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- [00:00]
Kristen Bell
Hi, I'm Kristen Bell.
- [00:01]
Julian
Carvana makes car buying easy.
- [00:03]
Kristen Bell
Isn't that right hun? Dax.
- [00:06]
Julian
Dax, Sorry. Did you know about this? 7 day money back guarantee.
- [00:11]
Kristen Bell
A week to evaluate seat comfiness.
- [00:13]
Julian
You say a week of terrain tests? Yeah, I can test the brake pad resistance at variable speeds. Make sure all the kids stuff fits nicely. Make sure our stuff fits nicely.
- [00:23]
Kristen Bell
Oh the right.
- [00:24]
Julian
Still need to buy the car. Getting ahead of ourselves here.
- [00:27]
Kristen Bell
Buy your car with Carvana.
- [00:29]
Julian
Today this Father's Day helped dad be all he can be with a gift.
- [00:33]
Kristen Bell
From the Home Depot.
- [00:34]
Julian
Because he's not just dad, he's the handyman of the house, the plumber in a pinch and the emergency mechanic. Upgrade his gear this Father's Day with the Husky mechanic's 270 piece tool set from the Home Depot. Now on special buy for $119. A$695 value for every kind of dad Find the perfect G this Father's Day at the Home Depot. Hi everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. Today I have an interview for you with journalist and author Matt Hungolds Hetling, who embedded himself with a paranormal research group for almost two years in New Hampshire. And he's written a really interesting book that asks the question, does failing trust in American institutions push people towards believing in Bigfoot, aliens and ghosts? And into seeking help with life's big questions from mediums and channelers who tell them that science is covering up the truth of the paranormal world. We're joined today by Matt Hongels Hetling to talk about his new book, the Ghost How Bigfoot Hunters, Mediums and Alien Enthusiasts Are Wrecking Science. Welcome Matt.
- [02:04]
Kristen Bell
Thank you so much for having me on. I've been waiting for this for a long time.
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Julian
Julio, it's great to get to talk to you. This is your third book since 2020, so congratulations. It's also on the same imprint as our conspirituality book on public affairs. But you've also had a decorated career as an international investigative journalist, a feature writer for by my calculation, at least the last 15 years. Is that right?
- [02:28]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, that's about right.
- [02:29]
Julian
You're also Pulitzer Prize nominated. You're a Polk Award winner. There's probably eight or ten other significant acknowledgments on your website, all for excellent reporting. So you come to this project with a lot of writing chops and the book really shows that it's beautifully written.
- [02:44]
Kristen Bell
Thank you. So much. That's very kind of you to say and to frame it that way.
- [02:48]
Julian
Yeah. So this book, the Ghost Lab, it has a few layers which we're going to get into. It includes some of the history of paranormal research and, and paranormal sort of media and entertainment. And then there's this through line about the modern day loss of trust in institutions. And that's something we'll talk about more at the end. So listeners, stay tuned for that. But at the heart of it all is your fascinating up close and personal account of the misadventures, I think it's fair to say, of a New Hampshire based paranormal group called the KIT Research Initiative, or kri. So would you tell me about them why you chose to embed yourself in their world for two years?
- [03:29]
Kristen Bell
But I was really interested in that as an issue because New Hampshire has been sort of on the leading edge of that national trend. So where America is now with terms of distrust of government and all other science evidence based institutions, New Hampshire was there 10 years ago and they're continuing to get worried there. So I wanted to sort of get to understand what was really driving the paranormal community, which I found was very tightly linked to this trend of distrust. If we can't understand where these folks are coming from, then how can we change the situation? Right. How can we change the dynamics? Yes, their beliefs are not grounded in what you and I would call reality, Julian, but they are. There's also a lot of nuance to them. And so I chose the KIT Research Initiative in particular because this was a really amazingly colorful, eclectic, fun group of folks who represented all the different sort of big buckets of new age beliefs that are bundled up in the believer community. So there was Andy Kitt, a science minded ghost hunter, or so he would say. There was an empath, there was a psychic medium who was very highly regarded. There was a paralegal who was looking for an explanation for the voices that she was hearing in her head. And then there was also a Bigfoot hunter who also happened to be an alien abductee. It was all under one roof, Julian. And I really wanted to get under that roof with them and sort of rub elbows.
- [05:11]
Julian
Yeah. And so you put yourself into that world for two years as a sort of anthropological project and it seems to me from a very empathic and, and open kind of relational stance of really wanting to be there with them. So it sounds pretty clear from what you've said already that going into this, your orientation toward paranormal pursuits was that this is not really part of the reality. Based community or worldview, did your perspective on that sort of domain, that subculture and the types of beliefs that they hold, did that go through any change over the course of the time that you were there?
- [05:52]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, I started off as a skeptic who said I really need to see hard evidence to move the needle on my own internal compass. And I ended in more or less that same place. But what I really came to appreciate is that the folks that I was speaking to weren't stupid and they weren't crazy and they weren't lying. You know, they were out there having personal experiences that were very compelling. And I found a real parallel that the sorts of experiences that they were having that were convincing to them are the same sorts of experiences that might convince me not to walk down a particular dark alleyway, or that they really sort of like spoke to a shared common humanity. And so what I've really come to believe is that belief in the supernatural is not a bug in the human animal. That is sort of our human nature. And we believe in science sort of. Despite this, our capacity for a reason allows us to sort of circumvent and short circuit that sort of natural bent towards supernatural thinking. That is a, that's a harder lift for some people than it is for others. And so I, I really sort of like came to respect the folks who had these worldviews almost as if they were a different culture or religion. What I found was that there are all sorts of like interesting nooks and practices within the believer community that provide the same sorts of mental and social services that we might get from a therapist, even a clinically trained psychologist. And I found that there were peer support groups. A lot of people who have become disillusioned with religion were turning to these folks for answers about those sort of like big 10,000 foot questions about our existence on earth, the metaphysical questions about what happens to us after we die and what's the meaning of life. That I might turn more to a philosophy book. For they were finding in these communities, and those are powerful things, and these are things that people by and large need to sort of get through their day. And so all of those things were nice. They were to the good.
- [08:11]
Julian
That goes to some really interesting questions around how certain forms of spirituality, certain types of cult membership, certain forms of fundamentalist religion, and then as we've seen over the last five years, belief and conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, alternative medicine, which I know is also the topic of another book that you've written, they meet certain needs, right? They don't arise in a vacuum and they don't become popular in a vacuum. And as you're saying, we have some sort of evolutionary wiring that makes us susceptible to these kinds of explanations for how reality works and solutions for whatever problems and existential un we might be feeling. And yet at the same time, I, I always find myself coming back around to saying, okay, well, they're, they're seeking to address those understandable human needs, but they're addressing them in false ways. Which, you know, it's not just about being a skeptic stickler around, well, is this true or is this false? It's also about, well, if it's false, what are the outcomes in terms of people going down a road where they accept one false belief after another as an explanation for their problems or as a way of trying to feel empowered or healed? What do you think about that?
- [09:25]
Kristen Bell
It's one thing to feel close to a recently lost loved one who may pass away, and it's another thing to sort of enter into a committed relationship with a spirit, which does happen in the book to the exclusion of more tangible connections with flesh and blood partners. Certainly if we look at the spectrum, we are going to find examples of the sorts of harm that you're talking about where somebody embraces an innocuous belief and it leads them to a place of bad acts motivated by conspiracy theories. If you believe that you've seen a ghost and you have a community of people around you who also believe that they've seen a ghost, then you become pretty convinced that A, ghosts are real, and B, it's not that hard to experience them. Everybody's doing it, right? And that sets you up sort of very naturally for this question of, okay, if ghosts are real, as I am now so 100% convinced they are, then why hasn't science sort of backed this? Why aren't they studying this thing? That would be the most important discovery ever. If they think about that, they're forced to conclude that either science is deeply flawed as a tool to understand the universe, or they're forced to conclude that science is actively suppressing the truth, that it's not a tool for enlightenment, but that in fact it's a tool of oppression. That is one sort of fundamental truth that is widely embraced within the paranormal community and that is a very destructive force. They are, they are naturally at odds with evidence based institutions in part for that reason.
- [11:09]
Julian
So welcome to very sort of initial conversation that leads to our podcast being created is that there is this overlap, right? There's this Overlap around what sociologists call stigmatized knowledge, knowledge that is not accepted by the mainstream. And that starts to be the sort of transitive quality that between these different beliefs that may seem at first to be disconnected, like believe in ghosts. Oh, I believe that science is, is covering up the existence of ghosts. Oh, well, maybe vaccines are much more dangerous than we've been told. Oh, and maybe Covid is a, is just an authoritarian power grab, for example.
- [11:44]
Kristen Bell
Right. Yeah, right, right. And there is a school of thought that folks can sort of compartmentalize their lives so that you can believe that every night you are being transported to another dimension in communing with an alien space God or whatever bizarre belief it is, but that when it comes time to do your taxes, you're going to go to an accountant. Right. And you're going to sort of do that the old fashioned way and not listen to what the runes tell you. And there's also a school of thought that people compartmentalize this sort of based on predictability of return. There is an anthropological study or documentation that I talk about in the book of a man who went to sort of like a remote indigenous island population in the Pacific and looked at two methods of fishing that they did. And in the one, the first form of fishing, they sort of stick a poisonous root onto the end of a stick or like a pulped root onto the end of a stick. They put that stick into the hole in the coral reef and the fish flee out of the coral reef and into the nets. It's very predictable. You get your fish all the time and you don't appeal to the gods for help with that practice. Yeah, but these same folks would also fish sharks in the open seas. And this was a very, very dangerous practice where they're, they're, you know, sort of trying to mimic the sound of shoals of fish jumping and then essentially staving in the top of the shark's head with a piece of wood. Right. Like, this is not for the faint of heart and your risks are high and your returns are much less assured. And so that practice was associated with all sorts of like, very onerous taboos that people and superstitions that people were able to, are willing to undergo some real trials and burdens of these spiritual based taboos. So when we live in a society that is sort of in a state of chaos where things are roiled and we perhaps feel more helpless, we're certainly more likely to look to our horoscope.
- [14:00]
Julian
Yeah, yeah. So finding some sort of ritual way to gain control or Some sort of metaphysical calculus that can be enacted in order to understand better and have an edge over something that feels out of control, that feels scary, that feels riskier. You're pointing to this wonderful example from your book as, As a contrast, right. Of. Of different situations in which we might be more prone to leaning towards getting some of that good luck charm energy.
- [14:28]
Kristen Bell
Right. People love stories. Right. People have narratives, and this is a narrative. And this narrative also puts you front and center and puts you in a. It's an ego stroke.
- [14:39]
Julian
It turns out that the northeast where you are right now, this, this whole area that you're talking about has actually been a hotbed of activity around the paranormal, if not of actual paranormal activity. A lot of activity around the paranormal, as well as new religious movements and revivals, is actually something I've been really fascinated about in my beat on the podcast. So in addition to covering the KIT research initiative, you also dip in and out throughout the book very artfully in talking about that rich history. So as a sort of entry point into that. Tell me about Ed and Lorraine Warren.
- [15:15]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, Ed and Lorraine Warren sort of like sparked the first spate of ghost hunting. Married couple. As a young couple, Ed was a bit of an art hound and an artistic talent himself. He liked to sit outside sort of rickety, odd looking houses and paint them. And the owner would come out and say, hey, yeah, what are you doing? I see you sitting at this easel here. And he would say, oh, yeah, I just thought that your house looked haunted. Would you mind if I come in and look around with my wife Lorraine? Homeowner would sometimes agree, and they would do that. And sort of like out of that repeated experience, Ed became convinced that there were sort of demons in a lot of these houses and that he was able to sort of combat or hold power over these demons through invocation of Christian iconography. This is sort of the mindset that gave rise to the exorcist trope. It is the mindset that gave rise to people battling demons. It was a very specific view of ghost hunting and the supernatural that sprang off of sort of like the dominant ideology of the day, which was the Christian faith. Right. It is much more dominant in America in the 1950s. And so they were able to become sort of like America's first paranormal celebrity ghost hunters.
- [16:42]
Julian
Yeah, I mean, as soon as you start getting into all of those cultural reference points, right away I, I hear the, the, the character from Poltergeist saying, go toward the light, Carolyn. Like all of that kind of like ghost and Poltergeist and, you know, haunted house kind of stuff. Always situated within this larger framework of Christian iconography and notions of how things, how all of that stuff works.
- [17:10]
Kristen Bell
And they're still making movies based on the warrants and they're sort of like intellectual properties. They came up with the idea of ectoplasm running down the wall. They came up with the idea of the dolls, haunted dolls, evil haunted dolls that they've got a doll that they've passed on, but their nephew still has a doll in a cage that's sort of like rounded by holy water. So very, very out there. Beliefs. And some of their beliefs did not take off, by the way. Some of them hilariously so they believe that someone who was possessed by a demon would sometimes turn into a gorilla.
- [17:50]
Julian
Haven't seen that one.
- [17:51]
Kristen Bell
That didn't catch on. That didn't catch on. Maybe next year we'll see what's the.
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Julian
I'm forgetting it right now. There's a very successful movie about an evil haunted house that's based on one.
- [18:05]
Kristen Bell
Of their stories, isn't it? Yeah, the Amityville Horror. They helped to define that. And then there's a current horror series, I think it's called like Annabeth or Annabelle. It's a haunted doll.
- [18:17]
Julian
Yeah, yeah. And you'll even see. You'll see characters based on them in some of these movies where the expert husband and wife team comes in to see if this is really real.
- [18:26]
Kristen Bell
Yeah. And they lived for a long time and they sort of dominated the scene. And they founded a supernatural like, ghost hunting organization. But, you know, their star sorted to wane with Christianity's descent. And also because as cameras became more ubiquitous, the very extreme claims that they were talking about, they couldn't manifest the sort of photographic and videographic evidence that would have been easy to get. Easy to get. Right, right, right, right, yeah.
- [18:58]
Julian
Filmation. Yeah. You mentioned Ed and Lorraine Warren founding the New England Society of psychical research in 1952, right?
- [19:09]
Kristen Bell
Yes, yes. Still, still in operation today.
- [19:12]
Julian
And I want to fact check you here, if you don't mind. I think you say in the book that this was the first of its kind in America, is that right?
- [19:20]
Kristen Bell
That was my understanding, yeah.
- [19:22]
Julian
No, it just so happens that I'm really fascinated in this particular niche interest. I believe in 1884 the American Society for Psychical Research was founded in Boston.
- [19:33]
Kristen Bell
Oh, right, right, right.
- [19:36]
Julian
Yeah. And it was a sister organization to the Society for Psychical Research, which was founded in London a couple years before, in 1882. And I only know about this because I've done this whole thing for our Patreon subscribers called the Roots of Conspirituality. It's about nine episodes deep at this point. It starts with the Great awakening of the 1840s in Northeast and then transitions into spiritualism and theosophy and, you know, all of that kind of stuff. So I. Yeah, I'm just really interested in it and, and, you know, the, the. The founding in 1884 of the American Society of Psychical Research. It's really a response to spiritualism and to people saying exactly what you're referring to. Let's study this scientifically and find out what's real and what's just charlatanry.
- [20:18]
Kristen Bell
Right, right. Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, in my head, I thought of those. Those movements as sort of like very different buckets. And I do talk about that earlier spiritual movement a bit, and certainly that has echoes that we're still suffering the effects of. But.
- [20:34]
Julian
Yes, I mean, I wanted to ask you about that, actually, because, you know, you have. You have the influence of Franz Mesmer and Emanuel Swedenborg, and then coming, I think, out of that influence significantly later. Spiritualism is started in New York by the Fox sisters. And you touch on them briefly. Tell us about the Fox sisters. They're so interesting.
- [20:52]
Kristen Bell
Two young girls, 10 and 12 or something like that. They're quite young. They demonstrate an ability to commune with spirits. And the proof of this is you sit in a room with them and you ask the spirits questions, and the spirits will respond with a series of raps. And nobody knows where these raps are coming from, so clearly they must be coming from thin air. They're demonstrating publicly, these spirits. And before whole crowds and folks of skeptics or, you know, committees of skeptics are coming in to explore evidence of their claims. They can't disprove it. And they eventually become, you know, very well paid for. For this thing that they do. They're. They're much older sister, like a 15 years older sister, takes them under a wing and sort of like turn professionalizes their show. Their show. Yeah.
- [21:46]
Julian
They perform in Impact theaters.
- [21:48]
Kristen Bell
Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. One of the things that I thought was fascinating about them is that they're doing this at a time where women don't have a lot of options in society. Right. So you are a housewife in the. Yeah, let's say 1874. You don't have a lot of wiggle room for your life course. But if you can identify as a medium, a psychic medium, Then you suddenly have a pathway to respectability and power and self identity and money. Right. Where you can sort of chart your own course much more so. So needless to say, this idea caught on and soon there were a lot of psychics coming out of the woodwork or mediums coming out of the woodwork. The other thing I thought was really interesting about the Fox sisters was sort of like the end of their story. They get up on stage and they tell a very packed audience crowd, a theater in New York. They tell them that they had been fooling the public for.
- [22:58]
Julian
For about 40 years.
- [22:59]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, years. Yeah. Right. They're not little girls anymore this way. Right. They are. They are grown women. Grown ass women. And they are. They sort of prostate themselves before the audience. And now the spiritualists who were in attendance said, well, yeah, the skeptics have gotten a hold of these women. They're giving them a big payoff. There's something's going on here. But it's not that there's no spirits. So the Fox sisters get up and they demonstrate how when they take off their shoes and socks, that they can produce these same exact wraps by cracking their toes. So this is the sound of synovial fluid and a little air bubbles. It is not the sound of spirits from beyond. You would think that would end things, right? Well, case closed. We finally figured. It took 40 years, but we finally figured it out. But that is not what happened, of course. And so the spiritualist movement just continued to grow despite these refutations and recantations by the foxes. And that was what really got me on the path of thinking like there's. This is not. This movement is not driven by proofs, it's not driven by evidence. It's driven by these other factors.
- [24:19]
Julian
Yeah. So the moment that, that anyone like that recants, the true believers suddenly find their skepticism. And their skepticism is about the fact that they're recanting. That's the one thing they're skeptical about. And the thing that I find so fascinating about this, this period is you also have Ellen G. White, who's the founder of Seventh Day Adventists, who herself, I believe was a temporal lobe epileptic. She would go into these kind of trance states where she believed God was talking directly to her. And she has all of the hallmarks of. Of Geshwin syndrome, which I think is actually probably very common amongst, amongst certain people in, in this field. And she's very, very opposed to spiritualism because, you know, you never know which spirits are coming through. And I'm actually The one who is directly the prophet of God. And then you also have Madame Helena Blavatsky swanning in and being like, oh, no, no, spiritualism is wonderful, but I'm going to organize it now under the umbrella of my set of claims from around the world of being in touch with the ancient white brotherhood and, you know, the masters of ancient wisdom and all of this kind of stuff. So it's really a fascinating period. And I think there's, there's a lot of resonance with what's going on today with, as you describe in the book, the kind of social, political, cultural upheaval, shifting in views, shifting in populations, people moving around cities getting bigger. In the period of the 1800s, you've got the movement for abolition of slavery, you've got women's rights on the menu, as you were saying, and into the sort of maelstrom of all of that confusion and uncertainty and shifting of values and loss of trust, say in conventional mainline Protestantism at that time, these new religious movements emerge. People are really fascinated, as you talk about in the book today, back then with direct experience. Right. An enthusiastic being filled with spirit, yourself and not having to have the mediation of institutional expertise. So let's transition to this real major theme that's in your book, which is about the relationship between today's institutional mistrust and how that potentially plays a role in enthusiasm for the paranormal.
- [26:28]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, well, one of the other facets, you know, I talked about one sort of like fixed feature in this is sort of like this built in belief that scientific institutions must be suppressing the truth or must just be really bad at discovering the truth. The other thing is this sort of emphasis on personal experience that you were just talking about. A dominant wing of the spiritualist movement, I would say, or of the believer community prioritizes honoring the experience of the individual over the desire for evidence or a shared reality. And I was really surprised when one of them laid it out to me in very naked terms, like you say, this is a table, but the culture is shifting. So that if my experience is that that is not a table that can coexist with your experience, that this is a table. And you know, and you know, she said, I'm not saying that like, oh, I'm going to knock on it and my fingers are going to pass through. They're not gone in that sense necessarily. But you know, this idea that mutually exclusive truths can coexist is more important than finding a shared reality, more important.
- [27:45]
Julian
Than claims of consensus objectivity.
- [27:47]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [27:48]
Julian
And so in a way, this is sort of filtering down from a perhaps oversimplification of postmodern philosophy, which we actually do see a lot in the new age. Because the new age is a postmodern phenomenon. It's, it's, it's borrowing from all of these different religious traditions and then remaking it anew in some kind of kaleidoscopic relativistic pattern.
- [28:11]
Kristen Bell
As, you know, troubling as that might be to you and I, it's ironically sort of like a very self sustaining, self perpetuating force. Because it means that when somebody's holding a peer group for UFO abductees and one guy stands up and he's telling a story that nobody else believes, nobody's going to contradict that guy, right? So now, hey, guess what? That guy's in the movement and he's going to bring his friends and maybe they have their own outlandish stories that can't possibly be true, and they're in too.
- [28:44]
Julian
That's so interesting that you put it that way. I'm sorry to interrupt you because it really makes me think about the difference between what's happening on the right politically and what's happening on the left politically, where there's a coalition of people on the right who can contradict one another, who can, who can have worldviews that couldn't possibly be true at the same time as the people, other people in the coalition with them who somehow, because of their, their perhaps transcendent focus on coming to power and on and on owning the libs, they're able. And this didn't used to be the case like you used to have, you know, evangelicals and Catholics saying, no, no, no, no, these aren't, you don't have the one true faith now. They're, they're in bed together in a way where it's like, no, we'll, we'll, we'll accommodate these differences because we have a shared agenda. And what you're describing is very, very similar where perhaps in some of these circles, conflicting interpretations and even, you know, sort of ontologies around how all of these paranormal phenomena fit together. There's no need to reconcile that or to contradict any of it. It's just, it just is what it is. And everyone has their own perspective that has to be somehow honored as long as it's within this particular bucket. Right?
- [30:00]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, you're right, it is that sort of like owning the lives is the defining feature of the right. That's all you need. And we saw an alternative medicine. You know, you and I both looked at that in some depth. And, you know, it doesn't matter if your medical theory, your theory of health is inconsistent with mine. We both think that it's. That conventional medicine is wrong and therefore were on the same team.
- [30:24]
Julian
That's right.
- [30:25]
Kristen Bell
Democrats.
- [30:26]
Julian
Even though homeopathy and acupuncture really don't overlap in any other way, they're both true when seen in contrast with evil western medicine.
- [30:37]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, it's like a great improv troupe. They're operating on the yes and principle. Right, whatever you said. Yes and da da da, da da. And the left, I think, has become very good at sort of balancing competing demands. Right. They represent a very large coalition of distinct interest groups and they're constantly, like, worrying about how to balance those. And Republicans have come up with a great strategy for balancing. Just don't address the conflict. You know, tell. Tell every group what they want and frame it with those few unifying, unifying messages of own the libs and government too big and why do we have to pay taxes?
- [31:22]
Julian
Yeah, yeah. And wokeness. So.
- [31:24]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, right.
- [31:25]
Julian
Tell me, tell me more about how you think about this loss of trust in institutions and the rise of, you know, people being really fascinated with and drawn to paranormal belief and entertainment.
- [31:39]
Kristen Bell
Institutional trust has been declining for a very long time. Right. And it declines for a lot of reasons. But this is a global general trend across all institutions. So you might say, oh, well, it's because healthcare is not accessible enough. Okay, maybe. But then you say, okay, but also the church is losing its trust. And I'm lumping the church in with those others because what it has in common with other institutions is that it adheres to a specific dogma. They have a shared reality. It's not my reality, but it is a. They agree on what the facts are within their community. So. All right, well, the church isn't doing well because of sex scandals. Okay, well, why. Why don't people believe in the military anymore? You know, why don't people believe in the CDC anymore? Why don't people believe in the idea of government anymore? And what you come up with is that people aren't believing in a whole lot of collective action. You know, people aren't believing in these. These big power players that have provided all these services for society over the past hundred years. Particularly the growth in paranormal beliefs, I think, was sort of gestating against that backdrop for a while. There were believers who were out there. They had wacky beliefs. They weren't necessarily united. They were pranks. They were on the fringe. And the combination of Sort of like the advent of the Internet, which allows like to find like, and to wrap yourself in a convincing digital bubble of a reality that is pertinent only to the folks inside the bubble, combined with sort of hitting a tipping point with that trust trend, allowed paranormal beliefs to explode and begin a really aggressive dynamic feedback loop with the distrust itself. And I went to New Hampshire because I think we saw this first in New Hampshire. And I'm talking about it now because I think we're seeing it on a. On a much broader scale. When I reported on the fringed alternative medicine movement, they had already been so politicized and radicalized against institutions to the right that they weren't really gettable for institutionalists or progressive thoughts, progressive mindsets anymore. I feel like this community of paranormal enthusiasts and believers is gettable. The dominant paradigm within that community is still this sort of earth mother, back to nature vibe. Right. The more sort of like macho, I'm gonna go shoot Bigfoot wing is not necessarily dominating that broader scene yet. And so I. Part of the reason why I'm talking about them so much now is because I think they're gettable and then some.
- [34:38]
Julian
Of it too, as you're saying. I think with the Internet and with niche cable tv, like, you think about how something like the History Channel has completely become taken over by all of this paranormal, ancient aliens, conspiratorial sort of stuff. So too, with. With smaller channels like the Travel Channel and DEST America, which is even smaller, but seems to even more have all of this emphasis on, like, here are all the places you can visit in America. Here's the history. And oh, by the way, there's a bunch of ghosts and poltergeists and strange things that have happened, right?
- [35:12]
Kristen Bell
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. No, there are a lot of people who are making a lot of money by working very hard to convince the public that the most extreme versions of supernatural beliefs is true. And some people dip in and out of it for entertainment, and some people dip into it and then never quite dip out of it.
- [35:34]
Julian
Yeah. And then for me, the extreme wing of that, like the History Channel is the most prominent and obvious. Everyone knows the guy with the crazy hair who's talking about ancient aliens. But then there's Gaia tv. And Gaia TV is really the Internet version, the next level of this, where they have about 840,000 paying subscribers. And if you just. I mean, I've gone on there, I've bought a. I've done trial subscriptions just to see what they're doing. And there's, there's a little bit of yoga and a little bit of meditation and there's a lot of stuff about interdimensional aliens and cryptids and Bigfoot and, you know, people who are channeling spirits. And then in equal measure, there's plenty of super red pilled, Super QAnon themed conspiratorial stuff. And I think, as you're saying, some people dip in and out, but I think there is a demographic where this starts to become incredibly powerful in terms of shaping their perspective on reality.
- [36:30]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
- [36:33]
Julian
So given all of this, Matt, given the amount of time you've spent looking into this, given your sense of the current predicament, let's end on this note. Do you have a sense of how we can move forward? Because one of the things you said a couple minutes ago is you see these folks as gettable.
- [36:48]
Kristen Bell
I have come up with a sort of prescriptive plan very reluctantly and one that sort of like goes against my own desire to hold my principles with scientific skepticism across the board in all sectors. Debunking, dismissing, deriding. It's not working. Scientists have been doing this as hard as they possibly can. And in the face of all of their efforts and in the face of all of the evidence that points to the amazing advances that they've achieved for society and for the public benefit and good, supernatural beliefs continue to grow. And so I think that as a matter of practicality and strategy, our institutions need to create more spaces within themselves that will allow for people who hold these beliefs to feel welcome in these institutions. And that might mean a doctor who has a developed protocol to treat an alien abductee that does not challenge those beliefs, but that takes them more or less seriously, that crafts a treatment that sort of accommodates and meets the more holistic psyche of the person that they're treating and that also sort of Trojan horses in all the good evidence based stuff. I think that means creating more licensing systems and licensing boards for ghost hunters so that if they come into a house where somebody is hearing voices or has a persistent hearing of unease, that they have some basic level of training to know when to refer folks to medical professionals. Same for psychic mediums. A lot of people are coming to them with a lot of problems. Yes, they should have some level of training. And I think if you do this, you're creating a class of stakeholders within the paranormal community who are elevated above the rank and file that can a phrase from the two A folks for a moment. The only way to stop a bad psychic is with a good psychic, right? So get the psychic who's acting ethically, who's not charging $17,000 to remove a curse. Get that person on our side and let them do what they do in a way that they can make a few bucks that we can live with. That's my proposal for our fellow skeptics.
- [39:21]
Julian
Great. Well, Matt, I really enjoyed the book. I've been talking to Matt Hongels Hetling about his new book the Ghost How Bigfoot Hunters, Mediums and Alien Enthusiasts Are Wrecking Science. Thank you so much for taking the time today, Julian.
- [39:34]
Kristen Bell
Thank you so much. I'm so excited that we got this chance to talk and I hope we get to do it again someday. Trip Planner by Expedia. You were made to have strong opinions about sand. We were made to help you and your friends find a place on the beach with a pool and a marina and a waterfall and a soaking tub. Expedia made to travel.