Stian is someone who has been quite deeply involved in the 9/11 Truth community and the UFO community. He also just read my book: Escaping the Rabbit Hole, and has a few questions for me about my approach to debunking.  We also cover the slippery slope of internet censorship, the sometimes useful role of conspiracy promoters, how to find common ground, and what I think about the Tic-Tac UFO. * 0:00:49 – Defining the Term “Debunked” * 0:08:27 – French Wikipedia’s Misleading Metabunk...

Anthony Magnabosco is the most well-known practitioner of the craft of “Street Epistemology”, which he defines as: “a dialog where you use questions to explore somebody’s claim to see how they concluded that it’s true.” While commonly associated with atheism (the term comes from the book “A Manual for Creating Atheists” by Peter Boghossian) Street Epistemology can be used to explore any kind of belief. There’s actually quite a bit of crossover with how to talk to conspiracy...

Phil is a former conspiracy theorist in Northern Ireland who got into conspiracy theories aged 18, around 14 years ago. Going to university exposed him to a variety of people and to new ways of thinking, which over the course of a year gradually pulled him out of the rabbit hole. Now Phil has started a YouTube channel as “The Skeptic of the North” to share some of his thoughts on the topic, and specifically on the conversational method of discussion Epistemology — how people know what they...

Elizabeth Loftus is an expert on memory. A Distinguished Professor in several fields*, her work focusses on false memories, how they can be accidentally created and how they can be deliberately manipulated. We discuss many aspects of memory and how it sometimes relates to the world of conspiracy theories.  We touch on UFOs, Chemtrails, 9/11, Jeffery Epstein, and the moral panics of the 1980s. *In my introduction, I mangled together the various departments where Professor Loftus is a...

Tom has dabbled in a few conspiracy theories over the years, and still thinks there are some significant questions that have never been answered about why the World Trade Center buildings fell down the way they did on 9/11. We talk about how he came to believe what he does,  how it has changed over the years, and what evidence it make take for him to feel the question is resolved. * Judith Miller’s Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller#Refusal_to_disclose_source * Donahue’s...

Geoff says that six years ago he was “as normal as everyone else,” but when he was caught up in the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bomber (Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) he took an interest in the events and eventually came to believe it was all staged. This led him to research other topics and now he feels nearly everything we see is staged, and that the world is run by an organization of Freemasons, Jesuits, and the Vatican. He also thinks that the earth is not a globe and that it’s possibly...

Brian Dunning is a prolific skeptical podcaster with his award-winning show “Skeptoid” coming up on its 700th episode. He’s also a writer, with his most recent book Conspiracies Declassified: The Skeptoid Guide to the Truth Behind the Theories, explaining the facts behind 50 different conspiracy theories. He’s also a documentary producer, currently working on Science Friction, a documentary about scientists who get misrepresented by the media. We discuss all these topics and more. *...

Dr Michael Shermer is founder of The Skeptics Society, and editor-in-chief of its magazine Skeptic. He’s written several books on science and skepticism and his latest work is an audio-only 12-part course, for Audible and The Great Courses, called Conspiracies & Conspiracy Theories: What We Should and Shouldn’t Believe—and Why. We cover the full spectrum of conspiracies, their history and context, their social and psychological causes and their very real effects. We discuss real and false...

UFO Jesus is a popular advocate of UFO “disclosure”, the belief that the US Government is close to revealing that it knows that some UFOs actually are the result of alien visitors. We talk about this and our different interpretation of the evidence used to support this case. In particular, we focus on the 2004 case of the USS Nimitz, where, over several days, unexplained sightings and radar returns culminated in two fighter planes observing what one pilot, Commander David Fravor, described as...

Jason Bermas is a producer, writer, and YouTuber, best known for conspiracy documentaries such as Loose Change, Fabled Enemies, Shade, and Invisible Empire. Loose Change was a seminal documentary for the 9/11 “Truth” movement, and I’ve often heard people cite it as a big part of why they got interested in the various 9/11 conspiracy theories. We talk about the topics in his films: 9/11, geopolitics and corruption, chemtrails, But we also talk quite a bit about UFOs, video games, and quantum...

Nick Pope is a journalist and media commentator who writes and talks a lot about the UFO phenomenon. He is perhaps best known for a role he undertook for the British Government from 1991 to 1994 which involved investigating reports of UFO sightings. We talk about his recent trip to view the storming of Area 51, his history of investigating UFO sighting, the current state of UFOlogy research and culture, and interaction with people on the internet    

Ian goes by the name TheoryQED on Metabunk and his YouTube Channel, where he posts about UFOs. Unlike me, and definitely unlike my last guest (Seth Shostak), Ian thinks there’s something highly significant to the UFO phenomenon, maybe even alien visitors. Like most Americans, he also suspects the government is not telling us everything it knows. Some of our disagreements have been about three videos that have been in the news recently: “Go Fast”, “Gimbal,” and “Flir1”. The latter is...

Seth Shostak is the Senior Astronomer for the SETI Institute and former Director of Center for SETI Research. A popular science communicator, Seth has hosted SETI’s weekly radio show (and now podcast) Big Picture Science since 2002. We discuss the work of SETI, and some of the more interesting developments. We also talk about the UFO “Disclosure” conspiracy theory, which suggests the US government is covering up evidence of extraterrestrial encounters and is (perhaps) on the verge of...

Donald Friedman, P.E., F.ASCE, is a professional engineer with more than 25 years of experience in the investigation, analysis, and restoration of landmark buildings. He has taught engineering  at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Columbia University; he has spoken at numerous conferences including the fourth and fifth ASCE Forensics Conference; he is the author of After 9-11: An Engineer’s Work at the World Trade Center, based on his work at...

JM Talboo runs the web site http://911debunkers.blogspot.com subtitled “Debunking the Debunkers of the 9/11 Truth Movement”. His focus is on debunking people like me, i.e. people who debunk 9/11 conspiracy theories. But he also debunks 9/11 Truthers when he sees them make mistakes, and recently added another subtitle to his blog: “Refuting the Hollow Arguments of the So-called 9/11 Debunkers & Truthers” We talk about how he got into 9/11 Truth and blogging, how his beliefs have changed...

Mike Rothschild is a writer who is an expert on a variety of conspiracy theories, in particular QAnon. We discuss the drawn-out decline of the QAnon theory, prosperity scams, and the theories around the death of the Jeffery Epstein. We also discuss Mikes upcoming book,  The World’s Worst Conspiracies.   * Mike on Twitter: @rothschildmd * QAnon (Wikipedia) * Comey not getting prosecuted * Iraqi Dinar Scam * Hyoid Bone Fractures with suicide and age. * Clinton Body Count (Snopes) *...

“Paradigm Shift” is the name used by a poster on Metabunk. Paradigm Shift had made many posts about 9/11, and the need, as he sees it, for a new investigation to look into the possibility of explosives being used to bring down the twin towers. Online discussions can be slow-moving and fractious, so I asked him to come on the podcast for a more detailed and direct conversation about what we believe, and why we believe it. Paradigm Shift is a student in his mid-20s. The drum graphic is what he...

Willie was one of the first people that I interviewed for my book Escaping The Rabbit Hole.  He’s a former believer in theories from 9/11 being an “inside job”, to chemtrails.  His story forms the preface to ETRH, and sets the tone for the whole book. No matter how deep you are down the rabbit hole, or how long you’ve been down there, there’s always the possibility of escape. We had this follow-up chat 2-years to the day after the first one and discuss his story, lesson learned, and what has...

Adam Taylor was very active in the 9/11 truth movement for ten years from 2007 to 2017.  He’s still very much in favor of a new investigation and thinks there are many unanswered questions about the events of 9/11. But he no longer spends time advocating, and instead is focusing on living a normal life. We talk about how he got into 9/11 “truth” activism, why he eventually retired from the movement, the role of debunkers, and his thoughts on the “truth” movement as a whole * Adam Taylor’s...

Brad is an electrical engineer and an expert in mathematics. He also likes to consider that an idea might be true before rejecting it, no matter how extreme. This led him very briefly down the rabbit hole of checking to see if the earth was actually round like a ball, or might it possibly be flat. His strong grounding in mathematics very quickly put an end to that – but what about the people who don’t really understand the math? Is there hope for “flat earthers” who don’t really understand...

Rory has an extensive series of videos on YouTube debunking Flat Earth, focusing on simple ways of demonstrating that there’s a curve. But he’s also got a very interesting life story as a traveler, both around the world and in a spiritual sense. This exploration has eventually given him a great perspective on why people believe in things when the evidence is against them, but at times led him to entertain a number of conspiracy theories and other esoteric beliefs. He’s still a little...

David Keith is Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. He is also executive chairman of Carbon Engineering.  Because he’s a well-known expert in the largely theoretical field of geoengineering (deliberately modifying the Earth’s climate) he has become an often demonized target for conspiracy theorists who think that the climate is actually being secretly modified using “chemtrails.” We discuss the actual state of Geoengineering research...

Paul is a former promoter of the Planet X conspiracy theory, which is also known as the Nibiru cataclysm. Planet X (or Nibiru) is a supposed rogue planet that some people claim they can observe near the sun. Supposedly the existence of this planet is being covered up by the government because it’s about to cause the end of the world. There’s a wide variety of versions of this theory. Paul discovered the Planet X theory back in 2013 and became very interested in it. He started posting lots of...

Jim Lee used to be a fairly hardcore conspiracy theorist, deep into things like Chemtrails and doomsday comets. Now he’s less deep down the rabbit hole, but has managed to create one of his own. He’s convinced there’s something going on involving chemicals in the air or modifying contrails. Not exactly chemtrails, but still something nefarious. He spends a lot of time researching what it might be.  He’s also concerned about the effects of potential future geoengineering, pollution, and...

Jen Senko is the director of the documentary film The Brainwashing of my Dad, released in 2016. The film tells the story of how her father had a drastic change in personality after slowly getting sucked into a rabbit hole of conservative talk radio. This was very interesting to me, not simply for the whole rabbit-hole aspect, but also because partisan media often traffics in conspiracy theories (like Obama being a Muslim.) Jen does a great job of examining the history of right wing media,...