If You Love Conspiracy Theories (Or Know Someone Who Does), Watch This | Michael Shermer

This episode is brought to you by Curiositystream. Go to curiositystream.com/impact for unlimited access to the world's top documentaries and non-fiction series. And exclusively for our audience, use promo code impact and you'll save 25% off, which comes out to only $14.99 a year. So, click the link below or go to curiositystream.com/impact. Now, enjoy the episode. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I am here to talk to the king skeptic himself, Michael Shermer. Michael, welcome to the show. King skeptic, okay, that's a new one. I like that. No, man, I love it. And so, your recent book, Giving the Devil His Due, uh A was a phenomenal read, I really enjoyed it. And it was really interesting for me to try to find sort of the the rubric with which to view you and your views. And I think I have it, which is why I call you uh the king skeptic. But, understanding what the skepticism lives in service of is what I found so interesting about you. Um I'll put it in my words and then you tell me if I'm on the money or not or if I'm way off, but Okay. uh to me it it seems like sort of a necessary approach if you want to find out what's really true, that we are wrong a lot, and the only way to actually figure out what is true um is to be skeptical and to make sure that your opponents, what you're calling the devil in this scenario, have a voice to help you sort of find what is true. How close am I? Perfectly stated. That that that's actually that's that's it. That's the Well, that's a steel man argument. I mean, this isn't all original to me at all. I mean, this has been around for a long time that, you know, in debates, formal debates, you know, you really uh should try to articulate clearly what the other side is arguing if for nothing else that you're not talking past each other, that you're not having a debate that neither one of you is actually positions that people are actually holding. So, Um and yes, you know what psychology has taught us the last century or so is that and the history of science is that we're wrong about so many things and the only way to find out is to talk to other people, especially those who don't agree with you. And and that's why like in science we have open peer commentary and peer review and and like for example, I just finished a book on conspiracy conspiracies and conspiracy theories and I wanted to go with a university press. So, they sent it out for review and I got two long reports back from blind reviewers that you know, they I don't know who they are. So, they're free to say whatever they want and you know, they were pretty brutal actually and and it's like, oh my god, that's a great point. I never thought of that or like how did I not know these four books and and important papers on conspiracies? How did I miss that? You know, so that's it's you know, it hurts the ego, you know, like, oh man, I should have been smarter whatever, but fact is nobody is omniscient. So, it's good to have that kind of feedback. All right. So, that response to getting critical feedback is sort of my intoxicant and I I this is probably the thing that I find most interesting about you and the way that you approach it. So, many people now are skeptical to get into a fight and you really feel like you're skeptical to sort of advance our collective thinking, which I find super admirable, but how did you get to the point where somebody could sort of kick you in the face? You've just written a book which I'm sure it took an inhuman amount of time and energy and how do you sort of self-soothe and then go this is actually useful? Self-soothe? Mostly I just go ride my bike. I ride my bike every day anyway for a couple hours and and it's especially useful when I'm you know obsessing about some something somebody said on social media. You know, I mean I you know I'm 66 years old but I can imagine if I was 16 years old I'd be falling apart, you know, going oh no somebody said something on Twitter that I don't like or that doesn't like me or whatever. So yeah, of course that you know, that doesn't feel good but you know, so what? Yeah, well I guess you know, the our mission as it were is to figure out what's true as you said. The problem is that there's a lot of areas where that that takes second place like in political truths if you want to call them that or economic truths or ideologies or you know, religious beliefs. You know, people already know what they think is true. You know, I'm a conservative so I hold these five values sacred and I'm not giving them up and I don't care what the arguments are. This is how I define myself or or a liberal the same way. So you know, if you approach something like abortion or immigration or gun control and you're trying to present facts to somebody and you're going well, maybe I'll change my mind. Maybe I'll go this way or maybe I'll go that way just kind of depends on what the research shows. Almost nobody thinks like that in those areas because you know, we sort of define ourselves by these tenets right here and you know, it's very rare for people to switch political parties, change religions. I mean it happens but but not very often especially if somebody makes their money doing it. You know, if this is their job if they're an actual elected official. In fact it's so rare that when a congressman changes parties, I mean it's just like front page news. It's it's the top of the news cycle. It's people can't believe it. You know, and they they're called flip-floppers or traitors. And well, what if somebody got new information and they changed their mind and and decided well, this is not my party anymore. Uh shouldn't you do that? Isn't that a good thing? That should be a virtue. But instead in in religious and political and economic and ideological beliefs, that's it's a vice. And uh and I think it has to do with the social nature of of of humans that we want to be liked, we want to be approved, we we want status in our group. Uh we want to be part of the group and belong and feel like we belong. And and groups can tolerate some dissent but not that much. And uh and so that and in that I'm I'm afraid it's gotten worse in politics, you know, the amount of dissent one is allowed to have. You know, breaking ranks on, you know, one of 12 different items, say, if you're conservative or liberal. Um you know, that then you're ousted. So, the cancel culture isn't just in colleges and high schools. I mean, it happens everywhere, unfortunately. So, why why do you lean into this stuff then? Because you're you have uh one would think certainly incentives to not lean into the hard things. But I actually heard you give an interview at one point where you were talking somebody said, "Hey, if you pursue that topic, it's really going to damage your career." And you said, "Well, then I'm definitely going to do it." Oh, yes. Yeah. Is it just your personality or is there some component to truth itself that is so important and so useful um that you pursue it even when it's {quote} {unquote} dangerous? Probably both. Um you know, by temperament, I'm fairly independent thinker. I don't like working for other people and and I don't like just going along with the herd and you know, politically, I've always been I've always been attracted to the kind of libertarian or classical liberal position because it allows me to bounce around and and take different positions um both on the left and the right. You know, I'm I'm pro-choice. Well, that's a liberal thing. Um and I uh but you know, but it but I I really favor free markets. I think capitalism is the greatest mechanism of wealth generation to pull people out of poverty um ever. And so, that makes me a a conservative. Well, but I wouldn't call myself a conservative or a liberal. So, that allows me to do that. I you know, why do I lean in? Well, um in part it's my job, you know, with Skeptic, just by way of background. Um the skeptical movement started in modern skeptical movement started in the '70s mainly as a pushback to the New Age movement and and uh spoon benders like Uri Geller and psychics and astrologers and tarot card readers and Kirlian photography and all the, you know, kind of woo-woo stuff as we call it. Uh but then, you know, in the '90s when we started Skeptic, I started kind of branching out for what we were doing to to to take on like Holocaust deniers. And um and you know, creationists and and then, you know, political um theories or economic theories, you know, the trick trickle down economics. Does it work or doesn't it work? Well, on the one hand, you could say, well, that's not a scientific question cuz it depends on what you mean by work and and therefore, what what is what is your goals as a society and something like that. But on the other hand, you can operationally define it in a way that's measurable and then say, well, it works or it doesn't work. You know, something like that. So, for me, skepticism is um is the application of science and reason to anything, including moral values. You know, facts and values sometimes overlap, not always, but sometimes. So, you know, uh and and I'm not suggesting you go to the paleontologist to to to find out your moral position on abortion. I just mean the tools of science, empiricism, reason, rationality, um and and again, sometimes you're going to hit a hit rock bottom of a of say, conflicting rights. Like the rights of the fetus to live, the rights of the mother to choose, and there's not ever going to be an ultimate resolution. And there, you know, that's the value of democracy. Well, we just have an election or you know, we put officials in or we or we we vote in a president that's going to appoint judges that are favorable to our position. And you do the same on your position. But even that's a kind of experiment. In a way, it an election is like an experiment where you tweak the variables and then you run it for a while and see how it goes. And so if you think of like gun control measures, there's 50 different states, 50 different kind of configurations of gun control measures. You know, carrying conceal and and you know, the waiting period to buy a gun and and how much ID you need and this and that. And you can kind of try to measure the results of you know, how many guns are you know, per per person in the state and what are their laws and so on and then what is their gun violence rate? Now, it's not perfect, but this is what social scientists do. You know, they try to control for variables and then look at the one they're interested in to see if it matters. Anyway, that's a that's a kind of way of to think about a social political issue that's you know, not so different from other scientific issues. Now, if you had to explain to somebody why the truth matters and also to give you my breakdown of why I think it matters and I'd love to hear how you'd answer that. So, for me, the truth you know, as an abstract concept is sort of irrelevant, but as a day-to-day application in your life, if you're dealing with the world the way you wish it were, you can end up being totally ineffective. You can't make change. You're you know, it's like an economist that doesn't acknowledge that humans are predictably irrational. So, you expect them to act like a perfectly rational economic being and they don't and so now all your models aren't going to work. You're going to make poor decisions, right? So, the truth matters in as much as recognizing the way the world works then gives you the ability to sort of This is a bad word, but like bend bend the society or whatever to your will to get hopefully you have honorable outcomes that you desire, but you're able to shape society a much better word. Um Is that Yeah. Is how how do you look at truth and its importance? Yeah, I think that's that I think that's right. I mean there's that's kind of a practical pragmatic approach to defining truth which is fine cuz that works. Uh but just pull back in general. I mean just organisms that learn. You know, they connect the dots. A is connected to B cuz be something like you know, a rat in a Skinner box pressing a bar and it gets re-reinforced for doing so and it presses it more or the you know, the the dog that that that you know, salivates when it sees food and the and and the person rings the bell with the food and so now the bell becomes the conditioned stimulus. He associates the bell with the food. A is connected to B. This is about as basic as it gets association learning. Uh everybody learns this in you know, psych 101. But but in a way what the organism is trying to do in learning is to figure out the cause of things. What causes things to happen? You know, how can I get more food? How can I find a mate? How can I survive? How can I avoid predators? And so my my thought experiment here uh that I developed in the believing brain was uh you know, imagine you're a hominid on the plains of Africa 3 million years ago and you hear a rustle in the grass. Is it a dangerous predator or is it just the wind? Well, if you assume that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind, well, that's a type one error, false positive. You thought it was the connection was real, but it wasn't. But that's a pretty harmless low cost error to make. On the other hand, if you assume the rustle in the grass is just the wind and it turns out it's a dangerous predator, you know, you're lunch, Right? That's a type two of false negative. That is you failed to recognize the true cause of the rustle in the grass and that cost you. So, my argument is that we tend to err on the side of making more type one errors than type two errors. That is to say, assume that A is really connected to B even if it's not just in case. And so, to me, you know, superstitions, magical thinking, these are not bugs in our cognition. They're features. They're built right in there. And so, it's not that you know, people believe weird things cuz they're dumb, uneducated, ignorant, you know, you know, unsophisticated. None of that. You know, we're all susceptible to these kinds of things. Everybody is. You know, you've seen people lose their minds over masks. You know, wear the mask, don't wear the mask. Get the vaccination, don't get the vaccination. Everybody's scrambling to figure out, well, what should I do? What's the cause? And so, behind that is, well, I want to know what's real. You know, I want to know what's true about the world. And in my example, it's obvious, you know, much decision-making about truth is made under uncertainty. So, we use these what are called cognitive heuristics. That is these shortcuts. Dan Kahneman calls this, you know, type type one or system one thinking. It's rapid. It's rapid cognition. It's intuitive. You know, I just have a feeling here. I'm walking in this house and I don't have a good feeling about it. It just feels I don't know what it is. This person I just met I don't care. I just have a bad vibe about this guy. I don't know. You know, well, that's not there's no psychic power there, right? That's you're picking up something. There's cues. There's information coming in. And but no one has the time to sit there and gather all the information. My other thought experiment is, you know, why can't you just sit there in the grass and wait to see whether it's just the wind or a predator? Because predators don't wait around for you to gather more information. You know, they're camouflaged. They stalk. they're stealthy because they know you're trying to get rapid information and they don't want to give you enough time to figure it out. You know, so most of life is like this, you know, um that uh you know, you just make rapid decisions. The thing that um freaks me out a little bit and that I am encouraged by somebody like yourself who is writing a book about making sure that your opponents have a voice and and to be fair to your book, obviously you're coming at it from a freedom of speech perspective and you want to make sure that people are talking, but as I ask like you know, why why does freedom of speech matter? And it comes back to this idea of truth, understanding how the world works. I'm going to be wrong a lot. I need people to come in and sort of adjust my thinking. And, you know, when you start pairing that with other sort of cognitive heuristics that people use uh or maybe that's not even the right way to think about it that we have predilections as a species towards say tribalism and you talked about how people believe I'll put that in quotes, things based on party affiliation or whatever because they're really just trying to fit into the in-group. So, it feels like and and maybe this is a cycle that you have awareness on that I don't, but it feels like now in a way that I am not familiar with that we're living in a world where people are trying to control the facts, the messaging that gets out there to try to get the herd to move in a certain direction that they think is I'm not even sure morally right, I don't know, but to get that done, they're taking a shortcut of silencing the opposition that strikes me as terrifying because it deprioritizes truth and says, I know what we should be doing and it's this and I'm going to silence all dissenting voices. Do you think we're living through something unique right now or is this um just Yeah. I I agree with you. It's it's more pronounced now. We're more polarized. You know, and number of factors that work, you know, the media has been driven by the economic model of competing against online news sites and and trying to capture eyeballs for advertising dollars. They've been driven toward more extreme headlines and news stories and and covering the most salacious, most fantastic, most outrageous things they can find. So, there there is that effect that's that's the result of current events. You know, the of the internet and so forth. But, more generally it it depends on the context as to what extent you want to be critical of that as an issue. Let's let's just say you're two lawyers in court. Well, your job as as a lawyer is not to find the truth. Your your job is to win, you know, defend your client. And you know, if you can bury evidence, you're going to bury evidence. If you can slant, you know, the evidence to the jury and the other side doesn't catch on to what you're doing, good for you. You know, that's kind of the the rules of the game. You know, if you can get away with it, that's that's what you're supposed to do. But, of course the the system is set up where for example, you have to share all your evidence with the other side ahead of time so they're prepared to respond, you know, and So, that's kind of the way the game is played and we're not supposed to do that in science. In science, we're supposed to have as a goal the truth, whatever it is. Now, of course scientists are humans and the more committed they are or devoted they are to a particular hypothesis or theory, you know, the more likely they are to engage in motivated reasoning, the confirmation bias, try to find evidence that fits it. They're not Popperian falsification philosophers. Popperian? Popperian, Karl Popper. Never heard that before. he's the he's the philosopher of science that first articulated that the idea that science is mainly progresses through falsification. That is trying to falsify theories. You can't prove theories in science. Maybe in math you you can through axioms, but in science no, you can't prove anything. You can just you can disprove it. And so what we're left with is the theories that haven't been disproven yet, so our confidence is high. Now that's that's a kind of a simplified version of Popper's theory. And in reality it's a carrot and stick thing you do you know you you try to falsify other people's theories, of course. That's how you advance in science. And but the the scientists that hold the theories, they're not just trying to falsify their theories. They're trying to confirm them. Uh now you can't prove them, but but if you can pile up lots and lots of evidence, your confidence grows that you're probably right. So just take something like anthropogenic global warming. You know so like in the 70s and 80s it wasn't clear that that that hypothesis was true. You know but by the late 90s, early 2000s, you know there was enough evidence from multiple lines of inquiry that all kind of pointed to the same thing. That our confidence grew. It's not that anyone had not falsified the theory. It's that a lot of evidence had supported it and that kind of confirmed it. And what really did it for me, cuz I study these things, is that the scientists were independent of one another. So it's not like they're they're all meeting on the weekends to get their story straight about what we're going to say about climate change, you know, because those conservatives, you know, they're trying to ruin America or vice versa if you're a conservative. Those liberals have trying to ruin America. So they're using climate change as an excuse. You know, first of all scientists are not like that, but but but even if they were, these are different scientists. So, you know, here here's one person that studies glaciers and somebody else that studies sea level rise and somebody else studies CO2 gases and somebody else studies when this particular species of flowers blooms in the spring and now it's happening earlier and earlier cuz temperatures are going up. Or the pollination or you know, there's like dozens of different fields. They they publish in different journals. They go to different conferences. They don't even know each other and yet they still come to the same conclusion. So, it's like, okay, this is probably really true. It's probably really happening. And now the political issue, what we should do about it, that's a separate thing. I'm just, what is true about the climate is my point. Yeah, the idea of using scientific reasoning for everyday life is something I've become really obsessed with in business. So, irony of ironies, I was trying to basically teach a class about what do you have to do to progress in business. And so, I was like asking myself, what is it that I do to grow my companies? And my answer was like, okay, I come up with a hypothesis and what I think is going to work. I try to identify the impediment that stands between where I am and the goal and my hypothesis is about what allows me to cross that chasm. Then I run that test and then I assess the data. I adjust and I try again. And one of the guys on my team was like, oh, that's the scientific method. And I was like, I see. Yeah. So, That's right. Right. when you boil things down to like the sort of basic just physics of the way things work. And this is why I resonate so much with your idea of getting to the truth, once you understand the nature of something, now you can leverage it to get wherever you're trying to go. So, in my case, to grow a thriving company, but I I have to understand how the world works. I have to understand how the pursuit of truth works, which is, hey, I have this hypothesis. A hypothesis will predict something. That's the fascination of like, hey, if this if my understanding here is true, it predicts this." And then you can go look and see, is that actually true? Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. No, you stated it perfectly. That's a that's a fabulous example. Uh and it is it's something we we all do. We make form hypotheses and then test them in everyday life. Now, my a philosopher of science friend of mine who is also a professional tracker, animal tracker. That's an unusual combination, philosopher and animal tracker. Uh Louis uh Liebenberg Liebenberg. Um and but he writes about how trackers are are kind of intuitive scientists. They're uh you know, they're gathering data about the footprints uh of the animal and then they're forming hypotheses. Uh let's say these trackers like these are essentially hunter-gatherers. They're trying to track the animal to kill it and eat it. This is how they they they survive, right? So, it's important to them. So, they see like there's a like an indentation in the dirt underneath this bush and uh and then the the tracks leave and they go in that direction. Now, it's you know, you can kind of see how how windy it is and if the tracks have kind of been covered over or not, see how fresh they are. And then like, "Well, what time of day is it? What's the temperature? And what's in that direction?" Well, there's a there's some water over there. So, you know, I intuit that as the sun came up and it started to get warm, the animal got up and went that way to get water. You know, so what they're doing is they're forming hypotheses and in a way they're kind of trying to mind read the animal. If I was the animal, what would I do? Well, I would go that way. And uh you know, and so they're they're you know, and then they go and check to see if it's there. And you know, they're testing the hypothesis in a way. So, that's that's kind of a you know, and in business, of course, we do this all the time. Now, professionally, you know, with advertising, you can do you know, massive data sets online where you do an AB test between two logos or different colors of the logo or or different advertising pitches, you know, should we use this word or that word, you know, this is an emotionally negative word, this is an emotionally positive word, which one should we use? And you can you can measure almost instantly how many hits you get. That's an experiment, right? And even something like in love, right? One of my favorite jokes from the singer-songwriter Tim Minchin is, you know, what you call stalking? Sorry, you know, what you call love without evidence? Stalking. Sorry, I gave away the punchline. Stalking, right? So, I mean, if if if you're single and let's say you're dating you're attracted to somebody and and you you you make a comment to them or you you buy them a little gift or you do something nice and nothing comes back or something negative comes back. Okay, that's evidence. Evidence that, you know, okay, this is probably the wrong direction to go. Or something positive comes back, you know, there's some kind of reciprocal sharing of information that's personal or a gift or whatever, then it's like, oh, okay, well, then I put that hypothesis out there, I tested it, I got some positive evidence. I'll do it again and see if I get more positive evidence. You know, and you know, you know, so in a way all human relations are like that. Yeah, it's why I don't understand why people are more interested in fitting into a group than they are about finding out how something really works because so I have I'm obsessed with this idea that to me in fact the very meaning of life is to find out how much potential that you have can be turned into actual skill set because of the following statement which I I want to carry more weight than it seems to with people which is that skills have utility. Meaning if I learn something, it actually lets me do something. It lets me be effective in the real world. So, if I want to build a building, I need to learn architecture. And if I don't understand, you know, material science and weight-bearing, load-bearing, that kind of stuff, then what I build is going to come tumbling down. But if I learn it, I could build a bridge that literally unites two land masses over water. I could build a house that my family can live in. I mean, it's really extraor- The aqueducts of Rome, right? Like, you can actually build things that have this extraordinary utility. But the price is that you have to want the truth even when it makes you feel stupid, even when it stings or hurts your feelings. Um but that really seems like a low price. Have you thought about the psychological mechanism that makes a moment like now possible, where people are some people are prepared to give up that quest for the truth for and I'm not even sure if you would say that it is solely about tribalism or if there's something else going on, but that seems like an easy one to point to. Well, there may be multiple um effects going on, which is almost always the case with human behavior. So, take something like uh QAnon, you know, and how anyone could possibly believe this. So, when a a Republican is so- something the last poll I saw was something like 30% of Republicans say they think there's something to the QAnon conspiracy. That is to say that there is a secret satanic cabal of pedophiles uh sacrificing children and drinking their blood in a uh Washington DC pizzeria led by Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks. Okay. No one in their right mind could possibly believe this is Tom Hanks, yeah. Yeah. And Beyoncé. She's in on it, yeah. It depends on who you talk to of who's involved. Okay, this is about as goofy a conspiracy theory as you could find. There's variations on it, some is not quite not quite that crazy. Some of it gets overlaps with the rigged election {slash} deep state conspiracy theory that was popular during Trump's administration. And so but if you sat down one of these people said, "Now, do you actually believe this?" And stated it the way I just did. I would hope they would say, "Well, no. I you know." Well, one guy did. The guy that went to the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria with his gun to break up the pedophile ring. Okay, well, he served time in jail for this. Fortunately, no one was killed. Um no one was even hit. He shot into the rough. But he was so upset when he found out there's no basement cuz this is where the pedophile ring was supposedly operating out of the basement of this pizzeria. But he totally believed it. And um And I suspect most people that say they believe it, they're doing something else. They're signaling, maybe a social signal like virtue signaling. You know, I'm so devoted to being a Republican, I'm willing to publicly state I believe this insane idea. You know, there's a lot of virtue signaling in politics. Um you know, where you're trying to get the attention of your fellow politicians or tribe members that to show your devotion. You know, I think much of religious um ceremonies is involved in signaling, social signaling. Like if I see you every week in in in the pews of of the synagogue or church or whatever and I know you're a devoted person, I can count on you. It's kind of a a reputation building mechanism, all right? So, there's some of that. Of course, that particular case of QAnon and Trump you know, there's he still wields power in the Republican Party. So, you never know if somebody actually believes any of this stuff or they're just saying it because they think the boss wants them to say it or maybe the boss believes this, but but I better go along with it just in case. Uh it's on or else I won't get reelected. I mean, that's what happened. We just saw what happened this you know, a couple days ago with Liz Cheney. You know, she's out just because she spoke up against Trump. I mean, she's lost her seat. And and has been replaced. Why? Because she refused to go along with the tribe. So, it's a it's a real effect. Um And this is why cancel culture can be very stifling, let's say, go back to college campuses. And even though it's probably a minority of people that are at the extremes that are into this cancel culture thing, it it's it's enough that it silences people. Again, back to my book, why I'm concerned about the free speech, people are afraid to say something if they feel like they're going to get socially ostracized. And cuz that doesn't feel good. And you know, and and that's the problem with that. And so, there's an effect called pluralistic ignorance or the spiral of silence, where everybody thinks everybody else believes something when in fact most of them don't believe it. You know, so like the the classic study on this is with binge drinking on college campuses. If you ask students individually, privately, in a you know, an anonymous survey, you know, almost all of them say, "No, I'm not I'm not into binge drinking. I don't think it's a good idea." But if you ask them, "Well, what do your fellow students think?" "Oh, everybody else is totally into binge drinking." And so, they all say this. So, everybody thinks everybody else thinks this is a good idea. So, in the when you think that, then you're afraid to say something cuz well, you know, I don't want to stand out and be the only one. You know, that's perf- perfectly normal. So, this this goes a long ways to explaining how corrupt ideas can carry on in a social environment or a nation like like national socialism. How is it possible that people bought onto this? Well, most of them didn't. Um you know, that Hitler came to power as a minority party. And and then he shut down the press so that there was no coverage of what people were saying. And what did they do with dissenters? They sent them to the concentration camps. You know, there were most people don't know this. Most people are familiar with the famous death camps like Auschwitz and and Majdanek and so forth. But there was you know, thousands, literally thousands of camps throughout Germany and and the European countries they conquered. And so what did they do with those? They filled them up with people that dissented from national socialism. And so if you if you want to speak out cuz you don't believe this ideology and you see your neighbor, you know, hauled off and you never see him again. It's like, I'm keeping my mouth shut. And this you know, back to the college example. I I know plenty of students and younger professors that don't have tenure who will not speak out against say the extreme far left woke progressive anti-racism movement. You know, they maybe they agree with some of it but not all of it. But they're afraid to say anything. Because you know, they could get fired. And um they and this has happened. You know, so that's that's stifling because again, whether there's some good ideas or not in this in these current movements, we'll never know if we can't talk about it. You know, if everybody's if the only answer could be I'm 100% behind it or else, you know, I'm not going to say anything. Well, that's not good for society. Did you see HBO's Chernobyl? Yes, I did. Yeah, that was quite the series. Man, that was so chilling. That idea of like yeah, that you just don't you don't want to speak up because you don't want to get in trouble within the group. Man, it's it's interesting growing up as a child of the 80s, it was such a a moment where sort of individualism was celebrated, being the iconoclast was celebrated and at least in youth culture. And so I never had a sense of how quickly a horde of people could become terrifyingly dangerous. And Yeah. seeing seeing what's going on now, I'm like, okay, like I s- it feels like sort of the the ground is being laid for how this gets really scary really fast in terms of like the Orwellian 1984 sense of like, hey, don't speak up. Like I want to live in a world where more people are like like the fact that you wrote a letter to the judge of a Holocaust denier and said, hey, this guy should be allowed to say these things even though I vehemently disagree with him. Um Yeah. But what in what way cuz you've talked about that being a self-protective act. In what way is making sure somebody like that has a voice self-protective? Yes, well, that's the devil that should be given his due. Why? So that if I'm the one who is speaking out, if I'm the lone voice uh and and maybe even maybe I'm wrong, but at least I want to have a voice and but I've already signed off on the idea that we should silence people that, you know, we disagree with or that are so-called dangerous. They have dangerous ideas. Um well, that's a very subjective uh evaluation. What do you mean by dangerous, you know? So I mean this is right there in in in legal precedents, a clear and present danger. That that's a very famous phrase now. Clear and present danger. That was um in the 1919 Supreme Court case of Schenck versus the United States in which this Charles Schenck, a socialist from Philadelphia, was handing out leaflets to uh draft age men as America was entering the First World War. You know, arguing that this is a form of slavery. It's a violation of your constitutional rights. The government cannot own your body and send you off to die. That's slavery. Okay, well, this whether that is or not is a separate issue. But he got arrested for this that this is sedition. It's undermining the the the nation's ability to to conduct war, for example. And so, that that case went all the way to the US Supreme Court where the Supreme Court Justice you know, issued that here I'll just I'll read you the I'll read you the line because it's so it's so kind of chilling in a way and he ended up kind of taking it back. This is Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. The most of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. Okay, so what what is this clear and present danger? Well, these are leaflets. You know, he was just making an argument, you know, that that um that that uh you know, forcing people into the army to go die, you know, conscription, that's unconstitutional. Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't, you know, it's a very debatable thing legally, but that that you can't even say it. The problem once you set up that precedence is that then you can make the case that anything anybody says could be a clear and present danger, it could lead people to riot, it could lead to violence against minorities and so on. Now, first of all, this almost never happens. There's very rare that you'll see a direct line between somebody giving a speech or writing an op-ed or writing a book or, you know, whatever, standing out on the street corner with his bullhorn on a soapbox. Uh you know, that that then then people go and riot. Now, maybe the Trump case on January 6th is is an exception, maybe that, but although that's very debatable about whether he was the cause of the capital storming of in Capitol building. Now looks like this was in the works for for for quite a a clear quite a few weeks before this. So maybe he was a secondary cause or whatever. But in most cases this historically the state has used that kind of power to silence people it simply does doesn't agree with or feels that this is challenging our power. And that's why we have to have those protections and you know the history of free speech it goes back thousands of years. You know historically states always want to control people. They never want to give up power. They always want to silence anybody that dissents and so it's a constant constant struggle. And so much of what we've been talking about today is not government silencing. It's just groups or religions or you know classrooms or you know whatever cancel culture is not the government but but it has the same chilling effect that then people are afraid to say anything. And if ever we should dissent it's you know if our government is doing something we don't like. That's the whole point of democracy. It's about time you try CuriosityStream. CuriosityStream is the Netflix for nerds, the Hulu for history buffs, and the Disney Plus for the scientist in all of us. CuriosityStream is also extremely affordable at under $20 a year. Their content spans science, nature, history, technology, society, and lifestyle. There's literally something for everyone with any interest on CuriosityStream. One of our Impact Theory team members is binge watching the deep ocean documentary series on CuriosityStream. It's all about the amazing life forms that have survived the pitch dark depths of our oceans and it includes some awesome 4K underwater visuals. 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It is really fascinating to live through these times where I do wonder how much is sort of an echo of the technological revolution and what's happened with our ability to get ideas across so quickly, you know, meme culture, the ability to um have a global audience from anywhere in the world. Ideas spread so rapidly and can catch fire so quickly that now uh living in America anyway, I'm more afraid of the mob, the the mob of humans, not like the, you know, Italian mafia, but I'm more afraid of mob mentality than I am the government. Now, that could just be foolishness on my part. I'm I'm certainly very open to that. Um but that, the the sort of herd mentality, feels like the more clear and present danger to me. Um and that Mhm. you know, even if people are prepared to rise up against the government, which is maybe a bit sexier, that standing up against the um just the herd mentality feels like the more sort of necessary thing. Yeah. Well, I mean in this case you're talking about a clear and present danger to you personally or your career, your job, uh or or whatever. Yes, and and you should be because there are enough cases uh where people are losing their jobs like Donald um oh shoot, I forget his last name but the New York Times the science writer um who lost his job. He'd been there like 35 years and had won numerous awards and so on. Anyway, he used the N-word uh with some interns on a trip and and it it only to tell them don't use this word. And he but he he didn't say N-word, he said the word itself. Wow. I mean, seriously, he got he got fired for this. And there's a lot of cases like that where it's obvious the person was not using the word in the derogatory sense. And uh so now, you know, no one I don't think anyone uh allows you to actually write the word out except the New York Times did last week when John McWhorter, who's a linguist and he's black, uh was talking about, you know, the the the words you can't use anymore and that's one of them and he said, "I'm going to just use the word." Okay. And uh you know, that it imbues so much power, almost talismanic magical power to a word. And I this is I don't I mean, I won't I'm not going to use this word. I won't I understand why it's offensive and hurtful. I do. But I also don't like giving any word that much power over other people. It's just I'd rather we just move on beyond it, but you know, at the time we're going through now, that's probably going to take a while. Uh I I've always liked I mentioned Tim Minchin, the singer-songwriter. Uh he wrote a really great song called Prejudice. Anyway, so it starts off with this, you know, there's this there's this word in the English language that's been used to really hurt people. It's It's a hurtful word. It's just six little letters, you know, a you know, a couple of G's and I and an N and an E and an R and and you know, he goes on and on about this for a while and you're thinking, "Oh my god." And then all of a sudden the the tone of the song changes. It becomes kind of a happy tone and he's like, you know, only a ginger can call another ginger ginger. So the word is ginger instead of the N-word. And but then it's kind of playful because he's he's a ginger, he's a redhead, you know, and he he talks about all the names he was called growing up. You know, what what was it something like fire truck and tampon and and matchstick and you know, all these kind of Well, if you're a redhead, you know, and you're and you're 10 years old, these are hurtful things, right? And So but but his point was that, you know, it's just let's just make fun of the whole thing and make light of it. Instead of being afraid of it. And uh you know, again, language we have language we have to use words cuz you know, we just have our thoughts that are in our skulls and to get them out of there into your skull, you I got to use words, okay? So words matter, but you know, I'm always afraid of endowing them with so much power that we're afraid to say them. You know, we just had an article on Skeptic on Tom on Tom Sorry, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. No, Huckleberry Finn where he uses the N-word. Well, he's you know, Twain used that word purposely cuz even a century ago, it was a hurtful word and and he was using it in the context of this is how people talk about blacks and you know, and this is why this is what it leads to, you know, prejudice and hate and it's a bad he was clearly he was making the point it's a bad thing. Yet in today's woke culture, there's a lot of schools that are banning the use of that book or there's even publishers republishing it without the word. It's like, well, but you've lost the point of why you used the word. Yeah, it is it is a a very fascinating time that we're living through in in the sense of um you can feel the sort of police mentality of people wanting to catch somebody slipping up and that there is a a sort of point point scoring system and a glory to catching somebody out. And I won't lie. Like I've felt the impulse before of like, oh, I caught that person doing something they're not supposed to do. And it's it's it's a very potent emotion and at the same time it feels like icky. Fragile is probably the way I would it it has it's the emotional equivalent of recognizing you just threw a rock at a glass house and you live in a glass house. You know what I mean? So it's like this I'm not so sure I should be chucking this rock right now because I know how easy it would be to take a sort of sideways glance at my life and find a ton of things that, you know, out of context or whatever somebody has a problem with. So like this the way that the human mind works is so fascinating. I love it. It's super powerful. There are things that we can do. We can love each other. We can bond. We can build societies and come together. Um I was just having a conversation with a um Stanford psychologist and we were talking about, you know, we've become the most dominant apex predator of all time through empathy. And yet tribalism is also this incredibly powerful and equally sort of primordial part of our brain and that you know, you look at at empathy and you venerate it and you celebrate it and isn't it wonderful? But tribalism is also part of how we've survived long enough and creating that sense of us and other. And so, once you take this brain and put it in a modern context, whether it's eating until you're obese or it's not recognizing that tribalism now can be extraordinarily dangerous or seeing how quickly you can other somebody else, it's uh it's really, really interesting. And, you know, seeing it manifest in ways that are worrisome is worrisome to uh wrap that thought up. Yeah, that's right. Well, this was uh in part uh Paul Bloom's point in his book Against Empathy. So, Paul Bloom is a psychologist at Yale. And his point was the one you just made is that um we are very empathetic with our fellow tribe members. In-group empathy is very strong. But, the problem with it, I'm oversimplifying his theory, but problem with it is that that it makes outsiders, people in other tribes, even more dangerous. You're going to be less empathetic with people that are not part of your group. Um so, there that's the risk of it. And that that was your point there. And I think I think that that's a good one. The other thing that make you made me think of before social media and the point scoring for catching people on up on things is gossip. You know, so social media is new, but gossip it's a form of gossip. And what is gossip? Gossip is mostly information about other people. I mean, gossip is always about other people and it's usually negative. There's a kind of a negative valence to it. Uh you know, having to do with deception and lying and cheating and and and and power and who has it, who doesn't. And or on the positive side, you know, who you can trust and who's trustworthy and a good person. So, Robin Dunbar's theory about this this is the famous Dunbar number of 150 that is about the number of people we know fairly well. So, Robin Dunbar is an anthropologist that studies these things and so his theory about gossip, not not just his, but that gossip is a a way of of of kind of knowing who you should trust. You know, especially beyond the 150 that you know, in in the you have a little social group that you know pretty well. How do I know if that guy over there I should trust? Well, I'll ask this person who knows this person who knows him. Right? And then so in a way gossip is like, yes, you can trust that person or no, I wouldn't trust that person. And and so it's it's information. And so social media is basically taking this natural human propensity to talk about other people and marrying it to the negativity bias where we notice negative things more than positive things, for example, like in economic modeling, you know, losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good. Let me just say that again. Losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good. So, for example, I'll I'll get, you know, like 100 positive likes on some tweet, but I don't even notice them if there's one negative one. I'll oh, who is this [ __ ] that put that negative I'm going to and then I'm I'm obsessed about it. I'm like, calm down, Shermer. Almost everybody loved your tweet. You know, how can I possibly be so influenced at this point in my life? Well, it's just normal, right? We notice the negative thing. So, um yeah, and then there's the principle of the counter of that is that I'm trying to you know, encourage people to practice the principle of charity that is charitable interpretations of what somebody else is actually like. You know, instead of attributing the worst possible motive to their words or their actions. You know, maybe you just don't know the context. What maybe they they had a were having a bad day. You know, maybe they didn't really mean it in the way you think they meant it. And so why not give them the benefit of the doubt? Just assume like, I don't know why this person used the N-word or whatever it is they did that you're you're upset about. You know, maybe I don't know the full story. So, let's just assume it was done accidentally or didn't mean any harm by it. Some something like that. And my favorite example of this of late I've been thinking about is you know, there's this kind of cancel culture for um anyone uh who uh doesn't meet our moral standards in the past, right? So, like, you know, Thomas Jefferson, you know, was a slaveholder and you know, any any raped his slave uh Sally uh Hen- Henny- Hemings and uh and they had children and oh, he's a bad guy. He's a rapist cuz, you know, slave owners raped their uh female slaves. Okay. How about a more charitable interpretation of this? You know, he he would have he would have been uh pro-abolition of slavery, but there would have been no United States. The Southern states would not have signed on uh against uh Great Britain. They would not have had the 13 colonies united. And then, you know, so he owns slaves. Okay. Uh but, you know, lots of people did. And then his wife died, right? So, maybe he's lonely. And maybe the only woman around in his environment is this woman. And maybe they fall in love and have children, but it's against the law to get married. You can't marry a white can't marry a black. You know, that was illegal until 1967. Interracial marriage was illegal until 1967. The Supreme Court case of of the Loving case, L O V I N G was the last name of of this couple. Uh an interracial couple and and they were Yeah, I know. 1967. Okay. So, maybe, you know, this let's So, before you judge somebody, you know, you don't know what what it's like to be them, what what's in their lives, what context it is either historically or even just socially in their particular lives. That's hard to do, you know, I I don't always practice it, but it's it's a virtue I think we should all promote, you know, the principle charitable uh tolerance. Yeah, I think that's really smart, but it what's super interesting to me is that as you were saying that I felt like we're juggling razor blades right now. Like one of us is about to get cut. And it's uh that like even even that like as you were describing it I was like, "God, that sounds terrible." And the the idea of frame of reference is something I think a lot about. And so you just did a great job of displaying. So one frame of reference is you know, total [ __ ] that should be forgotten by history, doesn't matter what he did well. Um he was a slave owner who raped his slave. I mean, it sounds so [ __ ] terrible. And Yeah. then the sort of flip side of we'll never know if there was love there. There was certainly a very distressing imbalance of power. And so it's like I don't even know how to talk about this um you know, without seeming like you at one point it's like so horrifying as to almost be uncontemplatable. But yet I don't want to live in a world where you can't contemplate and you can't talk about things and you can't sort of get to the messy truth of what it means to be a human. And that's one of the things that I worry about now is like how are we supposed to figure out what's true if the minute somebody starts thinking through something that they're just eviscerated. And I mean eviscerated, like where people are trying to destroy their lives for um telling people not to say the N-word, but actually saying it is not a destroy your life offense. It may be a hey, even saying that out loud like is really um upsetting for people and so don't like who who wouldn't like if you came to me and said cuz I'm a big believer in prepare the um child for the road not the road for the child Right. Yes. Yes. But if you came to me and said look this person is you know something happened in their past and they're very sensitive to XYZ so for I'll give you an example from my own life. I was once in a front yard drinking from a hose. I hear the roar of a car engine and then squeal of tires smash car smashes into a tree that I'm about 20 ft from guy gets out just literally covered in blood falls down on his face girl gets out screaming. I mean like this whole thing for two decades after that if I heard the sound of an engine revving my heart would like [ __ ] race and so if somebody were like trying to mess with me and they're like revving their engine or something like that one I wouldn't have asked that they not do it cuz whatever that's how I approach it but if somebody were like that and they said hey how if you don't mind not I'd be like of course G you know I I didn't know. So it's like you simultaneously want to be generous to whoever's asking but you don't like me revving the engine and having somebody come and drag me from the car and try to end my economic opportunities for that that's where it's like whoo I am not saying that that is the same as you know an offensive uh word No I got it. No it's a it's good example. Yeah. Yeah so there's a this fundamental attribution bias in in psychology where we tend to attribute um motives to somebody's character and personality rather than the environment or the context in which they did whatever they did. You know so I'm fond of asking I I have a whole discussion of Milgram's shock experiments and I you know show videotapes of it. I I did my own replication of it. We talk about that and and you know, 65% of subjects went all the way to 450 volts, you know, XXX, you know, the basically you're just frying this guy in the other room, who's not actually getting shocked, of course, but uh and then I ask students, how many of you would have gone all the way or participated, you know, they all say, "Oh, no, I definitely would not have done that. No. No, I'm just not not that kind of person." It's like, yeah, you're delusional. You know, this is what everybody told Milgram. You know, before he ran the experiment, part of his protocols was to survey psychologists and psychiatrists and others, you know, what percentage of people do you think will will participate and go all the way? And it was like one, maybe two percent at most. You know, so people were shocked that 65% you know, went all the way. And uh so or you could ask, if you lived in 1850s America, say in the South, you know, would you have been an abolitionist? You know, almost everybody today goes, "Of course, I would have stood up against this evil of slavery." I doubt it. You know, almost nobody did. Very rare. And and even if people were against it or thought it was a bad idea, you know, they kept their mouths shut cuz this is it was legal, everybody was doing it. And you know, there was it was a controversial thing to be against it. So, you know, it's easy to sit here in 2021 and judge people, you know, like in the 1960s, you know, you see these interviews with these old guys like John Wayne or or Sean Connery and they they make these disparaging remarks about women or Jews or blacks and just like, oh, it's just cringeworthy. And but you really got to put yourself historically back, you know, half a century in in which, you know, that was not unusual. And of course, today we would not do that and and it's a sign of how much progress we've made that we're we find such language cringeworthy or offensive. Uh but you know, they didn't. And it's just not really fair to say, "Well, I wouldn't have done that." You don't know you wouldn't have done that. Right? So, anyway. Yeah, there's two ideas that I find really interesting. So, Jordan Peterson introduced me to the idea of, "Hey, when you're revisiting um Nazi Germany in your mind, don't assume that you're the one that would hide Anne Frank in the um attic. Assume that you get sucked up into the you know, the Nazi machinery because survival um you know, literally watching people killed in front of you for having the wrong view. It's like pretty quickly you go, "Whoa, like I I would like to think that I would, but given you know, a gun in my face, it becomes a totally different idea." And then the um the follow-up to that, which is The Gulag Archipelago, where you've got Solzhenitsyn really just recanting what happens when you don't face down the gun, and how crazy it gets, and how ultimately that machine turns on you. So, it's like you should want to be the person that is the abolitionist in the South, you know, at the height of slavery. You should want to be the person hiding somebody in um in your attic during Nazi Germany. And you should be very worried that you wouldn't. And that's That gave me the chills. That to me is the idea of understanding the way the world works. Because once I understand that I'm prone to that weakness, like anybody else, I'm prone to being terrified if somebody has a gun in my face, I'm prone to silence when they shoot my neighbor in the face for having the wrong view. And like you have to sort of get ready, and this is why you're sort of in the face of all the hurt in the world that could come at you for having the wrong position, the fact that you keep like pursuing truth even if it has personal consequences. Like that to me is very, very interesting. And I actually want to know is do you have a process? Like what is the process for I think this, but I want to make sure that I stay skeptical? Oh boy. Well, first I'm not that brave on these things. I was just thinking of Navalny, the guy that stood up is standing up to Putin. You know, they tried to kill him, you know, poison him with this, you know, this uh radioactive stuff and and Is that the guy who like it it completely deformed his face or something? No, that was a different guy. They've They've done They've killed many people this way. Now, this is the guy that survived and he went to Germany and they and they cured him. And but he went back to Russia where he was promptly arrested. And then he then he went on a um a hunger strike. He's in jail. He just ended his hunger strike last week. Uh but he's not he's not giving up. He's standing up to Putin and Putin's cronies and all the corruption in Russia. You know, I admire the guy. I can't say I would do this. I think most people wouldn't. I mean, he's married with kids. You know, there's pictures of him with his family, you know, in Germany and they're they're like, "Okay, let's get on the plane. We're going back to Russia." And I'm just thinking, "Are you out of your mind? They hate you there. They're going to kill you or lock you up for life." And he's like Did he take his whole family? Yeah, they're in Russia. Yeah, they're they're fine. I mean, they Putin's leaving them alone. But he's in jail. He's probably never Well, he may get out. But who knows? I mean, anyway, my point is that, you know, I I would not do that. I would just say, you know, the hell with it. I'm going to stay in it I'm going to some other country. And I think most people probably like me. And but in terms of, you know, more of what I do and and the kind of issues we address, which are less political in that sense. Um You You again, like this recent 60 Minutes piece Sunday night on UFOs, UAPs, and you know, the government said they're real. Well, okay, what do you mean by real? Okay, so here, you know, there's there's certain principles of thinking, rationality, you can apply. Like, what what exactly are we talking about here, you know? Well, you know, that that we that's probably a balloon right there. The balloon is real, but when somebody says the government says they're real, what they mean is that real means extraterrestrial, real means it's a Russian asset, or it's a Chinese drone, or a spy plane, or something like this, capable of doing these incredible aerodynamic maneuvers that no no machine that we've ever built could possibly do, and so on and so forth, and and so to me, I just it's like yes, of course I I would love to think there's extraterrestrials or or there is technology able to fly, you know, 7,000 miles an hour and make a sharp left turn without killing the pilot, whatever. Uh but, you know, but but I don't think it's true. That that I would like it to be true that there are extraterrestrials out there somewhere, and they're even visiting us. That would be cool. You know, I'm not one of these people that thinks, "Oh, well, you know, the stock market would crash and people would lose their minds if if they discovered aliens." I don't think that would happen at all. I just I just don't think it's true because there's not enough evidence for it. You know, so for me, I just try to think, "Okay, you know, whatever it is I'm reading about or addressing, you know, I have to try to separate what I want to be true from what is actually true." And you know, most cases if I don't have a dog in the fight, if I'm not committed to it, you know, like gun control, you know, I did a whole analysis of that. Uh I'm not into guns. I don't care one way or the other. Uh I just want to know, does do gun control measures lower homicide, suicide, and accidental uh deaths or not? That's all. And uh you know, if if you if you can do that, then it's a lot less upsetting uh you know, when you engage with other people in conversation about it. And so, what's your process for mining for that data? Because right now, the way that people create these echo chambers, they only look at confirmatory evidence. Do you have any sort of best practices for not believing? Oh, I do. I do. Yeah, let's see. I have I have here, let's see, I have the New York Times. I have the local Santa Barbara newspaper. I get the uh Michael, you are definitely showing your age right now. This is madness. Who reads newspapers anymore? Wall Street I got the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, I know. I'm old school. I actually like physical books. Here's my book. I actually like physical books. I have hundreds of them here in my office. Uh yeah, so the the idea, of course, is, you know, multiple sources of of information. So, op-eds are good for this, you know, it's you know, the opinion editorial section of a newspaper. You know, hopefully they have multiple views. Well, they don't always do this, so you got to pick different newspapers. And uh or toggle back and forth between Fox News and MSNBC. You know, they they kind of they can be covering the same story, and you can't believe they're talking about the same thing at all. It's like, how can this be? Well, first of all, you have to know that's not news. Okay, Fox News is not news. It's entertainment. You know, their own their own defense case when they got sued. It was Tucker Carlson got sued. It was somebody Oh, it was the defense of one of the Capitol building stormers. One of the people that stormed the Capitol on January 6th. His defense was, "I watch Fox News all day, and I was 100% convinced that Biden stole the election, and they are stealing our democracy right there in that building. I'm going in." And so, his defense was I watched too much Fox News. And Fox's defense, by the way, in a previous case, was nobody should seriously believe what we say. Wow. It's like, "Wow. That's an admission, you know, that we're just bullshitting people. We're just saying crap because it's a television show. And the It's good to remember on commercial television, there's commercials. And so the content is basically whatever it takes to get people to get from one commercial to the next without clicking away. And that's become a charter for networks because of there's, you know, you know, hundreds and hundreds of channels to choose from, or you can just turn the TV off and go online. Then there's, you know, 10,000 sources of information you can get or entertainment. So, uh that's the problem. Is there a wellspring anywhere of people that are hearkening back to sort of the old school um journalistic practices of making sure that something is double or triple confirmed and cuz I've it feels to me like there's a business model opportunity now that sort of traditional journalism has gone away for somebody to say, "We adhere to all those old-school principles." When I write uh for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, LA Times, and so forth, they do have fact-checkers. I mean, whatever I write I mean, I'm writing I'm I'm writing mostly opinion editorials or book reviews. Uh but they do fact-check. They want to know like exactly where that quote come from. Well, this was the source. What page? Okay, here's I got to go look it up. Here's the page. Okay. So, I and I'm encouraged by that. And when it, you know, I wrote 214 consecutive monthly columns for Scientific American, they fact-checked them all. And and and in most cases where they found something, it was good that they found it. You know, I was wrong. I I don't, you know, I got this number 16, it was supposed to be 19. I don't know where I got 16. Maybe I flipped the nine to Who knows? But thank you for catching that, you know. So, So are, you know, there are sources that still do this. We fact check at Skeptic magazine. I have four different proofers. We call them proofers. But they, you know, they read every article uh carefully and not just for typos and spelling errors, but you know, content. And I have a couple of my fact checkers or my proofers are actual, you know, retired scholars. You know, they just volunteered cuz, you know, they they like helping out. And but they actually read it for content and they look stuff up and they always catch things. So, you know, that it's a good um norm that that developed in the early 20th century in journalism. And although it seems like it's disappeared, it hasn't. You know, there's still plenty of places that do it. Um but clearly again, if you're watching Fox News or maybe even MSNBC, just remember it's not news. Okay? It's those aren't news sites. And so they don't have fact Whether they have fact checkers or not, I, you know, it doesn't matter cuz that's not the point of it. Mhm. It's interesting. I heard somebody talking about um there people need to realize that in an era where there's limited newspaper space, that one of the things that makes something higher quality is its adherence to the truth. But once you go to an online source where there's basically infinite canvas, that it sort of degrades the bar that gets set for information to get posted onto. And obviously the incentives are around clicks and getting people to um you know, the sort of tripping things like our negativity bias and all of that um to make sure that you get the just the volume of humans that you need to that. Um and sort of speaking to our base instincts. Now, I didn't look into sort of how true that hypothesis was, but that rang true. Well, there are now, especially since the 2016 election, uh a number of political fact-checking sites like PolitiFact, for example, and Snopes has has gotten more political. Snopes started off They started about the time we did with Skeptic in the early '90s. Uh they mostly were fact-checking things like uh urban legends. And then a little spillover into what we were doing like claims by psychics or astrologers or whatever. But then now they're pretty political, you know, they they fact-check things that politicians say, speeches that politicians give, memes that are popular online about, you know, Biden did this or Trump did that, you know, they look it up or look at this photo of Biden and, you know, whatever. You know, they Oh, it turns out it was a fake photo, you know, so that there's a half a dozen of these sites that are really good. And and it shows to me it it shows that there's a market for it. The The fact that they're surviving and flourishing in this environment tells me that people actually do care about what what's actually true. And there's a there's a couple of fact quote-checking sites that I I use all the time because most quotes that are kind of catchy, you know, oh, by Mark Twain or, you know, Yogi Berra, you know, well, Yogi himself wrote a book that said, "I didn't say half the things I said." And uh and that's what he means is that, you know, that that quotes tend to gravitate up to the most famous person who ever said it or might have said it or could have said it or said something like that. And uh so, if you Google any quote, uh the same dozen or so sites will come up in the first couple pages on Google of just repeating the quote without any reference, no citation, uh but there's a couple of sites where they'll give you the whole history of the quote and everybody who ever said it. And uh you know, to their credit, that's a lot of work to do that. Let me to dig out historically where these things come from. Uh And uh so, you know, I'm grateful that there are people that do that and And and that they do and that they're useful, and somehow making a living doing it, uh I guess people do care. Yeah. Yeah, it's cert- I I want to believe that the majority care. Um I am cognizant of perverse incentives that, you know, can be created by things like social media where the different metrics are, you know, time on site and using sort of the dopamine um secreting techniques that people use. But, yeah, your point is is um encouraging to be sure. Now, one thing with you, Michael, as I was reading your book and listening to interviews that you've done is you strike me as a very foundational thinker. Um somebody that's really trying to get to sort of the root driving things. Um and I'm curious if you have like a set of foundational beliefs. And I'll give you one that you've said many times, um which may or may not be to you foundational, but this idea that the second law of thermodynamics is the first law of life. And um curious to know Are Are there like a few sort of maxims that you consider like I build my my thought process or my life on top of these ideas? Yeah, well, that's one. That's one I I developed at the end of uh this book, Heaven's on Earth. When I was trying to kind of come up with a a wrap-up chapter, like if there's no afterlife and there's no immortality, then what's the purpose of life? So, I have a discussion of the meaning of life. Okay. Well, so that particular way I said that, that second law of thermodynamics is the first law of life, is a kind of twist on Tooby and Cosmides' paper. They're They're a couple of evolutionary psychologists here at UC Santa Barbara. Uh and their their paper was titled the second law of thermodynamics is the first law of psychology. And what they meant by that was from an evolutionary psych perspective, most of our psychology is developed around pushing back against entropy. You know, the universe is basically running down. Uh you know, the world doesn't care about you. And you know, this is just so many more ways to die. Anyway, so then you know, Pinker has a Steve Pinker has a nice discussion of this in Enlightenment Now. And you know, he's a good friend, so we we read each other's works and so on. And so there I kind of and this is how all ideas work, by the way. We all build in each other. You know, no one comes up with stuff whole cloth out of thin air. And but you know, so that's one way to think of it. And and so I also think of it in the context cuz you know, I'm an atheist and I deal a lot with theists and I debate them and so on. It's not how I define myself, but it's part of our mission and what we do. And so one of the kind of memes that theists have, not memes, it's kind of a central belief is that if there's no god, if there's no afterlife, then there's no point to to to life at all. You know, what difference does it make what you do now because in 14 billion years the universe is going to be, you know, whatever it is, 40 billion years or whatever. 4 billion years the sun's going to expand, there'll be no earth. So what's the point? All right. So I call this Alvy's error. Alvy is Alvy Singer, Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall where he has a flashback to childhood where he refuses to do his homework and his mother takes him to the psychiatrist and he says, "Why don't Why won't you do your homework, Alvy?" He goes, "The universe is expand expanding." He goes, "What?" He goes, "I read that the universe is expanding and one day it's going to all just blow up. And so there's no point in my doing my homework." And his mother upbraids him and says, "What's the universe got to do with it? We live in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn's not expanding." So that's my, you know, my catchphrase there. You know, we live in the here and now, not in the hereafter. It doesn't matter what happens billions of years from now. It matters now. Uh you know, how we and this was in in the my essay in Scientific American about this was um this uh philosopher was debating William Lane Craig, who's a famous theologian. And he was making this argument. There's without a god, without an afterlife, there's no point at all. You know, it doesn't matter what people did to the Jews and and and and World War II, it doesn't matter. And uh so the philosopher, his name is escaping me right at the moment, uh Shelly. Um Kagan, Shelly Kagan, said, "It doesn't matter. It matters to the Jews and their families and their suffering right then." You know, it's like to me that was a slam. That was a mic drop. I mean, I how could you respond? Of course it matters. Right? So, that's the point. I think the grounding is that you know, today, right now, this is what you know, what's the purpose? This is it. You know, you know, of course we should have goals and work toward the goals and so forth. But, you know, our lifetime, now, our culture, our people, our family, our friends, our you know, our politics, our community, everything. This is it. This is why it matters now. And so that that's kind of how I live my life. Let's drill into that. So, I don't know as I was reading you, um it seems to me, and I could be wrong, but it seems to me like you fall into a similar vein of Sam Harris where it's like once you sort of grind it all down, God irrelevant, doesn't exist, whatever, you come to okay, what are you optimizing around? And it's the reduction of human suffering and the sort of optimization of human flourishing. I don't know if that's the word that sits well with you. But is that sort of what you Yeah. So, there's a a new book out um on uh sort of against this idea that science uh and rationality can lead to objective moral values and and the the the people they're writing against are myself, Sam Harris, Steve Pinker, and a few others like Jonathan Haidt and and and a few moral philosophers with a scientific uh grounding. And uh so yeah, so but but again, that's not original to us. I mean, this is utilitarian philosophy. This goes back to, you know, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and the first Enlightenment thinkers that tried to articulate some secular way of thinking about uh values and and morals and right and wrong and good and evil, whether or not there's a god. Uh and even if there is a god, I mean, you know, Plato refuted this with the Euthyphro's dilemma that, you know, if god is handing down moral values and telling us what's right or wrong, um are there any reasons why these things are right or wrong or is it just because god said so? And if there are good reasons, then what are the reasons? And then let's just skip the middle man and just follow the reasons. So, the idea of, you know, let's reason our way to determining what's right and wrong, that's a fairly new idea, that's an Enlightenment idea. But since then, you know, moral philosophy, this is what it's been all about. You know, you have just a handful, you know, Aristotle's virtue ethics, you have, you know, Kant's deontology or or categorical imperative kind of rules based, then you have Bentham and Mill's utilitarianism and variations on that. You have Rawls's just society, you know, the veil of ignorance, if you're going to write a law, you should write it in a way that you don't know which group you're going to be in. You don't know if you're white or black, male or female, tall or short or whatever, uh rich or poor, you know, the law should be fair. This idea of, you know, this kind of viewpoint from nowhere. Uh I think um Thomas Nagel called it a kind of a a universal perspective, Spinoza called it. So, there's a handful of these thinkers that and so there's just a few of these theories that have kind of survived over the last, say, 300 years that are not based in religion at all. And that's our mission is that well, we can go even we can do even better than that. We can use science. Not always, but you know, that you know, we can measure what people prefer. What do they want? You know, the social psychology, the cognitive psychology of right and wrong, good and evil because just what's better? A democracy or an autocracy? Well, where would you rather live? North Korea or South Korea? Do tell. Right? Well, people will tell you, you know, and in many cases they'll they'll they'll vote with their feet. Right? They're leaving these crappy countries that have corrupt governments and poor infrastructure and they're they're going to places like America. Why? Well, there's a good reason why that's, you know, has to do with human nature. And and we can discover that through science. Anyway, that's the point of So, human flourishing and you know, reducing suffering. You know, Peter Singer is again one of the giants of you know, the expanding circle. You know, he applies this principle to animals. And he's probably right. I mean, in in maybe a century or two they'll look back on us as just barbaric. You know, those people in the 21st century, they ate meat. They killed animals. They killed like a billion chickens a year. They killed like 500 million cows a year and they ate them. You know, they may may be people will look at us like we look at slaveholders raping their slave, you know, it's like woah, that is just you know. Again, we you know, we it's hard to get out of our culture and see what, you know, what we're really doing in that perspective. Yeah, it's interesting the idea of being a product of your time. Um I forget who it was somebody talking about writing and they said, "Look, you're going to be a product of your time. Don't even bother trying to avoid it." And to your point, you know, about um animals and all the things that we have yet to discover about um you know, who feels what and what level of sentience do different animals have. Uh it'll be really interesting to see where that goes over time as we have deeper and deeper discoveries. You know, it's uh people that say that animals can't feel and then if you've ever had a dog, uh you certainly know like you can see like heartbreak on their face. I mean, it's crazy. Of course. Of course. Yes. Yes. Yeah, this is the so-called other mind problem. Uh you know, this goes back to Descartes saying, "Well, you know, animals like dogs, they're just mechanical robots." So uh they don't actually feel anything. Well, what what happens when it you know, you kick it and it squeals? Oh, that's just an automated like sound that comes out of the tubes when it compresses the you know, blood or whatever. He thought it was going on. This is This is [ __ ] I mean, this is Here's my solution to the other minds problem. The The other mind problem is how do I know you're sentient and conscious and you feel and you think and so on. You know, maybe you're a philosophical zombie as it's called. You're just There's no lights on it in upstairs. You're just walking around making the sounds and and motions as if you're sentient but you're not. I'm the only one who actually feels this way. Okay. I apply the Copernican principle. I'm not special. The chances that I'm the only one My brain is just like yours. It runs on the same you know, hardware uh programs of in neurotransmitter substances, the little synaptic gaps and the neural networks and the modules and blah blah blah. You know, same as yours. So if if I'm feeling pain and I have certain facial expressions and I act a certain way and I see the same on your face, I think he's probably feeling what I'm feeling. Right? That's a reasonable assumption. And it's just a small step, you know, to animals. You know, you see the Uh, know, the dolphins or the whales or whatever. Where the conversation gets truly interesting for me is, um, and look, I have no idea this may just be like a an early sort of front-running piece of data that turns out to be nothing, but the fact that plants will allocate resources, like if they cuz they they're so connected under ground, and if they sense that there's like a fungus or something over here eating another, um, plant, they'll actually send chemicals over there to stop that from happening. If they find one that's malnourished, they'll send chemicals to them to try to help. It's like, what if we find out that there is a level of I hesitate to say sentience, but like that we just fundamentally do not understand what plant life is. And so, the I love answering the question when it's as hard as humanly possible. What happens if we go, "Fuck. Like, we can't kill animals. Like, they they're way more feeling than we think. We can't kill plants because there's a lot more going on there than we thought." Where do we end up? Like, what do you do at that point? Cuz this is like really interesting to me. we end up we end up hungry. But you end up having to do something, right? And so, it really forces people to face this sort sort of moral conundrum. And, you know, thinking back to like early hunter-gatherers who had this sense of respect for what they had hunted and what they killed. And like, this almost sense of gratitude for that thing having given itself to them so that they could sustain themselves. I mean, it's interesting. It doesn't It's cold comfort when I think about an alien coming down, you know, and being like, "Oh, thank you so much for giving your life and for giving your planet." Uh, that wouldn't help me a lot, but I I don't know what to do with that one. Yeah. Uh, well, I don't either, but, um, I mean, the thought experiments of, you know, test cases where you push it to the extreme just to see how strong your theory of ethics is, uh, is useful for, you know, for thinking about these things, practically speaking, uh I let's just take it one step at a time. Let's just, you know, do what we've been doing. That is, we have laws to protect abuse of animals. You know, and they're and they are applied. Every every week or two, you know, there's some story in the news of some guy had, you know, 50 dogs in his house and, you know, they arrested him for, you know, abusing these animals. And and good. That's good. Um you know, so there's the those are on the books. And then, uh you know, the protecting animals that are used in science and labs. You know, there's a tons of laws and rules about those. And now even the the, you know, the banning of the use of chimpanzees, that's a good step. You know, you can't use chimps anymore for uh research, medical research, for example, or psych research. That's good, you know, and there there so these chimps are being retired to these, you know, happy chimp farms where they can uh lead a good life. That's nice, you know, it's you know, the way they animals were treated in the '60s was you know, by today's standards just awful. And uh so that's my approach is like just once before we grant sentience to lobsters and don't eat them anymore, let's just start with the big ones, you know, the great apes, uh you know, gorillas, chimps, orangs, gibbons, and us. And then and by the way, let's expand the moral sphere to all humans. You know, we're still not quite there yet. Uh but getting there. And then, you know, then the cetaceans, you know, the dolphins, whales, and porpoises, and and uh sea lions and so on. You know, just all the maybe marine mammals that will be the next one. And just take it one step at a time. It's, you know, I know a lot of animal rights activists, they don't like this because it it it their analogy is that that would be like telling the slave holder, you know, the the people in 1850s America, take your time. No rush, you know, one small step at a time. You know, thanks a lot, says the slaves. Well, you know, it's not a perfect analogy, but I I understand why people want change instantly, but that's just not how it works. Yeah, that that is a a conundrum of how quickly we can make change. You know, when you think about moral progress and moving in the right direction, you need the friction of people saying that this isn't fast enough. You also have to be careful about sort of upending society, the notion of burn it all down and whatever we build in its stead will be better. Mhm. It's like I actually really get emotionally, I understand that argument. And it is where you see an injustice, it is so tempting to just want to break the back of whatever has created that, but the world is so freakishly unpredictable in terms of you change this here and it will have unintended consequences, but it is so emotionally unsatisfying to say incremental change. So, yeah, it's tough. I don't know it Is your take on that just like, "Hey, it is what it is and and the only way sort of safely forward is incremental change?" Yeah, I mean, I get your get your point. I mean, it might you know, if you had a rallying call cry, you know, "What do we want? Slow incremental peaceful change. When do we want it? Eventually." No one's going to, you know, come down to the park at 4:00 Saturday to meet meet with me and let's go on our march chanting this, right? Well, so this gets a, you know, a deeper um political philosophy that is you know, we have liberals and conservatives for a reason, you know, and no matter how many political parties there are in a country where, you know, we're a duopoly and probably always will be. You know, many European countries have half a dozen parties. I think that's great. I wish I wish we had more parties. Uh so no one side could capture too much power. But But But even there in European countries, they kind of clustered toward the left or toward the right. And the reason for that is, you know, gets back to the the first conservative intellectual, Edmund Burke, in his book on the French Revolution. And it basically he said he supported the American Revolution uh against England, but not the French Revolution because the one, the American, was more uh kind of rational-based, incremental uh legal changes and less violent. Till the war broke out, of course. But But even there, you know, the war kind of developed over many years and not not that many people died, comparatively speaking. But look what happened with the French Revolution. I mean, they just It was just burn it all down. Let's just start over. Well, what was the end end result of that? You know, was the you know, the the guillotine was brought out. And you just got this massacre of anybody and everybody that for whatever reason, not just political, just revenge and whatnot. And uh you know, that's the So his argument is that we need conservatives to prevent liberals from going too far, too fast. Cuz if you do that, those structures that were built up over centuries, um these social institutions that uh provide stability for society, that people count on and trust, if you just tear them all down and you replace them with whatever, it's very unlikely to work. And uh And so I One thing I'm worried about now is that, you know, historically the the you know, most of politics has been played between the two 40-yard lines, right? It's just kind of nudge this way, nudge that way. And now, you know, Trump and those people are pulling the center further and further to the right. And then the woke progressives are pulling the center further and further to the left. And uh and so what used to be, you know, uh a pretty stable system is is is kind of fracturing a bit. And now you see even that, you know, just like this last week, again mentioned Liz Cheney, you know, she's kind of old school GOP. You know, she's right there at the maybe the 45-yard line and and Biden is, you know, kind of old school liberal. He's like at the other 45-yard line. And you know, this idea, you know, Biden's a socialist or communist, this is crazy. It's not even remotely true. But I can see why people use that because they're trying to pull you know, the ends further further out. That's dangerous either on either side, it's dangerous and because of that leading to instability and that's what leads to violence. And that's what leads to deaths and property damage and all that's just no good for democracy. Yeah, and that brings us back to giving the devil his due. What How do you get this idea across? How do you encourage people to want to hear from the people who think differently than them? Well, of course you could just say it, but I turned it on tables on the other person. How would you feel if you're the one that's speaking out against the mob, you know, let's say like for example, I I talk about Holocaust deniers. Well, what if I'm skeptical of how many Native Americans died with European colonization of North America. And you know, the figure is not 90 million, it's more like 10 million. Am I a denier? You know, because you know, I got to be silenced for that. Uh you know, and and you know, creationists always want, you know, their side taught in public schools. Yeah, okay, but what if you set this up that whatever the dominant religion is in a country, that's your principle for what what gets taught in public schools. Well, what if Christianity is no longer the dominant religion? What if Islam is the dominant religion? Islam has its own creationist ideology. Hesitate to call it science that they think it is. You still want that on the books that well, whoever's in in the dominant group, they get to have their creation story taught in public schools. Of course, Christians go, "No. No, I don't want that." Right. Right. So, just flip it on on its head. Just just put yourself in the position of you're the lone voice. And do you or do you not want to be heard? Of course, people want to be heard. So, free speech is for those with whom we disagree. That's who it's for, the people we don't like. The people whose opinions we find abhorrent. That's what the free speech principles are for. I love that, man. I think that's a great place to wrap. Thank you for uh being the I don't want to say the devil in so many different arguments, but to be a dissenting voice. I think that's incredibly useful. Uh you're a very sound thinker. I think it's very telling that getting Jordan Peterson to blurb a book in which you have an entire chapter dedicated to why he's wrong uh and that he did it uh because he thinks that you ration your rationalize your way through things in a very sound way. Um I think is is a great testament. Where can people find you? Where can they engage with your unique way of thinking? Oh, well, uh skeptic.com is the main webpage for my magazine and at michaelshurmer.com for my personal webpage. And my books are all on Amazon and and so forth. So, and the Michael Shermer Show, my podcast, it's on at skeptic.com as well. I love that. Dude, thank you so much for coming on and being such a foundational thinker. I really appreciate it. It was wonderful. And guys, speaking of things that are so foundational, you can't miss it. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.