Pattern Recognition: Your Brain's Favorite Drug

November 4th, that was the date.

I looked at the charts, I looked at the weather patterns in Guam, and I realized the price of decorative gourds has been inversely correlated with the release dates of every single

Nicolas Cage movie since Con Air.

It's not an accident, it's a signal.

If you take the runtime of national treasure, divide it by the current interest rate, and subtract the number of times my cat is meowing in the refrigerator today,

The number you get is exactly the zip code for Langley, Virginia.

This is what happens.

This is what happens when you leave me alone in a room with a microphone and an internet connection for too long.

I start connecting dots that aren't even dots.

I start connecting lint.

Welcome to the overlap.

I am Joshua.

Usually at this exact moment, you'd hear a reassuring slightly deeper voice say, and I'm Will.

And you'd hear that voice and think, good, the responsible adult is here.

The guy who keeps Joshua from spending 45 minutes talking about the simulation hypothesis is in the room.

But you aren't hearing that voice today, are you?

Silence.

Just the hum of the air conditioner and the sound of my own existential dread.

Will is not here.

And because Will is not here, the guardrails are off.

The teachers left the classroom and I have access to the chalk.

Now, before we get into the heavy stuff, we have to address the elephant in the room, or rather the absence of the elephant.

Where is Will?

The official narrative, the press release sent out by the Deep State PR team, also known as Will's wife,

is that he's at the dentist.

He's allegedly getting a crown replaced on molar number 18.

Boring, plausible, suspiciously mundane.

I don't buy it.

You don't buy it.

We're critical thinkers here at The Overlap.

We look beneath the surface.

So I have spent the last six hours developing three alternative working theories regarding his location.

number one.

Will got too close to the truth about why the ice cream machines at fast food chains are always broken.

You know the ones.

it's statistically impossible for them to be broken that often.

Will started asking questions.

He started poking around the supply chain data and now he's currently being debriefed at a black site in the Nevada desert.

If he comes back next week and suddenly has a passionate love for soft serve vanilla, we know he's been compromised.

We know the reprogramming worked.

Theory number two, Will is actually a large language model.

He's ChatGPT in a human suit.

uh

The developers of Northern Virginia just need to take him offline for a patch to update because he's starting to hallucinate too much about 90s shoe gaze bands.

He's currently buffering on a server rack somewhere in Ashburn.

And theory number three, and this is the one that really worries me, Will never existed.

He's a Tyler Durden-esque projection of my own psyche.

I created him because I needed someone to nod while I ranted about technology.

I'm actually sitting in a basement talking to a volleyball with a face drawn on.

I'm kidding.

He's at the dentist.

Probably.

But did you feel that?

Did you feel that tiny little dopamine hit when I said the thing about the ice cream machines?

For a split second, your brain went, wait, maybe he has a point.

Why are they always broken?

Is it a conspiracy?

That little itch, that friction?

It's exactly what we're talking about today here on The Overlap.

We aren't talking about the aliens.

We aren't talking about the grassy knoll.

We aren't talking about who really built the pyramids.

We're talking about the container.

We're talking about the wetware, your brain.

Why does the human mind crave a pattern so badly that it will invent a tiger in the bushes, even when there's only wind?

Why does a complex scary lie feel so much better physically, chemically better than a boring chaotic truth?

Today I'm flying solo.

no will to rein me in, we're gonna do a deep dive into the evolutionary psychology of conspiracy theories.

We're gonna look at the paranoia feature that came pre-installed in your operating system 50,000 years ago and why it's glitching out in 2025.

It's gonna be messy.

It might get a little weird, but that's what happens when you let the pattern matcher run wild.

Let's get into it.

So to strip this down, we're gonna take the hood off the engine block of the human mind.

If you're listening to this and you're feeling a little smug, maybe thinking, well, I don't believe in conspiracies.

I trust the science.

I trust the process.

I have some bad news for you.

You are running the exact same software as the guy wearing the sandwich board on the corner screaming about the end of days.

You just have a different user interface.

To understand why we see patterns where they don't exist, we actually have to go back, like way back, like way, way back.

We leave.

this beautifully air conditioned studio.

have wifi gone, no paved roads, back to a hundred thousand years to the African savanna.

I want you to picture the scene with me.

It's hot.

The sun's beating down.

We're in the pleocysteine era.

I want to introduce you to two of our ancestors.

Let's call them Skeptical Bob and Paranoid Pete.

And these two guys are hanging out near the watering hole.

They're friends, they're just trying to get through the day without being trampled by a mastodon or dying of an infected hangnail.

Now, Skeptical Bob, he's a cool customer.

He's the intellectual of the tribe.

If Skeptical Bob was alive today, he'd be, I don't know, a data scientist.

He'd read The Economist.

He'd want peer-reviewed studies before he made a decision and prides himself on his rationality.

Paranoid Pete's a little different.

He's a mess.

He's jumpy.

He didn't sleep well last night because he thought the moon looked at him funny.

Pete is constantly scanning the horizon, sweating, waiting for something to go wrong.

So they're standing there chatting about, I don't know, the best way to sharpen a stick when suddenly something happens.

A bush rustles about 30 feet away.

Now this is the moment, the split second decision that defines human history.

Skeptical Bob looks at the bush.

His brain starts running the numbers.

He thinks, okay, what are the variables here?

It's windy today.

There are small rodents in this area.

Statistically speaking, the probability of that Russell being a predator, specifically a saber-toothed tiger, is pretty low.

It's most likely the wind.

Bob requires evidence.

He stays put.

He waits for more data.

Paranoid Pete, Pete doesn't wait for data.

Pete hears the Russell and he screams, tiger, it's a tiger, we're all gonna die.

Pete doesn't check the wind speed, right?

Pete doesn't look for fur.

He runs up to the nearest acacia tree and doesn't come down for three hours.

Turns out it was a tiger.

Skeptical Bob's dead.

He's been removed from the gene pool.

His rational evidence-based DNA ends right there on the grass.

Paranoid Pete looks like an idiot stuck in a tree.

He's hyperventilating.

The rest of the tribe might even laugh at him later for being so scared of a bush.

But here's the crucial difference.

Pete's alive.

Pete goes on to have children.

And he passes down his jumpy, paranoid, assume the worst genes to those children.

This happens over and over and over again for thousands of generations.

The skeptics get eaten, the paranoid survive.

You and I, we are the children of paranoids.

We are the descendants of people who ran away from the wind.

We are the spawn of the cowards.

And because of that lineage, your brain has a very specific piece of software installed.

Psychologists call it the HAD, H-A-D-D.

It stands for hyperactive agency detection device.

It sounds like a weapon from a sci-fi movie or something, but it's actually just a bias in your cognitive processing.

So let's break down the words.

Agency detection, obviously agency means intention.

It means a who, an agent.

Your brain is obsessed with finding a who behind every what.

If a rock falls off a cliff, a purely rational computer would say gravity plus erosion equals falling rock.

But your human brain, your had brain, instinctively thinks, who threw that?

Was it a monkey?

Was it an enemy?

Was it a ghost?

We project agency onto everything.

Think about it.

When your car won't start in the morning, you think about the spark plugs and the fuel injection solenoid.

Or do you hit the steering wheel and yell, why are you doing this to me today?

Come on, Betsy, don't be like this.

You're talking to the car.

You're treating a pile of metal and plastic like it has feelings and tensions and a vendetta against your morning commute.

But this is your agency detection device firing off.

Okay.

You're creating a personality where there isn't one.

Let's look at the first word.

Hyperactive.

It's hyperactive because it's calibrated to be trigger hatch.

This brings us to a concept in statistics called type one and type two errors.

I know statistics are like mind numbingly boring, but stay with me because this literally explains why your uncle believes the earth is flat.

A type one error is a false positive, right?

This is paranoid Pete thinking the wind is a tiger.

He sees a pattern that isn't there.

What is the cost of a type one error?

Well, you look silly.

You burn a few calories running away.

Maybe you lose a little social status because you screamed like a dummy but you live.

The cost is low.

A type two error is a false negative.

This is skeptical Bob thinking the tiger is just the wind and he fails to see the pattern.

Well, what's the cost of a type two error in this scenario is obviously death.

It's extinction game over.

Evolution is a ruthless mathematician.

It looked at the cost benefit analysis and says, okay, we're going to the wire and we're going to make the human brain to make type one errors constantly.

It's safer to see a hundred imaginary tigers than it is really to miss one real tiger.

It's basically safer to assume that every noise, every shadow, every coincidence is a threat, another monster, another plot against you.

So your brain is a false positive machine.

It's designed to be wrong as long as being wrong keeps you safe.

Now, this was a fantastic system for the savanna, right?

It kept us alive.

It got us to where we are as a species.

But here's the problem.

We aren't on a savanna anymore.

Some of us.

Hopefully, maybe I have a few listeners out there on the savanna.

But this is what biologists call an evolutionary mismatch.

Currently, we're living in a world of high information and very low physical threat, respectively.

There are no saber-toothed in the break room at work.

There's no predators hiding in your inbox.

But your HAD software, it hasn't had a firmware update in 50,000 years.

It's still running on version 1.0.

So it's constantly scanning your environment for threats.

It's scanning for agents.

So when you see a stock market crash, your inner caveman screams, tiger!

But there is no tiger.

There is no physical predator.

So your brain starts looking for the invisible predator.

It starts looking for the who.

It can't just be market forces.

It can't just be a housing bubble burst caused by complex derivatives that nobody understood.

That's wind.

That's random.

And random is scary because you can't fight random.

So your brain invents an agent.

It's the hedge funds.

It's the deep state.

It's the Illuminati.

It's the lizard people.

Ah, that feels better, doesn't it?

Even though it's scary, it feels better because now there's a who.

Now there's a tiger you can't point at.

This is why conspiracy theories thrive in chaotic times like the one we're living in.

When the world feels unpredictable, during a pandemic, during a war, during an economic crisis, your agency detection device goes into overdrive.

It's screaming at you that someone must be in on this and has to be doing it on purpose.

Because the alternative, the idea that bad things just happen, that systems fail, that incompetence is more common than malice, that's the wind.

And your brain is terrified of the wind.

So if you find yourself reading a news story and connecting dots that seem, I don't know, a little crazy, if you find yourself thinking that a celebrity blinking in Morse code is a

signal to the resistance, don't beat yourself up.

You aren't crazy.

You're just a hairless ape with an overactive security system looking for a tiger in a digital jungle.

But here's the kicker.

The tiger isn't the only thing driving us.

Fear is a powerful motivator, sure, but fear is exhausting.

You can't run on fear forever.

To get really hooked, to really fall down the rabbit hole and stay there, you need something else.

You need a reward.

You need a chemical hit that makes you feel like a genius.

You need dopamine.

So that's what we're gonna talk about next.

How your brain kind of turns the connecting the dots into a drug that is more addictive than caffeine, sugar, or validation from your parents combined.

So we've established the brain is a coward.

It's an ancient, terrified little creature scanning the horizon for tigers.

That explains the fear.

That explains why conspiracy theories often start with a threat.

A virus, a war, a takeover.

But fear,

is a terrible fuel source for long-term engagement.

Fear burns hot and fast.

Adrenaline is exhausting.

If conspiracy theories were only about being afraid, we'd all burn out in a week.

We'd get tired of being scared, and we'd go back to watching dog videos.

But people don't burn out.

It sucks, but they dig in.

They spend years on this shit.

They ruin their marriages, they ruin their lives, they lose jobs.

Why?

Because for them, it's not just about fear.

It's about pleasure.

It's about the juice, the sauce, the chemical reward system that keeps you doom scrolling at 3 a.m.

I know it so well.

We need to talk about dopamine.

Now, usually when we talk about dopamine, we talk about it in the context of TikTok or gambling or sugar.

It's the do it again molecule.

but it plays a massive role in how we process truth.

To understand this, I need to introduce you to two of my favorite words in the English language today.

They're fancy Greek words.

And if you can use them at parties, you'll maybe sound a little smarter than you are.

The first word is pareidolia.

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon where your brain perceives a specific meaningful image

in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.

This is the reason you see a man in the moon.

It's the reason why back in 1976, the Viking 1 orbiter took a picture of the Sedonia region on Mars and everyone lost their minds because a shadow looked like a giant stone

face.

This is the reason why every few years someone sells a grilled cheese sandwich on eBay for $5,000 because the burn mark looks vaguely like the Virgin Mary.

And notice, it's always the Virgin Mary, right?

Like it's never like Gary from accounting.

You never look at a cloud and go, look, that's that guy who cut me off in traffic yesterday.

Your brain searches for significance.

So it wants the pattern to be important.

Your brain's hardwired to recognize faces.

It's the first thing we learn to do as babies.

We were so desperate to see faces that we will construct them out of burnt bread, cheddar cheese, marching rocks, um cheese-its, yeah.

But visual patterns are just the tip of that iceberg.

The real drug is the second word.

Apophenia.

Apophenia is a spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of completely unrelated things.

It's looking at static and seeing a signal.

It's looking at chaotic world and seeing a script by a cabal of

powerfully rich people.

No, I don't want you to think that I'm casting aspersions or doubt about the current world we're living in, of the oligarchy that is building inside the United States, but we're

talking about things that don't exist, right?

These things obviously do exist, and I'm pretty sure I'm not crazy.

It's how the chemistry works, right?

Your brain hates ambiguity.

We hate not knowing.

because ambiguity causes us cognitive stress.

mean, sometimes more than cognitive stress, but definitely cognitive stress.

And it's actually painful at like a neural level.

When you're confused, your brain releases the stress hormone, cortisol, and you feel anxious.

But when you solve the puzzle, right, when you connect the dots, relief, satisfaction, a little hit of dopamine.

Think about when you finish a really hard Sudoku puzzle or when you finally guess the wordle in three tries or when you're watching a mystery movie and you figure out who the

killer is five minutes before the detective does.

I do that all the time.

My wife hates it.

You get the rush, right?

That aha moment.

You feel smart, you feel capable.

You feel like you've brought order to chaos.

Now, imagine that feeling not from a crossword puzzle,

but from reality itself.

Yeah, let's walk through the do your own research rabbit hole.

uh Let's simulate this addiction.

It's late.

You can't sleep.

You're worried about the economy or the election or the fact that Will still hasn't texted me back about the podcast outline.

You feel powerless.

You stumble across a forum post.

Someone mentions, I don't know, the Denver International Airport.

They say, have you noticed the murals are really weird?

then you Google the murals.

You see a picture of a soldier in a gas mask stabbing a dove and your brain goes, well, that is kind of weird.

Then you click a link.

It says the airport went $2 billion over budget.

Your brain asks, well, why is that?

The mainstream media says, well, bureaucratic incompetence and the construction delays.

Boring, there's no dopamine there, right?

Bureaucracy is kind of dull.

But then you find a YouTube video.

It's got 400 views.

It was filmed in some guy's basement named Truthseeker69.

And he says, we went over budget because they're building a massive underground bunker for the global elite to hide during the apocalypse.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, dopamine.

You just connected two dots.

Murals plus budget equals bunkers.

The ambiguity is gone.

The chaos has been replaced by a story.

You keep clicking.

Why is the airport shaped like a swastika?

It's not, by the way.

It's actually shaped like a pinwheel for, they say, for wind dynamics or whatever.

But if you squint hard enough and you, guess, want to see it, that's, there's gargoyles in the baggage claim.

Yeah, sure.

Every time you find a clue, you get a reward.

You feel like a detective.

You feel like Neo waking up in the Matrix.

For the first time all day, you aren't just a passive victim of a confusing world.

You're an active participant.

You're, quote, doing research.

And let's be honest about the phrase, do your own research, right?

I love that phrase.

If I mean that I absolutely hate it because it's the mantra of today, right?

Like 99 % of the time, quote, doing your own research means quote, I'm actually conducting a double blind peer reviewed study, right?

No, it doesn't.

It means I'm Googling shit until I can find the one guy on page 38 of the search results who completely agrees with what I was currently anxious about.

It's literally confirmation bias powered by Google's algorithm and is also designed to keep you clicking.

It's a feedback loop in hell.

But here's the darkest part, the part that I think we miss when we make fun of conspiracy theorists.

We think they're nuts, right?

We think they're afraid.

We think they're terrified of the Illuminati or the deep state or the reptilians.

And sure, on the surface they are.

I mean, they talk about evil plans and global domination, but deep down,

Beyond it, subconsciously, they love the conspiracy because consider the alternative.

Option A, there's a secret group of evil elites controlling the weather, rigging the banks, and scripting every single war.

That is scary, but it implies that someone is in charge.

It implies that the world is a machine.

It has levers.

It has a steering wheel.

And if there are villains, that means there can be heroes.

It means you can be the hero by exposing them.

It means the suffering in the world has a reason.

It's part of a plan, an evil plan, but a plan.

Now, option B.

Option B is the truth.

Option B is nobody's actually driving this janky bus.

Option B is that pandemics happen because of random biological mutations that don't give two shits about humanity.

Option B is that

Economies crash because of complex mathematical feedback loops that not even bankers understand, not even the stock market can figure out how it works.

Option B is that wars start because of incompetence, miscommunication, and ego.

Option B is that bad things happen to good people for absolutely no reason at all.

And that?

That is terrifying.

Chaos is unbearable to the human mind.

Would you rather believe in a malevolent God than an empty sky?

Would you rather believe that a secret cabal is steering the bus toward a cliff than face the fact that the driver had a heart attack 10 miles ago and we're just careening down the

highway on momentum?

Conspiracy theories are just fan fiction for reality, right?

They structure the world, they give it a plot.

They give it a climax, they give it a meaning and people, we will die for that meaning.

And as evidence by what's going on in our world today, we will kill for meaning and we will absolutely ignore reality if it means we get to keep our story.

So when someone dives deep into that rabbit hole of spontaneity, don't think of them as crazy.

They're addicts.

They're addicted to the story.

to the feeling of order and that they understand it.

Okay.

That's a lot of the science.

We've talked about the brain.

Let's talk a little bit about the heart.

We need to talk about why this is happening now in the 2020s.

Why the most dangerous ingredient in the conspiracy cocktail isn't misinformation.

It's actually loneliness.

So if you're just tuning in, we've taken a tour through the haunted house of the human mind.

We've looked at the evolutionary hardware, the HAD system that makes us spot tigers and bushes.

We've looked at the neurochemical software, the dopamine hits that makes connecting the dots feel like winning the lottery.

But if we stop, we're missing the most important piece of the puzzle.

We have to ask the question, why now?

Humans have always been pattern matchers.

We've always been superstitious.

We've always seen faces in the clouds, but it feels a little bit different lately, doesn't it?

It feels like reality itself is fracturing.

You go to Thanksgiving dinner and you realize halfway through the mashed potatoes that you and your uncle aren't just disagreeing about politics.

You are inhabiting two completely different physical realities.

In your reality, the sky is blue and vaccines work.

In his reality, the sky is a holographic projection and vaccines are full of nanobots controlled by Bill Gates's 5G network.

Why is this happening so much to us in the mid 2020s?

The answer is the one reason why you're able to listen to this podcast, the internet.

And the easy answer is the algorithms.

And sure, the internet is the gasoline.

It's the delivery mechanism, but you can pour gasoline on a pile of wet logs and it won't catch fire.

You need a spark.

You need dry.

And I think dry tender is actually loneliness and it's a massive loss of agency.

We've talked on the show before about the concept of subscription serfdom.

If you haven't listened to it, go back and take a look at that.

Think about your life right now.

What do you actually own?

You don't own your music.

You rent it from Spotify.

You don't own your movies.

You license them from Netflix.

You barely own your phone.

You're leasing it from the carrier.

Software companies are moving to a model where you never buy an actual program or app.

You just pay a monthly fee to be a user.

We're shifting from ownership economy to a usership economy.

And look, if you want to know more about that, you can definitely check out our subscription serfdom podcast.

That's another solo one this uh this past week.

If you're listening to these in order.

uh But while that's convenient,

Hey, mean, look, unlimited music is great.

Unlimited books are great.

Unlimited movies are great.

Psychologically, it changes us.

It does something to our brains.

It makes us feel like passengers.

It makes us feel like we have no control over the framework of our own lives.

We're just renting space in a world owned by somebody that's not us.

So if you combine that economic lack of control with

The political situation, you look at the government and it feels deadlocked.

It feels like no matter who you vote for, the machine just keeps grinding.

You look at the economy, inflation is eating your savings if you're lucky enough to have savings at all.

You look at the culture and it's moving faster than you can possibly keep up with.

You feel small.

You feel ignored.

You feel like a cog in a broken machine.

Psychologists call this a loss of agency.

And the human brain hates feeling powerless.

If you can't control your rent, you can't control your job, you can't control the government, you will desperately look for something you can control.

You can control the truth.

Enter the conspiracy theory.

This is where the conspiracy stops being a theory and starts being a hero's journey.

And I'm not talking about five grams of psychedelic mushrooms.

Think about the narrative structure of QAnon or the whole Flat Earth thing or the anti-vax movement.

In these stories, you aren't just somebody who got laid off from your secretarial job or your factory working job.

You aren't just a mom struggling to pay the bills.

No, you're a digital soldier.

You're awake.

The wool has been pulled away from your eyes.

You're one of the chosen few who sees the real world behind the curtain.

You're fighting a cosmic war against absolute evil.

That gives you dignity.

It does give you a mission.

And I say people need a mission.

It turns your suffering into a plot point in this gigantic story where you, my friend, are the hero.

So if you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right, right above safety is belonging.

And this is the part where we kind of laugh, right?

We call them crazy, we call them stupid, but we forget that they're lonely.

And if you go down a rabbit hole, let's say you start getting really into the idea that the earth is flat, you don't just find facts about the horizon line, you find a community,

you join it.

Discord server, you join a telegram channel, you go to a convention, and suddenly you're surrounded by thousands of people who say, I see you, I hear you, you're smart, you

matter.

Ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping.

For a lot of people, especially older men, statistically speaking, who are suffering from an epidemic of loneliness right now, this is the first time they felt heard in years.

Same thing with MAGA.

It's a club.

And it's a tribe.

It's a price of admission to the club.

You know, it's just agreeing the earth is flat.

It's agreeing that Donald Trump is a family man who's a Christian and is going to bring America back to a period of greatness.

It's a small price to pay for friendship.

This brings us to the tragedy of debunking.

And I see this a lot.

I do this a lot.

I see people who mean well.

like me, skeptics, scientists, maybe you, trying to save their family members and Facebook friends with facts.

You sit your dad down, you bring a stack of peer-reviewed papers, you bring up Snopes, you have NASA data, you prove mathematically, logically, undeniably that he is wrong, and you

think, done, I win.

Hopefully now he has to come back to reality.

But he doesn't, does he?

No.

He gets mad.

He digs his heels in.

He calls you a sheeple, brainwashed by the demon rats.

Why?

Because to him, you aren't correcting a math error.

You're trying to evict him from his house.

If he admits you're right,

If he admits the earth is round, he loses everything.

He loses his status as a digital soldier.

He loses his sense of superior knowledge, but most importantly, he has to leave the club.

He has to log off the Discord server and he has to say goodbye to the friends who validated him.

I hope you're listening to me when I say this.

He has to go back to being a lonely aging man in a scary, expensive world where nobody's in charge and he doesn't own his own future.

And when you're given the choice between a lie that brings comfort, community and purpose, and a truth that brings isolation and existential dread, most human beings choose the lie

every single time.

think it was Miracle on 34th Street, the updated one, where he says, what's better?

A lie, an easy, harmless lie that brings a smile or the truth that brings a tear.

We laugh at the tinfoil hat, right?

Like it's kind of the universal symbol of a crackpot, a lunatic.

Everybody knows, right?

But you should look at it differently today.

That hat for them is their armor.

And I'm using it symbolically.

I don't mean the literal hat.

It's designed to protect the wearer from the sheer crushing weight of chaos, right?

It protects them from the idea that everything

within their suffering right now is completely random.

It protects them from the idea that no one is coming to save them.

But the truth is no one's coming to save us.

We have to make the changes.

We have to do the things.

So when we look at these breakdowns of our society, right, when we look at the polarization of our communities, we kind of have to think about it and say, look, we

aren't having a crisis of information.

We don't have a crisis of facts.

What we have is a connection crisis.

We built a world that's incredibly efficient at delivering goods and information as data, but really bad at delivering meaningfulness and belonging.

We're trying to cure loneliness with algorithms, but as we're seeing on a massive scale, the side effect is mass paranoia.

I think about Will.

If he existed, which we are still debating, the reason Will and I can disagree on things, and we do often without spiraling into conspiracy, is that we have a relationship.

We have trust.

I don't need to invent a secret cabal to explain why Will disagrees with me about tax policy.

I just know he's wrong because he has bad taste in economics.

But if you strip away that trust, if you isolate people,

the had system kicks in.

The pattern matcher in our brain wakes up and suddenly the person you live right next door to isn't just a guy with a different opinion, he's an agent of the enemy.

And we've seen this on both sides.

So the million dollar question, how do we fix it?

How do we talk to someone who's wearing that armor?

Either physically or metaphorically.

How do you pull someone out of the rabbit hole without destroying them and their whole world?

Because I can promise you yelling facts at them definitely doesn't work.

Mocking them seemed to work for a minute and then quickly they pivoted away from it.

So what does work?

We're gonna talk about that now.

We're gonna talk about epistemic humility and the one question, the magic question that can actually

put a jam in the gears of a conspiracy theory.

So here we are, rubber meets the road.

We've covered the evolutionary biology, which is the tiger in the bush.

We've covered the neurochemistry that was the dopamine hit in solving the puzzle and Sudoku and whatever.

And we've covered the sociology, right?

Like the fact that loneliness drives people into these weirdo communities.

It's all very interesting, very nerdy sociological stuff.

But I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking, okay, that's great, but how does that help me?

And when my uncle Steve corners me at the barbecue next week to talk about the moon landing film by Stanley Kubrick or religion.

I hate to say it for my more religious listeners, but it's the hardest part, right?

Your instinct and my instinct is to fight fire with water.

Water puts out fire.

We want to fight fiction with facts.

But if you take one thing away from this episode, let it be this.

Facts are not the cure to feelings.

You cannot logic someone out of a position they didn't logic themselves into.

If Steve, Uncle Steve, believes the moon landing was faked, it's not because he analyzed the telemetry data from Apollo 11.

It's because believing it makes him feel smart.

It makes him feel like he sees something that you sheeple don't.

It gives him status.

It gives him agency.

If you show him a photo of the lunar rover, like on the moon, you aren't fighting his logic, you're attacking his status.

You're attacking his identity at that point.

So he'll just say the photo's faked.

So what do you do?

You stop playing debunker.

You stop playing fact checker.

And these things are incredibly difficult for me.

So I'm uh not making fun of you by any means.

So I'm preaching to myself as much as I'm preaching to you, I guess.

You should start playing mechanic.

Stop asking, why do you believe that?

And start asking, how would that work?

Psychologists call this exposing the illusion of explanatory depth.

Most people think they understand how the world works, but look, most of us don't.

If I ask you to draw a bicycle from memory, including the chain and the frame structure, you probably couldn't do it correctly.

You'd draw a bike that wouldn't steer or would collapse the moment you sat on it.

We feel like we know how a bike works, but we really only know the surface.

Conspiracy theories operate in the same principle.

They rely on magic, not mechanics.

Let's use our missing co-host, as an example.

Let's say I believe that Will is a lizard person, a cold-blooded, shape-shifting reptilian sent to monitor the podcast by the Galactic Federation.

If you tell me Joshua, that's stupid.

Will is human.

I'll just dig in.

I'll say, well, that's exactly what a lizard sympathizer would say.

You've been compromised.

But if you ask me how that changes the game.

Okay, Joshua, let's assume Will is a lizard.

How does he maintain his body temperature in the studio?

We keep the AC at 68 degrees.

Wouldn't he become slow and cold?

And does he have a heat lamp under his desk?

How does he blink?

I've seen him blink.

Did the eyelids move sideways?

Have you checked the slow motion footage?

How does he pay his taxes?

Does the IRS have a reptilian checkbox?

If he uses a fake social security number, how did he pass the background check for his job?

Is the HR department also lizards?

You see what happens, right?

You force the brain to explain the boring mechanical logistical details of a conspiracy that dopamine hit.

It dries up that sense of superiority doesn't hit the same way that it used to just like a meth addict.

The movie script falls apart because movie scripts don't worry about tax forms or thermodynamics, right?

The how is where the conspiracy dies.

But there is a catch and it's my biggest flaw.

You can't do this if you're arrogant about

what you already know.

You can't do this if you're just trying to dunk on them.

You have to be genuinely curious, right?

Like you have to treat their theory with enough respect to take it apart piece by piece.

And finally, you have to look in the mirror.

We talked about epistemic humility.

I do this too, right?

I have my own patterns.

I have this tendency to believe that eventually technology will solve everything.

I believe that if we get the data right, humans will behave rationally.

That is a conspiracy theory.

There is zero historical evidence that humans behave rationally.

But I believe it because it makes me feel safe.

It makes me feel like the future is manageable.

We're all pattern matchers, right?

Like we're all descendants of paranoid Pete.

We're all looking for a signal in the noise.

The only difference is which channel we have it turned to.

Does that still work anymore?

Channels turning.

I don't know.

I don't know if that holds up for the, the, um, Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

Um,

if you don't change channels i guess let's say changing you to channels still works tells you change channels on you to break

But I digress.

So the point is, have a little grace, right?

The person wearing the tinfoil hat is just trying to survive the chaotic, scary, scary universe you are, right?

They're just running a different user interface of a shared operating system.

To wrap this up, your brain is a beautiful, old, terrified mess.

It really is.

It's running software designed for the Pleo Sistine era on hardware that is being flooded with fiber optic data speeds.

It's DSL running high speed data.

It's desperate for connection, for safety, and kind of addicted to the feeling of being right.

So be kind to your brain, give it a break, go outside, touch grass, look at a tree, and not because the tree is a 5G antenna disguised as an oak tree, just because it's a tree

and trees are nice.

Next time you see your face in a piece of toast, please don't start a religion, just eat the toast, it's probably sourdough.

Will should be back soon, unless of course, don't know, theory number two was correct and he's currently rebooting a server farm in Virginia.

But look, if he comes back with a slightly robotic voice and an encyclopedic knowledge of capture codes, just uh act normal.

Don't spook him.

I'm Joshua.

This has been a solo flight on the overlap.

Thank you all for listening.

Please try not to connect the dots.

They know you're listening.