Transcript of Alternate Realities: Down the Rabbit Hole

This message comes from This is History. Discover the incredible true story of Monsa Musa, who many claim was the wealthiest ruler in history. Immerse yourself in the epic six-part series, Empire of Gold. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers, and you're listening to episode 2 of Embedded's Alternate Reality's Series. If you haven't listened to episode 1, please go back to the feed and start there. One more thing before we get started, this episode contains explicit language. Here's episode 2. So Mark Twain had a famous quote. He said, If voting really mattered, they wouldn't let us do it.

Isn't that great? I mean, it's a good quote. After my dad and I started this year-long experiment, this bet, he and I began talking a lot more. But the more we talked, the harder both of us clung the idea that only one of us was right. Can I read you a Mark Twain quote that I was thinking about just this weekend?

Yeah, absolutely.

I was thinking about it in relationship to conspiracy theories. Mark Twain said this, It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they've been fooled.

Yeah, I would agree with that 100%.

Herein lies my conflict with you. I got I'm trying to convince you that you've been told.

And Zack, mine with you. Mine with you. We're on the same page here.

Funny thing about that quote my dad just used. I found out later that it's fake. Mark Twain never actually said that. But even funnier is the quote that I used as a rebuttal. Well, Mark Twain never said that either. Proof we could both be wrong. I guess in the end, misinformation comes for us all. But hey, that's why we have fact checkers. A couple of months into our bet, and I was still feeling good about things. Still, no EMP device used to take down the grid, no sign of Obama, Pelosi, Biden or the Clintons being tried for treason. The governor and mayor of New York still had their jobs, and no sign of martial law being imposed anywhere. To be honest, I wasn't worried about the outcome of these predictions. For me, the bet wasn't just about proving him wrong or winning $10,000. It was about changing his mind. And that's the I was worried about because I really didn't understand why my father believed what he believed. In fact, I wasn't sure I understood him much at all. Lately, I've been thinking back to this argument I had with my dad years ago. I was home visiting my parents, and we went to one of our favorite restaurants.

I can't remember the specifics about what he and I were arguing about, but it had to have been about politics. I mostly remember how it felt because it got contentious and it ended with father getting the last word. He said, Well, you don't really know me. That stopped me dead in my tracks because despite 30 plus years of history, I wondered if he might be right. Maybe I didn't really know him. And so if I had any hope of changing his mind, I was going to need to learn a lot more about him and figure out why he seemed so prepared to give up so much, including his own family. So last year, that's what I set out to do. From NPR's Embedded, I'm Zack Mac, and this is Alternate Realities.

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Bella DiPaulo is glad if you're happily married, but she is perfectly happy being single.

I would love to have someone who took care of my card or someone who cleaned up the dishes after dinner, but then I'd want them to leave. From yourself to your dog to your spouse are significant others.

That's on the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. In order to get to know my father, one of the first places I thought to start was with the people around him. I reached out to four of his closest friends to get their take. Curious if they also thought he had a problem with reality. You talked to my dad the other day?

We had an interesting conversation. He did share with me his prophecys.

This is Chuck. He's my father's oldest friend. They've known each other over 40 years, back when dad was a very different guy.

Your father had frost hair when I first met him. He was a fun guy and pretty liberal and smoked hot more than I did. He lived with this drag queen, and so there was a wild party atmosphere around him.

Chuck is like the one friend my dad has held on to from his old life in the Midwest. They've been living apart since the '80s, yet they've remained close despite being political opposites.

I always take your dad in small doses. Maybe part of the reason I don't reach out as much is because I am afraid that we get to a point where it would be like drawing a line in the sand and I wouldn't be able to cross it. Deep down in my heart, I would love to understand it, and I don't.

Another friend I reached out to was a guy named Paul. He's been one of my dad's closest friends over the past decade. They'd go to church together, even attend Christian retreats together. My working theory was that Paul might have been ground zero for a lot of my dad's conspiracies, stuff like globalist cabals and believing that Biden has multiple body doubles.

I'm not sure where he's getting most of his information from. It's been rather alarming. And I've been in the same room where he's showing me, is that Biden or not?

And I'm like, I just don't see it. I'm not seeing what you're seeing. What do you think that exchange would go like if you started to push back on some of those ideas that you found outlandish?

I think it would cause a rift in our relationship, and it has.

As dad tells it, Paul was not ground zero.

I've actually exposed him to more truth and more reality than he wanted to deal with.

Dad told me that the person he speaks to the most about these theories is his friend and neighbor, John. So I spoke to him, too. When he talks about, Hey, I think there's going to be a martial law. I think there's going to be an EMP device that wipes out all communication. Are you like, He's been watching too many of the X files.

It surprised me that he had fallen down a rabbit hole.

What could do that to him? And then there's Marty. He's known my parents for 40 years. He's basically family. He actually held me and dropped me the week I was born. Of all my father's friends, he might be the only one who really pushed us back.

I've asked him in a non-offensive way how it is that he's come to accept these line of thinking.

Do you think I can persuade him out of some of this, though?

I don't think it's for you to persuade. It's for the stuff not to come pass. There's a lot of conspiracy theory groups that expected the end of the world to have come, and they've just pushed the date back.

I'll admit, I was worried about this happening, dad pushing the date back. But I was hoping that losing the bet would be enough to sway him.

What he may learn is not to be so gung-ho. He should always keep open the possibility that this theory, his belief, is wrong.

Dad's My husband's clearly thought he was going the wrong way. He was mostly on his own with these beliefs. I had seen this thing play out before in the family. Some parallels with what happened to his father, my grandfather. Do you think your dad was I don't know. How would you describe him? Would you describe him as stubborn?

Oh, yeah. Stubborn, very opinionated, hard-headed at times. Yeah, very embittered against the medical society. They literally ran him out of business.

My My grandfather was a chiropractor. Like dad, he was also against vaccines. He believed in what he called the body's natural immunities, so much so that he held my father out of school in the '60s due to a new vaccine mandate at the time.

I kept telling my dad and my mom, I just want to go to school.

My grandfather was living in Ohio with his wife and six kids, and he had his own business. That is until the Ohio State Medical Board cracked down on him.

And so they literally threw my dad in jail for a couple of days for practicing without a license. I was 13 or 14 years old.

After my grandfather's business dissolved, dad says he was never able to fully recover.

He became so depressed that he literally couldn't get out of bed for six months. And he was never the same man. That literally broke him.

My grandfather was a tall and thin man. And one of the One of the things I remember most about him is this one time when he came to visit us, his body had just completely changed. He had gained over 100 pounds in a short amount of time. He was going through some mental health issues that the family never fully understood, and it was affecting his weight and his ability to sleep. It's hard to tell because he would never see a doctor, but I remembered he'd just start falling asleep a lot. He would be in the middle of a conversation sometimes or even at dinner, and he'd just start snoring. Minutes later, he'd abruptly wake up and carry on as if nothing happened. This also began to happen while he was driving. My grandpa got into a number of car accidents. He totaled several cars and nearly killed my grandma. He refused to stop driving and even went to a neighboring state to get a driver's license after his was taken away. He refused to admit anything was wrong. The family tried talking to him, so did my father, several times. When that didn't work, dad tried something else.

I wrote him a long letter. I wrote him like a a two or three-page letter and mailed it to him. I said, Dad, I love you. I want the best for you. I'm not trying to say anything horrible or damaging or critical about you, but your whole family is concerned about you. Can't you see this? Can't you recognize that we all would like to see you live to a ripe old age? Because I said, If you continue on this path, I don't know when you're going to die, but I know you're going to die.

Not long after this, when I was nine or 10 years old, my parents called my sister and me into the kitchen to tell us something. But before they said anything, I already knew. My grandfather was dead. They told us he had fallen asleep while driving and that his vehicle veered off the road. When I think about my grandfather, I think about how what caused his death may have been stubbornness, a refusal to listen to those around him. I don't think my father's in imminent physical danger, but I am worried about him. Through my grandfather's story, I see a direct correlation with his stubbornness, his deep distrust in institutions, and the attitude that no matter what, he knows best. How can I break the cycle? It's a question that made me turn to professionals.

You could probably debunk one of your dad's ideas, one of his conspiracy theories, but you're just playing Whac-a-mole.

This is Joseph Yuzinski, a professor at the University of Miami. He's one of the foremost political scientists studying conspiracy theories.

He's going to have 500 others, right? It's not until you get under the hood and start dealing with the predisposition, that basic idea that this is how the world works.

Joseph runs experiments to try to find ways to pull people out of the rabbit hole. He's tried challenging them with facts, but he says that doesn't really work.

Because that belief is just a manifestation of something bigger and stronger underneath. Perhaps it's a reflection of their personal identity.

I used to think of my dad's beliefs as separate. There's how he feels about God or curasexuality, global cabals. But the more I learned, the more I realized it's all interconnected. Part of a worldview that's been many years in the making.

This is the thing that's tough to deal with. We'd like to think that if we could just convince people of the right facts, if everyone just believed the right thing, they'd all act the right way. But here's the thing, is that you You correct people's wrong beliefs in something, you correct the misinformation, but their views don't matter. They know that a lot of the things aren't true, and they like them because they like them. And simply changing their mind about a handful of facts isn't going to change that.

This is a tough one for me. I've always thought that if I could just stirring together the exact right pieces of information, that would be enough to change his mind. But that's just not how it works. I realize now that my Father is addressing a need, a need that's being fulfilled by conspiracies and prophets like Julie Green. You are my warriors, children of Almighty God, and I am telling you today to fight back take back the dominion and the power and the authority upon this Earth.

It invites them into a cosmic battle. It gives their life this sense of transcendence.

This is Dr. Bradley Onishi, he's a professor and former evangelical minister who studies the threat of religious extremism. He says rhetoric like this cast believers as heroes.

It draws someone like your dad into the belief that they're part of something big. Hey, my kids, my wife, my pastor, they don't get it, but they will. They're going to see that there's a reality here that is just hiding right below the surface. I've been right all along. All of the ways that they've given me a side eye or laughed me off in the past when I was hinting at the idea that I thought vaccines were a conspiracy or from the New World order, they're going to finally see. I'm just tired of people telling me that I don't get it. With folks like your dad, what I've seen is they have felt like fish out of water for a long time.

In the Bay Area and amongst our family and friends, dad will always be an outsider. As I watch my family push him further and further away because of his beliefs, I can see how from his perspective, we are the intolerant ones, the ones who don't understand. I can't imagine what that must feel like, and I know it wears on him. You feel like you're the odd man out?

No, by far.

What is that like?

It's painful at times, It's very sad for me. Yeah, it's a drag.

What happens when your family, your friends, the people you surround yourself with don't respect your beliefs? You look elsewhere, and I see dad seeking out community and followers. A few years ago, he started a small Bible study group, which I sat in on recently. While he's mostly facilitating discussion about scripture, I was shocked by the sheer amount of misinformation being flung around so casually. I'm talking about everything from weather-controlling devices to global cabals to a lot of anti-vax rhetoric. Amongst this small group, I got to see my father surrounded by people that weren't pushing him away. A place where he gets to be the thought leader. Along with this, he's been writing a book that he plans to self-publish. My dad's never written a book or identified as a writer, but this past year, he seemed to be looking for an audience. I think between some of your beliefs between the Bible group and now with the book, I'm wondering if you feel a deeper urge to be heard.

I do. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Can you tell me about that?

Sure. I have a deeper urge to be heard.

Oh, man. It feels like there's maybe a little bit of a shift where you're maybe seeking more attention.

I'm not seeking more attention. I'm seeking to speak more truth and touch more people's lives in a positive healing way.

Dad has big plans for this book. My understanding is that it's about forgiveness and the state of Christianity. I'm still fuzzy on the details, but whenever he discusses it, it feels grandiose. Book tours, maybe a bestseller, speaking engagements. It all felt like it was tying back to a higher purpose, something existential. It's something that I brought up while speaking with other experts.

Even if your father doesn't put the pieces together, there is some awakening He's thinking of his own mortality that might be contributing to all of this as well.

This is Charlie Safford. He designs clinical therapy techniques for people who believe in far-right conspiracies. He believes conspiracy theories are fundamentally emotional coping mechanisms.

I don't know how old your father is. I'm guessing he's probably in his 50s to 60s.

Yeah, he just turned 69.

Okay. Whether he knows it or not is addressing issues related to mortality. One of the ways that you come to terms with your mortality is to look back and say, did my life have meaning? How old was his father when his father died?

I had never considered this angle before. I wasn't sure how old my grandfather was when he passed, so I asked dad. When he told me, my jaw dropped. Oh, wow.

Yes.

Grandpa was 68 years old, the exact same age as my father when we made our bet.

I've thought about that a million times. I'm not afraid of dying. I'm just saying. It's ironic. I finally hit that age, but I'm not worried about it.

Do you feel like you need to get a lot done before that happens?

Not at all. No. I just want to get this book finished and published as soon as possible because I think it's a great book, and I think it's going to touch a lot of lives. I feel like it's a culmination of my life's work.

I'm hesitant to overly psychoanalyze him, but I think his actions are addressing a way to seek meaning and community and status, all the things he lacks within our family. I see a determination in him that I haven't seen before, an ambition. While he looks to move more into the role of thought leader, I find that there's even less space for the possibility that he's wrong. Your beliefs, I feel like, have gotten more extreme.

I know. Mom said the same thing. It's not that they've gotten more extreme, because extremism is a negative and pejorative word. I've become more in tune with who I really am.

As we were talking, I reminded dad of that argument we had in the restaurant years ago when he insisted I hardly knew him. Do you feel like I know you now better?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, you know me. It's hard to put a percentage on it, but yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. These conversations and just talking about my dad and all the rest. Yeah, absolutely.

I spent years feeling distant and frustrated with my dad, but it felt like we were starting to have a breakthrough. That is until November happened.

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By the fall, as we rounded into the final stretch of the year, there had still been no movement it on any of dad's predictions, but he didn't seem worried. You still feel good about the bet?

I do.

You're running out of time.

Yeah, I got plenty of time.

I was beginning to realize that my dad might be operating on an entirely different timeline than me. Maybe the end of the year wasn't the end for him. However, I knew I was sticking to January first, and so was my mom.

I don't know what's going to happen at the end of the where I'm gearing up for a very, very big life change.

What if he just says, I still think all these things are going to happen. I just got the timeline wrong. It's just going to happen next Sure.

I can't wait. I can't keep living with crazy.

You know that meme of the dog sitting in a room engulfed in flames, pretending nothing's wrong, and all they have to say is, This fine. Usually, that's my mom's approach with dad. Usually. I think there's part of me that is trying to ignore where he has gone.

This project is making it a little harder to do that.

For my dad, it was becoming a lose-lose situation. He was either going to have to forfeit his beliefs or forfeit the family.

He's very aware that that's a distinct disability more aware than I realized by just what happened today when he gave me a belated anniversary gift, and he gave it to me today because he said, Honestly, I wasn't sure what frame of mine you would be in and if you would be willing to even accept it.

And he said that crying.

He wrote in this card, I love you. I love Zack. I love Kira. I love you.

You're the three most important people in in my life.

And he said something, and I said, But you don't with Kira.

You don't.

I said, Yes, you love her. You say you accept her, but you don't accept her. I don't see a way to sway him around that.

And so what it means is that the family is irretrievably broken. Shortly after this conversation took place, the election happened. My father who no longer trusts elections, didn't even bother to watch. My mom was actually the one who told him about Trump's victory. I was calling the next day to discuss the results, and apparently before I called, dad had echoed some of the false claims about January 6, something about how the rioters were paid tears, and that pissed mom off.

Things were tipping, and that just knocked it all over.

The sad part is, I had known for years that he believed this. Mom tried her best to look away for so long, but now she was looking.

I have tolerated for a long time, and I don't choose to tolerate it anymore.

That day, mom began sleeping in a separate bedroom, a step I've never seen her take before. How was your conversations with mom today?

Brief and painful.

She said that she She doesn't mind being politically different, but the conspiracy stuff she's really struggling with.

Yeah.

Do you feel like any pull to meet her half way on that stuff?

I have my opinion. I have my beliefs. How can I halfway believe what I believe?

It's a fair question. Deep beliefs don't feel like choices. But when you reach an impasse like this, choices have to be made. It looks like my mom is making them, and she's not the only one. After a year of nearly no contact with my father, my sister informed the family that she wouldn't be coming home for the holidays, which we always come together for. But after two Christmases in a row where communication had broken down over her sexuality, she decided she wasn't interested in a third. Why aren't she coming home for Christmas?

Because I don't want to be there. I feel like I'm going to cry. I think last year was so terrible.

Incredibly terrible for me.

And the thought of being back in that space feels awful. Why would I choose that?

What would need to happen for things to change for you?

I think for things to change. It's not like things are better than where they were almost a year ago. It's just like enough time has passed that I don't feel like shit every day, but it's not like much has changed. I'm learning to deal with it.

Do you feel like you have a plan for how you're going to interact with him moving forward?

No, because I feel like there are parts of me that want to continue to have a lot of space and not really have a relationship, but I'm also not in a place where I'm not ready to do that either. And so that's hard. I don't want to not have a relationship with him. But do you want to feel a little bit shitty every day for the rest of your life, or do you want to feel like one big, terrible, gaping wound and then allow that to heal and then keep living. But a lot of people choose the tiny paper cuts every day.

Yeah, the slow death.

Yeah. And I'm just not interested in the tiny paper cuts every day.

For years, Kira had the better relationship with dad, certainly the less contentious one. Now, while Kira and dad are further apart than ever, he and I have forged this newfound closeness.

Yeah, I mean, I've thought about it a lot. It not lost on me that you're closer, and it's odd, but I'm not upset about it. I know I sound upset, but I think it's just very layered for me. But I think part of me in a very bizarre way is glad that you both have had that. It's not something at all that I can give him, and I don't know if I ever will be to anymore.

Making this series has been really difficult for me. It's been hard to watch my family go up in flames and to see my mom and sister in pain and to document all that in real-time. For months, I wrestled over whether or not I was doing the right thing. To be honest, I'm still not sure that I am. But I have to acknowledge that it's because of this project that I've been able to speak with my father in ways that I never had before. Still, I wasn't sure that would lead to change. It's my wishful thinking that he will realize if he steps back and looks at the whole picture, that he's not grounded in any reality, and that he'll have an awakening, and I will have a marriage and a family. All these conversations with mom and Kira were happening as the deadline for the bed was bearing down on us. So I asked them to think if they had any asks of dad that I could relay to him, anything at all, like seeing a therapist, reading a specific book, attending a church with more inclusive views on sexuality. After getting so much closer to him, I just thought that he might be open to it.

They said they'd think on it and they would get back to me before New Year's. And this idea of ask got me thinking, my dad is actually pretty good at giving advice, he has this rare ability to step outside of himself. So I asked him, what if a complete stranger came to him with these exact problems? What advice would he give? What would he say to himself if he wasn't himself?

Help me understand why you believe what you believe. And let's look at the fallacies or the shortcomings in believing that. If you continue to believe that, how is that going to impact your world? How is that going to affect your relationships? What if you entertain this thought? What if you could believe this way? Can you see that that would make a difference in your life or in your relationship with your spouse, your son, your daughter? What if you could just adjust that thinking enough so that it didn't cause you the pain and the anguish that your current belief causes you? If you can't let go of those beliefs, how can you make room for your wife's, your son's, your daughter's belief without it becoming a stumbling block and you having a relationship with them.

It trips me out when you say things like that because you're saying it with such clarity, but I wish you were saying it to yourself. I wish you were hearing that.

I am hearing that.

As I prepared to have our final conversation, it felt like maybe he had it in him. If there was ever a time I could possibly get through to him, it would be now. All right. I love you. Thank you for doing this. Thank you so much for your time. All right.

Have a good night. We'll talk to you soon. You know what, Zack? This alone has been well worth it. All the conversations we've had. I mean, to be perfectly honest, if I had to pay you 50 grand for the time we've spent together, every penny has been worth it.

I appreciate it, dad. It's actually been really nice talking to you, too.

All right. All right. Take care. You, too.

Good night. All right. Okay, here we go. Coming up on the final episode of Alternate Realities.

Oh, I should go get my list, right? Yeah, go get your list.

It's time to settle the bet.

So I'm going to say to you, sincerely and honestly and heartfelt, that, wow, Zack, I was wrong. And you were correct.

However, That's next time on Alternate Realities. This is episode 2 of 3, and just a heads up, the final episode of the series is available right now. Thank you for listening.

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