workings. But then when we see this out in the wild, when we see this being shared by elected representatives, for example, you know, we’re used to seeing this on trolls and 4chan, and then we’re like, hold on, that’s an elected official in Colorado? Wow.

0:49:35
CW: Yeah.

0:49:36
BR: Okay, this is a whole different thing.

0:49:38
CW: You hang out with these folklorists, tell me, do they get at least a little bit of a rise going, oh my, how interesting, you know. Adrenochrome is a brand new blood libel myth and look at how many people believe it. I mean, on the one hand, it just flat out depresses me, but from a folklorist’s point of view, is it like, oh, I can write a paper about that?

0:49:59
BR: It kind of is, I hate to say it. I mean, it’s, well, it’s the same thing. I mean, you know, when I was doing the research into organ theft legends, right, you know, again, from a folklore point of view, we know the themes, we know how these transmitted, some of the earliest versions of this and that. But then, you know, there was a case, I’ve forgotten their names, there was a two Chinese American couple, it was a Chinese American couple who had adopted two young African children and they were actually, they were put on trial and found guilty of trying to kill their children for their organs.

0:50:35
CW: Holy crap.

0:50:36
BR: Yeah, yeah, I think it was Grace Huang. And this is being reported on CNN and us folklorists are like, that’s not, that did not, that’s not a thing. The thing you’re accusing them of doesn’t happen. But of course, the folklorist, I think it was in Singapore, I’ve forgotten all the details, but yeah, it was an actual case and it was terrifying. And I’m seeing this couple being accused of something that is self-evidently a fictional crime. Yeah, it’s a horrific story. But so again, and the same thing with the, we talked briefly about the needle spiking panic in England, where I and other folklorists are sort of following it, and we’re looking at the origin of it, but AIDS-infected needles and different versions here and there. And at the same time, I’m watching BBC News, which is reporting on this as an actual genuine threat. Again, we’re talking about fear here, and people were being fearful. People were going out to nightclubs wearing leather, not just leather to look good, but leather to keep themselves from being attacked by non-existent pricks, if you will.

0:51:50
CW: There are very existent pricks in nightclubs, I have seen. Long story. So this does just reinforce the fact that we’ve mentioned on this show before, our brains are no different than the brains of medieval peasants who were worried about vampires rising from the grave to infect them, maybe even at a nightclub. So how does that translate in terms of narratives today in the media that are creating this toxic swirl?

0:52:21
BR: Well, there’s a couple of ways. One of them is it lends – these sorts of stories and narratives lend themselves to the sort of dueling narrative about America. If you talk to one set of people, America and Americans are gun loving, violence loving people. We all have guns, we all love guns, we spend our time shooting each other and that’s what it is. Other people are like, no, that’s not true. There are mass shootings and of course, you know, there is an undeniable gun culture in America. But in fact, it’s not accurate or fair to say that most Americans love guns. In fact, most Americans don’t own guns and most Americans actually favor gun control. Then you have another narrative which talks about, for example, how inherently and fundamentally racist and misogynistic America is. And they can point to many, many examples from not too long ago to the modern day, and look at these, oh, this is happening all the time. Here’s this case of George Floyd, here’s the case there. And at the same time, someone else could say, okay, well, that happened, but the officer that killed George Floyd, he was sentenced to like 22 years in prison. This is not a consequence that you would expect that a country that is inherently lenient would give them. You would expect, well, he killed George Floyd and he got six months in jail and he’s on the force again. You can pick and choose which of these dueling narratives you wanna do. Oftentimes, of course, aligned with your politics. And so my goal here with the book, America the Fearful, it’s not to necessarily point one way or the other, it’s to give people a prism or a framework or mechanism through which to decide for themselves which of these fears are overblown and which ones are a real problem.

0:54:04
CW: Now, the whole looking at America through that certain prism, I remember in the early discussions we were having that sort of led to part of this book, you mentioned the term sort of a national masochism, that was very sort of like, and I see it in friends in my loved ones and my husband when we have discussions about the news, it’s almost this like resilience against any and all good news. Oh, yes. Derek Chauvin, the police officer who murdered George Floyd, was convicted, but it wasn’t fast enough, but it wasn’t for long enough. But that’s just one guy. And for for every cop that’s convicted of something like that, a hundred others never get brought up on charges. And it’s just these overwhelming assumptions that always go with the negative, like whatever is the thing to be most feared is the thing you better believe is going on because otherwise you’re a sucker, otherwise you’re just being a Pollyanna.

0:55:05
BR: Yeah, or you get accused of what side are you on or who are you defending? And I have to explain to people, I’m not on anybody’s side here. You know, in previous years, when, for example, I debunked the stranger of danger panic, right, this notion that sex offenders are just hiding behind every tree, just waiting to abduct and molest kids. And I say, look, the facts of the matter are, and look this up, this is well established, children are at far greater danger of being sexually molested and killed and abused by their parents and caregivers. That is by far the greatest threat to children. It’s not some released sex offender down the road. It’s not something else. That’s who that is. But people don’t want to hear it because it’s easier to sort of create the bogeyman and say, OK, well, there’s there’s the others, the them, the they. And I say people look, I mean, I’m not I’m not denying that that released sex offenders do sometimes attack kids. Of course they do. That’s not the question. The question is how representative are they? How common is that? Is it something that happens one in a thousand times, one in 10,000 times, or something that happens far more often? And so my goal is not to, I’m not trying to advocate one way or the other. I’m trying to get people to look at threats in perspective and say, okay, well, here’s the numbers here. Look at it from that point of view. And if you still are concerned that, you know, that this is a problem, that’s right, then go ahead, but at least, at least if we can agree on some common framework, if we can at least have people agreeing on some basis to determine how, how much, how big a threat these things are, that’s at least something to go on.

0:56:47
PR: Yeah. And it kind of, it kind of seems to me like people, you know, it’s just we instinctively want the easiest answer, you know, and when things get complicated, it’s difficult for us to just accept, especially when you talk about stranger danger, how the danger is in the home more often than it’s not. And you know, how do we come to grips with that? You know, that means you probably know someone who’s had, you know, some form of abuse or had been kidnapped by a parent or something. I mean, you know, it’s it becomes much more difficult to wrap your head around. Really, I think it’s hard to swallow and it makes it difficult because it’s just so tidy when you have a perfectly laid out bad guy to blame for everything.

BR: Yeah. And that goes back to us. Talk about the fairy tales. Right. We like we like our stories binary. We like to be clear on who the bad guy is, who the good guy is, and what they’re going to do. And in the real world, in the real world, that’s not always the case, right? You know, the stereotype of a white male mass shooter is true for a small subset of mass shootings. That’s not representative of all mass shootings. So it’s actually far more diverse than that. So the concern that I have, it’s not so much that some middle-aged white guy is going to be unfairly accused of being a mass shooter, because that’s not likely to happen. I mean, either he’s carrying a gun or not. I’m not worried about that. The bigger problem that I see is that it’s going to misdirect attention, right? If somebody assumes that 99% or 90%, whatever it is, of mass shooters are middle-aged white guys, you’re going to be missing the bulk of other mass shooters who are not, and they’re not going to go on your radar, and then people are going to wonder, well, why didn’t we see it? Well, it’s because you misunderstood the threat, because of social scripts and other factors, you misunderstood where the real threat was coming from. And that sort of goes to, we’ll talk more about this later, but that goes back to the importance of identifying threats and putting proportionate resources towards them, and making an effort to quantify and understand a problem rather than just sort of going blindly being basically being reactive to fear.

0:58:57
CW: Now you have you have said that your goal is not to say that this danger or that danger does not exist, or rather to put it in perspective to actualize it rather than catastrophize it. especially a voice doing that is going to get accused of minimizing a problem, minimizing racism, minimizing the dangers that trans Americans face or and any disenfranchised group of people minimizing the even if it’s just one person who’s had this awful thing to them. How dare you minimize what they have gone through? How do you deal with that when people might take the wrong message from your book and decide, oh, this is just another, you know, just like Steven Pinker because he’s been accused of this too. Some middle-aged academic white guy claiming that we’re all just worried over nothing. What do you tell people?

0:59:52
BR: Yeah, I mean, I come across on occasion, it’s difficult to deal with because I try and point to, I mean, I have a long history of trying to, you know, bring critical thinking and perspectives to this. So I would hope that I might be given the benefit of the doubt, as naive as that sounds.

1:00:11
CW: Yeah, keep hoping.

1:00:13
BR: Keep hoping. Good luck with that. Knock on wood. Where’s your four-leaf clover and your rabbit’s foot? But there’s a couple of things. So I would say that I’m not minimizing anything. And so in science, part of the fundamental goals of science is to ask the question, compare to what? That’s that is a key basic question of science. Does this medicine work? If so, compared to what? Compared to no medicine, compared to a placebo, compared to a different medicine. Comparing something to what is a key fundamental question in science. And I explicitly reject this notion that we shouldn’t apply that to social problems. In fact, if there’s anywhere where they should be applied, it is to social problems, specifically because that is the way that we understand the nature of these problems. If putting a number in context seems to minimize the threat, then that’s a function of statistics. Again, my goal is to put something in context, not to minimize or maximize it. People can disagree about what to do about it. If I explain to somebody that, in fact, statistically, released sex offenders, they are a threat. Again, no one said they’re not, but they are a far smaller threat than, for example, parents and caregivers. Am I minimizing the harm done by sex offenders? No. I’m trying to arm people who care about children, who want to protect the kids. And if you want to put your head in the sand and say, well, I’m not comfortable with that answer. Well, that’s the facts. I mean, you know, the harm being done is to the people that they’re trying to advocate for.

1:01:54
CW: So better grasp of statistics and math literacy, numeracy, will help everybody sort of wrap their head around this concept.

1:02:07
BR: Absolutely, and particularly because with the dialogue becoming so polarized, right, this is another one of the problems, is that everybody has their own set of facts. Everybody, you know, the right and the left wing, the progressives and the, and there’s they all have their own sort of sets of facts. And what’s important to make any progress at all is to get a shared understanding, right? We don’t need to agree on everything, but can we at least agree on definitions? Can we at least agree on the numbers? Can we at least – that’s the first step to making progress, to building coalitions, to getting unity.

1:02:41
CW: How do we get a copy of this book to every member of Congress?

1:02:48
BR: I will autograph them. You can get them from me, Amazon.com, get them at your local bookstore.

1:02:53
CW: If anybody would like to sponsor their home senators and send out two copies, get in touch with us. We’ll give you a discount.

1:03:01
BR: I’ll put a smiley face on the one to Laura Bobert. But I mean, look, ultimately, the key here is it’s important to know whether it’s anecdote or it’s data, whether it’s representative or not. That’s how you address problems. So whatever the problem is, racism, sexism, mass shootings, whatever the problem is, one of the first things you have to do is understand its nature. How common is it? How does it emerge? Where does it emerge? Is it more common in big cities and small cities? Is it more common among certain demographics? These are not sort of pedantic nerd problems. These are central concerns in statistics and trying to understand how to fix them. Again, at this point, I’m coming from background epidemiology. This is how public health officials solve problems. We examine the problems, we define them, we put labels on them, and we try and figure out, okay, like we say, what is the case? What is the non-case? What are the definitions here and how do we know when this is emerging in a population? And again, who is it most prevalent among? How can we address it and things like that? And if you don’t at least acknowledge and have some basic understanding of how common something is and recognize the bigger threats from the smaller threats and distinguish the two, then you’re lost. You have no place to start from.

PR: So what are some of the myths that you debunk about Americans?

BR: Many, many, many, many. Yeah, so a bit a while ago, Celestia mentioned Steven Pinker, who I admire and I have several of his books, and I am building to some extent on those books, particularly The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now. You can argue with his specifics and this and that. His overall theme is pretty well established. People can – they can write to Stephen and argue with him if they want. But basically, one of the premises here is that overall, things are good and getting better when you look at most metrics of human quality of life. You look at life expectancy. You look at the number of wars. You look at sandards of living. There are exceptions, of course, but overall and by and large around the world, including in America, these things are getting better. There’s more literacy than ever before. There’s better education than ever before. Standards of living are increasing and so on. This doesn’t mean that everything is rosy. This doesn’t mean that things are great. It doesn’t mean there isn’t work to do. It just means that the arc, and Michael Shermer’s book, the moral arc touches on this as well, is overall that the trends are getting better. The question then becomes, how do we reconcile this? How do we reconcile the public’s general belief that things are horrible and getting worse with the true facts, which is that things are generally, there are setbacks, especially this past year. Again, not being Pollyanna about it, but overall, the trends are there, you know, just as weather is not climate, for example, would be the other way to look at it. The trends are getting better. And so in terms of some of the myths I debunk in the book, one of them is about immigration, particularly during the Trump administration. I was seeing a bunch of memes that were talking about, in fact, I have one in the book, it has this widely shared meme that says, how did a nation of immigrants come to be a nation that hates immigrants? It was widely shared, mostly among my progressive friends, and they thought, oh, this is very clever, you know, isn’t this horrible that America hates immigrants? America doesn’t hate immigrants. That is factually false. If you look at, if you go beyond the anecdotes, if you go beyond your uncle who hates immigrants, and you look at polls and surveys of most Americans, you in fact find that most Americans favor more immigration. They welcome immigrants. They’re looking forward to it. They’re not rushing to build the wall that Trump wants. I mentioned earlier about gun control. The same thing, right? Where there’s this sort of perception that all Americans are gun loving, gun toting, gun crazy, and certainly a small number of them are. But by and large, most Americans, statistically, most Americans don’t own guns and most Americans favor more gun control.

1:07:23
CW: Yeah, if we could just kick out like the five guys who own all the guns in America, our demographics would totally shift.

1:07:31
BR: But here’s the thing, right? Here’s where I’m going with this, is that if you’re trying to make progress on gun control, if you’re trying to make progress on abortion rights, whatever the topic is, immigration, one thing that you need to do is to build common ground with people who you may disagree with. I’m not suggesting you go and hug your enemies and sing Kumbaya, but what you need to do is to find common ground that everybody can agree on. We all want to protect our kids. Now, some people may say, oh, well, the gun nuts, they want, no, no, believe me. Even hardcore gun owners are not in favor of mass shootings. So that’s just on the basis of that. They are as horrified and angry about that as the rest of us are. So all this sort of divisive polar rhetoric of, well, if you’re in favor of gun rights, then you don’t care about mass shootings in schools. Not true and not helpful, more importantly. So if we can all say, okay, well, where do we have some common ground? Okay, you know, you’re trying to keep a hold of the Second Amendment, but at the end of the day, the question becomes, what are we going to do about it and can we make some progress? And in fact, just earlier this year, there was some progress. Now, going back to what Celestia was saying, it was widely condemned. I mean, I saw the most recent measures on gun control passing, and a lot of my progressive friends, they didn’t even mention it. They’re like, well, it’s not enough. It’s not, you know, this is just a drop in the bucket. This isn’t going to do any good. And I’m thinking, it’s something. It may not be what you want.

1:09:14
CW: Again, I haven’t read every single word of this book in its current form, which I’m in the process of doing. But I hope you mentioned the Nirvana fallacy and how people just don’t give credit to incremental progress, which is really the only way progress happens.

1:09:32
BR: No, that’s exactly right. And this goes back to what I was talking about before, about the psychology of fear and where we pay attention. And so when there are dramatic setbacks, for example, depending on your point of view, the overturning of Roe v. Wade or the mass shootings, whatever else, these are huge, dramatic headline-making setbacks. At the same time, there are incremental achievements and things that are widely ignored because they’re not these dramatic, sensational, negative things. And so it goes back to news media and social media not promoting the positive things. And even when you bring it up, it’s again, this sort of negative, well, that’s not enough and it’s not this, it’s not that. Well, at some point, you’re just letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. If your only criteria for success, if the only time you’re celebrating is when you’ve won the war, well then you’re not going to go through many fireworks. It’s not a useful, healthy approach to solving the problem.

1:10:35
CW: So we’ve talked about why people are kind of drawn to this fear and the narrative and the boogeyman. What are some of the consequences of all this? I mean, how is our world worse because of the fear? Because a lot of people say, hey, you should use fear to make progress, to get people motivated. How does it make the world worse, though?

1:10:56
BR: Yeah, and there’s a couple ways that it happens. And this is actually a fine line, right? Because we see this, for example, with people who are fighting ecological problems. Deforestation in the Amazon, for example, or global warming. So they have to walk a fine line, right? because on one hand, you want to encourage people to make some contribution, like, you know, recycle and, you know, and try and stem the deforestation in the Amazon and, you know, pass emissions restrictions. At the same time, you don’t want to say, well, we’re all good, you know, don’t worry about it. You also don’t want to say, we’re doomed, give it up. You know what, do whatever you want, burn the planet down, we’re all screwed.

1:11:37
CW: I think Michael Mann has actually mentioned this in terms of with climate change. He has this is climatologist Michael Mann has noted that it’s kind of a victory of big oil and all the folks who are pushing the narrative of don’t worry about climate change. It’s not human. You know, it’s not human cause. There’s nothing you can do about it. If people are thinking, oh, we’ve passed that threshold, we’re doomed anyway, there’s nothing we can do, then there’s no motivation to reduce carbon emissions. There’s no motivation to even try. You’re just kind of hopeless.

1:12:13
BR: Yeah. And that’s one of the big problems that I see with all the fear and alarmism is this sort of creeping cynicism. Sometimes people confuse skepticism and cynicism. I see them as very different myself, but some people sort of lump them together. But particularly when it comes to when the cynicism leads to voter apathy. I mean, I can’t tell you how often I see, you know, there’s this meme or something, everything sucks, everything’s going to hell. The politicians are all the same. It doesn’t matter who you vote for. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not, not accurate. It does matter. Whatever you may believe about different politicians, the Democrats and the Republicans have demonstrably different agendas. They’re not the same. They may be equally mired in scandals, but it is factually false to say it doesn’t matter who you vote for because they’re all the same. They’re not the same. And if you think they are the same, then you’re part of the problem.

1:13:09
CW: Oddly enough, in a meta sort of way, I have seen lately people who are staunch like I’m never going to vote. It doesn’t do any good. I’ve seen that particular person, the non-voter vilified and turned into a boogeyman like they’re to blame for all our problems. How dare they not vote?

1:13:27
BR: Well, there you go. I mean, you know, this isn’t to say that fear can’t be positive in some ways. Generally, it isn’t positive, partly because fear empowers bad people. Fear leads people to make bad decisions because you’re acting on impulse. You’re reacting on what scared the hell out of you. And it could be that you’re scared because of all the crime reports. You’re scared because there’s immigrants in your backyard. There’s people moving in and they’re speaking different languages or someone’s saying gay. I mean, there’s all these people who you’re supposed to be afraid of. The fear is not helpful, and the oversimplification isn’t helpful. So, that’s part of it, and just the wasted resources. I touched on this earlier. In the real world, outside of fairy tales and their binary characters, in the real world, people are complex, and there isn’t always, in fact, there often isn’t, these clear heroes and villains. There may be times when they play one or the other role. I mean Bill Barr, for example, depending on what the news story is about him, he is either a hero or a villain to progressives. He was very clear that there was no voter fraud and he was standing up to Trump. At the same time, he did other things that were just as problematic from the progressive point of view. So this notion that all these people are sort of iron cast into these roles, it’s not helpful, oftentimes it’s counterproductive. And again, it wastes resources because we have finite resources, we have finite attention spans, we have finite political capital. And if we’re throwing time and fear and money and attention and all these different things, then we’re not parsing out what is a genuine threat, what’s a genuine danger. The other effects are more personal. You have, you have individual level fears. You have people who, uh, who buy guns in reaction, not because they are personally endangered, but because they hearing new stories about how dangerous the world is, so they, that, that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. They, they go out and buy more guns. So then they’re armed and they’re more likely to engage in, in, in the gunfight because, because they were scared into that. There’s also increased anxiety and depression, things like that. And also just general, sort of goes along with the cynicism is outrage fatigue, right? When everything is a crisis, then nothing is a crisis.

1:15:53
CW: Yeah, I know far too many people who have definite news-related anxiety and depression and it’s just, it can be overwhelming. If you, you gotta just unplug yourself sometimes and if you unplug, you’re also not really gonna be able to help anything. If you’re not aware, then that kind of sidelines you. And if you’re too aware, then it also sidelines you.

1:16:17
BR: Yeah, and so again, you know, the solution is not to necessarily get off social media and to, I mean, the solution is to recognize some of the mechanisms at play here and to recognize the way that our brains and news media and social media and other things work together to push our buttons and play on our fears and once we recognize that, we can sort of defend ourselves against it in some ways.

1:16:45
CW: Now what you mentioned before in terms of all the negative consequences of getting embroiled in this this fear narrative. I’m recalling when Dr. Dan was on our show some years ago and we were just learning about the coronavirus. It hadn’t even I think we had him on the day it was given a name, COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2, whatever the actual virus name was given. And we asked him, OK, how afraid should we be of this? And he said, the amount of fear you should have is always zero. The amount of concern, the amount of precaution, the amount of steps you take, you can measure that level, you know, how many precautions should I take against this? How concerned should I be? But the amount of fear should always be zero. And in terms of public health, which you have studied over the past two years, what kind of consequences have you seen from a public health aspect, from this human desire to sort of be afraid or make other people afraid in light of all this that we’ve just experienced?

1:17:49
BR: Well, yeah, I mean, and just to reinforce what Doc Dan said, I mean, the level of fear should have a zero. Same thing with panicking. If you’ve ever taken a scuba diving course, one of the first rules is don’t panic. If you’re, you know, 30 meters down and you run out of oxygen, panicking is only gonna make things worse, guaranteed. There is no upside to panic. There’s really no upside to fear. There may be upside to concern if it’s directed at genuine concerning threats and ones that you can identify and hopefully ameliorate. So I would say that probably the most obvious example in public health, and we’ve talked about this in the show, so it’s nothing too insightful, but would be the fear surrounding vaccinations, particularly the COVID vaccinations, where you had people who were, and again, oftentimes activists, right? There are people that you and I know on social media. People are just random people who sort of take on an activist role on social media. They may be conspiracy-minded, and they’re sharing, well, watch out, you know, there’s this, you know, trackers in the vaccines or, you know, watch out, there’s side effects. When again, no one’s denying that there are side effects. There are side effects to literally everything. Every medicine has potential side effects. Any food might harm you. You can drink too much water, it can kill you. That’s not the question. The question isn’t, is there potentially some danger here? The question is, how big is that danger? And how big is that danger compared to the benefits and compared to other threats? That’s where it comes back to me for public health. And fear is trying to get people to recognize, yes, there is a genuine, small, not insignificant, yet not alarming danger in anything. And so that’s, I mean, that’s part of it is just, you know, is trying to put these fears in context. Say, look, no one’s saying these things aren’t real. We’re just saying, you have people who are freaking out, you know, they’re more than happy to drive down the highway without a seatbelt, smoking a cigarette, talking on their cell phone, but they’re freaking out over a side effect of a COVID vaccine that’s going to affect one in two million people.

PR: So now we’ve identified a lot of problems, but what would you recommend to fix the situation?

BR: Well, I would recommend people buy my book, to be honest with you. But I will summarize, you know, there’s no magic bullet here. This book is not going to save America, probably. But hopefully it will sort of give people more perspective and try and help them navigate this. So there’s a couple things. One of them is, as I mentioned, recognizing the biases that are going on here. Because fear is such an easy card to play, because fear is so common, there’s so many sources of it, if you can recognize some of the techniques that I talk about in the book and some of the different ways, you can in some ways inoculate yourself against it. And by recognizing and saying, okay, well, hold on here. You know, there’s this news story. And part of the reason that I’m seeing is because it was selected by social media algorithms in many cases to scare me. And that was pulled from a news article, which was perhaps written to scare me already. And so that’s why I’m remembering talking about it now.

1:21:07
CW: I want to interrupt. I realize it is just the first of the list here, but a really interesting little sort of hack, a news hack, if you will, that Ben pointed out in his book, is if you look for the good news, that is always tends to be hidden. The headline will read, oh, this terrible thing is happening, like 35% of, you know, high school dropouts are up 35%. And if you read further on in the article, it’ll talk about how that high school has made incremental progress over the past 10 years. And then due to this one thing, it had a drop just now, and it’s expected to go back up later. And all that good news part, all the progress is just completely relegated to the bottom of the article.

1:21:57
BR: Yeah, it’s usually in the second to last paragraph. There’s like so oh yeah Crime is up 14% It’s of course is down 80% over the past five years, but last month is up 14%

1:22:11
CW: Yeah, so if you read the fear-mongering headline And you’re interested in that topic Just keep reading and also take note of the fact that not all of the article is going to be about the horrible stuff There’s also positives that any good journalist will put in there. They’re just not going to be grabbed by the headline writer.

1:22:30
BR: Exactly. No, I’m glad you brought that up.

1:22:33
CW: Okay, so that ends my little jump in there. What is next on the list of recommendations people can do?

1:22:39
BR: So another one, and again, we’ve touched on this before, but don’t be afraid to quantify risks and threats. People sometimes get queasy, go, I don’t mind. They’re uncomfortable with the idea of quantifying something because they may say, well, if it affects even one person, if even a few people are affected by this, yes, granted, everyone agrees with that. But in order to understand the phenomenon and to understand a particular social problem, understand how to address it, you have to quantify it. You have to get some some good hard data on it. You have to understand its nuances. And over and over again, I see people who they’re sort of like, well, we, they’re reluctant to like, you know, put a price on a life or to this, that, like, you need to get past that and look at it from a critical thinking and statistical point of view and try to understand the real threats here. So that’s part of it is recognizing that quantifying threats isn’t, it’s not minimizing them, it’s not dismissing them, it’s trying to put a number on them. Avoid generalizations, particularly about minorities and disenfranchised peoples, and try to see are these stories representative? Are they representative of the whole? Be media literate about headlines, as Celestia just mentioned. And also beware of the broken bellwethers, which I talk about in the book. There’s a tendency for people to sort of say, well, if this happens, everything is doomed, everything is lost, right? If this court decision happens or this happens, it’s all over. And oftentimes those bellwethers are not quite as prophetic as it may seem. And lastly, try not to be afraid. I know it’s easier said than done, but one of the benefits of putting threats in perspective is oftentimes it helps you identify what are the bigger threats, what are the more genuine, what are the more significant threats. And oftentimes, that helps calm people. I’ll give you one quick example. I was on a plane the other day, and I was talking to somebody, and she was scared of flying. And I said, well, you know, I mean, believe me, I know that statistics don’t always help. In this case, it’s, well, you know, in fact, you know, so many planes fly all the time. They don’t crash and in the rare very rare cases they do crash. Of course that makes the news and I said by the way, I looked into it and most people survive airline crashes, and she’s like, oh so we’re we’re almost certainly not going to crash and if we do crash we’re almost certainly gonna walk away and I said, yeah She’s like, oh, all right.

1:25:09
CW: So your book could have been one page that just says, try not to be so afraid.

1:25:16
BR: Yes, yes. But I can’t sell that for $24.

1:25:20
CW: OK. OK. Well, now how are we going to actualize this in a classroom? How can this book be taught? How would a college professor or even a high school teacher work this into a lesson plan, you think?

1:25:31
BR: Well, there’s a couple ways. One would be sort of looking at it from a media literacy perspective, as of course we’ve done before. And part of it would be sort of doing a compare and contrast, which of course is a staple of many university courses, and saying, look, okay, here’s this narrative, here’s this fairy tale, here’s this story about America. How well does it align with the facts? And again, I’m not saying it does or doesn’t, it depends on what you choose. But it might be an interesting exercise for students to pick something, they pick a meme or a series of memes or something they see on social media and say, okay, is this true? What is the data behind this? So ignore whether they agree with it politically, focus on, you know, what is the claim? What is it saying about America? And is there data to back it up?

1:26:19
CW: So, yeah, so your book would be a good companion for a journalism class or a media literacy, obviously, class, sociology, you think?

1:26:28
BR: Yeah, absolutely. Sociology, yeah, there’s so many angles to it, right? I mean, sociology, folklore. Yeah, I mean, it is. I mean, again, it sounds weird, but it absolutely brings in folklore because that’s what I do. So, and of course, I’d be pleased if even one or two courses adopted the book. So check it out.

1:26:47
CW: Yeah, right. Well, it’s just fresh out of the gate, so everybody order your copy. And if there’s something you disagree with, I’ll give you Ben’s email address and you can take it up directly with him.

1:26:58
BR: Bring it on. I’ll debate. Let’s do this.

(MUSIC)

1:27:03
CW: Okay, well Ben, thanks for taking the time to talk to us about your book. I wish you the best of book sales as the months go on here.

BR: Well, yeah, thanks. As I mentioned, you were instrumental in helping some of the ideas and stuff come together. I will take full blame for all the mistakes, of course, but you did contribute to it. So I want to make sure that’s acknowledged.

1:27:42
CW: Well, we had a lot of discussions about what a book like that should be like and should cover. And I do remember chastising you quite a bit, saying, damn it, Ben, if you had written this 10 years ago, Trump might not have been elected.

1:27:56
BR: I appreciate your the assumption of power influence you think I wield, but sure.

1:28:07
CW: Well, one can hope. Anyway, everybody should go out and buy yourself a copy. Now, Ben, it’s available at bookstores and as an e-book, right?

1:28:14
BR: Yes, I believe so. I, again, always encourage people to shop locally, but not everybody can. So, yes, it’s available here and there, and even there will be a review of it in the upcoming issue of Skeptical Inquirer, actually.

1:28:27
CW: Fantastic. All right. Well, until next time, everybody, take care.

1:28:31
Bye bye. See you.

1:28:32
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1:28:39
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