You're Wrong About
Sarah is a journalist obsessed with the past. Every week she reconsiders a person or event that's been miscast in the public imagination.
You're Wrong About
How to Deprogram a Guy in 10 Days with Endless Thread
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Free yourself. What does it take to get someone to leave a cult? What happens if the cult is all around us? In this episode, Ben Brock Johnson & Amory Sivertson of NPR’s Endless Thread podcast join Sarah for a discussion about the cultier aspects of our culture, politics, and history, from the surprising origin of the anti-vax movement to the online communities that conspiracy theories can provide to lonely seekers. Together they try to figure out if it is indeed possible to “deprogram” those who wander too far into conspiracies. Digressions include the TikTok Button Girl, chicken pox playtime, and the grave sin of sleep shaming.
More Endless Thread:
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/568542542/endless-thread
Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler:
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More You're Wrong About:
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YWA - How to Deprogram a Guy in 10 Days
Sarah: You come together because you all love Newsies, and then you look around and you realize that you're all bisexual 15-year-olds.
Welcome to You’re Wrong About. And welcome also to You’re Wrong About and Endless Thread crossover event, like on TGI Friday when Corey from Boy Meets World would write a letter to Urkel or something. And with me today are Ben and Amory of Endless Thread.
Ben: Hello.
Sarah: Hello. Thank you so much for being here.
Ben: Love a crossover.
Sarah: Do you, is that a familiar reference? Did that happen?
Amory: Yeah. But who's Urkel and who's Corey?
Ben: No. How dare. Don't say that. Oh God no. That's very familiar. Although I feel like you could convince me that it happened, even if it didn't. If that makes sense.
Sarah: That's the thing, too.
Ben: Yeah.
Sarah: Well, and so you do a show where you're really, you're doing a lot of things, but I feel like partly investigating pop culture memory. Is that fair to say?
Ben: Sure. Yeah.
Sarah: Oh, there's definitely some of that. A lot of Mandela effect popping up.
Ben: Yeah. Love a good Mandela effect.
Amory: A lot of internet cultural mysteries.
Ben: Yep. We'll take a Streisand effect if that comes along.
Amory: Oh yeah. Did the Fruit of the Loom logo have a cornucopia? Still wrapping my head around that one.
Sarah: Okay. Don't tell us. I feel like people need to walk on over.
Ben: Yeah. We described the show to each other as Unsolved Mysteries, Untold Histories, and other weird stories from the internet. And that sort of encompasses everything, but yeah, that's what we kind of think about and tackle.
Sarah: Yeah. And did you have a sense when you got started that you were going to be involved less in the far too serious issues of America's fascist takeover than perhaps you inevitably ended up being by working on the internet?
Ben: Oh man. Oh man. It did feel more friendly in 2017, I will say.
Sarah: Which is odd, right? Because all this stuff was in motion, but I guess it hadn't gotten that far and we were still… we thought we were so grizzled, but in retrospect, we were like, oh God. It was our first time at the rodeo or something.
Amory: Yeah. Fun fact, Endless Thread sort of grew out of a story that someone at WBUR did about a beautiful Reddit thread where someone was soliciting letters for their dying uncle with Downs Syndrome. It was this beautiful, heartwarming story, and that was the thing.
Ben: The internet coming together to be kind to everyone being kind to each other.
Sarah: Yeah. And it's all gone downhill from there. And so You’re Wrong About started in 2018 and I think it was based on this idea of like, boy, howdy, gee willikers, there sure are a lot of stories where… I feel like I'm doing a Jiminy Cricket impression.
Ben: Keep going. You're doing great.
Sarah: There sure are a lot of stories that we think we know, but we don't. And if we tell you the truth, then you'll remember and you'll learn them. And I mean, the thing is, a lot of people do listen because they want the truth and they're extremely curious. And I feel like that's maybe the most heartening thing, certainly for me, about making the show over the past decade.
But I think that, you know, Michael and I began making the show out of the sense of - not to speak for him, because he is probably wiser about this than I was. But I definitely came to it with a sense of, really to me, incredible innocence of like, now that we have the internet and information can travel faster, people can learn the truth faster and more also.
Ben: Yeah.
Sarah: And it’s like, yeah. But there's other stuff that they prefer to learn that's getting around as well.
Ben: Yeah. Well I feel like years ago I would sort of come to these topics in this sort of general value. It’s sort of a neutral. It's sort of like, yeah, there's a lot of good, there's a lot of bad, it's fine.
Amory: It’s a tube.
Ben: Yeah. It's a series of tubes. And now I have to say that my operating stance is more under siege than yeah, let's figure it out together. And I think we're all a little more jaded than we were in 2017 and 2018.
Sarah: Yeah. Which is good. We don't want to learn nothing.
Amory: Yeah. I agree with the, let's figure it out together. But I have definitely increasingly become more of the, let's figure it out together offline kind of person.
Sarah: Yeah.
Amory: I think I even said to Ben sometime last year, I don't know if I can keep scrolling, man.
Sarah: Yeah.
Amory: I'm getting off of more platforms, and that means that I'm finding less material. But like with all things, it ebbs and flows. I get off and then I get back on.
Sarah: Yeah. And then something great lures you back. You know?
Ben: Yeah.
Sarah: Like there was a SNL sketch about the girl on TikTok with the buttons. I was amazed by that.
Amory: I don't know this one. I'm out of the loop.
Sarah: Okay, here's the thing. I get it. I stand by this person. Because there was someone on TikTok who was like, okay, for the new year I want to have like 365 buttons just to keep track of time or whatever, have a sense of time. And everyone was like, but what are you going to do with the buttons? Like, are you going to sew them on something? Are you going to move them from one container to the other? Like, what are they for?
And she was like, I don't have to explain it to you. I don't have to tell you about it. And it just became like people were so abused by this.
Amory: Welcome to my life. Go away.
Sarah: Yeah. Like, I get it. It was such a phenomenon. But as someone who has been making… I was thinking about this earlier, actually. I've been publishing writing online since 2012. That was what I started off doing. And of course, before that I was on Live Journal starting in 2004.
Ben: As one does. Yes.
Sarah: As one does. Especially when one is writing Newsies fan fiction.
Amory: Oh, this is a fun fact about you that I did not know.
Sarah: It's a biographical detail that gets a little bit funnier with every year about me, possibly. And then, you know that I've been doing this show since 2018 and was on Twitter a lot back when Twitter was really fun. And I imagine for this TikTok or this fatigue that comes with people asking you to explain every single thing you say every day, where I like to think that maybe she just hit a wall and was like, I do not have to tell you what I'm doing with these buttons. You just have a little imagination and figure it out.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. That's good. I don't have to tell you everything on the internet all the time.
Sarah: I talked once on my show, You Are Good, I think about doing this thing I called, Movie Hat. I actually stole this idea from my friends, Colin and Andy Wynette, who I think they just called it that, when you write down movies you want to see on slips of paper and then put them in something and shake it up. Because it's based on the idea of “throw it in the hat”. You're going to throw your ideas in the hat or whatever.
But, so the hat can be a jar. And I get that's confusing. This is my button moment. But I explained ‘movie hat’ where you write down movies you generally want to see and then shake it up and pull out one slip and you're like, “Tonight we're watching Diabolique, because that's what movie hat says.”
And I'm like, a bunch of people are like, but where's movie hat? I've searched on the app store for Movie Hat and I can't find it. I can't find movie hat.
Ben: You have to build your own Movie Hat app in real life.
Sarah: Yeah. I'm sorry. I was just like, I explained it perfectly. I need people to make their own Movie Hat. I can't contribute to the decline of western civilization like this.
Ben: But Sarah, I don't understand. Your hat is a jar. I'm confused by the jar.
Sarah: But what are the buttons for? Amory, what do you think about the 365 buttons? Whose side are you on in this important issue?
Amory: You know, any ounce of joy that we can squeeze out of this life in these times, I am all for. So if you want 365 buttons.
Sarah: So you're just pro everyone.
Amory: I'm pro… I mean, truly, if you are not hurting anyone right now, you're doing a lot better than most people.
Sarah: Yeah. There you go.
Amory: Collect those buttons, put 'em in a hat, put 'em in a jar.
Sarah: Get those buttons.
Amory: Hide 'em around your house.
Sarah: Tell people what you're doing with them. Or not. Never tell people what you're doing with your buttons. They don't have to know that about you. It's okay. People know everything else about you. They don't have to know what you're doing with buttons.
Amory: That's right.
Sarah: So I have called you here today, to our meeting of the Midnight Society, Ben and Amory.
Ben: Dearly beloved.
Sarah: To get through this thing called life. And we're doing a show that I have been calling to myself, I'm not married to this title, but it is catchy, How To Deprogram a Guy in 10 days? And the idea, I guess, is to kind of call on your experience. Because you've done so much investigative work in this kind of counterfactual landscape that we live in, on both the silliest and the most serious levels. And I guess there isn't so much difference between them at the end of the day sometimes.
We were talking about things that you could come on the show and talk about with me, because you were so generous as to have me on and talk to me about my Satanic panic show, The Devil You Know, which of course gets internet-y there at the end. But to talk about maybe this question of, because I had been thinking with the Satanic panic stuff, I think we've just been talking about this, how in my opinion, having done this research, an abusive family has about the same structure a lot of the time as a cult, which has the same structure a lot of the time as a dictatorship.
Amory: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: And this question of, what do you do when the cult has to disband because the leader dies or something? And just that despite how few of the hopes I had 10 years ago have been born out, there will continue to be people who, despite sunk cost fallacy being as powerful as it is, despite all the things we've observed, are going to look up one day and have to walk away from kind of I guess the MAGA cult and this worldview that has required a lot of sacrifice from people.
Ben: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: And not really had any reward as far as I can tell. And what kind of you found in your work of what it takes to allow people to do that, how that can happen, what it can look like. And I don’t know, I guess kind of what insight your work has given you into the capacity that people still can have to change their minds.
Amory: Hmm. Well, I like the How to Deprogram a Guy in 10 days? If we think of each day kind of like how I think about a year in podcast years, where it's like one year of your podcast existing is actually 10 years in the industry or what would be a normal industry. So if a day is say, who knows what measurement of time, but longer than a day, I think we do hopefully have some things to offer in that arena, I believe.
Ben: Well, and it's also so interesting that you're making me think more about the history of our show. Because it is true that in the beginning, we were really just kind of going down kind of fun and silly rabbit holes. And we still do that. But some of our first episodes I think were about people helping each other. They were about that famous story of the guy getting sucked out of the windshield of the plane.
Amory: Oh, yeah.
Ben: And people grabbing onto the pilot and holding onto them until they landed, and things like that. But then we started finding all of these debates about what was real and what was fake and what was true and what was not.
And I want to say one of the early ones we did was another silly one, which is like this piece of audio. There was this like 24-hour debate about Yanni versus Laurel.
Sarah: Oh my, I was just thinking about that and trying to remember the non Yanni word. Yeah, I remember that. Yes. Oh my god. I might have listened to you guys talking about that, actually.
Ben: Absolutely. That was such a fun, early one.
Sarah: Yeah.
Ben: But I feel like more and more we've started to get into these spaces where there is a lot of debate and see a lot of debate, without raising the terrible present specter of AI that feels very all around us right now.
I feel like it's just become more and more common in the work that we do, and we've done. Some pretty, very different kinds of stories where there are kind of similar themes and they often get into this world of, I guess how to deprogram people or how to have people talk to each other about something they really, really, really, really strongly disagree about. And bringing people over to the - exposing my bias here - maybe like what I would describe as the rational, reasonable, science-based, fact-based side of any issue.
Amory: Mm-hmm.
Ben: And I think we've done some stories about that. And I feel like over time have learned, mostly just learned from the people that we've talked to.
Amory: Yeah. I mean, what's interesting about Yanni and Laurel right off the bat is that - sort of a spoiler - there is a sort of right answer about what that piece of audio actually is. The same way that there's a right answer about whether the dress is blue and black or white and gold. And the difference is in how we see it or what frequencies our ears here.
But there is a truth at the center of it. And that when we talk about deprogramming someone right off the bat, you're talking about maybe one group of people who want to deprogram another group of people. But that other group of people might think that the first group of people are actually the ones who need deprogramming.
And whether there is an actual right, the same way that a dress is blue and black, some things are more up for debate than others, and some things are more subjective than others. And so in thinking about even just this conversation of deprogramming, there's a big, flashing caveat at the top to say, we are talking about deprogramming in general, but we might not be thinking about that. We might not have the same group in mind that needs the deprogramming, and that makes it tricky to talk about.
But yes, if the first year of Endless Thread, let's say, dipped more towards the positive and silly, who knows how it actually shook out. But if it was more positive and silly, we kicked off 2019 with a series called Infectious, which was all about anti-vaxxers, the history of anti-vaxxers in the US, how they have come to believe that vaccines are dangerous. And right off the bat in that series, we have an episode, the title of which I think I'm still, I don't, I think you came up with this one, Ben, but I'm still proud of it on our behalf, which is, Scabs, Puss, and Puritans.
Sarah: Oh, that is good.
Amory: And it tells the story of, are you familiar with Cotton Mather, Sarah?
Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I haven't done a ton of coursework on the Mathers, but yes, I know that there were two of them. They were father and son. There was a Cotton and an Increase, and they said a whole bunch of scary stuff all the time.
Amory: Yes. Very good.
Ben: You nailed it.
Sarah: Thank you.
Amory: The Increase detail, that his father's name was Increase, was new information to me when we were reporting this.
Sarah: Thank you Liz Seppi. Yeah.
Amory: Yes. So he was this Puritan minister who in the 1700s in Boston, there is a terrifying smallpox outbreak. And, you know, most people were walking around with the evidence of smallpox. Either having smallpox or…
Sarah: This is one of my issues with costume dramas, by the way, is not enough pox. Rarely do you see a costume drama where people have pox scars.
Ben: Yeah. You should have those bumpy faces, come on! Not enough bumpy faces. Yeah.
Sarah: Too pristine and too much filler. But that's, you know, on top of the EP issue, which is my main problem.
Amory: So Cotton Mather, he has enslaved someone who has a scar. And he inquires about this scar. And this person that he's enslaved says, we had to get the smallpox to avoid the smallpox, basically. And so he's talking about being scratched with a little bit of the puss of someone who had smallpox in his home country. And that prevented him from getting full-blown smallpox.
And this was revolutionary to Cotton Mather. And it was a really weird, scary thing to think about at the time that you would give yourself a little bit of this horrific virus in order to try to prevent yourself from getting full blown smallpox.
Sarah: Do we know this enslaved person's name? Or is it just lost to the sands of time?
Amory: Well, yes and no.
Ben: So yeah, the enslaved person's name is not actually their real name.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Ben: As near as we can tell. And it's an interesting. I mean, one of the things that's funny about this story, too, is like, and I don't know, maybe I'm giving away the punchline here, but Cotton Mather ends up getting completely credited, by the way, with saving Boston from this smallpox outbreak.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, because he is close, personal friends with God. It makes total sense.
Ben: Exactly. God. Yeah. He's picking up the God phone. But the actual person who made this happen was this enslaved person in Cotton Mather's house who was actually bringing this idea to 1700s Boston. But it was a much older idea.
Sarah: And someone who you trust enough to save Boston, but not to be freed.
Ben: Exactly.
Sarah: Interestingly, for the Puritans, yeah.
Amory: he called him Onesimus, which we're not sure exactly how to pronounce. But Onesimus, which means “useful”.
Sarah: Oh, dear.
Amory: Oh, dear, indeed.
Ben: Yeah. Oh, dear, indeed.
Amory: But at the time, there's a group that forms called the Society of Physicians Anti- Inoculator, and this is, you could say today is like the earliest anti-vaccine group in the country. And it's led by one of the only official MDs in the area at the time.
Sarah: Hmm.
Amory: And so Cotton Mather was the one who was conducting these weird, seemingly dangerous experiments. And most people saw them as such.
Ben: Yeah.
Amory: And it just kind of speaks to the idea that mainstream thinking can flip flop and become fringe. And it has, and vaccines are a perfect example of this.
Sarah: Well, and also it seems like that maybe vaccine at the time was something that if you haven't really tested something and you're advocating using it on a large human population, then I don't care what it is. I don't care if it's milk, I want more data. And we have kind of done the milk thing.
Ben: Yes. And this is what's so interesting about the history, is that in the beginning the vaccinators in the inoculator were the weird ones, right? They were the ones who were like, okay, I guess we're just going to try this.
Sarah: We’re a bunch of kooks.
Ben: Yeah, we're going to try this in our houses, and then we're going to try to get a bunch of people to do it. And Dr. William Douglas, the person who's leading this opposition group, which also was a surprise to me that when you go back to the beginning of this history, people think of anti-vaxxers or vaccine hesitant people or resistance to vaccination as being a relatively new development in our experience, in our lived experience. But it was going on since the beginning.
And I think that's because the science in the beginning was weird and experimental, and one might say non-scientific. It was like, this person, I think they know how to do this thing that's going to save us all. Let's try it on a couple of people and see how it works out.
Sarah: Well, yeah. And then I think we also weren't really taught that history because I certainly was, and I realize there's only so much time we have for this type of thing. But taught history with this view of, and then science figured this out, and everyone was like, yeah, that makes sense. And they all did it.
I mean, also I'm sure there was stuff that I just kind of didn't pay enough attention to, but I feel like having experienced what we are experiencing, I would want to teach history with more of an emphasis on just the behavior of people being anything but monolithic consistently. And this is kind of different from what we're talking about, but the fact that there were a lot of very loud isolationists before and during World War II based partly on just sort of this idea of old-fashioned American antisemitism.
Ben: Yep.
Sarah: And painting America sort of as the protagonist of most historical events, and the American people as basically in agreement. Except during the Civil War feels like it a service to sort of the history that we could learn to be able to better understand what we're going through right now.
Ben: And that also helps us deprogram people by understanding and acknowledging that the history is mixed. That it's not actually just this way or just that way. That, that there were experiments that have gone wrong. There are things that have happened that have been huge, huge disasters, and you can acknowledge that stuff while still maintaining a position that’s science-based and fact-based when you're talking about the efficacy of vaccines.
But I think often this stuff gets turned into this because there's been flip flopping in the past. People get scared to even acknowledge how messy the past is because they feel like they're giving ground up. And I actually think if we're talking about how to deprogram somebody in 10 days, part of the answer is acknowledging.
Sarah: Or even more days. But it's a good title, isn't it?
Ben: Yeah. Yeah, it is good.
Amory: 10 days, asterisk. Fine print.
Sarah: Mileage may vary.
Ben: Yeah. Just acknowledging that stuff is actually helpful because it builds rapport with the person that you're trying to bring around.
Amory: I think the thing it, continuing to trace the history, the thing about this that sort of broke my brain, shattered me a little bit, is that if you keep tracing it through the 20th century and you get to the counterculture of the sixties and the seventies, when there is quite a bit of authority being questioned. And you have things like the feminist movement, which offshoot of that is the women's health movement. And growing out of that is people asking more and more questions about doctors, and doctors having the end all be all word.
And maybe doctors aren't telling us about all the risks associated with certain procedures and medications. And maybe we do need to educate ourselves and advocate for ourselves. And we should have control over whether we become pregnant or not. We need to be empowered over our bodies. And in time, some of those questions end up getting applied to that generation's children and saying, oh, well, we should have control over our children and whether they're getting vaccinated or not. There's an empowerment in the skepticism and the right to be skeptical and to exercise that skepticism.
Sarah: Yeah. And then it's like, it comes around to the fact that a lot of the people kind of leading the whole anti-vax ID in its most recent iteration is that they're kind of bad at being skeptical.
Because the point of being skeptical is to want to assess information on your own. And in fact, it feels like we have sort of something else with the mask of skepticism on when really it turns into something that is more comforting and easier to do, which is blind rule following. But following someone else's , and then letting them tell you that you're being really smart and skeptical for doing it.
But I mean, it does feel like we got stuck a lot and this feels like a very sort of like part of the culture of American liberalism in the past 10 years has been the famous… And I brought this up recently, but you know, the little yard sign or whatever of like, “In this house we believe science”, and because this kind of idea of science couldn't hurt a fly. And it's like, science has broken some very precious eggs for very little reason to make some very pointless omelets.
Amory: Yeah.
Sarah: And it's not doing anyone favors to pretend that didn't happen, you know?
Ben: Yes, totally.
Amory: Yeah. People did die in the early inoculation experiments. And it led to modernized vaccination, which has saved millions and millions of lives. And both things are true. And if you can't handle them both, you're in trouble.
Ben: We talked to this guy as part of that reporting, this guy Ian McCauley. And he was such an interesting example because he got the polio vaccine, and he got polio. And there was an error in how it was administered to him. So it's less likely than your typical tiny percentage of people who might get it from the vaccine.
But again, Ian McCauley was a great person to talk to because on the one hand he's like, yeah, I got polio from the vaccine. And on the other hand he was like, everyone should absolutely get the polio vaccine.
Sarah: Hmm.
Ben: So part of that, like you're saying, part of acknowledging the broken eggs and the omelets that were pointless, leads people to make their own decisions, hopefully in a direction that is positive for everyone,
Sarah: Yeah. And also, you can't demand people's trust while also not giving them the whole truth.
Ben: Yeah, exactly.
Sarah: Which is tricky. Because I realize that if there's one thing we like to indicate as Americans, it's that we really would prefer not to handle the truth. But if you try and make us do it anyway, sometimes it works.
Ben: That's right.
Amory: Well, and this speaks a little bit to why people get programmed in the first place. When we were talking to some parents who would label themself as ‘vaccine hesitant’, some of that hesitation, or what was hesitation, turned into opposition to vaccines for some of them is a conversation with a doctor that really ended up not being a conversation because they tried to raise concerns and felt very quickly shut down. Like, oh God, here's another one. Like, here's the packet, out of my way, we're getting your child vaccinated.
They just felt totally dismissed and that pushed them further in the direction. What might have been skepticism, a normal amount of skepticism got turned up to 10 because they just didn't feel listened to. And so we can push people further in one direction simply in how we talk to them about something that they are uncertain of.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, and that seems like, again, evidence of this bigger systemic problem that so many people are experiencing where it feels like you're made to feel lucky to be able to see a doctor at all, and then they seem as if they only have about 18 seconds.
Ben: Yeah.
Sarah: Yes, absolutely.
Ben: And if you're purposely going into a situation where you are trying to change someone's mind, it's maybe a statement of the obvious. If you're a jerk to them and you write off all their questions and tell them they're stupid, that's not going to work. That's a bad place to start.
Sarah: Right.
Ben: You know, that's part of what the professionals say about deprogramming people, is be careful about your language. Talk about your own experience. Ask questions. Don't tell people, don’t say, “you're stupid, you're wrong.”
Sarah: You don't say you're wrong about, yeah. We're starting off on the right foot, I got to say.
Ben: Great title for a show, though. It's good, but you have to just build that trust. If you don't have a situation where you're building that trust, then of course people are going to say, oh, screw this person. I'm going to go over here and try to figure out the truth. And then wherever they end up going for the truth might be even more problematic.
Sarah: It also occurs to me that probably in the past, it was easier to make yourself feel better by denouncing someone, by calling them stupid or ignorant. And at this point, to me, it seems like the only thing that really matters is willingness to try and learn. Because to me, that might be the most frustrating thing is the number of people who are like, “I do my own research.” And you're like, “Okay, can I tell you some numbers?” And they're like, “No.”
Amory: Yeah. We were talking about this the other day with regards to the ‘change my view’ subreddit and how people are going on there and saying, “change my view about X”.
And we had an example recently on the show that was something light, but it was about the correct way to open a banana. So a person is going into that subreddit clearly with a strong held belief about, in this case, opening a banana. But the very fact that they're posting in that subreddit, at least if they're doing so in good faith, comes with the idea that they're open to their view being changed. They are ready to hear other information.
And doesn't mean that their view will be changed, but that is actually kind of a hopeful place, I think, on the internet in the sense that when the person is actually posting in good faith, they're saying, okay, show me what you got. Gimme what you got. Here's what I think. And you do see in those posts sometimes going like, alright, I hear you.
We need a little bit more of that, I think. Because the shutting down and the, I think, isolation is really a key ingredient in how people fall down some rabbit hole from which they might need to be deprogrammed.
Sarah: Yeah.
Amory: And whether it's isolation of just a doctor that doesn't even want to hear your concerns or actual isolation of, you know, we talked to someone who had fallen down the QAnon rabbit hole. His name was Jitarth Jadeja. And Jitarth told us, I think from the very simple question of just, how would you describe yourself, Jitarth? He says, “Well, I have bipolar disorder. I have epilepsy, I have ADHD.”
He had this list of mental health issues that he led with, and that kind of set the stage for him telling the story of falling down the QAnon rabbit hole, which is he's not feeling well. He has isolated himself from his friends in this period of time that he falls down the rabbit hole because he just feels overwhelmed by a lot of things in life.
Ben: Hmm.
Amory: And Trump had just won the 2016 election and every news source that he had been watching at the time told him that was never going to happen, basically. And so he starts consuming Alex Jones, because Alex Jones was one of the people at the time saying Trump is going to win, Trump is going to win. And he goes, maybe this is the person I should be following. They seem to have the answers.
Sarah: He's surrounded by gold.
Amory: He's surrounded by gold, and he is surrounded by gold at a time when his mental health sets him up to fall down a rabbit hole that he really might not have fallen down otherwise.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. And Jitarth was interesting too, because Jitarth told us, I used to be a Libertarian left-wing guy. Get rid of student debt, et cetera, et cetera.
Sarah: I the old X-Files track, you start off as a lone gunman and then you end up in QAnon.
Ben: That's right. And he really took this hard, hard turn. And Amory, you can talk about how he got out, but I think it was this kind of thing where he felt really isolated.
And we did a couple of episodes about QAnon and talked to people who dealt with QAnon. And one of the things in the same episode where we talk to Jitarth, I had had this really weird thing happen to me where it was 2018 Thanksgiving. And I did the Thanksgiving tradition of going out the night before Thanksgiving in my hometown and seeing all the people I used to go to high school with, which I don't know why I did that to myself, but I did that. And I had gotten Lyft on the way home and started talking to the guy who was driving the Lyft.
And as soon as I told him what I did, he was like, oh, Reddit. He was like, do you know about QAnon? He just like went off on how Donald Trump was working with the secret government agent and the whole QAnon story. And he was in so deep, like he had dates. He knew exactly what was going to happen over the next six months and he was telling me all about it and it actually freaked me out being in this car with this guy. I got freaked out and I purposely got out of the Lyft before my house. Because I was like, I don't want this guy to know where I live. He seems unhinged. And then I left my phone in the car.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Ben: And so then I spent the next day trying to get the phone back from this guy. And he came to the dinner. He came back to where I was eating Thanksgiving dinner.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Ben: And I was so thankful that I could get him back. And I had $40 for him, and I made him a giant plate of food. And I was so thankful. And I went out and tried to offer him the food, and I gave him the $40 bucks. He gave me my phone. He had parked in the street, and I tried to give him the food and he started crying.
And he was like. “My mother died a year ago today, and I told myself that I wouldn't eat today.” And he sort of got out of the car and I was worried he was going to walk into traffic. And I got him to the side of the road, and he was super distraught and I gave him a hug and he said, “Thank you”, and he got back in the car and drove away.
But it just struck me that he had described his discovery of Q, and it really had happened during this year after this super traumatic thing had happened to him. He went deep into Q. And I'm not saying that it's guaranteed, obviously, that this was the thing. But I think there's a lot of trauma behind our really strong opinions, too.
Sarah: Yeah, yeah.
Ben: And that's a thing that we have to acknowledge and understand when people have a really strong place that they're coming from. And that that's part of it, too. And we have to be cognizant of that.
And it was, I think it was the same with Jitarth, where he was really isolated, feeling alone had some really serious stuff going on in his life. And that can be a real trigger for you ending up in a place where you have these really, really strong, intense feelings and beliefs about something, and you're not always looking at it as objectively as you should be.
Amory: Yeah, and he also said that Q brought him so much joy for the first time in a while, because he felt like he had this new sense of purpose in life. This new sort of meaning that he was a warrior for this information that only a certain group of people know the actual truth, and I'm fighting the good fight for that information.
And he said it was like he was an addict for this information. He couldn't stop talking about it because it invigorated, infused his life with something that it was missing before. And so if we're going to keep people from falling down these rabbit holes, we have to confront the void before conspiracies fill it.
Sarah: Yeah. And it does feel like a conspiracy theory and becoming a big believer in it. I mean, there's so many things that can draw you to that. And one of them is because, you know, good old-fashioned mania. But another, I feel like, is that the kind of lack of meaning in life or a lack of a feeling of meaning or a feeling of feeling connected with other people or with a community.
And that it's been such a long time now in a way, but I mean, I feel like is it fair to say, that at least in its original iteration that kind of the QAnon fandom, I guess, I read it as fan fiction of at least the first term of the Trump presidency. And it was like all these ways that you could decode what appeared to be happening, which was…
Ben: Hard to explain sometimes.
Sarah: Because it would appear to be a racist and small-time criminal who had accidentally become president. And now you could kind of get his ear if you gave him a bunch of pink starburst. But in fact, according to QAnon, it was really this complex web of codes, and it was like this web of symbolism. It was like playing Myst or reading TS Elliot or something, where in reality Trump was going to find all of the child sexual abusers and get them.
Ben: Yeah.
Sarah: A mission that he has undertaken with great restraint, it must be said. But that this idea that every day you got to wake up and see not what all these idiots thought was happening, but what was really happening, and have a community about it.
I feel like when people talk about the male loneliness epidemic, A) the type I've seen that I agree with most is that there's just a human loneliness epidemic, and men are about half of that. And we're focusing on them more.
Ben: Yep.
Sarah: And B) that it feels like the proposed cure for the male loneliness epidemic proposed by men, interestingly, is that if women have sex with them, then they won't all be so lonely. So we just need to lower our standards. Which I don't think is it. I think community is the answer. And it feels like Q Anon was like, I want to call it a community substitute, but do you think that that became an actual community for people?
Ben: Oh, definitely. I think so. Yeah.
You know, you see this stuff at political rallies and stuff too, and people are so amped. They're so, I mean, I feel like the Charlie Kirk public event after his death felt that way to me, where there was a community coming together. And again, I'm not trying to compare all the people who followed Charlie Kirk to QAnon, necessarily, but I guess I'm just saying I think there is absolutely community in strongly held beliefs.
Sarah: Yeah.
Ben: And I don't think there's probably not a lot of Newsies Fanfic and QAnon crossover.
Sarah: There's got to be a little, and that does worry me.
Ben: Yeah. You'd be the one to tell us.
Sarah: I don't want to know. There's some things that are better left unlearned.
Ben: But I do think folks are looking for community. And that when they find community, and if that community is a skepticism of vaccines community, if it's a community that is that Donald Trump is working with a secret government agent to disassemble a deep state, that can be a community, too.
Amory: I see it maybe slightly differently, where I wouldn't doubt that it is a community of sorts. But it's sort of like when you're on social media and you feel like you're interacting with your friends because you're commenting on their posts or their pictures or whatnot, and there is community in that. There's more connection there than there would be if you hadn't commented at all. But it's not the same as sitting down with a muffin. And I don't know why I picked a muffin, but sitting down with them.
Sarah: Muffin equals community.
Amory: Oh, a muffin.
Sarah: And some soup.
Amory: And being face to face. And I do feel like some of this was greatly exacerbated by the fact that there was a false sense of community, a very shallow false sense of community around ideas that got people really energized without actually being really connected to each other.
Sarah: To use the Newsies fandom as an example, come together because you all love Newsies. And then you look around and you realize that you're all bisexual, 15-year-olds. And you're like, well, all right. And you all love fandom, or something like that.
There are all these things that draw people together. And then it's like once you're there you get to figure out what the real thing is. And not that everything's always hunky dory.
Amory: But it's easier to be a community when you're nameless and faceless on the internet than it is in real life.
Sarah: And I guess the question is, what is that community for and for and how is that affected by the way that it's created? Because if you're a community, because you have a shared enemy even when you invented, then how will you grow around that?
And will you sort of find that, because I'm sure that some people who are brought together by QAnon did find things that they had in common outside of this, and then that could create real bonds and that there was the capacity for that. But that gets into sort of the area of community feeling where you're just in a cult.
Ben: Yeah.
Sarah: Where also then it's like you're brought together by beliefs and ideas, but then if you start to question them, then the threat - implicitly at least - is that that is going to be taken away from you because there are things that you have to believe in, enemies that you have to share, or else you don't get to have this community anymore.
Ben: That's right. And I also think this is why I think people say, when you're trying to deprogram someone, that getting specific is important because you start to, like you're saying, when you are face to face with people and you're interacting with the community, you start to realize, hopefully you start to realize why you're really together, why you're really getting together, and what is the actual thing that's drawing you together?
And maybe it's the thing that you started with and maybe it's not. And getting specific when you talk to people helps you figure that out, I think. Helps you suss out the why of why you're involved in this thing. And also, you start to learn other people's logic for their decisions.
And I remember when we were doing some of the vaccine reporting, we met a family outside of a grocery store in Portland, Oregon. Actually I think it was in Clark County. We talked to this family, and they were kind of half in, half out. Like they were a little bit skeptical. They had several kids.
Amory: They were doing it on a different schedule.
Ben: Yeah. They did a different vaccine schedule. That's right. Yeah.
Amory: Yeah. They just had decided that they were going to, I think, give their kids most of the vaccines. They weren't sure about the chickenpox vaccine, but they just wanted to do it on a different timeline. And they felt immediately dropped into the anti-vax bucket for not wanting to vaccinate their kids on the schedule that the CDC at the time was following.
Ben: Yeah. I remember the mother, she was sort of like, I'd rather that my kids get chickenpox. They're not going to die from chickenpox. I'm just saying, this is what she said. So why am I vaccinating them for chickenpox? And she said, because I think somebody's making money on me vaccinating against chickenpox.
Sarah: And the thing is, I don't know if you can literally die from chicken pox, but I know that there can be very dire consequences. Or you can get shingles later on in life. There are all these reasons medically why it's much better to be vaccinated.
And if I had kids, I would absolutely vaccinate them against everything I could think of. But also, I was exposed to chickenpox intentionally when I was a kid, as probably everyone was in the nineties, when your moms would just be like, all right, go get chickenpox. We got to do it now. It's going to be worse if we wait.
Ben: Yep, yep.
Amory: Same.
Sarah: And that was kind of fun. And it's also nice that doesn't have to happen. It's just something that we get to share and lord over our children one day, I guess.
But at the same time, I look at Ozempic and I am very conspiracy theory minded about that one. I don't think it's really, I don't even have to see myself as a conspiracy theorist. I think it's just a medication that has never been adequately tested on humans that now is being handed to the consumer and the citizens of a large, god-fearing nation are being used as its guinea pigs. And we have no idea what the long-term side effects are. And also, people are making so much money.
So again, it's like the impulse to question the motivations behind big pharma, that is part of all this is like, I don't ever want to act like that's dumb because obviously seeing the nefarious behind the choices that we're able to make for ourselves medically, you shouldn't tell people to not see that.
Amory: Hmm.
Ben: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that's another interesting piece where again, if you're trying to deprogram a guy in 10 days and you're getting specific and starting to talk to them, and also being curious and also acknowledging the sort of mixed past that has led to whatever topic you're talking about, I do think that part of it is like, yeah, I'm skeptical of giant, mega, multinational corporations, and I think you should be.
I think you should be asking questions about that stuff. I think you should be thinking about things like good, scientific testing. And I have similar feelings about Ozempic myself. And you might end up realizing that you have more in common with this person than you think you do. And again, that can sort of build this trust.
Another thing that they say is that if the person is close to you, you have to actually spend, believe it or not, you have to spend more time with them, not less.
Amory: Sorry.
Ben: If it feels safe to do so, right?
Sarah: Yeah.
Ben: Because again, you sort of build this common language and trust and rapport, and you understand that neither of you are necessarily a huge, you are just going to take whatever big pharma throws at you, right? And that starts to build this foundation where you can pull them out of wherever they are in that is maybe less reasonable and less of a shared perspective.
Amory: Yeah. And that's where the 10 days asterisk comes in. Because I feel like there's so much patience required in that approach. And for some people it's really not possible.
We had done this episode right after the 2024 election where someone didn't feel like they could spend time with a family member. It was a trans person who felt like they couldn't spend time with a family member who did not acknowledge their identity as their true self. And that is understandable.
But if you can spend more time with them and you can just build more trust overall. And maybe you're just hanging out and doing the kind of common ground- ish activities of, well, hate is politics, but we both like the Patriots or whatever. And another weird example coming from me, specifically.
Ben: And we'd be finding more commonality with someone who hates the Patriots, I think maybe, but go on.
Sarah: I think that's the main thing to look for.
Amory: Just football in general. Yeah.
Sarah: I mean, I feel like no one should ever feel like they have to spend time with their family for truly any reason.
Ben: Fair.
Sarah: But it does feel like part of the situation we're in is people relying on media as kind of a community substitute. And of course that's been sold to us as well. And then the fact that when we try and picture each other, we often see caricatures that have been sort of given to us as opposed to, having real people to associate those ideas with, you know?
Ben: Yeah. Oh yeah.
Amory: Well, and I think that gets at, in terms of whether you spend time with a family member or not, the question is, do you want to deprogram this person? If you do and it feels safe to spend time with them, then you go for it. And if you feel like they are, maybe not a lost cause, but if it's better…
Sarah: What if you find someone else's family member, and then someone else gets yours?
Amory: That's right. If it's healthier for you to not deprogram that person in particular, that is also understandable.
Sarah: Well, so in terms of the stories that you've reported on and experienced in the past, I don't know however many era of American life this has been. I'm curious, just kind of personally, about what do you think of when you think of someone changing their mind in this way or about this kind of deprogramming idea? Are there examples that come to mind?
Ben: Yeah. I mean, we could go back to Jitarth, and how he came out of it.
Sarah: Yeah. What was that like for him?
Amory: Yeah, so it's funny with Jitarth, because he was so deep into QAnon, and yet the thing that pulled him out was pretty small comparatively.
So he comes across this video online that has to do with a very particular theory around QAnon, which is the phrase ‘tippy top’, Trump saying the phrase ‘tippy top’ was sort of…
Sarah: What? Not “tippy top”?
Ben: Tippy top.
Amory: Tippy top. He does say that a lot.
Sarah: Or at least he did.
Sarah: Yeah. Yes. No, that is one of his favorites.
Amory: And Q followers thought that this was a sort of like a dog whistle to them and that this held some larger significance.
Sarah: I mean, there was that episode of Seinfeld where George wanted to change a woman's answering machine tape. And then the code word for when she was getting too close was to go ‘tippy toe, tippy toe’. So, you know, I'm sure there's precedent. It all makes sense.
Amory: It all comes back to Seinfeld.
Ben: It all makes sense.
Amory: Yeah. And so he watches this one video that shows that Trump had actually been using ‘tippy top’ long before he ever ran for public office.
Sarah: Oh no.
Amory: It all fell apart. I mean, it was these tiny seeds of doubt.
Sarah: That’s incredible.
Amory: Yeah. And that actually gives me a lot of hope. Because you don't know what is going to sow a seed of doubt. And there are people who would say that doubt is the way out. Doubt is how you claw your own way out.
And there's sort of some Jedi mind trick stuff going on with deprogramming where it is helpful if you can make someone think that this was their idea. If you can put material in front of them, whether it's a cult, if it's someone who has left that cult and found their way out, and you are helping them find that information without necessarily holding the mirror so obviously up to them and accusing their exact beliefs. It's going to be a lot easier for that person to sort of doubt freely within their own mind without you looking over their shoulder and going, are you with me yet? Are you with me yet?
Sarah: Right.
Amory: So it can be something so small. And whatever you can do to sow a seed of doubt is helpful.
Sarah: Well, and I think too, that there's the joy of conspiracy making, conspiracy theorizing, is the same in a way as the joy of figuring out the truth or of doubting or of thinking, my God, what if tippy top is just like, I found evidence of him saying it in 2008. We're getting to the bottom of tippy top, you know?
And I feel like that can be not as satisfying in the sense that you think you found your theory of everything right, but that it feels good to dig into reality in that way, I really believe.
Amory: Yeah. And I think it feels even better if you can really, either literally or figuratively, wrap your arms around that person when they do come out of it. Because the truth feels good, but also, you do lose some of that sort of greater purpose.
Ben: I believe the phrase is, the truth hurts, Amory. I believe that's the phrase.
Amory: The truth. Yeah. The truth hurts. And if you are making sure that there is not some new void created that will be filled with something else. But that you are there to fill the void and be there for the person as they are sort of like, I don't know. Mourning a loss, is a fair analogy. But you're mourning a loss of something, of some way of thinking that was kind of intoxicating, and now you need a new source of support.
Ben: Sarah, do you know the Herman Cain award?
Sarah: Oh my gosh. Wait, I might, I feel like it's not for something good. Um, what is it?
Ben: That's correct. That is correct. That's correct.
Amory: You don't want to get it.
Ben: You may remember that presidential candidate and Republican politician Herman Cain. So Herman Cain is somewhat infamous, one could say, for basically questioning COVID pretty intensely.
Sarah: Yeah.
Ben: And going to a rally in Tulsa unmasked. And then very quickly after that, after publicly tweeting that the disease was not deadly, dying from complications of COVID.
Sarah: Yeah.
Ben: And so of course there is a subreddit and there are internet communities based around this idea of the Herman Cain Award. And we did an episode about this and talked to some of the moderators from that subreddit.
But essentially, the idea is taking people who are basically attacking COVID as a hoax, et cetera, et cetera, online. And then sort of following what happens to them. And in some cases, people do get sick from COVID and die from COVID.
And it is one of those when you see this stuff pass you by - well this is my experience - when you see this stuff pass you by on the internet, you're kind of like, huh. It's easier to have some schadenfreude there, but when you actually think about it, it's pretty messed up. You know, one could say that anyone dying unnecessarily is a sad thing. And it's sort of somewhat nihilistic to make fun of people for dying.
Sarah: I think so. I think I'm going to really get behind that idea. Yeah, no reservations there. And I get that it's hard to look at what's going on and not fall into nihilism to an extent. Because sometimes the call is too strong. But ultimately, I don't want to celebrate anyone's death except possibly one. So there you go.
Amory: Who shall remain nameless.
Ben: No, but I do think, and this was kind of interesting because you hope when you're trying to deprogram someone that ridicule will work. And you know, in some cases I think ridicule does work, but I think most of the time it doesn't seem to work.
And I think when we made this episode and we talked to both the recipient of a Herman Cain nomination, his name is Glenn, he lives in Colorado, and also the moderators. And we talked to a moderator of the subreddit for the Herman Cain Award, it was really interesting because Glen is, you can sort of maybe assume kind of where he is coming from. He is posting a lot of memes on Facebook about how COVID was stupid and fake, et cetera, et cetera.
He got nominated for an award, went viral because of being nominated for the Herman Cain Award, and then you got a call from his daughter who was like please, please stop this. Go to the hospital. He got sick with COVID, of course, and she was really upset that he had been nominated for the award and gone viral for all this sort of COVID skepticism. And he stuck to his guns. He was being treated with Ivermectin, and he did not end up going to the hospital.
But it was so interesting to talk to him. He really reminded me of my uncles who live in Colorado, just in terms of the way he sounded. And it made me sort of feel badly that he had gone viral in this way. But, of course, understanding some of the things that he put on Facebook were really misguided. And what we tried to do, because the moderator for this Herman Cain Award subreddit actually told us that they had seen evidence of people who got nominated for the award, actually changed their tune and changed the way that they were thinking about this. And so what we tried to do, we didn't end up doing it, but what we tried to do is get them to talk to each other.
Sarah: That would've been interesting.
Ben: Yeah, because eventually, ultimately, a lot of these people who are really upset about this stuff that is happening. And one of the interesting things was that Glenn and the moderator both had long COVID. And so it was this interesting thing where the both were coming from totally different ends of the spectrum in terms of what they believed about the virus and how to approach it. But they had this kind of shared experience.
And we tried to get them to talk to each other. They didn't end up talking to each other. But Glen's daughter was, I think, an example of somebody who was coming from a very different place than Glen and I think had a change of heart to be taking COVID much more seriously.
So I do think that this stuff can happen. And we have talked to people who have had real changes of heart. We talked to somebody, we did an episode about Hasan Piker. Do you know of that guy?
Sarah: No.
Ben: They call him the Joe Rogan of the left.
Sarah: Oh boy.
Ben: He is, yeah.
Sarah: Or as I call him, the guy from News Radio of the left.
Ben: Yes. Yes. He's somebody who a lot of people talk to after the most recent presidential election because he's a very popular streamer and he was kind of helping a lot of more legacy media decode what had happened in the election from his perspective, obviously.
He's definitely controversial in his own right for some of the views that he yields and some of the things that he says while he streams on Twitch for eight hours a day, seven days a week, or whatever it is.
Sarah: That's too many hours, Hasan.
Ben: Too many hours. But we talked to somebody named Jayden who had grown up in a small town in Arkansas, and it was very small religious town, grew up around pretty, we could say, homophobic views. And Jayden eventually, through this parasocial relationship that he developed with Hasan, as a college kid started to question some of the things that he had been taught growing up.
And eventually, it was sort of happening at the same time he was going to college. And so his universe was expanding there, because he was going to University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, which is much bigger place than where he grew up. But the internet was also expanding his understanding of different ideas about American foreign policy, for instance, and what was happening in Gaza, for instance.
And so I think over time it's so tricky because on the one hand, you're doing your own research on the internet and you're pulled down these rabbit holes. And on the other hand, when your universe expands, you can also find people that help you change the way you feel in what I would describe as a positive way sometimes.
Amory: Hasan's an interesting example too, because in thinking about this topic to talk to you about it, Sarah, I guess I've become more and more thinking along the lines of one-on-one conversations and the idea that a lot of times when people pull themselves out of something that they didn't even realize the depths of the hole that they've fallen into, it was one person who didn't give up on them. It was one family member, it was one friend. It was these kinds of conversations that inch their way towards curious, well-meaning questions with a foundation of trust and rapport there to sort of catch them when they get caught in a web of friction in the conversation.
And yet I think Hasan, and I'm not holding up Hasan personally in this example, but that is an example of some of the approach that we could take if we were thinking about deprogramming large amounts of people. There is a lot to be said for someone who just kind of sets an example that you want to follow, and maybe that is a person close to you in your life.
Maybe that's a parent or a friend, or maybe it's a person on the internet who is not just talking about politics or not just talking about his fitness regimen or whatever, but together there's some model of behavior that you want to emulate and we just need a lot more truth on these platforms. And being these sorts of examples of the kind of person you want to see in the world. If we're going to swing things in a more truthful direction than in the one that we seem to be going in, I guess I won't be too depressing about it, but it's going to take some combination of better examples on larger platforms, but also just better conversations one-on-one.
Ben: Yeah.
Sarah: Part of this bigger picture, I think, is that people say they want community, but then I think many of us in the United States have been raised to be consumers more than citizens. And that is kind of the culture that we've been given and what has been taught to us. And if we're trying to combat the sort of cheap or the easily had sense of false comfort that comes from getting upset about something online and feeling like you're surrounded by people who are as upset as you, then you can't combat that with just sort of low effort online platform type stuff. The only way to combat that maybe is through actual human connection.
Amory: Yeah.
Sarah: And that's the thing that you can't really scale up either. You just have to keep doing it.
Amory: Yeah. And I guess that's going back to sort of the beginning of this conversation and talking about the internet and its role, and vacillating between optimism and pessimism on the internet.
I feel like maybe if not optimism that I feel now, it's more of an acceptance of the internet as a tool that is never ever going away. And so I'm not feeling like we need to lean into it harder. I'm just looking for ways to harness it to do more good than harm.
Sarah: Yeah.
Amory: And that's a low bar for a lot of people out there. Or that would sound like a low bar to someone who's like, “AI is the future”. But that is like the bar that I am clinging to right now as I try to get more and more offline while accepting this genie that can't be put back in the bottle.
Ben: Well, part of the problem is that it's actually a high bar. Like in my mind, when we did our series about vaccines and anti-vaxxers, we looked a lot at Facebook groups and other online communities where a lot of misinformation exists. And I'm not saying that there's plenty of misinformation and disinformation on Reddit as well, there're on all of the platforms.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Ben: But you know, Joan Donovan, who's a Harvard researcher, or was at the time, she's not at Harvard anymore, but she was at the time. She said to us, “It's hard to make the truth go viral”, or some version of that, which is true. I think unfortunately, there's so much more engagement around rage bait or whatever you want to call it or however you want to describe it. And that's a big part of the problem, too.
And so having the internet do more good than harm is actually a high bar. Because unfortunately, I do think it sort of leans, thanks to the folks who have built the tools and the way that they have built them in their propensity for fixing things versus just breaking things, and building things and caring more about the sort of training consumers, like you're saying, Sarah. Thanks to all of that, it is actually harder, it is actually a high bar in my mind to make this stuff do more good than harm.
Sarah: I mean, this is also kind of why I'll defend that the girl with the buttons. Because famously, if you're writing for Netflix, you have to have characters saying what they're doing and what the stakes are of the movie all the time. Because the assumption is that people are looking at their phones or washing dishes or something.
Ben: As anyone who watched The Rip recently knows, you have to.
Sarah: Right. Which is like, how could they do that to Matt and Ben? Is nothing sacred? And this idea that we can't expect people to just sit and think for one second. I'll always push on the idea of let’s just let people be a little bored. Encourage people to have to sit and wonder. We can't write all of our media for your mom on the day after Thanksgiving, who never normally goes to see movies and spends the whole time going, “Who's that?” And you're like, we haven't seen him before, it's Gary Sinise.
Amory: Yeah. Don't go after the girl with the buttons when there are actual climate change deniers out there.
Sarah: Yeah. Protect button person.
Amory: We were talking as we were preparing for this conversation, Sarah, and wondering if either one of us had been deprogrammed, or feel like we had been programmed and then deprogrammed, or deprogrammed ourselves at any point in time. And just the act of going through that exercise, I think, immediately builds a little bit of extra compassion that is necessary when doing this exercise. Because you do realize like we are set up to fail with social media just literally digging its nails into you and pulling you down with the algorithm, to make you believe more and more and view more and more of what you might be inclined to watch in a moment of weakness.
I would encourage anyone to kind of do that thought experiment with themself coming out of this conversation, because we've sort of all been there. Even if it's not a government cabal, it might just be some weird button belief that we've had.
Ben: I was going to say, Sarah's deprogrammed me from wanting answers on the button person.
Amory: That's right.
Ben: I've come around.
Amory: Button and let button.
Sarah: Each citizen can do whatever they want with their buttons. I am curious about if you had answers for that when you did that thought experiment or is there anything that you would want to talk about here?
Because when I think about that for myself, and maybe this is not on such a grand scale, but I've been teaching myself to sleep enough lately because I have always known intellectually that I was supposed to be sleeping more. But because I'm sure we're raised to know in our hearts, especially, there's like so much terminology that I do kind of thank social media for being hyper specific enough to come up with. And one of them is a non-sleep supportive family, which I'm sure many of us know. Where you come down at 9:00 AM and they're like, oh, you're finally awake. And you're like, okay, that's nice.
And I was raised sort of where the stated goal for me was to achieve highly. And so even though it was implicit, even if people were like, you should sleep, you should make healthy choices, at school and with teachers and just kind of from adult authority figures, it felt like they were being like, you should get plenty of sleep - wink, wink. No, you shouldn't. Totally. If you did that, you couldn't do all the stupid stuff we were telling you to do.
And so I've been training myself to sleep, not by teaching myself to love myself enough to do it, because that's a really big goal that I'm working toward. But because I found an app where the numbers turn a nicer color if you have less than five hours of sleep debt.
Ben: Nice.
Sarah: And it's like, I don't have to have healthy attitudes about myself or my needs. I can just start by liking the app and then baby steps. I'm using my most frivolous… I've become a big believer lately in the idea that you can train yourself like you're your own cute, little dog. And that you can train yourself to do something important for a stupid little reason.
Ben: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: And I don't know if that's deprogramming, but it's behaviorizing. I'm behaviorizing myself.
Ben: Mm. I feel like Amory deprogrammed me from being a person who inadvertently was pushing procreation.
Sarah: Hmm. How so? I want to hear that story.
Ben: We did an episode about the child-free community. And I think Amory, I don't know if you're a fence sitter, how would you, I'm not sure how you would describe yourself at this point.
Amory: I think I'm a fence sitter. I think most of my life I was leaning ‘no’ in the fence sitter on having kids, that is. And the fence sitter part of me is just like, well, we haven't taken all of the extremes to never have kids ever, so I'll still identify as a fence sitter, even though it has not felt like now is the time.
Ben: Well, I think Amory, over the course of the episode, sort of deprogrammed me from like, I think I showed up for the episode being like whatever, it's cool for me to say you'd be a great mom.
Sarah: Hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ben: You know what I mean? And I think Amory helped me understand the pressure that can be applied culturally, especially for women with those kinds of statements and comments. And I still feel like in the episode, I was still kind of coming from a place of like, well, we're close, we're good friends and longtime colleagues, and we're honest with each other. And it feels not right for me to not tell you how I feel about this if we're talking about it.
But I think Amory helped me realize how some of that language just more broadly, culturally, and especially when you're talking to somebody who you're close to, you should be careful about how you do that and not be putting pressure on them unnecessarily.
And so I feel like Amory, maybe that's not full deprogramming, but you really helped me come from a place where I wasn't seeing the sort of truth of it, and I think you brought me towards that.
Amory: Thanks, Ben.
Ben: Yeah.
Sarah: I'll take a demi deprogramming,
Amory: A demi deprogramming.
Sarah: I feel like also part of what you're identifying with that story is the fact that in looking at kind of human relationships and this idea of having someone who's not giving up on you as being the antidote to these kind of bigger, technological sweep of rhetoric that people are responding to that can be a big cause, but maybe not an equally sweeping solution. Which is so often the case, annoyingly.
Amory: Mm-hmm.
Ben: Yeah.
Sarah: But also that a big part of this is you or anyone else being receptive to the idea of someone being like, “Actually, when you say that, it causes me or theoretically another human being to feel these things that you might not have thought of.” And then for you, the person would be like, oh, I didn't think of that. And now I'm thinking of it because someone told me about it and now I know.
And just that ability to alter your behavior out of consideration for somebody in a way also feels like the antidote to what feels to me to be the cause of a lot of conspiracy theory fandom, I guess. Which is the idea that the man is oppressing you, which he surely is. And therefore, in order to fight back against being told what to do, that you're going to rebel.
And I feel like if you feel oppressed by being told what to do, then if you can be receptive to the idea that someone is not telling you, they're asking you to help them. Which is very different from giving someone orders. And I feel like if someone can understand that distinction, then that can mean a lot.
Amory: I think my example of deprogramming is in a very squishy place, and I'll offer it up with the asterisk that I feel like I'm a real work in progress and I'm still figuring out.
Sarah: Well I'm finished and I am just right. So that must be embarrassing for you.
Ben: Yeah. Sarah's fully baked.
Sarah: Yeah. The toothpick came out clean.
Amory: Well, on this particular issue, aren't we all. But on this particular issue. So I probably, my least popular opinion has to do with the fact that I'm vegan.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Amory: And it's not something that I really talk about publicly.
Sarah: Because people would put you in the stocks if you did.
Amory: Yeah. It is a part of my life, and yet I feel a lot of feelings about it and I get really hurt when I still hear veganism being the butt of jokes among a group of people that I wouldn't expect to be making it the butt of jokes. And it's still you hear on certain public radio programs even, jokes being made at vegans being this weird group of people.
Ben: Which is insane.
Amory: When I actually really do think we need to pay attention to factory farming and our planet dying. And so a lot of times I feel like a crazy person for feeling this way. And I'm aware that social media, this is also a place where the ideas are, the opinions are very strong. The ideas are very polarized about this. And I have felt myself getting pulled further down a particular rabbit hole with regards to my veganism.
And I am actively trying to figure out what is the way that I want to exist in the world. And if these beliefs that I do hold dear, how do you resonate with people and how do you feel all those feelings without letting yourself become…? I think as Jitarth were talking about before with QAnon, he said that when he was really in the depths of Q, he resented other people who didn't believe what he believed. And he didn't understand how they couldn't see what he saw.
And that's a really painful place to be in. And I'm not trying to compare my feelings towards him to the extent of his, but I am still trying to figure out what social media do I want to pay attention to. What is helpful to me in figuring out how I want to exist in the world in this way, and how can I maybe help other people understand some truths without thinking that I'm a crazy vegan and wanting to just shut me down altogether.
Sarah: Well, and also I feel like, and this is, obviously people are different from each other. Positive stereotypes are annoying too. But I feel, based on my experience, that most vegans I've interacted with do not want to bother anyone. And then in fact, people love to tell them about how they could never not eat meat and how much meat they ate and how great it is.
Amory: Amen.
Sarah: And it feels like there's some projection happening there. Perhaps because what we really hate, what we claim to hate is someone proselytizing to us. And of course that's true. I certainly don't like it. But I think what a lot of people don't like is someone quietly abstaining from something and not even talking about it, because it just bothers us to think of somebody not being annoying about doing something that we find difficult.
Amory: Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah.
Amory: There's a defensive offense that is head splittingly frustrating.
Sarah: Yeah. Please stop bothering vegans. And also, I know that the numbers for vegans have probably held pretty steady for a really long time. Which is very low. But as food becomes more and more expensive, we're all going to be eating vegan more, whether we realize it or not. I got some great recipes. Be nice or you won't get the recipes.
Ben: Also, Amory really is, like she was talking about before, trying to live as an example. And I think Amory, you really do that with how you live as a vegan. I think you're really, really good at that. It's a quiet, strong, and very respected position that you take that to me, that makes sense.
Amory: Thank you. I'm trying.
Ben: You're doing great. You're doing great.
Amory: I’m still figuring it out.
Ben: You know, every once in a while when we're trying to go out to eat and you're like, what about this place? I'm like, oh God damn it. But you know what? It's great. Generally speaking.
Sarah: It’s great as long as we know we're figuring it out.
Ben: Yeah, exactly.
Sarah: But no, I think that's great. And Ben, Amory, this has been, I don’t know, just a very, very hopeful conversation for me. And I hope that this has brought some hope to our listeners, too. And you don't have to talk to your family, you don't have to talk to anybody. But we all need community, and you deserve to get the closeness and the connection that you need to. Just so you know.
And in terms of listening to more Endless Thread, especially if people liked this episode and want to know where to start, what are some episodes that you can recommend to people?
Ben: Ooh. Oh man. I'm ready for the Newsies fanfic episode. So we should do, we should delve and find Sarah's old posts.
Sarah: Look, there is some great literature in the Newsies fan fiction archives, and I'm not even talking about the one I started about what if the Newsies went on the Oregon Trail, because I did not finish it. Maybe I will this year, we don't know.
Ben: Love to hear a song about dying of dysentery. That sounds great.
Sarah: Imagine having to deal with all the problems of being a Newsie and then dysentery gets you? It gets me too sad.
Ben: We've got a couple of episodes that I feel like we usually send people to. One is called, We Want Plates. And there's a follow up to that one called, Pile of Crockery.
Sarah: I love that. We want plates subreddit.
Amory: Those people deserve plates.
Ben: Yes, totally. Same.
Amory: If you want to hear us go on a journey into the woods, looking for a mountain of abandoned dishware, this is the episode for you. And the second part, where we may or may not have found the dishware called, Pile of Crockery.
Sarah: Beautiful.
Ben: Amory did an amazing one called, Artist Known, about a Madeleine L’Engle book cover.
Amory: Oh yeah. Wrinkle In Time. The most famous book cover for A Wrinkle in Time.
Sarah: I feel like that book cover probably creeped me out as a child.
Ben: Definitely creepy.
Amory: I think you and everyone else. And it was uncredited up until that episode that we made.
Sarah: Oh my gosh. So you're putting right what once went wrong. You're doing it, Quantum Leap.
Amory: Exactly.
Sarah: We're wrinkling time. I love these topics that you're describing, especially after the kind of more serious kind of ground we've trod in this episode. Because the world is just odd, and amidst everything, just the little ways that humans, I don't know… like humans do the most awful things imaginable.
Ben: Yes.
Sarah: And yet when you look at us as a species, for the most part, I remain convinced that we are not even good. Just weird. Weird and charming in our eccentricity, you know? And I just love media that allows us to see that. And I feel like you're doing that with your show.
Ben: Well, thank you.
Amory: May we change in many, many, many ways, but not that one.
Sarah: And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here. Thank you to Miranda Zickler, who was our editor and producer, and Nicole Ortiz, who is our administrative assistant.
We also have a new bonus episode that you can listen to about all things dolls. Creepy dolls. Haunted dolls with dolls, and a doll survey for our listeners with our guest, Chelsey-Weber Smith of American Hysteria, and you can find that on Patreon and Apple+ subscriptions.
Thank you again for being here. We'll see you next time.