Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 545: Michael Marshall: The Skeptic

Episode Date: October 12, 2020

Thank you to Michael Marshall for joining us - make sure to follow him at   Follow and  

Today's show is brought to you by AdamandEve.com. Go to AdamandEve.com right now and you'll get 50% off just about any item. All you have to do is enter the code word GLORY, G-L-O-R-Y, at checkout. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago, this is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way.

We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome mat. This is episode 545 of Cognitive Dissonance. And Cecil,

I want to point out to our fans, to our audience, that we record this show once a week. We record on Thursday. we release on Monday. And there was a time in the world where that made sense. You know, where you could say things on a Thursday night, Thursday night late. Yeah, it's not like it's Thursday 6 a.m.

We recorded Thursday 10 p.m. normally is when we end. So Thursday night you could wrap it up and you really just have one business day for the world to go to shit or fundamentally

change in every way. And we have had how many experiences this year where we record and we're like well the big story

this week is purr purr der and it's and by the fucking time we hung up, by the time we hung up last week, Cecil and I, we hung up at like 11 o'clock, 1030, whatever it was, last Thursday, midnight or so, I get a text from Cecil,

Trump's got the Rona. And it was so fast because Hope Hicks had gotten it right as we were leaving. Just as we stopped recording, I looked at my phone. There was a BBC alert. And I said, oh, shit, Hope Hicks has it. And Tom says, oh, fuck, what? And so both of us were like, fingers crossed, fingers crossed, fingers crossed, fingers crossed.

No whammies, no whammies, no whammies. No whammies, no whammies, no whammies. And then we left. And I'm editing the show at night. I'm sitting. It's midnight. I'm editing last week's show, just trying to get it show at night i'm sitting out it's midnight i'm editing last week's show just trying to get it done and i'm sitting at home and a bbc alert pops up rona for the president here's your ice cold rona with a fucking lime in it and so we're just both like what the fuck we totally missed it and what do we talk about last week the big things we're

talking about last week we're like oh man, the debates, and are they going to have another one? Now you're just like, what the fuck, man? How quaint are the debates at this point? Are you kidding me? People are yelling at each other. The president has the Rona. And the best part is

now it's the Thursday. It's the next Thursday we're recording, and he doesn't have the fucking Rona anymore. He's the only person that got COVID for the Thursday. It's the next Thursday we're recording and he doesn't have the fucking Rona anymore. Like he's the only person that got COVID for the weekend. Yeah, I mean, you know, and that's, and I think we should talk about that. I do want to mention to everybody who's waiting for later on, we are going to have Michael

Marshall on for a lot of this show. We talked to him about his new role at Skeptic Magazine. So you're going to want to stick around for that. But we are going to talk a little bit about the president's illness before we move on because it's the big news tonight. Yeah. Wednesday night.

I don't know. By Monday, maybe he'll have wings or something. Who knows? So first off, let's talk about the timeline of the sickness. So like Tom said, 10 p.m. last week, the world started to learn about the different types of people in the White House that had the Rona.

We found out through the weekend, we found out a lot of different conflicting reports on when the president knew, when he didn't know. It's still not completely clear because they're obfuscating it. They're not telling anyone really those things, but from the way they've let slip information, it sounds like he knew before he let everybody else know and like almost a full day,

which means that he probably went to some events knowing he had the Rona, which is terrible. And specifically other people who have subsequently come forward and have had it, knew they had it and still did events, which is terrible. And specifically other people who have subsequently come forward and have had it, knew they had it and still did events,

which is fucking awful. The president got an antibody cocktail. He got an experimental drug. He got a couple of other things, wound up getting flown to the hospital. Then after that was over, he stayed there for a couple of days, made a couple of fake ass videos

of him signing blank fucking papers. Signing blank pieces of paper with a sharpie. Yeah, blank paper. Because that's what the president does. We'll get into it in a second. We'll get into it in a second. But anyway, like after that was over, he went home in a big thing. He did his Evita thing on top of the balcony.

Hold on, you forgot his drive. Oh yeah, he did. He did do a little parade, a single parade where he infected several members of his, his secret service staff in his hermetically sealed beast of a car. It is, it is COVID mobile. Yeah,

it is little, little COVID car. Then he went home, did his, don't cry for me, USA, standing there with his mask off.

He looked like Lord of the Dance after he got done finishing dancing. He's just breathing really heavily. He looked like Lord of the Dance after he got done finishing dancing. He's just breathing really heavily. With his like shirt no time. He was just like, I'm good.

You could just tell he was, he was Fatty McGee in those fucking old, old fucking Adam Sandler tapes or whatever. Fatty McGee climbing up the fucking stairs. Then that was over. Then he worked and tweeted

supposedly for the past couple of days. Now they're saying he's essentially symptom free and he's fine. He's going to be doing just great. Don't you worry, everybody. And so that's sort of where we're at right now. But we don't know where we're going to be in a couple of days because they say that this disease, as time goes on, can get a lot worse and you can feel a lot better. In fact, I thought I saw somewhere that Herman Cain even left the hospital before

he died. He felt well enough to leave and then died afterwards. And so that happens to a lot of people. It also happens when you're taking drugs that give you delusions of grandeur and psychosis. So, you know, there's possibilities. So how would he notice those symptoms? Like, how would you even document those symptoms, right? Yeah, how do you test for them? And it is like he took a steroid. So some of the conflicting information from the doctors is fucking ridiculous. It's like everything from this goddamn administration.

It's nothing but obfuscation and outright lies. Like, if you watch when they were asking his doctors, like, has he ever received any supplemental oxygen? That was so awesome. Like he's not on supplemental oxygen right now. And the reporters were dogging about it. They really were. And they're like, yeah.

Okay. But that's, and they're saying like, that's not the question I asked. The question I asked is, has he ever received any supplemental oxygen? As of this morning, the president has not received any supplemental oxygen today. And they're just like, okay, should, should we interpret that to mean he previously got supplemental oxygen? Like, today, there was no oxygen delivered today as of today, today, today. Yep. I mean, it's like, it's fucking ridiculous. But they put that guy on a bunch of fucking steroids,

that Dexa whatever steroid. They put the guy on an antiretroviral cocktail, which they gave it to him for compassionate use. It's not even approved for the general public to use. Yeah, it's not even. They gave him the antibody. I forgot what it's called. They basically gave him like the antibody clones. Remdesivir or whatever it is. So they gave, they fucking threw everything in the guy.

Like, of course he feels good. He's hopped up. Have you taken steroids for injuries? I don't think so, no. I've taken steroids for injuries before, like anti-inflammatory for my back when my back was fucked up. Like, you can take,

like a lot of shit can feel bad and you can take steroids and you feel really good because it reduces inflammation. Like, boom, like that. Like steroids really do make you feel really good because it reduces inflammation like boom, like that. Like it, like steroids really do make you feel really good fairly quickly. Like within the same day that you took them, like they're, they're really remarkable. And they're a great thing to have in your toolbox when you need like a, a, an inflammatory response to calm the fuck down.

And the reason they give steroids to people on, like with the Rona, is so that their immune system doesn't go fucking bonkers crazy and create that cytokine storm, which I may be mispronouncing. But like feeling good is not the same thing as being okay. And the seven to 10 days is the, that's kind of where it's at.

Like it's seven to 10 days. We're really at day seven right now because it was Thursday night. It's Wednesday, so it's at. Like it's seven to 10 days. We're really at day seven right now because it was Thursday night. It's Wednesday. So it's six days right now. Yeah, they were saying next Monday is when you're going to really know whether or not he's out of the woods.

And nobody gets fucking Corona for the weekend. Like that's not really a fucking thing. So we'll see. I mean, unless there really are remarkable therapeutic medications which are available to a tiny, minute fraction of ultra wealthy and powerful people. Yeah. Well, how about how tone deaf his fucking tweet was? he feels and how he doesn't, he's like, I feel great. Don't be afraid of COVID. And you're like, yeah, well, when you have a hundred thousand dollars of medical treatment, that's jumped on you. And the normal person basically gets thrown into a fucking, a fucking coat closet with a

fucking, uh, with a bellows to hopefully make them breathe. You're oh no. Yeah, I'm good. Well, yeah, of course you're good. Asshole. No fucking shit. You're going to be fine because you know, there was, there's very little chance he was going to die. But anyway, they're saying like all the different ways, so many different pieces of the pie have to be cut the right way for him to actually fucking die from it. It's, you know, it's so many percentage gets sick and then, you know, so few percentage gets sick and so few get this and so few, and then it finally works its way down to him. And it's, it is a small percentage of people who die, but it's enough to be,

it's enough for the normal person to be like, whoa, that's not fucking a really good odds. But if you get it, you shouldn't feel like, oh my God, it's a death sentence. And no one should think that. Right. Yeah. But like, you know,

it's tone deaf on so many levels. It's like, first of all, like 210,000 people like died. So that's how many family members are out there reading your tweet like don't let it dominate your life yeah easy for you to say like your mom didn't just die of it yeah you know what i mean like you're fucking like somebody close to you this year that you fucking woke up in january with is not fucking dead because like plus how fucking expensive is this? Do you have any, like he has no concept of

how financially devastating it would be to be inpatient at a hospital for three days. If a regular person shows up at a hospital and has to send Friday, Saturday, and Sunday inpatient in a hospital, like even with insurance, you're looking at, you're looking at deductibles of five, six, $7,000 as pretty standard deductibles in this country. Yeah, you're not going to walk out of there without paying. Most people don't have $5,000 or $6,000 or $7,000. Yeah, yeah. It's financially crippling to so many people in a timeline where the economy has absolutely taken a shit.

The economy has not fully recovered. The economy is not fully turned on. How many people can like look at something like this? It's like, don't let it dominate your life. Look, getting well is not the same thing as like being off scot-free. It's scot-free when you don't have any fucking consequences. When you're the president of the United States, it's like, yeah, I got sick. I got better. What's the fucking big deal? Well, I don't know. How about like, I got sick, I got better. And then I got a bill I can never pay, which forces me into financial bankruptcy and like makes me lose my car or lose my house or sometimes ruins my credit, which prevents me from getting jobs that run your credit

in order to get that job. Yep. Like it's, it's a devastation. It is a financial crippling. And he's just so fucking clueless about how things interact with real people let's talk about who got sick so people who got sick in the white house uh who's tested positive thus far uh donald trump melania trump hope hicks uh kaylee mccainy stephen miller amazing Stephen Miller. Amazing. Amazing. So good. Also, a couple of senators. We have the RNC. Well, we also have the RNC chairwoman,

Rona McDaniel. Then Rona McDaniel. Not Rona, but it's Rona now. Rona got the Rona? Yeah, it's Rona now. Mike Lee, Utah Senator. Tom Tillis, North Carolina Senator. And then Kellyanne Conway got it and Chris Christie got it. I was just like, the fucking Yahtzee for me is Bill Barr.

Like, I really just genuinely want Bill Barr to get it, like more than anybody else. But I'll take, I will certainly take Stephen Miller. Like Stephen Miller, of all the people who I really want to see get complications of the Rona, he's the one I want the most. Yeah. So, yeah, if you had a—the Rona card that you could play, like right now,

like, I mean, it's got to be Mitch McConnell is high on your list. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Mitch is on my list. Mitch is up there. Lindsey Graham's up there for me. Yeah, I don't know how close they were to all this stuff. You could see these other, because they figured that the Amy Coney Barrett thing

is where the super spreader stuff happened. Right. And what happened was, is that it was an outdoor event, right? And I don't, I'm not quite sure that there was a lot of stuff transmitted outdoors because they've come and shown a lot of things

that have happened after the fact that have shown that there was a large indoor gathering. And a lot of these people are shown in this indoor gathering. And those are the people who got sick. And so again, it shows, yeah, outdoors probably was okay. It's just, and even though they weren't really practicing social distancing, they weren't wearing masks, they were outdoors. And I don't know that that is what caused it.

I really do feel like it was that little fucking like, like little fucking hors d'oeuvre party that they had inside the fucking white house that fucked everybody up you know somebody double dipped you know that was how the whole thing somebody steven miller's just licking the ball he's just licking the outside of the ball like a dog god well i saw pictures of these idiots like they're not not practicing they're hugging each other they're like handshaking they're like fucking licking their palms and rubbing it on their eyes and shit. Absolutely, yeah, yeah.

What the fuck? They're smelling each other's assholes like stray dogs. Like it's unreal how much, how close they are to each other, how much up each other's ass they are. But, you know, again, I want to talk too about, specifically about what happened afterwards because Trump comes home.

He's got his little fucking, his mask on, he walks up to the top of the stairs and he rips the mask off to show how great he is. All drama. Then he's literally fucking hyperventilating up there.

You could totally see him fucking really just digging for breath at that point. He does a salute and then he walks inside as a show of how great he is and how strong he is. But, you know, him taking him traveling around with the Secret Service, even with a mask on, is very dangerous.

Him doing that and walking around the White House without a mask on is giving the wrong idea about what what can actually prevent this. All these different people that knew that they were in contact with somebody not wearing masks around other people. The way in which Trump has flaunted the testing rules and the way in which he's tested. He actually actually find out that he didn't actually come in and get tested on the night of the debate because he was running late. Running late. Yeah. There's all these different things that are coming out that are showing how badly they have bungled their own safety protocols, let alone the nation's. These guys, I mean, and the only thing that I find comforting about this whole thing is it's super fucking evident what side of the aisle all this shit is falling on, right? Like the Democrats on their side are saying like, yeah, you should

fucking listen to the scientists and wear a mask. And you know how many of them are getting sick? Yeah. Not a lot of those guys. 18 fucking idiots on the right are like, this is no big deal. Don't wear a mask. And they all get fucking sick. And the evidence, like the polls, I read something today, 70% of Americans think he handled this poorly.

Yeah. That is an enormous number. You don't see those kind of numbers in America. Yeah. It was like 72. It's an enormous, enormous number of people that are looking at this like, what the fuck, you idiot? Like, you don't look tough.

Like, and then he came out like later and said like, I had to get it to show you I wasn't afraid to get out in front of it. I went to the real school of COVID. I learned the real school by learning it the hard way. He's trying to like play it off like he got the Rona for us. Like, yeah, I got the Rona for you. Like, that works if there's only one Rona.

Like, if you took a fucking bullet, like if you jump in front of me like, no. Okay, cool, man. But like, you got the Rona like you just spread it to a bunch of other idiots. like like nobody is better off because of that we're all a little worse off actually unless we look at that and see the emperor has no clothes and this really could be like a deeply deeply emperor has no

clothes moment for this fucking clueless dipshit i hope it is because it's just it's been an embarrassing you know his tweet storm is embarrassing because it's just, it's been an embarrassing, you know, his tweet storm is embarrassing. The way he's handled it has been absolutely embarrassing. You know, I cannot imagine being from another country

and watching this from afar and thinking that somehow this guy is doing the right thing. But you look at all the sycophants on Twitter and they're all thinking, oh,

they're all saying out loud or at least typing on Twitter how strong you are and how great you are and you're all thinking, oh, they're all saying out loud, or at least typing on Twitter, how, how strong you are and how great you are. And you're just thinking, man, just jerk the guy off already. Just absolutely pathetic. Like, how do you praise somebody for like beating an illness? That's fucking random. It's weird. That's not something like, isn't that like Cecil, so glad you got better from that cold you had. Yeah. I mean, like, don't get me wrong. I am. Actually, it's not even what I meant to say.

Like, you're so powerful for getting better from that cold. Man, you're a better person than I am. You are fundamentally more fit to lead others. Yeah. Because you got over a sickness. Your immune system prowess is fucking amazing, bro. Dude. What?

I want to talk a little bit about just the fact that nobody was sure whether or not anything he was saying was the truth because the man lives on a mountain of lies. And I saw so many people over the week talk about how they didn't even know if any of this stuff was true. Is it a ploy? Is it him just pretending? What should we believe? Yeah. How crazy is that? That like, as soon as it comes out that like the president of the United States has a fucking pandemic illness, like it's like people I respect, like not conspiracy theorists are just like, yeah, probably not. Yeah. I mean, like you could like, you could read the

news and like left and right. We're like, well, we're not really sure exactly what's happening. You should be sure we should be able to rely on the attestations of the people in charge. How fucking crazy is it that we're just like, I don't know if that's true just because he said it. I mean, so many times he says things that aren't true. OK, you fundamentally outlined the problem. It doesn't matter like what you think anymore of this guy's policies. Don't you have to take a step back and say, you know, a democracy does require transparency.

I'll tell you, man, it's crazy how much his lies over the past three and a half, three years, more than that, because he's been in this public spotlight about sort of around the orbit of the presidency for longer than that. And it's been, uh, it's been lie after lie. They were catching him with crazy lies during his, during his candidacy. And they caught it. They've caught him with a multitude of lies way more now because it's, it's just public record or he said something out loud that he's being taped on now. And so there's just so many,

so many, so many, so many of these fucking lies that are coming out. But this is, this is one of those moments where you just, you, it's hard to be sure because you don't know, is he playing this up?

And, and here's the thing. If he did, it's not a 40 chest move. Cause everybody thinks he fucked it up. So it's not a 40 chest move, even if he fucked it up. So it's not a 40 chest move even if he's lying, but I don't think he's lying. I think he did get

the Rona. I mean, if you look at him, he did look sick on those things, mainly because he didn't have his bronzer with him, but he did look sick in those photos. There's no way, you know, that's how you know he got sick because you know for sure he's way too vain not to leave without his makeup and there's no way he's ever's that's how you know he got sick because you know for sure he's way too

vain not to leave without his makeup and there's no way he's ever going to get filmed without his makeup and he was and he was photographed in the hospital with his shirt off signing blank pieces of paper because that's what a president does by the way everybody just so you know you sit around with fucking leather bound folders around you you open them and sign them. I don't know. Like, there's no digital anything anymore. The fucking president just has to have cartfuls of fucking leather-bound volumes delivered to him

so he could fucking manuscript that shit. Whatever the fuck. I don't know what world we're supposed to live in. We're a bunch of fucking idiots. These fucking, these images, too, are metadata 10 minutes apart. And he's trying to make it look like he worked all day.

It's pathetic. I mean, it's just pathetic. It's, he thinks everybody's as stupid as he is. But the fact that he's sitting in front of everybody, completely pale, tells me that he was sick because he would never, if he were feeling well or thinking about it, would never walk out looking like that. It just wouldn't happen. You know, it's funny because I didn't think of it that way. And I initially thought, well, if we could fake a moon landing,

we could fake a sick old man. You know? Tom, last question. Should you feel bad about this? No. Should you feel bad? Should you feel bad and think it's in bad taste to say,

ha ha, you got the Rona? No, no, no, no, no, no. I don't think so at all. I think we're looking at a guy, and I'll take it a step further. I think it's okay to publicly wish ill will on people that have gone to such extraordinary lengths to harm so many people.

Like, I mean, you look at Trump and he has gone to purposeful, extraordinary lengths to harm, to directly and knowingly harm millions of people. And he knows it. And it's not accidental. It's not a, oh, I disagree with his policy about this or that. It's not about that. I lost all sympathy and like my heart hardened like the fucking Pharaoh around his immigration policies. Yep. You know, like when he supported border patrol agents kicking water over in the desert so that people would literally die of thirst in the sun. I am completely bored with the notion of sympathy around his well-being.

I want him to die because I want someone better to replace him. Not because I have any, like, I don't think dying is a bad thing in the sense that he won't experience it. So, like, I don't give a shit. Like, it's not a matter of, like, I hope you die and then you don't enjoy the non-existence that follows. Like, I don't care about that. But like, I'm afraid that he is going to, that any day that he remains in office, he'll continue to erode our democracy,

to call into question our election, to damage the future of this country. Every day matters with this guy. And I've never thought that before. Even with W, who put us into an entirely illegitimate war that cost people hundreds of thousands of lives. I think George W. Bush was a fucking war criminal. He is a monster of a human being for allowing himself to be led by Dick Cheney and others. But Donald Trump is going to ruin our democracy. And every day that

he stays well and stays in power is a day closer to that erosion. I don't think that there's anything wrong with wanting someone to be sick and to experience things that they have been passing off as nothing where other people have suffered. And they have made it look like it's not a big deal to people in this country that have had to deal with it, that it is a big deal. And it has ruined or changed their life in drastic ways. And so the fact that he's pretending that it's nothing throughout this entire pandemic and then getting sick,

there's a karmic justice to that that I find hard not to relish the schadenfreude on that. I find it, it's impossible for me. In fact, I have to relish it. And I also am with you too, that I actually saw, and I think it was Noah who was arguing that it's the moral. It is actually more moral to think, I hope he dies because he's causing less damage than, you know, it is a utilitarian standpoint, it's more moral to wish that he was dead. And, you know, I, I, it's hard to, it's hard to argue with that. It's definitely hard to argue with that. I don't, I don't disagree. And I think that there was a lot of people who

I read a lot about a lot of people sort of saying, Hey man, we really need to not look like, you know, we're, we're ghoulish and we're, we're, uh, we're looking at this in a, in a way that is that other people could look down on. And I say, fuck you. You know, fuck you because they have basically decided that, like you said, that immigrants don't deserve to live. That refugees should just go like walk a thousand miles back to the awful place where they decided to leave from.

You know, all these different things that they've done to our, just to undermine our democracy. Fuck you. I shouldn't feel bad about that at all. Yeah, no, I am 100% okay with the idea that like he, of wishing ill will upon somebody who chose not to take this pandemic seriously.

The idea that like, we don't have to be in this mess. That is a true statement. We don't have to be in this mess. We don't have to, this doesn't have to hurt this much. Our economy does not have to have suffered this much. All those people out of jobs

and wondering how they're going to feed their family. And like no second stimulus bill passed, no fucking aid around the passed, no fucking aid around the corner, no fucking white knight over the horizon. And none of this had to happen like this. Yeah. Yeah. This happened like this because Trump for personal political gain chose to politicize and downplay this pandemic. He chose to politicize the things that the scientists were saying all along, you know, from things that the scientists were saying all along, you know, from very early on, maybe not all along, but from very early on, things to do to mitigate the effects of this virus. He came out and not only did he not lead by example,

but he continues to cast doubt on masks and social distancing. And I mean, he's an embarrassment. Yeah. 210,000 people have died. That's, I mean, like if you want to put that in a context, he basically is thumbing his nose at 66 9-11s. Yeah. Imagine if we did such a thing.

Yeah, yeah. Imagine if 9-11 happened, you thumbed your fucking nose at it and it happened every fucking day for two and a half months and you just thumbed your fucking nose at it and then a plane crashed into the building you were in. You'd be like, all right, you had that one coming.

Yeah, yeah. I don't give a fuck. He's got this coming. And I hope it goes poorly for him. I genuinely, sincerely, in my hearty, heart, heart. I don't think it will either. It won't because he's got the best medical coverage in the world and he's got people around him

that are constantly monitoring him way more than you'll ever have, way more than you'll ever have, way more than I'll ever have, way more than any listener will ever have. He lives a charmed life that will protect him from this, which is sad because I think that he should, he should have to experience it like a person who's on Medicare.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he should experience it like somebody who pays $700 a year in taxes. That's right. You're absolutely right. Hey, everyone. I've got to be a little quiet because I have relatives upstairs. So I just wanted everybody to know that Adam and Eve's is the best part of staying at home is playing at home.

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Thank you. You're welcome. So we're joined by Michael Marshall, who is a part of the Merseyside Skeptics and now has a brand new gig. And Marsh, we actually invited you on specifically to talk about that. Tell us about your new gig. And Marsh, we actually invited you on specifically to talk about that. Tell us about your new gig. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on, guys. I am the editor of The Skeptic, the UK's longest running publication of skeptical analysis of the paranormal and pseudoscience and

conspiracy theory. And yeah, it's really exciting. So the magazine's been going since 1987, theory. And yeah, it's really exciting. So the magazine's been going since 1987, which is such a long time and such an established part of the UK sceptical community and UK sceptical scene, that it's an honour to have been asked to take over as editor. And so yeah, we relaunched at the start of September. It's going to be produced and published by the Merseyside Skeptics Society. We're going to go online. So rather than being a quarterly print periodical, we're publishing stories online. I'm the editor. We've got the team from the Merseyside Skeptics are going to be helping to produce it. And Dr. Alice Howarth is the deputy editor. And we've got some really exciting and fantastic writers on board writing for us

pretty regularly as well. So it's quite an exciting venture, really, to be able to steer this well-established and kind of respected platform in UK skepticism into its next chapter. Now, I do want to make a quick, just for our listeners, because I had to take a double take. This is different than the Michael Shermer-led Skeptic magazine. It is. This is the Michael Marshall-led Skeptic magazine. Just want to be clear, because you guys both have Michael as your first name. And Michael Shermer is not somebody we generally want to be, at this point, associated with.

So I just wanted to point that out. Yeah, I mean, obviously, we've got a similar, you know, we've got the same first name. And otherwise, it'd be very easy to confuse Michael Shermer for me across the various projects I've been involved in and various things that I've done throughout my career. I'm not saying there's not a lot of difference. I'm just trying to draw that out for any listeners, you know, just make sure that there's no, hey, why'd you have that guy on? No, no, they're totally separate entities completely

separate entities as is the the australian magazine which is also called the skeptic it turns out when you're putting together a magazine about skepticism uh the skeptic or skeptic magazine feels like quite a natural title for it so the the three uh the three publications came up with it as far as i'm aware independently um i think uh there was no kind of overlap and certainly there's no affiliation. This is an entirely separate venture. The one in the UK was founded in 1987 by Wendy Grossman. And they've had some really excellent editors through the years with Chris French and Deborah Hyde, who I picked up from.

But yeah, there's no overlap. There's no affiliation. We're completely separate bodies. Now, had you also considered the name like Nuh-uh as a title for your magazine as an option per chance? No. Well, you know, I actually really like the fact that we've kind of made it very specific. We've rebranded it a little, but we were really keen to keep the name and call it The Skeptic because what we really want to do and what we've always wanted to do with Merseyside Skeptics and the various of the projects that the MSS and I are involved in.

So QED and Good Thinking Society and Be Reasonable, those projects were all about trying to show that skepticism isn't kind of ivory tower intellectuals prognosticating from on high and never getting their hands dirty by actually talking to people or encountering these ideas in the real life. And that's kind of what we want people to think of when they think of skeptic. We don't want them to think this person just doesn't give a shit and is saying no. They want them to think this person is trying to figure stuff out and trying to help other people figure stuff out as we go.

So I'm really keen to try and continue rehabilitating the word skeptic. We've reclaimed it from the people who are climate change deniers. We've reclaimed it from people who deny the moon landing and deny vaccines. And we also want to reclaim it from people who just like to feel intellectually superior to others without actually putting the hard yards in. Well, you know, that's actually something that I wanted to ask you about. So I'm glad you gave me a perfect segue for that. So do you think that the word skeptic has been properly reclaimed? I feel like some sense of trepidation around that word lately, because skeptic has for a long time there

been branded with, you know, denialism of some sort, some sort of like, you know, climate change denialism, flat earthers or round earth skeptics, right? Like they've, they've seized upon that word. So many goofball conspiracy theorists, nut jobs have sort of seized upon that word and tried to organize it into their, into their own vocabulary and make it part of their branded lexicon. So have you, do you feel, one, do you feel like that it really has been taken back from those lunatics? I guess is my first question. And two, if it's not, or if it has, how do we keep it from falling back into their hands? If it's not, what do we need to do to make sure that that doesn't become

kind of rebranded into the conspiracy theory lexicon again? come, you know, kind of rebranded into the conspiracy theory lexicon again. Yeah. I mean, I think we've gone to some degree towards reclaiming the word. And I think these days, when I first got involved in skepticism 10 years ago, you'd say you were a skeptic and people would assume you meant something like climate change denier or something like that. And I think we see that far less often. And also I find myself, when I talk to new people, I find myself having to that's because there has been in pop culture, certainly in the UK, a pretty clear association, I think, with the type of evidence-based critical thinking stuff that we do with people who are quite prominent in pop culture. People like Brian Cox and the comedian Dara O'Brien does a whole bit. And it's really clear that that's skepticism. So I think that has helped. But on the flip side, if you go to YouTube and start looking for skeptics on YouTube,

what you will get isn't someone who is trying to reason the world out as clearly and impassionately as possible. What you'll often get is somebody who wants to tell their audience how right they are about whatever particular thing they feel passionate or strongly about. And they want to use that label as a way of giving them a legitimacy to their opinions. I am the ultimate fact and reason person. I am a sceptic. And therefore, when I react to things, it can't be from an emotional point of view, it can't be from a biased point of view or a subjective point of view, because I said sceptic before. So therefore, my ideas carry more weight. And I think there is a bit of a problem really with the way skepticism is seen on YouTube in certain quarters. And I think that's an assumption that people, an association that people could come to and

falsely make. But I think we only have two choices. One is to try and reclaim the word, and two is to take off and nuke it from space and move on to a different word. I don't think the word has been so tainted by some of these ideas that it's beyond salvation. I think we have actually gone quite far towards salvaging it. That said, here in the UK, we do have a prominent alt-right chap, basically, who set up a lockdown sceptics website where he's basically arguing that COVID isn't as dangerous as you think. And it's so annoying. We just got it back from the climate change knobheads, and now this bellend comes along and starts misusing our vocabulary. But I think if we carry on doing things the right way and showing what we think skepticism should be and what the process skepticism should be, then I think we can

reclaiming that word and making people see that it's a positive thing and not just a kind of a position of blind arrogance. I'm curious, you know, in your opening article, where you took over as the editor, you talk about a group of people, sort of the facts don't care about your feelings group. And you sort of just touched on them now. There's certainly a large contention on YouTube and other places on the internet that have this very, very strong stance that, that I'm going to use facts to convince you whether you like it or not. And

that's just how this works. And you sort of come out against that as a way to say, maybe we should approach this differently. What, what other approach should people take if they're trying to convince someone of something other than sort of just laying the facts bare? Yeah. I mean, I, I than sort of just laying the facts bare? Yeah. I mean, I don't think that laying the facts bare is a very good way of convincing almost anybody of anything. There's very few people. You can convince someone who is, I guess, kind of values neutral on the thing you're trying to convince them about. You can convince them on facts. But as soon as there's an investment in there in any direction, the facts alone and just giving people the evidence just

isn't enough. And I've had these conversations with people for a really long time and they'd say, you know, all you need to do is just give people the evidence and if they can't understand it, that's their own fault. And so, well, if you look at any of the studies around how we make our decisions and how we can persuade people, those studies show that giving people the evidence doesn't help. And I can prove that to you because I've just said that to you and you still think giving people the evidence is all you need to do. So this is in itself absolutely proof that that is not a useful way of going about it. I think it's something actually that, you know, talking to Noah Lusions and listening to him on

the scathing, he did a piece at the start of the scathing a little while ago where he talked about when you talk to Christians and you start talking to them about the Bible. And if you assume you're going into the details of the Bible, you're assuming they've read the Bible because they might be bringing out particular bits of the Bible to defend their views. But really their views aren't based on the Bible in the first place. So arguing that evidence point isn't actually going to get you anywhere because they might be saying, here's this point that I think I can use to persuade you. But that isn't why they believe in something. It's just why they think you should believe in it. It's the defence that they use. It's not actually why they come to believe it. So I think it's something I do with Be Reasonable. The way you actually try to understand, the way you

try to, the way you can help people challenge their worldview is to first understand what their worldview is and understand how they got there. And the way you do that isn't by assuming what they might think or assuming what their journey might be from the outside, but actually asking them what they think and asking them how they got there and asking them to talk about what they believe. And then you can understand whether it was the evidence that convinced them. The vast majority of people that I've met in terms of conspiracy theorists, they'll go through individual little details of how this building fell that way or how this camera in a tunnel in Paris wasn't working. But that isn't why they believe that 9-11 was an inside job and Princess

Diana was killed. They believed because it hit a value point for them first and foremost, and then they backfilled with the evidence. And so if we tackle the evidence, and only tackle the evidence, all we'll do is they'll put up an argument, we'll knock it down, they'll bring the next argument up, we'll knock it down, and nothing will ever get anywhere because the facts that they're bringing up aren't the things that persuaded them. And dealing with those facts alone isn't going to help. You have to try and understand that person a lot more, understand the mindset and understand their experience and their journey into it. And only that way can I think you can start to reason them back out of it. So I got to ask you about that because that's very, very interesting.

I want to ask you about the idea of scaling. very, very interesting. I want to ask you about the idea of scaling. So what you just described is an incredibly laborious one-on-one kind of a process. You know what I mean? It's like, how do you scale this up? How do we, the world needs skepticism, right? One of the questions I wrote down is kind of a softball, like what is the role of skepticism in the world? But like, fuck that question, because the world has gone crazy right now. The world seems to me to be more in need of skepticism than ever. I mean, we've got a tragic rise of populism across the country right now, or across the world right now, that's threatening democracies everywhere. We've got climate change denialism, which seems to sink its teeth in deeper and deeper rather than relinquishing its hold. We've got a pandemic that huge chunks of the world don't believe in, even as we are in the

grip of it. The role of skepticism, it seems to me, couldn't be more important. But like what you just described is not scalable. Is there a scalable way to do this? Can we do this in mass? I mean, this is kind of the question of our age. And it's kind of one of the other reasons I felt it so important that I do pick up editing The Skeptic and sort of take it on into this new kind of era, because I think it is really vital right now that we are able to spread skepticism and how we scale it is the big challenge. And I think we can't do that at an individual level. There won't be enough time for me to convince people or either you two to convince people or any other one person in our movement really to convince people. What to convince either you to convince people or any other one person in

our movement really to convince people um what we can do i think is to try to spread the idea in our movement that um we can i guess remove some of the the the polarization or the the instant polarization this idea i think so many people end up entrenched in the ideas that disagree with us because they feel that disagreeing with us is part of a value set they have to defend. You know, it's that kind of it's almost like cultural war wedge issue type of thing of all of these all of these these positions have to stand together. And if I disagree with this person, if they're my my intellectual enemy on one front, then it has to be the same on all fronts. And anytime I think we hit that wall head on, I think we only drive people to reinforce that wall. So when it comes to vaccines, for example, we can say, you kill children, you are baby killers, you are monsters, And you are responsible for the premature deaths of children from diseases that we could otherwise control. Hold on. You're going too fast. I got to write all that down. You kill children. I say that a lot. Yeah. Well, we see that a lot in our movement and we see it. We say to each other and we will

pick out a thing that someone said on Twitter or a news article, and we'll share it around saying, this is a baby killer. This person is endangering the lives of children. And it may be true. It's almost certainly true that they are endangering the lives of children, but it's not true that that's what they're meaning to do. So if it comes to people who are hesitant about vaccine, even if they're not all the way to being actively anti-vaccine, if they're hesitant about vaccines, and what they see is someone expressing what they think is a similar kind of hesitancy or some of the language of their hesitancy being met by people who are calling them baby murderers, they're not going to side with the people calling their ideas baby murdering ideas. Whereas I think if you can say, if you're talking to or talking about that

hesitant area of people who have those kind of hesitancies on vaccines, you can say, look, I understand that what you're trying to do is to protect children. That is clearly your main aim. You're not trying to harm children. You're not trying to kill children. But you know what? Neither are we. We're trying to protect children as well. And if you can first align on that value of protecting children. You can try to hive it away from the detail of vaccines to a point where you can look at things in a way where people aren't thinking, if you're challenging my position on vaccines, you're calling me someone who doesn't care about children. And I think that kind of language is what can end up getting people's backs up to a

point where they're just not going to listen. Now, how we do that scalably is tricky because those conversations are happening so much. And so often, not just in our community, but in the wider society. But I think by trying to show that there is a version of skepticism that yes, has the facts and yes, looks at the evidence, but also tries to look at the emotional impact on the people we're talking to and talking about, look at the emotional impact on the people we're talking to and talking about, and try to look at that value of rhetoric and the understanding of counter-rhetoric and understanding how people make their decisions and how it's not purely based on evidence, how it is a much more emotional thing for not just the people we disagree with, but also us as well. I said it in the first piece I wrote for The Skeptic, that we are just as guilty of making decisions based on our emotions and feelings first. It just happens that we try to train ourselves to be on the evidence a lot of the time. But the detail that we go away to fact check is always the one that feels wrong and not the one that feels right.

and not the one that feels right. Because if you say this thing and it chimes with my feelings, I'm much more likely to agree with it. And if we're not careful in skepticism, we can find ourselves putting forward positions that are absolutely indefensible just because it didn't feel wrong enough for us to check it. And so we end up saying, well, not only am I putting forward something that isn't true without realising, but I'm doing it with all the gusto of someone who's so used to being right that the very idea of being wrong can be an anathema to us. That ends up doing a lot more damage. I think trying to spread the idea that understanding that we're all human, we're all prone to making leaps. Really what skepticism is, is a way to minimize how many leaps we're making or try to make sure that those leaps are made as responsibly as possible.

Knowing full well that we're going to fail from time to time, but hopefully we'll fail a hell of a lot less because we're trying to be aware of what we're doing. Should we be advocating? I mean, like, I'm thinking about like policy positions. Like, I mean, should should skepticism be something that's taught formally in school? Is there any appetite for that kind of broad-based, like, hey, look, we need this. We need to teach this. We need to get it into kids before they become garbage people. Yeah. I mean, I think whenever we have conversations, and it's not new in skepticism for us to have conversations about what can be fixed and we come down to this should be taught at schools. And it's an obvious fix and it's an easy fix and maybe it would certainly make a huge difference. But I also think in some parts of some lessons, some of those messages are being taught, but they're not taught as universal principles.

They're taught as very subject specific or situational specific issues. One of the things that I find really frustrating or have found frustrating occasionally in the work I've been doing in skepticism is when I've seen conversations of people involved in skepticism and they'll say, oh yeah, that person's got a degree in philosophy, which makes them qualified to flip burgers. It's a comment I remember seeing somewhere and it always stuck with me because I thought, you think you're all about the evidence. Well, what's the evidence that degree in philosophy only qualifies you to flip burgers for one thing? And the other thing is, what do you think a degree in philosophy is? Because people have assumptions and they don't realize that things like philosophy

are just ways of interrogating the way we come to decisions, interrogating the way we know things. And while that might be in a fairly abstract way at times, it teaches the kind of patterns that allows us to apply that same skill set more broadly. And I think we see that in philosophy. We see it even in something like the much maligned media studies courses that you get at universities, which are constant tabloid fodder here in the UK. One of my favourite stories that tabloids and other sort of ilk of news programming will do is the, did you know you could do a degree in David Beckham studies? And it always gets loads of clicks and people mock it and things.

But when you actually look at what those degrees involve, it often involves, yes, there's a lesson on David Beckham's image or whatever, but often it's how do we understand what we read in the media and how do we understand where it comes from, what is and isn't true in there, what the mechanisms by which it ends up being printed, which is actually really valuable stuff. And so the same people we see saying philosophy is worthless and degrees in media studies, well, that's just David Beckham studies, so the same people we see saying philosophy is worthless and degrees in media studies, well, that's just David Beckham studies, are the same people who end up fucking posting that Facebook meme about that conspiracy that they don't even realise they're picking up that conspiracy from QAnon and they're going on a Save Our Children march. It's all in that same milieu,

really, of people who aren't valuing the questioning of ideas and the process of thinking. So I think some courses that you get at university, college, maybe a little earlier, some of those skills are in there. The fact that they're not more broadly throughout the curriculum, I think, is a shame and is something we should be looking to try and encourage. But we also shouldn't be denigrating the subjects that do quite a lot of it. I mean, history is something where the whole point of history is that person's dead and can't tell you what really happened. So we have to try and figure out from what we've got about them. And we understand that all of these sources are tainted by bias. And how do we try to minimize that bias? Those are fundamentally skeptical skills. And we can sometimes get into the narrow path of thinking that if it's not science, it's not skepticism, um, which I don't think is very valuable to us.

I wonder too, like, you know, you were talking about, uh, the, the sort of media poking fun at certain courses in college. And there's, that's a huge thing here in the United States is people attacking, uh, types of programs at college and types of degree type programs at college. Recently, the president tweeted about banning critical race theory. And so we have a genuine attack on intellectualism here in the United States that is somewhat frightening and I think does play into this sort of anti-skepticism thought process that many people are using to now justify sharing QAnon memes. I mean, it feels like that sort of thing feeds into this, that there are no experts, that there is no one

that you can look to get good information. And so some rando who posted some blog is just as good as, say, the New York Times. Yeah, I think that's very true. And one of the things that always strikes me as quite an irony is that a lot of the people who would be saying, you know, ban critical race theory, for example, which that's not an academic field I know a huge amount about, but I have looked at some of the criticisms people have had of it. And some of the criticisms I've seen have been enormously flimsy and in some cases, outright strawman of some studies. Not to say that those studies are the greatest studies in the world, but the way that they've been characterised has been hugely disingenuous and has in many ways spread throughout large parts of some of the society, which would also

cross over into the sceptical movement. But the irony is the very people who are saying those academic fields ought to be completely banned from universities, and I want to see those departments dismantled from universities, are the same people who would say that they are all about free speech, first and foremost. That's the most important thing, is the defenders of free speech. And the fact that there's a bait and switch going on there is evidence that something's going wrong, really. That those people can simultaneously be saying, all I care about is the free exchange of

ideas. And also, those ideas should not be discussed by anyone. The very idea that that's a discussion worth having itself is ludicrous. It shows you that there are people who are so invested in their own opinions and invested in their own conclusions that they're blind to their biases. And I think that is something that's spreading and it's something we need to curtail because I think it does contribute to, as you say, this idea that universities are filled with untouchable elites who are out of touch with the common man on the street. That populist rhetoric, it's nothing new. We've seen it through populist regimes throughout history. And it's that old adage that, you know, history never repeats itself, but it does rhyme,

is that we're seeing echoes from other regimes generally throughout history. And we don't learn those lessons, partly because we don't value the people who teach those lessons. And we don't learn those lessons partly because we don't value the people who teach those lessons. So, Marsh, I'm going to ask you, I mean, skepticism right now, I don't think could be much more important. Like as a skill, like, and we're just like, it feels very much like we are at a crossroads moment. And we have precious little time to fix some of the issues. You know, again, climate change being a massive, massive issue, but, you know, just the rise of anti-intellectualism in general, which is seizing hold, as Cecil pointed out, just across almost every spectrum of society, it really couldn't be more important for us to be skeptical and to train people how to be skeptical. But I want to ask you, outside of what you would consider

the non-critical subjects of skepticism, right? What's your favorite just goofball skepticism subject? Like just, you know what I mean? Like the one where you're just like, I mean, like the Bigfoot level stuff. Like they're just the kooky, like what is your favorite where you just think, I mean, just something about it just grabs hold of you.

What's your favorite goofball non-critical skeptical? Oh, you know what? So like, I, I find this really hard, hard question to, to, to answer. Um, and I thought about this a lot recently and I was, I was talking to a friend of mine, um, Haley Stevens, who's a blogger and a skeptic and a researcher in the UK who, um, when I first got involved in skepticism 10, 11 years ago, we had a podcast together and we've been sort of friends ever since. And she was just saying to me the other day, it all seems so real right now. Everything seems so important. And looking back at the days when it was ear candles and it was dowsing, how far things have gone from there when the biggest, most kind of egregious things we could think of was boots pharmacy in the UK,

selling sugar pills to people. And now we have actual QAnon marches through the streets of the UK, you know, fucking pedophiles in America. Um, so it's, it's really hard. And so I think I really miss the,

I really miss being in mind, body, spirit festivals. I used to love to go to mind, body, spirit festivals, you know, these big conferences of all manner of,

of, of pseudoscience from alternative medicine, right through to psychics. And one of my favorite things to do would just to be spend, to spend a day walking around those places, just talking to people, talking to the practitioners and just trying to suss out what's going on. And you'd have some of the strangest conversations

and the most exciting and weird and interesting conversations ever I've ever had in my life. I talked to one lady who believed she was in a cult, I would call it. She didn't say that, where she had the book of knowledge, which is passed down to her. It was a book that to gain the alpha energy from this book, you have to transcribe the book completely out by hand because the book itself was unintelligible. She gave me a page of the book to look at, a printout, and it was unintelligible gibberish as if anyone had just thrown random words together. And she said, well, it looks like that because- Did David Icke write it?

Well, it was even worse than David Icke. And I spent four hours watching David Icke in a lecture theater. And it was worse than that. It's complete, utter gibberish. The sentences don't even make grammatical sense, really. And she was saying the reason we can't understand it is because the information is too complex for us because it was beamed from outer space by aliens through the alpha channel into the brain of a 91 year old Turkish lady. And the only way you can benefit from the alpha energy, which if you absorb enough alpha energy, you will live forever. The only way you can benefit from that is to write the book out by hand. She said you can't thought or copy it. You have to do it by hand.

And she said, because the thing is, the book itself, the book of knowledge, the real living, the actual out by hand. She said, you can't thought or copy it. You have to do it by hand. And she said, because the thing is the book itself, the book of knowledge, the real living, the actual book is alive. And every night the aliens send down new information through the alpha channel that changes the words in the book completely. I said, yeah, but- I love this so much.

You've written this out. You've written copies of this out. Surely you can just like look at your copy and look at the new book each morning. And it's different. She said, no, no, the aliens change all of the copies that have ever been made of it all in one go. So they all match again. And they change our memory of what we wrote.

So it's that comprehensive. And I miss that so much. I miss those things so much. But the reason I find it such a hard question to answer is because I can tell that story and it's bizarre and it's kooky. a hard question to answer. I can tell that story and it's bizarre and it's kooky. And I find it really hard not to look back at that and say, this is an example of how people get radicalized into a cult. And we see the same signs all over. So even that idea itself is kind of illustrative that even dangerous, bizarre, even silly, kooky ideas have the same, they exploit the same gaps in our brain and the same instincts and the same biases

that it's hard right now not to look back on that stuff and see it with a slightly darker tinge than I saw at the time. Um, but certainly I, I, I so miss just being in a room with like three, well, first of all, I miss being in a room with like 300 people. Like, once that's safe again, I'm there. Um, but I just miss being able to walk from conversation to conversation and just have just conversations going somewhere. You'd never thought imaginable in a second. Um, and they just trying to track how that got there and trying to, to see what, what you can ask people without kind of queuing on too much that you're a skeptic and therefore getting kind of booted out of the room is I miss that so much. It's so much fun.

I agree that there is that, that when I look back on that stuff, I miss that so much. It's so much fun. I agree that there is, that when I look back on that stuff, I see the threads that make it dangerous, right? So what I used to think when I used to think about, you know, Bigfoot or Nessie or UFOs, I used to think it was kind of a harmless sort of belief that really didn't have a lot of danger to it because it was, it wasn't, there wasn't anybody who was impacted by it. Right. Um, no one was, no one was damaged because

someone said they saw a UFO. Uh, you know, people can be damaged if they don't think vaccines are real. So there is, there's like a level of, uh, of, uh, hurting other people in some skepticism that is important. It makes it important. It makes it more important at least. But when I look back on it now, just like you, I see it as sort of this gateway. It's almost like a gateway drug. When I look back on it, I see these threads that feel really dangerous now.

And it's because of all this, of where we're at now with climate denial and mask denial, those two things in general are so unbelievably dangerous. And I think they're seeded by, specifically by those beliefs in what we think might be nonsense. Yeah, I think that's true. And I also think maybe a reason why things are way much more, like way more dangerous now than they were when I first started doing this 10 years ago, I think, is in part the way that social media has changed in that time.

Yeah, I think so too. And so I was thinking even, I spent a long time looking at the flat earth movement, and a large part of that was driven by people getting videos recommended to them by YouTube when they were watching a video about nothing to do with flat earth, YouTube would start floating flat earth videos as a way of trying to keep people on the platform and engaged. And the same kind of thing was happening with Facebook. It was happening through Facebook pages, kind of posts coming from pages that Facebook was promoting. But around that time, Facebook, I think it was about 2017, 2018, changed part of its recommendation algorithm to stop favoring pages and start to favor groups. So very engaged groups, busy groups where there's lots of conversations and

comments and things like that going on would start to get recommended a lot more. And I think that's kind of where we see something like QAnon come from, not just from there, but certainly kind of accelerated from that. Because when you have with the Q conspiracy, you've got this supposed deep state operative who's dropping these completely cryptic, arguably nonsensical clues. Then you have thousands of people who are trying to read meaning into that nonsense. Those people are going to necessarily have quite detailed conversations as each brings forth their interpretation and argues with it. And those are going to look like really active groups. And so Facebook started to promote Q groups, but it promoted us to people who, based on the people in the Q group, what are the beliefs,

what are the groups did they join? What are the interests did they have with that kind of micro-targeting thing that Facebook does? And so you'd get people who would be in a homeopathy group who'd be like, well, you're interested in alternative medicine. Quite a few people over here in the Q group have said they're also interested in alternative medicine, so we'll start floating you that group. And you get the same thing with an anti-vax group starts becoming a Q group and around 9-11 conspiracies or something like that. And so I think social media has inadvertently, but also callously and blindly, started to stitch together alternative beliefs by accidentally micro-targeting people with blind spots as to their critical thinking and their ability to appraise evidence. And I think that's, this is just a theory I'm

currently working on, but I think that's kind of why everything is getting so much more intense and important and meaningful right now. And it feels like there are no harmful pseudoscientific beliefs because the second you start to head down any of these pseudoscience routes, you've now got this engine that's built to find you, to inadvertently target you and start pushing stuff on you in order to sell you as a product of advertising. And I think this is why we're seeing QAnon marches through Liverpool. Yeah.

Yeah. So that's... Yeah, very much so, I think. Yeah. I think the stakes have never been higher because the amplification effect of bad ideas as a direct result of the AI algorithms that, you know, social media uses in order to, like you said, stitch together, like, oh, okay, you're, you're interested in this. You will likely follow this rabbit hole and that'll keep your time on platform longer. And time on platform just translates immediately

into ad scene, which is dollars and cents. It's like the, the, the, the amplification effect is, is massive. I, did The Social Dilemma, the documentary on Netflix about social media? No, no. It's real interesting. One of the points in it, they interview a bunch of guys that built these platforms. So it's all interviews with people

that were responsible for creating these different platforms. And one of the things they mentioned there is that fake news spreads six times faster than true news. And that's because it plays into exactly what you're describing. It's like people are interested in this. They want this to be true. It fits a belief or value system. And so it moves faster.

It moves six times faster than true news, which makes the job of skepticism all the more vital right now, right? I mean, like if there's no opposing force, I mean, there's no hope against, you know, trying to counter some of this bullshit. And one of the things too, is that people are retreating into their echo chambers, right?

So even just to get into one of those groups, like you're saying, like a QAnon group, if you were to try to push back against any of that stuff as a group member, there's a possibility that they may ban you. They may kick you out. And so they just keep that same sort of idiot circle alive constantly and never ever have any kind of other viewpoint.

And granted, that's happening all over the internet, not just with QAnon, that's happening with all different types of groups. Yeah. And I think, is it a process known as group polarization? I think I remember seeing reports of a study on this. And so this is quite fuzzy. And so don't take my word for it. If you're interested, go look it up a bit more, see if I was right. But my understanding is if you take a lot of people and you gauge how strongly they feel about their position on a topic, you know, that they feel that they might be towards the left hand side of the political spectrum and they might find themselves to be like a six or a seven out of 10 as to how far they define themselves as left. If you take those people and just put them together in a room, just to have conversations amongst themselves, what you find is they become

more extreme in their beliefs, even though they're all at the same kind of level, because there isn't any other side of the belief to push back against. And so they start to kind of push themselves further in that direction. I think that's, that's something we see in those, those social media silos is that a lot of people might join that group and anybody who starts to, to, to express dissent is removed. And you end up with that kind of, that polarization driver, um, just sending people to more extreme positions. Is there anything that's off limits though? Like I got to ask, because that there feels like, um, like, would you have a conversation with somebody who let's say thinks eugenics is a real thing or, you know, thinks

that, um, that like, you know, like somebody is, uh, uh, a certain race is, is far inferior than another race. Like, is there, is there even a starting point there that you can have a conversation with somebody about? Um, so it depends, it depends on what you mean have a conversation with somebody about? So it depends on what you mean by a conversation, like where and with what goal. So on Be Reasonable, I've had that conversation. I've spoken to Jared Taylor, the head of American Renaissance, who describes himself as a race realist. I would describe him as a white supremacist. And he dances around it a bit, but he's expressing pretty much those views that there are some races that just aren't as good as others and we're best off keeping to ourselves. And I'm willing to have those conversations, but also I try to have those conversations quite...

I don't rush into those conversations because I try to show that the respectable face of so-called race realism actually has some, if you can't get the ugly views out of them, you can certainly hear the slipperiness around avoiding answering questions in certain ways and trying to drive the conversation in certain ways. So I think it is worth having those conversations. If it's someone who's just expressing those views and isn't leading a movement such as Jared Taylor, someone who's just more of an everyday kind of person, I think I would still have those conversations if those people were in my life enough for me to matter to them. Because if you're talking to someone who just outright

expresses eugenicist views or outright racist views, and unashamedly, they're just stating this as fact. If you aren't someone that they know, you aren't necessarily going to be someone that they invest the time in having the conversation with and actually listening to. You end up being seen as more of a sparring partner to own the libs rather than a genuine conversation. And I try never to have debates in that kind of way. I try to have conversations and never try to get into that sparringness, although occasionally I do slip in and become a snarky arsehole, but that's natural. I try to limit the amount that I do that as much as possible. But I think the way you are able to get people to question what they think and to change their mind isn't to have one conversation with them and to challenge the points that they make, to point out the evidence behind what they're saying is wrong,

or all those kinds of things. I think it's to have lower level, longer conversations over a broader period of time so that you are the person, and it only really works if they've got an investment in you, that if they think you're someone that they should listen to generally because they're family or they're a co-worker who respects you or they're a friend or something that gives them a reason not to just dismiss you outright, then all the time you can anchor them away from certain beliefs by being respectful in your challenging. Now, in some particularly dangerous views, then it's not always appropriate to be respectful, especially if you've got an audience on that. I wouldn't want to be talking to a

white supremacist while anybody else was listening. And if it's someone in my family who's a white supremacist, I wouldn't be having those conversations around strangers in the park who might overhear because I don't want them to think that I give quarter to those kind of views. And I'd only do that in a very isolated kind of way where I thought I was trying to change someone's mind or try to persuade them to see whether they needed to change their mind. But I don't write anybody off because I think for a lot of people, I don't think the worst opinions and the worst beliefs that they hold, I don't think are a product of inherent evil or anything kind of directly core. In the vast majority of people, I don't believe evil is a thing particularly. And I don't think people delight in holding those views unless there's something else going on with them. So I think, yeah, I think we're all a product of our environment.

And as such, as our environment changes, we can change with it. And so I don't try to write anybody off, but I understand that that's an incredibly privileged position for a white straight cis male to be in. And I don't advocate it for everybody. Yeah. I was just going to say, I was just going to point out too, for people who were probably going to start typing that email, that I'm pretty sure Marsh is not saying that everyone should be having these conversations. That certainly, you know, you shouldn't be, if you're, if you're a person of color, you shouldn't have to argue with someone about your own existence, about how that's valid.

That's not up to you. Because I think that people miss that. They think, oh, well, everyone should have these conversations. And I think you're right. It's right to point out that, you know, the people of privilege should be having these conversations. Yeah. I mean, you don't owe anybody the time to debate your personhood with them. You absolutely don't.

And no one should ever make you feel like you owe somebody in that kind of way your time. Equally, I think it's important for us to be challenging these ideas, but we absolutely shouldn't be challenging them for sport either. I think we see this sometimes for people who want to be involved in conversations with people with particularly noxious views, partly because they enjoy the sparring of knocking around these ideas. And I think that I'm very wary about too, because the worse an idea is and the more harmful an idea is, and especially the more directly harmful it is to particular people, the more you have to think about the arena in which you're having those conversations and the spirit that you're going to those conversations with. But I also don't, yeah, I, I think nobody, nobody should be written off, but also it's not anybody's

duty to save someone, especially if that person is doubting your very humanity and doubting your, your, um, your right to existence. You just mentioned an interesting word. I want to, I want to go back to it. You said the arena in which those conversations are taking place. You mentioned an interesting word. I want to go back to it. You said the arena in which those conversations are taking place. Is there a best, I mean, I think medium matters, right? The medium is massively important in terms of receptivity to conversation. What is the medium we should be, I mean, are there mediums we should avoid for these conversations in your opinion? Or where should these conversations be taking place? How should they be had? You mentioned what, what I, what immediately struck me as you, you mentioned, you know, sitting with someone in the park and that's, that's very different than, um, engaging with someone in a comment section, for example. So where, what, what is the most effective way to have these conversations and are there ways that we should avoid having these conversations or places we should avoid having these conversations? Yeah, that's a good question.

And I certainly don't want to sound like I've got all the answers here because I think a plurality of approaches is useful. But I think the more personal a space you can be in with someone, where they can recognize that you're a person, the more effective I think you can be at communicating. Because the person who's just popping up in the comments section of the Daily Mail online to tell Boards Go Home 3005 that they're racist about their views on immigrants is not going to change either Boards Go Home 3005's views or the views of anybody watching. I think that becomes a performance in a way that might make the person who's challenging that idea feel good about themselves, but ultimately won't achieve anything. And in the worst case scenario, will just draw more bigots into the conversation as they fight with them.

And I think that isn't always useful. And we see this sometimes, people who are often quite well-meaning will think, I need to dive into this conversation and defend whatever particular view is being attacked or whatever particular group of people has been attacked. And what can sometimes happen is they just start an even bigger conversation where anybody who's stumbling on that conversation, you're more likely to see that conversation because there's more people involved and it's got a lot more kind of vociferous and it ends up sort of filling someone's Facebook page that otherwise they might have completely not seen this conversation going on about the nature of their existence and whether

they have a right to exist. So I think you can sometimes fall into the trap of having a conversation that does in some ways more harm because it brings a lot more attention to it. I think anytime, it's not a new idea, I think, that people are way more willing to be angry and brash and dismissive online than they are in any other format where you can actually see the person, look them in the eye, where you aren't constrained by character limits and you aren't constrained by the absence of tone to a point where the person you're talking to, so often in Twitter conversations, you just see one person either deliberately or accidentally take the worst possible, most uncharitable view of

what the person just said to them. And you see the second person throw that right back at them, and they just do this dance of uncharitableness and strawmanning all the way. And it doesn't achieve anything. The more you can have those conversations in person, again, if you've got the privilege to do so and you don't owe anybody your time and your energy in that kind of way, but the more in person you can do it, the harder it is for someone to dismiss that your points are coming from a valid place. Because it's so, people we disagree with and people who disagree with us, the accusation will just get thrown around all the time that you don't actually believe the point you're making, you're just trying to win the argument. And that's much harder to do when you're looking someone in the eye and actually can tell that

they really feel what they're saying. And the other time is when you're looking someone in the eye and actually can tell that they really feel what they're saying. And the other time is when you're talking to people in person, you can sometimes get the sense that the point they're making isn't the point that they want to be making. Isn't the thing that they're really thinking about. And you can spot that in conversation, in tone of voice way easier than you can through just the black on white characters in a Twitter feed. Well, I think that's interesting because that's the harder thing to do, right? Like the harder thing to do is always, because most of us have been raised to be live and let live kind of folks,

you know, for the most part, right? It's like we hear bad ideas espoused at the gym and we hear bad ideas, you know, by people we know, you know, not just casually like two machines over, you know, but by people we know, not just casually like two machines over, but by people we know. But these are people that we're, if not friends with, we are friendly with. And we see this stuff online, I think, and a lot of people feel very comfortable online popping in and joining the fight. But joining the fight online can create, like you mentioned, you can create deeper polarization. So it can do more harm than it does good. And it rarely does any good. So it's probably more

neutral to neutral bad than it is actively positive. But the harder part is chatting with that person we're friendly with and saying, have you thought about this? Just reaching them as a human being, finding them on an individual level and trying to connect with that person. That's, that's way harder to do, you know, cause most of us have been raised not to do that work. You know, most of us have been raised to just kind of blow that off and say, all right, well, we'll just, we avoid politics or, you know, we avoid, you know, questions about vaccines. Cause you know, but we don't, cause we don't need to be on that space together. We don't need to be on that same page together. Cause we, we don't need to be on that space together. We don't need to be on that same page together because we, we don't need

to live in that world. We can, we can sort of siphon that off from our relationship. But you know, if we're going to be effective, which is the only reason to do it, if we're going to be effective in trying to, you know, change minds and trying to teach people like, Hey, there's, there's a world of evidence out there that's valuable. And that's where we should draw our conclusions from. We've got to kind of get over some of that discomfort if we can. Like, again, to Cecil's point, it's nobody's individual responsibility. But it seems to me like if you can do it, you kind of have to do it, right? Yeah, I think you're right in so much that really, yeah, completely. It is hard to do, but watching the world slide into chaos is easy. It's not rewarding. And I don't know if anybody's

finding the world right now particularly easy. As we watch the rise of anti-vaccine movements and stuff in the longer term, as we watch the climate change denial continue, arguably past the point of no return or approaching the point of no return. Those things are easy until they're not. The small act in the moment, in the conversation with a friend, as you say, at the gym or a family member, it's not about getting into a heated argument over Thanksgiving dinner with your uncle. about getting into a heated argument over Thanksgiving dinner with your uncle. But it is, I guess, about letting people know which ideas don't just get a pass. And it might well be, you do see people will say, well, I assumed everyone thought this, and it's never occurred to me that you didn't think this. It's never occurred to me that there's a reason not to be

mistrustful of the vaccine companies. And sometimes just hearing someone that you know and are friendly with and presumably respect and admire and like and all those things that we have with friends express a difference of opinion, if not done in an aggressively challenging way where you feel you've got to defend yourself, but just, actually, no, I don't really think that's true because I don't know if you looked at this, but I saw this and I think this is pretty persuasive. That can give people pause for thought and they may not change their mind. Well, they won't change their mind right there and then, but they may change their mind in the future, knowing that it is possible to have a different view of it and still be someone that they can respect and admire because they can see you as the person in their life who fits that

criteria. Have you ever walked away from a conversation and like fully changed somebody's mind? Like move them from a non-skeptical position to a skeptical position in a single conversation? No, not that I'm aware of. That's important. Yeah. That's important. Yeah. Like I may have moved people from a neutral position.

The only reason I ask is because I kind of assumed the answer. Yeah. I kind of assumed the answer. I kind of assumed the answer. I think that's really important. It's not satisfying that it doesn't quote-unquote work, but it does work. It's just like it's incremental

change. It's small pieces. It's driving wedges after wedges, bigger and bigger wedges into that. I don't know. And I think there's a desire that people have intrinsically and naturally to be like, well, we had a conversation.

We have a disagreement. I want to win. And then when I win, you will have changed your mind. And that's the nature of how winning works. But that's not the actuality of how people behave. Yeah. And if you go into those conversations thinking in that kind of way, Um, that's not, that's not, that's not the actuality of like how people behave. Yeah. Yeah. And if you go into those conversations, thinking in that kind of way, that winning is having

you say, having you change your mind and admit you're wrong. Um, for one thing, you're always on a hide into nothing, trying to get someone, if you need someone to change their mind and tell you their mind is changed, um, you're going to lose more often than not anyway, because the hardest thing, the hardest thing isn't to change our mind. It's to tell people we were wrong about that thing we were absolutely certain about in that conversation we had. That's the hardest thing. And people will often quietly go away and change their mind so long as they never have to do the embarrassing climb down.

But if you go into those conversations thinking, I'm going to win by changing your mind, sometimes that even influences the way you go about those conversations and makes you go down certain routes of rhetoric and of posturing that actually is completely counterproductive. Whereas if your win conditions are, I'm going to give those people some things to think about that they may not have thought about before. I'm going to leave these people with a lot of stuff that they can go in and that'll sit with them. Then I think that's the win condition you should be aiming for because then people can go away and change their own mind if they review the ideas you've given them. And so the way to leave people with stuff that will linger and have them thinking about it for a while afterwards and

sort of returning to it is to do that in a non-aggressive way, in a non-shoreboarding way, in a way that they don't have to do the big climb down, but just, oh, maybe you've not looked about it this way before. And have you thought about this? And that thing that you were saying, actually, I looked into that a little bit and did you know this element of it? I thought that was quite interesting. One of the things I do when I have those conversations with people on Be Reasonable is rather than say, here's why you're wrong about your idea. I'll say, I want to follow your idea, but when I do, I come across this hurdle that I find really hard to get past. Can you explain to me how you get past this? Can you help me over this hurdle

and talk me through your ideas? That's a great question, right? People will do so much, I think, to avoid feeling embarrassed. And especially if they're going to be publicly embarrassed. It seems like any method that we can use that avoids pushing people into a position of feeling shamed and feeling stupid. And feeling like, man, I think people are more willing to be wrong, I guess I'm saying, than we give them credit for as long as they don't have to be publicly wrong. And as long as they don't have to be like shamed in their changing of their mind. And it strikes me as an important goal of skepticism to give people grace in that and

to give people some room and to give people some, you know, to do it with some amount of humility and remember the things that we were wrong about. Yeah, I think so. And I think one of the ways that we can do that is the way in which we're communicating some of these ideas. We can build in the space to be able to demonstrate that we understand that people who disagree with us aren't disagreeing with us on purpose because they're evil or because they want to be wrong or they want there to be more chaos in the world or more hurt in the world,

that it's okay to, that you can be wrong without being a bad person. And if we can build that in and also sort of demonstrate that we can be wrong about stuff as well, then I think we leave enough, instead of having a one side or the other, you have enough space in the middle

for people to come into and to move towards what I would argue is a more reasonable worldview. So Marsh, if people were going to find Skeptic, the Skeptic magazine, where would they look? So yeah, you've got to skeptic.org.uk

and that's our website, which we're really happy about. It looks really cool. Or on Twitter and Facebook, it's, uh, the, the skeptic mag. So at the skeptic mag, and you can find us there and we're publishing a couple of stories a week, uh, and, uh, and we'll be hopefully ramping up even further than that. Marsh. Thanks so much for joining us. It was really great conversation. Yeah. Marsh. Thanks so much, man. Always a pleasure guys. Oh, always a pleasure. You guys take care.

So we are not going to be doing any email this week. We want to, because we recorded so early this week, we're just not doing email. We're going to save it. We are off next week. So next week we are taking vacation day. We will not be doing a live stream next Thursday. If you missed our live stream,

we actually are recording a little early, but we are going live after the debate tonight with Pence and Harris. So if you want to catch that, it was recorded on Wednesday, but you go to our YouTube page and check it out. If you're a patron, you should have already gotten the audio for that.

We're going to have Thomas Smith from Serious Inquiries Only on to join us. But we are skipping next Thursday's live stream. We'll be back the following Thursday with a live stream, but we will be skipping next Thursday's live stream. And next Thursday, we are also playing something from the vault.

So we are doing a deep dive next week, specifically because Tom and I are both going on vacation, so we are not going to be in. So if anything big happens, we're totally going to miss that for like two straight weeks, and everything big is going to happen in these next two weeks for sure. Two weeks? I can't even imagine

what the world's going to look like in 14 days. We are also planning, by the way, to do a... So put it on your calendars. The night of the election, Tom and I are going to try to either get together or do... We're definitely doing a live stream. We're not sure if we're going to election, Tom and I are going to try to either get together or we're definitely doing a live stream. We're not sure if we're going to get together, but we're going to try to be online.

We're going to be on a live stream for a while that night. We're going to have guests hopefully join us throughout the night and we're going to be doing live election coverage. So the night of the election, we're not sure exactly when we're going to go on, probably normal time when we normally go on, which is like, you know,

like seven o'clock, eight o'clock, something like that. We'll probably go on and then we'll be on for the rest of the night until both Tom and I look at the map and say, well, we can't decide tonight because not all the votes are in. Right.

So it'll be some point that, but we're going to have guests on. So you're going to want to check out our live election coverage. It's going to be, well, we'll have links and stuff as we get closer to it. But I won't have an opportunity to mention it

for the next couple of weeks because we're going to be off. So we hope that you come check out our live stream that we did last week. We hope that you come to our future live streams, which are normally on Thursday. And we hope that you pencil us in for your election coverage the night of the election. We want to thank Michael Marshall for joining us today.

Michael Marshall is the editor of the Skeptic magazine, the Skeptic UK magazine. And he is also part of the Merseyside Skeptics. So thank you so much for joining us, Mike. We love having you on. And it was a very interesting conversation. So that is going to wrap it up for this week.

We're going to leave you, like we always do, with the Skeptic's Creed. not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babylon bullshit. Couched in scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quasi-alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water, downward

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