- [Cara] Stories.
They're more than entertainment.
They're essential tools for understanding our world.
- [Rob] Stories teach us moral lessons.
How we should live our lives, what we should aspire to.
- I must right these wrongs.
- [Cara] Almost every story ever told
follows the same basic formula.
Hero fights villain,
struggle, triumph, repeat.
This pattern is so deeply etched in our brains
it's become a framework for how we see everything.
So what happens when real life doesn't follow the script?
- We have an active shooter. - Struggling to make sense
of the unspeakable.
- [Reporter] The looming question is why?
- Sometimes we create a story that does.
- [Woman] I'll ask the editors
to make sure everything's blacked out.
- Right okay. - Don't worry.
- [Leonard] Dealing with the crazies,
that's my only superpower
just to kind of keep it in Clark Kent mode.
- [Woman] Can you just say your name so we get that right.
- I am Leonard Pozner.
Father of Noah Pozner.
He was killed at the Sandy Hook School shooting.
- [Reporter] State police and swat teams are now responding
to a school shooting. - [Female reporter] They're at
Sandy Hook Elementary School. - [Male reporter] 27 people,
most of them children, before turning the gun on himself.
- [Cara] On December 12th, 2012,
Lenny Pozner found himself at the center
of one of America's most tragic news stories.
- [Leonard] We kept looking around
and waiting for Noah to come.
And he never did.
- [Cara] Losing his son was just the beginning.
- [Leonard] I stayed off of the internet all of December.
And then at some point in January,
I started to look at news reports about the shooting.
I came across the term crisis actors.
The photos that I had posted on my social media
were getting hate comments.
- [Cara] While Lenny was grieving,
an unsettling new story about Sandy Hook had emerged.
- This Sandy Hook situation, more and more,
it's looking like a fully staged operation.
- There is no evidence of any child having died
at Sandy Hook.
- [Cara] For two amateur investigators named
James Fetzer and Wolfgang Halbig,
unmasking the conspiracy became a personal obsession.
- [Wolfgang] This government,
they have an agenda.
And now it's the time to get the truth.
- [James] Sandy Hook was designed to constrain our access
to weapons under the second amendment.
They fabricated Noah Pozner,
who is a completely fictional entity.
- Do you honestly and truly in your heart believe
that Sandy Hook actually happened, yes or no?
- [Group] No.
- [Cara] Why were so many people willing
to dismiss the most well-documented news event of 2012?
One reason is that Sandy Hook was simply too devastating
for some to process.
- [Leonard] People have a hard time understanding
how someone can look a small child in the face
and then shoot them in head.
- But there was a deeper reason the story didn't feel right.
- There are time tested rules for how to tell a good story,
what a good screenplay is like,
what a good plot is like.
And these rules are totally at odds
with the way the real world works.
- The official story was messy.
There was no victory, no deeper meaning,
just a senseless tragedy.
- [Ben] People randomly kill people sometimes
for no reason whatsoever.
People really desperately want some sort
of meaning for things that don't mean anything.
- We try and come up with an explanation
that seems somehow plausible.
And that resonates with our bias towards certain kinds
of stories about heroes and villains.
Conspiracies talk about this vast, faceless, evil,
up to know good.
- This is a very elaborate project,
the Democratic Party was deeply involved.
- [Rob] And it casts all of us as the underdog hero
who can overcome this monster if we just wake up.
- We're gonna get to the bottom of it one way or another
because the people have a right to know the truth.
- [Blonde Woman] Look again, it's a pattern.
- [Cara] That pattern follows one
of the most popular basic plots in the history
of storytelling.
It's called overcoming the monster.
Here's how it goes.
A menacing super villain
is confronted by a brave hero.
The hero is outmatched.
But then, just when all hope is lost,
the villain's weakness is discovered.
Evil is vanquished, peace returns.
Once you know the pattern, you see it everywhere.
What makes this narrative formula so alluring?
The first key ingredient is the hero.
The best heroes are underdogs
because human beings evolve to root for the little guy.
Consider for example, this animation.
Which dot is your favorite?
A 2008 study found that people were much more likely
to root for the sweet little underdot
struggling up the hill
than for the top dot.
- [Rob] We are hard-wired to root for the underdog.
Some of the most well known, beloved stories
include underdog.
- [Cara] But there's one thing that's even better
than cheering on the underdog hero.
And that's being the underdog hero.
- [Wolfgang] People write me to say,
"Thank you," so I feel good that there is support out there.
- [Leonard] Wolfgang has gotten a sense of significance
because he's able to do a lot of talking.
He's demanding all of this information.
It gives him a sense of purpose.
This conspiracy mindset,
this cult has become their identity.
So they're not just searching for the truth,
but they know the truth.
And they are part of this army of good guys
that is going to uncover the bad guys.
- That brings us to the second key character
in any good story.
Our instinct to cheer on the underdog
becomes even more powerful when he's up against
a sinister enemy.
Take for example this slightly different dot animation.
Viewers were even more likely to rally behind
poor underdot in this version
where its opponent seemed malicious.
Why?
Because protecting the weak and shunning bullies
helps promote peace and cooperation.
Which is critical to our survival.
That explains why we instinctively root for the little guy.
And why we love punishing the bad guys.
- [Leonard] I'm the villain for them.
- [James] Lenny Pozner,
he's a very elusive fellow,
he won't even allow his face to be shown on television.
Maybe he works for the FBI,
maybe he works for the CIA.
- [Leonard] I've had a lot of death threats.
I've moved more than six times since the shooting.
They don't think that they're doing anything wrong.
They consider themselves to be a part of the army of light.
- [Man] I know why the call you Crazy Lenny.
You're a thief, you're a crook, and you're a bad man.
- [Leonard] All right I had enough of this.
- Eventually, Lenny Pozner decided it was time
to vanquish his own monster.
- [Leonard] I started to take down the hateful content.
Reporting YouTube videos
and reporting blogs and other websites.
- [Cara] Today he has an army of volunteers
called the HONR network.
Together, they've scrubbed the internet
of hundreds of thousands of false stories
and banished some of the worst offenders
from social media altogether.
- [Alex] They just burned a giant library
of 36,000 videos.
They just blew 'em into outer space.
- [Cara] Lenny has also fought back against his
harassers in court.
And he's finally beginning to reclaim his own story.
- [Reporter] Alex Jones is saying psychosis
caused him to believe the Sandy Hook massacre was staged.
- [Reporter] You wouldn't agree with me that
that man is a raving lunatic?
- [Alex] He seemed very credible earlier on,
my opinions have been wrong.
- [Cara] Will Lenny Pozner stamp out the forces
of conspiracy thinking once and for all?
Unfortunately, the monster in this story won't be defeated
so easily.
Because it's bigger than Wolfgang Halbig or James Fetzer
or Alex Jones.
The monster is all of us.
- [Rob] If we ask people, do you believe any
conspiracy theory, and almost everybody does.
We are all potential conspiracy theorists
because this is how our minds work.
We're all looking to understand our world
a little bit better.
We're all looking for meaning.
We're all hard-wired to see patterns, to connect the dots.
We're looking for reassurance,
and all we have to do is reveal what's happening
and we can overcome it.
- We all love a good story.
And in the stories we tell ourselves,
we are always the heroes
and someone else is always the villain.
We are always right and they are always wrong.
- [Michael] All of us think we're rational.
And that the other side, they're just a bunch of idiots.
The problem is everybody thinks that.
- [Cara] And that belief that we are on the right side
of an epic battle between good and evil
is being used to justify more and more bad behavior.
So how can we tame this monster?
- We can't get rid of our biases, we're stuck with them,
we've evolved this way.
But, that doesn't mean that we should give into
our biases entirely.
- [Cara] We have to accept that reality is a lot
messier and more complicated than we'd like it to be.
And most people aren't inherently good or evil.
We're all just human
and a lot less rational than we think.