This week, US TV Show Adams Ruins Everything has an episode on conspiracy theories. If you are in the US, you can tune in on 10th October 10/9c on Tru TV. If you are not based in the US, you should be able to catch the episode online after it has aired.
In the show, Adam adds humour backed with scientific evidence to discuss important topics. This week’s episode will showcase some of the research into the psychology of conspiracy theories that we discuss on this blog, such as to do with cognitive biases (see clips below).
I was involved in advising the writers on the script to ensure it was accurate and – to my surprise – was invited to join the cast on set. During the series, Adam brings on experts in the topic area to join the characters in a scripted segment; I involved in such a segment and was invited to discuss some of my work examining the consequences of conspiracy theories.
It was a fantastic experience to join the cast and crew on set and whilst at the time of writing this post I have not seen the full episode, it is great to bring our research to a wide-reaching audience.
Here are some teaser clips:
The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories 
Four hundred thousand NASA employees? Someone might want check that number.
Harvey Weinstein should have got a mention….gotta be a conspiracy – he could not be a sex offender because thousands of people would have known and had to keep quiet…. Oh, that is what happened? No doubt some of the script writers for Adam knew the secret.
This episode was a one sided trivialisation but a good example of how lowi American TV programming has descended.
At the height of the Apollo program, there were about 400,000 people working on it (mostly contractors).
Actually, you could check all of these facts yourself. He lists his sources in his episodes.
Well, along with Vietnam, that would explain why Nixon needed to take the US off the gold standard in 1971.
This is hilarious! While Microsoft presenter Michael Leworthy was doing his presentation to advertise Microsoft Edge as the best browser in the world, the web browser Microsoft Edge suddenly crashed. Leworthy was forced to install Google Chrome to finish his presentation: “I love it when demos break,” he said. “So while we’re talking here, I’m gonna go install Chrome”.
We never went to the moon! Kubrick filmed the whole thing!