Hi friend,

Joseph Uscinski has a line that gets him into trouble.

Conspiracy theories are for losers.

He does not mean it as an insult. He mean it as a description. When things go well, people do not look for hidden explanations. When things go badly, they do. When a team loses, the fans blame the referee. When a candidate loses, their supporters say it was rigged.

The explanation protects the ego and keeps the identity intact.

Joseph is a political scientist, conspiracy expert and professor, who has spent 15 years studying conspiracy theories and public opinion. His data challenges almost everything most people assume about this subject.

And that conversation is this week's episode.

The data does not say what you think it says

Most of us walk around assuming conspiracy theories are exploding.

Joseph Uscinski has been measuring them for 15 years. His data says belief has stayed mostly flat, and in some cases it has gone down.

To illustrate how surprising this is, Joseph describes what it would take to make belief in conspiracy theories actually rise. Economic uncertainty. Job losses. Isolation. A deadly disease. Constant social media exposure or a deeply polarised political environment.

Covid was all of those things simultaneously. He describes it as cranking every knob to 11 in a laboratory designed to maximise conspiratorial belief.

And it did not happen.

What Covid actually did was make existing beliefs visible. People who had quietly held vaccine scepticism for years suddenly had a reason to express it. Family members who seemed normal revealed views they had always held. The beliefs did not appear from nowhere. They surfaced because the situation made them relevant.

Joseph also pushes back on the assumption that more information changes minds. People believe what they want to believe because it feels good to them. Evidence gets filtered through the lens people already hold. Releasing more documents, holding more hearings, providing more data rarely moves the needle for people who are already convinced.

The more important question for Joseph is not who believes what. It is what happens when people with power start acting on those beliefs.

That distinction is what the full episode is for.

In this episode you will learn:

Notice the lens before the conclusion

Most people do not start with evidence and arrive at conclusions. They start with conclusions and filter evidence through the lens they already hold. After that, information comes second.

This week, pick one topic you feel strongly about. Find one credible source that presents a view you disagree with. Read it fully before responding to it in your head.

The exercise is not to change your mind. It is to notice the lens you are using before you decide what the evidence means.

Why: You cannot assess information fairly if you do not know what filter it is passing through first.

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Most conspiracy theories die quietly before anyone notices them.

The ones that matter are the ones that reach people with the power to act on them.

Joseph left me thinking about that distinction for days after we recorded.

Stay skeptical and grounded.

Julian x