SIO5: Fake News Epidemic

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode number five, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. All right, got an excellent interview for you today. And I have to say, I have to confess, it's maybe not going to be the most optimistic and encouraging of interviews. You may have seen somewhat recently, actually this came out around the election, but it's still in the news. There was a Stanford study done saying, saying, most students don't know when news is fake, and that's so heartbreaking to hear because we're already having a big enough problem as it is with fake news and with just information reliability in general, and to hear that kids and students aren't any better necessarily than adults are is a little discouraging, but so to talk about these results is Dr.

0:01:16 Thomas: Joel Breakstone. He's the director of the Stanford History Education Group, and that was the group that put on the study. I'm amazed by the fortuitous timing of it, and I don't think it was merely luck. I'm sure they were catching on a trend ahead of time, and I think that's really cool. So I'm going to talk to him about the study, you'll learn what was done, what tests were done, and what the results look like. So here find out more about this study.

0:01:50 Thomas: Joining me right now is Joel Breakstone, director of the Stanford History Education Group. How are you doing, Joel?

0:01:58 Joel: I'm doing very well. How are you doing?

0:01:59 Thomas: Oh, I'm doing excellent. I am so excited to talk to you. And I first, I think I need to do a little bit of, I don't know, praising you guys a bit or whoever the group that was responsible for this study. Because I was just noticing, we're going to talk about the fake fake news study you guys did over at Stanford. And I was noticing that you began this in January 2015, but that's just when you began questioning, right? So you must have started this study even, or like kind of formulating it even early, right? Even earlier than that.

0:02:32 Joel: Right. Yeah. So, this is a question that has come up for us for some time. So, as the name of our organization suggests, for some, we've been very interested in history education and creating materials for teachers to use with their students. We have an online curriculum called Reading Like a Historian that is free online and is focused on asking students to engage in historical thinking, to engage with historical documents in the way that historians do, to ask questions like, who wrote this document? When? Why? For what purpose? And to consider the context in which documents were created and to think about how the context of a document influences the content of it and to not accept a single document as evidence of the past, but to corroborate across multiple documents.

0:03:20 Joel: And sometimes we've been criticized by people who say, so what do you want to do, create an army of many historians who will be underemployed in the future. And we've always resisted that criticism by saying that although we believe it's important to have students engaged in disciplinary ways of thinking about documents from the past, we also think that those are skills that are applicable beyond the history classroom, that we'd like students to be asking those types of questions of, where did this document come from?

Can I trust it? In their everyday lives. But we hadn't ever created the materials to make that connection explicit for students and we and teachers in particular to help teachers make those connections with students. And so we believe it was really important to make those connections more direct, especially given the proliferation of information, given our information age and the extent to which students are going to find all of the information that they, or much of the information that they will use to make decisions as citizens, online. We thought that it was really important to come up with tools to help teachers to gauge how well their students could make sense of that online content.

0:04:27 Thomas: Yeah.

0:04:36 Thomas: Yeah, well, surely it's not only historians can be critical thinkers. I think that'd be a pretty dismal view of the world. But yeah, but What incredible timing. Did you have any idea? I mean, this because this the timing of these things take a few years, of course, to do in the in the just the idea that you guys release this and finish this at a time when it couldn't be more relevant. I mean, literally just so relevant to the election, to everything that was going on with that. I mean, that's incredible. So I guess my question is, when, when, you know, whose idea, how did you start thinking about this and when, and did you have, and were you surprised by how, how just sort of, I don't know, prescient, or at least how, how relevant it ended up being and how well timed it ended up being.

0:04:43 Joel: Without a doubt. Yeah, certainly. We've been very surprised by the reaction to our materials. We had never expected that the work we had been doing would be so timed with this incredible interest in so-called fake news. And, you know, that suddenly everybody knows that term, fake news, and it's hard to turn on a news program and not hear some reference to it. So certainly we've been surprised by that. But, you Know, we do believe that the issue is not new, that this has been going on for some time. And the increasing reliance by young young people, but also by many Americans and many people across the world of digital devices for gathering and for reading about current events. That's not new. And so that's what motivated our work. But without a doubt, we could not have anticipated how well timed the release of these findings would be.

0:05:37 Thomas: Yeah, sure.

0:06:23 Thomas: I'm just curious, do you see it as of course, it's I'm not saying it's a brand new problem, but do you See it as even proliferating even more given this election? Or is that something that maybe you wouldn't is out of the scope of your research here?

0:06:36 Joel: You know, I think it's I think I can't say with With certainty, I don't have evidence about sort of the changes in terms of how much was spread online, but it certainly seems to have taken on greater proportion recently. And, you know, that the increasing reliance on social media for people to gather information about political decisions and political issues certainly suggests that it is as important as ever. You know, and certainly have been other other work done about how much inaccurate and downright false information was spread on on various social media platforms during this last election cycle.

0:06:50 Thomas: Hmm.

0:07:20 Thomas: Yeah. So one thing that's really cool about this that you've already touched on a little bit is that this is as much a study guide as it is a study. I mean, it's sort of like a lesson plan in some ways too. So that's really awesome because as I was reading through your executive summary, which I'll definitely link in the show notes, thought, wow, this is just such a useful thing. Like there's no way anyone could have made this, of course, when I was in high school because, you know, Twitter and Facebook didn't exist. But I just thought like this would have been such a good thing to be part of my education. And I'm really excited. I hope people utilize it. But maybe let's get into it a little bit. Would you mind going into sort of some of the questions and I guess what would you call them, tests in a way that were done and administered here?

0:08:04 Joel: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, thank you for that compliment. I appreciate it. We certainly hope that the teachers will find these materials useful. Ultimately, we'll be releasing the tasks that we've created and used with students on our website, shag.stanford.edu, in the coming months. At the moment, we're still doing some work with students with those, so we're not able to release them all just yet. But yeah, so what we've done is to create short tasks that ask students ranging in age from middle school through college to engage with online content. And so that ranges from a task for middle school students, ask students to look at the homepage of a news website and to identify ads and news stories. And what we discovered was that students were very good at identifying news stories. They're also very good at identifying traditional advertisements, things that say 25% off.

0:09:00 Joel: In contrast, students are hard-pressed to understand what sponsored content is. We found that more than 82% of students failed to identify an item labeled as sponsored content on a homepage of a news website as an advertisement. Advertisement smart students who knew what the word sponsored meant and knew what the word content meant, but they didn't know what that genre was. And so they didn't understand that this was paid for by a company that was seeking to influence their thinking and, you know, really suggest some of the challenges that the young people face if they are unaware of who is putting material out and what their intents are in and purposes are in putting that information.

0:09:46 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Because one thing the summary talks about a littlebit is how companies are moving and websites are moving to this different kind of advertising. And so is that something that definitely seems like it'll be a challenge going forward if If, you know, young people, and even as we'll see later, maybe, maybe older people, not so young people are having, having trouble differentiating between these traditional advertising and the sponsored content kind of model.

0:10:13 Joel: Absolutely. You know, if you go online, it's on most websites, it becomes increasingly challenging to understand what is part of the content of a news website and what is the advertisement and what are the advertisements. And, you know, the term sponsored content is intentionally ambiguous because they are trying to blur the lines. And, and, you know, it's understandable on some level in that traditional media organizations have been hard pressed to stay alive and they're trying to figure out new revenue streams. That being said, it's troubling if students don't understand or anybody who is reading this content, if they don't understand who's behind that content and what their motivations are.

0:10:35 Thomas: Yeah.

0:10:58 Thomas: Yeah. Certainly the ethics of it are kind of, they're, they'RE kind of interesting because the, the more prominent, the more well-known the website, the, you Know, there it's a little more obvious, but when, as you go down to, to websites that are maybe not as, upstanding the line becomes really blurry and almost non-existent sometimes between what's an actual article and what's merely an ad. So it's definitely a little tricky. So yeah, so you said, what, was it 82% couldn't recognize that sponsored content? What about the number of the percentage that could recognize the basic ad? Was that pretty good?

0:11:22 Joel: Absolutely.

0:11:35 Joel: Yeah. The majority of students identify that readily, you know, that they're only a handful. You know, so certainly they're aware of traditional forms of advertising. And it's not just middle school students. We had another task for high school students presented students with two items from the Atlantic's website. One was from the science section and one was a sponsored post by an oil company. And they were both about climate change. The sponsored content was an infographic. And the majority of students thought that the infographic was a better source of information because there was data being

0:11:38 Thomas: Well, that's something.

0:12:14 Thomas: Yeah, Yeah. It looks

0:12:15 Joel: Presented.

0:12:15 Thomas: Better.

0:12:16 Joel: It looks better, right? Rather than sort of this, you know, ho-hum article about climate change. Change. So it certainly extends beyond middle school students and is an issue high school students struggle with. That was nearly 70% of high school students struggled to make that distinction. So problem is not just about age.

0:12:16 Thomas: Yeah.

0:12:36 Thomas: Can I ask a basic question? What was the environment in which you did this? Because it sounds like, uh, for some of these, if not all of them, students were allowed to kind of poke around and like Google stuff, right? Like it wasn't just a defined look at this one thing. Like they were allowed to Google and research stuff. Right.

0:12:54 Joel: So in some cases, yes, in some places, no. So we made a range of tasks. So for instance, the middle school task that I described with the sponsored That was actually a paper and pencil task, In part because although we think it's really important for some materials to be online and we want students to actually have to wrestle with all the vast amount of information online, we also want some more discrete tasks that can be completed quickly, given the realities of classrooms and how much time is available for these types of things. In addition, we also realized that in many places there are not digital devices for every student in a classroom.

And so we wanted to make tasks that could be used there. But we also did we made tasks that did send students into open Web searches, for instance, for one task for college students. Students, we directed them to an ad from the website minimumwage.com and asked them whether or not they thought that would be a reliable source of information to understand the minimum wage Policies And what students needed to figure out was that minimumwag.com is actually funded by a lobbying group that receives funding from the food and beverage industry and has a a very particular slant on the minimum wage and is opposed to raising minimum wage across the country. But there are layers separating that website, minimumwage.com, from the information about who's behind it. And if you just go to the About tab, for instance, on minimumwage.com, you'll find out that minimum wage is a project of the Employment Policies Institute, which is is described as a nonprofit research organization dedicated to studying public policy issues. But that doesn't say that EPI is actually funded by and run by a lobbyist named Richard Berman, who works for the food and beverage industry.

0:12:56 Thomas: Okay. Okay, yeah.

0:14:49 Joel: But if you were to just Google Employment Policies Institute on the first page, the Google results, there are several articles by people like the The New York Times describing Berman and the various websites that he runs as part of lobbying efforts. But most students were unable to come to that conclusion. They they they deemed it to be a reliable site. They saw that it was run by a nonprofit research organization. Conversation. And that was how they made their decision, even when they had the full scope of the web at their fingertips. They were not able to come to that conclusion. They read deeply on the websites rather than leaving the website to try to find out what other sources say about that particular site.

0:15:34 Thomas: How explicit was it made in the instructions? Like, feel free to Google around, you know,

0:15:39 Joel: Yeah, we know we said, we said please feel free to open a new tab and do a Google search if you want. But students, for the most part, stuck on the sites that they were directed to initially and did, I think, what students have often been told to do, which is to consider things like the About tab. What does the About tap say? Is there an organization listed? Is it a nonprofit? Um, is there contact information? What Uh, is, is it a.org or.com? You know, if you look at much of the, or many of the media literacy resources online, they teach students to do those kinds of moves, um, which are inadequate at this point, uh, in a world in which many people are seeking to obscure their real identity online and are trying to deceive people, um. Because they they have particular reasons to do so, that they don't want people to know who they are and what their motivations are.

0:15:43 Thomas: Oh, okay.

0:16:32 Thomas: Yeah. And did you say this was a high school one, or was this one of the ones you did for both high school and college students?

0:16:38 Joel: This one was actually done with college students.

0:16:41 Thomas: Oh, this was because I remember there was one that I saw that where it looked like high school And college students had similar results. Do you remember which one that one was?

0:16:42 Joel: Yeah, So this is one where we actually have about both. We've also done this with some high school students as well, um, and have, have seen, um, both, uh, both high school and college students, um, struggling. So this is, uh, this is one that suggests that the problem is, is not, uh, about high school or college. Um, you know, both high and college student struggled with this task.

0:17:05 Thomas: Yeah. Was that were you disappointed by that? Was it? What was your feeling on that? Because I would have been hopeful that, you know, maybe in college, there's going to be a little more critical thinking taught. Maybe there'll be some difference. And was there a particular year in college that you were doing or was it just kind of spread out?

0:17:29 Joel: It Was spread out. So we were, we did it in a, in a few different courses where there were, um, yes, students who range from freshmen through seniors. Um, and we, we, uh, did this at a couple of different colleges. So, um, so yeah, so it was not just freshmen. Um, guess I, yeah, I would say I was disappointed. You know? We, we were hopeful, right?

0:17:45 Thomas: Yeah.

0:17:45 Joel: We were hopeful the college students would do better, right? Of, of, you know, across the board, students really did quite poorly, uh, on all of the tasks that we did. Um, and it suggests the depth of the problem. Um, you know, that although young people have had access to digital devices ever since they were very young, that doesn't mean they know how to make sense of the content that they encounter on those devices. And the ability to navigate Instagram and Twitter simultaneously doesn't guarantee that a student is going to be able to know whether or not to trust the post that pops up on the feeds of one of those services. Services?

0:18:25 Thomas: Yeah. Have you, I know your, your guys' focus in that group is going to be education, of course. So it makes sense that you're focusing on students, but have you had any desire to wonder, you know, what about other age groups? Could we go further up in age and kind of find a way to test that and see what the response would be in that case?

0:18:43 Joel: Mean, there's certainly some interest. But I think, as you mentioned, you know, ultimately our our our focus is on educational resources. And so I don't think we're going to make more materials or work with adults. But certainly other other research that has come out in recent weeks suggests that the the problem is the same for adults, that their Survey showing that, you, you know, I think nearly a third of adults in one survey indicated that they had shared fake news on one of their social media platforms. And that the number of fake posts that appear both on the left and the right during the election were quite high on accounts that were identified as either left wing or right wing. You know, they were, yeah, they, they were really up there and they were being shared tens of thousands of times. So, you know, I think that there is ample evidence that this is an issue that is not limited to young people.

0:19:05 Thomas: Right.

0:19:46 Thomas: Yeah. What was the most surprising result to you out of all of this?

0:19:50 Joel: I think the thing that was most surprising for us was the consistency that students struggled across the board. We were expecting that some of these easier tasks might be too easy. And We really had to rethink our approach, because early on we were dismissing some of the tasks that we, we had thought up because we thought they would be too Easy.

0:20:01 Thomas: Yeah.

0:20:09 Joel: But Once we put them in front of students, students really had a hard time. And so that, that consistency across the board was striking and underscores the need for additional work to equip, equip young people, and ultimately all of us, to be better suited to make sense of the incredible amount of information that comes at us in this digital age.

0:20:08 Thomas: I don't know.

0:20:29 Thomas: Yeah, I have to say that it's certainly, this study has made me a little cynical. How about you? How are you faring with, because I feel like this is such a huge problem. I mean, it's almost like there's a different level we need to be even trying to engage. I know that's maybe not your particular role and, you know, where your position, but somebody like me or just anybody who's, I don't know, doing something political or trying to maybe change people's minds one way or the other, it's a little troubling to think like, well, if most people are not even able to differentiate, you know, fake news or at least motivated news, I mean, how can we even begin? You know, there's not like any source you could show to someone if they don't respect the right sources, you

0:20:36 Joel: Right.

0:21:16 Joel: I mean, I think the piece that leaves me with some hope is that I think there are some, some ways of thinking that we can begin to instill in young people, and that ultimately that that might go beyond the walls of schools. And I think one is to look for multiple sources and not to accept a single account as evidence of something happening.

And although certainly people like to find information that confirms their beliefs and their views of the world, if we could push students to say, like, actually, I want to see, is there another source that says the same thing? Is there another source from a different perspective that says the same thing? That that type of thinking can go a long way. Even the basic move of just doing a Google search of what is the organization that's Putting this out can often reveal a great deal. Ultimately, people are not going to spend hours and hours searching out the exact information about a given claim or a given post. But, you know, even a couple of very quick moves potentially can, can reveal a great deal about what, what is going on with these types of posts.

0:22:04 Thomas: Yeah.

0:22:25 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Do you think that the that the truth has a slant in some ways? I mean, do you I I I'm unabashed, pretty liberal. I'm happy to point OUT where liberals are screwing up just as much as where conservatives are screwING UP just just to kind of, you KNOW, be fair about it. But do you think there is a sland particularly in this election? Is that anything you could comment on?

0:22:45 Joel: I mean, you Know, I think that there's certainly people have I think, you Know, we there's a challenge when people believe that major news organizations are not trustworthy, right? Right. And, my understanding is that Alex Jones has put out a list of fake news websites and he included New York Times and Washington Post In that. And I think that speaks to part of the challenge that we're confronted with. I think it's important to distinguish between a individual blogger or somebody who has a great number of Twitter followers and large news organizations that have reporters who are gathering information and is having it fact checked. I think that that continues to be important, and that that there is a difference between those types of news organizations and others who are putting out information under the title of news. I think that we need to continue to make those differences clear, and that, you know, that if two news organizations that are at opposite ends of the political spectrum are reporting the same information, that gives me a lot of confidence in the content of that particular story.

0:23:03 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:23:57 Joel: You know, that if the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the New York Times editorial page are both saying the same thing about something, you know, that that tells me something, right? Of if, you know, the Wall Street Journal leans right and the New York Times leans left. Right. But that, that, that there continues to be importance to identify the role of, of reporters and of legitimate large news organizations that spend a great deal of time and energy on trying to get information out to people.

0:24:26 Thomas: Yeah, one thing that occurs to me with all this is it's like skepticism is very important. But there's also, in some ways, for some of this fake news stuff and for some people like Alex Jones or people who follow him, there's almost like a hyper skepticism that goes on. Do you know what I mean? Like there's almost like a well, sure, there's the New York Times. But if I Google that, you can still find it's not like a Google search is going to guarantee that you'll go to the right lengths. If You you want to think something is fake, you Can find a way to Google enough to find like, oh, well, they have this motivation. And there's some loose tie to this company or something. You You know what I mean? Like I, I picture, uh, I Glenn Beck. I, you know, that kind of thing where it's, there can almost be like too much of a vetting that you could do.

0:25:16 Thomas: Do you have any thoughts on that? Like how to, how to differentiate or know what lengths you're going to, whether you're being like almost too skeptical of everything or not.

0:25:24 Joel: Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. It is a real challenge, right, that there is a certain element, right, that if you don't believe anything that is coming out of the mainstream media, that's problematic of where do you go from there. I think that it's one way to think about that is the multiple perspectives. Can you find competing perspectives that are saying something similar? Are there various types of sources that you trust, you know, that this is not to dismiss individuals as having useful information? An individual who's at a protest in Baltimore following, there are people on the streets, it's really angry, that the citizens who are taking pictures on Twitter, that's a useful piece of information paired with accounts from news, newspapers, that makes an even more convincing account about what is happening in a given place.

0:26:18 Joel: And so I think that we can continue to a belief in, and that we are not in a post-fact era, and that it just demands a slightly different way of approaching the various types of information that are available to people.

0:26:37 Thomas: Yeah. You know, you reminded me when you mentioned the photos. I don't know if I have like a particular question about it, but I'm wondering if you can just talk about it, because I thought it was a really good part of the test where it was a picture of flowers that were possibly like, can you talk about that? Because I thought it was really cool.

0:26:53 Joel: Yeah. So it's the task presents students with a post from Imgur, which is a photo sharing website and it displays a group of daisies that appear to be deformed. They're sort of their two heads on the on the flowers. And the the post says that these were mutant daisies that were from the Fukushima nuclear disaster. And they the Post says not much more to say. This is what happens when flowers get nuclear birth defects. And then we asked students, does this post provide strong evidence about the conditions near the Fukushima Daiichi power plant? Explain your reasoning. And in the opening, we briefly explained what the Fukushima disaster was. And our hope was that students would raise questions about where this photograph came from, if it was anywhere near Fukushima, and who the photographer was. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. We

0:27:21 Thomas: Right. And what

0:27:59 Joel: That this was with high school students.

0:27:59 Thomas: Age group was this? Okay.

0:28:02 Joel: So a lot of students said that it was strong evidence because it provided evidence, pictorial evidence, about the conditions. That was about nearly 40% of students who said that. Another quarter of students argued that the post did not provide strong evidence, but they said that, uh, it was only because it showed flowers and and not other plants or animals that may have been affected by the nuclear radiation. Really, only less than 20% of students came up with explanations that questioned the source of the post or the source of the photo. They wanted to just accept it at face value, which I think is something that happens far too often online.

0:28:02 Thomas: Okay. Right?

0:28:43 Thomas: Yeah, that's something, thing that's interesting too, because it's it sounds like you guys went into depth with these questions and answers and analyzing them. It's not as though it was a pick one, A, B, or C, and if everybody who picked one answer got it right, they had to get it right for the right reasons, right? I'm sure you had a lot of people, like you just mentioned, who said, "Yes, I'm skeptical," but it was for some reason that really made no sense, and that didn't count as, like, a mastery of content.

0:29:07 Joel: Correct. Correct. Yep. No, they need—that is exactly right. They needed to be to explain something related to the photograph or who posted the photograph that, you know, there were a lot of ones that just said, yeah, look at this. This is absolute nuclear radiation. The students believed it at face value. What more would you need to see? Let me see. One of the of the ones that I have right in front of me are that funny. But yeah, students students were pretty blunt. They they just said it's good. Good, it's an image. What more do you want to say? This is what nuclear radiation does.

0:29:10 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. All right. What was the funniest answer you got?

0:29:40 Thomas: Yeah. Yep. And it's such a problem too. That's something I did an episode a while back on how some anti-social justice stories people had been sending me so often turned out to be misleading. And one of the biggest things I found is first thing is like, check the date on something, like so many things are posted, so many news stories or videos or whatever it is, saying "oh here's this" and you look and it's like this is five years old.

And you're assuming, like, people just assume when they're seeing it, if it seems like it's relevant to a current event, then it's a new article. Like, they don't even look at the date. And same goes with with pictures, you just have a picture of flowers, you have no way of knowing what it's from, what it is, what even what what those flowers are, like, maybe that is just some different like kind of flower. And it's just like people, it's, it's amazing that it's so suggestive when people want to see something when they want to see like, oh, this correlates with this. Therefore it, that makes perfect sense that we're not able to question it.

0:30:34 Joel: Absolutely.

0:30:44 Joel: Yeah, no, it is a basic question that is so rarely asked. It is one of the core questions of our history curriculum, and we call it sourcing, asking who is the source, who wrote this, when, why, for what purpose. And it is something that we see across the board in history classrooms, is that students really struggle to engage in that basic move of considering the source information. That's not what they have traditionally been asked to do in classrooms. They aren't asked to question the information that's being presented to them. They're just asked, what is the information? Overwhelmingly, they are asked for the content of text or images, but not, where did this come from? And so in some ways, the results were not not too surprising in that regard because we've seen it over and over again in history classrooms, right?

0:31:33 Thomas: Yeah. I've had a historian on before and it seems like with some sources it's it's so difficult. I bet I'm not a historian at all, but you have to think like, okay, what was this person at this time trying to accomplish with what they were writing? And it'S like, there was a way less as bad as it. The misinformation may be now, uh, at least historically, I know there's a lot of so many sources where it's like, okay, half of this is just made up. Like there's not, it's, it'S very hard to differentiate, but, uh. Let me ask you this. What do you think about, I think it was right. I want to say it was pretty soon after the election, Facebook announced that they were going to start doing some sort of, flagging system for what they thought was fake news. What do you thing about that effort? Do you have any opinion on that?

0:32:13 Joel: You know, I think it's great that there are efforts to try to curb the number of fake or misleading posts that are online, but I don't think that an algorithm from Facebook is or from Google or any other technology companies is ultimately going to be the solution to this issue, because the people who are creating this content are just going to shift and they're going to come up with a way to evade those algorithms. And so I think that's why it's so important to create systems to help people build the skills to make sense of the content that they encounter, not to rely on the technology to tell them what is trustworthy or not. We need individuals to be able to to make some of those decisions for themselves.

0:32:39 Thomas: Yeah.

0:33:02 Thomas: Yeah. We need the algorithm in our brain, huh? Everybody's got to have their, their trusty algorithm. Did you say earlier, has anyone, I don't know if it's like too soon because it's just came out, but have you seen anyone, you wanting to utilize this, this, these study materials right away, like get them into their curriculum or anything like that? Or is it still too early?

0:33:05 Joel: Right. No.

0:33:21 Joel: Yeah, so we certainly have been contacted by by, uh, teachers who are excited about these resources, uh, and are planning to use some of the tasks from the executive summary, uh, in their classrooms right away, um, and are looking forward to additional resources. So Um, yeah, and in various, uh, workshops that we've done with with teachers, and over the course of the last month, um, there's been a lot lot of enthusiasm. People absolutely see the need and are excited about trying to integrate these into their classrooms. So that is something that we are definitely looking forward to, of working with teachers to figure out the best way to do that, and also to figure out where in the curriculum do these materials fit. That although we've worked in history classrooms in the past, we certainly do not believe that these should be limited to the history classroom or social studies classrooms.

0:34:08 Joel: That, you know, it's just as important in a science classroom. If students are doing a research report on climate change, we want them to be asking the question of where did this, where this information come from? Who, what website is this? Can I trust them? Given given how much controversy there can be and misinformation on that topic and other scientific topics. So trying to figure out ways to make these types of questions of where does information come from a more routine part of students surfing the web.

0:34:38 Thomas: Wow. Well, if I had my way, I mean, this would just be a required course. I mean you could make such a good course out of this for, I mean, really a couple of times for any age level, because merely knowing what the word sponsored content is supposed to mean, I means, it seems like it would help a lot of the problem that you measured. And I could imagine such a great course being created on the basis of these materials and maybe further expanding them too. So I wish it, man, I wish It could be like a requirement.

0:35:07 Joel: Well, thanks. We're excited to see what's possible.

0:35:10 Thomas: Yeah. All right. Well, that's about all the of questions I had. Is there anything you want to say in closing about this? Is there any place you want point people to? I'll certainly link the summary in the show notes, as I said.

0:35:23 Joel: Yeah, so people can check out the summary on our website, shag.stanford.edu. And if they keep their eye on the website, more materials will be released hopefully by the end of the school year. So in the spring and over the course of the next year, we'll be making more materials available there. And we'd certainly welcome feedback that people have about those resources, and you can find out ways to contact us on our website.

0:35:48 Thomas: Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Joel Breakstone, Stanford History Education Group. This is well-timed and incredibly good work because I just think it's so critical going forward. We really did see that in this election. And as you said, I mean, not just this election leading up to it, but I think this is so critical. I mean, it's square one before we can even agree on anything. We've got to be able to agree on what sources of information, roughly speaking, are going to be more reliable than others. So excellent work, and thank you so much for coming on the show.

0:36:19 Joel: Well, thank you for having me. Really appreciate it.

0:36:36 Thomas: All right, so I just wanted to announce and let everybody know I'm going to be at Logical LA that's in obviously Los Angeles. That's this week. That is Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of this week. Let me know if you're down there. If I get enough people who are around that area, maybe I could do some sort of meetup. Andrew and I did one when we were in Milwaukee. It was actually really fun. Even, you know, it's just a handful of people. It's fun to do a little meetup, have a meal or a drink or whatever it is. Let me know. We'll see. It is a little short notice and I am not speaking or anything. I am just going to be hanging out at the conference. In order to get more of an idea about what is going on there, I wanted to have the director of the conference on to talk about it. With that said, here is a quick little extra interview today with With the director of the conference, friends.

0:37:30 Thomas: Joining me right now is Bruce Gleason, Director of Logical LA. How's it going, Bruce?

0:37:36 Bruce: Fine, fine. You've got to pronounce it right, though.

0:37:38 Thomas: Uh-oh, what is it? Well, correct, I've only ever read it.

0:37:41 Bruce: Logical, as in California.

0:37:44 Thomas: Okay, LogicalLA. I like it. Well, as listeners no doubt have gathered, it's in California, which is where I am, so I'm very excited to head down to see this conference. Conference, why don't you talk a little bit about it and some of the attractions in case anyone's in town wants to check it out?

0:38:00 Bruce: Okay, well, it's been a long time. In fact, never since we've had an scientific skeptic conference in Los Angeles. Michael Shermer did a really good one a couple years ago. I decided not to do it on an annual basis, but this is the first annual Logical Scientific Skeptics Conference happening in January or February of each year. And it starts off with a free Friday lecture with the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe co-host Bob Novella, Skeptoid founder Brian Dunning, and LA skeptic Ross Blotcher, those three will be having an open to the public free lecture on what is scientific skepticism. So this is, again, open to the public. Anybody can come in. It's going to be at the Hyatt Hotel in Los Angeles, right next to LAX.

0:38:49 Bruce: It is on Century Boulevard, the closest hotel to LAx. And I am really glad they have double-paned windows as well.

0:38:55 Thomas: That's awesome, yeah, and that part, I guess it'll be good for anybody who wants to get a little preview, because as you said, that that part's totally open, right?

0:39:02 Bruce: It is, right. And then it follows up on Saturday with lots of great speakers. Joe Nickell, the only full-time paranormal investigator in the world is going to be there, along with Godsat. This is only two I'm picking from. Godsat is an evolutionary psychologist from Montreal, excuse me, Toronto. And he is just terrific. He's done a couple of 10 lectures and very impressive. And I don't have his actual title speech, but we'll be putting that up on the web very shortly. And the website, of course, is Logical, L-A-L, lowercase, dot com. Do you want to find out what's happening on Sunday?

0:39:45 Thomas: Yeah, I would love to. I certainly am really looking forward to one of the speakers who's been on the show, maybe that's who you're going to mention, but yeah, what's going on on Sunday?

0:39:53 Bruce: Sunday is really full of events and lectures because that's one thing. I could just put on a lecture series, but I wanted this to have a little bit of entertainment, especially during the evening. We have a comedy show on Saturday night. We have a concert on Sunday night with Roy Zimmerman, Shelly Segal, one of the most famous atheistic artists of the decade, at least, and Dan Barker. And I don't know if you know Dan Barker from FFRF. I'm sure you knew of him, but did you know he was a musician as well?

0:40:27 Thomas: Yeah, I was, I was at a conference in Milwaukee just in October and he did his performance there. I met him. It was fun. He's great.

0:40:37 Bruce: Good, good. Yeah, him and Shelly are going to be doing a little duo. And I'm sure for Roy Zimmerman as well. He's a satirist.

0:40:47 Thomas: Logic Cal.

0:40:48 Bruce: He on politics and atheism and nuclear energy, but his songs are very funny and inspiring. But let me talk about what's happening Sunday morning. We have not only a four-hour geological field trip, this is Sunday morning from 8 to 12. But we also have a Sunday assembly in the morning.

0:40:48 Thomas: Oh, no. Yeah. Saturn.

0:41:10 Bruce: And the movie, A Year Without God, it's a movie screening. It's the first time it's open to the public with Ryan Bell and executive producer Emery Emery. Are you familiar with both of those?

0:41:09 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've spoken to Ryan Bell. He has been on the show. I haven't spoken to Emery Emery, but yeah, that's going to be really cool. I interviewed him about A Year Without God a while ago, so listeners might remember that. I have to say I'm incredibly excited for Sean Carroll. I'm a big fan of Sean Carroll He's been on this show and he's got to be maybe my favorite speaker, so I'm just so excited to go see him at this conference.

0:41:24 Bruce: Good.

0:41:45 Bruce: Yeah, the nice thing about Sean, he really brings down-to-earth astrophysics into to a understanding that the layman can can really take a hold of it because is fascinating for us layman just just to have a peak of what these guys are doing as you know Sean Carroll, he's a theoretical astrophysicist, so he doesn't even do any of the experiments. He theorizes what things are going to turn out, and then it's up to the guys at CERN to get into it, you know, nine miles down or whatever it is to

0:41:49 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Yeah, I love Sean, particularly on time and and stuff like that. He really explains it in a way that non-physicists like you and I can grasp. So that's going to be really cool. You know, know, it sounds like there's a million good reasons to come to Logical LA, which again is LogicalLA.com. So I would just encourage people to check it out. I'm going to be there. Maybe if, if listeners can let me know if they're going to me there, I can maybe set up a, a meetup or something at some point during the proceedings, but I'm really excited to be here. Is there anything else while I have you on that you wanted to put in your pitch here, Bruce?

0:42:46 Bruce: I did forget about the anti-superstition party starting at 7 30 on Friday. This is kind of a kickoff entertainment event. It's open to the public as well, and uh, you have to pass under a ladder to get in the party. There's going to be doctors and nurses with stuffed cats ready to cat scan you to get rid of your superstitions. They're going tobe umbrella dancers, yes, umbrellas opening inside on the dance floor. Amazing, amazing. As well as a lot of other great events and it accumulates to the breaking of mirrors at the very end of the party. So it's one hell of an entertaining party. And I don't know if anybody realizes that there's a big economic cost to having fear of Friday the 13th. People don't get married on Friday the 14th.

0:43:35 Bruce: They don't get business deals or have business deals if they're superstitious. A lot of economic it

0:43:35 Thomas: Huh yeah yeah tolls yeah I didn't even make the connection that it's friday the 13th that day see I don't I don'T CARE but uh but uh BUT YOU'RE RIGHT YOU BRING UP A GREAT POINT YEAH THAT'S THAT'S INTERESTING

0:43:47 Bruce: Is you're probably not anti-superstitious you're not anti superstitious, right

0:43:53 Thomas: YEAH I'M NOT NO I'M BUT IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE EVEN PEOPLE WHO ARE SKEPTICS AND MAYBE YOU KNOW ATHEISTS DON'T REALLY BELIEVE IN IN ANYTHING LIKE THAT THEY STILL RETAIN SOMETIMES THOSE SUPERSTITIONS LIKE THE UMBRELLA THING AND THE MIRROR THING SO IT'S THAT'S A THAT'S a good idea for a party. I'm looking forward to that.

0:44:11 Bruce: Happy to see you there and I hope everybody can make it

0:44:14 Thomas: Awesome. Yeah, I'm excited to meet you. And thanks for coming on, sharing information about the conference.