Agnotology (WILLFUL IGNORANCE) Updated Encore with Dr. Robert Proctor

Yes, there is an -ology for that. And yes, we’re airing this episode -– with a ton of 2025 updates -– because it’s never felt more relevant. Dr. Robert Proctor is a Stanford professor of the History of Science and co-edited the book “Agnotology: The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance,” having coined the word 30 years ago. We chat about everything from tobacco marketing, to the sugar lobby, to racial injustice, horse vision, the psychology of the Flat Earther movement, which countries have the highest rates of climate denial, empathy, how to navigate difficult conversations and why it's critical to dismantle the systems of willful ignorance, starting locally.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

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• 0:45Alie Ward?

  Unlike other services, there's no subscription required, so you can order whenever you want without a huge commitment. Plus, you get free shipping and returns. Get started today at StitchFix.com. That's StitchFix.com. This podcast is brought to you by Aura. Your body has a lot going on. Sleep, stress, recovery. You would be surprised how connected it all is. Aura Ring tracks more than 50 metrics from your finger, and the Aura app brings that information together to help you see patterns across your sleep and stress, activity and more, so you can start connecting the dots and figure out what works for you. Learn more at AuraRing.com. Wear your best life with Aura.

• 1:31Alie Ward?

  Oh, hey, it's the teabag camped out in your garbage disposal. Ali Ward, here we are. It's February 2025. We've got a fresh, shiny new year. Now, this is an updated encore. So we have gone through meticulously and added updated asides, extra asides, more references of articles, and even some news from the last few weeks for you. So you can please pass it on to everyone in the world, because today we are exploring the topic of not just ignorance, but willful ignorance, intentional misinformation, doubt, controversy, how populations can willingly swallow ladlefuls of bullshit as if it's the truth. But before we

• 2:10Alie Ward?

  Examine our own lingering denseness. Let's thank the folks at Patreon.com/ologies for all their great questions they submitted and for supporting the show for as little as a dollar a month. You too can join if you'd like. Thank you to everyone who subscribes and rates and of course, reviews to keep the show up in the charts. And this week's hot pick from just a few days ago is from Heaelllpppp, who wrote, "Thanks, handsome. Heard from another podcast and hooked. Really enjoy. Passing on to friends. Heaelllpppp." Handsome is a compliment I will take. And everyone who left reviews, I read them all. I love them all. Thank you so much. Okay, on to this 2025 update to Agnotology.

• 2:49Alie Ward?

  We're gonna get into it. Agno comes from the Greek for unknown. And according to the originator of the word Agnotology, it is the study of ignorance, and it seeks to answer why we don't know what we don't know. And the person who coined the phrase, I'm sure you're like, was it a long-dead philosopher? Was it a quippy war nurse? Was it a child wise beyond her years? Nope, it's our guest today. That is correct. The biggest cheese in the Agnotology world is here to talk to you. And he edited the book Agnotology, The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. And approximately 10 million of you have tweeted and emailed me begging to have him on. He's been on my list for years. So this was a huge get to have him sit down during a pandemic and chat via computer.

• 3:36Alie Ward?

  He got his bachelor's degree in biology and then went to Harvard University to get his master's and his PhD in the history of science. He is now a professor at Stanford University, teaching the history of science. And I'm going to warn you up top, if you do not enjoy political discourse, or scientific facts versus religious mythology, or how industry favors profits over health, or the topic of equity for marginalized groups, this episode may not be for you. Or rather, it might be perfect for you. We're living in very uncomfortable, very polarized, scary times in so many ways. We've got a lot of decisions being made that will impact generations. We've seen a rise in incredibly alarming ideologies.

• 4:20Alie Ward?

  And gestures, a lot of folks not talking to certain family members. Shit is fucked. And it pains me to see the divides because I feel like there's so much at place psychologically underneath these sometimes violent differences of opinion. So we get into all of that. And I was very curious and excited to talk it out with someone who studies ignorance and the comfort of ignorance for a living agnotologist, Dr. Robert Proctor.

• 5:07Alie Ward?

  I, everyone has told me I need to hunt you down to talk about what you study. And you are technically speaking, an agnotologist?

• 5:18Speaker 01

  I guess so. Yeah, that's one of the things I do. I do a lot of different things. I'm, my title is I'm professor of the history of science at, at Stanford University, where I'm also a professor by courtesy of pulmonary medicine. But I work on a lot of different things, including the history of ignorance.

• 5:40Alie Ward?

  And you studied also the history of science. How did it dovetail into the history of ignorance? At what point did a light bulb go off and you thought, oh, I want to study that?

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Well, I was always interested in puzzles and mysteries and illusions even from, from being a kid. I remember in high school trying to figure out the moon illusion. Why, why does the moon appear a large on the horizon? And I basically, I think, figured it out. It's, you know, we live in a low dome cosmology where the sky we figure is about two or three miles high and the horizon is about 10 or 20 miles high. So it makes sense that if something appears the same above you and on the horizon, it will actually in effect create an illusion of being much larger on the horizon. So that's kind of the popular cosmology we live in because.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  If a bird is overhead, it's closer. If it's on the horizon, it's farther. And we normalize that and that creates the the moon illusion. So I was always interested in puzzles and, you know, Martin Gardner type of mysteries.

• 6:51Alie Ward?

  Oh, and for more on those moon illusions, see the Selenology episode with Raquel Nunez. Also, side note, Martin Gardner was a popular and beloved mathematics columnist. Yeah, he made math cool and he was a founder of the skeptics movement, starting way back with his early 1950s book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. So this guy was the original Mythbuster, the founder of the debunking of phlegm phlegmery.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  And I remember noticing, learning things that I thought were true that turned out not to be true. I remember as a kid thinking that we would eat chicken hearts. I grew up in in South Texas and we would eat chicken hearts. So I thought my heart was the size of a chicken heart. And I still, when I think of my heart, I kind of think of like a little tiny chicken heart. And I remember thinking that every country was the same size and the same shape. And that I remember puzzling, how can it be that a refrigerator is hot at the back? And that it's the heat at the back that makes the cold in the front?

• 7:55Alie Ward?

  One day, we're going to figure this out in a thermotechnology episode for y'all. I promise. That day is not today.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  You know, so I was a curious child. And when I went off to graduate school, after majoring in biology and chemistry, I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I started noticing that, basically, that all what I was supposed to learn was all of this great science, Darwin and Einstein and the double helix. And I thought, you know, well, what about, you know, the things people don't know? And what about all the people who don't believe in evolution and don't understand cosmology? What about them? And that was uninteresting to my Harvard professors. And so I thought, you know, hey, wait a minute, a lot of people don't believe evolution. Why don't we study them?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  You know, and so that's kind of one of the things that got me going on ignorance.

• 8:50Alie Ward?

  And what about the word itself, agnotology? Where did that come from?

• 8:53Speaker 01

  I started, I got involved with some radical science groups at Harvard University, where I was studying with Stephen J. Gould.

• 9:01Alie Ward?

  Stephen J. Gould, side note, was known as someone who challenged the scientific theories he found to be rooted in racism, among studying a lot of other things. So this work toward dismantling misinformation goes way back.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  And we were studying things like how the chemical industry lies about chemicals, and how the tobacco industry lies about cigarettes, and the sugar industry has its own set of deceptions. And so I was saying, you know, this is, this is kind of a big deal. Harvard was taking all this money from the sugar industry and, and creating ignorance. And I could see it around me. And I said, you know, we need a word for the creation of ignorance. There's something called epistemology, which is the study of knowledge. How we know what we know? What are the methods? Empiricism, rationalism, you know, the sources of knowledge?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  That was, that was heavily studied. And what I noticed is everyone was ignoring ignorance.

• 10:04Alie Ward?

  He says this was salient to him because he comes from the deep south, and his beliefs didn't match those of a lot of his relatives.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Again, it was sort of like, what about them? You know, and what about these big corporations lying about tobacco, or lying about chemicals? And so I said, well, we need a word. And so this was in the early 1990s. I was writing a book on cancer. I'd already written a book on Nazi medicine, because that's another, another thing I write about, Nazi science. But I was writing a book on what causes cancer. And I needed a word for all of these efforts to create ignorance. And so I asked a linguist friend of mine, a brilliant linguist by the name of Ian Bull. And he came up with agnotology.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  And originally, we spelled it differently. It was A-G-N-A, and agnotology. And we got protests from the people who study jawless fish, which is agnotology. And so I changed it to A-G-N-O. So there's a cognate with, you know...

• 11:20Alie Ward?

  Agnostic and

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Agnostic and that sort of thing. So that was sort of how it came up. I needed a word to describe the deliberate production of ignorance, the kind of things we now associate with climate denial, or fear of vaccines, or, you know, the denial of the HIV etiology of AIDS, things like that.

• 11:46Alie Ward?

  And what is the difference between creating willful ignorance and propaganda? Is there a difference, or is propaganda just another word for it?

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Well, they're slightly different. Both involve deception, but not necessarily, and not in every case. For example, I think the Nazis really believed their own propaganda. In other words, propaganda is a kind of like an extreme word for education, and it's bad if it's bad education, it's good if it's good education, or at least used to be. And so you can believe your own propaganda. But agnatology is maybe a little more subtle, because the tobacco industry, they knew that cigarettes caused cancer, and their whole

• 12:36Speaker 01

  goal was to create ignorance, to stave off people learning the truth by creating doubt, by throwing up a smokescreen, by throwing sand in the gears.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Playing tag with the waves. A refreshing way to take a walk at the beach. How can you add to it? With a menthol cigarette.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  And they were able to instrumentalize science by doing that. So by funding genetics, by funding the study of viruses, they created all these blind alleys and false etiologies for disease. So it's a much more diabolical thing. Propaganda, I think of as more ham-handed. It's just brainwashing, really. Whereas the tobacco industry was much more clever in creating doubt by emphasizing uncertainty.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  And they become really engines of uncertainty by saying there's two sides to every question.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  There are two sides to a story.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  You know, there's, so they set up the whole tobacco institute to promote these non-tobacco causes of cancer. It's a kind of giant misdirection campaign. And that's much more subtle than just the, you know, browbeating of propaganda.

• 13:56Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Um, my mom told me a story that when she was trying to lose some weight after her first baby in the early seventies, that her obstetrician recommended taking up smoking.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  You know, that's a, I'm so glad you brought that up because, uh, until the 1980s, doctors were more likely to recommend that pregnant women smoke than to recommend against it.

• 14:20Alie Ward?

  Ah.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  And it was the, it was called the smaller babies theory and the tobacco industry ran with it. They funded the people pushing for this theory. The, the theory was that, yeah, yes, it makes a smaller baby if you smoke, but they're just as healthy and it's, you know, more pleasant to just have this nice small baby. And so I, I've, I've talked to several women who, whose doctors told them to take up smoking during pregnancy. Again, that was part of that whole, you know, the sunny side of nicotine that was pushed, uh, by the, the tobacco industry.

• 14:56Alie Ward?

  Just a quick side note. In 1937, Philip Morris, tobacco giant, ran an ad in the Saturday Evening Post depicting a child bellhop offering up a silver platter of cigarettes with the information, When smokers changed to Philip Morris, every case of irritation of the nose and throat caused by smoking cleared completely or definitely improved. Then there are TV gems too. Timeout for many men of medicine usually. He means just long enough to enjoy a cigarette. So as an agnotologist, he clearly covers smoking, but his book also includes chapters on military operations and clitoral orgasms, issues with indigenous paleontology, racial ignorance,

• 15:39Alie Ward?

  and injustice, and of course commerce. What are, what are some of the other historical, especially in America, campaigns of doubt and ignorance that have kind of been waged on our collective intelligence?

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Well, there's so many. The, in Washington DC, there's 1500 trade associations, you know, the Beer Institute, the Sugar Institute, the Methybul ether Task Force, Salt Institute. Basically, every product that might cause harm has an institute or a trade association designed to diminish, you know, that harm or to cast doubt on that harm. So there are, basically, every thing that causes harm, whether that be asbestos, or food dyes, or Coca-Cola through the Beverage Council, or whatever it's called, there are these organizations

• 16:33Speaker 01

  whose job it is to rescue products. And, you know, some of the more dramatic ones are things like the Lead Institute, which years ago, going back, you know, into the 20s, 30s, 40s, they would promote lead and just, you know, cast doubts on the hazards of lead. And the Asbestos Information Association did the same thing, the Calorie Control Council. Coca-Cola was funding some of these things, trying to rescue the reputation of sugar. And these things often were interrelated. So the Sugar Research Foundation president

• 17:14Speaker 01

  in the early 1950s actually goes to work for the tobacco industry, saying that he could use the same techniques that they'd used to rescue the reputation of sugar to rescue the, you know, safety of tobacco. So there's an interlocking, there are even trade associations of trade associations. In other words, they're whole buildings. I remember one, I think it was in Atlanta, where there's a whole building full of these trade associations, and they share tricks and. It's a little bit like that great scene in Thank You for Smoking, where there's the gun lobby and, what is it, sugar or tobacco?

• 17:53Speaker 02

  We call ourselves the mod squad, M O D, merchants of death. We're lobbyists for the tobacco, alcohol, and firearms industries. How many alcohol-related deaths a year? Well, does that... A hundred thousand? That's what, 270 a day? A tragedy.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  So these groups sometimes even work together as engines of uncertainty, engines of ignorance.

• 18:16Alie Ward?

  And does that change, for you, I imagine, how you just live your day-to-day life? Do you kind of see things with like an infrared vision that maybe other people don't? Like when you walk down the soda aisle in your store, or see flashes on social media or the news?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Well, sure. Yeah, you always want to know who's funding it. I remember I had an aunt who worked for, I think it was some kind of dairy council or chicken council herself, even in my own family. And there was an issue on the ballot about whether to require a certain minimum square footage for chickens, you know? And I remember her raising this to her, and she said, "Oh, chickens hate to run free, you know, they'll just peck themselves to death." And so she had kind of been bought in, had sort of bought into this mythology of, you know, chickens actually like their confinement. So I see it all the time.

• 19:13Alie Ward?

  Yeah. See, the oft cited 2015 study put out by the Coalition for Sustainable Egg Supply. They're like, "Trust us, man, these chickens love cages the size of a shoebox. It's cozy as hell, man." Actually, bad news. Cage-free hens do not typically spend their days roaming rolling green hills, though. They're not out there chasing grasshoppers, singing Joni Mitchell songs into the golden horizon. Cage-free just means that they kind of hang out in a big warehouse, pooping on each other. Forgive me of robbing anyone of that willful ignorance. I had cage-free eggs for breakfast. And what do you think the difference is between just straight up ignorance of not being exposed to something versus willful ignorance,

• 19:58Alie Ward?

  when you maybe have an inkling that you perhaps could be wrong about something, but you just don't want to believe it? Where does denial fit into that?

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, denial is key. There's all kinds of ignorance. There's native, what I call native ignorance. We all start off, you know, as embryos, we're ignorant, right?

• 20:16Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  We have to come, each one of us comes into the world innocent and not knowing everything we know we have to learn. And so all of us have a kind of innocent ignorance. And then our very lives as creatures, you know, it has a lot to do with evolution because we evolved as predators. We have the forward-looking eyes of the predator, which means we are highly focused. And what, but highly focused means we ignore almost everything. So we have the focus of the predator and not the eternal watchfulness of prey. A horse sees 360, but nothing in particular. They're on the watch for everything,

• 20:59Speaker 01

  but they don't focus on any one thing. And the biology of that is, you know, deep in our neural circuits.

• 21:05Alie Ward?

  At this moment, I felt embarrassed for Robert because he clearly went 180 degrees. Because you know how people will say, she changed her mind and did a 360. But you're like, well, technically that just means that they came full circle. I think you mean 180. And I looked it up and it read, horses have a range of vision of about 350 degrees. What? So he was totally right. Horses can see almost everything around them. I was ignorant of this. They could pretty much see everything but their own butts. Also, their eye anatomy involves something called a nervous tunic, which sounds like something I would wear in a nightmare of me giving a TED Talk. Anyway, human eyesight is more literally straightforward.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  We have a fovea, which concentrates our perception. And that's very different from a prey, like a deer. And so even in our biology, it means that we have this intensive focus and we have to ignore. Everything, I mean, if you think about it, if you saw everything at once, you would, you could see nothing. Or if you remembered everything you've ever known, you would also know nothing. So a big part of learning is forgetting. A big part of focus is inattention. You know, you can't focus without defocusing at the very same time on most things that are, that are around you.

• 22:28Alie Ward?

  So 2025 me here. So since this episode aired, we have put out a three-part ADHD episode series that will either change your life or maybe the life of someone in your life. It's linked in the show notes. It's a banger. Okay, cool.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  So that's another aspect of agnotology is actually looking at the creation of ignorance, even in the, in the non-human animal world. So the reason that deer have white bellies is that's how they create themselves as a non-object. All objects in the world have a shadow on the bottom. And if you're prey, you create a white underbelly to dissolve yourself as an object into the surrounding. So that's a form of ignorance creation or creating the, the invisibility or camouflage. And many, many animals do that. So as long as there's been predation, there's been camouflage. And that's a kind of way of, of making yourself invisible.

• 23:28Alie Ward?

  So next time you see a deer or a frog or a lizard, just feel free to say, that's called counter shading. And then if you want, you can high five yourself. And what about what is, say, happening on a nationwide level, the last few years in particular? Do you have to use maps at all to study higher levels, maybe of willful ignorance? Or how do you, how do you parse out who is maybe more susceptible to believing certain things?

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's, it's true. There's a, there's a geography of ignorance. So while it's true that basically everything that has been known has been forgotten, it's also true that many of the things that have been forgotten are known to some people. And in a way, that's what the whole field of, of history is, is to recover lost, lost knowledge. But education is very selective, right? People are well-educated, they're poorly-educated. There's a big geography of knowledge. And humorists deal with this very well. I remember Jay Leno, the comedian, used to do what he called "jaywalking", and he would ask people, "How many moons does the Earth have?"

• 24:42Speaker 04

  What does our galaxy call?

• 24:49Speaker 05

  I am...

• 24:51Speaker 04

  It's also a candy bar.

• 24:52Speaker 05

  Mars.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  I mean, it was kind of one of those "who's buried in Grant's Tomb" kind of questions. But a lot of people don't know a lot of things. And that's one of the things I actually do in my classes, is I do a kind of, what I call, an agnotology survey, where I, you know, ask people something else that's really... "How old is the Earth?" And it's surprising. I remember when I did this at Harvard for the undergraduates, it turned out about 15% of the biology majors at Harvard were creationists. They thought the world was 6,000 years old.

• 25:26Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  So it's... In other words, I developed what I call "agnometrics", the measurement of ignorance. And, you know, there's lots of techniques for studying ignorance and surveys you can do. And, um, yeah, it's cool.

• 25:43Alie Ward?

  "Agnometrics", by the way, isn't the only great word that you're gonna learn today. Also, consider "agnogenesis", which is creating doubt for nefarious purposes, or "agnometric generators", which are the forces generating the doubt. Now, why do some opinions seem so regional? What creates factors that are "agno-geographical", which is a word that I just made up? Is there something about, perhaps, the geography of being near a port city or a body of water that exposes people to, say, different cultures or different types of people?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that historically has been true. That's why a lot of the great... Early empires and intellectual centers are built on maritime commercial centers. You think of the ancient Greeks, trading amongst the city-states, or you think of the river cultures, either in Mesoamerica or ancient China. So, trade, that's one of the old theories of actually the rise of modern science is that it's deeply connected with cosmopolitan trade. And so, there definitely is something to isolation and the monkish life, you might say, that's not conducive to intellectual discovery.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Intellectual discovery involves a kind of mixing of ideas, and that allows you to see yourself as a parochial agent.

• 27:12Alie Ward?

  Oh, P.S. A parochial agent is someone who's narrow-minded or doesn't know a lot, which is a humbling thing to have to Google.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  But it certainly is a, that's part of the need, is to, you know, to get rid of parochialism, to ask, why are we the way we are? You know, that's kind of the undergraduate experience.

• 27:32Alie Ward?

  And what about social media, or just the democratization of information in the digital age? Do you think that we're getting more brainwashed, more quickly? Or are we finally getting exposure to voices that have been systemically oppressed for a long time through, through large media channels? I'm learning a lot more about just how to word things and how to include people, but at the same time, it seems like we're distracted by stupid stuff.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  No, for sure. I think we live in the golden age of ignorance. Ignorance spreads at the speed of light now, and with the rise of conspiracy theories, with the rise of denial campaigns, with the siloing of people into reinforcing like communities through Facebook, or whatever, it's easy to find, you know, self-reinforcing bubble worlds, and that's a huge... Problem now, there's also the kind of the flattening of data and source, the sheer flatness of an iPhone, if you're getting your information off that or a laptop, it

• 28:43Speaker 01

  doesn't discriminate by quality. And so that democratization has also been a kind of a dumbing down, I think, a lot of media. And it's very easy to circulate. If everyone can pop off anything they want on Twitter, and that's all you read, there's no quality control there. So that is a big problem.

• 29:03Alie Ward?

  Do you remember Twitter? We were so young. Since this episode first aired, Twitter is now X, having been purchased by Emerald Mine Air and richest person in the world, Elon Musk, and other media forces who control the information, kind of making its way to your brain, are the founders of Meta and Google execs, the TikTok top brass, the one-time book retailer and now newspaper owner Jeff Bezos, and others who prominently attended the last presidential inauguration and are holding some critical positions in the government. Also, since this episode was recorded, we have a new friend in our pocket, a little ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence services. And for this, I wanted to see what

• 29:46Alie Ward?

  AI had to say about me. So I Googled myself, and I followed the prompt, "Whatever happened to Ali Ward?", which was the most humbling thing I have ever read. But the AI overview then confidently listed the recent removal of my thyroid as this ongoing health issue. And my thyroid, which is stationed faithfully still in my throat, was insulted and frankly pissed at this misinformation. I have a thyroid, but if I didn't know me, I might assume that that bullshit was factual. It was right in the AI overview. Isn't that vetted? No. And to prove also that this update is fresh, just yesterday, February 10, 2025, a paper came out in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, and it was titled,

• 30:28Alie Ward?

  "Turning Right: An Experimental Study on the Political Value Shift in Large Language Models." And it found that ChatGPT's social, economic, and political biases show, quote, "a clear and statistically..." Significant rightward shift in ideological positioning over time. But it's tough to keep an eye or a study focused on bias these days. Just in the last few weeks in 2025, the National Science Foundation has been ordered to scrub certain words from its website, including flagged words like advocacy, biased, biased towards, biases towards, BIPOC, black, disabilities, diverse, equality, equitable, female, gender, hate speech,

• 31:10Alie Ward?

  LGBT, marginalized, racial justice, sexual preferences, trauma, stereotypes, socioeconomic, victim, women, and more. So if you find it infuriating and unnerving that there's been some shakeups in governmental agencies, you can stick around to the end of the episode when I give you some resources from some folks that work within those agencies. But why is science frequently in the crosshairs? Well, since this episode first aired, Dr. Proctor has also published a book titled, Science and the Production of Ignorance: When the Quest for Knowledge is Thwarted, in which he explains that when industries know they're up to some harmful stuff, they can fund research with deliberately murky results.

• 31:53Alie Ward?

  And then they can say they don't know for sure if, say, smoking is bad for you. They'll say it needs more research. And Dr. Proctor writes that it's really quite brilliant because it captures the authority of science and the allegiance of scientists. And it made the tobacco industry seem open-minded, and it made public health advocates seem like close-minded fanatics. So that is an interesting read. We'll link that in the show notes. And also this week, in this illuminating interview featuring political scientist and professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Erika Chenoweth was titled "The Nature of Our Power", in which Erika says, "When you see what autocratic leaders try to eliminate, you get clearer on what constrains or threatens them

• 32:38Alie Ward?

  and why these systems, procedures, institutions, and the dedicated civil servants within them are so important to protect." This year, Meta suddenly eliminating fact checking and loosening hate speech restrictions. And the Bezos-owned Washington Post declining to publish a presidential endorsement for the first time in decades. Or the TikTok ban and then the instant reboot. In a time when tech giants control what we see and AI can fabricate images and they can deep fake voices and social media owners are installed Rasputin-like behind some pretty historical desks, can we even trust our own perception? And I always think about, you know, even when I was growing up, I grew up in near

• 33:23Alie Ward?

  San Francisco and everyone had a copy of The Chronicle and that's where they got their news. You woke up in the morning, you read it when it was delivered at 3:00 in the morning, whatever. And granted, a lot of voices were probably stifled by not getting through to the press, but at the same time, you probably had less disparate sources of information and maybe, was there more collective trust?

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, certainly in the pre-Watergate era, there was more collective trust in all kinds of institutions.

• 33:54Alie Ward?

  Oh, in the Watergate era, in case you're like, hmm, was in the mid-1970s. So, all you youngins who were born after the mid-1970s, which technically is me, FYI. I'm very, I'm very young and cool.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  But, you know, it's, it's also, another whole thing I look at is virtuous ignorance. So, not all ignorance is bad. That's another one of our myths. In fact, many of our forms of ignorance, you have to have, a right to privacy is a form of ignorance that you, you don't want other people to know everything about you, your medical records or personal life or whatever. So, we create ignorance about things all the time in order just to have a right to privacy. The same thing with all kinds of dangerous knowledge, right? No science magazine will publish, you know, a recipe book on how to make AIDS airborne, right?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  I mean, there's all kinds of dangerous things that should not be known. And there are all kinds of institutions that require ignorance. So, juries must be ignorant of the particulars of a, of a case before they go in or, or there's medical confidentiality. There's all kinds of virtuous ignorance. So- Yeah, there's a mix in how things circulate. And the flatness is a big concern I have, but it's also important to realize, we can, it's easy to be awash in information and as easily to be awash in misinformation.

• 35:32Alie Ward?

  And how do we know if we're ignorant or not? I mean, I understand people say ignorance is bliss. I don't know how you feel about that, but how do we know if we're the dummies who are misbelieving things?

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Well, for one thing, all of us are profoundly ignorant. You know, one of the things I work on is gemstones. I saw you had an interesting episode on gemology. And that's one of the things I do is I cut and polish stones. And what I fantasize about are all the gemstones on other planets. I call them exoagates, you know, and we'll never know about that, right? I mean, think of the infinity of beautiful gemstones on other planets. So each of us is profoundly ignorant. You know, we walk through a tiny slice of life and, you know, that's, you know, Socratic wisdom is knowing the limits of what you know.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  So all we can do is, you know, scrape together a few things and, and hopefully those turn out to be true.

• 36:36Alie Ward?

  Just a side note disclaimer, that gemology episode was one of the first ever recorded, and it's a wild ride, not just through minerals and rocks, but also exploring the gemologist's faith in crystal powers, which I discuss from a neuroscience perspective, the mechanisms of the placebo effect are very thrilling and interesting. So does having a pointy gem in your bra cause you to alter your decisions throughout the day? Feel free to run the experiment yourself. Now, let's move on from my bra to the apocalypse, climate change. So the top contributors worldwide to carbon emissions, China and the US. So while many of us in industrialized nations are wringing our hands every day looking

• 37:21Alie Ward?

  at climate data, as a whole... There's actually a lot of shrugs. According to some Gallup data, which is now admittedly 10 years old, residents of the US and China are less worried about climate change and less likely to agree with, do you think rising temperatures are a result of human activities? Less likely to agree in the nations with the biggest carbon emissions. Latin America, European countries, they're like, hell yeah. But the Middle East is also like, eh, probably not because of humans. So as you'll hear in my ignorant question coming up, I thought the US was more vocal and concerned, but no. Oh, no, we're not. It's just my little bubble. And a 2025 update for you. So yes, according to the 2023 paper,

• 38:04Alie Ward?

  Climate Watch Historical GHG Emissions Via the World Resources Institute, the top five contributors of greenhouse gases per capita are the United States, Russia, South Korea, Iran, Japan, and then China. That was six, extra bonus. But US very much in the top there. And a 2024 paper in the journal Nature titled, "The Social Anatomy of Climate Change Denial in the United States", found that nearly 15% of Americans deny that climate change is real. And that denialism is highest in the South, with more than 20% of the populations of Oklahoma and Mississippi, Alabama, consisting of deniers.

• 38:46Alie Ward?

  Along the West and East Coasts, belief in climate change tends to be higher. But a 2018 paper also in Nature titled, "Relationships Among Conspiratorial Beliefs, Conservatism, and Climate Skepticism Across Nations", notes that there is a political culture in the United States that offers particularly strong encouragement for citizens to appraise climate science through the lens of their worldviews. So why does this happen? Why does the nation that contributes the most per capita toward climate change, why do we believe at the least? Is it because you can't see something because it's so close to you? And it could unmoor your sense of safety and your identity? Kind of like having eyebrow blindness?

• 39:31Alie Ward?

  Because we tend to have more resources, but are the most maybe vocal in terms of combating climate change, but we're the biggest contributors? How does anyone kind of grapple with that?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Well, both those things are true.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  In a way, we diagnosed the problem earlier than a lot of people because we're the ones making the problem, right? And it's exactly true what you say. We're the biggest culprits and we're gonna have to lead out of the mess that we've created. Now fortunately, you know, we do have a lot of critiques and tools that we can use to try to undo some of the ignorance, the damage that's been done. But again, that's why I'm so interested. A lot of other people are interested in climate agnotology because there are these dedicated bodies, bodies like the American Petroleum Institute or these various fronts of, you know,

• 40:32Speaker 01

  oil producers whose job is dedicated to continuing the carbon world. And so that's what we've really got to expose and fight against. So it was just a big debate in our Senate at Stanford last week about whether to divest from carbon stocks, you know, big oil and so forth. So a lot of institutions have already done that. Harvard has done that and a lot of other institutions. So there is going to have to be a reckoning and a break with this carbon world. And unfortunately, things are heading in the wrong direction at present.

• 41:11Alie Ward?

  Most of that comes down to, of course, greed. Now, what about how power is established or maintained through willful ignorance and hate? And what about racial justice? It always struck me, even as a kid, reading that all men are created equal, which A, left out women entirely and was written by slaveholders. What, at what point do you think that this country might start to recognize its own ignorance and racism and correct course?

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, that's what's been going on for years now, right? Is a slow, steady, you know, one step forward, several steps back sometimes. That was actually yet another prompt for agnotology is I

• 42:01Speaker 01

  I was studying science and wanted to go, I thought about going to MIT out of high school and I looked at it, it was 96% male. And I wasn't going to go spend my best hormonal years at MIT around, you know, 96% guys. And I thought about going there for graduate school again, and it was still 92% male. So I became aware of that very early. That's how I became a feminist and involved in feminist critiques of science early on. And I was amazed that no one was researching this, or that this was not a primary object of study. And this was, I'm talking about the late 1970s now. And that again, was like a gaping, gaping

• 42:45Speaker 01

  hole. Why is no one studying this? Why is, why is there silence around that? The same theory with racial equality and inequality. Again, I came from the deep south where I remember whites only signs in the early 1960s, late 1950s. And why were people not studying that? And that's why I actually wrote two books on Nazi medicine, looking at how the American racial experience was actually used by Hitler and by the Germans and the Nazi regime to carry out their programs of racial destruction, that there was this bond between

• 43:26Speaker 01

  American racialism and the racism of Nazi Germany. And people hadn't really written on that either. So that was another gaping hole. So we've got a lot of these holes that have not been properly excavated or filled.

• 43:43Alie Ward?

  Yeah, it seems a little bit, it seems that that is what's happening a bit with police brutality and Black Lives Matter.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  That's right. Well, and of course, one glimmer of hope is that these things are being filmed. Uh, you know, that's why body cams are so important as we can actually get a record of this, this horror and that makes it possible to address it. I mean, imagine they, how difficult it would be to prove something like what we saw with the George Floyd case 30 years ago, you know, before ubiquitous.

• 44:16Alie Ward?

  Or even now, even now without video, even with video, um, you know, so imagine that without video, um.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:25Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Do you get along with all your relatives in this house still, or do you just not talk?

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I get along with them. Yeah, I don't see them a lot, but, uh, yeah, I think we know we have different, different points of view. Um, but it is interesting because my mom, she didn't even know that her dad was in the Ku Klux Klan and I could sort of tell by talking with them, something like this was going on and she was surprised to learn it from me that her own dad had been in the Klan. So some aspects of this get, get covered up.

• 44:57Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  It's again, part of the sort of psychological denial, maybe that, that you were bringing up earlier.

• 45:03Alie Ward?

  Having studied this, I know that there's a difference between research and diagnosing versus, um, prescriptive perhaps, but do any studies come up that show what is effective in changing ignorance in our, in ourselves?

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Well, of course, that's what pedagogy is all about. That's why a lot of educators have become so interested in agnotology because that's what education is all about. In a way, it's about overcoming, overcoming ignorance. You know, there's no magic wand that you can wave, but the thing you can do, I think, is, you know, try to get some of the big money out of politics, uh, to try to go after these institutions that create ignorance.

• 45:52Alie Ward?

  Um.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  And one of the things I do, I testify against the tobacco industry as an expert witness. And that's one of the things we always talk about is how the. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to create this fantasy world of what was called alternative causation, or the sunny side of nicotine. And so exposing that, how that work diagnosing it and showing how it went to very high levels. Because what I found is that 25 Nobel laureates have taken money from big tobacco. So the corruption of of science, that's one of the main things I'm interested in is how science itself can become corrupted. Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. Good science.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  As part of these engines of ignorance to to create distractions about, well, cancer is all genetic, it's your ancestry, it's all food dyes, it's all, you know, anything but but cigarettes. So, once you understand how these powerful institutions work, that lets you understand, you know, how they might be dismantled.

• 47:00Alie Ward?

  And side note, it's easy to look back on horrible ignorance and injustice and lies and say, of course, that was wrong. How could people not know then? How could their intuition or moral compass be so skewed by outside sources? From cigarette commercials to misogyny and more. Now, what will future generations look back on now with utter mortification? What would they profess to build a time machine to come back and fight? How opioids are marketed and have led to an epidemic, our daily dependence on oil, how we vaped on TikTok? Or America's love affair with cheeseburgers?

• 47:41Alie Ward?

  And since we last recorded this, we're now in February of 2025, that list of potential future mortifications is like, oh, it's like so cute now. It's so innocent.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Well, sure. And that's why you have these ag gag laws in so many states where you can't even film inside a slaughterhouse. There's a recognition that if people saw the horror of some of the ways we, you know, process animals, that this might give us, give us pause. So there are a lot of things we do in life that Are really made possible by a kind of invisibility, a kind of distancing. That's something that's important to realize is that a lot of what we are able to see is is only because we are allowed to see it. I remember when I was at Penn State, we were calling to arrange a lecture series and I called

• 48:33Speaker 01

  it up and it was like, this is Department of Undersea Warfare. And this wasn't even in the card, in the, in the catalog, the college catalog that we had, that we had whole section or division on undersea warfare. And so there are a lot of things that are kept from us. And again, that's why I like to expose secrets. I like whistleblowing. You know, you have to see these things to let the sunshine in.

• 48:59Alie Ward?

  Please see our episode on genocide with Dr. Dirk Moses for more in this vein. And I have questions from listeners. Is it okay to pepper you with them?

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 49:10Alie Ward?

  Good. So, so many questions. And before we get to questions, some words from sponsors of the show who make it possible to donate to a cause each week. And this week, while researching, I learned of a lecture our guest gave citing some extremely hurtful racist tobacco advertising in an effort to teach students about how big industries use systemic racism as a weapon. And he read off the names of a few of the brands that many people in attendance were deeply hurt to hear aloud and later released a statement saying it was in effort to illuminate the wrongness of the messages, saying, quote, "My whole career has been devoted to exposing, analyzing, and condemning racism and white privilege." And I wanted to support the National Black Law Students Association, who spoke out

• 49:54Alie Ward?

  about the incident and educated so many on the pain that words can cause, even in historical and scholastic contexts. So this week I'm choosing that a donation will be going to them. And I support the shared goal of dismantling systemic racism. And I think organizations who work to keep us all less ignorant, especially when it comes to intentions versus impact, which is so important. Dr. Proctor also wanted to support savingblacklives.org, which is the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council. Which educates the public about tobacco products and their effects on black, American, and African immigrant populations. And he's been working closely with them for years. So a donation goes to them. And why not? Let's do a third donation. This is an important topic. It's going to go to the Public Health Advocacy Institute.

• 50:39Alie Ward?

  They use the civil justice system to improve public health by focusing on litigation, targeting tobacco industry products, and unhealthy foods, and deceptive health marketing. Maybe jade eggs, I'm not sure, but deceptive gambling practices also. All to advance public health and social justice. So a lot of great donations this week, and a lot of ignorance on all of our parts. But what's important is the willingness to learn. So those donations were made possible by sponsors who you may hear about now. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all in one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name.

• 51:23Alie Ward?

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• 52:08Alie Ward?

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• 52:52Alie Ward?

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• 53:37Alie Ward?

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• 53:47Alie Ward?

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• 54:22Alie Ward?

  Listen, sometimes you get out of your routine. That happened to me recently when I went out of town and I realized I forgot my Ritual Essential for Women 18+ It's a multi that I've been taking for years. And guess who landed in another country without them? Me, didn't feel right. They contain nine key nutrients, two delayed-release capsules designed for optimal Absorption. But Ritual, why do I love them so much? They have a team of scientists. They poured over thousands of studies to figure out what are common gaps that people need in their diet, but they don't actually consume. It's also designed to be gentle on the stomach. You can take it with or without food, which I love. Plus, I like that it looks like a tiny lava lamp. I tell you that every time, but it has just beads and oil. And it tastes like mint, easy down the hatch. I usually take them in the morning.

• 55:07Alie Ward?

  And the reason why I've stuck with Ritual for so many years is because my schedule is all over the place. Sometimes I'm eating breakfast. Sometimes I'm running through an airport with one shoe. So instead of striving for perfect health, aim for supporting foundational health. Save 25% on your first month at ritual.com/ologies. That's ritual.com/ologies for 25% off your first month. Okay, now to your questions. Now, the first question is about willful ignorance, and if it's related to the Dunning Kruger effect, in which the less you know, the smarter you think you are. Nicole Howley, Joe Marcello, Elle Wink, Ed Mastavek, and first time question asker Phyllis wanted to know.

• 55:50Alie Ward?

  People are very excited about the topic. And some people asked about the Dunning Kruger effect, and whether or not agnotology is related to the Dunning Kruger effect, where people who maybe think that they're more intelligent than they are are ignorant of what they don't know. Do you use that in research at all?

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Well, I don't use that specifically, but that's certainly true, is there's a kind of, I link it also to a kind of myopia of specialization, you know. The more expertise you often get in science, the more narrow is your focus. And that becomes a kind of tragedy, because you don't see the forest for the trees. And I believe that the truth is in the whole, and you have to see the big picture. I'm a big fan of what we call big history.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  And also, the unity of what we know with what animals know as well. Our unity of biological life in the course of evolution. That's one of the things I study also is human origins, how we became human. A lot of our deep biology is still expressed in our limitations today.

• 57:01Alie Ward?

  Okay, quick question, because I am unwillingly ignorant. What is big history? Okay, I looked it up, and it's history taught from the Big Bang onward, instead of just starting when us hairy humans meandered on the scene. So, big history ends up being kind of multidisciplinary, because in order to teach how the planets and the stars formed and the universe expanding, you gotta go back and learn about physics and astrophysics. It's a bit of a hodgepodge of sciences, which is fun. And for more on that, you can enjoy the two-parter on cosmology with Dr. Katie Mack, wherein I get cosmic vertigo, which is a kind of horror at the scale of things. Now, speaking of fear, who asked about fear fueling ignorance? Huh?

• 57:46Alie Ward?

  Turns out, a lot of you. First-time question asker Ethan Stoller, Erin Maglisick, Stutten Taggart, Megan Walker, Zora Phoenix, Devon Robertson, Misty Dawn, Beth Monaco, Sam Correa, and Greg. A few people had a question about whether or not fear plays into ignorance, and Emily Meredith Lewis is a first-time question asker, asks, "How much does vulnerability play into it versus entitlement?"

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Well, that's a great question, too. That's why we talk about homophobia. That's fairly new, to talk about ignorance as a kind of fear, or fear as a kind of ignorance, to not know what it really means to, say, be homosexual, for example, leads to a kind of alien misunderstanding. And that, I think, is a really important part, just of human relations, is the distancing of peoples from one another allows stereotypes to develop, and stereotyping and blanket ignorances. It goes back, sort of, to your point about circulation and travel.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Descartes used to say, "There's three great principles for science: travel, travel, travel." Because really, knowing the other and walking in their shoes, that's why I talk about the importance of, in the history of science, of wonder, sympathy, and critique. You wanna wonder like a child. But you also want to have sympathy and you want to have critique. So sympathy part is you want to walk in the shoes of the past or in this case in someone else's experience to understand them so you don't fear them. And then, but then you still retain your humanity and your recognition there is right and wrong and you can, you are free to critique. You don't want to lose yourself in someone else's shoes. So you want to maintain principles.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  So those are three of the principles I operate with, wonder, sympathy and critique.

• 59:40Alie Ward?

  Oh, that's beautiful. When it comes to the travel, travel, travel part, what if that causes more of a carbon footprint?

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Well, of course, that's, that's part of the big problem. The world of the future is going to be very different. We're not going to have ubiquitous travel. We're not going to have, you know, cigarettes being sold. We're not going to have meat consumption the way we've had it. And hopefully we'll even have a lower population because that's also part of the problem. So the world of the future is going to have to be very different. We're, we're kind of sailing away, as people like to say, running the book of Genesis backwards, you know, and in creating this, this unholy world. And that's going to have to change.

• 1:00:23Alie Ward?

  I'm doing my part by being infertile. You're welcome. Now, did anyone ask about the demographics of climate science believers? Katar Zarandi did, as well as? Hannah Johnson also was the first time question asked if there have been research about the demographics of people who are more likely to be science deniers, like significant differences across gender, education level, income, et cetera.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Yes, well, of course, of course. Wealth is power, power is wealth. Knowledge is power. Wealth helps create knowledge. Wealth can also destroy knowledge, but of course, there's huge, huge differences in that regard there. An interesting connection with climate science denialism is the whole evangelical problem because a lot of climate denialists are evangelical Christians who don't want to confront a world where their God is... Abandoning them, in a sense, or allowing us to follow our own nest. I mean, there's some problems even with the recency of the age of the earth in that whole view.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  But there are some progressive evangelical critics of us fouling our net. And that's why we need to think very important metaphorically about what kinds of metaphors do we use to overcome denialism? Metaphors of the garden, of the steward, of the flock, and, you know, the caring for our own life as for other people. So we're gonna have to rethink our metaphors. You know, we can't just get away with polar bears and even the 1, 2, 3 degree threshold problem, that's not good enough. We've got to think much more creatively about how to bond people in the stories we tell,

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  the allegories, the stories we tell about why we need to act differently from how we've acted in the past.

• 1:02:18Alie Ward?

  And I did a little bit of research on this, and it turns out that evangelical Christians, that just means Christians who want to spread the good news, and it's kind of been co-opted a little bit to mean the Christian right. But there are a lot of evangelical Christians who do not find that the teachings of Christ align with certain political parties wholly, wholly with a W. Amy Black is a professor of political science at Wheaton College and writes a lot about faith and politics. She wrote in 2016, "Because evangelical voters are an important voting block, politicians have many incentives to pander to them. In this time of rapid social change, church leaders need to train people in the pews on how to respond, helping them understand and embody the core commitments of the Christian faith."

• 1:03:02Alie Ward?

  Now, what about folks who do not have faith that the earth is round? A lot of you asked about flat-earthers, including D.B. Narverson, Mackenzie Campbell, Kate Stomps, Kayleigh Douglas, Cassidy Williams, science teacher Karen Blaisdell, another science teacher and first-time question asker Chloe Chambers, first-time question askers Kevin Beamer and Mara Rosenbloom, and Ben Bignell, who says, "I drive by a sign for Flat Earth Canada twice a day, five days a week, and wonder every day why people can believe it." I don't know, is the road flat, Ben? Think about it. Kind of asked along that line, like, without the ability to connect with people digitally, do you think that there'd be fewer flat-earthers? Like, when did we start believing the earth was flat?

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  No, that's actually a great question. One of the favorite... Gotchas or corrections historians of science like to make is actually, most people did not think the earth was flat, say, in the Middle Ages. People knew the world was round. That goes back to antiquity. The actually myth that people used to think the earth was flat really arises in the 19th century in order to basically beat our own chest and say how much greater we are than the Middle Ages. There's a whole book about this, about how in the 1830s, the myth of that people, you know, used to think the world was flat arose. Now, obviously, if you go back far enough, I'm sure there, most people were flat-earthers.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  But yeah, since we are in a world where misinformation, disinformation circulates faster than ever before. I think your questioner is quite right. That's allowing this, some of this craziness to flourish, you know? And so there may be more flat-earthers now than there have been in the last 300 years.

• 1:04:53Alie Ward?

  Just gonna toss in real quick. If you want more info on this, watch the documentary Behind the Curve. I just saw the trailer for it and wow, wow, wow. Thank you to patron Nicole Thomas, who wrote in, quote, "At first I was furious, but after watching that, I understand that people who operate on the fringe beliefs usually get further marginalized and isolated with their thoughts. And since no one is engaging them with the correct information and they've isolated themselves from everyone that has a different set of beliefs, it's really easy to retreat to the community bubbles that have the same belief set." Thanks for writing in, Nicole Thomas. Good point, indeed. You know, Francesca Huggins and Toby Kristnik seconded this question. Francesca just asked, "Religion, what gives?"

• 1:05:36Alie Ward?

  And I do wonder, you mentioned evangelical Christians.

• 1:05:41Alie Ward?

  It seems sometimes that there's a disconnect between the teachings of a certain religion and the actions of its most extreme promoters of the religion. And 2025 update here. So this confused me because like we got this new president who signed all these executive orders and one was an executive order titled eradication of anti-Christian bias, which is confusing because I thought that the administration didn't believe in bias. But anyway, this executive order is supposed to quote, "ensure that any unlawful and improper conduct, policies, or practices that target Christians are identified, terminated, and rectified." And the president also signed an order that establishes a White House faith office, which

• 1:06:26Alie Ward?

  is to be led by this televangelist who has been, she's been married like three times. She was caught having an affair with another televangelist, but I'm not sure if that goes against any like personal or religious beliefs. And really who people sleep with is like, none of my business. But anyway, a few weeks ago, at the customary interfaith service of prayer for the nation at the Washington National Cathedral, this Episcopalian bishop, Marian Buddy, sermon spoke to Christian values and family values that a lot of political leaders have often used to galvanize their cause.

• 1:06:58Speaker 06

  In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they, they may not be citizens or have the proper

• 1:07:43Speaker 06

  documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, Wadara, and temples.

• 1:08:04Alie Ward?

  And for some reason, that sermon didn't sit right with some high-level politicians in the front few rows. And our sitting president later posted that Bishop Buddy, quote, "brought her church into the world of politics in a very ungracious way," and that she was nasty in tone and not compelling or smart. He continues, "Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one. She is not very good at her job. She and her church owe the public an apology." And Time Magazine asked for the bishop's reaction to that, and she said that her message, quote, "was rooted in Jesus." She said, "Not a partisan agenda." And she continued, "I'm not going to apologize

• 1:08:46Alie Ward?

  for asking for mercy for others." She also warned against America's culture of contempt, as well as the harms of polarizing narratives. And a week or so after the sermon, some folks were still fuming. One U.S. House of Representatives said that Bishop Buddy should be deported. Bishop Buddy is from New Jersey, so I think she's safe. But yes, why sometimes do politicians appeal to the Christian right? Like, why sell a line of $60 Bibles to be used in public schools, but not place your hand on a Bible for swearing in? Did ChatGPT come out with a recent translation of the scriptures that's different? Where is that disconnect, where you're like, "I don't think Christ would do that?"

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  That's for sure. I mean, you know, the Sermon on the Mount is very different from some of the craziness we hear in a megachurch nowadays. You know, there are good lessons, good principles in all religions, and there are moral aspects, there's ontological aspects. And so I think part of the problem has been become this commercialization of the churches, the merger of churches with the Tea Party movement, which itself was created by big oil and big tobacco in order to fight taxation and fight governmental regulation. So...

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  You have to look at these things politically and in the political context and see how religions have bonded to these other powerful institutions. And in many parts of the world, you can be three religions. You know, in Japan, you can be Shintoist and Daoist and Confucian. There's no contradiction there. It's really kind of the, there's something strange about parts of the West that we feel we have to be either Jewish or Protestant or Catholic or Muslim. That either or is part of the problem. We need to view these things as maybe more like a buffet of practices, sacred practices. And remember, the sacred means that which you value, you know, that which cannot be

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  touched in some negative way. And we need, I think, to revisit aspects of the sacred.

• 1:11:01Alie Ward?

  Yeah, and you know, you mentioned that kind of really stark dichotomy. And I always feel like everything from the colors to the mascots are political parties have become like opposing sports teams more and more. But do you think that a strong like third party or more political parties would, would help see those kind of gray areas more?

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that would be because there is something weird about the binary world we're in where winner takes all. Some of the European systems I think are better in the sense of parliamentary representation. You know, so I think we do have some big problems in how we organize our binary world, and I think it's getting much worse. So I do worry a lot about that.

• 1:11:47Alie Ward?

  And Jessica Craver asked, is there a good way to handle talking with someone on a subject like refusal to wear a mask when any slight mention just makes them very angry and worked up and they are maybe incapable of hearing reason? In times of pandemic and self-preservation, any way to get through to people or is that denial just out of fear?

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  It is odd that something as simple as wearing a mask has become politicized. You know, basically it's something, just follow the rules, right? I mean, just, and I think people need to be just a little more chill. You know, as we say in California, don't harsh my mellow.

• 1:12:23Alie Ward?

  Kelsey's story had a health question and a lot of people seconded to this. They said, why are people so willing to believe in wellness therapies such as cleanses to remove toxins from our bodies? Thanks, liver, but so resistant to facts from actual health professionals?

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  A lot of my agnotology class, I teach both an introduction to agnotology and an advanced agnotology class. We've had several students do interesting projects on food supplements and how people will pay hundreds of dollars for basically something which is basically additives without food. And, you know, there's a lot of mythology surrounding what we eat. I'm a big fan of Michael Pollan, you know, eat simply. There's so many mythologies about what we put into our bodies. I think because we've had so many powerful trade associations promoting sugar or additives or salt or whatever, highly, highly packaged, processed food. So that's been part of the problem is that trade association problem

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  I, I mentioned. I mean, just one simple example of that, my granddad, three of my four grandparents died from smoking, but my dad's dad, he died of a heart attack and he had smoked two packs a day and died in his mid 50s. But the theory promoted by the tobacco industry at that time was that eggs are what kill you. And so the, the family story was always, he died of eggs.

• 1:13:47Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  So I was always terrified of eggs.

• 1:13:49Alie Ward?

  Oh, no.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  And then when I finally realized by reading the industry's secret documents, the tobacco industry basically created that theory attacking eggs that in order to exonerate smoking.

• 1:14:01Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  So, you know, we, we do live awash in, in mythologies about, about what we eat.

• 1:14:08Alie Ward?

  So, so, so many patrons asked this next question, almost 50. It's the one question on literally all of our minds. So I'm just going to read the names of the first time question submitters who asked it. Another high school science teacher, Miranda Chavez, Susan Webb, Aloy Johnson, scientist Courtney Mallow, Emily Taylor, Kazia Wizniewski, Troy Langneck, Samantha Sonich, and Kevin Leahy, who is a second time question asker, but forgot to say it was their first time last time. And also, you know, all of us want to know. And one last question a lot of listeners had, essentially, like in Shirley Dark's words, As they say, I know others who seem to hold tight to their wrong ideas. What are some good steps to take to make sure you can maybe get through to people?

• 1:14:50Alie Ward?

  And that that's also you're not clinging to false information. I mean, I think I just see, you know, a lot of the fake news, a lot of the doubts cast on a lot of media. How do, how do we correct that? What do we do?

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, if it's one on one, of course, intelligent listening and sympathetic listening is absolutely crucial. You know, I think there's too much, often too much talking, not enough listening. And so, and, and, you know, view other people as, if nothing else, as anthropologically fascinating. You know, um, my, my own brother has become alt right recently, and we've had many back and forth about that. But if nothing else, I still love him and I'm, I'm still fascinated by how in the world this happened. Almost, you know, in a medical sense, but, uh, you know, I think we need to be sympathetic and to listen and to learn from people whose views are very different from us.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  That's the kind of the anthropological ethnographic aspect, I think, of being a scholar or an ordinary person in the world is, is learning from others, however strange they, they, they may seem.

• 1:16:05Alie Ward?

  Is there a way to use empathy to kind of deescalate the denial that might come with ignorance?

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  Yes, and that's why I have, I have an idea I developed it called on surrogacy. Basically, when people deny evolution or climate change, they're really not so much denying evolution or climate change, there's something usually that is behind that. So we, we need to understand a particular form of denialism as, as possibly standing for something else. If, if someone is, doesn't believe in climate change, is that because they're worried economically that their way of life is going to disappear? Is it, uh, they're worried about a threat to, to religion, a religious view they might have? Is it, in other words, what stands behind these movements? Because a lot of

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  This goes back to our talk about fear. A lot of ignorance is really, as you said about fear.

• 1:17:03Alie Ward?

  And so maybe we would have better luck having an open discourse by being empathetic to the fears that are behind that and addressing those rather than, say, with the people in our lives that that we might see having viewpoints that are not not super kind.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  I think that's exactly right. Yeah, you have to say, what is at stake? Who benefits? What are the alternatives? You know, and until you get behind those, then it could be just, you know, shadow boxing or useless confrontation.

• 1:17:43Alie Ward?

  Exactly. Yeah. I think that especially right now, it's imperative that white people in their lives have those conversations with people that they know. It's almost harder to speak up on a family group text than it is to post a lot of hashtags on Twitter to people who agree with you.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  Get out of your bubble.

• 1:18:05Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Yeah. So and have those conversations, you know, privately with people in your life as well as publicly to the people who agree with you.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:14Alie Ward?

  And last questions I always ask every guest, what is the worst thing about your job or the thing that you dislike the most? What is something that sticks in your craw? Either from a philosophical or just from a practical standpoint, like filing?

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I have a great job, which is being a professor. I get to interact with with students. I do miss the personal contact because now it's all over Zoom. And I miss the interaction in terms of artifacts. When I teach ignorance or I teach world history or I teach human origins, I bring in artifacts. And it's not the same in the screened world. We already live obsessively in a screened world. And so I do miss the the loss of the artifactual world. So I guess that I would say is the worst part of my my job right at the moment.

• 1:19:14Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  But I'm hoping that will change.

• 1:19:17Alie Ward?

  What about the thing that you love the most about what you do?

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  Well, I love dealing with young people who are learning about the world. I love challenging my own views. I love finding out where I'm wrong, what I didn't know. You know, it wasn't so long ago, I learned there was a color called dun. I never heard of the color dun before. So I love learning new things. And if people can tell me something I didn't know, I just, what could be better?

• 1:19:48Alie Ward?

  And that is what he is trying to do for us. Also, what color is dun? How does one even spell that? Of course, I looked it up for us. And it's a camely, creamy kind of buckskin color. D U N. So a dun horse is like a pretty beige horse. So when in doubt, Google a reputable source. What else? Any, any places people can start to look if they want to make sure that they're dismantling their own ignorance?

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  Well, they can always check any of these books that are coming out now about ignorance. There's, there's a whole slew of them. There's a new one, Science and the Production of Ignorance, that just came out by Janet Karaney and Martin Carrier. Those are people who are, agnotology is also being taught now in Europe. And there's the Oreskes Conway Book, Merchants of Doubt. There's our Agnotology book. I've, you know, I've published a lot of other books. One is called The Golden Holocaust, which is about the use of science as a form of deception by the tobacco industry.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  You know, so there's so many great, I just finished assigning to students the Wallace Wells Uninhabitable Earth. And before that, we did the Shock of the Anthropocene, which is such a great book. So, you know, those are some of the hot topics that we like to explore in the agnotology world.

• 1:21:12Alie Ward?

  Great. I will put links to those in the show notes as well as to yours, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. So we'll make sure that we we put that up too. But this was so amazing. I can't thank you enough for doing this. This is an episode people couldn't be more thrilled or ready for. So.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  Great. Well, it's very timely.

• 1:21:34Alie Ward?

  It is indeed. So ask smart people stupid questions because the only thing worse than ignorance is when you don't want to do anything to get rid of it. So yes, that was Dr. Robert Proctor. You can grab his book, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, which was co-edited with Londa Scheibinger, wherever books are sold. And dude also came through with some book recs. So if you hit the link in the show notes to aliward.com/ologies/agonatology, there will be links to all of those books he mentioned, including his. So I hope you'll call a local bookstore and order those up. We are at Ologies on Blue Sky and Instagram. I'm at Ali Ward with one L on both. If you need perhaps an Ology sweatshirt, a beanie, maybe a T-shirt, don't hesitate to hit up ologiesmerch.com. We also now have Smologies. Those are shorter, classroom-safe, kid-friendly

• 1:22:19Alie Ward?

  versions of Ologies episodes. They're in their own G-rated feed. You can look for Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-I-G-S, wherever you find podcasts. It's got new green artwork, or you can find it linked in the show notes. Thank you to Erin Talbert for adminning the wonderful Facebook group. Hello to all the Ologies Redditors. Thanks to all the folks who support at Patreon.com/ologies. Avale Malick makes our professional transcripts. Noelle Dilworth is scheduling producer. Susan Hale managing directs the whole shebang. This episode was initially edited by Stephen Ray Morris and Jarrett Sleeper of Mindjam Media. Jake Chaffee is one wonderful editor here. Mercedes Maitland is our lead editor and did some extra producing on this encore. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed our theme music. If you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this

• 1:23:01Alie Ward?

  week, before we get to that, I promised you some resources for what to do about government agencies, particularly in the science sector, being targeted and censored. One thing I'll say is to read these executive orders firsthand. When we see a headline, we often don't get the full scope of the wording, especially on like so many recent executive orders coming all at once. So no one can. Possibly go through them in one sitting, but it's very illuminating and a little bit more shocking. But when you actually read the executive orders, you'll feel more ready to sort of digest the enormity of them. So if something's going to scare you or piss you off, you kind of owe it to yourself to read it fully, because it's oftentimes worse than expected. Or if you're in support of these, then it's good to know exactly what you're supporting, word for word.

• 1:23:46Alie Ward?

  So you can go to whitehouse.gov/presidential-action to see exactly what's getting signed. Also, I've been chatting with our lovely sea turtle scientist and colonialologist, Dr. Cameron Allen. And she works with NOAA a lot. She gave me a list, which we can also put on our website, which can be found at the link in the show notes. She said if any of the censoring of science is bothering you, then you can speak out against current and future harmful executive orders and funding cuts. You can go to fivecalls.org. You can also go to senate.gov and house.gov, where you can look up senators and representatives by state and get contact information. Another thing you can do is donate to NGOs, which are suing against the unlawful executive orders. And you can go to aclu.org. You can go to nrdc.org.

• 1:24:30Alie Ward?

  She also says, keep speaking your truth on your social media accounts and connecting with trusted media sources. You can educate yourself on all that's happening to the federal workforce. Heather Cox Richardson has a Substack that covers that. ThePublicServiceAlliance.com is another one. And if you want to find out more about how the federal workforce is important to you, the public, you can check out a link that we'll post to noaa.gov. They have a podcast called Planet NOAA, From Sun to the Sea and Everything in Between, where they talk about what NOAA does. So we'll put those resources up on our website. And then the second secret is that I'm drinking hot tea out of a vase. It was a vase that came with flowers from the nice lady who helped us design our new kitchen cabinets. I used it as a vase, and then I washed all the flower gunk out. And now I use it as a mug.

• 1:25:14Alie Ward?

  It doesn't have handles, which means it can hurt my hands. But the size is right. And I just, I guess I've remained willingly ignorant about how the situation is just not convenient. It's not intelligent. Sometimes I put a sock on it. And then I'm just drinking out of a vase with a sock on it. Okay, bye bye.

• 1:25:51Alie Ward?

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• 1:26:32Speaker 02

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