 Now is the moment we've all been training for. As you know, here at the Rewired Soul, we discuss the importance of using critical thinking and practicing skepticism. On Monday, July 27th, a doctor by the name of Stella Emanuel passionately told the world that not only do we not need masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but hydroxychloroquine is the cure. Today, we're going to break down what Dr. Stella Emanuel said and use critical thinking so we can make intelligent decisions. For weeks, COVID numbers have been spiking and as you saw in a previous video, people still aren't taking it seriously. It's of the utmost importance that we know how to critically think about everything being said because we're literally in a life or death situation. One of the primary reasons I'm making this video as well is because I've had multiple people reach out to me and I also see people I know sharing this misinformation. You've probably noticed this too. In fact, do me a favor and let me know down in the comments below if you've seen people in your life sharing COVID conspiracies on social media. In this video, we're going to pull out a variety of our critical thinking skills and if you find anything in this video useful, please share it with others. And remember, as we discussed in the video on Andrew Wakefield, insulting those who believe in this misinformation isn't a good strategy if we hope to change minds. Countless studies have shown that the best way to get someone to change their mind is to let them come to their own conclusions. When we argue with people, it often makes them believe in the wrong information even more. By simply asking questions and presenting evidence, people will start applying critical thinking naturally. This is actually one of the ways that interventionists help drug addicts and alcoholics to get help. This is a therapeutic technique called motivational interviewing. Motivational interviewing asks the person questions that helps them begin looking at the situation from different angles. So in this first section, we're going to look at some of the claims Dr. Stella Emanuel made and ask questions to see if we can get closer to the truth. But before we get started, if you're new to the rewired soul, we look at various aspects of everyday life and use critical thinking to improve our personal emotional intelligence. So if you're like the rest of us and are regularly trying to improve your mental and emotional well-being, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. When analyzing potential conspiracies, one of the first things we have to do is ask ourselves, what's the motive? Behind every conspiracy, there are claims that a person or group of people is behind it with some nefarious motive. Oftentimes, that motive is financial gains. What makes conspiracy theories so believable is that there's often a speck of truth underneath it all. In this case, Dr. Emanuel claims this is a financial move from Big Pharma. I've also seen those who have been sharing this misinformation and attempt to back it up by discussing the fact that Big Pharma is a multi-billion-dollar industry only looking out for themselves. Although I practice critical thinking, this is definitely one of the arguments that could catch me off-guard if I didn't pause and be skeptical. I'm a recovering prescription drug addict. I spent almost a decade of my life having my addiction fueled by Big Pharma. My drug dealers weren't the type of people you see on TV. My drug dealers were doctors who were being manipulated by Big Pharma. As a recovering drug addict who tries to help others, I've spoken out publicly many times on this channel and at events about how Big Pharma has turned many of us into drug addicts. Due to my own experience with doctors, I can fall for something known as motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is one of the primary factors that play into why people believe in conspiracies. The phenomenon of motivated reasoning has been studied for years in the fields of cognitive science and social psychology. Motivated reasoning makes us produce justifications for believing information that confirms our belief as a way to ease cognitive dissonance. So, those who already have a reason to distrust Big Pharma are more likely to experience motivated reasoning and believe the claims of Dr. Emanuel. But if we hope to make the most informed decisions, we need to be aware of our motivated reasoning. Step back and start asking questions. As I saw people sharing this misinformation and claimed that Big Pharma was lying about hydroxychloroquine, they would claim the motivation was money. Well, I know Big Pharma loves money and if the opioid epidemic has taught us anything, it's that they don't mind people dying to line their own pockets. So, to avoid my own motivated reasoning, I started asking myself a simple question. If Big Pharma was doing this for money, why wouldn't they just start making and selling hydroxychloroquine? I want you to take a second and ask yourself that same question. If you were Big Pharma and hydroxychloroquine was the cure, wouldn't you start making it in mass quantities to make a profit? If you remember the man known as Pharma Bro, Martin Schlecky, did this with AIDS medications. He bought the rights to the AIDS medication, Daraprim and jacked up the price from $13.50 to $750. Pharmaceutical companies could make massive amounts of money by producing hydroxychloroquine if it were the answer. In fact, many of them have been making quite a bit of money because after President Trump endorsed this medication as the answer, it began being sold out across the country. This is another reason we need to practice critical thinking when it comes to these conspiracies. Those who need this medication who struggle with lupus or have malaria benefit from this medication and they can't even get a hold of it if people are following the misinformation of Dr. Emanuel. And to conclude this section, I want to address some of the rebuttals that may come up. During my own critical thinking practices, I try to argue all the possibilities in my head and some come up when we ask ourselves the motive of Big Pharma. I believe one argument that would come up would be that Big Pharma can make more money getting funded for research than producing more hydroxychloroquine. But as this pandemic has proceeded, we've learned more about the process of racing towards a vaccine. One of the reasons that we don't have preventative vaccines is because our governments don't buy the fifth vaccine that works. They buy the first. When the dust settles and a vaccine goes to market, many Big Pharma companies are going to have lost a lot of valuable time and money researching a vaccine that wasn't purchased. And in this next section, we're going to discuss some common traits of conspiracy theories and what makes people believe them way more than they should. Known as the Seekers believe that on December 21st, the world would end, but a UFO was going to come and spare those who believed. The head of the Seekers, Dorothy Martin, convinced a group of people to join her in selling all of their worldly possessions and gathering to be spared from the apocalypse. During this time, the famous psychologist Leon Festinger predicted that not only would this prophecy not come true, but the Seekers would believe it even more than before. And he was right. Before I tell you what happened, I want you to pause and ask yourself, why would someone believe something even more after it didn't come true? Rationally, we think that all we need is counter evidence to change our beliefs, but oftentimes this isn't the case. So what made the Seekers believe the prophecy even more after it didn't happen? Cognitive dissonance. After the UFO didn't come, the Seekers started discussing what happened and they were able to come up with an explanation to ease their cognitive dissonance. What they told themselves was that clearly, since they were true believers, God decided to spare the entire planet. To get rid of cognitive dissonance, it was a lot easier to believe they saved the world than it was to believe that they sold all of their possessions over a false belief. You'll notice something similar happened with modern-day conspiracies. Those who believe in them confabulate a wide range of reasons to believe in the conspiracy even more. In the age of social media, the best way to sell a conspiracy and to get it to spread like wildfire is to tell people to watch it before it gets taken down. As the social media companies try to curb conspiracies and misinformation, they take it down or fact-check it. But, like the Seekers, COVID conspiracy theorists just hold their belief even stronger. They claim that Dr. Emanuel's talk was taken down because it was true. So, this is when we have to ask the person, what would it take to make you believe otherwise? Oftentimes, they'll tell you that nothing will change their mind. Although we're in the middle of a pandemic, it unfortunately takes time for people to change their beliefs. Typically, we can only plant the seed and hope they start thinking about some of the questions we presented them with. Those who try to spread this misinformation also use one of the oldest sales tactics in the book, which is creating a sense of urgency. To sell the conspiracy, they tell you to watch it before it's removed. By making people believe that the truth is trying to be hidden, people are going to watch these videos as quick as possible in fear that someone is trying to hide the information. As you can see in the example on the screen, this post claims an ad was banned by YouTube and people need to share it. And it looks like it worked because this post was shared over 255,000 times. In the final section of this video, we're going to discuss how we can become a little bit more self-aware to avoid falling down the rabbit hole. No matter what we do or how much we learn, we're human, so we're always going to get caught by cognitive biases. You and I are just as susceptible of getting caught up in a conspiracy theory or misinformation, but we can take action to avoid getting caught by it. Nobody is completely immune, and a prime example is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle was the author of the famous Sherlock Holmes books. Doyle created a character that was the epitome of critical thinking and skepticism, but Doyle even fell for a conspiracy. Due to new technologies with photography and the world not having as much information as we do now, Doyle fell for the caughtingly fairy's hoax. So, if one of the most rational people in history can fall for a hoax, you and I must stay on guard as well. Right now, the most dangerous thing we're facing is doctors who are spreading misinformation about COVID-19. Due to the appeal to authority fallacy, people believe Dr. Emanuel and others must be telling the truth because they have credentials. But as more information came out about Dr. Emanuel, we found out that she has a history of erroneous claims. While some argue that people are using her religion as a way to discredit her, that's not the case at all. People are using her false claims about proven medical science to discredit her. Some of her claims involve alien DNA being used for medical treatments, and that endometriosis is caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches. We must always remember that even doctors are fallible. Up until the 1800s, doctors couldn't figure out why so many women were dying during childbirth. It turned out that it was because they weren't washing their hands. They were transferring infections from corpses to the women who were giving birth. When Dr. Ignez Semmelweis made the discovery that handwashing was the answer, doctors pushed back against him. They believed that it was impossible that people of such high stature as doctors could possibly have filthy hands. So listen, the world is a complicated, scary place, and we turn to doctors, scientists, and experts for answers. Unfortunately, sometimes they're wrong. So it's up to us to do as much research as possible and ask ourselves questions. When presented with a claim, we need to follow it to the logical conclusion. We can ask ourselves who benefits from this, and if this is true, then what else has to be true about it? Right now, things are scarier than many of us have ever faced in a lifetime. An invisible virus is infecting and killing us, and the unknown is terrifying. If we hope to get out of this thing safely, we need to start practicing critical thinking and having calm, rational conversations with one another. So, the next time you see someone spreading this information, rather than attacking them, ask them some questions. Woo! That's crazy! Two videos in two days. That's some old-school Chris right there. But yeah, I really wanted to get this video out because right now, we're living in such a crazy time and there's so much misinformation being spread. And I like to have fun and do the supernatural psychology series and then blend in like pop culture and what's going on in the YouTube community. But it's all leading up to stuff like this, where we can use critical thinking to avoid falling for conspiracy theories and things like that. But again, the most important thing is when we're talking to people, we need to have calm, rational conversations and ask questions. Alright, don't forget, motivational interviewing is an amazing tool. But anyways, if this is a topic that you're interested in, I don't know how many of you guys checked the description, but I always, always, always, always link some of my favorite books on the various subjects that I cover. So, down in the description below, there's some great books. One of my favorite books that really got me on this kick of critical thinking is The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. They have a podcast, but this book is also pretty dope. And then I took one of the author's critical thinking courses that was on Audible as well. I also just recently finished this book called Science Fictions. Plus, about all these errors and things like that in science, like, I think it's so important, like, we need to understand that scientists and doctors and everybody, they're humans too. And sometimes, like we discussed in the Andrew Wakefield video, they're having a bias or they have a conflict of interest or money is playing a role and things like that. But the thing is, is that we depend on them, we rely on them. So, we just need to have a little bit of skepticism and start asking these questions. Like, is this true? Where else can I check for information? What does the other side of this argument say? What's the consensus? Is there one fringe person saying this or is the entire community agreeing on this? You know what I mean? There's all sorts of stuff that it taught me from reading these books that helps me question these things as they come up so I can keep my head on straight. Like, I am somebody with an anxiety disorder and if I don't rationally think this stuff through, I will freak out. And I know some of you can relate to it. Alright, but anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up if you're new. Make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And a huge, huge thank you to everybody out there supporting the channel over on Patreon, as well as everybody who supports the channel by buying my books at therewiretsal.com or getting merch from the merch store. You're all awesome. Alright, thanks again for watching. I'll see you next time.