Cautionary Conversation: The Conspiracy Theorist Who Changed His Mind
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 21 October 2022
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Charlie Veitch was certain that 9/11 was an inside job. The attack on the World Trade Center wasn't the work of Al-Qaeda, but an elaborate conspiracy. He became a darling of so-called "9/11 truthers" - until he actually visited Ground Zero to meet architects, engineers and the relatives of the dead. The trip changed his mind... there was no conspiracy.
His fellow "truthers" did not take Charlie's conversion well.
David McRaney (host of You Are Not So Smart and author of How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion and Persuasion) joins Tim Harford to discuss what happened to Charlie Veitch; what it tells us about those who hold strong beliefs even in the face of damning contrary evidence; and why persuasion isn't always the right answer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Here in the last archive, I've been trying to figure out what happened to Truth. |
| 0:03.6 | I've been telling stories about how we know what we know, |
| 0:06.4 | and why it seems sometimes lately is if we don't know anything at all. |
| 0:10.6 | But I am done with the problems of Truth. I want solutions. |
| 0:14.8 | The season of the last archive is all about common knowledge. |
| 0:18.8 | Is that kind of knowledge still possible? I tried to find out. |
| 0:22.4 | Coming soon. |
| 0:24.7 | Listen to the last archive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, |
| 0:28.4 | or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:58.9 | Pushkin. |
| 1:11.3 | I have been preparing a special Halloween episode of cautionary tales, |
| 1:16.9 | but this week isn't Halloween. So that's not right. |
| 1:21.3 | We don't want to annoy the spirits, so we'll release the cautionary tales Halloween episode next week. |
| 1:28.8 | Well, what should we do this week? This week I will be dropping another of our occasional |
| 1:34.5 | cautionary conversations, an interview with someone with a story to tell that I think you might enjoy. |
| 1:42.8 | In June 2011, Charlie Veech boarded a British Airways flight to London's Heathrow airport. |
| 1:50.4 | He was headed to New York City, in fact, to Ground Zero. |
| 1:55.7 | There, on September 11th, 2001, the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, |
| 2:02.7 | killing thousands, after being struck by two passenger aircraft hijacked by Al-Qaeda terrorists. |
| 2:10.5 | That's the official story anyway, but Charlie didn't believe it. |
| 2:15.0 | Charlie Veech was a truther, a man who didn't believe that the World Trade Center collapsed because |
| 2:21.4 | of a terrorist attack, who thought instead that it was a controlled demolition, part of a deadly |
... |
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