Behind the Book: Ridiculous Things People Actually Believe

This is the first nonfiction book in this Behind the Book series, and it could not be more different from the novels that came before it. No galaxies, no reapers, no immortal admirals. Just a direct look at the things people believe that are not true, and my honest, rarely charitable reaction to them.

It started, as these things often do, with a television.

Where did the book come from?

I was watching Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, the show that spends its runtime suggesting that extraterrestrials built the pyramids, the Nazca lines, and roughly everything else humans have ever accomplished. And somewhere in the middle of it I had a very simple reaction: this is asinine. Not interesting-wrong. Not a fun what-if. Just stupid, presented as history, on a channel with the word History in its name. And the thought that followed was, someone should write a book taking all of this apart. Not this one belief. All of them.

The irony of the channel was part of what pushed me. This was not some fringe website streaming to a few thousand true believers. This was a mainstream network, with History in its name, presenting the claim that human beings were too primitive to stack their own rocks and must have had help from space. The pyramids, the moai, the great monuments of people who were every bit as intelligent as we are, quietly reassigned to aliens because a cable channel found the alien version more profitable to broadcast. That is not harmless. It tells millions of viewers that their ancestors were incapable, and it does it under the banner of history.

From there it grew the way my larger books grow, one piece at a time, this belief and then that one, until it became a field guide across eighteen chapters: the flat earthers, the anti-vaxxers, the celebrity death hoaxers, the secret-society watchers, the moon-landing deniers, the financial-fantasy crowd, and on and on. And the show that set the whole thing off got its own chapter. The ancient-astronaut idea it sells is in there, getting the treatment it earned.

Why be unsparing instead of understanding?

Because there is a great deal of nonfiction that takes the compassionate, understanding approach to misinformation, and it is very polite, and it has not fixed anything. I wanted to do the opposite. As I put it in the introduction, I am not interested in validating the journey. I am interested in the destination, which is usually embarrassing and occasionally catastrophic.

The reason is not that I enjoy being mean. It is that these beliefs are not weak positions with thin evidence. They are claims with no basis in reality. Take homeopathy, which is one of the stupidest things I have ever encountered. The theory is that a substance diluted in water so many times that not one molecule of the original remains can still cure you, because the water remembers what used to be in it. People pay real money for water on the grounds that the water has a memory. Laid out plainly, it explains its own absurdity.

Or take the flat earthers, who are back, in numbers, in the age of satellites. The model requires that every airline pilot, every ship captain, every physics teacher, and every space agency on earth keep the same secret across generations without one of them cracking. A conspiracy of millions, perfectly airtight, maintained for no stated reason. It is easier to believe the earth is round than to believe that many people could keep any secret at all. The belief does not survive five seconds of thinking about the logistics, and yet the conferences sell out.

And this is what decided the tone of the entire book. If you are charitable toward that, you encourage it. Being gentle with a baseless belief tells the believer that their version of reality has value, that it is a legitimate item on the menu of things a reasonable person might think. That reinforces the delusion. A lot of what is in this book is low-level insanity, and the polite approach keeps conceding the one thing that should never be conceded, which is that the belief might have a point.

Underneath all of it is a principle I earned across forty-five years in technology. A database either stores the data or it does not. A network either routes the packets or it does not. You do not get to believe your way to a different outcome. Reality has opinions, and they are not negotiable. The bluntness in this book is just that same intolerance for things that do not work, pointed at ideas instead of systems.

Do you have any standing to be this harsh?

More than you might guess, because I came up inside this material.

When I was a kid we would travel to see my grandmother on holidays, and she had a room full of UFO books and conspiracy books. That is where I found Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods and its sequels, the foundational ancient-astronaut texts, the direct ancestor of the very show that would set off this book decades later. I did not skim them. I read all of them, cover to cover, several times. I was fascinated.

But I want to be honest about why. It was the science-fiction feel that hooked me, not belief. Those books read like speculative fiction, and that is what I loved about them. Then I grew up, a few brain cells came online, and I saw them for what they were: theories built out of straw, grand claims assembled from a scrap of coincidence or a misread artifact and presented as revelation. I saw the machinery, and I discarded them.

That arc is why I feel entitled to the harshness. I am not a scold who never felt the pull. I was charmed by exactly this material, read the founding text of it more times than I can count, and then learned to see how the arguments were built. As I say in the book, the difference between me and the people in it is not that I am incapable of irrational thinking. I have owned a lucky shirt. I have knocked on wood. The difference is that I never let irrational thinking kill anyone, and that bar turns out to be higher than you would expect.

Why is the book funny?

Because a book that says “these beliefs are stupid and some of them kill children” for eighteen straight chapters would be unbearable, and unreadable. The comedy breaks the critical feel. It lowers the harshness enough that you can keep going, and it makes the beliefs look ridiculous while it does it.

That double duty is the point. Mockery here is more than decoration; it is the argument. When I describe the flat-earth model as the world’s worst lazy Susan, the joke is doing the debunking. Making a thing look absurd is a way of showing that it is absurd. The humor and the demolition are the same motion.

There is a practical calculation in it too. A reader who is laughing is still reading. The moment a book about human folly turns into a lecture, the people who most need to hear it close the cover, and the ones who stay are only the ones who already agreed. Humor keeps the door open. It lets me say something genuinely cutting about a belief and keep the reader with me to the end of the chapter, where the actual argument lives. A joke is a delivery system for a point that would bounce off if I stated it flatly.

One clarification, though, because people assume a book like this comes from rage. I was not angry. I was mocking it. The register I chose is what I would call humorous anger, and it is a mode, not a mood. It reads as anger on the page because that is the key I decided to write in, not because I was sitting there seething. I like writing nonfiction in different emotional states, and I vary the delivery from book to book the way a novelist varies voice. This one happens to be written in humorous anger because that register both entertains and dismantles at the same time.

What is the book arguing?

The first two-thirds catalog the beliefs. The last chapters do the more important work, which is to explain why any of this exists. Ridiculing a delusion is satisfying, but it is not enough. The book had to answer the real question: why do people believe this, and what is behind it?

What is behind it, most of the time, is money. Or power. Or a hostile actor, a state that weaponizes belief, or simply someone with a financial stake in keeping the nonsense alive. Go back to the show that started the book. Ancient Aliens makes money from people watching it. So of course it glamorizes and exaggerates the ancient-astronaut idea, because the more people watch, the more money it makes. The absurdity is not an accident or an honest mistake. It is a product, tuned for engagement, because engagement is revenue. The nonsense is profitable, which is precisely why it persists and spreads.

That gives the whole second half its spine, and it is a simple rule.

The logical fallacies and the cognitive biases I cover in those late chapters are the mechanism inside the individual head, the vulnerabilities that let a belief take hold. But the money is the reason the belief is being aimed at that head in the first place. The biases explain how ordinary brains get weaponized against their owners. The money explains who is aiming the weapon, and why. Put them together with the social-media dynamics that connect the two at scale, and you get the real picture: profit and power on one side manufacturing the beliefs, human cognitive weakness on the other side accepting them, and the platforms wiring the whole circuit together.

And it matters because the bill comes due in the real world. These are not harmless hobbies. Some of the beliefs in this book empty bank accounts. Some of them break families. Some of them put children in the ground, because a parent chose a manifestation coach over an oncologist, or skipped a vaccine for a disease we had beaten. The comedy is real and so is the body count, and holding both at once is the honest way to write about it. Laughing at the flat-earth conference does not mean pretending the anti-vaccine chapter has no funerals in it.

So the specific idiocies are the entertaining way in, but the book’s actual thesis is structural. This is an industry. Delusion is monetized, sometimes weaponized, and a field guide to specific ridiculous beliefs is really a guide to noticing when you are the product being sold to.

How does it fit with the rest of your work?

In the fiction, the through-line across these Behind the Book essays has been writing from viewpoints that are not my own: a cat, a galaxy, an artificial mind, prehistoric people. Nonfiction runs on a parallel version of the same instinct. Instead of choosing a viewpoint, I choose an emotional register and write the whole book inside it. Ridiculous Things is written in humorous anger. Another of my nonfiction books is measured, another is warm, another is something else. The register is a deliberate choice I make for the material, the same way a novelist chooses a voice. Control of tone is the craft either way.

And like all my larger books, this one grew by accumulation, one belief at a time, until the pattern underneath the beliefs became visible, and that pattern was the point all along.

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